It doesn't break anything. Opera already supports zoom and it causes no problems. Of course the pixel distances would be interpreted accordingly in zoomed mode, the users wouldn't like it if most of the web looked broken on their new browser.
Depends. Viewing 640x480 Flash movies is much better at 200% zoom. Zooming also helps when some retarded web designer chose to use a font size that hurts to read.
Opera already had the option for years so I don't know why that's news.
Most people just look at Blender and give up after five minutes because you can't do anything without an interface tutorial. Many attempt to use it via GUI while it's pretty much completely hotkey driven. Lightwave and Maya are better, yes, but they aren't exactly affordable. The Blender devs seem to react much faster to user requests, though.
A good idea alone doesn't make a good game. Far too many games started with a great idea but failed at the implementation. Severe imbalances, bad user interfaces, AI problems, bad or uninteresting level design, lack of variety (especially when your core idea is used only in limited ways), severe bugs, all of these can kill a great idea. Usually graphics are a rough indicator at how skilled a developer is in general, games with bad graphics* often suffer from other bad implementations as well.
*= Bad as in "badly executed", not as in "behind the times". Like having your characters sport ten thousand polygons, normalmaps and tons of customization options yet still looking like disfigured monkey corpses.
Yes except most of the hours in any MMORPG are spent grinding and the level of fun is generally rather low, even during the non-grind parts. The two hours in the cinema might cost more but they are definitely of higher quality than the average two hours spent in an MMORPG (assuming both a decent movie and MMORPG, obviously comparing an Uwe Boll flick here doesn't make sense). MMORPGs have as much content as every other game but they stretch it to months of playtime. Most singleplayer games don't stretch their content that thin, you can play for an evening and have a meaningful and varied experience as opposed to slaying 50 more monsters and getting a few percent closer to the next levelup. Hell, in many games (especially older ones) the entire content of the game can be experienced in one hour if you're good enough.
Never mind that few people really play an entire year at 12 hours a week, boredom usually sets in much earlier.
The XT beats the hell out of a C64 and the C64 could play Tetris easily. Hell, you could implement Tetris in BASIC and the C64 would still handle it easily.
If you want to program games, study computer science (since you'll learn everything you need to know about games in some form there), if you want to be an artist, study traditional art. If you can draw well you can usually apply the knowledge to 3d art and get good results easily. Application-specific knowledge is unimportant, especially for entry-level positions. If you can use one app you can use any app after some time to get used to the differences. A game degree is worthless and you will need to further your skills yourself even if you get such a degree (the people in charge of hiring artists often complain about those game students doing everything the same way and rarely up to par).
Seriously, games are just a simple subclass of realtime programs, if you can write programs you can write games (though learning an API might be necessary).
Actually with modding I'd be more worried about the code itself, the Source SDK is supposedly VERY messy, I've seen mods switch from HL2 to other engines (Quake 4 I think) simply because Source is a huge PITA.
You can learn how to swing a brush in minutes. You can learn how to plot polygons in minutes as well. Neither means that you'll be able to make anything resembling a human. Both drawing and modeling requires training. There are advanced techniques in both Photoshop and 3D you have to master if you wish to make good art in a reasonable timeframe.
Amiga. You do know that software has advanced quite a bit since then, right? I do remember some WYSIWYG 3d game creation system (and I'm not referring to the program by Pie In The Sky) where you just drag code blocks together to form your game somewhen 'round 2000-2001. There's the Blender game engine as well, while it's not very good for serious purposes it can support some simple games and allows Python scripting. And while pricey, Unreal Engine 3's level scripts are WYSIWYG affairs as well and alledgedly capable of describing an entire game logic.
Oh and keep in mind that telling your artist to use Milkshape is akin to raping him with a hot iron poker. Blender crushes Milkshape like a grain of rice. Milkshape sucks horribly for anything except basic mesh modelling and even there it's like driving a nail into the wall with your thumb, Blender is just a better tool in every single respect.
I don't think 3d is that hard, sure it uses university-level maths but what you're lacking there you can read up on. Most of the problems you are going to encounter have been solved in traditional math already, you just need to transscribe the algorithms into your programming language (and know where and how to use them, of course). The basic transformations and lighting are done by the API, the hardest part is optimizing stuff and even that has been explored thoroughly. Of course you're not going to churn out a state-of-the-art engine on your first try but you'll get something more than workable easily.
Yes but compare the people that bought a blockbuster game to the number of people that saw a blockbuster movie. Games are a large market, yes, but unless you are only perusing mechanics and plot points that are very common throughout games that's not going to help. In anime you often see shows refer to the generic idea of a jRPG with text boxes and defeating a great evil but never specific plot points of a specific game. Even the adaptions of videogames make sure to independently introduce the necessary plot points, no matter how far they are from the source material.
AFAIK the number of viewers decreases with movie sequels, that would be because in order to understand the second part you usually have to have seen the first so the potential audience is limited. Now you have a "first part" that consists of four games. How large is your audience then? Certainly not enough to justify showing it in cinema.
Okay, Mario or Sonic would qualify as widely known specific games but I doubt the Silent Hill series has a similar presence.
Ah, so it's different in 2150. In 2160 you have a row of items below the bar for each type of construction unit/building, clicking them repeatedly cycles through the buildings/complexes (it always issues build orders to the closest drone for the UCS, the LC still builds in orbit and the ED has colony centers that spawn the buildings). If you select a building it'll show you that building's list but you can cycle through them without selecting anything so your group of units will not be deselected.
If you understand each unit as a group it actually makes sense, a machinegun is much more effective for mowing down a group of infantry (especially when they are spread out) than trying to hit them with the main cannon. Though running infantry over wouldn't be possible/practical with groups, in real life that'd just end up giving the surviving infantry a clear line of fire to your vulnerable rear armor.
Actually C&C is more arcade-like and puts emphasis on quick battles and obvious unit strengths and weaknesses while TA takes a highly realistic approach. TA isn't just about fielding more and the right units, it's a lot about information warfare. If the enemy's scouts can spot your force before you see theirs you'll take heavy losses before you even get to fire one shot. When I was a noob I sent 20 goliath tanks towards the enemy and got them wiped out by a single HLT.
Slashdot Mirror
FF3DS is a complete remake of the game (with 3d graphics and stuff), Valkyrie Profile for the PSP is the first VP game.
I only see the adjective, tr verb and verb definitions. Appropriation is a noun.
The difference is that Weird Al clearly made a parody while this logo doesn't have anything funny about it.
As Wiki said, the domain registration expired, the server is still reachable through its IP.
Freespace 2 isn't that rare, it's gone through several budget rereleases, with some looking around you can find one.
Sarcasm can be used as more than humour, in this case I'd say the insightful upmod is justified.
Use Opera. You can scale websites freely so those 800px wide pages will take your full screen width if you want.
It doesn't break anything. Opera already supports zoom and it causes no problems. Of course the pixel distances would be interpreted accordingly in zoomed mode, the users wouldn't like it if most of the web looked broken on their new browser.
Depends. Viewing 640x480 Flash movies is much better at 200% zoom. Zooming also helps when some retarded web designer chose to use a font size that hurts to read.
Opera already had the option for years so I don't know why that's news.
Most people just look at Blender and give up after five minutes because you can't do anything without an interface tutorial. Many attempt to use it via GUI while it's pretty much completely hotkey driven. Lightwave and Maya are better, yes, but they aren't exactly affordable. The Blender devs seem to react much faster to user requests, though.
A good idea alone doesn't make a good game. Far too many games started with a great idea but failed at the implementation. Severe imbalances, bad user interfaces, AI problems, bad or uninteresting level design, lack of variety (especially when your core idea is used only in limited ways), severe bugs, all of these can kill a great idea. Usually graphics are a rough indicator at how skilled a developer is in general, games with bad graphics* often suffer from other bad implementations as well.
*= Bad as in "badly executed", not as in "behind the times". Like having your characters sport ten thousand polygons, normalmaps and tons of customization options yet still looking like disfigured monkey corpses.
Yes except most of the hours in any MMORPG are spent grinding and the level of fun is generally rather low, even during the non-grind parts. The two hours in the cinema might cost more but they are definitely of higher quality than the average two hours spent in an MMORPG (assuming both a decent movie and MMORPG, obviously comparing an Uwe Boll flick here doesn't make sense). MMORPGs have as much content as every other game but they stretch it to months of playtime. Most singleplayer games don't stretch their content that thin, you can play for an evening and have a meaningful and varied experience as opposed to slaying 50 more monsters and getting a few percent closer to the next levelup. Hell, in many games (especially older ones) the entire content of the game can be experienced in one hour if you're good enough.
Never mind that few people really play an entire year at 12 hours a week, boredom usually sets in much earlier.
The XT beats the hell out of a C64 and the C64 could play Tetris easily. Hell, you could implement Tetris in BASIC and the C64 would still handle it easily.
If you want to program games, study computer science (since you'll learn everything you need to know about games in some form there), if you want to be an artist, study traditional art. If you can draw well you can usually apply the knowledge to 3d art and get good results easily. Application-specific knowledge is unimportant, especially for entry-level positions. If you can use one app you can use any app after some time to get used to the differences. A game degree is worthless and you will need to further your skills yourself even if you get such a degree (the people in charge of hiring artists often complain about those game students doing everything the same way and rarely up to par).
Seriously, games are just a simple subclass of realtime programs, if you can write programs you can write games (though learning an API might be necessary).
Actually with modding I'd be more worried about the code itself, the Source SDK is supposedly VERY messy, I've seen mods switch from HL2 to other engines (Quake 4 I think) simply because Source is a huge PITA.
You can learn how to swing a brush in minutes. You can learn how to plot polygons in minutes as well. Neither means that you'll be able to make anything resembling a human. Both drawing and modeling requires training. There are advanced techniques in both Photoshop and 3D you have to master if you wish to make good art in a reasonable timeframe.
Amiga. You do know that software has advanced quite a bit since then, right? I do remember some WYSIWYG 3d game creation system (and I'm not referring to the program by Pie In The Sky) where you just drag code blocks together to form your game somewhen 'round 2000-2001. There's the Blender game engine as well, while it's not very good for serious purposes it can support some simple games and allows Python scripting. And while pricey, Unreal Engine 3's level scripts are WYSIWYG affairs as well and alledgedly capable of describing an entire game logic.
Oh and keep in mind that telling your artist to use Milkshape is akin to raping him with a hot iron poker. Blender crushes Milkshape like a grain of rice. Milkshape sucks horribly for anything except basic mesh modelling and even there it's like driving a nail into the wall with your thumb, Blender is just a better tool in every single respect.
I don't think 3d is that hard, sure it uses university-level maths but what you're lacking there you can read up on. Most of the problems you are going to encounter have been solved in traditional math already, you just need to transscribe the algorithms into your programming language (and know where and how to use them, of course). The basic transformations and lighting are done by the API, the hardest part is optimizing stuff and even that has been explored thoroughly. Of course you're not going to churn out a state-of-the-art engine on your first try but you'll get something more than workable easily.
Yes but compare the people that bought a blockbuster game to the number of people that saw a blockbuster movie. Games are a large market, yes, but unless you are only perusing mechanics and plot points that are very common throughout games that's not going to help. In anime you often see shows refer to the generic idea of a jRPG with text boxes and defeating a great evil but never specific plot points of a specific game. Even the adaptions of videogames make sure to independently introduce the necessary plot points, no matter how far they are from the source material.
AFAIK the number of viewers decreases with movie sequels, that would be because in order to understand the second part you usually have to have seen the first so the potential audience is limited. Now you have a "first part" that consists of four games. How large is your audience then? Certainly not enough to justify showing it in cinema.
Okay, Mario or Sonic would qualify as widely known specific games but I doubt the Silent Hill series has a similar presence.
What's the advantage of sprites in an RTS?
Ah, so it's different in 2150. In 2160 you have a row of items below the bar for each type of construction unit/building, clicking them repeatedly cycles through the buildings/complexes (it always issues build orders to the closest drone for the UCS, the LC still builds in orbit and the ED has colony centers that spawn the buildings). If you select a building it'll show you that building's list but you can cycle through them without selecting anything so your group of units will not be deselected.
If you understand each unit as a group it actually makes sense, a machinegun is much more effective for mowing down a group of infantry (especially when they are spread out) than trying to hit them with the main cannon. Though running infantry over wouldn't be possible/practical with groups, in real life that'd just end up giving the surviving infantry a clear line of fire to your vulnerable rear armor.
The NES and the Famicom were for different markets so I wouldn't call the NES a separate revision, no buyer would see both of them.
Actually C&C is more arcade-like and puts emphasis on quick battles and obvious unit strengths and weaknesses while TA takes a highly realistic approach. TA isn't just about fielding more and the right units, it's a lot about information warfare. If the enemy's scouts can spot your force before you see theirs you'll take heavy losses before you even get to fire one shot. When I was a noob I sent 20 goliath tanks towards the enemy and got them wiped out by a single HLT.