I truly believe that Blizzard went after bnetd solely to stop software piracy. The online CD key system used by Blizzard, Valve, Id, etc is the best way to combat piracy and the only feasible way for pirates to get around this method is to offer their own "cracked" servers which don't authenticate the CD keys.
Furthermore, I also suspect (sorry guys) that the majority of the bnetd/warforge users (who are still using today, well after war3 has been released) did NOT buy the game and are using bnetd primarily to circumvent the CD key copy protection.
It just doesn't make sense that the majority of bnetd users would be legitimate war3 CD owners. Why would you play on a small server instead of battle.net? The argument about lousy battle.net performance simply doesn't hold water these days. I play on battle.net ALL THE TIME and the performance is a lot better than warforge EVER was (yes, I was part of the warforge 'unofficial' beta test, and yes I bought the game the day it was released).
There are some cases (DeCSS) where a free alternative is desperately needed and the people protecting encrypted DVD's really are Evil. (hehe) But in this case, I truly don't think Blizzard is trying to stomp on the open source coder. Blizzard is only concerned with software piracy and their concern is very warranted, I daresay.
With all due respect to the submitter of this news article, I have to question the statement that the Rage Pro beat the TNT.
As I recall the days when Quake 3 was getting ready to be released, the id guys specifically said that they were trying to really hard to make Q3 work on the ATI Rage Pro, and the way they were going about making it work was allowing the user to turn off enough eye candy (ie remove enough features) so that the game would be compatible with the Rage Pro. The end result was that it looked rather ugly. On the other hand, as far as I know, the TNT1, although probably too slow to play Q3 feasibly, could support full eye candy, including 32-bit color.
I actually played the game on a TNT2 for a while, which, I believe, had the same features as the TNT1 with a speed boost.
Now if you are talking about quake1 benchmarks or something, I don't know which card would've been faster (rage pro or tnt1) but let's face it, there's more to video cards than just high framerates, as 3dfx found out (the hard way).
I am mostly in favor of bnetd but the one glaring problem I have with it is that as far as I can tell it is very easy to use a pirated copy of a Blizzard game (Starcraft for example) with bnetd. Aside from that, I think it's a nice idea.
Therefore, I think that the law should be that if Blizzard requests it, bnetd should be required to implement some kind of cd-key check (similar to how quake3 authenticates with the id master server). If Blizzard is unwilling to provide the means for bnetd to authenticate, then bnetd shouldn't have to comply. If bnetd cannot provide any decent cd-checking (due to not being allowed to integrate any closed source DLL's, for example) then it should be shut down.
If you have a better idea, let's hear it. But I think it's pretty irresponsible to just ignore the fact that bnetd basically cracks all of Blizzard's copy protection in one fell swoop. Blizzard makes cool games, let's at least try to prevent software piracy.
I am not sure why you chose to accuse all laserdisc collectors of "REALLY REALLY [hating]" anyone who isn't near their level of knowledge, and I find this stereotype unfortunate. Perhaps my wording in the FAQ is a little bit strong, but I don't think I ever said that I hated newbies or uninformed people. I just said that our primary goal is to develop the emulator, and not to answer FAQ's all day. If you think that we should be spending our time answering FAQ's instead of writing the emulator, then I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that point.
To see the current list of supported games, just view the main documentation.
And they are :
Astron Belt
Cliff Hanger
Cobra Command (running on Astron Belt hardware)
Dragon's Lair (US)
Esh's Aurunmilla
Galaxy Ranger
Space Ace (US)
Star Blazer
Super Don Quix-ote
Thayer's Quest
I work on a project which has some developers with full read/write CVS access and others who have just submitted patches from time to time. A few of the patches I've received have been nothing more than quick hacks to solve an immediate problem, but which (in my mind) do not solve _the_ problem. I have chosen not to apply these patches. The people who submit these patches may be upset with me, but I think it's important to realize that not all code is good code and we as developers shouldn't be obligated to accept anything just in the spirit of cooperation. If someone is going to modify the source code, I think their changes need to have a few attributes.
1 - The change has to be in harmony with the overall goal of the project. Just because a piece of code has bugs or is incomplete in functionality, does NOT mean that the main developers don't know what they want the code to do. It often just means that the main developers are too busy to implement the feature at that specific time. If someone comes along and submits changes that go against the main developers' wishes for the direction of that particular piece of code, then that submitter ought to first a) know WHAT the developers' original goal was so that he can demonstrate that he b) is informed enough to know why his new method will work better. The developers aren't going to trust someone who just submits a new idea without first getting acquainted with the overall vision.
2 - The submitted code should be well written. If it's just a hack using borrowed code from other source with a few modifications, and lacking comments, the main developers aren't going to be too crazy about using that code. "Oh great, he just went and copied and pasted this other code, made a few hack changes to it, and now he wants to use it." Come on, let's have some pride in our work here.
This game has a few features that are unique to the other Dragon's Lairs out there. For one, it has a control panel with instructions on it, a feature not found on the other Dragon's Lairs. For another, the side art on the side of the machine appears to be a different shade of green. And of course, since the machine has sat in Don Bluth's office, that is also an appealing aspect. There may be other subtle differences not readily available from the photographs.
One thing to point out though is that this is not the first ever Dragon's Lair created. There were various prototype cabinets with different control panels/marquees created and there were also prototype laserdisc created with different footage. Pictures of this prototype stuff can be seen on the Dragon's Lair Project .
I don't know any serious laserdisc game collector who wouldn't love to have this game sitting in their home. But I also think you'd have to be a fool to spend $25k on the game. I think it's worth $3000 at most, and last I checked the bidding was up to $5000.
A quick word on the ports of Dragon's Lair : In my opinion they are not very faithful to the arcade and I would encourage people to avoid the temptation to describe the Dragon's Lair ports as being "just like the arcade!" The CD-ROM and DVD ports are more like new games that use the same footage as the arcade. As near as I can tell, the creators of these games did NOT have an arcade machine available for reference.
I am in the middle of writing a
laserdisc arcade game emulator . The emulator controls real laserdisc players. I thought it would be easy to find the information needed to control laserdisc players on the internet but in actuality I found NO information at all! I subsequently purchased manuals directly from Pioneer (and other supporters of laserdisc games managed to get ahold of some Sony manuals and scan them in) and we have made this info available finally. Laserdisc players aren't really used anymore but they are still pretty cool to play around with =].
It always amuses/irritates me when non-gamers publish "studies" to show that hardcore gamers don't need ultra high frame rates. My response is, perhaps that is the reason why the hardcore gamers are beating the non-gamers.
I used to be a pretty serious Quake2/Quake3 player. I won a local Quake2 tournament with over 120 contestants. And I can tell you right now that 72 FPS is not the maximum framerate that the the human eye can detect. Higher framerate translates into much PRECISION and CONTROL and that is why the more FPS you have, the more advantage you have. You've got to be able to aim extremely quickly, usually by flicking your wrist. These wrist flicks can turn as much as 90 to even 180 degrees. I haven't done the math, but I'm guessing that 72 FPS isn't going to cut it when making a 180 degree turn in a split second.
These people kill me. "Well, no one should need over 72 FPS and BTW I always lose at Quake 3."
They should interview some of the top gamers in the world such as Fatality or Makaveli and ask them their thoughts on the importance of high framerate.
they wouldn't have any problem with ip-based virtual hosting if there were more IPs than people know what to do with floating around.
I predict IPv6 sees a return to ip-based virtual hosting.
Name based hosting isn't a bad idea though, since most people use a browser that supports it nowadays.
I've always been of the opinion that RAM that is erased when the computer is turned off is a good thing. The ability to erase all your RAM to me is like "starting fresh", similar to rebooting Windows to regain some temporary stability.
What would happen if a virus was loaded into your memory and you wanted to shutdown and wipe the virus from memory, but your memory was permanent? I don't see that as a good thing at all.
There are probably many arguments for why static memory is a good thing, but right now I am definitely leaning toward memory that can be erased by powering down.
A few days ago Slashdot ran the story about Carmack's speech at Quakecon. If anyone had followed the link to Gamespy, they would've read that Q3 Linux sales were down. In addition, Q3a Linux sales were discussed in the thread and Carmack himself commented about it.
And now Slashdot makes a news story out of their user's comments a few days late? I don't get it. But I can't imagine that Carmack is going to keep coming back if we keep getting more BS news stories like this one (redundant). Ya gotta wonder whether the people submitting and accepting these news stories really read slashdot themselves.
I was in attendance at the Classic Gaming Expo 2000 mentioned in the news article. One of the ONLY reasons I went was to play Dragon's Lair again (and Space Ace!). And I had a blast. To feel the joystick in my hands again, to press the buttons, to hear the little *beep* that the game emits when you make a correct move--it was all worth the price of the plane ticket! Dragon's Lair's gameplay was all about memorization, it's true. But don't ignore the incredible animation created by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (who went on to create such movies as An American Tale, Anastasia, and most recently Titan AE). Many animation experts agree that the animation in Dragon's Lair and Space Ace is of incredibly high quality. Also, Dirk the Daring has personality.. great personality. For many laserdisc collectors (such as myself), Dragon's Lair is all about reliving childhood memories. A ton of information can be had on the Dragon's Lair Project website (http://www.d-l-p.com) and I have written a Dragon's Lair emulator called DAPHNE which can be downloaded at the DAPHNE home page: http://daphne.rulecity.com . As you mentioned in another post, Dragon's Lair is available on DVD now, but as you surmised, its gameplay is fairly useless. Whereas the original Dragon's Lair relied on timing (which presented somewhat of a challenge!) the DVD version relies exclusively in memorization, and no randomization. Hence it is rather dull. However, my emulator is true to the arcade version and I recommend it to everyone *shameless plug* Hehe. You do need the original laserdisc to play it though. But I've got it working with DVD at the moment (unreleased) and I just started messing around with mpeg1 yesterday. Progress is being made.
Anyway, to summarize what I've been trying to say here... to many of us, Dragon's Lair and other laserdisc games ARE what classic gaming is all about (the early 80's). The other vector/raster games are cool too (Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc) but it was Dragon's Lair which blew EVERYONE away. Can you imagine playing on a game with the graphic of Donkey Kong and then seeing a game that had CD quality sound and NTSC quality "graphics"? (basically a movie). Everyone was blown away. Dragon's Lair rules!! Hehe. And as far as replay value.. well... I still play it from time to time just to relive the old memories. And also what you didn't mention is that Dragon's Lair has a "very hard difficulty" setting in which incredibly precise timing is involved. So the game isn't just about memorization but it's about timing. The timing can be QUITE challenging.
Laserdisc games rule =]
PS - I would be interested in buying that Dragon's Lair that is sitting in your friend's garage.
90% done? That is pretty impressive considering only id seemed to be porting their games to linux when D3 was released.
I remember when the D3 demo came out. I downloaded it and played it. I was very impressed by the engine, the graphics, and the special effects. But I didn't buy the game. Why? Because, frankly, I have never really enjoyed the Descent series of games. Descent 1 I played to death because it was the first game I had seen to give true 3D (even DOOM, a Descent 1 contemporary, was not true 3D). But I have always been more of a Doom/Quake guy than a Descent guy.
My brother swears up and down that Descent 3 is an amazingly cool game. And I believe him. Many games that do not sell so well turn out to be amazingly cool (all of Looking Glass's games.. who just went bankrupt). I suppose the problem is that the market is saturated with games and you have to choose just a few to spend your time with.
As for Loki porting Descent 3, I think it's a great move. People will look at linux and say, "Wow, it's got all kinds of mainstream games available for it now: Quake 3, Soldier of Fortune, Descent 3, Heretic 2, Unreal Tournament etc." Though D3 might not sell well under linux (if Windows is any indication) much good will still be done simply by having it available. People will take linux more seriously with each port that Loki does. More power to them.
I am 24 years old and I think this news story is flamebait more than real news. Oh no, teenagers can't play public violent video games. Yeah, like I really am worried about that. I don't see any freedom being lost here... at least I don't see any freedom being lost here that is _worth losing_.
You people who are fighting against this notion of restricting violent video game access in arcades need to find a real cause. Fighting over this issue isn't worth it.
I believe that these so-called recreational drugs you mention are a scourge to all society and I am not interested at all in fighting for your "right" to engage in this kind of drug use.
And I am not convinced that censorship in any and every form is Bad. I can't see any legitimate reason why tutorials on how to make illegal drugs should be propogated on the internet. I am not going to make any move to stop its propogation (after all, information will find a way, you can't stop it) but I certainly am not going to shed any tears if prominent drug sites are shut down. In fact, I might crack a grin... the same kind of grin I would crack if Microsoft is split.
I just hope that QWest makes US West a BETTER place with this merger because right now US West has some serious problems:
I have used US West DSL for a year now and while it usually has worked great, the times when it hasn't has been a nightmare. I would call their "tech support" (if you can call it that) only to be connected with a bottom-level tech who insisted that I undertake beginner trouble-shooting measures to try to solve my problem. After the tech had asked me to check to make sure everything was plugged in, he would then proceed to tell me that he could issue a "trouble ticket" to his higher ups, but judging from the lack of any apparent problem with my line, he doubted that the higher-ups would bother looking into my case. I responded with something like, "Well, so you're telling me that there is no way to detect the 40% packet loss on my line, and thus no way to get anyone to fix it?" "Well, sir, like I said I can issue a trouble ticket but I don't think they will accept it." "Well there has to be some procedure for taking care of this. Just because your diagnostics tools apparently can't detect severe packet loss doesn't mean there isn't a problem." "Well, sir, like I said I can issue a trouble ticket but I don't think they will accept it." He was like a monotonous robot. I was so mad. Naturally he also pointed fingers at my non-USwest ISP. A few days later I got a phone call from another office populated with techs who had clues. I told them of my horrible experience with the first line of US West DSL defense and the tech I talked to agreed that they sucked bad. They also acknowledged that my packet loss was indeed a USWest problem. All we can hope for is that QWest will somehow make things better because it is a nightmare to ponder things getting worse than they are now.
Is 150kbit/sec really that cool in this case? I am reminded of the dial-up modem "shotgun" technology sold by vendors such as Diamond. These shotgun modems basically allowed you to use two modems simultaneously to achieve double the bandwidth that you would with a single modem. So presumably instead of 56k you'd get 112k. I have a friend who tried these shotgun modems out and to his dismay, his latency had not decreased. I suspect that latency will be quite high with these Beowulf cell phones (or whatever you want to call them). And to me, low latency is nearly as important as high bandwidth (which is why I've never been intrigued by some of these satellite internet solutions).
Exactly. "The end of the internet?" Uh ok. This title to this news story indeed does sound like trolling.
The internet is too important to businesses to simply go away. Commerce seems to dictate the way that laws go nowadays, unfortunately. I will be interested to see how businesses try to stop information sharing among private users while still keeping the connections open between themselves and their credit-card using buyers.
Banning FTP? Ridiculous. If any governmental entity attempted to ban FTP, people would simply develop a new standard which operated on a different port.
Yes I read the article. As far as I can tell, they used dual Celeron 433's and a 12 meg Voodoo2. I used to play Quake 2 on an overclocked 300A (450) using a 12 meg Canopus voodoo2 so I know what the voodoo2 is capable of, and it is a lot more than 22 fps on crusher with that kind of CPU power. Before I left the 3dfx world I made extensive benchmarks of what my system was capable of and I documented them here: http://www.xmission.com/~redflame/v3_vs_tnt2.html Notice my Voodoo3 on my 450A was producing 51.1 FPS under Crusher at 640x480. Are you going to argue that a Voodoo2 on a Celeron 433 is getting 22 FPS while a V3 on a 450 is getting 51.1 ??? That is a major leap--too big of a leap in fact. There is no way a V3 is twice as fast as a V2 (and the cpu difference is quite small). So now that you have seen my evidence, I say to you again, the Quake 2 crusher benchmarks done by the benews site look like BS to me. I think after you examine my benchmarks on the aforementioned page you will see why. Oh and take note of my Quake 1 benchmarks too. And I have nothing against BeOS blowing away the competition, I think it's cool. I just think the guys running these benchmarks don't seem to know what they are doing.
I just ran a quick Crusher benchmark myself and I got 57.0 FPS (Athlon 500, TNT2 ultra, Win98, 640x480x16, NO TWEAKS). I don't know what stone-age architecture benews.com was using to do their Quake 2 benchmarks, but I find their numbers to be highly questionable and this throws their credibility in doubt. 22.3 FPS under windows? Please. I want to see benchmarks that relate to MY hardware, not to a Pentium 200 MMX or whatever they used.
I am 24 and have lived here in Utah since 1983 and I prefer the atmosphere here. There has never been a time in my recollection when there haven't been outsiders who have disagreed with the LDS church's doctrine or the effect that this has on laws in the state. And sadly enough there are always those who lack the maturity to react to these differences in a dignified and respectful manner. While I realize that censorship has its share of problems, I applaud the government for having the courage to take this step. Everyone who has thought about it for two seconds will realize that smut sites are going up every day and that no filtering software is perfect; but the fact that they are showing the intent to try to put a stop to it is a gesture of goodwill and I support them for doing it. What some of you people who are flaming the state or the LDS church don't realize is that there are plenty of ISP's in Salt Lake which are privately owned and provide complete access to the entire internet without any kind of censorship whatsoever. I happen to subscribe to such an ISP. It astounds me why some people are so afraid that a public library is blocking sites and accidently blocking some legitimate sites here and there, especially when they don't even live in the state. A public library isn't the kind of place where anyone who is serious about internet access will go to get online; any serious person will get DSL or cable and go through an ISP. Filtering out content at a public library isn't going to hurt anyone (and if you live outside the state and you feel hurt by this action, I think you are overreacting). I expect my local government to champion morals and values and I will allow them some leniancy if they don't do a perfect job. That's why I elect them, that's why I live here. --Matt Ownby http://www.xmission.com/~redflame
Slashdot Mirror
I truly believe that Blizzard went after bnetd solely to stop software piracy. The online CD key system used by Blizzard, Valve, Id, etc is the best way to combat piracy and the only feasible way for pirates to get around this method is to offer their own "cracked" servers which don't authenticate the CD keys.
Furthermore, I also suspect (sorry guys) that the majority of the bnetd/warforge users (who are still using today, well after war3 has been released) did NOT buy the game and are using bnetd primarily to circumvent the CD key copy protection.
It just doesn't make sense that the majority of bnetd users would be legitimate war3 CD owners. Why would you play on a small server instead of battle.net? The argument about lousy battle.net performance simply doesn't hold water these days. I play on battle.net ALL THE TIME and the performance is a lot better than warforge EVER was (yes, I was part of the warforge 'unofficial' beta test, and yes I bought the game the day it was released).
There are some cases (DeCSS) where a free alternative is desperately needed and the people protecting encrypted DVD's really are Evil. (hehe) But in this case, I truly don't think Blizzard is trying to stomp on the open source coder. Blizzard is only concerned with software piracy and their concern is very warranted, I daresay.
With all due respect to the submitter of this news article, I have to question the statement that the Rage Pro beat the TNT.
As I recall the days when Quake 3 was getting ready to be released, the id guys specifically said that they were trying to really hard to make Q3 work on the ATI Rage Pro, and the way they were going about making it work was allowing the user to turn off enough eye candy (ie remove enough features) so that the game would be compatible with the Rage Pro. The end result was that it looked rather ugly. On the other hand, as far as I know, the TNT1, although probably too slow to play Q3 feasibly, could support full eye candy, including 32-bit color.
I actually played the game on a TNT2 for a while, which, I believe, had the same features as the TNT1 with a speed boost.
Now if you are talking about quake1 benchmarks or something, I don't know which card would've been faster (rage pro or tnt1) but let's face it, there's more to video cards than just high framerates, as 3dfx found out (the hard way).
I am mostly in favor of bnetd but the one glaring problem I have with it is that as far as I can tell it is very easy to use a pirated copy of a Blizzard game (Starcraft for example) with bnetd. Aside from that, I think it's a nice idea.
Therefore, I think that the law should be that if Blizzard requests it, bnetd should be required to implement some kind of cd-key check (similar to how quake3 authenticates with the id master server). If Blizzard is unwilling to provide the means for bnetd to authenticate, then bnetd shouldn't have to comply. If bnetd cannot provide any decent cd-checking (due to not being allowed to integrate any closed source DLL's, for example) then it should be shut down.
If you have a better idea, let's hear it. But I think it's pretty irresponsible to just ignore the fact that bnetd basically cracks all of Blizzard's copy protection in one fell swoop. Blizzard makes cool games, let's at least try to prevent software piracy.
I am not sure why you chose to accuse all laserdisc collectors of "REALLY REALLY [hating]" anyone who isn't near their level of knowledge, and I find this stereotype unfortunate. Perhaps my wording in the FAQ is a little bit strong, but I don't think I ever said that I hated newbies or uninformed people. I just said that our primary goal is to develop the emulator, and not to answer FAQ's all day. If you think that we should be spending our time answering FAQ's instead of writing the emulator, then I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that point.
If you are using mpeg, you don't need any additional equipment.. just a reasonably fast computer and preferably a video card with YUV acceleration.
My mistake.
To see the current list of supported games, just view the main documentation.
And they are :
Astron Belt
Cliff Hanger
Cobra Command (running on Astron Belt hardware)
Dragon's Lair (US)
Esh's Aurunmilla
Galaxy Ranger
Space Ace (US)
Star Blazer
Super Don Quix-ote
Thayer's Quest
I work on a project which has some developers with full read/write CVS access and others who have just submitted patches from time to time. A few of the patches I've received have been nothing more than quick hacks to solve an immediate problem, but which (in my mind) do not solve _the_ problem. I have chosen not to apply these patches. The people who submit these patches may be upset with me, but I think it's important to realize that not all code is good code and we as developers shouldn't be obligated to accept anything just in the spirit of cooperation. If someone is going to modify the source code, I think their changes need to have a few attributes.
1 - The change has to be in harmony with the overall goal of the project. Just because a piece of code has bugs or is incomplete in functionality, does NOT mean that the main developers don't know what they want the code to do. It often just means that the main developers are too busy to implement the feature at that specific time. If someone comes along and submits changes that go against the main developers' wishes for the direction of that particular piece of code, then that submitter ought to first a) know WHAT the developers' original goal was so that he can demonstrate that he b) is informed enough to know why his new method will work better. The developers aren't going to trust someone who just submits a new idea without first getting acquainted with the overall vision.
2 - The submitted code should be well written. If it's just a hack using borrowed code from other source with a few modifications, and lacking comments, the main developers aren't going to be too crazy about using that code. "Oh great, he just went and copied and pasted this other code, made a few hack changes to it, and now he wants to use it." Come on, let's have some pride in our work here.
This game has a few features that are unique to the other Dragon's Lairs out there. For one, it has a control panel with instructions on it, a feature not found on the other Dragon's Lairs. For another, the side art on the side of the machine appears to be a different shade of green. And of course, since the machine has sat in Don Bluth's office, that is also an appealing aspect. There may be other subtle differences not readily available from the photographs.
One thing to point out though is that this is not the first ever Dragon's Lair created. There were various prototype cabinets with different control panels/marquees created and there were also prototype laserdisc created with different footage. Pictures of this prototype stuff can be seen on the Dragon's Lair Project .
I don't know any serious laserdisc game collector who wouldn't love to have this game sitting in their home. But I also think you'd have to be a fool to spend $25k on the game. I think it's worth $3000 at most, and last I checked the bidding was up to $5000.
A quick word on the ports of Dragon's Lair : In my opinion they are not very faithful to the arcade and I would encourage people to avoid the temptation to describe the Dragon's Lair ports as being "just like the arcade!" The CD-ROM and DVD ports are more like new games that use the same footage as the arcade. As near as I can tell, the creators of these games did NOT have an arcade machine available for reference.
Feel free to visit my Dragon's Lair emulation project.
I am in the middle of writing a laserdisc arcade game emulator . The emulator controls real laserdisc players. I thought it would be easy to find the information needed to control laserdisc players on the internet but in actuality I found NO information at all! I subsequently purchased manuals directly from Pioneer (and other supporters of laserdisc games managed to get ahold of some Sony manuals and scan them in) and we have made this info available finally. Laserdisc players aren't really used anymore but they are still pretty cool to play around with =].
It always amuses/irritates me when non-gamers publish "studies" to show that hardcore gamers don't need ultra high frame rates. My response is, perhaps that is the reason why the hardcore gamers are beating the non-gamers.
I used to be a pretty serious Quake2/Quake3 player. I won a local Quake2 tournament with over 120 contestants. And I can tell you right now that 72 FPS is not the maximum framerate that the the human eye can detect. Higher framerate translates into much PRECISION and CONTROL and that is why the more FPS you have, the more advantage you have. You've got to be able to aim extremely quickly, usually by flicking your wrist. These wrist flicks can turn as much as 90 to even 180 degrees. I haven't done the math, but I'm guessing that 72 FPS isn't going to cut it when making a 180 degree turn in a split second.
These people kill me. "Well, no one should need over 72 FPS and BTW I always lose at Quake 3."
They should interview some of the top gamers in the world such as Fatality or Makaveli and ask them their thoughts on the importance of high framerate.
they wouldn't have any problem with ip-based virtual hosting if there were more IPs than people know what to do with floating around.
I predict IPv6 sees a return to ip-based virtual hosting.
Name based hosting isn't a bad idea though, since most people use a browser that supports it nowadays.
I've always been of the opinion that RAM that is erased when the computer is turned off is a good thing. The ability to erase all your RAM to me is like "starting fresh", similar to rebooting Windows to regain some temporary stability.
What would happen if a virus was loaded into your memory and you wanted to shutdown and wipe the virus from memory, but your memory was permanent? I don't see that as a good thing at all.
There are probably many arguments for why static memory is a good thing, but right now I am definitely leaning toward memory that can be erased by powering down.
This news story = -1, Redundant
A few days ago Slashdot ran the story about Carmack's speech at Quakecon. If anyone had followed the link to Gamespy, they would've read that Q3 Linux sales were down. In addition, Q3a Linux sales were discussed in the thread and Carmack himself commented about it.
And now Slashdot makes a news story out of their user's comments a few days late? I don't get it. But I can't imagine that Carmack is going to keep coming back if we keep getting more BS news stories like this one (redundant). Ya gotta wonder whether the people submitting and accepting these news stories really read slashdot themselves.
I was in attendance at the Classic Gaming Expo 2000 mentioned in the news article. One of the ONLY reasons I went was to play Dragon's Lair again (and Space Ace!). And I had a blast. To feel the joystick in my hands again, to press the buttons, to hear the little *beep* that the game emits when you make a correct move--it was all worth the price of the plane ticket!
Dragon's Lair's gameplay was all about memorization, it's true. But don't ignore the incredible animation created by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (who went on to create such movies as An American Tale, Anastasia, and most recently Titan AE). Many animation experts agree that the animation in Dragon's Lair and Space Ace is of incredibly high quality. Also, Dirk the Daring has personality.. great personality.
For many laserdisc collectors (such as myself), Dragon's Lair is all about reliving childhood memories. A ton of information can be had on the Dragon's Lair Project website (http://www.d-l-p.com) and I have written a Dragon's Lair emulator called DAPHNE which can be downloaded at the DAPHNE home page: http://daphne.rulecity.com .
As you mentioned in another post, Dragon's Lair is available on DVD now, but as you surmised, its gameplay is fairly useless. Whereas the original Dragon's Lair relied on timing (which presented somewhat of a challenge!) the DVD version relies exclusively in memorization, and no randomization. Hence it is rather dull. However, my emulator is true to the arcade version and I recommend it to everyone *shameless plug* Hehe. You do need the original laserdisc to play it though. But I've got it working with DVD at the moment (unreleased) and I just started messing around with mpeg1 yesterday. Progress is being made.
Anyway, to summarize what I've been trying to say here... to many of us, Dragon's Lair and other laserdisc games ARE what classic gaming is all about (the early 80's). The other vector/raster games are cool too (Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, etc) but it was Dragon's Lair which blew EVERYONE away. Can you imagine playing on a game with the graphic of Donkey Kong and then seeing a game that had CD quality sound and NTSC quality "graphics"? (basically a movie). Everyone was blown away. Dragon's Lair rules!! Hehe. And as far as replay value.. well... I still play it from time to time just to relive the old memories. And also what you didn't mention is that Dragon's Lair has a "very hard difficulty" setting in which incredibly precise timing is involved. So the game isn't just about memorization but it's about timing. The timing can be QUITE challenging.
Laserdisc games rule =]
PS - I would be interested in buying that Dragon's Lair that is sitting in your friend's garage.
90% done? That is pretty impressive considering only id seemed to be porting their games to linux when D3 was released.
I remember when the D3 demo came out. I downloaded it and played it. I was very impressed by the engine, the graphics, and the special effects. But I didn't buy the game. Why? Because, frankly, I have never really enjoyed the Descent series of games. Descent 1 I played to death because it was the first game I had seen to give true 3D (even DOOM, a Descent 1 contemporary, was not true 3D). But I have always been more of a Doom/Quake guy than a Descent guy.
My brother swears up and down that Descent 3 is an amazingly cool game. And I believe him. Many games that do not sell so well turn out to be amazingly cool (all of Looking Glass's games.. who just went bankrupt). I suppose the problem is that the market is saturated with games and you have to choose just a few to spend your time with.
As for Loki porting Descent 3, I think it's a great move. People will look at linux and say, "Wow, it's got all kinds of mainstream games available for it now: Quake 3, Soldier of Fortune, Descent 3, Heretic 2, Unreal Tournament etc." Though D3 might not sell well under linux (if Windows is any indication) much good will still be done simply by having it available. People will take linux more seriously with each port that Loki does. More power to them.
I am 24 years old and I think this news story is flamebait more than real news. Oh no, teenagers can't play public violent video games. Yeah, like I really am worried about that.
I don't see any freedom being lost here... at least I don't see any freedom being lost here that is _worth losing_.
You people who are fighting against this notion of restricting violent video game access in arcades need to find a real cause. Fighting over this issue isn't worth it.
I believe that these so-called recreational drugs you mention are a scourge to all society and I am not interested at all in fighting for your "right" to engage in this kind of drug use.
And I am not convinced that censorship in any and every form is Bad. I can't see any legitimate reason why tutorials on how to make illegal drugs should be propogated on the internet. I am not going to make any move to stop its propogation (after all, information will find a way, you can't stop it) but I certainly am not going to shed any tears if prominent drug sites are shut down. In fact, I might crack a grin... the same kind of grin I would crack if Microsoft is split.
I just hope that QWest makes US West a BETTER place with this merger because right now US West has some serious problems:
I have used US West DSL for a year now and while it usually has worked great, the times when it hasn't has been a nightmare. I would call their "tech support" (if you can call it that) only to be connected with a bottom-level tech who insisted that I undertake beginner trouble-shooting measures to try to solve my problem. After the tech had asked me to check to make sure everything was plugged in, he would then proceed to tell me that he could issue a "trouble ticket" to his higher ups, but judging from the lack of any apparent problem with my line, he doubted that the higher-ups would bother looking into my case.
I responded with something like, "Well, so you're telling me that there is no way to detect the 40% packet loss on my line, and thus no way to get anyone to fix it?"
"Well, sir, like I said I can issue a trouble ticket but I don't think they will accept it."
"Well there has to be some procedure for taking care of this. Just because your diagnostics tools apparently can't detect severe packet loss doesn't mean there isn't a problem."
"Well, sir, like I said I can issue a trouble ticket but I don't think they will accept it."
He was like a monotonous robot. I was so mad. Naturally he also pointed fingers at my non-USwest ISP. A few days later I got a phone call from another office populated with techs who had clues. I told them of my horrible experience with the first line of US West DSL defense and the tech I talked to agreed that they sucked bad. They also acknowledged that my packet loss was indeed a USWest problem.
All we can hope for is that QWest will somehow make things better because it is a nightmare to ponder things getting worse than they are now.
Is 150kbit/sec really that cool in this case? I am reminded of the dial-up modem "shotgun" technology sold by vendors such as Diamond. These shotgun modems basically allowed you to use two modems simultaneously to achieve double the bandwidth that you would with a single modem. So presumably instead of 56k you'd get 112k. I have a friend who tried these shotgun modems out and to his dismay, his latency had not decreased.
I suspect that latency will be quite high with these Beowulf cell phones (or whatever you want to call them). And to me, low latency is nearly as important as high bandwidth (which is why I've never been intrigued by some of these satellite internet solutions).
Exactly. "The end of the internet?" Uh ok. This title to this news story indeed does sound like trolling.
The internet is too important to businesses to simply go away. Commerce seems to dictate the way that laws go nowadays, unfortunately. I will be interested to see how businesses try to stop information sharing among private users while still keeping the connections open between themselves and their credit-card using buyers.
Banning FTP? Ridiculous. If any governmental entity attempted to ban FTP, people would simply develop a new standard which operated on a different port.
Yes I read the article. As far as I can tell, they used dual Celeron 433's and a 12 meg Voodoo2. I used to play Quake 2 on an overclocked 300A (450) using a 12 meg Canopus voodoo2 so I know what the voodoo2 is capable of, and it is a lot more than 22 fps on crusher with that kind of CPU power. Before I left the 3dfx world I made extensive benchmarks of what my system was capable of and I documented them here: http://www.xmission.com/~redflame/v3_vs_tnt2.html Notice my Voodoo3 on my 450A was producing 51.1 FPS under Crusher at 640x480. Are you going to argue that a Voodoo2 on a Celeron 433 is getting 22 FPS while a V3 on a 450 is getting 51.1 ??? That is a major leap--too big of a leap in fact. There is no way a V3 is twice as fast as a V2 (and the cpu difference is quite small). So now that you have seen my evidence, I say to you again, the Quake 2 crusher benchmarks done by the benews site look like BS to me. I think after you examine my benchmarks on the aforementioned page you will see why. Oh and take note of my Quake 1 benchmarks too. And I have nothing against BeOS blowing away the competition, I think it's cool. I just think the guys running these benchmarks don't seem to know what they are doing.
I just ran a quick Crusher benchmark myself and I got 57.0 FPS (Athlon 500, TNT2 ultra, Win98, 640x480x16, NO TWEAKS). I don't know what stone-age architecture benews.com was using to do their Quake 2 benchmarks, but I find their numbers to be highly questionable and this throws their credibility in doubt. 22.3 FPS under windows? Please. I want to see benchmarks that relate to MY hardware, not to a Pentium 200 MMX or whatever they used.
I am 24 and have lived here in Utah since 1983 and I prefer the atmosphere here. There has never been a time in my recollection when there haven't been outsiders who have disagreed with the LDS church's doctrine or the effect that this has on laws in the state. And sadly enough there are always those who lack the maturity to react to these differences in a dignified and respectful manner. While I realize that censorship has its share of problems, I applaud the government for having the courage to take this step. Everyone who has thought about it for two seconds will realize that smut sites are going up every day and that no filtering software is perfect; but the fact that they are showing the intent to try to put a stop to it is a gesture of goodwill and I support them for doing it. What some of you people who are flaming the state or the LDS church don't realize is that there are plenty of ISP's in Salt Lake which are privately owned and provide complete access to the entire internet without any kind of censorship whatsoever. I happen to subscribe to such an ISP. It astounds me why some people are so afraid that a public library is blocking sites and accidently blocking some legitimate sites here and there, especially when they don't even live in the state. A public library isn't the kind of place where anyone who is serious about internet access will go to get online; any serious person will get DSL or cable and go through an ISP. Filtering out content at a public library isn't going to hurt anyone (and if you live outside the state and you feel hurt by this action, I think you are overreacting). I expect my local government to champion morals and values and I will allow them some leniancy if they don't do a perfect job. That's why I elect them, that's why I live here. --Matt Ownby http://www.xmission.com/~redflame