"Portal is basically a new IP. The universe is the same, but so distantly related that they're essentially different. " That's more or less true, for now. But Valve dropped plenty of hints in Episode Two that the two stories are going to converge in Episode 3. Here's a clip of a scripted sequence in which the Half Life scientists talk about the Aperture science research vessel "Borealis".
You forgot to mention that you find the Borealis's drydock in Portal 2.
Indie PC titles are the next step up from that, but you have to be big enough to get listed on steam to have a chance, and then the next step up from that would be the PSN/XBLA type stores
I suggest you review what Zeboyd said about Steam versus XBLA. Something like they sold more copies of Cthulu Saves the World on Steam in the first week than they did in the first year on Xbox Live Indie Games.
I can't spend 16 hours a day learning a single character so TF2 is right out
You don't need to spend that much time, but I will admit that TF2 has a lot of game mechanics to throw at you, and Valve is constantly adding more.
with TF2 most of the maps I've seen everyone is either a sniper or the pyro
Wow, what terrible maps/servers have you been playing? All CTF maps?
Pyro is arguably the weakest class in the game. They have basically no ranged attack at all and can be mowed down by Heavy or Sniper with no problems. Soldier vs. Pyro or Demoman vs. Pyro can depend on how good the Pyro is at reflecting projectiles (tip: Shoot at their feet). Scouts should use their Pistol at range against Pyros... Scattergun in a pinch. If an Engineer lets an enemy Pyro get near him... wtf were you doing Engy?
Seriously, all classes in TF2 have things they're good at and things they're bad at.
Scout: Good at capturing points & intel, close range combat, dodging. Bad at long range combat, taking out enemy emplacements.
Soldier: Good at long range combat, surprise flanking moves, taking out enemy emplacements, and damaging multiple enemies at once. Bad at close range combat, easy Spy target.
Pyro: Good at close range combat, revealing Spies, damage over time (fire), stopping enemy ubercharges (airblast), soldier rockets (reflect), and demo spam (airblast). Bad at medium and long range combat, taking out enemy emplacements. The above good things are heavily dependent on loadout, specifically the choice of flamethrower.
Demoman (standard): Good at setting traps, shooting around corners (grenades bounce), and breaking enemy emplacements. Bad at medium and long range combat.
Demoman (Demoknight): Good at closing distances, melee combat. Bad at everything else.
Heavy: Good at combat at all ranges, good at surviving lots of damage. Bad at movement, easy Sniper and Spy target, easy to kill using the Pyro's Flare Gun at a distance.
Engineer (standard): Good at defensive emplacements (via sentry gun), controlling team movement (via teleporters), resupplying the team (via dispenser). Bad at one-on-one fighting.
Engineer (Gunslinger): Good at surprising enemies with mini-sentries, controlling team movement (via teleporters), resupplying the team (via dispenser). Bad at one-on-one fighting.
Medic: Good at keeping the team healed, breaking enemy emplacements. Bad at one-on-one fighting, #1 target of Snipers and Spies.
Sniper: Good at long range fighting, headshots will one-shot lower-HP classes regardless of HP. Bad at close range fighting, snap sniper shots against higher-HP targets, tends to have tunnel vision.
Spy (standard): Good at breaking enemy emplacements (sapper), sneaking past enemies (disguise and cloak), taking out strategic enemy targets (backstab). Bad at close range combat if they didn't surprise the enemy, escaping bad situations.
Spy (Dead Ringer): Good at breaking enemy emplacements (sapper), taking out strategic enemy targets (backstab), escaping bad situations. Bad at close range combat if they didn't surprise the enemy.
It didn't pose a problem at all, you have to learn the keywords character-by-character anyways,
As a native English speaker, I can tell you that I didn't have to learn all keywords character by character when learning BASIC.
IF and THEN are common English, I didn't have to think about those. ELSE was a little trickier (because "or else" is a common English phrase) but still simple enough. ENDIF and GOTO were easy because they're two English words stuck together. PRINT was a common word for newspaper or magazine text, so it clearly had to do something with text.
FOR EACH was somewhat understandable because I knew what EACH meant, even if FOR didn't make a lot of sense there. A LOOP was something round that came back to meet itself, such as a piece of string looping back on itself. Oh, and there were things you would DO WHILE waiting for something.
A computer language using native language terms really is easier to learn.
And of course I can't even call it that here on Slashdot, because Slashdot mangles the thorn for some inexplicable reason, so I have to substitute letters. And this is just a comment website!
Slashdot's web server and webpages claim to support UTF-8, but the Slashdot backend treats it as ASCII and will helpfully display the ASCII 2+ character representation (sometimes these characters are unprintable).
For instance, here's a Euro currency symbol (U+20AC): â
However, HTML entities work. Here's a Euro currency symbol (€): €
As for thorn, I believe Þ and þ will give you the characters you want: and respectively... although I don't seem to see those, so maybe not.
I see no problem with any of that. Soon Samsung will have the same packaging and they will claim that's the only way to do it. The judge will believe them and Apple will be forced to apologize to Samsung, the court, slashdot, me, you, and everyone else on this planet for thinking their packaging is special.
Samsung already has the same kind of packaging. This was used as one of the complaints by Apple during the lawsuit.
On Windows, when you install Steam, it changes the permissions of the directory you install it to to allow the Users group write access to it.
I'm not sure how that will work on Linux, though... I don't think there are any default groups that all users are added to, especially on Debian-based systems that give each user their own group.
Steam has always been pretty good at embracing new technologies (they were among the first game vendors to utilize bittorrent for content distribution)
Steam doesn't use BitTorrent, unless it's the system they said was going into place before CS:GO launched (and only work with newer games).
Team Fortress 2 is Valve's multiplayer test game. The majority of new features for their multiplayer games appear there first and the rest (at least the good features) eventually migrate there. I made a post last week about this.
I almost believed this up until you mentioned CS 1.6. Valve is only porting Source (the 2004+ engine) over, not GoldSrc (the 1997-2003 engine). Which means that CS:S and CS:GO will be on Linux, but not CS 1.6.
The Ouya is okay for today, but it'll be decidedly shoddy in five years' time
That's what wii said about the last budget console wii saw, but for a while, wii ended up seeing it printing money.
Yes, it did print money... for the first few years. Then the prices started dropping on the "expensive" consoles. Right now, you can get the cheapest Xbox 360 for $50 more than the Wii. Whats more, the cheapest Xbox 360 model can play Xbox (original) games, while the cheapest (read: only) new Wii model currently for sale can't play GameCube games, thanks to Nintendo making a hardware modification that removed backwards compatibility without dropping the price.
Not only that, but the bottom has dropped out of the market niche the Wii occupies, which is why Nintendo is trying to get its successor, the Wii U, out by the end of this year.
That said, little things like having to use WHERE ROWNUM = X, rather then LIMIT which basically always requires a subselect to get correct results is just annoying and makes our code less portable.
One of the sad parts of SQL is that row limiting (to my knowledge) isn't part of the standard. So, unless a database explicitly adds support for another database's syntax it doesn't happen.
SQL and NoSQL are different, with different use cases.
No. Wrong. Clearly, $CHOICE is superior in all cases. If you think you've found a situation in which !($CHOICE) is better, you're obviously using $CHOICE wrong and should RTFM before you EVER say anything against it again, n00b.
Ah, but then you have to look at the implications of $UNRELATED_PROBLEM. After all, $CHOICE can't $BUZZWORD1, at least not without support for $BUZZWORD2.
Once $CHOICE supports those, then maybe it'll be better in all cases.
The thing is, the default setting if you have a disc (XBL gold or not) is for that disc to play.
I have a disc in my 360 now and I never changed the default settings for game discs.
Lets see what happens when I turn it on.
Xbox 360 logo... Choose a profile screen... signing into Xbox Live...
OK, I was deposited at the Main Menu's "home" tab with 7 boxes. They are:
1. Upper-left corner: Small box, Alan Wake (the disc currently in the console) 2. Lower-left corner: Small box, Quickplay (for accessing my XBLA games) 3. Left-center: Large box the switches ads every 2 seconds between "Comic Con is On", "Crackle's The Unknown" (tv series?), "Call of Duty: Black Ops II", "Quantum Conundrum", and "Xbox Live Good, Better, Gold" 4. Right-center-upper: Small box, ad for MLB & More 5. Right-center-lower: Small box, ad for Arcade Sale 6. Upper-right corner: Small box, ad for Kinect 7. Lower-right corner: Small box, ad for Netflix
My empirical evidence says you're wrong.
Oh, and if you're referring to what happens when you put a disc in, the main menu has likely already loaded and you've already seen the ads.
Uh, Valve uses the same engine for its games -- why wouldn't they "backport" features from one game into another??
You'll note that TF2 is the only game Valve has backported features into, despite 3 other Valve multiplayer games using the exact same version of the game engine.
some of us hate what TF2 became (grind to unlock gear! buy stupid crap! deal with screaming 12 year olds! fun!)
Er... grind to unlock gear? There are a grand total of 27 weapons (3 per class) you can grind to get out of the 200ish weapons in the game. The rest are gained about 6-8 per week at random, or if you don't want to wait, you can grind up the unwanted weapons you have and craft it.
Also, the screaming 12 year olds is why there's a Mute button on the main menu (which appears if you hit Esc).
The downside of TF2 becoming the top game on Steam is that TF2 doubles as Valve's guinea pig.
What do I mean by this?
Almost every new feature added to Source multiplayer games originates in TF2. If not originating there, they'll be ported to the Source MP engine and appear in TF2.
The most obvious example of features originating in TF2 are:
Achievement System unlocking in-game items. This was re-used in Portal 2.
Replays: A year out and replays still have problems where it'll crash the server on map change if replays are disabled via the server console (or remote console aka rcon) mid-game. Replays will, of course, appear in DOTA2 and CS:GO.
In-game Store: Also appears in Portal 2, DOTA2, and likely CS:GO.
Even if it didn't originate in TF2, it will likely be backported.
Left 4 Dead in particular has had a lot of system backported to TF2:
Glow system: In L4D, Survivor players have a glow based on their health visible to their teammates and enemies (in Versus mode). TF2 reused this for its sticky bombs, payload cart, and intelligence briefcases. TF2 also supports making player entities glow in the exact same manner that L4D does (this is used in the Freak Fortress 2 user mod).
Particle effects system. The L4D particle system got back-ported to TF2.
Different visuals: The L4D system that lets certain players see the world differently than others got backported to TF2 (although TF2 upgraded it and made it enable based on specific items being equipped).
If you click on "show search tools" on the left, and then "verbatim", Google will stop searching for other spellings and synonyms and will require all search terms to be on the page. In general, verbatim mode actually lowers the quality of the search results, which is why it's turned off by default, but there are exceptions so it's made available as an option.
Synonyms and other spellings aren't the problem, returning results that have nothing to do with one of the search terms or its alternate spellings and synonyms is the problem. I want it to do the former and not the latter.
My only real complain with steam is that all games are locked to a single account on a single PC (e.g. I can't have two games across one account active on two different systems).
As mentioned by others, Offline mode can be used to bypass this... except for the online components of games, for obvious reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
"Portal is basically a new IP. The universe is the same, but so distantly related that they're essentially different. " That's more or less true, for now. But Valve dropped plenty of hints in Episode Two that the two stories are going to converge in Episode 3. Here's a clip of a scripted sequence in which the Half Life scientists talk about the Aperture science research vessel "Borealis".
You forgot to mention that you find the Borealis's drydock in Portal 2.
Indie PC titles are the next step up from that, but you have to be big enough to get listed on steam to have a chance, and then the next step up from that would be the PSN/XBLA type stores
I suggest you review what Zeboyd said about Steam versus XBLA. Something like they sold more copies of Cthulu Saves the World on Steam in the first week than they did in the first year on Xbox Live Indie Games.
I can't spend 16 hours a day learning a single character so TF2 is right out
You don't need to spend that much time, but I will admit that TF2 has a lot of game mechanics to throw at you, and Valve is constantly adding more.
with TF2 most of the maps I've seen everyone is either a sniper or the pyro
Wow, what terrible maps/servers have you been playing? All CTF maps?
Pyro is arguably the weakest class in the game. They have basically no ranged attack at all and can be mowed down by Heavy or Sniper with no problems. Soldier vs. Pyro or Demoman vs. Pyro can depend on how good the Pyro is at reflecting projectiles (tip: Shoot at their feet). Scouts should use their Pistol at range against Pyros... Scattergun in a pinch. If an Engineer lets an enemy Pyro get near him... wtf were you doing Engy?
Seriously, all classes in TF2 have things they're good at and things they're bad at.
Scout: Good at capturing points & intel, close range combat, dodging. Bad at long range combat, taking out enemy emplacements.
Soldier: Good at long range combat, surprise flanking moves, taking out enemy emplacements, and damaging multiple enemies at once. Bad at close range combat, easy Spy target.
Pyro: Good at close range combat, revealing Spies, damage over time (fire), stopping enemy ubercharges (airblast), soldier rockets (reflect), and demo spam (airblast). Bad at medium and long range combat, taking out enemy emplacements. The above good things are heavily dependent on loadout, specifically the choice of flamethrower.
Demoman (standard): Good at setting traps, shooting around corners (grenades bounce), and breaking enemy emplacements. Bad at medium and long range combat.
Demoman (Demoknight): Good at closing distances, melee combat. Bad at everything else.
Heavy: Good at combat at all ranges, good at surviving lots of damage. Bad at movement, easy Sniper and Spy target, easy to kill using the Pyro's Flare Gun at a distance.
Engineer (standard): Good at defensive emplacements (via sentry gun), controlling team movement (via teleporters), resupplying the team (via dispenser). Bad at one-on-one fighting.
Engineer (Gunslinger): Good at surprising enemies with mini-sentries, controlling team movement (via teleporters), resupplying the team (via dispenser). Bad at one-on-one fighting.
Medic: Good at keeping the team healed, breaking enemy emplacements. Bad at one-on-one fighting, #1 target of Snipers and Spies.
Sniper: Good at long range fighting, headshots will one-shot lower-HP classes regardless of HP. Bad at close range fighting, snap sniper shots against higher-HP targets, tends to have tunnel vision.
Spy (standard): Good at breaking enemy emplacements (sapper), sneaking past enemies (disguise and cloak), taking out strategic enemy targets (backstab). Bad at close range combat if they didn't surprise the enemy, escaping bad situations.
Spy (Dead Ringer): Good at breaking enemy emplacements (sapper), taking out strategic enemy targets (backstab), escaping bad situations. Bad at close range combat if they didn't surprise the enemy.
It didn't pose a problem at all, you have to learn the keywords character-by-character anyways,
As a native English speaker, I can tell you that I didn't have to learn all keywords character by character when learning BASIC.
IF and THEN are common English, I didn't have to think about those. ELSE was a little trickier (because "or else" is a common English phrase) but still simple enough. ENDIF and GOTO were easy because they're two English words stuck together. PRINT was a common word for newspaper or magazine text, so it clearly had to do something with text.
FOR EACH was somewhat understandable because I knew what EACH meant, even if FOR didn't make a lot of sense there. A LOOP was something round that came back to meet itself, such as a piece of string looping back on itself. Oh, and there were things you would DO WHILE waiting for something.
A computer language using native language terms really is easier to learn.
You need to learn keywords, they could be klingon, do not need to make any sense for you
Nonsense, all programmers know JavaScript as well as Klingon!
And of course I can't even call it that here on Slashdot, because Slashdot mangles the thorn for some inexplicable reason, so I have to substitute letters. And this is just a comment website!
Slashdot's web server and webpages claim to support UTF-8, but the Slashdot backend treats it as ASCII and will helpfully display the ASCII 2+ character representation (sometimes these characters are unprintable).
For instance, here's a Euro currency symbol (U+20AC): â
However, HTML entities work. Here's a Euro currency symbol (€): €
As for thorn, I believe Þ and þ will give you the characters you want: and respectively... although I don't seem to see those, so maybe not.
2 tonnes = 4409.24 pounds.
So, 2 tonnes is $6,927.02 at today's exchange rates?
I see no problem with any of that. Soon Samsung will have the same packaging and they will claim that's the only way to do it. The judge will believe them and Apple will be forced to apologize to Samsung, the court, slashdot, me, you, and everyone else on this planet for thinking their packaging is special.
Samsung already has the same kind of packaging. This was used as one of the complaints by Apple during the lawsuit.
i.e.: kickbacks OR a tombstone?
More like
"What do you want on your Tombstone? 'Here lies David Harvey' or 'Pepperoni and Cheese'?"
On Windows, when you install Steam, it changes the permissions of the directory you install it to to allow the Users group write access to it.
I'm not sure how that will work on Linux, though... I don't think there are any default groups that all users are added to, especially on Debian-based systems that give each user their own group.
Steam has always been pretty good at embracing new technologies (they were among the first game vendors to utilize bittorrent for content distribution)
Steam doesn't use BitTorrent, unless it's the system they said was going into place before CS:GO launched (and only work with newer games).
Perhaps you're confusing them with Blizzard?
Team Fortress 2 is Valve's multiplayer test game. The majority of new features for their multiplayer games appear there first and the rest (at least the good features) eventually migrate there. I made a post last week about this.
I almost believed this up until you mentioned CS 1.6. Valve is only porting Source (the 2004+ engine) over, not GoldSrc (the 1997-2003 engine). Which means that CS:S and CS:GO will be on Linux, but not CS 1.6.
Pssh, digital hats are for the Steam servers for the rumored Steam box, not Ouya.
(For the record, Valve launched a Linux blog yesterday, don't think /. mentioned that anywhere)
The Ouya is okay for today, but it'll be decidedly shoddy in five years' time
That's what wii said about the last budget console wii saw, but for a while, wii ended up seeing it printing money.
Yes, it did print money... for the first few years. Then the prices started dropping on the "expensive" consoles. Right now, you can get the cheapest Xbox 360 for $50 more than the Wii. Whats more, the cheapest Xbox 360 model can play Xbox (original) games, while the cheapest (read: only) new Wii model currently for sale can't play GameCube games, thanks to Nintendo making a hardware modification that removed backwards compatibility without dropping the price.
Not only that, but the bottom has dropped out of the market niche the Wii occupies, which is why Nintendo is trying to get its successor, the Wii U, out by the end of this year.
On the hack side: every console is hackable to a point that you can play "backup" games on any console.
As I recall, it took them four years to do so on the PS3, and it stops working again if you upgrade to firmware 3.55 or newer.
That said, little things like having to use WHERE ROWNUM = X, rather then LIMIT which basically always requires a subselect to get correct results is just annoying and makes our code less portable.
One of the sad parts of SQL is that row limiting (to my knowledge) isn't part of the standard. So, unless a database explicitly adds support for another database's syntax it doesn't happen.
For example, from the MySQL docs:
Until MySQL 4, MySQL's LIMIT command was LIMIT x,y which was the equivalent of Postgres's LIMIT y OFFSET x.
SQL and NoSQL are different, with different use cases.
No. Wrong. Clearly, $CHOICE is superior in all cases. If you think you've found a situation in which !($CHOICE) is better, you're obviously using $CHOICE wrong and should RTFM before you EVER say anything against it again, n00b.
Ah, but then you have to look at the implications of $UNRELATED_PROBLEM. After all, $CHOICE can't $BUZZWORD1, at least not without support for $BUZZWORD2.
Once $CHOICE supports those, then maybe it'll be better in all cases.
The thing is, the default setting if you have a disc (XBL gold or not) is for that disc to play.
I have a disc in my 360 now and I never changed the default settings for game discs.
Lets see what happens when I turn it on.
Xbox 360 logo... Choose a profile screen... signing into Xbox Live...
OK, I was deposited at the Main Menu's "home" tab with 7 boxes. They are:
1. Upper-left corner: Small box, Alan Wake (the disc currently in the console)
2. Lower-left corner: Small box, Quickplay (for accessing my XBLA games)
3. Left-center: Large box the switches ads every 2 seconds between "Comic Con is On", "Crackle's The Unknown" (tv series?), "Call of Duty: Black Ops II", "Quantum Conundrum", and "Xbox Live Good, Better, Gold"
4. Right-center-upper: Small box, ad for MLB & More
5. Right-center-lower: Small box, ad for Arcade Sale
6. Upper-right corner: Small box, ad for Kinect
7. Lower-right corner: Small box, ad for Netflix
My empirical evidence says you're wrong.
Oh, and if you're referring to what happens when you put a disc in, the main menu has likely already loaded and you've already seen the ads.
Uh, Valve uses the same engine for its games -- why wouldn't they "backport" features from one game into another??
You'll note that TF2 is the only game Valve has backported features into, despite 3 other Valve multiplayer games using the exact same version of the game engine.
some of us hate what TF2 became (grind to unlock gear! buy stupid crap! deal with screaming 12 year olds! fun!)
Er... grind to unlock gear? There are a grand total of 27 weapons (3 per class) you can grind to get out of the 200ish weapons in the game. The rest are gained about 6-8 per week at random, or if you don't want to wait, you can grind up the unwanted weapons you have and craft it.
Also, the screaming 12 year olds is why there's a Mute button on the main menu (which appears if you hit Esc).
The downside of TF2 becoming the top game on Steam is that TF2 doubles as Valve's guinea pig.
What do I mean by this?
Almost every new feature added to Source multiplayer games originates in TF2. If not originating there, they'll be ported to the Source MP engine and appear in TF2.
The most obvious example of features originating in TF2 are:
Achievement System unlocking in-game items. This was re-used in Portal 2.
Replays: A year out and replays still have problems where it'll crash the server on map change if replays are disabled via the server console (or remote console aka rcon) mid-game. Replays will, of course, appear in DOTA2 and CS:GO.
In-game Store: Also appears in Portal 2, DOTA2, and likely CS:GO.
Even if it didn't originate in TF2, it will likely be backported.
Left 4 Dead in particular has had a lot of system backported to TF2:
Glow system: In L4D, Survivor players have a glow based on their health visible to their teammates and enemies (in Versus mode). TF2 reused this for its sticky bombs, payload cart, and intelligence briefcases. TF2 also supports making player entities glow in the exact same manner that L4D does (this is used in the Freak Fortress 2 user mod).
Particle effects system. The L4D particle system got back-ported to TF2.
Different visuals: The L4D system that lets certain players see the world differently than others got backported to TF2 (although TF2 upgraded it and made it enable based on specific items being equipped).
I keep meaning to find and play a copy of the Baldur's Gate series, which I never did play
Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 are both on GoG.
If you click on "show search tools" on the left, and then "verbatim", Google will stop searching for other spellings and synonyms and will require all search terms to be on the page. In general, verbatim mode actually lowers the quality of the search results, which is why it's turned off by default, but there are exceptions so it's made available as an option.
Synonyms and other spellings aren't the problem, returning results that have nothing to do with one of the search terms or its alternate spellings and synonyms is the problem. I want it to do the former and not the latter.
My only real complain with steam is that all games are locked to a single account on a single PC (e.g. I can't have two games across one account active on two different systems).
As mentioned by others, Offline mode can be used to bypass this... except for the online components of games, for obvious reasons.