it's funny, but you'll probably get flamed or modded to oblivion just for posting about the only reasonable solution to his conundrum. i seriously doubt this kid is going to learn the Java API and throw together something on the scale most of these people are talking about in the 3 months or so of after-school time he has to work with.
Flash is a great medium for 2D games. the graphics are drag and drop, and the actionscripting is a perfect introduction to handling the logic associated with managing a game.
but, this being slashdot, anything mentioning Flash in a positive light will probably get modded downward and derided by the community.
yeah, the truth is it is very tricky to get it to run on modern processors. even with the latest patch, i had to edit the config file with some jargon i found on a messageboard just to get it to run. i'm at work, otherwise i'd paste the config file here. sorry!
i agree with this also. even though the landscape is pretty ugly (everything is pretty much a shade of red), the game itself is fantastic. it's a perfected version of civ2.
totally customizable units, functional and relatively deep diplomacy, fantastic story and brilliant characters (in a civ game?!?!), multiple paths to victory (victory by diplomacy, victory by economic domination, victory by Transcendent technology, or of course the good old victory by genocide) and an unceasing number options and worlds to play around with.
my favorite feature, though, is the wonderfully clever quotes or movies you get every time you discover a new tech or wonder of the world. they really give one a sense of not only accomplishment, but wonder at this new, exciting technology your society has just produced.
you're still missing the point, which is to maximize the fun for the most number of people. a tiny minority breaking the game's mechanics and economy comes at the cost of the fun of hundreds of thouands of others. that's not a game, that's real life. people play games to get away from that kind of frustration.
the problem is, the game quickly ceases to become fun for all but 5 or 6 players trained in computer programming. the other hundreds of thousands of players end up having a crappy time. the very concept of "game" is based on the idea of rules. the rules are there to keep the thing fun. without them, the magic drains out of it rather quickly.
not everyone draws the same conclusions from the same information. to call someone who disagrees with your stance "stupid" is just you being an asshole.
since when does everyone who reads a certain website have to act in the same manner? obviously some feel blizzard's actions warrant a boycott and some don't. there's no hipocracy, jsut a difference of opinion.
actually, you can run wow with a minimal processor and video card, it's mainly just a RAM hog. i know people playing it who are BELOW minimum specs on processor AND video card, but they upgraded their ram and they were ok.
this is true. when i upgrade from 512MB to a gig, it made a HUGE difference, believe it or not. i can run the game at 1600x1200 with all the graphics settings at maximum, and i get about 45-60 FPS.
i'm on the 5th most populous server, out of 88 servers. Mannoroth. yes, it crashes occasionally, but it's more like once a day on average, not 4+ times. also, i have yet to see a single rollback of more than 2 minutes. the lag has been bad, but the waiting lines haven't been more than 3 or 4 minutes to get into the game. compared to the hour and a half line when the game came out, that's not so bad.
i think WoW's problems have been blown out of proportion in recent days. i played for about 6 hours yesterday with no crash and no lag to speak of, except it was just a little slow in Orgrimmar, the main orc town, near the auction house. the problems are not non-existant, but i tihnk one of the reasons we're hearing such an uproar is because Blizzard brought in so many people who've never played a MMORPG before. this is pretty much par for the course, if not a little better. NOBODY could have anticipated the sheer volume of people who bought this game.
i certainly wouldn't mind going on as long as i want, without growing old and feeble, and being able to choose at what point i was finished.
there's no fundamental reason (that we know of) that a sentient biological entity shouldn't be able to sustain itself indefinitely. the only reason we're not effectively immortal is that we're not designed to be. there's no evolutionary advantage to being so.
actually, the forehead ridges of the klingons are getting explained in an upcoming Enterprise episode. trekkies eveywhere are wetting their underpants in anticipation.
well, he simply answered the question as to why someone would want to save it. because, against all odds, it suddenly got pretty good in season three, and season four has been solid as well.
regardless of whether many people sat through seasons 1-2 (obviously many didn't), those that did have been rewarded and woudl like to see the series continue.
by the way, if you think Enterprise is bad, i highly suggest you go back and watch seasons 1 and two of TNG... they are truly AWFUL. way worse than enterprise ever was. i think they get a pass because back then, people just sort of expected trek to be campy and bad.
you really think a proclivity for answering random bits of trivia and a talent for buzzing in before your opponents is a sign of a truly transcendent intelligence? i'm as amazed as anyone by his feat, but putting him in charge of something like that would be like assuming michael jordan would make a great president of a basketball team just because he could dunk.
the article was just salivating at what the PSP *MIGHT* be, once they fix all the current issues. i don't buy it.
Just look at how the PS2 games have evolved since its launch. If handheld games are looking this good at launch, imagine what a couple years of development time will do. You can expect the same leaps, similar to those found with home based consoles, as developers become more familiar with it.
whaaa? no. Gran Turismo A-spec was one of the first games released for that system, and it's still probably the best looking game ever released for it. 4 years of tweaking have yielded incremental at best improvements. people worried idly about the PS2 being underpowered, and those worries proved to be all too well founded. it's easily the weakest of the major players in that department.
The battery time issue is fixable.
fixable?! yes, if sony feels like it. it's also possible that sony will upgrade the system so it runs on gumdrops and spits out hundred dollar bills. the technology is there!!
Music playback.
or right like what new gadget CANT play mp3's? my car keys will probably have hard drives by next year. big deal.
they've really gone all-out. every major city is decked out in colorful lights, there are vendors selling snowballs and cookies and candy canes, there's even an orc dressed up as "Greatfather Winter" (Santa), and 3 new holiday-related quests. one them requires you to kill a big yeti named "Mr. Greench", and the reward is a random holiday related prize, such as the ability to turn yourself into a snowman at any time, or the ability to build a showball-making contraption.
they've even got a whole backstory of lore about Greatfather Winter, what it means, where it came from, and how it ties into each race in the warcraft universe.
and i could name 100 times as many BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES that exploit females just as much. both genres have art and both genres have dreck. ther are games, like the final fantasy series, anything by blizzard, the civ series, and many others, that deserve to be treated with a lot MORE respect than, say, a crappy summer blockbuster like WILD WILD WEST 2.
obviously people who REALLY REALLY want to buy / sell gear will probably be able to find a way. but if blizzard can keep it sufficiently underground, that is, off the major auction sites, then it won't be prevalent to a) ruin the game for others or b) support the foreign sweatshops that populate everquest.
well, for one thing, when there's an incentive for profit, it greatly increases the incentive for the invention of hacks and exploits, as well as bots.
in Everquest, i've heard that foreign sweatshops constantly camp and farm certain resources / monsters to the point where they have a virtual monopoly on certain items or resources, so that purchasing it from them is virtually the only way to acquire it.
in addition, from a legal standpoint, the ebayers are selling something that technically doesn't belong to them. the game data and code on the servers belongs to blizzard. regardless of your stance on intellectual property laws, this IS stated pretty clearly in the Terms of Service.
personally i prefer CTMod. granted it doesn't have every feature under the sun like Cosmos, but it's a lot less bloated and buggy. it includes the features that i consider "vital", including the extra toolbars, HP and Mana recovery tickers, map notes that you can send to other players, Damage per Second indicator, and the ability to re-name your bags.
the only feature i missed after switching from Cosmos was the explicit levels of the quests in my quests logs. so i found someone who ripped that feature from Cosmos, then i edited to work with the current version, and slapped it on. you can download my UI here: (i didn't really write any of it, just collected it and made some minor changes) http://www.theoverprivileged.com/wow/Interface.zip
just put this Interface directory in your WoW directory and you should be good to go. click on the "Ct" button on your mini-map to configure it. the initially-empty toolbars are invisible until you drag an icon, then they show up. you'll figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
it's funny, but you'll probably get flamed or modded to oblivion just for posting about the only reasonable solution to his conundrum. i seriously doubt this kid is going to learn the Java API and throw together something on the scale most of these people are talking about in the 3 months or so of after-school time he has to work with.
Flash is a great medium for 2D games. the graphics are drag and drop, and the actionscripting is a perfect introduction to handling the logic associated with managing a game.
but, this being slashdot, anything mentioning Flash in a positive light will probably get modded downward and derided by the community.
hahaha! you took my post =(
yeah, the truth is it is very tricky to get it to run on modern processors. even with the latest patch, i had to edit the config file with some jargon i found on a messageboard just to get it to run. i'm at work, otherwise i'd paste the config file here. sorry!
i agree with this also. even though the landscape is pretty ugly (everything is pretty much a shade of red), the game itself is fantastic. it's a perfected version of civ2.
totally customizable units, functional and relatively deep diplomacy, fantastic story and brilliant characters (in a civ game?!?!), multiple paths to victory (victory by diplomacy, victory by economic domination, victory by Transcendent technology, or of course the good old victory by genocide) and an unceasing number options and worlds to play around with.
my favorite feature, though, is the wonderfully clever quotes or movies you get every time you discover a new tech or wonder of the world. they really give one a sense of not only accomplishment, but wonder at this new, exciting technology your society has just produced.
you're still missing the point, which is to maximize the fun for the most number of people. a tiny minority breaking the game's mechanics and economy comes at the cost of the fun of hundreds of thouands of others. that's not a game, that's real life. people play games to get away from that kind of frustration.
the problem is, the game quickly ceases to become fun for all but 5 or 6 players trained in computer programming. the other hundreds of thousands of players end up having a crappy time. the very concept of "game" is based on the idea of rules. the rules are there to keep the thing fun. without them, the magic drains out of it rather quickly.
not everyone draws the same conclusions from the same information. to call someone who disagrees with your stance "stupid" is just you being an asshole.
since when does everyone who reads a certain website have to act in the same manner? obviously some feel blizzard's actions warrant a boycott and some don't. there's no hipocracy, jsut a difference of opinion.
actually, you can run wow with a minimal processor and video card, it's mainly just a RAM hog. i know people playing it who are BELOW minimum specs on processor AND video card, but they upgraded their ram and they were ok.
this is true. when i upgrade from 512MB to a gig, it made a HUGE difference, believe it or not. i can run the game at 1600x1200 with all the graphics settings at maximum, and i get about 45-60 FPS.
i'm on the 5th most populous server, out of 88 servers. Mannoroth. yes, it crashes occasionally, but it's more like once a day on average, not 4+ times. also, i have yet to see a single rollback of more than 2 minutes. the lag has been bad, but the waiting lines haven't been more than 3 or 4 minutes to get into the game. compared to the hour and a half line when the game came out, that's not so bad.
i think WoW's problems have been blown out of proportion in recent days. i played for about 6 hours yesterday with no crash and no lag to speak of, except it was just a little slow in Orgrimmar, the main orc town, near the auction house. the problems are not non-existant, but i tihnk one of the reasons we're hearing such an uproar is because Blizzard brought in so many people who've never played a MMORPG before. this is pretty much par for the course, if not a little better. NOBODY could have anticipated the sheer volume of people who bought this game.
i certainly wouldn't mind going on as long as i want, without growing old and feeble, and being able to choose at what point i was finished.
there's no fundamental reason (that we know of) that a sentient biological entity shouldn't be able to sustain itself indefinitely. the only reason we're not effectively immortal is that we're not designed to be. there's no evolutionary advantage to being so.
actually, the forehead ridges of the klingons are getting explained in an upcoming Enterprise episode. trekkies eveywhere are wetting their underpants in anticipation.
well, he simply answered the question as to why someone would want to save it. because, against all odds, it suddenly got pretty good in season three, and season four has been solid as well.
... they are truly AWFUL. way worse than enterprise ever was. i think they get a pass because back then, people just sort of expected trek to be campy and bad.
regardless of whether many people sat through seasons 1-2 (obviously many didn't), those that did have been rewarded and woudl like to see the series continue.
by the way, if you think Enterprise is bad, i highly suggest you go back and watch seasons 1 and two of TNG
wrong on both counts, sorry try again.
you really think a proclivity for answering random bits of trivia and a talent for buzzing in before your opponents is a sign of a truly transcendent intelligence? i'm as amazed as anyone by his feat, but putting him in charge of something like that would be like assuming michael jordan would make a great president of a basketball team just because he could dunk.
the article was just salivating at what the PSP *MIGHT* be, once they fix all the current issues. i don't buy it.
Just look at how the PS2 games have evolved since its launch. If handheld games are looking this good at launch, imagine what a couple years of development time will do. You can expect the same leaps, similar to those found with home based consoles, as developers become more familiar with it.
whaaa? no. Gran Turismo A-spec was one of the first games released for that system, and it's still probably the best looking game ever released for it. 4 years of tweaking have yielded incremental at best improvements. people worried idly about the PS2 being underpowered, and those worries proved to be all too well founded. it's easily the weakest of the major players in that department.
The battery time issue is fixable.
fixable?! yes, if sony feels like it. it's also possible that sony will upgrade the system so it runs on gumdrops and spits out hundred dollar bills. the technology is there!!
Music playback.
or right like what new gadget CANT play mp3's? my car keys will probably have hard drives by next year. big deal.
they've really gone all-out. every major city is decked out in colorful lights, there are vendors selling snowballs and cookies and candy canes, there's even an orc dressed up as "Greatfather Winter" (Santa), and 3 new holiday-related quests. one them requires you to kill a big yeti named "Mr. Greench", and the reward is a random holiday related prize, such as the ability to turn yourself into a snowman at any time, or the ability to build a showball-making contraption.
they've even got a whole backstory of lore about Greatfather Winter, what it means, where it came from, and how it ties into each race in the warcraft universe.
well, the ORIGINAL CTS comic was funny, but then they took it too far.
the
and i could name 100 times as many BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES that exploit females just as much. both genres have art and both genres have dreck. ther are games, like the final fantasy series, anything by blizzard, the civ series, and many others, that deserve to be treated with a lot MORE respect than, say, a crappy summer blockbuster like WILD WILD WEST 2.
and when World of Warcraft became the fastest selling game of all time last month, is that because of all the EXTREME advertising they did?
obviously people who REALLY REALLY want to buy / sell gear will probably be able to find a way. but if blizzard can keep it sufficiently underground, that is, off the major auction sites, then it won't be prevalent to a) ruin the game for others or b) support the foreign sweatshops that populate everquest.
well, for one thing, when there's an incentive for profit, it greatly increases the incentive for the invention of hacks and exploits, as well as bots.
in Everquest, i've heard that foreign sweatshops constantly camp and farm certain resources / monsters to the point where they have a virtual monopoly on certain items or resources, so that purchasing it from them is virtually the only way to acquire it.
in addition, from a legal standpoint, the ebayers are selling something that technically doesn't belong to them. the game data and code on the servers belongs to blizzard. regardless of your stance on intellectual property laws, this IS stated pretty clearly in the Terms of Service.
personally i prefer CTMod. granted it doesn't have every feature under the sun like Cosmos, but it's a lot less bloated and buggy. it includes the features that i consider "vital", including the extra toolbars, HP and Mana recovery tickers, map notes that you can send to other players, Damage per Second indicator, and the ability to re-name your bags.
p
the only feature i missed after switching from Cosmos was the explicit levels of the quests in my quests logs. so i found someone who ripped that feature from Cosmos, then i edited to work with the current version, and slapped it on. you can download my UI here: (i didn't really write any of it, just collected it and made some minor changes)
http://www.theoverprivileged.com/wow/Interface.zi
just put this Interface directory in your WoW directory and you should be good to go. click on the "Ct" button on your mini-map to configure it. the initially-empty toolbars are invisible until you drag an icon, then they show up. you'll figure it out.
i had an Athlon643 FX51 and never had this error, and i worked my character up close to level 30 in the beta...