IIRC, there was a plan to integrate Sim City 4 with the Sims, so your city could double as a virtual universe for Sims. In the end, this was not implemented in SC4. Imagine if we had a copy of Springfield in Sim-City, we could have Sim-Simpsons, and in fact, Sims of any character from the Simpsons.
Sounds like these guys would be the judges if writing C compilers ever became an Olympic event. Pity this wasn't mentioned in the recent poll "Olympic Sports Needed in 2008?".
I wonder how other Olympic events would benefit from obfuscation. Perhaps all the race-tracks would resemble spaghetti junctions.
Another piece of advice: If you are writing the game just for fun, anyone who offers to contribute to it in anyway is not under any obligation, and may never get round to it. So try and rely on yourself as much as possible.
>Opensource isn't just a one man band. The best games would have >1 developer to lend a hand.
If you're going at the programming by yourself, I would strongly recommend you use a library to save you from having to write your own low-level access routines (unless you just want to learn about how all these whiz-bang effects are done, but that may distract you from the goal of getting a game finished). Unless you have commerical backing, or are absolutely sure you have the willpower to stick to the project (by "absolutely sure", I mean you've done it before right to the bitter end and want to do it again), I would recommend using as hing-a-level library as possible.
There are several out there with their advantages and dis-advantages. Some of them are Microsoft DirectX., OpenGL, Allegro and SDL. High-level libraries are good for beginners and are useful for rapidly developping games. You can accomplish a lot with a few lines of code, but they can make the executable size bloat, and sometimes, you may want more control over the system. Low-level libraries are useful for control-freaks who want more control of what's going on.They let you access the system with little overhead, but require a lot of work to get to work. DirectX and OpenGL are low-level libraries, Allegro is a high-level library, and SDL is somewhere in the middle.
Also, check to see which platforms the library is available for. DirectX is only available for Microsoft, whereas OpenGL, SDL and Allegro let you write programs that can be ported to a multitude of systems and OS's.
Personally, I use Allegro, but other people may have different requirements or desires to dig down deep into the hardware.
One of the problems about modern games is that they take too long to play and you get absorbed by them. They take forever to complete, and in some cases, can't be completed coz they're open ended (eg. Sim-City). MMORPGs like Everquest create a complete virtual community filled with real people, which makes it even more absorbing. Games like Civilisation III just take too long to complete, and even FPSs can be absorbing.
Back in the early 80's, games were just a quick 15-30 minute affair. A quick blast of Space Invaders, a quick nibble with Pacman. You did not get absorbed by the games, you just played them. This may explain why mobile-phone games are doing well. They are so simple that they require little commitment.
A video-game is just that - a video game. It's just a toy that's meant to be played with - not an experience that immerses you inside it. You're just meant to play a game, not to commit yourself to it.
Dispite my rant, I still get addicted to games like Civilisation III, Age of Wonders II, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, etc.... but in my defense, I used to work in the games industry, so there.
If you know the 8-bit ASCII code of the character, you can type it in on the numeric keypad while pressing 'ALT'. The Num-Lock light must be on for this to work (press the 'num-lock' button to toggle the light).
If you don't know the ASCII code, experiment by typing out all numbers from 128 to 255 and observing which character the number produces (you must release ALT after typing each number and press it again before typing the next number).
As for non-ASCII characters (Unicode) - I have no idea how to get those on an English keyboard.
I just updated my Windows 2000 Pro installation (SP4 and all the critical and most non-critical patches) with the latest crop of patches (including 841873), re-booted, and checked Windows update again to see if anything new appeared. I tried running Firefox 0.9.2 and it runs just fine (I'm using it to post this comment). I am using an AMD Athlon 600MhZ with 256MB. Perhaps there's something else on your machine that doesn't play nice with the new patch and Firefox.
A few months ago when Microsoft released another set of patches (one of which plugged the hole that Sasser exploited), somebody posted a comment in the story about these patches. They also claimed that the new pathces buggered up their Windows installation (it worked fine on mine), but this time round, somebody discovered a 3rd party app that conflicted with the patch (I vaguely remember seeing something about in on the Microsoft site, but can't find it).
> Actually, my dummy email has always been support@microsoft.com.
Oh dear... I can see this already.
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 555666
Are we satisfied with the length of our penis?
Symptoms: You are unsure if we at Microsoft Support are satisfied with the length of our collective penis.
Resolution: To solve the problem:
Repeat the following mantra to yourself over and over again: "Microsoft Support is satisfied with the length of it's penis. Everyone is satisfied with the length of their penises. If I don't stop asking people these questions, my own penis will shrivel up and fall off."...
Fuck off.
Status: Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the internet e-mail system, which thanks to our insecure e-mail apps and OSses, has gotten a lot worse than it should. Also, stupid users are to blame.
The information in this article applies to: Yourself you good for nothing spammer, Clippy.
>A common rule of thumb is that the rate of chemical reactions doubles for every 10C increase in temperature. Going the other way, that means they halve for every 10C decrease. A place as bitterly cold as Titan would see chemistry taking place at a crawl - if at all. There may not have been time to assembled complex molecules at such temperatures.
Titan does not have a magnetic field, and is outside of Saturn's, so that means that the Solar wind does not get deflected like it does on Earth. This stream of charged particles from the Solar wind could provide energy to compensate for the slowdown in the rate of chemical reactions at Titan's frigid temperatures. As Titan is much farther from the Sun than Earth, it does not get as much Solar radiation, but because of the lack of magtnetic field, there are several more types of Solar radiation and charged particles that make it to the surface.
>Why do people always assume that you need an earth like environment for life to exist.
With "Life as we know it" - ie. life that exists in an Earthlike environment, we know excactly what we're looking for, and if we detect DNA/RNA molecules, amino-acids, etc, we can point out to it and say "AHA - we've found it!" (either that, or one of the technicians sneezed all over Huygens).
With "Life as we don't know it", we have no idea what to look for. If this 'life' has evolved sufficiently, it will be noticable by complex-looking structures on the surface (and if it's really advanced, it will move). If not, it will be at the equivalent evolutionary stage to Bacteria and Amoebas, and without a frame of reference, we would not know that this really is a lifeform or just some random chemical.
Huygens is supposed to have a mass-spectrometer that can be used to identify any molecules it comes accross. If it finds really complex molecules on Titan that have previously been unknown to science (especially if they were in the form of an irregular polymer), then it would be reasonable to speculate that it might be a life-form. From what I know, the chemicals that meke up Terran life-forms are some of the most complex known to science. A strand of DNA is a polymer consisting of thousands (if not millions) of atoms.
But even a mass-spectrometer cannot answer the question of 'Is it alive'? Does it have a conciousness? In fact, I don't even think we've answered the question about Bacteria here on Earth. Are Bacteria alive, or just a complex self-replicating chemical reaction?
Now we know that Mars is the location of NASA's top-secrtet film-studio. Every time those middle-managers at NASA want to pocket those government grants for themselves (or occasionally to show that the Americans are better than the Soviets), instead of spendiung billions on sending spacecraft out to deep-spcae, they just spend millions on sending spacecraft to Mars, take some photos, and Photoshop them to look like any other celestial body they chose. In fact, I even suspect that the Apollo Moon landings were filmed on Mars.
As a European who travelled around USA, I found that Amtrak was one of the country's pleasant suprises. While the trains may not be as fast or as punctual as they are in Europe, the long-distance trains are a great way to relax, see the country and meet new people. I'd even go as far as to say that Amtrak is America's most underrated thing.
There is no medical evidence to suggest that mastrubation is a cause of blindness. One theory on how this myth got started is that most mastrubators discover the joys of self-pleasuring at the onset of puberty. At puberty, the body experiences lots of growth-spurts, including deformation of the eyes. Many people who wear glasses only need to wear them from their teenaged years onwards. As the discovery of you-know-what and teenaged eye-deformations happen at around the same time, it only takes a religious fundamentalist to put two and two together and spread lies with a zeal. The hairy-palms theory comes into this as well, as puperty means more hair.
One thing you could do is to instruct your workforce not to have annoying habits, as this can get on the nerves of other employees. Here is an article with reader-feedback that explains just how annoyed people can get by other people's habbits, and lists examples of things which annoy other people. This should be required reading for anyone who wants to work with anyone else. Are there more such places on the web with examples of that which annoys?
IIRC, playing real-time arcade-type games over TCP/IP, or even GPRS or GPS is not feasable, as the information cannot be communicated in real-time. Bluetooth (and Infra-Red) does not rely on networks, and can do straight peer-to-peer connections. Also, multiplayer games where everyone is close together are more fun, as you get to share in the emotions of the other nearby players.
Mobile phone SDKs such as Mophun include a module for communicationg over Bluetooth and Infra-Red connections.
IIRC, at the time Windows 2000 came out, there were no Windows 2000 drivers for the G400TV card, but they promised they would eventually make them. Some 16 or so months later, they announced that they had given up on them (blaming the way Windows 2000 was designed, but I wonder if there was a 'real' story that only a small handfull of people know about). What they did then was to offer Windows 2000 users a free upgrade to a G450eTV card. Unfortunately, when I finally switched from Win98 to Win2000, the offer had long since expired, and I was left to do battle with Google to find out what to do.
What you can do is to download the latest 'beta' (or is that 'alpha') of the G400TV Windows 2000 drivers and video-tools and install these. They can be found on the "Latest Matrox Drivers" page. Unfortunately, a few features, such as MJPEG support, and the ability to record from the remote-control app are not available. However, someone has figured out how to get a Marvel G400TV to use MJPEG with Windows 2000. This site explains it (it's in Italian use Google language tools to translate), and offers a patch or two that can be downloaded. Also, you should be able to record video with a 3rd-party video-editing app (but I've not tried that yet from Windows 2000).
Incidentally, has Matrox abandoned the video-editing/TV-tuner/graphics card all in one market, or is it just hopelessly late in bringing one out? Back in 1999, the G400TV seemed like the best option at the time, and I went for that (and I'm still using mine). At that time, I became fond of Matrox, but due to the lack of a more modern replacement (the latest offering in that line, the G450eTV is hopelessly out of date), I'll have to switch over to ATI All-In-Wonder or NVidia Whatever-The-Hell-The-Equivalent-Is-Called. One of the things I've heard about Matrox cards is that they have a reputation for the best screen-clarity. As I'm used to pushing my monitor's rez as high as it will go before my eyes explode, I'm a bit concerned that I may be forced to use a lower rez if I go with an ATI or NVidia.
Although I've not used an N-Gage, I get the impression that it's more of a console with a built in phone, than a phone that can play games. Just about every other mobile-phone has games on it. Making it look like a handheld was nothing more than a marketing gimmick. I suppose Nokia desperately wanted to be up there with Sony, Nintendo, et al so much that they forgot that it was a phone - hence the side-talking.
Trouble is that there are so many individual updates since the last service pack that it would take ages trying to find all of them and downloading them all. Also, if you only want to install the updates that have not been made redundant by the latest service-pack, you have to check to see if they are covered by the service-pack as well.
One way of finding out which patches you need to download is to download the latest service-pack and a few of the most critical fixes since that service-pack (eg. the fix for the Blaster worm and fix for the Sasser worm). Download using an up-to-date Windows installation, or any other OS. When installing Windows, make sure the network-cable is unplugged, and install the service-pack and these critical patches. Then, plug the cable back in, go to Windows update, and from there, download and install all of the "critical updates" (to save time, you can un-select the MSIE-related updates and just install the OS-related updates, and after the re-boot, go to Windows update again and then install the MSIE patches that you missed out on the first time round).
I'm not sure how safe this is, as during the searching/downloading time, your machine may be compromised using one of the lesser/known or less severe vulnerabilities. The high-profile vulnerabilities involved attackers taking control of your machine (eg. Blaster), but if you are concerned about attackers just being able to read files on your machine, or remotely crash it, I would not recommend the above method.
Anyone interested in the practice of Toothing ends up leaving their Bluetooth on. For more info on Toothing, see also here (Search for "toothing" in the page that appears - there's even a link to the Toothing forums).
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, there was a plan to integrate Sim City 4 with the Sims, so your city could double as a virtual universe for Sims. In the end, this was not implemented in SC4. Imagine if we had a copy of Springfield in Sim-City, we could have Sim-Simpsons, and in fact, Sims of any character from the Simpsons.
You can find the release notes for Firefox 0.10 (aka 1.0PR AKA "Greenlane") here - http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/0 .10.html. The MozillaNews link got the wrong page for the release notes, but thankfully, the Firefox Homepage gets the right link.
I now have a vision of a one-sided PDA in the shape of a Moebius strip, with screens/buttons all over the one 'side'.
Sounds like these guys would be the judges if writing C compilers ever became an Olympic event. Pity this wasn't mentioned in the recent poll "Olympic Sports Needed in 2008?".
I wonder how other Olympic events would benefit from obfuscation. Perhaps all the race-tracks would resemble spaghetti junctions.
Unless you're writing games for mobile phones - especially if writing for a virtual 32-bit processor emulated on an 8-bit physical processor. Ouch!
Slightly offtopic, but this will serve the needs of those of us reading this thread for a fix of C-related humour. The Infrequently asked questions in C (C-IAQ)
Another piece of advice: If you are writing the game just for fun, anyone who offers to contribute to it in anyway is not under any obligation, and may never get round to it. So try and rely on yourself as much as possible.
If you're going at the programming by yourself, I would strongly recommend you use a library to save you from having to write your own low-level access routines (unless you just want to learn about how all these whiz-bang effects are done, but that may distract you from the goal of getting a game finished). Unless you have commerical backing, or are absolutely sure you have the willpower to stick to the project (by "absolutely sure", I mean you've done it before right to the bitter end and want to do it again), I would recommend using as hing-a-level library as possible.
There are several out there with their advantages and dis-advantages. Some of them are Microsoft DirectX., OpenGL, Allegro and SDL. High-level libraries are good for beginners and are useful for rapidly developping games. You can accomplish a lot with a few lines of code, but they can make the executable size bloat, and sometimes, you may want more control over the system. Low-level libraries are useful for control-freaks who want more control of what's going on.They let you access the system with little overhead, but require a lot of work to get to work. DirectX and OpenGL are low-level libraries, Allegro is a high-level library, and SDL is somewhere in the middle.
Also, check to see which platforms the library is available for. DirectX is only available for Microsoft, whereas OpenGL, SDL and Allegro let you write programs that can be ported to a multitude of systems and OS's.
Personally, I use Allegro, but other people may have different requirements or desires to dig down deep into the hardware.
Back in the early 80's, games were just a quick 15-30 minute affair. A quick blast of Space Invaders, a quick nibble with Pacman. You did not get absorbed by the games, you just played them. This may explain why mobile-phone games are doing well. They are so simple that they require little commitment.
A video-game is just that - a video game. It's just a toy that's meant to be played with - not an experience that immerses you inside it. You're just meant to play a game, not to commit yourself to it.
Dispite my rant, I still get addicted to games like Civilisation III, Age of Wonders II, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, etc.... but in my defense, I used to work in the games industry, so there.
If you don't know the ASCII code, experiment by typing out all numbers from 128 to 255 and observing which character the number produces (you must release ALT after typing each number and press it again before typing the next number).
As for non-ASCII characters (Unicode) - I have no idea how to get those on an English keyboard.
A few months ago when Microsoft released another set of patches (one of which plugged the hole that Sasser exploited), somebody posted a comment in the story about these patches. They also claimed that the new pathces buggered up their Windows installation (it worked fine on mine), but this time round, somebody discovered a 3rd party app that conflicted with the patch (I vaguely remember seeing something about in on the Microsoft site, but can't find it).
Oh dear... I can see this already.
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 555666
Are we satisfied with the length of our penis?
Symptoms: You are unsure if we at Microsoft Support are satisfied with the length of our collective penis.
Resolution: To solve the problem:
Status: Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the internet e-mail system, which thanks to our insecure e-mail apps and OSses, has gotten a lot worse than it should. Also, stupid users are to blame.
The information in this article applies to: Yourself you good for nothing spammer, Clippy.
Titan does not have a magnetic field, and is outside of Saturn's, so that means that the Solar wind does not get deflected like it does on Earth. This stream of charged particles from the Solar wind could provide energy to compensate for the slowdown in the rate of chemical reactions at Titan's frigid temperatures. As Titan is much farther from the Sun than Earth, it does not get as much Solar radiation, but because of the lack of magtnetic field, there are several more types of Solar radiation and charged particles that make it to the surface.
With "Life as we know it" - ie. life that exists in an Earthlike environment, we know excactly what we're looking for, and if we detect DNA/RNA molecules, amino-acids, etc, we can point out to it and say "AHA - we've found it!" (either that, or one of the technicians sneezed all over Huygens).
With "Life as we don't know it", we have no idea what to look for. If this 'life' has evolved sufficiently, it will be noticable by complex-looking structures on the surface (and if it's really advanced, it will move). If not, it will be at the equivalent evolutionary stage to Bacteria and Amoebas, and without a frame of reference, we would not know that this really is a lifeform or just some random chemical.
Huygens is supposed to have a mass-spectrometer that can be used to identify any molecules it comes accross. If it finds really complex molecules on Titan that have previously been unknown to science (especially if they were in the form of an irregular polymer), then it would be reasonable to speculate that it might be a life-form. From what I know, the chemicals that meke up Terran life-forms are some of the most complex known to science. A strand of DNA is a polymer consisting of thousands (if not millions) of atoms.
But even a mass-spectrometer cannot answer the question of 'Is it alive'? Does it have a conciousness? In fact, I don't even think we've answered the question about Bacteria here on Earth. Are Bacteria alive, or just a complex self-replicating chemical reaction?
Now we know that Mars is the location of NASA's top-secrtet film-studio. Every time those middle-managers at NASA want to pocket those government grants for themselves (or occasionally to show that the Americans are better than the Soviets), instead of spendiung billions on sending spacecraft out to deep-spcae, they just spend millions on sending spacecraft to Mars, take some photos, and Photoshop them to look like any other celestial body they chose. In fact, I even suspect that the Apollo Moon landings were filmed on Mars.
Incidentally, you might be interested in reading AMTRAK'S VISION FOR AMERICA'S HIGH-SPEED RAIL PROGRAM.
There is no medical evidence to suggest that mastrubation is a cause of blindness. One theory on how this myth got started is that most mastrubators discover the joys of self-pleasuring at the onset of puberty. At puberty, the body experiences lots of growth-spurts, including deformation of the eyes. Many people who wear glasses only need to wear them from their teenaged years onwards. As the discovery of you-know-what and teenaged eye-deformations happen at around the same time, it only takes a religious fundamentalist to put two and two together and spread lies with a zeal. The hairy-palms theory comes into this as well, as puperty means more hair.
One thing you could do is to instruct your workforce not to have annoying habits, as this can get on the nerves of other employees. Here is an article with reader-feedback that explains just how annoyed people can get by other people's habbits, and lists examples of things which annoy other people. This should be required reading for anyone who wants to work with anyone else. Are there more such places on the web with examples of that which annoys?
Mobile phone SDKs such as Mophun include a module for communicationg over Bluetooth and Infra-Red connections.
What you can do is to download the latest 'beta' (or is that 'alpha') of the G400TV Windows 2000 drivers and video-tools and install these. They can be found on the "Latest Matrox Drivers" page. Unfortunately, a few features, such as MJPEG support, and the ability to record from the remote-control app are not available. However, someone has figured out how to get a Marvel G400TV to use MJPEG with Windows 2000. This site explains it (it's in Italian use Google language tools to translate), and offers a patch or two that can be downloaded. Also, you should be able to record video with a 3rd-party video-editing app (but I've not tried that yet from Windows 2000).
Incidentally, has Matrox abandoned the video-editing/TV-tuner/graphics card all in one market, or is it just hopelessly late in bringing one out? Back in 1999, the G400TV seemed like the best option at the time, and I went for that (and I'm still using mine). At that time, I became fond of Matrox, but due to the lack of a more modern replacement (the latest offering in that line, the G450eTV is hopelessly out of date), I'll have to switch over to ATI All-In-Wonder or NVidia Whatever-The-Hell-The-Equivalent-Is-Called. One of the things I've heard about Matrox cards is that they have a reputation for the best screen-clarity. As I'm used to pushing my monitor's rez as high as it will go before my eyes explode, I'm a bit concerned that I may be forced to use a lower rez if I go with an ATI or NVidia.
Although I've not used an N-Gage, I get the impression that it's more of a console with a built in phone, than a phone that can play games. Just about every other mobile-phone has games on it. Making it look like a handheld was nothing more than a marketing gimmick. I suppose Nokia desperately wanted to be up there with Sony, Nintendo, et al so much that they forgot that it was a phone - hence the side-talking.
One way of finding out which patches you need to download is to download the latest service-pack and a few of the most critical fixes since that service-pack (eg. the fix for the Blaster worm and fix for the Sasser worm). Download using an up-to-date Windows installation, or any other OS. When installing Windows, make sure the network-cable is unplugged, and install the service-pack and these critical patches. Then, plug the cable back in, go to Windows update, and from there, download and install all of the "critical updates" (to save time, you can un-select the MSIE-related updates and just install the OS-related updates, and after the re-boot, go to Windows update again and then install the MSIE patches that you missed out on the first time round).
I'm not sure how safe this is, as during the searching/downloading time, your machine may be compromised using one of the lesser/known or less severe vulnerabilities. The high-profile vulnerabilities involved attackers taking control of your machine (eg. Blaster), but if you are concerned about attackers just being able to read files on your machine, or remotely crash it, I would not recommend the above method.
Actually, GERMAN would be a better choice, as it's a more precice language. English can be a bit vague sometimes.
Anyone interested in the practice of Toothing ends up leaving their Bluetooth on. For more info on Toothing, see also here (Search for "toothing" in the page that appears - there's even a link to the Toothing forums).