Re:Removing a HUD is not an easy task
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Off With Their HUDS!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
### If you were to try to make a fighting game without a health meter, you would have to convey the state of health of the player in a different manner.
Or the game could be designed in such a way that there wouldn't be conventional health points in the first place. After all humans don't have a internal health meter either, so why should fighting games have one? Its just a convention that most fighting games follow these days, because every game did it that way. Bushido Blade is one of the few exceptions, you don't have 'energie' in that game, every hit with a sword can kill you there, no matter if the fight has just started or is running for multiple minutes. Hits on certain body parts can injure you and thus affecting your performance. This is bejoint just having a linear health meter displayed via animation, this is about having a non-linear health status in the game which is affected by all what happens to your character. So its not "50% healthy", but "arm broken, leg injured, etc.".
A different example of the same thing would be simulations, in most arcade-like games you have just a linear health meter, if its down you are dead, if its more then zero, even just 1%, you still have 100% performance on your vehicle. In more serious simulation however your vehicle doesn't have linear 'health', instead every system inside and outside of the vehicle can get damaged, so if in a flight game the gear gets hit, it gets broken and you have to do a belly landing, if radar gets it, you have to fly blind, your guns might not survive an attack, might jam, overhead or even explode, engines might catch fire, in a car game every tire might get damaged individually and thus affecting how well you can drive, etc. Such non-linearity in the 'health-meter' can lead to much more interesting and variing gameplay and especially much more interesting situations, its not just a "I survived or I died", things like trying to fly a broken plane home can be extremly fun challanges on their own and thus adding a lot of replay value, since each run of the same mission might turn out completly different.
The games that keep me coming back have mostly been more or less complex simulation games, since they often provide a wide varity of gameplay and huge scenarios to explore. Some of those games I rememeber having played for years would be Eurofighter2000, OperationFlashpoint, Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, F/A 18 Interceptor and Falcon4. There are of course other non-simulation games that have keep me coming back, AnotherWorld being probally the one I replayed the most, even so it has almost no non-linearity, its just so perfectly done and so different from all other games, that its worth to be replayed every now and then. Other games I have replayed a lot would be Yoshis Island, Mario64 and last not least MarioKart(SNES), that one I have played for at least half a decade more or less regularly.
Would recomment you download a walkthrough for Another World, once you know what to do game its not very difficult and not really long either, can be played through in 30-40min.
### The feel of control you get by being able to look around and even for the most part stall as much as you would like in scripted events strengthens the illusion.
For me, I am probally one of the few, Half Life just didn't work very well. The in-game 'cutscenes' sounded like a nice idea on paper, but most of the time I just ended up standing there asking myself what the heck I should do and especially *why* I should do it. Since the game didn't have a real intro, explaining who I am playing and what I need to do, I had huge throuble connecting with that guy I was playing. I mean you start with doing some funky science experiment knowing exactly nothing about what you are doing there. AnotherWorld, which starts out kind of similar, on the other side worked much better, since it started with a normal intro, then had the science experiment go wrong, then placing you in another world and *then* giving the player control over the 'hero'. Since both the hero and the player at that point had exactly no idea what was going on it worked very well for me.
Beside from that there is also another classic problem with cutscenes where you can walk around: cutscenes often feel different from the main game and follow their own laws or no laws at all since all the events are prescripted, which makes it very hard to the player to know how to react to something that is happening (ie. should I run away or just stand there watching since that script-object doesn't harm me? can I shoot that thing or is it invulurable? etc.).
In RE4 cutscenes are part of the gameplay, they are not there for you to sit back, but to keep you busy. In one cutscene you actually fight against another person right inside that cutscene by pressing a bunch of button combinations. It is even more extrem is it in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, where virtually half the game consists of 'cutscenes' which you have to solve via pressing button combinations. Of course that might sound annoying at first, the thing why it works however is because you, the player, end up having the same pacing as the hero. Meaning whenever the hero needs to take action, you need to take action. I think failing to keep the pacing between the player and the hero in the game syncron is one of the reasons why cutscenes can get annoying in some games, because its no longer you who controls the action, but the video. Its especially annoying in games where the action that takes place would be perfectly controlable in-game, but isn't due to some stupid design decisions (classic example: flight game that doesn't allow you to land, but does it in a cutscene). The technique used by RE4, Fahrenheit, Shenmue and a few other games however always ends up giving the player some control, not much, but enough to still give the feeling that the player is controlling the action.
This of course might not work for all games and all kinds of cutscenes. If the cutscene is just a reward after a boss fight the player might not want to take action and it simply might not be needed since the action is already over, but especially for cutscenes that happen before or while the player is playing, giving him some control over the happening can be a great way to smoothen the gaming experince and turn the cutscene into a part of the game, instead an annoyency.
### Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy."
The problem with WindWaker and SuperMarioSunshine isn't that they are buggy, but simply that they are broken by design, they might not be bad games, but for sure they aren't great either. Comparing them to the really old classics is kind of pointless, since you end up comparing a brilliant game of yesterday to an average one of today. Comparing Sunshine and Windwaker to their predecessors on the N64 is much more interesting, since it shows that both of them are not as much fun as Ocarina of Time or Mario64 due to numerous faults in the design (ridding Epona through the world is much more interesting then a stupid ship on a ocean that is all blue and boring, being able to jump into a picture is a lot more fun then watching a stupid cutscene seeing mario dissolve, having actual Jump'n Run action is more fun then annoying 'puzzles', etc). While I would love to have more 2D games released, their simplicity had something that got lost in the more complex games, I can have just as much fun with a 3D game if it is as good as a Mario64.
### As for people not looking at specs. Right. Nice try. Specs matter. Specs determine a lot of gameplay. The simplest thing of level size and level load is determined by the specs.
Even my NES could display a whole 3D *universe* in Elite, just a matter of clever programming. In the end it makes little difference if a wall is rendered flat-shaded or instead build out of thousands of bump-mappeded polygons, it might look prettier, but from a gameplay point of view its both the same. Only in the times where the specs where good enough to go from 2D to 3D there was a significant change in gameplay, beside that specs never really changed anything in terms of gameplay, instead only in terms of presentation.
### And here you said it- Nothing _you_ can't fix. However about the rest of the 99% population?
Its no different with Windows. I have some serious doubt that a large number of people could actually reinstall a windows from scratch an configure it, thats what people have childrens, neightbours, friends and such for. Heck, most people don't even know how to copy a file to a floppy in Windows. Well, even I have throuble reinstalling Windows, since unless Linux, Windows provides *very* little hint about what drivers I have to install. Simple example, no Via4in1 installed -> computer crashes randomly after a few minutes, after install stuff mostly fine. How the heck should a normal user find that out? Same with many many other drivers, Windows ends up telling the user that there is no driver or installs a horbily outdated version and the user now has to go out itself and find a correct driver, not an easy task given that its often almost impossible to figure out how a piece of hardware is actually called. In Linux there are for most part simply no obscure third-party drivers you have to install, it all work by default and even the 'evil' binary nvidia driver is just a 'module-assistant auto-install nvidia' away.
### Binary drivers? App installation with different arguements? Device configuration that doesn't require a kernel compilation?
I have compiled my last Kernel around 2.2 times, havn't compiled a kernel for *years*, because its for most part simply a complete waste of time and unnecessary. Linux of course is far from perfect, configuring printing is a pain and configuring some other stuff as well, especially because there isn't any central point where you can configure stuff, but is spread, a little bit is done by the distro, a little bit done by Gnome and KDE and a little bit is left to 'vi'. Its all quite doable and *not* more complicated then Windows, sure maybe also not less complicated. The thing with Windows is that it only works good in theory, in practice its still a pain in the ass to keep it running, especially when you don't use it that often and aren't up to date with how to bypass this or that quirk it has.
In the end neither Windows or Linux are anywhere close to be really managable by a normal person, a normal person is able to use both without to much throuble, but as soon there is a problem both of them require quite some thinking or try&error.
Actually most of the time people have serious throuble with their Linux installation the answer is "Switch the distro", its after all so much more userfriendly then a kernel recompile.
I think the key problem with many reviews is that they only show one side of the coin, knowing why somebody might like a game is all nice and good, however quite often it would be far more interesting to know reasons why one might *not* like a game, meaning not only discussion the stuff obviously provides, since that is mostly already in the previews and press releases, but focusing on what is not there and what people might expect. I also often have the feeling when reading reviews that I am kind of from a different planet, sometimes reviews get extremly harsh on graphics, music and sound, having endless talk about how dated they look, how they ruin the experience, etc, while for me they are often a completly non-issue. I really do like good graphics, but good for me is a matter of style, not technique, I don't care if its C64, NES, SNES or a 386 PC with 320x200 VGA, as long as the graphic has a good style, I am fine with it, heck, often I find old games looking better then new ones. A typical example would be Operation Flashpoint, dropped from 8.7(PC) in score down to 5.4(XBox) in the review on gamespot, while that score might be justified or not, its pretty much impossible from the review to figure out why there was such a huge drop in score, review mostly just focuses on how dated everything looks and little else that however alone doesn't explain much and leaves out a lot (how are the controlls, save system, what didn't surive the PC->Xbox porting, etc). For me good games don't age, at least not much. What was lots of fun back 10 years ago is most likly still a lot of fun today and not just for nostalgica, but because once your into a game the experince is all matters, not how shiny the gfx look by todays 'standards'.
PS: While I am not much a fan of RE4 either (mostly due to its lack of story, puzzles and connection to the other RE-parts), the controls aren't that bad when you get used to it, sure some more dodge moves might have been good, but not being able to shoot while running around is for most part simply realism. Its actually one thing that annoys me a lot with FPS, they don't even try to get anywhere near the realism that they often claim to have, most often you can jump around almost like SuperMario yet still have super precise aiming and shooting, reality just doesn't work that way.
Yeah, would be interesting to see more of that type of game, especially know where we have 3d capabilites that can actually produce extremly good looking graphics and are no longer limited to pre-filmed stuff. While the 'interactive movie' genre had many bad games, things like WingCommander3/4, The Last Express or Fahrenheit/IndigoProphecy show pretty well that such type of game can work if done right. Even 'The Sims' is kind of an interactive movie, only that it isn't prescripted, but one creates it while playing the game automatically.
I wrote something in my blog about that kind of game, full text follows for those who are to lazy to follow the link:
== 'Viewpoints' - A form of entertainmaint beside games and movies? ==
Computer and console hardware has advanced to a point where it is possible to render quite realistically looking scenes in realtime, not yet the quality of Final Fantasy, but its getting pretty damn close. This made me thinking, what beside games will it offer us? There are already machinema aprearing every onces in a while, movies rendered with ingame engines. However those are still classic movies for most part, fixed camera angles, nothing happening behind you, etc. I think sooner or later we will see a new type of entertainment, neither a movie nor a game, but something inbetween and no I don't mean those crappy interactive games with filmed actors.
A classic movie is always linear, it has a start and an end. The camera angles are fixed and you know always exactly what is happening at any given minute if you have already watched it. With realtime rendered movies this could be different, instead of providing a fixed linear film to watch, a realtime rendered movie could provide a complete world to explore by the viewer. The viewer itself wouldn't interact with the happenings like in a game, the whole story would still be linear like in a movie, but it would allow the freedom to move around, to look at other stuff in a scene, to observe happenings beside what is happening to the main characters. This would allow to dive into the movie much deeper and the movie would be allowed to present a far richer setting as it does today. Instead of fixed camera angles and just a few characters with a few lines, it could provide dozens of characters with tons of text, the viewer wouldn't get everything on the first viewing, but could focus on different parts of the happenings on each viewings, if there is talking in the background, he could move over to that and listen. If there is a fight happening, he could view it from the perspective of the other oponent or from the perspective of a by-stander. The viewer had the ability to view a movie from multiple viewpoints, not only predefined ones, but also ones that he chose for himself.
The effort that would be required for such a movie would be quite huge, since not only a few maincharecters would need to be fitted with dialog, but everybody appearing in a movie would get text and something todo. It would turn a simple movie into a complete little world. It would of course also steel some artistic freedom, since the director could no longer force the viewer to a specific camera angle, do things offscreen and the like, when the user can always adjust the camera completly to his liking, but it would of course also offer tons of new ways which could be artistically explored.
You might think that this sounds a bit weird, but its really not that weird, both games and movies already have gone that route, at least to a little extend. In game The Longest Journey for example there is one point where the game branches, either you go to work or you stay at home on both places something is happening, but you see only one event life, the other is told you then from the other characters. A even more drastic example is the Last Express, its an adventure g
### Why I do believe there are game concepts that warrant revisits,
Its not the concept that makes Beyond Good&Evil worth a sequel, its the story. There are still many things pretty much unclear at the end of Beyond Good&Evil and having some of that cleared up in a sequel really wouldn't hurt. If I remember correctly it was planed from the beginning as triology, but due to bad sales, the sequel was put on ice. Sure, on the other side there are many sequels out there that feel kind of pointless, but if the story justifies a sequel I see nothing wrong with that. In the end a game doesn't have to be awufully innovative to be good, sure it can help, but its not a requirement. Many People don't consider Indy4 to be one of the best adventures of all time because it was revolutionary in terms of gameplay, it wasn't, it was basically all the same as you have seen in former LucasArts games, just extremly well put together with a great story.
FOSS games seldomly fall into a single year and almost never get a final release, so its hard to judge them together with commerical games which do have a final release.
### Now, of course, compilers don't detect when you change around the order of arguments with compatible types, but you apparently don't worry about those.
Well, yeah, it isn't a 100% perfect solution, but swapping arguments around which have compatible types happens quite seldomly.
### Doing a search for a complete function name (and TAGS helps you use autocompletion) shouldn't have "gazillions" of false hits, unless you use cryptically short function names, or ones that are confusingly identical to variable names.
The 'joy' of C++ or in general OOP is that you do end up having tons of very short function names, since all, or most, function ends up being members of a class there is little reason to keep them long. So instead of shape_draw(Shape*) you have Shape::draw() and in the code it will just look like obj->draw(). The throuble is a simple grep won't catch the type of obj and have no idea at all which draw() it is actually referening to. Which is also the reason why I don't use etags, since it simply doesn't understand them either and thus is of no real help.
### You are using the compiler to basically do a search through your source code.
Yes, and it makes quite a bit more sense then plain 'sed' or 'grep', since the compiler has a full understanding of the source code, while simply search through the code will hit a lot of wrong spots.
### Surely, you can find a working environment in which you can find all instances of a particular class or calls of a particular function without invoking the compiler?
Don't know any free ones for C++ (Eclipse maybe?), currently use GNU Emacs. Anyway, while the compile-and-replace way of doing it is not the fasted, its still a pretty painless ones, with Ruby or Python I can not even do that and I am left with a plain search and replace which will necessarily hit gazillions of wrong spots.
### It's a valid concern you have, but it turns out it's just a theoretical problem - not one you encounter in practice.
How to you solve type problems when you are refactoring code, ie. say you change the parameters a function or move a function to a different class ?How do you change the rest of the code that depends on the old code? In static-typed languages I would simply recompile and catch all the type errors the compiler throws at me, but in dynamic-typed languages so far I havn't really found a good solution to come anywhere near the ease that static languages provide when it comes to refactoring.
Re:Semi-Off-Topic Python vs. Perl discussion
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Guido Goes Google
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· Score: 1
### If I'm reasonably proficient in Perl, what would I gain by using Python instead?
I would suggest you give Ruby a try instead, it mixes pretty much the best of both Python and Perl. Meaning it has nice looking regex, a 'normal' non indention based syntax and plenty of other stuff.
### Even the article you linked to doesn't deny that. Whether it failed at slowing typists down is arguable, but it was still designed to do just that.
It was designed to reduce the jamming to *speed up* the writing with the available hardware. Qwerty is not optimal for todays hardware, but still a lot better then abc-layout, which is no better then a completly random one.
The point is that I *don't* need them just to get type safity in C++, of course they can do more, but I don't want to be forced to write them in the first place.
### and quicker to get done than taking the time to create massive class hierarchies whose inheritance structures and interfaces only exist to satisfy type-safety requirements.
I totally agree that a lot of coding done in static-typed languages is simply wasted, since it serves no other purpose then to make the compiler happy, however on the other side I love compile-time checks, far to many times I had some piece of Python, Ruby or some other dynamic typed language which ended up just being a *HUGE* pain to refactor, since each refactoring step (renaming a function, moving a member from one class to another, etc.) ended up in a broken programm and errors that could only be catched at runtime. Static typed languages are far easier to refactor, since one can simply rename something and then just compile and jump to the places where function are missing or types missmatch. Sure, unittesting can help a bit with dynamic typed language, but then one is kind of back at square one, only that one now ends up writing plenty of code to do stuff that the compiler would have done in a static language. I wish those dynamic languages out there would try a little bit harder to detect errors at compile time and not just runtime, sure its not always possible, but for lots and lots of cases it should be rather obvious.
Such keyboards are already invented and called chord keyboards, the good news is that they can be quite efficent and fast in use, which is why they are used in court or elsewhere where typing speed is important (Stenotype), the bad news is that they are incredible hard to learn and it is very easy to forget how to use them if you don't use them for a few weeks, meaning they have basically zero chance in the mass market.
###### Alphabetical letters are easier to find and keys are color-coded on the NSK535R to aid hunt & peck typists ### Easier to find if you have never typed before, otherwise they will be just as hard to find.
There are studies that say that even for new typists a alphabetic layout helps pretty much nothing at all, since while you might know the alphabet, you don't know where the row on a keyboard break, so you might be quick on the first row, but on the second or third you end up search as with any other layout. So alphabet layout might at best provide a very very tiny benefit for the first half an hour, but it will be a pain for the rest of your live. In the long term alphabetic layout is no better than a completly random one.
Because you either had to do it for each game over and over again, which becomes boring pretty quickly, for some games it might not even be possible. Or you have to switch layout on the OS level, then however you no longer can type in-game messages on network play.
Slashdot Mirror
### If you were to try to make a fighting game without a health meter, you would have to convey the state of health of the player in a different manner.
Or the game could be designed in such a way that there wouldn't be conventional health points in the first place. After all humans don't have a internal health meter either, so why should fighting games have one? Its just a convention that most fighting games follow these days, because every game did it that way. Bushido Blade is one of the few exceptions, you don't have 'energie' in that game, every hit with a sword can kill you there, no matter if the fight has just started or is running for multiple minutes. Hits on certain body parts can injure you and thus affecting your performance. This is bejoint just having a linear health meter displayed via animation, this is about having a non-linear health status in the game which is affected by all what happens to your character. So its not "50% healthy", but "arm broken, leg injured, etc.".
A different example of the same thing would be simulations, in most arcade-like games you have just a linear health meter, if its down you are dead, if its more then zero, even just 1%, you still have 100% performance on your vehicle. In more serious simulation however your vehicle doesn't have linear 'health', instead every system inside and outside of the vehicle can get damaged, so if in a flight game the gear gets hit, it gets broken and you have to do a belly landing, if radar gets it, you have to fly blind, your guns might not survive an attack, might jam, overhead or even explode, engines might catch fire, in a car game every tire might get damaged individually and thus affecting how well you can drive, etc. Such non-linearity in the 'health-meter' can lead to much more interesting and variing gameplay and especially much more interesting situations, its not just a "I survived or I died", things like trying to fly a broken plane home can be extremly fun challanges on their own and thus adding a lot of replay value, since each run of the same mission might turn out completly different.
### The reasoning behind computer-generated child porn is #1. It creates a demand...
a) How does it create demand?
b) How do you actually get the exact age of a computer generated or hand animated person to determine if its child porn or just normal porn?
The games that keep me coming back have mostly been more or less complex simulation games, since they often provide a wide varity of gameplay and huge scenarios to explore. Some of those games I rememeber having played for years would be Eurofighter2000, OperationFlashpoint, Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix, F/A 18 Interceptor and Falcon4. There are of course other non-simulation games that have keep me coming back, AnotherWorld being probally the one I replayed the most, even so it has almost no non-linearity, its just so perfectly done and so different from all other games, that its worth to be replayed every now and then. Other games I have replayed a lot would be Yoshis Island, Mario64 and last not least MarioKart(SNES), that one I have played for at least half a decade more or less regularly.
Would recomment you download a walkthrough for Another World, once you know what to do game its not very difficult and not really long either, can be played through in 30-40min.
### The feel of control you get by being able to look around and even for the most part stall as much as you would like in scripted events strengthens the illusion.
For me, I am probally one of the few, Half Life just didn't work very well. The in-game 'cutscenes' sounded like a nice idea on paper, but most of the time I just ended up standing there asking myself what the heck I should do and especially *why* I should do it. Since the game didn't have a real intro, explaining who I am playing and what I need to do, I had huge throuble connecting with that guy I was playing. I mean you start with doing some funky science experiment knowing exactly nothing about what you are doing there. AnotherWorld, which starts out kind of similar, on the other side worked much better, since it started with a normal intro, then had the science experiment go wrong, then placing you in another world and *then* giving the player control over the 'hero'. Since both the hero and the player at that point had exactly no idea what was going on it worked very well for me.
Beside from that there is also another classic problem with cutscenes where you can walk around: cutscenes often feel different from the main game and follow their own laws or no laws at all since all the events are prescripted, which makes it very hard to the player to know how to react to something that is happening (ie. should I run away or just stand there watching since that script-object doesn't harm me? can I shoot that thing or is it invulurable? etc.).
In RE4 cutscenes are part of the gameplay, they are not there for you to sit back, but to keep you busy. In one cutscene you actually fight against another person right inside that cutscene by pressing a bunch of button combinations. It is even more extrem is it in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, where virtually half the game consists of 'cutscenes' which you have to solve via pressing button combinations. Of course that might sound annoying at first, the thing why it works however is because you, the player, end up having the same pacing as the hero. Meaning whenever the hero needs to take action, you need to take action. I think failing to keep the pacing between the player and the hero in the game syncron is one of the reasons why cutscenes can get annoying in some games, because its no longer you who controls the action, but the video. Its especially annoying in games where the action that takes place would be perfectly controlable in-game, but isn't due to some stupid design decisions (classic example: flight game that doesn't allow you to land, but does it in a cutscene). The technique used by RE4, Fahrenheit, Shenmue and a few other games however always ends up giving the player some control, not much, but enough to still give the feeling that the player is controlling the action.
This of course might not work for all games and all kinds of cutscenes. If the cutscene is just a reward after a boss fight the player might not want to take action and it simply might not be needed since the action is already over, but especially for cutscenes that happen before or while the player is playing, giving him some control over the happening can be a great way to smoothen the gaming experince and turn the cutscene into a part of the game, instead an annoyency.
### Wouldn't it be cool if it made use of two of the "remotes"? One as a flashlight and the other as a handgun?
Add a dance mate, for actual movement of the character, into the mix and it could end up being a fun experince...
### Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't describe Wind Waker or Super Mario Sunshine as "buggy."
The problem with WindWaker and SuperMarioSunshine isn't that they are buggy, but simply that they are broken by design, they might not be bad games, but for sure they aren't great either. Comparing them to the really old classics is kind of pointless, since you end up comparing a brilliant game of yesterday to an average one of today. Comparing Sunshine and Windwaker to their predecessors on the N64 is much more interesting, since it shows that both of them are not as much fun as Ocarina of Time or Mario64 due to numerous faults in the design (ridding Epona through the world is much more interesting then a stupid ship on a ocean that is all blue and boring, being able to jump into a picture is a lot more fun then watching a stupid cutscene seeing mario dissolve, having actual Jump'n Run action is more fun then annoying 'puzzles', etc). While I would love to have more 2D games released, their simplicity had something that got lost in the more complex games, I can have just as much fun with a 3D game if it is as good as a Mario64.
### As for people not looking at specs. Right. Nice try. Specs matter. Specs determine a lot of gameplay. The simplest thing of level size and level load is determined by the specs.
Even my NES could display a whole 3D *universe* in Elite, just a matter of clever programming. In the end it makes little difference if a wall is rendered flat-shaded or instead build out of thousands of bump-mappeded polygons, it might look prettier, but from a gameplay point of view its both the same. Only in the times where the specs where good enough to go from 2D to 3D there was a significant change in gameplay, beside that specs never really changed anything in terms of gameplay, instead only in terms of presentation.
### And here you said it- Nothing _you_ can't fix. However about the rest of the 99% population?
Its no different with Windows. I have some serious doubt that a large number of people could actually reinstall a windows from scratch an configure it, thats what people have childrens, neightbours, friends and such for. Heck, most people don't even know how to copy a file to a floppy in Windows. Well, even I have throuble reinstalling Windows, since unless Linux, Windows provides *very* little hint about what drivers I have to install. Simple example, no Via4in1 installed -> computer crashes randomly after a few minutes, after install stuff mostly fine. How the heck should a normal user find that out? Same with many many other drivers, Windows ends up telling the user that there is no driver or installs a horbily outdated version and the user now has to go out itself and find a correct driver, not an easy task given that its often almost impossible to figure out how a piece of hardware is actually called. In Linux there are for most part simply no obscure third-party drivers you have to install, it all work by default and even the 'evil' binary nvidia driver is just a 'module-assistant auto-install nvidia' away.
### Binary drivers? App installation with different arguements? Device configuration that doesn't require a kernel compilation?
I have compiled my last Kernel around 2.2 times, havn't compiled a kernel for *years*, because its for most part simply a complete waste of time and unnecessary. Linux of course is far from perfect, configuring printing is a pain and configuring some other stuff as well, especially because there isn't any central point where you can configure stuff, but is spread, a little bit is done by the distro, a little bit done by Gnome and KDE and a little bit is left to 'vi'. Its all quite doable and *not* more complicated then Windows, sure maybe also not less complicated. The thing with Windows is that it only works good in theory, in practice its still a pain in the ass to keep it running, especially when you don't use it that often and aren't up to date with how to bypass this or that quirk it has.
In the end neither Windows or Linux are anywhere close to be really managable by a normal person, a normal person is able to use both without to much throuble, but as soon there is a problem both of them require quite some thinking or try&error.
Actually most of the time people have serious throuble with their Linux installation the answer is "Switch the distro", its after all so much more userfriendly then a kernel recompile.
I think the key problem with many reviews is that they only show one side of the coin, knowing why somebody might like a game is all nice and good, however quite often it would be far more interesting to know reasons why one might *not* like a game, meaning not only discussion the stuff obviously provides, since that is mostly already in the previews and press releases, but focusing on what is not there and what people might expect. I also often have the feeling when reading reviews that I am kind of from a different planet, sometimes reviews get extremly harsh on graphics, music and sound, having endless talk about how dated they look, how they ruin the experience, etc, while for me they are often a completly non-issue. I really do like good graphics, but good for me is a matter of style, not technique, I don't care if its C64, NES, SNES or a 386 PC with 320x200 VGA, as long as the graphic has a good style, I am fine with it, heck, often I find old games looking better then new ones. A typical example would be Operation Flashpoint, dropped from 8.7(PC) in score down to 5.4(XBox) in the review on gamespot, while that score might be justified or not, its pretty much impossible from the review to figure out why there was such a huge drop in score, review mostly just focuses on how dated everything looks and little else that however alone doesn't explain much and leaves out a lot (how are the controlls, save system, what didn't surive the PC->Xbox porting, etc). For me good games don't age, at least not much. What was lots of fun back 10 years ago is most likly still a lot of fun today and not just for nostalgica, but because once your into a game the experince is all matters, not how shiny the gfx look by todays 'standards'.
PS: While I am not much a fan of RE4 either (mostly due to its lack of story, puzzles and connection to the other RE-parts), the controls aren't that bad when you get used to it, sure some more dodge moves might have been good, but not being able to shoot while running around is for most part simply realism. Its actually one thing that annoys me a lot with FPS, they don't even try to get anywhere near the realism that they often claim to have, most often you can jump around almost like SuperMario yet still have super precise aiming and shooting, reality just doesn't work that way.
Yeah, would be interesting to see more of that type of game, especially know where we have 3d capabilites that can actually produce extremly good looking graphics and are no longer limited to pre-filmed stuff. While the 'interactive movie' genre had many bad games, things like WingCommander3/4, The Last Express or Fahrenheit/IndigoProphecy show pretty well that such type of game can work if done right. Even 'The Sims' is kind of an interactive movie, only that it isn't prescripted, but one creates it while playing the game automatically.
I wrote something in my blog about that kind of game, full text follows for those who are to lazy to follow the link:
http://grumbel.blogspot.com/2005/08/viewpoints-for m-of-entertainmaint.html
== 'Viewpoints' - A form of entertainmaint beside games and movies? ==
Computer and console hardware has advanced to a point where it is possible to render quite realistically looking scenes in realtime, not yet the quality of Final Fantasy, but its getting pretty damn close. This made me thinking, what beside games will it offer us? There are already machinema aprearing every onces in a while, movies rendered with ingame engines. However those are still classic movies for most part, fixed camera angles, nothing happening behind you, etc. I think sooner or later we will see a new type of entertainment, neither a movie nor a game, but something inbetween and no I don't mean those crappy interactive games with filmed actors.
A classic movie is always linear, it has a start and an end. The camera angles are fixed and you know always exactly what is happening at any given minute if you have already watched it. With realtime rendered movies this could be different, instead of providing a fixed linear film to watch, a realtime rendered movie could provide a complete world to explore by the viewer. The viewer itself wouldn't interact with the happenings like in a game, the whole story would still be linear like in a movie, but it would allow the freedom to move around, to look at other stuff in a scene, to observe happenings beside what is happening to the main characters. This would allow to dive into the movie much deeper and the movie would be allowed to present a far richer setting as it does today. Instead of fixed camera angles and just a few characters with a few lines, it could provide dozens of characters with tons of text, the viewer wouldn't get everything on the first viewing, but could focus on different parts of the happenings on each viewings, if there is talking in the background, he could move over to that and listen. If there is a fight happening, he could view it from the perspective of the other oponent or from the perspective of a by-stander. The viewer had the ability to view a movie from multiple viewpoints, not only predefined ones, but also ones that he chose for himself.
The effort that would be required for such a movie would be quite huge, since not only a few maincharecters would need to be fitted with dialog, but everybody appearing in a movie would get text and something todo. It would turn a simple movie into a complete little world. It would of course also steel some artistic freedom, since the director could no longer force the viewer to a specific camera angle, do things offscreen and the like, when the user can always adjust the camera completly to his liking, but it would of course also offer tons of new ways which could be artistically explored.
You might think that this sounds a bit weird, but its really not that weird, both games and movies already have gone that route, at least to a little extend. In game The Longest Journey for example there is one point where the game branches, either you go to work or you stay at home on both places something is happening, but you see only one event life, the other is told you then from the other characters. A even more drastic example is the Last Express, its an adventure g
### Why I do believe there are game concepts that warrant revisits,
Its not the concept that makes Beyond Good&Evil worth a sequel, its the story. There are still many things pretty much unclear at the end of Beyond Good&Evil and having some of that cleared up in a sequel really wouldn't hurt. If I remember correctly it was planed from the beginning as triology, but due to bad sales, the sequel was put on ice. Sure, on the other side there are many sequels out there that feel kind of pointless, but if the story justifies a sequel I see nothing wrong with that. In the end a game doesn't have to be awufully innovative to be good, sure it can help, but its not a requirement. Many People don't consider Indy4 to be one of the best adventures of all time because it was revolutionary in terms of gameplay, it wasn't, it was basically all the same as you have seen in former LucasArts games, just extremly well put together with a great story.
FOSS games seldomly fall into a single year and almost never get a final release, so its hard to judge them together with commerical games which do have a final release.
### Now, of course, compilers don't detect when you change around the order of arguments with compatible types, but you apparently don't worry about those.
Well, yeah, it isn't a 100% perfect solution, but swapping arguments around which have compatible types happens quite seldomly.
### Doing a search for a complete function name (and TAGS helps you use autocompletion) shouldn't have "gazillions" of false hits, unless you use cryptically short function names, or ones that are confusingly identical to variable names.
The 'joy' of C++ or in general OOP is that you do end up having tons of very short function names, since all, or most, function ends up being members of a class there is little reason to keep them long. So instead of shape_draw(Shape*) you have Shape::draw() and in the code it will just look like obj->draw(). The throuble is a simple grep won't catch the type of obj and have no idea at all which draw() it is actually referening to. Which is also the reason why I don't use etags, since it simply doesn't understand them either and thus is of no real help.
### You are using the compiler to basically do a search through your source code.
Yes, and it makes quite a bit more sense then plain 'sed' or 'grep', since the compiler has a full understanding of the source code, while simply search through the code will hit a lot of wrong spots.
### Surely, you can find a working environment in which you can find all instances of a particular class or calls of a particular function without invoking the compiler?
Don't know any free ones for C++ (Eclipse maybe?), currently use GNU Emacs. Anyway, while the compile-and-replace way of doing it is not the fasted, its still a pretty painless ones, with Ruby or Python I can not even do that and I am left with a plain search and replace which will necessarily hit gazillions of wrong spots.
### It's a valid concern you have, but it turns out it's just a theoretical problem - not one you encounter in practice.
How to you solve type problems when you are refactoring code, ie. say you change the parameters a function or move a function to a different class ?How do you change the rest of the code that depends on the old code? In static-typed languages I would simply recompile and catch all the type errors the compiler throws at me, but in dynamic-typed languages so far I havn't really found a good solution to come anywhere near the ease that static languages provide when it comes to refactoring.
### If I'm reasonably proficient in Perl, what would I gain by using Python instead?
I would suggest you give Ruby a try instead, it mixes pretty much the best of both Python and Perl. Meaning it has nice looking regex, a 'normal' non indention based syntax and plenty of other stuff.
### Even the article you linked to doesn't deny that. Whether it failed at slowing typists down is arguable, but it was still designed to do just that.
It was designed to reduce the jamming to *speed up* the writing with the available hardware. Qwerty is not optimal for todays hardware, but still a lot better then abc-layout, which is no better then a completly random one.
The point is that I *don't* need them just to get type safity in C++, of course they can do more, but I don't want to be forced to write them in the first place.
### and quicker to get done than taking the time to create massive class hierarchies whose inheritance structures and interfaces only exist to satisfy type-safety requirements.
I totally agree that a lot of coding done in static-typed languages is simply wasted, since it serves no other purpose then to make the compiler happy, however on the other side I love compile-time checks, far to many times I had some piece of Python, Ruby or some other dynamic typed language which ended up just being a *HUGE* pain to refactor, since each refactoring step (renaming a function, moving a member from one class to another, etc.) ended up in a broken programm and errors that could only be catched at runtime. Static typed languages are far easier to refactor, since one can simply rename something and then just compile and jump to the places where function are missing or types missmatch. Sure, unittesting can help a bit with dynamic typed language, but then one is kind of back at square one, only that one now ends up writing plenty of code to do stuff that the compiler would have done in a static language. I wish those dynamic languages out there would try a little bit harder to detect errors at compile time and not just runtime, sure its not always possible, but for lots and lots of cases it should be rather obvious.
Such keyboards are already invented and called chord keyboards, the good news is that they can be quite efficent and fast in use, which is why they are used in court or elsewhere where typing speed is important (Stenotype), the bad news is that they are incredible hard to learn and it is very easy to forget how to use them if you don't use them for a few weeks, meaning they have basically zero chance in the mass market.
###### Alphabetical letters are easier to find and keys are color-coded on the NSK535R to aid hunt & peck typists
### Easier to find if you have never typed before, otherwise they will be just as hard to find.
There are studies that say that even for new typists a alphabetic layout helps pretty much nothing at all, since while you might know the alphabet, you don't know where the row on a keyboard break, so you might be quick on the first row, but on the second or third you end up search as with any other layout. So alphabet layout might at best provide a very very tiny benefit for the first half an hour, but it will be a pain for the rest of your live. In the long term alphabetic layout is no better than a completly random one.
Because you either had to do it for each game over and over again, which becomes boring pretty quickly, for some games it might not even be possible. Or you have to switch layout on the OS level, then however you no longer can type in-game messages on network play.