when I first saw Warcraft, I thought: Hey, they used the Dune II engine and replaced the SF artwork with a fantasy one...
That's exactly what WarCraft 1 was. It used the Dune 2 control scheme and included silly restrictions like forcing you to build roads before you could build buildings next to them just like Dune 2 forced you to build cement slabs. I want to say you had to build units centrally like Dune 2, but that may be wrong. WarCraft 1 also ran tediously slowly and I don't remember it having a game speed control.
WarCraft 2 added a bunch of new controls, like right-click to move instead of right-click to cancel, removed some of the dumber building restrictions, and added the game speed control. Oh, and also upgraded the multiplayer component from 2 players (yes, WC1 only supported 2 players) to 8 players.
StarCraft changed things up by making it so that the various units for different races weren't carbon copies of one another, made it so multiplayer matches started with your command center/nexus/hive and 4 peons instead of a single peon with enough resources to build a town hall.
And then WarCraft 3 came out, which added Hero units. The less said about those the better.
Because of COPPA and other laws in the same vein more traditional online identities are not really practical if you intend the services to be used by children. With Friend Codes two players have to provide each with their personal code for each game. Ostensibly (and likely in the eyes of the law) these codes are not personally identifiable nor do they provide any sort of 1-to-1 correspondance to any particular person. It's just a code that corresponds to a particular game inserted into a particular console.
A few problems I can see in your statements:
1. Unlike the DS and Wii, the 3DS and WiiU use system-wide friend codes (or system+account-wide, I'm not sure since my 3DS only has one user), not per-game friend codes. The way the DS worked wouldn't allow for this, but the Wii did... just Nintendo didn't use them that way.
2. As I recall, all the other consoles also require you to have both sides add each other as friends before they can see what you're doing. I may be misremembering since it's been years since I've registered my PSN or Xbox Live accounts, but I doubt it.
The only thing friends codes gain you over usernames is that it's harder to spoof numbers.
I'm going to stop you right there to point out that the SNES sound chip was the Sony SPC-700 and the next generation of that same chip powered the PS1's sound system.
I remember that when the Dreamcast came out, it was a 128-bit machine that blew the competition out of the water technologically (several Dreamcast games eventually became PS2/Gamecube/Xbox ports). This was when the N64 & PS1 were fairly new.
That depends on what market you were in.
In North America, the Dreamcast launched exactly 4 years (to the day) after the PS1, 3 years after the N64, and just a measly year before the significantly more powerful PS2.
It didn't help that Sony was (and still is) good at the hype machine.
OK, lets look at the current generation (well... current because the WiiU is out) and previous 3 generations.
Current: WiiU: Weaker hardware than its competitors, but only slightly cheaper than the announced launch prices for the other two consoles. Isn't doing so well at the moment. Third-party developers are hesitant to support it. Xbox One: May flop due to marketing mistakes by Microsoft and their insistence that the Kinect is mandatory. PS4. Current predicted winner of the next console generation thanks to mistakes MS made with the Xbox One and the tepid reception of the WiiU.
Previous: Wii: Weaker hardware than its competitors, but a low price to match. Managed to pull third-party developers back in. Outsold everyone else. Xbox 360: Did pretty decently throughout, but got burned a bit by the Red Ring Of Death issue. PS3: Flopped at launch due to high prices (cost more than two times the Wii's price) and new unusual programming architecture. Managed to catch up to the Xbox 360 in the last few years of this generation.
2000-2005 gen: Xbox: New vendor. Didn't do that great. Only killer end-user feature over the PS2 was Xbox Live. PS2: Harder to program for than the PS1, but still managed to keep massive third-party support. Outsold everyone else. GameCube: Decent hardware but lacked third party support due to previous generation. The loss of Rare and Silicon Knights during this time frame only exacerbated this problem. Dreamcast: Didn't do so hot, Sega left the market about halfway through this generation.
1995-2000 gen: Saturn: Biggest flop of the generation. In part because of Sega's braindead strategy of releasing the 32x, a competing "32-bit" addon for the Genesis. Also cost $100 more than the PS1 and launched with no warning. PS1: Easiest console to develop for. Launched $100 cheaper than the Saturn. Outsold everyone else. N64: Sticking with cartridges lost Nintendo the majority of its third-party support.. This came back to bite them in the following generation.
I'm not going to address Nintendo's handhelds simply because they've dominated the market since their introduction in 1989 and have essentially kept the company running even when it was doing poorly.
Germany now exports more to China than they do any other country. Which is manufactured in Germany.
I really don't think it will be long before China decides its sick of making shit for the US for peanuts, only to buy it back again at inflated prices.
I can't find the numbers, but I recall that China exports more goods to the United States than any other country. Which is where they get the money to import goods from Germany in the first place.
How am I supposed to take a platform seriously if the fundamental piece that has to be installed by all developers
You had me up until said you "all developers".
Developers need the Java Developers Kit, which notably doesn't prompt you to install toolbars. Nor does the JRE installer on the Java developer site (which used to be java.sun.com).
Unfortunately, unless you know to grab the installer from there...
1: They are easier to bounds check. If you have an unsigned type you only have to worry about making sure it is not too large. If you only have a signed type then you either have to make sure all your bounds checks cover the negative case or be very careful not to accidently generate negative values.
So, what does your code do if an end-user passes -1 which would get stored in your unsigned value? And as a reminder, your argument is that you don't have to do bounds checking for the lower bound.
Unfortunately Microsoft hasn't grasped what exactly that is - they make a PC in a slightly smaller form factor than a laptop, and a tablet that has no software to run on it. (I exaggerate for effect before any MS marketeer comes along to tell me how many hundreds of thousands of apps they are).
There are two version of the Surface tablets. The first is the Surface RT that uses an ARM chip and runs Windows RT... and can't run existing Windows applications. The second is the Surface Pro that uses an Intel chip and runs Windows 8.
The smart thing to do would be to only make Surface Pros for the new models. Unfortunately, they've decided to make new versions of both.
The Surface 2 replaces the Surface RT and the Surface Pro 2 replaces the Surface Pro.
If you're borrowing a game, and the owner starts playing, you get booted after a few minutes warning (so you can save or whatever).
Since this happens if the owner starts playing any game, this doesn't really address what the GP was asking about. One player will still be logged off.
2) One place to look at merchandise at and buy from (not necessarily beneficial, if one could buy form many places but still add it to the same common storage that would be better.)
There are a few other places that sell you keys to activate on Steam. The biggest being Amazon...
Steam items on Amazon are marked with the text "[Online Game Code]". Right now, the Bioshock Triple Pack is on sale for half of what Steam sells Bioshock Infinite for, let alone the other two games with it. When you buy it, it'll give you either a single Steam code for all 3 games or separate Steam codes for each game.
Note: Bioshock Infinite is listed as [Download] game, but it also mentioned Steam is required for it... which is because Bioshock Infinite is a SteamWorks game, so you still have to activate it on Steam.
Agreed, Steam has always been quite puffy. It's also a bit crazy that the client gobs 100MB of memory when it only sits in the system tray. Modern machines have a lot of RAM, but it could still be engineered much better.
According to my (Windows) Task Manager, Steam is currently taking up 12MB of RAM sitting in my system tray.
I know the Windows Task Manager's accuracy isn't always the best, but... were the numbers you quoting from before Steam switched to Webkit in 2010?
Eternal Darkness, Golden Sun, Xenoblade, and Baten Kaitos are all non-Nintendo titles. They were developed by Silicon Knights, Camelot, Monolith Soft, and tri-Crescendo/Monolith Soft respectively. You really need to stop confusing games published by Nintendo with games produced by Nintendo.
Heck, Baten Kaitos wasn't even published by Nintendo anywhere but Australia... Namco published it everywhere else.
Of the remaining ones, only one of them is less than a decade old (Wii Sports).
The N64 had some downright amazing games, and this is the first time I've seen any real hate/badmouthing for it. It's hard to dislike the console that brought us Mario 64, LoZ: Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask, Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Starfox 64, Mario Kart 64, Perfect Dark, Super Smash Bros, and... well, the list just goes on.
The list goes on? Does it include any titles not by Nintendo or the company it owned 49% of, Rare?
I mean, I had a Nintendo 64 back in the day, but even I'll admit that the PlayStation had more of what we would refer to today as AAA titles.
After using JDeveloper and Oracle Middleware for the past 4 months my opinion of Oracle has greatly lowered. Not to mention the forms for EBS don't work with any Java after Oracle changed the vendor name. https://blogs.oracle.com/ptian/entry/solution_for_error_frm_92095
As much as I'd love to give Oracle hell over such a stupid mistake... the Eclipse Foundation (which includes contributions from the likes of Google and IBM) made the same mistake... relying on the java.vendor field to detect which JVM is running.
Drivers for two specific types of hardware changed. Everything else (input devices, printers, SATA, north/south-bridge, etc...) didn't.
No, the issue with moving to newer versions of Windows with older hardware is that the manufacturers didn't make 64-bit drivers for those devices. Windows XP 64-bit was basically non-existent and had very little driver support. Vista 64-bit appeared in small numbers, while win7 64-bit made up the majority of win7 installs iirc.
Oh, did I mention 32-bit Windows drivers don't work on 64-bit Windows?
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Windows driver interface hasn't changed since Windows 2000 was released.
There are two exceptions to this: Sound Drivers and Display Drivers.
The former changed when Windows "enhanced" sound drivers in Windows Vista. And by "enhanced" I mean such useful things as killing hardware acceleration in order to have separate volume sliders for each app and adding effects like making things sound like they were in a Bathroom or Auditorium.
The latter changed when Windows added desktop compositing, also in Windows Vista... and has continued changing as Microsoft realizes that some of the original assumptions they had were faulty... such as having a copy of each window's draw area in both system and video memory for GDI windows*.
* Which, as far as I know, is all non-fullscreen windows.
I know a guy who works at Valve. He told me that Half-Life 3 launches next week...
nah, I'm kidding. I do know a guy at Valve (we used to run the OCReMix TF2 servers together), but he tells me nothing about any Valve product ever. Which I assume is how most employees would do it.
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when I first saw Warcraft, I thought: Hey, they used the Dune II engine and replaced the SF artwork with a fantasy one...
That's exactly what WarCraft 1 was. It used the Dune 2 control scheme and included silly restrictions like forcing you to build roads before you could build buildings next to them just like Dune 2 forced you to build cement slabs. I want to say you had to build units centrally like Dune 2, but that may be wrong. WarCraft 1 also ran tediously slowly and I don't remember it having a game speed control.
WarCraft 2 added a bunch of new controls, like right-click to move instead of right-click to cancel, removed some of the dumber building restrictions, and added the game speed control. Oh, and also upgraded the multiplayer component from 2 players (yes, WC1 only supported 2 players) to 8 players.
StarCraft changed things up by making it so that the various units for different races weren't carbon copies of one another, made it so multiplayer matches started with your command center/nexus/hive and 4 peons instead of a single peon with enough resources to build a town hall.
And then WarCraft 3 came out, which added Hero units. The less said about those the better.
Because of COPPA and other laws in the same vein more traditional online identities are not really practical if you intend the services to be used by children. With Friend Codes two players have to provide each with their personal code for each game. Ostensibly (and likely in the eyes of the law) these codes are not personally identifiable nor do they provide any sort of 1-to-1 correspondance to any particular person. It's just a code that corresponds to a particular game inserted into a particular console.
A few problems I can see in your statements:
1. Unlike the DS and Wii, the 3DS and WiiU use system-wide friend codes (or system+account-wide, I'm not sure since my 3DS only has one user), not per-game friend codes. The way the DS worked wouldn't allow for this, but the Wii did... just Nintendo didn't use them that way.
2. As I recall, all the other consoles also require you to have both sides add each other as friends before they can see what you're doing. I may be misremembering since it's been years since I've registered my PSN or Xbox Live accounts, but I doubt it.
The only thing friends codes gain you over usernames is that it's harder to spoof numbers.
SNES's graphics, sound and controller
I'm going to stop you right there to point out that the SNES sound chip was the Sony SPC-700 and the next generation of that same chip powered the PS1's sound system.
I remember that when the Dreamcast came out, it was a 128-bit machine that blew the competition out of the water technologically (several Dreamcast games eventually became PS2/Gamecube/Xbox ports). This was when the N64 & PS1 were fairly new.
That depends on what market you were in.
In North America, the Dreamcast launched exactly 4 years (to the day) after the PS1, 3 years after the N64, and just a measly year before the significantly more powerful PS2.
It didn't help that Sony was (and still is) good at the hype machine.
OK, lets look at the current generation (well... current because the WiiU is out) and previous 3 generations.
Current:
WiiU: Weaker hardware than its competitors, but only slightly cheaper than the announced launch prices for the other two consoles. Isn't doing so well at the moment. Third-party developers are hesitant to support it.
Xbox One: May flop due to marketing mistakes by Microsoft and their insistence that the Kinect is mandatory.
PS4. Current predicted winner of the next console generation thanks to mistakes MS made with the Xbox One and the tepid reception of the WiiU.
Previous:
Wii: Weaker hardware than its competitors, but a low price to match. Managed to pull third-party developers back in. Outsold everyone else.
Xbox 360: Did pretty decently throughout, but got burned a bit by the Red Ring Of Death issue.
PS3: Flopped at launch due to high prices (cost more than two times the Wii's price) and new unusual programming architecture. Managed to catch up to the Xbox 360 in the last few years of this generation.
2000-2005 gen:
Xbox: New vendor. Didn't do that great. Only killer end-user feature over the PS2 was Xbox Live.
PS2: Harder to program for than the PS1, but still managed to keep massive third-party support. Outsold everyone else.
GameCube: Decent hardware but lacked third party support due to previous generation. The loss of Rare and Silicon Knights during this time frame only exacerbated this problem.
Dreamcast: Didn't do so hot, Sega left the market about halfway through this generation.
1995-2000 gen:
Saturn: Biggest flop of the generation. In part because of Sega's braindead strategy of releasing the 32x, a competing "32-bit" addon for the Genesis. Also cost $100 more than the PS1 and launched with no warning.
PS1: Easiest console to develop for. Launched $100 cheaper than the Saturn. Outsold everyone else.
N64: Sticking with cartridges lost Nintendo the majority of its third-party support.. This came back to bite them in the following generation.
I'm not going to address Nintendo's handhelds simply because they've dominated the market since their introduction in 1989 and have essentially kept the company running even when it was doing poorly.
Pretty much the only good Wii titles are first-party titles.
Actually, living in the real MI (Michigan)... hey Canada, can we join you guys up there? Maybe merge us into Ontario?
Number one trading partner? Are you sure?
Germany now exports more to China than they do any other country. Which is manufactured in Germany.
I really don't think it will be long before China decides its sick of making shit for the US for peanuts, only to buy it back again at inflated prices.
I can't find the numbers, but I recall that China exports more goods to the United States than any other country. Which is where they get the money to import goods from Germany in the first place.
How am I supposed to take a platform seriously if the fundamental piece that has to be installed by all developers
You had me up until said you "all developers".
Developers need the Java Developers Kit, which notably doesn't prompt you to install toolbars. Nor does the JRE installer on the Java developer site (which used to be java.sun.com).
Unfortunately, unless you know to grab the installer from there...
What other language/platform is out there that could rival Java? AFAIK none!
For good or bad... Java's younger cousin C# / .NET.
1: They are easier to bounds check. If you have an unsigned type you only have to worry about making sure it is not too large. If you only have a signed type then you either have to make sure all your bounds checks cover the negative case or be very careful not to accidently generate negative values.
So, what does your code do if an end-user passes -1 which would get stored in your unsigned value? And as a reminder, your argument is that you don't have to do bounds checking for the lower bound.
Game developers can't rely on the end user to buy a $39.99 controller for a $2.99 game.
Also I didn't have to buy a controller for my tablet since my PS3 controller connects to it via Bluetooth.
So... your correcting him by pointing out that you are using an MSPRP $54.99 controller instead of an MSRP $39.99 controller?
Languages are just Syntax - get over it.
Except in PHP where certain functions change their behavior depending on what values are set in an .ini file.
Unfortunately Microsoft hasn't grasped what exactly that is - they make a PC in a slightly smaller form factor than a laptop, and a tablet that has no software to run on it. (I exaggerate for effect before any MS marketeer comes along to tell me how many hundreds of thousands of apps they are).
There are two version of the Surface tablets. The first is the Surface RT that uses an ARM chip and runs Windows RT... and can't run existing Windows applications. The second is the Surface Pro that uses an Intel chip and runs Windows 8.
The smart thing to do would be to only make Surface Pros for the new models. Unfortunately, they've decided to make new versions of both.
The Surface 2 replaces the Surface RT and the Surface Pro 2 replaces the Surface Pro.
If you're borrowing a game, and the owner starts playing, you get booted after a few minutes warning (so you can save or whatever).
Since this happens if the owner starts playing any game, this doesn't really address what the GP was asking about. One player will still be logged off.
2) One place to look at merchandise at and buy from (not necessarily beneficial, if one could buy form many places but still add it to the same common storage that would be better.)
There are a few other places that sell you keys to activate on Steam. The biggest being Amazon...
Steam items on Amazon are marked with the text "[Online Game Code]". Right now, the Bioshock Triple Pack is on sale for half of what Steam sells Bioshock Infinite for, let alone the other two games with it. When you buy it, it'll give you either a single Steam code for all 3 games or separate Steam codes for each game.
Note: Bioshock Infinite is listed as [Download] game, but it also mentioned Steam is required for it... which is because Bioshock Infinite is a SteamWorks game, so you still have to activate it on Steam.
Agreed, Steam has always been quite puffy. It's also a bit crazy that the client gobs 100MB of memory when it only sits in the system tray. Modern machines have a lot of RAM, but it could still be engineered much better.
According to my (Windows) Task Manager, Steam is currently taking up 12MB of RAM sitting in my system tray.
I know the Windows Task Manager's accuracy isn't always the best, but... were the numbers you quoting from before Steam switched to Webkit in 2010?
Eternal Darkness, Golden Sun, Xenoblade, and Baten Kaitos are all non-Nintendo titles. They were developed by Silicon Knights, Camelot, Monolith Soft, and tri-Crescendo/Monolith Soft respectively. You really need to stop confusing games published by Nintendo with games produced by Nintendo.
Heck, Baten Kaitos wasn't even published by Nintendo anywhere but Australia... Namco published it everywhere else.
Of the remaining ones, only one of them is less than a decade old (Wii Sports).
The N64 had some downright amazing games, and this is the first time I've seen any real hate/badmouthing for it. It's hard to dislike the console that brought us Mario 64, LoZ: Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask, Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Starfox 64, Mario Kart 64, Perfect Dark, Super Smash Bros, and... well, the list just goes on.
The list goes on? Does it include any titles not by Nintendo or the company it owned 49% of, Rare?
I mean, I had a Nintendo 64 back in the day, but even I'll admit that the PlayStation had more of what we would refer to today as AAA titles.
After using JDeveloper and Oracle Middleware for the past 4 months my opinion of Oracle has greatly lowered. Not to mention the forms for EBS don't work with any Java after Oracle changed the vendor name. https://blogs.oracle.com/ptian/entry/solution_for_error_frm_92095
As much as I'd love to give Oracle hell over such a stupid mistake... the Eclipse Foundation (which includes contributions from the likes of Google and IBM) made the same mistake... relying on the java.vendor field to detect which JVM is running.
Why would Java devs need to tell that to JS devs? JS devs who aren't abstracting everything away with libraries like jQuery already know this.
I can think of a handful of languages WTFier than Java and JS is on that list.
Drivers for two specific types of hardware changed. Everything else (input devices, printers, SATA, north/south-bridge, etc...) didn't.
No, the issue with moving to newer versions of Windows with older hardware is that the manufacturers didn't make 64-bit drivers for those devices. Windows XP 64-bit was basically non-existent and had very little driver support. Vista 64-bit appeared in small numbers, while win7 64-bit made up the majority of win7 installs iirc.
Oh, did I mention 32-bit Windows drivers don't work on 64-bit Windows?
Will this release of Java come with an Ask.com toolbar, a Yahoo.com toolbar, or a Google toolbar?
Yes.
Wait, I thought you said "and"
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Windows driver interface hasn't changed since Windows 2000 was released.
There are two exceptions to this: Sound Drivers and Display Drivers.
The former changed when Windows "enhanced" sound drivers in Windows Vista. And by "enhanced" I mean such useful things as killing hardware acceleration in order to have separate volume sliders for each app and adding effects like making things sound like they were in a Bathroom or Auditorium.
The latter changed when Windows added desktop compositing, also in Windows Vista... and has continued changing as Microsoft realizes that some of the original assumptions they had were faulty... such as having a copy of each window's draw area in both system and video memory for GDI windows*.
* Which, as far as I know, is all non-fullscreen windows.
I know a guy who works at Valve. He told me that Half-Life 3 launches next week...
nah, I'm kidding. I do know a guy at Valve (we used to run the OCReMix TF2 servers together), but he tells me nothing about any Valve product ever. Which I assume is how most employees would do it.