Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
Because I, as well as lots of other people with desire and some free time, can write our own games and share them with others. When a console is produced with the intention to allow this, instead of actively working to prevent it, then and only then will I be able to see a serious threat to computer gaming.
Two more recent games I've played that really present interesting, large, explorable "worlds" are Morrowind -- a very open-ended RPG in the Elder Scrolls series (often panned for its overpopulation of extremely generic NPCs, but interesting for its explorability and unparalleled mod possibilities) -- and Freelancer -- a space combat game with a solid plot but a large amount of gameplay outside the main story, relatively solid multiplayer (if that's your thing) and graphics that are nothing to sneeze at. You might want to have a look at one or both of these -- who knows, you might enjoy 'em.
Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself.
-- USENET posting, author unknown
source: nethack.org
I haven't had the chance to actually check it out yet (plan to when I get home from work), but I'd like to respond to one aspect of your post:
We're constantly working on ways to make Castle Infinity feel much more "modern", giving it features to make it compare to the MMOGgs of today's standard.
Please don't overdo it. Many "modern" games introduce overcomplexity for its own sake and lack a certain "fun factor" present in more simplistic and streamlined gameplay. There's a reason older games and retro gaming still have a strong fanbase (and it's not just because old games remind us of the bygone halcyon days of our youth).
Overly complex systems invariably lead to a neverending cycle of people taking advantage of an obscure imbalance in the system followed by nerfing which then leads to some other way of gaming the system and so on. Don't worry about having every bell and whistle. Keep a clear vision, keep it fun, and people will enjoy.
And allow me to chime in with a "me too" to thank you and the rest of the team for all the hard work.
Garbage collection is primarily interested in reclaiming memory, a resource where it makes good sense to reclaim it lazily. You are right that lazy collection is a Bad Thing for other system resources (file handles, database connections, etc.) that need to be cleaned up in a more prompt fashion. You are, however, wrong in implying that garbage collection and RAII are mutually exclusive. See IDisposable in.net with the C# ``using'' statement for an example where a good design pattern and a little syntactic sugar make an excellent compromise.
Cleaning up scarce resources is unfortunately still best done manually (with some help from the language to prevent your forgetting), but my original point still stands -- namely that it's not a fault when a programmer working under a garbage collected environment doesn't concern himself with trivial details of *memory* management. This usually isn't a problem with *well-written* C++, but it gets pretty hairy when you're forced to juggle pointers (and not everyone is using auto_ptr (or shared_ptr) yet).
(And before you consider me a flaming zealot, I still prefer C++ for most of my personal projects. It's too tough to part with <algorithm>, after all.)
Some people that write Java don't even know what the heap is, they don't concern themselves with memory management because it's so difficult to free dynamicly allocated memory with Java.
Wouldn't it be amazing if the Java runtime had functionality to automatically clean up unreferenced memory? It'd be like picking up trash in the memory to make it usable again. We could call it a "Garbage Collector."
I'd better go patent that.
We already missed it ticking over to 2^30 last January (Sat, 10 Jan 2004 13:37:04 GMT to be precise). I find that more interesting because it's the "halfway to doom" point. And because binary is geekier than decimal. 8-)
Touchpad buttons be damned. What I want to know is why more systems with touchpads don't support chording (i.e. tap with two fingers for right-click, 3 for middle-click)? I use tapping most of the time and it's very inconvenient to have to reach for the buttons when I don't want to left-click.
I've seen support for this on older hardware, but never in recent years. Anybody know why?
Finally, Google IS a US-based country.
Well, they've got an economy (Google Ads/Froogle) and an educational system (Google Scholar/Answers), but aren't you exaggerating just a bit?
Re:Online worlds should implement escrows, not gri
on
The Basics of EULAs
·
· Score: 1
I've got a better idea: Trade in-game items for in-game items and currency. No muss, no fuss.
So many people don't understand that it's a fricking game. Unlike so many other things in life, you shouldn't be able to just sit there and throw money at it and expect to come out on top. A sense of fairness (even if only perceived) is essential to most people's enjoyment of a game. Legal liabilities aside, Blizzard is trying to provide that sense of fairness.
to visit the SENS site itself and avoid the commentary-bloated article.
Basically TFA gives 3 pages of pertinent information and 3-4 pages of the author saying "He's charismatic but I hope he's wrong because I disagree with him." And he uses way too much verbal flourish to give his writing an air of authority.
I think the author could learn a thing or two from De Grey: "Everything he says is pertinent to his argument". He could've cut this article down by 1/3, and as a bonus it probably would have been a more enjoyable read.
The problem with your question is that you're considering self-consciousness as a binary value.
What are the criteria that differentiate a self-conscious being from one that lacks this quality? A notion of self-preservation, a mere acknowledgement that one exists and can affect one's surroundings, a human notion of "self"? The problem is, these qualities and other similar traits are found in varying degrees in organisms today.
A colony of ants works toward self-preservation in a highly organized manner, but the individuals have little to no intelligence. Microorganisms strive to obtain food and avoid harmful environments (e.g. photophobic microorganisms).
Does this mean they have a sense of self?
How about dogs? They often seem to consider things on a high level, but do they have a sense of "self"?
It's not so easy to just lay out some rules and toss things into the "self-conscious" or "not self-conscious" basket. Self-consciousness is a simple label to a complex set of qualities and behaviors and as such it's more of a sliding scale than a boolean true/false.
So when you say "that is all", it really isn't. Taking a complex issue like this and putting a simple black-and-white face on it doesn't answer anything, it only gives the deceptive appearance that it is an easy problem to solve.
And quadruple-bucky-cokebottle will make it play Duke Nukem Forever. Let's face it, Joe User is not going to remember all these shortcuts; useful features should be obvious--that's a hallmark of a good interface.
As a debian user for almost a couple of years now, I can honestly say I've never used any of the Debian kernel packages when upgrading. When I'm working with the most important component of my operating system, I like to have as much control as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
480p is a form of SDTV
Technically, SDTV is defined as 480i. 480p is EDTV (Enhanced Definition TV).
</pedantic>
Or perhaps the real point is, why use your computer for gaming?
Because I, as well as lots of other people with desire and some free time, can write our own games and share them with others. When a console is produced with the intention to allow this, instead of actively working to prevent it, then and only then will I be able to see a serious threat to computer gaming.
Clever hackers are now avoiding detection by using the nearly undetectable /* */ sequence instead.
Two more recent games I've played that really present interesting, large, explorable "worlds" are Morrowind -- a very open-ended RPG in the Elder Scrolls series (often panned for its overpopulation of extremely generic NPCs, but interesting for its explorability and unparalleled mod possibilities) -- and Freelancer -- a space combat game with a solid plot but a large amount of gameplay outside the main story, relatively solid multiplayer (if that's your thing) and graphics that are nothing to sneeze at. You might want to have a look at one or both of these -- who knows, you might enjoy 'em.
Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself.
-- USENET posting, author unknown
source: nethack.org
Please don't overdo it. Many "modern" games introduce overcomplexity for its own sake and lack a certain "fun factor" present in more simplistic and streamlined gameplay. There's a reason older games and retro gaming still have a strong fanbase (and it's not just because old games remind us of the bygone halcyon days of our youth).
Overly complex systems invariably lead to a neverending cycle of people taking advantage of an obscure imbalance in the system followed by nerfing which then leads to some other way of gaming the system and so on. Don't worry about having every bell and whistle. Keep a clear vision, keep it fun, and people will enjoy.
And allow me to chime in with a "me too" to thank you and the rest of the team for all the hard work.
Garbage collection is primarily interested in reclaiming memory, a resource where it makes good sense to reclaim it lazily. You are right that lazy collection is a Bad Thing for other system resources (file handles, database connections, etc.) that need to be cleaned up in a more prompt fashion. You are, however, wrong in implying that garbage collection and RAII are mutually exclusive. See IDisposable in .net with the C# ``using'' statement for an example where a good design pattern and a little syntactic sugar make an excellent compromise.
Cleaning up scarce resources is unfortunately still best done manually (with some help from the language to prevent your forgetting), but my original point still stands -- namely that it's not a fault when a programmer working under a garbage collected environment doesn't concern himself with trivial details of *memory* management. This usually isn't a problem with *well-written* C++, but it gets pretty hairy when you're forced to juggle pointers (and not everyone is using auto_ptr (or shared_ptr) yet).
(And before you consider me a flaming zealot, I still prefer C++ for most of my personal projects. It's too tough to part with <algorithm>, after all.)
Some people that write Java don't even know what the heap is, they don't concern themselves with memory management because it's so difficult to free dynamicly allocated memory with Java.
Wouldn't it be amazing if the Java runtime had functionality to automatically clean up unreferenced memory? It'd be like picking up trash in the memory to make it usable again. We could call it a "Garbage Collector."
I'd better go patent that.
How do you feel about luckily an AI strong enough to replace pyschologists has existed for quite a long time?
See Wikipedia's entry or google magic sysrq for descriptions of its use under Linux.
First thing I thought of was
"Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! No Pepsi. Coke."
Do you have a text/html editor?
Some people do.
I bet he plays Dungeons and Dragons.
Am I the only one who thinks this headline sounds like it came from The Onion?
We already missed it ticking over to 2^30 last January (Sat, 10 Jan 2004 13:37:04 GMT to be precise). I find that more interesting because it's the "halfway to doom" point. And because binary is geekier than decimal. 8-)
Touchpad buttons be damned. What I want to know is why more systems with touchpads don't support chording (i.e. tap with two fingers for right-click, 3 for middle-click)? I use tapping most of the time and it's very inconvenient to have to reach for the buttons when I don't want to left-click. I've seen support for this on older hardware, but never in recent years. Anybody know why?
Finally, Google IS a US-based country.
Well, they've got an economy (Google Ads/Froogle) and an educational system (Google Scholar/Answers), but aren't you exaggerating just a bit?
</sarcasm>
in an entry in Michael Kaplan's blog last month. That in turn mentions this entry which talks about spoofing filenames using a similar method.
I've got a better idea: Trade in-game items for in-game items and currency. No muss, no fuss.
So many people don't understand that it's a fricking game . Unlike so many other things in life, you shouldn't be able to just sit there and throw money at it and expect to come out on top. A sense of fairness (even if only perceived) is essential to most people's enjoyment of a game. Legal liabilities aside, Blizzard is trying to provide that sense of fairness.
to visit the SENS site itself and avoid the commentary-bloated article.
Basically TFA gives 3 pages of pertinent information and 3-4 pages of the author saying "He's charismatic but I hope he's wrong because I disagree with him." And he uses way too much verbal flourish to give his writing an air of authority.
I think the author could learn a thing or two from De Grey: "Everything he says is pertinent to his argument". He could've cut this article down by 1/3, and as a bonus it probably would have been a more enjoyable read.
The problem with your question is that you're considering self-consciousness as a binary value.
What are the criteria that differentiate a self-conscious being from one that lacks this quality? A notion of self-preservation, a mere acknowledgement that one exists and can affect one's surroundings, a human notion of "self"? The problem is, these qualities and other similar traits are found in varying degrees in organisms today.
A colony of ants works toward self-preservation in a highly organized manner, but the individuals have little to no intelligence. Microorganisms strive to obtain food and avoid harmful environments (e.g. photophobic microorganisms).
Does this mean they have a sense of self?
How about dogs? They often seem to consider things on a high level, but do they have a sense of "self"?
It's not so easy to just lay out some rules and toss things into the "self-conscious" or "not self-conscious" basket. Self-consciousness is a simple label to a complex set of qualities and behaviors and as such it's more of a sliding scale than a boolean true/false.
So when you say "that is all", it really isn't. Taking a complex issue like this and putting a simple black-and-white face on it doesn't answer anything, it only gives the deceptive appearance that it is an easy problem to solve.
And quadruple-bucky-cokebottle will make it play Duke Nukem Forever. Let's face it, Joe User is not going to remember all these shortcuts; useful features should be obvious--that's a hallmark of a good interface.
On the slime page, the shape of that borate ion is a little bit suspicious...
Pixie dust and happy thoughts?
As a debian user for almost a couple of years now, I can honestly say I've never used any of the Debian kernel packages when upgrading. When I'm working with the most important component of my operating system, I like to have as much control as possible.