This EULA says nothing about the software hiding itself from the user's eyes, about it soaking up resources constantly, about it being difficult to uninstall without at least a BA in Computer Science.
"Software" is a fairly nebulous term here, but some of these things, to this layman's eye, may be actionable. Of course it'd take a laywer to know and even then, maybe not. Hmm.
Interesting point there, although it has to be said, yet again, that just because the motivations of someone telling you something important are suspect, it is not necessarily a reason to discard what they're saying out of hand.
Is it possible that something like Warden is acceptable? Here are what I consider to be some relevant questions:
1. How likely is Warden to give a false positive? If you happen to have a Word window open with a document's name in the title bar that happens to match a cheating tool, what happens?
2. Does Warden run when WoW isn't running? Programs are "allowed" to start up extra processes as part of their running, but are supposed to vanish from memory when the program is shut down. Sony's recently-discussed rootkit-ish DRM software soaks up system resources even when you're doing something that has nothing to do with sharing music.
3. When you uninstall World of Warcraft, does Warden get uninstalled too? Secret software pieces like this tend to get left behind by various programs.
Consider this to be #4, although I know the answer already: 4. Warden DOES appear to snoop around a user's machine, thus using his hardware for purposes against him. Who is to know exactly what Warden sends back to the mothership, without an in-depth disassembly? We know that if it finds something suspecious, Blizzard will probably know about it; isn't that intrusion upon privacy right there? Software has been used for this for quite some time now (expiring software, shareware nag screens, all flavors of DRM, Windows activation codes, all these are different permutations of it), but this is quite definitely a disturbing new step.
And a quick #5: 5. Now that details of Warden are known, how easily will hackers be able to get around it? That is to say, is its protection scheme trivial to defeat for anyone looking out for it?
Afraid I can't help you either. But PC Rogue kept me going for many late nights when I was fifteen, and it's not hard to find. Assuming you can't find what you're looking for, and your 10-year-old can handle the every-key-does-something interface, may I humbly suggest showing him that?
I have ascended a Valkyrie, a Barbarian, an Archeologist, a Priest, a Wizard and a Tourist. Here's the secret about Nethack: it's not that hard.
Woah now, did I just say that? Granted, there is a lot, and I mean a LOT, to learn. It has taken me years to get to the point where I can say that.
But once you get to that point, you start seeing how the game really gives you many possible escapes. Just remembering that you can pray to get out of trouble will prevent a huge number of deaths. Finding strategies for early wishes, keeping a good stock of food, learning the Sokoban solutions, finding out about Elbereth, finding good equipment-gaining strategies, learning the ways to identify and bless stuff, knowing when to fight and when (and how) to run, and most importantly, avoiding trivial errors like stepping into water like you did. Nethack characters tend to get much more survivable as they proceed; if that character of yours hadn't died at the Castle, you would probably have stood a reasonable at winning, assuming you had a good ascension kit put together and knew how to handle the special situations remaining in the game.
There are a lot of things to learn in Nethack, but there are not an infinite number of them. No one ascends their first Nethack character, or even their 40th. But with spoilers, newsgroup reading (rec.games.roguelike.nethack) and practice, it is certainly possible to ascend in nearly every game, and once you learn all the tricks, it could almost be termed easy.
That's the point where you start playing conducts, special challenges designed to make the game harder: Atheist. Vegetarian. Foodless. Pacifist.
You may also begin playing Slash'em, the super-deluxe Nethack variant with three times MORE stuff in it. And the process begins again....
However, it's one of the reasons Nethack players prefer it. There's always something new to discover about the game, unless you've played it for years and years. And even then....
(GAME SPOILERS FOLLOW)
To be accurate here, none of the time or date effects really ends up influencing the game that much except for the Friday the 13th bit, which doesn't roll around all THAT much. On Friday the 13th, the neutral luck value is -1, instead of zero, and prayer (the catch-all, get-me-out-of-trouble solution for low-to-mid level characters) will never work when you have negative luck. Unless you're carrying a luckstone, luck will always trend towards the neutral value over time, regardless of whether it's good or bad. On F the 13, that value is negative, so until you get that luckstone at the bottom of the mines, prayer will not work by default, a significant increase in difficulty.
Cockatrices start stoning you automatically if you hear their hissing in melee combat on new moons, but smart players aren't fighting them hand-to-hand anyway. And usually, by the time you start encountering truly dangerous undead like vampires and barrow wights, you're already much more dangerous than they are. Even double damage is much less dangerous with them than their level drain attack, and wearing a simple elven cloak will prevent that almost always.
Actually, this tournament itself is such a case, as it's played over telnet.
Also, blessed scrolls of genocide, which wipe out a whole class of monster, ask for a letter to identify that class. If you aren't familiar with what the letters mean from ASCII play, you might not know what represents the class you're removing from play.
And inventory management uses shortcut keys to select all of one type of item or another, that matches with that item type's symbol in the game.
Well, at least you admitted that you were yelling.
The things here to keep in mind, though, are as follows: 1. Of course they're opinions. Was this ever in doubt? 2. My comment is based partly on personal experience, and partly from reasoning from that experience and projecting it forward. It's not the same as a scientific study, sure, but then in the original post, I did ask people to try to explain it to me. I would hope that's the rational way to go about it, especially when game companies will spout any figure they can to try to stir up hype over their consoles. It is healthy to approach them with a greater-than-usual degree of skepticism. 3. Your comment is an opinion, too. We should be grateful that we can both express our opinions so freely. 4. These things said, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If you want to convince someone of something you're generally better off doing it by behaving nicely.
You'll notice that I haven't responded to anything content-wise in your comment. It's because I haven't read much of it; I have better things to do than read flames like this. I don't think people will blame me.
Hm, I still have my copy of Aria of Sorrow, let me check....
Er. Well, they are there, that's settled. It's difficult to tell what they are, they're scattered around the place, and they're in a room with a cavern tileset so it's easy to mistake them for bits of detail, but they quite obviously, upon close examination of the pictures and the game graphics, supposed to represent the transformations that Soma can undergo when he uses the Curly, Devil and Manticore souls.
I'm still not sure it's exactly a fair hint (the transformation souls are almost useless elsewhere in the game), but it quite obviously is a hint. You were correct.
While I weep for a world in which the difference between 60 and 90 frames per second is considered a competitive edge important to playing a game, I think I can imagine gamers who would go just that far to get such an edge. Thanks for the insight.
Hmm, I don't remember any pictures, that room was a cavern if memory serves, pictures would rather stand out...?
The clue I found (which I didn't use, I ended up going to a FAQ too) was one of those that the guys waiting at the castle entrance give you, you know if you talk with them sometimes throughout the game, eventually one of 'em (I think it was Mina) will drop a hint left by Alucard about one of the game's secrets.
The idea that nothing above 60 FPS is useful is absolute nonsense.
Sigh. A good number of well-reasoned responses, I was starting to feel pretty good about people and human-kind even, then: "absolute nonsense."
Bah to you, sir! If the game is flashing stuff filling the screen for individual frames at 60fps, then I don't want to play it anyway. I have better uses for my eyeballs than to waste them so shamefully.
A computer does not produce images this way. A computer frame is perfectly clear, pristine, in exactly one place.
How a computer produces images is less important than how it displays them, and in that context your statement is incorrect. Cathode ray tubes scan the image on the screen very rapidly to give an illusion of steady appearance, but it is by no means instant. (Laptop screens may be a different matter, but I don't think they are.)
This seems to indicate that humans can see identify pictures flashed at them for only 1/220th of a second. Very interesting.
However, it also says that with blurring, the human eye will see even 18fps as smooth and continuous. And it says that continual motions require much lower frame rates to seem smooth than sudden changes.
So while this fills in the blanks a bit as to why Sony might think it's important, I'm still not sure if the difference will be noticable in PS3 video games, since unless the game is totally spastic, 60fps should be enough to see it all smoothly. I guess we'll have to see actual games to know for sure, however.
(And this is all assuming you have a display device that can SHOW 120fps, of course.)
Same people want Quake 3 to run at at an average 300fps! It means that when you hit high poly regions in the game then the fps won't dip down to 12fps where you can actually notice it in really detailed rooms.
But either on a computer or on a television, the rooms with that "high frame rate" are still effectively limited to the frame rate of your display device. Meaning that these people are actually going after excess rendering capacity, and not actually higher frame rates. (If they think they're actually getting 300fps on their screen then they're fooling themselves.) The guy said the PS3 has 120fps frame rates, not a bucketload of spare graphics power.
To me, it sounds like his statement is just one of those things meant to insprire uncritical fanboys to rapse eloquent about the wonderers of his next-gen electrobox, in its holy battle against the other, evil next-gen electroboxes. So yeah, I think Ken's talking out of his ass on this one, and -- so far -- I haven't heard anything to make me thing otherwise.
Which doesn't mean that it's *not* true, I guess. It just sounds crazy to me.
In general, 60 Hz with motion blur looks better than 60 Hz without motion blur.
Not a bad idea.
Except... the lowly N64 showed that it could do motion blur without rendering each scene twice, in games like Majora's Mask (which didn't make extensive use of it, but it was there at key moments), which seems to indicate you don't need that much extra power to do it.
Of course, It's probable that you're talking about the slight motion blurring that CGI in movies needs to make it fit in with live action footage, although I'm not convinced that needs double frame rates, either. Anyway, rendering a scene twice isn't the same thing as 120fps, it means 60fps with twice the render time. The guy said 120fps, and wasn't implying anything that I can see. This feature is not one that I'm aware of having been announced for the PS3, so I have to discount it.
120fps is just when stereographic glasses start to work great.
So.... they've announced stereographic glasses for the PS3? First I've heard of this.
Word is that the Sega Master System actually had a pretty good 3D glasses setup, and it certainly wasn't at 120fps, although it was at 60.
But no, I'm afraid I cannot take your word on this, I have to challenge. Even if you take dual-shutters into account, 200fps is far above the 60 that the human eye is reputed to be able to detect.
Re:I agree, but think you disproved your own metap
on
PS3 To Run At 120 FPS?
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· Score: 1
Well my point with Vinyl/CD was that some people claim that Vinyl sounds better, or "warmer." But now that I think about it, while I don't think I disproved my own argument, you're right in that it was a bad analogy.
I don't know if it's pointless to argue it on Slashdot. My karma would probably like me better if I didn't but if you're going to say something or not based on the result it'll have on your Arbitrary Good Poster Score then you're worrying too much, heh.
He is indeed a descendant, one of the Belmont line of vampire killers who we first saw in Simon. Konami has tried to be fairly consistent with how the different Castlevanias relate to each other. Me, I think that's a rather silly way to approach your line of side-scrolling action games, but I guess it's better than the way Nintendo's approached Mario. ("Dude, what's Mario's younger self doing here in Double Dash? Did the plumber and the princess finally get it on? And wasn't Baby Bowser originally Mario's nemesis when he was a baby, in Yoshi's Island?" The correct answer to all these questions is, of course, "Put down the bong.")
By the way, I hear Simon is playable in Boss Rush mode in the second DS Castlevania (the one I haven't played, argh).
It's far less noticed in recent years than many other classic franchises,
False, the Gameboy Advance Castlevanias are fairly popular. Castlevania is, actually, one of the classic series that's stayed closest to its roots, although they did mix in a healthy portion of Metroid. Even so, almost every Metroid-like Castlevania game contains a mode that lets you play as a whip-wielder.
The Forbidden Zone was interesting, but a little arbitrary in how you got into it. The only clue as to how to get into it was in one of the later hint messages.
There are some optional areas in the new game as well, although they aren't as extensive as the Forbidden Zone. Still, the idea that there are secret transportation and barrier-breaking uses for some souls is definitely back, and they don't seem as arbitrary this time.
The most important optional zone contains its own boss, and it's greatly recommended that he be beaten....
F-Zero X ran at 60 frames a second and it looked utterly, silky smooth because it was already past the zone the human eye can distinguish. How is 120 fps going to be better if you can't even distinguish it? Is this going to be a visual version of people claiming vinyl sounds better than CD? Someone tell me, I really want to know.
Second point. It may be able to run at 120 fps, but you can bet that scenes will look better at 60.
Slashdot Mirror
This EULA says nothing about the software hiding itself from the user's eyes, about it soaking up resources constantly, about it being difficult to uninstall without at least a BA in Computer Science.
"Software" is a fairly nebulous term here, but some of these things, to this layman's eye, may be actionable. Of course it'd take a laywer to know and even then, maybe not. Hmm.
Interesting point there, although it has to be said, yet again, that just because the motivations of someone telling you something important are suspect, it is not necessarily a reason to discard what they're saying out of hand.
Is it possible that something like Warden is acceptable? Here are what I consider to be some relevant questions:
1. How likely is Warden to give a false positive? If you happen to have a Word window open with a document's name in the title bar that happens to match a cheating tool, what happens?
2. Does Warden run when WoW isn't running? Programs are "allowed" to start up extra processes as part of their running, but are supposed to vanish from memory when the program is shut down. Sony's recently-discussed rootkit-ish DRM software soaks up system resources even when you're doing something that has nothing to do with sharing music.
3. When you uninstall World of Warcraft, does Warden get uninstalled too? Secret software pieces like this tend to get left behind by various programs.
Consider this to be #4, although I know the answer already:
4. Warden DOES appear to snoop around a user's machine, thus using his hardware for purposes against him. Who is to know exactly what Warden sends back to the mothership, without an in-depth disassembly? We know that if it finds something suspecious, Blizzard will probably know about it; isn't that intrusion upon privacy right there? Software has been used for this for quite some time now (expiring software, shareware nag screens, all flavors of DRM, Windows activation codes, all these are different permutations of it), but this is quite definitely a disturbing new step.
And a quick #5:
5. Now that details of Warden are known, how easily will hackers be able to get around it? That is to say, is its protection scheme trivial to defeat for anyone looking out for it?
Afraid I can't help you either. But PC Rogue kept me going for many late nights when I was fifteen, and it's not hard to find. Assuming you can't find what you're looking for, and your 10-year-old can handle the every-key-does-something interface, may I humbly suggest showing him that?
Don't laugh! Hobbits will use whatever's at hand for sling ammo....
I have ascended a Valkyrie, a Barbarian, an Archeologist, a Priest, a Wizard and a Tourist. Here's the secret about Nethack: it's not that hard.
Woah now, did I just say that? Granted, there is a lot, and I mean a LOT, to learn. It has taken me years to get to the point where I can say that.
But once you get to that point, you start seeing how the game really gives you many possible escapes. Just remembering that you can pray to get out of trouble will prevent a huge number of deaths. Finding strategies for early wishes, keeping a good stock of food, learning the Sokoban solutions, finding out about Elbereth, finding good equipment-gaining strategies, learning the ways to identify and bless stuff, knowing when to fight and when (and how) to run, and most importantly, avoiding trivial errors like stepping into water like you did. Nethack characters tend to get much more survivable as they proceed; if that character of yours hadn't died at the Castle, you would probably have stood a reasonable at winning, assuming you had a good ascension kit put together and knew how to handle the special situations remaining in the game.
There are a lot of things to learn in Nethack, but there are not an infinite number of them. No one ascends their first Nethack character, or even their 40th. But with spoilers, newsgroup reading (rec.games.roguelike.nethack) and practice, it is certainly possible to ascend in nearly every game, and once you learn all the tricks, it could almost be termed easy.
That's the point where you start playing conducts,
special challenges designed to make the game harder: Atheist. Vegetarian. Foodless. Pacifist.
You may also begin playing Slash'em, the super-deluxe Nethack variant with three times MORE stuff in it. And the process begins again....
However, it's one of the reasons Nethack players prefer it. There's always something new to discover about the game, unless you've played it for years and years. And even then....
(GAME SPOILERS FOLLOW)
To be accurate here, none of the time or date effects really ends up influencing the game that much except for the Friday the 13th bit, which doesn't roll around all THAT much. On Friday the 13th, the neutral luck value is -1, instead of zero, and prayer (the catch-all, get-me-out-of-trouble solution for low-to-mid level characters) will never work when you have negative luck. Unless you're carrying a luckstone, luck will always trend towards the neutral value over time, regardless of whether it's good or bad. On F the 13, that value is negative, so until you get that luckstone at the bottom of the mines, prayer will not work by default, a significant increase in difficulty.
Cockatrices start stoning you automatically if you hear their hissing in melee combat on new moons, but smart players aren't fighting them hand-to-hand anyway. And usually, by the time you start encountering truly dangerous undead like vampires and barrow wights, you're already much more dangerous than they are. Even double damage is much less dangerous with them than their level drain attack, and wearing a simple elven cloak will prevent that almost always.
There are cases where playing ASCII is better....
Actually, this tournament itself is such a case, as it's played over telnet.
Also, blessed scrolls of genocide, which wipe out a whole class of monster, ask for a letter to identify that class. If you aren't familiar with what the letters mean from ASCII play, you might not know what represents the class you're removing from play.
And inventory management uses shortcut keys to select all of one type of item or another, that matches with that item type's symbol in the game.
Well, at least you admitted that you were yelling.
The things here to keep in mind, though, are as follows:
1. Of course they're opinions. Was this ever in doubt?
2. My comment is based partly on personal experience, and partly from reasoning from that experience and projecting it forward. It's not the same as a scientific study, sure, but then in the original post, I did ask people to try to explain it to me. I would hope that's the rational way to go about it, especially when game companies will spout any figure they can to try to stir up hype over their consoles. It is healthy to approach them with a greater-than-usual degree of skepticism.
3. Your comment is an opinion, too. We should be grateful that we can both express our opinions so freely.
4. These things said, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If you want to convince someone of something you're generally better off doing it by behaving nicely.
You'll notice that I haven't responded to anything content-wise in your comment. It's because I haven't read much of it; I have better things to do than read flames like this. I don't think people will blame me.
Hm, I still have my copy of Aria of Sorrow, let me check....
Er. Well, they are there, that's settled. It's difficult to tell what they are, they're scattered around the place, and they're in a room with a cavern tileset so it's easy to mistake them for bits of detail, but they quite obviously, upon close examination of the pictures and the game graphics, supposed to represent the transformations that Soma can undergo when he uses the Curly, Devil and Manticore souls.
I'm still not sure it's exactly a fair hint (the transformation souls are almost useless elsewhere in the game), but it quite obviously is a hint. You were correct.
Guh....
While I weep for a world in which the difference between 60 and 90 frames per second is considered a competitive edge important to playing a game, I think I can imagine gamers who would go just that far to get such an edge. Thanks for the insight.
Useful information thanks, although I'm still not sure it's all that much better. It'll probably have to be something I see for myself by this point.
As for the bah... I gave the original poster his for his attitude more for the information. So there.
Hmm, I don't remember any pictures, that room was a cavern if memory serves, pictures would rather stand out...?
The clue I found (which I didn't use, I ended up going to a FAQ too) was one of those that the guys waiting at the castle entrance give you, you know if you talk with them sometimes throughout the game, eventually one of 'em (I think it was Mina) will drop a hint left by Alucard about one of the game's secrets.
The idea that nothing above 60 FPS is useful is absolute nonsense.
Sigh. A good number of well-reasoned responses, I was starting to feel pretty good about people and human-kind even, then: "absolute nonsense."
Bah to you, sir! If the game is flashing stuff filling the screen for individual frames at 60fps, then I don't want to play it anyway. I have better uses for my eyeballs than to waste them so shamefully.
A computer does not produce images this way. A computer frame is perfectly clear, pristine, in exactly one place.
How a computer produces images is less important than how it displays them, and in that context your statement is incorrect. Cathode ray tubes scan the image on the screen very rapidly to give an illusion of steady appearance, but it is by no means instant. (Laptop screens may be a different matter, but I don't think they are.)
You can, probally not easily and probally not everybody (think eSport people), but 60fps is certainly not the upper end.
s ee.htm
Hmm, I'm still not convinced, but I found some interesting pages on a Google search:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_
This seems to indicate that humans can see identify pictures flashed at them for only 1/220th of a second. Very interesting.
However, it also says that with blurring, the human eye will see even 18fps as smooth and continuous. And it says that continual motions require much lower frame rates to seem smooth than sudden changes.
So while this fills in the blanks a bit as to why Sony might think it's important, I'm still not sure if the difference will be noticable in PS3 video games, since unless the game is totally spastic, 60fps should be enough to see it all smoothly. I guess we'll have to see actual games to know for sure, however.
(And this is all assuming you have a display device that can SHOW 120fps, of course.)
Same people want Quake 3 to run at at an average 300fps! It means that when you hit high poly regions in the game then the fps won't dip down to 12fps where you can actually notice it in really detailed rooms.
But either on a computer or on a television, the rooms with that "high frame rate" are still effectively limited to the frame rate of your display device. Meaning that these people are actually going after excess rendering capacity, and not actually higher frame rates. (If they think they're actually getting 300fps on their screen then they're fooling themselves.) The guy said the PS3 has 120fps frame rates, not a bucketload of spare graphics power.
To me, it sounds like his statement is just one of those things meant to insprire uncritical fanboys to rapse eloquent about the wonderers of his next-gen electrobox, in its holy battle against the other, evil next-gen electroboxes. So yeah, I think Ken's talking out of his ass on this one, and -- so far -- I haven't heard anything to make me thing otherwise.
Which doesn't mean that it's *not* true, I guess. It just sounds crazy to me.
In general, 60 Hz with motion blur looks better than 60 Hz without motion blur.
Not a bad idea.
Except... the lowly N64 showed that it could do motion blur without rendering each scene twice, in games like Majora's Mask (which didn't make extensive use of it, but it was there at key moments), which seems to indicate you don't need that much extra power to do it.
Of course, It's probable that you're talking about the slight motion blurring that CGI in movies needs to make it fit in with live action footage, although I'm not convinced that needs double frame rates, either. Anyway, rendering a scene twice isn't the same thing as 120fps, it means 60fps with twice the render time. The guy said 120fps, and wasn't implying anything that I can see. This feature is not one that I'm aware of having been announced for the PS3, so I have to discount it.
120fps is just when stereographic glasses start to work great.
So.... they've announced stereographic glasses for the PS3? First I've heard of this.
Word is that the Sega Master System actually had a pretty good 3D glasses setup, and it certainly wasn't at 120fps, although it was at 60.
But no, I'm afraid I cannot take your word on this, I have to challenge. Even if you take dual-shutters into account, 200fps is far above the 60 that the human eye is reputed to be able to detect.
Well my point with Vinyl/CD was that some people claim that Vinyl sounds better, or "warmer." But now that I think about it, while I don't think I disproved my own argument, you're right in that it was a bad analogy.
I don't know if it's pointless to argue it on Slashdot. My karma would probably like me better if I didn't but if you're going to say something or not based on the result it'll have on your Arbitrary Good Poster Score then you're worrying too much, heh.
He is indeed a descendant, one of the Belmont line of vampire killers who we first saw in Simon. Konami has tried to be fairly consistent with how the different Castlevanias relate to each other. Me, I think that's a rather silly way to approach your line of side-scrolling action games, but I guess it's better than the way Nintendo's approached Mario. ("Dude, what's Mario's younger self doing here in Double Dash? Did the plumber and the princess finally get it on? And wasn't Baby Bowser originally Mario's nemesis when he was a baby, in Yoshi's Island?" The correct answer to all these questions is, of course, "Put down the bong.")
By the way, I hear Simon is playable in Boss Rush mode in the second DS Castlevania (the one I haven't played, argh).
It's far less noticed in recent years than many other classic franchises,
False, the Gameboy Advance Castlevanias are fairly popular. Castlevania is, actually, one of the classic series that's stayed closest to its roots, although they did mix in a healthy portion of Metroid. Even so, almost every Metroid-like Castlevania game contains a mode that lets you play as a whip-wielder.
The Forbidden Zone was interesting, but a little arbitrary in how you got into it. The only clue as to how to get into it was in one of the later hint messages.
There are some optional areas in the new game as well, although they aren't as extensive as the Forbidden Zone. Still, the idea that there are secret transportation and barrier-breaking uses for some souls is definitely back, and they don't seem as arbitrary this time.
The most important optional zone contains its own boss, and it's greatly recommended that he be beaten....
No, THAT was Simon Belmont. Julius originated in Aria of Sorrow.
Oh, come ON now...
F-Zero X ran at 60 frames a second and it looked utterly, silky smooth because it was already past the zone the human eye can distinguish. How is 120 fps going to be better if you can't even distinguish it? Is this going to be a visual version of people claiming vinyl sounds better than CD? Someone tell me, I really want to know.
Second point. It may be able to run at 120 fps, but you can bet that scenes will look better at 60.
Yeah, but everyone seems really heavily into roleplaying.
Especially if they can get hold of the "magic white powder" the GMs were working on, abandoned, but then somehow got out of beta....
Yeah, funny that.
In other news, the sky is blue. A RESULT OF THE COSMIC BLUE CONSPIRACY?!