Right, but in UO you also didn't have melee special attacks - you basically walked up to someone and thwacked him repeatedly. As a guy who plays a Warrior in WoW, I can honestly say that the game would be *incredibly boring* if thwacking was all you could do.
I disagree pretty strongly. Yes, the end effect of each class is pretty similar, but the actual play mechanics are vastly different. Even within a "ranged magic dps class", all three specs play differently and feel different.
In a skill-based system you'd have, at most, two or three viable damage specs. In the entire game. At least with WoW there's some variation if you get tired of dotting or nuking or burning cooldowns or using reaction abilities.
A better analogy is ten different computers, all running Linux with different window managers and themes. The underlying code is the same - but the interface is different.
On the other hand, in Eve, your decisions never permanently screw a character - even before neural re-mapping, all it meant was that you trained up slower than your friends did. You're never limited to a certain number of skill points - given enough years spent playing Eve, you'll eventually get all skills maxed out.
(I mean, you would if they didn't keep adding more, obviously.)
Didn't virtually every serious player in UO end up being a magician wearing platemail?
The problem with a "skill system" is that, inevitably, there's going to be a small handful of "skill choices" that are just flat-out better than the alternatives. More damage, more survivability. It's only easier to balance if there's absolutely no skill synergy - and good luck making a fun game that has no synergy whatsoever between skills.
On top of that it's hard to give flavor to a fully skill-based system. A large amount of WoW's appeal is that you have a pile of interesting abilities. Your class behaves fundamentally differently to every other class in the game, and the talents you pick make it behave even more differently. With a skill-based system it's hard to figure out where "abilities" come from - do you buy them with skill points? Do you get them automatically with certain levels of skill? Those approaches both have serious issues, both of which make the whole "skill balancing" thing even more difficult.
Skill based systems can be a lot of fun, I'm not saying they're eternally bad. However, I'd love to see a skill-based system that - assuming everyone is trying to play for maximum effectiveness - creates anything even remotely like the flavor and differences between WoW's ten classes and over 30 major specs.
I do agree that the Holy Trinity is stale, though I believe that's not because each player should be a polyglot, able to take on any role - it's just because I think that particular standard role combination is getting a bit dull. Move on, people, find something new.
Take that $40k, invest it instead. Assume ~8% returns (historically accurate for the index.) That's $3.2k per year that you're already spending in just not having money invested.
Assume the cheap beater car is 25mpg, $3/gallon of gas, that's almost 27,000 miles per year that you can drive before you've spent your $3200/year. More, if your $40k car isn't free to drive.
From here it gets hairier as you'll have to factor in things like repair costs.
People grossly overestimate the cost of gas and grossly underestimate the real cost of large purchases.
1. If the health of the company and their product is absolutely dependent on the well being of Lance, then they should have done everything they could to keep this story quiet, as it is embarrassing.
Quality developers care more about the quality of their product than about a little bit of embarrassment. I would call this a mark in their favor - they care so much about CentOS that, if it's the only option remaining, they're willing to publicly drag themselves into the spotlight to solve a major problem.
On the other hand, if you'd rather give money to a classic not-our-fault everything-is-fine the-ship-is-not-sinking oh-btw-we're-bankrupt company, which would always choose the least embarrassing option even when it means the death of the company and all its products . . .
. . . well, then I suppose you'll get exactly what you hope for.
Who says every package is OSS? I've got some ideas of things I want to do on the iPhone. Sure as hell not going to, though - I like coding in Lua, and that's simply verboten on the iPhone.
This isn't limited to email. After donating to the ACLU, they started calling me on the phone constantly. Told them to stop, they kept calling. Told them to put me on the do-not-call list, they kept calling. Told them to do it again, they kept calling. Threatened to report them to the FCC, they stopped.
Do you really need street-level detail for places like Brady, Montana, with 16 streets and maybe 200 people?
Actually, I did several times:) One time when I managed to get turned around in the middle of Godforsaken, Nowhere, and wasn't sure which was led further north, several other times when I was unsure which highway I was trying to take.
As it turned out I also only hit three of those cities you listed up there, so that'd be a significant chunk of wasted money and space.
Keep in mind that I was wandering around off the beaten path - I pretty much avoided interstates whenever possible. Signage was minimal, and the Alaska Highway was a busy thoroughfare compared to some of the places I ended up.
I don't know about you, but the last time I took a long trip I used a map on my laptop. I figured out what was coming up by using a fantastic new technology called "zooming out and scrolling a bit". I planned stuff by either writing it down in a text file, or by dropping a waypoint on the map.
Not only that, but my laptop map had a street-level diagram of every city I went through. Considering that I was driving from SF to Anchorage, without any particular route in mind besides "drive to Las Vegas, then approximately northish", I don't really want to think about how many paper maps I would have needed to procure in order to get that sort of detail.
While I'm generally a fan of keeping old technology around when it has advantages, I'm really unsure of what advantages paper maps have over electronic maps at this point, besides the fact that they still function if your power goes out . . . and I'm having a real hard time coming up with a scenario where both car battery and laptop battery have died, but your paper map is still helpful.
Or people could buy a cheap used car for things like this. I actually own two cars, neither of which cost me over $1500, just because it's real convenient when one's in the shop for an oil change or for maintenance. (My mechanic loves me - I tell him "here ya go, I want it back within a month, take your time.")
If one of my cars were a Tesla Model S, I'd still have a cheap gas car to take cross-country.
Keeping two cars is really not a significant extra cost. It's ridiculously convenient.
Seriously. That's the first thing you need to do. If you know C++, write 'em in C++. If you know Flash, write 'em in Flash. If you don't know any programming language, pick up GameMaker and write 'em in GameMaker. Can't draw? Grab The Gimp, read some sprite tutorials, and draw anyway.
Then start making games. Don't make epics, don't make blockbusters, spend a week on a game and churn them out, because you'll learn a thousand times more from making ten games than you will from making a tenth of a game.
If you've been hit hard enough to otherwise launch yourself out of your car you likely don't have control of it anyway. At best, you're probably pushing hard on one pedal or another and holding the wheel straight. Who knows which pedal though!
On the other hand, there are other choices. Just like "wind power vs free power that magically appears out of the ether" is a false dichotomy, so is "wind power vs evil coal plants".
What we've got is a whole host of options, including but not limited to wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, tidal, hydroelectric, geothermal, and probably others I haven't thought of. Saying that wind is the best option because it's better than coal . . . well, that's just as shortsighted as the group that ignores the environment entirely.
Yeah, but we'll run out of fuel tens of thousands of years in the future. Giving us ample time to figure out fusion, which would last for even longer.
Technically, the sun isn't renewable either because eventually it'll go out, but it just doesn't matter. Nuclear is as close to infinite as we need to be concerned with for quite some time.
It could just be that the US coders are no longer interested.
I used to compete in Topcoder. I made it to #2, I was in the top ten for over a year solid. Then I got a job at Google thanks to my Topcoder ranking. I joined a team that had a bunch of other ex-Topcoders in it and, as with them, determined pretty quickly that Topcoder just wasn't worth my time anymore.
Now, I don't know how many Chinese programmers got jobs through Topcoder, but I do know that the vast majority of the best Topcoder competitors in the US were hired by a surprisingly small set of companies. And, well, as cool as Topcoder is, if you sit down and look at dollars-per-hour . . . it's pretty crummy compared to a real job. Especially since they lowered all the prizes.
So, US coders do Topcoder, do well, get job, quit Topcoder because we get paid well. Chinese coders do Topcoder, do well, don't get job, don't quit Topcoder. Or they do Topcoder, do well, get job, don't quit Topcoder because they're not yet being paid well enough.
Doesn't surprise me in the least.
Re:Windows has more and more Unix features
on
Unix Turns 40
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· Score: 4, Insightful
On the other hand, Linux has been adding Windows-like features for the same period of time . . . like, say, GUIs, and drivers, and hardware acceleration, and programs that end-users want to use.
Another issue with this (besides the fact that I don't want the college spyware looking at my internal VM hard drive) is that VMs are not 100% efficient, and, in fact, are usually noticeably slower. I'd much rather be using the outside computer as my actual computer than the inside one.
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Which obviously means nobody could ever find them fun!
"More combinations" does not necessarily imply "better gameplay".
Right, but in UO you also didn't have melee special attacks - you basically walked up to someone and thwacked him repeatedly. As a guy who plays a Warrior in WoW, I can honestly say that the game would be *incredibly boring* if thwacking was all you could do.
I disagree pretty strongly. Yes, the end effect of each class is pretty similar, but the actual play mechanics are vastly different. Even within a "ranged magic dps class", all three specs play differently and feel different.
In a skill-based system you'd have, at most, two or three viable damage specs. In the entire game. At least with WoW there's some variation if you get tired of dotting or nuking or burning cooldowns or using reaction abilities.
A better analogy is ten different computers, all running Linux with different window managers and themes. The underlying code is the same - but the interface is different.
On the other hand, in Eve, your decisions never permanently screw a character - even before neural re-mapping, all it meant was that you trained up slower than your friends did. You're never limited to a certain number of skill points - given enough years spent playing Eve, you'll eventually get all skills maxed out.
(I mean, you would if they didn't keep adding more, obviously.)
Didn't virtually every serious player in UO end up being a magician wearing platemail?
The problem with a "skill system" is that, inevitably, there's going to be a small handful of "skill choices" that are just flat-out better than the alternatives. More damage, more survivability. It's only easier to balance if there's absolutely no skill synergy - and good luck making a fun game that has no synergy whatsoever between skills.
On top of that it's hard to give flavor to a fully skill-based system. A large amount of WoW's appeal is that you have a pile of interesting abilities. Your class behaves fundamentally differently to every other class in the game, and the talents you pick make it behave even more differently. With a skill-based system it's hard to figure out where "abilities" come from - do you buy them with skill points? Do you get them automatically with certain levels of skill? Those approaches both have serious issues, both of which make the whole "skill balancing" thing even more difficult.
Skill based systems can be a lot of fun, I'm not saying they're eternally bad. However, I'd love to see a skill-based system that - assuming everyone is trying to play for maximum effectiveness - creates anything even remotely like the flavor and differences between WoW's ten classes and over 30 major specs.
I do agree that the Holy Trinity is stale, though I believe that's not because each player should be a polyglot, able to take on any role - it's just because I think that particular standard role combination is getting a bit dull. Move on, people, find something new.
Take that $40k, invest it instead. Assume ~8% returns (historically accurate for the index.) That's $3.2k per year that you're already spending in just not having money invested.
Assume the cheap beater car is 25mpg, $3/gallon of gas, that's almost 27,000 miles per year that you can drive before you've spent your $3200/year. More, if your $40k car isn't free to drive.
From here it gets hairier as you'll have to factor in things like repair costs.
People grossly overestimate the cost of gas and grossly underestimate the real cost of large purchases.
Quality developers care more about the quality of their product than about a little bit of embarrassment. I would call this a mark in their favor - they care so much about CentOS that, if it's the only option remaining, they're willing to publicly drag themselves into the spotlight to solve a major problem.
On the other hand, if you'd rather give money to a classic not-our-fault everything-is-fine the-ship-is-not-sinking oh-btw-we're-bankrupt company, which would always choose the least embarrassing option even when it means the death of the company and all its products . . .
. . . well, then I suppose you'll get exactly what you hope for.
Who says every package is OSS? I've got some ideas of things I want to do on the iPhone. Sure as hell not going to, though - I like coding in Lua, and that's simply verboten on the iPhone.
This isn't limited to email. After donating to the ACLU, they started calling me on the phone constantly. Told them to stop, they kept calling. Told them to put me on the do-not-call list, they kept calling. Told them to do it again, they kept calling. Threatened to report them to the FCC, they stopped.
Not donating to them again!
Yes, chances are very good that all of those situations are illegal and prosecutable.
Actually, I did several times :) One time when I managed to get turned around in the middle of Godforsaken, Nowhere, and wasn't sure which was led further north, several other times when I was unsure which highway I was trying to take.
As it turned out I also only hit three of those cities you listed up there, so that'd be a significant chunk of wasted money and space.
Keep in mind that I was wandering around off the beaten path - I pretty much avoided interstates whenever possible. Signage was minimal, and the Alaska Highway was a busy thoroughfare compared to some of the places I ended up.
I don't know about you, but the last time I took a long trip I used a map on my laptop. I figured out what was coming up by using a fantastic new technology called "zooming out and scrolling a bit". I planned stuff by either writing it down in a text file, or by dropping a waypoint on the map.
Not only that, but my laptop map had a street-level diagram of every city I went through. Considering that I was driving from SF to Anchorage, without any particular route in mind besides "drive to Las Vegas, then approximately northish", I don't really want to think about how many paper maps I would have needed to procure in order to get that sort of detail.
While I'm generally a fan of keeping old technology around when it has advantages, I'm really unsure of what advantages paper maps have over electronic maps at this point, besides the fact that they still function if your power goes out . . . and I'm having a real hard time coming up with a scenario where both car battery and laptop battery have died, but your paper map is still helpful.
It turns out that you don't need any children involved for it to be a crime.
Or people could buy a cheap used car for things like this. I actually own two cars, neither of which cost me over $1500, just because it's real convenient when one's in the shop for an oil change or for maintenance. (My mechanic loves me - I tell him "here ya go, I want it back within a month, take your time.")
If one of my cars were a Tesla Model S, I'd still have a cheap gas car to take cross-country.
Keeping two cars is really not a significant extra cost. It's ridiculously convenient.
Start writing games.
Seriously. That's the first thing you need to do. If you know C++, write 'em in C++. If you know Flash, write 'em in Flash. If you don't know any programming language, pick up GameMaker and write 'em in GameMaker. Can't draw? Grab The Gimp, read some sprite tutorials, and draw anyway.
Then start making games. Don't make epics, don't make blockbusters, spend a week on a game and churn them out, because you'll learn a thousand times more from making ten games than you will from making a tenth of a game.
I've recently started a project where I make a game every month, spending at most a week on it. I strongly recommend it. You'll learn fast, and quite possibly end up with real games to show off.
If you want to design games, you gotta practice your ass off.
Sure it does. Even ignoring the nontrivial funeral costs, there's opportunity costs versus what they would have contributed to society otherwise.
And, hell, if he convinces one person to wear a condom so they, themselves, don't get AIDS, he's already paid for his own treatment.
If you've been hit hard enough to otherwise launch yourself out of your car you likely don't have control of it anyway. At best, you're probably pushing hard on one pedal or another and holding the wheel straight. Who knows which pedal though!
On the other hand, there are other choices. Just like "wind power vs free power that magically appears out of the ether" is a false dichotomy, so is "wind power vs evil coal plants".
What we've got is a whole host of options, including but not limited to wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, tidal, hydroelectric, geothermal, and probably others I haven't thought of. Saying that wind is the best option because it's better than coal . . . well, that's just as shortsighted as the group that ignores the environment entirely.
Yeah, but we'll run out of fuel tens of thousands of years in the future. Giving us ample time to figure out fusion, which would last for even longer.
Technically, the sun isn't renewable either because eventually it'll go out, but it just doesn't matter. Nuclear is as close to infinite as we need to be concerned with for quite some time.
In Soviet Russia, clouds get hit by lightning?
Yeah, it's sorta weak, but that's what they were going for.
Innocent until proven guilty. Go get one of them convicted, and they're guilty. Until then, they're innocent.
Good luck getting one convicted.
It could just be that the US coders are no longer interested.
I used to compete in Topcoder. I made it to #2, I was in the top ten for over a year solid. Then I got a job at Google thanks to my Topcoder ranking. I joined a team that had a bunch of other ex-Topcoders in it and, as with them, determined pretty quickly that Topcoder just wasn't worth my time anymore.
Now, I don't know how many Chinese programmers got jobs through Topcoder, but I do know that the vast majority of the best Topcoder competitors in the US were hired by a surprisingly small set of companies. And, well, as cool as Topcoder is, if you sit down and look at dollars-per-hour . . . it's pretty crummy compared to a real job. Especially since they lowered all the prizes.
So, US coders do Topcoder, do well, get job, quit Topcoder because we get paid well. Chinese coders do Topcoder, do well, don't get job, don't quit Topcoder. Or they do Topcoder, do well, get job, don't quit Topcoder because they're not yet being paid well enough.
Doesn't surprise me in the least.
On the other hand, Linux has been adding Windows-like features for the same period of time . . . like, say, GUIs, and drivers, and hardware acceleration, and programs that end-users want to use.
Another issue with this (besides the fact that I don't want the college spyware looking at my internal VM hard drive) is that VMs are not 100% efficient, and, in fact, are usually noticeably slower. I'd much rather be using the outside computer as my actual computer than the inside one.