The bot does nothing crazy. it knows the odds on everything. which means that it plays no better or worse than a human who knows the odds of each hand.
sure, it can tap into other bots playing so that it develops a huge advantage over other players, but so can two humans with an instant message or voice chat program.
I've been working with Machinima for about 2 years now. Generally, people are happy to help. I haven't heard of anyone asking to be paid. In most games, you can find people looking to do something different. While the game might be incredibly fun, there's almost always a monotony that they're willing to break by trying something new.
I got my start doing Machinima in Planetside. The response that I got from the community was really impressive. I could give people about a week's notice and have a turnout of 10-20 people just from my server willing to help me with a film project.
Sometimes it was really hard to express what I wanted them to do and there is always the inevitable people that will screw off and not really pay attention, as well as those that have no idea that there's filming going on and ruin the fun by playing the game the "right" way.
However, all in all, I've had a very rewarding experience. In fact, in Planetside, I ended up deleting my character and switching sides (this was before you could have characters on multiple factions. it was really painful to delete a fairly high level character and restart as a newbie) to get into a clan that had been helping me a lot. To this day, I'm still an active member in that clan, although I've stopped playing Planetside awhile ago.
Film is a very expressive form and Machinima is no different. There are humorous series, like those done by the Rooster Teeth bunch, there are extremely artsy works like those that won the Make Something Unreal Contest Machinima catagory, there are music videos and there are even video memorials for players that have passed away in real life.
Machinima is a lot of fun and a lot of work. While the goal is always to create something visual and compelling, along the way, you immerse yourself with the community and make something as equally important as a good film; friendships.
I appologize if that came off really sappy, but I've had Machinima films succeed and I've had them fail, but regardless of the outcome of a project, I couldn't have gotten as far as I did with it without the help of many other people.
hack an xbox1 and do it. they're fairly cheap now and you don't even need to open the case to do it.
I set up my xbox and red hat machine to play nice with each other. streaming formats stream, although non-streaming media like AVI, have to download before they'll start playing. still, that's only about a 10 second wait for a ~200 MB TV show file.(damn you, BBC! send some quality programming to America!)
I haven't looked recently, but I don't know of anything that'll let you stream out of a windows shared directory, but I haven't looked for one in about 2 years and someone may have put something together by now.
if the xbox 360 had included all of the features that I enjoy with my hacked xbox, I'd be much more enthused about it. as it is, likely the only reason while I'll even bother renting a system is to play the Shadowrun game when it comes out. there's just not enough new functionality and I don't play console games enough to justify the price tag.
true, but I would expect that an american-based site, with americans running the content would use the wacky american date format. I side-step the entire problem by using the first three letters of the month instead. ie today is 22AUG05
I would have accused Terminator and the Matrix files of being ripped off of myths and folklore before I would have said that some obscure author was the basis for the screenplays.
wholly untrue. I know that slimeball lawyer is making those claims, but he's full of shit. there's nothing but smooth skin underneath those pixelated squares
anti-cheating/hacking program that was born from the cesspit that Counterstrike became IIRC, and is now the industry standard for preventing cheating and hacking in online first person shooters.
currently, there are too many bittorrent clients out there for a change to the protocol to propogate to all the users any time soon.
also, your basic theory is that the seed file is poisoned and that others in the swarm will pick up on that and report to you that it's bad.
however, when RIAA or MPAA poison a bit-torrent file, they seed it. some times many times over. I recall seeing a warning against trying one poisoned file. the tracker was reporting several hundred seeds, well over the amount of a legitimate file of a similar name. that tells me that RIAA or MPAA will host a poisoned file and seed it heavily.
so any sort of peer-processing would be dependant on RIAA or MPAA admitting to all the other clients in the swarm that it's fake.
also, if most people that find out that they're downloading a fake file would kill the download and delete the file. they wouldn't keep seeding the file in order to warn others off.
In short:
1. BT is too decentralized to try that with.
2. The *AA groups will brute force false negatives
3. Users won't suppor the system.
Nice idea, but it's just not feasible enough. In the meantime, the primary way to find out whether or not a file is legit or not is to go through the comments pages of major BT aggregator sites. The community does post feedback and sometimes it's worth paying attention to. (there's also a bunch of teenage bullshit comments on there, too. but it's worth it to take a closer look before you download the torrent and connect to a *AA BT tracker.
agreed. OCRemix has had quality music on its site for quite a long time. I'm very much intrigued by the choices that the artists have made making these songs.
I think they made some bold choices. Some paid off, some end up sounding a little rough, but it's a very enjoyable listening experience.
The new Half-Life 2 short movie, "A Few Good G-men," is a nice example of what Source can do with its facial expressions and lip synching and such, but I wonder if anyone will take it further by making a longer, original movie.
I'm in late script-writing phase for an original full-length machinima for UT2004, I'm calling "Skaarj Wars". I'm looking to release it sometime around this time next year. Depending on how soon I can get the attention and efforts of good modelers and mappers, it may get released sooner.
You can poke at Johari Sports Network to keep tabs on my project, if you like, but like I said, it's not going to be done for awhile, so don't expect too much in the near future.
I'd love to post a mirror, but it's gonna be awhile before I can finish grabbing the PDF version. I both bless Slashdot for showing me such great stuff and curse it for holding it out of reach.
D&D Online claims that twitch skills will play a part in combat.
Last thing I read from them was talking about certain monsters having attack patterns. Such as a minotaur liking to charge. But if it charged into a wall, it'd be stunned for a moment. So, you could dodge the minotaur and then go for the rear attack. (or if you're a really patient and lucky thief, a backstab).
I donno. There's a good deal of strategy involved in Planetside. In order to make any progress as far as taking over facilities, zerg tactics will only get you so far. A more intelligent commander that can get his forces to outmanuver the other can usually force his opponent into a corner where they get ground to a pulp.
Of course, that was when I had last played. I've been in Iraq for the past 8 months and haven't played PS in about a year. I'm sure things have changed. I hope they haven't changed so much that strategy's no longer a factor.
Likening a GUIed persistant world to a movie isn't a very valid comparison.
When you type in "kill orc" 15 times in a row, you're not thinking "And this one is a devasting overhead swing, then I parry, dodge to the side and thrust my blade into his ribcage". You're typing in "kill orc" 15 times. or pushing the up arrow and enter 14 times. either way, there's no immersion.
You're not letting your creativity have full reign of the situation. You are sitting there, numbly hitting an orc because you want its stuff. You're only really paying attention to two things. His HP and your HP. If you hit "are severly wounded and bleeding from orifices you didn't know you had" before he does, you type in "flee" or an arbitrary cardinal direction.
compared that to a persistant world game with a GUI. you're swinging your blade and seeing other things that don't pertain to your fight. maybe it's a buddy racing to help you. maybe it's a baddy racing to help your orc. it adds excitment and drama to a fight other than staring at text prompts for levels of damage. attack animations have variety. attacking a selected target is often automatic, leaving my hands free to do something else that might be useful. calling for help, insulting a monster's mother and questioning her source of income, using some special ability, spell or other, or just moving around, whether or not it actually gives me a tactical advantage. I can imagine that it does and move accordingly. no such middle ground for movement occurs in a MUD. either you go N or you don't. When you flee combat, either the monster follows you or he doesn't. in a game with a GUI, you're in a frantic race to dodge around level architecture to get away from it. it's a good deal more exciting because the your input into the game and it's feedback to you is a lot less binary.
There's quite of few other reasons that I feel that having a GUI for a game is a giant plus, but it really boils down to "am I having enough fun playing the game this way?". For me, MUDs just aren't enough.
one of the problems with PC games versus console games is that console developers can tweak all the settings to make their game squeeze every ounce of power out of the console.
in developing PC games, you can't tweak your code that finely, because you have to support a wide variety of machines.
take as an example, Splinter Cell for Xbox. A game that was incredibly graphics intensive, featuring quite a few effects that would choke a machine with the exact same specs.
I think doom3 will be successful on the xbox, but not nearly to the extent that it was on the PC.
if I was a professional game commentator, I'd have more than one machine, with several monitors in my face, and easily controllable camera macros at my fingertips.
I'd want to be able to track about 4 point of views at a time. Any less and I'd be afraid I missed something. Any more and I'd just be at overload. I'd probably have my camera macros set to cycle through a few different settings. various angles on players, the different players and static cameras that are in places that I've already found to be great shots as well as the places most likely to have action in.
sure, I'd run into a problem if there was more than a few good fights occuring in the same time, however, if I have 4 POVs, the odds of me catching the right stuff is pretty likely. especially if you consider that in most team on team FPS games there's only going to be about 2 actions each team is going to take.
if it's a massive free for all deathmatch (well, I can't see wanting to commentate on that over and over. straight deathmatch is boring for spectators) then I'd concentrate on two or three of the favorites so I could base the commentary off of them and get the audience to get into the groove of whoever they find most appealing.
I've seen TV shows in korea where they were entirely on warcraft 3 or (more commonly) starcraft. the commentator would have 3 monitors. one for each side and then one to float around. cycling through them and having people monitoring each of the three POVs they were able to string together some decent programming.
I'd say it's all very possible. We've got the tech for it. We've got enough people interested in it. Hell, I'd do it if I wasn't in the Army. The only real question here, is does the audience exist for this?
If there's an audience, people will do it, get grass-roots movements started and eventually get sponsorship to get paid for it. (and people making a living off of it would naturally spur more such shows or stations into existence) It's really just a matter of finding the people to watch it.
assuming martial law is brutally imposed on America, having an armed populace will curb direct military strikes.
I can speak with certainty because I'm a US Army soldier in Iraq and while I have only limited reservations about going out to deal with insurgents in a war I know little and care little about, it's a wholly different story if I was sent to go after Americans in a war that I held a vested interest in doing as little damage as possible.
That's what the VAST majority of all the "what if" senarios involving a military coup in America fail to take into account. Those of us in the military aren't nameless and faceless. We *will* question stupid orders. And being ordered to start rounding up citizens, especially if we know they're armed and will defend themselves is something I would strongly question and more than likely refuse. Why would I place myself and my soldiers in a position where they'd have to kill their neighbors for defending themselves?
Now, if they weren't armed, they'd be peacefully rounded up. I wouldn't like it, but no one would be in any immediate danger.
GetUpMove.Com offers inspirational stories of people who have used the game to lose weight - people like Matt Keene, 20, who dropped 150 pounds playing the game.
"He lost a person, an entire person," Snitker said.
That's the absolute best way to phrase a success story.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd stab a hole through your touch-screen just getting through the first level.
The bot does nothing crazy. it knows the odds on everything. which means that it plays no better or worse than a human who knows the odds of each hand.
sure, it can tap into other bots playing so that it develops a huge advantage over other players, but so can two humans with an instant message or voice chat program.
unfair? you bet.
cheating when it's used stand-alone? hell no.
18-13 miles to the gallon on a fucking motorcycle?! holy shit!
I got my start doing Machinima in Planetside. The response that I got from the community was really impressive. I could give people about a week's notice and have a turnout of 10-20 people just from my server willing to help me with a film project.
Sometimes it was really hard to express what I wanted them to do and there is always the inevitable people that will screw off and not really pay attention, as well as those that have no idea that there's filming going on and ruin the fun by playing the game the "right" way.
However, all in all, I've had a very rewarding experience. In fact, in Planetside, I ended up deleting my character and switching sides (this was before you could have characters on multiple factions. it was really painful to delete a fairly high level character and restart as a newbie) to get into a clan that had been helping me a lot. To this day, I'm still an active member in that clan, although I've stopped playing Planetside awhile ago.
Film is a very expressive form and Machinima is no different. There are humorous series, like those done by the Rooster Teeth bunch, there are extremely artsy works like those that won the Make Something Unreal Contest Machinima catagory, there are music videos and there are even video memorials for players that have passed away in real life. Machinima is a lot of fun and a lot of work. While the goal is always to create something visual and compelling, along the way, you immerse yourself with the community and make something as equally important as a good film; friendships.
I appologize if that came off really sappy, but I've had Machinima films succeed and I've had them fail, but regardless of the outcome of a project, I couldn't have gotten as far as I did with it without the help of many other people.
I set up my xbox and red hat machine to play nice with each other. streaming formats stream, although non-streaming media like AVI, have to download before they'll start playing. still, that's only about a 10 second wait for a ~200 MB TV show file.(damn you, BBC! send some quality programming to America!)
I haven't looked recently, but I don't know of anything that'll let you stream out of a windows shared directory, but I haven't looked for one in about 2 years and someone may have put something together by now.
if the xbox 360 had included all of the features that I enjoy with my hacked xbox, I'd be much more enthused about it. as it is, likely the only reason while I'll even bother renting a system is to play the Shadowrun game when it comes out. there's just not enough new functionality and I don't play console games enough to justify the price tag.
true, but I would expect that an american-based site, with americans running the content would use the wacky american date format. I side-step the entire problem by using the first three letters of the month instead. ie today is 22AUG05
do what? is that span of days retroactive or something?
I would have accused Terminator and the Matrix files of being ripped off of myths and folklore before I would have said that some obscure author was the basis for the screenplays.
but it's not $200,000 worth of cool to most people.
wholly untrue. I know that slimeball lawyer is making those claims, but he's full of shit. there's nothing but smooth skin underneath those pixelated squares
anti-cheating/hacking program that was born from the cesspit that Counterstrike became IIRC, and is now the industry standard for preventing cheating and hacking in online first person shooters.
currently, there are too many bittorrent clients out there for a change to the protocol to propogate to all the users any time soon.
also, your basic theory is that the seed file is poisoned and that others in the swarm will pick up on that and report to you that it's bad.
however, when RIAA or MPAA poison a bit-torrent file, they seed it. some times many times over. I recall seeing a warning against trying one poisoned file. the tracker was reporting several hundred seeds, well over the amount of a legitimate file of a similar name. that tells me that RIAA or MPAA will host a poisoned file and seed it heavily.
so any sort of peer-processing would be dependant on RIAA or MPAA admitting to all the other clients in the swarm that it's fake.
also, if most people that find out that they're downloading a fake file would kill the download and delete the file. they wouldn't keep seeding the file in order to warn others off.
In short:
1. BT is too decentralized to try that with.
2. The *AA groups will brute force false negatives
3. Users won't suppor the system.
Nice idea, but it's just not feasible enough. In the meantime, the primary way to find out whether or not a file is legit or not is to go through the comments pages of major BT aggregator sites. The community does post feedback and sometimes it's worth paying attention to. (there's also a bunch of teenage bullshit comments on there, too. but it's worth it to take a closer look before you download the torrent and connect to a *AA BT tracker.
I think they made some bold choices. Some paid off, some end up sounding a little rough, but it's a very enjoyable listening experience.
well, except Groom Lake's not all secret squirrel anymore. hell, the Foo Fighters had a concert at Area 51 a few weeks ago.
I'm in late script-writing phase for an original full-length machinima for UT2004, I'm calling "Skaarj Wars". I'm looking to release it sometime around this time next year. Depending on how soon I can get the attention and efforts of good modelers and mappers, it may get released sooner.
You can poke at Johari Sports Network to keep tabs on my project, if you like, but like I said, it's not going to be done for awhile, so don't expect too much in the near future.
I'd love to post a mirror, but it's gonna be awhile before I can finish grabbing the PDF version. I both bless Slashdot for showing me such great stuff and curse it for holding it out of reach.
That's boring and time consuming.
I said to hell with that and used a sledgehammer and didn't stop until every platter was multiple pieces. Faster and waaaaay more fun.
it means you could skip the third step and go straight to profit.
Last thing I read from them was talking about certain monsters having attack patterns. Such as a minotaur liking to charge. But if it charged into a wall, it'd be stunned for a moment. So, you could dodge the minotaur and then go for the rear attack. (or if you're a really patient and lucky thief, a backstab).
Of course, that was when I had last played. I've been in Iraq for the past 8 months and haven't played PS in about a year. I'm sure things have changed. I hope they haven't changed so much that strategy's no longer a factor.
When you type in "kill orc" 15 times in a row, you're not thinking "And this one is a devasting overhead swing, then I parry, dodge to the side and thrust my blade into his ribcage". You're typing in "kill orc" 15 times. or pushing the up arrow and enter 14 times. either way, there's no immersion.
You're not letting your creativity have full reign of the situation. You are sitting there, numbly hitting an orc because you want its stuff. You're only really paying attention to two things. His HP and your HP. If you hit "are severly wounded and bleeding from orifices you didn't know you had" before he does, you type in "flee" or an arbitrary cardinal direction.
compared that to a persistant world game with a GUI. you're swinging your blade and seeing other things that don't pertain to your fight. maybe it's a buddy racing to help you. maybe it's a baddy racing to help your orc. it adds excitment and drama to a fight other than staring at text prompts for levels of damage. attack animations have variety. attacking a selected target is often automatic, leaving my hands free to do something else that might be useful. calling for help, insulting a monster's mother and questioning her source of income, using some special ability, spell or other, or just moving around, whether or not it actually gives me a tactical advantage. I can imagine that it does and move accordingly. no such middle ground for movement occurs in a MUD. either you go N or you don't. When you flee combat, either the monster follows you or he doesn't. in a game with a GUI, you're in a frantic race to dodge around level architecture to get away from it. it's a good deal more exciting because the your input into the game and it's feedback to you is a lot less binary.
There's quite of few other reasons that I feel that having a GUI for a game is a giant plus, but it really boils down to "am I having enough fun playing the game this way?". For me, MUDs just aren't enough.
in developing PC games, you can't tweak your code that finely, because you have to support a wide variety of machines.
take as an example, Splinter Cell for Xbox. A game that was incredibly graphics intensive, featuring quite a few effects that would choke a machine with the exact same specs.
I think doom3 will be successful on the xbox, but not nearly to the extent that it was on the PC.
I'd want to be able to track about 4 point of views at a time. Any less and I'd be afraid I missed something. Any more and I'd just be at overload. I'd probably have my camera macros set to cycle through a few different settings. various angles on players, the different players and static cameras that are in places that I've already found to be great shots as well as the places most likely to have action in.
sure, I'd run into a problem if there was more than a few good fights occuring in the same time, however, if I have 4 POVs, the odds of me catching the right stuff is pretty likely. especially if you consider that in most team on team FPS games there's only going to be about 2 actions each team is going to take.
if it's a massive free for all deathmatch (well, I can't see wanting to commentate on that over and over. straight deathmatch is boring for spectators) then I'd concentrate on two or three of the favorites so I could base the commentary off of them and get the audience to get into the groove of whoever they find most appealing.
I've seen TV shows in korea where they were entirely on warcraft 3 or (more commonly) starcraft. the commentator would have 3 monitors. one for each side and then one to float around. cycling through them and having people monitoring each of the three POVs they were able to string together some decent programming.
I'd say it's all very possible. We've got the tech for it. We've got enough people interested in it. Hell, I'd do it if I wasn't in the Army. The only real question here, is does the audience exist for this?
If there's an audience, people will do it, get grass-roots movements started and eventually get sponsorship to get paid for it. (and people making a living off of it would naturally spur more such shows or stations into existence) It's really just a matter of finding the people to watch it.
I can speak with certainty because I'm a US Army soldier in Iraq and while I have only limited reservations about going out to deal with insurgents in a war I know little and care little about, it's a wholly different story if I was sent to go after Americans in a war that I held a vested interest in doing as little damage as possible.
That's what the VAST majority of all the "what if" senarios involving a military coup in America fail to take into account. Those of us in the military aren't nameless and faceless. We *will* question stupid orders. And being ordered to start rounding up citizens, especially if we know they're armed and will defend themselves is something I would strongly question and more than likely refuse. Why would I place myself and my soldiers in a position where they'd have to kill their neighbors for defending themselves?
Now, if they weren't armed, they'd be peacefully rounded up. I wouldn't like it, but no one would be in any immediate danger.
"He lost a person, an entire person," Snitker said.
That's the absolute best way to phrase a success story.