I think the reason for this assumption is that FF7 truly showed what RPGs could do with next-gen hardware. Before FF7 there were no 3D worlds, no 3D monsters, no true spatial and particle effects.
Yet, FF7 uses game mechanics that date from prehistoric times. There's nothing in the game per se that couldn't be be done in 2D somehow. It was just a graphical bump. There was nothing really revolutionary about going 3D in FF7. The technological leap from FF6 to FF7 wasn't clearly as epic as the leap from Ultima VIII to IX. (Ack, I think I just defended Ultima IX. I feel dirty. =)
But yes, I still agree that FF7 maintained a pretty reasonable balance between good playability and eee-pic glittery superfluous effects. =)
The storyline was so intriguing thanks to the amazing visuals that it simply took the gameplay to a new level.
Storyline? Phffff. But the visuals were something amazing, yes; the look of the whole game was done pretty successfully. Everything looks pretty damn beautiful.
They also killed a major character, a love-interest no less, right in the middle of the story. This, to my recollection, had never happened in such as quick, brutal and shocking manner before.
Yet, for me, it was a complete anticlimax. Why? Because if you kill a major character in any kind of fiction, everyone will talk about it. Loudly. Very loudly. (This discussion is yet another fine example.) There's no chance in hell I was able to avoid finding out about that before I played that far.
I had same problem with Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle. One more time, for old times' sake: Hey everybody. Dupre dies. =)
Yeah, except the games themselves are hard as hell. =(
But I can definitely recommend the soundtracks for the whole Last Ninja series. LN1 had amazing soundtrack. LN2 had even better. LN3, while I never thought that was possible, was even better than that. The Central Park theme of Last Ninja 2 has the Best Synthetic Electric Guitars Ever(tm). The intro to LN3 is probably the very embodiment of Real Ultimate Power. (You've got to see the intro to believe it. I'll try to sneak the game to my real C64 and see that it actually runs - I still sometimes think the video I've seen is a modern fake =)
As for other great C64 soundtracks, try Rob Hubbard's...anything (Mega Apocalypse is my favorite), Richard Joseph's Barbarian (far more Conan than Conan itself!), Wally Beben's Tetris (No recycled Russian songs here!) and just about anything by Jeroen Tel (I got to know his music through Golden Axe - can you imagine the crummy little home version of the game to have better music than the arcade version?)
The last one looked gorgeous, but the plot was almost non-existent.
"I am particularly enjoying the visual effects. The script is a little weak, dost thou not think?" - Iolo (incidentally describing Every Play And Movie Ever Made[tm])
Final Fantasy movie was, at least in spirit, rather close to FF series (well, I'm not familiar with FF series in particular, but even I could spot dozens of things that were, ahem, probably typical to the genre.)
CRPGs rarely have overly complex plots either, there's mostly just recycling of the same old stuff - but at least they bother to get the nitty-gritty details different in each part. And in my opinion, that's okay, if a little bit predictable. What I don't know is what is a good plot? Before you say "unusual", I usually have to say that "usual" can also work. Details matter - often even more than the actual bigger picture. (You can get away with "they take the Ring to the Mountain and destroy it there" synopsis if you spend a thousand pages describing how it's done while keeping it interesting enough...)
Argh, I should get to sleep...
Of course, I'm also hoping for a direct to DVD release
Don't worry! What I heard is that it is direct-to-DVD. (Or, more likely considering my unfortunate geographical location, direct-to-overpriced-DVD-and-bittorrent release. =)
But that's different. GNU is about politics of programming and software distribution. In my view, the GNU people have an extremely valid reason to argue about the politics.
However, if you try to twist a completely unrelated political angle into the thing... well, that's just silly.
Still, it'd be interesting to get the design docs and specifications. A company that had plans to roll out a huge MMORPG system probably did some research on how to pull that off, research that is pretty tricky to do by little guys... even if a) it's impossible to follow them to letter if you're doing your own game and b) they were probably Subject to Change and require Expertise anyway, they might have proved to be valuable lessons anyway.
Also the actual game code might be crap, but there's got to be some artwork assets - those might be interesting to people like Worldforge project...
Surely by that definition, script + interpreter + kernel is a full program?
In modern operating systems, there are so many layers of abstraction between the actual program code and the physical hardware that this is all just nitpicking.
Practically, and as intended by the theory, a program is simply a set of instructions. It doesn't matter what language it's written in. It doesn't matter what you need to do to actually execute the program. It doesn't matter what the computer is doing to get the program executed. It doesn't matter what else the computer is doing while it is executing the program.
It's far easier to understand "program" as "a set of instructions" rather than any specific combination of operating system features, libraries, runtime environments or other things like that.
Good grief, this is good news. File associations and MIME stuff was always the least working part of GNOME for me. I have no idea what they've changed, but any change is probably good. I hope custom filetype icons and icon themes actually work from now on =)
The first movie was average, the second one was average and kind of stupid =) But I kind of liked the third movie - it actually had something that resembled a complex plot.
As for movies aimed at more mature audience, the three movies that I found most impressive were Wings of Honneamise (kind of like 2001: Space Odyssey but more obvious), Princess Mononoke (wolves!) and Metropolis (apart of slightly dead-ended pace at times). Most of these picks are due to personal reasons, I'm nowhere near an expert - and more familiar with european/us animations anyway.
Well, the fact that someone's been erasing stuff from paper is usually fairly obvious and easy to see - just toss out all votes that look like they've been toyed around with an eraser. To further help this you could also print the things on paper that's not very friendly to any kind of erasing (Roughish surface etc).
And I also remember the day, long ago, when someone found out that one store had erasers that could (in theory) erase ballpoint pen marks - every kid in the class wanted to have one... =)
Metadata doesn't go with the file when the file is transferred, so a person's metadata will probably end up just as organized as his/her desktop.
Well, duh. Solve it in the protocol then.
In fact, I think the P2P systems could work better if there were universal way of accessing the file metadata - it would allow for more accurate search criteria, and so on and so forth.
The P2P client knows the file's name and files can be searched based on it, some programs also search by the file's contents - there's no reason why the client couldn't look at the file metadata as well.
First benefit: (semi-)standard interface. Want to parse MP3 tags? Write code for it. Want to parse Vorbis tags? Write code for it. Want to parse WMA? More code, man, more code! If it all were in the file system side, you could edit and find it easily.
Second benefit, especially for l33t m00zik d00dz in P2P networks: Editing file metadata would not touch file contents and thus not the file checksum. You could manipulate the tags to your heart's content and the MD5 for that file would stay the same. These days, there are only hacks that specifically open the file, parse the actual data content, and get checksum for that. Very wasteful. Very non-generic.
Third benefit: Extensibility. Ease of searching. Blah blah. Read the marketing material.
Humm, would be cool to use vorbis-like tags in POSIX extended file attributes, but the software as of yet doesn't even think of supporting them... =(
Can't remember the exact details, but there were special computers designed to handle the networking, called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). So you had the actual ARPAnet host, IMP machine, more than some dedicated cabling between them, another IMP, and another host.
TCP/IP, as far as I remember, was more like formal spec of what was going on between IMPs, and hosts and IMPs - adapted so that the actual networking hardware didn't matter that much.
I was rather doubting at first, but... Holy schnitzel! beneath-a-steel-sky is in main, not non-free! Woowowowie! And other mysterious sounds!
I think it's in main because the distribution of the data has been approved AND it doesn't use the actual BaSK's interpreter but rather relies on scummvm.
MP3 is open "The Open Group" way. Think of early Unix advertising before the free Unix-likes got popular. =)
"Open" in Ancient Computer Marketing Vocabulary means roughly "if you have a little bit of money to cover our expenses and the holiday trips for our executives, you can get a specification from us - and if you pay even more, you can actually use the thing for making money."
Yes, it was "open" - because you had a chance of getting the specification and license somehow.
"Closed" was defined as "oh, damn, I don't think we have specs for this thing for sale, even looking at the format makes my head ache", or "Don't even ask about the spec, and we'll sue if you reverse-engineer this thing."
The meanings have fluctuated a bit, especially regarding "open" - you see, back in the day, people thought that stuff that was merely a bit open was "open". Nowadays, there's open... and then there's Open. =)
So now there's an authoritatively chosen scientific constant that measures the quality of science fiction movies. Let's call it B.
Now the quality q of all movies can be expressed as q = xB. Of course, unlike all absolute constants like c which by most definitions can't be surpassed, the quality can be x > 1.0 if it needs to be, because movie quality is always subjective but everyone agrees that Blade Runner rocks. Thus, I can easily say that, for example, "The Matrix" is approximately 2.0 * B but "Plan 9 from Outer Space" was only 0.75 * B iff you like bad movies.
I hereby propose that we devise similar qualification system for video games, using The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (quality of which is Z, quality of a video game expressed thus as q = xZ) as basis.
Not to even mention it makes the whole game experience change.
I can imagine showing the game to some kids five years from now and say stuff like "When this game was brand new, they had a tasteful company X ad here, none of this blinking stuff."
Not that the crappily coded game even could work five years now when the publisher is gone and it can't find the ad server...
But why is it? All the X-WMs look shabby, slapdash and incomplete compared to MacOSX and even, dare I say it... WinXP.
Do they have to look that great? I use WindowMaker, which isn't the greatest-looking from the whole bunch - but I use it because I value its rich functionality and good theme-consistency. It's fairly close to MacOSX, actually, due to both borrowing from NeXT roots. Heck, it's far better than MacOSX in some aspects (virtual desktops out of box, yay!) And it sure does everything Windows does. But what it doesn't do is superfluous eyecandy that is good for nothing. (Well, there are a few n3at effects but those are optional and just to soothe the newbie nerves =)
As long as the X-Windows system is divided with no clear objective
Contrary to popular misconception, the people behind X Windowing System have a very clear, consistent and well-defined goal in respect to window management: To improve and maintain twm, the official window manager(tm). Everyone but hardcore practicality fans are supposed to go "ewww" at this point and go find an alternative that satisfies them.
All Linux/BSD WMs are good for is keeping several CLIs in the same 'desktop'...
Heathen! Are you suggesting that there's more to the world than xterm, xload and xclock - The Apps That X Was Meant To Run? What else could anyone ask for?
The links from site # 5 in google:http://bitzi.com/... don't work - so that's 4 sites so far:-)
Well, wouldn't be too excited about it anyway - Bitzi is a bitprint comment service (basic idea is that you send in a fancy-schmansy checksum a la md5sum, and you get back quality rating and user comments) and they don't host files themselves.
Now, go type the file name in ed2k or gnutella client and there you go...
I always thought this was a bad idea and should be replaced by various triggers.
So they invent a new trigger technique, think "hmm, looks like this is a bit stupid, painful and extremely limited way, let's make it more powerful", then they tune it... and before you know, they have reinvented shell scripts once again!
I think it would be better to have a mix of these - the package manager would have a framework that would have bunch of scripts that have Common Things To Do, which would let the package do certain things more or less securely, and also a script support - installer would then warn stuff like "This installer wants to use this installation script, are you sure?" and show the script, with hopefully helpful comments added to the top by packager. This could be bypassed only if the script is signed by a trusted party.
But right now, I'm fairly confident in trusting the Debian package maintainers anyway =)
Won't work. All simulator games are rather "unfashionable" (read: devs would like to make them but the marketing says they won't sell) these days, especially ultra-realistic hardcore military flight simulators. Good licensable engines can't be found either.
I guess that MGS:TTS was mostly created for fans of the original MGS. I liked the original, I really liked TTS as well. Yeah, and I've accepted the fact that there's too damn too much cutscenes, but I don't care much, it's a good enough game. =)
If you hated TTS you probably won't find original MGS any better, and you'll probably find MGS2 profoundly horrible. (Hint: Even more cutscenes. Same acting quality. Even less gameplay. =)
You may, however, like the Gameboy Color version of Metal Gear Solid. It's like the NES game, only better. =)
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Yet, FF7 uses game mechanics that date from prehistoric times. There's nothing in the game per se that couldn't be be done in 2D somehow. It was just a graphical bump. There was nothing really revolutionary about going 3D in FF7. The technological leap from FF6 to FF7 wasn't clearly as epic as the leap from Ultima VIII to IX. (Ack, I think I just defended Ultima IX. I feel dirty. =)
But yes, I still agree that FF7 maintained a pretty reasonable balance between good playability and eee-pic glittery superfluous effects. =)
Storyline? Phffff. But the visuals were something amazing, yes; the look of the whole game was done pretty successfully. Everything looks pretty damn beautiful.
Yet, for me, it was a complete anticlimax. Why? Because if you kill a major character in any kind of fiction, everyone will talk about it. Loudly. Very loudly. (This discussion is yet another fine example.) There's no chance in hell I was able to avoid finding out about that before I played that far.
I had same problem with Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle. One more time, for old times' sake: Hey everybody. Dupre dies. =)
Yeah, except the games themselves are hard as hell. =(
But I can definitely recommend the soundtracks for the whole Last Ninja series. LN1 had amazing soundtrack. LN2 had even better. LN3, while I never thought that was possible, was even better than that. The Central Park theme of Last Ninja 2 has the Best Synthetic Electric Guitars Ever(tm). The intro to LN3 is probably the very embodiment of Real Ultimate Power. (You've got to see the intro to believe it. I'll try to sneak the game to my real C64 and see that it actually runs - I still sometimes think the video I've seen is a modern fake =)
As for other great C64 soundtracks, try Rob Hubbard's ...anything (Mega Apocalypse is my favorite), Richard Joseph's Barbarian (far more Conan than Conan itself!), Wally Beben's Tetris (No recycled Russian songs here!) and just about anything by Jeroen Tel (I got to know his music through Golden Axe - can you imagine the crummy little home version of the game to have better music than the arcade version?)
"I am particularly enjoying the visual effects. The script is a little weak, dost thou not think?" - Iolo (incidentally describing Every Play And Movie Ever Made[tm])
Final Fantasy movie was, at least in spirit, rather close to FF series (well, I'm not familiar with FF series in particular, but even I could spot dozens of things that were, ahem, probably typical to the genre.)
CRPGs rarely have overly complex plots either, there's mostly just recycling of the same old stuff - but at least they bother to get the nitty-gritty details different in each part. And in my opinion, that's okay, if a little bit predictable. What I don't know is what is a good plot? Before you say "unusual", I usually have to say that "usual" can also work. Details matter - often even more than the actual bigger picture. (You can get away with "they take the Ring to the Mountain and destroy it there" synopsis if you spend a thousand pages describing how it's done while keeping it interesting enough...)
Argh, I should get to sleep...
Don't worry! What I heard is that it is direct-to-DVD. (Or, more likely considering my unfortunate geographical location, direct-to-overpriced-DVD-and-bittorrent release. =)
But that's different. GNU is about politics of programming and software distribution. In my view, the GNU people have an extremely valid reason to argue about the politics.
However, if you try to twist a completely unrelated political angle into the thing... well, that's just silly.
A big honkin' helicopter.
Propels Fox upward (or whevever you tilt the stick) while frying everyone nearby on the ground.
It only plays from the other speaker, or if you're lucky, same stuff from two speakers. So, it's probably ancient.
Hey, I know this one! It moves tons and tons of bits from one place to another! Am I right?! What did I win? Tell me!
Turns perfectly working Linux server into a blob of clay, probably. Remotely. From a Windows desktop.
"-Fu" probably refers to martial arts, so... um... "Script-Fu's Name that could be understood is not the true Script-Fu's Name." Or something.
Another possibility is to mess around with the *instripe theme's spacing in userChrome.css file.
here's some instructions regarding the thing. Personally, I just went for zero pixel padding =)
Still, it'd be interesting to get the design docs and specifications. A company that had plans to roll out a huge MMORPG system probably did some research on how to pull that off, research that is pretty tricky to do by little guys... even if a) it's impossible to follow them to letter if you're doing your own game and b) they were probably Subject to Change and require Expertise anyway, they might have proved to be valuable lessons anyway.
Also the actual game code might be crap, but there's got to be some artwork assets - those might be interesting to people like Worldforge project...
Nope. x.org server is going forward, yeah, but Window Maker is progressing pretty damn slowly and almost no one is actually writing GNUstep apps...
In modern operating systems, there are so many layers of abstraction between the actual program code and the physical hardware that this is all just nitpicking.
Practically, and as intended by the theory, a program is simply a set of instructions. It doesn't matter what language it's written in. It doesn't matter what you need to do to actually execute the program. It doesn't matter what the computer is doing to get the program executed. It doesn't matter what else the computer is doing while it is executing the program.
It's far easier to understand "program" as "a set of instructions" rather than any specific combination of operating system features, libraries, runtime environments or other things like that.
Good grief, this is good news. File associations and MIME stuff was always the least working part of GNOME for me. I have no idea what they've changed, but any change is probably good. I hope custom filetype icons and icon themes actually work from now on =)
And tons of SVG stuff? Yay.
The first movie was average, the second one was average and kind of stupid =) But I kind of liked the third movie - it actually had something that resembled a complex plot.
As for movies aimed at more mature audience, the three movies that I found most impressive were Wings of Honneamise (kind of like 2001: Space Odyssey but more obvious), Princess Mononoke (wolves!) and Metropolis (apart of slightly dead-ended pace at times). Most of these picks are due to personal reasons, I'm nowhere near an expert - and more familiar with european/us animations anyway.
Well, the fact that someone's been erasing stuff from paper is usually fairly obvious and easy to see - just toss out all votes that look like they've been toyed around with an eraser. To further help this you could also print the things on paper that's not very friendly to any kind of erasing (Roughish surface etc).
And I also remember the day, long ago, when someone found out that one store had erasers that could (in theory) erase ballpoint pen marks - every kid in the class wanted to have one... =)
Well, duh. Solve it in the protocol then.
In fact, I think the P2P systems could work better if there were universal way of accessing the file metadata - it would allow for more accurate search criteria, and so on and so forth.
The P2P client knows the file's name and files can be searched based on it, some programs also search by the file's contents - there's no reason why the client couldn't look at the file metadata as well.
File metadata should be in filesystem side.
First benefit: (semi-)standard interface. Want to parse MP3 tags? Write code for it. Want to parse Vorbis tags? Write code for it. Want to parse WMA? More code, man, more code! If it all were in the file system side, you could edit and find it easily.
Second benefit, especially for l33t m00zik d00dz in P2P networks: Editing file metadata would not touch file contents and thus not the file checksum. You could manipulate the tags to your heart's content and the MD5 for that file would stay the same. These days, there are only hacks that specifically open the file, parse the actual data content, and get checksum for that. Very wasteful. Very non-generic.
Third benefit: Extensibility. Ease of searching. Blah blah. Read the marketing material.
Humm, would be cool to use vorbis-like tags in POSIX extended file attributes, but the software as of yet doesn't even think of supporting them... =(
Can't remember the exact details, but there were special computers designed to handle the networking, called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). So you had the actual ARPAnet host, IMP machine, more than some dedicated cabling between them, another IMP, and another host.
TCP/IP, as far as I remember, was more like formal spec of what was going on between IMPs, and hosts and IMPs - adapted so that the actual networking hardware didn't matter that much.
I was rather doubting at first, but... Holy schnitzel! beneath-a-steel-sky is in main, not non-free! Woowowowie! And other mysterious sounds!
I think it's in main because the distribution of the data has been approved AND it doesn't use the actual BaSK's interpreter but rather relies on scummvm.
MP3 is open "The Open Group" way. Think of early Unix advertising before the free Unix-likes got popular. =)
"Open" in Ancient Computer Marketing Vocabulary means roughly "if you have a little bit of money to cover our expenses and the holiday trips for our executives, you can get a specification from us - and if you pay even more, you can actually use the thing for making money."
Yes, it was "open" - because you had a chance of getting the specification and license somehow.
"Closed" was defined as "oh, damn, I don't think we have specs for this thing for sale, even looking at the format makes my head ache", or "Don't even ask about the spec, and we'll sue if you reverse-engineer this thing."
The meanings have fluctuated a bit, especially regarding "open" - you see, back in the day, people thought that stuff that was merely a bit open was "open". Nowadays, there's open... and then there's Open. =)
So now there's an authoritatively chosen scientific constant that measures the quality of science fiction movies. Let's call it B.
Now the quality q of all movies can be expressed as q = xB. Of course, unlike all absolute constants like c which by most definitions can't be surpassed, the quality can be x > 1.0 if it needs to be, because movie quality is always subjective but everyone agrees that Blade Runner rocks. Thus, I can easily say that, for example, "The Matrix" is approximately 2.0 * B but "Plan 9 from Outer Space" was only 0.75 * B iff you like bad movies.
I hereby propose that we devise similar qualification system for video games, using The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (quality of which is Z, quality of a video game expressed thus as q = xZ) as basis.
Not to even mention it makes the whole game experience change.
I can imagine showing the game to some kids five years from now and say stuff like "When this game was brand new, they had a tasteful company X ad here, none of this blinking stuff."
Not that the crappily coded game even could work five years now when the publisher is gone and it can't find the ad server...
I've seen it. It's not connected to anything so it doesn't work. If you hit Start nothing will freeze, you know, like it did in Captain N comics.
Do they have to look that great? I use WindowMaker, which isn't the greatest-looking from the whole bunch - but I use it because I value its rich functionality and good theme-consistency. It's fairly close to MacOSX, actually, due to both borrowing from NeXT roots. Heck, it's far better than MacOSX in some aspects (virtual desktops out of box, yay!) And it sure does everything Windows does. But what it doesn't do is superfluous eyecandy that is good for nothing. (Well, there are a few n3at effects but those are optional and just to soothe the newbie nerves =)
Contrary to popular misconception, the people behind X Windowing System have a very clear, consistent and well-defined goal in respect to window management: To improve and maintain twm, the official window manager(tm). Everyone but hardcore practicality fans are supposed to go "ewww" at this point and go find an alternative that satisfies them.
Heathen! Are you suggesting that there's more to the world than xterm, xload and xclock - The Apps That X Was Meant To Run? What else could anyone ask for?
=)
Well, wouldn't be too excited about it anyway - Bitzi is a bitprint comment service (basic idea is that you send in a fancy-schmansy checksum a la md5sum, and you get back quality rating and user comments) and they don't host files themselves.
Now, go type the file name in ed2k or gnutella client and there you go...
So they invent a new trigger technique, think "hmm, looks like this is a bit stupid, painful and extremely limited way, let's make it more powerful", then they tune it... and before you know, they have reinvented shell scripts once again!
I think it would be better to have a mix of these - the package manager would have a framework that would have bunch of scripts that have Common Things To Do, which would let the package do certain things more or less securely, and also a script support - installer would then warn stuff like "This installer wants to use this installation script, are you sure?" and show the script, with hopefully helpful comments added to the top by packager. This could be bypassed only if the script is signed by a trusted party.
But right now, I'm fairly confident in trusting the Debian package maintainers anyway =)
Won't work. All simulator games are rather "unfashionable" (read: devs would like to make them but the marketing says they won't sell) these days, especially ultra-realistic hardcore military flight simulators. Good licensable engines can't be found either.
Even if it's just paper planes.
I guess that MGS:TTS was mostly created for fans of the original MGS. I liked the original, I really liked TTS as well. Yeah, and I've accepted the fact that there's too damn too much cutscenes, but I don't care much, it's a good enough game. =)
If you hated TTS you probably won't find original MGS any better, and you'll probably find MGS2 profoundly horrible. (Hint: Even more cutscenes. Same acting quality. Even less gameplay. =)
You may, however, like the Gameboy Color version of Metal Gear Solid. It's like the NES game, only better. =)