You could probably do something with some flat text files, some scripts and Graphviz that would be at least as good as what you have coming out of Photoshop....that assumes you have no need to put boobies on your network diagrams.
Oh, and that whole "M$" thing - dang, that's hysterical! I mean, who else could have thought of such a funny use of the dollar sign! Of course, I'm sure you use it when you type out My$QL, too, since they also charge for their products. And of course, you probably really hate Clothing $tores, and evil people who charge you money when you order $ushi from them. To say nothing of ga$oline, mu$ic, and film$.
Best use I ever saw was at the Salt Lake City airport. On the departures board, it listed the flight to "La$ Vega$" as delayed.
Is having those items actually going to make the game more fun? Short of getting out of the noob zones (which doesn't really take long), there's no magical point at which you suddenly have good enough gear & a powerful enough character to finally start having fun.If the game's not fun at level 15 with the armor you can get through normal play & trade, what makes somebody think it'd be any better at level 30 with several hundred dollars invested in the armor?
It's somewhat believable if you look at how Sony treated the Dreamcast. Sony was pushing the PSX while hyping the PS2, doing whatever they could to stop people from buying a DC until they could roll out their competition for it, almost a year after the DC shipped.
This sounds like it's got about as much of a basis as saying that violence in games leaves us desensitized to real violence and more likely to commit violent acts.
The problem is that since the game wasn't a runaway success, those who claimed it would promote vandalism would simply spin this to back up their point even further.
High-school lasts 4 years of your life. You grow up & move on with your life (if you're mentally stable).
The West has been occupying & opressing the Middle East for generations with no sign of stopping any time soon.
There's a very major difference between the two causes. I fail to understand how you can have sympathy for some kids that went on a killing spree because of a temporary situation and not have any for those who have been systematically put down for generations.
What's wrong with being "left in the dust"? As long as there's content and players around, it shouldn't matter what level you're at. If the game isn't fun at level 10, it's not going to be fun at level 40. Beyond that, the hardcore guys at the level cap aren't generally going to -want- to group with some casual gamer who doesn't have skills & dedication for some massive raid.
OTOH, if you're speaking about being able to keep playing with friends that have progressed at different levels, I can understand that. EQ2 and CoH already have systems that temporarily gives players different 'virtual' levels to allow characters with wildly differing levels to effectively group together.
You don't find people rambling about how FPSes are unfriendly to noobs and those with slow reflexes. Nobody would seriously consider making the next Final Fantasy 'accessable' to people who want action gaming and don't have the attention span to play a 40+ hour game. You don't see Hollywood putting massive explosions into romantic comedies to make them more appealing to guys. Where does this need to make MMORPGs appeal to everyon come from?
Most of the (rather short) article is uninspired whinging about MMORPGs and can be discarded. The only point they made that seems valid is the bit about solo, class-specific instances. The idea of providing a class-tailored quest that focuses on the players skill with their class' unique skills sounds like it would be good, especially if you can break it up into several sessions and use it to fill time between finding groups.
Everquest 2 has an element of this in the Halmark Quests that you need to progress beyond levels 10 and 20 but they provide an unequal challenge and are generally fairly easy. For example, the level 10 quests for the rogue involve killing mobs, sneaking and tricking people while the priest quests simply involve spending large amounts of time running back and forth between your trainer and some random NPC with no real challenges involved.
Guildwars also has an aspect of this in the early game, where you're picking up your secondary profession. You get quests that are designed to expose you to the abilities of your potential secondary class so you can decide what skillset is right for you. This works out really well since the game already has an established system for NPC 'henchmen' that work with the player but, unfortunately, it falls short because these quests only happen at early levels - pretty much everything else is generic and non-class-specific.
I don't claim to know how it should work but, if the game's going to have solo content, having some of it targeted at how well you play your role would be a lot better than "you're level $X, go do $FOO".
I've never been able to understand how people are willing to pay money like this for MMORPGs. Why would you want to pay large sums of money to play, as a high level character, a game that you're unwilling to play as a low-level character? There's nothing significantly different about gameplay at high levels and, without the experience of actually leveling a character up through the levels, you're going to suck because you don't know what your skills are, ruin other people's gameplay & be left with an unenjoyable game and a bunch of people hating you for being a noob.
I'd much rather play as a level 10 noob in a group with a bunch of other level 10 noobs who are going to forgive you for fucking up and doing level 10 quests than have a level 60 character that I don't understand and pissing everyone off because being off 2s in casting a spell got the whole group killed.
Exactly - even if sharing the program wouldn't result in a competitors gaining a significant advantage over your company, 'open source' implies a much larger scale of colaboration. What you might suggest would be more along the lines of a 'strategic partnership' or something along those lines - an agreement to share the burden of development of the code. With $2M in development costs, flat-out giving it away to the world sounds like an iffy case, at best, to make even if, as you say, supporting it as a commercial product doesn't make business sense either. What you might propose is, instead of selling it as a product would be to get some 'buy in' fee to become a partner in the project - a financial and contractual obligation to shoulder part of the continued development costs.
Granted, the OP was too vague about what the project is, what kinds of effects it might have on the market and what use it would be to other groups, it's hard to say anything absolutely. A collaborative effort such as this might've been easier to sell to the suits at an earlier stage, before $2M had been sunk into the project.
You are right when you talk about support issues - nobody's going to drop $500k on a piece of software, even if they get source, without expecting some sort of support or continued development and, if the market's as small as you believe it to be, that probably won't be cost effective.
In the end, these sorts of decisions really should've been made -far- earlier in the development process. Waiting until you've got a final build in hand is entirely too late to think about making it a commercial product. If nothing else, you've designed the entire product without seeking any input from potential customers - it may not even properly meet any of needs.
It might not be long before they do. California can be a real hassle when it comes to taxes.
My father retired from the Air Force and then moved to Washington. It took 5 years to get California to stop sending him bills & nasty letters. They were convinced that he owed them taxes because he was living in CA when he retired.
It's not such a bad thing if mommy & daddy are willing to throw enough money at your business ideas for you to figure out how to make money. For the rest of us, it doesn't work so well.
Then what's the catch? I can't think of anyone in a major American corporation that would make a sequel to a film that lost $13M. If these numbers are accurate either "gross" and "cost" mean something other than what they mean in normal English or there is something hidden in there.
You seem to forget that most professors, even those in computer science, don't have an IT background and don't think of things like "web logs". Even those that do aren't generally going to have access to the logs on their departmental webservers.
Slashdot Mirror
You could probably do something with some flat text files, some scripts and Graphviz that would be at least as good as what you have coming out of Photoshop. ...that assumes you have no need to put boobies on your network diagrams.
Best use I ever saw was at the Salt Lake City airport. On the departures board, it listed the flight to "La$ Vega$" as delayed.
nVidia is known for having superior Linux and OpenGL support, relative to ATI's offerings.
Is having those items actually going to make the game more fun? Short of getting out of the noob zones (which doesn't really take long), there's no magical point at which you suddenly have good enough gear & a powerful enough character to finally start having fun.If the game's not fun at level 15 with the armor you can get through normal play & trade, what makes somebody think it'd be any better at level 30 with several hundred dollars invested in the armor?
This I can't understand.
It's somewhat believable if you look at how Sony treated the Dreamcast. Sony was pushing the PSX while hyping the PS2, doing whatever they could to stop people from buying a DC until they could roll out their competition for it, almost a year after the DC shipped.
This sounds like it's got about as much of a basis as saying that violence in games leaves us desensitized to real violence and more likely to commit violent acts.
The problem is that since the game wasn't a runaway success, those who claimed it would promote vandalism would simply spin this to back up their point even further.
Not quite. I think it's supposed to be "Why I hate apache.slashdot.org's color scheme".
High-school lasts 4 years of your life. You grow up & move on with your life (if you're mentally stable).
The West has been occupying & opressing the Middle East for generations with no sign of stopping any time soon.
There's a very major difference between the two causes. I fail to understand how you can have sympathy for some kids that went on a killing spree because of a temporary situation and not have any for those who have been systematically put down for generations.
What's wrong with being "left in the dust"? As long as there's content and players around, it shouldn't matter what level you're at. If the game isn't fun at level 10, it's not going to be fun at level 40. Beyond that, the hardcore guys at the level cap aren't generally going to -want- to group with some casual gamer who doesn't have skills & dedication for some massive raid.
OTOH, if you're speaking about being able to keep playing with friends that have progressed at different levels, I can understand that. EQ2 and CoH already have systems that temporarily gives players different 'virtual' levels to allow characters with wildly differing levels to effectively group together.
You don't find people rambling about how FPSes are unfriendly to noobs and those with slow reflexes. Nobody would seriously consider making the next Final Fantasy 'accessable' to people who want action gaming and don't have the attention span to play a 40+ hour game. You don't see Hollywood putting massive explosions into romantic comedies to make them more appealing to guys. Where does this need to make MMORPGs appeal to everyon come from?
I thought Wired was on "our side". Why are they dragging this shit out of the past?
Most of the (rather short) article is uninspired whinging about MMORPGs and can be discarded. The only point they made that seems valid is the bit about solo, class-specific instances. The idea of providing a class-tailored quest that focuses on the players skill with their class' unique skills sounds like it would be good, especially if you can break it up into several sessions and use it to fill time between finding groups.
Everquest 2 has an element of this in the Halmark Quests that you need to progress beyond levels 10 and 20 but they provide an unequal challenge and are generally fairly easy. For example, the level 10 quests for the rogue involve killing mobs, sneaking and tricking people while the priest quests simply involve spending large amounts of time running back and forth between your trainer and some random NPC with no real challenges involved.
Guildwars also has an aspect of this in the early game, where you're picking up your secondary profession. You get quests that are designed to expose you to the abilities of your potential secondary class so you can decide what skillset is right for you. This works out really well since the game already has an established system for NPC 'henchmen' that work with the player but, unfortunately, it falls short because these quests only happen at early levels - pretty much everything else is generic and non-class-specific.
I don't claim to know how it should work but, if the game's going to have solo content, having some of it targeted at how well you play your role would be a lot better than "you're level $X, go do $FOO".
I work for a super-secret government facility in a shielded bunker a mile below the surface, you insensitive clod.
Crack Attack.
I've never been able to understand how people are willing to pay money like this for MMORPGs. Why would you want to pay large sums of money to play, as a high level character, a game that you're unwilling to play as a low-level character? There's nothing significantly different about gameplay at high levels and, without the experience of actually leveling a character up through the levels, you're going to suck because you don't know what your skills are, ruin other people's gameplay & be left with an unenjoyable game and a bunch of people hating you for being a noob.
I'd much rather play as a level 10 noob in a group with a bunch of other level 10 noobs who are going to forgive you for fucking up and doing level 10 quests than have a level 60 character that I don't understand and pissing everyone off because being off 2s in casting a spell got the whole group killed.
What happens when somebody makes a high-quality digital back to that same camera body that Ansel Adams was using?
Exactly - even if sharing the program wouldn't result in a competitors gaining a significant advantage over your company, 'open source' implies a much larger scale of colaboration. What you might suggest would be more along the lines of a 'strategic partnership' or something along those lines - an agreement to share the burden of development of the code. With $2M in development costs, flat-out giving it away to the world sounds like an iffy case, at best, to make even if, as you say, supporting it as a commercial product doesn't make business sense either. What you might propose is, instead of selling it as a product would be to get some 'buy in' fee to become a partner in the project - a financial and contractual obligation to shoulder part of the continued development costs.
Granted, the OP was too vague about what the project is, what kinds of effects it might have on the market and what use it would be to other groups, it's hard to say anything absolutely. A collaborative effort such as this might've been easier to sell to the suits at an earlier stage, before $2M had been sunk into the project.
You are right when you talk about support issues - nobody's going to drop $500k on a piece of software, even if they get source, without expecting some sort of support or continued development and, if the market's as small as you believe it to be, that probably won't be cost effective.
In the end, these sorts of decisions really should've been made -far- earlier in the development process. Waiting until you've got a final build in hand is entirely too late to think about making it a commercial product. If nothing else, you've designed the entire product without seeking any input from potential customers - it may not even properly meet any of needs.
It might not be long before they do. California can be a real hassle when it comes to taxes.
My father retired from the Air Force and then moved to Washington. It took 5 years to get California to stop sending him bills & nasty letters. They were convinced that he owed them taxes because he was living in CA when he retired.
It's not such a bad thing if mommy & daddy are willing to throw enough money at your business ideas for you to figure out how to make money. For the rest of us, it doesn't work so well.
Then what's the catch? I can't think of anyone in a major American corporation that would make a sequel to a film that lost $13M. If these numbers are accurate either "gross" and "cost" mean something other than what they mean in normal English or there is something hidden in there.
Ask and you shall recieve.
Ask and you shall recieve.
You seem to forget that most professors, even those in computer science, don't have an IT background and don't think of things like "web logs". Even those that do aren't generally going to have access to the logs on their departmental webservers.
OTOH, look at how MSFT is position the new XBox, a product based on IBM's PPC chips, as something more than just a game console.