I don't buy music CDs anymore. I have bought *one* in the past three and a half years (and I did some real hand wringing over that purchase of Sting's new CD).
Previous to the Napster shutdown - I probably bought about 30 or so a year.
The reason why I no longer do this is exemplified within the article.
The recording industry clearly has me confused with somebody whose money they already have.
I wish them a bitter harvest of continued troubles, eroding sales and file sharing nightmares.
What's wrong with NASA is not a "culture of wrecklessness".
The same culture of wrecklessness got American driving cars on the moon.
The same culture of wrecklessness ran about 100 Shuttle Flights with a 1 in 50 failure record.
NASA's manned space program had its genesis in the desert. These were men who flew aircraft that were plainly unsafe in a manner where death was a constant companion.
We have replaced those who wish to push the envelope with those who wish to push pencils and teach kindergarten. Where is the courage to stand up to these people?
Because now - that sense of adventure and acceptance of risk which is inherent when strapping yourself on the top of a chemical rocket has been replaced with some conception of space which has more to do with TV fantasy than it does with hard science.
Hubble will now be lost because of "the danger" associated with servicing it. What a complete pile of crap.
This is political hackery. There is no one left at NASA who has the balls to stand up to these pencil pushers and tell 'em straight up: this is inherently dangerous. "We lost astronuats before and guess what - we'll lose them again. It is a statistical certianty. That's reality."
Every astronuat who is part of that program and wants to get to space takes that risk. Virtually all of them will do so again if presented with that risk. The few astronauts who have joined the Cabal of the Criticizers have done so in a effort to exert administrative *control* over the US manned space program. This chorus of cowardice is just a means to an end.
Of course it is. That's what we do. Jans Carton is a Mac user and a photographer. That's why he uses Photoshop.
I use a Thnkpad and NWN. Running NWN's largest mod group doesn't hurt us on getting cool unreleaed tilesets for use with the projector either.
IF you link to the original article on ENWorld, you'll see the DLP shots using NWN.
There are more of them here:
http://www.dladventures.net/iB/index.php?showtop ic =2386
It's excellent as I can use the Toolset to whip up an encounter zone and detail it in 2 minutes. It would take me longer to use overhead pens and a battlemat.
Dude. WE've been gaming since the late 70's. We use this setup for one reason and one reason only:
IT's FREAKIN COOL.
Our roleplaying and GMing skills are just fine thank-you-very-much. Our setup *rocks*. We love it - and there isn't a single gamer who has seen it whose eyes don't bug out of their heads and ask if we need a player.
The "we just need our imagination" line is for people who don't have a projector. Pure and simple.
The initial poster is describing our gaming set-up actually.
Our gaming circle e-bayed our DLP projector off of ebay for just less than $600 USD. It worked out to $120 CDN per member of our group.
The D&D Core Rules cost $130. Keep it in perspective.
We use our projector *every single session*. That's more than can be said for 99% of the gaming books I own. Maybe your group is different...but I doubt it.
Too expensive? Nope. This is accessible and affordable technology. High power LEDs vy Luxeon promise to make this even cheaper in the next 3-5 years.
Show me a gamer without $130 worth of gaming stuff purchased over the course of several months and I'll show you a gamer with a mean wife.:)
Actually. This is really really wierd, becaue I MADE SLASHDOT and the writer didn';t link to my story - he linked to Jans Carton's setup!!
I've been ripped off my Uber_geek moment!
The original poster is describing in my Coolest. Gaming Set-up. Evar. post on EnWorld - but the setup linked to in the post isn't mine - it's Jans Carton's projection page The projector shown in the pic is an 800 lumens LCD projector, not our 1600 ANSI DLP which is way smaller.
Anyways, we went through the projection surface debate with Alan Stalpes at DIY Projector last fall, and the best surface to use for rear projection is a piece of buffed Lexan.
But all of that is besides the point. You need a projector with a very wide angle lens to compensate for the decreased throw distance in a rear mount system. Problem is, the contrast of such an image without serious optics backing it up looks like crap.
And all of this is why? Due to shadows? Sorry. Overengineering for a problem that does not exist.
We use the over the table rig described in the initial story - and shadows are not a problem at all. I mean ZIP. NADA. NYET. No problem during game play at all.
A little less engineering - a little more experience with the tech guys.
"It basically boils down to the fact that none of the original people developing NWN will be involved in this."
I think if you open your NWN player's manaul, under "credits", you'll see that Feargus Urquhart and several others from Black Isle got a design credit on the game. They WERE involved in it for 4 years or so, until Interplay welched on their BGII royalties...
Stef Gagne has his reasons for thinking the way he does. He's entitled to that opinion.
I happen to think Obsidian will do what they can to NOT screw this up and will do what they can to make as good a sequel as they possibly can. THese guys are solid developers who care every but as much about this genre as we do (in fact - for the most part - they care *more*).
If they can pull it off - they can solidify their position as a leading edge Triple A CRPG house. KotOR II plus NWN II = SUCCE$$.
They blow it - they'll be Troika in a heartbeat.
Seeing as BioWare had a hand in making sure Obsidian got the deal and continues to remain on board, albeit in a less direct capacity, I think there is good cause for optomism.
I am bullish on NWN2. I got 20 artists and the main utility authors for NWN on our team who think the same. Right now? We're happy.
That does not mean DLA has moved away from DA, but we have today changed from horrifically afraid of an NWN sequel to cautiously optomistic.
One last comment: do you guys have any idea how FEW Triple A PC games there are in development? We are under a dozen a year right now and the piracy this past weekend with Doom 3 didn't help that at all at a publisher level. The dev money is simply just *not* there for PC games.
Never mind the whys, wherefores and how to minimize pirating and what they can do to change that. What they can *also* do is what they have done: which is say "screw this" and go make console games, en masse.
To think that we are getting not one but TWO sequels to NWN in *this* market is bloody amazing news. Last E3, we had Gamespot give a best CRPG to Paper Mario Bros for christ's sakes.
1 - X-Box is similar, but not yet structly portable in terms of code. The plan is to make Next Box and PC development easily trasnposable. This will be an excellent thing for developers and gamers both.
2 - X-Box development is still nigh impossible fomr a start-ups persepctive. You simply cannot get the dev kit as a start-up. PC development is the way into the marketplace.
3 - The more sophisticated PC Games get, the more expensive they are to make. A Triple A is 12-20 million $$ in dev costs. That is a HUGE gamble to take on a genre where barely 1 in 20 titles is successful. Think about it. As a console game you cover your bets and greatly reduce the chances of becoming the next Daikatana.
4 - MMORPGS, not the XBox, killed the PC RPG market. The glut of MMORPGS has killed development in a major category of PC development. This will sort itself out in 2 years with a massive die off. The market simply cannot support the number of MMORPGS in development. Several devs and publishers are going to lose BIG.
5 - It's a Mature Console Market: During a mature console market, the emphasis is always on maximizing software return on the platform while the PC beings to move seriously ahead and the tech gap becomes massive. Relax. Next year the generation AFTER Doom3 and HL2 will be on the horizon. 2 million polygon models - real time.
6- Next Gen is Coming: Games like Unreal 3 and Dragon Age are going to be making the consoles look like gameboys. No serious game will suggest otherwise. Relax. It's a product cycle.
"The RPG market is pretty durn ambiguous, but even in a narrow interpretation it's not as bad as it's been."
_________________
No it's not. Only on the console side of the market has there been an ettempt to brand non RPGs as RPGs.
No PC developer does it. Those who do something akin to Diablo call an Action/RPG title exactly that - Witcher, Bard's Tale and Jade Empire ere not being held out as CRPGs. Sacred is marketed as an Action/RPG as well.
The RPG market did not die in 1995 - it went to sleep. Baldur's Gate and Falpout revived it.
And a bunch of quality developers (and publishers)will have to lose their shirts on the MMORPG glut before it returns to the PC side.
The real point is simple: is the genre so "ambiguous" as to permit inclusion of "Paper Mario 2" as an RPG?
No - and it's not even close. This is not reporting - this is repeating a marketer's spin over a kid's game.
What's next: Spyro the Dragon 4 is an CRPG now too? Blinx? Krash Cart Racing?
"This was a particularly strong year for RPG's at E3", says Gamespot.
Ok. I am not going to be restrained about this at all.
This is clueless reporting and this *idiot* does not have a CLUE as to what he is talking about.
This was the worse year for RPG's in about 7 or 8 years at E3. The PC side has all but abandoned stand alone CRPG titles chasing the MMORPG prize, with a glutted market and a significant crash in 2005/6 expected. It's a friggin disaster waiting to happen.
The fact that someone could posit - with a stright face - that "Paper Mario 2" even *qualifies* as an RPG is about 5 mm away from ludicrous.
KotOR2 would have been about the only traditional CRPG title on view by the public. Dragon Age, which would otherwise qualify, was for press showings by invite only.
The rest of those claiming to be CRPGs really don't even qualify for the monniker.
So - to summarize: Gamespot's reporting on this subject borders on stupidity. Next time, just drink a lot, get plastered at the Microsoft party on Wednesday night and throw up most of Thursday. Save us the trouble of reporting on it at all.
Actually, this is exactly corrent. My youngest daughter, who was 5 at the time, went to episode I and hated it. The only thin she liked was Jar-Jar.
Jar-Jar was about marketing to young kids.
That does not make it right - it just makes it what it is.
BTW, I expect that we'll get Episodes VII-IX 20 years from now - not Episodes I-III. Maybe PEter Jackson could direct and we'd get a trilogy for the Ages.
The point was not that adding pause was something special or new. NWN had a pause feature - just like BG - you hit the space bar. We all know this.
The point is that NWN was not *designed* as a pause n play game as BG/BGII and KotoR were.
With the reintroduction of a party and a campaign that focusses on the Single Player experience in Dragon Age to permit parties and more cinematics in game. Above all, it will feature a move back to pause n play tactics during combat.
The fact there is a pause button is drwan to your attention as it is to be an integral part of the game - something you use during combat often -not when you want to refill the coffee mug.
This was not a silly "tech feature" comment - it was an important comment on the expected style of gameplay. Less Diablo - more BGII.
Well. Lots of new pretty graphics and maybe even high res textures this time around.
*yawn*
In the end, there was not a story in sight in the first game and it is plain and obvious that they have no intention of *pretending* they've added one in its sequel.
The plot from DS1, without any real exaggeration, was basically "They killed my cow, the bastards."
This gets a sequel?
Last time they tried this, NeverWinter Nights was released 2 months later and DS fell into the bargain bin in short order. (Not that NWN had a great story by BioWare's standards, but at least it had one).
Sad thing appears to be, no large CRPG on the horizon for this summer, such that DS might make decent money this time and encourage DS3: Return of the Bovine Murderers.
That's a shame, but it's not the REAL shame. The REAL shame is that GPG can technically make good games.
These are NOT talentless developers making the best game they can which just happens to be crap. These are devs with TONS of talent making a crappy game out of CHOICE.
How do you do that? How do you get up in the morning all perky and up-and-attem to drive into work to make this game? I don't get it.
Why would you go through the hell of being a start-up, work understaffed on DS1 under conditions which event Taylor admits was a family killing "epic crunch" (read: understaffed and over-featured to a scary degree) and then, THEN when you persuade a publisher like Microsoft to do it all over again...
You STILL don't want to have a story in it? Even Diablo II had a story (and a pretty good one compared to DS).
I don't get that. What makes a talented group of game developers want to do that? I really, really don't understand.
No, actually, I meant exactly what I said, and I was correct.
Intent is irrelvant in a civil copyright suit. It is not a matter of finesse.
Your example of the ambulance is not a defence of intent at all; it is, in fact, an attempt to resort to the defence of necessity, a defence which is necessarily carefully circumscribed under Canadian law (and certainly of no application here).
As for "balance of probabilites" - that is exactly the term used in our courts. When one refers to evidence, the term is "preponderance of the evidence".
The parent was Perry Mason fluff - and it's just wrong headed both in fact and in law. It's just *wrong*.
The problem with law school is that while you learn the theory of law, you don't learn much about the practice of law. That comes only after law school.
All the potential copyright actions in the world aren't going to matter when you don't know who to name as a party defendant.
The DMCA has a subpoena provision which has been interpreted to require an ISP to provide the identity of the Kazaa user (say) in the USA.
No such similar provision exists under Canadian law and the DMCA has no applicability in Canada in a civil suit. The closest you could get to it is a Bill of Discovery for an intended action.
While you might get such a discovery right against the ISP, this area of the law is wholly unexplored in the context of file sharing in Canada.
Getting a Bill of Discovery granted for a novel action is also problematic.
And most of all - it would be extremely expensive. You can't just do all your Bills of Discovery in one motion either. To do them all at once would amount to a Class Proceeding, which in this context, would first require a certification motion and motions to strike before you ever got a single user name. And then it's appeals to the Divisional Court, Court of Appeal, motion for Leave to Appeal to the SCC and maybe even leave granted...
Four years later...your Kazaa user isn't even with the ISP anymore and Kazaa is yesterday's news. What now Mr. Bronfman?
Theory is fine - but $$$ and delay are the essence of the practice of litigation.
Piracy is a tricky thing to analyze. It doesn't always mean disaster - and sometimes you can profit from it.
But in this case, the RIAA and the cartel know full well that they are fighting for their very survival. And they are going to lose.
Piracy is ultimately about money and convenience vs. the perceived inferiority or superiority of the pirated good.
If I grab X-Men 2 off of the Internet on opening night as an iffy VCD, I save a LOT of money vs. taking my wife and three kids to it the next day in the theatres. I pay for that savings by the inconvenience of having to download the movie, and the poor quality of the VCD.
We can all follow that line of reasoning.
But when it comes to music, the inconvenience just isn't there. I fire up Kazaa and boom - in 3 minutes or less, I have the song I wanted at a quite acceptable sampled rate and I'm done. I know some guys have posted here about inconvenience and bandwidth - but that's all crap. Its convenient, its fast, its reasonably high quality and once people get used to FREE, they don't go back to $$. Not without some other reason.
For a time, in the heyday of Napster, I think there was some collective guilt in the people who pirated music. And even if they were pirating, say, the new Offspring CD, they got into *music* as a past time and were willing to purchase music too. In the heydey of Napster, sales were UP.
Shutting down Napster was the worst thing they could ever have done. They lost control of a central distribution network and they lost the moral high ground all at the same time.
Suing individual users of Kazaa and Morpheus isn't a clever mastermind scheme. It is the act of desperate men who see no other alternative. They are now willing to try wildly provocative tactics not because they make sense or hold real promise, but because its they best they can come up with.
It isn't that the RIAA will fail; the plain fact is that the RIAA >>has already failed. Stalingrad is over - we are witnessing the slow inexorable march to Berlin.
Rolling back the price some weeks after widely publicized lawsuits is all part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to 1) create moral and ethical awareness and 2) promote a safer, more ethical alternative.
That's how this was analyzed in the boardroom.
The problem is: it's just too late for that. The technology is established. Like a hydra, P2P has regrown - and will continue to do so, no matter what they do.
Worse, the destruction of Napster, the publicity of the lawsuits against users of Morpheus, Kazaa and against various university networks have created an US vs. THEM mentality.
The only pitch men they have to combat piracy are the artists themselves. But the problem is that the artists with recognition are the ones who are already rich. Moral suasion does not work when the speaker is perceived as being extremely wealthy. The fans just CAN'T be moved to guilt with that sort of pitchman.
Show us a moderate artist on the financial edge? Maybe that fan might care, but as Courtney Love has already convinced a lot of us, most of the problems with artists not making enough $$ is the fault of the cartel that backs the RIAA.
So again, the customer has ready arguments to justify theft.
What are they going to do next? Get Madonna - one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world, to record some more "What the fuck do you think you are doing" samples?
Do you think any rational person would feel guilt about reducing the rate of growth of Madonna's already obscene wealth? (Really. What was she thinking. Bright gal from Detroit ought to know better. She's been a star too long).
So what's the solution for the RIAA?
There *is* no solution. It's just too late. This is one long "retrograde advance", a mighty swirl round the bowl as the industry slides down the crapper.
We are witnessing the write down of billions of $$ in share value. It is NEVER, EVER coming back.
"Ever notice that the U.S. govt is the most stable democratic entity? The system has been clicking effortlessly for over two hundred years now and going strong. Of course it has its (big) problems, but for a democratic state such durability is practically unheard of."
This is romantic bullshit.
I am guessing that if you had been somewhere near Manassas in 1861, or Gettysburg a couple years years later, you'd have a very different view of the eternal stability of the United States of America.
500,000 dead and 4 times that more in casualties in a civil war casued over democratic differences over the political, economic and social utility of slavery rates - in anybody's who'd head has a shred of a clue - as a problem.
In Canada, we've had our secessin problems too. So twise over the past 25 years we have had a vote in Quebec. The secessionists lost. We carry on.
When the power went out in Toronto yesterday (5.5 million poeple), people took to the streets and went to intersections and started directing traffic to get people home.
There is no second amenedment here and we actively prohibit guns. No surprise, our murder rate is vastly lower than the USA's.
No Civil War hitherto so far; no East LA in Flames, no Watts riots. 136 years & going strong. And when Hitler invaded *your country* we didnt dither about it, declared was within hours and sent our boys over to bail your asses out the fire (for the second time).
We issued guns to the soliders then, and asked them to give em back when they were done with em. 99% did.
No offence, but romantic bullshit like your post is intolerable.
Perhaps this is a uniquely Canadian perspective, seeing as we have adopted the Debit card more pervasively than anybody else, but our major contribution to money is quite simple: we use less of it than anybody else on the planet.
There isn't a store around anymore that does not take a debit card. You have to SEARCH WITH DETERMINATION for a store that does not take a debit card in Canada.
Deboit Card: your ATM bank card and same pin number swi[ed at the check out - you tap in PIN at a hand held terminal - you leave.
First off, this answer applies in Canada. I am a Canadian lawyer and quite confident about my advice in this country. My familiarity with American law is necessarily less thorough, but I do know the US Bankruptcy code reasonably well.
Ok. "My company folded". What is THAT supposed to mean? Was there a bankruptcy order made? That makes all the difference in the world.
If so - the source code vested in the Trustee in Bankruptcy. His task was to sell it on behalf of the creditors and remit to the court.
VERY often however, this does not come to pass.
So what happens?
Here is your answer:
When a Trustee in Bankruptcy does not sell an asset, the asset remains vested in the Trustee. By default, under Canadian Bankruptcy law, property that is not disposed of by the Trustee is supposed to be returned to the bankrupt prior to the Trustee being discharged.
In practice, this hardly ever happens in a corporate bankruptcy. Trustees don't do anything they aren't paid to do and if no one is watching about i dotting and t crossing, nothing gets done.
In Canada, the post bankruptcy corporation is neither alive nor dead. It can be revived by the shareholders but this is highly unusual and typically this is never done. A post bankrupt corporation is a lurking mess and the responsibilities for tax filings and potential director's liability issues is hardly ever worth it.
As there is no one left around to pay the corporate fees for the corporation, it is dissolved by order of the Director of the Business Corporation statute in its jurisdiction and it becomes essentially dead. (But if someone were to acquire the shares from the former shareholder and file articles of revival, THEN persuade the Trustee (who is almost always discharged by now) to go back on as Trustee and THEN make the necessary motion to the Registrar to return the property to the bankrupt, you could then have the corporation AND the rights to the code.
But - not so fast. That is assuming there was a deal in place for the corporation to actually own the code. Sometimes there is not and the bankruptcy itself reverted ownership in the code to someone else because of a defaulted royalty.
In other words - it's a complex answer which is highly dependent on the facts.
Under Canadian law at least - one thing is NOT true - the property does not vest in a creditor be it secured or unsecured. It is highly unusual for a creditor to foreclose and this is almost never done. The property does not belong to the creditor - the right to sell it for FMV and keep the proceeds is what the creditors - both secured and unsecured - had.
(While I won't vouch for this analysis under US Bankruptcy law as 100% correct - it is MOSTLY correct I expect).
So - is this lurking code something you can manage to make your own? Yes. With the fees to a lawyer and the Trustee, it's possible. The problem is, questions of this kind alert people to residual value in an undisposed property. People who are otherwise unaware of value will be alerted by your inquiries and requests.
Which is a nice way of saying that sometimes it's best to shut your mouth and make some quiet and discrete inquiries.
If the worst case scenario is there is some Trustee theoretically who did not dispose of a copyright it should have, and it would at law have reverted to a dead corporation, then it isn't very likely that anybody would have any right to assert that - say - code you claimed was yours was NOT yours.
The ownership of the copyright in DragonLance remains a property of WotC, a subsidiary of Hasbro.
The license right to make computer games based upon D&D, including all of the published worlds & settings in WotC's stable (ie. DragonLance) is subject to the exclusive 20 year license purchased by Infogrames when it bought Hasbro Interactive (approx 18 years left to go on that license).
All by way of saying,the license rights to make any DragonLance computer game lie exclusively with Infogrames - now known as Atari Corporation.
If Atari Corporation, the publisher of Neverwinter Nights wants to stop DLA's mod - then that is what they will do.
Slashdot Mirror
A privilege? Screw me? No no no. Screw *YOU*.
I don't buy music CDs anymore. I have bought *one* in the past three and a half years (and I did some real hand wringing over that purchase of Sting's new CD).
Previous to the Napster shutdown - I probably bought about 30 or so a year.
The reason why I no longer do this is exemplified within the article.
The recording industry clearly has me confused with somebody whose money they already have.
I wish them a bitter harvest of continued troubles, eroding sales and file sharing nightmares.
*bling*bling*bling*
(That's the sound of wishes coming true.)
What's wrong with NASA is not a "culture of wrecklessness".
The same culture of wrecklessness got American driving cars on the moon.
The same culture of wrecklessness ran about 100 Shuttle Flights with a 1 in 50 failure record.
NASA's manned space program had its genesis in the desert. These were men who flew aircraft that were plainly unsafe in a manner where death was a constant companion.
We have replaced those who wish to push the envelope with those who wish to push pencils and teach kindergarten. Where is the courage to stand up to these people?
Because now - that sense of adventure and acceptance of risk which is inherent when strapping yourself on the top of a chemical rocket has been replaced with some conception of space which has more to do with TV fantasy than it does with hard science.
Hubble will now be lost because of "the danger" associated with servicing it. What a complete pile of crap.
This is political hackery. There is no one left at NASA who has the balls to stand up to these pencil pushers and tell 'em straight up: this is inherently dangerous. "We lost astronuats before and guess what - we'll lose them again. It is a statistical certianty. That's reality."
Every astronuat who is part of that program and wants to get to space takes that risk. Virtually all of them will do so again if presented with that risk. The few astronauts who have joined the Cabal of the Criticizers have done so in a effort to exert administrative *control* over the US manned space program. This chorus of cowardice is just a means to an end.
To boldly go? What a laugh.
$120 CDN for the projector each
~$130 CDN for the core rules. DMG, PhB, MM
Of course it is. That's what we do. Jans Carton is a Mac user and a photographer. That's why he uses Photoshop.
p ic =2386
I use a Thnkpad and NWN. Running NWN's largest mod group doesn't hurt us on getting cool unreleaed tilesets for use with the projector either.
IF you link to the original article on ENWorld, you'll see the DLP shots using NWN.
There are more of them here:
http://www.dladventures.net/iB/index.php?showto
It's excellent as I can use the Toolset to whip up an encounter zone and detail it in 2 minutes. It would take me longer to use overhead pens and a battlemat.
Newer GMS? :roll:
Dude. WE've been gaming since the late 70's. We use this setup for one reason and one reason only:
IT's FREAKIN COOL.
Our roleplaying and GMing skills are just fine thank-you-very-much. Our setup *rocks*. We love it - and there isn't a single gamer who has seen it whose eyes don't bug out of their heads and ask if we need a player.
The "we just need our imagination" line is for people who don't have a projector. Pure and simple.
You have one of these? You don't go back.
The initial poster is describing our gaming set-up actually.
:)
Our gaming circle e-bayed our DLP projector off of ebay for just less than $600 USD. It worked out to $120 CDN per member of our group.
The D&D Core Rules cost $130. Keep it in perspective.
We use our projector *every single session*. That's more than can be said for 99% of the gaming books I own. Maybe your group is different...but I doubt it.
Too expensive? Nope. This is accessible and affordable technology. High power LEDs vy Luxeon promise to make this even cheaper in the next 3-5 years.
Show me a gamer without $130 worth of gaming stuff purchased over the course of several months and I'll show you a gamer with a mean wife.
Actually. This is really really wierd, becaue I MADE SLASHDOT and the writer didn';t link to my story - he linked to Jans Carton's setup!!
I've been ripped off my Uber_geek moment!
The original poster is describing in my Coolest. Gaming Set-up. Evar. post on EnWorld - but the setup linked to in the post isn't mine - it's Jans Carton's projection page The projector shown in the pic is an 800 lumens LCD projector, not our 1600 ANSI DLP which is way smaller.
Anyways, we went through the projection surface debate with Alan Stalpes at DIY Projector last fall, and the best surface to use for rear projection is a piece of buffed Lexan.
But all of that is besides the point. You need a projector with a very wide angle lens to compensate for the decreased throw distance in a rear mount system. Problem is, the contrast of such an image without serious optics backing it up looks like crap.
And all of this is why? Due to shadows? Sorry. Overengineering for a problem that does not exist.
We use the over the table rig described in the initial story - and shadows are not a problem at all. I mean ZIP. NADA. NYET. No problem during game play at all.
A little less engineering - a little more experience with the tech guys.
"It basically boils down to the fact that none of the original people developing NWN will be involved in this."
I think if you open your NWN player's manaul, under "credits", you'll see that Feargus Urquhart and several others from Black Isle got a design credit on the game. They WERE involved in it for 4 years or so, until Interplay welched on their BGII royalties...
Stef Gagne has his reasons for thinking the way he does. He's entitled to that opinion.
I happen to think Obsidian will do what they can to NOT screw this up and will do what they can to make as good a sequel as they possibly can. THese guys are solid developers who care every but as much about this genre as we do (in fact - for the most part - they care *more*).
If they can pull it off - they can solidify their position as a leading edge Triple A CRPG house. KotOR II plus NWN II = SUCCE$$.
They blow it - they'll be Troika in a heartbeat.
Seeing as BioWare had a hand in making sure Obsidian got the deal and continues to remain on board, albeit in a less direct capacity, I think there is good cause for optomism.
I am bullish on NWN2. I got 20 artists and the main utility authors for NWN on our team who think the same. Right now? We're happy.
That does not mean DLA has moved away from DA, but we have today changed from horrifically afraid of an NWN sequel to cautiously optomistic.
One last comment: do you guys have any idea how FEW Triple A PC games there are in development? We are under a dozen a year right now and the piracy this past weekend with Doom 3 didn't help that at all at a publisher level. The dev money is simply just *not* there for PC games.
Never mind the whys, wherefores and how to minimize pirating and what they can do to change that. What they can *also* do is what they have done: which is say "screw this" and go make console games, en masse.
To think that we are getting not one but TWO sequels to NWN in *this* market is bloody amazing news. Last E3, we had Gamespot give a best CRPG to Paper Mario Bros for christ's sakes.
THAT is the context of this news.
1 - X-Box is similar, but not yet structly portable in terms of code. The plan is to make Next Box and PC development easily trasnposable. This will be an excellent thing for developers and gamers both.
2 - X-Box development is still nigh impossible fomr a start-ups persepctive. You simply cannot get the dev kit as a start-up. PC development is the way into the marketplace.
3 - The more sophisticated PC Games get, the more expensive they are to make. A Triple A is 12-20 million $$ in dev costs. That is a HUGE gamble to take on a genre where barely 1 in 20 titles is successful. Think about it. As a console game you cover your bets and greatly reduce the chances of becoming the next Daikatana.
4 - MMORPGS, not the XBox, killed the PC RPG market. The glut of MMORPGS has killed development in a major category of PC development. This will sort itself out in 2 years with a massive die off. The market simply cannot support the number of MMORPGS in development. Several devs and publishers are going to lose BIG.
5 - It's a Mature Console Market: During a mature console market, the emphasis is always on maximizing software return on the platform while the PC beings to move seriously ahead and the tech gap becomes massive. Relax. Next year the generation AFTER Doom3 and HL2 will be on the horizon. 2 million polygon models - real time.
6- Next Gen is Coming: Games like Unreal 3 and Dragon Age are going to be making the consoles look like gameboys. No serious game will suggest otherwise. Relax. It's a product cycle.
"The RPG market is pretty durn ambiguous, but even in a narrow interpretation it's not as bad as it's been."
_________________
No it's not. Only on the console side of the market has there been an ettempt to brand non RPGs as RPGs.
No PC developer does it. Those who do something akin to Diablo call an Action/RPG title exactly that - Witcher, Bard's Tale and Jade Empire ere not being held out as CRPGs. Sacred is marketed as an Action/RPG as well.
The RPG market did not die in 1995 - it went to sleep. Baldur's Gate and Falpout revived it.
And a bunch of quality developers (and publishers)will have to lose their shirts on the MMORPG glut before it returns to the PC side.
The real point is simple: is the genre so "ambiguous" as to permit inclusion of "Paper Mario 2" as an RPG?
No - and it's not even close. This is not reporting - this is repeating a marketer's spin over a kid's game.
What's next: Spyro the Dragon 4 is an CRPG now too? Blinx? Krash Cart Racing?
*puhleeze*
"This was a particularly strong year for RPG's at E3", says Gamespot.
Ok. I am not going to be restrained about this at all.
This is clueless reporting and this *idiot* does not have a CLUE as to what he is talking about.
This was the worse year for RPG's in about 7 or 8 years at E3. The PC side has all but abandoned stand alone CRPG titles chasing the MMORPG prize, with a glutted market and a significant crash in 2005/6 expected. It's a friggin disaster waiting to happen.
The fact that someone could posit - with a stright face - that "Paper Mario 2" even *qualifies* as an RPG is about 5 mm away from ludicrous.
KotOR2 would have been about the only traditional CRPG title on view by the public. Dragon Age, which would otherwise qualify, was for press showings by invite only.
The rest of those claiming to be CRPGs really don't even qualify for the monniker.
So - to summarize: Gamespot's reporting on this subject borders on stupidity. Next time, just drink a lot, get plastered at the Microsoft party on Wednesday night and throw up most of Thursday. Save us the trouble of reporting on it at all.
Actually, this is exactly corrent. My youngest daughter, who was 5 at the time, went to episode I and hated it. The only thin she liked was Jar-Jar.
Jar-Jar was about marketing to young kids.
That does not make it right - it just makes it what it is.
BTW, I expect that we'll get Episodes VII-IX 20 years from now - not Episodes I-III. Maybe PEter Jackson could direct and we'd get a trilogy for the Ages.
The point was not that adding pause was something special or new. NWN had a pause feature - just like BG - you hit the space bar. We all know this.
The point is that NWN was not *designed* as a pause n play game as BG/BGII and KotoR were.
With the reintroduction of a party and a campaign that focusses on the Single Player experience in Dragon Age to permit parties and more cinematics in game. Above all, it will feature a move back to pause n play tactics during combat.
The fact there is a pause button is drwan to your attention as it is to be an integral part of the game - something you use during combat often -not when you want to refill the coffee mug.
This was not a silly "tech feature" comment - it was an important comment on the expected style of gameplay. Less Diablo - more BGII.
Well. Lots of new pretty graphics and maybe even high res textures this time around.
*yawn*
In the end, there was not a story in sight in the first game and it is plain and obvious that they have no intention of *pretending* they've added one in its sequel.
The plot from DS1, without any real exaggeration, was basically "They killed my cow, the bastards."
This gets a sequel?
Last time they tried this, NeverWinter Nights was released 2 months later and DS fell into the bargain bin in short order. (Not that NWN had a great story by BioWare's standards, but at least it had one).
Sad thing appears to be, no large CRPG on the horizon for this summer, such that DS might make decent money this time and encourage DS3: Return of the Bovine Murderers.
That's a shame, but it's not the REAL shame. The REAL shame is that GPG can technically make good games.
These are NOT talentless developers making the best game they can which just happens to be crap. These are devs with TONS of talent making a crappy game out of CHOICE.
How do you do that? How do you get up in the morning all perky and up-and-attem to drive into work to make this game? I don't get it.
Why would you go through the hell of being a start-up, work understaffed on DS1 under conditions which event Taylor admits was a family killing "epic crunch" (read: understaffed and over-featured to a scary degree) and then, THEN when you persuade a publisher like Microsoft to do it all over again...
You STILL don't want to have a story in it? Even Diablo II had a story (and a pretty good one compared to DS).
I don't get that. What makes a talented group of game developers want to do that? I really, really don't understand.
No, actually, I meant exactly what I said, and I was correct.
Intent is irrelvant in a civil copyright suit. It is not a matter of finesse.
Your example of the ambulance is not a defence of intent at all; it is, in fact, an attempt to resort to the defence of necessity, a defence which is necessarily carefully circumscribed under Canadian law (and certainly of no application here).
As for "balance of probabilites" - that is exactly the term used in our courts. When one refers to evidence, the term is "preponderance of the evidence".
The parent was Perry Mason fluff - and it's just wrong headed both in fact and in law. It's just *wrong*.
Robert Trifts
Barrister & Solicitor (Ontario)
This is just ill-informed nonsense.
In a criminal trial, this might be of use, but intent is not at issue in a civil copyright action.
You either did or you did not; try is not the issue.
As for ghosts and teleoperators, the test is simply a statutory violation on the balance of probabilites. This Perry Mason puffery is irrelevant.
The problem with law school is that while you learn the theory of law, you don't learn much about the practice of law. That comes only after law school.
All the potential copyright actions in the world aren't going to matter when you don't know who to name as a party defendant.
The DMCA has a subpoena provision which has been interpreted to require an ISP to provide the identity of the Kazaa user (say) in the USA.
No such similar provision exists under Canadian law and the DMCA has no applicability in Canada in a civil suit. The closest you could get to it is a Bill of Discovery for an intended action.
While you might get such a discovery right against the ISP, this area of the law is wholly unexplored in the context of file sharing in Canada.
Getting a Bill of Discovery granted for a novel action is also problematic.
And most of all - it would be extremely expensive. You can't just do all your Bills of Discovery in one motion either. To do them all at once would amount to a Class Proceeding, which in this context, would first require a certification motion and motions to strike before you ever got a single user name. And then it's appeals to the Divisional Court, Court of Appeal, motion for Leave to Appeal to the SCC and maybe even leave granted...
Four years later...your Kazaa user isn't even with the ISP anymore and Kazaa is yesterday's news. What now Mr. Bronfman?
Theory is fine - but $$$ and delay are the essence of the practice of litigation.
Robert Trifts
Barrister & Solicitor (Ontario)
Piracy is a tricky thing to analyze. It doesn't always mean disaster - and sometimes you can profit from it.
But in this case, the RIAA and the cartel know full well that they are fighting for their very survival. And they are going to lose.
Piracy is ultimately about money and convenience vs. the perceived inferiority or superiority of the pirated good.
If I grab X-Men 2 off of the Internet on opening night as an iffy VCD, I save a LOT of money vs. taking my wife and three kids to it the next day in the theatres. I pay for that savings by the inconvenience of having to download the movie, and the poor quality of the VCD.
We can all follow that line of reasoning.
But when it comes to music, the inconvenience just isn't there. I fire up Kazaa and boom - in 3 minutes or less, I have the song I wanted at a quite acceptable sampled rate and I'm done. I know some guys have posted here about inconvenience and bandwidth - but that's all crap. Its convenient, its fast, its reasonably high quality and once people get used to FREE, they don't go back to $$. Not without some other reason.
For a time, in the heyday of Napster, I think there was some collective guilt in the people who pirated music. And even if they were pirating, say, the new Offspring CD, they got into *music* as a past time and were willing to purchase music too. In the heydey of Napster, sales were UP.
Shutting down Napster was the worst thing they could ever have done. They lost control of a central distribution network and they lost the moral high ground all at the same time.
Suing individual users of Kazaa and Morpheus isn't a clever mastermind scheme. It is the act of desperate men who see no other alternative. They are now willing to try wildly provocative tactics not because they make sense or hold real promise, but because its they best they can come up with.
It isn't that the RIAA will fail; the plain fact is that the RIAA >>has already failed. Stalingrad is over - we are witnessing the slow inexorable march to Berlin.
Rolling back the price some weeks after widely publicized lawsuits is all part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to 1) create moral and ethical awareness and 2) promote a safer, more ethical alternative.
That's how this was analyzed in the boardroom.
The problem is: it's just too late for that. The technology is established. Like a hydra, P2P has regrown - and will continue to do so, no matter what they do.
Worse, the destruction of Napster, the publicity of the lawsuits against users of Morpheus, Kazaa and against various university networks have created an US vs. THEM mentality.
The only pitch men they have to combat piracy are the artists themselves. But the problem is that the artists with recognition are the ones who are already rich. Moral suasion does not work when the speaker is perceived as being extremely wealthy. The fans just CAN'T be moved to guilt with that sort of pitchman.
Show us a moderate artist on the financial edge? Maybe that fan might care, but as Courtney Love has already convinced a lot of us, most of the problems with artists not making enough $$ is the fault of the cartel that backs the RIAA.
So again, the customer has ready arguments to justify theft.
What are they going to do next? Get Madonna - one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world, to record some more "What the fuck do you think you are doing" samples?
Do you think any rational person would feel guilt about reducing the rate of growth of Madonna's already obscene wealth? (Really. What was she thinking. Bright gal from Detroit ought to know better. She's been a star too long).
So what's the solution for the RIAA?
There *is* no solution. It's just too late. This is one long "retrograde advance", a mighty swirl round the bowl as the industry slides down the crapper.
We are witnessing the write down of billions of $$ in share value. It is NEVER, EVER coming back.
"Ever notice that the U.S. govt is the most stable democratic entity? The system has been clicking effortlessly for over two hundred years now and going strong. Of course it has its (big) problems, but for a democratic state such durability is practically unheard of."
This is romantic bullshit.
I am guessing that if you had been somewhere near Manassas in 1861, or Gettysburg a couple years years later, you'd have a very different view of the eternal stability of the United States of America.
500,000 dead and 4 times that more in casualties in a civil war casued over democratic differences over the political, economic and social utility of slavery rates - in anybody's who'd head has a shred of a clue - as a problem.
In Canada, we've had our secessin problems too. So twise over the past 25 years we have had a vote in Quebec. The secessionists lost. We carry on.
When the power went out in Toronto yesterday (5.5 million poeple), people took to the streets and went to intersections and started directing traffic to get people home.
There is no second amenedment here and we actively prohibit guns. No surprise, our murder rate is vastly lower than the USA's.
No Civil War hitherto so far; no East LA in Flames, no Watts riots. 136 years & going strong. And when Hitler invaded *your country* we didnt dither about it, declared was within hours and sent our boys over to bail your asses out the fire (for the second time).
We issued guns to the soliders then, and asked them to give em back when they were done with em. 99% did.
No offence, but romantic bullshit like your post is intolerable.
Americans... *Yeesh*
It is fascinating that a country founded upon religious dissent is still so consumed by it.
Have this discussion till doom's day for all the rest of the industrialized world cares.
- A proud Canadian
Perhaps this is a uniquely Canadian perspective, seeing as we have adopted the Debit card more pervasively than anybody else, but our major contribution to money is quite simple: we use less of it than anybody else on the planet.
There isn't a store around anymore that does not take a debit card. You have to SEARCH WITH DETERMINATION for a store that does not take a debit card in Canada.
Deboit Card: your ATM bank card and same pin number swi[ed at the check out - you tap in PIN at a hand held terminal - you leave.
First off, this answer applies in Canada. I am a Canadian lawyer and quite confident about my advice in this country. My familiarity with American law is necessarily less thorough, but I do know the US Bankruptcy code reasonably well.
Ok. "My company folded". What is THAT supposed to mean? Was there a bankruptcy order made? That makes all the difference in the world.
If so - the source code vested in the Trustee in Bankruptcy. His task was to sell it on behalf of the creditors and remit to the court.
VERY often however, this does not come to pass.
So what happens?
Here is your answer:
When a Trustee in Bankruptcy does not sell an asset, the asset remains vested in the Trustee. By default, under Canadian Bankruptcy law, property that is not disposed of by the Trustee is supposed to be returned to the bankrupt prior to the Trustee being discharged.
In practice, this hardly ever happens in a corporate bankruptcy. Trustees don't do anything they aren't paid to do and if no one is watching about i dotting and t crossing, nothing gets done.
In Canada, the post bankruptcy corporation is neither alive nor dead. It can be revived by the shareholders but this is highly unusual and typically this is never done. A post bankrupt corporation is a lurking mess and the responsibilities for tax filings and potential director's liability issues is hardly ever worth it.
As there is no one left around to pay the corporate fees for the corporation, it is dissolved by order of the Director of the Business Corporation statute in its jurisdiction and it becomes essentially dead. (But if someone were to acquire the shares from the former shareholder and file articles of revival, THEN persuade the Trustee (who is almost always discharged by now) to go back on as Trustee and THEN make the necessary motion to the Registrar to return the property to the bankrupt, you could then
have the corporation AND the rights to the code.
But - not so fast. That is assuming there was a deal in place for the corporation to actually own the code. Sometimes there is not and the bankruptcy itself reverted ownership in the code to someone else because of a defaulted royalty.
In other words - it's a complex answer which is highly dependent on the facts.
Under Canadian law at least - one thing is NOT true - the property does not vest in a creditor be it secured or unsecured. It is highly unusual for a creditor to foreclose and this is almost never done. The property does not belong to the creditor - the right to sell it for FMV and keep the proceeds is what the creditors - both secured and unsecured - had.
(While I won't vouch for this analysis under US Bankruptcy law as 100% correct - it is MOSTLY correct I expect).
So - is this lurking code something you can manage to make your own? Yes. With the fees to a lawyer and the Trustee, it's possible. The problem is, questions of this kind alert people to residual value in an undisposed property. People who are otherwise unaware of value will be alerted by your inquiries and requests.
Which is a nice way of saying that sometimes it's best to shut your mouth and make some quiet and discrete inquiries.
If the worst case scenario is there is some Trustee theoretically who did not dispose of a copyright it should have, and it would at law have reverted to a dead corporation, then it isn't very likely that anybody would have any right to assert that - say - code you claimed was yours was NOT yours.
Get the picture?
YMMV
The ownership of the copyright in DragonLance remains a property of WotC, a subsidiary of Hasbro.
The license right to make computer games based upon D&D, including all of the published worlds & settings in WotC's stable (ie. DragonLance) is subject to the exclusive 20 year license purchased by Infogrames when it bought Hasbro Interactive (approx 18 years left to go on that license).
All by way of saying,the license rights to make any DragonLance computer game lie exclusively with Infogrames - now known as Atari Corporation.
If Atari Corporation, the publisher of Neverwinter Nights wants to stop DLA's mod - then that is what they will do.
The screenshots are here:
y 1. shtml
y 2. shtml
y 3. shtml
y 4. shtml
http://nwvault.ign.com/features/previews/DLA/Da
http://nwvault.ign.com/features/previews/DLA/Da
http://nwvault.ign.com/features/previews/DLA/Da
http://nwvault.ign.com/features/previews/DLA/Da
The module will support Solo play and full party control.
See Q. 10 here:
http://nwvault.ign.com/features/interviews/Steel_Changes in 1.30 by Bioware have opened up the radial menu and our party AI system can be implemented. More details on that on Day 9.
While it is still best in multiplayer - it WILL be solo supported.