Netscape died when IE5 was released as it turned out that IE didn't have completely b0rked support for basic HTML features such as CSS and DHTML.
Hmm... So IE5 supports CSS right...
What's the CSS way of doing that ol' "Netscape Extensions" and later HTML 4 Transitional <img border="0"...>? I've always figured out that it's a:link img { border: 0px; } or some variant of thereof - it worked in NS4, it works in Mozilla, it is a correct construct according to the CSS validator, but it bloody well won't work in any version of IE I've tried!
Am I just stupid or what? I've been doing web pages for a long time and I've still not mastered the art of Unbordering Some Strategic Linked Buttons. I feel miserable.
I don't buy the "parody" argument. Nor do I buy the "cleverness"...
How about the "zen" argument? "If you have to ask, you will never understand" =)
Yeah, I liked the game as a whole too and actually found the dialogue good too, but damn if I have to explain why it was so good. =) I just can't understand why some people didn't like it...
Yeah, WPTS back when I fist discovered it had an article about pretentious web pages. There's time and place for everything, and really "creative" and "unusual" navigation and presentation don't belong to average web pages. (The trend still continues. Everyone who makes web pages should definitely read this classic article.)
People who insist on art approach to mundane issues should focus on decorating (or non-decorating, as the modern schools of design seem to teach), not just making stuff that looks good. There's as much art in creative use of media and practical use of media. The latter can actually be far more challenging and rewarding =)
A bit more concrete example: The NeXT Cube was a beautiful computer, a true work of art. Did it also have an UI that drove people nuts? Nope. It was a beautiful computer with a functional, nice enough OS. (And now I'll never be able to get one. At least we have GNUstep.)
Art has its place, but designers should never forget that What Works, Works. =)
There was an excellent C-64 soccer game called "Microprose Soccer".
Oh, yeah, Microprose Soccer, how could I forget. Nice enough playability and I particularly liked the cool and very authentic looking replays, looked like real videotape rewinds and all =)
I was never a big fan of top-down sports games, though (not sure why), International Soccer was isometric side-view...
We might very well end up with a situation in which two individuals, indistinguishable by inspection, are accorded different rights, because one is a anthropomorphic wolf (a wolf made to look human) and one is a lupopomorphic man (a man made to look like a wolf).
Imagine the legal mess that will be!
...and determining one's human/animal ancestry can also be difficult. A cow-morph was asked, "Are you a cow or a human?" to which she replied, "Mu." =)
Oh, I (of course) thought of GM things as one way to furrydom. I even thought of word monsters like "lupomorphosis" and "vulpomorphosis" in advance... =)
I write in pure HTML - why would anyone do different?
People seem to think it's easier to do HTML with a graphical toy, even when it, of course, isn't in retrospect - you get a pretty site with, shall we say, challenging HTML code that people will need to modify by hand...
Amaya tends to generate pretty cool and even standards-compliant code, though it's still possible to do strange things with it.
Suppose you're (like me) teaching non-techs how to do web pages with Amaya. You can start telling web newbies about page structure, different meanings of different tags, but when they find out the hard font changing options, all hell breaks loose and they never learn how to do proper pages. =( And on top of all this, they insist on using graphical tools because raw HTML is "hard".
If people call HTML hard, well, I'm these days tempted to tell them back, "Ah, but in that case, just write the content and let someone else to do the HTML page. HTML requires some patience and willing to understand. If you don't have either, it obviously isn't your forte." The problem is, some people might be angered by that reply...
Anyway, personally, yeah, I think Amaya is nice, but I still like xemacs, optionally with wml+tidy =)
PCs just don't have all the good games, I don't think we can get rid of C64 yet... Some nice PC titles have surfaced on genres that are difficult to implement on C64 (large RPGs are really cool on PC, without the constant floppy swapping, and the graphics are finally starting to get better than some of the best C64 titles...)
did you know they haven't even produced a single fun soccer game for PC? EA is rumored to push some garbage for the unsuspecting masses (thus has it always been, and thus it shall always be!), but that's about that, nothing as good as the good ol' Commodore's International Football. Sad. Really sad.
All that and, as I recall the stores were chock full of games for DOS.
Yeah, and as far as I can tell, Linux gaming is just about as easy as DOS gaming - somewhat confusing at first, but definitely easy with some dedication.
I'd even get farther by saying it's actually far easier than DOS gaming. DOS games had a page of install instructions and two for making boot floppies and fixing the startup in general, but the Loki games generally had just that one page of install info =)
When users apt-get install firebird, should they get the browser or the database?
Okay, this comment has nothing to do with the point in your message, but apt-get install firebird will not install anything, not even Firebird database right now... apt-cache search firebird brings up many many packages related to the Firebird database (actually, my reaction to this listing was more like "Super? Classic? 32 or 64 bit I/O? Aw fweck it, too many choices! apt-get install postgresql. I've heard that's a good one." =)
Oh yeah, but it runs already, sort of. Like just today I totally quit playing NWN on Windows and switched to Linux, because I got my accelerated graphics working and got far better performance than the 5 fps I pulled earlier. It was like, adding "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1" to the nwn shell script with vim because it used the Mesa library for some reason instead of the nvidia-glx libGL.so
I mean, it's so simple. I can't see why anyone's still using Windows for gaming.
(Yeah, I'm inspired by that... whatever switch ad parody it was out there in the great web. But really, I'm happy that it now works and I get really amazingly smooth game. =)
For as long as I remember I have had/usr/bin/omega (TeX macro package almost two people use) and/usr/games/omega (Roguelike game - apparently in Debian called omega-rpg).
There's also Jack the CD ripper and Jack the low-latency audio API.
So so what if there's a Firebird and a Firebird. I'm sure they can both be packaged without too many conflicts =)
People always say "it is better at lower bitrates" but who wants to listen to audio at lower (read: poorer) bitrates?
That's missing the point. The obvious conclusion everyone is supposed to make is this, now said aloud in case you can't come to it yourself: "If it sounds Truly Bold on bitrates that make mp3 encoders sputter, it sounds Rather Majestic on higher bitrates."
For digital backup, I can't imagine using anything less than --alt-preset standard/extreme whatever from LAME or MPC.
Are you serious??? For digital backup, I can't imagine using anything less than -8 or whatever from FLAC. Or better yet, burn it on audio CD as an uncompressed.wav or a redbook audio track.
For my casual music listening, oggenc -q 6 is far more than adequate.
It's always easy to get hidebound and get stuck to using one thing that you know to work, rather than finding out what's actually best. I too thought MP3s were pretty good until I a) noted one rather high-bitrate MP3 sounded like crap compared to the CD, and b) a medium-bitrate Ogg Vorbis of same version sounded damn good still. Just my experiences, again...
but we are quickly moving to ubiquitous broadband world, making a 24kBps or whatever stream quite feasible, making the sacrifice in quality unjustified.
Oh yeah, broadband world all right. Internet radio clients get faster lines. ISPs still charge the same per gigabyte from the radio server, as they have from the beginning of the time. Right?
Hell, I just tried downloading stuff from archive.org (an etree.org distributor). Had to leave the thing downloading the song for several minutes (didn't check, I went to sleep), and I have a "broadband" connection. It was a.shn file, which is a lossless, True Quality-Freak Format like FLAC. This is the quality we're aiming, streaming losslessly compressed stuff - by your logic, anything else is futile. Sure, maybe in future it's possible to stream this stuff. Right now, it's quite ridiculous to even try.
At the moment, I use SixXS ipv6gate. I bet if I told about this site to censorware folks, they'd go "this isn't a very good loophole site, is it? Slow like heck and the addresses won't even resolve most of the time!" =) as if anyone would have heard of ipv6 by now... (glory and honor to most well-working Linux 6to4 implementation!)
If that isn't the thing to do, there's SSL (stuff goes encr0pt3d), and if the site doesn't do SSL, I can SSH to another host + lynx, or SSH port forward some local port to some other host and go to http://localhost:whatever/...
And no, I don't have a censorware proxy anywhere near. Just that the ISP sometimes gets this weird idea like "hey! Let's build a transparent web proxy!" that they have yet to learn how to do propely. =)
Microsoft can simply give Windows (XP/2003) away for free.. (Hey.. it's a 30 day window period) and when you want to "Activate", you then have to pay.
Pay how, exactly? Nowadays, I can go to the store, pick up WinXP and pay in hard cash. Send me a bill? No thanks, paying in cash is far easier. Credit card? I don't have one. Phfff.
The system you're proposing is similar to shareware. The problem with shareware, in my opinion, is that if you tell people "You can use this for free for 30 days, then you need to pay to continue using it", most people hear only the "You can use this for free" part. People like the word "free".
Then there were always people who got around the registration and nag screens using tricks. Or just didn't care. Now, think of Microsoft making Windows shareware. Microsoft is so universally despised that people would certainly go very far trying to find ways around the activation. No sales.
The current system makes people pay in advance. This means sales.
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
I had one particularly bad month when I had to detach and attach my keyboard and mouse many times. My crappy motherboard absolutely insists on powering down to register PS/2 plugging.
So, I first got an USB mouse and later a keyboard. The PS/2 devices usually gave some Final Curses and then after some setup I was happily using USB keyboards and mice in both Linux and Win98SE.
But I did attach the PS/2-USB-adapter that came with the keyboard to the PS/2 port. One reason.
I still have the root partition on ext2. Sometimes when I do crazy opengl crap the OS crashes. That means fsck.
And sometimes that means it insists that I log on as r00t and do a manual fsck.
And at that point, the USB keyboard ab-so-lute-ly refuses to cooperate. It works after the boot, not during it. Even if the mods are loaded or if the USB stuff is compiled in. (Maybe the BIOS supports PS/2 keyboard emulation for USB only if nobody asks for USB bus, and Linux finds the bus but won't actually load the kb drivers before going to fsck...)
And I still get two harmless "PS/2 keyboard not found" errors when I boot Linux.
Maybe the kernels should really focus better on USB input devices? I heard that's where the future is. Like, assume there's an USB bus, if it can't find it, then look at PS/2. Or something. I don't know.
I agree with the story points for most parts. U7 is a really good game. (I just hope Exult folks implement journal so that I can remember what the hell I was doing after I've taken a break of a month. I guess I need to start all over again and get a notebook like everybody else! =)
I see the problem with buying the sucky campaign. I have some hopes about Shadows of Undrentide campaign, but I'll be definitely buying it for the tiles and creatures =)
The engine has been pushed pretty far - not quite as cool as official support, but good enough. 1st person view was possible (until.28, camera change broke it) for people who have tunnel-vision and insist on torturing themselves with it. (Really, what's wrong with over-the-shoulder??? Bloody immersive...) There has been sky hacks, but regrettably it needs a quite dynamiteful vidcard. There was some "go jump in lake" script which I haven't seen. And no, there's no Z axis =( Yet, climbing walls or cliffs is cheatable with exit triggers. No transportation is stupid, yeah, but static ship transports aren't that bad (the galley in last NWNWednesday rules - small file and feels almost like the real thing! =)
Regarding the potential... well, Half-Life also has the potential to be used for RPGs.
Yeah, and I have here a recent copies of XEmacs and GCC that also have potential to create great CRPGs. But obviously it's far easier to create interesting RPG scenarios with NWN toolkit - the toolkit is suitable for the purpose, so let's use the suitable tools =)
It's a good thing people can use the NwN engine to make their own games, but it would have been an even "gooder" thing if NwN was a better game to begin with.
Mmyeah, the official campaign obviously wasn't Bioware's focus, but rather the toolkit and the multiplayer. Shame, but hardly something that destroys it.
The main difference is the fact that the world in Ultima games (especially U7 and U7p2) is much more dynamic, much more "alive".
Ultimas are made for single-player game only, and in their design, the story was of lesser priority. Thus, the game needed a good world where things seem alive.
In NWN, the story is more important, the players need to interact with the world far less because they can interact with the other players. People don't come to the module to live virtual life for months in game time, they're coming to adventure for hours at time.
Yet, NWN has tools to produce modules with a "living world", and even tools to produce MMORPG-like persistent worlds (even when it's clumsy at the time). People are making story-focused games simply because making story-focused games is far easier. Besides, that was the focus of the game from early on: Make a game where DMs can create their own game modules to tell stories and improvise. In PnP games, people sat down and went adventuring, led by their DM. In NWN, people sit down in front of their PCs and log on to server where DM leads them to the adventure.
Certainly, creating a world where everything is scheduled and every NPC has daily routines is hard now. But as said, I'm really waiting for something like the Memetic AI to make lifelike routines easier. =)
Most people at the moment seem just think "we don't need a living world - let's build a world in MMORPG style where players can be their own 'living' NPCs."
If we were to download a module called "The Defeat of the Guardian" and play that with a group of 5 people, would it make sense if the adventurers just sat down and baked bread for weeks? Sure, it would be a nice touch, but hey, nobody expects that in a module of such epic proportions. Who wants to bake bread when they are adventurers by occupation and there's a world to save?
This would be perfectly OK if a) you could buy just the engine and the tools, without the original campaign
I don't follow the logic here. If the point of the game is the toolkit, who cares of the official work? If it's good, fine, if it's bad, bleah? Or are you saying people shouldn't pay extra for the official campaign if it sucks?
...how we are going to be able to find older, less popular music titles?
And personally, I don't care if Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is marketed as "The first videogame to release a boxed set of compact discs of the soundtrack" (obviously no one at IMDB has heard of a little-known game series called Final Fantasy, just for instance...) - where the heck can I find game soundtracks in general?
There are old, old games that I wanted soundtracks from. When AudioGalaxy was up, it was easy to find the complete Myth II soundtrack, which was released on CD but it's bloody difficult to buy here!
And as for ripping music from the games themselves - yeah, these days many games have some form of extractible.mp3/.ogg/.wav/RedBook soundtrack (yeah, vorbis too!), but that's always tricky.
There are rare cases where things turn out to be very good and leave a very positive impression...
This is the only reason I share the game music I've ripped or downloaded: The music is bloody difficult to get (especially in high-quality format), and it should be easier.
WML does most of what you list, and I've found it far niftier than most of the WYSIWYG stuff. Has everything from macros and Perl subroutines through custom tags, content diversion, conditional slicing (good for building different language versions from same source file!), markup fixups (and I pipe everything through Tidy afterwards, whee, clean as heck).
It allows me to operate on clean, simple HTML snippets and hide unbelieveable amount of complicated generation behind clean tags and processing instructions.
FrontPage may be good for people who make changes to websites, but WML is good for people who make changes to their websites and know what they've done. =)
...were added to distract you from her absolutely terrible voice acting.
Agreed, Aribeth was tolerable only in the last
chapter. But, well, paladins are dull =)
BTW, if you don't have the game and are looking for a real RPG (à là Ultima 7), this is not it. NwN is a lot more like Diablo than like Ultima.
But it certainly is more like a "real" RPG than Diablo or Nethack, and has the potential to be used for real RPGs!
There's no food,
Which is, in my opinion, only a good thing. But if you want food, get any module with Hardcore Ruleset or the other cool script packs - resting requires bedroll and food rations.
dialogs and "quests" are very simplistic,
Yep. Though I did enjoy some of the quests that didn't involve combat at all, for example, the defense attorney quest in ch3.
NPCs just stand in the same place day and night (they don't have jobs, don't go to the pub, etc., like in U7),
Yeah, admittedly that's bad. Right now, I'm waiting for the memetic AI to develop something practical and non-beta - finally a CRPG AI that's cooler than U7's usecode =) For highly personal reasons, the recent demo of wolf packs was pretty damn cool.
and the scenery is very repetitive.
I've said this before, but I think tilesets are crutch for a weak imagination. The tilesets as they stand cover most stuff with reasonable detail and can be used to make distinct areas, which is good enough for most purposes.
they have stolen those hands and coming out of the wall from zelda 1 on the nes:-)
Those are Bigby's Hands... Did Gary Gygax (or whoever came up with those) borrow the hands from Nintendo or the other way around? I think it's more likely that they both come independently to the conclusion that "Giant hands that throw people around are cool!" - not an entirely far-fetched idea =)
I don't think Office Depot considers Red Hat or OO to be Windows XP apps.
Red Hat maybe not, but OpenOffice.org sure runs on Windows too. (Or maybe my NWN design work was so coffee-powered that I thought I had installed it in Win98SE and wrote pages of stuff, when I in fact had done that in Linux instead... =)
Charity for me is something that you don't expect anything in return from,
Whenever I donate anything on charities, I sure expect something in return. If I a coin or six to Red Cross, I expect that someone out in the cold cruel world gets a little bit of help. It may not help me, right now, but it helps someone out there. And if I ever end up bruised and mangled in a traffic accident or something (it is pretty unlikely with today's safe transportation methods, but it can happen), I sure hope there's someone around the area whom the helpful Red Cross folks have taught first aid =)
Besides...
Think of me. I'm a tunafish-eatin' student who can't afford audio codec software. I can get everything from xiph.org! Wheee! Thanks, xiph.org donators! Without you, it would (almost) be a world of silence for me!
PS. I'm not donating to Xiph at the moment - aside of the fact that I don't have the money for that, the international banking is very costy business for someone without a credit card. =(
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... So IE5 supports CSS right...
What's the CSS way of doing that ol' "Netscape Extensions" and later HTML 4 Transitional <img border="0" ...>? I've always figured out that it's a:link img { border: 0px; } or some variant of thereof - it worked in NS4, it works in Mozilla, it is a correct construct according to the CSS validator, but it bloody well won't work in any version of IE I've tried!
Am I just stupid or what? I've been doing web pages for a long time and I've still not mastered the art of Unbordering Some Strategic Linked Buttons. I feel miserable.
How about the "zen" argument? "If you have to ask, you will never understand" =)
Yeah, I liked the game as a whole too and actually found the dialogue good too, but damn if I have to explain why it was so good. =) I just can't understand why some people didn't like it...
Yeah, WPTS back when I fist discovered it had an article about pretentious web pages. There's time and place for everything, and really "creative" and "unusual" navigation and presentation don't belong to average web pages. (The trend still continues. Everyone who makes web pages should definitely read this classic article.)
People who insist on art approach to mundane issues should focus on decorating (or non-decorating, as the modern schools of design seem to teach), not just making stuff that looks good. There's as much art in creative use of media and practical use of media. The latter can actually be far more challenging and rewarding =)
A bit more concrete example: The NeXT Cube was a beautiful computer, a true work of art. Did it also have an UI that drove people nuts? Nope. It was a beautiful computer with a functional, nice enough OS. (And now I'll never be able to get one. At least we have GNUstep.)
Art has its place, but designers should never forget that What Works, Works. =)
Oh, yeah, Microprose Soccer, how could I forget. Nice enough playability and I particularly liked the cool and very authentic looking replays, looked like real videotape rewinds and all =)
I was never a big fan of top-down sports games, though (not sure why), International Soccer was isometric side-view...
...and determining one's human/animal ancestry can also be difficult. A cow-morph was asked, "Are you a cow or a human?" to which she replied, "Mu." =)
Oh, I (of course) thought of GM things as one way to furrydom. I even thought of word monsters like "lupomorphosis" and "vulpomorphosis" in advance... =)
People seem to think it's easier to do HTML with a graphical toy, even when it, of course, isn't in retrospect - you get a pretty site with, shall we say, challenging HTML code that people will need to modify by hand...
Amaya tends to generate pretty cool and even standards-compliant code, though it's still possible to do strange things with it.
Suppose you're (like me) teaching non-techs how to do web pages with Amaya. You can start telling web newbies about page structure, different meanings of different tags, but when they find out the hard font changing options, all hell breaks loose and they never learn how to do proper pages. =( And on top of all this, they insist on using graphical tools because raw HTML is "hard".
If people call HTML hard, well, I'm these days tempted to tell them back, "Ah, but in that case, just write the content and let someone else to do the HTML page. HTML requires some patience and willing to understand. If you don't have either, it obviously isn't your forte." The problem is, some people might be angered by that reply...
Anyway, personally, yeah, I think Amaya is nice, but I still like xemacs, optionally with wml+tidy =)
PCs just don't have all the good games, I don't think we can get rid of C64 yet... Some nice PC titles have surfaced on genres that are difficult to implement on C64 (large RPGs are really cool on PC, without the constant floppy swapping, and the graphics are finally starting to get better than some of the best C64 titles...)
did you know they haven't even produced a single fun soccer game for PC? EA is rumored to push some garbage for the unsuspecting masses (thus has it always been, and thus it shall always be!), but that's about that, nothing as good as the good ol' Commodore's International Football. Sad. Really sad.
(This message was 85% serious. =)
Yeah, and as far as I can tell, Linux gaming is just about as easy as DOS gaming - somewhat confusing at first, but definitely easy with some dedication.
I'd even get farther by saying it's actually far easier than DOS gaming. DOS games had a page of install instructions and two for making boot floppies and fixing the startup in general, but the Loki games generally had just that one page of install info =)
Okay, this comment has nothing to do with the point in your message, but apt-get install firebird will not install anything, not even Firebird database right now... apt-cache search firebird brings up many many packages related to the Firebird database (actually, my reaction to this listing was more like "Super? Classic? 32 or 64 bit I/O? Aw fweck it, too many choices! apt-get install postgresql. I've heard that's a good one." =)
Oh yeah, but it runs already, sort of. Like just today I totally quit playing NWN on Windows and switched to Linux, because I got my accelerated graphics working and got far better performance than the 5 fps I pulled earlier. It was like, adding "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1" to the nwn shell script with vim because it used the Mesa library for some reason instead of the nvidia-glx libGL.so
I mean, it's so simple. I can't see why anyone's still using Windows for gaming.
(Yeah, I'm inspired by that... whatever switch ad parody it was out there in the great web. But really, I'm happy that it now works and I get really amazingly smooth game. =)
For as long as I remember I have had /usr/bin/omega (TeX macro package almost two people use) and /usr/games/omega (Roguelike game - apparently in Debian called omega-rpg).
There's also Jack the CD ripper and Jack the low-latency audio API.
So so what if there's a Firebird and a Firebird. I'm sure they can both be packaged without too many conflicts =)
That's missing the point. The obvious conclusion everyone is supposed to make is this, now said aloud in case you can't come to it yourself: "If it sounds Truly Bold on bitrates that make mp3 encoders sputter, it sounds Rather Majestic on higher bitrates."
Are you serious??? For digital backup, I can't imagine using anything less than -8 or whatever from FLAC. Or better yet, burn it on audio CD as an uncompressed .wav or a redbook audio track.
For my casual music listening, oggenc -q 6 is far more than adequate.
It's always easy to get hidebound and get stuck to using one thing that you know to work, rather than finding out what's actually best. I too thought MP3s were pretty good until I a) noted one rather high-bitrate MP3 sounded like crap compared to the CD, and b) a medium-bitrate Ogg Vorbis of same version sounded damn good still. Just my experiences, again...
Oh yeah, broadband world all right. Internet radio clients get faster lines. ISPs still charge the same per gigabyte from the radio server, as they have from the beginning of the time. Right?
Hell, I just tried downloading stuff from archive.org (an etree.org distributor). Had to leave the thing downloading the song for several minutes (didn't check, I went to sleep), and I have a "broadband" connection. It was a .shn file, which is a lossless, True Quality-Freak Format like FLAC. This is the quality we're aiming, streaming losslessly compressed stuff - by your logic, anything else is futile. Sure, maybe in future it's possible to stream this stuff. Right now, it's quite ridiculous to even try.
At the moment, I use SixXS ipv6gate. I bet if I told about this site to censorware folks, they'd go "this isn't a very good loophole site, is it? Slow like heck and the addresses won't even resolve most of the time!" =) as if anyone would have heard of ipv6 by now... (glory and honor to most well-working Linux 6to4 implementation!)
If that isn't the thing to do, there's SSL (stuff goes encr0pt3d), and if the site doesn't do SSL, I can SSH to another host + lynx, or SSH port forward some local port to some other host and go to http://localhost:whatever/...
And no, I don't have a censorware proxy anywhere near. Just that the ISP sometimes gets this weird idea like "hey! Let's build a transparent web proxy!" that they have yet to learn how to do propely. =)
Pay how, exactly? Nowadays, I can go to the store, pick up WinXP and pay in hard cash. Send me a bill? No thanks, paying in cash is far easier. Credit card? I don't have one. Phfff.
The system you're proposing is similar to shareware. The problem with shareware, in my opinion, is that if you tell people "You can use this for free for 30 days, then you need to pay to continue using it", most people hear only the "You can use this for free" part. People like the word "free".
Then there were always people who got around the registration and nag screens using tricks. Or just didn't care. Now, think of Microsoft making Windows shareware. Microsoft is so universally despised that people would certainly go very far trying to find ways around the activation. No sales.
The current system makes people pay in advance. This means sales.
I had one particularly bad month when I had to detach and attach my keyboard and mouse many times. My crappy motherboard absolutely insists on powering down to register PS/2 plugging.
So, I first got an USB mouse and later a keyboard. The PS/2 devices usually gave some Final Curses and then after some setup I was happily using USB keyboards and mice in both Linux and Win98SE.
But I did attach the PS/2-USB-adapter that came with the keyboard to the PS/2 port. One reason.
I still have the root partition on ext2. Sometimes when I do crazy opengl crap the OS crashes. That means fsck.
And sometimes that means it insists that I log on as r00t and do a manual fsck.
And at that point, the USB keyboard ab-so-lute-ly refuses to cooperate. It works after the boot, not during it. Even if the mods are loaded or if the USB stuff is compiled in. (Maybe the BIOS supports PS/2 keyboard emulation for USB only if nobody asks for USB bus, and Linux finds the bus but won't actually load the kb drivers before going to fsck...)
And I still get two harmless "PS/2 keyboard not found" errors when I boot Linux.
Maybe the kernels should really focus better on USB input devices? I heard that's where the future is. Like, assume there's an USB bus, if it can't find it, then look at PS/2. Or something. I don't know.
Because "OpenOffice" was someone else's trademark...
(My guess it was some product that was "open" as in "Open Group", therefore it didn't gain that much reputation =)
I agree with the story points for most parts. U7 is a really good game. (I just hope Exult folks implement journal so that I can remember what the hell I was doing after I've taken a break of a month. I guess I need to start all over again and get a notebook like everybody else! =)
I see the problem with buying the sucky campaign. I have some hopes about Shadows of Undrentide campaign, but I'll be definitely buying it for the tiles and creatures =)
The engine has been pushed pretty far - not quite as cool as official support, but good enough. 1st person view was possible (until .28, camera change broke it) for people who have tunnel-vision and insist on torturing themselves with it. (Really, what's wrong with over-the-shoulder??? Bloody immersive...) There has been sky hacks, but regrettably it needs a quite dynamiteful vidcard. There was some "go jump in lake" script which I haven't seen. And no, there's no Z axis =( Yet, climbing walls or cliffs is cheatable with exit triggers. No transportation is stupid, yeah, but static ship transports aren't that bad (the galley in last NWNWednesday rules - small file and feels almost like the real thing! =)
Ultimas are made for single-player game only, and in their design, the story was of lesser priority. Thus, the game needed a good world where things seem alive.
In NWN, the story is more important, the players need to interact with the world far less because they can interact with the other players. People don't come to the module to live virtual life for months in game time, they're coming to adventure for hours at time.
Yet, NWN has tools to produce modules with a "living world", and even tools to produce MMORPG-like persistent worlds (even when it's clumsy at the time). People are making story-focused games simply because making story-focused games is far easier. Besides, that was the focus of the game from early on: Make a game where DMs can create their own game modules to tell stories and improvise. In PnP games, people sat down and went adventuring, led by their DM. In NWN, people sit down in front of their PCs and log on to server where DM leads them to the adventure.
Certainly, creating a world where everything is scheduled and every NPC has daily routines is hard now. But as said, I'm really waiting for something like the Memetic AI to make lifelike routines easier. =)
Most people at the moment seem just think "we don't need a living world - let's build a world in MMORPG style where players can be their own 'living' NPCs."
If we were to download a module called "The Defeat of the Guardian" and play that with a group of 5 people, would it make sense if the adventurers just sat down and baked bread for weeks? Sure, it would be a nice touch, but hey, nobody expects that in a module of such epic proportions. Who wants to bake bread when they are adventurers by occupation and there's a world to save?
I don't follow the logic here. If the point of the game is the toolkit, who cares of the official work? If it's good, fine, if it's bad, bleah? Or are you saying people shouldn't pay extra for the official campaign if it sucks?
And personally, I don't care if Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is marketed as "The first videogame to release a boxed set of compact discs of the soundtrack" (obviously no one at IMDB has heard of a little-known game series called Final Fantasy, just for instance...) - where the heck can I find game soundtracks in general?
There are old, old games that I wanted soundtracks from. When AudioGalaxy was up, it was easy to find the complete Myth II soundtrack, which was released on CD but it's bloody difficult to buy here!
And as for ripping music from the games themselves - yeah, these days many games have some form of extractible .mp3/.ogg/.wav/RedBook soundtrack (yeah, vorbis too!), but that's always tricky.
There are rare cases where things turn out to be very good and leave a very positive impression...
This is the only reason I share the game music I've ripped or downloaded: The music is bloody difficult to get (especially in high-quality format), and it should be easier.
It allows me to operate on clean, simple HTML snippets and hide unbelieveable amount of complicated generation behind clean tags and processing instructions.
FrontPage may be good for people who make changes to websites, but WML is good for people who make changes to their websites and know what they've done. =)
Agreed, Aribeth was tolerable only in the last chapter. But, well, paladins are dull =)
But it certainly is more like a "real" RPG than Diablo or Nethack, and has the potential to be used for real RPGs!
Which is, in my opinion, only a good thing. But if you want food, get any module with Hardcore Ruleset or the other cool script packs - resting requires bedroll and food rations.
Yep. Though I did enjoy some of the quests that didn't involve combat at all, for example, the defense attorney quest in ch3.
Yeah, admittedly that's bad. Right now, I'm waiting for the memetic AI to develop something practical and non-beta - finally a CRPG AI that's cooler than U7's usecode =) For highly personal reasons, the recent demo of wolf packs was pretty damn cool.
I've said this before, but I think tilesets are crutch for a weak imagination. The tilesets as they stand cover most stuff with reasonable detail and can be used to make distinct areas, which is good enough for most purposes.
Those are Bigby's Hands... Did Gary Gygax (or whoever came up with those) borrow the hands from Nintendo or the other way around? I think it's more likely that they both come independently to the conclusion that "Giant hands that throw people around are cool!" - not an entirely far-fetched idea =)
Maybe that's just a safeguard. Under normal conditions I'd think leaving content-type as is and setting "Content-Encoding: evil" would be better...
Red Hat maybe not, but OpenOffice.org sure runs on Windows too. (Or maybe my NWN design work was so coffee-powered that I thought I had installed it in Win98SE and wrote pages of stuff, when I in fact had done that in Linux instead... =)
Whenever I donate anything on charities, I sure expect something in return. If I a coin or six to Red Cross, I expect that someone out in the cold cruel world gets a little bit of help. It may not help me, right now, but it helps someone out there. And if I ever end up bruised and mangled in a traffic accident or something (it is pretty unlikely with today's safe transportation methods, but it can happen), I sure hope there's someone around the area whom the helpful Red Cross folks have taught first aid =)
Besides...
Think of me. I'm a tunafish-eatin' student who can't afford audio codec software. I can get everything from xiph.org! Wheee! Thanks, xiph.org donators! Without you, it would (almost) be a world of silence for me!
PS. I'm not donating to Xiph at the moment - aside of the fact that I don't have the money for that, the international banking is very costy business for someone without a credit card. =(