Netherland is high on the use of IT and broadband connectivity, but not nearly so much on education. The last 25 years have seen nothing but budget cut after bad reorganisation. We really should and could have a much better education system, and I was fortunate to go to a university that was literally loaded with money (each CS student almost had a sparc station of their own during mid '90s), but on some other universities, CS students had to make do with pretty old PCs.
I don't find that remarkable at all. I lived in the Netherlands for a few years, and one of the things that struck me was how Microsoft-centric the universities were. A huge percentage of the Computer Science students had never even tried an OS other than Windows! (I come from one of those sunny countries in the south of Europe, and that's where I attended university. There, the various flavours of Unix -- mainly Linux of course -- ruled and continue to rule inside the Computer Science department). Therefore it doesn't surprise me at all that the Dutch are still stuck in the yesteryear of Internet Explorer.
My (Dutch) university was entirely SunOS back in the day, but after the introduction of Solaris, Windows started gaining ground, and by the time I left, many younger students only used the Windows machines and didn't know anything about unix. It was really sad to see that shift happen.
Has poor support for standards like CSS, and has done for years thus stunting web development. Very little has been done to fix this, even in 7.
Has loads of outstanding rendering bugs
IE7 has fixed quite a lot of the bugs, actually. Not nearly all of them, though, which means neither the IE6 CSS nor the mozilla CSS works quite right, and everybody needs to fix their websites again. Mind you, firefox isn't all that perfect either, it's just a lot better.
Still IE7 was a very big step forward for IE. Instead of being 10 years behind, they're only 5 years behind now. After the eternal stagnation of IE5/6, this is a pretty big step forward. Might still be too little and tooo late, though.
I would rather see a Bethesda game than to let the IP become worthless and totally die out.
Doing nothing with it isn't what makes IP worthless. Doing something bad with it is. For ages after its release, Star Wars was the greatest thing ever. But the prequels (though I'm sure they made a lot of money) really lost the franchise a lot of appreciation, and therefore value. The next Star Wars movie won't make nearly as much money. Same thing for Terminator. Terminator 1 and 2 were brilliant, but 3 killed it. People prefer too ignore it. If Fallout 3 is bad, there may never be a Fallout 4. No Fallout 3 means that in 5 or 10 years, when the time is right, someone who knows what to do with it can still resurrect it.
I don't think the article does Planescape:Torment justice. I mean, it does call it a cult hit and a work of art, and I realise it didn't sell as well as Baldur's Gate 2 or Falout, but to many die-hard pen-and-paper roleplaying purists who, like me, don't really think most CRPGs deserve to be called Roleplaying games, Torment is the only game that deserves that title, or at least comes close to it. Torment holds a very special place in the CRPG pantheon, and I think that deserved a bit more emphasis.
And rightly so, considering the huge difference between the media. I'm still hoping for a real single-player RPG for the computer, but I fear that'll never happen. So far, for roleplaying on the computer, email seems to work best (although some prefer IMs).
RPGs have taken a different meaning from role-playing games.
Huh? RPGs are roleplaying games. I think you mean CRPGs here. They tend to be a completely different animal, focusing much more on combat and combat prowess than real RPGs. The only exception ofcourse being Torment.
By asking developers to take into the account the limitations for Cedega you are encouraging them to develop an inferior product. I want a full Linux port not some half-assed hack designed to work with an equally dodgy emulater hack.
And I want a mountain of gold. But in the mean time, I'm happy with games that work on linux.
Wine is not an emulator... and neither is Cedega..
And how is that a bad thing? They're implementations on the windows API, and as such, they're a lot faster than emulators would be. They're not full implementations unfortunately, and they'll probably always be lagging behind, but they certainly help to get windows games working on linux, which is quite a lot better than nothing.
It's obviously possible for game developers to target Cadega
WRONG!
Not at all. It may not be what you want, but it's most definitely possible for game developers too target Cedega. And to be honest, I'd rather see windows game developers take the limitations of Cedega or Wine into account than ignore linux completely.
I haven't had that problem. Cedega has clear and easy to find lists of which games are supported and to what extend. I use it to play Morrowind, and apart from a few glitches, it works fine. Most of the time.
Okay, so it's not perfect, but neither is Windows. Due to Cedega, I really don't miss Windows anymore.
tbh, if Linux worked out of the box then it would be ready for desktop.
It does. Ofcourse it depends a lot on which linux your using, but Ubuntu is a lot easier to install than Windows nowadays. The main reason why windows remains big is that it comes preinstalled on new PCs. That's even easier for the average user.
The truth of course is that there is simply less government involvement. Thus such transactions should be carried out at a reduced tax rate.
Taxing transactions is silly in any case. Governments should be taxing the use of scarce resources. But as long as the system taxes transactions, it should realise that virtual transactions are virtual, and have no direct relation to the real world. The only thing that has a relation to the real world is when the transactions involve real money: selling in-game gold or items for real money. Or selling your character, even. Or selling property in Second Life. That can be taxed, according to the llaws of the nation in which the recipient of the money lives. Other transactions shouldn't be.
And as I understand it, that's exactly what TFA proposes.
Secondly, I get the distinct impression that the original audience doesn't take these games nearly as seriously as US players. Settlers says on the packaging that its running time is about 1-2 hours (If I recall correctly, my original packaging has been lost to the sands of time), yet my games regularly run 3 or more hours, as trades and debates and discussions of beat-the-current-leader happens. This ratio of about twice-as-long seems to be consistent with most of the German Board Games my group plays/played.
I take it very sriously and I've played hundreds of times, and I think 1 hour is about the average (the quickest game was over in 15 minutes, though that was due to two 5/8/10 positions and a lot of luck), and I'm generally known as a slow player (because of my trades, debates and beat-the-leader).
And I STILL can't find anyonre to play Kingmaker with me, and very few who play Magic Realm.
Last time I played Kingmaker, everybody wondered why we even needed a game to have a big row.
I wholeheartedly agree that the German board game industry has done woonderful things over the last 15 years. I don't agree with the article that it's the German board games that take long. They usuallly take about an hour. A game is long if it takes 2 hours. It's always been the Anglo-saxon style games that can take an entire day.
This is mostly due to them being more simulationist. Anglosaxon style games invent a new way to model some part of reality (often in a very primitive way) and tweak that into a playable game. German style games invent an interesting and highly playable game mechanism and make up a nice theme around it. The German approach leads to very playable and accessible games. The anglosaxon approach can lead to highly detailed that touch your imagination. Both have their attraction, but if you want speed, German is the way to go. (I personally am more leaning towards anglosaxon games at the moment.)
Note that the designations "German" or "Anglosaxon" don't mean the game actually comes from Germany or the US/UK. Cheapass Games, for example, is a US company that leans much more to the German way of doing things (but with more humour), whereas German companies have also produced games that definitely lean more in the anglosaxon direction.
(This difference in approach can also be seen in the 18xx games hobby. Lots of hobbyists make excellent games in that genre, but Americans tend to start with a region, research the historic background and try to model that, whereas Europeans think of an interesting concept they want to model in the game, and then look for which region is most suitable for a game implementing that idea.)
Does anyone think there would even *be* a Mal Reynolds if there hadn't been a Han Solo first?(and yes, they both shot first!)
Despite the depths of mediocrity that Lucas has since sunk to, give credit where credit is due. Star Wars and all the technology that ILM created during the making of the Star Wars films changed the industry forever. Blade Runner certainly changed the look of sci-fi films, but it still didn't have the impact that Star Wars did. I'm not sure that was the overriding criterion for making the list, though.
It depends on what the question was. Most influential SF film, then Star Wars (the original film, now episode IV) is a clear winner. For best film, I'd like a bit more quality acting, more consistency and believable characters, that sort of thing (the more I watch them, the more i'm convinced that Harrison Ford saved the original trilogy). On that scale, Star Wars shouldn't be in the top 10 at all. If the question is favourite film, then anything goes.
Exactly. That's not like a "proper" human opponent. And you're right that since RTS AI is so weak at the moment they really do just need to focus on making the best AI possible.
But even in current RTSs, the AI acts too much like a machine. The problem is, computer AI has shit macro control, but awesome micro. Basically, they can't plan strategies, they can't design defensive bases, they can't do effective counters. Their overall macro strategy is crap.
But when you look at a computer AI on the battlefield, they have superhuman micro. (Maybe not when measured to the Koreans... but anyway)... the computer can basically control every unit on the screen at the same time, and still be able to construct his base. It can automatically cast spells for its entire army at the same time, it doesn't suffer from not being quick enough to select units, or target spells, etc. So in that regard, the computer doesn't act "human" enough.
I think RTS is about halfway between FPS and TBS in this matter. I don't play a lot of RTS (other than Medieval Total War, which allows you to give orders while the game is paused), but in turn based strategy games, human and AI really have the same level of control (although the human may not want to go to the same level of micromanagement that the AI is capable of), and there AI tends to be absolutely awful. In real time games it relies almost entirely on its superior reaction speed. Strategic thinking is almost completely absent.
Now ignoring stuff like FPS where you can get away with fairly basic AI if you want, you have turn based (ie Civ, chess, Battle for Wesnoth etc) and real time (Starcraft, C&C, boswars, etc). Obviously there must be some very different strategies and approaches, for turn based you get to spend a lot more cycles figuring what to do, then again the player has a lot more expectation of a good strategy from you. For real time you don't have much time to make decisions and need to be very event based, but on the other hand you generally have fewer variables to worry about (after all humans need to play it as well) and you have a significant click speed advantage over the human player.
Exactly. In games where the interface is an obstacle, like in RTS and FPS, the human has a disadvantage that the AI doesn't have, so halfway decent AI will kick the human's ass because it has much more control. In TBS, everybody has the same level of control, the human has time to think, and suddenly you notice that the AI has no idea what it's doing. In RTS and FPS, it's just responding really fast, but in TBS, you notice that that's not enough. It actually has to think and plan, and not just click faster than the opponent, and AI is clearly still very bad at going up against a well thought out, well executed plan.
That's why the "best" game AI isn't necessarily the smartest or most responsive - it's the most human.
Writing an AI that makes the occasional "human error", or responds in a reasonable time is harder than writing the "best AI possible", but makes for a more believable (and of course, enjoyable (since who likes getting beaten all the time)) game experience.
That depends entirely on the genre of the game. You probably play FPS games, and there you're right. It's a simulation of a human setting with humans trying to spot other humans, reacting at human speeds with human accuracy, and bots who never miss aren't much fun. For strategy games, the goal should really be the "best AI possible". So far, most strategic AI plays like a distracted teenager with a serious case of ADD and no real sense of what it's doing. I don't doubt those people exist, but they're not my favourite opponents for a game.
But intelligence is what distinguishes people from machines. An artificial intelligence is any machine that invalidates a person's means of making that distinction.
You do realise that that is your own personal definition of intelligence and AI, right? Just as with opinions, everybody has there own definitions about this. If you want to know what AI is, take a look at what researchers in the field are doing.
But it's true that as soon as computers can do something well, AI researchers start losing interest in it. AI is about expanding the boundaries of what computers can do, and so far, strategic thinking is something computers have serious problems with, so it should be something that AI researchers should be working on.
If you have never played GalCiv, and you like strategy, I highly recommend picking them up. I consider them to be superior even to the Civilization series. Brad Wardell prides himself on the AI, and it definitely shows. The computer is very difficult to beat and does not cheat.
Actually, it does. Very slightly. The AI knows at the start where all the yellow stars (which have the best planets) are, so it won't have to scout for them. This gives it a significant advantage at the start of the game. Also, at the highest difficulty levels it gets an economic bonus. But its cheating is not anywhere near that of most strategy game AIs.
It actually responds in a logical manner, which makes GalCiv go from just being a number-crunching exercise to an actual strategy game. For example, when making some "aggressive" moves towards an enemy (moving some attack ships to an "ally" to wipe them out) I've actually had the game pop up a message from my ally (before ever entering his space) saying something to the effect of "I used to play video games when I was a kid, and when I did I used to build my forces up and send them to sneak attack an opponent. Well I am no video game." Other things like the fact that if another civilization is dependent on you for a large amount of trade income, they won't just randomly attack you because it would hurt them too.
Unfortunately, it still is a video game. It does the economic empire building brilliantly, and the wars do indeed make a lot more sense than in most games, but it's still much too passive in it's warfare and lacks the killer instinct that a good human player has. I still steamroller over them with my much more focused attacks. It doesn't concentrate its forces enough, doesn't accompany attack fleets with big troop transports, and doesn't protect its troop transports with big attack fleets. It's still too fragmented, and it's a rare day that an AI player actually manages to conquer one of my planets.
Still, compared to pretty much every single other strategy game out there, "halfway decent" is high praise. There's still a lot of work on AI to be done, however.
Yeah but note that brad has all the time and money to pour the resources into galciv due to his company subsidizing its development,
Stardock (Brad's company) is much smaller than many other game developers. Why does a small company have all the time and money to put into their new game, while a big company doesn't?
Galciv is much more simple then other games in many respects, planets have all the resources, so its a race to colonize the most/best planets in the beginning, and since no one can attack attack at the beginning, it's no surprise the AI is pretty decent.
There are definitely aspects of the game that I would have done differently, but that's not what explains why the AI is pretty decent, although it is true that the AI is far, far better at empire building than it is at waging war. It could have been better at fighting, though. At least in the case of GC1, Brad dumbed down the AI a bit because he thought it was too nasty. I'm nasty too, so I would really have prefered to face the full nastiness he could come up with at the highest difficulty level. Still, it's not nearly as braindead at waging war as pretty much every single other strategy game out there. It's just not quite there yet, though.
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I take it you're of the dailyWTF-style "enterpriseyness sucks" school?
Shh! Don't say that! Netscape was even worse than IE. I'm glad it's gone.
No, I'm refering to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Netherland is high on the use of IT and broadband connectivity, but not nearly so much on education. The last 25 years have seen nothing but budget cut after bad reorganisation. We really should and could have a much better education system, and I was fortunate to go to a university that was literally loaded with money (each CS student almost had a sparc station of their own during mid '90s), but on some other universities, CS students had to make do with pretty old PCs.
My (Dutch) university was entirely SunOS back in the day, but after the introduction of Solaris, Windows started gaining ground, and by the time I left, many younger students only used the Windows machines and didn't know anything about unix. It was really sad to see that shift happen.
IE7 has fixed quite a lot of the bugs, actually. Not nearly all of them, though, which means neither the IE6 CSS nor the mozilla CSS works quite right, and everybody needs to fix their websites again. Mind you, firefox isn't all that perfect either, it's just a lot better.
Still IE7 was a very big step forward for IE. Instead of being 10 years behind, they're only 5 years behind now. After the eternal stagnation of IE5/6, this is a pretty big step forward. Might still be too little and tooo late, though.
Doing nothing with it isn't what makes IP worthless. Doing something bad with it is. For ages after its release, Star Wars was the greatest thing ever. But the prequels (though I'm sure they made a lot of money) really lost the franchise a lot of appreciation, and therefore value. The next Star Wars movie won't make nearly as much money. Same thing for Terminator. Terminator 1 and 2 were brilliant, but 3 killed it. People prefer too ignore it. If Fallout 3 is bad, there may never be a Fallout 4. No Fallout 3 means that in 5 or 10 years, when the time is right, someone who knows what to do with it can still resurrect it.
I don't think the article does Planescape:Torment justice. I mean, it does call it a cult hit and a work of art, and I realise it didn't sell as well as Baldur's Gate 2 or Falout, but to many die-hard pen-and-paper roleplaying purists who, like me, don't really think most CRPGs deserve to be called Roleplaying games, Torment is the only game that deserves that title, or at least comes close to it. Torment holds a very special place in the CRPG pantheon, and I think that deserved a bit more emphasis.
And rightly so, considering the huge difference between the media. I'm still hoping for a real single-player RPG for the computer, but I fear that'll never happen. So far, for roleplaying on the computer, email seems to work best (although some prefer IMs).
Huh? RPGs are roleplaying games. I think you mean CRPGs here. They tend to be a completely different animal, focusing much more on combat and combat prowess than real RPGs. The only exception ofcourse being Torment.
And I want a mountain of gold. But in the mean time, I'm happy with games that work on linux.
And how is that a bad thing? They're implementations on the windows API, and as such, they're a lot faster than emulators would be. They're not full implementations unfortunately, and they'll probably always be lagging behind, but they certainly help to get windows games working on linux, which is quite a lot better than nothing.
Not at all. It may not be what you want, but it's most definitely possible for game developers too target Cedega. And to be honest, I'd rather see windows game developers take the limitations of Cedega or Wine into account than ignore linux completely.
I haven't had that problem. Cedega has clear and easy to find lists of which games are supported and to what extend. I use it to play Morrowind, and apart from a few glitches, it works fine. Most of the time.
Okay, so it's not perfect, but neither is Windows. Due to Cedega, I really don't miss Windows anymore.
It does. Ofcourse it depends a lot on which linux your using, but Ubuntu is a lot easier to install than Windows nowadays. The main reason why windows remains big is that it comes preinstalled on new PCs. That's even easier for the average user.
Taxing transactions is silly in any case. Governments should be taxing the use of scarce resources. But as long as the system taxes transactions, it should realise that virtual transactions are virtual, and have no direct relation to the real world. The only thing that has a relation to the real world is when the transactions involve real money: selling in-game gold or items for real money. Or selling your character, even. Or selling property in Second Life. That can be taxed, according to the llaws of the nation in which the recipient of the money lives. Other transactions shouldn't be.
And as I understand it, that's exactly what TFA proposes.
I really hate to disappoint you, but 18xx games are about trains. Can also be arrousing, ofcourse, but only if you're extremely nerdy.
I take it very sriously and I've played hundreds of times, and I think 1 hour is about the average (the quickest game was over in 15 minutes, though that was due to two 5/8/10 positions and a lot of luck), and I'm generally known as a slow player (because of my trades, debates and beat-the-leader).
Last time I played Kingmaker, everybody wondered why we even needed a game to have a big row.
I wholeheartedly agree that the German board game industry has done woonderful things over the last 15 years. I don't agree with the article that it's the German board games that take long. They usuallly take about an hour. A game is long if it takes 2 hours. It's always been the Anglo-saxon style games that can take an entire day.
This is mostly due to them being more simulationist. Anglosaxon style games invent a new way to model some part of reality (often in a very primitive way) and tweak that into a playable game. German style games invent an interesting and highly playable game mechanism and make up a nice theme around it. The German approach leads to very playable and accessible games. The anglosaxon approach can lead to highly detailed that touch your imagination. Both have their attraction, but if you want speed, German is the way to go. (I personally am more leaning towards anglosaxon games at the moment.)
Note that the designations "German" or "Anglosaxon" don't mean the game actually comes from Germany or the US/UK. Cheapass Games, for example, is a US company that leans much more to the German way of doing things (but with more humour), whereas German companies have also produced games that definitely lean more in the anglosaxon direction.
(This difference in approach can also be seen in the 18xx games hobby. Lots of hobbyists make excellent games in that genre, but Americans tend to start with a region, research the historic background and try to model that, whereas Europeans think of an interesting concept they want to model in the game, and then look for which region is most suitable for a game implementing that idea.)
It depends on what the question was. Most influential SF film, then Star Wars (the original film, now episode IV) is a clear winner. For best film, I'd like a bit more quality acting, more consistency and believable characters, that sort of thing (the more I watch them, the more i'm convinced that Harrison Ford saved the original trilogy). On that scale, Star Wars shouldn't be in the top 10 at all. If the question is favourite film, then anything goes.
I think RTS is about halfway between FPS and TBS in this matter. I don't play a lot of RTS (other than Medieval Total War, which allows you to give orders while the game is paused), but in turn based strategy games, human and AI really have the same level of control (although the human may not want to go to the same level of micromanagement that the AI is capable of), and there AI tends to be absolutely awful. In real time games it relies almost entirely on its superior reaction speed. Strategic thinking is almost completely absent.
Exactly. In games where the interface is an obstacle, like in RTS and FPS, the human has a disadvantage that the AI doesn't have, so halfway decent AI will kick the human's ass because it has much more control. In TBS, everybody has the same level of control, the human has time to think, and suddenly you notice that the AI has no idea what it's doing. In RTS and FPS, it's just responding really fast, but in TBS, you notice that that's not enough. It actually has to think and plan, and not just click faster than the opponent, and AI is clearly still very bad at going up against a well thought out, well executed plan.
That depends entirely on the genre of the game. You probably play FPS games, and there you're right. It's a simulation of a human setting with humans trying to spot other humans, reacting at human speeds with human accuracy, and bots who never miss aren't much fun. For strategy games, the goal should really be the "best AI possible". So far, most strategic AI plays like a distracted teenager with a serious case of ADD and no real sense of what it's doing. I don't doubt those people exist, but they're not my favourite opponents for a game.
You're confusing AI with Turing-test defeating StrongAI. Very few researchers take such StrongAI very seriously nowadays.
You do realise that that is your own personal definition of intelligence and AI, right? Just as with opinions, everybody has there own definitions about this. If you want to know what AI is, take a look at what researchers in the field are doing.
But it's true that as soon as computers can do something well, AI researchers start losing interest in it. AI is about expanding the boundaries of what computers can do, and so far, strategic thinking is something computers have serious problems with, so it should be something that AI researchers should be working on.
Actually, it does. Very slightly. The AI knows at the start where all the yellow stars (which have the best planets) are, so it won't have to scout for them. This gives it a significant advantage at the start of the game. Also, at the highest difficulty levels it gets an economic bonus. But its cheating is not anywhere near that of most strategy game AIs.
Unfortunately, it still is a video game. It does the economic empire building brilliantly, and the wars do indeed make a lot more sense than in most games, but it's still much too passive in it's warfare and lacks the killer instinct that a good human player has. I still steamroller over them with my much more focused attacks. It doesn't concentrate its forces enough, doesn't accompany attack fleets with big troop transports, and doesn't protect its troop transports with big attack fleets. It's still too fragmented, and it's a rare day that an AI player actually manages to conquer one of my planets.
Still, compared to pretty much every single other strategy game out there, "halfway decent" is high praise. There's still a lot of work on AI to be done, however.
Stardock (Brad's company) is much smaller than many other game developers. Why does a small company have all the time and money to put into their new game, while a big company doesn't?
There are definitely aspects of the game that I would have done differently, but that's not what explains why the AI is pretty decent, although it is true that the AI is far, far better at empire building than it is at waging war. It could have been better at fighting, though. At least in the case of GC1, Brad dumbed down the AI a bit because he thought it was too nasty. I'm nasty too, so I would really have prefered to face the full nastiness he could come up with at the highest difficulty level. Still, it's not nearly as braindead at waging war as pretty much every single other strategy game out there. It's just not quite there yet, though.