In Prince of Persia 2(the original side-view platforming series), you reach a point in the game where you must die to continue....yeah.
You see, you're in this temple, and you want to steal the magic flame hidden inside it. But, as one message reads, "he who would steal the flame must die."
The thing is, you might easily miss this and get stuck, because the player can "end" the Prince's death and restart the level at any time. Instead you have to wait for quite a while after he dies, perhaps 15 seconds, to get the flame. It's metagaming in the most direct sense - you, the player, have to take action - or inaction rather - at a point when you normally are no longer controlling the gameplay, the place where we all habitually hit the button and restart/reload. And neither are you directly addressed to do something different after your death - the entire puzzle hinges upon correctly interpreting the message.
Very tricky puzzle, that one. But then, PoP2 as a whole was a tricky game, with many puzzles of that nature. Unfortunately the whole thing got bogged down by introducing new types of traps and fights that were frustrating and less satisfying than the original's.
If/when I even manage to finish the game I'm working on(a scrolling 2d action title...what you might get if you mixed Wing Commander with racing and changed the format), I'll release it as a GPL'd shareware game: the code's free, the content isn't.
I only came to accept this idea because of the language I chose when I started the project - Python. While it's possible to compile binaries in Python...it's only really *necessary* for Windows. Unix-based systems(and any other platforms that might run PyGame/SDL) are generally better equipped to run programs in script form, and binary packaging would introduce some ugly overhead. Additionally, I was planning to have "moddable" elements in the engine from the beginning, so, of course, why not make it totally open? It's growing into something that could handle any sort of 2d game using tiles and sprites(i.e. most of them - it's a bit on the slow side of course but I can still get 90+ fps), and I'm planning to reuse it myself.
In the worst case, nobody will care about the game or the engine. It would have made no difference whether it was closed or open then - a project to replace or extend the original content might form but it couldn't, out of necessity, end up being the exact same game, leaving the purchasing incentive intact.
But in the best case, I get free press, a stronger community, and a better game.
Remember that when the concept was first invented, companies did not build their business on fundamentally new concepts. Only individuals could hope to do so. (additional historical background) If you came up with a little invention, good for you. Big companies(if any, since patents came about before industrialization) only existed in commodity sectors, like steel or oil. The only thing they might have reason to patent is, of course, new processes. And unlike with software patents, if you invent, say, a better way to extract iron, and then sit on it without using it, life can still continue, because the old method was working fine.
Where the law becomes highly distruptive is in our current era, where businesses making money by pushing around information are not only possible but highly successful. Patents in this context are harmful for two reasons:
First, in a purely conceptual business world, any barrier set on accessing an idea imposes significant economic loss not just on competitors but also on consumers and businesses only indirectly related to the market, because now time and money must be spent creating an alternative solution that otherwise could have be spent on something genuinely innovative and benificial. Music formats, for example....MP3 works, but the cost of using it in software has set back any technology based on it's use, and has encouraged society to develop alternatives like OGG.
Second, with the advent of PCs and the Internet, illegal uses of patented(or copyrighted for that matter) concepts can go undetected for quite a while. Only large corporations are capable of taking on the world. And at least on the file-sharing front, it's proving to be a massive struggle. Patent violations are easier to pursue, but even so, a small owner can do little to stop it. Another example...
If Joe's small(shareware?) business, ABCsoft, sells ABCwork 1.0 containing patented Foo technology, and Bob decides to make a free clone, XYZwork, recreating the Foo technology, what is Joe going to do? He can go through the courts and penalize Bob, but if we assume that Bob has already released XYZwork, some unscrupulous person will always be around to host it. Joe may have lost $500k because of the continued presence of XYZwork, but can he get that much out of Bob? Not likely. Big companies have some advantages here if only because their products are larger and harder to recreate, and can contain more sophisticated legal minefields. Yet at the same time they too are vulnerable; it will be only a matter of time before the system collapses due to the impossibility of indefinitely maintaining these shields.
It may seem blindingly obvious, but the best way to go about getting new ideas is to come into contact with those of other people(regardless of their field) and then link them up to make something original.
Given that many people today haven't ever touched old games, not even the most classic, the most basic and revolutionary of them, I think a good start to a designer's curriculum would be based primarily on seminar classes where the students investigate older works within, say, a given platform or time frame, and then discuss and write on them. As the field progresses, a more standardized pattern of study would emerge as we better recognize the most important aspects - the alternative being years of toiling away at emulators and playing everything in the library of each and every 8-bit platform from A to Z as I have done - or tried to do; the 16-bit era I have only slightly trodden into, and while I've tried to keep up with modern stuff, it's hard to do in any depth since games tend to get much bulkier as time goes on - but for the time being what's necessary is a program that turns out designers who have a clear view of what's been tried before, and how it has/hasn't worked. Even if they don't come up with anything new, they should become competent at identifying some successful forms of gameplay and avoiding classic pitfalls. That's the whole point of their training, after all; to learn game design at a level that average people wouldn't reach on their own.
It was 1995, and the library at our elementary had a whole bunch of Macs, times being what they were. I believe they still had the IIes around at that point, but with the only software for them being 10+ years old, their days were numbered...my high school kept theirs around longer because there was a great grammar practice program series for various languages...corrected your mistakes and everything, unbeaten even by the newest ones. So anyway I used the Macs cause they had software I hadn't seen before, being a PC user, which naturally made them more interesting to use.
I came across Hypercard at some point, but I remember wondering what the point of it was. I set up simple "click-through" tests but I never discovered the magic scripting powers everyone describes. It was all hidden to me, and so Hypercard seemed like nothing more than a toy, though it stuck in my mind quite a while, since I did find it quite interesting. I knew there was more there but I couldn't get at it(if only I had had a manual...) Probably I would have figured it out if I had spent enough time in there, but that wasn't to be. One can sneak into the library during lunch hours only so many times....;)
The MSX version is in fact totally different from the NES one in level design, though the gameplay is basically identical, right down to the pixel-level. This is evident from the very beginning, where you start with an underwater entrance rather than the paradrop of the NES version.
I don't know what happened there, but the MSX one is definitely the original, as are Castlevania and Dragon Quest 1.
Yes, you can lose out in practical terms when you let gaming(as with any hobby) overwhelm the rest of your life.
But then, I also think that it's a necessary thing for one to lose themselves in their dreams for at least a year or two of their life, especially when you're younger and have little power to do great things yourself. Games offer one way to do that. I gamed hardcore, I guess, for maybe four years in middle and high school.
It's only unhealthy, I think, if it's done for the wrong reasons. I gamed as much out of a care for the games as anything else; I wanted to see every one there was, and through the magic of (ahem) emulation I've managed to cover great amounts for pretty much any platform up until maybe 1994, but still nowhere near all. And coming out the end of it I knew what I wanted to do; design them.
Compare this to my roommate, now that I'm here in college. Games are a buffer, a drug, for him. They are, like reading forums, watching movies, and TV, a way to pass time. One of the most telling particular cases of this was when one of the guys down the hall knocked and asked if we wanted to go to dinner with the floor(as we often do). He said no, he just came back from class and had to "unwind." He did come back, but he "unwound" by playing about three hours' worth of Halo multiplayer, followed by dinner and then approximately another three hours. If he finds Halo unappealing at the moment he fidgets a bit and then turns to another of the aformented activities. It's as though he were waiting for something, but I'm not quite sure what. It makes me uneasy to see him do it though, since I know he's not playing with my goals, nor is he really doing any role-playing or vicarious living through simulation. It's just something he *does*, using all of his free time to do it.
Because different groups have different ideas of how the game should be played, the rules as written usually don't actually matter as much as one might be led to believe, scanning through all the pages of different rules and statistics and options and tables as I remember doing when I was younger. When it comes down to it, all the material, the minatures, the sourcebooks, the rulesets - all are just tools to help along the storytelling, and fun reading in between sessions.
They do help in some aspects, I have to admit, but if you figure you can do a better job yourself, then you can easily roll your own with the guidance of a meta-system like FUDGE. The difference between it and something that's big by design like GURPS is mainly a matter of the fluffy pieces of detail, stuff like the exact effects of consuming a case of beer or getting hit with a radiation blast of 1000 rads or how far characters should be able to jump.
Run to two years. That's to clean everything up, add portability, and externalize all the gameplay-related code, which is unfortunately heavily spread around throughout the source(written in C, not C++), so that modmaking becomes a viable option.
I suspect that it would probably be easier to integrate an interpreter(such as Python or Lua) and start converting the gameplay to that, though regardless it will be quite a mammoth task to refactor the project:P
The only difference is that video games are still too new to have properly settled themselves into a couple of classics, and the market isn't particularly interested in pushing forward unless profit can be found. Production values seem like a sort of trade-off to me; for a few million bucks you can make a game that looks fantastically real, but at the same time has become devoid of any unified personal touch by dint of being produced by a huge team rather than a small group or a single person. I really haven't seen any big-budget games within the last ten-odd years that have managed to overcome this problem; they all seem to get mired in this sort of muddled, disunited world-view, where you get things like campy dialogue spoken by uber-realistic, vicious-looking thugs and secret agents, while moody BGM plays. Certainly, some fare better than others, but the old perfection of the experience is pretty much gone in big titles now. I think that smaller ones will continue to be the place for real innovation for the immediate future.
A CLI that had lots of programs with simple optional curses-based menu systems(but nothing using the mouse).
Why?
Because I remember what it was like when I was little. Typing quickly was difficult, and my mouse control wasn't so great either. So what I really wanted was something with short commands that still let me choose what I wanted.
So in that context, some sort of standard menu that appeared if I just typed, say, "cp" without arguments would be great. I would have access to all the options, without having to read and interpret the man page and then copy the things I wanted by hand into the command line. And if I wanted to do power-user type things or shell scripts, the options would still be around.
It wouldn't even have to be an interface that let me get at all the little features and options; just supporting the basic tasks would be simple enough.
In my writing class(which is just now ending), we wrote several encyclopedia-style entries for the KnowledgeWeb Project. They had to be factually correct, of course, with research and citings and some form-filled information for technical purposes. The entries I worked on varied from pathetically easy(locomotive) to impossible(Henry Hindley, whom I managed to find about two sentences' worth on after considerable searching through the Britannica and Americana, Who's Who's, and then in historical listings of clockmakers. You can see what I came up with on Wikipedia.) Comparatively, I've also started up new articles in Wikipedia anonymously, some of them stubs and others full articles.
Based on this experience, I've decided that it's FAR, FAR easier to work on a Wikipedia article than one that would go in a commerical encyclopedia. Not just because there's peer review without any institutionalization required(someone reviewing generally reviews the article itself and not the database info), but because the amount of research any one person has to do is minimal for most topics; if you know something, you put it in, else you leave it open for the next guy and mark the article a stub. Eventually someone comes along who knows the bits that are missing, and the article is completed with a minimum of tedium on everyone's part. The articles that nobody knows about, you can post bounties for, and eventually someone brave and passionate about the subject will take on the adventure of searching through dusty archives in the real world looking for the letters or documents that would give him material for an article. There's not really any commercial interest to spoil this picture, since it's all entirely voluntary.
Vandalization is less of a problem than one might think; if the article is simply turned into whitespace, you roll it back from the history, which covers 100 edits IIRC. If there's bad information, someone had to work hard to come up with it and put it there; it can't be done on a massive scale like other forms of Internet abuse, and it takes at most an equal amount of effort to give the bad information a place as a "minority viewpoint," and much less to just roll the page back. If rival factions fight over an entry, then either it gets hammered out over time into something acceptable to both sides, or it gets locked.
However, I admit that I still am hesitant to cite Wikipedia as a source, and turn to the library's Britannica for all my encylopedia citations and fact-checking, just because of that "you never know" tendency. It'll probably go away as the Wikipedia becomes better developed and respected. I know that the development of Internet citations took a similar path while I was in school. In middle school(the mid-to-late 90s), the Internet was still "new enough" that many teachers just banned citing from it outright. Later, by high school, they had developed lists of trusted sites to access. Now in college, I can feasably cite anything I want off the Net if I think it's trustable, but most of what I end up using are official documents in PDF format from some research or government group, because they all post them online these days. Wikipedia citations will probably follow in a year or three.
Is that when I was 3 me and my older brother made these little cardboard cut-out replicas with gold and silver marker of all the items in the original Legend of Zelda.
I'm a n00b with Blender. After about three tries that failed right at the start I've been making good progress on a humanoid character; a high-poly one(I'm doing a game with pre-rendered sprites), but nonetheless a pretty good one.
There are plenty of tuts that point you in the right direction, but mine basically involved starting with a torso outline, then extruding/rescaling and repeating until the outline of the full torso's made. Once you have the outline, you chop off half of the character so that you only need to deal with one side, and then start adding detail and the additional appendages. With subdivision surfaces and decent anatomy knowledge you can get a fantastic-looking result with only a few hours' work.
Strangely enough, I've had more difficulty in making spaceships than on this character.
Twin Galaxies does NOT host submitted videos for the public. Why? Because most of these videos are NOT a mere five minutes. They tend to be several hours' worth, because most records, even speed runs, can't be completed any faster. If someone tries to "marathon" a classic game that he's previously mastered, it can stretch on past a day's length. (And in those cases live refereeing rather than video is probably the only viable option) That, of course, would cost them a lot in bandwidth and storage to host, even if it were only the "world records," since TG has hundreds of those.
So for those reasons, they won't host any videos at all. You'll have to take their word for it that it was true.
If you can't take the bad with the good, I'm sorry, but you simply aren't tolerant.
Freenet is the ultimate test of tolerance - will you allow things you(and possibly most people) disagree with, such as those things the parent just mentioned, in exchange for supporting those things that you DO agree with? Or will you say "no deal?" It's hard to say that anyone "wins" whichever side you choose, since you don't know what you're participating in, but in the end it's all a matter of trusting that the elements you like will prevail regardless. If you're a cynical bastard, you'll mutter something like the parent post, and move on with your life. If you're super-optimistic like me, you'll think it's keen ^.^
Painkiller moves as slow as molasses and has, well, "painfully" repetitive play. The physics additions are little different from any other special effects gimmick - knocking down the balconies was sort of interesting, but the level provided little opportunity to really make use of it other than to take down the odd barrel or zombie. Indeed, the level was garbage. Now, I'll admit that I didn't go the whole way through it before I felt that I'd had enough, but it seemed pretty clear to me that the whole thing wasn't going to be much more than variations on "corridor, corridor, open area. Corridor, corridor, open area. Badger, badger, badger." There was some modest challenge in defeating the zombies and cloaked guys, but that could not possibly sustain the length of an entire game. The zombies in Quake 1 were truthfully much more interesting than these, seeing as they were a real hassle unless you had gibbing power handy.
Apparently Slashdotters will have to get the full version and play through a dozen levels of this tripe to figure that out.
...were emulated fairly imperfectly and had features cut out from the original games(mainly the two player options though I believe difficulty modes might've also been cut).
Slashdot Mirror
http://bane.servebeer.com/programming/blender/
In X11, this problem is usually caused by the cursor settings. Some people have to render it with software mode, others hardware.
I dunno about under other platforms. I never had trouble with it in Windows.
In Prince of Persia 2(the original side-view platforming series), you reach a point in the game where you must die to continue. ...yeah.
You see, you're in this temple, and you want to steal the magic flame hidden inside it. But, as one message reads, "he who would steal the flame must die."
The thing is, you might easily miss this and get stuck, because the player can "end" the Prince's death and restart the level at any time. Instead you have to wait for quite a while after he dies, perhaps 15 seconds, to get the flame. It's metagaming in the most direct sense - you, the player, have to take action - or inaction rather - at a point when you normally are no longer controlling the gameplay, the place where we all habitually hit the button and restart/reload. And neither are you directly addressed to do something different after your death - the entire puzzle hinges upon correctly interpreting the message.
Very tricky puzzle, that one. But then, PoP2 as a whole was a tricky game, with many puzzles of that nature. Unfortunately the whole thing got bogged down by introducing new types of traps and fights that were frustrating and less satisfying than the original's.
If/when I even manage to finish the game I'm working on(a scrolling 2d action title...what you might get if you mixed Wing Commander with racing and changed the format), I'll release it as a GPL'd shareware game: the code's free, the content isn't.
I only came to accept this idea because of the language I chose when I started the project - Python. While it's possible to compile binaries in Python...it's only really *necessary* for Windows. Unix-based systems(and any other platforms that might run PyGame/SDL) are generally better equipped to run programs in script form, and binary packaging would introduce some ugly overhead. Additionally, I was planning to have "moddable" elements in the engine from the beginning, so, of course, why not make it totally open? It's growing into something that could handle any sort of 2d game using tiles and sprites(i.e. most of them - it's a bit on the slow side of course but I can still get 90+ fps), and I'm planning to reuse it myself.
In the worst case, nobody will care about the game or the engine. It would have made no difference whether it was closed or open then - a project to replace or extend the original content might form but it couldn't, out of necessity, end up being the exact same game, leaving the purchasing incentive intact.
But in the best case, I get free press, a stronger community, and a better game.
Where the law becomes highly distruptive is in our current era, where businesses making money by pushing around information are not only possible but highly successful. Patents in this context are harmful for two reasons:
First, in a purely conceptual business world, any barrier set on accessing an idea imposes significant economic loss not just on competitors but also on consumers and businesses only indirectly related to the market, because now time and money must be spent creating an alternative solution that otherwise could have be spent on something genuinely innovative and benificial. Music formats, for example....MP3 works, but the cost of using it in software has set back any technology based on it's use, and has encouraged society to develop alternatives like OGG.
Second, with the advent of PCs and the Internet, illegal uses of patented(or copyrighted for that matter) concepts can go undetected for quite a while. Only large corporations are capable of taking on the world. And at least on the file-sharing front, it's proving to be a massive struggle. Patent violations are easier to pursue, but even so, a small owner can do little to stop it. Another example...
If Joe's small(shareware?) business, ABCsoft, sells ABCwork 1.0 containing patented Foo technology, and Bob decides to make a free clone, XYZwork, recreating the Foo technology, what is Joe going to do? He can go through the courts and penalize Bob, but if we assume that Bob has already released XYZwork, some unscrupulous person will always be around to host it. Joe may have lost $500k because of the continued presence of XYZwork, but can he get that much out of Bob? Not likely. Big companies have some advantages here if only because their products are larger and harder to recreate, and can contain more sophisticated legal minefields. Yet at the same time they too are vulnerable; it will be only a matter of time before the system collapses due to the impossibility of indefinitely maintaining these shields.
Linux is a pirate ship! arrr....
It may seem blindingly obvious, but the best way to go about getting new ideas is to come into contact with those of other people(regardless of their field) and then link them up to make something original.
Given that many people today haven't ever touched old games, not even the most classic, the most basic and revolutionary of them, I think a good start to a designer's curriculum would be based primarily on seminar classes where the students investigate older works within, say, a given platform or time frame, and then discuss and write on them. As the field progresses, a more standardized pattern of study would emerge as we better recognize the most important aspects - the alternative being years of toiling away at emulators and playing everything in the library of each and every 8-bit platform from A to Z as I have done - or tried to do; the 16-bit era I have only slightly trodden into, and while I've tried to keep up with modern stuff, it's hard to do in any depth since games tend to get much bulkier as time goes on - but for the time being what's necessary is a program that turns out designers who have a clear view of what's been tried before, and how it has/hasn't worked. Even if they don't come up with anything new, they should become competent at identifying some successful forms of gameplay and avoiding classic pitfalls. That's the whole point of their training, after all; to learn game design at a level that average people wouldn't reach on their own.
It was 1995, and the library at our elementary had a whole bunch of Macs, times being what they were. I believe they still had the IIes around at that point, but with the only software for them being 10+ years old, their days were numbered...my high school kept theirs around longer because there was a great grammar practice program series for various languages...corrected your mistakes and everything, unbeaten even by the newest ones. So anyway I used the Macs cause they had software I hadn't seen before, being a PC user, which naturally made them more interesting to use.
;)
I came across Hypercard at some point, but I remember wondering what the point of it was. I set up simple "click-through" tests but I never discovered the magic scripting powers everyone describes. It was all hidden to me, and so Hypercard seemed like nothing more than a toy, though it stuck in my mind quite a while, since I did find it quite interesting. I knew there was more there but I couldn't get at it(if only I had had a manual...) Probably I would have figured it out if I had spent enough time in there, but that wasn't to be. One can sneak into the library during lunch hours only so many times....
Robotron can be marathoned. The difficult maxes out.
is well known for being perhaps the safest big city in the world. That's why they can get away with it there.
The MSX version is in fact totally different from the NES one in level design, though the gameplay is basically identical, right down to the pixel-level. This is evident from the very beginning, where you start with an underwater entrance rather than the paradrop of the NES version.
I don't know what happened there, but the MSX one is definitely the original, as are Castlevania and Dragon Quest 1.
Yes, you can lose out in practical terms when you let gaming(as with any hobby) overwhelm the rest of your life.
But then, I also think that it's a necessary thing for one to lose themselves in their dreams for at least a year or two of their life, especially when you're younger and have little power to do great things yourself. Games offer one way to do that. I gamed hardcore, I guess, for maybe four years in middle and high school.
It's only unhealthy, I think, if it's done for the wrong reasons. I gamed as much out of a care for the games as anything else; I wanted to see every one there was, and through the magic of (ahem) emulation I've managed to cover great amounts for pretty much any platform up until maybe 1994, but still nowhere near all. And coming out the end of it I knew what I wanted to do; design them.
Compare this to my roommate, now that I'm here in college. Games are a buffer, a drug, for him. They are, like reading forums, watching movies, and TV, a way to pass time. One of the most telling particular cases of this was when one of the guys down the hall knocked and asked if we wanted to go to dinner with the floor(as we often do). He said no, he just came back from class and had to "unwind." He did come back, but he "unwound" by playing about three hours' worth of Halo multiplayer, followed by dinner and then approximately another three hours. If he finds Halo unappealing at the moment he fidgets a bit and then turns to another of the aformented activities. It's as though he were waiting for something, but I'm not quite sure what. It makes me uneasy to see him do it though, since I know he's not playing with my goals, nor is he really doing any role-playing or vicarious living through simulation. It's just something he *does*, using all of his free time to do it.
They do help in some aspects, I have to admit, but if you figure you can do a better job yourself, then you can easily roll your own with the guidance of a meta-system like FUDGE. The difference between it and something that's big by design like GURPS is mainly a matter of the fluffy pieces of detail, stuff like the exact effects of consuming a case of beer or getting hit with a radiation blast of 1000 rads or how far characters should be able to jump.
Run to two years. That's to clean everything up, add portability, and externalize all the gameplay-related code, which is unfortunately heavily spread around throughout the source(written in C, not C++), so that modmaking becomes a viable option.
:P
I suspect that it would probably be easier to integrate an interpreter(such as Python or Lua) and start converting the gameplay to that, though regardless it will be quite a mammoth task to refactor the project
The only difference is that video games are still too new to have properly settled themselves into a couple of classics, and the market isn't particularly interested in pushing forward unless profit can be found. Production values seem like a sort of trade-off to me; for a few million bucks you can make a game that looks fantastically real, but at the same time has become devoid of any unified personal touch by dint of being produced by a huge team rather than a small group or a single person. I really haven't seen any big-budget games within the last ten-odd years that have managed to overcome this problem; they all seem to get mired in this sort of muddled, disunited world-view, where you get things like campy dialogue spoken by uber-realistic, vicious-looking thugs and secret agents, while moody BGM plays. Certainly, some fare better than others, but the old perfection of the experience is pretty much gone in big titles now. I think that smaller ones will continue to be the place for real innovation for the immediate future.
A CLI that had lots of programs with simple optional curses-based menu systems(but nothing using the mouse).
Why?
Because I remember what it was like when I was little. Typing quickly was difficult, and my mouse control wasn't so great either. So what I really wanted was something with short commands that still let me choose what I wanted.
So in that context, some sort of standard menu that appeared if I just typed, say, "cp" without arguments would be great. I would have access to all the options, without having to read and interpret the man page and then copy the things I wanted by hand into the command line. And if I wanted to do power-user type things or shell scripts, the options would still be around.
It wouldn't even have to be an interface that let me get at all the little features and options; just supporting the basic tasks would be simple enough.
Based on this experience, I've decided that it's FAR, FAR easier to work on a Wikipedia article than one that would go in a commerical encyclopedia. Not just because there's peer review without any institutionalization required(someone reviewing generally reviews the article itself and not the database info), but because the amount of research any one person has to do is minimal for most topics; if you know something, you put it in, else you leave it open for the next guy and mark the article a stub. Eventually someone comes along who knows the bits that are missing, and the article is completed with a minimum of tedium on everyone's part. The articles that nobody knows about, you can post bounties for, and eventually someone brave and passionate about the subject will take on the adventure of searching through dusty archives in the real world looking for the letters or documents that would give him material for an article. There's not really any commercial interest to spoil this picture, since it's all entirely voluntary.
Vandalization is less of a problem than one might think; if the article is simply turned into whitespace, you roll it back from the history, which covers 100 edits IIRC. If there's bad information, someone had to work hard to come up with it and put it there; it can't be done on a massive scale like other forms of Internet abuse, and it takes at most an equal amount of effort to give the bad information a place as a "minority viewpoint," and much less to just roll the page back. If rival factions fight over an entry, then either it gets hammered out over time into something acceptable to both sides, or it gets locked.
However, I admit that I still am hesitant to cite Wikipedia as a source, and turn to the library's Britannica for all my encylopedia citations and fact-checking, just because of that "you never know" tendency. It'll probably go away as the Wikipedia becomes better developed and respected. I know that the development of Internet citations took a similar path while I was in school. In middle school(the mid-to-late 90s), the Internet was still "new enough" that many teachers just banned citing from it outright. Later, by high school, they had developed lists of trusted sites to access. Now in college, I can feasably cite anything I want off the Net if I think it's trustable, but most of what I end up using are official documents in PDF format from some research or government group, because they all post them online these days. Wikipedia citations will probably follow in a year or three.
That I really need a joystick, myself. Gamepads with thumbstick just don't cut it for games that expect precision movement.
Any recommendations?
Is that when I was 3 me and my older brother made these little cardboard cut-out replicas with gold and silver marker of all the items in the original Legend of Zelda.
The fighting part was no different ^.^
I'm a n00b with Blender. After about three tries that failed right at the start I've been making good progress on a humanoid character; a high-poly one(I'm doing a game with pre-rendered sprites), but nonetheless a pretty good one.
There are plenty of tuts that point you in the right direction, but mine basically involved starting with a torso outline, then extruding/rescaling and repeating until the outline of the full torso's made. Once you have the outline, you chop off half of the character so that you only need to deal with one side, and then start adding detail and the additional appendages. With subdivision surfaces and decent anatomy knowledge you can get a fantastic-looking result with only a few hours' work.
Strangely enough, I've had more difficulty in making spaceships than on this character.
Twin Galaxies does NOT host submitted videos for the public. Why? Because most of these videos are NOT a mere five minutes. They tend to be several hours' worth, because most records, even speed runs, can't be completed any faster. If someone tries to "marathon" a classic game that he's previously mastered, it can stretch on past a day's length. (And in those cases live refereeing rather than video is probably the only viable option) That, of course, would cost them a lot in bandwidth and storage to host, even if it were only the "world records," since TG has hundreds of those.
So for those reasons, they won't host any videos at all. You'll have to take their word for it that it was true.
"Free Money" sounds like a counterfeiting tool to me >.>
If you can't take the bad with the good, I'm sorry, but you simply aren't tolerant.
Freenet is the ultimate test of tolerance - will you allow things you(and possibly most people) disagree with, such as those things the parent just mentioned, in exchange for supporting those things that you DO agree with? Or will you say "no deal?" It's hard to say that anyone "wins" whichever side you choose, since you don't know what you're participating in, but in the end it's all a matter of trusting that the elements you like will prevail regardless. If you're a cynical bastard, you'll mutter something like the parent post, and move on with your life. If you're super-optimistic like me, you'll think it's keen ^.^
Painkiller moves as slow as molasses and has, well, "painfully" repetitive play. The physics additions are little different from any other special effects gimmick - knocking down the balconies was sort of interesting, but the level provided little opportunity to really make use of it other than to take down the odd barrel or zombie. Indeed, the level was garbage. Now, I'll admit that I didn't go the whole way through it before I felt that I'd had enough, but it seemed pretty clear to me that the whole thing wasn't going to be much more than variations on "corridor, corridor, open area. Corridor, corridor, open area. Badger, badger, badger." There was some modest challenge in defeating the zombies and cloaked guys, but that could not possibly sustain the length of an entire game. The zombies in Quake 1 were truthfully much more interesting than these, seeing as they were a real hassle unless you had gibbing power handy.
Apparently Slashdotters will have to get the full version and play through a dozen levels of this tripe to figure that out.
...were emulated fairly imperfectly and had features cut out from the original games(mainly the two player options though I believe difficulty modes might've also been cut).
I wouldn't hold my breath on this one.