Roller Coaster Tycoon had bots that expressed emotions. Literally you had hundreds of kids and parents running around your theme park that you could click on to find out their emotions and what they were thinking. It was actually pretty instructive and tied into improving your park.
Another example that springs to mind is Creatures where the Norns spoke their thoughts too. Although it has to be said that the game was so controlled by positronic / neural net behaviour that half the time you had no idea what the hell was going on in their heads. I ended up beating them senseless just out of frustration.
What bias is that? I deal with XML on a daily basis - it is more sensitive to errors, it is harder to read, it is slower to parse. Try writing XSLT or RDF sometime and see if you can write a simple useful document in a text editor without introducing numerous errors and typos.
I don't doubt that it's a better way to structure data and has numerous advantages but much of that is irrelevant noise if the file is just holding name / value pairs for a proprietary app.
Now I don't know what data the new Civ will hold, but the original poster was lauding it as some breakthrough when it isn't. Lots of games hold values in plain old.ini format and they're considerably faster to parse, and edit. If the new Civ is doing the same, then XML is pointless overkill.
Yeah but XML is simply a format for structuring data and quite a heavy one at that. Previous versions of Civ & countless other games allowed you change various settings through a plain.ini style text file.
Switching to XML might make the data more structured but at the expense of loading speed, readability, editability and sensitivity to parsing errors.
I'd agree they might be difficult in an open terrain, but in Doom 3? I seriously doubt it. There is no layInWait() since zombies spawn only when you walk on the trigger to spawn them. You can ignore wouldFragSelf() by making the zombie immune to its own fire. The teleportTo() is trivial. The dodge() is just a variation on takeCover(). The run() is just a variation on walk(). The only remotely challenging thing is jumpAcross() and even that could be accomplished by pairing spots that jumping can happen between.
Toss in invisible tram lines for pathing and I don't think it's that complex. Lots of games manage it, and frankly I'd expect a little more from Id.
HL2 is better, but even that suffers from stupid AI. The humans who follow you around are especially annoying.
Most NPCs or 'bots in FPS games I've played have had an AI that can be encapsulated by these few lines of pseudo-code:
IF playerCanSeeMe() THEN
IF coverNear() && rand() > 0.5 THEN
takeCover();
ELSE
standUp();
shoot();
ENDIF ELSE
advanceTowardsPlayer(); ENDIF
I wish the likes of Doom 3, HL2 et al would pay half as much attention to making the enemies smart and resourceful as they do to making the scenery pretty. Sometimes I wonder if zombies are such a staple of FPS games to explain why the game AI is so retarded.
Even multi-player games could benefit (e.g. the Battlefield series) if the single player training mode bots had an ounce of sense or tactics.
The only FPS I would consider containing remotely convincing AI is Far Cry and even the NPCs in that are fairly predictable and easy to fool - just swim to an island and pick them off one by one as they swim to you or drown trying. But at least they seem to have a spoonful of brains in their heads - crouching, taking cover, encircling, giving orders and other tactics that other games haven't even bothered to implement.
Good luck installing the RAM. It's not beyond the realms of difficulty, but as the article shows, neither has it been made very easy.
The Mac Mini specs also say that "Memory, AirPort Extreme and internal Bluetooth upgrades must be performed by an Apple Authorized Service provider; fees may apply.". In light of the assurances in the article this may not be true for memory but it certainly is for the other components.
Truly there is no better definition of sucks than the Usenet service in AOL. Imagine their built-in email client but ten times worse, unloved, frozen in time, built around an ancient Compuserve-style chat forum. That's AOL Usenet.
Anyone who uses it should just shoot themselves and be done with it.
Yeah it is a big deal. I'm sure tools do become available over time, but a deeply recessed screw with a non-standard head is a bitch to remove especially if you don't have the luxury of being on the same continent as a Sears.
They've done it more recently than that - the iPod is sealed too. Hence why sites have sprung up just documenting how to open the bloody thing to change the battery without sending it off for servicing.
But I'll let the early adopters find out the story with this Mac first. My guess is either the unit is sealed (as in it can only opened with a special tool) or they cover / hide the screws with warranty stickers and pads.
I do like the concept of the Mac Mini, but as I have a G4 already, I think I'll hang on for the next generation which will no doubt improve on these specs somewhat.
Besides which, does the Mac Mini's case even open up? The website makes ominous hints about expansions saying "the rest can be added in-store at an Apple Store or an Apple authorized reseller.".
Which sounds awfully like "we're closing the box with special screws or hidden latches so you can't open it without a special tool". Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but Apple have done it before (as my Mac SE can attest to) and they may well decided to do it again.
That's why I said I don't know what US keyboards are like but UK PC / Mac keyboards have a different layout from each other. It's not a locale issue since the Mac is set to UK, it's simply that on the UK PC keyboard you hit Shift + 2 to get a double-quote, and on the Mac you hit Shift + the key to the right of 'L'. There are lots of other differences, such as the # own key on the PC keyboard which prints '\' on the Mac (to get # you do Option + 3), the and so on. The keyboard isn't at fault here, it's sending the raw keycodes, it's just that the Mac is interpretting them incorrectly according to the Mac keyboard layout. But that assumes that you are like me and have used enough US / UK keyboards of various types to guess the right key.
Now the Mac could fix this easily enough by offering a "I have a PC keyboard" checkbox on the System Prefs but it doesn't. Therefore the keys are all screwed up. That probably made no difference in the "old days" where you'd be weird to attach a PC keyboard but this new Mac explicitly says bring your own keyboard and mouse. And when people do it they'll find their keyboard has shifted all the symbols around which is hardly a good first impression.
And that's on the keyboard that works. The other one does nothing as I mentioned before.
The one good thing is that the multimedia keys on the Logitech work as expected. So I've trained it to eject the disc, change volume etc., but the mappings are a major pain.
That's a great idea, but the dists need to support the model. It's no good saying to some small business that they should backup all their data, write out all their passwords, their network settings, write down details of all their shares, install Red Hat and then spend an ungodly amount of time reproducing the exact same environment.
It strikes me as an obvious business opportunity that all of this could be automated - i.e. you feed a CD into an old NT box, it makes a careful audit of all your settings, backs up the data somewhere, and then proceeds to replicate the environment using Linux as best as humanly possible. This is after all what the Microsoft does from one version of Windows to the next, so why not do the same on Linux?
For example you can log the fact they have an HP laserjet called "foo" and replicate the same with CUPs and SAMBA. You can see they have a domain controller and replicate the same. You can see they have a web server and try and mimic the settings. Obviously it wouldn't be perfect, but even something that removes 95% of the drudgery would be a boon.
Sorry, that's not true. As I posted in response to someone else, I have a PC USB keyboard which absolutely doesn't work in the Mac. The Mac just ignores the keyboard like it isn't there. It may well be that most USB keyboards work, but some don't. I don't know if that was due to the keyboard having an extra row of multi-media buttons or not, but it doesn't work.
I have another keyboard which is a Logitech which does work (and I bought specifically because it had a Mac logo on the packaging) but OS X snarls up the key mappings so you get the Mac layout with a PC keyboard. I don't know what the US keyboards are like, but in the UK the PC / Mac layouts are sufficiently different that it is a pain because you must go hunting for euros, tildas, bars or whatnot. The key says one thing and they're actually somewhere else. If Apple are touting the ability to be able to plug-in your PC peripherals then it should give them the sane and expected behaviour.
Sadly this isn't true. I have several USB keyboards and only one works on my Mac. The other just sits there and doesn't respond at all. It works fine with XP & Linux though, so clearly it's in disagreement with OS X for some reason.
A secondary problem is the keyboard layout for PC keyboards are different from Mac keyboards. For example the #, " keys are different on my UK PC keyboard compared to my UK Mac keyboard. I assume there is enough information supplied in the USB plug and play handshake that the Mac could do a much better job and actually map the keys properly.
So unless Apple have fixed both problems there are going to be a lot of pissed off people.
$499 is a fairly impressive price for a Mac but it's still nowhere near as cheap as a PC. The price doesn't include a monitor, speakers or even a mouse or keyboard if I read the specs correctly. Now some people will have some of those things lying around, but I wonder if for example a PC keyboard works on a Mac - I know most of them don't.
Once you add all that you need to do and a memory upgrade it isn't that special at all, probably costing you $800.
I'd still be tempted to get one once my existing G4 system packs in, but it doesn't seem like a bargain. It's certainly better than previous Apple products, but it's more like they've caught up than raced ahead of their PC counterparts.
If you want a decent open source media player, choose VLC. It works great on Win32, Linux & OS X. Works well supporting CDs, DVDs, AVI, DiVX, MP3, Ogg and just about every other media format known to man - except protected WMA.
So if the exploit relies on dangling a "carrot" in the shape of some free pr0n if you download some licence into WMP, VLC won't protect you from yourself and doesn't offer comparable functionality.
I don't see why retail and download should be mutually exclusive. The fact is there is a place for both of them. Direct retail satisfies the impulse buyers who see it and want the game and 30 days of play *now* versus 20 hours of downloading. The direct download is for those who'd *like* the game but aren't going to fork out $50 when they might dump it in a month.
I truly believe that you could do both and make much more money than if you did one alone. Its clear from the number of people who bothered to download the public beta (myself included), weighing in at 1.7gb that there is an untapped market there to exploit. I don't see that it matters to Vivendi *how* they get their subs so long as people are handing over the money in one way or another.
I wonder if EQ2 didn't get bitten because so many people are ex-EQ or ex-SWG. I know from my experience of EQ (playing for close to 2 years) and from SWG (just a 2 week trial) that I wouldn't touch anything made by Verant with a bargepole without deliriously positive reviews appearing for it first. I know from experience that their customer service stinks. I know from experience that their games are based on the concept of camping, grind and all around tedium. I know from experience that they'll happily use their paying customers as beta testers for some broken new game engine. I know from experience that certain features are half baked with promises that it will be fixed in an expansion (costing $$$). I know from experience that they don't care about casual gamers.
Now EQ2 got reasonable reviews which might suggest Verant have learned something, but WoW got *great* reviews. So if I were choosing one I'd know which I'd pick. And since I played WoW in the beta I happen to know its a great game with a great UI. Unlike EQ, you feel you can just pick it up and play. Furthermore, the graphics are pretty are not *demanding* so it runs great on older machines with huge zones and brief loading times.
My only concern with MMPORGS in general is how much they cost. My belief is that if someone is going to charge me $15 a month to play it, then the client had better damned well be free to download. WoW had the right idea to release the beta as a modified bittorrent - it's just too bad they didn't follow the idea through with the final release. What difference does it make to them if I buy the game retail or not? I actually believe that making it a free download would substantially increase their subscriber base.
That would be out but in the "barely" sense. Toms Hardware was looking at sample boards last month, but they're really flooding the supply chains. Looking at Komplett online I see they are nominally out, but the site doesn't even have a picture for them yet so clearly they're just in.
PCI-E boards have been out for Intel for ages. Naturally, Intel are going to support their own CPUs first, but it is this continuous drip-drip effect of new tech in Intel chipsets that keeps people using Intel hardware instead of AMDs.
Which is why I think it's a smart thing. I'm a patient person so I've been hanging on for PCI-E to appear for AMD, but I reckon a lot of people, especially hardcore gamers, and OEM channels will simply use Intel if it means better performance at the end of the day.
IBM was evil up until the point that MS kicked the shit out of them. Microsoft is and always will be evil. Apple is arguably excessively evil given its meagre market share. Sun has a latent evil tendency which manifests itself whenever they think they have a market to themselves. And SCO is just plain pitiful, and evil.
And Google is starting to become evil despite their self-proclaimed "don't be evil" policy. Their new Group "beta" is pure evil, a) for being a compulsary beta b) for making the search and thread browsing facilities very, very sucky indeed.
The thing is Intel are making the right moves in other areas. For example some Intel CPUs might suck slightly compared to their AMD counterparts, but they have much better chipsets. While everyone is sitting around twiddling their thumbs for PCI Express to appear for AMD (since it is a very desirable feature), it has been available for Intel CPU boards for ages. Also, some Intel chips don't suck, e.g. Pentium M, which is why Intel are kicking the crap out of all and sundry in the notebook arena.
Something similar happened in one of his later books (Debt of Honor IIRC) except it was an extremely bright flash light that blinded pilots just as they were landing.
Well it does and it doesn't. Certainly it has the potential to move simple VB apps over, but apps that use OCX / ActiveX controls? Forget it.
And that's part of the problem. VB was until VB6 such a hopelessly shitty language that it was impossible to extend it in interesting ways. Either you resigned yourself to using the meagre toolkit that it came with or you supplemented it with 3rd party controls (written in C++) that you bought elsewhere. Consequently only toy VB apps stand a chance of porting easily, unless of course GAMBAS could somehow invoke WINE to host native controls.
By VB6 you could finally produce your own ActiveX controls and apps in VB that you could embed in other apps but even so most controls were still produced native binaries in C++.
In fact I reckon that only VB.NET stands the chance of smooth porting to Linux (via an IDE and Mono), but even that would not be plain sailing since the shortcomings in Windows.Forms mean many.NET apps are already infested with PInvoke calls and hooks to other proprietary libraries.
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Another example that springs to mind is Creatures where the Norns spoke their thoughts too. Although it has to be said that the game was so controlled by positronic / neural net behaviour that half the time you had no idea what the hell was going on in their heads. I ended up beating them senseless just out of frustration.
I don't doubt that it's a better way to structure data and has numerous advantages but much of that is irrelevant noise if the file is just holding name / value pairs for a proprietary app.
Now I don't know what data the new Civ will hold, but the original poster was lauding it as some breakthrough when it isn't. Lots of games hold values in plain old
Switching to XML might make the data more structured but at the expense of loading speed, readability, editability and sensitivity to parsing errors.
Toss in invisible tram lines for pathing and I don't think it's that complex. Lots of games manage it, and frankly I'd expect a little more from Id.
HL2 is better, but even that suffers from stupid AI. The humans who follow you around are especially annoying.
Most NPCs or 'bots in FPS games I've played have had an AI that can be encapsulated by these few lines of pseudo-code:
IF playerCanSeeMe() THEN
IF coverNear() && rand() > 0.5 THEN
takeCover();
ELSE
standUp();
shoot();
ENDIF
ELSE
advanceTowardsPlayer();
ENDIF
I wish the likes of Doom 3, HL2 et al would pay half as much attention to making the enemies smart and resourceful as they do to making the scenery pretty. Sometimes I wonder if zombies are such a staple of FPS games to explain why the game AI is so retarded.
Even multi-player games could benefit (e.g. the Battlefield series) if the single player training mode bots had an ounce of sense or tactics.
The only FPS I would consider containing remotely convincing AI is Far Cry and even the NPCs in that are fairly predictable and easy to fool - just swim to an island and pick them off one by one as they swim to you or drown trying. But at least they seem to have a spoonful of brains in their heads - crouching, taking cover, encircling, giving orders and other tactics that other games haven't even bothered to implement.
The Mac Mini specs also say that "Memory, AirPort Extreme and internal Bluetooth upgrades must be performed by an Apple Authorized Service provider; fees may apply.". In light of the assurances in the article this may not be true for memory but it certainly is for the other components.
Anyone who uses it should just shoot themselves and be done with it.
Maybe it hit water in some previous age and sunk to the bottom?
Yeah it is a big deal. I'm sure tools do become available over time, but a deeply recessed screw with a non-standard head is a bitch to remove especially if you don't have the luxury of being on the same continent as a Sears.
But I'll let the early adopters find out the story with this Mac first. My guess is either the unit is sealed (as in it can only opened with a special tool) or they cover / hide the screws with warranty stickers and pads.
I do like the concept of the Mac Mini, but as I have a G4 already, I think I'll hang on for the next generation which will no doubt improve on these specs somewhat.
Which sounds awfully like "we're closing the box with special screws or hidden latches so you can't open it without a special tool". Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but Apple have done it before (as my Mac SE can attest to) and they may well decided to do it again.
Now the Mac could fix this easily enough by offering a "I have a PC keyboard" checkbox on the System Prefs but it doesn't. Therefore the keys are all screwed up. That probably made no difference in the "old days" where you'd be weird to attach a PC keyboard but this new Mac explicitly says bring your own keyboard and mouse. And when people do it they'll find their keyboard has shifted all the symbols around which is hardly a good first impression.
And that's on the keyboard that works. The other one does nothing as I mentioned before.
The one good thing is that the multimedia keys on the Logitech work as expected. So I've trained it to eject the disc, change volume etc., but the mappings are a major pain.
It strikes me as an obvious business opportunity that all of this could be automated - i.e. you feed a CD into an old NT box, it makes a careful audit of all your settings, backs up the data somewhere, and then proceeds to replicate the environment using Linux as best as humanly possible. This is after all what the Microsoft does from one version of Windows to the next, so why not do the same on Linux?
For example you can log the fact they have an HP laserjet called "foo" and replicate the same with CUPs and SAMBA. You can see they have a domain controller and replicate the same. You can see they have a web server and try and mimic the settings. Obviously it wouldn't be perfect, but even something that removes 95% of the drudgery would be a boon.
I have another keyboard which is a Logitech which does work (and I bought specifically because it had a Mac logo on the packaging) but OS X snarls up the key mappings so you get the Mac layout with a PC keyboard. I don't know what the US keyboards are like, but in the UK the PC / Mac layouts are sufficiently different that it is a pain because you must go hunting for euros, tildas, bars or whatnot. The key says one thing and they're actually somewhere else. If Apple are touting the ability to be able to plug-in your PC peripherals then it should give them the sane and expected behaviour.
Sadly this isn't true. I have several USB keyboards and only one works on my Mac. The other just sits there and doesn't respond at all. It works fine with XP & Linux though, so clearly it's in disagreement with OS X for some reason.
A secondary problem is the keyboard layout for PC keyboards are different from Mac keyboards. For example the #, " keys are different on my UK PC keyboard compared to my UK Mac keyboard. I assume there is enough information supplied in the USB plug and play handshake that the Mac could do a much better job and actually map the keys properly.
So unless Apple have fixed both problems there are going to be a lot of pissed off people.
Once you add all that you need to do and a memory upgrade it isn't that special at all, probably costing you $800.
I'd still be tempted to get one once my existing G4 system packs in, but it doesn't seem like a bargain. It's certainly better than previous Apple products, but it's more like they've caught up than raced ahead of their PC counterparts.
If you want a decent open source media player, choose VLC. It works great on Win32, Linux & OS X. Works well supporting CDs, DVDs, AVI, DiVX, MP3, Ogg and just about every other media format known to man - except protected WMA.
So if the exploit relies on dangling a "carrot" in the shape of some free pr0n if you download some licence into WMP, VLC won't protect you from yourself and doesn't offer comparable functionality.
I truly believe that you could do both and make much more money than if you did one alone. Its clear from the number of people who bothered to download the public beta (myself included), weighing in at 1.7gb that there is an untapped market there to exploit. I don't see that it matters to Vivendi *how* they get their subs so long as people are handing over the money in one way or another.
Now EQ2 got reasonable reviews which might suggest Verant have learned something, but WoW got *great* reviews. So if I were choosing one I'd know which I'd pick. And since I played WoW in the beta I happen to know its a great game with a great UI. Unlike EQ, you feel you can just pick it up and play. Furthermore, the graphics are pretty are not *demanding* so it runs great on older machines with huge zones and brief loading times.
My only concern with MMPORGS in general is how much they cost. My belief is that if someone is going to charge me $15 a month to play it, then the client had better damned well be free to download. WoW had the right idea to release the beta as a modified bittorrent - it's just too bad they didn't follow the idea through with the final release. What difference does it make to them if I buy the game retail or not? I actually believe that making it a free download would substantially increase their subscriber base.
PCI-E boards have been out for Intel for ages. Naturally, Intel are going to support their own CPUs first, but it is this continuous drip-drip effect of new tech in Intel chipsets that keeps people using Intel hardware instead of AMDs.
Which is why I think it's a smart thing. I'm a patient person so I've been hanging on for PCI-E to appear for AMD, but I reckon a lot of people, especially hardcore gamers, and OEM channels will simply use Intel if it means better performance at the end of the day.
And Google is starting to become evil despite their self-proclaimed "don't be evil" policy. Their new Group "beta" is pure evil, a) for being a compulsary beta b) for making the search and thread browsing facilities very, very sucky indeed.
The thing is Intel are making the right moves in other areas. For example some Intel CPUs might suck slightly compared to their AMD counterparts, but they have much better chipsets. While everyone is sitting around twiddling their thumbs for PCI Express to appear for AMD (since it is a very desirable feature), it has been available for Intel CPU boards for ages. Also, some Intel chips don't suck, e.g. Pentium M, which is why Intel are kicking the crap out of all and sundry in the notebook arena.
Shit book, but a plausible idea nonetheless.
And that's part of the problem. VB was until VB6 such a hopelessly shitty language that it was impossible to extend it in interesting ways. Either you resigned yourself to using the meagre toolkit that it came with or you supplemented it with 3rd party controls (written in C++) that you bought elsewhere. Consequently only toy VB apps stand a chance of porting easily, unless of course GAMBAS could somehow invoke WINE to host native controls.
By VB6 you could finally produce your own ActiveX controls and apps in VB that you could embed in other apps but even so most controls were still produced native binaries in C++.
In fact I reckon that only VB.NET stands the chance of smooth porting to Linux (via an IDE and Mono), but even that would not be plain sailing since the shortcomings in Windows.Forms mean many .NET apps are already infested with PInvoke calls and hooks to other proprietary libraries.