Wow, looking through these games I've found some pretty cool looking things.
In industry, there is a distinct lack of multiplayer cooperative games (especially ones that are welcoming to non-hardcore game players -- my wife just doesn't grasp the nuances of Starcraft or the controls of Serious Sam).
I looked through a lot of them, and found some cool stuff (but not exactly what I'm looking for).
Bempu seems interesting, I'll be trying that out tonight.
Does anyone know of any games in this crop that are good? (and preferrably coop in nature?) Which are your favorites out of this list?
I agree, digital radio over land-based transmitters is the way to go.
Unfortunately, the HD-Radio standard developed by iBiquity (which is in use in North America) is pretty poor in that it abuses the allowed signal mask by sending the digital information below the accepted noise floor that bleeds into neighboring channels (this is AM, mind you). This effectively raises the noise floor for neighboring channels, and cripples the range of their signals from the interference. This works both ways -- so if everyone used iBiquity's technology, it would make the whole AM band sound even crappier than it does. This is acknowledged in that Wikipedia article.
IMO, a much better standard is the international standard that is mentioned at the top of that article you linked -- Digital Radio Mondiale. It's a more intelligent design, and doesn't hurt the spectrum for other broadcasters the way HD-Radio does.
This situation is reminiscent of other standards -- the rest of the world uses a smart system like the metric system, and the US is stuck on some wonky system that makes no sense.
The DRM consortium is growing, and I think it really has potential. Think XM sattelite radio without the need for a sattelite, and so therefore without the need for a subscription fee. Cool, no?:)
I remember my best friend and I used to play Escape Velocity together for hours and hours. I was the pilot, and he was the gunner (managing the primary and secondary weapons). That was a really nice combo, and we had a lot of fun doing it.
I think this could work, and I especially think that I would like my position as an engineer a lot better if I could see the ships while they're fighting, and see my newly-tuned impulse-drive glow even a brighter blue as we pull our evasive maneuvers.
As a side-note, one nice thing about having a ground-based combat mode (with phasers and whatnot) is that someone will get to play Security Officer (like Worf) and blast all the enemies hand-to-hand when they teleport aboard.
I agree with you -- sort of a sci-fi Puzzle Pirates, where the puzzles/tasks/minigames are more geeky.
Now that I think about it, I actually started coding something like this up many months ago in C# and SDL. There's not much, just fly the ship around a blank star-universe. The main part I focused on is a minigame for the ship-repairman -- it's a welding minigame. Use left-click for flame, and right-click to feed more metal in there. Nothing fantastic, but it was mainly an experiment in using skill-based minigames instead of a boring grind "You are now a master welder!". This is something that would (hopefully) teach people a little something about the finesse of welding. Here's the link if anyone's interested: AirLockedDemo.zip
Re:disappointed -- try the java cert exam
on
Java Puzzlers
·
· Score: 1
Took me a little while, but here's my guess (rot13 encoded)
Vg ybbxf yvxr cersvkvat n pbafgnag ol gur ahzore 0 vf n jnl gb fcrpvsvl gung gur ahzore vf va bpgny. Gurersber, 012 vf gur fnzr nf fnlvat bpgny 12, juvpu vf, bs pbhefr, gra.
However, I've never coded in Java, so that's just my uninformed guess. Regardless, that's a pretty good puzzler.:) Thanks!
*don't feed the trolls, don't feed the trolls*... bah. I'll bite and reply.
If you remember anything about the article from 6 weeks ago that you posted a link to, then you would remember that it was extremely thin as far as details went. Did you look at many of the projects when it was "officially over"? If you had, you would remember that a quite a number of them hadn't turned in their final versions yet, nor had they turned in their final reports (and if they had finished/turned in the report, then it wasn't available yet for public access, it had only been turned into their project supervisors).
If you went to college, then maybe you remember that college students have a "habit" of turning stuff in at or after the deadline? The SOC was no different. That's why you don't get your grade results until a week or two *after* it's over. It takes time to figure out what-the-heck-happened during the flurry that was the deadline.
You would have preferred this in a slashback then? Perhaps -- I for one was glad to see this, and I look forward to more updates as this list is completed. It will be good to see some more information about the results of the SOC, and what can be changed to improve it in the future.
There was plenty of new information in this new article, after having read both of them, I frankly don't see what you're griping about.
Next time, complain about a legitimate dupe. If things are as bad as you say they are, then you should have no trouble finding a real one.
Thanks for the info! I had no idea where to look for Vulture's Eye stuff, the only place I had to look at was Clive's website. I look forward to trying some of the 1.9.4 builds, and I'm very much encouraged to hear that things are progressing well on the development side. Thanks for correcting me!
Do you like Vulture's Eye? Between it and noeGNUd, I'm still learning towards noeGNUd (though I'm interested to see what Yendor will bring).
My wife and I only somewhat recently got into Nethack, she plays a monk, I play a ranger, and the farthest either of us have really gotten is around dlvl 10 or so.
Isn't that why these games are successful though? Because they're so easy to get? Since when was the Sourceforge download page easy for new-users to navigate?
Jonathan's statement also caught my eye -- though perhaps he was talking about the worldview of Atheistic Evolutionists. Atheism and Evolution seem to go hand in hand on a great many points, and as such, they often get lumped together.
EV drove me to learn how to do graphics programming in high-school, I was working on a multiplayer version of EV called "Air Locked" that actually made it kindof far before I lost all of my source in a hard-drive incident. Through that experience I learned a ton about programming, and that has proven invaluable to me through the years.
My friends always wanted to *emulate* macs for the purposes of gaming -- just the one game Escape Velocity. Heck, I *still* emulate a Mac just so I can play it from time to time (I know they have Nova for the PC, but I like the old ones better).
Sure, Mac gaming pickings have always been a bit thin, but it felt like a tighter-knit community, and they still always had the quality, just not necessarily the quantity.
Here's a screenshot of the new IDE -- sorry for the ugliness, but it's a much nicer way of editing scripts than editing the database in a standard DB editor.:) That screenshot shows the server running on the bottom layer, the IDE in the middle layer (with the get script in view) and the top layer is a simple telnet session that shows the get script in action (all dynamically compiled and cached on-the-fly).
Not only are MUDs still being created, but even the MUD engines are still in development. I can think of three off the top of my head that are being programmed in.NET/Mono (TigerMUD, PMud, and MITE).
As the lead programmer for MITE, I can tell you that it's really nice having the Code DOM in.Net to compile scripts on the fly in C# or Boo. Very cool stuff.:)
I dunno' -- speaking as one who makes his bread and butter in front of a computer monitor, I'm quite willing to dish out money for quality products if it makes my work experience healthier / more productive / more comfortable. That's why I could justify spending $450 on an Aeron chair three years ago. It was hard to justify at the time that I got it, but after three years of use, I'm very glad I have a nice chair to sit in all day every day.
I think I could justify $200+ for a good keyboard if I felt it made my work more productive, and if it was a long-term investment.
I challenge you to find any real world religion well represented by fictional book, music, or video game. Where's my video game that simulates the Buddhist wheel of life and my character's struggle to wake up from it and break the chains that bind? Of course the realtime lifelong meditation would be tricky to gamify, but I'm sure it could be done.:-)
Most of the other answers to this challenge focused on Christianity, so here's a couple others:
The religion of Atheistic Existentialism I feel is well-represented by the book "L'etranger" (The Stranger) by Albert Camus.
For a video game example of this worldview, any atheistic hedonistic game such as GTA will do (not bashing it, I played through it and enjoyed it, I'm just commenting on the worldviews represented).
A classic Buddhist book would be "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse -- while it's not perfect doctrine, I'm under the impression that it represents many things well.
I've seen a couple examples of Buddhist video games, but they were usually things to aid in meditation.
I haven't read many writings of followers of Joseph Smith, but the best example I can think of that I've read was some of the literature by Orson Scott Card. "The Lost Boys" did an excellent job of presenting real-life Mormonism to the reader in a way that showed the difference between the psychos that give Mormons a bad name and to the ones who are more moderate, reasonable, and intelligent. Interestingly enough, the protagonist in that story is a former video game programmer.:) I don't know of any specifically Mormon video games.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the storylines of Final Fantasy heavily influenced by Japanese Shinto religion?
So anyway, there's a taste of religious literature and video games other than the obvious Christian ones.
There's no reason to presume telling a good story in video game form is impossible, but also no reason - yet - to presume that doing so is a necessary or desirable thing.
Certainly it's not any more necessary than it is for movies to achieve a higher excellence, but that seems to be the way culture is headed. I personally think a good imagination beats special effects any day (hence why the LotR books will always be better than a movie effort), but people aren't turning to books for their entertainment as much as they used to.
So just as it's good for a society to have excellent writers in books (Victor Hugo), film (Akira Kurosawa), animation (Hayao Miyazaki), I'm looking forward to seeing who will do this sort of thing in video games.
There are very few video games that aren't full of frightfully hokey writing, if you start judging them by the same standards as movies or novels. Generally, the audience for video games doesn't have very refined taste in writing and doesn't value originality or sophistication very much.
If you think about it though, there are very few books and movies that also aren't frightfully full of hokey writing. The ratio of "great" literature to the amount of "okay" literature is very small. For every really good book published, you probably have a couple hundred or thousand trashy romance novels published. I wouldn't expect it to be any different with video games.
The OP was talking about a call to higher literature in video games. I'm really looking forward to there being classic-literature quality stories in the form of video games. It's been done with movies, it's been done with books, it's been done with radio drama -- why can't it be done with video games? Why are we so jaded into thinking that video games can't hold to higher standards? It's like saying "well we certainly can't hold movies to the same standards as books, because all moviegoers want to see are adventure, sex, and violence" but that certainly isn't true.
I dunno', perhaps it's just an unjustified soapbox of mine, but I really wonder if we could finally start seeing some good literature come out of interactive fiction in the form of video games.
...whether you think this is astroturfing or not-news, I still think this is incredibly riveting.
Am I the only one who believes this sort of thing is going to be the future of video gaming?
Games are just the next level of interactivity. It was books, then radio, then movies, now video games. It's just the next level, and I for one am looking forward to getting some "good literature" out there in the form of video games. Classic storylines that are powerful and mean something and stir something from within us.
The concept of "destroyed beauty" in the article's pictoral essay is quite good imho, and if you like the storylines of games like Half Life, Myst, FFX, or other games with rich, involved storylines, you may find Gears interesting.
Here's hoping they don't b0rk it up and turn it into a cheesy shoot-em-up, but remain true to the concept and retain some of the good storyline.
The only part that I'm worried about is the cheesy cliche'ness of the protagonist, but perhaps they can pull it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, looking through these games I've found some pretty cool looking things. In industry, there is a distinct lack of multiplayer cooperative games (especially ones that are welcoming to non-hardcore game players -- my wife just doesn't grasp the nuances of Starcraft or the controls of Serious Sam). I looked through a lot of them, and found some cool stuff (but not exactly what I'm looking for). Bempu seems interesting, I'll be trying that out tonight. Does anyone know of any games in this crop that are good? (and preferrably coop in nature?) Which are your favorites out of this list?
Unfortunately, the HD-Radio standard developed by iBiquity (which is in use in North America) is pretty poor in that it abuses the allowed signal mask by sending the digital information below the accepted noise floor that bleeds into neighboring channels (this is AM, mind you). This effectively raises the noise floor for neighboring channels, and cripples the range of their signals from the interference. This works both ways -- so if everyone used iBiquity's technology, it would make the whole AM band sound even crappier than it does. This is acknowledged in that Wikipedia article.
IMO, a much better standard is the international standard that is mentioned at the top of that article you linked -- Digital Radio Mondiale. It's a more intelligent design, and doesn't hurt the spectrum for other broadcasters the way HD-Radio does.
This situation is reminiscent of other standards -- the rest of the world uses a smart system like the metric system, and the US is stuck on some wonky system that makes no sense.
The DRM consortium is growing, and I think it really has potential. Think XM sattelite radio without the need for a sattelite, and so therefore without the need for a subscription fee. Cool, no? :)
I think this could work, and I especially think that I would like my position as an engineer a lot better if I could see the ships while they're fighting, and see my newly-tuned impulse-drive glow even a brighter blue as we pull our evasive maneuvers.
As a side-note, one nice thing about having a ground-based combat mode (with phasers and whatnot) is that someone will get to play Security Officer (like Worf) and blast all the enemies hand-to-hand when they teleport aboard.
I agree with you -- sort of a sci-fi Puzzle Pirates, where the puzzles/tasks/minigames are more geeky.
Now that I think about it, I actually started coding something like this up many months ago in C# and SDL. There's not much, just fly the ship around a blank star-universe. The main part I focused on is a minigame for the ship-repairman -- it's a welding minigame. Use left-click for flame, and right-click to feed more metal in there. Nothing fantastic, but it was mainly an experiment in using skill-based minigames instead of a boring grind "You are now a master welder!". This is something that would (hopefully) teach people a little something about the finesse of welding.
Here's the link if anyone's interested: AirLockedDemo.zip
Cheers!
Well maybe if you were wielding a gom jabbar...
Took me a little while, but here's my guess (rot13 encoded)
:) Thanks!
Vg ybbxf yvxr cersvkvat n pbafgnag ol gur ahzore 0 vf n jnl gb fcrpvsvl gung gur ahzore vf va bpgny. Gurersber, 012 vf gur fnzr nf fnlvat bpgny 12, juvpu vf, bs pbhefr, gra.
However, I've never coded in Java, so that's just my uninformed guess. Regardless, that's a pretty good puzzler.
Registration is only open for those who where were registered in previous years, and are re-activating their accounts for this year.
:)
If you are new to the tournament (like me), then you have to wait until midnight tonight to register.
Happy hacking!
*don't feed the trolls, don't feed the trolls*... bah. I'll bite and reply.
If you remember anything about the article from 6 weeks ago that you posted a link to, then you would remember that it was extremely thin as far as details went. Did you look at many of the projects when it was "officially over"? If you had, you would remember that a quite a number of them hadn't turned in their final versions yet, nor had they turned in their final reports (and if they had finished/turned in the report, then it wasn't available yet for public access, it had only been turned into their project supervisors).
If you went to college, then maybe you remember that college students have a "habit" of turning stuff in at or after the deadline? The SOC was no different. That's why you don't get your grade results until a week or two *after* it's over. It takes time to figure out what-the-heck-happened during the flurry that was the deadline.
You would have preferred this in a slashback then? Perhaps -- I for one was glad to see this, and I look forward to more updates as this list is completed. It will be good to see some more information about the results of the SOC, and what can be changed to improve it in the future.
There was plenty of new information in this new article, after having read both of them, I frankly don't see what you're griping about.
Next time, complain about a legitimate dupe. If things are as bad as you say they are, then you should have no trouble finding a real one.
Also, here's a better writeup promoting RDKF for the DS
Very cool!
Thanks for the info! I had no idea where to look for Vulture's Eye stuff, the only place I had to look at was Clive's website. I look forward to trying some of the 1.9.4 builds, and I'm very much encouraged to hear that things are progressing well on the development side. Thanks for correcting me!
Do you like Vulture's Eye? Between it and noeGNUd, I'm still learning towards noeGNUd (though I'm interested to see what Yendor will bring).
My wife and I only somewhat recently got into Nethack, she plays a monk, I play a ranger, and the farthest either of us have really gotten is around dlvl 10 or so.
Well, oghc just finished God of War today. Though perhaps that's not the kind of gamer grandma they're targeting. :)
Mod parent up, good article, thanks!
Isn't that why these games are successful though? Because they're so easy to get? Since when was the Sourceforge download page easy for new-users to navigate?
Jonathan's statement also caught my eye -- though perhaps he was talking about the worldview of Atheistic Evolutionists. Atheism and Evolution seem to go hand in hand on a great many points, and as such, they often get lumped together.
> Yeah, "Real World" is an awful MTV show.
:)
And an oxymoron.
Rock on!
:)
:)
Your user profile just got another fan entry.
EV drove me to learn how to do graphics programming in high-school, I was working on a multiplayer version of EV called "Air Locked" that actually made it kindof far before I lost all of my source in a hard-drive incident. Through that experience I learned a ton about programming, and that has proven invaluable to me through the years.
So in short, thanks for the inspiration!
My friends always wanted to *emulate* macs for the purposes of gaming -- just the one game Escape Velocity. Heck, I *still* emulate a Mac just so I can play it from time to time (I know they have Nova for the PC, but I like the old ones better).
Sure, Mac gaming pickings have always been a bit thin, but it felt like a tighter-knit community, and they still always had the quality, just not necessarily the quantity.
It's only been in development for 2 months, but it's coming along quite nicely imho.
Here's the link
Here's a screenshot of the new IDE -- sorry for the ugliness, but it's a much nicer way of editing scripts than editing the database in a standard DB editor. :) That screenshot shows the server running on the bottom layer, the IDE in the middle layer (with the get script in view) and the top layer is a simple telnet session that shows the get script in action (all dynamically compiled and cached on-the-fly).
Not only are MUDs still being created, but even the MUD engines are still in development. I can think of three off the top of my head that are being programmed in .NET/Mono (TigerMUD, PMud, and MITE).
.Net to compile scripts on the fly in C# or Boo. Very cool stuff. :)
As the lead programmer for MITE, I can tell you that it's really nice having the Code DOM in
I think I could justify $200+ for a good keyboard if I felt it made my work more productive, and if it was a long-term investment.
Most of the other answers to this challenge focused on Christianity, so here's a couple others:
The religion of Atheistic Existentialism I feel is well-represented by the book "L'etranger" (The Stranger) by Albert Camus.
For a video game example of this worldview, any atheistic hedonistic game such as GTA will do (not bashing it, I played through it and enjoyed it, I'm just commenting on the worldviews represented).
A classic Buddhist book would be "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse -- while it's not perfect doctrine, I'm under the impression that it represents many things well.
I've seen a couple examples of Buddhist video games, but they were usually things to aid in meditation.
I haven't read many writings of followers of Joseph Smith, but the best example I can think of that I've read was some of the literature by Orson Scott Card. "The Lost Boys" did an excellent job of presenting real-life Mormonism to the reader in a way that showed the difference between the psychos that give Mormons a bad name and to the ones who are more moderate, reasonable, and intelligent. Interestingly enough, the protagonist in that story is a former video game programmer. :)
I don't know of any specifically Mormon video games.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the storylines of Final Fantasy heavily influenced by Japanese Shinto religion?
So anyway, there's a taste of religious literature and video games other than the obvious Christian ones.
Cheers!
--clint
Certainly it's not any more necessary than it is for movies to achieve a higher excellence, but that seems to be the way culture is headed. I personally think a good imagination beats special effects any day (hence why the LotR books will always be better than a movie effort), but people aren't turning to books for their entertainment as much as they used to.
So just as it's good for a society to have excellent writers in books (Victor Hugo), film (Akira Kurosawa), animation (Hayao Miyazaki), I'm looking forward to seeing who will do this sort of thing in video games.
If you think about it though, there are very few books and movies that also aren't frightfully full of hokey writing. The ratio of "great" literature to the amount of "okay" literature is very small. For every really good book published, you probably have a couple hundred or thousand trashy romance novels published. I wouldn't expect it to be any different with video games.
The OP was talking about a call to higher literature in video games. I'm really looking forward to there being classic-literature quality stories in the form of video games. It's been done with movies, it's been done with books, it's been done with radio drama -- why can't it be done with video games? Why are we so jaded into thinking that video games can't hold to higher standards? It's like saying "well we certainly can't hold movies to the same standards as books, because all moviegoers want to see are adventure, sex, and violence" but that certainly isn't true.
I dunno', perhaps it's just an unjustified soapbox of mine, but I really wonder if we could finally start seeing some good literature come out of interactive fiction in the form of video games.
...whether you think this is astroturfing or not-news, I still think this is incredibly riveting.
Am I the only one who believes this sort of thing is going to be the future of video gaming?
Games are just the next level of interactivity. It was books, then radio, then movies, now video games. It's just the next level, and I for one am looking forward to getting some "good literature" out there in the form of video games. Classic storylines that are powerful and mean something and stir something from within us.
The concept of "destroyed beauty" in the article's pictoral essay is quite good imho, and if you like the storylines of games like Half Life, Myst, FFX, or other games with rich, involved storylines, you may find Gears interesting.
Here's hoping they don't b0rk it up and turn it into a cheesy shoot-em-up, but remain true to the concept and retain some of the good storyline.
The only part that I'm worried about is the cheesy cliche'ness of the protagonist, but perhaps they can pull it off.
I'll be watching this one with interest.
Blech! Dog food
(no, not a troll -- if you don't get it, you probably just don't like text games)