Simply put a few games up for opinion that came out each month and see which ones get voted up.
It'd be not a single people's opinion, but a democracy of opinions.
How do you mount a gun on it if its security?
Or is it just one big bomb that rolls up and detonates on you?
It'd be cool if it was like a pill bug robot, that could climb walls and morph into a ball.
Or maybe its the suit from metroid.
I always doubted my math and physics professors in school. But they could come up with arguments to back up their claims. And when they showed me the facts, I accepted their teaching as superior. How can I accept a game design professor's ideas when I disagree fundamentally on what I think is fun?
The reason is, the harcore gamer tries to find the best path to beat the game through analysis. Some rare games have several paths that are equal, but most games have one best path even though their instruction manual boasts many. Now given, suboptimal paths are sometimes fun, but if they can't compete in an online game it shows.
I argue that a hardcore gamer makes a good designer though. A hardcore gamer can't spot imbalances, and thusly change statistics on stuff to bring things to balance. Without balance, some routes in the game just aren't worth taking. Balance flaws especially show up in competitive play. Also a hardcore gamer can 'play out' a game faster than a normal player as been said in this thread. When you 'play out' a game, you can see things to add that aren't in the game. Of course, this doesn't automatically make you a main game designer, more of a game-tester with ideas.
What does French authority have over Google? What if Zimbabwe issued an order that Google do something? Or what about my grandmother? If Google doesn't comply, what authority does France have to sanction Google?
"You directly helped Blizzard with balance issues in Warcraft 3? I thought you designed the game......"
No way man, I had no hand in designing it. I just pointed out a ton of imbalances, and was rewarded with Blizzard friend status from my frequent feedback. It was barely a game at beginning of beta, just a bunch of units with semi-random statistics. Its fun for me when a game doesn't choose to balance their game because I can find imbalances like no other. I was winning close to 100% of my games at start and as things became more balanced and everyone started learning strats, my winning % dropped down to like 85%. I definately would like to design games though, or do more beta testing. I like to be in the development process because I think thats where all the fun is. Once a game's strategies are known by all, the game either becomes paper rock scissors, a twitch fest or a fun psychological battle of wits. I think a psychological game is the best, but they're hard to achieve.
Bnetd are your friends? They publish a public server to bypass the copy protection on Blizzard games and they're your friends? Maybe some people like software pirates as friends, but I don't get it. Why was Slashdot moved by the plight of BnetD? I used BnetD when I couldn't get into beta, and I actually later bought a beta and with the knowledge I gained helped Blizzard directly with War3(if you saw war3 early beta, you laugh at the imbalances). So in a way BnetD was good there. But when Blizzard released War3, the only way the pirates could play would be to use BnetD. You can't log into BattleNet with a pirated CDkey, its pretty good copy protection.
I took my desktop through the airport, now it doesn't run. In fact the fan(which I replaced) got broken somehow. Its ok, it was adequete, but now I have an excuse to buy a new PC.
On cheats. Do you think console games will be plagued with cheats like PCs are. On a pc, all you need to do is run a background ap. On consoles, a bit more is involved. So I think maybe a few people may cheat on consoles, but it wouldn't become widespread? I thought the same on arcade games. If you made an online game that used an arcade, its less likely to become overridden with cheats because people could report the game.
Sure you can play against thousands online, but how does it rate skill to match you in a game. Starcraft did it right with the chess rating system, nothing else comes close. With a chess rating system, you're matched with people of your skill level and you're ranked accordingly. The good rise to the top, while the unskilled strain to get better. Warcraft 3 failed to have a good rating system, but instead had one where you constantly 'leveled' and had less to do with how skilled you are, and more to do with how many games you played. Halo 2 has a leveling system much the same way, but its arguably harder to rate fragfest because you could encourage campers who don't want to die in order to preserve their rating. But with straight up head to head competitive games, I haven't seen anything close to the plain old chess rating system... well tournament systems are good too.
Without a good rating system, random punks think they're the best at a game when they really haven't experienced playing against the best. Strategies don't evolve as fast as they do in a good chess rated system. Some games aren't deep and don't have a lot of strategies so they don't want to see their shallowness come to bare. But games that have deep strategies or try to have deep strategy should use a good rating system. As you advance in your rating, you come to witness new strategies which you can learn to beat or assimilate into your own bag of tricks. When you play an online game that doesn't have a good ladder/tournament mode, you never get to see the fully evolved version of combat. You may see someone do something strong here or there, but you don't get to experience strong play consistantly to know what is competitive and what is plain cheese(cheese being a strategy thats really powerful, but easily countered by a good player).
It was the infamous speed hack. I was selling it for AC1 because if you didn't have it, AC1 was virtually unplayable from other characters using it. Basically it was a network hog that sped up one character and slowed everyone else down. It was a really nasty program that worked cross platform. I called up verant on the phone and they shouted,"Criminal!" in the phone and hung up. Looking back, I shouldn't have been selling vicious debilitating cheats, but at the time it seemed like everyone needed to use it or they couldn't play the game at all.
I saw one guy on two games: AO and DAOC, selling what amounts to 100 player loads of items. But here's the catch, no one was mature(leveled up) enough to get to the level to sell even 1 player load at the time. Also, everyone else was being banned. So somehow one dude is able to evade detection with his 4 pages of gold selling, while everyone else gets banned within 2 hours of their post. This was about 2 years ago, but there is no doubt in my mind the MMORPG companies were teaming with this guy to sell extra gold. I found out the company would be in the position to make $100,000 a month of the endevour. At the time there was also the philosophy prevailing for companies to spoil the ebay markets by flooding them with loot. I sold lots of stuff in the past, and I have tales of awesomeness and pain. 100$/hr is awesome, losing your apartment, fiancee, and flunking school out because Everquest bans you for selling Asheron Call cheats is pain. But theres degrees within.
I was thinking of making a novel called Human Farm
In it, they clone people to do brain transplants.
The first batch doesn't have muscle development because they grew them without true lifelike interactions. This spawns a sicklike monster of a person who had to be emergency transplanted to save their life. The next batch is grown up with the help of a nanny in a secure environment. Later the nanny learns of the sick proceedure, so the third batch she trains them to be sick martial arts trainers who are highly moral, also in the third batch, they decide to transplant the young ones into the old bodies so they can get some extra work out of them. One of the young ones gets transplanted to an old person before the plot to rebel happens. So later the old guy has to kill his young self to prevent something serious from happening, forever dooming himself to the old body. Lots of plot twists and a demonization of old people trying to extend their life through use of young people's lives. Properly written it could be good, but I doubt my writing skills, and I don't know if I want to pollute the culture with some of my warped ideas.
I went to the CPL and they will be having WC3/CS/Halo 2 tournaments this summer. Technically I should go back to WC3 where I was owning house, but I think it'd be more fun to take up a new hat.
Besides the CPL, are there other leagues to pay attention to?
I know theres a ladder system in it, but does anyone know if there will be big money tournaments for it? I'm trying to figure out which FPS I want to pick up and get good at to pro-game.
I don't use anti-lock brakes either. I specificially got my car without them. Theres tricks you can pull by locking your breaks up that you can't with ABS. For example, I avoided an accident once by powersliding my car sideways on the road. If I would have had ABS slow me, I woulda wrecked into the car in front of me, but since I powerslid, I lowered the profile of my car by half. Imagine a 4 square tetris block facing forward vs rotated to the side to get the image.
I use windows 98 because 95 wasn't stable. As long as Microsoft doesn't make any move to obfuscate windows 98, I'm in the clear since it doesn't bloat as much as newer OSes.
I play games hardcore, so fast I can squeeze all the fun out of a game. I disect the balance, and many games have imbalances that make certain routes useless.
You'd think if they had gamers working for gaming companies, they'd not make the imbalances. You'd think if gamers worked for gaming companies, you'd see longer lasting games.
But what we're looking at isn't good because we're on the eve of an end game. There will be monopolistic gaming dynasties that make games that everyone plays. The reason they make such a good game is that everyone plays them, and they can make a bigger investment in the game. They get funded by a large player base, and then make expansions, furthering their lead on the competition. There's some monopolistic fuel that hasn't been consumed either and it mostly revolves around online play where users can build content. I have some online monopoly plays in my design documents at: www.jimsager.com
I think the brain is more important than the body. Humans are more advanced than animals, but some animals on a basic level think in 3d. Animals know which route they can escape, and if their adversary looks like lunch or will eat them. The brain is similar, but the body is different. Creation of the body will not facillitate the brain creation(excepting on vision detection). But once you have AI, it can train itself to learn how to use any body you place it in, especially if you give it a manual on the voltages and maybe precalibrate it.
Its non-trivial but totally doable with a team of programmers and physicists. It requires no real research as the problems are straight forward modeling grunt work mainly. Building a road from the east coast to the west coast is non-trivial but is something we can do with today's technology. In fact we have! I think the problem why we haven't built non-trivial AI is that no one had the roadmap.
The AI responds directly to what it knows. It would be able to hold a conversation with you. For example:
Me:Computer, how was your day.
Computer:My sensors were scanning the internet, I read up on bees, space exploration, and disease research.
Me: Interesting. Tell me something about bees.
Computer: They're yellow and black, they collect pollen from flowers, and can sting you.
Me: Thats cool. Whats the cheapest I could build a rocket to take me into space for?
Computer:Well I remember you weigh X kg, and the material needed for construction of such a device would cost Y, and you can get it from Home Depot.
Me: Thanks, I don't understand why people say you're not actual AI.
For real, you could give the AI weighted desires to do certain things. But it wouldn't think like a human, it'd mainly respond to what you're doing and its environment, but I won't get into that stuff because its a higher complexity than just the basics. But with just the basics it expands into the higher complexity. Once you have the basic AI it expands.
I don't think anyone's suggested natural language input interwoven with a 3d world. Novamemente.net just recently mentioned my approach is very similar to theirs, down to the programming language and graphics engine! The key is that natural language only makes sense in context, and the context to use is a 3d world. You remember see spot, see spot run? How do you see spot if you can't picture a dog in your mind.
3d imagination space and natural language are not trivial to code, but it is really easy to think about. And while its not trivial, it is doable with a skilled team. I don't know of any other AI that actually makes sense like this AI approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply put a few games up for opinion that came out each month and see which ones get voted up. It'd be not a single people's opinion, but a democracy of opinions.
How do you mount a gun on it if its security? Or is it just one big bomb that rolls up and detonates on you? It'd be cool if it was like a pill bug robot, that could climb walls and morph into a ball. Or maybe its the suit from metroid.
I always doubted my math and physics professors in school. But they could come up with arguments to back up their claims. And when they showed me the facts, I accepted their teaching as superior. How can I accept a game design professor's ideas when I disagree fundamentally on what I think is fun?
I meant to say: can spot, not can't
The reason is, the harcore gamer tries to find the best path to beat the game through analysis. Some rare games have several paths that are equal, but most games have one best path even though their instruction manual boasts many. Now given, suboptimal paths are sometimes fun, but if they can't compete in an online game it shows.
I argue that a hardcore gamer makes a good designer though. A hardcore gamer can't spot imbalances, and thusly change statistics on stuff to bring things to balance. Without balance, some routes in the game just aren't worth taking. Balance flaws especially show up in competitive play. Also a hardcore gamer can 'play out' a game faster than a normal player as been said in this thread. When you 'play out' a game, you can see things to add that aren't in the game. Of course, this doesn't automatically make you a main game designer, more of a game-tester with ideas.
What does French authority have over Google? What if Zimbabwe issued an order that Google do something? Or what about my grandmother? If Google doesn't comply, what authority does France have to sanction Google?
"You directly helped Blizzard with balance issues in Warcraft 3? I thought you designed the game......"
No way man, I had no hand in designing it. I just pointed out a ton of imbalances, and was rewarded with Blizzard friend status from my frequent feedback. It was barely a game at beginning of beta, just a bunch of units with semi-random statistics. Its fun for me when a game doesn't choose to balance their game because I can find imbalances like no other. I was winning close to 100% of my games at start and as things became more balanced and everyone started learning strats, my winning % dropped down to like 85%. I definately would like to design games though, or do more beta testing. I like to be in the development process because I think thats where all the fun is. Once a game's strategies are known by all, the game either becomes paper rock scissors, a twitch fest or a fun psychological battle of wits. I think a psychological game is the best, but they're hard to achieve.
Bnetd are your friends? They publish a public server to bypass the copy protection on Blizzard games and they're your friends? Maybe some people like software pirates as friends, but I don't get it. Why was Slashdot moved by the plight of BnetD? I used BnetD when I couldn't get into beta, and I actually later bought a beta and with the knowledge I gained helped Blizzard directly with War3(if you saw war3 early beta, you laugh at the imbalances). So in a way BnetD was good there. But when Blizzard released War3, the only way the pirates could play would be to use BnetD. You can't log into BattleNet with a pirated CDkey, its pretty good copy protection.
I took my desktop through the airport, now it doesn't run. In fact the fan(which I replaced) got broken somehow. Its ok, it was adequete, but now I have an excuse to buy a new PC.
On cheats. Do you think console games will be plagued with cheats like PCs are. On a pc, all you need to do is run a background ap. On consoles, a bit more is involved. So I think maybe a few people may cheat on consoles, but it wouldn't become widespread? I thought the same on arcade games. If you made an online game that used an arcade, its less likely to become overridden with cheats because people could report the game.
Sure you can play against thousands online, but how does it rate skill to match you in a game. Starcraft did it right with the chess rating system, nothing else comes close. With a chess rating system, you're matched with people of your skill level and you're ranked accordingly. The good rise to the top, while the unskilled strain to get better. Warcraft 3 failed to have a good rating system, but instead had one where you constantly 'leveled' and had less to do with how skilled you are, and more to do with how many games you played. Halo 2 has a leveling system much the same way, but its arguably harder to rate fragfest because you could encourage campers who don't want to die in order to preserve their rating. But with straight up head to head competitive games, I haven't seen anything close to the plain old chess rating system... well tournament systems are good too.
Without a good rating system, random punks think they're the best at a game when they really haven't experienced playing against the best. Strategies don't evolve as fast as they do in a good chess rated system. Some games aren't deep and don't have a lot of strategies so they don't want to see their shallowness come to bare. But games that have deep strategies or try to have deep strategy should use a good rating system. As you advance in your rating, you come to witness new strategies which you can learn to beat or assimilate into your own bag of tricks. When you play an online game that doesn't have a good ladder/tournament mode, you never get to see the fully evolved version of combat. You may see someone do something strong here or there, but you don't get to experience strong play consistantly to know what is competitive and what is plain cheese(cheese being a strategy thats really powerful, but easily countered by a good player).
It was the infamous speed hack. I was selling it for AC1 because if you didn't have it, AC1 was virtually unplayable from other characters using it. Basically it was a network hog that sped up one character and slowed everyone else down. It was a really nasty program that worked cross platform. I called up verant on the phone and they shouted,"Criminal!" in the phone and hung up. Looking back, I shouldn't have been selling vicious debilitating cheats, but at the time it seemed like everyone needed to use it or they couldn't play the game at all.
I saw one guy on two games: AO and DAOC, selling what amounts to 100 player loads of items. But here's the catch, no one was mature(leveled up) enough to get to the level to sell even 1 player load at the time. Also, everyone else was being banned. So somehow one dude is able to evade detection with his 4 pages of gold selling, while everyone else gets banned within 2 hours of their post. This was about 2 years ago, but there is no doubt in my mind the MMORPG companies were teaming with this guy to sell extra gold. I found out the company would be in the position to make $100,000 a month of the endevour. At the time there was also the philosophy prevailing for companies to spoil the ebay markets by flooding them with loot. I sold lots of stuff in the past, and I have tales of awesomeness and pain. 100$/hr is awesome, losing your apartment, fiancee, and flunking school out because Everquest bans you for selling Asheron Call cheats is pain. But theres degrees within.
Its not just 'uns uns uns' but you gotta remember the variety in "mmmch mmmch mmmch"
I was thinking of making a novel called Human Farm In it, they clone people to do brain transplants. The first batch doesn't have muscle development because they grew them without true lifelike interactions. This spawns a sicklike monster of a person who had to be emergency transplanted to save their life. The next batch is grown up with the help of a nanny in a secure environment. Later the nanny learns of the sick proceedure, so the third batch she trains them to be sick martial arts trainers who are highly moral, also in the third batch, they decide to transplant the young ones into the old bodies so they can get some extra work out of them. One of the young ones gets transplanted to an old person before the plot to rebel happens. So later the old guy has to kill his young self to prevent something serious from happening, forever dooming himself to the old body. Lots of plot twists and a demonization of old people trying to extend their life through use of young people's lives. Properly written it could be good, but I doubt my writing skills, and I don't know if I want to pollute the culture with some of my warped ideas.
I went to the CPL and they will be having WC3/CS/Halo 2 tournaments this summer. Technically I should go back to WC3 where I was owning house, but I think it'd be more fun to take up a new hat.
Besides the CPL, are there other leagues to pay attention to?
I know theres a ladder system in it, but does anyone know if there will be big money tournaments for it? I'm trying to figure out which FPS I want to pick up and get good at to pro-game.
I don't use anti-lock brakes either. I specificially got my car without them. Theres tricks you can pull by locking your breaks up that you can't with ABS. For example, I avoided an accident once by powersliding my car sideways on the road. If I would have had ABS slow me, I woulda wrecked into the car in front of me, but since I powerslid, I lowered the profile of my car by half. Imagine a 4 square tetris block facing forward vs rotated to the side to get the image.
I use windows 98 because 95 wasn't stable. As long as Microsoft doesn't make any move to obfuscate windows 98, I'm in the clear since it doesn't bloat as much as newer OSes.
I haven't played Kingdom hearts, but Stunt Island was advanced for its time.
I play games hardcore, so fast I can squeeze all the fun out of a game. I disect the balance, and many games have imbalances that make certain routes useless.
You'd think if they had gamers working for gaming companies, they'd not make the imbalances. You'd think if gamers worked for gaming companies, you'd see longer lasting games.
But what we're looking at isn't good because we're on the eve of an end game. There will be monopolistic gaming dynasties that make games that everyone plays. The reason they make such a good game is that everyone plays them, and they can make a bigger investment in the game. They get funded by a large player base, and then make expansions, furthering their lead on the competition. There's some monopolistic fuel that hasn't been consumed either and it mostly revolves around online play where users can build content. I have some online monopoly plays in my design documents at: www.jimsager.com
I think the brain is more important than the body. Humans are more advanced than animals, but some animals on a basic level think in 3d. Animals know which route they can escape, and if their adversary looks like lunch or will eat them. The brain is similar, but the body is different. Creation of the body will not facillitate the brain creation(excepting on vision detection). But once you have AI, it can train itself to learn how to use any body you place it in, especially if you give it a manual on the voltages and maybe precalibrate it.
Its non-trivial but totally doable with a team of programmers and physicists. It requires no real research as the problems are straight forward modeling grunt work mainly. Building a road from the east coast to the west coast is non-trivial but is something we can do with today's technology. In fact we have! I think the problem why we haven't built non-trivial AI is that no one had the roadmap.
The AI responds directly to what it knows. It would be able to hold a conversation with you. For example:
Me:Computer, how was your day.
Computer:My sensors were scanning the internet, I read up on bees, space exploration, and disease research.
Me: Interesting. Tell me something about bees. Computer: They're yellow and black, they collect pollen from flowers, and can sting you.
Me: Thats cool. Whats the cheapest I could build a rocket to take me into space for?
Computer:Well I remember you weigh X kg, and the material needed for construction of such a device would cost Y, and you can get it from Home Depot.
Me: Thanks, I don't understand why people say you're not actual AI.
For real, you could give the AI weighted desires to do certain things. But it wouldn't think like a human, it'd mainly respond to what you're doing and its environment, but I won't get into that stuff because its a higher complexity than just the basics. But with just the basics it expands into the higher complexity. Once you have the basic AI it expands.
I don't think anyone's suggested natural language input interwoven with a 3d world. Novamemente.net just recently mentioned my approach is very similar to theirs, down to the programming language and graphics engine! The key is that natural language only makes sense in context, and the context to use is a 3d world. You remember see spot, see spot run? How do you see spot if you can't picture a dog in your mind. 3d imagination space and natural language are not trivial to code, but it is really easy to think about. And while its not trivial, it is doable with a skilled team. I don't know of any other AI that actually makes sense like this AI approach.