If you've seen the kind of dev support they gave to WC3, you can believe it. Everything that was missing from the Starcraft editor (logic, data structures) has been addressed. WC3 has a full programming language, and supports imported models and effects.
What I'm wondering is if Battle.net will ever support custom maps in a structured way, other than just the "custom map" catch-all button.
Remember several years ago?...Even outside of slashdot, you could hardly go ten minutes without hearing something or another about how great Linux was and how it was going to make everyone's live better.
And where was the Linux community during this time? They were working on making the Linux desktop a reality. "Several years ago," KDE looked like a cheap knock-off of Win95. Simple applications like a GUI email client barely existed. OpenOffice was a buzzword, not something that was deployed large-scale.
Ubuntu didn't exist, neither did Mozilla and Firefox, and the sexiest "Windows" app on Linux was the XMMS music player.
So...point is, only now do we have a viable Linux desktop. Now we can work on games. And because of this:
for simple and sound business reasons, it will be quite a while before anyone major takes a risk on Linux gaming again.
I suspect gaming on Linux should start as an in-house project. Get someone to write a pair of FPS and RTS engines. Once we have those, you'll see how quickly the "community" unleashes hours of programming time on having fun.
This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz.
Can your computer hear 22kHz?
Are "audiophiles" just another name for the Circuit City retail market?
"Audiophiles" get laughed at by people who own direct-drive, S-shaped tonearm turntables such as the Technics MkIII.
You might want to hear 8-10 violin fiddlers recorded on a Mackie 16-channel. There's a reason why they make these boards.
>Until I started going to actual rock concerts. The truth: On most of them the sound sucks.
Yep, that's true. Queensryche and Black Sabbath (big name bands) sounded good. The rest (Pearl Jam, RHCP, Tool, etc) sounded like crap. I was fairly horrified to be a teenager realizing that my favorite bands couldn't do "studio" live.
The problem is that with vinyl, you are required to sanely mix their tracks, whereas with a CD you can blow out everything with no repercussion. On vinyl if you do that, you wind up with the needle skipping.
I'm trying to answer this intelligently and I'm not sure what you mean.
CD's have a defined audio range. If you amplify it too much, you can hear the limits of the CD format. Generally CD's have a well-defined high end and no bass. No amount of bass boost is going to give you that bass.
Vinyl tracks, otoh, have a well-defined bass range, and the upper end is mostly defined by the quality of the cartridge (anywhere from $20 to $175). However, most records play, without skipping, at any speed and with any cartridge. "Skipping" has nothing to do with vinyl play. It's not an issue unless you scratch.
> searching the disk for a particular pattern and dropping the needle on it. Deadly accurate and spot on.
Yep. Welcome to vinyl. Instant-access, highest quality. Vinyl is there for a reason. Like most great inventions, there will be detractors.
Best advice, buy MKIII's and don't look back. You might hate the fact that you have to spend $10.99 for every 4-track album. But you will love the fact that you get to listen to it completely before buying.
>I find it hard to believe that there are vinyl purists who want MP3s
I don't want mp3. I can cue vinyl with my hands. MP3 is just for preview or for live mixes I can't get any other way. Thus, this article seems gimmicky.
I'll be glad if on-line stores want to sell WAVs (or FLAC), that's an honest format. But the trade-off for massive amounts of WAVs at deep discount is that I have to sit in front of my computer.
Download Reason-->sitting in front of computer-->underwhelmed.
What if these virtual worlds reach a level of sophistication that the interaction, physics and graphics are on par with "normal" video games? wouldn't that be dangerous for game companies?
It's already happened. To my knowledge, Blizzard has released exactly 2 maps for Warcraft III ("Blizzard TD" and "Bomber Command").
Meanwhile, 3rd party mapmakers have released hundreds of maps. "Battleships" has dozens of spin-offs. "Tank Wars," dozens of spin-offs. And so on.
Ever heard of a "TD" (tower defense)? These are making the rounds on Flash servers nowadays. The whole TD concept comes from WC3. Wholly unauthorized, user generated. The TD concept has even reverse-infected the Starcraft servers.
The good news is, Blizzard writes the engine (WC3) and we make our own maps. It's a symbiotic relationship. If anything, we need to get game publishers to admit that we make our own games, they just supply the raw materials.
After all, I'm not looking to write a 3D engine anytime soon.
Zelda has been shifting its focus from pure combat to RPG
Yes. People tend to forget that the first three Zelda games were action-adventure, not puzzle solving. Even the side-scrolling Link had some damn interesting battles, with high/low shield parries and jumping attacks.
>So how do you handle extensions? You know, someone calls you, and you want to say, "Honey, pick up an extension."
I must have been corrupted by cells because I had to stare at that sentence for a minute before I realized what you meant.
All good points.
Biggest problem with cell phones is reliability of getting calls. If you forget to take your phone, forget to charge it, forget to turn it on, there's no warning that you're now off the grid. It's a little pet that needs constant care.
If I write a song, Sony can get one of their artists to record it without obtaining my explicit permission, and I would get paid pennies per copy produced.
If Sony can legally appropriate your work, why would they pay you anything, even pennies?
That seems odd. You must have signed a contract with them in the past and forgotten.
They weren't enviable for very long. Here's a timeline of Microsoft's relationship with the home user:
1988: Microsoft achieves name recognition with the useless, but pretty, Windows 2.0
1990: Microsoft releases Windows 3.0, enabling shared memory (aka crash-prone, but useful) multitasking for the PC. The PC world goes wild!
1992: Just two years later, IBM releases OS/2 2.0 with true workstation multitasking, and we realize how much we got screwed. Microsoft pulled out of the OS/2 deal. At this point, they are just starting to write the NT kernel.
The rest is denouement...
1995: Microsoft introduces the Start! button and the puke-green desktop.
1994-96: Two great programs, Word and Excel reach stability, and are promptly forgotten as the whole world gets buried in PowerPoint presentations.
1997: Outlook becomes the poster-child for complex, bloated, and virus-laden software design. Likewise, IE kills Netscape and replaces it with even more viruses.
2000: A full eight years later, OS/2 style multitasking reaches a home audience with Windows 2000. Whew! Thank God!
And since then?
Nada. Unless you count XP, which is...seven years old on the inside.
> I'm sorry, but open-source software doesn't pay the bills.
I've got news for you pal. You can charge money for writing software!
It doesn't matter what the license is. Open source, you write a new program for each client. Closed, you write one program for one client and then try to scam it off on the others.
Selling a closed-source software "product" sounds more difficult to me, because everyone just wants to steal it. Meanwhile, you have to devote constant effort to fixing bugs that only affect a few users at a time.
It's much easier to fork your own toolkit, add custom code, charge full-price and voila, it's done. With custom code, the client pays to fix his own bugs, because he's buying your time and the "bugs" are often miniature feature requests.
As long as we decide to keep Windows desktops around, we might as well keep the compatibility code (Samba). For this reason, Microsoft probably thinks the Samba team did them a favor.
Hell, has Microsoft ever written/released unix code? "Microsoft Compatibility Server for Linux"? They might actually stoop that low in the coming years:)
casual copyright infringing consumers want content but are not willing to pay for it.
Literally? Because anyone with a DVD collection, which is all of us, is willing to pay. So I guess it's a question of how much and for what.
there are now many (perhaps too many) services out there offering legally downloadable music, DRM-FREE, for reasonable prices
Since when? I've never seen a website sell FLAC or WAV files, have you?
And if they did, they would have to be hella cheap to justify the lack of a preview you would get from going to the store. Can you imagine downloading ten albums at ten bucks a pop and finding out that half of them suck? I'd be PISSED.
Free mp3 previews would solve that problem. And conveniently enough for the studios, mp3's don't pose a piracy problem. The low quality of mp3 relegates it to a broadcast format, and the license terms on a broadcast is everyone.
After all, when was the last time you knew someone who collected all their music by taping FM radio? That's so scrubby. If people are actually out there "collecting" mp3's, I'll laugh.
In conclusion, free mp3's would get people to download FLACs, but you still have to burn your own CDs, and there's no artwork that comes with it (u got a 4-color laser? I don't) so in the end, the studios would have to charge less.
That's probably why none of the studios have tried to sell music on the internet so far.
"That's the dirty little secret. When I talk to open source developers, at least half are talking about Windows, from SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP. Every single one," he said.
He sounds rushed.
Hilf said that the Linux phenomenon had nothing to do with Linux, but rather it had a lot to do with Apache, MySQL and PHP. It was those applications which pulled Linux up with it, the "Visual Basic of open source."
"Visual Basic" implies that PHP made it drop-dead easy to develop web apps on Linux.
Actually, PHP and all these tools are available on Windows too. And they work. It's Windows itself that is the hassle.
This seems to illustrate viability of a new kind of business to come. Providing highly personal entertainer-to-audience interactivity going beyond old models.
Wasn't the web supposed to enable people to be their own publishers? Oh it works. Hmm.
OK, granted. But they seem to be flip sides of the same coin. Credit is the positive claim on a successful work. Copy control is how you keep your work suppressed. Between the two, you have total control to push or pull.
What's the motivation for separating these two concepts?
Likewise, with total control, money is not an issue because we are free to negotiate our own contracts.
Copyright is a personal right, why would I give that up?
>These attributes are hostile for creating cult followings, there is hardly anything there -- just a juggernaut of an industry bully.
Nicely put, thank you.
How about the article's premise that Oracle, IBM, Java, and Google have cults of their own?
I can't imagine being in a Google cult unless you work for them. The IPO set off a great deal of fear about what they would do next.
Meanwhile, if you've ever read an Oracle admin manual, you've probably fantasized about the performance of a 26-spindle disk array. Likewise for IBM, it's engineering fanboyism.
Java is fanboyish, but a little more cult-like because they shove it down the throats of college students, who tend to worship it because that's what they were told. But that's really second-hand.
Only Apple, I think, reaches out to the public with this idea of, "it's good because it's Apple and that's all that matters."
Slashdot Mirror
>They claim full map dev. and scripting support.
If you've seen the kind of dev support they gave to WC3, you can believe it. Everything that was missing from the Starcraft editor (logic, data structures) has been addressed. WC3 has a full programming language, and supports imported models and effects.
What I'm wondering is if Battle.net will ever support custom maps in a structured way, other than just the "custom map" catch-all button.
Remember several years ago? ...Even outside of slashdot, you could hardly go ten minutes without hearing something or another about how great Linux was and how it was going to make everyone's live better.
And where was the Linux community during this time? They were working on making the Linux desktop a reality. "Several years ago," KDE looked like a cheap knock-off of Win95. Simple applications like a GUI email client barely existed. OpenOffice was a buzzword, not something that was deployed large-scale.
Ubuntu didn't exist, neither did Mozilla and Firefox, and the sexiest "Windows" app on Linux was the XMMS music player.
So...point is, only now do we have a viable Linux desktop. Now we can work on games. And because of this:
for simple and sound business reasons, it will be quite a while before anyone major takes a risk on Linux gaming again.
I suspect gaming on Linux should start as an in-house project. Get someone to write a pair of FPS and RTS engines. Once we have those, you'll see how quickly the "community" unleashes hours of programming time on having fun.
This is why vinyl fanatics get laughed at by people who know how and why digital audio works. The limits of even now-mundane CD audio are far above the possible limits of even hypothetically perfect human hearing. Nobody can hear 22kHz.
Can your computer hear 22kHz?
Are "audiophiles" just another name for the Circuit City retail market?
"Audiophiles" get laughed at by people who own direct-drive, S-shaped tonearm turntables such as the Technics MkIII.
>Until I started going to actual rock concerts.
You might want to hear 8-10 violin fiddlers recorded on a Mackie 16-channel. There's a reason why they make these boards.
>Until I started going to actual rock concerts. The truth: On most of them the sound sucks.
Yep, that's true. Queensryche and Black Sabbath (big name bands) sounded good. The rest (Pearl Jam, RHCP, Tool, etc) sounded like crap. I was fairly horrified to be a teenager realizing that my favorite bands couldn't do "studio" live.
Solution? Go to raves.
As I said in another post, the process of vinyl-->tape-->CD removes scratches and hisses.
So it's safe to assume that CD does not have the quality to record scratches and hisses?
I'd say so.
Get a minimal recording studio and get back to me.
>I do have a theory that perhaps the extra noise on a record creates interference patterns that have a pyscho-acoustic effect
Who says vinyl records are noisier?
Maybe CD's and mp3's just don't have the resolution to record the "scratches" and "pops" of vinyl?
Are scratches and pops the problem, or evidence that the solution (vinyl) works?
I know that when I go vinyl-->VHS Stereo-->16-bit DAC, the scratches and pops dissapear. How convenient.
The problem is that with vinyl, you are required to sanely mix their tracks, whereas with a CD you can blow out everything with no repercussion. On vinyl if you do that, you wind up with the needle skipping.
I'm trying to answer this intelligently and I'm not sure what you mean.
CD's have a defined audio range. If you amplify it too much, you can hear the limits of the CD format. Generally CD's have a well-defined high end and no bass. No amount of bass boost is going to give you that bass.
Vinyl tracks, otoh, have a well-defined bass range, and the upper end is mostly defined by the quality of the cartridge (anywhere from $20 to $175). However, most records play, without skipping, at any speed and with any cartridge. "Skipping" has nothing to do with vinyl play. It's not an issue unless you scratch.
> searching the disk for a particular pattern and dropping the needle on it. Deadly accurate and spot on.
Yep. Welcome to vinyl. Instant-access, highest quality. Vinyl is there for a reason. Like most great inventions, there will be detractors.
Best advice, buy MKIII's and don't look back. You might hate the fact that you have to spend $10.99 for every 4-track album. But you will love the fact that you get to listen to it completely before buying.
if you believe in vinyl you believe that analog reproduction is better than whatever sampling rate you've set your WAV to.
The nice thing about WAV is that it doesn't have the audio resolution to record scratches on vinyl, so it sounds better.
In other news, Heather Locklear looks great on television.
>I find it hard to believe that there are vinyl purists who want MP3s
I don't want mp3. I can cue vinyl with my hands. MP3 is just for preview or for live mixes I can't get any other way. Thus, this article seems gimmicky.
I'll be glad if on-line stores want to sell WAVs (or FLAC), that's an honest format. But the trade-off for massive amounts of WAVs at deep discount is that I have to sit in front of my computer.
Download Reason-->sitting in front of computer-->underwhelmed.
What if these virtual worlds reach a level of sophistication that the interaction, physics and graphics are on par with "normal" video games? wouldn't that be dangerous for game companies?
It's already happened. To my knowledge, Blizzard has released exactly 2 maps for Warcraft III ("Blizzard TD" and "Bomber Command").
Meanwhile, 3rd party mapmakers have released hundreds of maps. "Battleships" has dozens of spin-offs. "Tank Wars," dozens of spin-offs. And so on.
Ever heard of a "TD" (tower defense)? These are making the rounds on Flash servers nowadays. The whole TD concept comes from WC3. Wholly unauthorized, user generated. The TD concept has even reverse-infected the Starcraft servers.
The good news is, Blizzard writes the engine (WC3) and we make our own maps. It's a symbiotic relationship. If anything, we need to get game publishers to admit that we make our own games, they just supply the raw materials.
After all, I'm not looking to write a 3D engine anytime soon.
Try RealAlternative and QTAlternative.
Granted, I watched the "standard" versions of these trailers, but RealAlt and QTAlt are good programs to have.
A lot of good points, but this one stands out:
Zelda has been shifting its focus from pure combat to RPG
Yes. People tend to forget that the first three Zelda games were action-adventure, not puzzle solving. Even the side-scrolling Link had some damn interesting battles, with high/low shield parries and jumping attacks.
>To be fair, I was joking
I figured. I just liked the OP's comment too much. IMO chaos theory is teh balls.
>So how do you handle extensions? You know, someone calls you, and you want to say, "Honey, pick up an extension."
I must have been corrupted by cells because I had to stare at that sentence for a minute before I realized what you meant.
All good points.
Biggest problem with cell phones is reliability of getting calls. If you forget to take your phone, forget to charge it, forget to turn it on, there's no warning that you're now off the grid. It's a little pet that needs constant care.
If I write a song, Sony can get one of their artists to record it without obtaining my explicit permission, and I would get paid pennies per copy produced.
If Sony can legally appropriate your work, why would they pay you anything, even pennies?
That seems odd. You must have signed a contract with them in the past and forgotten.
They weren't enviable for very long. Here's a timeline of Microsoft's relationship with the home user:
1988: Microsoft achieves name recognition with the useless, but pretty, Windows 2.0
1990: Microsoft releases Windows 3.0, enabling shared memory (aka crash-prone, but useful) multitasking for the PC. The PC world goes wild!
1992: Just two years later, IBM releases OS/2 2.0 with true workstation multitasking, and we realize how much we got screwed. Microsoft pulled out of the OS/2 deal. At this point, they are just starting to write the NT kernel.
The rest is denouement...
1995: Microsoft introduces the Start! button and the puke-green desktop.
1994-96: Two great programs, Word and Excel reach stability, and are promptly forgotten as the whole world gets buried in PowerPoint presentations.
1997: Outlook becomes the poster-child for complex, bloated, and virus-laden software design. Likewise, IE kills Netscape and replaces it with even more viruses.
2000: A full eight years later, OS/2 style multitasking reaches a home audience with Windows 2000. Whew! Thank God!
And since then?
Nada. Unless you count XP, which is...seven years old on the inside.
> I'm sorry, but open-source software doesn't pay the bills.
I've got news for you pal. You can charge money for writing software!
It doesn't matter what the license is. Open source, you write a new program for each client. Closed, you write one program for one client and then try to scam it off on the others.
Selling a closed-source software "product" sounds more difficult to me, because everyone just wants to steal it. Meanwhile, you have to devote constant effort to fixing bugs that only affect a few users at a time.
It's much easier to fork your own toolkit, add custom code, charge full-price and voila, it's done. With custom code, the client pays to fix his own bugs, because he's buying your time and the "bugs" are often miniature feature requests.
As long as we decide to keep Windows desktops around, we might as well keep the compatibility code (Samba). For this reason, Microsoft probably thinks the Samba team did them a favor.
:)
Hell, has Microsoft ever written/released unix code? "Microsoft Compatibility Server for Linux"? They might actually stoop that low in the coming years
casual copyright infringing consumers want content but are not willing to pay for it.
Literally? Because anyone with a DVD collection, which is all of us, is willing to pay. So I guess it's a question of how much and for what.
there are now many (perhaps too many) services out there offering legally downloadable music, DRM-FREE, for reasonable prices
Since when? I've never seen a website sell FLAC or WAV files, have you?
And if they did, they would have to be hella cheap to justify the lack of a preview you would get from going to the store. Can you imagine downloading ten albums at ten bucks a pop and finding out that half of them suck? I'd be PISSED.
Free mp3 previews would solve that problem. And conveniently enough for the studios, mp3's don't pose a piracy problem. The low quality of mp3 relegates it to a broadcast format, and the license terms on a broadcast is everyone.
After all, when was the last time you knew someone who collected all their music by taping FM radio? That's so scrubby. If people are actually out there "collecting" mp3's, I'll laugh.
In conclusion, free mp3's would get people to download FLACs, but you still have to burn your own CDs, and there's no artwork that comes with it (u got a 4-color laser? I don't) so in the end, the studios would have to charge less.
That's probably why none of the studios have tried to sell music on the internet so far.
>Would you grant an exception to 0 K (-273.15 C) [wikipedia.org]?
I dunno, if someone said that lizards can't fly, would you grant an exception for black dragons?
Might want to read the first paragraph of that link you posted.
He sounds rushed.
"Visual Basic" implies that PHP made it drop-dead easy to develop web apps on Linux.
Actually, PHP and all these tools are available on Windows too. And they work. It's Windows itself that is the hassle.
Call it FUDR...the R stands for "redirection."
This seems to illustrate viability of a new kind of business to come. Providing highly personal entertainer-to-audience interactivity going beyond old models.
Wasn't the web supposed to enable people to be their own publishers? Oh it works. Hmm.
Crediting and copying are two different things.
OK, granted. But they seem to be flip sides of the same coin. Credit is the positive claim on a successful work. Copy control is how you keep your work suppressed. Between the two, you have total control to push or pull.
What's the motivation for separating these two concepts?
Likewise, with total control, money is not an issue because we are free to negotiate our own contracts.
Copyright is a personal right, why would I give that up?
>These attributes are hostile for creating cult followings, there is hardly anything there -- just a juggernaut of an industry bully.
Nicely put, thank you.
How about the article's premise that Oracle, IBM, Java, and Google have cults of their own?
I can't imagine being in a Google cult unless you work for them. The IPO set off a great deal of fear about what they would do next.
Meanwhile, if you've ever read an Oracle admin manual, you've probably fantasized about the performance of a 26-spindle disk array. Likewise for IBM, it's engineering fanboyism.
Java is fanboyish, but a little more cult-like because they shove it down the throats of college students, who tend to worship it because that's what they were told. But that's really second-hand.
Only Apple, I think, reaches out to the public with this idea of, "it's good because it's Apple and that's all that matters."