One of the things about being god awful bad at something is you can improve a lot and still stink.
The DRM still only allows three total installs for the lifetime of the game (although you can call EA tech support and ask for more, no guarantee though). I have many games that have existed on more than three of my personal computers. Just glancing at my shelf I see 1830, Star Fleet Command, Transport Tycoon, Starcraft, Rome Total War and the list goes on. I don't want to have to beg tech support every time I upgrade my game machine, many of these companies don't even exist anymore.
The fact of the matter is that DRM that limits the total number of times you can install the game is unacceptable. They may have fixed other problems with the DRM, but this issue remains.
For what it's worth my desktop at work is running Gentoo Linux with two monitors that work flawlessly. It does it better than either windows or MACOSX, which both work well but occasionally open a window across both monitors. Both monitors are running the same resolution, but are not clones obviously. The videocard is an nvidia GeForce, probably a 4 or 5 series, and I'm using the nvidia drivers with hardware acceleration.
SFB was a great game, but it was hardcore. The complete set of rules completely packed the 3" binder I had and they were clearly written for a lawyer. The rules had section labels like G.13.37, which as I recall detailed how direct fire weapon damage was reduced against a cloaked target.
Myself I loved this game because those hundereds of pages of rules covered everything, which meant there were no loopholes. I'm what the champions roleplaying book refers to as a "rules rapist", I'm very good at finding and exploting loopholes in rules. Ironically I really despise game systems that allow me to do this, and I loved SFB because it didn't.
The fact of the matter is realising you're uninformed is actually a sign of intelligence, so please vote. It only takes a few minuites to find the key candidates websites online and give them at least a brief viewing.
I'm sure there are people who are so ignorant they shouldn't vote, but the fact of the matter is those people don't know they're ignorant and hence won't choose not to vote because of it.
I grant you that the Caps lock key isn't particularlly useful, but the Windows Start Menu button is even more annoying. I've only ever hit that key accidentally, usually causing whatever program I'm using to minimize, wether or not the program can handle that!
These days I simply pop the windows start menu key off every keyboard I get with a screwdriver, and I'm a much happier man for it.
Slashdot is a friendly crowd in terms of google's view that NetNeutrality is important.
So lets say your the one of those friendlies reading this posting. You're sitting there thinking to yourself yeah I like this idea of Net Neutrality, and I think congress should support Net Neutrality. Now ask yourself this, did your write your congressman? .
If your answer is yes stop reading this post now.
So why haven't you? Sure it'd be best to write a real letter, and bravo if you decide to do that. But if, like me, you're just too damned lazy, submit and electronic carbon copy one that's linked from the article. It's really not that hard, and these things really do work if enough people submit them. Just ask the Parents Television Council, the nice people who convinced the FCC to fine any broadcaster who doesn't conform to their censorship standards. They did that by setting up a nice simple website to send electronic complaints to the FCC with a few clicks.
....is stoking a costly arms race among golfers looking for an edge in a sport that already has an elitist reputation.
Golf is not a sport it's a game. What makes something a game rather than a sport may be a fuzzy line, but I assure you if it can be played by fat out of shape buisness executives it's not a sport.
-Mark
Level scaling is truely insipid
on
Living In Oblivion
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The point of the scaling system it to make it just as hard to fight any monster no matter what your level. This makes levels completely pointless since, PLAYER_LEVEL - MONSTER_LEVEL = [constant].
It's just as easy to go slay the dragon when your level 1 as it is when your level 25, similarly the rodent of unusual size you fought in the training dungeon is just as likely to kill you in the tutorial as it is when you've maxed out your level.
This has to be on of the most brain dead design decisions I've every heard of.
They are factors but not insurmountable ones. For 95% of your activity simply recharging your BEV overnight would be good enough. Think about it -- you go to work (30 miles in my case -- that's probably average for the US), work all day, then you go home. Even if you go out and party until last call your car still has several hours to be recharged before you go back to work.
Are you insane? You really think a car that you can go to work in but can't take a weekend vacation in is going to sell? Don't get me wrong, I totally back the idea of cleaner more fuel efficient cars, but you have a total disconnect with the realities of the situation here.
While I grant you that Linux drivers are available for some ATI cards, those from NVIDIA are clearly a cut above.
The NVIDIA "universal driver architecture" or whatever they call it works very well. The same driver works on my GeForce2 Go and my GeForce 6800.
With ATI you have to worry about what specific card you have, and the performance of those drivers is generally inferior (the xfree drivers don't have any hardware acceleration at all).
Check out this article for acomparison of ATI vs. NVIDIA under linux.
3.include better stuff in the box (e.g. a printed manual, mabie a poster of the main character or something)
How about just a freaking better box! I don't know about the rest of you but the ergonomic nightmare boxes are these days is a pet peeve of mine, and seriously contributes to the annoyance of retrieving the CD to play the game.
Game boxes used to be 2 simple pieces, a bottom and a top that slides right over it. Take off the top and you have access to everything inside, and can trivially put it all back. Try that with the box of any current game.
The hypocracy of americans trying rationalize the slanted views never ceases to amaze me. If China throws a few 'inusurgents' in jail for political reasons, it's a 'violation of human rights'. If america throws a few into a jail in cuba with no trials, and no rights to defend against accusations, thats 'for the good of the people'. The amazing part is, americans cant see the hypocracy of it, and they actually believe the drivel from the politicians about 'well, this is different, human rights dont apply when its us doing the afflicting'.
Excuse me, I am an American and I do see the hipocracy and I vote. I grant you a large group of American's don't, but many do. I know I talk to them.
USA doesn't have to take second place to any third world dictatorship when it comes to invading another country, setting up jails for political prisoners, or establishing systematic torture treatment for political prisoners.
Perhaps not, but we get first place for having a system where nobody even considers throwing people who report this in jail. Yes the Iraqi jails are a stain upon America, but to say that America is every bit as bad as China and other human rights violators is absurd.
I just called sprint to modify my plan last night. I was adding and removing some services for a net zero overall change to my bill. The service rep I spoke to was polite and helpful.
The rep told me the new plan (which included more minuites) wouldn't start until the begining of next month and that there was not way to have is retroactively start this month. Completely unprompted, however, she simply added 180 minuites to my plan this month free of charge. Realistically it's not that big a deal, I'm sure it costs sprint next to nothing, but I thought it was a good customer relations move and was impressed.
Overall my plan breaks down to this.
$40 : 500 peak time minuites
$5 : Picture mail
$5 : Start weeknight off peak at 7pm instead of 9pm
Off peak hours (weekends and weeknights after 7pm) calling is unlimited. I find this really useful for playing team WC3 tournaments with a friend from out of state where we will stay on for hours.
The 7pm peak time plan required a two year agreement, and while I don't like that I doubt I'll want to change in that period of time anyway. I've been a sprint customer for several years and I refused to get a year contract for several years initially, but after 15 months it costs you more not to get the contract than to get it and pay the early termination fee. Yes I wish the contracts would go away, but I am nevertheless pleased with my service.
-Mark
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect 4x style games will be among the hardest computer games for AI to tackle for several reasons. Just off the top of my head.
Some of those things RTS AI's already have to deal with, but I think 4x game are more complex overall.
I'd kill for a great Age of Wonders III AI.
One of the things about being god awful bad at something is you can improve a lot and still stink.
The DRM still only allows three total installs for the lifetime of the game (although you can call EA tech support and ask for more, no guarantee though). I have many games that have existed on more than three of my personal computers. Just glancing at my shelf I see 1830, Star Fleet Command, Transport Tycoon, Starcraft, Rome Total War and the list goes on. I don't want to have to beg tech support every time I upgrade my game machine, many of these companies don't even exist anymore.
The fact of the matter is that DRM that limits the total number of times you can install the game is unacceptable. They may have fixed other problems with the DRM, but this issue remains.
For what it's worth my desktop at work is running Gentoo Linux with two monitors that work flawlessly. It does it better than either windows or MACOSX, which both work well but occasionally open a window across both monitors. Both monitors are running the same resolution, but are not clones obviously. The videocard is an nvidia GeForce, probably a 4 or 5 series, and I'm using the nvidia drivers with hardware acceleration.
SFB was a great game, but it was hardcore. The complete set of rules completely packed the 3" binder I had and they were clearly written for a lawyer. The rules had section labels like G.13.37, which as I recall detailed how direct fire weapon damage was reduced against a cloaked target.
Myself I loved this game because those hundereds of pages of rules covered everything, which meant there were no loopholes. I'm what the champions roleplaying book refers to as a "rules rapist", I'm very good at finding and exploting loopholes in rules. Ironically I really despise game systems that allow me to do this, and I loved SFB because it didn't.
The fact of the matter is realising you're uninformed is actually a sign of intelligence, so please vote. It only takes a few minuites to find the key candidates websites online and give them at least a brief viewing.
I'm sure there are people who are so ignorant they shouldn't vote, but the fact of the matter is those people don't know they're ignorant and hence won't choose not to vote because of it.
I grant you that the Caps lock key isn't particularlly useful, but the Windows Start Menu button is even more annoying. I've only ever hit that key accidentally, usually causing whatever program I'm using to minimize, wether or not the program can handle that!
These days I simply pop the windows start menu key off every keyboard I get with a screwdriver, and I'm a much happier man for it.
-Mark
Slashdot is a friendly crowd in terms of google's view that NetNeutrality is important.
So lets say your the one of those friendlies reading this posting. You're sitting there thinking to yourself yeah I like this idea of Net Neutrality, and I think congress should support Net Neutrality. Now ask yourself this, did your write your congressman? .
If your answer is yes stop reading this post now.
So why haven't you? Sure it'd be best to write a real letter, and bravo if you decide to do that. But if, like me, you're just too damned lazy, submit and electronic carbon copy one that's linked from the article. It's really not that hard, and these things really do work if enough people submit them. Just ask the Parents Television Council, the nice people who convinced the FCC to fine any broadcaster who doesn't conform to their censorship standards. They did that by setting up a nice simple website to send electronic complaints to the FCC with a few clicks.
Write your damned congressman!
-Mark
Golf is not a sport it's a game. What makes something a game rather than a sport may be a fuzzy line, but I assure you if it can be played by fat out of shape buisness executives it's not a sport.
-Mark
The point of the scaling system it to make it just as hard to fight any monster no matter what your level. This makes levels completely pointless since, PLAYER_LEVEL - MONSTER_LEVEL = [constant].
It's just as easy to go slay the dragon when your level 1 as it is when your level 25, similarly the rodent of unusual size you fought in the training dungeon is just as likely to kill you in the tutorial as it is when you've maxed out your level.
This has to be on of the most brain dead design decisions I've every heard of.
-Mark
They are factors but not insurmountable ones. For 95% of your activity simply recharging your BEV overnight would be good enough. Think about it -- you go to work (30 miles in my case -- that's probably average for the US), work all day, then you go home. Even if you go out and party until last call your car still has several hours to be recharged before you go back to work.
Are you insane? You really think a car that you can go to work in but can't take a weekend vacation in is going to sell? Don't get me wrong, I totally back the idea of cleaner more fuel efficient cars, but you have a total disconnect with the realities of the situation here.
-Mark
While I grant you that Linux drivers are available for some ATI cards, those from NVIDIA are clearly a cut above.
2
The NVIDIA "universal driver architecture" or whatever they call it works very well. The same driver works on my GeForce2 Go and my GeForce 6800.
With ATI you have to worry about what specific card you have, and the performance of those drivers is generally inferior (the xfree drivers don't have any hardware acceleration at all).
Check out this article for acomparison of ATI vs. NVIDIA under linux.
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=230
ATI does slowly seem to be making progress, but NVIDIA is still the clear hands down winner in the Linux arena.
-Mark
3.include better stuff in the box (e.g. a printed manual, mabie a poster of the main character or something)
How about just a freaking better box! I don't know about the rest of you but the ergonomic nightmare boxes are these days is a pet peeve of mine, and seriously contributes to the annoyance of retrieving the CD to play the game.
Game boxes used to be 2 simple pieces, a bottom and a top that slides right over it. Take off the top and you have access to everything inside, and can trivially put it all back. Try that with the box of any current game.
-Mark
The hypocracy of americans trying rationalize the slanted views never ceases to amaze me. If China throws a few 'inusurgents' in jail for political reasons, it's a 'violation of human rights'. If america throws a few into a jail in cuba with no trials, and no rights to defend against accusations, thats 'for the good of the people'. The amazing part is, americans cant see the hypocracy of it, and they actually believe the drivel from the politicians about 'well, this is different, human rights dont apply when its us doing the afflicting'.
Excuse me, I am an American and I do see the hipocracy and I vote. I grant you a large group of American's don't, but many do. I know I talk to them.
USA doesn't have to take second place to any third world dictatorship when it comes to invading another country, setting up jails for political prisoners, or establishing systematic torture treatment for political prisoners.
Perhaps not, but we get first place for having a system where nobody even considers throwing people who report this in jail. Yes the Iraqi jails are a stain upon America, but to say that America is every bit as bad as China and other human rights violators is absurd.
-Mark
I just called sprint to modify my plan last night. I was adding and removing some services for a net zero overall change to my bill. The service rep I spoke to was polite and helpful. The rep told me the new plan (which included more minuites) wouldn't start until the begining of next month and that there was not way to have is retroactively start this month. Completely unprompted, however, she simply added 180 minuites to my plan this month free of charge. Realistically it's not that big a deal, I'm sure it costs sprint next to nothing, but I thought it was a good customer relations move and was impressed. Overall my plan breaks down to this. $40 : 500 peak time minuites $5 : Picture mail $5 : Start weeknight off peak at 7pm instead of 9pm Off peak hours (weekends and weeknights after 7pm) calling is unlimited. I find this really useful for playing team WC3 tournaments with a friend from out of state where we will stay on for hours. The 7pm peak time plan required a two year agreement, and while I don't like that I doubt I'll want to change in that period of time anyway. I've been a sprint customer for several years and I refused to get a year contract for several years initially, but after 15 months it costs you more not to get the contract than to get it and pay the early termination fee. Yes I wish the contracts would go away, but I am nevertheless pleased with my service. -Mark