Every MMO to appear in Korea for several years now have been based on the Free-To-Play model. Even those who were launched on a subscription one migrated to it, forcing their western licencees to do the same.
Example : _RF Online (CodeMasters dragged their feet but had to accept the free to play model) _Granado Espada aka Sword of the New World (K2 Networks wanted a hybrid system, but had to change to a pure free to play one)
Even legacy power house Lineage 2 from NCsoft is heading towards a cash shop item addition to its subscription based model.
More recent ones like Perfect World are free to play from the start. To sum up : Free-to-Play IS the de facto business model in asia, and has been for years. The western licencees also are bound to use free to play.
Turbo pascal 3.X was crap
on
C# In-Depth
·
· Score: 1
On my ATARI ST :
_GFA Basic (automatic syntax correction, automatic indentation, folded procedures, etc...) _Omikron Basic (reset resistance) _or even 68000 assembler were light years ahead in terms of ease of use that the MS-DOS Turbo pascal 3.3 I had the utter disgust of using.
Showcase :
_Turbo Pascal 3.3 on 8MHz 286 dual 3"5 floppy
Aim : display math graphics on screen.
After the 3rd time the program runs, error message : graphics not initialized. WTF ? What do you mean not initialized, what the hell did you just display 10 seconds ago ?
_Reset PC _Reboot MS-DOS from floppy _Reload Turbo Pascal _Reload program source _Recompile & run _Try again another equation.
Compare with this :
_Omikron Basic on ATARI ST, 68000 @ 8MHz
Aim : Screw around with the xbios functions about display addresses
ATARI ST crashes
_Reset ATARI ST
As soon as your finger leaves the reset button :
You are still under the OS You still have the Omikron Basic interpreter loaded Your source code is still in memory All you have to do is run it again.
Similar results could be obtained with GFA Basic and a reset resistant RAM-disk.
And why, oh why the heck did that piece of crap turbo pascal had to use only ONE fricking pass for compiling ? Even my 68000 assembler used two : First one for syntax error, second for actual compile. The first pass will list you ALL syntax errors and you will navigate from one to the other at will (not to mention with mouse and GUI). Compare this with (TEXT mode) Turbo-Pascal that will STOP compiling on the very first syntax error it encounters. 30 semicolons omitted in your source ? That's 30 recompiles, one correction after the other.
AMIGA and ATARI ST were light years in almost all respects compared to the clunky and pain in the ass platform that was the PC.
Confirms why I thought of the C64 when I read Contiki. Here is a list of supported systems from wikipedia :
* Computers:
o Apple II family[1]
o Atari 8-bit[1]
o Atari ST
o Atari Portfolio
o Casio Pocketview
o Commodore PET[1]
o Commodore VIC 20[1]
o Commodore 64[1]
o Commodore 128[1]
o GP32
o Oric
o PC-6001
o Sharp Wizard
o x86-based Unix-like systems, on top of GTK+ as well as directly using the X Window System[2]
* Video game consoles:
o PC Engine
o Sega Dreamcast
o Sony PlayStation
* Handheld game consoles:
o Nintendo Game Boy
o Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Impressive features as well :
A full installation of Contiki includes the following features:
* Multitasking kernel
* Optional per-application pre-emptive multithreading
* Protothreads
* TCP/IP networking
* Windowing system and GUI
* Networked remote display using Virtual Network Computing
* A web browser (claimed to be the world's smallest)
* Personal web server
* Simple telnet client
* Screensaver
I agree with you that the actions takens by NCNA (NCsoft North America) to reduce botting are few and insufficient.
However, we should take a broader look about the problem. There are two problems that would rise in Lineage 2 if bots were really excluded from the game.
1/ NCNA would lose a lot of money. Every bot account does pay a monthly subscription. Even though the trend for Korean games is Free-To-Play, such isn't the case for Lineage2 which still relies on the old monthly subscription model. A once in a while wave of banning bot accounts generate money : They buy new accounts ($$) and subcriptions ($$). A permanent and efficient ban would deprive NCNA from the bots subscription which, as any player, you can attest is a BIG part of the server population.
2/The game is DESIGNED to be botted. The most acute problem that would stem from the complete removal of bots would be the effective inability for normal players to craft their gear. Lineage2 is over-dependent on gear, you cannot do anything without proper level weapons and armors. But the time needed to farm all the components is ludicrous. The thousands of low-level mats required for any major craft would force anyone to play a mat-gathering dwarf class for 80% of their play time, to say the least. Leaving only 20% or so of game time to really play their main character.
In conclusion, the presence of bots in NCNA Lineage2 is a lesser evil unless the game has its game design adapted to Western audiences. It is a common problem with Korean games (RF Online comes to mind) that have their content translated in english, but their design still aimed at Korean market and culture. Which leads to frustration for the western fans of these games, as they see the goodness and potential of their loved game sabotaged by the licensed operator who did not care about tuning the game to the audience.
It was Blueside who first introduced the idea to me, cynically stating that consoles won't succeed in Korea until players start just playing games for fun, instead of treating them as work. I laughed then, but subsequent meetings only served to confirm the theory.
Companies from Gravity to Ntreev to Nexon agreed that a very large number - varying from 30 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask - of players in South Korea are playing games as a job. Generally, people didn't feel too good about it either, which at least indicates that people aren't designing them with that as a goal. But it's still disconcerting.
And as any player of Lineage2 can attest, some Korean MMOs really ARE designed to be grindfests and farming prone.
From L2 official boards:
PushyCat on official boards: So, Koreans play and sell in their own servers and it covers the cost of their PC Room and meals. This is a normal aspect of Korean games. Listen to me while I say this. Ebaying is NOT CONSIDERED CHEATING in KORea. It is an important element of mmporgs. With game money, not only can you sell it to make cash, you can also order pizza, buy computers and accessories (like auto mouses, keyboards, macroprograms), and pay for your monthly fee (for those who play at home). In Korea, game money is an accepted tender for Real Life. Noone posts on message boards about cheaters, ebayers, and bots because EVERYONE does it. In Korea, the game is played much differently than in North America, and asians have different cultural backgrounds that make gameplay different as well.
"Mac OS X has come a long way. It is everything a UNIX guy could evey have hoped for in a desktop/laptop OS "
Well, Unix savvy users who used ATARI ST, AMIGA or especially NEXSTEP computers might disagree. Yes, Mac OS X is undeniably good. But not that "alpha and omega" good.
The author, Yukito Kishiro always documents himself a lot before drawing and has the humans on Venus use floating cities in the "Last Order" series of his manga.
In france, you get a discount on power cost when operating between 10.30pm and 6am or so. All electrical based water heaters are set to draw power only during this time period (unless set on manual).
So... Turkey can harbor US nuke missiles pointed to Moscow, but Cuba can't have a few pointed to the US ?
The winner of the Cuban missiles crisis was the USSR who negociated the removal of the plethora of US missiles in Turkey, in exchange of the few missiles in Cuba.
Anime and its associated culture has done infinitely more to heal the wounds stemming from WW2 between Japan and Korea, or Japan and China, than all the official gestures, discourses, intents put together.
Ask a young Korean what he thinks about Japan, and compare with the general feeling of 40 years ago.
I suggest you go visit IN PERSON any such country that you berate 'raped, pillaged, destroyed' by teh eviiiil western nations and see for yourself the real causes of their current state.
That should constitute for you a real eye-opening experience.
For every new medium, you need a core market of enthusiast adopters, that will later expand to more casual consumers.
In the case of DVD-A and SACD, bear in mind that the enthusiast who spend big $$ on the new digital audio discs cannot.. link them to their digital audio hi-fi set-up. You are forced to use analog outputs only, on your brand new high resolution audio player. You also cannot import your bought music onto your PC or any other device (disc formats are unreadable).
If the new formats doesn't make buying sense to the enthusiasts, how would it make to the casual buyer ? Answer is it doesn't, and we have yet another still-born format(s).
Your ignorance of the ATARI ST/AMIGA/ARCHIMEDES markets is abysmal.
Those are the machines that made "the price of computing dive into regular joe range". They were powerful, cheap, advanced and extremely popular at times when the PC was an overpriced and pitiful piece of computing machinery.
It was the ATARI ST that broke the 1 Mb RAM under $ 1,000 bar (with the 1040 ST. remember 'Power without the price' ?), that brought Personal Publishing with laser printers (SLM series)to the masses amongst many other things. The multimedia capabilities of the AMIGA also far surpassed the PC's.
Take any printed magazine of the time and compare their prices to that of PC hardware in the ads and you will never be able to bring that argument again. Compatible PC has been synonym with overpriced hardware for dozen of years.
And should you take the argument route that that PC was made in 1981 while the ATARI ST was in 1985 and the Amiga in 1986, I shall remind you that my ATARI 800XL (8-bit, first model in 1978 as ATARI 800) ran Flight Simulator 2 or Visicalc perfectly well at a fraction of the price of a PC.
I actually thought "Extremely high precision Inertial sensor", the kind that is put in space probes or satellites, since perfect spheres are required for the gyroscopes IIRC.
The DOS emulator on Unix was faster than native DOS on the same machine. I can't recall the Win 3.1 emulator on unix having any performance issues, to the contrary. Don't some of the Windows games that currently run under WINE have more FPS than natively under Windows ?
So, yes, running Microsoft originated OS on Unix can result in a faster and more stable experience.
How about we dump IPv6 and work on a sane evolution of the internet protocol ? I seriously ask the question.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that IPv6 adresses are not a superset of IPv4 ones. That means, that absolutely no current internet site is reachable by IPv6. Every site, every PC connected to the net today has to be modified in order to be reachable through IPv6.
Win16 was extended with Win32 and then with Win64. But you can still run Win16 program on windows OS. An Intel or AMD CPU can still execute early 8086 code. You don't succeed by cutting of the work of the whole world has been doing for decades and forcing a total rewrite, just because you feel your new engineered standard is so much better.
Please someone explain to me that I have deeply misunderstood IPv6, because I can't understand this case of engineer/developer hubris of not expanding the current internet has we know it and forcing a complete 'rewrite'.
IPv6 address should be a superset of IPv4 ones. (or example : 1.2.3.4 is IPv4, 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 would be IPvX. you type the former in IPvX, it gets padded to 1.2.3.4.0.0.0.0 and still works). I fail to understand why it isn't so.
and 37 sailors on the USS Stark died due to a friendly fire incident.
Friendly fire implies your own troops or allies, doesn't it ? The USS Stark was hit by a missile shot from an Iraqi plane. The official word was it was not an authorized action, but I would hardly call it friendly fire.
if they want to continue producing a useful OS that people will actually buy, they will need to innovate, and to innovate they will need to break compatibility. I'm afraid you are not realizing that 99% of the corporate world has no use for a windows OS that breaks compatibility.
The value of windows are the apps it allows to run on, not the OS in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Every MMO to appear in Korea for several years now have been based on the Free-To-Play model.
Even those who were launched on a subscription one migrated to it, forcing their western licencees to do the same.
Example :
_RF Online (CodeMasters dragged their feet but had to accept the free to play model)
_Granado Espada aka Sword of the New World (K2 Networks wanted a hybrid system, but had to change to a pure free to play one)
Even legacy power house Lineage 2 from NCsoft is heading towards a cash shop item addition to its subscription based model.
More recent ones like Perfect World are free to play from the start.
To sum up :
Free-to-Play IS the de facto business model in asia, and has been for years. The western licencees also are bound to use free to play.
On my ATARI ST :
_GFA Basic (automatic syntax correction, automatic indentation, folded procedures, etc ...)
_Omikron Basic (reset resistance)
_or even 68000 assembler were light years ahead in terms of ease of use that the MS-DOS Turbo pascal 3.3 I had the utter disgust of using.
Showcase :
_Turbo Pascal 3.3 on 8MHz 286 dual 3"5 floppy
Aim : display math graphics on screen.
After the 3rd time the program runs, error message : graphics not initialized.
WTF ? What do you mean not initialized, what the hell did you just display 10 seconds ago ?
_Reset PC
_Reboot MS-DOS from floppy
_Reload Turbo Pascal
_Reload program source
_Recompile & run
_Try again another equation.
Compare with this :
_Omikron Basic on ATARI ST, 68000 @ 8MHz
Aim : Screw around with the xbios functions about display addresses
ATARI ST crashes
_Reset ATARI ST
As soon as your finger leaves the reset button :
You are still under the OS
You still have the Omikron Basic interpreter loaded
Your source code is still in memory
All you have to do is run it again.
Similar results could be obtained with GFA Basic and a reset resistant RAM-disk.
And why, oh why the heck did that piece of crap turbo pascal had to use only ONE fricking pass for compiling ?
Even my 68000 assembler used two :
First one for syntax error, second for actual compile.
The first pass will list you ALL syntax errors and you will navigate from one to the other at will (not to mention with mouse and GUI).
Compare this with (TEXT mode) Turbo-Pascal that will STOP compiling on the very first syntax error it encounters.
30 semicolons omitted in your source ? That's 30 recompiles, one correction after the other.
AMIGA and ATARI ST were light years in almost all respects compared to the clunky and pain in the ass platform that was the PC.
This game used a custom hybrid format so the same game disk worked on both ATARI ST and AMIGA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starglider_2
How is that any worse than the destruction of some german cities by allied bombers in WWII ?
You should really take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
and educate yourself some more about the destruction waged on germany during that time.
Looking at the wikipedia page :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki
Confirms why I thought of the C64 when I read Contiki.
Here is a list of supported systems from wikipedia :
* Computers:
o Apple II family[1]
o Atari 8-bit[1]
o Atari ST
o Atari Portfolio
o Casio Pocketview
o Commodore PET[1]
o Commodore VIC 20[1]
o Commodore 64[1]
o Commodore 128[1]
o GP32
o Oric
o PC-6001
o Sharp Wizard
o x86-based Unix-like systems, on top of GTK+ as well as directly using the X Window System[2]
* Video game consoles:
o PC Engine
o Sega Dreamcast
o Sony PlayStation
* Handheld game consoles:
o Nintendo Game Boy
o Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Impressive features as well :
A full installation of Contiki includes the following features:
* Multitasking kernel
* Optional per-application pre-emptive multithreading
* Protothreads
* TCP/IP networking
* Windowing system and GUI
* Networked remote display using Virtual Network Computing
* A web browser (claimed to be the world's smallest)
* Personal web server
* Simple telnet client
* Screensaver
I agree with you that the actions takens by NCNA (NCsoft North America) to reduce botting are few and insufficient.
However, we should take a broader look about the problem. There are two problems that would rise in Lineage 2 if bots were really excluded from the game.
1/ NCNA would lose a lot of money.
Every bot account does pay a monthly subscription.
Even though the trend for Korean games is Free-To-Play, such isn't the case for Lineage2 which still relies on the old monthly subscription model.
A once in a while wave of banning bot accounts generate money : They buy new accounts ($$) and subcriptions ($$).
A permanent and efficient ban would deprive NCNA from the bots subscription which, as any player, you can attest is a BIG part of the server population.
2/The game is DESIGNED to be botted.
The most acute problem that would stem from the complete removal of bots would be the effective inability for normal players to craft their gear.
Lineage2 is over-dependent on gear, you cannot do anything without proper level weapons and armors.
But the time needed to farm all the components is ludicrous.
The thousands of low-level mats required for any major craft would force anyone to play a mat-gathering dwarf class for 80% of their play time, to say the least. Leaving only 20% or so of game time to really play their main character.
In conclusion, the presence of bots in NCNA Lineage2 is a lesser evil unless the game has its game design adapted to Western audiences.
It is a common problem with Korean games (RF Online comes to mind) that have their content translated in english, but their design still aimed at Korean market and culture.
Which leads to frustration for the western fans of these games, as they see the goodness and potential of their loved game sabotaged by the licensed operator who did not care about tuning the game to the audience.
Excerpt from Brandon Sheffield article on Gamasutra :
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18510
It was Blueside who first introduced the idea to me, cynically stating that consoles won't succeed in Korea until players start just playing games for fun, instead of treating them as work. I laughed then, but subsequent meetings only served to confirm the theory.
Companies from Gravity to Ntreev to Nexon agreed that a very large number - varying from 30 to 50 percent, depending on who you ask - of players in South Korea are playing games as a job. Generally, people didn't feel too good about it either, which at least indicates that people aren't designing them with that as a goal. But it's still disconcerting.
And as any player of Lineage2 can attest, some Korean MMOs really ARE designed to be grindfests and farming prone.
From L2 official boards :
PushyCat on official boards:
So, Koreans play and sell in their own servers and it covers the cost of their PC Room and meals. This is a normal aspect of Korean games. Listen to me while I say this. Ebaying is NOT CONSIDERED CHEATING in KORea. It is an important element of mmporgs. With game money, not only can you sell it to make cash, you can also order pizza, buy computers and accessories (like auto mouses, keyboards, macroprograms), and pay for your monthly fee (for those who play at home). In Korea, game money is an accepted tender for Real Life. Noone posts on message boards about cheaters, ebayers, and bots because EVERYONE does it. In Korea, the game is played much differently than in North America, and asians have different cultural backgrounds that make gameplay different as well.
Only oil and nuclear have limited supply.
Thorium, which can be used to power nuclear plants, is in insanely vast supply in sea water and can be extracted at a very competitive price.
Top Gun, aka. Fighter Weapons School was a NAVY course, not Air Force ;)
"Mac OS X has come a long way. It is everything a UNIX guy could evey have hoped for in a desktop/laptop OS "
Well, Unix savvy users who used ATARI ST, AMIGA or especially NEXSTEP computers might disagree.
Yes, Mac OS X is undeniably good. But not that "alpha and omega" good.
Except it was originally the UK :)
Parent and grand-parent are referring to :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
The author, Yukito Kishiro always documents himself a lot before drawing and has the humans on Venus use floating cities in the "Last Order" series of his manga.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Angel_Alita:_Last_Order
In france, you get a discount on power cost when operating between 10.30pm and 6am or so.
All electrical based water heaters are set to draw power only during this time period (unless set on manual).
So ... Turkey can harbor US nuke missiles pointed to Moscow, but Cuba can't have a few pointed to the US ?
The winner of the Cuban missiles crisis was the USSR who negociated the removal of the plethora of US missiles in Turkey, in exchange of the few missiles in Cuba.
Anime and its associated culture has done infinitely more to heal the wounds stemming from WW2 between Japan and Korea, or Japan and China, than all the official gestures, discourses, intents put together.
Ask a young Korean what he thinks about Japan, and compare with the general feeling of 40 years ago.
I never played Diablo, thus never lost a single hour to it.
Phantasy Star Online on the other hand ... I could even tell you how long down to a single hour, just let me add all my characater's time count :)
What you say is a big amount of bollocks.
I suggest you go visit IN PERSON any such country that you berate 'raped, pillaged, destroyed' by teh eviiiil western nations and see for yourself the real causes of their current state.
That should constitute for you a real eye-opening experience.
For every new medium, you need a core market of enthusiast adopters, that will later expand to more casual consumers.
In the case of DVD-A and SACD, bear in mind that the enthusiast who spend big $$ on the new digital audio discs cannot .. link them to their digital audio hi-fi set-up.
You are forced to use analog outputs only, on your brand new high resolution audio player.
You also cannot import your bought music onto your PC or any other device (disc formats are unreadable).
If the new formats doesn't make buying sense to the enthusiasts, how would it make to the casual buyer ?
Answer is it doesn't, and we have yet another still-born format(s).
Your ignorance of the ATARI ST/AMIGA/ARCHIMEDES markets is abysmal.
Those are the machines that made "the price of computing dive into regular joe range".
They were powerful, cheap, advanced and extremely popular at times when the PC was an overpriced and pitiful piece of computing machinery.
It was the ATARI ST that broke the 1 Mb RAM under $ 1,000 bar (with the 1040 ST. remember 'Power without the price' ?), that brought Personal Publishing with laser printers (SLM series)to the masses amongst many other things.
The multimedia capabilities of the AMIGA also far surpassed the PC's.
Take any printed magazine of the time and compare their prices to that of PC hardware in the ads and you will never be able to bring that argument again.
Compatible PC has been synonym with overpriced hardware for dozen of years.
And should you take the argument route that that PC was made in 1981 while the ATARI ST was in 1985 and the Amiga in 1986, I shall remind you that my ATARI 800XL (8-bit, first model in 1978 as ATARI 800) ran Flight Simulator 2 or Visicalc perfectly well at a fraction of the price of a PC.
I actually thought "Extremely high precision Inertial sensor", the kind that is put in space probes or satellites, since perfect spheres are required for the gyroscopes IIRC.
I'm not sure I understand your questions.
The DOS emulator on Unix was faster than native DOS on the same machine.
I can't recall the Win 3.1 emulator on unix having any performance issues, to the contrary.
Don't some of the Windows games that currently run under WINE have more FPS than natively under Windows ?
So, yes, running Microsoft originated OS on Unix can result in a faster and more stable experience.
How about we dump IPv6 and work on a sane evolution of the internet protocol ?
I seriously ask the question.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that IPv6 adresses are not a superset of IPv4 ones.
That means, that absolutely no current internet site is reachable by IPv6.
Every site, every PC connected to the net today has to be modified in order to be reachable through IPv6.
Win16 was extended with Win32 and then with Win64.
But you can still run Win16 program on windows OS.
An Intel or AMD CPU can still execute early 8086 code.
You don't succeed by cutting of the work of the whole world has been doing for decades and forcing a total rewrite, just because you feel your new engineered standard is so much better.
Please someone explain to me that I have deeply misunderstood IPv6, because I can't understand this case of engineer/developer hubris of not expanding the current internet has we know it and forcing a complete 'rewrite'.
IPv6 address should be a superset of IPv4 ones.
(or example : 1.2.3.4 is IPv4, 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8 would be IPvX. you type the former in IPvX, it gets padded to 1.2.3.4.0.0.0.0 and still works).
I fail to understand why it isn't so.
and 37 sailors on the USS Stark died due to a friendly fire incident.
Friendly fire implies your own troops or allies, doesn't it ?The USS Stark was hit by a missile shot from an Iraqi plane. The official word was it was not an authorized action, but I would hardly call it friendly fire.
The value of windows are the apps it allows to run on, not the OS in itself.
Unfortunately, the cheapest foods are not the healthy ones. ...
Which brings us in a in a vicious catch-22 situation