I've been dying for a good mech game. It sucks that Microsoft has the Battletech license. Mechwarrior 2 was the ultimate, everything after that was downhill. I've got the original DOS CD-ROM and I can't get it to work in any kind of emulator or anything, believe me I tried. Someone should make a real mech game like that that is moddable. Or create a mech mod of an existing game. The world needs it.
Oh yeah, modding is great and all, but developers really need to make it easier to make a mod. I mean, most stuff is undocumented and development tools and resources are not available in any official central location. If you want people to mod your game, release a dev kit that is up to date and documented. What is needed most is an intuitive map making program. I remember trying to use Worldcraft to make a half-life map once and giving up within 15 minutes because the program was the worst piece of crap I had ever seen. I still can't understand how people make beautiful things like the natural selection maps with such shitty programs like that.
Also a note to mod makers. Make your mod and all necessary files available in a safe place on the internet that isn't file planet. If your mod can't be downloaded it can't be played.
I think the personal firewall is the best example of this. It's great at keeping all kinds of software on your machine from getting out. But a lot of people think its also good at keeping worms and things out. Which it is, kind of. But I think the recent attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in personal firewall programs prove otherwise.
It's not directly relevant, but pretty much encompasses what I'm trying to say. There's another journal entry about Puzzle Pirates in there too. I just don't want to hurt my hands retyping it.
FFXI is a glorified chatroom, just like Everquest and 90% of the other MMOs out there. Whoever plays the most gets the highest levels and is the "winner". They make addicting stupid crap and they keep expanding the game to make you player longer and pay more money.
Puzzle Pirates is the only MMO worth two craps, possibly with the exception of that desert one which I didn't play yet. It is the best because progress is determined by skill. No matter how much you play you might still suck. Puzzle Pirates is a real game of skill. FFXI is a glorified chat room of crap and money wasting.
People like you are ruining the game industry because you are sending the developers a bad message. "Make stupid games because there are a zillion people stupid enough to play them". Don't send that message. Demand real games.
Is that there are so many game developers nowadays that are super succesful despite completely lacking any brains whatsoever when it comes to good design and human experience that it wont matter. The market, especially the PC, PS2, XboX and GBA markets, are flooded with crap games nowadays. Many of these games turn a profit despite being total trash. Until the game players force game makers to step up the quality nobody will need this training to get in the industry. And while the hardcore of us know which are good and which are bad, even some are guilty of buying crap games, like progress quest MMOs/RPGs and movie license games. When gamers stop buying into such unoriginal crapass games developers will go out and start trying to make quality.
I must say again the same thing I said the last time the kernel updated. Make a USEFUL CHANGELOG. That huge document is completely useless to a guy like me who needs to decide whether or not to rebuild his kernel or not. Make a changelog more like winamps that lists what actually happened. For example
* X piece of hardware now works * We made X faster * X is more secure now * X is more stable now
stuff like that is useful because I can grep for X and see if anything I use is changed. With the current changelogs I get stuff like.
What the hell does this mean? Obviously the netconsole return code was changed. 2 lines were added and two lines were removed. But wtf does this mean for the end user!!?! You know the guy who compiles and uses the kernel, but never hacks the source. Make a changelog for me!
Nvidia was great. Their binary drivers for linux installed easily and worked well. Until now. Now is the time to do the same thing we did with forcedeth. If mplayer doesn't play DVDs with NVidias binary driver, fudge 'em in the ass.
Strategy guides should all die. Anyone who ever looks in a strategy guide prior to beating a video game is a total loser. The fun of the game is figuring out the puzzle and things. If someone just tells you how to do it, what's the point?
However, there is another issue with strategy guides nowadays. I believe that some game designers are purposefully making games with arbitrary bullshit in them on purpose. For example, FF:CC. FF:CC is awesome because of its multiplayer gameboy aspect. Without it the game is crap. The reason is that the way to get many of the best items and secret plot and side questy things is completely random and arbitrary. There is nothing to figure out, there is nothing to solve, no brainwork involved. You simply either know or you don't know. And sometimes the game will give you a hint. And sometimes the game wont tell you jack. If the game doesn't tell you anything, a strategy guide is the only way to get everything in the game. Fuck that. Fuck that with the three horrid whirling cocks. (PA)
Strategy guides ruin all video gaming. They should all go away. However, there are exceptions. The exception is fighting games. A strategy guide that tells you what the special moves are is permitted. Because a fighting game isn't about figuring out the moves, it's about doing them with your hands. Other than that if you pick up a strategy guide for a game you haven't already beaten, you are the lowest of the low in terms of video gaming.
Seriously. April fools gets crappier and crappier every year.
Do one of the following:
1) Make stuff that is just so rediculous its funny
2) Make stuff that is so hard to tell from the truth you actually fool people. That way the fooling of the people is funny.
Slashdot and most other sites on the net seem to keep doing the third option on April Fool's day, and that is to make fools of themselves. Stop wasting our time. Try something more subtle and intelligent. Like what google did.
NPC speech? big deal. In puzzle pirates my flag uses Teamspeak. All the pcs have voices. It's funny how sometimes the lag of the game is slower than the lag of the teamspeak. People will yell out how much booty we won while on someone elses screen it is still counting up.
Oh yeah, EQ and all similar MMOs suck. Whoever plays the most is the "winner" not the person with the most skill. Progress quest, etc. etc. Puzzle Pirates is the only mmo worth two craps because it is skill based, you know a GAME and not just a glorified chat room.
I remember the day when geocities was still geocities and you got 1MB of space for free and were happy with it. So in about 10 years everything is up 1000 fold.
It is commonly known that we are nowhere near running out of space on earth. That is not what overpopulation is about. Heck everyone can fit in Texas. The so called problem of overpopulation is that we can't feed everybody. This is also complete bullshit. If we wanted to we could produce enough foodstuffs every year to make "filling rations" (as oregon trail would put it) for every man womand and child on earth. The reason people are starving is two fold.
1) Things like farm subsidies where the US government pays farmers to make less food.
2) Poor distribution of food.
By poor distribution means two things. First it means that food isn't doled out in proportion to where it is needed. Some places are difficult to send food to. Other places it is not economical to send food to. The food just isn't brought to where it needs to be. In conjunction with that some people eat more than their fair share. I'm no commy, in fact quite the opposite, but all these fat disgusting americans eating McDonalds two to three times a day is just sick. Eat when you are hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. Eating is not an activity, that flabby gut of yours could be someone's atrophied muscle.
Set up shoutcast to stream whatever xmms is putting out. Use one of those xmms-remote programs that lets you control xmms from the command line. Write a small program, in bash or python or something that provides a gui/curses/text interface that will do this: ssh into the box, get list of mp3s, let user select mp3, control xmms from the command line to make that mp3 play. Also allow stopping, pausing, shuffle on/off, etc.
There are also shoutcast server control things that make a web site that controls the server. Often they are not direct control, but a request queue type of thing where you request a song and it gets put in the queue. Get winamp5 and start browsing shoutcast with the minibrowser open, you'll eventually find what I'm talking about.
People always talk about how Playstation and XBox have more games than the GCN. They sure do, but have you seen those games? They are all the random, crappy, hollywood licensed, violence without gameplay, total crap games. On the GameCube you have to compete with Nintendo to sell software and so very few developers can hold a candle.
When a Nintendo game comes out for the GCN it sells zillions. When other games come out for the cube the players compare them to the Nintendo games they have and say "screw that! it isn't worth my money or time." So what you get on the cube is quality before quantity. If you stop making games for the cube your only two possible reasonings can be these 1) You're stupid 2) You can't compete with Nintendo in quality.
3rd parties can succeed on the cube *cough*soul calibur 2*cough*. Cube owners are just too smart to buy stupid generic movie based game number 3.
I used to think java had no place in games. It's "slow" and the 3d isn't the greatest. Then puzzle pirates changed my mind. That's the kind of game that java does well, that and Yahoo! games type stuff. It's really great playing Puzzle Pirates in linux and windows and mac. Lots of open source in the pirate crew.
Use one of the programs suggested by other posters for your RPG elements. Then use something like TeamSpeak or Gnomeeting for audio/video conferencing. I've found that trying to use IRC doesn't give you the full effect. Also set up a shoutcast server for the background music.
6 years ago I used redhat because I heard about this linux thing. Then 4 years ago I switched up to Mandrake, because it supported my hardware, came with a newer version of KDE (2 instead of 1) and I needed a *nix to do CS homework. Even after many years I still really didn't know much about linux. I mean I'm not a complete moron, so I could use it, and I knew how to use some of the tools, but I had no clue on most of it. After installing numerous gentoo systems I've come to learn everyting about linux through experience.
If you want to learn about linux, just grab any x86 computer and install one of the "real" distributions on it like gentoo or debian. Then configure all the services and things like X and alsa. Simply doing this process will teach you everythign you need to know, no book necessary.
All this time I thought that with debian you use jigdo to make your own custom cds. Oh well, guess I was wrong. Gentoo has catalyst now for making custom live cds, FYI. Oh yeah, network installs are king, if you're installing off cds still that's pretty sad.
At work I'm doing an embedded linux system. I've got a nice little board which has an XScale processor and some other goodies. It's my job to program it to do various things. The embedded linux system that came pre-installed is taking up too much room. I need a cross-compiler so I can build a new kernel and new system for it.
So I take the dev kit cd that came with it and try to install it by following the directions included. No go. It wants an LSB distro and I use gentoo. I hack the perl install scripts, still no dice. Apparently the install disc has rpms debs and tars. And it installs by converting them all to one of the 3. So if you use debian the install scripts converts the tgz and the rpm to deb then isntalls them. Too bad the conversion program doesn't work. Their tech support didn't help much either.
What did I do? I went online and searched for arm linux. Got arm-linux-gcc from an ftp and patched up the 2.4.25 kernel. When its easier for me to do things myself for free than to use your product what am I paying for besides the hardware? Technically I paid for that support and that software and I got jack. Just too many free and non-free linux things do not work. Sure, there is plenty of commercial software that doesn't work. The odd game here and there and such. But if the company behind it isn't fake you can bet that it is going to work sooner or later. With linux stuff sometimes you just don't know.
This is the opinion of a gentoo user, so I'm not bashing linux as a whole. I'm just saying that if you're going to make something, make it work. Just because a geek is going to use it doesn't mean they want to have to go through more effort to make it go. They just want to go through a little effort to make it go better.
They most definitely do. The problem is they get no respect. For example, only people with exceptional leadership and social skills can become great captains in a game like puzzle pirates. But you can't put that on your resume. You'll only get hired on the rare rare rare chance that the person hiring is a player.
Of course other skills go over as well. Problem solving, hand eye coordination, etc. etc. But in this world nobody will care unless you've done something "real".
Slashdot Mirror
Netmech, that means you have the windows 95 version of mech 2. I have the DOS version. Try getting that to work.
I've been dying for a good mech game. It sucks that Microsoft has the Battletech license. Mechwarrior 2 was the ultimate, everything after that was downhill. I've got the original DOS CD-ROM and I can't get it to work in any kind of emulator or anything, believe me I tried. Someone should make a real mech game like that that is moddable. Or create a mech mod of an existing game. The world needs it.
Oh yeah, modding is great and all, but developers really need to make it easier to make a mod. I mean, most stuff is undocumented and development tools and resources are not available in any official central location. If you want people to mod your game, release a dev kit that is up to date and documented. What is needed most is an intuitive map making program. I remember trying to use Worldcraft to make a half-life map once and giving up within 15 minutes because the program was the worst piece of crap I had ever seen. I still can't understand how people make beautiful things like the natural selection maps with such shitty programs like that.
Also a note to mod makers. Make your mod and all necessary files available in a safe place on the internet that isn't file planet. If your mod can't be downloaded it can't be played.
I think the personal firewall is the best example of this. It's great at keeping all kinds of software on your machine from getting out. But a lot of people think its also good at keeping worms and things out. Which it is, kind of. But I think the recent attacks that exploited vulnerabilities in personal firewall programs prove otherwise.
PLOT != GAMEPLAY!!!!!
I repeat
PLOT != GAMEPLAY!!!!!
Just read my journal entry
http://slashdot.org/~Apreche/journal/53559
It's not directly relevant, but pretty much encompasses what I'm trying to say. There's another journal entry about Puzzle Pirates in there too. I just don't want to hurt my hands retyping it.
FFXI is a glorified chatroom, just like Everquest and 90% of the other MMOs out there. Whoever plays the most gets the highest levels and is the "winner". They make addicting stupid crap and they keep expanding the game to make you player longer and pay more money.
Puzzle Pirates is the only MMO worth two craps, possibly with the exception of that desert one which I didn't play yet. It is the best because progress is determined by skill. No matter how much you play you might still suck. Puzzle Pirates is a real game of skill. FFXI is a glorified chat room of crap and money wasting.
People like you are ruining the game industry because you are sending the developers a bad message. "Make stupid games because there are a zillion people stupid enough to play them". Don't send that message. Demand real games.
Is that there are so many game developers nowadays that are super succesful despite completely lacking any brains whatsoever when it comes to good design and human experience that it wont matter. The market, especially the PC, PS2, XboX and GBA markets, are flooded with crap games nowadays. Many of these games turn a profit despite being total trash. Until the game players force game makers to step up the quality nobody will need this training to get in the industry. And while the hardcore of us know which are good and which are bad, even some are guilty of buying crap games, like progress quest MMOs/RPGs and movie license games. When gamers stop buying into such unoriginal crapass games developers will go out and start trying to make quality.
* X piece of hardware now works
* We made X faster
* X is more secure now
* X is more stable now
stuff like that is useful because I can grep for X and see if anything I use is changed. With the current changelogs I get stuff like.
I chose this at randomWhat the hell does this mean? Obviously the netconsole return code was changed. 2 lines were added and two lines were removed. But wtf does this mean for the end user!!?! You know the guy who compiles and uses the kernel, but never hacks the source. Make a changelog for me!
Nvidia was great. Their binary drivers for linux installed easily and worked well. Until now. Now is the time to do the same thing we did with forcedeth. If mplayer doesn't play DVDs with NVidias binary driver, fudge 'em in the ass.
Strategy guides should all die. Anyone who ever looks in a strategy guide prior to beating a video game is a total loser. The fun of the game is figuring out the puzzle and things. If someone just tells you how to do it, what's the point?
However, there is another issue with strategy guides nowadays. I believe that some game designers are purposefully making games with arbitrary bullshit in them on purpose. For example, FF:CC. FF:CC is awesome because of its multiplayer gameboy aspect. Without it the game is crap. The reason is that the way to get many of the best items and secret plot and side questy things is completely random and arbitrary. There is nothing to figure out, there is nothing to solve, no brainwork involved. You simply either know or you don't know. And sometimes the game will give you a hint. And sometimes the game wont tell you jack. If the game doesn't tell you anything, a strategy guide is the only way to get everything in the game. Fuck that. Fuck that with the three horrid whirling cocks. (PA)
Strategy guides ruin all video gaming. They should all go away. However, there are exceptions. The exception is fighting games. A strategy guide that tells you what the special moves are is permitted. Because a fighting game isn't about figuring out the moves, it's about doing them with your hands. Other than that if you pick up a strategy guide for a game you haven't already beaten, you are the lowest of the low in terms of video gaming.
Seriously. April fools gets crappier and crappier every year.
Do one of the following:
1) Make stuff that is just so rediculous its funny
2) Make stuff that is so hard to tell from the truth you actually fool people. That way the fooling of the people is funny.
Slashdot and most other sites on the net seem to keep doing the third option on April Fool's day, and that is to make fools of themselves. Stop wasting our time. Try something more subtle and intelligent. Like what google did.
NPC speech? big deal. In puzzle pirates my flag uses Teamspeak. All the pcs have voices. It's funny how sometimes the lag of the game is slower than the lag of the teamspeak. People will yell out how much booty we won while on someone elses screen it is still counting up.
Oh yeah, EQ and all similar MMOs suck. Whoever plays the most is the "winner" not the person with the most skill. Progress quest, etc. etc. Puzzle Pirates is the only mmo worth two craps because it is skill based, you know a GAME and not just a glorified chat room.
I remember the day when geocities was still geocities and you got 1MB of space for free and were happy with it. So in about 10 years everything is up 1000 fold.
With 3 homing pigeons and those things in the iPod mini they could have easily done 12GB instead of 4.
It is commonly known that we are nowhere near running out of space on earth. That is not what overpopulation is about. Heck everyone can fit in Texas. The so called problem of overpopulation is that we can't feed everybody. This is also complete bullshit. If we wanted to we could produce enough foodstuffs every year to make "filling rations" (as oregon trail would put it) for every man womand and child on earth. The reason people are starving is two fold.
1) Things like farm subsidies where the US government pays farmers to make less food.
2) Poor distribution of food.
By poor distribution means two things. First it means that food isn't doled out in proportion to where it is needed. Some places are difficult to send food to. Other places it is not economical to send food to. The food just isn't brought to where it needs to be. In conjunction with that some people eat more than their fair share. I'm no commy, in fact quite the opposite, but all these fat disgusting americans eating McDonalds two to three times a day is just sick. Eat when you are hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. Eating is not an activity, that flabby gut of yours could be someone's atrophied muscle.
Why is everything cool the same weekend? I'm missing triple points weekend at media play and now this. All because I'm going to Penguicon Oh well.
Set up shoutcast to stream whatever xmms is putting out. Use one of those xmms-remote programs that lets you control xmms from the command line. Write a small program, in bash or python or something that provides a gui/curses/text interface that will do this: ssh into the box, get list of mp3s, let user select mp3, control xmms from the command line to make that mp3 play. Also allow stopping, pausing, shuffle on/off, etc.
There are also shoutcast server control things that make a web site that controls the server. Often they are not direct control, but a request queue type of thing where you request a song and it gets put in the queue. Get winamp5 and start browsing shoutcast with the minibrowser open, you'll eventually find what I'm talking about.
But it's worth saying again.
Relevent Penny Arcade Comic
People always talk about how Playstation and XBox have more games than the GCN. They sure do, but have you seen those games? They are all the random, crappy, hollywood licensed, violence without gameplay, total crap games. On the GameCube you have to compete with Nintendo to sell software and so very few developers can hold a candle.
When a Nintendo game comes out for the GCN it sells zillions. When other games come out for the cube the players compare them to the Nintendo games they have and say "screw that! it isn't worth my money or time." So what you get on the cube is quality before quantity. If you stop making games for the cube your only two possible reasonings can be these
1) You're stupid
2) You can't compete with Nintendo in quality.
3rd parties can succeed on the cube *cough*soul calibur 2*cough*. Cube owners are just too smart to buy stupid generic movie based game number 3.
I used to think java had no place in games. It's "slow" and the 3d isn't the greatest. Then puzzle pirates changed my mind. That's the kind of game that java does well, that and Yahoo! games type stuff. It's really great playing Puzzle Pirates in linux and windows and mac. Lots of open source in the pirate crew.
Use one of the programs suggested by other posters for your RPG elements. Then use something like TeamSpeak or Gnomeeting for audio/video conferencing. I've found that trying to use IRC doesn't give you the full effect. Also set up a shoutcast server for the background music.
6 years ago I used redhat because I heard about this linux thing. Then 4 years ago I switched up to Mandrake, because it supported my hardware, came with a newer version of KDE (2 instead of 1) and I needed a *nix to do CS homework. Even after many years I still really didn't know much about linux. I mean I'm not a complete moron, so I could use it, and I knew how to use some of the tools, but I had no clue on most of it. After installing numerous gentoo systems I've come to learn everyting about linux through experience.
If you want to learn about linux, just grab any x86 computer and install one of the "real" distributions on it like gentoo or debian. Then configure all the services and things like X and alsa. Simply doing this process will teach you everythign you need to know, no book necessary.
Mine is blank, always has been. but I might consider this wikipedia thing, it suits me nicely.
Right now I have a job and I'm using linux on an ARM XScale processor.
All this time I thought that with debian you use jigdo to make your own custom cds. Oh well, guess I was wrong. Gentoo has catalyst now for making custom live cds, FYI. Oh yeah, network installs are king, if you're installing off cds still that's pretty sad.
At work I'm doing an embedded linux system. I've got a nice little board which has an XScale processor and some other goodies. It's my job to program it to do various things. The embedded linux system that came pre-installed is taking up too much room. I need a cross-compiler so I can build a new kernel and new system for it.
So I take the dev kit cd that came with it and try to install it by following the directions included. No go. It wants an LSB distro and I use gentoo. I hack the perl install scripts, still no dice. Apparently the install disc has rpms debs and tars. And it installs by converting them all to one of the 3. So if you use debian the install scripts converts the tgz and the rpm to deb then isntalls them. Too bad the conversion program doesn't work. Their tech support didn't help much either.
What did I do? I went online and searched for arm linux. Got arm-linux-gcc from an ftp and patched up the 2.4.25 kernel. When its easier for me to do things myself for free than to use your product what am I paying for besides the hardware? Technically I paid for that support and that software and I got jack. Just too many free and non-free linux things do not work. Sure, there is plenty of commercial software that doesn't work. The odd game here and there and such. But if the company behind it isn't fake you can bet that it is going to work sooner or later. With linux stuff sometimes you just don't know.
This is the opinion of a gentoo user, so I'm not bashing linux as a whole. I'm just saying that if you're going to make something, make it work. Just because a geek is going to use it doesn't mean they want to have to go through more effort to make it go. They just want to go through a little effort to make it go better.
They most definitely do. The problem is they get no respect. For example, only people with exceptional leadership and social skills can become great captains in a game like puzzle pirates. But you can't put that on your resume. You'll only get hired on the rare rare rare chance that the person hiring is a player.
Of course other skills go over as well. Problem solving, hand eye coordination, etc. etc. But in this world nobody will care unless you've done something "real".