C&C generals was actually the first RTS I played more than once or twice. I found after playing for 1-2 weeks the AI was painfully dumb. Are most RTS games that bad?
I found that Generals had the best skirmish mode of the series, but yes, the AI in most RTS games is like that, and as one of the other responses points out, there's not much to the AI that can be made for an RTS unless developers expand on what an RTS actually is.
I actually only buy games that are multiplayer. I even bought generals with the thought that I would mostly play online until I found out how poor the community was.
I generally only buy FPS games that I feel might be fun in multiplayer. With RTS games, though, I rarely play multiplayer, because I tend to feel that either the rush gets you or you spend a near eternity building up a massive force to take out the other player(s).
"Why do I feel like a shrinking demographic?"
You aren't, if anything you will become part of a growing demographic as players get turned off of multiplayer by poor matchmaking systems. If Joe Player works 8 hours, comes home and wants to play a game online, he doesn't want to play Joe EliteGamer who has no job, and has been playing for the 8 hours that Joe Player was at work. Multiplayer is fun when the participants are at equal skill levels, when they aren't it gets pretty boring and/or annoying pretty quickly.
I agree here, though I think it will take a little longer to get through this stage. PC games are mostly over the multiplayer stage, but the obsession with MMO games is huge with publishers right now because of the possible cash that a successful MMO game can bring in, every month. The single player experiences in games that pushed internet multiplayer to the forefront, like FPS games, has been improving a great deal over the past few years. RTS is likely to follow, because although RTS games had multiplayer capability from the start, they weren't really popular for internet multiplayer until StarCraft came around (which, coincidentally, had one of the better single-player experiences for an RTS game). RPG games may actually be more likely to split over this, as the multiplayer- and MMO- RPGs that are successful generally are quite different from the successful single-player experiences in the genre. We'll see the same thing in a few years with console games, as it's almost a given that the next generation of consoles will be internet multiplayer capable out of the starting gate (though Nintendo might stay away for a little while).
The other alternative is that someone will develop some amazing ranking/tracking system that is connected to a matchmaking system and starts a revolution in internet multiplayer matchmaking. We've all known for quite some time that people don't enjoy playing against people of vastly different skill levels all the time and it's quite possible that someone will figure out how to solve this problem. That being said, I have had occasions where I really enjoyed playing against people that were much better than I was, and really benefitted from that experience, but I knew full well what I was getting into because I knew who those people were and where they regularly played.
Sometimes I download demos or spectate live when some clans are playing, but it's hard to follow since you can only spectate one person at a time, or watch an overivew wich aint that fun to watch. Alot of the time you'll be spectating the wrong guy and miss all the action.
I'm not sure about CS, but if you download an HLTV demo of a TFC match or spectate live you can go into free mode and watch particular areas without depending on people actually being there. Generally, when I did spectate a lot of matches (almost 2 years ago now), I kept the overview in the top-right of my screen and floated around until I saw some reason to spectate a particular person. The most fun thing to do, of course, was to float over the middle of the map when prematch ended (in TFC you end up with 3-5 people from each team leaving their base and crossing through the middle fairly soon after prematch ends).
CS may not lend itself as well to spectating simply because of it's slower pace and the more specific roles of each team (one team defends something while another attacks rather than both teams having to fill both roles).
But anyone that ever played World Class Track Meet knows that the game was better played if you got down on the floor and beat the mat with your hands.
Since I use a 'MS Natural' style keyboard and a trackball anyway, I've always found that if I just put one or two pillows on my right and set my trackball on that, and then put the keyboard in my lap, I'm just fine. I could see needing a board or something, though, with the smaller straight keyboards, and know that at least one friend of mine does this with a plain old board (that came from a desk he had fall apart after roughly 6 months with a 30" TV sitting on it).
I'm not sure about cheaper, unless they're on sale for one reason or another at that particular time, but I do know that the local BestBuy carries a hell of a lot more PC games than any of the local EBGames or GameStops. Therefore, if I'm looking for a PC game, I usually go to BestBuy. All of the local EBGames, GameStops, etc have had their PC games down to a very small amount of space (compared to the 3 major consoles) for the last several months, and they don't seem to keep games around as long as they used to.
If I'm looking for console games, I go to them, because they have a better selection than BestBuy and usually better prices (especially if I can find them used, or if they're a month or so old). BestBuy keeps multiple copies of each title on the floor and yet still has less space dedicated to console games than most of the others.
Saying "I'm a fan of so-and-so" is fine because it's an expression of admiration and respect. But saying, without any embarsassment and maybe even with some pride, "that person is a fan of me", reveals a grossly inflated self-image.
Except, of course, that they're not saying "you over there are a fan of mine", they're saying "I owe it to those people that call themselves my fans".
Referring to people as customers is sometimes equally (if not more) offensive simply because it shows a very definite profit motive (which people don't like to admit is the real reason for a move like this). Besides, as far as the Middle Earth and D&D games go, they have no customers, only potential customers and many of those are fans of their previous work.
Like RtCW, MoH was not an HL engine license. In fact, the only games that used the HL engine were HL and the various mods that were released to retail (like Counterstrike). HL itself was a Quake-engine based game, which could explain the similarities between it and other games which licensed newer Quake engines (most recent FPS games licensed the Q3 engine).
As for someone stealing HL2's thunder, well, I just don't think that's going to happen. Doom 3 is probably the only game that has a chance of doing that, as no FPS game has sold as well as HL, yet when Doom came out no PC game had sold as well as it did (until Myst came out).
Not to mention games that came out a few weeks ago, such as Crimson Skies (though a bit older) Final Fantasy X-2 Fire Emblem (again a bit older) Mario Kart:DD Super Mario Bros. 3 Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
but yes, a lot of the new games came out almost a bit early for the XMas rush, and many games were delayed until January at the earliest (FF:CC, Doom 3, HL2), and probably later (in the cases of the latter 2).
Got my parents done, but have to wait for payday to get my gf's gifts. I also have to ship my dad's gifts still, which will probably also be on Friday (day after payday). So, in short, I'll be done (and probably nearly broke) just in time for the weekend.
I am old enough to remember when music in games was made with the midi part of your soundcard. It meant music was small, took little to no cpu time to play, didn't create crashes (music would keep playing AFTER a crash) and could easily be altered. The idea was in some games like x-wing that the music would change according to what was happening.
Even games that don't use midi will sometimes continue playing the music after a crash, it simply depends on how the game handled the music. The idea behind using midi, though, was simply that the music could be as complicated as you wanted it to be, and the sound card's ability to play it would determine what the user heard. In other words, if the user couldn't play 32, 64, 128, or 256 voices, it would just play the 8 or 16 voices it could play (and a well-encoded midi score would do this gracefully). Many of those older games sound significantly better on new sound cards if they can still be played (and can still work with your sound card).
For some reason midi died. I blame consoles but I blame them for anything. More likely just to many cheapo soundcards came out that did not properly support midi.
Actually, it's simply a matter of cheap soundcards that only had 16-voice midi playback being able to play the full score off a Redbook CD. In other words, playing off the CD sounded better, even on a cheap sound card. The only time the midi was comparable was on high-end cards that most people simply didn't have (and there was a whole industry of midi daughter-boards that catered to gamers and musicians which is now significantly smaller).
Instead some games. Tombraider comes to mind played music from the cd. Not file from the CD. Actual cd music. In fact speech was played from the cd as well. This more then anything else is my reason for hating consoles. Anyone who played it on a pc would probably agree.
Very little of this, though, had anything to do with consoles. Games were doing it quite a while before Tomb Raider came out, and it was mostly a big love-fest with the ability to do full CD-quality sound on even crappy computers, and the CD format in general.
Anyway. Nowadays music is most often an MP3 or even more recent an OGG or somthing like that. And I noticed something. Almost always switching the music off will improve not only speed but stability as well. The speed issue has dropped a bit since Command & Conquer days but the stability still seems to be there for me. Over several new pc's I always noticed that if a game reguarly freezes switching the music off will help.
These types of problems should only occur with the music being streamed off the CD (especially in Redbook format) and not being cached in any way on the disc. Generally speaking, any game that stores it's music in MP3 or OGG format shouldn't have this problem, and it was mostly corrected on games using Redbook audio by caching the soundtrack (though caching the music sometimes still lead to a slight delay or even freeze between tracks as the CD spun up, unless they had the forethought to cache the first few seconds of each song to play while the CD started).
That and the fact that most music is crap and even more crappily mixed. Soft music during heavy combat then swelling up as people start to talk.
That's just poor production on the part of the developers and/or whoever put the music into the game. That's not nearly as common today as it was almost 10 years ago, when CD music first started becoming popular in PC games.
So leave the music out eh? Or least keep it to the movies. I can play my own cd's thank you very much. My tastes are probably different anyway. Worst example of that was playing Kotor and finding a techno beat in some places. Ewh.
I prefer that they supply music, do it well, and then still give me the option to either turn it off or use my own music (the latter especially). There are plenty of music soundtracks out there that I can't stand, but there are also quite a few that I absolutely love, and that would not have existed if it weren't for the games themselves.
Although I don't think it was licensed, the soundtrack to C&C Red Alert was the first one that I actually bought as a soundtrack (though I bought the Quake shareware CD for the NIN soundtrack and it eventually migrated to my music CD collection with the full version CD in with my games CDs). Instead of simply picking up the expansion, I bought the set that included the game, the expansion, and the soundtrack CD simply because it had the CD in it (and the expansion that I was already looking to buy), and then gave my original game CDs to a friend.
I also like the soundtracks to Frequency and Amplitude, although they tend to have more pop music than I care for, and the game is all about manipulating the music in the first place.
With the XBox I find that I have a tendency to use my own music collection in most of the games that allow me to. It almost seems that the console's ability to do that has replaced most exclusive developers' desire to put together a good soundtrack (exceptions are Halo and KOTOR off the top of my head, which have original soundtracks anyway). I never get through more than one track on Project Gotham Racing without heading to the options menu to pull a couple of CDs worth of music from the hard drive to replace the crap on that game.
Not sure about how things were licensed and whatnot, but my favourite soundtrack was probably Trent Reznor's (NIN) score for Quake. Creepy ambient music, perfect for blasting zombies.
The music was written specifically for the game, and, iirc, the Doom 3 soundtrack is supposed to be written by Trent Reznor as well. One of the best parts, imo, was that the entire sound track was included on the shareware CD, so you could essentially get a full NIN album (though quite different from his other work) for $5-9 by just skipping the first track (the data track).
The soundtrack to the sequel sounded too cheesy-90s-action-flick.
I forget which band wrote that music, but they also did half the music for Quake 3. Front Line Assmebly did the rest of the music in Q3, and, iirc, all of the tracks can be found in the main data file for the game, named according to which band created them (all of the Front Line Assembly tracks' filenames start with fla). Unfortunately, since the files are included in the data, you're stuck with the quality level of the files rather than having the tracks on the CD like they were with Q1 and Q2. Of course, they could've been in wav format at full quality, it's just been a long time since I looked at Q3.
Just a quick note, the Age of Empires soundtrack is actually one piece, at least in the way it's placed on the disc. The whole thing can be ripped by most MP3 rippers as a single 30-minute-or-so track.
and the more recent True Crime ("a well-made licensed soundtrack") as good examples of this,
I can't really agree or disagree because I never played the game, but he states the choice of using music that "consisted almost entirely of hardcore West Coast hip-hop and rap and really made you feel like you were listening to LA radio". I'm sorry, but L.A. radio isn't that different from radio anywhere else. Most of it is the same old Clear Channel crap. Independant radio survives a little better because of the size of the audience, but not to the point where you're going to hear that music on the air, especially uncensored. You'll get the same watered down hip-hop and rap that plays on 50+% of the radio stations in the country. I do agree, however, that the particular choice of music was probably good for the style and feel of the game they were trying to create.
before singling out the EA Sports Trax program, as used in Madden 2004 and others, as "destined to fail - 'cus you can't make a good soundtrack out of singles."
Of course, that one line was probably his worst argument in the entire article. Even the rest of his reasoning for EA Sports Trax' problems is better than this (and even the part of the quoted line before 'destined to fail'). You can make a good soundtrack out of singles, you simply have to make sure that the singles you use are coherent as a single piece, or that they play against each other well.
His section on how SSX 3 handles music was probably the most interesting analysis of a single game, probably simply because it's the most complex handling of music in any game he mentioned. I do agree that the rhythm-game approach (similar to that of Frequency and Amplitude, for instance) is one of the best ways to handle changing the music in reaction to what's happening in the game, especially if you are licensing the music (rather than writing or having it written specifically for the game). Otherwise, the music you license would have to be very close in sound to not cause awkward shifts from one track to the next when the pace of the game changes (you can write music to limit the audible shift from one track to the next even if you don't know where it's going to shift, but it's significantly harder to do this with music that wasn't written with this in mind).
Come on now, don't you remember the Golden Gate falling into the sea in 1989 and the BART tunnels collapsing?
Oh, wait, that was in my head. The biggest problem the bay area had in 1989 was concerning the supports for the upper roads on double-decker bridges spanning the bay. The bridges themselves stayed up, and the tunnels under the bay did, as well. A lot of traffic was rerouted around the bay after the quake, but that was because they had to clear the 2nd road from the bridges and rebuild them (with supports that would actually survive an earthquake).
The differences in even the most minor items in terms of building codes between an earthquake-prone area such as California and an area that is not earthquake-prone (such as Virginia) are amazing. The level of damage when an earthquake actually hits an area that is not built to deal with earthquakes tends to make people think that they are more destructive forces than they usually are (after all, here in VA people were showing off the new cracks in their walls after a 4.9 earthquake that had an epicenter a good distance away).
Mentioning Mandrake as a distributor of (mostly) OSS is wrong. Mandrake distributes 100% free code, including their in-house apps like drakx, urpmi, mcc, you name it. The download edition that anyone can get for free (as in beer and speech) is actually that: FREE. The boxed sets include some useful commercial and/or closed source apps (mainly to make life easier, like nvidia accelerated drivers) but overall, their distro and the work they contribute is open and free.
How, exactly, does the rest of your paragraph support your first sentence? In fact, your last sentence contradicts your second sentence.
The Mandrake boxed sets still cost money, but I'm not condemning the practices of any of these companies, simply pointing out that they are companies that use OSS in a commercial manner, some (like Red Hat and SuSe) with more success than others (like Mandrake, which has had financial difficulty for some time). Even the FSF, which is arguably one of the most radical free software organizations in terms of their views, supports the idea of selling software and support, as long as the code is available to the people that have the software (and under the GPL primarily in the FSF's case).
and either way, even 32 gallons could be a big deal in an environment like the antarctic. Beyond that, the cost for 32 or 104 gallons of gas considering all of the additional concerns of shipping and storage is probably extremely high, and calculating the cost for an unplanned expenditure is often a risky proposal (because the gas would have to be replaced at current or future gas prices, not at the original cost at the time they originally brought it to Antarctica).
Commercial development does exactly the opposite, by protecting everything with patents and forcing everyone to re-invent the wheel when they write anything.
That is a strawman, as commercial and open source are not opposing viewpoints. I write a great deal of software that comes with the source code and is not commercial, yet that doesn't mean I post it on the internet, either. Red Hat, Mandrake, and many others are commercial software companies that happen to distribute (mostly) open source software. Microsoft, of all people, distributes some open source software (and charges money for some of it).
Furthermore, even closed-source software does not generally mean using patents or even forcing people to reinvent the wheel. You deal with a lot of APIs, frameworks, libraries, and so on in commercial software development, and you also produce those things. IT departments don't all buy MS Office just because it's the most used office software, but also because it's a rather minor job to write a piece of software that utilizes and controls any piece of software in the Office suite (which is also why Office has been such a problem when it comes to viruses, worms, trojans, macro exploits, and so on). It's easy to put an Excel worksheet in a window with a bunch of custom controls and save the data as an Excel file. This isn't re-inventing the wheel, it's high level re-use, without needing access to the code.
Open source works because, when they want to, anyone can work on it. It works because, as long as people are willing to host it, the code is always there. You can't kill it unless you drive out the desire to work on it. However, there are no guarantees, and this is what the myth is dealing with. Just because you write something and release it's source code doesn't mean that you'll find people that even want to use your software, never mind actually write code or tell you what's wrong with it. It's not just the OSS community that makes these assumptions, but it is an assumption generally made about OSS. My managers sometimes like to make threats, especially when software is taking too long to complete (in their estimate, not based on the estimates I gave them at the beginning of the project), that they'll just get someone else to finish it up. While that is possible (just as it's possible that people will help if you just open-source something), it isn't an easy road to take, and doesn't guarantee anything. Someone coming in to take my place on a software project has to figure out what's being done, what has been done, and where it needs to be to finish it. Someone coming into an OSS project has to figure out where they should start to contribute. For some people, just the mass of unfamiliar code will prevent them from getting anything done for days, weeks, or months, or even discourage them from doing anything at all. Many either won't see a need to add to the code, or won't see anything that makes your project any more valuable than any other project performing a similar function (or anything of value in the project at all). You have to get past all of these obstacles before you get a single contribution. All of these obstacles are also hidden behind the first major obstacle: making people aware that your project even exists.
Mozilla has, for most of the projects lifetime, been mostly a project of the same group of Netscape developers, whether they're the ones that open-sourced it in the first place or people that have been hired in the time since then. OSS probably saved Netscape from extinction, but how many projects have the recognition to survive the time of complete failure and uselessness that existed in the Mozilla project before a single good build came about?
I would imagine this would be a huge problem. Syncing the visual motion/ frame rate, with the motion sensation (and it's frame rate) could take a while to perfect.
It shouldn't be any bigger of an issue than cueing rumble effects in rumble/force feedback controllers. The biggest part will be keeping it from over- or under- doing it with each change, and, assuming they use the full 360 degrees in each axis both in the hardware and the software this might actually be easier than force feedback. It's all a matter of developing the right API for the device, and then putting it in the hands of the developers.
I also have the problem only when watching people play (or when watching recorded demos). I've never had it when I was playing the game.
That being said, my dad does have problems when playing the games, and he pretty much stopped playing games around the same time.
As for the eye problems thing, I guess bad eyesight could make the effect more likely, but in my case my vision is better than average at close distances (I'm near-sighted), and I almost always wear my glasses anyway. It does make me wonder, though, whether or not my dad's ever tried playing FPS games with his reading glasses on.
Additionally, I've never had any other type of motion sickness, whether in a car, plane, or boat, unless some other problem caused it (ie I had an ear or sinus infection), and it takes about 30 minutes or more of watching for it to really kick in. When I do get eye strain, it's caused by a poor quality monitor and/or graphics card (ie low refresh rate), and that just gives me very bad headaches (sometimes migraines).
Even CD-RWs are cheaper than those floppy disks were back when shareware was really big. Beyond that, you don't need to burn a CD until you plan to give it to someone else, and if the game sucks just uninstall it and delete the installer.
This is going to cost Johanson an arm and a leg, regardless of how it all turns out. If the Americans and Kiwis continue to refuse to sell him any fuel, I suspect that he'll have to do one of two things to get his plane out of there:
Not to mention that: a) He should've had a plan in place in case he couldn't make it and had to land in Antarctica that didn't depend on his ability to find the bases in the first place, let alone buy gas from them
b) The bases more than likely have regular shipments of gas in regular amounts that more or less take care of their needs, with some minor excess in case of emergency. It's unlikely they have enough gas to sell him some without scheduling an unplanned shipment to replace what they sell.
It probably maintains currency in international usage because "Yank" sounds a fair bit like "wank(er)" which is more or less the sort of feeling that is often meant.
And interestingly enough, at least to some people in the US, yank or yanker has pretty much the same meaning as wank or wanker in the UK.
heh, in the US, Yankees would most likely be those in the northern states, specifically referring to the US Civil War (North vs. South and all of that). To some people here in the south it is quite an offense to be called a Yankee. Then again, there're also those like myself that grew up outside of the area involved that just think the only reason someone would use such an antiquated term would be to use it in a derogatory sense.
It's not all that bad. Basically, Final Fantasy IV was released as Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy VI was released as Final Fantasy III. When Final Fantasy VII came out, they decided to use the original titles for that and all future releases, which lead to the US finally getting FFII and FFV, as well as the remakes of FFIV(II on US SNES) and FFVI(III on US SNES) with their original titles.
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C&C generals was actually the first RTS I played more than once or twice. I found after playing for 1-2 weeks the AI was painfully dumb. Are most RTS games that bad?
I found that Generals had the best skirmish mode of the series, but yes, the AI in most RTS games is like that, and as one of the other responses points out, there's not much to the AI that can be made for an RTS unless developers expand on what an RTS actually is.
I actually only buy games that are multiplayer. I even bought generals with the thought that I would mostly play online until I found out how poor the community was.
I generally only buy FPS games that I feel might be fun in multiplayer. With RTS games, though, I rarely play multiplayer, because I tend to feel that either the rush gets you or you spend a near eternity building up a massive force to take out the other player(s).
"Why do I feel like a shrinking demographic?"
You aren't, if anything you will become part of a growing demographic as players get turned off of multiplayer by poor matchmaking systems. If Joe Player works 8 hours, comes home and wants to play a game online, he doesn't want to play Joe EliteGamer who has no job, and has been playing for the 8 hours that Joe Player was at work. Multiplayer is fun when the participants are at equal skill levels, when they aren't it gets pretty boring and/or annoying pretty quickly.
I agree here, though I think it will take a little longer to get through this stage. PC games are mostly over the multiplayer stage, but the obsession with MMO games is huge with publishers right now because of the possible cash that a successful MMO game can bring in, every month. The single player experiences in games that pushed internet multiplayer to the forefront, like FPS games, has been improving a great deal over the past few years. RTS is likely to follow, because although RTS games had multiplayer capability from the start, they weren't really popular for internet multiplayer until StarCraft came around (which, coincidentally, had one of the better single-player experiences for an RTS game). RPG games may actually be more likely to split over this, as the multiplayer- and MMO- RPGs that are successful generally are quite different from the successful single-player experiences in the genre. We'll see the same thing in a few years with console games, as it's almost a given that the next generation of consoles will be internet multiplayer capable out of the starting gate (though Nintendo might stay away for a little while).
The other alternative is that someone will develop some amazing ranking/tracking system that is connected to a matchmaking system and starts a revolution in internet multiplayer matchmaking. We've all known for quite some time that people don't enjoy playing against people of vastly different skill levels all the time and it's quite possible that someone will figure out how to solve this problem. That being said, I have had occasions where I really enjoyed playing against people that were much better than I was, and really benefitted from that experience, but I knew full well what I was getting into because I knew who those people were and where they regularly played.
Sometimes I download demos or spectate live when some clans are playing, but it's hard to follow since you can only spectate one person at a time, or watch an overivew wich aint that fun to watch. Alot of the time you'll be spectating the wrong guy and miss all the action.
I'm not sure about CS, but if you download an HLTV demo of a TFC match or spectate live you can go into free mode and watch particular areas without depending on people actually being there. Generally, when I did spectate a lot of matches (almost 2 years ago now), I kept the overview in the top-right of my screen and floated around until I saw some reason to spectate a particular person. The most fun thing to do, of course, was to float over the middle of the map when prematch ended (in TFC you end up with 3-5 people from each team leaving their base and crossing through the middle fairly soon after prematch ends).
CS may not lend itself as well to spectating simply because of it's slower pace and the more specific roles of each team (one team defends something while another attacks rather than both teams having to fill both roles).
But anyone that ever played World Class Track Meet knows that the game was better played if you got down on the floor and beat the mat with your hands.
Since I use a 'MS Natural' style keyboard and a trackball anyway, I've always found that if I just put one or two pillows on my right and set my trackball on that, and then put the keyboard in my lap, I'm just fine. I could see needing a board or something, though, with the smaller straight keyboards, and know that at least one friend of mine does this with a plain old board (that came from a desk he had fall apart after roughly 6 months with a 30" TV sitting on it).
I'm not sure about cheaper, unless they're on sale for one reason or another at that particular time, but I do know that the local BestBuy carries a hell of a lot more PC games than any of the local EBGames or GameStops. Therefore, if I'm looking for a PC game, I usually go to BestBuy. All of the local EBGames, GameStops, etc have had their PC games down to a very small amount of space (compared to the 3 major consoles) for the last several months, and they don't seem to keep games around as long as they used to.
If I'm looking for console games, I go to them, because they have a better selection than BestBuy and usually better prices (especially if I can find them used, or if they're a month or so old). BestBuy keeps multiple copies of each title on the floor and yet still has less space dedicated to console games than most of the others.
Saying "I'm a fan of so-and-so" is fine because it's an expression of admiration and respect. But saying, without any embarsassment and maybe even with some pride, "that person is a fan of me", reveals a grossly inflated self-image.
Except, of course, that they're not saying "you over there are a fan of mine", they're saying "I owe it to those people that call themselves my fans".
Referring to people as customers is sometimes equally (if not more) offensive simply because it shows a very definite profit motive (which people don't like to admit is the real reason for a move like this). Besides, as far as the Middle Earth and D&D games go, they have no customers, only potential customers and many of those are fans of their previous work.
Like RtCW, MoH was not an HL engine license. In fact, the only games that used the HL engine were HL and the various mods that were released to retail (like Counterstrike). HL itself was a Quake-engine based game, which could explain the similarities between it and other games which licensed newer Quake engines (most recent FPS games licensed the Q3 engine).
As for someone stealing HL2's thunder, well, I just don't think that's going to happen. Doom 3 is probably the only game that has a chance of doing that, as no FPS game has sold as well as HL, yet when Doom came out no PC game had sold as well as it did (until Myst came out).
Not to mention games that came out a few weeks ago, such as
Crimson Skies (though a bit older)
Final Fantasy X-2
Fire Emblem (again a bit older)
Mario Kart:DD
Super Mario Bros. 3
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
but yes, a lot of the new games came out almost a bit early for the XMas rush, and many games were delayed until January at the earliest (FF:CC, Doom 3, HL2), and probably later (in the cases of the latter 2).
Got my parents done, but have to wait for payday to get my gf's gifts. I also have to ship my dad's gifts still, which will probably also be on Friday (day after payday). So, in short, I'll be done (and probably nearly broke) just in time for the weekend.
I am old enough to remember when music in games was made with the midi part of your soundcard. It meant music was small, took little to no cpu time to play, didn't create crashes (music would keep playing AFTER a crash) and could easily be altered. The idea was in some games like x-wing that the music would change according to what was happening.
Even games that don't use midi will sometimes continue playing the music after a crash, it simply depends on how the game handled the music. The idea behind using midi, though, was simply that the music could be as complicated as you wanted it to be, and the sound card's ability to play it would determine what the user heard. In other words, if the user couldn't play 32, 64, 128, or 256 voices, it would just play the 8 or 16 voices it could play (and a well-encoded midi score would do this gracefully). Many of those older games sound significantly better on new sound cards if they can still be played (and can still work with your sound card).
For some reason midi died. I blame consoles but I blame them for anything. More likely just to many cheapo soundcards came out that did not properly support midi.
Actually, it's simply a matter of cheap soundcards that only had 16-voice midi playback being able to play the full score off a Redbook CD. In other words, playing off the CD sounded better, even on a cheap sound card. The only time the midi was comparable was on high-end cards that most people simply didn't have (and there was a whole industry of midi daughter-boards that catered to gamers and musicians which is now significantly smaller).
Instead some games. Tombraider comes to mind played music from the cd. Not file from the CD. Actual cd music. In fact speech was played from the cd as well. This more then anything else is my reason for hating consoles. Anyone who played it on a pc would probably agree.
Very little of this, though, had anything to do with consoles. Games were doing it quite a while before Tomb Raider came out, and it was mostly a big love-fest with the ability to do full CD-quality sound on even crappy computers, and the CD format in general.
Anyway. Nowadays music is most often an MP3 or even more recent an OGG or somthing like that. And I noticed something. Almost always switching the music off will improve not only speed but stability as well. The speed issue has dropped a bit since Command & Conquer days but the stability still seems to be there for me. Over several new pc's I always noticed that if a game reguarly freezes switching the music off will help.
These types of problems should only occur with the music being streamed off the CD (especially in Redbook format) and not being cached in any way on the disc. Generally speaking, any game that stores it's music in MP3 or OGG format shouldn't have this problem, and it was mostly corrected on games using Redbook audio by caching the soundtrack (though caching the music sometimes still lead to a slight delay or even freeze between tracks as the CD spun up, unless they had the forethought to cache the first few seconds of each song to play while the CD started).
That and the fact that most music is crap and even more crappily mixed. Soft music during heavy combat then swelling up as people start to talk.
That's just poor production on the part of the developers and/or whoever put the music into the game. That's not nearly as common today as it was almost 10 years ago, when CD music first started becoming popular in PC games.
So leave the music out eh? Or least keep it to the movies. I can play my own cd's thank you very much. My tastes are probably different anyway. Worst example of that was playing Kotor and finding a techno beat in some places. Ewh.
I prefer that they supply music, do it well, and then still give me the option to either turn it off or use my own music (the latter especially). There are plenty of music soundtracks out there that I can't stand, but there are also quite a few that I absolutely love, and that would not have existed if it weren't for the games themselves.
Although I don't think it was licensed, the soundtrack to C&C Red Alert was the first one that I actually bought as a soundtrack (though I bought the Quake shareware CD for the NIN soundtrack and it eventually migrated to my music CD collection with the full version CD in with my games CDs). Instead of simply picking up the expansion, I bought the set that included the game, the expansion, and the soundtrack CD simply because it had the CD in it (and the expansion that I was already looking to buy), and then gave my original game CDs to a friend.
I also like the soundtracks to Frequency and Amplitude, although they tend to have more pop music than I care for, and the game is all about manipulating the music in the first place.
With the XBox I find that I have a tendency to use my own music collection in most of the games that allow me to. It almost seems that the console's ability to do that has replaced most exclusive developers' desire to put together a good soundtrack (exceptions are Halo and KOTOR off the top of my head, which have original soundtracks anyway). I never get through more than one track on Project Gotham Racing without heading to the options menu to pull a couple of CDs worth of music from the hard drive to replace the crap on that game.
Not sure about how things were licensed and whatnot, but my favourite soundtrack was probably Trent Reznor's (NIN) score for Quake. Creepy ambient music, perfect for blasting zombies.
The music was written specifically for the game, and, iirc, the Doom 3 soundtrack is supposed to be written by Trent Reznor as well. One of the best parts, imo, was that the entire sound track was included on the shareware CD, so you could essentially get a full NIN album (though quite different from his other work) for $5-9 by just skipping the first track (the data track).
The soundtrack to the sequel sounded too cheesy-90s-action-flick.
I forget which band wrote that music, but they also did half the music for Quake 3. Front Line Assmebly did the rest of the music in Q3, and, iirc, all of the tracks can be found in the main data file for the game, named according to which band created them (all of the Front Line Assembly tracks' filenames start with fla). Unfortunately, since the files are included in the data, you're stuck with the quality level of the files rather than having the tracks on the CD like they were with Q1 and Q2. Of course, they could've been in wav format at full quality, it's just been a long time since I looked at Q3.
Just a quick note, the Age of Empires soundtrack is actually one piece, at least in the way it's placed on the disc. The whole thing can be ripped by most MP3 rippers as a single 30-minute-or-so track.
and the more recent True Crime ("a well-made licensed soundtrack") as good examples of this,
I can't really agree or disagree because I never played the game, but he states the choice of using music that "consisted almost entirely of hardcore West Coast hip-hop and rap and really made you feel like you were listening to LA radio". I'm sorry, but L.A. radio isn't that different from radio anywhere else. Most of it is the same old Clear Channel crap. Independant radio survives a little better because of the size of the audience, but not to the point where you're going to hear that music on the air, especially uncensored. You'll get the same watered down hip-hop and rap that plays on 50+% of the radio stations in the country. I do agree, however, that the particular choice of music was probably good for the style and feel of the game they were trying to create.
before singling out the EA Sports Trax program, as used in Madden 2004 and others, as "destined to fail - 'cus you can't make a good soundtrack out of singles."
Of course, that one line was probably his worst argument in the entire article. Even the rest of his reasoning for EA Sports Trax' problems is better than this (and even the part of the quoted line before 'destined to fail'). You can make a good soundtrack out of singles, you simply have to make sure that the singles you use are coherent as a single piece, or that they play against each other well.
His section on how SSX 3 handles music was probably the most interesting analysis of a single game, probably simply because it's the most complex handling of music in any game he mentioned. I do agree that the rhythm-game approach (similar to that of Frequency and Amplitude, for instance) is one of the best ways to handle changing the music in reaction to what's happening in the game, especially if you are licensing the music (rather than writing or having it written specifically for the game). Otherwise, the music you license would have to be very close in sound to not cause awkward shifts from one track to the next when the pace of the game changes (you can write music to limit the audible shift from one track to the next even if you don't know where it's going to shift, but it's significantly harder to do this with music that wasn't written with this in mind).
Come on now, don't you remember the Golden Gate falling into the sea in 1989 and the BART tunnels collapsing?
Oh, wait, that was in my head. The biggest problem the bay area had in 1989 was concerning the supports for the upper roads on double-decker bridges spanning the bay. The bridges themselves stayed up, and the tunnels under the bay did, as well. A lot of traffic was rerouted around the bay after the quake, but that was because they had to clear the 2nd road from the bridges and rebuild them (with supports that would actually survive an earthquake).
The differences in even the most minor items in terms of building codes between an earthquake-prone area such as California and an area that is not earthquake-prone (such as Virginia) are amazing. The level of damage when an earthquake actually hits an area that is not built to deal with earthquakes tends to make people think that they are more destructive forces than they usually are (after all, here in VA people were showing off the new cracks in their walls after a 4.9 earthquake that had an epicenter a good distance away).
Mentioning Mandrake as a distributor of (mostly) OSS is wrong. Mandrake distributes 100% free code, including their in-house apps like drakx, urpmi, mcc, you name it. The download edition that anyone can get for free (as in beer and speech) is actually that: FREE. The boxed sets include some useful commercial and/or closed source apps (mainly to make life easier, like nvidia accelerated drivers) but overall, their distro and the work they contribute is open and free.
How, exactly, does the rest of your paragraph support your first sentence? In fact, your last sentence contradicts your second sentence.
The Mandrake boxed sets still cost money, but I'm not condemning the practices of any of these companies, simply pointing out that they are companies that use OSS in a commercial manner, some (like Red Hat and SuSe) with more success than others (like Mandrake, which has had financial difficulty for some time). Even the FSF, which is arguably one of the most radical free software organizations in terms of their views, supports the idea of selling software and support, as long as the code is available to the people that have the software (and under the GPL primarily in the FSF's case).
and either way, even 32 gallons could be a big deal in an environment like the antarctic. Beyond that, the cost for 32 or 104 gallons of gas considering all of the additional concerns of shipping and storage is probably extremely high, and calculating the cost for an unplanned expenditure is often a risky proposal (because the gas would have to be replaced at current or future gas prices, not at the original cost at the time they originally brought it to Antarctica).
Commercial development does exactly the opposite, by protecting everything with patents and forcing everyone to re-invent the wheel when they write anything.
That is a strawman, as commercial and open source are not opposing viewpoints. I write a great deal of software that comes with the source code and is not commercial, yet that doesn't mean I post it on the internet, either. Red Hat, Mandrake, and many others are commercial software companies that happen to distribute (mostly) open source software. Microsoft, of all people, distributes some open source software (and charges money for some of it).
Furthermore, even closed-source software does not generally mean using patents or even forcing people to reinvent the wheel. You deal with a lot of APIs, frameworks, libraries, and so on in commercial software development, and you also produce those things. IT departments don't all buy MS Office just because it's the most used office software, but also because it's a rather minor job to write a piece of software that utilizes and controls any piece of software in the Office suite (which is also why Office has been such a problem when it comes to viruses, worms, trojans, macro exploits, and so on). It's easy to put an Excel worksheet in a window with a bunch of custom controls and save the data as an Excel file. This isn't re-inventing the wheel, it's high level re-use, without needing access to the code.
Open source works because, when they want to, anyone can work on it. It works because, as long as people are willing to host it, the code is always there. You can't kill it unless you drive out the desire to work on it. However, there are no guarantees, and this is what the myth is dealing with. Just because you write something and release it's source code doesn't mean that you'll find people that even want to use your software, never mind actually write code or tell you what's wrong with it. It's not just the OSS community that makes these assumptions, but it is an assumption generally made about OSS. My managers sometimes like to make threats, especially when software is taking too long to complete (in their estimate, not based on the estimates I gave them at the beginning of the project), that they'll just get someone else to finish it up. While that is possible (just as it's possible that people will help if you just open-source something), it isn't an easy road to take, and doesn't guarantee anything. Someone coming in to take my place on a software project has to figure out what's being done, what has been done, and where it needs to be to finish it. Someone coming into an OSS project has to figure out where they should start to contribute. For some people, just the mass of unfamiliar code will prevent them from getting anything done for days, weeks, or months, or even discourage them from doing anything at all. Many either won't see a need to add to the code, or won't see anything that makes your project any more valuable than any other project performing a similar function (or anything of value in the project at all). You have to get past all of these obstacles before you get a single contribution. All of these obstacles are also hidden behind the first major obstacle: making people aware that your project even exists.
Mozilla has, for most of the projects lifetime, been mostly a project of the same group of Netscape developers, whether they're the ones that open-sourced it in the first place or people that have been hired in the time since then. OSS probably saved Netscape from extinction, but how many projects have the recognition to survive the time of complete failure and uselessness that existed in the Mozilla project before a single good build came about?
I would imagine this would be a huge problem. Syncing the visual motion/ frame rate, with the motion sensation (and it's frame rate) could take a while to perfect.
It shouldn't be any bigger of an issue than cueing rumble effects in rumble/force feedback controllers. The biggest part will be keeping it from over- or under- doing it with each change, and, assuming they use the full 360 degrees in each axis both in the hardware and the software this might actually be easier than force feedback. It's all a matter of developing the right API for the device, and then putting it in the hands of the developers.
I also have the problem only when watching people play (or when watching recorded demos). I've never had it when I was playing the game.
That being said, my dad does have problems when playing the games, and he pretty much stopped playing games around the same time.
As for the eye problems thing, I guess bad eyesight could make the effect more likely, but in my case my vision is better than average at close distances (I'm near-sighted), and I almost always wear my glasses anyway. It does make me wonder, though, whether or not my dad's ever tried playing FPS games with his reading glasses on.
Additionally, I've never had any other type of motion sickness, whether in a car, plane, or boat, unless some other problem caused it (ie I had an ear or sinus infection), and it takes about 30 minutes or more of watching for it to really kick in. When I do get eye strain, it's caused by a poor quality monitor and/or graphics card (ie low refresh rate), and that just gives me very bad headaches (sometimes migraines).
Even CD-RWs are cheaper than those floppy disks were back when shareware was really big. Beyond that, you don't need to burn a CD until you plan to give it to someone else, and if the game sucks just uninstall it and delete the installer.
This is going to cost Johanson an arm and a leg, regardless of how it all turns out. If the Americans and Kiwis continue to refuse to sell him any fuel, I suspect that he'll have to do one of two things to get his plane out of there:
Not to mention that:
a) He should've had a plan in place in case he couldn't make it and had to land in Antarctica that didn't depend on his ability to find the bases in the first place, let alone buy gas from them
b) The bases more than likely have regular shipments of gas in regular amounts that more or less take care of their needs, with some minor excess in case of emergency. It's unlikely they have enough gas to sell him some without scheduling an unplanned shipment to replace what they sell.
It probably maintains currency in international usage because "Yank" sounds a fair bit like "wank(er)" which is more or less the sort of feeling that is often meant.
And interestingly enough, at least to some people in the US, yank or yanker has pretty much the same meaning as wank or wanker in the UK.
heh, in the US, Yankees would most likely be those in the northern states, specifically referring to the US Civil War (North vs. South and all of that). To some people here in the south it is quite an offense to be called a Yankee. Then again, there're also those like myself that grew up outside of the area involved that just think the only reason someone would use such an antiquated term would be to use it in a derogatory sense.
It's not all that bad. Basically, Final Fantasy IV was released as Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy VI was released as Final Fantasy III. When Final Fantasy VII came out, they decided to use the original titles for that and all future releases, which lead to the US finally getting FFII and FFV, as well as the remakes of FFIV(II on US SNES) and FFVI(III on US SNES) with their original titles.