Man, I love Duke3D. That Duke is awesome. That Duke is cool. That Duke came to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and he was all out of bubble gum*.
Picking up shit from a toilet is not cool. It's something Roger Wilco, Space Janitor, would refuse to do. It's not funny, it's not cool, it's idiotic. Using a urinal, yeah, it makes a joke of game characters not having to use the bathroom, and in the 90s was actually an innovative amount of environmental interaction.
But toilet-diving? Don't act like this is something any true fan of the game would think was hilarious and not stupid. I shudder to think of the mind who both thinks "I picked up the poo!" itself is funny and appreciates strippers.
* And he made pop-culture reference that were awesome or funny, outside of just being a pop-culture reference
As mentioned, Duke was not fully 3D, it was 2.5D. It's big enhancement over previous 2.5D games like Doom was allowing you to have multiple "layers".
Descent was the first fully-3D shooter (I'm aware of), though it had restrictions on the geometries allowed in the levels (everything had to be a rectangular prism).
Quake was the first fully-3D shooter to allow arbitrary polygonal geometry, which was a pretty huge step. So while these other games made noteworthy technology achievements, I think it's appropriate to think of Quake as the first of the true 3D shooter era.
So, your comment isn't really about grammar or proper punctuation. Your comment is just you yelling "hey look at me, I'm an angry atheist!". To which I reply, "good for you, but who cares?"
It struck me as a very bad attempt at a joke -- the joke being boobs are like God to men, I guess, or maybe the joke was just saying "tit" over and over -- that got derailed due to the need to wedge in the atheist thing. Also due to being irrelevant. And not making sense. But "humor" nonetheless!
Actually, based on his latest blog entry, it sounds like the "Adventure Update" isn't going to be about a separate game mode, but rather adding things to Survival Mode that encourage and reward exploration and otherwise flesh it out. Which I personally much prefer. "Challenge maps" are already quite possible and popular -- and if you're into trying one, obeying the creator's rules like "don't destroy blocks" is simple enough to do yourself. No need to create a separate game mode that removes fundamental aspects of said game. No need to split development effort.
And wrt the GP, personally I'm a long, long way from getting bored of the game. There's always more things to build, and always more caves to explore. If I thought making a shelter so I'm safe at night was the goal, then yeah, I'd have gotten bored of the game in ten minutes, too.
That must be a "feature" of the EB-style stores which I avoid. When I buy used, it's at a store that sells used and that's it.
But in that case my next question is: Why are there so many used copies of the game available so quickly that it can have a significant impact on full-price retail sales?
People buying used games intended on purchasing the game, but bought used to save $5.
I think they're doing it to save a bit more than $5.
If law-abiding folk aren't willing to pay retail for your game, but are willing to pay a much lower cost for a used copy, then this seems to be speaking to an underlying issue. The problem isn't that they're able to buy it used. The problem is that they don't think full retail for your game is worth it. Maybe the problem is that you're charging too much.
Emacs window with several panes to view code. 4-5 terminals for compilation, greps, test runs, and other such things. That pretty much takes up a full 1600x1200 screen. If I need to view a lengthy debug log, maybe grep'ed subsets of said log that I want to cross-reference with other logs, that is really handy to have up on a second screen so I can see both that and the code and the execution output. And when I'm viewing waveforms, or using other graphical debug tools, then that's a shoe-in for needing a second screen. Ideally that could be a third screen, with debug output on the second, and code + terminals on the 1st.
I can never have enough screen real-estate, and it has nothing to do with dumb applications wasting it.
It was seaQuest DSV. People made fun of the talking dolphin in the '90s. Looks like the producers and writers of that show had more foresight than they were given credit.
Well, I watched some SeaQuest, and what I always made fun of was that the translator made the dolphin talk like a 1950s robot. Or Talking Moose.
Why on earth would you do that? I mean if you were building an actual dolphin translator, not making a TV show. It's not like you just take dolphin noises, pass them through some analog filters like they're an electric guitar, and what comes out is English but with a "dolphin accent". You'd use a dictionary of dolphin 'words'. And it's not like Talking Moose or Stephen Hawking's chair, where the dolphin could type out words that aren't in the dictionary. So, just have a dictionary of recorded words and have the dolphin sound normal.
In any case it was just stupid to have the advanced technology on display, but have the voice synthesis technology be stuck in the 80s.
I still loved the talking dolphin character though.:)
Well, that claims 20 ppb, so that's ~ 1 part in 10^8. If the article mentioned the stability of this chip, I missed it, but other cesium atomic clocks are stable to 1 part in 10^14. So they're literally orders of magnitude more precise.
But if you 10^8 is good enough, then $20 sounds like a great deal!
I'm figuring they wanted to develop this chip for applications where currently caesium or other atomic clocks are required, though.
Then why do you and the grandparent insist on treating them as such? If they aren't political activists (or more correctly, terrorists in the normal sense of the word), then they're criminals.
I'm not treating them like political activists, I'm treating them like criminals -- or terrorists, if you prefer.
We're just talking realistically about underlying problems, the causes and effects.
Or do you really think that saying poverty is a cause of crime means treating the burglar like a political activist instead of a criminal? If you do, then that's your problem. I don't have that problem. I can both treat the criminal as a criminal, and think logically about why crime occurs.
Then why do you go to such lengths to provide excuses and justifications? As above, you're saying one thing and then blithely saying another without the foggiest clue as your inconsistency.
This just demonstrates your utter inability to distinguish between excuses and explanations. Explanations are why things happen, reality, cause and effect. Excuses are saying that therefore peoples' choices are Okay. Notice how I'm saying the opposite of that, took great pains to point out the distinction? No, because noticing that would mean separating understanding with justifying, and you won't do that.
Because to you explaining something means excusing it, and because of course piracy is inexcusable, you cannot accept the explanation. This means you are deliberately, if unconsciously, refusing to understand. And when you refuse to understand a problem, you fail to solve it.
Yet another inconsistency due to utter cluelessness.
In the first place, pirates arise independently where piracy is profitable. Stopping piracy off of Somalia won't make a bunch of fisherman off of Chile (grabbing a country at random) suddenly go "yo! let's all be pirates". In the second place, history has shown again and again that when you make piracy unprofitable and dangerous - it stops.
Another response due to a refusal to think.
I'm obviously talking about the problem of the Somalis popping up again. In the case of Somalia, piracy arose because it was profitable, and because the fishing jobs dried up. Piracy doesn't spontaneously appear everywhere on earth where it would be profitable, or they'd be a lot more pirates. And if you really give the boot to piracy and don't deal with the underlying problem as you propose, then they aren't just going to go back to being quiet fishermen, because they can't. And they aren't going to quietly lie down and die, either. So, instead, the problem will just move from piracy to something else.
Cracking down on the pirates is fantastic. However, fail to deal with the underlying issues, and the problem won't actually be solved. You have to do both.
But you won't think about those issues as being related. Because acknowledging cause and effect would be an excuse. Because you're an idiot. On purpose.
And unless you've bought into the pirate's propaganda hook, line, and sinker - there doesn't need to be.
They sail hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to take hostages and demand ransoms without speaking a word about fisheries or toxic waste.
Yeah, and the burglar who robbed some houses just sold the loot for profit, without once making a political statement about the issues of poverty. Therefore, poverty has nothing to do with crime and you don't need to deal with poverty to deal with crime. If you do, then you're just buying into the criminal's propaganda and excusing their behavior.
Except that's not how it works. That's the "Trying to understand the bad guys is to justify the bad guys as if they're really nice guys" BS that has utterly failed us in the last ten years. Reality is that even criminal assholes are still human beings with the same motivations, and only by dealing with that can you ultimately fix the problem.
The pirates aren't political activists, they're people whose previous jobs dried up and decided to turn the lawlessness that caused their problems into an opportunity. In a violent and despicable way. They aren't insane, though, and their actions have reasons. Reasons that won't go away just because we crack down on them harder. It's not like there's a cushy desk job waiting for them that they just don't want to take, but would if piracy became too dangerous. If we actually push hard enough on piracy, then the problem will just pop up somewhere else.
We have to deal with the destruction of environments and its effect on local populations. That part of the population turned to violence doesn't excuse us from that responsibility. Just the destruction of their environments excuses the pirates violence.
Reality isn't about excuses and justifications. That's just human psychology. Reality is about cause and effect.
It was an 80s-ish RPG. One of the background stories was that Word War 3 broke out and because of all the space weapons and counter-weapons blasting each other to bits and throwing up buckshot at each other, Earth's orbit becomes full of so much shrapnel that it's impossible to achieve orbit.
I did play Rifts. That bit about orbit was a nice touch, but also clearly a game-balance thing to keep players of sufficient resources from dealing with that whole alien-insect infestation in Minnesota or the Spluggorths (sp?) in Atlantis by going up into orbit and dropping rocks on them.
But nevertheless, yes, it does bring to mind the dangers of letting space junk get out of hand.
For the record I liked that movie, once I accepted that it was basically the Star Wars movie we should have had, in the trappings of a Star Trek movie.
The only other reply to my post understood what I was saying, by pointing out how Activision's influence has undermined Blizzard's "it's done when it's done" philosophy, which was understood to be a positive thing.
And then the only reply to you disagreed with you. So it's 2:1 against. Sorry! Maybe next time the "definitions by democracy" game will work out for you.;)
If only they released things when they were done now. Take StarCraft 2 for instance. Prior to Activision taking over we would not have seen SC2 released until all three races single player campaigns were in place.
Yeah, that's true, Activision has been a baleful influence on Blizzard.
It could arrive in 2020 and still not be late, if Blizz never promised a specific release date.
That was all true. Though I think that if it did end up getting to be 2020 then whether they've technically been "late" wouldn't really matter and comparisons to DNF would be rather apt.
I don't care either way, when it comes then very nice, but could we hold off on these sort of posts until, say, a few months before it comes out in 2014? Call me troll i don't care, i'm just sick of hyping up the hype that leads to endless post-pones that have been the norm in recent years.
I agree, and that's even accepting that Blizzard product delays are typically because they want to make the product as high quality as possible, not because they're a shit developer who needs the extra time to make their product barely salable. Or to chase a never-ending stream of complete revamps like a certain notable example.
"It's done when it's done" is a great mantra, but we already knew that. So "no official release date" is as non-newsworthy as possible.
So for 52 years the money has been used for other science. For a much more worthy project read about the recently canceled LISA project.
They cancelled LISA?! D=
If it's because there's no room in the budget for LISA and a shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicle, I'm personally going to go kick a bunch of congresscritters in the jewels.
Having every president wanting to leave their mark on outer space like Kenedy did is irresponsible and leaves them with ever changing goals and a rotating set of tools to do the job. We've changed what vehicles they're supposed to be using two or three times now since they declared the end of the space shuttle.
Solution: Instead of trying to "leave their mark" by creating an immensely difficult goal that requires tons of task-specific development and a huge vehicle to accomplish in the time allotted (and then gets canned with nothing to show for it), instead develop a large number of more manageable and general purpose capabilities and technologies, that will make future missions easier.
You know, what we're doing.
At this rate, an American vessel may never lift an astronaut in to space again.
Er, no, at this rate we'll have an American vessel lifting astronauts to space in a few years.
That's not even bringing congressional funding issues in to the mix...
The biggest danger from Congress, besides them simply slashing the budget, is their insistence on having a NASA in-house gigantic useless boondoggle vehicle, perpetuating the problem.
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Man, I love Duke3D. That Duke is awesome. That Duke is cool. That Duke came to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and he was all out of bubble gum*.
Picking up shit from a toilet is not cool. It's something Roger Wilco, Space Janitor, would refuse to do. It's not funny, it's not cool, it's idiotic. Using a urinal, yeah, it makes a joke of game characters not having to use the bathroom, and in the 90s was actually an innovative amount of environmental interaction.
But toilet-diving? Don't act like this is something any true fan of the game would think was hilarious and not stupid. I shudder to think of the mind who both thinks "I picked up the poo!" itself is funny and appreciates strippers.
* And he made pop-culture reference that were awesome or funny, outside of just being a pop-culture reference
As mentioned, Duke was not fully 3D, it was 2.5D. It's big enhancement over previous 2.5D games like Doom was allowing you to have multiple "layers".
Descent was the first fully-3D shooter (I'm aware of), though it had restrictions on the geometries allowed in the levels (everything had to be a rectangular prism).
Quake was the first fully-3D shooter to allow arbitrary polygonal geometry, which was a pretty huge step. So while these other games made noteworthy technology achievements, I think it's appropriate to think of Quake as the first of the true 3D shooter era.
So, your comment isn't really about grammar or proper punctuation. Your comment is just you yelling "hey look at me, I'm an angry atheist!". To which I reply, "good for you, but who cares?"
It struck me as a very bad attempt at a joke -- the joke being boobs are like God to men, I guess, or maybe the joke was just saying "tit" over and over -- that got derailed due to the need to wedge in the atheist thing. Also due to being irrelevant. And not making sense. But "humor" nonetheless!
He (and his main Minecraft programming assistant, Jeb) aren't the ones working on the ports. They're focused on the PC game.
Actually, based on his latest blog entry, it sounds like the "Adventure Update" isn't going to be about a separate game mode, but rather adding things to Survival Mode that encourage and reward exploration and otherwise flesh it out. Which I personally much prefer. "Challenge maps" are already quite possible and popular -- and if you're into trying one, obeying the creator's rules like "don't destroy blocks" is simple enough to do yourself. No need to create a separate game mode that removes fundamental aspects of said game. No need to split development effort.
And wrt the GP, personally I'm a long, long way from getting bored of the game. There's always more things to build, and always more caves to explore. If I thought making a shelter so I'm safe at night was the goal, then yeah, I'd have gotten bored of the game in ten minutes, too.
Okay, but I'm guessing you're not a mechanic working at a car dealership's garage. For them it's a question of if and when they can't buy OEM.
There's a lot of money being made by the car companies in that part of the food chain.
That must be a "feature" of the EB-style stores which I avoid. When I buy used, it's at a store that sells used and that's it.
But in that case my next question is: Why are there so many used copies of the game available so quickly that it can have a significant impact on full-price retail sales?
People buying used games intended on purchasing the game, but bought used to save $5.
I think they're doing it to save a bit more than $5.
If law-abiding folk aren't willing to pay retail for your game, but are willing to pay a much lower cost for a used copy, then this seems to be speaking to an underlying issue. The problem isn't that they're able to buy it used. The problem is that they don't think full retail for your game is worth it. Maybe the problem is that you're charging too much.
Emacs window with several panes to view code. 4-5 terminals for compilation, greps, test runs, and other such things. That pretty much takes up a full 1600x1200 screen. If I need to view a lengthy debug log, maybe grep'ed subsets of said log that I want to cross-reference with other logs, that is really handy to have up on a second screen so I can see both that and the code and the execution output. And when I'm viewing waveforms, or using other graphical debug tools, then that's a shoe-in for needing a second screen. Ideally that could be a third screen, with debug output on the second, and code + terminals on the 1st.
I can never have enough screen real-estate, and it has nothing to do with dumb applications wasting it.
It was seaQuest DSV. People made fun of the talking dolphin in the '90s. Looks like the producers and writers of that show had more foresight than they were given credit.
Well, I watched some SeaQuest, and what I always made fun of was that the translator made the dolphin talk like a 1950s robot. Or Talking Moose.
Why on earth would you do that? I mean if you were building an actual dolphin translator, not making a TV show. It's not like you just take dolphin noises, pass them through some analog filters like they're an electric guitar, and what comes out is English but with a "dolphin accent". You'd use a dictionary of dolphin 'words'. And it's not like Talking Moose or Stephen Hawking's chair, where the dolphin could type out words that aren't in the dictionary. So, just have a dictionary of recorded words and have the dolphin sound normal.
In any case it was just stupid to have the advanced technology on display, but have the voice synthesis technology be stuck in the 80s.
I still loved the talking dolphin character though. :)
Well, that claims 20 ppb, so that's ~ 1 part in 10^8. If the article mentioned the stability of this chip, I missed it, but other cesium atomic clocks are stable to 1 part in 10^14. So they're literally orders of magnitude more precise.
But if you 10^8 is good enough, then $20 sounds like a great deal!
I'm figuring they wanted to develop this chip for applications where currently caesium or other atomic clocks are required, though.
Then why do you and the grandparent insist on treating them as such? If they aren't political activists (or more correctly, terrorists in the normal sense of the word), then they're criminals.
I'm not treating them like political activists, I'm treating them like criminals -- or terrorists, if you prefer.
We're just talking realistically about underlying problems, the causes and effects.
Or do you really think that saying poverty is a cause of crime means treating the burglar like a political activist instead of a criminal? If you do, then that's your problem. I don't have that problem. I can both treat the criminal as a criminal, and think logically about why crime occurs.
Then why do you go to such lengths to provide excuses and justifications? As above, you're saying one thing and then blithely saying another without the foggiest clue as your inconsistency.
This just demonstrates your utter inability to distinguish between excuses and explanations. Explanations are why things happen, reality, cause and effect. Excuses are saying that therefore peoples' choices are Okay. Notice how I'm saying the opposite of that, took great pains to point out the distinction? No, because noticing that would mean separating understanding with justifying, and you won't do that.
Because to you explaining something means excusing it, and because of course piracy is inexcusable, you cannot accept the explanation. This means you are deliberately, if unconsciously, refusing to understand. And when you refuse to understand a problem, you fail to solve it.
Yet another inconsistency due to utter cluelessness.
In the first place, pirates arise independently where piracy is profitable. Stopping piracy off of Somalia won't make a bunch of fisherman off of Chile (grabbing a country at random) suddenly go "yo! let's all be pirates". In the second place, history has shown again and again that when you make piracy unprofitable and dangerous - it stops.
Another response due to a refusal to think.
I'm obviously talking about the problem of the Somalis popping up again. In the case of Somalia, piracy arose because it was profitable, and because the fishing jobs dried up. Piracy doesn't spontaneously appear everywhere on earth where it would be profitable, or they'd be a lot more pirates. And if you really give the boot to piracy and don't deal with the underlying problem as you propose, then they aren't just going to go back to being quiet fishermen, because they can't. And they aren't going to quietly lie down and die, either. So, instead, the problem will just move from piracy to something else.
Cracking down on the pirates is fantastic. However, fail to deal with the underlying issues, and the problem won't actually be solved. You have to do both.
But you won't think about those issues as being related. Because acknowledging cause and effect would be an excuse. Because you're an idiot. On purpose.
"Just as the destruction of their environments doesn't excuse the pirates' violence." is what I meant to say.
And unless you've bought into the pirate's propaganda hook, line, and sinker - there doesn't need to be.
They sail hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to take hostages and demand ransoms without speaking a word about fisheries or toxic waste.
Yeah, and the burglar who robbed some houses just sold the loot for profit, without once making a political statement about the issues of poverty. Therefore, poverty has nothing to do with crime and you don't need to deal with poverty to deal with crime. If you do, then you're just buying into the criminal's propaganda and excusing their behavior.
Except that's not how it works. That's the "Trying to understand the bad guys is to justify the bad guys as if they're really nice guys" BS that has utterly failed us in the last ten years. Reality is that even criminal assholes are still human beings with the same motivations, and only by dealing with that can you ultimately fix the problem.
The pirates aren't political activists, they're people whose previous jobs dried up and decided to turn the lawlessness that caused their problems into an opportunity. In a violent and despicable way. They aren't insane, though, and their actions have reasons. Reasons that won't go away just because we crack down on them harder. It's not like there's a cushy desk job waiting for them that they just don't want to take, but would if piracy became too dangerous. If we actually push hard enough on piracy, then the problem will just pop up somewhere else.
We have to deal with the destruction of environments and its effect on local populations. That part of the population turned to violence doesn't excuse us from that responsibility. Just the destruction of their environments excuses the pirates violence.
Reality isn't about excuses and justifications. That's just human psychology. Reality is about cause and effect.
It was an 80s-ish RPG. One of the background stories was that Word War 3 broke out and because of all the space weapons and counter-weapons blasting each other to bits and throwing up buckshot at each other, Earth's orbit becomes full of so much shrapnel that it's impossible to achieve orbit.
I did play Rifts. That bit about orbit was a nice touch, but also clearly a game-balance thing to keep players of sufficient resources from dealing with that whole alien-insect infestation in Minnesota or the Spluggorths (sp?) in Atlantis by going up into orbit and dropping rocks on them.
But nevertheless, yes, it does bring to mind the dangers of letting space junk get out of hand.
Different kind of space junk. Hey-o!
For the record I liked that movie, once I accepted that it was basically the Star Wars movie we should have had, in the trappings of a Star Trek movie.
The only other reply to my post understood what I was saying, by pointing out how Activision's influence has undermined Blizzard's "it's done when it's done" philosophy, which was understood to be a positive thing.
And then the only reply to you disagreed with you. So it's 2:1 against. Sorry! Maybe next time the "definitions by democracy" game will work out for you. ;)
I think you misunderstood me, to say the least. I said they're not shit developers. Their products, when they're released, are top-notch.
If only they released things when they were done now. Take StarCraft 2 for instance. Prior to Activision taking over we would not have seen SC2 released until all three races single player campaigns were in place.
Yeah, that's true, Activision has been a baleful influence on Blizzard.
It could arrive in 2020 and still not be late, if Blizz never promised a specific release date.
That was all true. Though I think that if it did end up getting to be 2020 then whether they've technically been "late" wouldn't really matter and comparisons to DNF would be rather apt.
Not that I think this will happen. Just sayin. :)
I agree, and that's even accepting that Blizzard product delays are typically because they want to make the product as high quality as possible, not because they're a shit developer who needs the extra time to make their product barely salable. Or to chase a never-ending stream of complete revamps like a certain notable example.
"It's done when it's done" is a great mantra, but we already knew that. So "no official release date" is as non-newsworthy as possible.
They cancelled LISA?! D=
If it's because there's no room in the budget for LISA and a shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicle, I'm personally going to go kick a bunch of congresscritters in the jewels.
It's unique to the ScaledComposite's SpaceShipX series of vehicles, of which this is only the second, you useless pedantards.
Even if you live in Michigan [...] Expect every living thing under ash, no Sun for a decade.
So what's new?
Ash, instead of snow. So it'll be gray instead of white, outside of the roads where the slush was already gray.
I welcome this change of pace!
Having every president wanting to leave their mark on outer space like Kenedy did is irresponsible and leaves them with ever changing goals and a rotating set of tools to do the job. We've changed what vehicles they're supposed to be using two or three times now since they declared the end of the space shuttle.
Solution: Instead of trying to "leave their mark" by creating an immensely difficult goal that requires tons of task-specific development and a huge vehicle to accomplish in the time allotted (and then gets canned with nothing to show for it), instead develop a large number of more manageable and general purpose capabilities and technologies, that will make future missions easier.
You know, what we're doing.
At this rate, an American vessel may never lift an astronaut in to space again.
Er, no, at this rate we'll have an American vessel lifting astronauts to space in a few years.
That's not even bringing congressional funding issues in to the mix...
The biggest danger from Congress, besides them simply slashing the budget, is their insistence on having a NASA in-house gigantic useless boondoggle vehicle, perpetuating the problem.