rRootage is another random game, though limited: a "boss only" space shooter, where big enemy motherships get created for your blasting pleasure.
Other similar ideas are a few games that generate games based on music...there was that one (unreleased in the USA?) for PSX, MOnster Rancher, a few others based on MP3...
Are we still waiting for FPS to "randomize" your opponents, mixing 'em the visual appearance enough so every game doesn't feel like a battle against the clone armies of Star Wars?
Atari did have an excellent "randomized" game--mode 3 on Adventure, if memory serves, would scramble the basic elements. Admittedly I think the level layout was constant, and there weren't THAT many items to scramble, but still, when mixed in with the chaos provided by the bat, it had the makings of some interesting gaming.
A big part of that is how well these games mimic the camera angles used in television broadcasts. That part was done fairly well at least as early as Virtua Racing (the arcade edition with the separate screen for spectators, anyway)
You're absolutely right on that one, that was a big part of it...and the overlay of what was going on (facemask penalty) looked just like something a network would put on screen. (well, sort of...I guess it looked more like the "meet the players" screens they use during the superbowl, a real game doesn't usually use a head shot for a face mask penalty...)
Actually, that was undoubtedly one of the most realistic parts of the game, because it doesn't have to be 'playable'. But to have those closeups be realistic, the models have to be pretty damn good in texture, shape, and movement, and they are.
From these "modified" CG applications, how far are we from completely CGI movies that are indestinguishable from real life?
We're getting closer. I'm a pretty regular video game player, but I was at a party were a GameCube was playing one of the new football games. The game was put down (but not paused) on some penalty announcement, and it took me at least 10 minutes and 4 or 5 glances before I realized it wasn't a real game.
Sort of the same way chatbots can already pass a weak variant of the Turing test (where the 'judge' isn't skeptical, just interacting), we're passing weak forms of the "indistinguishable from reality" tests with cheap hardware.
And yeah...I laugh when I hear about "first 100% computer generated character" milestones, because the Voices are the same basic techniques they used on the Flintstones. (I blame cheap voice sampling for setting back voice synthesis at least 10 years. We're barely getting things that sound better than S.A.M. on my C=64.)
MOD PARENT UP...that is the coolest story I've ever heard.
That must have been so surreal...putting in a tank character set was a great idea but dang, it sure let some weirdly-meta stuff happen...kind of like Tron.
(Actually, this one videogame book circa 1984 I have has a cool screen where the word "TRON" is spelled out with hundreds of character-graphic looking tanks in formation, with a few stragglers for show...I wonder if maybe it was made with that computer?)
I think steampunk has to be one of the silliest things ever thought up.
True to a certain extent...but I thought "The Difference Engine" was a pretty good extrapolation of "what if the engineering standards were high enough to make Babbage's stuff work? what could have happened?"
It's kind of interesting to think about some of the challenges of space travel, even in the solar system, that I didn't know about when I was a kid. I mean, I knew that fuel, food, and water was going to be an issue, but I had no idea about bone density loss due to zero-gravity, or how we'd do w/ solar radiation outside of earth's protective magnetic field.
Y'know, it sounds a little unpatriotic and has some geopolitical ramifications I don't want to think about, but I'm kind of rooting for the Chinese and Indians w/ some of these ideas.
On the other hand, I'm kind of nervous about the idea of accesibility to orbit letting some terrorist put an EMF weapon up way high...
You know, this reminds me of why I always preferred space Legos to the other series; we KNOW that in the current day, cars and trucks and houses and what not weren't covered with little dots, same with castles and pirates and all of that; but the future...the FUTURE...those little dots might be what keeps it all together!
Actually, that kind of applies to why I liked scifi over fantasy in general.
Steampunk is an interesting crossover genre, I jsut discovere Steam Trek, a mapping of Star Trek onto the "what if the Victorians got space travel" theme.
It probably wouldn't be bad at all to just use a DOM-based parser in Perl or Python or something and use that to generate the output. This has been too long of a day. Now I'm thinking about "DOOM-based parsers". Kind of like that old "sysadmin DOOM hack" where you could take out processes with a shotgun, but for code...
I only played a bit with Driver for the PSX, but it wasn't all that fun. Compared to GTA, it was crap. Maybe 'realistic crap', but crap. I think GTA finds the sweet spot of physics realistic enough to feel "movie real" (and throw in a lot of minigames and sidequests, all based on that engine).
Not really cheating, but I remember there was this cool game "Omega" where you would program a battletank and then let it fight a head to head battle on its own.
I found out a good strategy was not to waste my tank's precious cycles moving...just staying in one place scanning and waiting for the enemy tank to come to me...
I think this proved to be a tremendous "evolutionary deadend". It let me advance quickly in the game, but when it finally stopped working, the game was so tough that i had no chance to get better, no alternate strategies to tweak or switch to.
But overall, I'm a big fan of walkthroughs and a medium fan of cheats. It's an issue of trust; I don't always trust game developers to make a part of a game solvable in the amount of time and effort I'm willing to put into it (which varies with my exectation of the payoff, both in terms of cool stuff to see and feeling of satisfaction). If the effort/reward ratio starts to get too topheavy, I'm all over gamefaqs.com....
51 highway? I thought the cars weren't any better on the highway, because the normal effeciency of cruusing at one speed (heck, in a physics class "ideal world", no energy needed at all...) were balanced by the way it will reclaim braking energy and cut the engine at a stop.
BTW, the new search is badly broken. I've had it tell me that thus-and-such a file is nowhere to be seen, when I'm staring right at it in Explorer. Yeah, I've seen that, but very rarely.
More common is this retarded thing where it takes a while for the "starting in folder" textbox to be filled in with the name of the folder I launched the search from, and it tells me "you must enter a valid folder name"...durr!
Seriously, I think Microsoft does do a number of UI things right, but it's amazing some of the pure crap they let through.
Gawd, yeah. I REALLY long for the old behavior of Ctrl-F bringing up a useful little search in its own window, not taking over my current explorer window. It's stupid how many clicks that adds to my everyday user experience.
You know, I NEVER want a sidebar appearing in explorer, file or internet or otherwise. Like when I hit ctrl-F on a page that hasn't finished loading, it pulls up a useless OEM-branded websearch...a chance for all kinds of retarded branding and useles portalling when all I want is MY FUCKING SEARCHBOX. (which is braindamaged anyway, pulling up random previous searches. Considering that the Address box and other autocompletes are pretty good, I'm appalled at what crap the ctrl-F search is. It must be some form of primitive protoDRM.)
I think about how much better I am at adapting to new technologies than my parents; not just the things I grew up with (C=64s and 386s running DOS) but new things that come down the pike. And I wonder, has there been a shift? Culturally, am I of a new paradigm that has an easier time with the new stuff.
I assumed that I would grow old-fogey like and conservative in someways, but I didn't know how. Though when I saw your "kid flying around the kiddie interface" comment after thinking "man, remember when you could tell what was clickable in a UI because it looked like a button or was an underlined link? Or a typeable textbox because of the way all typeable textboes looked?" I now realize the limits of my flexibility; I will always prefer UIs that use elements that are standard across many apps, where as to the yungun's, they'll just look corny and clunky.
Though in a way, it's a throwback to the pre- and early-Win3.1 days, when every program would draw its own buttons and few scrollbars had the full functionalty we now expect.
Re:Pffft .... Commander Keen
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
Quake 3 was never meant to be a game, it was a technology demo you paid for. Best deathmatch game for Dreamcast though, for which I am greatful.
(nerver having developed any mouseaim skills, I don't mind the controls. Only problem is, no camping/sniping since other people can get an idea of where you are.)
Re:Pffft .... Commander Keen
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
No they werent, they were completely derivitave platformer games. Nothing whatsoever original about them.
Well, it's been a long time since I've even look at 'em, but I think those old games were original, with a lot more 2D exploration. (i.e. you'd be running around a big square) Most Mario derivatives (a ton on NES, Sonic on Genesis, etc) tended to be more "1D", with boards that were horizontal, than vertical, than horizontal.
I remember Keen as generally being less action packed than the consoles platformers.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people aren't crazy about the positioning of the analog sticks, myself included. Not the happiest thumb angle for long term play.
Wow, that sounds pretty cool.
rRootage is another random game, though limited: a "boss only" space shooter, where big enemy motherships get created for your blasting pleasure.
Other similar ideas are a few games that generate games based on music...there was that one (unreleased in the USA?) for PSX, MOnster Rancher, a few others based on MP3...
Are we still waiting for FPS to "randomize" your opponents, mixing 'em the visual appearance enough so every game doesn't feel like a battle against the clone armies of Star Wars?
Atari did have an excellent "randomized" game--mode 3 on Adventure, if memory serves, would scramble the basic elements. Admittedly I think the level layout was constant, and there weren't THAT many items to scramble, but still, when mixed in with the chaos provided by the bat, it had the makings of some interesting gaming.
A big part of that is how well these games mimic the camera angles used in television broadcasts. That part was done fairly well at least as early as Virtua Racing (the arcade edition with the separate screen for spectators, anyway)
You're absolutely right on that one, that was a big part of it...and the overlay of what was going on (facemask penalty) looked just like something a network would put on screen. (well, sort of...I guess it looked more like the "meet the players" screens they use during the superbowl, a real game doesn't usually use a head shot for a face mask penalty...)
Actually, that was undoubtedly one of the most realistic parts of the game, because it doesn't have to be 'playable'. But to have those closeups be realistic, the models have to be pretty damn good in texture, shape, and movement, and they are.
From these "modified" CG applications, how far are we from completely CGI movies that are indestinguishable from real life?
We're getting closer. I'm a pretty regular video game player, but I was at a party were a GameCube was playing one of the new football games. The game was put down (but not paused) on some penalty announcement, and it took me at least 10 minutes and 4 or 5 glances before I realized it wasn't a real game.
Sort of the same way chatbots can already pass a weak variant of the Turing test (where the 'judge' isn't skeptical, just interacting), we're passing weak forms of the "indistinguishable from reality" tests with cheap hardware.
And yeah...I laugh when I hear about "first 100% computer generated character" milestones, because the Voices are the same basic techniques they used on the Flintstones. (I blame cheap voice sampling for setting back voice synthesis at least 10 years. We're barely getting things that sound better than S.A.M. on my C=64.)
MOD PARENT UP...that is the coolest story I've ever heard.
That must have been so surreal...putting in a tank character set was a great idea but dang, it sure let some weirdly-meta stuff happen...kind of like Tron.
(Actually, this one videogame book circa 1984 I have has a cool screen where the word "TRON" is spelled out with hundreds of character-graphic looking tanks in formation, with a few stragglers for show...I wonder if maybe it was made with that computer?)
I think steampunk has to be one of the silliest things ever thought up.
True to a certain extent...but I thought "The Difference Engine" was a pretty good extrapolation of "what if the engineering standards were high enough to make Babbage's stuff work? what could have happened?"
It's kind of interesting to think about some of the challenges of space travel, even in the solar system, that I didn't know about when I was a kid. I mean, I knew that fuel, food, and water was going to be an issue, but I had no idea about bone density loss due to zero-gravity, or how we'd do w/ solar radiation outside of earth's protective magnetic field.
Y'know, it sounds a little unpatriotic and has some geopolitical ramifications I don't want to think about, but I'm kind of rooting for the Chinese and Indians w/ some of these ideas.
On the other hand, I'm kind of nervous about the idea of accesibility to orbit letting some terrorist put an EMF weapon up way high...
You know, this reminds me of why I always preferred space Legos to the other series; we KNOW that in the current day, cars and trucks and houses and what not weren't covered with little dots, same with castles and pirates and all of that; but the future...the FUTURE...those little dots might be what keeps it all together!
Actually, that kind of applies to why I liked scifi over fantasy in general.
Steampunk is an interesting crossover genre, I jsut discovere Steam Trek, a mapping of Star Trek onto the "what if the Victorians got space travel" theme.
Nah, just a lean to the Northwest.
I wrote a 'software generator'. It worked so well, they laid of 3 coders, and yes I was one of them.
Gawd, that sucks.
Can you share any details?
It probably wouldn't be bad at all to just use a DOM-based parser in Perl or Python or something and use that to generate the output.
This has been too long of a day. Now I'm thinking about "DOOM-based parsers". Kind of like that old "sysadmin DOOM hack" where you could take out processes with a shotgun, but for code...
Ya, I've done some code generation myself. I used a text editor and my brain. How does everyone else do it?
I thought about using my wang instead of my brain but he just types screenfulls of the V word.
" V", huh? I feel sorry for your romantic partners. My wang can type " VFR"...
" VFR4" if I'm really excited.
there is always the chance that this isn't by Nintendoites, that Famicom is...I dunno, something about Famiy planning or something weird like that
I only played a bit with Driver for the PSX, but it wasn't all that fun. Compared to GTA, it was crap. Maybe 'realistic crap', but crap. I think GTA finds the sweet spot of physics realistic enough to feel "movie real" (and throw in a lot of minigames and sidequests, all based on that engine).
The GBC Driver was kind of fun.
Not really cheating, but I remember there was this cool game "Omega" where you would program a battletank and then let it fight a head to head battle on its own.
I found out a good strategy was not to waste my tank's precious cycles moving...just staying in one place scanning and waiting for the enemy tank to come to me...
I think this proved to be a tremendous "evolutionary deadend". It let me advance quickly in the game, but when it finally stopped working, the game was so tough that i had no chance to get better, no alternate strategies to tweak or switch to.
But overall, I'm a big fan of walkthroughs and a medium fan of cheats. It's an issue of trust; I don't always trust game developers to make a part of a game solvable in the amount of time and effort I'm willing to put into it (which varies with my exectation of the payoff, both in terms of cool stuff to see and feeling of satisfaction). If the effort/reward ratio starts to get too topheavy, I'm all over gamefaqs.com....
51 highway? I thought the cars weren't any better on the highway, because the normal effeciency of cruusing at one speed (heck, in a physics class "ideal world", no energy needed at all...) were balanced by the way it will reclaim braking energy and cut the engine at a stop.
Sorry, the headline should be "resume" not "resue", though by a happy chance either works.
"C++ has probably set back the computing industry by 10 years."
Damn! I thought it was Microsoft. Guess I lost that bet.
Both!
It's time to party like it's 1983!
PS...3 +1 Funny on my original comment? I really don't understand the moderators sometimes. It was just a heartfelt rant...
BTW, the new search is badly broken. I've had it tell me that thus-and-such a file is nowhere to be seen, when I'm staring right at it in Explorer.
Yeah, I've seen that, but very rarely.
More common is this retarded thing where it takes a while for the "starting in folder" textbox to be filled in with the name of the folder I launched the search from, and it tells me "you must enter a valid folder name"...durr!
Seriously, I think Microsoft does do a number of UI things right, but it's amazing some of the pure crap they let through.
Gawd, yeah.
I REALLY long for the old behavior of Ctrl-F bringing up a useful little search in its own window, not taking over my current explorer window. It's stupid how many clicks that adds to my everyday user experience.
You know, I NEVER want a sidebar appearing in explorer, file or internet or otherwise. Like when I hit ctrl-F on a page that hasn't finished loading, it pulls up a useless OEM-branded websearch...a chance for all kinds of retarded branding and useles portalling when all I want is MY FUCKING SEARCHBOX. (which is braindamaged anyway, pulling up random previous searches. Considering that the Address box and other autocompletes are pretty good, I'm appalled at what crap the ctrl-F search is. It must be some form of primitive protoDRM.)
Heh. Yeah.
I think about how much better I am at adapting to new technologies than my parents; not just the things I grew up with (C=64s and 386s running DOS) but new things that come down the pike. And I wonder, has there been a shift? Culturally, am I of a new paradigm that has an easier time with the new stuff.
I assumed that I would grow old-fogey like and conservative in someways, but I didn't know how. Though when I saw your "kid flying around the kiddie interface" comment after thinking "man, remember when you could tell what was clickable in a UI because it looked like a button or was an underlined link? Or a typeable textbox because of the way all typeable textboes looked?" I now realize the limits of my flexibility; I will always prefer UIs that use elements that are standard across many apps, where as to the yungun's, they'll just look corny and clunky.
Though in a way, it's a throwback to the pre- and early-Win3.1 days, when every program would draw its own buttons and few scrollbars had the full functionalty we now expect.
Quake 3 was never meant to be a game, it was a technology demo you paid for.
Best deathmatch game for Dreamcast though, for which I am greatful.
(nerver having developed any mouseaim skills, I don't mind the controls. Only problem is, no camping/sniping since other people can get an idea of where you are.)
No they werent, they were completely derivitave platformer games. Nothing whatsoever original about them.
Well, it's been a long time since I've even look at 'em, but I think those old games were original, with a lot more 2D exploration. (i.e. you'd be running around a big square) Most Mario derivatives (a ton on NES, Sonic on Genesis, etc) tended to be more "1D", with boards that were horizontal, than vertical, than horizontal.
I remember Keen as generally being less action packed than the consoles platformers.