I use my keyboard/mouse frequently while laying on either side, on my stomach (most of time it's like this) or on my back. Gamepad doesn't work as conveniently in all these positions because I lose some control when I'm using my elbows to support my body.
My roommate does it reclined all the time at his computer.
I'm guessing one of the problems a lot of people have is the mouse since they're used to their mousepad/desk surface. Mousepads are so flimsy they can't be used on non-sturdy surfaces. I use a hard cover book (wuth a nice texture, not the glossy kind), it works great. Plus I get the added benefit of always having a dictionary handy.;)
IMO any company that doesn't include subtitles is just lazy. That's the first (well maybe second) option I look to enable when I play a game. My hearing is a little poor when it comes to speech (nothing that effects my life though), and I tend to watch lips to fill in the gaps. In video games this just doesn't work since you lose mouth movements. Between all the weird accents and bad acting they put into games, I miss like every fifth word, very frustrating.
It's very easy to add subtitles and there should be the option to enable it for speech (of whole sentences). Catchphrases/Exclamations are a different story, and aren't really necessary.
The worse are games that TRY to make the speech hard to understand (white noise, very soft, etc). Think of Myst, when you click on the talking books. Sure it adds ambience, but did anyone else find it fun playing it over and over again trying to figure out what they were saying. At least it wasn't critical to the storyline.
At this point, I dont see any reason why a massively multiplayer world wouldn't give their user base a christmas gift, unless the dev team is made up of Grinches.
Grinches hehe.. a book that tries to demonstrate that Christmas isn't just about giving gifts but is about good will. The book is against the consumerization of XMas, which is amazing considering the marketting gone into it recently (Jim Carrey movie, toys etc). The moral of the story is NOT generosity.
Scrooge would of been a lot better choice.
However you still seem to be under the assumption that the whole world subscribes to Christmas, the illegimate child of Christianity and Consumerism. There's plenty of things Devs can do to show they care, without getting the taint of Christmas on their game.
No thanks, I know how to be generous and kind without a social obligation, and my way works the other 364.2425 days a year.
I agree completely, I played halo for about an hour on the PC, what a joke. Between Halo and Serious Sam, I think Serious Sam would win. Serious Sam is somewhere below X-Com: Enforcer as a FPS too.
Those games were all flops on PC.. partially because most players want a lot of scripting (explosions etc). I don't mind a lack of scripting (its fluff) if the game just included Co-Op. Co-Op alone made X-Com: Enforcer and Serious Sam worth playing. Halo(PC) didn't have the scripting or the co-op, and it had a simple but very repetitve gameplay.
I can't see what made Halo not plain crap, can someone explain it to me?
Worlds of WarCraft, because I like MMORPGs when I have lots of spare time and Blizzard is the only company I know who seems to be able to make fun RPG systems.... Which Blizzard's RPG system do you mean?;)
I'm guessing you just plain don't like RPG systems period. I really hope you're not going to tell me the diablos are RPG.
Ya that'd be great, a system where voting for someone can CAUSE them to lose.
7 votes for A, B, C 6 votes for B, A, C 5 votes for C, B, A 3 votes for D, C, B
D gets dropped, then B gets dropped, and finally A wins (A:13 vs C:8).
But if the last three voters instead voted A, D, C, B then A loses BECAUSE they voted for A:
7 votes for A, B, C 6 votes for B, A, C 5 votes for C, B, A 3 votes for A, D, C, B
D gets dropped, then C gets dropped, and finally B wins (B:11 vs A:10)
In instant RunOff Voting there are the following problems: -Raising your vote for someone can cause them to lose (Monotonicity Criterion) -Lowering your vote for someone can cause them to win (Monotonicity Criterion) -A one on one comparison between the winner and any other candidate should show the winner being preferred in every pair. IRV doesn't do this. (Condorcet Criterion) -Doesn't scale at all. The possible votes are basically a factorial. Sorry if its hard to describe the formulaes. But the number of possibilites without truncation is N! with truncation its the summation of permutations. sPn (where s=1 to n-1) xPy = x!/(x-y)!
California's recall would of just not scaled with IRV. Suppose 100 candidates then the number of possible votes is 100! + 100!/2! + 100!/3! +... + 100!/98! + 100!/99!
-It's not easy to understand by the common guy (not/. ) imagine the news trying to explain HOW a candidate won.
A condorcet method would be a more sound election method, because basically the voter ranks the candidates. Then the method sees which candidates are preferred by one-on-one comparisons. Joe Shmoe can understand this because when the news comes on, it just shows the comparison of the winner to every other candidate.
I'll try to remember that the next time kids ask for candy... if I don't give it to them it's punishment. That's a great idea, when they start misbehaving, all I have to do is nothing, because it's punishment... and it's a lot simpler then spankings or time-outs.
Seems like you've probably lived to long on entitlements if not rewarding is a punishment.
So what's the deal about good SciFi shows getting cancelled? Farscape was a fantastic show, certainly worthy of more seasons. I think Firefly had some longevity to it, too. Just think, if they hadn't given Buffy more than 13 episodes... There'd be no Witchblade, no Dark Angel, no Bird of Prey, no ActionSciFi Show with buttkicking chicks!
Sci-Fi shows take more in the way of special effects, and so are more expensive. (which is why they often cut corners on actors) The question I have is why isn't the Sci-Fi channel actually playing Sci-Fi. All I ever see when I flip to it is some horror or monster movie. Just cuz a laser creates a giant man-eating platypus doesn't make it sci-fi.
The RIAA (or chinese government) can put a lot of nodes on the network to spy on the requests, proxies. RIAA just has to have computer to keep sending out requests for only illegal data. Eventually nodes will forward through the RIAA's proxy to the RIAA's requester.
As long as an arbitrary (untrusted) node can see who the source and destination is, it won't work.
My complaint is not with competition, but artificial competition. I'd say it's healthy if the competition is in the "spirit of the game". I don't think it's intended in everquest. To me, it's very much like playing soccer and competing against your own teammates to be the one to score the goal. I guess I'm disappointed since MMORPG's model fictional societies and it'd be nice to think people can work together, rather then compete over trivialities.
That soccer example breaks the spirit of the game, since the goal is to play as a team. Look at DAOC and you'll see the same thing, three realms at war with eachother. Guilds and Individuals will do what it takes (at the expense of other realmmates and possibly the realm as a whole) to be the one that gets the realm points for killing the enemy.
The "spirit of the game" is of course quoted all the time when someone takes advantages of code oddities, and it's always hard to define. But clearly in your system the competition is generally healthy. If for example the guild leader was killed in some jerk-ish manner by the next in line (lets say "train"-ing as an example from EQ lingo), it fits with their role in the game.
Compare PK muds with Non-PK muds and look at the common problems on Non-PK muds. Players fight indirectly (and artificially).. "We were killing that mob/Zone!" (Many muds have Tag Rules), people try to interfere with eachother's raid. Players drop that key that has a max instances of 1 in their house behind locked doors.. etc. A lot of these problems can be fixed by direct competition, namely PK.
But it has some good, it can train our youth for corporate culture.. Treat everyone at the company as your adversary, even if you should be striving for a mutual goal.
I'm glad to hear it, guess I'm misinformed and i hope someone mods you up to counter my mistake.
Perhaps its a difference between casual players and hardcore players.. The system is good, but whenever I tried to introduce it to a player group, it wouldn't fly because of the reliance on the book.
Try to have 4 new players make their characters with 1 book.. my experiences were a nightmare, each player has to read through a large chunk of the book. They pretty much have to do it one at a time (since the book is the bottleneck). With D&D (2E moreso then 3E) you can more or less guide the players along to make their characters without it taking hours upon hours. At the conventions, how do you introduce your book without making it time prohibitive? Does it take as long with experienced GURPS players moving to a new book?
The article takes a very singleminded view based on features. It seems to me that people play WhiteWolf because of the genre and the style. IMHO WhiteWolf *system* isn't very good.
From the WhiteWolf games I've observed or played in, the rules are even more loosely followed then D&D. It seems the players want to play Vampire, but it's not clear they care if it's Vampire: The Masquerade.
But then I also knew people that bought the book because of it's content without any desire to play the game.
I never understood WhiteWolf, but guess I'm just not into that genre.
It doesn't work for P&P RPG's because they can't adopt the features. Some games use a one dice feature (IIRC Star Wars is D6 only, WhiteWolf is D10 only) should they try to adopt that to D&D.. of course not, it's counter to what it's built on.
If you keep adopting features, the game loses it integrity. In fact D&D's continued success has little to do with features, but is based completely on playerbase. If you need 4 more players to play a game, it is much easier to find 4 D&D players then to 4 people to play RIFTS. This means the D&D books have more utility, since you're more likely to play D&D and new P&P players are more likely to learn D&D.
If the article truly wanted to talk about a game thats based on using competitors ideas, the author should of brought up Steve Jackson's GURPS. There is a lot of original content, but you can play anything in GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) that there is in another system... GURPS failed because it had to much detail, you NEEDED the book to play each genre. Since each genre had it's own modified rules (think inheritence) and long tables of skills, traits etc.
List of Gurps Books... Waiting for someone to reply saying GURPS isn't a failure
Not hard to program, pretty much all sims are easy to program. The hard part is to generate the model by which the program acts. All the formulaes, statistics, decisions etc are decided within that model (probably not a programmer doing this, but a statistian/PLS). From that point it's more or less translating the model to code.
The rest of the complexity is the interface.. and that can be simple or complex but that has little to do with the underlying game in this case.
agreed, FPS is overdone but that's because they actually sell.
But RTS is worse IMO... there's a million of them, but none of them actually sell copies. They're so cheap to make (relatively) that everyone has their own crappy RTS release.
Slashdot Mirror
Very informative, does anyone know of something similar for DSL modems? (that is if DSL modems do similar reporting)
I recently quit my caffeine habit and plan to reduce my sugar addiction (soda) any recommendations for alternative drinks?
I tried the tea thing but couldn't find any I liked. Most juices I like but are also high sugar...
maybe you can't, I can...
;)
I use my keyboard/mouse frequently while laying on either side, on my stomach (most of time it's like this) or on my back. Gamepad doesn't work as conveniently in all these positions because I lose some control when I'm using my elbows to support my body.
My roommate does it reclined all the time at his computer.
I'm guessing one of the problems a lot of people have is the mouse since they're used to their mousepad/desk surface. Mousepads are so flimsy they can't be used on non-sturdy surfaces. I use a hard cover book (wuth a nice texture, not the glossy kind), it works great. Plus I get the added benefit of always having a dictionary handy.
Large Monitors (TV-OUT), Gamepads and Couches are all compatible with the PC.
:P
Oh wait, you seem to like consoles because their limitations. No mouse means people can't aim... you say its good, I say its bad.
There are lots of games that make it harder to aim and not a simple click-and-kill. (Gunwobble, Cone of Fire, etc)
IMO any company that doesn't include subtitles is just lazy. That's the first (well maybe second) option I look to enable when I play a game. My hearing is a little poor when it comes to speech (nothing that effects my life though), and I tend to watch lips to fill in the gaps. In video games this just doesn't work since you lose mouth movements. Between all the weird accents and bad acting they put into games, I miss like every fifth word, very frustrating.
It's very easy to add subtitles and there should be the option to enable it for speech (of whole sentences). Catchphrases/Exclamations are a different story, and aren't really necessary.
The worse are games that TRY to make the speech hard to understand (white noise, very soft, etc). Think of Myst, when you click on the talking books. Sure it adds ambience, but did anyone else find it fun playing it over and over again trying to figure out what they were saying. At least it wasn't critical to the storyline.
At this point, I dont see any reason why a massively multiplayer world wouldn't give their user base a christmas gift, unless the dev team is made up of Grinches.
Grinches hehe.. a book that tries to demonstrate that Christmas isn't just about giving gifts but is about good will. The book is against the consumerization of XMas, which is amazing considering the marketting gone into it recently (Jim Carrey movie, toys etc). The moral of the story is NOT generosity.
Scrooge would of been a lot better choice.
However you still seem to be under the assumption that the whole world subscribes to Christmas, the illegimate child of Christianity and Consumerism. There's plenty of things Devs can do to show they care, without getting the taint of Christmas on their game.
No thanks, I know how to be generous and kind without a social obligation, and my way works the other 364.2425 days a year.
Psh, doesn't matter if the person drinks... you give booze so you have something decent to drink at next years party. ;)
But you can't say mB and MB by that system, lest you confuse megabits with millibits. ;)
I agree completely, I played halo for about an hour on the PC, what a joke. Between Halo and Serious Sam, I think Serious Sam would win. Serious Sam is somewhere below X-Com: Enforcer as a FPS too.
Those games were all flops on PC.. partially because most players want a lot of scripting (explosions etc). I don't mind a lack of scripting (its fluff) if the game just included Co-Op. Co-Op alone made X-Com: Enforcer and Serious Sam worth playing. Halo(PC) didn't have the scripting or the co-op, and it had a simple but very repetitve gameplay.
I can't see what made Halo not plain crap, can someone explain it to me?
Worlds of WarCraft, because I like MMORPGs when I have lots of spare time and Blizzard is the only company I know who seems to be able to make fun RPG systems. ... Which Blizzard's RPG system do you mean? ;)
I'm guessing you just plain don't like RPG systems period. I really hope you're not going to tell me the diablos are RPG.
It's easy to understand the system, what I meant is it's not easy to convey the results.
How would the news publish the results of an IRV vote, the whole vote, not just the final result?
Ya that'd be great, a system where voting for someone can CAUSE them to lose.
... + 100!/98! + 100!/99!
/. ) imagine the news trying to explain HOW a candidate won.
7 votes for A, B, C
6 votes for B, A, C
5 votes for C, B, A
3 votes for D, C, B
D gets dropped, then B gets dropped, and finally A wins (A:13 vs C:8).
But if the last three voters instead voted A, D, C, B then A loses BECAUSE they voted for A:
7 votes for A, B, C
6 votes for B, A, C
5 votes for C, B, A
3 votes for A, D, C, B
D gets dropped, then C gets dropped, and finally B wins (B:11 vs A:10)
In instant RunOff Voting there are the following problems:
-Raising your vote for someone can cause them to lose (Monotonicity Criterion)
-Lowering your vote for someone can cause them to win (Monotonicity Criterion)
-A one on one comparison between the winner and any other candidate should show the winner being preferred in every pair. IRV doesn't do this. (Condorcet Criterion)
-Doesn't scale at all. The possible votes are basically a factorial. Sorry if its hard to describe the formulaes. But the number of possibilites without truncation is N! with truncation its the summation of permutations. sPn (where s=1 to n-1) xPy = x!/(x-y)!
California's recall would of just not scaled with IRV. Suppose 100 candidates then the number of possible votes is 100! + 100!/2! + 100!/3! +
-It's not easy to understand by the common guy (not
For detailed explanation of these problems:
http://electionmethods.org/evaluation.htm
A condorcet method would be a more sound election method, because basically the voter ranks the candidates. Then the method sees which candidates are preferred by one-on-one comparisons. Joe Shmoe can understand this because when the news comes on, it just shows the comparison of the winner to every other candidate.
The decision is 100% US on who they chose to support.. I'd like to know who you think should tell US who they should be supporting.
If you want to say US should have no input, then come out and say it... cuz that's all it is.. input
I'll try to remember that the next time kids ask for candy... if I don't give it to them it's punishment. That's a great idea, when they start misbehaving, all I have to do is nothing, because it's punishment... and it's a lot simpler then spankings or time-outs.
Seems like you've probably lived to long on entitlements if not rewarding is a punishment.
Ever consider that maybe US is rewarding Japan.
Funny you say Russia is #1, but they're not even on the chart. To me it looks like USSR is #1. today's Russia!=USSR.
Your point still stands if you take them off the chart as a dissolved country. It just moves France right up to the top.
Who says its either Christianity or Atheism ;)
Maybe you're both wrong! God really was the goatse.cx guy.. you don't wanna know where you're going (plus you still wasted that hour)
I'm glad you realize that you should donate to projects you find meaningful. (Apparently this guy already did)
So what's the deal about good SciFi shows getting cancelled? Farscape was a fantastic show, certainly worthy of more seasons. I think Firefly had some longevity to it, too. Just think, if they hadn't given Buffy more than 13 episodes... There'd be no Witchblade, no Dark Angel, no Bird of Prey, no ActionSciFi Show with buttkicking chicks!
Sci-Fi shows take more in the way of special effects, and so are more expensive. (which is why they often cut corners on actors) The question I have is why isn't the Sci-Fi channel actually playing Sci-Fi. All I ever see when I flip to it is some horror or monster movie. Just cuz a laser creates a giant man-eating platypus doesn't make it sci-fi.
The RIAA (or chinese government) can put a lot of nodes on the network to spy on the requests, proxies. RIAA just has to have computer to keep sending out requests for only illegal data. Eventually nodes will forward through the RIAA's proxy to the RIAA's requester.
As long as an arbitrary (untrusted) node can see who the source and destination is, it won't work.
My complaint is not with competition, but artificial competition. I'd say it's healthy if the competition is in the "spirit of the game". I don't think it's intended in everquest. To me, it's very much like playing soccer and competing against your own teammates to be the one to score the goal. I guess I'm disappointed since MMORPG's model fictional societies and
it'd be nice to think people can work together, rather then compete over trivialities.
That soccer example breaks the spirit of the game, since the goal is to play as a team. Look at DAOC and you'll see the same thing, three realms at war with eachother. Guilds and Individuals will do what it takes (at the expense of other realmmates and possibly the realm as a whole) to be the one that gets the realm points for killing the enemy.
The "spirit of the game" is of course quoted all the time when someone takes advantages of code oddities, and it's always hard to define. But clearly in your system the competition is generally healthy. If for example the guild leader was killed in some jerk-ish manner by the next in line (lets say "train"-ing as an example from EQ lingo), it fits with their role in the game.
Compare PK muds with Non-PK muds and look at the common problems on Non-PK muds. Players fight indirectly (and artificially).. "We were killing that mob/Zone!" (Many muds have Tag Rules), people try to interfere with eachother's raid. Players drop that key that has a max instances of 1 in their house behind locked doors.. etc. A lot of these problems can be fixed by direct competition, namely PK.
But it has some good, it can train our youth for corporate culture.. Treat everyone at the company as your adversary, even if you should be striving for a mutual goal.
I'm glad to hear it, guess I'm misinformed and i hope someone mods you up to counter my mistake.
Perhaps its a difference between casual players and hardcore players.. The system is good, but whenever I tried to introduce it to a player group, it wouldn't fly because of the reliance on the book.
Try to have 4 new players make their characters with 1 book.. my experiences were a nightmare, each player has to read through a large chunk of the book. They pretty much have to do it one at a time (since the book is the bottleneck). With D&D (2E moreso then 3E) you can more or less guide the players along to make their characters without it taking hours upon hours. At the conventions, how do you introduce your book without making it time prohibitive? Does it take as long with experienced GURPS players moving to a new book?
The article takes a very singleminded view based on features. It seems to me that people play WhiteWolf because of the genre and the style. IMHO WhiteWolf *system* isn't very good.
From the WhiteWolf games I've observed or played in, the rules are even more loosely followed then D&D. It seems the players want to play Vampire, but it's not clear they care if it's Vampire: The Masquerade.
But then I also knew people that bought the book because of it's content without any desire to play the game.
I never understood WhiteWolf, but guess I'm just not into that genre.
It doesn't work for P&P RPG's because they can't adopt the features. Some games use a one dice feature (IIRC Star Wars is D6 only, WhiteWolf is D10 only) should they try to adopt that to D&D.. of course not, it's counter to what it's built on.
... Waiting for someone to reply saying GURPS isn't a failure
If you keep adopting features, the game loses it integrity. In fact D&D's continued success has little to do with features, but is based completely on playerbase. If you need 4 more players to play a game, it is much easier to find 4 D&D players then to 4 people to play RIFTS. This means the D&D books have more utility, since you're more likely to play D&D and new P&P players are more likely to learn D&D.
If the article truly wanted to talk about a game thats based on using competitors ideas, the author should of brought up Steve Jackson's GURPS. There is a lot of original content, but you can play anything in GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System) that there is in another system... GURPS failed because it had to much detail, you NEEDED the book to play each genre. Since each genre had it's own modified rules (think inheritence) and long tables of skills, traits etc.
List of Gurps Books
Not hard to program, pretty much all sims are easy to program. The hard part is to generate the model by which the program acts. All the formulaes, statistics, decisions etc are decided within that model (probably not a programmer doing this, but a statistian/PLS). From that point it's more or less translating the model to code.
The rest of the complexity is the interface.. and that can be simple or complex but that has little to do with the underlying game in this case.
agreed, FPS is overdone but that's because they actually sell.
But RTS is worse IMO... there's a million of them, but none of them actually sell copies. They're so cheap to make (relatively) that everyone has their own crappy RTS release.