NS requires more real teamwork than any other computer game I've ever played. I recommend trying out the CO servers with extra levels and builder mods too.
Co-op was the big thing with Doom/2. I don't know of any co-op FPS PVM games release recently. Anyone know of a good one?
A friend and I want to build an NS mod that is PVM. The AI is gonna be a pain though, and I have no other friends that can do the content design (map, model, sound etc).
The good: Power of the flavor and amount the device wants. The bad: How do you talk to a device that's completely dead? Always have a hot +5v line? The ugly: Cost, Cost, Cost. Manufacturers for devices like this scrutinize fractions of pennies when they're pricing products like these. There is NO WAY you're going to convince them to put 50 cents worth of useless electronics into a device like that.
Building a self-consistent rule set as complex as a parser/compiler combination takes years and years of work to get it right. And you're saying leave that to the programmer??? That's the biggest maintenance nightmare I have EVER heard of.
It's bad enough that a new programmer has to learn the application idiosyncrasies; throwing in the fact that every instance of the language is fundamentally different would at least double the length of the learning curve.
I do however see the appeal of having a common syntax for several different styles of programming schema. Imagine having one punctuation set and operator set for a language that can be either script-like (no typing system), strongly typed, garbage collected, etc, and have it all inter-operate. I just don't think it should be left to the whims of some dude in the back room that would never document his intent and execution properly.
That would be awesome. With as much money as they're making in most MMOs, why not?
Similar to the ARK program in Anarchy Online, you could train advanced players to run NPCs also. You can reward them with in-game perks worth a pittance.
The difficult part would be to give them enough leeway in the things they can say and quests they can give to keep both them and the players interesting. The nice thing is that a player run quest character could inspect the party that is asking for the quest and give them a quest tailored for their party, i.e. right difficulty given their armor, rewards that they can get based on their class, etc. What they do to unlock the quest can be interesting too. A player run quest giving character could give out quests as whimsical as "Get four other players to feel pity on you and give you one credit" to as serious as "Given your excellent service in holding up your side of the battle in the war against the other side, I've decided to reward you with a quest for..."
I always kept the archer from the first land. The only really useful one, imo.
As I usually played Sorceress I found the A2 mercs with their auras more helpful. In one of the very recent expansions they added many polearm runewords (a2 mercs use polearms) that give auras, including one with an easy to acquire very very handy mana regen aura. The biggest problem was that it was very difficult keeping one alive when fighting bosses because Blizzard set it up so that they take something like 4x the damage from bosses. As a sorceress I can keep it alive by constantly teleporting it away and healing it. Having the option to change their AI to one that is more defensive (like the A1 merc) for bosses and then switching back to aggressive for normal fighting would be a godsend. On a sorceress usually my merc goes down first, but if I see my merc go down that means "Get the heck outta here!!!".
That's a very good point. It was interactivity that made all of those easy to tinker with. So maybe something like a console you can pull down like in an FPS game?
For enabling us to feel like we can ditch our nuclear program? I'd say it's worth the cost.
Keep in mind that you're blaming a budget issue on a Republican president that had a Democratically controlled congress. Last time I checked it was congresses job to create the budget.
Bleh.... Just make it like Anarchy Online: Heal up differently depending on whether or not you are in combat. Combine that with potions that stack up into the thousands and you don't have to worry about moving them around. In AO they have two different sets of healing but I don't think that's necessary. Just make it so that it has a moderate initial bonus, then heals slowly but progressively gets faster unless you take damage.
What they did will cause progress to slow down through an area with little health vs how much damage you take. I mean, are they going to remove the ability to go to town and heal up? Will the character not heal slowly over time?
How are support classes supposed to pick up the healing mid-fight? Do they really want an Amazon that is being harried running into a big pack being tanked by a barb to try to heal up?
I agree with you about the stupid instant death things. Those undead stygian ankle biters were a real pain in the neck. It's ok to have monsters that can kill you in one hit if you can prepare for it ahead of time by changing your equipment or tactics, but having 1-hit KOs on random mobs with the lighting set to 1/2 second in front of you is just ludicrous.
That one was promised. The following are my pipe dreams:
Gui base scripting language that ties together different applications. (GUI adaptation of the unix idea of many small tools tied together to do a job). Ship a couple programming languages with it. (What happened to every computer shipping with basic?)
These go together:
Cluster based computing with process migration.
Getting rid of the need to save your work to not lose it during a power outage.
2 second boot time. (Ok, that's 90% a hardware thing).
A real distributed filesystem
And last but not least: Keep the start menu looking exactly the same, and all the shortcuts working exactly the same way (as they were in 2k). I want Windows, not some new tart with a pretty face that doesn't know what to do when I push her err its buttons.
The big key to the explosion of basic was the the shallower learning curve, and the availability of it and of small programs in magazines and books you could just type in.
As someone that endured the progression of from: IBM PC BIOS Basic, GWBasic, Visual Basic 3.0, VB 4.0, VB 5.0, VB 6.0 I can say that the newer flavors of Basic do not deserve the stigma associated with the earlier versions. (I used VB.net but I'm not sure if it should be called Basic or not.)
Including a version of basic that has GOTO disabled by default and has OO and module support and a newb friendly manual would be one of the best things I can think of to provide to a child.
Including that, a C compiler and an Assembler and you have the makings of a computer programmer indoctrination machine.
I used Turbo Pascal extensively when I was about 14 (up until I got a copy of Turbo c++) That development environment was AWESOME. I don't think any other compiler I have used was as fast as that. On a modern machine it would compile and run a decently sized program before I could take my finger off the control-f9 key.
I even used TP in a commercial project. It was a Z-80 based dispatch display unit for a fleets of vehicles. (Yes, you can download a Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M). It was the only project I ever remember completing on time and under budget at that place.
No, the reaction to a hijacking should always be the same: Give the passengers 5 minutes to regain control of the airplane. If they do not regain control, shoot it down.
We do not negotiate with terrorists. To allow them to succeed even partly just encourages more of them. Given this official policy, the following would happen: 1: Passengers will immediately and overwhelmingly act to subdue the terrorists. (Already a given since 9/11, but reinforced) 2: Terrorists will be less motivated to take over a plane full of very motivated defenders. 3: Terrorists will not have the time to make demands. 4: Terrorists will not be able to use the airplane for any purpose other than immediately crashing it. (If they wanted to do that just smuggle in a Stinger, at least then they'd have a chance at getting away with it.)
All that's missing is the official policy statement, and a method to communicate directly with the passengers that their plane has been hijacked. Shooting a few tracers across the wing in front of the passenger windows would do the trick.
What is broken though? The display? The keyboard? Why couldn't we make a case with jacks for keyboard, mouse, network, video and power that would hold cellphone guts?
The hard part would be the video. Is there some way to translate the LCD signals going to the cellphone display into some other format like HDMI on a cheap FPGA? Some earlier poster suggested putting the CPU inside the FPGA, but one that large would be pretty expensive. I think that's the key: leverage the cpu and memory from the cellphone to keep the size of the FPGA down.
The key would be finding a large quantity of identically architected cellphones.
That's the difference between D2, WC3, and HL In the first, it's a total pain in the neck "we'll litigate you to death if you touch it" to mod it. In the second, limitations on the map creation tools limited its usefulness. On the last, there are huge amount of power available, but it's nearly as bad as writing your own game from scratch.
I say give us a D3 engine with 32 player multiplayer support, several levels of moddability (NWN style DM support - wc3ish type map/character/scripting - source module additions/changes), and an official launcher that mixes the best of BNetD and Steam that allows customs mods. The community can take it from there just like we did with Half-Life.
There is still the hardware work-around: Hook up the video out to a video capture card on a second computer, make a hardware widget that takes goes from the second computers USB port to keyboard in on the first computer.
You jest, yet they are worrying about similar kinds of things wrt video. (See Trusted Computing)
Slashdot Mirror
NS requires more real teamwork than any other computer game I've ever played.
I recommend trying out the CO servers with extra levels and builder mods too.
Co-op was the big thing with Doom/2. I don't know of any co-op FPS PVM games release recently. Anyone know of a good one?
A friend and I want to build an NS mod that is PVM. The AI is gonna be a pain though, and I have no other friends that can do the content design (map, model, sound etc).
The good: Power of the flavor and amount the device wants.
The bad: How do you talk to a device that's completely dead? Always have a hot +5v line?
The ugly: Cost, Cost, Cost. Manufacturers for devices like this scrutinize fractions of pennies when they're pricing products like these. There is NO WAY you're going to convince them to put 50 cents worth of useless electronics into a device like that.
And XML? Puhleeeeze... You really need to read the story about the king and the toaster.
Or was that a whooshing sound I heard?
Building a self-consistent rule set as complex as a parser/compiler combination takes years and years of work to get it right. And you're saying leave that to the programmer??? That's the biggest maintenance nightmare I have EVER heard of.
It's bad enough that a new programmer has to learn the application idiosyncrasies; throwing in the fact that every instance of the language is fundamentally different would at least double the length of the learning curve.
I do however see the appeal of having a common syntax for several different styles of programming schema. Imagine having one punctuation set and operator set for a language that can be either script-like (no typing system), strongly typed, garbage collected, etc, and have it all inter-operate. I just don't think it should be left to the whims of some dude in the back room that would never document his intent and execution properly.
If you do go ahead and write it, I nominate Female+- as the name (see http://www.anvari.org/fun/Gender/17_Female_Rules.html )
That would be awesome. With as much money as they're making in most MMOs, why not?
Similar to the ARK program in Anarchy Online, you could train advanced players to run NPCs also. You can reward them with in-game perks worth a pittance.
The difficult part would be to give them enough leeway in the things they can say and quests they can give to keep both them and the players interesting. The nice thing is that a player run quest character could inspect the party that is asking for the quest and give them a quest tailored for their party, i.e. right difficulty given their armor, rewards that they can get based on their class, etc. What they do to unlock the quest can be interesting too. A player run quest giving character could give out quests as whimsical as "Get four other players to feel pity on you and give you one credit" to as serious as "Given your excellent service in holding up your side of the battle in the war against the other side, I've decided to reward you with a quest for ..."
I always kept the archer from the first land. The only really useful one, imo.
As I usually played Sorceress I found the A2 mercs with their auras more helpful. In one of the very recent expansions they added many polearm runewords (a2 mercs use polearms) that give auras, including one with an easy to acquire very very handy mana regen aura.
The biggest problem was that it was very difficult keeping one alive when fighting bosses because Blizzard set it up so that they take something like 4x the damage from bosses. As a sorceress I can keep it alive by constantly teleporting it away and healing it. Having the option to change their AI to one that is more defensive (like the A1 merc) for bosses and then switching back to aggressive for normal fighting would be a godsend.
On a sorceress usually my merc goes down first, but if I see my merc go down that means "Get the heck outta here!!!".
That's a very good point. It was interactivity that made all of those easy to tinker with.
So maybe something like a console you can pull down like in an FPS game?
For enabling us to feel like we can ditch our nuclear program? I'd say it's worth the cost.
Keep in mind that you're blaming a budget issue on a Republican president that had a Democratically controlled congress. Last time I checked it was congresses job to create the budget.
Bleh.... Just make it like Anarchy Online: Heal up differently depending on whether or not you are in combat. Combine that with potions that stack up into the thousands and you don't have to worry about moving them around. In AO they have two different sets of healing but I don't think that's necessary. Just make it so that it has a moderate initial bonus, then heals slowly but progressively gets faster unless you take damage.
What they did will cause progress to slow down through an area with little health vs how much damage you take. I mean, are they going to remove the ability to go to town and heal up? Will the character not heal slowly over time?
How are support classes supposed to pick up the healing mid-fight? Do they really want an Amazon that is being harried running into a big pack being tanked by a barb to try to heal up?
I agree with you about the stupid instant death things. Those undead stygian ankle biters were a real pain in the neck. It's ok to have monsters that can kill you in one hit if you can prepare for it ahead of time by changing your equipment or tactics, but having 1-hit KOs on random mobs with the lighting set to 1/2 second in front of you is just ludicrous.
Combine this with fractal compression and we could store all the videos we've ever seen on one hard disk.
Not quite, it's like if she threw off her clothes behind the filing cabinet and they overheard the noise.
The point is was it done on company time or not?
That was a bad link anyways the correct one is: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm?THREAD=192300&BHCP=1%2C1%2C1&PAGE=1&bhjs=-1
Based on the link I posted I wonder if it was a setup on the part of a player with an axe to grind?
Compile at install time?
One of the benefits of getting rid of the VM is to trim the app footprint down to what is needed.
VMs take forever to load.
It's too bad MS hasn't been split up yet, we might have a chance at getting cross platform .NET and DirectX.
WinFS?
That one was promised. The following are my pipe dreams:
Gui base scripting language that ties together different applications. (GUI adaptation of the unix idea of many small tools tied together to do a job).
Ship a couple programming languages with it. (What happened to every computer shipping with basic?)
These go together:
Cluster based computing with process migration.
Getting rid of the need to save your work to not lose it during a power outage.
2 second boot time. (Ok, that's 90% a hardware thing).
A real distributed filesystem
And last but not least:
Keep the start menu looking exactly the same, and all the shortcuts working exactly the same way (as they were in 2k). I want Windows, not some new tart with a pretty face that doesn't know what to do when I push her err its buttons.
The big key to the explosion of basic was the the shallower learning curve, and the availability of it and of small programs in magazines and books you could just type in.
As someone that endured the progression of from:
IBM PC BIOS Basic, GWBasic, Visual Basic 3.0, VB 4.0, VB 5.0, VB 6.0
I can say that the newer flavors of Basic do not deserve the stigma associated with the earlier versions.
(I used VB.net but I'm not sure if it should be called Basic or not.)
Including a version of basic that has GOTO disabled by default and has OO and module support and a newb friendly manual would be one of the best things I can think of to provide to a child.
Including that, a C compiler and an Assembler and you have the makings of a computer programmer indoctrination machine.
Amen brother.
I used Turbo Pascal extensively when I was about 14 (up until I got a copy of Turbo c++)
That development environment was AWESOME. I don't think any other compiler I have used was as fast as that. On a modern machine it would compile and run a decently sized program before I could take my finger off the control-f9 key.
I even used TP in a commercial project. It was a Z-80 based dispatch display unit for a fleets of vehicles. (Yes, you can download a Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M). It was the only project I ever remember completing on time and under budget at that place.
Tetris totally plays you.
I played that for like 8 hours one time, then closed my eyes and saw falling blocks on the inside of my eyelids.
Manga car?
No, the reaction to a hijacking should always be the same:
Give the passengers 5 minutes to regain control of the airplane.
If they do not regain control, shoot it down.
We do not negotiate with terrorists. To allow them to succeed even partly just encourages more of them.
Given this official policy, the following would happen:
1: Passengers will immediately and overwhelmingly act to subdue the terrorists. (Already a given since 9/11, but reinforced)
2: Terrorists will be less motivated to take over a plane full of very motivated defenders.
3: Terrorists will not have the time to make demands.
4: Terrorists will not be able to use the airplane for any purpose other than immediately crashing it. (If they wanted to do that just smuggle in a Stinger, at least then they'd have a chance at getting away with it.)
All that's missing is the official policy statement, and a method to communicate directly with the passengers that their plane has been hijacked. Shooting a few tracers across the wing in front of the passenger windows would do the trick.
My understanding of NNTP is that it is push, not selective pull.
What is broken though? The display? The keyboard?
Why couldn't we make a case with jacks for keyboard, mouse, network, video and power that would hold cellphone guts?
The hard part would be the video. Is there some way to translate the LCD signals going to the cellphone display into some other format like HDMI on a cheap FPGA? Some earlier poster suggested putting the CPU inside the FPGA, but one that large would be pretty expensive. I think that's the key: leverage the cpu and memory from the cellphone to keep the size of the FPGA down.
The key would be finding a large quantity of identically architected cellphones.
You know it's evil when the sound they make is some guy going "MOOO".
... And now for my human call...
Hmm, I'd say they should let us repackage D2/3.
That's the difference between D2, WC3, and HL
In the first, it's a total pain in the neck "we'll litigate you to death if you touch it" to mod it.
In the second, limitations on the map creation tools limited its usefulness.
On the last, there are huge amount of power available, but it's nearly as bad as writing your own game from scratch.
I say give us a D3 engine with 32 player multiplayer support, several levels of moddability (NWN style DM support - wc3ish type map/character/scripting - source module additions/changes), and an official launcher that mixes the best of BNetD and Steam that allows customs mods.
The community can take it from there just like we did with Half-Life.
Try playing Median and Kingdom of Tenaii.
I gorged on D2 also back in the day. Still can't forgive them for DMCA'ing BNetD and deleting all my characters though.
And then you have POVRAY.
(My point is that the open source developers think you can use a text editor to create 3 dimensional screens)
Dude! why do you think we bought all those suv's & hummers?
We were planning on the extra surface area when we put in the solar conversion kits.
There is still the hardware work-around: Hook up the video out to a video capture card on a second computer, make a hardware widget that takes goes from the second computers USB port to keyboard in on the first computer.
You jest, yet they are worrying about similar kinds of things wrt video. (See Trusted Computing)