Don't get it, it's not ready. Out of the box with its own drivers and software it can work fine. The minute you try to put in video drivers or a third party game or app you could run in to problems. My NVidia drivers still don't appear to be working 100% though they're much better with the latest update I did. Under XP, things "Just worked" and that was that. Vista is an aggrivation, an aggrivation thats full of eye candy.
Not only do geeks have to make a will save against this cave woman creature, but now they'll have to make a fort save from the alcoholic aura this thing radiates. No matter what happens with the fort save, I know the will save will get larger penalties as geeks stay around this creature too long from the intoxicating aura of her cloths.
This could get really interesting if it applies to virtual reality. I think my favorite tauren female dance could be in trouble if this guy ever decided to go after Blizzard Entertainment.
Better to let them know in a positive way and hope they do something good with it then to leave them hanging. At least you pointed them in the right direction.
I used to love playing with the toolset for hours on end. Now I'm disappointed, the new one has a lot of neat new things but lacks a lot of useability. When I went to create a new suit of armor over half of the controls were off screen and not visible. I had to enlarge the window to get them in view on a 1280x1024 display.
Things just seem overly complicated for what they were in the original toolset and people had a hard time figuring the original one out. I wouldn't be suprised if you won't see near the developement you did with NWN1. Some are arguing this is good for only "professional" builders in some forums. I say BS, it was the professionals and amatures alike that made the community. Even the guy who could barely slap two fixtures in place in the original NWN toolset had something to contribute.
Online game play is a nightmare. Originally you could put something together and go online right away. Now you have to download an extra file and hope the owner of the module publishes the link properly in the server information. People with add on packs for their modules in NWN1 were notorious for not providing direct links to the HAK files they used and that discouraged me from seeing a lot of places.
The worst part about the whole game is only TWO dragons in the toolset. You had TEN in the first one, 5 chromatic (evil) and 5 metalic (good) dragons to work with. Now you just have red and black, what a disapointment.
I remember back in the day, going to a movie for around a $1.25-2.50. I think that has something even more to do with the decline. People used to go for even less. o.O
Yeah I went to see where this service was and all I saw was Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing(ICS). The firewall service is tied to the ICS service. You can't shut one off and not the other. They both go down when you disable this service. Atleast thats what I'm seeing on my patched XP pro box. I never changed the settings for that so it's defaulted to Automatic and on all the time.
It would have had to have been an invisible dome. You could easly fly over the wall.
Performance wise I tried that place out. On a dual core 3ghz machine with 4 gigs of ram and a 7900gtx nvidia card it was a bit slow in places. The graphics were nice but it reminded me of a cross between Active Worlds and There. Somehow that cross gave me pretty poor performance although I did have my visual range set to around 120m. I cut it back to 60m and it was slightly better.
Object creation and manipulation is interesting. Reminds me of Calagari Truespace. So Second Life is like three programs in one to me. Active Worlds, There, and Calagari Truespace.
I installed it and Firefox automaticlly updated my existing extensions. I found it to be quite easy and painless. Firefox gets the kudos, it replaced IE7 on my desktop because some sites just loaded slow under IE7 compared to Firefox 2.0 and I'm running a fully patched and updated XP box.
Good for them, I hope they get the bugs out and have a quality product on release. I admire a company that tries to get it right the first time instead of releasing buggy crap. They took a short cut once in one of their patch cycles and it bit them in the arse. If it's not going to meet the target date, then that happens sometimes. Life goes on and maybe some people will be out playing in the snow instead of sitting behind a keyboard around Christmas.
I've noticed that IE7 has moments where it needs to think about rendering a page where Fire Fox would just do it. The new IE is nice but when those moments of hesitation occure it's like you can feel extra bloat in the browser or something holding it up. Firefox isn't without its quirks, now and then it locks up in memory and you have to kill the process because of some interaction with Sun's JVM. Not sure if it's the VM or Firefox, but thats one thing I noticed there.
No no! The third one burned down, fell over, then sank in to the swamp. It was the fourth one that stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest post in Slashdot!
Started with a Radio Shack Coco 2, 16k of ram. All basic, and it was a blast. Got me excited about doing more programming later on and tearing apart my old 286, which had to go back to the shop and get repaired. Then I tore it apart again after I got it home. Though successfully rebuilt it the second time around.
When I was coding on my old coco I did programs that had light cycles of tron, tape cassette drive access, and other fun stuff. I even tried coding pictures of Voltron and other fun things. It was neat to play with and simple. Got me more interested in doing computer programming and other things as well. No real structures or concepts to worry about right off. Just good clean fun and an introduction to take the first fun step to learning more if I decided to learn more.
Not many other languages these days are as easy to run a program in as basic was. You just typed 'run' and boom your off. This helped eliminate the boring parts because kids don't always have long attention spans. The fact that I could punch out a couple lines of code and run it instantly without dependancies, libraries, etc made it all the friendly to a new person.
Basic needs to live again as a default programming environment in OS's like back in the day. Nothing serious, just good clean fun to learn basic things in.
I realize how much of a customer base WoW has but their site is regularly down every tuesday during the maintenance time. That time usualy lasts most of the day. They are very lucky because I think most companies would loose customers if their sites were down regularly one day every week like Blizzards WoW site.
Its adicting... way more so then most other MMO's I think for it's simplicity. The expansion is coming around the corner. They're addressing a lot of issue players have had with the game as it currently is. One of the biggest things is shortening the number of people needed for end game content. Originally to do anything signifigant beyond hitting 60 you had to get 40 people together. Now that number will be down to 25. Also with the level cap going to 70 existing 40 man content will be 20-25 manable.
Some of it's biggest problems:
* Lag.. it's a huge problem though they're working on it slowly.
* PvP. The honor system is setup such that some people actually go 6-8 hours or more a day, 7 days a week to make rank. This can get very unhealthy. They're addressing that with the expansion by removing the existing honor system and making it more people friendly.
* PvP survivability. Right now a decked out character can pretty much kill a person so quick that healing isn't an option. You basicly have level 60 characters running around with gear that should be for people 60+. Highest I think is around level 90 gear that only requires 60. One side of the coin says anyone can get it if they put the time in, other side is not everyone has the time. Either way it's easy for pick up groups to get totally steamrolled. Some are calling for normaling damage more so things arn't as whacked out as can be. The other thing is its neat to one shot someone but after a while that can get boring and you want something more challenging.
* Healers.. right now there's a signifigant lack of healers or high healer rotation. Thats most likely typical with any MMO. Who wants to stare at peoples health bars and fill them all day, every day? Very few. They need to set the end game class gear so for healers so it's not just good at the PvE but also PvP. Yeah you got huge healing bonuses but if your not damaging someone it's kinda prolonging the inevitable. A lot of people say, "Oh great, another heal set to grind for. Whoopie." and burn out.
* Epic gear isn't so epic anymore. Its to the point where gear thats suposed to be rare is actually everywhere practiclly. Take a walk through each factions heavly populated cities and you'd have a hard time not seeing druids that look like moose or deer with their suits. Warriors that look like pin cushions or axe heads. Still to some extent that can be a good thing in that more people get to see end game content to some degree.
* Customization.. you can't dye or paint your armor. It's as it always will be till you get a new piece. You also can't change your hair style or color. There are a lot of choices but your looking at static ones mostly.
* Twinking, botting, gold farming, it's all in there.
Some of it's biggest benefits...
* $15/month unlimited access gets you on any server with like 8 character slots per server. Server types range from PvP, PvE, RP, and RP-PVP.
* Little things. You don't just have epic dragons to slay, you have a wandering faire that travels between two factions cities. Fishing contests in neutral towns, some other factions hold festivals like the Lunar Festival from the druids common faction. These events have some nifty quests and rewards that are neat outside of the regular grind.
* RP... yes AAARRRPEEEE! There seems to be a very health RP community on the RP servers. You definatly have your share of arse-hats, catgirl and vampire wannabe's but it's there. Some people actually post some great stories and content about their characters. Why bother when you have PnP D&D, etc? Why not? You actually get to meet more people outside of your neck of the woods and get to hear some great stories and you don't have to give up the PnP D&D, etc.
* Cow people.. tell me it's not cool to be a cow, especially a cow with a big gun. You get to be part of the secret cow level. It's a playable race inspite of them telling you there is no cow level.;)
As much as it would be nice to fix this without reinstalling. I don't know where that pirated copy of Windows came from. I can't say for sure that it's 100% safe from the original CD and that the OS could have been compromised on the burned install CD. There isn't a 100% way to fix this without reinstalling. It could be made legit I'm sure, but you never know with a burned copy.
1> Backup data. Thats the first thing I'd do. Documents, pictures, etc.. Burn them to a CD or copy them to external media like an external USB hard drive.
2> Wipe the system completely with a full reformat.
3> Install the legit copy of windows.
4> Restore the backup data after installing new legit anti-virus software and make sure it's fully updated and scanned the backups.
I think the pictures look neat. They'd make some nice wall papers and even backdrops for different movies depending on the content.
I do agree with what one poster said earlier that the software itself is art to a good extent, but if this were setup as a tool for people to play with you'd probebly see people putting in different types of input to produce different results. Wither it's a brush on a canvis or strings of ascii text to function call, it's all input of some form. Who knows, maybe the next big thing will come from this? As long as the guy enjoyed what he did I'm happy for him and nice job.
Now that he'd be semi-retired around 2008, he should invest in a nice dark robe and put his pastey whiteness to good use. Isn't that right Senator Bill'patine?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get it, it's not ready. Out of the box with its own drivers and software it can work fine. The minute you try to put in video drivers or a third party game or app you could run in to problems. My NVidia drivers still don't appear to be working 100% though they're much better with the latest update I did. Under XP, things "Just worked" and that was that. Vista is an aggrivation, an aggrivation thats full of eye candy.
Not only do geeks have to make a will save against this cave woman creature, but now they'll have to make a fort save from the alcoholic aura this thing radiates. No matter what happens with the fort save, I know the will save will get larger penalties as geeks stay around this creature too long from the intoxicating aura of her cloths.
This could get really interesting if it applies to virtual reality. I think my favorite tauren female dance could be in trouble if this guy ever decided to go after Blizzard Entertainment.
Better to let them know in a positive way and hope they do something good with it then to leave them hanging. At least you pointed them in the right direction.
I used to love playing with the toolset for hours on end. Now I'm disappointed, the new one has a lot of neat new things but lacks a lot of useability. When I went to create a new suit of armor over half of the controls were off screen and not visible. I had to enlarge the window to get them in view on a 1280x1024 display.
Things just seem overly complicated for what they were in the original toolset and people had a hard time figuring the original one out. I wouldn't be suprised if you won't see near the developement you did with NWN1. Some are arguing this is good for only "professional" builders in some forums. I say BS, it was the professionals and amatures alike that made the community. Even the guy who could barely slap two fixtures in place in the original NWN toolset had something to contribute.
Online game play is a nightmare. Originally you could put something together and go online right away. Now you have to download an extra file and hope the owner of the module publishes the link properly in the server information. People with add on packs for their modules in NWN1 were notorious for not providing direct links to the HAK files they used and that discouraged me from seeing a lot of places.
The worst part about the whole game is only TWO dragons in the toolset. You had TEN in the first one, 5 chromatic (evil) and 5 metalic (good) dragons to work with. Now you just have red and black, what a disapointment.
I'd dump it in the river with the tea if they ever taxed online gaming. I go online to play games not get taxed for them or make a profit.
I remember back in the day, going to a movie for around a $1.25-2.50. I think that has something even more to do with the decline. People used to go for even less. o.O
Yeah I went to see where this service was and all I saw was Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing(ICS). The firewall service is tied to the ICS service. You can't shut one off and not the other. They both go down when you disable this service. Atleast thats what I'm seeing on my patched XP pro box. I never changed the settings for that so it's defaulted to Automatic and on all the time.
Wow.. they actually brought the MMO grind to real life. Thats just disturbing.
It would have had to have been an invisible dome. You could easly fly over the wall.
Performance wise I tried that place out. On a dual core 3ghz machine with 4 gigs of ram and a 7900gtx nvidia card it was a bit slow in places. The graphics were nice but it reminded me of a cross between Active Worlds and There. Somehow that cross gave me pretty poor performance although I did have my visual range set to around 120m. I cut it back to 60m and it was slightly better.
Object creation and manipulation is interesting. Reminds me of Calagari Truespace. So Second Life is like three programs in one to me. Active Worlds, There, and Calagari Truespace.
You actually think a bunch of untrained civilians with guns would stand an ounce of a chance against the most powerful military in the world?
Lets not forget that these untrained civilians here in America could possibly be their own family and friends.
I installed it and Firefox automaticlly updated my existing extensions. I found it to be quite easy and painless. Firefox gets the kudos, it replaced IE7 on my desktop because some sites just loaded slow under IE7 compared to Firefox 2.0 and I'm running a fully patched and updated XP box.
It's obviously best to simply give up and leave, rather than actually stand up and do something about changing your country.
Isn't that how things pretty much started in America. Got fed up with the king, came over? Hmmmm....
Good for them, I hope they get the bugs out and have a quality product on release. I admire a company that tries to get it right the first time instead of releasing buggy crap. They took a short cut once in one of their patch cycles and it bit them in the arse. If it's not going to meet the target date, then that happens sometimes. Life goes on and maybe some people will be out playing in the snow instead of sitting behind a keyboard around Christmas.
I've noticed that IE7 has moments where it needs to think about rendering a page where Fire Fox would just do it. The new IE is nice but when those moments of hesitation occure it's like you can feel extra bloat in the browser or something holding it up. Firefox isn't without its quirks, now and then it locks up in memory and you have to kill the process because of some interaction with Sun's JVM. Not sure if it's the VM or Firefox, but thats one thing I noticed there.
They did have that one accident recently where they had to clean out the air. That might be whats left over from that accident.
More advanced versions might allow cars to lift from the ground and hover.
Meet George Jetson!
No no! The third one burned down, fell over, then sank in to the swamp. It was the fourth one that stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest post in Slashdot!
Started with a Radio Shack Coco 2, 16k of ram. All basic, and it was a blast. Got me excited about doing more programming later on and tearing apart my old 286, which had to go back to the shop and get repaired. Then I tore it apart again after I got it home. Though successfully rebuilt it the second time around.
When I was coding on my old coco I did programs that had light cycles of tron, tape cassette drive access, and other fun stuff. I even tried coding pictures of Voltron and other fun things. It was neat to play with and simple. Got me more interested in doing computer programming and other things as well. No real structures or concepts to worry about right off. Just good clean fun and an introduction to take the first fun step to learning more if I decided to learn more.
Not many other languages these days are as easy to run a program in as basic was. You just typed 'run' and boom your off. This helped eliminate the boring parts because kids don't always have long attention spans. The fact that I could punch out a couple lines of code and run it instantly without dependancies, libraries, etc made it all the friendly to a new person.
Basic needs to live again as a default programming environment in OS's like back in the day. Nothing serious, just good clean fun to learn basic things in.
I realize how much of a customer base WoW has but their site is regularly down every tuesday during the maintenance time. That time usualy lasts most of the day. They are very lucky because I think most companies would loose customers if their sites were down regularly one day every week like Blizzards WoW site.
Its adicting... way more so then most other MMO's I think for it's simplicity. The expansion is coming around the corner. They're addressing a lot of issue players have had with the game as it currently is. One of the biggest things is shortening the number of people needed for end game content. Originally to do anything signifigant beyond hitting 60 you had to get 40 people together. Now that number will be down to 25. Also with the level cap going to 70 existing 40 man content will be 20-25 manable.
;)
Some of it's biggest problems:
* Lag.. it's a huge problem though they're working on it slowly.
* PvP. The honor system is setup such that some people actually go 6-8 hours or more a day, 7 days a week to make rank. This can get very unhealthy. They're addressing that with the expansion by removing the existing honor system and making it more people friendly.
* PvP survivability. Right now a decked out character can pretty much kill a person so quick that healing isn't an option. You basicly have level 60 characters running around with gear that should be for people 60+. Highest I think is around level 90 gear that only requires 60. One side of the coin says anyone can get it if they put the time in, other side is not everyone has the time. Either way it's easy for pick up groups to get totally steamrolled. Some are calling for normaling damage more so things arn't as whacked out as can be. The other thing is its neat to one shot someone but after a while that can get boring and you want something more challenging.
* Healers.. right now there's a signifigant lack of healers or high healer rotation. Thats most likely typical with any MMO. Who wants to stare at peoples health bars and fill them all day, every day? Very few. They need to set the end game class gear so for healers so it's not just good at the PvE but also PvP. Yeah you got huge healing bonuses but if your not damaging someone it's kinda prolonging the inevitable. A lot of people say, "Oh great, another heal set to grind for. Whoopie." and burn out.
* Epic gear isn't so epic anymore. Its to the point where gear thats suposed to be rare is actually everywhere practiclly. Take a walk through each factions heavly populated cities and you'd have a hard time not seeing druids that look like moose or deer with their suits. Warriors that look like pin cushions or axe heads. Still to some extent that can be a good thing in that more people get to see end game content to some degree.
* Customization.. you can't dye or paint your armor. It's as it always will be till you get a new piece. You also can't change your hair style or color. There are a lot of choices but your looking at static ones mostly.
* Twinking, botting, gold farming, it's all in there.
Some of it's biggest benefits...
* $15/month unlimited access gets you on any server with like 8 character slots per server. Server types range from PvP, PvE, RP, and RP-PVP.
* Little things. You don't just have epic dragons to slay, you have a wandering faire that travels between two factions cities. Fishing contests in neutral towns, some other factions hold festivals like the Lunar Festival from the druids common faction. These events have some nifty quests and rewards that are neat outside of the regular grind.
* RP... yes AAARRRPEEEE! There seems to be a very health RP community on the RP servers. You definatly have your share of arse-hats, catgirl and vampire wannabe's but it's there. Some people actually post some great stories and content about their characters. Why bother when you have PnP D&D, etc? Why not? You actually get to meet more people outside of your neck of the woods and get to hear some great stories and you don't have to give up the PnP D&D, etc.
* Cow people.. tell me it's not cool to be a cow, especially a cow with a big gun. You get to be part of the secret cow level. It's a playable race inspite of them telling you there is no cow level.
There's a lot of other pro's and co
As much as it would be nice to fix this without reinstalling. I don't know where that pirated copy of Windows came from. I can't say for sure that it's 100% safe from the original CD and that the OS could have been compromised on the burned install CD. There isn't a 100% way to fix this without reinstalling. It could be made legit I'm sure, but you never know with a burned copy.
1> Backup data. Thats the first thing I'd do. Documents, pictures, etc.. Burn them to a CD or copy them to external media like an external USB hard drive.
2> Wipe the system completely with a full reformat.
3> Install the legit copy of windows.
4> Restore the backup data after installing new legit anti-virus software and make sure it's fully updated and scanned the backups.
5> Profit!
I think the pictures look neat. They'd make some nice wall papers and even backdrops for different movies depending on the content.
I do agree with what one poster said earlier that the software itself is art to a good extent, but if this were setup as a tool for people to play with you'd probebly see people putting in different types of input to produce different results. Wither it's a brush on a canvis or strings of ascii text to function call, it's all input of some form. Who knows, maybe the next big thing will come from this? As long as the guy enjoyed what he did I'm happy for him and nice job.
Now that he'd be semi-retired around 2008, he should invest in a nice dark robe and put his pastey whiteness to good use. Isn't that right Senator Bill'patine?