The author mentions Choose Your Own Adventure in "Branching and Hypertext Narratives," and he doesn't think highly of the concept, beyond the initial novelty.
I think some of today's games could stand a bit of CYOA-style novelty.
Games like Half-Life, as high as their production values are, make me feel like a rat being led through a maze.
Halo puts a red or green light over the door to let you know whether it's locked.
Elite Force puts force fields in the corridors.
A cheap way to spice up a game is to borrow attribute or skill points from role-playing games.
System Shock 2 is linear, but you can choose skills to balance the gameplay to your liking.
A branching narrative is more expensive, because you're purposely making content that the player is not supposed to see (unless he plays the game repeatedly).
Content is expensive.
There are two challenges to effective branching narrative: making it less expensive, and making it aesthetically pleasing.
Choose Your Own Adventure stories limited the branching factor to a few main plot lines.
Most of the choices were dead ends or digressions.
Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests a more sophisticated use of branching, based on Kuleshov's early studies of film.
Some of your scenes can be neutral or ambiguous, such that their interpretation is subject to discoveries in later scenes.
This technique is used to good effect in The Sixth Sense and Memento.
It's a craft with few or no masters, but I think it's worth exploring.
If either the Mozilla or Trolltech pages had been updated in the last year, I might agree that this is old news.
As it is, two developers with a lot of experience with KHTML seem interested in making this a viable port.
It also seems that their approach may be more sustainable, such that Qt/KDE can be a fully supported peer of GTK+ as a Mozilla front end.
the only project actually using Mozilla's "software development platform" is Mozilla
While it's not free, Komodo is a slick app. built with the Mozilla framework.
I've been meaning to take a look at Creating Applications with Mozilla to see whether it's worth considering for my projects.
Perhaps more interesting than porting Gecko to Konqueror is integrating Qt and KDE with Firefox.
It sounds like this porting fest has gained a couple of talented developers for the Mozilla project.
This is good for both KDE and Mozilla.
a lot of time was wasted on getting some of the more complex applications to work on [Debian] (e.g. Oracle 9i)
Oracle only supports RHEL, SLES, and Asianux (a Red Hat derivative).
I don't know what problems you had, but I doubt that they were due to any fault of Debian, per se.
That said, I agree with many of the "duh" posts in this article about using a supported platform.
I'm not thrilled about the trend towards supporting only "enterprise" distributions, but that's what you sign up for when you rely on proprietary software.
The other argument against Debian is that it's yet another platform to learn.
Does it matter that (OpenBSD | FreeBSD | Gentoo | Debian) is more (secure | reliable | optimized | comprehensive) if no one knows how to administer it?
When you have limited staff (and who doesn't?), there's value in standardizing.
For example, use SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for production servers and SuSE Linux for other tasks (desktops, NIS slaves, etc.).
I'll second this recommendation.
I was never a fan of Mac OS, because it was far from intuitive for a power user.
After a few chapters of Missing Manual, I've picked up some keyboard shortcuts, and figured out some nifty features, like Expose.
Pogue does a good job of addressing multiple audiences, especially the 10.1 and 10.2 users, the 9 users, and the Windows users.
There are two things I don't like about the iBook: the single-button trackpad, and the tiny modifier keys (Emacs is a disaster).
On Windows, I change the active tab in Firefox by pressing Ctrl-PgDn, an easy one-handed movement.
On OS X, I change the active tab in Safari by pressing Cmd-Shift-Arrow, an awkward (usually) two-handed movement.
I also miss the Windows key and the Start menu.
The gist of the article is that games are too short lived to benefit from a collaborative development model: by the time you get out of alpha, everyone will be bored with the game.
However, the technology underlying Unreal, and other engines, has evolved over the course of several games.
Thus, projects like Crystal Space, ODE, Blender, and SDL are ideal for advancing a game development platform.
To some extent, a library of content could also benefit from collaborative development, but serious projects wouldn't likely use it past the prototyping stage.
Story-based games, especially, deserve to be presented in a final, polished form.
For that reason, I would not expect it to be released early and often.
There is also a question of artistic integrity.
Game designers, amateur and professional alike, have strong ideas.
Can they share authorship with some dude on the Internet?
Anyone have experience with a Bluetooth mouse?
I've read complaints that the Logitech MX 900 is slow and uneven, due to the low bandwidth of Bluetooth.
I found it interesting that the Mac and Windows version of Word have forked, again.
They merged for Word 6.0, but forked for Word 98.
That seems like an admission of failure.
Everyone talks about how complex Windows and Office are (millions of LOC), but I have to believe that some of it is unnecessary.
If I was sitting on a few billion dollars, I think I would spend some of it on refactoring.
When SCO talks about Unix, what, exactly, are they talking about?
In Lindon, UT, UNIX is synonymous with System V, which is, reportedly, highly contagious.
In the rest of the world, Unix is a de facto standard surrounded by de jure standards, from which there are so many to choose: POSIX, SUS, UNIX, SVID, LSB.
In the early days of the SCO nuisance, Eric Raymond wrote about "genetic" Unix and "trademark" Unix as curiosities in the family of operating systems that share design elements.
Those design elements (or, as the court jesters would describe them, "methods and concepts") are responsible for the enduring success of Unix, not ten to twenty-year old code.
I've been dipping my feet back into Unix programming, and it's maddeningly difficult to write portable code.
Whether it's non-blocking I/O, pseudo terminals, or reaping child processes, one platform has some weird quirk.
Still, I'll take it over the dozen-parameter functions in the Windows API and the quaint world of VMS.
DeepDiscountDVD.com typically smokes both Target and Walmart's prices and has a FAR biger selection.
I guess it's time for my off-topic DDD story.
I put the Indiana Jones box set in my cart for $35.
When I placed the order, it showed up as $45.
I immediately sent an email to customer service, which replied that it couldn't do anything until after the item shipped.
I reminded them, after it shipped, that I had been overcharged, but got no reply.
The credit card company came through, but I'm done with DDD.
I remember iMuse being a touted feature of X-Wing.
With the wholesale adoption of digital audio, I imagine it's harder to implement.
A soundtrack can add to the experience, but I'm hard pressed to think of a good example.
What's wrong with Bison that you keep looking for alternatives?
Before I discovered the new GLR parser, I couldn't manage to write a LALR(1) grammar for the source language.
The target language is Python, so I experimented with PLY, Spark, and others.
This looks like a terrific tool for someone who has finished the front end of a compiler and wants to save some time on the back end.
I'm still struggling with a project to build the front end, so I'm always on the lookout for tools to help me with parsing.
I've dabbled with several, but I keep coming back to Bison.
Recent releases (I'm using 1.875c, I think) include a Tomita-style generalized LR parser generator that is a god send for a newbie like me.
If I ever do build a satisfactory parser with Bison, I wonder how it would interface with LLVM.
I tried converting a toy Bison parser to C++ and it seemed like there were some rough edges.
Tell me which one is faster!
On modern equipment, you won't notice any difference for most tasks.
If only this were true.
It's fashionable to say that modern hardware frees you from performance concerns, but I have found Python's slow performance to be an obstacle.
Loops, function calls, and name lookups can be annoyingly expensive, to say nothing of bit twiddling.
I like Python, but its full potential isn't realized without some optimization and, occasionally, an accompanying C module.
Anyone who thinks Python is cool, should really look at Perl.
Many Python programmers are (often former) Perl programmers who are fed up with Perl's expressiveness (i.e., TMTOWTDI).
Making Perl as complex as a natural language may be empowering, but only if you have a commensurate amount of time to devote to it.
I've read Programming Perl cover to cover (twice), and I'm still not as comfortable with it as I am with Python, for which I haven't read any books.
Based on what I've heard about the new features of Perl 6, I doubt I'll ever go back.
The white space thing is virtually a non-issue.
The only problem I have with it is that it complicates copy and paste to a different indent level.
Even then, most editors have a command to indent or outdent a region.
We're all entitled to our opinions, but it's a shame that so many people can't get past a few parentheses (Lisp) or spaces (Python).
I doubt that UT2k3 could be released as anything resembling Free software when it is a true legacy product
I see no reason to think that the Unreal engine will ever be released as free software, regardless of its ties to third-party software.
It's really something special for id to release the Quake engines.
You see it here and there with smaller and older titles, but John has said that the Quake 3 engine (still to be found in recent games like Jedi Academy and Medal of Honor) may be released by the end of the year.
The version of Word which killed WordStar 2000 and WordPerfect came directly from the Mac
As I recall, 6.0 was a very modest upgrade from 2.0.
I remember thinking: "I paid $100 for squiggly red lines?"
I liked WordPerfect for DOS, but Word for Windows had it all over WordPerfect for Windows in the early years.
No one factor gave Windows its dominance.
Clearly, it rode the commodity PC wave.
I would, however, credit Word for Windows 2.0 with showing off the potential of Windows, such as it was.
The GNOME terminal is really just a shell for VTE.
(It may still be possible to build it with ZVT.)
90% of the bugs associated with the terminal should really be filed against VTE, the maintenance for which seems to be a low-priority task for Nalin Dahyabhai at Red Hat.
If you want to help, try testing some of the unconfirmed bug reports, or some of the patches, such as 143914.
I try to buy directly from the developer to give them as big a cut of the pie as I can.
On the other hand, strong retail sales can make an impression on the publisher, distributor, wholesalers, and retailers, which may make it easier to secure an advance on the next title.
That said, id Software isn't exactly strapped for cash or clout, so I don't think they care where you buy Doom 3.
And this is why the gulf between Linux and Mac OS is so wide.
"It's so easy, just do this and this and this.
Oh, you mean you want it to just work?"
Whether it's because iTunes tagged the files unconventionally, or because the XMMS is broken/inferior, the simplicity of iTunes didn't translate to the original poster's Linux environment.
iTunes has plenty of room for improvement, but it's a solid app., both on Windows and OS X.
I don't blame the OP for missing it.
this must actually break the iTunes DRM good and hard
You can already de-DRM iTMS songs with Hymn.
If you don't like leaving your Apple ID in the file, it's probably not a big deal to modify the Hymn source.
I'd caution people authorizing iTunes under Wine (and Windows, for that matter) to be aware of the DRM scheme, so that you don't accidentally lose the right to play your songs.
You can authorize up to five computers, and you may unwittingly reauthorize the same computer multiple times with no clear way to fix it.
With Wine, it is probably quite easy to reset some of the data that determines the system key:
Windows product ID
BIOS version
CPU name
serial number of C: drive
The first three items are taken directly from the Registry.
I don't have a Linux box handy, but it's possible that those entries are simply missing.
I don't know how Wine would handle the serial number of the C: drive.
Slashdot Mirror
A cheap way to spice up a game is to borrow attribute or skill points from role-playing games. System Shock 2 is linear, but you can choose skills to balance the gameplay to your liking. A branching narrative is more expensive, because you're purposely making content that the player is not supposed to see (unless he plays the game repeatedly). Content is expensive.
There are two challenges to effective branching narrative: making it less expensive, and making it aesthetically pleasing. Choose Your Own Adventure stories limited the branching factor to a few main plot lines. Most of the choices were dead ends or digressions. Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests a more sophisticated use of branching, based on Kuleshov's early studies of film. Some of your scenes can be neutral or ambiguous, such that their interpretation is subject to discoveries in later scenes. This technique is used to good effect in The Sixth Sense and Memento. It's a craft with few or no masters, but I think it's worth exploring.
Are you sure there is a CodeWarrior for Linux? The only product I ever knew was an IDE for GCC.
If either the Mozilla or Trolltech pages had been updated in the last year, I might agree that this is old news. As it is, two developers with a lot of experience with KHTML seem interested in making this a viable port. It also seems that their approach may be more sustainable, such that Qt/KDE can be a fully supported peer of GTK+ as a Mozilla front end.
While it's not free, Komodo is a slick app. built with the Mozilla framework. I've been meaning to take a look at Creating Applications with Mozilla to see whether it's worth considering for my projects.
Perhaps more interesting than porting Gecko to Konqueror is integrating Qt and KDE with Firefox. It sounds like this porting fest has gained a couple of talented developers for the Mozilla project. This is good for both KDE and Mozilla.
Oracle only supports RHEL, SLES, and Asianux (a Red Hat derivative). I don't know what problems you had, but I doubt that they were due to any fault of Debian, per se. That said, I agree with many of the "duh" posts in this article about using a supported platform. I'm not thrilled about the trend towards supporting only "enterprise" distributions, but that's what you sign up for when you rely on proprietary software.
The other argument against Debian is that it's yet another platform to learn. Does it matter that (OpenBSD | FreeBSD | Gentoo | Debian) is more (secure | reliable | optimized | comprehensive) if no one knows how to administer it? When you have limited staff (and who doesn't?), there's value in standardizing. For example, use SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for production servers and SuSE Linux for other tasks (desktops, NIS slaves, etc.).
There are two things I don't like about the iBook: the single-button trackpad, and the tiny modifier keys (Emacs is a disaster). On Windows, I change the active tab in Firefox by pressing Ctrl-PgDn, an easy one-handed movement. On OS X, I change the active tab in Safari by pressing Cmd-Shift-Arrow, an awkward (usually) two-handed movement. I also miss the Windows key and the Start menu.
Story-based games, especially, deserve to be presented in a final, polished form. For that reason, I would not expect it to be released early and often. There is also a question of artistic integrity. Game designers, amateur and professional alike, have strong ideas. Can they share authorship with some dude on the Internet?
Anyone have experience with a Bluetooth mouse? I've read complaints that the Logitech MX 900 is slow and uneven, due to the low bandwidth of Bluetooth.
A GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. You can get better video in a PowerBook. I guess that settles it: no Doom 3 for OS X.
Everyone talks about how complex Windows and Office are (millions of LOC), but I have to believe that some of it is unnecessary. If I was sitting on a few billion dollars, I think I would spend some of it on refactoring.
In Lindon, UT, UNIX is synonymous with System V, which is, reportedly, highly contagious. In the rest of the world, Unix is a de facto standard surrounded by de jure standards, from which there are so many to choose: POSIX, SUS, UNIX, SVID, LSB.
In the early days of the SCO nuisance, Eric Raymond wrote about "genetic" Unix and "trademark" Unix as curiosities in the family of operating systems that share design elements. Those design elements (or, as the court jesters would describe them, "methods and concepts") are responsible for the enduring success of Unix, not ten to twenty-year old code.
I've been dipping my feet back into Unix programming, and it's maddeningly difficult to write portable code. Whether it's non-blocking I/O, pseudo terminals, or reaping child processes, one platform has some weird quirk. Still, I'll take it over the dozen-parameter functions in the Windows API and the quaint world of VMS.
I guess it's time for my off-topic DDD story. I put the Indiana Jones box set in my cart for $35. When I placed the order, it showed up as $45. I immediately sent an email to customer service, which replied that it couldn't do anything until after the item shipped. I reminded them, after it shipped, that I had been overcharged, but got no reply. The credit card company came through, but I'm done with DDD.
I remember iMuse being a touted feature of X-Wing. With the wholesale adoption of digital audio, I imagine it's harder to implement. A soundtrack can add to the experience, but I'm hard pressed to think of a good example.
Before I discovered the new GLR parser, I couldn't manage to write a LALR(1) grammar for the source language. The target language is Python, so I experimented with PLY, Spark, and others.
If I ever do build a satisfactory parser with Bison, I wonder how it would interface with LLVM. I tried converting a toy Bison parser to C++ and it seemed like there were some rough edges.
If only this were true. It's fashionable to say that modern hardware frees you from performance concerns, but I have found Python's slow performance to be an obstacle. Loops, function calls, and name lookups can be annoyingly expensive, to say nothing of bit twiddling.
I like Python, but its full potential isn't realized without some optimization and, occasionally, an accompanying C module.
Many Python programmers are (often former) Perl programmers who are fed up with Perl's expressiveness (i.e., TMTOWTDI). Making Perl as complex as a natural language may be empowering, but only if you have a commensurate amount of time to devote to it. I've read Programming Perl cover to cover (twice), and I'm still not as comfortable with it as I am with Python, for which I haven't read any books. Based on what I've heard about the new features of Perl 6, I doubt I'll ever go back.
The white space thing is virtually a non-issue. The only problem I have with it is that it complicates copy and paste to a different indent level. Even then, most editors have a command to indent or outdent a region. We're all entitled to our opinions, but it's a shame that so many people can't get past a few parentheses (Lisp) or spaces (Python).
I see no reason to think that the Unreal engine will ever be released as free software, regardless of its ties to third-party software. It's really something special for id to release the Quake engines. You see it here and there with smaller and older titles, but John has said that the Quake 3 engine (still to be found in recent games like Jedi Academy and Medal of Honor) may be released by the end of the year.
As I recall, 6.0 was a very modest upgrade from 2.0. I remember thinking: "I paid $100 for squiggly red lines?" I liked WordPerfect for DOS, but Word for Windows had it all over WordPerfect for Windows in the early years.
No one factor gave Windows its dominance. Clearly, it rode the commodity PC wave. I would, however, credit Word for Windows 2.0 with showing off the potential of Windows, such as it was.
The GNOME terminal is really just a shell for VTE. (It may still be possible to build it with ZVT.) 90% of the bugs associated with the terminal should really be filed against VTE, the maintenance for which seems to be a low-priority task for Nalin Dahyabhai at Red Hat.
If you want to help, try testing some of the unconfirmed bug reports, or some of the patches, such as 143914.
On the other hand, strong retail sales can make an impression on the publisher, distributor, wholesalers, and retailers, which may make it easier to secure an advance on the next title. That said, id Software isn't exactly strapped for cash or clout, so I don't think they care where you buy Doom 3.
Reminds me of the start of Jedi Knight II. I really wanted that light sabre.
And this is why the gulf between Linux and Mac OS is so wide. "It's so easy, just do this and this and this. Oh, you mean you want it to just work?"
Whether it's because iTunes tagged the files unconventionally, or because the XMMS is broken /inferior, the simplicity of iTunes didn't translate to the original poster's Linux environment.
iTunes has plenty of room for improvement, but it's a solid app., both on Windows and OS X.
I don't blame the OP for missing it.
You can already de-DRM iTMS songs with Hymn. If you don't like leaving your Apple ID in the file, it's probably not a big deal to modify the Hymn source.
I'd caution people authorizing iTunes under Wine (and Windows, for that matter) to be aware of the DRM scheme, so that you don't accidentally lose the right to play your songs. You can authorize up to five computers, and you may unwittingly reauthorize the same computer multiple times with no clear way to fix it. With Wine, it is probably quite easy to reset some of the data that determines the system key:
- Windows product ID
- BIOS version
- CPU name
- serial number of C: drive
The first three items are taken directly from the Registry. I don't have a Linux box handy, but it's possible that those entries are simply missing. I don't know how Wine would handle the serial number of the C: drive.