Yeah, it'd have to either be limited to the body type of your sex-bot model (perhaps with modular parts, so you can have a couple of boob sizes for it and just put on whichever type you feel like that day) or the bot would have to be able to expand/contract in some places, which is probably not practical if you want to make it feel at all skin-like.
It'll be used to present a VR overlay ("skin") on your generic sex-bot, which will be printed with a pattern that the lenses can easily recognize so it can correctly orient the 3-D model. Get bored with the Angelina Jolie skin? Fick your eyes to the side to cycle forward to the Cindy Crawford skin in mid-stroke!
Note that if you need to open old PS files or deal with new ones from other people, Gimp does not support all of the features of the.ps format. Notably, it's lacking support for some (all?) layer effects, like drop shadow. They'll just disappear when you open the.ps in The GIMP.
That's just who pays. Doctors and hospitals would remain (to more or less the same extent as they are now) private.
Single-payer doesn't mean the government takes over the health care field. The only major country I can think of where the government directly runs the hospitals is the UK, and their health care system is arguably almost as bad as ours (in some ways), which is why no-one is suggesting we do what they've done.
50 years ago, did those middle class people do anywhere near as much luxury spending as we expect a modern middle class family to do? How big were their houses, on average? How often did they go on vacation, and how much did they spend on them?
I suspect you could easily live by '50s or '60s middle class standards on one moderately high income today.
I was being serious, not trolling. Thought I was offering useful advice. Wish I'd read something like my post before paying money for such a crappy game. Never even occurred to me that I might get any sort of negative mod for that post. Huh.
You know a sequel sucks when it makes you want to quit playing about 1/4 of the way through and break out the original instead--and then never go back to the sequel ever again.
I've muddled through some bad RPGs, but at least the ARPGs like Fable usually satisfy some sort of dungeon-clearing, exploring urge in me, so that I slug through it even if I'm not enjoying any of the rest of the game. Fable II didn't even do that. To me, the worst thing someone can say about a game is that it fails at what it's trying to do, and Fable II fails hard at pretty much everything it shoots for.
It's no good. Really. I even liked Fable I (I didn't pay much attention to the hype, though, so that may have helped, but I didn't for II, either).
Play The Witcher or a well-modded copy of Morrowind or Oblivion instead, if you haven't already. Any of the Baldur's gate series, Arcanum, or the first two Fallouts would be fine, too, if you just want a good PC-RPG to play. Hell, even the barely-mediocre Fallout 3 is better than Fable II.
Or just re-play Fable I. II is awful. It's basically a shitty version of Harvest Moon with a shitty version of one of the Ys games or Crystalis or Zelda: A Link to the Past tacked on, emphasis on the shitty. In fact, just fire up two emulators and play Harvest Moon for the SNES in one and Zelda in the other. There, you're officially having more fun than you would playing Fable II.
Ha! My wife and I just watched Whisper of the Heart for the first time a few days ago, and we had a good laugh at the card catalog bit.
Last time either of us saw one was junior high, which would have been around 1998/99 for us. I believe the library already had a digital catalog, but was keeping the cards around for a year or two (to make sure this computer thing wasn't just a fad, I guess).
This expectation of major content updates to a game from the game developer after release seems a little peculiar to me
Well, they did it with TF2, then they said (to paraphrase) "hey, you know what we did with TF2? We're gonna do that with L4D. In fact, you can specifically expect X, Y and Z"
They then released the game, and it already had A and B, though both were buggy, and C was just missing. No one much cared that they'd payed $50 for an incomplete game, 'cuz hey, it's Valve, and it may take them forever to fix it, but they fucking will, right?
Months later, A and B are more-or-less fixed, then around the time C (which isn't just new content, it was missing content) finally comes out we are told that we should be excited because the entirety of X, Y, and Z that we were promised are coming out just one year after release... for a mere $50 more!
The expectation was there because Valve has delivered in the past, and because they said they would deliver this time. Looks like they won't, which is a first AFAIK. It's kind of annoying (to me, and many are far more pissed off) and it's troubling, because they were one of the few "good guys" left out there in the PC gaming world.
That's debateable. New engine, new art, new campaigns, new voice actors, vastly expanded team working on it. Most people arguing against L4D2 seem to be arguing because it's "too soon". It's like you guys would be happier if it were released in 2012, rather than 2009. And the irony is, the release date won't affect anything, because L4D updates are still going to come out as slow as they have been. It'll just give some extra content before the release, giving the perception that they kept their word.
"New engine" is a stretch, IMO. Most of the actual content--new weapons, new campaigns, new enemy types--were supposed to be free DLC for L4D, according to interviews before L4D's release.
They were also supposed to have a real, full-featured dev kit for it so the community could do what it usually does with games like this, but they've been dragging their feet on releasing it. Probably worried that the community would just clone the stuff they have slated for L4D2, which is exactly what would have happened if they'd released it months ago.
This is the first time I've seen Valve act like a greedy corporate whore, and it's troubling because they're one of the few remaining PC developers who are worth a damn.
A friend of mine feels fine on 5 hours a night, and can do that indefinitely. 6 is a really, really restful 9 to him. He can't even force himself to do 8 hours unless he's been up more than 24. Sounds about like the people in the study--no coffee or anything like that necessary, he simply doesn't need or even want more sleep than that.
Bastard gets so much done. It's amazing how much extra reading/video-game-playing/movie watching you can get done with an extra 2-3 hours every day, in the early morning or late at night when no-one's awake to bother you. Irritates his wife, though, because she wants him to go to sleep when she does (early), so his "bonus" time for the last year or so has shifted from being late at night to early in the morning. He just gets up way earlier than she does.
He's got a crazy-fast metabolism, and he's a bit on the short side (5'5" or so). No signs of his sleep patterns changing nor his metabolisms slowing yet, but he's only 24, so who knows. Smart as hell, as in top 2-3% of the population smart.
The trouble is you need quick access to most things. The key is that you need to be able to hit commands while moving and aiming. Taking one hand off the controller to hit keyboard buttons would work for a few things, but not for any of the commands that you need to be able to hit without interrupting your maneuvering of the vehicle, which is most of them.
It would be more likely to work than trying to go controller-only, though.
The problem with fallout 3 is that it was so close to being a FPS, but wasn't. I want to play it like a FPS but its just too inferior. I keep thinking to myself how awesome the game would have been if it was built on an FPS engine like the one used in Call of Duty 5
You really, really need to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.
Really.
A better overall game than Fallout 3, and definitely a better FPS (since F3 wasn't really trying to be one, that's not saying much)
Do the MechWarrior games work well with a PlayStation-2 style controller? (I have a Logitech USB controller which is basically a PS2 controller).
Fuck no. Sorry.
Every played X-Wing or TIE Fighter? It's like that, but instead of flying a starfighter you pilot a giant robot. To do well you need to be able to instantly arm any one of 4-10 weapons (plus some hotkeys for combinations of them), control direction of movement and torso orientation, control jump jets (in a few different directions), run coolant flushes, control targeting systems (there's several more buttons right there), issue commands to allies, change your speed (forward and reverse), etc.
You'd assign maybe 1/2 of the commands you needed (not all possible ones, just the ones you really need) before you ran out of buttons on the controller.
Come on now Armored Core does VERY well on consoles IMO, and I don't care who you are that series is twice as complex as Mechwarrior ever was!
LOLWUT?
It's a bit faster-paced. The customization of your machine is (in some ways) a bit more involved.
The actual fighting is painfully simplified compared to Mech 2, and it still struggles to fit on the gamepad. I hate, hate, hate that if my targeting computer gets knocked out (and a stiff breeze can cause that to happen) I have to aim manually--which is fine--but it's impossible to both aim and shoot at the same time (right thumb both looks and fires weapons, so you have to aim, move your thumb to the button, fire, move your thumb back, adjust, move thumb to button, fire, etc), meaning that you're just boned if your opponent isn't standing still or moving in a straight line. This would be a non-issue with a keyboard+mouse--hell, in Mech2 the norm was manual targeting for non-missiles, and even those you had to intentionally dead-fire sometimes.
Trying to keep all the battle functions of Mech 2 present would result in far, far worse overcrowding of the controller, assuming you could do it at all (I doubt it). AC4 barely pulls it off, and even it would be better on a PC.
I've tried twice to play the original System Shock, but I was unable to get very far either time.
Mind you, I can still play games like Doom and Blake Stone and enjoy them, but SS seemed to be stretching the limits of its graphics a bit too far. Everything feels cramped and awkward, if that makes sense. It's like playing an FPS on a console, in a way--you have to concentrate so much on compensating for the shit interface that you can't really get in to the game.
I think that rather than being immersed in a FPS, people play those kind of games to vent frustration or to prove superiority at the comfort of their own home.
Personally, I get a few things out of FPS gaming (and gaming in general, in most cases):
1. "Literary" experiences. I don't know a better way to describe it. These are rare, but they are spectacular. Deus Ex is the king of this. I'd class the Half Life series in here, too, though it's more film-like in its design and execution. Same concept, though. This isn't just having a story; it's a combination of good story, competent writing, and atmosphere. Most games that I'd call good have at least a little of this, though it's not always the only thing that carries them (Bioshock, System Shock 2, Portal, Max Payne 1&2, STALKER, and the Thief series come to mind)
2. The ability to have a taste of feelings and circumstances that I can't or don't want to experience in real life. These are some of the most valuable bits of gaming IMO, because you might only get to feel it the first time through--in re-plays you will know what's coming, and maybe have seen enough of the game to start seeing the cracks and tricks in the game engine so it feels less real. Call of Duty 1 & its expansion had quite a bit of this (a couple parts of the Russian campaign, the Battle of the Bulge, a certain mission that takes place in the air that I won't describe because part of the thrill for me was realizing where these wonderful game devs had just put me and what they were about to help me experience). Most games with horror in them (and quite a lot have at least a bit of it, not just pure-horror games) have some of this. These are things that stick with you. Maybe they're virtual versions of things from real-life like in CoD, or maybe it's just seeing some truly beautiful and striking landscape in a totally made-up world (Morrowind had tons of this, at least for me, and Oblivion's failure to strike me the same way is perhaps the biggest part of why I don't like it very much). Or maybe it's being creeped the fuck out in ways that movies and books can't manage (not that they're worse, of course--just different).
3. Sheer arcade fun. The GTA games excel at this. Doom-like games are defined by it (Doom, Quake, Serious Sam, Painkiller, etc.) Most FPS games need at least a bit of this to not suck, even if their real strengths lie elsewhere (the Half Life series has other positive attributes, but it's also good clean shootin' fun, for example; Max Payne is a well-acted, well-written, pulp-fiction romp, but the actual shooting is fun too). Portal managed to satisfy this without even having a real gun!
4. Having fun with my friends. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark back on the N64, Left 4 Dead more recently.
Other people enjoy the competitive aspect (Counter Strike especially, but any game you can play online will attract these types). I don't, but it's another reason people play FPS.
That said, I've had extremely immersive games of pinball before now, which I'd tend to put more in the category of sports than of computer game, so I suspect it's entirely possible.
Playing pinball isn't gaming and it's not a sport.
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Yeah, it'd have to either be limited to the body type of your sex-bot model (perhaps with modular parts, so you can have a couple of boob sizes for it and just put on whichever type you feel like that day) or the bot would have to be able to expand/contract in some places, which is probably not practical if you want to make it feel at all skin-like.
No no no no no
It'll be used to present a VR overlay ("skin") on your generic sex-bot, which will be printed with a pattern that the lenses can easily recognize so it can correctly orient the 3-D model. Get bored with the Angelina Jolie skin? Fick your eyes to the side to cycle forward to the Cindy Crawford skin in mid-stroke!
Holy shit, I think I need to patent that...
Someone's been reading Anathem by Stephenson...
Note that if you need to open old PS files or deal with new ones from other people, Gimp does not support all of the features of the .ps format. Notably, it's lacking support for some (all?) layer effects, like drop shadow. They'll just disappear when you open the .ps in The GIMP.
That's just who pays. Doctors and hospitals would remain (to more or less the same extent as they are now) private.
Single-payer doesn't mean the government takes over the health care field. The only major country I can think of where the government directly runs the hospitals is the UK, and their health care system is arguably almost as bad as ours (in some ways), which is why no-one is suggesting we do what they've done.
50 years ago, did those middle class people do anywhere near as much luxury spending as we expect a modern middle class family to do? How big were their houses, on average? How often did they go on vacation, and how much did they spend on them?
I suspect you could easily live by '50s or '60s middle class standards on one moderately high income today.
Who's talking about "socializing" the field of medicine? I don't even think Dennis Kucinich is for that.
nt
I was being serious, not trolling. Thought I was offering useful advice. Wish I'd read something like my post before paying money for such a crappy game. Never even occurred to me that I might get any sort of negative mod for that post. Huh.
You know a sequel sucks when it makes you want to quit playing about 1/4 of the way through and break out the original instead--and then never go back to the sequel ever again.
I've muddled through some bad RPGs, but at least the ARPGs like Fable usually satisfy some sort of dungeon-clearing, exploring urge in me, so that I slug through it even if I'm not enjoying any of the rest of the game. Fable II didn't even do that. To me, the worst thing someone can say about a game is that it fails at what it's trying to do, and Fable II fails hard at pretty much everything it shoots for.
It's no good. Really. I even liked Fable I (I didn't pay much attention to the hype, though, so that may have helped, but I didn't for II, either).
Play The Witcher or a well-modded copy of Morrowind or Oblivion instead, if you haven't already. Any of the Baldur's gate series, Arcanum, or the first two Fallouts would be fine, too, if you just want a good PC-RPG to play. Hell, even the barely-mediocre Fallout 3 is better than Fable II.
Or just re-play Fable I. II is awful. It's basically a shitty version of Harvest Moon with a shitty version of one of the Ys games or Crystalis or Zelda: A Link to the Past tacked on, emphasis on the shitty. In fact, just fire up two emulators and play Harvest Moon for the SNES in one and Zelda in the other. There, you're officially having more fun than you would playing Fable II.
Of course they should!
It's in the commercials for that bathroom and kitchen cleaner stuff, after all.
Ha! My wife and I just watched Whisper of the Heart for the first time a few days ago, and we had a good laugh at the card catalog bit.
Last time either of us saw one was junior high, which would have been around 1998/99 for us. I believe the library already had a digital catalog, but was keeping the cards around for a year or two (to make sure this computer thing wasn't just a fad, I guess).
Well, they did it with TF2, then they said (to paraphrase) "hey, you know what we did with TF2? We're gonna do that with L4D. In fact, you can specifically expect X, Y and Z"
They then released the game, and it already had A and B, though both were buggy, and C was just missing. No one much cared that they'd payed $50 for an incomplete game, 'cuz hey, it's Valve, and it may take them forever to fix it, but they fucking will, right?
Months later, A and B are more-or-less fixed, then around the time C (which isn't just new content, it was missing content) finally comes out we are told that we should be excited because the entirety of X, Y, and Z that we were promised are coming out just one year after release... for a mere $50 more!
The expectation was there because Valve has delivered in the past, and because they said they would deliver this time. Looks like they won't, which is a first AFAIK. It's kind of annoying (to me, and many are far more pissed off) and it's troubling, because they were one of the few "good guys" left out there in the PC gaming world.
"New engine" is a stretch, IMO. Most of the actual content--new weapons, new campaigns, new enemy types--were supposed to be free DLC for L4D, according to interviews before L4D's release.
They were also supposed to have a real, full-featured dev kit for it so the community could do what it usually does with games like this, but they've been dragging their feet on releasing it. Probably worried that the community would just clone the stuff they have slated for L4D2, which is exactly what would have happened if they'd released it months ago.
This is the first time I've seen Valve act like a greedy corporate whore, and it's troubling because they're one of the few remaining PC developers who are worth a damn.
Anectdote:
A friend of mine feels fine on 5 hours a night, and can do that indefinitely. 6 is a really, really restful 9 to him. He can't even force himself to do 8 hours unless he's been up more than 24. Sounds about like the people in the study--no coffee or anything like that necessary, he simply doesn't need or even want more sleep than that.
Bastard gets so much done. It's amazing how much extra reading/video-game-playing/movie watching you can get done with an extra 2-3 hours every day, in the early morning or late at night when no-one's awake to bother you. Irritates his wife, though, because she wants him to go to sleep when she does (early), so his "bonus" time for the last year or so has shifted from being late at night to early in the morning. He just gets up way earlier than she does.
He's got a crazy-fast metabolism, and he's a bit on the short side (5'5" or so). No signs of his sleep patterns changing nor his metabolisms slowing yet, but he's only 24, so who knows. Smart as hell, as in top 2-3% of the population smart.
Yeah, sorry.
It might run in Wine, if you use Linux. The WineHQ App DB says it does.
The trouble is you need quick access to most things. The key is that you need to be able to hit commands while moving and aiming. Taking one hand off the controller to hit keyboard buttons would work for a few things, but not for any of the commands that you need to be able to hit without interrupting your maneuvering of the vehicle, which is most of them.
It would be more likely to work than trying to go controller-only, though.
You really, really need to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.
Really.
A better overall game than Fallout 3, and definitely a better FPS (since F3 wasn't really trying to be one, that's not saying much)
Fuck no. Sorry.
Every played X-Wing or TIE Fighter? It's like that, but instead of flying a starfighter you pilot a giant robot. To do well you need to be able to instantly arm any one of 4-10 weapons (plus some hotkeys for combinations of them), control direction of movement and torso orientation, control jump jets (in a few different directions), run coolant flushes, control targeting systems (there's several more buttons right there), issue commands to allies, change your speed (forward and reverse), etc.
You'd assign maybe 1/2 of the commands you needed (not all possible ones, just the ones you really need) before you ran out of buttons on the controller.
LOLWUT?
It's a bit faster-paced. The customization of your machine is (in some ways) a bit more involved.
The actual fighting is painfully simplified compared to Mech 2, and it still struggles to fit on the gamepad. I hate, hate, hate that if my targeting computer gets knocked out (and a stiff breeze can cause that to happen) I have to aim manually--which is fine--but it's impossible to both aim and shoot at the same time (right thumb both looks and fires weapons, so you have to aim, move your thumb to the button, fire, move your thumb back, adjust, move thumb to button, fire, etc), meaning that you're just boned if your opponent isn't standing still or moving in a straight line. This would be a non-issue with a keyboard+mouse--hell, in Mech2 the norm was manual targeting for non-missiles, and even those you had to intentionally dead-fire sometimes.
Trying to keep all the battle functions of Mech 2 present would result in far, far worse overcrowding of the controller, assuming you could do it at all (I doubt it). AC4 barely pulls it off, and even it would be better on a PC.
Hell, I've seen text adventures that are scarier (and way, way better written) than the average horror movie.
Babel* comes to mind.
* it's down that page a bit, you'll need TADS to play it.
I've tried twice to play the original System Shock, but I was unable to get very far either time.
Mind you, I can still play games like Doom and Blake Stone and enjoy them, but SS seemed to be stretching the limits of its graphics a bit too far. Everything feels cramped and awkward, if that makes sense. It's like playing an FPS on a console, in a way--you have to concentrate so much on compensating for the shit interface that you can't really get in to the game.
Personally, I get a few things out of FPS gaming (and gaming in general, in most cases):
1. "Literary" experiences. I don't know a better way to describe it. These are rare, but they are spectacular. Deus Ex is the king of this. I'd class the Half Life series in here, too, though it's more film-like in its design and execution. Same concept, though. This isn't just having a story; it's a combination of good story, competent writing, and atmosphere. Most games that I'd call good have at least a little of this, though it's not always the only thing that carries them (Bioshock, System Shock 2, Portal, Max Payne 1&2, STALKER, and the Thief series come to mind)
2. The ability to have a taste of feelings and circumstances that I can't or don't want to experience in real life. These are some of the most valuable bits of gaming IMO, because you might only get to feel it the first time through--in re-plays you will know what's coming, and maybe have seen enough of the game to start seeing the cracks and tricks in the game engine so it feels less real. Call of Duty 1 & its expansion had quite a bit of this (a couple parts of the Russian campaign, the Battle of the Bulge, a certain mission that takes place in the air that I won't describe because part of the thrill for me was realizing where these wonderful game devs had just put me and what they were about to help me experience). Most games with horror in them (and quite a lot have at least a bit of it, not just pure-horror games) have some of this. These are things that stick with you. Maybe they're virtual versions of things from real-life like in CoD, or maybe it's just seeing some truly beautiful and striking landscape in a totally made-up world (Morrowind had tons of this, at least for me, and Oblivion's failure to strike me the same way is perhaps the biggest part of why I don't like it very much). Or maybe it's being creeped the fuck out in ways that movies and books can't manage (not that they're worse, of course--just different).
3. Sheer arcade fun. The GTA games excel at this. Doom-like games are defined by it (Doom, Quake, Serious Sam, Painkiller, etc.) Most FPS games need at least a bit of this to not suck, even if their real strengths lie elsewhere (the Half Life series has other positive attributes, but it's also good clean shootin' fun, for example; Max Payne is a well-acted, well-written, pulp-fiction romp, but the actual shooting is fun too). Portal managed to satisfy this without even having a real gun!
4. Having fun with my friends. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark back on the N64, Left 4 Dead more recently.
Other people enjoy the competitive aspect (Counter Strike especially, but any game you can play online will attract these types). I don't, but it's another reason people play FPS.
Playing pinball isn't gaming and it's not a sport.
It's a religious experience.