Or even swashbuckkling/pirate style in a postapocolyptic dark scifi universe, focusing on ship combat and boarding. Say that most projectile weapons in the person-to-person combat are infeasible because of the likelyhood to pierce the hull of the ship the battle is taking place in.
Ship-to-ship combat may be equipment based (and to some extent, player skill based), but boarding would involve player-skill melee combat.
Or maybe I'm just being a moron, I really don't know. It seemed a good idea at the time.
As AO amply demonstrated, the whole Sci-Fi themed RPG on a computer doesn't work out so well, and ends up being pretty silly.
No, they just proved the Sci-Fi themed RPG they made didn't work out so well. Knights of the Old Republic is Sci-Fi, as is Fallout. Deus-Ex is Sci-Fi, but albeit with FPS elements.
AO was poor implementation of a poorly designed universe with poor players. It by no means dictates that the Sci-Fi setting is not viable for an RPG (or a MMPORPG for that matter).
Years and years ago, when I was on dial-up with a local provider (nando.net, which was bought out by mindspring, which was bought out by earthlink), my family received a letter similar to this. We were paying for unlimited access, sure, but that didn't mean that we could use the 12+ hours a day we were connected. We curtailed it for a little bit, but went back to our habits and nothing happened. This isn't a new trend.
Just set up launchers on a *nix desktop with different scripts which burn different isos. Have a desklet with burning instructions on it, or have a piece of paper tacked up next to the computer. Have a chart with what launcher burns what, and what that cd will do for them. voila.
What scares me is that the schools are actually teaching and using PowerPoint!
I just got finished with a CIS110 class (it has bored me to tears; the lab instructor spent two weeks instructing us on how to copy files and create folders in windows). The only reason I'm taking this class is because it is a prerequisit for high performance computing (which involves clustering *nix boxes and such).
The last unit in the lab section of the course was power point. Our project was to compare the pros and cons of different websites on the same subject, create a power point presentation, and present it to the class. I was appalled at not only how many people had absolutely ugly and overly complicated slides, but also how many people missed the entire point of the presentation - half the class simply did a little this-is-a-little-about-my-subject presentation, citing a few websites on the last slide. Not only that, but several people stood up there, facing the projector's screen, reading word for word the slides they had written.
It is not my conclusion that powerpoint makes people dumb; it is my conclusion that people are dumb, and giving them powerpoint is like giving a blind man paintbrushes or a digital camera.
From what I've been able to gather, the EULA for Rainbow Six 3 says you canNOT make a backup copy.
This, however, does not circumvent state copyright laws that provide one copy for backup purposes. If the EULA is contradicted by state law, as far as I know, the state law takes precidence.
What's sad, is that while BioWare kept the IP to Neverwinter Nights, et al, Black Isle Studios' developers have lost the Fallout title.
Hopefully they reform an independant development house, and make more great games for us to enjoy..
Until then, godspeed to BIS.. my wishes are with them this holiday season. I would go out and buy a copy of Fallout/Fallout2 bundled set from [insert local game dealer that would carry it here], but I'm sure the good folks at BIS would never see a cent of that.
What gets me as moronic on Interplay's part, though, is the fact that they're planning to make a sequel to Fallout Brotherhood of Steel. You know, that X-Box shooter title that barely deserves a Fallout name. The one that people have been banned from the official boards for pointing out serious flaws in the design, and seperation from the fallout franchise while keeping its name. The one that's likely to get one of those 15% ratings.
Meenwhile, Fallout 3 was the only one in the franchise that could have been released by xmas next year (at the latest, anyways). From what I understand, they were more than half way through developing the title. A title that's been rumored about and talked about everywhere from No Mutants Allowed to the official Interplay boards. A game that lots and lots of people, I'm sure, would enjoy.
They dumped it because it wasn't console. (When they conceivably could have easily made it for both xbox and pc..)
They got shut down because the suits over at Interplay sat down and thought through a dialog most likely similiar to this:
Exec 1: How well did our last Fallout game sell?
Exec 2: Fallout Tactics did not sell very well at all.
Exec 3: We also project that console sales are more useful than PC game sales.
Exec 1: Why are we developing fallout for PC then?
Exec 3: We aren't, we're making a game named after fallout, loosely based on fallout, that a majority of fallout fans hate - for console.
Exec 2: That'll make us money.
Exec 1: Great, then why do we have these people over at Black Isle making a fallout sequel that isn't likely to succeed, given the success rate of.. oh wait, RPGs are doing pretty well.
Exec 2 & 3: Huh? We have an RPG fallout game in development? That'll go nowhere.
Exec 1: alright, we'll shut them down. And right before christmas.. that's their punishment for thinking an rpg could sell well when the sales of games like Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights are abysmally low.
Fallout fans: *commits seppuku*
*flies his flag at half mast to mourn the loss of BIS*
Heh, reminds me of the campus labs at my school.
The computers read from the server when they boot up, so every time you boot you get a fresh image. This is annoying if you want something like xchat or mozilla to stay installed (they have netscape and IE.. morons).. but nice for spyware.
The first thing I do whenever I hop on one of those pieces of crap is reboot it, especially if it's late in the day. There will usually be about 4 different search bars, gator, bonzi buddy, and countless crap running in the system tray.
The first thing I do when I reboot it, is install the google toolbar into IE and disable feedback. Future users not smart enough to use netscape instead (hey, it's better than IE) are at least saved from popups.
It's amazing how much utter crap the average university student will download and install onto their computer. If this is the next generation of suits... god help us all.
..and still more expensive than a lot of the competition. You'd think the price would go down over two years.
The features are nice, the design is nice.
But like all of Apple's hardware, it's just too expensive to justify the buy.
The segway patent is on a self-balancing scooter, I do believe.
This isn't a scooter, it's a unicycle.;) Show me a one-wheeled scooter, and maybe I'd believe the argument..
Plus, scooters are generally used standing up, not sitting down.
it's not terrible. It's not unusable. but it's starting to look pretty rusty compared to some of the other stuff out there, and a lot of things about it need to be / can be improved.
I'm not very knowledgable about the inner workings of X, but I can tell you this:
Running at 1280x1024 and gnome 2.4, my x server already routinely uses around 100mb of memory (around what you're estimating it would take with all windows kept in memory). This isn't a big deal for me, since i have 640mb. But still, it is a lot. X, by the way, maps your video ram as system ram, so if it's taking up 120mb in top, and you have a 64mb card, it's actually only taking up about 56mb of main memory.
With vector graphics up and coming, along with vertex and pixel shading technology, I can see GUIs taking a huge step. If the GUI is, for example, OpenGL based... vector graphics won't take up texture memory, they will simply use geometry memory. I can see much more efficient GUIs based on OpenGL + hardware + vectors than ever possible with traditional software + raster.
I've held three jobs over the past five years (changed jobs all three times because of pay difference, not due to misconduct on my part), and hold an A+ certification. Portland is probably a little bit different than the Research Triangle at the moment. Tech stores aren't even giving options of requesting and turning in job applications here; they simply are not hiring. In fact, most of the computer retail stores I have talked to have been laying employees off.
Actually, they aren't. I've been searching for a decent job (ie, not at a movie theater) for the past two years. None of the technology stores have been hiring. We don't have Frys here (research triangle), but we have Intrex, Jano, and a few other smaller companies. None of which are hiring - even people with A+ certs (which imho after taking the training are rather useless, as it's all based on 2-3 year old technology...) are turned down. Partially because a lot of the big telecom flushes hit us hard in this area, and a lot of those people are also looking for tech jobs.. it's just hard for college students like me to get a decent job. Grocery stores, movie theaters, fast food are always hiring. But technology stores like Frys and Best Buy rarely hire for their high tech sectors. Not only has the economy hit laid off tech workers hard, it's hitting up-and-coming tech workers hard. I may have a primary interest in art, but that doesn't mean I don't know a scsi cable from a sata cable. By forcing skilled tech workers to be under-employed at mid-tech retail jobs, the next generation of techies is being pushed out of the job market as well.
Or perhaps do away with NPC adversaries entirely, and have the entire level treadmill consist of fighting other players. Of course, for this to be successful, you must get experience with actual experience, not with combat victories. (think about it like this: usually you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes)
Of course, this forks away from the 'level treadmill' and lands on the uncharted land of skill-based gaming.. but oh wait! It's not uncharted. UO did it. And did it well. (the problem was, after you GM'd your character out, there was nothing to do besides get more phat lewt. this is where the story and stuff could come in, though it doesn't right now).
I used to play UO. Hell, I beta tested it, like I've beta tested just about every other MMPORPG out there (the only exception is DAoC). I quit about a year after it was released... it was by far the longest hold any of these games had on me. This was in the Dread Lord days, when you had to be careful who you associated with. Keep in mind, I wasn't one of these people.. but this sense of adventure and danger really enhanced the game for me. DAoC's RvR sort of put this in, but it was nerfed and pointless. Capture the flag to what end? So your realm could gain access to the super-duper dungeon? Lame. What MMPORPGs need is an excitement factor, and less of the camping factor. And more of the story factor. There's a good article that's about a year old on Gamasutra about putting stories into mmporpgs. (free reg. required)
"claims to be the... only 64-bit processor for the desktop and workstation market"
Whatever happened to SGI machines with MIPS RISC chips? AFAIK, the O2 had 64bit processors. They may not be as fast as a G5, but they were still 64 bit.
with a soundblaster 16 isa, and a trident 2mb video card. I use it to play all my old games on... it certainly brings back the nostalgia, being able to play ultima 7, ultima underworld, and other older games that are nearly impossible to get working under windows.
I'm thinking about picking up an old sgi indy machine for fun, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I don't think waterworld involved space pirates... ;)
Or even swashbuckkling/pirate style in a postapocolyptic dark scifi universe, focusing on ship combat and boarding. Say that most projectile weapons in the person-to-person combat are infeasible because of the likelyhood to pierce the hull of the ship the battle is taking place in. Ship-to-ship combat may be equipment based (and to some extent, player skill based), but boarding would involve player-skill melee combat. Or maybe I'm just being a moron, I really don't know. It seemed a good idea at the time.
As AO amply demonstrated, the whole Sci-Fi themed RPG on a computer doesn't work out so well, and ends up being pretty silly.
No, they just proved the Sci-Fi themed RPG they made didn't work out so well. Knights of the Old Republic is Sci-Fi, as is Fallout. Deus-Ex is Sci-Fi, but albeit with FPS elements.
AO was poor implementation of a poorly designed universe with poor players. It by no means dictates that the Sci-Fi setting is not viable for an RPG (or a MMPORPG for that matter).
Years and years ago, when I was on dial-up with a local provider (nando.net, which was bought out by mindspring, which was bought out by earthlink), my family received a letter similar to this. We were paying for unlimited access, sure, but that didn't mean that we could use the 12+ hours a day we were connected. We curtailed it for a little bit, but went back to our habits and nothing happened. This isn't a new trend.
Just set up launchers on a *nix desktop with different scripts which burn different isos. Have a desklet with burning instructions on it, or have a piece of paper tacked up next to the computer. Have a chart with what launcher burns what, and what that cd will do for them. voila.
What scares me is that the schools are actually teaching and using PowerPoint!
I just got finished with a CIS110 class (it has bored me to tears; the lab instructor spent two weeks instructing us on how to copy files and create folders in windows). The only reason I'm taking this class is because it is a prerequisit for high performance computing (which involves clustering *nix boxes and such).
The last unit in the lab section of the course was power point. Our project was to compare the pros and cons of different websites on the same subject, create a power point presentation, and present it to the class. I was appalled at not only how many people had absolutely ugly and overly complicated slides, but also how many people missed the entire point of the presentation - half the class simply did a little this-is-a-little-about-my-subject presentation, citing a few websites on the last slide. Not only that, but several people stood up there, facing the projector's screen, reading word for word the slides they had written.
It is not my conclusion that powerpoint makes people dumb; it is my conclusion that people are dumb, and giving them powerpoint is like giving a blind man paintbrushes or a digital camera.
From what I've been able to gather, the EULA for Rainbow Six 3 says you canNOT make a backup copy.
This, however, does not circumvent state copyright laws that provide one copy for backup purposes. If the EULA is contradicted by state law, as far as I know, the state law takes precidence.
What's sad, is that while BioWare kept the IP to Neverwinter Nights, et al, Black Isle Studios' developers have lost the Fallout title. Hopefully they reform an independant development house, and make more great games for us to enjoy.. Until then, godspeed to BIS.. my wishes are with them this holiday season. I would go out and buy a copy of Fallout/Fallout2 bundled set from [insert local game dealer that would carry it here], but I'm sure the good folks at BIS would never see a cent of that.
What gets me as moronic on Interplay's part, though, is the fact that they're planning to make a sequel to Fallout Brotherhood of Steel. You know, that X-Box shooter title that barely deserves a Fallout name. The one that people have been banned from the official boards for pointing out serious flaws in the design, and seperation from the fallout franchise while keeping its name. The one that's likely to get one of those 15% ratings. Meenwhile, Fallout 3 was the only one in the franchise that could have been released by xmas next year (at the latest, anyways). From what I understand, they were more than half way through developing the title. A title that's been rumored about and talked about everywhere from No Mutants Allowed to the official Interplay boards. A game that lots and lots of people, I'm sure, would enjoy. They dumped it because it wasn't console. (When they conceivably could have easily made it for both xbox and pc..)
They got shut down because the suits over at Interplay sat down and thought through a dialog most likely similiar to this:
.. oh wait, RPGs are doing pretty well.
Exec 1: How well did our last Fallout game sell?
Exec 2: Fallout Tactics did not sell very well at all.
Exec 3: We also project that console sales are more useful than PC game sales.
Exec 1: Why are we developing fallout for PC then?
Exec 3: We aren't, we're making a game named after fallout, loosely based on fallout, that a majority of fallout fans hate - for console.
Exec 2: That'll make us money.
Exec 1: Great, then why do we have these people over at Black Isle making a fallout sequel that isn't likely to succeed, given the success rate of
Exec 2 & 3: Huh? We have an RPG fallout game in development? That'll go nowhere.
Exec 1: alright, we'll shut them down. And right before christmas.. that's their punishment for thinking an rpg could sell well when the sales of games like Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights are abysmally low.
Fallout fans: *commits seppuku*
*flies his flag at half mast to mourn the loss of BIS*
Heh, reminds me of the campus labs at my school. The computers read from the server when they boot up, so every time you boot you get a fresh image. This is annoying if you want something like xchat or mozilla to stay installed (they have netscape and IE.. morons).. but nice for spyware. The first thing I do whenever I hop on one of those pieces of crap is reboot it, especially if it's late in the day. There will usually be about 4 different search bars, gator, bonzi buddy, and countless crap running in the system tray. The first thing I do when I reboot it, is install the google toolbar into IE and disable feedback. Future users not smart enough to use netscape instead (hey, it's better than IE) are at least saved from popups. It's amazing how much utter crap the average university student will download and install onto their computer. If this is the next generation of suits... god help us all.
..and still more expensive than a lot of the competition. You'd think the price would go down over two years. The features are nice, the design is nice. But like all of Apple's hardware, it's just too expensive to justify the buy.
The segway patent is on a self-balancing scooter, I do believe. This isn't a scooter, it's a unicycle. ;) Show me a one-wheeled scooter, and maybe I'd believe the argument..
Plus, scooters are generally used standing up, not sitting down.
it's not terrible. It's not unusable. but it's starting to look pretty rusty compared to some of the other stuff out there, and a lot of things about it need to be / can be improved.
I'm not very knowledgable about the inner workings of X, but I can tell you this:
Running at 1280x1024 and gnome 2.4, my x server already routinely uses around 100mb of memory (around what you're estimating it would take with all windows kept in memory). This isn't a big deal for me, since i have 640mb. But still, it is a lot. X, by the way, maps your video ram as system ram, so if it's taking up 120mb in top, and you have a 64mb card, it's actually only taking up about 56mb of main memory.
With vector graphics up and coming, along with vertex and pixel shading technology, I can see GUIs taking a huge step. If the GUI is, for example, OpenGL based... vector graphics won't take up texture memory, they will simply use geometry memory. I can see much more efficient GUIs based on OpenGL + hardware + vectors than ever possible with traditional software + raster.
Hard to go where the jobs are when I'm enrolled in college :P
I've held three jobs over the past five years (changed jobs all three times because of pay difference, not due to misconduct on my part), and hold an A+ certification. Portland is probably a little bit different than the Research Triangle at the moment. Tech stores aren't even giving options of requesting and turning in job applications here; they simply are not hiring. In fact, most of the computer retail stores I have talked to have been laying employees off.
Actually, they aren't. I've been searching for a decent job (ie, not at a movie theater) for the past two years. None of the technology stores have been hiring. We don't have Frys here (research triangle), but we have Intrex, Jano, and a few other smaller companies. None of which are hiring - even people with A+ certs (which imho after taking the training are rather useless, as it's all based on 2-3 year old technology...) are turned down. Partially because a lot of the big telecom flushes hit us hard in this area, and a lot of those people are also looking for tech jobs.. it's just hard for college students like me to get a decent job. Grocery stores, movie theaters, fast food are always hiring. But technology stores like Frys and Best Buy rarely hire for their high tech sectors. Not only has the economy hit laid off tech workers hard, it's hitting up-and-coming tech workers hard. I may have a primary interest in art, but that doesn't mean I don't know a scsi cable from a sata cable. By forcing skilled tech workers to be under-employed at mid-tech retail jobs, the next generation of techies is being pushed out of the job market as well.
Or perhaps do away with NPC adversaries entirely, and have the entire level treadmill consist of fighting other players. Of course, for this to be successful, you must get experience with actual experience, not with combat victories. (think about it like this: usually you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes) Of course, this forks away from the 'level treadmill' and lands on the uncharted land of skill-based gaming.. but oh wait! It's not uncharted. UO did it. And did it well. (the problem was, after you GM'd your character out, there was nothing to do besides get more phat lewt. this is where the story and stuff could come in, though it doesn't right now).
I used to play UO. Hell, I beta tested it, like I've beta tested just about every other MMPORPG out there (the only exception is DAoC). I quit about a year after it was released... it was by far the longest hold any of these games had on me. This was in the Dread Lord days, when you had to be careful who you associated with. Keep in mind, I wasn't one of these people.. but this sense of adventure and danger really enhanced the game for me. DAoC's RvR sort of put this in, but it was nerfed and pointless. Capture the flag to what end? So your realm could gain access to the super-duper dungeon? Lame. What MMPORPGs need is an excitement factor, and less of the camping factor. And more of the story factor. There's a good article that's about a year old on Gamasutra about putting stories into mmporpgs. (free reg. required)
Use a server operating system that doesn't need to be rebooted when patched.
Car companies are paying them not to :( Curse our petrolium-driven economy.
"claims to be the ... only 64-bit processor for the desktop and workstation market"
Whatever happened to SGI machines with MIPS RISC chips? AFAIK, the O2 had 64bit processors. They may not be as fast as a G5, but they were still 64 bit.
oh, i forgot to mention the old DG Eclipse machine they have at a company I sometimes do freelance work for.. though I don't really own that, huh.
with a soundblaster 16 isa, and a trident 2mb video card. I use it to play all my old games on... it certainly brings back the nostalgia, being able to play ultima 7, ultima underworld, and other older games that are nearly impossible to get working under windows. I'm thinking about picking up an old sgi indy machine for fun, though.