Last night did a check and found 12,000 cs servers. And of course that check only covers the US, canada, and some parts of europe and south america.
CS is probably even more popular in asia than it is here, so if we very conservatively claim that 24,000 servers are up at any one time, and maybe 5% of those are full of bots, and maybe 10% of those servers are empty, you still have 20,400 servers. If each server had just an average of 10 people playing, that would be 204,000 players. Some servers have only a few players sure, but others have 32.
Again there are probably closer to 50,000 CS servers running at any one time globally. I've never played on a russian, chinese, or korean server...
All right I give. I'm not disrespecting HL either, I played it to completion...and enjoyed it. But HL is a classic case of a technology becoming something much larger than it was ever intended to be.
Modding HL into TFC and CS was a huge, and very overlooked, occurance in the game community. Most game companies still don't have a clue on how to capitalize on the modding phenomenon. HL is a perfect success story for this.
And there's noone on this board who can say with a straight face that CS didn't at least double HL sales.
Why in gods name is this modded as troll? I'm not an andersen consultant, sales numbers aren't made up on the back of an envelope. Hundreds of thousands of people are playing counter-strike RIGHT NOW.
One would hope and expect so. The thing that made the first game was the fantastic story line, the incredible scripted sequences, and the feeling of intellegence from the enemy.
Disagree, game was OK but I would have never heard of it if not for counter-strike. Valve owes the cs team everything for thier success.
I think this is a great tool for directors and actors. Instead of having to wait weeks/months to incorporate CGI and see the interaction, it can be done in minutes/hours or as fast as the CGI people can splice things together.
From the article:
"It's not at full resolution, but at least it gives them something to work with rather than working completely blind after each take."
So how is this different from using wireframe models to do live action takes? That's been done for years now. All I can tell from the article is that they managed to put a few more polygons on the wireframe than they did last year. They are not doing WYSIWYG.
As far as I can tell, "ILM Now Capable of Realtime CGI" is a misleading title for this story. It's only natural that if you upgrade your processor you're going to be able to put more polygons on the wireframe model. We see this kind of thing every year with new games. It gets better incrementally, year by year.
If a standard wireframe model has 0 polygons, and a fully rendered Jar Jar has 10^5 polygons, then how many do these new liveaction models have? 10^3, 10^4? The article doesn't even say.
Rather, I like the dynamics of Neverwinter Nights. Small groups of people, who are like-minded. It's what you look for in your typical RPG anyways; the party comraderie, the give-and-take, clasing of personalities... a great story to tell later, if successful.
I agree with many of your points. The best way to bring the players closer together would be voice chat. Naturally you'd need a small, NWN-type party system in order for it to work. The griefers just love to abuse voice channels. You need to game with a group of people you know in order to avoid this problem.
I mean, do the authors of this thing ever go *outside*? Like, breathe in dust or anything like that? There are tiny particles of all sorts of things all over!
Yes, but the mamallion respiratory system has had millions of years to evolve and adapt to the types of conditions you're referring to. Suddenly introducing thousands of new types of airborne radicals is not something the human body has been designed for.
This is outrageous, how far will the DMCA go before those in charge realize what it's doing to us. How much will it take before soemone decides to put an end to it.
Hitler made a policy of eradicating intellectualis in order to quell dissent within germany. George Bush and friends are promoting laws that do the same thing within the United States. In an ideal republican world, there will be no "end to it". Or, as Orwell put it, "the future is a boot stomping on a human face forever".
Clinton may have passed the DMCA, but like any other sensible human being he would re-evaluate its effect, listen to his public, and make changes that were better in accord with the spirit of america. There is little hope of that within the current regime.
Intellectuals, professionals, and the middle-class are the enemies of republicanism. Just as republicanism is the enemy of the american dream.
Does being born in the US make you more entitled to a middle class or better living, than someone from somewhere else with greater skills, intelligence, and willingness to work?
Almost every american generation since 1776 has seen its stardard of living improve. If you're asking me if college educated americans working 50-60hr weeks for a crappy studio apt and barely enough money to survive, when in 1970 a house painter could own his own 3 bedroom home is upsetting? Yes that is very upsetting.
And you H1b folks aren't the only ones who are contributing to this. The mexican workers here all live communally so they can afford to charge what they do. All the rich white republican assholes who hire them are just fine with that because they don't believe human beings deserve basic neccesities like Health Care, or families, or cars, or privacy. H1bs are similar in that they are indentured slaves.
You justify what you earn as being meritous, in that you are "better" than those of us you replace. But in fact you are morally inferior. When you start lobbying for standardized health care, and unionized labor forces...then maybe you'll convince me you're better human beings than we are. Until then you're just arrogant, self-righteous, and morally barkrupt people here to chase after greed just like the white masters who brought you here.
The american dream is supposed to be about improving the standard of living for everyone. What's happening now is some young, cheap 70hr a week kid is doing the job of 3 people. If 2 or 3 americans standard's of living are lowered to provide you the american dream, then who is selfish and arrogant?
I'd say most of you H1B workers have landed in the wrong part of the century, 1930s germany would be more your style.
Can anyone explain why mercury isn't a good solution?
It's highly conductive, liquid, and has a much larger heat capacity than water. Sure it's a poison, but this is a closed system. No leakage. So why not inject liquid mercury into these micro-channels instead of water?
Spoken language is far too full of grammatical bodges and fixes to become a structure logical enough for a programming language
This is a false and limited conception of the original poster's intent. Imagine having an A.I. on a PDA-type device that you carry with you from the age of 4. The PDA has a 100Terabye HD, and records/monitors your spoken words, actions, etc. After 20 or 30 years of this, your PDA probably knows you better than anyone. So if you tell your PDA "make a cool program that looks like this, and does this" there's a very good chance it understands what you mean.
Think about police sketch artists. They take vague, half remembered information...and turn it into a very accurate rendering of the original image. You have a vague idea in your mind of what you are describing, and you can't see what he/she is drawing. So you describe the person...and 5 minutes later the artist shows you a rather remarkable portrait of what you described. Which in many cases later turns out to very closely resemble the suspect. The missing link here is context. The context of shared culture and language.
If you can sit at a table and describe the basic functionality of a program, and describe its interface using words. Then your magic PDA will do the rest. It will even give you demos and visual feedback on the fly as you describe the program. It would serve as a layer between the absolutely massive context of your personal history, and the "structured" programming language required to build said program.
Please don't limit the future, it's bigger than you are.
EA and Nvidia best consumate this in word and not so much in act.
No actually it's been happening for some time now. There's a cluster of 64? servers provided by NVidia to host Battlefield 1942 games. As far as I know these are deticated servers provided as a courtesy by NVidia in order to promote Battlefield 1942, which EA produced.
This helps NVidia because BF1942 requires a high-end video card to run...so the more popular the game becomes, the more potential business for them. I believe these servers have been running for almost a year now.
I admire the simplicity of the capitalist ideal, but using it as a justification for making everything behave like property by enforcing scarcity where there is none, is an ugly perversion of capitalism, in fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of capitalism.
That's the best short description of the problem I've ever heard.
Slightly off-topic, but interesting none-the-less. Would some industrious young slashdotter mind compiling a "Top 100 slashdot trolls of all time" list for the bemusement of the common reader?
It's highly likely that such a list would be modded into oblivion, so perhaps your could link the list in your sig? Title it something conspicuous like "The top 100 slashdot trolls of all time".
Would someone please do this? Is the troll community still alive and well on SD? In the 3 years I've been reading SD, I've seen some gems. Make this list, and let everyone share in your trolling glory! Make a new account, and link the top 100 trolls of all time to it. Pretty please, with sugar on top.
This isn't a political protest and its not getting back at "the man". Its spoiling other peoples leisure time. And if you haven't learned yet that you have to get on with people of other belief systems then I hope you are still young or otherwise your fucked.
Slashdot Mirror
That number is HUGELY exagerated
Nope.
Last night did a check and found 12,000 cs servers. And of course that check only covers the US, canada, and some parts of europe and south america.
CS is probably even more popular in asia than it is here, so if we very conservatively claim that 24,000 servers are up at any one time, and maybe 5% of those are full of bots, and maybe 10% of those servers are empty, you still have 20,400 servers. If each server had just an average of 10 people playing, that would be 204,000 players. Some servers have only a few players sure, but others have 32.
Again there are probably closer to 50,000 CS servers running at any one time globally. I've never played on a russian, chinese, or korean server...
It sold very, very well in its original form.
All right I give. I'm not disrespecting HL either, I played it to completion...and enjoyed it. But HL is a classic case of a technology becoming something much larger than it was ever intended to be.
Modding HL into TFC and CS was a huge, and very overlooked, occurance in the game community. Most game companies still don't have a clue on how to capitalize on the modding phenomenon. HL is a perfect success story for this.
And there's noone on this board who can say with a straight face that CS didn't at least double HL sales.
Why in gods name is this modded as troll? I'm not an andersen consultant, sales numbers aren't made up on the back of an envelope. Hundreds of thousands of people are playing counter-strike RIGHT NOW.
Think about it.
So, the prolonged success is due to CS, the game can stand on its own merits though.
OK, but I would bet you top dollar that over 90% of sales were "AFTER the initial 5 months".
One would hope and expect so. The thing that made the first game was the fantastic story line, the incredible scripted sequences, and the feeling of intellegence from the enemy.
Disagree, game was OK but I would have never heard of it if not for counter-strike. Valve owes the cs team everything for thier success.
I think this is a great tool for directors and actors. Instead of having to wait weeks/months to incorporate CGI and see the interaction, it can be done in minutes/hours or as fast as the CGI people can splice things together.
From the article:
"It's not at full resolution, but at least it gives them something to work with rather than working completely blind after each take."
So how is this different from using wireframe models to do live action takes? That's been done for years now. All I can tell from the article is that they managed to put a few more polygons on the wireframe than they did last year. They are not doing WYSIWYG.
As far as I can tell, "ILM Now Capable of Realtime CGI" is a misleading title for this story. It's only natural that if you upgrade your processor you're going to be able to put more polygons on the wireframe model. We see this kind of thing every year with new games. It gets better incrementally, year by year.
If a standard wireframe model has 0 polygons, and a fully rendered Jar Jar has 10^5 polygons, then how many do these new liveaction models have? 10^3, 10^4? The article doesn't even say.
Poor title, poor article, poor journalism, poor science.
Hopefully.
Wow. Ya, that just about sums it up.
Rather, I like the dynamics of Neverwinter Nights. Small groups of people, who are like-minded. It's what you look for in your typical RPG anyways; the party comraderie, the give-and-take, clasing of personalities... a great story to tell later, if successful.
I agree with many of your points. The best way to bring the players closer together would be voice chat. Naturally you'd need a small, NWN-type party system in order for it to work. The griefers just love to abuse voice channels. You need to game with a group of people you know in order to avoid this problem.
I mean, do the authors of this thing ever go *outside*? Like, breathe in dust or anything like that? There are tiny particles of all sorts of things all over!
Yes, but the mamallion respiratory system has had millions of years to evolve and adapt to the types of conditions you're referring to. Suddenly introducing thousands of new types of airborne radicals is not something the human body has been designed for.
I've gotta come down on the side of the cautious on this one. Until you can control it, don't deploy it.
Harumph! Harumph!
*points* I didn't get a harumpm outta that guy!
This is outrageous, how far will the DMCA go before those in charge realize what it's doing to us. How much will it take before soemone decides to put an end to it.
Hitler made a policy of eradicating intellectualis in order to quell dissent within germany. George Bush and friends are promoting laws that do the same thing within the United States. In an ideal republican world, there will be no "end to it". Or, as Orwell put it, "the future is a boot stomping on a human face forever".
Clinton may have passed the DMCA, but like any other sensible human being he would re-evaluate its effect, listen to his public, and make changes that were better in accord with the spirit of america. There is little hope of that within the current regime.
Intellectuals, professionals, and the middle-class are the enemies of republicanism. Just as republicanism is the enemy of the american dream.
Does being born in the US make you more entitled to a middle class or better living, than someone from somewhere else with greater skills, intelligence, and willingness to work?
Almost every american generation since 1776 has seen its stardard of living improve. If you're asking me if college educated americans working 50-60hr weeks for a crappy studio apt and barely enough money to survive, when in 1970 a house painter could own his own 3 bedroom home is upsetting? Yes that is very upsetting.
And you H1b folks aren't the only ones who are contributing to this. The mexican workers here all live communally so they can afford to charge what they do. All the rich white republican assholes who hire them are just fine with that because they don't believe human beings deserve basic neccesities like Health Care, or families, or cars, or privacy. H1bs are similar in that they are indentured slaves.
You justify what you earn as being meritous, in that you are "better" than those of us you replace. But in fact you are morally inferior. When you start lobbying for standardized health care, and unionized labor forces...then maybe you'll convince me you're better human beings than we are. Until then you're just arrogant, self-righteous, and morally barkrupt people here to chase after greed just like the white masters who brought you here.
The american dream is supposed to be about improving the standard of living for everyone. What's happening now is some young, cheap 70hr a week kid is doing the job of 3 people. If 2 or 3 americans standard's of living are lowered to provide you the american dream, then who is selfish and arrogant?
I'd say most of you H1B workers have landed in the wrong part of the century, 1930s germany would be more your style.
This post may be offtopic, but it's absolutely correct.
Yes I thought of this while I was posting, but wanted to know of any particular technical reasons why it wouldn't be feasible.
Can anyone explain why mercury isn't a good solution?
It's highly conductive, liquid, and has a much larger heat capacity than water. Sure it's a poison, but this is a closed system. No leakage. So why not inject liquid mercury into these micro-channels instead of water?
The expansion of Internet access in any way is a good thing
Yes, it's always a good thing for american workers when 3rd world countries learn how to telecommute.
Spoken language is far too full of grammatical bodges and fixes to become a structure logical enough for a programming language
This is a false and limited conception of the original poster's intent. Imagine having an A.I. on a PDA-type device that you carry with you from the age of 4. The PDA has a 100Terabye HD, and records/monitors your spoken words, actions, etc. After 20 or 30 years of this, your PDA probably knows you better than anyone. So if you tell your PDA "make a cool program that looks like this, and does this" there's a very good chance it understands what you mean.
Think about police sketch artists. They take vague, half remembered information...and turn it into a very accurate rendering of the original image. You have a vague idea in your mind of what you are describing, and you can't see what he/she is drawing. So you describe the person...and 5 minutes later the artist shows you a rather remarkable portrait of what you described. Which in many cases later turns out to very closely resemble the suspect. The missing link here is context. The context of shared culture and language.
If you can sit at a table and describe the basic functionality of a program, and describe its interface using words. Then your magic PDA will do the rest. It will even give you demos and visual feedback on the fly as you describe the program. It would serve as a layer between the absolutely massive context of your personal history, and the "structured" programming language required to build said program.
Please don't limit the future, it's bigger than you are.
EA and Nvidia best consumate this in word and not so much in act.
No actually it's been happening for some time now. There's a cluster of 64? servers provided by NVidia to host Battlefield 1942 games. As far as I know these are deticated servers provided as a courtesy by NVidia in order to promote Battlefield 1942, which EA produced.
This helps NVidia because BF1942 requires a high-end video card to run...so the more popular the game becomes, the more potential business for them. I believe these servers have been running for almost a year now.
I admire the simplicity of the capitalist ideal, but using it as a justification for making everything behave like property by enforcing scarcity where there is none, is an ugly perversion of capitalism, in fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of capitalism.
That's the best short description of the problem I've ever heard.
The best way to sell cars make them free.
Thankyou for the link. Very enjoyable stuff...lots more honesty, and a lot less PC.
Slightly off-topic, but interesting none-the-less. Would some industrious young slashdotter mind compiling a "Top 100 slashdot trolls of all time" list for the bemusement of the common reader?
It's highly likely that such a list would be modded into oblivion, so perhaps your could link the list in your sig? Title it something conspicuous like "The top 100 slashdot trolls of all time".
Would someone please do this? Is the troll community still alive and well on SD? In the 3 years I've been reading SD, I've seen some gems. Make this list, and let everyone share in your trolling glory! Make a new account, and link the top 100 trolls of all time to it. Pretty please, with sugar on top.
Human evolution is a myth.
What fucking age are you? 14?
This isn't a political protest and its not getting back at "the man". Its spoiling other peoples leisure time. And if you haven't learned yet that you have to get on with people of other belief systems then I hope you are still young or otherwise your fucked.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply