Maybe the easiest way to describe Mount & Blade is Elite on horseback, with an incredible hand-to-hand combat system.
There are several nations at war, and you can work for any of them, or none of them. Each nation has their own unit style, and it takes very different tactics to succeed with viking-style heavy infantry as opposed to Mongol-style light cavalry + horse archers as opposed to medieval English-style heavy cavalry + bowmen.
It's a fantastic game. It's been in beta for years, has been playtested for zillions of man-hours, and the developer has payed a lot of attention to the community feedback.
Go download a NWN module written by someone with literary pretensions- dialogs drone on and on and on, because you the player must be shown how brilliant the module writer is.
I'd say a good video game writer is the one who can pack the most meaning, the most nuance, into the fewest words.
Here's a paragraph of Dickens...
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
Great text.
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.
Great description, we pass this on to the art department so they can bring it to life. Now we don't need these words narrated to the player.
Do a little research, see what the most popular/powerful end-user game toolset is right now (NWN2? Oblivion? Half Life?) and write a few mods.
At the very least you'll have some practice and something to put on your resume. If you're good maybe you'll get some attention. If writing turns out to be less fun then you expected, better to find out early.
The original IBM 360 did.02 MIPS, the iphone does around 2 MIPS.
There were a LOT of 370 models with way less then 2 MIPS.
I'm too lazy to research memory and the relative I/O speeds, but modern smartphones certainly have the balls for boring batch jobs like payroll if someone was crazy enough to code it.
Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.
Do you have any idea how fast modern computers handle that kind of trivial bullshit? Your cell phone probably has enough storage and CPU to run that job in 10 minutes.
I'm told the publisher forced them to ship over strenuous objections from Flagship. But it doesn't matter, the damage is done and the franchise is almost certainly dead.
Slashdot Mirror
"whilst"?
Seriously?
Comic Book Guy voice would be better.
no central mirrors
What
So
EVER!!!!
I bow to your wisdom, why would anyone writing for video games be interested in a medium that uses text, voice, music and art to tell a story?
Maybe the easiest way to describe Mount & Blade is Elite on horseback, with an incredible hand-to-hand combat system.
There are several nations at war, and you can work for any of them, or none of them. Each nation has their own unit style, and it takes very different tactics to succeed with viking-style heavy infantry as opposed to Mongol-style light cavalry + horse archers as opposed to medieval English-style heavy cavalry + bowmen.
It's a fantastic game. It's been in beta for years, has been playtested for zillions of man-hours, and the developer has payed a lot of attention to the community feedback.
download the demo here.
sometimes you don't even need dialog to tell the story...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGE8wVTvHF0&feature=related
There's a middle ground.
Go download a NWN module written by someone with literary pretensions- dialogs drone on and on and on, because you the player must be shown how brilliant the module writer is.
I'd say a good video game writer is the one who can pack the most meaning, the most nuance, into the fewest words.
Here's a paragraph of Dickens...
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
Great text.
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.
Great description, we pass this on to the art department so they can bring it to life. Now we don't need these words narrated to the player.
the days of one or two people with next to no money producing a commercially viable game are pretty much gone.
Actually that's pretty much the story behind Mount & Blade, one of the featured games.
He wants to write games, where it's very important to communicate your ideas quickly.
If you want to convey extra details with the art, music, sound etc. that's awesome, but any dialog should be short and sweet.
Do a little research, see what the most popular/powerful end-user game toolset is right now (NWN2? Oblivion? Half Life?) and write a few mods.
At the very least you'll have some practice and something to put on your resume. If you're good maybe you'll get some attention. If writing turns out to be less fun then you expected, better to find out early.
Could you give us a little more detail, which ones are decent, which ones suck, etc?
I'm unlikely to download and try them all.
The sliders in MOO1 were research dependent as well.
Research a better factory tech -> build more factories with the slider, or better yet just set all planets to build extra factories with 1 click.
Ditto for terraforming/defense bases etc.
Back in the stone age, NT 3.x and 4 ran on a couple of architectures, MIPS and Alpha.
I never saw anyone use it, anyone remember how well it worked?
very few of the animals you eat are grazing animals
Since when have cows and sheep not been "grazing animals"?
I expect he means free range, as opposed to standing around a barn with their head in a trough of commercial feed.
Haven't used Citrix for a while, but couldn't you still take screenshots of confidential stuff?
It wouldn't be much good for long stuff like source code, but you could snarf memos, spreadsheets, incriminating email, etc.
The original IBM 360 did .02 MIPS, the iphone does around 2 MIPS.
There were a LOT of 370 models with way less then 2 MIPS.
I'm too lazy to research memory and the relative I/O speeds, but modern smartphones certainly have the balls for boring batch jobs like payroll if someone was crazy enough to code it.
Yeah there's lots of IBM history but the rest of that stuff is darn obscure now.
I googled for pics of the old Unisys terminals and all I could find was screenshots of a terminal emulator that was UTS20/UTS60 compatible.
Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.
Do you have any idea how fast modern computers handle that kind of trivial bullshit? Your cell phone probably has enough storage and CPU to run that job in 10 minutes.
I'm told the publisher forced them to ship over strenuous objections from Flagship. But it doesn't matter, the damage is done and the franchise is almost certainly dead.
"Get" who? The company is bankrupt, there's no-one to get.
It launched at least 6 months too early, if you play the latest patch it's stable and fun.
But the first impressions were so poor it killed any chance the game had, hopefully a lesson to other game developers.
It was a wreck at release but is very playable with the latest patch.
But they'll never live down the rep they got at release.
C64 mouse
Yeah, subtly wrong data is a million times worse then goatse, the scraper might not notice for weeks or months...
Will what I do become the lawyer of the job market? Universally dispised, but still neccesary?
Goddamn, I wish.
No-one likes or respects us now, why not get paid well?