This is one of many reasons why I think that false accusation is roughly equivalent to kidnapping, and should be charged and sentenced as such. Falsely accusing someone is a violent crime, when you consider the kind of methods the police are authorised to use in enforcing it.
Idunno, once you get passed the fisher-price appearance, I think the gamecube is decidedly hot. How many consoles have a carrying handle? The PS2 is pretty smooth, I've always thought. Nobody's ever made a sexy controller tho.
It looks like the worst of both worlds - a sick, half-assed copy of an Apple product.
Remember when the first iMac was released? Within a month, everybody and his brother was doing the stupid "white body and clear-plastic panels" thing, using cheap plastic and half-assed processes. They all were bulky, ugly, and crappy. Think back and remember stupid iMac-styled pencil cases, CD holders, mice, ATX cases, etc. all made copying the surface features of an iMac and not getting the sexy underlying curves and solid engineering of Apple's designs.
This looks like that, except sucking off of Apple's newer designs.
Bull. Play the Serious Sam games, or Halo II - run and gun gameplay is alive and well, its just that Id never was that hot at it. We just gave Id a pass because we hadn't seen better yet.
Carmack should fire all his game designers and just stick to making engines for Raven or some other team to design for. Still, I liked Quake 2 - although I found the gameplay somewhat sluggish compared to old Doom. And the new UT games aren't anything like a typical run&gun - the hybrid of classic FPS gameplay with large-scale tactical warfare Battlefield/Tribes gameplay comes out into a new approach that I absolutely love.
Remember, there is such a thing as a game that is _too_ involving. System shock gameplay is good for people who want an engrossing, involving game, but for a working stiff who gets his gametime in hour-long snippets, a game with simple gameplay and easy-to-learn rules is much more popular. Many people don't have the time to invest in learning the intricacies of an RPG, and just want fun. Frequently, games that focus on "RPG elements" often end up just letting those elements get in the way (remember Daikatana?).
Plus, remember that there are two major seperate approaches to combat in FPS games - run&gun and stealth. While stealth has it's appeal, there's something to be said for just letting the adrenaline flow. Stealth is a lot harder to do in multiplayer too - stealth games usually rely on making the enemies much weaker than the player, and often also rely on lots of "die-reload" gameplay. This sort of thing doesn't translate as well to multiplayer without careful craftsmanship. Rocketlaunchers, as has been demonstrated countless times, have been proven fun in both single-player campaigns and multiplayer frag-fests.
What I want to see is more developments in individual gameplay - most action FPS games do exciting things with teamplay games, but still fall back to dull deathmatch for individual achievement. Compare to some classics like Critical Depth (look it up), or good old fashioned "king of the hill" gametypes, and there's much more to be done. Some way to make a 32-player game actually have some personality besides mindless carnage or team-v-team would be cool.
I don't have a problem with these kinds of games except when major gameplay features are missing until you unlock the last 99% of the game. Its like an embarrassing admission that the gameplay is crappy and that the designers need to provide you with an incentive to play. This is especially terrible on multiplayer games, where all the good arena levels require tedious single-player tasks to fetch. Or one of the Crash Bandicoot games, where the "ending movie" was a half-assed 5-second cliffhanger telling you to go back and redo the levels, but better this time.
Meanwhile, if the game is just Donky Kong, where all you get for those last percentile is a little extra concept art or something, then it's no trouble.
Want a new Nobel Prize? How about one for friggen' math? As a mathy, the best you can get is a Fields' Medal - and if you haven't heard of it, don't worry - nobody else has either. The closest Nobel is for economics, which imho is about the same as awarding one for alchemy.
You should look up Nyquist limits then. A single image that is 2x the resolution of the image is functionally a substitute for the image and all smaller sizes. So, a raster image at 2x resolution would be just as good as a vector graphic.
Don't assume everyone on Slashdot is an idiot. It makes you look like one.
Wrong. Every time I make an icon, and I'm not even pro. Why do you think Windows XP icons are stored in 9 different sizes independantly, rather than just a single high-res copy that's rescaled? Because it looks like crap.
Well, although many languages have lexical closures, very few allow custom blocks, which is simply syntactic sugar on top of lexical closures. Very few languages let you make a custom looping block system and have it work as well as the built-in loop statements. afaik, only Ruby and lisp-alikes let you, neither of which could be considered mainstream.
Well, I understand there's a.NET Lisp in the works, which would mean cross-platform and featureful (thanks to MS-CLR and Mono) Lisp. Anybody have details?
This, imho, is something every language should have, and yet the only new language I've seen that lets users create their own blocks that way is Ruby, and nobody uses Ruby, 'cause it feels like somebody took Python and took all the ease-of-use out. I just want Python with custom blocks.
The thing to compare is not just the language, but the implementations. For example, the Java compiler and runtimes are free, cross-platform, and have obscenely robust libraries bundled in (for everything except GUI, where the built-ins are retarded). Python is opensource and pretty much lets you get at every single aspect of a standard Linux box, plus is cross-platform with Win32 - even with the GUI objects through TkInter.
Haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things about using Yoper if you want a distro that's actually optimized for a modern computer but is still fairly easy to use.
The creators have various reasons for this. First and foremost, the fact that its a lot of work to make all those units - more than just Cavedog's content, this also gives them access to all the TA mods.
The Spring guys have said their ultimate goal is a new RTS "inspired" by TA, and that this is an interrim step - full TA content support so that TA players can use their engine for a modern port.
I think this is the big thing: educational games are dead, except for stupid multimedia treehouse and barbie games. Puzzle games are no longer things like The Incredible Machine and Lemmings, that actually give you _problem solving_ skills, but twitch-puzzles like Tetris and Chu-Chu Rocket (which are fun by their own right, but not mind-expanding).
Hmm. I look at that list, and all the games I think are "solid, decent games - but nothing that really rocked my socks".
Hexen was frustrating and dull. Hexen 2 was slightly less frustrating and slighly more dull. JK2 was good, but got old with time. S.O.F was directorial genius and gameplay boredom.
Basically, I'm looking at Raven and seeing a long history of unimaginative gameplay. But I guess I'm just bitchy and negative - I still haven't seen a single player action experience to top Abuse.
Nobody giving any love for Descent II? That was one of the very first titles to have a CD audio soundtrack. The songs were all very experimental industrial music. A few were crap (particularly the one by Ogre from Skinny Puppy) but a few were friggin' awesome.
I agree that perma-death could work. There are several problems that come from the lack of perma-death:
1) endless progress. The strong players can become obscenely powerful and lord over the newer players. While this provides a nice incentive to keep playing, it means that the fundamental concept of play balance is really impossible (which is pretty crucial for a multiplayer game).
2) fear. Fear is fun. This is why many people prefer Counterstrike to fast paced FPS games - CS has the fear of death because if you die, it sucks. It gets your heart thumping hard.
3) changing classes. These games often have a massive variety of player classes and species to play, and often no easy way to change. Death lets you roll up a new character, and lets the player explore the game more completely.
4) realism. How realistic is it to never die?
Of course, then there's the converse problem - nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to lose their stuff. Not losing their stuff also means there's no reason to kill anyone - you don't get to take anything. So PVP never becomes anything but a side-game.
Personally, I'd like to see a short-term MMO. Something that had thousands of players, but didn't focus on keeping them on the level treadmill. Something like a throne war - every man for himself, but you can form alliances, and the winner is the one who controls the Throne Tower (spoils of controlling teh Throne are divided among the members of the winning alliance, so pruning your ranks is encouraged). Various smaller towers allow control over areas with good resources that can be used to arm your players for sieging the main Citadel (and these smaller towers are, in turn, being raided by members of smaller clans as well as unaligned thieves).
Let the players have storage lockers for backing up extra equipment and spells and otherwise eliminate any concept of "level-up" besides your gear. Make it easy to escape/survive combat (but at the loss of some gear) so that death matters but is avoidable. Then make the equipment come easily with some hunting. Kind of a compromise between traditional action gameplay and MMORPG gameplay. You could have backstabbing, binding oaths of fealty, heroic wanderers, oppressive kings, tight squads of bandits, etc.
iirc, Civ2 wasn't multiplayer online. Most of the UI advancements were meant to streamline the process because mutiplayer is played with a turn-clock. Thus, all the news appears in quick console announcements instead of pop-ups so you have more time for planning.
Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
The point of municipal wi-fi is having one set of someones is cheaper for people living in the city than having 5 different someones competing and setting up towers with arguing signals.
In some municipal-service-style industries, the lost cost due to governmental inefficieny surpasses the lost cost from capitalist redundancy. At this point the socialisation of the system becomes a viable, reasonable option.
100% agree with the first part. Look at the infamous "SpikeTV Games awards" - parading actors and musicians across the stage, and none of the people who... y'know... actually made the game.
At least the directors get their names on things in the movies. In the games industry, at best its a development group - which could be entirely restaffed with a new team and nobody would know (eg: Cavedog losing Chris Taylor and making TA:K suck).
Really, I'm sure that all but the most hardcore gamers would be hard pressed to name designers other than the rockstars of Molyneux, Carmack, and Romero.
Here's a thought - how about actually recognising the real brains behind the project?
Slashdot Mirror
And your old boss went on to fuck over the next dozen people who walked through the door, totally unpunished. Hooray.
So, if I break into someone's house and steal $500 from his dresser drawer, what is my punishment? Let's compare, shall we?
This is one of many reasons why I think that false accusation is roughly equivalent to kidnapping, and should be charged and sentenced as such. Falsely accusing someone is a violent crime, when you consider the kind of methods the police are authorised to use in enforcing it.
Idunno, once you get passed the fisher-price appearance, I think the gamecube is decidedly hot. How many consoles have a carrying handle? The PS2 is pretty smooth, I've always thought. Nobody's ever made a sexy controller tho.
It looks like the worst of both worlds - a sick, half-assed copy of an Apple product.
Remember when the first iMac was released? Within a month, everybody and his brother was doing the stupid "white body and clear-plastic panels" thing, using cheap plastic and half-assed processes. They all were bulky, ugly, and crappy. Think back and remember stupid iMac-styled pencil cases, CD holders, mice, ATX cases, etc. all made copying the surface features of an iMac and not getting the sexy underlying curves and solid engineering of Apple's designs.
This looks like that, except sucking off of Apple's newer designs.
Bull. Play the Serious Sam games, or Halo II - run and gun gameplay is alive and well, its just that Id never was that hot at it. We just gave Id a pass because we hadn't seen better yet.
Carmack should fire all his game designers and just stick to making engines for Raven or some other team to design for. Still, I liked Quake 2 - although I found the gameplay somewhat sluggish compared to old Doom. And the new UT games aren't anything like a typical run&gun - the hybrid of classic FPS gameplay with large-scale tactical warfare Battlefield/Tribes gameplay comes out into a new approach that I absolutely love.
Remember, there is such a thing as a game that is _too_ involving. System shock gameplay is good for people who want an engrossing, involving game, but for a working stiff who gets his gametime in hour-long snippets, a game with simple gameplay and easy-to-learn rules is much more popular. Many people don't have the time to invest in learning the intricacies of an RPG, and just want fun. Frequently, games that focus on "RPG elements" often end up just letting those elements get in the way (remember Daikatana?).
Plus, remember that there are two major seperate approaches to combat in FPS games - run&gun and stealth. While stealth has it's appeal, there's something to be said for just letting the adrenaline flow. Stealth is a lot harder to do in multiplayer too - stealth games usually rely on making the enemies much weaker than the player, and often also rely on lots of "die-reload" gameplay. This sort of thing doesn't translate as well to multiplayer without careful craftsmanship. Rocketlaunchers, as has been demonstrated countless times, have been proven fun in both single-player campaigns and multiplayer frag-fests.
What I want to see is more developments in individual gameplay - most action FPS games do exciting things with teamplay games, but still fall back to dull deathmatch for individual achievement. Compare to some classics like Critical Depth (look it up), or good old fashioned "king of the hill" gametypes, and there's much more to be done. Some way to make a 32-player game actually have some personality besides mindless carnage or team-v-team would be cool.
Somebody tried, and the project croaked. Look up Indrema to see what happened to the short-lived Linux game console.
So, when're they going to get openGL on this thing? I wanna play some BZFlag or Quake.
I don't have a problem with these kinds of games except when major gameplay features are missing until you unlock the last 99% of the game. Its like an embarrassing admission that the gameplay is crappy and that the designers need to provide you with an incentive to play. This is especially terrible on multiplayer games, where all the good arena levels require tedious single-player tasks to fetch. Or one of the Crash Bandicoot games, where the "ending movie" was a half-assed 5-second cliffhanger telling you to go back and redo the levels, but better this time.
Meanwhile, if the game is just Donky Kong, where all you get for those last percentile is a little extra concept art or something, then it's no trouble.
Want a new Nobel Prize? How about one for friggen' math? As a mathy, the best you can get is a Fields' Medal - and if you haven't heard of it, don't worry - nobody else has either. The closest Nobel is for economics, which imho is about the same as awarding one for alchemy.
You should look up Nyquist limits then. A single image that is 2x the resolution of the image is functionally a substitute for the image and all smaller sizes. So, a raster image at 2x resolution would be just as good as a vector graphic.
Don't assume everyone on Slashdot is an idiot. It makes you look like one.
Wrong. Every time I make an icon, and I'm not even pro. Why do you think Windows XP icons are stored in 9 different sizes independantly, rather than just a single high-res copy that's rescaled? Because it looks like crap.
Well, although many languages have lexical closures, very few allow custom blocks, which is simply syntactic sugar on top of lexical closures. Very few languages let you make a custom looping block system and have it work as well as the built-in loop statements. afaik, only Ruby and lisp-alikes let you, neither of which could be considered mainstream.
Well, I understand there's a .NET Lisp in the works, which would mean cross-platform and featureful (thanks to MS-CLR and Mono) Lisp. Anybody have details?
No. Best scenes in teh Batman movies was Michelle Pfeiffer's big entrance as Catwoman - the one with the backflips and the explosion.
Kinky thought: Michelle Pfeiffer knows how to swing a bullwhip.
This, imho, is something every language should have, and yet the only new language I've seen that lets users create their own blocks that way is Ruby, and nobody uses Ruby, 'cause it feels like somebody took Python and took all the ease-of-use out. I just want Python with custom blocks.
The thing to compare is not just the language, but the implementations. For example, the Java compiler and runtimes are free, cross-platform, and have obscenely robust libraries bundled in (for everything except GUI, where the built-ins are retarded). Python is opensource and pretty much lets you get at every single aspect of a standard Linux box, plus is cross-platform with Win32 - even with the GUI objects through TkInter.
What does Lisp have?
Haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things about using Yoper if you want a distro that's actually optimized for a modern computer but is still fairly easy to use.
They only reuse TA units, not code.
The creators have various reasons for this. First and foremost, the fact that its a lot of work to make all those units - more than just Cavedog's content, this also gives them access to all the TA mods.
The Spring guys have said their ultimate goal is a new RTS "inspired" by TA, and that this is an interrim step - full TA content support so that TA players can use their engine for a modern port.
I think this is the big thing: educational games are dead, except for stupid multimedia treehouse and barbie games. Puzzle games are no longer things like The Incredible Machine and Lemmings, that actually give you _problem solving_ skills, but twitch-puzzles like Tetris and Chu-Chu Rocket (which are fun by their own right, but not mind-expanding).
Where's my Island of Dr. Brain?
Hmm. I look at that list, and all the games I think are "solid, decent games - but nothing that really rocked my socks".
Hexen was frustrating and dull. Hexen 2 was slightly less frustrating and slighly more dull. JK2 was good, but got old with time. S.O.F was directorial genius and gameplay boredom.
Basically, I'm looking at Raven and seeing a long history of unimaginative gameplay. But I guess I'm just bitchy and negative - I still haven't seen a single player action experience to top Abuse.
Nobody giving any love for Descent II? That was one of the very first titles to have a CD audio soundtrack. The songs were all very experimental industrial music. A few were crap (particularly the one by Ogre from Skinny Puppy) but a few were friggin' awesome.
I agree that perma-death could work. There are several problems that come from the lack of perma-death:
1) endless progress. The strong players can become obscenely powerful and lord over the newer players. While this provides a nice incentive to keep playing, it means that the fundamental concept of play balance is really impossible (which is pretty crucial for a multiplayer game).
2) fear. Fear is fun. This is why many people prefer Counterstrike to fast paced FPS games - CS has the fear of death because if you die, it sucks. It gets your heart thumping hard.
3) changing classes. These games often have a massive variety of player classes and species to play, and often no easy way to change. Death lets you roll up a new character, and lets the player explore the game more completely.
4) realism. How realistic is it to never die?
Of course, then there's the converse problem - nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to lose their stuff. Not losing their stuff also means there's no reason to kill anyone - you don't get to take anything. So PVP never becomes anything but a side-game.
Personally, I'd like to see a short-term MMO. Something that had thousands of players, but didn't focus on keeping them on the level treadmill. Something like a throne war - every man for himself, but you can form alliances, and the winner is the one who controls the Throne Tower (spoils of controlling teh Throne are divided among the members of the winning alliance, so pruning your ranks is encouraged). Various smaller towers allow control over areas with good resources that can be used to arm your players for sieging the main Citadel (and these smaller towers are, in turn, being raided by members of smaller clans as well as unaligned thieves).
Let the players have storage lockers for backing up extra equipment and spells and otherwise eliminate any concept of "level-up" besides your gear. Make it easy to escape/survive combat (but at the loss of some gear) so that death matters but is avoidable. Then make the equipment come easily with some hunting. Kind of a compromise between traditional action gameplay and MMORPG gameplay. You could have backstabbing, binding oaths of fealty, heroic wanderers, oppressive kings, tight squads of bandits, etc.
iirc, Civ2 wasn't multiplayer online. Most of the UI advancements were meant to streamline the process because mutiplayer is played with a turn-clock. Thus, all the news appears in quick console announcements instead of pop-ups so you have more time for planning.
Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
The point of municipal wi-fi is having one set of someones is cheaper for people living in the city than having 5 different someones competing and setting up towers with arguing signals.
In some municipal-service-style industries, the lost cost due to governmental inefficieny surpasses the lost cost from capitalist redundancy. At this point the socialisation of the system becomes a viable, reasonable option.
100% agree with the first part. Look at the infamous "SpikeTV Games awards" - parading actors and musicians across the stage, and none of the people who... y'know... actually made the game.
At least the directors get their names on things in the movies. In the games industry, at best its a development group - which could be entirely restaffed with a new team and nobody would know (eg: Cavedog losing Chris Taylor and making TA:K suck).
Really, I'm sure that all but the most hardcore gamers would be hard pressed to name designers other than the rockstars of Molyneux, Carmack, and Romero.
Here's a thought - how about actually recognising the real brains behind the project?