When I was at school, physics was the one subject I enjoyed the most, because I felt that there was a lot of underlying context for the math that I was using. Because I took math and physics some of the course material overlapped, meaning that at one point in my math course I already knew alternative solutions to the course material. I still remember the derisive snorts from the equation regurgitating elite as I solved a ball trajectory problem in front of the class using the equations of motion instead of using sines and cosines (wow my memory is bad, I forget exactly what equations we were actually supposed to use) and got the correct result. The cool thing was that the maths teacher then took my workings and made some substitutions to the equations and got back the method he was teaching. Sadly, that didn't happen very often, and I never really engaged with any math teachers at school.
I happen to have been one of the many people who suffered from the mindless teaching of equations while at school. I found that almost all of my classmates had no trouble picking up topics like fractions, trigonometry and angles, yet for some reason I struggled to understand them for years. This was further compounded when I did my A-Levels (qualifications needed to get into University) and found that my previous math teachers hadn't even attempted to teach me a basic understanding of calculus which I now needed. In all, it took me until halfway through my comp-sci degree, at which point I wrote a game engine in openGL with simple newtonian physics, to appreciate the meaning of vectors, matrices, angles expressed in radians, fractions and differentiation and integration. For a while I pondered why it had taken me so long to learn all of this when it didn't seem to be all that complicated, and I realised that throughout my life in school the mathematics I had been taught had completely lacked any meaningful context, and so I was not able to grasp its usefulness.
Unless the laws of physics in his reality were screwy, the top wavering signified that he was not dreaming. Once a top starts to wobble, it means that it's state of equilibrium is faltering and that it will definitely fall over eventually.
There's a lot to be said then, for just how effective viewing the world from the eyes of your character is, if all you said is true yet Half-Life's refusal to use cut scenes or go into 3rd person in any way was hailed as a revolution in gaming. No matter how pretty your character's animations are, no matter how much you perceive your sense of spacial awareness to be greater in 3rd person, the fact that you are seeing the world from a camera floating above your character will always be less immersive and less real than a first person perspective.
You say that "Some smart folks may point out that Mirror's Edge is a first person game and jumping and climbing in that game is a really nice experience. The fact that that's an achievement really says a lot about the first person perspective", 3rd person games have barely innovated beyond placing the camera behind the character's shoulder since their inception. I find 3rd person games to be clunky, I find their environments to be unrealistic (as they often must be scaled up to meet the requirements of a 3rd person view, see Max Payne dream sequence or World of Warcraft) and the sense of detachment from the main character too great to warrant any advantages in 'spacial awareness' they may bring. Furthermore, a game with good 3D audio will allow you to sense the area around you almost as well as being able to see everything around you, with the added effect of engaging your other senses rather than simply allowing you to see everything.
...Not exactly impressive. They basically have a bunch of shops (Walmart, Gamestop), some random studios (but hey if they made the hit SuperMonkeyBash HD on XBLA, then who are we to doubt the decades of industry knowledge AngryChimp Studios has?) and then XBox 360. Well then, that'd explain all the XBox related crap on the list. The whole site smacks of some coordinator of State relations being given a government grant and noticing that them thar games are big at the moment, and gathering a similar bunch of people who know nothing with some input from that AngryChimp Studio they managed to get onboard for a few thousand bucks. I've actually seen this happen and sadly been a part of it, and it's a soul sucking experience when a bunch of 40 something HR/marketing people decide that Gaming is the Next Big Thing and proceed to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on stupid conferences and websites built by amateur local design companies. Oh yeah, and any Gaming hall of anything with Master Chief at the top has about as much credibility as a gaming degree without math in it.
That's why you impose a daily spending limit, so that if someone does steal your card there's only so much damage they can do. Not ideal, but not as terrible as you made it out to be.
I agree that copyright laws are evil, however I don't agree that any action to subvert them is righteous. I used to have a friend in school long before TPB was around, and he would buy pirated dreamcast games from the local market for a fraction of their normal price. He made fun of another friend of mine who had about a quarter as many games, but paid for every one of them. The actions of people who download games/movies/music/apps for free simply because they can and do not feel morally obligated to pay for their downloads at some point are indefensible. Meanwhile they post obviously farcical statements like the one I originally replied to, to cover up their actual motives, and people like the mod who modded me troll are happy to have them on the bandwagon.
I love it when people try to defend piracy in this way.
Pirate: "But but the evil copyright holders are wrongs! We're not infringing on anything because we don't have the files you say we pirate on any of our servers, nerr nerr!"
Judge: "But you provide a service for people to find the files, and the vast majority of your traffic is for the specific purpose of getting these files"
Pirate: "Yah but the files aren't on our server! We merely provide a service, we're not doing anything wrong! It's not our fault people use our servers in this way!"
Judge: "You make fun of people sending you take down notices, you ignore any copyright claims made against you and your website has a fucking pirate ship on it, how are you NOT pirates?"
Pirate: "We don't have control of what people do with our servers! You can't blame us because Swedish law says so!"
Judge: "Pay up buddy"
Pirate: "OMGZ noways! We're appealing!"
Judge: "Nuh-uh, pay up."
Pirate: "AAAAwwwwwww"
Everyone and their mum knows people go to the pirate bay to PIRATE stuff, there's nothing "good" about TPB, and they most definitely ARE breaching copyright. Calling judges geriatric, or jumping up and down in a hissy fit accusing the older generation of "not getting it" is childish and retarded. The older generation most definitely do "get it" and like it or not when you steal enough shit from rich people they're going to come looking for their shit and they're going to want it back with cherries on top.
*** Now talking in #christian
-Word_of_God- Welcome Abstruse to #christian I am a Bible Bot. For more info type:/msg Word_of_God !info
[Abstruse] !kjv numbers 22:21
[Word_of_God] Numbers 22:21 -- And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab. - (KJV)
*** SageRider sets mode: +b *!*@c211-30-208-111.rivrw3.nsw.optusnet.com.au
*** Word_of_God was kicked from #christian by SageRider (Please dont Swear)
[Abstruse] I know I'm never going to be able to come back in this channel again after this, but damn was it worth it to see that...
http://www.bash.org/?178890
You're welcome;)
(did you try to search in the quote number box by any chance? I keep doing that and forgetting that 'search' is actually a link)
Yep it depends on your data plan as to what you consider a lot of data sent/received. 315-375ms is pretty awesome though! However I think WoW can probably pull off optimisations that would be more difficult for a space MMO - such as not orientating players or monsters in the exact direction they're facing. It'd be cool to see what's under the hood in WoW, just their terrain engine is amazing enough, all that expansive world and barely a loading screen in sight.
It's not just the graphical objects though, it's all the players and enemies and other objects in that particular area, and what they're doing, which can potentially become quite complex. For example, a packet of data updating the current game state might include for every interactable object in the same area as the player:
The object's scale, orientation, position, velocity and angular velocity
The current action the object is taking
The object's health, armour and other statistics (e.g. agility, stamina etc, this could include modifiers from debuffs)
Any temporary alteration to the object's state (e.g. debuffs, buffs to display when the object is targetted, or to display visually on the object)
You then have player messages and game announcements (private to you, local to the area, global) which will happen often enough in crowded areas to be sent on most game updates, and any temporary states inflicted upon the game world (effects being played like explosions, changes to the environment etc).
This is just a small subset of the information that may be sent to your phone many times a second depending on the MMO, and considering that people tend to play MMOs for longer than your average phone call, you can begin to see why playing an MMO might become costly for your data plan in the long run. Now having only paid a tertiary glance at Vendetta's homepage, I can't even begin to say exactly HOW costly playing it would be, especially if it is specifically optimised for low bandwidth / data transfer (e.g. you can't control your ship more than clicking where to go, or combat is turn based etc), but it definitely has potential.
Yeah but most of them weren't particularly involving, you didn't build any emotional attachment with the characters. It was usually something along the lines of:
"Hi [player] we are the [random persecuted race] and the [evil maniacal race] are trying to kill us because [we/they] [are in the way of their expansion / look displeasing to them / are weak as fuck / taste great skewered on a stick]! Please go and kill [20] of their most pathetic scouts to prove your loyalty to the cause..."
And so it would begin, culminating in killing some mob 2 or 3 levels above you and earning their "eternal gratitude" which translates into a slotted POS green that no one in their right mind would waste gems on.
Indeed, I remember playing through the Stalvan Mistmantle quest line around EU release and actually feeling a little sorry for pervy old Stalvan at the end. Most of my friends were delighted to be able to kill him, but I was somewhat hesitant - I felt he'd received enough torment already... That and he was 3 levels above me when I found him and I was playing a dagger Rogue (read bad success rate on skills and pathetic survivability at low level). However having said that, I've not found all that many quests in the game to be involving. Sure, they've become more interesting and varied, but nothing quite like running around Darkshire with a character low level enough to aggro even the critters hiding in the shadows. I'm really hoping that cataclysm injects something new back into all those legendary old areas that will make it worthwhile to explore them again. The only character I had stomach to level up passed 30 after my Rogue maxed out was my hunter, and that was purely to see how my counter class worked back in the day.
In all 3 cases no training is required when you give them to the right users? Isn't that the same case with windows? I program on a windows 7 PC all day, and although the switch from XP to Win 7 was a little annoying at first, I find it's new explorer window much more useful, along with the ability to search programs in the start menu (I skipped out on Vista because I saw first hand its effects on my wife's "vista ready" laptop). I wouldn't call the iPad a windows replacement, for starters it can't multitask very well, has a piddly screen, and it doesn't run Office. Lets face it, most "Office workers" are used to Powerpoint and Word, which don't come on an iPad, and they'll have a gajillion windows open, which won't happen on an iPad either. We have an iPad at the office now, and all I've see it do is make some crappy guitar and piano noises and stay closely to our resident iCrazy person's chest.
The question "if you could kill someone you didn't like, and nobody would know, would you do it?" comes to mind. However I imagine that most people would not be able to kill that person, especially after seeing and hearing their pleas. I think the reason that we don't kill people often is not because we have effective police forces, but because we are at large, social people. The time we would be most likely to kill someone would be under peer pressure, or mob mentality - that time when "the will of the many" appears to make right our evil choices. But this is subjective: "murder is incredibly common amongst higher primates" could mean 1/10 primates or 1/10000. I still think that humans are far more civilized than your average primate, it's just unfortunate that in our society it only takes a few bad apples to seriously screw things up for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was at school, physics was the one subject I enjoyed the most, because I felt that there was a lot of underlying context for the math that I was using. Because I took math and physics some of the course material overlapped, meaning that at one point in my math course I already knew alternative solutions to the course material. I still remember the derisive snorts from the equation regurgitating elite as I solved a ball trajectory problem in front of the class using the equations of motion instead of using sines and cosines (wow my memory is bad, I forget exactly what equations we were actually supposed to use) and got the correct result. The cool thing was that the maths teacher then took my workings and made some substitutions to the equations and got back the method he was teaching. Sadly, that didn't happen very often, and I never really engaged with any math teachers at school.
The last half of your comment is the literary equivalent of scraping nails down a chalkboard :(
I happen to have been one of the many people who suffered from the mindless teaching of equations while at school. I found that almost all of my classmates had no trouble picking up topics like fractions, trigonometry and angles, yet for some reason I struggled to understand them for years. This was further compounded when I did my A-Levels (qualifications needed to get into University) and found that my previous math teachers hadn't even attempted to teach me a basic understanding of calculus which I now needed. In all, it took me until halfway through my comp-sci degree, at which point I wrote a game engine in openGL with simple newtonian physics, to appreciate the meaning of vectors, matrices, angles expressed in radians, fractions and differentiation and integration. For a while I pondered why it had taken me so long to learn all of this when it didn't seem to be all that complicated, and I realised that throughout my life in school the mathematics I had been taught had completely lacked any meaningful context, and so I was not able to grasp its usefulness.
Cheers for the commands, my net can be choppy at times and that might prove quite useful, alas I have no mod points to mod this informative.
Unless the laws of physics in his reality were screwy, the top wavering signified that he was not dreaming. Once a top starts to wobble, it means that it's state of equilibrium is faltering and that it will definitely fall over eventually.
yeah sunshine inbetween the never ending rain... You do have nice mountains though I'll give you that
Do you have any idea how many Canadian jokes we Ontarians have to put up with just because the rest of you can't be as normal as us?
There's a lot to be said then, for just how effective viewing the world from the eyes of your character is, if all you said is true yet Half-Life's refusal to use cut scenes or go into 3rd person in any way was hailed as a revolution in gaming. No matter how pretty your character's animations are, no matter how much you perceive your sense of spacial awareness to be greater in 3rd person, the fact that you are seeing the world from a camera floating above your character will always be less immersive and less real than a first person perspective.
You say that "Some smart folks may point out that Mirror's Edge is a first person game and jumping and climbing in that game is a really nice experience. The fact that that's an achievement really says a lot about the first person perspective", 3rd person games have barely innovated beyond placing the camera behind the character's shoulder since their inception. I find 3rd person games to be clunky, I find their environments to be unrealistic (as they often must be scaled up to meet the requirements of a 3rd person view, see Max Payne dream sequence or World of Warcraft) and the sense of detachment from the main character too great to warrant any advantages in 'spacial awareness' they may bring. Furthermore, a game with good 3D audio will allow you to sense the area around you almost as well as being able to see everything around you, with the added effect of engaging your other senses rather than simply allowing you to see everything.
You guys sure did manage to induct a bunch of XBox developers, though
...Not exactly impressive. They basically have a bunch of shops (Walmart, Gamestop), some random studios (but hey if they made the hit SuperMonkeyBash HD on XBLA, then who are we to doubt the decades of industry knowledge AngryChimp Studios has?) and then XBox 360. Well then, that'd explain all the XBox related crap on the list. The whole site smacks of some coordinator of State relations being given a government grant and noticing that them thar games are big at the moment, and gathering a similar bunch of people who know nothing with some input from that AngryChimp Studio they managed to get onboard for a few thousand bucks. I've actually seen this happen and sadly been a part of it, and it's a soul sucking experience when a bunch of 40 something HR/marketing people decide that Gaming is the Next Big Thing and proceed to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on stupid conferences and websites built by amateur local design companies. Oh yeah, and any Gaming hall of anything with Master Chief at the top has about as much credibility as a gaming degree without math in it.
That's why you impose a daily spending limit, so that if someone does steal your card there's only so much damage they can do. Not ideal, but not as terrible as you made it out to be.
A programmer who has found true love, and trust me, it will be against his will.
I agree that copyright laws are evil, however I don't agree that any action to subvert them is righteous. I used to have a friend in school long before TPB was around, and he would buy pirated dreamcast games from the local market for a fraction of their normal price. He made fun of another friend of mine who had about a quarter as many games, but paid for every one of them. The actions of people who download games/movies/music/apps for free simply because they can and do not feel morally obligated to pay for their downloads at some point are indefensible. Meanwhile they post obviously farcical statements like the one I originally replied to, to cover up their actual motives, and people like the mod who modded me troll are happy to have them on the bandwagon.
Yeah nice one modding me troll, it's the truth and you know it.
I love it when people try to defend piracy in this way.
Pirate: "But but the evil copyright holders are wrongs! We're not infringing on anything because we don't have the files you say we pirate on any of our servers, nerr nerr!"
Judge: "But you provide a service for people to find the files, and the vast majority of your traffic is for the specific purpose of getting these files"
Pirate: "Yah but the files aren't on our server! We merely provide a service, we're not doing anything wrong! It's not our fault people use our servers in this way!"
Judge: "You make fun of people sending you take down notices, you ignore any copyright claims made against you and your website has a fucking pirate ship on it, how are you NOT pirates?"
Pirate: "We don't have control of what people do with our servers! You can't blame us because Swedish law says so!"
Judge: "Pay up buddy"
Pirate: "OMGZ noways! We're appealing!"
Judge: "Nuh-uh, pay up."
Pirate: "AAAAwwwwwww"
Everyone and their mum knows people go to the pirate bay to PIRATE stuff, there's nothing "good" about TPB, and they most definitely ARE breaching copyright. Calling judges geriatric, or jumping up and down in a hissy fit accusing the older generation of "not getting it" is childish and retarded. The older generation most definitely do "get it" and like it or not when you steal enough shit from rich people they're going to come looking for their shit and they're going to want it back with cherries on top.
For the lazy
/msg Word_of_God !info
*** Now talking in #christian
-Word_of_God- Welcome Abstruse to #christian I am a Bible Bot. For more info type:
[Abstruse] !kjv numbers 22:21
[Word_of_God] Numbers 22:21 -- And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab. - (KJV)
*** SageRider sets mode: +b *!*@c211-30-208-111.rivrw3.nsw.optusnet.com.au
*** Word_of_God was kicked from #christian by SageRider (Please dont Swear)
[Abstruse] I know I'm never going to be able to come back in this channel again after this, but damn was it worth it to see that...
http://www.bash.org/?178890 You're welcome ;)
(did you try to search in the quote number box by any chance? I keep doing that and forgetting that 'search' is actually a link)
That's what he meant - machetes and AKs are far more dangerous than nukes because they're easier to obtain and use
Yep it depends on your data plan as to what you consider a lot of data sent/received. 315-375ms is pretty awesome though! However I think WoW can probably pull off optimisations that would be more difficult for a space MMO - such as not orientating players or monsters in the exact direction they're facing. It'd be cool to see what's under the hood in WoW, just their terrain engine is amazing enough, all that expansive world and barely a loading screen in sight.
It's not just the graphical objects though, it's all the players and enemies and other objects in that particular area, and what they're doing, which can potentially become quite complex. For example, a packet of data updating the current game state might include for every interactable object in the same area as the player:
The object's scale, orientation, position, velocity and angular velocity
The current action the object is taking
The object's health, armour and other statistics (e.g. agility, stamina etc, this could include modifiers from debuffs)
Any temporary alteration to the object's state (e.g. debuffs, buffs to display when the object is targetted, or to display visually on the object)
You then have player messages and game announcements (private to you, local to the area, global) which will happen often enough in crowded areas to be sent on most game updates, and any temporary states inflicted upon the game world (effects being played like explosions, changes to the environment etc).
This is just a small subset of the information that may be sent to your phone many times a second depending on the MMO, and considering that people tend to play MMOs for longer than your average phone call, you can begin to see why playing an MMO might become costly for your data plan in the long run. Now having only paid a tertiary glance at Vendetta's homepage, I can't even begin to say exactly HOW costly playing it would be, especially if it is specifically optimised for low bandwidth / data transfer (e.g. you can't control your ship more than clicking where to go, or combat is turn based etc), but it definitely has potential.
How did you come up with the $50,000 per household to recover the "lost sales"? I lost you there
Yeah but most of them weren't particularly involving, you didn't build any emotional attachment with the characters. It was usually something along the lines of:
"Hi [player] we are the [random persecuted race] and the [evil maniacal race] are trying to kill us because [we/they] [are in the way of their expansion / look displeasing to them / are weak as fuck / taste great skewered on a stick]! Please go and kill [20] of their most pathetic scouts to prove your loyalty to the cause..."
And so it would begin, culminating in killing some mob 2 or 3 levels above you and earning their "eternal gratitude" which translates into a slotted POS green that no one in their right mind would waste gems on.
Indeed, I remember playing through the Stalvan Mistmantle quest line around EU release and actually feeling a little sorry for pervy old Stalvan at the end. Most of my friends were delighted to be able to kill him, but I was somewhat hesitant - I felt he'd received enough torment already... That and he was 3 levels above me when I found him and I was playing a dagger Rogue (read bad success rate on skills and pathetic survivability at low level). However having said that, I've not found all that many quests in the game to be involving. Sure, they've become more interesting and varied, but nothing quite like running around Darkshire with a character low level enough to aggro even the critters hiding in the shadows. I'm really hoping that cataclysm injects something new back into all those legendary old areas that will make it worthwhile to explore them again. The only character I had stomach to level up passed 30 after my Rogue maxed out was my hunter, and that was purely to see how my counter class worked back in the day.
In all 3 cases no training is required when you give them to the right users? Isn't that the same case with windows? I program on a windows 7 PC all day, and although the switch from XP to Win 7 was a little annoying at first, I find it's new explorer window much more useful, along with the ability to search programs in the start menu (I skipped out on Vista because I saw first hand its effects on my wife's "vista ready" laptop). I wouldn't call the iPad a windows replacement, for starters it can't multitask very well, has a piddly screen, and it doesn't run Office. Lets face it, most "Office workers" are used to Powerpoint and Word, which don't come on an iPad, and they'll have a gajillion windows open, which won't happen on an iPad either. We have an iPad at the office now, and all I've see it do is make some crappy guitar and piano noises and stay closely to our resident iCrazy person's chest.
The question "if you could kill someone you didn't like, and nobody would know, would you do it?" comes to mind. However I imagine that most people would not be able to kill that person, especially after seeing and hearing their pleas. I think the reason that we don't kill people often is not because we have effective police forces, but because we are at large, social people. The time we would be most likely to kill someone would be under peer pressure, or mob mentality - that time when "the will of the many" appears to make right our evil choices. But this is subjective: "murder is incredibly common amongst higher primates" could mean 1/10 primates or 1/10000. I still think that humans are far more civilized than your average primate, it's just unfortunate that in our society it only takes a few bad apples to seriously screw things up for the rest of us.