And while this article is really old, I just noticed your reply -
The point in this different sort of death system is to change the paradigm of building a single character into building a whole legacy of characters. Maybe give characters a hovel when they start their character, and eventually through building their legacy, can have a palace... who knows.
(IANAMD,BIRW [I am not a medical doctor, but I read wikipedia])
Actually, it sort of does. When you have MS, you can have "relapses" or "attacks" that increase the severity of your disability. These can be triggered by disease (colds, influenza, etc), or stressful events.
Needless to say, having to go through the ordeal of a trial may cause her disease to get worse. So it sort of does have an inhumane quality if she really did pirate music. Even so: couple thousand dollars, or potentially make the person you're suing degenerate further into a permanent and debilitating disease... sort of calls their morals into question, eh?
It's developed by Simutronics (makers of Gemstone, DragonRealms). First of all, realize that this company has nearly 20 years of experience in MUDs.
They've been developing this engine for use in their game, Hero's Journey. One of the key things about Simutronics games is their army of GMs, constantly creating content that's tacked onto the world. Maps, quests, items, etc etc. They've worked hard to make their toolset easy for GMs to use to make new content, and add it to the world - seamlessly, with no patches downloaded.
That means a constant array of new material being released.
One of the aspects of Hero's Journey that I doubt will take place in Bioware's game, but would be awesome if it did, is the concept of an actual Hero's Journey with your character. Quests have branching storylines, several ways to complete them (with reactions appropriately by the quest generation schema)... and eventually you'll find that one of the big baddies of a failed quest has become your nemesis, and shows up again and again.
Another really cool thing about the Hero Engine is its ability for character customization. Think Oblivion (face, skintone, hair, etc) + UO (outfit customizability). I really liked this aspect of UO, and hopefully Bioware will take cue from this part of UO that has yet to be truly present in an MMO since (DAoC had some dyes, but they didn't do much and looked pretty ugly. This is more akin to what the armor customize tool in the NWN toolset was like, except you know - upgraded for today's technology)..
It also handles instancing as well as contiguous common areas. Whether it's more of a Guild Wars or more of a WoW is up to the developers.
Now, some commentary on the meat of the article;
"That's something we don't want to encourage. We want to encourage players to continue to make progress in their story, to do new quests, consume new content, constantly move forward."
This is encouraging to see. I hate grinding instances just as much as I hate grinding random mobs in the Plaguelands. They want players to constantly move forward - but there comes a point when a character's potential is met, and cannot proceed further. This makes a tough decision; my pet idea is to have permanent death, but have that death be an integral part in the creation of your next character. That leads you to build a sort of legacy, etc, and dying eventually becomes - while something of an inconvenience - just another step in playing the game, advancing your legacy. This way the game's overall character strength is more of a bell curve than an exponential curve.
"Remind me again, why do WE care about the dev environment? How is that warning consumers of the dangers of the PS3?"
Because poor dev environments caused the downfall of several historic game consoles. See: Sega Saturn.
While there were other issues with the Saturn, such as dev libraries being difficult to get ahold of... development of Sega Saturn cross platform titles often meant spending several extra months of development on the Saturn compared to, say, the PS1. It was one of the primary reasons the Saturn failed (along with its high initial pricetag, and difficulty getting hands on dev kits in the first place, low number of game releases outside of japan.. all of which except the last sound eerily familiar when looked at in context of the PS3).
Ease of system development is very important in forecasting how well third party developers will attach to a system. That's why it's important for a consumer to take into account on initial release. After a year or two when it becomes obvious which system will have better developer support, it can be safely ignored. But what we're trying to do is forecast which will be the one that will have the most numbers sold.
On a sidenote, one of the reasons the PS2 caught on initially and sold a huge number of units was adding DVD. At least, in Japan. DVD technology hadn't caught on huge there yet, and that coupled with several exclusive RPGs (squeenix, etc) cemented its success in Japan. This to some extent also helped it sell well in the US. It's what they're trying to do again with the Blu-ray, but unfortunately the blu-ray technology doesn't have a firm foothold in one of their markets already. Blu-ray movies are few and far between, compared to a point when DVDs were being sold like hotcakes - at least, for US movies. This, along with the production woes, make them introducing a new format much more risky at this point in time.
And about your point about the 'top ten xmas gifts':
The kids polled are probably very young. While this is one of the targets of the Wii, I can definitely see how the PS3 came on the list, and the DS as well - without the Wii.
You have to look at where the youngin's are getting their information, and keep in fact that they're more impressionable by the media than your typical teenage/adult gamer. They hear 'blazingly fast' and 'not much faster than the gamecube' and they go apeshit. They list the DS because they've seen older kids at school with them, or schoolmates with them, or they've played their friends DS, etc. You have to keep in mind that younger kids see a bunch of people with something and say "Those are cool! Everyone has one! I want one too!" rather than making a truly informed decision based on market level projections, hardware issues/points, games, etc.
As a sidenote, I like how legos are up there on the list;)
"The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined"
Except it's all locked away in slow bus, streaming bit-style mini-CPUs that are harder to program for than your average chihuahua.
Great for decoding media. We'll see how great it is at doing things that require you to constantly refer back to data that you've already crunched (ie, every other application out there).
Right now I have:
X-chat, 4 windows of OpenOffice, two of SodiPodi, itunes, a dice roller, ssh (putty), Notebook, two of gaim (buddy list and chat window), two of firefox (one download window, one with 8 tabs), and google talk.
It was a lot worse last night. I shut some programs down this morning.
Also: I hibernate my computer while I'm at work, and turn off my power-hungry 19" CRT.
My electricity is included with my apartment!:D If I'm not using it, someone else will.
Re:Not the type of "fraidy cat gamer I was expecti
on
Fraidy Cat Gamer
·
· Score: 1
"Speaking of campers, what's with people who hide under the stairs in FPS and wait for someone to walk around the corner? Are you afraid of real combat?"
Real combat is about maximizing enemy losses and minimizing personal risk. They're playing the game like Ghost Recon, not like Doom.
Try leaning around the corner to see if they're waiting for you. Tossing a grenade.
Not being able to play the game flexibly reveals your own weaknesses.
It will be better when indian tech companies start making their own products to compete with us, instead of us using indian tech companies to make our products. It will generate a maelstrom of competition, and will be better for both sectors - the Indian tech companies won't have to rely on american tech companies to hire them, and will instead focus on creating solutions that only a new industry could create: a new OS, maybe, that can take microsoft down?
Once Indian tech companies realize that they can strike it out on their own, things will be much better.
Since Opera has much experience in porting their browser to low-powered machines, I'm guessing it will be to internal memory - and since it will likely use the interface library that the Wii's OS uses, it will probably clock in at less than 3mb.
Keep in mind that they've made a version for the Nintendo DS.
"Human ears cannot hear past 20 KHz, and even that is diminished during the earliest parts of youth. Since CDs record at 44 KHz, they do in fact sample all the data."
CDs play at 44KHz, but that does not necessarily mean they were recorded at 44KHz. DAT, for example, only has a frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz.
And as has been said before, even if your human ears cannot discern frequencies above ~21KHz (Many people can hear above this, however - I've tested myself and can hear up to 27KHz), the interaction of the harmonics above 20Khz and those below 20KHz produces a much warmer, fuller sound. The imperfect reproduction of both analog and digital mediums is why going to an excellent acoustically designed auditorium for a symphony concert can never be replaced by any modern recording medium. The depth of volume and the harmonic interaction in live music still has not been overcome in modern recording medium. Perhaps if you recorded every instrument on a seperate track with a huge dynamic range, and played them through seperate (v. high end) speakers, you might be able to approximate it.
Of course, some bands just don't sound the same if all the instruments are played at the same time, instead of multitrack record studio techniques...
Google.org does not blowback money to google.com, the search engine company.
The government should do a few main things:
-make sure other people don't take my stuff, my life, or impose upon my life in a negative way. -protect my life and the sovereignty of my country. -make sure its populace is well-educated and healthy -deal with the people who cross the above two in a just manner.
In doing the above in a farsighted manner, it will maintain a good quality of life through protecting our nature reserves (if we don't have nature reserves, then arguably a future generation may indeed have a lower quality of life, lack of knowledge, and a higher death rate. Education and health may well be an extrapolation of 'protect my life.'
Of course, to do all of that a huge network of laws is written, several branches of government are created, and everything gets bogged down in beaurocracy - especially if morals are the key focus of politicians.
Google's involvement with the chinese government is actually a far cry better than any other search engine - when pages are censored, it tells the user that there were results that were censored. In a devious way, it does more to increase the knowledge of government censorship in China better than showing everything.
Google is doing things with google.org that a government shouldn't have to do. And you've seen what kind of bumbling the beaurocracy does when this kind of thing is involved.
Because google's company is knowledge based, it is not beholden to the same types of shareholders as, say, an oil company. This is well shown by their work on a hybrid-electric car. And because it has shareholders, instead of throwing money at problems like poor food and water quality in developing countries, it will work to fix the causitive issues. And with the brilliant minds they have there, I have no doubt this will be extremely successful.
"Hell, if school peformance is what drives what schools get the money...they will attract students...from all races I'd think...so, it might also end the dependance we have on busing kids all around."
And the schools that do poorly get underfunded. Great way to increase the education gap. In fact, that's exactly what No Child Left Behind does.
How about you make it so that there's actually more skill involved in combat and leveling up.
Do away with levels entirely. Use a skill-based system (origional ultima online, anyone?)
Make it so you can get to "slightly better than average" in under a few hours, and most of the game content can be experienced at this "slightly better than average" point.
Make it so equipment doesn't have so much of a bearing on how well you fight/cast magic/whatever. (A master swordsman with a stick could probably best a neophyte with a finely weighted broadsword)
Make permanent death part of the game.
Utilize some inheritance system, so that you don't lose EVERYTHING when you die... and allow all your characters to share the same surname.
One thing this would do: allow casual gamers to quickly and easily accomplish just about everything in the game. And those people who get -good- at the game - not those who just play it endlessly - might eventually get characters that are much more skilled than other players, and actually become famous for whatever they might do. Ideally, the player power curve would be a bell curve, with very few weak characters and very few powerful characters, but a lot of average characters - and have most of the game content focused on the average players.
Slashdot Mirror
I long for the days of a 3D engine, but 2D gameplay Metroid.
I love MP. I loved Metroid: Zero Mission more.
You weren't on the 5 train uptown between grand central and 59th st, were you?
If so, I think we saw the same guy...
And while this article is really old, I just noticed your reply - The point in this different sort of death system is to change the paradigm of building a single character into building a whole legacy of characters. Maybe give characters a hovel when they start their character, and eventually through building their legacy, can have a palace... who knows.
Actually, it sort of does. When you have MS, you can have "relapses" or "attacks" that increase the severity of your disability. These can be triggered by disease (colds, influenza, etc), or stressful events.
Needless to say, having to go through the ordeal of a trial may cause her disease to get worse. So it sort of does have an inhumane quality if she really did pirate music. Even so: couple thousand dollars, or potentially make the person you're suing degenerate further into a permanent and debilitating disease... sort of calls their morals into question, eh?
It's developed by Simutronics (makers of Gemstone, DragonRealms). First of all, realize that this company has nearly 20 years of experience in MUDs.
They've been developing this engine for use in their game, Hero's Journey. One of the key things about Simutronics games is their army of GMs, constantly creating content that's tacked onto the world. Maps, quests, items, etc etc. They've worked hard to make their toolset easy for GMs to use to make new content, and add it to the world - seamlessly, with no patches downloaded.
That means a constant array of new material being released.
One of the aspects of Hero's Journey that I doubt will take place in Bioware's game, but would be awesome if it did, is the concept of an actual Hero's Journey with your character. Quests have branching storylines, several ways to complete them (with reactions appropriately by the quest generation schema)... and eventually you'll find that one of the big baddies of a failed quest has become your nemesis, and shows up again and again.
Another really cool thing about the Hero Engine is its ability for character customization. Think Oblivion (face, skintone, hair, etc) + UO (outfit customizability). I really liked this aspect of UO, and hopefully Bioware will take cue from this part of UO that has yet to be truly present in an MMO since (DAoC had some dyes, but they didn't do much and looked pretty ugly. This is more akin to what the armor customize tool in the NWN toolset was like, except you know - upgraded for today's technology)..
It also handles instancing as well as contiguous common areas. Whether it's more of a Guild Wars or more of a WoW is up to the developers.
Now, some commentary on the meat of the article;
"That's something we don't want to encourage. We want to encourage players to continue to make progress in their story, to do new quests, consume new content, constantly move forward."
This is encouraging to see. I hate grinding instances just as much as I hate grinding random mobs in the Plaguelands. They want players to constantly move forward - but there comes a point when a character's potential is met, and cannot proceed further. This makes a tough decision; my pet idea is to have permanent death, but have that death be an integral part in the creation of your next character. That leads you to build a sort of legacy, etc, and dying eventually becomes - while something of an inconvenience - just another step in playing the game, advancing your legacy. This way the game's overall character strength is more of a bell curve than an exponential curve.
"Remind me again, why do WE care about the dev environment? How is that warning consumers of the dangers of the PS3?"
;)
Because poor dev environments caused the downfall of several historic game consoles. See: Sega Saturn.
While there were other issues with the Saturn, such as dev libraries being difficult to get ahold of... development of Sega Saturn cross platform titles often meant spending several extra months of development on the Saturn compared to, say, the PS1. It was one of the primary reasons the Saturn failed (along with its high initial pricetag, and difficulty getting hands on dev kits in the first place, low number of game releases outside of japan.. all of which except the last sound eerily familiar when looked at in context of the PS3).
Ease of system development is very important in forecasting how well third party developers will attach to a system. That's why it's important for a consumer to take into account on initial release. After a year or two when it becomes obvious which system will have better developer support, it can be safely ignored. But what we're trying to do is forecast which will be the one that will have the most numbers sold.
On a sidenote, one of the reasons the PS2 caught on initially and sold a huge number of units was adding DVD. At least, in Japan. DVD technology hadn't caught on huge there yet, and that coupled with several exclusive RPGs (squeenix, etc) cemented its success in Japan. This to some extent also helped it sell well in the US. It's what they're trying to do again with the Blu-ray, but unfortunately the blu-ray technology doesn't have a firm foothold in one of their markets already. Blu-ray movies are few and far between, compared to a point when DVDs were being sold like hotcakes - at least, for US movies. This, along with the production woes, make them introducing a new format much more risky at this point in time.
And about your point about the 'top ten xmas gifts':
The kids polled are probably very young. While this is one of the targets of the Wii, I can definitely see how the PS3 came on the list, and the DS as well - without the Wii.
You have to look at where the youngin's are getting their information, and keep in fact that they're more impressionable by the media than your typical teenage/adult gamer. They hear 'blazingly fast' and 'not much faster than the gamecube' and they go apeshit. They list the DS because they've seen older kids at school with them, or schoolmates with them, or they've played their friends DS, etc. You have to keep in mind that younger kids see a bunch of people with something and say "Those are cool! Everyone has one! I want one too!" rather than making a truly informed decision based on market level projections, hardware issues/points, games, etc.
As a sidenote, I like how legos are up there on the list
"What most games are more concerned about is PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii, generally in that order."
Not according to a previous slashdot article linking to gamasutra - the order should be Wii, Xbox 360, PS3.
You mean like dungeon siege? :D
Ultima Online came with a pewter UO pin and a NICE silk-screened cloth map.
That is, uh, if you bought the game back in 1998.
I miss these kind of add-ins...
"The Cell has about 20x the processing power as a Core Duo with a high-end graphics card combined"
Except it's all locked away in slow bus, streaming bit-style mini-CPUs that are harder to program for than your average chihuahua.
Great for decoding media. We'll see how great it is at doing things that require you to constantly refer back to data that you've already crunched (ie, every other application out there).
Right now I have: X-chat, 4 windows of OpenOffice, two of SodiPodi, itunes, a dice roller, ssh (putty), Notebook, two of gaim (buddy list and chat window), two of firefox (one download window, one with 8 tabs), and google talk. It was a lot worse last night. I shut some programs down this morning. Also: I hibernate my computer while I'm at work, and turn off my power-hungry 19" CRT.
My electricity is included with my apartment! :D If I'm not using it, someone else will.
"Speaking of campers, what's with people who hide under the stairs in FPS and wait for someone to walk around the corner? Are you afraid of real combat?" Real combat is about maximizing enemy losses and minimizing personal risk. They're playing the game like Ghost Recon, not like Doom. Try leaning around the corner to see if they're waiting for you. Tossing a grenade. Not being able to play the game flexibly reveals your own weaknesses.
How about a physics coprocessor instead of an entire board?
Except if you declare your doctype as XHTML. Then it renders it as HTML in quirksmode. Read here about this and other, more important issues.
Especially considering that the game is several years old.
"Think Luke after his parents were killed by stormtroopers."
:D
Try aunt & uncle - though they were parent figures.
Sorry to nitpick!
It will be better when indian tech companies start making their own products to compete with us, instead of us using indian tech companies to make our products. It will generate a maelstrom of competition, and will be better for both sectors - the Indian tech companies won't have to rely on american tech companies to hire them, and will instead focus on creating solutions that only a new industry could create: a new OS, maybe, that can take microsoft down?
Once Indian tech companies realize that they can strike it out on their own, things will be much better.
Since Opera has much experience in porting their browser to low-powered machines, I'm guessing it will be to internal memory - and since it will likely use the interface library that the Wii's OS uses, it will probably clock in at less than 3mb.
Keep in mind that they've made a version for the Nintendo DS.
"Human ears cannot hear past 20 KHz, and even that is diminished during the earliest parts of youth. Since CDs record at 44 KHz, they do in fact sample all the data."
CDs play at 44KHz, but that does not necessarily mean they were recorded at 44KHz. DAT, for example, only has a frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz.
And as has been said before, even if your human ears cannot discern frequencies above ~21KHz (Many people can hear above this, however - I've tested myself and can hear up to 27KHz), the interaction of the harmonics above 20Khz and those below 20KHz produces a much warmer, fuller sound. The imperfect reproduction of both analog and digital mediums is why going to an excellent acoustically designed auditorium for a symphony concert can never be replaced by any modern recording medium. The depth of volume and the harmonic interaction in live music still has not been overcome in modern recording medium. Perhaps if you recorded every instrument on a seperate track with a huge dynamic range, and played them through seperate (v. high end) speakers, you might be able to approximate it.
Of course, some bands just don't sound the same if all the instruments are played at the same time, instead of multitrack record studio techniques...
Google.org does not blowback money to google.com, the search engine company.
The government should do a few main things:
-make sure other people don't take my stuff, my life, or impose upon my life in a negative way.
-protect my life and the sovereignty of my country.
-make sure its populace is well-educated and healthy
-deal with the people who cross the above two in a just manner.
In doing the above in a farsighted manner, it will maintain a good quality of life through protecting our nature reserves (if we don't have nature reserves, then arguably a future generation may indeed have a lower quality of life, lack of knowledge, and a higher death rate. Education and health may well be an extrapolation of 'protect my life.'
Of course, to do all of that a huge network of laws is written, several branches of government are created, and everything gets bogged down in beaurocracy - especially if morals are the key focus of politicians.
Google's involvement with the chinese government is actually a far cry better than any other search engine - when pages are censored, it tells the user that there were results that were censored. In a devious way, it does more to increase the knowledge of government censorship in China better than showing everything.
Google is doing things with google.org that a government shouldn't have to do. And you've seen what kind of bumbling the beaurocracy does when this kind of thing is involved.
Because google's company is knowledge based, it is not beholden to the same types of shareholders as, say, an oil company. This is well shown by their work on a hybrid-electric car. And because it has shareholders, instead of throwing money at problems like poor food and water quality in developing countries, it will work to fix the causitive issues. And with the brilliant minds they have there, I have no doubt this will be extremely successful.
"Hell, if school peformance is what drives what schools get the money...they will attract students...from all races I'd think...so, it might also end the dependance we have on busing kids all around."
And the schools that do poorly get underfunded. Great way to increase the education gap. In fact, that's exactly what No Child Left Behind does.
Early nintendo power wasn't about reviews.
It was about tips and guides for games.
Pick up Nintendo Power issue 1, if you can find it. Maps of Super Mario Bros. 2, maps of Metroid, guides for slews of other games.
How about you make it so that there's actually more skill involved in combat and leveling up. Do away with levels entirely. Use a skill-based system (origional ultima online, anyone?) Make it so you can get to "slightly better than average" in under a few hours, and most of the game content can be experienced at this "slightly better than average" point. Make it so equipment doesn't have so much of a bearing on how well you fight/cast magic/whatever. (A master swordsman with a stick could probably best a neophyte with a finely weighted broadsword) Make permanent death part of the game. Utilize some inheritance system, so that you don't lose EVERYTHING when you die... and allow all your characters to share the same surname. One thing this would do: allow casual gamers to quickly and easily accomplish just about everything in the game. And those people who get -good- at the game - not those who just play it endlessly - might eventually get characters that are much more skilled than other players, and actually become famous for whatever they might do. Ideally, the player power curve would be a bell curve, with very few weak characters and very few powerful characters, but a lot of average characters - and have most of the game content focused on the average players.