Ever heard of the rather obscure physical situation known as confined space? Resources are not unlimited. Hence the growth curve will flatten out with the limit being the maximum that earth can sustain. (Excess life will die because of a lack of resources. Excess resources will be used up by growing life.)
Yes, this is also true for information and innovation, and hence the “singularity” will never happen.
The ribbon is stupid. But what was there before is a horrible nightmare of a piece of crap of interface design. You only like it, because you are used to it. It really is really really really bad design. Menus and modal dialogs? In 2010? Are you kidding me?? Lotus SmartSuite had property state panels in what...1991? I think all the Adobe/ex-Macromedia products use them. KOffice started using them.
Sorry, but MS Office is really a piece of shit, no matter how you look at it. And OpenOffice, being so very similar, is not better. Limited software by limited minds for limited minds.
They don’t even have semantics and style separation. Even HTML+CSS is decades ahead of this. It’s so sad. And all in the name of “WYSIWYG” pseudo-simplicity, which actually just makes everything much harder and suckier, because it makes no damn sense at all.
Yes it is ours. If “ours” means: Us idiots who made Flash dominant in the first place, by using it in any way. It always takes two. The ass doing it, and the idiot letting him do it. That guy with the narrow mustache from the 40s would agree to that: “What luck for rulers that men do not think.” ^^
Yes, I agree. I have rarely seen such an epic failure of tediousness as this game. (Apart from Asia grinders of course.;) For a counter-example look at all those new games that let you start nearly right where you died, when you die. It may feel a bit too easy, but in total it usually is a lot more fun. Or a bit less annoyance but a lot more intensity.:) I think that Prince of Persia with that barefoot girl that runs around with you was the first to re-discover this simple principle. The art is not to make a game harder. The art is to make you stay as close as possible to the sweet spot between too easy and too hard. Where it always is extremely close. Then you grow the game with the improving user. Which causes him to be able to stand even closer wins. That’s what will get the adrenaline pumping!:)
I’m sorry, but you forgot to mention any arguments for why that bold statement is true.
While I myself can easily prove that it is possible with this very simple example: A racing game: Just make everything feel faster and narrower, and the win closer, and you got a shorter, but more intense experience. The “greatness” total stays the same. QED
My biggest problem with modern games is that the type of complexity that they introduce doesn't make any sense. One way is that they add some sort of "puzzle" or something to solve. But this puzzle isn't solvable by logic or intelligence, it's just something completely random. This is why game walkthroughs are so popular. Some of the predicaments are just so obtuse and weird.
Oh god, I can feel with you. I can tell you that that is really lazy design. Or rather designing it just as much as needed for people to buy it. Not for it to be some kind of art or making sense. It’s the gameplay equivalent of a writer using a deus ex machina to fix his story line. In a good game, the aesthetics and story are in perfect union with those gameplay “puzzles”. Meaning: The puzzle is an actual part of the story and everything. That it makes sense in that world you created, and doesn’t feel like a random puzzle thrown in, to make it feel longer. In other words: It is a bad experience. As you said: It sucks.;)
The other way is that they introduce complexity to the controls. This is particularly common in console games, but not unknown in the PC gaming world, either. I want to be immersed in the game, I don't want to spend the time trying to adapt to whatever weird control scheme or combo of button presses the interface requires.
That’s in essence that “emergence” I talked about. For controls that means: The art to be able to do many different things with very minimalistic controls. Any new control you add should multiply the number of things you can do in a natural way. In a way that makes sense in the game. (There is no such thing as “intuitive”. That’s just what we are used to. So it’s better for the complete game to be consistent, to help people find functionality in a natural way.) Also, controls should be 100% customizable. No exceptions. E.g. I’m left-handed, and hence can’t play on WASD, since I use that hand for the mouse. Also my keyboard layout is a rare one. Flash games are very often having that problem. Which instantly makes me dismiss them and give them the lowest rating.
I see a lot too many layers over layers there. Which always smells like the inner-platform anti-pattern that a “enterprise consultant” would to, to me. But maybe I’m just misunderstanding things and that amount of layers is needed for large installations. Anyone here, who actually administers such large storage systems and read the article? Would be interesting to hear from someone with daily experience in this.
Also, I could not find any mentioning of any ZFS-like scrubbing going on. Which in my experience equals zero reliability at all with today’s unreliable drives. How would that system detect a controller creating corruption? Or data degradation? I had those problems. And they killed half my data. Despite having a RAID, doing automatic backups with verification and having a git-like history of changes (to protect from accidental overwriting). Nothing of that helped me at all. Only constantly checking all data, and fixing them, before the errors become big enough for ECC to stop working, can prevent this.
Did I miss it, or did they really forget that crucial part?
I think you might be the delusional one. Since what you describe... is called... NATURAL SELECTION! It’s the principle that all life adheres to. In all of the whole of the universe.
Yes, in a confined space, if you win, I lose! Since “win” always implies gaining some resources (or more people with your mindset). So since the resources are fixed, this means they got taken from somewhere. Which is: YOU.
Even the simplest bacteria in a petri dish follow that basic rule. You live in a happy hippie fantasy world, my friend. And some day, your line will become extinct because of it. Which essentially means nature going: “He’s right, you’re wrong.” to you.
Uuum, you do know that there is already a huge satellite there, that beams power down all the time? It’s called the sun! And just as much as any “power beam”, it transmits the energy in form of electromagnetic waves. And guess what the dust would do to those satellite’s EM waves...
Unfortunately here the old motto from my home country counts: Maybe that would work on humans. But the SS are not humans. They don’t understand the concept of a “joke”.
What's the problem with most humans? They always seem to want to only advance to the bare miminum required.
Most humans? More like: All life in all of the whole universe! It’s called efficiency. Look it up! ^^ (You can always use those resources for other things, where they are actually urgently needed.)
So that’s why it was so easy to circumvent that “protection”. Come on. I build notch (and other) filters for my first rudimentary synth when I was still in puberty. It’s piss-easy. You could teach it to any Joe Random in a couple of minutes.
They want more efficient games. With “efficient” meaning: More fun for less time. Or: If they are shorter and don’t require as much getting into, they should just as much be more intense.
Your question falls to the classical “KISS” fallacy. Simplicity is a oversimplification of the original goal (efficiency). And, being oversimplified, it’s worse, not better, than that goal. Did you ever use software that was “so easy”, that you weren’t able to use it anymore? (At least not without disabling most of your brain.) I get that a lot nowadays.:/
So you also misunderstood what gamers actually want: To have a just as great experience without investing a lot of time in it. The “just as great” is the key here. Because 1 hour of some level of greatness is only a fraction of 40 hours of that same greatness. You know what I’m trying to say.
Also, even a beginner game designer knows, that if there is no challenge, there is no fun, and there also is no game. So simple is by definition not an ideal in game design. But efficiency... or rather emergence is very much.:)
Make the UI (or rather the whole game) emergent, and the experience great. That’s it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That you need an operating system to do that. Neither the Quake console or the Windows command line will do.
Ever heard of the rather obscure physical situation known as confined space?
Resources are not unlimited. Hence the growth curve will flatten out with the limit being the maximum that earth can sustain. (Excess life will die because of a lack of resources. Excess resources will be used up by growing life.)
Yes, this is also true for information and innovation, and hence the “singularity” will never happen.
The ribbon is stupid.
But what was there before is a horrible nightmare of a piece of crap of interface design.
You only like it, because you are used to it.
It really is really really really bad design.
Menus and modal dialogs? In 2010? Are you kidding me??
Lotus SmartSuite had property state panels in what...1991? I think all the Adobe/ex-Macromedia products use them. KOffice started using them.
Sorry, but MS Office is really a piece of shit, no matter how you look at it. And OpenOffice, being so very similar, is not better. Limited software by limited minds for limited minds.
They don’t even have semantics and style separation. Even HTML+CSS is decades ahead of this. It’s so sad.
And all in the name of “WYSIWYG” pseudo-simplicity, which actually just makes everything much harder and suckier, because it makes no damn sense at all.
Yeah. You’re a total expert on the whole subject right there... *sigh*
(It’s so ignorant, I don’t even think I have to answer it at all.)
Yes it is ours. If “ours” means: Us idiots who made Flash dominant in the first place, by using it in any way.
It always takes two. The ass doing it, and the idiot letting him do it. That guy with the narrow mustache from the 40s would agree to that: “What luck for rulers that men do not think.” ^^
Offtopic? Naah. I have my Windows VM under the appropriate category: K -> Games -> Windows XP. You’re definitely on-topic. :)
Yes, I agree. I have rarely seen such an epic failure of tediousness as this game. (Apart from Asia grinders of course. ;) :) :)
For a counter-example look at all those new games that let you start nearly right where you died, when you die. It may feel a bit too easy, but in total it usually is a lot more fun. Or a bit less annoyance but a lot more intensity.
I think that Prince of Persia with that barefoot girl that runs around with you was the first to re-discover this simple principle.
The art is not to make a game harder. The art is to make you stay as close as possible to the sweet spot between too easy and too hard. Where it always is extremely close. Then you grow the game with the improving user. Which causes him to be able to stand even closer wins. That’s what will get the adrenaline pumping!
That's just not possible.
I’m sorry, but you forgot to mention any arguments for why that bold statement is true.
While I myself can easily prove that it is possible with this very simple example:
A racing game: Just make everything feel faster and narrower, and the win closer, and you got a shorter, but more intense experience.
The “greatness” total stays the same.
QED
My biggest problem with modern games is that the type of complexity that they introduce doesn't make any sense. One way is that they add some sort of "puzzle" or something to solve. But this puzzle isn't solvable by logic or intelligence, it's just something completely random. This is why game walkthroughs are so popular. Some of the predicaments are just so obtuse and weird.
Oh god, I can feel with you. I can tell you that that is really lazy design. Or rather designing it just as much as needed for people to buy it. Not for it to be some kind of art or making sense. It’s the gameplay equivalent of a writer using a deus ex machina to fix his story line. ;)
In a good game, the aesthetics and story are in perfect union with those gameplay “puzzles”. Meaning: The puzzle is an actual part of the story and everything. That it makes sense in that world you created, and doesn’t feel like a random puzzle thrown in, to make it feel longer.
In other words: It is a bad experience. As you said: It sucks.
The other way is that they introduce complexity to the controls. This is particularly common in console games, but not unknown in the PC gaming world, either. I want to be immersed in the game, I don't want to spend the time trying to adapt to whatever weird control scheme or combo of button presses the interface requires.
That’s in essence that “emergence” I talked about. For controls that means: The art to be able to do many different things with very minimalistic controls. Any new control you add should multiply the number of things you can do in a natural way. In a way that makes sense in the game. (There is no such thing as “intuitive”. That’s just what we are used to. So it’s better for the complete game to be consistent, to help people find functionality in a natural way.)
Also, controls should be 100% customizable. No exceptions. E.g. I’m left-handed, and hence can’t play on WASD, since I use that hand for the mouse. Also my keyboard layout is a rare one. Flash games are very often having that problem. Which instantly makes me dismiss them and give them the lowest rating.
I see a lot too many layers over layers there. Which always smells like the inner-platform anti-pattern that a “enterprise consultant” would to, to me.
But maybe I’m just misunderstanding things and that amount of layers is needed for large installations. Anyone here, who actually administers such large storage systems and read the article? Would be interesting to hear from someone with daily experience in this.
Also, I could not find any mentioning of any ZFS-like scrubbing going on. Which in my experience equals zero reliability at all with today’s unreliable drives. How would that system detect a controller creating corruption? Or data degradation? I had those problems. And they killed half my data. Despite having a RAID, doing automatic backups with verification and having a git-like history of changes (to protect from accidental overwriting). Nothing of that helped me at all.
Only constantly checking all data, and fixing them, before the errors become big enough for ECC to stop working, can prevent this.
Did I miss it, or did they really forget that crucial part?
I think you might be the delusional one. Since what you describe... is called... NATURAL SELECTION!
It’s the principle that all life adheres to. In all of the whole of the universe.
Yes, in a confined space, if you win, I lose! Since “win” always implies gaining some resources (or more people with your mindset). So since the resources are fixed, this means they got taken from somewhere. Which is: YOU.
Even the simplest bacteria in a petri dish follow that basic rule.
You live in a happy hippie fantasy world, my friend. And some day, your line will become extinct because of it. Which essentially means nature going: “He’s right, you’re wrong.” to you.
Uuum, you do know that there is already a huge satellite there, that beams power down all the time? It’s called the sun!
And just as much as any “power beam”, it transmits the energy in form of electromagnetic waves.
And guess what the dust would do to those satellite’s EM waves...
Exactly.
Seems like you just bit the troll. Who himself was weirdly moderated +4, Insightful. While good comments got moderated -1, Troll.
I don’t think that there is any doubt left, that the moderation system has been taken over by trolls / 4channers.
Unfortunately here the old motto from my home country counts: Maybe that would work on humans. But the SS are not humans. They don’t understand the concept of a “joke”.
No lock-in.
Remember how Firewire fell into oblivion on the standard consumer desktop, because of USB, despite being technically far superior?
USB = power to intel.
<with an accent> Hey, I’m check, you insensitive clod!
What's the problem with most humans? They always seem to want to only advance to the bare miminum required.
Most humans? More like: All life in all of the whole universe!
It’s called efficiency. Look it up! ^^
(You can always use those resources for other things, where they are actually urgently needed.)
Well, we could simply transport out boolean variables in 64kbit integers, and waste 65535 bits instead of the 63 bits we waste nowadays.
(I’ll Barf a Yogurt with bit field flavoring into their faces when that happens. ;)
So that’s why it was so easy to circumvent that “protection”. Come on. I build notch (and other) filters for my first rudimentary synth when I was still in puberty. It’s piss-easy. You could teach it to any Joe Random in a couple of minutes.
I didn’t know that a Mars bar is 4% iron.
Still not enough to replace my favorite morning cereal: Gravel and nails.
Greets,
Chuck
They want more efficient games. With “efficient” meaning: More fun for less time. Or: If they are shorter and don’t require as much getting into, they should just as much be more intense.
Your question falls to the classical “KISS” fallacy. Simplicity is a oversimplification of the original goal (efficiency). And, being oversimplified, it’s worse, not better, than that goal. :/
Did you ever use software that was “so easy”, that you weren’t able to use it anymore? (At least not without disabling most of your brain.) I get that a lot nowadays.
So you also misunderstood what gamers actually want: To have a just as great experience without investing a lot of time in it. The “just as great” is the key here. Because 1 hour of some level of greatness is only a fraction of 40 hours of that same greatness. You know what I’m trying to say.
Also, even a beginner game designer knows, that if there is no challenge, there is no fun, and there also is no game. So simple is by definition not an ideal in game design. :)
But efficiency... or rather emergence is very much.
Make the UI (or rather the whole game) emergent, and the experience great. That’s it. :)
Sorry, I don’t follow links, that have “fap/image” anywhere in their name. Especially if they come from NASA. ;)
P.S.: (I prefer videos. ;)
Do you realize the implication of oil being there? That would mean that once there was life there! ^^
We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who
collected it.
Ah, but then they don't need to provide provenance or data. That's so comforting.
You may be seeing more conspiracy than there is. Because I’d call that: Job security ;)
This may be the best comment on the whole thing, I have read. You hit the nail on the head.
It’s so sad, when people destroy such important things in such stupid ways with such tiny pieces of wrongness.