A 3-D graphics TA port was bound to happen. The original game is THAT good. All it needs is a graphics update and it would be the best RTS on the market. Everyone should take a look at the two videos, here, before you start comparing it to WarCraft. Even StarCraft, which came out years after TA and is WarCraft's superior, was still not as good as TA.
I still don't see why everyone thinks WC is some kind of RTS benchmark. Don't get me wrong. It is fun, but limited. Warlords Battlecry is a superior fantasy RTS. Check out the latest release here. Believe me, if you give it a try you won't go back to WC.
If a roll fails that is going to kill the adventure to early or a party fails to pick up a clue he [the DM] will make a choice wether he had enough or to step in and help out
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Do you think that the computer should alter the game if it detects that you are about to die? Would that make the game too easy? No challenge, no fun?
Why am I so restricted in my classes? Simple, so that I need the other players in my party. BUT computer games are solo afairs. I am the hero, I am the center of the story, the universe revolves around me! No need to play fair. If I want to stab someone with the biggest sword available and then pour magic into the wound like there is no tomorrow then let me.
If I'm not mistaken, the article was referring to MMORPG's, which by definition are not "solo afairs" are you are not the center of the universe. It sounds like you may prefer Diablo 2 over FFXI. There is nothing wrong with that, Diablo 2 was a lot of fun. FFXI is also fun, or so I'm told. I've been too busy grinding to have fun.:)
Wizards don't sweep the battlefield. They can do 3-4 spells and then must go for a lie down. Constantly finding resting places. IS that supposed to be fun?
It would be fun for the wizard, but no one else. The wizard would walk into an area and fireball everythign in sight, then move on while the poor fools that chose not to be wizards would have to wait for the respawn and pray the wizard does not come back and steal all the kills again. Again, it sounds like Diablo 2 would suit your urges better than FFXI.
Get rid of the limits. Battles do not have to be balanced, the computer controlled NPC's are not going to suffer confidence crisises because my player character scores all the kills. Or even the other way around, let the beginner player character have the help of a more powerfull older master. You know to stop the annoying killed by rat syndrome.
If battles should not have limits or be balanced then why should the old master save you when they are not balanced in your favor? Is this the game detecting you are going to die again and save you from your mistakes? It sounds like you want the game to be so easy that you can just walk through the world with little chance of death. Did I mention you might like Diablo 2???
One of my biggest peefs is that it shouts artificial. Take weapon skills. My character has totally mastered the long sword (one-handed) but if you put a short sword in his hands he has no idea wich end to hold. WTF? It is a bloody sword
This is a very good point and I wish it was engineered into RPGs more often. As another poster pointed out, FFXI allows you to learn things faster when you have more skill points in required areas, but you still have to re-learn it. Also in one of the later patches to Diablo 2 added a feature where points in one skill added bonuses to another skill. I forget the name they called it. This is what I think SmallFurryCreature is talking about.
Ditch D&D and give me an RPG with en-equal characters, an asskicking swordwielding wizard demonmaster ninja and a doctor with special attack "scream like a little girl and faint", adjust the game on the fly so I only get loot of value not the stack of 1 gold axes that I have to pick up one by one
Interesting....however power is relative. If there is too much powerful equipment in the game, then the least of the powerful equipment becomes the "1 gold axe". It's economics actually.
I agree with his overall topic. Computer RPG's weither single player or MMO should abandon the D&D style and find one more suited to a video game. Killing bees and crabs just for the sake of killing something to gain experience has to go. Come up with an in-game REASON the bees or crabs have to die. Perhaps they are attaking local merchants or caravans and you protect the caravans then you get a reward. Surely there is something game designers can come up with to make it more interesting than "where can I find an easy place to level up".
It reminds me of when they use the transporters to solve problems in Star Trek. Sure, you could use them to solve everything, but then the show would be boring.
I have been thinking about this particular topic for a while, especially since I started playing FFXI. $15 is my limit, due to budget restraints. I can not help but wonder if it would be possible to have an open-sourced, Free as in beer MMORPG. It would not be easy, but stranger things have come to pass.
A game where all content is created by all players that care to contribute. Like the old MUD's, but with graphics. You would need a massively-scaleable server, a client, world/level/item editors.
But who would run and organize this? Where would you host it? Where would you get the initial money required for hardware/storage?
Animal Crossing can only hold one town per card. This is not a space requirement, but a design "feature". You are better off having several smaller cards to hold several towns.
Also, All-Star Baseball 2004 has a block requirement of 240 blocks to hold data for franchise mode. If you save options and cards then you easily shoot over the 251 block cards just for this one game.
"I can't speak to the other "cheese" moves he's talking about..."
I can. The one example was Top Spin, a tennis game. In video game emulation of tennis, you are thrown right into the mental aspects. His "cheese" was to hit an acute angle shot, a drop shot, that the other team could not return. Quite frankly, that is exactly what you are supposed to do. You play enough, you learn how hard and where to hit the ball to increase your chances.
If your opponents are living at the baseline, come to the net and do drop shots. If they are always at the net, lob it over them or try to smash it past them down the lines. If they try to do both, catch them in transition and they are dead in the water. There is no perfect strategy, you win the point by realizing where you need to be, what you need to do, and doing it.
With fighting games like Soul Calibur, the cheese move is to fight with Siegfried and just do the "circle button mash" move where he swings that big sword up twice and then down once. Nearly invincible. This is due to the priority of the move. Most moves in fighting games have a priority, just like processes in your OS. The higher ones hit first no matter when you decide to use it. You know, "Unblockable!" Sometimes it's not just a move that is "cheese" but the entire charachter. It is a flaw in the game design. They designed the game and made it unbalanced because this move makes this character practically invincible. Perhaps they wanted it like that, to make single player really tough when you have to defeat that character. *shrug*
I believe the elegant solution is to have the game balanced. No one character, strategy, or move will completely dominate the game. Yin and Yang. Balance. You want the unblockable move, give it a drawback of some kind...like it's slow. I remember this one game where you were fighting with swords, except for one character that had a gun. *shakes head* You could be this charachter and kill your opponent within one second after the match started by shooting him. Just like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes, it's realistic, but for the sake of balance they could have nerfed it in some fashion.
Warlords Battlecry II does some of this. You can choose unit AI's to modify how they act. You can also download custom AI's beyond the base set that comes with the game. It's my opinion that WC3 should have been more like this game.
Poker is a bad example, because it is rarely about "fair" unless you are a mechanic and are dealing from the bottom or something. They guy with more chips definately has an advantage because he can afford more mistakes. How is your example any different from a regular poker game? You against everyone else. The pot is not going to go to just one person everytime one of them wins. Anyway....
Perhaps I explained myself poorly.
A wise man once told me that there is a solution to every problem, but sometimes the solution is to learn to live with the problem. You find a way to identify their cheat and block them, they find a new one. Move, Counter-Move. I appreciate your idealism and truly wish we could eliminate all cheaters from all games, but the fact of the matter is that we can't. While a cheat free experience is the Holy Grail for a lot of us, I'm afraid it's a wild goose chase.
"People *do* care if the person who just grind them into a fine dust is really a super-player, or if it's the teenage-kid newbie from down the block with a +700% health-patch."
With a ranking system and all else being equal, the health-patch kid will not be anywhere near you in the ranking system. The only cheaters you will play are the ones that *NEED* the cheat just to get to your level of skill. For example, the health-patch kid is so bad that your kill ratio to him without the cheat would be 7-1 (and he would accuse you of cheating). Therefore, he needs the cheat to be competitive relative to your skill. When he gains more skill, or finds a better cheat, he will increase in the rankings and you will be able to see this.
Also, I do not mean to say that there should be no effort to stop cheats. Rather that trying to stop cheaters is not the most elegant solution.
Basically, you as a person cannot tell all the time if someone is using a cheat or is just really good. You would have to run on a trusted server with trusted clients. In the long term, people using the uber-cheats will only be playing against themselves, with a natural uber-player mixed in here and there. The cheaters will move up in rank faster and higher than most non cheaters.
However, this all depends on the ranking system and how it relates to the servers. Perhaps the server is set up so there is a rank range, only players with a rank from x to y can join. You compete against people with the same rank, more or less. The better you play, your rank increases you have to play on the higher rank ranges. Kind of like baseball where you have A, AA, AAA, and the majors except here it will look like novice, good, expert, master, & cheaters:) Seriously, the very top level will be for the cheaters who keep upping their health from 10 to 25 or whatever.
I don't know how the ranking system would calculate ranks. Math is not my strong suit. However, it should probably be based on how well you did in a game, what rank the other players were, what level you played, etc. Things of that nature...weigh them in and calculate it over several games to produce a rank. Then work on recalculating it again. Stats can be show for that player like current ranking, max rank, average rank, rank over last x days/weeks. It would not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be....it just needs to be close. If what you are after is a clear 1,2,3,4,... then I would rely on an actual tournament.
"Who would bother spending a lot of time becoming the best possible CS-player if all that means is that you'll be able to compete successfully in a group consisting of the newbie from last week that upped his health to ten times the normal ? Would that still be a challenge and fun ? Even when you know that what you achieve with an extra half-year of training, the kid will compensate by multiplying his health not by 10, but by 25 ?"
Yes, it would still be a challenge. Because if "the kid" were that much better than you, via cheats or pure skill, then you would not be in the same rank. If you p
Reading faces was not what I had in mind. I'm not that good at it. You just have to protect yourself when you have a weak hand and bet well when you have a good one, you can still do well. I play poker with my old college gang and I have always left with more than I brought by doing just that. By not betting foolishly you can do wonders for your game.
"Or let's say online poker. Let's say it's implemented with Schneiers cryptographically secure poker-system, so that no client can cheat. But, the thing you don't know is that the three other guys at the table are really friends, and communicating over IM. They'll tell eachothers who has the best hand, and the others will fold. Essentially, you're playing against a player who gets three hands every round, and can choose the best one to play with. You will loose. There is nothing the game-client can do to prevent this. Even if it *somehow* blocked all other ip-communications, the others could be sitting in the same room and communicating by talking, or they could be sending eachothers sms or any of a 100 other possibilities."
Actually, if you are a good enough of a poker player this won't matter. It's all in how they act and what they tend to do in different situations and how well you read it. Besides, you don't have to win every hand to do very well.
Anyway, I believe that cheeting is a symptom of a logical game design flaw. Solutions are either a better way to implemet what they are exploiting, or a workaround in the game that makes it the cheat irrelevant to other players (somehow design it so that the other players don't mind that others are cheating).
The first is very hard because network games rely on sharing data and off-loading some of the work to the consoles. Even if every computation was done on the server and your computer did a remote GUI login, you could still figure a way to exploit it. (perhaps by sniffing the video packets for something that looks like a player's head and then having it automatically send the proper mouse/keyboard commands to aim at it and shoot). Trying to prevent it is a never ending battle. A more elegant solution would be the latter.
Have a system built into the game where the players not care if the others are cheating. How? Well, why do players get mad at cheaters? Because they are so much better than they are and never have a chance to do well against them. The same can be said for very gifted non-cheaters. The problem is not the cheating, it's the lack of balance between the players skill level, artificially enhanced or not. Therefore the answer is to build in a balancing system into the game, often reffered to as ranking. Rank the players according to how well they do in the game, wheither it is acquired by cheating or not, and make the rank public. In a short time it will be obvious which players are in your rank range and which are not. Each game will be more enjoyable because each party has a good chance to be victorious. It will be a fun challenge, not excersise in futility.
Of course, how do you do it in an MMORPG where everyone is interacting with everyone else? Well, fortunately in this case "everyone" is a relative term and can be redefined. I have seen implementations that keep users of different levels in different areas. Newbie areas, secret passages that cannot be seen until you are a certian level, etc. Mostly, the level difference in RPG's are not that much of an irritation however abusive PK'ing and griefing are. A couple of ideas. First, keep the people that want to PK away from the non-PK'ers. How? Different sever or different world. You can do the same for griefers too. Send them to a "grief" version of the world and let them grief themselves to their hearts content. This grief world could even be on their own client machine. A private hades just for themselves.
As I recall, SMB was mostly timing and memorization. In fact, I would say it is easier to run through the game rather than to loiter. The pipe sequence in 8-4 is rather easy, always take the pipe imediately after the lava. Back in the day, my neighbor and I would pay it to see how far we could get before the first time we died. In our prime, this was usually well into the second time through, when all the goombas are beetles. (beetles move faster and slightly throw off your timing)
I would have to say more stressful. Deifinately. Just one technology by itself is not bad, but when you have to use a bunch of them together and have them interact it is easy for the stress to increase dramatically. However, I would say that more of my stress comes from the inability of my managers to understand the technologies that we use than from the technology itself. Troubleshooting a java application is one thing and having my manger scream "Just make it work!" at me because he does not understand that I cannot get 24bit color out of a legacy 8bit video card is something else.
I see that you have YellowDog on a 604e....I have a 6500/225 with a 603e that I would like to get yellowdog on, but I lack installation experience and am having difficulties in finding help.
I keep seeing conflicting/confusing reports on what I need to start the install. I was wondering if you could give me a cheat-sheet to what I exactly need to have in order to do the install. I think I need something called Xboot, some version of a boot flopy, a root floppy, and an install CD(s). Links to exactly what to download for my install would be sweet, if you have the time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. My past attemtps end with some errors with the root floppy. I cannot tell if it is the wrong floppy image, or if I even need it.
No, I have not. For me, my laptop is a gaming platform first, which means XP, and a business tool second, which also means XP. As for other OS's....I don't know. I would imagine it is possible to get the basics up, but having only toyed with Linux in the past I would not even begin to know how to figure out what the devices are or how to configure them. I always have to call my linux guru friends and ask them to configure stuff for me. I could do it myself, but it's too *hard. My advice would be to find an older system to ensure that Linux had support for it's hardware. Even with the cheaper Dell, it is still a big chunck of change just for something to toy around with an OS.
* Rule of Hard - Any task which is or percieved to require too much effort will be avoided.
Hopefully the compitition between these high powered portable game systems will force the price down a bit. $3k for any system is a bit much, I 'd say. However, portability is worth a little extra price. I was pondering a system like this for a while and ended up going for an Area 51m from Alienware. It's sweet! Yeah, I paid through the nose, but I use it all the time on business travel, let alone ad-hoc LAN parties at my friends, so for me it was worth it. If the price can come down a grand or so, I would probably be able to talk some friends into them which would really open up the possibility of some nice LAN parties. Seriously, most people I know do not want to take their desktop and monitor all over creation just for one evening is too hard*; for them to do. [* The Rule of Hard: Any task that is or precieved to be too dificult will be avoided.] But portable systems like these laptops are much better and with XP, the network is plug and play (usually) (Also, wireless networking is great). All you have to lug around is a backpack and setup is as simple as taking it out, plugging in the mouse and turning it on.
Performance wise, my only issue is that some games do not render quite right on my Area51m and an occasional few don't work at all. They work fine on my desktop so I would have to say that there is a difference between the PCI and the laptop version of a card. Fortuantely, they were odd games that I did not need to have portable.
Well, I personally never dreamt of this job, but it is pretty cool. It involves system integration, application integration, scripting, coding, international travel, flexable hours, and good pay. I use Windows, Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, and others except for Apple. They always balk at the Apple when I suggest integrating it into a system architecture. I'll get an OSX server in some day.:) Anyway, the cool parts are that I get to integrate all the latest technology and play with bleeding edge stuff. Of course, with all things there is balance so naturally there are some times that I must integrate legacy HW/SW too. Sometimes the job is really challenging and requires a lot of creativity...and long hours.
But the stuff that is really cool about my job...... ...I'm not at liberty to discuss.:)
The man's trying to live out a dream, which is cool. I always have respect for people trying to live out their dreams. However I don't fancy his odds. MTG is a tough world. There are only so many tournament worthy decks out there. Yeah, there are thousands of cards, but if you pay attention to the decks that win, there are only a few in each block. You can get lucky with an obscure one, but not win consistantly.
The moment the majority of your fate in a tourney is decided is the moment you build your deck and pick the sideboard. They call it the meta-game. After that, it's luck of the draw with a smidgeon of bluff on the side. And that bluff is not much of a help, for it's only in trying to make your opponent think you may have a certain card in your hand which would kill his creature if he blocked or counter his creature when he plays it.
A lot of that stuff you have to figure out on your own. There is plenty of bad advice floating around about deckbuilding. It is almost like they will tell you some advice, X, and if you follow it you can get from being novice to advance, but in the long term advice X actually ends up keeping you from going to advance to expert. They won't tell you this even though they know it. It helps you in the short term, but in the long run it holds you back.
No matter. I say good luck to him.
Be wary of strange rocks!
on
News from Mars
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· Score: 1
In other news, the Spirit rover is getting ready to grind the rock Adirondack (picture)."
As we have clearly seen in Star Trek TOS episode 38, "The Apple".
http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/TheApple.html
"Say I tend to shootjump to the right when I head into battle. The AI couldn't care less. Now if it _did_ notice that enemies tended to die more often when I did so, and cause them to proactively fire where I would, statistically speaking, very likely end up, that'd be an AI to write home about."
That would be interesting to play against, but I don't think it would be very realistic. Each AI person that you enounter in the game would have no idea what your tendancies were at first. They should not know how you fought in the last room, unless they saw you. Now if you were in a room full of guy and you did the same move to kill off the first handfull, then it would be realistic if the AI controlling the individual guys would adapt and counter your move. Otherwise, if they "just know" how you have been fighting the whole game, how would they explain it "in game"? Does one of them make a phone call while you are killing his friends? Are they the Borg?
For example in Prince of Pursia: The Sands of Time, I always tend to use the vaulting head-slash move, and the computer bad-guys just stand there and let me do it. (unless they are a specific type, then they always counter that move) Instead, they should have a small chance of blocking any move at first, but the more I use a move in a row in the same room, the bad-guys in that room should have a better chance of countering that move because they expect it that much more.
For Targus owners and possibly other laptop bags, if you have a wheeled carry-on that has a snap-strap for luggage this is what you can do.
Connect the waist strap on your Targus, then feed the luggage strap through from the bottom and then through the handle at the top of the targus, then connect the luggage strap back to the carry-on. Sinch up the luggage strap so the targus is snug against the carry-on. If it is done just right, the carry-on won't tip over backwards completely.
This piggy-backs the bag on the carry-on and it accomplishes two things: First it gets the laptop off your shoulders. Second, the additional weight and the location of the weight can balance your carry-on so it's actually easier to pull.
...give Warlords Battlecry 2 a try. Web site is here:
http://www.warlordsbattlecry2.com/
Sure, it's got 12 different races to choose from, lots of units and spells, heros you level and equip from game to game....that's fine, but what really makes this game great is the random map generator.
Currently, I have a Human Paladin, a Dwarf Merchant, and a Wood Elf Druid. The Paladin is can heal himself and his armies, the Merchant can produce units for less and exchange resources at a better rate, and the Druid can summon creatures.
I highly recommend this game to anyone who loves RTS games.
At least in the IT sector. Basically, the Baby Boomers are all starting to retire and the number of college graduates is only a small fraction of that segment of the population. Over time, there will be more jobs than people.
On the political discussion, Alan Greenspan has more influence over the economy than whoever the president happens to be. I could never understand why people automatically give credit to the leader of the executive branch of the government for anything that happens to the economy. Was Hoover responsible for the stock market crash of '29? No. He just happened to be in office that year. Same with Clinton and the internet bubble. That's why you got to do you own thinking on these, or any, issues. People will try to sell you circumstantial evidense as hard fact and get you to buy into their ideas/scam.
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I still don't see why everyone thinks WC is some kind of RTS benchmark. Don't get me wrong. It is fun, but limited. Warlords Battlecry is a superior fantasy RTS. Check out the latest release here. Believe me, if you give it a try you won't go back to WC.
I just hope this team can "pull it off".
If a roll fails that is going to kill the adventure to early or a party fails to pick up a clue he [the DM] will make a choice wether he had enough or to step in and help out
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here. Do you think that the computer should alter the game if it detects that you are about to die? Would that make the game too easy? No challenge, no fun?
Why am I so restricted in my classes? Simple, so that I need the other players in my party. BUT computer games are solo afairs. I am the hero, I am the center of the story, the universe revolves around me! No need to play fair. If I want to stab someone with the biggest sword available and then pour magic into the wound like there is no tomorrow then let me.
If I'm not mistaken, the article was referring to MMORPG's, which by definition are not "solo afairs" are you are not the center of the universe. It sounds like you may prefer Diablo 2 over FFXI. There is nothing wrong with that, Diablo 2 was a lot of fun. FFXI is also fun, or so I'm told. I've been too busy grinding to have fun. :)
Wizards don't sweep the battlefield. They can do 3-4 spells and then must go for a lie down. Constantly finding resting places. IS that supposed to be fun?
It would be fun for the wizard, but no one else. The wizard would walk into an area and fireball everythign in sight, then move on while the poor fools that chose not to be wizards would have to wait for the respawn and pray the wizard does not come back and steal all the kills again. Again, it sounds like Diablo 2 would suit your urges better than FFXI.
Get rid of the limits. Battles do not have to be balanced, the computer controlled NPC's are not going to suffer confidence crisises because my player character scores all the kills. Or even the other way around, let the beginner player character have the help of a more powerfull older master. You know to stop the annoying killed by rat syndrome.
If battles should not have limits or be balanced then why should the old master save you when they are not balanced in your favor? Is this the game detecting you are going to die again and save you from your mistakes? It sounds like you want the game to be so easy that you can just walk through the world with little chance of death. Did I mention you might like Diablo 2???
One of my biggest peefs is that it shouts artificial. Take weapon skills. My character has totally mastered the long sword (one-handed) but if you put a short sword in his hands he has no idea wich end to hold. WTF? It is a bloody sword
This is a very good point and I wish it was engineered into RPGs more often. As another poster pointed out, FFXI allows you to learn things faster when you have more skill points in required areas, but you still have to re-learn it. Also in one of the later patches to Diablo 2 added a feature where points in one skill added bonuses to another skill. I forget the name they called it. This is what I think SmallFurryCreature is talking about.
Ditch D&D and give me an RPG with en-equal characters, an asskicking swordwielding wizard demonmaster ninja and a doctor with special attack "scream like a little girl and faint", adjust the game on the fly so I only get loot of value not the stack of 1 gold axes that I have to pick up one by one
Interesting....however power is relative. If there is too much powerful equipment in the game, then the least of the powerful equipment becomes the "1 gold axe". It's economics actually.
I agree with his overall topic. Computer RPG's weither single player or MMO should abandon the D&D style and find one more suited to a video game. Killing bees and crabs just for the sake of killing something to gain experience has to go. Come up with an in-game REASON the bees or crabs have to die. Perhaps they are attaking local merchants or caravans and you protect the caravans then you get a reward. Surely there is something game designers can come up with to make it more interesting than "where can I find an easy place to level up".
It reminds me of when they use the transporters to solve problems in Star Trek. Sure, you could use them to solve everything, but then the show would be boring.
A game where all content is created by all players that care to contribute. Like the old MUD's, but with graphics. You would need a massively-scaleable server, a client, world/level/item editors.
But who would run and organize this? Where would you host it? Where would you get the initial money required for hardware/storage?
I have no idea. However, due to the fact that I never think of anything first I decided to do FGI and found lists of free MMORPG's: http://www.onrpg.com/mmorpg-free-games3.html
http://www.gamesites200.com/mpog/
Anyone know more about these or other FREE MMORPG's?
Also, All-Star Baseball 2004 has a block requirement of 240 blocks to hold data for franchise mode. If you save options and cards then you easily shoot over the 251 block cards just for this one game.
I can. The one example was Top Spin, a tennis game. In video game emulation of tennis, you are thrown right into the mental aspects. His "cheese" was to hit an acute angle shot, a drop shot, that the other team could not return. Quite frankly, that is exactly what you are supposed to do. You play enough, you learn how hard and where to hit the ball to increase your chances.
If your opponents are living at the baseline, come to the net and do drop shots. If they are always at the net, lob it over them or try to smash it past them down the lines. If they try to do both, catch them in transition and they are dead in the water. There is no perfect strategy, you win the point by realizing where you need to be, what you need to do, and doing it.
With fighting games like Soul Calibur, the cheese move is to fight with Siegfried and just do the "circle button mash" move where he swings that big sword up twice and then down once. Nearly invincible. This is due to the priority of the move. Most moves in fighting games have a priority, just like processes in your OS. The higher ones hit first no matter when you decide to use it. You know, "Unblockable!" Sometimes it's not just a move that is "cheese" but the entire charachter. It is a flaw in the game design. They designed the game and made it unbalanced because this move makes this character practically invincible. Perhaps they wanted it like that, to make single player really tough when you have to defeat that character. *shrug*
I believe the elegant solution is to have the game balanced. No one character, strategy, or move will completely dominate the game. Yin and Yang. Balance. You want the unblockable move, give it a drawback of some kind...like it's slow. I remember this one game where you were fighting with swords, except for one character that had a gun. *shakes head* You could be this charachter and kill your opponent within one second after the match started by shooting him. Just like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes, it's realistic, but for the sake of balance they could have nerfed it in some fashion.
Warlords Battlecry II does some of this. You can choose unit AI's to modify how they act. You can also download custom AI's beyond the base set that comes with the game. It's my opinion that WC3 should have been more like this game.
Perhaps I explained myself poorly.
A wise man once told me that there is a solution to every problem, but sometimes the solution is to learn to live with the problem. You find a way to identify their cheat and block them, they find a new one. Move, Counter-Move. I appreciate your idealism and truly wish we could eliminate all cheaters from all games, but the fact of the matter is that we can't. While a cheat free experience is the Holy Grail for a lot of us, I'm afraid it's a wild goose chase.
"People *do* care if the person who just grind them into a fine dust is really a super-player, or if it's the teenage-kid newbie from down the block with a +700% health-patch."
With a ranking system and all else being equal, the health-patch kid will not be anywhere near you in the ranking system. The only cheaters you will play are the ones that *NEED* the cheat just to get to your level of skill. For example, the health-patch kid is so bad that your kill ratio to him without the cheat would be 7-1 (and he would accuse you of cheating). Therefore, he needs the cheat to be competitive relative to your skill. When he gains more skill, or finds a better cheat, he will increase in the rankings and you will be able to see this.
Also, I do not mean to say that there should be no effort to stop cheats. Rather that trying to stop cheaters is not the most elegant solution.
Basically, you as a person cannot tell all the time if someone is using a cheat or is just really good. You would have to run on a trusted server with trusted clients. In the long term, people using the uber-cheats will only be playing against themselves, with a natural uber-player mixed in here and there. The cheaters will move up in rank faster and higher than most non cheaters.
However, this all depends on the ranking system and how it relates to the servers. Perhaps the server is set up so there is a rank range, only players with a rank from x to y can join. You compete against people with the same rank, more or less. The better you play, your rank increases you have to play on the higher rank ranges. Kind of like baseball where you have A, AA, AAA, and the majors except here it will look like novice, good, expert, master, & cheaters :) Seriously, the very top level will be for the cheaters who keep upping their health from 10 to 25 or whatever.
I don't know how the ranking system would calculate ranks. Math is not my strong suit. However, it should probably be based on how well you did in a game, what rank the other players were, what level you played, etc. Things of that nature...weigh them in and calculate it over several games to produce a rank. Then work on recalculating it again. Stats can be show for that player like current ranking, max rank, average rank, rank over last x days/weeks. It would not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be....it just needs to be close. If what you are after is a clear 1,2,3,4,... then I would rely on an actual tournament.
"Who would bother spending a lot of time becoming the best possible CS-player if all that means is that you'll be able to compete successfully in a group consisting of the newbie from last week that upped his health to ten times the normal ? Would that still be a challenge and fun ? Even when you know that what you achieve with an extra half-year of training, the kid will compensate by multiplying his health not by 10, but by 25 ?"
Yes, it would still be a challenge. Because if "the kid" were that much better than you, via cheats or pure skill, then you would not be in the same rank. If you p
Reading faces was not what I had in mind. I'm not that good at it. You just have to protect yourself when you have a weak hand and bet well when you have a good one, you can still do well. I play poker with my old college gang and I have always left with more than I brought by doing just that. By not betting foolishly you can do wonders for your game.
Actually, if you are a good enough of a poker player this won't matter. It's all in how they act and what they tend to do in different situations and how well you read it. Besides, you don't have to win every hand to do very well.
Anyway, I believe that cheeting is a symptom of a logical game design flaw. Solutions are either a better way to implemet what they are exploiting, or a workaround in the game that makes it the cheat irrelevant to other players (somehow design it so that the other players don't mind that others are cheating).
The first is very hard because network games rely on sharing data and off-loading some of the work to the consoles. Even if every computation was done on the server and your computer did a remote GUI login, you could still figure a way to exploit it. (perhaps by sniffing the video packets for something that looks like a player's head and then having it automatically send the proper mouse/keyboard commands to aim at it and shoot). Trying to prevent it is a never ending battle. A more elegant solution would be the latter.
Have a system built into the game where the players not care if the others are cheating. How? Well, why do players get mad at cheaters? Because they are so much better than they are and never have a chance to do well against them. The same can be said for very gifted non-cheaters. The problem is not the cheating, it's the lack of balance between the players skill level, artificially enhanced or not. Therefore the answer is to build in a balancing system into the game, often reffered to as ranking. Rank the players according to how well they do in the game, wheither it is acquired by cheating or not, and make the rank public. In a short time it will be obvious which players are in your rank range and which are not. Each game will be more enjoyable because each party has a good chance to be victorious. It will be a fun challenge, not excersise in futility.
Of course, how do you do it in an MMORPG where everyone is interacting with everyone else? Well, fortunately in this case "everyone" is a relative term and can be redefined. I have seen implementations that keep users of different levels in different areas. Newbie areas, secret passages that cannot be seen until you are a certian level, etc. Mostly, the level difference in RPG's are not that much of an irritation however abusive PK'ing and griefing are. A couple of ideas. First, keep the people that want to PK away from the non-PK'ers. How? Different sever or different world. You can do the same for griefers too. Send them to a "grief" version of the world and let them grief themselves to their hearts content. This grief world could even be on their own client machine. A private hades just for themselves.
Revised: Is purely a function of the number of empty pint glasses on your table.
As I recall, SMB was mostly timing and memorization. In fact, I would say it is easier to run through the game rather than to loiter. The pipe sequence in 8-4 is rather easy, always take the pipe imediately after the lava. Back in the day, my neighbor and I would pay it to see how far we could get before the first time we died. In our prime, this was usually well into the second time through, when all the goombas are beetles. (beetles move faster and slightly throw off your timing)
I would have to say more stressful. Deifinately. Just one technology by itself is not bad, but when you have to use a bunch of them together and have them interact it is easy for the stress to increase dramatically. However, I would say that more of my stress comes from the inability of my managers to understand the technologies that we use than from the technology itself. Troubleshooting a java application is one thing and having my manger scream "Just make it work!" at me because he does not understand that I cannot get 24bit color out of a legacy 8bit video card is something else.
I keep seeing conflicting/confusing reports on what I need to start the install. I was wondering if you could give me a cheat-sheet to what I exactly need to have in order to do the install. I think I need something called Xboot, some version of a boot flopy, a root floppy, and an install CD(s). Links to exactly what to download for my install would be sweet, if you have the time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. My past attemtps end with some errors with the root floppy. I cannot tell if it is the wrong floppy image, or if I even need it.
No, I have not. For me, my laptop is a gaming platform first, which means XP, and a business tool second, which also means XP. As for other OS's....I don't know. I would imagine it is possible to get the basics up, but having only toyed with Linux in the past I would not even begin to know how to figure out what the devices are or how to configure them. I always have to call my linux guru friends and ask them to configure stuff for me. I could do it myself, but it's too *hard. My advice would be to find an older system to ensure that Linux had support for it's hardware. Even with the cheaper Dell, it is still a big chunck of change just for something to toy around with an OS. * Rule of Hard - Any task which is or percieved to require too much effort will be avoided.
[* The Rule of Hard: Any task that is or precieved to be too dificult will be avoided.]
But portable systems like these laptops are much better and with XP, the network is plug and play (usually) (Also, wireless networking is great). All you have to lug around is a backpack and setup is as simple as taking it out, plugging in the mouse and turning it on.
Performance wise, my only issue is that some games do not render quite right on my Area51m and an occasional few don't work at all. They work fine on my desktop so I would have to say that there is a difference between the PCI and the laptop version of a card. Fortuantely, they were odd games that I did not need to have portable.
But the stuff that is really cool about my job......
...I'm not at liberty to discuss. :)
The moment the majority of your fate in a tourney is decided is the moment you build your deck and pick the sideboard. They call it the meta-game. After that, it's luck of the draw with a smidgeon of bluff on the side. And that bluff is not much of a help, for it's only in trying to make your opponent think you may have a certain card in your hand which would kill his creature if he blocked or counter his creature when he plays it.
A lot of that stuff you have to figure out on your own. There is plenty of bad advice floating around about deckbuilding. It is almost like they will tell you some advice, X, and if you follow it you can get from being novice to advance, but in the long term advice X actually ends up keeping you from going to advance to expert. They won't tell you this even though they know it. It helps you in the short term, but in the long run it holds you back.
No matter. I say good luck to him.
As we have clearly seen in Star Trek TOS episode 38, "The Apple".e .html
http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/TheAppl
Strange rocks must be handled carefully.
The requirement to get along would exclude most married couples.
That would be interesting to play against, but I don't think it would be very realistic. Each AI person that you enounter in the game would have no idea what your tendancies were at first. They should not know how you fought in the last room, unless they saw you. Now if you were in a room full of guy and you did the same move to kill off the first handfull, then it would be realistic if the AI controlling the individual guys would adapt and counter your move. Otherwise, if they "just know" how you have been fighting the whole game, how would they explain it "in game"? Does one of them make a phone call while you are killing his friends? Are they the Borg?
For example in Prince of Pursia: The Sands of Time, I always tend to use the vaulting head-slash move, and the computer bad-guys just stand there and let me do it. (unless they are a specific type, then they always counter that move) Instead, they should have a small chance of blocking any move at first, but the more I use a move in a row in the same room, the bad-guys in that room should have a better chance of countering that move because they expect it that much more.
Actually, if you finished the original game fast enough Samus strips down to her bikini and you can play the game that way.
If I remember correctly, this code will show her this way:
justin bailey
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Connect the waist strap on your Targus, then feed the luggage strap through from the bottom and then through the handle at the top of the targus, then connect the luggage strap back to the carry-on. Sinch up the luggage strap so the targus is snug against the carry-on. If it is done just right, the carry-on won't tip over backwards completely.
This piggy-backs the bag on the carry-on and it accomplishes two things: First it gets the laptop off your shoulders. Second, the additional weight and the location of the weight can balance your carry-on so it's actually easier to pull.
...give Warlords Battlecry 2 a try. Web site is here: http://www.warlordsbattlecry2.com/ Sure, it's got 12 different races to choose from, lots of units and spells, heros you level and equip from game to game....that's fine, but what really makes this game great is the random map generator. Currently, I have a Human Paladin, a Dwarf Merchant, and a Wood Elf Druid. The Paladin is can heal himself and his armies, the Merchant can produce units for less and exchange resources at a better rate, and the Druid can summon creatures. I highly recommend this game to anyone who loves RTS games.
On the political discussion, Alan Greenspan has more influence over the economy than whoever the president happens to be. I could never understand why people automatically give credit to the leader of the executive branch of the government for anything that happens to the economy. Was Hoover responsible for the stock market crash of '29? No. He just happened to be in office that year. Same with Clinton and the internet bubble. That's why you got to do you own thinking on these, or any, issues. People will try to sell you circumstantial evidense as hard fact and get you to buy into their ideas/scam.