If by "Looks really good" you mean "Looks like they tried to recreate Unreal Tournament with the Quake engine and turned the bloom up to eleven" then sure. I'll wait until I can find a server with a good ping before I judge the netcode.
Seriously, it's not really bad. It's basically just Quake with enhanced graphics support and awful weapon models, but having everything be GPL is nice in theory for mods. However, I could see people not wanting to release their mod to the world under GPL and thus giving this a pass.
These patents all stem from patents for the N64DD, the hard disk add-on for the Nintendo 64 that was only released in Japan. (And for good reason. It flopped.)
Whether or not Nintendo will attempt to use them to lock out current competition is another question.
On-line gaming, no matter who good the technology, will always have it's weakest link, the reliance on other human players. It's so easy for a few troublemakers to ruin the game for everybody, and drive away the honest, and now frustrated players for good. I have no intention of playing Diablo 2 on Battle.net anymore, and that was decided before this ridiculous incident. If it's not rude player killers, or pests trying to scam you, it's aimbots, skin cheats, or simply poor sportsmanship. The anonymity of the internet proves one simple thing. Without somebody forcing them to be moral, and no ramifications, people are scum.
I want to play a co-op dungeon crawl. People on battle.net don't. They want to max their characters out, so they join your game to solo and kill monsters, making it harder for you, and taking up a space an honest co-op player could be in. The usual response when you ask them to go to an experience building game? "Fuck you." And this isn't even a tech problem, it's a person problem.
For some reason, I get called a whiner for bitching about this. I want to play the game's main feature, playing with other people to explore the dungeons, but it's simply impossible nowadays, because nobody has the courtesy to stick in games made for what they want to do, and it's whining to be upset?
On top of all this, Blizzard's attention to security has been atrocious. The game shipped with full online functionality, but NO change password function. Got your password stolen by a keystroke logger trojan advertised as a simple text color changer? Too bad, better start downloading that Starcraft Shareware over your modem to get password changing before somebody strips your account. Has password theft become an epidemic? Let's wait six months to add one of the most necessary parts of account management to a game.
That was bad enough. Now there's a sure-fire method to access anybody's characters, with no way for people to defend themselves, and Blizzard leaves the servers up. What? Although naturally not as serious, it's akin to a credit card company leaving a server up that has compromisable CC#'s, even after numerous incidents. WTF kind of logic is that? And it's not just hard-core nerds who stay in their basements all day, playing the game 24/7, unlike the snide posts on here would have you believe. It's people who play the game a few times a week, building up their characters slowly, only the have it all ruined through the maliciousness of another person, and no fault of their own. Yeah, that's real funny.
Wow! Why a typically misleading and paranoid article headline, considering Whistler will feature the option to warn about or not run unsigned code, not flat out refuse to run it all like the topic insinuates. Of course, what else can you expect with a track record of journalistic integrity like slashdot's?
I'm certainly glad I don't have my own technology or intellectual property to defend, because the moment I tried to, this entire extremist community would attack me.
The entire argument that Pro-Napster users use, is a sidetrack from the argument that Napster is a massive music piracy ring. Don't try and tell me some preachy bullshit that it's for "Free distribution and sharing". Only an idiot would not see that the entire reason for Napster's existance is to pirate MP3's, no matter what kind of holy label you try to place on it. Certainly it could be some kind of "Free distribution system" for unknown artists, but who thinks that's the real reason they filed for an IPO and put up Napster to begin with? Pure bullshit. The courts simply aren't falling for it, as much as you'd like to try and distract them to irrelevant moral arguments. You know the truth, Napster knows the truth, and these people know the truth as well.
Wow. Here we are, just got done mapping the human genome, and people still manage to cling to extreme alarmist attitudes. Hey/users/chickenlittle, the sun doesn't seem to have burnt out just yet, at least from my point of view. I think you people need to realize just how deeply you've entrenched yourselves in paranoia. Try a refreshing mug of reality instead of beer next time you declare the end of the internet.
Then again, paranoia sells news, and garners publicity for slashdot, and I believe a wise man once said, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Microsoft is evil, Windows is evil, Linux gives me orgasms, I need more beer, buy Jon Katz's book, GNU is better than sex, information should be free, Metallica sucks, I'm being censored, my head is no less than 55 centimeters up my ass.
Thanks for reading it for us, and posting your version of the facts by the story. God forbid us geeks read a story and form our own opinion that might run contrary to the slashdot mantra of paranoia, propoganda, and sensationalism.
It's good that we're getting Doom 3. I've been dreaming of this one for a long time. Unfortunately, I don't think this is the best of circumstances to do it under. The basics are, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, who between them own a majority in id, didn't want to do it. Everybody else did. So in order to get it done, they threatened to quit, including John Carmack, without whom, id simply wouldn't be id. Doom 3 is getting made, but in response, Paul Steed got fired. This cannot end pleasantly. Period. If it's come to firing employees out of spite, the conflict'll never die down enough to get actual work done. I see Adrian and/or Kevin selling off their stake in id to John Carmack or somebody else, and leaving. You don't want people working on a game they didn't want to make. It's hard enough to make a quality game when the drive *IS* there. The fact that politics involving the product are this thick so soon, simply spells doom (no pun intended) for the project already. Paul Steed's modeling skills IMHO were a large part of Quake 3, and suddenly id's out a major asset. John Carmack can not make Doom 3 by himself, no matter how outstanding an engine he writes. Do we really want id Software to make another Doom game? The original pushed the envelope of technology, and went somewhere only id had gone before. But times have changed, and the expectations of Doom 3 are ones they might not be able to meet. Would Doom have been as outstanding had it not been a groundbreaker of technology? Can id make a single-player game that'd be as good as Half-Life or System Shock 2? Check the credits for the original Doom. Compare that to who's at id now. The original Doom was written by friends, people who shared a common vision, wanted to see it get done. They played AD&D together in their spare time. This isn't the same people making Doom 3, this is a split company, with agendas being pushed, and major players already telling their tale to the public. In their credit, I'm certain id doesn't hire no-skill jobbers to fill their positions. You don't make games like Doom and Quake consistently without making sure you have the damned best talent you can have. John Carmack's firm grasp of knowing what technology can and cannot do has helped keep them steady, something John Romero learned the hard way. Other people at id also have incredible talent, but we simply don't hear about them because they're not "The Coder" or whatnot. This is all speculation though. I don't work at id, none of us do, and this is based on one man's.plan update, viewed from the context of a paranoid, over-analytical geek (me). So far as I know, politics are always this bad, with this much infighting, but we simply never hear about it. Remember, I'm ignorant of the matter at large, and speculation is 99% to amuse myself.
"At least" they're going after the poster. So what part of copyright and property ownership is so morally wrong to slashdot in general? Why is it wrong for Penthouse to not want you to redistribute stuff that belongs to them, that they made, and that they distribute, for their profit?
I forgot, it's the same law congress passed that let Slashdot posters dictate who has intellectual property control over Metallica's property.
I think people are attaching too many freedoms and rights to an issue, that is a non-issue. Everquest is a/game/. Games follow rules. People have to pay money to play Everquest, and they're paying money to play by the rules. When people go outside the rules, to changing it where in-game progress is no longer tied to game performance, people who are paying money to play, are having their due services stolen from them. They can no longer play the game they're paying for, because other people are violating the rules. Verant, as the people running this game, have every right to change the rules as they see fit to maintain the state of the/game/. There's no grand freedoms or big brother or anything else at issue here. Would you exclaim people being denied their freedoms if somebody got suspended from the NBA for cheating? This is no different whatsoever. The items are not virtual property or real estate, they are aspects of a game, and you would deny the maintainers of the game the paying subscribers the right to keep it played as intended?
Slashdot Mirror
If by "Looks really good" you mean "Looks like they tried to recreate Unreal Tournament with the Quake engine and turned the bloom up to eleven" then sure. I'll wait until I can find a server with a good ping before I judge the netcode.
Seriously, it's not really bad. It's basically just Quake with enhanced graphics support and awful weapon models, but having everything be GPL is nice in theory for mods. However, I could see people not wanting to release their mod to the world under GPL and thus giving this a pass.
It's a nice effort.
These patents all stem from patents for the N64DD, the hard disk add-on for the Nintendo 64 that was only released in Japan. (And for good reason. It flopped.)
Whether or not Nintendo will attempt to use them to lock out current competition is another question.
The copy of Alien versus Predator I bought came with a voucher for free boxers.
Fortunately, I never had to use it.
This talk about Nvidia coming out on top makes me worry, since the talk is that ATI cards are tops for Half-Life 2.
I'm hoping the differences are exaggerated, but I'd hate to see it become a one-or-the-other situation as far as optimal performance goes.
Gator/Claria is classified as 'adware' (as opposed to spyware) by the toolbar, and all adware by default is not blocked.
The toolbar will block them, it requires users clicking on a checkbox somewhere in the options. This makes it just a bit less sleazy.
A GPL inkompatibel XMoose86 once bit my sister... No realli!...Mynd you, XMoose86 bites Kan be pretty nasti...
Even better, they say the entire universe may be inside one huge gravastar.
/dev/null.
Which would mean the universe is already *in*
The real reason they want to keep people out of there, is The Mountains of Madness, of course.
They're keeping us safe from ourselves.
Dude, this is /. Don't read the article before posting a follow-up, or you'll be rational again like this.
On-line gaming, no matter who good the technology, will always have it's weakest link, the reliance on other human players. It's so easy for a few troublemakers to ruin the game for everybody, and drive away the honest, and now frustrated players for good. I have no intention of playing Diablo 2 on Battle.net anymore, and that was decided before this ridiculous incident. If it's not rude player killers, or pests trying to scam you, it's aimbots, skin cheats, or simply poor sportsmanship. The anonymity of the internet proves one simple thing. Without somebody forcing them to be moral, and no ramifications, people are scum.
I want to play a co-op dungeon crawl. People on battle.net don't. They want to max their characters out, so they join your game to solo and kill monsters, making it harder for you, and taking up a space an honest co-op player could be in. The usual response when you ask them to go to an experience building game? "Fuck you." And this isn't even a tech problem, it's a person problem. For some reason, I get called a whiner for bitching about this. I want to play the game's main feature, playing with other people to explore the dungeons, but it's simply impossible nowadays, because nobody has the courtesy to stick in games made for what they want to do, and it's whining to be upset?
On top of all this, Blizzard's attention to security has been atrocious. The game shipped with full online functionality, but NO change password function. Got your password stolen by a keystroke logger trojan advertised as a simple text color changer? Too bad, better start downloading that Starcraft Shareware over your modem to get password changing before somebody strips your account. Has password theft become an epidemic? Let's wait six months to add one of the most necessary parts of account management to a game.
That was bad enough. Now there's a sure-fire method to access anybody's characters, with no way for people to defend themselves, and Blizzard leaves the servers up. What? Although naturally not as serious, it's akin to a credit card company leaving a server up that has compromisable CC#'s, even after numerous incidents. WTF kind of logic is that? And it's not just hard-core nerds who stay in their basements all day, playing the game 24/7, unlike the snide posts on here would have you believe. It's people who play the game a few times a week, building up their characters slowly, only the have it all ruined through the maliciousness of another person, and no fault of their own. Yeah, that's real funny.
Wow! Why a typically misleading and paranoid article headline, considering Whistler will feature the option to warn about or not run unsigned code, not flat out refuse to run it all like the topic insinuates. Of course, what else can you expect with a track record of journalistic integrity like slashdot's?
I'm certainly glad I don't have my own technology or intellectual property to defend, because the moment I tried to, this entire extremist community would attack me.
The entire argument that Pro-Napster users use, is a sidetrack from the argument that Napster is a massive music piracy ring. Don't try and tell me some preachy bullshit that it's for "Free distribution and sharing". Only an idiot would not see that the entire reason for Napster's existance is to pirate MP3's, no matter what kind of holy label you try to place on it. Certainly it could be some kind of "Free distribution system" for unknown artists, but who thinks that's the real reason they filed for an IPO and put up Napster to begin with? Pure bullshit. The courts simply aren't falling for it, as much as you'd like to try and distract them to irrelevant moral arguments. You know the truth, Napster knows the truth, and these people know the truth as well.
Wow. Here we are, just got done mapping the human genome, and people still manage to cling to extreme alarmist attitudes. Hey /users/chickenlittle, the sun doesn't seem to have burnt out just yet, at least from my point of view. I think you people need to realize just how deeply you've entrenched yourselves in paranoia. Try a refreshing mug of reality instead of beer next time you declare the end of the internet.
Then again, paranoia sells news, and garners publicity for slashdot, and I believe a wise man once said, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Microsoft is evil, Windows is evil, Linux gives me orgasms, I need more beer, buy Jon Katz's book, GNU is better than sex, information should be free, Metallica sucks, I'm being censored, my head is no less than 55 centimeters up my ass.
Thanks for reading it for us, and posting your version of the facts by the story. God forbid us geeks read a story and form our own opinion that might run contrary to the slashdot mantra of paranoia, propoganda, and sensationalism.
It's good that we're getting Doom 3. I've been dreaming of this one for a long time. Unfortunately, I don't think this is the best of circumstances to do it under. The basics are, Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, who between them own a majority in id, didn't want to do it. Everybody else did. So in order to get it done, they threatened to quit, including John Carmack, without whom, id simply wouldn't be id. Doom 3 is getting made, but in response, Paul Steed got fired. This cannot end pleasantly. Period. If it's come to firing employees out of spite, the conflict'll never die down enough to get actual work done. I see Adrian and/or Kevin selling off their stake in id to John Carmack or somebody else, and leaving. You don't want people working on a game they didn't want to make. It's hard enough to make a quality game when the drive *IS* there. The fact that politics involving the product are this thick so soon, simply spells doom (no pun intended) for the project already. Paul Steed's modeling skills IMHO were a large part of Quake 3, and suddenly id's out a major asset. John Carmack can not make Doom 3 by himself, no matter how outstanding an engine he writes. Do we really want id Software to make another Doom game? The original pushed the envelope of technology, and went somewhere only id had gone before. But times have changed, and the expectations of Doom 3 are ones they might not be able to meet. Would Doom have been as outstanding had it not been a groundbreaker of technology? Can id make a single-player game that'd be as good as Half-Life or System Shock 2? Check the credits for the original Doom. Compare that to who's at id now. The original Doom was written by friends, people who shared a common vision, wanted to see it get done. They played AD&D together in their spare time. This isn't the same people making Doom 3, this is a split company, with agendas being pushed, and major players already telling their tale to the public. In their credit, I'm certain id doesn't hire no-skill jobbers to fill their positions. You don't make games like Doom and Quake consistently without making sure you have the damned best talent you can have. John Carmack's firm grasp of knowing what technology can and cannot do has helped keep them steady, something John Romero learned the hard way. Other people at id also have incredible talent, but we simply don't hear about them because they're not "The Coder" or whatnot. This is all speculation though. I don't work at id, none of us do, and this is based on one man's .plan update, viewed from the context of a paranoid, over-analytical geek (me). So far as I know, politics are always this bad, with this much infighting, but we simply never hear about it. Remember, I'm ignorant of the matter at large, and speculation is 99% to amuse myself.
"At least" they're going after the poster. So what part of copyright and property ownership is so morally wrong to slashdot in general? Why is it wrong for Penthouse to not want you to redistribute stuff that belongs to them, that they made, and that they distribute, for their profit?
I forgot, it's the same law congress passed that let Slashdot posters dictate who has intellectual property control over Metallica's property.
I think people are attaching too many freedoms and rights to an issue, that is a non-issue. Everquest is a /game/. Games follow rules. People have to pay money to play Everquest, and they're paying money to play by the rules. When people go outside the rules, to changing it where in-game progress is no longer tied to game performance, people who are paying money to play, are having their due services stolen from them. They can no longer play the game they're paying for, because other people are violating the rules. Verant, as the people running this game, have every right to change the rules as they see fit to maintain the state of the /game/. There's no grand freedoms or big brother or anything else at issue here. Would you exclaim people being denied their freedoms if somebody got suspended from the NBA for cheating? This is no different whatsoever. The items are not virtual property or real estate, they are aspects of a game, and you would deny the maintainers of the game the paying subscribers the right to keep it played as intended?