We all lament the lack of creativity in games these days. First off, it isn't true. There's TONS of creativity in games these days, more so than at any time after the early-1980s. Where is all this creativity going? Sports Games, Party Games, and new Immersion Arcade Games. The more "nerdy" games have completely stagnated while Dance Dance Revolution and Tony Hawk are changing everything.
The problem is, of course the nerds. Nerds, for all their wonderful taste in pop-culture weirdness, aren't really willing to try new things. We say that the RTS genre has completely stagnated, but every time a new RTS game is released, message boards fill with "bla bla bla, Starcraft was so much better. They messed this part up, they should have made it more like Starcraft." The best example I can think of is Neverwinter Nights. Now overall, professional reviewers love this game. It's the first game to ever take the D&D ruleset in (almost) all of its complexity, and actually make it easy to play in realtime. The DM system is amazing. The single player ain't half-bad either. Gamers, however, were apparently expecting a cross between Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate. And because it was actually innovative, and wasn't a cross between Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate, they threw a fit.
It's like scifi on TV and in Movies, If it's not exactly like Star Trek or the X Files, we won't watch it. The Matrix sequels are doomed from the start. They'll be blasted by critics everywhere if they're too much like the first movie, but if they aren't basically the same as the first movie, geeks will go up in arms.
Obsessive fans are really the worst thing that can happen to a creative medium. They pretty much single-handedly destroyed comic books as a popular medium. In 1972 Comic books were basically like the early X-Files episodes, some continuity, but more or less completely encapsulated adventures. In 2002 if a kid could even find a comic book, they would have no idea what the hell is going on, since we want to be Japan and have 3000 page running stories. The 3000 page running story is great for the fat bearded guy that works in a comic book store, and is so rude and elitist that nobody but comic book obsessives can even shop there, but it means that comics are getting almost no new fans.
First off, no innovation happens in a vacuum. As Newton put it, any great innovator is standing on the shoulders of giants.
Even the most innovative works of art can be described in terms of older works of art. A contemporary of Van Gough might have said "well, he takes the hazy imagery and thick brushstrokes of the new landscape painters and applies them to still-lifes and portraits"
All innovation is made by modifying and expanding existing works, that's how it works.
Furthermore, even if you don't start out trying to create a missile command game, but the game you create has a passing resemblance to Missile Command, then the easiest way to describe it to people who haven't played the game would be "somewhat Missile Command like" even if the only real similarity is an a stressful game involving an increasingly dangerous wave of enemy attacks, that you have less and less time to deal with.
Before you blast them for lack of innovation, download some of the games and play around with them, I promise you you haven't seen anything like them before.
Id software is pretty cool about letting users get creative with their older (and newer!) products. It was their open policy toward user mods (are you listening, Blizzard?) that helped create the amazing community of indie game authors creating commercial release quality games.
This is such a cool project, I'm sure all they'd have to do is write Carmack (or whoever makes such decisions) and he'd let them use it. A God bowling game based on 8 year old sprites isn't going to decrease the marketability (or whatever) of Doom 3.
Hmmmm... might be time to hunt down one of the old editors and make myself a.WAD, just for old time's sake.
I was at an indie rock show a few weeks ago, and the band on stage had brought along a pretty drunken friend to sing with them. There was one lyric where the lead singer and the drunken guy clearly said different things, and during an instrumental section of the song the following dialouge occured:
Lead Singer: Dude, the lyric was "I'll call you if you want it, what the hell were you singing?"
Drunken Guy: Oh! I thought it was "I'll beat your ass at Gauntlet"
Let's see... I posted that before noon, so it was probably "Why the hell hasn't the caffeine kicked in yet."
I'm perfectly aware that wan't isn't correct. It's a bizarre mistake that I catch myself making all the time, and I can't explain it. And otherwise, I'm pretty good with apostrophes; I don't put them on plural's like a lot of people do around here. But for some reason "wan't" is a really really stupid mistake that I've been making for a long long time.
My original (mid '99) @home link was consistantly that fast, and it was only $30 per month.
However, that kind of pricing is probably impossible to maintain profitability.
However, the regular AT&T service offers 256k upstream, and it would take more than a 128k improvement on that for me to double my monthly bill. I would never pay $80/month for less than 5 mbps down/ 1 mbps up, and a guarantee that I wouldn't be penalized as a "bandwidth hog" for using the service I'm paying for to its full advertized potential.
Weren't we supposed to hit some sort of quantum limit before.1 Micron? What are the current guesses on how much smaller we can get?
I wan't to be reading my email and playing nethack on a petaflop machine by the time this decade is out!
Re:Solution to low battery and hover problems
on
Micro Air Vehicles
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· Score: 2
While humming birds might have the agility we're looking for, as well as the low profile, they're hardly better than batteries. Flapping wings 60 times a second takes a lot of energy. A whole lot of energy. Humming birds spend just about every waking moment seeking out an extremely high-energy food source (nectar) and consume well over their body weight every day. Have you ever seen a humming bird that wasn't eating?
Re:Solution to low battery and hover problems
on
Micro Air Vehicles
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· Score: 2
oh come on, we're talking about warfare here, how good for the little critters is it to indescriminately drop bombs on a large area?
better recon would allow more precise strikes, which would probably mean a lot fewer toasted birds, gophers, and whatever they have living out there in the desert.
Actually, you can scratch off the VIN and you can monitor police frequencies.
Blowing up your neighborhood is obviously illegal because, well, you blow up your neighborhood. Recklessly endangering others is illegal for very good reasons, and has nothing to do with modifying a telephone that you own.
I assume that the Iraq comment was a joke. But it's a good example. Just saying "society has rules" and not questioning those rules is a good way to end up in a nation where you can't criticize your leaders, religion, or society. I'm not the biggest patriot on my block, and I don't like the direction that America is heading in, but I'm sure glad that we're still (basically) free to live in (almost) any way that doesn't harm others.
Well when you write software for Windows, you have to play by their rules, even if Microsoft breaks them from time to time.
I'm not saying that Moz should look and act exactly like IE, I'm saying it should look like a windows application. If we want non-developers to use Mozilla (which is supposedly the purpose of the binary distribution, right?) then we should make the default install work the way people expect a Windows app to work.
As it stands now, Mozilla kills IE on features, but loses big time on the interface. I'm not suggesting we take away the ability to switch interfaces or develop new ones. And once we really get one that works well, within the windows idiom, there's no reason not to use that. But for right now, Mozilla would be a better product for a larger number of people if it switched default interfaces.
And this is doubly true for netscape. the 6.x/7.x line is simply horrible. I can't believe that AOL is putting up with those clowns. Lord only knows how much money it's lost them.
Speaking of alternate history and the confederacy, anyone interested in such things should check out Harry Turtledove's excellent alternate history series.
And since I can anticipate the off-topic discussion, as an educated southerner, I feel I should say that, yes while the South was fighting to preserve slavery, (it was, after all, the basis of their economy) the North was *not* fighting to abolish it(*). And if you read the constitution literally, the south had the right to secession. Having said that, it would have really sucked if the nation had been split in two, and I'm certainly glad President Lincoln was able to later use the war as an excuse to abolish slavery.
(*) in fact, two full regiments of union soldiers disbanded in protest after the emancipation proclimation, refusing to fight a war for slaves.
Exactly, software should work, in default mode, like the other software on that platform. That is fundamental UI that the open-source community feels perfectly happy to neglect.
It's probably one of the biggest obstacles to the holy grail of a popular linux desktop that no two applications work the same way. Right-clicking in one does something completely different than right-clicking in the other. Hell, there are major applications that have completely different keyboard shortcuts for basic actions like save, copy and paste.
Perhaps one of the greatest reasons for Windows' (and Mac's especially) success is that learning one application makes learning other applications much much easier.
Last summer I taught my mom how to use MS Word. After that she picked up Internet Explorer with no problem whatsoever. When Moz 1.0 came out, I tried to get the family to switch over, but it was an effort in futility. Internet Explorer on Windows, for all its many many flaws, works the way a Windows application is supposed to work. Mozilla on Windows (kind of) works the way an X-Win application is supposed to work, which is absolutely no good. The Windows theme should be the default on the Win32 binary package, and the only reason it isn't is the stupid pride of the OS community.
They like the engine. It's the default interface that 99% of users will be using that they have problems with, and I think that's a valid point.
XUL makes it possible to do a lot of cool interface things, and it is definitely a Good Thing For Mozilla, but it doesn't really matter when the default interface is slow and sucks.
Heck, most people never even change their startup page, much less program a new *interface*
I know, I was just about to write up a whole thing about how they can work on any field, and how elliptic curves themselves make pretty interesting groups, how they are topologically equivalent to toruses, etc. but I stopped myself, the article only mentioned applications of - curves that exist in 2 real or 2 complex dimentions.
discrete logs actually have to do with modular spaces (remainder math, in mod 4, you divide any number by 4 and take the remainder. counting in mod 4 goes like: 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1, 2, 3...)
the discrete log problem is specifically, given integers y, g, p, find a (preferably minimal)solution x to the problem
y = g^x mod p, 0 = y p
actually the problem is more general than that, but that's the case that most people talk about and has direct application to cryptanalysis.
it doesn't look too hard, but sit down and try. the algorithms that solve the problem amount to basically highly erudite mathematical guess-and-check. if you can find a P time solution to this, you're a billionaire.
It's also a fun problem because, like Fermat's Last Theorem, Goldbach's Conjecture, and the 4-Color problem, it's easy for an amateur to work on, understand, and make some elementary discoveries and proofs, but the problems have difficulties that test the furthest extent of mathematical knowledge.
here's a fun, related problem:
if you shuffle a 52 card deck perfectly 7 times (divide the deck exactly in half, always have the top half drop the first card, drop exactly one card after another) then you end up with the original order of the deck. Given a deck of n cards, how many shuffles are required for the same effect?
This fails both under quantum physics and general relativity.
Under the quantum physics interperetation, since both the cat's feet and the buttered toast are equally likely to land on the floor, the cat-toast enters a superposition where both cat and toast are simultaneously on the floor until it is observed, at which point a radioactive particle decays, and the cat is skinned in a number simultaneous, equally likely, yet distinct ways.
Relativity predicts that the intense attraction to the floor will, in fact, bend space-time in such a way that the floor actually is in contact with both the cat and the toast. If the cat is of the black variety, then it will thus cross its own path, generate a singularity, and vanish in a puff of logic.
The debate continues, as attempts at experimental verification have thus far failed. Dr. Kibble at Princeton's IAS said "Look, have YOU ever tried to hold a cat still and strap some friggin' TOAST to its back?"
Gravitons are a nice way of satisfying a few equations, but they don't really fit in the standard model and have never been even indirectly observed.
I suspect that gravitons are the particle representation of quantum physicists' inability to think of things other than particles.
Hmmm... that probably sounded like more of a flame than it should have. It's really one of those "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" things.
funny seeing this
on
Gaming Zone?
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· Score: 3, Funny
funny seeing this after waking up at 1 PM due to a 12 hour marathon nethack session last night...
it would depend on the rarity of the game, if it were say tetris, which is relatively rare, then yeah, that would be in poor taste, but if it's common like galaga or Ms. Packman, which are still everywhere, then I say, the owner can do what he or she wants to with it.
the point is, we're not going to run out of NESes or 2600s anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
They could commercialize their techniques and make a fortune.
You aren't suggesting that the Church of Scientology is out to make a profit are you?
* BEGIN RANT *
We all lament the lack of creativity in games these days. First off, it isn't true. There's TONS of creativity in games these days, more so than at any time after the early-1980s. Where is all this creativity going? Sports Games, Party Games, and new Immersion Arcade Games. The more "nerdy" games have completely stagnated while Dance Dance Revolution and Tony Hawk are changing everything.
The problem is, of course the nerds. Nerds, for all their wonderful taste in pop-culture weirdness, aren't really willing to try new things. We say that the RTS genre has completely stagnated, but every time a new RTS game is released, message boards fill with "bla bla bla, Starcraft was so much better. They messed this part up, they should have made it more like Starcraft." The best example I can think of is Neverwinter Nights. Now overall, professional reviewers love this game. It's the first game to ever take the D&D ruleset in (almost) all of its complexity, and actually make it easy to play in realtime. The DM system is amazing. The single player ain't half-bad either. Gamers, however, were apparently expecting a cross between Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate. And because it was actually innovative, and wasn't a cross between Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate, they threw a fit.
It's like scifi on TV and in Movies, If it's not exactly like Star Trek or the X Files, we won't watch it. The Matrix sequels are doomed from the start. They'll be blasted by critics everywhere if they're too much like the first movie, but if they aren't basically the same as the first movie, geeks will go up in arms.
Obsessive fans are really the worst thing that can happen to a creative medium. They pretty much single-handedly destroyed comic books as a popular medium. In 1972 Comic books were basically like the early X-Files episodes, some continuity, but more or less completely encapsulated adventures. In 2002 if a kid could even find a comic book, they would have no idea what the hell is going on, since we want to be Japan and have 3000 page running stories. The 3000 page running story is great for the fat bearded guy that works in a comic book store, and is so rude and elitist that nobody but comic book obsessives can even shop there, but it means that comics are getting almost no new fans.
* END RANT *
First off, no innovation happens in a vacuum. As Newton put it, any great innovator is standing on the shoulders of giants.
Even the most innovative works of art can be described in terms of older works of art. A contemporary of Van Gough might have said "well, he takes the hazy imagery and thick brushstrokes of the new landscape painters and applies them to still-lifes and portraits"
All innovation is made by modifying and expanding existing works, that's how it works.
Furthermore, even if you don't start out trying to create a missile command game, but the game you create has a passing resemblance to Missile Command, then the easiest way to describe it to people who haven't played the game would be "somewhat Missile Command like" even if the only real similarity is an a stressful game involving an increasingly dangerous wave of enemy attacks, that you have less and less time to deal with.
Before you blast them for lack of innovation, download some of the games and play around with them, I promise you you haven't seen anything like them before.
Id software is pretty cool about letting users get creative with their older (and newer!) products. It was their open policy toward user mods (are you listening, Blizzard?) that helped create the amazing community of indie game authors creating commercial release quality games.
.WAD, just for old time's sake.
This is such a cool project, I'm sure all they'd have to do is write Carmack (or whoever makes such decisions) and he'd let them use it. A God bowling game based on 8 year old sprites isn't going to decrease the marketability (or whatever) of Doom 3.
Hmmmm... might be time to hunt down one of the old editors and make myself a
it was a joke son, a joke.
I was at an indie rock show a few weeks ago, and the band on stage had brought along a pretty drunken friend to sing with them. There was one lyric where the lead singer and the drunken guy clearly said different things, and during an instrumental section of the song the following dialouge occured:
Lead Singer: Dude, the lyric was "I'll call you if you want it, what the hell were you singing?"
Drunken Guy: Oh! I thought it was "I'll beat your ass at Gauntlet"
Lead Singer: Well it is now!
"Erotic Painting" Hmmmm... now that's a texture you could never find on the internet.
What were you thinking?
Let's see... I posted that before noon, so it was probably "Why the hell hasn't the caffeine kicked in yet."
I'm perfectly aware that wan't isn't correct. It's a bizarre mistake that I catch myself making all the time, and I can't explain it. And otherwise, I'm pretty good with apostrophes; I don't put them on plural's like a lot of people do around here. But for some reason "wan't" is a really really stupid mistake that I've been making for a long long time.
My original (mid '99) @home link was consistantly that fast, and it was only $30 per month.
However, that kind of pricing is probably impossible to maintain profitability.
However, the regular AT&T service offers 256k upstream, and it would take more than a 128k improvement on that for me to double my monthly bill. I would never pay $80/month for less than 5 mbps down/ 1 mbps up, and a guarantee that I wouldn't be penalized as a "bandwidth hog" for using the service I'm paying for to its full advertized potential.
Weren't we supposed to hit some sort of quantum limit before .1 Micron? What are the current guesses on how much smaller we can get?
I wan't to be reading my email and playing nethack on a petaflop machine by the time this decade is out!
While humming birds might have the agility we're looking for, as well as the low profile, they're hardly better than batteries. Flapping wings 60 times a second takes a lot of energy. A whole lot of energy. Humming birds spend just about every waking moment seeking out an extremely high-energy food source (nectar) and consume well over their body weight every day. Have you ever seen a humming bird that wasn't eating?
oh come on, we're talking about warfare here, how good for the little critters is it to indescriminately drop bombs on a large area?
better recon would allow more precise strikes, which would probably mean a lot fewer toasted birds, gophers, and whatever they have living out there in the desert.
Actually, you can scratch off the VIN and you can monitor police frequencies.
Blowing up your neighborhood is obviously illegal because, well, you blow up your neighborhood. Recklessly endangering others is illegal for very good reasons, and has nothing to do with modifying a telephone that you own.
I assume that the Iraq comment was a joke. But it's a good example. Just saying "society has rules" and not questioning those rules is a good way to end up in a nation where you can't criticize your leaders, religion, or society. I'm not the biggest patriot on my block, and I don't like the direction that America is heading in, but I'm sure glad that we're still (basically) free to live in (almost) any way that doesn't harm others.
Well when you write software for Windows, you have to play by their rules, even if Microsoft breaks them from time to time.
I'm not saying that Moz should look and act exactly like IE, I'm saying it should look like a windows application. If we want non-developers to use Mozilla (which is supposedly the purpose of the binary distribution, right?) then we should make the default install work the way people expect a Windows app to work.
As it stands now, Mozilla kills IE on features, but loses big time on the interface. I'm not suggesting we take away the ability to switch interfaces or develop new ones. And once we really get one that works well, within the windows idiom, there's no reason not to use that. But for right now, Mozilla would be a better product for a larger number of people if it switched default interfaces.
And this is doubly true for netscape. the 6.x/7.x line is simply horrible. I can't believe that AOL is putting up with those clowns. Lord only knows how much money it's lost them.
Speaking of alternate history and the confederacy, anyone interested in such things should check out Harry Turtledove's excellent alternate history series.
And since I can anticipate the off-topic discussion, as an educated southerner, I feel I should say that, yes while the South was fighting to preserve slavery, (it was, after all, the basis of their economy) the North was *not* fighting to abolish it(*). And if you read the constitution literally, the south had the right to secession. Having said that, it would have really sucked if the nation had been split in two, and I'm certainly glad President Lincoln was able to later use the war as an excuse to abolish slavery.
(*) in fact, two full regiments of union soldiers disbanded in protest after the emancipation proclimation, refusing to fight a war for slaves.
Exactly, software should work, in default mode, like the other software on that platform. That is fundamental UI that the open-source community feels perfectly happy to neglect.
It's probably one of the biggest obstacles to the holy grail of a popular linux desktop that no two applications work the same way. Right-clicking in one does something completely different than right-clicking in the other. Hell, there are major applications that have completely different keyboard shortcuts for basic actions like save, copy and paste.
Perhaps one of the greatest reasons for Windows' (and Mac's especially) success is that learning one application makes learning other applications much much easier.
Last summer I taught my mom how to use MS Word. After that she picked up Internet Explorer with no problem whatsoever. When Moz 1.0 came out, I tried to get the family to switch over, but it was an effort in futility. Internet Explorer on Windows, for all its many many flaws, works the way a Windows application is supposed to work. Mozilla on Windows (kind of) works the way an X-Win application is supposed to work, which is absolutely no good. The Windows theme should be the default on the Win32 binary package, and the only reason it isn't is the stupid pride of the OS community.
XUL has nothing to do with it.
They like the engine. It's the default interface that 99% of users will be using that they have problems with, and I think that's a valid point.
XUL makes it possible to do a lot of cool interface things, and it is definitely a Good Thing For Mozilla, but it doesn't really matter when the default interface is slow and sucks.
Heck, most people never even change their startup page, much less program a new *interface*
I know, I was just about to write up a whole thing about how they can work on any field, and how elliptic curves themselves make pretty interesting groups, how they are topologically equivalent to toruses, etc. but I stopped myself, the article only mentioned applications of - curves that exist in 2 real or 2 complex dimentions.
Aren't Barney jokes a little... oh I don't know... 1994?
Elliptic Curves:
curves of the form y^2 = Ax^3 + Bx^2 + Cx + D
pick values for A B C and D, the locus in 2 space (the cartesian plane, or R2) is the type of curve Escher was using.
In analysis, which is where all of the headline making math using Elliptic Curves, A B C and D (as well as x and y) can be complex numbers.
At this point things get complicated. I'm not going to fill up 1000 words explaining Riemann surfaces, algebraic functions, etc.
There are a lot of good pages out there.
discrete logs actually have to do with modular spaces (remainder math, in mod 4, you divide any number by 4 and take the remainder. counting in mod 4 goes like: 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1, 2, 3...)
the discrete log problem is specifically, given integers y, g, p, find a (preferably minimal)solution x to the problem
y = g^x mod p, 0 = y p
actually the problem is more general than that, but that's the case that most people talk about and has direct application to cryptanalysis.
it doesn't look too hard, but sit down and try. the algorithms that solve the problem amount to basically highly erudite mathematical guess-and-check. if you can find a P time solution to this, you're a billionaire.
It's also a fun problem because, like Fermat's Last Theorem, Goldbach's Conjecture, and the 4-Color problem, it's easy for an amateur to work on, understand, and make some elementary discoveries and proofs, but the problems have difficulties that test the furthest extent of mathematical knowledge.
here's a fun, related problem:
if you shuffle a 52 card deck perfectly 7 times (divide the deck exactly in half, always have the top half drop the first card, drop exactly one card after another) then you end up with the original order of the deck. Given a deck of n cards, how many shuffles are required for the same effect?
This fails both under quantum physics and general relativity.
Under the quantum physics interperetation, since both the cat's feet and the buttered toast are equally likely to land on the floor, the cat-toast enters a superposition where both cat and toast are simultaneously on the floor until it is observed, at which point a radioactive particle decays, and the cat is skinned in a number simultaneous, equally likely, yet distinct ways.
Relativity predicts that the intense attraction to the floor will, in fact, bend space-time in such a way that the floor actually is in contact with both the cat and the toast. If the cat is of the black variety, then it will thus cross its own path, generate a singularity, and vanish in a puff of logic.
The debate continues, as attempts at experimental verification have thus far failed. Dr. Kibble at Princeton's IAS said "Look, have YOU ever tried to hold a cat still and strap some friggin' TOAST to its back?"
Gravitons are a nice way of satisfying a few equations, but they don't really fit in the standard model and have never been even indirectly observed.
I suspect that gravitons are the particle representation of quantum physicists' inability to think of things other than particles.
Hmmm... that probably sounded like more of a flame than it should have. It's really one of those "when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" things.
funny seeing this after waking up at 1 PM due to a 12 hour marathon nethack session last night...
it would depend on the rarity of the game, if it were say tetris, which is relatively rare, then yeah, that would be in poor taste, but if it's common like galaga or Ms. Packman, which are still everywhere, then I say, the owner can do what he or she wants to with it. the point is, we're not going to run out of NESes or 2600s anytime soon.