Game developers are mostly still supporting GeForce MX cards on the low end, because there's only fifty squillion of them still out there. The upper end creeps ever upward, but the baseline for most games is still very, very reasonable. It's the best of all worlds.
Thanks for stopping by and looking at LotRO, Taco
on
PAX05 Writeup
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· Score: 1
It was fun showing the game off. PAX was excellent: it's really great to be at a show with so many folks who just really want to be there. Not every show is like that. We had an excellent time.
I do want to clarify that 9-player fellowships were considered early on for Lord of the Rings Online, as a nod to the novels, but that they were abandoned almost as early as impractical, so you need not fear being driven mad.
"Mr Slattery called himself an iTunes customer who 'was also forced to purchase an Apple iPod' if he wanted to take his music with him to listen to."
He can burn CDs of his music from iTunes. Even the claim that Apple has turned an "open and interactive standard" into something proprietary is ludicrous, as AAC is not an open standard.
Story and Interactivity has an odd relationship
on
Interactive Storytelling
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They are, at their extremes, mutually exclusive, but in the middle, they are not. It is possible to add more story and more interactivity to a game, and neither will impinge on the other -- for a while. But there is a certain threshhold one passes where, if more story is to be told, then one must constrain the player's freedom of choice. Conversely, if one gives the player ever greater scope for interactivity, story will become more marginalized. Taken to extremes, they are completely exclusive of one another: complete freedom means no real narrative, and complete story can only be received passively.
A blend of some story with a player's interactivity can enhance the interaction by providing greater context, but the storyteller must realize that they relinquish a good amount of narrative control over the outcome.
"There is no true difference between an open source and a closed source creation of a game." This is an admission that there is no true difference between the cathedral and the bazaar, for any project, which I don't think you intend.
The advantage OS brings to a project is that of many eyes all looking at it, testing it, and improving it. The thing a game often requires is novelty of experience, even the superficial novelty of a cheap knockoff, and this is not something that the OS model can permit: either your community is looking at the project in development, or it's not. If it's not looking at your project, OS is offering you no advantages whatsoever, while offering several disadvantages. If your community is looking at it, there is no novelty, and the game will have no excitement for anyone involved when it reaches completion, if ever.
Games that are truly replayable are open-sourcable, which is why the mod community for FPS games is almost exclusively multiplayer: multiplayer game designs don't rely on pre-created content for novelty, they rely on players. FreeCiv is a fine game for OS, because it's a well-understood game design, relatively undemanding of the hardware, and is very replayable; it is almost unique among single-player games in its level of replayability.
THE USER OWNS THE SCREEN. This is why pop-ups are so much more annoying than banner ads, and why this sort of advertising will be instantly the most hated form of ad yet devised.
They think this is akin to a television commercial that viewers are forced to sit through in order to finish watching the show, because they understand television advertising but not web advertising. They don't realize that banner ads are the natural analogues to commercials. This is more akin to being forced to watch a commercial before your television will permit you to change the channel. How many viewers would put up with that?
...and you only think you know what parenting means. Most kids (of which you are only bordering on not being) have grand ideas about how they're not going to make the mistakes with their kids that their parents made with them, and they have an incredible faith that people grow up with instincts far better than they actually are.
Your parents know better. They had lived with you for years before the earliest memory you can recall. And if you have a good head on your shoulders, you should thank the folks that raised you, because they probably worked hard putting it there.
I completely agree. Bad names are also doubly damning when they use trite naming artifacts that only serve to annoy: *The* GIMP (with capitalization a must), instead of Gimp. It takes a bad name and worsens it.
Call it PixelMip (being the first pixelly sort of name I tried that wasn't already in Google) or something else that sounds vaguely like *what it does*. A descriptive name sounds professional, a cutesy acronym or punning name sounds hackerish in all of the worst ways, for folks not involved in the hacker community.
The *real* problem of the little guy having a global reach is that very quickly, it's possible to create costs to others that *far* outstrip a single person's ability to compensate everyone involved (given reasonable, non-Gatesian amounts of personal wealth). The Radicati Group estimates that "malicious code" will cost more than $54 billion in economic damage by 2006: this is not inconsequential activity.
Of course, graffiti isn't, either. The US costs are around $15 billion a year, which doesn't count things like lowered property values for folks in graffiti-filled neighborhoods. Both forms of expression are anti-democratic and exploitive, much as those of pseudo-anarchist bent would like to think otherwise.
OS X is nice, but it has inconsistencies that show poor design. Closing a window might just close a window, or it might close a window and close its application. Many preference dialogues do not have an explicit "Save" option, and no explicit way to revert the settings to what they were: the way to save is to close the window.
So closing a window might mean "close the window," "quit the application," or "save and close the window." There is no explicit interface to tell you what will happen when you click that little red ball. You have to have a good bit of a priori knowledge to guess what will happen.
A lot of hash is made by folks about security, and security holes are cited as reasons to call programmers "dumbasses" and "idiots". Most of this obviously heads Microsoft's direction.
But it's clear to me that audience size has more to do with security exploits than programmer skill. Counterstrike has *far* more cheaters, and far more dedicated crackers, than any other online game. It also has 10x as many people as any other online game. Valve programmers aren't stupid. I'm sure the AIM programmers aren't stupid, either, and neither are the MSN or Outlook folks. It seems to me that the more people you throw at a problem, the more holes you'll find: that the holes are inevitable for any non-trivial program.
You get the "more people to throw at the problem" in security cases by having the "bigger audience to screw with". I was wondering when I'd start seeing non-MS general apps attract enough crackers, and AIM with 100 million folks appears to be sufficiently large.
How much blame should attach to programmers? I notice Red Hat has about 4 security updates a month (for their most current version), looking at their own list on their website. Mandrake has about double that. They're smart guys, too. But you don't hear about it nearly as much, because obviously any exploit is a much smaller ripple, compared to the millions more Windows boxes out there.
I've downloaded 17 XP updates since it came out, most of them security updates. I'm not seeing a train wreck of incompetance with Windows: if a flaw is discovered, it's bigger news just by being more widely distributed. But the flaws seem to get fixed, on the whole. At least, they seem to get fixed at a reasonable rate, comparable to the rate at which Linux companies issue fixes. One could argue that, given the mumblemillion more Windows boxes there are, that MS should fix the bugs mumblemillion times faster to compensate for the severity difference they pose the world, but that's a pretty facile argument, and easy to dismiss.
I guess I'm thinking that it's gotta be pretty damned hard to write software to allow two computers to talk and take every single eventuality into account before shipping it. It's got to get geometrically more complicated the more apps and such talk in a variety of ways. I'm wondering how "bombproof" some things are by virtue of just not having enough folks that care enough to try.
This is the "Originality" definition of Art, and it has some problems. There are an awful lot of paintings in the world, and an awful lot of ways paint has been used to produce Art. I'd say it is impossible for an artist to use paint completely originally at this point in time: does this make all current painting NotArt?
What about a derivative work encountered by an Art neophyte? I do an Impressionist painting and an alien arrives from his Monetless world and sees my painting first, and is truly moved by its riot of color and deft condensation of light and time into one powerful image: is it NotArt to him?
Art is about perception, and the important person in the perception process is the viewer, not the producer.
All you're saying is that you're the audience for your own art. That's completely fine. You can be an artist and not care about any audience that isn't you.
What you can't do is demand that the NotYou Audience recognize anything in your work as Art purely at your behest. It just isn't up to you whether or not your effort gets called Art.
Seen from the other end, I don't think Chippendale said, "This chair is statement of Man's inhumanity to Man." He was after a pleasing chair of excellent Craft, and he made Art.
I would say that anything can be Art if the *audience* thinks it's Art. Just as you can think you're funny, you might not be. Your audience gets to say if you're funny or not.
Anything is Art if it produces an aesthetic reaction in the viewer. Intent on the part of the artist can't be part of the definition: it would exclude much that is in fact Art, and include much that isn't, so it's a bad cut to make with your logical scalpel.
Nowhere does he define "culture" or "community" in his article. Nowhere does he acknowledge that, while some claims about a community may be untrue, that that does not nullify the claim that the community is still legitimately called such. The reader is given no indication that Lockard has explored any of several types of community available online (IRC, MUD, Usenet, etc; this is 1997, before the spread of other communities like ICQ and web forums.)
Not making clear what research he has done makes his comments rather facile and easily dismissed. I'm surprised this topic has come up: the book is three years old, and the entire first section has wonderful essays that far more adeptly refute Lockard's essay than anything that can be easily posted here (I recommend Michele Tepper's essay on Usenet and trolling, and the shibboleths of online communities.)
Slashdot Mirror
Game developers are mostly still supporting GeForce MX cards on the low end, because there's only fifty squillion of them still out there. The upper end creeps ever upward, but the baseline for most games is still very, very reasonable. It's the best of all worlds.
It was fun showing the game off. PAX was excellent: it's really great to be at a show with so many folks who just really want to be there. Not every show is like that. We had an excellent time.
I do want to clarify that 9-player fellowships were considered early on for Lord of the Rings Online, as a nod to the novels, but that they were abandoned almost as early as impractical, so you need not fear being driven mad.
At least, not by LotRO.
"Mr Slattery called himself an iTunes customer who 'was also forced to purchase an Apple iPod' if he wanted to take his music with him to listen to."
He can burn CDs of his music from iTunes. Even the claim that Apple has turned an "open and interactive standard" into something proprietary is ludicrous, as AAC is not an open standard.
They are, at their extremes, mutually exclusive, but in the middle, they are not. It is possible to add more story and more interactivity to a game, and neither will impinge on the other -- for a while. But there is a certain threshhold one passes where, if more story is to be told, then one must constrain the player's freedom of choice. Conversely, if one gives the player ever greater scope for interactivity, story will become more marginalized. Taken to extremes, they are completely exclusive of one another: complete freedom means no real narrative, and complete story can only be received passively.
A blend of some story with a player's interactivity can enhance the interaction by providing greater context, but the storyteller must realize that they relinquish a good amount of narrative control over the outcome.
"There is no true difference between an open source and a closed source creation of a game." This is an admission that there is no true difference between the cathedral and the bazaar, for any project, which I don't think you intend.
The advantage OS brings to a project is that of many eyes all looking at it, testing it, and improving it. The thing a game often requires is novelty of experience, even the superficial novelty of a cheap knockoff, and this is not something that the OS model can permit: either your community is looking at the project in development, or it's not. If it's not looking at your project, OS is offering you no advantages whatsoever, while offering several disadvantages. If your community is looking at it, there is no novelty, and the game will have no excitement for anyone involved when it reaches completion, if ever.
Games that are truly replayable are open-sourcable, which is why the mod community for FPS games is almost exclusively multiplayer: multiplayer game designs don't rely on pre-created content for novelty, they rely on players. FreeCiv is a fine game for OS, because it's a well-understood game design, relatively undemanding of the hardware, and is very replayable; it is almost unique among single-player games in its level of replayability.
THE USER OWNS THE SCREEN. This is why pop-ups are so much more annoying than banner ads, and why this sort of advertising will be instantly the most hated form of ad yet devised.
They think this is akin to a television commercial that viewers are forced to sit through in order to finish watching the show, because they understand television advertising but not web advertising. They don't realize that banner ads are the natural analogues to commercials. This is more akin to being forced to watch a commercial before your television will permit you to change the channel. How many viewers would put up with that?
...and you only think you know what parenting means. Most kids (of which you are only bordering on not being) have grand ideas about how they're not going to make the mistakes with their kids that their parents made with them, and they have an incredible faith that people grow up with instincts far better than they actually are.
Your parents know better. They had lived with you for years before the earliest memory you can recall. And if you have a good head on your shoulders, you should thank the folks that raised you, because they probably worked hard putting it there.
I completely agree. Bad names are also doubly damning when they use trite naming artifacts that only serve to annoy: *The* GIMP (with capitalization a must), instead of Gimp. It takes a bad name and worsens it.
Call it PixelMip (being the first pixelly sort of name I tried that wasn't already in Google) or something else that sounds vaguely like *what it does*. A descriptive name sounds professional, a cutesy acronym or punning name sounds hackerish in all of the worst ways, for folks not involved in the hacker community.
Fragapalooza.com says that on the front page. Not "North America".
The *real* problem of the little guy having a global reach is that very quickly, it's possible to create costs to others that *far* outstrip a single person's ability to compensate everyone involved (given reasonable, non-Gatesian amounts of personal wealth). The Radicati Group estimates that "malicious code" will cost more than $54 billion in economic damage by 2006: this is not inconsequential activity.
Of course, graffiti isn't, either. The US costs are around $15 billion a year, which doesn't count things like lowered property values for folks in graffiti-filled neighborhoods. Both forms of expression are anti-democratic and exploitive, much as those of pseudo-anarchist bent would like to think otherwise.
OS X is nice, but it has inconsistencies that show poor design. Closing a window might just close a window, or it might close a window and close its application. Many preference dialogues do not have an explicit "Save" option, and no explicit way to revert the settings to what they were: the way to save is to close the window.
So closing a window might mean "close the window," "quit the application," or "save and close the window." There is no explicit interface to tell you what will happen when you click that little red ball. You have to have a good bit of a priori knowledge to guess what will happen.
A lot of hash is made by folks about security, and security holes are cited as reasons to call programmers "dumbasses" and "idiots". Most of this obviously heads Microsoft's direction.
But it's clear to me that audience size has more to do with security exploits than programmer skill. Counterstrike has *far* more cheaters, and far more dedicated crackers, than any other online game. It also has 10x as many people as any other online game. Valve programmers aren't stupid. I'm sure the AIM programmers aren't stupid, either, and neither are the MSN or Outlook folks. It seems to me that the more people you throw at a problem, the more holes you'll find: that the holes are inevitable for any non-trivial program.
You get the "more people to throw at the problem" in security cases by having the "bigger audience to screw with". I was wondering when I'd start seeing non-MS general apps attract enough crackers, and AIM with 100 million folks appears to be sufficiently large.
How much blame should attach to programmers? I notice Red Hat has about 4 security updates a month (for their most current version), looking at their own list on their website. Mandrake has about double that. They're smart guys, too. But you don't hear about it nearly as much, because obviously any exploit is a much smaller ripple, compared to the millions more Windows boxes out there.
I've downloaded 17 XP updates since it came out, most of them security updates. I'm not seeing a train wreck of incompetance with Windows: if a flaw is discovered, it's bigger news just by being more widely distributed. But the flaws seem to get fixed, on the whole. At least, they seem to get fixed at a reasonable rate, comparable to the rate at which Linux companies issue fixes. One could argue that, given the mumblemillion more Windows boxes there are, that MS should fix the bugs mumblemillion times faster to compensate for the severity difference they pose the world, but that's a pretty facile argument, and easy to dismiss.
I guess I'm thinking that it's gotta be pretty damned hard to write software to allow two computers to talk and take every single eventuality into account before shipping it. It's got to get geometrically more complicated the more apps and such talk in a variety of ways. I'm wondering how "bombproof" some things are by virtue of just not having enough folks that care enough to try.
"-Art forges new ground and manifests new ideas"
This is the "Originality" definition of Art, and it has some problems. There are an awful lot of paintings in the world, and an awful lot of ways paint has been used to produce Art. I'd say it is impossible for an artist to use paint completely originally at this point in time: does this make all current painting NotArt?
What about a derivative work encountered by an Art neophyte? I do an Impressionist painting and an alien arrives from his Monetless world and sees my painting first, and is truly moved by its riot of color and deft condensation of light and time into one powerful image: is it NotArt to him?
Art is about perception, and the important person in the perception process is the viewer, not the producer.
All you're saying is that you're the audience for your own art. That's completely fine. You can be an artist and not care about any audience that isn't you.
What you can't do is demand that the NotYou Audience recognize anything in your work as Art purely at your behest. It just isn't up to you whether or not your effort gets called Art.
Seen from the other end, I don't think Chippendale said, "This chair is statement of Man's inhumanity to Man." He was after a pleasing chair of excellent Craft, and he made Art.
I would say that anything can be Art if the *audience* thinks it's Art. Just as you can think you're funny, you might not be. Your audience gets to say if you're funny or not.
Anything is Art if it produces an aesthetic reaction in the viewer. Intent on the part of the artist can't be part of the definition: it would exclude much that is in fact Art, and include much that isn't, so it's a bad cut to make with your logical scalpel.
Nowhere does he define "culture" or "community" in his article. Nowhere does he acknowledge that, while some claims about a community may be untrue, that that does not nullify the claim that the community is still legitimately called such. The reader is given no indication that Lockard has explored any of several types of community available online (IRC, MUD, Usenet, etc; this is 1997, before the spread of other communities like ICQ and web forums.)
Not making clear what research he has done makes his comments rather facile and easily dismissed. I'm surprised this topic has come up: the book is three years old, and the entire first section has wonderful essays that far more adeptly refute Lockard's essay than anything that can be easily posted here (I recommend Michele Tepper's essay on Usenet and trolling, and the shibboleths of online communities.)