That is very useful, unfortunately this mechanism can also be used to the advantage of cheaters. If dead players spectating can talk to their team, they can observe enemy players' movements and report them to still living teammates. Some servers disable dead spectating for this reason.
Talking to teammates or opponents while dead spectating is still somewhat legitimate.
Imagine the situation in Urban Terror's Team Survivor. All but one player on both sides are dead. They stalk each other for several minutes. About 3 minutes into the game, everyone wants to cry "You're both on the wrong sides of the map, you blind morons! FrAgLaMa is on the roof, Bam-CommAndA is in the garage!" =)
Someone please explain: why does this feature make you so upset?
"Lieutenant, bomb that indent line back about a hundred lines. Give me some room to breathe."
I think I once described Python as a crammed language I can't breathe in. The whole code seems claustrophobic and somewhat... monolithic. It seems like it just sits there. It forms a structure. It sits in the file. Like a mountain built of small rocks and concrete. Once built, it won't move anywhere without a large effort. It just stands there.
And I feel it's tricky that the code relies ONLY on the indent to store structure. Once you take away even a little bit of that structure, it all collapses. If you take a block of Python and paste it elsewhere, it may just not work. If you lose the indent, it won't work either. Losing indents is very possible and very real - one example was already given: quoting, printing long code on paper, or some such.
Your comment about Haskell's one-letter documentation mania brought one idea into my mind: Haskell is probably a nice language, but it definitely needs some practical documentation. I'm not a theoretical computer science type (though I appreciate that subtle art), know a little bit of Lisp and Scheme, hear Haskell is cool, and get completely baffled by the online documentation. Anyone working on a book like "Haskell explained in monosyllablic words for former and current Lisp coders"? Or even "Practical Haskell"? Look, if I read a doc I don't want to know how you define some library function, I just want to know how to use the thing. Examples. Oh, let me clarify that request: Practical examples. Please.
Speaking of documentation, I think Python's online documentation is extremely frustrating. (aesthetically unpleasing and can't find a damn thing even when armed with grep and the kind of regex that makes most Python people vomit) Ruby gets that right. And Ruby's.inspect is cooler than Python's dir() (says pen name "Blender's online API references drive me nuts".)
I'm seriously also starting to believe Python doesn't like my Perl Coder Karma. Every time I try to use a Python app some small things start to click. Or, if I code in Python, some bad stuff happens. (Recently, I've been coding an exporter script for Blender. Blender's built-in editor in Windows works just fine but some characters don't work, oh, say, square brackets and backslash for example. Very convenient. At least cut and paste works. One day I'll call them and politely ask them something that can be summarised as "embed Scintilla or... or... or I'll get Wings3D!")
And I agree with your points about Perl (especially the OO part), but it's still my language of choice for most of my tasks =)
I found that comment rather odd. I have no idea why the price of that software is so high, since everyone with half the brain can piece a web crawler or Usenet address harvester together. There's tons of components for this already, so making a program to do this hardly is that difficult.
Maybe it is priced so due to "laborous development" costs. You know, idiot spamware author figuring out how to get it to work in the headache-inducing Visual BASIC (or any other Windows) development environment. =) Of course with the "the customers are idiots" slice added to the price.
My Diablo II character was just deleted because I dared to have a life for 3 months (second time this has happened). Well, I guess I could always start over again.
Could be worse.
On my system Direct3D 8 blew up and didn't work for over an year. Luckily D3D7 and earlier and OpenGL games worked just fine, and as long as I got Neverwinter Nights and Myth series and Mechwarriors and Warcraft 3 things were just fine. (And Nethack, of course, ran. =)
When I finally was able to fix that, well, I didn't have disk space on which to install D2 for weeks. And now, I have just that latter situation again.
Then of course Warcraft 3, which is a new genre making RTS, on that caused those silly command and conquer people to copy it's formula (to a point),
People who say Warcraft 3 was a "new genre making RTS" must be blind.
War3 takes many ideas from its predecessors and quite a few ideas (namely, heroes that level up and replay feature) from the Myth series. One could argue that 3D terrain sort of followed so it isn't taken directly.
And in my opinion, Myths work better because there's no micromanagement whatsoever (If I buy a strategy game, I don't want to play an economy simulation, thank you), just the strategy, and every unit is able to "level up".
(Off-topic rambling: Now I only wish Mythdev would release Myth II's new version for Linux too (1.4 is for Win/Mac only at the moment, I'm still stuck here with SDL1.1 statically linked binary and "bungie.net" when everyone's gone to PlayMyth and such), and port Myth III to Linux, even when the latter is probably wishful thinking...)
On the other hand, Blizzard never claimed they're innovative as such, and while they make cliched games, they at least make these games very very pretty and shiny in visual, audio and gameplay sides. Blizzard's garbage is for most part playable and enjoyable garbage, and that's unusual! =)
There are many more important areas that could be improved, like a consistent clipboard, working drag drop,
Oh, drag and drop works often enough all right. (Except in some situations. Why can't I drag an image from gthumb2 to GIMP and expect it to open? It works for Nautilus...)
But progress in some X apps never fail to amaze me. I was writing one RPG module in OpenOffice.org, and decided to copy a little bit of song lyrics to it from Mozilla. The page that had the lyrics used what the lyric page author probably calls "l33t f0nts and cUlrs". I selected the text, hit middle button in OO.o, and uttered a quiet random voice of amazement as it actually copied the font and color too. That was pretty unexpected! The next task was to figure out how to remove the undesired formatting =)
Hm? Oh yeah, I'm rambling again. I should really drink less coffee. I'd better stop.
The Mac OS X or ROX-desktop approach is better; an application is contained in its own directory,
...and GNUstep, which is the same system as OSX. Well, I also looked at the GNUstep built app stuff and the complications under the hood are pretty convoluted, but at least it hides the complexity. Binary distribution seems pretty straightforward - there's AppName.app directory tree that can be tarred and untarred under/Local/Applications. Very neat. Now, if only the whole development environment would be >1.0 and there would be some *good* documentation... oh, yeah, more actually working applications would do no harm either.
Interestingly, ISO C defines shorthands for people with crap keyboards.
Now I wish Python would do stuff like that that, also. Or at very least I wish Blender folks would fix their damn editor in the Windows port of Blender =)
But seriously, I think sometimes stuff like this is very cool, even when it looks somewhat, um, inelegant. Uses for constructs like this may surface in unexpected places.
Never heard of anyone willingly aiming for a bad score, as that would land them in a shitty job...
We have the same sort of thing in Finnish military to find potentials for the NCO / reserve officer training - two tests, if I remember correctly, one that has math skills and logic, one that tests ability to withstand pressure (They ask stupid questions about the subject's mental health repeatedly in different ways =). Of course, we were not told that was the strategy until when we got the results, everyone assumed the actual answers to the questions are important... clever.
When I did that there actually were people who did try to answer randomly. Most of these people weren't actually insane, but rather were of those 17-year-olds who had volunteered to come to the service early. Some of these individuals were unfortunately still quite immature =)
(Likewise, we don't have tests like this for academia - the decisive factor here is the matriculation examination, combined with entrance examinations for individual institutions.)
Gah. Been in Slashdot for ages and when I finally get a story submission through, people focus on another submitter's bad news, and mostly needlessly. =/
Okay, so the Linux NWN client won't do cutscenes. Big deal. Very few mods use cutscenes anyway, and the only thing I remember from the cutscenes in the official campaign is that the playback was quite choppy. =)
But the developer section is huge news. Yeah, the obscure file formats Bioware has developed have been reverse-engineered, but this stuff is still a little bit spotty here and there so official documentation is definitely a nice thing.
Yeah, the toolkit won't be ported officially, but this file format news and the developer support in general is good for people like OpenKnights who work on Linux/MacOSX tools.
Yep. Game cutscene production is often out of the league of Your Average Modder. The software is way too expensive and lousy software makes cheesy cutscenes. (Heck, the cutscene tutorial by Bioware recommended PowerPoint and an.avi screen recorder! Ewww!) Almost everyone can make mods with the toolset, quite a few can make custom 3D objects, but producing several minutes of cool-looking animations is stuff that requires a severe caffeine budget for even pros.
Besides, for most modules I've seen, the opening and closing videos are always optional and are gigantic downloads that most people will skip anyway.
I still say EA is the best company for Sega to merge with. EA does good games. EA has the capital. EA has the inovation. Namco hasn't done anything last few years. The keep rehashing the same titles.
You're kidding, right?
EA, the company that made Origin (creators of Ultima VII, the best CRPG ever made) make Ultima VIII and... um, that other game, I think? The company that once carried Bullfrog's games but somehow doesn't, anymore? The company that gets most of its money from crappy sports games that are re-released every year, and expansion packs for one of the most pointless games in existence, The Sims?
If you want to know what would likely happen to Sega if EA bought them/"merged" with them(ha ha), take a look at anyone other company that got absorbed by the EA behemoth. OSI/Origin comes to mind in particular, though Bullfrog suffered a horrible fate as well.
Yeah, but at least they could bring sweet revenge on EA.
The Sims: Altered Beast
Sims turning into werewolves and killing sims! Woohoo!
Or make a new Sonic game where Sonic destroys a Cube, Sphere and a Tetrahedron. Or something. Probably not original but at least it has a point.
Gartner and some MS supporters on a local Holy Wars newsgroup always get caught in the "Linux isn't actually free" part and say that TCO is lower.
...which is why everyone who has ever been to that group now use "TCO" as an expression meaning "if we had been using something other than Windows, this would have been really cheap." For example, "Exchange blew up again and we lost hours and hours fixing it. TCO! TCO!" Or "So the next version of Windows will be even more expensive and requires subscription? TCO!"...
Nobody seemed to really put that much faith in Gartner analyses. Except the people who make decisions. Infortunately.
Re:Ultima Copy Protection Warning
on
Ultima on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Never finished V, because there was a musical puzzle that I couldn't solve without the materials
Come on, everyone knows how to play "Stones"... =)
(no PDFs on the CD set I bought),
Let me guess: "Ultima I-VI Series" published by Encore? People were driven mad by the lack of documentation on that one. Not me, I was probably insane before that too. Can't remember.
Some helpful people have published the documentation for I-VI precisely for the reason that no proper manuals existed. The basics (including the missing copy protection questions) are in the Ultima Archive (It's on a website controlled by EA, so it can't be too WaReZy)... There are others that have complete manuals and the books that come with the games, with colored art, too lazy to google for them right now. =/
Re:Ultima Copy Protection Warning
on
Ultima on Linux
·
· Score: 1
And unfortunately these are not provided with most CD re-releases (and not at all with downloads of course).
Um, don't know about that. I have two copies of the game - the Complete Ultima 7 and one from some EA compilation - and both have a list of the asked coordinates and stuff on the documentation. The Complete Ultima 7 has it even on the printed installation instruction booklet / quick start thing, and it also has the whole map as PDF. Neither came with a cloth map, which is obviously a great shame, but this is what I get for being so slow.
Actually, I always thought the real copy protection feature of the game was the Voodoo Annoyator, er, excuse me, Protected Mode Memory Manager - and Exult team did a wonderful job cracking this cunning encryption scheme =)
The fact that such generated music can make it onto the charts is telling about the quality of MTV hits in general, no?
Well, the program was used to "sketch" the music, which sort of implies that they didn't do it all the way on the program.
If the chart-topping single would have been made from beginning to end within the generator using nothing but pre-packaged samples, that might have been far more worrying.
Try generating Mozart.
::spills coffee when listening to a cool.mod remix of Bach's Toccata and Fugue::
Also, where's Ogg Theora? A video codec test isn't complete unless an alpha Free codec is there to rank with all the proprietary ones.
Well, last I checked Theora was alpha, bitstream format was not stabilized, and there was only Linux code. And in my humble opinion, a codec isn't a codec unless I can VirtualDub it (or otherwise encode in Windows), WMP it, and Xine it...
I would have loved to see a comparison of VP3 and other codecs - last time Doom9 tried it they were criticized of Not Knowing How To Twiddle The Controls. My own conclusion was that I could get pretty good stuff... hrm.
I've noted the quality vs file size of Bink is pretty good, and I'm not surprised that game developers love it. I also like the Rad Video Tools application, because it can transform most game movie clips (including Smacker, Bink and QuickTime) to AVI, with some minor processing too - really convenient...
Yet, even when the quality is pretty good, I'd hesitate to use Bink for anything because almost no player supports it - there's the featureless Bink player and that's that. Then again, it seems it was never intended for any other purpose than game cutscenes and such, where good watching UI is irrelevant.
<linuxrant> And RAD folks should better tell us soon that there's a port to Linux so that Bioware can give us the True Client. </linuxrant>
the Fins found out about nematodes from an article about using them on shuttle missions.
Heh. Actually, I believe it comes from earlier meaning of the word 'shuttle' (Finnish 'sukkula') - a weaving instrument that goes back and forth, or a reasonable facsimile of thereof that does something similar. The translation of 'Space Shuttle' was kind of literal and the name stuck.
If I remember correctly, a number of C64 games were launched directly from the basic interpreter.
LOAD "MYPROGRAM, 8, 1"
or something like that.
Quote goes after the program name (LOAD "programname",8,1). The most typical form was, of course, LOAD "*",8,1 which loaded the first program on the floppy's catalog.
Tape users got it a little bit easier - just LOAD, or pushing Shift+RunStop.
This was an Obscure Command-Line Interface by today's standards, but the Commodores still came and conquered the gamers' hearts =)
(And what do you mean by "were launched"? They still are =)
Oh yes, the Barcode Battler. Interesting idea, not that charming implementation back in the day... It got boring pretty fast.
Apparently there have been some revival of the idea (some game called Scannerz was being advertised here, I believe), but I have no idea if it's any better.
Slashdot Mirror
Talking to teammates or opponents while dead spectating is still somewhat legitimate.
Imagine the situation in Urban Terror's Team Survivor. All but one player on both sides are dead. They stalk each other for several minutes. About 3 minutes into the game, everyone wants to cry "You're both on the wrong sides of the map, you blind morons! FrAgLaMa is on the roof, Bam-CommAndA is in the garage!" =)
"Lieutenant, bomb that indent line back about a hundred lines. Give me some room to breathe."
I think I once described Python as a crammed language I can't breathe in. The whole code seems claustrophobic and somewhat... monolithic. It seems like it just sits there. It forms a structure. It sits in the file. Like a mountain built of small rocks and concrete. Once built, it won't move anywhere without a large effort. It just stands there.
And I feel it's tricky that the code relies ONLY on the indent to store structure. Once you take away even a little bit of that structure, it all collapses. If you take a block of Python and paste it elsewhere, it may just not work. If you lose the indent, it won't work either. Losing indents is very possible and very real - one example was already given: quoting, printing long code on paper, or some such.
Speaking of documentation, I think Python's online documentation is extremely frustrating. (aesthetically unpleasing and can't find a damn thing even when armed with grep and the kind of regex that makes most Python people vomit) Ruby gets that right. And Ruby's .inspect is cooler than Python's dir() (says pen name "Blender's online API references drive me nuts".)
I'm seriously also starting to believe Python doesn't like my Perl Coder Karma. Every time I try to use a Python app some small things start to click. Or, if I code in Python, some bad stuff happens. (Recently, I've been coding an exporter script for Blender. Blender's built-in editor in Windows works just fine but some characters don't work, oh, say, square brackets and backslash for example. Very convenient. At least cut and paste works. One day I'll call them and politely ask them something that can be summarised as "embed Scintilla or... or... or I'll get Wings3D!")
And I agree with your points about Perl (especially the OO part), but it's still my language of choice for most of my tasks =)
Oh yes. Particularly when the singers mumble a whole lot and expect everyone to understand automatically =)
Maybe the music publishers think that lack of printed lyrics also enhances the listening experience, just the other way around, and probably more creatively too...
I found that comment rather odd. I have no idea why the price of that software is so high, since everyone with half the brain can piece a web crawler or Usenet address harvester together. There's tons of components for this already, so making a program to do this hardly is that difficult.
Maybe it is priced so due to "laborous development" costs. You know, idiot spamware author figuring out how to get it to work in the headache-inducing Visual BASIC (or any other Windows) development environment. =) Of course with the "the customers are idiots" slice added to the price.
Could be worse.
On my system Direct3D 8 blew up and didn't work for over an year. Luckily D3D7 and earlier and OpenGL games worked just fine, and as long as I got Neverwinter Nights and Myth series and Mechwarriors and Warcraft 3 things were just fine. (And Nethack, of course, ran. =)
When I finally was able to fix that, well, I didn't have disk space on which to install D2 for weeks. And now, I have just that latter situation again.
People who say Warcraft 3 was a "new genre making RTS" must be blind.
War3 takes many ideas from its predecessors and quite a few ideas (namely, heroes that level up and replay feature) from the Myth series. One could argue that 3D terrain sort of followed so it isn't taken directly.
And in my opinion, Myths work better because there's no micromanagement whatsoever (If I buy a strategy game, I don't want to play an economy simulation, thank you), just the strategy, and every unit is able to "level up".
(Off-topic rambling: Now I only wish Mythdev would release Myth II's new version for Linux too (1.4 is for Win/Mac only at the moment, I'm still stuck here with SDL1.1 statically linked binary and "bungie.net" when everyone's gone to PlayMyth and such), and port Myth III to Linux, even when the latter is probably wishful thinking...)
On the other hand, Blizzard never claimed they're innovative as such, and while they make cliched games, they at least make these games very very pretty and shiny in visual, audio and gameplay sides. Blizzard's garbage is for most part playable and enjoyable garbage, and that's unusual! =)
But progress in some X apps never fail to amaze me. I was writing one RPG module in OpenOffice.org, and decided to copy a little bit of song lyrics to it from Mozilla. The page that had the lyrics used what the lyric page author probably calls "l33t f0nts and cUlrs". I selected the text, hit middle button in OO.o, and uttered a quiet random voice of amazement as it actually copied the font and color too. That was pretty unexpected! The next task was to figure out how to remove the undesired formatting =)
Hm? Oh yeah, I'm rambling again. I should really drink less coffee. I'd better stop.
...and GNUstep, which is the same system as OSX. Well, I also looked at the GNUstep built app stuff and the complications under the hood are pretty convoluted, but at least it hides the complexity. Binary distribution seems pretty straightforward - there's AppName.app directory tree that can be tarred and untarred under /Local/Applications. Very neat. Now, if only the whole development environment would be >1.0 and there would be some *good* documentation... oh, yeah, more actually working applications would do no harm either.
Now I wish Python would do stuff like that that, also. Or at very least I wish Blender folks would fix their damn editor in the Windows port of Blender =)
But seriously, I think sometimes stuff like this is very cool, even when it looks somewhat, um, inelegant. Uses for constructs like this may surface in unexpected places.
We have the same sort of thing in Finnish military to find potentials for the NCO / reserve officer training - two tests, if I remember correctly, one that has math skills and logic, one that tests ability to withstand pressure (They ask stupid questions about the subject's mental health repeatedly in different ways =). Of course, we were not told that was the strategy until when we got the results, everyone assumed the actual answers to the questions are important... clever.
When I did that there actually were people who did try to answer randomly. Most of these people weren't actually insane, but rather were of those 17-year-olds who had volunteered to come to the service early. Some of these individuals were unfortunately still quite immature =)
(Likewise, we don't have tests like this for academia - the decisive factor here is the matriculation examination, combined with entrance examinations for individual institutions.)
Okay, so the Linux NWN client won't do cutscenes. Big deal. Very few mods use cutscenes anyway, and the only thing I remember from the cutscenes in the official campaign is that the playback was quite choppy. =)
But the developer section is huge news. Yeah, the obscure file formats Bioware has developed have been reverse-engineered, but this stuff is still a little bit spotty here and there so official documentation is definitely a nice thing.
Yeah, the toolkit won't be ported officially, but this file format news and the developer support in general is good for people like OpenKnights who work on Linux/MacOSX tools.
Could be worse. Could be so much worse.
Yep. Game cutscene production is often out of the league of Your Average Modder. The software is way too expensive and lousy software makes cheesy cutscenes. (Heck, the cutscene tutorial by Bioware recommended PowerPoint and an .avi screen recorder! Ewww!) Almost everyone can make mods with the toolset, quite a few can make custom 3D objects, but producing several minutes of cool-looking animations is stuff that requires a severe caffeine budget for even pros.
Besides, for most modules I've seen, the opening and closing videos are always optional and are gigantic downloads that most people will skip anyway.
You're kidding, right?
EA, the company that made Origin (creators of Ultima VII, the best CRPG ever made) make Ultima VIII and... um, that other game, I think? The company that once carried Bullfrog's games but somehow doesn't, anymore? The company that gets most of its money from crappy sports games that are re-released every year, and expansion packs for one of the most pointless games in existence, The Sims?
Right.
Yeah, but at least they could bring sweet revenge on EA.
The Sims: Altered Beast
Sims turning into werewolves and killing sims! Woohoo!
Or make a new Sonic game where Sonic destroys a Cube, Sphere and a Tetrahedron. Or something. Probably not original but at least it has a point.
Gartner and some MS supporters on a local Holy Wars newsgroup always get caught in the "Linux isn't actually free" part and say that TCO is lower.
...which is why everyone who has ever been to that group now use "TCO" as an expression meaning "if we had been using something other than Windows, this would have been really cheap." For example, "Exchange blew up again and we lost hours and hours fixing it. TCO! TCO!" Or "So the next version of Windows will be even more expensive and requires subscription? TCO!" ...
Nobody seemed to really put that much faith in Gartner analyses. Except the people who make decisions. Infortunately.
Come on, everyone knows how to play "Stones"... =)
Let me guess: "Ultima I-VI Series" published by Encore? People were driven mad by the lack of documentation on that one. Not me, I was probably insane before that too. Can't remember.
Some helpful people have published the documentation for I-VI precisely for the reason that no proper manuals existed. The basics (including the missing copy protection questions) are in the Ultima Archive (It's on a website controlled by EA, so it can't be too WaReZy)... There are others that have complete manuals and the books that come with the games, with colored art, too lazy to google for them right now. =/
Um, don't know about that. I have two copies of the game - the Complete Ultima 7 and one from some EA compilation - and both have a list of the asked coordinates and stuff on the documentation. The Complete Ultima 7 has it even on the printed installation instruction booklet / quick start thing, and it also has the whole map as PDF. Neither came with a cloth map, which is obviously a great shame, but this is what I get for being so slow.
Actually, I always thought the real copy protection feature of the game was the Voodoo Annoyator, er, excuse me, Protected Mode Memory Manager - and Exult team did a wonderful job cracking this cunning encryption scheme =)
Well, the program was used to "sketch" the music, which sort of implies that they didn't do it all the way on the program.
If the chart-topping single would have been made from beginning to end within the generator using nothing but pre-packaged samples, that might have been far more worrying.
::spills coffee when listening to a cool .mod remix of Bach's Toccata and Fugue::
Well, last I checked Theora was alpha, bitstream format was not stabilized, and there was only Linux code. And in my humble opinion, a codec isn't a codec unless I can VirtualDub it (or otherwise encode in Windows), WMP it, and Xine it...
I would have loved to see a comparison of VP3 and other codecs - last time Doom9 tried it they were criticized of Not Knowing How To Twiddle The Controls. My own conclusion was that I could get pretty good stuff... hrm.
I've noted the quality vs file size of Bink is pretty good, and I'm not surprised that game developers love it. I also like the Rad Video Tools application, because it can transform most game movie clips (including Smacker, Bink and QuickTime) to AVI, with some minor processing too - really convenient...
Yet, even when the quality is pretty good, I'd hesitate to use Bink for anything because almost no player supports it - there's the featureless Bink player and that's that. Then again, it seems it was never intended for any other purpose than game cutscenes and such, where good watching UI is irrelevant.
<linuxrant> And RAD folks should better tell us soon that there's a port to Linux so that Bioware can give us the True Client. </linuxrant>
So one day he rolls 2, consults the table, and says, "Hmm, this week it will be... Gygaxoids??? This 3rd ed Revised is weird."
Heh. Actually, I believe it comes from earlier meaning of the word 'shuttle' (Finnish 'sukkula') - a weaving instrument that goes back and forth, or a reasonable facsimile of thereof that does something similar. The translation of 'Space Shuttle' was kind of literal and the name stuck.
Quote goes after the program name (LOAD "programname",8,1). The most typical form was, of course, LOAD "*",8,1 which loaded the first program on the floppy's catalog.
Tape users got it a little bit easier - just LOAD, or pushing Shift+RunStop.
This was an Obscure Command-Line Interface by today's standards, but the Commodores still came and conquered the gamers' hearts =)
(And what do you mean by "were launched"? They still are =)
Oh yes, the Barcode Battler. Interesting idea, not that charming implementation back in the day... It got boring pretty fast.
Apparently there have been some revival of the idea (some game called Scannerz was being advertised here, I believe), but I have no idea if it's any better.