Why should you care? You're not forced to buy them and use them. So how do they effect your gameplay to tick you off?
Perhaps because it encourages game makers to make more games aimed at the cheating audience, and fewer games aimed at people who like a puzzle that's challenging without being impossible to solve without the walkthrough always on hand.
You are the reason they were reluctant to make it (fully) open source.
You obviously are confident you know more about what makes a good language than the designers of Java do. Have you read even one paper at jcp.org? Have you looked at the people who make up the JCP? IBM, Apple, Cisco, Intel, HP, ATI, NVidia, Creative Labs, Google (!), Apache, Apogee, Namco... you really think you're smarter than their combined intellect and months of discussion? Trust me, you're not.
I'm sure you and a lot of others are already giddy with excitement over the idea of making a "better Java" with
const and
operator overloading.
When you understand the "less is more" principle, you'll begin to understand why all your pet features don't belong in the language.
I agree completely. J2EE provides an excellent solution to this.
But the government systems to which I referred are not J2EE environments (yet).
I also agree that J2EE and manifests are not difficult to use, but that doesn't seem to be the prevailing opinion among most of the other developers I meet.
A new ClassLoader was the first solution considered, obviously.
Guess what? Any ClassLoader is required to query its parent before it attempts to resolve a class. And no, you can't get around it (for security reasons which become obvious if you think about it).
If a particular version is already in the class path at JVM startup, you can't override it.
Sure, there were libraries like ORO that would provide regex support, but it wasn't built in and not many companies allow the use of 3rd party libraries
Who's boneheaded enough to do this? I want to know so I can avoid buying anything from them, because their products are going to be overpriced by at least 50% due to the wasted effort.
It's DLL Hell all over again. Every time you use a third-party library, the user has to make sure it's installed. And in the classpath, unless they installed it as root/admin and placed it in the JRE's extensions directory.
If your program is going to be in a shared JVM with many other programs (which is common in some government systems), all of whom are contributing their own "favorite" third-party jars, it's very easy to end up with multiple versions of the same third-party library. Now, ideally, third-party vendors would gracefully evolve their own libraries so there are no runtime conflicts across versions, but... well, even my mentioning that probably has a lot of readers snickering derisively.
There are ways to ameliorate this, most notably Java Web Start and specifying the required extensions (and versions) in a jar's manifest, but few software authors seem to want to bother with those.
I realize that the other extreme is Not Invented Here Syndrome, but I often encounter people who are far too quick to jump on a third-party solution when there is an adequate but maybe not as whiz-bang-kewl solution built into Java. Premature optimization and all that.
What it comes down to is that any external dependency is a burden and makes installation significantly more of a chore. Dependencies are a big deal and developers need to consider the penalties they bring, not just the benefits.
A final consideration is that Sun APIs undergo considerably more review than most third-party APIs. Read the progress of any JSR at jcp.org to see what I mean. API usability has a direct effect on productivity.
A vast increase in the number of games where the main character is "you". First person shooters, MMORPGs, and even to an extent with something like GTA's "everyman" sort of main characters, you spend more time trying to look through the eyes of your avatar than actually looking at them. This is not an environment where mascots thrive.
This may be true, but I don't think it follows that such games can't have mascots.
I consider Duke Nukem a mascot. The fact that people still make Duke Nukem Forever jokes suggests that he's pretty hard to forget. It wasn't just the corny lines (half of them lifted from Army of Darkness), either; a lot of other games have tried to do that and their characters weren't a fraction as memorable. The humor was clever and didn't feel forced, and it helped that it was a good game in almost every respect. And it was a good game with enough "mascot" participation to ensure you didn't forget he was the guy you were playing.
It's a good thing Duke Nukem Manhattan Project got so little attention, or it probably would have a dilution effect similar to what the article describes. (It's not a horrible game, but it sure pales compared to Duke Nukem 3D.)
I would posit that the public school system as it stands today is actually more HARMFUL socially to our kids than helpful.
And I would agree with you.
One of the most harmful, even detrimental consequences of a school's warped social atmosphere is the massive (though not total) inhibition of dating. As Slashdotters know all too well, if you're not one of the popular elite, any attempt at dating will not only be rejected but will be the business of 400 other kids within twenty-four hours. When you detain kids for six hours a day, under threat of legal enforcement, it's only natural they'll be extremely bored and behave like this.
But it sure doesn't teach all those non-elite how to interact with the opposite sex in a normal manner. If anything, it teaches them to be separate and distant. I think we all know people who never overcame that handicap.
I can't imagine how this prepares anyone for adult life. When I date someone, it's no one's business except mine, hers, and possibly a few friends and family. I'm obviously not the only one who places value on this, considering the lengths to which celebrities have been known to go in order to get a little privacy where their social lives are concerned.
Remember that jerk in school who used to punch a select few nerds in the head as hard as he was able? Remember how the teacher always ignored it?
Go try that in "real life." Punch someone in the office like that. Or even your neighbor. Let me know how it turns out.
The absurdly antisocial behaviors which go on in schools every single day are things that no adult would put up with in the workplace for an instant.
Re:Duh... they couldn't make money any more.
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
Atari failed because most of their games were crap, and the bad games typically had as big or bigger budgets than the good ones. (Remember the horrible Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi games?)
You must be joking.
Those two games were constantly being played everywhere I went. They were only "crap" in a relative sense: they weren't masterpieces like other Atari Games offerings.
Gauntlet, 720, Marble Madness, Paperboy, Tetris, KLAX, STUN Runner, Space Lords, Primal Rage, Area 51... I'm sure there were some bad games, but I can't imagine what perceptual universe you're in that you would claim "most of their games" were crap. If anything, the quality and careful gameplay design that went into their games was evident from the moment you looked at them and from the moment you started playing.
Especially Tetris. Their Tetris was light-years ahead of all other versions, in that they gave it colors and levels and intermissions and variation beyond just a gradual speedup. Ask any NES collector which is better, Tengen's Tetris or Nintendo's.
We were all playing to get the Hi-Scores. You were playing against the person who got the previous Hi-score, right? Remember how badass it was to get the top Hi-Score? That meant that your initials (and score) displayed top center all the time!
Now, think about a giant electronic board that shows all the Hi-Scores across the _entire_ chain of Tilt stores (it could even be available to look at via the www while sitting at home).
Anyway, I could go on and on. Arcades rooms really should start linking up their stores, and the arcade machines themselves, and drop all Hi-Scores across the organization into one DB accessable via a badass screen.
I agree that the reward of seeing your name at the top of the high score table, or in the table at all, was a huge part of the attraction of arcades. But I think your suggestion would actually sabotage that. If the high score table is nationwide (or continent-wide or worldwide), the odds of my getting a significant place in it are quite low. No reward.
Perhaps a compromise would work: show two high score tables, a networked one and a local one from the machine's own VRAM, as was done before. Being the local best is something most of us feel is within our reach.
After reading the article, I don't feel like I know any more than I did before reading it. Take the closing paragraph from the Gameworks guy being interviewed:
"Sega Entertainment is looking at expanding the U.S. market, that's what our focus and vision is. We will work with Sega of Japan, we're going to work with them on taking GameWorks abroad as the opportunities present themselves. Right now we're working on the U.S. and making GameWorks as big as we can."
So... you're going to do... something. Am I supposed to get even a little excited by this? (Insert "???/Profit" joke here.)
When I hear someone talk about trying make an arcade "appeal to the whole family" I know it's already doomed. The notion that arcades were sinister places was always completely incorrect. No one actually bought or sold drugs in arcades. So a lot of resources will be going into making the establishment "family friendly," which will appear to have no effect because there was never anything to fix, instead of concentrating on making good games that cost less than a dollar per play.
Please accept that "global warming" is not conclusively linked to man, oil, or any other favorite targets of the left. The Earth goes through cycles regularly, and until you can PROVE that man is to blame, stop using man's actions as fuel for political attacks.
Now where have I heard this type of reasoning before?
Oh yeah... it was roughly thirty years ago, when conservatives were arguing that there were no "conclusive links" between tobacco and lung cancer, and anyway it was more important that tobacco farmers didn't lose their jobs.
The sad thing is that Digital Leisure/ReadySoft has released somewhere around a dozen Dragon's Lair and Space Ace conversions, on various media, and every one has sucked.
They always manage to digitize the video well, but they utterly ignore the gameplay: the careful timing of moves, the deliberate allowance of alternate moves (for instance, if the character needs to move "northwest" then either up or left is accepted), the randomization and mirroring, the adjustment of some Dragon's Lair rooms so they were much harder if they appeared later in the game than they were if they appeared early in the game, and so on. Yes, there was plenty more to it than dumb memorization and with every single version Digital Leisure has released, they have totally ignored this. Plus, many of the Windows versions are just badly programmed, with windows whose title bar and menu bar flicker, and even pixel trails between scenes. The end result has been one turd after another.
And that is why the Daphne project exists and thrives: despite the glut of conversions Digital Leisure has made, not a single one has managed to give the classic gamers what they want. Which is pretty ludicrous considering classic gamers are the core audience, if not the exclusive audience, of a Dragon's Lair conversion.
Okay, there must be thirty posts here already saying the same thing. So let me set you all straight: the reason the game wasn't fun for you is because you don't know how to play it.
Instead of just mashing the stick around (and thank you so much for doing that, as the sticks were sensitive and easily ruined by dumb apes like yourself beating on them in pointless frustration), did it ever occur to any of you to use your brain? EVERY single move had visual cues to let you know what you should be doing. Obviously those cues were often flashing areas or a flashing sword hilt, but even the other scenes all had distinct visual hints. (Space Ace and Dragon's Lair II had flashing areas for nearly every move, apparently in response to the realization that people weren't smart enough to use their eyes and brains.)
If your complaint is that the game was all memorization, then you don't know how to play a videogame. You're probably the same sort who buys or downloads a walkthrough at the same time he obtains the game itself. If all you do is try to memorize Dragon's Lair, then duh, of course it's as boring as a scholastic achievement test. You want it to be fun? Try playing with your reflexes. Try reacting to everything instead of hauling out a cheat sheet for every room. Watch for those flashes and other cues.
The real beauty of the game is that it was designed to actively thwart memorization by having sequences that are counterintuitive to our natural tendency to move in patterns. If you've ever been a percussionist who had to practice a paradiddle then you know what I mean. If you haven't, then the short explanation is that it's natural for a person to fall into rhythm or repetition, so the game would frequently present moves that started to fall into a pattern only to insert a move that broke the pattern. "Left, right, left, right... yeah, I've got this pattern down. Left, right, left, right... d'oh! It was supposed to be another right, not a left!"
You have a right to say "I played it for five minutes and couldn't figure it out" or "it was too scripted," but I'd like to make it known that some of us discovered it had a lot more depth than that and found it damn fun.
Remember: Your right to "free speech" does NOT come with a corresponding right to be heard.
True, but it does come with the right to be reachable. Free speech is meaningless if no one can get to you and hear it. If the government (or a powerful corporation) can lock you in a windowless, soundproof, RF-shielded room and they tell you "go ahead and say whatever you like" while you're in there, is it still free speech?
Implicit in the right to free speech is the right of others to listen if they wish.
Unfortunately, J2k seems to be stuck, and since most browsers don't support it by default (even the upcoming IE7 and Opera 9), using this format on web is suicide.
Isn't this what the <object> tag is supposed to accomplish? Isn't it meant to let you have "preferred" formats and "fallback" formats? For instance:
<object data="tux.j2k">
<object data="tux.png">
[Picture of tux]
</object>
</object>
I admit I don't know whether IE 6 will handle that properly, though.
Good grief. 400 megabyte file. But well presented.
Half of the assertions about J2EE are true. But there's a huge amount of bias in there. I should have taken notes, but I remember a few of the really erroneous things.
J2EE is subject to SQL injection? What? No Java program is subject to SQL injection unless a neophyte or moron is writing it. (Hint: PreparedStatement.)
JSP doesn't integrate with editors? So tag libraries aren't part of JSP all of a sudden?
J2EE doesn't come with security? What are all those XML elements with "role" in their name for?
I don't know about Tomcat, but every J2EE server I've used will recognize newly deployed files without being restarted. And given Tomcat's popularity, I'd be amazed if it still has that handicap, if it ever had it at all.
EJBs are unclear? I read the entire specification (a PDF) in less than one day. I wasn't an instant expert but I was able to write functioning entity beans immediately. The "complex" home and remote interfaces I wrote had a stunning two methods each.
And the "Hello World" tests had an interesting conclusion. He gives J2EE a score of zero, which translates to "sucks." The frameworks get scores of 0.1 to 0.9, but all of those scores somehow translate to "rocks." Smell the bias?
I won't disagree with the video's conclusion, though. If you just need simple data-in-data-out pages, straight J2EE is not a good solution. The other frameworks are all better choices. (The video didn't mention JavaServer Faces, but JSF is a total turd, so it's just as well.)
If I needed any level of complexity beyond data-in and data-out, I would be sticking with J2EE. Yes, it has a higher learning curve. The video made it clear that the more programming a solution uses, the harder it will be. Imagine that.
Slashdot is news, not journalism. The distinction is that there's (almost) no reporting here. It's a "thought you might want to know about this" site with discussion.
Because Java's syntax is enough like C++ that many C++ veterans are desperate to see it have all the ghastly "features" of C++ that make C++ a nightmare to maintain. Go look at the Top 25 Requests for Enhancement: operator overloading and chdir are still getting votes from those veterans. And then there's all the
requestsforconst by C++ veterans who can't grasp the immutability pattern.
As in your parent post, you should read Jenson Harris' blog.
I have read it. I read it yesterday, and I remember reading a few pages of his, some months back.
I'm afraid the only thing I get from it is that he and his coworkers mean well.
I see a lot of "we're doing this in the name of usability" but they don't seem to understand the point of usability. The point of usability studies is to find out if your software changes are helping the user's productivity, not to let the user chime in with a wishlist. At the risk of sound elitist, it is we the UI designers who should be deciding the look and feel of software, not the users.
When I read such blogs with "we're doing this because the users demanded it" I get the sense that they're just taking the easy (or, more likely, cheap) way out instead of sitting down and thinking about how to address the user's concern in a way that's genuinely an improvement.
I'm kind of reminded of that Simpsons episode where Homer's long lost brother (played by Danny DeVito) lets Homer design a car. Customers should be describing their needs, not telling engineers how to fulfill customers' needs. That's why we give engineers money: because they're supposed to be more schooled in designing products that meet customers' needs.
You're right; it would be absurd for me to think my dogma outweighs usability studies.
But I've read a lot of usability studies. Mostly from Apple and NextStep, but I actually did read two Microsoft ones. And I've read the human interface guidelines from Apple, Microsoft and Sun, cover to cover. Even the accessibility parts. Oh, and I've read a few books on the subject, too.
So when I say that ribbons aren't significantly better than menus, I don't mean that I dislike ribbons; I mean that ribbons don't address the issues which have been raised in the usability studies I've read over the last twenty years or so. I mean that, based on what I've read about the expectations of most users, I believe ribbons will not enhance productivity and may very well take away from it.
I wonder if a Microsoft usability study was what led to the introduction of "personalized menus." That may have addressed a need of users, but it didn't address it at all well.
UI design is largely about the art of communication, and ribbons don't seem to communicate available options very well. I believe Microsoft either has done or will do a usability study on that very subject, but I doubt that study will carry the weight it should. It certainly appears to have been pushed to the side where other Microsoft products are concerned.
When Microsoft says it's better, I'm afraid I don't trust them, because they have a history of not putting the users' experience at the front of their list of priorities.
You know that Microsoft does usability tests, right? They don't just randomly place things (well, they did in Office for a long time, which is why they're fixing that now), and they don't just rip-off other programs like open source projects to. You can bet your ass that if Microsoft is making a change for usability reasons, they have documented, repeatable, scientific evidence that the new version is better.
What you're griping is basically, "but I don't like to learn new things!," which is the opposite of how most Slashdotters seem to be... for instance, a lot of Slashdotters recommend starting with Gentoo when switching to Linux you can see how Linux works, or learning the CLI even if you're already experienced at a GUI interface.
As I said in another post, it's not just about being different. A very good policy for UI design is that significant change must be significantly better. If a bunch of geeks, a large percentage of whom are early adopters, are resistant to a new interface, what hope is there that regular users will tolerate it?
However, if the interface were good and intuitive, then that would trump the whole fear of new things, because it would require almost no time to learn.
The problem here is that ribbons aren't significantly better than menus. In my opinion they're not better at all. A menu is an organized list; a ribbon is a jumbled box full of functions which are barely in any order at all. But I will admit they're better than toolbars, whose horizontal layout is slightly less readable than a long line of words with no punctuation or capitalization, except the words aren't text, they're hieroglyphics. (Those icons may look nice, but they suck at conveying information. Most icons do.)
Microsoft holds usability studies, but so does Apple, and yet we see radically different results (at least until Microsoft gets around to copying each Apple product). Why? Well, I've worked at a number of places which had QA, but somehow we always ended up making crappy software, because QA wasn't given any power of enforcement. Decisions like "We need to ship right now, meeting our arbitrarily set deadline with a load of critical bugs is more important than robust software" effectively neutered the QA people. (Not surprisingly, QA had a high turnover.) Similarly, it's fairly evident Microsoft does the same thing with usability. Their driving force may not be deadlines, though; I think the need to keep a tight grip on the market governs a lot of their seemingly baffling decisions.
My point being that just because there are usability studies being done, doesn't mean they're being heeded.
WTF? But I like my menu bars and toolbars, thank you very much. Menu bars has been a part of Windows since 1985 (and the Mac since 1983 thanks to the Lisa). I think most users would have a hard time understanding "ribbons"; I don't like it when programs try to be "smart" and hide features away from me. There must be an option to use the old menus and toolbars in Office 2007; if not, then I'm not buying it.
Hear, hear! One of the first rules of UI design is, don't move things around and don't change the layout. It's a lot easier to familiarize myself with a static layout than one that shuffles itself around. And how will I know to use functions I can't even see until I'm lucky enough to "trigger" the appearance of the controls which activate them?
An interesting book, About Face 2.0, makes a good point: Significant change must be significantly better. (There's a lot of things in the book with which I disagree, but I agree strongly with this one.) Ribbons are different but they're not better.
Menu bars alone are neither good nor bad; it's all in the organization. Organize a menu bar well, and it is a perfect UI: for any given function, the user should be able to intuit which menu will lead to that function, and the words that make up the menu path should, as closely as possible, form a phrase describing the function. (For instance, "Go --> Home" in a browser.)
Every time Microsoft tries to innovate for real, they fall flat on their face, because they're so used to buying up others' products that they don't know how to create anything original which is actually good. If "ribbons" are a true attempt at improving the interface, they are a miserable failure. Of course I'm more inclined to believe the whole thing is just a way to convince less-savvy users that Word 2007 really is a new product which is worth a few hundred of their dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps because it encourages game makers to make more games aimed at the cheating audience, and fewer games aimed at people who like a puzzle that's challenging without being impossible to solve without the walkthrough always on hand.
I know, I shouldn't feed a troll....
You are the reason they were reluctant to make it (fully) open source.
You obviously are confident you know more about what makes a good language than the designers of Java do. Have you read even one paper at jcp.org? Have you looked at the people who make up the JCP? IBM, Apple, Cisco, Intel, HP, ATI, NVidia, Creative Labs, Google (!), Apache, Apogee, Namco ... you really think you're smarter than their combined intellect and months of discussion? Trust me, you're not.
I'm sure you and a lot of others are already giddy with excitement over the idea of making a "better Java" with const and operator overloading.
When you understand the "less is more" principle, you'll begin to understand why all your pet features don't belong in the language.
When I stated it is a "shared JVM" I was implying that it is a JVM whose command-line invocation parameters are not under our control.
I agree completely. J2EE provides an excellent solution to this.
But the government systems to which I referred are not J2EE environments (yet).
I also agree that J2EE and manifests are not difficult to use, but that doesn't seem to be the prevailing opinion among most of the other developers I meet.
A new ClassLoader was the first solution considered, obviously.
Guess what? Any ClassLoader is required to query its parent before it attempts to resolve a class. And no, you can't get around it (for security reasons which become obvious if you think about it).
If a particular version is already in the class path at JVM startup, you can't override it.
It's DLL Hell all over again. Every time you use a third-party library, the user has to make sure it's installed. And in the classpath, unless they installed it as root/admin and placed it in the JRE's extensions directory.
If your program is going to be in a shared JVM with many other programs (which is common in some government systems), all of whom are contributing their own "favorite" third-party jars, it's very easy to end up with multiple versions of the same third-party library. Now, ideally, third-party vendors would gracefully evolve their own libraries so there are no runtime conflicts across versions, but... well, even my mentioning that probably has a lot of readers snickering derisively.
There are ways to ameliorate this, most notably Java Web Start and specifying the required extensions (and versions) in a jar's manifest, but few software authors seem to want to bother with those.
I realize that the other extreme is Not Invented Here Syndrome, but I often encounter people who are far too quick to jump on a third-party solution when there is an adequate but maybe not as whiz-bang-kewl solution built into Java. Premature optimization and all that.
What it comes down to is that any external dependency is a burden and makes installation significantly more of a chore. Dependencies are a big deal and developers need to consider the penalties they bring, not just the benefits.
A final consideration is that Sun APIs undergo considerably more review than most third-party APIs. Read the progress of any JSR at jcp.org to see what I mean. API usability has a direct effect on productivity.
This may be true, but I don't think it follows that such games can't have mascots.
I consider Duke Nukem a mascot. The fact that people still make Duke Nukem Forever jokes suggests that he's pretty hard to forget. It wasn't just the corny lines (half of them lifted from Army of Darkness), either; a lot of other games have tried to do that and their characters weren't a fraction as memorable. The humor was clever and didn't feel forced, and it helped that it was a good game in almost every respect. And it was a good game with enough "mascot" participation to ensure you didn't forget he was the guy you were playing.
It's a good thing Duke Nukem Manhattan Project got so little attention, or it probably would have a dilution effect similar to what the article describes. (It's not a horrible game, but it sure pales compared to Duke Nukem 3D.)
And I would agree with you.
One of the most harmful, even detrimental consequences of a school's warped social atmosphere is the massive (though not total) inhibition of dating. As Slashdotters know all too well, if you're not one of the popular elite, any attempt at dating will not only be rejected but will be the business of 400 other kids within twenty-four hours. When you detain kids for six hours a day, under threat of legal enforcement, it's only natural they'll be extremely bored and behave like this.
But it sure doesn't teach all those non-elite how to interact with the opposite sex in a normal manner. If anything, it teaches them to be separate and distant. I think we all know people who never overcame that handicap.
I can't imagine how this prepares anyone for adult life. When I date someone, it's no one's business except mine, hers, and possibly a few friends and family. I'm obviously not the only one who places value on this, considering the lengths to which celebrities have been known to go in order to get a little privacy where their social lives are concerned.
Remember that jerk in school who used to punch a select few nerds in the head as hard as he was able? Remember how the teacher always ignored it?
Go try that in "real life." Punch someone in the office like that. Or even your neighbor. Let me know how it turns out.
The absurdly antisocial behaviors which go on in schools every single day are things that no adult would put up with in the workplace for an instant.
You must be joking.
Those two games were constantly being played everywhere I went. They were only "crap" in a relative sense: they weren't masterpieces like other Atari Games offerings.
Gauntlet, 720, Marble Madness, Paperboy, Tetris, KLAX, STUN Runner, Space Lords, Primal Rage, Area 51... I'm sure there were some bad games, but I can't imagine what perceptual universe you're in that you would claim "most of their games" were crap. If anything, the quality and careful gameplay design that went into their games was evident from the moment you looked at them and from the moment you started playing.
Especially Tetris. Their Tetris was light-years ahead of all other versions, in that they gave it colors and levels and intermissions and variation beyond just a gradual speedup. Ask any NES collector which is better, Tengen's Tetris or Nintendo's.
I agree that the reward of seeing your name at the top of the high score table, or in the table at all, was a huge part of the attraction of arcades. But I think your suggestion would actually sabotage that. If the high score table is nationwide (or continent-wide or worldwide), the odds of my getting a significant place in it are quite low. No reward.
Perhaps a compromise would work: show two high score tables, a networked one and a local one from the machine's own VRAM, as was done before. Being the local best is something most of us feel is within our reach.
So ... you're going to do ... something. Am I supposed to get even a little excited by this? (Insert "???/Profit" joke here.)
When I hear someone talk about trying make an arcade "appeal to the whole family" I know it's already doomed. The notion that arcades were sinister places was always completely incorrect. No one actually bought or sold drugs in arcades. So a lot of resources will be going into making the establishment "family friendly," which will appear to have no effect because there was never anything to fix, instead of concentrating on making good games that cost less than a dollar per play.
Now where have I heard this type of reasoning before?
Oh yeah... it was roughly thirty years ago, when conservatives were arguing that there were no "conclusive links" between tobacco and lung cancer, and anyway it was more important that tobacco farmers didn't lose their jobs.
The sad thing is that Digital Leisure/ReadySoft has released somewhere around a dozen Dragon's Lair and Space Ace conversions, on various media, and every one has sucked.
They always manage to digitize the video well, but they utterly ignore the gameplay: the careful timing of moves, the deliberate allowance of alternate moves (for instance, if the character needs to move "northwest" then either up or left is accepted), the randomization and mirroring, the adjustment of some Dragon's Lair rooms so they were much harder if they appeared later in the game than they were if they appeared early in the game, and so on. Yes, there was plenty more to it than dumb memorization and with every single version Digital Leisure has released, they have totally ignored this. Plus, many of the Windows versions are just badly programmed, with windows whose title bar and menu bar flicker, and even pixel trails between scenes. The end result has been one turd after another.
And that is why the Daphne project exists and thrives: despite the glut of conversions Digital Leisure has made, not a single one has managed to give the classic gamers what they want. Which is pretty ludicrous considering classic gamers are the core audience, if not the exclusive audience, of a Dragon's Lair conversion.
Okay, there must be thirty posts here already saying the same thing. So let me set you all straight: the reason the game wasn't fun for you is because you don't know how to play it.
Instead of just mashing the stick around (and thank you so much for doing that, as the sticks were sensitive and easily ruined by dumb apes like yourself beating on them in pointless frustration), did it ever occur to any of you to use your brain? EVERY single move had visual cues to let you know what you should be doing. Obviously those cues were often flashing areas or a flashing sword hilt, but even the other scenes all had distinct visual hints. (Space Ace and Dragon's Lair II had flashing areas for nearly every move, apparently in response to the realization that people weren't smart enough to use their eyes and brains.)
If your complaint is that the game was all memorization, then you don't know how to play a videogame. You're probably the same sort who buys or downloads a walkthrough at the same time he obtains the game itself. If all you do is try to memorize Dragon's Lair, then duh, of course it's as boring as a scholastic achievement test. You want it to be fun? Try playing with your reflexes. Try reacting to everything instead of hauling out a cheat sheet for every room. Watch for those flashes and other cues.
The real beauty of the game is that it was designed to actively thwart memorization by having sequences that are counterintuitive to our natural tendency to move in patterns. If you've ever been a percussionist who had to practice a paradiddle then you know what I mean. If you haven't, then the short explanation is that it's natural for a person to fall into rhythm or repetition, so the game would frequently present moves that started to fall into a pattern only to insert a move that broke the pattern. "Left, right, left, right... yeah, I've got this pattern down. Left, right, left, right... d'oh! It was supposed to be another right, not a left!"
You have a right to say "I played it for five minutes and couldn't figure it out" or "it was too scripted," but I'd like to make it known that some of us discovered it had a lot more depth than that and found it damn fun.
Always makes me want to quote The Oblongs: "If the Valley is so toxic, why do you people still live there?!" (Very paraphrased from memory.)
Implicit in the right to free speech is the right of others to listen if they wish.
<object data="tux.j2k">
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I admit I don't know whether IE 6 will handle that properly, though.
Despite its age, it has plenty of valuable lessons. For instance, abuse of tabs is certainly as relevant today as it was eight years ago.
Good grief. 400 megabyte file. But well presented.
Half of the assertions about J2EE are true. But there's a huge amount of bias in there. I should have taken notes, but I remember a few of the really erroneous things.
J2EE is subject to SQL injection? What? No Java program is subject to SQL injection unless a neophyte or moron is writing it. (Hint: PreparedStatement.)
JSP doesn't integrate with editors? So tag libraries aren't part of JSP all of a sudden?
J2EE doesn't come with security? What are all those XML elements with "role" in their name for?
I don't know about Tomcat, but every J2EE server I've used will recognize newly deployed files without being restarted. And given Tomcat's popularity, I'd be amazed if it still has that handicap, if it ever had it at all.
EJBs are unclear? I read the entire specification (a PDF) in less than one day. I wasn't an instant expert but I was able to write functioning entity beans immediately. The "complex" home and remote interfaces I wrote had a stunning two methods each.
And the "Hello World" tests had an interesting conclusion. He gives J2EE a score of zero, which translates to "sucks." The frameworks get scores of 0.1 to 0.9, but all of those scores somehow translate to "rocks." Smell the bias?
I won't disagree with the video's conclusion, though. If you just need simple data-in-data-out pages, straight J2EE is not a good solution. The other frameworks are all better choices. (The video didn't mention JavaServer Faces, but JSF is a total turd, so it's just as well.)
If I needed any level of complexity beyond data-in and data-out, I would be sticking with J2EE. Yes, it has a higher learning curve. The video made it clear that the more programming a solution uses, the harder it will be. Imagine that.
Slashdot is news, not journalism. The distinction is that there's (almost) no reporting here. It's a "thought you might want to know about this" site with discussion.
Because Java's syntax is enough like C++ that many C++ veterans are desperate to see it have all the ghastly "features" of C++ that make C++ a nightmare to maintain. Go look at the Top 25 Requests for Enhancement: operator overloading and chdir are still getting votes from those veterans. And then there's all the requests for const by C++ veterans who can't grasp the immutability pattern.
I'm afraid the only thing I get from it is that he and his coworkers mean well.
I see a lot of "we're doing this in the name of usability" but they don't seem to understand the point of usability. The point of usability studies is to find out if your software changes are helping the user's productivity, not to let the user chime in with a wishlist. At the risk of sound elitist, it is we the UI designers who should be deciding the look and feel of software, not the users.
When I read such blogs with "we're doing this because the users demanded it" I get the sense that they're just taking the easy (or, more likely, cheap) way out instead of sitting down and thinking about how to address the user's concern in a way that's genuinely an improvement.
I'm kind of reminded of that Simpsons episode where Homer's long lost brother (played by Danny DeVito) lets Homer design a car. Customers should be describing their needs, not telling engineers how to fulfill customers' needs. That's why we give engineers money: because they're supposed to be more schooled in designing products that meet customers' needs.
You're right; it would be absurd for me to think my dogma outweighs usability studies.
But I've read a lot of usability studies. Mostly from Apple and NextStep, but I actually did read two Microsoft ones. And I've read the human interface guidelines from Apple, Microsoft and Sun, cover to cover. Even the accessibility parts. Oh, and I've read a few books on the subject, too.
So when I say that ribbons aren't significantly better than menus, I don't mean that I dislike ribbons; I mean that ribbons don't address the issues which have been raised in the usability studies I've read over the last twenty years or so. I mean that, based on what I've read about the expectations of most users, I believe ribbons will not enhance productivity and may very well take away from it.
I wonder if a Microsoft usability study was what led to the introduction of "personalized menus." That may have addressed a need of users, but it didn't address it at all well.
UI design is largely about the art of communication, and ribbons don't seem to communicate available options very well. I believe Microsoft either has done or will do a usability study on that very subject, but I doubt that study will carry the weight it should. It certainly appears to have been pushed to the side where other Microsoft products are concerned.
When Microsoft says it's better, I'm afraid I don't trust them, because they have a history of not putting the users' experience at the front of their list of priorities.
However, if the interface were good and intuitive, then that would trump the whole fear of new things, because it would require almost no time to learn.
The problem here is that ribbons aren't significantly better than menus. In my opinion they're not better at all. A menu is an organized list; a ribbon is a jumbled box full of functions which are barely in any order at all. But I will admit they're better than toolbars, whose horizontal layout is slightly less readable than a long line of words with no punctuation or capitalization, except the words aren't text, they're hieroglyphics. (Those icons may look nice, but they suck at conveying information. Most icons do.)
Microsoft holds usability studies, but so does Apple, and yet we see radically different results (at least until Microsoft gets around to copying each Apple product). Why? Well, I've worked at a number of places which had QA, but somehow we always ended up making crappy software, because QA wasn't given any power of enforcement. Decisions like "We need to ship right now, meeting our arbitrarily set deadline with a load of critical bugs is more important than robust software" effectively neutered the QA people. (Not surprisingly, QA had a high turnover.) Similarly, it's fairly evident Microsoft does the same thing with usability. Their driving force may not be deadlines, though; I think the need to keep a tight grip on the market governs a lot of their seemingly baffling decisions.
My point being that just because there are usability studies being done, doesn't mean they're being heeded.
An interesting book, About Face 2.0, makes a good point: Significant change must be significantly better. (There's a lot of things in the book with which I disagree, but I agree strongly with this one.) Ribbons are different but they're not better.
Menu bars alone are neither good nor bad; it's all in the organization. Organize a menu bar well, and it is a perfect UI: for any given function, the user should be able to intuit which menu will lead to that function, and the words that make up the menu path should, as closely as possible, form a phrase describing the function. (For instance, "Go --> Home" in a browser.)
Every time Microsoft tries to innovate for real, they fall flat on their face, because they're so used to buying up others' products that they don't know how to create anything original which is actually good. If "ribbons" are a true attempt at improving the interface, they are a miserable failure. Of course I'm more inclined to believe the whole thing is just a way to convince less-savvy users that Word 2007 really is a new product which is worth a few hundred of their dollars.