Here's a free tip. Never attack anyone personally. If you have a valid point, state it. Name calling is something that people revert to when they feel the point they're trying to make can't stand its ground on its own, and needs an intimidating muscle-showoff to help others get convinced. It screams at the reader that you yourself aren't buying into whatever it is you're saying. Here on/. it won't cut you any slack.
Now all you had to do was ask. Microsoft announced and revealed Palladium, and quite plainly As MS Employee states [Palladium] "is to be included in a future version of Windows, possibly in Windows XP successor Longhorn, scheduled for release in 2005".
Taking an educated guess based on the fact that their interest does lie there, that they announced it, that they're well underway developing it and that the DMCA was legislated, I'd dare say it will show up in Windows sooner or later. Sooner if they have anything to do with it.
If you do not yet realize the extent of the problem this poses, I strongly suggest you spend 10 minutes
reading up.
I'm as much an Open Source lover as the next FreeBSD religious geek, but the way I see the train going right now, here's where it'll get:
DMCA is already in action. TCPA and DRM are coming on us in the next couple of years, we already know Microsoft's Paladium will be present in longhorn. Fritz chips are already being sold, and sooner than we might like, DRM-enforcement will migrate from our motherboard into our CPU. Microsoft, Disney, the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been lobbying Intel and AMD over this for a while now.
This actually gets on-topic when the DMCA is used to trash competition, as in cases of 3rd-party-made garage-door remotes, printer cartridges and.. yes. Office suites that attempt to open MS Office formats.
Once Microsoft uses the DRM-enforcing Fritz chip (which, according to the DMCA legislation, must be present in your computer) to encode their.doc/.xls/.ppt/whatever files, it becomes _illegal_ [in the US] for OpenOffice to attempt to open them under the DMCA. Unless this can somehow be steered away, OO is going to be beheaded swiftly and cruelly, and nobody will use anything besides MS Office, because nothing else will open MS Office formats.
Many questions are asked about how this will affect non-US countries without silly DMCA legislation, and the legal answer is "It won't". The economic one however says "If there is no US market for products like OO, quite a few them may simply cease to exist". Add to that the unwillingness of many OS developers to contribute their time to an open source project that is used in other countries but makes them criminals in the US where they live, and where they cannot use their own project where they work. OO may simply not bother breaking the DRM on Office files for non-US clients. And that would indeed hurt Israeli clients.
This conclusion makes me question the wisdom of moving an entire government agency to OO. It actually hurt me to say that.
Okay, since you brought up the inflation topic, might as well brandish a braincell or two on it.
I'd say you're right, game economics are governed by physics (spawning, item decay, etc.) that aim to mimic RL, but sometimes do so poorly. And yes, you could very easily reach a point of massive inflation, as quite a few MMOGs found out.
That's where the game dev's job comes in. Prior to going to work on the artwork and the 3D engine, you (as a game economy designer - hmm, I smell a new profession, and new university courses) have to design a supply/demand system that: Major goal: is diverse enough for people want to play and be unique in. This means: A. Involves many diverse professions that manufacture items. B. Creates a market for those items. C. Since more and more items are created all the time, you'd need to build an item-decay system into the game, such as item-durability that deteriorates over time on all in-game items, at a rate that is deduced from the amount of said item in the game, or form its monetary value. This in iteself is a two-edged sword, because when people stash stuff and it rusts away and dies, they'll lose interest, and you'll lose them. D. Your game must be able to handle (artificially balance out) shortages in supply, like where there are not enough blacksmiths.
None of this is really news, and all MMOG designer teams out there had their share with brainstorming sessions, where they idea-pounded these subjects all the way to china and back.
My point in all this being that since, like a real economy is controlled, balanced and tweaked by a government to avoid extreme cases of inflation and deflation, a MMOG can be just as easily (probbably more easily) artificially steered away from the same extreme cases using well-thought-through economic balance tweaking.
Your doomsday claim of "But there will be inflation!!" is like saying "But there will be accidents!!" when you hear of an inflation called cars. Yes, when people do stupid things, there will. When they don't, there won't. Does that make the concept bad? I don't think so.
You're absolutely right, but only if an assumption (which you or the first poster automatically assume as true) is indeed true.
What you said is true if you're thinking PROFIT. If you'll eventually take that amount of time you spent and either calculate how much money you'd have earned elsewhere in the same amount of time, or how much cash you need to pay your Hong Kong sweatshop employee.
It's not true when you play for FUN, much like you don't go visit Santorini for profit either.
My point being that people who play for FUN, to whom above poster's statement applies, compose a large chunk of the virtual item acquisition market, and that those people don't connect the value of the Mace of Thwappage to the value of the time spent obtaining it.
Much like you don't compare the value of a trip to Santorini to the value of time you spent working for the money it cost you to travel there. You just enjoy the trip.
I could say the same for money. It's not the possibilities that money offers that give it value, but rather the effort gone into obtaining it. The value lies in the effort, and the money in itself has no value whatsoever. From a purely psychological standpoint that could be a partial truth, but nobody sees the world that way today. We all commonly agree that money _has_ value, and so does any commodity, be it virtual or not, that people are willing to pay money for.
You see, value passes. If you bought a carton of milk and paid for it with money, that carton of milk HAS VALUE. Otherwise, you wouldn't have paid for it.
Same goes with time and virtual posessions. People pay for them with time (or money), and get them as a reward. If they thought like you that these items have no value to begin with, they wouldn't have invested their time or money in acquiring them.
I could (truthfully) claim the same for other "virtual" stuff that people apply monetary value to, in spite them not taking anything (other than an experience or feeling) home with them after paying:
How about _attending_ an Irish music concert? Or _seeing_ the Greek island of Santorini?
Technically, none of those is a substantial item, and yet they all quite assuredly have a very real value - easy to spot once you see people taking wallets out of their pockets.
What you're saying is something along my grandmother's [somewhat subjective] "Your music is worthless" . Yep. Quite a few people agree. Pink Floyd sucks. Not worth a penny. That's exactly why those guys are flat broke.
In order to advance to a stage where a MMOG has an actual economy, it needs some form of export, hence a GDP. More money should come in than goes out. While each and every game out there is still a closed economy (where for party X to go home with 100$, party Y must lose 100$, and party Company-That-Runs-The-Game must also make ends meet as a prerequisite), item trade is a somewhat unexpected (to me at least) way for this to become an open one. I always imagined they'd think of some way for MMOG lurkers to generate something actually _useful_. Like share their CPU or generate content on their own. Or something.
And yet, once people have applied the meaning of value to items within a game, and others are willing to lay out real hard american green cash in order to own them, this plainly shows that the game world managed to generate something of value to the outside world. That's a very substantial step, and it's completely unsurprising that someone for whom this would make economic sense (who can employ people at 5$/month) would take this up as a very real business opportunity.
I wonder just how much global market there is for Maces of Thwappage +5.
The obvious route to take would be to legislate (as international law, not US law) that you can only lay claim to Extra Terrestrial Real Estate (ETRE from now on) if you can land on it.
This would indeed solve the immediate story - keep the loonies out of courts and from having any legal basis for such claims.
It would, however, create some bigger problems. Here's a few probs with "Landers-Keepers":
1. Instead of starting stellar colonization as a single political entity (eg humanity/earth), we'll just start another colony race (eg china vs US for example, like Britain vs. France vs. lesser colonizers a century ago) and deepen division between world powers instead of using this exact endeavor to bridge across and achieve something together.
2. What's to prevent someone with a home-made rocket (eg starchaser, or the X-prize-winner-to-be) from actually landing there and forming his own country? would that be in the best interests of you? me? the US? Humanity?
And this brings us to the big kahoona.
3. Whose interests do we aim to serve by this sort of legislation?
The US? I daresay Europe and Asia will disagree. The UN? The UN is just short of owned by 1 billion oil-supplying muslims. That wouldn't be so bad at all, if the muslim world hadn't been a poverty-stricken, politically-faltering, violence-promoting human-life-has-no-value culture at the core of which lies Jihad upon which quite a large chunk of the world's next generation of muslims are raised. Even richer arab countries like Saudi Arabia are extremely polarized between westernization-seekers and this ugly side of the Islam.
I daresay that the US will disagree to serve these radicals and their agendas.
Humanity _does_ include 1 billion arabs and you can't exclude them. But when you count humanity as a whole, you suddenly realize that there is no common agenda to serve by ETRE legislation. You are eventually going to displease a large portion of this planet.
Finally, I'll point out that legislation on this is entire nonsense in itself, as legislation is useless without some form of enforcement. Face it, if the moon belongs to NASA and some rogue party lands on it, there is NOBODY that can remove him and throw him in jail.
The best solution would probbably be:
a. Keep working hard to eventually reach ETRE. Ignore mosquito bites like the article above. At this stage, a space race actually serves humanity quite well, as it drives tech development faster.
b. Keep this legally vague for as long as possible (until someone can actually sheriff ETRE). If this doesn't clarify for a while yet, the arab world might by then reach the point where (Golda Meir quote) "They love their children more than they hate someone else's".
Wait for an entity that all humanity can trust to appear and pose a common-to-all agenda. Then and only then legislate something along the lines of
"ETRE initially belongs to said entity" and then be distributed and regulated much like US soil real estate.
Remember the books marketers read to their kids? - Bill and the Pie - Bill and the Blue Screen of Death - Sir Mcbride and the Incredibly Big Monster? followed by the rest of the "Free global advertising in a nutshell" children's literature series?
That's a rather unscientific doom'n'gloom approach.
Why would it collapse under its own beurocracy? Yes, ID's _are_ meant to keep tabs on people. They proved their usefulness well and beyond in allowing governments to control the populace (for the populace's own good). How would you like to drive around a place where anyone can print out a phony driver's license, kids with no driver training just go sit behind wheels, and people get killed daily by the doesen?
What is being said here about bio ID's invading your privacy is just as relevant about your regular ID today. In spite of the privacy invasion, the benefits of such a system outweigh the penalties by far. Don't forget it goes the other way around too - If you didn't do something bad, keeping bio tabs on you makes framing someone innocent or wrongful accusation harder. Furthermore, we already live in a world where you can be tracked quite easily with your credit card, given a court warrant.
Law-abiding people actually want the "right to be able to commit a crime and be hard to track" (though they don't intent to ever excersize that right). Sorta reminds "The right to have children" that the guy wanted in "Life of Bryan".
Going bio will actually make ID-faking harder, hence more expensive, hence less accessible, hence make crimedoers more easily trackable, hence reduce crime and be good for us all on the end count.
To your point of it being a "farce" and falling apart due to that - highly unlikely. Same could be said for card ID's - nobody will take it seriously, and it'll just be a pain that will inevitably be repulsed. Yeah right. Hell, I could have said that when someone came up with the idea of money. But Woe and Behold! people _do_ take the idea of money seriously and it is anything but falling apart. Why should bio ID's be any different from ID cards, drivers licenses or money?
Using... umm.. me.
Growing humans may not be a power-efficient way of producing power, but it sure as hell can give you a handy power socket when you need one.
Maybe in a decade or two...
>> What is the most "fab" game on the Internet right now? Lemme check...ah...CS? Made by Valve right? No, a small group of "Indy" developers!
Valve got their salaries at the time from a corporation known as "Sierra Online". And when a corp pays your salary, guess who makes decisions. It's a rarity that a corp will make the right ones for us gamers when better ones for its pocket that throw us gamers in the dirt are available.
>> Most games on the market today and in the near future are mostly hype(graphics, benchmarks, boobs) and emptiness
My point exactly:-)
>> The energy that once went into hacking the next great "civ game" is now in the mod community and very healthy.
Can a mod community make a mod better (or more unique) than the game they're modding? Can they put together an actual _game_? The theoretical possibility is there, but it has yet to be proven.
When it comes to creating an anti-terrorist mod on top of UT or HL, that's one thing. You're not really writing a 'game' as such. It's the most unsophisticated thing of all - multiplayer. You just slap on new textures and a new rules together.
Tell me, did the Neverwinter Nights community manage to rig together a decent 50-game-hours+ game? NADA. And even if they did, chances are it would only look like more of NWN. Communities create maps, textures, even artwork but with a catch: after the game is released. Not complete games. Your salvation will not come from them.
>> There will always be private development of games, as long as people can program computers.
There will always be bizillions of free downloadable crap, a 0.5% of which may be worthwhile, but we'll never know cuz we don't go there. _WE_ are part of the problem here. We won't buy stuff unless it's as visually stunning as what the corps give us.
>> Don't have such destructively high standards.
I don't. I enjoyed Sam. But existing genres are starting to sink in, get boring with time, and nothing *new* seems to be showing up. Just same old. More same 3D shooters. More same RPG's. More same RTS. And instead of getting more sophisticated, they get shallower and prettier.
>> Games come from programers, not magically wished into existance by invisible corporate Gods.
Actually, the corporatios buy indys, then just rub and wish.
There are two things that small developers lack to make the gaming rennasaince days come back.
Let's assume their spouce can feed them for the 3-4 years it takes to actually code a decent games. Let's even assume they gang together and form tiny companies.
One problem is the enourmous amounts of artistic property needed to raise a modern-looking game. Individual developers (or tiny dev groups/companies) don't have anywhere near the amount needed. Getting it isn't cheap, and getting competitive stuff is hard on top of expensive. Sure, someone like Sid Meyer can throw out a marvelous design, a brilliant concept nobody has thought of, a whole new potential genre. But who'll pay for it? It'll just stack with the mountains of 15-year-old-graphic _freeware_ games that're up there. That word, "freeware", is a death-sentance for a game. No gamer, neither soft- nor hardcore, would allow himself to ever be caught playing freeware (except, that is, nethack).
The second thing small devs lack is the power to go 3D. Consider the following: 1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years. 2. Alternatively, coding it costs a few developer decades (translate that to manhours). 3. While the amount of code increases in a linear form, complexity increases logarighmically, and the amount of QA needed increases with it. More resources that a small dev practically cannot muster.
The bare few small developers that actually managed to overcome this hurdle (Croateam - four devs - with Serious Sam for example) just found themselves up agains a second, even larger one - actually coding the GAME. Which, in spite of Sam having been endless hours of insane ammospraying at literally thousands of enemies, was neither a sophisticated, ingenuous, original or groundbreaking game. Face it, It barely kept up, and was nothing more than yet-another-shooter(tm). I'm not saying Croateam didn't do a tremendous job. I'm saying that the amount of resources these four guys had after going 3D to put on anything else was a plain zero.
And that goes for so many games I can think of.. So much energy has to go into getting the 3D to function, people forget to actually put a _game_ on top of it. How many 3D shooters can you name that were actually more sophisticated than mining ore in UO and doing the same repetitive things over and over? Practically none - Deus-Ex. Thief. I really can't think of more. Even long-selling sequels like M&M that decided to go 3D put so much on the 3D that the game itself got neglected to oblivion.
So no, individual or small company devs won't crank up what they used to 15 years ago. No more Star Control II's and Civilization. The few small companies that are left are having their games produced by (read: are being absorbed by) corporations with marketing and fossilized management that will only risk doing games that have already proven to pull in money (read: same old). With corporate management in charge, games are getting less technical and more casual to appeal to wider audiences, while throwing bizillions on washing the shallowness over with stunning visuals. It's been the trend since 3D kicked in, and I highly doubt it's going to change.
I only see corporations owning the future of gaming. Death, Darkness and Gloom. Anyone care to cheer me up a bit here?
My intention was never to raise alarms, I view the entire crystal-industry (I think you should trademark that term) in the same light you do. I did, however, bury 3 close people of cancer below the age of 60 within the last year, and that does have me a bit worried. And no, cell phones are definitely not the primary cause of it. Pollution, Shitty industrial food and what not all contribute their share. In Israel that's a 1-in-9. I don't know how bad it is where you live.
Besides, I think this entire offspring of the initial discussion missed my main point and went into the obvious and redundant. The initial thread attempted to claim that WiFi makes BT redundant, I just pointed out that given two similar wireless headsets (one of each tech) and a regular phone without a headset, BT boasts an advantage by using the smallest transmitter up to your head (not to mention smaller energy consumption hence smaller battery). Which is probbably why I use one:-).
Whoa, keep'em flames a bit lower, will you? I never said any of those cellphonescausecancer.com or oprah things. Don't put words in my mouth. Thatcher once said she really likes having conversations go down to personal lines and name-calling. It means that the attacker is flat out of arguements. Consider revising the way you conduct a conversation.
I worked on radars, and there is one thing I know quite well - RF heats shit up. The stronger the transmission, the more heat. Strong RF very near tissue most definitely cause cancer. That's no conspiracy theory. It's what any electronics freshman will tell you.
The _big_ question here is not "Do strong RF transmissions cause cancer" but rather "Do cell phones (or, if you want it more scientific, GSM900/1800/1900/CDMA/TDMA/WCDMA/whathaveyou or Nokia/Motorolla/Samsung units) transmit STRONG ENOUGH to cause it?" as you quite well pointed out.
The simple answer is - we don't know.
Is there very scientific POSSIBILITY of such harm? absolutely YES. It's just a matter of determining if cell transmission falls above or below the red line of causing harm. But sure enough, that red line is there.
We will know, in a few decades time, when we will, in the least, have statistics on how the masses react to having a cell phone placed against their head for 70 years. We might also have different phones.
Now if you want to use the austrich approach and say "If we don't know that it causes harm = It doesn't cause harm" - fine by me. You can glue 10 1st-generation 4Watt "bannana" phones to your head and cook aumlets on it all day. I suggest you find a local electronics engineer you trust and ask him if placing a 4Watt transmitter to your head for an hour a day will hurt you. Don't mention cell phones.
I prefer to say "If we don't know, it MIGHT be harmful, and I prefer to minimize the chance I'll get cancer due to this, and as long as I have the possibility to use smaller transmitters (Bluetooth) or plastic-tube headsets which do not complicate use, I will use them."
Oh, and the 1-in-9 is an Israeli cancer statistic that has nothing to do with cell phones. It's just how many people die in Israel of cancer. Forgive the irrelevance, I just don't want to end up as a part of it.
Here's the REAL goal list, let's see what the/. community can think of on those points.
There's an enoumous drive for skill points in these games. Those are likely valued higher than money, and a more stable (albeit untradable) property. Since people excert so much energy to boost their stats (or gain money), why not take a ride on this and turn the stat/money acquiring process into:
a. Something that is actually productive in the real world. Manually decrypting 3DES, I dunno:-P. If you manage this one, You'll probbably be the first to make an MMO with an open economy (i.e. an economy that can grow. An economy that can contain more _real_ money than the sum of what all the subscribers paid. An economy where everyone can become richer, as opposed to an economy where for every dollar that player A withdraws in real cash, player B must pay said doller, and that's without mentioning the operator's fee)
alternatively, b. Something that is productive within the game. That too is harder than it sounds. Having players build their own maps/levels that will incorporate dynamically into the world? Have them contribute artwork? too few people can do that. Have them contribute lawyer/accountant/coder skills? Have virus-writing contests? It's still too narrow to invest in a game that will facilitate it. How about a game where you "add" non-game-related-activities that apply to people who have real skills in the real world?. It's just a mishmash of ideas, but maybe if I raise the question, someone will think of an answer:-)
alternatively, c. Something that is FUN TO DO. Here are some examples:
1. Arcomage
2. Tetris, like the article mentioned
3. If you're completely unimaginative and see only black when you close your eyes, I think even chess/backgammon would do. Hell, Chrome incorporated the oldest memory-game in the book while hacking computers (as opposed to watching progress bars) and That old 'Broken Sword' quest had you playing arkanoid while waiting for saved games to load.
And only if all else fails, d. Repetitive mouse-clicking on a single point on your screen that can be done by anyone with the IQ of an oat.
Now [a] and [b] are definitely very serious challenges, both in the thinking and implementation categories.
[c] is easy in both, but nobody does it. All MMO's just go for [d]. Am I the only one whose intelligence feels insulted here?
And am I hearing the words "Market Opportunity" reverberating in the brain of some investor who is reading this?
Did you ever try comparing the money you pay your optometrist and the price for a monitor that can do 100Hz or higher at whatever resolution you like using?
So many [quite-tech-savvy] people pay hundreds of dollars for CPU cycles they don't use or a twice-as-fast FSB, and yet a good 90% of them utterly neglect to buy hardware (like a good monitor for your eyes or a decent chair for your back) that has an adverse affect on their health. Needless to say, once they need treatment, they do pay that same money to the doctor.
>> Bluetooth IS NOT A WIRELESS TCP/IP Alternative!
No, it isn't. But it does have its own protocol stack.
>> They also still want to use non-standard connectors to you have to buy from them and noone else.
Yep, and to compensate for their inability to make overpriced proprietary plugs, they made a hugely diverce protocol stack that is waaay too redundant. Here's an example: There are no less than three profiles (aka protocols) to transfer audio - one for a handsfree set (HFP), another for headset(HSP), yet another for CD-quality stereo (A2DP).
You'd think that if a phone has bluetooth it can connect with any bluetooth headset. Wrong. Nokia 3650 for instance only supports the "HFP" profile, while 99% of the BT headsets support the Headset (HSP) profile. The nokia headset supports both, and is therefore the only headset that will work with this phone. Did I hear anyone say "wireless proprietary 50$ plugs"?
(and there's even no mention of A2DP support, in spite the fact that the phone has [a] Intel arm CPU, [b] MMC storage card [c] an almost-decent OS and [d] MP3 playback software)
The major difference between WiFi and BT is in what the product actually is.
WiFi is Ethernet, albeit wireless. Once the little green "LINK" light goes on, it's just another network card. Lop ye good'ol TCP/IP stack on it and you're set. It definitelty has its uses, but definitely too large, too strong, or too energy-draining for others.
Bluetooth is NOT ONLY Ethernet. It's not only a wireless hardware layer, but a whole new _SOFTWARE_ protocol stack on top, in which "TCP/IP" fits into a very small slot.
And not only is it a whole software stack, it's a NEW stack, with various implementations, all of which are NOT based on 30-year-old working berkeley code. They're based on 12-month-old bugged-to-hell-and-back commercial code, and each vendor's particular implementation (like that in a taiwanese no-brand headset) differs and has its own bugs and such.
Bluetooth is attempting a lot here, and it's attepmting to satisfy a very real need that the market is willing to pay for, but this requires overcoming a whole set of hurdles and immaturity stage, incompatibility issues, buggy stacks and what not till it gets to where Ethernet, TCP/IP and other 30-year-old things are today.
I think it has a bright enough future, even if they'll replace the actual hardware transmitter with smaller/faster/cheaer transmitters 5 years down the road. The protocol stacks, API's and BT maturity in general are all here to stay.
Just for the record A cell phone transmits up to a distance of a two to three kilometers, maybe more depending on technology, vendor etc. A Wifi transmitter transmits up to a hundred meters or so. A bluetooth transmitter transmits up to a distance of 10 meters.
But they're all still RF transmitters.
Which one do _you_ want to fry your brain with? (do you want to take part in the 1-in-9-have-cancer statistic?) Cuz ignore it or not, them brain cells do get fried and _die_.
The three orders of magnitude that exist between robbing a store and robbing a couple of billion from wherever the US treasury stores it doens't mean that the former is less of a 'robbery' than the latter. The term applies to both regardless of severity. Yes, getting raped yourself is less fun than having your computer raped, but it's still rape.
And as for that 'rape applies only to sex' comment, we do 'base-rape' when we play tribes, don't we? (or is it something else you've been doing with the mortar each time the rest of us were flattening enemy installations?;-)
Exactly why we need a stronger term than SPYware
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A Gator By Any Other Name
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And this is why this sort of software should be called RAPEware.
Last I checked, violating someone without his/her consent, against his will, and giving him no ability to stop it when he asks to is called RAPE in the English language. I see no reason why the term cannot apply to one's computer.
Yes, that may have been a turning point in game-making. And still, I think that if you want to define something as we wish everyone could have experienced, It's not this or that idea that appeared in a certain Ultima sequel, but rather the point where it became an immersive experience to be remembered for decades.
I think it became a classic when Origin managed to score on 4 counts simultaneously - a VERY difficult feat, and managed to hold that position for two straight games. And that happened in 6 (argueably 5), not in 4, and vanished after 7. 7 part II was a linear adventure and lost its touch due to that. 8 doesn't deserve to bear the Ultima title, and 9 almost made it, but the small game map compared with the vastness of 6 and 7 kept it from receiving the glory of its ancestors.
The four counts are: 1. As you said, this was not eye of the beholder, and wasn't just one big dungeon crawl. A lot of your tasks had to do with people, talking to them, helping them, and generally setting things right (or figuring out which one of the town folk had the damn mantra for the shrine). Yet others had to do with discovering stuff. Unlike so many other RPGs then and now, the people and places in Ultima always had character. And your companions were more than just your fighter - cleric - mage drones.
2. Illinear game play where you could access practically all of the game (except maybe 1-2% that were plot-dependant and that were near-impossible to find at the beginning anyway). Of course, if you decided to make your first trip out of town directly to the dragon cave north of Trinsic, you'd get roasted on the spot, but the fact was that you _could_.
3. A _HUMONGOUS_ game world. You could play that darn thing forever. And then play it again and discover locations you haven't discovered the first time by the dozen. Furthermore, the game world was not a million connected screens. It was one huge continuos map.
4. Well-developed and extremely-well balanced money system. In fact, game balance was perfect in just about everything. So many corporate management-driven companies strip the months needed for proper game balancing from their schedule, and end up throwing an unbalanced game to the market. Arcanum and Morrowind come to mind. That's a major Maker or Breaker.
You won't find a single game since U7 that managed to score on all of these four points.
U9 scored on counts 1 and 4 and partially on 3. Morrowind III scored on the huge game world, which was nice at the beginning, but the game soon became super-repetitive and you found out that the whole world was a lot of copy-pasting of exactly the same things. And then a completely unbalanced system utterly killed the game.
Ultima 9 attempted at unlinearity, but screwed up on the large game world account. Morrowind attempted at the huge world (count 3) but failed miserably in balance (4) and character (1). Planescape tried for (1), but never made it to either 3 or 2.
The _ONLY_ other two [sets-of] CRPGs that I played that managed to score almost all of these , each in its own style but definitely score, are Fallout II and Gothic (and to a lesser extent Fallout I and Gothic II).
The list is inconsistent, jumps chronologically across 10 computer eras, skips between genres and simply misses out on some major trendmakers.
Furthermore, when talking of an era (by mentioning a game from it) it does the entire era a lot of disrespect by pointing at the games that neither helped shape the genre, were not successesful by any major standards, nor had any innovative ideas. I suspect the only reason they got written down was because the author had a limited game education and at that particular era had those (and only those) games around.
Here's a few examples: A familiarity with more than Sierra's first 1986 (or so) quest title is recommended. While they did spawn off a lot of clones, they also generated a huge amount of ideas, refined interface and spawned a lot of imagination. I wouldn't add the entire list of 30 or so games to the list, but another, interim KQ4-era game would add nicely. Someone explain to me what exactly did Myst and the 7th guest add to the collective genre knowhow? Riddle-quests is probbably the most insignificant of all genres, and fit under "adventures" as much as FIFA does.
Lucas wasn't given due credit either. Maniac Mansion, the daddy of all Lucas quests. Full Throttle, probbably the brutally funniest game ever. Indiana Jones, and so forth.
I'd add a few "Legend" text based quests to such a list, I believe they contributed some nice ideas.
Then we come to RPG's. SSI and it's older Pools/Curse/Secrets/PoD and Krynn and later Eye of the Beholder series aren't even mentioned. They had nothing to do with putting together the genre now, did they. Nobody played those games, and TSR/WOC/AD&D have absolutely nothing to do with the genre.
Neither is Lands of Lore credited, the smash game that saved EOBIII disapointees.
Thief is a ROLE PLAYING GAME? If you guys wanted to take something modern & 3D into a dev's RPG repertoir, add Deus Ex.
Ultima 4? why not 3 or 5? what's so special about 4? I'd say 6 or 7, as they were the last of the Ultima Great Map unlinear games, and should probbably be tought at gamemking school today.
Another early Origin HUGE-WORLD-MAP genre-shaper called Times of Lore (graphically superior to U4 and chronologically completely out of its time).
I won't even ask why the only _real_ ROLE-PLAYING (and not xp-acquring-character-buildup) game ever out there - Planescape: Torment - never made this chart.
Or the RAW, PURE Hack&Slash fun of (not "Heroes-of")Might&Magic, both in their groundbraking 3-4-5 era and in the later 6-7-8 outdated-3d-engine-era (where hacking and slashing was no less fun). I refuse to acknowledge there were any more games in this series.
One last gem (that whoever omitted should be _shot_) is Star Control 2. Not really an RPG, but... If you haven't played it, you're not worthy of being called a game developer.
And now the most painful part. Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Instead of combining genre-makers with innovative ideas, they made a list of drones/clones. Age of Empires? Command & Conquer? Starcraft?
This list should have consisted of Warcraft/WC2, Dune II, Civilization, Master of Orion and simcity. PERIOD. Roots & ideas, not clonelists.
Then they simply _forgot_ the whole 'lancer'/'Mercenary' Genre. Strike Commander, PrivateerI&II, Freelancer, etc. In fact, the whole "Simulator" genre got ignored (X-Wing? MechWarrior? )or stuffed into "Miscelaneous" categories like Wing Commander did.
To sum up (in nice words) an "extremely lacking" list, made by someone who seriously lacks the exact knowledge he is attempting to put forth, and obviously didn't himself play some of the biggest groundshakers ever to see light. Quite a few veteran gamers I know (myself included) could make a much better list.
I see what you're saying. If you enable FSAA at 31FPS, you'll end up having 30fps one moment, then 15fps with FSAA enabled the next.
Furthermore, let's for arguement's sake forget 30FPS, and instead use N as the fps value above which we can no longer discern a smoother picture.
My point, however, remains. Consider the following two points: A. There _is_ redering power wasted. B. There _are_ more useful things to do with it than render frames I cannot discern.
What you said does not adress the why/why-nots of dynamic FSAA, it's simply a well-made point that definitely should affect the FSAA-enabling threshold.
If I need no more than N fps, And FSAA will drop my rendering rate by 200%, I can set the dynamic FSAA-enabling threshold at 2N. Given a good implementation, I won't even discern the switch.
>> Other than that, FSAA isn't a feature that is universally liked
probbably the most ingenious invention of all time is the ON/OFF switch. Let the user decide:-)
>> The things that are most likely to be worked on are extending the viewing distance and model complexity while maintaining a decent (60fps or so) framerate
Model complexity is definitely a very good use for them extra GPU cycles. I fully agree with you there.
As for viewing distance - my opinion here is based on a combination of ignorance and some common sense, but doesn't the following sound a bit silly? You're looking through the scope of your sniper rifle, the business end of which is pointed at your mark 500 meters away. A car drives up near him (complicating the rendering process), your field of view decreases, whoops? I can only see 400 meters! where did the fog of war come from? where's my mark?!
Your viewing distance has an adverse affect on almost all genres of games, and hanging it on your ability to render sounds offhand like a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does it take 5 pistol rounds to the head to take out a guard?
Makes you wonder. The first four. You think the guard noticed?
Here's a free tip. Never attack anyone personally. If you have a valid point, state it. Name calling is something that people revert to when they feel the point they're trying to make can't stand its ground on its own, and needs an intimidating muscle-showoff to help others get convinced. It screams at the reader that you yourself aren't buying into whatever it is you're saying. Here on /. it won't cut you any slack.
.
Now all you had to do was ask. Microsoft announced and revealed Palladium, and quite plainly As MS Employee states [Palladium] "is to be included in a future version of Windows, possibly in Windows XP successor Longhorn, scheduled for release in 2005".
Taking an educated guess based on the fact that their interest does lie there, that they announced it, that they're well underway developing it and that the DMCA was legislated, I'd dare say it will show up in Windows sooner or later. Sooner if they have anything to do with it.
If you do not yet realize the extent of the problem this poses, I strongly suggest you spend 10 minutes reading up
Cheers mate.
I'm as much an Open Source lover as the next FreeBSD religious geek, but the way I see the train going right now, here's where it'll get:
.. yes. Office suites that attempt to open MS Office formats.
.doc/.xls/.ppt/whatever files, it becomes _illegal_ [in the US] for OpenOffice to attempt to open them under the DMCA. Unless this can somehow be steered away, OO is going to be beheaded swiftly and cruelly, and nobody will use anything besides MS Office, because nothing else will open MS Office formats.
DMCA is already in action. TCPA and DRM are coming on us in the next couple of years, we already know Microsoft's Paladium will be present in longhorn. Fritz chips are already being sold, and sooner than we might like, DRM-enforcement will migrate from our motherboard into our CPU. Microsoft, Disney, the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been lobbying Intel and AMD over this for a while now.
This actually gets on-topic when the DMCA is used to trash competition, as in cases of 3rd-party-made garage-door remotes, printer cartridges and
Once Microsoft uses the DRM-enforcing Fritz chip (which, according to the DMCA legislation, must be present in your computer) to encode their
Many questions are asked about how this will affect non-US countries without silly DMCA legislation, and the legal answer is "It won't". The economic one however says "If there is no US market for products like OO, quite a few them may simply cease to exist". Add to that the unwillingness of many OS developers to contribute their time to an open source project that is used in other countries but makes them criminals in the US where they live, and where they cannot use their own project where they work.
OO may simply not bother breaking the DRM on Office files for non-US clients. And that would indeed hurt Israeli clients.
This conclusion makes me question the wisdom of moving an entire government agency to OO. It actually hurt me to say that.
Cheers.
Okay, since you brought up the inflation topic, might as well brandish a braincell or two on it.
I'd say you're right, game economics are governed by physics (spawning, item decay, etc.) that aim to mimic RL, but sometimes do so poorly.
And yes, you could very easily reach a point of massive inflation, as quite a few MMOGs found out.
That's where the game dev's job comes in. Prior to going to work on the artwork and the 3D engine, you (as a game economy designer - hmm, I smell a new profession, and new university courses) have to design a supply/demand system that:
Major goal: is diverse enough for people want to play and be unique in.
This means:
A. Involves many diverse professions that manufacture items.
B. Creates a market for those items.
C. Since more and more items are created all the time, you'd need to build an item-decay system into the game, such as item-durability that deteriorates over time on all in-game items, at a rate that is deduced from the amount of said item in the game, or form its monetary value.
This in iteself is a two-edged sword, because when people stash stuff and it rusts away and dies, they'll lose interest, and you'll lose them.
D. Your game must be able to handle (artificially balance out) shortages in supply, like where there are not enough blacksmiths.
None of this is really news, and all MMOG designer teams out there had their share with brainstorming sessions, where they idea-pounded these subjects all the way to china and back.
My point in all this being that since, like a real economy is controlled, balanced and tweaked by a government to avoid extreme cases of inflation and deflation, a MMOG can be just as easily (probbably more easily) artificially steered away from the same extreme cases using well-thought-through economic balance tweaking.
Your doomsday claim of "But there will be inflation!!" is like saying "But there will be accidents!!" when you hear of an inflation called cars. Yes, when people do stupid things, there will. When they don't, there won't. Does that make the concept bad? I don't think so.
You're absolutely right, but only if an assumption (which you or the first poster automatically assume as true) is indeed true.
What you said is true if you're thinking PROFIT.
If you'll eventually take that amount of time you spent and either calculate how much money you'd have earned elsewhere in the same amount of time, or how much cash you need to pay your Hong Kong sweatshop employee.
It's not true when you play for FUN, much like you don't go visit Santorini for profit either.
My point being that people who play for FUN, to whom above poster's statement applies, compose a large chunk of the virtual item acquisition market, and that those people don't connect the value of the Mace of Thwappage to the value of the time spent obtaining it.
Much like you don't compare the value of a trip to Santorini to the value of time you spent working for the money it cost you to travel there. You just enjoy the trip.
Wrong. The items/levelup _have_ value.
I could say the same for money. It's not the possibilities that money offers that give it value, but rather the effort gone into obtaining it. The value lies in the effort, and the money in itself has no value whatsoever. From a purely psychological standpoint that could be a partial truth, but nobody sees the world that way today. We all commonly agree that money _has_ value, and so does any commodity, be it virtual or not, that people are willing to pay money for.
You see, value passes. If you bought a carton of milk and paid for it with money, that carton of milk HAS VALUE. Otherwise, you wouldn't have paid for it.
Same goes with time and virtual posessions. People pay for them with time (or money), and get them as a reward. If they thought like you that these items have no value to begin with, they wouldn't have invested their time or money in acquiring them.
I could (truthfully) claim the same for other "virtual" stuff that people apply monetary value to, in spite them not taking anything (other than an experience or feeling) home with them after paying:
How about _attending_ an Irish music concert?
Or _seeing_ the Greek island of Santorini?
Technically, none of those is a substantial item, and yet they all quite assuredly have a very real value - easy to spot once you see people taking wallets out of their pockets.
What you're saying is something along my grandmother's [somewhat subjective] "Your music is worthless" . Yep. Quite a few people agree. Pink Floyd sucks. Not worth a penny. That's exactly why those guys are flat broke.
In order to advance to a stage where a MMOG has an actual economy, it needs some form of export, hence a GDP. More money should come in than goes out.
While each and every game out there is still a closed economy (where for party X to go home with 100$, party Y must lose 100$, and party Company-That-Runs-The-Game must also make ends meet as a prerequisite), item trade is a somewhat unexpected (to me at least) way for this to become an open one. I always imagined they'd think of some way for MMOG lurkers to generate something actually _useful_. Like share their CPU or generate content on their own. Or something.
And yet, once people have applied the meaning of value to items within a game, and others are willing to lay out real hard american green cash in order to own them, this plainly shows that the game world managed to generate something of value to the outside world. That's a very substantial step, and it's completely unsurprising that someone for whom this would make economic sense (who can employ people at 5$/month) would take this up as a very real business opportunity.
I wonder just how much global market there is for Maces of Thwappage +5.
The obvious route to take would be to legislate (as international law, not US law) that you can only lay claim to Extra Terrestrial Real Estate (ETRE from now on) if you can land on it.
This would indeed solve the immediate story - keep the loonies out of courts and from having any legal basis for such claims.
It would, however, create some bigger problems.
Here's a few probs with "Landers-Keepers":
1. Instead of starting stellar colonization as a single political entity (eg humanity/earth), we'll just start another colony race (eg china vs US for example, like Britain vs. France vs. lesser colonizers a century ago) and deepen division between world powers instead of using this exact endeavor to bridge across and achieve something together.
2. What's to prevent someone with a home-made rocket (eg starchaser, or the X-prize-winner-to-be) from actually landing there and forming his own country? would that be in the best interests of you? me? the US? Humanity?
And this brings us to the big kahoona.
3. Whose interests do we aim to serve by this sort of legislation?
The US? I daresay Europe and Asia will disagree.
The UN? The UN is just short of owned by 1 billion oil-supplying muslims. That wouldn't be so bad at all, if the muslim world hadn't been a poverty-stricken, politically-faltering, violence-promoting human-life-has-no-value culture at the core of which lies Jihad upon which quite a large chunk of the world's next generation of muslims are raised.
Even richer arab countries like Saudi Arabia are extremely polarized between westernization-seekers and this ugly side of the Islam.
I daresay that the US will disagree to serve these radicals and their agendas.
Humanity _does_ include 1 billion arabs and you can't exclude them. But when you count humanity as a whole, you suddenly realize that there is no common agenda to serve by ETRE legislation. You are eventually going to displease a large portion of this planet.
Finally, I'll point out that legislation on this is entire nonsense in itself, as legislation is useless without some form of enforcement. Face it, if the moon belongs to NASA and some rogue party lands on it, there is NOBODY that can remove him and throw him in jail.
The best solution would probbably be:
a. Keep working hard to eventually reach ETRE.
Ignore mosquito bites like the article above. At this stage, a space race actually serves humanity quite well, as it drives tech development faster.
b. Keep this legally vague for as long as possible (until someone can actually sheriff ETRE). If this doesn't clarify for a while yet, the arab world might by then reach the point where (Golda Meir quote) "They love their children more than they hate someone else's".
Wait for an entity that all humanity can trust to appear and pose a common-to-all agenda. Then and only then legislate something along the lines of
"ETRE initially belongs to said entity" and then be distributed and regulated much like US soil real estate.
Cheers.
Hell, they were _in_the_office_.
Any 2-bit tech can ghost a harddrive onto a laptop/clamshell in well under 20 minutes with an external USB2-to-IDE connector.
How the hell can you assume they didn't do just that?
.. I think you forgot the obvious:
/.
FREE PUBLICITY by going on the news and
Remember the books marketers read to their kids?
- Bill and the Pie
- Bill and the Blue Screen of Death
- Sir Mcbride and the Incredibly Big Monster?
followed by the rest of the "Free global advertising in a nutshell" children's literature series?
That's a rather unscientific doom'n'gloom approach.
Why would it collapse under its own beurocracy? Yes, ID's _are_ meant to keep tabs on people. They proved their usefulness well and beyond in allowing governments to control the populace (for the populace's own good). How would you like to drive around a place where anyone can print out a phony driver's license, kids with no driver training just go sit behind wheels, and people get killed daily by the doesen?
What is being said here about bio ID's invading your privacy is just as relevant about your regular ID today. In spite of the privacy invasion, the benefits of such a system outweigh the penalties by far. Don't forget it goes the other way around too - If you didn't do something bad, keeping bio tabs on you makes framing someone innocent or wrongful accusation harder. Furthermore, we already live in a world where you can be tracked quite easily with your credit card, given a court warrant.
Law-abiding people actually want the "right to be able to commit a crime and be hard to track" (though they don't intent to ever excersize that right). Sorta reminds "The right to have children" that the guy wanted in "Life of Bryan".
Going bio will actually make ID-faking harder, hence more expensive, hence less accessible, hence make crimedoers more easily trackable, hence reduce crime and be good for us all on the end count.
To your point of it being a "farce" and falling apart due to that - highly unlikely. Same could be said for card ID's - nobody will take it seriously, and it'll just be a pain that will inevitably be repulsed. Yeah right. Hell, I could have said that when someone came up with the idea of money. But Woe and Behold! people _do_ take the idea of money seriously and it is anything but falling apart. Why should bio ID's be any different from ID cards, drivers licenses or money?
Cheers.
Then I'll be able to charge my smartphone.
Using... umm.. me. Growing humans may not be a power-efficient way of producing power, but it sure as hell can give you a handy power socket when you need one. Maybe in a decade or two...
>> What is the most "fab" game on the Internet right now? Lemme check...ah...CS? Made by Valve right? No, a small group of "Indy" developers!
:-)
Valve got their salaries at the time from a corporation known as "Sierra Online". And when a corp pays your salary, guess who makes decisions.
It's a rarity that a corp will make the right ones for us gamers when better ones for its pocket that throw us gamers in the dirt are available.
>> Most games on the market today and in the near future are mostly hype(graphics, benchmarks, boobs) and emptiness
My point exactly
>> The energy that once went into hacking the next great "civ game" is now in the mod community and very healthy.
Can a mod community make a mod better (or more unique) than the game they're modding? Can they put together an actual _game_? The theoretical possibility is there, but it has yet to be proven.
When it comes to creating an anti-terrorist mod on top of UT or HL, that's one thing. You're not really writing a 'game' as such. It's the most unsophisticated thing of all - multiplayer. You just slap on new textures and a new rules together.
Tell me, did the Neverwinter Nights community manage to rig together a decent 50-game-hours+ game? NADA. And even if they did, chances are it would only look like more of NWN.
Communities create maps, textures, even artwork but with a catch: after the game is released. Not complete games. Your salvation will not come from them.
>> There will always be private development of games, as long as people can program computers.
There will always be bizillions of free downloadable crap, a 0.5% of which may be worthwhile, but we'll never know cuz we don't go there. _WE_ are part of the problem here. We won't buy stuff unless it's as visually stunning as what the corps give us.
>> Don't have such destructively high standards.
I don't. I enjoyed Sam. But existing genres are starting to sink in, get boring with time, and nothing *new* seems to be showing up. Just same old. More same 3D shooters. More same RPG's. More same RTS. And instead of getting more sophisticated, they get shallower and prettier.
>> Games come from programers, not magically wished into existance by invisible corporate Gods.
Actually, the corporatios buy indys, then just rub and wish.
There are two things that small developers lack to make the gaming rennasaince days come back.
Let's assume their spouce can feed them for the 3-4 years it takes to actually code a decent games. Let's even assume they gang together and form tiny companies.
One problem is the enourmous amounts of artistic property needed to raise a modern-looking game.
Individual developers (or tiny dev groups/companies) don't have anywhere near the amount needed. Getting it isn't cheap, and getting competitive stuff is hard on top of expensive.
Sure, someone like Sid Meyer can throw out a marvelous design, a brilliant concept nobody has thought of, a whole new potential genre. But who'll pay for it? It'll just stack with the mountains of 15-year-old-graphic _freeware_ games that're up there. That word, "freeware", is a death-sentance for a game. No gamer, neither soft- nor hardcore, would allow himself to ever be caught playing freeware (except, that is, nethack).
The second thing small devs lack is the power to go 3D. Consider the following:
1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years.
2. Alternatively, coding it costs a few developer decades (translate that to manhours).
3. While the amount of code increases in a linear form, complexity increases logarighmically, and the amount of QA needed increases with it. More resources that a small dev practically cannot muster.
The bare few small developers that actually managed to overcome this hurdle (Croateam - four devs - with Serious Sam for example) just found themselves up agains a second, even larger one - actually coding the GAME. Which, in spite of Sam having been endless hours of insane ammospraying at literally thousands of enemies, was neither a sophisticated, ingenuous, original or groundbreaking game. Face it, It barely kept up, and was nothing more than yet-another-shooter(tm). I'm not saying Croateam didn't do a tremendous job. I'm saying that the amount of resources these four guys had after going 3D to put on anything else was a plain zero.
And that goes for so many games I can think of.. So much energy has to go into getting the 3D to function, people forget to actually put a _game_ on top of it. How many 3D shooters can you name that were actually more sophisticated than mining ore in UO and doing the same repetitive things over and over? Practically none - Deus-Ex. Thief. I really can't think of more. Even long-selling sequels like M&M that decided to go 3D put so much on the 3D that the game itself got neglected to oblivion.
So no, individual or small company devs won't crank up what they used to 15 years ago. No more Star Control II's and Civilization. The few small companies that are left are having their games produced by (read: are being absorbed by) corporations with marketing and fossilized management that will only risk doing games that have already proven to pull in money (read: same old). With corporate management in charge, games are getting less technical and more casual to appeal to wider audiences, while throwing bizillions on washing the shallowness over with stunning visuals. It's been the trend since 3D kicked in, and I highly doubt it's going to change.
I only see corporations owning the future of gaming. Death, Darkness and Gloom. Anyone care to cheer me up a bit here?
My intention was never to raise alarms, I view the entire crystal-industry (I think you should trademark that term) in the same light you do. I did, however, bury 3 close people of cancer below the age of 60 within the last year, and that does have me a bit worried. And no, cell phones are definitely not the primary cause of it. Pollution, Shitty industrial food and what not all contribute their share. In Israel that's a 1-in-9. I don't know how bad it is where you live.
:-).
Besides, I think this entire offspring of the initial discussion missed my main point and went into the obvious and redundant.
The initial thread attempted to claim that WiFi makes BT redundant, I just pointed out that given two similar wireless headsets (one of each tech) and a regular phone without a headset, BT boasts an advantage by using the smallest transmitter up to your head (not to mention smaller energy consumption hence smaller battery). Which is probbably why I use one
Whoa, keep'em flames a bit lower, will you?
I never said any of those cellphonescausecancer.com or oprah things. Don't put words in my mouth. Thatcher once said she really likes having conversations go down to personal lines and name-calling. It means that the attacker is flat out of arguements. Consider revising the way you conduct a conversation.
I worked on radars, and there is one thing I know quite well - RF heats shit up. The stronger the transmission, the more heat. Strong RF very near tissue most definitely cause cancer. That's no conspiracy theory. It's what any electronics freshman will tell you.
The _big_ question here is not "Do strong RF transmissions cause cancer" but rather "Do cell phones (or, if you want it more scientific, GSM900/1800/1900/CDMA/TDMA/WCDMA/whathaveyou or Nokia/Motorolla/Samsung units) transmit STRONG ENOUGH to cause it?" as you quite well pointed out.
The simple answer is - we don't know.
Is there very scientific POSSIBILITY of such harm? absolutely YES. It's just a matter of determining if cell transmission falls above or below the red line of causing harm. But sure enough, that red line is there.
We will know, in a few decades time, when we will, in the least, have statistics on how the masses react to having a cell phone placed against their head for 70 years. We might also have different phones.
Now if you want to use the austrich approach and say "If we don't know that it causes harm = It doesn't cause harm" - fine by me. You can glue 10 1st-generation 4Watt "bannana" phones to your head and cook aumlets on it all day. I suggest you find a local electronics engineer you trust and ask him if placing a 4Watt transmitter to your head for an hour a day will hurt you. Don't mention cell phones.
I prefer to say "If we don't know, it MIGHT be harmful, and I prefer to minimize the chance I'll get cancer due to this, and as long as I have the possibility to use smaller transmitters (Bluetooth) or plastic-tube headsets which do not complicate use, I will use them."
Oh, and the 1-in-9 is an Israeli cancer statistic that has nothing to do with cell phones. It's just how many people die in Israel of cancer. Forgive the irrelevance, I just don't want to end up as a part of it.
Here's the REAL goal list, let's see what the /. community can think of on those points.
:-P. If you manage this one, You'll probbably be the first to make an MMO with an open economy (i.e. an economy that can grow. An economy that can contain more _real_ money than the sum of what all the subscribers paid. An economy where everyone can become richer, as opposed to an economy where for every dollar that player A withdraws in real cash, player B must pay said doller, and that's without mentioning the operator's fee)
:-)
There's an enoumous drive for skill points in these games. Those are likely valued higher than money, and a more stable (albeit untradable) property. Since people excert so much energy to boost their stats (or gain money), why not take a ride on this and turn the stat/money acquiring process into:
a. Something that is actually productive in the real world. Manually decrypting 3DES, I dunno
alternatively, b. Something that is productive within the game. That too is harder than it sounds. Having players build their own maps/levels that will incorporate dynamically into the world? Have them contribute artwork? too few people can do that. Have them contribute lawyer/accountant/coder skills? Have virus-writing contests? It's still too narrow to invest in a game that will facilitate it. How about a game where you "add" non-game-related-activities that apply to people who have real skills in the real world?. It's just a mishmash of ideas, but maybe if I raise the question, someone will think of an answer
alternatively, c. Something that is FUN TO DO. Here are some examples:
1. Arcomage
2. Tetris, like the article mentioned
3. If you're completely unimaginative and see only black when you close your eyes, I think even chess/backgammon would do. Hell, Chrome incorporated the oldest memory-game in the book while hacking computers (as opposed to watching progress bars) and That old 'Broken Sword' quest had you playing arkanoid while waiting for saved games to load.
And only if all else fails, d. Repetitive mouse-clicking on a single point on your screen that can be done by anyone with the IQ of an oat.
Now [a] and [b] are definitely very serious challenges, both in the thinking and implementation categories. [c] is easy in both, but nobody does it. All MMO's just go for [d]. Am I the only one whose intelligence feels insulted here?
And am I hearing the words "Market Opportunity" reverberating in the brain of some investor who is reading this?
Did you ever try comparing the money you pay your optometrist and the price for a monitor that can do 100Hz or higher at whatever resolution you like using?
So many [quite-tech-savvy] people pay hundreds of dollars for CPU cycles they don't use or a twice-as-fast FSB, and yet a good 90% of them utterly neglect to buy hardware (like a good monitor for your eyes or a decent chair for your back) that has an adverse affect on their health. Needless to say, once they need treatment, they do pay that same money to the doctor.
>> Bluetooth IS NOT A WIRELESS TCP/IP Alternative!
No, it isn't. But it does have its own protocol stack.
>> They also still want to use non-standard connectors to you have to buy from them and noone else.
Yep, and to compensate for their inability to make overpriced proprietary plugs, they made a hugely diverce protocol stack that is waaay too redundant.
Here's an example:
There are no less than three profiles (aka protocols) to transfer audio - one for a handsfree set (HFP), another for headset(HSP), yet another for CD-quality stereo (A2DP).
You'd think that if a phone has bluetooth it can connect with any bluetooth headset. Wrong. Nokia 3650 for instance only supports the "HFP" profile, while 99% of the BT headsets support the Headset (HSP) profile. The nokia headset supports both, and is therefore the only headset that will work with this phone. Did I hear anyone say "wireless proprietary 50$ plugs"?
(and there's even no mention of A2DP support, in spite the fact that the phone has [a] Intel arm CPU, [b] MMC storage card [c] an almost-decent OS and [d] MP3 playback software)
The major difference between WiFi and BT is in what the product actually is.
WiFi is Ethernet, albeit wireless. Once the little green "LINK" light goes on, it's just another network card. Lop ye good'ol TCP/IP stack on it and you're set. It definitelty has its uses, but definitely too large, too strong, or too energy-draining for others.
Bluetooth is NOT ONLY Ethernet. It's not only a wireless hardware layer, but a whole new _SOFTWARE_ protocol stack on top, in which "TCP/IP" fits into a very small slot.
And not only is it a whole software stack, it's a NEW stack, with various implementations, all of which are NOT based on 30-year-old working berkeley code. They're based on 12-month-old bugged-to-hell-and-back commercial code, and each vendor's particular implementation (like that in a taiwanese no-brand headset) differs and has its own bugs and such.
Bluetooth is attempting a lot here, and it's attepmting to satisfy a very real need that the market is willing to pay for, but this requires overcoming a whole set of hurdles and immaturity stage, incompatibility issues, buggy stacks and what not till it gets to where Ethernet, TCP/IP and other 30-year-old things are today.
I think it has a bright enough future, even if they'll replace the actual hardware transmitter with smaller/faster/cheaer transmitters 5 years down the road. The protocol stacks, API's and BT maturity in general are all here to stay.
Just for the record
A cell phone transmits up to a distance of a two to three kilometers, maybe more depending on technology, vendor etc.
A Wifi transmitter transmits up to a hundred meters or so.
A bluetooth transmitter transmits up to a distance of 10 meters.
But they're all still RF transmitters.
Which one do _you_ want to fry your brain with? (do you want to take part in the 1-in-9-have-cancer statistic?) Cuz ignore it or not, them brain cells do get fried and _die_.
The three orders of magnitude that exist between robbing a store and robbing a couple of billion from wherever the US treasury stores it doens't mean that the former is less of a 'robbery' than the latter. The term applies to both regardless of severity.
;-)
Yes, getting raped yourself is less fun than having your computer raped, but it's still rape.
And as for that 'rape applies only to sex' comment, we do 'base-rape' when we play tribes, don't we? (or is it something else you've been doing with the mortar each time the rest of us were flattening enemy installations?
And this is why this sort of software should be called RAPEware.
Last I checked, violating someone without his/her consent, against his will, and giving him no ability to stop it when he asks to is called RAPE in the English language.
I see no reason why the term cannot apply to one's computer.
Yes, that may have been a turning point in game-making. And still, I think that if you want to define something as we wish everyone could have experienced, It's not this or that idea that appeared in a certain Ultima sequel, but rather the point where it became an immersive experience to be remembered for decades.
:-)
I think it became a classic when Origin managed to score on 4 counts simultaneously - a VERY difficult feat, and managed to hold that position for two straight games. And that happened in 6 (argueably 5), not in 4, and vanished after 7. 7 part II was a linear adventure and lost its touch due to that. 8 doesn't deserve to bear the Ultima title, and 9 almost made it, but the small game map compared with the vastness of 6 and 7 kept it from receiving the glory of its ancestors.
The four counts are:
1. As you said, this was not eye of the beholder, and wasn't just one big dungeon crawl. A lot of your tasks had to do with people, talking to them, helping them, and generally setting things right (or figuring out which one of the town folk had the damn mantra for the shrine). Yet others had to do with discovering stuff. Unlike so many other RPGs then and now, the people and places in Ultima always had character. And your companions were more than just your fighter - cleric - mage drones.
2. Illinear game play where you could access practically all of the game (except maybe 1-2% that were plot-dependant and that were near-impossible to find at the beginning anyway). Of course, if you decided to make your first trip out of town directly to the dragon cave north of Trinsic, you'd get roasted on the spot, but the fact was that you _could_.
3. A _HUMONGOUS_ game world. You could play that darn thing forever. And then play it again and discover locations you haven't discovered the first time by the dozen.
Furthermore, the game world was not a million connected screens. It was one huge continuos map.
4. Well-developed and extremely-well balanced money system. In fact, game balance was perfect in just about everything. So many corporate management-driven companies strip the months needed for proper game balancing from their schedule, and end up throwing an unbalanced game to the market. Arcanum and Morrowind come to mind. That's a major Maker or Breaker.
You won't find a single game since U7 that managed to score on all of these four points.
U9 scored on counts 1 and 4 and partially on 3.
Morrowind III scored on the huge game world, which was nice at the beginning, but the game soon became super-repetitive and you found out that the whole world was a lot of copy-pasting of exactly the same things. And then a completely unbalanced system utterly killed the game.
Ultima 9 attempted at unlinearity, but screwed up on the large game world account.
Morrowind attempted at the huge world (count 3) but failed miserably in balance (4) and character (1).
Planescape tried for (1), but never made it to either 3 or 2.
The _ONLY_ other two [sets-of] CRPGs that I played that managed to score almost all of these , each in its own style but definitely score, are Fallout II and Gothic (and to a lesser extent Fallout I and Gothic II).
My 2 cents
The list is inconsistent, jumps chronologically across 10 computer eras, skips between genres and simply misses out on some major trendmakers.
Furthermore, when talking of an era (by mentioning a game from it) it does the entire era a lot of disrespect by pointing at the games that neither helped shape the genre, were not successesful by any major standards, nor had any innovative ideas. I suspect the only reason they got written down was because the author had a limited game education and at that particular era had those (and only those) games around.
Here's a few examples:
A familiarity with more than Sierra's first 1986 (or so) quest title is recommended. While they did spawn off a lot of clones, they also generated a huge amount of ideas, refined interface and spawned a lot of imagination. I wouldn't add the entire list of 30 or so games to the list, but another, interim KQ4-era game would add nicely.
Someone explain to me what exactly did Myst and the 7th guest add to the collective genre knowhow? Riddle-quests is probbably the most insignificant of all genres, and fit under "adventures" as much as FIFA does.
Lucas wasn't given due credit either.
Maniac Mansion, the daddy of all Lucas quests. Full Throttle, probbably the brutally funniest game ever. Indiana Jones, and so forth.
I'd add a few "Legend" text based quests to such a list, I believe they contributed some nice ideas.
Then we come to RPG's.
SSI and it's older Pools/Curse/Secrets/PoD and Krynn and later Eye of the Beholder series aren't even mentioned. They had nothing to do with putting together the genre now, did they. Nobody played those games, and TSR/WOC/AD&D have absolutely nothing to do with the genre.
Neither is Lands of Lore credited, the smash game that saved EOBIII disapointees.
Thief is a ROLE PLAYING GAME? If you guys wanted to take something modern & 3D into a dev's RPG repertoir, add Deus Ex.
Ultima 4? why not 3 or 5? what's so special about 4? I'd say 6 or 7, as they were the last of the Ultima Great Map unlinear games, and should probbably be tought at gamemking school today.
Another early Origin HUGE-WORLD-MAP genre-shaper called Times of Lore (graphically superior to U4 and chronologically completely out of its time).
I won't even ask why the only _real_ ROLE-PLAYING (and not xp-acquring-character-buildup) game ever out there - Planescape: Torment - never made this chart.
Or the RAW, PURE Hack&Slash fun of (not "Heroes-of")Might&Magic, both in their groundbraking 3-4-5 era and in the later 6-7-8 outdated-3d-engine-era (where hacking and slashing was no less fun). I refuse to acknowledge there were any more games in this series.
One last gem (that whoever omitted should be _shot_) is Star Control 2. Not really an RPG, but... If you haven't played it, you're not worthy of being called a game developer.
And now the most painful part.
Real Time Strategy (RTS) games.
Instead of combining genre-makers with innovative ideas, they made a list of drones/clones.
Age of Empires? Command & Conquer? Starcraft?
This list should have consisted of Warcraft/WC2, Dune II, Civilization, Master of Orion and simcity. PERIOD. Roots & ideas, not clonelists.
Then they simply _forgot_ the whole 'lancer'/'Mercenary' Genre. Strike Commander, PrivateerI&II, Freelancer, etc.
In fact, the whole "Simulator" genre got ignored (X-Wing? MechWarrior? )or stuffed into "Miscelaneous" categories like Wing Commander did.
To sum up (in nice words) an "extremely lacking" list, made by someone who seriously lacks the exact knowledge he is attempting to put forth, and obviously didn't himself play some of the biggest groundshakers ever to see light. Quite a few veteran gamers I know (myself included) could make a much better list.
I see what you're saying. If you enable FSAA at 31FPS, you'll end up having 30fps one moment, then 15fps with FSAA enabled the next.
:-)
Furthermore, let's for arguement's sake forget 30FPS, and instead use N as the fps value above which we can no longer discern a smoother picture.
My point, however, remains. Consider the following two points:
A. There _is_ redering power wasted.
B. There _are_ more useful things to do with it than render frames I cannot discern.
What you said does not adress the why/why-nots of dynamic FSAA, it's simply a well-made point that definitely should affect the FSAA-enabling threshold.
If I need no more than N fps, And FSAA will drop my rendering rate by 200%, I can set the dynamic FSAA-enabling threshold at 2N. Given a good implementation, I won't even discern the switch.
>> Other than that, FSAA isn't a feature that is universally liked
probbably the most ingenious invention of all time is the ON/OFF switch. Let the user decide
>> The things that are most likely to be worked on are extending the viewing distance and model complexity while maintaining a decent (60fps or so) framerate
Model complexity is definitely a very good use for them extra GPU cycles. I fully agree with you there.
As for viewing distance - my opinion here is based on a combination of ignorance and some common sense, but doesn't the following sound a bit silly?
You're looking through the scope of your sniper rifle, the business end of which is pointed at your mark 500 meters away.
A car drives up near him (complicating the rendering process), your field of view decreases, whoops? I can only see 400 meters! where did the fog of war come from? where's my mark?!
Your viewing distance has an adverse affect on almost all genres of games, and hanging it on your ability to render sounds offhand like a bad idea.