6KB is definitvly to little to store any real game data (keymappings or such) or personal data (say a picture of you), however 6kb should be enough to store your user-id and your password/key for the online account. So if they are actually going to use a 'personal' controller, they have to do it over the online service and just use the controller as a login tool.
### however, due to the GPL requirements, I have to keep source packages available for the next 3 years
You only have to make the code available for 3 years if you did *not* distribute the source code along with the binary. So just upload the source code together with the binary, and problem solved.
The PS2 has FinalFantasy and GT, not exactly classical mascots, but whenever Nintendo has Mario running around in a techdemo, Sony has some FinalFantasy or GT based stuff ready to show of new tech and there is of course also the famous yellow rubberduck. But in the end none of this qualifies as a mascot, they simply happen to be used in a few places where you would normally use your mascot.
### I also use a Marble Mouse. I have it configured (under X11) so that holding down one of the scroll buttons (the little darker buttons close to the ball) while moving the ball scrolls.
That sounds usefull, could you emplain what/where you configured to get that behaviour?
Speaking about split-keyboards, one thing that is starting to annoy me with my Microsoft Natural Pro is that the left and right sides are very badly balanced in terms of number of keys and overall symmetry. While on the left you have Caps-Lock, A, S, D, F, G you have on the Right H, J, K, L, Ö, Ä, #, Return (German layout), meaning the right side has two more keys and the frequently used Return key, which in turn means that the left hand can almost stand still for most typing (all keys reachable without hand movement) while the right one has to constantly move around a lot, since there simply are far more keys and they are also spread across much more (Return isn't reachable without hand movement). There are also other symmetry issues like the non-regular key placement (T,G,N is facing exactly the other way around then Z,H,N).
Are there any other keyboards around beside the (sadly horribly expensive) Maltron ones that have a symmetric split layout?
### As opposed to pointing and moving with a thumbstick?
Thumbstick has two degrees of freedom, the Wiimote has six, which makes the Wiimote one of the few devices, and probally the first mainstream one, that allows you to do full and direct movement in 3D. I am sure we will see lots of missuse of the Wiimote and badly adopted games, but what the Wiimote allows is *way bejoint* what you can do with a thumbstick in terms of gameplay. That doesn't mean that the Wiimote is necessarily the better controller, but it will certainly allow games that would be impossible with a thumbstick.
#### this would eliminate much of the need for new versions of games
When somebody comes up with a way to generate good dialog, story and gameplay via procedural algorithms, then maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath. For today I am very happy with good old hand crafted storylines, dialogs and well designed gameplay, graphics, while important, really are secondary to the rest of the game. That said, there is a lot of benefit in these algorithms, Elite was a perfect example of this in offering a whole universe on a tiny 5.25" disc, while Elite didn't exactly have lots of story, there is nothing that would stop an developer to generate the universe itself proceduraly and then add here and there some handcrafted events to keep the player involved. Procedural algorithms also have the advantage that they keep things consistent, if you want to have a huge releastic looking landscape, there is simply no better way then to go procedural, since handcrafted stuff simply has its limits and you don't want to have the some less visited parts of your world look ugly and boring just because the developers ran out of time.
Ok, so this "microformats" thing is about encoding extra data inside an HTML file by abusing CSS class names for markup, isn't that completly unnecessary and nothing more than an ugly hack? Don't we have XML namespaces for exactly that reason? Wouldn't something like:
50TB, hm, lets see, that should be about the right amount of space to save a lifetime of MP3 in decent quality (1min ~ 1MB, 100y*365d*24h*60m -> 52'560'000), probally even a bit of video when better compression is used. Could be interesting when one day we have enough space to store absolutly everything we see and hear on a single disk, your whole memory on disk.
In that simple case 'for i in *' will already help, in more complicated cases something like this will do (assuming here that you want to move all files in a given directory and its subdirectories around):
find -type f | while read filename; do mv "$filename"./archive/; done
Unlike the 'for' solution this will handle spaces and many other characters, it will still barf when it runs into a newline, but better then nothing. The only truly correct solution is:
find . -type f -exec mv {}./archive/ \;
or
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 mv --target-directory./archive/
However, using 'find' sadly destroys a bit of the freedom you have with normal bash, thus it gives you less power, but it is the only way that really works with all filenames.
### There are plenty of arguments on both sides of this one. I'm more used to/more comfortable with/prefer case-sensitive filenames, but I can't bring myself to claim that one option is better than the other.
I think the 'correct' solution is to simply stop to refer to files by name and make the filename just another piece of meta data that is attached to the file and thus allow it to be completly free form, all characters could be allowed, upcase/downcase, even mark-up would be possible inside the filename.
In GUI environments today you often don't refer to a file by name, instead you click on icons, so having two files with the same name in the same directory wouldn't do any harm there, it would simply require that the OS provides a way to refer to files by something uniq, something like the inode number or so. Now for good old shell it would of course get a bit weird, but even there it shouldn't be that difficult to solve, simply might end up a bit more ugly. Given that the 'future' of the desktop provides things like google-like full-text search the filename would get even less important, since you would search for files by context, instead of by their name.
They are stored that way, yes, but its still metadata, the filename stops before the last '.'.
### They are completely arbitrary and can be removed entirely if I so choose.
If you want to destroy metadata you can of course do that, that however doesn't make it any less metadata. If you destroy the extensions your file browser won't recognize the file type and you have a harder time opening the file, how again is that different from a resource fork or from a magic string, if I zero either of them out you are in throuble as well.
### Magic strings are the "right way", or at least close to it.
It looks like have never actually used 'cat' or a text file or a file with random binary data, since none of them contains a magic string and *CAN'T* contain a magic string, because said magic string would *destroy* the data (magic + data != data). Magic strings can *never* work because a file needs to be able to store random data, with magic strings it can't, you would force the file to follow a predefined structure, making files unsuitable as a general file storage mechanism. Magic strings are really completly unsuited as a file identification mechanism, because they simply cannot work, ever, its simply impossible. The only way to make magic strings work would be to use a container format, where one part of the container contains the true data and the other the magic, but then you don't really have what you'd consider a magic string, but simply a meta-data container.
Now back to extension, file extension *are* metadata, thats how they are threaded by almost every application. They lack the extra-information that a mime-type contains and easily conflict due to lack of limited range, but beside from that they are almost perfect in todays environments, they are easily transmitted, handled fine by almost every OS and application and easily fixable if they ever get wrong. The only improvment would be to store them in a seperate from the filename, that would however break all the backward compability.
### It's about time the issue of captioning is getting press. I'm hearing-impaired and captions are vital to me.
Captions are also very important for non-native speakers, average school english might be enough when you have a non-accent english speaker, but as soon as a game adds some accent it gets a heck of a lot more difficult to follow, if the game has environmental sound or badly balanced volume for speech and other sounds it gets often impossible to decipher what people are saying. One game which solved the issue very well was Fahrenheit, it not offered subtitles, but allowed you to switch freely between all available languages independly for subtiles and audio, so if one wanted english audio with german subtiles, no problem, most other games often either only allow to set both subtiles and audio at once or even worse, only come with a single language to begin with, in days of the DVD thats really not excusable, there is more then enough diskspace available.
Another benefit of subtiles is that they allow you to easily skip through dialog while still allowing you to know what the person would have said, this is especially nice when one ends up running into an already heard dialog again. Luckily most adventure games have allowed this, but many other genres still allow little freedom when it comes to skipping through cutscenes and dialog.
The "all feature in the beginning" is probally the most extreme in simulations, where you often get everything at the very beginning and there aren't even stats you could improve. What however improves over time is the players ability to handle the plane/car/mech and that is IMHO by far the best thing, since its fair, there is no magic 'smash hundert monster to level up', but its all simply your skill and nothing else. Ikaruga is yet another game where you start with everything right from the start, there are no uber-weapons to collect, yet it was the best shooter of the past years thanks to the interesting black/white game mechanic.
### The problem is that extensions are part of the filename
Extensions are not part of the filename and they are not arbitary. They are perfectly good metadata that just happens to be stored right next the the filename, which is actually quite a good thing, since the filename is the only place where you can pack your metadata to transfer it over a network in a reliable way. The only throuble with fileextension is that they were limited to three characters in the past, which lead to some conflicts here and there and that Microsoft for some stupid reasons hides that metadata per default which leads to "lookhereiamcertainlynotavirus.jpg.exe". However thats not the fault of fileextensions, quite the oposite, the.exe clearly marks the file as executable data, its not the fault of the fileextension that Microsoft strips it away.
Mime-types are pretty much the same as file-extension, just without the three character limit and a bit of structure, throuble is, you can't store mime-types anywhere easily and portably not at all. So they get lost as soon as you copy a file around, which makes them rather worthless in practice and results in most applications that use mime-types to base them on file-extension (Apache with things like 'AddType image/gif.gif').
Magic strings are probally the worst of all, since they are part of the actual file data, not metadata, even worse, most files simply contain no magic strings at all, making file detection impossible or worse a game of luck, since there is nothing that stops random data from having the magic string of another filetype and in such a case there is nothing the user can do to fix that misdetection. Magic have of course still a value as file-type guessing method and they work good that way, but as reliable way to identify a file they are completly worthless.
### but others were notices for which someone might have very well signed up for,
That problem could relativ easly be solved:
a) those newsletters should sign their mail, a whitelist could then easily distingush it from spam or phishing
b) they shouldn't send out automated mail in the first place, instead the users client should pull the information and subscribtion should be a client-thing, that not only would make the whole sign-up unnneed, it would also solve the problem with unsubscribing, since getting unsubscribed from newsletters can be quite a time consuming task. There is neither a standard how to handle unsubscribe nor a standard to authenticate the send unsubscribe mail, so you are often forced to send multiple mails and confirmations around till you get it accepted, if you have multiple mail addresses or forwards it gets even more 'fun' to get your unsubscribe mail accepted due to different from from header.
One of the things that made Elephant Dream, the recently released 3D short movie that was created (almost) with only Open Source Tools, so interesting was that it focused on doing it completly the 'Open Source'-way, free tools whereever possible and all source and data was released as well. This lead to quite some nice improvments in Blender, which was used for most of the work and a whole lot of data to look at and browse around to learn from. So the question is, how does OpenFrag compare to that? We already have quite a few free FPS floating around, so yet another one isn't all that interesting by itself, even with source. However, having access to a bunch of 3d animated models with free licensing and a whole lot of textures would definitvly be very interesting, especially when they could be manipulated with open source tools and not just Photoshop and Max. So is OpenFRAPs trying to stay completly with all its files "Open Source" or will it only be the engine that have an OpenSource license and data more or less locked up by only being available in engine specific or proprietary data formats?
He does not seem to realise that the people who want stories and adventure-style puzzles are turned off by mindless action sequences. Mixing up different styles is a surefire way to make a game fail miserably. Try to please all, and you wll please none.
Most people don't have any problem with action sequences, the problem why action isn't much liked in the adventure community is that the action sequences in adventure games are *extremly* badly done, Fahrenheit so far was the only game that made action actually fit the story and not look completly out of place. That said, it is extremly difficult to mix action and story in a meaningfull, which makes it very risky to try to mix those since either the action will suffer or the story, causing a game that doesn't make anybody happy. I found Psychonauts quite annoying for that reason, the game didn't really know what it wanted to be, in some parts it feels like a normal fun adventure game, in other it turns into a frustrating jump'n run only to turn into an Zelda-like action-adventure for the next few minutes, it misses some consistant pacing so that you know what to expect, instead you kind of jump from genre to genre with none of them being half as good as a pure game would be. Its still not a bad game, but it could have been so much better with a bit more focus on specific aspects of gameplay and not a crazy mix of everything.
### The Internet, or at least mainstream use of it, killed the Adventure Genre.
The adventure genre died off quite a while before the internet got mainstream, back around in 1997. Beside from that, walkthroughs have been popular long before that, for pretty much any adventure game, except Maniac Manison back on the C64, I had a walk through right at hand when playing it. Its simply isn't a lot of fun to walk around for hours and hours in an adventure game, getting stuck is no fun and walkthroughs prevent that frustration.
### Most adventure games last a day at most
Guess what, most other games from those days don't last any longer either, especially not when you cheat. Today its really not that much different, games have gotten longer, but so did adventure games, The Longest Journey takes a good 20-30h, Dreamfall takes a solid 15h and the other ones aren't that far behind. Fahrenheit was rather short with 7h, but than that game was more interactive movie than classic adventure game (little to no running around, little to no freedom), so thats excusable. Beside, not everybody wants to run around like in FinalFantasy slaying the same old monsters over and over again in endless boring random encounters, some people acually like to have games without useless gameplay that is only there to stretch the game.
### With CG movies becoming more common, is this scenario possible?
I don't think so. The only 'usefull' reuse of CG actors is advertisment, but if a new movie gets created I expect to see new characters, not recycled ones. I mean isn't the great thing about CG that it lets us produce a character thats a perfect fit for the movie, instead of having to rely on an actor to more or less match the role? I seriously don't want to see King Kong, Aki Ross or any other CG character again in another movie, it just wouldn't make sense and only destroy the whole reason to go CG in the first place.
### Now, Wii is different, watching the videos of the guy playing Red Steel, made me wonder "why didn't we have that before?"
Because all those virtual-reality helmets and equipment tanked in the consumer marked some years ago.
### it looks like it may even be SUPERIOR to a keyboard and mouse.
In terms of precision it will most likly be inverior (turning is done 'absolute', like with a joystick, not 'relative' like with a mouse), it might however offer a better 'feel' for the gun, which would be nice, but I don't see professional eSports players switching to Wii controller anytime soon.
### I want to play some FPS with that pointer
I actually want to play Mario and Zelda *without* a pointer, the Wii controller looks definitvly interesting, however its use in games that have basically no use for it, is something that I found not so exciting. Beside from that, first person shooters have been done to death, adding a new controller won't make them any more interesting, once you are over the "new and cool" feeling you are stuck with the same old fps that you have already played the last five years. That of course isn't the controllers fault, there are probally some great new things that you can do with the controller, so far however, I haven't seen any interesting games.
### All PS3 and XBox 360 seem to have is high prices, faulty hardware, and "new features" that would cost me 5 grand to be able to use.
XBox360 starts at $300, Wii at something like $250-200, since the XBox360 could even drop in price there really is not such a big difference between the two, it however of course depends if Microsoft actually drops the price and if the Wii is actually costing so much.
I see the main success of the Wii at the moment in the VirtualConsole, since that seems like a save bet without to much that could go wrong. If the controller however will turn out as a success is still somewhat doubtfull, it has some potential, but there is a lot that could go wrong and the first reviews so far havn't been all that exciting.
### The difference is, on a PC, it's usually possible for you to prevent things from going wrong, whereas on a console, there's not much you can do if someone else (console manufacturer, game developer/publisher) screws it up.
The thing is, on a console the developers already *fixed* all the bugs for you, no manual work required, ever, since there is only one hardware configuration available its acutally not that difficult to make an almost bug free console game. On the PC on the other side its basically *impossible* to make a game that works everywhere out of the box, heck even if a PC works out of the box, exactly as intended, I still often have to spend an hour or more to get the controls and graphics setting fully tweaked to something usable, since controls, CPU and GPU speed can varry a lot and of course one also has to install the game in the first place. And well, there is also good old copy protection that does its fair share of rendering PC games unusable. Console games on the other side are up an running in a matter of seconds. Its true that console games can have critical bugs, but it happens so extremly seldomly, that its really not an issue, beside from that if a console game doesn't work, its broken, if a PC game doesn't work thats basically pretty normal, you wait for a patch and accept it.
### At least with a PC, it's highly likely I'll have a backup for all my savegames
Buy yourself a second memory card if you want backup, its no more difficult then on a PC.
### a Mac is pretty easy to maintain, and Linux, while hard to set up, is even easier to keep clean.
We were talking about *games* weren't we? Neither Mac or Linux are any usefull for that, they have a few games, but *far* from the number of games that would make a gamer happy.
Slashdot Mirror
6KB is definitvly to little to store any real game data (keymappings or such) or personal data (say a picture of you), however 6kb should be enough to store your user-id and your password/key for the online account. So if they are actually going to use a 'personal' controller, they have to do it over the online service and just use the controller as a login tool.
### IPv6 uses 256-bit numbers broken into 32-bit chunks.
rfc4291 thinks it are 128bit...
### however, due to the GPL requirements, I have to keep source packages available for the next 3 years
You only have to make the code available for 3 years if you did *not* distribute the source code along with the binary. So just upload the source code together with the binary, and problem solved.
The PS2 has FinalFantasy and GT, not exactly classical mascots, but whenever Nintendo has Mario running around in a techdemo, Sony has some FinalFantasy or GT based stuff ready to show of new tech and there is of course also the famous yellow rubberduck. But in the end none of this qualifies as a mascot, they simply happen to be used in a few places where you would normally use your mascot.
### I also use a Marble Mouse. I have it configured (under X11) so that holding down one of the scroll buttons (the little darker buttons close to the ball) while moving the ball scrolls.
That sounds usefull, could you emplain what/where you configured to get that behaviour?
Speaking about split-keyboards, one thing that is starting to annoy me with my Microsoft Natural Pro is that the left and right sides are very badly balanced in terms of number of keys and overall symmetry. While on the left you have Caps-Lock, A, S, D, F, G you have on the Right H, J, K, L, Ö, Ä, #, Return (German layout), meaning the right side has two more keys and the frequently used Return key, which in turn means that the left hand can almost stand still for most typing (all keys reachable without hand movement) while the right one has to constantly move around a lot, since there simply are far more keys and they are also spread across much more (Return isn't reachable without hand movement). There are also other symmetry issues like the non-regular key placement (T,G,N is facing exactly the other way around then Z,H,N).
Are there any other keyboards around beside the (sadly horribly expensive) Maltron ones that have a symmetric split layout?
My way to missspell "beyond"...
### As opposed to pointing and moving with a thumbstick?
Thumbstick has two degrees of freedom, the Wiimote has six, which makes the Wiimote one of the few devices, and probally the first mainstream one, that allows you to do full and direct movement in 3D. I am sure we will see lots of missuse of the Wiimote and badly adopted games, but what the Wiimote allows is *way bejoint* what you can do with a thumbstick in terms of gameplay. That doesn't mean that the Wiimote is necessarily the better controller, but it will certainly allow games that would be impossible with a thumbstick.
#### this would eliminate much of the need for new versions of games
When somebody comes up with a way to generate good dialog, story and gameplay via procedural algorithms, then maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath. For today I am very happy with good old hand crafted storylines, dialogs and well designed gameplay, graphics, while important, really are secondary to the rest of the game. That said, there is a lot of benefit in these algorithms, Elite was a perfect example of this in offering a whole universe on a tiny 5.25" disc, while Elite didn't exactly have lots of story, there is nothing that would stop an developer to generate the universe itself proceduraly and then add here and there some handcrafted events to keep the player involved. Procedural algorithms also have the advantage that they keep things consistent, if you want to have a huge releastic looking landscape, there is simply no better way then to go procedural, since handcrafted stuff simply has its limits and you don't want to have the some less visited parts of your world look ugly and boring just because the developers ran out of time.
Ok, so this "microformats" thing is about encoding extra data inside an HTML file by abusing CSS class names for markup, isn't that completly unnecessary and nothing more than an ugly hack? Don't we have XML namespaces for exactly that reason? Wouldn't something like:
<span style="display: none">
<vevent:event>
<vevent:dtstart>20060501</vevent:dstart>
<vevent:dtend>20060502<vevent:dtend>
<vevent:summary">My Conference opening</vevent:summary>
<vevent:location>Hollywood, CA</vevent:location>
</vevent:event>
</span>
We the 'right'[tm] way to day it?
50TB, hm, lets see, that should be about the right amount of space to save a lifetime of MP3 in decent quality (1min ~ 1MB, 100y*365d*24h*60m -> 52'560'000), probally even a bit of video when better compression is used. Could be interesting when one day we have enough space to store absolutly everything we see and hear on a single disk, your whole memory on disk.
In that simple case 'for i in *' will already help, in more complicated cases something like this will do (assuming here that you want to move all files in a given directory and its subdirectories around):
./archive/; done
./archive/ \;
./archive/
find -type f | while read filename; do mv "$filename"
Unlike the 'for' solution this will handle spaces and many other characters, it will still barf when it runs into a newline, but better then nothing. The only truly correct solution is:
find . -type f -exec mv {}
or
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 mv --target-directory
However, using 'find' sadly destroys a bit of the freedom you have with normal bash, thus it gives you less power, but it is the only way that really works with all filenames.
### There are plenty of arguments on both sides of this one. I'm more used to/more comfortable with/prefer case-sensitive filenames, but I can't bring myself to claim that one option is better than the other.
I think the 'correct' solution is to simply stop to refer to files by name and make the filename just another piece of meta data that is attached to the file and thus allow it to be completly free form, all characters could be allowed, upcase/downcase, even mark-up would be possible inside the filename.
In GUI environments today you often don't refer to a file by name, instead you click on icons, so having two files with the same name in the same directory wouldn't do any harm there, it would simply require that the OS provides a way to refer to files by something uniq, something like the inode number or so. Now for good old shell it would of course get a bit weird, but even there it shouldn't be that difficult to solve, simply might end up a bit more ugly. Given that the 'future' of the desktop provides things like google-like full-text search the filename would get even less important, since you would search for files by context, instead of by their name.
### Extensions are part of the filename.
They are stored that way, yes, but its still metadata, the filename stops before the last '.'.
### They are completely arbitrary and can be removed entirely if I so choose.
If you want to destroy metadata you can of course do that, that however doesn't make it any less metadata. If you destroy the extensions your file browser won't recognize the file type and you have a harder time opening the file, how again is that different from a resource fork or from a magic string, if I zero either of them out you are in throuble as well.
### Magic strings are the "right way", or at least close to it.
It looks like have never actually used 'cat' or a text file or a file with random binary data, since none of them contains a magic string and *CAN'T* contain a magic string, because said magic string would *destroy* the data (magic + data != data). Magic strings can *never* work because a file needs to be able to store random data, with magic strings it can't, you would force the file to follow a predefined structure, making files unsuitable as a general file storage mechanism. Magic strings are really completly unsuited as a file identification mechanism, because they simply cannot work, ever, its simply impossible. The only way to make magic strings work would be to use a container format, where one part of the container contains the true data and the other the magic, but then you don't really have what you'd consider a magic string, but simply a meta-data container.
Now back to extension, file extension *are* metadata, thats how they are threaded by almost every application. They lack the extra-information that a mime-type contains and easily conflict due to lack of limited range, but beside from that they are almost perfect in todays environments, they are easily transmitted, handled fine by almost every OS and application and easily fixable if they ever get wrong. The only improvment would be to store them in a seperate from the filename, that would however break all the backward compability.
### It's about time the issue of captioning is getting press. I'm hearing-impaired and captions are vital to me.
Captions are also very important for non-native speakers, average school english might be enough when you have a non-accent english speaker, but as soon as a game adds some accent it gets a heck of a lot more difficult to follow, if the game has environmental sound or badly balanced volume for speech and other sounds it gets often impossible to decipher what people are saying. One game which solved the issue very well was Fahrenheit, it not offered subtitles, but allowed you to switch freely between all available languages independly for subtiles and audio, so if one wanted english audio with german subtiles, no problem, most other games often either only allow to set both subtiles and audio at once or even worse, only come with a single language to begin with, in days of the DVD thats really not excusable, there is more then enough diskspace available.
Another benefit of subtiles is that they allow you to easily skip through dialog while still allowing you to know what the person would have said, this is especially nice when one ends up running into an already heard dialog again. Luckily most adventure games have allowed this, but many other genres still allow little freedom when it comes to skipping through cutscenes and dialog.
The "all feature in the beginning" is probally the most extreme in simulations, where you often get everything at the very beginning and there aren't even stats you could improve. What however improves over time is the players ability to handle the plane/car/mech and that is IMHO by far the best thing, since its fair, there is no magic 'smash hundert monster to level up', but its all simply your skill and nothing else. Ikaruga is yet another game where you start with everything right from the start, there are no uber-weapons to collect, yet it was the best shooter of the past years thanks to the interesting black/white game mechanic.
### The problem is that extensions are part of the filename
.exe clearly marks the file as executable data, its not the fault of the fileextension that Microsoft strips it away.
.gif').
Extensions are not part of the filename and they are not arbitary. They are perfectly good metadata that just happens to be stored right next the the filename, which is actually quite a good thing, since the filename is the only place where you can pack your metadata to transfer it over a network in a reliable way. The only throuble with fileextension is that they were limited to three characters in the past, which lead to some conflicts here and there and that Microsoft for some stupid reasons hides that metadata per default which leads to "lookhereiamcertainlynotavirus.jpg.exe". However thats not the fault of fileextensions, quite the oposite, the
Mime-types are pretty much the same as file-extension, just without the three character limit and a bit of structure, throuble is, you can't store mime-types anywhere easily and portably not at all. So they get lost as soon as you copy a file around, which makes them rather worthless in practice and results in most applications that use mime-types to base them on file-extension (Apache with things like 'AddType image/gif
Magic strings are probally the worst of all, since they are part of the actual file data, not metadata, even worse, most files simply contain no magic strings at all, making file detection impossible or worse a game of luck, since there is nothing that stops random data from having the magic string of another filetype and in such a case there is nothing the user can do to fix that misdetection. Magic have of course still a value as file-type guessing method and they work good that way, but as reliable way to identify a file they are completly worthless.
### presentation is excellent, the story is very good
Presentation is quite good, I agree, but story? Whats so good about the story? It basically works like this:
1) run around with Alexandra, find a page of the book
2) jump into a character
3) you walk around killing zombies
4) you die
5) goto 1
Thats for all the twelve or so characters that are in the game, none of the characters ever gets any deepth, history or interesting dialog to speak.
### but others were notices for which someone might have very well signed up for,
That problem could relativ easly be solved:
a) those newsletters should sign their mail, a whitelist could then easily distingush it from spam or phishing
b) they shouldn't send out automated mail in the first place, instead the users client should pull the information and subscribtion should be a client-thing, that not only would make the whole sign-up unnneed, it would also solve the problem with unsubscribing, since getting unsubscribed from newsletters can be quite a time consuming task. There is neither a standard how to handle unsubscribe nor a standard to authenticate the send unsubscribe mail, so you are often forced to send multiple mails and confirmations around till you get it accepted, if you have multiple mail addresses or forwards it gets even more 'fun' to get your unsubscribe mail accepted due to different from from header.
One of the things that made Elephant Dream, the recently released 3D short movie that was created (almost) with only Open Source Tools, so interesting was that it focused on doing it completly the 'Open Source'-way, free tools whereever possible and all source and data was released as well. This lead to quite some nice improvments in Blender, which was used for most of the work and a whole lot of data to look at and browse around to learn from. So the question is, how does OpenFrag compare to that? We already have quite a few free FPS floating around, so yet another one isn't all that interesting by itself, even with source. However, having access to a bunch of 3d animated models with free licensing and a whole lot of textures would definitvly be very interesting, especially when they could be manipulated with open source tools and not just Photoshop and Max. So is OpenFRAPs trying to stay completly with all its files "Open Source" or will it only be the engine that have an OpenSource license and data more or less locked up by only being available in engine specific or proprietary data formats?
Most people don't have any problem with action sequences, the problem why action isn't much liked in the adventure community is that the action sequences in adventure games are *extremly* badly done, Fahrenheit so far was the only game that made action actually fit the story and not look completly out of place. That said, it is extremly difficult to mix action and story in a meaningfull, which makes it very risky to try to mix those since either the action will suffer or the story, causing a game that doesn't make anybody happy. I found Psychonauts quite annoying for that reason, the game didn't really know what it wanted to be, in some parts it feels like a normal fun adventure game, in other it turns into a frustrating jump'n run only to turn into an Zelda-like action-adventure for the next few minutes, it misses some consistant pacing so that you know what to expect, instead you kind of jump from genre to genre with none of them being half as good as a pure game would be. Its still not a bad game, but it could have been so much better with a bit more focus on specific aspects of gameplay and not a crazy mix of everything.
### The Internet, or at least mainstream use of it, killed the Adventure Genre.
The adventure genre died off quite a while before the internet got mainstream, back around in 1997. Beside from that, walkthroughs have been popular long before that, for pretty much any adventure game, except Maniac Manison back on the C64, I had a walk through right at hand when playing it. Its simply isn't a lot of fun to walk around for hours and hours in an adventure game, getting stuck is no fun and walkthroughs prevent that frustration.
### Most adventure games last a day at most
Guess what, most other games from those days don't last any longer either, especially not when you cheat. Today its really not that much different, games have gotten longer, but so did adventure games, The Longest Journey takes a good 20-30h, Dreamfall takes a solid 15h and the other ones aren't that far behind. Fahrenheit was rather short with 7h, but than that game was more interactive movie than classic adventure game (little to no running around, little to no freedom), so thats excusable. Beside, not everybody wants to run around like in FinalFantasy slaying the same old monsters over and over again in endless boring random encounters, some people acually like to have games without useless gameplay that is only there to stretch the game.
### With CG movies becoming more common, is this scenario possible?
I don't think so. The only 'usefull' reuse of CG actors is advertisment, but if a new movie gets created I expect to see new characters, not recycled ones. I mean isn't the great thing about CG that it lets us produce a character thats a perfect fit for the movie, instead of having to rely on an actor to more or less match the role? I seriously don't want to see King Kong, Aki Ross or any other CG character again in another movie, it just wouldn't make sense and only destroy the whole reason to go CG in the first place.
### Now, Wii is different, watching the videos of the guy playing Red Steel, made me wonder "why didn't we have that before?"
Because all those virtual-reality helmets and equipment tanked in the consumer marked some years ago.
### it looks like it may even be SUPERIOR to a keyboard and mouse.
In terms of precision it will most likly be inverior (turning is done 'absolute', like with a joystick, not 'relative' like with a mouse), it might however offer a better 'feel' for the gun, which would be nice, but I don't see professional eSports players switching to Wii controller anytime soon.
### I want to play some FPS with that pointer
I actually want to play Mario and Zelda *without* a pointer, the Wii controller looks definitvly interesting, however its use in games that have basically no use for it, is something that I found not so exciting. Beside from that, first person shooters have been done to death, adding a new controller won't make them any more interesting, once you are over the "new and cool" feeling you are stuck with the same old fps that you have already played the last five years. That of course isn't the controllers fault, there are probally some great new things that you can do with the controller, so far however, I haven't seen any interesting games.
### All PS3 and XBox 360 seem to have is high prices, faulty hardware, and "new features" that would cost me 5 grand to be able to use.
XBox360 starts at $300, Wii at something like $250-200, since the XBox360 could even drop in price there really is not such a big difference between the two, it however of course depends if Microsoft actually drops the price and if the Wii is actually costing so much.
I see the main success of the Wii at the moment in the VirtualConsole, since that seems like a save bet without to much that could go wrong. If the controller however will turn out as a success is still somewhat doubtfull, it has some potential, but there is a lot that could go wrong and the first reviews so far havn't been all that exciting.
### The difference is, on a PC, it's usually possible for you to prevent things from going wrong, whereas on a console, there's not much you can do if someone else (console manufacturer, game developer/publisher) screws it up.
The thing is, on a console the developers already *fixed* all the bugs for you, no manual work required, ever, since there is only one hardware configuration available its acutally not that difficult to make an almost bug free console game. On the PC on the other side its basically *impossible* to make a game that works everywhere out of the box, heck even if a PC works out of the box, exactly as intended, I still often have to spend an hour or more to get the controls and graphics setting fully tweaked to something usable, since controls, CPU and GPU speed can varry a lot and of course one also has to install the game in the first place. And well, there is also good old copy protection that does its fair share of rendering PC games unusable. Console games on the other side are up an running in a matter of seconds. Its true that console games can have critical bugs, but it happens so extremly seldomly, that its really not an issue, beside from that if a console game doesn't work, its broken, if a PC game doesn't work thats basically pretty normal, you wait for a patch and accept it.
### At least with a PC, it's highly likely I'll have a backup for all my savegames
Buy yourself a second memory card if you want backup, its no more difficult then on a PC.
### a Mac is pretty easy to maintain, and Linux, while hard to set up, is even easier to keep clean.
We were talking about *games* weren't we? Neither Mac or Linux are any usefull for that, they have a few games, but *far* from the number of games that would make a gamer happy.