The most obvious problem it had was simple- unless you give the geography a purpose, all you're doing is hindering communication and simulating very annoying properties of the real world. That made it pretty hard to get into.
The aesthetics of the world do not matter one whit- they will only attract newbies once, and then once the newbies have gathered a base of friends, they generally don't leave their standard stomping grounds. There are certain people that live for exploring the world for its own sake, but they are rare
The fact that nearly all MUDs include some kind of broadcast chat channel and affinity group chat systems is a big hint as to what people want. They enjoy overcoming the challenges of the MUD's geography, and yet prefer all possible haste in communicating with one another.
The problem with alphaworld was that it provided all the lovely geography, but there was no point to even leaving the same area.
In this vein, Ultima Online is probably the most successful in the "personal space chat" category- players wander around in a pre-made world, but as they gain more power by interacting with that environment, they can eventually exercise that power by building their own house, which functions as a meeting place and status symbol. Your point about land scarcity is dead on as well- if your giant castle is a hard thing to make, people might come on over just to see it.
If you make the avatars able to kill each other, then the world is generally a great success, because the inconveniences of geography become a challenge to overcome and a situational help or hindrance to the hunters or hunted.
To me, application domination is acceptable- you can always dethrone an application by superior features. People are conscious of applications, they aren't infrastructure. In my mind, as long as something doesn't carry data or isn't infrastructure, it can be proprietary in its methods.
This doesn't mean that open applications aren't great- what I mean by this is that we do not suffer nearly as much from closed applications as we do from closed infrastructure systems and closed file formats.
.Net has infrastructure elements, but those are remarkably well documented, and the need to standardize will keep major elements of.Net from becoming a moving target.
When I first started using Linux, that had to be the number one UI irritation I suffered. However, once I got used to it, it ended up feeling more correct than the standard way of doing things (the selection becomes the home for things to be copied, which makes sense because it defines selected text as text upon which operations are performed, not some mysterious, invisible paste buffer.)
That having been said, a couple of mysterious invisible paste buffers with a status viewing application (which I would leave perpetually open on head 2) would rock.
Oh yeah, that and Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark ports. Honk.
Don't let users store all their own crap on their own machines. Work exclusively from a shared storage area on a networked machine, with everything set up so that a simple login on the client desktop provides access. For a small shop this will be a two-day job, and there are many many ways to do it. You could do it with a linux box running samba as domain controller and CIFS file server, and run it all from there. Very easy.
Supporting them now is like caving to the first offer to a street vendor in Thailand.
Wish I had a mod point to throw at that statement...
This is, at the end of the day, a negotiation. A very unfair, one sided, bullshit negotiation that any worthwhile negotiator would walk away from- but it's what we have. So, the answer is not to cave at all. Continue to do what we do until the other side matches us. Very simple...
I love to see cool, random stuff like this happening on these sorts of networks... this sort of nearly prankish interaction is the proper spirit for the duel between recording companies and P2P services.
Not only does it not involve lawyers in any way (a deal maker right there) but it also creates a robust meta-game within the service- can you find the real mp3? Can you develop a reliable way to repeat that process?
As long as no one goes to court or Congress when they start to lose, this is the way things ought to be.
Seems to me the point of XML is to provide an interface for metadata- which is all a file format is, anyway- which is more readily usable. XML also includes the capability to store that "pseudo proprietary data" you mention as well.
Is it via a plugin in your illustration software that allows embedding only?
Or, does it convert from their format into something more usable?
If it does the latter, seems the first thing I'd do is use a standard Windows macro program to automate the process of extracting images, and let it run overnight.
Now that's a killer app for home automation
on
USMC Shows Off New Toys
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Drive the goddamn thing around your backyard, with a.22 on it, and wait for groundhogs.... ELL OH ELL.
The XBox is just the first part of the plan. Live is the second. Next, media boxes with interactive television.
Interactive television. Another thing folks have been trying, touting, and dumping millions into for nearly 30 years now.
No one wants it.
No one has ever wanted it.
Until there are some seriously fresh ideas going around, no one ever will want it, either.
Here is a hint: people don't want to interact with NBC or CBS, people don't want to play peanut gallery to the x-files, people don't want to play patty cake with the idiot box. They want to be entertained when they watch TV. Not entertain themselves, *be entertained*. In essence, they want to sit back and get a blowjob, not engage in fabulous, athletic intercourse.
I got my first one fourth-hand, and it was smooth and awesome. I was always looking for its equal in a stick for a second player (mostly for use with my c64,) and was never able to find it.
If our descendants are anything like we are, they'll be digging that stuff up like nobody's business.
A few things spring to mind-
The tale of Father Boedullus in A Canticle for Leibowitz. In a post-nukewar world, a Church scholar and his team attempt to reactivate a mysterious ancient site they found. All that's left many years later is a giant crater lake and local legends about evil spirits.
Artifacts from the "Age of Legends" in Wheel of Time. Madness and destruction generally resulted from meddling, but meddling was done all the same.
And finally, every single ancient site we've ever defiled- who knows what kind of things those places were designed to keep *in* rather than *out*...
Each id game is pretty much a tech demo for what we should expect to see in the intervening years between games- I don't expect much out of Doom III- but it's a harbinger of the next Half-Life.
Secondly, without a strong player-killing element I don't see how interest can be sustained. Pre-programmed quests can only go so far, and AI is no match for fighting against real opponents.
Actually, if you don't ever want to lose, a lack of PKing is perfect.
That desire accurately sums up most folks' desires of their games.
Slashdot Mirror
Maricopa County contains the city of Phoenix, among others. Hardly podunk.
He is the greatest unlicensed doctor ever. Unfortunately, like most other good things, he lives in the world of anime.
Who is more accountable?
- the power grabbing government
- the file-hiding incumbent
Hard choice. I do not like either.
The most obvious problem it had was simple- unless you give the geography a purpose, all you're doing is hindering communication and simulating very annoying properties of the real world. That made it pretty hard to get into.
The aesthetics of the world do not matter one whit- they will only attract newbies once, and then once the newbies have gathered a base of friends, they generally don't leave their standard stomping grounds. There are certain people that live for exploring the world for its own sake, but they are rare
The fact that nearly all MUDs include some kind of broadcast chat channel and affinity group chat systems is a big hint as to what people want. They enjoy overcoming the challenges of the MUD's geography, and yet prefer all possible haste in communicating with one another.
The problem with alphaworld was that it provided all the lovely geography, but there was no point to even leaving the same area.
In this vein, Ultima Online is probably the most successful in the "personal space chat" category- players wander around in a pre-made world, but as they gain more power by interacting with that environment, they can eventually exercise that power by building their own house, which functions as a meeting place and status symbol. Your point about land scarcity is dead on as well- if your giant castle is a hard thing to make, people might come on over just to see it.
If you make the avatars able to kill each other, then the world is generally a great success, because the inconveniences of geography become a challenge to overcome and a situational help or hindrance to the hunters or hunted.
To me, application domination is acceptable- you can always dethrone an application by superior features. People are conscious of applications, they aren't infrastructure. In my mind, as long as something doesn't carry data or isn't infrastructure, it can be proprietary in its methods.
.Net from becoming a moving target.
This doesn't mean that open applications aren't great- what I mean by this is that we do not suffer nearly as much from closed applications as we do from closed infrastructure systems and closed file formats.
.Net has infrastructure elements, but those are remarkably well documented, and the need to standardize will keep major elements of
A
When I first started using Linux, that had to be the number one UI irritation I suffered. However, once I got used to it, it ended up feeling more correct than the standard way of doing things (the selection becomes the home for things to be copied, which makes sense because it defines selected text as text upon which operations are performed, not some mysterious, invisible paste buffer.)
That having been said, a couple of mysterious invisible paste buffers with a status viewing application (which I would leave perpetually open on head 2) would rock.
Oh yeah, that and Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark ports. Honk.
Don't let users store all their own crap on their own machines. Work exclusively from a shared storage area on a networked machine, with everything set up so that a simple login on the client desktop provides access. For a small shop this will be a two-day job, and there are many many ways to do it. You could do it with a linux box running samba as domain controller and CIFS file server, and run it all from there. Very easy.
Supporting them now is like caving to the first offer to a street vendor in Thailand.
Wish I had a mod point to throw at that statement...
This is, at the end of the day, a negotiation. A very unfair, one sided, bullshit negotiation that any worthwhile negotiator would walk away from- but it's what we have. So, the answer is not to cave at all. Continue to do what we do until the other side matches us. Very simple...
It'll be forever before we have such a lovely thing in the US, with our collective allergy to mass transit...
The rest of the world has the right of it, I think, sometimes.
Very Viridian. It certainly seems like a lifesaver.
Now, if only I could jack it up to my PDA and give it that last few seconds of oomph it needs to grab a critical number...
I love to see cool, random stuff like this happening on these sorts of networks... this sort of nearly prankish interaction is the proper spirit for the duel between recording companies and P2P services.
Not only does it not involve lawyers in any way (a deal maker right there) but it also creates a robust meta-game within the service- can you find the real mp3? Can you develop a reliable way to repeat that process?
As long as no one goes to court or Congress when they start to lose, this is the way things ought to be.
Seems to me the point of XML is to provide an interface for metadata- which is all a file format is, anyway- which is more readily usable. XML also includes the capability to store that "pseudo proprietary data" you mention as well.
Is it via a plugin in your illustration software that allows embedding only?
Or, does it convert from their format into something more usable?
If it does the latter, seems the first thing I'd do is use a standard Windows macro program to automate the process of extracting images, and let it run overnight.
Drive the goddamn thing around your backyard, with a .22 on it, and wait for groundhogs.... ELL OH ELL.
Dragon Warrior? sheesh.
The XBox is just the first part of the plan. Live is the second. Next, media boxes with interactive television.
Interactive television. Another thing folks have been trying, touting, and dumping millions into for nearly 30 years now.
No one wants it.
No one has ever wanted it.
Until there are some seriously fresh ideas going around, no one ever will want it, either.
Here is a hint: people don't want to interact with NBC or CBS, people don't want to play peanut gallery to the x-files, people don't want to play patty cake with the idiot box. They want to be entertained when they watch TV. Not entertain themselves, *be entertained*. In essence, they want to sit back and get a blowjob, not engage in fabulous, athletic intercourse.
"Name one single atari 2600 game that actually has a decent plot, good replayability, long shelflife and non-repetitive gameplay."
Plot: Do you complain when your game of checkers doesn't have any love interests in it?
Replayability: the name of the game with these old Atari games. You never really beat them- you're mostly competing against yourself.
Shelflife: Witness the plethora of 2600 emulators out there. Geez.
Non-repetitive gameplay: See "plot", above. What are you looking for, final fantasy?
Old Atari games may not have beautiful, amazing graphics, but many of them are unbeatable in the arena of actual gameplay.
I got my first one fourth-hand, and it was smooth and awesome. I was always looking for its equal in a stick for a second player (mostly for use with my c64,) and was never able to find it.
If our descendants are anything like we are, they'll be digging that stuff up like nobody's business.
A few things spring to mind-
The tale of Father Boedullus in A Canticle for Leibowitz. In a post-nukewar world, a Church scholar and his team attempt to reactivate a mysterious ancient site they found. All that's left many years later is a giant crater lake and local legends about evil spirits.
Artifacts from the "Age of Legends" in Wheel of Time. Madness and destruction generally resulted from meddling, but meddling was done all the same.
And finally, every single ancient site we've ever defiled- who knows what kind of things those places were designed to keep *in* rather than *out*...
Why is it that slashdot so often fails to close italic tags?
Just wondering.
They did bring it to your attention, after all. That's generally the role of sales, and in this case, an affiliate payment is certainly fair enough.
Not like it costs you any more, anyway.
Each id game is pretty much a tech demo for what we should expect to see in the intervening years between games- I don't expect much out of Doom III- but it's a harbinger of the next Half-Life.
Secondly, without a strong player-killing element I don't see how interest can be sustained. Pre-programmed quests can only go so far, and AI is no match for fighting against real opponents.
Actually, if you don't ever want to lose, a lack of PKing is perfect.
That desire accurately sums up most folks' desires of their games.
It's happened already, ask Google about it.
The result was that MS said "well if you fuck with us, we'll fuck with you- drop this or we'll
stop making Office for Macintosh."
Apple bowed under the pressure, and nothing really was made of it.
Hooray, hooray, the first of May.
Outdoor fucking starts today.