But the creator ended the game because he got sick of people cheating. The game was free and extremely fun and this was many years ago. See if this sounds FUN then look at the images:
In the game, there would be many cities equidistant from each other. A city would start off as just one building, I'll call it "Main Building" so you guys can't find out what game I'm talking about with a search engine:)
If an enemy ship places an ***** on the steps infront of the MB, the whole city is gone and that city's mayor and fighters are kicked out of the game, and players of the enemy's city get points and advance in ranking.
So you try to a) protect your city and b) while attacking other cities. First guy to a city is the mayor, and he has $$ to build up housing and labs to build bombs/weapons/autoguns (the building-up stage takes only a few minutes so it's not time consuming.)
The mayor generally stays around the city and calls for help and builds it up and rebuilds it, although he may leave the city to attack others (not advised). The "fighters" (real name removed to protect the game) ships drive around to the other cities and blow them up with bombs and try to get to the MB and drop the ***** on the MB, causing that whole city to go BOOM and you get points. Then new people can occupy that city but you will have to wait for htem to place 13 buildings before you can try to ***** them, too.
The mayor try to place buildings strategically to minize access to the MB and make people have to blow up a lot of stuff first. You can place several types of auto guns around your city to protect it. Also there are mines and thingies that trap you to the ground.
When you login to the game, you can chat or go to view the "cities". If the city is looking for a mayor (meaning it's empty but available) you could select it and appear. You would have some money $$ now to build housing or build a building for scientists and build weapons/turrets. So every city always has one MB, the life blood of the city. He can also kick out the fighters on his team and when others want to join this city (ie, "LET ME IN OR I WILL **** YOUR CITY!!"), the mayor interviews them in a window then accepts or rejects.
Very fun, someone took multiple screen shots of one city once and combined them into one file. You can really only actually see about 9 buildings (3x3) at once.
...Judge a persons ability by the quality of code, not the features they produce.
How absurd. Programming is about solving a problem (especially by definition of a "program"). How one gets there is his or her own journey.
I have seen code that was written by a team of people that expanded over 150K lines to do some amazing things. But the code was shit. You could tell the programmers did not have a grasp on not only how to write what they wrote, but even on common agreed-upon design and implementation principles
This all sounds well and good, but the reality is that users/clients/consumers would choose a "poorly coded" (but stable) program with amazing features and GUI over a slightly faster, well-coded, and similarly priced application with NO amazing features. Why? Because consumers aren't stupid! Nobody will reward a company just because they put "USES 100KB LESS DISK SPACE THAN OUR LEADING COMPETITOR" on the box. People's $$ will just simply go further if they choose to buy the poorly coded, amazing features one. And if both versions are exactly the same (features, price, GUI, relative execution speed), then people will buy from the company that offers the best technical support, guarantee, and testimonials (and the most dollars to spend on advertising;P). Also, don't forget that a re-write of old code will always be more efficient than the original...and if the re-write is done by a third party (100% efficient coders, but no access to the original source!) then, well... The sloppy-coding team will have a new 2.0 version to offer to consumers by the time the third party is done creating a smaller, slightly speedier clone. That's how the market works.
In the real world, nobody except your company has to know how crappy your code is. If it's stable, who cares how it's written! What you get done at the end of the day is what counts. For example, I know of a very poorly-coded RPG written entirely in Visual Basic and made by a novice teen-age programmer. It was to be a free Ultima Online clone. Well, the graphics sucked, the code sucked, the networking sucked, but it was a fun game! Thousands of people have played, or at least heard of "Era Online", and hundreds of people still keep current about its progress (with the game's new developers) via message boards.
You *need* to have spaghetti code to finish large projects. Most programs do not get completed. An article on gamedev.net states that in only 1 instance of 50 does a started game is ever completed to the point of release. And that's remembering that with most games, it seems 'obvious' to most programmers how to code them. But take a network protocol of such complexity and see how only freenet authors are up to the challenge: if they've had direct competition developing such a protocol since 1999, then there are probably not many competitors still going strong.
And let's not forget that no program is ever perfect. Making a compiler work how you imagine it should work sometimes fails, and one ends up hacking up work-around code... which eventually end up being part of the permanent code.
Successful programmers don't write the most efficient code. Successful programmers accomplish things. There is nothing one can criticize Freenet programmers for with what they have done so far.
Software!!
And it used to be that selling Not Labeled For Resale candy was naughty!
Well I guess I know what my friend's NEW business will be after he gets out of jail;) (and he'll do just that when the stand-alone Get Out of Jail Free card I bought for him on eBay arrives...)
It's not like your old card is worthless, some of us mortals still get along with 550mhz Pentium III's and TNT2's
Some of us get along just semi-fine with 500mhz celerons and generic Intel graphic cards...:)
Speaking of which, nVidia's web site has a performance analyzer that compares your CPU / Graphics Card combination against similar setups taken from a benchmarking database (and it's also a page that probably everybody knows about.) It estimates what your computer's new performance level would be for each graphic card in their product line, should you buy and install it. (A GeForce3 would supposedly increase my computer's performance to 1179% of what it's now.)
And 20fps/640x480 in CS is fine--not like cool people play anything besides HL, anyway...;)
Slashdot Mirror
But the creator ended the game because he got sick of people cheating. The game was free and extremely fun and this was many years ago. See if this sounds FUN then look at the images:
:)
p le.jpg
In the game, there would be many cities equidistant from each other. A city would start off as just one building, I'll call it "Main Building" so you guys can't find out what game I'm talking about with a search engine
If an enemy ship places an ***** on the steps infront of the MB, the whole city is gone and that city's mayor and fighters are kicked out of the game, and players of the enemy's city get points and advance in ranking.
So you try to a) protect your city and b) while attacking other cities. First guy to a city is the mayor, and he has $$ to build up housing and labs to build bombs/weapons/autoguns (the building-up stage takes only a few minutes so it's not time consuming.)
The mayor generally stays around the city and calls for help and builds it up and rebuilds it, although he may leave the city to attack others (not advised). The "fighters" (real name removed to protect the game) ships drive around to the other cities and blow them up with bombs and try to get to the MB and drop the ***** on the MB, causing that whole city to go BOOM and you get points. Then new people can occupy that city but you will have to wait for htem to place 13 buildings before you can try to ***** them, too.
The mayor try to place buildings strategically to minize access to the MB and make people have to blow up a lot of stuff first. You can place several types of auto guns around your city to protect it. Also there are mines and thingies that trap you to the ground.
When you login to the game, you can chat or go to view the "cities". If the city is looking for a mayor (meaning it's empty but available) you could select it and appear. You would have some money $$ now to build housing or build a building for scientists and build weapons/turrets. So every city always has one MB, the life blood of the city. He can also kick out the fighters on his team and when others want to join this city (ie, "LET ME IN OR I WILL **** YOUR CITY!!"), the mayor interviews them in a window then accepts or rejects.
Very fun, someone took multiple screen shots of one city once and combined them into one file. You can really only actually see about 9 buildings (3x3) at once.
http://games.bizhosting.com/cgi-bin/i/Images/exam
...Judge a persons ability by the quality of code, not the features they produce.
;P). Also, don't forget that a re-write of old code will always be more efficient than the original...and if the re-write is done by a third party (100% efficient coders, but no access to the original source!) then, well... The sloppy-coding team will have a new 2.0 version to offer to consumers by the time the third party is done creating a smaller, slightly speedier clone. That's how the market works.
How absurd. Programming is about solving a problem (especially by definition of a "program"). How one gets there is his or her own journey.
I have seen code that was written by a team of people that expanded over 150K lines to do some amazing things. But the code was shit. You could tell the programmers did not have a grasp on not only how to write what they wrote, but even on common agreed-upon design and implementation principles
This all sounds well and good, but the reality is that users/clients/consumers would choose a "poorly coded" (but stable) program with amazing features and GUI over a slightly faster, well-coded, and similarly priced application with NO amazing features. Why? Because consumers aren't stupid! Nobody will reward a company just because they put "USES 100KB LESS DISK SPACE THAN OUR LEADING COMPETITOR" on the box. People's $$ will just simply go further if they choose to buy the poorly coded, amazing features one. And if both versions are exactly the same (features, price, GUI, relative execution speed), then people will buy from the company that offers the best technical support, guarantee, and testimonials (and the most dollars to spend on advertising
In the real world, nobody except your company has to know how crappy your code is. If it's stable, who cares how it's written! What you get done at the end of the day is what counts. For example, I know of a very poorly-coded RPG written entirely in Visual Basic and made by a novice teen-age programmer. It was to be a free Ultima Online clone. Well, the graphics sucked, the code sucked, the networking sucked, but it was a fun game! Thousands of people have played, or at least heard of "Era Online", and hundreds of people still keep current about its progress (with the game's new developers) via message boards.
You *need* to have spaghetti code to finish large projects. Most programs do not get completed. An article on gamedev.net states that in only 1 instance of 50 does a started game is ever completed to the point of release. And that's remembering that with most games, it seems 'obvious' to most programmers how to code them. But take a network protocol of such complexity and see how only freenet authors are up to the challenge: if they've had direct competition developing such a protocol since 1999, then there are probably not many competitors still going strong.
And let's not forget that no program is ever perfect. Making a compiler work how you imagine it should work sometimes fails, and one ends up hacking up work-around code... which eventually end up being part of the permanent code.
Successful programmers don't write the most efficient code. Successful programmers accomplish things. There is nothing one can criticize Freenet programmers for with what they have done so far.
Isn't it possible that the virus itself flooded the website with many hits to it coming from just instant messenger? :)
:)
Plus, since the topic author knew the exact URL from somewhere, it must have already been fairly widespread before it got here
Software!! And it used to be that selling Not Labeled For Resale candy was naughty!
;)
;)
Well I guess I know what my friend's NEW business will be after he gets out of jail
(and he'll do just that when the stand-alone Get Out of Jail Free card I bought for him on eBay arrives...)
It's not like your old card is worthless, some of us mortals still get along with 550mhz Pentium III's and TNT2's
Some of us get along just semi-fine with 500mhz celerons and generic Intel graphic cards...
Speaking of which, nVidia's web site has a performance analyzer that compares your CPU / Graphics Card combination against similar setups taken from a benchmarking database (and it's also a page that probably everybody knows about.)
It estimates what your computer's new performance level would be for each graphic card in their product line, should you buy and install it. (A GeForce3 would supposedly increase my computer's performance to 1179% of what it's now.)
And 20fps/640x480 in CS is fine--not like cool people play anything besides HL, anyway...