The guide is littered with "more details at our premium forums", "detailed description of how to do it on the forums", "which can be obtained in our store" etc. The guide is just a top of an iceberg. The previous "pay for the guide, get access to the forum" seemed more honest than current "get guide free, pay to access the forums so the guide is of any actual use to you".
how hard would it be to build one from a Slide projector? Bulb and some optics already in place, just the "LCD screen format" (35mm slides) somewhat too small:) Any pointers/help?
Not because of this. You could still shout "stop you stupid fleabag!" and then using the GPS catch up with the dog waiting for you. Or shout "Go home" or such. Smarter dogs understand it and would obey. But it won't work, because all the dog will hear would be some nonrecognizable screech. GSM is a psychoacoustic(sp?) audio compression model meant to be understandable and working for humans. Dogs have wider recognizable audio spectrum, focus on other frequencies than humans, and generally catch different features of the voice than humans. Shout "come" and the dog will come. Play the same "come" from mp3 player to speakers, and the dog won't recognize the signal. For dogs things like mp3, computer-generated music etc are just some nondescript noises. Sometimes, rarely they understand some very characteristic noises - barking, cat's meow etc. Audio CDs are for them about the sound quality of 72rpm vinyl records. GSM is just a random noise.
1. PARENTAL ATTENTION is the way to bring up and protect children. Not dumping them in front of a TV or internet and have the insane fscking government decide.
I wholeheartedly agree. But as long as there's no governmental motivation (say, making it a federal crime?), parents WILL be dumping kids in front of TV or internet. And the problems resulting from it are in the same degree of the parents, as ours, as the kids are what the society is being built of, and you DO have to live near them, no matter how much you hate that.
Know the new fad in the world of early teen boys? Collecting. No longer collecting postcards, car models, stamps, pokemon pics or such. Collecting brothel leaflets. It's the rage now. Of course very few parents know.
Take note of the critical two words of that sentence: "psycho kid." A kid with the severity of psychological issues that would be necessary to confuse video games with the real world would, sooner or later, run across something violent
You're thinking on a single-bit level. Normal kid - psycho kid. Normal kid sees arbitrary amount of violence, never does any fighting, psycho kid sees dogs fighting in the lawn and goes on a rampage. Thing is, there's no fixed level of "psycho". Expose a normal, psychically stable adult to enough of strong enough violence and you'll drive them insane. Take a kid with something seriously wrong in its brain and it will go on rampage without -any- kind of stimulation. But there's a whole range of greys inbetween and the more you expose children to violence, the more likely given kid will snap, while still the "base probability" depends on individual traits. Take a kid from higher regions of the scale, it could pass whole life as a good citizen if living in relatively calm environment. But give enough stimulus and it will go nuts. It's not about enabling/disabling these kinds of things from happening. It's about decreasing levels of risk.
Video games are rarely, if ever, the only factor in any individual's decision to commit violence. It would be more effective to address the psychological issues making the kid susceptible to influence by video games than to censor the games.
True video games aren't the only factor, they are just a serious contributor. Limiting access just to the games would be somewhat like banning driving after gin&tonic because it contains alcohol, while still allowing to drink whisky and drive. Still doesn't mean drunken driving should be allowed because banning gin&tonic is unfair. Note, I'm all against -censoring- games. I just mean limiting access wherever applicable. As for addressing psychological issues... *shrug* if this was -detectable- easily enough, then sure. But otherwise, I don't think so. Finding out a given kid is/isn't suspectible to this kind of issues should be a parent's thing, but as history proves we can't depend on parents, and once the kid does go nuts, it's not just the parents' problem.
Remember that before video games were the villain of the moment, school shootings were blamed on Marilyn Manson and The Basketball Diaries.
meantime, there was still a lot of violent cartoons on TV, quite violent movies, etc. Curious thing, in Europe these kinds of things are almost unknown. Why?
IMHO games should be just honestly released in "adults-only" versions whenever applicable, and possibly with "violence-free" editions optionally, whenever the developer feels like it. It's a responsible thing to do.
The fact -your- kid knows the real thing apart from the game world doesn't mean some other kid does. The fact you're a responsible parent and watch what titles your kid plays, doesn't mean other parents are. And if your kid gets shot by a psycho kid who played one brutal game too many, and lost the sense of difference between the games and the real world, the fact that you're a responsible parent and didn't let your kid play violent games, or that your smart kid didn't ever get the idea to bring a gun to school won't make much of a difference.
So, simply - if you want -your- kid to play adult games, go, buy them for him/her. If you want to play them, you're adult, cool, no problem. But if the kid goes to spend the pocket money on a game where the brain splashes oh so cool on the wall, and then unattended will play with dad's gun and test it on his sister, to see if her brain splashes just the same, better if the seller says "sorry, kid, bring your parents." And fuck all the money retailers and game manufacturers lose because of these very kids not being able to but these very games.
Similar idea, but not such HUGE world. I mean, what, 99 levels?:) (plus they get randomly generated everytime you enter. Same reason I didn't list Diablo. The idea is that the world, though generated, remains pretty much fixed thorough the time.)
If you know in real life they are 24-level... Otherwise, well... The challenge is even cooler. As for spell backfiring, true if it's a lvl1 magic missile you use two times a minute, it would suck. But if you're up to a great ritual you've never done before in your life, very risky and very dangerous, you know what you're doing. And screwing up in a creative way may be just as fun (or even more) than succeeding.
Now, what you have is a very large (very borring) world built in a couple of 'developer years' that you can then build off of.
Yes. Arbitrarily large. As huge as I only desire. As many developer-years as I desire, by just turning a knob. As for "boring", not necessarily THAT boring. Sometimes the game engine itself creates cool challenges. With medium amount of effort you can generate huge amount of medium-interesting content - hunting, mapping, mining, discovering resources, etc. This alone could keep some players occupied for weeks. But true, with extra content it would get very boring after some time. Thing is, you need very little custom content combined with the generated area to keep things interesting. Development of interesting world gets really cheap. True, as opposed to instanced world, not everyone can become a king twice a day. But all the more becoming a king gets valuable. And the chances you will, some day, are fair.
"Randomly generating an interesting, challenging world is really, really hard"
I agree. But instead of iteratively creating the world bit-by-bit, why not enter another spectrum and spend the same time and effort on tweaking the parameters of the random creation (or not so random, but macromanaged - say, you draw the world of the map, with one pixel relating to half a mile square of gameplay terrain, then generate the world with terrain made corresponding to the map). Then once the method of rapid creating the world has been developed, practically the developers can add new custom content faster than players could discover it, especially that 80% of the time the players would spend on "generics", random encounters in the wilderness, exploring, treasure-hunting in generic caves - or just doing the usual socializing in the cities. Really little work would go into changing a common "generic" into an interesting "custom" taking the generated world as your friend. A generic area inhabited by strong enemies - just place a single more expensive (if generic) item in the middle, and leave a rumor in the tavern. And you have a challenging quest. With making quests that easy, the game could be a huge success. And since the development goes on while the game is running, the world could keep growing all the time, and there would be always something new to do/find, new features being added all the time etc. The game would NOT be very ballanced, but still fun, and realistic. A newbie faces a randomly spawned enemy of some 60th level? Yay! Run for the city gates and yell for help! That completely generic cave a few paces from the capitol, thousands of players went through, but one bothered to pick up a rock and found a note with a hint for a hidden cave, not really far, but quite well hidden. Besides "generics" and "customs" there could be "specials", items, events, challenges unique to the whole game, happening just once. What about a big meteorite striking some big area in the middle of the map? What about an earthquake changing the face of Earth? Or a sea drying up by some rare magic spell? Just think of the opportunity to make heroes to be sung about, just by providing unique quests that are doable just once (not once by player, once total!) and having huge impact on the world? Want add some new kind of monsters? Don't make them appear overnight. Make a quest that ends up with a single player screwing up some important spell badly (scripted but unexpected) and summoning them. From then on, that single player would gain world's fame. Everyone could do it, and they would happen rarely enough to make them precious, but often enough that you could have a fair chance to stumble upon one. Real stories to tell, and proofs walking the earth, no "I've beaten X" "I've beaten X too!" "I've beaten X as a kid" as with instances where everyone repeats the same quest over and over, but as truly notable events.
"The Register reports on a [[register article|trojan spotted in the wild]] that takes advantage of the so-far unpatched IE [[|Slashdot story|vulnerability]] mentioned on Slashdot earlier this week."
That should be done like this:
"The Register [[register article|reports]] on a [[a page with the trojan|trojan spotted in the wild]] that takes advantage of the so-far unpatched IE [[How to exploit?|vulnerability]] [[Slashdot story|mentioned on Slashdot]] earlier this week."
And never a chance to meet another team... Sometimes such crossovers are really great, when a good GM or two pit two teams against each other in some weird competition, or force them to cooperate, or just two groups of players meet to play a common adventure together...
Instances are plain unnatural. Two guys go through the same door, they both land in identical environments but they are separate from each other. What about approach that was present in some long-forgotten games like Elite 2: Frontier? Just pseudorandomly (randomizing with a fixed seed, so it looks random in space, but doesn't change in time) create a huge game universe, with some overriding "specials" locations/events, and vast "generic" terrains, specific to given area somehow, but without having each tree in the forest placed by hand or c&p'd from neighbouring square, but placed in somewhat random pattern.
Instead of drawing the world from scratch, let the machine generate just a "generic world" , whole map of rivers, forests, mountains, caves etc (or whatever fits given universe...) from some basic "brick" elements, without cities and roads, but with monster spawning points, completely random caves, some low-value treasure, some very generic low-paying quests/missions, possibly even with some completely random villages. Then populate it by hand, using artists and mappers' skills, add custom quests, custom enemies, custom buildings. Remove architectonical nonsenses, add roads, transportation, special places - generally add sense of order to the world.
Effect: Development cost and time cut in half or more, gameplay area expanded almost indefinitely, possibly also vastly reducing the download/install size (Frontier would fit on a floppy, with billions of stars and advanced universe), because most of the world can be generated ("spawned") just from the fixed random seed and formula, instead of having to be read from database.
One more thing, sometimes you see dishonest negative astroturfing to undermine the competition's position. But this is easy to catch. The astroturfers rarely bother with detail, so "sucks", "cheaters", "thieves" etc reviews are usually worth simply disregarding. Then, given chain/store usually keeps having the same family of problems. So, if the review out of the blue throws in 30 different problems in different areas, it's hard to believe. But 6 reviews detailing excessively late delivery, or a group that shows the support sucks, or that they send other wares than ordered on regular basis... Sometimes you may even find the problem unimportant for you: Delivery delays up to two months, you want a camera for summer vacations, but it's shortly after xmas, fine, let them take their time. Or they do mistakes quite often, but with excellent user support they correct them painlessly if only asked. Feel free to go for it. Or their line of computer accessories really sucks, but there's not a single complain about the cameras, and quite a few positive reviews about them - just don't buy computer parts from them...
Slashdot Mirror
Just released for free. Before, you had to pay for it.
The guide is littered with "more details at our premium forums", "detailed description of how to do it on the forums", "which can be obtained in our store" etc. The guide is just a top of an iceberg. The previous "pay for the guide, get access to the forum" seemed more honest than current "get guide free, pay to access the forums so the guide is of any actual use to you".
how hard would it be to build one from a Slide projector? Bulb and some optics already in place, just the "LCD screen format" (35mm slides) somewhat too small :)
Any pointers/help?
Not because of this.
You could still shout "stop you stupid fleabag!" and then using the GPS catch up with the dog waiting for you. Or shout "Go home" or such. Smarter dogs understand it and would obey.
But it won't work, because all the dog will hear would be some nonrecognizable screech. GSM is a psychoacoustic(sp?) audio compression model meant to be understandable and working for humans. Dogs have wider recognizable audio spectrum, focus on other frequencies than humans, and generally catch different features of the voice than humans. Shout "come" and the dog will come. Play the same "come" from mp3 player to speakers, and the dog won't recognize the signal. For dogs things like mp3, computer-generated music etc are just some nondescript noises. Sometimes, rarely they understand some very characteristic noises - barking, cat's meow etc. Audio CDs are for them about the sound quality of 72rpm vinyl records. GSM is just a random noise.
HP's $150 Business Inkjet 1000 Printer (-1, overrated)
Slashvertisement.
There's nothing special about barcode printers. You can print a barcode on a $20 lexmark toy, on a sheet of sticker paper.
What about relligions that discard the concept of god? Or use multiple gods?
1. PARENTAL ATTENTION is the way to bring up and protect children. Not dumping them in front of a TV or internet and have the insane fscking government decide.
I wholeheartedly agree. But as long as there's no governmental motivation (say, making it a federal crime?), parents WILL be dumping kids in front of TV or internet. And the problems resulting from it are in the same degree of the parents, as ours, as the kids are what the society is being built of, and you DO have to live near them, no matter how much you hate that.
Know the new fad in the world of early teen boys?
Collecting. No longer collecting postcards, car models, stamps, pokemon pics or such.
Collecting brothel leaflets. It's the rage now.
Of course very few parents know.
Take note of the critical two words of that sentence: "psycho kid." A kid with the severity of psychological issues that would be necessary to confuse video games with the real world would, sooner or later, run across something violent
You're thinking on a single-bit level. Normal kid - psycho kid. Normal kid sees arbitrary amount of violence, never does any fighting, psycho kid sees dogs fighting in the lawn and goes on a rampage.
Thing is, there's no fixed level of "psycho". Expose a normal, psychically stable adult to enough of strong enough violence and you'll drive them insane. Take a kid with something seriously wrong in its brain and it will go on rampage without -any- kind of stimulation. But there's a whole range of greys inbetween and the more you expose children to violence, the more likely given kid will snap, while still the "base probability" depends on individual traits. Take a kid from higher regions of the scale, it could pass whole life as a good citizen if living in relatively calm environment. But give enough stimulus and it will go nuts.
It's not about enabling/disabling these kinds of things from happening. It's about decreasing levels of risk.
Video games are rarely, if ever, the only factor in any individual's decision to commit violence. It would be more effective to address the psychological issues making the kid susceptible to influence by video games than to censor the games.
True video games aren't the only factor, they are just a serious contributor. Limiting access just to the games would be somewhat like banning driving after gin&tonic because it contains alcohol, while still allowing to drink whisky and drive. Still doesn't mean drunken driving should be allowed because banning gin&tonic is unfair. Note, I'm all against -censoring- games. I just mean limiting access wherever applicable.
As for addressing psychological issues... *shrug* if this was -detectable- easily enough, then sure. But otherwise, I don't think so. Finding out a given kid is/isn't suspectible to this kind of issues should be a parent's thing, but as history proves we can't depend on parents, and once the kid does go nuts, it's not just the parents' problem.
Remember that before video games were the villain of the moment, school shootings were blamed on Marilyn Manson and The Basketball Diaries.
meantime, there was still a lot of violent cartoons on TV, quite violent movies, etc.
Curious thing, in Europe these kinds of things are almost unknown. Why?
IMHO games should be just honestly released in "adults-only" versions whenever applicable, and possibly with "violence-free" editions optionally, whenever the developer feels like it. It's a responsible thing to do.
The fact -your- kid knows the real thing apart from the game world doesn't mean some other kid does. The fact you're a responsible parent and watch what titles your kid plays, doesn't mean other parents are. And if your kid gets shot by a psycho kid who played one brutal game too many, and lost the sense of difference between the games and the real world, the fact that you're a responsible parent and didn't let your kid play violent games, or that your smart kid didn't ever get the idea to bring a gun to school won't make much of a difference.
So, simply - if you want -your- kid to play adult games, go, buy them for him/her. If you want to play them, you're adult, cool, no problem. But if the kid goes to spend the pocket money on a game where the brain splashes oh so cool on the wall, and then unattended will play with dad's gun and test it on his sister, to see if her brain splashes just the same, better if the seller says "sorry, kid, bring your parents." And fuck all the money retailers and game manufacturers lose because of these very kids not being able to but these very games.
actually, http://www.clamwin.com/ for my case. Thanks for the pointer. Citing Barney, "one less horror in the world". Bye AVG :)
Similar idea, but not such HUGE world. I mean, what, 99 levels? :)
(plus they get randomly generated everytime you enter. Same reason I didn't list Diablo. The idea is that the world, though generated, remains pretty much fixed thorough the time.)
If you know in real life they are 24-level... Otherwise, well... The challenge is even cooler.
As for spell backfiring, true if it's a lvl1 magic missile you use two times a minute, it would suck. But if you're up to a great ritual you've never done before in your life, very risky and very dangerous, you know what you're doing. And screwing up in a creative way may be just as fun (or even more) than succeeding.
With this method you can remove or minimize most of the above "unnaturals".
Now, what you have is a very large (very borring) world built in a couple of 'developer years' that you can then build off of.
Yes.
Arbitrarily large. As huge as I only desire. As many developer-years as I desire, by just turning a knob.
As for "boring", not necessarily THAT boring. Sometimes the game engine itself creates cool challenges. With medium amount of effort you can generate huge amount of medium-interesting content - hunting, mapping, mining, discovering resources, etc. This alone could keep some players occupied for weeks. But true, with extra content it would get very boring after some time. Thing is, you need very little custom content combined with the generated area to keep things interesting. Development of interesting world gets really cheap.
True, as opposed to instanced world, not everyone can become a king twice a day. But all the more becoming a king gets valuable. And the chances you will, some day, are fair.
"Randomly generating an interesting, challenging world is really, really hard"
I agree. But instead of iteratively creating the world bit-by-bit, why not enter another spectrum and spend the same time and effort on tweaking the parameters of the random creation (or not so random, but macromanaged - say, you draw the world of the map, with one pixel relating to half a mile square of gameplay terrain, then generate the world with terrain made corresponding to the map). Then once the method of rapid creating the world has been developed, practically the developers can add new custom content faster than players could discover it, especially that 80% of the time the players would spend on "generics", random encounters in the wilderness, exploring, treasure-hunting in generic caves - or just doing the usual socializing in the cities.
Really little work would go into changing a common "generic" into an interesting "custom" taking the generated world as your friend. A generic area inhabited by strong enemies - just place a single more expensive (if generic) item in the middle, and leave a rumor in the tavern. And you have a challenging quest. With making quests that easy, the game could be a huge success. And since the development goes on while the game is running, the world could keep growing all the time, and there would be always something new to do/find, new features being added all the time etc.
The game would NOT be very ballanced, but still fun, and realistic. A newbie faces a randomly spawned enemy of some 60th level? Yay! Run for the city gates and yell for help! That completely generic cave a few paces from the capitol, thousands of players went through, but one bothered to pick up a rock and found a note with a hint for a hidden cave, not really far, but quite well hidden.
Besides "generics" and "customs" there could be "specials", items, events, challenges unique to the whole game, happening just once. What about a big meteorite striking some big area in the middle of the map? What about an earthquake changing the face of Earth? Or a sea drying up by some rare magic spell? Just think of the opportunity to make heroes to be sung about, just by providing unique quests that are doable just once (not once by player, once total!) and having huge impact on the world? Want add some new kind of monsters? Don't make them appear overnight. Make a quest that ends up with a single player screwing up some important spell badly (scripted but unexpected) and summoning them. From then on, that single player would gain world's fame. Everyone could do it, and they would happen rarely enough to make them precious, but often enough that you could have a fair chance to stumble upon one. Real stories to tell, and proofs walking the earth, no "I've beaten X" "I've beaten X too!" "I've beaten X as a kid" as with instances where everyone repeats the same quest over and over, but as truly notable events.
"The Register reports on a [[register article|trojan spotted in the wild]] that takes advantage of the so-far unpatched IE [[|Slashdot story|vulnerability]] mentioned on Slashdot earlier this week."
That should be done like this:
"The Register [[register article|reports]] on a [[a page with the trojan|trojan spotted in the wild]] that takes advantage of the so-far unpatched IE [[How to exploit?|vulnerability]] [[Slashdot story|mentioned on Slashdot]] earlier this week."
And never a chance to meet another team...
Sometimes such crossovers are really great, when a good GM or two pit two teams against each other in some weird competition, or force them to cooperate, or just two groups of players meet to play a common adventure together...
Pity.
Instances are plain unnatural. Two guys go through the same door, they both land in identical environments but they are separate from each other.
What about approach that was present in some long-forgotten games like Elite 2: Frontier? Just pseudorandomly (randomizing with a fixed seed, so it looks random in space, but doesn't change in time) create a huge game universe, with some overriding "specials" locations/events, and vast "generic" terrains, specific to given area somehow, but without having each tree in the forest placed by hand or c&p'd from neighbouring square, but placed in somewhat random pattern.
Instead of drawing the world from scratch, let the machine generate just a "generic world" , whole map of rivers, forests, mountains, caves etc (or whatever fits given universe...) from some basic "brick" elements, without cities and roads, but with monster spawning points, completely random caves, some low-value treasure, some very generic low-paying quests/missions, possibly even with some completely random villages. Then populate it by hand, using artists and mappers' skills, add custom quests, custom enemies, custom buildings. Remove architectonical nonsenses, add roads, transportation, special places - generally add sense of order to the world.
Effect: Development cost and time cut in half or more, gameplay area expanded almost indefinitely, possibly also vastly reducing the download/install size (Frontier would fit on a floppy, with billions of stars and advanced universe), because most of the world can be generated ("spawned") just from the fixed random seed and formula, instead of having to be read from database.
How does that look like in other countries?
I'm a professional programmer (education, job experience), but currently working in a different domain. Still programming for a hobby though.
Someone replace that logo, proving them wrong?
Please?
One more thing, sometimes you see dishonest negative astroturfing to undermine the competition's position.
But this is easy to catch. The astroturfers rarely bother with detail, so "sucks", "cheaters", "thieves" etc reviews are usually worth simply disregarding. Then, given chain/store usually keeps having the same family of problems. So, if the review out of the blue throws in 30 different problems in different areas, it's hard to believe. But 6 reviews detailing excessively late delivery, or a group that shows the support sucks, or that they send other wares than ordered on regular basis... Sometimes you may even find the problem unimportant for you: Delivery delays up to two months, you want a camera for summer vacations, but it's shortly after xmas, fine, let them take their time. Or they do mistakes quite often, but with excellent user support they correct them painlessly if only asked. Feel free to go for it. Or their line of computer accessories really sucks, but there's not a single complain about the cameras, and quite a few positive reviews about them - just don't buy computer parts from them...
Plus, it's not legal to drive with headphones on
Why, mr Officer, that's my hands-free telephone setup!