Maybe his machine is setup terribly? My machine is more than 2 years old in pretty much all of its components, and it can run on high performance settings with high framerates all through the city (both of them).
Perhaps, if he can't figure out what specifically is causing the problem, he should use the Extreme Performance settings?
I think the HL2Files article author is either purposefully lying, or reading too far into the email response.
Steam works by only allowing you to play games that you have registered on your account. Downloading Half-Life 2 (or any other Steam game) doesn't matter, because you will still need to register it with steam to play.
Therefore, the only way to actually use a warez copy of a Steam game, is to (almost) completely bypass Steam. Needless to say, if you're bypassing Steam, VALVe isn't going to be able to ban your Steam account.
In any case, warez is bad, or some such.... and drink your milk!
Hmmm... lawsuit for sexist remarks made by a fictional character (who was being in-character), in a video game...
Does this mean that I, being a pacifist, could sue 90% of game companies, because they produce video games that involve killing (generally in large quantities), and that is offensive to me?
In any case, nearly all other forms of media (books and plays come to mind most) have had some works which include racism or sexism or other assorted bigotry, and most of those works have been accepted, and I don't see why a game should be different. What these people are trying to do is restrict creativity and freedom of speech because they were offended by a fictional character, it's certainly not a new phenomenon.
To conclude: Teppy/eGenesis should atleast place a nice large warning about the fact that by playing the game, you are susceptible to offensive/discomforting situations.
The problem with your logic, here, is that the article that this slashdot post is based upon, claims he loses on his 76th game, not on his 34th. Jeopardy! is taped in advance, and the article in question is using leaked information (true or not), that he has lost, and we will see it later. This is very clear from the article, and perhaps next time you should read it before making a post.
The game players buy those same old (or atleast very similar) games again and again because they enjoy it. People who bought Doom 1 and enjoyed it will buy Doom 2 because they liked the first one, and want something a little new, perhaps some new weapons, monsters, and levels.
Not every game has to be extremely original and revolutionary. Many games do very well simply by being what the customers enjoy playing, even if they shamelessly copy a previous successful game.
Obviously in those cases, the games need to be built well (of course there were dozens of Doom 1 clones, but not many of them were created well enough to be as enjoyable as the Doom series).
Yes, it's a shame that very few publishing companies will go out on a limb for a new game concept, but it's not a terrible shame that game players are getting what they want from the same old games with new titles.
There are a couple of problems with certain types of franchises. Several have been mentioned previously, but I noticed that the James Bond MMOG franchise idea wasn't brought up much.
Creating an MMOG based on a franchise that is character based (which is true to the extreme in the case of James Bond), is a very bad game design decision. With an MMOG, you have to consider the number of players involved.
A James Bond MMOG simply wouldn't work because you can't have 10,000 James Bonds. And someone who's playing a James Bond game, because they're a fan of James Bond, is not going to want to play Joe Bond, James' unknown-spy brother. If you don't allow people to play James Bond, a massive amount of the audience will leave, or perhaps never even pick up the game. If you let everyone be James Bond, no one will feel like an individual.
One must also factor in the content of that franchise. James Bond style gameplay really won't benefit from having other players around. Obviously you wouldn't want to be doing a mission and have 20 other James Bonds already in there doing that mission. Instead the game would use Instancing to create a new mission context for every player, but then you're just going to spend 99% of your time in a mission alone. Why not have a single player game, where you possibly pay to download new content once in a while? Concerning items and economy, James Bond doesn't normally buy his own items for the missions, so I'm not entirely sure if there would be any benefit to having an economy where you could trade with other players.
Lastly, MMOGs based on James Bond and Oz are simply too niche, in my view, to work out. There just won't be enough people willing to pay 10 or 15 dollars a month to play James Bond, or to have thier children play around in the world of Oz once or twice a month.
The thing about this database is that it includes many engines that are not considered major 3D engines, but could be useful to a hobbyist or even a small game development company. While I knew of many free/FOSS engines and some cheap ones, there are many there that I wasn't aware of, and already it has helped in that sense.
Well, since OGC does use code taken from the SDK, which is copyrighted material of Valve (and the OGC source code has those copyrights in it as well), Valve certainly has the right to say that it does not want to allow OGC, while still not requiring explicit consent for other mods. Either way, Valve should atleast ask the cheat makers to stop, before proceding with legal action (perhaps they already have, I don't know.)
While I certainly agree that knowledge of assembly (for the reason that it teaches you how the system actually works) is important, and anyone who wants to become a good coder should learn it... The 3770 is correct in that people who know it should not be revered and worshipped, because everyone should know assembly. That goes for people who mainly work with Java/.NET, they should learn Java Bytecodes and/or IL Assembler.
Part of the solution is to understand the game's audience. As many people have already stated, most gamers are trained to go for the NPCs to kill, or explosives to disable/sneak around, rather than for the (seemingly) easier solution. There are of course, audiences who would be more interested in problem solving. Such games as ATITD (www.atitd.net) have gameplay that would break down if the player base was that of normal MMOGs. ATITD, instead, has drawn a large audience of people who enjoy crafting and developing, and most importantly, working together with other players, and do not mind the lack of fighting.
If the Deus Ex 2 developers wanted to get people to do more problem solving or exploring, they should have targetted the FPS audience less than those that enjoy theif, or perhaps fans of action-oriented adventure games (if there are any...)
Not to mention that the winbridge CD includes Office -specific scripts and configuration files, which raises questions about it's useability for other Windows applications (assuming that it's more than just a ripoff of CrossOver Office).
Regardless of the fact that they still have two functioning gyroscopes... it still doesn't look bad that one of them failed, especially after that mysterious clanking noise earlier...
I don't see anything that says it's impossible to screenshot a text based game. I doubt that any reviwers are working on a system that has no GUI (and thus, usually, no screenshot capabilities).
And yes, it is possible that a terrible game can look good, and a great game can look terrible, and it's up to the reviewer to decide what to take the screenshot of. If they want to make the game seem great, they can take screenshots of the best looking parts of the game, or they could take a screenshot of the worst part of a game to make it appear horrible. Reviewers already do this, they just don't apply it to the rating part of their review.
And I know that sound is also a major output channel, however if a game's only problem is that the sound/voice acting is bad, I'm sure the reviewer could find a screenshot of something good.
Graphics may not be the most important part of the game, however they are the output mechanism. Taking a screenshot of say... a game-crashing bug and using that to show how the game is unplayable is not related to the graphical quality, but it does get across the message of the reviewer's opinion of the game.
Perhaps they should replace the number/star rating with a screenshot. If the reviewer really liked the game, they could put a screenshot of one of the best elements of the game. Conversely, they would put up a screenshot of the worst part of the game, in their opinion. Obviously, as with the number/star rating system, this wouldn't replace the review itself, only provide an easy to access summary of the reviewer's opinion.
The point of the grandparent's definition of metagaming is that the actual thinking outside of the game context is because of the player, not the game. There wouldn't be any games that use this, although the game examples cited in the article might encourage this type of behavior by not taking themselves seriously.
Yes, I have noticed the lack of grit and dirt a lot in games recently. Sometimes it's OK and works for the environment, but most times it's just a bit off. From what I've seen of Half-Life 2, however, a lot of the game has a bit of a gritty feel to it where it should.
He did mention that it was infact, a Computer game, not a game for a console. I haven't seen any computers that come with photosensitive seizure warnings, as general computer usage probably would not be a risk.
Clearly there is something in the job that they have to enjoy enough to put up with all of that stress and job instability. Some people must see something in it, or else there wouldn't be any games out there.
The solution to getting rid of the box cost is to have game developers use game client & server middleware, some of which is built specifically for MMOGs, and is free... such as NeL by Nevrax (www.nevrax.org).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe his machine is setup terribly? My machine is more than 2 years old in pretty much all of its components, and it can run on high performance settings with high framerates all through the city (both of them).
Perhaps, if he can't figure out what specifically is causing the problem, he should use the Extreme Performance settings?
I think the HL2Files article author is either purposefully lying, or reading too far into the email response.
Steam works by only allowing you to play games that you have registered on your account. Downloading Half-Life 2 (or any other Steam game) doesn't matter, because you will still need to register it with steam to play.
Therefore, the only way to actually use a warez copy of a Steam game, is to (almost) completely bypass Steam. Needless to say, if you're bypassing Steam, VALVe isn't going to be able to ban your Steam account.
In any case, warez is bad, or some such.... and drink your milk!
What about using components from manufacturers, that they would normally throw away because it doesn't exactly meet their lowest standards...
Hmmm... lawsuit for sexist remarks made by a fictional character (who was being in-character), in a video game...
Does this mean that I, being a pacifist, could sue 90% of game companies, because they produce video games that involve killing (generally in large quantities), and that is offensive to me?
In any case, nearly all other forms of media (books and plays come to mind most) have had some works which include racism or sexism or other assorted bigotry, and most of those works have been accepted, and I don't see why a game should be different. What these people are trying to do is restrict creativity and freedom of speech because they were offended by a fictional character, it's certainly not a new phenomenon.
To conclude: Teppy/eGenesis should atleast place a nice large warning about the fact that by playing the game, you are susceptible to offensive/discomforting situations.
The problem with your logic, here, is that the article that this slashdot post is based upon, claims he loses on his 76th game, not on his 34th. Jeopardy! is taped in advance, and the article in question is using leaked information (true or not), that he has lost, and we will see it later. This is very clear from the article, and perhaps next time you should read it before making a post.
apache.slashdot.org is by far the worst...
The game players buy those same old (or atleast very similar) games again and again because they enjoy it. People who bought Doom 1 and enjoyed it will buy Doom 2 because they liked the first one, and want something a little new, perhaps some new weapons, monsters, and levels.
Not every game has to be extremely original and revolutionary. Many games do very well simply by being what the customers enjoy playing, even if they shamelessly copy a previous successful game.
Obviously in those cases, the games need to be built well (of course there were dozens of Doom 1 clones, but not many of them were created well enough to be as enjoyable as the Doom series).
Yes, it's a shame that very few publishing companies will go out on a limb for a new game concept, but it's not a terrible shame that game players are getting what they want from the same old games with new titles.
There are a couple of problems with certain types of franchises. Several have been mentioned previously, but I noticed that the James Bond MMOG franchise idea wasn't brought up much. Creating an MMOG based on a franchise that is character based (which is true to the extreme in the case of James Bond), is a very bad game design decision. With an MMOG, you have to consider the number of players involved. A James Bond MMOG simply wouldn't work because you can't have 10,000 James Bonds. And someone who's playing a James Bond game, because they're a fan of James Bond, is not going to want to play Joe Bond, James' unknown-spy brother. If you don't allow people to play James Bond, a massive amount of the audience will leave, or perhaps never even pick up the game. If you let everyone be James Bond, no one will feel like an individual. One must also factor in the content of that franchise. James Bond style gameplay really won't benefit from having other players around. Obviously you wouldn't want to be doing a mission and have 20 other James Bonds already in there doing that mission. Instead the game would use Instancing to create a new mission context for every player, but then you're just going to spend 99% of your time in a mission alone. Why not have a single player game, where you possibly pay to download new content once in a while? Concerning items and economy, James Bond doesn't normally buy his own items for the missions, so I'm not entirely sure if there would be any benefit to having an economy where you could trade with other players. Lastly, MMOGs based on James Bond and Oz are simply too niche, in my view, to work out. There just won't be enough people willing to pay 10 or 15 dollars a month to play James Bond, or to have thier children play around in the world of Oz once or twice a month.
Are you sure that we have the right to posess that intellectual property?
The thing about this database is that it includes many engines that are not considered major 3D engines, but could be useful to a hobbyist or even a small game development company. While I knew of many free/FOSS engines and some cheap ones, there are many there that I wasn't aware of, and already it has helped in that sense.
Well, since OGC does use code taken from the SDK, which is copyrighted material of Valve (and the OGC source code has those copyrights in it as well), Valve certainly has the right to say that it does not want to allow OGC, while still not requiring explicit consent for other mods. Either way, Valve should atleast ask the cheat makers to stop, before proceding with legal action (perhaps they already have, I don't know.)
While I certainly agree that knowledge of assembly (for the reason that it teaches you how the system actually works) is important, and anyone who wants to become a good coder should learn it... The 3770 is correct in that people who know it should not be revered and worshipped, because everyone should know assembly. That goes for people who mainly work with Java/.NET, they should learn Java Bytecodes and/or IL Assembler.
Part of the solution is to understand the game's audience. As many people have already stated, most gamers are trained to go for the NPCs to kill, or explosives to disable/sneak around, rather than for the (seemingly) easier solution. There are of course, audiences who would be more interested in problem solving. Such games as ATITD (www.atitd.net) have gameplay that would break down if the player base was that of normal MMOGs. ATITD, instead, has drawn a large audience of people who enjoy crafting and developing, and most importantly, working together with other players, and do not mind the lack of fighting. If the Deus Ex 2 developers wanted to get people to do more problem solving or exploring, they should have targetted the FPS audience less than those that enjoy theif, or perhaps fans of action-oriented adventure games (if there are any...)
Not to mention that the winbridge CD includes Office -specific scripts and configuration files, which raises questions about it's useability for other Windows applications (assuming that it's more than just a ripoff of CrossOver Office).
Regardless of the fact that they still have two functioning gyroscopes... it still doesn't look bad that one of them failed, especially after that mysterious clanking noise earlier...
I don't see anything that says it's impossible to screenshot a text based game. I doubt that any reviwers are working on a system that has no GUI (and thus, usually, no screenshot capabilities). And yes, it is possible that a terrible game can look good, and a great game can look terrible, and it's up to the reviewer to decide what to take the screenshot of. If they want to make the game seem great, they can take screenshots of the best looking parts of the game, or they could take a screenshot of the worst part of a game to make it appear horrible. Reviewers already do this, they just don't apply it to the rating part of their review.
And I know that sound is also a major output channel, however if a game's only problem is that the sound/voice acting is bad, I'm sure the reviewer could find a screenshot of something good.
Graphics may not be the most important part of the game, however they are the output mechanism. Taking a screenshot of say... a game-crashing bug and using that to show how the game is unplayable is not related to the graphical quality, but it does get across the message of the reviewer's opinion of the game.
Perhaps they should replace the number/star rating with a screenshot. If the reviewer really liked the game, they could put a screenshot of one of the best elements of the game. Conversely, they would put up a screenshot of the worst part of the game, in their opinion. Obviously, as with the number/star rating system, this wouldn't replace the review itself, only provide an easy to access summary of the reviewer's opinion.
The point of the grandparent's definition of metagaming is that the actual thinking outside of the game context is because of the player, not the game. There wouldn't be any games that use this, although the game examples cited in the article might encourage this type of behavior by not taking themselves seriously.
Yes, I have noticed the lack of grit and dirt a lot in games recently. Sometimes it's OK and works for the environment, but most times it's just a bit off. From what I've seen of Half-Life 2, however, a lot of the game has a bit of a gritty feel to it where it should.
He did mention that it was infact, a Computer game, not a game for a console. I haven't seen any computers that come with photosensitive seizure warnings, as general computer usage probably would not be a risk.
Clearly there is something in the job that they have to enjoy enough to put up with all of that stress and job instability. Some people must see something in it, or else there wouldn't be any games out there.
The solution to getting rid of the box cost is to have game developers use game client & server middleware, some of which is built specifically for MMOGs, and is free... such as NeL by Nevrax (www.nevrax.org).