The concept art certainly looked real to me. I think it was definitely legit, else why pull it? Almost wish I hadn't looked at it now, spoilt the surprise:D
The human processing plant as seen previously in Q2 looked especially gruesome.
One thing that was really interesting were the pictures of vehicles as some of the concepts. I assume there will be some sort of driving element in Q4 - whether on-rails or freeform remains to be seen.
There's a lot to be said for clear, functional and obvious graphics in games - especially strategy games like Civ or MOO. In these games you spend so much time in the interface of the game rather than the game itself, that ease of use is the priority.
You want to be able to see where those resources are, see where your units are and be able to click on the right thing when browsing the map. That's why you get big black outlines around stuff, contrasting colours and what could be said to be unrealistic map elements (like the bright pollution in civ, or the chessboard-style strategy map in the Total War series).
However the artists still have a responsibility to make this stuff easy on the eyes, or it will just annoy you! There's a minimum level of professionalism that has to be attained to make the game look acceptable - graphics are part of the atmosphere. If the game looks shoddy, you're going to think the gameplay is shoddy or obscure all the time. Master of Orion 3 is a great example of this. It's more like a redundant open source operating system project than a game, and suffers terribly from its awful presentation.
The communities with the most valuable comments are those which enable moderation by peers. Slashdot readers are obviously very familiar with how this can work, and how discussions are enriched by the rating system. Good comments which help the discussion are more visible, driven by the collective reviews of many people. It's actually fairly rare that wrong information is allowed to exist in a slashdot comment thread at a high rating, as people are always keen to spot the trolls or crackpots. There are a couple of trolls in this thread already, and the system has worked perfectly to mod them down and recognise the comments that have exposed them as such.
The Halfbakery is pretty cool although the amount of dupes and repeated ideas would do the slashdot editors proud:) The community even has abbreviations such as 'WTCTTISITMWIBNIIWR - "Wasn't that cool, that thing I saw in the movie? Wouldn't it be neat if it were real?"' to quickly reject dumb comments before people waste time discussing them. The positive/negative ratings are nice but often find quirky or funny ideas rather than truly useful ones, which can be a little sad.
Even common BB software like vbulletin has the ability to rate threads, giving them cachet which makes more people likely to view them and comment. A sufficiently high threshold of votes before a rating is active weeds out the really dumb votes. You can get some truly outstanding informative threads on some forums - or 'just' funny stuff.
The main problems with all these communities are:
1) People leave the subject of the discussion. Not always a bad thing if the new direction is interesting or an improvement, but it can be frustrating. Whether an early comment is influential in dragging everything off course, or just the transparent interference of current events, politics and 'debate theory', oftentimes the threads seem like the answers to an essay written by someone who hasn't read the question.
2) Cliques. Quite prevalent at the halfbakery and practically every discussion board around. A lot of people with the same views and time on their hands can destroy any discussion they don't agree with, or use their moderating influence to hide ideas. The solution is to have a large readership from a wide spectrum of viewpoints and social/educational variety. Otherwise you get a lot of...
3) Prejudice. Wider than cliques, the readership of a whole site might hate some ideas. Perhaps their society or morals abhor the idea, or they feel some duty to an opposing point of view. Either way, they blindly attack/defend without true impartiality.
4) Fast movement. Pretty bad on Slashdot, if you're a day or a few hours late, you've often missed the discussion, especially if it's not very popular! Happens on all boards, things drop out of the front page spotlights and sink gradually down. Some forums allow these threads to be brought to the top again, others just let them go. One plus is that fast turnover aids quality of discussion. People have a short time to reply so they try to make it good and heartfelt. For a global discussion medium this problem is made worse when half the world is asleep when the comments are being written.
Slashdot is pretty close to a leader in the community moderation arena - will NASA be interested or instead rely on the media, a few well-to-do figureheads on a panel and a couple of paltry outsourced focus groups?
How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen, by Paul J. McAuley, is another perhaps slightly more far fetched short story dealing with particle accelerator experiments. Some nice black hole moments;)
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the story of Tolkien reading one of his latest drafts of The Lord of the Rings to the Inklings at Oxford.
Beginning the chapter he was interrupted with the mutter from the back of the room "Oh God, not another fucking elf!"
The concept art certainly looked real to me. I think it was definitely legit, else why pull it? Almost wish I hadn't looked at it now, spoilt the surprise :D
The human processing plant as seen previously in Q2 looked especially gruesome.
One thing that was really interesting were the pictures of vehicles as some of the concepts. I assume there will be some sort of driving element in Q4 - whether on-rails or freeform remains to be seen.
There's a lot to be said for clear, functional and obvious graphics in games - especially strategy games like Civ or MOO. In these games you spend so much time in the interface of the game rather than the game itself, that ease of use is the priority.
You want to be able to see where those resources are, see where your units are and be able to click on the right thing when browsing the map. That's why you get big black outlines around stuff, contrasting colours and what could be said to be unrealistic map elements (like the bright pollution in civ, or the chessboard-style strategy map in the Total War series).
However the artists still have a responsibility to make this stuff easy on the eyes, or it will just annoy you! There's a minimum level of professionalism that has to be attained to make the game look acceptable - graphics are part of the atmosphere. If the game looks shoddy, you're going to think the gameplay is shoddy or obscure all the time. Master of Orion 3 is a great example of this. It's more like a redundant open source operating system project than a game, and suffers terribly from its awful presentation.
The communities with the most valuable comments are those which enable moderation by peers. Slashdot readers are obviously very familiar with how this can work, and how discussions are enriched by the rating system. Good comments which help the discussion are more visible, driven by the collective reviews of many people. It's actually fairly rare that wrong information is allowed to exist in a slashdot comment thread at a high rating, as people are always keen to spot the trolls or crackpots. There are a couple of trolls in this thread already, and the system has worked perfectly to mod them down and recognise the comments that have exposed them as such.
:) The community even has abbreviations such as 'WTCTTISITMWIBNIIWR - "Wasn't that cool, that thing I saw in the movie? Wouldn't it be neat if it were real?"' to quickly reject dumb comments before people waste time discussing them. The positive/negative ratings are nice but often find quirky or funny ideas rather than truly useful ones, which can be a little sad.
The Halfbakery is pretty cool although the amount of dupes and repeated ideas would do the slashdot editors proud
Even common BB software like vbulletin has the ability to rate threads, giving them cachet which makes more people likely to view them and comment. A sufficiently high threshold of votes before a rating is active weeds out the really dumb votes. You can get some truly outstanding informative threads on some forums - or 'just' funny stuff.
The main problems with all these communities are:
1) People leave the subject of the discussion. Not always a bad thing if the new direction is interesting or an improvement, but it can be frustrating. Whether an early comment is influential in dragging everything off course, or just the transparent interference of current events, politics and 'debate theory', oftentimes the threads seem like the answers to an essay written by someone who hasn't read the question.
2) Cliques. Quite prevalent at the halfbakery and practically every discussion board around. A lot of people with the same views and time on their hands can destroy any discussion they don't agree with, or use their moderating influence to hide ideas. The solution is to have a large readership from a wide spectrum of viewpoints and social/educational variety. Otherwise you get a lot of...
3) Prejudice. Wider than cliques, the readership of a whole site might hate some ideas. Perhaps their society or morals abhor the idea, or they feel some duty to an opposing point of view. Either way, they blindly attack/defend without true impartiality.
4) Fast movement. Pretty bad on Slashdot, if you're a day or a few hours late, you've often missed the discussion, especially if it's not very popular! Happens on all boards, things drop out of the front page spotlights and sink gradually down. Some forums allow these threads to be brought to the top again, others just let them go. One plus is that fast turnover aids quality of discussion. People have a short time to reply so they try to make it good and heartfelt. For a global discussion medium this problem is made worse when half the world is asleep when the comments are being written.
Slashdot is pretty close to a leader in the community moderation arena - will NASA be interested or instead rely on the media, a few well-to-do figureheads on a panel and a couple of paltry outsourced focus groups?
It's in Best SF 13, a nice collection by all accounts. Amazon.co.uk listing