Who are these guys? I checked Google for both Lost Boys and Guerrilla Games and can find no previous product that they've shipped. Does anyone know what they've done?
Basically all I am seeing concerning this company is the fact that they changed their name and a brief blurb about how they've got an FPS game that's been getting an incredible amount of hype. It makes me a little uneasy about getting excited about a game from a publisher I've never seen work from and a game that's being hyped up this much by the media. But, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Does anyone know the storyline of the game? It looks like it involves shooting people. Although it may be noted that at the official Guerrilla Games website, they're taking applications. So maybe someone who reads Slashdot to infilitrate their operation by getting hired and then sneak some inside information out about this new game.
The screenshots look pretty sweet; quite a bit better than Socom.
I've got a dual monitor system with a TV tuner card that accepts input from both my PS2 and Dreamcast. So I've got the FAQ opened on my other monitor. No running for me.
What innovation is possible in 2D that is not possible in 3D? You talk of design compromises but you cite nothing but a game in 3D that "harkens back to the old button smashers", which sounds to me like you don't want innovation - you want the same old, same old.
As for your last comment, how you move a character within the game has little to do with the dimensions of the game. You can 'aim and click' and have your character move in either 3D or 2D. You can also "manuver" your character in either 3D or 2D. Although at this point, your statements have been a bit ambiguous.
First of all, 2D games are not dead. There are still 2D games released for all the major consoles each year. And why do you think that a 2D game can have more variety than a 3D game? I mean, anything that can be visualized on screen in 2D can be visualized on screen in 3D. Perhaps the first person shooter market has been flooded with a glut of dark-hallway games but that's not a limitation of the dimensions offered in the game; it's just a lack of creativity from the people who greenlight games and a lack of clamoring for anything but dark hallways by gamers. You may also want to note that a first person shooter is not the same as a 3D game. For instance, Doom is a first person shooter but is only 2D. So in your comparison, you're mixing things up a bit.
And I think that if you look at a game like Mario 64 and compare it to Super Mario Bros., you can see that the extra dimension adds quite a bit to the game. If you disagree, I'd be really surprised. Now, you may say that the majority of 3D games released today aren't as good as the original Super Mario Bros. but that has more to do with the fact that SMB is an all-time classic game. The NES market was flooded with tons of uninspired side-scrollers that were not innovative in any way - sad copies of SMB. The same is true today except that we've got uninspired fighting games with movie licenses.
So, in short, yes - an added dimension can add to the gameplay experience but it does not guarantee it. But just because a game only has 2 dimensions does not mean that will be a good game. So the next time you want to harken back, go get on your horse and buggy and think about those great days of the Atari.
Did you read the BBC article linked in the summary? There is more to the article than what you read. You should read all the links before you reply to a comment you don't understand.
Let me start of by saying that I don't normally agree with the Bush administration when it comes to environmental policy. Thus far they have not pushed at all for alternative and reusable energy sources, which is a huge mistake. That being said, this is a proposal for a 10 year initiative that could benefit everyone in years to come. First of all, it means that scientists will be funded for this study. Second of all, when it comes to the global environment, ten years is a small amount of time. If we do this study, conclude that global warming is happening, we will have more data and a much better understanding of it in order to properly combat it.
I know that people will post comments saying the Bush administration is trying to protect big business in the U.S. and doesn't want the bottom line hurt but has anyone considered that these less developed nations who are pushing for new regulations to be imposed want to see developed nations crippled and therefore the wealth they have redistributed to the rest of the world? Politicians the world over are usually most interested in the money issue - not the earth issues. So, more study is always a good thing, in my opinion. Has any scientist come out and said if we do not start changing things now, in ten years everyone will be dead or in ten years things will be so bad they won't be able to be fixed?
There's no legal leg for the RIAA to stand on in that case. Think of it this way, if I go into a record store and they're having a promotion where the next super-cool guy who comes through the door, gets a free cd - my acceptance of that cd does not violate any laws. There has to be a certain good-faith belief that the person distributing the work has the right to be distributing that work but due to the fact that this whole thing involves a computer, any lawyer worth a sum of money greater than minimum wage should be able to argue that that belief was there because of the lack of a physical purchase. A person can easily say that they believed P2P networks were akin to radio stations and that the value in an album comes from the packaging and the physical disc. Download all the music you want - just don't distribute; leave that up to people in other countries.
I've noticed that these bioethics departments are cropping up at universities all over the place but is this the type of material they're working on? Come on, how close are we to having intelligent robot companions? I can understand the need to consider the possibility of how humans will respond to a person with a bionic arm but, honestly, there's not that much to consider. Are people with artificial limbs currently hated and shunned? No, of course not. If we make these limbs much, much better - are we to expect anything different?
What these bioethics departments should be doing is trying to convince people that stem cell research is one of our best chances at curing many diseases. That's a much more important goal than trying to make sure society won't turn away when they see me and my robot walking hand in hand down the street.
Yes, we should be doing stem cell research! (Although, I doubt this will be an unpopular opinion here. Slashdot does attract many scientists, after all.)
One screenshot from the game has already gotten out and you can see it here, along with a bit of news about the game. Although, from what I've tried to gather, there's not much information about this game out there to read.
Although, rpgamer.com says that composer Nobuo Uematsu talks Final Fantasy XII in his online journal - but it's not in a language that I can read. Can anyone translate this?
This is a great example of democracy really working. The people understood this issue well enough (they don't want annoying phone calls!) that the lobbying efforts by the telemarketers have failed. Politicians realize that if they take the lobbying money and vote for the telemarketers, they will be voted out of office. (Politicians may also be tired of receiving telemarketing calls.)
On the other hand, there are issues like Disney buying a never-ending copyright where the public doesn't have enough of an interest in the matter to care and so Disney can purchase that copyright without any trouble. Possibly the same deal with the RIAA running roughshod over the consumer. Now, my question to the Slashdot audience, how can we better educate people to let them know what is going on with both Disney and the RIAA so that if a politician does take the money from the lobbyists and make the WRONG votes, they are voted out of office?
I think CourtTV is going to be really busy with the Kobe trial for awhile. I mean, when O.J. was on trial - that is all they showed, all the time. I think this trial is going to be of similar size and circus-like proportions. Of course, this fact actually hurts the RIAA - unless the trials get widely publicized the whole idea that they can scare people off falls apart.
But you may be right, they may just be doing searches for Madonna and grabbing the user names and IPs. And if that is the case, the RIAA is in some serious trouble. Bring a few cases against music fans who have done nothing wrong and we'll quickly see a backlash - after all, Americans don't like corporations, for the most part.
Well, if a vendor in the street is selling bootlegs movies or compact discs I would think that if the MPAA had purchased one of these discs, then went to go get the cops to arrest him/her, and in the meantime all the discs sold out, that person would still be arrested. Once you've got proof that someone was offering copyrighted material to others without the consent of the owner of that copyright, the person is in trouble. The issue (not "crime" since these are civil suits) is not one of possession but rather one of distribution. Thus, if some government agency checks your hard drive and finds stashes of mp3s, you're not in murky waters unless they can show that these mp3s are freely available to others through download.
Don't you think that when the RIAA is cruising around P2P networks, if they find someone sharing what looks like a copyrighted mp3, they download it and check it out? I know there was the incident with the Professor in Pennsylvania named Usher but I would imagine that if they were going to go to the point of a subpeona, they'd at least listen to the mp3.
But your idea would have the effect of introducing mislabelled junk to the P2P network, something the RIAA would love you to do.
What countries aren't driven by economics? The only ones that I can think of are obsessed with religion and if you offer me life in the U.S. or life in Iran, I'll take life in the U.S.
But you are right, the switch over to IPv6 will be costly and that's a big reason why it hasn't been widely adopted. But here's my thinking on this: if you look at this for the long-range economics, more IP addresses will be a good thing. Every device you own can have an address and when a device has an address, companies can sell you services for it. Certainly, I'm not the only one to ever realize this and so I've got to assume that companies just aren't ready to roll out their product line of George Foreman Grills/Web Browsers - but it's coming.
In short, the economics of the move are relevant but not in the simple sense that companies just don't want to pony up. The market has to be ready to capitalize on the change.
That's true - people do; but people with guns kill more people than people without guns. Also, people with guns have an easier time killing people without guns. It is very rare for a person without a gun to kill a person with a gun. Although, if two people with guns show up in the same place - it is more likely that one of those persons will kill the other one than if two people without guns show up in the same place. Also of interest is the fact that by percentages, people with bullets and guns kill more people than people with guns but without bullets. This is obviously quite an issue and one should carefully analyze it!:D
Great! Thanks for clearing that up. I think that the simplest way is just to remove the devices although Kinko's probably wouldn't want to go this route. The only concern with locking the box inside of something is the generation of heat within there - but there would be workarounds for that. Good points.
This is an excellent book. Richter's "Applied.NET Framework Programing" covers the CLR from the programmers point of view. Lidin's "Inside Microsoft.NET IL Assembler" is a detailed guide to IL, ilasm and the managed PE file format. Don Box's excellent "Essential.NET Volume 1" bridges the gap-- leveraging your knowledge of the CLS to present interesting internal, runtime aspects of the CLR.
The first couple of chapters do rehash the metadata structure (that is, assemblies, modules and members), which anyone who has been using.NET should already have covered in the text you've been using up until this point. Obviously these chapters will prove tedious if you are already familiar with the concepts, however they are probably too terse to serve as a useful introduction. There are better texts for getting up to speed on that.
However the latter two thirds of the book are excellent. I particularly enjoyed the precise, informative discussion of contexts, MarshalByRefObject, ContextBoundObject and method call interception. The book occasionally delves into implementation details of the Microsoft's CLR 1.0. These are extremely interesting and practically useful insights.
That said, there are occasionally annoying typographical mistakes in the figures.
"Essential.NET isn't an easy read but everyone should try to read it at least once."
Alright, if you say so - I'll give it out as a Christmas present to everyone I know. I don't know how much my butcher will like it; he seems like more of a C# kind of guy.
Get it? C-sharp? Because he uses knives...and they have to be sharp?
Physically blocking access to the floppy and CD drives? I can always get around that! Come on, if I can get to the box, then I can probably gain use of the CD or floppy. So as long as the machine accepts boot CDs, I am a happy camper. I think I know what you mean by a physical blockage of the drives but if you think you can keep me out, let me know. I'm interested in hearing it.
article on MSNBC that discusses advances being made in the realm of understanding how matter is organized. Certainly in order to have a "matter printer", we would have to know how to create material on the fly. I think there are steps being made in that direction.
The article wasn't raising the idea of downloading a physical object at all. Basically, the idea is that if you have a general piece of manufacturing equipment (the "printer" they're talking about uses polymers to build its products) then all you have to download are the instructions for this generalized manufacturing hardware and it will build whatever it needs. In the short run, this isn't probably going to get off the ground because products are built out of many different materials and I think we don't yet have a strong enough grasp on molecular manipulation to make this happen. But in the long run, if we could say have a device that could spit out steel-like material just as easily as plastic-like material, there's no reason manufacturing would have to happen in plants anymore. And ultimately, this leads to a society where people can drive their goods to market for much less money - you just need to come up with the idea and sell it to people. Of course, this type of society could only function with some type of control over the operation. If you had rampant downloading, as you do with current P2P networks, there would be no profit in sending a design to market and the markets would dry up.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically all I am seeing concerning this company is the fact that they changed their name and a brief blurb about how they've got an FPS game that's been getting an incredible amount of hype. It makes me a little uneasy about getting excited about a game from a publisher I've never seen work from and a game that's being hyped up this much by the media. But, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Does anyone know the storyline of the game? It looks like it involves shooting people. Although it may be noted that at the official Guerrilla Games website, they're taking applications. So maybe someone who reads Slashdot to infilitrate their operation by getting hired and then sneak some inside information out about this new game.
The screenshots look pretty sweet; quite a bit better than Socom.
I've got a dual monitor system with a TV tuner card that accepts input from both my PS2 and Dreamcast. So I've got the FAQ opened on my other monitor. No running for me.
As for your last comment, how you move a character within the game has little to do with the dimensions of the game. You can 'aim and click' and have your character move in either 3D or 2D. You can also "manuver" your character in either 3D or 2D. Although at this point, your statements have been a bit ambiguous.
And I think that if you look at a game like Mario 64 and compare it to Super Mario Bros., you can see that the extra dimension adds quite a bit to the game. If you disagree, I'd be really surprised. Now, you may say that the majority of 3D games released today aren't as good as the original Super Mario Bros. but that has more to do with the fact that SMB is an all-time classic game. The NES market was flooded with tons of uninspired side-scrollers that were not innovative in any way - sad copies of SMB. The same is true today except that we've got uninspired fighting games with movie licenses.
So, in short, yes - an added dimension can add to the gameplay experience but it does not guarantee it. But just because a game only has 2 dimensions does not mean that will be a good game. So the next time you want to harken back, go get on your horse and buggy and think about those great days of the Atari.
Did you read the BBC article linked in the summary? There is more to the article than what you read. You should read all the links before you reply to a comment you don't understand.
I know that people will post comments saying the Bush administration is trying to protect big business in the U.S. and doesn't want the bottom line hurt but has anyone considered that these less developed nations who are pushing for new regulations to be imposed want to see developed nations crippled and therefore the wealth they have redistributed to the rest of the world? Politicians the world over are usually most interested in the money issue - not the earth issues. So, more study is always a good thing, in my opinion. Has any scientist come out and said if we do not start changing things now, in ten years everyone will be dead or in ten years things will be so bad they won't be able to be fixed?
There's no legal leg for the RIAA to stand on in that case. Think of it this way, if I go into a record store and they're having a promotion where the next super-cool guy who comes through the door, gets a free cd - my acceptance of that cd does not violate any laws. There has to be a certain good-faith belief that the person distributing the work has the right to be distributing that work but due to the fact that this whole thing involves a computer, any lawyer worth a sum of money greater than minimum wage should be able to argue that that belief was there because of the lack of a physical purchase. A person can easily say that they believed P2P networks were akin to radio stations and that the value in an album comes from the packaging and the physical disc. Download all the music you want - just don't distribute; leave that up to people in other countries.
Yes - I want to find out if Duke Nukem Forever will come out at some point.
What these bioethics departments should be doing is trying to convince people that stem cell research is one of our best chances at curing many diseases. That's a much more important goal than trying to make sure society won't turn away when they see me and my robot walking hand in hand down the street.
Yes, we should be doing stem cell research! (Although, I doubt this will be an unpopular opinion here. Slashdot does attract many scientists, after all.)
Oh, wait - does the DMCA only apply when it's being used against the little guy by a huge corporation and never the opposite?
Although, rpgamer.com says that composer Nobuo Uematsu talks Final Fantasy XII in his online journal - but it's not in a language that I can read. Can anyone translate this?
On the other hand, there are issues like Disney buying a never-ending copyright where the public doesn't have enough of an interest in the matter to care and so Disney can purchase that copyright without any trouble. Possibly the same deal with the RIAA running roughshod over the consumer. Now, my question to the Slashdot audience, how can we better educate people to let them know what is going on with both Disney and the RIAA so that if a politician does take the money from the lobbyists and make the WRONG votes, they are voted out of office?
But you may be right, they may just be doing searches for Madonna and grabbing the user names and IPs. And if that is the case, the RIAA is in some serious trouble. Bring a few cases against music fans who have done nothing wrong and we'll quickly see a backlash - after all, Americans don't like corporations, for the most part.
Well, if a vendor in the street is selling bootlegs movies or compact discs I would think that if the MPAA had purchased one of these discs, then went to go get the cops to arrest him/her, and in the meantime all the discs sold out, that person would still be arrested. Once you've got proof that someone was offering copyrighted material to others without the consent of the owner of that copyright, the person is in trouble. The issue (not "crime" since these are civil suits) is not one of possession but rather one of distribution. Thus, if some government agency checks your hard drive and finds stashes of mp3s, you're not in murky waters unless they can show that these mp3s are freely available to others through download.
But your idea would have the effect of introducing mislabelled junk to the P2P network, something the RIAA would love you to do.
But you are right, the switch over to IPv6 will be costly and that's a big reason why it hasn't been widely adopted. But here's my thinking on this: if you look at this for the long-range economics, more IP addresses will be a good thing. Every device you own can have an address and when a device has an address, companies can sell you services for it. Certainly, I'm not the only one to ever realize this and so I've got to assume that companies just aren't ready to roll out their product line of George Foreman Grills/Web Browsers - but it's coming.
In short, the economics of the move are relevant but not in the simple sense that companies just don't want to pony up. The market has to be ready to capitalize on the change.
That's true - people do; but people with guns kill more people than people without guns. Also, people with guns have an easier time killing people without guns. It is very rare for a person without a gun to kill a person with a gun. Although, if two people with guns show up in the same place - it is more likely that one of those persons will kill the other one than if two people without guns show up in the same place. Also of interest is the fact that by percentages, people with bullets and guns kill more people than people with guns but without bullets. This is obviously quite an issue and one should carefully analyze it! :D
Great! Thanks for clearing that up. I think that the simplest way is just to remove the devices although Kinko's probably wouldn't want to go this route. The only concern with locking the box inside of something is the generation of heat within there - but there would be workarounds for that. Good points.
The first couple of chapters do rehash the metadata structure (that is, assemblies, modules and members), which anyone who has been using .NET should already have covered in the text you've been using up until this point. Obviously these chapters will prove tedious if you are already familiar with the concepts, however they are probably too terse to serve as a useful introduction. There are better texts for getting up to speed on that.
However the latter two thirds of the book are excellent. I particularly enjoyed the precise, informative discussion of contexts, MarshalByRefObject, ContextBoundObject and method call interception. The book occasionally delves into implementation details of the Microsoft's CLR 1.0. These are extremely interesting and practically useful insights.
That said, there are occasionally annoying typographical mistakes in the figures.
Get it? C-sharp? Because he uses knives...and they have to be sharp?
The important thing is that I am happy with me.
Physically blocking access to the floppy and CD drives? I can always get around that! Come on, if I can get to the box, then I can probably gain use of the CD or floppy. So as long as the machine accepts boot CDs, I am a happy camper. I think I know what you mean by a physical blockage of the drives but if you think you can keep me out, let me know. I'm interested in hearing it.
FURTHER PROOF THAT THE MODERATION SYSTEM DOES NOT WORK.
article on MSNBC that discusses advances being made in the realm of understanding how matter is organized. Certainly in order to have a "matter printer", we would have to know how to create material on the fly. I think there are steps being made in that direction.
The article wasn't raising the idea of downloading a physical object at all. Basically, the idea is that if you have a general piece of manufacturing equipment (the "printer" they're talking about uses polymers to build its products) then all you have to download are the instructions for this generalized manufacturing hardware and it will build whatever it needs. In the short run, this isn't probably going to get off the ground because products are built out of many different materials and I think we don't yet have a strong enough grasp on molecular manipulation to make this happen. But in the long run, if we could say have a device that could spit out steel-like material just as easily as plastic-like material, there's no reason manufacturing would have to happen in plants anymore. And ultimately, this leads to a society where people can drive their goods to market for much less money - you just need to come up with the idea and sell it to people. Of course, this type of society could only function with some type of control over the operation. If you had rampant downloading, as you do with current P2P networks, there would be no profit in sending a design to market and the markets would dry up.