GSW: When you're talking about "a shared world", to clarify, are you talking about what most MMO players think of when they think of a server? IE: a space with a few thousand players inhabiting it? Or something smaller?
Dave: We don't have any firm numbers as far as how big our servers would be, but we are definitely talking about a shared world with many, many, many players.
GSW: It's worth belaboring, because this is something that players have definitely been looking for â" for some time. It's worth clearing this up so as to avoid any vagueness here.
DW: We are not playing word games with you.
You can't say whether you're building a game world for either more than 1000 or less than 1000 players? You don't know that yet? Fail.
Continuing, on scope:
ES: We've all seen it. No matter how vast or big an MMO world is, players consume the content way faster than the design teams can get it out there.
Hmm, that's funny, we're still only about half through Black Temple 18 months after it was released. Number of folks that have really finished WoW is low. I don't have figures, but I'm not exactly seeing too many full T6 sets out there, you? Right, starting to get the impression you haven't actually played Warcraft much.
On guilds:
ES: One thing I will say, though, is that we want these small groups - two, three, four players that you'd traditionally think of as a party â" we want them to have a really fun game experience. We want them be able to go out and affect the world, even on a small level. We're also looking at what other games have done for guilds, and... itâ(TM)s not that great. "Oh, I have a chat channel! And a tabard! Don't I feel special?"
You shouldn't. That's almost nothing. Guilds are the backbones of MMO communities; you have to give these people tools to make them feel special. There should be actual game incentives to be part of a group.
Like the ability to challenge the 10 and 25 man content that represents a huge portion of the gameplay experience? You've never tried to pug kz have you?
On grouping:
ES: Let's face it, most games have content that is "great for groups", or "great for soloing" or "great for guilds". That's not always true. We're not going to try to say we're all things to all people. You do that and you end up being the middle of the road, nothing for no one.
DW: Unfortunately, yeah, any answer we gave on that would probably sound like what everybody else says. It all starts to run together and sound kind of pathetic.
Pretty much everything you're saying already sounds pathetic--stick to tabletop gaming, a genre you understand. Look, encounters either scale with the number of people in your group (dynamic), or you must scale your group up to handle the difficulty of the encounter (static). Give details, or wait to be interviewed until you have more than a few napkin scribbles of a design.
As I understand it this is likely to be how they handle the transition to Windows 7.
BeOS ownership is not entirely clear (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=294923), but I think at this point you pick a kernel/toolset and rebuild from there.
What always amazed me about Be was that every window had a separate thread--you didn't even have a choice. Now in 2008, with multiple cores on even the lowliest walmart special, I still get a hung Explorer (or Finder, or Nautilus last I checked) for 30 seconds when I try to look at a network share that isn't there anymore, or wait for an optical drive to spin up.
I expect extroverts would enjoy having people call them and give their brain something to do. Clearly you have not listened to the conversations of many extroverts.
Re:I don't understand...
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
My best stab at the popularity:
1. Looks a lot like HTML. "Oh, it has angle brackets, I know this!" 2. Inertia. 3. Has features that make it a good choice for business: schemas and validation, transforms, namespaces, a type system. 4. Inertia.
There just isn't that much need to switch. Modern parsers/hardware make the slowness argument moot, and everyone knows how to work with it.
As an interchange format with javascript (and other dynamically typed languages) it is sub-optimal for a number of reasons, and so an alternative, JSON has developed which fills that particular niche. But when I sit down to right yet another line of business app, my default format is going to be XML, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Which makes it very clear that there are good technological reasons for dropping it. Horseshit. His post says, at great length, that they didn't want to write a whole new jitter for the mac-intel platform. Fine, sounds tough. Wouldn't interpreting the VBA opcodes be worlds easier (and more future-proof)? Or just running the good ole legacy vba engine under a mac-ppc emulator?
The real problem is that the company has lost its consumer market lock-in and is desperate to staunch Apple uptake in the enterprise, and removing VBA support is as close to a guaranteed deal breaker as they'll ever get.
Actually, the pie menues DON'T work with Mozilla on OS X at all. You have to Ctrl+Click to simulate a right click, but the pie menu disables itself when the Ctrl key is pressed. *sigh*
How long will it be before every Windows user is required to have a Passport account before they can log into their workstation?
Not long I imagine. Have you used WinXP? The very first thing it asks when you log in the first time is, "Would you like to associate a.NET Passport account with this user?". Yup, scary.
Aerobraking large objects in Earth atmosphere is a very bad idea. Not only do you add heat to an already warming system, you'll melt large amounts of various gases into the atmosphere. No, a couple of asteroids wouldn't matter, but after hundreds and thousands of them... Of course, the largest argument against aerobraking is that you run a rather large risk of either skipping the asteroid back into space, sending it hurtling to the ground, or having it break up from the stress. NASA engineers lost the mars polar explorer due to mixing calculations from km to miles. Imagine a comercial organization and the "cost-cutting" measures THEY would take!
The trick will be to build extremely low delta-v engines that could very slowly move the asteriod into an orbit that intersect Earth's, and slow it down enough that it will get "cought" by our gravity (or the moon's). There's no reason why you would need to have the asteriod get here quickly, especially when you start a continous operation. If it take a few years for the thing to make its way toward us, who cares? Especially true if you could manage to get an automated factory installed.. you'd have a few billion tons of proccessed whatever just floating into orbit after a couple years.
Although I haven't had any problems with the vibrate or keylock feature (like one of the other readers I simply turn the whole phone off in meeting/movies), there's a major problem with the voicedial. Instead of setting up voicedial in the phonebook menu, there is a seperate menu just for voicedial. That's OK, just a poor menu design choice. But what really ruins it is that you cannot strongly tie a voicedial entry to a phonebook entry! When you create a new voicedial entry you are asked for the number the new entry should dial, then asked to speak the name, twice. If the number you enter matches a number from the phonebook, it will show up with the alphanumeric name you gave that phonebook entry.. but if you change the phonebook entry, the voicedial entry doesent change! And no, you can't just enter the phonebook entry ID into the voicedial prompt, since it will actually dial the ID, instead of trying to look it up in the phonebook.
This isn't too big a deal on its own, but be warned.. if you want to voice dial to an extension, you need to program in a few seconds of pause for before dialing the extension. You can do this in the phonebook entry prompt, but not the voicedial entry prompt! Only about half of the people I call have direct lines, so nearly half of my contacts are completely innaccesable by voicedial.
Overall though, I'm very happy with the Sprint service, I've travelled to a number of mid-west cities since I've got my phone (about 4 months ago), and have had very good success both at airports, on interstates, and around town. I just wish the damn voicedial would work better!
Slashdot Mirror
FTA:
GSW: When you're talking about "a shared world", to clarify, are you talking about what most MMO players think of when they think of a server? IE: a space with a few thousand players inhabiting it? Or something smaller?
Dave: We don't have any firm numbers as far as how big our servers would be, but we are definitely talking about a shared world with many, many, many players.
GSW: It's worth belaboring, because this is something that players have definitely been looking for â" for some time. It's worth clearing this up so as to avoid any vagueness here.
DW: We are not playing word games with you.
You can't say whether you're building a game world for either more than 1000 or less than 1000 players? You don't know that yet? Fail.
Continuing, on scope:
ES: We've all seen it. No matter how vast or big an MMO world is, players consume the content way faster than the design teams can get it out there.
Hmm, that's funny, we're still only about half through Black Temple 18 months after it was released. Number of folks that have really finished WoW is low. I don't have figures, but I'm not exactly seeing too many full T6 sets out there, you? Right, starting to get the impression you haven't actually played Warcraft much.
On guilds:
ES: One thing I will say, though, is that we want these small groups - two, three, four players that you'd traditionally think of as a party â" we want them to have a really fun game experience. We want them be able to go out and affect the world, even on a small level. We're also looking at what other games have done for guilds, and ... itâ(TM)s not that great. "Oh, I have a chat channel! And a tabard! Don't I feel special?"
You shouldn't. That's almost nothing. Guilds are the backbones of MMO communities; you have to give these people tools to make them feel special. There should be actual game incentives to be part of a group.
Like the ability to challenge the 10 and 25 man content that represents a huge portion of the gameplay experience? You've never tried to pug kz have you?
On grouping:
ES: Let's face it, most games have content that is "great for groups", or "great for soloing" or "great for guilds". That's not always true. We're not going to try to say we're all things to all people. You do that and you end up being the middle of the road, nothing for no one.
DW: Unfortunately, yeah, any answer we gave on that would probably sound like what everybody else says. It all starts to run together and sound kind of pathetic.
Pretty much everything you're saying already sounds pathetic--stick to tabletop gaming, a genre you understand. Look, encounters either scale with the number of people in your group (dynamic), or you must scale your group up to handle the difficulty of the encounter (static). Give details, or wait to be interviewed until you have more than a few napkin scribbles of a design.
As I understand it this is likely to be how they handle the transition to Windows 7.
BeOS ownership is not entirely clear (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=294923), but I think at this point you pick a kernel/toolset and rebuild from there.
What always amazed me about Be was that every window had a separate thread--you didn't even have a choice. Now in 2008, with multiple cores on even the lowliest walmart special, I still get a hung Explorer (or Finder, or Nautilus last I checked) for 30 seconds when I try to look at a network share that isn't there anymore, or wait for an optical drive to spin up.
Assumed you meant that as "had bought" in 1999 or so:
OSX would have failed, and I'd be $1000 richer because I wouldn't have bought this MBP?
Hey, it's a beautiful dream isn't it?
My best stab at the popularity:
1. Looks a lot like HTML. "Oh, it has angle brackets, I know this!"
2. Inertia.
3. Has features that make it a good choice for business: schemas and validation, transforms, namespaces, a type system.
4. Inertia.
There just isn't that much need to switch. Modern parsers/hardware make the slowness argument moot, and everyone knows how to work with it.
As an interchange format with javascript (and other dynamically typed languages) it is sub-optimal for a number of reasons, and so an alternative, JSON has developed which fills that particular niche. But when I sit down to right yet another line of business app, my default format is going to be XML, and will be for the foreseeable future.
The real problem is that the company has lost its consumer market lock-in and is desperate to staunch Apple uptake in the enterprise, and removing VBA support is as close to a guaranteed deal breaker as they'll ever get.
Actually, the pie menues DON'T work with Mozilla on OS X at all. You have to Ctrl+Click to simulate a right click, but the pie menu disables itself when the Ctrl key is pressed. *sigh*
A point where anything that doesn't exist in Google doesn't exist, period?
"Silly Obi-Wan, if its not in the Google Archive(tm), it doesn't exist..."
How long will it be before every Windows user is required to have a Passport account before they can log into their workstation?
Not long I imagine. Have you used WinXP? The very first thing it asks when you log in the first time is, "Would you like to associate a .NET Passport account with this user?". Yup, scary.
Aerobraking large objects in Earth atmosphere is a very bad idea. Not only do you add heat to an already warming system, you'll melt large amounts of various gases into the atmosphere. No, a couple of asteroids wouldn't matter, but after hundreds and thousands of them... Of course, the largest argument against aerobraking is that you run a rather large risk of either skipping the asteroid back into space, sending it hurtling to the ground, or having it break up from the stress. NASA engineers lost the mars polar explorer due to mixing calculations from km to miles. Imagine a comercial organization and the "cost-cutting" measures THEY would take!
The trick will be to build extremely low delta-v engines that could very slowly move the asteriod into an orbit that intersect Earth's, and slow it down enough that it will get "cought" by our gravity (or the moon's). There's no reason why you would need to have the asteriod get here quickly, especially when you start a continous operation. If it take a few years for the thing to make its way toward us, who cares? Especially true if you could manage to get an automated factory installed.. you'd have a few billion tons of proccessed whatever just floating into orbit after a couple years.
More voicedial info:
Although I haven't had any problems with the vibrate or keylock feature (like one of the other readers I simply turn the whole phone off in meeting/movies), there's a major problem with the voicedial. Instead of setting up voicedial in the phonebook menu, there is a seperate menu just for voicedial. That's OK, just a poor menu design choice. But what really ruins it is that you cannot strongly tie a voicedial entry to a phonebook entry! When you create a new voicedial entry you are asked for the number the new entry should dial, then asked to speak the name, twice. If the number you enter matches a number from the phonebook, it will show up with the alphanumeric name you gave that phonebook entry.. but if you change the phonebook entry, the voicedial entry doesent change! And no, you can't just enter the phonebook entry ID into the voicedial prompt, since it will actually dial the ID, instead of trying to look it up in the phonebook.
This isn't too big a deal on its own, but be warned.. if you want to voice dial to an extension, you need to program in a few seconds of pause for before dialing the extension. You can do this in the phonebook entry prompt, but not the voicedial entry prompt! Only about half of the people I call have direct lines, so nearly half of my contacts are completely innaccesable by voicedial.
Overall though, I'm very happy with the Sprint service, I've travelled to a number of mid-west cities since I've got my phone (about 4 months ago), and have had very good success both at airports, on interstates, and around town. I just wish the damn voicedial would work better!