(A nitpick: Zork was Infocom's and not Infogrames' - I was under the impression Infocom's stuff belonged to Activision these days or something. Which is curious, since Atari brand belongs to Infogrames, and Atari's and Activision's relationship... uh, ergh, I got a headache. What a tangled web!)
Scene: A Tomb of Old Brands, under the ruined halls of a Game Company.
A pair of Electronic Arts' IP Robbers break through the sealed door and collect their jaws from the floor as their flashlight beams reveal untold number of great game franchises.
They stare at the treasures with most amazed expression before the cynicism and professionalism rise from within their hearts once again, and open their briefcases and start putting some of the documents from the tomb there. But then, suddenly, a *rattle* is heard.
*rattle*
*Rattle*
*RATTLE*
The two glance around, nervously, only to be faced with a most horrifying thing ever imagined.
"WHO dares to DISTURB our slumber?"
The IP Robbers can only stand there, petrified with horror, in front of the fearsome, awe-inspiring, noble forms of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank.
The two eye the papers the two scumbags were taking, and then eye these petrified robbers in turn, who suddenly manage to snap out of this and flee toward the door.
...and as they race toward the exit, a speck of light so far, far away, they realize they will never reach it in time.
"NOTHING can save you from our wrath! We are INVINCIBLE!"... are just about the last words they can hear.
Weeks later, an expedition was finally sent to move the papers away from the old vault, and the ghastly, rather well eaten remains of the IP robbers were found. Later that day, Activision CEO threw some comments to the company's PR people responsible for press statements, and they had considerable trouble making the statements marketable. Uncensoredly, it went somewhat like this: "I knew this Doom 3 distribution deal would work out just fine! La la la la..."
I would be extremely surprised if Dragon Age comes out this year - after all, it's going to be based on a completely new engine, and Bioware is busy with other projects right now...
I'd say 2006 very earliest, 2007 if we're just normally optimistic and 2010 if they're going to make it as influential as NWN has been. And Linux client in 2013, no matter what year the game is released =)
Okay, I installed 1.0 off Debian. I can't even create a new project, because the directory browser window in that step makes it very unclear what directory I'm trying to pick right now as the project directory. And, it won't even work otherwise: either it tells me to pick a valid directory (umm, I suppose I did?), won't let me pick a valid directory (I can choose it all right, but clicking on Next won't do anything!) or randomly picks "/" as the project directory, and it obviously fails because it can't create project there...
And on top of that, when I just started it up, tried to create a new directory in home directory, it actually created "New directory", then said it couldn't use that. Clicking on directories almost randomly didn't make things show up.
Then I had a bright idea: There were examples. I copied one off to a directory of my own. Tried opening it. It couldn't find the project from this directory at all.
At which project dpkg -r mysteriously nuked the whole thing and I just got back waiting for 1.0.2 or 1.1 or something.
I really hate to say this, but this experience sucked. This sort of lack of usability is completely inexcusable. The directory browing window was one of those horrible excuses of directory browsers stolen from Motif and nightmares.
I'm pretty certain the project looks good, and there's definitely a need for a good Basic-based RAD tool, but based on this horror story of mine, there's still some way to go before I can even try it.
Why mess around with WineX/Cedega when Serious Sam has native Linux ports? I haven't tried SS2, but I know SS1 worked pretty well and SS2 is available.
...native Freedom Force for Linux, oh boy, now that would rule... =)
Well, the thing is, the console makers have this annoying tendency to charge arm and leg for developer license. You may be able to do development without paying using third-party toolkits (homebrew dev tools exist for many consoles), but a) the hardware itself is tricky (mysterious cartridges or proprietary optical media, signed code and other copy-protection mechanisms, you name it...) and b) the console makers get Very Angry if you develop unlicensed but for-profit games, so that kind of depresses the indie game developers.
As for your sig about Microsoft users calling C64 a game machine - well, the thing had Microsoft's BASIC, right? =)
NES folks have difficulty replacing processor because the sound unit is integrated to CPU...
...otherwise, we would have already seen some mods that would stick in a 65816 (as with Commodore 64) and take the homebrew games to the next level. =)
Yet, it's cool to see someone actually overclocking the thing and seeing what that does to the games! At least that will deal with the slowdown a bit. And, of course, it's at last a chance to see how well Nintendo games were actually coded - the games should work if you make the hardware different, even when the consoles traditionally never have to take hardware differences in account... or even if hardware differences were an issue at all in those days.
I see a lot of fixes in the list, but since it's getting late, I can't read well... =/
Is there anything at all to warrant another glance at it? I used to think ZSNES was pretty damn cool, until I noted that SNES9X has actually working hardware screen scaling (through OpenGL - hardware scaling was pretty damn relevant on a P3-600 which I used until this month...)...and another thing I had going for SNES9X was that there was an OS X port of it, too, so I could use the very same NVRAM files on all computers I could theoretically use. For me, it seemed like the best of the open-source SNES emulators, everyone said ZSNES was good on MS-DOS and not really anything else.
So I suppose they're getting really great emulation quality now, though... is there hardware scaling now? Since it now seems to use SDL, will there be a Mac port?
Ever heard what C# on Windows uses as their UI toolkit? Windows.Forms, which is a clean, we-seriously-don't-want-to-hear-what's-under-it wrapper over the existing Win32 GUI toolkits. You can guess how well Mono folks have replicated it. Not yet very well.
Guess what Mono folks use as their GUI toolkit? Gtk#. A wrapper over GTK+, which, coincidentally, happens to be the toolkit GIMP uses. Directly through C API, too.
I have no idea how well Mono + Gtk# are supported on platforms GIMP is currently directly supported on... my point is, sticking Mono on GIMP would do absolutely nothing to improve GIMP's portability or cross-platform "native" GUIs!
As for writing "photoshop-like UI plugins": This would be possible, just not terribly fun. Witness how much GIMP's main GUI has changed over time. If it can be done on such grand scale, it's certainly possible if people bother to try. GIMP developers just won't bother. As for "plugins", I'm guessing here the UI should first be made to support pluggable UIs, and nobody is going to want to do that.
People these days don't know EA is evil? Huh... Well, let me tell you.
I don't know much about Ubisoft, but EA certainly is evil...
EA has this nasty habit of buying smaller companies, then making them producing crap. Just look what happened to Bullfrog, Westwood, Maxis and, worst of all, Origin Systems. Gradually, the staff that knew and loved the old games gets replaced by new folks who don't know a whole lot. The leading visionaries of the old companies stay aboard only as puppets or brainwashed zombies. Gradually, there's more and more big-corporate politics, and EA gets more and more say in what they expect the games should have. The results first become stinkers that leave old fans seriously annoyed, then they become mass-market, lowest-common-denominator soullless burger games that inspire "casual gamers" to either ignore them completely or to go "kewl, this is so innovative"... (not.)
And once they have the "brand" - not necessarily the essence of the particular game series, just the "brand" - chained down, they milk the living bejezus out of it. They know how to sell their stuff to the idiots. And, by the might of their CEO's shiny forehead and stock-value-raising haircut, truly, that is what they do. There's Game, and either million and two yearly upgrades, expansion disks, or some variation on that theme. And then there's Sequel, and same deal for that too, unless the first Game's expansions are still selling tons and tons and tons.
And, seriously, if you think EA games are good... imagine what they could have been WITHOUT all-consuming abyss of politicking and Mass-Market Appeal Maximizing behind them! Just compare any of their games to whatever the competition has cooked up. You'll probably note a few things: The competition's game is probably slightly better, far less buggy, and better crafted. And, of course, that they aren't selling or marketed as well. EA's marketing is simply something they do right, often, and eagerly so.
And, hey, that was just what I already knew. By the way, recently it was also revealed why they are able to make games in really, really, really damn short time too: They treat their employees pretty damn badly. I always joked about "code slaves", but never thought there were actual code slaves anywhere. Apparently, there are. And knowing EA, it just didn't surprise me at all.
But hey, don't listen to me. I'm just generally peeved about EA. One of them "old fans", you know. Do something for me, will you? Look up "Ultima IX: Ascension" some day. And I don't mean the official word. Look for the damn fan opinion about it. Not exactly pretty.
dd isn't working. CDDA doesn't have filesystem or even any way to syncing to the data as such - the only method to read a CDDA tracks reliably is to access them per sectors, read several times in times of trouble, and try to overlay the multiple-read data. Which is what cdparanoia does. And you still may not get byte-to-byte exact copy, especially at track ends...
Some Broken Discs I've seen were so completely broken. The CD-ROM drives just gave up trying to make sense out of them.
Then, there have been "Windows compatible" Broken Discs (Cactus Data Shield and similar - you know, the kind of protection that inspires people to get sued by pressing shift key in Windows). These actually had a real Table of Contents, except that the values in them were completely bogus, so obviously all rippers were confused. I could copy these pretty easy in Linux: I just told cdrdao to read the disc's session 1, while pretending to be a single-session drive. Yes, the "protection" was that it was a multisession CD with a severely broken 2nd session the CD-ROM drives chomped on! the 1st session had a completely valid ToC!
...well, my sister just inserted Cactus Data Shield-mangled Broken Discs to her PowerBook and ripped them to iTunes without problems. Damn Mac users always get away easy =)
An almost equivalent solution: WebDAV. Just stick Apache and mod_dav on the file server and configure appropriately. Both Windows and MacOSX support WebDAV folders right from the desktop. And you can probably build all sorts of cool access methods on top of that (I wonder if SSL is supported? I suppose it is...)
Or, if you're in silly mood, there's always Samba =)
Yep, Insert Credit pretty much rules. And while we are at it, let's not forget their own commentary on the state of videogame journalism. Very insightful.
Re:"Start to Crate" disses all Sokoban fans
on
Doom Movie Update
·
· Score: 1
I just believe Boxxle was just wrongfully accused.
After all, Sokoban is a puzzle game, and the Puzzle Game Design Rule states that in nine out of ten cases, puzzle games have to be about placing or arranging objects consisting of one or more rectangles (or cubes, in case of 3D games).
In the modern era where logic games, like all games, strive for "realistic" graphics, they're usually represented by crates, so this rule is fundamentally in conflict with with the Crate Review System, therefore the Crate Review System should not be used for puzzle games at all.
Yeah, but in reality, it doesn't work that way. sco.com website will be changed to say something along the lines of "The SCO Group, unit of the department of the contractor of the fully owned subsidiary of (company)", and to state the new corporate motto, "ownership relations of our IP makes Commodore roll in their grave", and if you try to search for them from Google, you'll find that the #2 hit is a company that sells AmigaOS Ghost Detectors retrofitted to find UNIX(r) ghosts (that won't be detecting AmigaOS either, but their new companion product, Vapor-Radar(tm), will find anything from AmigaOS 4.0 to traces of Duke Nukem Forever, if you're into such things).
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
I know, but it gets the job done! Speech synthesis is extremely cool if I'm really tired or whatever, though. Or when I won't bother to print a gigantic file out.
Besides, have you ever even fed H.P. Lovecraft to speech synthesizer? You'd have to agree that it's even somewhat appropriate. I started listening to The Whisperer in Darkness, and since it had been quite a while since I read it, I didn't even remember that the story itself involved speech synthesis (not digital, but still)! It was definitely a doubly creepy experience...
And I particularly liked Festival's extremely drunken rendition of that... drunk guy in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. =)
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
·
· Score: 1
Oh, yeah, and my wife says how are you supposed to read an ebook in the bath?
Easy... or not so easy with DRM'd books, but plain text files are trivial. I've gone to sleep listening to Sherlock Holmes stories from Gutenberg, Lovecraftian horror stories, and 419 baitings. =)
It's funny that for years, I firmly believed I couldn't draw worth damn. Now I think I *can* draw somewhat, I just should do most of the groundwork the old way: pen and paper.
I've found it best to sketch on paper, scan it, pop it on a layer in GIMP, set it to 30% opacity, pop an empty layer on top of it, then ink the sketches with tablet and all. Even better would be to use some tools that clean up the ink drawings (potrace, and so on), because if I zoom the ink drawings, I often note the drawing is just a little bit wobbly or something.
The tablets are just too accurate for drawing. Perfect embodiment of computing in general: They do what I tell them to, not what I mean. =)
Yeah, I'd love to see FF7 done in FF6j/3u style on GBA, that would be just great.
In my opinion FF7 evolved too much in directions that didn't particularly matter that much (oh, kewl, ugly 3D stuff and cruddy FMV... yawn). If there were a "faithful" remake of FF7 on GBA, we'd really be able to prove the talk that FF7 just wasn't as good as FF6. Or maybe prove such talk wrong. Who knows.
What I'm really waiting for is the SNES FF6 remade on GBA, though - all good SNES RPGs get remade for GBA, why not FF6?
For some reason, every time someone talks of "jumping" techniques in Halo, I'm somehow, somehow reminded of the phrase "crash-jumping", even though that has little to do with Halo as such...
Well that was clever. I didn't even notice it at first, and didn't even consider that the thing was in text. I was looking at the graphics, since I completely ignored all textual content on the page anyway...
Maybe all text on sco.com toggles on the bullshit filter in my mind. Previously that thing only worked on banners =)
Wait a second, you mean they didn't write it in Scheme?!!
They looked at Crack dot Com, who implemented most of Abuse in C++ but actually did implement a Lisp interpreter in the game... and kind of remembered Phil Greenspun's 10th Rule of Programming ("any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp").
Then they got Cautious, for they had Reputation to Preserve, and not wanted themselves to be remembered as yet another living proof of that rule.
But I guess you can still find some sort of functional language interpreter from HL2. After all, they're boasting their improved AI and all =)
But yes, "foobar2000" is still a very silly name for a music player, silly enough for not making me use it - and probably hinders other people's adoption as well. It's bad enough if you're thinking "FUBAR", but it's especially bad if you know what the name really means: The authors were too lazy to come up with a proper name, so they used a temporary name and stuck an year to the end so you know how long they've been avoiding giving it a real name =)
Well, could be worse. Yafray's directory name on the server says "noname" for historical reasons. Anything was better than "no name". I'm glad they came up with a new name =)
Slashdot Mirror
(A nitpick: Zork was Infocom's and not Infogrames' - I was under the impression Infocom's stuff belonged to Activision these days or something. Which is curious, since Atari brand belongs to Infogrames, and Atari's and Activision's relationship... uh, ergh, I got a headache. What a tangled web!)
Scene: A Tomb of Old Brands, under the ruined halls of a Game Company.
A pair of Electronic Arts' IP Robbers break through the sealed door and collect their jaws from the floor as their flashlight beams reveal untold number of great game franchises.
They stare at the treasures with most amazed expression before the cynicism and professionalism rise from within their hearts once again, and open their briefcases and start putting some of the documents from the tomb there. But then, suddenly, a *rattle* is heard.
*rattle*
*Rattle*
*RATTLE*
The two glance around, nervously, only to be faced with a most horrifying thing ever imagined.
"WHO dares to DISTURB our slumber?"
The IP Robbers can only stand there, petrified with horror, in front of the fearsome, awe-inspiring, noble forms of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank.
The two eye the papers the two scumbags were taking, and then eye these petrified robbers in turn, who suddenly manage to snap out of this and flee toward the door.
...and as they race toward the exit, a speck of light so far, far away, they realize they will never reach it in time.
"NOTHING can save you from our wrath! We are INVINCIBLE!" ... are just about the last words they can hear.
Weeks later, an expedition was finally sent to move the papers away from the old vault, and the ghastly, rather well eaten remains of the IP robbers were found. Later that day, Activision CEO threw some comments to the company's PR people responsible for press statements, and they had considerable trouble making the statements marketable. Uncensoredly, it went somewhat like this: "I knew this Doom 3 distribution deal would work out just fine! La la la la..."
I would be extremely surprised if Dragon Age comes out this year - after all, it's going to be based on a completely new engine, and Bioware is busy with other projects right now...
I'd say 2006 very earliest, 2007 if we're just normally optimistic and 2010 if they're going to make it as influential as NWN has been. And Linux client in 2013, no matter what year the game is released =)
Okay, I installed 1.0 off Debian. I can't even create a new project, because the directory browser window in that step makes it very unclear what directory I'm trying to pick right now as the project directory. And, it won't even work otherwise: either it tells me to pick a valid directory (umm, I suppose I did?), won't let me pick a valid directory (I can choose it all right, but clicking on Next won't do anything!) or randomly picks "/" as the project directory, and it obviously fails because it can't create project there...
And on top of that, when I just started it up, tried to create a new directory in home directory, it actually created "New directory", then said it couldn't use that. Clicking on directories almost randomly didn't make things show up.
Then I had a bright idea: There were examples. I copied one off to a directory of my own. Tried opening it. It couldn't find the project from this directory at all.
At which project dpkg -r mysteriously nuked the whole thing and I just got back waiting for 1.0.2 or 1.1 or something.
I really hate to say this, but this experience sucked. This sort of lack of usability is completely inexcusable. The directory browing window was one of those horrible excuses of directory browsers stolen from Motif and nightmares.
I'm pretty certain the project looks good, and there's definitely a need for a good Basic-based RAD tool, but based on this horror story of mine, there's still some way to go before I can even try it.
Why mess around with WineX/Cedega when Serious Sam has native Linux ports? I haven't tried SS2, but I know SS1 worked pretty well and SS2 is available.
...native Freedom Force for Linux, oh boy, now that would rule... =)
Well, the thing is, the console makers have this annoying tendency to charge arm and leg for developer license. You may be able to do development without paying using third-party toolkits (homebrew dev tools exist for many consoles), but a) the hardware itself is tricky (mysterious cartridges or proprietary optical media, signed code and other copy-protection mechanisms, you name it...) and b) the console makers get Very Angry if you develop unlicensed but for-profit games, so that kind of depresses the indie game developers.
As for your sig about Microsoft users calling C64 a game machine - well, the thing had Microsoft's BASIC, right? =)
NES folks have difficulty replacing processor because the sound unit is integrated to CPU...
...otherwise, we would have already seen some mods that would stick in a 65816 (as with Commodore 64) and take the homebrew games to the next level. =)
Yet, it's cool to see someone actually overclocking the thing and seeing what that does to the games! At least that will deal with the slowdown a bit. And, of course, it's at last a chance to see how well Nintendo games were actually coded - the games should work if you make the hardware different, even when the consoles traditionally never have to take hardware differences in account... or even if hardware differences were an issue at all in those days.
I see a lot of fixes in the list, but since it's getting late, I can't read well... =/
Is there anything at all to warrant another glance at it? I used to think ZSNES was pretty damn cool, until I noted that SNES9X has actually working hardware screen scaling (through OpenGL - hardware scaling was pretty damn relevant on a P3-600 which I used until this month...) ...and another thing I had going for SNES9X was that there was an OS X port of it, too, so I could use the very same NVRAM files on all computers I could theoretically use. For me, it seemed like the best of the open-source SNES emulators, everyone said ZSNES was good on MS-DOS and not really anything else.
So I suppose they're getting really great emulation quality now, though... is there hardware scaling now? Since it now seems to use SDL, will there be a Mac port?
Just curious...
Ever heard what C# on Windows uses as their UI toolkit? Windows.Forms, which is a clean, we-seriously-don't-want-to-hear-what's-under-it wrapper over the existing Win32 GUI toolkits. You can guess how well Mono folks have replicated it. Not yet very well.
Guess what Mono folks use as their GUI toolkit? Gtk#. A wrapper over GTK+, which, coincidentally, happens to be the toolkit GIMP uses. Directly through C API, too.
I have no idea how well Mono + Gtk# are supported on platforms GIMP is currently directly supported on... my point is, sticking Mono on GIMP would do absolutely nothing to improve GIMP's portability or cross-platform "native" GUIs!
As for writing "photoshop-like UI plugins": This would be possible, just not terribly fun. Witness how much GIMP's main GUI has changed over time. If it can be done on such grand scale, it's certainly possible if people bother to try. GIMP developers just won't bother. As for "plugins", I'm guessing here the UI should first be made to support pluggable UIs, and nobody is going to want to do that.
People these days don't know EA is evil? Huh... Well, let me tell you.
I don't know much about Ubisoft, but EA certainly is evil...
EA has this nasty habit of buying smaller companies, then making them producing crap. Just look what happened to Bullfrog, Westwood, Maxis and, worst of all, Origin Systems. Gradually, the staff that knew and loved the old games gets replaced by new folks who don't know a whole lot. The leading visionaries of the old companies stay aboard only as puppets or brainwashed zombies. Gradually, there's more and more big-corporate politics, and EA gets more and more say in what they expect the games should have. The results first become stinkers that leave old fans seriously annoyed, then they become mass-market, lowest-common-denominator soullless burger games that inspire "casual gamers" to either ignore them completely or to go "kewl, this is so innovative"... (not.)
And once they have the "brand" - not necessarily the essence of the particular game series, just the "brand" - chained down, they milk the living bejezus out of it. They know how to sell their stuff to the idiots. And, by the might of their CEO's shiny forehead and stock-value-raising haircut, truly, that is what they do. There's Game, and either million and two yearly upgrades, expansion disks, or some variation on that theme. And then there's Sequel, and same deal for that too, unless the first Game's expansions are still selling tons and tons and tons.
And, seriously, if you think EA games are good... imagine what they could have been WITHOUT all-consuming abyss of politicking and Mass-Market Appeal Maximizing behind them! Just compare any of their games to whatever the competition has cooked up. You'll probably note a few things: The competition's game is probably slightly better, far less buggy, and better crafted. And, of course, that they aren't selling or marketed as well. EA's marketing is simply something they do right, often, and eagerly so.
And, hey, that was just what I already knew. By the way, recently it was also revealed why they are able to make games in really, really, really damn short time too: They treat their employees pretty damn badly. I always joked about "code slaves", but never thought there were actual code slaves anywhere. Apparently, there are. And knowing EA, it just didn't surprise me at all.
But hey, don't listen to me. I'm just generally peeved about EA. One of them "old fans", you know. Do something for me, will you? Look up "Ultima IX: Ascension" some day. And I don't mean the official word. Look for the damn fan opinion about it. Not exactly pretty.
dd isn't working. CDDA doesn't have filesystem or even any way to syncing to the data as such - the only method to read a CDDA tracks reliably is to access them per sectors, read several times in times of trouble, and try to overlay the multiple-read data. Which is what cdparanoia does. And you still may not get byte-to-byte exact copy, especially at track ends...
Some Broken Discs I've seen were so completely broken. The CD-ROM drives just gave up trying to make sense out of them.
Then, there have been "Windows compatible" Broken Discs (Cactus Data Shield and similar - you know, the kind of protection that inspires people to get sued by pressing shift key in Windows). These actually had a real Table of Contents, except that the values in them were completely bogus, so obviously all rippers were confused. I could copy these pretty easy in Linux: I just told cdrdao to read the disc's session 1, while pretending to be a single-session drive. Yes, the "protection" was that it was a multisession CD with a severely broken 2nd session the CD-ROM drives chomped on! the 1st session had a completely valid ToC!
...well, my sister just inserted Cactus Data Shield-mangled Broken Discs to her PowerBook and ripped them to iTunes without problems. Damn Mac users always get away easy =)
P2P using Telepathy? Be careful, not only might the music and movie industry sue you, but that Sollog guy might get annoyed as well...
An almost equivalent solution: WebDAV. Just stick Apache and mod_dav on the file server and configure appropriately. Both Windows and MacOSX support WebDAV folders right from the desktop. And you can probably build all sorts of cool access methods on top of that (I wonder if SSL is supported? I suppose it is...)
Or, if you're in silly mood, there's always Samba =)
What do you mean? There's probably a picture of the player character (with all of that acting-ability glory!) in the status bar...
Yep, Insert Credit pretty much rules. And while we are at it, let's not forget their own commentary on the state of videogame journalism. Very insightful.
I just believe Boxxle was just wrongfully accused.
After all, Sokoban is a puzzle game, and the Puzzle Game Design Rule states that in nine out of ten cases, puzzle games have to be about placing or arranging objects consisting of one or more rectangles (or cubes, in case of 3D games).
In the modern era where logic games, like all games, strive for "realistic" graphics, they're usually represented by crates, so this rule is fundamentally in conflict with with the Crate Review System, therefore the Crate Review System should not be used for puzzle games at all.
Yeah, but in reality, it doesn't work that way. sco.com website will be changed to say something along the lines of "The SCO Group, unit of the department of the contractor of the fully owned subsidiary of (company)", and to state the new corporate motto, "ownership relations of our IP makes Commodore roll in their grave", and if you try to search for them from Google, you'll find that the #2 hit is a company that sells AmigaOS Ghost Detectors retrofitted to find UNIX(r) ghosts (that won't be detecting AmigaOS either, but their new companion product, Vapor-Radar(tm), will find anything from AmigaOS 4.0 to traces of Duke Nukem Forever, if you're into such things).
I know, but it gets the job done! Speech synthesis is extremely cool if I'm really tired or whatever, though. Or when I won't bother to print a gigantic file out.
Besides, have you ever even fed H.P. Lovecraft to speech synthesizer? You'd have to agree that it's even somewhat appropriate. I started listening to The Whisperer in Darkness, and since it had been quite a while since I read it, I didn't even remember that the story itself involved speech synthesis (not digital, but still)! It was definitely a doubly creepy experience...
And I particularly liked Festival's extremely drunken rendition of that... drunk guy in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. =)
Easy... or not so easy with DRM'd books, but plain text files are trivial. I've gone to sleep listening to Sherlock Holmes stories from Gutenberg, Lovecraftian horror stories, and 419 baitings. =)
Exactly my ideas as well.
It's funny that for years, I firmly believed I couldn't draw worth damn. Now I think I *can* draw somewhat, I just should do most of the groundwork the old way: pen and paper.
I've found it best to sketch on paper, scan it, pop it on a layer in GIMP, set it to 30% opacity, pop an empty layer on top of it, then ink the sketches with tablet and all. Even better would be to use some tools that clean up the ink drawings (potrace, and so on), because if I zoom the ink drawings, I often note the drawing is just a little bit wobbly or something.
The tablets are just too accurate for drawing. Perfect embodiment of computing in general: They do what I tell them to, not what I mean. =)
Yeah, I'd love to see FF7 done in FF6j/3u style on GBA, that would be just great.
In my opinion FF7 evolved too much in directions that didn't particularly matter that much (oh, kewl, ugly 3D stuff and cruddy FMV... yawn). If there were a "faithful" remake of FF7 on GBA, we'd really be able to prove the talk that FF7 just wasn't as good as FF6. Or maybe prove such talk wrong. Who knows.
What I'm really waiting for is the SNES FF6 remade on GBA, though - all good SNES RPGs get remade for GBA, why not FF6?
For some reason, every time someone talks of "jumping" techniques in Halo, I'm somehow, somehow reminded of the phrase "crash-jumping", even though that has little to do with Halo as such...
Well that was clever. I didn't even notice it at first, and didn't even consider that the thing was in text. I was looking at the graphics, since I completely ignored all textual content on the page anyway...
Maybe all text on sco.com toggles on the bullshit filter in my mind. Previously that thing only worked on banners =)
Yeah, actually, I find it almost as humorous as puns involving the word "pun". =)
Then again, it's not really my kind of humor. I've never found fools who follow fools too funny, just generally unfortunate...
They looked at Crack dot Com, who implemented most of Abuse in C++ but actually did implement a Lisp interpreter in the game... and kind of remembered Phil Greenspun's 10th Rule of Programming ("any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp").
Then they got Cautious, for they had Reputation to Preserve, and not wanted themselves to be remembered as yet another living proof of that rule.
But I guess you can still find some sort of functional language interpreter from HL2. After all, they're boasting their improved AI and all =)
"Foo" and "bar" are metasyntactic variables.
But yes, "foobar2000" is still a very silly name for a music player, silly enough for not making me use it - and probably hinders other people's adoption as well. It's bad enough if you're thinking "FUBAR", but it's especially bad if you know what the name really means: The authors were too lazy to come up with a proper name, so they used a temporary name and stuck an year to the end so you know how long they've been avoiding giving it a real name =)
Well, could be worse. Yafray's directory name on the server says "noname" for historical reasons. Anything was better than "no name". I'm glad they came up with a new name =)