Re:The reason these games are classics...
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 1
I agree. updating classics in "a rich 3d environment" is the best way to get kicked in sales. The truth is though, a lot of these games are *still* fun, and that's why people want to keep on playing them. I played Day of the Tentacle recently, and it was still as fun as I remembered it, and Sam & Max hit the road have yet to be matched(especially with full voice).
Another thing to remember, which most people don't: sprites can look a lot better than 3d, especially for small, "look at me, I'm 10x10 pixels under 320x240" type graphics.
Re:Suggested Change to IP Laws
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 1
Company X will argue that it could be working on the new version during those 2 years
well, that would be a different IP, wouldn't it? One thing I think should be (and it's likely not this way currently), is that individual pieces of IP should be able to enter PD when a time period elapses. For example; the first mickey mouse cartoons are at this point a part of cultural history, and should be in the public domain, yet diseny still has their copyright(after a legal battle to extend it too!)
But back to my point, the copyright on the original shouldn't be kept just because a sequel has been made, because the sequel will not change the fact that the original is a classic.
I'd agree that some cutscenes are unnessessary (like the cutscenes from the original Blood -- what a waste of a CD!), but in a well designed game, they are the difference between a mediocre game with a crappy story and a masterpiece. Even in a crappy game they can make a huge difference. SiN wouldn't have been much fun without the cutscenes and story...
Re:Talk about disrespect...
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 1
If you ever actually *CREATE* something, you may understand. It's not a matter of getting copyright rights or anything legal, it's about respect. Ultima is the game he made. It's his creation. Asking him for his permission to remake it isn't asking for the legal right, it's more like asking for the fathers blessing before a wedding. It's just respect for the man who made the game.
I think it would be really cool if somebody remade the old game "stunts" (also called 4d racing when microprose did it...) and stuck in decent multiplayer. I think that if somebody made a game like that, then the racing game market might go flat.:)
Personally, I'm working on a game which is inspired by the old SNES RPGs, especially Chronotrigger. A lot of things taken for granted in those RPGs are quite hard to code (such as a SEVERAL towns, each with 50 NPCs, who all say something different AT LEAST TWICE, and room for plot twists too...It takes a really good system to keep track of all this
whether it ever gets finished is another thing...:D
Alternatives for the platform could be very good. Think of the Socket 7 architecture in retrospect. They ended up going much faster than the marketing people at Intel would have liked! People still use K6-2s and K6-IIIs, but who would use a p200 in this age?
this is another blow against no competition (note the double negative). intel no longer has the only chip for the p4 platform. This is good for consumers and it is good for the industry. Way to go Via!
I'm truly relieved to know that not all companies can get into a market and dominate it thoroughly like microsoft. I'm very glad that intel doesn't have this power, despite the fact that they are rich.
It's also a shame though, when the peripheral market shrinks a little bit.
Just spare me the holier-than-thou "you should learn to write better" routine.
I apologize. It was just a passing comment and I never meant for it to be a be-all end all of Slashdot posting rules or anything like that. I was just posting something off the top of my head(not everything I write is informative or insightful:)). It seems you were doing the same thing with that whole thing.:)
That's one of the reasons why I post to slashdot so rarely (except when I should be doing work:))...in another discussion board there aren't 300000 different users (not to mention ACs) and twice as many messages in a day...
...And as for your last remark, good. I wish that pro writers took that approach when writing anyway.:)
sorry for being so anal. Reading too much slashdot will do that to a person:)
And at $16 for.3 megapixels, this sounds like more of a novelty than a bargain, considering that 4-megapixel cameras are available now for less than a thousand dollars.
Yeah! I mean, for the low price of 50 of these, you could buy a high end camera!
Seriously, high definition isn't really as important as an accurate picture. even a decent 640x480 picture is fine, as long as the picture is accurate(no glitchy pixels). my USB webcam sucks in this regard except outdoors in summer (and even then it's not always a sure thing). Spending 16 bucks for a camera to go on vacation and take a few pictures sounds fine.
The only real barrier to this is that unless you have some tech saavy neighbours, you'd have a pretty hard sell. Instead of thinking of all the possibilities (there are even more than with the internet!), they'll be thinking of 'why should I go out and buy a fifty dollar part so I can talk to my neighbours?'. Even with all the advantages, there are a lot of "I don't need access to a network unless I'm at my computer desk, and the internet is great for that" mentallity. If it could be done though, I could see this being a new utopia (think of the internet 5 years ago) until businesses learn about it and government agenices start to try to limit peoples freedoms using it.
Even if the Duron is twice as fast, that would only account for a factor of two in the boot time, and I would still have a hard time seeing how that would be so universally derided as being slow. My post wasn't about the claim that w2k is slow (it's alright in boot time compared to NT4, which I have seen take up to half an hour to boot and login!!!), it was just about mentioning data which isn't really relevant. If you wanted to claim that windows wasn't slow to boot, just mention the windows machine. The moment you brought the Linux machines boot time into account, it became a comparison of (admittedly inaccurate and subjective) benchmarks.
It doesn't really bother me, but it's a bad habit to get into, and one which people fall into quickly. You were good enough to admit the systems weren't equal, but some people (trolls?) who want to throw bogus benchmarks out wouldn't hesitate to drop that little detail from the equasion. Imagine "My (386) linux box running KDE is so shitty and slow compared to my (athlonXP1800+) W2k box! Programs(Doom III) take so long to load on the linux box that I can take a coffee break waiting for them! Windows 2000 is so smooth and responsive in comparison!". I've seen it.
In related news, ford reprimanded crash test labs for disclosing and showing the world about the exploding gastank in the ford pinto.
F*cking idiot. They're willing to blame everyone but themselves for the fact that they have such easily exploitable software.
BTW, to back up this claim, I urge everyone to read up on how exactly how ILOVEYOU and SIRCAM were so popular. ILOVEYOU didn't even need to exploit anything!
...and if you have software which is THAT easily exploitable, maybe you deserve the critisism, rather than blaming the security industry. If nobody published anything on exploits or viruses, E-mail viruses would be even worse because nobody would realize that the way that ILOVEYOU ruined their system is by reading the e-mail called ILOVEYOU which ran script automatically, and everybody would be busy reading a file to have your advise.
The W2K box is a Duron-700, and the Linux box is a dual Celeron-400. Yet I have heard repeatedly that Win2k is slow-booting.
er...you're joking...right? maybe I'm asking too much for a comparison between two *similar* systems? My linux machine is a p200 and it boots in about one minute, while my (p75) w2k machine takes at least two, yet I have heard repeatedly that linux is slow booting...
I'm not disputing what you are saying, but please, if you have a benchmark, don't even mention it if it isn't on similar hardware.
as much as it pains me to admit it, MS is virtually immune from the law. Even in the antitrust case, they are hanging it up so long that by the time the decision comes out, it won't matter anymore. I remember saying this to myself when I first heard about the MS case in 1999. Imagine Microsofts immunity to a small joke of a lawsuit like this after being able to battle it out against the full force of the DoJ and a bunch of states and businesses.
It makes me depressed just to be alive when a corp. is so far above the law that they can't even be brought down by the government of the nation that spawned it.
I'd establish a base on the moon. When we have living quarters on a celestial body other than earth, I'll get excited. As it is, all were doing is sending probes. This could have been done 25 years ago (and was...), albiet with lesser technology, but something like a colonization program, or even something larger, like the terraforming of mars (I'm not sure if it's possible, but I saw it on TV once, where they pump super greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to equalize the tempeture...), could get people interested. As it stands, even a mission to mars is just a pipe dream at this point...
When I first got my nick on slashdot, I posted a message. It got modded up.
yep, I got some karma.........well, that's all there is for that feature...
The written word is far too impresise for moderation to be completely accurate. what the writer considers an editorial(which every message on slashdot is by the way), the reader could misinterpet as a troll, or worse yet, he could make the mistake of considering what you say serious. Without ":)"'s, irony and humor is slow to reach the reader when it is surrounded by dead serious posts about exactly the same sentiment.
Also, Time magazine reported last year about this, and they pointed out that the kind of speed offered by fiber is the only real bottleneck to creating a truly self aware computer.
In that case, Time magazine is filled with idiots. Computers will never be self aware as long as they are the glorified calculators they are.
People who talk about self aware computers are usually ignorant of what computers do. They do not do incredible things, they do what they are programmed to do. One cannot program in self awareness. The closest we can get is a convincing emulation of self awareness. if you write a program to print "I think therefore I am" on the screen, the computer doesn't suddenly see any value or meaning in those words, simply a string of Ascii characters. Even with the hal project (remeber that article?), all they accomplished was a sophisticated simulation using years of statistical data of what a self aware organism may say, NOT self awareness itself. the greatest emulation is still an emulation. Science fiction paints a strange picture that powerful computers will eventually become sentient. This is mistaken. Build the worlds fastest and most powerful calculator, and you still have to press 1+1 in order to get it to answer the question -- and the computer will never ask the question...Unless we tell it to.
I can see nothing but latency if a bus was set up to be optical. Why spend money on transcievers when wires on the bus interface directly with the processors? The wasted money could be easily spent on something which could actually increase speed, like increasing motherboard size to allow for a thicker, more spaced apart set of bus wires to decrease resistance and the effects of capacitance.
oh...Odd, I mentioned it because I read about it years ago in the c64 programming manuals when they first mentioned ASM...THAT was cooler by far than the basic crap which it had (no good for a beginner, but if c64s were around today, it'd be fine -- there wasn't much technical documentation on using it all...the Internet fixed that...)
Actually that is just the problem! Way too often THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE
These people are what I like to call 'idiots'. These people don't deserve an opinion(and don't usually have one for more than an hour:)). Just let them sit around and believe that they are political because they can spout off a few words which have something to do with the subject. Sort of like the guy who thinks that Quake II would be a breeze to code because he's been able to finish TIC-TAC-TOE(true story!).
Everything has a potintial for evil. if you want a purely good company, don't look to a capitalistic system to provide it, because good companies are punished. It's the way captialism, and even the way life, works.
I agree, but it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. AMD is merely trying to stay in business because intel has beaten them in MHZ by designing a chip which runs slower but reaches higher clock speeds.
Most of what you're looking for could only be done in the game's code itself, and to be honest, mean, cruel, blunt (whatever you want to call it), if you don't have a 3d card, you're pretty far off from the target audience for a 3d game
not really...A lot of people I know who buy games don't have 3d cards -- right now, myself included (I'm using a laptop as my main system, so no 3d card), not to mention that a lot of relatively old cards can't even play todays games (UT only works on new cards -- the ATI rage LT doesn't run it except in software mode)
I'd say that the ultra hardcore gamer who bought a new card in the last few months are a minority compared to the people who have crappy computers yet still play games.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. updating classics in "a rich 3d environment" is the best way to get kicked in sales. The truth is though, a lot of these games are *still* fun, and that's why people want to keep on playing them. I played Day of the Tentacle recently, and it was still as fun as I remembered it, and Sam & Max hit the road have yet to be matched(especially with full voice).
Another thing to remember, which most people don't: sprites can look a lot better than 3d, especially for small, "look at me, I'm 10x10 pixels under 320x240" type graphics.
Company X will argue that it could be working on the new version during those 2 years
well, that would be a different IP, wouldn't it? One thing I think should be (and it's likely not this way currently), is that individual pieces of IP should be able to enter PD when a time period elapses. For example; the first mickey mouse cartoons are at this point a part of cultural history, and should be in the public domain, yet diseny still has their copyright(after a legal battle to extend it too!)
But back to my point, the copyright on the original shouldn't be kept just because a sequel has been made, because the sequel will not change the fact that the original is a classic.
That's sort of a strange thing to ask...
I'd agree that some cutscenes are unnessessary (like the cutscenes from the original Blood -- what a waste of a CD!), but in a well designed game, they are the difference between a mediocre game with a crappy story and a masterpiece. Even in a crappy game they can make a huge difference. SiN wouldn't have been much fun without the cutscenes and story...
If you ever actually *CREATE* something, you may understand. It's not a matter of getting copyright rights or anything legal, it's about respect. Ultima is the game he made. It's his creation. Asking him for his permission to remake it isn't asking for the legal right, it's more like asking for the fathers blessing before a wedding. It's just respect for the man who made the game.
I think it would be really cool if somebody remade the old game "stunts" (also called 4d racing when microprose did it...) and stuck in decent multiplayer. I think that if somebody made a game like that, then the racing game market might go flat. :)
:D
Personally, I'm working on a game which is inspired by the old SNES RPGs, especially Chronotrigger. A lot of things taken for granted in those RPGs are quite hard to code (such as a SEVERAL towns, each with 50 NPCs, who all say something different AT LEAST TWICE, and room for plot twists too...It takes a really good system to keep track of all this
whether it ever gets finished is another thing...
Alternatives for the platform could be very good. Think of the Socket 7 architecture in retrospect. They ended up going much faster than the marketing people at Intel would have liked! People still use K6-2s and K6-IIIs, but who would use a p200 in this age?
this is another blow against no competition (note the double negative). intel no longer has the only chip for the p4 platform. This is good for consumers and it is good for the industry. Way to go Via!
I'm truly relieved to know that not all companies can get into a market and dominate it thoroughly like microsoft. I'm very glad that intel doesn't have this power, despite the fact that they are rich.
It's also a shame though, when the peripheral market shrinks a little bit.
Just spare me the holier-than-thou "you should learn to write better" routine.
:)). It seems you were doing the same thing with that whole thing. :)
:))...in another discussion board there aren't 300000 different users (not to mention ACs) and twice as many messages in a day...
:)
:)
I apologize. It was just a passing comment and I never meant for it to be a be-all end all of Slashdot posting rules or anything like that. I was just posting something off the top of my head(not everything I write is informative or insightful
That's one of the reasons why I post to slashdot so rarely (except when I should be doing work
...And as for your last remark, good. I wish that pro writers took that approach when writing anyway.
sorry for being so anal. Reading too much slashdot will do that to a person
And at $16 for .3 megapixels, this sounds like more of a novelty than a bargain, considering that 4-megapixel cameras are available now for less than a thousand dollars.
Yeah! I mean, for the low price of 50 of these, you could buy a high end camera!
Seriously, high definition isn't really as important as an accurate picture. even a decent 640x480 picture is fine, as long as the picture is accurate(no glitchy pixels). my USB webcam sucks in this regard except outdoors in summer (and even then it's not always a sure thing). Spending 16 bucks for a camera to go on vacation and take a few pictures sounds fine.
Imagine doing this cross-border (i.e., CAN-US, US-Mex).
:)
Now THAT would really get some people's britches in a bunch.
It would be especially hilarious if you had an Archie Bunker type living next door
"We don't need to be communicatin' with no mexicans! Next thing you know they'll be associatin' with normal folk!"
lol
ignorance can be funny.
The only real barrier to this is that unless you have some tech saavy neighbours, you'd have a pretty hard sell. Instead of thinking of all the possibilities (there are even more than with the internet!), they'll be thinking of 'why should I go out and buy a fifty dollar part so I can talk to my neighbours?'. Even with all the advantages, there are a lot of "I don't need access to a network unless I'm at my computer desk, and the internet is great for that" mentallity. If it could be done though, I could see this being a new utopia (think of the internet 5 years ago) until businesses learn about it and government agenices start to try to limit peoples freedoms using it.
Even if the Duron is twice as fast, that would only account for a factor of two in the boot time, and I would still have a hard time seeing how that would be so universally derided as being slow.
My post wasn't about the claim that w2k is slow (it's alright in boot time compared to NT4, which I have seen take up to half an hour to boot and login!!!), it was just about mentioning data which isn't really relevant. If you wanted to claim that windows wasn't slow to boot, just mention the windows machine. The moment you brought the Linux machines boot time into account, it became a comparison of (admittedly inaccurate and subjective) benchmarks.
It doesn't really bother me, but it's a bad habit to get into, and one which people fall into quickly. You were good enough to admit the systems weren't equal, but some people (trolls?) who want to throw bogus benchmarks out wouldn't hesitate to drop that little detail from the equasion. Imagine "My (386) linux box running KDE is so shitty and slow compared to my (athlonXP1800+) W2k box! Programs(Doom III) take so long to load on the linux box that I can take a coffee break waiting for them! Windows 2000 is so smooth and responsive in comparison!". I've seen it.
In related news, ford reprimanded crash test labs for disclosing and showing the world about the exploding gastank in the ford pinto.
F*cking idiot. They're willing to blame everyone but themselves for the fact that they have such easily exploitable software.
BTW, to back up this claim, I urge everyone to read up on how exactly how ILOVEYOU and SIRCAM were so popular. ILOVEYOU didn't even need to exploit anything!
...and if you have software which is THAT easily exploitable, maybe you deserve the critisism, rather than blaming the security industry. If nobody published anything on exploits or viruses, E-mail viruses would be even worse because nobody would realize that the way that ILOVEYOU ruined their system is by reading the e-mail called ILOVEYOU which ran script automatically, and everybody would be busy reading a file to have your advise.
The W2K box is a Duron-700, and the Linux box is a dual Celeron-400. Yet I have heard repeatedly that Win2k is slow-booting.
er...you're joking...right? maybe I'm asking too much for a comparison between two *similar* systems? My linux machine is a p200 and it boots in about one minute, while my (p75) w2k machine takes at least two, yet I have heard repeatedly that linux is slow booting...
I'm not disputing what you are saying, but please, if you have a benchmark, don't even mention it if it isn't on similar hardware.
as much as it pains me to admit it, MS is virtually immune from the law. Even in the antitrust case, they are hanging it up so long that by the time the decision comes out, it won't matter anymore. I remember saying this to myself when I first heard about the MS case in 1999. Imagine Microsofts immunity to a small joke of a lawsuit like this after being able to battle it out against the full force of the DoJ and a bunch of states and businesses.
It makes me depressed just to be alive when a corp. is so far above the law that they can't even be brought down by the government of the nation that spawned it.
I'd establish a base on the moon. When we have living quarters on a celestial body other than earth, I'll get excited. As it is, all were doing is sending probes. This could have been done 25 years ago (and was...), albiet with lesser technology, but something like a colonization program, or even something larger, like the terraforming of mars (I'm not sure if it's possible, but I saw it on TV once, where they pump super greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to equalize the tempeture...), could get people interested. As it stands, even a mission to mars is just a pipe dream at this point...
When I first got my nick on slashdot, I posted a message. It got modded up.
yep, I got some karma.........well, that's all there is for that feature...
The written word is far too impresise for moderation to be completely accurate. what the writer considers an editorial(which every message on slashdot is by the way), the reader could misinterpet as a troll, or worse yet, he could make the mistake of considering what you say serious. Without ":)"'s, irony and humor is slow to reach the reader when it is surrounded by dead serious posts about exactly the same sentiment.
Hal...open my CD-rom drive door!
Hal:I'm sorry dave, I can't do that.
Hal, I was just getting the source code for vi off that redhat disk -- I swear!
Hal:Open source is like pac-man. All your base are belong to us. You are on the path to destruction.
NOOOOOOOOOO!
Also, Time magazine reported last year about this, and they pointed out that the kind of speed offered by fiber is the only real bottleneck to creating a truly self aware computer.
In that case, Time magazine is filled with idiots. Computers will never be self aware as long as they are the glorified calculators they are.
People who talk about self aware computers are usually ignorant of what computers do. They do not do incredible things, they do what they are programmed to do. One cannot program in self awareness. The closest we can get is a convincing emulation of self awareness. if you write a program to print "I think therefore I am" on the screen, the computer doesn't suddenly see any value or meaning in those words, simply a string of Ascii characters. Even with the hal project (remeber that article?), all they accomplished was a sophisticated simulation using years of statistical data of what a self aware organism may say, NOT self awareness itself. the greatest emulation is still an emulation. Science fiction paints a strange picture that powerful computers will eventually become sentient. This is mistaken. Build the worlds fastest and most powerful calculator, and you still have to press 1+1 in order to get it to answer the question -- and the computer will never ask the question...Unless we tell it to.
I can see nothing but latency if a bus was set up to be optical. Why spend money on transcievers when wires on the bus interface directly with the processors? The wasted money could be easily spent on something which could actually increase speed, like increasing motherboard size to allow for a thicker, more spaced apart set of bus wires to decrease resistance and the effects of capacitance.
oh...Odd, I mentioned it because I read about it years ago in the c64 programming manuals when they first mentioned ASM...THAT was cooler by far than the basic crap which it had (no good for a beginner, but if c64s were around today, it'd be fine -- there wasn't much technical documentation on using it all...the Internet fixed that...)
Actually that is just the problem! Way too often THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE
:)). Just let them sit around and believe that they are political because they can spout off a few words which have something to do with the subject. Sort of like the guy who thinks that Quake II would be a breeze to code because he's been able to finish TIC-TAC-TOE(true story!).
These people are what I like to call 'idiots'. These people don't deserve an opinion(and don't usually have one for more than an hour
Everything has a potintial for evil. if you want a purely good company, don't look to a capitalistic system to provide it, because good companies are punished. It's the way captialism, and even the way life, works.
I agree, but it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. AMD is merely trying to stay in business because intel has beaten them in MHZ by designing a chip which runs slower but reaches higher clock speeds.
Most of what you're looking for could only be done in the game's code itself, and to be honest, mean, cruel, blunt (whatever you want to call it), if you don't have a 3d card, you're pretty far off from the target audience for a 3d game
not really...A lot of people I know who buy games don't have 3d cards -- right now, myself included (I'm using a laptop as my main system, so no 3d card), not to mention that a lot of relatively old cards can't even play todays games (UT only works on new cards -- the ATI rage LT doesn't run it except in software mode)
I'd say that the ultra hardcore gamer who bought a new card in the last few months are a minority compared to the people who have crappy computers yet still play games.