Game developers use cheat codes to debug and test the gameplay. If they took the cheats out before release, there would be no mods for the game and the lifespan would be much shorter.
Amen! A Quake 3 mod developer's best friends are "god" and "give". (Trust me. I know.) A mapper's best friends are probably "noclip", "r_showtris", "r_speeds", and so on. (There are tons of others, too.) If those were left out, map and mod making would really, really suck. It would be impossible to line textures up properly all the time, examine your geometry close up, or find out how the BSP compiler split up your brushes. Testing new bot code is significantly easier if you're indestructible and have every weapon.
Heck, I've even added cheat codes from time to time to check out my stuff.
Incidentally, there's a fun side-effect to the "noclip" cheat. If you have the gauntlet selected before you go into "noclip" mode, you can still attack players with it, and with no reload time! I believe there was a buffer overrun exploit in version 1.16n that let you get into "noclip" mode with an evil chat or something...people used to use it on MPlayer servers all the time.
Actually, it's not quite a "slippery-slope" fallacy. The implication is that, if the citizens of a country have no way to form a revolution, their government will be more likely to be tyrannical.
If the link guns->threat-of-revolution->keeping-the-gove rnment-in-line weren't implied, I'd agree with you. (Of course, the idea makes some of its own assumptions that may be argued, but that's a discussion for another day...)
To AC or not to AC? Oh, well, I can take the hit...
C64, Lisa and Mac, AIDS (a purely homosexual disease?!?!- really weird 'cause I just found an old copy of Discover magazine that had a first mention of AIDS; blew me away due to difference in info we know now)
Change the word from "purely" to "primarily" and you've just about hit the nail on the head, even right now. So the author wasn't that far off (not that I'm exactly defending him), and it's really, really easy to see why people thought that initially.
What bothers me, though, is that we've done a complete about-face on this. It seems, when I was in my 7th-12th year, all our sex education classes told us that this was an "equal opportunity" (or some other nauseatingly misapplied phrase) disease. Until recently, I thought that more heterosexual people had it. (Wrong - dead wrong.) The problem with this political correctness is that we're not allowed to contain the disease like we would every other epidemic: identification and of at-risk groups ("No way! That's anti-homosexual!"), some sort of isolation of those individuals tested positive ("No way! I have a right to have sex!"), shutting down operations that deal in high-risk activities (we already tried it with gay sex clubs, but they put up such a civil rights stink that it never went anywhere), and so on.
That's right, kids - our concern for appearing to give everyone a fair shake is going to keep this epidemic around much, much longer than it has to be. I wonder if our civil rights heroes of the past would approve...
Whether you're for or against Microsoft, it's an invalid comparison. You don't have to pay for a Linux upgrade, but you do for a Microsoft upgrade. And the kinds of people that run Linux aren't generally afraid to install things, even new kernels.
I'm the author of Unlagged Quake 3, so naturally I'm biased. For those of you who don't know, it's a server-side hit-scan lag compensation mod, which means there's no extra cheating and nothing to download to play. It works by remembering every player's position - and when instant-hit weapon hit tests need to be done, it tests with the players in the positions they were in at the time of attack as opposed to the time the command was actually received.
Of course, the problem with lag compensation is that it causes weird side-effects, like people hitting others around corners and without facing the proper direction, and it only gets worse as the two players involved have higher pings.
You're right, but those side-effects are much less noticeable than people like to make them out to be. The reason these "problems" sometimes seem so big is that people generally sit around and theorize about the idea rather than test it. Another issue is that there are always, always, always inconsistencies when you try to make anything real-time with latency involved. The game designer has to choose which inconsistencies he thinks he and his audience can deal with.
So let's take a look at lag compensation vs. no lag compensation in the inconsistency category to see how they stack up. First, lag compensation:
You sometimes, but rarely, notice that you get shot when you think you're hidden
You sometimes, but even more rarely, notice that the person who shot you isn't currently aiming at you (this also happens with no lag compensation, but to a lesser extent)
HPB's sometimes, and still rarely, seem to make impossible shots - like they seem to rail you right after you hit a bouncepad
And now, without lag compensation:
HPB's can line up a rail shot perfectly and miss
Game balance is skewed by the fact that four of the weapons are nearly useless to anyone pinging over 100
I stand by my assertion that the inconsistencies in hit-scan lag compensation are very rare. I've been testing it for weeks now, and I've only noticed them a few times - like three. Just about everyone else who's tried it and given feedback has said about the same thing - and usually, they love it.
The only people who really hate it seem to be those who consider their broadband edge to be more important than fairer play. ("Fairer" because the low-ping player will always have the advantage.) They'll avoid it like the plague.
Even worse, still, is when a router hiccoughs and your ping spikes to 80 from 20...
Hit-scan lag compensation takes care of that, too, so it isn't just for HPB's.
My point is that people should try it out before they let the supposed problems dissuade them from it. I've just finished a server listing page that updates every five minutes. Check it out. Just remember not to aim ahead of your target with the railgun.
A second game for the teenage age that I would certainly recommend is Halflife. Yes, it's been out forever. But, for people who dont have brand new 2.0 ghz p4's or 1900+ Athlon XP's, Halflife offers a game that is easy on older hardware, has an active online multiplayer community, and is really fun to play.
I second that. Also, as far as community goes, it's not just active, it's HUGE. According to the GameSpy stats page, it's seriously kicking everything else's butt in terms of players. (Think like 10 times more people play it than play Quake III Arena.)
Actually, the biggest difference, in the eyes of the huge media companies, is something that too many Slashdotters tend to dismiss as an invalid argument: you can make perfect copies of digital material, with no loss.
Before anybody dismisses it: try to think like a big media company for a minute. You have rights over works that you've bought or hired people to produce, called "copyrights." They're exclusive, with certain exceptions. (You'd like to forget the exceptions of course, but that's beside the point right now.) One nice thing about the current media formats (a few years ago) is that copies degrade, even without copy protection measures. Books are really hard to copy cheaply (so anyone who does it likely has deep pockets and is quite sueable), and audio and video tapes get noticeably worse with each generation.
If anyone was going to pay for the material in the first place, they'd want a good copy, so they'd get it from your publishers. You can almost forget about the pirates' fair use excuses - nearly no impact on you, right?
So along comes the digital media. It looks and sounds great forever! But...you can copy it! Perfectly! No degradation! All of the sudden, you have a new brand of pirates: the ones that don't have much money. And there are a lot of them, at least potentially, and they're really, really hard to track down.
Now, I'm not saying that all of their actions and arguments are excusable, justified, and sane. I am saying that, at least in this one thing - the difference between analog and digital - they have a good point. It's something more people in the tech crowd should at least acknowledge if they don't want to look like punk 13-year-olds when they argue copyright issues.
The way to avoid being struck by your enemies is to have no enemies.
I'm sure the Bush Administration would be more than happy to entertain your thoughts on how to accomplish that. Why don't you give them a call and tell them all of your wonderful ideas?
No, I think you're missing the point. "Version Niceness" can't have seemingly arbitrary numbers in it - that's why Microsoft ditched their scheme after Windows 3.1.
I think that 2.4.XP is a much nicer version number.
You're perfectly right. I actually mentioned something about that in another post, but Slashdot had that weird error while I was trying to post it.
I have many restrictions on what I can do with my house and my car, and all of them have to do with my actions' effects on other people's money, happiness, and well-being. I have to let the meter reader guy onto my lawn. As you said, I can't dump toxic waste in my back yard. I probably couldn't take the parents of the kids in my neighborhood to court because they let their kids ride around in my driveway on their bikes - if I didn't have a fence around it. (I don't.)
I think copyright lasts way too long. I think there ought to be fair use rights built into every IP law. These kinds of things would help keep the balance of power properly.
What I think doesn't help at all are ignorant people screaming about how it's all unfair - even though it is unfair - and misunderstanding how law, property, and IP work. There are plenty of decent arguments to be made instead.
I used to agree with this, but now I'll have to differ on this point. Here come the flames...
How do you define property? Quite simply, it's the right, given to you by law and society, not nature, to control something. It's my house because I can decide who can enter in and who cannot. It's my car because I can decide that, if you drive it, you're commiting a crime. I control those things.
The control is completely artificial. It's been decided in our culture that people should have a right to control these things they call "possessions." There have been plenty of cultures in which the right to control was out of the hands of the people.
Now, I will admit that it is much easier to understand possession as it relates to physical things than as it relates to ideas or art. However, our current system has defined the control of the latter as property, and we accept it.
Removing control of my house from me is stealing. Likewise, removing control of my artistic works is also stealing.
It's nice and quippy, but the fundamental flaw in your argument is the assumption that peace can never be regained. History shows otherwise. (WWII and Japan?)
It's all about control and giving people what they want.
In my opinion, the best software of any sort is the kind that is simple to pick up but doesn't really hide anything. It's really hard to pull off in most cases. In Quake's case, the easiest way to mix simplicity with control was to add the console. You'll notice that the game is perfectly playable without it, and in fact, there is a high percentage of Quake players that refuse to use it.
I suppose it gives both people who like a simple interface and those who like a complex interface exactly what they want. I hate having to do a "skirmish" to test out a CTF map - I always pull down the console and send a "g_gametype 4" and a "map [blah blah]".
I don't like them, either. They're kinda hokey, and the "particle" engine they're based on (you can trust me, I make a mod) is just a list of sprites.
The new effects weren't developed by id - they came from someone else. You can turn them off by setting cg_oldrail, cg_oldplasma, and cg_oldrocket all to zeros.
Actually, I believe it would be "/Mr/bin/Laden," which, in addition to looking weird, probably wouldn't execute. (Most people I know don't name their "mr" directories with a capital "M.")
Slashdot Mirror
Game developers use cheat codes to debug and test the gameplay. If they took the cheats out before release, there would be no mods for the game and the lifespan would be much shorter.
Amen! A Quake 3 mod developer's best friends are "god" and "give". (Trust me. I know.) A mapper's best friends are probably "noclip", "r_showtris", "r_speeds", and so on. (There are tons of others, too.) If those were left out, map and mod making would really, really suck. It would be impossible to line textures up properly all the time, examine your geometry close up, or find out how the BSP compiler split up your brushes. Testing new bot code is significantly easier if you're indestructible and have every weapon.
Heck, I've even added cheat codes from time to time to check out my stuff.
Incidentally, there's a fun side-effect to the "noclip" cheat. If you have the gauntlet selected before you go into "noclip" mode, you can still attack players with it, and with no reload time! I believe there was a buffer overrun exploit in version 1.16n that let you get into "noclip" mode with an evil chat or something...people used to use it on MPlayer servers all the time.
Actually, it's not quite a "slippery-slope" fallacy. The implication is that, if the citizens of a country have no way to form a revolution, their government will be more likely to be tyrannical.
If the link guns->threat-of-revolution->keeping-the-gove rnment-in-line weren't implied, I'd agree with you. (Of course, the idea makes some of its own assumptions that may be argued, but that's a discussion for another day...)
To AC or not to AC? Oh, well, I can take the hit...
C64, Lisa and Mac, AIDS (a purely homosexual disease?!?!- really weird 'cause I just found an old copy of Discover magazine that had a first mention of AIDS; blew me away due to difference in info we know now)
Change the word from "purely" to "primarily" and you've just about hit the nail on the head, even right now. So the author wasn't that far off (not that I'm exactly defending him), and it's really, really easy to see why people thought that initially.
What bothers me, though, is that we've done a complete about-face on this. It seems, when I was in my 7th-12th year, all our sex education classes told us that this was an "equal opportunity" (or some other nauseatingly misapplied phrase) disease. Until recently, I thought that more heterosexual people had it. (Wrong - dead wrong.) The problem with this political correctness is that we're not allowed to contain the disease like we would every other epidemic: identification and of at-risk groups ("No way! That's anti-homosexual!"), some sort of isolation of those individuals tested positive ("No way! I have a right to have sex!"), shutting down operations that deal in high-risk activities (we already tried it with gay sex clubs, but they put up such a civil rights stink that it never went anywhere), and so on.
That's right, kids - our concern for appearing to give everyone a fair shake is going to keep this epidemic around much, much longer than it has to be. I wonder if our civil rights heroes of the past would approve...
Whether you're for or against Microsoft, it's an invalid comparison. You don't have to pay for a Linux upgrade, but you do for a Microsoft upgrade. And the kinds of people that run Linux aren't generally afraid to install things, even new kernels.
Of course, the problem with lag compensation is that it causes weird side-effects, like people hitting others around corners and without facing the proper direction, and it only gets worse as the two players involved have higher pings.
You're right, but those side-effects are much less noticeable than people like to make them out to be. The reason these "problems" sometimes seem so big is that people generally sit around and theorize about the idea rather than test it. Another issue is that there are always, always, always inconsistencies when you try to make anything real-time with latency involved. The game designer has to choose which inconsistencies he thinks he and his audience can deal with.
So let's take a look at lag compensation vs. no lag compensation in the inconsistency category to see how they stack up. First, lag compensation:
And now, without lag compensation:
I stand by my assertion that the inconsistencies in hit-scan lag compensation are very rare. I've been testing it for weeks now, and I've only noticed them a few times - like three. Just about everyone else who's tried it and given feedback has said about the same thing - and usually, they love it.
The only people who really hate it seem to be those who consider their broadband edge to be more important than fairer play. ("Fairer" because the low-ping player will always have the advantage.) They'll avoid it like the plague.
Even worse, still, is when a router hiccoughs and your ping spikes to 80 from 20...
Hit-scan lag compensation takes care of that, too, so it isn't just for HPB's.
My point is that people should try it out before they let the supposed problems dissuade them from it. I've just finished a server listing page that updates every five minutes. Check it out. Just remember not to aim ahead of your target with the railgun.
A second game for the teenage age that I would certainly recommend is Halflife. Yes, it's been out forever. But, for people who dont have brand new 2.0 ghz p4's or 1900+ Athlon XP's, Halflife offers a game that is easy on older hardware, has an active online multiplayer community, and is really fun to play.
I second that. Also, as far as community goes, it's not just active, it's HUGE. According to the GameSpy stats page, it's seriously kicking everything else's butt in terms of players. (Think like 10 times more people play it than play Quake III Arena.)
If I were Apple, I'd be much more worried about what my shareholders thought. In that case, I would be obligated to enforce whatever I could.
Never, because that's not the only difference.
Actually, the biggest difference, in the eyes of the huge media companies, is something that too many Slashdotters tend to dismiss as an invalid argument: you can make perfect copies of digital material, with no loss.
Before anybody dismisses it: try to think like a big media company for a minute. You have rights over works that you've bought or hired people to produce, called "copyrights." They're exclusive, with certain exceptions. (You'd like to forget the exceptions of course, but that's beside the point right now.) One nice thing about the current media formats (a few years ago) is that copies degrade, even without copy protection measures. Books are really hard to copy cheaply (so anyone who does it likely has deep pockets and is quite sueable), and audio and video tapes get noticeably worse with each generation.
If anyone was going to pay for the material in the first place, they'd want a good copy, so they'd get it from your publishers. You can almost forget about the pirates' fair use excuses - nearly no impact on you, right?
So along comes the digital media. It looks and sounds great forever! But...you can copy it! Perfectly! No degradation! All of the sudden, you have a new brand of pirates: the ones that don't have much money. And there are a lot of them, at least potentially, and they're really, really hard to track down.
Now, I'm not saying that all of their actions and arguments are excusable, justified, and sane. I am saying that, at least in this one thing - the difference between analog and digital - they have a good point. It's something more people in the tech crowd should at least acknowledge if they don't want to look like punk 13-year-olds when they argue copyright issues.
So who's the host there? The Wicked Witch of the West?
I love that quote. I'm a programmer, and it's on my cubicle wall. I point to it every now and then and ask people to read it.
The way to avoid being struck by your enemies is to have no enemies.
I'm sure the Bush Administration would be more than happy to entertain your thoughts on how to accomplish that. Why don't you give them a call and tell them all of your wonderful ideas?
"Let's have no enemies!" Great! How?
No, I think you're missing the point. "Version Niceness" can't have seemingly arbitrary numbers in it - that's why Microsoft ditched their scheme after Windows 3.1.
I think that 2.4.XP is a much nicer version number.
Wow. I just looked at his comments and their moderations. I wish I could get an automatic "+5, Alan Cox" for everything I posted...
You're perfectly right. I actually mentioned something about that in another post, but Slashdot had that weird error while I was trying to post it.
I have many restrictions on what I can do with my house and my car, and all of them have to do with my actions' effects on other people's money, happiness, and well-being. I have to let the meter reader guy onto my lawn. As you said, I can't dump toxic waste in my back yard. I probably couldn't take the parents of the kids in my neighborhood to court because they let their kids ride around in my driveway on their bikes - if I didn't have a fence around it. (I don't.)
I think copyright lasts way too long. I think there ought to be fair use rights built into every IP law. These kinds of things would help keep the balance of power properly.
What I think doesn't help at all are ignorant people screaming about how it's all unfair - even though it is unfair - and misunderstanding how law, property, and IP work. There are plenty of decent arguments to be made instead.
US copyright does not create property rights.
I used to agree with this, but now I'll have to differ on this point. Here come the flames...
How do you define property? Quite simply, it's the right, given to you by law and society, not nature, to control something. It's my house because I can decide who can enter in and who cannot. It's my car because I can decide that, if you drive it, you're commiting a crime. I control those things.
The control is completely artificial. It's been decided in our culture that people should have a right to control these things they call "possessions." There have been plenty of cultures in which the right to control was out of the hands of the people.
Now, I will admit that it is much easier to understand possession as it relates to physical things than as it relates to ideas or art. However, our current system has defined the control of the latter as property, and we accept it.
Removing control of my house from me is stealing. Likewise, removing control of my artistic works is also stealing.
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
It's nice and quippy, but the fundamental flaw in your argument is the assumption that peace can never be regained. History shows otherwise. (WWII and Japan?)
..."automatic optical compensator of polarization mode dispersion"...
Next it'll be a nanite-enhanced inverse tachyon pulse Heisenberg compensator.
I could use one of those...
Dunno about anyone else; maybe it's the attack on the Taliban - but I read "balls of solder" as "balls of the soldier."
Had to do a double-take on that one.
I was thinking more along the lines of "NVidia Locotanium."
Great list, BTW.
Sorry about the double post - set them all to "1."
It's all about control and giving people what they want.
In my opinion, the best software of any sort is the kind that is simple to pick up but doesn't really hide anything. It's really hard to pull off in most cases. In Quake's case, the easiest way to mix simplicity with control was to add the console. You'll notice that the game is perfectly playable without it, and in fact, there is a high percentage of Quake players that refuse to use it.
I suppose it gives both people who like a simple interface and those who like a complex interface exactly what they want. I hate having to do a "skirmish" to test out a CTF map - I always pull down the console and send a "g_gametype 4" and a "map [blah blah]".
I don't like them, either. They're kinda hokey, and the "particle" engine they're based on (you can trust me, I make a mod) is just a list of sprites.
The new effects weren't developed by id - they came from someone else. You can turn them off by setting cg_oldrail, cg_oldplasma, and cg_oldrocket all to zeros.
If that isn't flaimbait, then what is!?
Well, as of now, it seems that your comment (Score:1, Flamebait) is.
Maybe there should be a "Funny" meta-moderation? Personally, I thought this moderation was hilarious.
...when I can play Quake IX with my buddy on Mars at LAN speeds.
Actually, I believe it would be "/Mr/bin/Laden," which, in addition to looking weird, probably wouldn't execute. (Most people I know don't name their "mr" directories with a capital "M.")