### I can not understand why anyone would want to release their code with a "or any future version" clause.
One simple reason: to keep incompatibility issues to a minimum. I consider license incompatibility a far bigger issue than RMS releasing GPLv4 with BSD text pasted in. Just look at BSD, its all BSDL and it seems to be doing quite fine, so if that is the *worse case*, I really don't see it as a big problem with it. I of course prefer the additional protection the GPL gives, but I really wouldn't want to end up having compatibility issues with two pieces of software released under GPL just because the version number is different, which would kind of go totally against the spirit of Free Software.
The problem I have with Halo is that you really only see a tiny little piece of the whole story, I can read the Halo novels, read about it on Wikipedia and all that stuff, but when it comes to the game there really is very little story there. Sure, a bit is still left, but you don't really get to know the Halo universe with just the games alone. Same problem with Half Life 2, sure, there might be some story actually hidden in there, but when I need a magnifying glass to find it I really feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with the game. Story should be something you experience in the game itself, not something you have to read on Wikipedia.
### And why does an FTP user need to be a 'nix user, anyway?
Because thats how it all started many years ago and nobody ever bothered to fix it. One of the problems is that there has been virtually no fixing of usability going on the command-line/server side of things. When people talk about usability they always focus on the desktop side, which is all fine and good, the command-line/server one however is often even more broken, which is sad, since especially security would profit a lot when people would actually understand what they are doing and not just patching together snippets that they have picked up from some howto/mailinglist/random-webpage, like way to many do these days due to programs simply being both to hard to understand and simply unsuited for the job they are used for.
No matter how much you educate, the user is the one piece in the equation that you can't 'fix', at least not on a large scale, which is why software and hardware *must be* designed in such a way that it works in a secure way even with a 'broken' user. The default password thing is easily fixed: don't set the same default one for each device, instead use a random one or none at all if possible (i.e. disable remote login). You don't want users to use 'qwerty' password, so use a function to check that the users password is not a weak one.
Forbidding the sale of pre-installed Windows and forcing users to install a OS themselves would be stupid, however, what definitvly should happen is that the OS should becomes a separate item, something you have to pay for when you want it, not something you are forced to pay for even if you *don't* want it, as is today mostly the case. It might also help when Windows is sold at its 'real' price, not the extra low one which retails can get it at when bundling it with a machine.
The main thing that killed the Dreamcast was that Sega stopped making them *before* XBox and Gamecube hit the shelves. Kind of hard to win a fight when you give up before it has even fully started. EA not supporting the Dreamcast of course kind of helped of course too.
### So, looking at the game market, what game titles have been out there that have any level of nudity that can be considered an artistic addition to the story, rather than as a very poor way to try to sell more copies to the young male audience?
Dreamfall and Fahrenheit come to mind, both of them have been censored. Fahrenheit actually managed to come out as originally planed in Europe and only get censored for the US market. Other examples would be GTA:SA and Singles.
### This is why the game market doesn't get the same treatment as movies when it comes to material
Well, not really, because due to the handling of AO nobody dares to touch nudity and sex, except porn games, which really can't work around the issue, everybody else censors their game to have a chance to market them. So its clear that most AO games end up being porn.
### Honestly, if a game is rated M due to violent content, then adding a bit of nudity that isn't a part of some sex game within the main game should be considered natural.
Yep, but thats not the case, you quickly get a AO from trying something like that.
### The problem is that there really hasn't been a lot of attention to artistic nudity in games,
Well, because there really isn't much to pay attention to. No console allows AO and no PC publishers is going to deliberately risking a AO after having invested millions in a title, so everybody plays save. The only chance I currently see to change this is online publishing, when I remember correctly Gametap offers the uncut AO version of Fahrenheit, which is a good start, but its still a long long way to go from there.
The basic problem here is that retailers base their decision on what to carry and what not on the ESRB rating, which however has *nothing* to do with how good or bad a game sells. Just for the record, GTA:SA is among the top ten best selling games in video game history and quite a few of those copies have a AO rating, due to the AO rating being given out a while after the game was already on the market. So "AO ratings don't sell" is quite simply bullshit, because the rating has nothing to do with how popular a game gets. You think that the Fahrenheit(AO) would have sold less then its censored US-release twin Indigo Prophecy(M)? I kind of doubt that it would have made much of a difference. But since AO won't even be on the shelves, the developers have to censor it to get M, not because AO "doesn't sell well", but because AO isn't sold at all.
The crux is of course that its a feedback loop, since not stocking AO causes all potential AO games to be censored to get a M, which in turn only leaves a few crappy sex games with an AO rating, which then of course don't sell well.
I have no idea how government regulation should help with this, but on the other side I strongly disagree with just saying "its private business, they can do what they want, everything is fine", because something is hugely screwed up here. One thing that might help is simply having a mandatory and government controlled game rating system, since unlike with a a private business controlled one, one could start a lawsuit against it to fix the issue.
### It's not the "sex is bad" crowd that's causing this.
AO was for years a 'sex' rating, games with violence didn't get it, games with nudity and sex got it. Manhunt2 is I think the first violent game that got it. This really has nothing to do with Jack Thompson and friends, since violent games continue to sell and allowed to be made, its only the AO ones that aren't even allowed to make it onto the consoles, since Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo won't allow it.
What tech drives the SIXAXIS?
on
Lair Review
·
· Score: 1
While at the topic of motion control, does anybody know what tech actually drives the SIXAXIS? With the Wiimote its, easy, you can find the exact chip used, what data is returned and such, but with the SIXAXIS I have a really hard time finding any hard information. From what I could gather it seems to have more then just an accelerometer, i.e. it seems to have at least one kind of gyro-sensor to sense yaw rotation. However I couldn't find exact details and I am still puzzled on if it can also sense pitch and roll directly or only derive from the accelerometer.
Does anybody have details on how many axis it actually supports and if it returns rotation independed of acceleration and if that data is absolute or just relative?
### Current game levels are often in the 10,000,000 triangle range.
How many of those 10,000,000 per level are visible on the screen at once?
Re:Get Heavenly Sword - Its Brilliant.
on
Lair Review
·
· Score: 1
### It seems the bar moves depending on the game...
A Ikaruga requires in 5min far more concentration then most RPGs in ten hours combined. So its natural that a Ikaruga can be a lot shorter then a RPG and still provide a good experience. With on RPG you are often wandering around without much goal for hours, so if it would be over after 10 hours, there really wouldn't be much place to fit a story in. On the other side you have games like Fahrenheit, that are only 7 hours, but feel like you are watching a season of a TV show, i.e. the story is very dense and there isn't aimless wandering or level-up'ing, just story, dialog and stuff. When one looks at how much dialog a game has, one will often find out that a 40h RPG has the same amount as another game that is just 15h long. It just a matter of how much 'filler' there is that decides the final game length, not content.
Truth to be told, I have yet to play a single game that has enough content to make it past the 30h mark, much just end up in repetition or stretch that bit of content they have so far out that it simply gets uninteresting. But to come back to Heavenly Sword, which is rumored to be around the 6h, that simply is quite a bit shorter then a God of War that was like twice as long, so its clear why it is a disappointment to some people.
There are no gyros in the Wiimote, just one image sensor which registers the two dots from the sensorbar (dots closed together are merged into one, so the 10 LED show up as two dots) and one XYZ-accelerometer, which also can, with the help of gravity, be used to measure rotation around two axis.
The IR bar is used for motion sensing in some games, i.e. Metroid Prime 3 uses it as far as I know for the door handles, since due to the sensorbar having two light, it can easily calculate distance and orientation to the bar, thus you can push/pull and rotate a handle in the game.
Metroid on DS was plain awful, the Primes weren't that bad, but I don't consider all that great either. I don't blame this on 3D, but mainly on the first person view. When jumping is a central part of the gameplay it just flat out sucks to not have a body. Which not only makes jumps annoying (even so Prime was always rather tolerant in that aspect) it also, and this is far more important, makes them uninteresting. In the 2D Metroid you had way more possibilities when jumping, you had the ledge-grab, walljumps, screw-jump and could combine them more or less freely, in the 3D ones some of that is still present, but its degraded to a special gimmick that you use in a few special places, not everywhere you want.
I would love to see a 3D third person Metroid next. While 2D is fun, they also tend to just be clones of SuperMetroid. A third person Metroid would give the freedom to do something new without losing the core of the 2D ones.
The issue is: more graphics mean more costs, more costs means less flexibility and less flexibility means less innovation and independence. The past isn't something where all games were great, it is however a time where a lot of games were far more innovative then anything today. Just compare how many new stuff happened between 1990-1995 and compare it to 2002-2007. It is not even that just little new innovation is happening, a lot of genres simply died out because they where to far of the mainstream and that is what publishers are targeting.
That said, not everything looks bad today, the real next gen games seem to slowly appear (i.e. those that use processing power for more then just shinier gfx), but it is really a rather slow process, which in large part can be blamed on the strive for more and more gfx and less focus on other aspects.
I really do miss the old days, not because of nostalgia, but simply because I like those games and genres, not of all them where good, but many are still great and haven't been replaced by anything, since nobody is left creating games of that type.
If only developers would actually strive for realism, the thing is, by far most of them don't. The flightsim genre is mostly dead, Need for Speed got turned into a primitive arcade racer instead of striving to be a simulation like the first did, if Grand Turismo ever gets a realistic damage model is still on open question and everytime somebody mentioned 'realism' and points his finger at some bunny-hopping, circle-strafing FPS shooter I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
Developers for most part try to do yesterday games with prettier graphic, not more realistic games. A todays FPS shooter is just as unrealistic as Doom1. It however looks prettier, but even that not in the necessary in the realistic sense (i.e. reality isn't build out of 30 foot wide corridors like all of Half Life 2, a pretty sky box doesn't change that fact).
I for one have kind of lost the feeling for what is considered pretty by todays standards, I just don't really see much of a difference between a game from five or ten years ago and a game from today. Sure, more shaders, more polygons, but the underlying gameplay is often very much the exact same.
Final Fantasy, ResidentEvil, GTA, MetalGear, God of War, Zelda, Mario and a ton more. FPS are for most part a phenomenon of XBox and PC. Japanese don't really seem to care about them all that much. So, lets play a different game: Name a few popular FPS that came out of Japan.
### If the app's source code included a program that unpacked an asset archive appended to the executable, would that be enough to make the final work an "aggregate"?
Since you are only packing the files into the executable due to hardware limitations this is really no different then a.tar.gz,.iso, reiserfs, ext2 or whatever, especially when there are tools to properly extract the files from the binary and replace them, which there of course are, since you distribute source according to the GPL.
The safest bet is of course to go dual-license GPL+CC-by-sa if possible, but even without I don't really see a real problem with mixing a GPL app with CC-by-sa when the mixing is really doing nothing more then attaching data to the same file.
From the CC-by-sa side it is a bit trickier, since a game could be considered as an adoption instead of a collection from the artwork and thus might need to be covered under CC-by-sa as well. However CC-by-sa doesn't really give a clear answer of when a thing becomes a adoption and when a collection, since in this case its a bit of both.
Last not least I would say, don't worry to much, people licensed their stuff under GPL and CC-by-sa so that other people could use it, not to send out lawyers to other people in the same spirit. If you want it bullet proof contact the original authors and ask for permission, but for practical purposes you should be fine even without.
All thus buzz over toolkits, lack of graphics and stuff... its pointless. Those are not the problems of Free Software games, sure, they can annoy, but they also would be pretty easy to fix. They are not what makes a project succeed or not. The game design that is *BY FAR* the biggest issue. It is the lack of a team, the lack of a vision and the lack of basically everything that makes a game a game instead of just little graphic tech demo.
If you for example look at a MMORPGs, we almost had it already back then in seven years ago with WorldForge:Acorn. It might not have been the best looking MMORPG ever, it might have not been the best code base, but it was there and running. In seven years of time you would expect that it would have expanded, got polished and all that stuff. Nope, didn't happen, UClient (the 2D client running Acorn) got ditched and WorldForge seems to be toying around in 3D now. I don't really know and don't really care what they are doing right now. They simply haven't managed to get a game done in all those years even so all the bits and pieces where already there and that is simply sad. They simply don't seem to know what they actually want to accomplish. Know maybe the will come out with a playable game one day, but I kind of have given up hope.
Its really that simple, most people simply prefer to toy around instead of deliver a finished game and most 'teams' are horrible unorganized in that *nobody* knows what they are actually trying to accomplish, everybody is just pulling their strings, all in different directions and going nowhere in the end.
People always say that ideas are cheap and handle them as basically worthless, but from my experience its exactly what the Free Software world lacks. People with good ideas, who know what they want and who have the will to drive a team to accomplish that goal from start to finish.
Incorrect, the sensorbar is there to give you the mouse-pointer-like functionality, its basically the same as an LCD lightgun. Thanks to the sensorbar having two IR dots it allows the calculation of distance and rotation around one axis, but nothing more then that. It doesn't give you 3D data, just two dots.
Yep, I second that. I really have a hard time to find a gaming trilogy that actually did get completly finished as originally planed. There are of cause dozens of games around with multiple sequels, but those very seldomly build up on each other, most of the time its simply more of a same with not much if any connection to the previous story. And heck, even if the trilogy works out, you might end up with a game split across multiple platform, some of which you might not own. So no matter of it turns out, the potential for trouble with a gaming trilogy is *huge*.
Slashdot Mirror
### I can not understand why anyone would want to release their code with a "or any future version" clause.
One simple reason: to keep incompatibility issues to a minimum. I consider license incompatibility a far bigger issue than RMS releasing GPLv4 with BSD text pasted in. Just look at BSD, its all BSDL and it seems to be doing quite fine, so if that is the *worse case*, I really don't see it as a big problem with it. I of course prefer the additional protection the GPL gives, but I really wouldn't want to end up having compatibility issues with two pieces of software released under GPL just because the version number is different, which would kind of go totally against the spirit of Free Software.
The problem I have with Halo is that you really only see a tiny little piece of the whole story, I can read the Halo novels, read about it on Wikipedia and all that stuff, but when it comes to the game there really is very little story there. Sure, a bit is still left, but you don't really get to know the Halo universe with just the games alone. Same problem with Half Life 2, sure, there might be some story actually hidden in there, but when I need a magnifying glass to find it I really feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with the game. Story should be something you experience in the game itself, not something you have to read on Wikipedia.
### A tax is an obligatory payment to some higher powers.
Yep, and thats exactly why people like to call it "MS tax".
### And why does an FTP user need to be a 'nix user, anyway?
Because thats how it all started many years ago and nobody ever bothered to fix it. One of the problems is that there has been virtually no fixing of usability going on the command-line/server side of things. When people talk about usability they always focus on the desktop side, which is all fine and good, the command-line/server one however is often even more broken, which is sad, since especially security would profit a lot when people would actually understand what they are doing and not just patching together snippets that they have picked up from some howto/mailinglist/random-webpage, like way to many do these days due to programs simply being both to hard to understand and simply unsuited for the job they are used for.
If you argue that way you can never feel safe, since who says that there isn't a hidden backdoor in your otherwise secured router?
No matter how much you educate, the user is the one piece in the equation that you can't 'fix', at least not on a large scale, which is why software and hardware *must be* designed in such a way that it works in a secure way even with a 'broken' user. The default password thing is easily fixed: don't set the same default one for each device, instead use a random one or none at all if possible (i.e. disable remote login). You don't want users to use 'qwerty' password, so use a function to check that the users password is not a weak one.
To be fair here, XBox360 modding is for running pirated games, not for running homebrew software, since there doesn't exist any.
What is so special with self-shadowing? Isn't that kind of an old-hat? Doom3 could already do it.
Forbidding the sale of pre-installed Windows and forcing users to install a OS themselves would be stupid, however, what definitvly should happen is that the OS should becomes a separate item, something you have to pay for when you want it, not something you are forced to pay for even if you *don't* want it, as is today mostly the case. It might also help when Windows is sold at its 'real' price, not the extra low one which retails can get it at when bundling it with a machine.
The main thing that killed the Dreamcast was that Sega stopped making them *before* XBox and Gamecube hit the shelves. Kind of hard to win a fight when you give up before it has even fully started. EA not supporting the Dreamcast of course kind of helped of course too.
### So, looking at the game market, what game titles have been out there that have any level of nudity that can be considered an artistic addition to the story, rather than as a very poor way to try to sell more copies to the young male audience?
Dreamfall and Fahrenheit come to mind, both of them have been censored. Fahrenheit actually managed to come out as originally planed in Europe and only get censored for the US market. Other examples would be GTA:SA and Singles.
### This is why the game market doesn't get the same treatment as movies when it comes to material
Well, not really, because due to the handling of AO nobody dares to touch nudity and sex, except porn games, which really can't work around the issue, everybody else censors their game to have a chance to market them. So its clear that most AO games end up being porn.
### Honestly, if a game is rated M due to violent content, then adding a bit of nudity that isn't a part of some sex game within the main game should be considered natural.
Yep, but thats not the case, you quickly get a AO from trying something like that.
### The problem is that there really hasn't been a lot of attention to artistic nudity in games,
Well, because there really isn't much to pay attention to. No console allows AO and no PC publishers is going to deliberately risking a AO after having invested millions in a title, so everybody plays save. The only chance I currently see to change this is online publishing, when I remember correctly Gametap offers the uncut AO version of Fahrenheit, which is a good start, but its still a long long way to go from there.
The basic problem here is that retailers base their decision on what to carry and what not on the ESRB rating, which however has *nothing* to do with how good or bad a game sells. Just for the record, GTA:SA is among the top ten best selling games in video game history and quite a few of those copies have a AO rating, due to the AO rating being given out a while after the game was already on the market. So "AO ratings don't sell" is quite simply bullshit, because the rating has nothing to do with how popular a game gets. You think that the Fahrenheit(AO) would have sold less then its censored US-release twin Indigo Prophecy(M)? I kind of doubt that it would have made much of a difference. But since AO won't even be on the shelves, the developers have to censor it to get M, not because AO "doesn't sell well", but because AO isn't sold at all.
The crux is of course that its a feedback loop, since not stocking AO causes all potential AO games to be censored to get a M, which in turn only leaves a few crappy sex games with an AO rating, which then of course don't sell well.
I have no idea how government regulation should help with this, but on the other side I strongly disagree with just saying "its private business, they can do what they want, everything is fine", because something is hugely screwed up here. One thing that might help is simply having a mandatory and government controlled game rating system, since unlike with a a private business controlled one, one could start a lawsuit against it to fix the issue.
### It's not the "sex is bad" crowd that's causing this.
AO was for years a 'sex' rating, games with violence didn't get it, games with nudity and sex got it. Manhunt2 is I think the first violent game that got it. This really has nothing to do with Jack Thompson and friends, since violent games continue to sell and allowed to be made, its only the AO ones that aren't even allowed to make it onto the consoles, since Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo won't allow it.
While at the topic of motion control, does anybody know what tech actually drives the SIXAXIS? With the Wiimote its, easy, you can find the exact chip used, what data is returned and such, but with the SIXAXIS I have a really hard time finding any hard information. From what I could gather it seems to have more then just an accelerometer, i.e. it seems to have at least one kind of gyro-sensor to sense yaw rotation. However I couldn't find exact details and I am still puzzled on if it can also sense pitch and roll directly or only derive from the accelerometer.
Does anybody have details on how many axis it actually supports and if it returns rotation independed of acceleration and if that data is absolute or just relative?
### Current game levels are often in the 10,000,000 triangle range.
How many of those 10,000,000 per level are visible on the screen at once?
### It seems the bar moves depending on the game...
A Ikaruga requires in 5min far more concentration then most RPGs in ten hours combined. So its natural that a Ikaruga can be a lot shorter then a RPG and still provide a good experience. With on RPG you are often wandering around without much goal for hours, so if it would be over after 10 hours, there really wouldn't be much place to fit a story in. On the other side you have games like Fahrenheit, that are only 7 hours, but feel like you are watching a season of a TV show, i.e. the story is very dense and there isn't aimless wandering or level-up'ing, just story, dialog and stuff. When one looks at how much dialog a game has, one will often find out that a 40h RPG has the same amount as another game that is just 15h long. It just a matter of how much 'filler' there is that decides the final game length, not content.
Truth to be told, I have yet to play a single game that has enough content to make it past the 30h mark, much just end up in repetition or stretch that bit of content they have so far out that it simply gets uninteresting. But to come back to Heavenly Sword, which is rumored to be around the 6h, that simply is quite a bit shorter then a God of War that was like twice as long, so its clear why it is a disappointment to some people.
There are no gyros in the Wiimote, just one image sensor which registers the two dots from the sensorbar (dots closed together are merged into one, so the 10 LED show up as two dots) and one XYZ-accelerometer, which also can, with the help of gravity, be used to measure rotation around two axis.
The IR bar is used for motion sensing in some games, i.e. Metroid Prime 3 uses it as far as I know for the door handles, since due to the sensorbar having two light, it can easily calculate distance and orientation to the bar, thus you can push/pull and rotate a handle in the game.
Metroid on DS was plain awful, the Primes weren't that bad, but I don't consider all that great either. I don't blame this on 3D, but mainly on the first person view. When jumping is a central part of the gameplay it just flat out sucks to not have a body. Which not only makes jumps annoying (even so Prime was always rather tolerant in that aspect) it also, and this is far more important, makes them uninteresting. In the 2D Metroid you had way more possibilities when jumping, you had the ledge-grab, walljumps, screw-jump and could combine them more or less freely, in the 3D ones some of that is still present, but its degraded to a special gimmick that you use in a few special places, not everywhere you want.
I would love to see a 3D third person Metroid next. While 2D is fun, they also tend to just be clones of SuperMetroid. A third person Metroid would give the freedom to do something new without losing the core of the 2D ones.
The issue is: more graphics mean more costs, more costs means less flexibility and less flexibility means less innovation and independence. The past isn't something where all games were great, it is however a time where a lot of games were far more innovative then anything today. Just compare how many new stuff happened between 1990-1995 and compare it to 2002-2007. It is not even that just little new innovation is happening, a lot of genres simply died out because they where to far of the mainstream and that is what publishers are targeting.
That said, not everything looks bad today, the real next gen games seem to slowly appear (i.e. those that use processing power for more then just shinier gfx), but it is really a rather slow process, which in large part can be blamed on the strive for more and more gfx and less focus on other aspects.
I really do miss the old days, not because of nostalgia, but simply because I like those games and genres, not of all them where good, but many are still great and haven't been replaced by anything, since nobody is left creating games of that type.
If only developers would actually strive for realism, the thing is, by far most of them don't. The flightsim genre is mostly dead, Need for Speed got turned into a primitive arcade racer instead of striving to be a simulation like the first did, if Grand Turismo ever gets a realistic damage model is still on open question and everytime somebody mentioned 'realism' and points his finger at some bunny-hopping, circle-strafing FPS shooter I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
Developers for most part try to do yesterday games with prettier graphic, not more realistic games. A todays FPS shooter is just as unrealistic as Doom1. It however looks prettier, but even that not in the necessary in the realistic sense (i.e. reality isn't build out of 30 foot wide corridors like all of Half Life 2, a pretty sky box doesn't change that fact).
I for one have kind of lost the feeling for what is considered pretty by todays standards, I just don't really see much of a difference between a game from five or ten years ago and a game from today. Sure, more shaders, more polygons, but the underlying gameplay is often very much the exact same.
Final Fantasy, ResidentEvil, GTA, MetalGear, God of War, Zelda, Mario and a ton more. FPS are for most part a phenomenon of XBox and PC. Japanese don't really seem to care about them all that much. So, lets play a different game: Name a few popular FPS that came out of Japan.
### If the app's source code included a program that unpacked an asset archive appended to the executable, would that be enough to make the final work an "aggregate"?
.tar.gz, .iso, reiserfs, ext2 or whatever, especially when there are tools to properly extract the files from the binary and replace them, which there of course are, since you distribute source according to the GPL.
Since you are only packing the files into the executable due to hardware limitations this is really no different then a
The safest bet is of course to go dual-license GPL+CC-by-sa if possible, but even without I don't really see a real problem with mixing a GPL app with CC-by-sa when the mixing is really doing nothing more then attaching data to the same file.
From the CC-by-sa side it is a bit trickier, since a game could be considered as an adoption instead of a collection from the artwork and thus might need to be covered under CC-by-sa as well. However CC-by-sa doesn't really give a clear answer of when a thing becomes a adoption and when a collection, since in this case its a bit of both.
Last not least I would say, don't worry to much, people licensed their stuff under GPL and CC-by-sa so that other people could use it, not to send out lawyers to other people in the same spirit. If you want it bullet proof contact the original authors and ask for permission, but for practical purposes you should be fine even without.
All thus buzz over toolkits, lack of graphics and stuff... its pointless. Those are not the problems of Free Software games, sure, they can annoy, but they also would be pretty easy to fix. They are not what makes a project succeed or not. The game design that is *BY FAR* the biggest issue. It is the lack of a team, the lack of a vision and the lack of basically everything that makes a game a game instead of just little graphic tech demo.
If you for example look at a MMORPGs, we almost had it already back then in seven years ago with WorldForge:Acorn. It might not have been the best looking MMORPG ever, it might have not been the best code base, but it was there and running. In seven years of time you would expect that it would have expanded, got polished and all that stuff. Nope, didn't happen, UClient (the 2D client running Acorn) got ditched and WorldForge seems to be toying around in 3D now. I don't really know and don't really care what they are doing right now. They simply haven't managed to get a game done in all those years even so all the bits and pieces where already there and that is simply sad. They simply don't seem to know what they actually want to accomplish. Know maybe the will come out with a playable game one day, but I kind of have given up hope.
Its really that simple, most people simply prefer to toy around instead of deliver a finished game and most 'teams' are horrible unorganized in that *nobody* knows what they are actually trying to accomplish, everybody is just pulling their strings, all in different directions and going nowhere in the end.
People always say that ideas are cheap and handle them as basically worthless, but from my experience its exactly what the Free Software world lacks. People with good ideas, who know what they want and who have the will to drive a team to accomplish that goal from start to finish.
Incorrect, the sensorbar is there to give you the mouse-pointer-like functionality, its basically the same as an LCD lightgun. Thanks to the sensorbar having two IR dots it allows the calculation of distance and rotation around one axis, but nothing more then that. It doesn't give you 3D data, just two dots.
Yep, I second that. I really have a hard time to find a gaming trilogy that actually did get completly finished as originally planed. There are of cause dozens of games around with multiple sequels, but those very seldomly build up on each other, most of the time its simply more of a same with not much if any connection to the previous story. And heck, even if the trilogy works out, you might end up with a game split across multiple platform, some of which you might not own. So no matter of it turns out, the potential for trouble with a gaming trilogy is *huge*.