As an example, in a Java servlet environment (think Java CGI), the individual pages might be run in the Java sandbox.
Java servlets are running on the server side, which makes this a moot point. The client side isn't running any Java code for a servlet and the client's JVM (if present) is never invoked.
Unless, or course, the page hosts an applet, but you already discussed applets.
Asked by kotaku (http://kotaku.com/5940782/ea-says-theyre-not-killing-single+player-games), he made a clarification: "Let me clarify," Gibeau began. "What I said was [about not greenlighting] anything that [doesn't have] an online service. You can have a very deep single-player game but it has to have an ongoing content plan for keeping customers engaged beyond what's on the initial disc. I'm not saying deathmatch must come to Mirror's Edge."
So, in other words, it has to either have multiplayer or mandatory DLC?
Umm, if you don't want DLC, then... don't buy it? Is that hard? Is someone holding a gun to your head and making you whip out a credit card and buy DLC?
Not the GP, but likely because companies are shipping games that aren't complete. Either they're missing what could be considered important story elements or in some cases the game's ending. I haven't played it, but I've heard Alan Wake is like this; you need to download not one, but two DLCs to get the game's actual ending.
I'd love to see the figures that Valve gets for its back catalogs, to this very day they are still getting sales from properties like Half-Life 1 and Counter Strike Classic, long after the property has made them their investment back plus a big profit.
I'd certainly hope that people are buying one of the packs that contain their old games.
The Valve Complete Pack usually sells for $50 during Steam's major sales that happen two or three times a year.
I would love to play, for instance, StarCraft 2 against people of my own social circle. Unfortunately, none of them are in the least interested in playing.
Maybe they tried the game and didn't see much of a point in buying it over SC1? I'm going to note that I'm going off of my own personal experience here, except that I made the mistake of buying it before realizing that I like SC1 better.
Personally, I can't stand ANY multiplayer games. Not sure exactly why, I guess I prefer to compete against fixed challenges and at my own pace. I am probably in the minority, but I certainly can't be alone.
I like Multiplayer games, but I have noticed that the only multiplayer games I tend to stick with are the ones that have NO single player component attached.
Having said that, the multiplayer game I play the most is Team Fortress 2, and I'm a member of a community that tends to play together (Reddit's RUGC Midwest).
Yes, our 24-player server is a public server, but there are enough of us that when people are playing, most of them are server regulars or people those regulars know.
Sometimes, rude people do show up... and we tend to escort them out fairly quickly; one of the advantages to running our own server.
ere is what I do in TF2: Scroll up for slot1 Scroll down for slot2 press 3 (or rebind, or whatever) for slot3.
No muss, no fuss, instant weapons select for both my ranged weapons and a quick button press for melee.
You'd still have to hit 4 for the Spy's Disguise Kit or 4 and 5 for the Engineer's build and destruct toolkits.
That's the other thing... as Spy, the Knife is your most used weapon and the Sapper your least, meaning that your weapon priority is a bit different than most classes.
Heck, I actually have my various.cfg files set up so that R is different depending on which class I'm playing (R is reload for most classes, Switch Disguise teams for Spy ever since Valve messed up the Simplified Disguise Kit's switch disguise team button)
To be honest, though... I only rebound reload because of a game mod that needed it; Freak Fortress 2 for some of its specials specifically.
Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel. Having played FPS for ~ 20+ years, using the mouse wheel to select weapons is incredibly slow compared to keyboard since you need to cycle through them to get to the right weapon. It is significantly faster to just press a single key to select the correct weapon.
I've been playing multiplayer FPS games on and off since the original Doom in 1993 (10Base2 coax LAN ftw). However, I took a break from them from sometime in 2003 (I know because Unreal Tournament 2003 was out, but 2004 wasn't) to 2008 when I picked up Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately, when I came back to them is when I picked up the habit of using the mouse wheel.
I've played TF2 for the past 4.25 or so years. Unlike most games, TF2 has you start out with all the equipment for your class (Loadouts aren't important for this discussion).
7 of the 9 classes only have 3 weapon slots. Meaning that any other weapon is just one scroll of the mouse wheel away; two if you go the wrong way.
Having said that, I play Spy the most. Spy has 4 weapon slots and a right-click item. I tend to manually trigger slot 4 (the Spy's disguise kit) because I'll be using it almost every time I'm invisible (the right-click item) and after every kill.
The problem is that I tend to use the mouse wheel while switching between the other 3. The Knife (slot 3) has an instant-kill backstab, but is otherwise the weakest weapon in the game. The Sapper (slot 2) only works on Engineer buildings (and robots in the new mode). That leaves the Revolver (slot 1).
In case it wasn't obvious, that means you want to switch between weapons 3 and 1 quickly as the situations dictates, but I still tend to use the mouse-wheel for it.
So, yes, I need to get back into the habit of using 1-3 to switch between my main weapons.
Show me the first guy to win a fighting game tournament using a keyboard and I'll agree with you.
There are more types of games than FPSes and MMOs.
True, but talking about just FPSes would be on topic, since the article is about Valve. They are a company that, to date, has made two games that aren't an FPS. One of those games was Alien Swarm, a top-down shooter that still uses the mouse to aim. The other is DOTA 2, a MOBA that hasn't officially launched yet.
I guess that makes sense in games where one weapon makes you move faster.
I'm used to playing TF2. Melee weapons don't make you move faster in TF2*. There are really only a handful of weapons in the entire game where you'd want to have a weapon selected but not switched to, out of something like 200 unique weapons in the game.
* There are two exceptions: 1. The Gloves of Running Urgently make the Heavy (one of the two slowest class in the game) move at nearly the speed of the standard classes, but the Heavy takes double damage while they're equipped and 3 seconds after you change weapons. 2. The Disciplinary Action allows the Soldier (the other slow class) to hit a teammate with it to make both the Soldier and the person he whipped move faster for about 5 seconds. This makes more sense when you realize TF2 has Friendly Fire off by default (very important since one of the classes can disguise as any class on either team).
When Valve's own people stop using keyboards and mice to do their work then I'll believe they aren't just trying to foist a solution looking for a problem.
Yes, they should clearly use something other than keyboards and mice to do programming. I hear C++ is really easy to write using a gamepad!
For one thing, movement with the keyboard lacks the nuance of an analog joystick. When I move in a console game, I control the speed of the movement. With a keyboard, it's either run or stop--on or off. And the mouse, while offering more speed and precision on a large display than a joystick, feels artificial to me (sorry to those of you who love the ultra-quick headshot).
The keyboard is a terrible controller. Its only saving grace is the sheer number of keys it has... I have at least one FPS where every key on the left side of the keyboard is assigned to something (WASD for moment, ~ for game console, 1-5 for weapons, Tab for scorboard, Q for quick switch, E to call for a Medic, R to reload, F to taunt, G to use an action item, ZXC for "voice" menus, V for push to talk voice chat, CTRL to crouch, spacebar to jump.. pretty sure shift and caps lock have things assigned to them too, although I can't remember what at the moment.
A mouse is no more artificial than a joystick. A joystick is good for turning/strafing, but it's terrible for precision aiming ("ultra-quick headshot" as you refer to it). Most console FPS games have automatic aim assist to compensate for the joystick's terribleness at aiming.
In theory, the Wii remote would make an excellent aiming device. Unfortunately, it's hooked to a game system that has less power than my PC had at the turn of the millennium, let alone now. Oh, and using the pointer for a turning device as well? Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy showed how to mess that one up (capped turn speeds, was extremely picky about turning in general).
My mouse already has two buttons on each side of the mouse (although the two on your non-mouse hand are hard to press so I don't usually map anything to them).
Plus, Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel. Just make sure you turn on fast weapon switching or it'll drive you mad (you mean I have to click the primary mouse button before it'll switch weapons?!)
You know that 4GB, 120GB, 250GB, and 320GB in the Xbox 360 model names? Those are HDD sizes (or Flash in the case of the 4GB model).
You know that the first generation of Xbox 360 also came in a version without storage? Also, game developers were required to always make their games playable on any Xbox, including the ones without storage. This caused quite a few headaches to some developers.
And by "the first generation" you mean one of the two models in the first generation; said model also came with wired controllers. The other model came with a 20GB HDD and wireless controllers.
No Xbox 360 model made in the last 5 years has had no storage... even the base models were bumped to 256MB and have since increased all the way to 4GB. And nothing from XBLA, DLC included, will run on Xbox 360 systems that have no storage space, which ruins your argument since that's what this entire discussion is about.
What planet do you live on? You'll be waiting a long time if you think you're ever going to live in a world where people will just do the right thing out of principle.
It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
Obviously, you can.
It does make me wonder if people who got banned this way who bought the game using a credit card can file a chargeback against ArenaNet and successfully win it.
No, but it could be due to RAM or processor issues.
Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have roughly 512MB RAM.
The Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM embedded on the graphics processor die, plus 512MB GDDR3 system RAM. My understanding is that it can allocate some of the system RAM to the video processor as needed.
The PS3 has 256MB XDR DRAM for its processors and 256MB GDDR3 RAM for its GPU. Yes, you read that correctly: the PS3 has as much video RAM as it does regular RAM.
If it wasn't clear, this means that the Xbox 360 has more RAM that games can use.
As for the processor, the PS3's Cell processor (and its 7-8 SPUs) is harder to optimize for than the 3-core PowerPC processor used by the Xbox 360.
Why use SWT at all I found it to be a collection of lowest common denominator APIs. Just use Qt directly in Java via the QtJambi project.
IMHO If the SWT on Qt project should get more traction in the future it is better throught of as being an "SWT compatibility layer (to help migration away from SWT)" since the direct Qt API in Java is so much better and that API already works on the big 3 desktop enviroments (Windows, Unix and MacOSX). So what purpose does SWT continue to serve.
SWT doesn't require a third-party UI library on OSX or Windows and thus acts like native programs do (since it's using native widgets).
Slashdot Mirror
As an example, in a Java servlet environment (think Java CGI), the individual pages might be run in the Java sandbox.
Java servlets are running on the server side, which makes this a moot point. The client side isn't running any Java code for a servlet and the client's JVM (if present) is never invoked.
Unless, or course, the page hosts an applet, but you already discussed applets.
(Taking things out of context will continue for the duration of U.S. Silly Season.)
I'm glad that silly season only happens every other year, and to a lesser degree on the years not divisible by 4.
Asked by kotaku (http://kotaku.com/5940782/ea-says-theyre-not-killing-single+player-games), he made a clarification: "Let me clarify," Gibeau began. "What I said was [about not greenlighting] anything that [doesn't have] an online service. You can have a very deep single-player game but it has to have an ongoing content plan for keeping customers engaged beyond what's on the initial disc. I'm not saying deathmatch must come to Mirror's Edge."
So, in other words, it has to either have multiplayer or mandatory DLC?
Mr. Gibeau, please go die in a fire.
Umm, if you don't want DLC, then... don't buy it? Is that hard? Is someone holding a gun to your head and making you whip out a credit card and buy DLC?
Not the GP, but likely because companies are shipping games that aren't complete. Either they're missing what could be considered important story elements or in some cases the game's ending. I haven't played it, but I've heard Alan Wake is like this; you need to download not one, but two DLCs to get the game's actual ending.
Interesting analogy, but to make the analogy correct, Bob would have to be selling access to his driveway to people who want to skateboard on it.
Which of course, means that the people paying him can request that he repave it, yes, as a gravel driveway is suboptimal to skateboard on.
I'd love to see the figures that Valve gets for its back catalogs, to this very day they are still getting sales from properties like Half-Life 1 and Counter Strike Classic, long after the property has made them their investment back plus a big profit.
I'd certainly hope that people are buying one of the packs that contain their old games.
The Valve Complete Pack usually sells for $50 during Steam's major sales that happen two or three times a year.
I would love to play, for instance, StarCraft 2 against people of my own social circle. Unfortunately, none of them are in the least interested in playing.
Maybe they tried the game and didn't see much of a point in buying it over SC1? I'm going to note that I'm going off of my own personal experience here, except that I made the mistake of buying it before realizing that I like SC1 better.
Personally, I can't stand ANY multiplayer games. Not sure exactly why, I guess I prefer to compete against fixed challenges and at my own pace. I am probably in the minority, but I certainly can't be alone.
I like Multiplayer games, but I have noticed that the only multiplayer games I tend to stick with are the ones that have NO single player component attached.
Having said that, the multiplayer game I play the most is Team Fortress 2, and I'm a member of a community that tends to play together (Reddit's RUGC Midwest).
Yes, our 24-player server is a public server, but there are enough of us that when people are playing, most of them are server regulars or people those regulars know.
Sometimes, rude people do show up... and we tend to escort them out fairly quickly; one of the advantages to running our own server.
ere is what I do in TF2:
Scroll up for slot1
Scroll down for slot2
press 3 (or rebind, or whatever) for slot3.
No muss, no fuss, instant weapons select for both my ranged weapons and a quick button press for melee.
You'd still have to hit 4 for the Spy's Disguise Kit or 4 and 5 for the Engineer's build and destruct toolkits.
That's the other thing... as Spy, the Knife is your most used weapon and the Sapper your least, meaning that your weapon priority is a bit different than most classes.
Heck, I actually have my various .cfg files set up so that R is different depending on which class I'm playing (R is reload for most classes, Switch Disguise teams for Spy ever since Valve messed up the Simplified Disguise Kit's switch disguise team button)
To be honest, though... I only rebound reload because of a game mod that needed it; Freak Fortress 2 for some of its specials specifically.
Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel.
Having played FPS for ~ 20+ years, using the mouse wheel to select weapons is incredibly slow compared to keyboard since you need to cycle through them to get to the right weapon. It is significantly faster to just press a single key to select the correct weapon.
I've been playing multiplayer FPS games on and off since the original Doom in 1993 (10Base2 coax LAN ftw). However, I took a break from them from sometime in 2003 (I know because Unreal Tournament 2003 was out, but 2004 wasn't) to 2008 when I picked up Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately, when I came back to them is when I picked up the habit of using the mouse wheel.
I've played TF2 for the past 4.25 or so years. Unlike most games, TF2 has you start out with all the equipment for your class (Loadouts aren't important for this discussion).
7 of the 9 classes only have 3 weapon slots. Meaning that any other weapon is just one scroll of the mouse wheel away; two if you go the wrong way.
Having said that, I play Spy the most. Spy has 4 weapon slots and a right-click item. I tend to manually trigger slot 4 (the Spy's disguise kit) because I'll be using it almost every time I'm invisible (the right-click item) and after every kill.
The problem is that I tend to use the mouse wheel while switching between the other 3. The Knife (slot 3) has an instant-kill backstab, but is otherwise the weakest weapon in the game. The Sapper (slot 2) only works on Engineer buildings (and robots in the new mode). That leaves the Revolver (slot 1).
In case it wasn't obvious, that means you want to switch between weapons 3 and 1 quickly as the situations dictates, but I still tend to use the mouse-wheel for it.
So, yes, I need to get back into the habit of using 1-3 to switch between my main weapons.
Show me the first guy to win a fighting game tournament using a keyboard and I'll agree with you.
There are more types of games than FPSes and MMOs.
True, but talking about just FPSes would be on topic, since the article is about Valve. They are a company that, to date, has made two games that aren't an FPS. One of those games was Alien Swarm, a top-down shooter that still uses the mouse to aim. The other is DOTA 2, a MOBA that hasn't officially launched yet.
I guess that makes sense in games where one weapon makes you move faster.
I'm used to playing TF2. Melee weapons don't make you move faster in TF2*. There are really only a handful of weapons in the entire game where you'd want to have a weapon selected but not switched to, out of something like 200 unique weapons in the game.
* There are two exceptions:
1. The Gloves of Running Urgently make the Heavy (one of the two slowest class in the game) move at nearly the speed of the standard classes, but the Heavy takes double damage while they're equipped and 3 seconds after you change weapons.
2. The Disciplinary Action allows the Soldier (the other slow class) to hit a teammate with it to make both the Soldier and the person he whipped move faster for about 5 seconds. This makes more sense when you realize TF2 has Friendly Fire off by default (very important since one of the classes can disguise as any class on either team).
When Valve's own people stop using keyboards and mice to do their work then I'll believe they aren't just trying to foist a solution looking for a problem.
Yes, they should clearly use something other than keyboards and mice to do programming. I hear C++ is really easy to write using a gamepad!
Yes, exactly... why don't you own one of those?
I opted not to get one of those when last getting a new mouse... too many buttons for my taste.
For one thing, movement with the keyboard lacks the nuance of an analog joystick. When I move in a console game, I control the speed of the movement. With a keyboard, it's either run or stop--on or off. And the mouse, while offering more speed and precision on a large display than a joystick, feels artificial to me (sorry to those of you who love the ultra-quick headshot).
The keyboard is a terrible controller. Its only saving grace is the sheer number of keys it has... I have at least one FPS where every key on the left side of the keyboard is assigned to something (WASD for moment, ~ for game console, 1-5 for weapons, Tab for scorboard, Q for quick switch, E to call for a Medic, R to reload, F to taunt, G to use an action item, ZXC for "voice" menus, V for push to talk voice chat, CTRL to crouch, spacebar to jump.. pretty sure shift and caps lock have things assigned to them too, although I can't remember what at the moment.
A mouse is no more artificial than a joystick. A joystick is good for turning/strafing, but it's terrible for precision aiming ("ultra-quick headshot" as you refer to it). Most console FPS games have automatic aim assist to compensate for the joystick's terribleness at aiming.
In theory, the Wii remote would make an excellent aiming device. Unfortunately, it's hooked to a game system that has less power than my PC had at the turn of the millennium, let alone now. Oh, and using the pointer for a turning device as well? Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy showed how to mess that one up (capped turn speeds, was extremely picky about turning in general).
... a steam driven computer?
They're called 'Valve' so it will be made using vacuum tubes.
Are you saying valves only exist in vacuum tube-based systems?
Remind me to never let you look at my water pipes.
My mouse already has two buttons on each side of the mouse (although the two on your non-mouse hand are hard to press so I don't usually map anything to them).
Plus, Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel. Just make sure you turn on fast weapon switching or it'll drive you mad (you mean I have to click the primary mouse button before it'll switch weapons?!)
You're honestly disappointed that there's no Xen?
You mean we should be happy that the last third or so of the game, including the final boss, is missing?
You know that 4GB, 120GB, 250GB, and 320GB in the Xbox 360 model names? Those are HDD sizes (or Flash in the case of the 4GB model).
You know that the first generation of Xbox 360 also came in a version without storage? Also, game developers were required to always make their games playable on any Xbox, including the ones without storage. This caused quite a few headaches to some developers.
And by "the first generation" you mean one of the two models in the first generation; said model also came with wired controllers. The other model came with a 20GB HDD and wireless controllers.
No Xbox 360 model made in the last 5 years has had no storage... even the base models were bumped to 256MB and have since increased all the way to 4GB. And nothing from XBLA, DLC included, will run on Xbox 360 systems that have no storage space, which ruins your argument since that's what this entire discussion is about.
What planet do you live on? You'll be waiting a long time if you think you're ever going to live in a world where people will just do the right thing out of principle.
It was Areanet's mistake. Of course people took advantage of it, and you really can't punish them for it.
Obviously, you can.
It does make me wonder if people who got banned this way who bought the game using a credit card can file a chargeback against ArenaNet and successfully win it.
No, but it could be due to RAM or processor issues.
Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have roughly 512MB RAM.
The Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM embedded on the graphics processor die, plus 512MB GDDR3 system RAM. My understanding is that it can allocate some of the system RAM to the video processor as needed.
The PS3 has 256MB XDR DRAM for its processors and 256MB GDDR3 RAM for its GPU. Yes, you read that correctly: the PS3 has as much video RAM as it does regular RAM.
If it wasn't clear, this means that the Xbox 360 has more RAM that games can use.
As for the processor, the PS3's Cell processor (and its 7-8 SPUs) is harder to optimize for than the 3-core PowerPC processor used by the Xbox 360.
So remove the drive. The 360 doesn't have one, and it can play the content just fine.
You know that 4GB, 120GB, 250GB, and 320GB in the Xbox 360 model names? Those are HDD sizes (or Flash in the case of the 4GB model).
Why use SWT at all I found it to be a collection of lowest common denominator APIs. Just use Qt directly in Java via the QtJambi project.
IMHO If the SWT on Qt project should get more traction in the future it is better throught of as being an "SWT compatibility layer (to help migration away from SWT)" since the direct Qt API in Java is so much better and that API already works on the big 3 desktop enviroments (Windows, Unix and MacOSX). So what purpose does SWT continue to serve.
SWT doesn't require a third-party UI library on OSX or Windows and thus acts like native programs do (since it's using native widgets).
flawed jury verdict
Apple's new shinny
the currently best smartphone in the market
Whoever wrote this made it a touch too clear their loathing for Apple and preference for Samsung.
At least one of those 3 can be factually supported by evidence.
I am, of course, referring to Apple's new shinny.
er... I mean flawed jury verdict.
We were talking about using Java on the server side, not the client side.
Thanks for playing, though!