Yes, apparently at this moment they are tracking the SOJs sold to merchants. When enough SOJs are sold to merchants, a world event is sent to all currently running Hell games on that realm saying 'Diablo walks the earth!'
At that point, the next superunique generated in each of those games (i.e. the seal bosses in the Chaos Sanctuary) will become a souped up Diablo, much more powerful than the normal version. Kill him and you're very likely to get an Annihilus, a unique small charm with must-be-seen-to-believe stats.
I noticed that the demo was running rather sluggishly on my Athlon XP 2000+ with a GeForce 4 Ti 4600. You may have noted that the demo warns you about your video card being in PCI mode-- well, here's how to tell, and what to do.
Right-click the desktop; select 'Properties', then the 'Settings' tab, then the 'Advanced' button. Go to the tab that has your video card name on it, i.e. GeForce 4 Ti 4600. It should have a line on it that indicates what bus mode your card is using. For mine, it showed 'AGP (PCI mode)'.
In this case, what you'll need to do is to download a new AGP driver for your motherboard. For mine, an Asus A7V266-E, I needed the Via 4-in-1 driver, which included the AGP driver among other updates.
Once I updated that, the demo ran smooth as glass! I promptly re-clicked all the expensive shading options and bumped up the resolution, of course.
I have one thing to point out to Slashdotters cheering the 'death of the rock star lifestyle'.
A singer's livelihood is tied up in her voice. How would this sound if it it were rephrased thus: "In China, we have to write so much code that we do not have time to rest our wrists."
Mind you, there are two bad extremes here: earnings divided among a million pirates who have no rights to them and no intention of paying the musicians, and earnings shared only by a wealthy cartel that does not feel an obligation to share with the musicians.
It seems to me as if people are shooting at the phenomenon of the 'elite few' and missing the existance of the 'mediocre many'.
In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can't be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience.
Just think, what if 50% of the audience out there was in those 'microcommunities'? What if a viable business model could succeed by aiming at word of mouth and spreading virally through those people's weblogs?
We already see memes spreading this way: quizzes of the day proliferate my own LJ friendlist, and if you're LJers yourself, you may have seen other memes making the rounds. There's no reason awareness of a sufficiently compelling commercial phenomenon couldn't be passed along the same way.
Considering it's Japan, I pyxture it will either have big eyes and go 'Piku!' or it will be an amorphous blob that will shoot oozing tendrils at various wall sockets and 'wire' your home for you without you asking it to, then take over your life.;)
The real worry should be that Intel might toss more money at these fabs to make their processors, not AMD's, locking AMD out of the business. Intel builds fabs to give itself guaranteed production capacity.
You can at least have an idea what principles are being followed... Though yes, you (as in the author of a project) should note when a document is outdated -- but it still gives you a starting point because it was at one point, accurate.
It's very, very easy to let documentation fall out of date, but even old documentation is preferable to none.
Your most important job here will be to get people in the habit of creating and committing documents to some kind of record. Ideally, you should have a source control system, and you can easily place documents under source control as well, so you can go back to previous versions of documents or recover in case you accidentally overwite documents or lose something important in an overly ambitious cut.
Be at least systematic enough to put design documents in appropriate project folders. Set a good example and people coming after you will look at what's already there as a model for making their own documents.
Use descriptive file names. Naming something 'design1.txt' may seem simple enough now but three months later you'll be wondering if that was your first rough or final design concept, whether it includes feedback from the customers, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
At that point, the next superunique generated in each of those games (i.e. the seal bosses in the Chaos Sanctuary) will become a souped up Diablo, much more powerful than the normal version. Kill him and you're very likely to get an Annihilus, a unique small charm with must-be-seen-to-believe stats.
See this thread: the Amazon Basin
Right-click the desktop; select 'Properties', then the 'Settings' tab, then the 'Advanced' button. Go to the tab that has your video card name on it, i.e. GeForce 4 Ti 4600. It should have a line on it that indicates what bus mode your card is using. For mine, it showed 'AGP (PCI mode)'.
In this case, what you'll need to do is to download a new AGP driver for your motherboard. For mine, an Asus A7V266-E, I needed the Via 4-in-1 driver, which included the AGP driver among other updates.
Once I updated that, the demo ran smooth as glass! I promptly re-clicked all the expensive shading options and bumped up the resolution, of course.
I have one thing to point out to Slashdotters cheering the 'death of the rock star lifestyle'. A singer's livelihood is tied up in her voice. How would this sound if it it were rephrased thus: "In China, we have to write so much code that we do not have time to rest our wrists." Mind you, there are two bad extremes here: earnings divided among a million pirates who have no rights to them and no intention of paying the musicians, and earnings shared only by a wealthy cartel that does not feel an obligation to share with the musicians.
Considering it's Japan, I pyxture it will either have big eyes and go 'Piku!' or it will be an amorphous blob that will shoot oozing tendrils at various wall sockets and 'wire' your home for you without you asking it to, then take over your life. ;)
The real worry should be that Intel might toss more money at these fabs to make their processors, not AMD's, locking AMD out of the business. Intel builds fabs to give itself guaranteed production capacity.
You can at least have an idea what principles are being followed... Though yes, you (as in the author of a project) should note when a document is outdated -- but it still gives you a starting point because it was at one point, accurate.
It's very, very easy to let documentation fall out of date, but even old documentation is preferable to none. Your most important job here will be to get people in the habit of creating and committing documents to some kind of record. Ideally, you should have a source control system, and you can easily place documents under source control as well, so you can go back to previous versions of documents or recover in case you accidentally overwite documents or lose something important in an overly ambitious cut. Be at least systematic enough to put design documents in appropriate project folders. Set a good example and people coming after you will look at what's already there as a model for making their own documents. Use descriptive file names. Naming something 'design1.txt' may seem simple enough now but three months later you'll be wondering if that was your first rough or final design concept, whether it includes feedback from the customers, and so on.