Sorry, I wasn't whining, just hoping aloud. Apologies if it sounded like whining. Wasn't the intention.
I don't have much money (empty bank account and 5 Euros cash...) and I don't know much about Renderman's specifics, so all I can do right now is to express my wishes that these features are implemented some day. Hopefully, someone with either the money or expertise (or both) can hear this pathetic little plea and do something about it. As for myself, I sure don't mind waiting a few years, as I'm not paying so I'm not in the position to demand anything to happen immediately. Besides, Blender rules even without Renderman support - the internal renderer and Yafray appear to be improving nicely =)
Oh yeah, U7 with DOSbox is a funny case. Some time ago, I was browsing through the DOSBox compatibility list, trying to see if the games I had at hand worked. Mechwarrior 2? Not supported. Pirates Gold? Nope, don't think it was then. Wolf? Noooope. Warcraft 2? Nope. Ultima VII? Supported!!! Strangest thing I had heard =)
Still, Exult is the best way to run U7 these days =)
Spymac registeration asks for the number of Macs and other computers you have, and your primary OS, but it's all optional and doesn't affect anything.
In fact, the odd thing is that I could get GNUMail.app (on Linux) to work beautifully with Spymac's SMTP/POP server, but I couldn't get my sister's Mail.app (on MacOSX) to work yet, but I suppose it's only temporary =)
There's a legend that back in the day, Microsoft representative was enthusiastically babbling how well Windows 95 will preserve DOS compatibility and you can easily run most of the DOS games right off the desktop without dual-booting. Then someone from the crowd just asked "How about Ultima VII?" Without bothering to make excuses, the rep just admitted that U7 still doesn't work that easily. =)
These days, U7 is nothing more than a nightmare with which to scare DOS emulator authors. For playing the game, there's Exult.
These days the best thing that can happen to a DOS (and any older) games is a rewrite of the underlying engine so it works on modern hardware (Frotz for Infocom games, Exult for Ultima VII, Freecraft/Stratagus for Warcraft II, some others that I haven't tried, like FreeSCI and ScummVM, and so on).
For the rest, I just have to hope it works from Win98SE DOS box (most "modern" DOS games do; it was just staggering to hear Betrayal at Krondor's MIDI music with SBLive =).
It's always good to hope that DOSEMU works, in very rare primitive cases where there's no need for staggering speed (who needs Mo'slo when you have sluggish emulation? =) or fancy features like VGA and sound card (I was almost through Ultima IV with DOSEMU until the floppy I kept my savegames on died).
I've tried Bochs and DOSBox, but they're a little bit on the slow side on my comp (P3-600)...
Aqsis and other open-source Renderman renderers are not based on BMRT source code (which has never been released, I think) - they're all independently developed.
Renderman specification, as I understand it, has been "open" for a quite a time now. You can download the specs for both the protocols/APIs and the shading language. The main difference between commercial and open-source renderers is the supported feature set and the level of speed optimisations...
And yeah, it's nice to see Renderman stuff available as open source. Now, if only Blender folks would get us Renderman integration instead of three-quarters-convenient scripts, then we would also have a nice modeller as well...
Curious. I can't remember any Infocom game that bluntly replied "invalid command" (Most reply like "I don't know the word "foo"). Infocom's competitors did ocassionally write less glorious parsers, however.
Besides, Infocom parser excelled at figuring out the ambiguities. In above case, it'd say something like "Which door do you mean, the north door or the south door?"
And besides, they usually had a little bit more clever replies to frustrated players, like:
>damn
Such language in a high-class establishment like this!
Not quite LORD, but very close: Legend of the Green Dragon. Web browser based version, complete with hideous overblown ANSI colors and keyboard navigation. And it's open source too. =)
Maybe they could ask the lottery people for help..
on
419er Lost in Space
·
· Score: 1
The 419 folks also operate under disguise of lotteries. A few scammers apparently built their computer center in an old dusty NASA facility. Maybe they could help?
Well, that depends on what "labelling" is defined as. Is it defined in human terms ("You put this label there, and as every idiot can recognize it, it's okay"), or in computer terms ("Use a single, agreed-upon, standardized sequence of bytes that are machine-interpretable as well as human-readable")=
If it's defined as "The Subject header, purpose of which is defined in RFC 2822, must contain character sequence '[ADULT]' (represented in ASCII, ISO 8859-1, Windows-1252 and UTF-8 character sets as a byte sequence 5b 41 44 55 4c 54 5d (in base 16)), contained either in ASCII or Quoted-Printable (as defined in RFC 2045) representation of ASCII", I guess there's less room for misinterpretation...
As I'm one of the guys responsible for this game,...
Tammo "kb" Hinrichs
Oooo, it all suddenly makes sense. You were the one of the guys who ported Second Reality to C64, right? Can't stop amazing people with smaller and smaller things, eh? =) Great work!
Actually, if I remember correctly, these things didn't even exist as plain text files in the very beginning. They were on paper first, mailed around.
As it says in the end of RFC 1: "This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry into the online RFC archives by Celeste Anderson 3/97"
I hear the Crocker also wrote the first RFC in the bathroom or something. (Got to check that fact. It was in book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late". Somewhere in my bookshelf, can't reach there right now.)
Otherwise yes, but I'm having a little bit of problems finding required space. There's this somewhat buggy "coffee" process that needs all of the temp space it can get...
And regrettably I have this bulk-produced (pretty smoothly designed but uncomfortably tight) chassis that doesn't have any extra brain lobe slots and there's not even any way to plug them to the brain stem, so getting extra space seems to be nearly impossible.
And sorry for being hostile toward BeOS - I was just temporarily afraid of the unknown. =)
RFCs are basically Internet standard drafts that are circulated in hopes of, uh, receiving comments. They describe how the various things in the Internet are supposed to work, covering almost everything from low-level standards (packet structures and such) to high-level protocols (such as HTTP, SMTP and so on).
They're generally of the quality of becoming de-facto standards in themselves without ever getting officially turned into actual standards anywhere. They're what everyone refers to, anyway. =)
Text may be obscure, but at least it can be followed if you paid attention to the game. Video can be considerably more obscure if you only see segments of what to do. The cautionary example.
The only way the video walkthrough can help is that if you cover the entire game, collecting everything and doing everything there's to do. If you can't fit that on a DVD, forget the whole thing.
Here's some good examples of video walkthroughs (some ed2k'ing required). Check out the Last Ninja 3 one, for example. (There's no audio commentary, though.) These are from the age when a well-edited 20-minute video could conceivably cover the whole game =)
Ummm... the high-tech ones that finally exist due to wonders of technology and a couple of decades of development in computers?
In other words, what we need is programs that operate similar to invisiclues. Show a question, click on a link or button or whatever to show more detailed hints. Not as funny or challenging as the originals, but it's the idea that matters.
If I ever finish making the NWN module I'm working on, I'll make a separate "hint module" that solely exists to provide clues in probably some invisiclue-inspired ways. I've actually recommended this to one NWN mod author who put riddles in the module.
The Best Mod winner of Phase 1 was a European Football adaptation of Unreal.
Really??? I was thinking of starting a "First Person Soccer" mod for Quake 3, but it never got anywhere (not even the drawing board) due to lack of skill and time.
And now that this fine idea has been implemented, it's on the wrong engine! Arrrrrgh!
Now I'm just praying for a three gigahertz computer to fall from the skies, or something. Can't run UT2kWhatever on my trusty ol' P3-600.
There are standard installation scheme. And there's only two of them.
Specifically, source packages, and whatever packaging mechanism your distro comes with.
In Debian, for example, I don't need to deal with anything else besides source tarballs and.deb packages. (And GNU Stow is a cool tool for handling source-built stuff.)
These two options are minimal in any distribution that is based on pre-built binaries. and you shouldn't need to deal with any other formats. And, seeing that I don't have any Alien-installed packages right now (but quite a few Stowed ones), this thing works.
Of course, if you run exclusively what your distro provides, you only need what's there in the distro's package format. If you prefer to build everything from source, well, you get everything you deserve =)
A counterargument: Why doesn't Windows have a standard packaging mechanism? Why, for love of God, is there any need for executable installers? (There's installer scripts in rpms and debs, but they aren't needed in all cases - the package manager just blows the file open, sticks the files in the file system, and updates its internal database...) Why we have Microsoft Installer, InstallShield, InstallAnywhere, Nullsoft Installer, Mozilla XPInstall, and whatever the hell else there are? And the installer UIs aren't much standardized either - except, perhaps, you know how to remove the apps, just go to the control panel! I don't think Windows is exactly the utopia of package formats either...
::falls on the knees and kowtows:: Our hero! Legend of the Hex, Warrior of Mysterious Numbers, The One Without An Assembler! Allow us worthless people to bask in your radiant glory, oh Lord of Bit Twiddlers! We're not worthy! We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
I was a spoiled brat, I had a sprite and character editor all along. Actually, it was on a cartridge. Built right in the machine language monitor for Christ's sake. Writing the editors yourself, wow, that's totally cool and sweet. Writing my own programming tools might have been a really cool experience.
What every military mech designer should remember: Remember the Battle of Hoth. If every kid with a small jet aircraft, a bit of string and a lightsaber can conceivably take the thing down, there's probably a fundamental kind of problem in the overall design.
The problem with mechs is that they're relatively slow and big. The theory is that they can easily take down everything smaller than them. The practice is that they probaly won't, and only serve as big targets for artillery and air-launched missiles - and infantry specifically trained to attack them.
Slashdot Mirror
Rubbish! Utter, complete, total rubbish!
Most people keep saying they have Linux when they actually have GNU/Linux!
...or whatever. I've not tested that. Making it work and testing the ANSI-capability of the terminal left as an exercise to the reader =)
I use PROMPT_COMMAND to set the xterm title myself...
The NES game was, um, changed a bit here - retitled to Shadow Warriors, and the box was slightly changed.
All this while C64 players whacked The Last Ninja - European games, by the way - without any discussion about silly retitling =)
Yeah, but that kinds of data transfer speeds can only be theoretically approached if you use a Turing Machine.
Sorry, I wasn't whining, just hoping aloud. Apologies if it sounded like whining. Wasn't the intention.
I don't have much money (empty bank account and 5 Euros cash...) and I don't know much about Renderman's specifics, so all I can do right now is to express my wishes that these features are implemented some day. Hopefully, someone with either the money or expertise (or both) can hear this pathetic little plea and do something about it. As for myself, I sure don't mind waiting a few years, as I'm not paying so I'm not in the position to demand anything to happen immediately. Besides, Blender rules even without Renderman support - the internal renderer and Yafray appear to be improving nicely =)
Oh yeah, U7 with DOSbox is a funny case. Some time ago, I was browsing through the DOSBox compatibility list, trying to see if the games I had at hand worked. Mechwarrior 2? Not supported. Pirates Gold? Nope, don't think it was then. Wolf? Noooope. Warcraft 2? Nope. Ultima VII? Supported!!! Strangest thing I had heard =)
Still, Exult is the best way to run U7 these days =)
Spymac registeration asks for the number of Macs and other computers you have, and your primary OS, but it's all optional and doesn't affect anything.
In fact, the odd thing is that I could get GNUMail.app (on Linux) to work beautifully with Spymac's SMTP/POP server, but I couldn't get my sister's Mail.app (on MacOSX) to work yet, but I suppose it's only temporary =)
There's a legend that back in the day, Microsoft representative was enthusiastically babbling how well Windows 95 will preserve DOS compatibility and you can easily run most of the DOS games right off the desktop without dual-booting. Then someone from the crowd just asked "How about Ultima VII?" Without bothering to make excuses, the rep just admitted that U7 still doesn't work that easily. =)
These days, U7 is nothing more than a nightmare with which to scare DOS emulator authors. For playing the game, there's Exult.
These days the best thing that can happen to a DOS (and any older) games is a rewrite of the underlying engine so it works on modern hardware (Frotz for Infocom games, Exult for Ultima VII, Freecraft/Stratagus for Warcraft II, some others that I haven't tried, like FreeSCI and ScummVM, and so on).
For the rest, I just have to hope it works from Win98SE DOS box (most "modern" DOS games do; it was just staggering to hear Betrayal at Krondor's MIDI music with SBLive =).
It's always good to hope that DOSEMU works, in very rare primitive cases where there's no need for staggering speed (who needs Mo'slo when you have sluggish emulation? =) or fancy features like VGA and sound card (I was almost through Ultima IV with DOSEMU until the floppy I kept my savegames on died).
I've tried Bochs and DOSBox, but they're a little bit on the slow side on my comp (P3-600)...
Aqsis and other open-source Renderman renderers are not based on BMRT source code (which has never been released, I think) - they're all independently developed.
Renderman specification, as I understand it, has been "open" for a quite a time now. You can download the specs for both the protocols/APIs and the shading language. The main difference between commercial and open-source renderers is the supported feature set and the level of speed optimisations...
And yeah, it's nice to see Renderman stuff available as open source. Now, if only Blender folks would get us Renderman integration instead of three-quarters-convenient scripts, then we would also have a nice modeller as well...
Curious. I can't remember any Infocom game that bluntly replied "invalid command" (Most reply like "I don't know the word "foo"). Infocom's competitors did ocassionally write less glorious parsers, however.
Besides, Infocom parser excelled at figuring out the ambiguities. In above case, it'd say something like "Which door do you mean, the north door or the south door?"
And besides, they usually had a little bit more clever replies to frustrated players, like:
>damn
Such language in a high-class establishment like this!
=)
Not quite LORD, but very close: Legend of the Green Dragon. Web browser based version, complete with hideous overblown ANSI colors and keyboard navigation. And it's open source too. =)
The 419 folks also operate under disguise of lotteries. A few scammers apparently built their computer center in an old dusty NASA facility. Maybe they could help?
Well, that depends on what "labelling" is defined as. Is it defined in human terms ("You put this label there, and as every idiot can recognize it, it's okay"), or in computer terms ("Use a single, agreed-upon, standardized sequence of bytes that are machine-interpretable as well as human-readable")=
If it's defined as "The Subject header, purpose of which is defined in RFC 2822, must contain character sequence '[ADULT]' (represented in ASCII, ISO 8859-1, Windows-1252 and UTF-8 character sets as a byte sequence 5b 41 44 55 4c 54 5d (in base 16)), contained either in ASCII or Quoted-Printable (as defined in RFC 2045) representation of ASCII", I guess there's less room for misinterpretation...
Oooo, it all suddenly makes sense. You were the one of the guys who ported Second Reality to C64, right? Can't stop amazing people with smaller and smaller things, eh? =) Great work!
Actually, if I remember correctly, these things didn't even exist as plain text files in the very beginning. They were on paper first, mailed around.
As it says in the end of RFC 1: "This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry into the online RFC archives by Celeste Anderson 3/97"
I hear the Crocker also wrote the first RFC in the bathroom or something. (Got to check that fact. It was in book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late". Somewhere in my bookshelf, can't reach there right now.)
Otherwise yes, but I'm having a little bit of problems finding required space. There's this somewhat buggy "coffee" process that needs all of the temp space it can get...
And regrettably I have this bulk-produced (pretty smoothly designed but uncomfortably tight) chassis that doesn't have any extra brain lobe slots and there's not even any way to plug them to the brain stem, so getting extra space seems to be nearly impossible.
And sorry for being hostile toward BeOS - I was just temporarily afraid of the unknown. =)
RFCs are basically Internet standard drafts that are circulated in hopes of, uh, receiving comments. They describe how the various things in the Internet are supposed to work, covering almost everything from low-level standards (packet structures and such) to high-level protocols (such as HTTP, SMTP and so on).
They're generally of the quality of becoming de-facto standards in themselves without ever getting officially turned into actual standards anywhere. They're what everyone refers to, anyway. =)
BeOS? Over my dead body.
Text may be obscure, but at least it can be followed if you paid attention to the game. Video can be considerably more obscure if you only see segments of what to do. The cautionary example.
The only way the video walkthrough can help is that if you cover the entire game, collecting everything and doing everything there's to do. If you can't fit that on a DVD, forget the whole thing.
Here's some good examples of video walkthroughs (some ed2k'ing required). Check out the Last Ninja 3 one, for example. (There's no audio commentary, though.) These are from the age when a well-edited 20-minute video could conceivably cover the whole game =)
Ummm... the high-tech ones that finally exist due to wonders of technology and a couple of decades of development in computers?
In other words, what we need is programs that operate similar to invisiclues. Show a question, click on a link or button or whatever to show more detailed hints. Not as funny or challenging as the originals, but it's the idea that matters.
If I ever finish making the NWN module I'm working on, I'll make a separate "hint module" that solely exists to provide clues in probably some invisiclue-inspired ways. I've actually recommended this to one NWN mod author who put riddles in the module.
Yeah, the domain was gone. The old developer didn't have time to work on the project so it just sort of disappeared.
They have a new developer and a new site nowadays, though.
Really??? I was thinking of starting a "First Person Soccer" mod for Quake 3, but it never got anywhere (not even the drawing board) due to lack of skill and time.
And now that this fine idea has been implemented, it's on the wrong engine! Arrrrrgh!
Now I'm just praying for a three gigahertz computer to fall from the skies, or something. Can't run UT2kWhatever on my trusty ol' P3-600.
There are standard installation scheme. And there's only two of them.
Specifically, source packages, and whatever packaging mechanism your distro comes with.
In Debian, for example, I don't need to deal with anything else besides source tarballs and .deb packages. (And GNU Stow is a cool tool for handling source-built stuff.)
These two options are minimal in any distribution that is based on pre-built binaries. and you shouldn't need to deal with any other formats. And, seeing that I don't have any Alien-installed packages right now (but quite a few Stowed ones), this thing works.
Of course, if you run exclusively what your distro provides, you only need what's there in the distro's package format. If you prefer to build everything from source, well, you get everything you deserve =)
A counterargument: Why doesn't Windows have a standard packaging mechanism? Why, for love of God, is there any need for executable installers? (There's installer scripts in rpms and debs, but they aren't needed in all cases - the package manager just blows the file open, sticks the files in the file system, and updates its internal database...) Why we have Microsoft Installer, InstallShield, InstallAnywhere, Nullsoft Installer, Mozilla XPInstall, and whatever the hell else there are? And the installer UIs aren't much standardized either - except, perhaps, you know how to remove the apps, just go to the control panel! I don't think Windows is exactly the utopia of package formats either...
::falls on the knees and kowtows:: Our hero! Legend of the Hex, Warrior of Mysterious Numbers, The One Without An Assembler! Allow us worthless people to bask in your radiant glory, oh Lord of Bit Twiddlers! We're not worthy! We're not worthy! We're not worthy!
I was a spoiled brat, I had a sprite and character editor all along. Actually, it was on a cartridge. Built right in the machine language monitor for Christ's sake. Writing the editors yourself, wow, that's totally cool and sweet. Writing my own programming tools might have been a really cool experience.
What every military mech designer should remember: Remember the Battle of Hoth. If every kid with a small jet aircraft, a bit of string and a lightsaber can conceivably take the thing down, there's probably a fundamental kind of problem in the overall design.
The problem with mechs is that they're relatively slow and big. The theory is that they can easily take down everything smaller than them. The practice is that they probaly won't, and only serve as big targets for artillery and air-launched missiles - and infantry specifically trained to attack them.