Final Fantasy XI is rooted in the same pattern you illustrate outright. A couple key differences might just interest you, however.
First, it requires teamwork. There are few quests or story advancing missions one can complete on their own. A player can hardly acquire experience on their own (with the exception of one or two specific jobs). One must work with others at a nominal level to even survive to 75 (our max). A group of players that work well together will be highly rewarded. Teams that don't work together as well will still advance, but not as quickly.
Second, there's stories. Lots of stories. Sure starting out you'll see your share of "Kill X enemies," "retrieve X items," or "ferry this item" missions. It'll seem very familiar at first. Stick it out, though, and missions start drawing you into the lives of the NPCs, the politics of our nations, the history of our lands, and the traditions of your very own job.
These are some high quality stories as well. Here's a script of the cutscenes belonging to just one of our hundred-plus missions. If you don't mind reading spoilers, you can see I've dropped you at an interesting turning point in the story. Every character name you see in there has a back story, that you've discovered by now. They have their own motivations, and you're the thread that briefly weaves their fates together.
Once you're out of the lower level quests you might just find yourself pursuing quests with very poor rewards JUST to see what a particular NPC's story is, or simply because you believe it will be entertaining.
We've comedy, we've tragedy. When it comes to story lines, I'd say FFXI players are a pretty spoiled lot.
I'd love to go over the team-work oriented battle-system, but I'd really rather get back to playing.
I doubt any mod team was hit harder by that fact than mine. Yet, I can't fault him for the decision. It's unlikely anyone on my team did/does. By supporting almost every hardware graphics accelerator on the market at the time, Quake 3 almost single-handedly fostered the feedback loop that drove mainstream adoption of dedicated graphics accelerators.
You sound like someone that's had the same thought every serious modder/engine-licensee has ever had; "if they could have just included/modified this ONE feature, my game would be feasible/better."
Yet you haven't encountered that phrase enough times to appreciate the fact that engine developers have to draw a performance line somewhere. Your desired feature just happened to be on the wrong side of that line.
Further, engine-developers of John Carmack's caliber would (I promise you this) love to have supported every feature you've ever thought of (and more). John Carmack's always been on the cutting edge, usually refining it. He sometimes makes decisions that are a matter of taste that you can feel free to disagree with him on, but that particular feature wasn't one of them.
And I must say, I like where this is going so far. It feels like a very natural progression from HTML4's ideology, while respecting authors' collective recent interests, such as media embedding, and .
When J.C. says he's never going to work with someone again, that doesn't mean id intellectual property will never hit that platform. They just happen to be a game studio that isn't at the complete whim of their publisher, and thus are not forced to entertain business dealings they find unsavory.
I never heard anyone from id software saying they would never work with apple... actually, I don't remember anyone from id software actually working with apple. Nevertheless, if such statements were made, why is it surprising that they changed their mind? I mean, if they were stubbornly refusing to release on the mac platform for personal reasons, would that benefit their fans?
Did John Carmack say this somewhere in his.plan, or was it elsewhere? Where did you hear this? I think some context would really help.
I'm a modder, I follow id because I'm invested in their platform. Offerings outside of Epic's tool sets and support haven't had much appeal for the level of modification I perform.
I don't really give a shit about your Far Cry hard-on. I'm sure it was fun for you but its appeal is not universal.
Indeed. Just one example, look at Beryl/Compiz, Vista, OS X. I would argue that operating systems wouldn't have come this far, visually, if it weren't for the Quake series. Thanks to Quake, OEMs were increasingly compelled to include dedicated graphics processors in every box. There was a time when Carmack's decision to completely drop software rendering was considered risky. It's a risk id took, and every modern computer user (even if they never play any game) benefitted from it.
While I'd like to see a different genre from id on one hand, I'd also like to see their response to Halo and Gears of War. id is the original owner of the FPS format, but they're not owning recent FPS sales. They've gotten their artistic Doom 3 done-the-way-we-always-wanted-to-do-it title out. So perhaps they're readying some super-charged pure FPS revolution.
I gaurantee you, what happened here is gameindustry.biz asked for some statements regarding their next title, and id gave them a straight up answer. Gameindustry.biz considered this news-worthy. If you read the entire (and very short) article, you see Hollenshed say "We can't really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet."
In other words, this isn't an an announcement that id is making. They're not trying to start the hype machine. Gameindustry.biz just get over-excited about their "exclusive."
John Carmack's keynotes from the last three QuakeCons are available here. You won't get any solid answers on their next title, but in the 2006 speech you can get some clues when John Carmack starts elaborating on his game design philosophies.
Oh game developers will sample another game all the time. Thing is, the game developers that do that are modders. They usually don't charge people for their work, and always cite the sampled game developers in credits.
First, no, that isn't what happened. While it's possible that most of the images cited could be create procedurally, an experienced video game artist will tell you that it would take far less time to generate most of those image maps in photoshop. Tablet input is very fast, and far more intuitive than tweaking algorithms to produce base shapes, then seeding more complicated algorithms to overlay multiple varying patterns.
Second, is there some organization of procedural texture trolls out there or something? Must procedural textures be mentioned in every video game article?
I don't think it's our industry.
on
IT and Divorce?
·
· Score: 1
See how plausible these edits sound to you:
"I am graduate student and work as an accountant. I am also getting a divorce and I have a son caught in the middle. I believe my profession had a part in it. [...] I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce..."
"I am graduate student and work as a construction worker. I am also getting a divorce and I have a son caught in the middle. I believe my profession had a part in it. [...] I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce..."
"I am graduate student and work as a project manager. I am also getting a divorce and I have a son caught in the middle. I believe my profession had a part in it. [...] I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce..."
"I am graduate student and work as an engineer. I am also getting a divorce and I have a son caught in the middle. I believe my profession had a part in it. [...] I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce..."
"I am graduate student and work as a cop. I am also getting a divorce and I have a son caught in the middle. I believe my profession had a part in it. [...] I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce..."
"I am graduate student and work as a web developer. I am also getting a divorce and I have a son caught in the middle. I believe my profession had a part in it. [...] I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce..."
I'd personally find it more likely that divorce rates are a product of our society. Our workplaces are certainly a factor, perhaps even the dominant factor, but I don't think divorce rates vary significantly corresponding to industry.
It's my impression, though. If your study yields compelling evidence to the contrary please let us know, I'm sure such an article would make it on Slashdot.
Indeed, WSUS is the way to go without spending money. It's supported by Microsoft. It sports patches for Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, and even definition updates for the (still beta) Windows Defender. It's a lot like hosting your own windowsupdate.microsoft.com really. You're given an overview of what patches a computer needs, and what patches WSUS has installed. You can choose to automatically approve certain types of updates. It gives you a lot.
Requirements are a Windows NT 5.0+ server hosting IIS, and some sort of SQL database. The documentation will reccomend MSDE or MS SQL server. I personally reccomend MSDE.
Try to remember to patch MSDE before you install WSUS.
Loading all of this on an internet facing server (outside the firewall) is NOT reccomended (and may violate the license depending on how it's configured).
Regardless, one should use the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer for any IIS server.
That's the install routine off the top of my head. It actually helps to read the documentation for this particular MS Product. There are tons of helpful tips, such as, disabling languages you don't use (to reduce bandwidth and storage space consumed).
There's nothing fantastic, or pro-computer, about that post. I'm sick of people saying this/that is going to have some serious impact on the next generation of consoles. If any one of the next big consoles didn't have wireless controllers, you'd hear people claiming that one was going to fade into obscurity in two years.
It's simply not the case. It doesn't matter what features you add or subtract from a console, what matters is attracting game developers. If you get the game developers, you get the games. Get the games and you have the gamers. It's the difference in a consoles success for its lifespan. Nintendo64 died because game developers were put off by cartridge production costs, and limited space. Gamecube still lives because they cater to, and still have enough, big developers to keep them going. The Dreamcast lost its licensees and we see where that put Sega.
There's nothing fan-boyish or fantastic about these simple facts. Gamers go where the games are. They always have, they always will. No early release, or technical gee-whiz add-on is going to change that.
It's frustrating to see these, supposed, professional gaming news sources always talking to gamers about how this technical merit, or this release schedule will affect their spending. It's bullshit. If IGN,/., PCGaming, or really anybody had the sense to ask what game studios thought about the consoles and where they were investing their development dollars they would have their answer for which console will succeed.
A console's success is directly tied to its titles. The faster you can get more titles from bigger publishers the more successful you will be. Microsoft's early debut will help simply because they'll be given more time to acquire a greater game library (quantity and quality-wise) than Sony will have at their launch. Microsoft and Sony both have a critical mass of game developers. However, Sony does still have the most licensees.
Microsoft knows this, that's why they're attempting to release so early. Getting out early is going to put both systems with nearly an equivalent number of quality[1] titles three months after the PS3s launch (which is about the only time we could really start forcasting how this generation's console wars will go). The only way this won't end up with them on a fairly even playing field is if either of them (or their licensed developers) screws up royally.
Understanding these facts, one can clearly determine that the beginning of the war will be fairly even. Playstation still has a slightly greater number of hard-hitters licensed but Microsoft is closing that gap as fast as they can.
Even though I will never own an X-Box (OMG TEH M$ IZ TEH SUK! SONEH 4 TEH WIN1), I think Microsoft is going to pull ahead thanks to the developers they've just bought outright. Microsoft's acquiring a nice line-up of in-house developers, while Playstation seems to have forgotten that it was largely their in-house developments like Warhawk, Twisted Metal, etc. that got them ruling during the Playstation era.
To summarize: It is to Microsoft's advantage to be the first-mover. It does not give Microsoft the advantage.
[1] - For those that can't guess, I'm not trying to define quality titles in any artistic sense. By "quality" titles I mean games that sell well due to consumer satisfaction not simply hype. I personally find most of these "quality" titles to be average in execution and enjoyability, but my personal tastes don't define the gaming market. To summarize this footnote: Please don't try to argue with me about what makes a quality title. Chances are, I already agree with you.
It really shouldn't just be called Vi because when people refer to "Vi" they're usually talking about an entire operating system of which "Vi" is a small part. For accuracy and to give credit where credit is due it should be called "Emacs/Vi."
Slashdot Mirror
Why isn't anyone asking this?
Really? You couldn't just write multiple frames simultaneously on an alternating phase?
I should expect with digital someone's already done this.
For 1/96th exposure you'd have two phases that do the same thing:
- Collect the light.
- Write to prior frame and save.
- Store for current frame.
Increase the number of frames simultaneously written to increase exposure.
Final Fantasy XI is rooted in the same pattern you illustrate outright. A couple key differences might just interest you, however.
First, it requires teamwork. There are few quests or story advancing missions one can complete on their own. A player can hardly acquire experience on their own (with the exception of one or two specific jobs). One must work with others at a nominal level to even survive to 75 (our max). A group of players that work well together will be highly rewarded. Teams that don't work together as well will still advance, but not as quickly.
Second, there's stories. Lots of stories. Sure starting out you'll see your share of "Kill X enemies," "retrieve X items," or "ferry this item" missions. It'll seem very familiar at first. Stick it out, though, and missions start drawing you into the lives of the NPCs, the politics of our nations, the history of our lands, and the traditions of your very own job.
These are some high quality stories as well. Here's a script of the cutscenes belonging to just one of our hundred-plus missions. If you don't mind reading spoilers, you can see I've dropped you at an interesting turning point in the story. Every character name you see in there has a back story, that you've discovered by now. They have their own motivations, and you're the thread that briefly weaves their fates together.
Once you're out of the lower level quests you might just find yourself pursuing quests with very poor rewards JUST to see what a particular NPC's story is, or simply because you believe it will be entertaining.
We've comedy, we've tragedy. When it comes to story lines, I'd say FFXI players are a pretty spoiled lot.
I'd love to go over the team-work oriented battle-system, but I'd really rather get back to playing.
I doubt any mod team was hit harder by that fact than mine. Yet, I can't fault him for the decision. It's unlikely anyone on my team did/does. By supporting almost every hardware graphics accelerator on the market at the time, Quake 3 almost single-handedly fostered the feedback loop that drove mainstream adoption of dedicated graphics accelerators.
You sound like someone that's had the same thought every serious modder/engine-licensee has ever had; "if they could have just included/modified this ONE feature, my game would be feasible/better."
Yet you haven't encountered that phrase enough times to appreciate the fact that engine developers have to draw a performance line somewhere. Your desired feature just happened to be on the wrong side of that line.
Further, engine-developers of John Carmack's caliber would (I promise you this) love to have supported every feature you've ever thought of (and more). John Carmack's always been on the cutting edge, usually refining it. He sometimes makes decisions that are a matter of taste that you can feel free to disagree with him on, but that particular feature wasn't one of them.
Did you turn off all the indexing? Have you installed SP1?
And I must say, I like where this is going so far. It feels like a very natural progression from HTML4's ideology, while respecting authors' collective recent interests, such as media embedding, and .
As long as we get them sweet bikes, I'm down.
When J.C. says he's never going to work with someone again, that doesn't mean id intellectual property will never hit that platform. They just happen to be a game studio that isn't at the complete whim of their publisher, and thus are not forced to entertain business dealings they find unsavory.
I never heard anyone from id software saying they would never work with apple... actually, I don't remember anyone from id software actually working with apple. Nevertheless, if such statements were made, why is it surprising that they changed their mind? I mean, if they were stubbornly refusing to release on the mac platform for personal reasons, would that benefit their fans?
Did John Carmack say this somewhere in his .plan, or was it elsewhere? Where did you hear this? I think some context would really help.
I'm a modder, I follow id because I'm invested in their platform. Offerings outside of Epic's tool sets and support haven't had much appeal for the level of modification I perform.
I don't really give a shit about your Far Cry hard-on. I'm sure it was fun for you but its appeal is not universal.
I do mean owned. While I disagree, you have a point.
Indeed. Just one example, look at Beryl/Compiz, Vista, OS X. I would argue that operating systems wouldn't have come this far, visually, if it weren't for the Quake series. Thanks to Quake, OEMs were increasingly compelled to include dedicated graphics processors in every box. There was a time when Carmack's decision to completely drop software rendering was considered risky. It's a risk id took, and every modern computer user (even if they never play any game) benefitted from it.
Yeah, he did.
While I'd like to see a different genre from id on one hand, I'd also like to see their response to Halo and Gears of War. id is the original owner of the FPS format, but they're not owning recent FPS sales. They've gotten their artistic Doom 3 done-the-way-we-always-wanted-to-do-it title out. So perhaps they're readying some super-charged pure FPS revolution.
I gaurantee you, what happened here is gameindustry.biz asked for some statements regarding their next title, and id gave them a straight up answer. Gameindustry.biz considered this news-worthy. If you read the entire (and very short) article, you see Hollenshed say "We can't really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet." In other words, this isn't an an announcement that id is making. They're not trying to start the hype machine. Gameindustry.biz just get over-excited about their "exclusive."
John Carmack's keynotes from the last three QuakeCons are available here. You won't get any solid answers on their next title, but in the 2006 speech you can get some clues when John Carmack starts elaborating on his game design philosophies.
No Tyranids, not diggin' it.
Oh game developers will sample another game all the time. Thing is, the game developers that do that are modders. They usually don't charge people for their work, and always cite the sampled game developers in credits.
First, no, that isn't what happened. While it's possible that most of the images cited could be create procedurally, an experienced video game artist will tell you that it would take far less time to generate most of those image maps in photoshop. Tablet input is very fast, and far more intuitive than tweaking algorithms to produce base shapes, then seeding more complicated algorithms to overlay multiple varying patterns.
Second, is there some organization of procedural texture trolls out there or something? Must procedural textures be mentioned in every video game article?
Those of us intimately familiar with Doom3's assets know that the pictures floating around with this story do contain Doom 3 image maps.
Hey now, what's the problem with Activision?
See how plausible these edits sound to you:
I'd personally find it more likely that divorce rates are a product of our society. Our workplaces are certainly a factor, perhaps even the dominant factor, but I don't think divorce rates vary significantly corresponding to industry.
It's my impression, though. If your study yields compelling evidence to the contrary please let us know, I'm sure such an article would make it on Slashdot.
Indeed, WSUS is the way to go without spending money. It's supported by Microsoft. It sports patches for Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, and even definition updates for the (still beta) Windows Defender. It's a lot like hosting your own windowsupdate.microsoft.com really. You're given an overview of what patches a computer needs, and what patches WSUS has installed. You can choose to automatically approve certain types of updates. It gives you a lot.
Requirements are a Windows NT 5.0+ server hosting IIS, and some sort of SQL database. The documentation will reccomend MSDE or MS SQL server. I personally reccomend MSDE.
Try to remember to patch MSDE before you install WSUS.
Loading all of this on an internet facing server (outside the firewall) is NOT reccomended (and may violate the license depending on how it's configured).
Regardless, one should use the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer for any IIS server.
That's the install routine off the top of my head. It actually helps to read the documentation for this particular MS Product. There are tons of helpful tips, such as, disabling languages you don't use (to reduce bandwidth and storage space consumed).
What? x86? Fantasyland?
/., PCGaming, or really anybody had the sense to ask what game studios thought about the consoles and where they were investing their development dollars they would have their answer for which console will succeed.
There's nothing fantastic, or pro-computer, about that post. I'm sick of people saying this/that is going to have some serious impact on the next generation of consoles. If any one of the next big consoles didn't have wireless controllers, you'd hear people claiming that one was going to fade into obscurity in two years.
It's simply not the case. It doesn't matter what features you add or subtract from a console, what matters is attracting game developers. If you get the game developers, you get the games. Get the games and you have the gamers. It's the difference in a consoles success for its lifespan. Nintendo64 died because game developers were put off by cartridge production costs, and limited space. Gamecube still lives because they cater to, and still have enough, big developers to keep them going. The Dreamcast lost its licensees and we see where that put Sega.
There's nothing fan-boyish or fantastic about these simple facts. Gamers go where the games are. They always have, they always will. No early release, or technical gee-whiz add-on is going to change that.
It's frustrating to see these, supposed, professional gaming news sources always talking to gamers about how this technical merit, or this release schedule will affect their spending. It's bullshit. If IGN,
A console's success is directly tied to its titles. The faster you can get more titles from bigger publishers the more successful you will be. Microsoft's early debut will help simply because they'll be given more time to acquire a greater game library (quantity and quality-wise) than Sony will have at their launch. Microsoft and Sony both have a critical mass of game developers. However, Sony does still have the most licensees.
Microsoft knows this, that's why they're attempting to release so early. Getting out early is going to put both systems with nearly an equivalent number of quality[1] titles three months after the PS3s launch (which is about the only time we could really start forcasting how this generation's console wars will go). The only way this won't end up with them on a fairly even playing field is if either of them (or their licensed developers) screws up royally.
Understanding these facts, one can clearly determine that the beginning of the war will be fairly even. Playstation still has a slightly greater number of hard-hitters licensed but Microsoft is closing that gap as fast as they can.
Even though I will never own an X-Box (OMG TEH M$ IZ TEH SUK! SONEH 4 TEH WIN1), I think Microsoft is going to pull ahead thanks to the developers they've just bought outright. Microsoft's acquiring a nice line-up of in-house developers, while Playstation seems to have forgotten that it was largely their in-house developments like Warhawk, Twisted Metal, etc. that got them ruling during the Playstation era.
To summarize: It is to Microsoft's advantage to be the first-mover. It does not give Microsoft the advantage.
[1] - For those that can't guess, I'm not trying to define quality titles in any artistic sense. By "quality" titles I mean games that sell well due to consumer satisfaction not simply hype. I personally find most of these "quality" titles to be average in execution and enjoyability, but my personal tastes don't define the gaming market. To summarize this footnote: Please don't try to argue with me about what makes a quality title. Chances are, I already agree with you.
It really shouldn't just be called Vi because when people refer to "Vi" they're usually talking about an entire operating system of which "Vi" is a small part. For accuracy and to give credit where credit is due it should be called "Emacs/Vi."