While I think there is merit to venting steam in a game, if you need to vent steam, I suspect it's not the whole story.
See, if there was an inverse proportion between how much you do X in a game, and how much you need to do X in the real world (where X can be violence or anything else), then those of us playing Lawful Good, and if at all possible peaceful, characters in games would be the Antichrist incarnate in Real Life.
E.g., I invariably play a lawful good person in games. I find the idea of harming inocents inherently abhorrent. And btw, by "Lawful Good", I don't mean only D&D games, but rather the general idea and code of conduct. Even if it's not even an RPG at all, I try to help the NPCs and keep them happy. E.g., in city/empire building games I try to give my citizens/subjects/whatever the highest standard of living possible in the game/scenario.
The only game I could force myself to play until the end as an evil son-of-a-bitch was KOTOR. I find it more like repulsive than anything even resembling entertainment. Taking out frustration on an inocent, even an NPC, is something that's hard-wired as "wrong" in my brains.
(And no, I'm not gonna foam at the mouth against games where it's possible to play an evil SOB. _I_ don't find that entertaining for myself, but then I don't find RTS entertaining either, and that doesn't mean I'm gonna lobby against RTS. If that's what floats _your_ boat, sure, knock yourself out, for all I care.)
By now someone's probably just itching to jump in and say some variant of "WTF? Are you a total nut-job? They're NPCs, for f-word's sake. They don't have feelings. WTF is wrong with harming those?" (Yes, I know that. It's just not the kind of story line I enjoy, ok?)
But it actually brings me to the real point: I suspect the real factor there is precisely that you know it's just a game. Regardless of whether you give money to NPC beggars or beat them with a baseball bat to vent steam, in the end what matters is: you _know_ it's just a game and they're just NPCs.
You _know_ that what happened for example in World Of Warcraft is just that: something that exists only in WoW. You won't ever wake up in the Real World thinking "I must drop by at the smithy and pick a new mithril breastplate on the way to work."
Or to give another example, in City Of Heroes people often jump off bridges and skyscrappers to save time, because COH heroes can never die from falling damage. (Lowest you can get from falling is 1 hp.) But you know that that happened only in a game, and is valid only in that game. The closest I've ever come to extrapolating that to RL was along the lines of "heh, if it was COH I'd jump down instead of taking the stairs." Worth a brief chuckle, but nothing more.
Ditto about venting frustration by beating up NPCs. You _know_ that you're not really hurting any real human. You know it in the back of your brains even while you're doing it in a game. That's IMHO really what keeps you from doing it In Real Life.
And that's what all these "waaah, but games get them used to being violent" scare-mongers just don't get. In the end games get you used to being _not_ violent. You're immersed into something which you _know_ to not harm anyone.
For someone to put an equals sign between violence in a game and violence in the real world, their perception would have to be deffective to start with. And if someone really is that brain-damaged to not be able to tell the difference between a fantasy world and reality, then IMHO it won't be just games. They'll likely confuse any other fantasy world, be it from novels or from movies or from comics, with the real one.
Can't say I've made a proper statistic of who hits stationary objects more, but I see some guy or another doing it almost every other day. Being by and large the programming building here (well, one of them), we're by far more guys than women in it and in the parking lot. So again, I can't say it's a comparison based on equal samples, or representative samples, or anything.
But anyway, our smoking place overlooking the parking lot, now and then I get to see a guy bumping with the car into the parking lot number plates. Or some guy's car parked right against one. Or some guy parking/having parked right between two park places, or for bonus points diagonally.
So at the very least I'd say it's not a woman-only passtime.
Admittedly, though, it could also reflect the quality of the people hired lately as part of "saving costs". Some of them have trouble even with the basics, such as copy and pasting text from a log file. Nah, they'll make a 1600x1200 screenshot including the terminal Window and paste it into a Word file. For bonus points: one sent such a screenshot of an email in Outlook, presumably because advanced functions like "Forward" were beyond his grasp. Again, we're talking "programmers", not a secretary hired purely for cup size.
So, well, it's probably less than surprising that some of them have problems parking, or probably even tying their shoelaces in less than 3 tries.
E.g., World Of Warcraft currently has some 2 million subscribers. If a whole 10% of them were that influenceable, you'd have some 200,000 people running around with swords trying to slash their class mates.
In reality, we have, what? Maybe 10-20 people who were anywhere near (debatably) influenced by games, out of maybe that many millions of gamers. We're not even talking one percent, we're talking maybe 1 in a million.
And were games the real reason there? Or is it just another scapegoat? We have people who got bullied _daily_, and eventually one of them breaks under stress and goes homicidal. Happens every day among non-gamers too. E.g., since "Postal 2" is mentioned, the term "to go postal" has to do with, you know, post office employees and pre-dates video games.
But games make an easy scapegoat and a very visible straw man. Blaming everything on one simple bogeyman (games, jews in 1930's Germany, world conspiracies, etc) is _easy_. It lets one ignore the more complex _real_ problems.
We're all suddenly no longer to blame for failed parenting, the massive cultural failure in which being smart in school is _uncool_, for the social factors involved, etc. Nosiree, bob, it's the games that are to blame.
"I realize you were half joking, but if girls start playing games we're going to have to come up with a new rating system to prevent them from buying driving games"
You know, I find this sexist stereotype much more interesting than the gaming stereotype. And here's why. In games, we really don't know much yet what each population segment does. But when it comes to cars, there are corporations whose very source of money depends on knowing who does what. They're called insurance companies.
And here's what actual insurance data says: at an equal number of miles driven, women cause _half_ the number of accidents that guys cause. There are whole classes of cars which have higher insurance rates just because they appeal to a certain category of male cretin who drives like he must _prove_ his virility by driving fast and dangerous. That includes both teenagers and a large chunk of the mid-life crisis gang.
And here's some anecdotal evidence hint: when you see some idiot with added dual 4" exhausts (on a 1 liter inline car, how sad), sheet metal skirts/wings (bonus points: rear wing on a front drive car), fake disk brakes, and a ton of stickers (bonus points: VTEK sticker on a Toyota), chances are it's not a woman's car.
Frankly, I'm a guy, and I still find it sad. There's a whole group of idiots who seem to think that they must _prove_ they're a Real Man (TM) by driving like homicidal maniacs. That anything less than flooring it at a green light... just to have to brake at the next street light, might actually make them sprout breasts and a vagina.
Here's an idea: a man or a woman is what you _are_. You still have an Y chromosome no matter what. You don't have to "prove" anything. Taking unnecessary risks and endangering others too, doesn't make you a man, it just makes you an irresponsible idiot.
Have you read the licenses to some other non-MS stuff out there lately?
I seem to recall quite a few (e.g., Sun's or IBM's Java, since both of them are/. darlings) which explicitly say they're not for critical stuff. In fact, if you'll read their disclaimer, you'll see some far less critical stuff they're _not_ ready for.
I also don't seem to recall any program lately -- open source included -- which doesn't come with a "provided as is, no guarantee whatsoever, blah, blah, blah" in its license. Unless my memory fails me in my old age, it's a standard part of the GPL, so there goes Linux too.
There's a whole class of applications, e.g., embeded software used in airplanes, where that just won't cut it. You want stuff there that's had every single line and algorithm reviewed, because you're literally trusting your life to it. They're a whole other class of problem than having your blog or e-commerce site down for an hour or two. Down for a few seconds during an airplane's landing is enough to be a spectacular catastrophe.
I'd imagine that stuff implanted in your body would deserve to be in the same category.
So is Windows OK for that? Probably not, but then MS never advertised it as such. Is Linux ready for it? Not with a "no guarantees express or implied" disclaimer, it's not.
Frankly, I think real nerds are the least guilty of this.
Now I'm not an american, nor a native English speaker, so my evidence is just anecdotal at best. But out of all americans I did talk to on bulletin boards, newsgroups, MUDs, MMOs, etc, frankly, the techies were the _least_ guilty of it. In fact, the techies were the most likely to show contempt or be annoyed by mangled writing, especially the l33t n3tsp33k kind.
Or compare Slashdot to an average CS clan board or some non-technical boards. Sure, we pick on the occasional mis-spelling here, but IMHO it' on the average head and shoulders above the spelling level in other segments of the population.
What IMHO we have here is more like the effect that any script kiddie can claim they're a l33t h4xxx0r, and some computer-illiterate out there will believe them.
There's a whole class of people who aren't anywhere near actually having any actual computer skills, but think they're oh-so-great because they can run someone else's script. (Be it a rootkit script, a compile script in Linux, or whatever.) Or because they can do the most basic text editing in Word. And by "the most basic", I mean they didn't even get to (still basic) parts like using paragraph styles, or generally everything above the level of the old MS Write.
To cut a long rant short, I think it's _those_ pseudo-nerds who take pride in writing like a retard. It won't be a programmer who writes like Something Awful's Jeff K. The programmer already makes a living with typing, and won't gain anything by typing some abhomination "ne1 wanna cum hear b4 lunch, plz?" instead of the correct sentence with complete words. It'll be one of those wannabe pseudo-nerds who thinks he's oh-so-cool and oh-so-tech-savvy for writing in l33t sp34k.
But again, the problem is that someone out there will be computer-illiterate enough to believe them to be TEH UBER-L33T TECH GOD. ("Whoa, he can turn on a computer! He's so smart!") A lot of someones, in fact. And those someones will then extrapolate it to mean "nerds/techies talk/write/whatever like complete retards", because they can't tell who's who.
I'm not just picking on this particular message, but on a whole sub-set of tech support people who are, in fact, far more arrogant than the post I was answering to. Some seem to eventually get stuck in the mentality that everyone they're talking to is by default an idiot.
Again, not all. I did say a sub-set. I assume it's a small sub-set, but, you know, at some times that minority can be loud and annoying.
And it's not just towards uncooperative customers, but to people who didn't even ask the troll's help or opinion to start with. In which case, sorry, that excuse doesn't exist any more.
There's a whole class of "you're stupid if you don't take my word for <insert topic>. I'm TEH L33T EXPERT because I'm tech support for <insert completely unrelated field>" trolls. In fact, _the_ nastiest thing I've seen posted by a fanboy to someone complaining about a CTD (crash to desktop) bug in a game, namely "then you should pack your computer and take it back to the shop, because you're too stupid to own one" was... some alleged tech support veteran.
You see people arguing stuff like (massively paraphrased for compactness sake, since some of those rants go on and on for pages, but keeping the idea):
- "Noo, the game is perfect, it has no bugs. You must defragment your hard drive. It only crashes once every 2-3 hours after that. I'm an expert in these things, because I'm tech support for an ISP. If you say it didn't help, then you're stupid." (Uh, nope. Even skipping over the internal contradiction that something crashing every 2-3 hours is claimed to have no bugs at all, still nope. If changing timings, which is all that defrag does to the game, actually affects a bug's probability to happen, then you have the clear symptoms of a race condition in the code.)
- "I made a priest character and took no healing spells, nor any other spells that can help a party member, and people kick me out of their teams! They don't realize how useful a purely mace-swinging priest would be to teams! They're all idiots! And I'm tech support, so I know all about idiocy!"
And so on.
Now I do have all the sympathy in the world for all you good hard working people stuck in that low-pay high-stress kinda job. But that particular "I'm a complete genius, you're all complete idiots" sub-set is getting more and more on my nerves.
"There are two million people playing World Of Warcraft - and with Guild Wars fighting WoW for the top place in the PC games chart - I'd say that the appeal of the MMO can be pretty damn non-hardcore"
To start with the nitpicking: even if they were only from the USA, 2 million players would mean less than 1% of the population. If you throw in Europe, some Asian players, Australia, the rest of America, etc, we're suddenly talking less than 1 per thousand.
So there still is plenty of room for attracting more casual players.
But in the end you provide the perfect example of why the author is right, after all. Think about it: WoW has some 5 times more players than EQ at its peak. What does WoW do differently? Catters a lot better to the non-hardcore folks, _and_ tries to reduce the difference between folks playing 16 hours a day and those playing 4 hours on weekends only.
With the XP bonus for being _offline_, it becomes a lot less of a race to squeeze in 1 extra hour a day or fall behind. If I play 6 hours a day, and you can play only 5 hours a day, chances are you won't fall as far behind as you would in some other games.
This is the exact opposite of what other games try to do. Most MMOs seem to be in a mentality that they must invent more devices to force/coax you to stay online more.
E.g., since you mention City Of Heroes, consider taskforces where if you quit before all 10 missions are over, the whole team might be screwed. Try doing the Cave Of Transcendence mission for example when one player has quit the team. You're screwed: you can't activate possibly activate all 8 obelisks at the same time, with less than 8 players.
E.g., consider COH's timed missions being _real_ time instead of game time. If you just got a mission with a 2 hour countdown, you can't quit, go to work for 8 hours, and come back to it. You do it _now_, work be damned, or find out you've failed the mission when you come back.
Fail too many of those, and you won't be able to buy some Single Origin enhancers from that contact. (Well, after level 35 it doesn't matter any more, since you can buy all SO from the shop NPCs. But if you want a Fly SO or an Endurance Regen SO at level 22, better do a lot of missions for the right NPC.)
Now I'm not saying COH is bad or anything. (Hey, it's my current addiction again. Damn right I won't say it's bad;) But I _am_ saying that its design goes even above and beyond the level grind to coax you to stay online more.
Blizzard takes the opposite approach: hey, if you can't stay online all day, it's cool with us. Here, we'll even give you _some_ xp bonus for the time you couldn't be on. Just so you won't fall too far behind and be unable to group with your friends.
So far, that seems to pay off for Blizzard. A _lot_ of people seem to be more comfortable with Blizzard's idea than with the traditional pressure to spend more and more time.
The point is still that what you expect from them is the exact opposite of what all the barrage of ads told them. The ads told them some variant of "hey, just plug it in and turn it on, and you're online! It's easy! It just works!"
Well, that's the phenomenon you're dealing with. You get people on the phone expecting that it just works. And I find it fairly understandable if some are pissed off that they got sold something that doesn't work as advertised.
You're also expecting a level of cooperation from that user that _is_ entirely unreasonable in any other industry. If his new car doesn't start, Joe Average just picks the phone, calls the service centre, and has it repaired for him. Joe doesn't expect someone on the phone telling him "ok, I want you to open the hood and measure the battery voltage... how many volts does it show?" That's basically what you're expecting from him there.
And again, it's not something that marketting told him.
Basically what I'm saying is that (_if_ you're in tech support) it's not those users that are your enemy, it's the marketting guys who are... well, certainly not "enemy" but the direct cause of your misery. What you deal with is the fallout from marketting run amok without any reality check, and then basically expecting _you_ to turn their wild promises into reality.
The users are the scammed ones there. Marketting on the other hand, chances are they knew they're lying, and they knew that it will be you taking the flak for it. They actually planned around it.
"If they are so unimportant, then don't waste tech support's time over them either..."
Which still translates roughly into "ok, we got your money, now shut up and don't call us if it doesn't work." I'm sure you can see what's flawed in that business model.
Here's an idea: if you want them to make that decision, how about giving them the data to make an informed decision _before_ getting their money? _If_ they had known up-front what kind of time investment and expertise is required of them, and still decided "bah, it's not worth my time, but I'll buy it anyway", then you'd have a valid point. Until then, sorry, nope.
"Ask most people about their cars. They know that they have to take driving lessons, they know that they need servicing and that they need repairs and a AAA/AA membership card in case it breaks down.
No car manufacturer tries to make out that dealing with a breakdown (beyond fixing a tyre) is easy. No-one thinks they can just go for years without essential maintenance and protection for their cars."
Well, that's the whole point: unlike the computer industry, the car industry doesn't need lies and fraud to sell its stuff. They're very up-front about that stuff. (And if they aren't, then the police will be when they catch you driving without a license.)
So people can factor that stuff in, when they make a decision. You can know up-front how much extra you have to pay for that car in maintenance, money and time for driving lessons, insurance, etc. And then make an informed decision which to buy, or whether to buy one at all.
"But a lot of people don't defrag or backup. "
Because the computer industry is the exact opposite: it tries hard to obfuscate and basically lie. They try to get your attention to buzzwords, most of which either mean nothing or are comparatives with one of the members missing. And make promises which they can't possibly keep.
Noone will say up front "dude, that stuff is hard and requires clue. Read half a dozen books on security and networking, or get someone who knows that stuff, before you even think of configuring a wireless access point." That's not the message that sells.
No, they'll tell you the exact oposite. People are explicitly _told_ that it's ok to not know anything. "No, no, you don't need to know anything at all. Just plug it in a PCI/USB/whatever slot and it will just work." (Maybe if you define "work" as having half the neighbourhood downloading kiddie porn and uploading pirated movies through your network.)
"I'm convinced there's a "net station" market out there, where people have a near-solid state machine and all their data is stored online. Where you pay a small cost for the box, and a monthly subscription for all the support."
Yup, I can see a good market for that. Well, or there would be one if you didn't have to compete with the snake oil peddlers.
If people had to make an informed decision between "do I pay, say, 10$ a month for storage/support/etc on this net-station thing, or spend half of next year removing spyware and struggling with various other problems", I can see a good segment saying "screw that, I'll pay the 10$ a month then."
The problem is that you'll also compete with the snake oil vendors who actively represent their solution as just as easy, just as secure, and costing 0$ per month.
You know, we're all nerds, and we're all arrogant.
But what cracks me up is that the most arrogant assholes are the ones with the least skill or achievement. When you see someone harping the most about how he's uber-L33T because he knows what an IP address is, and how everyone else is an idiot... chances are it's someone who actually knows the _least_ about those. Chances are it's not a programmer who actually writes socket code, it's not a hardware engineer who's designed a network card, etc. No siree, it's a script-reader from the hell-desk that does the "I'm so l33t and everyone else is an idiot" fuss.
So you want to call people idiots if they don't know some computer trivia you know (off a list of canned answers)? Well, then being an EE and having some 20+ years of programming experience, I'll call _you_ an idiot, because you're below _my_ skill level.
Sure, you know what an IP or port number is or how to find it out in Windows. (Or can find it out on your list of canned answers.) But can you actually _use_ a socket on that port? Can you for example write a game server that listens on that port? If I gave you an old network card, can you find the right Linux kernel driver and change it to make it work with that card? Or what?
Or, ok, you do know what an IP address is. Congrats. Do you also know what a B-Tree is, how it works, and how to implement one in your code? Do you also know the difference between, say, MergeSort and QuickSort, and the influence of external (e.g., DB file on a disk) vs internal (in RAM) sorting on their performance? Can you implement either purely as, say, a state-machine driven by exceptions to signal state changes, just to prove that you actually understand the algorithm, as opposed to copying someone else's code off the net? Do you know the difference between bitmap indexes and b-tree indexes in Oracle, and can discuss when you might need one instead of the other?
Hey, it's computer stuff too. Very basic stuff too, nothing esoteric. We established already that computer stuff matters, and you're an idiot if there's something you don't know about them.
What cracks me up is the nerd infatuation with, basically, "only the trivia _I_ know are the essential things. And you're an idiot if you don't know them, no matter how utterly useless or irrelevant they are to _your_ job or interests."
No, sorry. The world doesn't revolve around you or your hobbies. There _are_ plenty of jobs for which the computer isn't the important part. It's not what makes them money.
E.g, for a lawyer it's a better investment of their time to study the laws and precendents, than to learn networking protocols. E.g., when you need surgery, better hope that that surgeon spent their time becoming a better surgeon, instead of becoming a networking expert. Etc.
For most jobs the computer isn't even as necessary as you'd think. It's at best "nice to have", but not justifying investing months into learning IT and networking protocols.
E.g., it's nice for a lawyer or doctor to have the client files on a computer instead of looking through a filing cabinet. But it's not as essential as you'd think. If you expect him/her to spend months becoming a computer expert, for something that saves him/her _maybe_ an hour per week, you need to put down the crack pipe. Then the computer would actually waste their time instead of saving them anything.
Here's another idea for you: You are there and are getting those calls not from "idiots" but from basically victims of a scam. All the "computers are easy", "wireless networking is easy" or "connecting through our ISP is so easy that grandma could do it" ads are actually marketting scams.
Computers are nowhere near that easy yet, or not without investing some signifficant time. But if your employer actually told those people "sorry, folks, it's only for IT gurus. Spend some time becoming an IT pro and growing a goatee, and then it'll be for you", then they'd lose business. Then, see above, you'd be surprised for how many people the computer isn't _that_ important.
So your employer, and a bunch of others, lied to those people to get their money. There's a name for that. It's called "fraud".
And now those people merely expect your employer to live up to those fake claims. They were explicitly told that they'll just plug it in and be online, so it's _not_ unreasonable for them to actually expect it to work like that.
Because thet's how any other industry works. If a car manufacturer told you "this model reaches 60mph in 8.9 seconds", you'd damn well expect it to live to those expectations. You'd expect that after 8.9 seconds, that car damn better be at 60mph.
Same here. If your employer told them "just pop in this CD and you'll be online in less than 1 minute", they expect that after 1 minute they damn better be online and surfing.
That's why you get those calls. Because those people expect your employer to live up to some very explicit claims.
Actually, I'll bother writing another message, because it's amusing so far to watch a retarded fanboy throwing a fuss. You've been arguing nonsense from the start, changing meanings, and being unable to read. Classic fanboy, really.
E.g., get this, fanboy: we're not arguing sloppy programming, we're arguing sloppy testing. Look at the message which started your spoiled pre-schooler tantrum, and try to find a single sentence where I said "sloppy programming".
If in your world buggy stuff being shoved out the door can only possibly mean "sloppy programming", then you just made the point about lack of testing and QA in this industry. Yes, fanboy, everyone who's ever programmed knows that bugs do happen, even if you're not a crap programmer. The thing that gets some of us angry at this industry is that there seems to be some total lack of QA, and only superficial testing.
It shouldn't be _me_ who's beta-testing the game for EA, and paying for the privilege. It should be EA that does the testing. That's all.
If in your own words, "I never once defended the crap. I was the one which called it crap. All I did was to say that the reason it was crap was not because of sloppy workers" then spend some time looking in the message that triggered your fanboy tantrum, and point me at the phrase where I say "sloppy workers". You've been fighting stuff from your sick imagination from the start, huh?
E.g., for that matter, look again through the message that triggered your tantrum. You might see some quotes around "flaws" in one of the sentences that triggered your whole rant about your mom's patients. You may also see that I was acknowledging that some stuff I want to mod is "Working As Designed."
I just want to mod it, yes, to suit my personal taste more, and hopefully also the taste of other people who think like me. (As they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 worldwide just like you.) It's easier to do that than to argue with a designer's grand vision.
So you've been arguing... what? That I shouldn't be allowed that? Or what? That PM's and Sid's vision are the only thing that matters, and customers be damned, noone should be able to change the balance between Phalanx and Tank? (Well, Sid would seem to disaggree with you in that case, since Civ 3 was moddable and this whole thread is about Civ 4 being even more moddable.)
Or what? It's hard to even figure out WTH are you arguing, among all those off-topic rants, tantrums, straw men, and just plain fits.
Well, at least now I understand the reference to your mom's work. I can see her motivation there now. With a son like that, ouch, I can see what would drive her to study those cases. She has all my compassion. Honestly.
E.g., first you rant about how a program goes through 12 interfaces in a year and you coded more than 20 in the last 2 years alone. Then when I say I was talking about the finished stuff, not about the intermediate steps, you pretend you never discussed anything of the sort. Short memory, eh?
E.g., while we're at your whole surrealistic running amok about interfaces, the particularly funny paragraph is: "That's like saying "here's a hint, what do those natural speech interpreters do? They type letters. Typing letters isn't hard." It's mighty easy to say that the output isn't hard to deal with. That doesn't mean you can make the interpreter."
Well, I'll say it again, fanboy, maybe this time it'll get into your tiny thick skull: I don't want to make another interpreter. What I want would translate in your example into: "so I don't want to put up with your crap speech-to-text interpreter, just let me type. Or just give me the API, I'll then write my own keyboard handler then."
There, do you understand now? I don't want to rewrite B&W's crap gesture code, I want to bypass it altogether. I fucking _hate_ those retarded gestures. I just want to click on those icons at the bottom, and never have to draw one of those retarded gestures ever again.
"Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?"
Well, that all is a very insightful post, and I'll largely aggree with your analysis, but what I quoted there hints at a different aspect of the problem too.
You've correctly pointed out that for one criterion ("I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water"), you only find something satisfactory in the "from 2002 onwards" group.
However, there are other personal criteria where the same situation happens in reverse. There's stuff which is basically _only_ present in "The set of all games from before 2002". Or at the very least, a tiny minority in the other.
It's not just a case of selecting from two different sized sets. Even if you take equal intervals to pick from, some things will be severely missing from one or the other. E.g., let's take the intervals '90..'95 and 2000..2005, with a hiatus in the middle just to leave some space for the transition to have a noticeable effect.
E.g., what if my standards include "but I really want my RPGs to be tactical turn based, and thus be an _intellectual_ exercise, instead of an exercise in reflexes"? You know, closer to playing chess than to an exercise in circle strafing.
In the '90..'95 interval I can find _plenty_ of turn based RPGs, and in fact they're dominating the RPG scene. In the 2000..2005 interval they didn't disappear completely, but the dominant flavours have become the real-time click-fest and the "action-RPG".
Even admittedly good games like the two Vampire games, basically are more about testing the _player's_ reflexes than about carefully planning team tactics. Whether I hit anyone with a Mac-10 in Bloodlines depends more on my control of a mouse, than on planing my _character's_ stats and tactics.
E.g., the same can be said to an even more extreme extent about _strategy_ games. It used to be that they were like chess for nerds, and relied on carefully considering each unit's many stats and carefully planning the exact sequence of moves.
Now it's more like clicking 20 times on "Build Dwarf" and rushing. Units have been "streamlined" to barely having 2 stats, maximum 3, or even literally to a rock-paper-stone system (e.g., in Empire Earth.) And you don't have time to carefully plan and execute anything. You just drag a big rectangle around whatever you could build quickly, and send them that-a-way in a chaotic mass.
This isn't necessarily to say that RTS is "crap" for everyone or anything. But if what you're really looking for is a TBS, a RTS isn't even the same genre.
So, again, it's not just the size of the interval from which we cherry-pick. It's that whole genres or gameplay elements we've grown up with, are now all but extinct. Even taking equal intervals, you just don't have much of a choice to cherry-pick from.
Of course, that may well be the whole problem. We're talking stuff that we grew up with. Someone who's just growing up on RTS, click-fest real-time RPGs and circle-strafing in action-RPGs... well, they probably won't miss the old elements. In some cases they may not even know that anything else ever existed.
A couple of months ago I was talking to a coworker about console games. And the invariable "yeah, but gamepads suck for FPS and RTS" pops up.
That's the downside of this phenomenon that everyone basically copies a previous gamepad, with only minor tweaks: they also copy the limitations of it. We've been stuck with the "yeah, but for FPS or RTS you're better off with a PC and a mouse" syndrom for more than a decade already. And now I see that the next generation consoles _still_ did nothing about making a controller that's fit for those.
So here's the idea we came up with: a gamepad with a trackball instead of the right thumbstick. (The left stick would remain a stick, of course.)
Think about it. I've had co-workers that played multiplayer PC FPS (e.g., half life) on a trackball, and they weren't bad at all with it. And it would definitely rule for selecting units and clicking around in a RTS. Plus a few other possible uses, like point-and-click adventures.
And for more traditional console games, I think it wouldn't be any worse than a thumbstick. In the vast majority of games the right stick either isn't used at all, or is used for looking around, or is used for scrolling text and such, like in Jade Empire. Neither would work any worse with a trackball.
So that's my wish. That some console manufacturer would finally start shipping just that.
While I'll aggree that there is _some_ nostalgia involved, that is definitely not the whole story. Games _are_ becoming more and more "streamlined" and shallow.
1. Games are becoming more and more simplified, I assume for the benefit of the casual gamer. I'm all for cattering to casual gamers, since I like a good intuitive interface myself. But often it means degrading gameplay as well.
E.g., look at a single series of games, from the same company, not even going that far back to be a case of nostalgia. Look at the (d)evolution that happened between Patrician 2 and Port Royale 2. (And if you're nasty, trace it all the way back to Elite, since Patrician 2 to Port Royale 2 are basically Elite on water.)
The economy got over-simplified. Basically while Patrician 2 was _hard_ and actually a trade and economy simulation, in Port Royale 2 you pretty much are guaranteed to make money as long as you don't actively try not to. It also doesn't help that the whole strategy element of leading a _fleet_ in Patrician 2, eventually devolved into a sea arcade game with a single ship in Port Royale 2. (The rest of the ships in your fleet are basically extra lives in that arcade fight.)
2. As an additional reason for that, there's a bunch of stuff that's just hard to implement properly in 3D, or not obvious to the casual player in 3D, so it either disappeared or got the equivalent of a big neon sign saying "use it HERE ==>"
E.g., I can think of old 2D games where you could scale any wall, or (try to) blow up walls, or use a grappling hook on any ledge. Nowadays you have clearly marked "you can climb this one" walls, e.g., in Sudeki. Or if you get a grappling gun, there will be a big marking where you can use it, and typically not too often.
3. There's a lot of stuff that gets streamlined because everything today has to be real-time. Actual strategy tends to be replaced by whack-a-mole clicking without a plan. E.g., whereas a PC RPG used to involve basically squad tactics and use of a whole range of spells (status effects, buffs, etc), nowadays you get action-RPGs where you have to run, hit and block in real time, and if you get any spells they're direct damage.
Compare for example, the old D&D games from SSI, which were practically a turn based tactics game, to, say, Demon Stone. Right. Nothing says "D&D" like having to do attack combos, and all spells being nothing more than a weapon upgrade for the mage.
4. Variety _is_ shrinking. Games tend to be easily dividable in narrow "genres" lately, often meaning a clone of other games that sold well. While it doesn't necessarily say "new games are bad", playing an exact clone of a game I've already bought before, does somewhat reduce my satisfaction.
1. If you can compare WW2 battles where both sides had rifles and AT guns, to a battle involving bronze spears against tanks, I rest my case. You do have a perception problem. By Civ 3 standards every WW2 battle involved _at_ _least_ Riflemen.
Ditto about infantry taking on tanks. If you'll actually researched how that was done in WW2 or now, you may discover it involved AT rifles, bazookas and AT magnetic mines. If for you that's the same as poking it with a bronze spear, that's funny.
2. My dear fanboy, you don't even start to understand the difference between "renderer" and "interface".
The renderer's job is to take a 3D scene and paint the polygons on the screen. Rendering in an isometric view isn't even requiring a new renderer. It's the same renderer with a different view.
Clicking and dragging to select units, and clicking to move/attack, as well as all the rest of a RTS interface, instead of FPS controlls, _is_ a different kind of interface.
3. The fact that UT2004 did support different interfaces, or that in your own words "Yes, facilities exist for that in many games, and also in many operating systems." is just proving my point: it _is_ possible. And no, it doesn't take years in development to allow loading DLLs, or to have a clean API that allows one to read a list of displayed icons and intercept mouse clicks.
4. If you're at OS interface replacements, why don't you look at Linux, then? Have a look on Freshmeat, and you might find a _ton_ of different window managers for it. Ranging from simple stuff like Ratpoison to complete desktop environments like KDE.
Or since you mention Windows 3.x, there were a lot more than OpenStep out there. I personally had Dashboard and Norton Desktop on my computer at different times. And that's just what I used.
Which, again, is just proving the point: if a clean API exists, people will do it. Now remind me, why was this somehow inapropriate for games?
5. So your claim is that, for an icon that is already painted on the screen, taking a click in that area and sending an event to the game engine would take 4 years to code? Heh. Funny stuff.
Here's a hint: what do those gestures do? Tell the engine "ok, prime spell X". So you're telling me that intercepting a mouse click and sending the exact same event to the game engine would take _four_ _years_ to code? Dude, I know some people write awful unmaintainable spagetti code, but _four_ _years_ to interpret a click and call a function is... extreme.
I used to think my coleague Wally was slow, because he took two years to implement something... which someone else implemented in 6 hours. But four years to (A) get a list of painted icons, (B) see if the coordinates of a mouse-click are within one, and (C) call the apropriate function... is surrealistic.
There, I even gave you the pseudo-code above. You can stop ranting about DirectX widgets now. You don't need those to compare the coordinates of a mouse click to a list of icon coordinates.
6. When I've talked about coding interfaces, I meant complete interfaces, that actually shipped, not "I've added a button on a mockup for tomorrow's meeting, so I'll call it a new interface." 'Nuff said.
7. Ah, more clinging to your own redefined meaning of what "mod" really means. If your argument relies on redefining a word to mean something else than the dictionary says, or what the programmers have been using it for ages (see the jargon file)... well, I don't even see a point in arguing that. What next? Argue your point based on redefining "Tuesday" to mean a species of dinosaur?
8. "I work in the industry you're criticizing, and you don't."
Well, that would explain the holy crusade in defense of the sacred right to write crap code and shove it untested out the door. Yes. Of course.
Actually, sorry, especially then the defense of crap quality doesn't make sense. The PC gaming industry is alienating a lot of it
Well, I'm definitely not agains _some_ preservation measures. E.g., I'm actually for emission controlls because, frankly, whether it causes warming or not, we end up breathing that shit.
I've seen some towns in Eastern Europe, where ecology didn't even start to be a concern during communism, and gee, that's scary. They had mining towns that were _covered_ in black dust. That's a silicosis waiting to happen if you just live anywhere near there. Or they had stuff like cement factories without filters in the middle of some city, spewing tons of dust per day into the air.
Kinda makes one realize the things we take for granted on this side. Or why emision controls are good, much as the industry whines about it.
A six trillion dollar ring seems overkill to me, but wth, if someone can prove it's needed, fine by me.
What I _am_ against, though, is the bullshit pseudo-science and doomsday menace wrapper that already has all the symptoms of a religion. The whole absolute truth, and if you don't believe the holy (eco) scripture you're everyone's enemy, etc, that's what gets my goat.
That's not how science works. In science you're _supposed_ to question everything, and approach _any_ theory with the frame of mind that it might be wrong, or at least incomplete. The whole reason we have for example quantum mechanics, astrophysics, etc, (and thus why you have a CPU, lasers, a TV, etc) is that people didn't take Newton's mechanics as some absolute holy truth. Or for that reason even those are because people like Newton, Galileo, etc, didn't buy the holy dogma that Aristotle's theories are the final truth.
So the moment someone basically claims that their theory is _the_ one absolute truth, and that you're everyone's sworn enemy (or at least actively on the payroll of some lobby) if you dare as much study more of it... they lost me. That's not how science works. That's dogma. That's how religion works.
Italy did indeed do rather poorly all around in WW2, and I was sorta expecting Italy as an example there. Ethiopia is probably an even better example where they barely succeeded against inferior tech.
Still, even (A) Ethiopia did have imported rifles, and (B) Italy used mostly infantry there too, which is probably just as well, since Italy's tanks were closer to WW1 level anyway. So IMHO in Civ3 terms we're talking at most 1 tech level difference, _not_ a 200 man Phalanx with bronze spears vs a 20,000 man tank division.
If you're performing a full HDD scan at the same time as playing a game, yes, that will benefit from a second CPU. Then again, since a major bottleneck there is the HDD, and as you've noticed the scan runs with low priority, hyperthreading would also be enough.
How much _are_ you encoding, that it can't possibly finish in the 16 hours a day when you're at work or sleeping, and it has to overlap your gaming time?
And more importantly, if you absolutely have to encode about a dozen movies to DivX per day, how on Earth do you have time to see all those _and_ have time left for gaming? Not a flame, I'm actually genuinely curious.
Yes, that would be good and fine, if it wasn't utterly false.
Let's take those in the paragraph you quote, because two are synchronous tasks, and one is a whole 0% to 1% CPU time.
1. The swap file. Do you understand how that works? It a process wants to read 1 byte from the memory location X, that process can't possibly proceed until that byte has been fetched. If that's in a page currently swapped out, it can't possibly proceed before it's finished loading back into RAM.
So offloading swap management solves... what? You wait for that page anyway, and wait exactly as much time anyway, because it's the HDD that's the bottleneck there. So offloading that to another CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit.
2. Your real time virus scanner. Another synchronous task: if your game is waiting (e.g., at a loading screen) for a block to be loaded and scanned by the real time AV scanner, that's it. That thread is stopped and waiting until the scanner is done with that block.
So, again, a second CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit there,
3. Your real time firewall. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, look at the CPU usage for that one. Oops it's at most 1%, most of the time less. Yeah, it sooo makes sense to buy a slower dual-CPU for that.
Here's just some simple maths: if you have a 2.8 GHz CPU and lose 1% of that to the firewall, it leaves you with some 2.77 GHz worth of power for your game. If you get a 2.4 GHz dual CPU so the second one can take care of the firewall, you're left with a 2.4 GHz CPU for your game. Ooops, so dualies are still a losing proposition after all.
So, no offense, all I see there is one aspect of why premature optimization (in this case, of hardware) based on false assumptions and lack of measurement is bad. That's just the problem: you end up dumping time and/or money and more often than not end up with something actually _slower_ than the straightforward solution. In this case you dump a bunch of cash on a l33t dual-core solution, based on false assumptions about what those processes do and how, and actually end up _slower_ than a cheaper one-core solution. Was it worth it?
Around the year 1000 for example, it was much warmer than today. There's a reason why "Greenland" is called that: it had thawed and the Vikings could colonize and farm it.
Then it cooled off some time later, and the colony was all but abandoned.
The fun part is, the humans didn't go extinct, the gulf stream didn't reverse, ocean fauna didn't all float belly-up because of melting glaciers being sweet water, etc.
Basically that's what gets me pissed off about this _political_ "waah, we're all DOOMED if you don't follow ME" hype about global warming. It's mis-representation and scare tactics.
As was said, it's only the bullshit media and political speeches where global warming is a certainty, and certain doom is just around the corner. The media loves a good scare story. That's what sells. Actual scientific facts don't.
The science part is a lot more ambiguous and not fully understood yet. It's not just that the earth has cooled off just fine before. It's also that:
- The "Global Warming" measured, that started the whole hype, was actually based on limited data from only a tiny portion of the world. And it was only a 1 degree Celsius over a _century_ increase.
- The Earth has periodic warming and cooling cycles, ranging roughly between 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today in the last glaciations, and some 6 degrees warmer in the times of the dinosaurs. Think roughly a sine wave spanning whole ages. With a lot of noise superimposed.
And we're roughly in the middle. It's _normal_ to rise slowly on the average. Not this fast, but basically a century of it might well be measuring just the noise in the real signal. Especially given that:
- Actual satellite data that covers a helluva lot more of the whole globe (you know, the "global" part of "global warming") actually shows a global _cooling_ for the last 20 years straight. There is actually a theory that we might be heading into a "mini ice age". (Not that it will stop journalists and politicians from presenting a _cooling_ as an effect of global _warming_.)
- Also for this last interval, there is data indicating that the average temperature on Earth just faithfully follows fluctuations in the Sun's energy output. Think, for example, how we got a very warm winter between 2003 and 2004, because of solar flares. We can actually observe and measure those things nowadays, and blimey, temperature on Earth seems to just follow them.
Is it that unbelievable, since Sun is where that heat comes from in the first place? We're talking some 0.3% temperature difference in this "global warming." It only takes _minor_ fluctuations in the energy input to produce that.
- Humans never accounted for more than 2% of greenhouse gasses. If not only we stopped driving cars, but if humanity as a whole even stopped breathing, it still just wouldn't make that much of a difference.
"Your whole argument relies on some made up numbers. What if the other background processes took 50 units of work per second, then suddenly the dual core processor has the advantage."
That's the _whole_ point: they don't take much. All this dual-core hype is based on the lie that there are some massively CPU-intenside background processes that leave your game starving for its own dedicated CPU.
Well, here's what you can do. Turn off SETI, IM, and generally all the things you would realistically turned off if you wanted the maximum frames-per-second in a game. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. Let it stabilize for a few seconds, then look at your CPU usage. Those are your Windows background processes at work.
There's no made up number there. You don't have to believe my numbers. You can read the actual numbers for your own system, yourself.
_If_ you were to see some 50% CPU usage when idle, yeah, _then_ you need a second CPU badly. But here's the fun part: I see 0% on mine.
So getting a second CPU to run all that 0%, and thus reduce the game CPU's load by a whole 0%... well, I hope you can understand why some of us are less than thrilled by that idea:)
Windows background processes take less time than you think. What Windows does have, though, is a lot of _synchronous_ stuff going, i.e., where your application must wait for the results anyway. I.e., moving that to another CPU wouldn't do you one bit of good.
E.g., when your game is taking ages at the loading screen, because some AV program scans every byte loaded, that's one such synchronous thing. Each call to load a block _must_ wait until that block is scanned and loaded. Whether that's happening on CPU 1 or CPU 2 is irrelevant. Your game gets to wait exactly the same time in both cases.
E.g., if a computer is slow because it's swapping (e.g., your computer illiterate friend -- you know you have one by that description -- having 5 spyware programs and 5 applications open while gaming), that process just can't possibly proceed until the desired page is swapped in. If your game's (or any other application's) main thread wants to access location 31337, it can't possibly proceed until the value there has been fetched. Which means until that whole page is loaded from disk, if it was swapped out. Whether it's CPU 1 or CPU 2 handling the swapping, it still won't accelerate that one bit.
Catch mod. If you'll scroll down a bit, you may notice:
2. modify or modification.
This abbreviation is very common - in fact the full terms are considered formal. "Mods" is used especially with reference to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software, most especially with respect to patch sets or a diff.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think there is merit to venting steam in a game, if you need to vent steam, I suspect it's not the whole story.
See, if there was an inverse proportion between how much you do X in a game, and how much you need to do X in the real world (where X can be violence or anything else), then those of us playing Lawful Good, and if at all possible peaceful, characters in games would be the Antichrist incarnate in Real Life.
E.g., I invariably play a lawful good person in games. I find the idea of harming inocents inherently abhorrent. And btw, by "Lawful Good", I don't mean only D&D games, but rather the general idea and code of conduct. Even if it's not even an RPG at all, I try to help the NPCs and keep them happy. E.g., in city/empire building games I try to give my citizens/subjects/whatever the highest standard of living possible in the game/scenario.
The only game I could force myself to play until the end as an evil son-of-a-bitch was KOTOR. I find it more like repulsive than anything even resembling entertainment. Taking out frustration on an inocent, even an NPC, is something that's hard-wired as "wrong" in my brains.
(And no, I'm not gonna foam at the mouth against games where it's possible to play an evil SOB. _I_ don't find that entertaining for myself, but then I don't find RTS entertaining either, and that doesn't mean I'm gonna lobby against RTS. If that's what floats _your_ boat, sure, knock yourself out, for all I care.)
By now someone's probably just itching to jump in and say some variant of "WTF? Are you a total nut-job? They're NPCs, for f-word's sake. They don't have feelings. WTF is wrong with harming those?" (Yes, I know that. It's just not the kind of story line I enjoy, ok?)
But it actually brings me to the real point: I suspect the real factor there is precisely that you know it's just a game. Regardless of whether you give money to NPC beggars or beat them with a baseball bat to vent steam, in the end what matters is: you _know_ it's just a game and they're just NPCs.
You _know_ that what happened for example in World Of Warcraft is just that: something that exists only in WoW. You won't ever wake up in the Real World thinking "I must drop by at the smithy and pick a new mithril breastplate on the way to work."
Or to give another example, in City Of Heroes people often jump off bridges and skyscrappers to save time, because COH heroes can never die from falling damage. (Lowest you can get from falling is 1 hp.) But you know that that happened only in a game, and is valid only in that game. The closest I've ever come to extrapolating that to RL was along the lines of "heh, if it was COH I'd jump down instead of taking the stairs." Worth a brief chuckle, but nothing more.
Ditto about venting frustration by beating up NPCs. You _know_ that you're not really hurting any real human. You know it in the back of your brains even while you're doing it in a game. That's IMHO really what keeps you from doing it In Real Life.
And that's what all these "waaah, but games get them used to being violent" scare-mongers just don't get. In the end games get you used to being _not_ violent. You're immersed into something which you _know_ to not harm anyone.
For someone to put an equals sign between violence in a game and violence in the real world, their perception would have to be deffective to start with. And if someone really is that brain-damaged to not be able to tell the difference between a fantasy world and reality, then IMHO it won't be just games. They'll likely confuse any other fantasy world, be it from novels or from movies or from comics, with the real one.
Can't say I've made a proper statistic of who hits stationary objects more, but I see some guy or another doing it almost every other day. Being by and large the programming building here (well, one of them), we're by far more guys than women in it and in the parking lot. So again, I can't say it's a comparison based on equal samples, or representative samples, or anything.
But anyway, our smoking place overlooking the parking lot, now and then I get to see a guy bumping with the car into the parking lot number plates. Or some guy's car parked right against one. Or some guy parking/having parked right between two park places, or for bonus points diagonally.
So at the very least I'd say it's not a woman-only passtime.
Admittedly, though, it could also reflect the quality of the people hired lately as part of "saving costs". Some of them have trouble even with the basics, such as copy and pasting text from a log file. Nah, they'll make a 1600x1200 screenshot including the terminal Window and paste it into a Word file. For bonus points: one sent such a screenshot of an email in Outlook, presumably because advanced functions like "Forward" were beyond his grasp. Again, we're talking "programmers", not a secretary hired purely for cup size.
So, well, it's probably less than surprising that some of them have problems parking, or probably even tying their shoelaces in less than 3 tries.
I like to think it's a lot higher than 90%.
E.g., World Of Warcraft currently has some 2 million subscribers. If a whole 10% of them were that influenceable, you'd have some 200,000 people running around with swords trying to slash their class mates.
In reality, we have, what? Maybe 10-20 people who were anywhere near (debatably) influenced by games, out of maybe that many millions of gamers. We're not even talking one percent, we're talking maybe 1 in a million.
And were games the real reason there? Or is it just another scapegoat? We have people who got bullied _daily_, and eventually one of them breaks under stress and goes homicidal. Happens every day among non-gamers too. E.g., since "Postal 2" is mentioned, the term "to go postal" has to do with, you know, post office employees and pre-dates video games.
But games make an easy scapegoat and a very visible straw man. Blaming everything on one simple bogeyman (games, jews in 1930's Germany, world conspiracies, etc) is _easy_. It lets one ignore the more complex _real_ problems.
We're all suddenly no longer to blame for failed parenting, the massive cultural failure in which being smart in school is _uncool_, for the social factors involved, etc. Nosiree, bob, it's the games that are to blame.
I find it sad.
"I realize you were half joking, but if girls start playing games we're going to have to come up with a new rating system to prevent them from buying driving games"
You know, I find this sexist stereotype much more interesting than the gaming stereotype. And here's why. In games, we really don't know much yet what each population segment does. But when it comes to cars, there are corporations whose very source of money depends on knowing who does what. They're called insurance companies.
And here's what actual insurance data says: at an equal number of miles driven, women cause _half_ the number of accidents that guys cause. There are whole classes of cars which have higher insurance rates just because they appeal to a certain category of male cretin who drives like he must _prove_ his virility by driving fast and dangerous. That includes both teenagers and a large chunk of the mid-life crisis gang.
And here's some anecdotal evidence hint: when you see some idiot with added dual 4" exhausts (on a 1 liter inline car, how sad), sheet metal skirts/wings (bonus points: rear wing on a front drive car), fake disk brakes, and a ton of stickers (bonus points: VTEK sticker on a Toyota), chances are it's not a woman's car.
Frankly, I'm a guy, and I still find it sad. There's a whole group of idiots who seem to think that they must _prove_ they're a Real Man (TM) by driving like homicidal maniacs. That anything less than flooring it at a green light... just to have to brake at the next street light, might actually make them sprout breasts and a vagina.
Here's an idea: a man or a woman is what you _are_. You still have an Y chromosome no matter what. You don't have to "prove" anything. Taking unnecessary risks and endangering others too, doesn't make you a man, it just makes you an irresponsible idiot.
Have you read the licenses to some other non-MS stuff out there lately?
/. darlings) which explicitly say they're not for critical stuff. In fact, if you'll read their disclaimer, you'll see some far less critical stuff they're _not_ ready for.
I seem to recall quite a few (e.g., Sun's or IBM's Java, since both of them are
I also don't seem to recall any program lately -- open source included -- which doesn't come with a "provided as is, no guarantee whatsoever, blah, blah, blah" in its license. Unless my memory fails me in my old age, it's a standard part of the GPL, so there goes Linux too.
There's a whole class of applications, e.g., embeded software used in airplanes, where that just won't cut it. You want stuff there that's had every single line and algorithm reviewed, because you're literally trusting your life to it. They're a whole other class of problem than having your blog or e-commerce site down for an hour or two. Down for a few seconds during an airplane's landing is enough to be a spectacular catastrophe.
I'd imagine that stuff implanted in your body would deserve to be in the same category.
So is Windows OK for that? Probably not, but then MS never advertised it as such. Is Linux ready for it? Not with a "no guarantees express or implied" disclaimer, it's not.
Frankly, I think real nerds are the least guilty of this.
Now I'm not an american, nor a native English speaker, so my evidence is just anecdotal at best. But out of all americans I did talk to on bulletin boards, newsgroups, MUDs, MMOs, etc, frankly, the techies were the _least_ guilty of it. In fact, the techies were the most likely to show contempt or be annoyed by mangled writing, especially the l33t n3tsp33k kind.
Or compare Slashdot to an average CS clan board or some non-technical boards. Sure, we pick on the occasional mis-spelling here, but IMHO it' on the average head and shoulders above the spelling level in other segments of the population.
What IMHO we have here is more like the effect that any script kiddie can claim they're a l33t h4xxx0r, and some computer-illiterate out there will believe them.
There's a whole class of people who aren't anywhere near actually having any actual computer skills, but think they're oh-so-great because they can run someone else's script. (Be it a rootkit script, a compile script in Linux, or whatever.) Or because they can do the most basic text editing in Word. And by "the most basic", I mean they didn't even get to (still basic) parts like using paragraph styles, or generally everything above the level of the old MS Write.
To cut a long rant short, I think it's _those_ pseudo-nerds who take pride in writing like a retard. It won't be a programmer who writes like Something Awful's Jeff K. The programmer already makes a living with typing, and won't gain anything by typing some abhomination "ne1 wanna cum hear b4 lunch, plz?" instead of the correct sentence with complete words. It'll be one of those wannabe pseudo-nerds who thinks he's oh-so-cool and oh-so-tech-savvy for writing in l33t sp34k.
But again, the problem is that someone out there will be computer-illiterate enough to believe them to be TEH UBER-L33T TECH GOD. ("Whoa, he can turn on a computer! He's so smart!") A lot of someones, in fact. And those someones will then extrapolate it to mean "nerds/techies talk/write/whatever like complete retards", because they can't tell who's who.
I'm not just picking on this particular message, but on a whole sub-set of tech support people who are, in fact, far more arrogant than the post I was answering to. Some seem to eventually get stuck in the mentality that everyone they're talking to is by default an idiot.
Again, not all. I did say a sub-set. I assume it's a small sub-set, but, you know, at some times that minority can be loud and annoying.
And it's not just towards uncooperative customers, but to people who didn't even ask the troll's help or opinion to start with. In which case, sorry, that excuse doesn't exist any more.
There's a whole class of "you're stupid if you don't take my word for <insert topic>. I'm TEH L33T EXPERT because I'm tech support for <insert completely unrelated field>" trolls. In fact, _the_ nastiest thing I've seen posted by a fanboy to someone complaining about a CTD (crash to desktop) bug in a game, namely "then you should pack your computer and take it back to the shop, because you're too stupid to own one" was... some alleged tech support veteran.
You see people arguing stuff like (massively paraphrased for compactness sake, since some of those rants go on and on for pages, but keeping the idea):
- "Noo, the game is perfect, it has no bugs. You must defragment your hard drive. It only crashes once every 2-3 hours after that. I'm an expert in these things, because I'm tech support for an ISP. If you say it didn't help, then you're stupid." (Uh, nope. Even skipping over the internal contradiction that something crashing every 2-3 hours is claimed to have no bugs at all, still nope. If changing timings, which is all that defrag does to the game, actually affects a bug's probability to happen, then you have the clear symptoms of a race condition in the code.)
- "I made a priest character and took no healing spells, nor any other spells that can help a party member, and people kick me out of their teams! They don't realize how useful a purely mace-swinging priest would be to teams! They're all idiots! And I'm tech support, so I know all about idiocy!"
And so on.
Now I do have all the sympathy in the world for all you good hard working people stuck in that low-pay high-stress kinda job. But that particular "I'm a complete genius, you're all complete idiots" sub-set is getting more and more on my nerves.
"There are two million people playing World Of Warcraft - and with Guild Wars fighting WoW for the top place in the PC games chart - I'd say that the appeal of the MMO can be pretty damn non-hardcore"
To start with the nitpicking: even if they were only from the USA, 2 million players would mean less than 1% of the population. If you throw in Europe, some Asian players, Australia, the rest of America, etc, we're suddenly talking less than 1 per thousand.
So there still is plenty of room for attracting more casual players.
But in the end you provide the perfect example of why the author is right, after all. Think about it: WoW has some 5 times more players than EQ at its peak. What does WoW do differently? Catters a lot better to the non-hardcore folks, _and_ tries to reduce the difference between folks playing 16 hours a day and those playing 4 hours on weekends only.
With the XP bonus for being _offline_, it becomes a lot less of a race to squeeze in 1 extra hour a day or fall behind. If I play 6 hours a day, and you can play only 5 hours a day, chances are you won't fall as far behind as you would in some other games.
This is the exact opposite of what other games try to do. Most MMOs seem to be in a mentality that they must invent more devices to force/coax you to stay online more.
E.g., since you mention City Of Heroes, consider taskforces where if you quit before all 10 missions are over, the whole team might be screwed. Try doing the Cave Of Transcendence mission for example when one player has quit the team. You're screwed: you can't activate possibly activate all 8 obelisks at the same time, with less than 8 players.
E.g., consider COH's timed missions being _real_ time instead of game time. If you just got a mission with a 2 hour countdown, you can't quit, go to work for 8 hours, and come back to it. You do it _now_, work be damned, or find out you've failed the mission when you come back.
Fail too many of those, and you won't be able to buy some Single Origin enhancers from that contact. (Well, after level 35 it doesn't matter any more, since you can buy all SO from the shop NPCs. But if you want a Fly SO or an Endurance Regen SO at level 22, better do a lot of missions for the right NPC.)
Now I'm not saying COH is bad or anything. (Hey, it's my current addiction again. Damn right I won't say it's bad;) But I _am_ saying that its design goes even above and beyond the level grind to coax you to stay online more.
Blizzard takes the opposite approach: hey, if you can't stay online all day, it's cool with us. Here, we'll even give you _some_ xp bonus for the time you couldn't be on. Just so you won't fall too far behind and be unable to group with your friends.
So far, that seems to pay off for Blizzard. A _lot_ of people seem to be more comfortable with Blizzard's idea than with the traditional pressure to spend more and more time.
The point is still that what you expect from them is the exact opposite of what all the barrage of ads told them. The ads told them some variant of "hey, just plug it in and turn it on, and you're online! It's easy! It just works!"
Well, that's the phenomenon you're dealing with. You get people on the phone expecting that it just works. And I find it fairly understandable if some are pissed off that they got sold something that doesn't work as advertised.
You're also expecting a level of cooperation from that user that _is_ entirely unreasonable in any other industry. If his new car doesn't start, Joe Average just picks the phone, calls the service centre, and has it repaired for him. Joe doesn't expect someone on the phone telling him "ok, I want you to open the hood and measure the battery voltage... how many volts does it show?" That's basically what you're expecting from him there.
And again, it's not something that marketting told him.
Basically what I'm saying is that (_if_ you're in tech support) it's not those users that are your enemy, it's the marketting guys who are... well, certainly not "enemy" but the direct cause of your misery. What you deal with is the fallout from marketting run amok without any reality check, and then basically expecting _you_ to turn their wild promises into reality.
The users are the scammed ones there. Marketting on the other hand, chances are they knew they're lying, and they knew that it will be you taking the flak for it. They actually planned around it.
"If they are so unimportant, then don't waste tech support's time over them either..."
Which still translates roughly into "ok, we got your money, now shut up and don't call us if it doesn't work." I'm sure you can see what's flawed in that business model.
Here's an idea: if you want them to make that decision, how about giving them the data to make an informed decision _before_ getting their money? _If_ they had known up-front what kind of time investment and expertise is required of them, and still decided "bah, it's not worth my time, but I'll buy it anyway", then you'd have a valid point. Until then, sorry, nope.
"It's a question of perception."
Essentially, yes.
"Ask most people about their cars. They know that they have to take driving lessons, they know that they need servicing and that they need repairs and a AAA/AA membership card in case it breaks down.
No car manufacturer tries to make out that dealing with a breakdown (beyond fixing a tyre) is easy. No-one thinks they can just go for years without essential maintenance and protection for their cars."
Well, that's the whole point: unlike the computer industry, the car industry doesn't need lies and fraud to sell its stuff. They're very up-front about that stuff. (And if they aren't, then the police will be when they catch you driving without a license.)
So people can factor that stuff in, when they make a decision. You can know up-front how much extra you have to pay for that car in maintenance, money and time for driving lessons, insurance, etc. And then make an informed decision which to buy, or whether to buy one at all.
"But a lot of people don't defrag or backup. "
Because the computer industry is the exact opposite: it tries hard to obfuscate and basically lie. They try to get your attention to buzzwords, most of which either mean nothing or are comparatives with one of the members missing. And make promises which they can't possibly keep.
Noone will say up front "dude, that stuff is hard and requires clue. Read half a dozen books on security and networking, or get someone who knows that stuff, before you even think of configuring a wireless access point." That's not the message that sells.
No, they'll tell you the exact oposite. People are explicitly _told_ that it's ok to not know anything. "No, no, you don't need to know anything at all. Just plug it in a PCI/USB/whatever slot and it will just work." (Maybe if you define "work" as having half the neighbourhood downloading kiddie porn and uploading pirated movies through your network.)
"I'm convinced there's a "net station" market out there, where people have a near-solid state machine and all their data is stored online. Where you pay a small cost for the box, and a monthly subscription for all the support."
Yup, I can see a good market for that. Well, or there would be one if you didn't have to compete with the snake oil peddlers.
If people had to make an informed decision between "do I pay, say, 10$ a month for storage/support/etc on this net-station thing, or spend half of next year removing spyware and struggling with various other problems", I can see a good segment saying "screw that, I'll pay the 10$ a month then."
The problem is that you'll also compete with the snake oil vendors who actively represent their solution as just as easy, just as secure, and costing 0$ per month.
You know, we're all nerds, and we're all arrogant.
But what cracks me up is that the most arrogant assholes are the ones with the least skill or achievement. When you see someone harping the most about how he's uber-L33T because he knows what an IP address is, and how everyone else is an idiot... chances are it's someone who actually knows the _least_ about those. Chances are it's not a programmer who actually writes socket code, it's not a hardware engineer who's designed a network card, etc. No siree, it's a script-reader from the hell-desk that does the "I'm so l33t and everyone else is an idiot" fuss.
So you want to call people idiots if they don't know some computer trivia you know (off a list of canned answers)? Well, then being an EE and having some 20+ years of programming experience, I'll call _you_ an idiot, because you're below _my_ skill level.
Sure, you know what an IP or port number is or how to find it out in Windows. (Or can find it out on your list of canned answers.) But can you actually _use_ a socket on that port? Can you for example write a game server that listens on that port? If I gave you an old network card, can you find the right Linux kernel driver and change it to make it work with that card? Or what?
Or, ok, you do know what an IP address is. Congrats. Do you also know what a B-Tree is, how it works, and how to implement one in your code? Do you also know the difference between, say, MergeSort and QuickSort, and the influence of external (e.g., DB file on a disk) vs internal (in RAM) sorting on their performance? Can you implement either purely as, say, a state-machine driven by exceptions to signal state changes, just to prove that you actually understand the algorithm, as opposed to copying someone else's code off the net? Do you know the difference between bitmap indexes and b-tree indexes in Oracle, and can discuss when you might need one instead of the other?
Hey, it's computer stuff too. Very basic stuff too, nothing esoteric. We established already that computer stuff matters, and you're an idiot if there's something you don't know about them.
What cracks me up is the nerd infatuation with, basically, "only the trivia _I_ know are the essential things. And you're an idiot if you don't know them, no matter how utterly useless or irrelevant they are to _your_ job or interests."
No, sorry. The world doesn't revolve around you or your hobbies. There _are_ plenty of jobs for which the computer isn't the important part. It's not what makes them money.
E.g, for a lawyer it's a better investment of their time to study the laws and precendents, than to learn networking protocols. E.g., when you need surgery, better hope that that surgeon spent their time becoming a better surgeon, instead of becoming a networking expert. Etc.
For most jobs the computer isn't even as necessary as you'd think. It's at best "nice to have", but not justifying investing months into learning IT and networking protocols.
E.g., it's nice for a lawyer or doctor to have the client files on a computer instead of looking through a filing cabinet. But it's not as essential as you'd think. If you expect him/her to spend months becoming a computer expert, for something that saves him/her _maybe_ an hour per week, you need to put down the crack pipe. Then the computer would actually waste their time instead of saving them anything.
Here's another idea for you: You are there and are getting those calls not from "idiots" but from basically victims of a scam. All the "computers are easy", "wireless networking is easy" or "connecting through our ISP is so easy that grandma could do it" ads are actually marketting scams.
Computers are nowhere near that easy yet, or not without investing some signifficant time. But if your employer actually told those people "sorry, folks, it's only for IT gurus. Spend some time becoming an IT pro and growing a goatee, and then it'll be for you", then they'd lose business. Then, see above, you'd be surprised for how many people the computer isn't _that_ important.
So your employer, and a bunch of others, lied to those people to get their money. There's a name for that. It's called "fraud".
And now those people merely expect your employer to live up to those fake claims. They were explicitly told that they'll just plug it in and be online, so it's _not_ unreasonable for them to actually expect it to work like that.
Because thet's how any other industry works. If a car manufacturer told you "this model reaches 60mph in 8.9 seconds", you'd damn well expect it to live to those expectations. You'd expect that after 8.9 seconds, that car damn better be at 60mph.
Same here. If your employer told them "just pop in this CD and you'll be online in less than 1 minute", they expect that after 1 minute they damn better be online and surfing.
That's why you get those calls. Because those people expect your employer to live up to some very explicit claims.
Actually, I'll bother writing another message, because it's amusing so far to watch a retarded fanboy throwing a fuss. You've been arguing nonsense from the start, changing meanings, and being unable to read. Classic fanboy, really.
E.g., get this, fanboy: we're not arguing sloppy programming, we're arguing sloppy testing. Look at the message which started your spoiled pre-schooler tantrum, and try to find a single sentence where I said "sloppy programming".
If in your world buggy stuff being shoved out the door can only possibly mean "sloppy programming", then you just made the point about lack of testing and QA in this industry. Yes, fanboy, everyone who's ever programmed knows that bugs do happen, even if you're not a crap programmer. The thing that gets some of us angry at this industry is that there seems to be some total lack of QA, and only superficial testing.
It shouldn't be _me_ who's beta-testing the game for EA, and paying for the privilege. It should be EA that does the testing. That's all.
If in your own words, "I never once defended the crap. I was the one which called it crap. All I did was to say that the reason it was crap was not because of sloppy workers" then spend some time looking in the message that triggered your fanboy tantrum, and point me at the phrase where I say "sloppy workers". You've been fighting stuff from your sick imagination from the start, huh?
E.g., for that matter, look again through the message that triggered your tantrum. You might see some quotes around "flaws" in one of the sentences that triggered your whole rant about your mom's patients. You may also see that I was acknowledging that some stuff I want to mod is "Working As Designed."
I just want to mod it, yes, to suit my personal taste more, and hopefully also the taste of other people who think like me. (As they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 worldwide just like you.) It's easier to do that than to argue with a designer's grand vision.
So you've been arguing... what? That I shouldn't be allowed that? Or what? That PM's and Sid's vision are the only thing that matters, and customers be damned, noone should be able to change the balance between Phalanx and Tank? (Well, Sid would seem to disaggree with you in that case, since Civ 3 was moddable and this whole thread is about Civ 4 being even more moddable.)
Or what? It's hard to even figure out WTH are you arguing, among all those off-topic rants, tantrums, straw men, and just plain fits.
Well, at least now I understand the reference to your mom's work. I can see her motivation there now. With a son like that, ouch, I can see what would drive her to study those cases. She has all my compassion. Honestly.
E.g., first you rant about how a program goes through 12 interfaces in a year and you coded more than 20 in the last 2 years alone. Then when I say I was talking about the finished stuff, not about the intermediate steps, you pretend you never discussed anything of the sort. Short memory, eh?
E.g., while we're at your whole surrealistic running amok about interfaces, the particularly funny paragraph is: "That's like saying "here's a hint, what do those natural speech interpreters do? They type letters. Typing letters isn't hard." It's mighty easy to say that the output isn't hard to deal with. That doesn't mean you can make the interpreter."
Well, I'll say it again, fanboy, maybe this time it'll get into your tiny thick skull: I don't want to make another interpreter. What I want would translate in your example into: "so I don't want to put up with your crap speech-to-text interpreter, just let me type. Or just give me the API, I'll then write my own keyboard handler then."
There, do you understand now? I don't want to rewrite B&W's crap gesture code, I want to bypass it altogether. I fucking _hate_ those retarded gestures. I just want to click on those icons at the bottom, and never have to draw one of those retarded gestures ever again.
"Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?"
Well, that all is a very insightful post, and I'll largely aggree with your analysis, but what I quoted there hints at a different aspect of the problem too.
You've correctly pointed out that for one criterion ("I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water"), you only find something satisfactory in the "from 2002 onwards" group.
However, there are other personal criteria where the same situation happens in reverse. There's stuff which is basically _only_ present in "The set of all games from before 2002". Or at the very least, a tiny minority in the other.
It's not just a case of selecting from two different sized sets. Even if you take equal intervals to pick from, some things will be severely missing from one or the other. E.g., let's take the intervals '90..'95 and 2000..2005, with a hiatus in the middle just to leave some space for the transition to have a noticeable effect.
E.g., what if my standards include "but I really want my RPGs to be tactical turn based, and thus be an _intellectual_ exercise, instead of an exercise in reflexes"? You know, closer to playing chess than to an exercise in circle strafing.
In the '90..'95 interval I can find _plenty_ of turn based RPGs, and in fact they're dominating the RPG scene. In the 2000..2005 interval they didn't disappear completely, but the dominant flavours have become the real-time click-fest and the "action-RPG".
Even admittedly good games like the two Vampire games, basically are more about testing the _player's_ reflexes than about carefully planning team tactics. Whether I hit anyone with a Mac-10 in Bloodlines depends more on my control of a mouse, than on planing my _character's_ stats and tactics.
E.g., the same can be said to an even more extreme extent about _strategy_ games. It used to be that they were like chess for nerds, and relied on carefully considering each unit's many stats and carefully planning the exact sequence of moves.
Now it's more like clicking 20 times on "Build Dwarf" and rushing. Units have been "streamlined" to barely having 2 stats, maximum 3, or even literally to a rock-paper-stone system (e.g., in Empire Earth.) And you don't have time to carefully plan and execute anything. You just drag a big rectangle around whatever you could build quickly, and send them that-a-way in a chaotic mass.
This isn't necessarily to say that RTS is "crap" for everyone or anything. But if what you're really looking for is a TBS, a RTS isn't even the same genre.
So, again, it's not just the size of the interval from which we cherry-pick. It's that whole genres or gameplay elements we've grown up with, are now all but extinct. Even taking equal intervals, you just don't have much of a choice to cherry-pick from.
Of course, that may well be the whole problem. We're talking stuff that we grew up with. Someone who's just growing up on RTS, click-fest real-time RPGs and circle-strafing in action-RPGs... well, they probably won't miss the old elements. In some cases they may not even know that anything else ever existed.
A couple of months ago I was talking to a coworker about console games. And the invariable "yeah, but gamepads suck for FPS and RTS" pops up.
That's the downside of this phenomenon that everyone basically copies a previous gamepad, with only minor tweaks: they also copy the limitations of it. We've been stuck with the "yeah, but for FPS or RTS you're better off with a PC and a mouse" syndrom for more than a decade already. And now I see that the next generation consoles _still_ did nothing about making a controller that's fit for those.
So here's the idea we came up with: a gamepad with a trackball instead of the right thumbstick. (The left stick would remain a stick, of course.)
Think about it. I've had co-workers that played multiplayer PC FPS (e.g., half life) on a trackball, and they weren't bad at all with it. And it would definitely rule for selecting units and clicking around in a RTS. Plus a few other possible uses, like point-and-click adventures.
And for more traditional console games, I think it wouldn't be any worse than a thumbstick. In the vast majority of games the right stick either isn't used at all, or is used for looking around, or is used for scrolling text and such, like in Jade Empire. Neither would work any worse with a trackball.
So that's my wish. That some console manufacturer would finally start shipping just that.
While I'll aggree that there is _some_ nostalgia involved, that is definitely not the whole story. Games _are_ becoming more and more "streamlined" and shallow.
1. Games are becoming more and more simplified, I assume for the benefit of the casual gamer. I'm all for cattering to casual gamers, since I like a good intuitive interface myself. But often it means degrading gameplay as well.
E.g., look at a single series of games, from the same company, not even going that far back to be a case of nostalgia. Look at the (d)evolution that happened between Patrician 2 and Port Royale 2. (And if you're nasty, trace it all the way back to Elite, since Patrician 2 to Port Royale 2 are basically Elite on water.)
The economy got over-simplified. Basically while Patrician 2 was _hard_ and actually a trade and economy simulation, in Port Royale 2 you pretty much are guaranteed to make money as long as you don't actively try not to. It also doesn't help that the whole strategy element of leading a _fleet_ in Patrician 2, eventually devolved into a sea arcade game with a single ship in Port Royale 2. (The rest of the ships in your fleet are basically extra lives in that arcade fight.)
2. As an additional reason for that, there's a bunch of stuff that's just hard to implement properly in 3D, or not obvious to the casual player in 3D, so it either disappeared or got the equivalent of a big neon sign saying "use it HERE ==>"
E.g., I can think of old 2D games where you could scale any wall, or (try to) blow up walls, or use a grappling hook on any ledge. Nowadays you have clearly marked "you can climb this one" walls, e.g., in Sudeki. Or if you get a grappling gun, there will be a big marking where you can use it, and typically not too often.
3. There's a lot of stuff that gets streamlined because everything today has to be real-time. Actual strategy tends to be replaced by whack-a-mole clicking without a plan. E.g., whereas a PC RPG used to involve basically squad tactics and use of a whole range of spells (status effects, buffs, etc), nowadays you get action-RPGs where you have to run, hit and block in real time, and if you get any spells they're direct damage.
Compare for example, the old D&D games from SSI, which were practically a turn based tactics game, to, say, Demon Stone. Right. Nothing says "D&D" like having to do attack combos, and all spells being nothing more than a weapon upgrade for the mage.
4. Variety _is_ shrinking. Games tend to be easily dividable in narrow "genres" lately, often meaning a clone of other games that sold well. While it doesn't necessarily say "new games are bad", playing an exact clone of a game I've already bought before, does somewhat reduce my satisfaction.
Heh. Where shall I even start:
1. If you can compare WW2 battles where both sides had rifles and AT guns, to a battle involving bronze spears against tanks, I rest my case. You do have a perception problem. By Civ 3 standards every WW2 battle involved _at_ _least_ Riflemen.
Ditto about infantry taking on tanks. If you'll actually researched how that was done in WW2 or now, you may discover it involved AT rifles, bazookas and AT magnetic mines. If for you that's the same as poking it with a bronze spear, that's funny.
2. My dear fanboy, you don't even start to understand the difference between "renderer" and "interface".
The renderer's job is to take a 3D scene and paint the polygons on the screen. Rendering in an isometric view isn't even requiring a new renderer. It's the same renderer with a different view.
Clicking and dragging to select units, and clicking to move/attack, as well as all the rest of a RTS interface, instead of FPS controlls, _is_ a different kind of interface.
3. The fact that UT2004 did support different interfaces, or that in your own words "Yes, facilities exist for that in many games, and also in many operating systems." is just proving my point: it _is_ possible. And no, it doesn't take years in development to allow loading DLLs, or to have a clean API that allows one to read a list of displayed icons and intercept mouse clicks.
4. If you're at OS interface replacements, why don't you look at Linux, then? Have a look on Freshmeat, and you might find a _ton_ of different window managers for it. Ranging from simple stuff like Ratpoison to complete desktop environments like KDE.
Or since you mention Windows 3.x, there were a lot more than OpenStep out there. I personally had Dashboard and Norton Desktop on my computer at different times. And that's just what I used.
Which, again, is just proving the point: if a clean API exists, people will do it. Now remind me, why was this somehow inapropriate for games?
5. So your claim is that, for an icon that is already painted on the screen, taking a click in that area and sending an event to the game engine would take 4 years to code? Heh. Funny stuff.
Here's a hint: what do those gestures do? Tell the engine "ok, prime spell X". So you're telling me that intercepting a mouse click and sending the exact same event to the game engine would take _four_ _years_ to code? Dude, I know some people write awful unmaintainable spagetti code, but _four_ _years_ to interpret a click and call a function is... extreme.
I used to think my coleague Wally was slow, because he took two years to implement something... which someone else implemented in 6 hours. But four years to (A) get a list of painted icons, (B) see if the coordinates of a mouse-click are within one, and (C) call the apropriate function... is surrealistic.
There, I even gave you the pseudo-code above. You can stop ranting about DirectX widgets now. You don't need those to compare the coordinates of a mouse click to a list of icon coordinates.
6. When I've talked about coding interfaces, I meant complete interfaces, that actually shipped, not "I've added a button on a mockup for tomorrow's meeting, so I'll call it a new interface." 'Nuff said.
7. Ah, more clinging to your own redefined meaning of what "mod" really means. If your argument relies on redefining a word to mean something else than the dictionary says, or what the programmers have been using it for ages (see the jargon file)... well, I don't even see a point in arguing that. What next? Argue your point based on redefining "Tuesday" to mean a species of dinosaur?
8. "I work in the industry you're criticizing, and you don't."
Well, that would explain the holy crusade in defense of the sacred right to write crap code and shove it untested out the door. Yes. Of course.
Actually, sorry, especially then the defense of crap quality doesn't make sense. The PC gaming industry is alienating a lot of it
Well, I'm definitely not agains _some_ preservation measures. E.g., I'm actually for emission controlls because, frankly, whether it causes warming or not, we end up breathing that shit.
I've seen some towns in Eastern Europe, where ecology didn't even start to be a concern during communism, and gee, that's scary. They had mining towns that were _covered_ in black dust. That's a silicosis waiting to happen if you just live anywhere near there. Or they had stuff like cement factories without filters in the middle of some city, spewing tons of dust per day into the air.
Kinda makes one realize the things we take for granted on this side. Or why emision controls are good, much as the industry whines about it.
A six trillion dollar ring seems overkill to me, but wth, if someone can prove it's needed, fine by me.
What I _am_ against, though, is the bullshit pseudo-science and doomsday menace wrapper that already has all the symptoms of a religion. The whole absolute truth, and if you don't believe the holy (eco) scripture you're everyone's enemy, etc, that's what gets my goat.
That's not how science works. In science you're _supposed_ to question everything, and approach _any_ theory with the frame of mind that it might be wrong, or at least incomplete. The whole reason we have for example quantum mechanics, astrophysics, etc, (and thus why you have a CPU, lasers, a TV, etc) is that people didn't take Newton's mechanics as some absolute holy truth. Or for that reason even those are because people like Newton, Galileo, etc, didn't buy the holy dogma that Aristotle's theories are the final truth.
So the moment someone basically claims that their theory is _the_ one absolute truth, and that you're everyone's sworn enemy (or at least actively on the payroll of some lobby) if you dare as much study more of it... they lost me. That's not how science works. That's dogma. That's how religion works.
Italy did indeed do rather poorly all around in WW2, and I was sorta expecting Italy as an example there. Ethiopia is probably an even better example where they barely succeeded against inferior tech.
Still, even (A) Ethiopia did have imported rifles, and (B) Italy used mostly infantry there too, which is probably just as well, since Italy's tanks were closer to WW1 level anyway. So IMHO in Civ3 terms we're talking at most 1 tech level difference, _not_ a 200 man Phalanx with bronze spears vs a 20,000 man tank division.
If you're performing a full HDD scan at the same time as playing a game, yes, that will benefit from a second CPU. Then again, since a major bottleneck there is the HDD, and as you've noticed the scan runs with low priority, hyperthreading would also be enough.
An even more obvious answer: go to sleep.
How much _are_ you encoding, that it can't possibly finish in the 16 hours a day when you're at work or sleeping, and it has to overlap your gaming time?
And more importantly, if you absolutely have to encode about a dozen movies to DivX per day, how on Earth do you have time to see all those _and_ have time left for gaming? Not a flame, I'm actually genuinely curious.
Yes, that would be good and fine, if it wasn't utterly false.
Let's take those in the paragraph you quote, because two are synchronous tasks, and one is a whole 0% to 1% CPU time.
1. The swap file. Do you understand how that works? It a process wants to read 1 byte from the memory location X, that process can't possibly proceed until that byte has been fetched. If that's in a page currently swapped out, it can't possibly proceed before it's finished loading back into RAM.
So offloading swap management solves... what? You wait for that page anyway, and wait exactly as much time anyway, because it's the HDD that's the bottleneck there. So offloading that to another CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit.
2. Your real time virus scanner. Another synchronous task: if your game is waiting (e.g., at a loading screen) for a block to be loaded and scanned by the real time AV scanner, that's it. That thread is stopped and waiting until the scanner is done with that block.
So, again, a second CPU will bring exactly _zero_ benefit there,
3. Your real time firewall. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, look at the CPU usage for that one. Oops it's at most 1%, most of the time less. Yeah, it sooo makes sense to buy a slower dual-CPU for that.
Here's just some simple maths: if you have a 2.8 GHz CPU and lose 1% of that to the firewall, it leaves you with some 2.77 GHz worth of power for your game. If you get a 2.4 GHz dual CPU so the second one can take care of the firewall, you're left with a 2.4 GHz CPU for your game. Ooops, so dualies are still a losing proposition after all.
So, no offense, all I see there is one aspect of why premature optimization (in this case, of hardware) based on false assumptions and lack of measurement is bad. That's just the problem: you end up dumping time and/or money and more often than not end up with something actually _slower_ than the straightforward solution. In this case you dump a bunch of cash on a l33t dual-core solution, based on false assumptions about what those processes do and how, and actually end up _slower_ than a cheaper one-core solution. Was it worth it?
Around the year 1000 for example, it was much warmer than today. There's a reason why "Greenland" is called that: it had thawed and the Vikings could colonize and farm it.
Then it cooled off some time later, and the colony was all but abandoned.
The fun part is, the humans didn't go extinct, the gulf stream didn't reverse, ocean fauna didn't all float belly-up because of melting glaciers being sweet water, etc.
Basically that's what gets me pissed off about this _political_ "waah, we're all DOOMED if you don't follow ME" hype about global warming. It's mis-representation and scare tactics.
As was said, it's only the bullshit media and political speeches where global warming is a certainty, and certain doom is just around the corner. The media loves a good scare story. That's what sells. Actual scientific facts don't.
The science part is a lot more ambiguous and not fully understood yet. It's not just that the earth has cooled off just fine before. It's also that:
- The "Global Warming" measured, that started the whole hype, was actually based on limited data from only a tiny portion of the world. And it was only a 1 degree Celsius over a _century_ increase.
- The Earth has periodic warming and cooling cycles, ranging roughly between 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today in the last glaciations, and some 6 degrees warmer in the times of the dinosaurs. Think roughly a sine wave spanning whole ages. With a lot of noise superimposed.
And we're roughly in the middle. It's _normal_ to rise slowly on the average. Not this fast, but basically a century of it might well be measuring just the noise in the real signal. Especially given that:
- Actual satellite data that covers a helluva lot more of the whole globe (you know, the "global" part of "global warming") actually shows a global _cooling_ for the last 20 years straight. There is actually a theory that we might be heading into a "mini ice age". (Not that it will stop journalists and politicians from presenting a _cooling_ as an effect of global _warming_.)
- Also for this last interval, there is data indicating that the average temperature on Earth just faithfully follows fluctuations in the Sun's energy output. Think, for example, how we got a very warm winter between 2003 and 2004, because of solar flares. We can actually observe and measure those things nowadays, and blimey, temperature on Earth seems to just follow them.
Is it that unbelievable, since Sun is where that heat comes from in the first place? We're talking some 0.3% temperature difference in this "global warming." It only takes _minor_ fluctuations in the energy input to produce that.
- Humans never accounted for more than 2% of greenhouse gasses. If not only we stopped driving cars, but if humanity as a whole even stopped breathing, it still just wouldn't make that much of a difference.
"Your whole argument relies on some made up numbers. What if the other background processes took 50 units of work per second, then suddenly the dual core processor has the advantage."
:)
That's the _whole_ point: they don't take much. All this dual-core hype is based on the lie that there are some massively CPU-intenside background processes that leave your game starving for its own dedicated CPU.
Well, here's what you can do. Turn off SETI, IM, and generally all the things you would realistically turned off if you wanted the maximum frames-per-second in a game. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. Let it stabilize for a few seconds, then look at your CPU usage. Those are your Windows background processes at work.
There's no made up number there. You don't have to believe my numbers. You can read the actual numbers for your own system, yourself.
_If_ you were to see some 50% CPU usage when idle, yeah, _then_ you need a second CPU badly. But here's the fun part: I see 0% on mine.
So getting a second CPU to run all that 0%, and thus reduce the game CPU's load by a whole 0%... well, I hope you can understand why some of us are less than thrilled by that idea
Windows background processes take less time than you think. What Windows does have, though, is a lot of _synchronous_ stuff going, i.e., where your application must wait for the results anyway. I.e., moving that to another CPU wouldn't do you one bit of good.
E.g., when your game is taking ages at the loading screen, because some AV program scans every byte loaded, that's one such synchronous thing. Each call to load a block _must_ wait until that block is scanned and loaded. Whether that's happening on CPU 1 or CPU 2 is irrelevant. Your game gets to wait exactly the same time in both cases.
E.g., if a computer is slow because it's swapping (e.g., your computer illiterate friend -- you know you have one by that description -- having 5 spyware programs and 5 applications open while gaming), that process just can't possibly proceed until the desired page is swapped in. If your game's (or any other application's) main thread wants to access location 31337, it can't possibly proceed until the value there has been fetched. Which means until that whole page is loaded from disk, if it was swapped out. Whether it's CPU 1 or CPU 2 handling the swapping, it still won't accelerate that one bit.
Catch mod. If you'll scroll down a bit, you may notice:
2. modify or modification.
This abbreviation is very common - in fact the full terms are
considered formal. "Mods" is used especially with reference
to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software,
most especially with respect to patch sets or a diff.