I'm not personally a fan of the FPS genre, personally prefering RPGS, but I do have a friend whos CS clan is sponsered, they placed pretty high at the CPL last year (7th or something I think), he seems to think that Conditon Zero is going to pretty much flop, at least for the hardcore CS players.
What do other slashdotters think? Will players migrate and new clans form leaving the old CS clans antiquated memories, or will the original CS continue to flourish for a few more years?
Ok, maybe I just don't get it, but why is there such an argument over whether to classify pluto or sedna as planets?
Does having the name "planet" attatched to a celestial body raise it's intrinsic value? The word planet is just a word, like any other word, and exists merely as a way to denote a thing or group of things more easily.
Since the general population doesnt really care, and the astronimers will know what object is being refferred to regardles of the word used to describe it, why don't we just toss a coin/roll a dice/whatever and pick something
I'm not trying to troll here, I'm genuinly curious as to if there is a reason or not for the big argument.
Modding can be a rite of passage and learning experience before old parts are finally chucked into the bin and/or recycled.
While personally I have done very little modding byeond simple putting them together in the first place to any of the machines I use every day (added a couple of fans to one, things of that nature), I remember one time the place where a friend of mine works was throwing out all of their old machines. They stripped out all of the hard drives, and told the employees that if any of them wanted any of the machines they could take them. Well after a few days when they were about to throw them away my friend grabbed everything they had left.
Most of the boxes were old 133mz pentiums, there were a couple of 486s and a few newer machines (P3s if I remember correctly). Since they were not allowed to resell the machines or give them to anyone else, and there was no way my friend was going to use all these machines, we decided to have a little fun with them.
We did some really odd things to those machines, just trying to see what the limits were of still having a bootable machine.
The thing is, although I've always been more of a software person than a hardware person (I know enough to build a machine, replace parts, troubleshoot parts, and basically do anything a common person would need done), but I learned a lot about how the hardware works just from hanging out with my friends (most of them were electronics engineers and knew a lot more about the hardware than I did) and seeing what sort of crazy things they came up with.
...more specifically, I blame my school and schools like it.
Right now I'm attending a large university (formerly an "institute of technology") for a degree in Computer Information Systems, the main programming language they teach is Java (we also have to take classes on VB, PHP and COBOL, no C or C++ though)
I like to think that I have a pretty solid understanding of programming (I had 5 years experience with C++ before I started school), but I had never used Java before, I am probably about average in it now (average for the people who actually know the language anyway). The quality of the classes at my school (and I suspect other similar types of school) is absolutely horrid, I mean I know a guy who got an A in the first level java class and was unable to write a console application to convert between farenheit and celcius, even when he was given a class to read input from the keyboard so he didn't have to use BufferedReaders or anything like that. I know people who are graduating this term, have 3.5s and 4.0s and were absolutely amazed at a simple app I hacked together in a couple hours to allow me to remotely manage the MySQL database that runs behind my website (yeah I know I could have done that in PHP, but I'd never had java connect to a database before and I thought it would be fun to write a java app to do so).
What it comes down to is that there are a lot of degree factories that let people leave honestly thinking they know something about $subject when in reality they only know enough to be able to use a few of the right keywords in their resume.
I don't know how many of these people I've just looked at square in the eye and informed them that they need to do some heavy personal-time learning or they might as well just quit, because with their knowledge the only thing they will be doing is getting outsourced to india 6months after they find a job. And yes, I realize that ALL of our jobs are in danger of being outsourced, but I would like to think that it is the clueless code-monkies (people who's entire skill set involves turning a comprehensive UML diagram into really shitty code) who are really in danger of losing their jobs, and not the serious programmers (people who understand how to actually solve problems, how to write good code, understand the subtle nuances of the various languages, etc).
Dirt, grime, and other "real world effects" would be really nice, and I think that it would add orders of magnitude to the overall percived graphical quality of a game, but do we really have the hardware to support it yet?
I've seen a few games that feaures some of these effects, for example in Metroid Prime rain drops will hit your visor when it's raining, or your visor will steam up and collect condensation if you walk through steam, or in Resident Evil the dust that comes up when you walk and the light shining through it.
These games look wonderful when you see things like this, but I think it might be a couple more years before we can really expect to start seeing things like this in many games.
The Console systems are nearing their end of life, and I think we _might_ have the horsepower in the next gen systems to do some limited, but much more than we have now, "real world effects". It will probably be awhile before most PC games start to do this though.
I don't even pretend to understand in-depth all of the details that go into making a great game engine, but from what I do know I would postulate the following (any game engine programmers wanna back me up here?):
Having all of these "real world effects" might be possible on a top of the line gaming rig of today, but to get decent performance the engine would have to be too machine specific to be able to use in making a distributable game
In the next couple of years the top of the line video cards will probably start supporting effects like these, allowing game designers to impliment these effects in their engines
Given a year to design/customise an engine, at its finish it should be able to run acceptably on video cards at least 18 months old.
Anyway, I estimate that it might be about 18 months before we have cards that could really think about supporting this on some level, 6 months learning curve before people can do really neat stuff with it, and another 12 to 18 months before we start seeing it really implimented in games. Over all that means another 3 to 3.5 years before we can start seening high quality real world effects wowing us in the latest games.
I think that anyone who would say "video games are mindless entertainment" obviously does not understand enough about games to make such a judgment. That said, games run the whole spectrum from purely mindless entertainment to extremely though provoking.
Lets start out with an example, two games that I play alot are Kolf and KBounce, both are relativily simple and quite mindless games. These are games that I play during commercials on TV if i'm watching a show, during a lul in the conversation when i'm on the phone, while i'm waiting for a huge file to compile, or any other time when I just want some small distraction while I wait on something. These games are really mindless.
Lets look at another game that I play quite a bit. Soul Caliber II. This is a game that combines quick reflexes with strategy to defeat an opponent. It's not chess but it will keep you thinking, especially when you are playing against a human opponent, who's tactics are not quite as predictable as the computers.
Now for a third game, Neverwinter Nights. Since it's hard for my friends and I to get together and play D&D like we used too, usually a couple nights a week we will fire up Neverwinter Nights and play a DMed quest. This game definitly involves heavy thinking. Not only are there puzzles to be solved and tactics to be developed, but you must also manage inventory, remember to play in character, keep track of your health, spells/special abilities, the status of your party. If you are the DM for that particular game things get even more complicated as you have to have interesting and realistic in character text for NPCs, keep the flow of the story going etc.
Now, lets look at what non-gamers see when the look at each of these games:
Kolf and KBounce - a bunch of clicking
Soul Caliber II - pressing buttons and beating eachother up.
Neverwinter Nights - clicking on monsters and IMing your friends (remeber to someone who has never played D&D there is no challenge to playing in character, in fact few of them probably even realise there is such a thing as in character)
The thing is, most people have played solitaire (pretty brainless), or have played those brainless games on Pogo or the click the box game or whatever. Those are brainless games for (mostly) brainless people. When these people look at other games being played, they do not realize the though requied and associate the difficult level as being the same as the games they play. One has to realize that it is difficult to "see" thinking.
I think the idea they have is a good one. I've downloaded quite a few texts off of Project Gutenburg, and for those of you who haven't, all of their files are simple plaintext files. I've wished for a long while that project gutenburg would release files in HTML or some other format. If the Project Gutenburg won't, then I see nothing wrong with what Project Gutenburg 2 is doing.
If they would have come up with some better name, then I would have probably considered buying from them, but this is just asinine. It seems to me like they are intentionally trying to use a name very similar to Project Gutenburg so that people who may have heard of Project Gutenburg will be confused and pay them for their services.
Of course I guess this is what Trademark laws are all about, so hopefully this group will have some lawyers on their arses pretty soon.
One of the things I want to accomplish with the branching storyline is to having unique roles for players in the story. Instead of having players told "you will be playing the part of x in the group y" I want the many levels of branches from each of the stories to create those niches so that the player feels like they are choosing that predefined role.
Doing this is one of the biggest tricks in game design, crafting the flow of the game in such a way as the player chooses to follow one of the only few available paths, thereby creating the illusion of limitless possibilities in a limited world.
The level situation might not be bad for a new game, but for a D&D based game levels are a requirment. The thing is, finding a way to balance the level system out. The way I plan to handle experience is a task based system. Killing creatures may give you a little experience, but if you are a good character at least, your alignment will probably change before you ever gain a substantial number of levels just slaughtering random creatures. Instead, characters will be awarded for completing tasks.
Items that raise specific ability scores will also be given, but they will tend to be more rare than they are in most games of the type.
I've been working on designing a persistant world for Neverwinter Nights, and I have been considering many of the points that you brought up. The first thing I thought of was to get rid of the teleporting in the game. Town portal spells are ok, but general transit just takes away from the locales.
Teleporting is definitely a double edged sword, I think the best way to handle this, and what I have been working on is to allow players to travel to specific locations they have already visited. Essentially the way I am handling this is that in most of the interesting locations, there are mages who run teleportation booths. Sometimes they are out in the open, sometimes they are hidden in secret areas. When you run accross one of them, you can buy a warp coin which will allow you to teleport back to that location a set number of times. The cost and number of uses depends on how exotic the spot is.
Creating seemingly personalized quests is at the top of the list of "Hard Things To Do", the trick I have been using is a series of branching quests to make the quests seem more personal.
While this might not scale well, in this persistant world which will have about 60 people max, there will be 3 or 4 initial paths that a player can start out on, depending mainly on their alignment. Within each of these paths, there will be some branching depending on what quests have been completed. For example, if someone has already completed the "Kill the bandits in the forest" quest (just an example), then the next player would find a "Kill the troll under the bridge" quest. The plan is to have these 4 main paths and their branches intertwine and cycle in such a way that what previous people have done will effect the game, and will start back at the previous point at such a times as the players who have already completed earlier tasks will no longer have much to do in the areas that the quests they completed are starting over in.
Timing is going to play a big part in this and will require a lot of testing, but hopefull it will end up working for most players.
Weapons and monster dropped items is another area I've had a large focus on. Essentially I plan to eliminate "random treasure" and focus instead of collecting sellable items. For example, if the party goes up against a pack of giant spiders, they will be able to collect venom from the spiders to sell to alchemists and potion makers, or to use in magically enchanting their items.
One thing I hope to do is add the ability for players to specialize in creating items out of some of these materials. For example a mage merchant character might be able to pay a group of fighters to escort him into the ruins of an ancient library infested with undead so he can obtain scrolls that will teach him to make a powerful bone wand out of the bones of a lich. Or perhaps a blacksmith character is willing to pay top dollar for junk parts of a mythril golem in order to forge one of a kind weapons.
I think though the reason that these types of things are not present in games like EQ is that companies looking to make money on a game are afraid to take a gamble that people will want to play the part of a blacksmith, or that people will get mad they missed out on part of the quest.
FreeCiv supports OS X with Fink. I would think this would be a great game for the kids to get together and play. It would teach history, let them learn about ancient technologies etc.
If you feel like paying money, you might also think about getting Civilization 3, I've never played this game myself, but I recall Civilization II had a lot of good historical information about various technlogies and epochs in history. I would assume that this version would have something like that as well.
If you have any windows machines you might also consider exposing them to Alice, not it's not American McGee's twisted (and quite fun) game, but a project from Carnegie Mellon to teach kids about 3D and Game Programming.
* longer learning curve
I think you are quite correct there, but I think there is an important distinction between "longer" and "steeper" that needs to be made.
For someone who has never used either operating system, or is able to use Linux while realizing that it is not windows and can put away their ideas of how things should be done, for the most part, any given task is no more difficult to do in linux than in windows.
While there are things in Linux that take a couple of extra mouse clicks or a couple of extra keystrokes, few things that an average user would do is exceptionally more difficult in Linux. If we look at it on this level, linux has only a maginally steeper learning curve than windows.
The problem, if you would call it a problem, comes into focus when we zoom out to look at the systems as a whole. Linux has a lot *more* to learn than windows. I think this is what scares people off, people, most of them anyway, hate learning. They see a system which might not be "harder" to learn, but provides a much longer period of learning, and they run for the hills.
Of course I could be wrong, just my two cents.
I've always found that to be one of the most lacking features in windows. I don't know HOW many times i've tried to highlight/middleclick when working windows boxen.
I used to have the same problem. I failed tests and even lost a job because my handwriting was completely unreadable. What I finally realized was that my handwriting improved drastically (to the point where people would actually compliment me on my penmenship) if I just slowed down and paid attention to the actual letters I was writing. I know that this sounds like obvious advice, but it is something that you really have to be mindful of because most people have a tendancy to just start writing.
Another thing that may help is to try different grips on the pencil. As children we have it drilled into our heads that you HAVE to hold the pencil gripped between your thumb and index finger only, I've found that for me at least my writing and drawing as well is orders of magnintude better when the pencil or pen is gripped between my thumb and my index and middle fingers.
In my experience, good developers DO get recognized, maybe not by the publisher, but gamers, magazines and websites will note the developer.
The thing is, good developers are rare, and mediocre developers are a dime a dozen.
In an industry that is dominated more and more by rehashed formulas, dead mules beating beaten for 4 or 5 more sequals, and games whose whole concept is "hey, what if we made a game with all these chicks in like bikinis and they could jump around and shit. Oh we could have them play Volleyball! dude wouldn't that be awsome" the job of the developer is being replaced more and more by code monkies and marketing.
The point being, developers of many games that come out are nothing special, so why should they be treated like that, and from a publishers viewpoint, why excert the time and money to create a rockstar persona for a really awsome developer when they could just shit-can him and higher a few people to make Grand Theft Auto Elevendy Two or Dead or Alive: Naked Chicks on Trampolines.
Good developers do it because they love making games, poor developers don't deserve recognition anyway.
I noticed that microsofts statment that (if|when) Linux gains as much popularity as Windows, we will find that it is not inherintly more secure because "Using Linux does not make you defacto smarter"
Reading this I knew that SOMEONE would bring it up, so I might as well be the first
I think that as linux sits right at this moment, it does make one smarting to be using it, simple because it requires the user to be more aware of their system. I do not see this changing in the near future either, not because of the technical inability of linux to emulate Windows automagic configuration, but because the people who write the software do not seem to want that (I know I don't).
So does this mean Linux is more secure by default? I would have said yes if you asked me a week ago, but this last weekend I was at a LAN party and installed Linux on several machines of friends who were interested in learning about it. What I saw made me realize that in the hands of an average (l)user, Linux can be LESS secure
The thing is, even after my lecure I still had people choosing root passwords like "poopoo" and "iforgotit". Not only that, after a brief tutorial on how to do basic system administration through YaST (I installed SuSE 9 on their boxen), I had at least 3 people go in and turn on every single network service that was offered. One of these people even set up his box as an anonymous FTP server with read and WRITE priviliges to the root directory!
At the same time I had another guy logging on to IRC as root and downloading files, while I was taking care of these machines someone else had already created a user account and given the user name and password out to several people in his AIM buddy list.
I'm the last person to say that we should include less software with a distrobution. I think the fact that most distorbutions contain a complete operating environment is a good thing, but with a little bit of knowledge these people had already made their system much much less secure than a windows box with the security updates applied would have been.
The whole point of that rant being (other than just getting that off my chest), as linux becomes more popular I can easily see scripts writen to take advantage of clueless linux users just the same as there are scripts to take advantage of clueless windows users.
This seems like a great idea, untill some smartass decides to mask harmful commands as solutions to obscure problems.
Since it looks like anyone can update this thing, what happens when someone sneaks into a solution a command to write morse-code on the hard drive, or some command to rename all the files in/bin so that when you list all the files it does an asciiart of the goatse guy, or just throws in a "sudo rm -rf/" or something.
Not that I don't think this is a good idea, but without some sort of review process I would personally feel nervous about sending some of my more inexperienced friends to the site and having them execute commands all willy nilly.
I know that 99% of the users who would post something would do it out of an honest desire to help, in fact I will probably post a few things that I have had to do as obscure solutions to weird problems myself, but it only takes a single post to a problem that is just commen enough but not too comment to get a lot of people to fsck up their machines.
Offtopic hypothetical: you're at an accident on a street. traffic is backed up a bit, and the left lane is blocked off. Everyone gets into the right lane in an orderly fashion, except for one guy who drives up past everybody in the left lane all the way up to the cones, then merges in front of you at the last second. Is he the fool, or are you?
He isn't a fool, but he is an asshole.
Thing thing is that a franchise, by definition, carries a set of similarities between the games. Franchises often have a certain momentum with them, both in reality and in the minds and hearts of the players. When that momentum heads towards crappy games, it is difficult for the developers to turn the franchise around and create something fresh and new while still maintaining those elements that make it a member for the franchise, but what is often more difficult is for the players to reverse their attitudes.
I'm not saying that we should judge games by past mistakes. I'm just saying that, be they aware of it or not, a lot of people do. People remember when they get burned.
I remember being burned by a series of crappy MK games, and fair or not, I have a hard time letting go of those memories and giving the series another go.
I remember when Mortal Kombat first came out, I was 8 or 9 I think. I remember my friends and I ogling it at the arcades, and all of us going up to get it the day it came out on the consoles.
I remember the playground arguments over which version was better, the genisis version for the inclusion of the bloodcode, or the SNES version with it's cleaner graphics.
I remember staying home from school for a day to play Mortal Kombat II when it came out. I remember rea thinking "This is the best game ever!"
I remember mortal kombat 3, and I remember mortal kombat trilogy.
Sadly... I remember mortal kombat 4, and sadly I sort of remember that subzero game, what was it called?
Mortal Kombat was really good for its time, it had nice graphics, and a simple but not too simple fighting system. The fatalities were chock full of gore, and the hidden features were always nifty.
When mortal kombat 2 came out it was perfection, but when 3 came out, it was already on a very slippery slope.
I remember thinking how MK3 was just a crappy ripoff of Killer Instinct, and Marvel Vs Capcom had much better machanics.
And then that wretched entertainment abortion known as Mortal Kombat 4 came out.
It was with this release that I and many of my friends lost all hope for midway and the MK series.
The latest MK game wasn't bad, I played it a couple of times on my cousins XBOX, but everytime I see it, or anything mortal kombat, I remeber that awful taste left in my mouth from MK4, and I just move on.
Midway has killed it's best franchises, not only killed them but then urinated on their corpses. If midway can make a good game still (and I'm sure they can), they will have to do it with another franchise, because no matter how good the next mortal kombat or gauntlet is, gamers will only remember the awful craptasticness of the previous installments and move on.
I understand your point, but I think we might be using a different definition of the word "beat".
I am the author of a few open source projects myself, and I would be more than happy to contribute code to GIMP, however what I know about image editing algorithms (or GTK+ for that matter) wouldn't fill a thimble.
While businesses might compete moniarily, as programmers, we compete in the arena of software quality. It is not irrational to take pride in ones work. In the projects that I have started and worked on it has never been about getting the most people to use the program, or making money off of it, but it has been about having fun and creating the best program that we can create.
As a programmer I want to see my programs beat the competition because I enjoy the challenge of creating something, and I want to create the best solution out there. I'm sure many developers, OSS and otherwise, feel the same way.
When I say X,Y,Z needs to happen before GIMP can beat photoshop, I am saying "Hey, GIMP developers, I am supporting you!, if you guys want some ideas on how to make your pet project the best it can be, think about adding these features." It might not be as helpful as actually coding, but I know that I find it helpful to have people tell me what they would like to see happen with my projects.
I completely agree with you on the closed-source response to complaints, but the open source response is either "Hey, that is a good idea, the program would be better with that, lets add it as a matter of taking pride in our work" or "Hey, we hear you but we don't think we can do it at this time, but if you want to your free to do so". I think you missed out on the former of those.
Whether or not I use GIMP doesn't matter to the GIMP team, but making something they can be proud of surely does, and they should be proud of what they have so far, I'm just saying that maybe there are some ideas that they haven't considered or realized how important they are untill someone says something.
Your right, the 1,000,000 people who each lose a penny probably won't be bothered to do anything about it, but if this infrastructure was in place, there would likely be only a few companies at the top of this system, probably pay pal, the credit card companies, and maybe a couple of new companies.
These companies would notice something like that and they would be the one to prosecute. If a person did this scam and made say a million dollars (not hard to do over the course of some time with your system, scam 2 million people 50 times, multiple scams probably wouldn't be that hard because who would be paying attention, its only a penny right?), and the companies did refund that penny, then it would be their million dollars. A penny might not be worth going after, but 100,000 each from the say 10 companies that might be the leaders of this micropayment infrastructre would be something worth going after.
The gimp is a fine project as projects go, but it seems to me that there are a few things gimp needs before it will be able to really compete with Photoshop
First off, brushes, Photoshop 7 has a great brush system, being able to combine brushes is great. Photoshops size, color, shape dynamics as well as jitter control via pen preassure and tilt are great.
This brings up point number 2
This is just from my experience, but getting GIMP to work with a pen/tablet is like pulling the teeth of a grumpy aligator, it's just not worth it. I have a wacom tablet that supposedly works with drivers from the wacom linux project, although I can get it to work as a mouse in X, I have had 0 luck getting it to work with gimp
The last thing is a UI improvment
I haven't used the new version yet, and its hard to tell from the screenshots, but GIMP has some major usability problems when working with multiple layers, history editing, and things of that nature. I think the multiple document interface is a good thing, and the tool selection window is not bad, but having to right-click on the document to get the standard utility menus is a pain in the rear.
Because of the afore mentioned problems I have not used GIMP extensively for actual work, instead I photoshop on my mac, but it seems to have a solid painting engine underneath it, and many of the filters are better than those available for photoshop, even if some of them are a little to flashy.
All that said, I do graphics professionally and so perhaps I just put more demand on an application than the average user, but right now gimp seems like just a nice toy untill they get some of that stuff fixed.
I do prefer to use Open Source software when possible and wait eagerly for the day when GIMP or another project is a usable alternative to Photoshop, and I will be sure to give this new release a go, but I think we may still have a while to go.
Off Topic but, if anyone has had luck getting a Wacom tablet to work under Linux with GIMP and can let me know how to do so as well I'd love to know.
yeah, but what about people like my grandma who asked me who mr such and such was and why he wanted her to enlarge her member.
Or conversely people like me who delete anything with a subject line that starts with FW:
What about that guy who was suckered into half a million from the nigerian spammer, or my aunt who paid 4 times for some pos firewall software from that ad "your computer is broadcasting an ip address", or my friends sister who was conned out of quite a bit of money when someone said they had control over her system and wanted money (they sent her a link to a page with a frame that pointed to C:\)
To be honest, I'm supprised that the average (l)user can identify over 90% of spam.
I understand your point that spam is unwanted email, and you are the one who decides if it is unwanted or not, but sometimes it's easy to forget about those less technologically inclined than ourselves.
Chrono Trigger is one of a few SNES games that seen to be worth a crapload for their ages, Not exactly sure why, if anyone else knows (low number produced? few traded in?) why, let me know. I remember a while ago I was at a garage sale and the guy had a big box of SNES games for $0.50 to $1 each, I ended up giving him $25 for the whole box and took it home . I found 4 copies of Chrono Trigger, 3 copies of FFIII and 3 copies of Ogre Battle, along with several other games of varying entertainment value. I ended up keeping a copy of the games I didn't already have and actually wanted, and selling the rest. I ended up getting $50 for each copy of chrono trigger, $60 for each copy of FFIII and I got almost $90 for each copy of ogre battle. Looking back it may have been wise to hold onto those games.
Anyway, the point is there are quite a few games that I have seen sold bare bones for quite a bit, I remember a friend of mine who used to work at a local used game store said people would even come in and buy non-working copies of some of those games.
That said I know there are some games that are worth quite a bit more just because of their packaging. I know that a while ago up at GameStop they were selling copies of Earthbound for $20 but if you wanted the box and manual that came with it, they wanted almost $100.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not personally a fan of the FPS genre, personally prefering RPGS, but I do have a friend whos CS clan is sponsered, they placed pretty high at the CPL last year (7th or something I think), he seems to think that Conditon Zero is going to pretty much flop, at least for the hardcore CS players.
What do other slashdotters think? Will players migrate and new clans form leaving the old CS clans antiquated memories, or will the original CS continue to flourish for a few more years?
Ok, maybe I just don't get it, but why is there such an argument over whether to classify pluto or sedna as planets?
Does having the name "planet" attatched to a celestial body raise it's intrinsic value? The word planet is just a word, like any other word, and exists merely as a way to denote a thing or group of things more easily.
Since the general population doesnt really care, and the astronimers will know what object is being refferred to regardles of the word used to describe it, why don't we just toss a coin/roll a dice/whatever and pick something
I'm not trying to troll here, I'm genuinly curious as to if there is a reason or not for the big argument.
Modding can be a rite of passage and learning experience before old parts are finally chucked into the bin and/or recycled.
While personally I have done very little modding byeond simple putting them together in the first place to any of the machines I use every day (added a couple of fans to one, things of that nature), I remember one time the place where a friend of mine works was throwing out all of their old machines. They stripped out all of the hard drives, and told the employees that if any of them wanted any of the machines they could take them. Well after a few days when they were about to throw them away my friend grabbed everything they had left.
Most of the boxes were old 133mz pentiums, there were a couple of 486s and a few newer machines (P3s if I remember correctly). Since they were not allowed to resell the machines or give them to anyone else, and there was no way my friend was going to use all these machines, we decided to have a little fun with them.
We did some really odd things to those machines, just trying to see what the limits were of still having a bootable machine.
The thing is, although I've always been more of a software person than a hardware person (I know enough to build a machine, replace parts, troubleshoot parts, and basically do anything a common person would need done), but I learned a lot about how the hardware works just from hanging out with my friends (most of them were electronics engineers and knew a lot more about the hardware than I did) and seeing what sort of crazy things they came up with.
...more specifically, I blame my school and schools like it.
Right now I'm attending a large university (formerly an "institute of technology") for a degree in Computer Information Systems, the main programming language they teach is Java (we also have to take classes on VB, PHP and COBOL, no C or C++ though)
I like to think that I have a pretty solid understanding of programming (I had 5 years experience with C++ before I started school), but I had never used Java before, I am probably about average in it now (average for the people who actually know the language anyway). The quality of the classes at my school (and I suspect other similar types of school) is absolutely horrid, I mean I know a guy who got an A in the first level java class and was unable to write a console application to convert between farenheit and celcius, even when he was given a class to read input from the keyboard so he didn't have to use BufferedReaders or anything like that. I know people who are graduating this term, have 3.5s and 4.0s and were absolutely amazed at a simple app I hacked together in a couple hours to allow me to remotely manage the MySQL database that runs behind my website (yeah I know I could have done that in PHP, but I'd never had java connect to a database before and I thought it would be fun to write a java app to do so).
What it comes down to is that there are a lot of degree factories that let people leave honestly thinking they know something about $subject when in reality they only know enough to be able to use a few of the right keywords in their resume.
I don't know how many of these people I've just looked at square in the eye and informed them that they need to do some heavy personal-time learning or they might as well just quit, because with their knowledge the only thing they will be doing is getting outsourced to india 6months after they find a job. And yes, I realize that ALL of our jobs are in danger of being outsourced, but I would like to think that it is the clueless code-monkies (people who's entire skill set involves turning a comprehensive UML diagram into really shitty code) who are really in danger of losing their jobs, and not the serious programmers (people who understand how to actually solve problems, how to write good code, understand the subtle nuances of the various languages, etc).
Dirt, grime, and other "real world effects" would be really nice, and I think that it would add orders of magnitude to the overall percived graphical quality of a game, but do we really have the hardware to support it yet?
I've seen a few games that feaures some of these effects, for example in Metroid Prime rain drops will hit your visor when it's raining, or your visor will steam up and collect condensation if you walk through steam, or in Resident Evil the dust that comes up when you walk and the light shining through it.
These games look wonderful when you see things like this, but I think it might be a couple more years before we can really expect to start seeing things like this in many games.
The Console systems are nearing their end of life, and I think we _might_ have the horsepower in the next gen systems to do some limited, but much more than we have now, "real world effects". It will probably be awhile before most PC games start to do this though.
I don't even pretend to understand in-depth all of the details that go into making a great game engine, but from what I do know I would postulate the following (any game engine programmers wanna back me up here?):
Having all of these "real world effects" might be possible on a top of the line gaming rig of today, but to get decent performance the engine would have to be too machine specific to be able to use in making a distributable game
In the next couple of years the top of the line video cards will probably start supporting effects like these, allowing game designers to impliment these effects in their engines
Given a year to design/customise an engine, at its finish it should be able to run acceptably on video cards at least 18 months old.
Anyway, I estimate that it might be about 18 months before we have cards that could really think about supporting this on some level, 6 months learning curve before people can do really neat stuff with it, and another 12 to 18 months before we start seeing it really implimented in games. Over all that means another 3 to 3.5 years before we can start seening high quality real world effects wowing us in the latest games.
I think that anyone who would say "video games are mindless entertainment" obviously does not understand enough about games to make such a judgment. That said, games run the whole spectrum from purely mindless entertainment to extremely though provoking.
Lets start out with an example, two games that I play alot are Kolf and KBounce, both are relativily simple and quite mindless games. These are games that I play during commercials on TV if i'm watching a show, during a lul in the conversation when i'm on the phone, while i'm waiting for a huge file to compile, or any other time when I just want some small distraction while I wait on something. These games are really mindless.
Lets look at another game that I play quite a bit. Soul Caliber II. This is a game that combines quick reflexes with strategy to defeat an opponent. It's not chess but it will keep you thinking, especially when you are playing against a human opponent, who's tactics are not quite as predictable as the computers.
Now for a third game, Neverwinter Nights. Since it's hard for my friends and I to get together and play D&D like we used too, usually a couple nights a week we will fire up Neverwinter Nights and play a DMed quest. This game definitly involves heavy thinking. Not only are there puzzles to be solved and tactics to be developed, but you must also manage inventory, remember to play in character, keep track of your health, spells/special abilities, the status of your party. If you are the DM for that particular game things get even more complicated as you have to have interesting and realistic in character text for NPCs, keep the flow of the story going etc.
Now, lets look at what non-gamers see when the look at each of these games:
Kolf and KBounce - a bunch of clicking
Soul Caliber II - pressing buttons and beating eachother up.
Neverwinter Nights - clicking on monsters and IMing your friends (remeber to someone who has never played D&D there is no challenge to playing in character, in fact few of them probably even realise there is such a thing as in character)
The thing is, most people have played solitaire (pretty brainless), or have played those brainless games on Pogo or the click the box game or whatever. Those are brainless games for (mostly) brainless people. When these people look at other games being played, they do not realize the though requied and associate the difficult level as being the same as the games they play. One has to realize that it is difficult to "see" thinking.
I think the idea they have is a good one. I've downloaded quite a few texts off of Project Gutenburg, and for those of you who haven't, all of their files are simple plaintext files. I've wished for a long while that project gutenburg would release files in HTML or some other format. If the Project Gutenburg won't, then I see nothing wrong with what Project Gutenburg 2 is doing.
If they would have come up with some better name, then I would have probably considered buying from them, but this is just asinine. It seems to me like they are intentionally trying to use a name very similar to Project Gutenburg so that people who may have heard of Project Gutenburg will be confused and pay them for their services.
Of course I guess this is what Trademark laws are all about, so hopefully this group will have some lawyers on their arses pretty soon.
One of the things I want to accomplish with the branching storyline is to having unique roles for players in the story. Instead of having players told "you will be playing the part of x in the group y" I want the many levels of branches from each of the stories to create those niches so that the player feels like they are choosing that predefined role.
Doing this is one of the biggest tricks in game design, crafting the flow of the game in such a way as the player chooses to follow one of the only few available paths, thereby creating the illusion of limitless possibilities in a limited world.
The level situation might not be bad for a new game, but for a D&D based game levels are a requirment. The thing is, finding a way to balance the level system out. The way I plan to handle experience is a task based system. Killing creatures may give you a little experience, but if you are a good character at least, your alignment will probably change before you ever gain a substantial number of levels just slaughtering random creatures. Instead, characters will be awarded for completing tasks.
Items that raise specific ability scores will also be given, but they will tend to be more rare than they are in most games of the type.
I've been working on designing a persistant world for Neverwinter Nights, and I have been considering many of the points that you brought up.
The first thing I thought of was to get rid of the teleporting in the game. Town portal spells are ok, but general transit just takes away from the locales. Teleporting is definitely a double edged sword, I think the best way to handle this, and what I have been working on is to allow players to travel to specific locations they have already visited. Essentially the way I am handling this is that in most of the interesting locations, there are mages who run teleportation booths. Sometimes they are out in the open, sometimes they are hidden in secret areas. When you run accross one of them, you can buy a warp coin which will allow you to teleport back to that location a set number of times. The cost and number of uses depends on how exotic the spot is.
Creating seemingly personalized quests is at the top of the list of "Hard Things To Do", the trick I have been using is a series of branching quests to make the quests seem more personal.
While this might not scale well, in this persistant world which will have about 60 people max, there will be 3 or 4 initial paths that a player can start out on, depending mainly on their alignment. Within each of these paths, there will be some branching depending on what quests have been completed. For example, if someone has already completed the "Kill the bandits in the forest" quest (just an example), then the next player would find a "Kill the troll under the bridge" quest. The plan is to have these 4 main paths and their branches intertwine and cycle in such a way that what previous people have done will effect the game, and will start back at the previous point at such a times as the players who have already completed earlier tasks will no longer have much to do in the areas that the quests they completed are starting over in.
Timing is going to play a big part in this and will require a lot of testing, but hopefull it will end up working for most players.
Weapons and monster dropped items is another area I've had a large focus on. Essentially I plan to eliminate "random treasure" and focus instead of collecting sellable items. For example, if the party goes up against a pack of giant spiders, they will be able to collect venom from the spiders to sell to alchemists and potion makers, or to use in magically enchanting their items.
One thing I hope to do is add the ability for players to specialize in creating items out of some of these materials. For example a mage merchant character might be able to pay a group of fighters to escort him into the ruins of an ancient library infested with undead so he can obtain scrolls that will teach him to make a powerful bone wand out of the bones of a lich. Or perhaps a blacksmith character is willing to pay top dollar for junk parts of a mythril golem in order to forge one of a kind weapons.
I think though the reason that these types of things are not present in games like EQ is that companies looking to make money on a game are afraid to take a gamble that people will want to play the part of a blacksmith, or that people will get mad they missed out on part of the quest.
FreeCiv supports OS X with Fink. I would think this would be a great game for the kids to get together and play. It would teach history, let them learn about ancient technologies etc.
If you feel like paying money, you might also think about getting Civilization 3, I've never played this game myself, but I recall Civilization II had a lot of good historical information about various technlogies and epochs in history. I would assume that this version would have something like that as well.
If you have any windows machines you might also consider exposing them to Alice, not it's not American McGee's twisted (and quite fun) game, but a project from Carnegie Mellon to teach kids about 3D and Game Programming.
* longer learning curve
I think you are quite correct there, but I think there is an important distinction between "longer" and "steeper" that needs to be made.
For someone who has never used either operating system, or is able to use Linux while realizing that it is not windows and can put away their ideas of how things should be done, for the most part, any given task is no more difficult to do in linux than in windows.
While there are things in Linux that take a couple of extra mouse clicks or a couple of extra keystrokes, few things that an average user would do is exceptionally more difficult in Linux. If we look at it on this level, linux has only a maginally steeper learning curve than windows.
The problem, if you would call it a problem, comes into focus when we zoom out to look at the systems as a whole. Linux has a lot *more* to learn than windows. I think this is what scares people off, people, most of them anyway, hate learning. They see a system which might not be "harder" to learn, but provides a much longer period of learning, and they run for the hills.
Of course I could be wrong, just my two cents.
I've always found that to be one of the most lacking features in windows. I don't know HOW many times i've tried to highlight/middleclick when working windows boxen.
I used to have the same problem. I failed tests and even lost a job because my handwriting was completely unreadable. What I finally realized was that my handwriting improved drastically (to the point where people would actually compliment me on my penmenship) if I just slowed down and paid attention to the actual letters I was writing. I know that this sounds like obvious advice, but it is something that you really have to be mindful of because most people have a tendancy to just start writing.
Another thing that may help is to try different grips on the pencil. As children we have it drilled into our heads that you HAVE to hold the pencil gripped between your thumb and index finger only, I've found that for me at least my writing and drawing as well is orders of magnintude better when the pencil or pen is gripped between my thumb and my index and middle fingers.
In my experience, good developers DO get recognized, maybe not by the publisher, but gamers, magazines and websites will note the developer.
The thing is, good developers are rare, and mediocre developers are a dime a dozen.
In an industry that is dominated more and more by rehashed formulas, dead mules beating beaten for 4 or 5 more sequals, and games whose whole concept is "hey, what if we made a game with all these chicks in like bikinis and they could jump around and shit. Oh we could have them play Volleyball! dude wouldn't that be awsome" the job of the developer is being replaced more and more by code monkies and marketing.
The point being, developers of many games that come out are nothing special, so why should they be treated like that, and from a publishers viewpoint, why excert the time and money to create a rockstar persona for a really awsome developer when they could just shit-can him and higher a few people to make Grand Theft Auto Elevendy Two or Dead or Alive: Naked Chicks on Trampolines.
Good developers do it because they love making games, poor developers don't deserve recognition anyway.
I noticed that microsofts statment that (if|when) Linux gains as much popularity as Windows, we will find that it is not inherintly more secure because "Using Linux does not make you defacto smarter"
Reading this I knew that SOMEONE would bring it up, so I might as well be the first
I think that as linux sits right at this moment, it does make one smarting to be using it, simple because it requires the user to be more aware of their system. I do not see this changing in the near future either, not because of the technical inability of linux to emulate Windows automagic configuration, but because the people who write the software do not seem to want that (I know I don't).
So does this mean Linux is more secure by default? I would have said yes if you asked me a week ago, but this last weekend I was at a LAN party and installed Linux on several machines of friends who were interested in learning about it. What I saw made me realize that in the hands of an average (l)user, Linux can be LESS secure
The thing is, even after my lecure I still had people choosing root passwords like "poopoo" and "iforgotit". Not only that, after a brief tutorial on how to do basic system administration through YaST (I installed SuSE 9 on their boxen), I had at least 3 people go in and turn on every single network service that was offered. One of these people even set up his box as an anonymous FTP server with read and WRITE priviliges to the root directory!
At the same time I had another guy logging on to IRC as root and downloading files, while I was taking care of these machines someone else had already created a user account and given the user name and password out to several people in his AIM buddy list.
I'm the last person to say that we should include less software with a distrobution. I think the fact that most distorbutions contain a complete operating environment is a good thing, but with a little bit of knowledge these people had already made their system much much less secure than a windows box with the security updates applied would have been.
The whole point of that rant being (other than just getting that off my chest), as linux becomes more popular I can easily see scripts writen to take advantage of clueless linux users just the same as there are scripts to take advantage of clueless windows users.
This seems like a great idea, untill some smartass decides to mask harmful commands as solutions to obscure problems. /bin so that when you list all the files it does an asciiart of the goatse guy, or just throws in a "sudo rm -rf /" or something.
Since it looks like anyone can update this thing, what happens when someone sneaks into a solution a command to write morse-code on the hard drive, or some command to rename all the files in
Not that I don't think this is a good idea, but without some sort of review process I would personally feel nervous about sending some of my more inexperienced friends to the site and having them execute commands all willy nilly.
I know that 99% of the users who would post something would do it out of an honest desire to help, in fact I will probably post a few things that I have had to do as obscure solutions to weird problems myself, but it only takes a single post to a problem that is just commen enough but not too comment to get a lot of people to fsck up their machines.
Offtopic hypothetical: you're at an accident on a street. traffic is backed up a bit, and the left lane is blocked off. Everyone gets into the right lane in an orderly fashion, except for one guy who drives up past everybody in the left lane all the way up to the cones, then merges in front of you at the last second. Is he the fool, or are you?
He isn't a fool, but he is an asshole.
Thing thing is that a franchise, by definition, carries a set of similarities between the games. Franchises often have a certain momentum with them, both in reality and in the minds and hearts of the players. When that momentum heads towards crappy games, it is difficult for the developers to turn the franchise around and create something fresh and new while still maintaining those elements that make it a member for the franchise, but what is often more difficult is for the players to reverse their attitudes.
I'm not saying that we should judge games by past mistakes. I'm just saying that, be they aware of it or not, a lot of people do. People remember when they get burned.
I remember being burned by a series of crappy MK games, and fair or not, I have a hard time letting go of those memories and giving the series another go.
I remember when Mortal Kombat first came out, I was 8 or 9 I think. I remember my friends and I ogling it at the arcades, and all of us going up to get it the day it came out on the consoles.
I remember the playground arguments over which version was better, the genisis version for the inclusion of the bloodcode, or the SNES version with it's cleaner graphics.
I remember staying home from school for a day to play Mortal Kombat II when it came out. I remember rea thinking "This is the best game ever!"
I remember mortal kombat 3, and I remember mortal kombat trilogy.
Sadly... I remember mortal kombat 4, and sadly I sort of remember that subzero game, what was it called?
Mortal Kombat was really good for its time, it had nice graphics, and a simple but not too simple fighting system. The fatalities were chock full of gore, and the hidden features were always nifty.
When mortal kombat 2 came out it was perfection, but when 3 came out, it was already on a very slippery slope.
I remember thinking how MK3 was just a crappy ripoff of Killer Instinct, and Marvel Vs Capcom had much better machanics.
And then that wretched entertainment abortion known as Mortal Kombat 4 came out.
It was with this release that I and many of my friends lost all hope for midway and the MK series.
The latest MK game wasn't bad, I played it a couple of times on my cousins XBOX, but everytime I see it, or anything mortal kombat, I remeber that awful taste left in my mouth from MK4, and I just move on.
Midway has killed it's best franchises, not only killed them but then urinated on their corpses. If midway can make a good game still (and I'm sure they can), they will have to do it with another franchise, because no matter how good the next mortal kombat or gauntlet is, gamers will only remember the awful craptasticness of the previous installments and move on.
I understand your point, but I think we might be using a different definition of the word "beat".
I am the author of a few open source projects myself, and I would be more than happy to contribute code to GIMP, however what I know about image editing algorithms (or GTK+ for that matter) wouldn't fill a thimble.
While businesses might compete moniarily, as programmers, we compete in the arena of software quality. It is not irrational to take pride in ones work. In the projects that I have started and worked on it has never been about getting the most people to use the program, or making money off of it, but it has been about having fun and creating the best program that we can create.
As a programmer I want to see my programs beat the competition because I enjoy the challenge of creating something, and I want to create the best solution out there. I'm sure many developers, OSS and otherwise, feel the same way.
When I say X,Y,Z needs to happen before GIMP can beat photoshop, I am saying "Hey, GIMP developers, I am supporting you!, if you guys want some ideas on how to make your pet project the best it can be, think about adding these features." It might not be as helpful as actually coding, but I know that I find it helpful to have people tell me what they would like to see happen with my projects.
I completely agree with you on the closed-source response to complaints, but the open source response is either "Hey, that is a good idea, the program would be better with that, lets add it as a matter of taking pride in our work" or "Hey, we hear you but we don't think we can do it at this time, but if you want to your free to do so". I think you missed out on the former of those.
Whether or not I use GIMP doesn't matter to the GIMP team, but making something they can be proud of surely does, and they should be proud of what they have so far, I'm just saying that maybe there are some ideas that they haven't considered or realized how important they are untill someone says something.
a little sparse on the details but better than anything I've been able to find hence forth. thanks.
Your right, the 1,000,000 people who each lose a penny probably won't be bothered to do anything about it, but if this infrastructure was in place, there would likely be only a few companies at the top of this system, probably pay pal, the credit card companies, and maybe a couple of new companies.
These companies would notice something like that and they would be the one to prosecute. If a person did this scam and made say a million dollars (not hard to do over the course of some time with your system, scam 2 million people 50 times, multiple scams probably wouldn't be that hard because who would be paying attention, its only a penny right?), and the companies did refund that penny, then it would be their million dollars. A penny might not be worth going after, but 100,000 each from the say 10 companies that might be the leaders of this micropayment infrastructre would be something worth going after.
The gimp is a fine project as projects go, but it seems to me that there are a few things gimp needs before it will be able to really compete with Photoshop
First off, brushes, Photoshop 7 has a great brush system, being able to combine brushes is great. Photoshops size, color, shape dynamics as well as jitter control via pen preassure and tilt are great.
This brings up point number 2
This is just from my experience, but getting GIMP to work with a pen/tablet is like pulling the teeth of a grumpy aligator, it's just not worth it. I have a wacom tablet that supposedly works with drivers from the wacom linux project, although I can get it to work as a mouse in X, I have had 0 luck getting it to work with gimp
The last thing is a UI improvment
I haven't used the new version yet, and its hard to tell from the screenshots, but GIMP has some major usability problems when working with multiple layers, history editing, and things of that nature. I think the multiple document interface is a good thing, and the tool selection window is not bad, but having to right-click on the document to get the standard utility menus is a pain in the rear.
Because of the afore mentioned problems I have not used GIMP extensively for actual work, instead I photoshop on my mac, but it seems to have a solid painting engine underneath it, and many of the filters are better than those available for photoshop, even if some of them are a little to flashy.
All that said, I do graphics professionally and so perhaps I just put more demand on an application than the average user, but right now gimp seems like just a nice toy untill they get some of that stuff fixed.
I do prefer to use Open Source software when possible and wait eagerly for the day when GIMP or another project is a usable alternative to Photoshop, and I will be sure to give this new release a go, but I think we may still have a while to go.
Off Topic but, if anyone has had luck getting a Wacom tablet to work under Linux with GIMP and can let me know how to do so as well I'd love to know.
yeah, but what about people like my grandma who asked me who mr such and such was and why he wanted her to enlarge her member.
Or conversely people like me who delete anything with a subject line that starts with FW:
What about that guy who was suckered into half a million from the nigerian spammer, or my aunt who paid 4 times for some pos firewall software from that ad "your computer is broadcasting an ip address", or my friends sister who was conned out of quite a bit of money when someone said they had control over her system and wanted money (they sent her a link to a page with a frame that pointed to C:\)
To be honest, I'm supprised that the average (l)user can identify over 90% of spam.
I understand your point that spam is unwanted email, and you are the one who decides if it is unwanted or not, but sometimes it's easy to forget about those less technologically inclined than ourselves.
Chrono Trigger is one of a few SNES games that seen to be worth a crapload for their ages, Not exactly sure why, if anyone else knows (low number produced? few traded in?) why, let me know. I remember a while ago I was at a garage sale and the guy had a big box of SNES games for $0.50 to $1 each, I ended up giving him $25 for the whole box and took it home . I found 4 copies of Chrono Trigger, 3 copies of FFIII and 3 copies of Ogre Battle, along with several other games of varying entertainment value. I ended up keeping a copy of the games I didn't already have and actually wanted, and selling the rest. I ended up getting $50 for each copy of chrono trigger, $60 for each copy of FFIII and I got almost $90 for each copy of ogre battle. Looking back it may have been wise to hold onto those games.
Anyway, the point is there are quite a few games that I have seen sold bare bones for quite a bit, I remember a friend of mine who used to work at a local used game store said people would even come in and buy non-working copies of some of those games.
That said I know there are some games that are worth quite a bit more just because of their packaging. I know that a while ago up at GameStop they were selling copies of Earthbound for $20 but if you wanted the box and manual that came with it, they wanted almost $100.