Interestingly enough, the Appleseed Databook notes that "true production of master-slave armor" begins in 1992, with "armored shell exoskeleton unit created" in 2029. Oddly enough, true Landmates either aren't widely produced or kept secret for a while; they're portrayed to be a recent development in the first book.
MADOX-01 was particularly interesting, postulating an armored trooper created by the JSDF and US military(in 199X no less!), to semi-replace the attack helicopter. A cheap, lightweight, extremely mobile tank-killer, armed with a small gatling gun and some assorted missiles/shaped charges. About the only thing wrong with it is the assumption made by a lot of directors that the problem of nap-of-the-earth/ground-effect flight will be solved in no time, in a human-sized form without bulky fuel tanks(same assumption in Bubblegum Crisis and Power Dolls). Still, you could use a roller-skate design, like the VOTOMS or Heavy Gears..
The post was replying to one of the trolls, who had stated "didn't windows have this years ago?". Wheras I felt the need to point out gently that the Mac in turn had multi-head support before Windows. It wasn't a retort to the original "Support for multiple displays" post. Thus I suppose the trolls "claim" another victory...ah well, who needs karma anyways..
Rob didn't have the entry fields enforce a limit, so I typed in the full name: "Scott Francis[Mechaman]", since I used that as an identifier on Usenet. It seemed to be ok for a few weeks, then something chopped it off, and I'd have to create a new user to fix it. Decided that I'd rather keep the old one and just live with it(it's not a huge priority for me).
Funny. For fighting games, the DC's pad isn't bad. The lack of buttons doesn't really affect me; being a KoF and Guilty Gear slave. Three buttons for attack always seemed like overkill to me. As far as the pad, I prefer the Saturn round-style. There are people who say the PSX button/cross pad gives greater control; I say it tends to be more inaccurate with quarter/half circle motions, and gives me blisters a hell of a lot faster.
Give me my shmups. G-Darius, Einhander, or Sokyugurentai quality preferred, but a few good shmups in the air of Radiant Silvergun or Layer Section will do(heck, probably even Raiden Fighters 2/Jet).
Give me Armored Core. I don't mean some American PC game company's (bad) attempt to copy the style of a show that wasn't about mecha, or yet another saga in the overblown tales of pseudo-knights in slow, overheated walking tanks. I want my giant robot to be fast, somewhat airborne, and the ability to color it plaid with a smilely face on the shoulder. And have a guided-missile launcher hanging off said shoulder.
Give me Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, or Trap Gunner. Give me more than just one or two (very-well done) attempts at skulking through the shadows, or failing that, give me the ability to move fast and leave non-propelled explosive/kinetic gifts for my(hopefully non-silicon) foes.
Can you give me those from the American PC game companies? Hm?
..have a good Armored Core lookalike for a PC platform. It still amazes me that American companies who are interested in mecha games haven't taken the AC lessons to heart--insanely customizable units(switching body parts gives a very different playing style, not to mention designable logos/paint scheme), cleverly designed levels/arenas, and plot determined by the player's choice of missions. Weapons are very thought out as well. Lately, most American mecha games haven't made me feel a thing. MW3: admittedly, quite possibly the best Battletech game on the market. But the gameplay and feel hasn't changed for the past five years. Driving a walking tank with barely any agility and a poorly-designed cooling system doesn't appeal to me anymore. Though the graphics are stunning.
Heavy Gear 2: I'll plead guilty here; I haven't played anything beyond the demo, which did impress me in the drastic improvements from the first version. Activision's lame install program annoyed the hell out of me, though.
Slave Zero: at its roots, an Evangelion wannabe(and especially if you saw some of the early devel pictures). Enemies are nicely designed, but intelligence-wise fairly simple, except for the bosses. The shoulder missile unit was a breath of fresh air, but the handheld weapons have been done over and over again. Why can't Slave use those nifty back thrusters to scoot forward? Why don't the levels give me an impression of a real city? Don't even get me started on the Dreamcast version.
Shogo: if multiplayer works for you, you get very fast and furious dogfights. What's nice is that the duality of man/mecha modes is quite clear, and it forces you to take very different play styles. But mecha mode can still be classed as bringing nothing new; just a scaled up version.
Parting note; I've had a suspicion for a long time that Shogo and Blood 2 were seen by the Monolith higher-ups(not the programmers) as more of prototypes/stepping stones on the way to LithTech 2. Shogo got a good release(marred by some sloppy network design, which mutated into massive cheating), but then they wiffed on Blood2, and then decided "We'll just pretend they don't exist and start selling gamers on our new Wowie Zowie Engine". Sanity is still on my list of games to check out, and the new engine shots do look impressive. Hopefully 'Lith will do a bit more listening and improve their attention span.
If I remember right, on one of the other XFree articles, someone mentioned that the change to plug-in modules would probably result in more open development, since individual driver modules could be binary or closed but the core program would be available.
The still-alive-and-kicking-ass 2D genre is not as easily digitized. While Pulstar, Sokyugurentai, Septerra Core and others show that you can achieve magical results with pre-rendered 3D graphics in a 2D engine, some are not. I'd like to see someone try to 3D model or digitize an average KoF background and characters, or the graphics for Metal Slug 2/X. And you're only talking about graphics. Sound effects and music are digital, yes, but it still takes a good amount of skill to produce audio that doesn't sound like someone making mouth noises into a cheap microphone. Or to produce a soundtrack that can get the heart pumping, then break it in two.
Re:tiny little gameboys? [more information]
on
Medium Rare Quickies
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· Score: 1
Those are Dreamcast VMUs, Visual Memory Units. They're much like the Playstation memory cards, except that VMUs have a small display screen and controls. You can use them like a Tamagotchi, a Game Boy, or as a private screen--they plug into the Dreamcast controller, so you effectively have a small LCD screen for information. They can also plug into each other to share save files(and can even download patch and extension files from the 'Net, for even more after-market fun).
And in an off-topic rant that probably nobody on Slashdot will read, when do I get a nickel for when Yet Another game person/reviewer/"guru" blatantly states "the Saturn never had any good games"? Penny-Arcade's done it, Gamcenter's done it, and PlanetDreamcast still has that flavor about them. Bollocks. Even though Sega of America(and especially a certain former Sega employee who's initials are BS) did their best to ignore the Saturn, there was still a massive flood of good titles--BUT NOT IN THE UNITED STATES! Thanks to SOA, great titles like Radiant Silvergun, Soukyugurentai, many fighers and all the KoF ports to the Saturn(which the quickie got wrong as well, since KoF '99 Millenium Battle is hardly the first KoF title to appear on a Sega console), and a smattering of RPGs(including both versions of Lunar long before Working Designs rereleased Lunar: Silver Star Story) never appeared over here. Why? Because they felt the need to push the Saturn, which was never designed to be the 3D workhorse that the PSX is, to lousy graphical heights by employing every white trash genre ever conceived. Y'want graphical splendor on the Saturn? Look at Radiant Silvergun or Lunar: Eternal Blue. But look outside your own country once in a while. Ah well. The tesosterone living-on-the-edge gamers will probably mark this down because they can't stand the thought of playing something that isn't an FPS or RTS.:/
Er, if you're referring to PSEmuPro, that really _is_ a true emulator. While it uses a dynamic-recompiling core, it's still emulating the core R3000A, as well as the GTE and other whatnot(instead of aiming for the instructions just used by a few popular games, like UltraHLE). In fact, Tratax(the author) once said that PSEmuPro was born out of a discussion with his coworkers whether it was possible to get a good fast emulation of the R-series CPUs with an x86 processor.;) Bleem may be using a slightly different way, but since they're aiming for compatibility across the board I doubt that they've gone the UltraHLE route either. Also, only the NES used the several-hundred memory map idea. The SNES only had one or two, and there's no indication that the 32-bit and above systems use anything similar(or if they do use such an inefficient system, it hasn't been documented). And finally, I think you're talking about Marat Fayzullin, although it may be contested. Marat isn't exactly a popular person in the community these days...
"more and more fighting games"? I'm assuming that you mean 3D fighting games in the arcades, since the last 3D fighter for a PC platform that I can remember well was FX Fighter, which almost nobody cared about. As far as the rise of 3D in fighters; give me a good game of King of Fighters or Last Blade anyday.
"I long for the days of nes, snes, and genesis, where game programmers had to come up with ORIGINAL ideas. " And frequently didn't. Can we say Mortal Kombat and [insert SNES Street Fighter clone here]?
"Now it's almost always shoot-em-ups!" Please don't confuse 3D first-person-shooters with the traditional shoot-em-ups; as defined at Shmups.;)
..if that's the same place that makes light sabers I'm thinking about, a friend of mine borrowed one to use with his Obi-Wan(Guiness, not Ewan.;)) costume. Really cool--the hilt is a very close replica using aluminum, and it's got a power pack. The blade is several feet long and is a plexiglass tube with Indi-Glo strips down it, plugs in with a stereo jack. Even more amazing is that somehow the hilt, not the blade, determines the color(they've got blue, red and green, but the red doesn't work very well). Really quite amazing, it even leaves a bit of motion blur. We were wondering if we could wave it in front of drunks and see if they'd fall down.;)
As for the plant...why am I reminded of the "breeding for luck" discussed in Ringworld?
As someone on a different message board pointed out, many DVD players have support for DTS, and wear it proudly. But discs don't always use it. Heck, there are cases out there with "Designed for Windows 95" plastered on and people are running Linux on the computers inside. It's all about marketing.
..had it left the direct hands of MS when it became a huge hit in Japan? The MSX2, MSX+, etc. standards don't seem to have that much of MS's hands in them, and since the two Metal Gear games and the Gradius/Nemesis sequels were for them...
You're a bit out of touch; Ah! Megami-sama has been available for years(under AnimEigo's title of Oh My Goddess!, I suspect people probably wouldn't go for the Chibi A!MG even tho' it's fairly funny) and Pioneer has been releasing Fushigi Yuugi volumes for several months now. Hell, it was only last year that AnimeVillage started _officially_ releasing Gundam tapes in the U.S. and it was only at AX that they announced they would be releasing 08th MS Team and Gundam-W.
You wouldn't be related to Anthony Gaza by any chance, now would you? It's actually pretty amusing to see your floundering around on/., with your lame attempts at ridicule.
..Blender. Although right now it isn't as suitable for game development, since it can't export viable format or skeleton data, it's still a pleasure to use. Can always make 3D-rendered 2D graphics..
...as of AccelX 4.1.2 they still had a "dissappearing/corrupting" mouse cursor problem reminiscent of a MIT-SHM bug(very annoying when using Blender or the Gimp), couldn't use DGA extensions, and couldn't drop below 640x480 resolution. The only reason I ordered it in the first place was to support my i740 card, and when the XBF project produced an XF86 driver two weeks after I ordered it.. It _is_ faster than XF86, and you do get a nice splash screen, but XF86 is more feature-rich, IMHO.
Also, I could be mistaken, but it seems that the version of Accel-X I had didn't install any X source. When I compiled xanim for the first time, I had an error, and the author of xanim pointed out the problem--in the XF86 libraries that were still installed on my machine.
In the anime series stated, towards the end, humanity comes to the conclusion that to defeat the enemy insect race, they must destroy another galaxy. Jupiter is converted into the Black Hole Bomb(which requires a hyperdrive engine to set it off), and used to destroy the enemy galaxy. Yes, there's a whole backstory, plot, and angst behind the show--go watch it.
Recently someone posted about their experience in determining the file structure of the Doom WADfile. How did you feel when people were discovering how to modify Doom, from building new levels, to changing the executable itself(dhacked) originally without any information from id? In your opinion, is the modding community a valuable place for creating future game developers?
And, what did you think of how Nitrozac portrayed you in After Y2K?;)
..the Second Impact itself wasn't because of humanity(SEELE) playing around with cloning, it was when Adam was shrunken to embryo size. Adam _was_ there to tell humanity to stop dicking around with cloning, but got shrunken for his troubles(which then ended up killing half the world population).
From what I've heard, the WinCE used is so identical to the palmtop version that they had to suppress the mouse cursor subroutine. "Dragon", the native OS used, has been noted that it provides the usual console environment to develop in without using any CE code at all. I'd assume it would resemble SDL.
..there are those of us who still prefer action games that aren't clones. Grand Theft Auto, for example. Originality's out there; it just isn't hanging around for you to stumble over it. And both MK and SF2 are outdated; real fighting game fans are busy playing King of Fighers.;P
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, the Appleseed Databook notes that "true production of master-slave armor" begins in 1992, with "armored shell exoskeleton unit created" in 2029. Oddly enough, true Landmates either aren't widely produced or kept secret for a while; they're portrayed to be a recent development in the first book.
MADOX-01 was particularly interesting, postulating an armored trooper created by the JSDF and US military(in 199X no less!), to semi-replace the attack helicopter. A cheap, lightweight, extremely mobile tank-killer, armed with a small gatling gun and some assorted missiles/shaped charges. About the only thing wrong with it is the assumption made by a lot of directors that the problem of nap-of-the-earth/ground-effect flight will be solved in no time, in a human-sized form without bulky fuel tanks(same assumption in Bubblegum Crisis and Power Dolls). Still, you could use a roller-skate design, like the VOTOMS or Heavy Gears..
IIRC, the Discovery Channel did a series of articles on military/high technology and the anime series predicting them. The MADOX one is at discovery.com/area /technology/virtualtech/issue3/splash.html.
The post was replying to one of the trolls, who had stated "didn't windows have this years ago?". Wheras I felt the need to point out gently that the Mac in turn had multi-head support before Windows. It wasn't a retort to the original "Support for multiple displays" post. Thus I suppose the trolls "claim" another victory...ah well, who needs karma anyways..
And unless _I'm_ mistaken, the Macintosh had it years before Windows.
Poor little trolls, is it really that boring tonight?
Rob didn't have the entry fields enforce a limit, so I typed in the full name: "Scott Francis[Mechaman]", since I used that as an identifier on Usenet. It seemed to be ok for a few weeks, then something chopped it off, and I'd have to create a new user to fix it. Decided that I'd rather keep the old one and just live with it(it's not a huge priority for me).
Funny. For fighting games, the DC's pad isn't bad.
The lack of buttons doesn't really affect me; being a KoF and Guilty Gear slave. Three buttons for attack always seemed like overkill to me.
As far as the pad, I prefer the Saturn round-style. There are people who say the PSX button/cross pad gives greater control; I say it tends to be more inaccurate with quarter/half circle motions, and gives me blisters a hell of a lot faster.
Give me my shmups. G-Darius, Einhander, or Sokyugurentai quality preferred, but a few good shmups in the air of Radiant Silvergun or Layer Section will do(heck, probably even Raiden Fighters 2/Jet).
Give me Armored Core. I don't mean some American PC game company's (bad) attempt to copy the style of a show that wasn't about mecha, or yet another saga in the overblown tales of pseudo-knights in slow, overheated walking tanks. I want my giant robot to be fast, somewhat airborne, and the ability to color it plaid with a smilely face on the shoulder. And have a guided-missile launcher hanging off said shoulder.
Give me Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, or Trap Gunner. Give me more than just one or two (very-well done) attempts at skulking through the shadows, or failing that, give me the ability to move fast and leave non-propelled explosive/kinetic gifts for my(hopefully non-silicon) foes.
Can you give me those from the American PC game companies? Hm?
After all, the Appleseed Plan isn't supposed to be announced until 2030..oh, wait...:)
..have a good Armored Core lookalike for a PC platform.
It still amazes me that American companies who are interested in mecha games haven't taken the AC lessons to heart--insanely customizable units(switching body parts gives a very different playing style, not to mention designable logos/paint scheme), cleverly designed levels/arenas, and plot determined by the player's choice of missions. Weapons are very thought out as well.
Lately, most American mecha games haven't made me feel a thing.
MW3: admittedly, quite possibly the best Battletech game on the market. But the gameplay and feel hasn't changed for the past five years. Driving a walking tank with barely any agility and a poorly-designed cooling system doesn't appeal to me anymore. Though the graphics are stunning.
Heavy Gear 2: I'll plead guilty here; I haven't played anything beyond the demo, which did impress me in the drastic improvements from the first version. Activision's lame install program annoyed the hell out of me, though.
Slave Zero: at its roots, an Evangelion wannabe(and especially if you saw some of the early devel pictures). Enemies are nicely designed, but intelligence-wise fairly simple, except for the bosses. The shoulder missile unit was a breath of fresh air, but the handheld weapons have been done over and over again. Why can't Slave use those nifty back thrusters to scoot forward? Why don't the levels give me an impression of a real city? Don't even get me started on the Dreamcast version.
Shogo: if multiplayer works for you, you get very fast and furious dogfights. What's nice is that the duality of man/mecha modes is quite clear, and it forces you to take very different play styles. But mecha mode can still be classed as bringing nothing new; just a scaled up version.
Parting note; I've had a suspicion for a long time that Shogo and Blood 2 were seen by the Monolith higher-ups(not the programmers) as more of prototypes/stepping stones on the way to LithTech 2. Shogo got a good release(marred by some sloppy network design, which mutated into massive cheating), but then they wiffed on Blood2, and then decided "We'll just pretend they don't exist and start selling gamers on our new Wowie Zowie Engine". Sanity is still on my list of games to check out, and the new engine shots do look impressive. Hopefully 'Lith will do a bit more listening and improve their attention span.
If I remember right, on one of the other XFree articles, someone mentioned that the change to plug-in modules would probably result in more open development, since individual driver modules could be binary or closed but the core program would be available.
The still-alive-and-kicking-ass 2D genre is not as easily digitized. While Pulstar, Sokyugurentai, Septerra Core and others show that you can achieve magical results with pre-rendered 3D graphics in a 2D engine, some are not. I'd like to see someone try to 3D model or digitize an average KoF background and characters, or the graphics for Metal Slug 2/X.
And you're only talking about graphics. Sound effects and music are digital, yes, but it still takes a good amount of skill to produce audio that doesn't sound like someone making mouth noises into a cheap microphone. Or to produce a soundtrack that can get the heart pumping, then break it in two.
Those are Dreamcast VMUs, Visual Memory Units. They're much like the Playstation memory cards, except that VMUs have a small display screen and controls. You can use them like a Tamagotchi, a Game Boy, or as a private screen--they plug into the Dreamcast controller, so you effectively have a small LCD screen for information. They can also plug into each other to share save files(and can even download patch and extension files from the 'Net, for even more after-market fun).
:/
And in an off-topic rant that probably nobody on Slashdot will read, when do I get a nickel for when Yet Another game person/reviewer/"guru" blatantly states "the Saturn never had any good games"? Penny-Arcade's done it, Gamcenter's done it, and PlanetDreamcast still has that flavor about them. Bollocks. Even though Sega of America(and especially a certain former Sega employee who's initials are BS) did their best to ignore the Saturn, there was still a massive flood of good titles--BUT NOT IN THE UNITED STATES! Thanks to SOA, great titles like Radiant Silvergun, Soukyugurentai, many fighers and all the KoF ports to the Saturn(which the quickie got wrong as well, since KoF '99 Millenium Battle is hardly the first KoF title to appear on a Sega console), and a smattering of RPGs(including both versions of Lunar long before Working Designs rereleased Lunar: Silver Star Story) never appeared over here. Why? Because they felt the need to push the Saturn, which was never designed to be the 3D workhorse that the PSX is, to lousy graphical heights by employing every white trash genre ever conceived. Y'want graphical splendor on the Saturn? Look at Radiant Silvergun or Lunar: Eternal Blue. But look outside your own country once in a while.
Ah well. The tesosterone living-on-the-edge gamers will probably mark this down because they can't stand the thought of playing something that isn't an FPS or RTS.
Er, if you're referring to PSEmuPro, that really _is_ a true emulator. While it uses a dynamic-recompiling core, it's still emulating the core R3000A, as well as the GTE and other whatnot(instead of aiming for the instructions just used by a few popular games, like UltraHLE). In fact, Tratax(the author) once said that PSEmuPro was born out of a discussion with his coworkers whether it was possible to get a good fast emulation of the R-series CPUs with an x86 processor. ;)
Bleem may be using a slightly different way, but since they're aiming for compatibility across the board I doubt that they've gone the UltraHLE route either.
Also, only the NES used the several-hundred memory map idea. The SNES only had one or two, and there's no indication that the 32-bit and above systems use anything similar(or if they do use such an inefficient system, it hasn't been documented).
And finally, I think you're talking about Marat Fayzullin, although it may be contested. Marat isn't exactly a popular person in the community these days...
"I long for the days of nes, snes, and genesis, where game programmers had to come up with ORIGINAL ideas. "
And frequently didn't. Can we say Mortal Kombat and [insert SNES Street Fighter clone here]?
"Now it's almost always shoot-em-ups!" ;)
Please don't confuse 3D first-person-shooters with the traditional shoot-em-ups; as defined at Shmups.
..if that's the same place that makes light sabers I'm thinking about, a friend of mine borrowed one to use with his Obi-Wan(Guiness, not Ewan. ;)) costume. Really cool--the hilt is a very close replica using aluminum, and it's got a power pack. The blade is several feet long and is a plexiglass tube with Indi-Glo strips down it, plugs in with a stereo jack. Even more amazing is that somehow the hilt, not the blade, determines the color(they've got blue, red and green, but the red doesn't work very well). Really quite amazing, it even leaves a bit of motion blur. We were wondering if we could wave it in front of drunks and see if they'd fall down. ;)
As for the plant...why am I reminded of the "breeding for luck" discussed in Ringworld?
As someone on a different message board pointed out, many DVD players have support for DTS, and wear it proudly. But discs don't always use it.
Heck, there are cases out there with "Designed for Windows 95" plastered on and people are running Linux on the computers inside. It's all about marketing.
..had it left the direct hands of MS when it became a huge hit in Japan? The MSX2, MSX+, etc. standards don't seem to have that much of MS's hands in them, and since the two Metal Gear games and the Gradius/Nemesis sequels were for them...
You're a bit out of touch; Ah! Megami-sama has been available for years(under AnimEigo's title of Oh My Goddess!, I suspect people probably wouldn't go for the Chibi A!MG even tho' it's fairly funny) and Pioneer has been releasing Fushigi Yuugi volumes for several months now.
Hell, it was only last year that AnimeVillage started _officially_ releasing Gundam tapes in the U.S. and it was only at AX that they announced they would be releasing 08th MS Team and Gundam-W.
You wouldn't be related to Anthony Gaza by any chance, now would you? /., with your lame attempts at ridicule.
It's actually pretty amusing to see your floundering around on
..Blender. Although right now it isn't as suitable for game development, since it can't export viable format or skeleton data, it's still a pleasure to use. Can always make 3D-rendered 2D graphics..
...as of AccelX 4.1.2 they still had a "dissappearing/corrupting" mouse cursor problem reminiscent of a MIT-SHM bug(very annoying when using Blender or the Gimp), couldn't use DGA extensions, and couldn't drop below 640x480 resolution. The only reason I ordered it in the first place was to support my i740 card, and when the XBF project produced an XF86 driver two weeks after I ordered it..
It _is_ faster than XF86, and you do get a nice splash screen, but XF86 is more feature-rich, IMHO.
Also, I could be mistaken, but it seems that the version of Accel-X I had didn't install any X source. When I compiled xanim for the first time, I had an error, and the author of xanim pointed out the problem--in the XF86 libraries that were still installed on my machine.
In the anime series stated, towards the end, humanity comes to the conclusion that to defeat the enemy insect race, they must destroy another galaxy. Jupiter is converted into the Black Hole Bomb(which requires a hyperdrive engine to set it off), and used to destroy the enemy galaxy.
Yes, there's a whole backstory, plot, and angst behind the show--go watch it.
Recently someone posted about their experience in determining the file structure of the Doom WADfile. How did you feel when people were discovering how to modify Doom, from building new levels, to changing the executable itself(dhacked) originally without any information from id? In your opinion, is the modding community a valuable place for creating future game developers?
;)
And, what did you think of how Nitrozac portrayed you in After Y2K?
..the Second Impact itself wasn't because of humanity(SEELE) playing around with cloning, it was when Adam was shrunken to embryo size. Adam _was_ there to tell humanity to stop dicking around with cloning, but got shrunken for his troubles(which then ended up killing half the world population).
From what I've heard, the WinCE used is so identical to the palmtop version that they had to suppress the mouse cursor subroutine. "Dragon", the native OS used, has been noted that it provides the usual console environment to develop in without using any CE code at all. I'd assume it would resemble SDL.
..there are those of us who still prefer action games that aren't clones. Grand Theft Auto, for example. Originality's out there; it just isn't hanging around for you to stumble over it. ;P
And both MK and SF2 are outdated; real fighting game fans are busy playing King of Fighers.