Server. The key word is server. We used to run a Quake server on our huge multi processor sparc in the '90s. The server was way over specced for the work it was doing, it just hurt seeing those processor cycles go to waste.
"In my opinion, all reporting should be done through ingame interface. And, the reporting should be based on the developers pushing specific agendas for specific results, at least most of the time."
This is how I've seen it done in a couple of betas I've been on. The bug submittal is done through a game command or interface option so you can log the bug as it happens. Additionally, important information such as the player's location, status and even video card used can be automatically gathered. While the testing I've done hasn't been specific to the point of "run this one quest" - specific areas have been noted to test. For example: "concentrate on the tutorial", "the login interface has intermittent problems, please hammer it".
Yeah actually I have. Definately need to mod the screen on it - the default not lit one was pretty bad (I've never seen the back lit Euro version). The GP32 is also showing it's age processor wise. I really would love to see an update of this with faster hardware, more memory and a back lit screen.
I was lucky enough to meet a couple of players in the early levels by helping them out. They turned out to be good guys and 6 months later we have a smallish guild of quality players. We don't recruit just to get more players, we recruit good players who are out to have fun. In direct contrast, a guild we play with sometimes has recently started to blindly recruit. They are going for the numbers in order to run Molten Core and Zul Gurrab. Some of their new players are complete idiots and on more than one occasion they have recruited known loot ninjas. On one hand, now they have more people to fill out their runs, but on the other hand good luck with that team getting through MC or ZG. I much prefer having a smaller, better guild than a playing with a bunch of jerks, morons or griefers. Oh, and yes you can definately 5 man most of the later instances. Sure it takes more time and more skill but it's not impossible. You'll probably need a well rounded group to do it, and some classes are better then other for certain instances. Even Upper Black Rock Spire which tops out at a 15 man raid can be done with much fewer. I've done it in an 8 man run.
Hmmm. Well in the two betas I'm in at the current moment it kind of went this way:
Initial limited beta invites were a few thousand. This initial load revealed some big problems with the login system and database on both games. At this point, the beta sessions where more like "crash the server super quick to generate a ton of debug info". It seemed like in both cases the initial limited beta helped work out some major scale issues with the primary logon and character databases. This round of beta was also used in a marketing manner as a "thanks for playing our other game come check out our cool new one". Of course what you got to experience was about 5 seconds of game time as the client booted you out, and then hammering the login server trying to get back in. Then they started opening up the beta with more waves, once the initial login problems were fixed. Increasing load each time, particularly in the lower level zones, working towards a simulation of launch. With each patch and update the lag caused by the loaded server improved. It appears in both cases that in iterative process bringing more and more people into the beta helped to stabilize the game over time. Scaling straight up to a bojillion people wouldn't have helped because there were so many little pieces of could causing lag and load problems. As far as the value of the testers goes... sure you may get some crap feedback, but there were intelligent players that offered excellent feedback. Not always just in the "this is broken" manner, but more commonly in the "I really enjoy this aspect for this reason" or "this is tedious and annoying". The developer responses to this sort of feedback have been overwhelmingly positive. I think when you are deep in development it can be hard to see what's "fun" or not about the game in question.
When I first heard about the Gizmondo, I had hopes that it would be a good platform for homebrew and emulation. Hell no! They are using bios lockout just like on the PSP to prevent development. The now deceased Tapwave Zodiac was a pretty good little emulation handheld, although the processor was too slow and it had a weird mutant palm OS on it. I would really love a comfortable pocket pc designed for gaming. I have an Asus one which does the job ok, particularly for 8 bit games like NES and Segas Master System, but no Power PC handhelds have good button layouts for gaming, and most have terrible dpads. There is however, a ton of good emulation software for the platform.
My point is that they do it through deliberate castration. Even though the hardware can do it, they cripple it to preserve the levels they market their computers at. From looking at that screen extending hack, evey iBook from 2002 onward has a video card capable of supporting an additional monitor. But no! That's a PowerBook feature, so it gets castrated. Sure it's good marketing, but it's a disservice to the consumer to remove capabilities that are in the hardware they pay for.
No I didn't. Thanks for the information. It is pretty retarded that this has to be done with a hack! Even the new iMac G5 which come with 128MB ATI X600s built in, it only list screen mirroring! This is the type of crap that pisses me off about Apple. Even though the hardware will support a feature, they deliberately castrate it in order to preserve their stratified line of products. It's the exact same methodology that gave us wonders like the Color Classic featuring a 32bit processor wedded to a 16bit data bus./end rant
That's how I always played Civ. Expand rapidly, rush up the tech tree, slaughter everyone near you (I think the Knight unit was a real help initially), develop tanks as early as possible, kill everyone else. Game over around 1400ad. Oh yeah and fundamentalism was the greatest for having a massive army and keeping the civilians at home happy. Stop complaining and go to church! No wonder they took it out of Civ 3. The one time I won by reaching Alpha Centauri with the space ship was out of pure curiousity. I had wiped out every nation except poor India (I guess I have a soft spot for Ghandi). I surrounded the last remaining Indian city and kept them around to witness my glorious space ship launch. Interestingly enough I had trouble with military wins in Civ 3 - my cities would keep revolting. I ended up winning by culture most of the time. As for the topic of history and games, I think Colonization was fantastic. Very similar in gameplay to Civ, but focused on the idea of old world meets new. Of course I played that one by finding the Aztecs (richest tribe) and slaughtering them for their hoards of gold!
The iMac isn't a bad little machine and it does come at a decent cost point. In fact we just picked up one for a web developer at the office. There are some issues - with an Apple low end computer, you are stuck with what you get. For example, the iMac G5 doesn't support a second display. You can mirror the internal monitor but you can't expand your desktop to a second display. This is a shame because for things like web development or video work a second monitor can be extremely useful. I assume Apple deliberately does this to push professionals towards to the PowerMac line. Small businesses then have to make a choice, between the upgrade potential (RAM, video etc.) of the PowerMac or getting boxed in to lower end computer. I realize this makes good business sense for Apple, but it annoys me that for the lack of a slightly better video card, the iMac could be a much more useful computer.
These aren't laptop style hard drives, they are Compact Flash micro drives which are much smaller and use less battery juice. The largest capacity I can seem to find is 6GB, or 8GB flash modules. The 8GB flash cards cost over $700. And as the other poster mentioned, the current PSP firmware won't work with drives over 4GB in size.
"By exhibiting the wolf's clothing without the sheep, Newport exposes the superhero as fraud and demonstrates that growing into manhood may not require leaping over tall buildings but rather passing through the eye of a needle."
You see there is knitting and then there is exploring the nature of manhood via knitting superhero clothing. Which is art. And we all know knitted art is worth more than mere utilitarian knitting. In fact if your Grandma knitted a Bat Man costume it wouldn't be considered art, because she does not have the proper position (being female) to explore what it means to be a man, via knitting, of super hero costumes. Although were she creative enough she could however knit super hero costumes as a feminist reflection on the flaccid nature of men's symbolic chest beating and chauvanism by seperating the suit from the man, thus exposing that Bruce Wayne has a small weiner. And that would be art.
"For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation."
Those apps do however run natively on Mac OS X. Sure it's a proprietary OS and it runs on proprietary hardware, but for some reason you will get props from people on Slashdot if you run it instead of Windows.
(Disclaimer: runs Windows, BSD, Linux and Mac OS X at the office - each OS has it's uses)
Once upon a time when my World of Warcraft character was saving for the mount you can purchase at level 40, I though about just purchasing cash. That way I wouldn't have to scrimp, save and work the auction house to get the gold. I'm glad that I didn't end up doing it, because by slogging through the hard I way I figured out techniques for making money pretty quick. At level 60 I can generate enough cash to twink pretty much all I want, with the exception of ridiculously priced epic items.
I agree completely. The psychology questions tended to be pretty retarded as well. I find the studies done at the Daedalus Project more interesting. Yes most of the surveys deal with World of Warcraft, but they given interesting insight into who plays what character for what reason.
Does he mean does having the show for download 24-hrs-later mean we wouldnt want to watch the original show? LOL i dunno, does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies?
Well, knowing that if I Tivo it and wait to watch later I can skip the commercials does make me not want to watch it when it first airs. Or alternately, knowing that I can download a better HDTV version without ads off of usenet also can dissuade me from watching the regular broadcast. I hate having to make sure I'm home and stuck in front of the TV at a certain time to watch a show. And yes I do go to less movies in the theater thanks to DVDs. Now I only go to see movies that I REALLY want to see or that I feel would be best suited to theater viewing (i.e. ones with good cinematography).
I think the marketing is typical brain dead Microsoft marketing. Just like thinking the stupid MTV hour long launch show/advertisement. Keep in mind though that there is a difference between someone you might call a "gamer" and a casual player. There are a lot more casual gamers, playing Bejeweled or Scrabble online. Stuff that is quick to get into and quick to put down. I think it would be possible to pull some of these people away from Yahoo games and the like onto a service like Xbox live - but I doubt MS will be able to pull it off. As a father or two kids and a gamer (arguably relatively hardcore although admittedly less now that I have less time), the "hardcore eXXtreme" marketing that MS pushed wiht the Xbox is a big turn off. The Gamecube is the most used console in my house (yep we have a PS2 and Xbox too) because there are a lot of games that are family friendly and appeal to mom, dad and the kids. I think MS is aware of the fact that they need to reach out to new players - especially now as this stance seems to be a knee jerk response to Nintendo's statement on the direction they are headed with the Revolution. There is a market out there - but I would agree that it sure isn't Microsoft who is likely to dominate it.
Sure not the majority of women game but many do both in the younger and older sets. In World of Warcraft for example the average age of a female player is over 30. We have a 38 year old mom in my WoW guild (and no her kids don't play). A lot of younger women play games as well. Genres that attract women in general tend to be different (i.e. RPGs and puzzle games) but plenty of women even enjoy FPS (see www.pmsclan.com for example). Gaming can replace TV watching as family entertainment and can provide a more rewarding experience. Sure you would rather be out with your office mates, but that's where you are in life. Plenty of husband/wife teams play together - you see it in MMOs all the time. You seem to dismiss gaming as an entertainment form, but consider that plenty of people opt out of watching TV, movies, books whatever and choose interactive entertainment instead.
Yep it's not new but it wasn't an intended plague. It was accidental. So they weren't even trying to copy other MMOs. Bascially they had a disease that a high level boss in one of the instanced dungeons gave you. This disease infected people near you but was supposed to go away when you left the dungeon. It didn't, and so infected people leaving the dungeon would pass it on to people in the main cities. Most lower level characters would die instantly, but the high level NPCs (vendors, quest givers etc.) were able to be infected and strong enough not to be killed by it. This caused the mass infection. So in this case the disease was actually a bug.
On another note, I had a friend a long time ago who used to do some GM stuff for Gemstone (if I recall correctly). Gemstone had (has?) a lot of GM run events doesn't it? Just the other day one of my friends was lamenting how these MMOs have pretty much no GM driven events. Everything is canned scripts pretty much. I guess the closest thing is when Darth Vader pays a visit in Star Wars Galaxy to say something like "Keep up the good work for the Empire". Whoop dee do.
True that in a game where death is a recurring event and not final, everyone will probably deliberately spread the plague until they get annoyed of it and want to get back to playing. In real life however, you do still have individuals who through their actions knowingly spread a disease. This was shown to have happened in the outbreak of AIDs, as people who knew they were infected still engaged in practices that spread the infection (unprotected sex, sharing needles). Some of these acts are those of people in denial about their condition, but some are done in a malicious manner, or in anger.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is the reason why id would sacrifice sales to promote Linux?
What benefit would id receive from this action?
They also did Jedi Knight 2 and Jedi Academy as well as Star Trek Elite Force. All pretty good quake engine based shooters.
Server. The key word is server. We used to run a Quake server on our huge multi processor sparc in the '90s. The server was way over specced for the work it was doing, it just hurt seeing those processor cycles go to waste.
I've found that resizing and compressing the video down to 320x240 you can store a 90 minute movie in less than 200MB with good quality.
"In my opinion, all reporting should be done through ingame interface. And, the reporting should be based on the developers pushing specific agendas for specific results, at least most of the time."
This is how I've seen it done in a couple of betas I've been on. The bug submittal is done through a game command or interface option so you can log the bug as it happens. Additionally, important information such as the player's location, status and even video card used can be automatically gathered.
While the testing I've done hasn't been specific to the point of "run this one quest" - specific areas have been noted to test. For example: "concentrate on the tutorial", "the login interface has intermittent problems, please hammer it".
Yeah actually I have. Definately need to mod the screen on it - the default not lit one was pretty bad (I've never seen the back lit Euro version). The GP32 is also showing it's age processor wise.
I really would love to see an update of this with faster hardware, more memory and a back lit screen.
I was lucky enough to meet a couple of players in the early levels by helping them out. They turned out to be good guys and 6 months later we have a smallish guild of quality players. We don't recruit just to get more players, we recruit good players who are out to have fun.
In direct contrast, a guild we play with sometimes has recently started to blindly recruit. They are going for the numbers in order to run Molten Core and Zul Gurrab. Some of their new players are complete idiots and on more than one occasion they have recruited known loot ninjas. On one hand, now they have more people to fill out their runs, but on the other hand good luck with that team getting through MC or ZG.
I much prefer having a smaller, better guild than a playing with a bunch of jerks, morons or griefers.
Oh, and yes you can definately 5 man most of the later instances. Sure it takes more time and more skill but it's not impossible. You'll probably need a well rounded group to do it, and some classes are better then other for certain instances. Even Upper Black Rock Spire which tops out at a 15 man raid can be done with much fewer. I've done it in an 8 man run.
Hmmm. Well in the two betas I'm in at the current moment it kind of went this way:
Initial limited beta invites were a few thousand. This initial load revealed some big problems with the login system and database on both games. At this point, the beta sessions where more like "crash the server super quick to generate a ton of debug info". It seemed like in both cases the initial limited beta helped work out some major scale issues with the primary logon and character databases. This round of beta was also used in a marketing manner as a "thanks for playing our other game come check out our cool new one". Of course what you got to experience was about 5 seconds of game time as the client booted you out, and then hammering the login server trying to get back in.
Then they started opening up the beta with more waves, once the initial login problems were fixed. Increasing load each time, particularly in the lower level zones, working towards a simulation of launch. With each patch and update the lag caused by the loaded server improved.
It appears in both cases that in iterative process bringing more and more people into the beta helped to stabilize the game over time. Scaling straight up to a bojillion people wouldn't have helped because there were so many little pieces of could causing lag and load problems.
As far as the value of the testers goes... sure you may get some crap feedback, but there were intelligent players that offered excellent feedback. Not always just in the "this is broken" manner, but more commonly in the "I really enjoy this aspect for this reason" or "this is tedious and annoying". The developer responses to this sort of feedback have been overwhelmingly positive. I think when you are deep in development it can be hard to see what's "fun" or not about the game in question.
When I first heard about the Gizmondo, I had hopes that it would be a good platform for homebrew and emulation. Hell no! They are using bios lockout just like on the PSP to prevent development.
The now deceased Tapwave Zodiac was a pretty good little emulation handheld, although the processor was too slow and it had a weird mutant palm OS on it.
I would really love a comfortable pocket pc designed for gaming. I have an Asus one which does the job ok, particularly for 8 bit games like NES and Segas Master System, but no Power PC handhelds have good button layouts for gaming, and most have terrible dpads. There is however, a ton of good emulation software for the platform.
My point is that they do it through deliberate castration. Even though the hardware can do it, they cripple it to preserve the levels they market their computers at. From looking at that screen extending hack, evey iBook from 2002 onward has a video card capable of supporting an additional monitor. But no! That's a PowerBook feature, so it gets castrated.
Sure it's good marketing, but it's a disservice to the consumer to remove capabilities that are in the hardware they pay for.
No I didn't. Thanks for the information. It is pretty retarded that this has to be done with a hack! Even the new iMac G5 which come with 128MB ATI X600s built in, it only list screen mirroring! /end rant
This is the type of crap that pisses me off about Apple. Even though the hardware will support a feature, they deliberately castrate it in order to preserve their stratified line of products.
It's the exact same methodology that gave us wonders like the Color Classic featuring a 32bit processor wedded to a 16bit data bus.
That's how I always played Civ. Expand rapidly, rush up the tech tree, slaughter everyone near you (I think the Knight unit was a real help initially), develop tanks as early as possible, kill everyone else. Game over around 1400ad. Oh yeah and fundamentalism was the greatest for having a massive army and keeping the civilians at home happy. Stop complaining and go to church! No wonder they took it out of Civ 3.
The one time I won by reaching Alpha Centauri with the space ship was out of pure curiousity. I had wiped out every nation except poor India (I guess I have a soft spot for Ghandi). I surrounded the last remaining Indian city and kept them around to witness my glorious space ship launch.
Interestingly enough I had trouble with military wins in Civ 3 - my cities would keep revolting. I ended up winning by culture most of the time.
As for the topic of history and games, I think Colonization was fantastic. Very similar in gameplay to Civ, but focused on the idea of old world meets new. Of course I played that one by finding the Aztecs (richest tribe) and slaughtering them for their hoards of gold!
The iMac isn't a bad little machine and it does come at a decent cost point. In fact we just picked up one for a web developer at the office. There are some issues - with an Apple low end computer, you are stuck with what you get. For example, the iMac G5 doesn't support a second display. You can mirror the internal monitor but you can't expand your desktop to a second display. This is a shame because for things like web development or video work a second monitor can be extremely useful. I assume Apple deliberately does this to push professionals towards to the PowerMac line. Small businesses then have to make a choice, between the upgrade potential (RAM, video etc.) of the PowerMac or getting boxed in to lower end computer.
I realize this makes good business sense for Apple, but it annoys me that for the lack of a slightly better video card, the iMac could be a much more useful computer.
These aren't laptop style hard drives, they are Compact Flash micro drives which are much smaller and use less battery juice. The largest capacity I can seem to find is 6GB, or 8GB flash modules. The 8GB flash cards cost over $700.
And as the other poster mentioned, the current PSP firmware won't work with drives over 4GB in size.
"By exhibiting the wolf's clothing without the sheep, Newport exposes the superhero as fraud and demonstrates that growing into manhood may not require leaping over tall buildings but rather passing through the eye of a needle."
You see there is knitting and then there is exploring the nature of manhood via knitting superhero clothing. Which is art. And we all know knitted art is worth more than mere utilitarian knitting. In fact if your Grandma knitted a Bat Man costume it wouldn't be considered art, because she does not have the proper position (being female) to explore what it means to be a man, via knitting, of super hero costumes. Although were she creative enough she could however knit super hero costumes as a feminist reflection on the flaccid nature of men's symbolic chest beating and chauvanism by seperating the suit from the man, thus exposing that Bruce Wayne has a small weiner.
And that would be art.
"For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation."
Those apps do however run natively on Mac OS X. Sure it's a proprietary OS and it runs on proprietary hardware, but for some reason you will get props from people on Slashdot if you run it instead of Windows.
(Disclaimer: runs Windows, BSD, Linux and Mac OS X at the office - each OS has it's uses)
Once upon a time when my World of Warcraft character was saving for the mount you can purchase at level 40, I though about just purchasing cash. That way I wouldn't have to scrimp, save and work the auction house to get the gold. I'm glad that I didn't end up doing it, because by slogging through the hard I way I figured out techniques for making money pretty quick.
At level 60 I can generate enough cash to twink pretty much all I want, with the exception of ridiculously priced epic items.
I agree completely. The psychology questions tended to be pretty retarded as well.
I find the studies done at the Daedalus Project more interesting. Yes most of the surveys deal with World of Warcraft, but they given interesting insight into who plays what character for what reason.
Does he mean does having the show for download 24-hrs-later mean we wouldnt want to watch the original show? LOL i dunno, does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies?
Well, knowing that if I Tivo it and wait to watch later I can skip the commercials does make me not want to watch it when it first airs. Or alternately, knowing that I can download a better HDTV version without ads off of usenet also can dissuade me from watching the regular broadcast. I hate having to make sure I'm home and stuck in front of the TV at a certain time to watch a show.
And yes I do go to less movies in the theater thanks to DVDs. Now I only go to see movies that I REALLY want to see or that I feel would be best suited to theater viewing (i.e. ones with good cinematography).
Shush! Please don't upset the fanboys. Don't you know Steve Jobs invented everything ever?
I think the marketing is typical brain dead Microsoft marketing. Just like thinking the stupid MTV hour long launch show/advertisement.
Keep in mind though that there is a difference between someone you might call a "gamer" and a casual player. There are a lot more casual gamers, playing Bejeweled or Scrabble online. Stuff that is quick to get into and quick to put down. I think it would be possible to pull some of these people away from Yahoo games and the like onto a service like Xbox live - but I doubt MS will be able to pull it off.
As a father or two kids and a gamer (arguably relatively hardcore although admittedly less now that I have less time), the "hardcore eXXtreme" marketing that MS pushed wiht the Xbox is a big turn off. The Gamecube is the most used console in my house (yep we have a PS2 and Xbox too) because there are a lot of games that are family friendly and appeal to mom, dad and the kids. I think MS is aware of the fact that they need to reach out to new players - especially now as this stance seems to be a knee jerk response to Nintendo's statement on the direction they are headed with the Revolution.
There is a market out there - but I would agree that it sure isn't Microsoft who is likely to dominate it.
Sure not the majority of women game but many do both in the younger and older sets. In World of Warcraft for example the average age of a female player is over 30. We have a 38 year old mom in my WoW guild (and no her kids don't play).
A lot of younger women play games as well. Genres that attract women in general tend to be different (i.e. RPGs and puzzle games) but plenty of women even enjoy FPS (see www.pmsclan.com for example).
Gaming can replace TV watching as family entertainment and can provide a more rewarding experience. Sure you would rather be out with your office mates, but that's where you are in life. Plenty of husband/wife teams play together - you see it in MMOs all the time.
You seem to dismiss gaming as an entertainment form, but consider that plenty of people opt out of watching TV, movies, books whatever and choose interactive entertainment instead.
There was a hotfix for this bug. I don't know what the current status is now, but I never even saw the plague on the server I play on.
Yep it's not new but it wasn't an intended plague. It was accidental. So they weren't even trying to copy other MMOs. Bascially they had a disease that a high level boss in one of the instanced dungeons gave you. This disease infected people near you but was supposed to go away when you left the dungeon. It didn't, and so infected people leaving the dungeon would pass it on to people in the main cities. Most lower level characters would die instantly, but the high level NPCs (vendors, quest givers etc.) were able to be infected and strong enough not to be killed by it. This caused the mass infection.
So in this case the disease was actually a bug.
On another note, I had a friend a long time ago who used to do some GM stuff for Gemstone (if I recall correctly). Gemstone had (has?) a lot of GM run events doesn't it? Just the other day one of my friends was lamenting how these MMOs have pretty much no GM driven events. Everything is canned scripts pretty much. I guess the closest thing is when Darth Vader pays a visit in Star Wars Galaxy to say something like "Keep up the good work for the Empire". Whoop dee do.
True that in a game where death is a recurring event and not final, everyone will probably deliberately spread the plague until they get annoyed of it and want to get back to playing. In real life however, you do still have individuals who through their actions knowingly spread a disease. This was shown to have happened in the outbreak of AIDs, as people who knew they were infected still engaged in practices that spread the infection (unprotected sex, sharing needles). Some of these acts are those of people in denial about their condition, but some are done in a malicious manner, or in anger.