bandwidth requirements of a fighting game should remain stable through generations, just as any other game genre. Look at massively multiplayer RPGs for another example. Everquest has to communicate a great deal more information between the server and the client than a fighting game ever would, and EQ is quite playable on a POTS modem.
Yes but lag isn't as noticable in EQ as it is in a fighting game. If you lag for a split second in EQ you might not notice, while every second in a fast twitch fighting game matters. Even more than it does in a FPS. Also, EQ doesn't have to pass that much information. I'm sure it isn't passing much more than the players input, because none of the variables are trusted on the client.
Say you are fighting a bat in everquest. The server knows how much health you have, knows how much heath the bat has. You hit attack on your client, which is passed to the server. The server on it's side "rolls the dice",checks your weapon or does whatever it does to determain how much you hit for. It subtracts health from the bat, and from you. It pushes the two health values back to you. I'm probably missing something. But a RPG doesn't have to track everything constantly, if something goes wrong it can just trust the central server/database right?
A fighting game on every move has to check player heath, time, positions, input, combo meters, etc. If you don't check each one and validate, writing a cheat would be trivial since there is no central server to trust.
Let's just say we want to compare Soul Caliber II to MK2. The same type of data must be sent - character position, client actions and received - damage. If I move Johnny Cage forward 2 units and I move Link forward 2 units, the data sent is going to be the same. (Vastly oversimplifying things here but you get my point, right?)
I see your point. I can't use Soul Caliber II as an example because I haven't played it much (I don't like the SC games). Take MK5 and MK2. You have to send send a lot more than just character position, client actions and received damage. In MK5 you would have to send, heath, combo meter, positions of any of the weapons (if not you could easly write a cheat to have them flying around), etc. I would think every little bit helps (or hurts) in an online game.
they at least want to become so annoying that your average kid sez, "My parents are hassling me, my school is hassling me... y'know what, it just ain't worth it. I'll go to iTunes (or wherever) to download music."
Aren't they more likely to get the opposite response from pre-teens and teens? Something like "The RIAA sucks, and I'm going to do everything to avoid paying them". While older people (ie mid to late 20's) might go out and drop some money on a CD just because they don't want to spend time fishing around to get a good copy of the whole thing, teenagers tend to have more time on their hands and are more rebellious. Plus making something illegal to a teenager just makes it more attractive.
When you start seeing poorly designed Geocities/AOL anti RIAA websites with animated gifs all over, and teeny bopper girls wearing cutoff Anti-RIAA shirts then you will know the above scenerio has come to pass.
The graphics of the game don't have to be send over the pipe, as I think you're alluding to. Just because MK2 has less graphical data, does not mean it would send less data to an online competitor.
Not the graphical data, but you still have to keep track of certain things to make sure the clients are in sync and not cheating.
Don't you think War Machine is a little bit broken...?
War Machine wasn't in Marvel Super Heros. You are thinking of one of the later VS. games. The closest thing to war machine is Iron Man. Iron Man's projectile trap is tough but it's beatable. His Super moves and move of his specials have long recovery times. I wouldn't say he is the best character in the game, or head and shoulders above everyone else.
Unfortunately, this isn't really true. The fact is that, if placed online, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (new) and Mortal Kombat 2 (old) could be tuned to send almost exactly the same data over an internet connection. Even the addition of 3D to the former doesn't change the bandwidth requirements since you're still sending eight-way stick/pad inputs over the connection - the difference is simply what those inputs mean. The additional buttons aren't a big concern either since even combo presses would be interpreted as a single button input, albeit with a different machine code result.
Don't they have to keep track of other variables/objects and communicate them to each other to make sure they aren't out of sync? Such as player health, status of certain objects etc. I would think they are pushing more than the status of the control pads back and forth. At some point one of the sides has to check if everything is still the same as the other side. If not you could go out of sync and end up with a situation where both sides report a win back to the main server. (using x-box live as an example). The cheating implications if you are only passing the controls back and forth and trusting the data to the clients are pretty bad too.
I'm pretty sure x-box live works by connecting the players directly together with one person as the client and one as the server(rather than playing the game on a microsoft server). Can anyone verify this?
Being a huge fan of fighting games, and having played in (and won) quite a few tournaments I am always trying out new fighting games when they come online. I've played everything from X-Band Mortal Kombat to net fighter(ugg) to Capcom vs SNK EO. Each game, or system had it's own unique problems that kept it from really catching on. Still, there is a huge market of people who would play fighting games online if they worked and were promoted correctly.
Take an old game like Mortal Kombat 2,add a few characters to it, some new moves and fatalities and re-release it as an online game. Since it's older it should have less data you have to push over the network in order to play, plus people know how to play already and will want to play again for the new features and to play other people.
On top of that, announce an online tournament with $10,000 in prizes to be held 1 year after the release of the game. You will probably hook everyone who played the game before plus some new players.
This would work even better for capcom. I would bet if capcom re-released their old games in online form they would get more sales than they did from capcom vs SNK EO. For capcom, they could release a collection of fighting games on one disk. "Capcom Olympics" or something like that. Put Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (for the really old school players), Street Fighter Alpha (the most popular tournament SF game), Marvel Super Heros (The most well balanced capcom fighting game), X-Men vs Streetfighter (for the scrubs) on there. Hell, even throw in puzzle fighter (for the chicks). Hold a tournament for each game, and keep track of the overall score of the players.
Fighting games require fast reflexes to win against good players. If you'd have lag more than 25-50 milliseconds the game would not play right at all. That means the game would be limited to LAN play pretty much.
Having played just about every fighting game online that has been available, I can tell you that the lag isn't always an issue. I played MK2 and SF2 on XBand for the SNES (which was a 28.8 modem IIRC) and the lag wasn't too bad. Capcom vs SNK2 on Xbox does feel like it has lag problems at times (I've played over 1000 games on there), which is a joke because there is a free add on for MAME called kaillera which I was playing on a few years ago and handled lag better than the X-Box.
The point is, it can be done and there is a market just WAITING for it to be done right. Capcom vs SNK2 EO was a below average game by capcom standards and included a new cheezy fighting system which turned off long time players (EO). Still I went out and bought an X-box just for the chance to play a capcom game online against a bigger audence than kaillera had. I'm sure plenty of other people are just waiting too.
Mortal Kombat 3 having TV commercials hyping it's Arcade release still stands out in my mind. Not because it was that great, just because no one else ever did it.
. Creating a place where gamers could wander through the history of video games and read about the careers of legendary innovators like Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, and John Carmack sounds like an awesome idea.
I agree, and I was going to make this point if you hadn't already. Why are the characters getting honored and not the people who made them? I don't think Video Game Designers and Programmers get enough publicity. The video game industry should really promote itself and it's workers better. Sure, the big companies like EA get promoted well, but the actual people never do.
If you read a good book, you might go out and look for more books by that same author, you don't really care about who published it. The same (should) go for video games, if you like a game by a certain design team/programmer you should be able to easly figure out who they are so you can seek out more of the same.
thats why I find the multiplayer experience to be more and more what I can't deal with. I don't mind leisurely putting an hour or two in a week on something like Neverwinter Nights. Because I use it as an escape from the real world. Playing online you have to deal with the exact same attitudes you deal in the real world... if not worse because of the fourth wall and the ids gone wild
Video game companies should really do something about this. It would be nice if there were a feature that showed how many hours a player had logged playing the game so you can avoid matchups that are out of wack.
The systems they have in place now are a joke, for example C+C Generals...You go online to play and everyone has a record next to their name. The problem is you can reset your record all you want. So more than half the people are 0-0 and they go into the newbie rooms and "0wn". It's really sad when you come home from work, get everything you have to do done...sit down for a quick game online and you have to play some guy who's logged 10 hours already that day.
today's games are too complicated and hard for players. Carmack, surprisingly, agrees, saying 'I agree strongly with that point of view, but I'm in the minority in the PC space. I want a game you can sit down with, pick up and play. [Role playing games], for example, got to where they had to have a book ship with the game.'"
He's right in a sense, I don't think that PC games are too hard for players to play I think they are too had for players to *WANT* to play.
It's not that people are stupid, it's that they don't want to be frustrated by something that should be fun. Games for the most part should follow the golden rule of "Easy to learn, difficult to master". The mastery should come from learning the game too, not just the UI. Nobody says "Hey, I finally didn't have to look at my cheat sheet/instruction book to remember the 25 key mappings for UT2020." No, they will usually say, "Hey I had my first perfect deathmatch, I won and didn't get killed once." (UT's user interface is fine BTW, I just used them as an example)
Great Comment, but let me throw a few ideas out there...
By this definition, we mean the capacity to learn, to be instructed in tasks and incorporate ideas into itself and understand commands without detail, but without sentience or self awareness, never having emotions or being able to make fully independant decisions about freedom, what to do for itself..."snip"...But let's say you could make such a machine. One that you could give orders to "go clean the house", and it would intelligently understand and fulfill your wish without the "evil genie" effect..."snip"...Employees, especially blue collar, farmers, manufacturing and the like, could be mass produced. A whole army of robots that would work without tire, without pay, and if you could make them mass produced to be cheap (say $20,000 - $40,000 a year), if they break, get a new one.
at $20,000 to $40,000 it wouldn't be time to get a new one if they broke. It's too cost prohibitive. And if you work in IT, (since you are posting on slashdot, you probably do) you know no matter how well you program/design something, it can break. Now, say you have a company which employees 20 robots a year @20k each (the low end number). Wouldn't it make sense to hire a human at 40k a year if the human can fix 5 of the robots? (Assuming %25 percent of them have a problem during the year). That is a new job right there. Companies would probably hire 2 of them per 20 robots, just to be efficent. You will want a repair man around at all times, at least to turn a new robot on and remove the old one.
On top of that, A whole industry would be born for creating and teaching these robots. Who is going to teach the robots how to make those Big Macs? You will probably end up with the burger flippers being consultants to mcdonalds to work with the programmers to come up with the best burger flipping algorithms. It will take an army of tech support people, programmers and quality control people to maintain the robots. Sure, maybe you could argue for robots repairing other robots but that is a bit risky..and not really blue collor work.
They could work day and night, rotating in 8-12 hour shifts for maintenance and repairs. Farms could be worked all day long, and if there was a problem, robots could go out and fix the issue.
Are you really going to trust the robots to fix other robots? Say Medical Robot (MR) has an error in his code and goes to fix coffee bean picking robot(CBPR) even though CBPR is fine. MR tears him a new one and he is broke. Say MR goes on a rampage and kills your whole farm of 50 robots. $100K loss @20k per robot. Then what? Sue Microsoft or whoever is making the robots?
Assuming the robots can fix each others software problems takes them out of the realm of non-critical thinkers(blue collar).
truly "bloodless" wars where a million "soldiers" could be airdropped into the field loaded with advanced weapons to wipe out the enemy by beings that have no conscience.
Yes, but the US already has weapons that can render computers useless. (EMP based?) I would figure that other countries do also. If they don't, and the robots came around I'm sure they would build them very quick.:) I like the idea of bloodless war though.
Food prices, car prices - hell, prices for everything could actually drop, since the human cost of making them would be negligable.
Yes, but most of the money made in major companies is by upper management. They still have to make the money for buying the expensive robots. People still have to manage the food markets, Manage the food companies, Distribute the food, etc. Getting rid of low labor jobs wouldn't bring prices down significantly. Now if you had a CEO/Manager robot who sat around all day and stole investors money....let me stop..I
Madden years run ahead 1 year of the actual NFL season. What madden is calling "Madden 2004" is actually for the 2003 season. The person who wrote this article has the years mixed up.
Madden 2001 which was released at the start of the 2000 season a season in which the Titans went to the playoffs and lost the ravens. Eddie George who was on the cover that year had an impressive season...He rushed for 1509 yards and 14 TD's and had an additional 453 yards recieving and 2 TDs.
So overall he had 1962 yards and 16 tds. Very Impressive. He got injured the season AFTER that.
Madden 2002 which was released at the start of the 2001 season had Daunte Culpepper on the cover. In 2001 Culpepper was injured for a short while, but still managed to pass for 2612 yards and 14 TD's. He also rushed for 416 yards and 5 TD's. So overall he had 3028 yards and 19 TD's. While those aren't pro bowl numbers they aren't too shabby. What is impressive is, he had those numbers in playing only 11 games instead of 16.
Madden 2003 which was released at the start of the 2002 season had Marshall Faulk on the cover. In 2002, like Daunte Faulk was injured, although not badly enough to slow his productivity in the games he started. In only 10 Starts Marshall had 1490 all purpose yards and 10 TD's. While that is a down year for Marshall that is impressive for any other RB.
Now, Madden 2004 has Mike Vick on the cover who got hurt in preseason and will miss 4 regular season games. The games he will miss are at Dallas, Washington, Tampa bay, and at Carolina. The Falcons will likely go 3-1 without him, 2-2 if they blow the game to Carolina.
All in all, The Madden Curse didn't apply to Eddie George (he had a good year that year) and Culpepper and Faulk had off years due to minor injuries but their off years were as good as some players who weren't injured. We can't Judge Vick yet.
I wouldn't call it a curse just yet, now the guys who were on the covers of those old Sega Gensis sports games were cursed.
Thanks for the compliment on the dig. I knew all those years of usenet posting would pay off sometime. LOL.
I buy the fact that he was all natural. I knew him through high school and the start of college, and he didn't even drink or smoke pot. I couldn't see him using any kind of drug. Of course you aren't with someone 24/7, so you never know. When we were in high school I was with him almost 24/7 I know he definaly wasn't then unless he did it before bed.
He wouldn't have had any problem telling me if he was. And I never held him in that high of a regard anyway. Lifting weights doesn't impress me much..the women seem to like it though:)
What if one had decided to write a *really* malicious worm? In my mind, it is a 99% certainty that eventually some pissed off malcontent will do so. And they do not even have to be in the country.
Imagine a malicious government, with 100 dedicated programmers.
Or a well funded terrorist or anarchist.
Imagine, multiple simultaneously spreading worms, helping each other by opening backdoors, targeting Windows systems, Apache web servers, hardware routers, telephone switchboards, and whatever else they can find. And the payload? Designed to inflict the most economical damage. Perhaps even a smokescreen to illicitly gain access to systems that manage power, water, electricity, and actually cause physical damage too.
I've often wondered this myself, up until now it seems that most virus/worm writers haven't been too malicious. Sure there have been a few like CIH but most worms/viruses don't try to do anything too evil other than reproduce.
A team of programmers, or one really good one with a grudge who builds a virus which tries to spread through multiple means, and after using it's host for a few hours/days does as much harm as possible to the host would be nasty.
The DDoS that blaster ran against windows update was interesting. A successful malicious worm could do the same thing to the microsoft site as well as symantech and mcaffee cutting off users who aren't yet infected from updating anti-virus software easly.
ok, I'm going to stop thinking evil thoughts now. The good part about this is, nobody really wants to do anything like this. It's counter productive for the programmer who is playing around to destroy the internet since it is their playground. As for the governments hiring 100 programmers, why bother? Hire 1-2 Assassins and you will cause just as much havoc if not more.
If the person who made the "Good" worm comes forward and takes credit for it, I wouldn't be suprised if he was the same person who made the "Evil" one. Sounds like a good (albeit risky) way to build a rep.
If it isn't the same person, then good for the "good worm" writer. However, this type of behaviour could really lead to problems, it only takes 1 mistake in this type of code to make a real mess. Ask Robert Morris.
I'm real fuzzy on that issue, but I think the idea was that if your brother dies, you have to take care of his wife. If you don't have a wife you marry her, and if you do...well, I don't remember what happens then.
It was a system to take care of widows, not a method to get yourself some more lovin.
See, this is what the church should be pushing. The good features or religion such as wife inheratance. Forget the fire and the brimstone. Give me a good backup plan on case I can't find anyone to marry.
I rarely have great faith in "I know a guy..." stories,
and I rarely have faith in people who make broad generalizations. Believe what you will. Oh and it's not I know a guy, it's more like I was best friends with/trained with a guy.
Oh and BTW, hardgainer theory is like SO outdated......I hesitate to point you to www.hypertrophy-specific.com but I offer it in the spirit of generosity only.
I've seen HST routines, done them for a bit before and no, I don't like them. Sorry, it's not my thing. It's called a "different opinion" look it up sometime. Just because a theory is more recent doesn't mean it's correct. FYI you sound like a valley girl by the way you type.:) Somehow I can't picture thor saying..."Oh and BTW hard gainer theory is LIKE SO outdated"
Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should.
boy, I'm glad you weren't around when man discovered fire. I could hear the conversation now:
Caveman 1: Ooga booga, this fire stuff is great, it keeps us warm, we can cook meat, make light anywhere, etc.
AC Slashdot user: Ooga booga, Yes, but it can burn you. We shouldn't make it because we might hurt each other. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should. If we do keep making it, the whole earth might catch fire!
i'm not saying that we throw our morals to the wind and race to immortality and superhuman hybrids - just that we redirect our skepticism. are we really trying to play god? or are we just trying to preserve and extend life, to ease pain and suffering, and to advance as much of our species as we can, without hurting anyone? instead of just levelling opposition to every potential breakthrough because we're 'playing god' - can't we just look for a second at what the facts are?
It's the classic case of church and state mixing when it shouldn't. I'm no commie, but people are suffering every day that stem cell research could help. If anything I would say the people stopping the research are the ones guilty of wrong doing.
Rabbitmen. They can programs all night long and work for carrots. You thought outsourcing engineering to India was bad, wait till the HR department hears about THE ISLAND OF THE RABBITMEN!!!!! WHA HA! HA! HA! HAAAA!!!
No way, carrots are a lot more expensive than the dirt they work for in India.
Slashdot Mirror
bandwidth requirements of a fighting game should remain stable through generations, just as any other game genre. Look at massively multiplayer RPGs for another example. Everquest has to communicate a great deal more information between the server and the client than a fighting game ever would, and EQ is quite playable on a POTS modem.
:)
Yes but lag isn't as noticable in EQ as it is in a fighting game. If you lag for a split second in EQ you might not notice, while every second in a fast twitch fighting game matters. Even more than it does in a FPS. Also, EQ doesn't have to pass that much information. I'm sure it isn't passing much more than the players input, because none of the variables are trusted on the client.
Say you are fighting a bat in everquest. The server knows how much health you have, knows how much heath the bat has. You hit attack on your client, which is passed to the server. The server on it's side "rolls the dice",checks your weapon or does whatever it does to determain how much you hit for. It subtracts health from the bat, and from you. It pushes the two health values back to you. I'm probably missing something. But a RPG doesn't have to track everything constantly, if something goes wrong it can just trust the central server/database right?
A fighting game on every move has to check player heath, time, positions, input, combo meters, etc. If you don't check each one and validate, writing a cheat would be trivial since there is no central server to trust.
Or maybe I'm missing something big here
Let's just say we want to compare Soul Caliber II to MK2. The same type of data must be sent - character position, client actions and received - damage. If I move Johnny Cage forward 2 units and I move Link forward 2 units, the data sent is going to be the same. (Vastly oversimplifying things here but you get my point, right?)
I see your point. I can't use Soul Caliber II as an example because I haven't played it much (I don't like the SC games). Take MK5 and MK2. You have to send send a lot more than just character position, client actions and received damage. In MK5 you would have to send, heath, combo meter, positions of any of the weapons (if not you could easly write a cheat to have them flying around), etc. I would think every little bit helps (or hurts) in an online game.
they at least want to become so annoying that your average kid sez, "My parents are hassling me, my school is hassling me... y'know what, it just ain't worth it. I'll go to iTunes (or wherever) to download music."
Aren't they more likely to get the opposite response from pre-teens and teens? Something like "The RIAA sucks, and I'm going to do everything to avoid paying them". While older people (ie mid to late 20's) might go out and drop some money on a CD just because they don't want to spend time fishing around to get a good copy of the whole thing, teenagers tend to have more time on their hands and are more rebellious. Plus making something illegal to a teenager just makes it more attractive.
When you start seeing poorly designed Geocities/AOL anti RIAA websites with animated gifs all over, and teeny bopper girls wearing cutoff Anti-RIAA shirts then you will know the above scenerio has come to pass.
The graphics of the game don't have to be send over the pipe, as I think you're alluding to. Just because MK2 has less graphical data, does not mean it would send less data to an online competitor.
Not the graphical data, but you still have to keep track of certain things to make sure the clients are in sync and not cheating.
Don't you think War Machine is a little bit broken...?
War Machine wasn't in Marvel Super Heros. You are thinking of one of the later VS. games. The closest thing to war machine is Iron Man. Iron Man's projectile trap is tough but it's beatable. His Super moves and move of his specials have long recovery times. I wouldn't say he is the best character in the game, or head and shoulders above everyone else.
Unfortunately, this isn't really true. The fact is that, if placed online, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (new) and Mortal Kombat 2 (old) could be tuned to send almost exactly the same data over an internet connection. Even the addition of 3D to the former doesn't change the bandwidth requirements since you're still sending eight-way stick/pad inputs over the connection - the difference is simply what those inputs mean. The additional buttons aren't a big concern either since even combo presses would be interpreted as a single button input, albeit with a different machine code result.
Don't they have to keep track of other variables/objects and communicate them to each other to make sure they aren't out of sync? Such as player health, status of certain objects etc. I would think they are pushing more than the status of the control pads back and forth. At some point one of the sides has to check if everything is still the same as the other side. If not you could go out of sync and end up with a situation where both sides report a win back to the main server. (using x-box live as an example). The cheating implications if you are only passing the controls back and forth and trusting the data to the clients are pretty bad too.
I'm pretty sure x-box live works by connecting the players directly together with one person as the client and one as the server(rather than playing the game on a microsoft server). Can anyone verify this?
Being a huge fan of fighting games, and having played in (and won) quite a few tournaments I am always trying out new fighting games when they come online. I've played everything from X-Band Mortal Kombat to net fighter(ugg) to Capcom vs SNK EO. Each game, or system had it's own unique problems that kept it from really catching on. Still, there is a huge market of people who would play fighting games online if they worked and were promoted correctly.
Take an old game like Mortal Kombat 2,add a few characters to it, some new moves and fatalities and re-release it as an online game. Since it's older it should have less data you have to push over the network in order to play, plus people know how to play already and will want to play again for the new features and to play other people.
On top of that, announce an online tournament with $10,000 in prizes to be held 1 year after the release of the game. You will probably hook everyone who played the game before plus some new players.
This would work even better for capcom. I would bet if capcom re-released their old games in online form they would get more sales than they did from capcom vs SNK EO. For capcom, they could release a collection of fighting games on one disk. "Capcom Olympics" or something like that. Put Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (for the really old school players), Street Fighter Alpha (the most popular tournament SF game), Marvel Super Heros (The most well balanced capcom fighting game), X-Men vs Streetfighter (for the scrubs) on there. Hell, even throw in puzzle fighter (for the chicks). Hold a tournament for each game, and keep track of the overall score of the players.
tried and true gameplay + online features = money
Fighting games require fast reflexes to win against good players. If you'd have lag more than 25-50 milliseconds the game would not play right at all. That means the game would be limited to LAN play pretty much.
Having played just about every fighting game online that has been available, I can tell you that the lag isn't always an issue. I played MK2 and SF2 on XBand for the SNES (which was a 28.8 modem IIRC) and the lag wasn't too bad. Capcom vs SNK2 on Xbox does feel like it has lag problems at times (I've played over 1000 games on there), which is a joke because there is a free add on for MAME called kaillera which I was playing on a few years ago and handled lag better than the X-Box.
The point is, it can be done and there is a market just WAITING for it to be done right. Capcom vs SNK2 EO was a below average game by capcom standards and included a new cheezy fighting system which turned off long time players (EO). Still I went out and bought an X-box just for the chance to play a capcom game online against a bigger audence than kaillera had. I'm sure plenty of other people are just waiting too.
Mortal Kombat 3 having TV commercials hyping it's Arcade release still stands out in my mind. Not because it was that great, just because no one else ever did it.
. Creating a place where gamers could wander through the history of video games and read about the careers of legendary innovators like Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, and John Carmack sounds like an awesome idea.
I agree, and I was going to make this point if you hadn't already. Why are the characters getting honored and not the people who made them? I don't think Video Game Designers and Programmers get enough publicity. The video game industry should really promote itself and it's workers better. Sure, the big companies like EA get promoted well, but the actual people never do.
If you read a good book, you might go out and look for more books by that same author, you don't really care about who published it. The same (should) go for video games, if you like a game by a certain design team/programmer you should be able to easly figure out who they are so you can seek out more of the same.
thats why I find the multiplayer experience to be more and more what I can't deal with. I don't mind leisurely putting an hour or two in a week on something like Neverwinter Nights. Because I use it as an escape from the real world. Playing online you have to deal with the exact same attitudes you deal in the real world... if not worse because of the fourth wall and the ids gone wild
Video game companies should really do something about this. It would be nice if there were a feature that showed how many hours a player had logged playing the game so you can avoid matchups that are out of wack.
The systems they have in place now are a joke, for example C+C Generals...You go online to play and everyone has a record next to their name. The problem is you can reset your record all you want. So more than half the people are 0-0 and they go into the newbie rooms and "0wn". It's really sad when you come home from work, get everything you have to do done...sit down for a quick game online and you have to play some guy who's logged 10 hours already that day.
today's games are too complicated and hard for players. Carmack, surprisingly, agrees, saying 'I agree strongly with that point of view, but I'm in the minority in the PC space. I want a game you can sit down with, pick up and play. [Role playing games], for example, got to where they had to have a book ship with the game.'"
He's right in a sense, I don't think that PC games are too hard for players to play I think they are too had for players to *WANT* to play.
It's not that people are stupid, it's that they don't want to be frustrated by something that should be fun. Games for the most part should follow the golden rule of "Easy to learn, difficult to master". The mastery should come from learning the game too, not just the UI. Nobody says "Hey, I finally didn't have to look at my cheat sheet/instruction book to remember the 25 key mappings for UT2020." No, they will usually say, "Hey I had my first perfect deathmatch, I won and didn't get killed once." (UT's user interface is fine BTW, I just used them as an example)
at $20,000 to $40,000 it wouldn't be time to get a new one if they broke. It's too cost prohibitive. And if you work in IT, (since you are posting on slashdot, you probably do) you know no matter how well you program/design something, it can break. Now, say you have a company which employees 20 robots a year @20k each (the low end number). Wouldn't it make sense to hire a human at 40k a year if the human can fix 5 of the robots? (Assuming %25 percent of them have a problem during the year). That is a new job right there. Companies would probably hire 2 of them per 20 robots, just to be efficent. You will want a repair man around at all times, at least to turn a new robot on and remove the old one.
On top of that, A whole industry would be born for creating and teaching these robots. Who is going to teach the robots how to make those Big Macs? You will probably end up with the burger flippers being consultants to mcdonalds to work with the programmers to come up with the best burger flipping algorithms. It will take an army of tech support people, programmers and quality control people to maintain the robots. Sure, maybe you could argue for robots repairing other robots but that is a bit risky..and not really blue collor work.
Are you really going to trust the robots to fix other robots? Say Medical Robot (MR) has an error in his code and goes to fix coffee bean picking robot(CBPR) even though CBPR is fine. MR tears him a new one and he is broke. Say MR goes on a rampage and kills your whole farm of 50 robots. $100K loss @20k per robot. Then what? Sue Microsoft or whoever is making the robots?
Assuming the robots can fix each others software problems takes them out of the realm of non-critical thinkers(blue collar).
Yes, but the US already has weapons that can render computers useless. (EMP based?) I would figure that other countries do also. If they don't, and the robots came around I'm sure they would build them very quick. :) I like the idea of bloodless war though.
Yes, but most of the money made in major companies is by upper management. They still have to make the money for buying the expensive robots. People still have to manage the food markets, Manage the food companies, Distribute the food, etc. Getting rid of low labor jobs wouldn't bring prices down significantly. Now if you had a CEO/Manager robot who sat around all day and stole investors money....let me stop..I
Madden years run ahead 1 year of the actual NFL season. What madden is calling "Madden 2004" is actually for the 2003 season. The person who wrote this article has the years mixed up.
Madden 2001 which was released at the start of the 2000 season a season in which the Titans went to the playoffs and lost the ravens. Eddie George who was on the cover that year had an impressive season...He rushed for 1509 yards and 14 TD's and had an additional 453 yards recieving and 2 TDs.
So overall he had 1962 yards and 16 tds. Very Impressive. He got injured the season AFTER that.
Madden 2002 which was released at the start of the 2001 season had Daunte Culpepper on the cover. In 2001 Culpepper was injured for a short while, but still managed to pass for 2612 yards and 14 TD's. He also rushed for 416 yards and 5 TD's. So overall he had 3028 yards and 19 TD's. While those aren't pro bowl numbers they aren't too shabby. What is impressive is, he had those numbers in playing only 11 games instead of 16.
Madden 2003 which was released at the start of the 2002 season had Marshall Faulk on the cover. In 2002, like Daunte Faulk was injured, although not badly enough to slow his productivity in the games he started. In only 10 Starts Marshall had 1490 all purpose yards and 10 TD's. While that is a down year for Marshall that is impressive for any other RB.
Now, Madden 2004 has Mike Vick on the cover who got hurt in preseason and will miss 4 regular season games. The games he will miss are at Dallas, Washington, Tampa bay, and at Carolina. The Falcons will likely go 3-1 without him, 2-2 if they blow the game to Carolina.
All in all, The Madden Curse didn't apply to Eddie George (he had a good year that year) and Culpepper and Faulk had off years due to minor injuries but their off years were as good as some players who weren't injured. We can't Judge Vick yet.
I wouldn't call it a curse just yet, now the guys who were on the covers of those old Sega Gensis sports games were cursed.
Thanks for the compliment on the dig. I knew all those years of usenet posting would pay off sometime. LOL.
:)
I buy the fact that he was all natural. I knew him through high school and the start of college, and he didn't even drink or smoke pot. I couldn't see him using any kind of drug. Of course you aren't with someone 24/7, so you never know. When we were in high school I was with him almost 24/7 I know he definaly wasn't then unless he did it before bed.
He wouldn't have had any problem telling me if he was. And I never held him in that high of a regard anyway. Lifting weights doesn't impress me much..the women seem to like it though
I've often wondered this myself, up until now it seems that most virus/worm writers haven't been too malicious. Sure there have been a few like CIH but most worms/viruses don't try to do anything too evil other than reproduce.
A team of programmers, or one really good one with a grudge who builds a virus which tries to spread through multiple means, and after using it's host for a few hours/days does as much harm as possible to the host would be nasty.
The DDoS that blaster ran against windows update was interesting. A successful malicious worm could do the same thing to the microsoft site as well as symantech and mcaffee cutting off users who aren't yet infected from updating anti-virus software easly.
ok, I'm going to stop thinking evil thoughts now. The good part about this is, nobody really wants to do anything like this. It's counter productive for the programmer who is playing around to destroy the internet since it is their playground. As for the governments hiring 100 programmers, why bother? Hire 1-2 Assassins and you will cause just as much havoc if not more.
If the person who made the "Good" worm comes forward and takes credit for it, I wouldn't be suprised if he was the same person who made the "Evil" one. Sounds like a good (albeit risky) way to build a rep.
If it isn't the same person, then good for the "good worm" writer. However, this type of behaviour could really lead to problems, it only takes 1 mistake in this type of code to make a real mess. Ask Robert Morris.
Can you recommend a reliable place to buy one from?
and I rarely have faith in people who make broad generalizations. Believe what you will. Oh and it's not I know a guy, it's more like I was best friends with/trained with a guy.
I've seen HST routines, done them for a bit before and no, I don't like them. Sorry, it's not my thing. It's called a "different opinion" look it up sometime. Just because a theory is more recent doesn't mean it's correct. FYI you sound like a valley girl by the way you type.
boy, I'm glad you weren't around when man discovered fire. I could hear the conversation now:
Caveman 1: Ooga booga, this fire stuff is great, it keeps us warm, we can cook meat, make light anywhere, etc.
AC Slashdot user: Ooga booga, Yes, but it can burn you. We shouldn't make it because we might hurt each other. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should. If we do keep making it, the whole earth might catch fire!
Ok, then why doesn't the church take up this idea of wife inheritance also? I could use a few concubines.
It's the classic case of church and state mixing when it shouldn't. I'm no commie, but people are suffering every day that stem cell research could help. If anything I would say the people stopping the research are the ones guilty of wrong doing.