All in play has a multitude of card games available for deaf players. They also debued an audio-queued version of Quake several years ago at the monthly Boston Post Mortem, but have yet to release it to the general public.
I always find new reasons to be impressed with Apple's engineering.
Unmarked wires shouldn't be a problem. A little harmless experimentation with the wires on the fans will determine the power, ground, and monitoring wires. Panasonic does make panaflos with fan speed monitoring, though they tend to run quite expensive. It would be very important to know whether or not the G5 can run without monitoring, but that is also a test for experimentation. If so, you can always set your variables yourself, and just feed back the RPM settings to keep the mobo chugging along yourself. Bypassing the system is only dangerous if you let parts overheat. Plus, the effects of fan noise are reduced if all of the fans are spinning at the same speeds... giving off the same white noise, if you will.
Generally, the dual ball-bearing stuff that passes for low volume fans can't touch a hydro bearing one, but we can give Apple the benefit of the doubt. Assuming Apple has a great setup and assuming they have optimized fan usage for silence (which it doesn't seem like, seeing as how people seem to be complaining that it is the loudest component), there is still the option of replacing the faster running fans with a liquid cooled system and a large radiator. Such a thing could be used only on certain locations such as the CPU, PSU, and graphics card, and could significantly reduce overall volume. Passive heat-pipe based GPU coolers also exist for ATI's card range, but do take up quite a bit of room in a case. Here we're talking about a real investment in equipment, but the effects can be quite pronounced.
And of course, as much acoustic absorption material as can fit will reduce last-mile sound emissions. A musician out here in Boston recently had a G4 case custom built from sound-deadening plastic, with a lot of extra room for airflo and more acoustic padding.
Warranties aside, there is no reason to treat any computer like a black box. We don't need to know all of the details of how it is supposed to do what it is doing. We just need to know what it is supposed to do, come up with a better way of doing it (with usually means cutting fewer corners than they did), and trick the old system into accepting the new one.
Again, not having a G5 in front of me, I can't give more than preliminary ideas from someone who has been doing this for a while. But there is certainly no reason to give up, especially while improvements can be made.
Fans should be able to be run happily on any standard molex adaptor. Lacking those in an apple power supply, you should have no problem running an external 7v DC adaptor dirctly to all of the fans in the case. Fans can be positioned strategically using such tools as Zalman fan brackets, Erector sets, card blanks, double-sided tape, and zip-ties.
Two fans at 1/2 speed will be much quieter than 1 fan at full speed, but will move the same amount of air. 4 Panaflo L1A fans at 7v will be more than adequate to replace 2 case fans, but will run almost dead silently.
I just did a job doing a full fan replacement on a dual-processor AMD 2.4, using a card blank with fan to replace a graphics card wailer, and using a pair of 80mm Panaflos at 8v to replace a pair of screaming 60mm sleve bearing processor fans. Replacing fans is just about the easiest thing you can do on a computer... you don't even have to be exactly on the same spot to have the proper effect. If necessary, create a sleve from heavy-duty card stock to channel the airflow properly. That machine went down from 69 decibles at 12" from motherboard to a much more acceptable 45, all without using silencing material or encasing the HDDs.
I've never cracked open a G5, but most of the standard tricks should apply. Replace all of the fans with the hydrobearing Panaflo L1A s, adding more if necessary. If possible, run them low at 7v or so... Pay special attention to fans under 80mm, as those tend to be the loudest. Line the case with the heavy, stinky lining used by car stereo installers. This will increase your case temps but will reduce the audio significantly more than a standard computer case liner. You may need to make an audio absorbative box (with it's own fan) around your HDD, or try replacing them with hydro-bearing drives from Maxtor or Seagate mounted with rubber.
For general purpose quieting tips, check out Silent PC Review. You'll see me on the boards there sometimes.
Nintendo once upon a time claimed to be a "cartridge company." They would live and die making cartridges. After the market reality of the N64, they changed their tune. If Nintendo had stayed a "cartridge company," then they would be in the position that the author of this article describes... they would be the locomotive industry not realizing their impending obsolescence.
But Amtrak it is not. 1st of all, Amtrak was created in the 1970's by mandate of congress long after the battle with cars was a forgone conclusion. 2nd of all, Nintendo has broadened its perspective to see what it industry it is in. It is a videogame company. It does not make movies, it does not release multimedia CD's. It sells videogames, and players that play videogames. Sony can rightfully claim to be an entertainment company, because it owns movie studios, theme parks, musicians, etc. Microsoft can rightfully claim to be in the technology industry, as it does, well, techie stuff. But Nintendo's primary market is in gaming, and their competition in the gaming arena is with other video games (some would say they're competing with homework). They are right to be focused upon being the best gaming company they can be.
The article mentions several things the XBox does which the 'Cube does not, and rightfully so. The hard drive was a great addition to a console, as was the ethernet port. Some would say they are as revolutionary as the N64's addition of the analog stick. However, These were great in service of the videogame playing part. Nintendo was one of the first companies to test market a modem adapter (for the NES), and the rewritable bulky drive was a predecessor to the hard drive in the Xbox. Both were ahead of their time, and both failed. Now apparently the market is about ready for them, and hopefully Nintendo will notice on their next generation of hardware.
On the other hand, the author exposes a deeply flawed perspective of the situation claiming that Nintendo's lack of DVD playback capabilities are due to being videogame-only. DVD playback is a great feature in modern consoles. It's also the only feature mentioned that has nothing to do with videogames. Why is DVD playback not included in the GameCube? The reason Nintendo cited at the time was that they expected people who wanted to play DVDs would buy a proper DVD player, much like how the PS1 was capable of playing CD's but people kept buying real players. Furthermore, by not including DVD playback capabilities, Nintendo saved themselves an estimated (at the time) 50 dollars per console. That allowed Nintendo to ship at the magic $200 mark, and stay the low-price leader throughout the console wars. Stand-alone DVD players are now available for less than 80 dollars, with PC DVD drives hovering around 40.
Nintendo is attempting to avoid falling into the trap of so many systems before them. The historical landscapes are littered with systems that tried to do more than play videogames. The Saturn, for example, had a modem adaptor and a copy of Netscape available shortly after launch. How did it do? It died in the market. 3DO wanted to play games, read children's storybooks, play movies, surf the web... After about a year of beating around the bush, they refocused upon purely gaming, but by then the damage had been done. CDI? A console whose most compelling piece of software is an encyclopedia? The game.com organizer, game player, trivia master? The N-Gage? Admittedly, many systems that didn't try to be more than game playing machines have also died over the years. Dreamcast for one. Virtua-Boy for another. But no system that tried to market itself as a set-top box managed to survive.
Perhaps someday the set-top box analogy will be correct, but perhaps not. To function as a set-top box, the machine requires a fast connection to the web. That kind of connection will only exist if the person already has a computer. Why does this matter? Well, if downloadable content is your goal, the computer you already have can do
If the only justification for random enemy encounters the reviewer can come up with is that they are necessary to make a game longer, then the reviewer needs to re-examine why they have persisted for so long. What has kept them around for years?
I would argue that RPG fighting, when done well, is a strategy encounter. Final Fantasy is full of examples of this type of gameplay. Wall in your characters to reflect healing spells onto the undead. Falcon units off of the screen, then cast earthquake to damage everyone left. Lunar featured movement squares which played a strategic role in every battle. Grandia had a real-time fighting system that forced the player to decide between waiting for combined attacks or doing faster individual ones. Aside from the initial encounters, there are also long-term effects from fighting that must be balanced. All fighting has an associated cost in life, mana, and items, but pays off in gold and experience. Do you dart the glass sword now to top off the boss or do you rely upon your Phoenix Downs and save it for the next one? Do you level up your mighty axe which has +12 to goblins or the spear of light which gives a +3 to the undead? Use your fragile armor of perfect protection now or use up your spare cash on the mighty armor of swiss cheese? Done right, RPG's are resource management sims.
It's ironic the reviewer would mention Xenogears. Xenogears was a revolutionary game (and still is), whose dungeons alternated between having A: no enemies, B: very few random enemies, and C: frequent once-only battles at fixed locations. The jumping aspect made exploration actually fun, and the detail everywhere was just dripping.
That, and having the two different modes of fighting made Xenogears one of the most enjoyable games ever (right up to the point where they ran out of money).
Any game can take a fun genre and turn it into boring drivel if the developers don't focus on the right things. The winning strategy in Star Ocean 2, for example, consisted of buying forgery papers, spending hours clicking on "make fake money," and finally spending hours clicking on "photograph fake money." Eventually, you would have all of the resources you would need, but the mechanic to get there was no fun.
One of the ways to change the system would be to expand the concept of "attack." When swordfighting in the real world, you have head shots, body shots, leg attacks, limb attacks, etc. If you hammer away at one portion of the body, the enemy will expect that and block accordingly. Likewise, the player should set their guard after an attack, in any of the 8 control pad directions. Swordfighting should be as intricate as spellcasting.
Likewise, enemy encounters should be fewer and stronger. I'm not advocating the return of the infinite boss syndrome (2+ hours for Final Fantasy 8... What were they thinking?), But a battle with faceless drones should take longer than the loading screen... that way they wouldn't be faceless drones. Think of them as mini-mini bosses, with one or two per explorable area.
RPG's in recent years have plummeted in difficulty, which makes encounters more of an annoyance than a challenge. Sure, this opens things up to more players, but that also makes the game busywork. What was wrong with selectable difficulty levels? To balance this out, the designers should reduce the significance of death. Return the player to the last checkpoint with all of their items intact, and expect this to happen several times.
Another of the ways to change the system would be to have a target level associated with every area. If a player were to go to the second level with too few exp, for example, they would be given more to help them catch up. However, if they were dominating in an area, they receive fewer. That way players are discouraged from camping, and can explore what they are interested in without unbalancing the game.
Finally, players should be encouraged to consume resources, not horde them. Items should b
I'm ecstatic that Ice Climber took such a high position... It was underappreciated in the US at the time, where the game playing public wasn't ready to appreciate the extremely japanese characters. As 2-player games went it was in a class of its own, especially in the early days. It was a 2-player game where you could help your fellow team-member or hinder them, where you weren't allowed to attack them directly but you could really mess them up. You could cause them to die by scrolling too high, or you could give their jump a huge boost by jumping up underneath them. You could hammer away at bricks under their feet, or hammer away at enemies about to attack them. You could wait for your friend to join you in the bonus level, or you could heartlessly skip ahead and take all of the plunder for yourself.
It was never clear if you were supposed to be friends or foes, and that lack of distinction kept the game sessions hot and fun.
Personally, I hope someone in Japan sees this list and makes a GBA version of Ice-Climber, so that 4 people can work with / compete against eachother to reach the top of that mountain alive. It was a genius design then, and it would be a breath of fresh air now.
One of the major problems with MMPORPGs is they know they can't fit a traditional Japanese RPG Savior of the World goal structure into the game, so they hardly try with any goals. This needs to change, as goal-based gaming is far more rewarding than treadmilling.
For example, a player's NPC family might be sick, and the medicine is only available in a certain higher-level area that is significantly higher than the player's current level, and which is only available as an item to those who have sick families. Or perhaps a certain number of people start in a city that has been raided, and their purpose in the game is to rescue their Husband / Wife. Perhaps, as in SWG, there could be some form of Nirvana that individuals can reach by attaining X powers.
But all of this ignores the secret of good storytelling: it doesn't have to be consistent across all listeners, it just has to all make sense to each one. Phantasy Star Online did this admirably, with small groups venturing down to the planet's surface and miraculously not encountering the other groups on the surface. Many caves or dungeons in MMPORPGs would be significantly more emotionally gripping if they weren't full of hundreds of "William teh Great"s and "Yo m0t4a fuXor"s running around complaining about how easy the dungeon was. Why not have certain, if not most dungeons be party-based?
For that matter, why have goals be consistent? Maybe every now and then a few people in the world get singled out to form an impromptu party because they came across Midgard while it was being set ablaze by a Balrog, and it is their duty to defeat it. Maybe this happens to most people at a rough skill level in the game. Maybe not. Anyone else who happens across Midgard during that time gets the regular version.
You could take it one step further and have this as a function of the gameworld, ALA Silent Hill. The universe is being swallowed up by Hell (or The Nothing, for the Atreyu fans out there). It is your job to claw your way out. Or reach your goal, and stay to become one of the architects of hell. Maybe to some characters you speak a baffling language, to others you speak plain english. Maybe some characters watch as the world crumbles into a drug-induced fantasy realm, where others have no idea where the first group of people went. With people exiting and returning to MMPORPGs on their own schedules, this could mesh acceptably with the people's groupings.
With more and more people looking to use their broadband connections for online gaming we need to create more and more content tailored to the medium. Clan warfare was a good first step towards creating a unique language for MMP games, but there are many left to take. How far can we stretch consistency before players balk? How much of a "Tardis" effect can we rely upon, or do players need rigid spaces?
We won't know the answer until someone demonstratably steps over the line. Sadly, far more games fail these days because they are afraid of breaking conventions, rather than because they broke them too much.
Firstly this code is over a month old, and they're in crunch-mode. This means that drastic bug and graphics fixes are due for this code, and a month is a long time when everyone at Valve is probably putting in 16+ hour days.
They are most definitely in crunch mode. With a necessary holiday release date, they are probably focusing upon stability and networking issues, not additional features or graphical glitches. At this point, they had better be focused upon bringing the stability up to AAA level, rather than sneaking in that feature they always wanted.
Secondly, those modified binaries probably won't work correctly unless they also include modified DLL's, and even then some graphical bug could bite them in the ass, something that was probably fixed in the Gold release.
Right. I had meant all game-dependent binaries, including dll's.
is absolute nonsense, and kind of silly at best. Cripple their sales numbers? Hah! That was a good one.
Clearly you haven' t compared the thriving community and international competitions surrounding counterstrike with the not quite as thriving community surrounding Half-Life. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been "if Half-Life 2's shelf life were destined to follow a similar course as Half-Life 1, Valve's income stream could be greatly hampered."
Please, don't be as nieve as you're sounding here.
Valve makes money from three sources: Sales of their games for sake of their games, sales of their games to support mods (such as counterstrike), and sales of their engine to other companies to create their own game. Because the art resources weren't leaked with the source, sales of their own game for their own sake will not be hurt. The other two cases are a little more interesting.
Sales of the engine may be hurt, or it may be helped. Certain companies may wind up "doing the wrong thing" and incorporating Valve code into their own, but no major player would be caught dead doing such a thing. I expect that snippets of that code may find its way into the wild due to overtasked programmers trying to make their game the best it can be, but such snippets wouldn't have equalled a sale, they simply mean fiercer competition. And with the increased visibility, companies can now know the quality of the code that their 500 grand will be buying. True, being released into the wild may reduce the perception of value, but with the availability of the code this may still lead to increased sales.
Modders are a different story. Without economic interests compelling them to buy a license, they might begin releasing compiled binaries of their work to the community without requiring a half-life 2 license, which would cripple Valve's sales numbers. But on the other hand with access to source, modders could create more extensive and more active modifications, creating original features instead of mere graphical facelifts. If these code modders require the original game to be playable, it could lead to a real renissance in modding and a tremendous boost in sales for Valve.
I can see how this may possibly turn out to be somewhat damaging to Valve, but I can't see how this is one of the four horsemen of their apocolypse. The head of the man who intentionally leaked the code should roll (if it truly was intentional), but it is way too soon to declare this the end of the company. Under closer analysis, it may even be a boon.
Interesting, how in this more modern era of instant saving we now have more games with progressive defeats than with instant deaths. Does it break the skill necessary to play Warcraft 3 if the player is allowed to save after every weapon swing? Of course not, because with each encounter comes guaranteed damage, and the tradeoffs between taking and doing damage is what leads to success. Even in FPS shooters, one has to ask "did I take too much damage to save? Is losing 10% of my health for that encounter a bad thing?"
As we have moved away from the realistic one shot-one kill analogy to systems that are a bit more forgiving, the line between success and failure of an attack become blurred. But as games move online, the distinction becomes moot. If you don't like how an attack played out in Battlefield 1942, you have no option to restart. If you took too much damage running your UT2003 avatar into a room full of the opposite team, your recourse is nill.
Much like stores have to plan for losing 2 - 5 % of their inventory to theft ("shrinkage"), so too must software companies accept that someone, somewhere is going to hack your software if anyone likes it. If they have all of the bits and bytes of your system sitting in front of them, and they have no need to communicate with your server, they can always strip it out. Your purpose should be to encourage the maximum number of users to pay for the full version, not to have the minimum amount of piracy.
A freeware version is a good idea, as it will raise your visibility... If someone is so cheap that they would use a pirated version, you might convince them to become a customer by offering freeware, then enticing them with the full thing. Most of the copies of WinZip out there are the freeware version, but there are a heck of a lot more paid copies than if they didn't offer the free one.
A 15 day trial is too short. You are not just trying to show users the full value of your software, you are also trying to get them so used to using it that they are willing to shell out the cash to keep doing what they are doing. Most people have settled on 30 days, but 60 days wouldn't be out of the question.
I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.
You've probably heard the following, but as an avid digital photographer I would find your software difficult to use. For one, you don't have an intuitive, on-screen way to navigate through folders. There is a reason every other piece of image software out there has this... it's much easier to manually search your image collection, which is why you have a browser in the first place. No real image collection is a flat folder.
The single-level Thumbnail filmstrip is also a cute analogy, but it makes it difficult to, once again, search your pictures. There should be some way to have multiple filmstrips to facilitate easier searching.
On one hand, whatever algorithms you are using to handle large file databases is solid... ABC took a 10,000 image file folder with only a 5 second pause on this P3 800. And now that you have a solid program, the last bit of polish required is what brings in most of the money.
On the other hand, as you mentioned you are competing with literally thousands of other products, such as ThumbsPlus, SuperJPG, ACDsee, and many others which are all highly professional, tremendously polished, and mature products. Spidering websites is a good first step, but you need to differentiate yourself if you are going to see real success. Are you going to be the online viewer of choice, with auto-import from camera / auto-export to HTML via FTP features? Are you going to push yourself onto OEM machines as a simple, easy-to-use viewer for regular people?
And if you haven't read Steve Pavlina's excellent article on selling shareware, I strongly recommend you do so now.
I can't think of any game developer who wouldn't give a $5 (or even a $10) cut to a distributor who handled the online sales and downloading of games. As a genre jumpstarted by online sales of Doom, such a transition should be natural. Companies reach a wider market without having to pay for boxes, manuals, and disks, and consumers who might not have a game available at the local Walmart can still purchase AAA games. You don't deal with any of the hardware issues (or hardware duplication issues), and there aren't any warranty returns.
On the other hand, the prospect of spending 399 dollars on a P3 800 / nVidia based system just doesn't seem... Competitive. As for "blowing everything out of the water," it hardly beats this generation of consoles at its highly inflated price. Time will show how well it specs against the P3, Xbox2, and the GameTesseract, but if past performance is any indication it will not be able to compete.
Sadly, what the phantom people have is an interesting computer game distribution system that they are trying to leverage into a company-owned console, instead of taking advantage of existing infrastructure and happily taking a percentage. They are throwing away money in a foolhardy attempt to gain power.
"The similarities and likenesses include the same or nearly the same distinctive make-up, large eyelashes, doe eyes, red/pink hair, pony tails, cute backpacks, mini-skirts, knee-socks, knee-high boots, and platform shoes..."
Isn't she guilty of ripping off every Japanese pop idol girl? And the ultrashiek 60's "oh-lah-lah i'm so French" look?
I like Dee-lite as an act, but one must admit she is popular as a diva stereotype and not as an original. Sinead 'O Conner has a distinct look. Kiss has a distinct look. Dee-lite?
All I can say is
The lawyers dance The lawyers dance The lawyers dance And make some money
Dig
The bills that all spill out my box keep me filled with trepidation of what we've done litigation of what's to come
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Another try
My hole, I do deeply dig No walls, under the bridge, no supperdish My succotash wish
Screaming baby I'm gonna ask for a lawyer Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Green is in the heart, Green is in the heart Blue as in no heat, Blue as in no heat
Watch out!
The depth of Ulala's groove Makin money to the 5th hoop Sega's going to, Gonna feed my pitutie
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Here I was on a roll Now I've been told I can't be sold Not vicious or malicious Just not lovely or delicious
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
The fun of Second life, and the major problem with it, is the freedom of creation. You build and script objects in the world, from simple benches to mansions to Soccer Balls to Casinos. The problem arises that the world has all of the beauty and serenity of a graffiti wall. My little house by the hill is surrounded by a dilapidated building consisting of four walls and a triangle, a TIE FIGHTER on a launchpad, a pole-shaped thingie extending several miles into the sky, and a floating billboard for a skin modelling company, among others. There is no stretch of land anywhere unclaimed, and there is very, very little that isn't loud, gawdy, attention-grabbing, poorly made, or some combination of the above.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm attempting to get away from: I live in a loud, attention-grabbing city, and would suspect that most people do too. The gameworld doesn't have the cultural feel of a city, with densely-packed space and open culture, but rather a suburbia with every parcel of land claimed and all of it wasted. But it has the dirty, technological, noisy feel of a city. Very few people bother to plant trees on their land, or go through any other sort of beautification with the surrounding environment. Even the people themselves can look like anything, from tiny little dwarves to pasty-white goth vampires to robby the robot.
It's not necessarily lunacy, but it *is* disconcerting. Without an external area that people go to fight in, ala everquest, there is just no large open space within which one can be alone, or free, or communal. You can hardly sit down without paying attention to who owns the bench. Everything is owned, everything is shouting for attention, and everything looks different than everything else. The old-west themed area is refreshing, following the pre-concieved notions of design and function allows for a user to rest peacefully in a cute little town and recover sanity, but other than that area the game is a big aesthetic mess.
I wish the Second Life people much luck and much success... But, in addition to a tremendous server upgrade and continents more worth of land, they need to deal with issues such as how to regulate freedom such that the activities of one person do not create a form of aesthetic pollution that makes things less enjoyable for their other paying customers. Perhaps pre-set texture sets for given areas? Or single-purpose areas? We will have to see.
BTW, I gave credit card details, and haven't been charged. They do that to prevent people from signing up multiple times, giving the free sign-up currency and the weekly in-game stipend to the primay character.
It depends upon whether you consider videogames an art form or an industry. If it were an industry like the dogfood, wheat, or airlines, consolidation and efficiency would be of the utmost importance, and the invisible hand would be omnipotent. The market would be all that really matters.
Molyneux obviously considers videogames to be an artform that is culturally worthy of protections afforded filmmakers, musicians, and traditional media artists (in Britain). Artists, like parks, clean air, museums, and pets, give back something intangible but real to society in a way that the free market doesn't generally care about. A small development house may make truly unique and interesting games the way independent musicians do, contributing to the cultural well being of Britain but without achieving financial success. And with the economics of videogames (1 hit to 9 financial failures), and the high-entry cost, most development houses won't survive until that expected hit without loans/support.
And that is, of course, the roll of government... to cover those human needs that are mere deficiencies in the eyes of the free market, as well as covering the deficiencies in the free market. Britain does have a uniquely artistic gaming industry, and it would be a shame to see that disappear. Free-market pundits may disagree, but art is worth protecting.
I just tested the sample scripts on Opera 7.0, Mozilla, and I.E. for Windows. I know this isn't a comprehensive list of Windows browsers, but it is what I have on hand.
Opera and Mozilla both handled everything flawlessly except for the XML. Neither seemed too happy with the imported XML text, instead remaining blank. On the other hand, I.E. rendered all of the above with no problems.
In any case, you shouldn't be importing your site's content as XML anyway, as another poster pointed out. If you have to, your site will be I.E. only for now. Unless they have a Mac.
-Mark pairs of batteries. Most rechargers recharge two at a time, and with NIMH batteries you don't want to mix and match.
-If your player only takes one AA, make sure to drive both into the ground before attempting a recharge. This driving into the ground needs to happen with a digital device (like your MP3 Player) that has a minimum charge level, as NIMH batteries tend to die if you attach them to a lightbulb overnight.
-These will not be the last pair of batteries you will ever own, but may be the last recharger. Go cheap on the cells, but splurge on the charger. Cells will be replaced, and the price difference of a 2000 mAh isn't justified by the miniscule power difference from a 1800 mAh. If you need more juice that badly, wire some leads to an external pack.
YAMPP MP3 players can be made for the parts for about 80 dollars... perhaps less if you can find things on clearance. It is nowhere near $12, however.
Likewise, many MP3 players are significantly lower than 150 dollars. Poking around on Shopping.yahoo.com, you can find the the Ampigo3 for 50, the Samsung YEPP for 50, the JamP3 for 40, the Audiovox MP-1000 for 40, and the D-Link DMP-100 for 35 dollars. Rio PMP 300's are still available on ebay for $50 or less. They're all about the same quality as the "latest" MP3 players from sonicblue, and will compare favorably to that $20 CD walkman for high-impact activities like treadmill jogging, cycling, etc.
If you look hard, you can find 20GB Archos Jukeboxes for $150.
If you want an MP3 player, now is a great time. Actually, last year was a great time. Now isn't that bad though. Do some legwork and start saving those batteries.
You should have a micropayment system that takes the end user's payment once a month in the form of a credit card bill or account debit. You automatically track how much they spend, and with whom, but keep all notifications in electronic format. Recipients of payment are also paid once per month. You don't let people contest micropayments.
I don't see why this is such a hard idea. The revolution is not in redistributing payments but automating the bookkeeping. Like soda or Newspaper machines, nobody gets a recipt, or can complain about their purchase. Nobody keeps track of who bought the thing.
ATM transactions cost banks an average of 16 cents each... including location and restocking fees. The only thing holding back a traditional looking payment system from becoming a micropayment system is the credit card companies themselves... Amputate many of the expensive protections, and be willing to fiddle around agregating 50c claims over several months, and you have income potential.
Sadly, no existing credit card company would be foolish enough to try such a thing... and most micropayment companies don't realize that getting acceptance in the marketplace is more important than having some radical new approach. Many don't even realize that they are a medium of value rather than a facilitator of exchanges. I wish Peppercoin the best of luck in their endeavor, but I tend to doubt their future success. I give them a 1 in 10 chance of a payoff.
5 years to develop a massively multiplayer title isn't that far off. You are not only developing a AAA title game (3 years), but are also building a thin-client app and a server farm to support it. Your applications must be optimized for speed, graphics, low-bandwidth, and impregnability. Since you are developing an ap that the average user will spend 6 hours per day over the course of four months on, you need to develop major in-game tools to create a content load that makes Master of Orion 3 look like Advance Wars. If I'm not mistaken, the world in Asheron's Call 2 is about the size of Texas. Can you imagine filling Texas with intruiging content?
And after 5 years the code is not obsolete. Code is just that: code. A lot of that 5 years went to optimizing the code for a server farm and a computer speed that didn't exist before. If they started their server farm 5 years ago on BSD, their code is binary compatible. If they started 5 years ago on NT, their code is binary compatible. Solaris? Linux? Still going strong. In fact the only major changes they would have to make over that time would be to take advantage of multithreading, and a few other speed-up tricks that modern hardware pulls. But since that is backend, they could always compensate for that by buying more servers. On the backend what they optimize for is bandwidth costs, and if they were designing for 56k modems, they should be OK. As for the clients, It's never hard to take advantage of larger texture buffers.
5 years was the development cycle for Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, and Everquest 2. It takes a very, very long time to make a networked world large enough to entertain thousands of people for thousands of hours. This isn't unreasonable.
>These 1Mb cable connections are contended 50:1, so even 1GB a day is 5 peoples' share. It's not unreasonable, but people who have been treated to cheap peak bandwidth on the assumption that they won't use it all the time are getting a lesson in how much it costs.
I'm just pointing out, in case JamesO didn't make it clear, even if your line to the Cable company is 1 mbps, the Cable Company probably does not have that much throughput to their upstream provider. All broadband providers oversell for their capacity, on the perfectly accurate assumption that not all of your clients will be using all of their bandwidth at any given time. That's why you get 1 mbps for $50 per month: they're assuming you won't use it. That's a hard assumption for a business to make in these times of Kazaa, DIVX, and shoutcast.
Slashdot Mirror
All in play has a multitude of card games available for deaf players. They also debued an audio-queued version of Quake several years ago at the monthly Boston Post Mortem, but have yet to release it to the general public.
I always find new reasons to be impressed with Apple's engineering. Unmarked wires shouldn't be a problem. A little harmless experimentation with the wires on the fans will determine the power, ground, and monitoring wires. Panasonic does make panaflos with fan speed monitoring, though they tend to run quite expensive. It would be very important to know whether or not the G5 can run without monitoring, but that is also a test for experimentation. If so, you can always set your variables yourself, and just feed back the RPM settings to keep the mobo chugging along yourself. Bypassing the system is only dangerous if you let parts overheat. Plus, the effects of fan noise are reduced if all of the fans are spinning at the same speeds... giving off the same white noise, if you will. Generally, the dual ball-bearing stuff that passes for low volume fans can't touch a hydro bearing one, but we can give Apple the benefit of the doubt. Assuming Apple has a great setup and assuming they have optimized fan usage for silence (which it doesn't seem like, seeing as how people seem to be complaining that it is the loudest component), there is still the option of replacing the faster running fans with a liquid cooled system and a large radiator. Such a thing could be used only on certain locations such as the CPU, PSU, and graphics card, and could significantly reduce overall volume. Passive heat-pipe based GPU coolers also exist for ATI's card range, but do take up quite a bit of room in a case. Here we're talking about a real investment in equipment, but the effects can be quite pronounced. And of course, as much acoustic absorption material as can fit will reduce last-mile sound emissions. A musician out here in Boston recently had a G4 case custom built from sound-deadening plastic, with a lot of extra room for airflo and more acoustic padding. Warranties aside, there is no reason to treat any computer like a black box. We don't need to know all of the details of how it is supposed to do what it is doing. We just need to know what it is supposed to do, come up with a better way of doing it (with usually means cutting fewer corners than they did), and trick the old system into accepting the new one. Again, not having a G5 in front of me, I can't give more than preliminary ideas from someone who has been doing this for a while. But there is certainly no reason to give up, especially while improvements can be made.
Fans should be able to be run happily on any standard molex adaptor. Lacking those in an apple power supply, you should have no problem running an external 7v DC adaptor dirctly to all of the fans in the case. Fans can be positioned strategically using such tools as Zalman fan brackets, Erector sets, card blanks, double-sided tape, and zip-ties.
Two fans at 1/2 speed will be much quieter than 1 fan at full speed, but will move the same amount of air. 4 Panaflo L1A fans at 7v will be more than adequate to replace 2 case fans, but will run almost dead silently.
I just did a job doing a full fan replacement on a dual-processor AMD 2.4, using a card blank with fan to replace a graphics card wailer, and using a pair of 80mm Panaflos at 8v to replace a pair of screaming 60mm sleve bearing processor fans. Replacing fans is just about the easiest thing you can do on a computer... you don't even have to be exactly on the same spot to have the proper effect. If necessary, create a sleve from heavy-duty card stock to channel the airflow properly. That machine went down from 69 decibles at 12" from motherboard to a much more acceptable 45, all without using silencing material or encasing the HDDs.
I've never cracked open a G5, but most of the standard tricks should apply. Replace all of the fans with the hydrobearing Panaflo L1A s, adding more if necessary. If possible, run them low at 7v or so... Pay special attention to fans under 80mm, as those tend to be the loudest. Line the case with the heavy, stinky lining used by car stereo installers. This will increase your case temps but will reduce the audio significantly more than a standard computer case liner. You may need to make an audio absorbative box (with it's own fan) around your HDD, or try replacing them with hydro-bearing drives from Maxtor or Seagate mounted with rubber.
For general purpose quieting tips, check out Silent PC Review. You'll see me on the boards there sometimes.
Nintendo once upon a time claimed to be a "cartridge company." They would live and die making cartridges. After the market reality of the N64, they changed their tune. If Nintendo had stayed a "cartridge company," then they would be in the position that the author of this article describes... they would be the locomotive industry not realizing their impending obsolescence.
But Amtrak it is not. 1st of all, Amtrak was created in the 1970's by mandate of congress long after the battle with cars was a forgone conclusion. 2nd of all, Nintendo has broadened its perspective to see what it industry it is in. It is a videogame company. It does not make movies, it does not release multimedia CD's. It sells videogames, and players that play videogames. Sony can rightfully claim to be an entertainment company, because it owns movie studios, theme parks, musicians, etc. Microsoft can rightfully claim to be in the technology industry, as it does, well, techie stuff. But Nintendo's primary market is in gaming, and their competition in the gaming arena is with other video games (some would say they're competing with homework). They are right to be focused upon being the best gaming company they can be.
The article mentions several things the XBox does which the 'Cube does not, and rightfully so. The hard drive was a great addition to a console, as was the ethernet port. Some would say they are as revolutionary as the N64's addition of the analog stick. However, These were great in service of the videogame playing part. Nintendo was one of the first companies to test market a modem adapter (for the NES), and the rewritable bulky drive was a predecessor to the hard drive in the Xbox. Both were ahead of their time, and both failed. Now apparently the market is about ready for them, and hopefully Nintendo will notice on their next generation of hardware.
On the other hand, the author exposes a deeply flawed perspective of the situation claiming that Nintendo's lack of DVD playback capabilities are due to being videogame-only. DVD playback is a great feature in modern consoles. It's also the only feature mentioned that has nothing to do with videogames. Why is DVD playback not included in the GameCube? The reason Nintendo cited at the time was that they expected people who wanted to play DVDs would buy a proper DVD player, much like how the PS1 was capable of playing CD's but people kept buying real players. Furthermore, by not including DVD playback capabilities, Nintendo saved themselves an estimated (at the time) 50 dollars per console. That allowed Nintendo to ship at the magic $200 mark, and stay the low-price leader throughout the console wars. Stand-alone DVD players are now available for less than 80 dollars, with PC DVD drives hovering around 40.
Nintendo is attempting to avoid falling into the trap of so many systems before them. The historical landscapes are littered with systems that tried to do more than play videogames. The Saturn, for example, had a modem adaptor and a copy of Netscape available shortly after launch. How did it do? It died in the market. 3DO wanted to play games, read children's storybooks, play movies, surf the web... After about a year of beating around the bush, they refocused upon purely gaming, but by then the damage had been done. CDI? A console whose most compelling piece of software is an encyclopedia? The game.com organizer, game player, trivia master? The N-Gage? Admittedly, many systems that didn't try to be more than game playing machines have also died over the years. Dreamcast for one. Virtua-Boy for another. But no system that tried to market itself as a set-top box managed to survive.
Perhaps someday the set-top box analogy will be correct, but perhaps not. To function as a set-top box, the machine requires a fast connection to the web. That kind of connection will only exist if the person already has a computer. Why does this matter? Well, if downloadable content is your goal, the computer you already have can do
If the only justification for random enemy encounters the reviewer can come up with is that they are necessary to make a game longer, then the reviewer needs to re-examine why they have persisted for so long. What has kept them around for years?
I would argue that RPG fighting, when done well, is a strategy encounter. Final Fantasy is full of examples of this type of gameplay. Wall in your characters to reflect healing spells onto the undead. Falcon units off of the screen, then cast earthquake to damage everyone left. Lunar featured movement squares which played a strategic role in every battle. Grandia had a real-time fighting system that forced the player to decide between waiting for combined attacks or doing faster individual ones. Aside from the initial encounters, there are also long-term effects from fighting that must be balanced. All fighting has an associated cost in life, mana, and items, but pays off in gold and experience. Do you dart the glass sword now to top off the boss or do you rely upon your Phoenix Downs and save it for the next one? Do you level up your mighty axe which has +12 to goblins or the spear of light which gives a +3 to the undead? Use your fragile armor of perfect protection now or use up your spare cash on the mighty armor of swiss cheese? Done right, RPG's are resource management sims.
It's ironic the reviewer would mention Xenogears. Xenogears was a revolutionary game (and still is), whose dungeons alternated between having A: no enemies, B: very few random enemies, and C: frequent once-only battles at fixed locations. The jumping aspect made exploration actually fun, and the detail everywhere was just dripping.
That, and having the two different modes of fighting made Xenogears one of the most enjoyable games ever (right up to the point where they ran out of money).
Any game can take a fun genre and turn it into boring drivel if the developers don't focus on the right things. The winning strategy in Star Ocean 2, for example, consisted of buying forgery papers, spending hours clicking on "make fake money," and finally spending hours clicking on "photograph fake money." Eventually, you would have all of the resources you would need, but the mechanic to get there was no fun.
One of the ways to change the system would be to expand the concept of "attack." When swordfighting in the real world, you have head shots, body shots, leg attacks, limb attacks, etc. If you hammer away at one portion of the body, the enemy will expect that and block accordingly. Likewise, the player should set their guard after an attack, in any of the 8 control pad directions. Swordfighting should be as intricate as spellcasting.
Likewise, enemy encounters should be fewer and stronger. I'm not advocating the return of the infinite boss syndrome (2+ hours for Final Fantasy 8... What were they thinking?), But a battle with faceless drones should take longer than the loading screen... that way they wouldn't be faceless drones. Think of them as mini-mini bosses, with one or two per explorable area.
RPG's in recent years have plummeted in difficulty, which makes encounters more of an annoyance than a challenge. Sure, this opens things up to more players, but that also makes the game busywork. What was wrong with selectable difficulty levels? To balance this out, the designers should reduce the significance of death. Return the player to the last checkpoint with all of their items intact, and expect this to happen several times.
Another of the ways to change the system would be to have a target level associated with every area. If a player were to go to the second level with too few exp, for example, they would be given more to help them catch up. However, if they were dominating in an area, they receive fewer. That way players are discouraged from camping, and can explore what they are interested in without unbalancing the game.
Finally, players should be encouraged to consume resources, not horde them. Items should b
I'm ecstatic that Ice Climber took such a high position... It was underappreciated in the US at the time, where the game playing public wasn't ready to appreciate the extremely japanese characters. As 2-player games went it was in a class of its own, especially in the early days. It was a 2-player game where you could help your fellow team-member or hinder them, where you weren't allowed to attack them directly but you could really mess them up. You could cause them to die by scrolling too high, or you could give their jump a huge boost by jumping up underneath them. You could hammer away at bricks under their feet, or hammer away at enemies about to attack them. You could wait for your friend to join you in the bonus level, or you could heartlessly skip ahead and take all of the plunder for yourself.
It was never clear if you were supposed to be friends or foes, and that lack of distinction kept the game sessions hot and fun.
Personally, I hope someone in Japan sees this list and makes a GBA version of Ice-Climber, so that 4 people can work with / compete against eachother to reach the top of that mountain alive. It was a genius design then, and it would be a breath of fresh air now.
One of the major problems with MMPORPGs is they know they can't fit a traditional Japanese RPG Savior of the World goal structure into the game, so they hardly try with any goals. This needs to change, as goal-based gaming is far more rewarding than treadmilling.
For example, a player's NPC family might be sick, and the medicine is only available in a certain higher-level area that is significantly higher than the player's current level, and which is only available as an item to those who have sick families. Or perhaps a certain number of people start in a city that has been raided, and their purpose in the game is to rescue their Husband / Wife. Perhaps, as in SWG, there could be some form of Nirvana that individuals can reach by attaining X powers.
But all of this ignores the secret of good storytelling: it doesn't have to be consistent across all listeners, it just has to all make sense to each one. Phantasy Star Online did this admirably, with small groups venturing down to the planet's surface and miraculously not encountering the other groups on the surface. Many caves or dungeons in MMPORPGs would be significantly more emotionally gripping if they weren't full of hundreds of "William teh Great"s and "Yo m0t4a fuXor"s running around complaining about how easy the dungeon was. Why not have certain, if not most dungeons be party-based?
For that matter, why have goals be consistent? Maybe every now and then a few people in the world get singled out to form an impromptu party because they came across Midgard while it was being set ablaze by a Balrog, and it is their duty to defeat it. Maybe this happens to most people at a rough skill level in the game. Maybe not. Anyone else who happens across Midgard during that time gets the regular version.
You could take it one step further and have this as a function of the gameworld, ALA Silent Hill. The universe is being swallowed up by Hell (or The Nothing, for the Atreyu fans out there). It is your job to claw your way out. Or reach your goal, and stay to become one of the architects of hell. Maybe to some characters you speak a baffling language, to others you speak plain english. Maybe some characters watch as the world crumbles into a drug-induced fantasy realm, where others have no idea where the first group of people went. With people exiting and returning to MMPORPGs on their own schedules, this could mesh acceptably with the people's groupings.
With more and more people looking to use their broadband connections for online gaming we need to create more and more content tailored to the medium. Clan warfare was a good first step towards creating a unique language for MMP games, but there are many left to take. How far can we stretch consistency before players balk? How much of a "Tardis" effect can we rely upon, or do players need rigid spaces?
We won't know the answer until someone demonstratably steps over the line. Sadly, far more games fail these days because they are afraid of breaking conventions, rather than because they broke them too much.
It's not like Will just accidentally stumbled into Slashdot today. He lives here, and has at least enough cred to deserve respect.
In short, he's one of us, so let the man be.
Please mod parent down as Troll.
Firstly this code is over a month old, and they're in crunch-mode. This means that drastic bug and graphics fixes are due for this code, and a month is a long time when everyone at Valve is probably putting in 16+ hour days.
They are most definitely in crunch mode. With a necessary holiday release date, they are probably focusing upon stability and networking issues, not additional features or graphical glitches. At this point, they had better be focused upon bringing the stability up to AAA level, rather than sneaking in that feature they always wanted.
Secondly, those modified binaries probably won't work correctly unless they also include modified DLL's, and even then some graphical bug could bite them in the ass, something that was probably fixed in the Gold release.
Right. I had meant all game-dependent binaries, including dll's.
is absolute nonsense, and kind of silly at best. Cripple their sales numbers? Hah! That was a good one.
Clearly you haven' t compared the thriving community and international competitions surrounding counterstrike with the not quite as thriving community surrounding Half-Life. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been "if Half-Life 2's shelf life were destined to follow a similar course as Half-Life 1, Valve's income stream could be greatly hampered."
Please, don't be as nieve as you're sounding here.
Done and done.
Valve makes money from three sources: Sales of their games for sake of their games, sales of their games to support mods (such as counterstrike), and sales of their engine to other companies to create their own game. Because the art resources weren't leaked with the source, sales of their own game for their own sake will not be hurt. The other two cases are a little more interesting.
Sales of the engine may be hurt, or it may be helped. Certain companies may wind up "doing the wrong thing" and incorporating Valve code into their own, but no major player would be caught dead doing such a thing. I expect that snippets of that code may find its way into the wild due to overtasked programmers trying to make their game the best it can be, but such snippets wouldn't have equalled a sale, they simply mean fiercer competition. And with the increased visibility, companies can now know the quality of the code that their 500 grand will be buying. True, being released into the wild may reduce the perception of value, but with the availability of the code this may still lead to increased sales.
Modders are a different story. Without economic interests compelling them to buy a license, they might begin releasing compiled binaries of their work to the community without requiring a half-life 2 license, which would cripple Valve's sales numbers. But on the other hand with access to source, modders could create more extensive and more active modifications, creating original features instead of mere graphical facelifts. If these code modders require the original game to be playable, it could lead to a real renissance in modding and a tremendous boost in sales for Valve.
I can see how this may possibly turn out to be somewhat damaging to Valve, but I can't see how this is one of the four horsemen of their apocolypse. The head of the man who intentionally leaked the code should roll (if it truly was intentional), but it is way too soon to declare this the end of the company. Under closer analysis, it may even be a boon.
Interesting, how in this more modern era of instant saving we now have more games with progressive defeats than with instant deaths. Does it break the skill necessary to play Warcraft 3 if the player is allowed to save after every weapon swing? Of course not, because with each encounter comes guaranteed damage, and the tradeoffs between taking and doing damage is what leads to success. Even in FPS shooters, one has to ask "did I take too much damage to save? Is losing 10% of my health for that encounter a bad thing?"
As we have moved away from the realistic one shot-one kill analogy to systems that are a bit more forgiving, the line between success and failure of an attack become blurred. But as games move online, the distinction becomes moot. If you don't like how an attack played out in Battlefield 1942, you have no option to restart. If you took too much damage running your UT2003 avatar into a room full of the opposite team, your recourse is nill.
This really hasn't been a problem in years.
Much like stores have to plan for losing 2 - 5 % of their inventory to theft ("shrinkage"), so too must software companies accept that someone, somewhere is going to hack your software if anyone likes it. If they have all of the bits and bytes of your system sitting in front of them, and they have no need to communicate with your server, they can always strip it out. Your purpose should be to encourage the maximum number of users to pay for the full version, not to have the minimum amount of piracy.
A freeware version is a good idea, as it will raise your visibility... If someone is so cheap that they would use a pirated version, you might convince them to become a customer by offering freeware, then enticing them with the full thing. Most of the copies of WinZip out there are the freeware version, but there are a heck of a lot more paid copies than if they didn't offer the free one.
A 15 day trial is too short. You are not just trying to show users the full value of your software, you are also trying to get them so used to using it that they are willing to shell out the cash to keep doing what they are doing. Most people have settled on 30 days, but 60 days wouldn't be out of the question.
I'd also charge more for the software, as price creates a perception of value: 25 - 35 dollars should be sufficient. At 15 dollars you are putting yourself in the realm of cheaply made, junky Visual Basic apps.
You've probably heard the following, but as an avid digital photographer I would find your software difficult to use. For one, you don't have an intuitive, on-screen way to navigate through folders. There is a reason every other piece of image software out there has this... it's much easier to manually search your image collection, which is why you have a browser in the first place. No real image collection is a flat folder.
The single-level Thumbnail filmstrip is also a cute analogy, but it makes it difficult to, once again, search your pictures. There should be some way to have multiple filmstrips to facilitate easier searching.
On one hand, whatever algorithms you are using to handle large file databases is solid... ABC took a 10,000 image file folder with only a 5 second pause on this P3 800. And now that you have a solid program, the last bit of polish required is what brings in most of the money.
On the other hand, as you mentioned you are competing with literally thousands of other products, such as ThumbsPlus, SuperJPG, ACDsee, and many others which are all highly professional, tremendously polished, and mature products. Spidering websites is a good first step, but you need to differentiate yourself if you are going to see real success. Are you going to be the online viewer of choice, with auto-import from camera / auto-export to HTML via FTP features? Are you going to push yourself onto OEM machines as a simple, easy-to-use viewer for regular people?
And if you haven't read Steve Pavlina's excellent article on selling shareware, I strongly recommend you do so now.
I can't think of any game developer who wouldn't give a $5 (or even a $10) cut to a distributor who handled the online sales and downloading of games. As a genre jumpstarted by online sales of Doom, such a transition should be natural. Companies reach a wider market without having to pay for boxes, manuals, and disks, and consumers who might not have a game available at the local Walmart can still purchase AAA games. You don't deal with any of the hardware issues (or hardware duplication issues), and there aren't any warranty returns.
On the other hand, the prospect of spending 399 dollars on a P3 800 / nVidia based system just doesn't seem... Competitive. As for "blowing everything out of the water," it hardly beats this generation of consoles at its highly inflated price. Time will show how well it specs against the P3, Xbox2, and the GameTesseract, but if past performance is any indication it will not be able to compete.
Sadly, what the phantom people have is an interesting computer game distribution system that they are trying to leverage into a company-owned console, instead of taking advantage of existing infrastructure and happily taking a percentage. They are throwing away money in a foolhardy attempt to gain power.
"The similarities and likenesses include the same or nearly the same distinctive make-up, large eyelashes, doe eyes, red/pink hair, pony tails, cute backpacks, mini-skirts, knee-socks, knee-high boots, and platform shoes..."
Isn't she guilty of ripping off every Japanese pop idol girl? And the ultrashiek 60's "oh-lah-lah i'm so French" look?
I like Dee-lite as an act, but one must admit she is popular as a diva stereotype and not as an original. Sinead 'O Conner has a distinct look. Kiss has a distinct look. Dee-lite?
All I can say is
The lawyers dance
The lawyers dance
The lawyers dance
And make some money
Dig
The bills that all spill out my box
keep me filled with trepidation of what we've done
litigation of what's to come
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Another try
My hole, I do deeply dig
No walls, under the bridge, no supperdish
My succotash wish
Screaming baby
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Green is in the heart, Green is in the heart
Blue as in no heat, Blue as in no heat
Watch out!
The depth of Ulala's groove
Makin money to the 5th hoop
Sega's going to, Gonna feed my pitutie
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Here I was on a roll
Now I've been told I can't be sold
Not vicious or malicious
Just not lovely or delicious
I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Yeah, I'm gonna ask for a lawyer
Green is in the heart...
The fun of Second life, and the major problem with it, is the freedom of creation. You build and script objects in the world, from simple benches to mansions to Soccer Balls to Casinos. The problem arises that the world has all of the beauty and serenity of a graffiti wall. My little house by the hill is surrounded by a dilapidated building consisting of four walls and a triangle, a TIE FIGHTER on a launchpad, a pole-shaped thingie extending several miles into the sky, and a floating billboard for a skin modelling company, among others. There is no stretch of land anywhere unclaimed, and there is very, very little that isn't loud, gawdy, attention-grabbing, poorly made, or some combination of the above.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm attempting to get away from: I live in a loud, attention-grabbing city, and would suspect that most people do too. The gameworld doesn't have the cultural feel of a city, with densely-packed space and open culture, but rather a suburbia with every parcel of land claimed and all of it wasted. But it has the dirty, technological, noisy feel of a city. Very few people bother to plant trees on their land, or go through any other sort of beautification with the surrounding environment. Even the people themselves can look like anything, from tiny little dwarves to pasty-white goth vampires to robby the robot.
It's not necessarily lunacy, but it *is* disconcerting. Without an external area that people go to fight in, ala everquest, there is just no large open space within which one can be alone, or free, or communal. You can hardly sit down without paying attention to who owns the bench. Everything is owned, everything is shouting for attention, and everything looks different than everything else. The old-west themed area is refreshing, following the pre-concieved notions of design and function allows for a user to rest peacefully in a cute little town and recover sanity, but other than that area the game is a big aesthetic mess.
I wish the Second Life people much luck and much success... But, in addition to a tremendous server upgrade and continents more worth of land, they need to deal with issues such as how to regulate freedom such that the activities of one person do not create a form of aesthetic pollution that makes things less enjoyable for their other paying customers. Perhaps pre-set texture sets for given areas? Or single-purpose areas? We will have to see.
BTW, I gave credit card details, and haven't been charged. They do that to prevent people from signing up multiple times, giving the free sign-up currency and the weekly in-game stipend to the primay character.
It depends upon whether you consider videogames an art form or an industry. If it were an industry like the dogfood, wheat, or airlines, consolidation and efficiency would be of the utmost importance, and the invisible hand would be omnipotent. The market would be all that really matters.
Molyneux obviously considers videogames to be an artform that is culturally worthy of protections afforded filmmakers, musicians, and traditional media artists (in Britain). Artists, like parks, clean air, museums, and pets, give back something intangible but real to society in a way that the free market doesn't generally care about. A small development house may make truly unique and interesting games the way independent musicians do, contributing to the cultural well being of Britain but without achieving financial success. And with the economics of videogames (1 hit to 9 financial failures), and the high-entry cost, most development houses won't survive until that expected hit without loans/support.
And that is, of course, the roll of government... to cover those human needs that are mere deficiencies in the eyes of the free market, as well as covering the deficiencies in the free market. Britain does have a uniquely artistic gaming industry, and it would be a shame to see that disappear. Free-market pundits may disagree, but art is worth protecting.
Opera. Right-click. Reload every 30 seconds. Done.
I just tested the sample scripts on Opera 7.0, Mozilla, and I.E. for Windows. I know this isn't a comprehensive list of Windows browsers, but it is what I have on hand.
Opera and Mozilla both handled everything flawlessly except for the XML. Neither seemed too happy with the imported XML text, instead remaining blank. On the other hand, I.E. rendered all of the above with no problems.
In any case, you shouldn't be importing your site's content as XML anyway, as another poster pointed out. If you have to, your site will be I.E. only for now. Unless they have a Mac.
To add to this list.
-Mark pairs of batteries. Most rechargers recharge two at a time, and with NIMH batteries you don't want to mix and match.
-If your player only takes one AA, make sure to drive both into the ground before attempting a recharge. This driving into the ground needs to happen with a digital device (like your MP3 Player) that has a minimum charge level, as NIMH batteries tend to die if you attach them to a lightbulb overnight.
-These will not be the last pair of batteries you will ever own, but may be the last recharger. Go cheap on the cells, but splurge on the charger. Cells will be replaced, and the price difference of a 2000 mAh isn't justified by the miniscule power difference from a 1800 mAh. If you need more juice that badly, wire some leads to an external pack.
YAMPP MP3 players can be made for the parts for about 80 dollars... perhaps less if you can find things on clearance. It is nowhere near $12, however.
Likewise, many MP3 players are significantly lower than 150 dollars. Poking around on Shopping.yahoo.com, you can find the the Ampigo3 for 50, the Samsung YEPP for 50, the JamP3 for 40, the Audiovox MP-1000 for 40, and the D-Link DMP-100 for 35 dollars. Rio PMP 300's are still available on ebay for $50 or less. They're all about the same quality as the "latest" MP3 players from sonicblue, and will compare favorably to that $20 CD walkman for high-impact activities like treadmill jogging, cycling, etc.
If you look hard, you can find 20GB Archos Jukeboxes for $150.
If you want an MP3 player, now is a great time. Actually, last year was a great time. Now isn't that bad though. Do some legwork and start saving those batteries.
You know how many copies of Tetris there are for Linux?
Agreed.
You should have a micropayment system that takes the end user's payment once a month in the form of a credit card bill or account debit. You automatically track how much they spend, and with whom, but keep all notifications in electronic format. Recipients of payment are also paid once per month. You don't let people contest micropayments.
I don't see why this is such a hard idea. The revolution is not in redistributing payments but automating the bookkeeping. Like soda or Newspaper machines, nobody gets a recipt, or can complain about their purchase. Nobody keeps track of who bought the thing.
ATM transactions cost banks an average of 16 cents each... including location and restocking fees. The only thing holding back a traditional looking payment system from becoming a micropayment system is the credit card companies themselves... Amputate many of the expensive protections, and be willing to fiddle around agregating 50c claims over several months, and you have income potential.
Sadly, no existing credit card company would be foolish enough to try such a thing... and most micropayment companies don't realize that getting acceptance in the marketplace is more important than having some radical new approach. Many don't even realize that they are a medium of value rather than a facilitator of exchanges. I wish Peppercoin the best of luck in their endeavor, but I tend to doubt their future success. I give them a 1 in 10 chance of a payoff.
5 years to develop a massively multiplayer title isn't that far off. You are not only developing a AAA title game (3 years), but are also building a thin-client app and a server farm to support it. Your applications must be optimized for speed, graphics, low-bandwidth, and impregnability. Since you are developing an ap that the average user will spend 6 hours per day over the course of four months on, you need to develop major in-game tools to create a content load that makes Master of Orion 3 look like Advance Wars. If I'm not mistaken, the world in Asheron's Call 2 is about the size of Texas. Can you imagine filling Texas with intruiging content?
And after 5 years the code is not obsolete. Code is just that: code. A lot of that 5 years went to optimizing the code for a server farm and a computer speed that didn't exist before. If they started their server farm 5 years ago on BSD, their code is binary compatible. If they started 5 years ago on NT, their code is binary compatible. Solaris? Linux? Still going strong. In fact the only major changes they would have to make over that time would be to take advantage of multithreading, and a few other speed-up tricks that modern hardware pulls. But since that is backend, they could always compensate for that by buying more servers. On the backend what they optimize for is bandwidth costs, and if they were designing for 56k modems, they should be OK. As for the clients, It's never hard to take advantage of larger texture buffers.
5 years was the development cycle for Asheron's Call 2, Star Wars Galaxies, and Everquest 2. It takes a very, very long time to make a networked world large enough to entertain thousands of people for thousands of hours. This isn't unreasonable.
-Chris
>These 1Mb cable connections are contended 50:1, so even 1GB a day is 5 peoples' share. It's not unreasonable, but people who have been treated to cheap peak bandwidth on the assumption that they won't use it all the time are getting a lesson in how much it costs.
I'm just pointing out, in case JamesO didn't make it clear, even if your line to the Cable company is 1 mbps, the Cable Company probably does not have that much throughput to their upstream provider. All broadband providers oversell for their capacity, on the perfectly accurate assumption that not all of your clients will be using all of their bandwidth at any given time. That's why you get 1 mbps for $50 per month: they're assuming you won't use it. That's a hard assumption for a business to make in these times of Kazaa, DIVX, and shoutcast.