You can make a realistic flight sim, because you can make realistic flight sim controls. You can give the user the same physical feedback from a joystick... from a joystick. It can't be very realistic because you can't give the user the feeling of the plane reacting, but you can give the feeling of proper resistance from a joystick.
Sports, for instance, are far trickier. If you don't play sports, you might not know what I am talking about. There is no sport that is particularly complicated on the surface. Take tennis again. The sum total of the game is "hit ball in certain area." Not counting stamina, where the game gets difficult is the interface of the ball and the racquet.
First of all, if the game is well designed you'll be able to see your racquet in the game, along with the ball.
To start, let's look at depth perception. You will not find sucessful one-eyed tennis players. The reason should be simple enough. You cannot tell where the ball is, where the net is, or where the end line is to a great enough accuracy. You can see the ball and the racquet, but you cannot tell exactly where they need to meet. This is desperately important, because even small variations can cause very wild shots. Anyone without depth perception can tell you that is is dangerous to play certain sports, because your misperceptions can be large enough miss balls coming at your face completely.
On a 2D television you are doomed to the same lack of depth perception. You won't get hit in the face, but you will have difficulty hitting the ball at all, let alone with the same fine accuracy to make it useful.
There is more, but I'll stop there. The concept sounds simple, but there is a deceptive amount of information that needs to be present to make a truely realistic tennis game, and frankly, video games cannot give it to us. It is better to make a playable substitute like the example I gave a post ago, than to assume you can make the action of swinging work without the amount of information that make it work in real life.
Sure, you can't follow the ball from its origin to its point of impact on your controller (which represens your racket/bat/club) directly, but when you're using an analog stick and buttons to control the timing, location and direction of your swing, is the control really any less abstracted?
Depends.
Let's take a tennis game. If you keep the 3rd person view, you could tell when the ball is with respect to your character. You could pull the controller back and hit the ball. This is, however, the exact same mechanic that you see in current tennis games, only done with a different trigger. If you try to get cute and make a chopping motion a slice, an upswing a top spin, and a flat swing a flat shot, you suddenly are at the mercy of the interface. Where is the threshhold between the three? You have no way to tell.
Play Pac-Pix, you'll see what I mean. You need to draw arrows to defeat enemies. While practicing you can make one that meets the game's criteria every time, but when you are playing you must draw so quickly that you don't always meet the games threshhold for that gesture. There is nothing more frustrating than losing a game to the interface.
A first person tennis game would be unplayable, because you have no reference point for the ball. I've played a table tennis game like this at an arcade. I'm decent at table tennis, but I just stood waving at the screen, hoping it would finally register my motion. I need the game to show me where the ball is in relation to me hit it.
Simply substituting a button press for a wave isn't making the game better, but I think a tennis game would be better with the Revolution controller, and here's how.
The big problem with current tennis games is the method of aiming shots. The same stick you use to move, you use to direct the shot. This is difficult, especially for novices. With the Revolution controller you can run with the stick or the D-Pad, hit the shot with the buttons, and direct the shot by pointing where you want it to go.
Just because you can do something with the controller doesn't mean you should. Gestures are dangerous, because you are trying to trip thresholds that aren't clearly defined.
There are so many people still talking about gesture-based controls. I'm of the opinion that gestures will be the bane of game players for a while to come.
Swinging the controller for ball and raquet sports is not going to to work, because you have no reference point for the ball. I play table tennis, and I'm pretty good at it for an American. I have played an arcade table tennis game where you swing plastic raquets to hit the ball on screen, and it was unplayable. Why? There was no ball to hit. It ends up as yet another unintuitive indirect control method.
Don't even get me started on lifting the controller to jump and crap like that. I'm as excited about the Revolution as anyone, but there are going to be a heaping load of bad control schemes if developers convince themselves that they can sacrifice accuracy for "intuitive" gestures.
The New Tetris. No one remembers the New Tetris. I'm disappointed there are no 4x4 gold and silver blocks in this game. So much so, I'm on the fence about getting it.
If I prayed to God at night, I would say, "God? Please have Nintendo make another Pilotwings, and please kill that bastard Mr. Food. HE KEEPS MOCKING ME! Amen."
No, that was a second, separate promotional disc, bundled with Cubes sold at a certain time or given out free as part of Nintendo's loyalty program. The Wind Waker disc was a pre-order deal that included The Ocarina of Time and the Ocarina of Time Master Quest, a remix released for the 64DD in Japan.
Suicide does not have a significant effect on population. Not only that, most developed countries including Japan are having to deal with the prospect of a shrinking population. In fact, they call it their biggest problem.
The solution to the world's problems is never allowing people to suffer.
I can tell you the one thing I approve of in the Bush presidency:
Longer Daylight Saving Time starting in 2007.
Other than that, I can't say I've found anything to approve of. Of course, I was one of the 10% or so that disapproved of him right after 9/11, so you could say I'm rather hardcore in my disapproval of him.
Let's look at another fact. The employee was making $27K. I would break even here with that salary. I'm always of the opinion that the people you pay like shit should get a little leeway for the privlidege of paying them so little.
There is a difference between Mayor and Governor. No smoking in public buildings is a state law. Pataki would have signed that law. Now that I have lived with it for a couple of years, I have to say that it is a law I wholly endorse. I have asthema that can be aggrivated by cigarette smoke, and it makes breathe easier quite literally.
Honestly, group 1 had to clean up the messes of group 2. Customers were lied to, ignored, and sometimes abused. Those with a heart had to right what was wrong.
It takes a very good people manager to instil a culture of competitiveness while making sure that it doesn't get degenerated into a political dog-eat-dog culture. The first encourages employees to benchmark themselves against their (better) peers and helps them pull up their socks when they feel they're sliding.
No, it doesn't. If you make a fair system where everyone who does more gets more, you don't have a problem. When you make awards for only a certain number of people, you may do more, but still get the short end of the stick. What's worse? You have no idea how hard you'll have to work.
If you are a programmer working a 40+ hour week at a company, you likely can't compete with a jobless programmer. If you get something for your valuable effort based on how much you do or how important it is to the project, then you can walk away feeling appreciated for what work you could do. If not, you'll start to wonder why a big company like Apple couldn't do so. Where is your piece of the pie? You are not asking for more than you deserve, just the piece that was built on your back.
You have a valid point that all contributors should be rewarded and duly recognized. However, the key contributors also need to be rewarded more than the others, for that is the essence of meritocracy.
Whenever Open Source is involved with any Slashdot story, you get these fluffy, idealistic views of the world. Fine, you want to make a system based on merit? I won't stop you. At issue here is a very profitable company compensating the merits of only a very select few. This is not the fucking Red Cross. Why the hell should you give a profitable corporation your charity?
Let me tell you a story about a job I had. This job paid $8.50/hr and I spent my day on the phone blocking, unblocking, and collecting payments from the customers of a certain long distance company. The Company I worked for was in financial trouble, so they started cutting back actual pay increases in favor of contests.
The rules were simple. Produce more than every one else on the floor and get paid closer to what you were worth for that month. "Brilliance!" they must have thought. They could pay us less and increase production at the same time!
Immediately, the entire business fell into two camps:
1) People who decided it was futile to play this game. These people's morale was shattered, and as a result, their production decreased. 2) People who cheated to boost production, often leaving horrified customers in their wake, thus making it futile for anyone with a sense of ethics to play the game.
I do not like the "contest" style of compensation. I believe if Apple really wanted to do something, they should compensate every person who did good work for them. That would be fair. As it stands, for every chosen one, there will be many wringing their hands, angry that their hard work goes unappreciated and uncompensated.
Slashdot Mirror
You can make a realistic flight sim, because you can make realistic flight sim controls. You can give the user the same physical feedback from a joystick... from a joystick. It can't be very realistic because you can't give the user the feeling of the plane reacting, but you can give the feeling of proper resistance from a joystick.
Sports, for instance, are far trickier. If you don't play sports, you might not know what I am talking about. There is no sport that is particularly complicated on the surface. Take tennis again. The sum total of the game is "hit ball in certain area." Not counting stamina, where the game gets difficult is the interface of the ball and the racquet.
First of all, if the game is well designed you'll be able to see your racquet in the game, along with the ball.
To start, let's look at depth perception. You will not find sucessful one-eyed tennis players. The reason should be simple enough. You cannot tell where the ball is, where the net is, or where the end line is to a great enough accuracy. You can see the ball and the racquet, but you cannot tell exactly where they need to meet. This is desperately important, because even small variations can cause very wild shots. Anyone without depth perception can tell you that is is dangerous to play certain sports, because your misperceptions can be large enough miss balls coming at your face completely.
On a 2D television you are doomed to the same lack of depth perception. You won't get hit in the face, but you will have difficulty hitting the ball at all, let alone with the same fine accuracy to make it useful.
There is more, but I'll stop there. The concept sounds simple, but there is a deceptive amount of information that needs to be present to make a truely realistic tennis game, and frankly, video games cannot give it to us. It is better to make a playable substitute like the example I gave a post ago, than to assume you can make the action of swinging work without the amount of information that make it work in real life.
Sure, you can't follow the ball from its origin to its point of impact on your controller (which represens your racket/bat/club) directly, but when you're using an analog stick and buttons to control the timing, location and direction of your swing, is the control really any less abstracted?
Depends.
Let's take a tennis game. If you keep the 3rd person view, you could tell when the ball is with respect to your character. You could pull the controller back and hit the ball. This is, however, the exact same mechanic that you see in current tennis games, only done with a different trigger. If you try to get cute and make a chopping motion a slice, an upswing a top spin, and a flat swing a flat shot, you suddenly are at the mercy of the interface. Where is the threshhold between the three? You have no way to tell.
Play Pac-Pix, you'll see what I mean. You need to draw arrows to defeat enemies. While practicing you can make one that meets the game's criteria every time, but when you are playing you must draw so quickly that you don't always meet the games threshhold for that gesture. There is nothing more frustrating than losing a game to the interface.
A first person tennis game would be unplayable, because you have no reference point for the ball. I've played a table tennis game like this at an arcade. I'm decent at table tennis, but I just stood waving at the screen, hoping it would finally register my motion. I need the game to show me where the ball is in relation to me hit it.
Simply substituting a button press for a wave isn't making the game better, but I think a tennis game would be better with the Revolution controller, and here's how.
The big problem with current tennis games is the method of aiming shots. The same stick you use to move, you use to direct the shot. This is difficult, especially for novices. With the Revolution controller you can run with the stick or the D-Pad, hit the shot with the buttons, and direct the shot by pointing where you want it to go.
Just because you can do something with the controller doesn't mean you should. Gestures are dangerous, because you are trying to trip thresholds that aren't clearly defined.
There are so many people still talking about gesture-based controls. I'm of the opinion that gestures will be the bane of game players for a while to come.
Swinging the controller for ball and raquet sports is not going to to work, because you have no reference point for the ball. I play table tennis, and I'm pretty good at it for an American. I have played an arcade table tennis game where you swing plastic raquets to hit the ball on screen, and it was unplayable. Why? There was no ball to hit. It ends up as yet another unintuitive indirect control method.
Don't even get me started on lifting the controller to jump and crap like that. I'm as excited about the Revolution as anyone, but there are going to be a heaping load of bad control schemes if developers convince themselves that they can sacrifice accuracy for "intuitive" gestures.
Click on that link. That picture is not the Revolution controller I've seen. Has there just been a revision?
But that is 10 million DSs in Japan by year's end.
I've got a bad feeling this number leads to the audial equivalent of goatse.
You are way more mature than me. I asked them if there weren't any pretty missing white women they'd be better off covering.
That page was just a promo/placeholder until after this was posted.
Oh yeah, here is the offending ABC 6 website.
I love the picture of the evil pink DS with the subliminal dollar sign.
It airs tonight at 11 EST. Anyone in the Philadelphia area get ABC 6?
The New Tetris. No one remembers the New Tetris. I'm disappointed there are no 4x4 gold and silver blocks in this game. So much so, I'm on the fence about getting it.
If I prayed to God at night, I would say, "God? Please have Nintendo make another Pilotwings, and please kill that bastard Mr. Food. HE KEEPS MOCKING ME! Amen."
No, that was a second, separate promotional disc, bundled with Cubes sold at a certain time or given out free as part of Nintendo's loyalty program. The Wind Waker disc was a pre-order deal that included The Ocarina of Time and the Ocarina of Time Master Quest, a remix released for the 64DD in Japan.
You leave the Zappas out of it!
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Reel that back in.
Suicide does not have a significant effect on population. Not only that, most developed countries including Japan are having to deal with the prospect of a shrinking population. In fact, they call it their biggest problem.
The solution to the world's problems is never allowing people to suffer.
I can tell you the one thing I approve of in the Bush presidency:
Longer Daylight Saving Time starting in 2007.
Other than that, I can't say I've found anything to approve of. Of course, I was one of the 10% or so that disapproved of him right after 9/11, so you could say I'm rather hardcore in my disapproval of him.
Sadly, this is now how 75% of all companies act. (I made that number up, but it is a lot.)
Let's look at another fact. The employee was making $27K. I would break even here with that salary. I'm always of the opinion that the people you pay like shit should get a little leeway for the privlidege of paying them so little.
I hope the guy gets unemployment.
There is a difference between Mayor and Governor. No smoking in public buildings is a state law. Pataki would have signed that law. Now that I have lived with it for a couple of years, I have to say that it is a law I wholly endorse. I have asthema that can be aggrivated by cigarette smoke, and it makes breathe easier quite literally.
Honestly, group 1 had to clean up the messes of group 2. Customers were lied to, ignored, and sometimes abused. Those with a heart had to right what was wrong.
Sony announced pricing?!
No, no they didn't.
Yes, but what now? My point is there are a lot of people now who likely feel jilted.
Never mind that a profitable company like Apple not compensating everyone who does work for them is despicable.
Employers choose who gets to work for them. They don't just leave their doors open so anybody can walk in, do some work, and walk out with money.
This is, essentially, exactly what Apple did.
It takes a very good people manager to instil a culture of competitiveness while making sure that it doesn't get degenerated into a political dog-eat-dog culture. The first encourages employees to benchmark themselves against their (better) peers and helps them pull up their socks when they feel they're sliding.
No, it doesn't. If you make a fair system where everyone who does more gets more, you don't have a problem. When you make awards for only a certain number of people, you may do more, but still get the short end of the stick. What's worse? You have no idea how hard you'll have to work.
If you are a programmer working a 40+ hour week at a company, you likely can't compete with a jobless programmer. If you get something for your valuable effort based on how much you do or how important it is to the project, then you can walk away feeling appreciated for what work you could do. If not, you'll start to wonder why a big company like Apple couldn't do so. Where is your piece of the pie? You are not asking for more than you deserve, just the piece that was built on your back.
You have a valid point that all contributors should be rewarded and duly recognized. However, the key contributors also need to be rewarded more than the others, for that is the essence of meritocracy.
Whenever Open Source is involved with any Slashdot story, you get these fluffy, idealistic views of the world. Fine, you want to make a system based on merit? I won't stop you. At issue here is a very profitable company compensating the merits of only a very select few. This is not the fucking Red Cross. Why the hell should you give a profitable corporation your charity?
Good example?
Let me tell you a story about a job I had. This job paid $8.50/hr and I spent my day on the phone blocking, unblocking, and collecting payments from the customers of a certain long distance company. The Company I worked for was in financial trouble, so they started cutting back actual pay increases in favor of contests.
The rules were simple. Produce more than every one else on the floor and get paid closer to what you were worth for that month. "Brilliance!" they must have thought. They could pay us less and increase production at the same time!
Immediately, the entire business fell into two camps:
1) People who decided it was futile to play this game. These people's morale was shattered, and as a result, their production decreased.
2) People who cheated to boost production, often leaving horrified customers in their wake, thus making it futile for anyone with a sense of ethics to play the game.
I do not like the "contest" style of compensation. I believe if Apple really wanted to do something, they should compensate every person who did good work for them. That would be fair. As it stands, for every chosen one, there will be many wringing their hands, angry that their hard work goes unappreciated and uncompensated.