I agree with all you posted. I suspect (but not having really tried, it's pure speculation on my part) that having a complete combat simulator in software and then adding an "editorial console" on top to allow the DM to cheat would be very complex in terms of usability and would disrupt the game flow (even if the actual touching up of the results would be relatively rare).
What I think is that sometimes fudging rolls and changing things on the fly is almost automatic for a good DM, while having to change the results and propagate the effects back would be a bit cumbersome.
Example: an NPC Magic User casts some area effect spell (which I suppose would be shown to players, either with cool digital effects on the table, or at least with some text message). Now, if one of the PCs fails save and takes too much damage, do you ask the DM if he is ok with this before showing the results? How much of the "prerolled past" is the DM allowed to change?
Would this be a "change the rolled damage till the Ranger is safe"? And if this is the case what about NPCs and even opponents caught in the blast? Would they get back to life, too? What if you showed them getting burn to a crisp with an animation?
What if the only way to change the outcome requires the MU to fail the casting for some random motive?
Basically I see the tension between "let the system take care of the rolls" and "what if I want a different outcome for this specific result?" as something difficult to properly implement (the MS table thing is not the problem here, it's a conundrum for any computerized combat simulator, I am afraid) because a detailed combat turn in a RPG has lots of things happening, and changing the result would clash with lots of things the simulator has updated in its internal state, and makes things hard to properly edit.
Yes, sorry, I was a bit in a hurry and didn't add enough disclaimers to my post. I am answering to you but this goes for at least another couple of people who replied to my message.
Please understand that - of course - what I think is the "proper" way to play a RPG is just a matter of opinion and personal preference.
And when I say I "discussed it with people" I don't mean that everybody agreed, or that I managed to convince them of "the error of their ways", either.
I do take exception at considering RPGs in general games where you can "win" and therefore strict adherence to rules is not the proper way to go for me. But, obviously, it's my own opinion. Apologies if I didn't stress this enough in my post. The recent editions of D&D are very "tactical", I understand, so among the various different RPGs it may be the most suited for this kind of treatment, but I (personally, IMHO etc.) wouldn't find this kind of technology appealing for playing RPGs.
My god! Amazing! Who would have thought multitouch/surface technologies couuld be used for something like this! What's next, chess? ( joking, for the sarcasm impaired )
Actually, I don't find the technology very suitable for D&D and other role playing games (while it would be perfect for chess).
I have discussed this for ages with friends and strangers in forums. What people seem to miss is that a Role Playing Game is not a Wargame. It may have simulation elements, but it's - at its roots - a narrative game.
This means that at some point the Referee (or DM or whatever you call him/her) will want to "cheat", hopefully in favour of the players, or more specifically "in favour of a good story". Automated systems - especially combat automators - will therefore either have to be sidestepped or manually updated on the fly - especially to edit out irreversible results like a deadly wound for someone in the party, or killing a valuable NPC and so on.
A table automator makes things even worse: this kind of "cheating" would be even more blatant, and damage the game atmosphere.
So, to sum it up: if you want to automate tabletop games with rigid rules and heavy bookeeping, like wargames, it's probably great (apart from the fact it does not alleviate some specific problems like being able to see the other's player pieces, how to simulate fog-of-war and so on, unless you force players to take turns at the table).
If you want to participate in a shared narrative game (like I would say any RPG is, even those heavily influenced by wargames, like D&D) it's probably better to have a lighter set of rules, and allow the referee to edit things on the fly without having the players to necessarily spot any inconsistencies.
Although I'm still not sure what is mechanical or turkish about it. The Amazon part apparently refers to the fact that payment is made in way of credits to Amazon.com.
... In contrast an amazingly logical, super goddamn sticking-to-the-plot and really rigidly logical writing with plausible concepts and amazingly entertaining writing, nothing comes close to Asimov. I've read 2000 pages of his novels over the course of 2 months after discovering it recently. It is amazing, if you like Star Trek, go read Asimov. More originality in *any* two books of his than nearly half of TV sci-fi historh.
While you are assigning quotas, don't forget the "less characterization than a box of cereals".
I can not agree more. I started working with RDBMS on dBaseII in the early 80's....
Hate to nitpick, but if you are talking of the IBM product, I think you better say "DB2".
dBaseII was an Ashton-Tate product, originally conceived for CP/M. The dBase line introduced RELATIONAL functionalities only with DBase IV (and they allegedly never really worked).
I see two posts that talk about "serious deficiencies" in Sharepoint. Yet neither of them suggests a superior alternative. Please recommend what software package you would use in place of Sharepoint.
I am currently working on yet another Intranet Portal. This time it will be Liferay+Alfresco. Not sure if it will prove "a superior alternative" or just have a different set of limitations/problems. If you are interested drop me a line in a couple of months, maybe.
Can't vouch for the other poster, but in my case I wasn't saying that there are "superior alternatives" out there. It was just to point out that Sharepoint, on paper, looks like a great solution to a lot of problems. In reality, it isn't without lots of custom code, and the deployment phase looks overdesigned and buggy. It also shows a severe case of XMLitis without any practical advantage to show for it.
Note: I work for a large System Integrator company in my country and I have recently left a project which delivered a corporate intranet built on Sharepoint. The intranet has 3000 users, just so that you get a picture of what kind of systems I work on.
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples: - The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
Yet it is not a "proper" CMS. It fails spectacularly to provide a out-of-the-box solution for documents made of small sets of disparate files (ex.: a financial statement as.doc plus a pdf version and accompanying excel; in order to treat this set as a single identity you have to roll up your own custom implementation).
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
An interesting and flexible approach unless you want to build relationship among existing lists. Yes, you have "lookup" but it's fragile (good luck deploying a solution with lookup fields to different sites, for a start) and Sharepoint confines everything into non-communicating sites so if you need a list to centralize, say, a list of departments so that you can reuse it from other subsites... you have to write code for that.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
Didn't play much with it so I can't comment. If it does what it says on the box, it's nice.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
Forget about corporate homogeneous look&feel, or decent collaboration tools like forums, faq lists, or blogs, though. The stuff offered without resorting to third party solutions is pathetical.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
We used forums, mostly. They are horrible and very feature-limited.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
And forget setting up any meaningful relationship among the data unless you wrote code yourself.
Is it really fair to compare map-reading to calligraphy and roof-thatching?...
I study ShoDo, you insensitive clod!
Re:You can't win if you don't play
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 1
I do agree that LinkedIn is the best choice for a professional "net".
And yes, in Europe Xing may have its merits, too.
Forget about most of the rest (viadeo, etc.) and stay away from Facebook and the other "hobby/friends" network. Or better yet, don't stay away if you want to take part in that, but be careful not to mix the two aspects.
At best I think it could be interesting to use automated tools to verify that a ruleset can cover corner cases (by randomly or semi-sistematically try a large number of strategies) and or to help balance things, i.e., again, "playing" an enormous number of games to see if some resource/piece/characteristics is too costly or too cheap for the effect it has on the rest of the game.
In other words, automated playtesting. Which may still be near to impossible, but would benefit the gaming authors without devaluating their creativity and skill.
It allows you to do all you mentioned, except it places your files in Amazon Storage. So you pay a (incredibly small) fee for the storage and everytime you move files around.
Thanks a lot. Unfortunately she lives quite far from me so I have to focus on trying a few things on the next time we meet, and when problem arises I am usually not available to check out myself.
I'll dig deeper on the things you mentioned and I'll try to see what it works.
would you mind providing pointers? I am mostly on Mac at home and use XP at the office, but a friend of mine just got a new laptop with Vista and she is experiencing a lot of annoyances. Anything I could read to be able to help her to set it up correctly?
(We are talking a 2-core Acer with 4Gb of RAM, so not exactly low-end... and she gets freeze-ups when she can't launch new applications, and audio and video stuttering with MP3s and Youtube. Best cure is a reboot...)
I have been "playing" in SL since the end of 2005, and followed debates about the virtual economy in various forum(s).
Mapping Real World concepts on Second Life has proven to be a challenge. Most things we sort of consider as "given" about our lives (and which influence economy) don't even exist, or work as in sci-fi utopia (i.e.: Star Trek replicators, no illness, death, need for food etc.).
To actually define "value" in SL is a challenge. The most exquisite work of art can be copied by any hacker determined enough. Thriving social elements like live music or clubs could be wiped out by Linden Lab upgrading the software in an unexpected way, or by bugs being exploited...
One of the most interesting attempts I witnessed was a gentleman who wanted to create "bonds" linked to Real Life bonds which weren't tradeable outside of his own real world stock exchange. I.e. he would act as a proxy to operate on bonds not available to people without a specific licence and living outside of his country.
He had plenty of real life guarantees and seemed honest. The cost of buying even the smallest "Bond" was too high in the end, so I (and probably most other players) didn't take the risk to invest.
Being partly a game, and completely "virtual" makes prudent people wary of making big investments... and the not-so-prudent people are easy targets for all sorts of scams.
Most Mac users accept that each new OS X release will require more RAM to run than the last.
I have two "old" Macs. An Imac (end of 2005) and an iBook (April 2005). Both using PPC. Neither of them had max RAM (iBook is 768 Mb for example).
I installed Leopard on both 2 weeks ago. They work as before or even slightly better.
In my (admittedly limited experience) MacOSX does not requires extra RAM or more powerful CPUs to give acceptable performance when a new OS version is released.
I practice a martial art (Aikido / Iwama style) that includes staff and sword techniques.
The parent is completely correct. Without some sort of feedback when your weapon strikes your opponent's blade/weapon, this will feel odd, and probably affect the duels quite badly.
I stand corrected... in fact I don't remember having read anything from the authors you mentioned (and I agree that even this "worn out" device can still work well in the hands of a capable author...)
Well, it's a pretty standard "plot device". If you read any old (50's or so) Science Fiction, for example, it often has plenty of "world depicting" dialogue scenes, like if I invited you to my home and then started reciting "as you surely know, after WWII the world was split in two political/military groups..." and so on, adding some details about science stuff "... and the advance in microelectronics after Fagin..." to explain in a condensed form all the differences between the current "world" and the one the reader knows.
In order to add insult to injury, the role of "dumb creature who needs to get a lecture on the last decades of political and scientific advances" is usually reserved to female characters.
This literary device has been completely abandoned since the '80s, I think, and nowadays the author tends to throw the reader "in media res" and add details as the story moves along.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with all you posted. I suspect (but not having really tried, it's pure speculation on my part) that having a complete combat simulator in software and then adding an "editorial console" on top to allow the DM to cheat would be very complex in terms of usability and would disrupt the game flow (even if the actual touching up of the results would be relatively rare).
What I think is that sometimes fudging rolls and changing things on the fly is almost automatic for a good DM, while having to change the results and propagate the effects back would be a bit cumbersome.
Example: an NPC Magic User casts some area effect spell (which I suppose would be shown to players, either with cool digital effects on the table, or at least with some text message).
Now, if one of the PCs fails save and takes too much damage, do you ask the DM if he is ok with this before showing the results? How much of the "prerolled past" is the DM allowed to change?
Would this be a "change the rolled damage till the Ranger is safe"? And if this is the case what about NPCs and even opponents caught in the blast? Would they get back to life, too? What if you showed them getting burn to a crisp with an animation?
What if the only way to change the outcome requires the MU to fail the casting for some random motive?
Basically I see the tension between "let the system take care of the rolls" and "what if I want a different outcome for this specific result?" as something difficult to properly implement (the MS table thing is not the problem here, it's a conundrum for any computerized combat simulator, I am afraid) because a detailed combat turn in a RPG has lots of things happening, and changing the result would clash with lots of things the simulator has updated in its internal state, and makes things hard to properly edit.
Yes, sorry, I was a bit in a hurry and didn't add enough disclaimers to my post. I am answering to you but this goes for at least another couple of people who replied to my message.
Please understand that - of course - what I think is the "proper" way to play a RPG is just a matter of opinion and personal preference.
And when I say I "discussed it with people" I don't mean that everybody agreed, or that I managed to convince them of "the error of their ways", either.
I do take exception at considering RPGs in general games where you can "win" and therefore strict adherence to rules is not the proper way to go for me. But, obviously, it's my own opinion. Apologies if I didn't stress this enough in my post.
The recent editions of D&D are very "tactical", I understand, so among the various different RPGs it may be the most suited for this kind of treatment, but I (personally, IMHO etc.) wouldn't find this kind of technology appealing for playing RPGs.
My god! Amazing! Who would have thought multitouch/surface technologies couuld be used for something like this! What's next, chess?
( joking, for the sarcasm impaired )
Actually, I don't find the technology very suitable for D&D and other role playing games (while it would be perfect for chess).
I have discussed this for ages with friends and strangers in forums. What people seem to miss is that a Role Playing Game is not a Wargame. It may have simulation elements, but it's - at its roots - a narrative game.
This means that at some point the Referee (or DM or whatever you call him/her) will want to "cheat", hopefully in favour of the players, or more specifically "in favour of a good story". Automated systems - especially combat automators - will therefore either have to be sidestepped or manually updated on the fly - especially to edit out irreversible results like a deadly wound for someone in the party, or killing a valuable NPC and so on.
A table automator makes things even worse: this kind of "cheating" would be even more blatant, and damage the game atmosphere.
So, to sum it up: if you want to automate tabletop games with rigid rules and heavy bookeeping, like wargames, it's probably great (apart from the fact it does not alleviate some specific problems like being able to see the other's player pieces, how to simulate fog-of-war and so on, unless you force players to take turns at the table).
If you want to participate in a shared narrative game (like I would say any RPG is, even those heavily influenced by wargames, like D&D) it's probably better to have a lighter set of rules, and allow the referee to edit things on the fly without having the players to necessarily spot any inconsistencies.
...
Although I'm still not sure what is mechanical or turkish about it. The Amazon part apparently refers to the fact that payment is made in way of credits to Amazon.com.
Amazon got the name from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
You have achieved the proper balance of health and money when you can hold your breath for as long as it takes to make a dollar.
Interesting. Based on average pay for your country? Or your own income/salary? Or what?
I.e. how do you define "it takes X seconds to make a dollar"?
...
In contrast an amazingly logical, super goddamn sticking-to-the-plot and really rigidly logical writing with plausible concepts and amazingly entertaining writing, nothing comes close to Asimov. I've read 2000 pages of his novels over the course of 2 months after discovering it recently. It is amazing, if you like Star Trek, go read Asimov. More originality in *any* two books of his than nearly half of TV sci-fi historh.
While you are assigning quotas, don't forget the "less characterization than a box of cereals".
I think s/he is pointing at this: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/p/kit-pedler/mutant-59.htm
Can you spell "bad precedent"? I knew you could...
I see that name searches for unimportant people (like myself) don't put the Facebook, Netlog, Myspace, ... results on top anymore.
Progress!
You have pipl.com for that...
I can not agree more. I started working with RDBMS on dBaseII in the early 80's. ...
Hate to nitpick, but if you are talking of the IBM product, I think you better say "DB2".
dBaseII was an Ashton-Tate product, originally conceived for CP/M. The dBase line introduced RELATIONAL functionalities only with DBase IV (and they allegedly never really worked).
I see two posts that talk about "serious deficiencies" in Sharepoint. Yet neither of them suggests a superior alternative. Please recommend what software package you would use in place of Sharepoint.
I am currently working on yet another Intranet Portal. This time it will be Liferay+Alfresco. Not sure if it will prove "a superior alternative" or just have a different set of limitations/problems. If you are interested drop me a line in a couple of months, maybe.
Can't vouch for the other poster, but in my case I wasn't saying that there are "superior alternatives" out there. It was just to point out that Sharepoint, on paper, looks like a great solution to a lot of problems. In reality, it isn't without lots of custom code, and the deployment phase looks overdesigned and buggy. It also shows a severe case of XMLitis without any practical advantage to show for it.
Note: I work for a large System Integrator company in my country and I have recently left a project which delivered a corporate intranet built on Sharepoint. The intranet has 3000 users, just so that you get a picture of what kind of systems I work on.
It does a *lot* of things, all under the umbrella of web-based collaboration. Some examples:
- The document store (with optional versioning control) that you mentioned. This also includes the ability to add additional metadata to the files. For some special document types, you get a special type of library, like a picture gallery for images.
Yet it is not a "proper" CMS. It fails spectacularly to provide a out-of-the-box solution for documents made of small sets of disparate files (ex.: a financial statement as .doc plus a pdf version and accompanying excel; in order to treat this set as a single identity you have to roll up your own custom implementation).
- Lists - sort of like a web version of how business users tend to use Excel, although almost everything in SharePoint is a list at some level, including the document libraries.
An interesting and flexible approach unless you want to build relationship among existing lists. Yes, you have "lookup" but it's fragile (good luck deploying a solution with lookup fields to different sites, for a start) and Sharepoint confines everything into non-communicating sites so if you need a list to centralize, say, a list of departments so that you can reuse it from other subsites... you have to write code for that.
- A very powerful search engine that can index all of the content in SharePoint as well as other locations (file shares, Exchange public folders, other web sites). It has tons of Google-esque features like the ability to do "site:slashdot.org"-type syntax but e.g. instead of specifying a particular site, you can specify a particular metadata field to limit the search to. You can also heavily customize the back-end with lists of noise words, synonyms (e.g. specifying that if someone searches for "IBM", documents that contain "International Business Machines" should also be included), etc.
Didn't play much with it so I can't comment. If it does what it says on the box, it's nice.
- The whole thing is sort of a MySpace/Facebook for corporations. IE your users can throw together web content without actually knowing HTML, and can e.g. create simple applications vaguely similar to how Excel can.
Forget about corporate homogeneous look&feel, or decent collaboration tools like forums, faq lists, or blogs, though. The stuff offered without resorting to third party solutions is pathetical.
- From 2007 on, there are a number of specialized library types like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Note that the wiki support in particular is *very* limited compared to something like MediaWiki.
We used forums, mostly. They are horrible and very feature-limited.
- If you buy Enterprise SharePoint CALs for your users, you can make use of some incredibly powerful features like the Business Data Catalogue, which is an interface to SQL/ODBC/OLEDB data, and makes database content available as lists within SharePoint. So if you have e.g. an HR database sitting in Oracle, you can bring it (or at least the non-private data) into SharePoint for your users to use as a canonical version of that information (IE anything they use it for is automatically updated when the database is). Combine this with the Excel Services backend (which lets users set up Excel formulas and macros for online instead of local processing), and they can now make very powerful business web apps.
And forget setting up any meaningful relationship among the data unless you wrote code yourself.
Also, Sharepoint/Exchange integration has so
Is it really fair to compare map-reading to calligraphy and roof-thatching? ...
I study ShoDo, you insensitive clod!
I do agree that LinkedIn is the best choice for a professional "net".
And yes, in Europe Xing may have its merits, too.
Forget about most of the rest (viadeo, etc.) and stay away from Facebook and the other "hobby/friends" network. Or better yet, don't stay away if you want to take part in that, but be careful not to mix the two aspects.
I.e. not really likely, in my opinion.
At best I think it could be interesting to use automated tools to verify that a ruleset can cover corner cases (by randomly or semi-sistematically try a large number of strategies) and or to help balance things, i.e., again, "playing" an enormous number of games to see if some resource/piece/characteristics is too costly or too cheap for the effect it has on the rest of the game.
In other words, automated playtesting. Which may still be near to impossible, but would benefit the gaming authors without devaluating their creativity and skill.
I understand this is slightly different from what you described in the request, but I'd suggest (and maybe others did already) to have a look at:
http://www.jungledisk.com/
It allows you to do all you mentioned, except it places your files in Amazon Storage. So you pay a (incredibly small) fee for the storage and everytime you move files around.
Have a look.
Thanks a lot. Unfortunately she lives quite far from me so I have to focus on trying a few things on the next time we meet, and when problem arises I am usually not available to check out myself.
I'll dig deeper on the things you mentioned and I'll try to see what it works.
Thanks!
would you mind providing pointers? I am mostly on Mac at home and use XP at the office, but a friend of mine just got a new laptop with Vista and she is experiencing a lot of annoyances. Anything I could read to be able to help her to set it up correctly?
(We are talking a 2-core Acer with 4Gb of RAM, so not exactly low-end... and she gets freeze-ups when she can't launch new applications, and audio and video stuttering with MP3s and Youtube. Best cure is a reboot...)
TIA
Just out of curiosity, during the "DOS days", did you ever try Framework? If yes, what do you think of it?
I have been "playing" in SL since the end of 2005, and followed debates about the virtual economy in various forum(s).
Mapping Real World concepts on Second Life has proven to be a challenge. Most things we sort of consider as "given" about our lives (and which influence economy) don't even exist, or work as in sci-fi utopia (i.e.: Star Trek replicators, no illness, death, need for food etc.).
To actually define "value" in SL is a challenge. The most exquisite work of art can be copied by any hacker determined enough. Thriving social elements like live music or clubs could be wiped out by Linden Lab upgrading the software in an unexpected way, or by bugs being exploited...
One of the most interesting attempts I witnessed was a gentleman who wanted to create "bonds" linked to Real Life bonds which weren't tradeable outside of his own real world stock exchange. I.e. he would act as a proxy to operate on bonds not available to people without a specific licence and living outside of his country.
He had plenty of real life guarantees and seemed honest. The cost of buying even the smallest "Bond" was too high in the end, so I (and probably most other players) didn't take the risk to invest.
Being partly a game, and completely "virtual" makes prudent people wary of making big investments... and the not-so-prudent people are easy targets for all sorts of scams.
Most Mac users accept that each new OS X release will require more RAM to run than the last.
I have two "old" Macs. An Imac (end of 2005) and an iBook (April 2005). Both using PPC. Neither of them had max RAM (iBook is 768 Mb for example).
I installed Leopard on both 2 weeks ago. They work as before or even slightly better.
In my (admittedly limited experience) MacOSX does not requires extra RAM or more powerful CPUs to give acceptable performance when a new OS version is released.
In the past we have seen speculations about Google launching their own "gBrowser", somehow optimized for their own web-based applications.
Could Safari play that role? How do Gmail, the office suite and the other Google offerings work with it (on Windows)?
The parent is completely correct. Without some sort of feedback when your weapon strikes your opponent's blade/weapon, this will feel odd, and probably affect the duels quite badly.
I stand corrected... in fact I don't remember having read anything from the authors you mentioned (and I agree that even this "worn out" device can still work well in the hands of a capable author...)
Well, it's a pretty standard "plot device". If you read any old (50's or so) Science Fiction, for example, it often has plenty of "world depicting" dialogue scenes, like if I invited you to my home and then started reciting "as you surely know, after WWII the world was split in two political/military groups..." and so on, adding some details about science stuff "... and the advance in microelectronics after Fagin..." to explain in a condensed form all the differences between the current "world" and the one the reader knows.
In order to add insult to injury, the role of "dumb creature who needs to get a lecture on the last decades of political and scientific advances" is usually reserved to female characters.
This literary device has been completely abandoned since the '80s, I think, and nowadays the author tends to throw the reader "in media res" and add details as the story moves along.