Planetside was almost what you wanted, but they could never deliver the netcode to back up the kind of action they put in the game (to this day warp-strafe and other shitty netcode exploits are the tactic of choice for "elite" planetside players) and their engine was designed in a way that made updating the maps a monumental pain in the ass (which is pretty fail for an MMO developer, they should have known they'd be wanting to do that on a regular basis and ensured it was supported as a core functionality of the engine).
I have hopes that someday we'll see a planetside-type game in a fantasy world (like you said, with leveling = versatility and gameplay being teamplay/skill/brainpower based). That could be very fun.
My first real programming language (after having done a little bit of stuff in Pascal and BASIC) was LPC, the C variant used on LPmuds. Man that shit was fun. I started out hacking out copy paste areas and ended up re-writing the entire mudlib from scratch (with backwards compatibility).
I tried it and didn't find it very fun. Then again I didn't like the hack games either, and I know a lot of people love those. Lately I haven't really been enjoying much of anything though, so maybe I've just become old and embittered.
The real problem is that people judge a game based on its production quality. Having a diverse amount of play environments (zones or levels or instances or whatever you're using), having a decent amount of different ways of playing the game (classes, skills, what have you) and pretty graphics to show them off, etc. All of this means resources, and while you can use things like procedural content generation and randomizers to help pack as much fun as you can into the game, it is still hard to compete with something like WOW that has a brazillion dollars thrown at it on a daily basis.
Of course, you can always pick a genre that doesn't require a huge amount of art assets and can be expanded and supported by a small team, like EVE, and do great. Trying to compete in the fantasy genre is going to be really hard, and sadly thats what people like.
Honestly, cops waste their own time often enough that having people call 911 for shit that they aren't really sure about but just looks weird is really not a big deal. If cops have time to go around giving parking tickets for "parked facing the wrong way" on a residential street (like they do in my city), they have time to go check some shit out and see if its dangerous. In fact, if you talk to the police in some places (especially the quieter, more suburban or middle class areas without a lot of crime) the police actually wish people would call 911 more often when they saw weird shit.
Obama's anti-gun tendencies, eh? Go ahead and post your bullshit links to conspiracy fantasies on right wing blogs about that tired line. He's letting people bring guns into national parks but I guess thats anti-gun if you're a brainwashed ditto head. Not to mention the people who are bringing guns to protests outside his speaking venues with absolutely no retaliation, something Bush would have never allowed (hell, he wouldn't even allow protesters to be within sight of his travel routes, putting them in "free speech zones" as far away as he could manage). Hyperventilating right wing hypocrites sicken me.
Many small businesses start this way, with people maxing out credit cards and borrowing money from friends and family in order to get started. Many fail, too. Some don't. Richard Linklater got his start in this fashion and saw some reasonable success.
If you want flavorful red meat, I suggest buffalo. It costs more, but the flavor is unbeatable. I haven't bought beef (with the exception of roast beef for sandwhiches, and I've even stopped that) in more than a year once I discovered that my local supermarket started carrying buffalo.
Well shit, why didn't someone tell me John Fucking Emsley said I shouldn't eat organic. Sorry guys, this comment would be longer but if I don't go eat a McBurger right now, 2 billion people might DIE.
After seeing them systematically slaughter every one of Heinlein's books they made into movies during the 90's, I'm not sure I want to see them ruin "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" as well. I mean, how the fuck do you make a Starship Troopers movie with no power armor?
You can't make Ender's game unless you do it animated. Imagine a movie about young children (5-9 year olds) with one or two adults in the whole thing that is as bloody and violent and stuff as what Card originally wrote. They'll either turn it into Spy Kids vs. Buggers or they'll bump up the ages of everyone to high school age and then cast a bunch of young twentysomethings to play the characters. Think Shia Labouf as "18 year old" Ender Wiggin.
No, Ender's Game, if it is ever made, needs to be a totally CGI movie, and ideally it'd be 3D for those battle room scenes (imagine the vertigo of "the enemy gate is down" in digital 3D). Sadly, if they ever do it they'll fuck it up even worse than they fucked up Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters.
If you still want a real live bar fight, I guarantee you that you can find a bar that will meet your needs. Probably within walking distance of wherever you happen to live.
Please do not think that the behavior of most people who call themselves Christians is indicative of the content of the Bible. Many people use the Church as a social club to further their own worldly goals. Instead, read the Bible (it's not much longer than Atlas Shrugged, which you should also read BTW) with an open mind and see whether or not you agree that it is a better way to go about living.
Wow, trying to sell the Bible AND Atlas Shrugged in the same paragraph? Epic troll. Unless you're seriously advocating genocide, slavery, and the kind of economic policies that would utterly destroy the civilization you spent the first part of your post praising. I guess this is slashdot so it could be either.
Hah, try Stross. Halting State has what looks to me like a pretty damn good prediction for what AR games would be like a decade or two down the line. I can't wait to sign up for SPOOKS.
It occurs to me that injecting CO2 into the ground to store it could have some interesting side effects. Many caves are carved as carbonic acid eats away at cracks in the rocks. Mix CO2 with groundwater and wait a few million years and you have yourself some nice artificial cave systems.
Hmm. Ok, how about this: is it wrong to buffalo free range graze and then collect their manure for use as fuel and fertilizer? They enjoy the activity, it allows them to continue functioning, and we get something directly useful out of it. I know they're not considered 'sentient,' but if we have a role that needs to be filled that requires some level of sentience, wouldn't in fact be MORE wrong to cause the artificial being we create to fill that role NOT enjoy it?
The other, more obvious answer to your scenario is that once again your propisition fails due to a false equivalence. A sentient machine designed to enjoy doing some sort of repetitive, tedious work (maintaining an acre of farmland, perhaps) would be better than a sentient machine forced to do so but not enjoying it. The machine is designed from the ground up to have a specific function and to enjoy performing it. Your "addict someone to drugs" scenario is different because humans are not built from the ground up to do whatever you're forcing them to do. Our desires, needs, values, and priorities are different than those of a machine intelligence.
I really don't see a problem as long as the robot is happy, except the problem that people have when they anthromorphize something and then empathize with its "plight" based on false assumptions.
Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?
Is it wrong to enslave something if you can empirically prove that it consents and even finds joy in serving (say, by inspecting its source code)? The purpose behind our moral rejection of slavery is that we know that in general people do not wish to be enslaved. This reasoning doesn't automatically extend to an artificial being who has been created to actively find joy and pleasure in serving humans.
Anecdotal evidence time: My family's panasonic microwave that we bought around 1986 or so has only just recently been replaced, and not because it broke down, it just wasn't heating quite as quickly as my mother liked so she decided to replace it. The cheap piece of crap she replaced it with will probably last five years and need to be trashed. Planned obsolescense is, sadly, very real and part of the same Wall Street culture that gave you the current financial crisis, the real estate boom, the S&L scandal, and the dot com crash. There is a good article here that I highly recommend about the practice and how it is being pushed not just by the manufacturers but also by the retailers. You can get another piece of the puzzle here, in an article about how the CEO of CostCo resists pressure from Wal Street (you know, that was a typo but I decided to leave it... shit, now I'm going to have to fire up the gimp when I'm done posting this comment) to drive "growth" at the expense of his employees or the quality of the store (not that CostCo is perfect by any means, still a good article and worth a read though).
Slashdot Mirror
Planetside was almost what you wanted, but they could never deliver the netcode to back up the kind of action they put in the game (to this day warp-strafe and other shitty netcode exploits are the tactic of choice for "elite" planetside players) and their engine was designed in a way that made updating the maps a monumental pain in the ass (which is pretty fail for an MMO developer, they should have known they'd be wanting to do that on a regular basis and ensured it was supported as a core functionality of the engine).
I have hopes that someday we'll see a planetside-type game in a fantasy world (like you said, with leveling = versatility and gameplay being teamplay/skill/brainpower based). That could be very fun.
My first real programming language (after having done a little bit of stuff in Pascal and BASIC) was LPC, the C variant used on LPmuds. Man that shit was fun. I started out hacking out copy paste areas and ended up re-writing the entire mudlib from scratch (with backwards compatibility).
I tried it and didn't find it very fun. Then again I didn't like the hack games either, and I know a lot of people love those. Lately I haven't really been enjoying much of anything though, so maybe I've just become old and embittered.
The new USA modo.
I think you meant motto.
The real problem is that people judge a game based on its production quality. Having a diverse amount of play environments (zones or levels or instances or whatever you're using), having a decent amount of different ways of playing the game (classes, skills, what have you) and pretty graphics to show them off, etc. All of this means resources, and while you can use things like procedural content generation and randomizers to help pack as much fun as you can into the game, it is still hard to compete with something like WOW that has a brazillion dollars thrown at it on a daily basis.
Of course, you can always pick a genre that doesn't require a huge amount of art assets and can be expanded and supported by a small team, like EVE, and do great. Trying to compete in the fantasy genre is going to be really hard, and sadly thats what people like.
Honestly, cops waste their own time often enough that having people call 911 for shit that they aren't really sure about but just looks weird is really not a big deal. If cops have time to go around giving parking tickets for "parked facing the wrong way" on a residential street (like they do in my city), they have time to go check some shit out and see if its dangerous. In fact, if you talk to the police in some places (especially the quieter, more suburban or middle class areas without a lot of crime) the police actually wish people would call 911 more often when they saw weird shit.
Obama's anti-gun tendencies, eh? Go ahead and post your bullshit links to conspiracy fantasies on right wing blogs about that tired line. He's letting people bring guns into national parks but I guess thats anti-gun if you're a brainwashed ditto head. Not to mention the people who are bringing guns to protests outside his speaking venues with absolutely no retaliation, something Bush would have never allowed (hell, he wouldn't even allow protesters to be within sight of his travel routes, putting them in "free speech zones" as far away as he could manage). Hyperventilating right wing hypocrites sicken me.
Many small businesses start this way, with people maxing out credit cards and borrowing money from friends and family in order to get started. Many fail, too. Some don't. Richard Linklater got his start in this fashion and saw some reasonable success.
Then think of it more as the cheerleaders suddenly dissapear and are replaced by the special ed. band geeks.
Oh, and since I am a merciful DM, rocks fall and everyone dies.
Or could it just be that powerpoint culture is seeping out at the edges and contaminating everything it touches with bulleted lists?
Who DOESN'T want to be a little girl!?
If you want flavorful red meat, I suggest buffalo. It costs more, but the flavor is unbeatable. I haven't bought beef (with the exception of roast beef for sandwhiches, and I've even stopped that) in more than a year once I discovered that my local supermarket started carrying buffalo.
Well shit, why didn't someone tell me John Fucking Emsley said I shouldn't eat organic. Sorry guys, this comment would be longer but if I don't go eat a McBurger right now, 2 billion people might DIE.
Something dumber than Asteroids: The Movie.
No problem.
Food Channel Independent Movies Presents,
a Richard Linklater film,
Ben Afflek in:
Burger Time, the Movie
After seeing them systematically slaughter every one of Heinlein's books they made into movies during the 90's, I'm not sure I want to see them ruin "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" as well. I mean, how the fuck do you make a Starship Troopers movie with no power armor?
Fuck that, I want to see Tradewars the movie.
Jack Black: No dude, I wasn't running contraband through your sector, these are, uh, fishalotta. Yeah, they're luxury goods!
The Rock: All right, I'll let you go this time trader scum!
You can't make Ender's game unless you do it animated. Imagine a movie about young children (5-9 year olds) with one or two adults in the whole thing that is as bloody and violent and stuff as what Card originally wrote. They'll either turn it into Spy Kids vs. Buggers or they'll bump up the ages of everyone to high school age and then cast a bunch of young twentysomethings to play the characters. Think Shia Labouf as "18 year old" Ender Wiggin.
No, Ender's Game, if it is ever made, needs to be a totally CGI movie, and ideally it'd be 3D for those battle room scenes (imagine the vertigo of "the enemy gate is down" in digital 3D). Sadly, if they ever do it they'll fuck it up even worse than they fucked up Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters.
If you still want a real live bar fight, I guarantee you that you can find a bar that will meet your needs. Probably within walking distance of wherever you happen to live.
You obviously don't live in suburban Texas.
Please do not think that the behavior of most people who call themselves Christians is indicative of the content of the Bible. Many people use the Church as a social club to further their own worldly goals. Instead, read the Bible (it's not much longer than Atlas Shrugged, which you should also read BTW) with an open mind and see whether or not you agree that it is a better way to go about living.
Wow, trying to sell the Bible AND Atlas Shrugged in the same paragraph? Epic troll. Unless you're seriously advocating genocide, slavery, and the kind of economic policies that would utterly destroy the civilization you spent the first part of your post praising. I guess this is slashdot so it could be either.
Hah, try Stross. Halting State has what looks to me like a pretty damn good prediction for what AR games would be like a decade or two down the line. I can't wait to sign up for SPOOKS.
It occurs to me that injecting CO2 into the ground to store it could have some interesting side effects. Many caves are carved as carbonic acid eats away at cracks in the rocks. Mix CO2 with groundwater and wait a few million years and you have yourself some nice artificial cave systems.
It is thinking like yours that got us into this mess in the first place.
Hmm. Ok, how about this: is it wrong to buffalo free range graze and then collect their manure for use as fuel and fertilizer? They enjoy the activity, it allows them to continue functioning, and we get something directly useful out of it. I know they're not considered 'sentient,' but if we have a role that needs to be filled that requires some level of sentience, wouldn't in fact be MORE wrong to cause the artificial being we create to fill that role NOT enjoy it?
The other, more obvious answer to your scenario is that once again your propisition fails due to a false equivalence. A sentient machine designed to enjoy doing some sort of repetitive, tedious work (maintaining an acre of farmland, perhaps) would be better than a sentient machine forced to do so but not enjoying it. The machine is designed from the ground up to have a specific function and to enjoy performing it. Your "addict someone to drugs" scenario is different because humans are not built from the ground up to do whatever you're forcing them to do. Our desires, needs, values, and priorities are different than those of a machine intelligence.
I really don't see a problem as long as the robot is happy, except the problem that people have when they anthromorphize something and then empathize with its "plight" based on false assumptions.
Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?
Is it wrong to enslave something if you can empirically prove that it consents and even finds joy in serving (say, by inspecting its source code)? The purpose behind our moral rejection of slavery is that we know that in general people do not wish to be enslaved. This reasoning doesn't automatically extend to an artificial being who has been created to actively find joy and pleasure in serving humans.
Anecdotal evidence time: My family's panasonic microwave that we bought around 1986 or so has only just recently been replaced, and not because it broke down, it just wasn't heating quite as quickly as my mother liked so she decided to replace it. The cheap piece of crap she replaced it with will probably last five years and need to be trashed. Planned obsolescense is, sadly, very real and part of the same Wall Street culture that gave you the current financial crisis, the real estate boom, the S&L scandal, and the dot com crash. There is a good article here that I highly recommend about the practice and how it is being pushed not just by the manufacturers but also by the retailers. You can get another piece of the puzzle here, in an article about how the CEO of CostCo resists pressure from Wal Street (you know, that was a typo but I decided to leave it... shit, now I'm going to have to fire up the gimp when I'm done posting this comment) to drive "growth" at the expense of his employees or the quality of the store (not that CostCo is perfect by any means, still a good article and worth a read though).