The essential problem with a lot of the dialogue about internet "harassment" is that it ignores a few salient points.
The internet has zero barrier to entry for discussion. A ten year old girl can send death threats on the internet.
As social animals, human beings moderate entry to discussion on the basis of age, appearance, social class and intelligence. They use various signals to determine if a given individual is worthy of being granted entry into a dialogue.
Those signals are largely absent on the internet unless someone is using their real-world identity or they've built up an identity which has widespread credibility. Most internet discussions thus have no barrier to entry allowing children to participate as freely as Nobel prize winners. Anyone who seriously talks about "men harassing women" on the internet is a moron. It's children harassing anyone who crosses into their line of fire. I'd wager most "harassment" comes from teenagers who are delighted to find a medium in which they can exercise power in contrast to a society where they usually have very little.
Similarly, a sheltered Leftist college student with no experience of the real world is able - from the shelter of his safe space - to try and lecture real men who do society's dirty work. Normally these two groups would never engage because the sheltered college boy would be too despised to be granted entry to the dialogue of masculine men.
Thus, the conflict on the 'Net caused by a lack of social barriers and consequences. It's not hard to understand, it's just annoying to see the rampant stupidity written about it.
In the case of the article, the critic has no idea who is sending him death threats and his assumption that they are "men" is ludicrous. They're most likely teen DC fans spewing forth invective from the safety of their mother's basement. And some of them will be girls.
I had a good look during the recent State of The Union and I couldn't see any mechanical devices whatsoever. They must've really cracked the miniaturization problem.
Wrong. On the contrary, the article - if you read it - specifically says the following:
The conclusion of this study is that as much as 99.8 % of all virus/malware infections caused by commercial exploit kits are a direct result of the lack of updating five specific software packages.
So, fully patched installs let through 0.2% of infections.
The 31.3% figure refers to the percentage of infections relative to exposure. In other words, it's the infection success rate over the entire data set.
> No. The store sold me the game, on the disc. Once I'm finished playing the game, I can do whatever the hell I want with the game and the disc
No. You can't. You can only do what you want with the disc. The game is an experience you - as a consumer - have consumed.
You can't regurgitate food and pass that on. You can't unlisten to music and expect to sell it, you can't unexperience a game and expect to sell that.
Your "stuff" is tangibles. It's material goods. You can expect to sell on your material goods because the value in those goods is embodied in the goods themselves.
The value in a game is the experience. The media in and of itself has no utility that you could continue to benefit from if you were to keep it. When you sell a chair, you're deprived of the value of that chair and its utility. Once you've installed a game, the utility of the media is gone and there's nothing for you to sell. You have the right to sell the delivery mechanism. You do not have the right to sell the experience. Only the publisher has that right.
Basically, the disc is a box, and the game is a cake. You've eaten the cake and are now loudly trying to proclaim your right to resell the box because it's capable of magically producing another cake. The fact that this is a byproduct of the delivery mechanism completely escapes you. Despite the fact you've contributed nothing to the cake, you feel you have the right to sell a cake-producing box and feel sufficiently aggrieved to bitch and whine when the people who actually put blood, sweat and tears into producing the magic cake-producing box object to your behaviour and take steps to ensure people buy their own cake-producing box instead of using yours to cheat the developer.
> And do you know what most gamers do with the money they get from selling their used games? They buy MORE games.
Oh, give me a break. If gamers had to buy all their games for full price, perhaps they'd have to - oh, I don't know - get a fucking job to pay for their gaming habit.
I'm not buying the retarded excuse that gamers need to rip off developers so they can buy more games. That's like saying piracy's okay, because pirates save money which they'll spend on other goods, thus pumping value back into the economy. And that benefits all of us, dontcha know!
Basically, I fully support the publishers doing everything they can to stop the used game market from stealing from them. If you don't like it, tough. Consider the benefits of growing up - you know... thinking and acting like an adult, instead of a leech expecting a free lunch.
The whole used-game market is a monumental exercise in hypocrisy on the part of gamers and used-game resellers such as GameStop.
Here's a little piece of education for you used-game kiddies who want to get something for nothing. When a publishers sells a game to you, you're buying the experience. The game. You are not buying the delivery media. You're buying the game.
Once you've bought that media, you have zero rights to on-sell it unless you've simply not consumed the experience. You can on-sell the media all you like, but until the publisher gets paid for the resale of the game experience, that media is simply worth the cost of the delivery mechanism.
I'm a gamer, I buy games and I've never worked for a publisher. The used-game market is theft, pure and simple. If the publisher isn't being paid when someone enjoys their commercial game, then someone is stealing.
The problem, of course, is that when arguing for theft, people usually revert to invalid analogies with other types of media. Books, music and so on. Fact is, the ability for books and music to be shared is simply an artefact of the limitations of the media. They've been shared simply because it's impractical to try and prevent it and it's fair to do so under certain circumstances.
Moreover, books - traditionally - had the limitation that as embodied in physical media, they were only able to be shared with one individual at a time. Consequently the potential for one sale to deny another was limited.
With gaming, both gamers and Gamestop try and pretend that they're reselling the media. They're not. What they're actually doing is reselling the gaming experience, without a license to do so from the publisher.
Essentially, the used game market is a massive exercise in copyright infringement. And I simply do not blame the publishers for taking steps to fight it.
What's surprising to me is that Gamestop can get away with it. It should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense that the physical media is a delivery mechanism only. However Gamestop deliberately blurs the lines between the two to pretend they're only reselling the physical media when, in point of fact, they're reselling the experience. Something THEY make money from and which they have no authorisation from the publisher to do.
Every used game sale robs the publisher - and the game developers - of dollars which are rightfully theirs. It boggles my mind that people can rail against piracy in one breath but defend used game sales in another. There is no distinction between the two. A lost game sale due to piracy is the same as a lost game sale due to the theft which arises from a used game sale. In both instances, the publisher and developer receives nothing.
If you buy a used game, you're not supporting the developer. They receive nothing. You're supporting the theft by Gamestop and others and company of the money which is rightfully due to the publisher and game developer.
What I want to know is when gamers are going to grow up and stop pretending they're doing anything other than acting in self-interest. I'd love games to be cheaper and/or free, but I'm smart enough to know the world doesn't work that way. If you want to rip off the developer, then pirate the damn thing - don't buy a 'used game' and pretend you somehow have the moral high-ground over a pirate who paid nothing. You don't. You're just as bad.
No, I think you're clueless on this particular issue.
Screenplays are absolutely required to follow a strict set of conventions in order to even get a hope in hell of being glanced at, let alone read. If you spend so much time learning and implementing those conventions manually in Word or another naive editor instead of spending your time honing your craft then you're an idiot. Automatic assistance to format your intent into following these conventions is invaluable. Which is why custom software which assists you in doing this is a damn good idea.
> The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, > since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."
Utterly incorrect. People have this conceptual idea that gameplay is about merely providing a framework in which people exercise their skills. It's utterly wrong and I'll demonstrate why.
Back in the 80's, there was an air-combat game. Think it might've been F15-Strike Eagle... which included the concept of random missions in which you were sent out to hit one random air target and one random ground target for each mission.
It was the most boring thing I've ever seen. One random target is the same as another. And it very quickly becomes a case of "Why bother?". There's no progression, no reward. It's just a way of playing the same thing over and over again.
In the ensuing years, I've viewed a lot of games. And the one truism I've always found is that the length of the game and the amount of enjoyment I get out of it is directly related to the amount of information content the developers put into the game.
This is why the various Sim games bored me rigid. They have no information content. They provide a sandbox, a set of rules and let you go. To a certain extent Civilisation suffers the same problem, although the campaigns mitigate this to a degree. That's all very well if you want to play around but most of the games I enjoy playing most contain unique scenarios and ideas put forward by the developers which contribute to the information content inherent in the game.
Think of information content as the number of decisions and sets of consequences which the developers have explicitly coded for. For example, take a game like Uncharted 2. Say you have the possibility of collapsing a bridge as a gameplay goal. The game plays out with you either having collapsed the bridge or not. In the context of the story it could potentially shift between two opposite extremes, but in either case, the developers have explictly developed further decisions and consequences.
Now I know that branching pathways have a finite limit, because the development effort is effectively the sum of all the branching pathways that decisions allow. But I'd argue that a finite set of pathways is vastly preferably to a bunch of decisions which have a totally arbitrary effect on the outcome.
For example, in Civilisation, the exact placement of your home city has many potential possibilities, but to a large degree there's very few differences between them. Oh, the placement relative to resources and the coast is relevant, but on the whole it's a reaction to the randomness of the game. As such, it's exercising a skill, not giving you an opportunity to make meaningful decisions.
I've played CIV and enjoyed it, but I can't play it more than once every six months or so. It's just not interesting to me to repeat the same fundamental operations over and over again. I prefer Fallout 3 or Dragon Age. Dragon Age has extraordinarily high information content which is why it provides entertainment for so long. Fallout 3 actually has low information content relative to Dragon Age. Random encounters aside, there's just not that much to do beyond exploring or following the main narrative. And that narrative is not long. You'll find that most of your time in Fallout 3 is spent digging through minutiae in various locations, not exploring the game itself.
So the idea that you'll get extra replayability out of random generation of levels is completely false. You'll get a random experience which has no information content behind it. It'll be valueless except as a reaction test.
Crikey, I only lasted three. When the guy devotes pages and pages of dense text to the act of getting up, saddling the horses and buggering off, you know that the book has now turned into complete filler.
Since then, I've held the view that Jordan fans are easily-pleased and lacking any kind of discrimination. Those books really are incredibly boring.
These fucking cunts are the SCO of the hardware world. This company should have had a stake put through its heart a long time ago. It has no right to exist.
Dvorak's a cranky commentator but I'd hardly call him a voice of taste. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the guy's style, but the article talks about a voice which captures and/or defines the zeitgeist and I can't see Dvorak doing that any time soon.
The problem is simple. Tech is specialised. In some niches it's insanely specialised and those who think it's a matter of underestimating the average reader are in cloud-cuckoo land. The average reader couldn't give a flying fuck about your jargon, your OS wars, your graphics card zealoutry, your free software vs proprietary arguments or anything remotely similar. What they're concerned about is the experience itself.
And that experience is at the surface level. At the direct interface between the device and the user. The problem with tech people is that because they see the inner workings of the magic, they presume that other people also care about the inner workings. Wrong. Only fellow tech people do.
Tech commentary feeds a tech audience. If a commentator wants to reach the majority of the people, he has to dispense with caring about the tech wizardry. It gives depth to his understanding but it also gets in the way of communicating with people who simply don't care about the details.
It's not a matter of dumbing it down, it's a matter of focusing on the experience itself. When dealing with his IPod, does the average consumer care that he's used 4,147,232,232 bytes out of 5,368,709,120 available?
Fuck no! All he cares is that his IPod is about 80% full and he can probably fit another 300 songs on it. That's operating and communicating on the level of utility and experience. When someone finally gets with the program and starts relating tech to people at the user experience and impact level, then we've got potential for one of those voices to emerge. Until then, a lot of tech writing can probably be viewed as a bunch of intellectual masturbation.
This pretty much betrays Id's attitude to gaming and explains why their games are only really good as technology showpieces which gaming companies with innovation and talent turn into actual games.
Don't get me wrong. Carmack is smart, focused and incredibly productive. When it comes to engines he's one of the elite. However like all the boys at Id, he hasn't got a clue about making a good single-player FPS experience.
Raven is the company which uses Id's engines to make good games. So an ID announcement about a new title isn't really all that exciting. Most of us know from experience that gameplay-wise it's going to be the same old ID suckage with gameplay that hasn't moved on from the original Doom. Gameplay is more than simply designing your environments and monsters. Mind you, maybe that's a legacy of having a company 2/3rds owned by a pair of artists.
George, you can't even ship 'em a couple of years late. Face it dude, 'early' is way out of your league.
No. The article author simply doesn't get it.
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 1
This article is a childish 'waaaah', nothing more. One of the problems, indeed one of the hallmarks of bad game design has always been a failure to recognise the symbiosis between challenge and incentive.
Games are primarily about challenge. This is not always true, but it's true in the majority of cases. Good games allow players of varying skill levels to successfully deal with the challenges it produces. Really good games allow the players to meet the challenge in a way that reflects their play style. (System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Oblivion come to mind).
However, challenge is nothing without providing the impetus to meet it. Fundamentally we engage in challenges because they're fun, but combining challenge with incentive is the key to producing a true Skinner box which hooks the player.
I've seen a lot of bad games. Unimaginative design, pedestrian goals, poor challenges and lack of internal consistency all contribute toward a poor experience for the player. However the number one sin of poor game design is the failure to balance challenge and incentive. Heck, some games provide no incentive beyond "getting to the next level."
Good games provide multi-faceted multi-axial challenge/incentive pairs. Short, medium and long-term combinations of these produce varying and multiple axes of focus for the player's participation in the game.
Fundamentally, the only currency a game has to reward a player for participation is itself. And providing pieces of itself as a reward for successful play is a powerful incentive when used in the right way. For example, although Oblivion is wildly freeform, the reward for successful play is increased powers and access to useful weapons, armour and artifacts which increase the player's abilities. The other reward is access to future events and missions which are simply not available otherwise.
A game which makes ALL content freely available from the get go is no longer a game. It's a sandbox. And to be sure, those kinds of games do work and have their place, but a first person shooter sandbox is simply an incredibly bad design. The game is there to provide a challenge. If you want access to all the content, then just cheat. You're missing the point anyway, so you may as well stop pretending you're there to enjoy the gameplay.
I have to agree with some earlier comments. The runnerup is far superior. Less busy, more compact, streamlined and just plain easier on the eyes.
Heck, why not just skin the site? It's CSS right? Which means content is divorced from layout. So why on earth would you not just implement both and let us choose? I'm sure most of us are using browsers which support it, you wouldn't even need to implement switching on the site itself.
An inability to do this would tend to suggest that CSS is not exactly being used well here.
32,000 x 32,000 is 1024 million pixels. (A gigapixel?)
Presuming 16 bits per pixel, that's a couple of gigabytes. That's not going to be sitting in texture memory. Think about it.
The way I read this is pretty simple. Presume you have a texture that large to work with. Not necessarily just one but potentially many. Now go to town on the art.
Unless I'm completely misreading his intent, I suspect a decent portion of the magic is probably in the pre-processing. From what I can gather he's proposing that instead of getting your artists to do the compression by constructing textures and appying them to geometry, he's proposing the artists go insane and then get the pre-processor to chop it up into optimum texture slices.
Which, when you think about it, is kind of a "duh" moment. Of course code is going to be better at compression than human beings are.
"John Carmack. He's a pretty famous game programmer, and together with John Romero he made FPS games popular."
This is kind of a myth. Romero pretty much had nothing to do with it.
ID's games have been winners because of one simple thing. Technology. In game design terms they've always been example of what NOT to do. Quake was a sweet piece of rendering but other than that it was one boring as hell game. I have never completed it because I cannot do the same thing over and over again in different environments and find it entertaining.
"What about multiplayer?" I hear you cry. Simple. That's another win for tech. Quake multiplayer pretty much lucked out in the gameplay stakes. Nothing out there like it at the time and frankly Team Fortress was a much bigger step in gameplay terms than simple deathmatch ever was.
I have never seen anything which demonstrates that Romero even remotely understands the fundamentals of good gameplay. The guy is a level designer and gameplay is something which goes far beyond simple architecture.
ID creates the engines. And then Raven Software (or Valve) creates good games out of them. Quake was boring, Half_life was brilliant. Quake 2 was marginally better, Soldier of Fortune was vastly superior. Doom 3 was brilliant technologically speaking but the gameplay was a gross disappointment. (Dark thing in corner, BOO! Dark thing in corner, BOO!). Quake 4 was significantly better (although not up to Raven's usual standards).
ID does good tech. ID does good art (environments and creatures), it even does good level design. Id just doesn't do good gameplay and never has. On a fundamental, they just don't get it. They think good gameplay is a single player version of deathmatch. They think it can be dumped down to walking up to stuff and going "activate". They've got a few toys in Doom 3, but there is precious little in the way of actual game DESIGN.
I keep hoping their next game will finally demonstrate that they've got it, but they're stuck in DeathMatch nirvana in which multiplayer is king and single player is just the player shooting at bots with varying scripts.
I'm not sure what people are running on their machines but for me, Skype is tight, fast and has excellent voice quality.
I'm in New Zealand and I spend a lot of time talking to a good friend in Minnesota. Skype gives me excellent quality, even over 56K dialup and the sucky 128K (yes that's kiloBIT) DSL they have in this part of the world is enough to handle Skype plus a webcam which ties up 64-96Kbit/sec of my available incoming bandwidth. Anyone claiming Skype chews up their bandwidth is - quite frankly - on crack. It does nothing of the sort.
As far as sucking cpu power goes, all I have to say is, what the HELL are you people doing with your machine? I run Skype while my cpu/gfx card is chowing down on Deus Ex: Invisible War, or Splinter Cell, or Thief: Deadly Shadows and there's no frame slowdown whatsoever.
I've also seen Skype run on 400mhz PII's and the damn thing seemed to switch codecs to compensate for the decrease in cpu power. The call quality decreased slightly but it was still damn good.
So enough with the bullshit. Much as I like free software, I give Skype credit for actually working and providing a call quality that is far in excess of any intercontinental phone call I've ever made (and telcoms in Aus & NZ are really good). The free as in 'free speech' people really need to give it a rest sometimes without interjecting their constant 'proprietary is evil' refrain into every single thread on slashdot. Skype is free as in 'beer' and that's good enough for me. If you can't deal with its non-proprietary nature then feel free to write your own, GPL it, make it as easy to use as Skype is and then release it. Otherwise, for the love of Mike, quit whining.
This is yet another victory for the software giants. Heck, even when Mickeysoft loses, it wins.
The problem with the patent office - as most readers will well know - is that they award software patents for methods that are intuitive, obvious (to practitioners of the art), a logical outgrowth of an existing system or something that clearly has prior art.
The effect of all this is that large entities with extensive patent portfolios cross-licence to avoid patent infringement.
What are small developers supposed to do?
Why, we're not supposed to play. Patents are the mechanism by which big business is locking out competition from smaller more nimble startups.
The US patent office is criminally liable for egregiously granting the most bizarre series of competition-stifling patents in history.
Would you like to put a cursor on your screen sir? Patented. Use hypertext links? Patented. Embed access to applications into your browser? Patented.
You think open source is safe? Think again. The list of absurd software patents is so extensive, it's impossible for anyone to develop anything of reasonable utility without infringing someone's patent somewhere.
The fact that there exist companies whose sole mode of business is to scan patents in other jurisdictions and then lodge those same patents in the US is testament to the sheer corruption of the system.
Where I come from we call that theft. Theft of intellectual property. The fact that this can be done in the USA is damning evidence that the Patent Office's intention is not to support the small inventor, but to aid US companies in claiming inventors rights for inventions which are clearly not theirs.
None of the large companies will ever fight this battle in court. They have two much to gain by locking out their smaller competition. Essentially the existing scheme of software patents provides a stunning barrier to entry whose sole purpose is to prevent upstarts from upsetting the main players.
...whether a theory, unifying the gravitational force with the other three fundamental forces, would be at odds with the existence of black holes?
Superstring theory isn't. Indeed, black holes are said to have fundamental attributes such as charge and spin which make them sound very similar to elemental particles. Some superstring theorists have produced a model whereby a brane wrapped around a spatial tear methematically produces the kind of gravity field associated with a black hole.
I have often wondered (but never had the time, inclination or intelligence to go find out:)) how a quantum view of gravity would affect theories on black holes and the birth of the universe.
This is symptomatic of the fundamental incompatibility between Relativity and Quantum mechanics. Relativity relies upon smooth space-time which is true at a macro level, however at the quantum level space-time seethes with activity.
Basically my question is: If gravitational attraction is carried by a particle (the graviton) as is conjectured by many scientists, then how can one of these escape from a black hole any more than another particle?
IANAP (I am not a physicist) but I believe most of the messenger particles (photons, gluons and the as yet hypothetical graviton) are massless. The weak guage bosons have mass.
However this is where my ignorance rears it's ugly head. Black holes supposedly trap light due to the extreme curvature of space they create. (Or their extreme gravitational field). However if light (being an electromagnetic phenomenon) is massless, how can the graviton interact with it?
So which is it? Does light fail to escape a black hole because space is curved (Relativity) or because of the interaction with an extreme amount of gravitons? (Standard model).
I guess that either:
a) It can't, ergo black holes don't exist;
b) It can, and Einstein was wrong somewhere;
c) There is some effect similar to the X-ray "emissions" from black holes, whereby the particles appear to come from the black hole but actually never cross its event horizon.
That effect's a weird quantum exchange. Basically a pair of virtual particles are created (as is normal in empty space - think of it as quantum foam), the black hole sucks one of the pair in and gives it's twin a kick out away from the event horizon. The one that is sucked in annihilates when it hits the mass of the black hole . I'm not sure if it creates a resulting photon or not, this whole quantum 'borrowing' thing is fascinating but way beyond my ken.
Which just goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.:)
I know the feeling. The more I learn the more questions I have, however I've got this sinking feeling that I don't know anywhere near enough to ask intelligent questions.
In related news, Scott Culp - Manager of Microsoft's Security Response Center - publically castigated security experts for creating security flaws in Microsoft products.
"It's high time the security community stopped practicing Information Uncertainty." said Culp.
"Due to the quantum effects inherent in all new CPUs, searching for flaws in otherwise secure systems actually generates the very flaws being looked for."
Culp extended this theme further by claiming that non-security related bugs in Microsoft products were induced entirely by the faulty perception of the user.
When questioned about the relative paucity of security issues under Linux, Culp replied, "Linux clearly hasn't been subjected to the same level of scrutiny as our products. If it had, more security issues would have been found. The lack of exploits for Linux security holes shows just how poorly it's been tested."
Culp went on to say that opponents of Microsoft were agents of communism who refused to recognise the genius of Bill Gates and described "Temptation Island" as "a really fine example of quality programming."
Code Red deliberately self terminates on October 1st 2001.
There's a check inside the code that essentially sends the server into an endless reboot loop if the month is greater than 9 or the year is greater than 2001.
This pretty much ensures you either fix your server or stay offline.
I guess even a worm writer wants to use the 'Net. Building self-termination into a worm seems like an oddly moral thing to do, however closer examination will probably reveal the author was concerned about the worm making the net completely unusable.
Slashdot Mirror
The essential problem with a lot of the dialogue about internet "harassment" is that it ignores a few salient points.
The internet has zero barrier to entry for discussion. A ten year old girl can send death threats on the internet.
As social animals, human beings moderate entry to discussion on the basis of age, appearance, social class and intelligence. They use various signals to determine if a given individual is worthy of being granted entry into a dialogue.
Those signals are largely absent on the internet unless someone is using their real-world identity or they've built up an identity which has widespread credibility. Most internet discussions thus have no barrier to entry allowing children to participate as freely as Nobel prize winners. Anyone who seriously talks about "men harassing women" on the internet is a moron. It's children harassing anyone who crosses into their line of fire. I'd wager most "harassment" comes from teenagers who are delighted to find a medium in which they can exercise power in contrast to a society where they usually have very little.
Similarly, a sheltered Leftist college student with no experience of the real world is able - from the shelter of his safe space - to try and lecture real men who do society's dirty work. Normally these two groups would never engage because the sheltered college boy would be too despised to be granted entry to the dialogue of masculine men.
Thus, the conflict on the 'Net caused by a lack of social barriers and consequences. It's not hard to understand, it's just annoying to see the rampant stupidity written about it.
In the case of the article, the critic has no idea who is sending him death threats and his assumption that they are "men" is ludicrous. They're most likely teen DC fans spewing forth invective from the safety of their mother's basement. And some of them will be girls.
I had a good look during the recent State of The Union and I couldn't see any mechanical devices whatsoever. They must've really cracked the miniaturization problem.
Those fuckers took Kickstarter money and now they're selling out their backers.
Bunch of cunts - fuck 'em. And fuck Carmack too for enabling this fucking disaster.
Wrong. On the contrary, the article - if you read it - specifically says the following:
The conclusion of this study is that as much as 99.8 % of all virus/malware infections caused by commercial exploit kits are a direct result of the lack of updating five specific software packages.
So, fully patched installs let through 0.2% of infections.
The 31.3% figure refers to the percentage of infections relative to exposure. In other words, it's the infection success rate over the entire data set.
Thank you, come again!
> No. The store sold me the game, on the disc. Once I'm finished playing the game, I can do whatever the hell I want with the game and the disc
No. You can't. You can only do what you want with the disc. The game is an experience you - as a consumer - have consumed.
You can't regurgitate food and pass that on. You can't unlisten to music and expect to sell it, you can't unexperience a game and expect to sell that.
Your "stuff" is tangibles. It's material goods. You can expect to sell on your material goods because the value in those goods is embodied in the goods themselves.
The value in a game is the experience. The media in and of itself has no utility that you could continue to benefit from if you were to keep it. When you sell a chair, you're deprived of the value of that chair and its utility. Once you've installed a game, the utility of the media is gone and there's nothing for you to sell. You have the right to sell the delivery mechanism. You do not have the right to sell the experience. Only the publisher has that right.
Basically, the disc is a box, and the game is a cake. You've eaten the cake and are now loudly trying to proclaim your right to resell the box because it's capable of magically producing another cake. The fact that this is a byproduct of the delivery mechanism completely escapes you. Despite the fact you've contributed nothing to the cake, you feel you have the right to sell a cake-producing box and feel sufficiently aggrieved to bitch and whine when the people who actually put blood, sweat and tears into producing the magic cake-producing box object to your behaviour and take steps to ensure people buy their own cake-producing box instead of using yours to cheat the developer.
> And do you know what most gamers do with the money they get from selling their used games? They buy MORE games.
Oh, give me a break. If gamers had to buy all their games for full price, perhaps they'd have to - oh, I don't know - get a fucking job to pay for their gaming habit.
I'm not buying the retarded excuse that gamers need to rip off developers so they can buy more games. That's like saying piracy's okay, because pirates save money which they'll spend on other goods, thus pumping value back into the economy. And that benefits all of us, dontcha know!
Basically, I fully support the publishers doing everything they can to stop the used game market from stealing from them. If you don't like it, tough. Consider the benefits of growing up - you know... thinking and acting like an adult, instead of a leech expecting a free lunch.
The whole used-game market is a monumental exercise in hypocrisy on the part of gamers and used-game resellers such as GameStop.
Here's a little piece of education for you used-game kiddies who want to get something for nothing. When a publishers sells a game to you, you're buying the experience. The game. You are not buying the delivery media. You're buying the game.
Once you've bought that media, you have zero rights to on-sell it unless you've simply not consumed the experience. You can on-sell the media all you like, but until the publisher gets paid for the resale of the game experience, that media is simply worth the cost of the delivery mechanism.
I'm a gamer, I buy games and I've never worked for a publisher. The used-game market is theft, pure and simple. If the publisher isn't being paid when someone enjoys their commercial game, then someone is stealing.
The problem, of course, is that when arguing for theft, people usually revert to invalid analogies with other types of media. Books, music and so on. Fact is, the ability for books and music to be shared is simply an artefact of the limitations of the media. They've been shared simply because it's impractical to try and prevent it and it's fair to do so under certain circumstances.
Moreover, books - traditionally - had the limitation that as embodied in physical media, they were only able to be shared with one individual at a time. Consequently the potential for one sale to deny another was limited.
With gaming, both gamers and Gamestop try and pretend that they're reselling the media. They're not. What they're actually doing is reselling the gaming experience, without a license to do so from the publisher.
Essentially, the used game market is a massive exercise in copyright infringement. And I simply do not blame the publishers for taking steps to fight it.
What's surprising to me is that Gamestop can get away with it. It should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense that the physical media is a delivery mechanism only. However Gamestop deliberately blurs the lines between the two to pretend they're only reselling the physical media when, in point of fact, they're reselling the experience. Something THEY make money from and which they have no authorisation from the publisher to do.
Every used game sale robs the publisher - and the game developers - of dollars which are rightfully theirs. It boggles my mind that people can rail against piracy in one breath but defend used game sales in another. There is no distinction between the two. A lost game sale due to piracy is the same as a lost game sale due to the theft which arises from a used game sale. In both instances, the publisher and developer receives nothing.
If you buy a used game, you're not supporting the developer. They receive nothing. You're supporting the theft by Gamestop and others and company of the money which is rightfully due to the publisher and game developer.
What I want to know is when gamers are going to grow up and stop pretending they're doing anything other than acting in self-interest. I'd love games to be cheaper and/or free, but I'm smart enough to know the world doesn't work that way. If you want to rip off the developer, then pirate the damn thing - don't buy a 'used game' and pretend you somehow have the moral high-ground over a pirate who paid nothing. You don't. You're just as bad.
No, I think you're clueless on this particular issue.
Screenplays are absolutely required to follow a strict set of conventions in order to even get a hope in hell of being glanced at, let alone read. If you spend so much time learning and implementing those conventions manually in Word or another naive editor instead of spending your time honing your craft then you're an idiot. Automatic assistance to format your intent into following these conventions is invaluable. Which is why custom software which assists you in doing this is a damn good idea.
> The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games,
> since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."
Utterly incorrect. People have this conceptual idea that gameplay is about merely providing a framework in which people exercise their skills. It's utterly wrong and I'll demonstrate why.
Back in the 80's, there was an air-combat game. Think it might've been F15-Strike Eagle... which included the concept of random missions in which you were sent out to hit one random air target and one random ground target for each mission.
It was the most boring thing I've ever seen. One random target is the same as another. And it very quickly becomes a case of "Why bother?". There's no progression, no reward. It's just a way of playing the same thing over and over again.
In the ensuing years, I've viewed a lot of games. And the one truism I've always found is that the length of the game and the amount of enjoyment I get out of it is directly related to the amount of information content the developers put into the game.
This is why the various Sim games bored me rigid. They have no information content. They provide a sandbox, a set of rules and let you go. To a certain extent Civilisation suffers the same problem, although the campaigns mitigate this to a degree. That's all very well if you want to play around but most of the games I enjoy playing most contain unique scenarios and ideas put forward by the developers which contribute to the information content inherent in the game.
Think of information content as the number of decisions and sets of consequences which the developers have explicitly coded for. For example, take a game like Uncharted 2. Say you have the possibility of collapsing a bridge as a gameplay goal. The game plays out with you either having collapsed the bridge or not. In the context of the story it could potentially shift between two opposite extremes, but in either case, the developers have explictly developed further decisions and consequences.
Now I know that branching pathways have a finite limit, because the development effort is effectively the sum of all the branching pathways that decisions allow. But I'd argue that a finite set of pathways is vastly preferably to a bunch of decisions which have a totally arbitrary effect on the outcome.
For example, in Civilisation, the exact placement of your home city has many potential possibilities, but to a large degree there's very few differences between them. Oh, the placement relative to resources and the coast is relevant, but on the whole it's a reaction to the randomness of the game. As such, it's exercising a skill, not giving you an opportunity to make meaningful decisions.
I've played CIV and enjoyed it, but I can't play it more than once every six months or so. It's just not interesting to me to repeat the same fundamental operations over and over again. I prefer Fallout 3 or Dragon Age. Dragon Age has extraordinarily high information content which is why it provides entertainment for so long. Fallout 3 actually has low information content relative to Dragon Age. Random encounters aside, there's just not that much to do beyond exploring or following the main narrative. And that narrative is not long. You'll find that most of your time in Fallout 3 is spent digging through minutiae in various locations, not exploring the game itself.
So the idea that you'll get extra replayability out of random generation of levels is completely false. You'll get a random experience which has no information content behind it. It'll be valueless except as a reaction test.
The infringement was pretty much wireless networking, which the CSIRO invented and was granted a patent for in the mid-90's.
Basically, a raft of companies have been infringing on that patent for a decade or so and tried to use the US legal system to avoid paying the piper.
Crikey, I only lasted three. When the guy devotes pages and pages of dense text to the act of getting up, saddling the horses and buggering off, you know that the book has now turned into complete filler.
Since then, I've held the view that Jordan fans are easily-pleased and lacking any kind of discrimination. Those books really are incredibly boring.
These fucking cunts are the SCO of the hardware world. This company should have had a stake put through its heart a long time ago. It has no right to exist.
The problem is simple. Tech is specialised. In some niches it's insanely specialised and those who think it's a matter of underestimating the average reader are in cloud-cuckoo land. The average reader couldn't give a flying fuck about your jargon, your OS wars, your graphics card zealoutry, your free software vs proprietary arguments or anything remotely similar. What they're concerned about is the experience itself.
And that experience is at the surface level. At the direct interface between the device and the user. The problem with tech people is that because they see the inner workings of the magic, they presume that other people also care about the inner workings. Wrong. Only fellow tech people do.
Tech commentary feeds a tech audience. If a commentator wants to reach the majority of the people, he has to dispense with caring about the tech wizardry. It gives depth to his understanding but it also gets in the way of communicating with people who simply don't care about the details.
It's not a matter of dumbing it down, it's a matter of focusing on the experience itself. When dealing with his IPod, does the average consumer care that he's used 4,147,232,232 bytes out of 5,368,709,120 available?
Fuck no! All he cares is that his IPod is about 80% full and he can probably fit another 300 songs on it. That's operating and communicating on the level of utility and experience. When someone finally gets with the program and starts relating tech to people at the user experience and impact level, then we've got potential for one of those voices to emerge. Until then, a lot of tech writing can probably be viewed as a bunch of intellectual masturbation.
Shit Bill, in my day we just called 'em bugs.
This pretty much betrays Id's attitude to gaming and explains why their games are only really good as technology showpieces which gaming companies with innovation and talent turn into actual games.
Don't get me wrong. Carmack is smart, focused and incredibly productive. When it comes to engines he's one of the elite. However like all the boys at Id, he hasn't got a clue about making a good single-player FPS experience.
Raven is the company which uses Id's engines to make good games. So an ID announcement about a new title isn't really all that exciting. Most of us know from experience that gameplay-wise it's going to be the same old ID suckage with gameplay that hasn't moved on from the original Doom. Gameplay is more than simply designing your environments and monsters. Mind you, maybe that's a legacy of having a company 2/3rds owned by a pair of artists.
George, you can't even ship 'em a couple of years late. Face it dude, 'early' is way out of your league.
Games are primarily about challenge. This is not always true, but it's true in the majority of cases. Good games allow players of varying skill levels to successfully deal with the challenges it produces. Really good games allow the players to meet the challenge in a way that reflects their play style. (System Shock 2, Deus Ex and Oblivion come to mind).
However, challenge is nothing without providing the impetus to meet it. Fundamentally we engage in challenges because they're fun, but combining challenge with incentive is the key to producing a true Skinner box which hooks the player.
I've seen a lot of bad games. Unimaginative design, pedestrian goals, poor challenges and lack of internal consistency all contribute toward a poor experience for the player. However the number one sin of poor game design is the failure to balance challenge and incentive. Heck, some games provide no incentive beyond "getting to the next level."
Good games provide multi-faceted multi-axial challenge/incentive pairs. Short, medium and long-term combinations of these produce varying and multiple axes of focus for the player's participation in the game.
Fundamentally, the only currency a game has to reward a player for participation is itself. And providing pieces of itself as a reward for successful play is a powerful incentive when used in the right way. For example, although Oblivion is wildly freeform, the reward for successful play is increased powers and access to useful weapons, armour and artifacts which increase the player's abilities. The other reward is access to future events and missions which are simply not available otherwise.
A game which makes ALL content freely available from the get go is no longer a game. It's a sandbox. And to be sure, those kinds of games do work and have their place, but a first person shooter sandbox is simply an incredibly bad design. The game is there to provide a challenge. If you want access to all the content, then just cheat. You're missing the point anyway, so you may as well stop pretending you're there to enjoy the gameplay.
I have to agree with some earlier comments. The runnerup is far superior. Less busy, more compact, streamlined and just plain easier on the eyes.
Heck, why not just skin the site? It's CSS right? Which means content is divorced from layout. So why on earth would you not just implement both and let us choose? I'm sure most of us are using browsers which support it, you wouldn't even need to implement switching on the site itself.
An inability to do this would tend to suggest that CSS is not exactly being used well here.
Do some elementary calculations kiddies.
32,000 x 32,000 is 1024 million pixels. (A gigapixel?)
Presuming 16 bits per pixel, that's a couple of gigabytes. That's not going to be sitting in texture memory. Think about it.
The way I read this is pretty simple. Presume you have a texture that large to work with. Not necessarily just one but potentially many. Now go to town on the art.
Unless I'm completely misreading his intent, I suspect a decent portion of the magic is probably in the pre-processing. From what I can gather he's proposing that instead of getting your artists to do the compression by constructing textures and appying them to geometry, he's proposing the artists go insane and then get the pre-processor to chop it up into optimum texture slices.
Which, when you think about it, is kind of a "duh" moment. Of course code is going to be better at compression than human beings are.
"John Carmack. He's a pretty famous game programmer, and together with John Romero he made FPS games popular."
This is kind of a myth. Romero pretty much had nothing to do with it.
ID's games have been winners because of one simple thing. Technology. In game design terms they've always been example of what NOT to do. Quake was a sweet piece of rendering but other than that it was one boring as hell game. I have never completed it because I cannot do the same thing over and over again in different environments and find it entertaining.
"What about multiplayer?" I hear you cry. Simple. That's another win for tech. Quake multiplayer pretty much lucked out in the gameplay stakes. Nothing out there like it at the time and frankly Team Fortress was a much bigger step in gameplay terms than simple deathmatch ever was.
I have never seen anything which demonstrates that Romero even remotely understands the fundamentals of good gameplay. The guy is a level designer and gameplay is something which goes far beyond simple architecture.
ID creates the engines. And then Raven Software (or Valve) creates good games out of them. Quake was boring, Half_life was brilliant. Quake 2 was marginally better, Soldier of Fortune was vastly superior. Doom 3 was brilliant technologically speaking but the gameplay was a gross disappointment. (Dark thing in corner, BOO! Dark thing in corner, BOO!). Quake 4 was significantly better (although not up to Raven's usual standards).
ID does good tech. ID does good art (environments and creatures), it even does good level design. Id just doesn't do good gameplay and never has. On a fundamental, they just don't get it. They think good gameplay is a single player version of deathmatch. They think it can be dumped down to walking up to stuff and going "activate". They've got a few toys in Doom 3, but there is precious little in the way of actual game DESIGN.
I keep hoping their next game will finally demonstrate that they've got it, but they're stuck in DeathMatch nirvana in which multiplayer is king and single player is just the player shooting at bots with varying scripts.
Well, this has a lot to do with the fact that modern codemonkeys tend to have two things which earlier codemonkeys did not.
They're known as:
A) A life
B) A girlfriend.
I'm not sure what people are running on their machines but for me, Skype is tight, fast and has excellent voice quality.
I'm in New Zealand and I spend a lot of time talking to a good friend in Minnesota. Skype gives me excellent quality, even over 56K dialup and the sucky 128K (yes that's kiloBIT) DSL they have in this part of the world is enough to handle Skype plus a webcam which ties up 64-96Kbit/sec of my available incoming bandwidth. Anyone claiming Skype chews up their bandwidth is - quite frankly - on crack. It does nothing of the sort.
As far as sucking cpu power goes, all I have to say is, what the HELL are you people doing with your machine? I run Skype while my cpu/gfx card is chowing down on Deus Ex: Invisible War, or Splinter Cell, or Thief: Deadly Shadows and there's no frame slowdown whatsoever.
I've also seen Skype run on 400mhz PII's and the damn thing seemed to switch codecs to compensate for the decrease in cpu power. The call quality decreased slightly but it was still damn good.
So enough with the bullshit. Much as I like free software, I give Skype credit for actually working and providing a call quality that is far in excess of any intercontinental phone call I've ever made (and telcoms in Aus & NZ are really good). The free as in 'free speech' people really need to give it a rest sometimes without interjecting their constant 'proprietary is evil' refrain into every single thread on slashdot. Skype is free as in 'beer' and that's good enough for me. If you can't deal with its non-proprietary nature then feel free to write your own, GPL it, make it as easy to use as Skype is and then release it. Otherwise, for the love of Mike, quit whining.
This is yet another victory for the software giants. Heck, even when Mickeysoft loses, it wins.
The problem with the patent office - as most readers will well know - is that they award software patents for methods that are intuitive, obvious (to practitioners of the art), a logical outgrowth of an existing system or something that clearly has prior art.
The effect of all this is that large entities with extensive patent portfolios cross-licence to avoid patent infringement.
What are small developers supposed to do?
Why, we're not supposed to play. Patents are the mechanism by which big business is locking out competition from smaller more nimble startups.
The US patent office is criminally liable for egregiously granting the most bizarre series of competition-stifling patents in history.
Would you like to put a cursor on your screen sir? Patented. Use hypertext links? Patented. Embed access to applications into your browser? Patented.
You think open source is safe? Think again. The list of absurd software patents is so extensive, it's impossible for anyone to develop anything of reasonable utility without infringing someone's patent somewhere.
The fact that there exist companies whose sole mode of business is to scan patents in other jurisdictions and then lodge those same patents in the US is testament to the sheer corruption of the system.
Where I come from we call that theft. Theft of intellectual property. The fact that this can be done in the USA is damning evidence that the Patent Office's intention is not to support the small inventor, but to aid US companies in claiming inventors rights for inventions which are clearly not theirs.
None of the large companies will ever fight this battle in court. They have two much to gain by locking out their smaller competition. Essentially the existing scheme of software patents provides a stunning barrier to entry whose sole purpose is to prevent upstarts from upsetting the main players.
Code Red deliberately self terminates on October 1st 2001.
There's a check inside the code that essentially sends the server into an endless reboot loop if the month is greater than 9 or the year is greater than 2001.
This pretty much ensures you either fix your server or stay offline.
I guess even a worm writer wants to use the 'Net. Building self-termination into a worm seems like an oddly moral thing to do, however closer examination will probably reveal the author was concerned about the worm making the net completely unusable.
And that would never do.