First, don't aim for realism. Allow respawns because that's the way the game mechanic works and you like it that way. This worked well for Quake and earlier games. Why do you get to respawn? Because that makes the game fun. End of story.
Second, make it really hard to actually die. If you do die, then that's it, but generally you won't. Think of Monkey Island. There are only a few places where it's actually possible to die, and you need to try really hard. Or, to make it a bit harder, like Elite, where characters that had something to lose could buy escape pods and would then be able to survive their ship being destroyed (likely in a universe that is approximately 90% hostile spacecraft by mass).
Finally, work the respawning into the story. Have a friendly sorcerer resurrect the player in a fantasy game. In a futuristic game, have teleporters record the person that travels through them so that, if you die, you step out of the teleporter again with none of the experience or items you've collected since then. Or have it so that respawning doesn't really involve coming back to life, but rather taking control of a new person. This works fairly well in the Tom Clancy games.
Counterstrike wasn't the first. Action Quake II was the first mod I played that went in for realism, and was released about a year before Counterstrike. It was awful. You got shot, and you started to bleed, walked slowly, and had to find a first aid kit to bandage yourself to stop bleeding (and losing health). Even then, you didn't heal, you just stopped being more injured. You had so little ammo that you only got a couple of shots before having to resort to trying to knife your opponents.
It was the most realistic FPS I'd played - more realistic than Counterstrike a year later - and the least fun.
Actually, I think it's great news. A big company, with a product that's already so successful that they don't need any extra protection, is using the legal system to batter the competition. Those of us who wanted a clear and unambiguous example of the harm that current IP law does now have one to show our elected representatives.
Motorola has thousands of patents going right back through this
No they don't. Any patents from then will have expired in the '90s. They will, however, have a lot of patents from the '90s that may still be relevant now...
There's other crazy censorship in German games too. The German release of Red Alert, for example, had android infantry instead of human, and they died in pools of oil instead of blood.
Why does an installed base of USB2 stuff make Thunderbolt less good? In case you missed it, Apple's Thunderbolt display includes a USB hub. With a single cable, you can connect the display, 3 USB 2 devices (more if you add a hub), a chain of FireWire 800 devices, and gigabit Ethernet connection, a second display, and a downstream Thunderbolt device such as a high-end RAID enclosure to your laptop. Note the 3 USB 2 devices in the middle. Keyboard, mouse, and USB flash drive, only count as one, since Apple's keyboards include a hub with two powered ports. That leaves two USB ports for printer, scanner, camera, and so on (assuming these aren't all on WiFi already).
True, but they'll probably have some people with some Windows experience already. They're much less likely to have someone with *NIX experience. And, if they do, then they probably have someone who can nuke the XP install and install their favourite OS.
Maemo was a beautiful phone, then they decided to scrap it and redesign with MeeGo after they bought Qt
Did you actually use Maemo, or try developing for it? I did both, and beautiful is certainly not an adjective I'd use to describe it. Bloated, slow, crap at power management, badly designed, and with crappy developer tools, maybe. Beautiful? Not so much.
It's not that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's that if software patents start hurting everyone, instead of just the little guys who are kept out of established markets by existing large players with cross-licensing agreements, then we may start to see some of the reform that we've been wanting for the last decade or so, instead of having it blocked by deep-pocketed lobbyists from the few big companies that benefit from the current situation.
Nokia sued them because they really wanted to cross license Apple's multi-touch patents and had refused to give Apple the same licensing terms they give everyone else
So invalidating software patents would have been great for Nokia. They'd have had free access to Apple's bullshit 'pinching means zooming in' patent (filed years after that gesture was publicly demoed), and Apple would still have had to pay or a license to the various technologies that the world's mobile phone network infrastructure is built on.
Apple would have been more than happy to pay the same licensing fees that everyone else pays
And then sue Nokia for violating patents on things that should never have been allowed to be patented.
Lets face it, without the internet/media our convos wouldn't suddenly turn to philosophy, engineering, science and literature, but would be mostly the same only you couldn't talk to people outside of your geographic area.
Odd, they seem to around me. But maybe that's because none of my friends are ridiculous enough to feel the need to abbreviate the word 'conversation' to 'convo', and can actually handle polysyllabic words.
I've talked to quite a lot of non-geeks about Facebook. They first express surprise that I'm not on Facebook, and say something like 'but you know a lot about computers, why aren't you on it?' I tell them that I find Facebook's terms and conditions completely unacceptable, and quote a few of the things that I'm giving them permission to do. The response has been shock in about 90% of cases, about 10% have closed their Facebook accounts, and a lot more have dramatically reduced what they do on Facebook.
I have yet to meet anyone who has both read the Facebook T&Cs before agreeing. Most people believe Facebook's PR and so skip the legalese. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of people who put their face in the book have absolutely no idea what they permitted when they signed up.
In the USA, during the second world war, there were a number of charities that sent aid to the Russians (America's allies against the Nazis) to help the half of their country that was devastated by the Nazi war machine rolling over it twice. Lots of people gave money to these charities, because they were good causes.
Some years later, the political establishment decided that sending money to the USSR - in any context - was a sign of communist sympathy. The names of any donors to these various charities were all dug up and people found that they were under suspicion of being members of the communist party (or, as we'd call them today, suspected terrorists!!11eleventyone) and lost their jobs. They even lost many of their friends, who were afraid that they'd also be branded as communists.
They had nothing to hide - the fact that they'd made a donation to a charity 10 years earlier wasn't something any of them were ashamed of, or that most of them even thought about.
Why should I care that some companies know my buying habits? I am one of billions. There exist some unfathomably vast spreadsheets with a row that indicates I like oatmeal for breakfast and enjoy the works of Terry Pratchett
From just those two facts, I can make a good guess at your voting habits (look up the demographics of Pratchett readers some time). From the typical information that Facebook collects, you can get a 99% probability of exactly who you vote for. You don't think that this information is valuable? Collect it, process it, and you know exactly which voting stations you need to disrupt to win the next election. Or who to intimidate in a marginal constituency.
You think that people care about tracking you, personally. Let me assure you, you're not that important. No one cares. That's a good thing. You're one of billions, and well below the notice of multinational corporations
You're still in the late 20th century mindset where tracking someone was difficult. Now, you're just one entry in a database. You're filling it up with information about yourself, and hoping that no one will run a query that pops out your name in any context that you don't want. And you might be right, but the impact of the Stasi was a lot greater than just their effect on the relatively few people who came under their direct scrutiny.
Maybe he got his TV on a special Daily Mail promotion, and it has a Daily Mail approved colour filter that makes bad people look black (and adds 'Muslim!' as a subtitle when they appear), and good people look white.
I R'd TFA, and it seems that calling it an external graphics card is actually a bit misleading. It's basically a breakout box that turns the PCIe channel in Thunderbolt into a dedicated PCIe slot. This is a lot more interesting, because it means that you can plug any PCIe card into it, not just a graphics card. Thunderbolt's PCIe looks just like normal PCIe to the rest of the kernel, so you should be able to use any card that you have drivers for. If you're transferring a lot of data, you'll notice the bandwidth limit a bit, but if you're doing something that fits in VRAM and then does a lot of processing on it, a Tesla board should be very fast. You could alternatively plug in an FPGA dev board.
This is particularly interesting, because it means that one of the big reasons for using a desktop over a laptop - being able to plug in that one expansion card that only comes in desktop form factors that your business needs - no longer exists.
You know, it would be pretty simple to rig up a GM tube as a detonator, attach it to a bomb, and slip it into someone's carry-on luggage at an airport. When they get near the backscatter X-ray machines (or the luggage X-rays), boom. Since the TSA's job is anticipating threats and responding to them, I wonder what they're doing about this, other than crowding people together in the blast radius.
The latest Intel graphics cards aren't that bad. They're not great, but I'd imagine that they'd stack up quite well against something that's crippled by the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. Modern GPUs use 16x PCIe cards. Even with PCIe 1, this is 3 times the bandwidth that this device can use. With PCIe 3, it's 12 times as much. A slightly weaker GPU on a fast interface is going to beat a fast one that's spending 90% of its time waiting for data over the bus.
Totally agree. I mean, a single connector that can drive a monitor, external disks, and a range of peripherals and is small enough to fit on something like a mobile phone? What possible use case is there for that?
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You have three options.
First, don't aim for realism. Allow respawns because that's the way the game mechanic works and you like it that way. This worked well for Quake and earlier games. Why do you get to respawn? Because that makes the game fun. End of story.
Second, make it really hard to actually die. If you do die, then that's it, but generally you won't. Think of Monkey Island. There are only a few places where it's actually possible to die, and you need to try really hard. Or, to make it a bit harder, like Elite, where characters that had something to lose could buy escape pods and would then be able to survive their ship being destroyed (likely in a universe that is approximately 90% hostile spacecraft by mass).
Finally, work the respawning into the story. Have a friendly sorcerer resurrect the player in a fantasy game. In a futuristic game, have teleporters record the person that travels through them so that, if you die, you step out of the teleporter again with none of the experience or items you've collected since then. Or have it so that respawning doesn't really involve coming back to life, but rather taking control of a new person. This works fairly well in the Tom Clancy games.
Counterstrike wasn't the first. Action Quake II was the first mod I played that went in for realism, and was released about a year before Counterstrike. It was awful. You got shot, and you started to bleed, walked slowly, and had to find a first aid kit to bandage yourself to stop bleeding (and losing health). Even then, you didn't heal, you just stopped being more injured. You had so little ammo that you only got a couple of shots before having to resort to trying to knife your opponents.
It was the most realistic FPS I'd played - more realistic than Counterstrike a year later - and the least fun.
Actually, I think it's great news. A big company, with a product that's already so successful that they don't need any extra protection, is using the legal system to batter the competition. Those of us who wanted a clear and unambiguous example of the harm that current IP law does now have one to show our elected representatives.
Motorola has thousands of patents going right back through this
No they don't. Any patents from then will have expired in the '90s. They will, however, have a lot of patents from the '90s that may still be relevant now...
Any political group that wishes to attack me by giving me free t-shirts is welcome to do so. Also, a free laptop, maybe a free HiFi would be nice...
There's other crazy censorship in German games too. The German release of Red Alert, for example, had android infantry instead of human, and they died in pools of oil instead of blood.
Why does an installed base of USB2 stuff make Thunderbolt less good? In case you missed it, Apple's Thunderbolt display includes a USB hub. With a single cable, you can connect the display, 3 USB 2 devices (more if you add a hub), a chain of FireWire 800 devices, and gigabit Ethernet connection, a second display, and a downstream Thunderbolt device such as a high-end RAID enclosure to your laptop. Note the 3 USB 2 devices in the middle. Keyboard, mouse, and USB flash drive, only count as one, since Apple's keyboards include a hub with two powered ports. That leaves two USB ports for printer, scanner, camera, and so on (assuming these aren't all on WiFi already).
Aww, I don't have a microwave!
True, but they'll probably have some people with some Windows experience already. They're much less likely to have someone with *NIX experience. And, if they do, then they probably have someone who can nuke the XP install and install their favourite OS.
Maemo was a beautiful phone, then they decided to scrap it and redesign with MeeGo after they bought Qt
Did you actually use Maemo, or try developing for it? I did both, and beautiful is certainly not an adjective I'd use to describe it. Bloated, slow, crap at power management, badly designed, and with crappy developer tools, maybe. Beautiful? Not so much.
It's not that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's that if software patents start hurting everyone, instead of just the little guys who are kept out of established markets by existing large players with cross-licensing agreements, then we may start to see some of the reform that we've been wanting for the last decade or so, instead of having it blocked by deep-pocketed lobbyists from the few big companies that benefit from the current situation.
Apple single-handedly made tablets and smartphones into the products you recognize today. Before Apple, we had products like...
...this. How horrible.
Nokia sued them because they really wanted to cross license Apple's multi-touch patents and had refused to give Apple the same licensing terms they give everyone else
So invalidating software patents would have been great for Nokia. They'd have had free access to Apple's bullshit 'pinching means zooming in' patent (filed years after that gesture was publicly demoed), and Apple would still have had to pay or a license to the various technologies that the world's mobile phone network infrastructure is built on.
Apple would have been more than happy to pay the same licensing fees that everyone else pays
And then sue Nokia for violating patents on things that should never have been allowed to be patented.
Lets face it, without the internet/media our convos wouldn't suddenly turn to philosophy, engineering, science and literature, but would be mostly the same only you couldn't talk to people outside of your geographic area.
Odd, they seem to around me. But maybe that's because none of my friends are ridiculous enough to feel the need to abbreviate the word 'conversation' to 'convo', and can actually handle polysyllabic words.
Yup, it's when we in Britain celebrate Thanksgiving.
I've talked to quite a lot of non-geeks about Facebook. They first express surprise that I'm not on Facebook, and say something like 'but you know a lot about computers, why aren't you on it?' I tell them that I find Facebook's terms and conditions completely unacceptable, and quote a few of the things that I'm giving them permission to do. The response has been shock in about 90% of cases, about 10% have closed their Facebook accounts, and a lot more have dramatically reduced what they do on Facebook.
I have yet to meet anyone who has both read the Facebook T&Cs before agreeing. Most people believe Facebook's PR and so skip the legalese. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 90% of people who put their face in the book have absolutely no idea what they permitted when they signed up.
In the USA, during the second world war, there were a number of charities that sent aid to the Russians (America's allies against the Nazis) to help the half of their country that was devastated by the Nazi war machine rolling over it twice. Lots of people gave money to these charities, because they were good causes.
Some years later, the political establishment decided that sending money to the USSR - in any context - was a sign of communist sympathy. The names of any donors to these various charities were all dug up and people found that they were under suspicion of being members of the communist party (or, as we'd call them today, suspected terrorists!!11eleventyone) and lost their jobs. They even lost many of their friends, who were afraid that they'd also be branded as communists.
They had nothing to hide - the fact that they'd made a donation to a charity 10 years earlier wasn't something any of them were ashamed of, or that most of them even thought about.
Why should I care that some companies know my buying habits? I am one of billions. There exist some unfathomably vast spreadsheets with a row that indicates I like oatmeal for breakfast and enjoy the works of Terry Pratchett
From just those two facts, I can make a good guess at your voting habits (look up the demographics of Pratchett readers some time). From the typical information that Facebook collects, you can get a 99% probability of exactly who you vote for. You don't think that this information is valuable? Collect it, process it, and you know exactly which voting stations you need to disrupt to win the next election. Or who to intimidate in a marginal constituency.
You think that people care about tracking you, personally. Let me assure you, you're not that important. No one cares. That's a good thing. You're one of billions, and well below the notice of multinational corporations
You're still in the late 20th century mindset where tracking someone was difficult. Now, you're just one entry in a database. You're filling it up with information about yourself, and hoping that no one will run a query that pops out your name in any context that you don't want. And you might be right, but the impact of the Stasi was a lot greater than just their effect on the relatively few people who came under their direct scrutiny.
Aside from the fact that you seem to have missed the development of USB OTG, I have no idea what this had to do with my post.
Maybe he got his TV on a special Daily Mail promotion, and it has a Daily Mail approved colour filter that makes bad people look black (and adds 'Muslim!' as a subtitle when they appear), and good people look white.
Great, now I feel like a dork
Demonstrating that you've seen a film of a book, but not read the book that it was based on, does not make you a dork.
What happens if I have a solar panel on my back? What about if someone fires a 2GW laser at it?
I R'd TFA, and it seems that calling it an external graphics card is actually a bit misleading. It's basically a breakout box that turns the PCIe channel in Thunderbolt into a dedicated PCIe slot. This is a lot more interesting, because it means that you can plug any PCIe card into it, not just a graphics card. Thunderbolt's PCIe looks just like normal PCIe to the rest of the kernel, so you should be able to use any card that you have drivers for. If you're transferring a lot of data, you'll notice the bandwidth limit a bit, but if you're doing something that fits in VRAM and then does a lot of processing on it, a Tesla board should be very fast. You could alternatively plug in an FPGA dev board.
This is particularly interesting, because it means that one of the big reasons for using a desktop over a laptop - being able to plug in that one expansion card that only comes in desktop form factors that your business needs - no longer exists.
You know, it would be pretty simple to rig up a GM tube as a detonator, attach it to a bomb, and slip it into someone's carry-on luggage at an airport. When they get near the backscatter X-ray machines (or the luggage X-rays), boom. Since the TSA's job is anticipating threats and responding to them, I wonder what they're doing about this, other than crowding people together in the blast radius.
The latest Intel graphics cards aren't that bad. They're not great, but I'd imagine that they'd stack up quite well against something that's crippled by the bandwidth of Thunderbolt. Modern GPUs use 16x PCIe cards. Even with PCIe 1, this is 3 times the bandwidth that this device can use. With PCIe 3, it's 12 times as much. A slightly weaker GPU on a fast interface is going to beat a fast one that's spending 90% of its time waiting for data over the bus.
Totally agree. I mean, a single connector that can drive a monitor, external disks, and a range of peripherals and is small enough to fit on something like a mobile phone? What possible use case is there for that?