It's harder to try to be the king of that market, as Diablo series has been, arguably, surpassed by other companies. As opposed to Starcraft, which (with Starcraft 2) remains the king of its genre.
If you liked Diablo 2, I suggest checking out Path of Exile in particular, but there's a lot of options there.
(And no, do not mention Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander - they might be better RTS games, but they haven't out-starcrafted Starcraft. They're more strategically oriented while Blizzard still does the fast-paced rock-paper-scissors -style micromanagement RTS way better than the competition.)
I have friends who never buy new computers, instead they get frankenputers assembled from mismatched old parts put together for free (or rather, at the cost of a couple of beers). These computers work just fine unless you're playing newest games with high settings, which is completely fine by them, since if they were gaming enthusiasts, they would buy new computers anyway.
Getting rid of old parts has a low profit margin and people generally have no energy to do it. If your friend can get a workable rig from them, most computer enthusiasts are happy to help. The practice wasn't really possible in the 90's when old parts became obsolete at an alarming phase. This hasn't been the case for some 10 years.
To be absolutely honest, in the 286/386 era the socket and extension card interfaces were more uniform. There was generally one socket type for one type of processor that did not change every year. You did not have to worry about installing huge heatsinks or liquid cooling. You didn't have multiple different kinds of power cables going to your motherboard with extras going to your graphics card.
Granted, all the cables were bigger and fitting them to the case was harder (thank god for SATA). You had actual floppy drives that were a must. You had to fiddle with memory address and IRQ jumpers, but that wasn't impossible either. Most people had one sound card, one modem and (possibly) one network card at maximum to fiddle with. The maximum I remember having was a video card, modem, network card, sound card and a 25-pin COM port card (motherboard only had 9-pin).
Building a PC is by and large about as difficult now as it was before. Different, but in the same ballpark.
I use Sylpheed. It's light and fast and doesn't do anything I don't need. However, in truth, nowadays I mostly use Gmail web interface.
Used to use Evolution at work. It's okay too. If I remember correctly, it did something business-related (calendars?) better than Thunderbird circa '10. This is probably no longer relevant
Yes, Hollywood has done a few. Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters by Heinlein, for example. But they did them... WRONG.
You can argue that Hollywood did Starship Troopers in a way not in line with Heinlein's original, but there's no way you can argue they did it wrong. Seriously, it's an amazing movie that's not just about the action (which is good too), but also actually funny satire.
The surface gravity is proportional to mass (7x) and inversely so to the square of the radius (~1/4) so 7/4 is about 1.75 surface gravity compared to Earth.
Look, I know no one likes to speak ill of the dead and all, but geez, last week's lovefest got WAY WAY WAY out of hand.
The idol worship over the death of THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MAN IN COMPUTING was quite embarrassing, but the comment from RMS outdid that easily. He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement, and in a case like this, it does not only matter what he thinks or what the members of FSF think. Rather, it's what other people unaffiliated with open source movement think.
The end result here being that most people now percieve Stallman as a bully who would be quick to slander the dead, and those who despise open source will have a easy straw man to attack.
FreeBSD i386 has a pretty good Linux emulation, and I've been using Linux flash via nspluginwrapper on my machine until recently.
Now recently, with latest FreeBSD drivers from nvidia, the flash images start playing on every black pixel on my screen that's on the same relative screen position as the video. This happens on every desktop. If I put youtube on, then go into another desktop to do coding, the video happily keeps playing in my black-background terminal.
The bug is so bizarre I wouldn't know where to begin with it. If it persists with FreeBSD 8.3, it's time to start looking for a solution. As-is, downloadhelper and greasemonkey will do.
Blender is like Vim - it does not make compromises for usability versus power.
For professional purposes it does not make sense to create a program that's easy to use. Accessibility has zero value in this equation - the people just trying out thinking they can be the next Pixar would not achieve anything anyway. The people with willpower to become experts will only care whether it's powerful or not.
I'm actually running Gnome 2 sans Metacity. It's a clunky thing that requires you to constantly wave your mouse around. That's not optimal, the computer should be usable with keyboard only. Luckily, it is replaceable by any other ewmh compliant window manager.
I'm using FVWM mainly for configurability. With it, I can configure elementary sequences under a single keypress. For example:
- move this window to a corner of the screen
- resize this window to occupy exactly top/bottom or left/right part of the screen
- expand this window to fill the screen from a corner but don't overlap any other windows
(it appears awesome could be even better for my purposes - have to try it out sometime)
Video game products contain plenty of art, but it's product art, which is to say, kitsch art. Kitsch art is not bad art. It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity. And the bigger the audience, the kitschier it's gonna get.
People who talk about "Kitch" art are generally the kind of people who think that true "Art" consists of splotches of paint on canvas and rusty iron walls. I'm not going to dwell on this, but I will add that yes, some art is crass and cheap.
For as long as we've had 'modern' art, it's been popular to refer to it as monkeys painting on canvas or sperm, blood and shit in a blender.
In the old times being an artist used to mean the practical skill in painting, sculpting or the like. These people didn't do 'art' just for fun and for grants, they were employed by people who wanted something (usually themselves) immortalized. Anyone can appreciate the magnificent craft of these paintings and sculptures, but they could truly be understood by fellow practicioners or experts that can understand all the different nuances.
Computer gaming example, consider bullet hell games. Before 'shooter' came to mean FPS, vertical and horizontal shooters were popular. After their descent into oblivity, the genre was transformed into its extremes, with literal curtains of bullets and mind-boggling difficulty levels. Eventually that did turn everyone expect the most fanatic hobbyists away. If you'd say 'shooter' to a child from this gaming generation (s)he would think about a game where two fratboys do fistpounds after killing deveral dozens of people.
(the above is not demeaning, I like ridiculously macho killfests as much as you do)
But some art is heartfelt, and worked hard on, and that shows through in the final product. And there are video games which meet that standard.
Forementioned shooter genre received several of its finest contributions after vanishing from regular gamers' eyes. These could be appreciated (or even known) by only hardcore fans of the niche. Yet they're undeniably brilliant.
The point is - if you don't understand something, that does not make it not be art. I'm not saying that killing cats on video is art, but even among the paint splotches, there are people who are masters in their craft. Perhaps people who are into rusty walls can see something touching in a particular installment. At which point, it is art.
Conversely, even if someone does not understand gaming, it still is art. Simple as that. Perhaps not every game or even the most, but there undeniably:
I think most people on the forum will have played a game--however primitive--which moved them deeply in some way. And moved them in a more genuine and heartfelt way than any picture of circles has ever moved any art critic.
There's already been many great examples in this thread. I'll add The Void.
There was a better alternative back in the nineties called SMODEM. It had a bidirectional transfer of one file into each direction, and a real-time chat at the same time. For example, the Finnish BBS called MBnet used this to connect users into a group chat whenever they were downloading with SMODEM.
I doubt it was available for the first Linux images though.
Slashdot Mirror
It's harder to try to be the king of that market, as Diablo series has been, arguably, surpassed by other companies. As opposed to Starcraft, which (with Starcraft 2) remains the king of its genre.
If you liked Diablo 2, I suggest checking out Path of Exile in particular, but there's a lot of options there.
(And no, do not mention Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander - they might be better RTS games, but they haven't out-starcrafted Starcraft. They're more strategically oriented while Blizzard still does the fast-paced rock-paper-scissors -style micromanagement RTS way better than the competition.)
I have friends who never buy new computers, instead they get frankenputers assembled from mismatched old parts put together for free (or rather, at the cost of a couple of beers). These computers work just fine unless you're playing newest games with high settings, which is completely fine by them, since if they were gaming enthusiasts, they would buy new computers anyway.
Getting rid of old parts has a low profit margin and people generally have no energy to do it. If your friend can get a workable rig from them, most computer enthusiasts are happy to help. The practice wasn't really possible in the 90's when old parts became obsolete at an alarming phase. This hasn't been the case for some 10 years.
To be absolutely honest, in the 286/386 era the socket and extension card interfaces were more uniform. There was generally one socket type for one type of processor that did not change every year. You did not have to worry about installing huge heatsinks or liquid cooling. You didn't have multiple different kinds of power cables going to your motherboard with extras going to your graphics card.
Granted, all the cables were bigger and fitting them to the case was harder (thank god for SATA). You had actual floppy drives that were a must. You had to fiddle with memory address and IRQ jumpers, but that wasn't impossible either. Most people had one sound card, one modem and (possibly) one network card at maximum to fiddle with. The maximum I remember having was a video card, modem, network card, sound card and a 25-pin COM port card (motherboard only had 9-pin).
Building a PC is by and large about as difficult now as it was before. Different, but in the same ballpark.
I use Sylpheed. It's light and fast and doesn't do anything I don't need. However, in truth, nowadays I mostly use Gmail web interface.
Used to use Evolution at work. It's okay too. If I remember correctly, it did something business-related (calendars?) better than Thunderbird circa '10. This is probably no longer relevant
To run in PrBoom+, take your old doom.wad from the original, then run with:
Or glboom-plus.exe on Windows.
This was amazing. Thank you. I'd mod you up if I had points right now.
The team found that 82% of the genome was made up of duplicated segments,
-funroll-loops
A Battletech series would be fantastic if done correctly.
I'm throwing all my money and credit cards at the screen but nothing is happening.
Yes, Hollywood has done a few. Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters by Heinlein, for example. But they did them... WRONG.
You can argue that Hollywood did Starship Troopers in a way not in line with Heinlein's original, but there's no way you can argue they did it wrong. Seriously, it's an amazing movie that's not just about the action (which is good too), but also actually funny satire.
I used to use FreeBSD in the early-to-mid-2000s, back before I went to OS X
I'm the inverse. Tried out OSX back in the day, but couldn't get along with it. Tried FreeBSD later, and have been using it since '06.
Actually, I realized I have never donated to the FreeBSD foundation, so did that now.
The surface gravity is proportional to mass (7x) and inversely so to the square of the radius (~1/4) so 7/4 is about 1.75 surface gravity compared to Earth.
That's actually rather close. Here's a handy graph for demonstration purposes.
Expecting a lone husky to be seen escaping the facility in 2 days time.
Look, I know no one likes to speak ill of the dead and all, but geez, last week's lovefest got WAY WAY WAY out of hand.
The idol worship over the death of THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MAN IN COMPUTING was quite embarrassing, but the comment from RMS outdid that easily. He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
Stallman should remember that he isn't just any random character fighting for software freedom. He's the self-appointed publicity figure for open source movement, and in a case like this, it does not only matter what he thinks or what the members of FSF think. Rather, it's what other people unaffiliated with open source movement think.
The end result here being that most people now percieve Stallman as a bully who would be quick to slander the dead, and those who despise open source will have a easy straw man to attack.
You know, this has halready been done. With pictures. The only new idea here was to decrease the amount of poorly written pornography.
FreeBSD i386 has a pretty good Linux emulation, and I've been using Linux flash via nspluginwrapper on my machine until recently.
Now recently, with latest FreeBSD drivers from nvidia, the flash images start playing on every black pixel on my screen that's on the same relative screen position as the video. This happens on every desktop. If I put youtube on, then go into another desktop to do coding, the video happily keeps playing in my black-background terminal.
The bug is so bizarre I wouldn't know where to begin with it. If it persists with FreeBSD 8.3, it's time to start looking for a solution. As-is, downloadhelper and greasemonkey will do.
Blender is like Vim - it does not make compromises for usability versus power.
For professional purposes it does not make sense to create a program that's easy to use. Accessibility has zero value in this equation - the people just trying out thinking they can be the next Pixar would not achieve anything anyway. The people with willpower to become experts will only care whether it's powerful or not.
I'm actually running Gnome 2 sans Metacity. It's a clunky thing that requires you to constantly wave your mouse around. That's not optimal, the computer should be usable with keyboard only. Luckily, it is replaceable by any other ewmh compliant window manager.
I'm using FVWM mainly for configurability. With it, I can configure elementary sequences under a single keypress. For example:
- move this window to a corner of the screen
- resize this window to occupy exactly top/bottom or left/right part of the screen
- expand this window to fill the screen from a corner but don't overlap any other windows
(it appears awesome could be even better for my purposes - have to try it out sometime)
Please look into the light.
For as long as we've had 'modern' art, it's been popular to refer to it as monkeys painting on canvas or sperm, blood and shit in a blender.
In the old times being an artist used to mean the practical skill in painting, sculpting or the like. These people didn't do 'art' just for fun and for grants, they were employed by people who wanted something (usually themselves) immortalized. Anyone can appreciate the magnificent craft of these paintings and sculptures, but they could truly be understood by fellow practicioners or experts that can understand all the different nuances.
Computer gaming example, consider bullet hell games. Before 'shooter' came to mean FPS, vertical and horizontal shooters were popular. After their descent into oblivity, the genre was transformed into its extremes, with literal curtains of bullets and mind-boggling difficulty levels. Eventually that did turn everyone expect the most fanatic hobbyists away. If you'd say 'shooter' to a child from this gaming generation (s)he would think about a game where two fratboys do fistpounds after killing deveral dozens of people.
(the above is not demeaning, I like ridiculously macho killfests as much as you do)
Forementioned shooter genre received several of its finest contributions after vanishing from regular gamers' eyes. These could be appreciated (or even known) by only hardcore fans of the niche. Yet they're undeniably brilliant.
The point is - if you don't understand something, that does not make it not be art. I'm not saying that killing cats on video is art, but even among the paint splotches, there are people who are masters in their craft. Perhaps people who are into rusty walls can see something touching in a particular installment. At which point, it is art.
Conversely, even if someone does not understand gaming, it still is art. Simple as that. Perhaps not every game or even the most, but there undeniably:
There's already been many great examples in this thread. I'll add The Void.
There was a better alternative back in the nineties called SMODEM. It had a bidirectional transfer of one file into each direction, and a real-time chat at the same time. For example, the Finnish BBS called MBnet used this to connect users into a group chat whenever they were downloading with SMODEM.
I doubt it was available for the first Linux images though.
Note: I made an account to say this.