I've thought about this and think there might be something in it. While I was growing up, I always had a cold of some sort. Years upon end. I bit my nails heavily and would have used more than my fair share of grotty keyboards, and suspect there would have been a healthy transfer of ick. But now - I'm bulletproof. A couple of years into uni suddenly I didn't get sick with anything anymore. Occasionally after a bad hangover I'll come down with something - that's it.
I posted this while drunk, and think I have become part of a problem I usually despise in other people's posts: writing something fairly obvious, and then having it modded up far past what it's worth.:/
But on a positive note, the situation won a smile because it reminded me of happier days when Signal 11 was still strutting the course.
I spent a while collecting python books whilst trying to get fluent in it. On the whole, they're a complete waste of time. The oreilly jython book was useful as a syntax guide (but with python having come so far since then I'd avoid it now), and the python cookbook is occasionally useful. It's one of those books you read through to learn solutions to problems you've encountered in the past, rather than in anticipation of patterns you might need.
Basically - the python online documentation is adequate. It could have a few more examples in it, it's not as practically focussed as it might be, but it's better than anything else I've seen.
Here's how I'd recommend learning python 1) discpiline yourself to sit through a slab of the 2) get really comfortable for the pattern of opening a file, reading lines from it, closing it 3) get really comfortable with the pattern for list matching, [item.getName() for item in list] - this is gold 4) try to solve a tiny problems with python a couple of times a week. It helps if it's practical. My first was a program that listed the files in a directory and wrote a html index page linking to them.
If you can get this far, you're on the right path, and you don't need any books to get there. After this point you'll find yourself dropping into the python prompt to write little scripts to solve problems, and occasionally looking for modules to do slightly interesting things and - you're not there yet - but you're going to get there from this point. As time goes on become more familiar with lambda, map and reduce - these are fantastic, powerful approaches to solving poblems. If you haven't done any functional programming it's a bit weird to start with, but stick in there, it's worth it.
> Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.
Wow - I don't think so. Not at all. I have a mac as my laptop but use gnome at every opportunity. It supports my hotkeys better, it's more 'trim', the consoles apps are more responsive, you can resize windows using the metacity mouse+control-key combos for controlling your windows. The gnome 'run' panel is far more effective than the fiddly, mousey dock in aqua. Workspaces!!!! Etc. I *far* prefer gnome, although the bugs in the clipboard ("Oh - you close the window you copied from? Well we didn't save your clipboard data!") piss me off all the time.
One thing you might want to consider is how much ease/trouble you have setting up toolchains. I have some mates who have had difficulty getting C# up and running on linux. Try setting them both up and getting hello world programs running and see how you go with that. Then try creating a simple UI with each, or deploying to a webserver (ie: tomcat) and writing a hello world there. I'm not familiar with C# myself but have spoken to friends who have tried to get up and running under debian (some months ago now). I suspect you'll have a better time of java.
I like java, but I don't love it. Lots of things are laborious and it doesn't suppot first class functions elegantly. Processing lists is tedious when you're used to how python does it.
However!
As far as I know, Java still has far and away the best tools for web application development. I don't know much about J2EE, but there's all that to start with. Then there are the webobjects descendants. WO itself, and then open souce tools that do similar things (often a much better job of them and with far less pain from quirkiness): tapestry (templating), cayenne (persistence), hibernate (persistence).
I've heard suggested that the python framework turbogears might be set to take over as the leading webapp development environment.
But then - this article was about hype, not reality, so perhaps my coment is irrelevent?;)
That's incorrect. In the past they have awarded it to Khemlani when it was obvious he was a nutjob. They just lost their bottle in 2001 and chickened out. See http://www.snopes.com/rumors/manyear.htm
This was a really interesting post until the religion turned up.
> All you guys out there who won't learn Ruby?
What about all of us young guys who have no reason to learn ruby? There's no particularly significant difference to python except that python has had more time to be well-engineered (for little things like list-processing algorithms, etc), and ruby on rails is less powerful than webobjects was last century, and there are current, rapidly evolving systems like cayenne and tapestry (and even turbogears) that leave it for dead.
What *is* this crazy obsession with ruby??
I cannot see a path that is going to take ruby to be the next big thing. To be honest I'd think something like rebol would have a better chance, because although it's tiny and would seem to have had history pass it by, it stands on its own, whereas (with all respect to the developers - I'm sure they do good work) it's hard to see ruby as being much more than a late-to-the-party reimpl of python.
> Although politics wise I was under the (mis?)apprehension that the > real reason that the Libs and Nats were screwed in Tasmania is due > to major backlash over the Franklin Dam project that they have > never really recovered from.
http://www.australianpolitics.com/elections/house indicate that the Liberal Party clean-swept Tasmania in the 1983 election while the coalition parties lost every other state. The problem with the Tasmanian Liberal Party could be the ascendancy of a dominant faction that prevents the catch-all pattern from having an effect. If crikey reports are to be believed, NSW will probably go the same way unless the organised right are somehow contained. If not it will be be devestating for the LPA - numerous marginal federal seats in NSW are held by candidates not associated with the organised right.
Tut tut - I'm frequently surprised by what qualifies as 'informative' on slashdot.
> As a term of reference for you delightful residents of the US of A, Tasmania > is like the US 'south' (rednecks, interbreeding et al)
^- for instance - how does abuse like this qualify as being informative? How do people from the US South feel about this? Or Tasmanians. Why would anyone rate this up?
Tasmania is nothing like the US South, in terms of people or electoral representation. More than half of the available federal seats in Tasmania are held by notional left-leaning representatives, including people who would identify themselves as very left such as Tas. Senator Bob Brown who is national leader of the Australian Greens. The incumband state government is Labor.
> and the 'Liberal' > party isn't actually a liberal party, but a conservative party (similar to > your Republican party).
The Liberal Party is from the tradition of Australian non-Labor parties, as is its support base. While it's similar to the republican party in terms of the fact that it's notionally the rightermost of the parties, its support base demonstrates a lack of consistency on traditional values. See http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/?p=212. Contrast that to the Republicans which is widely held to have a very firm right-wing base in the area of 'traditional values' (I have no data available). The Liberal Party is more conservative than the ALP and minor parties. But if you asked all the federal Liberal MPs which US political party with which they most closely identified many would say the Democrats.
The reason for the name is a source of some controversy, but one popular opinion is that the founder wanted the party to be an effective catch-all party and not be pigeon-holed in the way a 'Conservative' party would be. The most effective way to do that is to have a spread of opinions across the notional right. It's meaningless to try and pigeon hole mainstream parties as being 'this' or 'that' ideology though, because practical considerations will tend to override idealogical. They're a catch-all party.
Of note, the major policies of the LPA are quite similar to many of those of the Blair Labor government (consider cost of education, war against Iraq, etc), and the policies of the Conservatives have in recent times mirrored those of the ALP. Comparisons with the US political scene are tenous. Their cleavages are too different.
> Hmmm, it seems to still be there when I middle click (scrollwheel).
Aah you're correct and I should have qualified. You're talking about the *other* buffer. [1] Try copying and pasting using the hotkeys. In gedit that's ctrl+c.
Of course - in gnome-terminal it's ctrl+shift+c (ctrl+c does something else). I wish they'd standardised gnome on clipboard operations using WindowsKey + c, WindowsKey + x, etc. [2] Alternatively they could have used ctrl+shift as the meta for all clipboard operations everywhere. Instead of a nice standard like that we now have a system where the key you use for aborting an operation in a terminal is innocent in other places. Just imagine what new users think of this when they (graphically) fall in it.
I have a newish Mac and far prefer gnome to it in spite of all these things. But until things like this are fixed so that they work properly in a default install, affected distributions cannot be seriously considered to be ready for the desktop.
While I'm listing niggles, another one is the stop_at_punctuation setting in mozilla (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19061 5). The current behaviour is inconsistent with other platforms and reduces functionality yet the maintainers insist on keeping it. Another niggle in linux firefox is the way middle click tries to load the clipboard text in your window. So you try to middle click on a link to open in a new tab, miss by a bit, and find your browser changing document or bringing up dialog box errors.
Oh, and then there's the way that many distributions repeatedly ram custom settings down your throat. Every time I upgrade vim under gentoo, I have to go through and purge a set of custom (ie, non-standard to official vim distribution) keybindings that gentoo insists on wiring into my configuration. Debian and redhat each have their own versions of this sort of nastiness with vim, also.
Linux is my favourite operating environment but it's far from end-user-friendly.
> I would say that windows has the first problem too, for example, not handling > line breaks without CR and LF when dealing with text from a unix box.
Yes, although I think that tends to be a series of application-based bugs rather than an environment problem. But the last time I looked (some time ago), notepad could indeed get quite upset about such things. But at least you can see that it's become upset and clean it up under most circumstances. Under this environment it acts as though there's no clipboard content.
[1] Having a single buffer would be far too simplistic for a unix-heritage GUI.
[2] For some reason on default installations of at least some distributions, the windows key behaves like a standard key rather than a meta key (why? why? why?)
"Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that's yesterday's news"
It might be yesterday's news, but that isn't to say that it's less current today. Try making sense of the clipboard in apps on the linux platform:
First test: - copy text containing 'Windows characters' (eg: stupid quotation marks - 'long' dash) - try to paste into gnome-terminal -> does nothing, which would be even worse for people who don't understand the issues around Windows characters (why can't it just filter the characters?)
Second test: - copy text in gnome-terminal or gedit - close the window - try pasting somewhere -> doesn't work (the clipboard data has disappeared)
They're just off-the-cuff examples of usability problems in a linux platform, and they are neither user- nor idiot-friendly. I'm on my gentoo workstation at work at the moment but am pretty sure Badger suffers identical problems.
""" In the one area where the US had an absolute advantage, we have lost it. We held an absolute advantage in technology until we started exporting jobs to countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Mexico and China. Once the cat was out of the bag, our friends became our economic foes. """
No - international trade is not a zero-sum game and this completely fails to take into account the rule of comparative advantage. Further, the dynamic of the system is not country vs country, it's company vs company. Further - as though you'd be 'friends' with someone by practicing protectionism in a doomed attempt to keep their nationals locked out of the industry. This paragraph is spectacularly ill-informed.
As other posts state the connection between 20s prohibition and linux being unable to play DVDs isn't made either.
Look - I see what you're saying - but look at it this way. He's just a guy who's doing this stuff in his spare time, and he's shipping! He gets stuff out there, and it's cool!:) He's had so many players through his system that he could probably ask for a lot more than he does and still make cash.
It is frustrating when something goes wrong but I've got a lot of respect for him, because some parts of his site of the system are so quirky it's pretty obvious he's self-taught, and I respect that. I've made my donation and bought him a book from amazon as a result. It's still much better value than most games I've paid for.
The guy who wrote this (kevan.org) has written lots of neat online games. My favourite is urban dead - urbandead.com. It's completely pathetic for the first five minutes and then utterly addictive. I recommend starting as a fireman:)
Why is game AI in FPS's always defined as "they can hide behind boxes?" Does that define sophistication for us now? It has been around since at least Half Life. People still ooh and ahh about it though, and I can't understand that.
I remember that in Half-Life, and damn that was cool. I think a big part of the problem is that there's not a great deal of room for strategies. The level designs tend to be linear - sometimes it's cleverly disguised (again - I remember playing through early stages of Half-Life and wondering whether I was taking a good route - in fact I was going down the only path). There's not much room for intelligence here. The whole premise of FPS is flawed - one person against a sea of other fighters. One person doesn't survive against a sea of other fighters.
Here's a bold statement: we reached the limits of AI within linear FPS games long ago.
It would make much more sense to have some sort of open environment. But the way games are designed at the moment this is very difficult to build just because the artwork would cost so much, and it's also expensive in terms of processor and memory (because you have to track the progress of all the characters around the gameworld and they have to be working out strategies).
One way that a game could get a lot in return for a low investment would be to have the player come into an existing defined conflict that is playing out. One scenario I've been thinking about: what if there was a prison riot of some sort going on, and you were part of a special ops unit sent in to extract someone held in high security. An easy way to create a diversion is to start letting prisoners out. Thus, there is a conflict going on: the guards and the prisoners are fighting, and there are perimeters they reach as they do that change the dynamics of the game world (ie: prisoners get hold of key vantages or the comms system and it changes control of regions and suddenly the guards are fighting for their lives instead of just keeping the prisoners at bay). Meanwhile you don't want the prisoners to get too powerful too quickly because then the guards will get air support which will threaten your escape. Everybody is suspicious of you, but they have a range of priorities in their heads and keeping you at a safe distance while you're hostile is only one of them.
But we're talking about serious memory to track this all. It's possible though. If you had a server farm and could cluster the intelligence out you could host it. And you wouldn't need a huge number of script points for it to start to feel like genuine intelligence.
Absolutely. Quake was frantic in a way that nothing else has come close to. It had bouncy physics - you could get blown around a room easily and do amazing things with grenade or rocket jumps and when you jumped it meant something. I think the impl of the rockets is a big part of the difference - they've never felt as fast as they do in the original game.
It was a really well-balanced game once you had players who were experienced with it enough to know how to use explosion physics.
Slashdot Mirror
I've thought about this and think there might be something in it. While I was growing up, I always had a cold of some sort. Years upon end. I bit my nails heavily and would have used more than my fair share of grotty keyboards, and suspect there would have been a healthy transfer of ick. But now - I'm bulletproof. A couple of years into uni suddenly I didn't get sick with anything anymore. Occasionally after a bad hangover I'll come down with something - that's it.
I posted this while drunk, and think I have become part of a problem I usually despise in other people's posts: writing something fairly obvious, and then having it modded up far past what it's worth. :/
But on a positive note, the situation won a smile because it reminded me of happier days when Signal 11 was still strutting the course.
Thank heavens we have those patents to encourage innovation. The invention would never have happened otherwise.
written in visual basic 27,700,000
:)
Poor fools!
I spent a while collecting python books whilst trying to get fluent in it. On the whole, they're a complete waste of time. The oreilly jython book was useful as a syntax guide (but with python having come so far since then I'd avoid it now), and the python cookbook is occasionally useful. It's one of those books you read through to learn solutions to problems you've encountered in the past, rather than in anticipation of patterns you might need.
Basically - the python online documentation is adequate. It could have a few more examples in it, it's not as practically focussed as it might be, but it's better than anything else I've seen.
Here's how I'd recommend learning python
1) discpiline yourself to sit through a slab of the
2) get really comfortable for the pattern of opening a file, reading lines from it, closing it
3) get really comfortable with the pattern for list matching, [item.getName() for item in list] - this is gold
4) try to solve a tiny problems with python a couple of times a week. It helps if it's practical. My first was a program that listed the files in a directory and wrote a html index page linking to them.
If you can get this far, you're on the right path, and you don't need any books to get there. After this point you'll find yourself dropping into the python prompt to write little scripts to solve problems, and occasionally looking for modules to do slightly interesting things and - you're not there yet - but you're going to get there from this point. As time goes on become more familiar with lambda, map and reduce - these are fantastic, powerful approaches to solving poblems. If you haven't done any functional programming it's a bit weird to start with, but stick in there, it's worth it.
> Most UNIX-people use Apple because it still is UNIX but with a better GUI.
Wow - I don't think so. Not at all. I have a mac as my laptop but use gnome at every opportunity. It supports my hotkeys better, it's more 'trim', the consoles apps are more responsive, you can resize windows using the metacity mouse+control-key combos for controlling your windows. The gnome 'run' panel is far more effective than the fiddly, mousey dock in aqua. Workspaces!!!! Etc. I *far* prefer gnome, although the bugs in the clipboard ("Oh - you close the window you copied from? Well we didn't save your clipboard data!") piss me off all the time.
My question is...
Will they sue China?
Copyrighted works are not property. Copyright in fringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is not stealing.
One thing you might want to consider is how much ease/trouble you have setting up toolchains. I have some mates who have had difficulty getting C# up and running on linux. Try setting them both up and getting hello world programs running and see how you go with that. Then try creating a simple UI with each, or deploying to a webserver (ie: tomcat) and writing a hello world there. I'm not familiar with C# myself but have spoken to friends who have tried to get up and running under debian (some months ago now). I suspect you'll have a better time of java.
I like java, but I don't love it. Lots of things are laborious and it doesn't suppot first class functions elegantly. Processing lists is tedious when you're used to how python does it.
;)
However!
As far as I know, Java still has far and away the best tools for web application development. I don't know much about J2EE, but there's all that to start with. Then there are the webobjects descendants. WO itself, and then open souce tools that do similar things (often a much better job of them and with far less pain from quirkiness): tapestry (templating), cayenne (persistence), hibernate (persistence).
I've heard suggested that the python framework turbogears might be set to take over as the leading webapp development environment.
But then - this article was about hype, not reality, so perhaps my coment is irrelevent?
That's incorrect. In the past they have awarded it to Khemlani when it was obvious he was a nutjob. They just lost their bottle in 2001 and chickened out. See http://www.snopes.com/rumors/manyear.htm
This was a really interesting post until the religion turned up.
> All you guys out there who won't learn Ruby?
What about all of us young guys who have no reason to learn ruby? There's no particularly significant difference to python except that python has had more time to be well-engineered (for little things like list-processing algorithms, etc), and ruby on rails is less powerful than webobjects was last century, and there are current, rapidly evolving systems like cayenne and tapestry (and even turbogears) that leave it for dead.
What *is* this crazy obsession with ruby??
I cannot see a path that is going to take ruby to be the next big thing. To be honest I'd think something like rebol would have a better chance, because although it's tiny and would seem to have had history pass it by, it stands on its own, whereas (with all respect to the developers - I'm sure they do good work) it's hard to see ruby as being much more than a late-to-the-party reimpl of python.
Please! WebObjects is much too powerful to be a viable 'commercial alternative' to Ruby on Rails :)
I'm subscribed to crikey as well :)
You might enjoy this: http://ozpolitics.info/blog/index.php?page_id=206
> Although politics wise I was under the (mis?)apprehension that the
> real reason that the Libs and Nats were screwed in Tasmania is due
> to major backlash over the Franklin Dam project that they have
> never really recovered from.
http://www.australianpolitics.com/elections/house indicate that the Liberal Party clean-swept Tasmania in the 1983 election while the coalition parties lost every other state. The problem with the Tasmanian Liberal Party could be the ascendancy of a dominant faction that prevents the catch-all pattern from having an effect. If crikey reports are to be believed, NSW will probably go the same way unless the organised right are somehow contained. If not it will be be devestating for the LPA - numerous marginal federal seats in NSW are held by candidates not associated with the organised right.
- C
Tut tut - I'm frequently surprised by what qualifies as 'informative' on slashdot.
> As a term of reference for you delightful residents of the US of A, Tasmania
> is like the US 'south' (rednecks, interbreeding et al)
^- for instance - how does abuse like this qualify as being informative? How do people from the US South feel about this? Or Tasmanians. Why would anyone rate this up?
Tasmania is nothing like the US South, in terms of people or electoral representation. More than half of the available federal seats in Tasmania are held by notional left-leaning representatives, including people who would identify themselves as very left such as Tas. Senator Bob Brown who is national leader of the Australian Greens. The incumband state government is Labor.
> and the 'Liberal'
> party isn't actually a liberal party, but a conservative party (similar to
> your Republican party).
The Liberal Party is from the tradition of Australian non-Labor parties, as is its support base. While it's similar to the republican party in terms of the fact that it's notionally the rightermost of the parties, its support base demonstrates a lack of consistency on traditional values. See http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/?p=212. Contrast that to the Republicans which is widely held to have a very firm right-wing base in the area of 'traditional values' (I have no data available). The Liberal Party is more conservative than the ALP and minor parties. But if you asked all the federal Liberal MPs which US political party with which they most closely identified many would say the Democrats.
The reason for the name is a source of some controversy, but one popular opinion is that the founder wanted the party to be an effective catch-all party and not be pigeon-holed in the way a 'Conservative' party would be. The most effective way to do that is to have a spread of opinions across the notional right. It's meaningless to try and pigeon hole mainstream parties as being 'this' or 'that' ideology though, because practical considerations will tend to override idealogical. They're a catch-all party.
Of note, the major policies of the LPA are quite similar to many of those of the Blair Labor government (consider cost of education, war against Iraq, etc), and the policies of the Conservatives have in recent times mirrored those of the ALP. Comparisons with the US political scene are tenous. Their cleavages are too different.
> Hmmm, it seems to still be there when I middle click (scrollwheel).
1 5). The current behaviour is inconsistent with other platforms and reduces functionality yet the maintainers insist on keeping it. Another niggle in linux firefox is the way middle click tries to load the clipboard text in your window. So you try to middle click on a link to open in a new tab, miss by a bit, and find your browser changing document or bringing up dialog box errors.
Aah you're correct and I should have qualified. You're talking about the *other* buffer. [1] Try copying and pasting using the hotkeys. In gedit that's ctrl+c.
Of course - in gnome-terminal it's ctrl+shift+c (ctrl+c does something else). I wish they'd standardised gnome on clipboard operations using WindowsKey + c, WindowsKey + x, etc. [2] Alternatively they could have used ctrl+shift as the meta for all clipboard operations everywhere. Instead of a nice standard like that we now have a system where the key you use for aborting an operation in a terminal is innocent in other places. Just imagine what new users think of this when they (graphically) fall in it.
I have a newish Mac and far prefer gnome to it in spite of all these things. But until things like this are fixed so that they work properly in a default install, affected distributions cannot be seriously considered to be ready for the desktop.
While I'm listing niggles, another one is the stop_at_punctuation setting in mozilla (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1906
Oh, and then there's the way that many distributions repeatedly ram custom settings down your throat. Every time I upgrade vim under gentoo, I have to go through and purge a set of custom (ie, non-standard to official vim distribution) keybindings that gentoo insists on wiring into my configuration. Debian and redhat each have their own versions of this sort of nastiness with vim, also.
Linux is my favourite operating environment but it's far from end-user-friendly.
> I would say that windows has the first problem too, for example, not handling
> line breaks without CR and LF when dealing with text from a unix box.
Yes, although I think that tends to be a series of application-based bugs rather than an environment problem. But the last time I looked (some time ago), notepad could indeed get quite upset about such things. But at least you can see that it's become upset and clean it up under most circumstances. Under this environment it acts as though there's no clipboard content.
[1] Having a single buffer would be far too simplistic for a unix-heritage GUI.
[2] For some reason on default installations of at least some distributions, the windows key behaves like a standard key rather than a meta key (why? why? why?)
"Historically, the lack of friendly interfaces has been an obstacle to making Linux a commercially viable product for end users, but with available GUIs, that's yesterday's news"
It might be yesterday's news, but that isn't to say that it's less current today. Try making sense of the clipboard in apps on the linux platform:
First test:
- copy text containing 'Windows characters' (eg: stupid quotation marks - 'long' dash)
- try to paste into gnome-terminal
-> does nothing, which would be even worse for people who don't understand the issues around Windows characters (why can't it just filter the characters?)
Second test:
- copy text in gnome-terminal or gedit
- close the window
- try pasting somewhere
-> doesn't work (the clipboard data has disappeared)
They're just off-the-cuff examples of usability problems in a linux platform, and they are neither user- nor idiot-friendly. I'm on my gentoo workstation at work at the moment but am pretty sure Badger suffers identical problems.
"""
In the one area where the US had an absolute advantage, we have lost it. We held an absolute advantage in technology until we started exporting jobs to countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Mexico and China. Once the cat was out of the bag, our friends became our economic foes.
"""
No - international trade is not a zero-sum game and this completely fails to take into account the rule of comparative advantage. Further, the dynamic of the system is not country vs country, it's company vs company. Further - as though you'd be 'friends' with someone by practicing protectionism in a doomed attempt to keep their nationals locked out of the industry. This paragraph is spectacularly ill-informed.
As other posts state the connection between 20s prohibition and linux being unable to play DVDs isn't made either.
Bad essay!
Look - I see what you're saying - but look at it this way. He's just a guy who's doing this stuff in his spare time, and he's shipping! He gets stuff out there, and it's cool! :) He's had so many players through his system that he could probably ask for a lot more than he does and still make cash.
;)
It is frustrating when something goes wrong but I've got a lot of respect for him, because some parts of his site of the system are so quirky it's pretty obvious he's self-taught, and I respect that. I've made my donation and bought him a book from amazon as a result. It's still much better value than most games I've paid for.
Catch you on the other side
heh. I'm 'cratuki' and 'Emily Howard', both of clan "Little Malton".
The guy who wrote this (kevan.org) has written lots of neat online games. My favourite is urban dead - urbandead.com. It's completely pathetic for the first five minutes and then utterly addictive. I recommend starting as a fireman :)
I've tried to get this working several times and never succeeded. Does it even work on modern distributions without sorcery?
Why is game AI in FPS's always defined as "they can hide behind boxes?" Does that define sophistication for us now? It has been around since at least Half Life. People still ooh and ahh about it though, and I can't understand that.
I remember that in Half-Life, and damn that was cool. I think a big part of the problem is that there's not a great deal of room for strategies. The level designs tend to be linear - sometimes it's cleverly disguised (again - I remember playing through early stages of Half-Life and wondering whether I was taking a good route - in fact I was going down the only path). There's not much room for intelligence here. The whole premise of FPS is flawed - one person against a sea of other fighters. One person doesn't survive against a sea of other fighters.
Here's a bold statement: we reached the limits of AI within linear FPS games long ago.
It would make much more sense to have some sort of open environment. But the way games are designed at the moment this is very difficult to build just because the artwork would cost so much, and it's also expensive in terms of processor and memory (because you have to track the progress of all the characters around the gameworld and they have to be working out strategies).
One way that a game could get a lot in return for a low investment would be to have the player come into an existing defined conflict that is playing out. One scenario I've been thinking about: what if there was a prison riot of some sort going on, and you were part of a special ops unit sent in to extract someone held in high security. An easy way to create a diversion is to start letting prisoners out. Thus, there is a conflict going on: the guards and the prisoners are fighting, and there are perimeters they reach as they do that change the dynamics of the game world (ie: prisoners get hold of key vantages or the comms system and it changes control of regions and suddenly the guards are fighting for their lives instead of just keeping the prisoners at bay). Meanwhile you don't want the prisoners to get too powerful too quickly because then the guards will get air support which will threaten your escape. Everybody is suspicious of you, but they have a range of priorities in their heads and keeping you at a safe distance while you're hostile is only one of them.
But we're talking about serious memory to track this all. It's possible though. If you had a server farm and could cluster the intelligence out you could host it. And you wouldn't need a huge number of script points for it to start to feel like genuine intelligence.
Absolutely. Quake was frantic in a way that nothing else has come close to. It had bouncy physics - you could get blown around a room easily and do amazing things with grenade or rocket jumps and when you jumped it meant something. I think the impl of the rockets is a big part of the difference - they've never felt as fast as they do in the original game.
It was a really well-balanced game once you had players who were experienced with it enough to know how to use explosion physics.
All perl code is obfuscated, you insensitive clod!!