They must have just made the conference call before I wrote this. Logged onto yahoo and saw "Microsoft to reveal Windows source code" and immediately cleaned up the half-chewed chicken melt pieces that fell out of my mouth and onto my lap. anyway, here's the link (sorry, I'm very rusty with HTML)
It's still unclear as to what parts of windows will be "revealed" and under what terms or even to whom. IMHO it looks like play-the-good-guy-and-smile-real-big-for-the-camer a legal manuevering.
Absolutely amazing. We can now hook indoor plumbing up to our computers to cool them instead of using electricity. Now we can start working on embedded devices for toilets and super soakers.
That would require some tricked up language in a EULA that actually shows up in order to fly in court. All you'd have to do to win the case is say that you never saw the EULA, thus never agreed to it, but it was installed anyway. Tough $h!% for the SW company.
It's one less copy of Mario Advance if you've got a palm PC running a NES emulator.
Nintendo doesn't sell the non-portable NES retail anymore. You either have to get one second-hand or get a game boy advance if you want to play the older Nintendo games (the better selling ones, anyway). If you download the NES Mario 2 and play it on a laptop, which is the closest you can get to an actual GBA with emulators (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong), you still have the slightly awkward and bulky keyboard as your controller instead of the very elegant hand-sized GBA controller-screen-system-all-in-one.
And porting the more popular old games to GBA still doesn't cover the hundreds of other NES and SNES games that weren't super-mega-blockbuster hits, but still had respectable followings.
The day that Nintendo releases a port of Muppet Adventure for Game Boy Advance, true to the original in all its super-cheesy glory, I will be buying many people drinks.
(1) American innovation, and the protection of that innovation by the government, has been a critical component of the economic growth of this Nation throughout the history of the Nation;"
Interesting how they use the word "innovation", a word commonly used by Microsoft to say that they come up with "new" (not necessarily "good", just "new") ideas. Gee, I wonder who lobbied this...
If you're still having trouble figuring it out, do a search on any techie news site on "palladium"
Correction: real men drove their pickup trucks to the woods and shot their dinner with a very large rifle. real programmers programmed in assembly language.
Who in their right mind would write a game engine in COBOL?
Never say never. Remember the thought of a computer fitting in a single room, let alone a desktop was a pretty far-flung idea forty years ago...
VR equipment would have to minimize any conflict between the senses. This would essentially mean having featherweight equipment, olfactory output, real-time photorealistic graphics, among other things. The way this will probably all be feasably done is by figuring out some way to hook some wires into a human brain in such a way that all the inputs and outputs to/from the brain can be monitored and controlled.
Neural Interfacing - still a decade or three away, but quite possible.
The whole idea behind the contruction set format is that you don't redistribute the actual construction set part of it - just the fruits of your labor.
It's not going to work as well now as it did ten or twenty years ago because the underlying code for games is getting much bigger. Way back in the day when there was usually one, maybe two programmers on a given project, and stuff generally didn't have to be cutting edge to sell, it wasn't that big of an issue to just give away your end-user executable, let the paying customers write their own data, and give out personalized games to their friends. If anything, it was a big plus to be able to do that.
These days, there's just so much stuff underneath the code that programmers actually write (any 100% asm games out there on the shelves? didn't think so.) that to be able to give away an actual executable file is bound to bring up either legal issues with a company that makes money off of licensing or internal financial issues related to the fact that precisely five people have bought the "construction set" and are now distributing hundreds of free games created with that construction set on the web.
What happened to the construction set games? They turned into engine licenses (i.e. Unreal, Quake, LithTech, etc). Except now you can sell the end product and the construction set costs a bit more.
This will undoubtably create an underground society of people who refuse to accept DRM and use non-DRM systems to continue what they love doing now that DRM will deny them - interacting with the public domain.
Is commercially-produced content "better" than non-commerical content? Yes, they pay money to get better results out of their efforts. That's capitalism.
Open Source will not die as long as there is some form of compensation to the people who contribute software/content to the public domain.
The training of video games does NOT necessarily translate to real life.
I often get asked by people I talk to in real life (there's those weakened social skills at work), when on the subject of video games, why the dead bodies in some shooting games just disappear or why buildings don't crumble when you shoot a rocket into their supports.
My simple answer to them is that video games aren't supposed to be realistic - that's what reality is for.
If they want something that is realistic but not actually reality, I tell them about this thing called "virtual reality", which is different from a video game in that it is more of a simulation following the rules of reality than a video game, which follows a design of abstract rules - kind of like a fictional physics book.
It's obvious that there exists some kind of problem, but I don't think it's with video games in general. I think it has something more to do with people's expectations of them.
Imagine people reading this wonderfully written textbook. It's got all kinds of neat color pictures, comes with a CD with interesting audio lectures. The catch is that everything in the book is intentionally false. But the people reading it were never told that. Are they going to believe the real, but boring textbook or the interesting, but untrue one?
Now, picture the same experiment, except now the people are told before reading the false textbook that everything in it is untrue.
If this whole expectation thing is the case, it might explain a number of the problems that have been associated with video games recently.
I couldn't agree with you more. There's absolutely no mention of what game(s) or even what type of game(s) was played or whether one specific game was played or they played every single video game ever made (not likely - that would take a very long time).
Playing Zelda constantly in my childhood and countless other games since then has affected my beta wave activity so negatively that I entered college with only two courses worth of AP credit and got a measly score of 1210 on my SATs. Shit, I could be going to Harvard now if it weren't for that damn Nintendo!
In other research news, it's been discovered that watching hamsters eat their own poop increases delta wave activity in the brain.:-)
The Undead - Remember the Zerg ? Change their colors to Green/Black.
That's a bit superificial, but yeah, there's quite a bit of Zerg in the Undead. There's also a bit of Protoss in there too (poke the acolytes).
Graphics:
Besides, this graphics engine couldn't hold a candle to other graphics engines today *cough*Quake3*cough*. The texture quality is very high though
Try throwing 90 player models at in the view at once with Quake 3 on a Pentium 2 400. I think you'd probably get a little bit of a frame rate dip.
Sound:
This is where I don't care. Seriously, I have something I like to call, A LIFE.
Keep in mind that Blizzard is a mass-market game developer and that not every gamer in this world frequents Slashdot or has played every single RTS ever made (or even Warcraft 2 ). Keep in mind that Warcraft 2 was made in the mid 90s and that since then, a lot of game companies have realized that more complex isn't always better. Blizzard is one of these companies. This is why you don't see things like pigeons carrying your commands or a hundred and fifty different resources to harvest. Most players just want to get in there and kill something. Mass market means appealing to as many heads as possible, not giving a few hardcore geeks a gaming orgasm.
anyhow, that's my whole 2c.
dude, who cares? Read a f#%@ing book if you want interesting plot devices. Besides, games with real plot devices built in as a playable element(and fail to suck) are still quite a way's away. Plot is not that much of an issue with games at this point (i.e. the click-through-the-stupid-movie factor with many games). What matters is that stuff flows coherently so that player has an idea of what's going on, who they are, and why the hell they're in this map they've been plopped on. I think Blizzard does that (and many other things) pretty well in Warcraft 3.
Just because something is new doesn't mean it's good. Any really new gameplay innovation (aka software feature) is never completely bug-free when it's first implemented. When Blizzard puts something in a game, they put it in because they know it will make the game cooler, not because it's something nobody else thought of before. So what if there's little or nothing actually new in Warcraft 3? There's like 4 1/2 million copies pre-ordered already, last time I checked. That's more than most games ever dream of selling after years on the shelf.
Diablo 2 used a graphics engine that virtually every game critic alive ripped into like a thanksgiving turkey, yet it still was a mega-kick-ass game that still holds out against newer games like Dungeon Siege that are supposedly "Diablo-killers" simply because of its sheer artistic quality if for nothing else. The point is that games are entertainment, not just computer programs that don't really do anything useful. The options available to a player are important to providing some actual meat to the game but in the end, the skin (i.e. the artwork, the movies, the background sound effects, etc.) is what makes it sell better than most other games (pardon the KFC analogy), giving it such a huge edge on the competition even with a not-very-innovative game design. And I still play it almost 2 years after buying it. And Starcraft. That said, do I, or the millions of consumers like me, really care whether or not some gameplay feature is new?
Innovation is mainly in the realm of academia. Commerical products are more about sales (you do actually BUY your games, right?) and consumer satisfaction than developing a genre. And really, if you think about it for a second, developing a genre is counter-innovative - the fundamental characteristics of an RTS are still going to be the same after dozens of years of "RTS development". Just a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
They must have just made the conference call before I wrote this. Logged onto yahoo and saw "Microsoft to reveal Windows source code" and immediately cleaned up the half-chewed chicken melt pieces that fell out of my mouth and onto my lap. anyway, here's the link (sorry, I'm very rusty with HTML)
d =5 80&e=3&cid=580&u=/nm/20020805/bs_nm/microsoft_code _dc_13
r a legal manuevering.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&nci
It's still unclear as to what parts of windows will be "revealed" and under what terms or even to whom. IMHO it looks like play-the-good-guy-and-smile-real-big-for-the-came
Absolutely amazing. We can now hook indoor plumbing up to our computers to cool them instead of using electricity. Now we can start working on embedded devices for toilets and super soakers.
That would require some tricked up language in a EULA that actually shows up in order to fly in court. All you'd have to do to win the case is say that you never saw the EULA, thus never agreed to it, but it was installed anyway. Tough $h!% for the SW company.
It's one less copy of Mario Advance if you've got a palm PC running a NES emulator.
Nintendo doesn't sell the non-portable NES retail anymore. You either have to get one second-hand or get a game boy advance if you want to play the older Nintendo games (the better selling ones, anyway). If you download the NES Mario 2 and play it on a laptop, which is the closest you can get to an actual GBA with emulators (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong), you still have the slightly awkward and bulky keyboard as your controller instead of the very elegant hand-sized GBA controller-screen-system-all-in-one.
And porting the more popular old games to GBA still doesn't cover the hundreds of other NES and SNES games that weren't super-mega-blockbuster hits, but still had respectable followings.
The day that Nintendo releases a port of Muppet Adventure for Game Boy Advance, true to the original in all its super-cheesy glory, I will be buying many people drinks.
"Congress finds that--
(1) American innovation, and the protection of that innovation by the government, has been a critical component of the economic growth of this Nation throughout the history of the Nation;"
Interesting how they use the word "innovation", a word commonly used by Microsoft to say that they come up with "new" (not necessarily "good", just "new") ideas. Gee, I wonder who lobbied this...
If you're still having trouble figuring it out, do a search on any techie news site on "palladium"
real men programmed in Cobol
Correction: real men drove their pickup trucks to the woods and shot their dinner with a very large rifle. real programmers programmed in assembly language.
Who in their right mind would write a game engine in COBOL?
Never say never. Remember the thought of a computer fitting in a single room, let alone a desktop was a pretty far-flung idea forty years ago...
VR equipment would have to minimize any conflict between the senses. This would essentially mean having featherweight equipment, olfactory output, real-time photorealistic graphics, among other things. The way this will probably all be feasably done is by figuring out some way to hook some wires into a human brain in such a way that all the inputs and outputs to/from the brain can be monitored and controlled.
Neural Interfacing - still a decade or three away, but quite possible.
Linux is free like a puppy as Windows is overly expensive like a poodle from the pet shop at the mall.
The whole idea behind the contruction set format is that you don't redistribute the actual construction set part of it - just the fruits of your labor.
It's not going to work as well now as it did ten or twenty years ago because the underlying code for games is getting much bigger. Way back in the day when there was usually one, maybe two programmers on a given project, and stuff generally didn't have to be cutting edge to sell, it wasn't that big of an issue to just give away your end-user executable, let the paying customers write their own data, and give out personalized games to their friends. If anything, it was a big plus to be able to do that.
These days, there's just so much stuff underneath the code that programmers actually write (any 100% asm games out there on the shelves? didn't think so.) that to be able to give away an actual executable file is bound to bring up either legal issues with a company that makes money off of licensing or internal financial issues related to the fact that precisely five people have bought the "construction set" and are now distributing hundreds of free games created with that construction set on the web.
What happened to the construction set games? They turned into engine licenses (i.e. Unreal, Quake, LithTech, etc). Except now you can sell the end product and the construction set costs a bit more.
Everything dies at some point.
This will undoubtably create an underground society of people who refuse to accept DRM and use non-DRM systems to continue what they love doing now that DRM will deny them - interacting with the public domain.
Is commercially-produced content "better" than non-commerical content? Yes, they pay money to get better results out of their efforts. That's capitalism.
Open Source will not die as long as there is some form of compensation to the people who contribute software/content to the public domain.
The training of video games does NOT necessarily translate to real life.
I often get asked by people I talk to in real life (there's those weakened social skills at work), when on the subject of video games, why the dead bodies in some shooting games just disappear or why buildings don't crumble when you shoot a rocket into their supports.
My simple answer to them is that video games aren't supposed to be realistic - that's what reality is for.
If they want something that is realistic but not actually reality, I tell them about this thing called "virtual reality", which is different from a video game in that it is more of a simulation following the rules of reality than a video game, which follows a design of abstract rules - kind of like a fictional physics book.
It's obvious that there exists some kind of problem, but I don't think it's with video games in general. I think it has something more to do with people's expectations of them.
Imagine people reading this wonderfully written textbook. It's got all kinds of neat color pictures, comes with a CD with interesting audio lectures. The catch is that everything in the book is intentionally false. But the people reading it were never told that. Are they going to believe the real, but boring textbook or the interesting, but untrue one?
Now, picture the same experiment, except now the people are told before reading the false textbook that everything in it is untrue.
If this whole expectation thing is the case, it might explain a number of the problems that have been associated with video games recently.
I couldn't agree with you more. There's absolutely no mention of what game(s) or even what type of game(s) was played or whether one specific game was played or they played every single video game ever made (not likely - that would take a very long time).
:-)
Playing Zelda constantly in my childhood and countless other games since then has affected my beta wave activity so negatively that I entered college with only two courses worth of AP credit and got a measly score of 1210 on my SATs. Shit, I could be going to Harvard now if it weren't for that damn Nintendo!
In other research news, it's been discovered that watching hamsters eat their own poop increases delta wave activity in the brain.
The Undead - Remember the Zerg ? Change their colors to Green/Black. That's a bit superificial, but yeah, there's quite a bit of Zerg in the Undead. There's also a bit of Protoss in there too (poke the acolytes). Graphics: Besides, this graphics engine couldn't hold a candle to other graphics engines today *cough*Quake3*cough*. The texture quality is very high though Try throwing 90 player models at in the view at once with Quake 3 on a Pentium 2 400. I think you'd probably get a little bit of a frame rate dip. Sound: This is where I don't care. Seriously, I have something I like to call, A LIFE. Keep in mind that Blizzard is a mass-market game developer and that not every gamer in this world frequents Slashdot or has played every single RTS ever made (or even Warcraft 2 ). Keep in mind that Warcraft 2 was made in the mid 90s and that since then, a lot of game companies have realized that more complex isn't always better. Blizzard is one of these companies. This is why you don't see things like pigeons carrying your commands or a hundred and fifty different resources to harvest. Most players just want to get in there and kill something. Mass market means appealing to as many heads as possible, not giving a few hardcore geeks a gaming orgasm. anyhow, that's my whole 2c.
dude, who cares? Read a f#%@ing book if you want interesting plot devices. Besides, games with real plot devices built in as a playable element(and fail to suck) are still quite a way's away. Plot is not that much of an issue with games at this point (i.e. the click-through-the-stupid-movie factor with many games). What matters is that stuff flows coherently so that player has an idea of what's going on, who they are, and why the hell they're in this map they've been plopped on. I think Blizzard does that (and many other things) pretty well in Warcraft 3.
That's basically saying "I can't pirate this game, so I'm not going to buy it." Real mature.
Just because something is new doesn't mean it's good. Any really new gameplay innovation (aka software feature) is never completely bug-free when it's first implemented. When Blizzard puts something in a game, they put it in because they know it will make the game cooler, not because it's something nobody else thought of before. So what if there's little or nothing actually new in Warcraft 3? There's like 4 1/2 million copies pre-ordered already, last time I checked. That's more than most games ever dream of selling after years on the shelf.
Diablo 2 used a graphics engine that virtually every game critic alive ripped into like a thanksgiving turkey, yet it still was a mega-kick-ass game that still holds out against newer games like Dungeon Siege that are supposedly "Diablo-killers" simply because of its sheer artistic quality if for nothing else. The point is that games are entertainment, not just computer programs that don't really do anything useful. The options available to a player are important to providing some actual meat to the game but in the end, the skin (i.e. the artwork, the movies, the background sound effects, etc.) is what makes it sell better than most other games (pardon the KFC analogy), giving it such a huge edge on the competition even with a not-very-innovative game design. And I still play it almost 2 years after buying it. And Starcraft. That said, do I, or the millions of consumers like me, really care whether or not some gameplay feature is new?
Innovation is mainly in the realm of academia. Commerical products are more about sales (you do actually BUY your games, right?) and consumer satisfaction than developing a genre. And really, if you think about it for a second, developing a genre is counter-innovative - the fundamental characteristics of an RTS are still going to be the same after dozens of years of "RTS development". Just a thought.