That's why C.J. Cherryh's ``Morgaine'' universe would be perfect --- it's a story of gates which lead to different worlds, each of which must be closed before heading on to the next, but almost all of which were manipulated by an all-but extinct precursor race, so repetitive elements would make sense --- basically a world would remain until played out, then the last character would close the gate on leaving, instantiating a new world which they went to.
C.J. Cherryh for instance, two of her universes --- the Morgaine series and her Alliance-Union (``Merchanter'') series both seem purpose-built to have RPGs built out of them --- and both have a sufficiently large canvas as to make a Massively Multiplayer game work very, very well.
The Gates in the Morgaine series in particular would translate well into RPG mechanics of restarting a game w/ an extant character.
There's a terrible irony in Donald Knuth feeling that it's an even more important development than TeX, yet outside of the TeX world, almost no one uses it:
There should also be a bit more to ``mature'' than splashing blood, gore and violence onto the game and ``decorating'' it w/ T&A.
- Make games which aren't on-rails, and have large, interesting environments to explore --- while exploration should be challenging, it needs to _not_ be frustrating and moving up / down ladders shouldn't require a perfect alignment of the character, the remote and the stars
- Provide a compelling story-line and universe which makes me want to explore and discover things
- Be sure to use the Wii motion controls and provide a customizable control scheme (Conduit allows for this while playing the game which is a nice touch) --- pointing w/ the Wii remote using a gun shell is an obvious and easy way to do this (though I want to see more games which allow for the archery style of Wii Sports Resort)
- Allow the user to control the character including the character's in-game appearance --- use the customized character for all cut-scenes (Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga does this really well)
Things which I haven't seen yet and would really like to see:
- take advantage of multiple Wii remotes --- I'd love to see a game which would allow me to find multiple weapons in the game and map them to different Wii remotes, so that Remote 2 could be a pistol shell, Remote 3 the machine-gun like Wii Zapper, while Remote 1 is the bare Remote attached to the Nunchuk and used to control a knife or sword, but has to be put down to switch to the Pistol --- I'd also like to be able to find multiple pistols, map them to 2 different Wii remotes and then dual-wield
- have a persistent on-line game environment which changes and evolves and has a scripted story arc, or at least a story which makes re-loading the game make sense --- C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine saga would make a good template for this
- try a vertical split-screen and allow for co-op play
Yeah, Compuserve rates were even more exorbitant, but I couldn't recall those off the top of my head and was too lazy to look it up --- Delphi was probably the least expensive connection, but I can't recall those rates either.
Even for those w/ ``free'' connections, someone was footing a similar bill --- the bottom line is, building the initial infrastructure is expensive and someone has to pay for it.
When I first started using AOL 18 years and 1 month ago, it was $8 / hour in business hours, plus long distance charges --- $4 during non-business hours after the first free 5 or 10 hours each month (and one paid the long distance charges regardless).
Granted, most people were in a metropolitan area w/ a local connect #, but still, bills could easily get into the hundreds of dollars per month.
Once the infrastructure is built and paid for, costs can come down, but one needs the early adopters to pay to run the copper and set up the connections &c.
I wouldn't say that the Wii control scheme is lacking, the problem is few developers have been willing to put forth the effort to achieve an interesting, workable and immersive interface which makes full use of the controls.
Closest things to RPGs on the Wii are Baroque (haven't tried it yet, said to be weird and to have twitchy camera control) and DragonQuest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, an on-rails game which is okay, but not much depth and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (no Wii motion controls or character creation)
Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is looking to be the first full-fledged RPG for the Wii, but it too doesn't make full use of the Wii motion controls (they went as far as using shaking to activate special attacks).
I'm hoping Red Steel 2 will offer a bit more (though it's not really an RPG?).
The next version of Zelda is supposed to make use of the Wii Motion Plus w/ sword play and archery much like in Wii Sports Resort --- hopefully other developers will follow through on that interface as a new standard.
There's a new WiiWare title, _Overturn_ which allows one the option of controlling it w/ a combination of the Wii Fit (for movement) and the Wii Remote / Nunchuk) weapons aiming, firing, reloading, &c.).
If it required one to hop on and off the balance board (say being on the balance board is movement, off the board is being still) it could be a decent workout.
I'd really like to see a first-person RPG (ideally w/ some sort of persistent on-line interaction) which would use such an interface.
spelling aside, Nintendo has eased the reins a bit, and one can find ``mature'' titles for the Wii now, even including WiiWare (though I'd be inclined to describe ``Sexy Poker'' as immature, puerile drivel).
A quick search reveals quite a few M-rated games:
Alone In The Dark Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 Call of Duty: World at War CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Hard Evidence Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop Driver: Parallel Lines Escape from Bug Island MadWorld Manhut 2 Mortal Kombatâ: Armageddon No More Heroes Obscure: The Aftermath Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers Resident Evil 4 Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles Target Terror Tenchu: Shadow Assassins The Godfather: Blackhand Edition Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agentâ &c.
and not line up on the baseline --- look at the CK-12 Calculus textbook (http://cafreetextbooks.ck12.org/math/CK12_Calculus.pdf) --- and of course Arial is the perfect choice for running text and it's perfect appropriate to use Computer Modern for equations in text, but Times and Symbol to label graphs....
Would someone please teach these people about typography?
just, some are more beautiful than others...
-- Robert Heinlein from _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_
William
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
``Soldier'' in this context means ground troops --- pilots are fliers, not ground troops.
William
How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enough?
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
``No American soldier has been killed by an enemy aircraft since 1951.''
Only because the U.S. doctrine has been to have total air superiourity and the Air Force (and Navy) have been able to achieve it through superiour technology (and training) --- if 187 Raptors aren't sufficient to achieve that in some future conflict, a lot of soldiers are going to die, and that statement will cease to be true.
I put myself through college working as a night counselor at a school for boys --- one needs to remove the perceived glamour of the ``gangsta'' lifestyle, demonstrate the consequences of poor decisions and provide the rewards of mature and responsible behaviour.
Most importantly this needs to be done regardless of the child's intellectual level --- at one meeting a fellow counselor argued that one of the students should be released because he wasn't particularly bright and was ``simply going to be a janitor when he grows up anyway'' to which another added, ``one who swipes small pilferables which won't be missed.'' --- my rejoinder was that if we kept him in the program and continued working w/ him until he successfully graduated that while he might be a janitor when he grew up, he'd be an honest one who wouldn't steal and that that was a worthwhile goal, and maybe he could be something else, but that he would never get that chance if he didn't graduate.
He stayed in the program and I actually ran into him a couple of years later --- he was just completing an apprenticeship in the building trades and had been out of trouble since graduation.
That would've required post-processing the.pdf to convert to outlines and a willingness to use technical chicanery to avoid the license terms --- the former was too expensive in terms of server time / effort, the latter wasn't happening.
I considered using my.eps work-around from my TUG2003 presentation, but it would've required a separate pass using Omega, then distilling a several hundred MB file to.pdf then compositing in the text of the letter --- again, too expensive in terms of server processing time.
There're scarcely more than 5 or 6 opensource / creative commons fonts which are:
- suitable for use as body copy
- not clones / knockoffs of extant fonts
- available in formats compatible w/ the technology in the original article
- and which people would actually be interested in using
As much as I like it, I doubt anyone will want to use Latin Modern (the OpenType version of Computer Modern). Others lack an italic, &c.
Actually all this begs the question of what typographic controls are available? Can one access things like contextual ligatures and the ssalt## (stylistic alternates 1--20) tags?
We had to switch from Linotype's Zapfino Extra to Adobe's Caflisch Script in a custom story book project 'cause Linotype wanted _thousands_ of dollars per _year_ to license the (already purchased) font for on-line PDF Previewing usage.
There are of course opensource / creative commons fonts, those can be used, but if everyone is using them, that kind of defeats the whole point of changing the typeface. Also, I haven't seen an opensource typeface that has the kind of hinting effort Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial &c. have (TNR in particular has man _years_ worth of effort in it) --- unfortunately we haven't gotten to the screen density which would allow us to dispense w/ hinting.
The irony of your wondering ``What have we gotten from all the experiments done in space since the sixties anyway? Do these expenses justify the cost?'' and then posting a story about smart (cell) phones has pegged my bogometer, actually bending the needle.
Here's a clue --- all interesting smartphone capabilities are intricately tied into satellites --- which are the result of space exploration and experimentation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why C.J. Cherryh's ``Morgaine'' universe would be perfect --- it's a story of gates which lead to different worlds, each of which must be closed before heading on to the next, but almost all of which were manipulated by an all-but extinct precursor race, so repetitive elements would make sense --- basically a world would remain until played out, then the last character would close the gate on leaving, instantiating a new world which they went to.
William
C.J. Cherryh for instance, two of her universes --- the Morgaine series and her Alliance-Union (``Merchanter'') series both seem purpose-built to have RPGs built out of them --- and both have a sufficiently large canvas as to make a Massively Multiplayer game work very, very well.
The Gates in the Morgaine series in particular would translate well into RPG mechanics of restarting a game w/ an extant character.
William
There's a terrible irony in Donald Knuth feeling that it's an even more important development than TeX, yet outside of the TeX world, almost no one uses it:
http://www.literateprogramming.com/
William
only those which are well-formed should be shown in public.
William
if not, it won't.
There should also be a bit more to ``mature'' than splashing blood, gore and violence onto the game and ``decorating'' it w/ T&A.
- Make games which aren't on-rails, and have large, interesting environments to explore --- while exploration should be challenging, it needs to _not_ be frustrating and moving up / down ladders shouldn't require a perfect alignment of the character, the remote and the stars
- Provide a compelling story-line and universe which makes me want to explore and discover things
- Be sure to use the Wii motion controls and provide a customizable control scheme (Conduit allows for this while playing the game which is a nice touch) --- pointing w/ the Wii remote using a gun shell is an obvious and easy way to do this (though I want to see more games which allow for the archery style of Wii Sports Resort)
- Allow the user to control the character including the character's in-game appearance --- use the customized character for all cut-scenes (Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga does this really well)
Things which I haven't seen yet and would really like to see:
- take advantage of multiple Wii remotes --- I'd love to see a game which would allow me to find multiple weapons in the game and map them to different Wii remotes, so that Remote 2 could be a pistol shell, Remote 3 the machine-gun like Wii Zapper, while Remote 1 is the bare Remote attached to the Nunchuk and used to control a knife or sword, but has to be put down to switch to the Pistol --- I'd also like to be able to find multiple pistols, map them to 2 different Wii remotes and then dual-wield
- have a persistent on-line game environment which changes and evolves and has a scripted story arc, or at least a story which makes re-loading the game make sense --- C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine saga would make a good template for this
- try a vertical split-screen and allow for co-op play
William
So why not make individual units which can optionally be connected together to then function as a 2-display unit?
William
Yeah, Compuserve rates were even more exorbitant, but I couldn't recall those off the top of my head and was too lazy to look it up --- Delphi was probably the least expensive connection, but I can't recall those rates either.
Even for those w/ ``free'' connections, someone was footing a similar bill --- the bottom line is, building the initial infrastructure is expensive and someone has to pay for it.
William
When I first started using AOL 18 years and 1 month ago, it was $8 / hour in business hours, plus long distance charges --- $4 during non-business hours after the first free 5 or 10 hours each month (and one paid the long distance charges regardless).
Granted, most people were in a metropolitan area w/ a local connect #, but still, bills could easily get into the hundreds of dollars per month.
Once the infrastructure is built and paid for, costs can come down, but one needs the early adopters to pay to run the copper and set up the connections &c.
William
installing 4.2 worked fine on my (unmodified) Wii.
William
I wouldn't say that the Wii control scheme is lacking, the problem is few developers have been willing to put forth the effort to achieve an interesting, workable and immersive interface which makes full use of the controls.
Closest things to RPGs on the Wii are Baroque (haven't tried it yet, said to be weird and to have twitchy camera control) and DragonQuest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, an on-rails game which is okay, but not much depth and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (no Wii motion controls or character creation)
Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga is looking to be the first full-fledged RPG for the Wii, but it too doesn't make full use of the Wii motion controls (they went as far as using shaking to activate special attacks).
I'm hoping Red Steel 2 will offer a bit more (though it's not really an RPG?).
The next version of Zelda is supposed to make use of the Wii Motion Plus w/ sword play and archery much like in Wii Sports Resort --- hopefully other developers will follow through on that interface as a new standard.
William
There's a new WiiWare title, _Overturn_ which allows one the option of controlling it w/ a combination of the Wii Fit (for movement) and the Wii Remote / Nunchuk) weapons aiming, firing, reloading, &c.).
If it required one to hop on and off the balance board (say being on the balance board is movement, off the board is being still) it could be a decent workout.
I'd really like to see a first-person RPG (ideally w/ some sort of persistent on-line interaction) which would use such an interface.
William
Blog link about the covers here:
http://igallo.blogspot.com/2009/09/wheel-of-time-ebook-repackaging-or-wo0t.html
William
I believe you mean ``bowdlerizing''....
spelling aside, Nintendo has eased the reins a bit, and one can find ``mature'' titles for the Wii now, even including WiiWare (though I'd be inclined to describe ``Sexy Poker'' as immature, puerile drivel).
A quick search reveals quite a few M-rated games:
Alone In The Dark
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
Call of Duty: World at War
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Hard Evidence
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Driver: Parallel Lines
Escape from Bug Island
MadWorld
Manhut 2
Mortal Kombatâ: Armageddon
No More Heroes
Obscure: The Aftermath
Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
Target Terror
Tenchu: Shadow Assassins
The Godfather: Blackhand Edition
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agentâ
&c.
William
and not line up on the baseline --- look at the CK-12 Calculus textbook (http://cafreetextbooks.ck12.org/math/CK12_Calculus.pdf) --- and of course Arial is the perfect choice for running text and it's perfect appropriate to use Computer Modern for equations in text, but Times and Symbol to label graphs....
Would someone please teach these people about typography?
William
::applaud:: and agree.
Here's a blast from the past:
âoePac-Man Feverâ (Pac-Man)
âoeFroggyâ(TM)s Lamentâ (Frogger)
âoeOde to a Centipedeâ (Centipede)
âoeDo the Donkey Kongâ (Donkey Kong)
âoeHyperspaceâ (Asteroids)
âoeThe Defenderâ (Defender)
âoeMousetrapâ (Mousetrap)
âoeGoinâ(TM) Berzerkâ (Berzerk)
William
just, some are more beautiful than others...
-- Robert Heinlein from _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_
William
``Soldier'' in this context means ground troops --- pilots are fliers, not ground troops.
William
``No American soldier has been killed by an enemy aircraft since 1951.''
Only because the U.S. doctrine has been to have total air superiourity and the Air Force (and Navy) have been able to achieve it through superiour technology (and training) --- if 187 Raptors aren't sufficient to achieve that in some future conflict, a lot of soldiers are going to die, and that statement will cease to be true.
William
I put myself through college working as a night counselor at a school for boys --- one needs to remove the perceived glamour of the ``gangsta'' lifestyle, demonstrate the consequences of poor decisions and provide the rewards of mature and responsible behaviour.
Most importantly this needs to be done regardless of the child's intellectual level --- at one meeting a fellow counselor argued that one of the students should be released because he wasn't particularly bright and was ``simply going to be a janitor when he grows up anyway'' to which another added, ``one who swipes small pilferables which won't be missed.'' --- my rejoinder was that if we kept him in the program and continued working w/ him until he successfully graduated that while he might be a janitor when he grew up, he'd be an honest one who wouldn't steal and that that was a worthwhile goal, and maybe he could be something else, but that he would never get that chance if he didn't graduate.
He stayed in the program and I actually ran into him a couple of years later --- he was just completing an apprenticeship in the building trades and had been out of trouble since graduation.
William
It wasn't an issue of embedding the font, it was a matter of interactively generating the .pdf on a server as a preview.
Here:
http://image.linotype.com/files/pdf/licenseagreement_e.pdf
William
Here:
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/spinoffs2.shtml
or here:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
Also, how does the GPS in a smartphone work w/o a satellite?
William
That would've required post-processing the .pdf to convert to outlines and a willingness to use technical chicanery to avoid the license terms --- the former was too expensive in terms of server time / effort, the latter wasn't happening.
I considered using my .eps work-around from my TUG2003 presentation, but it would've required a separate pass using Omega, then distilling a several hundred MB file to .pdf then compositing in the text of the letter --- again, too expensive in terms of server processing time.
Here's the paper for the morbidly curious:
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
Unfortunately, hosting on a Mac OS X box to use the version of Zapfino bundled w/ Mac OS X wasn't an option.
William
There're scarcely more than 5 or 6 opensource / creative commons fonts which are:
- suitable for use as body copy
- not clones / knockoffs of extant fonts
- available in formats compatible w/ the technology in the original article
- and which people would actually be interested in using
As much as I like it, I doubt anyone will want to use Latin Modern (the OpenType version of Computer Modern). Others lack an italic, &c.
Actually all this begs the question of what typographic controls are available? Can one access things like contextual ligatures and the ssalt## (stylistic alternates 1--20) tags?
William
Yep.
We had to switch from Linotype's Zapfino Extra to Adobe's Caflisch Script in a custom story book project 'cause Linotype wanted _thousands_ of dollars per _year_ to license the (already purchased) font for on-line PDF Previewing usage.
There are of course opensource / creative commons fonts, those can be used, but if everyone is using them, that kind of defeats the whole point of changing the typeface. Also, I haven't seen an opensource typeface that has the kind of hinting effort Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial &c. have (TNR in particular has man _years_ worth of effort in it) --- unfortunately we haven't gotten to the screen density which would allow us to dispense w/ hinting.
William
The irony of your wondering ``What have we gotten from all the experiments done in space since the sixties anyway? Do these expenses justify the cost?'' and then posting a story about smart (cell) phones has pegged my bogometer, actually bending the needle.
Here's a clue --- all interesting smartphone capabilities are intricately tied into satellites --- which are the result of space exploration and experimentation.
William