I read this article yesterday I first noticed it on the BBC web site.
The description of 'Professional Amature' for the contributer to an open source project struck me as complete misnomer right away.
As with the very the person they focus on in the article, contributers to open source software are generally PROFESSIONALS not amatures. Most do get paid for their skills in a professional capacity, but they also donate their skills to more charitable efforts.
This is not something you see many people doing - healthcare workers running free clinics, and some lawyers offering free legal advice spring to mind as rare examples of this - but it's not as if accountants, plumbers, electricians or salesmen are known for donating their free time, even to charitable causes. I listened to someone in another cube trying to explain the concept of open source software to a salesman in the office recently, the guy really couldn't grasp why you might want to charitably contribute something to others without some direct and immediate personal monetary benifit, an attitude I encounter all too often.
What particularly annoyed me in this instance is that work for a multinational company in the telecoms and network sector which relies (and contributes) to open source projects too. We simply couldn't run the company without open source software (at least, not if we wanted to stay in business, it simply wouldn't be profitable). For example, we'd have to buy dedicated hardware from the likes of Nortel that costs in the region of 70,000 USD to do what we can also a single 1U high dual CPU Linux server loaded with some additional open source software, which were able to modify to do what we wanted. One HP supplied server with dual CPU's, gigs of RAM and multiple gigabit interfaces only costs in the region of 5,000 USD. Bearing in mind we have to have at least two units for redundancy it would be a 130,000 USD price tag, for one project!
The kicker being, except for very specific tasks - thanks primarily due to it's larger back plane - the Nortel equipment is much more limited and has worse performance in many instances (in our case it could do 1/6th of the work and even then, only in a limited fashion). Simply by purchasing a gigabit switch and adding additional Linux systems you can grow to match the performance and still match it favourably for overal cost. It was fun to write a document for senior management explaing WHY we'd used an open source solution instead of suggesting buying Nortel kit, I really struggled to make the open sourced base solution look bad, because it had so few limitations.
But I digress!
Writing software (even CGI's, shell scripting) pays quite well and unless your daft enough to work for a lousy company, it's pretty easy work IMO. If your doing it in your free time presumably you like doing it too, so of course most people who do it are professionals in the field, and not simply amatures. In fairness, the same is not likely true with astronomy, largely due to the relatively small number of jobs avalible in that field I think, but the article does particularly focus on open source software and I do not belive most contributers to open source software in amatures who work in unreleated fields.
I don't think much effort really went into researching that article TBH, and it reads like it was written on a napkin. Open source remains a poorly covered topic, dispite it's huge and increasing influence both in our everyday lives, thanks to things like (embedded) Linux, and in the commerical sector, as an enabler the development and creation of new tools, products and services that would not otherwise be possible (certainly not at the current growth rate).
Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along
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SCO.com Defaced
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· Score: 1
Hey, the guy with the Mac here want to take a quick look at what his jpegs look like through strings?
I agree with the previous poster, I don't think Doom 3 was 'Doom Redux' at all.
The origional Doom games were much faster over all, even the 'slower' bits were much faster than the fastest parts of Doom 3, there were very dark sections in Doom but they were used sparingly to great effect (I didn't like them all that much, but they worked well because they were infrequent), not constantly, to the degree of invoking boredom and frustration as in Doom 3.
Doom 3 relied on tight indoor areas for the most part, I was greatly releaved when I game to nice open indoor areas in the game - the origional games were NEVER as horribly restrictive and small. In contrast, Doom 1 & 2 had many large open areas (indoor and outdoor) too.
I also think Doom 3 was survival horror - the whole concept of torch OR weapon, the rediclously dark environment, the many staged events, the limited 8 clip shotgun just scream survial horror to m (rather than mindless blasting fun).
While there were many traps in the origional game it almost never just open a wall behind you and had really nasty things fall out on top of you, you could almost always see them in front of you, or they would open up elsewhere on the level. Doom 3 was cheap in that reguard (also in the manner in which things would just 'popup' in front of you due to lack of proper spawn points, that's just really lazy design).
I wish that Doom 3 had been a continuation of the Doom series, but it's just no so IMO. I don't mind variation and thought the addition of PDA's and terminals was a good idea, but the game didn't feel like a spiritual sucessor even remotely to me. I think the likes of Serious Sam has gameplay that's closer to the origional Doom series as I remember it.
Re:Moderation - Read the moderation guidlines FFS
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Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: 1
Point out that there is BAD MODERATION and what does said moderator do? Not not UP the INCORRECTLY MODERATED POST but instead moderate down the *crititism* as OFFTOPIC, because apparently understanding the moderator guidelines is beyond their ability.
The/. moderation system would be fine, if it didn't rely on the people doing the moderation not being utter spanners.
Moderation - What do you think 'Troll' means?
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Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Ah letting the great unwashed moderate. I wonder what on earth they think 'Troll' means.
Presumably they think it means 'something I don't want to here because it's far to close to the bone'. *rolls eyes*
Here is a clue for the mentally impared, troll posts don't usually start with nice big diclaimers like "CAUTION: RANT AHEAD!" at the start.
But hey, if you don't think are up to writing a response just go a ahead and suppress it, that will make the truth go away (because hey there is nothing wrong with your Geforce 4, it's 1337 right?).
Re:trilinear filtering = UGLY - That AND no FSAA!
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Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: 1
Look man, there's no need to be upgrading your CPU every freaking year. I upgrade mine as soon as it gets doubled.
Every year? I haven't bought a new CPU in over a year and I have a P4 3.2 Ghz! It's not exactly bleeding edge (I can't afford to spend crazy amounts like 800 USD on a 3.6 Ghz P4 either!).
I don't want devs aiming for a 3.2Ghz as baseline specs when it means I have to spend EVEN MORE cash on gaming.
My P4 3.2 Ghz cost me 180 UKP and that was over as a year ago. According to Google's Froogle service they are down to 215 USD, 115 UKP at current exchange rates. Now, my previous system (from over a year ago) was an AMD 3200+ XP (bought for 90 UKP, and before that a 2500+ bought for 60 UKP) with an ATI 9700 Pro 28 MB (bought 2 years ago for 260 UKP). It ran Far Cry just fine (reasonbly well with the 2500+ too).
For you to say your CURRENT system cannot run Far Cry makes me sad.
Nothing that Far Cry did should needed a 3.0 Ghz. Not after you see how much more HL2 crams onto the screen and keeps framerate solid. My machine barely ran that game on the lowest settings.
As I say the AMD 3200+ system above played it just fine even with FSAA - and it's only a 2200 MHz CPU, even my 1800 Mhz 2500+ was alright. I'm curious to just what is the spec of your system because if it had issues with Far Cry to the extent it was unplayble that's a good sign your system is passed it, sorry but Far Cry doesn't have a poor engine, that's entirely unfair critisim of it.
I'd like to point out that Far Cry really renders a quite a bit more than HL2 does, really truly. HL2 has a pretty short draw distance (annoyingly short IMO, certainly noticeable) and it some serious LOD issues with small objects like foliage clearly fading out of view at a short distance and large objects like entire ships just 'disppearing' suddenly if you are far enough away from them.
The HL2 maps are very cleverly designed and it uses a LOT of cheap tricks to pull it off. I'd be fine with that but unfortuantely are all to visible to me during normal gameplay, in addition to the things I've already mentioned there is also stuff like like objects where the is no texture on the inside so you can see through them, and having certain items 'fade away' in front of you or when your turn you back (broken fences, for some reason). Of course it doesn't need to do any of this (and I dare say there are command line config options to tweak all of it) but it behaves like that because they have tried hard to make sure it's still playable even on 4 year CPU's (because sadly people will expect to be able to run a game like HL2 on a 4 year old CPU).
So while the performance of engine is certainly good (albeit the maps are not that big - the frequent level loading on the early levels drove me nuts) it's not rendering anything like the level of detail that Far Cry renders or (dispite the excellent map making) with quite the same quality, so of course it's going to run better.
HL2 I can run 800 x 600 with most of the settings turned up with a 1/2 GB of RAM
Eeep, wow, I'm not flaming here but I think the last time I ran a new game on Windows/Mac/Linux at 800x600 or lower was on a Voodoo 2, some time in 1998 IIRC. (Might have tried Q3A on the same card under Linux actually, at the same res, though the card was getting on by the time Q3A was released).
Re:trilinear filtering = UGLY - That AND no FSAA!
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Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: -1, Troll
IMO, people who care so little about gaming they have a POS card that doesn't do FSAA or Anisotropic filtering really shouldn't even be doing reviews. My last *three* graphics cards can all do that. This guy might flip burgers at McDonalds for all I know. If someone cares so little about games they are running on a 4 year old graphics card that doesn't even support Direct X 9 fully, I'm not inclined to value their opinion on the quality of a game.
*** CAUTION: RANT AHEAD! ***
(Really)
If a source I have some faith in (Edge, Penny Arcade) tells me a game is good, or that it sucks, I'll pay attention to their commentary and take it under consideration. I have no faith in this guy and those atrocious screen shots (which I can only assume were chosen by him to illustrate specific points in the game he wanted to draw atention to) destroy his credibility IMO.
I would have been far better to get at least 2 people in, including one who loves it and one who hates it (or at least is able to be meaningfuly critical about it) and let them discuss it, strip out the crap and let people make their own minds up from transcript.
Going back to the issue of POS hardware run by 1337 basement dwelling script kiddies the world over: The results of the Steam hardware survey made me angry to see so many people who consider themselves avid - even 'hardcore' - gamers running POS hardware I would have given away to some charitable cause *4 years ago* (let alone be using now). The reason the clipping distance outdoors is somewhat short in HL2 and that the levels are fairly small is that so many people have crap hardware because they are tight arses (and Valve know this).
If people weren't such tight arses and went out and got AT LEAST a GB of RAM and 3200XP/P4 3.0 or higher and a card with AT LEAST 128 MB texture memory (and DX9 support) then we could have better games quicker, because the quality wouldn't have to be sacraficed to keep the GeForce 4 / AMD 1800 / 512 MB crowd happy (who, let's face it barely have any money as it is). I want developers to be able to concentrate on adding art assets and more complex physics models, not making sure stuff is alright at 800x600 in 16 bit on a 64 MB card that couldn't even run Quake 3 Area at full detail at over 30 FPS.
It's NOT expensive to have decent hardware either. I'm 25, I don't earn shedloads and my hardware was better than that 12 months ago (in fact, that's when I gave a system of that spec away to friends who drive me nuts because there hardware is so utterly crap). It crazy for these people to think they are having a comparible gaming experience, it's so blurry and out of focus (and low res) in some respects it's like watching a movie stoned AND drunk then writing a review of it.
I understand that people have differnt financial priorities (their chidren of course being #1) but I don't think in the majority of cases this is about people not having enough money, it's just they are too tight to part with it.
*** CAUTION: RANT LEVEL INCREASING ***
They (the lusers who are the bane of every avid gamers existance) spend 50 USD every month or two on a new game SOFTWARE, but they won't spend HALF of that once a year on new HARDWARE, they just expect everything to 'run fine' and only upgrade every 4-5 years in one go (and because they do it in one go, it looks expensive, so they go for the cheap option, cut corners and get hardware that was released at least 12 months ago, so what they think is a hot new decent gaming system is at best 'meeting minimum requirements' and of course is POS in another 12-24 months, but it will be 2-3 years before they upgrade again at least).
It reminds me of the really dumb kids in school with Mega Drives/SNES systems who would always get the cheaper option 9.99 games and get two instead of a single 19.99 game. Not figuring that the 9.99 games are almost always so utterly crap hardly anyone plays them beyond the first level. You know the sort of games you can tell are OBVIOUSL
. ATI drivers won't work on mobility chipsets. Either mod the drivers, or just download some modded drivers.
Weird, I've just looked and your totally right it seems. They make dowloadable drivers for the mobility chipset for Mac OS X on the PowerBook (of all things) so I'd amazed they don't have them for Windows.
Not too surprised about about Dell being out of date, and in your situation I'd use something like the omega drivers too, so I guess that's one good use for them.
One more reason for me to avoid ATI in future I guess. I have a Radeon 9800 256MB in my gaming system, and before that a 9700 128 MB, and a 9700 128 MB in my laptop. I'm happy with the performance and features, the image fidelity is really good (with the quality settings turned up on both it really does beat an nVidia IMO) but after all the problems with not having XFree86 drivers avalible for PPC (in particular, not being able to get the DRI drivers for the mobility to not instantly crash my PowerBook) and the all round limited driver support for X even on i386 I'm considering steer clear of them and laptops which have them.
If there were a beggar on your way to work, and you went out of your way to avoid him, it would be fine. If there were a beggar on your way to work, and you surrounded him with some walls so no one would see him, that would be unethical.
Same thing goes here.
Ah, the Chewbacca defense.
That premise only even begin to make sense if people were preventing OTHER people from seeing the-paid-for advertising. Lets look at it in more detail though...
If you saw a beggar on the way to work the ethical thing to do would be to report him to the authories - begging is illegal in most modern westernised nations after all, and with good cause.
Very often it's done on private property (shop doorways, underground stations), often very assertively/aggressively causing harm to local business and increasing fear of crime (and increase in actual crime) in the area . It does very real damange to communities and the issues of drunkeness, instances of public disorder and the proliferation of hard drugs that go along with it to name but a few. It's such a problem in London that many local councils have put up paid advertisements trying to get it into peoples heads NOT to give to street beggers.
I could say "It's unethical to set kittens on fire and kick them around, same applies here." that would make about as much sense. Setting fire to kittens is something I'd consider unethical, and just like your analogy it doesn't in any way relate to the ethics of blocking adverts however.
I have tried endlessly to explain to fsckwit forum kids that these are not magical new binaries, and won't give performance gains above and beyond what you can get with the ordinary drivers and a small amount of clue.
There are plenty of tools avalible (including free GPL'd tools) to modify the large array of avalible registry settings through simple point-n-click interfaces. Most of them will tell you what the options do too.
Of course the normal ATI control panel provide the most useful set of options (balanced with simplicity), but the tragically 1337 kids who install these don't usually understand the options avalaible in the default drivers, because they never RTFM.
I can't wait until World of Warcraft blows this myth out of the water.
Amen to that. It's about time people stopped making excuses for crappy gameplay in MMOG's. They are full of harsh death penalties that make users not want to explore areas for fear of dying and tedious grind-a-thon crafting.
WoW really does blow that out of the water IMO, I do think it has what it takes to be genre defining.
I find it totally rediculous to suggest that harsh dealth penalties lead to greater immersion due to being more attached to the character. Most MMORPG's - including the likes of EQ and SWG - are not even remotely immersive, they are XP grinds with auto-generated quests that you could create a generator for in a matter of minutes! The terminal generator in SWG, for example, has got to be one of the lamest cop-outs ever.
WoW has managed, through a unique approach to death, to make it more immersive without this. WoW is a fun game that 'normal' people can play and enjoy on the same terms as any other game - that is it's fun to play, and that's why I think it will pull loads of new users. I think people have learned their lesson with SOE and are very wary of EQ2 (though I don't think SOE have learned it yet, though the approach of voice acting and improved questing over EQ1 shows they are trying to get it right I think).
And dispite the style of the graphics (which I was highly sceptical about at first - I thought it would wreck the experience, that was until I tried it) it's the most immersive MMOG experience I've ever had and by an enormous margin the most enjoyable MMORPG I've ever played.
players stick around in MMORPGs not because death penalties somehow give their characters depth, but because of the player community and because of the long term achievement goals.
Well said. Of course SOE rely very heavily on the 'keep grinding till level X to unlock $foo, plus you'll get fat loot and bragging rights!' approach. Addmittedly that approach has still dragged in bucketloads of people, but I think when average Joe's compare WoW with EQ I don't think they are going to hesitate before choosing WoW (that's certainly what I've seen born out from people I know IRL who I've also played titles like SWG with).
I think EQ2 is going to be a bit like L2 in that it's going to relegated primarily to the power levellers (only, in contrast to L2, ones that dislike PvP).
What you've said is true but I'd bear in mind that they had to cancel the signup after the servers were/.'d due to over subscription so we don't know what the number would have been if they had let it run.
That and it was a 2.5 GB download and the closed beta was only for a short period, with a client of that size a lot (but not all certainly) of freeloaders would be put off the lengthy download.
I think the large delay in the release outside the US will reduce the initial number of subscribers for a bit. ( This is because for the first time in a large MMO, users outside the US won't simply be able to play online on the US servers as players will need a US billing address).
I do agree with the parent poster though, WoW is just such a stunning example of how to get it right I think it's going to be genre defining (which would be a real coup for Blizzard). I don't think the hard core powerlevellers from EQ/SWG/L2 will like it as much, I think everyone else will love it. Like CoH, I think people who don't play a MMOG will love it in particular (though I think it will have wider appeal that CoH, not least because of the recent LOTR films, which it draws on for 'inspiration' noticeably).
I'd note I came across it as very skeptical at first but was won over by the game and genuine level of immersion and the fact that everything - from questing, to crafting to dying was pure fun from start to finish. I know quite a lot of people who think that dying should severly punish users, I think this is a big poke in the eye to that concept and it's about time people released everything in a game should be as fun as possible, no part of the fundamental game mechanics should be tedious or harshly punative.
Network admin: Do we really want to hire the creator of a protocol capable of swamping our network with overhead and STILL not achieving speeds any faster than traditional data transfer methods?
Indeed.
Bittorrent may save on bandwith for the person hosting the file, but it's very rarely faster. I download from FTP servers at 1Mbps-5Mbps on a regular basis. I rarely get anywhere near that from Torrents.
They are quite good in an initial release, when everyone is struggling to get the same file (where under normal cirumstances the server hosting it would be/.'d), but very quickly afterwards (the next day or so) and hardly anyone one bothers to run it any more, so download for other users to a crawl.
Anyone who thinks the levels in Doom 3 were "slapped together" to show off the engine should spend a little time designing levels. The general design, lighting, sound design (which was surprisngly important for some levels), and all around attention to detail in Doom 3 was very impressive. Whether you were a fan of the gameplay or not, you would be a fool to claim the levels were "thrown together".
The maps were superbly well done. Great texture work and lighting. It's the most impressive map design I've ever seen.
I do agree however that the actual in game levels did feel very "slapped together". Monster placement was appaling, monsters frequently spawned right in front of me, without any animation. The triggers were obvious and failed to immerse me. I also felt weapons and health placement was poor and offered no real challange, with powerful weapons being given far too early on (I found I either took heavy damage and died, or none).
Poor item placement and poor monster placement (and spawning) together with a lack luster nad obviously trigger based system does not make for good level design in my view because they are integral to the experience.
(And I think that's true, putting aside the gameplay).
The majority of current users do have a G4 (or better) though. The G4 range was released about 5 years ago. Anything pre G3 is firmly legacy hardware, and most G3 systems are legacy too.
just like every x86 owner doesn't run on a P4 HT (not to mention that hyper-threading requires no 'special coding' and was designed as such).
It's not true that using Hyper Threading delivers currently delivers some kind of automagic accelleration - you do specifically need to develop your program with it in mind to use it. Specifically, you need to think about threading. It doesn't just magically speed up software because you have Hyper Threading support on your CPU.
Software is written to be used across multiple platforms with the least amount development time. Case in point: MMORPGs. Developers write the graphics engine to mesh across platforms thus requiring a 'simplified' engine that can't be (easily) optimized per architecture.
The idea that 3D game engines cannot be easily optmized and still run on different platforms is proven to be not true. Its about the most portable aspect of any title, assuming you make a half way sensible choice about what 3D engine you use. You can rely to a very large extent on consistant hardware (due to the Nvidia and ATI dominance) on all platforms.
If you know MMOG's you'll know the worst offenders: SOE. Neither EQ, SWG or PS were designed to be ported (the only one that was was a limited version of EQ) and they still have performance ranging from appauling (SWG) to at best dubious (PS).
WoW, on the other hand is actually cross platform and runs very well (because it uses a sensible engine - the Unreal Warfare engine, which supports Open GL rendering). CoH uses it's own Open GL engine which performs spectacularly well. Even Vendetta performs comparibly or better than JTL and it's avalible on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (and has a development team of about 4 people).
Yes... writing software/apps for many different platforms is a BAD thing. Geez...
Its much more impressive to me to see someone downgrade, albeit with new non-bloated software, than it is to see the 'latest and greatest' ricerbox being sliding off someones credit card..
I dislike badly written software, (for example most MMORPG's have very poor 3D engines compared to most single player games - as an avid gamer this is a bug bear of mine) and I think it's been clear over the last 20 years that there are diminish returns in each upgrade cycle (Mac OS 6 through 9 were all faster to use for regular desktop bound tasks than Mac OS X for example, and it's not at all clear that the additional features are worth the disproportionate drop in speed - similar things can be said of the Windows platfom in comparing Windows XP to Windows 3.1).
I think it's fair to say that both Mac OS 7 and Windows 95 were faster for navigating directories, opening word processor documents and checking email on average hardware for the time than either Mac OS X or Windows XP are on significantly newer hardware. Linux on my 1.5 Ghz PowerBook is *staggeringly* fast compared to Mac OS X for example (so much so, that I'm very tempted to keep buying the hardware, because I like the feature set, but switch back to Debian). The very apparent lack of optimisation on Mac OS X is just staggering.
However...
I can honstly say that I find it much more impressive for me to see Doom 3, PlanetSide or Unreal 2 running on high end new hardware and it is to see that after months of hard work they have managed to port a rather mundane title to a 10 or 20 year old system. The price of not having bloated software is sometimes just that - a mesurable monetary cost which someone has to be willing to bear. Time, money and the very real resultant possiblity that if it can't be made quickly it can't be made at all (which in the case of some software, could be be bad for overall productivity).
I do think OS vendors have a lot to answer for - they are responsible for massive amounts of bloat (particularly Microsoft and Apple), but other than the period release of a new OS like XP or OS X, it's games more than anything that drive the cycle, and most developers are keen to do as much as they can to keep the performance as good as possible within reasonable limits.
I hear David Braben is working on a sequal to Elite, I'm sure it will be very tighly coded. I think perhaps it will be a long time coming though - if, dare I say it ever.
I do not think coding in assembly is very efficient, as it takes significantly longer to write complex software, which is why we have C (and other higher level languages). We should be picking the right battles I think. Perhaps by attacking poorly implimented and very inefficent high level languages and ensuring we have good compiler technology (and run time engines) to appropriatly optimise software to make use of the hardware it's running on.
Hardly any programs (certainly hardly any of the programs I use) take advantage of features like Altivec (on PPC G4's) or Hyperthreading (on Intel P4's) - having them do so by being appropriately written and having compilers that can do a good job of optimisation would be a big step in the right direction. It was the efforts of Motorola (donating code to GNU/FSF) and the work of companies like Red Hat and independant individuals that Altivec optimisation was added gcc for example - yet Apple rely on it, even ship it on CD/DVD with every Macintosh, as such many would think perhaps they should have been leading contributions to such a project. Which brings me to perhaps one of the best targets for bloatware critisim - vendors of commercial operating systems (i.e. Sun, Apple, Microsoft) - some of there software is frankly appaulingly slow given the hardware it runs on, and what they do in many ways sets the tone for the rest of the industry.
Not everyone in the StarWars Universe should have a ship. It should cost big bucks to have and maintain them.
We are led to belive that in fact it only costs around 15k credits for a basic ship, according to A New Hope. In the game it costs many, many times that. Certain items are too expensive for gamers, with constant upkeep required to ensure poeple keep playing (or your lose your stuff, oh no!), this in turn helps ensure monthly subscriptions just keep on rolling in. Until people get sick of it.
The ability to own and maintain house requires a level of grafting akin to my work, only it's more tedious. Players end up playing not for fun, but just so they can graft in a virtual world to own property, or sustain a mount or vehicle thus enabling them to do things in the gane that ARE fun. The should be having fun in the first place! It's a game based on a popular license and attempts to appeal to as many people as possible - it should be a joy to play, it should not feel like work!
The real content in the game (such as it is) is dominated by lonley, anti social males with huge amounts of free time on their hands (readily identifiable by the 100% composite armour). It's not played by your average joe or jane, it's not fun most normal people. The interface is undocumented, the only way to be good at it is by pouring over the websites for many hours to compare stats on mobs, buffs, weapons, armour and skills (not to mention following the forums to see what the latest stealth buff/nerfs have been - because it's never fully detailed in the patch notes, very often changes don't even get a mention). Those who don't play like this miss out on the majority of content because even after playing casually for 1 or even 2 years they aren't sufficently powerful to access 'the good stuff' unless they deliberly get on the leveling treadmil and start grinding away.
I have no problem with very well exceuted games that deliberately cater to the hardcore - like Lineage 2. But a game like SWG should have had a wider appeal, but the development team have blundered from patch to patch with no clear vision or gameplay premise in mind.
They have taken a massive license, some astounting art and sound property, wrapped it up in a very poorly executed 3D engine and pasted it on to a hacked up version of Ever Quest (not quite litterly, but that's just what the player experience is like - a more complicated version of EQ designed with even less focus on real gameplay, only with a popular license that dragged in loads of players).
Every piece of software has bugs... Get used to it.
Please don't assert that other games have anything like the number of bugs that recent SOE titles (SWG, PlanetSide) have had. They a Crash-To-Desktop athons, where as L2, CoH or WoW have never had such a reputation. I can testify that I CTD'd for months in SWG before it turned out it was due to the *amour* combination I was wearing! PlanetSide was so full of bugs for the first 6 months it regularly got refered to as BetaSide (though I'm happy to report both games are quite stable now).
Yes, it sucks having to waste AP on a Tailor or Merchant but, someone has to do it or we'd all run around bartering in our underwear.
I would like you to justify why you say that 'someone has to do it'? If it's tedious to do, eliminate it from the game, or at the very least minimise it - make many generic items of clothing items avalible from NPC's. Have players manufacture the really intersting items to give those that want to craft some reason to, that doesn't mean they have to make everything.
That's the point really it's all about focusing on *fun*. SWG did not do that nor does the team really understand how to pull it off. SOE are primarily all about the money, they are not really passionate about games as a company.
With EQ2 SOE have finally pulled out a reasonable 3D engine in a game! Sadly it seems they haven't quite got the 'gameplay' concept yet (though
Don't group Canada in with your view of 'America'. You won't have to be fingerprinted nor iris scanned to get into Canada, and even though Canadians aren't the greatest on world knowledge they're not the worst either. Your assumption that "North America" (no doubt excluding Mexico & Central America) is one big homogeneous blob shows the same lack of world knowledge that you accuse Americans of having.
Actually it shows poor reading and interpretation skills on the part of people who seem to think I in some way sought to infer or imply that Canada was part of the United States of Amercia.
You can see why I mentioned it if you look at the context in which it is in. I state as far north [in North America] as Canada and as far south as Florida - it is left to readers only ability to interperate where else I might have been. I did not mention a US state specifically because I can't recall if the northern most point I've been too within the United States was in Michigan or within the bounds of New York state and I didn't wish to be inaccurate on a technicality (though I seem to recall it's the former).
I have been very clear and said nothing that is not accurate in that respect. Canada is part of the region of North America, specifically it's notherly point, just as Florida is a southen most point (on the east coast). Perhaps you should think about why I would use those particular words (note the physical geography).
You are chosing to add your own meaning, rather than reading what I've actually written.
I don't care how many states of the US you've been to -- none of them are in Canada
I did not state or even imply that it was. It is however part of North America, as I stated.
Unfortunately it seems, with a final term president (who doesn't have to worry about re-election) with Republican Senate, House and Court behind him, that there is nothing we can do for the next 4 years.
GWB's administration doesn't seem keen to take any advise or even to discuss issues, even with his closest political ally (though of course UN member countries and the UN itself have a part to play in this, due to their proven inablity to be effectual, which is infuriating).
The EU has also been a lame duck too, it took the US to start going to Bosnia to stop the genocide (under a UN flag) because the EU and UN were complacent and spent too long debating the matter (very 'Episode I' IMO).
The EU is too immature at the moment, the UN is ineffectual and the only one with any real power - the US - is not willing to listen to anyone else (as is it's perogative). It's an unholy mess are we are all screwed and there is apparently nothing we can do about it for at least 4 years (or is there?).
I would assume that in most countries, it is possible for a President or Prime Minister to win an election witout actually getting a majority or even plurality of the popular vote.
It's pretty much unthinkable for any one who gets more votes in an election to LOSE it to someone else (who got less votes), anywhere in an EU state AFAIAA. The electoral college system is quite unique in that respect. In the vast majority of western countries such a thing would be quite impossible.
I was mearly using that as an example of how extensively I've travelled in the region (which is a reasonable amount, somewhere between 7-10 states across a reasonable segment I think). I find it neither misleading nor inaccurate in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
The culprits are primarily unknown, but these sites were flooded beyond control from the attack.
'flooded beyond control' indeed - 'beyond control of the group monkeys pretending to be network administrators' might be a more accurate summary.
My advice is to get a better provider, one with Arbor's Peakflow or similar home grown solution in place, for example.
I read this article yesterday I first noticed it on the BBC web site.
The description of 'Professional Amature' for the contributer to an open source project struck me as complete misnomer right away.
As with the very the person they focus on in the article, contributers to open source software are generally PROFESSIONALS not amatures. Most do get paid for their skills in a professional capacity, but they also donate their skills to more charitable efforts.
This is not something you see many people doing - healthcare workers running free clinics, and some lawyers offering free legal advice spring to mind as rare examples of this - but it's not as if accountants, plumbers, electricians or salesmen are known for donating their free time, even to charitable causes. I listened to someone in another cube trying to explain the concept of open source software to a salesman in the office recently, the guy really couldn't grasp why you might want to charitably contribute something to others without some direct and immediate personal monetary benifit, an attitude I encounter all too often.
What particularly annoyed me in this instance is that work for a multinational company in the telecoms and network sector which relies (and contributes) to open source projects too. We simply couldn't run the company without open source software (at least, not if we wanted to stay in business, it simply wouldn't be profitable). For example, we'd have to buy dedicated hardware from the likes of Nortel that costs in the region of 70,000 USD to do what we can also a single 1U high dual CPU Linux server loaded with some additional open source software, which were able to modify to do what we wanted. One HP supplied server with dual CPU's, gigs of RAM and multiple gigabit interfaces only costs in the region of 5,000 USD. Bearing in mind we have to have at least two units for redundancy it would be a 130,000 USD price tag, for one project!
The kicker being, except for very specific tasks - thanks primarily due to it's larger back plane - the Nortel equipment is much more limited and has worse performance in many instances (in our case it could do 1/6th of the work and even then, only in a limited fashion). Simply by purchasing a gigabit switch and adding additional Linux systems you can grow to match the performance and still match it favourably for overal cost. It was fun to write a document for senior management explaing WHY we'd used an open source solution instead of suggesting buying Nortel kit, I really struggled to make the open sourced base solution look bad, because it had so few limitations.
But I digress!
Writing software (even CGI's, shell scripting) pays quite well and unless your daft enough to work for a lousy company, it's pretty easy work IMO. If your doing it in your free time presumably you like doing it too, so of course most people who do it are professionals in the field, and not simply amatures. In fairness, the same is not likely true with astronomy, largely due to the relatively small number of jobs avalible in that field I think, but the article does particularly focus on open source software and I do not belive most contributers to open source software in amatures who work in unreleated fields.
I don't think much effort really went into researching that article TBH, and it reads like it was written on a napkin. Open source remains a poorly covered topic, dispite it's huge and increasing influence both in our everyday lives, thanks to things like (embedded) Linux, and in the commerical sector, as an enabler the development and creation of new tools, products and services that would not otherwise be possible (certainly not at the current growth rate).
Hey, the guy with the Mac here want to take a quick look at what his jpegs look like through strings?
I only run Gimp now, sorry.
--
token mac user
I agree with the previous poster, I don't think Doom 3 was 'Doom Redux' at all.
The origional Doom games were much faster over all, even the 'slower' bits were much faster than the fastest parts of Doom 3, there were very dark sections in Doom but they were used sparingly to great effect (I didn't like them all that much, but they worked well because they were infrequent), not constantly, to the degree of invoking boredom and frustration as in Doom 3.
Doom 3 relied on tight indoor areas for the most part, I was greatly releaved when I game to nice open indoor areas in the game - the origional games were NEVER as horribly restrictive and small. In contrast, Doom 1 & 2 had many large open areas (indoor and outdoor) too.
I also think Doom 3 was survival horror - the whole concept of torch OR weapon, the rediclously dark environment, the many staged events, the limited 8 clip shotgun just scream survial horror to m (rather than mindless blasting fun).
While there were many traps in the origional game it almost never just open a wall behind you and had really nasty things fall out on top of you, you could almost always see them in front of you, or they would open up elsewhere on the level. Doom 3 was cheap in that reguard (also in the manner in which things would just 'popup' in front of you due to lack of proper spawn points, that's just really lazy design).
I wish that Doom 3 had been a continuation of the Doom series, but it's just no so IMO. I don't mind variation and thought the addition of PDA's and terminals was a good idea, but the game didn't feel like a spiritual sucessor even remotely to me. I think the likes of Serious Sam has gameplay that's closer to the origional Doom series as I remember it.
Point out that there is BAD MODERATION and what does said moderator do? Not not UP the INCORRECTLY MODERATED POST but instead moderate down the *crititism* as OFFTOPIC, because apparently understanding the moderator guidelines is beyond their ability.
/. moderation system would be fine, if it didn't rely on the people doing the moderation not being utter spanners.
The
Ah letting the great unwashed moderate. I wonder what on earth they think 'Troll' means.
Presumably they think it means 'something I don't want to here because it's far to close to the bone'. *rolls eyes*
Here is a clue for the mentally impared, troll posts don't usually start with nice big diclaimers like "CAUTION: RANT AHEAD!" at the start.
But hey, if you don't think are up to writing a response just go a ahead and suppress it, that will make the truth go away (because hey there is nothing wrong with your Geforce 4, it's 1337 right?).
Look man, there's no need to be upgrading your CPU every freaking year. I upgrade mine as soon as it gets doubled.
Every year? I haven't bought a new CPU in over a year and I have a P4 3.2 Ghz! It's not exactly bleeding edge (I can't afford to spend crazy amounts like 800 USD on a 3.6 Ghz P4 either!).
I don't want devs aiming for a 3.2Ghz as baseline specs when it means I have to spend EVEN MORE cash on gaming.
My P4 3.2 Ghz cost me 180 UKP and that was over as a year ago. According to Google's Froogle service they are down to 215 USD, 115 UKP at current exchange rates. Now, my previous system (from over a year ago) was an AMD 3200+ XP (bought for 90 UKP, and before that a 2500+ bought for 60 UKP) with an ATI 9700 Pro 28 MB (bought 2 years ago for 260 UKP). It ran Far Cry just fine (reasonbly well with the 2500+ too).
For you to say your CURRENT system cannot run Far Cry makes me sad.
Nothing that Far Cry did should needed a 3.0 Ghz. Not after you see how much more HL2 crams onto the screen and keeps framerate solid. My machine barely ran that game on the lowest settings.
As I say the AMD 3200+ system above played it just fine even with FSAA - and it's only a 2200 MHz CPU, even my 1800 Mhz 2500+ was alright. I'm curious to just what is the spec of your system because if it had issues with Far Cry to the extent it was unplayble that's a good sign your system is passed it, sorry but Far Cry doesn't have a poor engine, that's entirely unfair critisim of it.
I'd like to point out that Far Cry really renders a quite a bit more than HL2 does, really truly. HL2 has a pretty short draw distance (annoyingly short IMO, certainly noticeable) and it some serious LOD issues with small objects like foliage clearly fading out of view at a short distance and large objects like entire ships just 'disppearing' suddenly if you are far enough away from them.
The HL2 maps are very cleverly designed and it uses a LOT of cheap tricks to pull it off. I'd be fine with that but unfortuantely are all to visible to me during normal gameplay, in addition to the things I've already mentioned there is also stuff like like objects where the is no texture on the inside so you can see through them, and having certain items 'fade away' in front of you or when your turn you back (broken fences, for some reason). Of course it doesn't need to do any of this (and I dare say there are command line config options to tweak all of it) but it behaves like that because they have tried hard to make sure it's still playable even on 4 year CPU's (because sadly people will expect to be able to run a game like HL2 on a 4 year old CPU).
So while the performance of engine is certainly good (albeit the maps are not that big - the frequent level loading on the early levels drove me nuts) it's not rendering anything like the level of detail that Far Cry renders or (dispite the excellent map making) with quite the same quality, so of course it's going to run better.
HL2 I can run 800 x 600 with most of the settings turned up with a 1/2 GB of RAM
Eeep, wow, I'm not flaming here but I think the last time I ran a new game on Windows/Mac/Linux at 800x600 or lower was on a Voodoo 2, some time in 1998 IIRC. (Might have tried Q3A on the same card under Linux actually, at the same res, though the card was getting on by the time Q3A was released).
IMO, people who care so little about gaming they have a POS card that doesn't do FSAA or Anisotropic filtering really shouldn't even be doing reviews. My last *three* graphics cards can all do that. This guy might flip burgers at McDonalds for all I know. If someone cares so little about games they are running on a 4 year old graphics card that doesn't even support Direct X 9 fully, I'm not inclined to value their opinion on the quality of a game.
*** CAUTION: RANT AHEAD! ***
(Really)
If a source I have some faith in (Edge, Penny Arcade) tells me a game is good, or that it sucks, I'll pay attention to their commentary and take it under consideration. I have no faith in this guy and those atrocious screen shots (which I can only assume were chosen by him to illustrate specific points in the game he wanted to draw atention to) destroy his credibility IMO.
I would have been far better to get at least 2 people in, including one who loves it and one who hates it (or at least is able to be meaningfuly critical about it) and let them discuss it, strip out the crap and let people make their own minds up from transcript.
Going back to the issue of POS hardware run by 1337 basement dwelling script kiddies the world over: The results of the Steam hardware survey made me angry to see so many people who consider themselves avid - even 'hardcore' - gamers running POS hardware I would have given away to some charitable cause *4 years ago* (let alone be using now). The reason the clipping distance outdoors is somewhat short in HL2 and that the levels are fairly small is that so many people have crap hardware because they are tight arses (and Valve know this).
If people weren't such tight arses and went out and got AT LEAST a GB of RAM and 3200XP/P4 3.0 or higher and a card with AT LEAST 128 MB texture memory (and DX9 support) then we could have better games quicker, because the quality wouldn't have to be sacraficed to keep the GeForce 4 / AMD 1800 / 512 MB crowd happy (who, let's face it barely have any money as it is). I want developers to be able to concentrate on adding art assets and more complex physics models, not making sure stuff is alright at 800x600 in 16 bit on a 64 MB card that couldn't even run Quake 3 Area at full detail at over 30 FPS.
It's NOT expensive to have decent hardware either. I'm 25, I don't earn shedloads and my hardware was better than that 12 months ago (in fact, that's when I gave a system of that spec away to friends who drive me nuts because there hardware is so utterly crap). It crazy for these people to think they are having a comparible gaming experience, it's so blurry and out of focus (and low res) in some respects it's like watching a movie stoned AND drunk then writing a review of it.
I understand that people have differnt financial priorities (their chidren of course being #1) but I don't think in the majority of cases this is about people not having enough money, it's just they are too tight to part with it.
*** CAUTION: RANT LEVEL INCREASING ***
They (the lusers who are the bane of every avid gamers existance) spend 50 USD every month or two on a new game SOFTWARE, but they won't spend HALF of that once a year on new HARDWARE, they just expect everything to 'run fine' and only upgrade every 4-5 years in one go (and because they do it in one go, it looks expensive, so they go for the cheap option, cut corners and get hardware that was released at least 12 months ago, so what they think is a hot new decent gaming system is at best 'meeting minimum requirements' and of course is POS in another 12-24 months, but it will be 2-3 years before they upgrade again at least).
It reminds me of the really dumb kids in school with Mega Drives/SNES systems who would always get the cheaper option 9.99 games and get two instead of a single 19.99 game. Not figuring that the 9.99 games are almost always so utterly crap hardly anyone plays them beyond the first level. You know the sort of games you can tell are OBVIOUSL
And yet a large minority of the players devote their time to knifing hapless newbs.
;)
Spoken like a true Lineage 2 player!
. ATI drivers won't work on mobility chipsets. Either mod the drivers, or just download some modded drivers.
Weird, I've just looked and your totally right it seems. They make dowloadable drivers for the mobility chipset for Mac OS X on the PowerBook (of all things) so I'd amazed they don't have them for Windows.
Not too surprised about about Dell being out of date, and in your situation I'd use something like the omega drivers too, so I guess that's one good use for them.
One more reason for me to avoid ATI in future I guess. I have a Radeon 9800 256MB in my gaming system, and before that a 9700 128 MB, and a 9700 128 MB in my laptop. I'm happy with the performance and features, the image fidelity is really good (with the quality settings turned up on both it really does beat an nVidia IMO) but after all the problems with not having XFree86 drivers avalible for PPC (in particular, not being able to get the DRI drivers for the mobility to not instantly crash my PowerBook) and the all round limited driver support for X even on i386 I'm considering steer clear of them and laptops which have them.
If there were a beggar on your way to work, and you went out of your way to avoid him, it would be fine. If there were a beggar on your way to work, and you surrounded him with some walls so no one would see him, that would be unethical.
Same thing goes here.
Ah, the Chewbacca defense.
That premise only even begin to make sense if people were preventing OTHER people from seeing the-paid-for advertising. Lets look at it in more detail though...
If you saw a beggar on the way to work the ethical thing to do would be to report him to the authories - begging is illegal in most modern westernised nations after all, and with good cause.
Very often it's done on private property (shop doorways, underground stations), often very assertively/aggressively causing harm to local business and increasing fear of crime (and increase in actual crime) in the area . It does very real damange to communities and the issues of drunkeness, instances of public disorder and the proliferation of hard drugs that go along with it to name but a few. It's such a problem in London that many local councils have put up paid advertisements trying to get it into peoples heads NOT to give to street beggers.
I could say "It's unethical to set kittens on fire and kick them around, same applies here." that would make about as much sense. Setting fire to kittens is something I'd consider unethical, and just like your analogy it doesn't in any way relate to the ethics of blocking adverts however.
I have tried endlessly to explain to fsckwit forum kids that these are not magical new binaries, and won't give performance gains above and beyond what you can get with the ordinary drivers and a small amount of clue.
There are plenty of tools avalible (including free GPL'd tools) to modify the large array of avalible registry settings through simple point-n-click interfaces. Most of them will tell you what the options do too.
Of course the normal ATI control panel provide the most useful set of options (balanced with simplicity), but the tragically 1337 kids who install these don't usually understand the options avalaible in the default drivers, because they never RTFM.
I can't wait until World of Warcraft blows this myth out of the water.
Amen to that. It's about time people stopped making excuses for crappy gameplay in MMOG's. They are full of harsh death penalties that make users not want to explore areas for fear of dying and tedious grind-a-thon crafting.
WoW really does blow that out of the water IMO, I do think it has what it takes to be genre defining.
I find it totally rediculous to suggest that harsh dealth penalties lead to greater immersion due to being more attached to the character. Most MMORPG's - including the likes of EQ and SWG - are not even remotely immersive, they are XP grinds with auto-generated quests that you could create a generator for in a matter of minutes! The terminal generator in SWG, for example, has got to be one of the lamest cop-outs ever.
WoW has managed, through a unique approach to death, to make it more immersive without this. WoW is a fun game that 'normal' people can play and enjoy on the same terms as any other game - that is it's fun to play, and that's why I think it will pull loads of new users. I think people have learned their lesson with SOE and are very wary of EQ2 (though I don't think SOE have learned it yet, though the approach of voice acting and improved questing over EQ1 shows they are trying to get it right I think).
And dispite the style of the graphics (which I was highly sceptical about at first - I thought it would wreck the experience, that was until I tried it) it's the most immersive MMOG experience I've ever had and by an enormous margin the most enjoyable MMORPG I've ever played.
players stick around in MMORPGs not because death penalties somehow give their characters depth, but because of the player community and because of the long term achievement goals.
Well said. Of course SOE rely very heavily on the 'keep grinding till level X to unlock $foo, plus you'll get fat loot and bragging rights!' approach. Addmittedly that approach has still dragged in bucketloads of people, but I think when average Joe's compare WoW with EQ I don't think they are going to hesitate before choosing WoW (that's certainly what I've seen born out from people I know IRL who I've also played titles like SWG with).
I think EQ2 is going to be a bit like L2 in that it's going to relegated primarily to the power levellers (only, in contrast to L2, ones that dislike PvP).
What you've said is true but I'd bear in mind that they had to cancel the signup after the servers were /.'d due to over subscription so we don't know what the number would have been if they had let it run.
That and it was a 2.5 GB download and the closed beta was only for a short period, with a client of that size a lot (but not all certainly) of freeloaders would be put off the lengthy download.
I think the large delay in the release outside the US will reduce the initial number of subscribers for a bit. ( This is because for the first time in a large MMO, users outside the US won't simply be able to play online on the US servers as players will need a US billing address).
I do agree with the parent poster though, WoW is just such a stunning example of how to get it right I think it's going to be genre defining (which would be a real coup for Blizzard). I don't think the hard core powerlevellers from EQ/SWG/L2 will like it as much, I think everyone else will love it. Like CoH, I think people who don't play a MMOG will love it in particular (though I think it will have wider appeal that CoH, not least because of the recent LOTR films, which it draws on for 'inspiration' noticeably).
I'd note I came across it as very skeptical at first but was won over by the game and genuine level of immersion and the fact that everything - from questing, to crafting to dying was pure fun from start to finish. I know quite a lot of people who think that dying should severly punish users, I think this is a big poke in the eye to that concept and it's about time people released everything in a game should be as fun as possible, no part of the fundamental game mechanics should be tedious or harshly punative.
Network admin: Do we really want to hire the creator of a protocol capable of swamping our network with overhead and STILL not achieving speeds any faster than traditional data transfer methods?
/.'d), but very quickly afterwards (the next day or so) and hardly anyone one bothers to run it any more, so download for other users to a crawl.
Indeed.
Bittorrent may save on bandwith for the person hosting the file, but it's very rarely faster. I download from FTP servers at 1Mbps-5Mbps on a regular basis. I rarely get anywhere near that from Torrents.
They are quite good in an initial release, when everyone is struggling to get the same file (where under normal cirumstances the server hosting it would be
Well cry me a river. I big bad international conglomertate has taken your money and not provided a service.
Valve employ a grand total of around 50 developers and are based entirely in the United States.
I don't think that qualifies them as a 'big bad international conglomertate'.
Anyone who thinks the levels in Doom 3 were "slapped together" to show off the engine should spend a little time designing levels. The general design, lighting, sound design (which was surprisngly important for some levels), and all around attention to detail in Doom 3 was very impressive. Whether you were a fan of the gameplay or not, you would be a fool to claim the levels were "thrown together".
The maps were superbly well done. Great texture work and lighting. It's the most impressive map design I've ever seen.
I do agree however that the actual in game levels did feel very "slapped together". Monster placement was appaling, monsters frequently spawned right in front of me, without any animation. The triggers were obvious and failed to immerse me. I also felt weapons and health placement was poor and offered no real challange, with powerful weapons being given far too early on (I found I either took heavy damage and died, or none).
Poor item placement and poor monster placement (and spawning) together with a lack luster nad obviously trigger based system does not make for good level design in my view because they are integral to the experience.
(And I think that's true, putting aside the gameplay).
Not every Mac owner has a G4/5.
The majority of current users do have a G4 (or better) though. The G4 range was released about 5 years ago. Anything pre G3 is firmly legacy hardware, and most G3 systems are legacy too.
just like every x86 owner doesn't run on a P4 HT (not to mention that hyper-threading requires no 'special coding' and was designed as such).
It's not true that using Hyper Threading delivers currently delivers some kind of automagic accelleration - you do specifically need to develop your program with it in mind to use it. Specifically, you need to think about threading. It doesn't just magically speed up software because you have Hyper Threading support on your CPU.
Software is written to be used across multiple platforms with the least amount development time. Case in point: MMORPGs. Developers write the graphics engine to mesh across platforms thus requiring a 'simplified' engine that can't be (easily) optimized per architecture.
The idea that 3D game engines cannot be easily optmized and still run on different platforms is proven to be not true. Its about the most portable aspect of any title, assuming you make a half way sensible choice about what 3D engine you use. You can rely to a very large extent on consistant hardware (due to the Nvidia and ATI dominance) on all platforms.
If you know MMOG's you'll know the worst offenders: SOE. Neither EQ, SWG or PS were designed to be ported (the only one that was was a limited version of EQ) and they still have performance ranging from appauling (SWG) to at best dubious (PS).
WoW, on the other hand is actually cross platform and runs very well (because it uses a sensible engine - the Unreal Warfare engine, which supports Open GL rendering). CoH uses it's own Open GL engine which performs spectacularly well. Even Vendetta performs comparibly or better than JTL and it's avalible on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (and has a development team of about 4 people).
Yes... writing software/apps for many different platforms is a BAD thing. Geez...
Errm...Wookie -> Endor!!1eleventy???
Its much more impressive to me to see someone downgrade, albeit with new non-bloated software, than it is to see the 'latest and greatest' ricerbox being sliding off someones credit card ..
I dislike badly written software, (for example most MMORPG's have very poor 3D engines compared to most single player games - as an avid gamer this is a bug bear of mine) and I think it's been clear over the last 20 years that there are diminish returns in each upgrade cycle (Mac OS 6 through 9 were all faster to use for regular desktop bound tasks than Mac OS X for example, and it's not at all clear that the additional features are worth the disproportionate drop in speed - similar things can be said of the Windows platfom in comparing Windows XP to Windows 3.1).
I think it's fair to say that both Mac OS 7 and Windows 95 were faster for navigating directories, opening word processor documents and checking email on average hardware for the time than either Mac OS X or Windows XP are on significantly newer hardware. Linux on my 1.5 Ghz PowerBook is *staggeringly* fast compared to Mac OS X for example (so much so, that I'm very tempted to keep buying the hardware, because I like the feature set, but switch back to Debian). The very apparent lack of optimisation on Mac OS X is just staggering.
However...
I can honstly say that I find it much more impressive for me to see Doom 3, PlanetSide or Unreal 2 running on high end new hardware and it is to see that after months of hard work they have managed to port a rather mundane title to a 10 or 20 year old system. The price of not having bloated software is sometimes just that - a mesurable monetary cost which someone has to be willing to bear. Time, money and the very real resultant possiblity that if it can't be made quickly it can't be made at all (which in the case of some software, could be be bad for overall productivity).
I do think OS vendors have a lot to answer for - they are responsible for massive amounts of bloat (particularly Microsoft and Apple), but other than the period release of a new OS like XP or OS X, it's games more than anything that drive the cycle, and most developers are keen to do as much as they can to keep the performance as good as possible within reasonable limits.
I hear David Braben is working on a sequal to Elite, I'm sure it will be very tighly coded. I think perhaps it will be a long time coming though - if, dare I say it ever.
I do not think coding in assembly is very efficient, as it takes significantly longer to write complex software, which is why we have C (and other higher level languages). We should be picking the right battles I think. Perhaps by attacking poorly implimented and very inefficent high level languages and ensuring we have good compiler technology (and run time engines) to appropriatly optimise software to make use of the hardware it's running on.
Hardly any programs (certainly hardly any of the programs I use) take advantage of features like Altivec (on PPC G4's) or Hyperthreading (on Intel P4's) - having them do so by being appropriately written and having compilers that can do a good job of optimisation would be a big step in the right direction. It was the efforts of Motorola (donating code to GNU/FSF) and the work of companies like Red Hat and independant individuals that Altivec optimisation was added gcc for example - yet Apple rely on it, even ship it on CD/DVD with every Macintosh, as such many would think perhaps they should have been leading contributions to such a project. Which brings me to perhaps one of the best targets for bloatware critisim - vendors of commercial operating systems (i.e. Sun, Apple, Microsoft) - some of there software is frankly appaulingly slow given the hardware it runs on, and what they do in many ways sets the tone for the rest of the industry.
Not everyone in the StarWars Universe should have a ship. It should cost big bucks to have and maintain them.
We are led to belive that in fact it only costs around 15k credits for a basic ship, according to A New Hope. In the game it costs many, many times that. Certain items are too expensive for gamers, with constant upkeep required to ensure poeple keep playing (or your lose your stuff, oh no!), this in turn helps ensure monthly subscriptions just keep on rolling in. Until people get sick of it.
The ability to own and maintain house requires a level of grafting akin to my work, only it's more tedious. Players end up playing not for fun, but just so they can graft in a virtual world to own property, or sustain a mount or vehicle thus enabling them to do things in the gane that ARE fun. The should be having fun in the first place! It's a game based on a popular license and attempts to appeal to as many people as possible - it should be a joy to play, it should not feel like work!
The real content in the game (such as it is) is dominated by lonley, anti social males with huge amounts of free time on their hands (readily identifiable by the 100% composite armour). It's not played by your average joe or jane, it's not fun most normal people. The interface is undocumented, the only way to be good at it is by pouring over the websites for many hours to compare stats on mobs, buffs, weapons, armour and skills (not to mention following the forums to see what the latest stealth buff/nerfs have been - because it's never fully detailed in the patch notes, very often changes don't even get a mention). Those who don't play like this miss out on the majority of content because even after playing casually for 1 or even 2 years they aren't sufficently powerful to access 'the good stuff' unless they deliberly get on the leveling treadmil and start grinding away.
I have no problem with very well exceuted games that deliberately cater to the hardcore - like Lineage 2. But a game like SWG should have had a wider appeal, but the development team have blundered from patch to patch with no clear vision or gameplay premise in mind.
They have taken a massive license, some astounting art and sound property, wrapped it up in a very poorly executed 3D engine and pasted it on to a hacked up version of Ever Quest (not quite litterly, but that's just what the player experience is like - a more complicated version of EQ designed with even less focus on real gameplay, only with a popular license that dragged in loads of players).
Every piece of software has bugs... Get used to it.
Please don't assert that other games have anything like the number of bugs that recent SOE titles (SWG, PlanetSide) have had. They a Crash-To-Desktop athons, where as L2, CoH or WoW have never had such a reputation. I can testify that I CTD'd for months in SWG before it turned out it was due to the *amour* combination I was wearing! PlanetSide was so full of bugs for the first 6 months it regularly got refered to as BetaSide (though I'm happy to report both games are quite stable now).
Yes, it sucks having to waste AP on a Tailor or Merchant but, someone has to do it or we'd all run around bartering in our underwear.
I would like you to justify why you say that 'someone has to do it'? If it's tedious to do, eliminate it from the game, or at the very least minimise it - make many generic items of clothing items avalible from NPC's. Have players manufacture the really intersting items to give those that want to craft some reason to, that doesn't mean they have to make everything.
That's the point really it's all about focusing on *fun*. SWG did not do that nor does the team really understand how to pull it off. SOE are primarily all about the money, they are not really passionate about games as a company.
With EQ2 SOE have finally pulled out a reasonable 3D engine in a game! Sadly it seems they haven't quite got the 'gameplay' concept yet (though
Don't group Canada in with your view of 'America'. You won't have to be fingerprinted nor iris scanned to get into Canada, and even though Canadians aren't the greatest on world knowledge they're not the worst either. Your assumption that "North America" (no doubt excluding Mexico & Central America) is one big homogeneous blob shows the same lack of world knowledge that you accuse Americans of having.
Actually it shows poor reading and interpretation skills on the part of people who seem to think I in some way sought to infer or imply that Canada was part of the United States of Amercia.
You can see why I mentioned it if you look at the context in which it is in. I state as far north [in North America] as Canada and as far south as Florida - it is left to readers only ability to interperate where else I might have been. I did not mention a US state specifically because I can't recall if the northern most point I've been too within the United States was in Michigan or within the bounds of New York state and I didn't wish to be inaccurate on a technicality (though I seem to recall it's the former).
Canada is not a state of the US
Where did I even imply or infer that it was?
I have been very clear and said nothing that is not accurate in that respect. Canada is part of the region of North America, specifically it's notherly point, just as Florida is a southen most point (on the east coast). Perhaps you should think about why I would use those particular words (note the physical geography).
You are chosing to add your own meaning, rather than reading what I've actually written.
I don't care how many states of the US you've been to -- none of them are in Canada
I did not state or even imply that it was. It is however part of North America, as I stated.
Unfortunately it seems, with a final term president (who doesn't have to worry about re-election) with Republican Senate, House and Court behind him, that there is nothing we can do for the next 4 years.
GWB's administration doesn't seem keen to take any advise or even to discuss issues, even with his closest political ally (though of course UN member countries and the UN itself have a part to play in this, due to their proven inablity to be effectual, which is infuriating).
The EU has also been a lame duck too, it took the US to start going to Bosnia to stop the genocide (under a UN flag) because the EU and UN were complacent and spent too long debating the matter (very 'Episode I' IMO).
The EU is too immature at the moment, the UN is ineffectual and the only one with any real power - the US - is not willing to listen to anyone else (as is it's perogative). It's an unholy mess are we are all screwed and there is apparently nothing we can do about it for at least 4 years (or is there?).
I would assume that in most countries, it is possible for a President or Prime Minister to win an election witout actually getting a majority or even plurality of the popular vote.
It's pretty much unthinkable for any one who gets more votes in an election to LOSE it to someone else (who got less votes), anywhere in an EU state AFAIAA. The electoral college system is quite unique in that respect. In the vast majority of western countries such a thing would be quite impossible.
I was mearly using that as an example of how extensively I've travelled in the region (which is a reasonable amount, somewhere between 7-10 states across a reasonable segment I think). I find it neither misleading nor inaccurate in any way.