Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of automatically generating code in the first place.
So, you've asked the Rails developers what their purpose was in using generated code?
The sole reason Rails has generators is to do the tedious bit that gets you started. That's all it's there for, that's all it was ever there for.
The confusion over this is in large part due to the early Rails marketing strategy of making screencast videos instead of readable documents, IMO; everyone latched onto the scaffold thing because it was visual. But scaffolding is really, really ridiculously unimportant.
The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
This is a complete copout. Here's a story.
I had two professors in college. One of them would lead class discussions, in which the sizable number of female students would tend to be quieter, and at some quiet point, he would kind of chuckle embarrasedly and say, "you know, it would be great if we heard some more from the women." And right afterwards, maybe a woman would say something out of obligation, but then things would pretty much go the way they were going before.
The other one led a discussion on the very first meeting of the class, and at the end of class, he stood in front of his desk and said this: "Okay, this public service message is for the women in the class. The message is: this was done to you. You were not born like this. When you were little babies in the nursery, you were blabbering and yelling just as much as the little boy babies were. But somewhere in between, something happened. What happened, or why, is not my department exactly. I'm just saying this because, the next time we talk over something in class, I want you to remember it. That's all." Then he gave us our reading assignments.
The moral of the story is: there is something you can do. The thing to do is: something. Something other than a shrug. Talk about the problem, from the beginning, and make it known how you feel and what you expect. Do not be rolled over by the freight train of social convention.
I recently found a cross-platform (Win, Mac and Linux) editor called MoonEdit which seems to do SEE's live-collaboration thing okay, although I don't think it uses Zeroconf to do so. I wouldn't recommend it as a code editor, as it has a number of interface conventions that... well... let's just say that the thing feels aptly named. But for joint note-taking or the kind of fiction described here, I bet it'd work fine.
1) A simple human- and machine-readable schema is defined for marking up descriptions of items for sale or wanted. 2) Google learns how to read them, thereby putting eBay, Craigslist, and other sundry companies out of business and putting your data back in your hands.
Okay, so the second sentence is a bit of a run-on, and this use case has a whole lot of hairy details I'm leaving out. But the possibilities are pretty exciting nonetheless.
I think we're artificially limiting the popularity and growth of one of the most exciting new art forms in decades if we chain it to logic puzzles.
Obviously something needs to engage and challenge the individual audience member, and hard, abstract, barely-justified-by-the-story braintwisters are of course the first thing that would occur to, well, game developers... but are there any other possibilities?
Is there any way to attach game progress or story progress to, say, having to interact with and figure out a character? (Or, for that matter, another player?)
This seems about as smart an idea as Monopoly: The First Person Shooter.
I think I might play that one. "Some damnable New Jersey residents' association is trying to block you from building a hotel in their neighborhood. They're like terrorists! Grab your M16 and get busy!"
Seriously, it just underscores the fact that games in different media should be different. The irony is that if Doom: the Board Game comes out and doesn't play much like a(n) FPS, everybody here is going to rag on it for that.
The financial barriers to publishing a CCG are enormous compared to the cost of doing a one-off game like Cthulhu 500. Your design costs are higher, first off, because of having to playtest all the different combinations. You have to commission at least twice as much color art and send it through prepress. You have to pay for the extra card-sorting and packaging. And finally, you have to contend with retailers who increasingly don't want to stock any more collectible games because players don't want to keep kicking down.
I have no idea where this misconception comes from. I mean, it can't be that people had never seen cards with multicolored art or rules on them before Magic came out. People remember Mille Bornes, right?
Next time you see a sticker or legend reading "Not a collectible game!" on a card game box on the game store shelf, go slap a stupid person. Those stickers are their fault. The world will thank you.
Think about it: it's easy to come up with multiple uses for a simple brick. Faced with the brown log-cabin wall pieces from the old Western-themed sets, well, what would you do then? A friend of mine was puzzling over that, and finally came up with a scale model of his old, ugly foam-and-corduroy couch (with a skeleton of Technic pieces). When you _do_ come up with alternate uses for highly specialized pieces, the results are really dazzling.
As long as I'm being heretical, I'll say that the Star Wars sets are the best things that happened to Lego in ten years. Those models are much higher quality and piece count than a lot of what came before, they got lots of geeks like me involved in Lego for the first time in their adult lives, and many of the "specialized" pieces created just for Star Wars sets turn out to be very versatile and beautiful. (Printed designs on pieces have got to go, though, as does the entire ugly-as-sin Harry Potter line.)
Blizzard has always been about perfecting existing genres rather than creating new ones out of whole cloth. That certainly seems to be their focus with WoW. I have my money on WoW for being the last man standing in a bloody arena full of fantasy MMOGs.
1) To others in the thread that claim that Warcraft and Starcraft rip off Warhammer Fantasy and 40K, respectively: this rings about as hollow as White Wolf's recent suit against the producers of Underworld. Both are actually ripping off a common source - in this case, Tolkien - and unless you can make a case for more specific infringement, that's the rightful end of it.
2) If a Warcraft board game will make Warcraft fans flock to Warhammer, why didn't Starcraft make Warcraft players pick up, say, Master of Orion? That's an imprecise analogy at best, but the point is that gameplay matters. Fantasy Flight (publishers of the Warcraft boardgame) appear to be focused on making a game that has the same sense of fun and action as the source material (unlike the publishers of the recent Age of Mythology board game, who focused on the resource management aspect to the detriment of everything else). The ponderous, crufty Warhammer rules base can't achieve any kind of a "real time" fell without major hacking. (The fact that such hacking is so common is a credit to Warhammer and its players... but my point stands.)
PR got compared to an RTS because of all the RTS elements besides units and combat. This is an imperfect analogy, but imagine what an RTS would be like if all the units you had were non-combatant gatherers. In Puerto Rico, you have a lot of decisions to make about what to build (crop fields or buildings, and what kind), and how many people to staff them with to achieve maximum benefits.
And yes, both Puerto Rico and AoM: Boardgame are turn-based, but they both use a mechanic (invented in Puerto Rico) wherein certain choices of what to do on your turn mean that all players will get to do that thing on your turn. Not real-time, but it changes the turn-based dynamic a bit.
You could call Puerto Rico an RTS simulation, only less of the RT and more of the S. Really, "real-time strategy" is a misnomer: most RTS games include a great deal of tactics as well as strategy. The tactics are in the unit placement and combat. Falling and other real-time card games are all tactics, unless they offer deck construction ahead of time, which is tricky.
I posted the OgreCave post, and I've now played part of a game of AoM (the board game) and will probably post about it on OC once I get another try done. We played with four players, two playing Norse and two Greek. The important bit is that all these people were Puerto Rico fans and fans of the German stuff in general, rather than fans even of the more mildly grognardy stuff like Axis and Allies.
I think you have to be an Axis fan, or a potential Axis fan, to enjoy this game. Our group found its array of details frustrating to stumble through for the first time - the first (and sole) combat of the game had a giant on each team and no giant-killers on either. The giant that had one more die to roll won the first roll and killed the opposing giant, and from there the combat was just a dice-rolling exercise. (It didn't help that the losing player was particularly pissed at the game and wouldn't retreat.) It comes down to which units you've built and send into battle - very like an RTS, but not fun for Puerto Rico players.
For my next game, I think I'm gonna try two things: 1) let players in their first Age draw one additional card per turn; 2) if I'm still playing with people unlikely to be fans, forgo the rolling of dice altogether during combat, merely comparing unit stats instead, and see how that goes.
This all sounds like gobbledygook to most of you, but it might also give some impression of what's going on. I'll either post in more detail on OgreCave or have a full review the next time I play.
Unless the designers make fun, worthwhile, and not entirely derivative board games, they'll flop. My money says not to expect too much.
Well, hey, how about that: bad board games don't sell even if they have a good license. Plenty of people are making good board games, though, so why don't you expect much?
Talisman is a game for adolescents, not adults. You want to have a friendly evening with your adult pals and not frustrate them, you don't pull out a one-to-twelve-hour game full of design-by-accretion.
Has the Mozilla crew ever thought of quit making the browser as one giant, bloated super-applicaton and separate all the components into distinct, different programs in the spirit of IE/Outlook/FrontPage as well as Safari/Mail/iCal?
I know Firebird/Thunderbird/Dodobird exist but they seem like separate distinct projects,
Looks like you just answered your own question there.
On a side note, can we call the next spinoff standalone project Dodobird? I'd appreciate that. Or at least Goonybird.
Companies that do fill-in-the-blank-opoly games pay a licensing fee to Hasbro (corporate parent of Parker Brothers, which I think is what you mean by "P&B"), unless they're flying way under the radar.
On the contrary: if you've got your fingers on the controls, an N-Gage looks more like a Game Boy than a phone. A casual glance from a flight attendant probably won't spot its phoneness. The N-Gage may find a target market in people who want to get away with using their phone before the plane is at the gate.
How about a tax on foods of which more than 50% of the caloric content is provided by carbohydrates and sugars?
But then, the grain growers have actual lobbyists even at the state level, whereas video game producers couldn't find a domed, white building with hacked in-game radar and a 17" monitor.
The "Avalon Hill"/Hasbro version, published in 1999 or so, has 20 alien powers, nothing resembling Flare cards, and truly gorgeous components. Oddly, you'll find it discounted at lots of game stores.
Well, that begs the question: what problem is Waste designed to solve? Who will use it?
It seems to me that secure instant messaging and peer-to-peer file transfer between members of a distributed workgroup serves a real need. I can't imagine that Nullsoft would have developed this unless they saw a need themselves. Other solutions might technically already exist, but they don't appear to be as easy to install. (In that respect I could be wrong about VPN; I haven't looked into it.)
It'll be interesting to see whether Waste follows the path of Groove in the respect of becoming a platform, and providing an API for others to develop new tools.
Winamp 2.9 is the latest release of the Winamp 2.x codebase, which takes most of the good ideas that went into Winamp 3 and codes them back to an API free of excessive abstraction. It's been out for weeks, if not months. Check your facts before posting.
Resolved that: Gnutella aside, this technology is really a direct shot at Groove Networks, the company founded by Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes fame to sell P2P-derived technology to small and large business.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of automatically generating code in the first place.
So, you've asked the Rails developers what their purpose was in using generated code?
The sole reason Rails has generators is to do the tedious bit that gets you started. That's all it's there for, that's all it was ever there for.
The confusion over this is in large part due to the early Rails marketing strategy of making screencast videos instead of readable documents, IMO; everyone latched onto the scaffold thing because it was visual. But scaffolding is really, really ridiculously unimportant.
The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
This is a complete copout. Here's a story.
I had two professors in college. One of them would lead class discussions, in which the sizable number of female students would tend to be quieter, and at some quiet point, he would kind of chuckle embarrasedly and say, "you know, it would be great if we heard some more from the women." And right afterwards, maybe a woman would say something out of obligation, but then things would pretty much go the way they were going before.
The other one led a discussion on the very first meeting of the class, and at the end of class, he stood in front of his desk and said this: "Okay, this public service message is for the women in the class. The message is: this was done to you. You were not born like this. When you were little babies in the nursery, you were blabbering and yelling just as much as the little boy babies were. But somewhere in between, something happened. What happened, or why, is not my department exactly. I'm just saying this because, the next time we talk over something in class, I want you to remember it. That's all." Then he gave us our reading assignments.
The moral of the story is: there is something you can do. The thing to do is: something. Something other than a shrug. Talk about the problem, from the beginning, and make it known how you feel and what you expect. Do not be rolled over by the freight train of social convention.
I recently found a cross-platform (Win, Mac and Linux) editor called MoonEdit which seems to do SEE's live-collaboration thing okay, although I don't think it uses Zeroconf to do so. I wouldn't recommend it as a code editor, as it has a number of interface conventions that... well... let's just say that the thing feels aptly named. But for joint note-taking or the kind of fiction described here, I bet it'd work fine.
You're on.
1) A simple human- and machine-readable schema is defined for marking up descriptions of items for sale or wanted.
2) Google learns how to read them, thereby putting eBay, Craigslist, and other sundry companies out of business and putting your data back in your hands.
Okay, so the second sentence is a bit of a run-on, and this use case has a whole lot of hairy details I'm leaving out. But the possibilities are pretty exciting nonetheless.
I think we're artificially limiting the popularity and growth of one of the most exciting new art forms in decades if we chain it to logic puzzles.
Obviously something needs to engage and challenge the individual audience member, and hard, abstract, barely-justified-by-the-story braintwisters are of course the first thing that would occur to, well, game developers... but are there any other possibilities?
Is there any way to attach game progress or story progress to, say, having to interact with and figure out a character? (Or, for that matter, another player?)
How do you beat the last level? I'm stymied.
I think I might play that one. "Some damnable New Jersey residents' association is trying to block you from building a hotel in their neighborhood. They're like terrorists! Grab your M16 and get busy!"
Seriously, it just underscores the fact that games in different media should be different. The irony is that if Doom: the Board Game comes out and doesn't play much like a(n) FPS, everybody here is going to rag on it for that.
The financial barriers to publishing a CCG are enormous compared to the cost of doing a one-off game like Cthulhu 500. Your design costs are higher, first off, because of having to playtest all the different combinations. You have to commission at least twice as much color art and send it through prepress. You have to pay for the extra card-sorting and packaging. And finally, you have to contend with retailers who increasingly don't want to stock any more collectible games because players don't want to keep kicking down.
I have no idea where this misconception comes from. I mean, it can't be that people had never seen cards with multicolored art or rules on them before Magic came out. People remember Mille Bornes, right?
Next time you see a sticker or legend reading "Not a collectible game!" on a card game box on the game store shelf, go slap a stupid person. Those stickers are their fault. The world will thank you.
Think about it: it's easy to come up with multiple uses for a simple brick. Faced with the brown log-cabin wall pieces from the old Western-themed sets, well, what would you do then? A friend of mine was puzzling over that, and finally came up with a scale model of his old, ugly foam-and-corduroy couch (with a skeleton of Technic pieces). When you _do_ come up with alternate uses for highly specialized pieces, the results are really dazzling.
As long as I'm being heretical, I'll say that the Star Wars sets are the best things that happened to Lego in ten years. Those models are much higher quality and piece count than a lot of what came before, they got lots of geeks like me involved in Lego for the first time in their adult lives, and many of the "specialized" pieces created just for Star Wars sets turn out to be very versatile and beautiful. (Printed designs on pieces have got to go, though, as does the entire ugly-as-sin Harry Potter line.)
Blizzard has always been about perfecting existing genres rather than creating new ones out of whole cloth. That certainly seems to be their focus with WoW. I have my money on WoW for being the last man standing in a bloody arena full of fantasy MMOGs.
Underestimate Animal Crossing at your peril.
2) If a Warcraft board game will make Warcraft fans flock to Warhammer, why didn't Starcraft make Warcraft players pick up, say, Master of Orion? That's an imprecise analogy at best, but the point is that gameplay matters. Fantasy Flight (publishers of the Warcraft boardgame) appear to be focused on making a game that has the same sense of fun and action as the source material (unlike the publishers of the recent Age of Mythology board game, who focused on the resource management aspect to the detriment of everything else). The ponderous, crufty Warhammer rules base can't achieve any kind of a "real time" fell without major hacking. (The fact that such hacking is so common is a credit to Warhammer and its players... but my point stands.)
And yes, both Puerto Rico and AoM: Boardgame are turn-based, but they both use a mechanic (invented in Puerto Rico) wherein certain choices of what to do on your turn mean that all players will get to do that thing on your turn. Not real-time, but it changes the turn-based dynamic a bit.
You could call Puerto Rico an RTS simulation, only less of the RT and more of the S. Really, "real-time strategy" is a misnomer: most RTS games include a great deal of tactics as well as strategy. The tactics are in the unit placement and combat. Falling and other real-time card games are all tactics, unless they offer deck construction ahead of time, which is tricky.
I posted the OgreCave post, and I've now played part of a game of AoM (the board game) and will probably post about it on OC once I get another try done. We played with four players, two playing Norse and two Greek. The important bit is that all these people were Puerto Rico fans and fans of the German stuff in general, rather than fans even of the more mildly grognardy stuff like Axis and Allies.
I think you have to be an Axis fan, or a potential Axis fan, to enjoy this game. Our group found its array of details frustrating to stumble through for the first time - the first (and sole) combat of the game had a giant on each team and no giant-killers on either. The giant that had one more die to roll won the first roll and killed the opposing giant, and from there the combat was just a dice-rolling exercise. (It didn't help that the losing player was particularly pissed at the game and wouldn't retreat.) It comes down to which units you've built and send into battle - very like an RTS, but not fun for Puerto Rico players.
For my next game, I think I'm gonna try two things: 1) let players in their first Age draw one additional card per turn; 2) if I'm still playing with people unlikely to be fans, forgo the rolling of dice altogether during combat, merely comparing unit stats instead, and see how that goes.
This all sounds like gobbledygook to most of you, but it might also give some impression of what's going on. I'll either post in more detail on OgreCave or have a full review the next time I play.
Unless the designers make fun, worthwhile, and not entirely derivative board games, they'll flop. My money says not to expect too much.
Well, hey, how about that: bad board games don't sell even if they have a good license. Plenty of people are making good board games, though, so why don't you expect much?
Talisman is a game for adolescents, not adults. You want to have a friendly evening with your adult pals and not frustrate them, you don't pull out a one-to-twelve-hour game full of design-by-accretion.
I know Firebird/Thunderbird/Dodobird exist but they seem like separate distinct projects,
Looks like you just answered your own question there.
On a side note, can we call the next spinoff standalone project Dodobird? I'd appreciate that. Or at least Goonybird.
Companies that do fill-in-the-blank-opoly games pay a licensing fee to Hasbro (corporate parent of Parker Brothers, which I think is what you mean by "P&B"), unless they're flying way under the radar.
On the contrary: if you've got your fingers on the controls, an N-Gage looks more like a Game Boy than a phone. A casual glance from a flight attendant probably won't spot its phoneness. The N-Gage may find a target market in people who want to get away with using their phone before the plane is at the gate.
That may, in fact, end up being its only market.
How about a tax on foods of which more than 50% of the caloric content is provided by carbohydrates and sugars?
But then, the grain growers have actual lobbyists even at the state level, whereas video game producers couldn't find a domed, white building with hacked in-game radar and a 17" monitor.
The "Avalon Hill"/Hasbro version, published in 1999 or so, has 20 alien powers, nothing resembling Flare cards, and truly gorgeous components. Oddly, you'll find it discounted at lots of game stores.
Well, that begs the question: what problem is Waste designed to solve? Who will use it?
It seems to me that secure instant messaging and peer-to-peer file transfer between members of a distributed workgroup serves a real need. I can't imagine that Nullsoft would have developed this unless they saw a need themselves. Other solutions might technically already exist, but they don't appear to be as easy to install. (In that respect I could be wrong about VPN; I haven't looked into it.)
It'll be interesting to see whether Waste follows the path of Groove in the respect of becoming a platform, and providing an API for others to develop new tools.
Winamp 2.9 is the latest release of the Winamp 2.x codebase, which takes most of the good ideas that went into Winamp 3 and codes them back to an API free of excessive abstraction. It's been out for weeks, if not months. Check your facts before posting.
Resolved that: Gnutella aside, this technology is really a direct shot at Groove Networks, the company founded by Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes fame to sell P2P-derived technology to small and large business.
Discuss.