Ah, that's very cool, didn't know that. They actually released their core book as a PDF for free a while ago, though I think that might have been a time-limited offer. The short fiction opening was really good.
All in all, I hope the game and the company do well.
From what I've heard (never played the tabletop wargames myself), 40k is more luck-driven and less strategic than fantasy.
It's a reasonably interesting universe, though. Worth looking into if you like sci-fi with a bit of a cthulhoid vibe, even if the people maintaining it are douchebags of the highest order.
It's why I stopped playing D20 games. After 4.0 came out with NO open content, I turned and never looked back.
Well, that's certainly stupid.
What exactly do you mean by open content? If you mean you're pissed because they didn't allow people to republish WotC's rules and content verbatim, then I suppose that's a legitimate concern.
I'm curious, which games do you play, since having an open system is so important? Off the top of my head, the only non-d20 game I can think of which has a semi-open license allowing 3rd parties to publish content is Savage Worlds. And their license, while free, is relatively restrictive in that you must specifically get permission from them.
If you want to sell your work, you must contact us at PEGShane@gmail.com with your plan and some samples of your work. We'll work with each company on a case-by-case basis. Once we grant your company the license, you can make whatever you want without submitting it for further approval, as long as you follow the guidelines below.
Be aware that we're looking for HIGH production values--meaning great art, trade dress, and professional layout--as much as we are great content.
I think BESM had some kind of license, but that game is long defunct. All the other stuff I can think of (True 20, Mutants & Masterminds, Pathfinder, SpyCraft) are d20-based.
So I can only think of one current, non-d20 RPG with an open license. You've stated that you play RPGs (plural) and that you no longer play d20-based games. You also implied that you only play games with open content, whatever twisted definition you might have for that term. So what are the other games you play?
They don't just give the fans freedom, they very actively encourage fans to use their IP (not for profit, of course). They hold regular contests for Warcraft comic strips, feature fan art on the website which ranges from decent amateur to professional quality, they encourage machinima, and of course they're always giving out loads of references to the community. For example, there's a gnome named Breanni in Dalaran who runs a pet store, and she's a direct reference to the founder and maintainer of warcraftpets.com.
A while back there was much gnashing of teeth in the RPG community because GW's book publishing arm, Black Industries, decided to cancel the RPG (which, by most accounts, had a reasonable level of popularity and success) so they could focus on the novels. This came right around the time I was tentatively getting into Warhammer, and after they did this I went to the GW store at the local mall and asked the manager there to relay the message to his corporate overlords that they'd lost a customer over there actions. And before you start yelling at me, I was polite and I know it wasn't his fault; I just felt that was the best way for me to personally send a message.
Then a few weeks (or months?) later, Fantasy Flight Games got the license to produce the Warhammer RPGs. Of course, by then I'd already gotten the WH bug out of my system. Which in retrospect was good, since the GW store actually shut down not too much later, meaning if I had gotten into it I wouldn't have had a place to play anyways./Cool story, bro
I think you mean "Doing to Warhammer 40k what they did to Warhammer Fantasy."
It's pretty obvious that Terrans, Zerg and Protoss are analagous to Space Marines, Tyranid and Eldar respectively. They barely even filed off the serial numbers.
Isn't the logical conclusion that if millions of people find a particular type of behaviour acceptable that it should be legalised? Otherwise it's socially unjust.
Millions of people found slavery acceptable. That doesn't mean it should ever have been legal.
Millions of people currently find all sorts of horrible practices acceptable. See, for example, the way women are treated in various parts of the world. That doesn't mean that it should be legal.
A huge number of people believing something is acceptable does not mean that it is, in fact, acceptable.
Please note that I'm not making a judgment on the issue of copyright law one way or another; I'm merely pointing out that your argument is flawed.
You're kidding, right? Porn is responsible for a lot of the innovation on the internet people take for granted today.
The big thing that comes immediately to mind is video technology, and streaming video in particular. I'm not saying that Youtube wouldn't exist if not for porn, I'm just saying that Youtube would have come quite a bit later.
Funny. P2P reacts to pressure and changes, porn is frequently on the cutting edge, but traditional media just sticks its fingers in its ears and chants "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Yeah, that oddity is actually what lead me to investigating things further in the first place.
My legal-fu is weak, but according to the interpretation of this page, the law you mention is even weirder than that; it's not just any intercourse with a chaste 16-18 year old, it's specifically intercourse which is otherwise illegal.
They mention adultery as an example, where you'd be violating this law by having sex with a 17-year old if you were married, but if you were unmarried (and not otherwise breaking the law) it would be legal.
Of course, since fornication is illegal, that means that technically any sex with a 16 or 17-year old virgin is illegal.
Or the fact that there are so many hidden settings only configurable by editing files which are in a location you'd never think to look on your own (My Documents\My Games? Seriously? Who the fuck does that?). Disabling mouse smoothing is absolutely vital, IMHO, and the game feels like trash until you've done that. But you'd never even think to do it unless you happened to stumble onto the instructions about it in a forum somewhere.
Since when has hosting a game impacted frame rates? In fact, I distinctly remember dedicated servers having a very, very low footprint as far as CPU and RAM usage went. That may have changed in recent years, I don't know, but with older games that's what I remember.
One of the first games I played online a lot was Heretic II. I did not have a particularly good computer, and I hosted a dedicated server and played on the same computer just fine.
The issues with hosting your own server are all related to networking, e.g. setting up all of your ports correctly, latency, etc.
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
As a student, I worked for the CS department. It was just me and my boss, and we both had extremely limited hours. Thus, we didn't have a whole lot of time or opportunity to figure out how to do things 'the right way' whenever that would change, and just kept doing things as we had been.
This was a problem when Vista was deployed. Once we got out image to where we wanted, we would ghost it and deploy to about 60 machines. For Vista, we used a KMS (Key Management Server) which is one of the options you have for licensing large numbers of machines. In a nutshell, each machine contacts the KMS and gets a license for itself.
This was supposed to be strictly limited to volume licensing; thus, the KMS would not activate any machines until it had at least 25 different machines registered to it.
Now, ideally what would happen is that before you make your image you'd basically set Windows into a 'deployment mode' (not the technical term) where, the next time it's booted, it would go through and reinitialize everything for the machine it's on, and part of this involves generating a unique SID.
We toyed with this a bit with the time we had, but couldn't get it to a place where we were happy with the results. In particular, we had some issues with networking, IIRC, that means we would have had to go and manually setup every machine for our network.
TL;DR: All of our machines had the same SID, the KMS only say 1 unique installation even though 60 machines were connecting to it, and Vista wouldn't activate. In order to fix it, we had to change the SIDs for each machine.
So to say that duplicate SIDs are not a problem is erroneous indeed.
A senior aide goes up to President Bush. "Sir," he begins, "we just heard that two Brazilian men were killed in an attack in Iraq."
Bush is visibly shaken, he hangs his head and covers his mouth with his palm. After a few moments, he asks in a solemn tone, "How many is a Brazilian, again?"
You can't watch live TV if you can't break it faster than that.
Unless I'm missing something, it should theoretically be possible to cache the stream and decrypt it on your own schedule. Would largely be invisible to anyone used to time-shifting the shows they watch anyways-- if I'm not planning to watch the new episode of [insert show here] until the next day after it airs, what do I care if it takes hours to decrypt?
The mainstream media are parasites who try to monetize anything. They're going to fail at that with respect to twitter, because frankly twitter sucks for that purpose.
What twitter really is, though, is basically a giant 24-hour chat room filled exclusively with people you actually care to chat with. The RPG blogging community, for example, is quite active on twitter discussing things with each other, sharing links with each other, etc. And it really is a discussion-- people read each others' tweets, respond to them, useful ideas are created, evolved and exchanged.
The MSM sees a bunch of people and sees dollar signs... The problem with that idea is that you have to voluntarily elect to follow someone, so no one who's actually reading tweets is going to sign themselves up for a bunch of spam.
I've vacationed briefly in Japan and Israel and was able to make out well enough speaking only English-- though in both cases I stayed primarily in large cities, so I can't comment on how difficult it may have been out in less cosmopoltian areas.
If I am exaggerating, it's not a conscious decision. I do admit that I have a terrible sense of time. But honestly, my guess is that you do receive more spam than me. Why? Who knows. I suspect it probably has more to do with the sorts of circles in which we expose our respective emails.
I publically list my email whenever I need to. If I want someone to email me something, I say, "Send it to itoltz@gmail.com". In fact, if HTML is allowed where ever I'm writing that, I'll even be so kind as make it a mailto link (i.e. <a href='mailto:itoltz@gmail.com'>itoltz@gmail.com</a>).
And you know what? I almost never get spam in my inbox. I'd say a piece squeaks through Gmail's filters every few months (though when it does, I usually seem to get 2-3 similar spams over the course of a day or two).
Granted, not everyone has the option of using gmail, and for those who do not everyone is comfortable with the idea of using it. That's fine. But the point is, if gmail is that good at filtering out spam, anyone else can be too.
My initial knee-jerk reaction is to be against this and feel that something should be done about it... If nothing else, it feels like it sets a bad precedent for Net Neutrality.
However, after some thought, there are a couple key issues here which make this a fundamentally different issue from that of ISPs charging websites for preferred access.
First, ISPs have had a lot of help from government getting established, and thus I don't have a problem with government regulating them much more heavily. Disney's ESPN website is for the most part a standard commercial venture. I'm sure there are some "gotchas" in there about some minor government crap that's inescapable with a company as large as Disney, but it's minor compared to what the ISPs have.
Second, ESPN isn't a monopoly. In fact, it's practically an anti-monopoly. If Disney drives people away from ESPN, it costs them literally nothing in terms of time, money or effort to find an alternative provider. Relatively few people in the US have a choice of broadband ISPs, and of those who do the choice is almost always limited to just two providers.
So yeah, in this case, I think Disney's perfectly welcome (and perfectly stupid) to do this, and I think the correct response is for absolutely no ISP to pay them.
Maybe you should take a couple classes in reading comprehension, since the line...
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
...explicitly states that most college students are not in it for education's sake.
Holy fuck, man, if you're going to force an acronym that hard at least make it one that's good and/or makes sense. That looks like you just took one word that sounded bad and started with a D, one word that sounded bad and had an R near the front, and one word that just happened to be a noun starting with M.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, that's very cool, didn't know that. They actually released their core book as a PDF for free a while ago, though I think that might have been a time-limited offer. The short fiction opening was really good.
All in all, I hope the game and the company do well.
From what I've heard (never played the tabletop wargames myself), 40k is more luck-driven and less strategic than fantasy.
It's a reasonably interesting universe, though. Worth looking into if you like sci-fi with a bit of a cthulhoid vibe, even if the people maintaining it are douchebags of the highest order.
It's why I stopped playing D20 games. After 4.0 came out with NO open content, I turned and never looked back.
Well, that's certainly stupid.
What exactly do you mean by open content? If you mean you're pissed because they didn't allow people to republish WotC's rules and content verbatim, then I suppose that's a legitimate concern.
But they certainly have opened 4.0 up, and there are plenty of 3rd party products available for it.
I'm curious, which games do you play, since having an open system is so important? Off the top of my head, the only non-d20 game I can think of which has a semi-open license allowing 3rd parties to publish content is Savage Worlds. And their license, while free, is relatively restrictive in that you must specifically get permission from them.
If you want to sell your work, you must contact us at PEGShane@gmail.com with your plan and some samples of your work. We'll work with each company on a case-by-case basis. Once we grant your company the license, you can make whatever you want without submitting it for further approval, as long as you follow the guidelines below.
Be aware that we're looking for HIGH production values--meaning great art, trade dress, and professional layout--as much as we are great content.
I think BESM had some kind of license, but that game is long defunct. All the other stuff I can think of (True 20, Mutants & Masterminds, Pathfinder, SpyCraft) are d20-based.
So I can only think of one current, non-d20 RPG with an open license. You've stated that you play RPGs (plural) and that you no longer play d20-based games. You also implied that you only play games with open content, whatever twisted definition you might have for that term. So what are the other games you play?
They don't just give the fans freedom, they very actively encourage fans to use their IP (not for profit, of course). They hold regular contests for Warcraft comic strips, feature fan art on the website which ranges from decent amateur to professional quality, they encourage machinima, and of course they're always giving out loads of references to the community. For example, there's a gnome named Breanni in Dalaran who runs a pet store, and she's a direct reference to the founder and maintainer of warcraftpets.com.
And who can forget their response to the complaints that early Diablo 3 screenshots didn't look dark and gritty enough?
A while back there was much gnashing of teeth in the RPG community because GW's book publishing arm, Black Industries, decided to cancel the RPG (which, by most accounts, had a reasonable level of popularity and success) so they could focus on the novels. This came right around the time I was tentatively getting into Warhammer, and after they did this I went to the GW store at the local mall and asked the manager there to relay the message to his corporate overlords that they'd lost a customer over there actions. And before you start yelling at me, I was polite and I know it wasn't his fault; I just felt that was the best way for me to personally send a message.
Then a few weeks (or months?) later, Fantasy Flight Games got the license to produce the Warhammer RPGs. Of course, by then I'd already gotten the WH bug out of my system. Which in retrospect was good, since the GW store actually shut down not too much later, meaning if I had gotten into it I wouldn't have had a place to play anyways. /Cool story, bro
Giving Warcraft a sci-fi twist?
I think you mean "Doing to Warhammer 40k what they did to Warhammer Fantasy."
It's pretty obvious that Terrans, Zerg and Protoss are analagous to Space Marines, Tyranid and Eldar respectively. They barely even filed off the serial numbers.
Isn't the logical conclusion that if millions of people find a particular type of behaviour acceptable that it should be legalised? Otherwise it's socially unjust.
Millions of people found slavery acceptable. That doesn't mean it should ever have been legal.
Millions of people currently find all sorts of horrible practices acceptable. See, for example, the way women are treated in various parts of the world. That doesn't mean that it should be legal.
A huge number of people believing something is acceptable does not mean that it is, in fact, acceptable.
Please note that I'm not making a judgment on the issue of copyright law one way or another; I'm merely pointing out that your argument is flawed.
You're kidding, right? Porn is responsible for a lot of the innovation on the internet people take for granted today.
The big thing that comes immediately to mind is video technology, and streaming video in particular. I'm not saying that Youtube wouldn't exist if not for porn, I'm just saying that Youtube would have come quite a bit later.
See also: http://www.pcworld.com/article/155745/thank_you_porn_12_ways_the_sex_trade_has_changed_the_web.html
Funny. P2P reacts to pressure and changes, porn is frequently on the cutting edge, but traditional media just sticks its fingers in its ears and chants "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Yeah, that oddity is actually what lead me to investigating things further in the first place.
My legal-fu is weak, but according to the interpretation of this page, the law you mention is even weirder than that; it's not just any intercourse with a chaste 16-18 year old, it's specifically intercourse which is otherwise illegal.
They mention adultery as an example, where you'd be violating this law by having sex with a 17-year old if you were married, but if you were unmarried (and not otherwise breaking the law) it would be legal.
Of course, since fornication is illegal, that means that technically any sex with a 16 or 17-year old virgin is illegal.
Well, to be fair, ACs are right down there with pedophiles, wiggas and the Finnish as far as pariahs go.
Funny thing, I was reading the Massachusetts General Laws today (started out trying to figure out what the age of consent is here-- don't ask).
There's a law on the books (chapter 272 section 18) which provides up to 3 months and $30 for fornfication.
So everyone in Massachusetts who has pre-marital sex is at risk of being imprisoned.
http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/272-18.htm
Or the fact that there are so many hidden settings only configurable by editing files which are in a location you'd never think to look on your own (My Documents\My Games? Seriously? Who the fuck does that?). Disabling mouse smoothing is absolutely vital, IMHO, and the game feels like trash until you've done that. But you'd never even think to do it unless you happened to stumble onto the instructions about it in a forum somewhere.
Since when has hosting a game impacted frame rates? In fact, I distinctly remember dedicated servers having a very, very low footprint as far as CPU and RAM usage went. That may have changed in recent years, I don't know, but with older games that's what I remember.
One of the first games I played online a lot was Heretic II. I did not have a particularly good computer, and I hosted a dedicated server and played on the same computer just fine.
The issues with hosting your own server are all related to networking, e.g. setting up all of your ports correctly, latency, etc.
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
As a student, I worked for the CS department. It was just me and my boss, and we both had extremely limited hours. Thus, we didn't have a whole lot of time or opportunity to figure out how to do things 'the right way' whenever that would change, and just kept doing things as we had been.
This was a problem when Vista was deployed. Once we got out image to where we wanted, we would ghost it and deploy to about 60 machines. For Vista, we used a KMS (Key Management Server) which is one of the options you have for licensing large numbers of machines. In a nutshell, each machine contacts the KMS and gets a license for itself.
This was supposed to be strictly limited to volume licensing; thus, the KMS would not activate any machines until it had at least 25 different machines registered to it.
Now, ideally what would happen is that before you make your image you'd basically set Windows into a 'deployment mode' (not the technical term) where, the next time it's booted, it would go through and reinitialize everything for the machine it's on, and part of this involves generating a unique SID.
We toyed with this a bit with the time we had, but couldn't get it to a place where we were happy with the results. In particular, we had some issues with networking, IIRC, that means we would have had to go and manually setup every machine for our network.
TL;DR: All of our machines had the same SID, the KMS only say 1 unique installation even though 60 machines were connecting to it, and Vista wouldn't activate. In order to fix it, we had to change the SIDs for each machine.
So to say that duplicate SIDs are not a problem is erroneous indeed.
A senior aide goes up to President Bush. "Sir," he begins, "we just heard that two Brazilian men were killed in an attack in Iraq."
Bush is visibly shaken, he hangs his head and covers his mouth with his palm. After a few moments, he asks in a solemn tone, "How many is a Brazilian, again?"
You can't watch live TV if you can't break it faster than that.
Unless I'm missing something, it should theoretically be possible to cache the stream and decrypt it on your own schedule. Would largely be invisible to anyone used to time-shifting the shows they watch anyways-- if I'm not planning to watch the new episode of [insert show here] until the next day after it airs, what do I care if it takes hours to decrypt?
The mainstream media are parasites who try to monetize anything. They're going to fail at that with respect to twitter, because frankly twitter sucks for that purpose.
What twitter really is, though, is basically a giant 24-hour chat room filled exclusively with people you actually care to chat with. The RPG blogging community, for example, is quite active on twitter discussing things with each other, sharing links with each other, etc. And it really is a discussion-- people read each others' tweets, respond to them, useful ideas are created, evolved and exchanged.
The MSM sees a bunch of people and sees dollar signs... The problem with that idea is that you have to voluntarily elect to follow someone, so no one who's actually reading tweets is going to sign themselves up for a bunch of spam.
I've vacationed briefly in Japan and Israel and was able to make out well enough speaking only English-- though in both cases I stayed primarily in large cities, so I can't comment on how difficult it may have been out in less cosmopoltian areas.
If I am exaggerating, it's not a conscious decision. I do admit that I have a terrible sense of time. But honestly, my guess is that you do receive more spam than me. Why? Who knows. I suspect it probably has more to do with the sorts of circles in which we expose our respective emails.
I publically list my email whenever I need to. If I want someone to email me something, I say, "Send it to itoltz@gmail.com". In fact, if HTML is allowed where ever I'm writing that, I'll even be so kind as make it a mailto link (i.e. <a href='mailto:itoltz@gmail.com'>itoltz@gmail.com</a>).
And you know what? I almost never get spam in my inbox. I'd say a piece squeaks through Gmail's filters every few months (though when it does, I usually seem to get 2-3 similar spams over the course of a day or two).
Granted, not everyone has the option of using gmail, and for those who do not everyone is comfortable with the idea of using it. That's fine. But the point is, if gmail is that good at filtering out spam, anyone else can be too.
My initial knee-jerk reaction is to be against this and feel that something should be done about it... If nothing else, it feels like it sets a bad precedent for Net Neutrality.
However, after some thought, there are a couple key issues here which make this a fundamentally different issue from that of ISPs charging websites for preferred access.
First, ISPs have had a lot of help from government getting established, and thus I don't have a problem with government regulating them much more heavily. Disney's ESPN website is for the most part a standard commercial venture. I'm sure there are some "gotchas" in there about some minor government crap that's inescapable with a company as large as Disney, but it's minor compared to what the ISPs have.
Second, ESPN isn't a monopoly. In fact, it's practically an anti-monopoly. If Disney drives people away from ESPN, it costs them literally nothing in terms of time, money or effort to find an alternative provider. Relatively few people in the US have a choice of broadband ISPs, and of those who do the choice is almost always limited to just two providers.
So yeah, in this case, I think Disney's perfectly welcome (and perfectly stupid) to do this, and I think the correct response is for absolutely no ISP to pay them.
Maybe you should take a couple classes in reading comprehension, since the line...
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.
...explicitly states that most college students are not in it for education's sake.
DRM - Devil's wRong Maintenance
Holy fuck, man, if you're going to force an acronym that hard at least make it one that's good and/or makes sense. That looks like you just took one word that sounded bad and started with a D, one word that sounded bad and had an R near the front, and one word that just happened to be a noun starting with M.