I think text adventures/interactive fiction (IF) has an edge because it self selects for a smarter, more literate demographic.
Certainly. The community was one of the reasons why I stopped working with the RPG Maker. Sturgeon's Law applies here very much.
I suspect the homebrew RPG community has working filtering mechanisms.
The communities (unfortunately there is little interaction between the individual sites, which also means that it's not easy to find out about good games outside your particular community) are usually centered around a site that provides game tests, resources etc. It really feels like a gaming mag, complete with the hype major projects get before they're even halfway done. We even had leaked betas once...
Indeed, so an extent I wonder how many of the RPG Maker fans are really interested in the retrogaming aspect compared to how many use it because it's what they have?
Usually the good ones. The retrogamers are by definition the most mature members and they usually know what they want to achieve. Note that by application of aforementioned Law that limits their number to 10 ± 5% of all users and not all good users are retrogamers. I'd put the figure at somewhere between three and five percent.
As the tools make things easier I'd expect 3D to be the default for future would be game creators, perhaps thanks to Super Ultra RPG Maker 3D.
There are programs like that, but few people use them. 3D is inherently more complex, especially when you want to use custom models - which are a must if you want your game to stick out. Also, most people prefer a 2D RPG looking like Final Fantasy 5 over a 3D game looking like Final Fantasy 7. Detailed characters are just much harder to do in 3D.
It's not like I can afford surgery in the next few years anyway...
The soft lenses aren't a good option - I spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer or book (CS student) and lots of text + blurry vision = lousy productivity.
I'm in loose contact with a game creation community I used to participate in. These guys are using the RPG Maker series of programs (read: illegal translations of the older releases) to create games similar to the action adventures found on the SNES. Most of the stuff they create is utter crap, some is pretty good and there are a handful of games that are on par with commercial SNES games. I don't envy the testers who sift through heaps of digital drivel each week...
And yes, some of that community's flair is very much like the IFers'. It's a combination of creativity and retrogaming - only with more twelve-year-olds, more crappy games relying on their crappy graphics and more Dragonball. But somewhere in there there's some flair, along with a community of geeks who use the software's scripting environment (a castrated crossbreed between assembler and BASIC, except for the latest release, which additionally uses a castrated version of Ruby) to make the engine do things it's not made for, like a sidescrolling shoot-em-up or a fully-working Mega Man clone.
I guess whichever system allows people to put their creative energies to use, you always end up with:
- A huge pile of completely useless rubbish
- Some stuff of halfway-decent quality
- Some really good stuff
- Some stuff that makes you wonder what kind of genius it takes to create something like that
And if a game has been developed for more than ten years (like NetHack or T2T), you get extreme results, a lot better than the typical sell&forget new-fangled stuff.
Or you get ZAngband, which has more key combinations than EMACS.
My roguelike of choice is Tyrant (http://tyrant.sf.net/, site is somewhat broken), which is not text-mode but which also happpens to be only occasinally frustrating. Like in some other roguelikes you can buy food, which means that you no longer starve because the random loot from slaughtered enemies didn't contain something edible for too long. Note to traditional roguelike fans: You still have to constantly reload, for example because you encountered the wrong enemy and get killed or you stepped on a fire trap and lost $PRIZE_ITEM... Additionally you can now reload constantly trying to steal from shopkeepers who are stronger than you are.* You should feel instantly familiar.
Also, being Java-based, it runs on OS X. And it has an interesting everything-is-an-instance-of-the-same-class object model where the only difference between, say, a sword and a pie lies in the objects' properties, which allows for interesting combo items.
* Transcript from a usual Tyrant session where the user tries to steal something: ps= (pick up, shoplift, reload savegame, confirm load dialog with the enter key)
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
psssb (the shopkeeper was a bit faster than usual; the player dies and had to click through the death screens and reload the game)
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps- (this time i worked - pick up, shoplift, save game)
My MMORPG of choice, Progress Quest (http://www.progressquest.com/), allows you to make a sandwich, go to the mall or take a three-week vacation without having to stop levelling up your character. You can even play PQ and a text adventure simultaneously! And it even works under vanilla WINE.
No, the grandparent is right: Sony executives have been seen sneaking out of the houses of LAME developers wearing masks and carrying bags with "source code" written on them.
I guess I could get thick lenses but what really drives up the price is the anti-mirror coating. You can't buy glasses over -10 Dpt without that coating (at least not over here) and it's really expensive. Contacts might be an idea, but I know the trouble they can make (my brother uses contacts) and AFAIK they don't sell soft lenses for anything above -10 Dpt.
If I manage to get enough money together I'll probably have my eyes lasered. If they'd scrape three diopters off my eyes it'd be great, but of course I wouldn't trust the well-being of my eyes to someone who doesn't have an excellent reputation and lots of experience. At least not until I can get fully working replacements.
I also found that most fillings are a massive amount of weak bonding agent, mercury and other toxins.
They're still used that much in the States? While most amalgam fillings are generally considered to be okay many dentists over here in Germany have dropped them in favor of polymer and ceramic fillings. Probably because in the 1990s amalgam fillings were a point of public interest over here. Many pople still see them with mistrust.
Heh, tell that to the people making the phsyical. In Germany military service is pseudo-mandatory, but there are too many people for the Bundeswehr, so only about 50% of all people capable of service are used. We have five "capability levels" (Tauglichkeitsgrade), T1 to T5:
T1 ("fully usable") means that you are healthy, 1,75 m tall and have good eyes and teeth.
T2 ("usable with restrictions for certain occupations") means that you have slight health problems; minor joint anomalies, allergies, bad vision up to +/-8 Dpt (sph), +/-5 (cyl) etc. A T2 means that some occupations are outside your reach, such as jet pilot.
T3 ("usable with restrictions for basic training and certain occupations") has been obsoleted in 2004, people who would have gotten T3 now get T5.
T4 ("temporarily incapable of military service") means that you hae some condition that might potentially leave you incapable of service (e.g. you recently broke your leg and it's not sure whether it will heal cleanly).
T5 ("incapable of military service") means that they'd rather tape a gun to a scarecrow and fire it using string than give it to you. Cancer, diabetes, suicidal tendencies, a screwed up spine etc. will get you this rating.
Note that even the T3 candidates were incapable of fully doing basic training and the T5ers... Well, I got T5 because I am extremely shortsighted (-11.0/-10.25 Dpt); without my glasses I can't see anything more than 10 cm from my eyes without blurring. Now imagine the glasses break in the middle of basic training. Doubleplusungood, especially since the damn things cost 0.5 kilobucks.
BTW, one interesting tidbit: While military service is "mandatory", everyone has the right to refuse if (s)he has a good reason ("I belive that killing people is unethical" is considered a valid reason). However, if you refuse you have to do "civil service" (Zivildienst), which means helping out at retirement homes, hospitals etc. Now comes the interesting part: If you don't do military service because you got T5 or because the Bundeswehr never bothered to draft you you don't have to do civil service. While I think that civil service is beneficial to the person doing it (working with old/sick persons gives you a new outlook on life) I'm pretty happy that I didn't have to do it - it gives me an advantage of one year over people who did do it. Yes, I am a selfish bastard, but we're talking about having a better chance to a job here...
Well yeah, but I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is not going to get their panties in a bunch because companies aren't going to early-adopt Vista. I mean, people are still using Windows 98 for various reasons. It's not like Windows XP came out and the whole business jumped at it... Adoption is going to be slow and sporadic, just like it has been with previous releases.
This is not good for Microsoft, but it sure didn't catch Redmond off-guard. I bet they hardly even touched the furniture over this.
"Don't install a brand-new software that hasn't yet been thoroughly tested." Of course that's a good advice, but is it really necessary to tell this to people? Well, maybe it'll add some credibility to the IT staff's complaints when someone from middle mismanagement wants to switch the entire infrastructure to Vista or soething...
I hear there's soon going to be a collector's edition of the book. It comes with a built-in speaker that constantly pays a loop of Linus laughing derisively when the book is open as well as a foreword by Steve Ballmer and an exclusive demo of Duke Nukem Forever.
True. I'nm thinking about getting a Playstation 2 because a) it's becoming cheap, b) it runs Linux, c) backwards compatibility means that Final Fantasy Tactics will probably run and d) I can't emulate Guilty Gear XX. I'm a retrogamer. If they released a console that plays PSX*, NES, SNES, GB, GBA, C64 and A500 games I'd be all over it. Yes, I know that the GP32 pretty much fits that description (and it's successor even more so), but I can't afford it.
* I'm referring to the Sony Playstation, not the Sony PSX. Thanks to Sony for using a common abbreviation for an older console as the name of a new one...
Slashdot Mirror
I think text adventures/interactive fiction (IF) has an edge because it self selects for a smarter, more literate demographic.
Certainly. The community was one of the reasons why I stopped working with the RPG Maker. Sturgeon's Law applies here very much.
I suspect the homebrew RPG community has working filtering mechanisms.
The communities (unfortunately there is little interaction between the individual sites, which also means that it's not easy to find out about good games outside your particular community) are usually centered around a site that provides game tests, resources etc. It really feels like a gaming mag, complete with the hype major projects get before they're even halfway done. We even had leaked betas once...
Indeed, so an extent I wonder how many of the RPG Maker fans are really interested in the retrogaming aspect compared to how many use it because it's what they have?
Usually the good ones. The retrogamers are by definition the most mature members and they usually know what they want to achieve. Note that by application of aforementioned Law that limits their number to 10 ± 5% of all users and not all good users are retrogamers. I'd put the figure at somewhere between three and five percent.
As the tools make things easier I'd expect 3D to be the default for future would be game creators, perhaps thanks to Super Ultra RPG Maker 3D.
There are programs like that, but few people use them. 3D is inherently more complex, especially when you want to use custom models - which are a must if you want your game to stick out. Also, most people prefer a 2D RPG looking like Final Fantasy 5 over a 3D game looking like Final Fantasy 7. Detailed characters are just much harder to do in 3D.
It's not like I can afford surgery in the next few years anyway...
The soft lenses aren't a good option - I spend most of my time sitting in front of a computer or book (CS student) and lots of text + blurry vision = lousy productivity.
Why does that sound so awfully familiar...?
I'm in loose contact with a game creation community I used to participate in. These guys are using the RPG Maker series of programs (read: illegal translations of the older releases) to create games similar to the action adventures found on the SNES. Most of the stuff they create is utter crap, some is pretty good and there are a handful of games that are on par with commercial SNES games. I don't envy the testers who sift through heaps of digital drivel each week...
And yes, some of that community's flair is very much like the IFers'. It's a combination of creativity and retrogaming - only with more twelve-year-olds, more crappy games relying on their crappy graphics and more Dragonball. But somewhere in there there's some flair, along with a community of geeks who use the software's scripting environment (a castrated crossbreed between assembler and BASIC, except for the latest release, which additionally uses a castrated version of Ruby) to make the engine do things it's not made for, like a sidescrolling shoot-em-up or a fully-working Mega Man clone.
I guess whichever system allows people to put their creative energies to use, you always end up with:
- A huge pile of completely useless rubbish
- Some stuff of halfway-decent quality
- Some really good stuff
- Some stuff that makes you wonder what kind of genius it takes to create something like that
And if a game has been developed for more than ten years (like NetHack or T2T), you get extreme results, a lot better than the typical sell&forget new-fangled stuff.
Or you get ZAngband, which has more key combinations than EMACS.
My roguelike of choice is Tyrant (http://tyrant.sf.net/, site is somewhat broken), which is not text-mode but which also happpens to be only occasinally frustrating. Like in some other roguelikes you can buy food, which means that you no longer starve because the random loot from slaughtered enemies didn't contain something edible for too long. Note to traditional roguelike fans: You still have to constantly reload, for example because you encountered the wrong enemy and get killed or you stepped on a fire trap and lost $PRIZE_ITEM... Additionally you can now reload constantly trying to steal from shopkeepers who are stronger than you are.* You should feel instantly familiar.
Also, being Java-based, it runs on OS X. And it has an interesting everything-is-an-instance-of-the-same-class object model where the only difference between, say, a sword and a pie lies in the objects' properties, which allows for interesting combo items.
* Transcript from a usual Tyrant session where the user tries to steal something: ps= (pick up, shoplift, reload savegame, confirm load dialog with the enter key)
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
psssb (the shopkeeper was a bit faster than usual; the player dies and had to click through the death screens and reload the game)
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps=
ps- (this time i worked - pick up, shoplift, save game)
Ahh, great fun.
I use them as throwaway names for VMs. If there's a VM that will only connect to the network once in three months it's name is xyzzy.
I also use them as names for temporary variables, but not as much as "bla" and "hunzst" (the latter I got from an issue of the German MAD Magazine).
My MMORPG of choice, Progress Quest (http://www.progressquest.com/), allows you to make a sandwich, go to the mall or take a three-week vacation without having to stop levelling up your character. You can even play PQ and a text adventure simultaneously! And it even works under vanilla WINE.
- UNIX contains Sony rootkit code
Yeah, but at first it'd have a horrible user interface.
No, the grandparent is right: Sony executives have been seen sneaking out of the houses of LAME developers wearing masks and carrying bags with "source code" written on them.
I guess I could get thick lenses but what really drives up the price is the anti-mirror coating. You can't buy glasses over -10 Dpt without that coating (at least not over here) and it's really expensive. Contacts might be an idea, but I know the trouble they can make (my brother uses contacts) and AFAIK they don't sell soft lenses for anything above -10 Dpt.
If I manage to get enough money together I'll probably have my eyes lasered. If they'd scrape three diopters off my eyes it'd be great, but of course I wouldn't trust the well-being of my eyes to someone who doesn't have an excellent reputation and lots of experience. At least not until I can get fully working replacements.
Make the floss from plastic explosives. That gives you fresh breath as well as superior firepower and hey, Semtex ain't that toxic.
I also found that most fillings are a massive amount of weak bonding agent, mercury and other toxins.
They're still used that much in the States? While most amalgam fillings are generally considered to be okay many dentists over here in Germany have dropped them in favor of polymer and ceramic fillings. Probably because in the 1990s amalgam fillings were a point of public interest over here. Many pople still see them with mistrust.
Heh, tell that to the people making the phsyical. In Germany military service is pseudo-mandatory, but there are too many people for the Bundeswehr, so only about 50% of all people capable of service are used. We have five "capability levels" (Tauglichkeitsgrade), T1 to T5:
T1 ("fully usable") means that you are healthy, 1,75 m tall and have good eyes and teeth.
T2 ("usable with restrictions for certain occupations") means that you have slight health problems; minor joint anomalies, allergies, bad vision up to +/-8 Dpt (sph), +/-5 (cyl) etc. A T2 means that some occupations are outside your reach, such as jet pilot.
T3 ("usable with restrictions for basic training and certain occupations") has been obsoleted in 2004, people who would have gotten T3 now get T5.
T4 ("temporarily incapable of military service") means that you hae some condition that might potentially leave you incapable of service (e.g. you recently broke your leg and it's not sure whether it will heal cleanly).
T5 ("incapable of military service") means that they'd rather tape a gun to a scarecrow and fire it using string than give it to you. Cancer, diabetes, suicidal tendencies, a screwed up spine etc. will get you this rating.
Note that even the T3 candidates were incapable of fully doing basic training and the T5ers... Well, I got T5 because I am extremely shortsighted (-11.0/-10.25 Dpt); without my glasses I can't see anything more than 10 cm from my eyes without blurring. Now imagine the glasses break in the middle of basic training. Doubleplusungood, especially since the damn things cost 0.5 kilobucks.
BTW, one interesting tidbit: While military service is "mandatory", everyone has the right to refuse if (s)he has a good reason ("I belive that killing people is unethical" is considered a valid reason). However, if you refuse you have to do "civil service" (Zivildienst), which means helping out at retirement homes, hospitals etc. Now comes the interesting part: If you don't do military service because you got T5 or because the Bundeswehr never bothered to draft you you don't have to do civil service. While I think that civil service is beneficial to the person doing it (working with old/sick persons gives you a new outlook on life) I'm pretty happy that I didn't have to do it - it gives me an advantage of one year over people who did do it. Yes, I am a selfish bastard, but we're talking about having a better chance to a job here...
Incidentally, using hot water to wash your crockery and cutlery will also fail to kill the bugs unless the above temperature is reached.
Hmm, maybe there's a market for kitchen autoclaves... With the right marketing there's gotta be a huge market of people who'd buy them.
Well yeah, but I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is not going to get their panties in a bunch because companies aren't going to early-adopt Vista. I mean, people are still using Windows 98 for various reasons. It's not like Windows XP came out and the whole business jumped at it... Adoption is going to be slow and sporadic, just like it has been with previous releases.
This is not good for Microsoft, but it sure didn't catch Redmond off-guard. I bet they hardly even touched the furniture over this.
"Don't install a brand-new software that hasn't yet been thoroughly tested." Of course that's a good advice, but is it really necessary to tell this to people? Well, maybe it'll add some credibility to the IT staff's complaints when someone from middle mismanagement wants to switch the entire infrastructure to Vista or soething...
What, you mean BDSM Linus is going to become a Slashdot meme? Oh my $DEITY...
I was planning on buying the original thing. I never liked the "smaller and improved" devices Sony makes (or the GBA SP, for that matter).
Thank you for putting a truly disturbing image in my head.
I hear there's soon going to be a collector's edition of the book. It comes with a built-in speaker that constantly pays a loop of Linus laughing derisively when the book is open as well as a foreword by Steve Ballmer and an exclusive demo of Duke Nukem Forever.
If you have mod points, please mod parent +1 funny, funny, FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY...
True. I'nm thinking about getting a Playstation 2 because a) it's becoming cheap, b) it runs Linux, c) backwards compatibility means that Final Fantasy Tactics will probably run and d) I can't emulate Guilty Gear XX. I'm a retrogamer. If they released a console that plays PSX*, NES, SNES, GB, GBA, C64 and A500 games I'd be all over it. Yes, I know that the GP32 pretty much fits that description (and it's successor even more so), but I can't afford it.
* I'm referring to the Sony Playstation, not the Sony PSX. Thanks to Sony for using a common abbreviation for an older console as the name of a new one...
Wait, let me query my botnet...
We're all so very proud of you.
"Amazing! Her poverty level is 20.000!"
-- from Dragonball Orphan Annie Z