Borda voting in action... that's my personal theory on how the "World Idol" thing went, every country placed the weird looking Norwegian guy second because they didn't think he'd win
R4 for the playstation had an interesting "b-side", on one disk they had a tech demo of the original ridge racer redone at 60fps, it was done to test the feasibility of doing a racing game on the playstation that could run at 60fps. It turns out they could but they wouldn't have enough resources to put in more than one car. Full Spectrum Warrior also included the prototype "military version" as a bonus.
I think why this isn't more common (including early tech demos) is that they are usually terribly buggy and there isn't enough time to fix them to meet quality control. The developers of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay had wanted to include the early prototype of the game as a bonus but they would have missed their deadline getting the bugs worked out.
The animation process doesn't use motion capturing or a physics engine or anything else that would further realism; it's old-school keyframe animation,
The animation you mentioned, Ryan, exclusively used old-school keyframe animation, even though it looks like it might be motion captured. Like I guess animators should go with whatever works.
Well at the beginning the lowest category is described as "<=24 Mb to >32 Mb", so extrapolating from that I would assume that "1 Gb to 1.5 Gb" means "<=1 Gb to >1.5 Gb".
I'd say a bit of both, like he was a multi-millionaire businessman before he started broadcast.com (selling MicroSolutions to Compuserve), and he's done okay with the Mavericks. The guy knows what he's doing.
Less of a fluke artist than that guy that started hotmail and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Usually the Sega Genesis game 'Herzog Zwei' is credited as being the beginning of the RTS genre, though it came out after Populous. Populous is more lumped in with the "god game" genre, like Sim City and Black & White.
anyway i found this article that goes over the history of RTS in detail.
Are you sure you're remembering the blockbuster version and not the tv version (alternate versions).
Blockbuster says they don't censor films, but they do refuse to carry NC-17 films until the studio cuts them (Bad Lieutenant, Crash) to an R-rated "blockbuster version". Since Silence of the Lambs was originally R I don't see why they would request an edited version.
While it's not censorship, I do think what blockbuster does is deceitful because their customers are unaware that several of the videos there have had parts removed. If blockbuster doesn't like a movie they shouldn't carry it, instead of carrying edited copies.
With the rare exception of a "Memento" here or a "Requiem For A Dream" there, you can limit your watching to only movies made prior to the late '80s without missing a single thing.
Funny you should mention Requiem For A Dream, originally that film was rated NC-17, which studios try to avoid because some theatres won't carry NC-17 films and some newspapers won't carry ads for them.
So what they did was release the film as unrated, with instructions for theatres not to allow anyone under 18 into the film. Since it wasn't technically an NC-17 film it was okay to show. Since then I think this loophole's been closed.
Anyway rating systems are messed up. Like foreign childrens films like "Billy Elliot" and "Whale Rider" get PG-13, and films with no sex or violence, just people talking, like "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" and "Before Sunrise" get an R rating because they used the word "fuck" more than twice. I don't get that, use the f word twice it's PG-13, three times it's an R. On the Bourne Identity commentary they said they had to carefully decide which character would get the alloted f word. I don't think language should even be a criteria, kids can see worse language in school libraries.
And what's up with Europeans get the uncut version of "Eyes Wide Shut" while the U.S. gets the family friendly R-rated version?
I'm not sure how the economics work specifically here, but if they end up selling twice as many songs at.49 cents than a dollar, then.49 cents is the better price, right?
1) OK, then... phone numbers are not trademarked. If I use my next door neighbor's phone number as the title of a book I should be OK, right? Probably up until I get sued for the cost of him changing his phone number and all associated costs. Imagine all the crank calls he'd receive at 3 am. This is why books and media started using 555 numbers.
Not just phone numbers but names and addresses. Usually media companies are careful to avoid this sort of thing, not just phone numbers but names and addresses. For instance the producers of Fight Club got permission to use the name Marla Singer from some woman named Marla Singer, to avoid getting sued. And Todd McFarlane is in a big court battle for using the name Tony Twist (a hockey player) for a character.
No one cares as much about the graphics quality, the omg lighting effects, the dark horror of the story...they care about fragging that bastard who just got the rocket pack you were headed for.
I vaguely recall an interview with someone at id saying the almost the same thing, that deathmatch FPS games had reached a plateau and most players play with a lot of the graphical settings off anyway (for example using 2d icons), so that was part of the reasoning for making a single player game.
Banks screw things up all the time, but at least you have receipts and records to help sort things out, they don't have the burden of keeping everything anonymous.
You can go doublecheck what you deposited last week but you can't (and shouldn't be able to) go back and doublecheck how you voted last week.
Cameras in games screw up in one of three ways. They can overcomplicate the game, they can become unfixed, or they can withold vital information at exactly the wrong time.
FPS/Side View cameras have very little of this; by their very nature, they tend to give all the information available in a scene.
I disagree, I've played a couple games that let you switch between first and third person perspectives (Theif III, The Suffering) and both were less frustrating in third person mode. The problem with first person is that you have less peripheral vision, you can't see what's around your character.
Stealth games are a lot less frustrating in third person. Some people like the challenge and immersion of playing the game in first person but I like being able to see what's happening around my character.
What the previous poster is referring to is the common "out-of-print clause" between writers and publishers. It's not a law, but it's common to many contracts. Basically if a publisher stops publishing a book after a certain period of time the copyright is suppossed to return to the author.
Yeah there used to be a page up for nowhere.com, where they would complain about their old IPX receiving about 80'000 emails a month. You can see the old page at archive.org.
Book prices have gone thru the roof in the past 10 years.
I hate this trend. The worst part is they're making the books bigger so they can charge more for them. Novels that aren't sci-fi or "genre", are rarely released in paperback, it's all in large trade paperback. The print isn't even much bigger, it's just thicker paper and more whitespace between the lines and in the margins.
For example, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, is only a bit longer than his preivous novel Strong Motion, but they made the trade paperback twice as big so they could charge twice as much for it. How am I suppossed to carry that around with me? And publishers have the gall to complain about rising paper prices.
Like I can understand if they want to charge more but I wish they wouldn't make the book so big and heavy, it's like they're punishing readers for slow book sales.
From the article: You're always fretfully observing your opponents. To get past a guard, you might spend five minutes just standing there, stock-still, spying on him to figure out his movements, the better to creep by.
Stealth games regularly force you to slow down, to observe, to go carefully. I spent over an hour going through the Theif III demo, if it was the type of game where I just had to go around and kill everyone, it probably would have taken me less than ten minutes.
The cynical part of me thinks stealth is popular with game developers because they can slow the player down and stretch a 5 hour game to 20+ hours.
I know that in 1994 you could get a 486 machine for word processing and if you could still easily get printer cartriges for printers made in 1994 I'm sure it would still be quite a usefull machine, but do you still see people using equipment that old?
Heh, I still have a HP Deskjet 500 from 1990 hooked up to my machine. They still sell cartridges for it. Alas I doubt they build printers as reliable as that anymore.
Retired my Pentium 90 six months ago (after replacing the floppy, cdrom, and hard drive over the years), it was still useful running Win95 with Opera and Trillian.
Yeah, it's too bad explorer doesn't support the CSS declaration position:fixed, (though you can get the same effect using a hack).
I'd guess that 90% of the time when you see frames on a page, the designer just wants to put up a sidebar that stays in the same spot on screen while the page scrolls. I'm surprised explorer is up to version 6 and it's still so complictated to put up a fixed sidebar.
You can have a theme while mostly avoiding politics.
I've noticed quite a few games have gone out of their way to treat politics in such an abstract sense as to render "right and wrong" meaingless. For example the old game "Balance of Power" fascinated me as a child in that it didn't delve into "good vs. evil". Your goal was give aid to countries that favour you and to aid insurgents in countries that oppose you. Whether the countries you were aiding were totalitarian or democratic was irrelevent, as was the political motivations of the insurgents (beyond being pro-U.S. or pro-USSR).
America's Army multiplayer also has an interesting approach, whatever side you play, you always see yourself as the "good guys".
It's sort of surprises me how many designers go for an entirely cyncial approach to politics in that there is no motivation for any side other than to "win".
What's the point DRMing in one market and not another - the Internet doesn't respect physical boundaries.
This'll have no effect on internet piracy, though i think the point may be to make it harder for regular people to burn a copy for a friend or to get people who use portable MP3 players to buy the album again from an online service.
The fact that they're doing it in some markets and not others probably means someone will be doing some research as to how it effects sales.
This is going to hurt gaming. We're already seeing shorter games and copied&pasted rooms simply because the effort to make those rooms is too high.
I don't think it'll be quite that bad. Nowadays you already have game designers making large levels that have to be subdivided into smaller levels with load screens in between, and things like textures and models start off as highly detailed but are reduced down significantly for the final game.
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Borda voting in action... that's my personal theory on how the "World Idol" thing went, every country placed the weird looking Norwegian guy second because they didn't think he'd win
I think why this isn't more common (including early tech demos) is that they are usually terribly buggy and there isn't enough time to fix them to meet quality control. The developers of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay had wanted to include the early prototype of the game as a bonus but they would have missed their deadline getting the bugs worked out.
The animation you mentioned, Ryan , exclusively used old-school keyframe animation, even though it looks like it might be motion captured. Like I guess animators should go with whatever works.
whoops, got all my <'s and >'s mixed up up... I meant ">=1 Gb to <1.5 Gb".
Well at the beginning the lowest category is described as "<=24 Mb to >32 Mb", so extrapolating from that I would assume that "1 Gb to 1.5 Gb" means "<=1 Gb to >1.5 Gb".
Jeesh, it's going to be in limited release in the U.S. on the 17th, why not just wait for it to hit theatres.
Less of a fluke artist than that guy that started hotmail and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
anyway i found this article that goes over the history of RTS in detail.
Blockbuster says they don't censor films, but they do refuse to carry NC-17 films until the studio cuts them (Bad Lieutenant, Crash) to an R-rated "blockbuster version". Since Silence of the Lambs was originally R I don't see why they would request an edited version.
While it's not censorship, I do think what blockbuster does is deceitful because their customers are unaware that several of the videos there have had parts removed. If blockbuster doesn't like a movie they shouldn't carry it, instead of carrying edited copies.
So what they did was release the film as unrated, with instructions for theatres not to allow anyone under 18 into the film. Since it wasn't technically an NC-17 film it was okay to show. Since then I think this loophole's been closed.
Anyway rating systems are messed up. Like foreign childrens films like "Billy Elliot" and "Whale Rider" get PG-13, and films with no sex or violence, just people talking, like "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" and "Before Sunrise" get an R rating because they used the word "fuck" more than twice. I don't get that, use the f word twice it's PG-13, three times it's an R. On the Bourne Identity commentary they said they had to carefully decide which character would get the alloted f word. I don't think language should even be a criteria, kids can see worse language in school libraries.
And what's up with Europeans get the uncut version of "Eyes Wide Shut" while the U.S. gets the family friendly R-rated version?
I'm not sure how the economics work specifically here, but if they end up selling twice as many songs at .49 cents than a dollar, then .49 cents is the better price, right?
Not just phone numbers but names and addresses. Usually media companies are careful to avoid this sort of thing, not just phone numbers but names and addresses. For instance the producers of Fight Club got permission to use the name Marla Singer from some woman named Marla Singer, to avoid getting sued. And Todd McFarlane is in a big court battle for using the name Tony Twist (a hockey player) for a character.
I vaguely recall an interview with someone at id saying the almost the same thing, that deathmatch FPS games had reached a plateau and most players play with a lot of the graphical settings off anyway (for example using 2d icons), so that was part of the reasoning for making a single player game.
You can go doublecheck what you deposited last week but you can't (and shouldn't be able to) go back and doublecheck how you voted last week.
FPS/Side View cameras have very little of this; by their very nature, they tend to give all the information available in a scene.
I disagree, I've played a couple games that let you switch between first and third person perspectives (Theif III, The Suffering) and both were less frustrating in third person mode. The problem with first person is that you have less peripheral vision, you can't see what's around your character.
Stealth games are a lot less frustrating in third person. Some people like the challenge and immersion of playing the game in first person but I like being able to see what's happening around my character.
How about "virus protected CD"? Sure it's still not technically a CD but it gets the point across.
What the previous poster is referring to is the common "out-of-print clause" between writers and publishers. It's not a law, but it's common to many contracts. Basically if a publisher stops publishing a book after a certain period of time the copyright is suppossed to return to the author.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/nowhere.com
I hate this trend. The worst part is they're making the books bigger so they can charge more for them. Novels that aren't sci-fi or "genre", are rarely released in paperback, it's all in large trade paperback. The print isn't even much bigger, it's just thicker paper and more whitespace between the lines and in the margins.
For example, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, is only a bit longer than his preivous novel Strong Motion, but they made the trade paperback twice as big so they could charge twice as much for it. How am I suppossed to carry that around with me? And publishers have the gall to complain about rising paper prices.
Like I can understand if they want to charge more but I wish they wouldn't make the book so big and heavy, it's like they're punishing readers for slow book sales.
Stealth games regularly force you to slow down, to observe, to go carefully. I spent over an hour going through the Theif III demo, if it was the type of game where I just had to go around and kill everyone, it probably would have taken me less than ten minutes.
The cynical part of me thinks stealth is popular with game developers because they can slow the player down and stretch a 5 hour game to 20+ hours.
Heh, I still have a HP Deskjet 500 from 1990 hooked up to my machine. They still sell cartridges for it. Alas I doubt they build printers as reliable as that anymore.
Retired my Pentium 90 six months ago (after replacing the floppy, cdrom, and hard drive over the years), it was still useful running Win95 with Opera and Trillian.
I'd guess that 90% of the time when you see frames on a page, the designer just wants to put up a sidebar that stays in the same spot on screen while the page scrolls. I'm surprised explorer is up to version 6 and it's still so complictated to put up a fixed sidebar.
I've noticed quite a few games have gone out of their way to treat politics in such an abstract sense as to render "right and wrong" meaingless. For example the old game "Balance of Power" fascinated me as a child in that it didn't delve into "good vs. evil". Your goal was give aid to countries that favour you and to aid insurgents in countries that oppose you. Whether the countries you were aiding were totalitarian or democratic was irrelevent, as was the political motivations of the insurgents (beyond being pro-U.S. or pro-USSR).
America's Army multiplayer also has an interesting approach, whatever side you play, you always see yourself as the "good guys".
It's sort of surprises me how many designers go for an entirely cyncial approach to politics in that there is no motivation for any side other than to "win".
This'll have no effect on internet piracy, though i think the point may be to make it harder for regular people to burn a copy for a friend or to get people who use portable MP3 players to buy the album again from an online service.
The fact that they're doing it in some markets and not others probably means someone will be doing some research as to how it effects sales.
I don't think it'll be quite that bad. Nowadays you already have game designers making large levels that have to be subdivided into smaller levels with load screens in between, and things like textures and models start off as highly detailed but are reduced down significantly for the final game.