Curious... Apple don't actually make TFT's, they just rebrand them. Who are they buying their gear from, so I can just buy direct from source, get a great monitor at a great price and without being stuck with the little fruit icon?
Usually Apple buys displays from Sony or Mitsubishi, these being in the upper echelons of display quality, certainly in the CRT space. I bet Sony has a great TFT display of equal quality to the Apple rebrand, and even with Sony's inflated pricing it'd be cheaper.
The MMORPG is here to stay! And here's another one. This one of course is a biggie.
But what will happen in the market?
Will all the EQ players upgrade to EQ2?
Will nobody upgrade to EQ2?
Or will all the players feel rich and buy time on both EQ and EQ2?
What about all the other MMORPG's coming out? Will they steal time off EQ? Is the MMORPG market saturated yet?
And, here's the one I really want to know about, will the open source community make their own sleek, efficient and free MMORPG that runs efficiently on a 286?
I played MOO3. God what a tedious game. It was incredibly complex. The menus were very deeply nested. Micromanagement was theoretically possible, but incredibly impracticle if you want to make it to the next game turn.
Furthermore, of course, with games like MOO, careful micromanagement is decisive in winning the game on any serious difficulty level.
Fleet management was also impractical to micromanage. Too much effort went into complicating things that were previously straightforward.
Want to build a big ship and go attack the enemy? No, you can't. First you need to go design a ship (or pick one that the AI has designed badly for you). That used to be simple in MOO, now it's complicated doing that as well. Then you need to build it.
Great, you've got a huge new warship. Where is it? It's hiding in some inactive group thingy that you have to click everywhere to try and find. Found it? Want to attack now? Too bad. Now you have to build a "fleet". That's right, a fleet isn't just a bunch of ships anymore! It's even more complicated than designing a single ship! But you only have one ship, and that's not a fleet? Sorry kids. This is MOO3, and a single ship isn't anything until it's in a fleet.
So you build a fleet. You need to decide how big the fleet is, what it's purpose is, what ships are in the fleet, and where the ships are supposed to position themselves when they're in the fleet. Then you can try and add your ship into the fleet! Hooray! But you can't do that until you've made sure that your fleet is completely full, if it's not, you can't do anything with it yet.
Then you get to attack.
In MOO, you had to select the ship and then right click the planet you wanted it to go to. If there was another ship there from the enemy, they'd fight. Just as a comparison.
I get this godawful graphics corruption when in the cockpit. Having said that I've shifted to an Athlon64 now with a shiny new mainboard and all the other accoutrements (same video card though). I should give it another shot.
And some of these "drugs" include the leafy THC variety, which has known medicinal purposes and is legal in many places around the world because of the clear benefits, especially to the blind and for people with painful cancer.
Sometimes just because something is illegal, doesn't mean it's wrong. As a matter of fact, if any of these groups were doing this for profit, I'd say they were worse than drug dealers. But that isn't the case.
It's been literally years since Lucasarts did a space combat sim. The last one they made was X-Wing:Alliance or something, which was a story based game running a really recent rev. of the X-Wing engine. Unfortunately the game doesn't run under Windows XP with an nVidia graphics adapter, and LucasArts haven't bothered maintaining it after all these years. Can't blame them, though.
Star Wars: Rebellion was a MOO style game that was completely underrated, it looks like there are no plans to release an updated game (possibly because of the tepid reception from the new and horribly aborted Master of Orion 3?)
Of course, now there's a new X-Wing style game, and you have to buy Galaxies and pay a monthly subscription fee just to play it. Typical.
What this has to do with Hyperspace however is completely subjective, because just about all the physics of the Star Wars universe is about as cohesive as the continuity in Star Trek.
It's ICQ I've got my eye on. ICQ is functionally differentiated from the other IM clients because of it's independently developed background, so it's got some features that are wholly unlike any other service, namely:
-Servers cache undelivered messages for later delivery -Random user finding capability -Loads of plugin support for the client
Of course Trillian supports some of these features by virtue of connecting to the same servers, and I find Trillian has matured enough to become the true ruler of all IM clients simply because it's cross platform.
Ahh, a set of API's that would allow PS/2 games to run seamlessly on Linux. That would be a coup, allright.
But, let's run with this idea, if Sony were to decide there was some profit in making such API's, how would they do it?
The problem with open sourcing the APIs is that it's next to impossible to stop microsoft or anyone else from adapting it to work with a different O/S. Sony's not the kind of company to embrace "open" anyway. Just look at how much proprietary they pump out!
So that means you'll presumably have to pay money for these APIs. Maybe even as much as it would cost to buy a PS/2 in the first place. Not to mention the high rates of piracy that would follow along.
I think DirectX compatibility would be the killer app for Linux, but unfortunately that's the absolute last thing Microsoft wants, especially in an era where the gaming comes first and the big bucks of business follow. Microsoft won't allow it and the technical challenges seem like they're insurmountable.
You could quite conceivably do this. You could effectively turn a PC into a mediocre abnormal console by using a bootable CD to apply an O/S and then execute the game.
But just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea.
Here are the flaws:
1) This is advocating using Linux for gaming on a PC. Linux is a great O/S in that it's open, free, and functional. But it has never, ever exceeded Windows in terms of gaming performance, even for OpenGL games that have optimisations for Linux. Linux doesn't have any API's that get close to the tight HAL/driver/API system that Windows uses so smoothly. Ahh, you say, but a bootable linux CD would be streamlined to run the game! Less overhead! This is true. But you'd also have more overhead because, as you know, Knoppix doesn't run nearly as tight as a properly optimised Linux install because it needs to be robust rather than sleek for compatibility purposes.
2) The reboot factor that people have mentioned
3) Windows XP boot time on my system at home: ~15 seconds. Redhat boot time on my system at home: ~20-30 seconds. Knoppix CD boot time on my system at home: ~120 seconds.
4) The no-patching problem that people have mentioned
5) Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.
Having said all this, once Linux starts supporting DirectX, there will most likely be a full scale revolt amongst gamers against the beast of Redmond. It's good to dream, isn't it?
What it shows is that, if you have a situation like CounterStrike where the modded game servers way outnumber Half-Life game servers, the customer is really showing the publishers what they want.
It's rare nowadays to see market forces so easily detectable and free from the controls of the publishing monstrosities.
But how many thousands of readers who are going to see the article, not their heads and place an order for another couple thousand Windows desktops?
It doesn't matter that it was only one journalist that had the problem.
So many Linux users and developers simply don't care that Linux has godawful PR. It's not artificial FUD that's out there. It's real.
Fear: People are afraid that what they have in terms of hardware won't work right away with Linux (and it probably won't).
Uncertainty: You can't trust Linux. You can download it but the only certainty you have is that it'll be a struggle to get everything to work properly, and it will need a lot of tinkering that you may or may not have the skill to do. Heaven forbid finding a manual that you can understand without having a PhD.
Doubt: You can't be sure of having complete satisfaction with Linux. What if... after hours of tinkering with the drivers and downloading bits of code off the net and trying to use a compiler and applying patches to your GUI just to make a web browser run... your stuff still doesn't work? People doubt Linux.
It's not fake FUD like SCO pumps out everywhere. It's real. People fear and doubt linux's abilities to function properly. The useability just isn't there.
Yes, I agree that it's a problem that a lot of PC hardware is designed for the primary OS that PC's use - Windows.
Mind you, the whole point of Linux, where it came from in the first place, was Linus Torvalds writing a UNIX like OS that ran on hardware that UNIX was never, ever meant to.
So if there are driver problems today, it's not because the people making hardware aren't doing the right thing. They're doing what they've always done. It's because the work of Linus Torvalds simply hasn't been finished. And the amount of complaining you hear around Slashdot about "it's the hardware manufacturers fault!" really makes me wonder if his OS will ever be finished.
You consider it a feature that installing applications under linux requires a PhD?
You consider the primary reason why Linux is completely failing to compete with Apple/MS on the desktop to be a positive feature of the OS?
That's hardly constructive. But it is useful for people to know. That kind of attitude is exactly why the usability problem hasn't been fixed, and probably never will be. You've just provided a great example as to why Linux won't make a dent in the Windows market. Because the people who write and use the software today aren't doing anything to encourage it's success.
Linux has all these killer apps already. IM clients, email, web browsing, office applications, photo editing. Linux has every possible useful app you can imagine.
It's just people can't figure out how to install them.
Maybe that's what they really mean by "useability". Not to ever, ever be confused with "functionality".
All you need to do to install an application is download the exe and doubleclick on it (although MSIE will also allow you to run the app just from clicking its link).
If you can't do exactly the same thing under Linux, then Linux has failed.
And I know you can't. You have to download some tarball thingy (cough hack) or run one of those apt-getty applications (and know heaps of stuff about the file you want to install and switches for Apt-get). Then you're watching the damned thing install packages for your entire UI manager. For an email client/web browser/whatever!
Tell me that's just as easy for the end user as clicking on a link in a browser to the exe file.
Curiously, the market saturation for this kind of job is very high, because you really only need a few brokers like this and the entire userbase with money to burn would be well taken care of.
Perhaps these guys could make more money by using in-game messaging to advertise their services to all of the players? Continually? What they might have to do is insert words into their messages in case the admins block the legitimate advertising to get past the filters....
It was okay. It just wasn't StarCon2. What they could have done was kept most of the mechanisms for StarCon2 instead of inventing new and untested ones. The game came out as a strange kind of StarCon/StarCon2 hybrid but without keeping the same kind of feel that StarCon2 had.
I think it's about time there was a re-write of StarCon2 with modern graphics, sound, and a true 3D galaxy.
The question is, once you're trading instead of playing the game for fun, isn't it just like having a job anyway?
And for the people buying the virtual goods, isn't that like paying to "cheat" in the game?
Or is the game written in such a way that this is taken into account, and hence the whole point of playing the game is purely concerned with how much real world money you can spend on improving your character?
Ugh, nobody in this thread seems to have looked at any D&D rules since before 1999. When 3rd ed came out, everything changed significantly and for the better.
Okay.
The CORE rules for D&D apply an armour class difference for each size category difference between attacker and defender. This is applied directly to the armour class of the defender as a penalty or bonus. To counteract this, smaller creatures also have an attack bonus, and larger creatures have an attack penalty. How does it work?
Two humans fighting each other makes no difference, because "medium" critters have no modification to hit or be hit.
A human fighting a gnome has to deal with the +1 bonus to the gnomes AC.
The gnome has a +1 to attack because he's small, which means it's easier to hit the human.
A gnome fighting a goblin gets no penalty or benefit, because his bonus to hit of +1 is counteracted by the +1 ac bonus enjoyed by the goblin.
Large creatures like ogres have a minus to hit because of size, and a minus to AC because they're big targets. But two ogres fighting each other would again balance out. A gnome would find it much easier to hit an ogre, though, and the ogre would find it much harder to hit the smaller gnome.
As for damage, the 3.5 DMG includes rules for variable massive damage. If a single source of damage is dealt to a susceptible creature (unlike things like undead and plants and weird monsters like gelatinous cubes), depending on the size of the creature (40 points for gnomes, 50 for humans, and 60 for ogres for example), the creature makes a save (based on constitution of course) or dies from the severity of the wound. Pretty straightforward and quite representative. So you can stab anyone in the heart and they'll die. That facilitates both a good combat system and it fits in with roleplaying nicely.
D20 is without a doubt the finest RPG system to date. It's not the most complex, it's not necessarily the best for some applications, true.
But it's better than every D&D before it (have a look at the sales figures if you don't believe me). Games like L5R, Call of Cthulu and Star Wars abandoned their existing systems and ported to D20. When the competition can't beat them, it joins them. And the popularity for the converted systems couldn't be better (perhaps L5R is excepted, there are some who still play the old rules).
It's published under an Open license. Publishers can use elements of the core rules to make their own complete systems, and publish them, or add onto existing rules. Anything they like. WoTC encourages people to use their system and share it around.
WoTC only makes money out of D20 because they happen to produce the best material, and people buy it because the want to own the books. Every page in the core rulebooks has a colour plate.
Slashdot Mirror
Curious... Apple don't actually make TFT's, they just rebrand them. Who are they buying their gear from, so I can just buy direct from source, get a great monitor at a great price and without being stuck with the little fruit icon?
Usually Apple buys displays from Sony or Mitsubishi, these being in the upper echelons of display quality, certainly in the CRT space. I bet Sony has a great TFT display of equal quality to the Apple rebrand, and even with Sony's inflated pricing it'd be cheaper.
The MMORPG is here to stay! And here's another one. This one of course is a biggie.
But what will happen in the market?
Will all the EQ players upgrade to EQ2?
Will nobody upgrade to EQ2?
Or will all the players feel rich and buy time on both EQ and EQ2?
What about all the other MMORPG's coming out? Will they steal time off EQ? Is the MMORPG market saturated yet?
And, here's the one I really want to know about, will the open source community make their own sleek, efficient and free MMORPG that runs efficiently on a 286?
I played MOO3. God what a tedious game. It was incredibly complex. The menus were very deeply nested. Micromanagement was theoretically possible, but incredibly impracticle if you want to make it to the next game turn.
Furthermore, of course, with games like MOO, careful micromanagement is decisive in winning the game on any serious difficulty level.
Fleet management was also impractical to micromanage. Too much effort went into complicating things that were previously straightforward.
Want to build a big ship and go attack the enemy?
No, you can't.
First you need to go design a ship (or pick one that the AI has designed badly for you). That used to be simple in MOO, now it's complicated doing that as well. Then you need to build it.
Great, you've got a huge new warship. Where is it? It's hiding in some inactive group thingy that you have to click everywhere to try and find. Found it? Want to attack now? Too bad. Now you have to build a "fleet". That's right, a fleet isn't just a bunch of ships anymore! It's even more complicated than designing a single ship! But you only have one ship, and that's not a fleet? Sorry kids. This is MOO3, and a single ship isn't anything until it's in a fleet.
So you build a fleet. You need to decide how big the fleet is, what it's purpose is, what ships are in the fleet, and where the ships are supposed to position themselves when they're in the fleet. Then you can try and add your ship into the fleet! Hooray! But you can't do that until you've made sure that your fleet is completely full, if it's not, you can't do anything with it yet.
Then you get to attack.
In MOO, you had to select the ship and then right click the planet you wanted it to go to. If there was another ship there from the enemy, they'd fight. Just as a comparison.
I get this godawful graphics corruption when in the cockpit. Having said that I've shifted to an Athlon64 now with a shiny new mainboard and all the other accoutrements (same video card though). I should give it another shot.
Actually ships "flew" from the surface of a planet, achieved escape velocity (presumably), and left the atmosphere.
And those little speeders flew around all over the place and tied up the AT-AT's (once they were adapted for the cold).
And some of these "drugs" include the leafy THC variety, which has known medicinal purposes and is legal in many places around the world because of the clear benefits, especially to the blind and for people with painful cancer.
Sometimes just because something is illegal, doesn't mean it's wrong. As a matter of fact, if any of these groups were doing this for profit, I'd say they were worse than drug dealers. But that isn't the case.
It's been literally years since Lucasarts did a space combat sim. The last one they made was X-Wing:Alliance or something, which was a story based game running a really recent rev. of the X-Wing engine. Unfortunately the game doesn't run under Windows XP with an nVidia graphics adapter, and LucasArts haven't bothered maintaining it after all these years. Can't blame them, though.
Star Wars: Rebellion was a MOO style game that was completely underrated, it looks like there are no plans to release an updated game (possibly because of the tepid reception from the new and horribly aborted Master of Orion 3?)
Of course, now there's a new X-Wing style game, and you have to buy Galaxies and pay a monthly subscription fee just to play it. Typical.
Han solo was the first to mention it:
"She'll make point-five past lightspeed."
What this has to do with Hyperspace however is completely subjective, because just about all the physics of the Star Wars universe is about as cohesive as the continuity in Star Trek.
It's ICQ I've got my eye on. ICQ is functionally differentiated from the other IM clients because of it's independently developed background, so it's got some features that are wholly unlike any other service, namely:
-Servers cache undelivered messages for later delivery
-Random user finding capability
-Loads of plugin support for the client
Of course Trillian supports some of these features by virtue of connecting to the same servers, and I find Trillian has matured enough to become the true ruler of all IM clients simply because it's cross platform.
Ahh, a set of API's that would allow PS/2 games to run seamlessly on Linux. That would be a coup, allright.
But, let's run with this idea, if Sony were to decide there was some profit in making such API's, how would they do it?
The problem with open sourcing the APIs is that it's next to impossible to stop microsoft or anyone else from adapting it to work with a different O/S. Sony's not the kind of company to embrace "open" anyway. Just look at how much proprietary they pump out!
So that means you'll presumably have to pay money for these APIs. Maybe even as much as it would cost to buy a PS/2 in the first place. Not to mention the high rates of piracy that would follow along.
I think DirectX compatibility would be the killer app for Linux, but unfortunately that's the absolute last thing Microsoft wants, especially in an era where the gaming comes first and the big bucks of business follow. Microsoft won't allow it and the technical challenges seem like they're insurmountable.
You could quite conceivably do this. You could effectively turn a PC into a mediocre abnormal console by using a bootable CD to apply an O/S and then execute the game.
But just because you can do something doesn't make it a good idea.
Here are the flaws:
1) This is advocating using Linux for gaming on a PC. Linux is a great O/S in that it's open, free, and functional. But it has never, ever exceeded Windows in terms of gaming performance, even for OpenGL games that have optimisations for Linux. Linux doesn't have any API's that get close to the tight HAL/driver/API system that Windows uses so smoothly. Ahh, you say, but a bootable linux CD would be streamlined to run the game! Less overhead! This is true. But you'd also have more overhead because, as you know, Knoppix doesn't run nearly as tight as a properly optimised Linux install because it needs to be robust rather than sleek for compatibility purposes.
2) The reboot factor that people have mentioned
3) Windows XP boot time on my system at home: ~15 seconds. Redhat boot time on my system at home: ~20-30 seconds. Knoppix CD boot time on my system at home: ~120 seconds.
4) The no-patching problem that people have mentioned
5) Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.
Having said all this, once Linux starts supporting DirectX, there will most likely be a full scale revolt amongst gamers against the beast of Redmond. It's good to dream, isn't it?
Linux Advocator: And you Linux-haters just eat that shit up.
Microsoft Representative: Where do you want to go today?
Which is the OS users feel most comfortable with?
What it shows is that, if you have a situation like CounterStrike where the modded game servers way outnumber Half-Life game servers, the customer is really showing the publishers what they want.
It's rare nowadays to see market forces so easily detectable and free from the controls of the publishing monstrosities.
Yes, ONE journalist.
But how many thousands of readers who are going to see the article, not their heads and place an order for another couple thousand Windows desktops?
It doesn't matter that it was only one journalist that had the problem.
So many Linux users and developers simply don't care that Linux has godawful PR. It's not artificial FUD that's out there. It's real.
Fear: People are afraid that what they have in terms of hardware won't work right away with Linux (and it probably won't).
Uncertainty: You can't trust Linux. You can download it but the only certainty you have is that it'll be a struggle to get everything to work properly, and it will need a lot of tinkering that you may or may not have the skill to do. Heaven forbid finding a manual that you can understand without having a PhD.
Doubt: You can't be sure of having complete satisfaction with Linux. What if... after hours of tinkering with the drivers and downloading bits of code off the net and trying to use a compiler and applying patches to your GUI just to make a web browser run... your stuff still doesn't work? People doubt Linux.
It's not fake FUD like SCO pumps out everywhere. It's real. People fear and doubt linux's abilities to function properly. The useability just isn't there.
I'd like to believe it will be one day.
Yes, I agree that it's a problem that a lot of PC hardware is designed for the primary OS that PC's use - Windows.
Mind you, the whole point of Linux, where it came from in the first place, was Linus Torvalds writing a UNIX like OS that ran on hardware that UNIX was never, ever meant to.
So if there are driver problems today, it's not because the people making hardware aren't doing the right thing. They're doing what they've always done. It's because the work of Linus Torvalds simply hasn't been finished. And the amount of complaining you hear around Slashdot about "it's the hardware manufacturers fault!" really makes me wonder if his OS will ever be finished.
You consider it a feature that installing applications under linux requires a PhD?
You consider the primary reason why Linux is completely failing to compete with Apple/MS on the desktop to be a positive feature of the OS?
That's hardly constructive. But it is useful for people to know. That kind of attitude is exactly why the usability problem hasn't been fixed, and probably never will be. You've just provided a great example as to why Linux won't make a dent in the Windows market. Because the people who write and use the software today aren't doing anything to encourage it's success.
Linux has all these killer apps already. IM clients, email, web browsing, office applications, photo editing. Linux has every possible useful app you can imagine.
It's just people can't figure out how to install them.
Maybe that's what they really mean by "useability". Not to ever, ever be confused with "functionality".
Urpwhat? Synwho? APT-wha?
All you need to do to install an application is download the exe and doubleclick on it (although MSIE will also allow you to run the app just from clicking its link).
If you can't do exactly the same thing under Linux, then Linux has failed.
And I know you can't. You have to download some tarball thingy (cough hack) or run one of those apt-getty applications (and know heaps of stuff about the file you want to install and switches for Apt-get). Then you're watching the damned thing install packages for your entire UI manager. For an email client/web browser/whatever!
Tell me that's just as easy for the end user as clicking on a link in a browser to the exe file.
I thought it said Q for Quake 4. This is silly.
Well maybe it wasn't playable. I don't know. The plot got me before the bugs did, how's that?
And yes I am a pedant.
Curiously, the market saturation for this kind of job is very high, because you really only need a few brokers like this and the entire userbase with money to burn would be well taken care of.
Perhaps these guys could make more money by using in-game messaging to advertise their services to all of the players? Continually? What they might have to do is insert words into their messages in case the admins block the legitimate advertising to get past the filters....
It was okay. It just wasn't StarCon2. What they could have done was kept most of the mechanisms for StarCon2 instead of inventing new and untested ones. The game came out as a strange kind of StarCon/StarCon2 hybrid but without keeping the same kind of feel that StarCon2 had.
I think it's about time there was a re-write of StarCon2 with modern graphics, sound, and a true 3D galaxy.
The question is, once you're trading instead of playing the game for fun, isn't it just like having a job anyway?
And for the people buying the virtual goods, isn't that like paying to "cheat" in the game?
Or is the game written in such a way that this is taken into account, and hence the whole point of playing the game is purely concerned with how much real world money you can spend on improving your character?
Ugh, nobody in this thread seems to have looked at any D&D rules since before 1999. When 3rd ed came out, everything changed significantly and for the better.
Okay.
The CORE rules for D&D apply an armour class difference for each size category difference between attacker and defender. This is applied directly to the armour class of the defender as a penalty or bonus. To counteract this, smaller creatures also have an attack bonus, and larger creatures have an attack penalty. How does it work?
Two humans fighting each other makes no difference, because "medium" critters have no modification to hit or be hit.
A human fighting a gnome has to deal with the +1 bonus to the gnomes AC.
The gnome has a +1 to attack because he's small, which means it's easier to hit the human.
A gnome fighting a goblin gets no penalty or benefit, because his bonus to hit of +1 is counteracted by the +1 ac bonus enjoyed by the goblin.
Large creatures like ogres have a minus to hit because of size, and a minus to AC because they're big targets. But two ogres fighting each other would again balance out. A gnome would find it much easier to hit an ogre, though, and the ogre would find it much harder to hit the smaller gnome.
As for damage, the 3.5 DMG includes rules for variable massive damage. If a single source of damage is dealt to a susceptible creature (unlike things like undead and plants and weird monsters like gelatinous cubes), depending on the size of the creature (40 points for gnomes, 50 for humans, and 60 for ogres for example), the creature makes a save (based on constitution of course) or dies from the severity of the wound. Pretty straightforward and quite representative. So you can stab anyone in the heart and they'll die. That facilitates both a good combat system and it fits in with roleplaying nicely.
Exactly. Where are my mod points?
D20 is without a doubt the finest RPG system to date. It's not the most complex, it's not necessarily the best for some applications, true.
But it's better than every D&D before it (have a look at the sales figures if you don't believe me). Games like L5R, Call of Cthulu and Star Wars abandoned their existing systems and ported to D20. When the competition can't beat them, it joins them. And the popularity for the converted systems couldn't be better (perhaps L5R is excepted, there are some who still play the old rules).
It's published under an Open license. Publishers can use elements of the core rules to make their own complete systems, and publish them, or add onto existing rules. Anything they like. WoTC encourages people to use their system and share it around.
WoTC only makes money out of D20 because they happen to produce the best material, and people buy it because the want to own the books. Every page in the core rulebooks has a colour plate.