I think WinXP is ugly as sin as well, but it's a silly thing to grip about since I can make it identical to Win2K/Win9x in less than a minute. The ease of security updates (auto-update vs "Did I check this week?") makes it worth it to me.
It's about as valid a complaint for an expert user as "I don't like the default background on Dell's Win98 CD so I updraded to a generic version of Win95".
Um...have you tried Google Calander yet? Why settle for features people have 10 years ago when you can get better ones. * Public calanders: Football fan? Add a team's schedule to your calander, whether it's Manchester United or the Washington Redskins. Create your own calanders or search google's. * GMail integration: If bob sends you an email message saying "There's a party saturday at Joe's place at 11 PM" google will know this is a date and time and add it to your schedule. It's like appointments, but no special formatting. * Available anywhere: All I need is a web browser and so it's also cross-OS. Also, if my hard disk dies, I still have my calander. * Free (as in Beer)
Just out of curiousity, the ability to effectively undelete things ought to rely on the filesystem. In the old days of MS dos, the first chars of the filename were simply changed to a reserved character, which was actually faster than going through and deleting the whole file. When the file system wanted to create a new file, it might use the nodes marked with the "it's ok to delete me flag". That's why MS Dos 6.22 and its brethren required you to type in the first char of the filename when you undeleted a file. So actually no, there's actually no overhead in creating a comprehensive file undelete system. Any 3rd party which implemented the same thing, might cause it to be slower.
If they could be fast in MS DOS 6.22, I don't see why XP would make the feature inherently slower.
Sure, her death is just a movie, but I'd argue the game is "just" a book.
As a traditional, FF7's lack of non-linearity allowed people to put more effort into making the characters better developed and more human: Aeris says almost the same dialogue no matter how you play the game, allowing the characters to develop in the same way a character in a novel does. Since the feelings of sadness in a novel are non-surprising, the novel-game's ability should not be surprising. The writer, I think, highlights the need for an illusion of control: we don't like to know we're in a game no more than we like knowing we're in a movie.
The problem with presenting anything as prerendered in a game, I'd argue is the "OMFG MOVIE!!!" effect where the movies seem disconnected from the game itself since we can clearly tell that (1) we're about to enter a movie and (2) the characters look very different than when I'm controlling them. I'd argue that FF7 got it the most right of any game to date, since 80%-90% of the movies seamlessly transition from the game scene to the movie and some even render the ingame characters in the movie itself rather than using a prerenderd version of Cloud. But it's clearly not "just" a movie, since were I to watch the video on its own, without the context of the game, I wouldn't feel anything.
Interesting note: Did anyone feel sadness when Cid (Cele's father and caretaker) dies in FF6 (FF3 US)? How did it feel to realize it was an event you had complete control over?
We're in the process of implementing further unit tests under the agile model (though not gaming related, it is a heavily interactive app). The idea behind unit testing is to:
1) find bug 2) write unit test for bug. 3) write fix. 4) verify unit test/program both work. If unit test works, but program fails, go to step 2.
1) In your example, a tester/coder would find see some soldier dude getting stuck in the middle of battle. 2) So do it again, saving the game before the bug occurs. Write a unit test which loads this save and then check after x seconds to see where the soldier is and then fail the unit test cause he's stuck behind the crate. The unit test will is not in any way general. It's not meant to test all your pathfinding issues, just this one. 3) Rework the pathfinding code. 4) After you notice the unit test passes, go in and see if the bug is still physically in the game. If it's not, you've fixed it. If it still is, well, write another test. You may end up with a dozen pathfinding unit tests this way all of which "fix" some sort of bug.
The idea behind this methodology is that let's say your new pathfinding algo causes a bug which developer B fixes, but which causes the original case to break. Your unit test will now "clue you in" before a checkin occurs. It also free testing to do more "battle" and "feel" stuff.
I suppose it depends on what one defines as "role playing". In the D&D sense, it means making your own "role" which isn't so much role playing it can be argued as "role making" while in a more structured environment, your role is given and you must "play your role" to complete the game.
The best analogy I can give is Classical vs Jazz. While there's room for some variation in Mozart (dynamics, articulation, tempo, and cadenzas) it's not like a Duke Ellington chart where what's written is almost a suggestion -- the further one strays from the written path as it were, the more "Jazzy" it is. It's not to say that either aren't "music played by a trumpet". It's also not to say there's not intersect.
FF6, for example, 1/2 the game is the Balder's Gate style "collect your party and use who you want" but with a better interface and a much more flexible skill system than any computerized D&D system.
Back in '99, AMD chips were found on laptops and whatnot, but they never really took off. They marketed their chips as a "value-priced" alternative to Intel (bullet train commercials mentioned "As fast as intel but cheaper"). Fast forward to today, where AMD abandoned their value brand (Duron, which they recently replaced with Sempron) and invented a new brand for their flagship chip (Opteron). AMD has gone from trying to compete in the Kia/Hyundai marketplace to competing in the Toyota/Lexus one -- rather than price being their selling point, they're focusing on quality (which, to be fair, they've had for quite a while. Again, this is just marketing.)
People bemoan the lack of AMD in the server/laptop Dell space but consider what this looks like to anyone buying from Dell: "You can either buy these cheap but 'good enough' Intel servers, or you can upgrade and buy this premium AMD box". In the end, people prefer switching to a "higher quality" brand rather than a "price aware" brand: isn't it hard to defend taking anyone to McDonald's when there's a much better but slightly more expensive restaurant next door?
When Gutenburg's printing press first went into production, the first book printed was the famous Gutenburg Bible. The second book printed was not a play, a novel, or any other work of fiction. It was a strategy guide for a game known as "Chess".
Unlike movies or books, games are interactive and the player's experience is caused by their actions. Many modern games try to combine this with a cinema-like experience, but don't be fooled: if the story was more important than the interactivity, the medium would be a book or movie.
Longevity is an oft-used measure of books and art in general. While the movies Ebert spent his time reviewing "Rambo the First Blood Part II", "Rocky IV", and "Back to Future" in 1985, we were playing Tetris and chess. Who still watches Rambo anyhow?
I am a developer on the Linux platform and have been using linux since 1999. About a week ago, I was ready to install a linux distro since my old HD bit the dust (on my new custom-built Asus SLI AMD64 box). After hearing all the press about Ubuntu, I burned a copy and tried it. I found the install slightly painful.
Installation: On my first install, I tried partitioning a 300 GB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive for sharing cross-OS stuff (mp3s, etc. I'd tried a windows Ext2 driver previously, but it eventually corrupted the partition and I lost all my recent mp3s) and 2 GB swap and the rest for the OS. Ubuntu absolutely failed to format the one partition Fat32, gave me an error and choked. OK. How tbout ext2? Well, that choked too. Not caring about that partition, I decided to just bypass the step manually and have it copy the OS. I can always format the partition manually. It choked setting up apt (for reasons I don't understand). I decided that, despite manually partitioning every linux distro I've ever used, I'd let ubuntu choose for me. This seemed to "work".
Configuration: The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my/etc/hosts file to include my hostname. After doing this, gnome allowed me to configure my network. (Why can't the installer do this?)
On the positive side all of my devices (audio/video) were configured correctly but on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).
I'm hoping with the new release, Ubuntu can fix some of these usability issues while keeping their slick package management.
My only complaint with Guitar Hero is that the song list is devoted half to the 80's, a little from the 70's and still a little less from 2000-present with one song from the 90's (by Helmet). If they're going to keep the same band (who did phenomenal work), they shouldn't do the same stuff. Why do we need more hair band metal when a good portion of the original IS hair band metal?
There was this religion started by some guy with sandals and a ponytail about peace and goodwill. Suits really didn't like him, nailed him to a tree. Don't remember if it caught on or not....
There was also some strange government of people with ponytails and almost-sandals with the idea of "liberty or death" and "all men created equal".....
I can't remember if either of these things exist anymore, but if they do, I bet the people in them are OK with ponytails and sandals.
The Best Sign of a Poor Battle System....
on
In Defense of FFXII
·
· Score: 1
....is the ability to automate easily. The point of games is to be interactive, not to watch battles take place and have you gain experience. Why not just have instant battles if you're not making any of the decisions? Just to waste your time watching the same animations over and over again? Please -- I have better things to do.
My girlfriend and I are playing through Dragon Quest VIII and learning chess at the moment. In one, we set the thing on autobattle and watch animations. In the other, we make careful decisions whose execution takes a mere moment.
I would say the more easily automated the game, the less fun. People generally praise Starcraft, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Tetris precisely because the AI for them wouldn't be 5 lines to write and (to my knowledge) the AI is far inferior to a human player.
(And for those of you who say story is important in FF, I'd agree (having played all of them). But then why not just take out the battles entirely?)
My girlfriend and I just finished playing "We 3 Katamari Damacy". She's not a hardcore gamer so FPS, RTS, and racing games aren't something that'd be much fun, since the relative learning curve would be pretty different. With Katamari, we played cooperatively and we learned a lot about interacting together as well as having a lot of fun. Perhaps the nicest thing is that Katamari is excellent for non-"hardcore" gamers while being fun for veterans as well. I've seen people who'd been playing sidescrollers/3D platformers since they were 10 and watched people who'd never touched gaming since NES -- and the learning curve was almost exactly the same.
We 3 Katamari is definitely a great game for couples with little or a lot of gaming experience.
Yeah, smaller maps. Thanks. I'll just skip the way I like to play the game and go with the smaller maps. I'm sorry it's not possible for you to enjoy playing the game on smaller maps. You may also want to think about not being able to enjoy the game without a mininum of a 1600x1200 resolution with bump mapping. Seriously, the game is exactly the same strategically regardless of map size, except that larger maps take much longer to complete a game in due to increased city-level micromanagement which adds little strategic value. But who really cares if it's more fun with a smaller map?
And new drivers - good hint Well, I couldn't possibly see what you were doing wrong otherwise. Again, Civ3 wouldn't play on a large map size without the modern processor of the day. This has been true since Civ2. It'd be like expecting to PS1 port of a PS2 game to have the same level sizes.
And PC games are not like console games - again, amazing! Thank you thank you thank you, a thousand times, thank you for sharing your wisdom. Thank you! You make the internet a fun and wonderful place to be!
Really? I'd played Civ4 one an Athlon T-Bird 1.33 Ghz with a GF2. Worked fine, so long as you played smaller maps.
The key with both of these is to upgrade one's NVidia's drivers. The performance difference is absolutely amazing, by a factor of 10 for me. Unfortunately, most people just try to play the game, see it not work, and then decide "Well, must be the developer's fault". Unlike a platform game, it's necessary on a PC to do things like disable AntiVirus and upgrade one's drivers. PC gaming is simply a different animal.
By your reasoning, changing from hand-written to printing presses did nothing to literacy, literature, or language. I don't think anyone would agree with that.
The printing press, by changing the medium, allowed more accessibility for people to produce new works for larger audiences. In effect, while before it required a much larger ammount of capital to be "published" (i.e. being copied by many people), now someone relatively unknown could write something and have country-wide distribution. Newspapers became possible, since previously each newspaper would have to be handwritten.
With the internet, we again see changes due to the medium. While printing presses were relatively inexpensive, computers and internet access are not even a luxury item to people in the first-world. Blogging is the new newspaper -- accessible , about everyday events as they happen, different ones for different localities -- and we must expect language and communication to change as a result.
With respect to the quality of an individual literary work, the medium is meaningless, but the effect of technology on a culture's written record is a different question entirely as new genres are created and new paradigms formed.
PS. We're talking on a forum. Didn't exist before the internet/BBS.
To say time is non-constant, requires explaination. Time is simply the phenomenon that things change and thus time as a quantity is a measure of change. Every "time" keeping device is measuring the change in some object, whether it's quartz, gears, or atomic.
When we say time passes slower in a moving object than in a stationary one (as Einstein did), what we're really saying is that the atomic clock changes more rapidly on while stationary than while moving (to be more precise, if at any point we measure the state of the moving object vs the state of the stationary object, the moving object will have been in a state previously visited by the stationary object). To say time varies universally from moment to moment is completely nonsensical, since by definition, this is impossible to measure. The only way to talk about time (as a quantity) is to refer to two different objects which change with respect to time that exist at the same time.
Basically, time exists, but is not quantifiable without reference to objects within its scope.
I, for one, think Blizzard is completely off-base.
There's certainly Chinese guilds, French guilds, mature guilds, and 1337 guilds; why not a GBLT guild? Being GBLT isn't about primarily about sexuality, it's about gender roles and common culture. Just as geeks have sites like slashdot, GBLT persons have common forums, movies, and books with which they identify to create common cultural references.
Defined gender roles and attitudes toward them have an integral role in any cooperative community -- real or virtual -- and I believe that it's perfectly reasonable to use this set of common beliefs to form a guild.
(Note: I am not GBLT, but I am friends with quite a few)
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday told students at Georgetown University that a wartime president has the lawful authority to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mail messages without court approval.
When asked when the war would started, Gonzales replied "September 11th, 2001". When asked when it would end, he said "Never".
There's a lot more to DirectX than Direct3D. Even companies who use OpenGL for their GFX engine use directX for interface (directInput) and sound (directSound). Additionally, threading libraries can be different and incompatible. For a real world example, Civilization 3 complete was released last week for Mac. Civ 4 was released a couple months ago for PC. Civ 3 uses OpenGL for graphics. So please, enlighten me as to why the port took so long if it's just a simple recompilation.
That's completely silly. If a kindergartner decided to write an official sequel to LoTR would it add to the series? Probably not, it would in fact detract from the series since the average quality would decrease. In the extreme case, if "everything" were added to every series, they would in fact, all be exactly the same, since they would all contain everything. Therefore, by taking things out we define them as much as by what we put in. This idea is very old:
Tao Te Ching #11 A clay bowl is molded; But the use of the bowl Will depend on the part Of the bowl that is void. Cut out windows and doors In the house as you build; But the use of the house Will depend on the space In the walls that is void. So advantage is had From whatever is there; But usefulness rises From whatever is not. [Translated by Raymond B. Blakney]
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I think WinXP is ugly as sin as well, but it's a silly thing to grip about since I can make it identical to Win2K/Win9x in less than a minute. The ease of security updates (auto-update vs "Did I check this week?") makes it worth it to me.
It's about as valid a complaint for an expert user as "I don't like the default background on Dell's Win98 CD so I updraded to a generic version of Win95".
So what kind of government is there where everyone is a member? I think they call it democracy or something....
(Republics work just fine too, and those in government are "elected" (i.e. "governed") by everyone)
Um...have you tried Google Calander yet? Why settle for features people have 10 years ago when you can get better ones.
* Public calanders: Football fan? Add a team's schedule to your calander, whether it's Manchester United or the Washington Redskins. Create your own calanders or search google's.
* GMail integration: If bob sends you an email message saying "There's a party saturday at Joe's place at 11 PM" google will know this is a date and time and add it to your schedule. It's like appointments, but no special formatting.
* Available anywhere: All I need is a web browser and so it's also cross-OS. Also, if my hard disk dies, I still have my calander.
* Free (as in Beer)
So why do you use 1996 technology again?
Just out of curiousity, the ability to effectively undelete things ought to rely on the filesystem. In the old days of MS dos, the first chars of the filename were simply changed to a reserved character, which was actually faster than going through and deleting the whole file. When the file system wanted to create a new file, it might use the nodes marked with the "it's ok to delete me flag". That's why MS Dos 6.22 and its brethren required you to type in the first char of the filename when you undeleted a file. So actually no, there's actually no overhead in creating a comprehensive file undelete system. Any 3rd party which implemented the same thing, might cause it to be slower.
If they could be fast in MS DOS 6.22, I don't see why XP would make the feature inherently slower.
Sure, her death is just a movie, but I'd argue the game is "just" a book.
As a traditional, FF7's lack of non-linearity allowed people to put more effort into making the characters better developed and more human: Aeris says almost the same dialogue no matter how you play the game, allowing the characters to develop in the same way a character in a novel does. Since the feelings of sadness in a novel are non-surprising, the novel-game's ability should not be surprising. The writer, I think, highlights the need for an illusion of control: we don't like to know we're in a game no more than we like knowing we're in a movie.
The problem with presenting anything as prerendered in a game, I'd argue is the "OMFG MOVIE!!!" effect where the movies seem disconnected from the game itself since we can clearly tell that (1) we're about to enter a movie and (2) the characters look very different than when I'm controlling them. I'd argue that FF7 got it the most right of any game to date, since 80%-90% of the movies seamlessly transition from the game scene to the movie and some even render the ingame characters in the movie itself rather than using a prerenderd version of Cloud. But it's clearly not "just" a movie, since were I to watch the video on its own, without the context of the game, I wouldn't feel anything.
Interesting note: Did anyone feel sadness when Cid (Cele's father and caretaker) dies in FF6 (FF3 US)? How did it feel to realize it was an event you had complete control over?
We're in the process of implementing further unit tests under the agile model (though not gaming related, it is a heavily interactive app). The idea behind unit testing is to:
1) find bug
2) write unit test for bug.
3) write fix.
4) verify unit test/program both work. If unit test works, but program fails, go to step 2.
1) In your example, a tester/coder would find see some soldier dude getting stuck in the middle of battle.
2) So do it again, saving the game before the bug occurs. Write a unit test which loads this save and then check after x seconds to see where the soldier is and then fail the unit test cause he's stuck behind the crate. The unit test will is not in any way general. It's not meant to test all your pathfinding issues, just this one.
3) Rework the pathfinding code.
4) After you notice the unit test passes, go in and see if the bug is still physically in the game. If it's not, you've fixed it. If it still is, well, write another test. You may end up with a dozen pathfinding unit tests this way all of which "fix" some sort of bug.
The idea behind this methodology is that let's say your new pathfinding algo causes a bug which developer B fixes, but which causes the original case to break. Your unit test will now "clue you in" before a checkin occurs. It also free testing to do more "battle" and "feel" stuff.
I suppose it depends on what one defines as "role playing". In the D&D sense, it means making your own "role" which isn't so much role playing it can be argued as "role making" while in a more structured environment, your role is given and you must "play your role" to complete the game.
The best analogy I can give is Classical vs Jazz. While there's room for some variation in Mozart (dynamics, articulation, tempo, and cadenzas) it's not like a Duke Ellington chart where what's written is almost a suggestion -- the further one strays from the written path as it were, the more "Jazzy" it is. It's not to say that either aren't "music played by a trumpet". It's also not to say there's not intersect.
FF6, for example, 1/2 the game is the Balder's Gate style "collect your party and use who you want" but with a better interface and a much more flexible skill system than any computerized D&D system.
AAC is what Apple licensed and rips to by default in iTunes, making song files incompatible with any portable player other than an iPod.
Except when I burn my music in iTunes to CD. Seems to work pretty well then with every portable device I own.
Back in '99, AMD chips were found on laptops and whatnot, but they never really took off. They marketed their chips as a "value-priced" alternative to Intel (bullet train commercials mentioned "As fast as intel but cheaper"). Fast forward to today, where AMD abandoned their value brand (Duron, which they recently replaced with Sempron) and invented a new brand for their flagship chip (Opteron). AMD has gone from trying to compete in the Kia/Hyundai marketplace to competing in the Toyota/Lexus one -- rather than price being their selling point, they're focusing on quality (which, to be fair, they've had for quite a while. Again, this is just marketing.)
People bemoan the lack of AMD in the server/laptop Dell space but consider what this looks like to anyone buying from Dell: "You can either buy these cheap but 'good enough' Intel servers, or you can upgrade and buy this premium AMD box". In the end, people prefer switching to a "higher quality" brand rather than a "price aware" brand: isn't it hard to defend taking anyone to McDonald's when there's a much better but slightly more expensive restaurant next door?
Why not try X-Wing Alliance? It was the last game to support the same mechanics as X-Wing/Tie Fighter but supports Direct3D.
When Gutenburg's printing press first went into production, the first book printed was the famous Gutenburg Bible. The second book printed was not a play, a novel, or any other work of fiction. It was a strategy guide for a game known as "Chess".
Unlike movies or books, games are interactive and the player's experience is caused by their actions. Many modern games try to combine this with a cinema-like experience, but don't be fooled: if the story was more important than the interactivity, the medium would be a book or movie.
Longevity is an oft-used measure of books and art in general. While the movies Ebert spent his time reviewing "Rambo the First Blood Part II", "Rocky IV", and "Back to Future" in 1985, we were playing Tetris and chess. Who still watches Rambo anyhow?
I am a developer on the Linux platform and have been using linux since 1999. About a week ago, I was ready to install a linux distro since my old HD bit the dust (on my new custom-built Asus SLI AMD64 box). After hearing all the press about Ubuntu, I burned a copy and tried it. I found the install slightly painful.
/etc/hosts file to include my hostname. After doing this, gnome allowed me to configure my network. (Why can't the installer do this?)
Installation:
On my first install, I tried partitioning a 300 GB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive for sharing cross-OS stuff (mp3s, etc. I'd tried a windows Ext2 driver previously, but it eventually corrupted the partition and I lost all my recent mp3s) and 2 GB swap and the rest for the OS. Ubuntu absolutely failed to format the one partition Fat32, gave me an error and choked. OK. How tbout ext2? Well, that choked too. Not caring about that partition, I decided to just bypass the step manually and have it copy the OS. I can always format the partition manually. It choked setting up apt (for reasons I don't understand). I decided that, despite manually partitioning every linux distro I've ever used, I'd let ubuntu choose for me. This seemed to "work".
Configuration:
The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my
On the positive side all of my devices (audio/video) were configured correctly but on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).
I'm hoping with the new release, Ubuntu can fix some of these usability issues while keeping their slick package management.
My only complaint with Guitar Hero is that the song list is devoted half to the 80's, a little from the 70's and still a little less from 2000-present with one song from the 90's (by Helmet). If they're going to keep the same band (who did phenomenal work), they shouldn't do the same stuff. Why do we need more hair band metal when a good portion of the original IS hair band metal?
There was this religion started by some guy with sandals and a ponytail about peace and goodwill. Suits really didn't like him, nailed him to a tree. Don't remember if it caught on or not....
There was also some strange government of people with ponytails and almost-sandals with the idea of "liberty or death" and "all men created equal".....
I can't remember if either of these things exist anymore, but if they do, I bet the people in them are OK with ponytails and sandals.
....is the ability to automate easily. The point of games is to be interactive, not to watch battles take place and have you gain experience. Why not just have instant battles if you're not making any of the decisions? Just to waste your time watching the same animations over and over again? Please -- I have better things to do.
My girlfriend and I are playing through Dragon Quest VIII and learning chess at the moment. In one, we set the thing on autobattle and watch animations. In the other, we make careful decisions whose execution takes a mere moment.
I would say the more easily automated the game, the less fun. People generally praise Starcraft, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Tetris precisely because the AI for them wouldn't be 5 lines to write and (to my knowledge) the AI is far inferior to a human player.
(And for those of you who say story is important in FF, I'd agree (having played all of them). But then why not just take out the battles entirely?)
My girlfriend and I just finished playing "We 3 Katamari Damacy". She's not a hardcore gamer so FPS, RTS, and racing games aren't something that'd be much fun, since the relative learning curve would be pretty different. With Katamari, we played cooperatively and we learned a lot about interacting together as well as having a lot of fun. Perhaps the nicest thing is that Katamari is excellent for non-"hardcore" gamers while being fun for veterans as well. I've seen people who'd been playing sidescrollers/3D platformers since they were 10 and watched people who'd never touched gaming since NES -- and the learning curve was almost exactly the same.
We 3 Katamari is definitely a great game for couples with little or a lot of gaming experience.
Not a problem.
Yeah, smaller maps. Thanks. I'll just skip the way I like to play the game and go with the smaller maps.
I'm sorry it's not possible for you to enjoy playing the game on smaller maps. You may also want to think about not being able to enjoy the game without a mininum of a 1600x1200 resolution with bump mapping. Seriously, the game is exactly the same strategically regardless of map size, except that larger maps take much longer to complete a game in due to increased city-level micromanagement which adds little strategic value. But who really cares if it's more fun with a smaller map?
And new drivers - good hint
Well, I couldn't possibly see what you were doing wrong otherwise. Again, Civ3 wouldn't play on a large map size without the modern processor of the day. This has been true since Civ2. It'd be like expecting to PS1 port of a PS2 game to have the same level sizes.
And PC games are not like console games - again, amazing! Thank you thank you thank you, a thousand times, thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Thank you! You make the internet a fun and wonderful place to be!
Really? I'd played Civ4 one an Athlon T-Bird 1.33 Ghz with a GF2. Worked fine, so long as you played smaller maps.
The key with both of these is to upgrade one's NVidia's drivers. The performance difference is absolutely amazing, by a factor of 10 for me. Unfortunately, most people just try to play the game, see it not work, and then decide "Well, must be the developer's fault". Unlike a platform game, it's necessary on a PC to do things like disable AntiVirus and upgrade one's drivers. PC gaming is simply a different animal.
This just in:
Charles Darwin believes in evolution.
George Washington likes democracy.
Dizzy Gillespie plays jazz.
Sure he said it before he died, but is that what he believes? In English, we tend to believe that Mozart no longer "composes", but "decomposes".
By your reasoning, changing from hand-written to printing presses did nothing to literacy, literature, or language. I don't think anyone would agree with that.
The printing press, by changing the medium, allowed more accessibility for people to produce new works for larger audiences. In effect, while before it required a much larger ammount of capital to be "published" (i.e. being copied by many people), now someone relatively unknown could write something and have country-wide distribution. Newspapers became possible, since previously each newspaper would have to be handwritten.
With the internet, we again see changes due to the medium. While printing presses were relatively inexpensive, computers and internet access are not even a luxury item to people in the first-world. Blogging is the new newspaper -- accessible , about everyday events as they happen, different ones for different localities -- and we must expect language and communication to change as a result.
With respect to the quality of an individual literary work, the medium is meaningless, but the effect of technology on a culture's written record is a different question entirely as new genres are created and new paradigms formed.
PS. We're talking on a forum. Didn't exist before the internet/BBS.
To say time is non-constant, requires explaination. Time is simply the phenomenon that things change and thus time as a quantity is a measure of change. Every "time" keeping device is measuring the change in some object, whether it's quartz, gears, or atomic.
When we say time passes slower in a moving object than in a stationary one (as Einstein did), what we're really saying is that the atomic clock changes more rapidly on while stationary than while moving (to be more precise, if at any point we measure the state of the moving object vs the state of the stationary object, the moving object will have been in a state previously visited by the stationary object). To say time varies universally from moment to moment is completely nonsensical, since by definition, this is impossible to measure. The only way to talk about time (as a quantity) is to refer to two different objects which change with respect to time that exist at the same time.
Basically, time exists, but is not quantifiable without reference to objects within its scope.
I, for one, think Blizzard is completely off-base.
There's certainly Chinese guilds, French guilds, mature guilds, and 1337 guilds; why not a GBLT guild? Being GBLT isn't about primarily about sexuality, it's about gender roles and common culture. Just as geeks have sites like slashdot, GBLT persons have common forums, movies, and books with which they identify to create common cultural references.
Defined gender roles and attitudes toward them have an integral role in any cooperative community -- real or virtual -- and I believe that it's perfectly reasonable to use this set of common beliefs to form a guild.
(Note: I am not GBLT, but I am friends with quite a few)
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday told students at Georgetown University that a wartime president has the lawful authority to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mail messages without court approval.
When asked when the war would started, Gonzales replied "September 11th, 2001". When asked when it would end, he said "Never".
Gonzales, however, is wrong. The war on terror is over! We're now in the "struggle against Islamic extremism".
There's a lot more to DirectX than Direct3D. Even companies who use OpenGL for their GFX engine use directX for interface (directInput) and sound (directSound). Additionally, threading libraries can be different and incompatible. For a real world example, Civilization 3 complete was released last week for Mac. Civ 4 was released a couple months ago for PC. Civ 3 uses OpenGL for graphics. So please, enlighten me as to why the port took so long if it's just a simple recompilation.
That's completely silly. If a kindergartner decided to write an official sequel to LoTR would it add to the series? Probably not, it would in fact detract from the series since the average quality would decrease. In the extreme case, if "everything" were added to every series, they would in fact, all be exactly the same, since they would all contain everything. Therefore, by taking things out we define them as much as by what we put in. This idea is very old:
Tao Te Ching #11
A clay bowl is molded;
But the use of the bowl
Will depend on the part
Of the bowl that is void.
Cut out windows and doors
In the house as you build;
But the use of the house
Will depend on the space
In the walls that is void.
So advantage is had
From whatever is there;
But usefulness rises
From whatever is not.
[Translated by Raymond B. Blakney]