Your first paragraph is the only one with any relevance to a discussion of UI - and since the only thing you say in it is "Moving it around doesn't make it great" and then continue with your broad, general strokes, I'll counter with:
No, that's one of the dozen things about the UI that work quite well.
The rest of your rant - and by the way, offline modules and overheating modules both have a rather pronounced effect, if you have any savvy in using them - has little do with a discussion of the UI. If you want to rant about net code, that's a whole different topic.
No, the UI is not "pretty." "Pretty" also doesn't equate to good. I can change the nature of information delivery, the amount of it, the location of it, the style of it, and how I manipulate, react to, and organize that information with a few simple clicks. I can custom-design a dozen information filters and pull them all up in two clicks. I'm not interested in a "pretty" UI - I'm interested in a functional one. If I wanted a pretty UI that didn't do anything useful, I've got plenty of other choices. The EVE UI is designed to give out information, and it does that very well.
Uh, with all due respect, I'm calling "troll." You've clearly never played the game yourself if you think the shields can be toggled on and off.
All but one section of the UI can be moved anywhere on the screen, 95% of the keyboard shortcuts can be remapped (and many have been added/made available.) You can modify the amount of information displayed on the screen from Arcade-Simplistic all the way up to "Makes a Simulator Junkie's Eyes Bleed." The amount of modules there to be turned on and off can be as many as 22, and they all have four states (online, offline, active, overload) to choose from as well. You can either pull things from a list on one side which can be sorted one of a dozen ways (Alphabetical, by distance, by speed, by size, by corporation, by alliance, by velocity relative to your own speed and direction - it's nuts) or you can simply pluck the one you want out of the swarm of things flickering in and out of the actual game screen.
The complexity of EVE is staggering and could have a 12 volume desk reference set written for it, if one so desired. WoW's strategy guide barely broke 150 pages, and most of that was pretty pictures.
Fanboy, go home. Or better yet - play EVE and then give an informed opinion. The lag could be better. The UI, however, is a long, long way from simple.
EVE is often ignored in discussions of MMORPGs because it is precisely the antithesis of what is popularly regarded as "smart" in the genre:
- It's not fantasy, but fantasy is the smart move because it is easier to understand and create; everyone knows the "ground rules."
- It's not warm or cuddly. You can be 5 hours in and get (metaphorically speaking) lured into an alley, have your throat slashed, and everything you own taken from you. (Scan-probing pirates in missions, anyone?) That's not smart because it makes people quit.
- The game is utterly, utterly sandbox. The missions are nothing but money generation and have no effect on your character's skills, and very little (positive) effect on equipment/ships.
- Some of the worst social behaviors possible are rewarded: ganging up on people, backstabbing, betrayal, strong preying on the weak, opportunism, and so on.
And yet despite all this, the game continues to thrive precisely BECAUSE it does not pander to the weak. It thrives because genuine accomplishment and reaching the highest levels of the game really does mean something (running major alliances, flying a titan), and not everyone can even come close to doing it. Because EVERYTHING in EVE relies on the player base, the community-binding aspect of the game is tremendously retentive.
In WoW, you can solo, get bored, and leave. In EVE, cooperation is an absolute must to experience more than a quarter of the game's content - and so people will actively solicit you into their groups, if they're smart - and many are.
EVE has a decent number of things wrong - including a grave, grave problem looming with the hideously imbalanced titan-class vessels appearing more and more on the battlefield - but anytime you create a total antithesis to the most popular game, you're going to draw a pretty good "backlash" crowd, and EVE has.
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm a bit surprised that neither the BBC nor CNN has picked this up yet. Deliberate media-snub to shut it down, or no press release yet, or...? Anyone have a notion?
One would think that someone throwing down the word "impeachment" would be worth some notice.
Part of the reason for the rise and decline of these games can be traced to the computing power of the eras. RPGs were getting better and better because the ability to make them more appealing - graphically, sound (voice quality, etc) were improving. It became easier to develop a more immersive environment, and so more and more attention went to writing a story that could show off the quality that was possible.
Unfortunately, with the rise of greater and easier connectivity, the ability to play RPG's with more friends came - and thus we saw the rise of the MMORPG. Although they might have first envisioned being more RPG than MUD, the popularity of the games erased Role-Playing very quickly. (Joe Sixpack likes killing monsters, but doesn't give a damn about "Thou and thee.")
What would it take for a great single-player RPG now? A game so enjoyable that it overshadows the enjoyment factor of playing a similar game with hundreds of others. Humans are social creatures, by and large, so that will be very tough to do. It won't be a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler in any case; that genre is utterly oversaturated in MMORPGs.
If another great RPG series is developed, my money is on a Fallout/Shadowrun-genre RPG; it's about the only genre not super-satured (ignoring the embarassing Matrix attempt at it) in the MMO world. (Though, in all honesty, the idea of playing a Shadowrun MMORPG....whew. I'm in, chummers.)
It alarms me this post isn't being modded down as flamebait.
"Relieves them from having to make an effort to teach?" Are you serious?
These boards aren't magic wands.
You have to:
1- Learn to use the software for the program, which is very often poorly documented. (Surely Slashdotters understand this!)
2- Develop lessons for the program, which usually involves coming up with entirely new materials, searching out sources, and coming up with ways to integrate them to the new software.
3- Like any other tool, debug its use.
4- Like any other EDUCATIONAL tool, note its success/failure level with the students and modify accordingly.
5- At least in the United States, justify to the principal and teaching standards why that lesson is both vital and significant.
Getting new tools as an educator involves MORE work, not less. It's only the outside public with its naive notions of the classroom that believes otherwise.
Interesting. Apparently you've been unaware of education in the United States since George W. took office - not that it's better now.
More curiously, a great many of my students (Dallas suburb) that come from Mexico are amongst the most poorly educated in my classes - and no, it's not a linguistic issue. They describe underpaid teachers who are undermotivated and often abusive.
I guess we both have our own forms of nationalism, eh?
Interesting what people can misread and misinterpret.
1- As a teacher who has one of those boards hanging in my room right now, 25 feet in front of me (I'm on my planning period, thanks) I can tell you:
THE BOARD DOES NOTHING UNTIL THE TEACHER CREATES THE LESSON TO OPERATE ON IT.
Very, very few high-quality lessons are available on the internet. Teachers are (disappointingly) a very territorial bunch with their lessons. At best, you'll find perhaps two dozen lessons attached to your grade/subject. Of those, at most five will be appropriate for your class/skillset of students.
2- Technology will only eclipse teachers when you show me the tool that will deal well with the kid who got his ass beat by dad last night for trying to get him to stop hitting his mom, who speaks a dozen words of the school's language, and has the unfortunate-but-true "Living for now" survival instincts of a child raised in poverty. When you develop a program that can educate that, all while taking role and helping Sarah get to the nurse because she's having her first period, I'll bow out of this classroom and go on welfare.
3- These boards, as great as they sound, are simply glorified mouse-pads with projectors hitting them. You synch up where the projector is aiming with the board, and you've basically got a supersized tablet that also happens to have the monitor on it. In short, something very similar to bank screens for the last ten years. The difference? Someone made the screen even bigger and got the cost low enough that a few principles caught on, and the rest followed like pigs in a pen, as most things in education go.
Do I use mine? Absolutely. I'm probably using it now while you read it - but it's just a tool (albeit a high-potential one), it's not the Educational Messiah, and technology is surely not going to destroy this field, popular Slashdot views to the contrary.;)
In point of fact, as an English teacher who owns two cats, I may have to purchase a machete on the way home this evening./me wanders off muttering about "relatedly."
Those have actually been there since the Civ IV: Vanilla version came out. I'd guess marketing is emphasizing them to give the game another laurel, but people have been playing Future Start, Industrial Start, Medieval Start for a long time now.
Better question: Will the AI be properly tuned for those starts, or will its ancient-era-prioritization cause it to be utterly demolished in the vastly different priorities of the more advanced eras?
While I respect anyone in the public limelight, I think Kathy is being a tad bit naive. As a mildly well-known member of a gaming community once upon a time, I came to realize that some people really do get their rocks off on simply making vile threats. (Yes, I know, the scale is very different, but the concept is much the same.)
Odds are very poor that many of them are serious, and in the case of the incredibly slim few that are, most of them are so functionally disturbed that they wouldn't be able to make a trip to a convention anyhow. They're too worried about the peanut butter covering their sidewalk or the time cubes floating in front of the bus station.
Part of being a celebrity on any level for any topic means accepting that you gain both fame and infamy in parts. Refusing to continue doing good because of the threat of others doing evil against you is (while perhaps the most understandable kind) simply cowardice.
I'm a schoolteacher. I *KNOW* because I'm a teacher who connects with kids, and has a knack for reaching troubled kids that my odds of being the target of an angry, weapon-holding students are *GOOD*... someday, I'm going to stare at that terrifying situation. I still teach - I know that I do good things, and I will not live in fear of evil ones.
Kathy should recognize that her acts do far more good than the risk of harm merits and go on. Courage of the unknown is a tough thing, but an important thing - it is what makes (most) of the greatest humans great.
I play EVE; hell, I run an up-and-coming alliance there. We do pretty well for ourselves; we just moved out into 0.0 and we've managed to establish some peace and tranquility there. We do bizzare things like smile at the neighbors, make nice with the locals, and make friends.
And you know what? I don't give a damn about what BoB is doing on the entire other side of the game universe. It doesn't affect me. It doesn't affect mine. Maybe one day we'll have to worry about what BoB is doing, provided we become that big of a fish.
And maybe not. I'm not going to quit playing a game over something that has absolutely no effect on me, and I'm not going to let someone else being a prick ruin my good time. If you let someone else's negative actions dictate the joys of your life, have fun hiding in a cave and screaming in impotent rage at the world every ten minutes.
Me? I've got a small alliance, in a small pond in EVE, and we're having a great time smashing pirates, breaking up gate-camps, and training new players who then become lifelong loyal members, because someone didn't instantly smear them into the wall and treat them like pricks the moment they arrived.
Even if the worst environments, if you DON'T subscribe to the worst possible behavior patterns, you gain a lot more respect - if only because people recognize quality character when they see it, even if they don't agree with it themselves.
I remember being young enough to sit in an elementary school classroom, and watching a Pac-Man stand-up arcade game competition televised on TV. The announcer actually did a great job with it, and it even had slo-mo replays.
I know I wasn't the only kid who was riveted.
Spectator-sport gaming is nearly a successful concept nearly a generation old; it just requires producers to accept the "geek" of it and move on.
Sure, I've met a terrorist. Quite a few in fact - I'm one. Remember "Education" Secretary's comments? The National Association of Teachers is a terrorist organization. So that makes all of us teacher folk terrorists.
Excuse me, I have to go build more paper-airplane bombs and continue brainwashing my fatwah legions with the rules of grammar, now.
Meh. I hate when I forget to log in before making a post.::glances up at his last post and grumbles::
Oh well. Not like I'll get any karma for it anyhow.;)
Ninja Gaiden isn't that bad; I think the problem is more that people are expecting games to come easier and be more accepting of button mashing.
In an era of "Respawn and frag again!" style games (Quake, Savage, Doom, et al) a game where death is something to be actively, intelligently avoided is automatically considered hard.
Now add in the component "must be able to respond to different situations in different manners" and you've got "really hard."
Now throw in the dreaded "have to be able to hit buttons in a certain combination while responding to different situations in different manners" and heaven forbid "USE THE APPROPRIATE TOOL FOR THE JOB".... well, wowee zowee, you've got Ninja Gaiden.
However, NG doesn't rank on the all time "hard" list simply because at no time does it "luck kill" you. Everything that happens is directly traceable to player skill. No "Ooops, we felt like you should die now." No "A random piano fell from the sky because you thought for too long."
Develop the skills. Learn the responses. Appreciate the tools for the job.
Ninja Gaiden isn't a hard game - it's just not a "gimme my gory gratification instantly with no work" game.
Slashdot Mirror
Your first paragraph is the only one with any relevance to a discussion of UI - and since the only thing you say in it is "Moving it around doesn't make it great" and then continue with your broad, general strokes, I'll counter with:
No, that's one of the dozen things about the UI that work quite well.
The rest of your rant - and by the way, offline modules and overheating modules both have a rather pronounced effect, if you have any savvy in using them - has little do with a discussion of the UI. If you want to rant about net code, that's a whole different topic.
No, the UI is not "pretty." "Pretty" also doesn't equate to good. I can change the nature of information delivery, the amount of it, the location of it, the style of it, and how I manipulate, react to, and organize that information with a few simple clicks. I can custom-design a dozen information filters and pull them all up in two clicks. I'm not interested in a "pretty" UI - I'm interested in a functional one. If I wanted a pretty UI that didn't do anything useful, I've got plenty of other choices. The EVE UI is designed to give out information, and it does that very well.
There needs to be a new category of upmod for priceless comments like that one. /me tries to slap +1 "Pwnage" beside Edfear's remark.
Uh, with all due respect, I'm calling "troll." You've clearly never played the game yourself if you think the shields can be toggled on and off.
All but one section of the UI can be moved anywhere on the screen, 95% of the keyboard shortcuts can be remapped (and many have been added/made available.) You can modify the amount of information displayed on the screen from Arcade-Simplistic all the way up to "Makes a Simulator Junkie's Eyes Bleed." The amount of modules there to be turned on and off can be as many as 22, and they all have four states (online, offline, active, overload) to choose from as well. You can either pull things from a list on one side which can be sorted one of a dozen ways (Alphabetical, by distance, by speed, by size, by corporation, by alliance, by velocity relative to your own speed and direction - it's nuts) or you can simply pluck the one you want out of the swarm of things flickering in and out of the actual game screen.
The complexity of EVE is staggering and could have a 12 volume desk reference set written for it, if one so desired. WoW's strategy guide barely broke 150 pages, and most of that was pretty pictures.
Fanboy, go home. Or better yet - play EVE and then give an informed opinion. The lag could be better. The UI, however, is a long, long way from simple.
EVE is often ignored in discussions of MMORPGs because it is precisely the antithesis of what is popularly regarded as "smart" in the genre:
- It's not fantasy, but fantasy is the smart move because it is easier to understand and create; everyone knows the "ground rules."
- It's not warm or cuddly. You can be 5 hours in and get (metaphorically speaking) lured into an alley, have your throat slashed, and everything you own taken from you. (Scan-probing pirates in missions, anyone?) That's not smart because it makes people quit.
- The game is utterly, utterly sandbox. The missions are nothing but money generation and have no effect on your character's skills, and very little (positive) effect on equipment/ships.
- Some of the worst social behaviors possible are rewarded: ganging up on people, backstabbing, betrayal, strong preying on the weak, opportunism, and so on.
And yet despite all this, the game continues to thrive precisely BECAUSE it does not pander to the weak. It thrives because genuine accomplishment and reaching the highest levels of the game really does mean something (running major alliances, flying a titan), and not everyone can even come close to doing it. Because EVERYTHING in EVE relies on the player base, the community-binding aspect of the game is tremendously retentive.
In WoW, you can solo, get bored, and leave. In EVE, cooperation is an absolute must to experience more than a quarter of the game's content - and so people will actively solicit you into their groups, if they're smart - and many are.
EVE has a decent number of things wrong - including a grave, grave problem looming with the hideously imbalanced titan-class vessels appearing more and more on the battlefield - but anytime you create a total antithesis to the most popular game, you're going to draw a pretty good "backlash" crowd, and EVE has.
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm a bit surprised that neither the BBC nor CNN has picked this up yet. Deliberate media-snub to shut it down, or no press release yet, or...? Anyone have a notion?
One would think that someone throwing down the word "impeachment" would be worth some notice.
"THE PC IS DYING".... ...hmm. You uh, miss that whole "World of Warcraft" thing, amigo?
Part of the reason for the rise and decline of these games can be traced to the computing power of the eras. RPGs were getting better and better because the ability to make them more appealing - graphically, sound (voice quality, etc) were improving. It became easier to develop a more immersive environment, and so more and more attention went to writing a story that could show off the quality that was possible.
Unfortunately, with the rise of greater and easier connectivity, the ability to play RPG's with more friends came - and thus we saw the rise of the MMORPG. Although they might have first envisioned being more RPG than MUD, the popularity of the games erased Role-Playing very quickly. (Joe Sixpack likes killing monsters, but doesn't give a damn about "Thou and thee.")
What would it take for a great single-player RPG now? A game so enjoyable that it overshadows the enjoyment factor of playing a similar game with hundreds of others. Humans are social creatures, by and large, so that will be very tough to do. It won't be a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler in any case; that genre is utterly oversaturated in MMORPGs.
If another great RPG series is developed, my money is on a Fallout/Shadowrun-genre RPG; it's about the only genre not super-satured (ignoring the embarassing Matrix attempt at it) in the MMO world. (Though, in all honesty, the idea of playing a Shadowrun MMORPG....whew. I'm in, chummers.)
I want to see corporate logos on their gear if they're getting sponsored. Heh.
Or character names that reflect it: "MountainDewMage" and "RedBullRogue."
C'mon, if you're going to commercialize something, let's go the whole way, people.
On the other hand... I hesitate to think about what would happen with the characters sponsored by Bawls.....
It alarms me this post isn't being modded down as flamebait.
"Relieves them from having to make an effort to teach?" Are you serious?
These boards aren't magic wands.
You have to:
1- Learn to use the software for the program, which is very often poorly documented. (Surely Slashdotters understand this!)
2- Develop lessons for the program, which usually involves coming up with entirely new materials, searching out sources, and coming up with ways to integrate them to the new software.
3- Like any other tool, debug its use.
4- Like any other EDUCATIONAL tool, note its success/failure level with the students and modify accordingly.
5- At least in the United States, justify to the principal and teaching standards why that lesson is both vital and significant.
Getting new tools as an educator involves MORE work, not less. It's only the outside public with its naive notions of the classroom that believes otherwise.
Interesting. Apparently you've been unaware of education in the United States since George W. took office - not that it's better now.
More curiously, a great many of my students (Dallas suburb) that come from Mexico are amongst the most poorly educated in my classes - and no, it's not a linguistic issue. They describe underpaid teachers who are undermotivated and often abusive.
I guess we both have our own forms of nationalism, eh?
Interesting what people can misread and misinterpret.
;)
1- As a teacher who has one of those boards hanging in my room right now, 25 feet in front of me (I'm on my planning period, thanks) I can tell you:
THE BOARD DOES NOTHING UNTIL THE TEACHER CREATES THE LESSON TO OPERATE ON IT.
Very, very few high-quality lessons are available on the internet. Teachers are (disappointingly) a very territorial bunch with their lessons. At best, you'll find perhaps two dozen lessons attached to your grade/subject. Of those, at most five will be appropriate for your class/skillset of students.
2- Technology will only eclipse teachers when you show me the tool that will deal well with the kid who got his ass beat by dad last night for trying to get him to stop hitting his mom, who speaks a dozen words of the school's language, and has the unfortunate-but-true "Living for now" survival instincts of a child raised in poverty. When you develop a program that can educate that, all while taking role and helping Sarah get to the nurse because she's having her first period, I'll bow out of this classroom and go on welfare.
3- These boards, as great as they sound, are simply glorified mouse-pads with projectors hitting them. You synch up where the projector is aiming with the board, and you've basically got a supersized tablet that also happens to have the monitor on it. In short, something very similar to bank screens for the last ten years. The difference? Someone made the screen even bigger and got the cost low enough that a few principles caught on, and the rest followed like pigs in a pen, as most things in education go.
Do I use mine? Absolutely. I'm probably using it now while you read it - but it's just a tool (albeit a high-potential one), it's not the Educational Messiah, and technology is surely not going to destroy this field, popular Slashdot views to the contrary.
-A teacher
In point of fact, as an English teacher who owns two cats, I may have to purchase a machete on the way home this evening. /me wanders off muttering about "relatedly."
Hi Solver. I notice you didn't say much about the second question. Tales told of silence, eh? ;)
Those have actually been there since the Civ IV: Vanilla version came out. I'd guess marketing is emphasizing them to give the game another laurel, but people have been playing Future Start, Industrial Start, Medieval Start for a long time now. Better question: Will the AI be properly tuned for those starts, or will its ancient-era-prioritization cause it to be utterly demolished in the vastly different priorities of the more advanced eras?
While I respect anyone in the public limelight, I think Kathy is being a tad bit naive. As a mildly well-known member of a gaming community once upon a time, I came to realize that some people really do get their rocks off on simply making vile threats. (Yes, I know, the scale is very different, but the concept is much the same.)
Odds are very poor that many of them are serious, and in the case of the incredibly slim few that are, most of them are so functionally disturbed that they wouldn't be able to make a trip to a convention anyhow. They're too worried about the peanut butter covering their sidewalk or the time cubes floating in front of the bus station.
Part of being a celebrity on any level for any topic means accepting that you gain both fame and infamy in parts. Refusing to continue doing good because of the threat of others doing evil against you is (while perhaps the most understandable kind) simply cowardice.
I'm a schoolteacher. I *KNOW* because I'm a teacher who connects with kids, and has a knack for reaching troubled kids that my odds of being the target of an angry, weapon-holding students are *GOOD*... someday, I'm going to stare at that terrifying situation. I still teach - I know that I do good things, and I will not live in fear of evil ones.
Kathy should recognize that her acts do far more good than the risk of harm merits and go on. Courage of the unknown is a tough thing, but an important thing - it is what makes (most) of the greatest humans great.
This may be shocking and all, but....
I could care less.
I play EVE; hell, I run an up-and-coming alliance there. We do pretty well for ourselves; we just moved out into 0.0 and we've managed to establish some peace and tranquility there. We do bizzare things like smile at the neighbors, make nice with the locals, and make friends.
And you know what? I don't give a damn about what BoB is doing on the entire other side of the game universe. It doesn't affect me. It doesn't affect mine. Maybe one day we'll have to worry about what BoB is doing, provided we become that big of a fish.
And maybe not. I'm not going to quit playing a game over something that has absolutely no effect on me, and I'm not going to let someone else being a prick ruin my good time. If you let someone else's negative actions dictate the joys of your life, have fun hiding in a cave and screaming in impotent rage at the world every ten minutes.
Me? I've got a small alliance, in a small pond in EVE, and we're having a great time smashing pirates, breaking up gate-camps, and training new players who then become lifelong loyal members, because someone didn't instantly smear them into the wall and treat them like pricks the moment they arrived.
Even if the worst environments, if you DON'T subscribe to the worst possible behavior patterns, you gain a lot more respect - if only because people recognize quality character when they see it, even if they don't agree with it themselves.
I remember being young enough to sit in an elementary school classroom, and watching a Pac-Man stand-up arcade game competition televised on TV. The announcer actually did a great job with it, and it even had slo-mo replays.
I know I wasn't the only kid who was riveted.
Spectator-sport gaming is nearly a successful concept nearly a generation old; it just requires producers to accept the "geek" of it and move on.
Sure, I've met a terrorist. Quite a few in fact - I'm one. Remember "Education" Secretary's comments? The National Association of Teachers is a terrorist organization. So that makes all of us teacher folk terrorists. Excuse me, I have to go build more paper-airplane bombs and continue brainwashing my fatwah legions with the rules of grammar, now.
Meh. I hate when I forget to log in before making a post. ::glances up at his last post and grumbles::
Oh well. Not like I'll get any karma for it anyhow. ;)
Ninja Gaiden isn't that bad; I think the problem is more that people are expecting games to come easier and be more accepting of button mashing. In an era of "Respawn and frag again!" style games (Quake, Savage, Doom, et al) a game where death is something to be actively, intelligently avoided is automatically considered hard. Now add in the component "must be able to respond to different situations in different manners" and you've got "really hard." Now throw in the dreaded "have to be able to hit buttons in a certain combination while responding to different situations in different manners" and heaven forbid "USE THE APPROPRIATE TOOL FOR THE JOB".... well, wowee zowee, you've got Ninja Gaiden. However, NG doesn't rank on the all time "hard" list simply because at no time does it "luck kill" you. Everything that happens is directly traceable to player skill. No "Ooops, we felt like you should die now." No "A random piano fell from the sky because you thought for too long." Develop the skills. Learn the responses. Appreciate the tools for the job. Ninja Gaiden isn't a hard game - it's just not a "gimme my gory gratification instantly with no work" game.