I'd rather play a fun-playing mediocre-looking game than a mediocre-playing good-looking game.
But most people would also rather play a mediocre-playing good-looking game than a mediocre-playing mediocre-looking game. It is a lot easier to look at a game and see if it is good-looking or not, which is true of consumers making purchase decisions as well as the game designers and management during development.
Fun-playing, on the other hand, is something you know you have when you have it but difficult to judge early in development, doesn't translate at all inscreenshots or videos, and is incredibly subjective besides.
Some people just like to look at really good looking graphics, and just need the game to provide an interactive interface in which to explore those graphics but otherwise not get in the way to much. Maybe they are artists themselves and are inspired by the game's content, or some other reason: the bottom line is that humans are very visually oriented.
perhaps the same way that making laws prohibiting the sale of certain items like tobacco and alcohol helps parents raise kids.
Alcohol and tobacco are medically proven not only to harm people in general, but to cause even greater problems in the developing child- and not just a few susceptible children, but I'm pretty sure if there was a experiment where every single child of x age given y amount of controlled substance for z years, 100% would have unquestionable physiological damage as a direct result.
With games and movies, I hear vague suppositions about children who are already at risk because of a multitude of other factors maybe some small fraction of the time are more likely to be influenced negatively by exposure to certain kinds of media.
With respect to games, right now I have to deal with the fact that a large number of the kids at school either own, or have access to, and regularly play the "latest" FPS and other combat related games... This makes it very hard for me to justify telling my kids that these games are not suitable for them at their age and that they are not allowed to play them.
No doubt, some of those kids also have religions that basically say your religion is a bunch of bullshit created by the devil. Some of their parents have told their kids the guy you voted for in the last election is liar and a coward and will destroy the country. If you can't handle that, you might want to find a place or group that has a support system designed to provide an entire range of worldview compatible educational systems, weekend group activities, and media for your children.
why should Valve have to pay for the programmers while Company #2 only needs to hire writers and artists?
Valve would still hire programmers to add features to the game that will help differentiate the game (after all, they started with the Quake source but had to make all kinds of changes for HL1, they didn't wait around for id to do the work for them), optimize the engine in ways that would be inappropriate for the main branch, or fix bugs that are critical to them but not the other coders developer the engine. Under the GPL, they could keep those features secret until they begin distribution of the game, or they could release them as they're added- but it would be unlikely for every other company to be able to capitalize on them faster than the guys that created it and already have a concept for its use.
That said, as we slowly begin to approach the photo-realism barrier, and as the tools to assemble graphics improve, we are once again begining to turn back towards the days when gameplay and innovation were what set a game apart from its peers.
So the only aspects to games development are graphics (and you are dismissing both the engines and the art content to go in the engines very quickly), and 'gameplay' and 'innovation'? I have the feeling that a lot of innovations are going to be gimmicks quickly dismissed by game players (or ignored, because it's too much trouble to learn an entirely new and 'innovative' interface or whatever), and also gameplay is going to become very refined (but of course innovation will still be needed at the edges of that refined area). Most of the innovation should be in the range of human emotions that a game can elicit from the player.
There have to be a lot of assumptions in that 'as the tools to assemble graphics improve' to make your claim correct. The better graphics get, the longer it will take to create highly detailed 3d art content that looks good and sufficiently differentiates from other works. You're also completely overlooking animation, which is also very time-consuming.
It's pretty easy to imagine open source game engines coming close to or surpassing commercial offerings in the areas of graphics and physics. But imagining the tools required to make 3d-character models, give them clothing and weapons, animate them, and give them extremely detailed surroundings- there aren't many projects out there that even attempt to make that easy aside from a few 3d modellers. Free content libraries would be nice, but all the games that use them would look the same.
Here are the tools I think need to be made (Lots of this software exists in hollywood to do this, expect it to be accessible to anyone in a few years, and then open-source hopefully soon after that):
2D video to 3d motion capture (no blue dot bodysuits and expensive tracking gear required) - Put a video camera on a tripod and film someone doing martial arts or whatever. Processor intensive algorithms that barely exist today will figure out the placement of bones etc. and generate an animation file that you can then attach to 3d characters. Pointing a second camera at them from different angle may make this more feasible. Probably still a lot of manually tweaking involved. Still have to find talent for non-standard motions.
Also, procedural+ai+physics generated motions that look very realistic will become used, but again if everyone is using the same software the all the motions will look the same. Probably there will be some pre-captured stuff, but if something interrupts the movement the character will have to maintain balance and recover in a non-scripted physically derived way.
Body&Face scanning/ clothing scanning - You've got the bones animation from the above process, but now you need a body to hang off them (not necessarily the same one that did the motions before). You get someone to stand on one of those toys that kids spin themselves sick on but with the handle removed, and you point a video camera on them while they hold still and someone else rotates them 360. The software extracts a 3d body from this, and now you can play any animation in your library with the scanned body. Certainly a lot of manually tweaking involved. Clothing here may be an issue if it is not sufficiently generic- the design might be copyrighted by the designer. The well-funded are going to have you beat on finding attractive people for this step, and a proper scan requires revealing skin tight clothing, so it may take a lot of smooth-talking to convince someone attractive that this will get them into hollywood or something.
Also use something similar to scan all other objects (vehicles, props), but again intellectual property issues may conflict.
Something like the Sims Bodyshop that allows procedural creation of a person, maybe b
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Don't all MMOGs die slowly a year or so after their release except for very rare games that are insanely popular? Only the speed at which it dies can be affected, perhaps, while increases in players just statistical noise, temporary deferrals of the inevitable. The only question is if the publisher knows that and adjusts expenditures accordingly to make a profit while not abandoning the game while there's still money to be made and repeat customers to piss off.
It's the Internet, I've got other things available to satisfy the "oggling at women" need
This is a recurring argument of the form "If I wanted X then I would do Y, which contains X in a very concentrated form, why would anyone want Z which has much less?" The answer is some people like X, but will get in trouble with their parents or wives or their own sense of self-respect so they want it at a low concentration in another format that may have other redeeming qualities.
...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?
That's got to be the stupidest engine name ever. Or maybe the were hoping that by making it ungoogleable they would be able to keep it safe from pirates and hackers...
I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later
But everyone knows it was going to be released soon after Doom3, I'm sure Carmack has said it here on Slashdot multiple times. If the other company didn't like that I'm sure they could have paid ID a whole lot more and written into the contract exactly when the code could be released.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Direct3D is also used on the XBox, since that's basically a Wintel PC w/ an Nvidia chipset.
Interestingly, the next Xbox will be non-Wintel (IBM powerpc or something like that), so the word is Direct3D is getting ported to a non-intel architecture for the first time - so they'll able to call it bi-platform, if not truly multiplatform like OpenGL.
Likewise, cellphones have their own APIs too
There's a stripped down OpenGL (OpenGL ES) for cellphones and other embedded devices, but it's not that widely used yet.
remember when the occasional new game was different and unique, instead of the same old game with graphics updates?
If I had any moderator points I'd mark all these kinds of posts as trolls. There's plenty of shareware, open source, and obscure commercial stuff that is different and unique. They don't get millions of dollars in development money because they aren't that profitable. Since they don't get lots of ads or media coverage, you have to put in the effort to find something to your tastes (slashdot whining doesn't count).
Processing power has increased to insane levels... and yet we get the same bland crap?
Ignoring the uncanny valley for the moment, normal people positively react to realistic depictions of human faces and mannerisms and so on much more so that blocks of pixels- the better games are at depicting humans in a realtime interactive fashion, the more popular and accessible they will be. We are just now reaching the production values and computer graphics capability to really take off in that area- games like The Sims point the way to games that cover a wider range of emotions and etc. than the generic anger and brutality of most games, and see HL2 for the facial animation stuff.
Blobs breaks new ground both on the UI side (for instance, the UI has no text whatsoever)
I'm pretty sure that isn't new ground.
It sucks when I have to figure out what the icon artists were thinking when I'm trying to learn a new interface, telepathy or something like that would come in handy there. There's a standard way to express symbolically- it's called letters and words. At the very least, make hovering the pointer for some amount of time over a purely graphical icon have some text popup to explain what it does.
so, this movie has what to do with DOOM exactly? 1st person perspective? Wow, because there aren't other games with that perspective.
The classic low-budget horror movie technique is to shoot a lot of first-person stuff from the point of view of the monster, so that way they can replace expensive computer graphics or traditional practical effects with the much cheaper distorted vision and breathing sounds, along with the occasional paw or claw get into the shot.
For this movie, I suppose they have enough money to cover the alien special effects, but lacked confidence in their actor and/or their directing skills, so they'll avoid showing human faces.
Doom without demons from hell on Mars or in Mars orbit is like Starship Troopers without powered armor, but probably way worse. I like seeing hell depicted in movies, like What Dreams May Come, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, or Spawn (Spawn had pretty crappy CG hell though)- it's a selling point to me. Little Nicky even.
There's an Unreal mod called 9/11 survivor. Looks like a dead project though, too bad, no downloads either.
I think this game would do better as a mod, or open source, so then people could examine the level design and correct any errors, or add improved ballistics and physics. It would also be better if you could recreate any major conspiracy scenario, or a novel one of your own, either as a player or just scripted as machinima.
There's obvious enormous potential in this sort of thing, although no matter how exhaustive the research there will always be someone saying that some factor or another wasn't simulated properly, or the design reflects some bias or another of the designers, and therefore the whole thing is worse than worthless. By taking a historical event and making it a sandbox for alternate history, or simply an aide to learning how an event transpired from any angle you can think of, very focused segments of history can be taken to a level impossible in film or text. It would be the closest thing we have to time travel.
A more rigorous simulation/recreation would have a certain amount of certainty assigned to every event- things captured from multiple angles on film would need to reflect the certainty in their depiction, while the fuzzy recollections of eye-witness would have depictions that reflect that uncertainty. Maybe a game could revolve around this- any scenario you alter to your own liking has a certain threshold of plausibility- all the freedom to act lies in what happens behind closed doors, in times forgotten by the witnesses, in places not in front of a camera- secrecy and occlusion is the life-blood of both real and imagined conspiracies.
I lost interest in MP after fighting and losing to some boss that shot bees out of it mouth at me while water was all around me (or something). What is it about the game that should make me pick it up again, or try the sequel?
All ive seen in the last couple of months is sequels
This argument keeps coming up again and again here and elsewhere on the internets.
There's always this unspoken implication that sequels are inherently bad. I would guess that the reason is that if all the big games are sequels, and all franchises eventually get boring and old and no one buys them anymore, then therefore the industry is in trouble because all the games are sequels and nothing will replace them when they die out. Or, the other reason is this argument keeps coming up is that the proponents of it are incredibly jaded, incredibly nostalgic for their lost youth spent playing more primitive games, or just don't have the same tastes as the majority of the gaming public so therefore anything new is not automatically good, but at least has a greater chance of appealing to their tastes than a tried-and-true formula that they know they'll dislike.
The other thing I hate about this "too many sequels" whining is that there are a lot of original games out there. Granted a lot of them were made on small budgets and don't get a lot of press (and are complete crap)- so what the critics are saying is that they'd like more game companies to make huge investments in experimental games, and that the press should devote more time to it accordingly, but without presenting a business case for why this is superior to making games that consumers unquestionably desire. My suggestion- if you like innovative and original games, go out and spend money on them. Talk them up on websites. Etc. And just ignore all the press the sequels are getting.
In movies there's this whole self-sustaining world called 'independent film' (someone needs to create that for games)- it wasn't created by critics, it was created by film-makers and supported by small but devoted audiences.
You want other people to pay for something you want but you don't want to pay your fair share, and you use fancy words to achieve this result... you are trying to get me to pay for your ideals
Eventually you'll realize nearly anything you buy or any taxes that you pay are going towards some purpose you don't care for. Those little tag on the necks of shirts drives their cost up slightly, and some people who don't discriminate between fabric types when they wash their clothes or who don't wash their clothes at all may resent having to pay for that. State sales tax or income tax may be going towards public education, where they teach kids evolution or how to use fancy words- a lot of people don't care for that.
But in many cases the lack of choice in those kinds of areas is good, because providing for every possible ideal people might have would be expensive. It's far easier to settle upon the average ideals of most of the people.
I kind of resent the fact that all these huge multi-billion dollar corporations get to save all this money with cheap overseas labor, when there is no parallel opportunity for me as an individual. I hear that there are programmers who will work for $5/hour (I don't know about the Ukraine)- it would be really great if I could jumpstart my sourceforge project by getting say 20 hours of programming time from someone for $100, or if I could do the same for art assets or anything else. Hell, if all the programming in this country is going to be outsourced while the management stays here, having this outsourcing management experience is going to look a lot better on my resume than if I had done all the coding myself.
Seriously, I realize that Sourceforge has the paypal thing which probably is more for rewarding work that has already been done, but there also needs to be some kind of micro-contract agency that allows me to get a set amount of work done in the future.
Hypocrites who yak about terrible working conditions in the 3rd world and then go by chineese t-shirts on sale get no respect from me.
The people arguing for equal wages and labor conditions want the government and large businesses to enforce those standards, exactly for the reason you state- the consumers, even those who would support goverment initiatives to do same- are incapable of it.
It becomes doubly expensive for an individual to buy things that were manufactured to some personal arbitrary standard- the minor expense is the cost of meeting that standard, and the major cost is acquiring enough information (and making determinations about the quality of that information) about the product to make a decision on whether it meets the standard or not. A single or small set of organizations can do that second step much more efficiently than individuals.
I think I can say, without hypocrisy, that A. I want to buy only things that weren't made by slave labor (for example), B. I want it to be extremely easy to buy things not made by slave labor, so easy that any licensed local business I patronize has a near zero probability of having slave made products. C. I want other people to not buy products made by slave labor, whether or not they care, because I know a lot of people don't care but slave labor is wrong regardless.
I don't feel strongly enough about A that I'll attempt it without B & C being in place, but I feel strongly enough that I'll vote for people who will make B & C happen.
When your brain is soaked with Andrenalin and fatigue, your abilities go down, even with the best training.
Even with reduced abilities, it's still hard to beat a well-trained human being - eyes and hears are going to have higher bandwidth than a microphone and a video camera or other sensors (which are further reduced by the telemetry link bandwidth), and the senses-to-brain-to-trigger latency time is going to be fairly low compared to having to send info to some remote location and then send the response back.
Most civilian casualties come from indirect fire - airstrikes & artillery, both of which seem off-topic here. In a firefight, there are forms of semi-indirect fire, like cover or supressive fire- this is where you shoot just to make sure the other guy is hiding behind his defenses and not shooting back, or you don't know where the enemy is specifically and you shoot randomly. More indirect would be in a panic situation where the senses are limited, like a tank machine gunner who has come under fire and fires the gun blindly while ducking inside the turret- those are the situations where civilians get killed. So the bot operator will never panic out of fear for their own life, avoiding those last situations I've mentioned- but my point remains that the civilian casualties in a firefight are not usually coming from reduced soldier abilities, but of the unwillingness to use those abilities in a way that puts their life at risk.
After that, I suppose there's willful murder or other court-martial material, so the bot has the advantage their of keeping logs of everything it sees and and everything the operator commands- but it's probably likely that future human ground troops are all going to have black-box recorder type stuff to provide the same kind of accountability.
I actually tried reporting it to Nintendo, because I was kind of pissed off out how obviously illegal it was. There weren't any price tags on the packaging, and I think the boxes themselves did not show pictures of Nintendo games, but with the kiosks running SMB and Contra it's pretty obvious what was going on. The other thing was that not only are ripping off Nintendo, but also the customer because they are charging $50-$60 for a flimsy piece of crap found for $5 or $10 online.
surely you can use the cheat codes to give yourself a light saber
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Dark Forces was the only game of the series I really liked- saber fights and the force looks good on the screen, but I'd rather play Han Solo than Luke Skywalker.
We're all happy that you have a gifted friend. But I'm certainly not +1 interested: you've added exactly zero content to the discussion. Anybody could claim to be his friend say 'trust me', but it would only be worth modding up if by virtue of knowing the guy you have some insight into is development process, anecdotes from the creation of this game, some knowledge above and beyond what's in the pages linked to from the article.
Slashdot Mirror
The classic slashdot gameplay-is-king curmudgeon:
I'd rather play a fun-playing mediocre-looking game than a mediocre-playing good-looking game.
But most people would also rather play a mediocre-playing good-looking game than a mediocre-playing mediocre-looking game. It is a lot easier to look at a game and see if it is good-looking or not, which is true of consumers making purchase decisions as well as the game designers and management during development.
Fun-playing, on the other hand, is something you know you have when you have it but difficult to judge early in development, doesn't translate at all inscreenshots or videos, and is incredibly subjective besides.
Some people just like to look at really good looking graphics, and just need the game to provide an interactive interface in which to explore those graphics but otherwise not get in the way to much. Maybe they are artists themselves and are inspired by the game's content, or some other reason: the bottom line is that humans are very visually oriented.
perhaps the same way that making laws prohibiting the sale of certain items like tobacco and alcohol helps parents raise kids.
... This makes it very hard for me to justify telling my kids that these games are not suitable for them at their age and that they are not allowed to play them.
Alcohol and tobacco are medically proven not only to harm people in general, but to cause even greater problems in the developing child- and not just a few susceptible children, but I'm pretty sure if there was a experiment where every single child of x age given y amount of controlled substance for z years, 100% would have unquestionable physiological damage as a direct result.
With games and movies, I hear vague suppositions about children who are already at risk because of a multitude of other factors maybe some small fraction of the time are more likely to be influenced negatively by exposure to certain kinds of media.
With respect to games, right now I have to deal with the fact that a large number of the kids at school either own, or have access to, and regularly play the "latest" FPS and other combat related games
No doubt, some of those kids also have religions that basically say your religion is a bunch of bullshit created by the devil. Some of their parents have told their kids the guy you voted for in the last election is liar and a coward and will destroy the country. If you can't handle that, you might want to find a place or group that has a support system designed to provide an entire range of worldview compatible educational systems, weekend group activities, and media for your children.
why should Valve have to pay for the programmers while Company #2 only needs to hire writers and artists?
Valve would still hire programmers to add features to the game that will help differentiate the game (after all, they started with the Quake source but had to make all kinds of changes for HL1, they didn't wait around for id to do the work for them), optimize the engine in ways that would be inappropriate for the main branch, or fix bugs that are critical to them but not the other coders developer the engine. Under the GPL, they could keep those features secret until they begin distribution of the game, or they could release them as they're added- but it would be unlikely for every other company to be able to capitalize on them faster than the guys that created it and already have a concept for its use.
That said, as we slowly begin to approach the photo-realism barrier, and as the tools to assemble graphics improve, we are once again begining to turn back towards the days when gameplay and innovation were what set a game apart from its peers.
So the only aspects to games development are graphics (and you are dismissing both the engines and the art content to go in the engines very quickly), and 'gameplay' and 'innovation'? I have the feeling that a lot of innovations are going to be gimmicks quickly dismissed by game players (or ignored, because it's too much trouble to learn an entirely new and 'innovative' interface or whatever), and also gameplay is going to become very refined (but of course innovation will still be needed at the edges of that refined area). Most of the innovation should be in the range of human emotions that a game can elicit from the player.
There have to be a lot of assumptions in that 'as the tools to assemble graphics improve' to make your claim correct. The better graphics get, the longer it will take to create highly detailed 3d art content that looks good and sufficiently differentiates from other works. You're also completely overlooking animation, which is also very time-consuming.
It's pretty easy to imagine open source game engines coming close to or surpassing commercial offerings in the areas of graphics and physics. But imagining the tools required to make 3d-character models, give them clothing and weapons, animate them, and give them extremely detailed surroundings- there aren't many projects out there that even attempt to make that easy aside from a few 3d modellers. Free content libraries would be nice, but all the games that use them would look the same.
Here are the tools I think need to be made (Lots of this software exists in hollywood to do this, expect it to be accessible to anyone in a few years, and then open-source hopefully soon after that):
2D video to 3d motion capture (no blue dot bodysuits and expensive tracking gear required) - Put a video camera on a tripod and film someone doing martial arts or whatever. Processor intensive algorithms that barely exist today will figure out the placement of bones etc. and generate an animation file that you can then attach to 3d characters. Pointing a second camera at them from different angle may make this more feasible. Probably still a lot of manually tweaking involved. Still have to find talent for non-standard motions.
Also, procedural+ai+physics generated motions that look very realistic will become used, but again if everyone is using the same software the all the motions will look the same. Probably there will be some pre-captured stuff, but if something interrupts the movement the character will have to maintain balance and recover in a non-scripted physically derived way.
Body&Face scanning/ clothing scanning - You've got the bones animation from the above process, but now you need a body to hang off them (not necessarily the same one that did the motions before). You get someone to stand on one of those toys that kids spin themselves sick on but with the handle removed, and you point a video camera on them while they hold still and someone else rotates them 360. The software extracts a 3d body from this, and now you can play any animation in your library with the scanned body. Certainly a lot of manually tweaking involved. Clothing here may be an issue if it is not sufficiently generic- the design might be copyrighted by the designer. The well-funded are going to have you beat on finding attractive people for this step, and a proper scan requires revealing skin tight clothing, so it may take a lot of smooth-talking to convince someone attractive that this will get them into hollywood or something.
Also use something similar to scan all other objects (vehicles, props), but again intellectual property issues may conflict.
Something like the Sims Bodyshop that allows procedural creation of a person, maybe b
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Don't all MMOGs die slowly a year or so after their release except for very rare games that are insanely popular? Only the speed at which it dies can be affected, perhaps, while increases in players just statistical noise, temporary deferrals of the inevitable. The only question is if the publisher knows that and adjusts expenditures accordingly to make a profit while not abandoning the game while there's still money to be made and repeat customers to piss off.
It's the Internet, I've got other things available to satisfy the "oggling at women" need
This is a recurring argument of the form "If I wanted X then I would do Y, which contains X in a very concentrated form, why would anyone want Z which has much less?" The answer is some people like X, but will get in trouble with their parents or wives or their own sense of self-respect so they want it at a low concentration in another format that may have other redeeming qualities.
...who thought they are going to release a clone of Q3A on the new HL2 engine "Source"?
That's got to be the stupidest engine name ever. Or maybe the were hoping that by making it ungoogleable they would be able to keep it safe from pirates and hackers...
I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later
But everyone knows it was going to be released soon after Doom3, I'm sure Carmack has said it here on Slashdot multiple times. If the other company didn't like that I'm sure they could have paid ID a whole lot more and written into the contract exactly when the code could be released.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Direct3D is also used on the XBox, since that's basically a Wintel PC w/ an Nvidia chipset.
Interestingly, the next Xbox will be non-Wintel (IBM powerpc or something like that), so the word is Direct3D is getting ported to a non-intel architecture for the first time - so they'll able to call it bi-platform, if not truly multiplatform like OpenGL.
Likewise, cellphones have their own APIs too
There's a stripped down OpenGL (OpenGL ES) for cellphones and other embedded devices, but it's not that widely used yet.
remember when the occasional new game was different and unique, instead of the same old game with graphics updates?
If I had any moderator points I'd mark all these kinds of posts as trolls. There's plenty of shareware, open source, and obscure commercial stuff that is different and unique. They don't get millions of dollars in development money because they aren't that profitable. Since they don't get lots of ads or media coverage, you have to put in the effort to find something to your tastes (slashdot whining doesn't count).
Processing power has increased to insane levels... and yet we get the same bland crap?
Ignoring the uncanny valley for the moment, normal people positively react to realistic depictions of human faces and mannerisms and so on much more so that blocks of pixels- the better games are at depicting humans in a realtime interactive fashion, the more popular and accessible they will be. We are just now reaching the production values and computer graphics capability to really take off in that area- games like The Sims point the way to games that cover a wider range of emotions and etc. than the generic anger and brutality of most games, and see HL2 for the facial animation stuff.
Blobs breaks new ground both on the UI side (for instance, the UI has no text whatsoever)
I'm pretty sure that isn't new ground.
It sucks when I have to figure out what the icon artists were thinking when I'm trying to learn a new interface, telepathy or something like that would come in handy there. There's a standard way to express symbolically- it's called letters and words. At the very least, make hovering the pointer for some amount of time over a purely graphical icon have some text popup to explain what it does.
so, this movie has what to do with DOOM exactly? 1st person perspective? Wow, because there aren't other games with that perspective.
The classic low-budget horror movie technique is to shoot a lot of first-person stuff from the point of view of the monster, so that way they can replace expensive computer graphics or traditional practical effects with the much cheaper distorted vision and breathing sounds, along with the occasional paw or claw get into the shot.
For this movie, I suppose they have enough money to cover the alien special effects, but lacked confidence in their actor and/or their directing skills, so they'll avoid showing human faces.
Doom without demons from hell on Mars or in Mars orbit is like Starship Troopers without powered armor, but probably way worse. I like seeing hell depicted in movies, like What Dreams May Come, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, or Spawn (Spawn had pretty crappy CG hell though)- it's a selling point to me. Little Nicky even.
It's probably going to be rated PG13 as well...
There's an Unreal mod called 9/11 survivor. Looks like a dead project though, too bad, no downloads either.
I think this game would do better as a mod, or open source, so then people could examine the level design and correct any errors, or add improved ballistics and physics. It would also be better if you could recreate any major conspiracy scenario, or a novel one of your own, either as a player or just scripted as machinima.
There's obvious enormous potential in this sort of thing, although no matter how exhaustive the research there will always be someone saying that some factor or another wasn't simulated properly, or the design reflects some bias or another of the designers, and therefore the whole thing is worse than worthless. By taking a historical event and making it a sandbox for alternate history, or simply an aide to learning how an event transpired from any angle you can think of, very focused segments of history can be taken to a level impossible in film or text. It would be the closest thing we have to time travel.
A more rigorous simulation/recreation would have a certain amount of certainty assigned to every event- things captured from multiple angles on film would need to reflect the certainty in their depiction, while the fuzzy recollections of eye-witness would have depictions that reflect that uncertainty. Maybe a game could revolve around this- any scenario you alter to your own liking has a certain threshold of plausibility- all the freedom to act lies in what happens behind closed doors, in times forgotten by the witnesses, in places not in front of a camera- secrecy and occlusion is the life-blood of both real and imagined conspiracies.
For a law to be made, a bill is introduced in one of the bodies of congress... ...a treaty is not law in the US unless ratified by the Senate.
Am I the only one seeing a talking piece of paper making its jolly way up the capital steps?
I lost interest in MP after fighting and losing to some boss that shot bees out of it mouth at me while water was all around me (or something). What is it about the game that should make me pick it up again, or try the sequel?
All ive seen in the last couple of months is sequels
This argument keeps coming up again and again here and elsewhere on the internets.
There's always this unspoken implication that sequels are inherently bad. I would guess that the reason is that if all the big games are sequels, and all franchises eventually get boring and old and no one buys them anymore, then therefore the industry is in trouble because all the games are sequels and nothing will replace them when they die out. Or, the other reason is this argument keeps coming up is that the proponents of it are incredibly jaded, incredibly nostalgic for their lost youth spent playing more primitive games, or just don't have the same tastes as the majority of the gaming public so therefore anything new is not automatically good, but at least has a greater chance of appealing to their tastes than a tried-and-true formula that they know they'll dislike.
The other thing I hate about this "too many sequels" whining is that there are a lot of original games out there. Granted a lot of them were made on small budgets and don't get a lot of press (and are complete crap)- so what the critics are saying is that they'd like more game companies to make huge investments in experimental games, and that the press should devote more time to it accordingly, but without presenting a business case for why this is superior to making games that consumers unquestionably desire. My suggestion- if you like innovative and original games, go out and spend money on them. Talk them up on websites. Etc. And just ignore all the press the sequels are getting.
In movies there's this whole self-sustaining world called 'independent film' (someone needs to create that for games)- it wasn't created by critics, it was created by film-makers and supported by small but devoted audiences.
You want other people to pay for something you want but you don't want to pay your fair share, and you use fancy words to achieve this result... you are trying to get me to pay for your ideals
Eventually you'll realize nearly anything you buy or any taxes that you pay are going towards some purpose you don't care for. Those little tag on the necks of shirts drives their cost up slightly, and some people who don't discriminate between fabric types when they wash their clothes or who don't wash their clothes at all may resent having to pay for that. State sales tax or income tax may be going towards public education, where they teach kids evolution or how to use fancy words- a lot of people don't care for that.
But in many cases the lack of choice in those kinds of areas is good, because providing for every possible ideal people might have would be expensive. It's far easier to settle upon the average ideals of most of the people.
I kind of resent the fact that all these huge multi-billion dollar corporations get to save all this money with cheap overseas labor, when there is no parallel opportunity for me as an individual. I hear that there are programmers who will work for $5/hour (I don't know about the Ukraine)- it would be really great if I could jumpstart my sourceforge project by getting say 20 hours of programming time from someone for $100, or if I could do the same for art assets or anything else. Hell, if all the programming in this country is going to be outsourced while the management stays here, having this outsourcing management experience is going to look a lot better on my resume than if I had done all the coding myself.
Seriously, I realize that Sourceforge has the paypal thing which probably is more for rewarding work that has already been done, but there also needs to be some kind of micro-contract agency that allows me to get a set amount of work done in the future.
Hypocrites who yak about terrible working conditions in the 3rd world and then go by chineese t-shirts on sale get no respect from me.
The people arguing for equal wages and labor conditions want the government and large businesses to enforce those standards, exactly for the reason you state- the consumers, even those who would support goverment initiatives to do same- are incapable of it.
It becomes doubly expensive for an individual to buy things that were manufactured to some personal arbitrary standard- the minor expense is the cost of meeting that standard, and the major cost is acquiring enough information (and making determinations about the quality of that information) about the product to make a decision on whether it meets the standard or not. A single or small set of organizations can do that second step much more efficiently than individuals.
I think I can say, without hypocrisy, that
A. I want to buy only things that weren't made by slave labor (for example),
B. I want it to be extremely easy to buy things not made by slave labor, so easy that any licensed local business I patronize has a near zero probability of having slave made products.
C. I want other people to not buy products made by slave labor, whether or not they care, because I know a lot of people don't care but slave labor is wrong regardless.
I don't feel strongly enough about A that I'll attempt it without B & C being in place, but I feel strongly enough that I'll vote for people who will make B & C happen.
Oh, I have to pre-order HL2. Never mind...
Having installed steam, how do I get the SDK?
When your brain is soaked with Andrenalin and fatigue, your abilities go down, even with the best training.
Even with reduced abilities, it's still hard to beat a well-trained human being - eyes and hears are going to have higher bandwidth than a microphone and a video camera or other sensors (which are further reduced by the telemetry link bandwidth), and the senses-to-brain-to-trigger latency time is going to be fairly low compared to having to send info to some remote location and then send the response back.
Most civilian casualties come from indirect fire - airstrikes & artillery, both of which seem off-topic here. In a firefight, there are forms of semi-indirect fire, like cover or supressive fire- this is where you shoot just to make sure the other guy is hiding behind his defenses and not shooting back, or you don't know where the enemy is specifically and you shoot randomly. More indirect would be in a panic situation where the senses are limited, like a tank machine gunner who has come under fire and fires the gun blindly while ducking inside the turret- those are the situations where civilians get killed. So the bot operator will never panic out of fear for their own life, avoiding those last situations I've mentioned- but my point remains that the civilian casualties in a firefight are not usually coming from reduced soldier abilities, but of the unwillingness to use those abilities in a way that puts their life at risk.
After that, I suppose there's willful murder or other court-martial material, so the bot has the advantage their of keeping logs of everything it sees and and everything the operator commands- but it's probably likely that future human ground troops are all going to have black-box recorder type stuff to provide the same kind of accountability.
I actually tried reporting it to Nintendo, because I was kind of pissed off out how obviously illegal it was. There weren't any price tags on the packaging, and I think the boxes themselves did not show pictures of Nintendo games, but with the kiosks running SMB and Contra it's pretty obvious what was going on. The other thing was that not only are ripping off Nintendo, but also the customer because they are charging $50-$60 for a flimsy piece of crap found for $5 or $10 online.
surely you can use the cheat codes to give yourself a light saber
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Dark Forces was the only game of the series I really liked- saber fights and the force looks good on the screen, but I'd rather play Han Solo than Luke Skywalker.
We're all happy that you have a gifted friend. But I'm certainly not +1 interested: you've added exactly zero content to the discussion. Anybody could claim to be his friend say 'trust me', but it would only be worth modding up if by virtue of knowing the guy you have some insight into is development process, anecdotes from the creation of this game, some knowledge above and beyond what's in the pages linked to from the article.