BS. IF linux gets adopted by the mainstream desktop market, you can bet your ass that spyware will quickly follow. And the mainstream desktop users will be just as helpless and unable to stop it as they are now.
BS. I can't bloody well get Firefox to install things when I'm trying under Linux. In an OS that makes installing anything a major operation only really undertakeable when logged in as root (and thus can't be done accidently while clicking around in a web browser logged in normally), it just ain't gonna happen...
Nothing about the way hard drives work makes it more logical to measure using the binary common use of the prefix over the traditional SI one.
False. Memory and hard drives always format to units that divide out well into base 2 but rarely into base 10 units. For example, your floppy disk holds EXACTLY 1440 KB using the base-2 KB definition. Using the base 10 definition, it holds 1474.56 kB. And the larger the drive, the more and more digits you need to start adding after the decimal point to be accurate, or eventually you just start approximating. It's much easier to be both concise and accurate using the base-2 versions of these terms...
If anything, Windows and whatever other reporting software used is incorrect, because "Giga" is an SI standard prefix...
Neither "bits" nor "bytes" are an SI unit, so this argument is screwed from the get-go...
...used in science and mathematics...
And here's the real key -- terminology in any field is defined by the practitioners of that field. If computer scientists define the terms differently, then using them the way mathematicians use them in a computer science context is wrong. Quantum physicists use the terms "strangeness", "charm", and "color" in ways that vary from the way these terms are used in other fields, that doesn't make them wrong, it makes those who use the other definitions while talking about quantum physics wrong. Saying a megabyte is one million bytes is every bit as wrong as saying the charm of a subatomic partical is a measure of its charisma...
Well, it should also be noted that they don't use the standard SI abbreviations either. (The abbreviation for kilo is "k", note the lowercase -- SI prefixes are case sensitive.) When I see "KB" I know that's 1024 bytes. If they meant 1000 bytes, they'd have used the proper SI abbreviation and said "kB"...
Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk
This sort of trick usually works best with "less powerful" FDD controllers. "More powerful" controllers do more themselves, "less powerful" controllers rely on the CPU to do more work for them -- and that's the trick. You could have all kinds of fun with Apple II floppy disks because the "controller" had no brains at all, the CPU did everything...
Remove that blue "e" from the Programs menu, and teach them to click on the little red fox circling the globe. That'll prevent a lot of this from happening...
Heh! No. I *wish* I had had that job. It's just that I've always held up the Thief series as, although not perfect, still the best AI I've ever seen in any game. I've played games were the slightest little thing and every guard goes bananas. Completely unrealistic. Try standing around some door 12 hours a day and see how long that attitude stays with you. The guards in the Thief series, more often than not, acted realistically considering who they were and where they were. Plus, many of them are a riot to listen to, especially the conversations they'll be having with each other sometimes. The guards have always been the best part of the game...
Off the top of my head, though, I'm not sure if the ones in the Rumford's mansion were all that entertaining... as someone else said, you may have given up on it too quickly...
Since I suck at most fighting games, this probably won't be of much help -- I'll end up playing through the same way I did in the previous titles: if you get spotted, you run or you die...
I just found it to be a little erring on the dumb-guard side
Err, where, and why? Given the setting and all, guards just aren't going to go searching out every little scuffle they hear, which will amount to them pursuing rats a hundred times every hour. After their first night doing that, they're going to get a little more realistic about things. Things that happen to you every night on the job aren't likely to provoke much response -- not unless the AI is hopelessly unrealistic, or you happen to bump into a guard on his first night on the job...
I can't help but wonder what this game will be like without the ingenious developers who brought the FPS genre to new heights?
Well, you'll have to keep wondering, since Thief 3 wasn't made without any of those developers -- Ion Storm scarfed a number of them up with Looking Glass went belly up, and picked up a few more when they started working on Thief 3...
From what I can see, the developers of Thief III have gone and made this great FPS into a 'Thief-flavored' Tomb Raider TPS. The game is 3rd person and playable on a console controller.
The game is only third person if you want it to be (unlikely for old Thief fans), and I'm quite sure the PC version will be playable with a mouse...
As for "Tomb Raider", Thief 1 has a few Tomb Raideresqe levels, and a few monster hunts as well. It's like the game couldn't decide if it wanted to be Thief, Tomb Raider, or Quake. Thief II, thankfully, learned that the Thief levels were what fans really wanted, and concentrated mostly on those (the final level, alas, being the least Thief-like...)
Given the reviews I've read for Invisible Wars [...] what gives anyone hope that Thief 3 will be any good?
Hope for the storyline, the fact that they say they've improved the engine based on their experience with Invisible Wars, and the fact that a lot of the things people whine about in IW really wouldn't apply to a Thief title anyway. You mean I don't have three gazillion different weapons to choose from and the simplified ammo system where the same ammo works with different weapons? Okay -- Thief I and II has two usable weapons (a blackjack and a bow) and one utterly useless one (a sword), and we already know they're supporting a variety of arrow types, like the previous games did (although apparently rope arrows are gone in favor of "gloves and boots of climbing", which works just fine for a fantasy title).
In short, I really don't see what the reviews of Invisible War are supposed to tell me about Thief III. Beyond the fact that there were framerate problems (which has apparently been improved for Thief III), most of what is complained about in IW just doesn't apply...
My problems with Thief were primarily the graphics and feel, and the AI.
The AI was quite excellent, actually. The guards invariably did something in response to any noise or odd thing they noticed, but not necessarily abandon their stations and go looking. It sounds like you were expecting guards to either be oblivious or in pursuit mode, but nothing in between. In fact, there was "la de da" mode, the "what's that?" mode, but don't do anything beyond watch/listen more carefully (at which point, the same noise that only put them into "what's that" mode before would push them into "let's just take a look around for a moment"), then there's the "let's just look around for a moment" mode, the "aha, there's definately something up", the "AH! THIEF! GET HIM!", the "Whoa, better run for backup!", and probably a few other alert states as well. I'm unaware of any games that had a finer AI.
There were certain problems in places (walking on tables would confuse them, for example), but it was quite good for the most part.
As for the graphics and feel, the game basically used the same engine as the original, and thus slightly dated by the time Thief II came about, but they weren't bad by any means. And the feel was better than any game I've ever played before or since...
whois says it was created Thu, Mar 23, 2000, so they had been planning for 4 years, at least.
Well, the game was planned for a long, long time. The Thief series was supposed to be a trilogy from the very beginning. We've tangled with the forces of Chaos (the Pagans), and with the forces of Order (the Hammerites/Mechanists), now we're gonna mess with the forces of Balance (the Keepers)...
Ah, but does it have that same Medieval/Fantasy/Steam-punk feel?
Thief never really struck me as an "action" game. Suspense, yes, and careful observation and planning (one of the few games were I'd find a dark corner to just sit and watch people come and go for a few minutes to learn their patterns). Any "action" that actually occured was usually fairly quickly followed by death and a reload from the last save, as Garrett was *not* a fighter...
Apparently, they learned from Deus Ex: IW and have improved the framerate, among other things. As for third person mode, thankfully it's completely optional. I just can't imagine playing Thief third person -- the first two were the most immersive games I've ever played. I don't usually literally jump when startled in other games, Thief gets high marks for doing that, among other things. And the great story. That'll definately be the key. I'll put up with a lot of other things if they can maintain the great storyline...
Eh? Thief 1 and 2 were set in the same world, with people running around in chainmail and using swords, while steam powered machines and electric lights buzzed away. Granted, the Mechanists in Thief 2 brought the industrial parts of the game setting more to the forefront, but the series was always fantasy "steam-punk". Thief 3 will have the same setting as well, but with Karras and the Mechanists out of the way, there will be no steam-powered robots, so it will be a bit more like Thief 1 in that respect.
As for throwing your eye around corners, I hope you'll still be able to do that. I mean, Garrett went through a lot in Theif 1 to get that artificial eye, it'd be a shame if he couldn't still get some benefit out of it...
You can add this feature to IE with the downloadable Google search bar. It also adds popup blocking, which is really nice. OTOH, you can just both of these features with Firefox right out of the box, and not be vulnerable to every browser exploit that comes along too...
Now with that out of the way -- I'll say I looked into this myself, when confronted with a similar contract, and found out that the State of Minnesota forbids this -- the company cannot claim as their IP what you develop in your own time on your own equipment, even if your employment contract says what you say it says. The above poster says California prevents this as well. I have no knowledge about the IP laws of any other states. But given what I do know, if you live in Minnesota, I'd sign the contract and not worry about it -- they cannot enforce that clause in this state...
Okay then, you explain why ABC and ESPN are horrible...
Good point, however. A lot of really, really good movies have been made by subsidiaries of Disney. You just need to watch out for the ones they actually brand as Disney movies rather than Touchstone/Miramax/Spyglass/etc. Those ones usually suck... usually...
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BS. I can't bloody well get Firefox to install things when I'm trying under Linux. In an OS that makes installing anything a major operation only really undertakeable when logged in as root (and thus can't be done accidently while clicking around in a web browser logged in normally), it just ain't gonna happen...
False. Memory and hard drives always format to units that divide out well into base 2 but rarely into base 10 units. For example, your floppy disk holds EXACTLY 1440 KB using the base-2 KB definition. Using the base 10 definition, it holds 1474.56 kB. And the larger the drive, the more and more digits you need to start adding after the decimal point to be accurate, or eventually you just start approximating. It's much easier to be both concise and accurate using the base-2 versions of these terms...
If anything, Windows and whatever other reporting software used is incorrect, because "Giga" is an SI standard prefix...
Neither "bits" nor "bytes" are an SI unit, so this argument is screwed from the get-go...
And here's the real key -- terminology in any field is defined by the practitioners of that field. If computer scientists define the terms differently, then using them the way mathematicians use them in a computer science context is wrong. Quantum physicists use the terms "strangeness", "charm", and "color" in ways that vary from the way these terms are used in other fields, that doesn't make them wrong, it makes those who use the other definitions while talking about quantum physics wrong. Saying a megabyte is one million bytes is every bit as wrong as saying the charm of a subatomic partical is a measure of its charisma...
Well, it should also be noted that they don't use the standard SI abbreviations either. (The abbreviation for kilo is "k", note the lowercase -- SI prefixes are case sensitive.) When I see "KB" I know that's 1024 bytes. If they meant 1000 bytes, they'd have used the proper SI abbreviation and said "kB"...
This sort of trick usually works best with "less powerful" FDD controllers. "More powerful" controllers do more themselves, "less powerful" controllers rely on the CPU to do more work for them -- and that's the trick. You could have all kinds of fun with Apple II floppy disks because the "controller" had no brains at all, the CPU did everything...
Remove that blue "e" from the Programs menu, and teach them to click on the little red fox circling the globe. That'll prevent a lot of this from happening...
Off the top of my head, though, I'm not sure if the ones in the Rumford's mansion were all that entertaining... as someone else said, you may have given up on it too quickly...
Well, that's actually somewhat encouraging -- I mean, after the latest Tomb Raider, any change has got to be for the better at this point, right?
Since I suck at most fighting games, this probably won't be of much help -- I'll end up playing through the same way I did in the previous titles: if you get spotted, you run or you die...
Err, where, and why? Given the setting and all, guards just aren't going to go searching out every little scuffle they hear, which will amount to them pursuing rats a hundred times every hour. After their first night doing that, they're going to get a little more realistic about things. Things that happen to you every night on the job aren't likely to provoke much response -- not unless the AI is hopelessly unrealistic, or you happen to bump into a guard on his first night on the job...
I can't help but wonder what this game will be like without the ingenious developers who brought the FPS genre to new heights? Well, you'll have to keep wondering, since Thief 3 wasn't made without any of those developers -- Ion Storm scarfed a number of them up with Looking Glass went belly up, and picked up a few more when they started working on Thief 3...
The game is only third person if you want it to be (unlikely for old Thief fans), and I'm quite sure the PC version will be playable with a mouse...
As for "Tomb Raider", Thief 1 has a few Tomb Raideresqe levels, and a few monster hunts as well. It's like the game couldn't decide if it wanted to be Thief, Tomb Raider, or Quake. Thief II, thankfully, learned that the Thief levels were what fans really wanted, and concentrated mostly on those (the final level, alas, being the least Thief-like...)
Hope for the storyline, the fact that they say they've improved the engine based on their experience with Invisible Wars, and the fact that a lot of the things people whine about in IW really wouldn't apply to a Thief title anyway. You mean I don't have three gazillion different weapons to choose from and the simplified ammo system where the same ammo works with different weapons? Okay -- Thief I and II has two usable weapons (a blackjack and a bow) and one utterly useless one (a sword), and we already know they're supporting a variety of arrow types, like the previous games did (although apparently rope arrows are gone in favor of "gloves and boots of climbing", which works just fine for a fantasy title).
In short, I really don't see what the reviews of Invisible War are supposed to tell me about Thief III. Beyond the fact that there were framerate problems (which has apparently been improved for Thief III), most of what is complained about in IW just doesn't apply...
The AI was quite excellent, actually. The guards invariably did something in response to any noise or odd thing they noticed, but not necessarily abandon their stations and go looking. It sounds like you were expecting guards to either be oblivious or in pursuit mode, but nothing in between. In fact, there was "la de da" mode, the "what's that?" mode, but don't do anything beyond watch/listen more carefully (at which point, the same noise that only put them into "what's that" mode before would push them into "let's just take a look around for a moment"), then there's the "let's just look around for a moment" mode, the "aha, there's definately something up", the "AH! THIEF! GET HIM!", the "Whoa, better run for backup!", and probably a few other alert states as well. I'm unaware of any games that had a finer AI.
There were certain problems in places (walking on tables would confuse them, for example), but it was quite good for the most part.
As for the graphics and feel, the game basically used the same engine as the original, and thus slightly dated by the time Thief II came about, but they weren't bad by any means. And the feel was better than any game I've ever played before or since...
Well, the game was planned for a long, long time. The Thief series was supposed to be a trilogy from the very beginning. We've tangled with the forces of Chaos (the Pagans), and with the forces of Order (the Hammerites/Mechanists), now we're gonna mess with the forces of Balance (the Keepers)...
Thief never really struck me as an "action" game. Suspense, yes, and careful observation and planning (one of the few games were I'd find a dark corner to just sit and watch people come and go for a few minutes to learn their patterns). Any "action" that actually occured was usually fairly quickly followed by death and a reload from the last save, as Garrett was *not* a fighter...
Yes, as was obvious from my comment where I said the engine had been improved, rather than replaced or entirely different...
Apparently, they learned from Deus Ex: IW and have improved the framerate, among other things. As for third person mode, thankfully it's completely optional. I just can't imagine playing Thief third person -- the first two were the most immersive games I've ever played. I don't usually literally jump when startled in other games, Thief gets high marks for doing that, among other things. And the great story. That'll definately be the key. I'll put up with a lot of other things if they can maintain the great storyline...
(1) Play only at night.
(2) Turn off all the lights.
(3) LOWER the gamma in the game as much as you can.
Trust me... this really makes the game much more enjoyable.
Eh? Thief 1 and 2 were set in the same world, with people running around in chainmail and using swords, while steam powered machines and electric lights buzzed away. Granted, the Mechanists in Thief 2 brought the industrial parts of the game setting more to the forefront, but the series was always fantasy "steam-punk". Thief 3 will have the same setting as well, but with Karras and the Mechanists out of the way, there will be no steam-powered robots, so it will be a bit more like Thief 1 in that respect. As for throwing your eye around corners, I hope you'll still be able to do that. I mean, Garrett went through a lot in Theif 1 to get that artificial eye, it'd be a shame if he couldn't still get some benefit out of it...
Heh. They say they've learned a lot from the mistakes they make with Deus Ex -- the engine in Thief 3 is supposed to be much improved.
You can add this feature to IE with the downloadable Google search bar. It also adds popup blocking, which is really nice. OTOH, you can just both of these features with Firefox right out of the box, and not be vulnerable to every browser exploit that comes along too...
A copy of Windows is cheaper than a console, and plays better games...
Now with that out of the way -- I'll say I looked into this myself, when confronted with a similar contract, and found out that the State of Minnesota forbids this -- the company cannot claim as their IP what you develop in your own time on your own equipment, even if your employment contract says what you say it says. The above poster says California prevents this as well. I have no knowledge about the IP laws of any other states. But given what I do know, if you live in Minnesota, I'd sign the contract and not worry about it -- they cannot enforce that clause in this state...
Good point, however. A lot of really, really good movies have been made by subsidiaries of Disney. You just need to watch out for the ones they actually brand as Disney movies rather than Touchstone/Miramax/Spyglass/etc. Those ones usually suck... usually...
Ha! I was thinking the same thing! And, now that I think about it, the cat would have made a decent Ford Prefect... hopefully this guy will too...