Well, FPS's have had this running rampant for years. Argueably the most popular multiplayer game ever (counter strike) started as user made content. Morrowind/oblivoin has as much mods as actual content fromt he developer. 60% of all games on battle.net for warcraft 3 is custom maps. Might be new to the console but PC has had this rampant for a long time.
I own a Ps3 and it does "itch" for the connectivity of Home TM. It feels like a full fledged computer with a web browser, store, and multiplayer but no IM. With IM and chat rooms and it may push the PS3 from "nice but not now" to "must have." User made content delivery may spark the content creators. If Sony allows content creation on a PC to be brought over it may be even bigger for them.
I'm not sure on that. I have a few folders that have a large number of photos in them (500 - 2000), if I open them in Windows Vista the computer essentially stops responding. A progress bar appears behind the address bar but the actual Explorer window won't respond -- for example, I cannot sort via size or filetype, it simply ignores me. If I try to open one of these files, the computer does not respond. Eventually, after 5-10 minutes, all open attempts will "fire off" at once.
I have a similiar problem in XP with my umm... perfectly normal library of several thousand 200k-600k jpegs and hundred gig of video. I had hoped vista would help but apparently not.
With such openly racist project names I sincerly hope the Xbox fails as an asian Canadian I find the references offensive. perhaps it's no wonder the xbox falls on it's face in japan. The people behind it seem to openly hate them and have bad taste in their choice of project names.
Heres a story. When I was in university I had a group of casual friends that I took classes with. 4 out of these 5 guys cheated their asses off. Copying from each other, from internet sources, buying papers, etc.. Myself and one of the other guys refused to do that and went it our own way. Myself and the other guy got okay marks couldn't find a good job and ended up in sales and tech support. The 4 others got good marks and each have a job with a major company (3 of them work for big blue). My anecdotal story high lights that I should teach my children to cheat their asses off because honesty doesn't pay.
Al Gore claimed "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Which can be easily miscontrued as "I invented the internet." But he was stating he hand an important hand in getting the internet up. He was instrimental in the efforts to create the early internet (darpnet) so his quote is true but mincontrued and blown out of proportion.
There is soem skilled required. Knowing your cool down timers so well that you never leave a valuable skills unused. Knowing the counters to the various effects and strategies of the opponents. The dexsterity required to hit a dozen hots in sequence and modify the action as the situations demands. Knowing the exact behavior of skills and the weaknesses of each. It's not entirely skilless and the gulf between a great player and a good player was entirely based in how much they knew and reflexes.
This is totally incorrect. Neither I nor Blizzard would need to write any AI to trounce the best players, this can be done with an Expert System (It's sad these two concepts have blended in modern usage of the terms). All RTS released to date do not require any form of adaptive learning. The is one optimal way to extract and utilize resources. An competent expert system is capable of micromanaging individual units with much greater performance than any human being could, assuming physical interface is required. With a simple Expert System running on a modern CPU it should be able to evaluate and issue millions of commands per second, something no human would be capable of since we as humans have uncountable evaluations being processed that are not part of the exact goal of winning the game and therefor take away from our ability to do so (This is why Tommy was so good at pinball)
A simpler game like a FPS can have a expert system trounce any player at any level. But a RTS need the ES to remember, to decide and had branchign similair to chess. I doubt it'd be a simple task. As for micromanagement, top level players have incredible multi tasking and the game is catered to them. The ES might be able to order a million mouse clicks but when the game is made for a human limitations like War 3 you lose much of that edge. Just consider what goals the ES/AI would have in a RTS like war 3. You must balance expansion with teching with harassing with creeping with defence. IT's not a simple or easy or well solved problem. The AI on hard is already gear to beat novice to intermediate players. But top end players can take on widely unbalanced scenarios of many computer opponents on hard. I agree that it's likely not the strongest AI possible but it's not an easy problem thus no one has attempted too hard to solve it. While there are numerous FPS bots.
Most consumers do not have HD TV's and most consumers have more than one TV in their home therefore it will be a very long time before either HD movie format matters as even when the majority of consumers own at least one HD TV, both formats will be worthless when watched on the other TV's in the home. Discuss.
You assumption was valid last year. This past christmas season HDTV's took a big junk of TV purchases. The market is growing fast.
Match anyone in top 20 in any catagory on Bnet ladder versus any AI you or blizzard can code in Warcraft 3. RTS's are hard to code for because you have so many situations and a well made games leaves too many options to code for. The bot may pound novices but high level play is exstremely difficult to program against.
I actually hit the reverse problem. I am so much better then the Warcraft 3 AI at any difficulty that playing against a computer is liek masterbating. No challenge but fun in moderation. This is because the AI doesn't cheat by having higher initial resources or other arbitrary cheats other games throw in. The computer might have perfect memory and what not but for a realtime game short cuts must be taken to allow it to run smoothly and this contributes to the autisism many games have. They are fun and challenging AI's for novices but fall flat against anything above novice. The primary reason is some one must program this AI and often times that someone wouldn't qualify as much better then "intermediate" in the game they make.
iPS: As for the "much better actress", Julianne Moore never in her life played a role that had a tenth the sex appeal of Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully. Boogey nights? Short cuts? The End of the Affair?
An MMOG is not a single-player CRPG with a multiplayer mode. It's an automated tabletop RPG without a GM and with rigid game-time.
Getting the darn thing right isn't hard; attracting both funding and a crowd of players to pay for said funding, and making it look PS3-style pretty is.
Graphics and marketting are a matter of money. Funding is a matter of pitching it to the publishers. Those require work and luck. Ps3 style pretty? what exactly do you mean. high res textures like most PC FPS? multicore programming like gears of war? Heavy graphic polish like FFXII? Companies known for good play balance spend 30%-50% of their developement time polishing play balance (blizzard). Studios that don't (Sony) tend to put out pretty rough games and then spend time doing post hoc game balancing. Sometimes exessively screwing it up (SW: galaxies).
your post is sort of tangiential to my point. Your reply was "no, it's not a single player RPG with more epeople." that was not my point. You need to balance the game so people find value and fun int he options your provide. Too few games do it right.
Night time by a window should be fine. it's the daytime heat that makes the wii mote useless.shaking games are fine but anything requiring the IR is useless.
No. My friend have blinds and curtains. The IR radiation still eminates enough to screw the wii mote. for his house setting the big screen in front of the front window is the only orientationt hat works. it's unfortunate but we're night owls so it doesn't effect us that much generally.
Find the number of people who owned a creative labs rio at ipod launch that also bought an ipod in the first year? I think you'll find the correlation is similiar to my situation. I am not saying the Ipod will fail because there is a cheaper product with 70% of the features. Only that I will not buy it because I own a item that has 70% of the features. Note I did not comment on the possibility for success but only mentioned the difference I think exists between what apple has done successfully and this industry.
Resistance is as good as say Far cry. Both are pretty standard FPS's. I think far cry has more innovation (big open enviroments) but they are very comparable in gameplay.
The Wii still doesn't allow someone to turn with the speed of a PC user and it doesn't allow for precise, quick targeting. The layout of the remote, and all the variables with the screen's size and the distance to that screen hinders accuracy.
Not to mention heat. If there is a window or a heater behind your TV, you can forget about playing with yoru Wii with anything that requires the wiimote to aim. IT's stutter and jump all over the screen because of the heat.
MS Tendancy: Will pretend to partner with you, steal your business models and contacts, cut you out, and grind your company into dust. "embrace, extend and extinguish"
Sony: Partner with you, promote your collaboration, sometimes provide innadaquete documentation at first, attempt to replace your collaboration with a propriatary project a few years later. Fail miserably to compete with your old collaboration.
From history it seems safer to partner with Sony. although they try to screw you later they tend to do it poorly when goign it alone. Their collaborations do well.
They collaborated to create CD's with massive success. Tried to replace it with minidisk and failed miserably. Collaborated to create DVDs to great success. Failed miserably to sort of replace it with UMDs. collaborated on Bluray (and it seems like successis coming).
MS has largely back stabbed their partners. (IBM on Os/2, IBM on PCs in general, Java, etc..)
When any one company corners the market they tend to do things like draconian licencing schemes, bloatware, price fixing, etc... one company in control is ever a good idea. Ideally I'd liek to see a 2 way tie for first with Sony/Nintendo and the 360 a distant third. Because we know Ninty is evil when dominant, we know Ms is evil all the time, and Sony is like your drunk uncle with tourettes, not so much evil as beligerent and puzzingly self defeating.
They can get out of a hole? They still haven't gotten out of the hole that is the PS2.
According to a press release several years ago the Ps2 was profitable "several months" after release. Only the Xbox and Dreamcast were known to sell at a loss for most of their lifespans. The Ps2, Wii, Gc etc.. all had profit margins soon after launch. also analsysts tend to over inflate their numbers. With vertical integration and without counting sunk costs like R&D the Ps2 was easily profitable. The Ps3 is likely the same. Sony is not into loss leader strategies unlike MS/Sega.
The next question is will Sony or Microsoft be the first to let you add an external HD for content? Sony already does sort of. You can hook up a USB external and mount it as a linux disc or you can just add a SATA HD to the machine since the HD is upgradable. You can go from 60 to 240 easily.
The two markets you mentioned (non CD based music players and personal computers) were both infant niche markets when Apple stepped in. I doubt they will fall on their faces but the cell market is a fairly mature industry. Time will tell. I for one will not be getting one asmy Motorola Q has 70% of the functionaity and I can't justify dropping $600+ to bridge the gap.
Slashdot Mirror
We upsell them to IP TV which has no bandwidth limit on the adsl. It's a glitch but a nice one.
Well, FPS's have had this running rampant for years. Argueably the most popular multiplayer game ever (counter strike) started as user made content. Morrowind/oblivoin has as much mods as actual content fromt he developer. 60% of all games on battle.net for warcraft 3 is custom maps. Might be new to the console but PC has had this rampant for a long time.
I own a Ps3 and it does "itch" for the connectivity of Home TM. It feels like a full fledged computer with a web browser, store, and multiplayer but no IM. With IM and chat rooms and it may push the PS3 from "nice but not now" to "must have." User made content delivery may spark the content creators. If Sony allows content creation on a PC to be brought over it may be even bigger for them.
I'm not sure on that. I have a few folders that have a large number of photos in them (500 - 2000), if I open them in Windows Vista the computer essentially stops responding. A progress bar appears behind the address bar but the actual Explorer window won't respond -- for example, I cannot sort via size or filetype, it simply ignores me. If I try to open one of these files, the computer does not respond. Eventually, after 5-10 minutes, all open attempts will "fire off" at once.
I have a similiar problem in XP with my umm... perfectly normal library of several thousand 200k-600k jpegs and hundred gig of video. I had hoped vista would help but apparently not.
With such openly racist project names I sincerly hope the Xbox fails as an asian Canadian I find the references offensive. perhaps it's no wonder the xbox falls on it's face in japan. The people behind it seem to openly hate them and have bad taste in their choice of project names.
/ vitriol
My only consolation is my GF is hotter then the girls they date. Rich too so maybe it didn't matter.
Heres a story. When I was in university I had a group of casual friends that I took classes with. 4 out of these 5 guys cheated their asses off. Copying from each other, from internet sources, buying papers, etc.. Myself and one of the other guys refused to do that and went it our own way. Myself and the other guy got okay marks couldn't find a good job and ended up in sales and tech support. The 4 others got good marks and each have a job with a major company (3 of them work for big blue). My anecdotal story high lights that I should teach my children to cheat their asses off because honesty doesn't pay.
Al Gore claimed "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Which can be easily miscontrued as "I invented the internet." But he was stating he hand an important hand in getting the internet up. He was instrimental in the efforts to create the early internet (darpnet) so his quote is true but mincontrued and blown out of proportion.
There is soem skilled required. Knowing your cool down timers so well that you never leave a valuable skills unused. Knowing the counters to the various effects and strategies of the opponents. The dexsterity required to hit a dozen hots in sequence and modify the action as the situations demands. Knowing the exact behavior of skills and the weaknesses of each. It's not entirely skilless and the gulf between a great player and a good player was entirely based in how much they knew and reflexes.
This is totally incorrect. Neither I nor Blizzard would need to write any AI to trounce the best players, this can be done with an Expert System (It's sad these two concepts have blended in modern usage of the terms). All RTS released to date do not require any form of adaptive learning. The is one optimal way to extract and utilize resources. An competent expert system is capable of micromanaging individual units with much greater performance than any human being could, assuming physical interface is required. With a simple Expert System running on a modern CPU it should be able to evaluate and issue millions of commands per second, something no human would be capable of since we as humans have uncountable evaluations being processed that are not part of the exact goal of winning the game and therefor take away from our ability to do so (This is why Tommy was so good at pinball)
A simpler game like a FPS can have a expert system trounce any player at any level. But a RTS need the ES to remember, to decide and had branchign similair to chess. I doubt it'd be a simple task. As for micromanagement, top level players have incredible multi tasking and the game is catered to them. The ES might be able to order a million mouse clicks but when the game is made for a human limitations like War 3 you lose much of that edge. Just consider what goals the ES/AI would have in a RTS like war 3. You must balance expansion with teching with harassing with creeping with defence. IT's not a simple or easy or well solved problem. The AI on hard is already gear to beat novice to intermediate players. But top end players can take on widely unbalanced scenarios of many computer opponents on hard. I agree that it's likely not the strongest AI possible but it's not an easy problem thus no one has attempted too hard to solve it. While there are numerous FPS bots.
It may be the quality of his TV. SD vs HD should still be obvious on a 32" set at 6'.
Most consumers do not have HD TV's and most consumers have more than one TV in their home therefore it will be a very long time before either HD movie format matters as even when the majority of consumers own at least one HD TV, both formats will be worthless when watched on the other TV's in the home. Discuss.
You assumption was valid last year. This past christmas season HDTV's took a big junk of TV purchases. The market is growing fast.
Match anyone in top 20 in any catagory on Bnet ladder versus any AI you or blizzard can code in Warcraft 3. RTS's are hard to code for because you have so many situations and a well made games leaves too many options to code for. The bot may pound novices but high level play is exstremely difficult to program against.
I actually hit the reverse problem. I am so much better then the Warcraft 3 AI at any difficulty that playing against a computer is liek masterbating. No challenge but fun in moderation. This is because the AI doesn't cheat by having higher initial resources or other arbitrary cheats other games throw in. The computer might have perfect memory and what not but for a realtime game short cuts must be taken to allow it to run smoothly and this contributes to the autisism many games have. They are fun and challenging AI's for novices but fall flat against anything above novice. The primary reason is some one must program this AI and often times that someone wouldn't qualify as much better then "intermediate" in the game they make.
iPS: As for the "much better actress", Julianne Moore never in her life played a role that had a tenth the sex appeal of Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully.
Boogey nights? Short cuts? The End of the Affair?
An MMOG is not a single-player CRPG with a multiplayer mode. It's an automated tabletop RPG without a GM and with rigid game-time.
Getting the darn thing right isn't hard; attracting both funding and a crowd of players to pay for said funding, and making it look PS3-style pretty is.
Graphics and marketting are a matter of money. Funding is a matter of pitching it to the publishers. Those require work and luck. Ps3 style pretty? what exactly do you mean. high res textures like most PC FPS? multicore programming like gears of war? Heavy graphic polish like FFXII? Companies known for good play balance spend 30%-50% of their developement time polishing play balance (blizzard). Studios that don't (Sony) tend to put out pretty rough games and then spend time doing post hoc game balancing. Sometimes exessively screwing it up (SW: galaxies).
your post is sort of tangiential to my point. Your reply was "no, it's not a single player RPG with more epeople." that was not my point. You need to balance the game so people find value and fun int he options your provide. Too few games do it right.
Night time by a window should be fine. it's the daytime heat that makes the wii mote useless.shaking games are fine but anything requiring the IR is useless.
No. My friend have blinds and curtains. The IR radiation still eminates enough to screw the wii mote. for his house setting the big screen in front of the front window is the only orientationt hat works. it's unfortunate but we're night owls so it doesn't effect us that much generally.
Find the number of people who owned a creative labs rio at ipod launch that also bought an ipod in the first year? I think you'll find the correlation is similiar to my situation. I am not saying the Ipod will fail because there is a cheaper product with 70% of the features. Only that I will not buy it because I own a item that has 70% of the features. Note I did not comment on the possibility for success but only mentioned the difference I think exists between what apple has done successfully and this industry.
Resistance is as good as say Far cry. Both are pretty standard FPS's. I think far cry has more innovation (big open enviroments) but they are very comparable in gameplay.
The Wii still doesn't allow someone to turn with the speed of a PC user and it doesn't allow for precise, quick targeting. The layout of the remote, and all the variables with the screen's size and the distance to that screen hinders accuracy.
Not to mention heat. If there is a window or a heater behind your TV, you can forget about playing with yoru Wii with anything that requires the wiimote to aim. IT's stutter and jump all over the screen because of the heat.
MS Tendancy: Will pretend to partner with you, steal your business models and contacts, cut you out, and grind your company into dust. "embrace, extend and extinguish"
Sony: Partner with you, promote your collaboration, sometimes provide innadaquete documentation at first, attempt to replace your collaboration with a propriatary project a few years later. Fail miserably to compete with your old collaboration.
From history it seems safer to partner with Sony. although they try to screw you later they tend to do it poorly when goign it alone. Their collaborations do well.
They collaborated to create CD's with massive success. Tried to replace it with minidisk and failed miserably. Collaborated to create DVDs to great success. Failed miserably to sort of replace it with UMDs. collaborated on Bluray (and it seems like successis coming).
MS has largely back stabbed their partners. (IBM on Os/2, IBM on PCs in general, Java, etc..)
When any one company corners the market they tend to do things like draconian licencing schemes, bloatware, price fixing, etc... one company in control is ever a good idea. Ideally I'd liek to see a 2 way tie for first with Sony/Nintendo and the 360 a distant third. Because we know Ninty is evil when dominant, we know Ms is evil all the time, and Sony is like your drunk uncle with tourettes, not so much evil as beligerent and puzzingly self defeating.
They can get out of a hole? They still haven't gotten out of the hole that is the PS2.
According to a press release several years ago the Ps2 was profitable "several months" after release. Only the Xbox and Dreamcast were known to sell at a loss for most of their lifespans. The Ps2, Wii, Gc etc.. all had profit margins soon after launch. also analsysts tend to over inflate their numbers. With vertical integration and without counting sunk costs like R&D the Ps2 was easily profitable. The Ps3 is likely the same. Sony is not into loss leader strategies unlike MS/Sega.
The next question is will Sony or Microsoft be the first to let you add an external HD for content?
Sony already does sort of. You can hook up a USB external and mount it as a linux disc or you can just add a SATA HD to the machine since the HD is upgradable. You can go from 60 to 240 easily.
The two markets you mentioned (non CD based music players and personal computers) were both infant niche markets when Apple stepped in. I doubt they will fall on their faces but the cell market is a fairly mature industry. Time will tell. I for one will not be getting one asmy Motorola Q has 70% of the functionaity and I can't justify dropping $600+ to bridge the gap.