I think I took this too far in Oblivion. I explored vast sections of land past the map borders. Cyrodiil's concave southern border means there are vast areas of what should be Elswyr and Valenwood to explore. Parts are full of trees and grass, but are eerie for lack of anything else. Other parts look like desert because they only have a basic dirt/sand texture and hills that go on forever. I think the amount of explorable "wasteland" in that game might match the size of the game itself. Why I spent hours looking around it is a question I can't completely answer.
and things that shouldn't be there! Sure, the regular easter eggs are fun, but it's more fun finding interesting ways to break a game or finding ways to end up somewhere that teaches you a bit more about how the game was constructed. TFA mentions suiciding in FO3. It sure is fun to shoot up a pile of cars and go flying (the best one is just west of the Arlington Library, on the freeway). The neat side effect of this is your corpse bouncing off the skybox. That's also the disappointing effect -- it limits how far you can fly.
I was particularly impressed when my brother called me over to show me how he figured out how to jump out of the train in Half-Life. My friends played that game for years and never found that little gem. Weirdness ensues when you leave the confines of the train and confound the scripts.
Yeah, I found that a bit odd. Wolfenstein 3D was the game that made EVERYBODY want 3D games It wasn't the first by far (even from id) but it was ridiculously fast, did 256 colours, and easy to play. I tried playing Catacombs 3D, which they released the year before, and it was just no fun. I've never tried Hovertank 3D.
Wolfenstein's engine also got used in a lot of places and extended in sometimes-interesting ways. ROTT was a good example.
The AI really is basically non-existent. The trick is he wants to replicate the behaviour of the original game. Getting comparable AI won't be hard but he's going for a game that plays like the original.
There are things he can use, but mostly for stuff like displaying the resources and cells. There are a few of these with code available.
I'm surprised the easily moddable graphical MUD idea hasn't happened (to my knowledge). One of the biggest downsides of MMOs is the lack of user content. I don't want any game on the scale of an MMO. Well, it can have the physical scale (like Daggerfall), but it would be fun to just have something to crawl dungeons with my bro and a couple friends.
I just had a bout of uncontrollable laughter. Those guards really are ridiculous. They also don't affect your reputation unless they manage to catch you.
Agreed. Drives me crazy how they don't release the source to these things. On the other hand, I suspect they really don't want to put in the work required to remove all the licensed code they probably used. DaggerXL appeared recently. It's a project to recreate the engine and game code from scratch. I'll be keeping an eye on it. A source release would probably help him along though. Getting the dungeons to render isn't too hard for him, but the AI and giant tangle of game logic sounds like a nightmare.
I found the same thing in tech support. It has side effects too. Occasionally these included women giving cell phone numbers and offering hugs. Often people were induced into wanting to tell stories. Those things, in turn, make the day suck much less. The guy on my team who never smiled on the phone had crappier days than me and didn't have a wallet full of unused cell numbers for strange women from Florida.
This doesn't mean you have to be a shining beacon of fake happiness at all times, since sometimes that does make people want to kill you. Empathy helps too.
A good point. My preferred screen configurations involve dark backgrounds and bright text, preferably something like amber on black. I don't know if it's just my bad eyes but I can't stand reading anything on that grey colour.
The white hurts but I do prefer it to the grey. You just reminded me I should see about getting a better setup for reading this site.
A couple years ago I was working at Dell and got a call from an old lady whose CS client broke. Seems it would eat half the CPU time instead of shutting down. She paid us $99 to fix it because she liked it that much. Solution was to patch the client from something like 7.xya to 7.xyb. Changing only from an a to b version in so much time didn't seem very encouraging since I couldn't find any kind of changelog. The thing worked and good thing too. Googling the issue wasn't getting me anywhere that day.
The funny part came when an L2 wandered by and asked what I was doing. I think he just about died when I told him I was fixing CompuServe. That's when the guy two seats down, a former ISP guy, piped up and told us it's had that bug since 1995 and her issue will likely return in a few months.
I understand people wanting to keep their old e-mail addresses but honestly I find it weird when they want to keep their 1990s method of browsing the web. I certainly don't have any attachment to whatever version of Netscape I was using back when she signed up for CS. The days of the pages with the default gray backgrounds are finally gone!
That's exactly what I meant to say. He wouldn't sign up for a contract stopping him from carrying out at least a large part of his vision for the company. Everything I've read from him indicates this and so do the things I've read about him.
He seems happy to work with them for now, indicating he likely got pretty much what he wanted. There are really no arguments against open-sourcing deprecated code. Things like that are great for PR, great for training programmers, great for keeping the games alive, etc. Carmack knows that and advocates it. If he sees things going the other way he will likely walk out the door and without him, id may just start feeling like a collection of old IP. In short, he's got leverage.
Rather than worry too much about not seeing any more id code, I was thinking maybe we'd get to see some olde Bethesda code! If they were willing to release TES: Arena as freeware why not release the source (aside from any licensed libraries)? Maybe he can't convince many Zenimax/Bethesda people of that, but I doubt he would have been willing to end id's independence without that freedom for himself.
John Carmack seems like the type who wouldn't buy into this kind of thing unless they let him do what he wants. He owned a big part of id. The open sourcing shall continue.
Funny thing about that. I used to work for Dell On Call. We did similar stuff, but only over the phone and through GoToAssist. Had a government employee from a state dept. of education call and accuse Dell of loading computers full of viruses and porn so we could use DOC to extort money from people. He refused to believe kids at school could find porn on the net. I wish he had gone through with the threats he'd made. Would have made funny news. He ended up taking the free option that time and going for an image restore on about five machines. The best part of the whole mess was when he let it slip that a bunch of them had sat down in a meeting and come to this conclusion. Near impossible to keep a straight face through that one.
On the plus side, selling support to people who had already called the Geek Squad was easy. "They charged me $300 to tell me there was a virus and they wanted another $300 to fix it!" "Well, for $239 we'd fix it on up to four machines, or four times on one machine..."
Hmm, seems the Candian Geek Squad site has links to online malware scanners.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, I was going to say that, but it took me too long to remember what my password was. Yeah, I agree. Tasty beer is a good painkiller.
I think I took this too far in Oblivion. I explored vast sections of land past the map borders. Cyrodiil's concave southern border means there are vast areas of what should be Elswyr and Valenwood to explore. Parts are full of trees and grass, but are eerie for lack of anything else. Other parts look like desert because they only have a basic dirt/sand texture and hills that go on forever. I think the amount of explorable "wasteland" in that game might match the size of the game itself. Why I spent hours looking around it is a question I can't completely answer.
and things that shouldn't be there! Sure, the regular easter eggs are fun, but it's more fun finding interesting ways to break a game or finding ways to end up somewhere that teaches you a bit more about how the game was constructed. TFA mentions suiciding in FO3. It sure is fun to shoot up a pile of cars and go flying (the best one is just west of the Arlington Library, on the freeway). The neat side effect of this is your corpse bouncing off the skybox. That's also the disappointing effect -- it limits how far you can fly.
I was particularly impressed when my brother called me over to show me how he figured out how to jump out of the train in Half-Life. My friends played that game for years and never found that little gem. Weirdness ensues when you leave the confines of the train and confound the scripts.
Yeah, I found that a bit odd. Wolfenstein 3D was the game that made EVERYBODY want 3D games It wasn't the first by far (even from id) but it was ridiculously fast, did 256 colours, and easy to play. I tried playing Catacombs 3D, which they released the year before, and it was just no fun. I've never tried Hovertank 3D.
Wolfenstein's engine also got used in a lot of places and extended in sometimes-interesting ways. ROTT was a good example.
The AI really is basically non-existent. The trick is he wants to replicate the behaviour of the original game. Getting comparable AI won't be hard but he's going for a game that plays like the original.
There are things he can use, but mostly for stuff like displaying the resources and cells. There are a few of these with code available.
I'm surprised the easily moddable graphical MUD idea hasn't happened (to my knowledge). One of the biggest downsides of MMOs is the lack of user content. I don't want any game on the scale of an MMO. Well, it can have the physical scale (like Daggerfall), but it would be fun to just have something to crawl dungeons with my bro and a couple friends.
I just had a bout of uncontrollable laughter. Those guards really are ridiculous. They also don't affect your reputation unless they manage to catch you.
Agreed. Drives me crazy how they don't release the source to these things. On the other hand, I suspect they really don't want to put in the work required to remove all the licensed code they probably used. DaggerXL appeared recently. It's a project to recreate the engine and game code from scratch. I'll be keeping an eye on it. A source release would probably help him along though. Getting the dungeons to render isn't too hard for him, but the AI and giant tangle of game logic sounds like a nightmare.
The closest thing it might run with sufficient hacker dedication would seem to be LUnix.
I found the same thing in tech support. It has side effects too. Occasionally these included women giving cell phone numbers and offering hugs. Often people were induced into wanting to tell stories. Those things, in turn, make the day suck much less. The guy on my team who never smiled on the phone had crappier days than me and didn't have a wallet full of unused cell numbers for strange women from Florida.
This doesn't mean you have to be a shining beacon of fake happiness at all times, since sometimes that does make people want to kill you. Empathy helps too.
Thanks! That saved me a lot of digging. Still gotta hack at the colours a bit. Funny how Slashdot, being a geek site, lacks a setting for this.
Oh well. You just made browsing literally less painful for me. :)
A good point. My preferred screen configurations involve dark backgrounds and bright text, preferably something like amber on black. I don't know if it's just my bad eyes but I can't stand reading anything on that grey colour.
The white hurts but I do prefer it to the grey. You just reminded me I should see about getting a better setup for reading this site.
A couple years ago I was working at Dell and got a call from an old lady whose CS client broke. Seems it would eat half the CPU time instead of shutting down. She paid us $99 to fix it because she liked it that much. Solution was to patch the client from something like 7.xya to 7.xyb. Changing only from an a to b version in so much time didn't seem very encouraging since I couldn't find any kind of changelog. The thing worked and good thing too. Googling the issue wasn't getting me anywhere that day.
The funny part came when an L2 wandered by and asked what I was doing. I think he just about died when I told him I was fixing CompuServe. That's when the guy two seats down, a former ISP guy, piped up and told us it's had that bug since 1995 and her issue will likely return in a few months.
I understand people wanting to keep their old e-mail addresses but honestly I find it weird when they want to keep their 1990s method of browsing the web. I certainly don't have any attachment to whatever version of Netscape I was using back when she signed up for CS. The days of the pages with the default gray backgrounds are finally gone!
That's exactly what I meant to say. He wouldn't sign up for a contract stopping him from carrying out at least a large part of his vision for the company. Everything I've read from him indicates this and so do the things I've read about him.
He seems happy to work with them for now, indicating he likely got pretty much what he wanted. There are really no arguments against open-sourcing deprecated code. Things like that are great for PR, great for training programmers, great for keeping the games alive, etc. Carmack knows that and advocates it. If he sees things going the other way he will likely walk out the door and without him, id may just start feeling like a collection of old IP. In short, he's got leverage.
Rather than worry too much about not seeing any more id code, I was thinking maybe we'd get to see some olde Bethesda code! If they were willing to release TES: Arena as freeware why not release the source (aside from any licensed libraries)? Maybe he can't convince many Zenimax/Bethesda people of that, but I doubt he would have been willing to end id's independence without that freedom for himself.
John Carmack seems like the type who wouldn't buy into this kind of thing unless they let him do what he wants. He owned a big part of id. The open sourcing shall continue.
Funny thing about that. I used to work for Dell On Call. We did similar stuff, but only over the phone and through GoToAssist. Had a government employee from a state dept. of education call and accuse Dell of loading computers full of viruses and porn so we could use DOC to extort money from people. He refused to believe kids at school could find porn on the net. I wish he had gone through with the threats he'd made. Would have made funny news. He ended up taking the free option that time and going for an image restore on about five machines. The best part of the whole mess was when he let it slip that a bunch of them had sat down in a meeting and come to this conclusion. Near impossible to keep a straight face through that one.
On the plus side, selling support to people who had already called the Geek Squad was easy. "They charged me $300 to tell me there was a virus and they wanted another $300 to fix it!" "Well, for $239 we'd fix it on up to four machines, or four times on one machine..."
Hmm, seems the Candian Geek Squad site has links to online malware scanners.