it was more like nintendo broke the lynxs neck...
the devs showed the lynx to bign - they refused to distribute it and then basically brought out the gameboy which broke the neck of lynx because it came out the same time and didnt have shortage problems.
the other thing is the titles, nintendo could rely on more third party devs than epyx/atari
Well, I cannot speak for the USA but over here in Europa the Amiga was highly successful. It basically was a worthy successor to the C64.
It slowly became obsolete once the PC graphics started to surpass the possibilities the amiga had.
Actually this will be one of the major turning pointsw of the current patent laws...
Currently we have the situation that one entity-the US tries to enforce its already broken patent system on the rest of the world, which complies as long as they can gain am advantage.
All it takes is one major entity, china, eu, australia, even japan, to break out of the system and all the artificial patent barriers crumble within a short period of time.
Artificial systems only can work as long as the people are willing to carry them. Even the english or US landgrabbing would not have worked if it was not carried by a majority of people, or lets say tolerated.
The indians for instance had the disadvantage of almost no technology less people, although some of the tribes were socially more advanced that 19th century USA.
They can be applied as long as our system here in earth is like that.
Lets assume a little sci fi. Humanity runs into a new langrabbing phase, this time in space.
As soon as they run into a superior alien race there is a high chance, that
a)Either humanity gets their asses kicked and the laws and laywers go down with the rest of the system
b) humanity adapts to the race and therefore stops landgrabbing, there goes capitalism as well in the long term
These kind of things only can be applied as long as we run into no or technically and socially less developed civilizations. Therefore landgrabbing might be possible in our own solar system but can proof fatal in the long term future.
Im pretty confident that a socially higher developed civilization would see our system of landgrabbing lawyers primitive and would try to influence us in the long term to get rid of it, onw way or the other.
(The indians were socially much more advanced in this regard, but did not have the technical means to defend their points)
Actually the original NWN (Without the expansions) was ok but nothing to rave bout.
There were several important issues.
a) The whole thing had a lego like feeling
b) the dreaded camera angle, if bioware had it unlocked fully as it is now the game would have looked and felt much better
c) the original campaign was a mediocre game
As for better RPGs, many rpgs you mentioned being the best suck badly. I especially hate the final fantasies, this is role playing on rails which does not leave you choices.
If you want to have really good role playing go for Ultima 4-7, the Underworlds, System Shock, Arx Fatalis and Gothic 1+2 (probably one of the best RPG series ever, highly underrated by the critics outside of germany)
During a high school internship. Fascinating machine. Back then, I think it was around 84 or 85, this machine served around 5 people on plain text terminals, and as soon as you started an integrated pascal compiler everybody complained that the machine was slow as a dog.
Needless to say, that the pascal compiler was slower than Turbo pascal on a normal PC (given the recursive descension nature of turbo pascal no wonder, although the pc was myriads slower)
But one thing I never saw with this machine, it never fell, and the multi language binaries, as far as I can remember where you could hook different languages easily together were really nifty.
No wonder the company used this machine mainly for development and holding customer data, this beast was as solid as a machine could get.
Swing starts to become slow as soon as it has to bypass the hardware acceleration functions entirely.
Even using volatile images for double buffering in java2d can help immensely once the volatile images can be handled by the graphics adapter.
You could see that in windows with the speed increase once you moved from jdk 1.3 to 1.4 it almost was five times faster.
Alas the unix version was a little bit behind because using backbuffers and directly using the graphics cards ram is not that trivial in plain X, you have to bypass X or go the OpenGL route.
Newere JDKs (1.4.2 rc1 from blackdown and 1.5 from Sun go that route)
Ahem... Fox routes to opengl and does not use something cpu intensive, it basically does only boxes and lines nothing more.
As for wxWidgeds (formerly wxWindows) this is just a meta library depending on an underlying toolkit.
It is comparable to SWT in this regard.
If the underlying toolkit is fast then SWT or wxWidgets is fast, if not, then nothing can help.
The funny thing is, that in the latest Blackdown JDK inkarnations (blackdown 1.4.2 - RC1) there seems to be some similar mechanism installed the drawing is heavily accelerated, the result, Swing is faster than GTK2 on my machine in Linux.
The rendering speed of a gui library is always heavily dependend on the fact whether a hardware accelerator can be used or not. The speed of the language is secondary in this regard. In Windows Swing became fast the time the started to use DirectX...
Expect similar effects for GTK2 and other toolkits once they start to use Cairo and cairo is rooted directly into opengl.
Ok giving that I havent used OODBs in years. There used to be a OODB standard, the ODMG standard for java. Believe me the standard was disastrous. Missing standardization left and right, no conrol over the object scope, now handling of mass data on a sane level, the OQL was not really good for real world purposes etc...
There were implementations of this standard, but you ended up always with code only geared to one OODB.
Most java programs nowadays use OODB-RDB mappers, I assume Zope does the same. There are excellent ones, like Hibernate (which basically solves every problem the ODMG back than didnt)
give one of these a try. Sun also comes out with something, done by former ODMG people, JDO, I dont know how this one stacks up to Hibernate, but I assume there arent too many mappers which come close to it or can surpass it.
The third one I know is Torque from the Apache Projekt, mediocre at its best.
The EJB also do this to a certain degree because part of their layer is direct object database mapping, but in my opinion they are total overkill.
Since my posting was moderated as a flamebait. Following, to be mor precise.
Reiser4 offers a clean all tree based structure, with everthing handled as files, every file can store metadata, add to that an indexing mechanism and you are way beyound WinFS, which still basically is an NTFS with a btree index for metadata added.
I see nothing in this article which justifies another filesystem development, because Reiser4 is the most advanced filesystem currently on commodity level.
Another issue is how fast the tools and desktops can integrate those features. This goes pretty much for everything except DRM in longhorn, there is already a solution in linux available or will be within this year.
It seems to be that google with their huge cluster from my point of the world is fast as ever (europe that is)
I think personally the problems are caused by the lines of certain providers which seem to give in.
Google works as fast as ever.
You hit the nail on the hand there are certain parts which are only machine readable.
AcceleratedX does it the right way, sort of, it has a nice config program which lets you adjust the whole thing easily and then it has a simplistic config file.
The way X-Free should go...
Split everything apart.
99.999% of the users dont really need refresh line settings and other stuff.
Add a good config program which works both on the command line with ncurses and graphically and add a separate config file with the more complicated stuff, which almost nobody touches anyway (and add warnings to that) and you are basically set.
The first part being a clear prince of persia rip off, the game play only has changed to the worse (more shooting) in the sequels.
There has to be a significant change in gameplay.
First of all reduce the lever puzzles, add real puzzles.
Add more stealth instead of acrobacy. I think a Thief approach could work for Tomb Raider as well.
Add a decent storyline and NPCs which are more than cannon fodder, and you are set.
I think Tomb Raider could be developed into something like a present deus ex, thief, if done well.
Actually no, japan was once the biggest single market from a country perspective, except for the us (with germany being in the third place)
But even back then this view was immensely wrong. You cant really go for country by country with those numbers.
Europe at least the western european part of the EU is basically one single cultural entity and (except for localisations to two or three countries) also economywise.
Now given the fact that the japanese market is a little bit bigger than the german market. Japan basically falls flat in sales compared to the EU or even the western part of the EU. Also countries like China or generally the whole souteast asian region are or will be more important than japan alone.
Therefore japanese numbers are mere nice marketing numbers for historical reasons (i dont have any clue why this bull**** ever was started, but the sales figures of japan are not really that significant on a worldwide scale to give japan the credits it gets currently.
I dont really know (and I dont like Microsoft at all) why it is, that a console which fails in japan is considered to be a failure. It doesnt have to be given the percentage of japanese sales compared to the bigger and stronger economical zones. Must be a remnant of the eighties, where japan basically was considered to be the only economic superpower besides the US.
Times have changed but journalists simply havent recognized it yet.
Well there were two reasons why Sony won over Nintendo back then.
They used CDs
Due to the fact they used CDs people could
copy their games much easier than Nintendos, so they reached a critical mass earlier and then the thing became a self seller with the non educated masses (who really buy the games)
If Microsoft was smart they should learn a lesson from that. They used the same tactics in the eighties and early nineties to get rid of competition like Borland and Lotus.
Actually I think Japan is rated more important than it really is.
Its main market is slightly bigger than germany alone.
There is only one fact why it is important. Japan has many game studios and is looked up upon for historical reasons.
The big markets currently are probably US, the EU as a whole (face it economically the EU is a single country) and China, with India probably as an emerging market.
Japan from a non producer perspective is small compared to those markets.
The fact why there are so many successful japanes game companies has two sides. Face it US corporations usually produce lots of rather lousy non intuive sequels, whereas japanes companies used to go for the riskier sides and didnt rely entirely on sequels and shooters. But the situation changes currently with more and more sequels to sequel being released by them also.
The other thing is, from the middle of the 80s til Microsofts attempt, there has not been a single successful console which was not japanese. So we have japanese manufacturers holding a tight grip on what games are released and we have game producers who want to enter the market. Guess who has an advantage?
What workaround cruft do you mean?
As for the bindings, not a big deal, as long as you stay in a oo context a binding is possible and there are bindings for many languages alreaday available.
My dear friend, what you basically dont believe in is coincidence. You need a time machine to actually be able to plant certain waypoints into history, so that you influence with a slight mockery history. And if you do that, you still cannot know if you dont screw everthing up unless you are able to calculate an infinite number of possible outcomes back to the certain waypoint which you can influence.
(Quite philsophical question, I must say)
To my knowledge there is only one being in the world being able to do that, God.
And what happens is what we call coincidence.
And yes I believe, that humanity is pushed towards a certain goal (and that is to reach the end of violence, unless we wanna die out as a species), but not by a bunch of whackos, who simply have oversite of present and future and push humanity themselves, with a technology nobody has seen except proably a few schizophrenic people, and with the knowledge of lost civilizations where remnant never could have been found, wheras remnants of nomadic tribes of the estimated time can be found all over the place people call earth.
Lets take the god argument outside, you know that in chaos theory every order can be pushed by a certain parameter into chaos and out of chaos a new order arises.
So what happens there is, that out of possibly thousands of antisemitic mockeries at the late 19th century one was suitable for Hitler to reach his goals of mass extinction. That being coincidentally the zion protocols. The Zion protocols were more an excuse than a reason.
If that would not have been enough, Hitler maybe would have blamed the weather. Like 16th century protestantic and catholic church did, during the witch trials. If somebody wants to kill somebody he will always find an excuse to justify the killing.
Says who... modern archeology...
the earliest writings can be found in mesopotamia and india both around 5000 years ago.
And as for the other thing, civlizations rise and fall, thats true, most of this stuff gets whiped out by the time. But only most of this stuff, you still can find stomehammers dating back 10.000 and more years you still can find wallpaintings dating back thousands of years.
But what you cannot find is writings pretty much ealier than 5000 years.
Part of this probably was caused by the fact, that 10.000 years ago the last ice age stopped and opened room for humanity to konquer new lands, thus the critical mass of people for development of new civilizations could be reached a while after that.
But given the fact that remnants of modern technology are much more durable (aka trash and other stuff) than old material used in mesopotamia and other places, and yet you still stumble over this stuff all over the place, leaves little room for a sophisticated advanced civilization during ice age time and before.
Like so many conspiracy theorists want us to believe.
During the ice age time, most of humanity had other problems than building up civilizations.
There is no deep knowledge beneath anything.
Modern civilization has risen somewhat around 5000 years ago, that is the ealiest of writings which have been found on the planet.
Lets take the theories seriously.
If you go to an advanced civlization which could have lived around the ice age in currently tropic regions. Lets say that they even were able to do metalworks in an advanced stage, you basically should be able to find writings remnants of their works and other things scattered all over the place or at least in the surrounding of the civilization sites.
Lets go even further and the civilizations have been equally or more advanced than ours 200 years ago, you should find remmants all over the world.
the only even remotely thing plausible could be some kind of meta civilization around 5000-6000 years ago, which went under in some kind of catastrophe and triggered some kind of civilization rise all over the world.
But given what happened when Byzantion went under with Europe, this meta civilization probably had only reached a status of minor metalworks knowledge and handwriting knowledge at that time. Otherwise, civilizations like Babylon would have gotten a severe headstart of a few thousand years of development.
So there is no base at all for secret societies, which keep knowledge far advanced to ours under the hood somewhere and who want to push humanity into a certain direction.
My dear friend if you read some of those so called secret books some of those societies use and check the times those societies were founded. You come to the conclusion that some of them originated from the late 16th century, where science, hoax and the middle age knowledge were close to each other.
lots of those so called conspiracy theories usually originate from hoaxes, for instance, the Zion protocols originate from a hatred pamphlet or a a hoax originating in a late 19th century publication. Over the years the hoax became a conspiracy theory, and Hitler took them as one of the cornerstones of the justification of the Holocaust.
Conspiracy theories have several things in common,
a) There is this secret society which basically tries to force humanity into a direction
b) Normal people cannot interfere with their works
c) They have powers unknown to humankind
not matter which theory you take, you always run into these three cornerstones,
a) being it the jews in the zion protocols
b) being it the illuminati
c) being it the aliens
d) being it doctors in a schizophrenic mind
e) being it secret agents or whoemver
g) being it whatever just perfectly fits into the day
If you read some of those so called secret books of those early societies, you run into many hoaxes which sound interesting from a 16th 17th 18th and 19th century standpoint but can be proven totally wrong with modern knowledge.
Those books are not that secret and can be found, but they were one cornerstones of those elite societies because the most important cornerstone always was and until now is, myths and weird traditions.
Slashdot Mirror
it was more like nintendo broke the lynxs neck... the devs showed the lynx to bign - they refused to distribute it and then basically brought out the gameboy which broke the neck of lynx because it came out the same time and didnt have shortage problems. the other thing is the titles, nintendo could rely on more third party devs than epyx/atari
Well, I cannot speak for the USA but over here in Europa the Amiga was highly successful. It basically was a worthy successor to the C64. It slowly became obsolete once the PC graphics started to surpass the possibilities the amiga had.
Actually this will be one of the major turning pointsw of the current patent laws... Currently we have the situation that one entity-the US tries to enforce its already broken patent system on the rest of the world, which complies as long as they can gain am advantage. All it takes is one major entity, china, eu, australia, even japan, to break out of the system and all the artificial patent barriers crumble within a short period of time. Artificial systems only can work as long as the people are willing to carry them. Even the english or US landgrabbing would not have worked if it was not carried by a majority of people, or lets say tolerated. The indians for instance had the disadvantage of almost no technology less people, although some of the tribes were socially more advanced that 19th century USA.
a)Either humanity gets their asses kicked and the laws and laywers go down with the rest of the system
b) humanity adapts to the race and therefore stops landgrabbing, there goes capitalism as well in the long term These kind of things only can be applied as long as we run into no or technically and socially less developed civilizations. Therefore landgrabbing might be possible in our own solar system but can proof fatal in the long term future. Im pretty confident that a socially higher developed civilization would see our system of landgrabbing lawyers primitive and would try to influence us in the long term to get rid of it, onw way or the other. (The indians were socially much more advanced in this regard, but did not have the technical means to defend their points)
Actually the original NWN (Without the expansions) was ok but nothing to rave bout. There were several important issues. a) The whole thing had a lego like feeling b) the dreaded camera angle, if bioware had it unlocked fully as it is now the game would have looked and felt much better c) the original campaign was a mediocre game As for better RPGs, many rpgs you mentioned being the best suck badly. I especially hate the final fantasies, this is role playing on rails which does not leave you choices. If you want to have really good role playing go for Ultima 4-7, the Underworlds, System Shock, Arx Fatalis and Gothic 1+2 (probably one of the best RPG series ever, highly underrated by the critics outside of germany)
America has given up its freedom for a false sense of security...
During a high school internship. Fascinating machine. Back then, I think it was around 84 or 85, this machine served around 5 people on plain text terminals, and as soon as you started an integrated pascal compiler everybody complained that the machine was slow as a dog. Needless to say, that the pascal compiler was slower than Turbo pascal on a normal PC (given the recursive descension nature of turbo pascal no wonder, although the pc was myriads slower) But one thing I never saw with this machine, it never fell, and the multi language binaries, as far as I can remember where you could hook different languages easily together were really nifty. No wonder the company used this machine mainly for development and holding customer data, this beast was as solid as a machine could get.
Swing starts to become slow as soon as it has to bypass the hardware acceleration functions entirely. Even using volatile images for double buffering in java2d can help immensely once the volatile images can be handled by the graphics adapter. You could see that in windows with the speed increase once you moved from jdk 1.3 to 1.4 it almost was five times faster. Alas the unix version was a little bit behind because using backbuffers and directly using the graphics cards ram is not that trivial in plain X, you have to bypass X or go the OpenGL route. Newere JDKs (1.4.2 rc1 from blackdown and 1.5 from Sun go that route)
Ahem... Fox routes to opengl and does not use something cpu intensive, it basically does only boxes and lines nothing more. As for wxWidgeds (formerly wxWindows) this is just a meta library depending on an underlying toolkit. It is comparable to SWT in this regard. If the underlying toolkit is fast then SWT or wxWidgets is fast, if not, then nothing can help. The funny thing is, that in the latest Blackdown JDK inkarnations (blackdown 1.4.2 - RC1) there seems to be some similar mechanism installed the drawing is heavily accelerated, the result, Swing is faster than GTK2 on my machine in Linux. The rendering speed of a gui library is always heavily dependend on the fact whether a hardware accelerator can be used or not. The speed of the language is secondary in this regard. In Windows Swing became fast the time the started to use DirectX... Expect similar effects for GTK2 and other toolkits once they start to use Cairo and cairo is rooted directly into opengl.
Ok giving that I havent used OODBs in years. There used to be a OODB standard, the ODMG standard for java. Believe me the standard was disastrous. Missing standardization left and right, no conrol over the object scope, now handling of mass data on a sane level, the OQL was not really good for real world purposes etc... There were implementations of this standard, but you ended up always with code only geared to one OODB. Most java programs nowadays use OODB-RDB mappers, I assume Zope does the same. There are excellent ones, like Hibernate (which basically solves every problem the ODMG back than didnt) give one of these a try. Sun also comes out with something, done by former ODMG people, JDO, I dont know how this one stacks up to Hibernate, but I assume there arent too many mappers which come close to it or can surpass it. The third one I know is Torque from the Apache Projekt, mediocre at its best. The EJB also do this to a certain degree because part of their layer is direct object database mapping, but in my opinion they are total overkill.
BSD is dead... I burried a bunch of BSD CDs yesterday in my garden.
Since my posting was moderated as a flamebait.
Following, to be mor precise.
Reiser4 offers a clean all tree based structure, with everthing handled as files, every file can store metadata, add to that an indexing mechanism and you are way beyound WinFS, which still basically is an NTFS with a btree index for metadata added.
I see nothing in this article which justifies another filesystem development, because Reiser4 is the most advanced filesystem currently on commodity level.
Another issue is how fast the tools and desktops can integrate those features.
This goes pretty much for everything except DRM in longhorn, there is already a solution in linux available or will be within this year.
But Reiser 4 goes way beyound anything Microsoft will deliver for Longhorn...
It seems to be that google with their huge cluster from my point of the world is fast as ever (europe that is) I think personally the problems are caused by the lines of certain providers which seem to give in. Google works as fast as ever.
You hit the nail on the hand there are certain parts which are only machine readable. AcceleratedX does it the right way, sort of, it has a nice config program which lets you adjust the whole thing easily and then it has a simplistic config file. The way X-Free should go... Split everything apart. 99.999% of the users dont really need refresh line settings and other stuff. Add a good config program which works both on the command line with ncurses and graphically and add a separate config file with the more complicated stuff, which almost nobody touches anyway (and add warnings to that) and you are basically set.
The passion of jar jar. Contents: Jar jar being tortured for almost three hours by the emperor....
The first part being a clear prince of persia rip off, the game play only has changed to the worse (more shooting) in the sequels. There has to be a significant change in gameplay. First of all reduce the lever puzzles, add real puzzles. Add more stealth instead of acrobacy. I think a Thief approach could work for Tomb Raider as well. Add a decent storyline and NPCs which are more than cannon fodder, and you are set. I think Tomb Raider could be developed into something like a present deus ex, thief, if done well.
Actually no, japan was once the biggest single market from a country perspective, except for the us (with germany being in the third place) But even back then this view was immensely wrong. You cant really go for country by country with those numbers.
Europe at least the western european part of the EU is basically one single cultural entity and (except for localisations to two or three countries) also economywise.
Now given the fact that the japanese market is a little bit bigger than the german market. Japan basically falls flat in sales compared to the EU or even the western part of the EU. Also countries like China or generally the whole souteast asian region are or will be more important than japan alone.
Therefore japanese numbers are mere nice marketing numbers for historical reasons (i dont have any clue why this bull**** ever was started, but the sales figures of japan are not really that significant on a worldwide scale to give japan the credits it gets currently.
I dont really know (and I dont like Microsoft at all) why it is, that a console which fails in japan is considered to be a failure. It doesnt have to be given the percentage of japanese sales compared to the bigger and stronger economical zones. Must be a remnant of the eighties, where japan basically was considered to be the only economic superpower besides the US. Times have changed but journalists simply havent recognized it yet.Due to the fact they used CDs people could copy their games much easier than Nintendos, so they reached a critical mass earlier and then the thing became a self seller with the non educated masses (who really buy the games)
If Microsoft was smart they should learn a lesson from that. They used the same tactics in the eighties and early nineties to get rid of competition like Borland and Lotus.
Actually I think Japan is rated more important than it really is. Its main market is slightly bigger than germany alone. There is only one fact why it is important. Japan has many game studios and is looked up upon for historical reasons. The big markets currently are probably US, the EU as a whole (face it economically the EU is a single country) and China, with India probably as an emerging market.
Japan from a non producer perspective is small compared to those markets. The fact why there are so many successful japanes game companies has two sides. Face it US corporations usually produce lots of rather lousy non intuive sequels, whereas japanes companies used to go for the riskier sides and didnt rely entirely on sequels and shooters. But the situation changes currently with more and more sequels to sequel being released by them also.
The other thing is, from the middle of the 80s til Microsofts attempt, there has not been a single successful console which was not japanese. So we have japanese manufacturers holding a tight grip on what games are released and we have game producers who want to enter the market. Guess who has an advantage?
What workaround cruft do you mean? As for the bindings, not a big deal, as long as you stay in a oo context a binding is possible and there are bindings for many languages alreaday available.
My dear friend, what you basically dont believe in is coincidence. You need a time machine to actually be able to plant certain waypoints into history, so that you influence with a slight mockery history. And if you do that, you still cannot know if you dont screw everthing up unless you are able to calculate an infinite number of possible outcomes back to the certain waypoint which you can influence. (Quite philsophical question, I must say)
To my knowledge there is only one being in the world being able to do that, God. And what happens is what we call coincidence. And yes I believe, that humanity is pushed towards a certain goal (and that is to reach the end of violence, unless we wanna die out as a species), but not by a bunch of whackos, who simply have oversite of present and future and push humanity themselves, with a technology nobody has seen except proably a few schizophrenic people, and with the knowledge of lost civilizations where remnant never could have been found, wheras remnants of nomadic tribes of the estimated time can be found all over the place people call earth.
Lets take the god argument outside, you know that in chaos theory every order can be pushed by a certain parameter into chaos and out of chaos a new order arises.
So what happens there is, that out of possibly thousands of antisemitic mockeries at the late 19th century one was suitable for Hitler to reach his goals of mass extinction. That being coincidentally the zion protocols. The Zion protocols were more an excuse than a reason.
If that would not have been enough, Hitler maybe would have blamed the weather. Like 16th century protestantic and catholic church did, during the witch trials. If somebody wants to kill somebody he will always find an excuse to justify the killing.
Says who... modern archeology... the earliest writings can be found in mesopotamia and india both around 5000 years ago. And as for the other thing, civlizations rise and fall, thats true, most of this stuff gets whiped out by the time. But only most of this stuff, you still can find stomehammers dating back 10.000 and more years you still can find wallpaintings dating back thousands of years. But what you cannot find is writings pretty much ealier than 5000 years. Part of this probably was caused by the fact, that 10.000 years ago the last ice age stopped and opened room for humanity to konquer new lands, thus the critical mass of people for development of new civilizations could be reached a while after that. But given the fact that remnants of modern technology are much more durable (aka trash and other stuff) than old material used in mesopotamia and other places, and yet you still stumble over this stuff all over the place, leaves little room for a sophisticated advanced civilization during ice age time and before. Like so many conspiracy theorists want us to believe. During the ice age time, most of humanity had other problems than building up civilizations.
There is no deep knowledge beneath anything. Modern civilization has risen somewhat around 5000 years ago, that is the ealiest of writings which have been found on the planet. Lets take the theories seriously.
If you go to an advanced civlization which could have lived around the ice age in currently tropic regions. Lets say that they even were able to do metalworks in an advanced stage, you basically should be able to find writings remnants of their works and other things scattered all over the place or at least in the surrounding of the civilization sites.
Lets go even further and the civilizations have been equally or more advanced than ours 200 years ago, you should find remmants all over the world.
the only even remotely thing plausible could be some kind of meta civilization around 5000-6000 years ago, which went under in some kind of catastrophe and triggered some kind of civilization rise all over the world.
But given what happened when Byzantion went under with Europe, this meta civilization probably had only reached a status of minor metalworks knowledge and handwriting knowledge at that time. Otherwise, civilizations like Babylon would have gotten a severe headstart of a few thousand years of development.
So there is no base at all for secret societies, which keep knowledge far advanced to ours under the hood somewhere and who want to push humanity into a certain direction.
My dear friend if you read some of those so called secret books some of those societies use and check the times those societies were founded. You come to the conclusion that some of them originated from the late 16th century, where science, hoax and the middle age knowledge were close to each other. lots of those so called conspiracy theories usually originate from hoaxes, for instance, the Zion protocols originate from a hatred pamphlet or a a hoax originating in a late 19th century publication. Over the years the hoax became a conspiracy theory, and Hitler took them as one of the cornerstones of the justification of the Holocaust. Conspiracy theories have several things in common, a) There is this secret society which basically tries to force humanity into a direction b) Normal people cannot interfere with their works c) They have powers unknown to humankind not matter which theory you take, you always run into these three cornerstones, a) being it the jews in the zion protocols b) being it the illuminati c) being it the aliens d) being it doctors in a schizophrenic mind e) being it secret agents or whoemver g) being it whatever just perfectly fits into the day If you read some of those so called secret books of those early societies, you run into many hoaxes which sound interesting from a 16th 17th 18th and 19th century standpoint but can be proven totally wrong with modern knowledge. Those books are not that secret and can be found, but they were one cornerstones of those elite societies because the most important cornerstone always was and until now is, myths and weird traditions.