And don't forget the Iraeli tactic of closing Palestine water installations/reservoirs/pumps in the neighbourhood of Israeli settlements. A very effective way of getting people to move away (and pretty well documented too, for those of you who would disagree).
My dad did that too...but when you see him use his PDA, you'll get that it's for the best. Odd that someone who started up the IT in a mayor corporation back in the day makes you physically cringe when using modern PC's and PDA's; you just wanna jank 'em away and do it yourself...
Hehe...thing is, it's all a form of OS-religion. The hardcore debate is not between sony, palm or ipaq...it's between PalmOS and PPC.
What makes me laugh is that PPC (an MS product) doesn't handle word and excell files as well as third party software does on the Palm, where.doc etc can be handled natively:)
True...and maybe a little graphical calculation on the side.
But until I can read books and do matrix calculations on a phone with a decent sized screen (which is why the Treo 600 fails miserably for me...sob), I'm keeping to a seperate phone/PDA...my jacket pockets are big enough (especially seeing as my phone damn near fits in the lighter pocket of my jeans:)).
In other words, what gets me is that all these companies are trying to give PDA functionality to a phone (which kyocera and samsung seem to be doing best)...but what about the people who want a PDA with phone functionality!?
I saw this coming a while back...but phone companies here seem oblivious. When I told a friend working for the biggest phone company over here, guess what he said: 'there must be laws against that'!
Sorry, but it's quite well known that US medical treatment of any kind is only decent if you can afford to pay through the nose. If you just make a decent living (not a decadent one) or are poor, you want to head over to parts of europe or the better of asian countries. Good healthcare for low prices, and it's available to damn near everyone.
Uh...in the books, Frodo was a coward (hey, he takes after his father!). And Aragorn was much more the typical arch-hero in the books.
As for your treatment...what you seem to assume is that people 'know this' and 'know that'...but that's all stuff which is built up in the books over paragraphs and chapter. You don't seem to realise that a movie is much more compact and just doesn't have the space (timewise) to include all that, not without it being boring beyond belief.
Now, sure, I think that the extended version of the first movie, although it's longer by half an hour, is shorter (feels shorter) than the theatrical release. But to get it correct and include everything (or even just half) of what was left out would make the movie run an hour longer and wouldn't do justice to the books, in the end.
Read more and watch more, and you'll understand there is a huge difference between the medium of film and that of the written word. The latter can have long inner-thought passages and has the convenience of being able to put in loads of subtext, context and history. A movie just doesn't. Even a trilogy has to obey the 'laws' of pacing and interest.
Now, iirc, the Patriot ACT's sole purpose was to combat terrorism. That's how it got through the US legal system without due process (ie congress people weren't allowed to read it until an hour before they had to vote on it...this is a true fact which still shocks me) and got passed unanimously (or near enough not to matter).
Now isn't this a mere case of fraud (aka impersonating a legal user of a computer system) or plain braeaking and entering? Isn't this a case of misuse of a tool? And please screw the Al Capone stories...this kind of 'request' by the FBI is plain misuse of power, period.
Uh...they did build it. I'm real glad you weren't around when they built the first (lightbulb sized) transistor.
Anyway, this kind of thing is much more interesting when thinking of optical computing. That's the next step anyway...quantum computing is just too far off at the moment.
That's becuase the people drafting those bills are alpha's, not beta's. Politicians took poli-science, or a language at uni. And techies like to do difficult and interesting stuff, and very very few have political ambitions (hell, they don't even want to go into managament!).
This results in a situation where you have peopel drafting legislation about something they don't know shit about, sometimes maybe asking advice (and often from parties who have a vested interest in that tech, too!). Thus strange and just plain wrong laws are passed concerning tech.
Get used to it or go into politics. And for me, that's a choice of two evils.
Dunno 'bout that; a stealthy bomber would appreciate the reduction of sound on it's aproach to the target. Makes 'em just a bit more undetectable...and the faster they can get to target, the better off they are.
You'd be surprised. At the moment, one of the biggest hurdles to expanding (public) air infrastructure is noise polution at airports. One way to get 'round it is to go supersonic, so that there can be a higher throughput at those airports...but sonic booms have always prevented that (except over the atlantic/pacific ocean...which is why the routes of the concorde where what they where: restricted over the oceans).
"We have imbeciles for kids, who can't distinguish reality from fiction. We have also failed utterly as parents to instill a sense of right and wrong in them, and have been so absent we didn't see this coming. We blame video games."
Considering how important I take this ruling to be (it's a ruling upholding fair use and against strong-arm tactics; and it sets a nice precedent) for the web, I'm surprised this isn't being covered in the news in the Netherlands...it didn't even make regional tv. I wonder if it makes the back pages of the papers...
Wow...you must have done your studies a long time ago in a place where the education level stinks. In Delft, the Netherlands, mechanical engineering entails a hell of a lot of computer science. When they expect you to roll your own rudimentary finite element analisys program, you do kind of have to know something about programming.
Not only that, but in Delft I was in the first year where they implemented the computer engineering minor. Meaning that they basically do what they always did; in the first year you go two thirds/one third for physics/specialisation, then you specialise and get more than half of your credits from your specialisation. Which in my case goes equally to digital systems, mathematical structures and programming (started on java, then went to c/c++...hey, I wanted the lowlevel control on the chips I got to build). Not only that, but I helped implement a few programs for the rapid prototyping tools during my working study.
So not only did you not have enough info to mouth off, but you weren't smart enough to even ask...or go into dialogue, or even refute any of the points I made. Which you still haven't adressed (not even a single one!), appart from comparing 'the whole quake II project' to some corporate stuff you've done.
And even that is irrelevant to the point of proving me right; in those lines of code, you have no levels (let a lone a fun level design) and no artwork (no models, no textures, no sounds). What's even funnier though is the fact that it takes people who specialise in writing game engines many more months to get a feature complete game engine, even when they base it on an existing one...and you say you can do it, tweaked and all, fully functioning with bells and whistles and ready for the artwork and AI to be imported, in two months. Uh-huh.
Anyway, not only have you told me that you have no single experience in game programming whatsoever (and trust me [or not]: games are very different beasts than spreadsheets), but also that you can't read; all I said was that based on my experience you need a hell of a lot of time to make any kind of (3d) game which meets the minimum standards of today's games.
And not a single thing you've said contradicts that.
But then again, a top-shelf guy like you who starts a pissing contest (only to end up wetting himself) should have figured that out.
So please qualify your rebuttal with some arguments based on anything but 'I code soooooo fast' (and making arguments based on authority; good god...did you never take logic?). Oh, and it would be nice if your argument would adress my points, instead of trying to discredit me personally. If you're right (which your arguments should bear out, according to you) I'll be discredited anyway.
I never claimed expert status. All I said is that I have a clue about how engines work and and what it takes to build 'em...and more importantly fill 'em. How do I know? Because I actually have worked with quite a few different engines, put models in them, played around with the game logic. A hobbyist, yes...but what are you and what have you done?
And just fyi, Carmack didn't build Doom by himself...he coded the engine and only the engine. He needed quite a few other people to add content to that engine. I'll go one further: without those people, Carmack would have shit...he'd have a few lines of code which did displayed some planes on screen. He needed others to add gameplay and content to make a fun game.
As for what I sound like...I sound like someone who knows his shit...as befits someone studying applied physics with a computer engineering minor, after finishing my Mechanical Engineering degree. I sound like someone who knows what to do to get the result I want, and like someone who has done exactly that before.
You on the other hand sound like someone who sticks his fingers in his ears when he hears something he doesn' like and screams: "Nah-nah! I can't hear you!".
Because it's a sociology thing. All you have to do to reject the terms of the contract is move out to the wilderness. You don't want to? You like your electricity and running water too much? Tough...either move away and build your own powerplant or accept. It's a tough decision, maybe, but who ever said life was fair?
What you don't seem to realise here is that I already am involved in the mod scene; I know exactly what I'm talking about. Go have a look on jk2files.com...one of the battledroids (the first one available, back when there where only about 5 models made for the game, 40.000+ downloads worldwide) is mine...the one made by MacD. Not my only work, just the most downloaded.
So, having established that I know what I'm talking about, artwise (and believe me, I know something about engines too...NWN is fun:)), lets get down to time.
Because that's what my post was about. If you want to do a game, there's a minimum of polish needed to it, gameplay wise, game logic wise, art wise and documentation wise. If you're not gonna shoot for that, you might as well not bother posting here because you obviously aren't shooting for a public release. Seeing as you mentioned quake 2 (might as well go for quake 3 actually, as that will be gpl'd shortly after doom 3 is released), you gotta realise that to do all that (make the models, levels and textures, develop and test gameplay, write documentation, code) takes time. If it's a solo project, we are talking years. Literally. And that's if you don't have a day job. It'll take twice that at least if you have a job...assuming you're not re-dev-ing the actual gameplay, let alone doing something innovative.
By the time you're done, your game will be hopelesly out of date...the gameplay probably won't stand up to the standards of a decade hence (which will be fully featured and make use of the latest in AI, auto-content generation and natural dialog trees etc) [unless of course your game is completely original...can happen, but the odds are against you], the gfx most certainly won't, same for the special effects and the sound. As I've said before...one of the few reasons games like nethack are still played is the new gfx frontends made for it...but die-hards aside, it's a game which is not played anymore.
Again, I am not saying 'don't do it'...I am merely stating that unless you do all this for pure personal pleasure and not as something you want to have the public enjoy, do it in a team or don't bother, because people won't pick it up if it's that outdated.
And that is why mods nowadays are done in teams: very few people are great at coding, sound, modeling, level design and texturing. I'd even say that no-one is, not at everything at a high standard. To get something out which people will enjoy it has to come out while the game you made it from is still in circulation (quake 2 is a good example...don't bother starting with quake 1 now, unless you don't mind just ten people picking it up). This means getting everything done on a reasonable time frame...which per definition means having multiple people on the project, working on different aspects of the mod...which you want to do anyway if you want each part to have a good standard.
Again, I'm not saying 'don't do it!'. I'm saying that unless it's for personal pleasure (and not pleasure in the fact that many people enjoy yourt game) you want a team working on the game.
Anyway, I do agree with you on the fact that open source game engines are a godsend. That's also the direction most innovative gameplay will come from (and very maybe even some innovative technology). However, I'm saying that to make something worthwhile for the public, you need a team of skilled, dedicated people working with you.
"An individual should not be forced to pay taxes to fund a program for the benefit of others"
Yup, he should...that's part of the social contract you sign up to when you decide to live in a society. You can always move off and become a hermit if you don't agree. It's harsh, but it is one or the other.
Not only that, but by paying for things like education, infrastructure and environmental programs you ensure that there is less crime, a road to travel to your work on and that you live in a place where the air is breathable...all things which directly affect you. And that is why the government is allowed to force you to pay...because otherwise you're enjoying the benfits which others are paying for.
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And don't forget the Iraeli tactic of closing Palestine water installations/reservoirs/pumps in the neighbourhood of Israeli settlements. A very effective way of getting people to move away (and pretty well documented too, for those of you who would disagree).
My dad did that too...but when you see him use his PDA, you'll get that it's for the best. Odd that someone who started up the IT in a mayor corporation back in the day makes you physically cringe when using modern PC's and PDA's; you just wanna jank 'em away and do it yourself...
Hehe...thing is, it's all a form of OS-religion. The hardcore debate is not between sony, palm or ipaq...it's between PalmOS and PPC.
.doc etc can be handled natively :)
What makes me laugh is that PPC (an MS product) doesn't handle word and excell files as well as third party software does on the Palm, where
True...and maybe a little graphical calculation on the side.
:)).
But until I can read books and do matrix calculations on a phone with a decent sized screen (which is why the Treo 600 fails miserably for me...sob), I'm keeping to a seperate phone/PDA...my jacket pockets are big enough (especially seeing as my phone damn near fits in the lighter pocket of my jeans
In other words, what gets me is that all these companies are trying to give PDA functionality to a phone (which kyocera and samsung seem to be doing best)...but what about the people who want a PDA with phone functionality!?
I saw this coming a while back...but phone companies here seem oblivious. When I told a friend working for the biggest phone company over here, guess what he said: 'there must be laws against that'!
Because one is concept based and the other knowledge/data based.
Sorry, but it's quite well known that US medical treatment of any kind is only decent if you can afford to pay through the nose.
If you just make a decent living (not a decadent one) or are poor, you want to head over to parts of europe or the better of asian countries. Good healthcare for low prices, and it's available to damn near everyone.
Uh...in the books, Frodo was a coward (hey, he takes after his father!). And Aragorn was much more the typical arch-hero in the books.
As for your treatment...what you seem to assume is that people 'know this' and 'know that'...but that's all stuff which is built up in the books over paragraphs and chapter. You don't seem to realise that a movie is much more compact and just doesn't have the space (timewise) to include all that, not without it being boring beyond belief.
Now, sure, I think that the extended version of the first movie, although it's longer by half an hour, is shorter (feels shorter) than the theatrical release. But to get it correct and include everything (or even just half) of what was left out would make the movie run an hour longer and wouldn't do justice to the books, in the end.
Read more and watch more, and you'll understand there is a huge difference between the medium of film and that of the written word. The latter can have long inner-thought passages and has the convenience of being able to put in loads of subtext, context and history. A movie just doesn't. Even a trilogy has to obey the 'laws' of pacing and interest.
Heh...for some reason I always pictured Gollum as a non-transparent, black and slimy version of Slimer from the Ghostbusters movie :)
Now, iirc, the Patriot ACT's sole purpose was to combat terrorism.
That's how it got through the US legal system without due process (ie congress people weren't allowed to read it until an hour before they had to vote on it...this is a true fact which still shocks me) and got passed unanimously (or near enough not to matter).
Now isn't this a mere case of fraud (aka impersonating a legal user of a computer system) or plain braeaking and entering? Isn't this a case of misuse of a tool? And please screw the Al Capone stories...this kind of 'request' by the FBI is plain misuse of power, period.
Uh...they did build it. I'm real glad you weren't around when they built the first (lightbulb sized) transistor.
Anyway, this kind of thing is much more interesting when thinking of optical computing. That's the next step anyway...quantum computing is just too far off at the moment.
Now that all depends if it's a federal 'pound-me-in-the-ass' prison or not :)
Easy: you send me money. My bank account no. is xx.xx.xx.xxx.
They can be. Have a look at the video's on i02something's site (links in posts above). Cool stuff.
That's becuase the people drafting those bills are alpha's, not beta's. Politicians took poli-science, or a language at uni. And techies like to do difficult and interesting stuff, and very very few have political ambitions (hell, they don't even want to go into managament!).
This results in a situation where you have peopel drafting legislation about something they don't know shit about, sometimes maybe asking advice (and often from parties who have a vested interest in that tech, too!). Thus strange and just plain wrong laws are passed concerning tech.
Get used to it or go into politics. And for me, that's a choice of two evils.
Dunno 'bout that; a stealthy bomber would appreciate the reduction of sound on it's aproach to the target. Makes 'em just a bit more undetectable...and the faster they can get to target, the better off they are.
You'd be surprised. At the moment, one of the biggest hurdles to expanding (public) air infrastructure is noise polution at airports. One way to get 'round it is to go supersonic, so that there can be a higher throughput at those airports...but sonic booms have always prevented that (except over the atlantic/pacific ocean...which is why the routes of the concorde where what they where: restricted over the oceans).
"We have imbeciles for kids, who can't distinguish reality from fiction. We have also failed utterly as parents to instill a sense of right and wrong in them, and have been so absent we didn't see this coming. We blame video games."
Nuisance suit, anyone?
Considering how important I take this ruling to be (it's a ruling upholding fair use and against strong-arm tactics; and it sets a nice precedent) for the web, I'm surprised this isn't being covered in the news in the Netherlands...it didn't even make regional tv.
I wonder if it makes the back pages of the papers...
Wow...you must have done your studies a long time ago in a place where the education level stinks. In Delft, the Netherlands, mechanical engineering entails a hell of a lot of computer science. When they expect you to roll your own rudimentary finite element analisys program, you do kind of have to know something about programming.
Not only that, but in Delft I was in the first year where they implemented the computer engineering minor. Meaning that they basically do what they always did; in the first year you go two thirds/one third for physics/specialisation, then you specialise and get more than half of your credits from your specialisation.
Which in my case goes equally to digital systems, mathematical structures and programming (started on java, then went to c/c++...hey, I wanted the lowlevel control on the chips I got to build).
Not only that, but I helped implement a few programs for the rapid prototyping tools during my working study.
So not only did you not have enough info to mouth off, but you weren't smart enough to even ask...or go into dialogue, or even refute any of the points I made. Which you still haven't adressed (not even a single one!), appart from comparing 'the whole quake II project' to some corporate stuff you've done.
And even that is irrelevant to the point of proving me right; in those lines of code, you have no levels (let a lone a fun level design) and no artwork (no models, no textures, no sounds). What's even funnier though is the fact that it takes people who specialise in writing game engines many more months to get a feature complete game engine, even when they base it on an existing one...and you say you can do it, tweaked and all, fully functioning with bells and whistles and ready for the artwork and AI to be imported, in two months. Uh-huh.
Anyway, not only have you told me that you have no single experience in game programming whatsoever (and trust me [or not]: games are very different beasts than spreadsheets), but also that you can't read; all I said was that based on my experience you need a hell of a lot of time to make any kind of (3d) game which meets the minimum standards of today's games.
And not a single thing you've said contradicts that.
But then again, a top-shelf guy like you who starts a pissing contest (only to end up wetting himself) should have figured that out.
So please qualify your rebuttal with some arguments based on anything but 'I code soooooo fast' (and making arguments based on authority; good god...did you never take logic?).
Oh, and it would be nice if your argument would adress my points, instead of trying to discredit me personally. If you're right (which your arguments should bear out, according to you) I'll be discredited anyway.
I never claimed expert status. All I said is that I have a clue about how engines work and and what it takes to build 'em...and more importantly fill 'em.
How do I know? Because I actually have worked with quite a few different engines, put models in them, played around with the game logic. A hobbyist, yes...but what are you and what have you done?
And just fyi, Carmack didn't build Doom by himself...he coded the engine and only the engine. He needed quite a few other people to add content to that engine. I'll go one further: without those people, Carmack would have shit...he'd have a few lines of code which did displayed some planes on screen. He needed others to add gameplay and content to make a fun game.
As for what I sound like...I sound like someone who knows his shit...as befits someone studying applied physics with a computer engineering minor, after finishing my Mechanical Engineering degree. I sound like someone who knows what to do to get the result I want, and like someone who has done exactly that before.
You on the other hand sound like someone who sticks his fingers in his ears when he hears something he doesn' like and screams: "Nah-nah! I can't hear you!".
Because it's a sociology thing. All you have to do to reject the terms of the contract is move out to the wilderness. You don't want to? You like your electricity and running water too much? Tough...either move away and build your own powerplant or accept. It's a tough decision, maybe, but who ever said life was fair?
No, you did. By staying within society, you explicitly imply (yeah, yeah, I know) that you agree to the terms. If you don't, move.
What you don't seem to realise here is that I already am involved in the mod scene; I know exactly what I'm talking about. Go have a look on jk2files.com...one of the battledroids (the first one available, back when there where only about 5 models made for the game, 40.000+ downloads worldwide) is mine...the one made by MacD. Not my only work, just the most downloaded.
:)), lets get down to time.
So, having established that I know what I'm talking about, artwise (and believe me, I know something about engines too...NWN is fun
Because that's what my post was about. If you want to do a game, there's a minimum of polish needed to it, gameplay wise, game logic wise, art wise and documentation wise. If you're not gonna shoot for that, you might as well not bother posting here because you obviously aren't shooting for a public release.
Seeing as you mentioned quake 2 (might as well go for quake 3 actually, as that will be gpl'd shortly after doom 3 is released), you gotta realise that to do all that (make the models, levels and textures, develop and test gameplay, write documentation, code) takes time. If it's a solo project, we are talking years. Literally. And that's if you don't have a day job. It'll take twice that at least if you have a job...assuming you're not re-dev-ing the actual gameplay, let alone doing something innovative.
By the time you're done, your game will be hopelesly out of date...the gameplay probably won't stand up to the standards of a decade hence (which will be fully featured and make use of the latest in AI, auto-content generation and natural dialog trees etc) [unless of course your game is completely original...can happen, but the odds are against you], the gfx most certainly won't, same for the special effects and the sound. As I've said before...one of the few reasons games like nethack are still played is the new gfx frontends made for it...but die-hards aside, it's a game which is not played anymore.
Again, I am not saying 'don't do it'...I am merely stating that unless you do all this for pure personal pleasure and not as something you want to have the public enjoy, do it in a team or don't bother, because people won't pick it up if it's that outdated.
And that is why mods nowadays are done in teams: very few people are great at coding, sound, modeling, level design and texturing. I'd even say that no-one is, not at everything at a high standard.
To get something out which people will enjoy it has to come out while the game you made it from is still in circulation (quake 2 is a good example...don't bother starting with quake 1 now, unless you don't mind just ten people picking it up). This means getting everything done on a reasonable time frame...which per definition means having multiple people on the project, working on different aspects of the mod...which you want to do anyway if you want each part to have a good standard.
Again, I'm not saying 'don't do it!'. I'm saying that unless it's for personal pleasure (and not pleasure in the fact that many people enjoy yourt game) you want a team working on the game.
Anyway, I do agree with you on the fact that open source game engines are a godsend. That's also the direction most innovative gameplay will come from (and very maybe even some innovative technology). However, I'm saying that to make something worthwhile for the public, you need a team of skilled, dedicated people working with you.
"An individual should not be forced to pay taxes to fund a program for the benefit of others"
Yup, he should...that's part of the social contract you sign up to when you decide to live in a society. You can always move off and become a hermit if you don't agree. It's harsh, but it is one or the other.
Not only that, but by paying for things like education, infrastructure and environmental programs you ensure that there is less crime, a road to travel to your work on and that you live in a place where the air is breathable...all things which directly affect you. And that is why the government is allowed to force you to pay...because otherwise you're enjoying the benfits which others are paying for.