Yes. If you have a better regular expression library, you're welcome to submit as a more efficient submission.
The C implementation of Hello World calls fputs instead of write()
fputs() is an ANSI C standard function designed to write text to an output stream or file. Write() is not ANSI C compatable, requires knowledge of the length of the string (either truncating if the length parameter is too low, or writes garbage if the length parameter is too high), and is designed for binary output rather than text.
When writing a portable C application, you should *NEVER* assume that a platform is using anything other than the ANSI C libraries except when absolutly necessairy (e.g. a mutlimedia library.)
The C++ implementation of hash uses sprintf and strdup.
Correct it then. The webpage containing the benchamarks has links available to contact the maintainers of the website so that you can submit a more efficient function.
This, of course, assumes that the HM class is not affected by the buf[] string being overwritten. If it is, then you'll have to find another way to eliminate the sprintf/strdup inefficiency.
The C and C++ implementations of the fibonatchi sequence test are recursive.
The fibonacci numbers test is explicitly stated that the procedure must be use recursion. If you want, you can ask the website maintainer to add a new test containg the iterative counterpart.
Just because there is an absolute best way of doing things does not mean that it is permitted in the test. Read the Testing Methodology for more information.
The tests themselves are so short that you are measuring the time to load the binary into memory and cleanup for half the tests
That's why the webpage provides an option to exclude startup time in the performance metrics. The option to do so is located at the top of the table, just below the Title naming the test.
Legal fees for defense: $5,000+ Settlement payout: $3,000.
Take your pick. That is why many people settled.
I'm honestly quite suprised that these defandants didn't see that it was possible to force the plaintiff to play the legal fees. The lawyers will still get their huge cheques, but it won't be at the expense of an "innocent bystander".
Certain places have drafted laws to make abuse of the legal system a criminal and civil offence, where damages can be levied against a plaintiff producing bogus or groundless claims. In fact, this should be one of the first things that should cross the defandant's minds when consulting with their lawyer - while it won't always be successful, there is a significant change that it will work, especially when combined with existing rulings from other judges stating that the claims were illegitimate.
Although, I must admit, I never had any of those problems you've had with Red Alert 2, which runs perfectly fine for me at the highest resolution.
IThe problems are there, and are well known on certain C&C boards. In particular, the resolution problem can be found when you head to the Westwood Online multiplayer options and select either "Quick Match" or "World Domination Tour". You will receive a prompt stating that this game mode can only be played at 640x480. This is fixed in the expansion pack, but the original version hand't been updated.
There was also a list of bugs being posted as a sticky on one of the major C&C forums - I'd provide a link if it weren't for the fact that it got deleted. (Probably because of too much noise apparing in the list - President IFV cheat was mentioned multiple times, etc.)
I'd pounce on the lawsuit insinuation, only you saved yourself by marking it as an extreme case.Probably should have tagged it as well - but I wasn't sure whether to place a IANAL or a <humor> tag...:)
That's a common myth of software development. While they aren't necessairly obliged to support productis, failing to do so leaves a bad mark on the image of the company. As an example, look at the Opposing Forces expansion pack. The version released under steam is sub-standard (and outdated) - as a result, playeers need to perform a seperate download in order to be able to use the CTF gameplay modes.
The same mistake is made by other companies as well. Take a look at Electronic Arts driving the C&C series into the ground with Red Alert 2. The game was somewhat substandard when it was released, mainly due to questionable game balacne issues and faulty design issues (e.g. Quick matches can only be played at 640x480, where everything is zoomed up close.) There is also many complaints that the AI is deadfully easy, even on Hard (and that the AI is still capable of cheating by building units outside of it's current techtree, such as Prism tanks without a battle lab.) Even though Generals appeared to sell decently, the performace of RA2 discouraged me from buying their latest installment.
Extreme cases of poorly maintained software can result in a lawsuit for breach of contract - the software is supposed to be licensed, but as an Average Joe would say: "The copy protection keeps saying that I've done an illegal operation." Naturally, a real lawyer would knowhow to properly launch such a lawsuit.
Would it be possible for people to bring in their own disks (USB disks, perhaps? How cheap can you make a 10GB USB disk?) with their own copy of HL installed and play off those? They're using their own copy, and not copying it, and not having it installed on multiple machines (read: hard drives), so the license is satisfied.
From what I see, there's no problem installing anything on a mobilehard drive. While some agressive lawyers may attempt to say that's piracy, nothing in a EULA states that a software package can only run on one specific computer or hardware configuration. Those things sometimes exist, but those are an exception rather than the rule (and those terms are ignored anyway).
Of course, Steam seems to keep track of absoluite paths in order to identify the location of the Steam cache files. If you want to get it working on such a mobile harddrive, you need to delete the "ClientRegistry.blob" file in the steam directory (and re-update the client - not an efficient way of handing bandwidth. )
The cybercafe could also turn a blind eye to what users do--they could, for instance, not kick out (condone) people who bring in cd/dvd images of their Steam directories, along with their exported registry keys. (Someone could write a little program that allows for "temporary" registry keys, so people don't cause any permanent damage to the machines.) All the mess gets cleaned up at the end of the day in any event as the disks are reloaded from a pristine image.
If users has that kind of access to the computer, then you probably want to give them access to a program known as DeepFreeze. If you use it, you can give your customers as much control over your computer as you want, while at the same time lock them out from doing changes to the network. (Usually, power user permissions combined with allowing the Windows installer to use escalated permissions is sufficient, but there are some applications that still demand "Administrator" privilages without a good reason.)
DeepFreeze cleans up everything - including virus infections. There are ways to get around DeepFreeze, but they aren't that well known.
One of the definitions of a witch would be a believer or follower of Wicca. They are definatly not fictional.
Because Wicca was not fully understood, certain "religious" fanatics made absurd claims that these "witches" were capable of casting spells because of certain demonic pacts... This hysteria allowed those fanatics to advance their political agenda by claiming that certain people were witches, and requiring that they be burned. Usually, these people were selected by random, as an effective escapegoat for a reputable farmer being incompetant for managing his crops/cattle, or as a method to eliminate a political opponent.
Re:Serious problems with this "research"
on
Testing ISP Censorship
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To begin with, ISPs are commercial entities with no legal obligation to allow you to post whatever content you please. If you don't want to use an ISP that is going to capitulate to the first takedown notice it gets, be selective when you choose your ISP.
A contract exists between you and the ISP. As long as the contract is in effect, ISPs are legally obligated through the terms of the contract to provide services, including websapce where you are allowed to post whatever content you please.
While there are ways that the contract can be terminated, reaction to any illegitimate takedown notice is not one of them. The correct procedure for dealing with those ISPs that instantly collapse under the first illegitimate complaint is to file a report at your local Better Business Bureau (or similar organization) and/or contact a lawyer.
Then when you're done with that, low level format the drive using a disk utility such as the ones that come with Maxtors and Western Digital drives.
Some hard drives do not permit a low-level format - it's hard coded in the electronics to prevent that sort of stuff. When released from the factory, the harddrives are allegedly formatted in their optimal setting - redoing this can cause loss of capacity.
There are rumours that some users have managed to do a low-level format anyway, resulting in the 80GB harddrive now only capable of holding around 1mb. (Units are correct, although the second value is somewhat exaggerated since I don't remember the actual result.)
Seriously, in big 32+ public servers, do you ever see any real, cohesive teamwork? They're chaos, and basically the only thing that having 'teams' does is cut the number of opponents in half.
I do see teamwork possible in large servers (although the server I was on was technically around 16 players at the time.) There was one player using voice chat to order people to gather around and await an attack signal. From there, the entire team attemped a big rush to the next capture point.
This tactic failed twice, and therefore the team leaders ordered everybody to fallback to the spawn. The team lost anyway, but they were working together. The server in question was attracting more experienced players that generally knew what they were doing as well - thus there were very few inexperienced players. (I would be one of the least experienced ones on the team - not very good when it comes to "real weapon" games.)
Except of course if you have TKers.
TKers are a major problem and even appear in 2v2 matches. When you encounter these assholes, try to do a vote kick.
Friendly Fire does occurr. I've done it one time when I fired a grenade at a teammate - he warned me not to do it again after I said that I thought he was on blue. (And I did - he was guarding a capture point "controlled" by blue, and was hiding in a shadow, and appeared to be facing towards the window. A few minutes later, I corrected the brightness on the monitor so that I could see much better.)
If so, just play through a whole level without loading. Don't save and load after each enemy you manage to sneak by.
My experience with the Thief series is that it is not possible to go through a level once without having to resort to saved games - while it's possible to ironman levels, they either take too long to do in one standard unit of time (i.e. 1 hour, as most popular games gear themselves to), or require lots of practice to breeze through it.
Being a "slow" game, you will need to reload, and therefore encounter the dumbed down guards. It is considered slow, since you have to generally sneak around occupied areas instead of running quickly to get to your destination.
Saved games are required - there are instances in Thief 1 and 2 where you need to do specific jump. The jumping occassionally failed because you were just beyond the tolerance range for making the jump (and therefore either fell to your death or made a loud noise attracting whatever guard is available.) Also, there were a few instant-killing traps that were not visible unless you had a really good eye - something that requires either prior knowledge or save-scumming to pass through.
Particularly in the graphics. The character models have visible gaps in them on my PC unless you turn the resolution down to cover it up.
That would be a problem with the models not being constructed correctly, not a problem with the game being XBox material.
A better example for stating a game was crippled because of it's XBOX port would be stating that the characters has a low-poly count compared to other average PC games (or some other appropriate comment about an XBOX limitation.)
I refuse to play Deus Ex: Invisible War until some unfixable flaws are fixed. (Read: unlikely anytime soon)
The same unfixable flaws that appear in Deus Ex: Invisible War appear in effectivly every other game. If you really have such high standards for Deus Ex, then you might as well apply it consistantly to all other games (i.e. not purchase any game on the market.)
If you are really referring to a flaw that is fixable then that's a different story. In that case, you can either post it on some Deus Ex forum so that another person can fix it, or so that you can eventually claim credit for discovering and fixing that flaw.
If you keep those bugs/flaws to yourself, then there will never be anything added to any lessons learned database, and products will never improve.
In Deus Ex 1 there were a waste of empty rooms and pointless windows,
I'm not sure which mission(s)/map(s) you are referring to, as I never encountered that problem to any significant degree. The closest that I can think of would be the creation of bathroom areas within pubs and stuff, and that isn't technically pointless (e.g. Manderly repremands you if you enter the women's washroom.)
so the developers themselves have no one to blame but themselves.
For gamers preferring a tripmine+turret area over a window or locked door? That is not true - with the current context, players might feel there might be something important past the lasers and stuff, such as a critical memo or piece of information - just like in the movies. Since the objective (building exit) is past the lasers/turrets anyway, then their assumption is correct. The explorers could go back to see if anything is behind the door or window (using a savegame backup), and recognize the door and window as an additional route to the objective.
There is a major theory why the playtesting gamers took the tripmine + turret route over the locked door or window. In spite of similar choices being given before and after this section (even when those testers choose stealth), the players choose the tripmine route because they felt they are in a combat area. This is determined either through an immediatly previous encounter, or through subtle hints from the surrounding area.
While other problems do exist, this would be one of the more noticable secondary issues - the game not being played as it was planned out. Developers should be interested in this sort of thing, because this is one of the core issues with level design that can only be easily addressed before the map is created.
The first mission of Deus Ex is a good way of letting the player choose how he wants to complete his mission - give a quick reminder about stealth, and a quick reminder that headshots are good if you want to get your hands dirty. You will see players pick one of the two routes, but not always picking one choice. The fact that most players gravitate to one of the three choices for DX:IW indicates that there is something wrong with the local envrionment, or that the majority of players have an impression of what the game should be played like.
Most games don't have a full interactive environment where doors and windows can be used. How many times have you gone through game levels with structures full of obviously fake, useless doors? Or played a game that has useable doors, the majority of which are purposely and permanently locked?
More than enough. However, the problem that I enounter isn't with doors being unusuable and fake, but with the fact that you can't tell them apart from ones that can or should be usuable. Even then, you can't tell them apary from doors that open automatically, open manually, or open by a button next to the door.
The games that I've played that do not place excessive amounts of useless doors look a bit less realistic in urban environments, but they actually feel that they are a better game. However, the game designers have to favour graphics rather than gameplay because of the noisy demand overshadowing the popular demand.
Windows are often just (you're looking for a pun here, aren't you?) wall candy.
I'm annoyed by windows as well - In games that implement breakable windows, I normally look to them as an alternate route, but yet there is almost no way of telling which Window is breakable and which one isn't. At the very least, there should be 25% opacity to at least imply that the glass is thicker than normal (or even better, place metal reinforcements in the glass as Red Faction does.)
Even with games that allow opening windows, there is very little insentive to do so. Deus Ex implemented exploration bonuses to allow your character to become slightly more powerful, but most other games simply place an item that you can find elsewhere or a simple health pack - something you can note later but nothing to really spend time looking at.
or even the linear route. (linear... that's a different topic)
Linearity, although another problem with games, is extremelt difficult to fix. As you know, the more options available, the harder it is to make sure that the plotline is consistant. For example, Deux Ex has three endings which appear to be mutually exclusive - merging with Helios, joining Illuminati, and destroying Area 51. It's sequel had to make a decision about which ending was official (all three of them combined, even if it creats questions such as "How did Alex Denton survive?").
As always, its developers not knowing how to write a game - or developers not having enough time or resources to write it properly.
In every single other game where you have an intersection like that, the locked door's key is always after the turret area (having to return to points breaks up the walking a straight line feeling); the openable window at best leads to a small enclosure where I fight two or three guys to get at a medkit - I'm already at full health or I'm a maschoist, either way, I scorn your medkit window.
You want me to try blowing my way through doors, article writer? I do. After going through the turret area. Why? Because as a function of my time, 99% I'm going down that turret alley anyway for the key, that 1% of doors someone was bright enough to say, "Let's have them expend all their ammo testing which weapon and how many rounds thereof will be required to 'unlock' this door, it'll be clever," aren't exactly a silent majority there, presidentio.
Deus Ex found a way to help ensure that players would be more willing to choose the locked door rather than a enemy infested area. In this case, the closed doors are given a Lock strength and Door strength - you can choose to go down the monster area to find the key (or the way to the objective), or expend lockpicks or explosives to blow it open.
An example would be when you are exiting the Paris catacombs and entering the metropolis. The first sewer grate has at least two MJ12 troops and a heavy military bot. Since I didn't have the equipment to take out a bot, I choose the other route which requires lockpicking.
I'm not sure about Deus Ex: Invisible War, but most gamers probably choose the tripmine route because they wanted to conserve their previous lockpicks, or thought that the locked door required a key to open up. The players also felt that setting off the tripmines would only have the problem with causing the turrets to activate with no other ill effects, and thus determined that as the most favourable route.
It all has to do with how well the game is designed.
Not true, it doesn't necessarily follow that a C&D letter means a court case: many matters are resolved prior to court, and often in these cases the parties want to keep the matter confidential for commercial reasons. These letters are no different to any other business letter.
If the matter is confidential for commercial reasons, then there is already an existing agreement or contract involving trade secrets or similar information. This is not related to copyright protection, but is something that does prevent C&D from being copied and distributed.
For C&D letters that are not considered confidential, there is generally no problem copying them verbatim. Examples would be the Mastercard and American Express incidents where C&D letters were used to quash jokes satiring their trademarks.
And I turn off both sleep AND hibernate on my Windows laptop because the Windows sleep and hibernate don't work... the battery goes flat just as fast whether it thinks it's hibernating or not.
The Windows' hibernate feature takes the entire contents of memory and saves them to the disk. In all of my experienced, it works every single time, although the operation was flaky in Windows ME (video driver was guarenteed to produce snow in either OpenGL or Direct3d.)
It's not an APM style of hibernation - with Windows XP, it changes the state to Soft Off, which means that the system can be unplugged, move around, and restored, without having to drain batteries or anything. If the Windoes hibernate isn't working correctly, then there's probably something wrong with the hard drive used to store the hibernation file, or with a hardware device that doesn't restart properly.
In fact, I've had a system placed into hibernation, removed a hard drive, and turned the computer back on - the operating system was working as normal. The applications that were reading from the removed hard drive will go haywire (haven't tested it, but it's obvious), but other than that, there is absolutly no ill effects.
The APM hibernation that the laptop's own BIOS implements works fine in FreeBSD, though.
Hmmm... Can't find my Bios manual.
Anyway, I suspect that MS is probably not trusting the current implementations of BIOSes - bugs have been known to exist, and Microsoft would prefer not to receive flak for faulty BIOS programming. (IIRC, there was one bios that had an off-by-one error when you used custom applications to format a disk. It would remain unreadable until you format again with another computer, or until youapply the workaround of reading from another properly formatted disk first. )
The hibernate term may have been chosen because it is "close enough" to other similar implementations, and that it is an actual powering-down of the system rather than a very-low power state. Whether or not it is an accurrate term is another story, but most users would not know the difference.
You absolutely cannot say that about Windows. Nobody sane would even consider trying to run XP on a PC they bought new in 1999.
Around 1999 would be 266Mhz-600Mhz computers.... It's possible. Windows XP can be installed and run on such a computer, provided that you strip out all of the excess bloatware that is inclduede with the default installation.
For example, you can scrap MSN Explorer, accessability utilites that you don't plan on using for a long time, the various desktop effects (e.g. Smooth scrolling - the greatest CPU hog of all time), and so on. The only problem is finding a site that contains a list of optimizations that produces a lean-and-mean install of Windows XP - that's not a problem to experienced computer users.
Also, right up until my latest computer with Windows XP on a 1700 AMD with 512MB of ram, I've *ALWAYS* had problems with the OS taking up too much resources. While I wasn't sure how the memory was being swallowed up, it was definatly a problem for the older computers since there was a lot of harddrive access for significant periods of time (indicating swap file usage, or requirement to load tons of programs).
Looks like I have to reinstall the operating system on that 1Ghz P3 - it's just entered the state where there it is too unstable.
Gah, private members are one of the stupidest ideas ever to come to OOP. They totally break the whole point of inheritance.
The problem has nothing to do with extending classes. Rather, it has to do with working with existing classes, which are not very well constructed.
BTW, I strongly doubt that creating a new class to extend an existing one could help - that needs to be created for an SFC mod is a DLL file, indicating that SFC needs to know that an exact class is being used. Also, there is information that needs to be passed between the DLL and the main program, indicating the SFC expects it to be transmitted in a specific manner. While modifing the classes (or extending them) could help, it could also cause problems as the same time depending on how the data is passed.
I still have ways to bypass the private class definition that hasn't been tried yet - it involves tricks with memory pointers (which entirely bypass private member declarations, but kill off any chance of portability. Worth the risk since SFC only exists for one platform.)
But especially Starfleet Command which as an old Starfleet Battles player, was a dream come true!
I would disagree here, mainly because I've attempted to write a mod for SFC. The API given for writing SFC mods is not up to par, and can quickly throw you into some very interesting limitations.
For example, I've attempted to modify the Tourneyfest to support AI players. It seemed to work find, but I quickly ran into problems with the AI players. In no particular order:
1. No matter which team I assign to the AIs, they always appear as Federation. There are ways to make sure that they are one of the other six factions, but it is not considered as dynamic as it could be. (tMissionInfo::mSetTeamRace sets the race for a team, but does not change the race for such a team after it has been created. You can't change it directly either, mainly because the team is stored in a Private section of the class.)
2. When you create a ship, you are neither returned a handle to the newly created ship, nor can you determine the existance of that ship without iterating through the entire list (assuming that it is possible.)
3. The documentation that came with the API was fairly poor - requiring the programmer to do a lot of guesswork of whcih functions did which.
The gameplay portion isn't bad - however, if you peek at the gory insides of the game itself, you'll begin to wonder how it managed to hold itself together.
a) if there were ever legal action over an email (say, for example, that you described something important in the email, and the person used it elsewhere), the fact that you have a disclaimer makes it _stronger_ evidence in the court, that would make damages and remedies much easier: the defendent would not be able to claim "d'oh, I did not know" or argue some other implied license, etc.
The disclaimer only qualifies as evidence if there is a violation of the terms of trade secret, contract or other thing. There are things that can override this disclaimer, such as this:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks
This is both an announcement that an employee of the company using the disclaimer has forfeitted trade secret protection (or is very close to doing so), and is proof that the sender wishes the file to be distributed to the receipient, as well as many other users on the Internet. The fact that some Idiot employee opened the SirCam virus doesn't change either of these facts.
On point (b) is a good example: a lawyer sends you an unsolicited C&D with a disclaimer: you are actually free to run around and tell people about what happened, but if you actually _reproduce_ the entire C&D itself verbatim, you would probably be violating the copyright in the letter.
There are certain documents where the copyright won't apply - such as C&D letters. If you try to launch a lawsuit because another person breached copyright by redistributing it, then the defendant can easily claim that it would be moot since it would most likely be entered as evidence for a public record.
Except Quake won't install on any Windows >= NT, meaning new machines can't play it.
Not a problem. Given the very simple nature of Quake, all you have to do is a manual installation where you copy the files from the CD to the Hard drive manually. All you really need are the pak files in the \id1 directory. (You can also include the expansion files in their appropriate directories if you want to play on the expansions)
Anyone who has trouble installing Quake under XP should find another computer, install and zip it right away for burning on a CD-R or CD-RW. Make sure you delete the opengl32.dll file before burning, as that file is for the 3DFX cards.
And the next person to call Quake a "cruddy" game gets their knees broken.
I doubt that you noticed that Quake has a shorter shelf-life than it's predessor, Doom. This is mainly because of it's Nightmare mode being not much different than "hard" because of the most common playing style of shoot and hide (combined with the fact that you had to jump through silly hoops to get it if you didn't know the appropriate console commands.)
The only interesting part with Quake would be it's relative ease to make mods, such as those various QuakeC Bots floating around. But still, I've moved on to better and more interesting games.
(One thing for sure - I'll probably write an automated waypoint builder later on. It'll be an interesting challenge and prepare me for more complex engines.)
Tell these morons selling their games to EB to STOP. Sell it on Ebay. It sells for a higher price, the seller gets much much more than the clowns at EB pays.
I don't trust EBay enough to do that, and neither are most people. While EBay may be a good company, they do not provide certification or escrow servies to users, and thus there is an element of risk that appears. The transactions don't really occurr through EBay, meaning that the buyer/seller have to do the shipping and payment through their own means (although, EBay is integrated with PayPal).
In any case, I'd prefer selling at EBGames even if it is a bit cheap. The 7-10 dollars of store credit is fairly instant, and does not come with much risk - the only problem occurrs if the merchandise is stolen or damaged, and that usually means that EBGames has to deal with the person they bought it from.
And another thought - publishers could come out with new versions every year. No one buys NFL 2003 after 2004 comes out and the inventory at EB becomes worthless.
I didn't have much trouble selling off UT2003 as soon as 2004 came out. In fact, there are also multiple copies of 2003 on the shelf (used and original) that will eventually sell to those wanting the feel of nostalgia. (Not bloody likely - UT would be a better choice.)
The extra 5000 people to provide support for is very negligable if the game is written properly. For faulty or improperly made games, not only do you receive more demands for a patch, but there is a larger quantity of things to patch as well.
If the product is properly manufactured (i.e. went through reasonable testing cycles) the only support issues will involve problems with hardware. This can be offset through a public support forum, where the cost would effectivly be the price of keeping your internet connection.
Serious Sam is an example of a low-priced game that had a lot more buyers because of its low price. From what I can tell, the support costs weren't that high because the product generally works well on most hardware - provided that the drivers aren't faulty.
Quake Mission Pack 2 is an example where technical support would be more expensive - the documentation says that it is possible to set the CTF mode to prevent or allow changing teams but provides no information on how to do so. the only reason the expense is not there is because Tech support uses a boiler plate message stating that they do not give out hints.
(BTW, I *DID* receive this "hint" reply from technical support when attempting to report a bug with the first misison pack, where you get stuck in a permanent state if you suicide with the Mjollnir or Lightning gun. Appearently, the mission pack was forked from Quake 1.01 rather than 1.06, and thus the LG bug reared its ugly head again - but TS didn't know how to handle it.)
Original Revenue = 10,000 * $60 = $600,000 New Revenue1 = 15,000 * $40 = $600,000 (0% increase in revenue)
You have more customers, but no more revenue. Considering production/distribution costs per unit, the overhead of the 5000 additional units means you probably lose money.
You won't lose money with the additional overhead of 5000 units - the cost for producing the packages is generally inexpensive on a bulk basis.
In fact, if yout game sold enough units, you would begin to have fan sites that appear to say yourgame is good. This, in turn, allows you to sell slightly more units when you release your next game as the fans will most likely say that this is another game the company is releasing - sort of like advertising.
If visual basic is too complicated, why not get an old version of Qbasic, or something like that:
There is a bug with QBasic that causes the appearance of a line to disappear.
To test it out, run a program, break it in a middle, and change one of the DIM statements to have a bit more elements. You will receive a prompt stating that the change will need to restart your program. Regardless of which choice you pick, the modified line will disappear from the display (although is not removed from the program.,)
The bug has not been fixed in the QBasic line, but it can be worked around by rapidly using PgUp/PgDn (provided your program is large enough.)
There are a few other bugs too, but those only crop up when you attempt the more advanced portions of BASIC programming.
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fputs() is an ANSI C standard function designed to write text to an output stream or file. Write() is not ANSI C compatable, requires knowledge of the length of the string (either truncating if the length parameter is too low, or writes garbage if the length parameter is too high), and is designed for binary output rather than text.
When writing a portable C application, you should *NEVER* assume that a platform is using anything other than the ANSI C libraries except when absolutly necessairy (e.g. a mutlimedia library.)
Correct it then. The webpage containing the benchamarks has links available to contact the maintainers of the website so that you can submit a more efficient function.
This, of course, assumes that the HM class is not affected by the buf[] string being overwritten. If it is, then you'll have to find another way to eliminate the sprintf/strdup inefficiency.
The fibonacci numbers test is explicitly stated that the procedure must be use recursion. If you want, you can ask the website maintainer to add a new test containg the iterative counterpart.
Just because there is an absolute best way of doing things does not mean that it is permitted in the test. Read the Testing Methodology for more information.
That's why the webpage provides an option to exclude startup time in the performance metrics. The option to do so is located at the top of the table, just below the Title naming the test.
Certain places have drafted laws to make abuse of the legal system a criminal and civil offence, where damages can be levied against a plaintiff producing bogus or groundless claims. In fact, this should be one of the first things that should cross the defandant's minds when consulting with their lawyer - while it won't always be successful, there is a significant change that it will work, especially when combined with existing rulings from other judges stating that the claims were illegitimate.
There was also a list of bugs being posted as a sticky on one of the major C&C forums - I'd provide a link if it weren't for the fact that it got deleted. (Probably because of too much noise apparing in the list - President IFV cheat was mentioned multiple times, etc.)
I'd pounce on the lawsuit insinuation, only you saved yourself by marking it as an extreme case.Probably should have tagged it as well - but I wasn't sure whether to place a IANAL or a <humor> tag...
The same mistake is made by other companies as well. Take a look at Electronic Arts driving the C&C series into the ground with Red Alert 2. The game was somewhat substandard when it was released, mainly due to questionable game balacne issues and faulty design issues (e.g. Quick matches can only be played at 640x480, where everything is zoomed up close.) There is also many complaints that the AI is deadfully easy, even on Hard (and that the AI is still capable of cheating by building units outside of it's current techtree, such as Prism tanks without a battle lab.) Even though Generals appeared to sell decently, the performace of RA2 discouraged me from buying their latest installment.
Extreme cases of poorly maintained software can result in a lawsuit for breach of contract - the software is supposed to be licensed, but as an Average Joe would say: "The copy protection keeps saying that I've done an illegal operation." Naturally, a real lawyer would knowhow to properly launch such a lawsuit.
Of course, Steam seems to keep track of absoluite paths in order to identify the location of the Steam cache files. If you want to get it working on such a mobile harddrive, you need to delete the "ClientRegistry.blob" file in the steam directory (and re-update the client - not an efficient way of handing bandwidth. )
If users has that kind of access to the computer, then you probably want to give them access to a program known as DeepFreeze. If you use it, you can give your customers as much control over your computer as you want, while at the same time lock them out from doing changes to the network. (Usually, power user permissions combined with allowing the Windows installer to use escalated permissions is sufficient, but there are some applications that still demand "Administrator" privilages without a good reason.)
DeepFreeze cleans up everything - including virus infections. There are ways to get around DeepFreeze, but they aren't that well known.
Because Wicca was not fully understood, certain "religious" fanatics made absurd claims that these "witches" were capable of casting spells because of certain demonic pacts... This hysteria allowed those fanatics to advance their political agenda by claiming that certain people were witches, and requiring that they be burned. Usually, these people were selected by random, as an effective escapegoat for a reputable farmer being incompetant for managing his crops/cattle, or as a method to eliminate a political opponent.
While there are ways that the contract can be terminated, reaction to any illegitimate takedown notice is not one of them. The correct procedure for dealing with those ISPs that instantly collapse under the first illegitimate complaint is to file a report at your local Better Business Bureau (or similar organization) and/or contact a lawyer.
There are rumours that some users have managed to do a low-level format anyway, resulting in the 80GB harddrive now only capable of holding around 1mb. (Units are correct, although the second value is somewhat exaggerated since I don't remember the actual result.)
This tactic failed twice, and therefore the team leaders ordered everybody to fallback to the spawn. The team lost anyway, but they were working together. The server in question was attracting more experienced players that generally knew what they were doing as well - thus there were very few inexperienced players. (I would be one of the least experienced ones on the team - not very good when it comes to "real weapon" games.)
TKers are a major problem and even appear in 2v2 matches. When you encounter these assholes, try to do a vote kick.
Friendly Fire does occurr. I've done it one time when I fired a grenade at a teammate - he warned me not to do it again after I said that I thought he was on blue. (And I did - he was guarding a capture point "controlled" by blue, and was hiding in a shadow, and appeared to be facing towards the window. A few minutes later, I corrected the brightness on the monitor so that I could see much better.)
My experience with the Thief series is that it is not possible to go through a level once without having to resort to saved games - while it's possible to ironman levels, they either take too long to do in one standard unit of time (i.e. 1 hour, as most popular games gear themselves to), or require lots of practice to breeze through it.
Being a "slow" game, you will need to reload, and therefore encounter the dumbed down guards. It is considered slow, since you have to generally sneak around occupied areas instead of running quickly to get to your destination.
Saved games are required - there are instances in Thief 1 and 2 where you need to do specific jump. The jumping occassionally failed because you were just beyond the tolerance range for making the jump (and therefore either fell to your death or made a loud noise attracting whatever guard is available.) Also, there were a few instant-killing traps that were not visible unless you had a really good eye - something that requires either prior knowledge or save-scumming to pass through.
A better example for stating a game was crippled because of it's XBOX port would be stating that the characters has a low-poly count compared to other average PC games (or some other appropriate comment about an XBOX limitation.)
If you are really referring to a flaw that is fixable then that's a different story. In that case, you can either post it on some Deus Ex forum so that another person can fix it, or so that you can eventually claim credit for discovering and fixing that flaw.
If you keep those bugs/flaws to yourself, then there will never be anything added to any lessons learned database, and products will never improve.
I'm not sure which mission(s)/map(s) you are referring to, as I never encountered that problem to any significant degree. The closest that I can think of would be the creation of bathroom areas within pubs and stuff, and that isn't technically pointless (e.g. Manderly repremands you if you enter the women's washroom.)
For gamers preferring a tripmine+turret area over a window or locked door? That is not true - with the current context, players might feel there might be something important past the lasers and stuff, such as a critical memo or piece of information - just like in the movies. Since the objective (building exit) is past the lasers/turrets anyway, then their assumption is correct. The explorers could go back to see if anything is behind the door or window (using a savegame backup), and recognize the door and window as an additional route to the objective.
There is a major theory why the playtesting gamers took the tripmine + turret route over the locked door or window. In spite of similar choices being given before and after this section (even when those testers choose stealth), the players choose the tripmine route because they felt they are in a combat area. This is determined either through an immediatly previous encounter, or through subtle hints from the surrounding area.
While other problems do exist, this would be one of the more noticable secondary issues - the game not being played as it was planned out. Developers should be interested in this sort of thing, because this is one of the core issues with level design that can only be easily addressed before the map is created.
The first mission of Deus Ex is a good way of letting the player choose how he wants to complete his mission - give a quick reminder about stealth, and a quick reminder that headshots are good if you want to get your hands dirty. You will see players pick one of the two routes, but not always picking one choice. The fact that most players gravitate to one of the three choices for DX:IW indicates that there is something wrong with the local envrionment, or that the majority of players have an impression of what the game should be played like.
The games that I've played that do not place excessive amounts of useless doors look a bit less realistic in urban environments, but they actually feel that they are a better game. However, the game designers have to favour graphics rather than gameplay because of the noisy demand overshadowing the popular demand.
I'm annoyed by windows as well - In games that implement breakable windows, I normally look to them as an alternate route, but yet there is almost no way of telling which Window is breakable and which one isn't. At the very least, there should be 25% opacity to at least imply that the glass is thicker than normal (or even better, place metal reinforcements in the glass as Red Faction does.)
Even with games that allow opening windows, there is very little insentive to do so. Deus Ex implemented exploration bonuses to allow your character to become slightly more powerful, but most other games simply place an item that you can find elsewhere or a simple health pack - something you can note later but nothing to really spend time looking at.
Linearity, although another problem with games, is extremelt difficult to fix. As you know, the more options available, the harder it is to make sure that the plotline is consistant. For example, Deux Ex has three endings which appear to be mutually exclusive - merging with Helios, joining Illuminati, and destroying Area 51. It's sequel had to make a decision about which ending was official (all three of them combined, even if it creats questions such as "How did Alex Denton survive?").
As always, its developers not knowing how to write a game - or developers not having enough time or resources to write it properly.
An example would be when you are exiting the Paris catacombs and entering the metropolis. The first sewer grate has at least two MJ12 troops and a heavy military bot. Since I didn't have the equipment to take out a bot, I choose the other route which requires lockpicking.
I'm not sure about Deus Ex: Invisible War, but most gamers probably choose the tripmine route because they wanted to conserve their previous lockpicks, or thought that the locked door required a key to open up. The players also felt that setting off the tripmines would only have the problem with causing the turrets to activate with no other ill effects, and thus determined that as the most favourable route.
It all has to do with how well the game is designed.
For C&D letters that are not considered confidential, there is generally no problem copying them verbatim. Examples would be the Mastercard and American Express incidents where C&D letters were used to quash jokes satiring their trademarks.
It's not an APM style of hibernation - with Windows XP, it changes the state to Soft Off, which means that the system can be unplugged, move around, and restored, without having to drain batteries or anything. If the Windoes hibernate isn't working correctly, then there's probably something wrong with the hard drive used to store the hibernation file, or with a hardware device that doesn't restart properly.
In fact, I've had a system placed into hibernation, removed a hard drive, and turned the computer back on - the operating system was working as normal. The applications that were reading from the removed hard drive will go haywire (haven't tested it, but it's obvious), but other than that, there is absolutly no ill effects.
Hmmm... Can't find my Bios manual.
Anyway, I suspect that MS is probably not trusting the current implementations of BIOSes - bugs have been known to exist, and Microsoft would prefer not to receive flak for faulty BIOS programming. (IIRC, there was one bios that had an off-by-one error when you used custom applications to format a disk. It would remain unreadable until you format again with another computer, or until youapply the workaround of reading from another properly formatted disk first. )
The hibernate term may have been chosen because it is "close enough" to other similar implementations, and that it is an actual powering-down of the system rather than a very-low power state. Whether or not it is an accurrate term is another story, but most users would not know the difference.
Around 1999 would be 266Mhz-600Mhz computers.... It's possible. Windows XP can be installed and run on such a computer, provided that you strip out all of the excess bloatware that is inclduede with the default installation.
For example, you can scrap MSN Explorer, accessability utilites that you don't plan on using for a long time, the various desktop effects (e.g. Smooth scrolling - the greatest CPU hog of all time), and so on. The only problem is finding a site that contains a list of optimizations that produces a lean-and-mean install of Windows XP - that's not a problem to experienced computer users.
Also, right up until my latest computer with Windows XP on a 1700 AMD with 512MB of ram, I've *ALWAYS* had problems with the OS taking up too much resources. While I wasn't sure how the memory was being swallowed up, it was definatly a problem for the older computers since there was a lot of harddrive access for significant periods of time (indicating swap file usage, or requirement to load tons of programs).
Looks like I have to reinstall the operating system on that 1Ghz P3 - it's just entered the state where there it is too unstable.
For example, I've attempted to modify the Tourneyfest to support AI players. It seemed to work find, but I quickly ran into problems with the AI players. In no particular order:
1. No matter which team I assign to the AIs, they always appear as Federation. There are ways to make sure that they are one of the other six factions, but it is not considered as dynamic as it could be. (tMissionInfo::mSetTeamRace sets the race for a team, but does not change the race for such a team after it has been created. You can't change it directly either, mainly because the team is stored in a Private section of the class.)
2. When you create a ship, you are neither returned a handle to the newly created ship, nor can you determine the existance of that ship without iterating through the entire list (assuming that it is possible.)
3. The documentation that came with the API was fairly poor - requiring the programmer to do a lot of guesswork of whcih functions did which.
The gameplay portion isn't bad - however, if you peek at the gory insides of the game itself, you'll begin to wonder how it managed to hold itself together.
The disclaimer only qualifies as evidence if there is a violation of the terms of trade secret, contract or other thing. There are things that can override this disclaimer, such as this:
This is both an announcement that an employee of the company using the disclaimer has forfeitted trade secret protection (or is very close to doing so), and is proof that the sender wishes the file to be distributed to the receipient, as well as many other users on the Internet. The fact that some Idiot employee opened the SirCam virus doesn't change either of these facts.
There are certain documents where the copyright won't apply - such as C&D letters. If you try to launch a lawsuit because another person breached copyright by redistributing it, then the defendant can easily claim that it would be moot since it would most likely be entered as evidence for a public record.
Not a problem. Given the very simple nature of Quake, all you have to do is a manual installation where you copy the files from the CD to the Hard drive manually. All you really need are the pak files in the \id1 directory. (You can also include the expansion files in their appropriate directories if you want to play on the expansions)
Anyone who has trouble installing Quake under XP should find another computer, install and zip it right away for burning on a CD-R or CD-RW. Make sure you delete the opengl32.dll file before burning, as that file is for the 3DFX cards.
I doubt that you noticed that Quake has a shorter shelf-life than it's predessor, Doom. This is mainly because of it's Nightmare mode being not much different than "hard" because of the most common playing style of shoot and hide (combined with the fact that you had to jump through silly hoops to get it if you didn't know the appropriate console commands.)
The only interesting part with Quake would be it's relative ease to make mods, such as those various QuakeC Bots floating around. But still, I've moved on to better and more interesting games.
(One thing for sure - I'll probably write an automated waypoint builder later on. It'll be an interesting challenge and prepare me for more complex engines.)
I don't trust EBay enough to do that, and neither are most people. While EBay may be a good company, they do not provide certification or escrow servies to users, and thus there is an element of risk that appears. The transactions don't really occurr through EBay, meaning that the buyer/seller have to do the shipping and payment through their own means (although, EBay is integrated with PayPal).
In any case, I'd prefer selling at EBGames even if it is a bit cheap. The 7-10 dollars of store credit is fairly instant, and does not come with much risk - the only problem occurrs if the merchandise is stolen or damaged, and that usually means that EBGames has to deal with the person they bought it from.
I didn't have much trouble selling off UT2003 as soon as 2004 came out. In fact, there are also multiple copies of 2003 on the shelf (used and original) that will eventually sell to those wanting the feel of nostalgia. (Not bloody likely - UT would be a better choice.)
The extra 5000 people to provide support for is very negligable if the game is written properly. For faulty or improperly made games, not only do you receive more demands for a patch, but there is a larger quantity of things to patch as well.
If the product is properly manufactured (i.e. went through reasonable testing cycles) the only support issues will involve problems with hardware. This can be offset through a public support forum, where the cost would effectivly be the price of keeping your internet connection.
Serious Sam is an example of a low-priced game that had a lot more buyers because of its low price. From what I can tell, the support costs weren't that high because the product generally works well on most hardware - provided that the drivers aren't faulty.
Quake Mission Pack 2 is an example where technical support would be more expensive - the documentation says that it is possible to set the CTF mode to prevent or allow changing teams but provides no information on how to do so. the only reason the expense is not there is because Tech support uses a boiler plate message stating that they do not give out hints.
(BTW, I *DID* receive this "hint" reply from technical support when attempting to report a bug with the first misison pack, where you get stuck in a permanent state if you suicide with the Mjollnir or Lightning gun. Appearently, the mission pack was forked from Quake 1.01 rather than 1.06, and thus the LG bug reared its ugly head again - but TS didn't know how to handle it.)
You won't lose money with the additional overhead of 5000 units - the cost for producing the packages is generally inexpensive on a bulk basis.
In fact, if yout game sold enough units, you would begin to have fan sites that appear to say yourgame is good. This, in turn, allows you to sell slightly more units when you release your next game as the fans will most likely say that this is another game the company is releasing - sort of like advertising.
To test it out, run a program, break it in a middle, and change one of the DIM statements to have a bit more elements. You will receive a prompt stating that the change will need to restart your program. Regardless of which choice you pick, the modified line will disappear from the display (although is not removed from the program.,)
The bug has not been fixed in the QBasic line, but it can be worked around by rapidly using PgUp/PgDn (provided your program is large enough.)
There are a few other bugs too, but those only crop up when you attempt the more advanced portions of BASIC programming.