The humor is one big thing why I thought in the beginning the game was seriously missing. And I still think they shouldnÂt have gotten rid of it. The first fallout had really black humor, well it has sort of worn off. While Mr Handyman for instance was really funny the first time, it is not humourous in Fallout 3 anymore. The second fallout felt like a monti pyhton episode. Fallout 3 made the mistake not to add too much humor to the in jokes Fallout 1 already had so it does not feel humorous except for a few things like the Talon Company Mercs or the Local cult or the VR simulation.
I think this is one thing Bethestha really has to work on for Fallout 4 bring back the humor and pop culture references! Fallout 3 simply is too gritty and to serious!
Well you really should have gotten the PC version it is very stable. I just have hangs when the game quits but then I simply kill the process. Never had a hang so far in game! The hangs at game quit have more to do with Windows Live than Bethestas code:-(
Actually the biggest issue probably is that the PS3 architecture is so inherently different to anything else. The PS3 almost is like a pentium with two high end graphics cards added on top of it. You get a lousy general purpose core and two units of SIMD procecssing fast as hell. (both the cell and the Nvidia card are pretty equal in speed) So if you program against a normal CPU with multiple cores do some serious threading which you can rely on and use the SIMD stuff mainly for pushing graphics and maybe adding a little bit of calculation over the nvidia API, and then you have to port this over to the PS3 you are seriously in porting hell.
(Bethesta has their own engine which makes porting even worse because they have to do everything themselves)
You can be glad that you still have that much time. I have mostly sunken 20-30 hours into the game. Between Girlfriend, her pregnancy, job and various tasks for the new family there is is not much more time left...
A life as a full blown adult and its merits:-) Btw. you never really stop gaming even if you are in the late 30s;-)
I second that I noticed that several times, that you still can miss with a perfect target. But using the sniper rifle shooter style still can give you an advantage in a plain shooter situation if you have the reflexes. There are certain weapons which work better in shooter style than in VATs style. The sniper type weapons for instance or the flamer, which is usually the close range combat option for me for groups of enemies.
Actually since I am not a shooter guy I basically always refer to the VATS where it makes sense. The VATs generally gives a more relaxed pace to the game (one reason why I hate shooters) From what I found is, that if your skills are low, the VATs makes more sense in the smaller distances while straight shooter style especially if you have sniper rifles or similar weapons make more sense in the longer ranges. But at higher levels both systems even out and the VATs in my opinion becomes more effective than straight shooter style! Also a good usage of VATs conserves a lot of ammo, and ammo is a huge concern if you are lower level. Later on it is not unless you want to use the FatMan and mini nukes all the time.
Since I liked the pace of the VATs I never really had the shooter feeling.
It depends, at the beginning I felt it lacked... but I am now 20 hours into the game and I am really happy with it. And I loved the old Fallouts! The game becomes better the longer you play!
Amen to that... I personally like Fallout 3 as well, it is not the same as the old Fallouts and I would loved to have seen some of the old Black Isle guys doing parts of the game (But from what I read there were really bad issues between Bethesta, Interplay ans Black Isle - Basically Black Isle got screwed by both parties in many ways!!!)
But that does not reduce the fact that Fallout 3 is an excellent RPG in the best sense. And definitely not a shooter or level grinding game!
I have to agree, Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda in a long time that I didn't finish.
Two things that really irked me:
1. There was no obvious forward progression. I kept having to go back to the same damn dungeon too many times to count, and every time it was the same dungeon with a few more levels accessable, and a clock to annoy me. No, I don't mind going back to a dungeon again if say a large event occured in-game that changed everything. But Hourglass is just repetitive for the sake of making the game seem longer.
ADDENTUM: if you're going to make a game THIS damn repetitive, do us gamers a favor and put in a quest log. If I so much as put the game down for a week, I had no freaking idea where I needed to go next.
2. The touch screen control is a bad idea for a top-down Zelda game, PERIOD. The problem is, some items benefitted from the interface (boomerang, bow and arrows) while others suffered (swordplay, movement), but overall the gameplay got worse. I say leave in the drawing gimmicks, and give me back my buttons.
Hell, I'd finish Zelda II before Hourglass.
Actually the touch screen controls worked way better for me than the buttons. I guess YMMV in this case. But I think everyone agrees that the temple of the ocean king was the thing which ruined this otherwise excellent game totally. It was annoying, only made the game longer than it really is and was totally pointless except for making the game longer!
I don't think Zelda was very cinematic before it turned 3d, it was less linear and more about exploration.
Phantom Hourglass was way better than the 3d Zeldas though too damn easy. Then again, all somewhat recent Zeldas are too damn easy since the damage you take doesn't grow much while your HP and the healing items you carry increase a lot and in any Zelda after the first two there are tons of breakable things to get hearts from instead of having to beat up enemies to get health back.
Actually phantom hourglass is the only Zelda I have finished so far. The reason time. I would not count it as the best, but definitely among the best handheld Zeldas so far. The main issue with PH is the temple you have to reenter again and again and again, that really sucked the life out of the game. This is one of the most annoying aspects of the game. But I have yet to play a Zelda without any annoyances, it seems to be one of the cornerpoints of the series, that they usually almost make the perfect game, but then they screw up big time in one small area! Almost every Zelda has this!
Try Super Paper mario, they solved this issue excellently. You are mostly in 2d and can switch to 3d to bypass enemies or solve certain puzzles in the game. The funniest moment usually is if you meet one of the 2d caracters which were accidentally beamed into the 3d space, and then are totally confused because they cannot cope with a third dimension!
Dunno where you live, maybe india, but I live here in Central Europe and I see a shitload of developers using macs privately and some even in the office! The exactly same people who have used Linux in the past are switching en masses to Apple!
1) It's not clear what Java6 update release this corresponds to.
2) It's not clear when they will provide Java6 update 10 which provides a major improvement for desktop applications.
3) It's not clear whether they resolved a lot of the compatibility issues I keep on reading about on java.net...
In short, the community complains a lot that Sun isn't as open with it as they would like, but Apple is a heck of a lot worse.
Developers would love an open-source bug tracking system for Apple JDK and *some* kind of transparent mechanism for informing users of upcoming feature and bug fixes. At least Sun provides a clear schedule ahead of time. Apple keeps it top-secret until the day of the release. This is very frustrating to developers whose businesses depend on these dates.
There is a real serious concern that Applet will simply stop developing the JDK one day. No one is afraid Sun will do the same.
I dont think java6 update 10 makes sense on a mac. The main issue about java6 upate 10 simply is that the core vm is reduced down to 1 meg or so and the rest is loaded on demand from the web as needed. Now this makes sense on windows machines, which do not have a java installed so that you can finally add java plugins to enable the latest applet version. It simply does not make sense on a mac at all which usually has java installed by default!
Actually the Mac is my main development platform, and I have to agree since I mostly do java development. The Mac is one of the worst platforms regarding java devlopment. The issue with Apples JDK 6 is not that is not there, it is that has been one year late and it is 64 bit only, so everyone who has to use SWT cannot use it. Which means all of the Eclipse users out there. I probably will see a similar timeframe for java 7. It still is way better to develop on a Mac than on Windows, due to the fact that Windows file locking and the inherent NTFS fragmentation issues, makes developing java on Windows a major pain.
The funny thing is despite all this shortcomings a huge load of developers nowadays use macs for java development, due to the fact that the rest of the system just is plain nice and works! And you get the unix layer underneath!
Well my biggest hope is that they finally hire some writers to do the story instead of having one programmer writing it down on a single piece of toilet paper!
That is one thing about the USA, that they donÂt have any clue what communism really is. The term has ben scapeogoated and misused so many times in the USA without people really knowing that it is basically used for everything which is not in the USA. In other words the McCarthy era had one effect, they brainwashed the people about the term communism so much that nowadays they dont even know what it is! If you want to blame somone then tell openly he/she is a communist/socialist no matter what he/she really is, works everytime in the USA;-)
Actually the entire mess was caused due to a lack of regulation.... So go figure. In other words, what has happened basically was having a country believing into a religion which is basically worshipping a henhouse filled with greedy hens which unregulated could pick on each other, and the greediest of them all could pick on all others without anyone interfering.
Also buy one of the books. The documentation has becomed better however on the original site. I really can recommend the pragmatic programmers book however to get a full grasp!
YUI has mainly the objective to cover widgets, it is comparable to the Dojo dijit widget set! The code itself and how the class files are done how the widgets are initialized are pretty similar. YUI however has the better documentation.
While dojos has improved it is necessary to get one of the tree dojo books to really grasp everything correctly.
In the end I still would choose dojo over YUI due to the fact that dojo is so much more. Around 90% of my work in javascript definitely I just use the dojo core 10% are the widgets and YUI is more widget centered!
So it depends on your needs, but I think you can even mix both, I have not seen anything in YUI which would prevent it to be mixed with other libs (unlike Prototype which is the high school bully of all javascript libraries)
I fully agree here, the learning curve is really steep because dojo is so extensive. It is basically to javascript what the java runtime is to java. It is a complete coverage of the entire domain of what you need in third party libs.
Also I think the learning curve used to be much steeper in the past, thanks to three excellent books (I prefer the one from pragmatic programmers though) and to the improved manuals online, which unfortunately really have a load of black holes in there!
As for the build size, I dont think this is an issue. If you run custom builds you can get the thing down to sizes between 50-500kbyte no matter how big the source distribution is (have in mind the source distro has several skins, a huge load of unit tests, demos etc...) which you all remove in a custom build.
Sure it takes time to invest learning it, but what you get from it is impressive!
Tje dojo library bloat is not that big. Dojo core is compressed around 50kbyte (compressed means just junk stripped, you get more if you go for real compression but that would cost initialization time) The full dijit widget set is 200 kbyte, not that much considering it covers around 30-40 components! And if you need just a subset you can roll your own custom builds and uses dynamic code loading if you miss something. Also have in mind that if you roll your own custom build the browser cache can trigger so all this is loaded only once!
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The humor is one big thing why I thought in the beginning the game was seriously missing.
And I still think they shouldnÂt have gotten rid of it. The first fallout had really black humor, well it has sort of worn off. While Mr Handyman for instance was really funny the first time, it is not humourous in Fallout 3 anymore. The second fallout felt like a monti pyhton episode. Fallout 3 made the mistake not to add too much humor to the in jokes Fallout 1 already had so it does not feel humorous except for a few things like the Talon Company Mercs or the Local cult or the VR simulation.
I think this is one thing Bethestha really has to work on for Fallout 4 bring back the humor and pop culture references! Fallout 3 simply is too gritty and to serious!
Actually who cares if you have to wait 1-2 months for the toolset, most games dont even have one.
I can live with it.
Well you really should have gotten the PC version it is very stable. I just have hangs when the game quits but then I simply kill the process. Never had a hang so far in game! :-(
The hangs at game quit have more to do with Windows Live than Bethestas code
Actually the biggest issue probably is that the PS3 architecture is so inherently different to anything else. The PS3 almost is like a pentium with two high end graphics cards added on top of it. You get a lousy general purpose core and two units of SIMD procecssing fast as hell.
(both the cell and the Nvidia card are pretty equal in speed)
So if you program against a normal CPU with multiple cores do some serious threading which you can rely on and use the SIMD stuff mainly for pushing graphics and maybe adding a little bit of calculation over the nvidia API, and then you have to port this over to the PS3 you are seriously in porting hell.
(Bethesta has their own engine which makes porting even worse because they have to do everything themselves)
You can be glad that you still have that much time. I have mostly sunken 20-30 hours into the game.
Between Girlfriend, her pregnancy, job and various tasks for the new family there is is not much more time left...
A life as a full blown adult and its merits :-) ;-)
Btw. you never really stop gaming even if you are in the late 30s
Huh? VATs means everything in the outside world is halted, unless I noticed it wrongly.
Pete Hines: Yes, all combat is governed by die rolls. So if you fire in real time and aim perfectly, you might still fail a roll and miss your target.
Source:http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=38623
I second that I noticed that several times, that you still can miss with a perfect target. But using the sniper rifle shooter style still can give you an advantage in a plain shooter situation if you have the reflexes. There are certain weapons which work better in shooter style than in VATs style. The sniper type weapons for instance or the flamer, which is usually the close range combat option for me for groups of enemies.
Actually since I am not a shooter guy I basically always refer to the VATS where it makes sense.
The VATs generally gives a more relaxed pace to the game (one reason why I hate shooters)
From what I found is, that if your skills are low, the VATs makes more sense in the smaller distances while straight shooter style especially if you have sniper rifles or similar weapons make more sense in the longer ranges.
But at higher levels both systems even out and the VATs in my opinion becomes more effective than straight shooter style! Also a good usage of VATs conserves a lot of ammo, and ammo is a huge concern if you are lower level. Later on it is not unless you want to use the FatMan and mini nukes all the time.
Since I liked the pace of the VATs I never really had the shooter feeling.
It depends, at the beginning I felt it lacked... but I am now 20 hours into the game and I am really happy with it. And I loved the old Fallouts!
The game becomes better the longer you play!
Amen to that... I personally like Fallout 3 as well, it is not the same as the old Fallouts and I would loved to have seen some of the old Black Isle guys doing parts of the game (But from what I read there were really bad issues between Bethesta, Interplay ans Black Isle - Basically Black Isle got screwed by both parties in many ways!!!)
But that does not reduce the fact that Fallout 3 is an excellent RPG in the best sense. And definitely not a shooter or level grinding game!
I have to agree, Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda in a long time that I didn't finish.
Two things that really irked me:
1. There was no obvious forward progression. I kept having to go back to the same damn dungeon too many times to count, and every time it was the same dungeon with a few more levels accessable, and a clock to annoy me. No, I don't mind going back to a dungeon again if say a large event occured in-game that changed everything. But Hourglass is just repetitive for the sake of making the game seem longer.
ADDENTUM: if you're going to make a game THIS damn repetitive, do us gamers a favor and put in a quest log. If I so much as put the game down for a week, I had no freaking idea where I needed to go next.
2. The touch screen control is a bad idea for a top-down Zelda game, PERIOD. The problem is, some items benefitted from the interface (boomerang, bow and arrows) while others suffered (swordplay, movement), but overall the gameplay got worse. I say leave in the drawing gimmicks, and give me back my buttons.
Hell, I'd finish Zelda II before Hourglass.
Actually the touch screen controls worked way better for me than the buttons. I guess YMMV in this case. But I think everyone agrees that the temple of the ocean king was the thing which ruined this otherwise excellent game totally.
It was annoying, only made the game longer than it really is and was totally pointless except for making the game longer!
I don't think Zelda was very cinematic before it turned 3d, it was less linear and more about exploration.
Phantom Hourglass was way better than the 3d Zeldas though too damn easy. Then again, all somewhat recent Zeldas are too damn easy since the damage you take doesn't grow much while your HP and the healing items you carry increase a lot and in any Zelda after the first two there are tons of breakable things to get hearts from instead of having to beat up enemies to get health back.
Actually phantom hourglass is the only Zelda I have finished so far. The reason time. I would not count it as the best, but definitely among the best handheld Zeldas so far. The main issue with PH is the temple you have to reenter again and again and again, that really sucked the life out of the game. This is one of the most annoying aspects of the game. But I have yet to play a Zelda without any annoyances, it seems to be one of the cornerpoints of the series, that they usually almost make the perfect game, but then they screw up big time in one small area!
Almost every Zelda has this!
Try Super Paper mario, they solved this issue excellently.
You are mostly in 2d and can switch to 3d to bypass enemies or solve certain puzzles in the game.
The funniest moment usually is if you meet one of the 2d caracters which were accidentally beamed into the 3d space, and then are totally confused because they cannot cope with a third dimension!
Dunno where you live, maybe india, but I live here in Central Europe and I see a shitload of developers using macs privately and some even in the office! The exactly same people who have used Linux in the past are switching en masses to Apple!
I stand corrected, thank you!
There are still outstanding issues:
1) It's not clear what Java6 update release this corresponds to.
2) It's not clear when they will provide Java6 update 10 which provides a major improvement for desktop applications.
3) It's not clear whether they resolved a lot of the compatibility issues I keep on reading about on java.net...
In short, the community complains a lot that Sun isn't as open with it as they would like, but Apple is a heck of a lot worse.
Developers would love an open-source bug tracking system for Apple JDK and *some* kind of transparent mechanism for informing users of upcoming feature and bug fixes. At least Sun provides a clear schedule ahead of time. Apple keeps it top-secret until the day of the release. This is very frustrating to developers whose businesses depend on these dates.
There is a real serious concern that Applet will simply stop developing the JDK one day. No one is afraid Sun will do the same.
I dont think java6 update 10 makes sense on a mac. The main issue about java6 upate 10 simply is that the core vm is reduced down to 1 meg or so and the rest is loaded on demand from the web as needed. Now this makes sense on windows machines, which do not have a java installed so that you can finally add java plugins to enable the latest applet version. It simply does not make sense on a mac at all which usually has java installed by default!
Actually the Mac is my main development platform, and I have to agree since I mostly do java development. The Mac is one of the worst platforms regarding java devlopment. The issue with Apples JDK 6 is not that is not there, it is that has been one year late and it is 64 bit only, so everyone who has to use SWT cannot use it. Which means all of the Eclipse users out there. I probably will see a similar timeframe for java 7. It still is way better to develop on a Mac than on Windows, due to the fact that Windows file locking and the inherent NTFS fragmentation issues, makes developing java on Windows a major pain.
The funny thing is despite all this shortcomings a huge load of developers nowadays use macs for java development, due to the fact that the rest of the system just is plain nice and works! And you get the unix layer underneath!
Well my biggest hope is that they finally hire some writers to do the story instead of having one programmer writing it down on a single piece of toilet paper!
That is one thing about the USA, that they donÂt have any clue what communism really is. The term has ben scapeogoated and misused so many times in the USA without people really knowing that it is basically used for everything which is not in the USA. ;-)
In other words the McCarthy era had one effect, they brainwashed the people about the term communism so much that nowadays they dont even know what it is!
If you want to blame somone then tell openly he/she is a communist/socialist no matter what he/she really is, works everytime in the USA
Actually the entire mess was caused due to a lack of regulation....
So go figure. In other words, what has happened basically was having a country believing into a religion which is basically worshipping a henhouse filled with greedy hens which unregulated could pick on each other, and the greediest of them all could pick on all others without anyone interfering.
Problem starts if you do not want to use java or GWT... ;-)
For a better documentation look here
http://dojocampus.org/
Also buy one of the books. The documentation has becomed better however on the original site.
I really can recommend the pragmatic programmers book however to get a full grasp!
Btw. if you need examples and documentation on dojo there probably is no better site than
dojocampus.org
I am way happier with this site than with the original dojo documentation!
YUI has mainly the objective to cover widgets, it is comparable to the Dojo dijit widget set!
The code itself and how the class files are done how the widgets are initialized are pretty similar. YUI however has the better documentation.
While dojos has improved it is necessary to get one of the tree dojo books to really grasp everything correctly.
In the end I still would choose dojo over YUI due to the fact that dojo is so much more. Around 90% of my work in javascript definitely I just use the dojo core 10% are the widgets and YUI is more widget centered!
So it depends on your needs, but I think you can even mix both, I have not seen anything in YUI which would prevent it to be mixed with other libs (unlike Prototype which is the high school bully of all javascript libraries)
I fully agree here, the learning curve is really steep because dojo is so extensive. It is basically to javascript what the java runtime is to java. It is a complete coverage of the entire domain of what you need in third party libs.
Also I think the learning curve used to be much steeper in the past, thanks to three excellent books (I prefer the one from pragmatic programmers though) and to the improved manuals online, which unfortunately really have a load of black holes in there!
As for the build size, I dont think this is an issue. If you run custom builds you can get the thing down to sizes between 50-500kbyte no matter how big the source distribution is (have in mind the source distro has several skins, a huge load of unit tests, demos etc...) which you all remove in a custom build.
Sure it takes time to invest learning it, but what you get from it is impressive!
Tje dojo library bloat is not that big. Dojo core is compressed around 50kbyte (compressed means just junk stripped, you get more if you go for real compression but that would cost initialization time)
The full dijit widget set is 200 kbyte, not that much considering it covers around 30-40 components!
And if you need just a subset you can roll your own custom builds and uses dynamic code loading if you miss something.
Also have in mind that if you roll your own custom build the browser cache can trigger so all this is loaded only once!