I personally think of console-exclusive bonus-characters as being basically jokes characters anyway, especially since none of them fit in the game anyway.
And I don't want my "for teh lulz" bonus characters to be balanced. We don't need another Ryu, give me Akuma, or give me Dan Hibiki. And the best part is, you can just avoid the joke character when playing against someone of similar skill, give the Akuma to the friend who's not in your ballpark, or take the Dan character to handicap yourself (and provide extra humiliation when you win).
Basically, one way or another, when I select Link in a Soul Calibur game, I'm not expecting, nor do I want, balance. Balance is for the main roster.
I think Wing Commander was sprite or voxel based rather than 3D polygons
Yeah, wing commander was sprite-based. That's a really old game, so you know can't knock 'em for that.
Descent is a little harder because of the terrain and caves need to be drawn in an optimized fashion, but I think one person with a little practice in OpenGL or whatever could write a clone of it these days without it becoming a Herculean effort
Seems like any modern engine with 6dof support should be able to handle Descent-style levels with no problem. 3D interior structures aren't a big deal anymore.
It's easier now that a path has been beaten, rather than being a trailblazer trying to take on such a project before 3D accelerators became a commodity.
True that. I tried to make a 3d texture mapping engine in college, software-only of course because that was the only choice, and it was a huge amount of work getting to the point where I could draw a single square with a simple texture on it and view it from arbitrary angles. Oh, and that engine used a standard rotate transformation matrix, and so suffered from the gimble locking problem, which I'd observed, so I really had no excuse to forget.;)
Kids these days can just create an OpenGL context with just a few lines of C and start feeding it triangle and texture data. Spoils 'em, I says!
That was not in any way even close to being implied by the conversation.
If someone says "So, because of their difficulties executing on their hardware roadmap, and the obvious trend away from proprietary RISC, I chose not to invest in Sun Microsystems," do you come back with "And, of course, the only possible company you could buy stock from is Sun?"
Yes, I meant it's angled either up or down (do not know which) by a small amount.
I don't think pilots aim by intuitively knowing the line the central axis of their plane is pointed along and following it to the target... I think they have reticles or HUDs that could be easily adjusted.:)
I'm not talking about moving it to the side, I'm talking about tilting it slightly relative to the engines. Yes, they'd have to offset the pilot's cockpit either way.
Well this is just what I heard from an Air Force geek (so many geeks in the Air Force) who did not directly work with A-10s, so consider this 2nd hand at best before it got to me.:)
Anyways, as I recall, the kickback of the gun was equal to the combined thrust of both engines. So it's not just counteracting some of the force of the engines and thus slowing the plane down some, but completely canceling it out, which makes stalling very easy. They didn't have to offset it much, just enough so it isn't completely canceling the engines.
Sarcasm aside, it shows a certain level of sophistication and planning. Hardwires can't be jammed, can't be detected, and are far more reliable.
Not so much sophistication and planning, as having payed attention to the last 10 years of asymmetric warfare and learned some of the lessons. Long ago the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan upgraded from wireless to wired control. They'd started using cell phones, but learned the hard way that high-tech != better, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Of course it's a bit different with IEDs. Being able to follow the wire back to the controller isn't a problem, because by the time the surviving enemy gets their shit together the controller has vanished back into the urban jungle.
I don't think the rebels are going to fire one round and then run away -- at least the ones that are ex-military; the kids who are joining in for something to do might find it wiser to do exactly that.
Why yes I do think they actually paid $800 for a special-purpose spark-free hammer (or impact driver, which I think was what the original "$800 hammer" quote from the areas) made in a limited run.
People forget that besides all the bureaucratic stuff like the GP described, there's the simple fact that the military often has specific, special-purpose needs. And custom-designed special-purpose limited-run materials are always, always, always much more expensive than general purpose commodity materials.
But when someone says "$800 hammer" they think of the claw hammer they can buy for $8 at the hardware store, and when they hear "$600 toilet seat" they think of the $10 seat on their toilet bowl at home. Because they were mislead by the person making the quote into thinking that the government could have just gone to the hardware store and bought what they needed.
It's the rhetorical equivalent of referring to the Apollo Program as a $170 billion rock collection.
I guess I'm not so concerned with the Descent property itself, in so much as it seems to be the only game of its kind. Really has nobody else wanted to tackle the idea of a gravity-less 6-degrees-of-freedom shooter?
This is exactly why we haven't given them surface to air missiles like we did in Afghanistan in the 80s. They tend to still be around later when they turnaround and start shooting at you.
Well yeah. Plus it'd be pointless and self-defeating. We gave Stingers to the Mujahideen because they were getting stomped by Russian air power, and being the Cold War we obviously couldn't directly protect them.
Libya is completely different, because we have free reign to use our Air Force and Navy -- conveniently the branches of military not strained to the limit by two other wars -- and so Qaddafi can't do shit from the air. There's nothing for the rebels to use Stingers on.
I mean, even in the best case where the rebels are our BFFs until the end of time, some of whatever anti-air weapon we gave them would end up in the hands of the Libyan army and just cause more headaches for us. And the Air Force has been having so much fun with their AC-130s and A-10s! It'd be a shame to have to go back to just using the fast-flying jets for a while.
No, that's why it's a pun, because it's playing off two similar words. The British slang for cigarettes, and the offensive derogatory slang for homosexual.
If it wasn't for the British slang, it would just be homophobia. Instead of a stupid homophobic pun.
what you suggest cannot be done with Quake1. no quaternions. no way to avoid gimbal lock.
Fair enough, I had indeed forgotten about the gimbal lock issue. You mentioned pretending someone got around this through quakec, but I don't think that's possible. Your only access to the view transform from quakec was through an x/y/z rotation vector.
Back to the original point. What you define as "
You got cut off. I'm assuming what you were going to put in the quotes was "first of the true 3D shooter era", because I already said "fully 3D" applies to both, and "arbitrary polygonal geometry" obviously only applies to Quake.
It's not a definition. It's a subjective evaluation that Quake's technological achievements were the stepping stone to the 3D shooters that followed, more than Descent's; that games afterward were following in Quake's footsteps, not Descent's, and I think that holds. 6doF is only important for a subset of games, while the ability to construct arbitrary polygons is a feature that every game after Quake has used. You can bolt 6dof support onto a game, you have to re-write it from scratch to go from simplified geometry to arbitrary polygons.
Basically for the last 15 years, 3d gaming has been defined by triangles, triangles, triangles. With dips into other things, but still dominated by putting textures on triangles. Your graphics card is optimized for a Quake-style graphics engine, not a Descent-style engine. Nobody uses those any more.
Again, Descent was awesome and ahead of its time. I just think that Quake is a better marker for the beginning of an era that we aren't even out of yet.
Don't go counting your Told-you-so Chickens quite yet.
Global temperatures continued to rise during the previous, unusually long solar minimum, so this potential lack-of-solar-maximum will probably not reverse the trend, either.
I specified in my first post that it was polygonal geometry. I forgot to mention that in my second post, so good catch.
Simulating a curved surface was using as many polygons as you could get away with -- which could be surprisingly many, if you were a level designer who knew the ins and outs of quake's engine and limitations.
I wonder what could have cooled an hypotetical nuclear reactor if it happened to be shut down during that time.
The hypothetical gravity-powered coolant system that would continue functioning without power as long as water remained in the reservoir. These are included in many designs that are more modern than Fukushima (but not 'modern' by typical technology standards).
Right. I prefer to go with the real hope, which is: If we* keep busting our asses like we are, then maybe in 50 years we will laugh at Alzheimers. Or at least be able to do something about it. We need hope to pursue this cause, but we can't act like it's a foregone conclusion.
Yeah even accepting that bullshit exception, you opined that the comedy in question was offensive to pussies. So now you're a fuckwad, dipshit, hypocrite, and a mental defective who doesn't even know what you're saying. Why are you so angry at others over your own fuckups?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way, just like the ones in the last post. The real message was: Take your own advice and shut the fuck up.
As for the capitalization of "God", as far as the base Christian documents go, it isn't a proper noun. It's a position or title, not a name.
There are thousands of religions currently practiced world wide, capitalizing "god" for one is horribly disrespectful to the others, who have named gods. It's an attempt to take possession of all gods of all religions, and saying "Nope, those are all mine, his name is God". Childish? Yes. Truthful? Unfortunately yes.
Yes it's disrespectful. That's hardly an accident. It's making a strong Monotheistic claim. Those other gods, says the Abrahamic religions, don't exist (which is not a claim every religion makes about other religion's gods). Those other gods need names, because there are many. The God of Abraham is God. God isn't a position or title, that different entities can hold in different times or places. It's the identity of the one true God. It's why He says "I am God", not "I'm a god". It is, for all intents and purposes, a proper noun in this context.
What I do know however is that anyone who feels the need to publically state their judgement call on a piece of comedy is a fuckwad.
Which you've done, making you a fuckwad by your own standards, a dipshit by mine, and a hypocrite by anyone's. Nice, a hat trick!
Now if publicly expressing judgments on subjective shit that doesn't matter is so bad, why are you still talking, and more importantly why did you start?
You obviously think you're special for not being offended, and thinking that's the difference between liking this (literal) piece of shit and not. But that's got nothing to do with it. The game sucks, it's not special, and neither are you for failing to see it.
First, I am calling Descent fully 3D, because it was.
Second, allowing arbitrary geometry is not an arbitrary distinction. It's a fundamental difference in the technology of the game engine that it doesn't make simplifying assumptions about the geometry. It makes a huge difference in the kinds of levels, and the features within them, that can be designed.
The everything-is-a-deformed-cube thing worked for Descent's levels which took place entirely inside of mine shaft. And because it worked, it was a fine trade-off to make in order to be able to accomplish what they did, when they did. And make no mistake, I'm calling it an accomplishment (first fully 3D game).
But it's not an arbitrary line between it and Quake. It's a fundamental one that reaches into the very heart of both games.
To show how this differs from something that is arbitrary, let's look at this 6-degrees-of-freedom thing. The Quake engine absolutely could roll the camera, but they didn't give you the ability to do so because it would serve no purpose in the game. It was trivial to mod the game to let you do this.
In fact some mods did just that because they were turning quake into more of a space-shooter like Descent. In fact it is theoretically possible to re-create the entire game Descent in the Quake engine. It is not possible to re-create Quake in the Descent engine. This is not an arbitrary distinction.
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I personally think of console-exclusive bonus-characters as being basically jokes characters anyway, especially since none of them fit in the game anyway.
And I don't want my "for teh lulz" bonus characters to be balanced. We don't need another Ryu, give me Akuma, or give me Dan Hibiki. And the best part is, you can just avoid the joke character when playing against someone of similar skill, give the Akuma to the friend who's not in your ballpark, or take the Dan character to handicap yourself (and provide extra humiliation when you win).
Basically, one way or another, when I select Link in a Soul Calibur game, I'm not expecting, nor do I want, balance. Balance is for the main roster.
But that's just me. :)
I think Wing Commander was sprite or voxel based rather than 3D polygons
Yeah, wing commander was sprite-based. That's a really old game, so you know can't knock 'em for that.
Descent is a little harder because of the terrain and caves need to be drawn in an optimized fashion, but I think one person with a little practice in OpenGL or whatever could write a clone of it these days without it becoming a Herculean effort
Seems like any modern engine with 6dof support should be able to handle Descent-style levels with no problem. 3D interior structures aren't a big deal anymore.
It's easier now that a path has been beaten, rather than being a trailblazer trying to take on such a project before 3D accelerators became a commodity.
True that. I tried to make a 3d texture mapping engine in college, software-only of course because that was the only choice, and it was a huge amount of work getting to the point where I could draw a single square with a simple texture on it and view it from arbitrary angles. Oh, and that engine used a standard rotate transformation matrix, and so suffered from the gimble locking problem, which I'd observed, so I really had no excuse to forget. ;)
Kids these days can just create an OpenGL context with just a few lines of C and start feeding it triangle and texture data. Spoils 'em, I says!
That was not in any way even close to being implied by the conversation.
If someone says "So, because of their difficulties executing on their hardware roadmap, and the obvious trend away from proprietary RISC, I chose not to invest in Sun Microsystems," do you come back with "And, of course, the only possible company you could buy stock from is Sun?"
Nice! Thanks for finding that. That's much better than my half-remembered bullshit.
The gun only produces 25% of the max forward thrust! Well actually that's rather a lot, but less than said bullshit. :)
Yes, I meant it's angled either up or down (do not know which) by a small amount.
I don't think pilots aim by intuitively knowing the line the central axis of their plane is pointed along and following it to the target... I think they have reticles or HUDs that could be easily adjusted. :)
I'm not talking about moving it to the side, I'm talking about tilting it slightly relative to the engines. Yes, they'd have to offset the pilot's cockpit either way.
Well this is just what I heard from an Air Force geek (so many geeks in the Air Force) who did not directly work with A-10s, so consider this 2nd hand at best before it got to me. :)
Anyways, as I recall, the kickback of the gun was equal to the combined thrust of both engines. So it's not just counteracting some of the force of the engines and thus slowing the plane down some, but completely canceling it out, which makes stalling very easy. They didn't have to offset it much, just enough so it isn't completely canceling the engines.
Sarcasm aside, it shows a certain level of sophistication and planning. Hardwires can't be jammed, can't be detected, and are far more reliable.
Not so much sophistication and planning, as having payed attention to the last 10 years of asymmetric warfare and learned some of the lessons. Long ago the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan upgraded from wireless to wired control. They'd started using cell phones, but learned the hard way that high-tech != better, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Of course it's a bit different with IEDs. Being able to follow the wire back to the controller isn't a problem, because by the time the surviving enemy gets their shit together the controller has vanished back into the urban jungle.
I don't think the rebels are going to fire one round and then run away -- at least the ones that are ex-military; the kids who are joining in for something to do might find it wiser to do exactly that.
If they hadn't offset the gun's axis from the engines', at full auto it would have caused the plane to stall. =D
Why yes I do think they actually paid $800 for a special-purpose spark-free hammer (or impact driver, which I think was what the original "$800 hammer" quote from the areas) made in a limited run.
People forget that besides all the bureaucratic stuff like the GP described, there's the simple fact that the military often has specific, special-purpose needs. And custom-designed special-purpose limited-run materials are always, always, always much more expensive than general purpose commodity materials.
But when someone says "$800 hammer" they think of the claw hammer they can buy for $8 at the hardware store, and when they hear "$600 toilet seat" they think of the $10 seat on their toilet bowl at home. Because they were mislead by the person making the quote into thinking that the government could have just gone to the hardware store and bought what they needed.
It's the rhetorical equivalent of referring to the Apollo Program as a $170 billion rock collection.
I guess I'm not so concerned with the Descent property itself, in so much as it seems to be the only game of its kind. Really has nobody else wanted to tackle the idea of a gravity-less 6-degrees-of-freedom shooter?
This is exactly why we haven't given them surface to air missiles like we did in Afghanistan in the 80s. They tend to still be around later when they turnaround and start shooting at you.
Well yeah. Plus it'd be pointless and self-defeating. We gave Stingers to the Mujahideen because they were getting stomped by Russian air power, and being the Cold War we obviously couldn't directly protect them.
Libya is completely different, because we have free reign to use our Air Force and Navy -- conveniently the branches of military not strained to the limit by two other wars -- and so Qaddafi can't do shit from the air. There's nothing for the rebels to use Stingers on.
I mean, even in the best case where the rebels are our BFFs until the end of time, some of whatever anti-air weapon we gave them would end up in the hands of the Libyan army and just cause more headaches for us. And the Air Force has been having so much fun with their AC-130s and A-10s! It'd be a shame to have to go back to just using the fast-flying jets for a while.
No, that's why it's a pun, because it's playing off two similar words. The British slang for cigarettes, and the offensive derogatory slang for homosexual.
If it wasn't for the British slang, it would just be homophobia. Instead of a stupid homophobic pun.
what you suggest cannot be done with Quake1. no quaternions. no way to avoid gimbal lock.
Fair enough, I had indeed forgotten about the gimbal lock issue. You mentioned pretending someone got around this through quakec, but I don't think that's possible. Your only access to the view transform from quakec was through an x/y/z rotation vector.
Back to the original point. What you define as "
You got cut off. I'm assuming what you were going to put in the quotes was "first of the true 3D shooter era", because I already said "fully 3D" applies to both, and "arbitrary polygonal geometry" obviously only applies to Quake.
It's not a definition. It's a subjective evaluation that Quake's technological achievements were the stepping stone to the 3D shooters that followed, more than Descent's; that games afterward were following in Quake's footsteps, not Descent's, and I think that holds. 6doF is only important for a subset of games, while the ability to construct arbitrary polygons is a feature that every game after Quake has used. You can bolt 6dof support onto a game, you have to re-write it from scratch to go from simplified geometry to arbitrary polygons.
Basically for the last 15 years, 3d gaming has been defined by triangles, triangles, triangles. With dips into other things, but still dominated by putting textures on triangles. Your graphics card is optimized for a Quake-style graphics engine, not a Descent-style engine. Nobody uses those any more.
Again, Descent was awesome and ahead of its time. I just think that Quake is a better marker for the beginning of an era that we aren't even out of yet.
Don't go counting your Told-you-so Chickens quite yet.
Global temperatures continued to rise during the previous, unusually long solar minimum, so this potential lack-of-solar-maximum will probably not reverse the trend, either.
No, it wasn't. If you ever built levels for it you would know that.
What wasn't what? I've made levels for both.
I specified in my first post that it was polygonal geometry. I forgot to mention that in my second post, so good catch.
Simulating a curved surface was using as many polygons as you could get away with -- which could be surprisingly many, if you were a level designer who knew the ins and outs of quake's engine and limitations.
I wonder what could have cooled an hypotetical nuclear reactor if it happened to be shut down during that time.
The hypothetical gravity-powered coolant system that would continue functioning without power as long as water remained in the reservoir. These are included in many designs that are more modern than Fukushima (but not 'modern' by typical technology standards).
And other things, too, but I meant more than that. Good point, though. Progress is being made, on multiple fronts.
Don't say that. It's false hope.
Right. I prefer to go with the real hope, which is: If we* keep busting our asses like we are, then maybe in 50 years we will laugh at Alzheimers. Or at least be able to do something about it. We need hope to pursue this cause, but we can't act like it's a foregone conclusion.
* I mean "we" as in "humanity".
Yeah even accepting that bullshit exception, you opined that the comedy in question was offensive to pussies. So now you're a fuckwad, dipshit, hypocrite, and a mental defective who doesn't even know what you're saying. Why are you so angry at others over your own fuckups?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way, just like the ones in the last post. The real message was: Take your own advice and shut the fuck up.
As for the capitalization of "God", as far as the base Christian documents go, it isn't a proper noun. It's a position or title, not a name.
There are thousands of religions currently practiced world wide, capitalizing "god" for one is horribly disrespectful to the others, who have named gods. It's an attempt to take possession of all gods of all religions, and saying "Nope, those are all mine, his name is God". Childish? Yes. Truthful? Unfortunately yes.
Yes it's disrespectful. That's hardly an accident. It's making a strong Monotheistic claim. Those other gods, says the Abrahamic religions, don't exist (which is not a claim every religion makes about other religion's gods). Those other gods need names, because there are many. The God of Abraham is God. God isn't a position or title, that different entities can hold in different times or places. It's the identity of the one true God. It's why He says "I am God", not "I'm a god". It is, for all intents and purposes, a proper noun in this context.
What I do know however is that anyone who feels the need to publically state their judgement call on a piece of comedy is a fuckwad.
Which you've done, making you a fuckwad by your own standards, a dipshit by mine, and a hypocrite by anyone's. Nice, a hat trick!
Now if publicly expressing judgments on subjective shit that doesn't matter is so bad, why are you still talking, and more importantly why did you start?
You obviously think you're special for not being offended, and thinking that's the difference between liking this (literal) piece of shit and not. But that's got nothing to do with it. The game sucks, it's not special, and neither are you for failing to see it.
First, I am calling Descent fully 3D, because it was.
Second, allowing arbitrary geometry is not an arbitrary distinction. It's a fundamental difference in the technology of the game engine that it doesn't make simplifying assumptions about the geometry. It makes a huge difference in the kinds of levels, and the features within them, that can be designed.
The everything-is-a-deformed-cube thing worked for Descent's levels which took place entirely inside of mine shaft. And because it worked, it was a fine trade-off to make in order to be able to accomplish what they did, when they did. And make no mistake, I'm calling it an accomplishment (first fully 3D game).
But it's not an arbitrary line between it and Quake. It's a fundamental one that reaches into the very heart of both games.
To show how this differs from something that is arbitrary, let's look at this 6-degrees-of-freedom thing. The Quake engine absolutely could roll the camera, but they didn't give you the ability to do so because it would serve no purpose in the game. It was trivial to mod the game to let you do this.
In fact some mods did just that because they were turning quake into more of a space-shooter like Descent. In fact it is theoretically possible to re-create the entire game Descent in the Quake engine. It is not possible to re-create Quake in the Descent engine. This is not an arbitrary distinction.