this is pretty much what most online games do, lookig for unmodified content, but again you're relying on the client to tell you that it hasn't been modified, which is pretty much impossible to trust.
punkbuster et al rely on a seperate executable checking the state of another executable, which is a slightly better situation, but it ends up in a situation like bf2 where the 'validating client data' stage of loading a game takes as long as loading the content & connecting to a server, if not longer.
modders like this person have pretty much ruined online gaming and should be dragged into the streets and shot.
if he's just 'evening up the odds', it's an arms race that can never be won by the modders, so if this is their actual motivation, you'd think they'd be supportive of developers that DO successfully provide counter measures to cheating.
at least with BF2 anyone that mods content are forced to play on non-punkbuster servers - on xbox live, there is no such 'alternate' network that we can throw the cheaters onto.
the worst part is that doing any kind of LEGITIMATE mods of games falls afoul of the anti-cheat systems which has a negative impact on the game's lifecycle as well - you can't mod anything in BF2 without getting rejected from punkbuster servers for 'modifying your game content'.
since when do casino's care what's legal or not? they have their own rules and can eject you for any reason they want - or send you out back with vito if they find you using devices that they don't permit in said casino.
>>Speculation will only result from people who don't even try to inform themselves.
ah, but this is all that the rabid fanboy community needs - the 'hint' of something - before they jump to conclusions and start screaming from the hilltops (for joy or in pain, either effect is about as useful)
exactly - who cares how often google or 'insert your service here' is down, when the local internet companies can't keep their service reliable for longer than a week at a time.
this seems to be a common 'issue' with these so called 'next-gen' consoles - apparently the 360 certification process only involves testing on HD tv's - this isn't the first game that has had this issue.
Considering the ratio of HD to 'standard' tv's on the market, this is yet another reason to NOT buy a 360...
[quote] Reuters, an international news wire service, caught heat by publishing a Beirut battle photo that contained an extra plume of smoke for dramatic effect. (Farid's software helped reveal that enhancement.) [/quote]
they needed software to detect this? the 'enhancements' were so blatantly obvious that anyone that's ever used photoshop would have been able to see them...
This argument makes me laugh particularly when it comes to so-called 'next gen' games - PC's have run at alot higher resolutions than the supposed 'HD' formats allow. Yet, the marketing machine continues to push the fact that supposedly these 'hd' consoles will give us a better gaming experience. No thanx.
>>But anyone can see 1280x960 is better than 640x480 which is better than 320x240.
which is why i'm sticking to the 'next gen hardware' I already have - ie my laptop - anyone can see that 1680x1050 is better than any HD format, period. for videos / movies, sure this might make a difference, but with all of the hurdles, i think alot of people will get burned and end up avoiding the battle completely until the manufacturers get their shit together.
Yes it's very well known that a simple credit check (ie someone doing a credit check on you), whether landlord, bank or employer, in fact removes several points from your credit.
In BC here, almost every landlord is askig for credit info these days to run credit checks, and the housing market is F*ked - so in order to find a house you may have to look at 5-10 (or many more) places before you actually get one. If every one of these landlords does a credit check, your 'oh so good' credit ends up suffering a ridiculous amount just because you are looking for a house to live in.
This is probably the biggest thing that apple & other 'convergent' device manufacturers are missing.
all of the new 'video on your celphone' pushes just make me laugh - who's seriously going to download video onto their celphone at the cost that it ends up being (few fixed data rate plans) plus the fact that people watch movies on their 40" TV's, not a 2 inch micro screen.
Everyone I have seen using their Ipod is using WHILE doing other things - it's not a 'lets sit around the house and listen to music' - so video doesn't fit into this model at all.
Apple needs to be pushing the wireless transmission from ipod's to their traditional devices (ie stereo's, tv's etc) instead of worrying about bigger screens, clunkier devices etc.
Providing wireless transmission from the Ipod (which is supposedly near/coming out soon) would take Ipod's out of the 'walkman' category into the 'portable media station' one, which would be a huge jump imho.
i already drag around portable harddrives packed with movies & mp3's - it's my 'portable music collection' - having an ipod sized device with 120 Gb of video / music on it would be a huge benefit to a lot of people.
yes exactly - doesn't explain what exactly they did to make their site so 'unaccessible' - is this simply a fact of not including some 'alt' tags for images? what if my entire site is images? if you can't see the images, then why would I care if you can access them properly?
This is a bit much - I fully agree with doing what you can to make your site accessible, but this seems like it is going a bit far.
having an entire storefront done in flash or something is worthy of being sued just for lack of taste, but until we know exactly what they got sued for, it is extremely difficult to see what 'normal' websites need to be doing differently, if anything.
exactly - how the f*k are we supposed to know what is considered 'inaccessible' - ie worthy of being sued over - without some specific, clearly defined guidelines.
i run a number of websites that sell video games and tools for game developers - am I going to be sued because these sites are graphically intensive? or because the games (products) themselves are 'inaccessible' to the blind?
i download everything off the net onto my laptop, and then burn &/or otherwise transfer to my other machine (desktop) with a nice big flat panel screen for watching.
this 'locking to one machine' system is completely bass-ackwards and a non-starter...
if these retards were only killing themselves, I'd say 'have at it', all the better. But when hundreds (thousands?) of people are killed every year due to idiots racing around the streets, it becomes exponentially worse.
Anyone whining about terrorism should look at the automobile fatality rates around the world - the TRUE terrorists are people driving 3000 lb moving weapons pretending they are all 'cool' while street racing.
Almost 100,000 people killed by vehicles just in the states - and yet one terrorist incident causes the entire world to freak right the fuck out. The odds of getting killed by a terrorist in comparison is effectively a rounding error.
I think that WGA has already proven that it's not worth upgrading. Running a hardware firewall and being half-intelligent as an internet user is more than sufficient to protect yourself from ANY issues with non-patched software.
I know some people that have never upgraded their windows XP ever via windows update, yet have never been infected with virus' (virii?) or other malware. Just takes half of a brain on the user-end to make this possible.
This is due to the recent patent system 'overhaul' that the big companies have been pushing through - it's not 'first to invent', but 'first to file' that they are trying to move the patent system towards.
If this actually goes through (if it hasn't already), then all of the prior art in the world doesn't matter because the ruling goes to whoever files the patent first.
Basically adding yet another layer of bullshit on a completely broken system. The funny part is how companies like MS try to claim that first to file will help clean up the backlog of bs patents clogging the system.
How is being a jackass street racing 'cool'? This mentality has to be stopped - being a reckless asshat ripping around at ridiculous speeds in a city is how hundreds of people are killed every year.
Then it inspires a generation of retards that don't know how to drive to try and reproduce tihs in their own town. We have a major street racing problem happening and it's a direct result of this kind of video.
Keep the idiotic behavior in the simulations and off the streets please
the problem is more machines like laptops etc with mics built in - no disabling them, other than muting them via windows.
then again my acer ferrari has a nice habit of farking the audio drivers - i have to uninstall & reinstall the device regularly just to get my audio to work, period, let alone the mic.
of course acer won't ever update the drivers because according to them the machine behaves 'according to spec' - stupid oem hardware...no video driver updates, etc...gotta love having to hack your video driver to get it to install updates...ie DHModTool
if you don't think that there are plenty of good paying jobs doing rewarding php/lamp development then you are either living in the wrong city or need to be doing contracting.
there are a LOT of clients that specifically look for non-MS solutions, and if they aren't, you can educate them about the world of stable, easy to develop for software;}
This is the biggest issue with XNA that I can see so far. You MUST use C# to write code for it - pretty much eliminating years of experience writing games with C++
So every developer has to rewrite whatever engine they were working on for other platforms to work on the MS platforms.
You can write managed code in C++ without problems, this decision can ONLY be designed to try and force indies to support their platform only. Typical MS decision
Loki's business model wasn't very scalable - while the concept was very noble, ie porting games to linux, the practicalities of doing so doesn't pay a whole lot.
there simply aren't enough linux users willing to buy software YET, and even if they are being paid money to port the games to linux (e by publishers), they aren't going to pay enough to grow a business properly.
For a game developer to truly become successful in the current industry, developers absolutely NEED to create their own IP. Look at any of the successful companies in the industry, they all became successful building their own IP. Continuing to build properties based on your own IP is vital to a companies success.
with wm-drm it can be setup to be as invasive or as liberal as the content author chooses. you can set that you want the user to be able to make backups, burn cd's and so on if you so choose, but the issue is the other side of the coin - where the author chooses to be ridiculously protective over their content.
whether you use linux or not, this kind of tool is important to maintaining the rights that we as content users have had since the beginning of copyright law. these aren't just made up rights (fair use in particular) - the circumvention of drm is a very valid concern for everyone - not just linux users.
the general 'doesnt affect me so i dont care' attitude that the general public connveys is the reason that the big media companies are and will continue to try and press drm into common use.
>>I don't know if it's a flaw or more of a "how the heck do you code something like that?"
this is probably already done, similar to how traditional (ie in the 'real world') military training defines tactical priority.
typically a soldier (tank, chopper, whatever) is supposed to attack the enemy target in the order of danger that the target presents to the soldier. So if a soldier spots a tank in their vicinity, it would typically present a much higher threat level than an individual solder, so it makes sense (in this context) to attack the tank before the soldiers.
mind you, for a soldier with a small arms weapon (rifle for example), it wouldn't make any sense to attack a tank, because you could shoot the tank all day and not make any damage to it.
whereas in most RTS games, even an infantry soldier with a rifle can eventually harm/damage/kill a tank with a rifle, even if this makes zero sense logically. so the soldier's AI tells it - that tank is dangerous, ima attack it, when logically the soldier should be fighting the infantry nearby instead.
getting the soldiers to attack soldiers instead of tanks isn't exactly rocket science, but to optimize it, would require a higher level 'squad' type of AI versus the individual soldier's AI.
so each 'turn' (or every few seconds, that type of thing), the squad AI would scan the unit's surrounding area for targets. if an optimal target has appeared that makes more sense to attack (ie an infantry unit versus a tank), then the squad AI should direct the infantry to attack the infantry, switching priorities and targets for each of the individual soldiers that the squad AI is controlling.
all of this can and should be done behind the scenes without any player input whatsoever.
the current 'state of the industry' leaves much to be desired as far as AI goes - i've tried to play a few RTS type games recently and gave up very early on because of the sheer amount of micro-management that was required.
galactic civilizations i gave up before i even got through the set of tutorials because it was so painstaking to do anything...
it's more of a personal preference than anything though - some people like the high-level 'god' view, whereas i'm more of a action / tactical type of person - give me a squad that actually behaves semi-intelligently and then let me control my soldier.
Slashdot Mirror
this is pretty much what most online games do, lookig for unmodified content, but again you're relying on the client to tell you that it hasn't been modified, which is pretty much impossible to trust.
punkbuster et al rely on a seperate executable checking the state of another executable, which is a slightly better situation, but it ends up in a situation like bf2 where the 'validating client data' stage of loading a game takes as long as loading the content & connecting to a server, if not longer.
modders like this person have pretty much ruined online gaming and should be dragged into the streets and shot.
if he's just 'evening up the odds', it's an arms race that can never be won by the modders, so if this is their actual motivation, you'd think they'd be supportive of developers that DO successfully provide counter measures to cheating.
at least with BF2 anyone that mods content are forced to play on non-punkbuster servers - on xbox live, there is no such 'alternate' network that we can throw the cheaters onto.
the worst part is that doing any kind of LEGITIMATE mods of games falls afoul of the anti-cheat systems which has a negative impact on the game's lifecycle as well - you can't mod anything in BF2 without getting rejected from punkbuster servers for 'modifying your game content'.
since when do casino's care what's legal or not? they have their own rules and can eject you for any reason they want - or send you out back with vito if they find you using devices that they don't permit in said casino.
rules, laws - this is a CASINO fer keripes sake
>>Speculation will only result from people who don't even try to inform themselves.
ah, but this is all that the rabid fanboy community needs - the 'hint' of something - before they jump to conclusions and start screaming from the hilltops (for joy or in pain, either effect is about as useful)
exactly - who cares how often google or 'insert your service here' is down, when the local internet companies can't keep their service reliable for longer than a week at a time.
but the internet's made out of pipes though, no? shouldn't it be the same thing to secure it?
you mean that govt's been lying to us?
this seems to be a common 'issue' with these so called 'next-gen' consoles - apparently the 360 certification process only involves testing on HD tv's - this isn't the first game that has had this issue.
Considering the ratio of HD to 'standard' tv's on the market, this is yet another reason to NOT buy a 360...
hilarious
[quote]
Reuters, an international news wire service, caught heat by publishing a Beirut battle photo that contained an extra plume of smoke for dramatic effect. (Farid's software helped reveal that enhancement.)
[/quote]
they needed software to detect this? the 'enhancements' were so blatantly obvious that anyone that's ever used photoshop would have been able to see them...
hilarious
This argument makes me laugh particularly when it comes to so-called 'next gen' games - PC's have run at alot higher resolutions than the supposed 'HD' formats allow. Yet, the marketing machine continues to push the fact that supposedly these 'hd' consoles will give us a better gaming experience. No thanx.
>>But anyone can see 1280x960 is better than 640x480 which is better than 320x240.
which is why i'm sticking to the 'next gen hardware' I already have - ie my laptop - anyone can see that 1680x1050 is better than any HD format, period. for videos / movies, sure this might make a difference, but with all of the hurdles, i think alot of people will get burned and end up avoiding the battle completely until the manufacturers get their shit together.
btw, standard dvd's are 720 wide, not 640
Yes it's very well known that a simple credit check (ie someone doing a credit check on you), whether landlord, bank or employer, in fact removes several points from your credit.
In BC here, almost every landlord is askig for credit info these days to run credit checks, and the housing market is F*ked - so in order to find a house you may have to look at 5-10 (or many more) places before you actually get one. If every one of these landlords does a credit check, your 'oh so good' credit ends up suffering a ridiculous amount just because you are looking for a house to live in.
Keep the poor down - it's the way of the system.
This is probably the biggest thing that apple & other 'convergent' device manufacturers are missing.
all of the new 'video on your celphone' pushes just make me laugh - who's seriously going to download video onto their celphone at the cost that it ends up being (few fixed data rate plans) plus the fact that people watch movies on their 40" TV's, not a 2 inch micro screen.
Everyone I have seen using their Ipod is using WHILE doing other things - it's not a 'lets sit around the house and listen to music' - so video doesn't fit into this model at all.
Apple needs to be pushing the wireless transmission from ipod's to their traditional devices (ie stereo's, tv's etc) instead of worrying about bigger screens, clunkier devices etc.
Providing wireless transmission from the Ipod (which is supposedly near/coming out soon) would take Ipod's out of the 'walkman' category into the 'portable media station' one, which would be a huge jump imho.
i already drag around portable harddrives packed with movies & mp3's - it's my 'portable music collection' - having an ipod sized device with 120 Gb of video / music on it would be a huge benefit to a lot of people.
yes exactly - doesn't explain what exactly they did to make their site so 'unaccessible' - is this simply a fact of not including some 'alt' tags for images? what if my entire site is images? if you can't see the images, then why would I care if you can access them properly?
This is a bit much - I fully agree with doing what you can to make your site accessible, but this seems like it is going a bit far.
having an entire storefront done in flash or something is worthy of being sued just for lack of taste, but until we know exactly what they got sued for, it is extremely difficult to see what 'normal' websites need to be doing differently, if anything.
exactly - how the f*k are we supposed to know what is considered 'inaccessible' - ie worthy of being sued over - without some specific, clearly defined guidelines.
i run a number of websites that sell video games and tools for game developers - am I going to be sued because these sites are graphically intensive? or because the games (products) themselves are 'inaccessible' to the blind?
this is ridiculous.
yup, pretty much.
i download everything off the net onto my laptop, and then burn &/or otherwise transfer to my other machine (desktop) with a nice big flat panel screen for watching.
this 'locking to one machine' system is completely bass-ackwards and a non-starter...
if these retards were only killing themselves, I'd say 'have at it', all the better. But when hundreds (thousands?) of people are killed every year due to idiots racing around the streets, it becomes exponentially worse.
Anyone whining about terrorism should look at the automobile fatality rates around the world - the TRUE terrorists are people driving 3000 lb moving weapons pretending they are all 'cool' while street racing.
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/
Fatalities
drivers & passengers: 37,594
pedestrians / non-motorists: 43,443
Almost 100,000 people killed by vehicles just in the states - and yet one terrorist incident causes the entire world to freak right the fuck out. The odds of getting killed by a terrorist in comparison is effectively a rounding error.
I think that WGA has already proven that it's not worth upgrading. Running a hardware firewall and being half-intelligent as an internet user is more than sufficient to protect yourself from ANY issues with non-patched software.
I know some people that have never upgraded their windows XP ever via windows update, yet have never been infected with virus' (virii?) or other malware. Just takes half of a brain on the user-end to make this possible.
This is due to the recent patent system 'overhaul' that the big companies have been pushing through - it's not 'first to invent', but 'first to file' that they are trying to move the patent system towards.
If this actually goes through (if it hasn't already), then all of the prior art in the world doesn't matter because the ruling goes to whoever files the patent first.
Basically adding yet another layer of bullshit on a completely broken system. The funny part is how companies like MS try to claim that first to file will help clean up the backlog of bs patents clogging the system.
How is being a jackass street racing 'cool'? This mentality has to be stopped - being a reckless asshat ripping around at ridiculous speeds in a city is how hundreds of people are killed every year.
Then it inspires a generation of retards that don't know how to drive to try and reproduce tihs in their own town. We have a major street racing problem happening and it's a direct result of this kind of video.
Keep the idiotic behavior in the simulations and off the streets please
the problem is more machines like laptops etc with mics built in - no disabling them, other than muting them via windows.
then again my acer ferrari has a nice habit of farking the audio drivers - i have to uninstall & reinstall the device regularly just to get my audio to work, period, let alone the mic.
of course acer won't ever update the drivers because according to them the machine behaves 'according to spec' - stupid oem hardware...no video driver updates, etc...gotta love having to hack your video driver to get it to install updates...ie DHModTool
if you don't think that there are plenty of good paying jobs doing rewarding php/lamp development then you are either living in the wrong city or need to be doing contracting.
;}
there are a LOT of clients that specifically look for non-MS solutions, and if they aren't, you can educate them about the world of stable, easy to develop for software
This is the biggest issue with XNA that I can see so far. You MUST use C# to write code for it - pretty much eliminating years of experience writing games with C++
So every developer has to rewrite whatever engine they were working on for other platforms to work on the MS platforms.
You can write managed code in C++ without problems, this decision can ONLY be designed to try and force indies to support their platform only. Typical MS decision
would make a good anti-fan video i'm thinkin...
don't forget Ken!
Loki's business model wasn't very scalable - while the concept was very noble, ie porting games to linux, the practicalities of doing so doesn't pay a whole lot.
there simply aren't enough linux users willing to buy software YET, and even if they are being paid money to port the games to linux (e by publishers), they aren't going to pay enough to grow a business properly.
For a game developer to truly become successful in the current industry, developers absolutely NEED to create their own IP. Look at any of the successful companies in the industry, they all became successful building their own IP. Continuing to build properties based on your own IP is vital to a companies success.
with wm-drm it can be setup to be as invasive or as liberal as the content author chooses. you can set that you want the user to be able to make backups, burn cd's and so on if you so choose, but the issue is the other side of the coin - where the author chooses to be ridiculously protective over their content.
whether you use linux or not, this kind of tool is important to maintaining the rights that we as content users have had since the beginning of copyright law. these aren't just made up rights (fair use in particular) - the circumvention of drm is a very valid concern for everyone - not just linux users.
the general 'doesnt affect me so i dont care' attitude that the general public connveys is the reason that the big media companies are and will continue to try and press drm into common use.
>>I don't know if it's a flaw or more of a "how the heck do you code something like that?"
this is probably already done, similar to how traditional (ie in the 'real world') military training defines tactical priority.
typically a soldier (tank, chopper, whatever) is supposed to attack the enemy target in the order of danger that the target presents to the soldier. So if a soldier spots a tank in their vicinity, it would typically present a much higher threat level than an individual solder, so it makes sense (in this context) to attack the tank before the soldiers.
mind you, for a soldier with a small arms weapon (rifle for example), it wouldn't make any sense to attack a tank, because you could shoot the tank all day and not make any damage to it.
whereas in most RTS games, even an infantry soldier with a rifle can eventually harm/damage/kill a tank with a rifle, even if this makes zero sense logically. so the soldier's AI tells it - that tank is dangerous, ima attack it, when logically the soldier should be fighting the infantry nearby instead.
getting the soldiers to attack soldiers instead of tanks isn't exactly rocket science, but to optimize it, would require a higher level 'squad' type of AI versus the individual soldier's AI.
so each 'turn' (or every few seconds, that type of thing), the squad AI would scan the unit's surrounding area for targets. if an optimal target has appeared that makes more sense to attack (ie an infantry unit versus a tank), then the squad AI should direct the infantry to attack the infantry, switching priorities and targets for each of the individual soldiers that the squad AI is controlling.
all of this can and should be done behind the scenes without any player input whatsoever.
the current 'state of the industry' leaves much to be desired as far as AI goes - i've tried to play a few RTS type games recently and gave up very early on because of the sheer amount of micro-management that was required.
galactic civilizations i gave up before i even got through the set of tutorials because it was so painstaking to do anything...
it's more of a personal preference than anything though - some people like the high-level 'god' view, whereas i'm more of a action / tactical type of person - give me a squad that actually behaves semi-intelligently and then let me control my soldier.