why would you use 'open source' software for that anyway? you're using commercial products right now (generic hardware and accounting software), the best bet would be to scrap everything you have and replace it with a single client/server application using a web interface.
one of the most offensive characters in game history is Barret from Final Fantasy VII. That guy nearly ruined the entire game for me.
Maybe it was because he was like the worst party member for cloud? its been so long, but when you could have tika, aeris and vincent (my god even Red XII) why would you choose barret?
he wasn't so offensive either, he just didn't say "I PITY THE FOOL" enough.
when you play for 2 hours and find an item that is worth $100 on ebay then you bet the time that you spent playing that game has 'real economic value'.
when the character that you create is how worth 5000 US dollars to someone, then the hours that you spent leveling/macroing/whatever that character up, definetly has economic value.
the thing is, there are plenty of gamers that buy and sell things online through ebay. they are not companies like IGE or whatever, they are just college kids (or now adults) that have made hundreds (and thousands!) of dollars of supplementary income just by doing something that they love (and this has been happening since 1997 or so). i count myself as one of those independent gamers that has made money off UO and AC. in fact, the majority of players that started playing these games in college has made that trade off: successful businessmen/women that make $600/day after taxes do not mind spending $50 on a sword/item that a fast food worker ($5/hour) playing after his shift has spent 40 hours grinding for. it comes down to the fact that there are people in the real world that have more money than you, and care about the same things that you do. and they will spend it doing things that make them happy (including buying a character to experience 'end game' content).
the buck never stops. you are being delusional if you think it does.
The March of Penguins movie released recently (produced by a major Hollywood studio) was a *very* good scientific movie. It gave the masses what they wanted to see: cute lovable babies, stark environments and brutal death wrapped in Morgan Freeman's scientific commentary.
Uhhhh, there weren't any 'rare' items in Shadowbane. That was the point. You would rank vendors and they would spit out (randomly) various types of weapons and armor depending on vendor type that were for players of the rank of the vendor. Now, it did cost money to rank and maintain the vendor. However, everyone used vendor created items, i think that there was one ring or something like 8 months into the game from a GM sponsored event that was 2% better than a vendor produced item.
The reason that duping gold in SB was such a big deal was that now *everyone* could have an open tree of life/city with rank 4 walls and rank 7 weapon and armor smiths producing whatever type of weapon/armor that the players wanted. Who cares if people just break the non-protected buildings, they will just buy more npc guards with thier millions of duped gold. No more need for organization and guild dues when one person has gold enough for the next 2 years of city maintanence.
Therefore, gold in SB was waaay more important than gold in WoW.
Thats why there are recommendation services. You find one band that you like and you get recommendations for tens or hundreds of others. As a simple example, chances are you go to Amazon.com and type in thier name and pull up thier albums you get a list of "People that bought this, also bought...". It is a good starting point.
Hell, running a music type of website like you do (assumed so, by the link in your profile), you have probably heard of audioscrobbler.com which is a way to automatically see hundreds (thousands!) of artists, albums and songs that you would like if you could just seed it with one (maybe two) bands that you like, and see what everyone else with your same musical taste (they are out there) is listening to. I am sure that there are plenty of other websites with the same recommendation services, but thats the one that I use.
They may make more money than the person that they are calling, because the engineer is an 'expert programmer' writing (a subset of) the system in question. When they have a problem with using the system, they call the help desk, which should be 'expert users'.
I think that asking the programmer that wrote the grammar checker in MS Word about a file configuration problem, and you probably wouldnt get a very good answer. You ask the help desk, and you're damn right you should.
I know 'gamers' that have grown up and barely play any games now (and would also consider myself one), but they still plug away a few hours a week in WoW. These are the same dread-lords from the '97 UO era, transitioned to EQ and/or AC, played DAoC and then moved onto SB before coming to rest in whatever gaming limbo they currently reside. They/we have been around and appreciate the history of gaming (at least online).
When you have some kid that just picks up WoW after playing Diablo 2 for 2 years, he may think that he is a 'gamer', but truely (in my biased opinion) has no appreciation of the way things work and have worked for the last 8+ years.
Its the same argument that people give that still use Fortran. Most (scientific) departments have professors that make extensive use of Fortran for research and in thier instruction.
Its what the instructors learned originally and it 'can get the job done', but it is not neccesarily the best solution in whatever terms that you measure success. Professors use it because that is what they know. People don't jump all over new technologies because the original learning curve even if is 'superior, free and customizable'.
I think the same can be said of your department's use of Matlab. You have a set of users already using it with a set of code that already does a lot of things that they find useful; if they switched to another platform thousands of lines of Matlab code would need to be re-written. Since Matlad 'still works' they will never switch due to the legacy it has.
For the same reason that the SSN's are used for 'everything a person does' is the same reason that they need to be used in schools. Granted, SSN's do not need to be used as school IDs and that is where the problem lies (they were used a lot previously because they are automatically a primary key). I think that the majority of cases where SSNs are exposed and 'hacked' in institutions, like this school, are because they can get the public list of all the students and thier student ID's: which are generally thier SSN.
the difference is that Turbine is just going to configure thier engine and have thier artists draw up some MiddleEarth/D&D artwork and they have insta-games. I am pretty sure thier plan is to (re-)use thier "Turbine Engine" as the basis for thier new games. Of note, the Turbine Engine, which was a total rework of the AC1 engine used for AC2, has at least one 'successful' game port in the Risk Your Life (www.ryl.net) (which is the Americanized port of some Korean game, and it must be doing somewhat well to offer $1 Million dollars for competitive play, even if it is just an asian themed AC2 clone!). I am sure that AC2 box sales must have *at least* offset the cost of the engine development, the question of the mediocre games is whether they are making money (my guess is that AC1: yes, AC2: breaking even).
What will be interesting is how flexible thier game engine is and therefore how different thier two games coming out will be. If MEO and D&D are just AC2.1 and AC2.2 then noone will play them. If thier designs are radical enough to be labeled "next generation", then they might just do okay.
i think that had more to do with cryptic data formats of OTS software testing at integration time rather than software validation at the segment level.
if thier data was in xml, i think that those types of things might not have happened:
Yeah the projectile motion of object in the world is what i was talking about: you know a real physics engine. I remember when they first implemented AoE spells, they had to hack the projectile system; the PB AoE was a set of short range projectiles emanating in a ring about the caster. The engine itself is dated.
Something you also forgot to mention is that AC1 was initially developed as a pvp game first and a PvE game second.
What you are talking about in your last paragraph was the vision of *what AC2 was supposed to be*. heh, its too bad that they had people like Troop working on it instead of Jesse.
[Hell, you could say that AC1 went downhill with troop, and that this jessica person was just doing cleanup on his design mishaps]
Its not that AC had depth, its that it had physics... no MMOG out since has had the projectile effects, true 3d, and collision detections that AC1 had (in 1999).
Also, each item in the game had a true 3d shape when placed in the world! You start to realize that with WoW, that each 'item' is just transferrable from one inventory container to another and that you either find a 'plant inventory' and collect herbs into your pack or kill a moster and move items from the 'corpse container' into your pack: items dont exist without containers. In AC1, players used to drop torches (independent light sources) all around town! And other players *could pick them up*. I miss that in a 3d game, the items just seem like database values to me instead of existing in the world.
Don't get me started on the 'skill based' game design versus the 'class based' design of AC1 vs. every MMO (besides UO), because it could be argued that it was actually a regression in design.
Ahh well, I stopped playing in 2002 for DAoC and sometimes wish I never did.
I think that the expansions are definetly going to include better skills. Meaning, if your 'Single Target Heal' spell that you use a lot restores 100-200 health, and this month's expansion's single target heal spell now restores 200-300 with the same casting time and mana cost, then you would definetly feel compelled to buy the expansion just to keep up with the joneses.
With the last patch (or the one before it?) WoW got rid of the leetspeak communication in between factions. That used to bother me as well... cause I couldn't understand it.
Also, if you've never played a PvP game with open communication (AC:Darktide or SB) then you don't really know how fun it is to verbally own someone after they spam you with thier dribble.
I'm not sure about this, but I know that when ICQ was still ordering people who signed up for thier server by number lower '7 digit' ids that were created in the late 90's were worth a lot more than the '9 digit' id that I had. Most of the other guys in my gaming guild had '7 digit' ids that were worth a considerable amount of money (to a broke ass college student) since they all used ICQ to communicate when playing UO.
You couldnt actually rename the numbers, but having a lower number made you more 'leet'/oldschool or whatever so they were coveted. Saying this, lowere icq numbered ids were often the prey of trojans/cracks to get thier password so that the person could get the password associated with the number.
Thats what i remember at least, everything from the late 90's is kinda a blur.
Also to note, that level 50 people (especially healers, since they tend to team up with characters higher level than themselves) will be gaining points from level 40-60 kills...
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why would you use 'open source' software for that anyway? you're using commercial products right now (generic hardware and accounting software), the best bet would be to scrap everything you have and replace it with a single client/server application using a web interface.
they implemented HJKL into gmail!
where is that sms messaging tool? I checked thier mobile site and couldn't find anything like what you describe.
maybe he goes to a college or university and not a "tech institute"?
you dont give your lead programming position to the valedictorian at devry, you give it to the 120th CS graduate from Michigan.
one of the most offensive characters in game history is Barret from Final Fantasy VII. That guy nearly ruined the entire game for me.
Maybe it was because he was like the worst party member for cloud? its been so long, but when you could have tika, aeris and vincent (my god even Red XII) why would you choose barret?
he wasn't so offensive either, he just didn't say "I PITY THE FOOL" enough.
when you play for 2 hours and find an item that is worth $100 on ebay then you bet the time that you spent playing that game has 'real economic value'.
when the character that you create is how worth 5000 US dollars to someone, then the hours that you spent leveling/macroing/whatever that character up, definetly has economic value.
the thing is, there are plenty of gamers that buy and sell things online through ebay. they are not companies like IGE or whatever, they are just college kids (or now adults) that have made hundreds (and thousands!) of dollars of supplementary income just by doing something that they love (and this has been happening since 1997 or so). i count myself as one of those independent gamers that has made money off UO and AC. in fact, the majority of players that started playing these games in college has made that trade off: successful businessmen/women that make $600/day after taxes do not mind spending $50 on a sword/item that a fast food worker ($5/hour) playing after his shift has spent 40 hours grinding for. it comes down to the fact that there are people in the real world that have more money than you, and care about the same things that you do. and they will spend it doing things that make them happy (including buying a character to experience 'end game' content).
the buck never stops. you are being delusional if you think it does.
The March of Penguins movie released recently (produced by a major Hollywood studio) was a *very* good scientific movie. It gave the masses what they wanted to see: cute lovable babies, stark environments and brutal death wrapped in Morgan Freeman's scientific commentary.
Uhhhh, there weren't any 'rare' items in Shadowbane. That was the point. You would rank vendors and they would spit out (randomly) various types of weapons and armor depending on vendor type that were for players of the rank of the vendor. Now, it did cost money to rank and maintain the vendor. However, everyone used vendor created items, i think that there was one ring or something like 8 months into the game from a GM sponsored event that was 2% better than a vendor produced item.
The reason that duping gold in SB was such a big deal was that now *everyone* could have an open tree of life/city with rank 4 walls and rank 7 weapon and armor smiths producing whatever type of weapon/armor that the players wanted. Who cares if people just break the non-protected buildings, they will just buy more npc guards with thier millions of duped gold. No more need for organization and guild dues when one person has gold enough for the next 2 years of city maintanence.
Therefore, gold in SB was waaay more important than gold in WoW.
Thats why there are recommendation services. You find one band that you like and you get recommendations for tens or hundreds of others. As a simple example, chances are you go to Amazon.com and type in thier name and pull up thier albums you get a list of "People that bought this, also bought ...". It is a good starting point.
Hell, running a music type of website like you do (assumed so, by the link in your profile), you have probably heard of audioscrobbler.com which is a way to automatically see hundreds (thousands!) of artists, albums and songs that you would like if you could just seed it with one (maybe two) bands that you like, and see what everyone else with your same musical taste (they are out there) is listening to. I am sure that there are plenty of other websites with the same recommendation services, but thats the one that I use.
They may make more money than the person that they are calling, because the engineer is an 'expert programmer' writing (a subset of) the system in question. When they have a problem with using the system, they call the help desk, which should be 'expert users'.
I think that asking the programmer that wrote the grammar checker in MS Word about a file configuration problem, and you probably wouldnt get a very good answer. You ask the help desk, and you're damn right you should.
I think you're spot on.
I know 'gamers' that have grown up and barely play any games now (and would also consider myself one), but they still plug away a few hours a week in WoW. These are the same dread-lords from the '97 UO era, transitioned to EQ and/or AC, played DAoC and then moved onto SB before coming to rest in whatever gaming limbo they currently reside. They/we have been around and appreciate the history of gaming (at least online).
When you have some kid that just picks up WoW after playing Diablo 2 for 2 years, he may think that he is a 'gamer', but truely (in my biased opinion) has no appreciation of the way things work and have worked for the last 8+ years.
As a famous man once said, "We take hits from the Eighties, But do it sound so crazy?"
its more of the fact that you actually have to read and learn new vocabulary rather than just stare at pretty 3d generated frames.
the term 'melee' (pronounced may-lay! not MEE-LEE as i found out in history class) i first learned from the 2nd Ed. AD&D books
Its the same argument that people give that still use Fortran. Most (scientific) departments have professors that make extensive use of Fortran for research and in thier instruction.
Its what the instructors learned originally and it 'can get the job done', but it is not neccesarily the best solution in whatever terms that you measure success. Professors use it because that is what they know. People don't jump all over new technologies because the original learning curve even if is 'superior, free and customizable'.
I think the same can be said of your department's use of Matlab. You have a set of users already using it with a set of code that already does a lot of things that they find useful; if they switched to another platform thousands of lines of Matlab code would need to be re-written. Since Matlad 'still works' they will never switch due to the legacy it has.
You mean they are going to re-license a copy of NDL's GameBryo engine and skin it for Necrons and Eldar instead of Tir Na Nog, Miggard and Camelot.
I don't expect any revolutions in game playability from Mythic with this release.
While Shadowbane's was originally a grey muscled minotaur, they have since moved to vampiric seducresses with thier expansion packs.
(I know noone plays SB, but hey)
For the same reason that the SSN's are used for 'everything a person does' is the same reason that they need to be used in schools. Granted, SSN's do not need to be used as school IDs and that is where the problem lies (they were used a lot previously because they are automatically a primary key). I think that the majority of cases where SSNs are exposed and 'hacked' in institutions, like this school, are because they can get the public list of all the students and thier student ID's: which are generally thier SSN.
the difference is that Turbine is just going to configure thier engine and have thier artists draw up some MiddleEarth/D&D artwork and they have insta-games. I am pretty sure thier plan is to (re-)use thier "Turbine Engine" as the basis for thier new games. Of note, the Turbine Engine, which was a total rework of the AC1 engine used for AC2, has at least one 'successful' game port in the Risk Your Life (www.ryl.net) (which is the Americanized port of some Korean game, and it must be doing somewhat well to offer $1 Million dollars for competitive play, even if it is just an asian themed AC2 clone!). I am sure that AC2 box sales must have *at least* offset the cost of the engine development, the question of the mediocre games is whether they are making money (my guess is that AC1: yes, AC2: breaking even).
What will be interesting is how flexible thier game engine is and therefore how different thier two games coming out will be. If MEO and D&D are just AC2.1 and AC2.2 then noone will play them. If thier designs are radical enough to be labeled "next generation", then they might just do okay.
i think that had more to do with cryptic data formats of OTS software testing at integration time rather than software validation at the segment level.
if thier data was in xml, i think that those types of things might not have happened:
<coordinate referenceFrame="SunFixed" type="Cartesian">
<x units="meters">1111111111.</x>
<y units="yards">123414231.</x>
<z units="lightyears">.1234</z>
</coordinate>
and all systems, legacy or modern, would be happy
Yeah the projectile motion of object in the world is what i was talking about: you know a real physics engine. I remember when they first implemented AoE spells, they had to hack the projectile system; the PB AoE was a set of short range projectiles emanating in a ring about the caster. The engine itself is dated.
Something you also forgot to mention is that AC1 was initially developed as a pvp game first and a PvE game second.
What you are talking about in your last paragraph was the vision of *what AC2 was supposed to be*. heh, its too bad that they had people like Troop working on it instead of Jesse.
[Hell, you could say that AC1 went downhill with troop, and that this jessica person was just doing cleanup on his design mishaps]
Its not that AC had depth, its that it had physics... no MMOG out since has had the projectile effects, true 3d, and collision detections that AC1 had (in 1999).
Also, each item in the game had a true 3d shape when placed in the world! You start to realize that with WoW, that each 'item' is just transferrable from one inventory container to another and that you either find a 'plant inventory' and collect herbs into your pack or kill a moster and move items from the 'corpse container' into your pack: items dont exist without containers. In AC1, players used to drop torches (independent light sources) all around town! And other players *could pick them up*. I miss that in a 3d game, the items just seem like database values to me instead of existing in the world.
Don't get me started on the 'skill based' game design versus the 'class based' design of AC1 vs. every MMO (besides UO), because it could be argued that it was actually a regression in design.
Ahh well, I stopped playing in 2002 for DAoC and sometimes wish I never did.
I think that the expansions are definetly going to include better skills. Meaning, if your 'Single Target Heal' spell that you use a lot restores 100-200 health, and this month's expansion's single target heal spell now restores 200-300 with the same casting time and mana cost, then you would definetly feel compelled to buy the expansion just to keep up with the joneses.
With the last patch (or the one before it?) WoW got rid of the leetspeak communication in between factions. That used to bother me as well... cause I couldn't understand it.
Also, if you've never played a PvP game with open communication (AC:Darktide or SB) then you don't really know how fun it is to verbally own someone after they spam you with thier dribble.
I'm not sure about this, but I know that when ICQ was still ordering people who signed up for thier server by number lower '7 digit' ids that were created in the late 90's were worth a lot more than the '9 digit' id that I had. Most of the other guys in my gaming guild had '7 digit' ids that were worth a considerable amount of money (to a broke ass college student) since they all used ICQ to communicate when playing UO.
You couldnt actually rename the numbers, but having a lower number made you more 'leet'/oldschool or whatever so they were coveted. Saying this, lowere icq numbered ids were often the prey of trojans/cracks to get thier password so that the person could get the password associated with the number.
Thats what i remember at least, everything from the late 90's is kinda a blur.
Also to note, that level 50 people (especially healers, since they tend to team up with characters higher level than themselves) will be gaining points from level 40-60 kills...