Li-Poly batteries are used a lot in RC aircraft. Here is a link to a page about LiPo fires (with a link to some videos) Lipo Fire info.
Lipos are used a lot in RC flying, but you have to be very careful with them. If they short, they will start to buldge a bit, and can catch fire. Also, LiPos can only be discharged so far, until they are useless (I believe under the 3.7 volt level). If you are interested about rechargable batteries, RC people are the ones to look at. (that includes NIMH, NICD, and LIPO)
There is room for blockbusters, and Episodic content. I think Rein is wrong, there. But, the episodic content will be built on engines like the Doom, Source, or Unreal engine. The blockbusters or bigger games, that come from Epic or iD or Valve, will have the time and money invested in an engine AND a game. While, a small publisher, like Ritual will take the engine, and develop an episode on it. I DO kind of find Valve jumping into Episodic content, odd. I think it is a good fit for Ritual.
Where Episodic content reigns surpreme, is to create a more constant revenue stream for smaller developers. Spending 3 or 4 years building a game can REALLY tax resources. If you can divide that by 2, or even 4, all of the sudden you have a shorter development time, and can start making money. The other advantage I think that episodic content gives you, is the ability to have a nimble storyline. Developers can add cool new "features" to test the water. If it goes well, future episodes can get that feature. If it falls flat on its face, well, they don't have to include it in the next release. Ultimately, as consumers, we ALL win, with multiple styles of game creations. Think of episodic content as those short summer run TV shows on the cable channels. They are entertaining, and short. That is a good thing.
I DO think that Mark hit the nail on the head, when it comes to marketting though. Valve can get away with producing an episode, and realsing it retail. I don't think a lot of that type of content will be distributed on physical medium. There are a LOT of people that do not like "virtual" assets. It also makes it more difficult to sell a "used" game, if you just downloaded it. Episodic contnet is in its infancy. I think it is an exciting concept, and I expect more innovation to come from that type of content, than I will from EA/Vivendi/Activision, and their much more costly (in terms of time AND money) blockbuster hits.
Have you looked at the videos? Looked at the game itself? It is shaping up nicely. Not to mention being done by Roper. This is pretty big news, outside of the theft.
Not exactly open source... but have you looked at the Torque Engine, from GarageGames.com? Commercial engine, for $100.
You know, Romero was a good designer.
on
Romero's New Gig
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I read an interview with him once, and the worlds he envisions are quite cool. It is making the translation from his imagination to the computer that is tricky. I think a large part of what made Doom so great, was his vision. When he did Diakatana, he was still on the high of making one of the most popular games ever created. Diakatana coming out to such horrible reviews pretty much kicked the crap out of his ego. Enough of that, and a person grows up. I think that he has the potential to bring us other great worlds, if he can keep his ego somewhat in check.:-) I have high hopes for games that Romero works on. One of these days, he going to get the pieces right, and blow everyone away. (at least, that is what I hope for)
I don't think I paid for either of them. PCG is still my favorite. I miss the Dreamcast Magazine, I still think that was a good one. The PC Accelerator was fun. I have to admit, some of the more porn side of it, annoyed me at times, but I liked the magazine. The early ones were poor, but it seemed to just be catching its stride, when it ended.:-(
Another magazine I miss, is Boot. That magazine was really for the hard-core gamer out there, and the hardware porn that he could never afford.:-) Maximum PC is ok, but it doesn't have that super-amazing-hardware thing going for it, like Boot did.
CoD 1 and 2 both were great single player games. I have only played CoD 1/2 over a LAN, and have found both version to be a LOT of fun. What I find annoying, is companies build up a franchise that is well-loved on a PC, and then port it over to the consoles, where it flourishes, and then the next version of the game is a PC port of a console game. Ubisoft has been doing this to us with the Tom Clancy games recently. It gets frustrating to support these game companies, and have them spit in your face once they have gotten the market penetration needed in consoles.
Re:Hmmm... they should have enlarged that list.
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
err... yea.:-)
Re:Hmmm... they should have enlarged that list.
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
Oh yea, I totally forgot about Freespace/Freespace 2. I guess I kind of forgot about Xwing, Tie Figther, and the 3rd one in that line, too. Great space flight/combat games. I have some hope for Darkstar one... but, after playing the demo, it isn't quite in the same league.
I also really enjoyed Microsoft's Alliegence, but I think they screwed that one up too badly... making it pay to play.
Re:Hmmm... they should have enlarged that list.
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
Actually, Papyrus got rolled under Dynamix. And Dynamix was still its own entity (i.e. seperate offices down in Eugene) until after Tribes 2 shipped. It was more recent that Vivendi and Sierra completely gutted the talent, and destroyed the once-great studios.
Re:Hmmm... they should have enlarged that list.
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
You know, I noticed someone mentioned Bullfrog. Jeeze, I would LOVE to see a sequel to Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper.
Re:Don't forget LucasArts
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
Hmmm, I see 5 upcomming game released from LA. 1 is an Expansion (for Empires at War), the other Star Wars game, is a sequel. That leaves 3 games that are not Star Wars based. 2 of which, are new properties, as far as I can tell. LA does a lot of games. Not just Star Wars. They rarely need to patch their games, either.
Hmmm... they should have enlarged that list.
on
Five That Fell
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· Score: 1
Lets see: Dynamix Papyrus Epyx (If you are old-school, you will recognize that one)
Black Isle is a bummer. As is Origin. I remember a few years ago, there was a GLUT of space flight sims, trying to take the throne from Wing Commander... and since then, there has not been one that has done it right. I wish that we could get a good sequel to Wing Commander. Better yet, a good sequel to Wing Commander: Privateer.
Kind of reminds me of a painful problem we had with a store. It seemed rather random, that our store's wireless hand helds would go down. They were generally within a certain period of time, but on random days. After MONTHS of troubleshooting, someone contacted the Air Force base nearby.
Go to find out, they were doing something, and targetting the store. (we were told, to get a land bearing?) well, the electronic pulse generated would knock out the equipment. Scrambled their poor little brains.
I had a buddy run into this, doing tech support in the early 90s. Not just one woman, several did that, when we first rolled out PCs. Put the mouse on the floor, and try to use it.
The other fun one, was leaving the mouse in the bag, so it wouldn't get dirty... but it wouldn't move the cursor on the screen.:-)
Jeeze, I have BEEN THERE, DONE THAT. I worked at one company, that we had this guy that would lie to me EVERY FREAKING TIME! Eventually he would reboot, and say. Weird, it worked that time! I finally got into the habit of remoting into his PC, and looking at the system event logs. I would comment. Odd, I can see the last time you rebooted was a week ago... not just before you called me. He then would come back saying he shouldn't have to reboot. I agreed, and had him reboot anyway.:-)
1) A buddy of mine got a call from a lady, and he told her to cut the power, to reboot. After leaving it off for 5 seconds, and asked her to power it back on. There is a pregnant pause, at which time, she asked how. Go to find out, she had taken some shears and CUT the power cord.
2) This was at a grocery chain. Our overnight guy got a call. It seems that a shoplifter had been caught, and instead of having a manager around to watch him, they locked him into the computer room. (you know, the one with the controllers for pharmacy, Shipping and receiving, registers, credit cards). He proceeded to unplug EVERY device in the room, and we had boot disks in some devices. He pulled them out, and hid them elsewhere, and jumbled the room up. It took the tech something like 12 hours to get that store running again.
3) I had a call that went something like this: me: Hello, how may I help you? Pharmacist: My laser printer is billowing black smoke. me: Turn it off. Pharmacists: Ok, it is off. Now, people are coughing, should we leave the pharmacy? me: Yes, and close it up, to keep the fumes out of the store. (and to keep customers from getting into the empty pharmacy)
4) Oh, this is a good one. I can handle ignorance. Someone that doesn't know something, doesn't know it. I can handle that... but the ones that KNOW something bad is happening, and ignore it, bug me. So, our bookkeepers had windows 3.1 machines in the offices at stores. One district manager gave the stores diskettes, so he could come around weekly, get their numbers, and keep close tabs on the stores.
So, we had DOS 5.0 installed (I think) with windows antivirus, that had not been updated in probably 2 years... These are supposed to be closed systems to prevent viruses. Well, our onsite tech (we just replaced whole hard drives when we had a failure, and the failed unit was sent back to be formatted), noticed the trend, and since he talked to me (a lot) let me in on the high number of failures he had been noticing. I finally tracked it down to this district manager. We asked him to stop sending diskettes to the store, and he refused, saying that he did better, with immediate numbers. Since his stores were doing so well, and we were "just IT" we couldn't do a lot to force him to change. Until our manager had a brilliant idea. We started charging the cost of those hard drive replacements to that division. When a division is all the sudden hit with 1k+ bills a month, because of a handful of stores... things get changed fast.:-)
The problem, is Sega did 2 blunders in a row. The 32x stuff and then the Saturn. The Saturn was head to head to the PS1, and the PS1 was superior. It was also more elegant. The PS1 had the added advantage of being easy to develop for, and easy to port games to PC.
The Dreamcast was just too little, too late. It was an AWESOME console. Awesome games, the whole 9 yards... but it never really took off, because customers felt burned by the previous 2 generations... and Sony's hype machine. Lets face it, both of the previous Playstations had some amazing video showing off their games, early on... but the ACTUAL product was far less. Once you put stuff like AI in... the games could never match what they were "showing off". But, for some reason, people forgive Sony for this.
All in all, I am happy with the Xbox... and look forward to one day owning a 360.:) (and a Wii)
A person can be precieved as a griefer, and not really be greifing. I agree there. Though, a guy going to a lowbie zone, and rampaging is griefing. Finding a spot to hide, and killing people as they come by, and can't do anything is griefing. Kiting a super-high level monster from one side of the world to the other in a newbie zone (while funny) is still griefing (I remember that happening a few years ago when someone brought the white rabbit from one side of the contenent to a starter town).
It is one thing to run up on someone a little lower than you, and nail them. It is something else entirely to to camp their bodies. When you go from enjoying yourself, to having a bad time, because someone is a jerk... they are griefing.
Actually, something that no one has hit on. When you design a site well, you open up all kinds of opportunities for people that are disabled, and have trouble shopping. When building albertsons.com we tried to adhere to good methods of page design, and that turned out to be a real boon for us, since the blind could use our site after a little practce. There was a lady up in Seattle that we flew down, to speak with our ecommerce team about the difficulties of "reading" a website, and things we could do, to make sites easier to navigate. I know it is not something we pushed, but it is something I am happy to have been a part of. Subsequent designs, we would have her look at, to make sure they were accessable, and would get her feedback, to make them better. Having online shopping opens up all kinds of opportunities to people that are handicap, to be more self sufficient. The lady that I am speaking about above, was able to shop, by herself for the first time in her life, because of our site. It is just plain cool, to be a part of something like that.
Hmmm.. another memory back in my Albertsons.com days... The director was looking at a trash can that would scan the UPCs, as you tossed items in the trash, and put the items into your shopping list.:-)
When we were devloping albertsons.com, the managment figured it was easier/cheaper to fulfill from a working store, rather than a distribution center. The stores were in the neigborhoods, and could pack the product, and have it ready in a short period of time. Distribution centers tend to be more removed from the actual grocery markets, which makes it hard to fulfill from a distrabution center.
I worked for Albertsons.com back in the late 90s to 2001. They started out with a warehouse, and were shipping non-perishables to select markets, but it was not working out so well. So, then the director started looking around at how others supplied food via the web, and really liked Tesco's version. If you look at how Tesco works and how Albertsons.com works, they are very similiar (at least, when I was working there, they were). Basically, you have a guy that "shops" for you. They go down the aisls and pick out items, toss it in a box, and either ship it to you on the next day, or have it ready that evening. I think it costs about $6 to pick up the order, or $10 or so to deliver the order. I know back when we were trying to figure out how to do this, we were avoiding the Peapod model, because it did not work as well as we wanted. In a MAJOR population center, it works ok, but as things spread out, their model used to start coming apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Li-Poly batteries are used a lot in RC aircraft. Here is a link to a page about LiPo fires (with a link to some videos) Lipo Fire info.
Lipos are used a lot in RC flying, but you have to be very careful with them. If they short, they will start to buldge a bit, and can catch fire. Also, LiPos can only be discharged so far, until they are useless (I believe under the 3.7 volt level). If you are interested about rechargable batteries, RC people are the ones to look at. (that includes NIMH, NICD, and LIPO)
There is room for blockbusters, and Episodic content. I think Rein is wrong, there. But, the episodic content will be built on engines like the Doom, Source, or Unreal engine. The blockbusters or bigger games, that come from Epic or iD or Valve, will have the time and money invested in an engine AND a game. While, a small publisher, like Ritual will take the engine, and develop an episode on it. I DO kind of find Valve jumping into Episodic content, odd. I think it is a good fit for Ritual.
Where Episodic content reigns surpreme, is to create a more constant revenue stream for smaller developers. Spending 3 or 4 years building a game can REALLY tax resources. If you can divide that by 2, or even 4, all of the sudden you have a shorter development time, and can start making money. The other advantage I think that episodic content gives you, is the ability to have a nimble storyline. Developers can add cool new "features" to test the water. If it goes well, future episodes can get that feature. If it falls flat on its face, well, they don't have to include it in the next release. Ultimately, as consumers, we ALL win, with multiple styles of game creations. Think of episodic content as those short summer run TV shows on the cable channels. They are entertaining, and short. That is a good thing.
I DO think that Mark hit the nail on the head, when it comes to marketting though. Valve can get away with producing an episode, and realsing it retail. I don't think a lot of that type of content will be distributed on physical medium. There are a LOT of people that do not like "virtual" assets. It also makes it more difficult to sell a "used" game, if you just downloaded it. Episodic contnet is in its infancy. I think it is an exciting concept, and I expect more innovation to come from that type of content, than I will from EA/Vivendi/Activision, and their much more costly (in terms of time AND money) blockbuster hits.
Have you looked at the videos? Looked at the game itself? It is shaping up nicely. Not to mention being done by Roper. This is pretty big news, outside of the theft.
Not exactly open source... but have you looked at the Torque Engine, from GarageGames.com? Commercial engine, for $100.
I read an interview with him once, and the worlds he envisions are quite cool. It is making the translation from his imagination to the computer that is tricky. I think a large part of what made Doom so great, was his vision. When he did Diakatana, he was still on the high of making one of the most popular games ever created. Diakatana coming out to such horrible reviews pretty much kicked the crap out of his ego. Enough of that, and a person grows up. I think that he has the potential to bring us other great worlds, if he can keep his ego somewhat in check. :-) I have high hopes for games that Romero works on. One of these days, he going to get the pieces right, and blow everyone away. (at least, that is what I hope for)
I don't think I paid for either of them. PCG is still my favorite. I miss the Dreamcast Magazine, I still think that was a good one. The PC Accelerator was fun. I have to admit, some of the more porn side of it, annoyed me at times, but I liked the magazine. The early ones were poor, but it seemed to just be catching its stride, when it ended. :-(
:-) Maximum PC is ok, but it doesn't have that super-amazing-hardware thing going for it, like Boot did.
Another magazine I miss, is Boot. That magazine was really for the hard-core gamer out there, and the hardware porn that he could never afford.
Maybe they just wanted Revolt, and had the rest thrust upon them? :-) Revolt was a LOT of fun. I hope they come out with another one.
CoD 1 and 2 both were great single player games. I have only played CoD 1/2 over a LAN, and have found both version to be a LOT of fun. What I find annoying, is companies build up a franchise that is well-loved on a PC, and then port it over to the consoles, where it flourishes, and then the next version of the game is a PC port of a console game. Ubisoft has been doing this to us with the Tom Clancy games recently. It gets frustrating to support these game companies, and have them spit in your face once they have gotten the market penetration needed in consoles.
err... yea. :-)
Oh yea, I totally forgot about Freespace/Freespace 2. I guess I kind of forgot about Xwing, Tie Figther, and the 3rd one in that line, too. Great space flight/combat games. I have some hope for Darkstar one... but, after playing the demo, it isn't quite in the same league.
I also really enjoyed Microsoft's Alliegence, but I think they screwed that one up too badly... making it pay to play.
Actually, Papyrus got rolled under Dynamix. And Dynamix was still its own entity (i.e. seperate offices down in Eugene) until after Tribes 2 shipped. It was more recent that Vivendi and Sierra completely gutted the talent, and destroyed the once-great studios.
You know, I noticed someone mentioned Bullfrog. Jeeze, I would LOVE to see a sequel to Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper.
Hmmm, I see 5 upcomming game released from LA. 1 is an Expansion (for Empires at War), the other Star Wars game, is a sequel. That leaves 3 games that are not Star Wars based. 2 of which, are new properties, as far as I can tell. LA does a lot of games. Not just Star Wars. They rarely need to patch their games, either.
Lets see:
Dynamix
Papyrus
Epyx (If you are old-school, you will recognize that one)
Black Isle is a bummer. As is Origin. I remember a few years ago, there was a GLUT of space flight sims, trying to take the throne from Wing Commander... and since then, there has not been one that has done it right. I wish that we could get a good sequel to Wing Commander. Better yet, a good sequel to Wing Commander: Privateer.
Kind of reminds me of a painful problem we had with a store. It seemed rather random, that our store's wireless hand helds would go down. They were generally within a certain period of time, but on random days. After MONTHS of troubleshooting, someone contacted the Air Force base nearby.
Go to find out, they were doing something, and targetting the store. (we were told, to get a land bearing?) well, the electronic pulse generated would knock out the equipment. Scrambled their poor little brains.
I had a buddy run into this, doing tech support in the early 90s. Not just one woman, several did that, when we first rolled out PCs. Put the mouse on the floor, and try to use it.
:-)
The other fun one, was leaving the mouse in the bag, so it wouldn't get dirty... but it wouldn't move the cursor on the screen.
Jeeze, I have BEEN THERE, DONE THAT. I worked at one company, that we had this guy that would lie to me EVERY FREAKING TIME! Eventually he would reboot, and say. Weird, it worked that time! I finally got into the habit of remoting into his PC, and looking at the system event logs. I would comment. Odd, I can see the last time you rebooted was a week ago... not just before you called me. He then would come back saying he shouldn't have to reboot. I agreed, and had him reboot anyway. :-)
1) A buddy of mine got a call from a lady, and he told her to cut the power, to reboot. After leaving it off for 5 seconds, and asked her to power it back on. There is a pregnant pause, at which time, she asked how. Go to find out, she had taken some shears and CUT the power cord.
:-)
2) This was at a grocery chain. Our overnight guy got a call. It seems that a shoplifter had been caught, and instead of having a manager around to watch him, they locked him into the computer room. (you know, the one with the controllers for pharmacy, Shipping and receiving, registers, credit cards). He proceeded to unplug EVERY device in the room, and we had boot disks in some devices. He pulled them out, and hid them elsewhere, and jumbled the room up. It took the tech something like 12 hours to get that store running again.
3) I had a call that went something like this:
me: Hello, how may I help you?
Pharmacist: My laser printer is billowing black smoke.
me: Turn it off.
Pharmacists: Ok, it is off. Now, people are coughing, should we leave the pharmacy?
me: Yes, and close it up, to keep the fumes out of the store. (and to keep customers from getting into the empty pharmacy)
4) Oh, this is a good one. I can handle ignorance. Someone that doesn't know something, doesn't know it. I can handle that... but the ones that KNOW something bad is happening, and ignore it, bug me. So, our bookkeepers had windows 3.1 machines in the offices at stores. One district manager gave the stores diskettes, so he could come around weekly, get their numbers, and keep close tabs on the stores.
So, we had DOS 5.0 installed (I think) with windows antivirus, that had not been updated in probably 2 years... These are supposed to be closed systems to prevent viruses. Well, our onsite tech (we just replaced whole hard drives when we had a failure, and the failed unit was sent back to be formatted), noticed the trend, and since he talked to me (a lot) let me in on the high number of failures he had been noticing. I finally tracked it down to this district manager. We asked him to stop sending diskettes to the store, and he refused, saying that he did better, with immediate numbers. Since his stores were doing so well, and we were "just IT" we couldn't do a lot to force him to change. Until our manager had a brilliant idea. We started charging the cost of those hard drive replacements to that division. When a division is all the sudden hit with 1k+ bills a month, because of a handful of stores... things get changed fast.
You know, I had not thought of that, but yea... they are poorly formed. Why couldn't they do something cool, like a trapazoid? :
The problem, is Sega did 2 blunders in a row. The 32x stuff and then the Saturn. The Saturn was head to head to the PS1, and the PS1 was superior. It was also more elegant. The PS1 had the added advantage of being easy to develop for, and easy to port games to PC.
:) (and a Wii)
The Dreamcast was just too little, too late. It was an AWESOME console. Awesome games, the whole 9 yards... but it never really took off, because customers felt burned by the previous 2 generations... and Sony's hype machine. Lets face it, both of the previous Playstations had some amazing video showing off their games, early on... but the ACTUAL product was far less. Once you put stuff like AI in... the games could never match what they were "showing off". But, for some reason, people forgive Sony for this.
All in all, I am happy with the Xbox... and look forward to one day owning a 360.
A person can be precieved as a griefer, and not really be greifing. I agree there. Though, a guy going to a lowbie zone, and rampaging is griefing. Finding a spot to hide, and killing people as they come by, and can't do anything is griefing. Kiting a super-high level monster from one side of the world to the other in a newbie zone (while funny) is still griefing (I remember that happening a few years ago when someone brought the white rabbit from one side of the contenent to a starter town).
It is one thing to run up on someone a little lower than you, and nail them. It is something else entirely to to camp their bodies. When you go from enjoying yourself, to having a bad time, because someone is a jerk... they are griefing.
Actually, something that no one has hit on. When you design a site well, you open up all kinds of opportunities for people that are disabled, and have trouble shopping. When building albertsons.com we tried to adhere to good methods of page design, and that turned out to be a real boon for us, since the blind could use our site after a little practce. There was a lady up in Seattle that we flew down, to speak with our ecommerce team about the difficulties of "reading" a website, and things we could do, to make sites easier to navigate. I know it is not something we pushed, but it is something I am happy to have been a part of. Subsequent designs, we would have her look at, to make sure they were accessable, and would get her feedback, to make them better. Having online shopping opens up all kinds of opportunities to people that are handicap, to be more self sufficient. The lady that I am speaking about above, was able to shop, by herself for the first time in her life, because of our site. It is just plain cool, to be a part of something like that.
Hmmm.. another memory back in my Albertsons.com days... The director was looking at a trash can that would scan the UPCs, as you tossed items in the trash, and put the items into your shopping list. :-)
When we were devloping albertsons.com, the managment figured it was easier/cheaper to fulfill from a working store, rather than a distribution center. The stores were in the neigborhoods, and could pack the product, and have it ready in a short period of time. Distribution centers tend to be more removed from the actual grocery markets, which makes it hard to fulfill from a distrabution center.
I worked for Albertsons.com back in the late 90s to 2001. They started out with a warehouse, and were shipping non-perishables to select markets, but it was not working out so well. So, then the director started looking around at how others supplied food via the web, and really liked Tesco's version. If you look at how Tesco works and how Albertsons.com works, they are very similiar (at least, when I was working there, they were). Basically, you have a guy that "shops" for you. They go down the aisls and pick out items, toss it in a box, and either ship it to you on the next day, or have it ready that evening. I think it costs about $6 to pick up the order, or $10 or so to deliver the order. I know back when we were trying to figure out how to do this, we were avoiding the Peapod model, because it did not work as well as we wanted. In a MAJOR population center, it works ok, but as things spread out, their model used to start coming apart.