A school is a public institution, not a private institution (at least in most cases). Despite legitimate and appropriate reasons for concern among many Slashdot readers, there are instances when compiling such data is a good thing. This happens to be a case where that is so. I would think that parents would want the schools to keep an eye on which students are having trouble at school, and possibly help them along.
That being said, I agree with the points you laid out for the most part. The real critical part is in the re-selling of that information to 3rd parties. If that can be prevented, then the bulk of the potential problems cease to exist.
I hate cars. They suck, and I mean that literally. They continually suck money out of your pocket for a variety of things.
Actual cost of car Fuel Parking fees Insurance and liscence fees Maintinence
And all of the costs except the first are pretty much continual.
Sure, there are times and places where owning a car is unavoidable, but in any decent sized city, given the choice, I would prefer to use transit. It may be inconvenient to have to wait for a bus or subway. And they may be crowded. But simply having that extra cash on hand, in my opinion, more then makes up for it. The only time I would prefer a Car to Transit is if I have an unweildly purchase, like a new TV, or a large load of groceries.
What would the obstacles to using mass transit be in Seattle?
Nintendo did not choose the cartridge to only prevent piracy. They did it because doing so generated more profits per game sold. Nintendo owned the patents on their cartridge's. The real reasoning was probably along these lines.
1) More profits per game 2) More difficult to Pirate 3) No loading times.
The reason that the publishers did not support the N64 is that producing a playstation game (Or saturn game for that matter) was cheaper. A cd is cheaper to manufacture then a cartridge.
Nintendo's use of the miniature disks also has less to do with piracy and more to do with manufacturing costs. First, since they dont play DVD's, they do not have to pay any fee's to use that technology. The cost per console is cheaper as a result. Nintendo figured that people who want to watch DVD's are going to buy a DVD player.
Assuming that the choice of avoiding or reducing piracy will win out over econimics for any console developer is just stupid. Its an important secondary concern, but not the primary concern. At least not right now, and certantly not 7 years ago.
The parents in this case are concerned with what their kids are doing. But, at least they know what their kids are doing. That is probably a step up from previous generations. Growing up, my mother was always insisting that I "Go outside and play". And that is probably how it was for most generations that predate videogames.
My mother and grandmother also have all sorts of stories about the things that they used to do as children. Things like jumping off of bridges into rivers while swimming. Underage drinking and smoking. Shoplifting and petty theft. Pranks that were malicious enough that getting caught would probably warrant jail time. One of my uncles told me about putting an elderly neighbors colostomy bags into the mail box.
The scary bit is this. All of the above is basically normal behaviour for childern and young adolescents. Are they seriously telling me that all things considered, they would prefer to have thier children doing that sort of thing as opposed to playing Super Smash Brothers? Granted, young children should not be playing Doom3 or Soldier of Fortune, but there are worse things out there then violent video games to worry about.
Darwin's are for people who take questionable actions which the person in question should be able to anticipate the result. Like checking the gas tank at night and lighting a match to see better. Darwins should also extend to people who disregard warnings of danger.
The X-Prize people are knowingly taking a big risk, and are aware of the dangers, and have tried to minimize them. The fatalaties are not going to result from monstously absurd ignorance or stupidity. The errors will be a magnitude or two lower.
If X Prize contenstants are viable Darwin Awards, then so should test pilots, infantry soldiers, and car accident fatalaties.
The only reason to track such information about a person is if you intend to screw that person.
If the government wants to screw you, its bad. If an attractive member of the opposite sex wants to screw you, its good. If an attractive member of the same sex wants to screw you, um... I leave that for you to decide.
If I understand this correctly, a company which has a physical retail store in California and sells over the internet (like Walmart) will have to charge California sales taxes. A company that is purly online (Amazon.com) might not have to. That much I think I understand.
Now, here are some quetions / problems.
Lets say California and some other state with a similar sales tax law. Some guy in the other state orders something from Walmart.com. Walmart has locations in both california and this other state. Now, whose tax gets charged? California's or the other states.
Lets say some guy in a state with no sales tax laws orders something online from a shop located in calfornia that does internet sales. Does that customer pay the California sales tax? If my reading of the story is correct, I would guess yes.
Would someone who has a better grasp of this tax crap care to answer?
One of the primary reasons for a game to have an expansion pack is to get a better return on the initial investment into the game its self. The secondary, and ultimately less important reason is to release features that were cut from the game during development due to cost constraints.
An expansion does not require quite as much staff to develop, since your not starting from zero. If a game takes about 2 years to develop at a cost of say $3,000,000 dollars, you need to do better then that in sales to make a profit. If you develop an expansion pack for the above game, you can probably do so for 1/3rd the cost. If you sell to the majority of the initial customer base, instead of making 4 million on a 3 million dollar investment, you make 7 million on a 4 million dollar investment.
I would guess that the basic strategy is to only release fixed content in patches, and release new content in expansions. They will probalby also start to bundle the expansions with the base game by this time next year at the latest.
The primary source of income among RIAA members is in recording songs and selling them. They have a huge amount of resources invested in making that particular business model work. While they could in theory promote concerts, there is one key problem.
Concerts are local events. You dont get much market penetration in Los Angeles when the concert is in New York. A recording can be sold pretty much anywhere.
According to the Prisoners dillemma, one of the few strategies that tends to win is to go tit for tat. If the opponenent co-operates, then co-operate. If the oppoenent screws you, screw them back.
Simply blocking the pop-ups is enough to get by. But the one responsible for the pop up cannot really tell if your blocking it, or just closing it. So what might work is a vengeance script.
When you are subjected to a pop-up, you execute a script that throws some pings at the sender, say 1 ping per kb of the popup. If enough people were using this sort of software, and the pop-up was obnoxious enough, the source would probably be intermittently crippled.
Of course, this would probably violate some inconvenient laws regarding hacking and Denial of Service attacks.
Honest and open accounting is probably a good thing, but only if the company its self is entirely on the up and up. And I am not talking about various strictly illegal activities either.
Do you think that there would be a morale increase when it becomes common knowledge that the owners unqualified son in a junior position is paid more then people with greater amounts of skill?
Or when the 2 highest paid employees ae the owner and his secretary (who is also his girl friend).
How about when the executives get a raise that is roughly equal to the amount of payroll reduction in the last round of lay offs?
Odds are that if office morale is in the crapper already, that there is a good reason for it.
And in Soviet Russia, people could be shot by the KGB for being retarded (not that they needed a reason I guess). Or at least thrown into a Gulag for a few years.
They are working together to convince a potential customer that their collective product is worth buying.
Getting the US Government to start buying Linux based solutions gives them more potential customers. I would guess that is a given that if it is certified for government use at the federal level, that it becomes a legitimate product for the state governments as well.
Besides, how is this different from say, IBM and Sun working together to promote Java?
The continuing erosion of civil liberties betrays the spirit of the US constitution. This is nothing more then a gross betrayal by the elected representitives that should be defending civil rights, not reducing them in the name of national security.
And as much as it might seem to be a marginal difference in the greater scheme of things, there is only one thing that I feel must be said.
I am Canadian. Ha ha, sucks to be american.
On the bright side as bad as it may become to be an american, there is a solution. If you dont like it, emigrate.
If NASA decides to repeat what they did back in 1986 and stop all Shuttle flights for a year or so, that is obviously a horrible thing for the ISS program. But what about the other nations space programs? Obvioulsy Russia is not in the best of shape financially to be able to continue things. And aside from the US and Russia, no other Nation has put people into space.
But what if Russia and the US shared more of their space tech with the European, Japanese, and Chinese space programs? China is nearly ready to put its 'taikonauts' into orbit, and surely some of the existing technology could be shared with other space programs to pick up the slack.
After all, its the International space station, not the US space station (despite the niggling fact that the US has funded the majority of the program).
I also wonder if this event will give a boost to the alternative space vehicles that have been shelved or scrapped over the last few decades.
First, let me state that I am very much a Nintendo Loyalist. This is due partly to customer loyalty. The primary reason however, is that the Game Cube currently has the games that I want to play.
However, I am forced to agree to an extent with the 'kiddy' image the console has. People who willfully deny this are quick to point out games like Eternal Darkenss (which I own), Resident Evil (which I do not), and Metroid Prime (which I also own) and BMX XXX (which I would not use to wipe my rectal cavity). By all accounts, 3 of those are great games. I can vouch for this for Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime.
However, Nintendo has not gone very far out of their way to encourage mature content for their console. There are no games like GTA for the console. And the other games that exist for the Game Cube which might appeal to those seeking more mature games, invariably end up on both the X-Box and PS2 anyway.
If Nintendo was willing to put more first party developers to work on their mature games, the situation would shift very rapidly to Nintendo's favor. But doing so endangers thier kid friendly image, which in turn hurts the bottom line.
Konkers Bad Fur Day was a very mature game, and quite funny. But alot of clueless parents bought the game for their 5 year olds (and somehow missed the very obvious NOT FOR KIDS warning on the box). They then realized their error, and it caused alot of problems for Nintendo.
Still, if Nintendo is willing to put more effort into getting games like Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime out, then their policy of developing for all ages would be the truth.
A friend of mine gave me access to his copy of the game when I was attending school. I ended up choosing a Lithovore race (can live in toxic environments by eating rocks). I was doing ok, but an aggressor species kept attacking me and demanding tribute. I had a few plantets, but had lost most of them quite quickly.
But lucky for me, I had some excellent research abilities. I managed to discover Planetary Converter lasers (one shot kills a planet) and Doom Stars. But I was so heavily out numbered, that I kept losing most direct confrontations. But I had enough to hold back the attackers from wiping me out.
At this point in the game, I had maybe 5 planets, and my opponent had everything else (about 100 planets). I was despearate, so I started sending my ships to planet colonies of the attacking race, and vaporising every planet in the system, and moving on.
Initially, he continued to demand my surrender and 75% tribute. After toasting about 20 systems, He demanded 50%. Another 20 systems turned to asteroid fields, and he was willing to settle for 25%. A few systems later, he was saying that I was no longer worth his time to squash, so lets call the whole war off. After destroying his home system, he began offering me tribute.
I ended up destorying every star system in the entire galaxy and all life (except my own). It was the only time I can recall winning a game by committing wholesale galactic genocide.
Dev kits arent the problem where developing independent console titles are concerned. There are enough code geeks out there who enjoy doing that sort of thing, and enough open source rendering engines (Quake, Crystal Space) that getting something on screen is not the real problem.
The problem is the art assets. Take a look at the credits for most modern 3d games. You will see a programming team of 5 to 10 people, and an art team of about 20. It takes a huge amount of work to actually create all of the textures and models for a complicated 3d game. And debugging an animation is not as easy as running a debugger. That sort of work is much more manual.
While the software takes more skill to do properly, the art takes more time, and often more people. If you want a large game, you need alot of artists. Metroid Prime, GTA 3, and Halo are all very large games.
I am a very heavy gamer. However, I have not developed what I would consider an addiction. After reading the article and some of the other replies in this thread, here are my opinions.
1) The sort of person who is likely to become addicted to gaming is probably getting more out of playing those games with their time then the other activities that are available to that person.
2) There is nothing inherently wrong with choosing to play a game rather then interacting with people.
3) The only time an addiction should be considered dangerous is when it begins to supercede things that should not be superceded. To that end, any activity that causes you to fail in your responsibilties to others, or causes harm to yourself and others is bad.
4) There are things more important in life then heavy gaming, drug use, and gambling. One of those is Soap.
First, let me state that I am very much a Nintento Loyalist. I own a Game Cube, and I love the system.
The problem is not the playability of the games available on the GameCube. Every one of the Cube games that I have purchased has been very entertaining and legitimately difficult. However, almost none of those games are geared for a more mature gaming audience.
Here is an example. Super Monkey Ball 2 is a very difficult game to beat, and is totally addictive (Monkey Ball 1 is has this going for it also). However, I cannot stand to play that game's story mode, as the FMV's seem geared towards moronic 3 year olds. With the Cube, its like having a huge amount of 'G' rated movies to choose from, but almost no 'R' rated movies. As good a movie as Harry Potter may be, I would much rather watch Red Dragon.
As much as I like my game cube, I have to look very hard to find games for it that can satisfy my blood lust.
"Isn't this bucking the trend? Aren't games systems moving towards ever more powerful graphics subsystems with modest increases in cpu performance."
Actually, the PS2 does not rely on the CPU for its graphics performance. It relys on a dedicated bit of hardware that can perform blindingly fast Vector Ops (VU0 and VU1), and insane memory bandwidth to move data. VU0 and VU1, however, do not have any branching instructions, and you typcially manipulate it indirectly. I assume that the Nintendo Gamecube is simular to this, and the X-Box uses nVIDIA's Ge-Force Technology to handle transform and lighting.
Most consoles are not really CPU limited any longer, its more of an issue of how much 'bandwidth' they have for processing geometry.
Having programmed professionally on the PlayStation2's hardware, I can tell you one thing right now. Attempting to make a Voxel Engine run well on a Playstation2 is like using a hammer to drive a screw.
The Playstation2 hardware is designed much differently then a PC game is. It has an ungodly amount of memory bandwidth, and very little VRAM. It cannot store much in the way of textures, or models. What it can do is draw huge amounts of polygons quickly. Its rendering hardware uses a Depth Buffer, and it can take huge amounts polygons and render them correclty to that depth buffer very quickly.
Voxels are essentially 3d pixels. While the PS2 can be made to render objects using that technique, it cannot take advantage of its specialized hardware when doing so. PC's tend to be more flexible, but since GeForce type cards are becomming the standard, if your using OpenGL or DirectX to do your rendering, then you cannot take advantage of your video card to draw yoru polygons.
Really? Story will become the crux of game development?
While that will indeed be true for many games, it wont be true for all games. It certaintly wont be true for the games that will often end up as the most remembered.
Those elements aside, there is one thing that will end up prevailing over hyper developed characters. The fewer critical and important decisions that are left to the player, the less of a game it is. And to have a good and enduring story, you cannot let the player make the critical decisons.
After all, your carefully devloped adventure where the Rugged Hero falls for the Beautiful Princess has some implied decions. Your story can have plenty of emotional development and character growth, but none of it matters if some Asshole like myself feels like shooting the woman instead of kissing her.
Might be when you have been arrested. Another is when you are accused of a criminal offense. The best clue that you need a lawyer outside of the two above cirumstances is when you start to become convinced that the only acceptable resolution to your situation involves the use of an Axe and a Shovel with respect to your antagonist.
If you can at all avoid it, however, do not start paying a lawyer until your sure that things are getting beyond your ability to control.
Slashdot Mirror
A school is a public institution, not a private institution (at least in most cases). Despite legitimate and appropriate reasons for concern among many Slashdot readers, there are instances when compiling such data is a good thing. This happens to be a case where that is so. I would think that parents would want the schools to keep an eye on which students are having trouble at school, and possibly help them along.
That being said, I agree with the points you laid out for the most part. The real critical part is in the re-selling of that information to 3rd parties. If that can be prevented, then the bulk of the potential problems cease to exist.
END COMMUNICATION
I hate cars. They suck, and I mean that literally. They continually suck money out of your pocket for a variety of things.
Actual cost of car
Fuel
Parking fees
Insurance and liscence fees
Maintinence
And all of the costs except the first are pretty much continual.
Sure, there are times and places where owning a car is unavoidable, but in any decent sized city, given the choice, I would prefer to use transit. It may be inconvenient to have to wait for a bus or subway. And they may be crowded. But simply having that extra cash on hand, in my opinion, more then makes up for it. The only time I would prefer a Car to Transit is if I have an unweildly purchase, like a new TV, or a large load of groceries.
What would the obstacles to using mass transit be in Seattle?
END COMMUNICATION
Nintendo did not choose the cartridge to only prevent piracy. They did it because doing so generated more profits per game sold. Nintendo owned the patents on their cartridge's. The real reasoning was probably along these lines.
1) More profits per game
2) More difficult to Pirate
3) No loading times.
The reason that the publishers did not support the N64 is that producing a playstation game (Or saturn game for that matter) was cheaper. A cd is cheaper to manufacture then a cartridge.
Nintendo's use of the miniature disks also has less to do with piracy and more to do with manufacturing costs. First, since they dont play DVD's, they do not have to pay any fee's to use that technology. The cost per console is cheaper as a result. Nintendo figured that people who want to watch DVD's are going to buy a DVD player.
Assuming that the choice of avoiding or reducing piracy will win out over econimics for any console developer is just stupid. Its an important secondary concern, but not the primary concern. At least not right now, and certantly not 7 years ago.
END COMMUNICATION
The parents in this case are concerned with what their kids are doing. But, at least they know what their kids are doing. That is probably a step up from previous generations. Growing up, my mother was always insisting that I "Go outside and play". And that is probably how it was for most generations that predate videogames.
My mother and grandmother also have all sorts of stories about the things that they used to do as children. Things like jumping off of bridges into rivers while swimming. Underage drinking and smoking. Shoplifting and petty theft. Pranks that were malicious enough that getting caught would probably warrant jail time. One of my uncles told me about putting an elderly neighbors colostomy bags into the mail box.
The scary bit is this. All of the above is basically normal behaviour for childern and young adolescents. Are they seriously telling me that all things considered, they would prefer to have thier children doing that sort of thing as opposed to playing Super Smash Brothers? Granted, young children should not be playing Doom3 or Soldier of Fortune, but there are worse things out there then violent video games to worry about.
END COMMUNICATION
Or, at least they should not be.
Darwin's are for people who take questionable actions which the person in question should be able to anticipate the result. Like checking the gas tank at night and lighting a match to see better. Darwins should also extend to people who disregard warnings of danger.
The X-Prize people are knowingly taking a big risk, and are aware of the dangers, and have tried to minimize them. The fatalaties are not going to result from monstously absurd ignorance or stupidity. The errors will be a magnitude or two lower.
If X Prize contenstants are viable Darwin Awards, then so should test pilots, infantry soldiers, and car accident fatalaties.
END COMMUNICATION
The only reason to track such information about a person is if you intend to screw that person.
If the government wants to screw you, its bad.
If an attractive member of the opposite sex wants to screw you, its good.
If an attractive member of the same sex wants to screw you, um... I leave that for you to decide.
END COMMUNICATION
If I understand this correctly, a company which has a physical retail store in California and sells over the internet (like Walmart) will have to charge California sales taxes. A company that is purly online (Amazon.com) might not have to. That much I think I understand.
Now, here are some quetions / problems.
Lets say California and some other state with a similar sales tax law. Some guy in the other state orders something from Walmart.com. Walmart has locations in both california and this other state. Now, whose tax gets charged? California's or the other states.
Lets say some guy in a state with no sales tax laws orders something online from a shop located in calfornia that does internet sales. Does that customer pay the California sales tax? If my reading of the story is correct, I would guess yes.
Would someone who has a better grasp of this tax crap care to answer?
END COMMUNICATION
One of the primary reasons for a game to have an expansion pack is to get a better return on the initial investment into the game its self. The secondary, and ultimately less important reason is to release features that were cut from the game during development due to cost constraints.
An expansion does not require quite as much staff to develop, since your not starting from zero. If a game takes about 2 years to develop at a cost of say $3,000,000 dollars, you need to do better then that in sales to make a profit. If you develop an expansion pack for the above game, you can probably do so for 1/3rd the cost. If you sell to the majority of the initial customer base, instead of making 4 million on a 3 million dollar investment, you make 7 million on a 4 million dollar investment.
I would guess that the basic strategy is to only release fixed content in patches, and release new content in expansions. They will probalby also start to bundle the expansions with the base game by this time next year at the latest.
END COMMUNICATION
The primary source of income among RIAA members is in recording songs and selling them. They have a huge amount of resources invested in making that particular business model work. While they could in theory promote concerts, there is one key problem.
Concerts are local events. You dont get much market penetration in Los Angeles when the concert is in New York. A recording can be sold pretty much anywhere.
END COMMUNICATION
According to the Prisoners dillemma, one of the few strategies that tends to win is to go tit for tat. If the opponenent co-operates, then co-operate. If the oppoenent screws you, screw them back.
Simply blocking the pop-ups is enough to get by. But the one responsible for the pop up cannot really tell if your blocking it, or just closing it. So what might work is a vengeance script.
When you are subjected to a pop-up, you execute a script that throws some pings at the sender, say 1 ping per kb of the popup. If enough people were using this sort of software, and the pop-up was obnoxious enough, the source would probably be intermittently crippled.
Of course, this would probably violate some inconvenient laws regarding hacking and Denial of Service attacks.
END COMMUNICATION
Honest and open accounting is probably a good thing, but only if the company its self is entirely on the up and up. And I am not talking about various strictly illegal activities either.
Do you think that there would be a morale increase when it becomes common knowledge that the owners unqualified son in a junior position is paid more then people with greater amounts of skill?
Or when the 2 highest paid employees ae the owner and his secretary (who is also his girl friend).
How about when the executives get a raise that is roughly equal to the amount of payroll reduction in the last round of lay offs?
Odds are that if office morale is in the crapper already, that there is a good reason for it.
END COMMUNICATION
And in Soviet Russia, people could be shot by the KGB for being retarded (not that they needed a reason I guess). Or at least thrown into a Gulag for a few years.
END COMMUNICATION
They are working together to convince a potential customer that their collective product is worth buying.
Getting the US Government to start buying Linux based solutions gives them more potential customers. I would guess that is a given that if it is certified for government use at the federal level, that it becomes a legitimate product for the state governments as well.
Besides, how is this different from say, IBM and Sun working together to promote Java?
END COMMUNICATION
The continuing erosion of civil liberties betrays the spirit of the US constitution. This is nothing more then a gross betrayal by the elected representitives that should be defending civil rights, not reducing them in the name of national security.
And as much as it might seem to be a marginal difference in the greater scheme of things, there is only one thing that I feel must be said.
I am Canadian. Ha ha, sucks to be american.
On the bright side as bad as it may become to be an american, there is a solution. If you dont like it, emigrate.
END COMMUNICATION
If NASA decides to repeat what they did back in 1986 and stop all Shuttle flights for a year or so, that is obviously a horrible thing for the ISS program. But what about the other nations space programs? Obvioulsy Russia is not in the best of shape financially to be able to continue things. And aside from the US and Russia, no other Nation has put people into space.
But what if Russia and the US shared more of their space tech with the European, Japanese, and Chinese space programs? China is nearly ready to put its 'taikonauts' into orbit, and surely some of the existing technology could be shared with other space programs to pick up the slack.
After all, its the International space station, not the US space station (despite the niggling fact that the US has funded the majority of the program).
I also wonder if this event will give a boost to the alternative space vehicles that have been shelved or scrapped over the last few decades.
END COMMUNICATION
First, let me state that I am very much a Nintendo Loyalist. This is due partly to customer loyalty. The primary reason however, is that the Game Cube currently has the games that I want to play.
However, I am forced to agree to an extent with the 'kiddy' image the console has. People who willfully deny this are quick to point out games like Eternal Darkenss (which I own), Resident Evil (which I do not), and Metroid Prime (which I also own) and BMX XXX (which I would not use to wipe my rectal cavity). By all accounts, 3 of those are great games. I can vouch for this for Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime.
However, Nintendo has not gone very far out of their way to encourage mature content for their console. There are no games like GTA for the console. And the other games that exist for the Game Cube which might appeal to those seeking more mature games, invariably end up on both the X-Box and PS2 anyway.
If Nintendo was willing to put more first party developers to work on their mature games, the situation would shift very rapidly to Nintendo's favor. But doing so endangers thier kid friendly image, which in turn hurts the bottom line.
Konkers Bad Fur Day was a very mature game, and quite funny. But alot of clueless parents bought the game for their 5 year olds (and somehow missed the very obvious NOT FOR KIDS warning on the box). They then realized their error, and it caused alot of problems for Nintendo.
Still, if Nintendo is willing to put more effort into getting games like Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime out, then their policy of developing for all ages would be the truth.
END COMMUNICATION
A friend of mine gave me access to his copy of the game when I was attending school. I ended up choosing a Lithovore race (can live in toxic environments by eating rocks). I was doing ok, but an aggressor species kept attacking me and demanding tribute. I had a few plantets, but had lost most of them quite quickly.
But lucky for me, I had some excellent research abilities. I managed to discover Planetary Converter lasers (one shot kills a planet) and Doom Stars. But I was so heavily out numbered, that I kept losing most direct confrontations. But I had enough to hold back the attackers from wiping me out.
At this point in the game, I had maybe 5 planets, and my opponent had everything else (about 100 planets). I was despearate, so I started sending my ships to planet colonies of the attacking race, and vaporising every planet in the system, and moving on.
Initially, he continued to demand my surrender and 75% tribute. After toasting about 20 systems, He demanded 50%. Another 20 systems turned to asteroid fields, and he was willing to settle for 25%. A few systems later, he was saying that I was no longer worth his time to squash, so lets call the whole war off. After destroying his home system, he began offering me tribute.
I ended up destorying every star system in the entire galaxy and all life (except my own). It was the only time I can recall winning a game by committing wholesale galactic genocide.
I look forward to buying MOO3.
END COMMUNICATION
Dev kits arent the problem where developing independent console titles are concerned. There are enough code geeks out there who enjoy doing that sort of thing, and enough open source rendering engines (Quake, Crystal Space) that getting something on screen is not the real problem.
The problem is the art assets. Take a look at the credits for most modern 3d games. You will see a programming team of 5 to 10 people, and an art team of about 20. It takes a huge amount of work to actually create all of the textures and models for a complicated 3d game. And debugging an animation is not as easy as running a debugger. That sort of work is much more manual.
While the software takes more skill to do properly, the art takes more time, and often more people. If you want a large game, you need alot of artists. Metroid Prime, GTA 3, and Halo are all very large games.
END COMMUNICATION
I am a very heavy gamer. However, I have not developed what I would consider an addiction. After reading the article and some of the other replies in this thread, here are my opinions.
1) The sort of person who is likely to become addicted to gaming is probably getting more out of playing those games with their time then the other activities that are available to that person.
2) There is nothing inherently wrong with choosing to play a game rather then interacting with people.
3) The only time an addiction should be considered dangerous is when it begins to supercede things that should not be superceded. To that end, any activity that causes you to fail in your responsibilties to others, or causes harm to yourself and others is bad.
4) There are things more important in life then heavy gaming, drug use, and gambling. One of those is Soap.
END COMMUNICATION
First, let me state that I am very much a Nintento Loyalist. I own a Game Cube, and I love the system.
The problem is not the playability of the games available on the GameCube. Every one of the Cube games that I have purchased has been very entertaining and legitimately difficult. However, almost none of those games are geared for a more mature gaming audience.
Here is an example. Super Monkey Ball 2 is a very difficult game to beat, and is totally addictive (Monkey Ball 1 is has this going for it also). However, I cannot stand to play that game's story mode, as the FMV's seem geared towards moronic 3 year olds. With the Cube, its like having a huge amount of 'G' rated movies to choose from, but almost no 'R' rated movies. As good a movie as Harry Potter may be, I would much rather watch Red Dragon.
As much as I like my game cube, I have to look very hard to find games for it that can satisfy my blood lust.
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"Isn't this bucking the trend? Aren't games systems moving towards ever more powerful graphics subsystems with modest increases in cpu performance."
Actually, the PS2 does not rely on the CPU for its graphics performance. It relys on a dedicated bit of hardware that can perform blindingly fast Vector Ops (VU0 and VU1), and insane memory bandwidth to move data. VU0 and VU1, however, do not have any branching instructions, and you typcially manipulate it indirectly. I assume that the Nintendo Gamecube is simular to this, and the X-Box uses nVIDIA's Ge-Force Technology to handle transform and lighting.
Most consoles are not really CPU limited any longer, its more of an issue of how much 'bandwidth' they have for processing geometry.
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Having programmed professionally on the PlayStation2's hardware, I can tell you one thing right now. Attempting to make a Voxel Engine run well on a Playstation2 is like using a hammer to drive a screw.
The Playstation2 hardware is designed much differently then a PC game is. It has an ungodly amount of memory bandwidth, and very little VRAM. It cannot store much in the way of textures, or models. What it can do is draw huge amounts of polygons quickly. Its rendering hardware uses a Depth Buffer, and it can take huge amounts polygons and render them correclty to that depth buffer very quickly.
Voxels are essentially 3d pixels. While the PS2 can be made to render objects using that technique, it cannot take advantage of its specialized hardware when doing so. PC's tend to be more flexible, but since GeForce type cards are becomming the standard, if your using OpenGL or DirectX to do your rendering, then you cannot take advantage of your video card to draw yoru polygons.
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I got re-directed to a page that said this:
Too many users... blah blah blah
Probable cause: http://www.slashdot.org
Try again in a few seconds...
-xian@idsoftware.com
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Really? Story will become the crux of game development?
While that will indeed be true for many games, it wont be true for all games. It certaintly wont be true for the games that will often end up as the most remembered.
Those elements aside, there is one thing that will end up prevailing over hyper developed characters. The fewer critical and important decisions that are left to the player, the less of a game it is. And to have a good and enduring story, you cannot let the player make the critical decisons.
After all, your carefully devloped adventure where the Rugged Hero falls for the Beautiful Princess has some implied decions. Your story can have plenty of emotional development and character growth, but none of it matters if some Asshole like myself feels like shooting the woman instead of kissing her.
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Might be when you have been arrested. Another is when you are accused of a criminal offense. The best clue that you need a lawyer outside of the two above cirumstances is when you start to become convinced that the only acceptable resolution to your situation involves the use of an Axe and a Shovel with respect to your antagonist.
If you can at all avoid it, however, do not start paying a lawyer until your sure that things are getting beyond your ability to control.
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