Personally, I thought Warcraft III was horrible. Absolute ass. Fuck, it was an FPS RPG, not an FPS- the "So and So Must Survive!" mission goals of some of the Warcraft II and Starcraft missions had gone from being occasional objectives to being shoved up your ass on every single map- to the point where the build tree was augmented to ressurect your characters!
War3 was everything I didn't like about Starcraft (precious little) blown up into a full game and stuck onto the same basic RTS model as Warcraft and Starcraft.
So yeah, I thought War3 sucked. Throwing in RPG elements and more plot does not constitute RTS Innovation, which is what I was hoping for. Instead I was stuck playing a hyperannoying character for half the game- the kind of guy you'd take out behind the bar and beat senseless in the Real World. Same reason I dropped Final Fantasy- the games went from being fun gameplay to tedius interactive novels focusing on characters I just couldn't get into.
Fortunately Blizzard has realized where its strengths are and seems to be focusing on the worldbuilding/character thing with WoW, rather than flogging the RTS genre into some bastard RPG hybrid. >_
Why would they want to DISCOUNT it? It's Ad Revenue. They're getting MORE money. They have NO incentive to make LESS money. NO REASON to cut the price. NONE to SPEAK OF.
So You're going to pay 50 for the game, 20 for the service, 50 for the expansion packs, and advertisters are going to pay the company to inject their fecal matter into your eyeballs while you're doing it.
Aspyr splash. Vivendi/Universal splash. Seirra splash. Relic splash. Not even a splash- it's 3x longer than the others.
You can't click past any of them, either, and you see them all again on the way out.
And there's that nasty turd of an NVidia splash on the Unreal games.
AND THEY WANNA PUT MORE ADS IN THE GAMES?! Not just the load/dump screens?!
I'm sick of paying to see/hear advertising.:| It's on the bus, it's on the web, it's on billboards in town, it's on the radio, it IS the television, it's on shirts, it's on hats, I CAN'T FUCKING GET AWAY FROM IT! >:|
The fact that Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Unreal Tournament, UT2k4, and several other games I can't remember off of the top of my head can interoperate SEAMLESSLY between the Mac and the PC is a Known Thing. Hell, Blizzard shipped an IPX installer for the Mac version of Starcraft so it could play with PCs Back In The Day.
So, is it REALLY that hard? Obviously not. Someone at valve was smoking crack. Fuck, if it'll run on a Dreamcast, it'll definitely run on a Mac....
Almost beside the point, really- I'm so fucking sick of Mac gaming and the fact that I can't get a useable machine for less than 1600 that I'm most likely going to buy a PC early next year. Something about four times the horsepower of my mac.:|
Don't forget the co-owner bit. The Technical Director point is slightly misleading, as it's well known that he does a bit more than tell iD codemonkeys where they're going.
Regardless, I played the game, I liked it.:P And I'm still deeply PISSED at Valve for nearly completing a Mac port and then whacking it and not releasing it. (I played Doom on a PC, having long since learned my lesson about gaming and the Mac.:P)
"looked damned pretty" and "left allot of open territory." ?!
Carmack's the graphics system programmer, not the game designer. If it looks damned pretty, then he did his job, and he did it damned well. If the game gets tedious or boring at times, well... that's not HIS fault in the least.
Out of a few thousand music tracks and a couple of hundred video files, I've come across approximately ONE ogg file. And it wasn't even straight audio- one of the video files I downloaded had an ogg audio track. It was fucking annoying, to put it mildly- I had to use mplayer.:P
Ogg is a lot like PNG was four years ago- fine in concept, but good luck getting the Great Unwashed to give a shit.
Difference is, it's 2004 and png is everwhere (albeit still shittily supported on everything, but support in some capacity is there), and ogg is... well, it isn't.
I've been using iTunes since 1.0- I'll be damned if I'm going to be bothered with a format it doesn't support out of the box!
There's "looking right" and there's "matching the fact I can't draw a straight line". Admittedly, I'm making my own obstacles here, but I try VERY hard to get my 3d material to match up with my line art and/or my digital materials. The goal for me is to avoid the OMFGCG reaction.
So far, I've been doing a fairly decent job of it, but I haven't been dealing with much material.... and there's the fact that my inking style is VERY uneven. Like, epileptic seizure kind of uneven.:P
Still.... the technique is GETTING there, and that makes me very happy.:) Hopefully the software tools will reach a "Do What I MEAN" level before I'm too old to use them...
Pencilling, inking, and scanning is ultimately faster than diddling a 3d mesh into a render that's even close to what you have in your head. Not only that, but if you want, say.... variable line weight or a very specific style of hatching, you'll have pages of sequential art done by hand before you can get a single render to look right.
This stuff definitely has its uses, but it's never going to replace the traditional media, at least not completely.
Me, I draw all of my humanoids. Everything else is fair game for any other technique.
And it's technically gone with Java, but until Big Apps or games get a.Net port, and until there's a.Net runtime on other architectures.... what's the big deal?
The only reason I have to run windows or even get near it is 3d apps and games. And if they resurrected the PPC port of Windows NT (hello, NT 3.x! They killed it for a reason!), there's still no compelling reason for Discreet to port MAX. And Maya's already available for OS X.
After that comes games, and I doubt any developer would compile two versions... hell, 95% of game developers don't even bother with ports to non-Windows OSsen on the SAME ARCH.
Assuming WinXP for PPC was released tomorrow and for some reason Doom 3 and Counterstrike and everything else ran on it (or released recompiled.exes that would), you'd still have the hideous optimization problems that pretty much every PC game in the last three years suffers from. You can't upgrade a mac the same way you can upgrade a PC, and while half of the G4s and all the G5s might be able to run the OS and games decently, that's less than 10% of the userbase.:P
Ultimately, people keep whining about how Apple Should Release OS X For x86 because they want to have their cake and eat it to- they want the nice OS and they want their games and their dirt cheap vending machine hardware.
Obviously, it's one or the other- cheap hardware decent games and shit OS, or a decent OS on moderately priced hardware with jack shit for games.
Personally, I want PPC binaries for games that have been ported to linux. Isn't portability one of the advantages of the system?
Sure, it's an added bonus- don't get me wrong. But there are those of us that feel like we're STUCK with the hardware and would LOVE to have ANYTHING cheaper and/or more expandable.
I think SGI's a better example of The Hardware- intensely awesome 3d and visualization capabilities, but you never hear anyone talking about how SGI should port IRIX to x86.:P
I'm already a Mac user. I'm in that FUN bracket of having shit for credit and needing expandability to get anything done. I'm stuck on a dual g4 450, and for the price it would take me to buy a processor upgrade (dual 1.25 ghz- JUST SIX HUNDRED BUX!) I could buy a middlish PC with a decent video card.
Oh, and that PC is expandable, has more than two drive bays and one optical bay, and is stupidly cheaper to upgrade in terms of horsepower.
So if OS X on x86 were released and would run native OS X apps without recompiling* at the same speed as a g5 (or faster), yeah. I'd pick one up. I wouldn't completely SWITCH, because I still need Classic, and you can forget about that running on the PC.:P
People like me- Mac users who would jump the hardware boat for a cheaper, faster mac the SECOND they had the CHANCE- are why Apple will NEVER do this. EVER.:|
*It's NeXT. IT. CAN. DO. THIS. Or at least, it could.
Look at the problems with powerbook displays and iBook logic boards. Apple CAN'T compete on price so they HAVE to slash QUALITY to get even CLOSE.
I own and admin a shitload of macs- ranging from a quadra 650 to G5s. The only macs I have that have BROKEN are one of the two G4s I admin, thirteen of the fifteen iMacs I admin, and BOTH of the G5s I admin (one blew a hard drive, the other the logic board and video card).
All my beige Macs are rock motherhumping solid. Never had a problem with any of them, ever. This candy colored aluminum crap, on the other hand, is- at BEST- consumer grade.:(
That was waaaay before the microsoft buyout, back when they had the animated globe and the login/password and pretty much nothing else on the front page. Much nicer back then, imo. And mysteriously upgraded to 250 megs of disk sometime last week, if memory serves.
I use Safari and Firefox, because hey- there's shit Safari just fucks up on. Period.
I think it's positively stupid that it's 2004 and there's no single Good Web Browser yet.:-| Hell, Safari has a ton of its own stupidities and neither Safari OR Firefox have a download manager that I like.:P
The number of people who WANT the ORIGINALS on DVD and are willing to track down laserdiscs, etceteras and actually do the work themselves to get a decent transfer of better movies.... yeah, that's loosely Fair Use. Problem is, there's one HELL of a market for The Original Trilogy on DVD. Probably BIGGER than for the current bastardized fuckstain that is the special edition.
Shit, I'd pay what the Short Bus version costs if I could just have the originals, remastered. Fuck interactive anything. I don't even need scene selections.
I want the originals. I refuse to pay for the sped editions, regardless of format, price, or extras. >:|
Dude, if I shoved a steaming pile of SHIT into my computer, I wouldn't expect to work.
And that's exactly what shit like this is. It ain't bad news for apple, it's bad news for the fuckwits who get suckered into buying trojan horse bullshit GARBAGE.
I spend a good chunk of several weeks of the year sitting on my ass doing not much of anything at work, which would suck ass if I didn't have linux to learn.
Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?
Fortunately, the variety of things I do adds up nicely- they'd need three different people to replace just me, so I'm cheaper. And I'm not the only one with occasional VAST GULFS of slack time. And I don't get training or any kind of tuition incentives. So I use that time to learn stuff, since it's the only way I'll be able to leverage myself out of this place.:P
Am I a Workaholic? Yes. Just not for the day job.:P
Yes, but Tron's actual CG footage was farmed out to every fledgling computer graphics house in the area.
TLS was rendered completely on a single Cray, and while some shots have a definite "atari" quality about them, some shots still hold their own, even today.
Yeah, Tron might have been first to market, but TLS was, imo, a whole hell of a lot cooler. TLS is why I went to Art School and why I have a degree in Computer Animation.
Of course, I spend my workdays subtitling video and being a linux bitch, but hey. That's the economy. A man can dream.
I find it amusing that the fact I've no piercings, tattos, brands, etc. and I've never died my hair actually puts me in the minority amongst the people I know.
Whenever the media gets down to or under a buck a disk.
Company purchasers get twitchy when it comes to the raw cost of media for some reason. Bastards won't spring for tape drives, which are really what we need for the volume of data we have.:|
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I thought Warcraft III was horrible. Absolute ass. Fuck, it was an FPS RPG, not an FPS- the "So and So Must Survive!" mission goals of some of the Warcraft II and Starcraft missions had gone from being occasional objectives to being shoved up your ass on every single map- to the point where the build tree was augmented to ressurect your characters!
War3 was everything I didn't like about Starcraft (precious little) blown up into a full game and stuck onto the same basic RTS model as Warcraft and Starcraft.
So yeah, I thought War3 sucked. Throwing in RPG elements and more plot does not constitute RTS Innovation, which is what I was hoping for. Instead I was stuck playing a hyperannoying character for half the game- the kind of guy you'd take out behind the bar and beat senseless in the Real World. Same reason I dropped Final Fantasy- the games went from being fun gameplay to tedius interactive novels focusing on characters I just couldn't get into.
Fortunately Blizzard has realized where its strengths are and seems to be focusing on the worldbuilding/character thing with WoW, rather than flogging the RTS genre into some bastard RPG hybrid. >_
Riiiiiight.
Why would they want to DISCOUNT it? It's Ad Revenue. They're getting MORE money. They have NO incentive to make LESS money. NO REASON to cut the price. NONE to SPEAK OF.
So You're going to pay 50 for the game, 20 for the service, 50 for the expansion packs, and advertisters are going to pay the company to inject their fecal matter into your eyeballs while you're doing it.
WELCOME TO CAPITALISM!
Seriously. Load up Homeworld 2:
:| It's on the bus, it's on the web, it's on billboards in town, it's on the radio, it IS the television, it's on shirts, it's on hats, I CAN'T FUCKING GET AWAY FROM IT! >:|
Aspyr splash.
Vivendi/Universal splash.
Seirra splash.
Relic splash. Not even a splash- it's 3x longer than the others.
You can't click past any of them, either, and you see them all again on the way out.
And there's that nasty turd of an NVidia splash on the Unreal games.
AND THEY WANNA PUT MORE ADS IN THE GAMES?! Not just the load/dump screens?!
I'm sick of paying to see/hear advertising.
The fact that Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Unreal Tournament, UT2k4, and several other games I can't remember off of the top of my head can interoperate SEAMLESSLY between the Mac and the PC is a Known Thing. Hell, Blizzard shipped an IPX installer for the Mac version of Starcraft so it could play with PCs Back In The Day.
:|
So, is it REALLY that hard? Obviously not. Someone at valve was smoking crack. Fuck, if it'll run on a Dreamcast, it'll definitely run on a Mac....
Almost beside the point, really- I'm so fucking sick of Mac gaming and the fact that I can't get a useable machine for less than 1600 that I'm most likely going to buy a PC early next year. Something about four times the horsepower of my mac.
Don't forget the co-owner bit. The Technical Director point is slightly misleading, as it's well known that he does a bit more than tell iD codemonkeys where they're going.
:P And I'm still deeply PISSED at Valve for nearly completing a Mac port and then whacking it and not releasing it. (I played Doom on a PC, having long since learned my lesson about gaming and the Mac. :P)
Regardless, I played the game, I liked it.
"looked damned pretty" and "left allot of open territory." ?!
Carmack's the graphics system programmer, not the game designer. If it looks damned pretty, then he did his job, and he did it damned well. If the game gets tedious or boring at times, well... that's not HIS fault in the least.
Out of a few thousand music tracks and a couple of hundred video files, I've come across approximately ONE ogg file. And it wasn't even straight audio- one of the video files I downloaded had an ogg audio track. It was fucking annoying, to put it mildly- I had to use mplayer. :P
Ogg is a lot like PNG was four years ago- fine in concept, but good luck getting the Great Unwashed to give a shit.
Difference is, it's 2004 and png is everwhere (albeit still shittily supported on everything, but support in some capacity is there), and ogg is... well, it isn't.
I've been using iTunes since 1.0- I'll be damned if I'm going to be bothered with a format it doesn't support out of the box!
Hey, you know monitors come in COLOR now, right?
There's "looking right" and there's "matching the fact I can't draw a straight line". Admittedly, I'm making my own obstacles here, but I try VERY hard to get my 3d material to match up with my line art and/or my digital materials. The goal for me is to avoid the OMFGCG reaction.
:P
:) Hopefully the software tools will reach a "Do What I MEAN" level before I'm too old to use them...
So far, I've been doing a fairly decent job of it, but I haven't been dealing with much material.... and there's the fact that my inking style is VERY uneven. Like, epileptic seizure kind of uneven.
Still.... the technique is GETTING there, and that makes me very happy.
Well, that means there's approximately two of us... :|
...albeit shittily in my case...
Pencilling, inking, and scanning is ultimately faster than diddling a 3d mesh into a render that's even close to what you have in your head. Not only that, but if you want, say.... variable line weight or a very specific style of hatching, you'll have pages of sequential art done by hand before you can get a single render to look right.
This stuff definitely has its uses, but it's never going to replace the traditional media, at least not completely.
Me, I draw all of my humanoids. Everything else is fair game for any other technique.
And it's technically gone with Java, but until Big Apps or games get a .Net port, and until there's a .Net runtime on other architectures.... what's the big deal?
The only reason I have to run windows or even get near it is 3d apps and games. And if they resurrected the PPC port of Windows NT (hello, NT 3.x! They killed it for a reason!), there's still no compelling reason for Discreet to port MAX. And Maya's already available for OS X.
.exes that would), you'd still have the hideous optimization problems that pretty much every PC game in the last three years suffers from. You can't upgrade a mac the same way you can upgrade a PC, and while half of the G4s and all the G5s might be able to run the OS and games decently, that's less than 10% of the userbase. :P
After that comes games, and I doubt any developer would compile two versions... hell, 95% of game developers don't even bother with ports to non-Windows OSsen on the SAME ARCH.
Assuming WinXP for PPC was released tomorrow and for some reason Doom 3 and Counterstrike and everything else ran on it (or released recompiled
Ultimately, people keep whining about how Apple Should Release OS X For x86 because they want to have their cake and eat it to- they want the nice OS and they want their games and their dirt cheap vending machine hardware.
Obviously, it's one or the other- cheap hardware decent games and shit OS, or a decent OS on moderately priced hardware with jack shit for games.
Personally, I want PPC binaries for games that have been ported to linux. Isn't portability one of the advantages of the system?
Sure, it's an added bonus- don't get me wrong. But there are those of us that feel like we're STUCK with the hardware and would LOVE to have ANYTHING cheaper and/or more expandable.
:P
I think SGI's a better example of The Hardware- intensely awesome 3d and visualization capabilities, but you never hear anyone talking about how SGI should port IRIX to x86.
I'm already a Mac user. I'm in that FUN bracket of having shit for credit and needing expandability to get anything done. I'm stuck on a dual g4 450, and for the price it would take me to buy a processor upgrade (dual 1.25 ghz- JUST SIX HUNDRED BUX!) I could buy a middlish PC with a decent video card.
:P
:|
Oh, and that PC is expandable, has more than two drive bays and one optical bay, and is stupidly cheaper to upgrade in terms of horsepower.
So if OS X on x86 were released and would run native OS X apps without recompiling* at the same speed as a g5 (or faster), yeah. I'd pick one up. I wouldn't completely SWITCH, because I still need Classic, and you can forget about that running on the PC.
People like me- Mac users who would jump the hardware boat for a cheaper, faster mac the SECOND they had the CHANCE- are why Apple will NEVER do this. EVER.
*It's NeXT. IT. CAN. DO. THIS. Or at least, it could.
Reality TV is about as cheap as infomercials and cooking shows, if not more so. Quality Programming, on the other hand, is a lot more expensive.
We've been told America Loves Reality TV when the Reality is that the networks LOVE it because it's PURE PROFIT.
Look at the problems with powerbook displays and iBook logic boards. Apple CAN'T compete on price so they HAVE to slash QUALITY to get even CLOSE.
:(
I own and admin a shitload of macs- ranging from a quadra 650 to G5s. The only macs I have that have BROKEN are one of the two G4s I admin, thirteen of the fifteen iMacs I admin, and BOTH of the G5s I admin (one blew a hard drive, the other the logic board and video card).
All my beige Macs are rock motherhumping solid. Never had a problem with any of them, ever. This candy colored aluminum crap, on the other hand, is- at BEST- consumer grade.
I created mine in September of 1997. So there. :p
That was waaaay before the microsoft buyout, back when they had the animated globe and the login/password and pretty much nothing else on the front page. Much nicer back then, imo. And mysteriously upgraded to 250 megs of disk sometime last week, if memory serves.
I use Safari and Firefox, because hey- there's shit Safari just fucks up on. Period.
:-| Hell, Safari has a ton of its own stupidities and neither Safari OR Firefox have a download manager that I like. :P
I think it's positively stupid that it's 2004 and there's no single Good Web Browser yet.
The number of people who WANT the ORIGINALS on DVD and are willing to track down laserdiscs, etceteras and actually do the work themselves to get a decent transfer of better movies.... yeah, that's loosely Fair Use. Problem is, there's one HELL of a market for The Original Trilogy on DVD. Probably BIGGER than for the current bastardized fuckstain that is the special edition.
Shit, I'd pay what the Short Bus version costs if I could just have the originals, remastered. Fuck interactive anything. I don't even need scene selections.
I want the originals. I refuse to pay for the sped editions, regardless of format, price, or extras. >:|
Dude, if I shoved a steaming pile of SHIT into my computer, I wouldn't expect to work.
And that's exactly what shit like this is. It ain't bad news for apple, it's bad news for the fuckwits who get suckered into buying trojan horse bullshit GARBAGE.
I spend a good chunk of several weeks of the year sitting on my ass doing not much of anything at work, which would suck ass if I didn't have linux to learn.
:P
:P
Underutilized employees are in all likelihood unnecesssary- which means they're a waste of money, right?
Fortunately, the variety of things I do adds up nicely- they'd need three different people to replace just me, so I'm cheaper. And I'm not the only one with occasional VAST GULFS of slack time. And I don't get training or any kind of tuition incentives. So I use that time to learn stuff, since it's the only way I'll be able to leverage myself out of this place.
Am I a Workaholic? Yes. Just not for the day job.
Yes, but Tron's actual CG footage was farmed out to every fledgling computer graphics house in the area.
TLS was rendered completely on a single Cray, and while some shots have a definite "atari" quality about them, some shots still hold their own, even today.
Yeah, Tron might have been first to market, but TLS was, imo, a whole hell of a lot cooler. TLS is why I went to Art School and why I have a degree in Computer Animation.
Of course, I spend my workdays subtitling video and being a linux bitch, but hey. That's the economy. A man can dream.
O_o
I find it amusing that the fact I've no piercings, tattos, brands, etc. and I've never died my hair actually puts me in the minority amongst the people I know.
Whenever the media gets down to or under a buck a disk.
:|
Company purchasers get twitchy when it comes to the raw cost of media for some reason. Bastards won't spring for tape drives, which are really what we need for the volume of data we have.