This is about the _past_ of the characters, right? And the actors are 8 or so years older even than the last time we saw them. The most likely conclusion is new, younger actors, so it doesn't matter who of the original cast is alive or not. Could see something like Sheridan's original actor being cast as Sheridan's grandfather or some such, though.
"We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."
I already wait for games to hit the clearance bin before buying them. I think high prices for AAA titles will be a good thing for indie developers, who aren't throwing the kind of money at a game that it requires a $60 price to recover the investment.
We've already reached the point where the cost of art assets is a greater limiting factor than hardware capabilities when it comes to graphics. I believe procedural generation will step up to the challenge and rescue the industry. Procedural terrain, buildings, and plant life are basically solved problems. Wil Wright's Spore is making a credible attempt at procedural animals. Our eyes have such high standards when it comes to the human form that I doubt we'll ever have completely procedural humans, but a number of games now have just a handful of human character graphics and parameterize features such as jaw width, cheekbone height, obesity, etc. to create combinatorial variety with a minimum of artist man-hours.
The beautiful thing about procedural and parameterized art is that they can be open-sourced in a meaningful fashion. There's currently a lot of free/public-domain game art out there, but not much of it helps. The art requirements for games are too idiosyncratic. With parameterized/procedural art you can fit random art from the internet to your needs a lot more easily. Parameterized art is re-usable art, which means less duplication of effort within the community. The collective art output of the indie gaming community will then be able to create games of similar graphical quality and content depth as commercial AAA titles.
BnetD was doing something they knew was blatantly not allowed by Blizzard.
However, there was good reason to believe that it was allowed by THE LAW. If you do something not allowed by Blizzard, you get banned from Battle.net. If you do something not allowed by the law, you get fines or a jail sentence. Big difference. However, at least when it comes to Bnet, the courts have effectively decided that Blizzard IS the law.
(Reposted because of the strange formatting of the original, my apologies.)
Warcraft's greatest strength to me is its abundance of hand-crafted quests - something most people before didn't think would be practical in a commercial-scale mmog. The quests are all quite entertaining, but something that's all too rare is for the player to be given a genuine choice. In particular there are several ideological factions within the game, such as the Defias and the Scarlet Crusade that occupy a moral gray area. Someone's real-life or roleplayed sensibilities might lead them to side with one of these factions, but the game dictates the player's allegience simply because there are quests against these factions, but few or no quests to take on behalf of them.
One case in which Blizzard has shown some much-welcome flexibility is the Bloodsail Buccaneers, allowing players to gain the friendship of these pirates who are normally the "bad guys." It wouldn't take an extreme investment of time to allow similar options for the Scarlet Crusade, Defias, Twilight Hammer, Syndicate, etc, etc.
To put the gist of this post in the form of a question: Is there any possibility that Blizzard will allow players to side with any of these factions, as with the Bloodsails?
That's the essence of it. For anyone curious, what follows are my own ideas of how to allow the choice while respecting the massive amount of content build around the assumption that these factions are players' enemies. In particular the Deadmines and Scarlet Monastery dungeons account for many hours of playtime of fighting these factions. That amount of content can't be tossed out nor duplicated, but a fictional reason can be told for someone on either side to do them. (If you don't want quest spoilers, stop reading the post here.)
Before completing the Deadmines instance, the Defias appear mainly as violent thugs. The choice to side with the Defias could easily come AFTER experiencing the Deadmines, so that content can remain completely intact. After delivering Van Cleef's letter and hearing Baros' Alexston's story of the unpaid workers and corrupt nobles, the player might be swayed to the Defias' point of view. However, someone siding with the Defias would be just as motivated to complete the same existing Stockade quests to root out the corrupt noble. All that's needed is two slightly varied dialogue paths and all the quests are still applicable. Some kind of follow on quest could then be provided to make the Defias in Westfall friendly to the player, a la the Bloodsail Buccanneers. Moonbrook might even become a functional town to players that have completed the series. I can't say how to support the choice in the Missing Diplomat quest series though, since it isn't finished. Please finish that, by the way.
For the Scarlet Crusade, the Alliance quests start out being against the undead on behalf of the Crusade, but suddenly the player is forced to turn againt the crusade on the say-so of an NPC he or she just met. First of all, this sudden change could be made more convincing by adding a step to the quest series for the players to go to the torture chamber wing of the Scarlet Monastery. There they would see for themselves what the crusade is doing. This would also give Alliance players a reason to visit that wing, as there are no alliance quests there currently. At a minimum this would make the requirement of turning againt the crusade more believable, but it could be taken further by offering a choice through a dialog with Interrogator Vishas. The first would be to decide the crusade has become overzealous and must be stopped by killing Interrogator Vishas, Arcanist Doan, Scarlet Commander Mograine, and High Inquisitor Whitemane. Alternatively the player could accept a quest from the interrogator to eliminate members of the crusade opposed to his extreme methods - Herod, Houndmaster Loksey, and High Inquisitor Fairbanks. I haven't experienced enough of the Scarlet Crusade content in the Plagu
Warcraft's greatest strength to me is its abundance of hand-crafted quests - something
most people before didn't think would be practical in a commercial-scale mmog. The
quests are all quite entertaining, but something that's all too rare is for the player to
be given a genuine choice. In particular there are several ideological factions within
the game, such as the Defias and the Scarlet Crusade that occupy a moral gray area.
Someone's real-life or roleplayed sensibilities might lead them to side with one of these
factions, but the game dictates the player's allegience simply because there are quests
against these factions, but few or no quests to take on behalf of them.
One case in which Blizzard has shown some much-welcome flexibility is the Bloodsail
Buccaneers, allowing players to gain the friendship of these pirates who are normally the
"bad guys." It wouldn't take an extreme investment of time to allow similar options for
the Scarlet Crusade, Defias, Twilight Hammer, Syndicate, etc, etc.
To put the gist of this post in the form of a question: Is there any possibility that
Blizzard will allow players to side with any of these factions, as with the Bloodsails?
That's the essence of it. For anyone curious, what follows are my own ideas of how to
allow the choice while respecting the massive amount of content build around the
assumption that these factions are players' enemies. In particular the Deadmines and
Scarlet Monastery dungeons account for many hours of playtime of fighting these factions.
That amount of content can't be tossed out nor duplicated, but a fictional reason can be
told for someone on either side to do them. (If you don't want quest spoilers, stop
reading the post here.)
Before completing the Deadmines instance, the Defias appear mainly as violent thugs. The
choice to side with the Defias could easily come AFTER experiencing the Deadmines, so
that content can remain completely intact. After delivering Van Cleef's letter and
hearing Baros' Alexston's story of the unpaid workers and corrupt nobles, the player
might be swayed to the Defias' point of view. However, someone siding with the Defias
would be just as motivated to complete the same existing Stockade quests to root out the
corrupt noble. All that's needed is two slightly varied dialogue paths and all the
quests are still applicable. Some kind of follow on quest could then be provided to make
the Defias in Westfall friendly to the player, a la the Bloodsail Buccanneers. Moonbrook
might even become a functional town to players that have completed the series. I can't say how to support the choice in the Missing Diplomat quest series though, since it isn't finished. Please finish that, by the way.
For the Scarlet Crusade, the Alliance quests start out being against the undead on behalf of the Crusade, but suddenly the player is forced to turn againt the crusade on the say-so of an NPC he or she just met. First of all, this sudden change could be made more convincing by adding a step to the quest series for the players to go to the torture chamber wing of the Scarlet Monastery. There they would see for themselves what the crusade is doing. This would also give Alliance players a reason to visit that wing, as there are no alliance quests there currently. At a minimum this would make the requirement of turning againt the crusade more believable, but it could be taken further by offering a choice through a dialog with Interrogator Vishas. The first would be to decide the crusade has become overzealous and must be stopped by killing Interrogator Vishas, Arcanist Doan, Scarlet Commander Mograine, and High Inquisitor Whitemane. Alternatively the player could accept a quest from the interrogator to eliminate members of the crusade opposed to his extreme methods - Herod, Houndmaster Loksey, and High Inquisitor Fairb
0x refers to the fact that the new standard is intended to be finalized in 200x. The current standard is C++98, but the language itself continues to be just C++.
If you don't want to worry about memory and pointers in C++, use a good reference-counted smart pointer implementation. There are also full-blown garbage collectors out there, if that's really what you need. I have yet to hear of a useful feature of another language that couldn't be adapted to C++98.
Memory was our bottleneck. More ram equals more speed.
Don't blame Itanium that you picked the wrong chip for your needs. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation could have saved you a lot of money. With your 70 gb database and 2 gb of ram, assuming there wasn't much locality in the lookups you have about a 2.85% chance that your next lookup is already in memory. Up it to 12 gb and you have 17.14% - still not much, so either way your main bottleneck is going to be the bandwidth of your memory system. There was no secret that the first batch of Itaniums used 133 MHz RAM while DDR ram for x86 was up to 266 or maybe even 333 MHz by that time. Itanium's niche has always been floating-point intensive applications, which yours was not.
On the bridge mockup at the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas, I noticed the engineering console had a button labeled EJCT WRP CR. Apparently LCARS is decended from bash. I pressed it, but sadly nothing happened.
The solution to class balance is to have no classes. Instead have a large array of abilities that can be combined arbitrarily. Or even better, eliminate character statistics entirely and base gameplay on player skill. However since this isn't what the market leaders (WoW and EQ do) no other company would dare to break the mold.
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone give a layman's description of the predicted particles?
As I see it, this is basically making the browser serve a role similar to an XWindows server.
I find std::map to be quite sufficient for this purpose.
There are a variety of treatments available to help manage paranoid schizophrenia.e nt_and_services
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Treatm
"If you can't convince adults who've made up their minds, just indoctrinate the young to agree with us from the start."
People who voluntarily risk their lives to protect others, feeling empathy for a machine that does the same - not so strange.
This is about the _past_ of the characters, right? And the actors are 8 or so years older even than the last time we saw them. The most likely conclusion is new, younger actors, so it doesn't matter who of the original cast is alive or not. Could see something like Sheridan's original actor being cast as Sheridan's grandfather or some such, though.
Odd, I can think of few things that would change life on earth more than a verifiable intelligent signal from outer space.
This story reminds me to go download SETI@home again.
However, they still lack a reasonable explanation why they aren't releasing it for the PC.
The reason can't be technical, as everyone knows the Xbox IS a (crippled) PC.
o rly?
"We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."
This has "Alcubierre Drive" written all over it.
Seeing as how Vista appears to be to XP what ME was to 98
Nah - XP is to 2000 what ME was to 98. I think you'd have to look to Microsoft Bob for a good analogy of how Vista fits in.
I already wait for games to hit the clearance bin before buying them. I think high prices for AAA titles will be a good thing for indie developers, who aren't throwing the kind of money at a game that it requires a $60 price to recover the investment.
We've already reached the point where the cost of art assets is a greater limiting factor than hardware capabilities when it comes to graphics. I believe procedural generation will step up to the challenge and rescue the industry. Procedural terrain, buildings, and plant life are basically solved problems. Wil Wright's Spore is making a credible attempt at procedural animals. Our eyes have such high standards when it comes to the human form that I doubt we'll ever have completely procedural humans, but a number of games now have just a handful of human character graphics and parameterize features such as jaw width, cheekbone height, obesity, etc. to create combinatorial variety with a minimum of artist man-hours.
The beautiful thing about procedural and parameterized art is that they can be open-sourced in a meaningful fashion. There's currently a lot of free/public-domain game art out there, but not much of it helps. The art requirements for games are too idiosyncratic. With parameterized/procedural art you can fit random art from the internet to your needs a lot more easily. Parameterized art is re-usable art, which means less duplication of effort within the community. The collective art output of the indie gaming community will then be able to create games of similar graphical quality and content depth as commercial AAA titles.
So yes, high game prices are a good thing.
This plan is flawless, except they failed to take into account that the electricity from their 1TB laptops will make the sun go supernova.
BnetD was doing something they knew was blatantly not allowed by Blizzard.
However, there was good reason to believe that it was allowed by THE LAW.
If you do something not allowed by Blizzard, you get banned from Battle.net.
If you do something not allowed by the law, you get fines or a jail sentence. Big difference.
However, at least when it comes to Bnet, the courts have effectively decided that Blizzard IS the law.
(Reposted because of the strange formatting of the original, my apologies.)
Warcraft's greatest strength to me is its abundance of hand-crafted quests - something most people before didn't think would be practical in a commercial-scale mmog. The quests are all quite entertaining, but something that's all too rare is for the player to be given a genuine choice. In particular there are several ideological factions within the game, such as the Defias and the Scarlet Crusade that occupy a moral gray area. Someone's real-life or roleplayed sensibilities might lead them to side with one of these factions, but the game dictates the player's allegience simply because there are quests against these factions, but few or no quests to take on behalf of them.
One case in which Blizzard has shown some much-welcome flexibility is the Bloodsail Buccaneers, allowing players to gain the friendship of these pirates who are normally the "bad guys." It wouldn't take an extreme investment of time to allow similar options for the Scarlet Crusade, Defias, Twilight Hammer, Syndicate, etc, etc.
To put the gist of this post in the form of a question: Is there any possibility that Blizzard will allow players to side with any of these factions, as with the Bloodsails?
That's the essence of it. For anyone curious, what follows are my own ideas of how to allow the choice while respecting the massive amount of content build around the assumption that these factions are players' enemies. In particular the Deadmines and Scarlet Monastery dungeons account for many hours of playtime of fighting these factions. That amount of content can't be tossed out nor duplicated, but a fictional reason can be told for someone on either side to do them. (If you don't want quest spoilers, stop reading the post here.)
Before completing the Deadmines instance, the Defias appear mainly as violent thugs. The choice to side with the Defias could easily come AFTER experiencing the Deadmines, so that content can remain completely intact. After delivering Van Cleef's letter and hearing Baros' Alexston's story of the unpaid workers and corrupt nobles, the player might be swayed to the Defias' point of view. However, someone siding with the Defias would be just as motivated to complete the same existing Stockade quests to root out the corrupt noble. All that's needed is two slightly varied dialogue paths and all the quests are still applicable. Some kind of follow on quest could then be provided to make the Defias in Westfall friendly to the player, a la the Bloodsail Buccanneers. Moonbrook might even become a functional town to players that have completed the series. I can't say how to support the choice in the Missing Diplomat quest series though, since it isn't finished. Please finish that, by the way.
For the Scarlet Crusade, the Alliance quests start out being against the undead on behalf of the Crusade, but suddenly the player is forced to turn againt the crusade on the say-so of an NPC he or she just met. First of all, this sudden change could be made more convincing by adding a step to the quest series for the players to go to the torture chamber wing of the Scarlet Monastery. There they would see for themselves what the crusade is doing. This would also give Alliance players a reason to visit that wing, as there are no alliance quests there currently. At a minimum this would make the requirement of turning againt the crusade more believable, but it could be taken further by offering a choice through a dialog with Interrogator Vishas. The first would be to decide the crusade has become overzealous and must be stopped by killing Interrogator Vishas, Arcanist Doan, Scarlet Commander Mograine, and High Inquisitor Whitemane. Alternatively the player could accept a quest from the interrogator to eliminate members of the crusade opposed to his extreme methods - Herod, Houndmaster Loksey, and High Inquisitor Fairbanks. I haven't experienced enough of the Scarlet Crusade content in the Plagu
Warcraft's greatest strength to me is its abundance of hand-crafted quests - something
most people before didn't think would be practical in a commercial-scale mmog. The
quests are all quite entertaining, but something that's all too rare is for the player to
be given a genuine choice. In particular there are several ideological factions within
the game, such as the Defias and the Scarlet Crusade that occupy a moral gray area.
Someone's real-life or roleplayed sensibilities might lead them to side with one of these
factions, but the game dictates the player's allegience simply because there are quests
against these factions, but few or no quests to take on behalf of them.
One case in which Blizzard has shown some much-welcome flexibility is the Bloodsail
Buccaneers, allowing players to gain the friendship of these pirates who are normally the
"bad guys." It wouldn't take an extreme investment of time to allow similar options for
the Scarlet Crusade, Defias, Twilight Hammer, Syndicate, etc, etc.
To put the gist of this post in the form of a question: Is there any possibility that
Blizzard will allow players to side with any of these factions, as with the Bloodsails?
That's the essence of it. For anyone curious, what follows are my own ideas of how to
allow the choice while respecting the massive amount of content build around the
assumption that these factions are players' enemies. In particular the Deadmines and
Scarlet Monastery dungeons account for many hours of playtime of fighting these factions.
That amount of content can't be tossed out nor duplicated, but a fictional reason can be
told for someone on either side to do them. (If you don't want quest spoilers, stop
reading the post here.)
Before completing the Deadmines instance, the Defias appear mainly as violent thugs. The
choice to side with the Defias could easily come AFTER experiencing the Deadmines, so
that content can remain completely intact. After delivering Van Cleef's letter and
hearing Baros' Alexston's story of the unpaid workers and corrupt nobles, the player
might be swayed to the Defias' point of view. However, someone siding with the Defias
would be just as motivated to complete the same existing Stockade quests to root out the
corrupt noble. All that's needed is two slightly varied dialogue paths and all the
quests are still applicable. Some kind of follow on quest could then be provided to make
the Defias in Westfall friendly to the player, a la the Bloodsail Buccanneers. Moonbrook
might even become a functional town to players that have completed the series. I can't say how to support the choice in the Missing Diplomat quest series though, since it isn't finished. Please finish that, by the way.
For the Scarlet Crusade, the Alliance quests start out being against the undead on behalf of the Crusade, but suddenly the player is forced to turn againt the crusade on the say-so of an NPC he or she just met. First of all, this sudden change could be made more convincing by adding a step to the quest series for the players to go to the torture chamber wing of the Scarlet Monastery. There they would see for themselves what the crusade is doing. This would also give Alliance players a reason to visit that wing, as there are no alliance quests there currently. At a minimum this would make the requirement of turning againt the crusade more believable, but it could be taken further by offering a choice through a dialog with Interrogator Vishas. The first would be to decide the crusade has become overzealous and must be stopped by killing Interrogator Vishas, Arcanist Doan, Scarlet Commander Mograine, and High Inquisitor Whitemane. Alternatively the player could accept a quest from the interrogator to eliminate members of the crusade opposed to his extreme methods - Herod, Houndmaster Loksey, and High Inquisitor Fairb
There are FOUR lights!
0x refers to the fact that the new standard is intended to be finalized in 200x. The current standard is C++98, but the language itself continues to be just C++.
If you don't want to worry about memory and pointers in C++, use a good reference-counted smart pointer implementation. There are also full-blown garbage collectors out there, if that's really what you need. I have yet to hear of a useful feature of another language that couldn't be adapted to C++98.
Memory was our bottleneck. More ram equals more speed.
Don't blame Itanium that you picked the wrong chip for your needs. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation could have saved you a lot of money. With your 70 gb database and 2 gb of ram, assuming there wasn't much locality in the lookups you have about a 2.85% chance that your next lookup is already in memory. Up it to 12 gb and you have 17.14% - still not much, so either way your main bottleneck is going to be the bandwidth of your memory system. There was no secret that the first batch of Itaniums used 133 MHz RAM while DDR ram for x86 was up to 266 or maybe even 333 MHz by that time. Itanium's niche has always been floating-point intensive applications, which yours was not.
On the bridge mockup at the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas, I noticed the engineering console had a button labeled EJCT WRP CR. Apparently LCARS is decended from bash. I pressed it, but sadly nothing happened.
Even with the "40% discount" this collection averages over $7.30 per book. Paperbacks of public-domain classics at several local bookstores run $2-$5.
I guess that means I haven't changed my sig in 5 years.
The solution to class balance is to have no classes. Instead have a large array of abilities that can be combined arbitrarily. Or even better, eliminate character statistics entirely and base gameplay on player skill. However since this isn't what the market leaders (WoW and EQ do) no other company would dare to break the mold.