I see that I forgot the birthday paradox, which means that brute forcing a hash is much closer to a 2 ^ 80 problem.
So here's the calculations for that:
2^80 = 1.208925819614629174706176 x 10^ 24, so we use 1.2 x 10 ^ 24. 1.2 x 10 ^ 24 seconds / 100 seconds/minute = 1.2 x 10 ^ 22 minutes 1.2 x 10 ^ 22 minutes / 100 minutes/hour = 1.2 x 10 ^ 20 hours 1.2 x 10 ^ 20 hours / 100 hours/day = 1.2 x 10 ^ 18 days 1.2 x 10 ^ 18 days / 1000 days/year = 1.2 x 10 ^ 15 years
A much smaller number, but you're still not likely to get it before the sun goes out.
Of course it will be possible to find a collision given enough time. There are only 2^160 possible sha0 hashes.
You say 2^160 like it's some tiny number.
To demonstrate how large that truly is, let me do a little thing that my cryptography prof did when I took the course several years ago:
2^160 = 1.4615016373309029182036848327163e+48 possibilities. (We'll be nice to the people following along and say 1.46 x 10 ^ 48 possibilities.) Now, let's say you can successfully generate one unique hash per second, that's 1.46 x 10 ^ 46 seconds.
But just how long is that exactly?
Well, let's be nice (for the sake of making the math easy), and say that there are 100 seconds in a minute. That's 1.46 x 10^46 minutes. Now, let's do the same thing for minutes in an hour: that's ~ 1.46 x 10^44 hours.
Now we reach hours in a day. I'm feeling really generous, so we'll say 100 hours in a day. That's 1.46 x 10 ^ 42 days.
365 (or 366) days in a year is too close to 3 x 10 ^ 2, and dividing by 3s is just messy, so we'll say 1 000 days in a year. That gives us 1.46 x 10 ^ 39 years.
Chances are good that our sun will have burnt itself out long before you've managed to generate every single possible hash.
However, what makes this particular case more interesting is that they've found a way to get a collision without brute forcing their way through every possible hash. It's not particularly useful yet, as it's still a 2^51 problem, (approx 2.25 x 10 ^15), so it's hardly trivial enough for you to do on your home PC, but it's a step in the right direction.
That's not a fix to the problem, that's just a way around it and for many people it's quite irritating.
Let's pretend you have a web browser that opens every link, regardless of what the target attribute is set to, in a new window. Now, you can get around this by right clicking the link and choosing 'follow link' from the menu everytime you want to do this.
Now, ask yourself this question: if another free web browser that didn't behave like this existed, would you stick with the one that required you to right click every link or would you switch to the new one?
Note: I'm not arguing whether or not a spatial browser is good or not, as both methods have advantages. The problem is that it doesn't really match the current file-system layout with its many nested directories, and as such many people are irritated by it.
While it's nice to say that, it's generally not doable.
LinuxBIOS has one Compaq machine in their list. Not only is it not the one that the person posting has (it's an Alpha), it's also unsupported.
OpenBIOS's main page includes the following quote: "Jens Axboe wrote an IDE driver for OpenBIOS. This will help OpenBIOS to boot on real hardware soon." That's from January of this year, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
This isn't explanations of missing codenames, but rather ones you're missing since I see that you have the Pentium II (Klamath, Deschutes), but not the Celerons from the same era. So, here they are:
From the looks of the changelog, the bug that prevents compilation of an SMP kernel for the SPARC32 (sun4m) architecture doesn't appear to have been fixed.
I guess this means I have to wait some more before trying out the kernel.
Regardless of what the article says, I know that ATI used to support the spanning mode, at least in some operating systems.
I know that was the default mode for my Radeon 7500 if I had hydravision installed under Windows 2000 and, to be honest, I found it extremely annoying.
I read this about a month ago. It's a decent book, fairly short (208 pages), but at the same time it's expensive for the length ($12.95 US).
It's based off of an interesting idea: a society where scarcity is no more and death has been cured. My only complaint is that, by the end, I was ready to hurt someone if I had to read the word "Bitchun" one more time.
I've got a SS20 sitting in a closet running my webserver.
Got it off of the government at one of their surplus equipment sales. There were tons of 10s, 5s, and 4s there when I got it but I decided I'd rather have the 20. (Especially seeing as, IIRC, the 10 was just the 20 with wa lower max bus speed (40MHz instead of 50), the 5 was just the 20 without MBUS support, and the 4 was a cheap version of the 5 with something else removed...)
Total cost? Probably about $60 Canadian after I got my hands on more RAM, a hard drive, and an adapter to use a VGA monitor.
Actualy, I've also got a SS10 I now need to get rid of. eBay here I come!
I remember that game, either it or Space Taxi was the first time I had ever heard synthesized speech on a computer. However, I never had the aforementioned problem.
Then again, it's been so long since I played it that I may have just forgotten.
They don't like doing things like that, as evidenced with the 2.4.18 problem. (For those who don't remember: -rc3 was accidentally released as the final version, rather than -rc4. This mistake made it impossible to compile the 2.4.18 release kernel on certain architectures, SPARC comes to mind at the moment. It was suggested that the version on the kernel.org site should be replaced with the -rc4 version, however this was vetoed by Mr. Morton.)
From what I recall, the reason is that mirrors and what not have already started to distribute the file across other sites. Suddenly the MD5 sum of the kernel changes and yikes! The MD5 sum of certain official kernels no longer match those of other kernels, with all the problems involved in that.
However, I do believe that an official patch should have been made available sooner.
None of the Scouring of the Shire made it. Jackson has stated that he doesn't like that section, so it was never considered for inclusion in the films.
I'll admit right here, I think the films are decent, but I don't think they're a great adaptation of the books. They seem to focus more on the action scenes than the actual story.
Anyways, I think leaving out the Scouring is even more of a disappointment than leaving out Tom Bombadil. But that's just me.
To be honest, I just didn't care for Chrono Cross. I found the characters unintersting and the plot just bored me, especially with it's poor excuse for branching. (Oh, you didn't want to kill that beast? Well, someone just killed it anyways, and look, someone cured that party member so they didn't die.)
I know people who loved Chrono Cross, and on the technical level it was a good game, but to me it just seemed to be missing something.
As for my original post, I really came across like an asshat, didn't I? Ah well, can't be helped now.
I'm not asking them to remove them from the Final Fantasy series, as a) I understand the point of tradition in a series, and b) I don't play that series anymore for other reasons.
My point was that, contrasting what the previous poster had said, an RPG does not mean it has to have random battles. Yes, the PC RPGs are signficantly different in nature than console ones, but that doesn't mean you can't take bits from them and try it on the console. I like the story elements to RPGs, I like the idea of having a world I can explore at my own pace, but I hate the inability to take more than a few steps without running into a random battle. There's plenty of newer games that come out without the tradition of previous games to tie them down, would it hurt them to try something different?
Now, moving on to Fallout. Yes, there were random encounters, yes the escaping was part of the battle system, but I'd argue your point that most of the battles were random. The only random battles were the ones on the world map, the majority of the ones I fought were in caves, sewers, mines, buildings, etc., where there was a set number of enemies, who were already visible, and once you killed them you could waltz through the area without anymore fights.
Yes, the 'no fights at all' option was incredibly hard to do, but it was an option. Imagine my surprise when, the very first time I reached the "boss" in Fallout, I managed to convince him to end his scheme without drawing a weapon.
(As for the non-linearity argument, I realise that was a different train of thought altogether, I just felt it needed to be listed in the description of the game.)
BTW, what system was Ultima 3 released for? I've never played any of the early ones.
Finally, as for FFVII, the rip-offs aren't that easy to find, as they never did well, but there's two types. There's the ones that rip-off the game visually (think Legend of Legaia, where the characters looked like less polished versions of FFVII ones), and there's ones that rip-off the game thematically (IMHO Legend of Dragoon was the most successful of these, granted I didn't play the entire thing, but what I did reminded me of FFVII something terrible. YMMV, etc etc.)
"I just dont understand. The random encounters are what RPG's are all about."
No, that's what a particular type of console RPG is about. If you play and RPG for, say PC, you'll find that many of them have some different form of dealing with the battles. Besides, what does RPG stand for? Role-Playing Game, not Random (Some word begining with P that I can't think up) Game.
What's happened is that a few games had success, such as Final Fantasy and the Dragon Quest/Warrior series. They had random encounters due to what were likely technical limitations of the platform they were built on. Other game developers have looked at that and decided that they want a piece of that market, so they release a game and they're careful not to tamper with the characteristics too much. (Case in point: Final Fantasy VII. Think of how huge it was, now think of how many half-assed RPGs came out immediately after it that seemed to be little more than a thinly veiled rip-off. It's a more modern example, but it's still an example.)
I personally always point to the Fallout series as a an excellent way of how to make RPGs that aren't dependent on the leveling treadmill, while at the same time not becoming a movie that you sometimes play. I'll give a brief description in case you haven't played it before:
- For starters, it's possible to make it through the first one without ever getting in a fight. (Not sure on the second one, I've heard it is, but never to the same degree as I did with number 1) You could gain experience by solving problems in ways other than slaughtering everything that opposed you, and it was possible (although quite difficult) to sneak past enemies rather than fight them. Which brings me to point number 2.
- Battles. All battles took place in the normal view, no fancy battle system, meaning that you saw the enemies before they attacked you. If you were travelling on the world map and hit an enemy you'd move into a screen with the enemies present, but, and this is something that I find is missing from current console RPGs, it was always easy to escape if you didn't feel like fighting.
- Finally, point 3, the plot, which was both branching and non-linear. The only sure thing you had in the game was the final goal, you had to do X for the game to end, of course, X might change slightly over time, but you still had a final goal. Now, what you did while trying to complete X and how you did it was all up to you. Sure, the game would try and push you along a certain path, but that doesn't mean you had to do that.
I'll agree that RPGs have made great strides, I can barely play the original Final Fantasy as I just can't get interested in it. (Contrast this with II, where there's more of a story, and which I don't mind playing at all.) But I still think the entire "take a couple of steps, fight an enemy" bit is a thing that needs to be more carefully examined to see if there's a decent replacement rather than just saying "Oh, it's tradition, we can't remove it."
I'm going to say you're either trolling or ignorant, as random encounters do not make a game an RPG.
They're a legacy item, why they were chosen, I don't know. My guess is that they were originally due to the technical constraints of older systems that made non-random encounters unfeasible. Now I'd say it's just the fact that they're so ingrained in our conception of a console RPG (Yes, console RPG. Many computer RPGs try different methods of creating encounters, it's largely consoles that are stuck with the random encounter system.) and the fact that they're quite simply the easy way out.
"So, Bob, how will we do the battle system?" "Well, we could place the enemies on the map and have them wondering around so that the player can see them, if you want we could have them chase the player when they spot him. We could even make it so that the player can avoid them if they want to." "What would that require?" "Well, to do it properly we'd need to make extra animations for the enemies, we'd need extensive play testing to figure out where they should go and how many there should be based on the boss stats, and... You know what, that's a lot of work, let's just add an algorithm to randomly send the player to a battle screen every so many steps."
There are a fair number of RPGs that don't have random encounters, some are good (I don't care what he says, Chrono Trigger was good and Chrono Cross just plain sucked.), others aren't.
Case in point: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. Ok, so it had other things against it, but it had no random battles. All the battles were represented by sprites on the screen. Oh, did I mention that these sprites never moved? If you ever want to see how not to make static encounters, then I'd suggest taking a look at that game. (Note: The author of this post does not actually recommend playing Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for any reason other than perhaps convincing yourself that the latest Final Fantasy is not the 'worst ever')
My main complaint is that it takes away from the enjoyment of the game, sure the author of the original article suggests that without them you'd have a very short game, and he's probably right. But that doesn't mean I want to spend the majority of the 70+ hours it takes to complete the game going through the menus for their battle system. Just cut them down a little perhaps? I used to have a metric that I used on sprite based systems to state what I thought was a too high of random encounter rate. Quite simply, if I was in a dungeon/on the world map for an hour, and never got from one side of the screen to the other without having an encounter, then the rate was too high. (Why sprite based? Well, in those cases the screen was always the same size due to a lack of perspective.)
I'd say the main reason I rail against random encounters is that they're an example of how the genre is stagnating. They're annoying and whatnot, but tweaking of the algorithm would fix a bit of it. But at the same time there's no real attempts to try anything new, stick with the tried and true, don't take the risks, and we'll make some money.
On a side note: the worst game I ever played for random encounters was a Japan-only Super Famicom RPG called Tales of Phantasia. (There's patches to translate the ROM to English for those who are curious.) Along with how long you'd been playing the game also kept track of how many battles you became involved in. When I gave up after several hours of play I'd been in twice as many battles as I had minutes of game play, and that includes time spent in towns/cut-scenes/other locations with no battles. To make things even worse, each dungeon had 3 or 4 enemies, when you got in a battle the enemies would always be in the same positions based on the combinations. (Oh, two of enemy A and one of enemy B. That means that in front of me there's A then B, and there's one A behind me.) I loved the story, but it just got so tedious that I eventually got rid of it for good.
There was a point to this post originally, but I seem to have lost it.
I was recently trapped on a rather boring boat ride where the ferry had a mini arcade consisting of a bunch of the multi-game cabinets and a pinball machine. (How you're supposed to play pinball on a boat that keeps rocking is beyond me, but it was on there.)
One of the machines was the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cabinet. I wasted a couple quarters on it, but had I known that Pac-Man was on there I probably would have wasted more.
Instead I spent most of my pocket change in the Missile Command/Centipede/Millipede cabinet.
Hmmmm... I just realised that a truck stop near 15 minutes out of town has that cabinet. Time to go take a look-see!
First no alt text is provided in the linked to implimentation.
Secondly, by doing so you've just eliminated the usefulness of the image as a spam bot blocker. I mean, how long would it really take someone to fix up the code on their spam bot to check for alt text and swipe the first letter of each word in it to deal with that kind of situation?
The entire point of the image was that it couldn't be read by machines, by providing alt text you've just removed that restriction and the image's usefulness along with it.
Ok, I can't say much about it's a Wonderful Life -- I personally can't stand that movie anymore.
Citizen Kane was hated because of a man known as William Randloph Hearst, owner of a huge publishing empire. The story was loosely based around him, and to say that he was slightly less than pleased would be putting it mildly. Very mildly. So Hearst had the critics who wrote for his papers publish bad reviews. You need to realise, this is a guy that some people claim helped to start the Spanish-American war. Just imagine what he could do to one measly little film.
Despite this, it was nominated 9 for Oscars, although it only won one of them. (Best screenplay for those who care -- and some believe that that was only because of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz rather than Orson Welles.)
Now, as for Star Wars. Does anyone have proof of this? I always hear this phrase brought, yet when The Phantom Menace came out one of the national papers here published all their previous Star Wars reviews. The ratings went much like you'd expect for a film series -- first was 4 stars, second was 3 stars, third was 2 stars plus a fairly sarcastic overtone to the review. (I believe the paper rates out of 4, I've never seen more than that.)
Not saying it can't be true, in a case like this one contradictory example does not refute the argument, I just don't remember hearing it until The Phantom Menace arrived and started getting sub-par reviews.
Before reading this: I haven't seen it and I don't plan on seeing it -- in my opinion the original was an above-average action flick which didn't need a sequel.
Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't any good, and it's got nothing to do with the fact that Reloaded got mediocre reviews. For me the alarm bells started ringing the moment I heard they were releasing it simeoultaneously.
Yes, I know what the official reasons are for doing that, but, no matter what the studios say, whenever I hear anything gimmicky about a film's release I can't help but wonder if there's a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
I see that I forgot the birthday paradox, which means that brute forcing a hash is much closer to a 2 ^ 80 problem.
So here's the calculations for that:
2^80 = 1.208925819614629174706176 x 10^ 24, so we use 1.2 x 10 ^ 24.
1.2 x 10 ^ 24 seconds / 100 seconds/minute = 1.2 x 10 ^ 22 minutes
1.2 x 10 ^ 22 minutes / 100 minutes/hour = 1.2 x 10 ^ 20 hours
1.2 x 10 ^ 20 hours / 100 hours/day = 1.2 x 10 ^ 18 days
1.2 x 10 ^ 18 days / 1000 days/year = 1.2 x 10 ^ 15 years
A much smaller number, but you're still not likely to get it before the sun goes out.
Of course it will be possible to find a collision given enough time. There are only 2^160 possible sha0 hashes.
You say 2^160 like it's some tiny number.
To demonstrate how large that truly is, let me do a little thing that my cryptography prof did when I took the course several years ago:
2^160 = 1.4615016373309029182036848327163e+48 possibilities. (We'll be nice to the people following along and say 1.46 x 10 ^ 48 possibilities.) Now, let's say you can successfully generate one unique hash per second, that's 1.46 x 10 ^ 46 seconds.
But just how long is that exactly?
Well, let's be nice (for the sake of making the math easy), and say that there are 100 seconds in a minute. That's 1.46 x 10^46 minutes. Now, let's do the same thing for minutes in an hour: that's ~ 1.46 x 10^44 hours.
Now we reach hours in a day. I'm feeling really generous, so we'll say 100 hours in a day. That's 1.46 x 10 ^ 42 days.
365 (or 366) days in a year is too close to 3 x 10 ^ 2, and dividing by 3s is just messy, so we'll say 1 000 days in a year. That gives us 1.46 x 10 ^ 39 years.
Chances are good that our sun will have burnt itself out long before you've managed to generate every single possible hash.
However, what makes this particular case more interesting is that they've found a way to get a collision without brute forcing their way through every possible hash. It's not particularly useful yet, as it's still a 2^51 problem, (approx 2.25 x 10 ^15), so it's hardly trivial enough for you to do on your home PC, but it's a step in the right direction.
I'll try not to open up the entire "1000 or 1024" can of worms, but I'll just say the following:
Firefox deals with network stuff. In network terms (speed, packet size, etc) megabytes, kilobytes and what not have always been powers of 10.
That's not a fix to the problem, that's just a way around it and for many people it's quite irritating.
Let's pretend you have a web browser that opens every link, regardless of what the target attribute is set to, in a new window. Now, you can get around this by right clicking the link and choosing 'follow link' from the menu everytime you want to do this.
Now, ask yourself this question: if another free web browser that didn't behave like this existed, would you stick with the one that required you to right click every link or would you switch to the new one?
Note: I'm not arguing whether or not a spatial browser is good or not, as both methods have advantages. The problem is that it doesn't really match the current file-system layout with its many nested directories, and as such many people are irritated by it.
While it's nice to say that, it's generally not doable.
LinuxBIOS has one Compaq machine in their list. Not only is it not the one that the person posting has (it's an Alpha), it's also unsupported.
OpenBIOS's main page includes the following quote: "Jens Axboe wrote an IDE driver for OpenBIOS. This will help OpenBIOS to boot on real hardware soon."
That's from January of this year, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
This isn't explanations of missing codenames, but rather ones you're missing since I see that you have the Pentium II (Klamath, Deschutes), but not the Celerons from the same era. So, here they are:
Covington: A city in Kentucky, Washington, Georgia (the US state, not the country), Virginia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania.
Mendocino: A city in California
Except, of course, for the fact that you're making the prefixes even more confusing, since a small m means milli.
Yes, I agree that the concept of a millibyte is just plain silly, but the point remains.
(And let's not even get into conversations: "Pardon me, when you said 'megabyte', did you mean mega byte or megabyte?")
From the looks of the changelog, the bug that prevents compilation of an SMP kernel for the SPARC32 (sun4m) architecture doesn't appear to have been fixed.
I guess this means I have to wait some more before trying out the kernel.
Have you tried this one?
http://cattlegrid.net/~christophe/titanium/#MODEM
I don't have access to a TiBook, so I can't say if it works or not, but some people seem to have success.
Not to be picky (ok, I am being picky), but their Castlevania listing is hardly complete.
I can remember playing a Castlevania on the original GameBoy which isn't listed there, and wasn't there one for N64?
Gamespy should know better than to skimp on things when catering to the obsessive set that is gamers.
Regardless of what the article says, I know that ATI used to support the spanning mode, at least in some operating systems.
I know that was the default mode for my Radeon 7500 if I had hydravision installed under Windows 2000 and, to be honest, I found it extremely annoying.
I read this about a month ago. It's a decent book, fairly short (208 pages), but at the same time it's expensive for the length ($12.95 US).
It's based off of an interesting idea: a society where scarcity is no more and death has been cured. My only complaint is that, by the end, I was ready to hurt someone if I had to read the word "Bitchun" one more time.
I've got a SS20 sitting in a closet running my webserver.
Got it off of the government at one of their surplus equipment sales. There were tons of 10s, 5s, and 4s there when I got it but I decided I'd rather have the 20. (Especially seeing as, IIRC, the 10 was just the 20 with wa lower max bus speed (40MHz instead of 50), the 5 was just the 20 without MBUS support, and the 4 was a cheap version of the 5 with something else removed...)
Total cost? Probably about $60 Canadian after I got my hands on more RAM, a hard drive, and an adapter to use a VGA monitor.
Actualy, I've also got a SS10 I now need to get rid of. eBay here I come!
Sampled? Interesting, I (obviously) never knew that. It would make sense as to why it sounded so good though.
Now, I still know nothing about whether or not Space Taxi was synth or sampled.
I remember that game, either it or Space Taxi was the first time I had ever heard synthesized speech on a computer. However, I never had the aforementioned problem.
Then again, it's been so long since I played it that I may have just forgotten.
They don't like doing things like that, as evidenced with the 2.4.18 problem.
(For those who don't remember: -rc3 was accidentally released as the final version, rather than -rc4. This mistake made it impossible to compile the 2.4.18 release kernel on certain architectures, SPARC comes to mind at the moment. It was suggested that the version on the kernel.org site should be replaced with the -rc4 version, however this was vetoed by Mr. Morton.)
From what I recall, the reason is that mirrors and what not have already started to distribute the file across other sites. Suddenly the MD5 sum of the kernel changes and yikes! The MD5 sum of certain official kernels no longer match those of other kernels, with all the problems involved in that.
However, I do believe that an official patch should have been made available sooner.
None of the Scouring of the Shire made it. Jackson has stated that he doesn't like that section, so it was never considered for inclusion in the films.
I'll admit right here, I think the films are decent, but I don't think they're a great adaptation of the books. They seem to focus more on the action scenes than the actual story.
Anyways, I think leaving out the Scouring is even more of a disappointment than leaving out Tom Bombadil. But that's just me.
To be honest, I just didn't care for Chrono Cross. I found the characters unintersting and the plot just bored me, especially with it's poor excuse for branching. (Oh, you didn't want to kill that beast? Well, someone just killed it anyways, and look, someone cured that party member so they didn't die.)
I know people who loved Chrono Cross, and on the technical level it was a good game, but to me it just seemed to be missing something.
As for my original post, I really came across like an asshat, didn't I? Ah well, can't be helped now.
I'm not asking them to remove them from the Final Fantasy series, as a) I understand the point of tradition in a series, and b) I don't play that series anymore for other reasons.
My point was that, contrasting what the previous poster had said, an RPG does not mean it has to have random battles. Yes, the PC RPGs are signficantly different in nature than console ones, but that doesn't mean you can't take bits from them and try it on the console. I like the story elements to RPGs, I like the idea of having a world I can explore at my own pace, but I hate the inability to take more than a few steps without running into a random battle. There's plenty of newer games that come out without the tradition of previous games to tie them down, would it hurt them to try something different?
Now, moving on to Fallout. Yes, there were random encounters, yes the escaping was part of the battle system, but I'd argue your point that most of the battles were random. The only random battles were the ones on the world map, the majority of the ones I fought were in caves, sewers, mines, buildings, etc., where there was a set number of enemies, who were already visible, and once you killed them you could waltz through the area without anymore fights.
Yes, the 'no fights at all' option was incredibly hard to do, but it was an option. Imagine my surprise when, the very first time I reached the "boss" in Fallout, I managed to convince him to end his scheme without drawing a weapon.
(As for the non-linearity argument, I realise that was a different train of thought altogether, I just felt it needed to be listed in the description of the game.)
BTW, what system was Ultima 3 released for? I've never played any of the early ones.
Finally, as for FFVII, the rip-offs aren't that easy to find, as they never did well, but there's two types. There's the ones that rip-off the game visually (think Legend of Legaia, where the characters looked like less polished versions of FFVII ones), and there's ones that rip-off the game thematically (IMHO Legend of Dragoon was the most successful of these, granted I didn't play the entire thing, but what I did reminded me of FFVII something terrible. YMMV, etc etc.)
"I just dont understand. The random encounters are what RPG's are all about."
No, that's what a particular type of console RPG is about. If you play and RPG for, say PC, you'll find that many of them have some different form of dealing with the battles. Besides, what does RPG stand for? Role-Playing Game, not Random (Some word begining with P that I can't think up) Game.
What's happened is that a few games had success, such as Final Fantasy and the Dragon Quest/Warrior series. They had random encounters due to what were likely technical limitations of the platform they were built on. Other game developers have looked at that and decided that they want a piece of that market, so they release a game and they're careful not to tamper with the characteristics too much. (Case in point: Final Fantasy VII. Think of how huge it was, now think of how many half-assed RPGs came out immediately after it that seemed to be little more than a thinly veiled rip-off. It's a more modern example, but it's still an example.)
I personally always point to the Fallout series as a an excellent way of how to make RPGs that aren't dependent on the leveling treadmill, while at the same time not becoming a movie that you sometimes play. I'll give a brief description in case you haven't played it before:
- For starters, it's possible to make it through the first one without ever getting in a fight. (Not sure on the second one, I've heard it is, but never to the same degree as I did with number 1) You could gain experience by solving problems in ways other than slaughtering everything that opposed you, and it was possible (although quite difficult) to sneak past enemies rather than fight them. Which brings me to point number 2.
- Battles. All battles took place in the normal view, no fancy battle system, meaning that you saw the enemies before they attacked you. If you were travelling on the world map and hit an enemy you'd move into a screen with the enemies present, but, and this is something that I find is missing from current console RPGs, it was always easy to escape if you didn't feel like fighting.
- Finally, point 3, the plot, which was both branching and non-linear. The only sure thing you had in the game was the final goal, you had to do X for the game to end, of course, X might change slightly over time, but you still had a final goal. Now, what you did while trying to complete X and how you did it was all up to you. Sure, the game would try and push you along a certain path, but that doesn't mean you had to do that.
I'll agree that RPGs have made great strides, I can barely play the original Final Fantasy as I just can't get interested in it. (Contrast this with II, where there's more of a story, and which I don't mind playing at all.) But I still think the entire "take a couple of steps, fight an enemy" bit is a thing that needs to be more carefully examined to see if there's a decent replacement rather than just saying "Oh, it's tradition, we can't remove it."
I'm going to say you're either trolling or ignorant, as random encounters do not make a game an RPG.
They're a legacy item, why they were chosen, I don't know. My guess is that they were originally due to the technical constraints of older systems that made non-random encounters unfeasible. Now I'd say it's just the fact that they're so ingrained in our conception of a console RPG (Yes, console RPG. Many computer RPGs try different methods of creating encounters, it's largely consoles that are stuck with the random encounter system.) and the fact that they're quite simply the easy way out.
"So, Bob, how will we do the battle system?"
"Well, we could place the enemies on the map and have them wondering around so that the player can see them, if you want we could have them chase the player when they spot him. We could even make it so that the player can avoid them if they want to."
"What would that require?"
"Well, to do it properly we'd need to make extra animations for the enemies, we'd need extensive play testing to figure out where they should go and how many there should be based on the boss stats, and... You know what, that's a lot of work, let's just add an algorithm to randomly send the player to a battle screen every so many steps."
There are a fair number of RPGs that don't have random encounters, some are good (I don't care what he says, Chrono Trigger was good and Chrono Cross just plain sucked.), others aren't.
Case in point: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest. Ok, so it had other things against it, but it had no random battles. All the battles were represented by sprites on the screen. Oh, did I mention that these sprites never moved? If you ever want to see how not to make static encounters, then I'd suggest taking a look at that game. (Note: The author of this post does not actually recommend playing Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for any reason other than perhaps convincing yourself that the latest Final Fantasy is not the 'worst ever')
My main complaint is that it takes away from the enjoyment of the game, sure the author of the original article suggests that without them you'd have a very short game, and he's probably right. But that doesn't mean I want to spend the majority of the 70+ hours it takes to complete the game going through the menus for their battle system. Just cut them down a little perhaps? I used to have a metric that I used on sprite based systems to state what I thought was a too high of random encounter rate. Quite simply, if I was in a dungeon/on the world map for an hour, and never got from one side of the screen to the other without having an encounter, then the rate was too high. (Why sprite based? Well, in those cases the screen was always the same size due to a lack of perspective.)
I'd say the main reason I rail against random encounters is that they're an example of how the genre is stagnating. They're annoying and whatnot, but tweaking of the algorithm would fix a bit of it. But at the same time there's no real attempts to try anything new, stick with the tried and true, don't take the risks, and we'll make some money.
On a side note: the worst game I ever played for random encounters was a Japan-only Super Famicom RPG called Tales of Phantasia. (There's patches to translate the ROM to English for those who are curious.) Along with how long you'd been playing the game also kept track of how many battles you became involved in. When I gave up after several hours of play I'd been in twice as many battles as I had minutes of game play, and that includes time spent in towns/cut-scenes/other locations with no battles. To make things even worse, each dungeon had 3 or 4 enemies, when you got in a battle the enemies would always be in the same positions based on the combinations. (Oh, two of enemy A and one of enemy B. That means that in front of me there's A then B, and there's one A behind me.) I loved the story, but it just got so tedious that I eventually got rid of it for good.
There was a point to this post originally, but I seem to have lost it.
I was recently trapped on a rather boring boat ride where the ferry had a mini arcade consisting of a bunch of the multi-game cabinets and a pinball machine. (How you're supposed to play pinball on a boat that keeps rocking is beyond me, but it was on there.)
One of the machines was the Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga cabinet. I wasted a couple quarters on it, but had I known that Pac-Man was on there I probably would have wasted more.
Instead I spent most of my pocket change in the Missile Command/Centipede/Millipede cabinet.
Hmmmm... I just realised that a truck stop near 15 minutes out of town has that cabinet. Time to go take a look-see!
<img alt=november oscar india delta echo alpha>
There's two problems with that:
First no alt text is provided in the linked to implimentation.
Secondly, by doing so you've just eliminated the usefulness of the image as a spam bot blocker. I mean, how long would it really take someone to fix up the code on their spam bot to check for alt text and swipe the first letter of each word in it to deal with that kind of situation?
The entire point of the image was that it couldn't be read by machines, by providing alt text you've just removed that restriction and the image's usefulness along with it.
Ok, I can't say much about it's a Wonderful Life -- I personally can't stand that movie anymore.
Citizen Kane was hated because of a man known as William Randloph Hearst, owner of a huge publishing empire. The story was loosely based around him, and to say that he was slightly less than pleased would be putting it mildly. Very mildly. So Hearst had the critics who wrote for his papers publish bad reviews. You need to realise, this is a guy that some people claim helped to start the Spanish-American war. Just imagine what he could do to one measly little film.
Despite this, it was nominated 9 for Oscars, although it only won one of them. (Best screenplay for those who care -- and some believe that that was only because of co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz rather than Orson Welles.)
Now, as for Star Wars. Does anyone have proof of this? I always hear this phrase brought, yet when The Phantom Menace came out one of the national papers here published all their previous Star Wars reviews. The ratings went much like you'd expect for a film series -- first was 4 stars, second was 3 stars, third was 2 stars plus a fairly sarcastic overtone to the review. (I believe the paper rates out of 4, I've never seen more than that.)
Not saying it can't be true, in a case like this one contradictory example does not refute the argument, I just don't remember hearing it until The Phantom Menace arrived and started getting sub-par reviews.
Before reading this: I haven't seen it and I don't plan on seeing it -- in my opinion the original was an above-average action flick which didn't need a sequel.
Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't any good, and it's got nothing to do with the fact that Reloaded got mediocre reviews. For me the alarm bells started ringing the moment I heard they were releasing it simeoultaneously.
Yes, I know what the official reasons are for doing that, but, no matter what the studios say, whenever I hear anything gimmicky about a film's release I can't help but wonder if there's a reason.