Well, right now a big chunk of computer users, are the young-ish gamers who surely don't know any better and will mostly switch to the coolest looking newest product, others such as hardcore/professional gamers who are interested in performance will probably stick with XP for now, as will the majority of people who generally know what they're doing when it comes to operating systems and computers in general.
As for the latest computer not running it will like 386's ran OS/2 sluggishly, quite honestly the user in this day and age has a big broader spectrum of possibilities, given enough funding you can build a PC with 2 very powerful CPUs, two (or is it four now, I haven't kept track of the latest technology) very powerful video cards, 8 Gigs (or more?) of incredibly fast RAM, and hell even hard drives are coming close to a terabyte in size, and are damn fast too, however will the average "good" computer be able to run Vista? probably not as smoothly as Microsoft or the end user would like, but that's how new things are, right?
-Lev
Well, I live in israel and we don't have PBS here (well, duh), any chance of someone recording this (high quality preferred, of course;) and posting it online? hm...now that I think of it, is it even legal to do that? well anyway, it would be really nice for this to be online.
Looks like the situation in the USA is worse than here, I live in israel and we pay between 120 and 180NIS (1 US$ = 4.5 NIS) for 1.5MBit download and 96KBit upload ADSL, dynamic IP (I prefer it that way), no bandwidth limit (I filled an 80GB hard drive in a week or so) and decent customer service, well actually the customer service is great, the only problem is that you gotta wait on the line for like 20 minutes before getting to talk to someone, but after that, I've yet to encounter a dumb customer service rep.
I remember back in the day I bought Tribes II for 240 NIS (4.5NIS=$1)...how many years ago was that...hm...two months, yup that's right, I bought Tribes II two months ago and now they're deciding to release it for free, well atleast now I'll have people to play with:)
Yeah, I just played king of fighters against a friend on the PSX, and in one of the fights he used a character he knows well, and I heard the exact same 'yihaaa' and me getting hurt around 8 times in a row, same happens when I play against some other, not-so-smart people at games like Mortal Kombat 2/3, anyone else remembers sitting there holding the controller while the enemy freezes, jumps to you, upper cuts and jumps back?
Anyway, these kind of tactics are usually annoying, but that same friend I just played KoF against can usually beat them, I usually play fair and not 'cheesy' in MK trilogy, but after him beating me around 30 times in a row with almost any character (even nightwolf o_O) I resorted to being cheesy and still failed, so one day I hope to be as good as he is to be able to beat even the button mashers and the cheesy people and everyone MOUAHAH!!...uh, yeah.
"PC games I think will continue to dominate in the FPS market as nothing can replace a Keyboard and Mouse for FPS's"
I didn't mean that the PS2 _already_ dominates the market, but in a few years, with it taking over everything else why not FPS with a mouse and keyboard?:)
Well, I played Diablo II(I know it's not an MMORPG, read on) since about 2 months before the Lord of Destruction expansion came out for around 2 years, I had some strong characters on the USWest realm and I finally got tired of it after 2 years because of having 2 of every characters at level 99, and the economy went to heck back then.
Now I started playing a MMORPG that was originally korean or chinese or something, but a few months ago went global and is free (for now), it is called MUOnline and at first glance I thought something like this "hm...Diablo II, worse grahpics, FREE!, more than 8 players per server" and now I play it, what do I do there? well, at first I killed spiders, then budge dragons, then bull fighters, then elite bull fighters, then beetle monsters...you get the picture, but it's still fun, both games consist of about the same thing and look similar and are all about clicking on monsters over and over and over again until they die, level up, move on to stronger monster, but people find that fun especially when you have hours of time to waste, and I find it fun too.
Now, that's what people basically want now-adays from MMORPGs, (well, free ones, if compared to a p2p MMORPG MUOnline would be considered 1/50th as good), now comparing MU to D2 I can say this, most of the interface is similar, most of the basic game functions are too, but there are ofcourse some new stuff, such as obviously the more than 8 players per server thing, as well as things like the specific classes (which may be similar in concept, but have a new look and name), the specific weapons...but overall the game is about the same, it was popular back then, it's popular now (did I mention it's free?).
Look at it this way, consoles are just like a smaller variety of PCs, each (Xbox/PS1/PS2/GC/DC) has it's own cd-rom drive, proccessor, motherboard, grahpics and sound chips, an operating system (though not as useable as on the PC) and DirectX-like grahpics/sound handling layers.
When the game developer makes a game, hm...which console(/OS?) should I make this for? a descision is made to make it for the PS2, the developer imidiatly knows that the PS2 has such and such parts, CPU, mobo, etc.
Imagine each person with an xbox having a different type of xbox, with different sound/video chips, proccessors, and no grahpic/sound handling layer (like DirectX), games would take YEARS to develop, Mario 64 would come out at around the year 2064 (or more likely, they would figure out to create consoles the same, or atleast have a handling layer, like they do).
Now, with consoles there is still a choice as to which type it will work on, but it's not that big of a choice, only 4 non-obsolete CD-Based consoles, PSX/PS2/XBOX/GC, some would argue that the DC isn't obsolete, but that's for another conversation.
So now we go back on the subject and see that developing with this kind would be a nightmare, because not only would the developer need to include drivers for every existing video/sound/whatever card out there, and be able to autodetect it, they would also have to develop either code to directly access the hardware (good ol' dos days), or a handler that the games communicate through to the hardware, like DirectX, which each developer would include with all their games (DirectUbiSoft, DirectBlizzard, DirectEA), spooky isn't it?:)
I work (well, I get to play for free as payment, since I'm underage) at a lan shop which also does computer sales and repairs, the manager there just turned 50 a couple weeks ago and I've known him for about 4 years now, around 2 years ago this 19 year old college student showed up and made a VB (oh, the horror) program for him that basically keeps a text-based database of all the computer parts, which needs to be updated manually and also allows for a person to tell him I want this, this and that and he'll just click 'add' on each one and see what the total outcome is, as well as be able to print out this little page that has all the parts, their prices and the final price written on them.
Other than also calculating it with Dollar>NIS rate, VAT and ammount of profit (also inputted manually), that's pretty much what the program does, not too complicated I guess, or is it?
A program as simple as this should be easy to use, even for a 50 year old man, right? wrong; it took him around 3 months just to remember what each button does, and what's the order of buttons he's supposed to click (call it syntax, if you like), for example to remember that he needs to first choose the ammount of profit for the sale, then choose the parts, then click 'next', then click the little checkmark that says 'print' and then click 'done', which then closes the program and prints out the price offer.
Now imagine that being text based, the above proccess would be consisted of something like this:
profit 20%
parts "mother boards"
list
choose "Asus ABCDE-34 USB2.0 S-ATA IEEE1394" (he would actually need to type in the entire thing that describes the mother board)
parts "RAM"
choose "Samsung DDRRAM 256MB 400MHz"
parts "CPU"
etc.
I think you get my point by now, remembering the syntax for that, for a 50 year old man (or even for me) would be extremely annoying and tiresome, when he could just run a simple GUI like he is on a 133 MHz PC, not to mention actually typing out the entire names of the models or whatnot.
No you don't, but I'll say it anyway:)
First of all, since I am not too familiar with non-graphical (and thus, non-commercial) multi-player dungeons (such as EQ, UO, and Asheron's call on the commercial side) I cannot safely say something along the lines of "but how can they even create perfect characters when there are limitations?", but what I can say is this; if there are no limitations, there should be!
This may not be completely relevant but I've played Diablo II back when it was...normal, and I've seen some characters (specifically barbarians, amazons and paladins) that each was unbeatable by anything that you attack it with other than the above three, kind of like rock paper scissors, barbarians would beat amazons who would beat paladins who would beat barbarians, and so the cycle went on.
When little old level 87 amazon me tried to intefere, I got as they say...my ass wooped, so I understand what this article is talking about, and sometihng has to be done.
On the extreme side a solution might be to just completely erase everything in such games every few months, but that would simply annoy everyone, including mary sues.
On the less extreme side, people could be appointed to watch for such perfect characters when being created in various games and to make them a bit less perfect as needed.
I wonder if this will even get read.
title is IcyTower, basically you jump up a tower trying to get as high as you can, or the best combo (where each jump in the combo skips atleast one floor), quite addicting and challenging.
Hm..i think this is a wonderfull step for linux
on
DVD Authoring In Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And for open source in general, if we can provide good open source solutions to things that until now cost alot of money, it is one of the strongest ways of supporting open source, providing however that the product really does do what is needed, and does it well (which in most cases i've seen with similar projects so far, was done extremely well, sometimes even better than the commercial product).
Uhm..after actually firing up the ol' IE instead of firebird and being able to see the button, i proceeded to choose the age group '17+' (which means anything from diablo to bridge), and the category 'all', now at this point i already don't like the fact that you can't specify your own 'from' and 'to' age group, what if you're a 20 year old man who likes both bloody and gruesome games and not so adult games like worms or commander keen?
Also, i feel the "Sports / Racing" category should be two seperate ones, soccer fans don't want to browse through NFS/F1 titles, and racing fans don't want to browse through NBA/FIFA/NHL titles.
In conclusion, i think it's a nice idea for those people who bought their first powerful computer, just got cable internet, and have never gamed before to be able to choose their first games, but for the average gamer online, or even the average internet user, it's hardly of any use.
But being on the page, all around the page, even used microsoft's search thingy, and i still couldn't figure out where i can get/use anything more than screenshots of the "Windows XP Game Advisor", where is it?
1. One day after this law comes in, it's you.know.what day.
2. That website is not government owned as far as i can tell, and thus it is possible that it is all a joke (see above:P)
3. Even if this is not a joke, it will probably be dropped in a few days.
4. And even if not, IE/Windows is still legal, the law says that doing all of that stuff is illegal, however it does not ban anything that potentially can do that.
Some of the recent game tests that didn't require experience were Earth and Beyond (for which i got in, downloaded the thing and forgot all about it), The War Craft III expansion, and prior to that War Craft III itself.
For some experience i would try going around the websites of othe various well known gaming companys such as blizzard, EA and westwood (westwood no longer exists, but just as an example).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, right now a big chunk of computer users, are the young-ish gamers who surely don't know any better and will mostly switch to the coolest looking newest product, others such as hardcore/professional gamers who are interested in performance will probably stick with XP for now, as will the majority of people who generally know what they're doing when it comes to operating systems and computers in general. As for the latest computer not running it will like 386's ran OS/2 sluggishly, quite honestly the user in this day and age has a big broader spectrum of possibilities, given enough funding you can build a PC with 2 very powerful CPUs, two (or is it four now, I haven't kept track of the latest technology) very powerful video cards, 8 Gigs (or more?) of incredibly fast RAM, and hell even hard drives are coming close to a terabyte in size, and are damn fast too, however will the average "good" computer be able to run Vista? probably not as smoothly as Microsoft or the end user would like, but that's how new things are, right? -Lev
Well, I live in israel and we don't have PBS here (well, duh), any chance of someone recording this (high quality preferred, of course ;) and posting it online? hm...now that I think of it, is it even legal to do that? well anyway, it would be really nice for this to be online.
Looks like the situation in the USA is worse than here, I live in israel and we pay between 120 and 180NIS (1 US$ = 4.5 NIS) for 1.5MBit download and 96KBit upload ADSL, dynamic IP (I prefer it that way), no bandwidth limit (I filled an 80GB hard drive in a week or so) and decent customer service, well actually the customer service is great, the only problem is that you gotta wait on the line for like 20 minutes before getting to talk to someone, but after that, I've yet to encounter a dumb customer service rep.
I remember back in the day I bought Tribes II for 240 NIS (4.5NIS=$1)...how many years ago was that...hm...two months, yup that's right, I bought Tribes II two months ago and now they're deciding to release it for free, well atleast now I'll have people to play with :)
Yeah, I just played king of fighters against a friend on the PSX, and in one of the fights he used a character he knows well, and I heard the exact same 'yihaaa' and me getting hurt around 8 times in a row, same happens when I play against some other, not-so-smart people at games like Mortal Kombat 2/3, anyone else remembers sitting there holding the controller while the enemy freezes, jumps to you, upper cuts and jumps back?
Anyway, these kind of tactics are usually annoying, but that same friend I just played KoF against can usually beat them, I usually play fair and not 'cheesy' in MK trilogy, but after him beating me around 30 times in a row with almost any character (even nightwolf o_O) I resorted to being cheesy and still failed, so one day I hope to be as good as he is to be able to beat even the button mashers and the cheesy people and everyone MOUAHAH!!...uh, yeah.
"PC games I think will continue to dominate in the FPS market as nothing can replace a Keyboard and Mouse for FPS's" I didn't mean that the PS2 _already_ dominates the market, but in a few years, with it taking over everything else why not FPS with a mouse and keyboard? :)
FPS market? Hm..let me see my PS2..yup, two USB ports, what were you saying about that mouse and keyboard? ;)
*Opens log of last 5 downloaded torrents* Hm...I think I could be causing it :P
Well, I played Diablo II(I know it's not an MMORPG, read on) since about 2 months before the Lord of Destruction expansion came out for around 2 years, I had some strong characters on the USWest realm and I finally got tired of it after 2 years because of having 2 of every characters at level 99, and the economy went to heck back then.
Now I started playing a MMORPG that was originally korean or chinese or something, but a few months ago went global and is free (for now), it is called MUOnline and at first glance I thought something like this "hm...Diablo II, worse grahpics, FREE!, more than 8 players per server" and now I play it, what do I do there? well, at first I killed spiders, then budge dragons, then bull fighters, then elite bull fighters, then beetle monsters...you get the picture, but it's still fun, both games consist of about the same thing and look similar and are all about clicking on monsters over and over and over again until they die, level up, move on to stronger monster, but people find that fun especially when you have hours of time to waste, and I find it fun too.
Now, that's what people basically want now-adays from MMORPGs, (well, free ones, if compared to a p2p MMORPG MUOnline would be considered 1/50th as good), now comparing MU to D2 I can say this, most of the interface is similar, most of the basic game functions are too, but there are ofcourse some new stuff, such as obviously the more than 8 players per server thing, as well as things like the specific classes (which may be similar in concept, but have a new look and name), the specific weapons...but overall the game is about the same, it was popular back then, it's popular now (did I mention it's free?).
Look at it this way, consoles are just like a smaller variety of PCs, each (Xbox/PS1/PS2/GC/DC) has it's own cd-rom drive, proccessor, motherboard, grahpics and sound chips, an operating system (though not as useable as on the PC) and DirectX-like grahpics/sound handling layers.
:)
When the game developer makes a game, hm...which console(/OS?) should I make this for? a descision is made to make it for the PS2, the developer imidiatly knows that the PS2 has such and such parts, CPU, mobo, etc.
Imagine each person with an xbox having a different type of xbox, with different sound/video chips, proccessors, and no grahpic/sound handling layer (like DirectX), games would take YEARS to develop, Mario 64 would come out at around the year 2064 (or more likely, they would figure out to create consoles the same, or atleast have a handling layer, like they do).
Now, with consoles there is still a choice as to which type it will work on, but it's not that big of a choice, only 4 non-obsolete CD-Based consoles, PSX/PS2/XBOX/GC, some would argue that the DC isn't obsolete, but that's for another conversation.
So now we go back on the subject and see that developing with this kind would be a nightmare, because not only would the developer need to include drivers for every existing video/sound/whatever card out there, and be able to autodetect it, they would also have to develop either code to directly access the hardware (good ol' dos days), or a handler that the games communicate through to the hardware, like DirectX, which each developer would include with all their games (DirectUbiSoft, DirectBlizzard, DirectEA), spooky isn't it?
I work (well, I get to play for free as payment, since I'm underage) at a lan shop which also does computer sales and repairs, the manager there just turned 50 a couple weeks ago and I've known him for about 4 years now, around 2 years ago this 19 year old college student showed up and made a VB (oh, the horror) program for him that basically keeps a text-based database of all the computer parts, which needs to be updated manually and also allows for a person to tell him I want this, this and that and he'll just click 'add' on each one and see what the total outcome is, as well as be able to print out this little page that has all the parts, their prices and the final price written on them.
Other than also calculating it with Dollar>NIS rate, VAT and ammount of profit (also inputted manually), that's pretty much what the program does, not too complicated I guess, or is it?
A program as simple as this should be easy to use, even for a 50 year old man, right? wrong; it took him around 3 months just to remember what each button does, and what's the order of buttons he's supposed to click (call it syntax, if you like), for example to remember that he needs to first choose the ammount of profit for the sale, then choose the parts, then click 'next', then click the little checkmark that says 'print' and then click 'done', which then closes the program and prints out the price offer.
Now imagine that being text based, the above proccess would be consisted of something like this:
profit 20%
parts "mother boards"
list
choose "Asus ABCDE-34 USB2.0 S-ATA IEEE1394" (he would actually need to type in the entire thing that describes the mother board)
parts "RAM"
choose "Samsung DDRRAM 256MB 400MHz"
parts "CPU"
etc.
I think you get my point by now, remembering the syntax for that, for a 50 year old man (or even for me) would be extremely annoying and tiresome, when he could just run a simple GUI like he is on a 133 MHz PC, not to mention actually typing out the entire names of the models or whatnot.
No you don't, but I'll say it anyway :)
First of all, since I am not too familiar with non-graphical (and thus, non-commercial) multi-player dungeons (such as EQ, UO, and Asheron's call on the commercial side) I cannot safely say something along the lines of "but how can they even create perfect characters when there are limitations?", but what I can say is this; if there are no limitations, there should be!
This may not be completely relevant but I've played Diablo II back when it was...normal, and I've seen some characters (specifically barbarians, amazons and paladins) that each was unbeatable by anything that you attack it with other than the above three, kind of like rock paper scissors, barbarians would beat amazons who would beat paladins who would beat barbarians, and so the cycle went on.
When little old level 87 amazon me tried to intefere, I got as they say...my ass wooped, so I understand what this article is talking about, and sometihng has to be done.
On the extreme side a solution might be to just completely erase everything in such games every few months, but that would simply annoy everyone, including mary sues.
On the less extreme side, people could be appointed to watch for such perfect characters when being created in various games and to make them a bit less perfect as needed.
I wonder if this will even get read.
title is IcyTower, basically you jump up a tower trying to get as high as you can, or the best combo (where each jump in the combo skips atleast one floor), quite addicting and challenging.
And for open source in general, if we can provide good open source solutions to things that until now cost alot of money, it is one of the strongest ways of supporting open source, providing however that the product really does do what is needed, and does it well (which in most cases i've seen with similar projects so far, was done extremely well, sometimes even better than the commercial product).
Uhm..after actually firing up the ol' IE instead of firebird and being able to see the button, i proceeded to choose the age group '17+' (which means anything from diablo to bridge), and the category 'all', now at this point i already don't like the fact that you can't specify your own 'from' and 'to' age group, what if you're a 20 year old man who likes both bloody and gruesome games and not so adult games like worms or commander keen? Also, i feel the "Sports / Racing" category should be two seperate ones, soccer fans don't want to browse through NFS/F1 titles, and racing fans don't want to browse through NBA/FIFA/NHL titles. In conclusion, i think it's a nice idea for those people who bought their first powerful computer, just got cable internet, and have never gamed before to be able to choose their first games, but for the average gamer online, or even the average internet user, it's hardly of any use.
But being on the page, all around the page, even used microsoft's search thingy, and i still couldn't figure out where i can get/use anything more than screenshots of the "Windows XP Game Advisor", where is it?
1. One day after this law comes in, it's you.know.what day. 2. That website is not government owned as far as i can tell, and thus it is possible that it is all a joke (see above :P)
3. Even if this is not a joke, it will probably be dropped in a few days.
4. And even if not, IE/Windows is still legal, the law says that doing all of that stuff is illegal, however it does not ban anything that potentially can do that.
Some of the recent game tests that didn't require experience were Earth and Beyond (for which i got in, downloaded the thing and forgot all about it), The War Craft III expansion, and prior to that War Craft III itself. For some experience i would try going around the websites of othe various well known gaming companys such as blizzard, EA and westwood (westwood no longer exists, but just as an example).