The various hard-working developers have legimitate grievances that need to be addressed. That is why they are spending a considerable amount of time on this new project (which is really a duplicate effort, but required because the original project, at least in their eyes, has failed). Writing this down as "public embarrassing flame wars" is really a rather derogatory way to look at it, especially considering that these developers do not actually have control over the legions of fanboys here on/. who are happily spending their time flaming and doing nothing productive whatsoever.
In this context I'd like to point out that I love the way you write "flaming for peace" at the bottom of your posts...
There is no need to worry. All implementations of X use the same protocol to communicate with their clients, thus they are all compatible with each other.
You _might_ want to worry about fragmentation in the driver space though, especially with all those binary-only drivers...
I never really liked Rare's games either. I've played DKC a bit, and I thought it was competent but ultimately rather boring. This criticism is true for many modern platformers, BTW. Everything is so smooth, so polished, so... Meaningless. I remember games like Jet Set Willy where I positively _feared_ certain jumps or rooms. It was frustrating, but ultimately also far more rewarding.
I'm not entirely advocating going back to pixel-perfect jumps and instant death, but I'm sick to death of jolly tunes, bright neon colors, and emotionally empty games.
yes, but those are all OLD games. The article laments that there are no NEW British games that have a major impact on the world, and all that remains is old glory.
You are trying to spin this into a negative attribute of the open source world, while in reality the problem is far more severe for closed source. Microsoft regularly declares "end of life" on products still in use by millions of people, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. At least with open source you still have the _option_ of hiring someone else to fix your issues.
You should also get a better appreciation for contract relationships. If you have a contract with me saying I need to write software X and support it for Y years, you are fully in your right to demand I stick to that arrangement (and you can expect to pay for it). On the other hand, if the agreement is no more than "you pay nothing and get a (potentially extremely valuable) piece of software, in its current state, without guarantees, for free" than that is exactly what you get. You shouldn't come whining for more. What you _can_ do, if you want more, is approach the developer or another interested party for a real contract (you know, involving signatures, money, etc.).
this one. I've had mine since the day I first bought my first computer, and despite heavy use I've never broken one of these babies. And thanks to this gadget, I look forward to using it again!
While most reactions to your post are evidently from system administrators, I cannot agree more. There are too many sys admins around who think the company is their own private kingdom, and more often than not they have the means to enforce it (at least, in the short term). Couple that to being treated like shit by most people (they are, after all, always being associated with computers being broken!), and I see where some of them get their attitude.
So could the system admins here please realize that us users just want to do our work, with as little hassle as possible? Try to make that possible, hard as it sometimes is. And remember, while you are important to the company, so are your colleagues. Yes, even that cute secretary who opens every single attachment and whose best two attributes are sticking forwards (you could think of here as the "morale officer").
And could the users, in return, perhaps treat their sys admins as real people? Because, you know, they are. Next time you have a computer problem, call your system guy over, _honestly_ tell him what happened ("I opened the attachment"), and then offer to get him some coffee while you are waiting for him to fix your machine. A bit of appreciation goes a long way to establishing a good working relationship, and it will guarantee you get a top response time in future problems.
Ah yes, "policy through phantom problem". Someone experienced a problem in the past, more often than not through his own incompetence, and has now made it into a hard policy that said technology/solution is off limits for everyone for all eternity, usually without any understanding what caused the problem in the first place.
In one case I had a program printing a rather large amount of data to a lineprinter. Since the buffer on such a printer is not that large it would hang while waiting for the printer to do its thing. Users complained (and rightly so), and I put in a thread to make the printing fully asynchronous. Next I was told by my boss that threads were unacceptable, since "they cause crashes".
Well, I can imagine how a highly complex multithreaded application can run into problems, but a simple worker thread, with a simple interface to the rest of the application, well-protected by a mutex, is perfectly safe. But no; in some unspecified project in a long-forgotten past there had been a Problem (the details of which were of course, long lost) and as a result I was not to use threads since that ancient project, written by someone else in another part of the world, might somehow contaminate my program and cause the same problem here. Yeah, right.
In the end I was saved by the bell - by the time my manager found out the project was already into acceptance testing (and doing just fine), and removing the thread would obviously be A Change, which would necessitate a new expensive acceptance test cycle. Since it never caused problems, the offending thread was allowed to live.
Of course at this time (five years later or so) everybody remembers that there was a responsiveness problem in a _PRE-RELEASE_ version of the software. That problem was fixed BEFORE RELEASE, and has never resurfaced. But with each new release we are still diligenty checking for "recurrence of responsiveness problem", because, hey, you cannot really trust those programming types right?
Don't misunderstand me here: actually I don't mind we are checking for a known old problem. What gets me is that nobody remembers what that problem actually was, or that we solved it about an hour after it was detected. What is the value of doing such a test if you do not know what you are testing for?
And of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have, at times, been forbidden to use threads, exceptions, templates, multiple inheritance, sockets (!?), and various other C++ features on account of all of these "causing crashes". One boss made me promise never to reuse code because that way I would also "reuse all the bugs".
It has became something of a hobby of mine to track policies to their initial event, and more often than not you find some minor problem (that could easily be solved, and more often than not _was_) has been blown out of all proportion, becoming a guiding principle for entire departments or even companies. And if nothing else, that's pretty sad...
'Not the performance Nintendo would have been looking for' is possibly the most accurate way to look at it. Yes, GameCube software sales rose by 26.5 per cent year on year by value, to 64.5 million (6 per cent of market value), but you'd expect that for a console only launched in May 2002. Units wise, sales rose by 63 per cent to 2.32 million, representing 4.8 per cent of all software sold.
I can think of quite a few companies and entire industries that would be ecstatic to see such growth, yet for the games industry this is not enough? Well, sorry if I take their next lament ("ohh, the evil pirates are destroying us!" or whatever crap) with a very large grain of salt...
Do you think there is any chance the Radeon 9800 will be supported in a decent fashion? I don't even care about 3D performance (that's for my games OS), but having a resolution greater than 800x600 would be _greatly_ appreciated...
You need a cheatbook. I recommend "messages and codes", which explains quite a few of the puzzles.
Of course "messages and codes" has its own puzzles, completely separate from the main game! I especially love those where it says "this error code is system specific, look in your platform documentation" (as if...).
I've been playing "Oracle" for a long time. Gameplay has undergone a lot of development during those years. For example, in the past I was playing on a Novell system which ran out of memory at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I have upgraded to a Linux box, on which I have recently completed the "installation" level. The difficulty of that level is phenomenal, combining all the tricks the Oracle developers have learned over the years: misleading messages, incorrect documentation, missing files, bad advice, etc. Of course it was merely a prelude to the "Pro*C" level...
Despite all the development the game is still fully text-based (reports of graphical interfaces have not been substantiated at this time). And unlike other game styles, the difficulty level has not dropped over the years. It is still a very difficult game, perhaps too difficult for novices. But like Nethack, I keep coming back.
Have you played Splinter Cell? It is far from a 'generic first person shooter'.
I have (now) played the demo. Maybe it was my failure in figuring out how to do it, but I could find no way to interact with any person or object, other than shooting. I've seen now that I was wrong - it is a third-person game, not a first-person game, but nonetheless my main point stands: it is a shoot'em-up. Stylish and beautiful, for sure, but still a shoot'em-up. Shoot'em-ups are great, I love them, but that's not the reason why I play Deus Ex.
Splinter Cell gets it right- the ammo you go in with, is generally all the ammo you get.
Do the weapons of your enemies disintegrate after you kill them, then? Or is your avatar unable to figure out how the enemies' guns work?
But, it does embody the spirit of what Deus Ex was about: Stealth, decision-making, a great story, you don't have to kill everybody...
Nonsense. In Deus Ex you are in the middle of the story, interacting with it every step of the way. In this game (and extrapolating from the demo, which should be representative) you get a "story-building" cutscene before the level starts and after that it is combat all the way. Once again, there is nothing wrong with that, but I expect a lot more from a Deus Ex game.
And annoying dialogue...tell me how many times you had to hear the bit about 'disabling your weapons' every time you went into a bar, in Invisible War? You can't tell me that kind of crap wasn't annoying..
Sure, that particular bit was annoying the tenth time. But many of the conversations with NPC's in the game were interesting and believable. And those conversations (as well as many of the other snippets of text, like the terminals) are part of what makes the game Deus Ex for me. Not just sneaking or combat, but interaction on another level as well.
I do not agree with you that Splinter Cell would have made a substitute for Deus Ex: Invisible War, and frankly I find it hard why you believe this to be the case. There is enough to complain about in DX:IW (see my other post for a list), but none of that could be fixed by replacing it with some random shooting game. Even one like Splinter Cell.
They are the expression of the human subconcious, given shape and voice through the power of the incredible/. machine. Luckily, we have moderation to stop them from destroying us all...
- Society developed along believable and interesting lines. I list this first since it is important in a plot-based game like Deus Ex.
- Interesting goodies and options.
- Some of the later levels are pretty good. Seeing the unatco base on liberty island again brought a tear to my eye.
- The physics engine really adds to the game. And when it screws up it can be pretty funny too (hint: try throwing a body at a flaming barrel. The thing will just about fly into orbit!)
Negative:
- Individual sections are too small (cut to fit the 64MB of XBox memory?). In Seattle, especially, I never felt like being in a city. And there are too few of them anyway, by the time the game really gets going it is just about over.
- Choices you make in one section barely influence what happens in another. The various parties are way too forgiving to you.
- Although everyone and everything casts a shadow, you yourself do not. It seems a strange oversight...
- The game is too easy. This was true for the first game as well, but since it was much longer that was less of an issue.
- The game rewards casual players far more than in-depth players. As casual player you will never run out of ammo or miss a story strand. An in-depth player is punished by hearing the same information over and over again, and will be forced to leave behind endless stacks of mod-canisters, ammo, weapons, and whatever. Speaking of which...
- I understand why they have one kind of ammo for all weapons, but I do not like it. There is far less strategy to weapon choice now.
- Since the game plays further in the future than the original Deus Ex, it does not feel quite so personal anymore. I've visited (in the great game of Real Life) Liberty Island, Battery Park, Hell's Kitchen, the Paris Catacombs, and many other locations from Deus Ex (Hong Kong and Area 51 are still on my todo list). By comparison, I doubt I'll ever set foot in a WTO arcology.
Despite all these complaints I enjoyed playing Invisible War! It is a good game; the complaint really is that it should have been _great_. At least it tries to do something new, to expand on the art of storytelling in games. And despite all the whining, it mostly succeeds in doing that.
So will there be a part 3? I really hope so; the brand is strong enough to allow it and by now they have the tools and experience to do it. And I think we deserve a game that covers the 20 years between J.C. and Alex, sort of like Deus Ex: the Dark Age;-)
Splinter Cell... This game is nearly everything that Deus Ex: IW *should* have been. Add in a little bit of character building, and some annoying dialogue, and this would have been the perfect Deus Ex game.
So your "perfect Deus Ex game" would be a generic first person shooter, burdened with some annoying dialogue? Puh-lease... Talk about not getting the point.
Slashdot Mirror
In this context I'd like to point out that I love the way you write "flaming for peace" at the bottom of your posts...
You _might_ want to worry about fragmentation in the driver space though, especially with all those binary-only drivers...
Yes, but we have it surrounded!
I know there are some excellent (if rather japanese) emulators around for this machine, but does anyone know where I can download software for it?
I'm not entirely advocating going back to pixel-perfect jumps and instant death, but I'm sick to death of jolly tunes, bright neon colors, and emotionally empty games.
Much like the country itself, then...
I'm happy to see there are still some people with good taste in the world ;-)
You should also get a better appreciation for contract relationships. If you have a contract with me saying I need to write software X and support it for Y years, you are fully in your right to demand I stick to that arrangement (and you can expect to pay for it). On the other hand, if the agreement is no more than "you pay nothing and get a (potentially extremely valuable) piece of software, in its current state, without guarantees, for free" than that is exactly what you get. You shouldn't come whining for more. What you _can_ do, if you want more, is approach the developer or another interested party for a real contract (you know, involving signatures, money, etc.).
he could go out and buy some more ingredients. Nah, that's just crazy talk...
this one. I've had mine since the day I first bought my first computer, and despite heavy use I've never broken one of these babies. And thanks to this gadget, I look forward to using it again!
I checked out the site and cannot find anything regarding AMD64 support. Is it there?
So could the system admins here please realize that us users just want to do our work, with as little hassle as possible? Try to make that possible, hard as it sometimes is. And remember, while you are important to the company, so are your colleagues. Yes, even that cute secretary who opens every single attachment and whose best two attributes are sticking forwards (you could think of here as the "morale officer").
And could the users, in return, perhaps treat their sys admins as real people? Because, you know, they are. Next time you have a computer problem, call your system guy over, _honestly_ tell him what happened ("I opened the attachment"), and then offer to get him some coffee while you are waiting for him to fix your machine. A bit of appreciation goes a long way to establishing a good working relationship, and it will guarantee you get a top response time in future problems.
In one case I had a program printing a rather large amount of data to a lineprinter. Since the buffer on such a printer is not that large it would hang while waiting for the printer to do its thing. Users complained (and rightly so), and I put in a thread to make the printing fully asynchronous. Next I was told by my boss that threads were unacceptable, since "they cause crashes".
Well, I can imagine how a highly complex multithreaded application can run into problems, but a simple worker thread, with a simple interface to the rest of the application, well-protected by a mutex, is perfectly safe. But no; in some unspecified project in a long-forgotten past there had been a Problem (the details of which were of course, long lost) and as a result I was not to use threads since that ancient project, written by someone else in another part of the world, might somehow contaminate my program and cause the same problem here. Yeah, right.
In the end I was saved by the bell - by the time my manager found out the project was already into acceptance testing (and doing just fine), and removing the thread would obviously be A Change, which would necessitate a new expensive acceptance test cycle. Since it never caused problems, the offending thread was allowed to live.
Of course at this time (five years later or so) everybody remembers that there was a responsiveness problem in a _PRE-RELEASE_ version of the software. That problem was fixed BEFORE RELEASE, and has never resurfaced. But with each new release we are still diligenty checking for "recurrence of responsiveness problem", because, hey, you cannot really trust those programming types right?
Don't misunderstand me here: actually I don't mind we are checking for a known old problem. What gets me is that nobody remembers what that problem actually was, or that we solved it about an hour after it was detected. What is the value of doing such a test if you do not know what you are testing for?
And of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. I have, at times, been forbidden to use threads, exceptions, templates, multiple inheritance, sockets (!?), and various other C++ features on account of all of these "causing crashes". One boss made me promise never to reuse code because that way I would also "reuse all the bugs".
It has became something of a hobby of mine to track policies to their initial event, and more often than not you find some minor problem (that could easily be solved, and more often than not _was_) has been blown out of all proportion, becoming a guiding principle for entire departments or even companies. And if nothing else, that's pretty sad...
'Not the performance Nintendo would have been looking for' is possibly the most accurate way to look at it. Yes, GameCube software sales rose by 26.5 per cent year on year by value, to 64.5 million (6 per cent of market value), but you'd expect that for a console only launched in May 2002. Units wise, sales rose by 63 per cent to 2.32 million, representing 4.8 per cent of all software sold.
I can think of quite a few companies and entire industries that would be ecstatic to see such growth, yet for the games industry this is not enough? Well, sorry if I take their next lament ("ohh, the evil pirates are destroying us!" or whatever crap) with a very large grain of salt...
Do you think there is any chance the Radeon 9800 will be supported in a decent fashion? I don't even care about 3D performance (that's for my games OS), but having a resolution greater than 800x600 would be _greatly_ appreciated...
Of course "messages and codes" has its own puzzles, completely separate from the main game! I especially love those where it says "this error code is system specific, look in your platform documentation" (as if...).
I've been playing "Oracle" for a long time. Gameplay has undergone a lot of development during those years. For example, in the past I was playing on a Novell system which ran out of memory at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I have upgraded to a Linux box, on which I have recently completed the "installation" level. The difficulty of that level is phenomenal, combining all the tricks the Oracle developers have learned over the years: misleading messages, incorrect documentation, missing files, bad advice, etc. Of course it was merely a prelude to the "Pro*C" level...
Despite all the development the game is still fully text-based (reports of graphical interfaces have not been substantiated at this time). And unlike other game styles, the difficulty level has not dropped over the years. It is still a very difficult game, perhaps too difficult for novices. But like Nethack, I keep coming back.
I wasn't dissing you, I was annoyed I couldn't do it myself ;-)
What's the use of a hosting company that crumbles at the first sight of a slashdotting anyway?
I have (now) played the demo. Maybe it was my failure in figuring out how to do it, but I could find no way to interact with any person or object, other than shooting. I've seen now that I was wrong - it is a third-person game, not a first-person game, but nonetheless my main point stands: it is a shoot'em-up. Stylish and beautiful, for sure, but still a shoot'em-up. Shoot'em-ups are great, I love them, but that's not the reason why I play Deus Ex.
Splinter Cell gets it right- the ammo you go in with, is generally all the ammo you get.
Do the weapons of your enemies disintegrate after you kill them, then? Or is your avatar unable to figure out how the enemies' guns work?
But, it does embody the spirit of what Deus Ex was about: Stealth, decision-making, a great story, you don't have to kill everybody...
Nonsense. In Deus Ex you are in the middle of the story, interacting with it every step of the way. In this game (and extrapolating from the demo, which should be representative) you get a "story-building" cutscene before the level starts and after that it is combat all the way. Once again, there is nothing wrong with that, but I expect a lot more from a Deus Ex game.
And annoying dialogue...tell me how many times you had to hear the bit about 'disabling your weapons' every time you went into a bar, in Invisible War? You can't tell me that kind of crap wasn't annoying..
Sure, that particular bit was annoying the tenth time. But many of the conversations with NPC's in the game were interesting and believable. And those conversations (as well as many of the other snippets of text, like the terminals) are part of what makes the game Deus Ex for me. Not just sneaking or combat, but interaction on another level as well.
I do not agree with you that Splinter Cell would have made a substitute for Deus Ex: Invisible War, and frankly I find it hard why you believe this to be the case. There is enough to complain about in DX:IW (see my other post for a list), but none of that could be fixed by replacing it with some random shooting game. Even one like Splinter Cell.
They are the expression of the human subconcious, given shape and voice through the power of the incredible /. machine. Luckily, we have moderation to stop them from destroying us all...
- Society developed along believable and interesting lines. I list this first since it is important in a plot-based game like Deus Ex.
- Interesting goodies and options.
- Some of the later levels are pretty good. Seeing the unatco base on liberty island again brought a tear to my eye.
- The physics engine really adds to the game. And when it screws up it can be pretty funny too (hint: try throwing a body at a flaming barrel. The thing will just about fly into orbit!)
Negative:
- Individual sections are too small (cut to fit the 64MB of XBox memory?). In Seattle, especially, I never felt like being in a city. And there are too few of them anyway, by the time the game really gets going it is just about over.
- Choices you make in one section barely influence what happens in another. The various parties are way too forgiving to you.
- Although everyone and everything casts a shadow, you yourself do not. It seems a strange oversight...
- The game is too easy. This was true for the first game as well, but since it was much longer that was less of an issue.
- The game rewards casual players far more than in-depth players. As casual player you will never run out of ammo or miss a story strand. An in-depth player is punished by hearing the same information over and over again, and will be forced to leave behind endless stacks of mod-canisters, ammo, weapons, and whatever. Speaking of which...
- I understand why they have one kind of ammo for all weapons, but I do not like it. There is far less strategy to weapon choice now.
- Since the game plays further in the future than the original Deus Ex, it does not feel quite so personal anymore. I've visited (in the great game of Real Life) Liberty Island, Battery Park, Hell's Kitchen, the Paris Catacombs, and many other locations from Deus Ex (Hong Kong and Area 51 are still on my todo list). By comparison, I doubt I'll ever set foot in a WTO arcology.
Despite all these complaints I enjoyed playing Invisible War! It is a good game; the complaint really is that it should have been _great_. At least it tries to do something new, to expand on the art of storytelling in games. And despite all the whining, it mostly succeeds in doing that.
So will there be a part 3? I really hope so; the brand is strong enough to allow it and by now they have the tools and experience to do it. And I think we deserve a game that covers the 20 years between J.C. and Alex, sort of like Deus Ex: the Dark Age ;-)
So your "perfect Deus Ex game" would be a generic first person shooter, burdened with some annoying dialogue? Puh-lease... Talk about not getting the point.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard people make this mistake, I would have enough to buy a burger by now...
So we can safely assume you are on teh spoke, then? ;-)
Alternatively, do what we do here on earth: spray them with windscreen fluid...