To be honest now that Vista 64-bit is out I'm thinking that XP Pro 64's pretty dead in the water. Never really got successful enough to get the software support of mainstream XP, and now never will.
Try looking into Western Martial Arts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Martial_Arts ). A lot of the guys involved do have quite scarily extensive experience of sword combat, although admittedly mainly with blunts.
Games will work fine without admin access, which is good and right. The WT bloke's complaining that downloaded non-trusted applications cannot be installed (WT's stuff doesn't just run in-situ, it tries to install stuff all over the place) without admin access, which is also good and right.
Think of Linux.. a normal user can happily run an installed Nethack binary, but they're going to have to type in an admin password to install their newly-downloaded nethack-with-wildtangent-malware.deb.
The ESRB argument is seperate, and only applies to machines with parental controls enabled and users without access to the parental control password.
As far as I know the ESRB ratings are only used if the Game Explorer's 'Parental Controls' thingie is enabled, which to me is fair enough as it needs to get ratings data from somewhere, and so it's only going to bite developers targeting people using machines with the parental controls enabled, and without the password to over-ride them. I'd hope it'll also allow those with full rights to mark selected unsigned games okay to be played by those without the password in future too which just means that games need the say-so of the computer's owner.
Not too painful, I'd have thought, and probably should help stop people playing the "Think of the children!" card when talking about computer game violence.
Some people have already got XNA development working with IronPython, and it all seems to work well. I've been playing about with XNA myself for the last few months (It's been in open beta for a while) and the codebase I'm working on now happily allows me to add IronPython scripting with very little pain.
In worse news there isn't though is much chance of ever gluing XNA and pygame together. XNA is heavily based around the current PC/XBox360 graphics hardware, it can't even target anything not capable of running shaders and has no support for the fixed-pipeline in 3d (The 360 doesn't have it so neither does XNA) hence relying very heavily on MS' HLSL graphics shader language.. any kind of cross-platform code conversion would be very difficult indeed.
As shaders are getting more powerful the number of texture maps is actually going up, a texture which once would have had a simple colour map now may well have a colour map, a specular map, a diffusion map, a glow map, and a normal map, all merged together with a shader.
Whilst it is possibly for shaders to produce textures in an entirely procedural manner it's not as fast for most textures as doing a few texture map lookups, munging the data, and throwing it out.. hence graphics memory is still needed. Also the number of people who can write good procedural shaders is also tiny compared to the number who can do good Photoshop (etc..) texture work, meaning it's a lot better from a dev. standpoint to have the shader developers working on the few special effect textures and a few nice 'reusable' shaders, and have the Photoshoppers working on producing all of the maps needed to make one of those reusable shaders look like a brick wall, or a steel gate.
Re:Must Buy New Book For Latest Proggramming Fad!
on
Design by Contract in C++?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
For that one example, pretty much. Now try and write me a C++ class function for an employee which is allowed to change the employees details, but not those of their direct manager.. whilst other functions on the employee should be able to. Show me how I can guarantee that an attribute is never decreased in any method, whilst allowing increases quite happily.
Interfaces are not Design by Contract. Design by Contract is setting some conditions which are required to be true before a method can be called (preconditions), conditions which are in turn guaranteed to be true when the method returns (postconditison), and conditions which are guaranteed to be true all the way through a method's execution (invariants). Design by Contract can even be done in none-OO languages too.
For example any accessor method can, by specifying invariants, be guaranteed not to change any of an object's state. If, for some reason, someone messes up and has this call a method which would change state then it's a compile time error.
It's not something I've used much admittedly, but I remember having my brain twisted by Eiffel's trickery during Computer Science lectures so I don't see why others should avoid such fun!
If we're including all of the 'not-quite sequels' for GTA why not do so for Final Fantasy too? A quick peek at the list of Final Fantasy titles on Wikipedia reveals there've been a a lot more than the numbered series, most notably things such as FF X-2 and the FF VII prequel, not to mention things like Crystal Chronicles and FF:Tactics.
When the iPod was first released making music players wasn't Apple's core business either, it seems to have worked out for them. Sometimes diversification works.. now, diversification into a saturated market may be more difficult.
I do suspect MS'll find a spin on this so it appears 'more' than the iPod.
Although in the case of HL2 it's more that you get the NPCs going through their set-piece stuff, as you would in a cut-scene, but Gordon is dicking round throwing books on the floor and jumping into them to watch them scatter rather than listening to them. He does occasionally get to interact with the set-pieces by plugging cables into sockets however, which is obviously the height of interaction.
You're right that those were the first three, but it was a trilogy of four to reference your sig. You're missing the concluding Pools of Darkness. If by any chance you never actually saw this part I'd recommend grabbing a copy, although getting your next door neighbour round may be more of a challenge.
If they were going up levels there's a good chance they were just grinding the creatures for XP (..and the bonus of nice cloth drops) rather than being a gold-farmer. I've done the same in different areas myself in the past.
Part of the problem this time was that the roll-out of new content didn't happen over all servers at once, instead being triggered on a per-server basis when all the items have been gathered. This had the problem that people from other servers who didn't want to wait for the event on their own server created characters on the servers which were ahead, resulting in this one server being first to open the Gate but also falling over repeatedly as there're many times the normal number of people trying to log on.
This would also happen if it were to be rolled out regionally. People on the servers who're not deployed first would want to try the new niftyness and as a result would come over to the servers scheduled for the new content earliest- resulting in those servers falling over in very short order.
I agree with the "Guards! Guards!" idea. A fair few years back I saw a stage version of the book and it worked wonderfully, even friends of mine who'd never read any of the books really enjoyed it. Was a very strong cast though- Paul Darrow ('Avon' from Blake's 7) made a very Sam Vimes.
I agree, Half Life was an incredible game, but so was The Sims. Both would have enjoyed relative obscurity compared to their current status were it not the free content, however. Let me explain more by going through the arguments as put forward and saying how I feel they apply to HL:
Half Life was a very strong game, but if it wasn't for it's expansions it would have been stale years ago. The expansions (Blue Shift etc.) offer very little compared to the free online add-ons, such as CS.
Half Life was in no was revolutionary, it was an evolution on the already saturated FPS genre. I'd actually go as far to say that if the argument against The Sims is allowed to hold then Half Life merely took the old Alien Breed computer game and put it in a first-person perspective.
Is Half Life's ability to withstand time a mark of its success? No, the expansion packs provided very little over the original game and it was the community's ability to make better free content using the provided engine. A lot of the sales for Half Life after the original 'honeymoon' months came from people buying the program specifically to run free content, such as CS.
The exact same argument can be leveled against the Half Life series. Without the niftiness of stuff like Counterstrike and Garry's Mod the entire series would have been 'just another FPS', instead of the juggernaut it is now. Any modern game which sets out to be a true classic seems to need one of two things going for it- either expandable by a mod community, or to be a MMORPG.
In the UK (Where the shop is) you need to be seventeen to drive but only sixteen to buy cigarettes, it really wouldn't make sense for people who can buy them on their own to harrass passers-by to buy them for them. If it was alcohol they're after that's available to eighteen year olds and a group with a few cars but none of them yet eighteen doesn't sound that likely.
Actually I would rather he kept a handgun under the counter- this is being used in Wales, where handguns are highly illegal. I'd like to see him get arrested and the shop get managed by someone who comes complete with a clue.
This sounds like it's being deployed in a small village in Wales, not a city. There's probably this Spar shop, a pub (Which the teenagers aren't allowed into anyway), and maybe something like a chip shop (Quite likely with no seating) in the entire village.
To get to anywhere with places which may cater for teenagers will probably involve getting a once-an-hour-and-never-on-time bus to a nearby town, and good luck getting back after 9pm when the bus stops.
I grew up in a place not entirely unlike this and, whilst I wasn't one of the ones who used to hang out in front of the newsagents, I can well understand now why those who did such did it. Nothing to do, nowhere to do it.
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To be honest now that Vista 64-bit is out I'm thinking that XP Pro 64's pretty dead in the water. Never really got successful enough to get the software support of mainstream XP, and now never will.
Try looking into Western Martial Arts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Martial_Arts ). A lot of the guys involved do have quite scarily extensive experience of sword combat, although admittedly mainly with blunts.
Games will work fine without admin access, which is good and right. The WT bloke's complaining that downloaded non-trusted applications cannot be installed (WT's stuff doesn't just run in-situ, it tries to install stuff all over the place) without admin access, which is also good and right.
Think of Linux.. a normal user can happily run an installed Nethack binary, but they're going to have to type in an admin password to install their newly-downloaded nethack-with-wildtangent-malware.deb.
The ESRB argument is seperate, and only applies to machines with parental controls enabled and users without access to the parental control password.
As far as I know the ESRB ratings are only used if the Game Explorer's 'Parental Controls' thingie is enabled, which to me is fair enough as it needs to get ratings data from somewhere, and so it's only going to bite developers targeting people using machines with the parental controls enabled, and without the password to over-ride them. I'd hope it'll also allow those with full rights to mark selected unsigned games okay to be played by those without the password in future too which just means that games need the say-so of the computer's owner.
Not too painful, I'd have thought, and probably should help stop people playing the "Think of the children!" card when talking about computer game violence.
Some people have already got XNA development working with IronPython, and it all seems to work well. I've been playing about with XNA myself for the last few months (It's been in open beta for a while) and the codebase I'm working on now happily allows me to add IronPython scripting with very little pain.
In worse news there isn't though is much chance of ever gluing XNA and pygame together. XNA is heavily based around the current PC/XBox360 graphics hardware, it can't even target anything not capable of running shaders and has no support for the fixed-pipeline in 3d (The 360 doesn't have it so neither does XNA) hence relying very heavily on MS' HLSL graphics shader language.. any kind of cross-platform code conversion would be very difficult indeed.
As shaders are getting more powerful the number of texture maps is actually going up, a texture which once would have had a simple colour map now may well have a colour map, a specular map, a diffusion map, a glow map, and a normal map, all merged together with a shader.
Whilst it is possibly for shaders to produce textures in an entirely procedural manner it's not as fast for most textures as doing a few texture map lookups, munging the data, and throwing it out.. hence graphics memory is still needed. Also the number of people who can write good procedural shaders is also tiny compared to the number who can do good Photoshop (etc..) texture work, meaning it's a lot better from a dev. standpoint to have the shader developers working on the few special effect textures and a few nice 'reusable' shaders, and have the Photoshoppers working on producing all of the maps needed to make one of those reusable shaders look like a brick wall, or a steel gate.
For that one example, pretty much. Now try and write me a C++ class function for an employee which is allowed to change the employees details, but not those of their direct manager.. whilst other functions on the employee should be able to. Show me how I can guarantee that an attribute is never decreased in any method, whilst allowing increases quite happily.
Interfaces are not Design by Contract. Design by Contract is setting some conditions which are required to be true before a method can be called (preconditions), conditions which are in turn guaranteed to be true when the method returns (postconditison), and conditions which are guaranteed to be true all the way through a method's execution (invariants). Design by Contract can even be done in none-OO languages too.
For example any accessor method can, by specifying invariants, be guaranteed not to change any of an object's state. If, for some reason, someone messes up and has this call a method which would change state then it's a compile time error.
It's not something I've used much admittedly, but I remember having my brain twisted by Eiffel's trickery during Computer Science lectures so I don't see why others should avoid such fun!
If we're including all of the 'not-quite sequels' for GTA why not do so for Final Fantasy too? A quick peek at the list of Final Fantasy titles on Wikipedia reveals there've been a a lot more than the numbered series, most notably things such as FF X-2 and the FF VII prequel, not to mention things like Crystal Chronicles and FF:Tactics.
When the iPod was first released making music players wasn't Apple's core business either, it seems to have worked out for them. Sometimes diversification works.. now, diversification into a saturated market may be more difficult.
I do suspect MS'll find a spin on this so it appears 'more' than the iPod.
Although in the case of HL2 it's more that you get the NPCs going through their set-piece stuff, as you would in a cut-scene, but Gordon is dicking round throwing books on the floor and jumping into them to watch them scatter rather than listening to them. He does occasionally get to interact with the set-pieces by plugging cables into sockets however, which is obviously the height of interaction.
then do a WoW on them when they want more
What, they're going to do huge Soduku puzzles which can only be solved by twenty or more people playing together?
How evil!
I'm assuming by OOO they meant Out-of-Order functionality.
You're right that those were the first three, but it was a trilogy of four to reference your sig. You're missing the concluding Pools of Darkness. If by any chance you never actually saw this part I'd recommend grabbing a copy, although getting your next door neighbour round may be more of a challenge.
If they were going up levels there's a good chance they were just grinding the creatures for XP (..and the bonus of nice cloth drops) rather than being a gold-farmer. I've done the same in different areas myself in the past.
Part of the problem this time was that the roll-out of new content didn't happen over all servers at once, instead being triggered on a per-server basis when all the items have been gathered. This had the problem that people from other servers who didn't want to wait for the event on their own server created characters on the servers which were ahead, resulting in this one server being first to open the Gate but also falling over repeatedly as there're many times the normal number of people trying to log on.
This would also happen if it were to be rolled out regionally. People on the servers who're not deployed first would want to try the new niftyness and as a result would come over to the servers scheduled for the new content earliest- resulting in those servers falling over in very short order.
I agree with the "Guards! Guards!" idea. A fair few years back I saw a stage version of the book and it worked wonderfully, even friends of mine who'd never read any of the books really enjoyed it. Was a very strong cast though- Paul Darrow ('Avon' from Blake's 7) made a very Sam Vimes.
If it was recieving "Game of the Year" for years after it's release I'd say there's something very wrong with the awards.
I agree, Half Life was an incredible game, but so was The Sims. Both would have enjoyed relative obscurity compared to their current status were it not the free content, however. Let me explain more by going through the arguments as put forward and saying how I feel they apply to HL:
Half Life was a very strong game, but if it wasn't for it's expansions it would have been stale years ago. The expansions (Blue Shift etc.) offer very little compared to the free online add-ons, such as CS.
Half Life was in no was revolutionary, it was an evolution on the already saturated FPS genre. I'd actually go as far to say that if the argument against The Sims is allowed to hold then Half Life merely took the old Alien Breed computer game and put it in a first-person perspective.
Is Half Life's ability to withstand time a mark of its success? No, the expansion packs provided very little over the original game and it was the community's ability to make better free content using the provided engine. A lot of the sales for Half Life after the original 'honeymoon' months came from people buying the program specifically to run free content, such as CS.
Face facts - anyone can do checklists for troubleshooting. Why is that being off-shored?
I'd say the fact that anyone can do it is the reason it's being off-shored; getting the cheapest possible people doing it.
The exact same argument can be leveled against the Half Life series. Without the niftiness of stuff like Counterstrike and Garry's Mod the entire series would have been 'just another FPS', instead of the juggernaut it is now. Any modern game which sets out to be a true classic seems to need one of two things going for it- either expandable by a mod community, or to be a MMORPG.
In the UK (Where the shop is) you need to be seventeen to drive but only sixteen to buy cigarettes, it really wouldn't make sense for people who can buy them on their own to harrass passers-by to buy them for them. If it was alcohol they're after that's available to eighteen year olds and a group with a few cars but none of them yet eighteen doesn't sound that likely.
Actually I would rather he kept a handgun under the counter- this is being used in Wales, where handguns are highly illegal. I'd like to see him get arrested and the shop get managed by someone who comes complete with a clue.
The funny part is this story is from a place called Wales, which as part of the UK has eighteen as it's age limit for consuming alcoholic beverages.
This sounds like it's being deployed in a small village in Wales, not a city. There's probably this Spar shop, a pub (Which the teenagers aren't allowed into anyway), and maybe something like a chip shop (Quite likely with no seating) in the entire village.
To get to anywhere with places which may cater for teenagers will probably involve getting a once-an-hour-and-never-on-time bus to a nearby town, and good luck getting back after 9pm when the bus stops.
I grew up in a place not entirely unlike this and, whilst I wasn't one of the ones who used to hang out in front of the newsagents, I can well understand now why those who did such did it. Nothing to do, nowhere to do it.