The problem arises when two people have an announcement to make at the same time, usually when they're both waiting for another person to finish making their own announcement. Also don't forget that gaming VOIP software is quite often used for social purposes (VOIP use in public server TF2 is very very rarely related to the game at hand), and occasionally used by casters for commentating as well. It absolutely needs to live up to the same demands that "conversational" VOIP software needs to live up to.
For simple half-duplex systems like gaming, more lag is not really noticeable.
The only practical difference between gaming VOIP and Skype is having to hit a push-to-talk button. Latency issues like people stepping on each other crop up in gaming VOIP in much the same way that they pop up in high-latency cell phone or Skype conversations.
VAC can drop the banhammer, locking you out of your game library at their whim with absolutely no way of redress.
A VAC ban only prevents you from playing online on VAC-enabled servers. It has no effect on your singleplayer library, and you can play multiplayer titles on non-VAC-enabled servers as well (however rare those may be).
your ass is banned even though you never did anything close to a wall hack...it is definitely not unheard of a permanent ban handed to a guy who forgot to uninstall SoftICE or Visual Studio.
The mystery guy they refer to in the first Matrix who "freed the first of us" and could "reshape the matrix to how he wished". Remember him? When he freed the first of the resistance fighters, who was piloting a ship to catch them and keep them from drowning???
At the end of Reloaded, The Architect tells Neo that the whole thing is a cycle where the machines repeatedly destroy Zion and whoever is The One at the time chooses a small group of people to start repopulating Zion with... I would assume that those people would have been chosen from the pod farm and delivered to Zion by the machines themselves, and could have simply woken up with The One standing over them saying "ohai, ur not in teh matricks anymore".
The difference between your real life examples and a video game is that you don't get another chance at real life, while in the video game you can reload an earlier save.
I have seen after game videos enough where impossible shots were made. Repeatedly.
What is your definition of an "impossible" shot? The problem with most accusations of cheating is that people generally use the term "impossible" to mean "something I couldn't do myself," when the reality is that what is humanly possible goes *well* beyond your own personal limitations, especially if you do not routinely push them. The top tiers of video gaming are full of people who have dedicated their lives to approaching the limits of what is humanly possible, just like the top tiers of any other endeavor you could imagine. Unless you're seeing things like crosshairs snapping perfectly (as in, in zero frames) to unpredictable targets (someone walking in a straight line is not unpredictable), I really wouldn't be that quick to label someone a cheater. There is a very real possibility that they're just that good.
I stand by my assertion that I have never, in 15 years of online gaming, ever seen anyone do anything that I couldn't attribute to pure skill on their part. If anyone I've played against actually was cheating, they weren't doing anything that was humanly impossible, and that I couldn't figure out how to beat.
Furthermore, if you're playing games that a simple automatic cheat could substantially improve someone's play at, then you're really playing the wrong games. Aimbots only help you in games with extremely powerful hitscan weapons, like Counter-Strike (which I've always found boring). Play Quake or Team Fortress. Even if you're cheating, somebody who knows the game better than you will demolish you.
aimbots are an accepted tool of the trade for pwnage.
[Citation Needed]
In all my years of PC gaming I've never run across anyone whose skills couldn't be explained by... skill. Your peers ignore your cries of "cheater!" because 99% of the time that someone accuses someone of cheating it's because they got owned and feel like crying about it. I have a friend who gets banned from MW:BO servers constantly, despite having a web page full of demos and a youtube channel full of videos showing him doing everything he does perfectly legitimately. People just can't believe that other people are better at video games than them.
So it took you 2 days of fairly constant work to get 30 million, and you need ten times that, or 20 days to get enough for a PLEX... I think I'd rather just spend the $15 that it would take me less than an hour to earn in real life.
a) All GPS receivers capable of sensing a position higher than 11 miles or a velocity higher than 515 meters/sec are classified as munitions and require state department licenses to export... Pretty much no consumer GPS receiver, including the iPad is going to be able to find itself in orbit. OTOH, the Space Shuttle itself uses GPS for space navigation, and I'm sure the ISS has a GPS receiver on board as well that can find its own location.
b) The GPS satellites orbit at 20,000 km, while the ISS orbits at 350km... The strength of the signal isn't really all that affected.
I suppose I can agree that maybe they didn't know what they were getting into... But I still have trouble with the idea that everyone would be that enthusiastic and that nobody would be hesitant about such a drastic change in their fundamental way of life, especially when the movie presents them as having been brought up as mindless consumers in the cradle of BnL Corp. I really don't see any precedent in the movie for these people to have any interest in anything outside of spending every moment relaxing and buying shit. Maybe if I'd seen some kind of sentiment that people were anxious to go back to Earth *before* Wall-E came on the scene it would be more believable... As it was, it took an accident to get people to even start looking out the window instead of sitting absorbed in their chairs' video screens.
And then there's the sheer implausibility of the idea of a group of people who are morbidly overweight and whose muscles have practically never been used at all, much less for supporting their weight under Earth gravity, being even *capable* of surviving after landing on Earth. These people are literally helpless without their chairs to haul them around, and all of a sudden they land on Earth and they can get up and walk around. I don't buy it.
Considering they'd been out there 700 years, I don't see why they had to start re-settling Earth that very instant. They did need the parts that Wall-E had stashed in his home to get him fixed up again, but there's no reason the ship couldn't have sat in orbit for a few decades to breed a generation of children who would have been physically capable of the task ahead of them.
My main beef was the characterization of the population of the Axiom. They've spent their entire lives on a space ship where their every whim is catered to by robots, and so have their parents and grandparents for many many generations. All of a sudden, out of nowhere they're being told that, hooray, Earth is growing plants again, we all get to go home... And every single person is totally, completely, enthusiastically on board with changing their entire way of life, to repopulate a deserted (and actually, still pretty polluted and disgusting) planet from scratch when none of them have ever had any sort of experience or exposure to even the outdoors, much less things like farming and the hardships of a largely non-technological existence. Oh, yeah, and Wall-E is dying and somehow everybody there knows who he is and cares about him, despite their only exposure to him being through huge blaring announcements saying "this robot is dangerous."
I've never run into any of the problems you talked about with the engine. In fact it's my opinion that the Source engine is the best modern engine for multiplayer gaming. Unreal Engine has very bad input latency (unacceptable for a first person shooter engine on PC), and Source's netcode beats the pants off of anything else out there. Not to mention the fact that I can play TF2 on hardware costing half as much as what I need to play any of the other modern shooters.
So basically, 25ms of encoding latency, plus the latency of your audio hardware input and output buffers, plus network/medium propagation (5-10ms for satellites?), plus any network jitter buffering. That's pretty good. CELT claims 3-9ms but I'd like to hear a comparison of audio quality at 24 kbps, especially considering the differences between their designs.
If your transmission medium is half duplex and shared by several users, you run into exactly the phenomenon I described. A codec with 250ms of latency creates a 250ms window in which two people can start talking without realizing they're stepping on each other. People on aviation frequencies step on each other all the time and the only latency there is speed of light radio propagation.
What we're trying to ask is if you pipe a real time stream of samples from a microphone into one end, encapsulate the data in UDP packets, bounce the stream off 127.0.0.1, unencapsulate them, pipe it into a decoder and from there into a sound card and speaker... How much time is there between me saying "hi" into the mic and hearing "hi" out of the speaker? This is by far the most important consideration for modern voice protocols. Low bandwidth is nice. Low CPU is nice. Error tolerance is nice. Latency is crucial. If you don't think it's crucial, get 30 people in a Ventrilo channel and listen to them step all over each other.
The developers of Mumble have gotten very good at reducing latency, and would be worthwhile to bounce ideas with.
You missed my point. I'll say it again. Every single physical phenomenon above the level of quantum physics is governed by deterministic physical laws, yet for the purpose of statistical analysis we treat them as random because we don't have the ability to know them exactly.
The poker analogy was talking about a *single hand.* When you shuffle a deck of cards, they will come out in an order which is precisely determined by the actions taken to shuffle them, yet we treat the order of the cards after shuffling as random for the purposes of the game, because no player has a way to know what order the cards came out in.
How about horse racing? You can't say that the outcome of a horse race is determined by any sort of random factor, it's simply a matter of which horse/jockey combination is the fastest... Yet people bet on horse racing. The future outcome of the race is being treated as random because it is impossible to know without just running the race.
In chess, we are not treating the individual moves as random phenomena, we are treating the overall outcome (win/loss/draw) as a random phenomenon for statistical purposes. Between players of equal skill, we treat the outcome of a game which hasn't been played yet as having an equal random chance of being won by either player, because we simply don't, and can't, know which player will win without simply playing the game.
This is not saying that the outcome of the game *is* random, it's saying that we simply don't have the predictive model to treat it as anything other than random. We don't have the ability to predict the exact result of the match with any certainty, we can only analyze past performance and assign a probability to certain future results occurring.
When you roll a die or spin a roulette wheel or deal a hand of cards, the outcome is governed purely by the laws of physics, yet you treat the result as random anyway. The outcome of a chess game is the same way. Even if the outcome of the game is decided solely by player skill within the rules of the game, the result is treated as a statistically random phenomenon.
Really, the high frequency traders are just taking money from each other. That's not the problem, the problem is people who have an unfair advantage in the market through their positions as middlemen. Disallowing anyone from owning a commodity which they also trade on behalf of other people is one thing, the elimination of the much-publicized 30-millisecond advantage on the market for certain parties is another.
How exactly is data which is transmitted to the public airwaves by you any different than an SSID which is transmitted into the public airwaves by a router? If you transmit information unencrypted in an extremely widely known modulation scheme, where exactly is the expectation of privacy in doing so? It's like complaining that someone wrote down something you yelled in the middle of Times Square.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem arises when two people have an announcement to make at the same time, usually when they're both waiting for another person to finish making their own announcement. Also don't forget that gaming VOIP software is quite often used for social purposes (VOIP use in public server TF2 is very very rarely related to the game at hand), and occasionally used by casters for commentating as well. It absolutely needs to live up to the same demands that "conversational" VOIP software needs to live up to.
For simple half-duplex systems like gaming, more lag is not really noticeable.
The only practical difference between gaming VOIP and Skype is having to hit a push-to-talk button. Latency issues like people stepping on each other crop up in gaming VOIP in much the same way that they pop up in high-latency cell phone or Skype conversations.
VAC can drop the banhammer, locking you out of your game library at their whim with absolutely no way of redress.
A VAC ban only prevents you from playing online on VAC-enabled servers. It has no effect on your singleplayer library, and you can play multiplayer titles on non-VAC-enabled servers as well (however rare those may be).
your ass is banned even though you never did anything close to a wall hack...it is definitely not unheard of a permanent ban handed to a guy who forgot to uninstall SoftICE or Visual Studio.
Are there any documented cases of this?
The mystery guy they refer to in the first Matrix who "freed the first of us" and could "reshape the matrix to how he wished". Remember him? When he freed the first of the resistance fighters, who was piloting a ship to catch them and keep them from drowning???
At the end of Reloaded, The Architect tells Neo that the whole thing is a cycle where the machines repeatedly destroy Zion and whoever is The One at the time chooses a small group of people to start repopulating Zion with... I would assume that those people would have been chosen from the pod farm and delivered to Zion by the machines themselves, and could have simply woken up with The One standing over them saying "ohai, ur not in teh matricks anymore".
The difference between your real life examples and a video game is that you don't get another chance at real life, while in the video game you can reload an earlier save.
I have seen after game videos enough where impossible shots were made. Repeatedly.
What is your definition of an "impossible" shot? The problem with most accusations of cheating is that people generally use the term "impossible" to mean "something I couldn't do myself," when the reality is that what is humanly possible goes *well* beyond your own personal limitations, especially if you do not routinely push them. The top tiers of video gaming are full of people who have dedicated their lives to approaching the limits of what is humanly possible, just like the top tiers of any other endeavor you could imagine. Unless you're seeing things like crosshairs snapping perfectly (as in, in zero frames) to unpredictable targets (someone walking in a straight line is not unpredictable), I really wouldn't be that quick to label someone a cheater. There is a very real possibility that they're just that good.
I stand by my assertion that I have never, in 15 years of online gaming, ever seen anyone do anything that I couldn't attribute to pure skill on their part. If anyone I've played against actually was cheating, they weren't doing anything that was humanly impossible, and that I couldn't figure out how to beat.
Furthermore, if you're playing games that a simple automatic cheat could substantially improve someone's play at, then you're really playing the wrong games. Aimbots only help you in games with extremely powerful hitscan weapons, like Counter-Strike (which I've always found boring). Play Quake or Team Fortress. Even if you're cheating, somebody who knows the game better than you will demolish you.
aimbots are an accepted tool of the trade for pwnage.
[Citation Needed]
In all my years of PC gaming I've never run across anyone whose skills couldn't be explained by... skill. Your peers ignore your cries of "cheater!" because 99% of the time that someone accuses someone of cheating it's because they got owned and feel like crying about it. I have a friend who gets banned from MW:BO servers constantly, despite having a web page full of demos and a youtube channel full of videos showing him doing everything he does perfectly legitimately. People just can't believe that other people are better at video games than them.
Rooting for all the stores that can't compete on price to go out of business is rooting for Wal-Mart.
...by making it easier for them to end their enemies' lives. You haven't saved any net lives, just switched which side lost the lives.
I prefer this one:
Q: How do you know if someone has an iPhone?
A: They tell you.
So it took you 2 days of fairly constant work to get 30 million, and you need ten times that, or 20 days to get enough for a PLEX... I think I'd rather just spend the $15 that it would take me less than an hour to earn in real life.
Have you played Zeno Clash? Not exactly the same feel, but a similar principle. Lots of hand-to-hand combat, maybe not *quite* as deep.
Also, Mirror's Edge. Sorta.
Am I included in that count or do I make it four?
Well, your reception certainly isn't going to get worse by putting less between you and the transmitter.
A few interesting things about GPS in space:
a) All GPS receivers capable of sensing a position higher than 11 miles or a velocity higher than 515 meters/sec are classified as munitions and require state department licenses to export... Pretty much no consumer GPS receiver, including the iPad is going to be able to find itself in orbit. OTOH, the Space Shuttle itself uses GPS for space navigation, and I'm sure the ISS has a GPS receiver on board as well that can find its own location.
b) The GPS satellites orbit at 20,000 km, while the ISS orbits at 350km... The strength of the signal isn't really all that affected.
I suppose I can agree that maybe they didn't know what they were getting into... But I still have trouble with the idea that everyone would be that enthusiastic and that nobody would be hesitant about such a drastic change in their fundamental way of life, especially when the movie presents them as having been brought up as mindless consumers in the cradle of BnL Corp. I really don't see any precedent in the movie for these people to have any interest in anything outside of spending every moment relaxing and buying shit. Maybe if I'd seen some kind of sentiment that people were anxious to go back to Earth *before* Wall-E came on the scene it would be more believable... As it was, it took an accident to get people to even start looking out the window instead of sitting absorbed in their chairs' video screens.
And then there's the sheer implausibility of the idea of a group of people who are morbidly overweight and whose muscles have practically never been used at all, much less for supporting their weight under Earth gravity, being even *capable* of surviving after landing on Earth. These people are literally helpless without their chairs to haul them around, and all of a sudden they land on Earth and they can get up and walk around. I don't buy it.
Considering they'd been out there 700 years, I don't see why they had to start re-settling Earth that very instant. They did need the parts that Wall-E had stashed in his home to get him fixed up again, but there's no reason the ship couldn't have sat in orbit for a few decades to breed a generation of children who would have been physically capable of the task ahead of them.
My main beef was the characterization of the population of the Axiom. They've spent their entire lives on a space ship where their every whim is catered to by robots, and so have their parents and grandparents for many many generations. All of a sudden, out of nowhere they're being told that, hooray, Earth is growing plants again, we all get to go home... And every single person is totally, completely, enthusiastically on board with changing their entire way of life, to repopulate a deserted (and actually, still pretty polluted and disgusting) planet from scratch when none of them have ever had any sort of experience or exposure to even the outdoors, much less things like farming and the hardships of a largely non-technological existence. Oh, yeah, and Wall-E is dying and somehow everybody there knows who he is and cares about him, despite their only exposure to him being through huge blaring announcements saying "this robot is dangerous."
Just too much of a stretch.
I've never run into any of the problems you talked about with the engine. In fact it's my opinion that the Source engine is the best modern engine for multiplayer gaming. Unreal Engine has very bad input latency (unacceptable for a first person shooter engine on PC), and Source's netcode beats the pants off of anything else out there. Not to mention the fact that I can play TF2 on hardware costing half as much as what I need to play any of the other modern shooters.
So basically, 25ms of encoding latency, plus the latency of your audio hardware input and output buffers, plus network/medium propagation (5-10ms for satellites?), plus any network jitter buffering. That's pretty good. CELT claims 3-9ms but I'd like to hear a comparison of audio quality at 24 kbps, especially considering the differences between their designs.
If your transmission medium is half duplex and shared by several users, you run into exactly the phenomenon I described. A codec with 250ms of latency creates a 250ms window in which two people can start talking without realizing they're stepping on each other. People on aviation frequencies step on each other all the time and the only latency there is speed of light radio propagation.
What we're trying to ask is if you pipe a real time stream of samples from a microphone into one end, encapsulate the data in UDP packets, bounce the stream off 127.0.0.1, unencapsulate them, pipe it into a decoder and from there into a sound card and speaker... How much time is there between me saying "hi" into the mic and hearing "hi" out of the speaker? This is by far the most important consideration for modern voice protocols. Low bandwidth is nice. Low CPU is nice. Error tolerance is nice. Latency is crucial. If you don't think it's crucial, get 30 people in a Ventrilo channel and listen to them step all over each other.
The developers of Mumble have gotten very good at reducing latency, and would be worthwhile to bounce ideas with.
You missed my point. I'll say it again. Every single physical phenomenon above the level of quantum physics is governed by deterministic physical laws, yet for the purpose of statistical analysis we treat them as random because we don't have the ability to know them exactly.
The poker analogy was talking about a *single hand.* When you shuffle a deck of cards, they will come out in an order which is precisely determined by the actions taken to shuffle them, yet we treat the order of the cards after shuffling as random for the purposes of the game, because no player has a way to know what order the cards came out in.
How about horse racing? You can't say that the outcome of a horse race is determined by any sort of random factor, it's simply a matter of which horse/jockey combination is the fastest... Yet people bet on horse racing. The future outcome of the race is being treated as random because it is impossible to know without just running the race.
In chess, we are not treating the individual moves as random phenomena, we are treating the overall outcome (win/loss/draw) as a random phenomenon for statistical purposes. Between players of equal skill, we treat the outcome of a game which hasn't been played yet as having an equal random chance of being won by either player, because we simply don't, and can't, know which player will win without simply playing the game.
This is not saying that the outcome of the game *is* random, it's saying that we simply don't have the predictive model to treat it as anything other than random. We don't have the ability to predict the exact result of the match with any certainty, we can only analyze past performance and assign a probability to certain future results occurring.
When you roll a die or spin a roulette wheel or deal a hand of cards, the outcome is governed purely by the laws of physics, yet you treat the result as random anyway. The outcome of a chess game is the same way. Even if the outcome of the game is decided solely by player skill within the rules of the game, the result is treated as a statistically random phenomenon.
Really, the high frequency traders are just taking money from each other. That's not the problem, the problem is people who have an unfair advantage in the market through their positions as middlemen. Disallowing anyone from owning a commodity which they also trade on behalf of other people is one thing, the elimination of the much-publicized 30-millisecond advantage on the market for certain parties is another.
How exactly is data which is transmitted to the public airwaves by you any different than an SSID which is transmitted into the public airwaves by a router? If you transmit information unencrypted in an extremely widely known modulation scheme, where exactly is the expectation of privacy in doing so? It's like complaining that someone wrote down something you yelled in the middle of Times Square.