That brings up a good issue. Warcraft 2 was arguably harder on the controls than Starcraft. You couldn't queue up unit production, among other things. Then from Starcraft to Warcraft 3 they made spellcasting smarter so you could, for example, select a group of priestesses and cast slow on a unit and let the game figure out which priestess will actually cast the spell. So games are clearly getting smarter about controls and making them get in the way less. Intuitive controls that don't get in the way are part of good game design.
The article basically points out that console controls just aren't as good as keyboard/mouse for some games. Especially games that try to mix genres and become more complicated. In the end it's all about having an input device that matches the game you're making. For example, I wouldn't want to play a game like Devil May Cry without a controller. And I wouldn't want to play a fighter without a joystick.
In the end I suspect consoles will have to develop better keyboard/mouse support if they want to become the platform of choice for some of these genres, but then you have the problem of location. Consoles are often next to a couch or some other layout that does not easily accommodate a keyboard/mouse setup. I think solving this problem is more likely than someone inventing some revolutionary new input method. This is mainly because of the hurdles of new input methods. They are expensive to design and build, then you have to convince the users to buy them and hope they are intuitive enough to warrant spending the time to learn. And since one input device is never optimal for different types of games you would be asking people to do all of this on top of buying other controls for other types of games.
Maybe the ultimate solution would be some sort of modular lap system where you can swap out a joystick, different buttons, connect a mouse, etc.
I think you've kind of missed the point. The "best practices" are likely more related to how you need to cover your ass to avoid being sued for IP issues or how to file your own patents if you're interested. It makes sense if you think about it. While businesses are trying to build up their software patent portfolios open source projects often ignore this side of things. While you may not be interested in filing patents the minefield will only get bigger over time and it helps when a group of lawyers is throwing out some friendly advice on how to stay out of trouble.
What may help is a psuedo social network, where players could rank each other in terms of who're good players, whether people enjoyed playing with/against them, etc. Somewhat like the feedback mechanisms of ebay and amazon. This way unpleasant players will find that they just don't get invited/allowed to many games.
A system of ranking each other just sounds like a horrible idea to implement on the kind of scale that would be required of a decently popular online game. In the case of DOTA and many other games it would also discourage people from playing support since they don't get recognized for having ridiculous amounts of kills. As if DOTA players needed more incentive to race for their favorite agility hero.
Rankings also wouldn't do much. Ever play Warcraft 3 random team games? In many games as soon as it looks like one team has an advantage the other team gets right to blaming each other for losing them the game. It's an ego thing. They're not willing to accept that someone else is simply better than them. It's either their allies or some imbalance in the game.
That's funny. I was going to UCI when they implemented Cisco Clean Access and I remember things a little differently.
First of all, prior to its implementation the network would go to shit during peak hours. I knew some people who worked at resnet and though I wasn't clear on the exact story my understanding was that it was a combination of bittorrent, viruses, and people running servers from their dorm rooms. There was one particular worm that hit the network really hard (I don't recall which it was but it was a big news story at the time about 5 years ago) which would have been avoided if people had installed the latest security patches. CCA was installed mostly to force people to patch their OS and install anti-virus software (which was free from the school). Now it did annoy the hell out of me that it forced you to turn automatic updates on. They started going after bittorrent around the same time.
Now I'm not saying CCA was wonderful, but I do understand why they used it. You have to keep in mind its primary purpose is to keep less technical people from bringing down the network. At UCI at least while I was there I didn't hear anything about them going after people using workarounds because if you knew enough to get around it chances are you wouldn't be spreading worms.
When they first implemented CCA it wouldn't run on my machine. Double click icon and you get a nice "Illegal Operation" dialog. So I couldn't access the network. The guy who lived next door to me worked at resnet and I called them up to let them know about this problem. Eventually I found out that if you boot into linux and loaded up a web browser it would redirect to a login page. Logging in gives you access for a week or 2 (under any OS) before you have to do it again. So my solution was to always dual boot and log in under linux. When the resnet guys heard about this workaround their response was congratulations on finding a solution. The next year I found out others found another solution: after logging in for the week they would kill the CCA application. Again, I never heard any complaints from resnet about this.
So I guess the point is if you're paranoid about them scanning your hard drive you may just be able to log in then kill the process before it gets a chance to scan. It's probably best to kill the process anyway because as I recall it took quite a bit of memory and CPU.
Almost everyone adds third party repositories? I've only had a need to add third party repositories twice. Once when I got my iPod classic which at the time was so new the stuff in the official repositories couldn't write to it. (Well worth it not having to install Apple's garbage software.) It's been long enough now that this is unnecessary. The only other thing I need third party repositories for on occasion is wine but that's more because they (last I checked) have a tendency to break support for some games from one version to the next. I've never had issues with drivers or codecs that required third party repositories. With Windows, on the other hand, I typically hunt down drivers for all of my hardware as soon as I install. These come from the manufacturers' websites. How much of that code do you think is more thoroughly reviewed than the official linux repositories?
That's exactly what I said. Who wants to buy a company with billions of dollars of debt? And who can afford it? The government gave out the money to encourage the companies that didn't screw up to buy the ones that did.
Notice how most of the banks that "needed" the money have been bought (WaMu, Meryl Lynch, etc.)? Yeah some of them were given money, but that was to improve their balance sheets to make them more appealing to buyers.
It didn't really vanish. It was used to handle some of the debt of the banks that screwed up and went under so the other banks that didn't screw up could buy them out without going down themselves. Bank of America did not give out sub-prime loans. I don't think JP Morgan did either. But they both bought companies that did and the government is basically paying for it.
Oh yeah and B of A spent about 7 billion of it buying into a Chinese bank before realizing it was a bad idea and trying to re-sell it. I think they sold back about half of it.
I love 9/80, but it really works best if you can work flexible hours. That way if you have to leave early some other day you can make it up on the off Friday. And since it's a 2 week period I can work a little extra every day and leave an hour or 2 early the other Friday. Many people also take vacation on weeks with a holiday on Monday and a Friday off. 3 days of vacation for a whole week off.
I've heard of 8/80 failing because 10 hours is just too much for one day. I've also heard of companies going to 9/80, but people scheduling meetings on the off Friday and if you have to be at the meeting you have to come in. It only works if it's a general company policy not to schedule anything on the off Friday unless absolutely necessary.
The only downside I've experienced with 9/80 is if you like to take long lunches or leave to do something in the middle of the day it could suck. This is where the flexibility comes in handy for making up time.
I'm sure it will if you keep running it on your flaky hardware.
Having been running both 32 bit and 64 bit on various machines since 2007, i can't say i've run into any of those mysterious types of problems the vista hating crowd seem to bitch about...
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean my hardware is flaky. I don't buy junk hardware.
I sure hope they kept that feature where Vista occasionally (actually quite frequently) decides I don't deserve a taskbar. Or decides my 2x4 quicklaunch section should really take up the entire top row. Or the fact that when I manage to get my taskbar back it reverts to 1 row.
No doubt I am being brainwashed into the "Microsoft way" of laying out my taskbar.
If you try to access an array element out of range it just gives you the default value for that data type rather than giving some indication that something is wrong.
There is an option to automatically build an array as the output of a loop, but no way to make it *not* add a value to the array. Like when you hit a terminating condition for the loop or some value you want to skip. If you have these situations you either have to modify the array afterwards or build the array manually.
My coworkers like it and what they seem to have in common is that they either don't know any other languages or aren't proficient in them.
It is a language that aims to be very simple by removing as much typed code as possible. Because of this you will spend stupid amounts of time moving little wires around and trying to make your code not look like a tangled mess. And good luck changing it later.
Since there are no functions and the only way to reuse code is to put it in a different file people tend not to do this. So if you want to use part of someone else's code you will usually have to copy and paste into a different file and spend a bunch of time reconnecting wires and dealing with references to variables you won't have access to in the new file.
The visual style is also, in my opinion, much harder to read than typed code. If I'm trying to figure out some sort of formula it's easier to read it as text than try to figure out where all these wires are coming from that are connected to little "+" and "-" terminals. Also, since comments take space they tend to be short and are usually missing in more complicated sections because it's harder to route the wires around them. And control structures quickly make code virtually unreadable.
There's also the part about writing most of your code with a mouse. Do you really enjoy having to navigate through a series of menus to do anything?
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That brings up a good issue. Warcraft 2 was arguably harder on the controls than Starcraft. You couldn't queue up unit production, among other things. Then from Starcraft to Warcraft 3 they made spellcasting smarter so you could, for example, select a group of priestesses and cast slow on a unit and let the game figure out which priestess will actually cast the spell. So games are clearly getting smarter about controls and making them get in the way less. Intuitive controls that don't get in the way are part of good game design.
The article basically points out that console controls just aren't as good as keyboard/mouse for some games. Especially games that try to mix genres and become more complicated. In the end it's all about having an input device that matches the game you're making. For example, I wouldn't want to play a game like Devil May Cry without a controller. And I wouldn't want to play a fighter without a joystick.
In the end I suspect consoles will have to develop better keyboard/mouse support if they want to become the platform of choice for some of these genres, but then you have the problem of location. Consoles are often next to a couch or some other layout that does not easily accommodate a keyboard/mouse setup. I think solving this problem is more likely than someone inventing some revolutionary new input method. This is mainly because of the hurdles of new input methods. They are expensive to design and build, then you have to convince the users to buy them and hope they are intuitive enough to warrant spending the time to learn. And since one input device is never optimal for different types of games you would be asking people to do all of this on top of buying other controls for other types of games.
Maybe the ultimate solution would be some sort of modular lap system where you can swap out a joystick, different buttons, connect a mouse, etc.
Then allow me to introduce you to kung-fu chess
I think you've kind of missed the point. The "best practices" are likely more related to how you need to cover your ass to avoid being sued for IP issues or how to file your own patents if you're interested. It makes sense if you think about it. While businesses are trying to build up their software patent portfolios open source projects often ignore this side of things. While you may not be interested in filing patents the minefield will only get bigger over time and it helps when a group of lawyers is throwing out some friendly advice on how to stay out of trouble.
What may help is a psuedo social network, where players could rank each other in terms of who're good players, whether people enjoyed playing with/against them, etc. Somewhat like the feedback mechanisms of ebay and amazon. This way unpleasant players will find that they just don't get invited/allowed to many games.
A system of ranking each other just sounds like a horrible idea to implement on the kind of scale that would be required of a decently popular online game. In the case of DOTA and many other games it would also discourage people from playing support since they don't get recognized for having ridiculous amounts of kills. As if DOTA players needed more incentive to race for their favorite agility hero.
Rankings also wouldn't do much. Ever play Warcraft 3 random team games? In many games as soon as it looks like one team has an advantage the other team gets right to blaming each other for losing them the game. It's an ego thing. They're not willing to accept that someone else is simply better than them. It's either their allies or some imbalance in the game.
I for one can't wait to get on Facebook and ask my sister what the best resource for tranny porn is.
(I'm not quite sure which side I'm arguing here.)
That's funny. I was going to UCI when they implemented Cisco Clean Access and I remember things a little differently.
First of all, prior to its implementation the network would go to shit during peak hours. I knew some people who worked at resnet and though I wasn't clear on the exact story my understanding was that it was a combination of bittorrent, viruses, and people running servers from their dorm rooms. There was one particular worm that hit the network really hard (I don't recall which it was but it was a big news story at the time about 5 years ago) which would have been avoided if people had installed the latest security patches. CCA was installed mostly to force people to patch their OS and install anti-virus software (which was free from the school). Now it did annoy the hell out of me that it forced you to turn automatic updates on. They started going after bittorrent around the same time.
Now I'm not saying CCA was wonderful, but I do understand why they used it. You have to keep in mind its primary purpose is to keep less technical people from bringing down the network. At UCI at least while I was there I didn't hear anything about them going after people using workarounds because if you knew enough to get around it chances are you wouldn't be spreading worms.
When they first implemented CCA it wouldn't run on my machine. Double click icon and you get a nice "Illegal Operation" dialog. So I couldn't access the network. The guy who lived next door to me worked at resnet and I called them up to let them know about this problem. Eventually I found out that if you boot into linux and loaded up a web browser it would redirect to a login page. Logging in gives you access for a week or 2 (under any OS) before you have to do it again. So my solution was to always dual boot and log in under linux. When the resnet guys heard about this workaround their response was congratulations on finding a solution. The next year I found out others found another solution: after logging in for the week they would kill the CCA application. Again, I never heard any complaints from resnet about this.
So I guess the point is if you're paranoid about them scanning your hard drive you may just be able to log in then kill the process before it gets a chance to scan. It's probably best to kill the process anyway because as I recall it took quite a bit of memory and CPU.
Almost everyone adds third party repositories? I've only had a need to add third party repositories twice. Once when I got my iPod classic which at the time was so new the stuff in the official repositories couldn't write to it. (Well worth it not having to install Apple's garbage software.) It's been long enough now that this is unnecessary. The only other thing I need third party repositories for on occasion is wine but that's more because they (last I checked) have a tendency to break support for some games from one version to the next. I've never had issues with drivers or codecs that required third party repositories. With Windows, on the other hand, I typically hunt down drivers for all of my hardware as soon as I install. These come from the manufacturers' websites. How much of that code do you think is more thoroughly reviewed than the official linux repositories?
That's exactly what I said. Who wants to buy a company with billions of dollars of debt? And who can afford it? The government gave out the money to encourage the companies that didn't screw up to buy the ones that did.
Notice how most of the banks that "needed" the money have been bought (WaMu, Meryl Lynch, etc.)? Yeah some of them were given money, but that was to improve their balance sheets to make them more appealing to buyers.
It didn't really vanish. It was used to handle some of the debt of the banks that screwed up and went under so the other banks that didn't screw up could buy them out without going down themselves. Bank of America did not give out sub-prime loans. I don't think JP Morgan did either. But they both bought companies that did and the government is basically paying for it.
Oh yeah and B of A spent about 7 billion of it buying into a Chinese bank before realizing it was a bad idea and trying to re-sell it. I think they sold back about half of it.
Don't worry about it in the future they'll have Brawndo and it's got what computers crave. Your computer will work fine.
Kind of funny how it's only ok to benefit from lower regional prices in other countries if you're a business looking to cash in on the cheap labor.
I love 9/80, but it really works best if you can work flexible hours. That way if you have to leave early some other day you can make it up on the off Friday. And since it's a 2 week period I can work a little extra every day and leave an hour or 2 early the other Friday. Many people also take vacation on weeks with a holiday on Monday and a Friday off. 3 days of vacation for a whole week off.
I've heard of 8/80 failing because 10 hours is just too much for one day. I've also heard of companies going to 9/80, but people scheduling meetings on the off Friday and if you have to be at the meeting you have to come in. It only works if it's a general company policy not to schedule anything on the off Friday unless absolutely necessary.
The only downside I've experienced with 9/80 is if you like to take long lunches or leave to do something in the middle of the day it could suck. This is where the flexibility comes in handy for making up time.
I'm sure it will if you keep running it on your flaky hardware.
Having been running both 32 bit and 64 bit on various machines since 2007, i can't say i've run into any of those mysterious types of problems the vista hating crowd seem to bitch about...
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean my hardware is flaky. I don't buy junk hardware.
I sure hope they kept that feature where Vista occasionally (actually quite frequently) decides I don't deserve a taskbar. Or decides my 2x4 quicklaunch section should really take up the entire top row. Or the fact that when I manage to get my taskbar back it reverts to 1 row.
No doubt I am being brainwashed into the "Microsoft way" of laying out my taskbar.
It has plenty of other annoying behaviors.
If you try to access an array element out of range it just gives you the default value for that data type rather than giving some indication that something is wrong.
There is an option to automatically build an array as the output of a loop, but no way to make it *not* add a value to the array. Like when you hit a terminating condition for the loop or some value you want to skip. If you have these situations you either have to modify the array afterwards or build the array manually.
I use LabView on a daily basis. I hate it.
My coworkers like it and what they seem to have in common is that they either don't know any other languages or aren't proficient in them.
It is a language that aims to be very simple by removing as much typed code as possible. Because of this you will spend stupid amounts of time moving little wires around and trying to make your code not look like a tangled mess. And good luck changing it later.
Since there are no functions and the only way to reuse code is to put it in a different file people tend not to do this. So if you want to use part of someone else's code you will usually have to copy and paste into a different file and spend a bunch of time reconnecting wires and dealing with references to variables you won't have access to in the new file.
The visual style is also, in my opinion, much harder to read than typed code. If I'm trying to figure out some sort of formula it's easier to read it as text than try to figure out where all these wires are coming from that are connected to little "+" and "-" terminals. Also, since comments take space they tend to be short and are usually missing in more complicated sections because it's harder to route the wires around them. And control structures quickly make code virtually unreadable.
There's also the part about writing most of your code with a mouse. Do you really enjoy having to navigate through a series of menus to do anything?