Civ4 is by leaps and bounds much better than Civ3 and finally makes a game by all qualifications better than Civ2.
* Tech tree more remniscent of Civ 2 -- Civ 3's tech tree was horribly shallow and game could be won or lost by a couple of advances. Civ 4's tech tree is more like Civ2 since there's more choices at any given point as to what to research and the greater diversity of research advances allows more strategic freedom -- like civ2
* Corruption was redone -- In Civ3, cities far from the capital were useless.
* Combat is the best yet -- Specialization makes it possible to play defensively or offensively based on unit production.
* Diplomacy is better -- Civ2 diplomacy was infexible. Civ3's had bugs. In Civ4, it's very clear why the AI will or won't allow certain deals
* Multiplayer finally ws done correctly -- Finally, you can play Civ with your friends without wanting to hurt yourself
All in all, I loved Civ2, was disappointed with Civ3 (but liked some of the improvements), but Civ4 I can say without reserve is an improvement.
That's why the statistic is quarter over quarter. Every sales statistic in existance uses quarter over quarter sales to account for the routine seasonal fluctuation, since after all, it was almost Christmas this time last year as well.
I think the largest problem with reviewers is that they all feel compelled to have a graphics catagory and then rate games partially based on it. Remember how much fun Doom 3 was? It got on 8.5 on Gamespot, slightly higher than We Love Katamari Damacy. I recently finished Commandos 3, which was extremely difficult but much more fun/satisfying than Doom 3. Gamespot gave it a 7.7, bemoaning the graphics were horror -- still 2D -- and the camera locked into 800x600.
Game reviewers love graphics because they can post pretty screenshots and seem objective. However, the most important part of games is the subjective fun-factor. It's like judging a theatrical play based on the quality of the costumes and stage design instead of the quality of the actors and the script.
I know people who program after drinking coffee and have a mug in their office. Having studied in Germany for a semester, I can't say I've ever seen anyone with a full beer stein in their office. Drinking on one's own time is not the same as drinking and trying to code.
That said, I gave up caffeine years ago. I love the taste of coffee so once every few months I'll indulge myself, but very rarely. I used to get tired at random points during the day as well as be fairly erratic mood-wise.
However, alcohol, I've found, doesn't have the same after-effects as caffeine, for me anyway. If alcohol effects you negatively, that's fine, no need to be a zealot, but that doesn't extrapolate to all of humanity. If you really want to go a step further, stop having sexual activity since it also clouds the mind and can make one lazy. Or maybe you should cut out eating, after eating, I usually feel the need to have a nap, and tiredness can't lead to good coding.
Unless you're a virgin and very picky vegan who advocates not eating cooked food, I'm afraid the absolutist reasoning breaks down rather quickly.
First of all, they are competing products in the same way a BMW and an SUV are. Can you drive them both to work? Sure, but many people own both. However, one appeals to higher quality and the other appeals to utility. BMW makes money. GM loses money. Guess which one sells more vehicles? Want an example in the software world? Apple computers. Apple's software/hardware product offerings (other than iTunes, whose main purpose is a marketing device for the iPod) compete on quality rather than purely volume. Go take a look at their stock chart or even their PC division shipping numbers and compare that to, say HP's margins. Most people who own a Mac or an iPod have a PC as well.
Of course Nintendo won't make more revenue, but revenue has little to do with profit; they'll spend less on the graphical fancies and processor power, recouping the unspent R&D money to fund game development. I bought Paper Mario the other day, it was still $50 years later, and still worth playing (thus differentiating their platform). With little first party game development and nearly identical interfaces (e.g. controllers), Sony and MS will be locked in totally undifferentiated products in a price race to the bottom, benefitting consumers, but hurting their margins and bottom line (MS may win this, since Halo 1/2 is the entire reason many people have an X-box). Both of them, by the way, are losing money. Nintendo makes a profit.
I don't know how many other people have noticed this, but the game runs very slowly on my relatively high-end system. I had to change the resolution down to the minimum and the GFX down to medium before I got a decent frame rate and it's still fairly choppy. The windows install is pretty fresh and since the newest UT plays just fine I'm hard-pressed to see it as a system issue. Anyone else having performance issues?
My spec: Athlon64 3500+ on a ASUS SLI motherboard 1 GB DDR400 RAM GeForce Quadro FX 1300 (128 MB GFX memory, PCI express) 300 GB Western Digital SATA HD WinXP (32 bit) Professional SP2
Next Tuesday, October 25th
on
Sid Meier Responds
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The game will be released on the 25th having entered final CD production on the 19th.
I'm sitting in front of my 64 bit box right now running flash.
1) Just go to getfirefox.org, run the automatic installation of that 2) Download the official macromedia flash tarball 3) Untar it and follow the manual install instructions in.txt file in the tarball (it involves copying some files into the plugins subdirectory) rather than doing the auto install (which will bomb). 4) Restart firefox.
Is tihs really that hard? Is there some mystical advantage to running 64 bit flash on my 64 opteron bit box when the 32 bit version works just fine?
For the most part in MTG, it's possible to win tournaments --and even national championships -- with very few or without any of these so-called rares. Most of them aren't overpowerering.
Compare this to an MMO where that axe of butt-whooping is definitely better than the normal axe you picked up at the merchant and you'll lose every time.
Guild wars is much like MTG, with even the most expensive items only giving a player a slight edge, rather than total dominance.
That's my suggestion. They offer free tech support to people who buy their systems and also have been reviewed in several magazines. They allow you to pick out every single part of your machine down to the processor fan and then offer these parts at very very competitive prices (see www.pricewatch.com on any one, they'll usually be the lowest or within $10).
I've had nothing but good experience with them; when something fails, I usually send stuff back within 10 minutes or whatever.
If you're looking for a more mainstream solution, go with Compaq/HP, who sell more traditionally marketed systems with AMD processors.
Personally, I think this is a horrible idea as no software exists in a vacuum.
So let's say I write a nice 3D program for doing something medical. Since I'm a reasonable person, I decide to use some engine, let's say I license the Unreal engine for some odd reason. After updating the engine from version 1.0 to 1.1, function foo() in my program crashes where it didn't before, but it seems to crash in an openGL function call which could be caused by a graphics driver by Nvidia.
From an engineering standpoint in our current model, we want to solve the problem and its difficult enough. With this new idea, everyone from epic to nvidia won't want to my company won't want to try to fix the bug because to do so would be accepting a huge monetary penalty by saying that "I caused this". In the end, lawyers would end up litigating this problem to death and at the end of the day, the software would stil crash.
We'd also have one supported platform (both hardware and software-wise) because no company would want to insure on a plethora of platforms with limited testing resources.
I understand why this is on slashdot (technology article in a major newspaper), but why oh why did NYT feel they needed to print this story? After reading it, it seems like the MS marketing director decided today's theme was "women gamers" and then looked over the X-Box marketing points that would fit the theme (as opposed to like, actually design a console with a larger audience in mind).
I thought the reason for advertisements was for MS marketing to communicate with the public. But...this is an actual article doing so.
From the Sony site: What is the bit rate that the audio files I move to my computer are encoded in?
Windows Media Audio (WMA): 128 kbps ATRAC3: 132 kbps
128Kbs (WMA) / 320Kbs (Real CD) == 40%
So let's see. I buy a CD and not only do I have to go through a 3 step process, but I get music with less than 40% of the value I payed for (as it's already one through one lossy compression). Thanks for the new format Sony.
As a somewhat practicing Buddhist, I always cringe when someone says "life means suffering (dukkha)" when Sanskrit word "dukkha" means so much more. The translation "life is unsatisfactory" is perhaps more accurate. Dissatisfaction is not just caused by suffering (i.e. the personal experience of loss) but also by the failures of expectations to be met and the innate mature of our mind -- especially knowledge of our own mortality.
There should be less than/greater than signs around stdio.h but slashdot formatting removes them. Couldn't figure out how to get slashdot to keep them so I left them out.
What's the rationale for comparing a 6600 to a 7800? Of *course* it's going to be slower.
Why not compare it to a vanilla 6600 and see if it performs any differently since there's quite a bit of benchmarks available for vanilla version?
If they perform exactly the same (what I'd expect), then we're just asking if noise difference is worth the price difference. Instead, they do gratuitous benchmarks. What a waste.
Having played all the different Sid Meier games of late, I had the distinct feeling that there was one "best" way of playing the game. The recent iteration of Pirates, for example, I recall most of my voyages being dictated by where a given relative was as finding all of them easily eat up the duration of one's career. Civ 3, as another example, I felt like I played the same every time -- as did other successful players with whom I've talked (succesful == being able to win on a high difficulty level).
People who are fans of the hack'n'slash genre know that character creation goes a long way in adding variety to what's otherwise a very long game. Master of Orion 2 took a similar step in in turn-based world. Civ 3 has some racial bonuses and whatnot as well, but I didn't feel they added as much variety as maybe they could.
So I suppose my question is this: are there any gameplay mechanisms to force players to play differently from game-to-game and will the game be balanced such that multiple stragies will be viable to victory or will it be like the pirates sequel, where I feel compelled to head towards one direction the whole time?
(I would argue the multiple Civ 3 ways to victory all depended on one condition (high production) and thus there weren't multiple ways to win with different strategies, more like multiple ways to win with THE strategy.)
While China may be authoritarian, it strikes me that perhaps the best way to change this is through inclusion in our interactions rather than the reverse. Maybe through regular interactions and exposures to democratic and free market ideals, China will change slowly over time. After all, its economy is radically different than it was 50 years ago due to precisely this influence (as a caveat, life in the countryside is largely unchanged).
In other related news, a survey showed most people believe it's "Evil Big Business" causing high gas prices, not higher demand due to increasing consumption (especially in China) and practices like buying a large SUV to drive to work.
Reprisal, while justified, may not be the best course of action if one's goal is for China's human rights record to impove.
Is that it'll differentiate the console enough from the competitiion. Let's say I develop a game for the revolution which uses the new controller. Not only will it give me new freedom to design the game from an interface standpoint, but it'll also make it virtually impossible to port to any other console without a redesign of the game itself.
So while I'll be able to buy GTA4 for either X-Box 360 or PS3, Metroid Prime 3 will not only be a Nintendo exclusive, but other games by 3rd party developers will become de-facto exclusives since porting the control scheme will be so difficult.
Basically, Nintendo is making itself a unique product so that it's not so much competing as becoming a new good in the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo has already SAID how backwards compatibility will be handled w.r.t. UI. You simply plug the gamecube controller into the revolution.
Civ4 is by leaps and bounds much better than Civ3 and finally makes a game by all qualifications better than Civ2.
* Tech tree more remniscent of Civ 2 -- Civ 3's tech tree was horribly shallow and game could be won or lost by a couple of advances. Civ 4's tech tree is more like Civ2 since there's more choices at any given point as to what to research and the greater diversity of research advances allows more strategic freedom -- like civ2
* Corruption was redone -- In Civ3, cities far from the capital were useless.
* Combat is the best yet -- Specialization makes it possible to play defensively or offensively based on unit production.
* Diplomacy is better -- Civ2 diplomacy was infexible. Civ3's had bugs. In Civ4, it's very clear why the AI will or won't allow certain deals
* Multiplayer finally ws done correctly -- Finally, you can play Civ with your friends without wanting to hurt yourself
All in all, I loved Civ2, was disappointed with Civ3 (but liked some of the improvements), but Civ4 I can say without reserve is an improvement.
That's why the statistic is quarter over quarter. Every sales statistic in existance uses quarter over quarter sales to account for the routine seasonal fluctuation, since after all, it was almost Christmas this time last year as well.
I think the largest problem with reviewers is that they all feel compelled to have a graphics catagory and then rate games partially based on it. Remember how much fun Doom 3 was? It got on 8.5 on Gamespot, slightly higher than We Love Katamari Damacy. I recently finished Commandos 3, which was extremely difficult but much more fun/satisfying than Doom 3. Gamespot gave it a 7.7, bemoaning the graphics were horror -- still 2D -- and the camera locked into 800x600.
Game reviewers love graphics because they can post pretty screenshots and seem objective. However, the most important part of games is the subjective fun-factor. It's like judging a theatrical play based on the quality of the costumes and stage design instead of the quality of the actors and the script.
I know people who program after drinking coffee and have a mug in their office. Having studied in Germany for a semester, I can't say I've ever seen anyone with a full beer stein in their office. Drinking on one's own time is not the same as drinking and trying to code.
That said, I gave up caffeine years ago. I love the taste of coffee so once every few months I'll indulge myself, but very rarely. I used to get tired at random points during the day as well as be fairly erratic mood-wise.
However, alcohol, I've found, doesn't have the same after-effects as caffeine, for me anyway. If alcohol effects you negatively, that's fine, no need to be a zealot, but that doesn't extrapolate to all of humanity. If you really want to go a step further, stop having sexual activity since it also clouds the mind and can make one lazy. Or maybe you should cut out eating, after eating, I usually feel the need to have a nap, and tiredness can't lead to good coding.
Unless you're a virgin and very picky vegan who advocates not eating cooked food, I'm afraid the absolutist reasoning breaks down rather quickly.
One of my favorite breweries already does this. Dogfish head's Chicory Stout is pretty decent.
From the URL:
"A dark beer made with a touch of roasted chicory, organic Mexican coffee, St. John's Wort, and licorice root."
I'd hope that the patent office would at least bother doing some research.
First of all, they are competing products in the same way a BMW and an SUV are. Can you drive them both to work? Sure, but many people own both. However, one appeals to higher quality and the other appeals to utility. BMW makes money. GM loses money. Guess which one sells more vehicles? Want an example in the software world? Apple computers. Apple's software/hardware product offerings (other than iTunes, whose main purpose is a marketing device for the iPod) compete on quality rather than purely volume. Go take a look at their stock chart or even their PC division shipping numbers and compare that to, say HP's margins. Most people who own a Mac or an iPod have a PC as well.
Of course Nintendo won't make more revenue, but revenue has little to do with profit; they'll spend less on the graphical fancies and processor power, recouping the unspent R&D money to fund game development. I bought Paper Mario the other day, it was still $50 years later, and still worth playing (thus differentiating their platform). With little first party game development and nearly identical interfaces (e.g. controllers), Sony and MS will be locked in totally undifferentiated products in a price race to the bottom, benefitting consumers, but hurting their margins and bottom line (MS may win this, since Halo 1/2 is the entire reason many people have an X-box). Both of them, by the way, are losing money. Nintendo makes a profit.
I don't know how many other people have noticed this, but the game runs very slowly on my relatively high-end system. I had to change the resolution down to the minimum and the GFX down to medium before I got a decent frame rate and it's still fairly choppy. The windows install is pretty fresh and since the newest UT plays just fine I'm hard-pressed to see it as a system issue. Anyone else having performance issues?
My spec:
Athlon64 3500+ on a ASUS SLI motherboard
1 GB DDR400 RAM
GeForce Quadro FX 1300 (128 MB GFX memory, PCI express)
300 GB Western Digital SATA HD
WinXP (32 bit) Professional SP2
The game will be released on the 25th having entered final CD production on the 19th.
Source
I'm sitting in front of my 64 bit box right now running flash.
.txt file in the tarball (it involves copying some files into the plugins subdirectory) rather than doing the auto install (which will bomb).
1) Just go to getfirefox.org, run the automatic installation of that
2) Download the official macromedia flash tarball
3) Untar it and follow the manual install instructions in
4) Restart firefox.
Is tihs really that hard? Is there some mystical advantage to running 64 bit flash on my 64 opteron bit box when the 32 bit version works just fine?
For the most part in MTG, it's possible to win tournaments --and even national championships -- with very few or without any of these so-called rares. Most of them aren't overpowerering.
Compare this to an MMO where that axe of butt-whooping is definitely better than the normal axe you picked up at the merchant and you'll lose every time.
Guild wars is much like MTG, with even the most expensive items only giving a player a slight edge, rather than total dominance.
http://www.monarchpc.com/
That's my suggestion. They offer free tech support to people who buy their systems and also have been reviewed in several magazines. They allow you to pick out every single part of your machine down to the processor fan and then offer these parts at very very competitive prices (see www.pricewatch.com on any one, they'll usually be the lowest or within $10).
I've had nothing but good experience with them; when something fails, I usually send stuff back within 10 minutes or whatever.
If you're looking for a more mainstream solution, go with Compaq/HP, who sell more traditionally marketed systems with AMD processors.
Marcelo Tosatti, who's the maintainer the 2.4, has lived in Brazil his whole life.
Interview and pic can be found here.
Personally, I think this is a horrible idea as no software exists in a vacuum.
So let's say I write a nice 3D program for doing something medical. Since I'm a reasonable person, I decide to use some engine, let's say I license the Unreal engine for some odd reason. After updating the engine from version 1.0 to 1.1, function foo() in my program crashes where it didn't before, but it seems to crash in an openGL function call which could be caused by a graphics driver by Nvidia.
From an engineering standpoint in our current model, we want to solve the problem and its difficult enough. With this new idea, everyone from epic to nvidia won't want to my company won't want to try to fix the bug because to do so would be accepting a huge monetary penalty by saying that "I caused this". In the end, lawyers would end up litigating this problem to death and at the end of the day, the software would stil crash.
We'd also have one supported platform (both hardware and software-wise) because no company would want to insure on a plethora of platforms with limited testing resources.
I understand why this is on slashdot (technology article in a major newspaper), but why oh why did NYT feel they needed to print this story? After reading it, it seems like the MS marketing director decided today's theme was "women gamers" and then looked over the X-Box marketing points that would fit the theme (as opposed to like, actually design a console with a larger audience in mind).
I thought the reason for advertisements was for MS marketing to communicate with the public. But...this is an actual article doing so.
At the same time, superior vigor I believe ups your HP like 8 vs a major rune of vigor.
What I like about GW is that the "best" weapons/armor/etc while expensive, are not horribly overpowering vs the regular stuff.
From the Sony site:
What is the bit rate that the audio files I move to my computer are encoded in?
Windows Media Audio (WMA): 128 kbps
ATRAC3: 132 kbps
128Kbs (WMA) / 320Kbs (Real CD) == 40%
So let's see. I buy a CD and not only do I have to go through a 3 step process, but I get music with less than 40% of the value I payed for (as it's already one through one lossy compression). Thanks for the new format Sony.
As a somewhat practicing Buddhist, I always cringe when someone says "life means suffering (dukkha)" when Sanskrit word "dukkha" means so much more. The translation "life is unsatisfactory" is perhaps more accurate. Dissatisfaction is not just caused by suffering (i.e. the personal experience of loss) but also by the failures of expectations to be met and the innate mature of our mind -- especially knowledge of our own mortality.
There should be less than/greater than signs around stdio.h but slashdot formatting removes them. Couldn't figure out how to get slashdot to keep them so I left them out.
I've written a program in C to provide technical support to new Gentoo users that behaves like a linux expert! The source code is below.
#include stdio.h
int main () { printf("RTFM\n"); }
What's the rationale for comparing a 6600 to a 7800? Of *course* it's going to be slower.
Why not compare it to a vanilla 6600 and see if it performs any differently since there's quite a bit of benchmarks available for vanilla version?
If they perform exactly the same (what I'd expect), then we're just asking if noise difference is worth the price difference. Instead, they do gratuitous benchmarks. What a waste.
Having played all the different Sid Meier games of late, I had the distinct feeling that there was one "best" way of playing the game. The recent iteration of Pirates, for example, I recall most of my voyages being dictated by where a given relative was as finding all of them easily eat up the duration of one's career. Civ 3, as another example, I felt like I played the same every time -- as did other successful players with whom I've talked (succesful == being able to win on a high difficulty level).
People who are fans of the hack'n'slash genre know that character creation goes a long way in adding variety to what's otherwise a very long game. Master of Orion 2 took a similar step in in turn-based world. Civ 3 has some racial bonuses and whatnot as well, but I didn't feel they added as much variety as maybe they could.
So I suppose my question is this: are there any gameplay mechanisms to force players to play differently from game-to-game and will the game be balanced such that multiple stragies will be viable to victory or will it be like the pirates sequel, where I feel compelled to head towards one direction the whole time?
(I would argue the multiple Civ 3 ways to victory all depended on one condition (high production) and thus there weren't multiple ways to win with different strategies, more like multiple ways to win with THE strategy.)
While China may be authoritarian, it strikes me that perhaps the best way to change this is through inclusion in our interactions rather than the reverse. Maybe through regular interactions and exposures to democratic and free market ideals, China will change slowly over time. After all, its economy is radically different than it was 50 years ago due to precisely this influence (as a caveat, life in the countryside is largely unchanged).
In other related news, a survey showed most people believe it's "Evil Big Business" causing high gas prices, not higher demand due to increasing consumption (especially in China) and practices like buying a large SUV to drive to work.
Reprisal, while justified, may not be the best course of action if one's goal is for China's human rights record to impove.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Is that it'll differentiate the console enough from the competitiion. Let's say I develop a game for the revolution which uses the new controller. Not only will it give me new freedom to design the game from an interface standpoint, but it'll also make it virtually impossible to port to any other console without a redesign of the game itself.
So while I'll be able to buy GTA4 for either X-Box 360 or PS3, Metroid Prime 3 will not only be a Nintendo exclusive, but other games by 3rd party developers will become de-facto exclusives since porting the control scheme will be so difficult.
Basically, Nintendo is making itself a unique product so that it's not so much competing as becoming a new good in the market.