>>Using this base means your mod can be played by anyone who has a source game (so someone with just L4D can play with someone who only has HL2), but it does mean you need to provide your own content.
Right, and I have absolutely no interest in recreating TF2 from scratch just so that I can mod it.
I do know that there's work being done on it right now, but I don't know how powerful their tools are.
Why use DarkPlaces when you can use FTEQuake and keep compatibility with Quakeworld?
I like having shaders when I play CustomTF. =)
But no, the point of modding TF2 would be to offer alternative servers for the large numbers of TF2 players to play on. There's not enough players in Darkplaces for it to be worth the effort.
I own an Xbox 360 and a PC (obviously). If I can get a game on the PC I will choose that over the console usually. Stuff like TF2, L4D etc... I fail to see the point of them on the consoles. FPS games on a console are a big bag of fail IMO. Only people who defend them in my experience are ones who haven't spent years using the superior mouse/keyboard combination.
For the DLC, I believe Microsoft FORCE Valve to charge. Gabe (who looks more like Peter from Family Guy by the day) has said that they want to give it away, but MS won't let them. Not sure how much truth there is in that given Valve have recently turned to the dark side and taken this DLC to its natural conclusion and are releasing what should be DLC for Left 4 Dead as a full title.
Back my dad, we used to call DLC "modding" a game, and it was free, and there were large vibrant modding communities for all games that had explicit or implicit modability. The Team Fortress guys started as a bunch of guys sitting around in Australia hacking on the mod source code for Quake 1 (before even Quakeworld).
But for TF2, they've published no mod tools except map editors, and have instead been releasing their own, official, mods for it, such as alternative weapons for each class. And charging for it on the Xbox. It's a shame, really, that they've gone so far from their roots.
I'd love to bring CustomTF into the 21st Century, but (as far as I know) there's no way to easily mod the TF2 sourcebase. So everyone loses... even Valve, I guess, since modding greatly extends the life of a game. Quakeworld is still played even today because of the mods for it.
>>Since when did we build hardware around APIs, rather than the other way around?
Always.
There's always a dialogue between software and hardware people on what needs to be implemented, and whether it should be done in hardware and software. The RISC/CISC days were full of stories like that in the CPU design world.
>>Don't forget when ti came out you could not become a 7xGM because someoen would lgiht a campfire next to you and you'd gain a point in Camping and lose one of your GMs.
Yeah the skirmishing combat chefs were one of the best parts of the early guild battles.
Don't look! He's cooking an omelet!
(For those of you who didn't play UO, the above is not actually a joke. You'd send people in front of their army to cook in order to drop their highest skills - the game had a skill cap, and also a system where you'd learn skills by watching other people. And the first skills to be dropped were your highest ones, like grandmaster spellcasting. =)
>>According to the article, only 13 Europeans and 13 people from China, Japan and Korea were asked to put a series of faces into categories such as sad and surprised
Any axioms proven about a mathematical integer which don't take into account boundary conditions and representations - the REAL semantics of the machine object as opposed to the pretend play semantics of a simplified mathematical toy version - don't necessarily apply to an int16, an int32, or an int64. And that's where programming, as opposed to mathematics, comes into play.
Absolutely. But that's why I tend to get annoyed when people get pretty high and mighty about formal proofs being the answer to anything. Rounding errors are very hard to deal with in formal proofs, since you don't know where they're going to come in. If you have an N-body simulation, for example, you'll violate conservation of momentum and energy unless you watch for that stuff, and somehow correct for it by injecting the missing energy back in. And practical stuff like that tends to make formal proofs explode.
>>The benefit is if the specification is right, the program should be right.
You'd think, but I've had formally proven algorithms fail when they encounter the real world. Niggling things like floating point round-off errors, etc., means that you can't even prove x+x = 2x in floats.
Also, it doesn't mean that that it's immune, to, say, buffer overflows.
>>Wikipedia has gone from "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit" to the "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit."
Pretty much. Elitism on the part of the core editors combined with a provincial desire to have articles "their way" combined with healthy doses of fucktardery has basically made me give up on contributing to wikipedia.
Case in point: I went to an article, saw that it was missing ISBN numbers for the books the subject was written.
I looked up the ISBN numbers, and added them to the bibliography.
The core editor who claimed it as part of his domain reverted the edit. Within a matter of seconds; certainly less than a minute. No comment on the revert.
I waited a day, added the ISBN numbers again. He reverted the edit again, again no comment.
I tried it a third time, then left a notice on his user page telling him that he shouldn't be acting like that.
One of his admin friends came onto his user page, reverted out my warning to him, said there was no evidence the editor was rejecting edits arbitrarily (even though I'd linked the reverts in the notice), and that I essentially shouldn't say such things to my betters.
So yeah, I waited a month, did it again, and they were accepted without comment. Because, you know, there's nothing controversial about ISBN numbers.:/
But that was enough for me. Wikipedia is an incestuous cesspool.
>>Production was always moving along and there were videos and screenshots of the game, but for the longest time there was simply no game for anyone except Mr. Smart to play.
Why on earth do you think that people need programming teams to make things happen? A lot of solo programmers go the way of Derek Smart, much like how so many wannabe authors who are "working on their book" never get around to actually writing it/finishing it/polishing it.
A lot of talented programmers make stuff happen on their lonesome though. If you don't want to give props to John Carmack for being nearly the only programmer at ID during its heyday, then look at the solo projects he's done since then - they're pretty good. Or a boss that I used to work for (in the 1990s) at a military contractor (which made VR headsets) on his own time created a VR game which caused the company to branch out into commercial sector for the first time. I wrote CustomTF over a pretty intense weekend in 1999. If this guy is smart (not Mr. Smart smart) AND is able to self-motivate, it should be quite possible.
>>Please describe a point in history where it was ever popular...seriously, there will always be a distribution of intelligence, quit bitching that you're on the higher end of it.
During the space race. My mom was a literature person, but even she got interested in science and started reading a lot of Heinlein, etc., and now writes sci-fi of her own.
>>The only reason Europe emerged from the dark ages is that crusades brought back the Arabic numbers, for example >>Gauss once blamed Euclid's not introducing digital numbers and sticking with base-60 numbers of the Greeks for all of the Dark Ages.
Just using the term "Dark Ages" reveals your lack of knowledge of history. The entire notion of a Dark Ages was a renaissance concept to differentiate themselves from their non-classically-inspired past.
The middle ages were actually a period of technological development, contrary to popular opinion. How far we could have developed without Arabic numerals would be an interesting study, though.
>>Social forces ALWAYS play catch up with technological state of humanity. As long as we remain the same specie, that is.
Why? What fundamental limit do you see us having by means of being human?
>>Intelligent Design is specifically referring to the theory advanced by the discovery institute saying that features of the universe and the Universe are best explained by intelligent cause, not an undirected process.
No, Intelligent Design is the premise that evolution did not happen naturally, but had an outside entity interfering in it to one degree or another. No more, no less. Just because the wikipedia article thinks that the Discovery Institute owns the idea, doesn't make it so. In fact, I'd rather not trust anything the Discovery Institute has to say.
Essentially the whole "ID vs. Evolution" debate is misguided, since ID *acknowledges* evolution. Read anything on ID - you'll see this is true, though not stated in so many words. They just feel that, for example, SJG's punctuated equilibrium can only be explained through some sort of external intervention due to, perhaps, the odds involved or Demsbki's no free lunch theory of information creation. It's a subtle distinction, and one most people miss. It's evolution + intervention.
You should be aware that back before ID became the whole hooplah that it is now, that I actually first heard about it from a lecturer from SIO (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) who considered it an interesting thing to consider, and said that it presented neat challenges for the evolutionary biologist. My atheist AP Bio teacher was the guy who invited him in, and treated it as an interesting topic for a classroom debate.
This was in 1993 or so, before all the nonsense really began with it, and is why I look at it in a different light (as a scientific theory, when presented the right way) than most people. I also doubt that he'd bring in such a speaker nowadays, with all the nonsense surrounding it.
>>[Panspermia is] not an "alternative explaination" or "controversy" to be taught that fills holes in the theory of evolution.
It is an alternative to the standard narrative on albiogenesis. I guess if you don't want to lump that in with the ToE, it's up to you.
>>The idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life influenced evolution on earth is likewise an existing hypothesis unrelated to Intelligent Design
Actually, that IS intelligent design. The idea that an intelligent entity intervened in evolution. I believe... eh, someone, trots this idea out as a possible explanation for some stuff. If you read any documents related to ID, you'll see it quite commonly referenced, since it gives the secular patina that people like the Discovery Institute want in order to get it into classrooms. Intelligent design is not equated with supernatural causes, regardless of what the wikipedia article says (which isn't an especially good article on the subject, by the by, though I guess I wouldn't expect it to be what with all the controversy surrounding it).
Try googling Intelligent Design and aliens. You'll see what I'm talking about.
>>It specifically posits a supernatural origin for life and the universe.
It specifically does not.
A number of fundies love ID because it sounds scientific because it posits "an entity" interfering with evolution, which is not necessarily God, thus making it theoretically acceptable for the classroom.
Aliens are often trotted out as stalking horses in this regard, and even Crick supposed something like panspermia could have been responsible for abiogenesis (though he reacted in horror to the notion that he supported ID).
>>Personally after reading Krugman the past two years I believe he is also just as nuts.
Yeah, I've read a lot of his articles and have come to the same conclusion.
Not that Charlie Strauss is much better. His fiction, especially Accelerando, reads like he just made a list of all the memes he could come across on teh intarwebs, and crafts a loosely structured story around it.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Using this base means your mod can be played by anyone who has a source game (so someone with just L4D can play with someone who only has HL2), but it does mean you need to provide your own content.
Right, and I have absolutely no interest in recreating TF2 from scratch just so that I can mod it.
I do know that there's work being done on it right now, but I don't know how powerful their tools are.
Why use DarkPlaces when you can use FTEQuake and keep compatibility with Quakeworld?
I like having shaders when I play CustomTF. =)
But no, the point of modding TF2 would be to offer alternative servers for the large numbers of TF2 players to play on. There's not enough players in Darkplaces for it to be worth the effort.
Sure, but that doesn't explain their lack of dev tools for TF2/L4D beyond map editors.
Back in my day...
Grr, I can't even do an old coot accent right online. =)
Back my dad, we used to call DLC "modding" a game, and it was free, and there were large vibrant modding communities for all games that had explicit or implicit modability. The Team Fortress guys started as a bunch of guys sitting around in Australia hacking on the mod source code for Quake 1 (before even Quakeworld).
But for TF2, they've published no mod tools except map editors, and have instead been releasing their own, official, mods for it, such as alternative weapons for each class. And charging for it on the Xbox. It's a shame, really, that they've gone so far from their roots.
I'd love to bring CustomTF into the 21st Century, but (as far as I know) there's no way to easily mod the TF2 sourcebase. So everyone loses... even Valve, I guess, since modding greatly extends the life of a game. Quakeworld is still played even today because of the mods for it.
>>Since when did we build hardware around APIs, rather than the other way around?
Always.
There's always a dialogue between software and hardware people on what needs to be implemented, and whether it should be done in hardware and software. The RISC/CISC days were full of stories like that in the CPU design world.
>>Don't forget when ti came out you could not become a 7xGM because someoen would lgiht a campfire next to you and you'd gain a point in Camping and lose one of your GMs.
Yeah the skirmishing combat chefs were one of the best parts of the early guild battles.
Don't look! He's cooking an omelet!
(For those of you who didn't play UO, the above is not actually a joke. You'd send people in front of their army to cook in order to drop their highest skills - the game had a skill cap, and also a system where you'd learn skills by watching other people. And the first skills to be dropped were your highest ones, like grandmaster spellcasting. =)
>>According to the article, only 13 Europeans and 13 people from China, Japan and Korea were asked to put a series of faces into categories such as sad and surprised
Oh, social science. What *can't* you prove?
>>risk = probability of failure * amount lost in case of failure.
>>Even if they were 5 times more likely to fail, the risk would have been lower.
Looking at WoW vs other MMORPGs, I think you're off by an order of magnitude or three.
Any axioms proven about a mathematical integer which don't take into account boundary conditions and representations - the REAL semantics of the machine object as opposed to the pretend play semantics of a simplified mathematical toy version - don't necessarily apply to an int16, an int32, or an int64. And that's where programming, as opposed to mathematics, comes into play.
Absolutely. But that's why I tend to get annoyed when people get pretty high and mighty about formal proofs being the answer to anything. Rounding errors are very hard to deal with in formal proofs, since you don't know where they're going to come in. If you have an N-body simulation, for example, you'll violate conservation of momentum and energy unless you watch for that stuff, and somehow correct for it by injecting the missing energy back in. And practical stuff like that tends to make formal proofs explode.
How odd that the ISBN links that I added to the article I found in the German version of the article. :p
Which is yet another example of the fucktardery involved in the revert warring the admin did over the ISBN numbers.
>>The benefit is if the specification is right, the program should be right.
You'd think, but I've had formally proven algorithms fail when they encounter the real world. Niggling things like floating point round-off errors, etc., means that you can't even prove x+x = 2x in floats.
Also, it doesn't mean that that it's immune, to, say, buffer overflows.
>>Wikipedia has gone from "the encyclopedia of everything that everyone can edit" to the "encyclopedia of things we like and some people may edit."
Pretty much. Elitism on the part of the core editors combined with a provincial desire to have articles "their way" combined with healthy doses of fucktardery has basically made me give up on contributing to wikipedia.
Case in point:
I went to an article, saw that it was missing ISBN numbers for the books the subject was written.
I looked up the ISBN numbers, and added them to the bibliography.
The core editor who claimed it as part of his domain reverted the edit. Within a matter of seconds; certainly less than a minute. No comment on the revert.
I waited a day, added the ISBN numbers again. He reverted the edit again, again no comment.
I tried it a third time, then left a notice on his user page telling him that he shouldn't be acting like that.
One of his admin friends came onto his user page, reverted out my warning to him, said there was no evidence the editor was rejecting edits arbitrarily (even though I'd linked the reverts in the notice), and that I essentially shouldn't say such things to my betters.
So yeah, I waited a month, did it again, and they were accepted without comment. Because, you know, there's nothing controversial about ISBN numbers. :/
But that was enough for me. Wikipedia is an incestuous cesspool.
>>Something that is low-budget is also low-risk by definition.
Would WoW have been more or less likely to fail with 10% of the budget they had?
Point taken, but from my research I've done there was a lot more interest in science then than there is now.
>>Isn't "high-risk, low-budget" sort of an oxymoron?
!oxymoron
It's 'redundant'.
>>Production was always moving along and there were videos and screenshots of the game, but for the longest time there was simply no game for anyone except Mr. Smart to play.
Why on earth do you think that people need programming teams to make things happen? A lot of solo programmers go the way of Derek Smart, much like how so many wannabe authors who are "working on their book" never get around to actually writing it/finishing it/polishing it.
A lot of talented programmers make stuff happen on their lonesome though. If you don't want to give props to John Carmack for being nearly the only programmer at ID during its heyday, then look at the solo projects he's done since then - they're pretty good. Or a boss that I used to work for (in the 1990s) at a military contractor (which made VR headsets) on his own time created a VR game which caused the company to branch out into commercial sector for the first time. I wrote CustomTF over a pretty intense weekend in 1999. If this guy is smart (not Mr. Smart smart) AND is able to self-motivate, it should be quite possible.
Was in EVE yesterday, and a guy was talking about "this toon", and one of my friends uses it even to describe his D&D characters.
I think the term is relatively widespread in the gaming parlance.
I personally kind of hate the term though. =)
>>Please describe a point in history where it was ever popular...seriously, there will always be a distribution of intelligence, quit bitching that you're on the higher end of it.
During the space race. My mom was a literature person, but even she got interested in science and started reading a lot of Heinlein, etc., and now writes sci-fi of her own.
>>The difference between the two is that Stross writes entertaining fiction, and Krugman influences international economic policy.
Heh, I'd say Krugman writes a lot of entertaining fiction too.
>>The only reason Europe emerged from the dark ages is that crusades brought back the Arabic numbers, for example
>>Gauss once blamed Euclid's not introducing digital numbers and sticking with base-60 numbers of the Greeks for all of the Dark Ages.
Just using the term "Dark Ages" reveals your lack of knowledge of history. The entire notion of a Dark Ages was a renaissance concept to differentiate themselves from their non-classically-inspired past.
The middle ages were actually a period of technological development, contrary to popular opinion. How far we could have developed without Arabic numerals would be an interesting study, though.
>>Social forces ALWAYS play catch up with technological state of humanity. As long as we remain the same specie, that is.
Why? What fundamental limit do you see us having by means of being human?
>>He flat out admits that in the recording("short attention span" and "read the internet too much")
Heh. Nice to see that my wildly speculative criticisms of an author are right every once in a while. =)
>>Intelligent Design is specifically referring to the theory advanced by the discovery institute saying that features of the universe and the Universe are best explained by intelligent cause, not an undirected process.
No, Intelligent Design is the premise that evolution did not happen naturally, but had an outside entity interfering in it to one degree or another. No more, no less. Just because the wikipedia article thinks that the Discovery Institute owns the idea, doesn't make it so. In fact, I'd rather not trust anything the Discovery Institute has to say.
Essentially the whole "ID vs. Evolution" debate is misguided, since ID *acknowledges* evolution. Read anything on ID - you'll see this is true, though not stated in so many words. They just feel that, for example, SJG's punctuated equilibrium can only be explained through some sort of external intervention due to, perhaps, the odds involved or Demsbki's no free lunch theory of information creation. It's a subtle distinction, and one most people miss. It's evolution + intervention.
You should be aware that back before ID became the whole hooplah that it is now, that I actually first heard about it from a lecturer from SIO (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) who considered it an interesting thing to consider, and said that it presented neat challenges for the evolutionary biologist. My atheist AP Bio teacher was the guy who invited him in, and treated it as an interesting topic for a classroom debate.
This was in 1993 or so, before all the nonsense really began with it, and is why I look at it in a different light (as a scientific theory, when presented the right way) than most people. I also doubt that he'd bring in such a speaker nowadays, with all the nonsense surrounding it.
>>[Panspermia is] not an "alternative explaination" or "controversy" to be taught that fills holes in the theory of evolution.
It is an alternative to the standard narrative on albiogenesis. I guess if you don't want to lump that in with the ToE, it's up to you.
>>The idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life influenced evolution on earth is likewise an existing hypothesis unrelated to Intelligent Design
Actually, that IS intelligent design. The idea that an intelligent entity intervened in evolution. I believe... eh, someone, trots this idea out as a possible explanation for some stuff. If you read any documents related to ID, you'll see it quite commonly referenced, since it gives the secular patina that people like the Discovery Institute want in order to get it into classrooms. Intelligent design is not equated with supernatural causes, regardless of what the wikipedia article says (which isn't an especially good article on the subject, by the by, though I guess I wouldn't expect it to be what with all the controversy surrounding it).
Try googling Intelligent Design and aliens. You'll see what I'm talking about.
Oh, this is amusing. From the Skeptic's Dictionary:
http://www.skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html
>>It specifically posits a supernatural origin for life and the universe.
It specifically does not.
A number of fundies love ID because it sounds scientific because it posits "an entity" interfering with evolution, which is not necessarily God, thus making it theoretically acceptable for the classroom.
Aliens are often trotted out as stalking horses in this regard, and even Crick supposed something like panspermia could have been responsible for abiogenesis (though he reacted in horror to the notion that he supported ID).
The Star Trek notion of the Preservers is likewise an example of Intelligent Design. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) )
But yes, in general, the way I'd restate ID is different from how other people do it.
>>Personally after reading Krugman the past two years I believe he is also just as nuts.
Yeah, I've read a lot of his articles and have come to the same conclusion.
Not that Charlie Strauss is much better. His fiction, especially Accelerando, reads like he just made a list of all the memes he could come across on teh intarwebs, and crafts a loosely structured story around it.