There hasn't been a verdict in the case yet, and we all know the judges in the US (or anywhere for that matter) don't always judge logically. Althought it looks promising, lets wait until the end before we pop the corks on the bubbly.
Are they still planing to release their archives online ? And in this new DIRAC codec that they're working on ? I've got a nasty feeling that about 12 months from now the archives will appear in some awfull closed format.
For my money I'd like to see their archives released in xvid and the radio archives in mp3. For that matter, why the hell are they doing online radio in Real Audio and not mp3 streams ?
If SCO dies during the trial , where does that leave the whole Linux IP issue ? Not proven ? Wouldn't it be better if they can at least survive until they get totally defeated in court, as a deterrent against other legal attacks ?
That's all most of the MMO's out there really are.
I tried the SWG:JTL demo , and found the space combat rather fun, but didn't like the ground stuff at all. It would have been much better if the ground combat againts the mobs worked more like an FPS (ala Planetside).
The real killer for a lot of MMO's , at least as far as I'm concerned, is the turn based combat.
I played the SWG:JTL (Jump To Lightspeed) 10 day demo, and frankly, didn't even make 10 day's. I tried the JTL bit, and it was amusing for an evening. I tried the walk around the planet bit, and couldn't believe what I saw.
SWG is nothing more than 3D bolt-on to the old text muds, with some StarWars make-up on. You go off to fight the mob's and it's a simple turn based combat thing where you just select what move you want to do. Why couldn't they make it more like an FPS ? Walk out and shoot the Gorgs, or the Womprats or the whatevers like any FPS.
The combat in Planetside http://www.planetside.com/Has exactly this type of combat. Yes, it has it's faults but's I'd really like to see this kind of game married to an economy and roleplaying experience like the starwars universe.
If no-one else does it, one day I'll get fed up with waiting and do it myself.
Taking market share from Apple involves one or both of:
Selling more MP3 players this year than apple.
Getting existing iPod owners to buy a Creative player.
Frankly, I don't see either happening. If apple sell more ipods than creative, then creative would lose market share. And I can't see that there are many people who would dump their iPod and buy a creative, especially since all their iTunes purchases wont play on it.
Creatives best shot this year is to produce a flash player that looks and plays good, and try to beat the ipod shuffle.
But the european players are expressly forbidden from playing it.
Yes, that's right - they don't want our custom until they "localise" the UK version. Fine. I'm making damn sure I/bug every instance of american spelling then.
And I'm a 33 yr old IT veteran gamer (been playing comp. games since I had a Sinclair ZX81).
If you've played this game a year or more ago and given up, get a trial key and give it a try. It has evolved and changed.
If you've not playing it at all, give it a try - its 7 days for free. And squad up with players - this game absolutely sucks big time if you play solo, but is much much better with a group. I'm in an outfit (Starwolf on werner server), and I have to say without them I'd have quit a year ago.
All that said, there is still room for improvement, and someone other than SOE could come in and steal 90% of the playerbase if they do it right. Having 3 producers over a 12 month period didn't help. I think "The Next Planetside" needs a definite "win" scenario , something that can be achieved by one side and resets the whole game.
Planetside, a MMOFPS, and to begin with, it kicked rear big time. I've been playing it for all of 2004 but I can see the end in sight, both of my subscription, and the game.
The idea was simple. Take an FPS, make it multiplayer over a persistant world. New vehicles came along after launch (a bomber and an AA vehicle) and the future looked rosy. But the game has suffered - it's had 3 different managers over the past year, an unpopular expansion, and promised features "just head" which never appear . They've added giant robots that looked cool, but alienated a large part of the player base (which prompted cancelled their subs and left). They've ignored problems in order to put "cool" stuff in (the commander system is still the same as it was on launch, and the high level commanders have just given up on trying to control the zerg).
I still like the game, but it's bleeding players at an alarming rate. It's going to take someone else to have a go at an MMOFPS to get it right. SOE just doesn't get it and that's just a tradgic waste of potential.
It's unlikely I know, but I hope the next Administrator decides invest in the Russian's Kliper proposal.
If NASA projects really are bid on by external companies, why haven't the Russians put in a proposal for the Crew Exploration Vehicle ? Is the contest "limited" to US only companies ?
Seems to me the most sensible thing for NASA to do is go back finish and finish the old X20 Dynasoar project and build up from there.
3 years ago I worked at a small college in the SW United Kingdom, and when the Internet became "The Big Thing" we used Netscape and then Mozilla as our browser base.
They've recently been merged with/taken over by a larger college in a nearby town, and the surviving IT department is in the process of converting the site from:
I seriously doubt the public will go for rebuying movies that they have already repurchased from VHS to DVD. SACD/DVD-Audio showed that they won't fall for the old vinyl-cd trick again. Factor in the additional cost of a new tv for the HD picture and these formats are commercially dead in the water.
Right now, you can pick up a divx/xvid compatible video player in the uk for £40, £50 in the high street. That lets you put an entire series, all 22 episodes, on a single (dual layer) dvd, and it looks "just as good" as regular dvd. I know there's a lot of videophiles out there who will argue the quality of it, but those kind of people still have laserdisc players in their setup.
The only thing stopping DVD-MPG4 from taking off is a universal menu system for these discs & players (the divx player I have just shows a directory browser - it's awfull).
Of course, if anyone knows a popular standard for media disc menu systems, please let me know!
This thing is written in C# (and I gather the # stands for RAP) and I only know java.
I've been writing a PVR system in Java for about a year now as a home project (running on a win box) , and I've got it working pretty sweet. Its not pure java, as it uses VirtualVCR for the grabbing and XMLTV for grabbing the listings. My next job is going from the WIMP style interface to something a little more set top box like. I'm also considering using a wireless joypad as a remote.
It just a shame that the UK source for XMLTV has been so unreliable over the past year. First ananova stop serving listings data, then the radio times changed their site to block xmltv, before relenting and releasing the listings in an alternate machine readable format. Lets hope the RT guys keep that going.
While likes of Valve & ID can afford to fund development of a game themselves there are a lot of smaller development houses who are employed by publishing houses to develop games. I'd even hazard a guess that the major of games publishers fall into this catagory.
The question [that a lot of people are asking] of how to remove the publisher from the loop extends to more than just getting the game onto the customers PC . Don't get me wrong, I liked the steam process and bought my HL2 from it. I love the idea that 100% of my money went to valve and not split between the shop and the guys who printed the box.
So the prime question facing game development today is not "how do we do away with the publisher?" but "how do you fund new game development without a publisher?".
I'd like to see a system where you could develop mini-games using the source SDK or an open source engine and sell them on a steam service for $5 a time or at a price that compares with renting a game from BlockBuster. Turn the games from monolithic creations into episodic series.
Small games that equate to an evenings entertainment, both financial and in terms of enjoyment, positioning themselves alongside movies and TV as entertainment mediums.
A subscription gaming network episodic games. Now that would scare the TV giants.
Arggghh!! I was too "honest" to call in sick today!
The rod up my butt must have a rod up its butt.
And I'm roleplaying tonight so I only get two hours when I get home to enjoy the goodness. (I swore to myself years ago never to forgo human interaction for a computer game. I haven't decided where online gaming lies yet).
This summer we had a media frenzy when it was discovered that someone who played Manhunt had murdered a 17 (IIRC) year old boy.
Funnily enough, not one of those sensationalist media outlets followed the sorry up when days later the police revealed that the VICTUM played manhunt, not the killer.
If I really thought videogames influenced real life, I'd buy the new Leasuresuit Larry game in a second.
Build a bit-torrent client in and integrate it with the download manager. This would enable mon & dad level users to download torrents as easily as regular files.
You can't take part unless you live in the US. European gamers have to wait until the European open beta.
Because it must take millions of $$$'s to convert American language localisation to English language. Must require an army of coders to add those extra U's.
Wait a minute - if it's illegal to make a copy of the music even if that copy is only in RAM for playback, then doesn't that make playback of legit cds illegal in portable players with an anti-shock memory buffer ?
I've got a Goodmans CD/MP3 player in my car and I love it. It plays ordinary CD's, CD-R's and RW's and can play mp3 files with ID tag display on the front.
And this cost me just under 100 pounds (uk). For 200 I could have got one with playlist support.
Until you add in a wifi adapter, I don't see what this one will give you that I don't get.
Slashdot Mirror
There hasn't been a verdict in the case yet, and we all know the judges in the US (or anywhere for that matter) don't always judge logically. Althought it looks promising, lets wait until the end before we pop the corks on the bubbly.
Are they still planing to release their archives online ? And in this new DIRAC codec that they're working on ? I've got a nasty feeling that about 12 months from now the archives will appear in some awfull closed format.
For my money I'd like to see their archives released in xvid and the radio archives in mp3. For that matter, why the hell are they doing online radio in Real Audio and not mp3 streams ?
If SCO dies during the trial , where does that leave the whole Linux IP issue ? Not proven ? Wouldn't it be better if they can at least survive until they get totally defeated in court, as a deterrent against other legal attacks ?
That's all most of the MMO's out there really are.
I tried the SWG:JTL demo , and found the space combat rather fun, but didn't like the ground stuff at all. It would have been much better if the ground combat againts the mobs worked more like an FPS (ala Planetside).
The real killer for a lot of MMO's , at least as far as I'm concerned, is the turn based combat.
I played the SWG:JTL (Jump To Lightspeed) 10 day demo, and frankly, didn't even make 10 day's. I tried the JTL bit, and it was amusing for an evening. I tried the walk around the planet bit, and couldn't believe what I saw.
SWG is nothing more than 3D bolt-on to the old text muds, with some StarWars make-up on. You go off to fight the mob's and it's a simple turn based combat thing where you just select what move you want to do. Why couldn't they make it more like an FPS ? Walk out and shoot the Gorgs, or the Womprats or the whatevers like any FPS .
The combat in Planetside http://www.planetside.com/Has exactly this type of combat. Yes, it has it's faults but's I'd really like to see this kind of game married to an economy and roleplaying experience like the starwars universe.
If no-one else does it, one day I'll get fed up with waiting and do it myself.
Frankly, I don't see either happening. If apple sell more ipods than creative, then creative would lose market share. And I can't see that there are many people who would dump their iPod and buy a creative, especially since all their iTunes purchases wont play on it.
Creatives best shot this year is to produce a flash player that looks and plays good, and try to beat the ipod shuffle.
But the european players are expressly forbidden from playing it.
/bug every instance of american spelling then.
Yes, that's right - they don't want our custom until they "localise" the UK version. Fine. I'm making damn sure I
And I'm a 33 yr old IT veteran gamer (been playing comp. games since I had a Sinclair ZX81).
If you've played this game a year or more ago and given up, get a trial key and give it a try. It has evolved and changed.
If you've not playing it at all, give it a try - its 7 days for free. And squad up with players - this game absolutely sucks big time if you play solo, but is much much better with a group. I'm in an outfit (Starwolf on werner server), and I have to say without them I'd have quit a year ago.
All that said, there is still room for improvement, and someone other than SOE could come in and steal 90% of the playerbase if they do it right. Having 3 producers over a 12 month period didn't help. I think "The Next Planetside" needs a definite "win" scenario , something that can be achieved by one side and resets the whole game.
You pay car tax and you're legally allowed to drive a car.
You pay tobacco tax and you're legally allowed to smoke it.
So if you pay a "digital copying tax" on a computer, you must be allowed to do digital copying on it, surely?
Out of curiosity, if you built a pc from scratch, which component gets this tax, or is it split up between all of them ?
Planetside, a MMOFPS, and to begin with, it kicked rear big time. I've been playing it for all of 2004 but I can see the end in sight, both of my subscription, and the game.
The idea was simple. Take an FPS, make it multiplayer over a persistant world. New vehicles came along after launch (a bomber and an AA vehicle) and the future looked rosy. But the game has suffered - it's had 3 different managers over the past year, an unpopular expansion, and promised features "just head" which never appear . They've added giant robots that looked cool, but alienated a large part of the player base (which prompted cancelled their subs and left). They've ignored problems in order to put "cool" stuff in (the commander system is still the same as it was on launch, and the high level commanders have just given up on trying to control the zerg).
I still like the game, but it's bleeding players at an alarming rate. It's going to take someone else to have a go at an MMOFPS to get it right. SOE just doesn't get it and that's just a tradgic waste of potential.
It's unlikely I know, but I hope the next Administrator decides invest in the Russian's Kliper proposal.
If NASA projects really are bid on by external companies, why haven't the Russians put in a proposal for the Crew Exploration Vehicle ? Is the contest "limited" to US only companies ?
Seems to me the most sensible thing for NASA to do is go back finish and finish the old X20 Dynasoar project and build up from there.
They've recently been merged with/taken over by a larger college in a nearby town, and the surviving IT department is in the process of converting the site from
Common Sense doesn't always win.
I predict the winner will be : DVD
I seriously doubt the public will go for rebuying movies that they have already repurchased from VHS to DVD. SACD/DVD-Audio showed that they won't fall for the old vinyl-cd trick again. Factor in the additional cost of a new tv for the HD picture and these formats are commercially dead in the water.
Right now, you can pick up a divx/xvid compatible video player in the uk for £40, £50 in the high street. That lets you put an entire series, all 22 episodes, on a single (dual layer) dvd, and it looks "just as good" as regular dvd. I know there's a lot of videophiles out there who will argue the quality of it, but those kind of people still have laserdisc players in their setup.
The only thing stopping DVD-MPG4 from taking off is a universal menu system for these discs & players (the divx player I have just shows a directory browser - it's awfull).
Of course, if anyone knows a popular standard for media disc menu systems, please let me know!
The end of left handed surfing!
This thing is written in C# (and I gather the # stands for RAP) and I only know java.
I've been writing a PVR system in Java for about a year now as a home project (running on a win box) , and I've got it working pretty sweet. Its not pure java, as it uses VirtualVCR for the grabbing and XMLTV for grabbing the listings. My next job is going from the WIMP style interface to something a little more set top box like. I'm also considering using a wireless joypad as a remote.
It just a shame that the UK source for XMLTV has been so unreliable over the past year. First ananova stop serving listings data, then the radio times changed their site to block xmltv, before relenting and releasing the listings in an alternate machine readable format. Lets hope the RT guys keep that going.
Relevant sites:
VirtualVCR : http://virtualvcr.sourceforge.net/
XmlTV : http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/
You mean they're claiming that it doesn't matter 'cos they'll lose the format war to an inferior product?
Ken Arnold's blog on java.net has a great (IMHO) idea for reforming the patent system that make it self-correcting and gives incentives for the patent lawyerst to enforce it.1 1/selfenforcing_p_1.html
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/arnold/archive/2004/
While likes of Valve & ID can afford to fund development of a game themselves there are a lot of smaller development houses who are employed by publishing houses to develop games. I'd even hazard a guess that the major of games publishers fall into this catagory. The question [that a lot of people are asking] of how to remove the publisher from the loop extends to more than just getting the game onto the customers PC . Don't get me wrong, I liked the steam process and bought my HL2 from it. I love the idea that 100% of my money went to valve and not split between the shop and the guys who printed the box. So the prime question facing game development today is not "how do we do away with the publisher?" but "how do you fund new game development without a publisher?". I'd like to see a system where you could develop mini-games using the source SDK or an open source engine and sell them on a steam service for $5 a time or at a price that compares with renting a game from BlockBuster. Turn the games from monolithic creations into episodic series. Small games that equate to an evenings entertainment, both financial and in terms of enjoyment, positioning themselves alongside movies and TV as entertainment mediums. A subscription gaming network episodic games. Now that would scare the TV giants.
Arggghh!! I was too "honest" to call in sick today! The rod up my butt must have a rod up its butt. And I'm roleplaying tonight so I only get two hours when I get home to enjoy the goodness. (I swore to myself years ago never to forgo human interaction for a computer game. I haven't decided where online gaming lies yet).
This summer we had a media frenzy when it was discovered that someone who played Manhunt had murdered a 17 (IIRC) year old boy. Funnily enough, not one of those sensationalist media outlets followed the sorry up when days later the police revealed that the VICTUM played manhunt, not the killer. If I really thought videogames influenced real life, I'd buy the new Leasuresuit Larry game in a second.
Sid Meier's Pirates! is (according to amazon) coming out the following week (22nd).
Build a bit-torrent client in and integrate it with the download manager. This would enable mon & dad level users to download torrents as easily as regular files.
You can't take part unless you live in the US. European gamers have to wait until the European open beta. Because it must take millions of $$$'s to convert American language localisation to English language. Must require an army of coders to add those extra U's.
Wait a minute - if it's illegal to make a copy of the music even if that copy is only in RAM for playback, then doesn't that make playback of legit cds illegal in portable players with an anti-shock memory buffer ?
I've got a Goodmans CD/MP3 player in my car and I love it. It plays ordinary CD's, CD-R's and RW's and can play mp3 files with ID tag display on the front.
And this cost me just under 100 pounds (uk). For 200 I could have got one with playlist support.
Until you add in a wifi adapter, I don't see what this one will give you that I don't get.