Blizzard has made some changes to their file formats, so many of the user-made maps which contain custom spells (such as Defense of the Ancients or DAOC Battlegrounds) are broken until further notice due to this patch. Too bad we don't have the option to not upgrade and still play online.
10% of a larger brain is still more than 10% of a smaller brain. I would venture to guess that the randomness of evolution causes the mutation that is statistically more likely (increase in brain size) to be selected over the mutation that is "better" (more efficient use of brain). And perhaps having a large, inefficient, difficult-to-birth brain improved the overall chances of survival and reproduction; even though it made the birthing process more difficult.
Late night bashing on enemy pixels is great stress relief. I'll take screwed up melatonin levels anyday over tossing and turning all night from pent-up anxiety.
The potential here is really great. The problem almost all MMORPGs have with is that they were designed to be a computer version of the traditional paper-and-pencil role playing game, but the crossover doesn't work.
I disagree. Most existing MMORPGs were designed to be computer versions of the 9-to-5 rat race: give players just enough incentive to keep them working on a repetetive treadmill for hours and hours, while cultivating as many feelings of social attachment and personal investment in the avatars on the treadmill as possible. They all intentionally design the game to have long boring stretches so that you will socialize and become attached to a social network in the game, and feel that you have invested alot of time into your avatar.
I like the sound of NCSoft's new project in that it actually follows the smaller-party, episodic nature of a traditional RPG campaign much more closely. I also like the idea of achieving social bonding and character investment through fun activities and playing out a story-rich adventure instead of through boredom-by-design.
So what if AOL owns the source? Even if the WASTE source can't be used legally, we now have a defacto protocol for small encrypted p2p networks. With WASTE, Justin has effectively pointed the way and said "look guys, heres a neat idea - go implement". After all, AOL pulled the plug on Gnutella and look at all the Gnutella clients out there.
However, that's gonna change. At the moment it's still quite complex to modify games to any real extent. I'm not saying it's gonna get easier per se, but it is gonna get easier to get more done (subtle distinction, but very important).
The trend does not continue ad infinitum, however. There reaches a point where the companies say "we will not give the modder this much control over the game", otherwise they will be putting in the hands of the user not just a reconfigurable game, but also a general game development platform. After sinking millions into developing their game engine and associated tools, no company is going to just give that away for free.
The closest thing so far has been Id's track record of GPLing older engines - but Id's behavior is the exception. And although there are several interesting projects out there using Id's codebase these, by using GPL code, will never serve as the foundation for commercial startups (getting coding experience is one thing - getting funding for a new idea entirely something else), and will never result in a game that pushes the technological envelope.
I could go on and on, but Eva is not just about action. In fact, the action often carries meaningful undercurrents (especially when Shinji first fights Sachiel).
I disagree. Evangelion is nothing more than a troll against anime fans everywhere. It is the emperor's new clothes of philosophical anime. No matter how packed with superficially philosophical elements the series is, that does not make it anything more than a mishmash of unrelated topics from religion, philosophy and psychology poorly strung together in a highly abstract and "artistic" fashion. Just because something sounds profound does not mean that it is. Just because a message looks obfuscated does not mean that it contains any deeper message.
remember also that MGS, despite being a "violent video game", was a social statement. MGS was threaded through and through with anti-war themes. From the dangers of landmines left after a conflict, to the horrors of torture, to the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, MGS made you think about the reality of the violence you were play-acting.
I cannot imagine him finding a real actress with both the physicality to play Alita AND the childlike innocence that made her so easy to identify with.
Thats because in reality having exceptionally powerful physique and being a childlike waif are mutually exclusive.
... because it is in the poorest areas of the earth that cannot afford genetic engineering that good old fashioned darwinian evolution and selection will ensure that the species always has a failsafe in the case that the rest of us engineer ourselves in some way that has some unforseen critical flaw (vulernability to a new class of infections, loss of ability to perform unassisted reprodutcion or childbirth, new genetic diseases resutling from mutations of engineered genes, etc.).
Does anyone else see the problem here? The lighting under the truch is all wrong, and the wheels are floating and not giving any sense of weight. I know its really a little detail, but you can honestly see it on a few of the other cars and trucks in this scene as well.
Correct me if I am wrong, but what I believe you are expecting to see are shadows that come right up to the wheels of the trucks - this is a mistaken expectation for two reasons. Firstly, the scene is lit with daylight coming from above and slightly behind the subjects in order to expose them in silouette, with just enough ambient lighting to make a few details distinguishable in each figure. The daylight illuminates some of the roadway that lies z-axis-wise under the truck because the light is not aiming straight down, but rather slightly towards the viewer. Secondly, the scene appears to have been rendered with some form of radiosity-like renderer. This type of rendering method takes into account light bouning around the atmosphere and off the objects in a much more realistic way than the flat ambient coefficient of more simplistic renderers. The end result is that scattered light encroaches even more upon what you are expecting to be a well-defined shadow under the truck. To summarize: this appears to be a fairly realistic rendering with the truck firmly set upon the road, given daylight that is aiming somewhat at us and light from the environment is bouncing around under the truck.
... they need models of their specific user: how the user likes to use the device, what knowledge of the device the user has, what the user is trying to do with the device presently, what emotional state the user is in, etc. A model of this type with minimalist presentation would be far superior to a pretty 3D visualization in helping the assistant do its job.
note that by this hypothesis a personal assistant should collect plenty of data about the user before ever interdicting - as opposed to making an immediate clippy-like interruption of the user's activities. appearing only in the proper context will also positively impact how the user feels about the assitant. if the assistant's first impression is "an annoyance that interrupts me when i am trying to do something" it will likely be shut off and never get a chance ot help the user. on the otherhand, if the assitant only appears when the user definitly needs help, he will viewed as "a friend that helps me when i am stuck" and will likely be given more chances to help the user in the future.
btw, i am a 3D animator by profession and a computer scientist by education and i still think that a fancy 3D model is not the right tool for the job.
> Basically, printers are becoming a consumable product.
ah, the beauty of capitalism at work! why do things efficiently when you can do things profitably? now this is surely a system we must spread to the rest of the world wether they like it or not!
...but I can't help feeling like "globalization" is entirely one-sided due to the geographical constraints of most people vs. most corporations - i.e. multinational X can shop around for cheap labor in country Y, but I can't reciprocally go to country Y to pick up cheap consumer products. especially with enforced geographical constraints such as region encoding on multimedia discs, companies get to keep the differential in their favor, paying the cheapest wage and charging the highest price. as foreign jobs ship overseas, we will eventually be put in a condition of earning the cheapest wage yet paying the highest prices.
... if everything that enters our ears is filtered through an mp3 encoder from birth.
The years of exposure to non-compressed environmental noise that any child would have (be it in the country or the city) is likely to ensure that their hearing development is never stunted by listening to too much compressed audio.
Are the editors not even trying to appear like normal, rational human beings rather than blithering idiot linux fanboys?
Well, to give them credit the blithering belonged to an "anonymous submitter" and not the slashdot editors.
Re:why they ever don't get it right about game des
on
Will Wright on Game Design
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Good game design lets you slip in a role of an actor, not a designer, thats what all the arcade stuff was all about. Gaming is adrenaline (defender, robotron) not administration(warcraft, sim xx) and should be not to time-consuming indeed.
I see, thats why mod'ability is becoming more and more of a standard feature on games these days. I guess all this time I've been having a blast designing a Warcraft III map, I really just been proving how bad the game is... mmm hmm
Being informed about all the issues facing a company is more than a full-time job. There is no feasible way for an individual shareholder to be well informed of every issue that goes into the day-to-day operation of a company they have stock in. Thus, as an absolute neccesity, shareholders trust the hired management to be well-informed and make the right decisions for the company.
The fact is that no one can supervise the supervisors because no one else has as much inside information about the company - especially nowadays when the books are far from transparent.
What is especially bad about this circumstance is that the management has been able to commit robbery from the owners of the company and it is perfectly legal. Its like owning a book store and coming in one morning to find the night-managers took a several-thousand-dollar loan from the vault - and not being able to put them in jail.
Won't this actually make RSA cryptography implementations stronger by enabling better selection of key pairs? I'm not exactly up to speed on crypto, but in the past weren't keys sometimes being selected that were only relatively prime, but guaranteeing that they are truly prime effectively strengthens the practical implementation - and faster primality testing perhaps makes it easier to up the practical key length?
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard has made some changes to their file formats, so many of the user-made maps which contain custom spells (such as Defense of the Ancients or DAOC Battlegrounds) are broken until further notice due to this patch. Too bad we don't have the option to not upgrade and still play online.
10% of a larger brain is still more than 10% of a smaller brain. I would venture to guess that the randomness of evolution causes the mutation that is statistically more likely (increase in brain size) to be selected over the mutation that is "better" (more efficient use of brain). And perhaps having a large, inefficient, difficult-to-birth brain improved the overall chances of survival and reproduction; even though it made the birthing process more difficult.
Late night bashing on enemy pixels is great stress relief. I'll take screwed up melatonin levels anyday over tossing and turning all night from pent-up anxiety.
The potential here is really great. The problem almost all MMORPGs have with is that they were designed to be a computer version of the traditional paper-and-pencil role playing game, but the crossover doesn't work.
I disagree. Most existing MMORPGs were designed to be computer versions of the 9-to-5 rat race: give players just enough incentive to keep them working on a repetetive treadmill for hours and hours, while cultivating as many feelings of social attachment and personal investment in the avatars on the treadmill as possible. They all intentionally design the game to have long boring stretches so that you will socialize and become attached to a social network in the game, and feel that you have invested alot of time into your avatar.
I like the sound of NCSoft's new project in that it actually follows the smaller-party, episodic nature of a traditional RPG campaign much more closely. I also like the idea of achieving social bonding and character investment through fun activities and playing out a story-rich adventure instead of through boredom-by-design.
So what if AOL owns the source? Even if the WASTE source can't be used legally, we now have a defacto protocol for small encrypted p2p networks. With WASTE, Justin has effectively pointed the way and said "look guys, heres a neat idea - go implement". After all, AOL pulled the plug on Gnutella and look at all the Gnutella clients out there.
However, that's gonna change. At the moment it's still quite complex to modify games to any real extent. I'm not saying it's gonna get easier per se, but it is gonna get easier to get more done (subtle distinction, but very important).
The trend does not continue ad infinitum, however. There reaches a point where the companies say "we will not give the modder this much control over the game", otherwise they will be putting in the hands of the user not just a reconfigurable game, but also a general game development platform. After sinking millions into developing their game engine and associated tools, no company is going to just give that away for free.
The closest thing so far has been Id's track record of GPLing older engines - but Id's behavior is the exception. And although there are several interesting projects out there using Id's codebase these, by using GPL code, will never serve as the foundation for commercial startups (getting coding experience is one thing - getting funding for a new idea entirely something else), and will never result in a game that pushes the technological envelope.
I could go on and on, but Eva is not just about action. In fact, the action often carries meaningful undercurrents (especially when Shinji first fights Sachiel).
I disagree. Evangelion is nothing more than a troll against anime fans everywhere. It is the emperor's new clothes of philosophical anime. No matter how packed with superficially philosophical elements the series is, that does not make it anything more than a mishmash of unrelated topics from religion, philosophy and psychology poorly strung together in a highly abstract and "artistic" fashion. Just because something sounds profound does not mean that it is. Just because a message looks obfuscated does not mean that it contains any deeper message.
YHBT by Gainax.
YHL
HAND
remember also that MGS, despite being a "violent video game", was a social statement. MGS was threaded through and through with anti-war themes. From the dangers of landmines left after a conflict, to the horrors of torture, to the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, MGS made you think about the reality of the violence you were play-acting.
... for any website that uses it!
I cannot imagine him finding a real actress with both the physicality to play Alita AND the childlike innocence that made her so easy to identify with.
Thats because in reality having exceptionally powerful physique and being a childlike waif are mutually exclusive.
... because it is in the poorest areas of the earth that cannot afford genetic engineering that good old fashioned darwinian evolution and selection will ensure that the species always has a failsafe in the case that the rest of us engineer ourselves in some way that has some unforseen critical flaw (vulernability to a new class of infections, loss of ability to perform unassisted reprodutcion or childbirth, new genetic diseases resutling from mutations of engineered genes, etc.).
Does anyone else see the problem here? The lighting under the truch is all wrong, and the wheels are floating and not giving any sense of weight. I know its really a little detail, but you can honestly see it on a few of the other cars and trucks in this scene as well.
Correct me if I am wrong, but what I believe you are expecting to see are shadows that come right up to the wheels of the trucks - this is a mistaken expectation for two reasons. Firstly, the scene is lit with daylight coming from above and slightly behind the subjects in order to expose them in silouette, with just enough ambient lighting to make a few details distinguishable in each figure. The daylight illuminates some of the roadway that lies z-axis-wise under the truck because the light is not aiming straight down, but rather slightly towards the viewer. Secondly, the scene appears to have been rendered with some form of radiosity-like renderer. This type of rendering method takes into account light bouning around the atmosphere and off the objects in a much more realistic way than the flat ambient coefficient of more simplistic renderers. The end result is that scattered light encroaches even more upon what you are expecting to be a well-defined shadow under the truck. To summarize: this appears to be a fairly realistic rendering with the truck firmly set upon the road, given daylight that is aiming somewhat at us and light from the environment is bouncing around under the truck.
... they need models of their specific user: how the user likes to use the device, what knowledge of the device the user has, what the user is trying to do with the device presently, what emotional state the user is in, etc. A model of this type with minimalist presentation would be far superior to a pretty 3D visualization in helping the assistant do its job.
note that by this hypothesis a personal assistant should collect plenty of data about the user before ever interdicting - as opposed to making an immediate clippy-like interruption of the user's activities. appearing only in the proper context will also positively impact how the user feels about the assitant. if the assistant's first impression is "an annoyance that interrupts me when i am trying to do something" it will likely be shut off and never get a chance ot help the user. on the otherhand, if the assitant only appears when the user definitly needs help, he will viewed as "a friend that helps me when i am stuck" and will likely be given more chances to help the user in the future.
btw, i am a 3D animator by profession and a computer scientist by education and i still think that a fancy 3D model is not the right tool for the job.
> Basically, printers are becoming a consumable product.
ah, the beauty of capitalism at work! why do things efficiently when you can do things profitably? now this is surely a system we must spread to the rest of the world wether they like it or not!
...but I can't help feeling like "globalization" is entirely one-sided due to the geographical constraints of most people vs. most corporations - i.e. multinational X can shop around for cheap labor in country Y, but I can't reciprocally go to country Y to pick up cheap consumer products. especially with enforced geographical constraints such as region encoding on multimedia discs, companies get to keep the differential in their favor, paying the cheapest wage and charging the highest price. as foreign jobs ship overseas, we will eventually be put in a condition of earning the cheapest wage yet paying the highest prices.
we all know that Cory is just pharming Whuffie.
...which means they are not rioting out in the streets. panne et MMORPG circus
i guess that to some, anything less than scrolling the text of LOTR over the movie screen would not constitute as a "movie adaptation".
... if everything that enters our ears is filtered through an mp3 encoder from birth.
The years of exposure to non-compressed environmental noise that any child would have (be it in the country or the city) is likely to ensure that their hearing development is never stunted by listening to too much compressed audio.
Are the editors not even trying to appear like normal, rational human beings rather than blithering idiot linux fanboys?
Well, to give them credit the blithering belonged to an "anonymous submitter" and not the slashdot editors.
Good game design lets you slip in a role of an actor, not a designer, thats what all the arcade stuff was all about. Gaming is adrenaline (defender, robotron) not administration(warcraft, sim xx) and should be not to time-consuming indeed.
... mmm hmm
I see, thats why mod'ability is becoming more and more of a standard feature on games these days. I guess all this time I've been having a blast designing a Warcraft III map, I really just been proving how bad the game is
who cares the topic
this is just a good excuse
to author haiku
third is BJ
Yeah, you're guaranteed to get your money's worth out of that. Oh wait you meant Black Jack...
Being informed about all the issues facing a company is more than a full-time job. There is no feasible way for an individual shareholder to be well informed of every issue that goes into the day-to-day operation of a company they have stock in. Thus, as an absolute neccesity, shareholders trust the hired management to be well-informed and make the right decisions for the company.
The fact is that no one can supervise the supervisors because no one else has as much inside information about the company - especially nowadays when the books are far from transparent.
What is especially bad about this circumstance is that the management has been able to commit robbery from the owners of the company and it is perfectly legal. Its like owning a book store and coming in one morning to find the night-managers took a several-thousand-dollar loan from the vault - and not being able to put them in jail.
Won't this actually make RSA cryptography implementations stronger by enabling better selection of key pairs? I'm not exactly up to speed on crypto, but in the past weren't keys sometimes being selected that were only relatively prime, but guaranteeing that they are truly prime effectively strengthens the practical implementation - and faster primality testing perhaps makes it easier to up the practical key length?