I know. What I'm saying is I think in the near future those effectively merged servers will become actually merged. Currently they have to run 6 character databases and 6 worldspace instances to run those 6 servers even though the players play as if they are on one server. All they will have to do is amend the database to include homeserver, merge those 6 databases together, run a couple checks based on that homeserver field for server first achievements, and they'll have one large pop server and 5 servers worth of hardware to save on upgrade costs. All without actually announcing they're merging servers for real, since the line in the sand drawn by the hardcore players seems to be that border between virtual merges and actual merges.
Last I checked WoW had a system that effectively merged servers by adding automatic cross-server gameplay to low pop servers. So your character from low pop server #1 would actually be playing on low pop server #2 in some or all zones so you would have other people to play with. They decided on this because the idea of them actually merging servers to reduce host footprint would spark a massive panic as The One True MMO all others aspire to replace would be in perceived death spiral.
Personally I expect there is a little more to the cross server feature than they're letting on, and eventually the part that differentiated players by their server ( in chat) will be set to fake that info and many servers will actually be fully merged at that point. All it would take is an extra field in the server database to denote which fake server their character is a member of and adding a check to the "server first" achievements to respect those groups. Not only would that let them avoid the whole "OMG WoW is dying!!!" panic from the fanboys while actually cutting underused hardware, but paid server moves become even more of a cash grab as in many cases it would be a quick field switch in a single server's database.
My problem is while we have very good insurance, we just don't have any other option. The only clinic here works 8-4 m-f and that's it, anything else has to go to the ER.
We had a small clinic open on the weekends for a short time, but the doctor running it was shunned by the other doctors in the area and died after 9 months of heart attack linked to work stress. Guy had a full workload all weekend long so there is a need for weekend care, but the other doctors in the area apparently find it more profitable to force people into ER visits.
If I thought it possible you might one day breed I would tell you to wait till you have a 3 year old with a fever of 104-105, 102 after both tylenol and ibuprophen, who sits quietly whimpering because everything hurts, and see if you feel comfortable waiting two days to see if it's serious.
But we both know that's never going to happen, so go ahead and fume over some mythical worldwide rate increase caused by my daughter's 4 ER visits over a 6 year period.
If we know it's the flu we can care for her normally without the looming fear it's something worse. Gives you the chance to wait till the clinic is open instead of wasting a trip to an ER that has the motto "If it ain't broken bones, don't fix it."
That's half our doctors trips, finding out it's something we just have to let run its course. But we still need to get those tests done to know that.
I have two kids, my family tends to come down with crap starting friday nights, and only the emergency room is available over the weekend in our area. The ability to do simple tests like flu or strep at home would be a godsend.
Of the 4 routes out of my area, all of them require driving 100+ miles before you reach another major town (as defined as having more than 1 gas station and a post office that opens atleast an hour a day).
Couple years ago the University of Wyoming took down a large sculpture on campus well before its planned exhebition run was done because the oil industry felt it was insulting. I'm pretty sure "don't bite the hand that feeds you" was an exact quote from a state official demanding it be taken down immediately.
Charging is the current hangup for electric cars. Mainstream is addicted to the ability to drive any distance they want with one vehicle and be able to refuel in 10 minutes at any gas station of their choosing.
Give someone an electric car with a 1000 mile range and they'll complain about having to stop for 8 hours to recharge it in the middle of their 2000 mile roadtrip they totally plan on taking one day. Having to stop for 8 hours to rest after 16 hours of activity is totally unacceptable from a car.
First update will bring their newly patented One-Word checkout. Just say the same of a movie, song, or product and it will automatically search and purchase it for you. No annoying keyworld like "ok google" required, the feature is always on and always parsing your conversations for products to purchase for you.
Second update brings predictive ordering. Fire TV will automatically purchase any and all products it thinks you may want, playing movies before you know you even want to watch.
Just stay away from Windows M, especially after the E service pack. Luckily the concurrent release of windows 20.00 will give people another, more suitable option.
Plus, no ISP would want to drop their revenue. So expect a static "line maintenance" fee pretty close to what you already pay and a per gig rate that brings a normal user up the rest of the way. Of course "normal" usage would be calculated by cutting out the extreme data users (as defined by people who use 100x or more the data as the lowest user, which would probably be an inactive connection or a restaurant that logs maybe 100meg a month running credit cards). Sure that would account for 90% of their customer base and make any statistician vomit, but that's irrelevant and should not be discussed by right of trade secret laws and DMCA takedown prenotices and you will be sued and thrown into liars prison so be scared and be quiet before you get labeled a terrorist for interfering with god given right to profit.
I really doubt a AAA with a 300 person team is going to purchase a game engine for a multi-million budget AAA title by going to a publicly accessible web store and queuing up 1 pro license + 299 team addon licenses and plunk down a credit card for that $151,000 bill. Just guessing here, but the same sales team that processes their console licenses will probably give that AAA different licensing prices and terms for a huge order like that.
A watermark? I haven't built anything with unity but all I can find is as long as you make less than $100k/year you can build and release with free with just a required splash screen.
And even if unity suddenly does become an overpriced piece of junk, there's other game engines including a good number of GPL and MIT licensed free ones. For the hypothetical 10 man team looking to break into the market with no money to spare for a big license, there are alternatives. And if they refuse to do without the extra pretty unreal rendering provides, then they probably lack the ability to compromise on other aspects of their vision and are pretty much doomed to fail.
Unreal's licensing scheme looks like nothing more than a way to squeeze some cash out of students looking to learn the engine before applying to a big company. That and court small to mid sized studios that have the resources to actually utilize the unreal pretties, and hopefully score a popular enough release to afford a real license and cut down the royalties.
$15000 would get you a 28 person team license with unity pro. It would also get you an infinite person team license with unity standard and $15000 in change. Both save you the 5% royalty.
And you have yet to explain what financial risk epic games is bearing for you when you use the unreal engine.
Why are you so intent on making it look like unity is a horribly overpriced alternative? I'm going to assume you're just an angry fanboy, because a paid shill would have better grammar.
https://store.unity3d.com/ $1500 gets you the pro version, or $75 a month. That's not thousands. Android and iOS are another chunk of cash each but are not required unless you're targeting those pro features.
Of course you can use and release free if you don't need the pro features...
And what financial risk are they taking? If I make a game and it flops badly with no sales they are still ahead by my monthly subscription.
Parent is an illegal alien. He has to be. He's advertising the fact he's a martian right in his name and no country on earth has laws to allow martians to immigrate.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why netflix? Why wasn't porn the first thing mentioned?
I know. What I'm saying is I think in the near future those effectively merged servers will become actually merged.
Currently they have to run 6 character databases and 6 worldspace instances to run those 6 servers even though the players play as if they are on one server.
All they will have to do is amend the database to include homeserver, merge those 6 databases together, run a couple checks based on that homeserver field for server first achievements, and they'll have one large pop server and 5 servers worth of hardware to save on upgrade costs. All without actually announcing they're merging servers for real, since the line in the sand drawn by the hardcore players seems to be that border between virtual merges and actual merges.
Last I checked WoW had a system that effectively merged servers by adding automatic cross-server gameplay to low pop servers. So your character from low pop server #1 would actually be playing on low pop server #2 in some or all zones so you would have other people to play with.
They decided on this because the idea of them actually merging servers to reduce host footprint would spark a massive panic as The One True MMO all others aspire to replace would be in perceived death spiral.
Personally I expect there is a little more to the cross server feature than they're letting on, and eventually the part that differentiated players by their server ( in chat) will be set to fake that info and many servers will actually be fully merged at that point.
All it would take is an extra field in the server database to denote which fake server their character is a member of and adding a check to the "server first" achievements to respect those groups.
Not only would that let them avoid the whole "OMG WoW is dying!!!" panic from the fanboys while actually cutting underused hardware, but paid server moves become even more of a cash grab as in many cases it would be a quick field switch in a single server's database.
Helps to bribe system builders to keep AMD out of most consumer's machines.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
My problem is while we have very good insurance, we just don't have any other option. The only clinic here works 8-4 m-f and that's it, anything else has to go to the ER.
We had a small clinic open on the weekends for a short time, but the doctor running it was shunned by the other doctors in the area and died after 9 months of heart attack linked to work stress.
Guy had a full workload all weekend long so there is a need for weekend care, but the other doctors in the area apparently find it more profitable to force people into ER visits.
If I thought it possible you might one day breed I would tell you to wait till you have a 3 year old with a fever of 104-105, 102 after both tylenol and ibuprophen, who sits quietly whimpering because everything hurts, and see if you feel comfortable waiting two days to see if it's serious.
But we both know that's never going to happen, so go ahead and fume over some mythical worldwide rate increase caused by my daughter's 4 ER visits over a 6 year period.
If we know it's the flu we can care for her normally without the looming fear it's something worse. Gives you the chance to wait till the clinic is open instead of wasting a trip to an ER that has the motto "If it ain't broken bones, don't fix it."
That's half our doctors trips, finding out it's something we just have to let run its course. But we still need to get those tests done to know that.
I have two kids, my family tends to come down with crap starting friday nights, and only the emergency room is available over the weekend in our area. The ability to do simple tests like flu or strep at home would be a godsend.
When your pregnant wife/girlfriend starts getting advertisements for odd foods before she starts craving them, then you should start to worry.
Of the 4 routes out of my area, all of them require driving 100+ miles before you reach another major town (as defined as having more than 1 gas station and a post office that opens atleast an hour a day).
Your claim is not exactly a shocking revelation.
Couple years ago the University of Wyoming took down a large sculpture on campus well before its planned exhebition run was done because the oil industry felt it was insulting. I'm pretty sure "don't bite the hand that feeds you" was an exact quote from a state official demanding it be taken down immediately.
V'GER.
Wrong probe anyway, VoyaGER is far beyond recovery with current technology and politics.
This is less rigged and better regulated.
Charging is the current hangup for electric cars. Mainstream is addicted to the ability to drive any distance they want with one vehicle and be able to refuel in 10 minutes at any gas station of their choosing.
Give someone an electric car with a 1000 mile range and they'll complain about having to stop for 8 hours to recharge it in the middle of their 2000 mile roadtrip they totally plan on taking one day. Having to stop for 8 hours to rest after 16 hours of activity is totally unacceptable from a car.
First update will bring their newly patented One-Word checkout.
Just say the same of a movie, song, or product and it will automatically search and purchase it for you. No annoying keyworld like "ok google" required, the feature is always on and always parsing your conversations for products to purchase for you.
Second update brings predictive ordering. Fire TV will automatically purchase any and all products it thinks you may want, playing movies before you know you even want to watch.
Just stay away from Windows M, especially after the E service pack.
Luckily the concurrent release of windows 20.00 will give people another, more suitable option.
That doesn't make what he said untrue.
Prepare eBay One for immediate departure.
And change the combination on my luggage!
Plus, no ISP would want to drop their revenue. So expect a static "line maintenance" fee pretty close to what you already pay and a per gig rate that brings a normal user up the rest of the way.
Of course "normal" usage would be calculated by cutting out the extreme data users (as defined by people who use 100x or more the data as the lowest user, which would probably be an inactive connection or a restaurant that logs maybe 100meg a month running credit cards). Sure that would account for 90% of their customer base and make any statistician vomit, but that's irrelevant and should not be discussed by right of trade secret laws and DMCA takedown prenotices and you will be sued and thrown into liars prison so be scared and be quiet before you get labeled a terrorist for interfering with god given right to profit.
Yeah that last bit kinda ran away from me.
I really doubt a AAA with a 300 person team is going to purchase a game engine for a multi-million budget AAA title by going to a publicly accessible web store and queuing up 1 pro license + 299 team addon licenses and plunk down a credit card for that $151,000 bill.
Just guessing here, but the same sales team that processes their console licenses will probably give that AAA different licensing prices and terms for a huge order like that.
A watermark? I haven't built anything with unity but all I can find is as long as you make less than $100k/year you can build and release with free with just a required splash screen.
And even if unity suddenly does become an overpriced piece of junk, there's other game engines including a good number of GPL and MIT licensed free ones.
For the hypothetical 10 man team looking to break into the market with no money to spare for a big license, there are alternatives. And if they refuse to do without the extra pretty unreal rendering provides, then they probably lack the ability to compromise on other aspects of their vision and are pretty much doomed to fail.
Unreal's licensing scheme looks like nothing more than a way to squeeze some cash out of students looking to learn the engine before applying to a big company.
That and court small to mid sized studios that have the resources to actually utilize the unreal pretties, and hopefully score a popular enough release to afford a real license and cut down the royalties.
$15000 would get you a 28 person team license with unity pro.
It would also get you an infinite person team license with unity standard and $15000 in change.
Both save you the 5% royalty.
And you have yet to explain what financial risk epic games is bearing for you when you use the unreal engine.
Why are you so intent on making it look like unity is a horribly overpriced alternative?
I'm going to assume you're just an angry fanboy, because a paid shill would have better grammar.
https://store.unity3d.com/
$1500 gets you the pro version, or $75 a month. That's not thousands.
Android and iOS are another chunk of cash each but are not required unless you're targeting those pro features.
Of course you can use and release free if you don't need the pro features...
And what financial risk are they taking? If I make a game and it flops badly with no sales they are still ahead by my monthly subscription.
Parent is an illegal alien.
He has to be. He's advertising the fact he's a martian right in his name and no country on earth has laws to allow martians to immigrate.
The amount of time I spend at work keeping printers running suggests this is false.
So any other late 90's predictions of the future you would like to share?