do the characters in any given three-dee game (say, everquest) look photorealistic to you? personally i think they look terrible. like cardboard boxes with people painted on them. we are a long way from doing large numbers of quality curved surfaces, photorealistic VR type environments. a long, long, long, long way.
it was the first mainstream MMORPG, and i can tell you it hooked a HUGE number of people.. half my Guild failed out of college, primarily because we HAD to maintain our grandmaster skills in magery, macefighting, wrestling, and uhm cooking.
it's open-ended games like this, with no story other than the one you make for yourself, that are often the most addictive. how many times can i kill Diablo before i get bored? "Not even death".. can save me from you, Diablo, yeah yeah, i know. especially since i'll respawn in town and come back to try to kill you again.
but see, in UO, if you were killed, any random newbie or PK wandering by could take from you what it took months of hard labor to accumulate. today's MMORPGs are so wimpy by those standards.. there's no risk, nothing to lose of any real value.
that, among other things, is what made UO so compelling. i don't think a game will ever match that level of sheer EMOTION involved. other UO players will remember hacking trees in the woods, making logs into shields to sell in town, every UO player remembers the SHEER DREAD they felt the first time a PK appeared out of nowhere and began attacking them. or the RAGE at being stabbed in the back by some low life while you were fighting a lich.. standing there screaming "ooOoOOooOoO" in your death shroud as he looted your corpse of everything that was important to you...
nope, today, you lose a little experience, oh well, whatever. off to fetch my stuff off of my corpse. UO players didn't have that luxury.. they're stuff was GONE. today, it's a much safer gaming world, much tamer, more mature. i miss the old days.
but to get no tea, you have to transport yourself via the Improbability Generator to the interior of your own mind. once there, you need to take your common sense. only then can you have both tea and no tea.
one of the coolest things about that game was all the cool stuff it came with... the Microscopic Space Fleet (an empty baggie), fluff, No Tea, Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (supposedly fogged up whenever danger was near, releaving you of the stress of looking at it) (they were made out of black paper if i recall), a "don't panic" button, and i don't know, that might have been it.. ah those were the days.. then of course along came King's Quest and that was pretty much the end of GOOD WRITING in computer games.:(
it was Vogons, not Gorgons, but close enough. you're right, that game rocks. modern game designers (especially arrogant adventure game designers, who somehow think the gaming community owes them a living) should be FORCED to go back and play this game, and realize what a truly well-written game can do.
do you remember reading through all the hilarious "footnotes"? even the ERROR messages were funny.
you can play the java version here: http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocom.html
(im' sure someone else has already given that link, but its in my "favorites", so no trouble..
i could live a little longer in this prison
yeeha sexist racist humor is funny and on topic
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
there are too many of us. agree to work for free, and MAYBE you can be a musician. the world doesn't owe you or me a living.
writing music, sure, it's work, but it's not unpleasant work. there's little else i'd RATHER do. if you don't like doing it for free, by all means, stop. we don't need ANY MORE "professional" musicians. they all suck donkey balls.
selfish, cynical, unhappy capitalism will again prevail, with its proponents screaming "we TOLD you the alternatives don't work!" after burning down the alternatives themselves.
call me mr. lenin if you like, mr. mccarthy, but i don't think namecalling is particularly effective.
i guess you like your culture dumn and pointless.
man if top 90% of all musicians (success-wise) retired, the QUALITY would go up a thousandfold. do you disagree with that?
capitalism has morphed into something else. a world where you never truly OWN anything you buy. a world of services instead of products. and THAT is how the corps want it. they want to tell you exactly how to use the item you bought, so they can maintain their market share and bottom line. we've got to MAKE a CHOICE in this country.
are we willing to trade personal freedom for economic prosperity? that's not a rhetorical question, either.
before, napster wasn't MAKING MONEY off of pirated music.. now they will be. making that much easier for the RIAA to put em out of business. oh woe is me we need a Gnutella that works:(
everyone get on the "flame jon katz without reading the article" bandwagon! it's so hip! c'mon folks if this article had been posted by ANYONE else it wouldn't have HALF the negative comments. admit it, you're all a bunch of biased mindless pack-animal knee-jerk hypocrites.
think about fpr a second at least before moderating this down.
they seem to labour under the illusion that science is about demeaning our cultures status
i am absolutely bewildered by this phrase. as if scientists somehow manufacture the theoreoms they put forward or the far off places they discover. no, this stuff is there for the discovering. closing our eyes and smiling.. whistling in the dark.. it may feel warm and fuzzy, but it ain't the truth.
don't get me wrong. there are plenty of things that ARE warm and fuzzy and true. it's true that science - objective truth - can often make you feel all frowny, especially if you are not confident or content with your true place in the universe.. but it's unhealthy to ignore things that make you uncomfortable.
i believe americans are culturally programmed to be successful within a technology, industry, and management - driven republic.
i believe other nations' citizens are culturally programmed to be successful within their own cultural surroundings.
i'm serious. it's not just a matter of green peices of paper that separates us from an agrarian in a third world nation.
maybe you don't realize how fundamental our programing is. we are inundated from birth on the ideas of heirarchically organized capitalism, our entire lives are studies in how our system works. a person growing up in an entirely differently structured society is exactly the same in this regard -- he can no more easily be a successful businessman than i could be a successful farmer.
don't get confused -- i'm not talking about skill sets here. i'm talking values and hell even thought patterns. i won't pretend to know what trends of thought are fundamentally important when the top priority is something other than maximizing your worth to society in order to increase the resources (in any sense of the word) allocated to you.
yeah i'm drunk off my ass.
but i think it's arrogant to think everyone is born with an intrinsic knowledge of how to look important while screwing the other guy (i.e. the american dream).
even an aging technological infrastructure is better than a field full of cattle. and trust me, the Next Best Thing, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be WAAAY too expensive for a third world nation, i can guarantee you that. we here in america have generations of cultural programming to make us successful in the modern world.
Joe Somalia sure can herd a mean sheep.
(ok i admit i don't even know if they have sheep in somalia, but i think you get my point)
AMD has had a great year. they've produced faster, more stable chips than Intel (when was the last time THAT happened?), sold them a lot cheaper, (and perhaps most importantly) actually met demand.
the future, however, looks dicey at best. right now, the P4 isn't hands-down outperforming the Athlon or the P3.. but once the SSE2 instructions work themselves into software, this CPU will BURY the Athlon, Palomino, and whatever else AMD throws at it... and you better believe this thing will ramp like a champ. Tom already has his 1.5 Ghz part running at 1.7Ghz. this is an AMD fan saying this.
AMD is pursuing the right goals by working almost exlusively to decrease the power consumption of their current core. thet should be able to milk significantly higher clock speeds and more stability out of it. i worry though, because they've all but handed the high-end market back to Intel, unless they get SSE2 support on to the Palomino.
pezpunk Internet killed the video star,
Re:PeerToPeer will live on the backs of the Horadr
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
i'm trying not to make this political.
i also do not think most people are altruistic, and i did not imply that most are. quite the opposite in fact. my point was that it only takes a small minority to actually give back to the system for the system to still have value.
secondly, is gnutella's worthlessness directly attributable to people NOT hosting files, or is it simply because there are too many users / searches running? i am not an expert, so i don't know, but i've never heard it said that gnutella would be more usable if more people hosted data.
pezpunk Internet killed the video star,
PeerToPeer will live on the backs of the Horadrim
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
well i host about a thousand songs on Napster.
i figure that makes up for quite a large number of leeches. you see, it doesn't take that many users to give a sh*t in order for it to work. look at Napster or Gnutella (putting aside it's current almost-unusable state). on Napster, you *CAN* find virtually any recorded music. leeches like you do detract from the system, but there are more than enough non-cynics like me to make up for it.
i don't understand the purpose for your blatantly destructive opinion, and why it persists despite its incongruity with simple reality.
Slashdot Mirror
do the characters in any given three-dee game (say, everquest) look photorealistic to you? personally i think they look terrible. like cardboard boxes with people painted on them. we are a long way from doing large numbers of quality curved surfaces, photorealistic VR type environments. a long, long, long, long way.
true enough.
i could live a little longer in this prison
it's open-ended games like this, with no story other than the one you make for yourself, that are often the most addictive. how many times can i kill Diablo before i get bored? "Not even death" .. can save me from you, Diablo, yeah yeah, i know. especially since i'll respawn in town and come back to try to kill you again.
but see, in UO, if you were killed, any random newbie or PK wandering by could take from you what it took months of hard labor to accumulate. today's MMORPGs are so wimpy by those standards .. there's no risk, nothing to lose of any real value.
that, among other things, is what made UO so compelling. i don't think a game will ever match that level of sheer EMOTION involved. other UO players will remember hacking trees in the woods, making logs into shields to sell in town, every UO player remembers the SHEER DREAD they felt the first time a PK appeared out of nowhere and began attacking them. or the RAGE at being stabbed in the back by some low life while you were fighting a lich .. standing there screaming "ooOoOOooOoO" in your death shroud as he looted your corpse of everything that was important to you...
nope, today, you lose a little experience, oh well, whatever. off to fetch my stuff off of my corpse. UO players didn't have that luxury .. they're stuff was GONE. today, it's a much safer gaming world, much tamer, more mature. i miss the old days.
i could live a little longer in this prison
i could live a little longer in this prison
i could live a little longer in this prison
do you remember reading through all the hilarious "footnotes"? even the ERROR messages were funny.
you can play the java version here: http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocom.html
(im' sure someone else has already given that link, but its in my "favorites", so no trouble..
i could live a little longer in this prison
bleah.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
writing music, sure, it's work, but it's not unpleasant work. there's little else i'd RATHER do. if you don't like doing it for free, by all means, stop. we don't need ANY MORE "professional" musicians. they all suck donkey balls.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
selfish, cynical, unhappy capitalism will again prevail, with its proponents screaming "we TOLD you the alternatives don't work!" after burning down the alternatives themselves.
call me mr. lenin if you like, mr. mccarthy, but i don't think namecalling is particularly effective.
i guess you like your culture dumn and pointless.
man if top 90% of all musicians (success-wise) retired, the QUALITY would go up a thousandfold. do you disagree with that?
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
a giant nuclear furnace.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
this is a good question. i really want to hear what they think about this. wish i had moderator points.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
we just switched to 10-digit dialing. it's a pain in the ass, and i don't understand why it's necessary.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
are we willing to trade personal freedom for economic prosperity? that's not a rhetorical question, either.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
before, napster wasn't MAKING MONEY off of pirated music .. now they will be. making that much easier for the RIAA to put em out of business. oh woe is me we need a Gnutella that works :(
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
of course it's entirely possible that the humans may wipe themselves out, and then arrogantly proclaim that they neglected to "save the planet"
hah.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
yeah, once we've all become fertilizer for future generations of stupider, simpler, and less destructive life forms.
we WILL kill ourselves, it's just a matter of when.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
that dissenting opinions get (0, troll) by dumbass moderators
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
think about fpr a second at least before moderating this down.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i am absolutely bewildered by this phrase. as if scientists somehow manufacture the theoreoms they put forward or the far off places they discover. no, this stuff is there for the discovering. closing our eyes and smiling .. whistling in the dark .. it may feel warm and fuzzy, but it ain't the truth.
don't get me wrong. there are plenty of things that ARE warm and fuzzy and true. it's true that science - objective truth - can often make you feel all frowny, especially if you are not confident or content with your true place in the universe .. but it's unhealthy to ignore things that make you uncomfortable.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
a mediocre 2 year old Windows title has hit linux. guess what -- linux will never rule the desktop / gamer market, sorry. get over it.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i believe americans are culturally programmed to be successful within a technology, industry, and management - driven republic.
i believe other nations' citizens are culturally programmed to be successful within their own cultural surroundings.
i'm serious. it's not just a matter of green peices of paper that separates us from an agrarian in a third world nation.
maybe you don't realize how fundamental our programing is. we are inundated from birth on the ideas of heirarchically organized capitalism, our entire lives are studies in how our system works. a person growing up in an entirely differently structured society is exactly the same in this regard -- he can no more easily be a successful businessman than i could be a successful farmer.
don't get confused -- i'm not talking about skill sets here. i'm talking values and hell even thought patterns. i won't pretend to know what trends of thought are fundamentally important when the top priority is something other than maximizing your worth to society in order to increase the resources (in any sense of the word) allocated to you.
yeah i'm drunk off my ass.
but i think it's arrogant to think everyone is born with an intrinsic knowledge of how to look important while screwing the other guy (i.e. the american dream).
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
Joe Somalia sure can herd a mean sheep.
(ok i admit i don't even know if they have sheep in somalia, but i think you get my point)
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
the future, however, looks dicey at best. right now, the P4 isn't hands-down outperforming the Athlon or the P3 .. but once the SSE2 instructions work themselves into software, this CPU will BURY the Athlon, Palomino, and whatever else AMD throws at it ... and you better believe this thing will ramp like a champ. Tom already has his 1.5 Ghz part running at 1.7Ghz. this is an AMD fan saying this.
AMD is pursuing the right goals by working almost exlusively to decrease the power consumption of their current core. thet should be able to milk significantly higher clock speeds and more stability out of it. i worry though, because they've all but handed the high-end market back to Intel, unless they get SSE2 support on to the Palomino.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i also do not think most people are altruistic, and i did not imply that most are. quite the opposite in fact. my point was that it only takes a small minority to actually give back to the system for the system to still have value.
secondly, is gnutella's worthlessness directly attributable to people NOT hosting files, or is it simply because there are too many users / searches running? i am not an expert, so i don't know, but i've never heard it said that gnutella would be more usable if more people hosted data.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i figure that makes up for quite a large number of leeches. you see, it doesn't take that many users to give a sh*t in order for it to work. look at Napster or Gnutella (putting aside it's current almost-unusable state). on Napster, you *CAN* find virtually any recorded music. leeches like you do detract from the system, but there are more than enough non-cynics like me to make up for it.
i don't understand the purpose for your blatantly destructive opinion, and why it persists despite its incongruity with simple reality.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,