While I agree very strongly with the sentiment that improvements in games have to go beyond tarting up graphics, if considererd carefully this exposes a fundamental problem.
Any aspect of a game may be programmed to scale with the hardware upon which the game is run (eg. graphics get more detailed, framerates improve, physics is more realistic, AI gets smarter)
However, the problem here is that if these improvements to the game are in any way substantial rather than superficial - if they actually affect the gameplay in any way - then users playing the game on a high-end machine will end up playing a substantially different game than users on a low-end machine.
In the case of more detailed graphics, or better framerates, the changes are superficial enough that this does not matter. But for anything deeper - such as AI - the developer has to ask themselves whether it is really desireable for the intelligence of in-game aliens to depend on the nature of the PC the game is run on. Will a low-end PC make the aliens so stupid that the game is substantially easier? Will a high-end PC result in aliens which consistently frustrate the player?
In order to fix this, developers might consider preventing the software from running on systems which are deemed 'too slow', or they may disable features such as 'AI scaling' on systems that are 'too fast' - ironically these desparate measures would of course be in direct opposition to the original intent of making the game scale well across a wide variety of hardware.
>> First, Orbitz should be allowed to do whatever they want. This includes prohibiting deep linking.
Problem is, that's not Orbitz doing what they want, that's Orbitz telling me what I can and cannot do with my own keyboard! The important thing here is they think that THEY get to define what is acceptable content in MY emails and webpages. Not a chance!
AllOfMp3.com is $0.01 per Mb, and they have *everything*, legally, at any bitrate, in any format.
There's a link on their page somewhere to translate into English (from the parent company's Russian)
> all the major software revolutions have
> been spawned by capitalist endeavors.
This isn't true. As proponents such as ESR have been pointing out for years, the Open Souce community built the web, and the internet that it depends upon, and the UNIX operating system, which was decades ahead of its time, and now is stronger than it's ever been. It created the Apache webserver, that serves three times more websites than the closest 'captialist' competitor, and has maintained that lead for years.
What other software has had such a profound effect on the world, and has lasted for decades without being usurped.
hee. It's all good.
My new programming project I just decieded on yesterday?
VecHack (working title): A Roguelike but implimented with very simple vector graphics, in a 2D rotateable, scaleable polygon world. Python & openGL, I think.
If it isn't open source, how do we know that the machine isn't printing one thing to give to the user, but a different thing to add to the vote tally and seal in the box?
Google reports:
Results 1 - 10 of about 225,000 for nethack
as opposed to:
Results 1 - 10 of about 947 for "mission: thunderbolt"
(regardless of whether the colon is included or not)
My conclusion: Nethack is more popular than M:T, by a factor of a thousand or so.
The first problem seems laughable. Have I missed something?
The problem is to parse a dependancy tree, and output the number of dependancies that can be fulfulled. Can't that be done in about three lines? - a teeny script to convert the input file into a Makefile (simply add a few colons?) and then run something like 'make -n | wc' on it.
a) Award 1.0 frags for killing a player of the same ranking of you. Award more for killing someone better than you. Award less for killing someone not as highly-ranked as you. Below a certain point, the reward for killing a player actually goes negative - lose points for killing newbs (unless you are a newb)
b) Rewarding highly-ranked players if they 'rescue' a newbie by killing any other highly-ranked players who were attacking the newb. (hmmm. perhaps not much window of opportunity for anyone to earn this one)
For extra incentive, 'reward' and 'punish' don't have to be restricted to points/frags. They could involve the gaining of powerups or powerdowns. (eg. Lose the use of a weapon? Slow running?)
If you're tempted by the RAM-based performance of this, but you don't want to give up on all the good things a RDBMS offers, check out MySQL HEAP tables - they are a polymorphous implementation of MySql's tables that are designed to be stored in memory.
Wrong about MySql failing to gracefully scale to RAM storage, btw:
MySql polymorphically implements several different types of table, all conforming to the same interface. One of those implementations (HEAP tables) is designed to store data entirely in memory:
They don't actually get the feedback from measuring the strain and deformation of the telescope's various parts - they simply look at the image the telescope is producing, and deform the lens based purely on that. This requires that some calibrated known object is present in the telescope field-of-view, known as a 'guide star'. As noted elsewhere in these comments, shining lasers into the ionosphere are often used as artificial guide stars.
The problem goes deeper than the original post suggests - The type of mind which is attracted to programming, and is good at it, is already entrenched in methods of decomposition and logical seperation. I don't think one could *be* a good low-level programmer without this sort of thinking. It isn't just methods of education - I think it's a fundamental dichotomy built into the subject matter of designing and building complex systems.
Alfred Bester wrote several science fiction books containing descriptions of this condition.
The Stars My Destination (aka Tyger, Tyger) is the most famous and most prominent example.
He was also notorious for experimenting with typography in 'visually onomatapiec' ways - by which I mean he arranged words and fonts on the page to resemble the sounds and actions they described. Stars (above) uses this a lot. To a lesser exent, so does Psychoshop.
The Demolished Man contains none of the above, but it's a freaking classic so it gets an honorable mention. (-:
-- Tartley
http://tartley.com
Yah. I personally *never* drink any water, and it's never seemed to do me any harm. The only drinks I consume are beers, shots, soda... ah and about a pint of milk per day on cereal. Maybe it's the latter that has saved me.
>> personally would love to see the middle east
>> die when all their cash cows dry up
AFAIK, most of the profits from middle eastern oil is actually earned by US owned corporations. Some countries like Saudi Arabia make a nice fortune out of their oil, but they are not the norm.
Microsoft does not stop selling Windows licences to your hyperthetical Gateway-like company. Instead, they revoke the $100 rebate they gave that company on each one of the 10,000,000 Windows licences they buy each year. **NOW** the Gateway-like company goes out of business.
I think it can, at least to a useful degree. Any application written for Win95 will still work on modern incarnations of Windows. Hence, the *backwards* compatability of the windows API is stable to that extent. Hence, Wine can, at the very least, become a stable platform upon which to run Win95-compliant applications, which is a very large number of apps.
Obviously, in a perfect world, Wine will also support apps which take advantage of new features in Win2000 etc. This is of course harder for the Wine project, to catch up with a moving target. But it isn't moving that fast. If the Win2000 API is stable for as long as the Win95 one has been, then Wine developers have plenty of time to catch up. IMHO.
Right now I'm running dozens of Windows games and applications on my Linux box, with great reliability and functionality. Wine (and WineX) are emminently practical in real life.
>> the BEST way for Ford to (help)
>> stop the theft of vehicles
Best for whom? Best for Ford? Maybe. Is it best for me, the consumer? No, it isn't. Is it best for the owners of independant service centers? Definately not.
So why does Ford's get the right to wade into our lives asserting what we can or cannot do? Is what's best for them somehow more important than what's best for everyone else in the world? I don't think so.
If Ford had another way of preventing theft, one that didn't feck up the world for everyone else, then I'd be all for them using that method.
Slashdot Mirror
How about Katamai Da... er... Dama... er... y'know? That Japanese thing.
Any aspect of a game may be programmed to scale with the hardware upon which the game is run (eg. graphics get more detailed, framerates improve, physics is more realistic, AI gets smarter)
However, the problem here is that if these improvements to the game are in any way substantial rather than superficial - if they actually affect the gameplay in any way - then users playing the game on a high-end machine will end up playing a substantially different game than users on a low-end machine.
In the case of more detailed graphics, or better framerates, the changes are superficial enough that this does not matter. But for anything deeper - such as AI - the developer has to ask themselves whether it is really desireable for the intelligence of in-game aliens to depend on the nature of the PC the game is run on. Will a low-end PC make the aliens so stupid that the game is substantially easier? Will a high-end PC result in aliens which consistently frustrate the player?
In order to fix this, developers might consider preventing the software from running on systems which are deemed 'too slow', or they may disable features such as 'AI scaling' on systems that are 'too fast' - ironically these desparate measures would of course be in direct opposition to the original intent of making the game scale well across a wide variety of hardware.
>> First, Orbitz should be allowed to do whatever they want. This includes prohibiting deep linking.
Problem is, that's not Orbitz doing what they want, that's Orbitz telling me what I can and cannot do with my own keyboard! The important thing here is they think that THEY get to define what is acceptable content in MY emails and webpages. Not a chance!
AllOfMp3.com is $0.01 per Mb, and they have *everything*, legally, at any bitrate, in any format. There's a link on their page somewhere to translate into English (from the parent company's Russian)
> all the major software revolutions have
> been spawned by capitalist endeavors.
This isn't true. As proponents such as ESR have been pointing out for years, the Open Souce community built the web, and the internet that it depends upon, and the UNIX operating system, which was decades ahead of its time, and now is stronger than it's ever been. It created the Apache webserver, that serves three times more websites than the closest 'captialist' competitor, and has maintained that lead for years.
What other software has had such a profound effect on the world, and has lasted for decades without being usurped.
hee. It's all good. My new programming project I just decieded on yesterday? VecHack (working title): A Roguelike but implimented with very simple vector graphics, in a 2D rotateable, scaleable polygon world. Python & openGL, I think.
If it isn't open source, how do we know that the machine isn't printing one thing to give to the user, but a different thing to add to the vote tally and seal in the box?
Google reports: Results 1 - 10 of about 225,000 for nethack as opposed to: Results 1 - 10 of about 947 for "mission: thunderbolt" (regardless of whether the colon is included or not) My conclusion: Nethack is more popular than M:T, by a factor of a thousand or so.
Hmmm, I see. Thanks Old Wolf.
The first problem seems laughable. Have I missed something? The problem is to parse a dependancy tree, and output the number of dependancies that can be fulfulled. Can't that be done in about three lines? - a teeny script to convert the input file into a Makefile (simply add a few colons?) and then run something like 'make -n | wc' on it.
How about in-game mechanisms like:
a) Award 1.0 frags for killing a player of the same ranking of you. Award more for killing someone better than you. Award less for killing someone not as highly-ranked as you. Below a certain point, the reward for killing a player actually goes negative - lose points for killing newbs (unless you are a newb)
b) Rewarding highly-ranked players if they 'rescue' a newbie by killing any other highly-ranked players who were attacking the newb. (hmmm. perhaps not much window of opportunity for anyone to earn this one)
For extra incentive, 'reward' and 'punish' don't have to be restricted to points/frags. They could involve the gaining of powerups or powerdowns. (eg. Lose the use of a weapon? Slow running?)
If you're tempted by the RAM-based performance of this, but you don't want to give up on all the good things a RDBMS offers, check out MySQL HEAP tables - they are a polymorphous implementation of MySql's tables that are designed to be stored in memory.
Wrong about MySql failing to gracefully scale to RAM storage, btw:
MySql polymorphically implements several different types of table, all conforming to the same interface. One of those implementations (HEAP tables) is designed to store data entirely in memory:
They don't actually get the feedback from measuring the strain and deformation of the telescope's various parts - they simply look at the image the telescope is producing, and deform the lens based purely on that. This requires that some calibrated known object is present in the telescope field-of-view, known as a 'guide star'. As noted elsewhere in these comments, shining lasers into the ionosphere are often used as artificial guide stars.
The problem goes deeper than the original post suggests - The type of mind which is attracted to programming, and is good at it, is already entrenched in methods of decomposition and logical seperation. I don't think one could *be* a good low-level programmer without this sort of thinking. It isn't just methods of education - I think it's a fundamental dichotomy built into the subject matter of designing and building complex systems.
Alfred Bester wrote several science fiction books containing descriptions of this condition.
The Stars My Destination (aka Tyger, Tyger) is the most famous and most prominent example.
He was also notorious for experimenting with typography in 'visually onomatapiec' ways - by which I mean he arranged words and fonts on the page to resemble the sounds and actions they described. Stars (above) uses this a lot. To a lesser exent, so does Psychoshop.
The Demolished Man contains none of the above, but it's a freaking classic so it gets an honorable mention. (-: -- Tartley http://tartley.com
Yah. I personally *never* drink any water, and it's never seemed to do me any harm. The only drinks I consume are beers, shots, soda... ah and about a pint of milk per day on cereal. Maybe it's the latter that has saved me.
FYI, Carmageddon 3 seems to work pretty well under Transgaming's WineX.
Transgaming's database here
>> personally would love to see the middle east >> die when all their cash cows dry up AFAIK, most of the profits from middle eastern oil is actually earned by US owned corporations. Some countries like Saudi Arabia make a nice fortune out of their oil, but they are not the norm.
There is such a concept as 'galactic south'. The axis of spin gives north/south, and east/west are clockwise/counterclockwise about that axis.
Microsoft does not stop selling Windows licences to your hyperthetical Gateway-like company. Instead, they revoke the $100 rebate they gave that company on each one of the 10,000,000 Windows licences they buy each year. **NOW** the Gateway-like company goes out of business.
Obviously, in a perfect world, Wine will also support apps which take advantage of new features in Win2000 etc. This is of course harder for the Wine project, to catch up with a moving target. But it isn't moving that fast. If the Win2000 API is stable for as long as the Win95 one has been, then Wine developers have plenty of time to catch up. IMHO.
Right now I'm running dozens of Windows games and applications on my Linux box, with great reliability and functionality. Wine (and WineX) are emminently practical in real life.
Make sense? Or am I missing something?
> WINE doesn't work
I'd prefer to express that fact using the words "the WINE project is not yet complete."
>> the BEST way for Ford to (help)
>> stop the theft of vehicles
Best for whom? Best for Ford? Maybe. Is it best for me, the consumer? No, it isn't. Is it best for the owners of independant service centers? Definately not.
So why does Ford's get the right to wade into our lives asserting what we can or cannot do? Is what's best for them somehow more important than what's best for everyone else in the world? I don't think so.
If Ford had another way of preventing theft, one that didn't feck up the world for everyone else, then I'd be all for them using that method.