Also, your site looks like some kind of silly troll hangout (judging by your About page and your forum). You can't expect anyone to take your grievances seriously with such an ugly site with unprofessional information and focus, and seedy members.
Here's an idea: You have a web site. Why not turn it into what you think Slashdot should be, instead of some worthless hive of negativity? Oh, that's right: it's easier to whine about something than to do it yourself.
Of course, this is offset by most American's apathy towards anything to do with government. As long as they can afford their beers, pay the bills and watch their idiot box most of them will be complacent about damn near anything that doesn't interfere with any of that.
Don't believe me? How about his for a statistic: more people voted in the last American Idol episode of that television show than did in the last Presidential Election.
9/11 has opened the door to a massive U.S. federal government power grab, which will continue as long as they are successful in controlling the situation enough to avoid massive public backlash.
I only played Star Fox in stores, but looking at the screenshots it doesn't look like there's anything in there that couldn't be done by shading tricks:
He only mentions a random smattering of Castlevania games, and there doesn't seem to be any point to his discussion (except maybe to mention Haunted Castle for the PS2, which he implies isn't very good). The biggest travesty is no mention of Symphony of the Night.
I think AitD was shaded polygons and pre-drawn 2D backgrounds. The ones that look textured are probably using some kind of random pattern rather than true texture mapping.
I guess those aren't true polygonal 3D games though (they used tricks to simulate it, as I recall, which limited the engines a bit). I can't think of an example of a texture-shaded polygonal 3D PC game from 1994 or earlier, but I'm sure some exist. Quake was around the same time, but I don't think it was earlier.
That makes sense on the surface, but it's kind of a weak argument for two reasons: 1. The new driver model is more restrictive than in previous versions of Windows, for security reasons, so it's not like there's some cool new feature that DirectX is hooking into. Maybe having the desktop (AeroGlass) use 3D acceleration makes things easier on DirectX 10, but it could just as easily make things more complicated. 2. Vista still has to maintain a large amount of backwards compatibility with DirectX 9 (and possibly lower). Nobody is going to upgrade if it means that they can no longer play almost all of the titles currently on store shelves, no matter how much shinier Vista is.
(side note: this is old news - I heard of it at least a week or so ago)
What does this mean for the games market? It seems to me that few developers/publishers are going to want to limit themselves to only a portion of their current market by developing a DirectX 10-only game - at least not until Vista is on well over half of Windows machines, which is likely to take a couple of years. This is especially likely considering the current cutthroat state of the PC games market, where the bar to entry in the top-sellers list is extremely high (not to mention that it's dominated by innovation-fearing publishers who would rather spend their money marketing recycled games built on DirectX 9 than fund a whole new engine for a DirectX 10 game).
My prediction is that only a few DirectX 10-only games will be seen in the first year after Vista's release, and most of them will be mediocre Microsoft titles. The only other thing I can think of is if a game could be made that takes advantage of DirectX 10 when available but falls back on DirectX 9 otherwise; in this case, I'd expect to see a handful of FPS games touting optional usage of DirectX 10 features. --
On the user end of things, most people aren't going to rush out and buy a new OS. Most people aren't going to know whether Vista will run on their system, much less what the advantages/disadvantages would be, so they will simply wait until their current system gets too old and will have Vista pre-installed on their next PC.
I'm guessing that a lot of people will be upgrading within the next year, though, as I've seen indications that a large number of people are, for example, still using early AMD64 CPUs and GeForce 5xxx and 6xxx video cards.
Yes, in fact each of your two accounts counts as an individual subscriber in Blizzard's reported numbers. It's the same thing as hard drive manufacturers defining a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of the way the rest of the computer world does (namely, 1024^3=1,073,741,824 bytes) - they artificially inflate the numbers for marketing/advertising purposes.
This presumes the game would be driven by a "level up" drive; while that's an easy to code concrete reward system, its not the only possible model for a game, even an MMO. A game with a more dynamic environment wouldn't, ideally, have to feature levelling up to give players an evolving set of challenges.
Exactly. In fact, the best thing would then be for the developers to try to balance things so that the Alliance players and NPCs would push back the Horde players in a desperate battle, eventually restoring the balance. Or maybe not: maybe the Horde would take over the city, and the Alliance players would have to flee somewhere else. It would work solely because the developers would still be there changing the content around to keep the game alive. It most certainly wouldn't be static amusement park content where the same guy would spawn back the next day with a different name, and the developers would be using the game to balance the odds so that large-scale or large-impact ganking and griefing wouldn't take place.
WOW is where the bulk of the players and it is there for a reason. A very good number of players don't want a full time job followed by a game that is yet another full time job.
It's true, Blizzard has boiled down the MMORPG genre to the elements that, ideally, are most fun (quests, exploration, small group runs). Of course, that runs out and people want more, so they concentrate on what's addictive enough to keep people playing (rep grinding, raiding end-game instances for uber loot, PvP battlegrounds, etc.). It works until people get burned out and realize how pointless it is in the end.
The main problem I have with his writing is that he has the same illusion many others who write like he does, that CRPGs have depth the online ones do not. The only true difference is that in a CRPG you are the only hero around.
I disagree with your interpretation of the article. I think his point is that you can make a game where the objective isn't to become a hero at all, but rather to have a small (but relatively equal) hand in changing the direction of large-scale events in a game world.
Still the games have to be mostly predictable because it is far easier to code for that.
That's it exactly: it would be an order of magnitude more difficult to make a dynamic game world in which the actions of players permanently change the game content in a meaningful way.
For example, imagine if the WoW developers unleashed the AQ invasion on the players, and depending on whether or not the players were able to stop it, the world would be different afterwards. The developers wouldn't know ahead of time how it would turn out because they'd let the players determine the outcome and then go from there with the direction of new content.
Or, imagine that the Horde players overrun Darnassus and kill the Arch Druid. Instead of him respawning 2 minutes later, what if he stayed dead? What if all the NPCs on the continent gathered for a funeral, followed by a power struggle for a replacement figurehead? What if this rippled out and shifted the balance and power and course of events in various ways across the whole game world? You get the idea.
And there's the problem: The developers couldn't just create a static amusement park world the way they do now. Instead, they'd have to be continually adding, changing, and removing content to create a dynamically changing universe in reaction to the players. This would take an enormous amount of time and effort, and would likely be a lot less profitable (at least at first).
Guild Wars took a more innovative approach, but it's still static, infinitely repeatable content. The author's points, I think, were: - it would be way, way more fun if the actions of the player community as a whole were to drive a continuous evolution of game content, as opposed to the current paradigm of seting up a rat's maze of static content that is destined to run out sooner or later (or become boring if it's repeatable) - removing the experience treadmill and level segragation would put players on more even ground, allwing for more realistic, less frustrating interaction between players - it would be way more fun to eliminate the focus on grinding for experience and items and instead make a game where the players play to affect the larger happenings of the world itself
The problem as I see it is that this would be a lot more work for developers, and would be potentially less profitable as a result.
The end result, though, would be a 50,000 pen-and-paper RPG that is played graphically over the Internet. A great idea on paper, but really really hard to pull off successfully.
#1, that is certainly not how water flows over something.
Indeed. Following it like the water analogy, you'd think the best they could hope for is to bend light around the user, leaving a wake in all directions. I imagine this would probably make the cloaked person/object look like a somewhat reflective sphere/cylinder, except that the part you look directly at would look darker and the edges would look brighter.
It would be a good way to cloak someone's identity, but I don't see it making them undetectable.
I didn't appreciate it turning into an Asimo ad at the end. Also, it's hard to belive it works very well (or at all) when they report only being able to do one gesture with it. Definitely a cool idea though, and it's good if they're really making progress.
Even more important than robotics would be the application to artificial/cybernetic replacement limbs. If they could miniturize the sensor technology to where it could be embedded in a hat, or (even better) just under the skin of the scalp, it could be used to provide decent motor control for an artificial limb.
Thanks! I'll give it a shot. Acrobat Reader is one of the things I usually install early on after a OS (re)install, but as we all know it's horribly bloated and the browser plugin is prone to crashing.
OGG would probably be a better example than AAC in this discussion.
Also, on general lossless compression file archive formats:.tar.bz2 is pretty good compression compared to the rest. I never understood what was so cool about RAR compared to ZIP (I also remember a lot of formats that more or less died, such as ARC/ARK and LHA/LZH, ACE, etc. - ACE in particular was an improvement over RAR, but never really caught on). I use ZIP when I just want to compress/decompress something quickly and get a decent reduction in file size, and.tar.bz2 when I'm really archiving something.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but not as tired as I am of spammers like you. Four spams to the same article? That's pretty lame.
Also, your site looks like some kind of silly troll hangout (judging by your About page and your forum). You can't expect anyone to take your grievances seriously with such an ugly site with unprofessional information and focus, and seedy members.
Here's an idea: You have a web site. Why not turn it into what you think Slashdot should be, instead of some worthless hive of negativity? Oh, that's right: it's easier to whine about something than to do it yourself.
Except that voting doesn't do any good now either: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/w
9/11 has opened the door to a massive U.S. federal government power grab, which will continue as long as they are successful in controlling the situation enough to avoid massive public backlash.
That's true. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt by assuming they meant texture-mapped true polygon 3D.
The games you listed used polygons that were shaded but not textured.
I only played Star Fox in stores, but looking at the screenshots it doesn't look like there's anything in there that couldn't be done by shading tricks:
e nshots
http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/star-fox-/scre
Here's a PC game from 1991 that used a similar quality of flat-shaded polygon graphics:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/epic/screenshots
He only mentions a random smattering of Castlevania games, and there doesn't seem to be any point to his discussion (except maybe to mention Haunted Castle for the PS2, which he implies isn't very good). The biggest travesty is no mention of Symphony of the Night.
I think AitD was shaded polygons and pre-drawn 2D backgrounds. The ones that look textured are probably using some kind of random pattern rather than true texture mapping.
r k/screenshots
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alone-in-the-da
lol, what about:
Wolfenstein 3-D (1992) - http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/wolfenstein-3d
Doom (1993) - http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/doom
I guess those aren't true polygonal 3D games though (they used tricks to simulate it, as I recall, which limited the engines a bit). I can't think of an example of a texture-shaded polygonal 3D PC game from 1994 or earlier, but I'm sure some exist. Quake was around the same time, but I don't think it was earlier.
That makes sense on the surface, but it's kind of a weak argument for two reasons:
1. The new driver model is more restrictive than in previous versions of Windows, for security reasons, so it's not like there's some cool new feature that DirectX is hooking into. Maybe having the desktop (AeroGlass) use 3D acceleration makes things easier on DirectX 10, but it could just as easily make things more complicated.
2. Vista still has to maintain a large amount of backwards compatibility with DirectX 9 (and possibly lower). Nobody is going to upgrade if it means that they can no longer play almost all of the titles currently on store shelves, no matter how much shinier Vista is.
(side note: this is old news - I heard of it at least a week or so ago)
What does this mean for the games market? It seems to me that few developers/publishers are going to want to limit themselves to only a portion of their current market by developing a DirectX 10-only game - at least not until Vista is on well over half of Windows machines, which is likely to take a couple of years. This is especially likely considering the current cutthroat state of the PC games market, where the bar to entry in the top-sellers list is extremely high (not to mention that it's dominated by innovation-fearing publishers who would rather spend their money marketing recycled games built on DirectX 9 than fund a whole new engine for a DirectX 10 game).
My prediction is that only a few DirectX 10-only games will be seen in the first year after Vista's release, and most of them will be mediocre Microsoft titles. The only other thing I can think of is if a game could be made that takes advantage of DirectX 10 when available but falls back on DirectX 9 otherwise; in this case, I'd expect to see a handful of FPS games touting optional usage of DirectX 10 features.
--
On the user end of things, most people aren't going to rush out and buy a new OS. Most people aren't going to know whether Vista will run on their system, much less what the advantages/disadvantages would be, so they will simply wait until their current system gets too old and will have Vista pre-installed on their next PC.
I'm guessing that a lot of people will be upgrading within the next year, though, as I've seen indications that a large number of people are, for example, still using early AMD64 CPUs and GeForce 5xxx and 6xxx video cards.
Except for you: -1, Flamebait
Maybe this will help clear things up (it did for me):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
Natural or not, the inconsistency is silly. Apparently the method used to report the capacity of CDs and DVDs even differs in this way.
Yes, in fact each of your two accounts counts as an individual subscriber in Blizzard's reported numbers. It's the same thing as hard drive manufacturers defining a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of the way the rest of the computer world does (namely, 1024^3=1,073,741,824 bytes) - they artificially inflate the numbers for marketing/advertising purposes.
Where are the up/down arrows on the right-side slashboxes? Will we be able to arrange them?
This presumes the game would be driven by a "level up" drive; while that's an easy to code concrete reward system, its not the only possible model for a game, even an MMO. A game with a more dynamic environment wouldn't, ideally, have to feature levelling up to give players an evolving set of challenges.
Exactly. In fact, the best thing would then be for the developers to try to balance things so that the Alliance players and NPCs would push back the Horde players in a desperate battle, eventually restoring the balance. Or maybe not: maybe the Horde would take over the city, and the Alliance players would have to flee somewhere else. It would work solely because the developers would still be there changing the content around to keep the game alive. It most certainly wouldn't be static amusement park content where the same guy would spawn back the next day with a different name, and the developers would be using the game to balance the odds so that large-scale or large-impact ganking and griefing wouldn't take place.
WOW is where the bulk of the players and it is there for a reason. A very good number of players don't want a full time job followed by a game that is yet another full time job.
It's true, Blizzard has boiled down the MMORPG genre to the elements that, ideally, are most fun (quests, exploration, small group runs). Of course, that runs out and people want more, so they concentrate on what's addictive enough to keep people playing (rep grinding, raiding end-game instances for uber loot, PvP battlegrounds, etc.). It works until people get burned out and realize how pointless it is in the end.
The main problem I have with his writing is that he has the same illusion many others who write like he does, that CRPGs have depth the online ones do not. The only true difference is that in a CRPG you are the only hero around.
I disagree with your interpretation of the article. I think his point is that you can make a game where the objective isn't to become a hero at all, but rather to have a small (but relatively equal) hand in changing the direction of large-scale events in a game world.
Still the games have to be mostly predictable because it is far easier to code for that.
That's it exactly: it would be an order of magnitude more difficult to make a dynamic game world in which the actions of players permanently change the game content in a meaningful way.
For example, imagine if the WoW developers unleashed the AQ invasion on the players, and depending on whether or not the players were able to stop it, the world would be different afterwards. The developers wouldn't know ahead of time how it would turn out because they'd let the players determine the outcome and then go from there with the direction of new content.
Or, imagine that the Horde players overrun Darnassus and kill the Arch Druid. Instead of him respawning 2 minutes later, what if he stayed dead? What if all the NPCs on the continent gathered for a funeral, followed by a power struggle for a replacement figurehead? What if this rippled out and shifted the balance and power and course of events in various ways across the whole game world? You get the idea.
And there's the problem: The developers couldn't just create a static amusement park world the way they do now. Instead, they'd have to be continually adding, changing, and removing content to create a dynamically changing universe in reaction to the players. This would take an enormous amount of time and effort, and would likely be a lot less profitable (at least at first).
Guild Wars took a more innovative approach, but it's still static, infinitely repeatable content. The author's points, I think, were:
- it would be way, way more fun if the actions of the player community as a whole were to drive a continuous evolution of game content, as opposed to the current paradigm of seting up a rat's maze of static content that is destined to run out sooner or later (or become boring if it's repeatable)
- removing the experience treadmill and level segragation would put players on more even ground, allwing for more realistic, less frustrating interaction between players
- it would be way more fun to eliminate the focus on grinding for experience and items and instead make a game where the players play to affect the larger happenings of the world itself
The problem as I see it is that this would be a lot more work for developers, and would be potentially less profitable as a result.
The end result, though, would be a 50,000 pen-and-paper RPG that is played graphically over the Internet. A great idea on paper, but really really hard to pull off successfully.
#1, that is certainly not how water flows over something.
Indeed. Following it like the water analogy, you'd think the best they could hope for is to bend light around the user, leaving a wake in all directions. I imagine this would probably make the cloaked person/object look like a somewhat reflective sphere/cylinder, except that the part you look directly at would look darker and the edges would look brighter.
It would be a good way to cloak someone's identity, but I don't see it making them undetectable.
Yes, absolutely - if they were building the prototype in the U.S. instead of France, that is.
*Whooosh!* He was being sarcastic.
I didn't appreciate it turning into an Asimo ad at the end. Also, it's hard to belive it works very well (or at all) when they report only being able to do one gesture with it. Definitely a cool idea though, and it's good if they're really making progress.
Even more important than robotics would be the application to artificial/cybernetic replacement limbs. If they could miniturize the sensor technology to where it could be embedded in a hat, or (even better) just under the skin of the scalp, it could be used to provide decent motor control for an artificial limb.
No, they're putting it in France in case it blows up.
Thanks! I'll give it a shot. Acrobat Reader is one of the things I usually install early on after a OS (re)install, but as we all know it's horribly bloated and the browser plugin is prone to crashing.
No, they buried it in the sand because noone would ever think to look for a submarine there. ;)
Can you suggest any Windows-based fully-featured PDF viewers other than Adobe's?
OGG would probably be a better example than AAC in this discussion.
.tar.bz2 is pretty good compression compared to the rest. I never understood what was so cool about RAR compared to ZIP (I also remember a lot of formats that more or less died, such as ARC/ARK and LHA/LZH, ACE, etc. - ACE in particular was an improvement over RAR, but never really caught on). I use ZIP when I just want to compress/decompress something quickly and get a decent reduction in file size, and .tar.bz2 when I'm really archiving something.
Also, on general lossless compression file archive formats: