It always seemed there were three or four different ways any goal could be accomplished, and I felt that added a huge amount to the experience of building up your characters skills.
I don't know if you're still an active gamer, but Deus Ex is a more recent game that utilizes this open-ended mechanic with great effectiveness.
Chrono Trigger
FF6
Golden Sun
Dragon Quest (Warrior)
Secret of Mana
Any Zelda Game
Your list is comprised solely of Japanese RPGs. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- I think RPG players are pretty well split between the RPG sub-genres:
"Japanese" RPG: Very well-(and pre-)defined characters; strong, linear story; limits on free will. Examples are, well, those you listed above.
"Western" RPG: User-defined characters; more open-ended stories; more stat-crunching; more opportunities for non-linearity. Examples include any and all of the 9 Ultima games; Neverwinter Nights; the Fallout series; the Daggerfall series.
They're notably different styles of game design, and each sub-genre has its fans. I, personally, would like to see things move in the open-ended direction -- although not really an RPG, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City both really did this right. If you could combine the depth of, say, Thief or Deus Ex with the non-linearity and persistence of GTA3, boy... you'd have one hell of a killer game.
Can we say "Tipper Gore"? How about "Hilary Clinton"? "Joe Lieberman"? Need I go on?
It's a good and oft-ignored point -- censorship (or, more accurately, attempted legislation of consumption behavior) isn't a Left/Liberal-Right/Conservative issue. There are plenty of folks on both sides who'd love to prevent potentially "offensive" material from being sold in stores.
Oh, yes you will. This failure will stick in your craw. It will tug at the corners of your conscousness. Eventually - perhaps when you read about an interesting tid-bit in a new distro release, you will be drawn in again to redeem yourself.
Modded as Funny, and rightfully so, but there's so much truth to what he's saying. This is what happened to me. I first installed Red Hat in 1997; I reformatted the partition about 12 hours later. Since then, I've re-installed Linux (on average) about twice a year. Each time, I stuck with it a little longer. Why? Because each time:
1. The installation process got a little smoother.
2. I learned a little more about this beast Linux and how it does things. This is akin to that "tugging" mentioned in the parent post.
3. There was a little more I could *do* in Linux. In other words, applications kept accumulating.
4. Microsoft just kept pushing me.
In the end ("the end" being about 6 months ago) it was the convergence of these factors that finally led to my full-time adoption of Linux at home. When MS started talking about their licensing plans for Windows XP, I made a resolution that Windows 2000 would be the last Microsoft OS I ever installed, and that I'd move myself over to Linux at home.
Sure enough, almost as if on schedule, Linux had finally reached the point where it did at least 75% of what I needed for day-to-day computing. For those things it still didn't do, there was WINE, WineX, and VMWare.
(I'll resist the urge to end this like a "Switch" ad...:)
May I ask, is MAME available for the Zaurus? And if so, would you consider it to be a decent platform for MAME (i.e. are there diagonals on the d-pad, does it handle multiple button-presses, etc.)?
May I ask, is MAME available for the Zaurus? And if so, would you consider it to be a decent platform for MAME (i.e. are there diagonals on the d-pad, does it handle multiple button-presses, etc.)?
There are some really amazing things going on... and I'm surprised no one mentions it too often. Things like generative programming, aspect oriented programming, domain engineering, the list goes on.
I'm interested in hearing more... do you have links to specific pages that exemplify some of these practices?
Experiments in "3D" interfaces always seem well-intentioned, but miss the point. When folks start placing the user in a virtual environment, making it necessary to "walk around" a cluttered file system or data structure, it becomes far more cumbersome than the file manager metaphor.
For my money and/or time, the proper direction for a 3D GUI would be something like a combination of Personal Brain and the GUI from Minority Report. (Don't laugh, I'm serious!) You want to give the user the ability to establish relationships between chunks of data, and visually echo those relationships in the UI -- thick cord connects to parent; thin line connects to peers; ghosted dots indicate references; etc.
So the "depth" isn't really about being inside a 3D space -- it's about always having related data nearby and available while keeping unrelated data out of the way. And, again, we know what's related, and in what way, because the user has established these relationships.
First, the real issue is not hardware or CPU cycles -- it is software.
Excellent post. Wish I had some mod points today.
It's good that someone is addressing the hardware issue, but the software is equally important. We're not even close to the sort of problem-solving software the human brain holds.
Personally, I don't think we'll get there by trying to simulate a human brain straight up. I think that, as we learn more about the building blocks of life over the next 200 years, we'll be able to build those low-level rules into a life simulation. Then... well, we let artificial life "evolve" within this simulation. If we start with one-celled animals and eventually multicellular creatures evolve, we know we're doing something right.
(And if we start with non-living components -- raw elements and quantum physics -- and eventually get living one-celled animals, then we REALLY know we're doing something right;)
Okay, okay, now I'm just talking crazy. But I think we'll be there within the next 200 years, and when we get there, we're going to have a whole new set of ethical and practical issues to grapple with...
It's almost as if they are completely ignorant of the fact that DEVELOPERS are the only ones keeping Microsoft in their position, so -- of *COURSE* Microsoft is going to be aggressive about controlling them.
I can't believe you would question Microsoft's devotion to developers...
His drivel about being able to "see a stream of 3D documents" reminds me of the virtual surreality user interfaces in that movie.
Actually, the UI from Minority Report seemed pretty badass. I could live happily with something like that, particularly for 2d paint apps and 3d modeling.
The unrealistic style is just that; style - something that's not really possible in live-action movies. If you're not going to have style, then you may as well film live-action.
As I've said in some other replies, I'm not suggesting that Pixar should use a more realistic style. I'm asking why their technology seems to be striving for realisim while their art is striving for a clearly non-photoreal style.
Well, maybe not quite, but since the tech isn't quite up to rendering realistic people (Exhibit A: Final Fantasy), you might as well exaggerate the shortcomings and call it 'artistic license'.
(I'm shamelessly duplicating another reply, but I can't think of many other ways to say it.)
Right, but you're missing my point -- I'm not saying that their stuff shouldn't be stylized (that's why I went out of my way to suggest that they were doing so deliberately)... my point is that if the tech people and the art people were of one mind, it seems like we'd see more innovations that were focused on enhancing the non-photoreal style that permeates Pixar's films.
It's like a paraphrased quote from a recent cinefx magazine... if you want to make a CG film with characters that all look and act perfectly human, just hire real people.
(I'm shamelessly duplicating another reply, but I can't think of many other ways to say it.)
Right, but you're missing my point -- I'm not saying that their stuff shouldn't be stylized (that's why I went out of my way to suggest that they were doing so deliberately)... my point is that if the tech people and the art people were of one mind, it seems like we'd see more innovations that were focused on enhancing the non-photoreal style that permeates Pixar's films.
The fact that pixar is still using unrealistic characters is just a sign that they don't feel the technology to do something "better" exists yet.
But wait, that wasn't my point -- I'm not saying Pixar should be doing realistic-looking films. I'm asking why their technology seems to be striving for realisim while their art is striving for a clearly non-photoreal style. Thus, the schizophrenia, blah blah blah.
They design them to look like a 3D rendering of a Disney character so that they can easy make the stuffed animals look like the character! And don't forget the full-sized characters that walk around at Disney World.
Because they are making animated movies. They are necessarily stylized.
Right, but you're missing my point -- I'm not saying that their stuff shouldn't be stylized (that's why I went out of my way to suggest that they were doing so deliberately)... my point is that if the tech people and the art people were of one mind, it seems like we'd see more innovations that were focused on enhancing the non-photoreal style that permeates Pixar's films.
It's possible that I'm just responding to the difference between the creative division and the PRman division.
(BTW, my other gripe is that Pixar's style is way too generic and "default" for my taste... it doesn't seem very carefully thought-through. But I suppose that's another rant;)
The under-water environment looks extremely well done; the colours, refraction, fading etc. look very realistic.
This is what continually perplexes me about Pixar. Technically, they seem very geared around the infinitely explanding path toward photorealism. And that's cool.
Yet, one could easily argue, given the evidence (Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, and now Finding Nemo) that Pixar has a clear and deliberately unrealistic style. So you have this bizarre juxtaposition of the big-eyed, cartoony character in Monsters Inc who sported a state-of-the-art hyper-realistic hair (or fur) simulation.
What I'm saying is, why bother with advances toward photorealism such as hair simulation and advanced underwater effects if every one of your characters is designed to look like a stuffed animal or 3d rendering of a Disney character?
It's almost as if there's a schizophrenia within Pixar.
These two are really on different sides of the political spectrum. Batman would be a hard core Libritarian or an anarchist, and Supes would likely be a puppet for the GOP.
While I agree that in DKR Superman and Batman represent opposite political poles, I'm not sure their politics are as cut and dry as this. I've heard many arguments in which people posited that Batman represented the radical Right with his Clint Eastwood-style desire for blind vengeance.
They certainly defined opposites, but I don't think those opposites were "Liberal" and "Conservative" or "Left" and "Right". (Then what axis did they define? If my brain weren't clouded by GTAVC right now, I'd probably write more here, but I'll leave it be and get back to my game;)
But in the end, BMRT died because it was not open source, because there was a single point of failiure conveniently avaiable to be attacked.
Do you say this because an open-source BMRT would have been open to public scrutiny, forcing Pixar to explicitly identify the infringing source code? Or because an open-source BMRT would have been well-distributed and dispersed, preventing the shutdown of a single distribution point?
I might buy the first argument, but not the second.
Slashdot Mirror
It always seemed there were three or four different ways any goal could be accomplished, and I felt that added a huge amount to the experience of building up your characters skills.
I don't know if you're still an active gamer, but Deus Ex is a more recent game that utilizes this open-ended mechanic with great effectiveness.
Candidates for best RPG ever?
Chrono Trigger
FF6
Golden Sun
Dragon Quest (Warrior)
Secret of Mana
Any Zelda Game
Your list is comprised solely of Japanese RPGs. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- I think RPG players are pretty well split between the RPG sub-genres:
"Japanese" RPG: Very well-(and pre-)defined characters; strong, linear story; limits on free will. Examples are, well, those you listed above.
"Western" RPG: User-defined characters; more open-ended stories; more stat-crunching; more opportunities for non-linearity. Examples include any and all of the 9 Ultima games; Neverwinter Nights; the Fallout series; the Daggerfall series.
They're notably different styles of game design, and each sub-genre has its fans. I, personally, would like to see things move in the open-ended direction -- although not really an RPG, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City both really did this right. If you could combine the depth of, say, Thief or Deus Ex with the non-linearity and persistence of GTA3, boy... you'd have one hell of a killer game.
Can we say "Tipper Gore"? How about "Hilary Clinton"? "Joe Lieberman"? Need I go on?
a nalysis2.html
q uestionnaire.pl?page=1
It's a good and oft-ignored point -- censorship (or, more accurately, attempted legislation of consumption behavior) isn't a Left/Liberal-Right/Conservative issue. There are plenty of folks on both sides who'd love to prevent potentially "offensive" material from being sold in stores.
There's more on the differences between the "Left/Right" axis and the "Libertarian/Authoritarian" axis here:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/
Or, if you want to take the test first and see where you stand:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/
Oh, yes you will. This failure will stick in your craw. It will tug at the corners of your conscousness. Eventually - perhaps when you read about an interesting tid-bit in a new distro release, you will be drawn in again to redeem yourself.
:)
Modded as Funny, and rightfully so, but there's so much truth to what he's saying. This is what happened to me. I first installed Red Hat in 1997; I reformatted the partition about 12 hours later. Since then, I've re-installed Linux (on average) about twice a year. Each time, I stuck with it a little longer. Why? Because each time:
1. The installation process got a little smoother.
2. I learned a little more about this beast Linux and how it does things. This is akin to that "tugging" mentioned in the parent post.
3. There was a little more I could *do* in Linux. In other words, applications kept accumulating.
4. Microsoft just kept pushing me.
In the end ("the end" being about 6 months ago) it was the convergence of these factors that finally led to my full-time adoption of Linux at home. When MS started talking about their licensing plans for Windows XP, I made a resolution that Windows 2000 would be the last Microsoft OS I ever installed, and that I'd move myself over to Linux at home.
Sure enough, almost as if on schedule, Linux had finally reached the point where it did at least 75% of what I needed for day-to-day computing. For those things it still didn't do, there was WINE, WineX, and VMWare.
(I'll resist the urge to end this like a "Switch" ad...
May I ask, is MAME available for the Zaurus? And if so, would you consider it to be a decent platform for MAME (i.e. are there diagonals on the d-pad, does it handle multiple button-presses, etc.)?
Thanks in advance!
May I ask, is MAME available for the Zaurus? And if so, would you consider it to be a decent platform for MAME (i.e. are there diagonals on the d-pad, does it handle multiple button-presses, etc.)?
Thanks!
There are some really amazing things going on... and I'm surprised no one mentions it too often. Things like generative programming, aspect oriented programming, domain engineering, the list goes on.
I'm interested in hearing more... do you have links to specific pages that exemplify some of these practices?
Experiments in "3D" interfaces always seem well-intentioned, but miss the point. When folks start placing the user in a virtual environment, making it necessary to "walk around" a cluttered file system or data structure, it becomes far more cumbersome than the file manager metaphor.
For my money and/or time, the proper direction for a 3D GUI would be something like a combination of Personal Brain and the GUI from Minority Report. (Don't laugh, I'm serious!) You want to give the user the ability to establish relationships between chunks of data, and visually echo those relationships in the UI -- thick cord connects to parent; thin line connects to peers; ghosted dots indicate references; etc.
So the "depth" isn't really about being inside a 3D space -- it's about always having related data nearby and available while keeping unrelated data out of the way. And, again, we know what's related, and in what way, because the user has established these relationships.
" They already have a great example... of a 'simple lifeform'. It lives in the white house..."
"Yep, the simplest examples of the dumbest and simplest lifeforms are the entire Democratic party."
No, you're a big dummy-head!
First, the real issue is not hardware or CPU cycles -- it is software.
;)
Excellent post. Wish I had some mod points today.
It's good that someone is addressing the hardware issue, but the software is equally important. We're not even close to the sort of problem-solving software the human brain holds.
Personally, I don't think we'll get there by trying to simulate a human brain straight up. I think that, as we learn more about the building blocks of life over the next 200 years, we'll be able to build those low-level rules into a life simulation. Then... well, we let artificial life "evolve" within this simulation. If we start with one-celled animals and eventually multicellular creatures evolve, we know we're doing something right.
(And if we start with non-living components -- raw elements and quantum physics -- and eventually get living one-celled animals, then we REALLY know we're doing something right
Okay, okay, now I'm just talking crazy. But I think we'll be there within the next 200 years, and when we get there, we're going to have a whole new set of ethical and practical issues to grapple with...
It's almost as if they are completely ignorant of the fact that DEVELOPERS are the only ones keeping Microsoft in their position, so -- of *COURSE* Microsoft is going to be aggressive about controlling them.
I can't believe you would question Microsoft's devotion to developers...
Hehe... it does beg some sort of vague "War On..." status, doesn't it?
"We believe Iraq may be harboring vast deposits of carbon and carbon-based life-forms. We must act now in order to..."
His drivel about being able to "see a stream of 3D documents" reminds me of the virtual surreality user interfaces in that movie.
Actually, the UI from Minority Report seemed pretty badass. I could live happily with something like that, particularly for 2d paint apps and 3d modeling.
No links from salon please, we all know which direction they lean.
Uh-huh. And thanks to the "NAAWP" link in your header, we all know which direction you lean.
Will winex run it?
Just wait for the final version next Spring. There'll be a Linux release, I'm sure.
The unrealistic style is just that; style - something that's not really possible in live-action movies. If you're not going to have style, then you may as well film live-action.
As I've said in some other replies, I'm not suggesting that Pixar should use a more realistic style. I'm asking why their technology seems to be striving for realisim while their art is striving for a clearly non-photoreal style.
Well, maybe not quite, but since the tech isn't quite up to rendering realistic people (Exhibit A: Final Fantasy), you might as well exaggerate the shortcomings and call it 'artistic license'.
(I'm shamelessly duplicating another reply, but I can't think of many other ways to say it.)
Right, but you're missing my point -- I'm not saying that their stuff shouldn't be stylized (that's why I went out of my way to suggest that they were doing so deliberately)... my point is that if the tech people and the art people were of one mind, it seems like we'd see more innovations that were focused on enhancing the non-photoreal style that permeates Pixar's films.
It's like a paraphrased quote from a recent cinefx magazine... if you want to make a CG film with characters that all look and act perfectly human, just hire real people.
(I'm shamelessly duplicating another reply, but I can't think of many other ways to say it.)
Right, but you're missing my point -- I'm not saying that their stuff shouldn't be stylized (that's why I went out of my way to suggest that they were doing so deliberately)... my point is that if the tech people and the art people were of one mind, it seems like we'd see more innovations that were focused on enhancing the non-photoreal style that permeates Pixar's films.
The fact that pixar is still using unrealistic characters is just a sign that they don't feel the technology to do something "better" exists yet.
But wait, that wasn't my point -- I'm not saying Pixar should be doing realistic-looking films. I'm asking why their technology seems to be striving for realisim while their art is striving for a clearly non-photoreal style. Thus, the schizophrenia, blah blah blah.
They design them to look like a 3D rendering of a Disney character so that they can easy make the stuffed animals look like the character! And don't forget the full-sized characters that walk around at Disney World.
;)
I was hoping to avoid such a cynical conclusion
Because they are making animated movies. They are necessarily stylized.
;)
Right, but you're missing my point -- I'm not saying that their stuff shouldn't be stylized (that's why I went out of my way to suggest that they were doing so deliberately)... my point is that if the tech people and the art people were of one mind, it seems like we'd see more innovations that were focused on enhancing the non-photoreal style that permeates Pixar's films.
It's possible that I'm just responding to the difference between the creative division and the PRman division.
(BTW, my other gripe is that Pixar's style is way too generic and "default" for my taste... it doesn't seem very carefully thought-through. But I suppose that's another rant
I would expect that when their contract with Disney is up, they may move towards other areas.
Cool. I'm keeping my mind open enough to fall back in love with Pixar if they do start taking more chances once the Disney contract is up.
The under-water environment looks extremely well done; the colours, refraction, fading etc. look very realistic.
This is what continually perplexes me about Pixar. Technically, they seem very geared around the infinitely explanding path toward photorealism. And that's cool.
Yet, one could easily argue, given the evidence (Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, and now Finding Nemo) that Pixar has a clear and deliberately unrealistic style. So you have this bizarre juxtaposition of the big-eyed, cartoony character in Monsters Inc who sported a state-of-the-art hyper-realistic hair (or fur) simulation.
What I'm saying is, why bother with advances toward photorealism such as hair simulation and advanced underwater effects if every one of your characters is designed to look like a stuffed animal or 3d rendering of a Disney character?
It's almost as if there's a schizophrenia within Pixar.
These two are really on different sides of the political spectrum. Batman would be a hard core Libritarian or an anarchist, and Supes would likely be a puppet for the GOP.
;)
While I agree that in DKR Superman and Batman represent opposite political poles, I'm not sure their politics are as cut and dry as this. I've heard many arguments in which people posited that Batman represented the radical Right with his Clint Eastwood-style desire for blind vengeance.
They certainly defined opposites, but I don't think those opposites were "Liberal" and "Conservative" or "Left" and "Right". (Then what axis did they define? If my brain weren't clouded by GTAVC right now, I'd probably write more here, but I'll leave it be and get back to my game
But in the end, BMRT died because it was not open source, because there was a single point of failiure conveniently avaiable to be attacked.
Do you say this because an open-source BMRT would have been open to public scrutiny, forcing Pixar to explicitly identify the infringing source code? Or because an open-source BMRT would have been well-distributed and dispersed, preventing the shutdown of a single distribution point?
I might buy the first argument, but not the second.