When game developers can see that people are willing to pay for beta access to games, what is their incentive to ship a polished game? Most consoles have online connectivity as well, so patching up later is usually not a problem either. I don't see this changing anytime soon, with quarterly budgets being more important than quality.
As for Fallout: New Vegas; the bugs were totally expected from anyone that played Fallout 3, which was also full of bugs. And it is not just gameplay bugs, the entire engine is extremely buggy and the game was neigh unplayable for a lot of PC players, but thankfully a very clever developer at http://www.transgaming.com/business/swiftshader made a custom D3D9.dll which corrects some of the engine bugs (like NOP all debug calls, ignore some buggy shaders, etc.): http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778 for the nVidia version. http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34970 for the ATI version. (The custom dll was made for Fallout 3 and not Fallout: New Vegas. Yet it fixes the same issues in both games.)
Note: the game is very, very good -- without the bugs. Too bad that it is the community that has to fix the bugs.
Please, if you encounter new acronyms or new words on the internet, follow common sense and try searching for them. Google is especially helpful in this regard.
Odds are that if you don't know what "DotA" means, then you wont know what "Defense of the Ancients" means anyways.
One does not get that much gold. But that's the good thing about MMO's, you're rarely ever alone.
The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.
A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.
This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.
At work we've got a semi-private irc channel where the majority of the developers and lead developers hang out. It's a simple way of communication and it excels in situations where not all people are in-house, especially in situations where I want to paste 12 lines of code/xml/etc. to a colleague and ask him if it'd work against his interface/service/etc.
Just as long as people remember that it's a second form of communication, nothing can beat actually being physically present:)
First of all, make your (hard) work open source because you want to share it with others. Don't do it for "street creds" or anything similar silly.
So what if the non-windows open source community doesn't like your project. If it's a good project people will get interested in it and contribute to it. If it's not.. well then you've at least put it out there. Someone somewhere will make use of some of the code somehow, even if they don't contribute back.
And personally I think the "but windows isn't free!" argument is void. If people wants to use some open source application on their platform of choice, it's open for them to port it.
But the name 'CmdrTaco' seems horribly misplaced in a world like WoW. I'm well aware that it's been your nick for ages, but there's just something about a Paladin (fighter for justice, light, all that's good, yadda yadda) named 'CmdrTaco'. But it's no different from a hunter called 'SgtCheeseDoodles' or any other silly name, regardless of the history of the nick.
Having said that, I'm surprised that Blizzard took action at all. I've been playing a Horde orc for over 6 months now and I've seen _a lot_ of stupid names. Names that makes 'CmdrTaco' seem like it's taken out of a Tolkien book and they're still around. You're most likely the victim of some arse that recognized the nickname and thought it'd be fun to annoy you, so he/her reported you to the GMs.
Oh and.. Paladin?! You must have a masochistic personality to play a heal/cleansebot! Oh well, at least you can always shield + hearthstone out of harms way:)
Short answer: Some UML (Use Case + Activity + Class) documents and a technical textual description of the task. You can of course add more, but in 99% of the time, the programmers will either ignore or overlook it.
Long answer: We (small software business) are working on making our inhouse design documents more standard.
One of the things we ran into was also the "What should we assume to be basic knowledge for a design document" question and after having spent some time, we came to the conclusion that design documents had to be so basic that you can replace a programmer in almost any state of the project.
Based on above we made an estimate on how long it'd take to make the proper documentation, showed it to the manager, got a swift "fsck no!" reply and went back to the old system of poor documentation, but high productivity (and many bugs;)
Personally I try to aim for the "three developers" goal. If three non-involved developers can understand it and come to the same conclusion as me, then it's all good.
I'm a professional software developer myself and while the software I work on isn't piracy prone, I'd never go this far.
Disable your own software, do bad encodes, draw goatse/tubgirl images on the encodings, but dont, DONT mess with files that doesn't belong to your program.
This is just plain immature, not to mention very wrong.
And yes, it seems like the author already removed it, but putting it there in the first place is bad.
I really like the direction Microsoft is heading.
Granted it was needed as their reputation, in regards of security, has always been low to none.
I really hope this will rid Windows XP of future remote exploits, since that's still the biggest threat Windows is facing.
Having said that, this wont fix all security problems, there will always be the luser that executes whatever is mailed to him/her, but it's still a step in the right direction.
.. memory upgrade implant, specially in the mornings.
It would also be cool with an encyclopedia or even a few o'reilly books implanted.
Too bad it seems to be a one-way communication only, otherwise a spellchecker implant would be cool too:-)
I doubt that MIPI finds anything..
on
Kazaa Offices Raided
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sherman Networks would be bloody stupid to have anything illegal (music/software/etc) on any of their computers and I really doubt they had anything.
This just seems like the MIPI along with the rest of the record industry is trying to harass Sherman Networks into going away. Personally I don't like/use KaZaa or any other P2P utility, but I think it's a necessary evil.
Oh well, if they should manage to close down KaZaa, there's plenty of underground alternatives for the (ab)users. Seems like wasted resources from a desperate industry.
.. I don't see it as anything but YaLC (yet another linux conversion) or in short, just a hobby.
I just can't see it working as a cheap thin client, due to all the (extra) needed accessories, like keyboard, mouse, etc. XBOX would probably be much better for this, due to DVD + HDD.
And as for the multimedia terminal, I'd personally rather have one machine that does it all; acts as tv recorder, multimedia player, storage server and even all that in silence, so it can stand next to the TV. Again the XBOX would most likely be better for this.
Having said that, I think it's a neat project. If I was a kernel monkey, I'd probably spend some time on it too. I also love messing around with new projects myself. I'm not trying to troll (honestly!:), just expressing my concerns/views on the project.
I had the same suspicion at first.
But then I checked the latest firmware for the Lite-On LVD 2001 player, which is also based on the EM8500 system.
It does NOT contain any of those strings, there's no sign of any mplayer binary in it. It does indeed use uCLinux, but that has already been sorted out.
There is always the chance that Lite-On isn't updating as fast as KISS, but the firmware I checked is less than a month old.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this won't be possible before Intel releases their Z68 chipset, so you're out of luck if your motherboard got a P67 chipset.
It is possible to do it with software on motherboards with the H67 chipset: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4113/lucid-enables-quick-sync-with-discrete-graphics-on-sandy-bridge
When game developers can see that people are willing to pay for beta access to games, what is their incentive to ship a polished game? Most consoles have online connectivity as well, so patching up later is usually not a problem either. I don't see this changing anytime soon, with quarterly budgets being more important than quality.
As for Fallout: New Vegas; the bugs were totally expected from anyone that played Fallout 3, which was also full of bugs. And it is not just gameplay bugs, the entire engine is extremely buggy and the game was neigh unplayable for a lot of PC players, but thankfully a very clever developer at http://www.transgaming.com/business/swiftshader made a custom D3D9.dll which corrects some of the engine bugs (like NOP all debug calls, ignore some buggy shaders, etc.):
http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778 for the nVidia version.
http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34970 for the ATI version.
(The custom dll was made for Fallout 3 and not Fallout: New Vegas. Yet it fixes the same issues in both games.)
Note: the game is very, very good -- without the bugs. Too bad that it is the community that has to fix the bugs.
Please, if you encounter new acronyms or new words on the internet, follow common sense and try searching for them. Google is especially helpful in this regard.
Odds are that if you don't know what "DotA" means, then you wont know what "Defense of the Ancients" means anyways.
minchar
One does not get that much gold. But that's the good thing about MMO's, you're rarely ever alone.
The first screenshot in the article is of Zxtreme, a guild master of the Blood Legion guild. http://bloodlegion.com/wow/
I believe this is the first guild to reach the gold limit and it was done simply through trade of rare items in the game. It is the money from the guild bank he is showing off.
A regular WoW guild got anywhere between 40 to 60 active players. If you take the gold limit of ~217k and divide it by 40 people, then it's only about ~5500 gold per player. I currently got around 8500 gold on my account and we got members in the guild with 20-30k gold on their accounts.
This article is a lot of fuss about nothing, gold in WoW has devaluated by a lot since the expansion pack.
At work we've got a semi-private irc channel where the majority of the developers and lead developers hang out.
:)
It's a simple way of communication and it excels in situations where not all people are in-house, especially in situations where I want to paste 12 lines of code/xml/etc. to a colleague and ask him if it'd work against his interface/service/etc.
Just as long as people remember that it's a second form of communication, nothing can beat actually being physically present
First of all, make your (hard) work open source because you want to share it with others.
.. well then you've at least put it out there.
Don't do it for "street creds" or anything similar silly.
So what if the non-windows open source community doesn't like your project.
If it's a good project people will get interested in it and contribute to it. If it's not
Someone somewhere will make use of some of the code somehow, even if they don't contribute back.
And personally I think the "but windows isn't free!" argument is void.
If people wants to use some open source application on their platform of choice, it's open for them to port it.
That's kinda the idea of open source, no?
But the name 'CmdrTaco' seems horribly misplaced in a world like WoW.
.. Paladin?! You must have a masochistic personality to play a heal/cleansebot! :)
I'm well aware that it's been your nick for ages, but there's just something about a Paladin (fighter for justice, light, all that's good, yadda yadda) named 'CmdrTaco'. But it's no different from a hunter called 'SgtCheeseDoodles' or any other silly name, regardless of the history of the nick.
Having said that, I'm surprised that Blizzard took action at all.
I've been playing a Horde orc for over 6 months now and I've seen _a lot_ of stupid names. Names that makes 'CmdrTaco' seem like it's taken out of a Tolkien book and they're still around. You're most likely the victim of some arse that recognized the nickname and thought it'd be fun to annoy you, so he/her reported you to the GMs.
Oh and
Oh well, at least you can always shield + hearthstone out of harms way
.. and if there is, I've yet to see it. :-)
;)
Short answer:
Some UML (Use Case + Activity + Class) documents and a technical textual description of the task.
You can of course add more, but in 99% of the time, the programmers will either ignore or overlook it.
Long answer:
We (small software business) are working on making our inhouse design documents more standard.
One of the things we ran into was also the "What should we assume to be basic knowledge for a design document" question and after having spent some time, we came to the conclusion that design documents had to be so basic that you can replace a programmer in almost any state of the project.
Based on above we made an estimate on how long it'd take to make the proper documentation, showed it to the manager, got a swift "fsck no!" reply and went back to the old system of poor documentation, but high productivity (and many bugs
Personally I try to aim for the "three developers" goal. If three non-involved developers can understand it and come to the same conclusion as me, then it's all good.
User: Take me to www.slashdot.org!
* Opera acknowledges the request and types www.goatse.cx *
I'm a professional software developer myself and while the software I work on isn't piracy prone, I'd never go this far.
Disable your own software, do bad encodes, draw goatse/tubgirl images on the encodings, but dont, DONT mess with files that doesn't belong to your program.
This is just plain immature, not to mention very wrong.
And yes, it seems like the author already removed it, but putting it there in the first place is bad.
I really like the direction Microsoft is heading.
Granted it was needed as their reputation, in regards of security, has always been low to none.
I really hope this will rid Windows XP of future remote exploits, since that's still the biggest threat Windows is facing.
Having said that, this wont fix all security problems, there will always be the luser that executes whatever is mailed to him/her, but it's still a step in the right direction.
.. memory upgrade implant, specially in the mornings.
:-)
It would also be cool with an encyclopedia or even a few o'reilly books implanted.
Too bad it seems to be a one-way communication only, otherwise a spellchecker implant would be cool too
Sherman Networks would be bloody stupid to have anything illegal (music/software/etc) on any of their computers and I really doubt they had anything.
This just seems like the MIPI along with the rest of the record industry is trying to harass Sherman Networks into going away. Personally I don't like/use KaZaa or any other P2P utility, but I think it's a necessary evil.
Oh well, if they should manage to close down KaZaa, there's plenty of underground alternatives for the (ab)users. Seems like wasted resources from a desperate industry.
.. I don't see it as anything but YaLC (yet another linux conversion) or in short, just a hobby.
I just can't see it working as a cheap thin client, due to all the (extra) needed accessories, like keyboard, mouse, etc. XBOX would probably be much better for this, due to DVD + HDD.
And as for the multimedia terminal, I'd personally rather have one machine that does it all; acts as tv recorder, multimedia player, storage server and even all that in silence, so it can stand next to the TV. Again the XBOX would most likely be better for this.
Having said that, I think it's a neat project. If I was a kernel monkey, I'd probably spend some time on it too. I also love messing around with new projects myself. I'm not trying to troll (honestly!:), just expressing my concerns/views on the project.
I had the same suspicion at first. But then I checked the latest firmware for the Lite-On LVD 2001 player, which is also based on the EM8500 system. It does NOT contain any of those strings, there's no sign of any mplayer binary in it. It does indeed use uCLinux, but that has already been sorted out. There is always the chance that Lite-On isn't updating as fast as KISS, but the firmware I checked is less than a month old.