Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You !!
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: HA HA HA HA....
Captain: Take off every 'zig' !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'zig'.
Captain: For great justice.
I would like to know if there are patents on the grid technology, and on MMORPGs based on that kind of technology.
Also, has someone found the url for the project of the University of Winsconsin?
prove that people is so stupid to make e-mail spamming profitable as well.
Ok, that was the flamebait... but think about it... GBA Lineup wouldn't be so full of shit if people didn't go to kwik-e-mart, bought the same buggy platformer with the brand new Disney character that looked like coming out from the Commodore 64 era and then went back to kiwk-e-mart only to buy another platformer based on a Cartoon Network show.
And considering the cost of those fucking games (50 euros here in EU), I wonder if the buyers are little children with little wages, or they demented parents with no knowledge of videogame whatsoever.
I hope when I will be a parent, the situation will be different, because I will not buy my daughter/son a lame game based on a lame franchise.
+ + + +
On the other hand, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, are really good games, even if the franchise is old. Sometimes having a franchise breathing beind the back of the developers makes them to publish good games... unless the franchise is Tomb Raider (rotfl).
+ + + +
I can still remember that Simspons episode with Bart being instigated from Donkey Kong, Mario and Sonic to steal Mortal Kombat from the Mall.
This reminds me of the morons that here in Italy try to sell on Usenet their warez crap, as if the internet isn't enough for doodz to find warez spending no money.
Those idiots spam, spam, spam, and continue to fill the newsgroups with their sales and shit, even coming to harass people with curses and blasphemy. I wonder HOW Usenet in Italy is still widely used with all that shit pestering it.
Luckily the Guardia di Finanza (Fiscal Police) regularly does a full clean sweep of morons selling on the newsgroups AND THEIR FUCKING 14yr old buyers (and supporters), like they have done with famous spammers (and scammers) Claudio Gaudino (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=author%3Aclaudi o_gaudino%40hotmail.com also known as "I would like to be like Goatseman") and Streetguy (http://groups.google.com/groups?author%3Astreetgu y+group%3Ait.comp.giochi.*)
You are so unfortunate not to be able to read Italian... otherwise I would suggest you to read this site:
http://www.bynoi.com/
http://www.bynoi.com/gaudino.html
I can remember When Tomb Raider was born, and who made it. Core Design was a hell of a publisher. It published very good games for the Amiga, like Premiere (a very colorful platformer), Jaguar, and a very nice helicopter simulation.
Core Design at the time was synonim of quality, of a good group that could make his own name to stand out.
Then Playstation came out, Commodore crash and burned, and Core Design found herself to do three things:
create a 3d game because all the lamers, pardon, the new videogamers brought in by the Sony Playstation wanted a 3d videogame, after having seen that spectaular demo (but gaming shite) of Toshinden they wanted a 3d game.
find herself a new patron, because the playstation development model demanded your team to be under a patron publisher at all times (in order to get the sdks you have not only to spend gabazilions of dollars, but also to demonstrate to be "worthy" of attention).
find a new way to create action videogames "the United Kingdom school"-way, since they lacked at the time. (Nowadays very few titles are action videogames like they were in the years of the Amiga, now all the software houses are american, and either they publish fps, or other action arcade titles they do are lame, lame, lame. Oh, yes, and Crash Bandicoot is shit, and the other titles mentioned by Crystal Dysuxmix is either inferior to many Amiga platformers or is something that has rpg-ey elements, so they don't count. There is no "American School" for arcade games. All the good action/arcade games are either english, japanese, or just overrated because there is no competition).
After Tomb Raider 1, Eidos put the gun to Core Design's head and said: "if you want more money (a) surrender Lara Croft, (b) publish other Lara Croft games. No, we are not Nintendo, don't even TRY to do something else or you are OUT".
Now what happens when the public gets tired of playing the same games for 7 times in a row?
What happens if you get the same team to reprogram the same game for 7 times in a row and NO research and development (which is IMPORTANT in the Videogames Market, Japanese do a great deal of R&D)?
What happen if in a franchise you put more hype than substance?
You got it: you produce lame ass games and people will let them stay on the shelves. That was the rule in 1980 with Commodore 64 and Nintendos, that is the rule nowadays.
Eidos taking Lara Croft from Core Design and giving the scepter to Crystan Dysuxmix is the sign that the dickheads at Eidos haven't understood a shit of what makes the videogame industry tick, and even if they have good developers and marketers under them they will soon be doomed. It happened to Square and to Sega which produced excellent games to be on the brink of death, why shouldn't it happen sooner or later to Eidos?
Maybe Core is having a party right now because they already tried to kill the bitch some time ago (wasn't Lara supposed to be dead at the end of "The Last Revelation"? Or at least >?) and maybe they programmed the new videogame with their own asses just to say screw you to Eidos and screw you to Paramount... I wouldn't be surprised by that
Anyway in 80s and 90s was the success of a movie that made or ruined the career of videogames. Paramount bitching about the poor sales of the videogame that reflected on the movie is someone spewing LIES to save their asses. A Movie Sells Itself. Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, it was a great movie but wayyy off-topic from Final Fantasy. Its sales were low. But Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, and the subsequent X were great sellers. Why do we have to believe to Paramount and Eidos corporate shit?
And now mod me down as troll and flamebait, but American Videogame Industry is good for RPGs, FPs, Strategy Games, and might be good for sports games as well, but for action games American Videogame Industry sucks my balls.
I have a 3 gig hd from 1996/1997. It has Debian 3.0 on it installed when Debian came out. It survived TWO motherboard deaths of two different pcs. I put it out and put it in again. No "secure ide" hindering me in the process.:)
The Sega, Atari, and TG16 handhelds all crashed and burned violently, and the 4-shades-of-yellow hunk of junk went on to be one of the most successful video game consoles of all time. Why? Because everyone but the Game Boy tried to do too much. All the more powerful handhelds were bulky as hell, didn't fit in your hand or pocket as easily, cost twice as much (bad for something like a handheld, which is usually an impulse purchase), and most damning of all SUCKED BATTERIES LIKE THERE WAS NO TOMORROW. Meanwhile, the 4-color, dinky, tinny games for the gameboy just somehow wound up being really fun.
The 4 color games were mostly trash, but at least nintendo got Tetris, Super Mario, and a wonderful Zelda. Nintendo at the time WAS the name for videogames. Sony now is in the same position as Nintendo was at the time: Sony has got way too many companies behind its back. I expect Square using the 1.8 gb dvd to do a Final Fantasy 7 PSP, and that would be the killer application.
Sony is experienced in rechargeable batteries. If Sony wants to put a DVD player with a portable, it will surely use rechargeable lithium batteries, like a cellphone. Recharge time will be enough for one DVD I think, if not more.
Sony doesn't need -games-. Sony need third party publishers! They publish games! They published games back in 1995, boring as they were (Wipeout, Zero Divide, Tohshinden, Tekken), and they will publish the games now.
I hope quality games come out as soon as the console is on the market. I also hope that PSP will not have country lock protection, so that I will be able to play tokimeki portable on my unmodified eurro PSP:)
Every computer has copyrighted material on their machines. Windows is copyrighted by Microsoft, so in essence, this bill makes committing a felony as simple as connecting a Windows machine to the internet.
to win a sleeping and important market has announced to be launching Slashdot Slashdot Revolution (also known in the european market as: DDR Nerd-News Rave)
It will come with the following and already beloved hits:
(Hot Grits) I want a petrifying gun. Natalie Portman Lovers
D.M.C.A. Village People remix starring Fritz Holling and Orrin Hatch
Boom Boom Dollar - Spam Attacks! (Enlarge your penis, merchant accounts)
In soviet russia you are belong to all your base The Marx Sisters
(Wednesday Trollday) The ballad of Anonymous Cowards Anonymous Cowards Commitee
The deluxe edition will contain two green/grey dancepads designed by Italian designer Pininfarina, a replica of CowboyNeal's hat, and a T-Shirt with a random quote from memorable collection including "I'm with Taco ->" "I was flamed on/. and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt" and "Would you like to pour hot grits down my pants?".
Preorder your copy now!
All the rave...
on
All The Rave
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Me thinks you protest too much. I freaking LOVE
punkbuster. Without it, I wouldn't bother playing
online at all. It's so pleasing when some moron
shows up with an ogc bot and gets kicked off.:)
Hey man! I'm not protesting! ^__^;
I was only saying that I don't like some spyware-like software being installed on my computer only because there are the usual morons ruining the game for all the others...
Maybe I am just lucky to have many friends that can bring the PCs to my house and that the Italian community is so small that servers are under good manual admin control (most of the time).
It's not a cheat if everyone has it. In the very
least, they should make sure that this 15 percent
slower version of quake2 that everyone will be
RUSHING to install, is only compatible with itself
and not prior clients.
Yes, but consider this:
How can you keep the 2% of people that can recompile the beast to play with the prior client/servers, since it is all GPLd code? And to share the compiled client with the others?:/
Here's what killed UO for me.
Macroing.
That's it. Macroing. It made the game completely un-fun.
Actually macros can be very useful since UO's skill system is lame. I think that a good MMORPG skill has to reward you for doing MANY DIFFERENT THINGS, and not the same stuff again and again like
Everquest's Timesinks.
But anyway, this is a company trying to hook you by compelling you to spend more time online in building up one strong character.
I think that a succesful MMORPG would reward people playing many different characters and try many different strategies. Hope to see one MMORPG like that coming out soon.
I remember when I used to play on an unofficial Ultima Online shard
Origin: before continuing please note
I aknowledge that it breaches your TOS contract
That shard anyway closed and disbanded and I am not informed what their admins are doing now
I am not advocating with this article to play on unofficial servers (rather: che contrary, play on official ones dudes, or play free games like muds or free mmorpgs)
Back to us...
I can remember playing on this unofficial UO shard. There the Admins tought the following things:
They were the admins and they were going to decide what was the best for the Shard, including:
Sudden Gameplay Changes (many of which undocumented or really far far far from the original UO experience)
Insane rules about guilds (like this one: "your guild space is sacred and no one can enter into it, HOWEVER, if someone manages to enters in it via a gate and mark the territory, you have to pay them a ransom"... that doesn't make any sense at all)
Some GMs really liked to unnerve you asking to stick to roleplay mode (they jailed a group of four girls who entered in one of their houses with their horses and stayed there for some time, just to avoid the horses to be killed by a group of PKs) and the minute later other GMs summon strange beasts inside guilds for entertainment (a red/black flametrowing Oclock which also liked to make jokes), or makes NPC bankers say funny out of character things to people around (yeah so much for the "RPG Mode ON" in the Message of the Day... my a$$).
A really childish management of the forums (replying to a professional pk and troll, which was 13 years old at the time, with the:rolleyes: smiley at every single post... and the admin/moderator doing replying with those spammy:rolleyes: was 24...)
The ban of the two most clever admins and making a third one to suspend herself temporarily because she was tied to the other two and did not want to impede the management... and all of them were people who really liked to work on the shard and who really did their questing job well (the third of them is a girl who was even neglecting other hobbies, and other friends for that damn server... but she was the one that answered all the Pages, all the damn subscription requests and mails, no Origin... she went to live to Venezuela with her boyfriend some months ago and I haven't heard from her since). All of this why? The comeback of the original founder of one of the two shards that have merged into the one I played.
What is my point with this rant?
I arrive to it in a minute.
Before that experience I loathed Ultima Online since it was sucking my friends in and I found myself alone... but when I started playing it on Christmas, I managed to understand why they liked it, and I began mining, hacking, chopping stuff for hours like them because I wanted my PC become stronger, and I wished to do quests with them.
I also found a very good game guild, I also found "my role" in there and my "part". Everyone else liked my PC and we exchanged our stuff, I repaired stuff for them and they gave me ingots... so I became part of that world.
Unfortunately the Game masters were too much involved in making the game a "continuous experimentation in serverside scripting", a "living lab of game design failures and unfixed bugs", and a "political chess game".
They managed to ruin an otherwise good experience.
Why?
Poor communication, poor understanding, and a really scarce level of humilty.
This is what happens with nowadays companies. Why, for example, my "railroad transportation authority" has to put loud, clearchannel/disco music at the train stations (yes, in Italy we have Clearchannel radio stations... I am not surprised by it). Does it enhace the service or is it only eye candy?
Is it
I play BF1942 for the most part now and the cheating is at the bare minimum if any at all. There is the superman cheat but it's relatively lame and you can still kill the person. Counterstrike is the single most frustrating online game ever because of the massive amount of cheating involved. I doubt I'll ever play C.S. again because of the amount of cheating and the lack of anti-cheating options implemented by Valve.
I think Valve was waiting to release his Steam platform before stopping cheaters. We will see how this "windowey updatey styley" platform will help Valve in squashing punks. And IF.
BF1942 has either more clever network protocol designers in the team, or simply a less known protocol and a less hacked executable... (Counter Strike's protocol is how much old? Six years ? Eight? Considering that the original Half Life engine was based on Quake 1 modified by Valve).
This doesn't invalidate what I said:), with a GPLd game you ought to hope that your friends are playing honestly:)
Better would be a lanparty for friends;).
In looking at the linked site I noticed that their port includes a "Quake 2 Radar". This is actually constitutes a new cheat.
Unfortunately "Cheating" with a GPLd client game is not new nor has to be considered as an issue.
Eric S. Raymond has a really nice essay about what happened the day that ID released the Quake 1 sources to the world, and what happens constantly to every damn online game out there.
Anyway, someone even thinks as going far as making you voluntarily install spyware on your pc in order to "certify" that you are not an online cheater:(. (If that's the added cost, no online games for me, thankyou).
This is a proof of concept that Microsoft's "Managed C++" stuff may be an interesting technology.
If really Managed C++ isn't too much slower than C given the standard optimizations Managed C++ may become a viable platform for development in the end. We will see what will happen as Microsoft's JIT compiler matures.
If it is viable for Quake 2, it might be viable for any future game coming to PC, XBOX or even Phantom. Remember that having.NET (or Java with JNI as well, see this nice soviet Sturmovik simulator which really owns you;D...) allows you to access several non time-critical libraries (chat, rankings), or to prototype in an easier way several features that you wish to implement, without introducing slowdowns in the development and security issues (XBox savegame hack anyone?).
I can remember Sony and other vendors being interested in a Java Gaming Profile for consoles... a very hefty addition to J2ME with JNI libraries for Physics, "Game Lobby" functionalities and mp3 streaming. That JCP anyway seems (in my experience) to be stalled. We will see if adoption of Managed C++/Managed DirectX will occur and will help the adoption of "Virtual Machines" technology in game consoles as well and revitalize the interest. Many titles, like Nihilistic Entertainment (of Zerstorer fame) Vampire The Masquerade use or used Java as a powerful scripting engine.
Anyway, remember that if you find Managed code to be too slow for your projects, you can always bridge your code with COM+, as Direct-X up to version 8 do succesfully:D... then using a COM+ component is easy as hell with.NET (let's hope that Mono makes this easy for Bonobo components too soon).
The drawbacks: don't expect this to be ported on Mono asap, Mono still lacks a Managed C++ compiler:(
+ + + +
And now imagine embedding Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 with Excel.NET... oh WAIT!
Outside of a few cases, where has the DMCA not been ultimately beneficial (the 'safe harbor' provision for ISPs, for one.) How many DMCA cases have actually been run through the system?
Just too many.
If you think about it DMCA, EUCD are ill-conceived, partisan laws.
Some order must be done in order for the society to stay healthy AND alive, and some clarifications must as well be done for laws (like, for example, extending the notion of transmission channels to the internet, so that you could prosecute Child pornography or shit like that), but DMCA and its clones only represents major companies.
The scariest part of DMCA are two:
The provision "your provider must cease the distribution of content you put online on notification". This goes against any reasoning of "innocent until proven". (Minority Report anyone?)
Any provision in it which helps kill scientific research by silencing the spreading of knowledge.
Ok, this doesn't answer your question. I hope anyway someone reads my rant but mods you up:).
So that I could use them as a sort of big blenders, so that I can stirr some large VATS full of hot grits (which I will then pour on my pants), but I'm afraid that the cd-rom reader is not strong enough to act like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Captain: What happen ? Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb. Operator: We get signal. Captain: What ! Operator: Main screen turn on. Captain: It's You !! Cats: How are you gentlemen !! Cats: All your base are belong to us. Cats: You are on the way to destruction. Captain: What you say !! Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time. Cats: HA HA HA HA ....
Captain: Take off every 'zig' !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'zig'.
Captain: For great justice.
I would like to know if there are patents on the grid technology, and on MMORPGs based on that kind of technology. Also, has someone found the url for the project of the University of Winsconsin?
Of course this wuould be the first senseful purpose for a computer of that kind...
Ok, that was the flamebait... but think about it... GBA Lineup wouldn't be so full of shit if people didn't go to kwik-e-mart, bought the same buggy platformer with the brand new Disney character that looked like coming out from the Commodore 64 era and then went back to kiwk-e-mart only to buy another platformer based on a Cartoon Network show.
And considering the cost of those fucking games (50 euros here in EU), I wonder if the buyers are little children with little wages, or they demented parents with no knowledge of videogame whatsoever.
I hope when I will be a parent, the situation will be different, because I will not buy my daughter/son a lame game based on a lame franchise.
+ + + +
On the other hand, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, are really good games, even if the franchise is old.
Sometimes having a franchise breathing beind the back of the developers makes them to publish good games... unless the franchise is Tomb Raider (rotfl).
+ + + +
I can still remember that Simspons episode with Bart being instigated from Donkey Kong, Mario and Sonic to steal Mortal Kombat from the Mall.
Those idiots spam, spam, spam, and continue to fill the newsgroups with their sales and shit, even coming to harass people with curses and blasphemy. I wonder HOW Usenet in Italy is still widely used with all that shit pestering it.
Luckily the Guardia di Finanza (Fiscal Police) regularly does a full clean sweep of morons selling on the newsgroups AND THEIR FUCKING 14yr old buyers (and supporters), like they have done with famous spammers (and scammers) Claudio Gaudino (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=author%3Aclaudi o_gaudino%40hotmail.com also known as "I would like to be like Goatseman") and Streetguy (http://groups.google.com/groups?author%3Astreetgu y+group%3Ait.comp.giochi.*)
You are so unfortunate not to be able to read Italian... otherwise I would suggest you to read this site:
http://www.bynoi.com/
http://www.bynoi.com/gaudino.html
GBA market is full of 2d action games. Unfortunately only a little number of them are made by talented european makers (The two Iridions for example).
Your evil chimera twin inside you owns you
Core Design at the time was synonim of quality, of a good group that could make his own name to stand out.
Then Playstation came out, Commodore crash and burned, and Core Design found herself to do three things:
After Tomb Raider 1, Eidos put the gun to Core Design's head and said: "if you want more money (a) surrender Lara Croft, (b) publish other Lara Croft games. No, we are not Nintendo, don't even TRY to do something else or you are OUT".
Now what happens when the public gets tired of playing the same games for 7 times in a row?
What happens if you get the same team to reprogram the same game for 7 times in a row and NO research and development (which is IMPORTANT in the Videogames Market, Japanese do a great deal of R&D)?
What happen if in a franchise you put more hype than substance?
You got it: you produce lame ass games and people will let them stay on the shelves.
That was the rule in 1980 with Commodore 64 and Nintendos, that is the rule nowadays.
Eidos taking Lara Croft from Core Design and giving the scepter to Crystan Dysuxmix is the sign that the dickheads at Eidos haven't understood a shit of what makes the videogame industry tick, and even if they have good developers and marketers under them they will soon be doomed. It happened to Square and to Sega which produced excellent games to be on the brink of death, why shouldn't it happen sooner or later to Eidos?
Maybe Core is having a party right now because they already tried to kill the bitch some time ago (wasn't Lara supposed to be dead at the end of "The Last Revelation"? Or at least >?) and maybe they programmed the new videogame with their own asses just to say screw you to Eidos and screw you to Paramount... I wouldn't be surprised by that
Anyway in 80s and 90s was the success of a movie that made or ruined the career of videogames. Paramount bitching about the poor sales of the videogame that reflected on the movie is someone spewing LIES to save their asses. A Movie Sells Itself. Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, it was a great movie but wayyy off-topic from Final Fantasy. Its sales were low. But Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, and the subsequent X were great sellers. Why do we have to believe to Paramount and Eidos corporate shit?
And now mod me down as troll and flamebait, but American Videogame Industry is good for RPGs, FPs, Strategy Games, and might be good for sports games as well, but for action games American Videogame Industry sucks my balls.
I have a 3 gig hd from 1996/1997. It has Debian 3.0 on it installed when Debian came out. It survived TWO motherboard deaths of two different pcs. I put it out and put it in again. No "secure ide" hindering me in the process. :)
Sony now is in the same position as Nintendo was at the time: Sony has got way too many companies behind its back. I expect Square using the 1.8 gb dvd to do a Final Fantasy 7 PSP, and that would be the killer application.
Sony doesn't need -games-. Sony need third party publishers! They publish games! They published games back in 1995, boring as they were (Wipeout, Zero Divide, Tohshinden, Tekken), and they will publish the games now. I hope quality games come out as soon as the console is on the market. I also hope that PSP will not have country lock protection, so that I will be able to play tokimeki portable on my unmodified eurro PSP :)
Try this other:
1. Send everyone to jail
2. Let Clearchannel buy all the jail radio systems
3. Riots!
Linux is Copyrighted by Linus Torvalds et al.
It will come with the following and already beloved hits:
The deluxe edition will contain two green/grey dancepads designed by Italian designer Pininfarina, a replica of CowboyNeal's hat, and a T-Shirt with a random quote from memorable collection including "I'm with Taco ->" "I was flamed on /. and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt" and "Would you like to pour hot grits down my pants?".
Preorder your copy now!
are belong to us.
Hey man! I'm not protesting! ^__^;
I was only saying that I don't like some spyware-like software being installed on my computer only because there are the usual morons ruining the game for all the others...
Maybe I am just lucky to have many friends that can bring the PCs to my house and that the Italian community is so small that servers are under good manual admin control (most of the time).
Yes, but consider this: How can you keep the 2% of people that can recompile the beast to play with the prior client/servers, since it is all GPLd code? And to share the compiled client with the others? :/
If a game requires you to have a non-intelligent macro in order to advance, that's a game I would like to leave only to non-intelligent beings O:)
Macroing.
That's it. Macroing. It made the game completely un-fun.
Actually macros can be very useful since UO's skill system is lame. I think that a good MMORPG skill has to reward you for doing MANY DIFFERENT THINGS, and not the same stuff again and again like Everquest's Timesinks.
But anyway, this is a company trying to hook you by compelling you to spend more time online in building up one strong character.
I think that a succesful MMORPG would reward people playing many different characters and try many different strategies. Hope to see one MMORPG like that coming out soon.
I remember when I used to play on an unofficial Ultima Online shard
Origin: before continuing please note
Back to us...
I can remember playing on this unofficial UO shard. There the Admins tought the following things:
What is my point with this rant?
I arrive to it in a minute.
Before that experience I loathed Ultima Online since it was sucking my friends in and I found myself alone... but when I started playing it on Christmas, I managed to understand why they liked it, and I began mining, hacking, chopping stuff for hours like them because I wanted my PC become stronger, and I wished to do quests with them.
I also found a very good game guild, I also found "my role" in there and my "part". Everyone else liked my PC and we exchanged our stuff, I repaired stuff for them and they gave me ingots... so I became part of that world.
Unfortunately the Game masters were too much involved in making the game a "continuous experimentation in serverside scripting", a "living lab of game design failures and unfixed bugs", and a "political chess game".
They managed to ruin an otherwise good experience.
Why?
Poor communication, poor understanding, and a really scarce level of humilty.
This is what happens with nowadays companies.
Why, for example, my "railroad transportation authority" has to put loud, clearchannel/disco music at the train stations (yes, in Italy we have Clearchannel radio stations... I am not surprised by it). Does it enhace the service or is it only eye candy?
Is it
I think Valve was waiting to release his Steam platform before stopping cheaters. We will see how this "windowey updatey styley" platform will help Valve in squashing punks. And IF.
BF1942 has either more clever network protocol designers in the team, or simply a less known protocol and a less hacked executable... (Counter Strike's protocol is how much old? Six years ? Eight? Considering that the original Half Life engine was based on Quake 1 modified by Valve).
This doesn't invalidate what I said :), with a GPLd game you ought to hope that your friends are playing honestly :) ;).
Better would be a lanparty for friends
In looking at the linked site I noticed that their port includes a "Quake 2 Radar". This is actually constitutes a new cheat. Unfortunately "Cheating" with a GPLd client game is not new nor has to be considered as an issue. Eric S. Raymond has a really nice essay about what happened the day that ID released the Quake 1 sources to the world, and what happens constantly to every damn online game out there. Anyway, someone even thinks as going far as making you voluntarily install spyware on your pc in order to "certify" that you are not an online cheater :(. (If that's the added cost, no online games for me, thankyou).
- This is a proof of concept that Microsoft's "Managed C++" stuff may be an interesting technology.
- If it is viable for Quake 2, it might be viable for any future game coming to PC, XBOX or even Phantom. Remember that having
.NET (or Java with JNI as well, see this nice soviet Sturmovik simulator which really owns you ;D ...) allows you to access several non time-critical libraries (chat, rankings), or to prototype in an easier way several features that you wish to implement, without introducing slowdowns in the development and security issues (XBox savegame hack anyone?).
- Anyway, remember that if you find Managed code to be too slow for your projects, you can always bridge your code with COM+, as Direct-X up to version 8 do succesfully
:D... then using a COM+ component is easy as hell with .NET (let's hope that Mono makes this easy for Bonobo components too soon).
The drawbacks: don't expect this to be ported on Mono asap, Mono still lacks a Managed C++ compilerIf really Managed C++ isn't too much slower than C given the standard optimizations Managed C++ may become a viable platform for development in the end. We will see what will happen as Microsoft's JIT compiler matures.
I can remember Sony and other vendors being interested in a Java Gaming Profile for consoles... a very hefty addition to J2ME with JNI libraries for Physics, "Game Lobby" functionalities and mp3 streaming. That JCP anyway seems (in my experience) to be stalled. We will see if adoption of Managed C++/Managed DirectX will occur and will help the adoption of "Virtual Machines" technology in game consoles as well and revitalize the interest. Many titles, like Nihilistic Entertainment (of Zerstorer fame) Vampire The Masquerade use or used Java as a powerful scripting engine.
+ + + +
And now imagine embedding Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 with Excel.NET... oh WAIT!
Just too many.
If you think about it DMCA, EUCD are ill-conceived, partisan laws.
Some order must be done in order for the society to stay healthy AND alive, and some clarifications must as well be done for laws (like, for example, extending the notion of transmission channels to the internet, so that you could prosecute Child pornography or shit like that), but DMCA and its clones only represents major companies.
The scariest part of DMCA are two:
Ok, this doesn't answer your question. I hope anyway someone reads my rant but mods you up :).
WIPO SUCKS
WTO SUCKS
Convert them in a magical petrify device maybe?