> Um... As far as I know, a source-based active-silencing system will only make things worse. You can actively silence a relatively small space
That's the case for classic noise reduction. This thing is not about responding with equal but opposite force but about distributing the wave over time, so that the front isn't a sharp spike in pressure but a gradual rise. The energy is same or slightly stronger, but by distributing it over time (even miliseconds) you reduce the sudden impact effect.
I thought I know C until I tried to fix a bug in the kernel.
It was a simple syntax bug. Somebody put xxx[...]->yyy instead of xxx->yyy[...] in one line, and the compiler was protesting about type mismatch. One single line. But it took me 4 hours or so and I figured out only what the correct syntax for that piece of code would be, by analysing types of the variables used. I have no idea if the fix really corrected the problem, it just made the line lexically correct and let the compiler go on. In the meantime I had to crawl about 4 levels of header files for each of the variables/records used in the line to reach primitive types of given variables and macros, from which the structures, pointers etc were derived, and generally was totally dizzy. And I was doing it the code monkey style, I didn't really understand the workings of the kernel, what was the line I edited meant. I was purely checking that a pointer to float isn't directly assigned a value of float, just pointer to it etc.
Kernel is too difficult for us average coders. Only the elite can fix these bugs for us.
> it takes roughly two to three times the fuel per km flown
First class is roughly two times more expensive than economy class. This one charging ten times the economy class will still produce enough demand to fill all seats.
> The sonic boom prevents any overflight of populated areas and even if significant noise reduction could be achieved the very small constituency for such a service would still see any residual boom noise used as an excuse by the general (and envious) public to restrict or outright ban such overflight
Most of the route over ocean, no problem. The part over populated land can be either performed at altitudes where the residual boom (after active silencing, tech already present in fighter planes) reaching the ground will be unaudible - or travel at subsonic speeds over the land.
> Exhaust emissions at 20km altitude (roughly double 10km of commercial jets) are of far greater environmental concern due to lower mixing rates with lower atmosphere
So there will be just a few such planes. With prices this high there won't be all that much demand anyway... and with enough lobbying environment impact will just get forgotten. Not that I want it, it's just a realistic look at what happens.
> Add to this the high costs of development, Government-funded, NASA plus JSA, come on...
> relatively restricted range
Half the Earth. Do you need more?
>and limited routes
Only routes where it would make sense. Really no need to fly supersonic from New York to Washington DC. It's not meant to replace current planes, it's just to fill a small niche where there's small but constant demand and no supply.
> and you have a total non-starter.
You have some not all that hard obstacles, no showstoppers.
Nope. There are people ready to pay enough to make it feasible. Increase price, increase unit profit, decrease number of potential customers, either increase or decrease total profit. I bet if they made 2-seat 6-mach fighter planes available for plain human transport across the ocean (pilot+1 passenger), there would be still enough demand to make it pay if the travel lasted 3h instead of 14. Likely impossible for military reasons, not economic.
I saw a seasoned hacker creating a large system file in vi. He was typing at a leisurely pace, two fingers, tap, tap, tap, tap, no hurry. Two keystrokes per second or so. But when I looked at his screen, it wasn't the usual editor's text growth by char, char, char, char, char each keystroke. It was char, char, line, line, char, char, line, two lines, char, word, word, char, line, half-screen, line, line...
Daggerfall was more revolutionary than Morrowind, but still Morrowind was a serious improvement over Daggerfall. It WAS better though not all that much. It retained most of what Daggerfall had good, corrected some it had bad and added some of its own good content. Oblivion is a step back. Lots and lots of good or at least medicore stuff was replaced with really poor stuff, and the few "revolutionary" concepts it had appeared to be a total failure. (why level up, when finishing the game is easiest if you are level 1 and grows harder with each level gained, level 30 becoming near-impossible?)
Daggerfall was too buggy and contained (the same as Oblivion, only worse) too much of random-generated stuff comparing to actual content. At least they didn't try to dumb it down for console lusers.
There are so many ways to rearrange the words in the title to make sense of the article, and they have chosen one that is plain dumb. Cell phones don't get signalled by rain drops, nor rain makes you drop cell phone meant to signal.
Rain drops drop cell phone signal. Rain drops cell phone signal. Rain signalled by cell phone signal drops. Cell phone signal drops signals rain. Cell phones signal rain drops. Drop in cell phone signal signals rain.
Generally people that implement both lists are paid by the same people, from the same pool, so often tradeoffs must be made, fire a writer and two designers, purchase physics engine and redirect two coders to implement it instead of making the extra spells, then tell the NPC designer to implement NPC schedules in AI instead of thinking of some smart things for the NPC to say. And some things from the list 1 make some things from the list 2 impossible or problematic, all the extra polygons, landscape effects, grass etc forced them to make towns inside separate cells, voice acting vastly limited number of dialogue options, weeks or months were spent on betatesting and debugging misbehaving AI instead of implementing quests.
Most of people asked say Morrowind was better than Oblivion.
What could make Oblivion better, or at least equal to Morrowind?
These: Better grass distance? More details in the LOD (distant textures) area? More objects covered by the physics engine? (furniture, rocks, plants) Items possible to shatter, smash, break, dent? Containers displaying their content in 3D and not in 2D menu? Better voice acting? Books that burn?
Or maybe these: Less linear quests not forcing the next step on you? Shorter load times of locations? Not removing levitation, slowfall and a dozen other classic spells? More factions to join, interesting quests? Dialogues and text that always makes sense, never seeing hearing the same thing less than 5 seconds apart? New, interesting books you haven't read in Morrowind already?
Graphics, interaction, physics, this all doesn't make a good game! This makes a game that may feel realistic at places, but not good! Good game is a fun game. One that has a captivating story with unexpected twists. (Aeris dies. That made a good game.) One that doesn't bore you with hourly load times because more data needs to be loaded. One that creates no artificial limits (you can't climb up there, invisible wall, from that place you'd see too much at once overflowing the gfx memory).
So arguing whether we need better physics engine for better games is like arguing if we need 5.1 audio equipment in the room to make the lunch taste better.
and Bethesda's 1.1 beta patch removes the nipples on the texture. Fuck, so that's why my darkelf girl has no nipples! Assholes didn't mention this in the release notes! If I knew I wouldn't install the patch!
I just hope for one thing, that Bethesda will cut on the hipocrisy and allow adult-themed stuff on the forums. Currently discussion of adult-themed mods is forbidden and there's a separate sticky to inform of the dire consequences of violating this rule.
Yeppers... The simple answer is that Bethesda set our expectations too high with Morrowind. The game isn't all that bad. But it's way worse than Morrowind. And it reeks with bad management decisions. The world, the general idea, plot, background, the part that belonged strictly to developers and designers is great. But then you see a lot of shit tacked on top of it, that looks like a manager sat for 5 minutes to the play, got some idea and told people to implement it. It stinks, it spoils the fun. Minigames, levelled everything, dumbed down enchanting system, fast travel, compass. This junk is a crime against the idea of RPG. And of course it traditionally contains its gallery of bugs:)
As for cliff racers, there were some "obligatory" mods for Morrowind, I preferred Passive Healthy Wildlife (keeping most of cliff racers in air, never bothering the player), though played some with the anti-cliffracer belt too (zap any cliff racer that gets closer), and it was fun. Extremists would use "no cliffracers" which would leave just one cliffracer in the game, hanging from the roof of Skaal village hall in Solstheim:)
50% chance on exit. 100% chance when looking at certain objects while Specular lighting is disabled. 10% chance of freezing indefinitely while loading certain areas.
3% chance to have the quest phase not acknowledged by essential NPC, making it impossible to proceed with the quest. (with the number of quests, and their phases, that's a lot!) 70% chance for friendly NPC to do something terribly dumb during a battle. 5% chance to get kicked out of all guilds whenever fighting near a horse. 1% chance to get stuck inside the rock, wall, etc whenever you knock against it at high speed. 0.3% chance to fall through the floor after a jump. 90% to open any lock with one lockpick, no matter what your character level/skill. 100% chance there won't be any worthwhile loot until you're a character of level 15 with world so full of powerful levelled creatures that you'll have your butt kicked no matter what wonders the chest contains.
The game is easiest to finish for a level 1 character. Then it only gets harder and the more levels you gain, the harder to do anything, bandits you kicked around at level 3 will kill you in matter of seconds at level 20. The only way to get through the game is to pick a heavyweight barbarian and play it as a strictly pure mage, or get a pure mage and use only heavy armour and heavy weapons and no spells... this way you buff up the character and don't level up. If that's not a bug....
Slashdot Mirror
> Nobody ever complained.
;)
Nope. Simply no complains were ever respected by the army
> Um... As far as I know, a source-based active-silencing system will only make things worse. You can actively silence a relatively small space
That's the case for classic noise reduction. This thing is not about responding with equal but opposite force but about distributing the wave over time, so that the front isn't a sharp spike in pressure but a gradual rise. The energy is same or slightly stronger, but by distributing it over time (even miliseconds) you reduce the sudden impact effect.
Oh, but that's exactly what KNOWING C is about. So that you spend 15-30 minutes on fixing said macro (...by replacing 1 wrong character), not 4 hours.
'kay, there were no floats. I just said what I meant, compiler says type mismatch so I check if all types match.
yep, the previous poster is right.
I thought I know C until I tried to fix a bug in the kernel.
It was a simple syntax bug. Somebody put xxx[...]->yyy instead of xxx->yyy[...] in one line, and the compiler was protesting about type mismatch. One single line. But it took me 4 hours or so and I figured out only what the correct syntax for that piece of code would be, by analysing types of the variables used. I have no idea if the fix really corrected the problem, it just made the line lexically correct and let the compiler go on. In the meantime I had to crawl about 4 levels of header files for each of the variables/records used in the line to reach primitive types of given variables and macros, from which the structures, pointers etc were derived, and generally was totally dizzy. And I was doing it the code monkey style, I didn't really understand the workings of the kernel, what was the line I edited meant. I was purely checking that a pointer to float isn't directly assigned a value of float, just pointer to it etc.
Kernel is too difficult for us average coders. Only the elite can fix these bugs for us.
> it takes roughly two to three times the fuel per km flown
First class is roughly two times more expensive than economy class. This one charging ten times the economy class will still produce enough demand to fill all seats.
> The sonic boom prevents any overflight of populated areas and even if significant noise reduction could be achieved the very small constituency for such a service would still see any residual boom noise used as an excuse by the general (and envious) public to restrict or outright ban such overflight
Most of the route over ocean, no problem. The part over populated land can be either performed at altitudes where the residual boom (after active silencing, tech already present in fighter planes) reaching the ground will be unaudible - or travel at subsonic speeds over the land.
> Exhaust emissions at 20km altitude (roughly double 10km of commercial jets) are of far greater environmental concern due to lower mixing rates with lower atmosphere
So there will be just a few such planes. With prices this high there won't be all that much demand anyway... and with enough lobbying environment impact will just get forgotten. Not that I want it, it's just a realistic look at what happens.
> Add to this the high costs of development,
Government-funded, NASA plus JSA, come on...
> relatively restricted range
Half the Earth. Do you need more?
>and limited routes
Only routes where it would make sense. Really no need to fly supersonic from New York to Washington DC. It's not meant to replace current planes, it's just to fill a small niche where there's small but constant demand and no supply.
> and you have a total non-starter.
You have some not all that hard obstacles, no showstoppers.
Nope. There are people ready to pay enough to make it feasible. Increase price, increase unit profit, decrease number of potential customers, either increase or decrease total profit. I bet if they made 2-seat 6-mach fighter planes available for plain human transport across the ocean (pilot+1 passenger), there would be still enough demand to make it pay if the travel lasted 3h instead of 14. Likely impossible for military reasons, not economic.
I saw a seasoned hacker creating a large system file in vi. He was typing at a leisurely pace, two fingers, tap, tap, tap, tap, no hurry. Two keystrokes per second or so.
But when I looked at his screen, it wasn't the usual editor's text growth by char, char, char, char, char each keystroke. It was char, char, line, line, char, char, line, two lines, char, word, word, char, line, half-screen, line, line...
Daggerfall was more revolutionary than Morrowind, but still Morrowind was a serious improvement over Daggerfall. It WAS better though not all that much. It retained most of what Daggerfall had good, corrected some it had bad and added some of its own good content. Oblivion is a step back. Lots and lots of good or at least medicore stuff was replaced with really poor stuff, and the few "revolutionary" concepts it had appeared to be a total failure. (why level up, when finishing the game is easiest if you are level 1 and grows harder with each level gained, level 30 becoming near-impossible?)
Daggerfall was too buggy and contained (the same as Oblivion, only worse) too much of random-generated stuff comparing to actual content. At least they didn't try to dumb it down for console lusers.
There are so many ways to rearrange the words in the title to make sense of the article, and they have chosen one that is plain dumb. Cell phones don't get signalled by rain drops, nor rain makes you drop cell phone meant to signal.
Rain drops drop cell phone signal.
Rain drops cell phone signal.
Rain signalled by cell phone signal drops.
Cell phone signal drops signals rain.
Cell phones signal rain drops.
Drop in cell phone signal signals rain.
and quite a few more.
Only means how hopelessly horrible their dedicated weather sensing hardware is.
Generally people that implement both lists are paid by the same people, from the same pool, so often tradeoffs must be made, fire a writer and two designers, purchase physics engine and redirect two coders to implement it instead of making the extra spells, then tell the NPC designer to implement NPC schedules in AI instead of thinking of some smart things for the NPC to say. And some things from the list 1 make some things from the list 2 impossible or problematic, all the extra polygons, landscape effects, grass etc forced them to make towns inside separate cells, voice acting vastly limited number of dialogue options, weeks or months were spent on betatesting and debugging misbehaving AI instead of implementing quests.
...and with time and resources redirected from the actual -game- development towards physics, graphics etc.
Most of people asked say Morrowind was better than Oblivion.
What could make Oblivion better, or at least equal to Morrowind?
These:
Better grass distance?
More details in the LOD (distant textures) area?
More objects covered by the physics engine? (furniture, rocks, plants)
Items possible to shatter, smash, break, dent?
Containers displaying their content in 3D and not in 2D menu?
Better voice acting?
Books that burn?
Or maybe these:
Less linear quests not forcing the next step on you?
Shorter load times of locations?
Not removing levitation, slowfall and a dozen other classic spells?
More factions to join, interesting quests?
Dialogues and text that always makes sense, never seeing hearing the same thing less than 5 seconds apart?
New, interesting books you haven't read in Morrowind already?
Graphics, interaction, physics, this all doesn't make a good game! This makes a game that may feel realistic at places, but not good! Good game is a fun game. One that has a captivating story with unexpected twists. (Aeris dies. That made a good game.) One that doesn't bore you with hourly load times because more data needs to be loaded. One that creates no artificial limits (you can't climb up there, invisible wall, from that place you'd see too much at once overflowing the gfx memory).
So arguing whether we need better physics engine for better games is like arguing if we need 5.1 audio equipment in the room to make the lunch taste better.
and Bethesda's 1.1 beta patch removes the nipples on the texture.
Fuck, so that's why my darkelf girl has no nipples! Assholes didn't mention this in the release notes! If I knew I wouldn't install the patch!
The Real Berenziah. I believe the uncensored version is available -somewhere-, though extremely rare.
I just hope for one thing, that Bethesda will cut on the hipocrisy and allow adult-themed stuff on the forums. Currently discussion of adult-themed mods is forbidden and there's a separate sticky to inform of the dire consequences of violating this rule.
A book, present both in Oblivion and in Morrowind. Contents follow:
The Lusty Argonian Maid
by Crassius Curio
Act IV, Scene III, continued
Lifts-Her-Tail: Certainly not, kind sir! I am here but to clean your chambers.
Crantius Colto: Is that all you have come here for, little one? My chambers?
Lifts-Her-Tail: I have no idea what it is you imply, master. I am but a poor Argonian maid.
Crantius Colto: So you are, my dumpling. And a good one at that. Such strong legs and shapely tail.
Lifts-Her-Tail: You embarrass me, sir!
Crantius Colto: Fear not. You are safe here with me.
Lifts-Her-Tail: I must finish my cleaning, sir. The mistress will have my head if I do not!
Crantius Colto: Cleaning, eh? I have something for you. Here, polish my spear.
Lifts-Her-Tail: But it is huge! It could take me all night!
Crantius Colto: Plenty of time, my sweet. Plenty of time.
END OF ACT IV, SCENE III
---
(and make friends to the alchemist in Skingrad, she'll ask you an interesting question...)
Good one :)
\NII
Backslash-N-2.
Counterattack, Nintendo Two.
Don't forget e) has porn.
That's why Betamax failed, they didn't want to open their platform for porn industry.
Yeppers... :)
:)
The simple answer is that Bethesda set our expectations too high with Morrowind.
The game isn't all that bad. But it's way worse than Morrowind. And it reeks with bad management decisions. The world, the general idea, plot, background, the part that belonged strictly to developers and designers is great. But then you see a lot of shit tacked on top of it, that looks like a manager sat for 5 minutes to the play, got some idea and told people to implement it. It stinks, it spoils the fun. Minigames, levelled everything, dumbed down enchanting system, fast travel, compass. This junk is a crime against the idea of RPG.
And of course it traditionally contains its gallery of bugs
As for cliff racers, there were some "obligatory" mods for Morrowind, I preferred Passive Healthy Wildlife (keeping most of cliff racers in air, never bothering the player), though played some with the anti-cliffracer belt too (zap any cliff racer that gets closer), and it was fun. Extremists would use "no cliffracers" which would leave just one cliffracer in the game, hanging from the roof of Skaal village hall in Solstheim
50% chance on exit.
100% chance when looking at certain objects while Specular lighting is disabled.
10% chance of freezing indefinitely while loading certain areas.
3% chance to have the quest phase not acknowledged by essential NPC, making it impossible to proceed with the quest. (with the number of quests, and their phases, that's a lot!)
70% chance for friendly NPC to do something terribly dumb during a battle.
5% chance to get kicked out of all guilds whenever fighting near a horse.
1% chance to get stuck inside the rock, wall, etc whenever you knock against it at high speed.
0.3% chance to fall through the floor after a jump.
90% to open any lock with one lockpick, no matter what your character level/skill.
100% chance there won't be any worthwhile loot until you're a character of level 15 with world so full of powerful levelled creatures that you'll have your butt kicked no matter what wonders the chest contains.
The game is easiest to finish for a level 1 character. Then it only gets harder and the more levels you gain, the harder to do anything, bandits you kicked around at level 3 will kill you in matter of seconds at level 20. The only way to get through the game is to pick a heavyweight barbarian and play it as a strictly pure mage, or get a pure mage and use only heavy armour and heavy weapons and no spells... this way you buff up the character and don't level up. If that's not a bug....