"Anyone who is on Outlook is potentially vulnerable and needs to be very careful and cautious," said Scott Blake, security program manager for Bindview. "It's very easy for someone to utilize the Outlook network to propagate a Trojan horse, a file that appears to be something useful but in fact is the SEED OF ONE'S DESTRUCTION!!!."
Blake added that Microsoft could possibly be at fault for encouraging people to use Outlook.
"It's somewhat irresponsible for (Microsoft) to be pushing a software that's fundamentally insecure as this," he said.
The Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory outlived its mission lifetime by seven years. NASA considers it to be one of the space agency's most successful missions.
All that any satellite has to do is fulfil its mission. If it sticks around another year or two, then that's gravy. All satellites eventually die; the low earth orbiting ones all need to be deorbited so they don't collide with other satellites. Compton outlived its life by _seven_ _years_. The US taxpayer got WELL worth his or her money with this one.;-)
Re:Is it totally necessary?
on
Open Music?
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· Score: 3
The nice thing about doing it as part of a project is that you have a way to get immediate feedback, and to commune with other like-minded individuals. When something is released for free external to any community or central project, then sometimes it might seem like you're just casting wine to the wind. With a project you have a close nit audience to give encouragement and praise.
Okay so you're probably thinking, "Praise is irrelevant; if it is good it doesn't matter what people think." For some types of people (programmers are an excellent example), the pride and joy is in the work alone. But for others (esp. artists and musicians), the work is more fun when they know other people are or will be enjoying it too.
At WorldForge ( www.worldforge.org) we have a small team of musicians and have been accumulating Free Music for use with our games (or to just listen to, we're open). One of the reasons we do well with art and music is because we recognize that even though it might seem irrelevant to the programmers, everyone is good about showing appreciation and encouragement to the media folks. It works well for us. Also, I suspect that the fact that the media is being created for a specific purpose helps give the artists and musicians a conceptual framework to operate within.
So anyway, based on my own experience I'd say a project organized around open/free music production would be a stellar idea. And it'd certainly help out WorldForge so you could count on our interest.:-)
Consider adding in the user pref's page a mechanism to allow the reader to give co-copyright of material to slashdot.org. Bruce Perens is the appropriate wiseman to speak to regarding this technique.
The fact they listed their alpha server only supporting 4 players worries me. With a massivly multiplayer game taking into account supporting hunderds and thousands of simeltaneous users has to be built in from the ground up. I don't think a game design liek Diablo, limited to 4 players, would scale well to a game like EQ and Asheron's Call without major changes.
Well, surely you know what you must do to
fix this - join the team and help make it the
way you want. Or else find another project
making a game more to your liking, and help them.
Game development is hard and takes
a lot of time. I gather these guys don't have
commercial backing behind them to do this, and are
doing this as a gift to all of us.
Consider that few commercial games, in spite
of all of their millions of dollars worth of
funding, meet every expectation of every gamer.
So is it really all that bad that this free game
has a few (theoretically fixable) limitations?
Worldforge, which I've heard so much about still doesn't have a working client that I can tell, and from every indication on the webpage, questions about the ones that have been released are not supported as these are obsolete versions!
Actually, there are working clients, but
things are still under heavy development so it's
a waste of your time and ours to provide
installation assistance. (Tech support for a
free pre-Alpha game?? Riiight...) We're still
in the stage of adding many features, and shaking
out design options. Please consider that even
commercial game developers require several years
paid fulltime work to get a game developed.
When WorldForge is closer to having a working
game we will split development of the various
items into stable/developmental trees for you.
The best way to get a working client is to
spend some of your time to help improve it.
Would it be useful to have CD's specific to a given game? For instance, with WorldForge, I've wondered if it would be useful to set up a CD-of-the-month club, with the latest versions of the clients - with all libraries, artwork, media, scripts, etc. - which could be booted independently without needing to disturb the primary OS.
IMHO, mental monopolies are just as damaging as physical monopolies. Someone needs to get out a cluebat for the MBAs running the show.
Agreed.
Hasbro claims "Hasbro has a long history of building great game brands. This suit is aimed at ensuring we can continue to deliver the high-quality, high-value games that consumers have come to expect from Hasbro Interactive. If we succeed, our development and licensing partners succeed and, ultimately, the game consumer wins."
Yet is it in the consumers' best interest to have fewer choices? What if the officially available version of a given Hasbro game is riddled with bugs or missing features? Wouldn't it be more in the consumer's best interests to have alternate versions competing with Hasbro - if not to provide those missing features then to at least force Hasbro to give attention to what consumers wish for, for competitive reasoning. Classic games, by definition, are not areas of innovation! Thus they are very succeptible to the problems inherent in monopolization.
Well I will tell you what I think: We need to have more Free games, with the source code available for customization and enhancement. And I'm not just spouting opinion here, I've running a net project to develop and promote Free games, both big and small. There is lots to do, and we could use help.
hasbro owns WotC owns TSR. can you see the same thing coming in pen & paper RPGs?
Actually, it's funny... this already sort of happened years ago, before the buy out. TSR shut down all fan-sites, taking all of those items (including GPL'd software) and relicensing it, without permission. (still there, see ftp.mpgn.com).
They threatened to sue people who were producing anything in anyway related to TSR materials. (They'd claim trademark infringement without ever publishing a list of exactly what those claimed trademarks were.)
The claim is that "rules" are a representation of "the idea of a particular game". Thus the rules themselves (and thus any game using those rules or rules derived thereof) are protected by copyright. So anyone producing a D&D knockoff gets sued (even the guy who *invented* D&D got a lawyer pummling for producing a similar game).
But that was long ago...
These days, WotC (aka Hasbro) is claiming that it will be putting out D&D/3rd under an open source license. Hmm
Feh, our games seem to be getting less Free year after year. This is bad.
I've been wondering, however . . . what would be the best long-term stable format for book-encoding? I imagine it would be some flavor of SGML (IIRC, long-term library data storage is its raison d'etre). But, which particular flavor? Does a suitable one already exist? Are there DTD's and stylesheets available?
DocBook springs to mind...
But while a flexible format would be handy, I envision some quite revolutionary steps that could be taken by 'leveraging' net project techniques, and chucking the books into revision control systems for open, distributed modification (why not, if it's public domain, it's allowed!) Imagine:
Proofreading can be distributed and done in massive parallel over time.
Rollback to the original document (or any intermediarily edited form) is possible.
Branches can be made for purposes of rendering the book in more modern speech, or to translate into other languages.
Annotations can be added to the documents and community-moderators can be used to filter out the best annotations. (just like Slashdot, eh?) (Maybe even essay questions and essays?)
Many, many possibilities... Of course, the future is not "theirs" but ours, and it is our own responsibility for building the foundations for the future we wish.
I've written a Free roleplaying game book (Circe), which is being used with the WorldForge project. One of our adopted goals is to build or assemble all of the tools and processes to be able to do precisely what I've described above (imagine being able to assemble your own set of game rules, customized to the kind of game *you* want to play). We've got the rulebook in CVS in DocBook format already, and are working on features to make it dynamic.
There was a project called Altima, which was meant to clone Ultima Online, I believe. But they seemed to have teamed up with some other folks to create a generic engine. Open Sourced, of course.
Altima never died, but instead reevaluated, refocused, and renamed to WorldForge. We were coming up with ideas that were much more ambitious than a simple UO cloning effort. The team composition and skills were more appropriate to doing original work than making copies. Of course, this meant it would take longer, but the team really seemed to resonate with envelope pushing.
Probably we ought to be putting out more announcements here on Slashdot but this site only seems to mention in-development games if they are closed source, so we may have to wait a bit. If you'd like to track our progress, send an email to announce-subscribe@worldforge.org.
The engine looks good and the graphics look great.
Thanks! The multi-disciplinary nature of game development is tough for typical free software development approaches, but we've hacked our project organization to handle this I think. We'll be putting out a few quickee games (not "massive") to demo art and technologies as we go. Bryce P.S., sorry the website's down. We're suspecting foul play...
The problem is... even if you do make your changes, it's a monumental amount of work to a) get *anyone* other than a select few of your friends to play your variation and b) you have to either somehow get your changes merged into the main tree, or spend the rest of your natural life maintaining your own branch, and mergeing in changes from the main tree.
Very valid and astute concerns. Keep them in mind and hold us (WorldForge) to providing you a solution to this problem.
There are many, many projects which have creatively solved the user-customization problem. We have many precidents to choose from. Scripting, world/engine separation, or well designed modular interfaces, for instance. (We are currently exploring all three of these. Can you think of more solutions we could try?)
UltimaOnline & EverQuest are setting a precedent for massive-multiplayer-games, a dangerous precedent, since most types of games are moving towards that direction.
yup, and not only games. UO and EQ style game architectures and business models are helping establish and prove the concept of subscription-based computing. People have been trying to turn software into subscription-like services for many years (this is why few consumer-oriented file formats are forward-compatible, even though any moderately skilled programmer could figure out how to generalize the design of any file format such that it is both forwards and backwards compatible.) Imagine paying $15 for MS Linux, plus $10/month for the opportunity to download the latest upgrades via "DirectGet" and "SelectX".
The obvious advantages for gamemakers are a steady income even after the game has been released, hardly any problems with warez (the game itself only works with a valid account), and full control over the game (central administration of the servers).
Do not underestimate the expenses associated with running a game server. This issue at play here is freedom, not cost. You are not being given the trust, respect, and honesty of being able to fix and improve your game. You deserve these freedoms and should demand them so that they are aware that you value freedom.
You know that open games will be better games, be they commercial or not. By continuing to buy freedomless games one does a disservice to the game industry by further locking them into that out-moded way of creating games. Insist on only paying only for games that meet your price/performance/openness criteria, and make the ones that don't meet your criteria unavailable to yourself. Let your itch grow, or try to scratch it yourself.
Without other human players, any online game would suck, bots and NPCs can't substitute real people playing. By playing properly, you are having fun, and increasing the fun of the other players. That makes the game more fun and interesting, so people will play more, and more people will buy the game. A nice player is worth more than a fancy feature of the software. Why don't players get paid?
I find this a very profound insight, I hope you don't mind if I borrow it from you. I have always been of the mind that players both figuratively and literally "make the game", and are sometimes, ironically forgotten by game designers.
If they ever close shop, all my stuff will be gone, I can't just keep it.
Keep this desire in mind. I have a solution for this. *grin*
If they really need to make more money, they should place some ads in-game, in a way that makes sense and fits to the game. It's possible and would work just like it does with websites.
I have never seen an implementation of this that was not, IMHO, tacky. 'Amature', in my book, is okay. But gods how I hate 'tacky'. Advertising prior to or after the game would be acceptable, but players deserve to not have the consistency of their game broken with tackiness. Mobile is able to gain the benefits of advertising by sponsoring NOVA, without making Stephen Hawkings oil his chair.
But try turning your idea inside out. Instead of the advertising being inside the game, how about making the game being inside the advertising? I.e., Disney hosting your game for you, using their trademarked characters in the game?
Actually it could work even better if a company would have a virtual subsidiary inside the game world and you could stop by and buy stuff without leaving the game. Lots of possibilities.
Now, this sounds interesting... I would love to see mixes of reality and fiction like this in virtual worlds. VirtualMacy's, where you can shop for and purchase clothing or gifts, or find yourself drawn into a tragic three-way romance destined for heart break and disaster - unless perhaps you can win Caitlen's heart. (Think Macy's might pay a player to be Caitlen?)
Well, personally I'd love to play such a massive multiplayer game, but out of principle I won't pay for it as I just explained. I'll have to wait until a free one comes along.
Thank you, you are doing the Right Thing, and for the right reasons. And I'm joining you.
Current projects like WorldForge look promising, but are still not ready, not yet. Let's wait and see what comes along...
You would wait less if those projects had your help (they especially need coders and non-coders).
Speaking of that, this reminds me of an interesting idea I had: Don't run central servers on a few machines, run small clients on lots of PCs. Just like SETI@home, encrypt the date, and make it very redundant.
This is called "peer to peer" and has some troublesome security issues. But it's definitely worthwhile for some kinds of games. NetTrek uses this approach. (Check out the FreeTrek project.)
There is always another way. Amen. Lack of choice is a symptom of brain inflexibility.
But if Iridium's satellites are a nuisance to astronomers, is it merely because of the way they were made? What if, instead, they were not made of reflective material?
The reflective material is most likely used for thermal control. Without it the spacecraft would most likely become too hot and burn out. Yes, there are other cooling mechanisms, but making a surface reflective is pretty darn cheap and easy.
The handful of iridium satellites is nothing compared to all the other debris and satellites that we have put in orbit - if iridium satellites are such nuisances to astronomers, then what about all the other ones?
Who says they aren't?;-) Seriously, though, most satellites are in orbits that aren't such a problem:
GeoSynchronous Earth Orbits (GEO) are way the hell away from the earth, and orbiting at the equator, and really easy for astronomers to avoid. The satellites are also in predictable places in the sky (by design). There are many hundreds of satellites in the GEO ring. These are the satellites you have the most immediate contact with - pagers, cable TV, satellite TV, etc.
Polar or Sun Synchronous satellites (weather satellites and land imaging, for instance) are in orbits that run north-to-south and generally pass overhead only very infrequently, and very quickly. Usually there's only a few satellites in these sorts of orbits.
LEO satellites, like Iridium, are pretty common. They're used for a whole host of different applications. I suppose theoretically any of these would pose the same problems as Iridium to astronomers, however they are usually at altitudes where they move too fast or too slow for them to be much of a problem. Iridium is a bit different in that it is a "Constellation". By *design* you're supposed to always have one in view; their velocity is set such that it "maximizes" the problem to astronomers.;-) I don't know if there are currently other constellation systems like Iridium in orbit, but I know there's been a bunch designed on paper (I should know, I helped design a few).
You may find this an interesting irony... Hubble is in one of these LEO orbits (so that the shuttle can get to it). So one of the things fouling up the Earth-based telescopes is a better telescope.;-) (Actually, Hubble is at a low enough orbit that it probably moves too quickly to be much of a problem, but there's other telescopes up there.)
Is there a set of rules for satellite construction? I'm sure there some rules that everyone follows loosely. Is there an international organization that regulates satellite launch schedules? I'm sure there is, it's too important for there not to be any.
Lots of red tape. Remember, your government has had its hand in this industry since its inception.;-)
If satellites were problems to astronomers, should we be concerned about all the satellite launches that seem to happen all the time?
From an astronomy standpoint, no, I wouldn't worry. Let me explain.
First, consider that the vast majority of satellites are going into orbits that for one reason or another won't be a problem. Period.
Second, step back and give thought to how astronomy has developed and evolved. Long ago, we knew so little about the heavens that a simple telescope out the window of a city apartment could generate a vast wealth of scientific data. As they gathered more data and started looking for higher quality images they were forced to move out of the cities, eventually to remote islands and mountaintops, in order to find clear, light-polution-free skies. Would it have made any sense to restrict electric lights in cities simply for astronomer's benefits?
Today, to achieve the major scientific advancements scientists are having to go into space orbit. Nothing we can trace to ourselves as the fault - it's the atmosphere itself that's at issue, this time. Does it make any more sense to hinder commercial spacecraft than it would have to place controls on electric lighting?
I've had the opportunity to work on some conceptual designing for the next generation telescopes. Very cool things are being designed for the new "mountaintops". In fact, NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope) is being designed to orbit a gravitational anomaly! Check it out: http://www.trw.com/ngst/ (My job is to come up with a propulsion system that'll keep it orbiting this point, without fouling the optics, and is as efficient as possible.)
Certainly, the iridium satellites can be put to use doing something, otherwise we'd just billions of dollars of floating space junk?
Perhaps... However it's not like we can retrofit them with radar sensors or something. I'm sure within a few months we'll hear some novel new use for them, but these spacecraft were pretty optimized for the task and business model they were set for.
I must say that for what Iridium did, it did well. Technically. (Since I worked on the software I'm not going to say it sucked;-) It's just too bad that by the time Iridium came to market, the market didn't care!
Iridium had a few more launch failures than planned, but yes, the system as a whole worked pretty much as planned (as far as I know). It overlooked the massive drop in cell phone costs, as well as the rise of the Internet.
As far as the satellites are conserned, they will either (1) go in to safe mode then auto-deboost after some period of silence, or (2) Motorola will continue to spend money to command the satellites in order to control their descent so no one gets banged by space junk.
The satellites will (eventually) decay and burn up in the orbit no matter what anyone does. The orbit is high enough that this won't happen any time soon (unlike the space station, which is at such a low altitude that it'll fall back to Earth if you so much as look at it crosseyed. I don't think the satellites have sufficient fuel to conduct a controlled reentry, but it doesn't matter - these things are small enough that they'll burn up completely before coming anywhere near the ground.
Best and easiest thing to do with $20k for purposes of supporting open source software development is to head over to cosource.com look for software tasks you'd like to see complete, and spread the money around liberally.
Most open source projects don't know how to accept donations, and for the money itself to make a difference (in terms of increasing amount of labor, as opposed to hardware purchases) it would take quite a bit of it. The nice thing about cosource.com is being able to join your donations with those of others in order to build up a more useful sum for supporting, etc.
If you just want to use the money as incentive, to carrot additional work out of people, that's fine too - and also quite doable through cosource.
They've got over a dozen people working on the project, including both coders and artists. There's definitely room for more help though.
Definitely can use more help. We've actually got about three or four dozen active developers, plus maybe another fifty or a hundred semi-active developers. There's well over two hundred registered with developer accounts and subscribed to our mailing lists.
We're especially looking for webmaster types (got a lot of online docs to clean up and maintain) these days. We've got coders aplenty but would never turn away more.;-) Musicians and artists are strongly valued, we've got a good team of them so far but always need more.
Last year we put out a skeleton demo, which is available from our Downloads page. (We'd hoped Slashdot would post an announce about it, but no dice.)
LibAtlas is our "Crown Jewels" - a result of a full year of design, planning, peer reviewing, and general hair pulling. It's a standard(izable) networking protocol suitable for games and for other data-type-rich applications. We'll try to post an announcement here (ok, probably won't get posted; watch our site) once we've had time to write docs and some sample apps.
One thing worth noting is that WorldForge is producing a number of other things besides the game itself. We've developed several libraries and tools which we've independently released on Freshmeat and SourceForge (libuta, for instance, the GUI library for SDL, is developed by our team members.) We've got several project management tools in development that other open source projects will find invaluable. Plus, just to be different we actually practice what we preach and make ALL of the source to our tools, apps, art, music, and etc. openly available for public download and reuse.;-)
We think we might be able to kill a bunch of birds for the Free Software community, by taking the extra step of designing our systems to be as game-neutral as possible, and have made our project infrastructure very robust. Thus, we can directly help any other Game Development Projects with roughly similar needs as us. So we'd like to welcome any GPL-compliant game development projects to come on by and discuss joining forces to develop mutually beneficial libraries, apps, or other tools.
Keep an eye on our News page for the latest developments. If you're interested in joining in the fun, head to our joining page.
Before they even had code, Slashdot posted their call for developers. So the support's there, it's just on a very hit and miss level.
True, but have you heard any other mention of them (or of Altima / WorldForge *grin*)? One announcement on Slashdot can supply a PROFOUND amount of resources to a net project, and thus can be much more valuable than just tossing money at it. WorldForge is where it is today largely _because_ of the initial Slashdot mention, IMHO.
I really truly believe that Slashdot could serve a very important role in helping organize and drive some of the really ambitious open source efforts towards success, if it wanted. The commercial Linux fixation is getting old, IMHO.
Okay, I'm biased since I'm working on one, but I sure would like to see Slashdot give more attention to the many free software game projects. There's a *lot* of them out there, and many are doing some very cool things. I mean, Slashdot *does* support open source software development, right? (Right???)
One thing I've found with the larger hard drives is, they put out a goodly amount of heat. And of course, the Pentium is no slouch at cooking plastic if given half a chance.
Even the ensuing debate over multi-user game/world security models is very significant for future development. If we can come up with a better, faster, tighter, cross-platform, secure model for network gameplay, I'm sure that many game developers would be interested in adopting it. so, let's start designing and implementing the new protocols for networked online worlds!
A number of game development projects have been working at exactly this; it might be worthwhile for those interested in working on such a protocol to see what's already in the pipeline. Freetrek and Netspace both have just recently started development on 3D protocols for space-flight. WarForge, Phoenix, Lycadican, Cyphesis, and Belchfire are all using WorldForge's "Atlas" 3D RPG protocol (libatlas2 was just completed last week).
NASA would probably have had a special Motherboard made, or at least a custom BIOS.
:-) Spacecraft manufacturers always use computer architectures specifically suited to space use. They tend to have a lot of unusual devices to connect to the processors, sometimes more cards than a typical motherboard handles. As well, they're driven by the shake, rattle, and roll of launch, and the need to keep mass, power, and cooling requirements to a minimum.
The attention to detail that goes into the design of a spacecraft's computer architecture is pretty amazing, too, especially given that often the computer architecture is only used (as designed) once. And all too often, we're faced with integrating things designed for multiple different architectures (imagine getting a PC modem, SGI video card, and Sun monitor integrated into a Mac chassis.)
In addition to the radiation and reliability concerns, as we all know the newer chips are larger thermal loads. And unlike here on the ground, you can't use fans for cooling.;-)
Another thing I wonder about is, are the more powerful chips really necessary, anyway? In none of the satellite designs I've been involved with has processor speed been a design driver or technical limitation. Mass, cost, and power are generally the design drivers (sometimes schedule). I would imagine that a chip optimized for low mass, power, and cost (like a 486) would trade off very well against more powerful chips, especially if it is also very reliable.;-)
Does anyone know the cost of this EOS system? I am not one of those to rant on system costs and how NASA is sucking up cash for whatever liberal cause is in the popular press. I was just wondering if this is a BIG budget kick or another small one?
I work at TRW (the company that produced this spacecraft, and some of the other recent NASA successes (e.g. Chandra)) and am privvy to the actual production costs. Obviously, I cannot give out figures, but we got good money's worth on this one.
NASA was particularly smart on this one, in that it is making two. EOS Chemistry is a follow-on, that reuses much of the existing spacecraft design (new payload, though) so we were able to realize a lot of savings by just referencing the original paperwork for many of the components (such as the propulsion system, which I got to work on briefly.)
So when is this one unexpectedly to crash back into Earth or go hurdling off into space?
Terra is in a "Low Earth Orbit" (LEO), and as such, will eventually crash back into Earth. In fact, NASA is requiring LEO satellites be de-orbited at end of life, as a way to keep trash out of orbit. (For several spacecraft I've designed this is an annoyingly design-driving requirement; simple spacecraft are being made complicated by the need for a beefy propulsion system simply to make it crash into Earth before it's dead. But keeping space clean is a noble and correct thing to do.)
So that I can blatantly plug my own company, here's my company's news release, a page describing the spacecraft briefly, a more detailed one and another that describes the follow-on spacecraft we're making. I don't know why TRW doesn't toot its own horn more, it's done some of the coolest physics-breaking things in the last fifty years, of any of the aerospace companies.
Slashdot Mirror
"Anyone who is on Outlook is potentially vulnerable and needs to be very careful and cautious," said Scott Blake, security program manager for Bindview. "It's very easy for someone to utilize the Outlook network to propagate a Trojan horse, a file that appears to be something useful but in fact is the SEED OF ONE'S DESTRUCTION!!!."
Blake added that Microsoft could possibly be at fault for encouraging people to use Outlook.
"It's somewhat irresponsible for (Microsoft) to be pushing a software that's fundamentally insecure as this," he said.
I love the smell of FUD in the morning. ;-)
The Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory outlived its mission lifetime by seven years. NASA considers it to be one of the space agency's most successful missions.
All that any satellite has to do is fulfil its mission. If it sticks around another year or two, then that's gravy. All satellites eventually die; the low earth orbiting ones all need to be deorbited so they don't collide with other satellites. Compton outlived its life by _seven_ _years_. The US taxpayer got WELL worth his or her money with this one. ;-)
The nice thing about doing it as part of a project is that you have a way to get immediate feedback, and to commune with other like-minded individuals. When something is released for free external to any community or central project, then sometimes it might seem like you're just casting wine to the wind. With a project you have a close nit audience to give encouragement and praise.
Okay so you're probably thinking, "Praise is irrelevant; if it is good it doesn't matter what people think." For some types of people (programmers are an excellent example), the pride and joy is in the work alone. But for others (esp. artists and musicians), the work is more fun when they know other people are or will be enjoying it too.
At WorldForge ( www.worldforge.org) we have a small team of musicians and have been accumulating Free Music for use with our games (or to just listen to, we're open). One of the reasons we do well with art and music is because we recognize that even though it might seem irrelevant to the programmers, everyone is good about showing appreciation and encouragement to the media folks. It works well for us. Also, I suspect that the fact that the media is being created for a specific purpose helps give the artists and musicians a conceptual framework to operate within.
So anyway, based on my own experience I'd say a project organized around open/free music production would be a stellar idea. And it'd certainly help out WorldForge so you could count on our interest. :-)
Consider adding in the user pref's page a mechanism to allow the reader to give co-copyright of material to slashdot.org. Bruce Perens is the appropriate wiseman to speak to regarding this technique.
Well, surely you know what you must do to fix this - join the team and help make it the way you want. Or else find another project making a game more to your liking, and help them. Game development is hard and takes a lot of time. I gather these guys don't have commercial backing behind them to do this, and are doing this as a gift to all of us.
Consider that few commercial games, in spite of all of their millions of dollars worth of funding, meet every expectation of every gamer. So is it really all that bad that this free game has a few (theoretically fixable) limitations?
Actually, there are working clients, but things are still under heavy development so it's a waste of your time and ours to provide installation assistance. (Tech support for a free pre-Alpha game?? Riiight...) We're still in the stage of adding many features, and shaking out design options. Please consider that even commercial game developers require several years paid fulltime work to get a game developed. When WorldForge is closer to having a working game we will split development of the various items into stable/developmental trees for you.
The best way to get a working client is to spend some of your time to help improve it.
Bryce
Agreed.
Hasbro claims "Hasbro has a long history of building great game brands. This suit is aimed at ensuring we can continue to deliver the high-quality, high-value games that consumers have come to expect from Hasbro Interactive. If we succeed, our development and licensing partners succeed and, ultimately, the game consumer wins."
Yet is it in the consumers' best interest to have fewer choices? What if the officially available version of a given Hasbro game is riddled with bugs or missing features? Wouldn't it be more in the consumer's best interests to have alternate versions competing with Hasbro - if not to provide those missing features then to at least force Hasbro to give attention to what consumers wish for, for competitive reasoning. Classic games, by definition, are not areas of innovation! Thus they are very succeptible to the problems inherent in monopolization.
Well I will tell you what I think: We need to have more Free games, with the source code available for customization and enhancement. And I'm not just spouting opinion here, I've running a net project to develop and promote Free games, both big and small. There is lots to do, and we could use help.
Hasbro's up and coming games.com site!
3 guesses why they're now starting to crack down on clones, and just one guess what they'll do to all the out there. Hint: Hasbro::WotC::TSR has done it before.
Better snag shareware games while you can, and Napsterize them down to the underground. ;-)
Actually, it's funny... this already sort of happened years ago, before the buy out. TSR shut down all fan-sites, taking all of those items (including GPL'd software) and relicensing it, without permission. (still there, see ftp.mpgn.com).
They threatened to sue people who were producing anything in anyway related to TSR materials. (They'd claim trademark infringement without ever publishing a list of exactly what those claimed trademarks were.)
The claim is that "rules" are a representation of "the idea of a particular game". Thus the rules themselves (and thus any game using those rules or rules derived thereof) are protected by copyright. So anyone producing a D&D knockoff gets sued (even the guy who *invented* D&D got a lawyer pummling for producing a similar game).
But that was long ago...
These days, WotC (aka Hasbro) is claiming that it will be putting out D&D/3rd under an open source license. Hmm
Feh, our games seem to be getting less Free year after year. This is bad.
DocBook springs to mind...
But while a flexible format would be handy, I envision some quite revolutionary steps that could be taken by 'leveraging' net project techniques, and chucking the books into revision control systems for open, distributed modification (why not, if it's public domain, it's allowed!) Imagine:
Many, many possibilities... Of course, the future is not "theirs" but ours, and it is our own responsibility for building the foundations for the future we wish.
I've written a Free roleplaying game book (Circe), which is being used with the WorldForge project. One of our adopted goals is to build or assemble all of the tools and processes to be able to do precisely what I've described above (imagine being able to assemble your own set of game rules, customized to the kind of game *you* want to play). We've got the rulebook in CVS in DocBook format already, and are working on features to make it dynamic.
There was a project called Altima, which was meant to clone Ultima Online, I believe. But they seemed to have teamed up with some other folks to create a generic engine. Open Sourced, of course.
Altima never died, but instead reevaluated, refocused, and renamed to WorldForge. We were coming up with ideas that were much more ambitious than a simple UO cloning effort. The team composition and skills were more appropriate to doing original work than making copies. Of course, this meant it would take longer, but the team really seemed to resonate with envelope pushing.
Probably we ought to be putting out more announcements here on Slashdot but this site only seems to mention in-development games if they are closed source, so we may have to wait a bit. If you'd like to track our progress, send an email to announce-subscribe@worldforge.org.
The engine looks good and the graphics look great.
Thanks! The multi-disciplinary nature of game development is tough for typical free software development approaches, but we've hacked our project organization to handle this I think. We'll be putting out a few quickee games (not "massive") to demo art and technologies as we go. Bryce P.S., sorry the website's down. We're suspecting foul play...
The problem is... even if you do make your changes, it's a monumental amount of work to a) get *anyone* other than a select few of your friends to play your variation and b) you have to either somehow get your changes merged into the main tree, or spend the rest of your natural life maintaining your own branch, and mergeing in changes from the main tree.
Very valid and astute concerns. Keep them in mind and hold us (WorldForge) to providing you a solution to this problem.
There are many, many projects which have creatively solved the user-customization problem. We have many precidents to choose from. Scripting, world/engine separation, or well designed modular interfaces, for instance. (We are currently exploring all three of these. Can you think of more solutions we could try?)
UltimaOnline & EverQuest are setting a precedent for massive-multiplayer-games, a dangerous precedent, since most types of games are moving towards that direction.
yup, and not only games. UO and EQ style game architectures and business models are helping establish and prove the concept of subscription-based computing. People have been trying to turn software into subscription-like services for many years (this is why few consumer-oriented file formats are forward-compatible, even though any moderately skilled programmer could figure out how to generalize the design of any file format such that it is both forwards and backwards compatible.) Imagine paying $15 for MS Linux, plus $10/month for the opportunity to download the latest upgrades via "DirectGet" and "SelectX".
The obvious advantages for gamemakers are a steady income even after the game has been released, hardly any problems with warez (the game itself only works with a valid account), and full control over the game (central administration of the servers).
Do not underestimate the expenses associated with running a game server. This issue at play here is freedom, not cost. You are not being given the trust, respect, and honesty of being able to fix and improve your game. You deserve these freedoms and should demand them so that they are aware that you value freedom.
You know that open games will be better games, be they commercial or not. By continuing to buy freedomless games one does a disservice to the game industry by further locking them into that out-moded way of creating games. Insist on only paying only for games that meet your price/performance/openness criteria, and make the ones that don't meet your criteria unavailable to yourself. Let your itch grow, or try to scratch it yourself.
Without other human players, any online game would suck, bots and NPCs can't substitute real people playing. By playing properly, you are having fun, and increasing the fun of the other players. That makes the game more fun and interesting, so people will play more, and more people will buy the game. A nice player is worth more than a fancy feature of the software. Why don't players get paid?
I find this a very profound insight, I hope you don't mind if I borrow it from you. I have always been of the mind that players both figuratively and literally "make the game", and are sometimes, ironically forgotten by game designers.
If they ever close shop, all my stuff will be gone, I can't just keep it.
Keep this desire in mind. I have a solution for this. *grin*
If they really need to make more money, they should place some ads in-game, in a way that makes sense and fits to the game. It's possible and would work just like it does with websites.
I have never seen an implementation of this that was not, IMHO, tacky. 'Amature', in my book, is okay. But gods how I hate 'tacky'. Advertising prior to or after the game would be acceptable, but players deserve to not have the consistency of their game broken with tackiness. Mobile is able to gain the benefits of advertising by sponsoring NOVA, without making Stephen Hawkings oil his chair.
But try turning your idea inside out. Instead of the advertising being inside the game, how about making the game being inside the advertising? I.e., Disney hosting your game for you, using their trademarked characters in the game?
Actually it could work even better if a company would have a virtual subsidiary inside the game world and you could stop by and buy stuff without leaving the game. Lots of possibilities.
Now, this sounds interesting... I would love to see mixes of reality and fiction like this in virtual worlds. VirtualMacy's, where you can shop for and purchase clothing or gifts, or find yourself drawn into a tragic three-way romance destined for heart break and disaster - unless perhaps you can win Caitlen's heart. (Think Macy's might pay a player to be Caitlen?)
Well, personally I'd love to play such a massive multiplayer game, but out of principle I won't pay for it as I just explained. I'll have to wait until a free one comes along.
Thank you, you are doing the Right Thing, and for the right reasons. And I'm joining you.
Current projects like WorldForge look promising, but are still not ready, not yet. Let's wait and see what comes along...
You would wait less if those projects had your help (they especially need coders and non-coders).
Speaking of that, this reminds me of an interesting idea I had: Don't run central servers on a few machines, run small clients on lots of PCs. Just like SETI@home, encrypt the date, and make it very redundant.
This is called "peer to peer" and has some troublesome security issues. But it's definitely worthwhile for some kinds of games. NetTrek uses this approach. (Check out the FreeTrek project.)
There is always another way. Amen. Lack of choice is a symptom of brain inflexibility.
The reflective material is most likely used for thermal control. Without it the spacecraft would most likely become too hot and burn out. Yes, there are other cooling mechanisms, but making a surface reflective is pretty darn cheap and easy.
The handful of iridium satellites is nothing compared to all the other debris and satellites that we have put in orbit - if iridium satellites are such nuisances to astronomers, then what about all the other ones?
Who says they aren't? ;-) Seriously, though, most satellites are in orbits that aren't such a problem:
GeoSynchronous Earth Orbits (GEO) are way the hell away from the earth, and orbiting at the equator, and really easy for astronomers to avoid. The satellites are also in predictable places in the sky (by design). There are many hundreds of satellites in the GEO ring. These are the satellites you have the most immediate contact with - pagers, cable TV, satellite TV, etc.
Polar or Sun Synchronous satellites (weather satellites and land imaging, for instance) are in orbits that run north-to-south and generally pass overhead only very infrequently, and very quickly. Usually there's only a few satellites in these sorts of orbits.
LEO satellites, like Iridium, are pretty common. They're used for a whole host of different applications. I suppose theoretically any of these would pose the same problems as Iridium to astronomers, however they are usually at altitudes where they move too fast or too slow for them to be much of a problem. Iridium is a bit different in that it is a "Constellation". By *design* you're supposed to always have one in view; their velocity is set such that it "maximizes" the problem to astronomers. ;-) I don't know if there are currently other constellation systems like Iridium in orbit, but I know there's been a bunch designed on paper (I should know, I helped design a few).
You may find this an interesting irony... Hubble is in one of these LEO orbits (so that the shuttle can get to it). So one of the things fouling up the Earth-based telescopes is a better telescope. ;-) (Actually, Hubble is at a low enough orbit that it probably moves too quickly to be much of a problem, but there's other telescopes up there.)
Is there a set of rules for satellite construction? I'm sure there some rules that everyone follows loosely. Is there an international organization that regulates satellite launch schedules? I'm sure there is, it's too important for there not to be any.
Lots of red tape. Remember, your government has had its hand in this industry since its inception. ;-)
If satellites were problems to astronomers, should we be concerned about all the satellite launches that seem to happen all the time?
From an astronomy standpoint, no, I wouldn't worry. Let me explain.
First, consider that the vast majority of satellites are going into orbits that for one reason or another won't be a problem. Period.
Second, step back and give thought to how astronomy has developed and evolved. Long ago, we knew so little about the heavens that a simple telescope out the window of a city apartment could generate a vast wealth of scientific data. As they gathered more data and started looking for higher quality images they were forced to move out of the cities, eventually to remote islands and mountaintops, in order to find clear, light-polution-free skies. Would it have made any sense to restrict electric lights in cities simply for astronomer's benefits?
Today, to achieve the major scientific advancements scientists are having to go into space orbit. Nothing we can trace to ourselves as the fault - it's the atmosphere itself that's at issue, this time. Does it make any more sense to hinder commercial spacecraft than it would have to place controls on electric lighting?
I've had the opportunity to work on some conceptual designing for the next generation telescopes. Very cool things are being designed for the new "mountaintops". In fact, NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope) is being designed to orbit a gravitational anomaly! Check it out: http://www.trw.com/ngst/ (My job is to come up with a propulsion system that'll keep it orbiting this point, without fouling the optics, and is as efficient as possible.)
Certainly, the iridium satellites can be put to use doing something, otherwise we'd just billions of dollars of floating space junk?
Perhaps... However it's not like we can retrofit them with radar sensors or something. I'm sure within a few months we'll hear some novel new use for them, but these spacecraft were pretty optimized for the task and business model they were set for.
I must say that for what Iridium did, it did well. Technically. (Since I worked on the software I'm not going to say it sucked ;-) It's just too bad that by the time Iridium came to market, the market didn't care!
Iridium had a few more launch failures than planned, but yes, the system as a whole worked pretty much as planned (as far as I know). It overlooked the massive drop in cell phone costs, as well as the rise of the Internet.
As far as the satellites are conserned, they will either (1) go in to safe mode then auto-deboost after some period of silence, or (2) Motorola will continue to spend money to command the satellites in order to control their descent so no one gets banged by space junk.
The satellites will (eventually) decay and burn up in the orbit no matter what anyone does. The orbit is high enough that this won't happen any time soon (unlike the space station, which is at such a low altitude that it'll fall back to Earth if you so much as look at it crosseyed. I don't think the satellites have sufficient fuel to conduct a controlled reentry, but it doesn't matter - these things are small enough that they'll burn up completely before coming anywhere near the ground.
Most open source projects don't know how to accept donations, and for the money itself to make a difference (in terms of increasing amount of labor, as opposed to hardware purchases) it would take quite a bit of it. The nice thing about cosource.com is being able to join your donations with those of others in order to build up a more useful sum for supporting, etc.
If you just want to use the money as incentive, to carrot additional work out of people, that's fine too - and also quite doable through cosource.
Definitely can use more help. We've actually got about three or four dozen active developers, plus maybe another fifty or a hundred semi-active developers. There's well over two hundred registered with developer accounts and subscribed to our mailing lists.
We're especially looking for webmaster types (got a lot of online docs to clean up and maintain) these days. We've got coders aplenty but would never turn away more. ;-) Musicians and artists are strongly valued, we've got a good team of them so far but always need more.
Last year we put out a skeleton demo, which is available from our Downloads page. (We'd hoped Slashdot would post an announce about it, but no dice.)
LibAtlas is our "Crown Jewels" - a result of a full year of design, planning, peer reviewing, and general hair pulling. It's a standard(izable) networking protocol suitable for games and for other data-type-rich applications. We'll try to post an announcement here (ok, probably won't get posted; watch our site) once we've had time to write docs and some sample apps.
One thing worth noting is that WorldForge is producing a number of other things besides the game itself. We've developed several libraries and tools which we've independently released on Freshmeat and SourceForge (libuta, for instance, the GUI library for SDL, is developed by our team members.) We've got several project management tools in development that other open source projects will find invaluable. Plus, just to be different we actually practice what we preach and make ALL of the source to our tools, apps, art, music, and etc. openly available for public download and reuse. ;-)
We think we might be able to kill a bunch of birds for the Free Software community, by taking the extra step of designing our systems to be as game-neutral as possible, and have made our project infrastructure very robust. Thus, we can directly help any other Game Development Projects with roughly similar needs as us. So we'd like to welcome any GPL-compliant game development projects to come on by and discuss joining forces to develop mutually beneficial libraries, apps, or other tools.
Keep an eye on our News page for the latest developments. If you're interested in joining in the fun, head to our joining page.
True, but have you heard any other mention of them (or of Altima / WorldForge *grin*)? One announcement on Slashdot can supply a PROFOUND amount of resources to a net project, and thus can be much more valuable than just tossing money at it. WorldForge is where it is today largely _because_ of the initial Slashdot mention, IMHO.
I really truly believe that Slashdot could serve a very important role in helping organize and drive some of the really ambitious open source efforts towards success, if it wanted. The commercial Linux fixation is getting old, IMHO.
Okay, I'm biased since I'm working on one, but I sure would like to see Slashdot give more attention to the many free software game projects. There's a *lot* of them out there, and many are doing some very cool things. I mean, Slashdot *does* support open source software development, right? (Right???)
One thing I've found with the larger hard drives is, they put out a goodly amount of heat. And of course, the Pentium is no slouch at cooking plastic if given half a chance.
A number of game development projects have been working at exactly this; it might be worthwhile for those interested in working on such a protocol to see what's already in the pipeline. Freetrek and Netspace both have just recently started development on 3D protocols for space-flight. WarForge, Phoenix, Lycadican, Cyphesis, and Belchfire are all using WorldForge's "Atlas" 3D RPG protocol (libatlas2 was just completed last week).
:-) Spacecraft manufacturers always use computer architectures specifically suited to space use. They tend to have a lot of unusual devices to connect to the processors, sometimes more cards than a typical motherboard handles. As well, they're driven by the shake, rattle, and roll of launch, and the need to keep mass, power, and cooling requirements to a minimum.
The attention to detail that goes into the design of a spacecraft's computer architecture is pretty amazing, too, especially given that often the computer architecture is only used (as designed) once. And all too often, we're faced with integrating things designed for multiple different architectures (imagine getting a PC modem, SGI video card, and Sun monitor integrated into a Mac chassis.)
In addition to the radiation and reliability concerns, as we all know the newer chips are larger thermal loads. And unlike here on the ground, you can't use fans for cooling. ;-)
Another thing I wonder about is, are the more powerful chips really necessary, anyway? In none of the satellite designs I've been involved with has processor speed been a design driver or technical limitation. Mass, cost, and power are generally the design drivers (sometimes schedule). I would imagine that a chip optimized for low mass, power, and cost (like a 486) would trade off very well against more powerful chips, especially if it is also very reliable. ;-)
I work at TRW (the company that produced this spacecraft, and some of the other recent NASA successes (e.g. Chandra)) and am privvy to the actual production costs. Obviously, I cannot give out figures, but we got good money's worth on this one.
NASA was particularly smart on this one, in that it is making two. EOS Chemistry is a follow-on, that reuses much of the existing spacecraft design (new payload, though) so we were able to realize a lot of savings by just referencing the original paperwork for many of the components (such as the propulsion system, which I got to work on briefly.)
Terra is in a "Low Earth Orbit" (LEO), and as such, will eventually crash back into Earth. In fact, NASA is requiring LEO satellites be de-orbited at end of life, as a way to keep trash out of orbit. (For several spacecraft I've designed this is an annoyingly design-driving requirement; simple spacecraft are being made complicated by the need for a beefy propulsion system simply to make it crash into Earth before it's dead. But keeping space clean is a noble and correct thing to do.)
So that I can blatantly plug my own company, here's my company's news release, a page describing the spacecraft briefly, a more detailed one and another that describes the follow-on spacecraft we're making. I don't know why TRW doesn't toot its own horn more, it's done some of the coolest physics-breaking things in the last fifty years, of any of the aerospace companies.