You guys need to get up to speed on your DOSBox knowledge.
The more recent versions of DOSBox use a dynarec backend. This is way faster than the old backend and has the added benefit of not requiring you to mess around with cycle numbers for every game.
How about CPU utilization? Are there any ultra-low-power decoding chips that play Theora?
H.264 already has a large install base of devices that play it. Is there enough of an advantage to Theora to warrant dumping all of those for new ones?
You need to pay more attention. Steam has sales all the time. I've seen games go anywhere from 10%-90% off. Left 4 Dead had a weekend where it was 50% off. It did massive sales numbers over that weekend.
In the future, when physical distribution is gone, these types of sales will become even more of a big deal. Gamers have shown that they can and will wait for a price drop before buying a game.
Even though digital distribution eliminates any supply issues, it is still subject to the law of demand.
It's simply, really. A few of the developers who do play ball with Apple tend to make a shitload of money. Everyone else sees that and scrambles to cash in.
People are willing to abandon far more important causes in exchange for money, why expect anything different here?
Yes, and the users who do nothing but surf and email (the majority) will enjoy paying $1/month for the tiny bandwidth they use.
If the ISPs used a metered system that reflected their actual costs, the 1% of users that use large amounts of bandwidth would quit and the remainder of users would be paying a tiny fraction of what they pay now.
Face it, the real reason they're cranking up the prices is because their cable tv business is in jeopardy.
I played Warhammer for a month and change after to released. I admired the amazing artwork and character designs, definitely top notch. However, the game itself was sorely lacking.
The entire game seemed to be designed like an amusement park combined with an assembly line. Your character is basically funneled through a series of increasingly difficult areas along a linear path that left nothing to the imagination. Exploration was pointless because you knew where you came from and where you were going.
Aside from the character stats and shiny purple magic items, this game could hardly be called an RPG at all. Interaction was kept to a bare minimum, both with NPCs and other players. The only real interactions you have are taking on 1000s of mundane fetch quests from NPCs or PvPing with players.
Speaking of PvP, the system is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose items on death and the loss a fortress or even an entire territory are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, these assets can be recaptured at no expense. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in anything in the war and therefore no real incentive to help.
In terms of gameplay, it is a major step back from the old days of UO 1997-1999. A real shame. It seems most of this industry is too caught up in trying to copy WoW rather than pushing the envelope with new paradigms for interactivity and gameplay.
Do you grow your own food? Raise your own livestock? If not, was all your food delivered to you without gasoline? How about electricity? Do you produce your own or is it from a clean source or not?
Pretty much everything you could ever buy has something to do with gasoline, diesel or other fossil fuels. If you really uphold your principles, you'll have to abstain from all of that. Good luck living in a vacuum.
The IRS doesn't have the power to declare that players own virtual assets when the players already agreed that the publisher owns them by accepting the license agreement.
The solution to all this, as advanced by the publishers of MMO games (such as Blizzard) is that all virtual assets are the property of the publisher. Therefore, players have no right to buy or sell any virtual assets and cannot be taxed for them.
If there was enough radiation in that chamber to melt a person, what on earth was the glass surrounding it made out of? It couldn't have been more than a few inches thick.
OK, you've listed a lot of things you don't like about Fallout 3. Some of them I agree with you on, some I don't.
Real-time combat as crappy as it always was in TES: do you remember how you could swing the sword at an enemy at your arm's length and not hit anything because your skill is not high enough? Well, now imagine the same with a shotgun!
I assume you're referring to Morrowind, where this was the case. Not so in Oblivion or Fallout 3, both use collision detection to determine whether you hit or miss.
also, forget about sniping the way you could in F1/2 - even with a sniper rifle, you'll have a hard time hitting the enemy's head at 30+ meters even with full 100 in Small Arms skill.
Also not true. My character only has 40% in small arms and I have been getting tons of 1-hit kill headshots at long range with my trusty hunting rifle. See above.
Skills redone TES-style with ranges from 0 to 100
In my opinion, the skills system in F3 is superior to the previous games. In F1/2, a lot of the skills were underutilized or redundant. Traps, Explosives, Throwing, First Aid, Doctor, Sneak and Steal were all redundant skills that were greatly streamlined by being integrated into F3's Explosives, Medicine and Sneak. Fallout 3's replacement of the largely useless First Aid and Doctor skills with Medicine is a great feature. Instead of healing your character a limited number of times per day with some invisible voodoo using your bare hands like in F1/2, F3's Medicine improves your ability to use stimpaks and other medical supplies such as Rad-X and RadAway.
Outdoorsman, Gambling, Lockpick, Science and Repair were all badly underutilized skills that were either removed (in the case of the first two) or made far more useful and integral. Repair was hardly ever used at all in F1/2, whereas in F3 it is used all the time to maintain your weapons and armor. The game gives you a great incentive to raise it by allowing you to repair things to a higher quality when your skill is higher. Same thing with Science and Lockpick. In F1/2 you hardly ever used these skills, but when you did use them they were often far too low for the situation. It often felt like the game was cheating you by requiring you to raise these otherwise useless skills to a very high level for only a handful of key situations in the game. Not in F3! You'll be using Science to hack computers (a very fun word puzzle) and Lockpick (not as fun as hacking, but still enjoyable) to open doors and containers all the time! Raising these skills now gives a very rewarding progression in your ability to access things without F1/2's annoying random crap such as "The door is now jammed due to your lack of skill".
and magical step values of 25-50-75 required to perform specific actions (it is very upfront about it - "you need 50 lockpicking to open this").
Ok, if you don't like that the game is upfront about it, that's your opinion. In my opinion it's a very minor text difference from "you have no chance of opening this door/repairing this machine/using this computer" in F1/F2, which otherwise had the exact same numeric checks going in the background (but with annoying randomness added).
If Alice and Bob are meeting in person, why do they need an elaborate key exchange protocol? Wouldn't it be easier for Alice to hand Bob a USB thumb drive with her key on it?
Slashdot Mirror
You guys need to get up to speed on your DOSBox knowledge.
The more recent versions of DOSBox use a dynarec backend. This is way faster than the old backend and has the added benefit of not requiring you to mess around with cycle numbers for every game.
Yes, but the publishers would be made extinct, replaced by these types of services.
Why deal with a company specializing in putting boxes on store shelves when this is your new business model?
I doubt it. The SIMD extensions on ARM chips are far less powerful than desktop equivalents.
We're talking about chips that are a pretty small fraction of the speed of desktop chips and only one core.
Superior in objective PSNR Quality. OK.
How about CPU utilization? Are there any ultra-low-power decoding chips that play Theora?
H.264 already has a large install base of devices that play it. Is there enough of an advantage to Theora to warrant dumping all of those for new ones?
You need to pay more attention. Steam has sales all the time. I've seen games go anywhere from 10%-90% off. Left 4 Dead had a weekend where it was 50% off. It did massive sales numbers over that weekend.
In the future, when physical distribution is gone, these types of sales will become even more of a big deal. Gamers have shown that they can and will wait for a price drop before buying a game.
Even though digital distribution eliminates any supply issues, it is still subject to the law of demand.
Corporations don't buy the voters, they buy their (supposed) representatives.
Because wattage is a unit of power, not energy.
This laser doesn't use very much energy, even though it produces a focuses a huge amount of power on a small area.
You can't compare water and sand. Water is a liquid, sand is not. Sand forms dunes that will bury low walls.
Entire civilizations have been buried by sand over the centuries. I highly doubt these walls will solve the problem.
It's simply, really. A few of the developers who do play ball with Apple tend to make a shitload of money. Everyone else sees that and scrambles to cash in.
People are willing to abandon far more important causes in exchange for money, why expect anything different here?
What? iPhone apps are being pirated left and right. There are even app stores dedicated to pirated apps.
Yes, and the users who do nothing but surf and email (the majority) will enjoy paying $1/month for the tiny bandwidth they use.
If the ISPs used a metered system that reflected their actual costs, the 1% of users that use large amounts of bandwidth would quit and the remainder of users would be paying a tiny fraction of what they pay now.
Face it, the real reason they're cranking up the prices is because their cable tv business is in jeopardy.
I played Warhammer for a month and change after to released. I admired the amazing artwork and character designs, definitely top notch. However, the game itself was sorely lacking.
The entire game seemed to be designed like an amusement park combined with an assembly line. Your character is basically funneled through a series of increasingly difficult areas along a linear path that left nothing to the imagination. Exploration was pointless because you knew where you came from and where you were going.
Aside from the character stats and shiny purple magic items, this game could hardly be called an RPG at all. Interaction was kept to a bare minimum, both with NPCs and other players. The only real interactions you have are taking on 1000s of mundane fetch quests from NPCs or PvPing with players.
Speaking of PvP, the system is supposed to be the central crowning jewel of the game. Problem is, there are no consequences for it: death and failure are meaningless, you do not lose items on death and the loss a fortress or even an entire territory are barely noticed. Within a short period of time, these assets can be recaptured at no expense. The entire exercise quickly begins to feel repetitive and boring. You have no personal stake in anything in the war and therefore no real incentive to help.
In terms of gameplay, it is a major step back from the old days of UO 1997-1999. A real shame. It seems most of this industry is too caught up in trying to copy WoW rather than pushing the envelope with new paradigms for interactivity and gameplay.
Do you grow your own food? Raise your own livestock? If not, was all your food delivered to you without gasoline? How about electricity? Do you produce your own or is it from a clean source or not? Pretty much everything you could ever buy has something to do with gasoline, diesel or other fossil fuels. If you really uphold your principles, you'll have to abstain from all of that. Good luck living in a vacuum.
The IRS doesn't have the power to declare that players own virtual assets when the players already agreed that the publisher owns them by accepting the license agreement.
The solution to all this, as advanced by the publishers of MMO games (such as Blizzard) is that all virtual assets are the property of the publisher. Therefore, players have no right to buy or sell any virtual assets and cannot be taxed for them.
If there was enough radiation in that chamber to melt a person, what on earth was the glass surrounding it made out of? It couldn't have been more than a few inches thick.
Guess they haven't heard of the Wayback Machine.
Real-time combat as crappy as it always was in TES: do you remember how you could swing the sword at an enemy at your arm's length and not hit anything because your skill is not high enough? Well, now imagine the same with a shotgun!
I assume you're referring to Morrowind, where this was the case. Not so in Oblivion or Fallout 3, both use collision detection to determine whether you hit or miss.
also, forget about sniping the way you could in F1/2 - even with a sniper rifle, you'll have a hard time hitting the enemy's head at 30+ meters even with full 100 in Small Arms skill.
Also not true. My character only has 40% in small arms and I have been getting tons of 1-hit kill headshots at long range with my trusty hunting rifle. See above.
Skills redone TES-style with ranges from 0 to 100
In my opinion, the skills system in F3 is superior to the previous games. In F1/2, a lot of the skills were underutilized or redundant. Traps, Explosives, Throwing, First Aid, Doctor, Sneak and Steal were all redundant skills that were greatly streamlined by being integrated into F3's Explosives, Medicine and Sneak. Fallout 3's replacement of the largely useless First Aid and Doctor skills with Medicine is a great feature. Instead of healing your character a limited number of times per day with some invisible voodoo using your bare hands like in F1/2, F3's Medicine improves your ability to use stimpaks and other medical supplies such as Rad-X and RadAway.
Outdoorsman, Gambling, Lockpick, Science and Repair were all badly underutilized skills that were either removed (in the case of the first two) or made far more useful and integral. Repair was hardly ever used at all in F1/2, whereas in F3 it is used all the time to maintain your weapons and armor. The game gives you a great incentive to raise it by allowing you to repair things to a higher quality when your skill is higher. Same thing with Science and Lockpick. In F1/2 you hardly ever used these skills, but when you did use them they were often far too low for the situation. It often felt like the game was cheating you by requiring you to raise these otherwise useless skills to a very high level for only a handful of key situations in the game. Not in F3! You'll be using Science to hack computers (a very fun word puzzle) and Lockpick (not as fun as hacking, but still enjoyable) to open doors and containers all the time! Raising these skills now gives a very rewarding progression in your ability to access things without F1/2's annoying random crap such as "The door is now jammed due to your lack of skill".
and magical step values of 25-50-75 required to perform specific actions (it is very upfront about it - "you need 50 lockpicking to open this").
Ok, if you don't like that the game is upfront about it, that's your opinion. In my opinion it's a very minor text difference from "you have no chance of opening this door/repairing this machine/using this computer" in F1/F2, which otherwise had the exact same numeric checks going in the background (but with annoying randomness added).
If Alice and Bob are meeting in person, why do they need an elaborate key exchange protocol? Wouldn't it be easier for Alice to hand Bob a USB thumb drive with her key on it?