Re:Is your friend Hitler?
on
Why We Fight
·
· Score: 1
Typed a nice reply to this, but somehow replied to posts down instead...
Anyway, when it comes down to it, even when games are designed to reward the "right" thing and punish the "wrong" thing, sometimes just the way the system works opens the a for solutions that we would abhor in real life, or even completely counterintuitive solutions.
Take the death camp solution: Your city is being wiped out by a highly virulent disease. Why would it not be considered acceptable to save a real city by sacrificing the sick population? Because you're killing people, plain and simple. You can't do that for any number of reasons.
In the game, though, the terms are different, depending on your exact goal. Let's say for the sake of simplicity that the situation is a war between neighboring cities, and your goal is simply to win. You have different options: One one hand, you can divert forces away from the war effort and dedicate significant effort and attention to stop t he spread of the disease and cure those who have it, or at least keep them isolated while they live out their final days, which still requires the resources to keep them alive with no payoff, as well as the resources for your doctors, who are spending their effort to care for people who will probably die later. This is the "good guy" way out, and it would be the one that I would advocate in a real life epidemic.
However, this is a game. Nobody's actually dying, just numbers are going up and down based on my inputs. So, instead of the monumental investment in hopes of saving my population, I just isolate or eliminate the diseased population as rapidly as possible and with a minimum investment of time and resources. After that, I'm back to the war effort with a healthy population. Better yet, I throw them at the other city and let HIM deal with the mess it makes.
Sorry about that, I know it has little to do with the grandparent post, replied to the wrong thread somehow
Re:C'mon, wrong answer
on
Why We Fight
·
· Score: 1
The issue decribed mentions plague. In Dungeon keeper, I'd usually hollow out a nice room out on my front lines and lock the door into it. In some of the later levels, disease becomes a bitch to deal with, and it's very expensive to build a large enough temple to try to cure everybody.
My solution when it got out of hand was to round up diseased minions and throw them in the locked room to keep them from spreading, then using imps to whip up a fight and throwing my sick units onto the enemy lines and locking the doors behind them. This would solve multiple problems: it would stall enemy aggression into my dungeon, it would get diseased minions away from my healthy ones, and it will spread the disease into the enemy dungeon, and the AI isn't nearly as creative at dealing with it.
Video games don't always work like real life. No matter how good they get, there's always some bit that means it's better to do something that makes no sense than to do what you would expect. Few examples:
Starcraft: There's an early mission where you need to survive for 20 minutes. Realistically, it would be best to dig in and try to repel the zerg assaults. However, because the zerg start out with a relatively small force and build up throughout the mission, I always faired best by waiting until after the first wave was over (when the enemy would have relatively few units on hand) and then going all out offensive and wiping out the zerg, then going to get lunch while the last 15 minutes count down.
How about the sandbag trick in Command and Conquer? You'd never think that sandbags were the most powerful weapon of any war effort, would you?
The Advance Wars series has a bunch of defensive "survive for n days" missions. Realistically, you'd again hunker down and blast incomming forces. But, advance wars gives the attacking unit an advantage, so to win, you have to be on the offensive.
Theme Hospital had a great one. Realistically, you'd never think that barricading the health inspector in a room somewhere would be a good idea, or just surrounding him on four sides with benches and vending machines, but you can do that in the game and then proceed to get away with the most greivous violations imaginable and he'll never be any the wiser. As long as he can't reach the front desk, he can't begin his inspection.
It's just the way games work. Every system has its flaws or exploits or whatever you want to call them, and they often make it so that doing things the "wrong" way is much more time and resource efficient than doing them the right way.
I used to play Civ II a lot, back before Civ III came out. Realistically? Democracy is great, I love Democracy, not a big fan of Fundamentalism. Playing Civ II, though... at the first sign of impending war, Democracy went out the window and in comes Fundamentalism. If I was having problems with civil disorder, why try to appease the people when it's often faster and chaper to have a revolution to Communism and institute martial law until the root problem can be corrected?
Just out of curiosity, is Bonhomie Snoutintroff a known name? I've never seen it before, but I did notice that the last name looks like it would be pronounced "Snout-in-trough," which somehow seems a bit appropriate after those last couple paragraphs.
I guess you didn't RTFA? Or the URL? for example, did you notice the URL says,/eff_needs_to_die/?
Perhaps you didn't read the big that says, "the worst possible development would be to find the EFF arguing the case"? Second page, the EFF's credited with blowing a case that "only an EFF principal could blow" despite the fact that the article even says directly above that the case isn't closed yet.
Then it gets into just plain meaningless slamming of Gilmore, suggesting that the EFF is only fighting to protect the rights of air travelers because Gilmore, "doesn't like to be searched, and thinks only about himself," obliquely accuses him of intentionally submarining efforts of rights advocates, page one even suggests that he sides with porkbarrel politicians.
Just to round it all off, the writer, who just finished writing the most arrogant article I've read outside of my local "news" has his little description of himself. I would have left that off, myself, it's in very poor representation of him after the article: "He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous... ventures that...no longer exist," and, "his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession" after just indulging in unabashed ad hominem attacks on the end of an otherwise passable article, and finally, "His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility."
Judging by his unrepentent lack of humlity, I guess he's not that great of a visionary either.
That's already started. Graphics haven't advanced much in realism in the last few years, but there are now new graphical styles that weren't explored in the past. Cell shading and other unusual graphical styles are becomming more common, not less as your statements would suggest.
When the status quo has been perfected, then new innovation is much more likely. Look at the Atari games: Some people wax nostalgic over them, but how many of them followed the same basic pattern as Pong and Arkanoid? How many more were variations on mazes inspired by Pac Man? And many of the others were much like Space Invaders or Pitfall.
They did that for a very long time until Nintendo came out with Super Mario World and shattered a lot of common conceptions about games. Remember that first time in the game? You get to the end of the screen and you KEPT GOING. It was a shock, you'd rarely or never seen that before. But you sure saw a lot of it over the following ten years. Hundreds of variations on the same concept, even taking older styles like Space Invaders adding the scrolling screen in place of the old static playfields. By the time the Playstation rolled around, that style had been played out, and I had trouble mustering any enthusiasm for just another platformer.
Every genre of games have gone through that too. Several times, in some cases. For a long time, every FPS followed a simmilar pattern to Doom. A lone gunman against hordes of mindless cannonfodder. And there were a LOT of FPS, and they started to become stale. Periodically, something completely different would come along. Half Life, Max Payne, Deus Ex, and it would bring some new life to the genre.
Now, do the same thing with books, movies, paintings, poetry, and plays.
It's like comparing Vanilla Ice to Beethoven. The argument could be made taht Vanilla Ice was indicative of the state of music, at least in its genre, but can the same be said of Beethoven? When Beethoven was alive, new symphonies came out like movies do now. A few new ones each week, if not more often than that. Some of them were ok, some were excellent, some didn't get the recognition they deserved because the composer couldn't get a venue to play it, some weren't that great, but were made by a locally popular composer and got much more attention than they were really worth.
What we have now is the music of that time that survived the test of over a century.
A better example would be movies. They came out even more rapidly years ago than they do now. Ask your grandparents: They'd go to the theater and watch the newsreel, a movie they'd never seen before, a few serials (usualloy half-hour TV shows, but on the big screen), and then another new movie. You can do this every saturday, and there were usually still choices. Saginaw had three theaters back then: Temple, Court, and another one on the east side that's been torn down. Often, each one would have a different set of movies running.
How many of those movies do you still see on DVD or the classic movie channels today? Not many. You see the ones that have stood the test of time and were accepted as among the best of their respective time. Not everybody agrees. Just like you find people who enjoy obscure classical music you've never heard of, there are people who prefer one of Carry Grant's hundred-some-odd movies you don't see in the DVD racks.
Books are even moreso. There are thousands of books written any given year. If you were to accept the books you see refernced in most discussions of classical literiture as the entire artistic output of their time, then it would lead us to believe that only a few hundred books were written in any given century. It's just not the case.
Some people comment that most modern art doesn't look as good as older works of art, but it's the same effect. People have always produced weird and stupid stuff and called it art. Five years later, it may still be remembered, but fifty years later, a lot of it is forgotten. Time distills the vast creative output down into a relatively small subset which could be considered best, or perhaps most representative.
Some bands were popular ten years ago, but now we're all ashamed to admit we even listened to them, let alone that we can still recite Vanilla Ice lyrics on demand. Two hundred years from now, few people will even recognize the name Vanilla Ice, but they'll still recognize Beethoven or Bach, and they'll remember some subset of singers from the last twenty years.
The same will happen to today's playwrites and authors, directors and actors, and even to our games. Some of games will be remembered some day as works of art, some just as simple fun, others may be studied to see the core aspects of the genre, the same way a professor today will pick apart Chopin to demonstrate the overall style of music, or Michelangelo's David to see the thousands of very simmilar works of religious art from the time. And then again, the other thousands of them will probably fall into obscurity, and some may even be lost entirely over time.
Heck, a few may even be remembered for being complete travesties. Some of the worst movies ever made have earned the same immortality that the greatest have.
Basically, to use your example, you spent that $1,000,000 of investor money (not your own). However, you collect investments of $100,000,000 to cover your rediculous budget, and you have a German company as your producer. Under German law, you get that tax deduction before the movie enters production, and then lease the film for your US studio for actual filming. So that's $99,000,000 you basically pocket on your $100m movie that really cost $1m.
Now, let's say your film goes to market and makes $125 million in revinues. By contract obligations, you pay back your investors their $100 million plus interest. Let's say 10% for another 10 million. Or, if you really screwed them, they signed for a percentage of the profits instead of that 10%, which means they get a set percentage out of $25m which could end up being even less. Heck, if you're lucky, the movie won't even make back the budget and your investors also get screwed even out of their full $100m.
All scenarios aside, let's say you agreed to 10% interset on the investment. That means $110m out of the $125m goes back to the investors, and your studio makes another $15m for a grand total of $114m profits on a movie that "cost" $100m and grossed $125m.
It's called cooking the books, it can get you in a lot of trouble, but a lot of companies get away with it for decades. However, if you have a good team of lawyers to handle your contracts and such, you can probably get away with this sort of thing without technically breaking the law.
Cases in point: Stonetalon and Hillsbrad.
Stonetalon is an alliance rogue playground. Try to do any of the quests - any of them, seriously - on a pvp server without getting ambushed a dozen times. Especially the ones that require you to go up north, near the alliance camp.
Hillsbrad, heck, my usual server isn't even pvp, but from THursay evening until Monday morning, the field between Tarren Mill and Southshore is a constant back-and-forth war. Since Arathi Basin came out, it's shifted a bit into Arathi, with the back and forth being between Hammerfall and Refugee Point. Don't evne try questing in most of Arathi, half the mobs in the zone will either be agroed into the raid groups or you'll just get caught in the lag caused by all those people running around hitting stuff.
The issue in MMORPGs becomes the issue that has been hashed out regarding Final Fantasy XI more than once: Having multiple groups in a dungeon area does, on one hand, allow for some cool interaction, but it also invites game-breaking abuse. The issue FFXI had was that guilds would large groups to monopolize bosses for weeks at a time, both making them incredibly rich and preventing other people in the game from finishing quests or getting good items themselves.
Most MMOs are set up so there's lots of space that allows, and often forces, interaction and confrontation between guilds. My personal favorite in World of Warcraft is trying to get into Blackrock Mountain to do one of the several instance dungeons inside. My server's one of the highest population servers in the US, and on weekends, it's not unusual for the areas outside of the instances to erupt in occasional skirmishes and sometimes large scale fights.
On the other hand, the instanced areas allow for the laying out of much more complex events than are feasible in a multi-party area. In many of the instance dungeons in WoW, there are chains of events that have to be triggered to open certain areas, unlock certain bosses, or complete certain quests. With multiple parties moving around in an area, this will cause all sort of headache. Imagine just clearing one of the pit bosses in Sunken Temple, only to have a party upstairs activate the last statue and spawn it again. Not only do you have to fight a fairly strong boss unprepared, but the other party just got screwed out of the boss THEY worked to spawn.
There's a balance to be sought between interaction and confrontation between players and the controlled teamwork scenarios in dungeon instances. An MMO needs the interaction with other players, but it also benefits greatly from the much richer content you can implement in an instance's controlled conditions.
Yeah, the expansion was called Limb from Limb. Added a few new monsters, a second campaign. Interplay sold Die by the Sword and Limb from Limb in a dual-jewel pack just like they did with Fallout and Fallout 2, you can probably find that for $10 online.
Not only was it all about Everquest, the guy strikes me as a bit hypocritical about the matter.
First, he goes into great detail of how he uses multiple accounts and multiple characters simultaneously because he didn't want to deal with finding a party or having to try to do things in a party that wasn't perfectly rounded.
Then, he talks about his guild, and how he doesn't want selfish "me-first" people, but instead wants people who will give and help others.
I don't know. Making multiple accounts to avoid the typical troubles of a party strikes me as pretty selfish.
Maybe I'm spoiled from years of playing MMOGs with deeper gameplay, where it takes a good chunk of one person's attention and both hands on the keyboard to handle just one character, let alone your own private army of SIX.
Sorta puts things in perspective when the most selfish thing I've ever had to deal with was a warlock who wouldn't ease up on the shadowbolts for a minute or so to let the warriors maintain agro.
Freespace 2 didn't do good mostly because of Interplay. There's probably a thousand examples of solid games that they barely even tried to sell. Die by the Sword comes to mind. Good game, completely unique playstyle, even if it did seem like a tech demo sometimes. I think that between DBtS and the expansion, I saw a grand total of one magazine ad for both six months after they'd come out, and never saw them on shelves anywhere. Same goes for Freespace, which I only once saw on shelves. That could be because Wing Commander: Prophecy came around the same time, and then there was that other Wing Commander game that was made free for download for a while. The space sim genre has never been strong enough to support multiple major releases in a short time.
More likely the first, if they used the same test they use now. It's false negative rate is so low as to be zero, but it's false positive rate is actually higher than the rate of HIV infection, so only around a third of those who test positive and agree to follow-up testing are confirmed to have the disease.
The article doesn't say anything about what tests he had done, but it sounds like it was just that one test. If that's the case, he could have tested false positive, freaked out, and refused further testing.
Monopolies were illegal in the US before, too. SBC's taken over here in Saginaw the same way Ma Bell did years ago.
Back in the days of crank-operated phones, this city had two city-owned phone services, one on each side of the river. They had some repulsively cute nicnames like Sweet and Pleasant or something like that. ATT took over by accusing the city of anticompetitive practices and basically ground the local cheap service to dust.
About 3 years ago, Saginaw was back to the old position: We had four phone companies in addition to the standard Ameritech. Three of them were available in my area without any special hoops to jump through, and all four matched Ameritech's prices (Depending mostly on how much long distance you had, you could save a LOT with them, too). There were a bunch of smaller services which came and went and weren't very reputable, but they were still phone companies.
One by one, SBC bought up the little ones. One of them put up a big fight complete with TV ads bashing SBC and Ameritech before it's bill showed up one month with the letters SBC added to the old logo. Finally, last year, the Ameritech sign comes down on the old ATT building and the SBC sign goes up. SBC had already owned Ameritech, but they claimed to be a different company locally, even competing with their little pickup companies against Ameritech and trying to steal customers from Ameritech. Now, though, it doesn't matter what you did for those years while we had plenty of phone options, you have an SBC bill now, because SBC bought all the other companies.
Hallow's End is one of those things that's simmilar enough to real life that you say, "Hey, it's Halloween!" but different enough that it can be fit into the game's world.
For specifics: Hallow's End was originally celebrated in the Eastern Kingdoms to commemorate the people killed in the Second War. It's taken up popularity in Orgrimar and Darnassas more recently.
I didn't see mention of it in the article, but that's not all going on in WoW. The Undercity is currently celebrating something called the Wickerman Festival, celebrating their escape from the Lich King's control. The highlight of the event is the burning of a giant wicker caricature of Arthas.
I should dig my free account out of the dust and check it out. I've got mixed feelings about WoW's haloween event. It's got some really cool seasonal quests, like stinkbombing Southshore and egging an inn, but alot of it seems just thrown in. In particular, my troll male can't wear any of the cheap costume masks, because instead of being on his face, they seem to be impaled through his skull.
So 10 minutes of some stupid video game excerpt was more important than explaining how Isildur died.
Stuff like that was what worried me years ago when I first heard about the LOTR movies.
Not that they would do this, but that they' WOULDN'T. LOTR, as it's set in the books, isn't very theatrical. There's a lot of walking. A lot of discussion and revisiting of old topics, lots historical background, lots of closure to plot lines lines that didn't actually play a part in the trilogy, some of which don't make complete sense unless you also read the Silmarillion or the Hobbit. There were lots of bits of minor excitement leading to entire chapters - and Tolkein seems to have liked long chapters - of talking and singing and carrying on (The Tom Bombadil stretch is a good example), which could be skipped without damaging the major plot thread.
That works in books. It works very well in books, in fact. Just not in movies. With a movie, you have that invisible clock ticking - the LOTR movies were pushing the limits of how long I wanted to sit in a cramped, poorly cleaned theater chair pondering what caused the strange discoloration on the back of the seat in front of me.
A lot of the backstory had to get dropped. Look at Serenity: One of it's main weaknesses is that it's an ending, not a beginning. People who didn't watch Firefly tend to be lost. LOTR had to be a beginning. It was pulling the series off the shelves of nerds and putting it in front of the entire world.
Movies also have to end on a BIG finish. I liked the Scouring of the Shire, it was an important part of the books, but it wasn't that exciting compared to the apocalyptic battle that just finished. I've seen movies that end like that, and I find myself wondering more when it'll be done so I can go pee than what's actually happening.
Sorry to reply seriously to a joke, but my guess is they'll have the same problem as early PS1 and PS2 games. They may have threading issues just like the Xbox360 as well, but I'm still betting on graphics being the one that'll hurt.
Remember the early PS1 games? A lot of them were 2D or mixed 2D/3D (Final Fantasy VII had 2D environments with chunky, lego-man 3D characters, many others had 3D environments with 2D objects in them). It was a good while before good-looking fully 3D games were the norm, and even then, there were 2D games that came out like Valkyrie Profile and various fighters that looked much smoother than simmilar 3D games.
Then the PS2. A lot of the early games looked butt ugly when compared to the recent releases. To look back at GTA3 next to San Andreas on the PS2, it's hard to believe they're on the same system. Do the same with the PC or Xbox, and although there's a difference, it's not nearly as marked.
When the Game Cube and Xbox each came out, they both looked (at least to my taste) a fair bit better than the PS2. Before long, though, the PS2 games were a good match with the other consoles.
With the lackluster screens being shown so far and the quantity of "bullshots," I don't think the PS3 titles will live up to the system's touted graphical power.
It definitely raises expectations of mission duration, but it shouldn't hurt funding.
No matter how long these rovers last, they move slow. Most unmanned missions are orbiters (which don't get the detail of a lander) or stationary drop landers, which cover very limited area. Even these rovers haven't covered much area. Even if they last five more years, they probably won't reach significantly different terrain. The bit in the article about spending months traversing a crater just to find that the rocks on the other side are pretty much the same should demonstrate that.
Planets are big things. A new rover, placed in a much different starting condition from Spirit or Opportunity, will give fresher and more unique data than Spirit or Opportunity will get by going over that next hill. Some of the recent Mars news sounds to me like Spirit and Opportunity are now existing very much just to cross, "that next hill." Good things can (and do) come from that, but NASA need only point out that usually, the other side of that hill looks pretty much like the one you're on now, and that they would learn more by sending a new rover to completely different hills.
Society's already giving an interesting change that should ease overpopulation in developed countries: More and more people, in the US, in Europe, moreso in Japan, aren't having children. There have been projections that these countries could actually see a population decline in the next 50-100 years.
As for developing countries, where overpopulation is a problem and will probably become worse in the next 50-100 years, do you really think they'll live for 1000 years, that this technology will be accessible to countries that can't even maintain their basic infrastructure for their entire population?
For that matter, do you believe you or I will live for 1000 years? If this sort of thing is possible in our lifetime, it will be fantastically expensive. It'll only be an option for people who have a LOT of money, and I can see it being a financed sort of thing that it'll take you most of that thousand years to pay off. This isn't just going to be a free aging shot you get every November at the local supermarket like you get flut shots now.
History has shown that, more often than not, first to market=first to games=first to sales. Price has never been a serious factor before, though, so Nintendo has an extra chip in their pile if they can pull off a cheap launch (Seeing as, despite being last in sales behind MS and Sony, they were first in profits, I don't doubt they'd be willing to eat an initial loss to get back on top).
Another boon for Nintendo is the delay rumors around the PS3. If it IS delayed even half as long as some of the rumors, that means Nintendo's still got a good shot at beating Sony to market. Sony got out first with the PS1 and PS2, and that head start hurt Nintendo both times in overall sales.
Microsoft will almost certainly get out first by the looks of things, but I still expect their Japanese game linup is going to be weak like it was with the original Xbox. They'll have the first-out advantage in the US, definitely, the Xbox didn't do poorly by any measure, but they have a bad track record in Japan against a household name. I think people there will be much more likely wait for the Revolution or PS3 rather than buy a 360. If Nintendo gets a good release lead on Sony, and have the games to back it up (Their weakness with the DS, although the same can be said for the PSP) they can easily come out on top.
Maybe Nintendo's got their act back together. Only thing I'll say without a "maybe" or "if only" or "I dunno" attached is that the news right now doesn't look too hot for Sony.
Yeah, I don't think this will have an overall effect on the release dates of games. Launch titles are usually done before launch, so there's time enough to catch up and release both Japanese and English versions with the console. But after that, I think it'll revert to the usual. The games will be written in their native language (be that Japanese or Enligh), and released in either the US or Japan when it's finished, and the translation will be started later in development - when the script is finalized, and thus take longer to complete for the overseas release.
To make a simultaneous software release as opposed to hardware would mean a change to the development process, which I don't think it warranted. Either they do it like they do now and delay the initial release while they wait on translations (which makes no sense, and could hurt the games in the long run), or they produce both versions simultaneously, meaning that every change to the content has to be done twice, rather than translating a completed script as they do now.
I played games like this, and I also played more mainstream MMORPGs where GMs had a much greater control over game events.
The problem in every single one of them came down to GM corruption. In one game, GMs would kill off unpopular players. Out killing spiders, eh? BOOM, level 500 dragon tha normally only appears as part of special events hits you for n+1 damage and you die and gain a status effect that prevents you from reviving until you cure it, and you can't cure it because your dead and can't do anything BUT revive.
Another one, GMs would give their friends extraordinarily powerful stuff. I knew a player who'd been given a set of armor and a staff named after her that was so powerful it actually rendered her immune to all damage types except one (which she took 10% damage from).
Another one, GMs only had the power to trigger monster attacks on towns. Town, middle of nowhere, spawn gate in a nice secure spot and a wall that would trap the guards so they couldn't attack the demons the GM creates (which normally "spoils" a mob, so it gives no loot or experience). GM can spawn Demon Spires all day long, and his friends can kill them and get amazing loot. For that matter, the GM himself could kill them in two hits and leave the loot for said friends, but they wouldn't also be able to rack up 25,000,000 exp a night then.
Furthur: One game, which because of developer shortsight (or rather, their twisted vision of what an MMORPG should be) made grief play not only easy, but almost imossible to advance without doing, ended up having a serious problem. Somebody could stand in a dark passage that was only wide enough for one person to pass, weight down the shift and left keys, and would kill everybody who came through there in three shots - because they had a weapon given to them by a GM which was not intended for player use. The solution was to have GMs hunt down, kill, and loot griefers, which rapidly decayed into GMs hunting down normal PKs who killed their player characters, and even GMs stalking members of opposing guilds and telling their or their friends' guilds where to find them, if the GM didn't feel like just dropping down a barricade around thim and killing thim himself.
And don't even ask me what the Arcs in Anarchy Online have been known to do. I could cost some of my real life and online frinds their cozy free subscriptions if I said HALF the stuff they do to give people they know a leg up.
One more, I was a GM, but I was tasked with the unhappy job of GMing the other GMs, tracking their abuses, undoing the damage they did to the game world where possible and handing it over to the devs where it wasn't, and even revoking other GM's powers. This was particularly messy, since due to dev shortsight, this caused them to become visible and mortal (while they're normally invincible and only visible when they need to be) wherever they happen to be. Since they have 1 hp, this almost invariably led to them dying and me having to barricade off sections of towns (usually active towns, since GMs hang around where players do, since they can't do their job otherwise), so players couldn't loot GM tools. Occasionally, people did. I had a real wild goose chase tracking down a Demon Summoner which somehow fell into player hands and was traded accross a dozen accounts. By the time I'd tracked where it went and banned one owner, the next one had already had his fun and sold it. Tracking it down eventually required an emergency reboot, a three hour rollback (which made a lot of people angry, obviously), and a server patch to actually change the functioning of all GM items to ban any user who tried to use them if they weren't a GM. (This also led to a second reboot when a bug caused them to also ban all GMs who used them, but that wasn't the GMs fault)
Actually, the article doesn't just talk about lunar missions. It also says that the crew launcher would be used to take astronauts to the ISS, and that the larger payload launcher (Which can launch a payload larger than the combined weight of the shuttle and its maximum payload) would take over for large orbital launches, such as ISS components. Which makes a lot of sense - if you look at the "dream vision" of the ISS in completion, it has parts too large to carry up in the shuttle.
Slashdot Mirror
Typed a nice reply to this, but somehow replied to posts down instead...
Anyway, when it comes down to it, even when games are designed to reward the "right" thing and punish the "wrong" thing, sometimes just the way the system works opens the a for solutions that we would abhor in real life, or even completely counterintuitive solutions.
Take the death camp solution: Your city is being wiped out by a highly virulent disease. Why would it not be considered acceptable to save a real city by sacrificing the sick population? Because you're killing people, plain and simple. You can't do that for any number of reasons.
In the game, though, the terms are different, depending on your exact goal. Let's say for the sake of simplicity that the situation is a war between neighboring cities, and your goal is simply to win. You have different options: One one hand, you can divert forces away from the war effort and dedicate significant effort and attention to stop t he spread of the disease and cure those who have it, or at least keep them isolated while they live out their final days, which still requires the resources to keep them alive with no payoff, as well as the resources for your doctors, who are spending their effort to care for people who will probably die later. This is the "good guy" way out, and it would be the one that I would advocate in a real life epidemic.
However, this is a game. Nobody's actually dying, just numbers are going up and down based on my inputs. So, instead of the monumental investment in hopes of saving my population, I just isolate or eliminate the diseased population as rapidly as possible and with a minimum investment of time and resources. After that, I'm back to the war effort with a healthy population. Better yet, I throw them at the other city and let HIM deal with the mess it makes.
Sorry about that, I know it has little to do with the grandparent post, replied to the wrong thread somehow
The issue decribed mentions plague. In Dungeon keeper, I'd usually hollow out a nice room out on my front lines and lock the door into it. In some of the later levels, disease becomes a bitch to deal with, and it's very expensive to build a large enough temple to try to cure everybody.
My solution when it got out of hand was to round up diseased minions and throw them in the locked room to keep them from spreading, then using imps to whip up a fight and throwing my sick units onto the enemy lines and locking the doors behind them. This would solve multiple problems: it would stall enemy aggression into my dungeon, it would get diseased minions away from my healthy ones, and it will spread the disease into the enemy dungeon, and the AI isn't nearly as creative at dealing with it.
Video games don't always work like real life. No matter how good they get, there's always some bit that means it's better to do something that makes no sense than to do what you would expect. Few examples:
Starcraft: There's an early mission where you need to survive for 20 minutes. Realistically, it would be best to dig in and try to repel the zerg assaults. However, because the zerg start out with a relatively small force and build up throughout the mission, I always faired best by waiting until after the first wave was over (when the enemy would have relatively few units on hand) and then going all out offensive and wiping out the zerg, then going to get lunch while the last 15 minutes count down.
How about the sandbag trick in Command and Conquer? You'd never think that sandbags were the most powerful weapon of any war effort, would you?
The Advance Wars series has a bunch of defensive "survive for n days" missions. Realistically, you'd again hunker down and blast incomming forces. But, advance wars gives the attacking unit an advantage, so to win, you have to be on the offensive.
Theme Hospital had a great one. Realistically, you'd never think that barricading the health inspector in a room somewhere would be a good idea, or just surrounding him on four sides with benches and vending machines, but you can do that in the game and then proceed to get away with the most greivous violations imaginable and he'll never be any the wiser. As long as he can't reach the front desk, he can't begin his inspection.
It's just the way games work. Every system has its flaws or exploits or whatever you want to call them, and they often make it so that doing things the "wrong" way is much more time and resource efficient than doing them the right way.
I used to play Civ II a lot, back before Civ III came out. Realistically? Democracy is great, I love Democracy, not a big fan of Fundamentalism. Playing Civ II, though... at the first sign of impending war, Democracy went out the window and in comes Fundamentalism. If I was having problems with civil disorder, why try to appease the people when it's often faster and chaper to have a revolution to Communism and institute martial law until the root problem can be corrected?
Just out of curiosity, is Bonhomie Snoutintroff a known name? I've never seen it before, but I did notice that the last name looks like it would be pronounced "Snout-in-trough," which somehow seems a bit appropriate after those last couple paragraphs.
I guess you didn't RTFA? Or the URL? for example, did you notice the URL says, /eff_needs_to_die/?
Perhaps you didn't read the big that says, "the worst possible development would be to find the EFF arguing the case"? Second page, the EFF's credited with blowing a case that "only an EFF principal could blow" despite the fact that the article even says directly above that the case isn't closed yet.
Then it gets into just plain meaningless slamming of Gilmore, suggesting that the EFF is only fighting to protect the rights of air travelers because Gilmore, "doesn't like to be searched, and thinks only about himself," obliquely accuses him of intentionally submarining efforts of rights advocates, page one even suggests that he sides with porkbarrel politicians.
Just to round it all off, the writer, who just finished writing the most arrogant article I've read outside of my local "news" has his little description of himself. I would have left that off, myself, it's in very poor representation of him after the article: "He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous... ventures that...no longer exist," and, "his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession" after just indulging in unabashed ad hominem attacks on the end of an otherwise passable article, and finally, "His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility."
Judging by his unrepentent lack of humlity, I guess he's not that great of a visionary either.
That's already started. Graphics haven't advanced much in realism in the last few years, but there are now new graphical styles that weren't explored in the past. Cell shading and other unusual graphical styles are becomming more common, not less as your statements would suggest.
When the status quo has been perfected, then new innovation is much more likely. Look at the Atari games: Some people wax nostalgic over them, but how many of them followed the same basic pattern as Pong and Arkanoid? How many more were variations on mazes inspired by Pac Man? And many of the others were much like Space Invaders or Pitfall.
They did that for a very long time until Nintendo came out with Super Mario World and shattered a lot of common conceptions about games. Remember that first time in the game? You get to the end of the screen and you KEPT GOING. It was a shock, you'd rarely or never seen that before. But you sure saw a lot of it over the following ten years. Hundreds of variations on the same concept, even taking older styles like Space Invaders adding the scrolling screen in place of the old static playfields. By the time the Playstation rolled around, that style had been played out, and I had trouble mustering any enthusiasm for just another platformer.
Every genre of games have gone through that too. Several times, in some cases. For a long time, every FPS followed a simmilar pattern to Doom. A lone gunman against hordes of mindless cannonfodder. And there were a LOT of FPS, and they started to become stale. Periodically, something completely different would come along. Half Life, Max Payne, Deus Ex, and it would bring some new life to the genre.
Now, do the same thing with books, movies, paintings, poetry, and plays.
It's like comparing Vanilla Ice to Beethoven. The argument could be made taht Vanilla Ice was indicative of the state of music, at least in its genre, but can the same be said of Beethoven? When Beethoven was alive, new symphonies came out like movies do now. A few new ones each week, if not more often than that. Some of them were ok, some were excellent, some didn't get the recognition they deserved because the composer couldn't get a venue to play it, some weren't that great, but were made by a locally popular composer and got much more attention than they were really worth.
What we have now is the music of that time that survived the test of over a century.
A better example would be movies. They came out even more rapidly years ago than they do now. Ask your grandparents: They'd go to the theater and watch the newsreel, a movie they'd never seen before, a few serials (usualloy half-hour TV shows, but on the big screen), and then another new movie. You can do this every saturday, and there were usually still choices. Saginaw had three theaters back then: Temple, Court, and another one on the east side that's been torn down. Often, each one would have a different set of movies running.
How many of those movies do you still see on DVD or the classic movie channels today? Not many. You see the ones that have stood the test of time and were accepted as among the best of their respective time. Not everybody agrees. Just like you find people who enjoy obscure classical music you've never heard of, there are people who prefer one of Carry Grant's hundred-some-odd movies you don't see in the DVD racks.
Books are even moreso. There are thousands of books written any given year. If you were to accept the books you see refernced in most discussions of classical literiture as the entire artistic output of their time, then it would lead us to believe that only a few hundred books were written in any given century. It's just not the case.
Some people comment that most modern art doesn't look as good as older works of art, but it's the same effect. People have always produced weird and stupid stuff and called it art. Five years later, it may still be remembered, but fifty years later, a lot of it is forgotten. Time distills the vast creative output down into a relatively small subset which could be considered best, or perhaps most representative.
Some bands were popular ten years ago, but now we're all ashamed to admit we even listened to them, let alone that we can still recite Vanilla Ice lyrics on demand. Two hundred years from now, few people will even recognize the name Vanilla Ice, but they'll still recognize Beethoven or Bach, and they'll remember some subset of singers from the last twenty years.
The same will happen to today's playwrites and authors, directors and actors, and even to our games. Some of games will be remembered some day as works of art, some just as simple fun, others may be studied to see the core aspects of the genre, the same way a professor today will pick apart Chopin to demonstrate the overall style of music, or Michelangelo's David to see the thousands of very simmilar works of religious art from the time. And then again, the other thousands of them will probably fall into obscurity, and some may even be lost entirely over time.
Heck, a few may even be remembered for being complete travesties. Some of the worst movies ever made have earned the same immortality that the greatest have.
Somebody above posted this link: http://www.slate.com/id/2117309/
Basically, to use your example, you spent that $1,000,000 of investor money (not your own). However, you collect investments of $100,000,000 to cover your rediculous budget, and you have a German company as your producer. Under German law, you get that tax deduction before the movie enters production, and then lease the film for your US studio for actual filming. So that's $99,000,000 you basically pocket on your $100m movie that really cost $1m.
Now, let's say your film goes to market and makes $125 million in revinues. By contract obligations, you pay back your investors their $100 million plus interest. Let's say 10% for another 10 million. Or, if you really screwed them, they signed for a percentage of the profits instead of that 10%, which means they get a set percentage out of $25m which could end up being even less. Heck, if you're lucky, the movie won't even make back the budget and your investors also get screwed even out of their full $100m.
All scenarios aside, let's say you agreed to 10% interset on the investment. That means $110m out of the $125m goes back to the investors, and your studio makes another $15m for a grand total of $114m profits on a movie that "cost" $100m and grossed $125m.
It's called cooking the books, it can get you in a lot of trouble, but a lot of companies get away with it for decades. However, if you have a good team of lawyers to handle your contracts and such, you can probably get away with this sort of thing without technically breaking the law.
Cases in point: Stonetalon and Hillsbrad. Stonetalon is an alliance rogue playground. Try to do any of the quests - any of them, seriously - on a pvp server without getting ambushed a dozen times. Especially the ones that require you to go up north, near the alliance camp. Hillsbrad, heck, my usual server isn't even pvp, but from THursay evening until Monday morning, the field between Tarren Mill and Southshore is a constant back-and-forth war. Since Arathi Basin came out, it's shifted a bit into Arathi, with the back and forth being between Hammerfall and Refugee Point. Don't evne try questing in most of Arathi, half the mobs in the zone will either be agroed into the raid groups or you'll just get caught in the lag caused by all those people running around hitting stuff.
The issue in MMORPGs becomes the issue that has been hashed out regarding Final Fantasy XI more than once: Having multiple groups in a dungeon area does, on one hand, allow for some cool interaction, but it also invites game-breaking abuse. The issue FFXI had was that guilds would large groups to monopolize bosses for weeks at a time, both making them incredibly rich and preventing other people in the game from finishing quests or getting good items themselves.
Most MMOs are set up so there's lots of space that allows, and often forces, interaction and confrontation between guilds. My personal favorite in World of Warcraft is trying to get into Blackrock Mountain to do one of the several instance dungeons inside. My server's one of the highest population servers in the US, and on weekends, it's not unusual for the areas outside of the instances to erupt in occasional skirmishes and sometimes large scale fights.
On the other hand, the instanced areas allow for the laying out of much more complex events than are feasible in a multi-party area. In many of the instance dungeons in WoW, there are chains of events that have to be triggered to open certain areas, unlock certain bosses, or complete certain quests. With multiple parties moving around in an area, this will cause all sort of headache. Imagine just clearing one of the pit bosses in Sunken Temple, only to have a party upstairs activate the last statue and spawn it again. Not only do you have to fight a fairly strong boss unprepared, but the other party just got screwed out of the boss THEY worked to spawn.
There's a balance to be sought between interaction and confrontation between players and the controlled teamwork scenarios in dungeon instances. An MMO needs the interaction with other players, but it also benefits greatly from the much richer content you can implement in an instance's controlled conditions.
Yeah, the expansion was called Limb from Limb. Added a few new monsters, a second campaign. Interplay sold Die by the Sword and Limb from Limb in a dual-jewel pack just like they did with Fallout and Fallout 2, you can probably find that for $10 online.
Not only was it all about Everquest, the guy strikes me as a bit hypocritical about the matter.
First, he goes into great detail of how he uses multiple accounts and multiple characters simultaneously because he didn't want to deal with finding a party or having to try to do things in a party that wasn't perfectly rounded.
Then, he talks about his guild, and how he doesn't want selfish "me-first" people, but instead wants people who will give and help others.
I don't know. Making multiple accounts to avoid the typical troubles of a party strikes me as pretty selfish.
Maybe I'm spoiled from years of playing MMOGs with deeper gameplay, where it takes a good chunk of one person's attention and both hands on the keyboard to handle just one character, let alone your own private army of SIX.
Sorta puts things in perspective when the most selfish thing I've ever had to deal with was a warlock who wouldn't ease up on the shadowbolts for a minute or so to let the warriors maintain agro.
Freespace 2 didn't do good mostly because of Interplay. There's probably a thousand examples of solid games that they barely even tried to sell. Die by the Sword comes to mind. Good game, completely unique playstyle, even if it did seem like a tech demo sometimes. I think that between DBtS and the expansion, I saw a grand total of one magazine ad for both six months after they'd come out, and never saw them on shelves anywhere. Same goes for Freespace, which I only once saw on shelves. That could be because Wing Commander: Prophecy came around the same time, and then there was that other Wing Commander game that was made free for download for a while. The space sim genre has never been strong enough to support multiple major releases in a short time.
More likely the first, if they used the same test they use now. It's false negative rate is so low as to be zero, but it's false positive rate is actually higher than the rate of HIV infection, so only around a third of those who test positive and agree to follow-up testing are confirmed to have the disease.
The article doesn't say anything about what tests he had done, but it sounds like it was just that one test. If that's the case, he could have tested false positive, freaked out, and refused further testing.
Monopolies were illegal in the US before, too. SBC's taken over here in Saginaw the same way Ma Bell did years ago.
Back in the days of crank-operated phones, this city had two city-owned phone services, one on each side of the river. They had some repulsively cute nicnames like Sweet and Pleasant or something like that. ATT took over by accusing the city of anticompetitive practices and basically ground the local cheap service to dust.
About 3 years ago, Saginaw was back to the old position: We had four phone companies in addition to the standard Ameritech. Three of them were available in my area without any special hoops to jump through, and all four matched Ameritech's prices (Depending mostly on how much long distance you had, you could save a LOT with them, too). There were a bunch of smaller services which came and went and weren't very reputable, but they were still phone companies.
One by one, SBC bought up the little ones. One of them put up a big fight complete with TV ads bashing SBC and Ameritech before it's bill showed up one month with the letters SBC added to the old logo. Finally, last year, the Ameritech sign comes down on the old ATT building and the SBC sign goes up. SBC had already owned Ameritech, but they claimed to be a different company locally, even competing with their little pickup companies against Ameritech and trying to steal customers from Ameritech. Now, though, it doesn't matter what you did for those years while we had plenty of phone options, you have an SBC bill now, because SBC bought all the other companies.
Hallow's End is one of those things that's simmilar enough to real life that you say, "Hey, it's Halloween!" but different enough that it can be fit into the game's world. For specifics: Hallow's End was originally celebrated in the Eastern Kingdoms to commemorate the people killed in the Second War. It's taken up popularity in Orgrimar and Darnassas more recently. I didn't see mention of it in the article, but that's not all going on in WoW. The Undercity is currently celebrating something called the Wickerman Festival, celebrating their escape from the Lich King's control. The highlight of the event is the burning of a giant wicker caricature of Arthas.
I should dig my free account out of the dust and check it out. I've got mixed feelings about WoW's haloween event. It's got some really cool seasonal quests, like stinkbombing Southshore and egging an inn, but alot of it seems just thrown in. In particular, my troll male can't wear any of the cheap costume masks, because instead of being on his face, they seem to be impaled through his skull.
So 10 minutes of some stupid video game excerpt was more important than explaining how Isildur died.
Stuff like that was what worried me years ago when I first heard about the LOTR movies.
Not that they would do this, but that they' WOULDN'T. LOTR, as it's set in the books, isn't very theatrical. There's a lot of walking. A lot of discussion and revisiting of old topics, lots historical background, lots of closure to plot lines lines that didn't actually play a part in the trilogy, some of which don't make complete sense unless you also read the Silmarillion or the Hobbit. There were lots of bits of minor excitement leading to entire chapters - and Tolkein seems to have liked long chapters - of talking and singing and carrying on (The Tom Bombadil stretch is a good example), which could be skipped without damaging the major plot thread.
That works in books. It works very well in books, in fact. Just not in movies. With a movie, you have that invisible clock ticking - the LOTR movies were pushing the limits of how long I wanted to sit in a cramped, poorly cleaned theater chair pondering what caused the strange discoloration on the back of the seat in front of me.
A lot of the backstory had to get dropped. Look at Serenity: One of it's main weaknesses is that it's an ending, not a beginning. People who didn't watch Firefly tend to be lost. LOTR had to be a beginning. It was pulling the series off the shelves of nerds and putting it in front of the entire world.
Movies also have to end on a BIG finish. I liked the Scouring of the Shire, it was an important part of the books, but it wasn't that exciting compared to the apocalyptic battle that just finished. I've seen movies that end like that, and I find myself wondering more when it'll be done so I can go pee than what's actually happening.
Sorry to reply seriously to a joke, but my guess is they'll have the same problem as early PS1 and PS2 games. They may have threading issues just like the Xbox360 as well, but I'm still betting on graphics being the one that'll hurt.
Remember the early PS1 games? A lot of them were 2D or mixed 2D/3D (Final Fantasy VII had 2D environments with chunky, lego-man 3D characters, many others had 3D environments with 2D objects in them). It was a good while before good-looking fully 3D games were the norm, and even then, there were 2D games that came out like Valkyrie Profile and various fighters that looked much smoother than simmilar 3D games.
Then the PS2. A lot of the early games looked butt ugly when compared to the recent releases. To look back at GTA3 next to San Andreas on the PS2, it's hard to believe they're on the same system. Do the same with the PC or Xbox, and although there's a difference, it's not nearly as marked.
When the Game Cube and Xbox each came out, they both looked (at least to my taste) a fair bit better than the PS2. Before long, though, the PS2 games were a good match with the other consoles.
With the lackluster screens being shown so far and the quantity of "bullshots," I don't think the PS3 titles will live up to the system's touted graphical power.
It definitely raises expectations of mission duration, but it shouldn't hurt funding.
No matter how long these rovers last, they move slow. Most unmanned missions are orbiters (which don't get the detail of a lander) or stationary drop landers, which cover very limited area. Even these rovers haven't covered much area. Even if they last five more years, they probably won't reach significantly different terrain. The bit in the article about spending months traversing a crater just to find that the rocks on the other side are pretty much the same should demonstrate that.
Planets are big things. A new rover, placed in a much different starting condition from Spirit or Opportunity, will give fresher and more unique data than Spirit or Opportunity will get by going over that next hill. Some of the recent Mars news sounds to me like Spirit and Opportunity are now existing very much just to cross, "that next hill." Good things can (and do) come from that, but NASA need only point out that usually, the other side of that hill looks pretty much like the one you're on now, and that they would learn more by sending a new rover to completely different hills.
Society's already giving an interesting change that should ease overpopulation in developed countries: More and more people, in the US, in Europe, moreso in Japan, aren't having children. There have been projections that these countries could actually see a population decline in the next 50-100 years.
As for developing countries, where overpopulation is a problem and will probably become worse in the next 50-100 years, do you really think they'll live for 1000 years, that this technology will be accessible to countries that can't even maintain their basic infrastructure for their entire population?
For that matter, do you believe you or I will live for 1000 years? If this sort of thing is possible in our lifetime, it will be fantastically expensive. It'll only be an option for people who have a LOT of money, and I can see it being a financed sort of thing that it'll take you most of that thousand years to pay off. This isn't just going to be a free aging shot you get every November at the local supermarket like you get flut shots now.
History has shown that, more often than not, first to market=first to games=first to sales. Price has never been a serious factor before, though, so Nintendo has an extra chip in their pile if they can pull off a cheap launch (Seeing as, despite being last in sales behind MS and Sony, they were first in profits, I don't doubt they'd be willing to eat an initial loss to get back on top).
Another boon for Nintendo is the delay rumors around the PS3. If it IS delayed even half as long as some of the rumors, that means Nintendo's still got a good shot at beating Sony to market. Sony got out first with the PS1 and PS2, and that head start hurt Nintendo both times in overall sales.
Microsoft will almost certainly get out first by the looks of things, but I still expect their Japanese game linup is going to be weak like it was with the original Xbox. They'll have the first-out advantage in the US, definitely, the Xbox didn't do poorly by any measure, but they have a bad track record in Japan against a household name. I think people there will be much more likely wait for the Revolution or PS3 rather than buy a 360. If Nintendo gets a good release lead on Sony, and have the games to back it up (Their weakness with the DS, although the same can be said for the PSP) they can easily come out on top.
Maybe Nintendo's got their act back together. Only thing I'll say without a "maybe" or "if only" or "I dunno" attached is that the news right now doesn't look too hot for Sony.
Yeah, I don't think this will have an overall effect on the release dates of games. Launch titles are usually done before launch, so there's time enough to catch up and release both Japanese and English versions with the console. But after that, I think it'll revert to the usual. The games will be written in their native language (be that Japanese or Enligh), and released in either the US or Japan when it's finished, and the translation will be started later in development - when the script is finalized, and thus take longer to complete for the overseas release.
To make a simultaneous software release as opposed to hardware would mean a change to the development process, which I don't think it warranted. Either they do it like they do now and delay the initial release while they wait on translations (which makes no sense, and could hurt the games in the long run), or they produce both versions simultaneously, meaning that every change to the content has to be done twice, rather than translating a completed script as they do now.
I played games like this, and I also played more mainstream MMORPGs where GMs had a much greater control over game events.
The problem in every single one of them came down to GM corruption. In one game, GMs would kill off unpopular players. Out killing spiders, eh? BOOM, level 500 dragon tha normally only appears as part of special events hits you for n+1 damage and you die and gain a status effect that prevents you from reviving until you cure it, and you can't cure it because your dead and can't do anything BUT revive.
Another one, GMs would give their friends extraordinarily powerful stuff. I knew a player who'd been given a set of armor and a staff named after her that was so powerful it actually rendered her immune to all damage types except one (which she took 10% damage from).
Another one, GMs only had the power to trigger monster attacks on towns. Town, middle of nowhere, spawn gate in a nice secure spot and a wall that would trap the guards so they couldn't attack the demons the GM creates (which normally "spoils" a mob, so it gives no loot or experience). GM can spawn Demon Spires all day long, and his friends can kill them and get amazing loot. For that matter, the GM himself could kill them in two hits and leave the loot for said friends, but they wouldn't also be able to rack up 25,000,000 exp a night then.
Furthur: One game, which because of developer shortsight (or rather, their twisted vision of what an MMORPG should be) made grief play not only easy, but almost imossible to advance without doing, ended up having a serious problem. Somebody could stand in a dark passage that was only wide enough for one person to pass, weight down the shift and left keys, and would kill everybody who came through there in three shots - because they had a weapon given to them by a GM which was not intended for player use. The solution was to have GMs hunt down, kill, and loot griefers, which rapidly decayed into GMs hunting down normal PKs who killed their player characters, and even GMs stalking members of opposing guilds and telling their or their friends' guilds where to find them, if the GM didn't feel like just dropping down a barricade around thim and killing thim himself.
And don't even ask me what the Arcs in Anarchy Online have been known to do. I could cost some of my real life and online frinds their cozy free subscriptions if I said HALF the stuff they do to give people they know a leg up.
One more, I was a GM, but I was tasked with the unhappy job of GMing the other GMs, tracking their abuses, undoing the damage they did to the game world where possible and handing it over to the devs where it wasn't, and even revoking other GM's powers. This was particularly messy, since due to dev shortsight, this caused them to become visible and mortal (while they're normally invincible and only visible when they need to be) wherever they happen to be. Since they have 1 hp, this almost invariably led to them dying and me having to barricade off sections of towns (usually active towns, since GMs hang around where players do, since they can't do their job otherwise), so players couldn't loot GM tools. Occasionally, people did. I had a real wild goose chase tracking down a Demon Summoner which somehow fell into player hands and was traded accross a dozen accounts. By the time I'd tracked where it went and banned one owner, the next one had already had his fun and sold it. Tracking it down eventually required an emergency reboot, a three hour rollback (which made a lot of people angry, obviously), and a server patch to actually change the functioning of all GM items to ban any user who tried to use them if they weren't a GM. (This also led to a second reboot when a bug caused them to also ban all GMs who used them, but that wasn't the GMs fault)
Actually, the article doesn't just talk about lunar missions. It also says that the crew launcher would be used to take astronauts to the ISS, and that the larger payload launcher (Which can launch a payload larger than the combined weight of the shuttle and its maximum payload) would take over for large orbital launches, such as ISS components. Which makes a lot of sense - if you look at the "dream vision" of the ISS in completion, it has parts too large to carry up in the shuttle.