Let's take a current example - the Army game. It has an FPS part, and what they're calling an RPG part.
The best FPS/RTS blend I've seen is Natural Selection. It's a free mod for Half-Life that you'll probably like. All but one of the players on the human team are playing a complicated FPS - but there's a commander giving orders with an overhead RTS interface.
It's immense fun. But because so much is going on it can be very difficult for FPS players who just want to shoot stuff. Because the commander is trying to accomplish a goal you can't see, sometimes the orders make no sense in the short term. Simplified example: If there's an alien in the room and the commander is telling you to repair a piece of equipment - do you shoot or obey? The learning curve is steep - new players can be dangerously counterproductive by taking the commander's attention away from the fight. But those who like it, love it.
And I know that the game Savage has a similar FPS/RTS blend, but I've not played it.
After a quick Google image search, I'd say SC5 has more of a resemblance to the classic sci-fi B-movie Barbarella (spaceships and laser guns) or the movie CQ than Deee-lite. Oh, and does that mean she's going to try and sue Monolith for the game No-One Lives Forever (and the latest Austin Powers franchise while she's at it?)
If there's any resemblance, it's because Dee copied Barb's look - which is only that cliched 60's view of the future anyway. I vaguely remember a DeeLite video featured aliens playing a keyboard. If it wasn't a straight rip-off of the Star Wars canteena band - I'm not sure what isn't. Although really the only similarity I can see is that they both Dee and Ulala have RED (or PINK) hair. Shocking!
I'd be suprised if SC5 actually made a profit for Sega given the nature of most games (and the Dreamcast's nosedive). I'm sure if Dee would like to take her fair share of the negative profits, Sega would be only too happy...:)
Popular fact #1: SC5 contained "spydance" (and was actually quite funky), as opposed to "shit pop music" that should have died in the early 90's.
Popular fact #2: Michael Jackson (yes that Michael) played a walk-on role and sung some backing vocals in SC5 if you rescued him from the aliens. The rumour is that he approched Sega and offered to appear for free (but I might be making that up).
I'm not familiar with his ISP, but if it doesn't let him do what I described - he should find another ISP (it sounds as though he's in the market for one anyway).
Oh, sure, that's a little hypocritical of me when it comes to using Yahoo mail fetch scripts. I'm still pissed at them for stopping the free POP access a little while back (after I actually started using the account & Yahoo Messenger, etc). Now that account mostly just collects spam.
Asinine = bad, non-troll = good. Um.. did you like or hate what I had to say?
And I usually don't like posting as myself because I believe posts should be judged on their content, not who they are posted as.
The Playstation 2 can do polygon *edge* anti-aliasing, but it can't do *full-screen* anti-aliasing like the Xbox and Gamecube.
What does this mean? It means that if you want to draw an anti-aliased scene on the PS2 you have to draw the polygons in back-to-front order yourself. Yes, this means software sorting every single polygon you draw - if you don't you'll get horrible artifacts around the edges of all your polygons when they get drawn out-of-order. This is a slow process, and in the case of FFX I can see why they were willing to compromise for the performance gains.
Xbox and NGC have full-scene antialiasing. Turn it on and: It Just Works. Behind your back the system will render to a 2x or 4x screen size back frame buffer and downsample for display on the front-buffer screen. This will, however, use more precious memory and sacrifice fill bandwidth because you've got to draw to a larger-than-normal frame in the first place.
Re:Totally insulting price!!
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· Score: 1
Well, I don't actually want either of them (I'm quite happy being a 'cager', anything else would be inconvenient given the snowy winters here in Colorado).
DarwinCycle - that's funny, but you're diverting attention away from the bike to the traits of the rider. Any vehicle is unsafe if you're a moron, doubly so for a sport bike. Ignoring safety factors, I was just pointing out the relative blandness and lack of practicality that you'll get spending $3k on a scooter, as compared to an entry-level bike.
While it still remains to be seen how safe 'IT' really is - regardless, you do have a point. If you're looking for safety, neither one offers much protection from being hit by a Suburban.:o)
Totally insulting price!!
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This is IT?
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· Score: 2, Flamebait
What gets me is the price - $3k for an electric scooter! Come on! For the same price you can get something that's a much nicer toy (the Kawasaki Ninja 250R has a retail price of $2,999, gets over 70mpg, does 0-60 in 5.5 seconds, and you won't look like a complete dork while riding one). Can you say 'Sinclair C5' all over again?
...because it will be able to make decisions about the mission on it's own - what pictures to transmit back to Earth and which one to junk. Autopilots are used to keep on doing something - like flying straight and level. Okay, so some of the more advanced autopilots can land a plane, but if anything goes wrong they still have to fall back to human input. Try flying anything manually with a couple of minute's worth of signal delay - it would be a real pain in the ass.
What they're doing here is (unless I'm horribly mistaken) a dramatic step beyond the typical abilities of an autopilot.
I would be inclined to agree with you. I can't talk for OpenBSD because I've not tried it, but I definitely appreciate the craftsmanship that seems to have gone into FreeBSD (a nice summary of which is presented here).
The rag-tag "throw a zillion monkeys at the problem" chaotic nature of the Linux evolution doesn't help for things like consistancy - something that I appreciate in FreeBSD. Then again, I'm a Win32 coder at heart...:op
I recently converted one of my old computer graphics demo reels to VideoCD (mpeg) format so that I could watch them on my Sony DVD player.
After some experimenting, all of the (admittedly less than high quality) CD-R disks I tried could not be read by the player - but CD-RW disks could be. So you might get better results with these disks if you have access to a CD-RW capable burner.
As mentioned here, it's most likely because of the tint of the disks - the underside of CD-RWs are "cleaner" and look a lot like regular CDs.
I have a Sprint PCS Touchpoint 120 and it's pretty nifty. It handles the essential phone basics very well - a reasonable battery life and good coverage around town and the city (town = Boulder, CO, city = Denver). The signal easily gets lost if I go up into the mountains, but that's to be expected. I am a little wary of their billing / web ordering process though - when I signed up they accidentally created two accounts in my name and billed me an extra $50 that I didn't owe before they eventually got it sorted out. Finally, their web site is also often overloaded if you want to check or pay your account online.
The WAP features were quite a fun toy for the first week or so, but you can't really do any serious stuff with 6 lines of text. I find myself using it occasionally to check my email and get movie times when I'm outside (one of the dangers of being in Boulder, I suppose). Look on Yahoo! for a WAP directory. Note that sending mail is possible but requires much patience, and there is no direct POP3/SMTP support (web email like Yahoo! works just fine). It has a secure WAP implementation of some sort, so you can happily buy stuff online from anywhere. The phone also has some basic PIM features, but I largely ignore them as I also have a Palm. I think I could plug my Palm into this phone and get online that way, but I've not yet had the urge to try.
In short: I love this phone. As long as you don't want the world, you should be fine with whatever Sprint WAP-enabled phone takes your fancy. You mention the NP1000 - I had a look at one in the store and I didn't like it. Sure, it has a larger screen - but it looked suspiciously fragile, and it was only single band (ie: no analog roaming).
I did find some reviews on Epinions, so go have a read. There was a mobile phone section up on the Deja.com buying forums, but they're gone now that Deja has reverted to being a usenet feed (yay!).
If you primarily need a new mobile phone - get one and enjoy WAP as a toy. If you need full web access (or if the phrase: "mobile ssh or telnet client" starts you drooling), get a VisorPhone (or wireless Palm if you don't mind not being able to make voice calls) - but the monthly subscription fee might be astronomical compared to the 1500-minute per month holiday offers I've seen Sprint pushing recently.
No, we don't really have "space". We just have "zero-g".:o)
Nothing mentioned so far would properly operate *outside* the space shuttle when in orbit. I imagine such a machine would have to be hardened enough that it would also operate just fine underwater - and in any environment it is possible for a suitably protected human to visit.
This sort of device would probably be a requirement for any future manned expeditions to the moon or mars - a mobile computer for data collection, mapping, email, reading/.
Those machines would be the ultimate road-warriors...
(Which brings up another point - how would remote internet access from another planet be handled - with round-trip signal delays of minutes rather than the seconds that the current generation of zero-G space hardware is designed to deal with?)
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Apparently they found religion.
;)
(Ahem.
Let's take a current example - the Army game. It has an FPS part, and what they're calling an RPG part.
The best FPS/RTS blend I've seen is Natural Selection. It's a free mod for Half-Life that you'll probably like. All but one of the players on the human team are playing a complicated FPS - but there's a commander giving orders with an overhead RTS interface.
It's immense fun. But because so much is going on it can be very difficult for FPS players who just want to shoot stuff. Because the commander is trying to accomplish a goal you can't see, sometimes the orders make no sense in the short term. Simplified example: If there's an alien in the room and the commander is telling you to repair a piece of equipment - do you shoot or obey? The learning curve is steep - new players can be dangerously counterproductive by taking the commander's attention away from the fight. But those who like it, love it.
And I know that the game Savage has a similar FPS/RTS blend, but I've not played it.
After a quick Google image search, I'd say SC5 has more of a resemblance to the classic sci-fi B-movie Barbarella (spaceships and laser guns) or the movie CQ than Deee-lite. Oh, and does that mean she's going to try and sue Monolith for the game No-One Lives Forever (and the latest Austin Powers franchise while she's at it?)
:)
If there's any resemblance, it's because Dee copied Barb's look - which is only that cliched 60's view of the future anyway. I vaguely remember a DeeLite video featured aliens playing a keyboard. If it wasn't a straight rip-off of the Star Wars canteena band - I'm not sure what isn't. Although really the only similarity I can see is that they both Dee and Ulala have RED (or PINK) hair. Shocking!
I'd be suprised if SC5 actually made a profit for Sega given the nature of most games (and the Dreamcast's nosedive). I'm sure if Dee would like to take her fair share of the negative profits, Sega would be only too happy...
Popular fact #1: SC5 contained "spydance" (and was actually quite funky), as opposed to "shit pop music" that should have died in the early 90's.
Popular fact #2: Michael Jackson (yes that Michael) played a walk-on role and sung some backing vocals in SC5 if you rescued him from the aliens. The rumour is that he approched Sega and offered to appear for free (but I might be making that up).
I'm not familiar with his ISP, but if it doesn't let him do what I described - he should find another ISP (it sounds as though he's in the market for one anyway).
Oh, sure, that's a little hypocritical of me when it comes to using Yahoo mail fetch scripts. I'm still pissed at them for stopping the free POP access a little while back (after I actually started using the account & Yahoo Messenger, etc). Now that account mostly just collects spam.
Asinine = bad, non-troll = good. Um.. did you like or hate what I had to say?
And I usually don't like posting as myself because I believe posts should be judged on their content, not who they are posted as.
Correct, but that doesn't mean that they haven't already found significant commercial applications (more than once ) in the real world.
> can't do *full-screen*
... "full-scene" rather.
As far as I'm aware it's something like:
The Playstation 2 can do polygon *edge* anti-aliasing, but it can't do *full-screen* anti-aliasing like the Xbox and Gamecube.
What does this mean? It means that if you want to draw an anti-aliased scene on the PS2 you have to draw the polygons in back-to-front order yourself. Yes, this means software sorting every single polygon you draw - if you don't you'll get horrible artifacts around the edges of all your polygons when they get drawn out-of-order. This is a slow process, and in the case of FFX I can see why they were willing to compromise for the performance gains.
Xbox and NGC have full-scene antialiasing. Turn it on and: It Just Works. Behind your back the system will render to a 2x or 4x screen size back frame buffer and downsample for display on the front-buffer screen. This will, however, use more precious memory and sacrifice fill bandwidth because you've got to draw to a larger-than-normal frame in the first place.
Well, I don't actually want either of them (I'm quite happy being a 'cager', anything else would be inconvenient given the snowy winters here in Colorado).
DarwinCycle - that's funny, but you're diverting attention away from the bike to the traits of the rider. Any vehicle is unsafe if you're a moron, doubly so for a sport bike. Ignoring safety factors, I was just pointing out the relative blandness and lack of practicality that you'll get spending $3k on a scooter, as compared to an entry-level bike.
While it still remains to be seen how safe 'IT' really is - regardless, you do have a point. If you're looking for safety, neither one offers much protection from being hit by a Suburban. :o)
What gets me is the price - $3k for an electric scooter! Come on! For the same price you can get something that's a much nicer toy (the Kawasaki Ninja 250R has a retail price of $2,999, gets over 70mpg, does 0-60 in 5.5 seconds, and you won't look like a complete dork while riding one). Can you say 'Sinclair C5' all over again?
...because it will be able to make decisions about the mission on it's own - what pictures to transmit back to Earth and which one to junk. Autopilots are used to keep on doing something - like flying straight and level. Okay, so some of the more advanced autopilots can land a plane, but if anything goes wrong they still have to fall back to human input. Try flying anything manually with a couple of minute's worth of signal delay - it would be a real pain in the ass.
What they're doing here is (unless I'm horribly mistaken) a dramatic step beyond the typical abilities of an autopilot.
I would be inclined to agree with you. I can't talk for OpenBSD because I've not tried it, but I definitely appreciate the craftsmanship that seems to have gone into FreeBSD (a nice summary of which is presented here).
The rag-tag "throw a zillion monkeys at the problem" chaotic nature of the Linux evolution doesn't help for things like consistancy - something that I appreciate in FreeBSD. Then again, I'm a Win32 coder at heart... :op
I recently converted one of my old computer graphics demo reels to VideoCD (mpeg) format so that I could watch them on my Sony DVD player.
After some experimenting, all of the (admittedly less than high quality) CD-R disks I tried could not be read by the player - but CD-RW disks could be. So you might get better results with these disks if you have access to a CD-RW capable burner.
As mentioned here, it's most likely because of the tint of the disks - the underside of CD-RWs are "cleaner" and look a lot like regular CDs.
- Chris.
I have a Sprint PCS Touchpoint 120 and it's pretty nifty. It handles the essential phone basics very well - a reasonable battery life and good coverage around town and the city (town = Boulder, CO, city = Denver). The signal easily gets lost if I go up into the mountains, but that's to be expected. I am a little wary of their billing / web ordering process though - when I signed up they accidentally created two accounts in my name and billed me an extra $50 that I didn't owe before they eventually got it sorted out. Finally, their web site is also often overloaded if you want to check or pay your account online.
The WAP features were quite a fun toy for the first week or so, but you can't really do any serious stuff with 6 lines of text. I find myself using it occasionally to check my email and get movie times when I'm outside (one of the dangers of being in Boulder, I suppose). Look on Yahoo! for a WAP directory. Note that sending mail is possible but requires much patience, and there is no direct POP3/SMTP support (web email like Yahoo! works just fine). It has a secure WAP implementation of some sort, so you can happily buy stuff online from anywhere. The phone also has some basic PIM features, but I largely ignore them as I also have a Palm. I think I could plug my Palm into this phone and get online that way, but I've not yet had the urge to try.
In short: I love this phone. As long as you don't want the world, you should be fine with whatever Sprint WAP-enabled phone takes your fancy. You mention the NP1000 - I had a look at one in the store and I didn't like it. Sure, it has a larger screen - but it looked suspiciously fragile, and it was only single band (ie: no analog roaming).
I did find some reviews on Epinions, so go have a read. There was a mobile phone section up on the Deja.com buying forums, but they're gone now that Deja has reverted to being a usenet feed (yay!).
If you primarily need a new mobile phone - get one and enjoy WAP as a toy. If you need full web access (or if the phrase: "mobile ssh or telnet client" starts you drooling), get a VisorPhone (or wireless Palm if you don't mind not being able to make voice calls) - but the monthly subscription fee might be astronomical compared to the 1500-minute per month holiday offers I've seen Sprint pushing recently.
- Chris.No, we don't really have "space". We just have "zero-g". :o)
Nothing mentioned so far would properly operate *outside* the space shuttle when in orbit. I imagine such a machine would have to be hardened enough that it would also operate just fine underwater - and in any environment it is possible for a suitably protected human to visit.
This sort of device would probably be a requirement for any future manned expeditions to the moon or mars - a mobile computer for data collection, mapping, email, reading /.
Those machines would be the ultimate road-warriors...
(Which brings up another point - how would remote internet access from another planet be handled - with round-trip signal delays of minutes rather than the seconds that the current generation of zero-G space hardware is designed to deal with?)