"OK, so if the tools are bad, that's no excuse, but if the tools are good, then it helps?"
Yup...the last part you can hardly argue with. And the first part means that if you are a good artist/programmer/whatever, you'll produce good work even with bad tools. If you don't, then you just aren't a great artist/programmer/whatever...good talent deals with the limitations, bad talent just whines.
As for OSS stuff...you might have noticed, but OSS only accounts for what, 5-10% of the market? That means there's a lot less people working on mods for OSS than for windows.
Kinda...but the gameplay is very different. As is the presentation, the speed, lack of freezetime, multiplayer aspect. Still, it does kinda somewhere resemble Space Hulk;)
But, man, that does take me back:) I wish I still had all of the original disks:(
Ok...I was talking about fy2002...but then again, you didn't take into account the extra 50 billion Bush got from congress for his warchest.
But what your also missing is that the numbers you quote are entirely uncorrected. Have a look here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c108: 1:./tem p/~c108sAQwzP:e2753:
That's what congress is actually recomending for federal income...now do you really thing your 2.1 trillion is correct, or don't you agree my 1.2 for 2002 is slightly more in line with the congress' expectaions? And again, my point on hidden defense spending still stands.
So what about [can't remeber the title]? It's built on Halflife, but it puts a team leader in a coordinating, top down view, ordering the rest around. The teammates then run around in the 3d view, building bases, defenses and moving into position (as directed by the teamleader) to mow down the opposition. Think a cross between an rts and a fps, but with more tactics involved.
Saying the engine is the limitation means you're blaming your tools...and everyone knows that that just means you're shifting the blame from where it belongs: you. All I'm saying is that the better the tools get, the easier it is...it lowers the barrier to entry, meaning more people try and thus we get more and better stuff to play with.
Anyway, doing that game needed a deep understanding of the tools...now imagine what those guys could have done with an easily modded engine (which HL just isn't...people do it casue it can be done, not because HL is an easy engine to mod); they'd have done it faster, with better gfx, more content and could have spent more time and effort on the game mechanics itself.
It's more the complexity and cost that is the barrier to entree and the damper on innovation.
But personally I think that this is just a short dip in the curve; at the moment, it just takes a lot of time and effort to create content and a feature rich enough engine to make a game which is polished enough to be sold.
However, that's gonna change. At the moment it's still quite complex to modify games to any real extent. I'm not saying it's gonna get easier per se, but it is gonna get easier to get more done (subtle distinction, but very important).
Every itteration of game engines makes more possible: automatic, procedural and easier content generation and integration; more transparent game rule changing...thgis is being worked on right now. Look at Deus Ex 2 and Halflife 2...the lipsyncing-tech in HL2 and the attribute-techture-tech in Deus Ex make life so much easier...it takes out a chunk of grunt work (which is exactly what automation and computers should be doing).
So while at the moment it takes huge sums of money and years of manyears(?) to create a game, in the future engine licensing will be more and more frequent. And as engines get more and more userfriendly and take more and more of the grunt work out of gamedev'ing, more and more time will be available to play around with game ideas and styles.
And that also means that modders will have an easier time doing the same. And that is, nowadays, where the real innovation in gameplay experiences come from.
Not only should you have a look at my sig, you should also judge a statement (or anything else in life for that matter) on content, not packaging (except for packing paper).
Then maybe you should adress my point. But before that you should maybe read the the UN charter. And realise that what was done in Afghanistan and Iraq (as in the rest of the middle east, south america and asia) can only be seen as meddling in other country's sovereignty.
Go learn your own national budget before you make an even bigger fool of yourself. The US national budget is 1.2 trillion, with 450 billion set aside for military spending. And please note that in what's left there's another chunk that's set aside for defense, homeland security and other related issues.
You really should be ashamed that a foreigner is explaining this to you.
Also, GDP and the budget aren't directly correlated. Go learn some economics while you're having a look at a simple version of your budget.
You don't read a lot of news, do you. If you had, you'd have noticed that it was the governments which had pledged support, but that in most of those countries, most of the population was directly opposed to that war.
You, my dear sir, should go read up on the UN's charter, the geneva conventions and then look up andask some political science mayor what 'souvereignity' means.
And as far as liberation goes, you might want to see what good this has done; Afghanistan is now a mess, sliding backwards towards feudalism worse than before the Taliban and Iraq is now a satelite state being built up by US corporations with ties to the US administration instead of by Iraqi companies (therefore preventing a much needed economic boost for Iraq) with it's laws being dictated by the US. Which is odd, considering the US can be considered a nicely corrupt government when looking at it's ties to companies and the laws passed in those companies favour, not to mention the privacy and civil rights degrading laws which have been passed in the US.
Actually, most europeans I've talked to think that getting rid of Saddam was the only good thing that came out of the whole mess...but we feel that it wasn't worth upsetting global stability or relinquishing huge oil-fields to the greatest wastrels on the planet.
Come to think of it, we're also kind of appaled at the fact that rebuilding Iraq has turned into a feeding frenzy for the corrupt US government. Truly, why is Halliburton and all those other companies which have ties one way or another to the US government getting those contracts? Why the fsck aren't Iraqi companies getting them?
As for being a troll...if your strong allies of 50 years (and that is a fact...go check voting records on many, many issues at G7/8 meetings, WTO meetings, UN resolutions and many other international treaties. Then go check the political background and you'll see how little a clue you have.
As for jealousy towards US powerprojection...yeah, we'de kind of like that...but not at the cost of !50%! of the budget. Europeans think it's better to spend that kind of money towards making human lives better than killing them.
Yeah, true Vietnam wasn't pleasant...but on the other hand, that was only televised. You don't have many battlefields across your nation, nor survivors who still bear tattoos of numbers on their wrist. Nothing strikes me as sitting on a terras, having a beer with my friends and seeing an old geezer with one of those serial numbers there. Not to mention the fact that my granddad has some storis to tell about his time in the concentration camps. And what does the US do? It lets it's vets sleep in the street....
Finally, the only country on record as having supplied Iraq with WMD's is the US. And the Iraqi's used tbose up...if France has supplied Iraq with WMD's...where are they now then?
's the whole point, isn't it? At the moment, planes don't use gps...becuase it isn't accurate enough. Galileo is accurate enough , so as soon as it's up, it can be implemented in planes in much the same way as it's used in cars.
I don't have an xbox, so I don't really know, but does the xbox have a eula that flashes up on boot up? Don't you just buy the thing in the store, plug it in and play? Do you actually have to sign your john hancock somewhere when you buy one, or when you buy an xbox game?
Wow...will you be surprised at the increase in performance when you do a clean install.
Had you used win2k/xp, I wouldn't have said that, but as an 'expert amateur' using dos/win95/98/2k and xp, (regcleaning, spy-ware busting, occaisonal virusscanning et all) I can say with confidence that win9x sucks the big one compared to the newer kernels.
Do yourself a favour...get win2k/xp...hell, even linux is better than a win9x OS:)
Yeah...read a book, spend a lot of time, and hope linux does what it should do...or spend some money and have a system which is consistent, crashes as rarely as linux and is userfriendly and GUI'd all across the board.
I guess it just goes to show you get what you pay for.
The only thing I ever wanted was a GSM integrated with my IIIc. That's it.
Sure, now I want high rez (480-320), dedicated mp3 support, removable storage and graffitti area, but just a IIIc with an internal GSM would have done it for me too.
And I've been saying that since I got my palmpilot...which is in the first month the IIIc was available. Palm/3com/whoever is just plain fucking dumb not to have done it since then (and no, Tungsten C is shit...I do not want a phone/pda without graffitti or which only work with a blooming headset!).
Palm just hasn't a fucking clue what the market wants....and for that, they deserve to go tits up.
But it's not about piracy...iot's about playing imports.
Why should I be limited to the shit that comes out in europe? Same for dvd's...can you explain regoin coding as anything else than a mechanism to control the market? And can you find a law that says I am not allowed to bypass someone who wants to limit my acces to commercially sold information that I legally pay for? No, you can't.
You can find a law which makes it illegal for me to bypass protection schemes...but if those schemes are illegal in the first place (ie anti-compettitive and anti-trust), then my rights supercede the ones which prevent me from doing what I have every right to do.
See, the mayor flaw here is that you equate moid-chips with modified binaries. Which is just so much bollocks. A mod chip might allow you to play imports, and even warez'd games...but it a) doesn't neccessarily allow modified binaries and b)when certain mod-chips do, it's dead easy to do a quick binary check to see if the binaries have been modded.
Anyway, it really brwaks down like this. I buy a car, and can buy any carburetor I want and install it. Not only that, but I can legally get many third party books on how to modify my car. The fact that xbox is a computer does not make one whit of a difference...no matter whatr MS say, or what they put in their eula (which, iirc, isn't there for an xbox).
So any limitation MS tries to pull flies right in the face of hundreds of years of precedent concerning motoring vehicles, shaving devices and even computers (remember the clone wars [as in pc clones...])!
Truly, even if the law says differently, I could not care less...the law of the land applies here and any other law is bought.
I would agree with you where it not for something I read a while back...it was about media convergence, and the fact that it had already happened. Case in point was this kid who was listening to the music cd from Lilo and Stich. Kid cries "I wanna play the game!".
Now that shows a change in the kid's perception of media. It's listening to the music from the film...and expects, no, doesn't even really consider, the fact that there/wouldn't/ be a video game.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...and the racing mod for Quake3 looks like quake...not; it looks a bit like Wipeout.
Basicaly your point is demonstrably not true.
"OK, so if the tools are bad, that's no excuse, but if the tools are good, then it helps?"
Yup...the last part you can hardly argue with. And the first part means that if you are a good artist/programmer/whatever, you'll produce good work even with bad tools. If you don't, then you just aren't a great artist/programmer/whatever...good talent deals with the limitations, bad talent just whines.
As for OSS stuff...you might have noticed, but OSS only accounts for what, 5-10% of the market? That means there's a lot less people working on mods for OSS than for windows.
Kinda...but the gameplay is very different. As is the presentation, the speed, lack of freezetime, multiplayer aspect. Still, it does kinda somewhere resemble Space Hulk ;)
:) I wish I still had all of the original disks :(
But, man, that does take me back
Ok...I was talking about fy2002...but then again, you didn't take into account the extra 50 billion Bush got from congress for his warchest.
: 1:./tem p/~c108sAQwzP:e2753:
But what your also missing is that the numbers you quote are entirely uncorrected. Have a look here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c108
That's what congress is actually recomending for federal income...now do you really thing your 2.1 trillion is correct, or don't you agree my 1.2 for 2002 is slightly more in line with the congress' expectaions? And again, my point on hidden defense spending still stands.
So what about [can't remeber the title]? It's built on Halflife, but it puts a team leader in a coordinating, top down view, ordering the rest around. The teammates then run around in the 3d view, building bases, defenses and moving into position (as directed by the teamleader) to mow down the opposition. Think a cross between an rts and a fps, but with more tactics involved.
Saying the engine is the limitation means you're blaming your tools...and everyone knows that that just means you're shifting the blame from where it belongs: you. All I'm saying is that the better the tools get, the easier it is...it lowers the barrier to entry, meaning more people try and thus we get more and better stuff to play with.
Anyway, doing that game needed a deep understanding of the tools...now imagine what those guys could have done with an easily modded engine (which HL just isn't...people do it casue it can be done, not because HL is an easy engine to mod); they'd have done it faster, with better gfx, more content and could have spent more time and effort on the game mechanics itself.
"Metroid Prime is a great example of something that really hasn't been done before (first-person adventure, not FPS)."
Actually, you might want to have a look at Ultima Underworld...and it was released before Wolfenstein 3D too.
Actually, after E3 there's just three games I'm lusting over; Halflife 2, Homeworld 2 and HALO 2.
Three sequels, yes, but oh-so tasty in gfx and gameplay. Doom 3 is just YAFPS (Yet Another FPS)for me, another engine showcase with little game.
It's more the complexity and cost that is the barrier to entree and the damper on innovation.
But personally I think that this is just a short dip in the curve; at the moment, it just takes a lot of time and effort to create content and a feature rich enough engine to make a game which is polished enough to be sold.
However, that's gonna change. At the moment it's still quite complex to modify games to any real extent. I'm not saying it's gonna get easier per se, but it is gonna get easier to get more done (subtle distinction, but very important).
Every itteration of game engines makes more possible: automatic, procedural and easier content generation and integration; more transparent game rule changing...thgis is being worked on right now. Look at Deus Ex 2 and Halflife 2...the lipsyncing-tech in HL2 and the attribute-techture-tech in Deus Ex make life so much easier...it takes out a chunk of grunt work (which is exactly what automation and computers should be doing).
So while at the moment it takes huge sums of money and years of manyears(?) to create a game, in the future engine licensing will be more and more frequent. And as engines get more and more userfriendly and take more and more of the grunt work out of gamedev'ing, more and more time will be available to play around with game ideas and styles.
And that also means that modders will have an easier time doing the same. And that is, nowadays, where the real innovation in gameplay experiences come from.
Not only should you have a look at my sig, you should also judge a statement (or anything else in life for that matter) on content, not packaging (except for packing paper).
Then maybe you should adress my point. But before that you should maybe read the the UN charter. And realise that what was done in Afghanistan and Iraq (as in the rest of the middle east, south america and asia) can only be seen as meddling in other country's sovereignty.
Go learn your own national budget before you make an even bigger fool of yourself. The US national budget is 1.2 trillion, with 450 billion set aside for military spending. And please note that in what's left there's another chunk that's set aside for defense, homeland security and other related issues.
You really should be ashamed that a foreigner is explaining this to you.
Also, GDP and the budget aren't directly correlated. Go learn some economics while you're having a look at a simple version of your budget.
You don't read a lot of news, do you. If you had, you'd have noticed that it was the governments which had pledged support, but that in most of those countries, most of the population was directly opposed to that war.
You, my dear sir, should go read up on the UN's charter, the geneva conventions and then look up andask some political science mayor what 'souvereignity' means.
And as far as liberation goes, you might want to see what good this has done; Afghanistan is now a mess, sliding backwards towards feudalism worse than before the Taliban and Iraq is now a satelite state being built up by US corporations with ties to the US administration instead of by Iraqi companies (therefore preventing a much needed economic boost for Iraq) with it's laws being dictated by the US. Which is odd, considering the US can be considered a nicely corrupt government when looking at it's ties to companies and the laws passed in those companies favour, not to mention the privacy and civil rights degrading laws which have been passed in the US.
Actually, most europeans I've talked to think that getting rid of Saddam was the only good thing that came out of the whole mess...but we feel that it wasn't worth upsetting global stability or relinquishing huge oil-fields to the greatest wastrels on the planet.
Come to think of it, we're also kind of appaled at the fact that rebuilding Iraq has turned into a feeding frenzy for the corrupt US government. Truly, why is Halliburton and all those other companies which have ties one way or another to the US government getting those contracts? Why the fsck aren't Iraqi companies getting them?
As for being a troll...if your strong allies of 50 years (and that is a fact...go check voting records on many, many issues at G7/8 meetings, WTO meetings, UN resolutions and many other international treaties. Then go check the political background and you'll see how little a clue you have.
As for jealousy towards US powerprojection...yeah, we'de kind of like that...but not at the cost of !50%! of the budget. Europeans think it's better to spend that kind of money towards making human lives better than killing them.
Yeah, true Vietnam wasn't pleasant...but on the other hand, that was only televised. You don't have many battlefields across your nation, nor survivors who still bear tattoos of numbers on their wrist. Nothing strikes me as sitting on a terras, having a beer with my friends and seeing an old geezer with one of those serial numbers there. Not to mention the fact that my granddad has some storis to tell about his time in the concentration camps. And what does the US do? It lets it's vets sleep in the street....
Finally, the only country on record as having supplied Iraq with WMD's is the US. And the Iraqi's used tbose up...if France has supplied Iraq with WMD's...where are they now then?
Go read a newspaper.
's the whole point, isn't it? At the moment, planes don't use gps...becuase it isn't accurate enough. Galileo is accurate enough , so as soon as it's up, it can be implemented in planes in much the same way as it's used in cars.
I know that....the thing is that according to some rulings they are binding, and acoording to others they aren't.
But my question is this: does the xbox even have an eula?
I don't have an xbox, so I don't really know, but does the xbox have a eula that flashes up on boot up? Don't you just buy the thing in the store, plug it in and play? Do you actually have to sign your john hancock somewhere when you buy one, or when you buy an xbox game?
Wow...will you be surprised at the increase in performance when you do a clean install.
:)
Had you used win2k/xp, I wouldn't have said that, but as an 'expert amateur' using dos/win95/98/2k and xp, (regcleaning, spy-ware busting, occaisonal virusscanning et all) I can say with confidence that win9x sucks the big one compared to the newer kernels.
Do yourself a favour...get win2k/xp...hell, even linux is better than a win9x OS
Yeah...read a book, spend a lot of time, and hope linux does what it should do...or spend some money and have a system which is consistent, crashes as rarely as linux and is userfriendly and GUI'd all across the board.
I guess it just goes to show you get what you pay for.
And that is different from linux how?
Oh, yeah...I don't have to download, recompile and then reboot.
Anyway, screw linux until they get a decent CAD/CAM package and the games (and no, a couple of games years late doesn't count).
The only thing I ever wanted was a GSM integrated with my IIIc. That's it.
Sure, now I want high rez (480-320), dedicated mp3 support, removable storage and graffitti area, but just a IIIc with an internal GSM would have done it for me too.
And I've been saying that since I got my palmpilot...which is in the first month the IIIc was available. Palm/3com/whoever is just plain fucking dumb not to have done it since then (and no, Tungsten C is shit...I do not want a phone/pda without graffitti or which only work with a blooming headset!).
Palm just hasn't a fucking clue what the market wants....and for that, they deserve to go tits up.
Oh, so true...wish I had modpoints.
Thing is, how is it IP infringement if I buy a real game (albeit from japan) and play it on my own machine!?
The machine is mine (not a knock off, the real deal), the game is mine (not warez'd, just imported from japan)...why can I be prosecuted?
But it's not about piracy...iot's about playing imports.
Why should I be limited to the shit that comes out in europe? Same for dvd's...can you explain regoin coding as anything else than a mechanism to control the market? And can you find a law that says I am not allowed to bypass someone who wants to limit my acces to commercially sold information that I legally pay for? No, you can't.
You can find a law which makes it illegal for me to bypass protection schemes...but if those schemes are illegal in the first place (ie anti-compettitive and anti-trust), then my rights supercede the ones which prevent me from doing what I have every right to do.
See, the mayor flaw here is that you equate moid-chips with modified binaries. Which is just so much bollocks. A mod chip might allow you to play imports, and even warez'd games...but it a) doesn't neccessarily allow modified binaries and b)when certain mod-chips do, it's dead easy to do a quick binary check to see if the binaries have been modded.
Anyway, it really brwaks down like this. I buy a car, and can buy any carburetor I want and install it. Not only that, but I can legally get many third party books on how to modify my car.
The fact that xbox is a computer does not make one whit of a difference...no matter whatr MS say, or what they put in their eula (which, iirc, isn't there for an xbox).
So any limitation MS tries to pull flies right in the face of hundreds of years of precedent concerning motoring vehicles, shaving devices and even computers (remember the clone wars [as in pc clones...])!
Truly, even if the law says differently, I could not care less...the law of the land applies here and any other law is bought.
I would agree with you where it not for something I read a while back...it was about media convergence, and the fact that it had already happened. Case in point was this kid who was listening to the music cd from Lilo and Stich. Kid cries "I wanna play the game!".
/wouldn't/ be a video game.
Now that shows a change in the kid's perception of media. It's listening to the music from the film...and expects, no, doesn't even really consider, the fact that there
Which isn't neccesarily true: iirc, 2001 was a bust at the box office. Only years later was it recognised as a real masterpiece.