The new originality on the original concept can improve upon the original concept, or hurt it.
If it improves upon it the original artist can utilize it.
If it drags it down, it can be dismissed.
The original artist observes his own work, and the work of the copy cats, creates a new work with the results of everything combined in mind.
Dare I say it, the amount of copy catting in FPS games creates better FPS games. I've seen ideas from arch rivals incorporated into each other games. Often this is better. Ocassionaly they incorporate one they should have ignored, but it will call come out in the wash.
BTW, your GK3 link requires a login. Is the for Gabriel Knight 3? I love that series! I love the Tex Murphey and Gabriel Knight style detective games. To bad that type of game is being assimulated with the unused bits being killed.
I'm not going over the whole thing, but I will give you an idea of where my mind is at. I see polygons going away for the most part. Future, I know, but I'm picturing 3D models being sculpted with curves that are expressed mathmaticaly. Instead of coloring 10,000 2D tiles why not have 1 object expressed as a formula that renders the entire object? This would allow it to scale tremendously, and if the output does require polygons (variable by the capabilities of the hardware) a driver or engine update could increase the end result rendered polygons. As long as old games are created with something vectorish they should be able to scale upwards quite well. Maybe there will be new features in the engine the old games wont use, but as long as the engine contains improved pieces that are compatible with the objects of the older engine it should work better.
For example take a MIDI file. I've played MIDI files on cheap hardware that sounds better than an ATARI 2600, but it still beeps, boops, and sounds electronic. I've played the same MIDI files through really good high end sound cards and pro-audio equipment and it sounds like a real instrument. Maybe thats a bad example, but the input source was the same.
It's perspective. I wouldn't say one was "better" than another just for the style.
My parents and my grandparents both love Tetris. They've even been known to play a classic 2D Mario game or two. My mom was even decent at some of the old 2D platformers.
I couldn't imagine giving grandpa a game that required 3D movement. My mom would get the hang of a couple, but not many. A 3D game that confined itself to 2D for all intents and purposes would work. Crack-attack is one such game that I play with in Linux. It requires 3D support, makes for some nice looking animations and effects but for all intents and purposes it's 2D.
You're both right. 2D has elements that can't be reproduced in 3D, unless it's 3D pretending to be 2D.
Games are starting to look simular even though vastly different. The reason for this? 3D
Think about it, back in the day you had single screen games. Everything took place on a single screen, and you had to move your sprites around to make a game happen in different and unique ways. Nobody would accuse PacMan being anything like Space Invaders but they each left you in control of a single sprite on a single screen. Eventually clones of nearly every good game happened, but it was new so it was overlooked.
Then came systems that could actually SCROLL their screens. You had Mario hopping around, you had 9,000 games that required moving right and beating up the bad guys (i.e. Double Dragon, Batman) and you had some zooming space ships. Zelda came along and was different, but before long that was coppied. So now we have scrolling games.
Eventually came true 3D. We are on a convergence. A big convergence. No longer is coding an engine from the ground up for each game a substainable buisness model, or even necessary. Compare Alice to Quake III. I would say they were remarkably different. Alice is a platformer, Quake III is a first person shooter. They both run on the same core engine.
Right now there are different 3D engines for different types of games, but there's becoming less of a reason to seperate engines between game types. It wont be long until one engine can be a first person shooter, a platformer, and a racing or flying game. I would venture to say it's already possible, Conkers Bad Fur day for example embraces all of these elements at one part of the game or another.
The reason this is percieved is the better 3D engines get, the more games are going to look alike reguardless of what core type it is.
As computers/consoles become more powerfull, have more RAM, and the engines become more refined the blurrier the line between game types becomes. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Sure, not every game has to be 3D, but we've crossed the threshold of the 3D age and theirs no going back.
The main difference I see between a racing game and a platformer? The racing game uses less detailed polygons because at high speeds it doesn't matter which leaves more memory for bigger worlds. A platformer moves slower and doesn't need as big of a world so more power is put into fine details.
How long will it be until a game comes out were the main character is able to interact with the environment on a platformer level, jump in a vehicle (or on a mount) and drive through the same world at high speeds with great detail? I can't put my finger on a particular example at the moment, but I'm sure it's already happened. Halo seems like a good example for now, UT2K4 is supposed to be simular.
Innovations not dead, reinventing the wheel on a regular basis is. Personally I'm hoping for incremental engine upgrades. Wouldn't it be nice if the UT2K3 engine would work with the game code from the orginal UT? I wouldn't mind the better rendering on the old game. Wouldn't it also be nice, if for some reason you haven't upgraded your game library for a year or so, then someone gives you a nice shiney new flight simulator for Christmas. You put the game in, decide it sucks, but all of the sudden since you got a game with an updated engine all your old games suddenly look better?
The day is coming. This convergence is a GOOD thing. Don't bitch about an empty gas tank when somebody GIVES you a car.
The Disk of Tron should be easy, but the original Tron could be a pain. What I REALLY want is someone to come up with a decent full size joystick setup so we can play Cybersled and T-Mech (my favorite) The name of the fighting mech game setup like this escapes my memory, but I liked it to.
They all seem to expire "at the end of session" so those don't seem to dangerous. Unfortunately it's what appears to be random data, probably keys or unique IDs. Just very poorly done considering the number of them and the fact it seems to send them again after idle time.
Did anyone else notice how many cookies RIAA sends
on
Freenet 0.5.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
just to read that article? I think they're starting their monitoring from their own site. I rejected them all, but I'm thinking about going back to read the content. If those cookies are trackable through ad sites..........
My educational advancement and creative ideas stopped shortly after I became teathered. Mine started before I was married. Something about someone being around nagging you about what you're doing, why you did what, what you're doing next and doing so over the phone when they're not around tends to do that.
Now that we have a kid the phone doesn't have to be there, if I have the kid while she's not around the kid substitutes that part, but don't think the phones not around for re-enforcement.
I do work with quite a few over 30 techs. One of them claims to not be a gamer (37). He avoids first person shooters, but he still plays a lot of classics, Atari style, 8-Bit Nintendo style and some text games. He plays a few newer 2-D title, but he's a gamer from what I've seen, just an old school gamer.
Another over 30 tech I work with has two of the new consoles (not gamecube) and can keep up with the best of us on the original UT, and does really well on Armagetron. Unfortunately things at work changed a couple of years ago so we really can't game much anymore.
All the other techs I know over 30 ARE gamers, just to various degrees, seems the younger 30s group will play 3D games but the later 30s people don't. This isn't an absolute, just typical. Most people I know over 40 get dizzy watching almost any 3D game, with noteable acceptions.
In my findings, at least in the tech field, hardcore gamers tend to fair better than non gamers. Hardcore gamers tend to know something about hardware and how to get the most out of it. Even when it's not strictly hardware, the hardcore gamers I've known have known enough to fix a multitude of network and other issues. You can't overclock and case mod sucessfully if you don't know your hardware.
That was the tech field. In other fields I find that casual gamers fair better in many cases than non-gamers or hardcore gamers (yes, hardcore gamers have their place). Face it. Gaming requires large amounts of abstract, or at least alternative thinking. I've found myself implementing the types of strategies I've used in video games to organize my work habbits. Item placements, order of operations, that sort of thing, all honed from video games. Hardcore gamers in other-than computer fields can do well, but based on what I've seen they don't work in other fields, and when they do it's usually flipping burgers or something until they can get another techie job.
I don't think I've worked with a single person on a job simular basis who wasn't at least a casual gamer since I've been in the tech field. I've only seen non-gamers in other fields, usually the ones that hired me to take care of their computers.
There was a boy at my old apartment complex who was mostly orphaned, he was being raised by his grandparents. He was well behind his age group at the age of 10 when it came to reading. Be it the Yorky I walked regularly, or the fact he liked checking out all the computer gear I worked on, he attached himself to me. It didn't take long for me to notice he could barely read. I got a pretty good handle on what the kid liked and I hooked him on two video games. I got him hooked on Illusion of Gaia for the SNES which required great amounts of reading admist quite a bit of overhead action. I also got him hooked on Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers on the PC (he didn't know it was capable of talking, and I turned the voices off). Granted, a somewhat scary adult targeted (and old) game, but considering his stacks of Playboys and scary movies okayed by his grandparents I deamed it acceptable in his case. After just two to three weeks his reading skills had more than doubled. He never compleated eaither game, but he did spent quite a few hours on each.
Later he found a 486 in the dumpster with Debian installed on it. Well, hated to do it, but I reformated the drive and put Win98 on it, after I gutted it and put a P166 in it. Hey, he was only 10 or 11 at the time. His grandma had heard all about ebay and wanted to check it out. Perfect! I worked for an ISP at the time. I spoke to my boss/CEO, he allowed no setup fee and the first six months free, I paid for the next six months after that. He knew that I was on IRC at work all day (it was part of my job), I showed him how to bring up the JAVA client (I had more control over that than a normal client would allow) and he chatted all day. At first it would take him serveral minutes to type a poorly spelled short sentance in the room, to the point you almost didn't realize he was there if you weren't looking for him. Within six months he could keep up.
It all started with video games.
Before I moved out of that complex his grandmother left a thank you letter under the windsheild wipper of my truck. It's framed and hanging in my computer loft at home now.
Two months ago I got married. That kid, now 16, was my best man.
Of course I did say it from the heart. I don't mention which Linux distro I would use on it, because that would start a distribution flame war, nor did I mention my desktop.
But just to anti-karma whore myself a bit, I currently use SuSE but am considering changing to eaither Debian or Slack, and I love my KDE and intend to stick with it. There, now I've just anti-karma whored but I upped the troll part.
Right now I run an older Dell Inspiron 5000. I run a rare model. It has a Celeron 450, most Inspiron 5000's had at least a PIII 500 or better, and I keep SuSE Linux 8.1 Pro on it.
Floppy drives should no longer be manufactured and all unused floppy disk should be placed in a large pile and burned. Exsisting floppy disk can be kept for archival purposes, but since they're floppies they should probably have their data transfered to something worth having it on.
I have to pay even more for a version of windows I don't want and will just fdisk away for a hardware upgrade. Wonderfull. Don't see an OS free option eaither, man MS has the manufactures by the balls on this. Looks like a great notebook to put mplayer and the Gimp on to.
As stated earlier, I think they could possibly have worked a 10 key number pad off to the side, that would have made a great addition to.
Give it a roll up LCD and a keyboard and you might even be able to fit the whole thing in a bag for portability.
RE: BG: There's no consideration of that at this
on
Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 1
Of course, that's if somebody cares enough about your bug to fix it...you might get stuck doing it your damn self.
At least with Linux, this IS an option.
Re:disabling RFIDs with mini-EMP?
on
RFID Explained
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· Score: 1
My thought is to get your own RFID reader/scanner and use it to pinpoint the location of the tag. Of course if it was dumped into the melted plastic while something was being molded or baked into the glass that would be somewhat difficult to remove. The tires for instance, if the RFID tags are actually between plys in the sidewall removal doesn't seem like such a good idea. EMP/microwave may be. My experience with manufactures is they're going to go out of their way to make it difficult to do things like this.
Re:disabling RFIDs with mini-EMP?
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
could work on stuff like jeans, tires and shoes, but are you going to EMP your new MP3 player? How about your new watch? Your PDA? Think of any other electronic device you might want to carry with you on the bus. Of course a notebook with Wi-Fi can track you by mac address (theoreticaly), and mobile phones already have GPS locators built in that the government can track you with. My Panasonic Duramax was on of the last phones made without it, and people (the phone company) are begining to call it dated.
Slashdot Mirror
This can be good and bad. Usually good.
I'm going to back that up now.
A game/idea that is mimicked is a good game/idea.
Copy cats usually introduce SOME originality.
The new originality on the original concept can improve upon the original concept, or hurt it.
If it improves upon it the original artist can utilize it.
If it drags it down, it can be dismissed.
The original artist observes his own work, and the work of the copy cats, creates a new work with the results of everything combined in mind.
Dare I say it, the amount of copy catting in FPS games creates better FPS games. I've seen ideas from arch rivals incorporated into each other games. Often this is better. Ocassionaly they incorporate one they should have ignored, but it will call come out in the wash.
BTW, your GK3 link requires a login. Is the for Gabriel Knight 3? I love that series! I love the Tex Murphey and Gabriel Knight style detective games. To bad that type of game is being assimulated with the unused bits being killed.
I'm not going over the whole thing, but I will give you an idea of where my mind is at. I see polygons going away for the most part. Future, I know, but I'm picturing 3D models being sculpted with curves that are expressed mathmaticaly. Instead of coloring 10,000 2D tiles why not have 1 object expressed as a formula that renders the entire object? This would allow it to scale tremendously, and if the output does require polygons (variable by the capabilities of the hardware) a driver or engine update could increase the end result rendered polygons. As long as old games are created with something vectorish they should be able to scale upwards quite well. Maybe there will be new features in the engine the old games wont use, but as long as the engine contains improved pieces that are compatible with the objects of the older engine it should work better.
For example take a MIDI file. I've played MIDI files on cheap hardware that sounds better than an ATARI 2600, but it still beeps, boops, and sounds electronic. I've played the same MIDI files through really good high end sound cards and pro-audio equipment and it sounds like a real instrument. Maybe thats a bad example, but the input source was the same.
It's perspective. I wouldn't say one was "better" than another just for the style.
My parents and my grandparents both love Tetris. They've even been known to play a classic 2D Mario game or two. My mom was even decent at some of the old 2D platformers.
I couldn't imagine giving grandpa a game that required 3D movement. My mom would get the hang of a couple, but not many. A 3D game that confined itself to 2D for all intents and purposes would work. Crack-attack is one such game that I play with in Linux. It requires 3D support, makes for some nice looking animations and effects but for all intents and purposes it's 2D.
You're both right. 2D has elements that can't be reproduced in 3D, unless it's 3D pretending to be 2D.
AHHH my head hurts.
Games are starting to look simular even though vastly different. The reason for this? 3D
Think about it, back in the day you had single screen games. Everything took place on a single screen, and you had to move your sprites around to make a game happen in different and unique ways. Nobody would accuse PacMan being anything like Space Invaders but they each left you in control of a single sprite on a single screen. Eventually clones of nearly every good game happened, but it was new so it was overlooked.
Then came systems that could actually SCROLL their screens. You had Mario hopping around, you had 9,000 games that required moving right and beating up the bad guys (i.e. Double Dragon, Batman) and you had some zooming space ships. Zelda came along and was different, but before long that was coppied. So now we have scrolling games.
Eventually came true 3D. We are on a convergence. A big convergence. No longer is coding an engine from the ground up for each game a substainable buisness model, or even necessary. Compare Alice to Quake III. I would say they were remarkably different. Alice is a platformer, Quake III is a first person shooter. They both run on the same core engine.
Right now there are different 3D engines for different types of games, but there's becoming less of a reason to seperate engines between game types. It wont be long until one engine can be a first person shooter, a platformer, and a racing or flying game. I would venture to say it's already possible, Conkers Bad Fur day for example embraces all of these elements at one part of the game or another.
The reason this is percieved is the better 3D engines get, the more games are going to look alike reguardless of what core type it is.
As computers/consoles become more powerfull, have more RAM, and the engines become more refined the blurrier the line between game types becomes. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Sure, not every game has to be 3D, but we've crossed the threshold of the 3D age and theirs no going back.
The main difference I see between a racing game and a platformer? The racing game uses less detailed polygons because at high speeds it doesn't matter which leaves more memory for bigger worlds. A platformer moves slower and doesn't need as big of a world so more power is put into fine details.
How long will it be until a game comes out were the main character is able to interact with the environment on a platformer level, jump in a vehicle (or on a mount) and drive through the same world at high speeds with great detail? I can't put my finger on a particular example at the moment, but I'm sure it's already happened. Halo seems like a good example for now, UT2K4 is supposed to be simular.
Innovations not dead, reinventing the wheel on a regular basis is. Personally I'm hoping for incremental engine upgrades. Wouldn't it be nice if the UT2K3 engine would work with the game code from the orginal UT? I wouldn't mind the better rendering on the old game. Wouldn't it also be nice, if for some reason you haven't upgraded your game library for a year or so, then someone gives you a nice shiney new flight simulator for Christmas. You put the game in, decide it sucks, but all of the sudden since you got a game with an updated engine all your old games suddenly look better?
The day is coming. This convergence is a GOOD thing. Don't bitch about an empty gas tank when somebody GIVES you a car.
The Disk of Tron should be easy, but the original Tron could be a pain. What I REALLY want is someone to come up with a decent full size joystick setup so we can play Cybersled and T-Mech (my favorite) The name of the fighting mech game setup like this escapes my memory, but I liked it to.
They all seem to expire "at the end of session" so those don't seem to dangerous. Unfortunately it's what appears to be random data, probably keys or unique IDs. Just very poorly done considering the number of them and the fact it seems to send them again after idle time.
oh well, have to check again later.
just to read that article? I think they're starting their monitoring from their own site. I rejected them all, but I'm thinking about going back to read the content. If those cookies are trackable through ad sites..........
My educational advancement and creative ideas stopped shortly after I became teathered. Mine started before I was married. Something about someone being around nagging you about what you're doing, why you did what, what you're doing next and doing so over the phone when they're not around tends to do that.
Now that we have a kid the phone doesn't have to be there, if I have the kid while she's not around the kid substitutes that part, but don't think the phones not around for re-enforcement.
Not mad,
I do work with quite a few over 30 techs. One of them claims to not be a gamer (37). He avoids first person shooters, but he still plays a lot of classics, Atari style, 8-Bit Nintendo style and some text games. He plays a few newer 2-D title, but he's a gamer from what I've seen, just an old school gamer.
Another over 30 tech I work with has two of the new consoles (not gamecube) and can keep up with the best of us on the original UT, and does really well on Armagetron. Unfortunately things at work changed a couple of years ago so we really can't game much anymore.
All the other techs I know over 30 ARE gamers, just to various degrees, seems the younger 30s group will play 3D games but the later 30s people don't. This isn't an absolute, just typical. Most people I know over 40 get dizzy watching almost any 3D game, with noteable acceptions.
In my findings, at least in the tech field, hardcore gamers tend to fair better than non gamers. Hardcore gamers tend to know something about hardware and how to get the most out of it. Even when it's not strictly hardware, the hardcore gamers I've known have known enough to fix a multitude of network and other issues. You can't overclock and case mod sucessfully if you don't know your hardware.
That was the tech field. In other fields I find that casual gamers fair better in many cases than non-gamers or hardcore gamers (yes, hardcore gamers have their place). Face it. Gaming requires large amounts of abstract, or at least alternative thinking. I've found myself implementing the types of strategies I've used in video games to organize my work habbits. Item placements, order of operations, that sort of thing, all honed from video games. Hardcore gamers in other-than computer fields can do well, but based on what I've seen they don't work in other fields, and when they do it's usually flipping burgers or something until they can get another techie job.
I don't think I've worked with a single person on a job simular basis who wasn't at least a casual gamer since I've been in the tech field. I've only seen non-gamers in other fields, usually the ones that hired me to take care of their computers.
There was a boy at my old apartment complex who was mostly orphaned, he was being raised by his grandparents. He was well behind his age group at the age of 10 when it came to reading. Be it the Yorky I walked regularly, or the fact he liked checking out all the computer gear I worked on, he attached himself to me. It didn't take long for me to notice he could barely read. I got a pretty good handle on what the kid liked and I hooked him on two video games. I got him hooked on Illusion of Gaia for the SNES which required great amounts of reading admist quite a bit of overhead action. I also got him hooked on Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers on the PC (he didn't know it was capable of talking, and I turned the voices off). Granted, a somewhat scary adult targeted (and old) game, but considering his stacks of Playboys and scary movies okayed by his grandparents I deamed it acceptable in his case. After just two to three weeks his reading skills had more than doubled. He never compleated eaither game, but he did spent quite a few hours on each.
Later he found a 486 in the dumpster with Debian installed on it. Well, hated to do it, but I reformated the drive and put Win98 on it, after I gutted it and put a P166 in it. Hey, he was only 10 or 11 at the time. His grandma had heard all about ebay and wanted to check it out. Perfect! I worked for an ISP at the time. I spoke to my boss/CEO, he allowed no setup fee and the first six months free, I paid for the next six months after that. He knew that I was on IRC at work all day (it was part of my job), I showed him how to bring up the JAVA client (I had more control over that than a normal client would allow) and he chatted all day. At first it would take him serveral minutes to type a poorly spelled short sentance in the room, to the point you almost didn't realize he was there if you weren't looking for him. Within six months he could keep up.
It all started with video games.
Before I moved out of that complex his grandmother left a thank you letter under the windsheild wipper of my truck. It's framed and hanging in my computer loft at home now.
Two months ago I got married. That kid, now 16, was my best man.
I'm sorry if I lessened the impact of your Beo-Wolf cluster joke by posting mine. I really am.
Hey everybody, I know of an A/C that needs a group hug!
Ungodly numbers of "Beo-Wolf" cluster jokes arriving now!
*Copy right of this T-Shirt in dispute, see SCO.com for details.
This shirt produced without patents, however Amazon has a few patents pending on the concept of printing T-Shirts.
then someone taps you on the back, do you have to stop, drop your pants, bend over and well, open wide?
I'm damn sure not buying one that says click here for goatse.cx
I wouldn't do that even under doctors orders.
Indeed
Of course I did say it from the heart. I don't mention which Linux distro I would use on it, because that would start a distribution flame war, nor did I mention my desktop.
But just to anti-karma whore myself a bit, I currently use SuSE but am considering changing to eaither Debian or Slack, and I love my KDE and intend to stick with it. There, now I've just anti-karma whored but I upped the troll part.
Right now I run an older Dell Inspiron 5000. I run a rare model. It has a Celeron 450, most Inspiron 5000's had at least a PIII 500 or better, and I keep SuSE Linux 8.1 Pro on it.
Now flame me, because now I asked for it.
Floppy drives should no longer be manufactured and all unused floppy disk should be placed in a large pile and burned. Exsisting floppy disk can be kept for archival purposes, but since they're floppies they should probably have their data transfered to something worth having it on.
Here's the starting point of a nice little rant on the subject.
I have to pay even more for a version of windows I don't want and will just fdisk away for a hardware upgrade. Wonderfull. Don't see an OS free option eaither, man MS has the manufactures by the balls on this. Looks like a great notebook to put mplayer and the Gimp on to.
As stated earlier, I think they could possibly have worked a 10 key number pad off to the side, that would have made a great addition to.
Give it a roll up LCD and a keyboard and you might even be able to fit the whole thing in a bag for portability.
Oh yeah?
Do codecs not count?
Don't worry, WINE will get what we want, but we mostly prefer our own stuff.
I hit reply on the Bill Gates on Linux story, not this one.
Oh yeah?
Do codecs not count?
Don't worry, WINE will get what we want, but we mostly prefer our own stuff.
Of course, that's if somebody cares enough about your bug to fix it...you might get stuck doing it your damn self.
At least with Linux, this IS an option.
My thought is to get your own RFID reader/scanner and use it to pinpoint the location of the tag. Of course if it was dumped into the melted plastic while something was being molded or baked into the glass that would be somewhat difficult to remove. The tires for instance, if the RFID tags are actually between plys in the sidewall removal doesn't seem like such a good idea. EMP/microwave may be. My experience with manufactures is they're going to go out of their way to make it difficult to do things like this.
could work on stuff like jeans, tires and shoes, but are you going to EMP your new MP3 player? How about your new watch? Your PDA? Think of any other electronic device you might want to carry with you on the bus. Of course a notebook with Wi-Fi can track you by mac address (theoreticaly), and mobile phones already have GPS locators built in that the government can track you with. My Panasonic Duramax was on of the last phones made without it, and people (the phone company) are begining to call it dated.