Does nobody else remember how ludicruous a moonshot was in 1962? We didn't know how to do it, we didn't know if we could figure out how to do it, and JFK might as well have signed the death warrants of the Apollo 11 crew.
And yet we did it, and got them there and back safely. We did it because one man said we would do it, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
Every time I read this pussyfooting around a manned Mars mission, it turns my stomach. We are now so petty and adverse to risk that I cannot see that we will ever launch a Mars mission. There are too many negatives and not enough positives. There's too much that we don't know, and that we think - assert vehemently even - that we can't learn or fix. It's too hard, we complain, it's too dangerous, we might fail. We can't afford the risk, we have to wait until we can make it safe. We have to wait, and wait and wait.
What we need is for one man - hell, even Dubya - to stand up say "This country commits itself to putting a man on Mars and bringing him back safely by the end of this decade. Make it happen."
Then we can turn some of our horrifying arms budget to something a little less self destructive, we can find volunteers, brave men and women who understand the risks and choose to go anyway, and we can stop nay-saying and do our damndest to get them there and back safely.
And we might fail. That's not an option, but it is a possibility. But to not try for
fear of failure means we're already defeated, and we should weep not for a lost crew of astronauts but for the loss of all astronauts. Buzz Aldrin - a man who has walked on the surface of another planet - laments that he never thought space exploration would mean shuttling cargo around in low Earth orbit. Perhaps we'd just become so used to watching stage managed, post-produced heroes on film and TV that we'd forgotten that the real thing still exists, until September 11th reminded us. We wept for the emergency services men and women who died, but nobody - nobody - cheapened their memory by suggesting that it would have been more prudent, more sensible, for them not to have put themselves in harm's way.
If our reach no longer exceeds our grasp then we might as well gear up to manufacture parts for the Chinese Mars mission, because if we don't go, then they will. Because they seem to understand (as we've forgotten) that constantly striving to achieve more than we believed ourselves capable of is the defining trait of being human.
I've heard talk that we'll rebuild the twin towers, just to show that our spirit isn't broken. Great, but why stop there? Why not keep going up, and up? Why not stop saying "We'll go when it's achievable" and say "We are going. Achieve it."?
Let's got to Mars, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
MPAA executive Fritz Allaway told Bobbie Johnson, "We have seen our future, and it is terrifying." I - like a lot of other independent directors and producers - would like to see the future get much more terrifying for Fritz and his pals; with a radical reform of copyright and patent law, and a curbing of behemoths such as AOL/Time/Warner, News International/Fox and Vivendi/ Universal/UIP.
Over the past 20 years I have attended a number of "demonstrations" of digital video technology. Often the video images produced are of outstanding quality. But, in spite of all the speeches, the brochures, the white wine and the canapes, I have never seen a video projection, analogue or digital, which looked like projected film.
In the case of Attack of the Clones, quality may not matter much since (a) almost all the shots are special effects shots done mainly by computer, and (b) the film is shite.
But try to imagine Citizen Kane shot on digital video (in colour, naturally), or Amelie, or Moulin Rouge. If its promoters are serious about the quality of their technology, let them put it to the test against the best work of contemporary and classic cinematographers - not against the worst.
My only regret is that we don't have the medical technology to give me a womb so that I can bear this man's children. I have never read such clear, plain spoken and informed articles about the MPAA agenda in a mainstream forum before. It makes me begin - begin - to hope that it's not too late to turn the tide of distributors controlling the very copyright laws that were originally and explicitely written to limit their ability to screw both creators and consumers. Alen Cox, I salute you.
I strongly object towards your critique that it is 'only a 2D game'. Good games are NOT made by graphics.
As implied by my praise of Advance Wars for the GBA. Please do me the courtesy of reading the whole post before replying. Incidentally, I also nethack, but that doesn't mean that I'll kid myself that Joe Player will downgrade from decent 3D or even good isometric graphics to something that looks like a refugee from the Commodore 64.
Compare for example, Stronghold, a pure 2D/isometric RTS that nearly made me mess my pants when I realised that it could handle hundreds of units, with archery volleys that looked (to me, a reenactment combat archer) absolutely flawless. Contrast with Freecraft's "PointToPoint" missiles, and see how far they have to go to catch up with the commercial standard of six months ago.
Yes, I know that I'm praising graphics and not gameplay, but in this the two go hand in hand. The tiny and painfully obviously tiled and flat world of Freecraft looks painfully primitive in comparison. I'd play Freecraft, but only if I had no other choice. I'm not going to contribute to it, because I think that it's stuck in the past, and it can't be saved bar a major rewrite, which isn't going to happen now that it's been released as stable.
Many people here seem to be commenting on the graphics of the screenshots. Um... hello? This is a game engine
OK, let's comment on the engine. It's not a "game" engine, it's a "Warcraft 2" engine. A cursory glance at the many hardcoded rules, behaviours, actions, messages and object types verifies this. There's nowhere (that I can see) to add behaviour hooks; you have to expand or modify the code. Modifying it to act as a DuneII or Starcraft clone, for example, would be a substantial rewrite. That means that when people add and submit their own rulesets and object types, the code base will bloat and/or fork.
A far better long term solution would have been a thin and generic object handling and UI framework, with plugins for UI, object behaviour and world rules. OK, I know the goal always was to produce a Warcraft clone, but in that case, the developers shouldn't claim that it's a generic RTS engine, because it simply isn't.
All that said, it's a well organised and very readable and clean piece of code. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of how to write a game. But keep in mind what was done wrong: too much integration of engine and behaviour (leading to lots of special cases for what should be generic behaviour, see the network "Send..." code, and the enumerated missile types), and (IMHO) loads of "object" manipulation in C, when C++ would have been more efficient.
Oh, and please remember to use a Unicode string table and not hardwired ASCII English strings. You'll save yourself a hell of a lot of trouble in the long run, especially if you get Deutsch translations done early on. German tends to be rather long winded, and doesn't abbrev. well.;-)
...for international businesses to not have a US subsidiary that can be sequestered in these cases? Remember that in many countries, courts habitually award legal fees to the winner, so frivilous lawsuits are less tempting. Not so in the US, where you have to pay to defend yourself, then pay to launch a counter suit to recover your fees, and it's much easier to use litigation to silence those who can't afford to defend themselves. Bottom feeders like $cientology Inc will be watching this case with great interest, I suspect.
It's 2D, it doesn't run under WinXP, it's buggy (sound keeps switching itself on, units keep disappearing), it's missing features that appeared in commercial RTS's years ago (unit queueing, and fullscreen. Hello, FULLSCREEN?).
I wrote a comparable engine using DOS4GW/allegro back in 1995, and canned it because it was obsolete back then. Seven years later, I'm not seeing any great improvements, nor any incentive to bring my commercial games development skills to this project.
This is a neat hobby project, and probably a great learning experience for the dev team, but that's about as far as it's going. I showed it to my (non-OS) coworkers and they laughed their collective asses off. One guy asked me if it was a GBA emulator, and if so, how come it sucked so much compared to Advance Wars, and I really had no answer for him.
Look, don't get me wrong. I'm an open source developer, and I support good open source project when I see them (like the Demeter terrain engine), but if it looks like a turkey, and walks like a turkey, and sounds like a turkey, then it is a turkey, and all the cross platform compatibility in the world (except for WinXP, of course) won't turn it in to an engine that anyone other than the development team would really choose to use.
Two final thoughts:
Writing a full game that people actually choose to play is damn hard, and it's getting harder every year as expectations rise. Trying to clone a full commercial game is egotistical folly. Try something like Advance Wars, which is twice as much fun with half of the features.
Better yet, stop living in the past. Aim a couple of years into the future (high polygon 3D) otherwise you'll lose another player or developer every time the Upgrade Fairy pays someone a visit.
It seems that if an artist is good enough, then they won't work for free or in their spare time - unlike programmers
I'd guess that's because good art is instantly recognisable even by guys in suits. Good code is recognisable only by the absense of broken parts, and that's something that takes weeks of analysis or testing to prove.
I require a minimum level of quality in the art/interface of a computer game for me to feel happy playing it. I'll be avoiding this one
Um, did you miss the point? The graphics are up to you. If you don't like them, you can change them. Yes, you. Not the guy standing behind you.
Because when they finally get it working right, with a really high degree of accuracy, then it'll positively identify me, and I'll be allowed to exercise my rights to have and bear arms on an airline for the purpose of forming a well ordered militia. Surely this situation exemplifies the purpose of the second amendment; an armed populace defending itself from attack.
What's that you say? That this won't happen? That security will still be something performed by bored and disinterested employees on the ground, not by the people under direct threat? That all this technology will do is to remove rights and further entrench the mentality that We, the People must be protected by a tiny minority of largely unanswerable and self appointed professionals.
Sometimes I wonder why we bother even pretending that the Constitution still applies. If anyone can think of a more relevant application for the Second Amendment short of a full scale invasion, I'd like to hear it.
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Please contact the administrator.
I'd be more inclined to listen to exhortations to write robust code from someone who can actually keep his web server up. Perhaps you could clean your own house first.
Now they'll be able to do a fully realistic military sim!
You'll spend two years digging really high polygon ditches, then get shipped to the asscrack of the world to perform a police action, and after two months of dysentary and grinding boredom, an extremely well rendered twelve year old kid will crack your skull with a well aimed rock.
Abort / Retry / Get a clue.
(Seriously, I love FPS's, but as games. Please let's not mention.mil and realistic in the same context as games)
The lesson for *any* pure-play tech company
on
RIAA Sues Audiogalaxy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Follow Kazaa. Set up a shell company on some Pacific island, and when (not if, when) the Big Lawsuit hits, sell the name and assets, and fold the US operation. Rinse and repeat until there are no US based technology companies left.
Sad, sad situation, but when the [MPA|RIA|BS]A can buy (nearly) any law they like and change the rules of the game whenever they feel like it, the only way to win is not to play in their schoolyard.
I've been thinking about this "protect ourselves from disaster" idea for a while and am increasingly of the opinion that before we try to fling our eggs out to Mars, we should explore some quicker solutions.
I like your ideas, but is there any reason we can't do both, plus a bunch of other stuff as well?
Offer me a stripped down OS that presents an API subset limited to DirectX, OGL and enough of the WinAPI [..] at a reasonable price ($30)
You just described the XBox.
Wow! So I did! Apart from the $170 difference in price, the fixed (and already painfully obsolete) hardware and the lack of online and budget classic games for it, that's exactly what I described.
When I was a youngster, I dreamed of zooming around in spaceships and meeting aliens.
Then I turned into an Angry Young Man and felt that we must tread lightly in the cosmos, and not pollute and exploit other planets the way we've plundered terra.
And then I started thinking about starting a family, and realised that as a human, my prime motivation is actually to make more humans. And then I thought about ice ages and planet-killer asteroid impacts (which are inevitable, not fantasy) and decided that we should say "Screw the fragile cosmos!", get our species' eggs out of our one fragile little basket and damn the cost in money and lives and ruined scientific study.
Who knows what I'll think as an old man. But right now, I reckon we should declare open season on other planets and start terraforming now. Because when the next ice age or asteroid hits, it'll be way, way too late to start, and as we've already plundered all of the easily available fossil resources, we can pretty much forget bootstrapping ourselves back out of the stone age.
Am I so very unusual in thinking that we should get real worried about these things now, while we've got the resources to do something about them?
How many US citizens does the RIAA represent? No, I don't mean how many artist or backroom techies or even corporate weasels in suits, because it's not actually representing them. The RIAA (rather the labels that comprise it) are businesses. As such, they represent their owners, not their employees, and not third parties relying on them to market their talents or products. Answering only to shareholders is a fiduciary duty for a publically traded company. If happy employees are the key to financial success, great, but if sacking 95% of them becomes a smarter move, they'll do that without batting an eye. The RIAA represents only the shareholders (or private owners) of the companies that comprise it.
So, does anyone actually know how many US citizens are shareholders in the music businesses that comprise the RIAA? Do these US citizens know? Do they know or care that their ownership legitimizes RIAA demands on Capital Hill?
I ask this because I keep hearing about how much money the RIAA represents, and there seems to be some sort of connection between this and the political influence that they have. Now, in a democracy, this can't be true, because then your vote would count more depending on your income, right? And that's not how a democracy works, is it?
So, let's hear it. Does anyone know how many US citizens the RIAA actually represents (that's US shareholders, not employees)? I'd really like to hear someone in government asking this, because it might (not likely, but perhaps) make Jane Investor start asking exactly where her financial representatives have been gambli^H^H^H^H^H^H investing her money on the stock market, and who she's legitimizing with her investment.
Pirated? I dunno about that, I have a shared copy of WinXP Pro, probably with one of "those" keys. I'll pay for it when my refund arrives for the OEM copy of Win98SE that I was forced to pay for on my laptop (now running SuSE), i.e. the 2nd of Never.
If any Microserf are reading, the only reason that I still boot to Windows is to play games. Offer me a stripped down OS that presents an API subset limited to DirectX, OGL and enough of the WinAPI to let me install and start a game, at a reasonable price ($30) without any idiotic licensing or activation crap, and I'll buy it. Short of that, forget it. Every dumbed down "Telletubbies" new Windows version, every curate's egg upgrade, every bluster and threat and waved MicroFist just brings me closer to the point where I'll wipe the Windows partition and take my chance with WineX. When that happens, you lose any chance of getting any more money out of me, ever.
There's no way the MPAA can succeed in this. All analog-to-digital conversion equipement?
More likely all equipment that a few select (patriotic) industry representatives point the Finger of Doom at. Hey, wanna bet that'll be mostly imported goods? I'm not being frivilous, the DMCA is being used to target imported goods right now (e.g. Dreamcast dev kit serial cables, Elcomsoft).
I'm wondering if anyone in the press will pick up on this and spot this situation. You're at a (smallish) presidential rally, where His Highness is speaking on record. Suddenly a (performance) copyrighted recording of "Hail to the Chief" starts playing... and every recorder in the room shuts down. In fact, you could have great fun at any press conference by playing a CD of the Star Spangled Banner and watching them scream in frustration, or just use a white noise generator that broadcasts a watermark at the limit of audibility. Actually, that might sell like hot cakes to all paranoid businesses (i.e. all of them).
I know all of this is so ridiculous as to make it seem beyond the pale, but we said that about the DMCA as well, remember? And I don't notice our elected representatives acknowledging that they pooched that law and moving to strike it. Do you?
The purpose of copyright law is to promote wide distribution of quality content and information.
The mechanism of copyright law was designed to protect powerless content producers from powerful content publishers.
Custom and usage has turned that on its head. The law now primarily protects the powerful publishers, and it does so more each year. Copyright law does not promote quality, nor does it encourage migration into the public domain, the original and quite explicit goal.
The goal of commercial publishers is now clear. It is to buy laws that - de facto - prevent self publishing by raising the technological and cost bar so high that only established interests will be able to distribute work that can be used by a significant proportion of the people. Instead of protecting talented people from ruthless publishers, copyright laws will soon mandate the effective enslavement of the very people they were meant to protect.
This is not what copyright law was invented for. And it was an invention. There is no "natural" or "social" law or convention that prevents people from sharing or repeating information. Copyright law was invented, and it was invented with a particular purpose in mind. We have now very nearly inverted that purpose through creeping amendments and fiddling with the original laws.
If you do write to your elected representatives, I'd suggest that you make it clear that you understand this, that you haven't been brainwashed by Disney into believing that only huge commercial publishers should control all distribution and dissemination of information, that you want a complete cleanout of copyright laws, and a return to the original intent.
Once more for luck: the original and explicit intent of copyright law is to promote the distribution of information and content from individual producers to individual consumers by ensuring that distributors - those with the money and power - could not dictate terms, steal work, and become even richer and more powerful at the expense of the people at either end of the chain.
I'd say we're well overdue for a return to that situation, and I'd bet good money that a vast majority of (nameless, faceless, powerless) authors, musicians, scriptwriters, and garage inventors would agree.
at this point they are going to be used for SEAD (supression of enemy air defenses) and precision strike, not air-to-air combat. That will be another 20 years off. Bandwidth is a killer in that application.
I doubt that very much. As I see it, the procedure will be this:
Watch one (repeat, one) superiority fighter take off automatically (as carrier based F-18's already do).
Watch as it autopilots itself to the combat area.
Press the "clear the skies" button.
Wait.
Watch it fly home.
Watch it land.
Outgoing packets, one.
Seriously, why would you want, let alone need, a human pilot in combat? Machines can respond faster, can read the input from control surfaces directly, and don't hesitate.
Personally I find the idea repulsive, but it's the only logical progression. Of course, it's a moot point, as it's far more efficient to destroy entire airforces on the ground than to risk engaging them in the air. The fighter era is over.
One of the defining strategies of the American armed forces since the Gulf War is a near pathelogical reluctance to accept friendly casulties.
Absolutely. Do a google search for UXO (unexploded ordnance) and you'll find that the primary military/government argument against use of cluster munitions and mines is that they cause a few casualties to US soldiers>. The dreadful humanitarian effect (e.g. in Iraq and Kuwait) is mentioned only as an aside.
witness the British Warriors taken out in the Gulf by American A10s [...] but at least [humans] were there [making the decision]
Witness the opening US shots of the ground conflict, which were from an AH-64 taking out an M-113. The footage from this incident is harrowing: the pilot (suffering from faulty navigation data) radios for confirmation again and again that he is engaging hostile targets, and he is repeatedly told that he is seeing BMP's and should engage. You can hear clearly in his voice that he knows it feels wrong. Ever though his instruments tell him he should fire, and the chain of command confirms it, and he is ordered to fire, he hesitates and questions, in a most human way.
And then he fires anyway. And the hesitation is gone. He whoops in triumph and crows "Nobody's getting out of that one!"
And then the order to "Cease fire! Cease fire!" comes in, and the pilot sounds like he's going to be sick when he realises that he was right, and that these were friendlies.
But the part that struck me the most was simply this: even though every human instinct was telling him not to fire, he fired anyway, because he had to fulfill his part in the military machine.
In other news, the US military is now sponsoring games to breed a new generation of soldiers. That's right kids, war is just a game, with you as the hero. It's not about mud and dust and dysentry and months and years of boredom and mindless toiling, it's a quick romp where you slay godless foreigners, complete with "pause" and "retry". Great PR, lousy message.
Our government and many of us as individuals are a part of the process of finding ways of protecting what we hold dear.
Seems to me that what we hold dearest is the process of protecting what we hold dearest. That's a reactive and recursive strategy, and it's producing a self fulfilling prophecy of anti-US aggresion.
I can't help but think that when Germany tells you that you have an over-invasive foreign policy, you'd better wake up and smell the coffee. Self defence is always justified, but just because you're being attacked doesn't mean that you're the good guys, or that you did nothing to provoke it.
As regarding the "cheap" cost of these things... $10-$13 million projected (and double or triple this in reality) is a lot of schools, hospitals... or foreign aid. Tell me, is a $20 million dollar plane so expensive that you can't afford to use it, or so expensive that you can't afford not to use it?
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, ooh, I pick Natalie Portman. So, yes, I do. ;-)
Does nobody else remember how ludicruous a moonshot was in 1962? We didn't know how to do it, we didn't know if we could figure out how to do it, and JFK might as well have signed the death warrants of the Apollo 11 crew.
And yet we did it, and got them there and back safely. We did it because one man said we would do it, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
Every time I read this pussyfooting around a manned Mars mission, it turns my stomach. We are now so petty and adverse to risk that I cannot see that we will ever launch a Mars mission. There are too many negatives and not enough positives. There's too much that we don't know, and that we think - assert vehemently even - that we can't learn or fix. It's too hard, we complain, it's too dangerous, we might fail. We can't afford the risk, we have to wait until we can make it safe. We have to wait, and wait and wait.
What we need is for one man - hell, even Dubya - to stand up say "This country commits itself to putting a man on Mars and bringing him back safely by the end of this decade. Make it happen."
Then we can turn some of our horrifying arms budget to something a little less self destructive, we can find volunteers, brave men and women who understand the risks and choose to go anyway, and we can stop nay-saying and do our damndest to get them there and back safely.
And we might fail. That's not an option, but it is a possibility. But to not try for fear of failure means we're already defeated, and we should weep not for a lost crew of astronauts but for the loss of all astronauts. Buzz Aldrin - a man who has walked on the surface of another planet - laments that he never thought space exploration would mean shuttling cargo around in low Earth orbit. Perhaps we'd just become so used to watching stage managed, post-produced heroes on film and TV that we'd forgotten that the real thing still exists, until September 11th reminded us. We wept for the emergency services men and women who died, but nobody - nobody - cheapened their memory by suggesting that it would have been more prudent, more sensible, for them not to have put themselves in harm's way.
If our reach no longer exceeds our grasp then we might as well gear up to manufacture parts for the Chinese Mars mission, because if we don't go, then they will. Because they seem to understand (as we've forgotten) that constantly striving to achieve more than we believed ourselves capable of is the defining trait of being human.
I've heard talk that we'll rebuild the twin towers, just to show that our spirit isn't broken. Great, but why stop there? Why not keep going up, and up? Why not stop saying "We'll go when it's achievable" and say "We are going. Achieve it."?
Let's got to Mars, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Heh, that's Esphion, I mean.
You jest, but this is a good point. I'm currently refreshing Epherion's web site. Dive in, everybody, let's see if:
This should be interesting.
In the case of Attack of the Clones, quality may not matter much since (a) almost all the shots are special effects shots done mainly by computer, and (b) the film is shite.
But try to imagine Citizen Kane shot on digital video (in colour, naturally), or Amelie, or Moulin Rouge. If its promoters are serious about the quality of their technology, let them put it to the test against the best work of contemporary and classic cinematographers - not against the worst.
My only regret is that we don't have the medical technology to give me a womb so that I can bear this man's children. I have never read such clear, plain spoken and informed articles about the MPAA agenda in a mainstream forum before. It makes me begin - begin - to hope that it's not too late to turn the tide of distributors controlling the very copyright laws that were originally and explicitely written to limit their ability to screw both creators and consumers. Alen Cox, I salute you.
As implied by my praise of Advance Wars for the GBA. Please do me the courtesy of reading the whole post before replying. Incidentally, I also nethack, but that doesn't mean that I'll kid myself that Joe Player will downgrade from decent 3D or even good isometric graphics to something that looks like a refugee from the Commodore 64.
Compare for example, Stronghold, a pure 2D/isometric RTS that nearly made me mess my pants when I realised that it could handle hundreds of units, with archery volleys that looked (to me, a reenactment combat archer) absolutely flawless. Contrast with Freecraft's "PointToPoint" missiles, and see how far they have to go to catch up with the commercial standard of six months ago.
Yes, I know that I'm praising graphics and not gameplay, but in this the two go hand in hand. The tiny and painfully obviously tiled and flat world of Freecraft looks painfully primitive in comparison. I'd play Freecraft, but only if I had no other choice. I'm not going to contribute to it, because I think that it's stuck in the past, and it can't be saved bar a major rewrite, which isn't going to happen now that it's been released as stable.
OK, let's comment on the engine. It's not a "game" engine, it's a "Warcraft 2" engine. A cursory glance at the many hardcoded rules, behaviours, actions, messages and object types verifies this. There's nowhere (that I can see) to add behaviour hooks; you have to expand or modify the code. Modifying it to act as a DuneII or Starcraft clone, for example, would be a substantial rewrite. That means that when people add and submit their own rulesets and object types, the code base will bloat and/or fork.
A far better long term solution would have been a thin and generic object handling and UI framework, with plugins for UI, object behaviour and world rules. OK, I know the goal always was to produce a Warcraft clone, but in that case, the developers shouldn't claim that it's a generic RTS engine, because it simply isn't.
All that said, it's a well organised and very readable and clean piece of code. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics of how to write a game. But keep in mind what was done wrong: too much integration of engine and behaviour (leading to lots of special cases for what should be generic behaviour, see the network "Send..." code, and the enumerated missile types), and (IMHO) loads of "object" manipulation in C, when C++ would have been more efficient.
Oh, and please remember to use a Unicode string table and not hardwired ASCII English strings. You'll save yourself a hell of a lot of trouble in the long run, especially if you get Deutsch translations done early on. German tends to be rather long winded, and doesn't abbrev. well. ;-)
...for international businesses to not have a US subsidiary that can be sequestered in these cases? Remember that in many countries, courts habitually award legal fees to the winner, so frivilous lawsuits are less tempting. Not so in the US, where you have to pay to defend yourself, then pay to launch a counter suit to recover your fees, and it's much easier to use litigation to silence those who can't afford to defend themselves. Bottom feeders like $cientology Inc will be watching this case with great interest, I suspect.
It's 2D, it doesn't run under WinXP, it's buggy (sound keeps switching itself on, units keep disappearing), it's missing features that appeared in commercial RTS's years ago (unit queueing, and fullscreen. Hello, FULLSCREEN?).
I wrote a comparable engine using DOS4GW/allegro back in 1995, and canned it because it was obsolete back then. Seven years later, I'm not seeing any great improvements, nor any incentive to bring my commercial games development skills to this project.
This is a neat hobby project, and probably a great learning experience for the dev team, but that's about as far as it's going. I showed it to my (non-OS) coworkers and they laughed their collective asses off. One guy asked me if it was a GBA emulator, and if so, how come it sucked so much compared to Advance Wars, and I really had no answer for him.
Look, don't get me wrong. I'm an open source developer, and I support good open source project when I see them (like the Demeter terrain engine), but if it looks like a turkey, and walks like a turkey, and sounds like a turkey, then it is a turkey, and all the cross platform compatibility in the world (except for WinXP, of course) won't turn it in to an engine that anyone other than the development team would really choose to use.
Two final thoughts:
I'd guess that's because good art is instantly recognisable even by guys in suits. Good code is recognisable only by the absense of broken parts, and that's something that takes weeks of analysis or testing to prove.
Um, did you miss the point? The graphics are up to you. If you don't like them, you can change them. Yes, you. Not the guy standing behind you.
Because when they finally get it working right, with a really high degree of accuracy, then it'll positively identify me, and I'll be allowed to exercise my rights to have and bear arms on an airline for the purpose of forming a well ordered militia. Surely this situation exemplifies the purpose of the second amendment; an armed populace defending itself from attack.
What's that you say? That this won't happen? That security will still be something performed by bored and disinterested employees on the ground, not by the people under direct threat? That all this technology will do is to remove rights and further entrench the mentality that We, the People must be protected by a tiny minority of largely unanswerable and self appointed professionals.
Sometimes I wonder why we bother even pretending that the Constitution still applies. If anyone can think of a more relevant application for the Second Amendment short of a full scale invasion, I'd like to hear it.
Very insightful post. One problem:
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Could not connect to the server
Please contact the administrator.
I'd be more inclined to listen to exhortations to write robust code from someone who can actually keep his web server up. Perhaps you could clean your own house first.
Now they'll be able to do a fully realistic military sim!
You'll spend two years digging really high polygon ditches, then get shipped to the asscrack of the world to perform a police action, and after two months of dysentary and grinding boredom, an extremely well rendered twelve year old kid will crack your skull with a well aimed rock.
Abort / Retry / Get a clue.
(Seriously, I love FPS's, but as games. Please let's not mention .mil and realistic in the same context as games)
Follow Kazaa. Set up a shell company on some Pacific island, and when (not if, when) the Big Lawsuit hits, sell the name and assets, and fold the US operation. Rinse and repeat until there are no US based technology companies left.
Sad, sad situation, but when the [MPA|RIA|BS]A can buy (nearly) any law they like and change the rules of the game whenever they feel like it, the only way to win is not to play in their schoolyard.
I like your ideas, but is there any reason we can't do both, plus a bunch of other stuff as well?
- Offer me a stripped down OS that presents an API subset limited to DirectX, OGL and enough of the WinAPI [..] at a reasonable price ($30)
You just described the XBox.Wow! So I did! Apart from the $170 difference in price, the fixed (and already painfully obsolete) hardware and the lack of online and budget classic games for it, that's exactly what I described.
When I was a youngster, I dreamed of zooming around in spaceships and meeting aliens.
Then I turned into an Angry Young Man and felt that we must tread lightly in the cosmos, and not pollute and exploit other planets the way we've plundered terra.
And then I started thinking about starting a family, and realised that as a human, my prime motivation is actually to make more humans. And then I thought about ice ages and planet-killer asteroid impacts (which are inevitable, not fantasy) and decided that we should say "Screw the fragile cosmos!", get our species' eggs out of our one fragile little basket and damn the cost in money and lives and ruined scientific study.
Who knows what I'll think as an old man. But right now, I reckon we should declare open season on other planets and start terraforming now. Because when the next ice age or asteroid hits, it'll be way, way too late to start, and as we've already plundered all of the easily available fossil resources, we can pretty much forget bootstrapping ourselves back out of the stone age.
Am I so very unusual in thinking that we should get real worried about these things now, while we've got the resources to do something about them?
How many US citizens does the RIAA represent? No, I don't mean how many artist or backroom techies or even corporate weasels in suits, because it's not actually representing them. The RIAA (rather the labels that comprise it) are businesses. As such, they represent their owners, not their employees, and not third parties relying on them to market their talents or products. Answering only to shareholders is a fiduciary duty for a publically traded company. If happy employees are the key to financial success, great, but if sacking 95% of them becomes a smarter move, they'll do that without batting an eye. The RIAA represents only the shareholders (or private owners) of the companies that comprise it.
So, does anyone actually know how many US citizens are shareholders in the music businesses that comprise the RIAA? Do these US citizens know? Do they know or care that their ownership legitimizes RIAA demands on Capital Hill?
I ask this because I keep hearing about how much money the RIAA represents, and there seems to be some sort of connection between this and the political influence that they have. Now, in a democracy, this can't be true, because then your vote would count more depending on your income, right? And that's not how a democracy works, is it?
So, let's hear it. Does anyone know how many US citizens the RIAA actually represents (that's US shareholders, not employees)? I'd really like to hear someone in government asking this, because it might (not likely, but perhaps) make Jane Investor start asking exactly where her financial representatives have been gambli^H^H^H^H^H^H investing her money on the stock market, and who she's legitimizing with her investment.
Pirated? I dunno about that, I have a shared copy of WinXP Pro, probably with one of "those" keys. I'll pay for it when my refund arrives for the OEM copy of Win98SE that I was forced to pay for on my laptop (now running SuSE), i.e. the 2nd of Never.
If any Microserf are reading, the only reason that I still boot to Windows is to play games. Offer me a stripped down OS that presents an API subset limited to DirectX, OGL and enough of the WinAPI to let me install and start a game, at a reasonable price ($30) without any idiotic licensing or activation crap, and I'll buy it. Short of that, forget it. Every dumbed down "Telletubbies" new Windows version, every curate's egg upgrade, every bluster and threat and waved MicroFist just brings me closer to the point where I'll wipe the Windows partition and take my chance with WineX. When that happens, you lose any chance of getting any more money out of me, ever.
More likely all equipment that a few select (patriotic) industry representatives point the Finger of Doom at. Hey, wanna bet that'll be mostly imported goods? I'm not being frivilous, the DMCA is being used to target imported goods right now (e.g. Dreamcast dev kit serial cables, Elcomsoft).
I'm wondering if anyone in the press will pick up on this and spot this situation. You're at a (smallish) presidential rally, where His Highness is speaking on record. Suddenly a (performance) copyrighted recording of "Hail to the Chief" starts playing... and every recorder in the room shuts down. In fact, you could have great fun at any press conference by playing a CD of the Star Spangled Banner and watching them scream in frustration, or just use a white noise generator that broadcasts a watermark at the limit of audibility. Actually, that might sell like hot cakes to all paranoid businesses (i.e. all of them).
I know all of this is so ridiculous as to make it seem beyond the pale, but we said that about the DMCA as well, remember? And I don't notice our elected representatives acknowledging that they pooched that law and moving to strike it. Do you?
The purpose of copyright law is to promote wide distribution of quality content and information.
The mechanism of copyright law was designed to protect powerless content producers from powerful content publishers.
Custom and usage has turned that on its head. The law now primarily protects the powerful publishers, and it does so more each year. Copyright law does not promote quality, nor does it encourage migration into the public domain, the original and quite explicit goal.
The goal of commercial publishers is now clear. It is to buy laws that - de facto - prevent self publishing by raising the technological and cost bar so high that only established interests will be able to distribute work that can be used by a significant proportion of the people. Instead of protecting talented people from ruthless publishers, copyright laws will soon mandate the effective enslavement of the very people they were meant to protect.
This is not what copyright law was invented for. And it was an invention. There is no "natural" or "social" law or convention that prevents people from sharing or repeating information. Copyright law was invented, and it was invented with a particular purpose in mind. We have now very nearly inverted that purpose through creeping amendments and fiddling with the original laws.
If you do write to your elected representatives, I'd suggest that you make it clear that you understand this, that you haven't been brainwashed by Disney into believing that only huge commercial publishers should control all distribution and dissemination of information, that you want a complete cleanout of copyright laws, and a return to the original intent.
Once more for luck: the original and explicit intent of copyright law is to promote the distribution of information and content from individual producers to individual consumers by ensuring that distributors - those with the money and power - could not dictate terms, steal work, and become even richer and more powerful at the expense of the people at either end of the chain.
I'd say we're well overdue for a return to that situation, and I'd bet good money that a vast majority of (nameless, faceless, powerless) authors, musicians, scriptwriters, and garage inventors would agree.
I doubt that very much. As I see it, the procedure will be this:
Outgoing packets, one.
Seriously, why would you want, let alone need, a human pilot in combat? Machines can respond faster, can read the input from control surfaces directly, and don't hesitate.
Personally I find the idea repulsive, but it's the only logical progression. Of course, it's a moot point, as it's far more efficient to destroy entire airforces on the ground than to risk engaging them in the air. The fighter era is over.
Absolutely. Do a google search for UXO (unexploded ordnance) and you'll find that the primary military/government argument against use of cluster munitions and mines is that they cause a few casualties to US soldiers>. The dreadful humanitarian effect (e.g. in Iraq and Kuwait) is mentioned only as an aside.
Witness the opening US shots of the ground conflict, which were from an AH-64 taking out an M-113. The footage from this incident is harrowing: the pilot (suffering from faulty navigation data) radios for confirmation again and again that he is engaging hostile targets, and he is repeatedly told that he is seeing BMP's and should engage. You can hear clearly in his voice that he knows it feels wrong. Ever though his instruments tell him he should fire, and the chain of command confirms it, and he is ordered to fire, he hesitates and questions, in a most human way.
And then he fires anyway. And the hesitation is gone. He whoops in triumph and crows "Nobody's getting out of that one!"
And then the order to "Cease fire! Cease fire!" comes in, and the pilot sounds like he's going to be sick when he realises that he was right, and that these were friendlies.
But the part that struck me the most was simply this: even though every human instinct was telling him not to fire, he fired anyway, because he had to fulfill his part in the military machine.
In other news, the US military is now sponsoring games to breed a new generation of soldiers. That's right kids, war is just a game, with you as the hero. It's not about mud and dust and dysentry and months and years of boredom and mindless toiling, it's a quick romp where you slay godless foreigners, complete with "pause" and "retry". Great PR, lousy message.
Seems to me that what we hold dearest is the process of protecting what we hold dearest. That's a reactive and recursive strategy, and it's producing a self fulfilling prophecy of anti-US aggresion.
I can't help but think that when Germany tells you that you have an over-invasive foreign policy, you'd better wake up and smell the coffee. Self defence is always justified, but just because you're being attacked doesn't mean that you're the good guys, or that you did nothing to provoke it.
As regarding the "cheap" cost of these things... $10-$13 million projected (and double or triple this in reality) is a lot of schools, hospitals... or foreign aid. Tell me, is a $20 million dollar plane so expensive that you can't afford to use it, or so expensive that you can't afford not to use it?