Perhaps because Maniac Mansion was such a seminal game. Monkey Island ultimately just uses a prettier implementation of the engine from it. Before Maniac Mansion, the major adventure creators were Sierra and Infocom, both of whom used parsers. MM was the game that made adventure games truly graphical. After that, it was the basis of all Lucasfilm adventures until Grim Fandango.
When you revolutionize a genre of computer games, you're allowed to crow a little about it. At least, that's what I think.
Mother Jones published an article some weeks back about the "hypermilers," a number of automotive enthusiasts whose method of madness is getting as much gas mileage out of a car as possible.
Some of the techniques they use include avoiding use of breaks whenever possible, attempting to stay at 50mph a much as they can, taking turns at the fastest possible speed, and strategizing as they drive to hit traffic lights when they're green as often as possible.
As someone who spent a large amount of time with Adventure Construction Set (or "ACS") back in the day, I can confirm that it was actually quite involved making good custom content with it. It didn't have literal scripting, but you did have to make use of "stacks" of objects with magic effects, which came down to about the same thing.
Because today's independent publishers are platform agnostic - that is to say, they build games for all major systems - taking over one would result in a massive revenue loss for Microsoft, as all development would be redirected toward the Xbox 360.
At the risk of asking a stupid question.... does this make sense? If Microsoft bought them then logically they wouldn't be independent any more. And why does Microsoft care about games getting released for other systems anyway? Are they trying to do Sony a favor?
That could be the case, if Linden Labs themselves plan on shuttering the doors permanently upon Second Life's demise. Otherwise they'll destroy their reputation as responsible virtual world stewards.
In fact, if the illusion is shattered for Second Life, it would harm confidence in all VWs that seek to be anything more than MUDs or graphical MUDs. Linden Labs still has a fairly positive reputation, so for them to suddenly turn evil, it'd do more than wreck confidence in that one company, but in the idea that a company can be a responsible steward of a virtual world at all.
Whether one can be or not, I don't rightfully know.
Scripting languages run scripts, no matter what the nature of those scripts may be. Many such languages do some degree of compiling internally, these days.
The determiner of whether it is a scripting language is not its basis, but what it does, whether it orchestrates the behavior of other objects, things like files and programs, according to what looks like a "script."
it really was a cool online social experiment -- it only ultimately confirmed what we knew all along -- the internet is good only for porn and consumerism.
If it is a cool online social experiment, then it is such regardless of what the evidence produced by that experiment is. A serious argument could be made that the division between sex and the rest of our lives has only arisen since the onset of Christianity, and that SL's focus on sex is part of a natural "repaganizing" of civilization.
But what is real currency? All money is fake, on a basic, fundamental level. Online games simply use faker money than usual, but with real world transactions becoming increasingly virtual, the difference between the two is becoming much more uncertain over time.
It is in the best interest of any online world to convince the government that their money is fake, since that means they won't have to subject their servers and source code to government oversight, which would ultimately make the game much harder to implement. Most games are content to let it rest at that, since they see their money as play tokens themselves.
Linden Labs is one of the first companies to realize that there is a value in allowing the public, if not regulators, to think otherwise. All L$ cashouts are probably, technically, at LL's discretion; to give players a true, real-world legal right to convert money would mean the government would ultimately start taking a hard look at them, since from a real-world standpoint they would start looking like a bank at best, and a potential tax dodge at worst.
It is important to note, though, that Linden Labs' business requires that the illusion be maintained. If they actually did refuse to cash out L$, it would shake user faith in the system. Trading between real-and-virtual money may be ultimately by permission only, but to exercise that authority would be dangerous to their business, and they seem like they're in this some degree of foresight instead of hoping to make a quick buck, so L$ are still, practically, safe to buy and sell. Mostly.
In fact, as people found out recently during the whole CopyBoy ruckus, using an outside client with the game allows people to copy almost any object in Second Life, but the scripts in objects were still safe. There is no known way to get the source code off an object for which it hasn't been provided, even through decompilation, since the object code, once on their servers, would seem to reside and run there entirely.
BTW, if and while in themselves are not "boolean logic", they are jumps that rely on a boolean condition. Boolean logic has no concept of jumps, because it is not a programming language, it is a form of maths.
1. Computer programming is a branch of math.
2. Perhaps more obviously, microprocessors handle reading the string of instructions laid out sequentially in memory by maintaining a Program Counter register, which is used an index into memory in order to fetch opcodes, operands, and other data. When an instruction is finished, it adds its length, in bytes, to the counter so it can find the next instruction. Jump instructions simply add their own value to that register. And addition, in this case, is carried out using boolean logic.
From what I remember from my old Computer Architecture class....
On some level, all traditional computers are basically *made of* boolean logic components. Even things like floating-point math is, ultimately, broken down to boolean operations by the hardware, even if they are not represented that way explicitly in the program or even the assembly code.
Except, to play this online version of Rampart, I would have to buy a console because it's only for the damnable PS3, a system that there is nothing else for it I'm even remotely interested in playing, bunky.
ll of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth.
Astroturfing is a serious offense, in my opinion at least. Do you have evidence they've been doing this?
While the Overrated mod IS frequently abused (take a look to what'll probably happen to this comment), the real shame here is that your original post wasn't marked -3 Troll instead. The Overrated mod is used because it's immune to metamoderation.
If that information is true, it should be included in boldface, italics, underlining and all caps in EVERY mention of Linux on the system. It is not playing fair, in my opinion.
I'd agree with you completely except for one thing.
Sonic Rush changed some of the basic rules of the game, with the biggest being that, when Sonic jumps, he spins and remains spinning until he touches the ground again. While he's spinning, he destroys any enemies he touches if they are not spiked, electrified or fiery in some way. When he lands on a foe while spinning, he bounces back up into the air, still spinning, and returns from the height from which he fell. And when running on the ground, pressing down causes him to roll into a ball and roll, during which time he cannot gain speed using his legs (he'll slow down on level terrain), but if he's going downhill while rolling he'll pick up speed, and can in fact exceed his normal maximum in this way.
These are fundamental aspects of the physics of 2D Sonic games for the Genesis, and they are not true, according to what I remember of the game, for Sonic Rush.
I said it had fiery craters, which are left by the shots of red ships.
The arcade version has the most well-balanced gameplay, but two home versions other than that in Midway Arcade Treasures are particularly interesting. One of them, as you noted, is the PC version, which offers three-player games -- although there is no network play and only one player can use the mouse, but the MAT version has that too. What it especially has, however, are the ability to send grunts over in multiplayer and I seem to remember it had Propaganda Balloons to place as well, which let you take over an enemy cannon without using up that space on your land permanently.
The most feature-packed version of the game, however, is unquestionably the SNES version. It only has two-player games, but it has Propaganda Balloons, Super Cannons that make fiery craters, grunts to send over in multiplayer, rocks that get in the way of building and can be destroyed with shots, and a single-player game with much more variety. Graphically it uses Mode 7 effects for the playfield which was impressive at the time, but ultimately the original game's bitmap graphics were better.
It's good play, but it's bad game design. A game is improved when a variety of winning strategy is possible. Conversely, if one tactic always wins then the game is weaker as a result.
Once a player learns to snake, then 95% of the time he'll only lose to other snakers. That is BAD.
Midway Arcade Treasures can be picked up used for not much (it was only $20 new) and has arcade Rampart on emulation.
If you attempt this however, you should play the game a lot in preparation. Rampart has some deviously subtle play elements. Cannons closer to their targets can get off more shots, for example, because each can only have one cannonball in the air at a time, but enemy ships/cannons also have this limitation. Building extra cannons means more shots, but makes it harder to rebuild because cannons can never be removed once placed. Continuing the game clears the board, and gives you more cannons and faster ones too, but you cannot continue more than a handful of times, even on the easiest difficulty settings.
I haven't even gotten into Grunts and fiery craters yet.
Some people in Second Live have been seen distributing "defenders" which are supposed to guard objects against copying. I do no know if they work or not, it would seem to me that it couldn't do a perfect job.
It is known that CopyBot cannot copy objects in someone's inventory, or in an object's inventory. Most importantly, this means scripts, the true power behind Second Life's object creation system, cannot be copied, and because script code is only ever sent over the line when it is opened for editing, and you can only do that if you have rights, scripts are wholly immune to this approach.
I'm surprised to see businesses closing up shop so quickly, actually. CopyBot hit the streets not very long ago -- I think those business owners are probably overreacting.
All this is possible because Linden Labs, in direct opposition to just about every other MMORPG out there, not only allows but encourages third parties to make software that works with, and can even serve as an alternative client to, their system. This likely will make far more interesting things than a simple prim copier possible available in the future. (The story is that CopyBot was originally a libsecondlife debug tool....)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps because Maniac Mansion was such a seminal game. Monkey Island ultimately just uses a prettier implementation of the engine from it. Before Maniac Mansion, the major adventure creators were Sierra and Infocom, both of whom used parsers. MM was the game that made adventure games truly graphical. After that, it was the basis of all Lucasfilm adventures until Grim Fandango.
When you revolutionize a genre of computer games, you're allowed to crow a little about it. At least, that's what I think.
Mother Jones published an article some weeks back about the "hypermilers," a number of automotive enthusiasts whose method of madness is getting as much gas mileage out of a car as possible.
Some of the techniques they use include avoiding use of breaks whenever possible, attempting to stay at 50mph a much as they can, taking turns at the fastest possible speed, and strategizing as they drive to hit traffic lights when they're green as often as possible.
In short, a very very Slashdot way to drive....
As someone who spent a large amount of time with Adventure Construction Set (or "ACS") back in the day, I can confirm that it was actually quite involved making good custom content with it. It didn't have literal scripting, but you did have to make use of "stacks" of objects with magic effects, which came down to about the same thing.
Because today's independent publishers are platform agnostic - that is to say, they build games for all major systems - taking over one would result in a massive revenue loss for Microsoft, as all development would be redirected toward the Xbox 360.
At the risk of asking a stupid question.... does this make sense? If Microsoft bought them then logically they wouldn't be independent any more. And why does Microsoft care about games getting released for other systems anyway? Are they trying to do Sony a favor?
That could be the case, if Linden Labs themselves plan on shuttering the doors permanently upon Second Life's demise. Otherwise they'll destroy their reputation as responsible virtual world stewards.
In fact, if the illusion is shattered for Second Life, it would harm confidence in all VWs that seek to be anything more than MUDs or graphical MUDs. Linden Labs still has a fairly positive reputation, so for them to suddenly turn evil, it'd do more than wreck confidence in that one company, but in the idea that a company can be a responsible steward of a virtual world at all.
Whether one can be or not, I don't rightfully know.
Scripting languages run scripts, no matter what the nature of those scripts may be. Many such languages do some degree of compiling internally, these days.
The determiner of whether it is a scripting language is not its basis, but what it does, whether it orchestrates the behavior of other objects, things like files and programs, according to what looks like a "script."
it really was a cool online social experiment -- it only ultimately confirmed what we knew all along -- the internet is good only for porn and consumerism.
If it is a cool online social experiment, then it is such regardless of what the evidence produced by that experiment is. A serious argument could be made that the division between sex and the rest of our lives has only arisen since the onset of Christianity, and that SL's focus on sex is part of a natural "repaganizing" of civilization.
Well, it's a thought at least.
But what is real currency? All money is fake, on a basic, fundamental level. Online games simply use faker money than usual, but with real world transactions becoming increasingly virtual, the difference between the two is becoming much more uncertain over time.
It is in the best interest of any online world to convince the government that their money is fake, since that means they won't have to subject their servers and source code to government oversight, which would ultimately make the game much harder to implement. Most games are content to let it rest at that, since they see their money as play tokens themselves.
Linden Labs is one of the first companies to realize that there is a value in allowing the public, if not regulators, to think otherwise. All L$ cashouts are probably, technically, at LL's discretion; to give players a true, real-world legal right to convert money would mean the government would ultimately start taking a hard look at them, since from a real-world standpoint they would start looking like a bank at best, and a potential tax dodge at worst.
It is important to note, though, that Linden Labs' business requires that the illusion be maintained. If they actually did refuse to cash out L$, it would shake user faith in the system. Trading between real-and-virtual money may be ultimately by permission only, but to exercise that authority would be dangerous to their business, and they seem like they're in this some degree of foresight instead of hoping to make a quick buck, so L$ are still, practically, safe to buy and sell. Mostly.
In fact, as people found out recently during the whole CopyBoy ruckus, using an outside client with the game allows people to copy almost any object in Second Life, but the scripts in objects were still safe. There is no known way to get the source code off an object for which it hasn't been provided, even through decompilation, since the object code, once on their servers, would seem to reside and run there entirely.
Actually, there are reports that they're considering moving to a more standard language, and Mono for internal representation, in a future revision.
Seconded. Its exclusion is appalling.
BTW, if and while in themselves are not "boolean logic", they are jumps that rely on a boolean condition.
Boolean logic has no concept of jumps, because it is not a programming language, it is a form of maths.
1. Computer programming is a branch of math.
2. Perhaps more obviously, microprocessors handle reading the string of instructions laid out sequentially in memory by maintaining a Program Counter register, which is used an index into memory in order to fetch opcodes, operands, and other data. When an instruction is finished, it adds its length, in bytes, to the counter so it can find the next instruction. Jump instructions simply add their own value to that register. And addition, in this case, is carried out using boolean logic.
From what I remember from my old Computer Architecture class....
On some level, all traditional computers are basically *made of* boolean logic components. Even things like floating-point math is, ultimately, broken down to boolean operations by the hardware, even if they are not represented that way explicitly in the program or even the assembly code.
Except, to play this online version of Rampart, I would have to buy a console because it's only for the damnable PS3, a system that there is nothing else for it I'm even remotely interested in playing, bunky.
ll of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth.
Astroturfing is a serious offense, in my opinion at least. Do you have evidence they've been doing this?
Ah, online Rampart at last, after all these years!
I still wouldn't pay $600 for it, though.
While the Overrated mod IS frequently abused (take a look to what'll probably happen to this comment), the real shame here is that your original post wasn't marked -3 Troll instead. The Overrated mod is used because it's immune to metamoderation.
Really? Dammit.
If that information is true, it should be included in boldface, italics, underlining and all caps in EVERY mention of Linux on the system. It is not playing fair, in my opinion.
I'd agree with you completely except for one thing.
Sonic Rush changed some of the basic rules of the game, with the biggest being that, when Sonic jumps, he spins and remains spinning until he touches the ground again. While he's spinning, he destroys any enemies he touches if they are not spiked, electrified or fiery in some way. When he lands on a foe while spinning, he bounces back up into the air, still spinning, and returns from the height from which he fell. And when running on the ground, pressing down causes him to roll into a ball and roll, during which time he cannot gain speed using his legs (he'll slow down on level terrain), but if he's going downhill while rolling he'll pick up speed, and can in fact exceed his normal maximum in this way.
These are fundamental aspects of the physics of 2D Sonic games for the Genesis, and they are not true, according to what I remember of the game, for Sonic Rush.
Dear God, I don't want anything for Christmas myself, but please... mod up the parent post. Thanks.
Did he just call God of War an interactive version of the Odyssey?!!
Stamping out censorship is good, but at what cost? Dear god, what terrible cost!
I said it had fiery craters, which are left by the shots of red ships.
The arcade version has the most well-balanced gameplay, but two home versions other than that in Midway Arcade Treasures are particularly interesting. One of them, as you noted, is the PC version, which offers three-player games -- although there is no network play and only one player can use the mouse, but the MAT version has that too. What it especially has, however, are the ability to send grunts over in multiplayer and I seem to remember it had Propaganda Balloons to place as well, which let you take over an enemy cannon without using up that space on your land permanently.
The most feature-packed version of the game, however, is unquestionably the SNES version. It only has two-player games, but it has Propaganda Balloons, Super Cannons that make fiery craters, grunts to send over in multiplayer, rocks that get in the way of building and can be destroyed with shots, and a single-player game with much more variety. Graphically it uses Mode 7 effects for the playfield which was impressive at the time, but ultimately the original game's bitmap graphics were better.
It's good play, but it's bad game design. A game is improved when a variety of winning strategy is possible. Conversely, if one tactic always wins then the game is weaker as a result.
Once a player learns to snake, then 95% of the time he'll only lose to other snakers. That is BAD.
Midway Arcade Treasures can be picked up used for not much (it was only $20 new) and has arcade Rampart on emulation.
If you attempt this however, you should play the game a lot in preparation. Rampart has some deviously subtle play elements. Cannons closer to their targets can get off more shots, for example, because each can only have one cannonball in the air at a time, but enemy ships/cannons also have this limitation. Building extra cannons means more shots, but makes it harder to rebuild because cannons can never be removed once placed. Continuing the game clears the board, and gives you more cannons and faster ones too, but you cannot continue more than a handful of times, even on the easiest difficulty settings.
I haven't even gotten into Grunts and fiery craters yet.
Some people in Second Live have been seen distributing "defenders" which are supposed to guard objects against copying. I do no know if they work or not, it would seem to me that it couldn't do a perfect job.
It is known that CopyBot cannot copy objects in someone's inventory, or in an object's inventory. Most importantly, this means scripts, the true power behind Second Life's object creation system, cannot be copied, and because script code is only ever sent over the line when it is opened for editing, and you can only do that if you have rights, scripts are wholly immune to this approach.
I'm surprised to see businesses closing up shop so quickly, actually. CopyBot hit the streets not very long ago -- I think those business owners are probably overreacting.
All this is possible because Linden Labs, in direct opposition to just about every other MMORPG out there, not only allows but encourages third parties to make software that works with, and can even serve as an alternative client to, their system. This likely will make far more interesting things than a simple prim copier possible available in the future. (The story is that CopyBot was originally a libsecondlife debug tool....)