So basically you're asking him which he thinks is more accurate, his assertion, or the assertion made by an anonymous stranger in another conversation? Do you really need him to answer that?
I'm just as happy with your opinion on this issue. I've got no idea whether the average American is poor or rich. In fact, I don't even know if the average Dutchman lives paycheck to paycheck or is rich enough to go skiing in the Alps in winter.
Being able to produce fertile ofspring" is the definition of "being the same species". Ring species just prove that "being the same species" is not a transitive relationship.
This is not entirely satisfactory.
Oh, it definitely isn't, but it is, as far as I know, still the only official definition of species.
With this definition you can (in principle) establish for any pair of creatures whether they do or do not belong to the same species, but you cannot make a partitioning classification of species that assigns only one species to any creature. Besides that, it is an extremely impractical method for establishing the species a creature belongs to.
Exactly. There is, however, no other, more exact classification system of species. Thing is, species are kind of hazy. They're just a group of individuals that are somewhat related and share certain traits. But we're also related to chimps and share certain traits with them. Where do you draw the line? Any classification system is going to arbitrary in some way. The ability to produce fertile offspring seemed to be the least arbitrary.
Besides this so-called "biological" species concept, there is also the ecological, cladistic, phenetic, and recognition species concept. Traditionally mankind mostly uses the ecological concept (e.g. fowl = bird used as food, chicken hawk = several species of small birds of prey known to prey on fowl), and location (Guineafowl) and phenetic traits (e.g. Red-tailed Hawk) for finer distinctions. This makes much for sense for anyone but breeders.
But what if a red-tailed hawk, due to a mutation, doesn't have a red tail? Is it suddenly a different species? Or what, for that matter, if due to that mutation it suddenly is unable to breed with most other red-tailed hawks?
Which ever way you turn it, and whichever definition you prefer, there's always going to be some arbitrary aspects to it, and it will work most of the time, but never always.
You forgot to include setting up a massive booth at the Game Developers Conference and E3 with a lot of nubile college girls and wild parties after the show with lots and lots of booze.
I'm already looking forward to my new career as game developer.
Nah, different species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Look up "ring species" for examples where A can breed with B, and B can breed with C but C cannot breed with A.
"Being able to produce fertile ofspring" is the definition of "being the same species". Ring species just prove that "being the same species" is not a transitive relationship.
The very existence of "one specific style of game where indie developers are out of luck" due to anticompetitive actions by all major video game console makers indicates that the mandate "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is failing.
I'm not sure what that mandate has to do with it, and those anticompetitive actions haven't closed all opportunities to indie developers; the PC is still wide open.
I do agree that those anticompetitive measures for consoles suck, and I wouldn't even be surprised if they'd were illegal in the EU. I definitely think they should be.
If a PC monitor can't comfortably accommodate four players around it, then any multiplayer game must be networked. Network play within a household requires a $2000 PC because it requires four $500 PCs. Consoles, on the other hand, can fit up to four players on one screen, which isn't always split.
So that's one specific style of game where indie developers are out of luck. There are plenty of other opportunities for indie devs, however.
But since we're doing unreasonable complaints, here's mine: a friend and I want to make computerised board games that you play on a large, touch-sensitive screen laying flat on the table. But nobody is publishing suitable hardware for this kind of game! What's an indie dev to do? It's not fair!
Don't "just give up". Instead, come to terms with the fact that you can't compete with the big guys on their home field.
Although the summary doesn't sound like it, this is exactly the message of TFA. "Just give up" would make no sense whatsoever; there are tons of successful indie game companies.
Know your strengths and play to them.
Know your weaknesses and how to compensate for them.
HAVE A REALISTIC PLAN AND STICK TO IT.
That sounds pretty much like what I'm planning to do. I'm hoping to make a start in the game business (and I'm probably one of the millions), and I figured it's best to focus on a niche that I know and love, that'd not too demanding in areas I'm not so good at, and has lots of room for improvement and good ideas. So I'm going to make complex strategy games.
There are lots of 2-man teams writing good strategy games, gamers are still enthousiastic about 11 year old graphicsless games like Stars!, and although I love the genre, with every game I play, I see tons of things that could be improved, the most important one being the AI; it's usually awful, while I majored in AI and am reasonably good at strategy games myself. Sounds like this is exactly where my strengths lie and where my weaknesses (graphics) don't matter too much. So it's a tiny niche, it's still big enough for me. I don't expect millions, but making a living this way would be really nice.
The plan: choose a game that's not too hard to write, get the basics working, and release it. If it's not good enough to ask money for it, just give it away, so people can try it and want more. Meanwhile, that's what I'll be writing: better interface, better AI, more depth, possibilities and what have you, and the next version is going to be sold for actual money. If I can sell 5000 copies for $10 each, I can eat for a year. Doesn't sound too ambitious, I think. I hope.
Ofcourse I have no idea if this will work, but hopefully you'll know in a year. Maybe two; I haven't quit my day job yet.
I'll grant you chess, but go? I admit I've been out of it for a couple of years, but last time I checked, I could easily beat the best go program out there. Maybe it can beat me now, but I seriously doubt it could beat a good go player (which i'm not).
The only problem I see is that the footer is positioned in the middle of the page. Apart from the line it's interfering with, I can read everything fine.
f you're just using the Shadowrun name to sell copies of the game, without the intent to stay reasonably compliant with the pre-existing material, you suck.
I agree completely, but I'm not entirely convinced that they're changing all that much. It sounds more like they're doing a prequel to show how it all started. If that's the case, that would be great. It could be that some of the details of their awakening world differ a bit from the official history, but I don't care too much about that, as long as the world is developing in the Shadowrun direction. If the world develops in a different direction, with less powerful megacorporations, more powerful nations, no matrix getting invented somewhere along the way and no astral space, then they do indeed suck.
Creatures was great, and that sort of thing works fine in a sim, but it isn't easily translated to tactical/strategy games.
Besides, Creatures made some short-cuts too. As far as I know, it wasn't just NN+genetics, it was NN+genetics to tune known factors in an unchanging algorithm. Still, cute idea.
The AI is also why I prefer real-time strategy games. It seems like that's the only place where good AI can be used without fear of players whining about it. The game that I got after Descent 2 was Total Annihilation. It had pretty damn good AI, at least on the higher difficlty settings. RTSs are probably the only games that really benefit from AI nowadays, mostly because increasing its intelligence doesn't hinder, or even really change gameplay. I still play TA once in a(n admittedly long) while, and it is the last computer game that I have owned.
I think the reason why AI in RTS games seems so good, it that the AI isn't hindered by the click-fest/limited field of view interface that the human has to use. The genre that really needs some good AI is turn-based strategy. There you really can see how pitiful the state of the art still is.
You really don't want artificial intelligence. You want the game to behave in a way that seem plausably intelligent but are actually beatably stupid.
Depends on the game, ofcourse. AI isn't all that interesting to FPSs and standard CRPGs, but I like strategy games, and there, even the best AI is just painfully stupid. I want strategy AI that doesn't need to cheat, get special bonuses or gang up on me in order to beat me. When I play Stars! against real humans, I have to work hard in order to outsmart them, which is a lot of fun against a really good opponent. But there's simply no turn-based strategy game that provides even a halfway decent challenge in a single player game.
Of course, there would be _some_ benefit to using microkernels, especially for less vital components such as the sound driver. But is it worth the trouble?
The main reason why my Windows machine crashes, is because some game doesn't like my graphics card or vice versa. It would be really nice if a graphics card failure didn't bring down the entire system but just the game and the card, after which the OS would hopefully simply reset the card, and I wouldn't lose any of my other programs I had in the background.
I mean, the guy is clever n' all, and he's written some great books, and I bet he's an awesome teacher.
He's written great books, at least. His classes are basically just him reciting his books from memory. Pretty impressive in itself, but every joke you'll hear in class is also in the book.
Linux is obsolete (even in 1992 it was obvious to many that Linux had potential. How much, who knew).
Minix had exactly the same potential. The real difference is that Tanenbaum didn't want to release control of minix and let everybody turn it into a heavy weight OS, because it had to remain simple and understandable for students. He wrote minix for academic purposes, while Linus wrote Linux first and foremost to be used, and to be turned into a full-fledged OS with all the bells and whistles.
I am still looking for a system that does not make the "netrunner" some kind of mage with programs instead of spells and somehow resemble the real experience of "hacking" without requiring all the knowledge.
This depends entirely on your opnion on what the "real experience of hacking" should be in a cyberpunk game. IMO the best approaches are either: some kind of mage with programs instead of spells (for people who like flashy netrunning), or some computer related skills that you simply roll for information gathering and anything else you want to do. The rest is just roleplay: handle it the same way you handle players looking for and meeting people and rolling Streetwise or Savoir-Faire, or burglars sneaking around and rolling Lockpicking to get into the building.
You don't need a big system if you don't want one. and the best part is that this works in any system.
I agree that D&D is not perfect, but I wouldn't call it the "Budweiser" of games. I'd call it the "vi" of games.
D&D the vi of games? Good god, no. vi is lightweight, fast, and easy to use, once you get the hang of it. D&D tries to force you in certainly shapes and directions that you may not like. It's more like the Word of games. Or the Windows of games. The vi of games would probably be Fudge or CORPS: needs quite a bit of work before things start to fall into place, but once you get the hang of it, you can do anything with it. But the average Joe won't understand why anyone would ever want to use something like that.
f you would do this movie, perhaps you'd do it right (assuming you had talent and experience as a filmmaker). I'm referring to what a mess the Hollywood establishment would make of it.
I'm afraid I don't have any experience as a filmmaker (don't know about talent), but I know good and bad movies, and I know there's a brilliant story in Torment. But you're absolutely correct that a lot of the people in Hollywood should be kept far away from Torment. (The story from the game, that is; I don't mind if anyone torments them.)
Deionara isn't exactly a love interest in the game, she's the one he lost.
You're right. But the story is all about loss, and about how that loss is all TNO's own stupid fault.
Casting... Johnny Depp as TNO? Maybe I'm just thinking too much of Edward Scissorhands.
Hadn't thought of him yet. I was looking for a bigger guy, who can act like that. Depp is certainly one of my favourite actors and is great at this kind of gothic role. For a brooding bigger guy, perhaps David Boreanaz? Problem is, I don't really like him.
For Anna I was thinking about Kate Beckinsale (pretty, can look stylish and dark, and it's not really a very deep role anyway), but Sheena Easton is certainly an interesting idea too. Great voice, but I can't remember het in any live roles.
That entire game is unresolved issues, hanging threads, and a hell of an unhappy ending. In its own way it's daring that way, but it would never make it as a script.
I don't recall all that many hanging threads. Not every question was answered, but not every question should be answered. And ofcourse there's tons of side quests which will end on the chopping block before anyone would even start on the script.
I can just see the way the screenplay would go: TNO learns his name within the first hour, and him and Daakon go down to the lower planes to win the Blood War so they let him go, and he goes back for Anna and they live happily ever after.
That would be really awful. Anna is the wrong love interest. If I would do this movie, I'd focus on Deionara (including the chilling stuff from the Hall of the Sensates) and Mortis and TNO's gradual discovery of what he did to them. I'd probably add Anna because the audience wants to look at a sexy chick with a tail, but that's all the pandering I'd stoop to. Everything else is going to be heavy, deep, dark, gothic drama.
Decent movies; on the other hand; rely on good writing, plot, and character development pretty much EXCLUSIVELY. That often means that a video game adaptation movie either has to reduce itself to being just as mindless as the video game, without even the benefit of any interaction (what the article complains about) or make HUGE alterations and additions to the original videogame storyline just to "flesh out" some interesting characters and plot developments (something which makes the studio and fans howl).
I see a solution: a Planescape: Torment movie. That game had better writing, stronger plot and much more character development than the vast majority of movies nowadays. You only have to choose which parts to skip.
Slashdot Mirror
Which ever way you turn it, and whichever definition you prefer, there's always going to be some arbitrary aspects to it, and it will work most of the time, but never always.
I do agree that those anticompetitive measures for consoles suck, and I wouldn't even be surprised if they'd were illegal in the EU. I definitely think they should be.
But since we're doing unreasonable complaints, here's mine: a friend and I want to make computerised board games that you play on a large, touch-sensitive screen laying flat on the table. But nobody is publishing suitable hardware for this kind of game! What's an indie dev to do? It's not fair!
There are lots of 2-man teams writing good strategy games, gamers are still enthousiastic about 11 year old graphicsless games like Stars!, and although I love the genre, with every game I play, I see tons of things that could be improved, the most important one being the AI; it's usually awful, while I majored in AI and am reasonably good at strategy games myself. Sounds like this is exactly where my strengths lie and where my weaknesses (graphics) don't matter too much. So it's a tiny niche, it's still big enough for me. I don't expect millions, but making a living this way would be really nice.
The plan: choose a game that's not too hard to write, get the basics working, and release it. If it's not good enough to ask money for it, just give it away, so people can try it and want more. Meanwhile, that's what I'll be writing: better interface, better AI, more depth, possibilities and what have you, and the next version is going to be sold for actual money. If I can sell 5000 copies for $10 each, I can eat for a year. Doesn't sound too ambitious, I think. I hope.
Ofcourse I have no idea if this will work, but hopefully you'll know in a year. Maybe two; I haven't quit my day job yet.
The only problem I see is that the footer is positioned in the middle of the page. Apart from the line it's interfering with, I can read everything fine.
Creatures was great, and that sort of thing works fine in a sim, but it isn't easily translated to tactical/strategy games.
Besides, Creatures made some short-cuts too. As far as I know, it wasn't just NN+genetics, it was NN+genetics to tune known factors in an unchanging algorithm. Still, cute idea.
I think the reason why AI in RTS games seems so good, it that the AI isn't hindered by the click-fest/limited field of view interface that the human has to use. The genre that really needs some good AI is turn-based strategy. There you really can see how pitiful the state of the art still is.
Depends on the game, ofcourse. AI isn't all that interesting to FPSs and standard CRPGs, but I like strategy games, and there, even the best AI is just painfully stupid. I want strategy AI that doesn't need to cheat, get special bonuses or gang up on me in order to beat me. When I play Stars! against real humans, I have to work hard in order to outsmart them, which is a lot of fun against a really good opponent. But there's simply no turn-based strategy game that provides even a halfway decent challenge in a single player game.
He's written great books, at least. His classes are basically just him reciting his books from memory. Pretty impressive in itself, but every joke you'll hear in class is also in the book.
Minix had exactly the same potential. The real difference is that Tanenbaum didn't want to release control of minix and let everybody turn it into a heavy weight OS, because it had to remain simple and understandable for students. He wrote minix for academic purposes, while Linus wrote Linux first and foremost to be used, and to be turned into a full-fledged OS with all the bells and whistles.
I am still looking for a system that does not make the "netrunner" some kind of mage with programs instead of spells and somehow resemble the real experience of "hacking" without requiring all the knowledge.
This depends entirely on your opnion on what the "real experience of hacking" should be in a cyberpunk game. IMO the best approaches are either: some kind of mage with programs instead of spells (for people who like flashy netrunning), or some computer related skills that you simply roll for information gathering and anything else you want to do. The rest is just roleplay: handle it the same way you handle players looking for and meeting people and rolling Streetwise or Savoir-Faire, or burglars sneaking around and rolling Lockpicking to get into the building.
You don't need a big system if you don't want one. and the best part is that this works in any system.
D&D the vi of games? Good god, no. vi is lightweight, fast, and easy to use, once you get the hang of it. D&D tries to force you in certainly shapes and directions that you may not like. It's more like the Word of games. Or the Windows of games. The vi of games would probably be Fudge or CORPS: needs quite a bit of work before things start to fall into place, but once you get the hang of it, you can do anything with it. But the average Joe won't understand why anyone would ever want to use something like that.
I'm afraid I don't have any experience as a filmmaker (don't know about talent), but I know good and bad movies, and I know there's a brilliant story in Torment. But you're absolutely correct that a lot of the people in Hollywood should be kept far away from Torment. (The story from the game, that is; I don't mind if anyone torments them.)
You're right. But the story is all about loss, and about how that loss is all TNO's own stupid fault.
Hadn't thought of him yet. I was looking for a bigger guy, who can act like that. Depp is certainly one of my favourite actors and is great at this kind of gothic role. For a brooding bigger guy, perhaps David Boreanaz? Problem is, I don't really like him.
For Anna I was thinking about Kate Beckinsale (pretty, can look stylish and dark, and it's not really a very deep role anyway), but Sheena Easton is certainly an interesting idea too. Great voice, but I can't remember het in any live roles.
I think in more developed countries, game-playing women are perceived as nerds, hence reducing their chances of finding mates.
Reducing? I'm pretty sure there are plenty of single male nerds looking for a woman. Or hoping for a woman, at least. Perhaps that's the problem.
And now for the inevitable casting thread...
I see a solution: a Planescape: Torment movie. That game had better writing, stronger plot and much more character development than the vast majority of movies nowadays. You only have to choose which parts to skip.
Depends on what you call "revolutionary" ofcourse. It's a lot more revolutionary than its competitors, which are just more of the same.
I wasn't really expecting holographic interfaces yet, but that controller certainly opens new possibilities.
Aren't they selling these things at a loss? So with a higher price tag, they would have lost less money per unit. And less money total as well.