While that's a related problem, I don't think its the root cause. The fact is the choices aren't being made easy.
First of all, your choice involves a significant investment of time. Changing your mind is a lot of work. With your programming language, your job, things like this, you are limited by the learning curve. Many PC games are suffering from this badly (although its not as bad as during the Sim era of the 90s when obtuse displays and complex missions and controls were the norm).
Combine this with the fact that your choices aren't very well explained - when I click around in many apps or application managers, I don't know whats what, what's better, what's worse. I don't know what music to download, what channels to watch. If there's a significant time investment in the wrong answer, I might just choose the safest bet. If the cost of a proper search for the rigth answer exceeds the benefits of finding the superiour solution, then I might just choose to do what everyone else does.
This is why we are stuck in a monoculture - society has made it very hard to even find the offstream material, and those in the offstream have not made it easy to know which of their offerings are meritorious for whom. I'm not pointing the finger - noone can blame independants for being disorganised - if they were organised, they wouldn't be the independants. But you see the problem. I don't like pop music, but finding good music is so much work. Solution? I'm finding every single old Depeche Mode and Collective Soul album I missed back in their heydays. When I run out of old music I like, I'll just stop listening. I've alraedy resorted to that for a while.
I don't know, it could produce a massive increase in quality. Look at HBO. At HBO, you, the viewer are the client - you are paying them directly for their TV. Result? Fucking awesome TV. Cable land? You are not paying the channel directly. They are not interested in keeping you wanting them, they just want your idle eyeballs. Result: you are the product, who's eyes they sell to their advertisers.
Yes, but its not a true free market. Cable companies have physical advantages of use of a land-line system that they other systems are not physically capable of competing with. Its like saying that, if there was only one car company, that they did not have a monopoly because you can still buy a motorcycle or take the bus.
Lets say there was only MS (sick sad world) on PC. DOn't like it? Oh, just get a Palm. Or a tablet. Or something else that's not a PC. Wait, you want a PC, but not MS?
The funny thing is people keep listing silly little platformers. They're all bizarre - games like Sonic, and Earthworm Jim. All wierd.
Now, the funny ones are serious, 3d action games with such amusing plots. Like Red Alert II, or Battlezone.
BattleZone's always been a fave of mine. Big complicated conspiracy to hide a secret interplanetary war between the USA and the Soviets occuring during the cold war, fighting over alien technology crashed on the moon, venus, mars, and Europa. The moon landing was faked: we already had a fully functioning military base there.
Or Recoil, another tank game. Its the old "machines have taken over the earth" except that the plot is that a team of human hackers have hotwired an experimental enemy Machine supertank - but if they control it remotely, they'll be discovered, so instead they open a time-portal so that they can send the control of the system back in time to you - the player. So the idea is taht you are actually, really controlling a tank hundreds of years in the future, saving the human race. The hackers occasionally hotwire you screen and talk to you directly. Its all the most hilarious camp I've ever seen in a game. Too bad the play wasn't so good.
Hell, the very concept of UT or Q3 - a tournament where somehow each player dies 50 times in a single match. wtf?
Used a PET - had a few at my school. Think Commodore 64, sans colour. That's all. C64's are plentiful, if that's what you want to play with.
And tabletops are common in the arcade-rebuilding industry. We're all nostalgic for that old form factor. Still, only ancient games get made that way. Nothing modern. IMHO, I'd love to try that myself - make a fun little top-down 3d four-player console-style arcade game. Maybe a simple Combat-style tank game with an FPS-style weaponspread, and then build a decent 4-player cocktail cabinet for it. Hell, if I find myself disgustingly rich, use a projector and mount the projector above it, facing downwards onto a white table, with trackballs, joysticsk and buttons for each player. Could make lots of 4-player games with that much playspace - combat, sports games, spacewar/starcontrol games, maybe a simple RTS (think Z or DuneII). Could be a fun toy. Pricy to build though.
Amen Brode. The problem is this - good games are made by people who like good games. Bad games are made by people who want money, not art. So, we have good gamers making games for other gamers (unfortunately most of my friends are stuck in this mindset) and businessmen-cum-designers making unoriginal copies of old games to stick on PDAs and Java sites.
And its not like the industry doesn't get their chances. I've played all through - there _are_ hardcore games attainable to normal people. I know girls who absolutly love GTA. Lindsey loves UT. Nobody learned the lesson from The Sims.
But instead, the industry moved the wrong way. UT2k4 is a spectacular piece of game design, but handles more like Quake3 and BF1942 than more casual games.
Hell, I think MMOs could be sold to normal people with the right play model. Basically design it _against_ antisocial freaks and _for_ casual people. I think that games like Second Life, with no advancement, no monster-whacking, just people having fun and making things - that could be the future of MMOs. The only catch is that casual players don't want a subscription based game.
I can frag with the best of them. Do I think all gamers should have to? Hell no.
While I disagree with the use of the term terrorist to describe this, I see the logic.
You try and scare the rest into behaving the way you want by randomly picking a few and attacking them. Make everyone feel threatened, knowing they could be next.
Heheh - yup, that's been in photoshop since 5. And copying photshop is also why there's no shape draw tool. In PS, you select the shape with the selection tool then stroke the outline.
Actually, the story on this one is well known - Mario 2 was two different games. The first game was a literal sequel to Mario 1. A hard, nasty, continuation of Super Mario 1 that had the same graphics and most of the same gameplay (except for a handful of very clever ideas).
Nintendo of America found that unacceptable. They wanted it to be something big, not just an expansion pack. So they had them convert another, in development game into Mario II. IMHO, it was a good idea - the new Mario 2 was an excellent game, and the original mario 2 game was incredibly difficult and really aimed at hardcore mario players.
The original Mario 2 was released in the west in the Super Mario Allstars set as Super Mario: The Lost Levels for the SNES. If you want an impossibly hard Mario 1 fix, look into it.
when an upcoming game gets redlighted. You have to wonder how many games never see the light of day, near completion, just to be completely thrown out and abandoned because the marketing people didn't think it would be viable.
Which isn't to say they wouldn't be right. Still, I always wonder what would have come of the StarCon game for the playstation (yes, it was made without Toys For Bob, but I was still curious).
Imho, Lith's involvement is NOT a good thing. Lith has good engine coders and hard working people, but they are very poor designers.
Their games are almost always filled with good story, interesting bad guys, and generic, poor gameplay. Shogo was an unremarkable FPS whose only interesting feature was the addition of transforming. Tron was not a good game - it suffered from "wouldn't it be neat if we...." design mentality, instead of what would actually be fun.
And one game they were responsible for that you neglected to mention was their involvement in AvsP 2. AvP2 took a spectacular game, added tons of new gameplay features, and ran the gameplay completely into the dirt. The first game was fun, smooth, and scary. The second game had every feature you could ever want from the movies, but was hideously unbalanced when played online.
And I notice you didn't mention Septerra Core. The less said about that the better.
So EVE was that good? I ask because it just hit the $5 bin at the local EB, so I was considering trying it for the bundled months (provided it has such things).
Plus, as a coder, I'm interested in seeing how a Stackless-Python based MMO would pan out.
You are guaranteed to have some breaks on the job - sometimes even unpaid. What you do on those is your own damn business. If its your own resources on that time (your phone) then they are violating your personal freedom by preventing you from spending yoru time with your money as you see fit.
If you yammer on the phone during work time, then they should get you in shit for wasting work time - not for using your own property in a non-destructive way.
As I was saying, the only way to make Linux popular as a gaming platform is if we do it ourselves. That's why we need a good, free, platform-agnostic framework. SDL/OpenGL running a standard model system, network system, and a script interpreter (Lua or Python) and all the rest of the middleware normally provided by the Unreal or Quake engines. Not just graphics and sound, but an internal filesystem and other features that would make the system totally agnostic, so that the entire game becomes content and only the framwork itself needs to be ported to other engines (unreal has this).
Stop thinking of the framework as middleware and start thinking of it as the platform, the application, and the whole game - code, script, and all, is the user-made content.
My point is that independant modder communities have been making content for free for over a decade. How many total conversions are there for Half Life and Quake 3, all for free? Those peopel replace teh base game content so completely that they really are just useing the codebase. What the OS community needs to do is make a platform attractive enough to bring them in. It would be attractive for them too - their game would be a free standalone instead of a mod for an existing game.
www.moddb.com will blow your mind with the amount of projects under way - most die early, but alarmingly many run to completion making a full game from nothing but an FPS codebase, replacing all other content and adding all relevant code. If ever there was a community that _needed_ to harvest this power, it was OS.
We need an OS answer to Half-Life. Not interms of plot or gameplay, but interms of the mod community around it. Then you'd have enough games on Linux that no-one would ever complain about Linux not being a game platform.
BF1942 and its offspring Desert Combat. Umpteen bazillion realism mods for Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. All of them totally replace the game content.
AirQuake II and AirFight UT are good examples of games that not only replace the content, but much of the codebase - converting an FPS entirely into combat flight game.
Heheh, this of course highlights the problem with Linux gaming that we all refuse to admit:
they suck.
I'm sorry, but a million clones of warcraft II and Quake 1 does not a gaming environment make. Still, there are Tux games that have real futures. I'm a windoze user and I can think of a few free software games that I play incessantly. Now, as I understand it, Tux Racer is not multiplayer. At this point, I stop giving a shit. There are some good ones like Cube and Armagetron, but even they are only skeletons of games - they have the minimum "get online and play" gameplay, and graphics that would be current for 1997. Still, I love them to death and have sunk countles hours into Cube (wouter.fov120.com).
The fact is that there is not a complete free software offering to counter the Quake and Unreal engines. Yes, crystalspace is nice, but it just doesn't have the complete feature-set and complete game to build a model of a full game onto.
Think about this - all of the retail engines have heaps upon heaps of mods that a) completely replace all of the in-game media and b) replace tons of code. Linux does not have a similar free alternative to these frameworks. As such, people that would like to develop for a free platform are instead relegated to retail world, and games that could become the basis for a free software community stay fringe.
Look at the best offerings of the free software community for gaming engines - CrystalSpace and various flavours of the Quake 1 and 2 engines - tell me that they really come close to the Unreal or Quake 3 engines, much less the current generation.
now, one thing I can't help but notice - free software games do not seem to be aware that I own a joystick, much less many joysticks. People who talk about "linux as a console" seem to neglect this little detail. I have a windows 98 box and an old gravis multiport wired to my TV set, and I have a handful of games that I play on that. The PC selection for games that support multiple joysticks for multiple players on a single screen is damn small, and all of them are DirectX-based games (blaster disaster rulz). None of the SDL-based offerings have shown me anything in that department.
Take the Quake II engine, give it a non-shitty modeling system, some physics, and some real shader support and convert it over to a Python or some other script-based framework so people can develop for it easily. Then re-implement a basic online CTF+DM game for people to start their work from. Then, maybe, Linux games will be able to compete. I haven't seen anyone succeeding at that. Even Doom engine ports are still painfully primitive in terms of script support and other features you'd expect them to get after so long.
I'm just curious - I've tried reading up on IPv6 but the articles are always too technical rather than just getting to the point.
So, if anyone can save my slacker self from the trouble - here's some question about IPv6.
1: is the IP address still fixed-length? Why not make it length-predefined like Pascal strings? As long as its length limited, people will branch badly and we'll run out as people are wasteful of the first addys. With some sort of string-system, higher-level branching could still be wasteful, but at least it would never come down to "there are sixteen trillion addys, but my entire workplace gets one - why?".
2. Is the god-awful port-numbering system still there? Can someone tell me why ports arent named with strings - hell, it could be numbered in the back end - someone requests to connect to you on a named port, and you send them back a port number your server assigned to that protocol and they connect to that. imho it would save everyone a lot of headache.
Slashdot Mirror
While that's a related problem, I don't think its the root cause. The fact is the choices aren't being made easy.
First of all, your choice involves a significant investment of time. Changing your mind is a lot of work. With your programming language, your job, things like this, you are limited by the learning curve. Many PC games are suffering from this badly (although its not as bad as during the Sim era of the 90s when obtuse displays and complex missions and controls were the norm).
Combine this with the fact that your choices aren't very well explained - when I click around in many apps or application managers, I don't know whats what, what's better, what's worse. I don't know what music to download, what channels to watch. If there's a significant time investment in the wrong answer, I might just choose the safest bet. If the cost of a proper search for the rigth answer exceeds the benefits of finding the superiour solution, then I might just choose to do what everyone else does.
This is why we are stuck in a monoculture - society has made it very hard to even find the offstream material, and those in the offstream have not made it easy to know which of their offerings are meritorious for whom. I'm not pointing the finger - noone can blame independants for being disorganised - if they were organised, they wouldn't be the independants. But you see the problem. I don't like pop music, but finding good music is so much work. Solution? I'm finding every single old Depeche Mode and Collective Soul album I missed back in their heydays. When I run out of old music I like, I'll just stop listening. I've alraedy resorted to that for a while.
Mod parent up, he just made my day.
I don't know, it could produce a massive increase in quality. Look at HBO. At HBO, you, the viewer are the client - you are paying them directly for their TV. Result? Fucking awesome TV. Cable land? You are not paying the channel directly. They are not interested in keeping you wanting them, they just want your idle eyeballs. Result: you are the product, who's eyes they sell to their advertisers.
I want to be the customer again.
Yes, but its not a true free market. Cable companies have physical advantages of use of a land-line system that they other systems are not physically capable of competing with. Its like saying that, if there was only one car company, that they did not have a monopoly because you can still buy a motorcycle or take the bus.
Lets say there was only MS (sick sad world) on PC. DOn't like it? Oh, just get a Palm. Or a tablet. Or something else that's not a PC. Wait, you want a PC, but not MS?
The funny thing is people keep listing silly little platformers. They're all bizarre - games like Sonic, and Earthworm Jim. All wierd.
Now, the funny ones are serious, 3d action games with such amusing plots. Like Red Alert II, or Battlezone.
BattleZone's always been a fave of mine. Big complicated conspiracy to hide a secret interplanetary war between the USA and the Soviets occuring during the cold war, fighting over alien technology crashed on the moon, venus, mars, and Europa. The moon landing was faked: we already had a fully functioning military base there.
Or Recoil, another tank game. Its the old "machines have taken over the earth" except that the plot is that a team of human hackers have hotwired an experimental enemy Machine supertank - but if they control it remotely, they'll be discovered, so instead they open a time-portal so that they can send the control of the system back in time to you - the player. So the idea is taht you are actually, really controlling a tank hundreds of years in the future, saving the human race. The hackers occasionally hotwire you screen and talk to you directly. Its all the most hilarious camp I've ever seen in a game. Too bad the play wasn't so good.
Hell, the very concept of UT or Q3 - a tournament where somehow each player dies 50 times in a single match. wtf?
Used a PET - had a few at my school. Think Commodore 64, sans colour. That's all. C64's are plentiful, if that's what you want to play with.
And tabletops are common in the arcade-rebuilding industry. We're all nostalgic for that old form factor. Still, only ancient games get made that way. Nothing modern. IMHO, I'd love to try that myself - make a fun little top-down 3d four-player console-style arcade game. Maybe a simple Combat-style tank game with an FPS-style weaponspread, and then build a decent 4-player cocktail cabinet for it. Hell, if I find myself disgustingly rich, use a projector and mount the projector above it, facing downwards onto a white table, with trackballs, joysticsk and buttons for each player. Could make lots of 4-player games with that much playspace - combat, sports games, spacewar/starcontrol games, maybe a simple RTS (think Z or DuneII). Could be a fun toy. Pricy to build though.
Amen Brode. The problem is this - good games are made by people who like good games. Bad games are made by people who want money, not art. So, we have good gamers making games for other gamers (unfortunately most of my friends are stuck in this mindset) and businessmen-cum-designers making unoriginal copies of old games to stick on PDAs and Java sites.
And its not like the industry doesn't get their chances. I've played all through - there _are_ hardcore games attainable to normal people. I know girls who absolutly love GTA. Lindsey loves UT. Nobody learned the lesson from The Sims.
But instead, the industry moved the wrong way. UT2k4 is a spectacular piece of game design, but handles more like Quake3 and BF1942 than more casual games.
Hell, I think MMOs could be sold to normal people with the right play model. Basically design it _against_ antisocial freaks and _for_ casual people. I think that games like Second Life, with no advancement, no monster-whacking, just people having fun and making things - that could be the future of MMOs. The only catch is that casual players don't want a subscription based game.
I can frag with the best of them. Do I think all gamers should have to? Hell no.
9 months? Look at it. Try 3 years. While CS is good, its the most overrated game in the history of the industry.
While I disagree with the use of the term terrorist to describe this, I see the logic.
You try and scare the rest into behaving the way you want by randomly picking a few and attacking them. Make everyone feel threatened, knowing they could be next.
Heheh - yup, that's been in photoshop since 5. And copying photshop is also why there's no shape draw tool. In PS, you select the shape with the selection tool then stroke the outline.
Actually, the story on this one is well known - Mario 2 was two different games. The first game was a literal sequel to Mario 1. A hard, nasty, continuation of Super Mario 1 that had the same graphics and most of the same gameplay (except for a handful of very clever ideas).
Nintendo of America found that unacceptable. They wanted it to be something big, not just an expansion pack. So they had them convert another, in development game into Mario II. IMHO, it was a good idea - the new Mario 2 was an excellent game, and the original mario 2 game was incredibly difficult and really aimed at hardcore mario players.
The original Mario 2 was released in the west in the Super Mario Allstars set as Super Mario: The Lost Levels for the SNES. If you want an impossibly hard Mario 1 fix, look into it.
when an upcoming game gets redlighted. You have to wonder how many games never see the light of day, near completion, just to be completely thrown out and abandoned because the marketing people didn't think it would be viable.
Which isn't to say they wouldn't be right. Still, I always wonder what would have come of the StarCon game for the playstation (yes, it was made without Toys For Bob, but I was still curious).
Imho, Lith's involvement is NOT a good thing. Lith has good engine coders and hard working people, but they are very poor designers.
Their games are almost always filled with good story, interesting bad guys, and generic, poor gameplay. Shogo was an unremarkable FPS whose only interesting feature was the addition of transforming. Tron was not a good game - it suffered from "wouldn't it be neat if we...." design mentality, instead of what would actually be fun.
And one game they were responsible for that you neglected to mention was their involvement in AvsP 2. AvP2 took a spectacular game, added tons of new gameplay features, and ran the gameplay completely into the dirt. The first game was fun, smooth, and scary. The second game had every feature you could ever want from the movies, but was hideously unbalanced when played online.
And I notice you didn't mention Septerra Core. The less said about that the better.
not so simple. The action wouldn't even be amusing - it would mostly be "log on and watch your script call 'kill all' " once per tick.
It would be very tricky to actually make this fun.
Thats disappointing - since they're already making Doom3 their story-driven SP game, I was hoping that Q4 would be a nice sequel to Q3 Arena.
I guess they've given up and let UT2k4 take over the genre.
So EVE was that good? I ask because it just hit the $5 bin at the local EB, so I was considering trying it for the bundled months (provided it has such things).
Plus, as a coder, I'm interested in seeing how a Stackless-Python based MMO would pan out.
You are guaranteed to have some breaks on the job - sometimes even unpaid. What you do on those is your own damn business. If its your own resources on that time (your phone) then they are violating your personal freedom by preventing you from spending yoru time with your money as you see fit.
If you yammer on the phone during work time, then they should get you in shit for wasting work time - not for using your own property in a non-destructive way.
Shoot down? with what? There is a short list of nations with firepower that can make it that high in the atmosphere.
As I was saying, the only way to make Linux popular as a gaming platform is if we do it ourselves. That's why we need a good, free, platform-agnostic framework. SDL/OpenGL running a standard model system, network system, and a script interpreter (Lua or Python) and all the rest of the middleware normally provided by the Unreal or Quake engines. Not just graphics and sound, but an internal filesystem and other features that would make the system totally agnostic, so that the entire game becomes content and only the framwork itself needs to be ported to other engines (unreal has this).
Stop thinking of the framework as middleware and start thinking of it as the platform, the application, and the whole game - code, script, and all, is the user-made content.
Linux needs a free one of those.
Yeah, I'm knurd and not fmailiar to this keyboard.
My point is that independant modder communities have been making content for free for over a decade. How many total conversions are there for Half Life and Quake 3, all for free? Those peopel replace teh base game content so completely that they really are just useing the codebase. What the OS community needs to do is make a platform attractive enough to bring them in. It would be attractive for them too - their game would be a free standalone instead of a mod for an existing game.
www.moddb.com will blow your mind with the amount of projects under way - most die early, but alarmingly many run to completion making a full game from nothing but an FPS codebase, replacing all other content and adding all relevant code. If ever there was a community that _needed_ to harvest this power, it was OS.
We need an OS answer to Half-Life. Not interms of plot or gameplay, but interms of the mod community around it. Then you'd have enough games on Linux that no-one would ever complain about Linux not being a game platform.
BF1942 and its offspring Desert Combat.
Umpteen bazillion realism mods for Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. All of them totally replace the game content.
AirQuake II and AirFight UT are good examples of games that not only replace the content, but much of the codebase - converting an FPS entirely into combat flight game.
Heheh, this of course highlights the problem with Linux gaming that we all refuse to admit:
they suck.
I'm sorry, but a million clones of warcraft II and Quake 1 does not a gaming environment make. Still, there are Tux games that have real futures. I'm a windoze user and I can think of a few free software games that I play incessantly. Now, as I understand it, Tux Racer is not multiplayer. At this point, I stop giving a shit. There are some good ones like Cube and Armagetron, but even they are only skeletons of games - they have the minimum "get online and play" gameplay, and graphics that would be current for 1997. Still, I love them to death and have sunk countles hours into Cube (wouter.fov120.com).
The fact is that there is not a complete free software offering to counter the Quake and Unreal engines. Yes, crystalspace is nice, but it just doesn't have the complete feature-set and complete game to build a model of a full game onto.
Think about this - all of the retail engines have heaps upon heaps of mods that a) completely replace all of the in-game media and b) replace tons of code. Linux does not have a similar free alternative to these frameworks. As such, people that would like to develop for a free platform are instead relegated to retail world, and games that could become the basis for a free software community stay fringe.
Look at the best offerings of the free software community for gaming engines - CrystalSpace and various flavours of the Quake 1 and 2 engines - tell me that they really come close to the Unreal or Quake 3 engines, much less the current generation.
now, one thing I can't help but notice - free software games do not seem to be aware that I own a joystick, much less many joysticks. People who talk about "linux as a console" seem to neglect this little detail. I have a windows 98 box and an old gravis multiport wired to my TV set, and I have a handful of games that I play on that. The PC selection for games that support multiple joysticks for multiple players on a single screen is damn small, and all of them are DirectX-based games (blaster disaster rulz). None of the SDL-based offerings have shown me anything in that department.
Take the Quake II engine, give it a non-shitty modeling system, some physics, and some real shader support and convert it over to a Python or some other script-based framework so people can develop for it easily. Then re-implement a basic online CTF+DM game for people to start their work from. Then, maybe, Linux games will be able to compete. I haven't seen anyone succeeding at that. Even Doom engine ports are still painfully primitive in terms of script support and other features you'd expect them to get after so long.
I'm just curious - I've tried reading up on IPv6 but the articles are always too technical rather than just getting to the point.
So, if anyone can save my slacker self from the trouble - here's some question about IPv6.
1: is the IP address still fixed-length? Why not make it length-predefined like Pascal strings? As long as its length limited, people will branch badly and we'll run out as people are wasteful of the first addys. With some sort of string-system, higher-level branching could still be wasteful, but at least it would never come down to "there are sixteen trillion addys, but my entire workplace gets one - why?".
2. Is the god-awful port-numbering system still there? Can someone tell me why ports arent named with strings - hell, it could be numbered in the back end - someone requests to connect to you on a named port, and you send them back a port number your server assigned to that protocol and they connect to that. imho it would save everyone a lot of headache.
Amen, its starting to get close to the magic TB line. And no, I don't mean tuberculosis.