I've coded an entire mailing list system in The Bat! (Actually only requires 3 filters). The thing has pretty powerful sorting / scripting capabilities, with regular expressions and lots of internal hooks. You can also have per-folder identities and templates, and the preview pane uses a custom HTML engine, free from I.E.'s security risks. While the developers never respond on their forums, it has happened several times that a feature requested on the forums would show up in a new build just days later. Even without delving into the weird, corporate abilities of SecureBat and BatNet, TheBat! is quite powerful.
Not being free is not a good reason to stop using something of quality. Your time must be worth 30 bucks. IMAP, despite what the developers may say, isn't done yet. It is something they promised for the big 2.0 release, but couldn't deliver on time. But overall TheBat! Is a very powerful little system. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably hasn't spent much time using it.
"...players have the opportunity to optimize their fighting technique by managing their move-by-move combat tactics, and performing combos and other special maneuvers. This is definitely not 'click and watch.'"
Why is it whenever that phrase gets uttered by a designer, it almost always the opposite of the truth? The fighting system he describes sounds like a RPGesque system of clicking buttons to queue up attacks ALA Xenogears. It also sounds like fights will proceed without user input, allowing avatars whose hosts are lagging out to continue with only a moderate effectiveness penalty. It makes sense for a MMPORPG to do it that way, and it is a cut above other games in terms of click-and-watch, but it still isn't the real time fighting that people want.
Describing the fighting system the way they do, people are going to be expecting Planetside, and will be disappointed to receive SW:KOTOR. It sounds like it could be fun, but they need to manage expectations better.
Despite the hype, most people would consider queuing up attacks a form of "click-and-watch."
I felt it was my job to show people exactly what they wanted. The stores are large enough, and have enough stock, that if the person didn't look in every corner, or didn't know exactly what features they could have, they weren't ready to buy something. Salespeople, when done right, are a good search algorithm, and leading exactly to what you want is a good way to sell something.
That's not to say that all salespeople know this. There was a guy at Microcenter the last time I bought a machine there whose commission tag I ripped off the box before reaching the register. But a good salesman will sell you something because they have exactly what you want or exactly what you didn't know you wanted but now do.
A good salesperson probably won't sell you the thing you are thinking about saying no to. A good salesperson will sell you the thing next to that thing which addresses all of your concerns and has a nifty built in pocketknife too, for just 5 dollars more.
Keep your systems together, keep your accessories together, but use that all important "depth". One bin might be for Nintendo cartridges A-D, organized in a very insert efficient fashion. It looks pretty terrible, but is very effective and space saving. Plus the bins double for controller and accessories.
Sometimes you get lucky... A Longs drug store plastic bin happened to be the exact dimensions for storing SNES cartridges. They were too small for a serious collection, but for the first 60 or 70 games they were perfect.
Warning! The link to the 2 legit article above attempts to install something from IE Plugin LTD, a spyware program which, amongst other things, tracks your surfing habits, pops up advertisements, and opens a backdoor for future program updates. Their terms can be found here.
If this is not just a fluke page served up by allrpg's advertising company, please remove the above article. Such behavior is not acceptable in a public forum. Companies should not abuse Slashdot as a way of sliming spyware onto people's computers.
Or imagine, for example, that you could craft items in Star Wars Galaxies while sitting on the bus with just your phone. This provides a way to buff your character without commiting as much sit-down gametime
I hate to be the one to say this, but this is exactly the part of modern gaming that should be stripped out. Sitting on a bus making items with your mobile phone? Select-select-combine-wait select-select-combine-wait. People have tried this with, for example, the Dreamcast VMU and it was about as boring as you would imagine.
There's also the tomogachi genre of VMU games, which hasn't advanced much beyond the original concept in terms of fun or replayability.
"Puzzle Pirates" would be perfect, but it is in the minority. It's the only successful commercial game that I know of that runs on Java. I'm sure you could make some sort of hack to deal with the lack of a persistent connection, but you're still talking about diverting more resources from the main project.
And that is the crux of the problem: money. I'm sure you could make an excellent version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Wacky Stuff Happens for the PSP that could connect with the PS3 version seamlessly given twice the resources and lots of time, but most developers don't have that. To take a fully immersive 3D game designed to push the latest hardware to the limits, and create a fun connected game on a miniscule platform that is connected in a form more substantive than Item Manipulation is very difficult. Final Fantasy could do a "pocket arena" type thing, but even then you would have a heck of a lot of art resources to recreate, a lot of balancing to do, and months and months of QA to make sure both platforms are perfectly synchronized. If it isn't a stand alone game, all you can hope for is a subset of those who bought the first game. If it is a stand alone game that happens to connect with the original, like Nintendo has been doing with their Zelda games, expect to invest far more than your original design would call for. And people won't consider that "Continuous Gaming" anyway.
Think of it this way, would you pay 40 dollars for a fun, full game on your cell phone? (say "yes") Good. Now, would you pay 40 dollars for a small offshoot of another game, where you get to move your items around? Or, looked at another way, if you would pay 40 dollars for $console_game, would you pay 80 dollars for $console_game+." Unless the game is incredibly good, most people would say no.
There are other good games out there. Go play something else.
Apparently, they surveyed their 1,118 of their own customers.
This is how bad statistics are born, people. An anti-spamming company surveys their own clients to find out what they think defines Spam, casually asks if they brought this down upon themselves, and find out that a surprisingly large percentage deserve what they got. Then news agencies get hold of this, strip out the "customers of" part, and it has become truth about the human condition. Furthermore, 6-10% of those surveyed said that spam can come from someone you have purchased from before. And, at least according to the above link, they didn't have to buy the product through the spam, just that they bought what was advertised in the spam, like a new Cingular Wireless telephone or a John Deere tractor. Or, for that matter, buying a subscription to the Wall Street Journal after they spammed you from the free signup page.
So in other words, it's a pretty big stretch to say that 8% of all people (+-2%) have bought from spam.
Note to Journalists: Can we at least put survey methodology in a footnote? It is a form of integrity, true, but it's not as much of a hassle as fact checking or having an objective viewpoint of your subjects.
Not to veer dangerously offtopic in a slashdot post, but I would be very happy if the P2P filesharing networks were shut down, and research focused instead on other, better uses for P2P.
Bittorrent, for one example. A distributed website distribution system, that would make sites go faster the more people reading them, for another. In this case, a distributed resource network for sharing data amongst spooks. Another would be a decentralized network file server using the famous 1-2, 2-3, 3-1 file transfer system (Ok, I forget the name and it wasn't that famous).
Except for viruses, computers aren't pro-active enough on the LAN. There is no easy way to share data, information, PDA files, or anything else without setting explicit servers and explicit clients. More research into simpler, decentralized networking systems would be very helpful.
It's not that I don't like filesharing pirated content. It's just that there are so many other uses for the technology that are being underrepresented at the table.
*Full Disclosure, I've got e-donkey running right now.
I doubt public outcry will be so large. If there was a way to keep lobsters live before reaching the store by simply freezing them, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a bumper crop of cheap live lobster. The public doesn't have to see the reanimation process, so they would be nonethewiser.
As you said, we're cruel enough to the tasty critters already. What's one more freezing going to do?
Shooting games. Not your modern FPS mind you, but the old-school overhead dodge-em-ups. Those games require tracking a very large number of objects moving quickly, dismissing anything irrelevant to the situation at hand, estimating positional changes over time, and compensating to avoid collisions. When driving in New York I can feel myself slip into shooter mode, tracking the position of everything moving, calculating collisions, and sliding into open pockets.
Of course, driving in the winter I frequently use years of simulated driving skills when hitting patches of ice. To straighten, let off the gas and turn into the turn. To keep turning, accelerate (assuming RWD) and turn into the turn less. Getting it right is entirely a feel thing.
I could ramble on for another hour, but I think I'll stop now... before I make more of a fool of myself.
No, I agree. This would only work in the specific example of an online-only game without a lot of patches. Or, for that matter, any patches. Backwards compatibility with future computers is never guaranteed, but at least one CAN write ext3 drivers for $system_of_choice. It appears that when Longhorn ships, reading from an NTFS file system will become very difficult.
The idea of pushing Linux as a gaming platform is kind of ridiculous, and I was reaching to find a way to do so. I had forgotten about writable storage. I still think a PSIX or SNIX is a good idea.
Offtopic, why are you posting at 0? All of your comments seem between reasonably and well thought out.
And all this time I thought Yahoo! was getting wise.
Thanks for the correction. It would explain why I haven't been able to find the link on Yahoo! Games. A subtitle would clear things up... Puzzle Pirates: Yohoho!
The PS2 and the X-Box(sic) run Linux, so let's create a distro that turns home PC into a console with development potential.
There's a man who has really thought this one out.
We need some "killer'"games on the CD. We need the source for the games on that CD. We need that CD in places like Electronics Boutique and GAME. We need kids able to pick up that CD (or DVD, with respect to another learned friend posting here) and turn their PC into a games console, without ruining Mum's or Dad's official documents.
Ok, to sell this as a platform, you have to add the words "exclusive" after the word "killer." Otherwise, you just have a platform that can play the games that are already available on Windows, and there is no incentive to switch. But making a "killer" exclusive game requires more than just 80 hour weeks and a 10 million dollar budget: it requires both of those things many times over to create a single "successful" title. A "killer" title might require 30 or 40 fully-funded projects that reach the store. If effort was enough, we would have 100 "killer" titles every year.
Good luck with source. If you though cheating in online games was rampant before...
Besides, most videogames don't lend themselves very well to open sourcing. The industry just moves too rapidly, and games aren't something you're going to improve because you use it every day. There is, of course, NetHack and other Open Source games that do incredible things. But let's be real here, would you buy a box with NetHack on the cover if it was sitting next to a box of Doom 3?
Getting on the shelf in E.B. is not that difficult once you have actual street cred and some cash to back it up. E.B. loves cash. But as this seems to be lacking a business model (or, for that matter, a plan), I don't know where they would get either.
As for transitioning to consoles... That doesn't make any sense. If the Phantom and ApeXtreme are such bad ideas, why would a Linux based ApeXtreme be any better? Why do you need a console when you can have a computer with TV out and hit the mass market? Or, conversely, why would the average person want to run Linux on the PS2?
He fails to mention that the CD would need to be bootable, ALA Knoppix, or else the formatting process would "ruin Mum's or Dad's official documents." Because, as we all know, official documents require Rockin' graphics cards left in public spaces or they get lonely. Likewise, you will need to be able to install to disk, like Knoppix, or else there can be no platform transition. You need to support a large amount of hardware, like Knoppix, and have a lot of available games, like Knoppix. Oh, and you want it based upon the most solid binary distro available with the clearest licensing, like Knoppix. Are you seeing where I'm going with this?
No. What he really should be doing is going to game development companies and pushing the idea of entirely self-contained games running on Linux. It would be significantly harder to cheat in a MMPORPG game if it ran as its own OS, booting without a HDD, and then you could offload the action processing to the individual clients without fear of modification. Lag would be a thing of the past, and MMP twitch games could be released. Ask for a hash key of random length of the CD every now and then, and you would have a very tough nut to crack. And if people did crack it by learning to hack through Linux, all the better for the platform. He could also push Linux to Sony and Nintendo as a way to quickly create a solid development system for next-gen gaming. Unlike Windows, Linux's multiprocessor kung-fu is superior, and would probably like the Ps3's 18 processor architecture in a way that nobody else would. It might even make it a bearable system to work on.
In short, this guy doesn't have a firm grasp on the industry. It would be great to push Linux to the people who control the standards, but pushing the OS without codifying it into the gaming ecosystem somehow is suicide. At least Sisyphus got near the top of the hill before the boulder rolled back down.
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the development picture of Duke Nukem Forever?
I've coded an entire mailing list system in The Bat! (Actually only requires 3 filters). The thing has pretty powerful sorting / scripting capabilities, with regular expressions and lots of internal hooks. You can also have per-folder identities and templates, and the preview pane uses a custom HTML engine, free from I.E.'s security risks. While the developers never respond on their forums, it has happened several times that a feature requested on the forums would show up in a new build just days later. Even without delving into the weird, corporate abilities of SecureBat and BatNet, TheBat! is quite powerful.
Not being free is not a good reason to stop using something of quality. Your time must be worth 30 bucks. IMAP, despite what the developers may say, isn't done yet. It is something they promised for the big 2.0 release, but couldn't deliver on time. But overall TheBat! Is a very powerful little system. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably hasn't spent much time using it.
"...players have the opportunity to optimize their fighting technique by managing their move-by-move combat tactics, and performing combos and other special maneuvers. This is definitely not 'click and watch.'"
Why is it whenever that phrase gets uttered by a designer, it almost always the opposite of the truth? The fighting system he describes sounds like a RPGesque system of clicking buttons to queue up attacks ALA Xenogears. It also sounds like fights will proceed without user input, allowing avatars whose hosts are lagging out to continue with only a moderate effectiveness penalty. It makes sense for a MMPORPG to do it that way, and it is a cut above other games in terms of click-and-watch, but it still isn't the real time fighting that people want.
Describing the fighting system the way they do, people are going to be expecting Planetside, and will be disappointed to receive SW:KOTOR. It sounds like it could be fun, but they need to manage expectations better.
Despite the hype, most people would consider queuing up attacks a form of "click-and-watch."
I can only imagine what the Google search for his name will turn up tomorrow. That should impress his clients.
He's a bright boy.
I felt it was my job to show people exactly what they wanted. The stores are large enough, and have enough stock, that if the person didn't look in every corner, or didn't know exactly what features they could have, they weren't ready to buy something. Salespeople, when done right, are a good search algorithm, and leading exactly to what you want is a good way to sell something.
That's not to say that all salespeople know this. There was a guy at Microcenter the last time I bought a machine there whose commission tag I ripped off the box before reaching the register. But a good salesman will sell you something because they have exactly what you want or exactly what you didn't know you wanted but now do.
A good salesperson probably won't sell you the thing you are thinking about saying no to. A good salesperson will sell you the thing next to that thing which addresses all of your concerns and has a nifty built in pocketknife too, for just 5 dollars more.
Keep your systems together, keep your accessories together, but use that all important "depth". One bin might be for Nintendo cartridges A-D, organized in a very insert efficient fashion. It looks pretty terrible, but is very effective and space saving. Plus the bins double for controller and accessories.
Sometimes you get lucky... A Longs drug store plastic bin happened to be the exact dimensions for storing SNES cartridges. They were too small for a serious collection, but for the first 60 or 70 games they were perfect.
"All computers", you sure?
Well, any computer running BlackICE under Linux is screwed too, though for different reasons.
Anyone know of a good way to get copies of these programs once they have aired? Is there a Tivo-MPEG-NET application people use?
I'd really like to see this, but don't have cable.
You do realize "IM me" has fewer syllables?
Warning! The link to the 2 legit article above attempts to install something from IE Plugin LTD, a spyware program which, amongst other things, tracks your surfing habits, pops up advertisements, and opens a backdoor for future program updates. Their terms can be found here.
If this is not just a fluke page served up by allrpg's advertising company, please remove the above article. Such behavior is not acceptable in a public forum. Companies should not abuse Slashdot as a way of sliming spyware onto people's computers.
Now I need to give this computer a bath.
Or imagine, for example, that you could craft items in Star Wars Galaxies while sitting on the bus with just your phone. This provides a way to buff your character without commiting as much sit-down gametime
." Unless the game is incredibly good, most people would say no.
I hate to be the one to say this, but this is exactly the part of modern gaming that should be stripped out. Sitting on a bus making items with your mobile phone? Select-select-combine-wait select-select-combine-wait. People have tried this with, for example, the Dreamcast VMU and it was about as boring as you would imagine.
There's also the tomogachi genre of VMU games, which hasn't advanced much beyond the original concept in terms of fun or replayability.
"Puzzle Pirates" would be perfect, but it is in the minority. It's the only successful commercial game that I know of that runs on Java. I'm sure you could make some sort of hack to deal with the lack of a persistent connection, but you're still talking about diverting more resources from the main project.
And that is the crux of the problem: money. I'm sure you could make an excellent version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Wacky Stuff Happens for the PSP that could connect with the PS3 version seamlessly given twice the resources and lots of time, but most developers don't have that. To take a fully immersive 3D game designed to push the latest hardware to the limits, and create a fun connected game on a miniscule platform that is connected in a form more substantive than Item Manipulation is very difficult. Final Fantasy could do a "pocket arena" type thing, but even then you would have a heck of a lot of art resources to recreate, a lot of balancing to do, and months and months of QA to make sure both platforms are perfectly synchronized. If it isn't a stand alone game, all you can hope for is a subset of those who bought the first game. If it is a stand alone game that happens to connect with the original, like Nintendo has been doing with their Zelda games, expect to invest far more than your original design would call for. And people won't consider that "Continuous Gaming" anyway.
Think of it this way, would you pay 40 dollars for a fun, full game on your cell phone? (say "yes")
Good. Now, would you pay 40 dollars for a small offshoot of another game, where you get to move your items around? Or, looked at another way, if you would pay 40 dollars for $console_game, would you pay 80 dollars for $console_game+
There are other good games out there. Go play something else.
A little bit can be found here.
Apparently, they surveyed their 1,118 of their own customers.
This is how bad statistics are born, people. An anti-spamming company surveys their own clients to find out what they think defines Spam, casually asks if they brought this down upon themselves, and find out that a surprisingly large percentage deserve what they got. Then news agencies get hold of this, strip out the "customers of" part, and it has become truth about the human condition. Furthermore, 6-10% of those surveyed said that spam can come from someone you have purchased from before. And, at least according to the above link, they didn't have to buy the product through the spam, just that they bought what was advertised in the spam, like a new Cingular Wireless telephone or a John Deere tractor. Or, for that matter, buying a subscription to the Wall Street Journal after they spammed you from the free signup page.
So in other words, it's a pretty big stretch to say that 8% of all people (+-2%) have bought from spam.
Note to Journalists: Can we at least put survey methodology in a footnote? It is a form of integrity, true, but it's not as much of a hassle as fact checking or having an objective viewpoint of your subjects.
http://www.cybercom.net/~seishino/specs_header0806 2004.jpg
But to their credit, many of those geeks walked away with other world records...
Worst teeth... Oldest Shoes... Largest number of days between sunlight... Most frequent use of the word "l337..."
RAM drive with 3.5" HDD backup. Untouchable seek times. Untouchable transfer rates. Very low failures. Less temperature. Less noise. Much cheaper.
Largest Lawsuit?
Is the effect of noise cancelling headphones more pronounced than, say, the effect of wearing a traditional pair of big muffley things?
I'm thinking about getting one for my girlfriend's subway commute, but I haven't tried a pair since the very, very early (read, bad) days.
Not to veer dangerously offtopic in a slashdot post, but I would be very happy if the P2P filesharing networks were shut down, and research focused instead on other, better uses for P2P.
Bittorrent, for one example. A distributed website distribution system, that would make sites go faster the more people reading them, for another. In this case, a distributed resource network for sharing data amongst spooks. Another would be a decentralized network file server using the famous 1-2, 2-3, 3-1 file transfer system (Ok, I forget the name and it wasn't that famous).
Except for viruses, computers aren't pro-active enough on the LAN. There is no easy way to share data, information, PDA files, or anything else without setting explicit servers and explicit clients. More research into simpler, decentralized networking systems would be very helpful.
It's not that I don't like filesharing pirated content. It's just that there are so many other uses for the technology that are being underrepresented at the table.
*Full Disclosure, I've got e-donkey running right now.
Well, that explains both the lawyers and the accountants I've met.
-40 degrees? No wonder the lobsters are so fresh here in Boston.
[shivers in the middle of a heated apartment]
I doubt public outcry will be so large. If there was a way to keep lobsters live before reaching the store by simply freezing them, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a bumper crop of cheap live lobster. The public doesn't have to see the reanimation process, so they would be nonethewiser.
As you said, we're cruel enough to the tasty critters already. What's one more freezing going to do?
Shooting games. Not your modern FPS mind you, but the old-school overhead dodge-em-ups. Those games require tracking a very large number of objects moving quickly, dismissing anything irrelevant to the situation at hand, estimating positional changes over time, and compensating to avoid collisions. When driving in New York I can feel myself slip into shooter mode, tracking the position of everything moving, calculating collisions, and sliding into open pockets.
Of course, driving in the winter I frequently use years of simulated driving skills when hitting patches of ice. To straighten, let off the gas and turn into the turn. To keep turning, accelerate (assuming RWD) and turn into the turn less. Getting it right is entirely a feel thing.
I could ramble on for another hour, but I think I'll stop now... before I make more of a fool of myself.
No, I agree. This would only work in the specific example of an online-only game without a lot of patches. Or, for that matter, any patches. Backwards compatibility with future computers is never guaranteed, but at least one CAN write ext3 drivers for $system_of_choice. It appears that when Longhorn ships, reading from an NTFS file system will become very difficult.
The idea of pushing Linux as a gaming platform is kind of ridiculous, and I was reaching to find a way to do so. I had forgotten about writable storage. I still think a PSIX or SNIX is a good idea.
Offtopic, why are you posting at 0? All of your comments seem between reasonably and well thought out.
And all this time I thought Yahoo! was getting wise.
Thanks for the correction. It would explain why I haven't been able to find the link on Yahoo! Games. A subtitle would clear things up... Puzzle Pirates: Yohoho!
The PS2 and the X-Box(sic) run Linux, so let's create a distro that turns home PC into a console with development potential.
There's a man who has really thought this one out.
We need some "killer'"games on the CD.
We need the source for the games on that CD.
We need that CD in places like Electronics Boutique and GAME.
We need kids able to pick up that CD (or DVD, with respect to another learned friend posting here) and turn their PC into a games console, without ruining Mum's or Dad's official documents.
Ok, to sell this as a platform, you have to add the words "exclusive" after the word "killer." Otherwise, you just have a platform that can play the games that are already available on Windows, and there is no incentive to switch. But making a "killer" exclusive game requires more than just 80 hour weeks and a 10 million dollar budget: it requires both of those things many times over to create a single "successful" title. A "killer" title might require 30 or 40 fully-funded projects that reach the store. If effort was enough, we would have 100 "killer" titles every year.
Good luck with source. If you though cheating in online games was rampant before...
Besides, most videogames don't lend themselves very well to open sourcing. The industry just moves too rapidly, and games aren't something you're going to improve because you use it every day. There is, of course, NetHack and other Open Source games that do incredible things. But let's be real here, would you buy a box with NetHack on the cover if it was sitting next to a box of Doom 3?
Getting on the shelf in E.B. is not that difficult once you have actual street cred and some cash to back it up. E.B. loves cash. But as this seems to be lacking a business model (or, for that matter, a plan), I don't know where they would get either.
As for transitioning to consoles... That doesn't make any sense. If the Phantom and ApeXtreme are such bad ideas, why would a Linux based ApeXtreme be any better? Why do you need a console when you can have a computer with TV out and hit the mass market? Or, conversely, why would the average person want to run Linux on the PS2?
He fails to mention that the CD would need to be bootable, ALA Knoppix, or else the formatting process would "ruin Mum's or Dad's official documents." Because, as we all know, official documents require Rockin' graphics cards left in public spaces or they get lonely. Likewise, you will need to be able to install to disk, like Knoppix, or else there can be no platform transition. You need to support a large amount of hardware, like Knoppix, and have a lot of available games, like Knoppix. Oh, and you want it based upon the most solid binary distro available with the clearest licensing, like Knoppix. Are you seeing where I'm going with this?
No. What he really should be doing is going to game development companies and pushing the idea of entirely self-contained games running on Linux. It would be significantly harder to cheat in a MMPORPG game if it ran as its own OS, booting without a HDD, and then you could offload the action processing to the individual clients without fear of modification. Lag would be a thing of the past, and MMP twitch games could be released. Ask for a hash key of random length of the CD every now and then, and you would have a very tough nut to crack. And if people did crack it by learning to hack through Linux, all the better for the platform. He could also push Linux to Sony and Nintendo as a way to quickly create a solid development system for next-gen gaming. Unlike Windows, Linux's multiprocessor kung-fu is superior, and would probably like the Ps3's 18 processor architecture in a way that nobody else would. It might even make it a bearable system to work on.
In short, this guy doesn't have a firm grasp on the industry. It would be great to push Linux to the people who control the standards, but pushing the OS without codifying it into the gaming ecosystem somehow is suicide. At least Sisyphus got near the top of the hill before the boulder rolled back down.