Whenever I play Half Speed, Camperstrike, or is it Quiet Life? I get more depressed!! You spend 10 minutes hiding behind a box and then someone snipes the 1 pixel that's showing using 1 of the 10 types of er.. railgun that the game has (sure it has chainguns etc, but you ever see anyone frag anything with it? - It's an A team special chaingun - the bullets don't do any damage..) All the damn guns that work are sniper efforts - railguns. It's bloomin Half Speed Instagib I tell ya!
All that creeping about and hiding - and when you do try and run, your man moves like his pants are round his ankles. CS is the only game I've found I can play whilst having a smoke, eating me dinner or reading a book - and it makes very little difference to the outcome.
If you take out the violence - how will you kill off those annoying hostage thingies that constantly get in your way?
That was the problem with Half a Life single player - I played it for 5 minutes: it involved endless scientists and they had neglected to issue me with a firearm! (some excuse about them being on my side or something).
Give them 3Wave Capturestrike - pure full on carnage with no tedious camping behind crates.
I must go now - I have a rocket launcher to strip down and clean:-]]
It's been done better a long time ago too - I remember seeing a device in the "Asian Sources" catalogue (basically an importers directory) for a very similar device that applied bitmaps to a wall or the side of a van using red green and blue paint mixed on the fly. This was well over 10 years ago.
I see your point - but then "loads of rain when all you want is some sun" would be ironic too - and I don't think there's any irony there at all - just bad luck. I mean there might be loads of soap as well as forks and no knives - the presence of some other object does not make the lack of knives ironic.
Now I suppose that if the previous day there were tonnes of knives and you wanted a fork, then the abundance of forks when you need a knife might just edge in, but as an event in isolation - no way.
In fact, I might be wrong but I don't think the song even mentions whether there are knives or not - there may be loads of knives too!
LOL you beat me to it. I've been waiting for an excuse to bitch about that song. Excuse me whilst I do so anyway. Ahem.. "Isn't it ironic" well no you thick woman - it's just unlucky. "like rain, on your wedding day" - no it's not ironic you moron. It might be if you were marrying a meteorologist, otherwise it's just bad luck. Like too many forks when all you want is a knife" (or something). Well, again, that's just unfortunate, or bad planning in the cutlery provisioning dept. It is *not* ironic. At all.
I already have something which does what you want - I am using a Slimp3 server to stream mp3 data to multiple players around the house (across a wireless network). I have 3 players and they are all able to play a different stream and all at once over a regular 10Mb/s wifi network (all my CD's are encoded to 128Kb/s mp3s)
If you ran long cables from 6 sound cards to 6 amps around your huse, this could be made to work, but the losses across such long cables would be unacceptable to all but the most tone deaf.
You can get details of Slimp3 from http://www.slimp3.com
One thing it won't currently do (and may never do to acceptable levels of timing) is play the same stream , in sync, to multiple players. Even using multicast, they might be up to.5 seconds out which would sound disconcerting to say the least if you were within earshot of more than one player.
However, if I undertsand your requirement , this (or any other digital music serving device) will do it justice.
Well I guess I asked for that one - but I just couldn't remember any of the other creature names:) I guess when I suggested it just wasn't Star Wars as I would define it, I meant that a lot of the professions and skills are things like "manufacture clothing" or "tame creature". Yeah I mean that's great from the point of view of modelling a workable society (someone has to make the clothes after all) but It's not what I want to do as a player - I want to be a smuggler, or a Jedi Knight and so on, and perhaps these things become possible after you've "paid your dues" as a lowly shirt maker for a few months. So I guess what I said was true - from a certain point of view.:P
Oh gawd - the floodgates are opened on the biggest quote fest of the year:)
Mind you - "Mynock Pest Control" - that could work as a profession. "Mynocks chewin' on yer power cables? Call 1-800-MYNOCK and ask for Dave. We'll be round within the hour and have your power cables pest free the same day. *.Additional charges may be made for asteroid visits"
So it's not just me then? I played in Beta 3. I take it the NDA has now been lifted so here's my mini Review. LordYUK's post further down this thread covers most of the points I'd make to be honest - but here's my $.02:-
The game is totally amazing to look at. Once I logged on and found 10 or so players just watching the Suns set on Tatooine. It really was amazing - the light actually looks like that of a sunset, and even the players' facial features cast shadows on their faces etc. I stood watching a bush blow in the breeze on Naboo for 10 minutes. When I first began to play, I spent 5 minutes fiddling with the brightness before a realised with a "doh!" that it was friggin night time.
The Character creation process is a joy - messing with all those sliders to change your appearance (from height, belly size, build, and age to eybrow shape, bushiness, nose lengh, width, protrusion, eye angle, colour, hair colour, style etc etc etc etc)
The sounds are authentic Star Wars from the inquisitive whistles of passing R2 units to the sounds of doors and blasters. I also really liked the way the game scans what you are saying to surrounding players and generates gestures to match - so saying "hi" for exmaple, will cause your avatar to wave, or typing "LOL" actually causes you to clutch your sides and er.. LOL.
The inventory system is quite nice allowing you to drag and drop items to put them in either hand.
I'm not sure I "get" this game though. Either that or it really is completely boring. As LordYuK said - this aint Star Wars. I mean, why, for example, are the inhabitants of the SWG world all expected to display a pathlogical dislike for passive grazing animals (or any animal life come to that) ? At first I thought - "that bloke's barmy - he keeps shooting at the local wildlife" until I realised that this was, bizzarely, the way your character advances - by shooting wamp rats and the like. "But I'm a friggin Scout ffs!" I thought. You seem to spend most of your time trudging about, shooting at furry animals that were minding their own business, and running errands for NPC's. I wanted to join the rebellion against the Empire! I wanted to team up with other rebllious players and smuggle guns, take out imperial installations, steal secret plans, fly an x-wing and all that. Not tame wamp rats, and manufacture cheap jewellry...
On one early session I had met up with 3 other new guys on Naboo and we'd wandered about a bit and murdered a few animals for no reason. We came across 2 storm troopers and an officer an went into a huddle. We decided after much discussion that we'd try having a firefight with them, so formed a plan and spread out in the surrounding bushes. We all leapt out.... only to discover you're not *allowed* to attack stormtroopers. Hmm not very free form then.
As a regular Quake/UT etc player I was also a bit frustrated that I didn't do the shooting myself. Choosing to attack some unfortunate creature causes your character to do the work - not you. This would be fine - but well - they suck at it! My avatar would generally not dodge incoming fire, but just spam it out with the opposition (which is usually biting your ankles) I found it bizzare that I frequently died from being repeatedly bitten on the big toe by a hamster that I'd shot 6 times with my blaster. Characters in the films were action heroes - I wanted to do all the acrobatics, blaster in hand and so on. What you atually end up being is a tourist in Sony's "Star Wars World" yeah sure you can go find the Pit of Carkoon and get your picture taken next to it, watch the twin suns set, visit the Royal palace on Naboo, or the shipyards of Corellia. Buy the t-shirt and send a postcard. Just being in the Star Wars world can keep you amused for quite a while, but evemtually, you want to actually do soemthing..
I've not played any other MMORPG's so as I said - maybe I just don't get it - but I didn't fancy being the guy who grows carrots. I mean - when you were a kid and Star
hehe well, you can imagine the laughter on QIII forums all around the globe at the thought of people trying to play the game with a console controller when the Dreamcast version was released:)
Especially funny was when someone finally assembled a map pak to allow PC users to play on Dreamcast servers. A very short and very bloody massacre ensued involving some fish and a barrel.
OK Kirk - we know it's you. Calling yourself tekunokurato doesn't fool us on the lower decks. And it's high time we had another shirt colour allocation day like you promised!
Re:chicken cannon / dethaw
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
LOL I once did a contract at BAE and have seen this done (they don't make engines either btw...) As I recall, at the time, we all made the obvious "so do you get them from Tesco's frozen food section?" joke which, of course, the testers had heard thousands of times. The SNCF semi-frozen turkey story is legend down there..
You're probably right, but once you have the data in digital format, the reliability of the media is not so important - just make sure you shift it to new media before the old wears out.
Hmm maybe it's not too difficult to train a script kiddie, but for real depth of knowledge, I do think you need to have some kind of aptitude for it, and that it isn't just a matter of enough training. I would say on that basis, that yes, flying a commercial airliner whilst not easier, *is* more a matter of training. You don't *really* need to understand the nitty gritty of fluid thermo-dynamics to fly the plane (although some knowledge of physics is appropriate... To be a really effective cyberspy though, I believe real in-depth knowledge is essential.
Script kiddies are another matter - I agree - anyone can be trained to operate some tools that someone with more aptitude and insight came up with.
I like the idea of C/R, but one problem I can see is that if a spammer sends some mail to a C/R user, his mail relay send the challenge mail to the reply-to address. This almost never exists, so some relay or other sends the C/R system an "undeliverable". If C/R catches on, thats a shed load of "undeliverable" messages being fired back. Sometimes the undeliverable messages are not aimed at the reply-to address but "postmaster" or something similar. I stopped sending 550's to known spammers as well - you just get back more crap! In one case, it set up a mail loop that took down the relay.
I just let it arrive at my ISP these days, and then zap it all off with Spam Assassin. I know it's a bit of a blunt instrument, and I have it set to be more aggressive than normal too, but then if someone I know really is trying to reach me, they can phone, and I'll add them to the whitelist. The only problem with this, is that the spam is still using Internet bandwidth. Perhaps it's time to build email filters into the core routers of the Internet?
I agree with your point about the rules being different etc and yes - of course you can't translate your real life motivation verbatim. It's a starting point though - you gave the impression in your original post that you'd not come across this style of game before (which is highly likely - they're aren't many that claim to be goal-less, let alone deliver).
You are of course absolutely right when you say that you are never free to do exactly what you want, and I didn't really make any claims that EVE delivered what I wanted.
Sample motivations for your alter ego in my utopian game design might include those good old favourites - greed and power. More cash, more territory, more reputation (oh and a faster car - er.. ship!)
I agree with your last staement too - if the game *doesn't* deliver on a free format (and to date, I've tried many and none of them have) then no, it isn't fun scratching about trying to figure out the carefully hidden artficial driver. I used to play RPG's (ie RuneQuest, AD&D etc) and I found that a lot of players would fall into the trap of playing the *mechanics* of the game and could recite how many XP you got for this and that off the top of their heads. Once the mechanics of a MMORPG like EVE become visible, it's almost impossible not to "play to win"
I stand by my statement though - what I want is a game that has no artifical goals, but does provide a more interesting setting. I have no idea whether EVE will deliver on this, although from your comments - probably not. Next one please!
As a long time Traveller player - I totally agree. Most Traveller player parties crewed (and usually owned) some beat up old freighter at some point in the campaign. Some were pilots, some gunners, some mechanics and so on.
Also see the "Trader Team" books of Poul Anderson (on which Traveller, and hence "Elite" is partly based) such as "Mirkheim" (spel?) and "The Long Night"
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I play Half Speed, Camperstrike, or is it Quiet Life? I get more depressed!! You spend 10 minutes hiding behind a box and then someone snipes the 1 pixel that's showing using 1 of the 10 types of er.. railgun that the game has (sure it has chainguns etc, but you ever see anyone frag anything with it? - It's an A team special chaingun - the bullets don't do any damage..) All the damn guns that work are sniper efforts - railguns. It's bloomin Half Speed Instagib I tell ya!
:-]]
All that creeping about and hiding - and when you do try and run, your man moves like his pants are round his ankles. CS is the only game I've found I can play whilst having a smoke, eating me dinner or reading a book - and it makes very little difference to the outcome.
If you take out the violence - how will you kill off those annoying hostage thingies that constantly get in your way?
That was the problem with Half a Life single player - I played it for 5 minutes: it involved endless scientists and they had neglected to issue me with a firearm! (some excuse about them being on my side or something).
Give them 3Wave Capturestrike - pure full on carnage with no tedious camping behind crates.
I must go now - I have a rocket launcher to strip down and clean
Indeed - it's about time SCO just died a death. It's over dudes - just let it go.
As I used a modem for years and had no problem with regular search engines.. What do they mean by "slow" connections? 9600bps? Carrier pigeon?
That's a quite a positive review actually. Sounds like he really enjoyed the game :P
It's been done better a long time ago too - I remember seeing a device in the "Asian Sources" catalogue (basically an importers directory) for a very similar device that applied bitmaps to a wall or the side of a van using red green and blue paint mixed on the fly. This was well over 10 years ago.
Really? Which dictionary is that? I mean by that definition - I'm drowning in irony :P
I see your point - but then "loads of rain when all you want is some sun" would be ironic too - and I don't think there's any irony there at all - just bad luck. I mean there might be loads of soap as well as forks and no knives - the presence of some other object does not make the lack of knives ironic.
Now I suppose that if the previous day there were tonnes of knives and you wanted a fork, then the abundance of forks when you need a knife might just edge in, but as an event in isolation - no way.
In fact, I might be wrong but I don't think the song even mentions whether there are knives or not - there may be loads of knives too!
Yeah - that was my point :)
Oh I dunno...
Too right mate. I'm a sucker for all the latest multi million dollar FPS productions too, but I still play NetHack from time to time :)
LOL you beat me to it. I've been waiting for an excuse to bitch about that song. Excuse me whilst I do so anyway. Ahem.. "Isn't it ironic" well no you thick woman - it's just unlucky. "like rain, on your wedding day" - no it's not ironic you moron. It might be if you were marrying a meteorologist, otherwise it's just bad luck. Like too many forks when all you want is a knife" (or something). Well, again, that's just unfortunate, or bad planning in the cutlery provisioning dept. It is *not* ironic. At all.
Thanks. I feel better now.
I already have something which does what you want - I am using a Slimp3 server to stream mp3 data to multiple players around the house (across a wireless network). I have 3 players and they are all able to play a different stream and all at once over a regular 10Mb/s wifi network (all my CD's are encoded to 128Kb/s mp3s)
.5 seconds out which would sound disconcerting to say the least if you were within earshot of more than one player.
If you ran long cables from 6 sound cards to 6 amps around your huse, this could be made to work, but the losses across such long cables would be unacceptable to all but the most tone deaf.
You can get details of Slimp3 from http://www.slimp3.com
One thing it won't currently do (and may never do to acceptable levels of timing) is play the same stream , in sync, to multiple players. Even using multicast, they might be up to
However, if I undertsand your requirement , this (or any other digital music serving device) will do it justice.
Well I guess I asked for that one - but I just couldn't remember any of the other creature names :) I guess when I suggested it just wasn't Star Wars as I would define it, I meant that a lot of the professions and skills are things like "manufacture clothing" or "tame creature". Yeah I mean that's great from the point of view of modelling a workable society (someone has to make the clothes after all) but It's not what I want to do as a player - I want to be a smuggler, or a Jedi Knight and so on, and perhaps these things become possible after you've "paid your dues" as a lowly shirt maker for a few months. So I guess what I said was true - from a certain point of view. :P
:)
Oh gawd - the floodgates are opened on the biggest quote fest of the year
Mind you - "Mynock Pest Control" - that could work as a profession. "Mynocks chewin' on yer power cables? Call 1-800-MYNOCK and ask for Dave. We'll be round within the hour and have your power cables pest free the same day. *.Additional charges may be made for asteroid visits"
So it's not just me then? I played in Beta 3. I take it the NDA has now been lifted so here's my mini Review. LordYUK's post further down this thread covers most of the points I'd make to be honest - but here's my $.02:-
The game is totally amazing to look at. Once I logged on and found 10 or so players just watching the Suns set on Tatooine. It really was amazing - the light actually looks like that of a sunset, and even the players' facial features cast shadows on their faces etc. I stood watching a bush blow in the breeze on Naboo for 10 minutes. When I first began to play, I spent 5 minutes fiddling with the brightness before a realised with a "doh!" that it was friggin night time.
The Character creation process is a joy - messing with all those sliders to change your appearance (from height, belly size, build, and age to eybrow shape, bushiness, nose lengh, width, protrusion, eye angle, colour, hair colour, style etc etc etc etc)
The sounds are authentic Star Wars from the inquisitive whistles of passing R2 units to the sounds of doors and blasters. I also really liked the way the game scans what you are saying to surrounding players and generates gestures to match - so saying "hi" for exmaple, will cause your avatar to wave, or typing "LOL" actually causes you to clutch your sides and er.. LOL.
The inventory system is quite nice allowing you to drag and drop items to put them in either hand.
I'm not sure I "get" this game though. Either that or it really is completely boring. As LordYuK said - this aint Star Wars. I mean, why, for example, are the inhabitants of the SWG world all expected to display a pathlogical dislike for passive grazing animals (or any animal life come to that) ? At first I thought - "that bloke's barmy - he keeps shooting at the local wildlife" until I realised that this was, bizzarely, the way your character advances - by shooting wamp rats and the like. "But I'm a friggin Scout ffs!" I thought. You seem to spend most of your time trudging about, shooting at furry animals that were minding their own business, and running errands for NPC's. I wanted to join the rebellion against the Empire! I wanted to team up with other rebllious players and smuggle guns, take out imperial installations, steal secret plans, fly an x-wing and all that. Not tame wamp rats, and manufacture cheap jewellry...
On one early session I had met up with 3 other new guys on Naboo and we'd wandered about a bit and murdered a few animals for no reason. We came across 2 storm troopers and an officer an went into a huddle. We decided after much discussion that we'd try having a firefight with them, so formed a plan and spread out in the surrounding bushes. We all leapt out.... only to discover you're not *allowed* to attack stormtroopers. Hmm not very free form then.
As a regular Quake/UT etc player I was also a bit frustrated that I didn't do the shooting myself. Choosing to attack some unfortunate creature causes your character to do the work - not you. This would be fine - but well - they suck at it! My avatar would generally not dodge incoming fire, but just spam it out with the opposition (which is usually biting your ankles) I found it bizzare that I frequently died from being repeatedly bitten on the big toe by a hamster that I'd shot 6 times with my blaster. Characters in the films were action heroes - I wanted to do all the acrobatics, blaster in hand and so on. What you atually end up being is a tourist in Sony's "Star Wars World" yeah sure you can go find the Pit of Carkoon and get your picture taken next to it, watch the twin suns set, visit the Royal palace on Naboo, or the shipyards of Corellia. Buy the t-shirt and send a postcard. Just being in the Star Wars world can keep you amused for quite a while, but evemtually, you want to actually do soemthing..
I've not played any other MMORPG's so as I said - maybe I just don't get it - but I didn't fancy being the guy who grows carrots. I mean - when you were a kid and Star
hehe well, you can imagine the laughter on QIII forums all around the globe at the thought of people trying to play the game with a console controller when the Dreamcast version was released :)
Especially funny was when someone finally assembled a map pak to allow PC users to play on Dreamcast servers. A very short and very bloody massacre ensued involving some fish and a barrel.
..they can chuck the Xbox and *really* beat the crap out of each other! Real pain, actually delivered to the point of impact!
OK Kirk - we know it's you. Calling yourself tekunokurato doesn't fool us on the lower decks. And it's high time we had another shirt colour allocation day like you promised!
LOL I once did a contract at BAE and have seen this done (they don't make engines either btw...) As I recall, at the time, we all made the obvious "so do you get them from Tesco's frozen food section?" joke which, of course, the testers had heard thousands of times. The SNCF semi-frozen turkey story is legend down there..
You're probably right, but once you have the data in digital format, the reliability of the media is not so important - just make sure you shift it to new media before the old wears out.
Hmm maybe it's not too difficult to train a script kiddie, but for real depth of knowledge, I do think you need to have some kind of aptitude for it, and that it isn't just a matter of enough training. I would say on that basis, that yes, flying a commercial airliner whilst not easier, *is* more a matter of training. You don't *really* need to understand the nitty gritty of fluid thermo-dynamics to fly the plane (although some knowledge of physics is appropriate... To be a really effective cyberspy though, I believe real in-depth knowledge is essential.
Script kiddies are another matter - I agree - anyone can be trained to operate some tools that someone with more aptitude and insight came up with.
"But I'm not surprised it was never productized."
:P
oooo now that's nasty. Was "produced" the word you were aiming for?
I like the idea of C/R, but one problem I can see is that if a spammer sends some mail to a C/R user, his mail relay send the challenge mail to the reply-to address. This almost never exists, so some relay or other sends the C/R system an "undeliverable". If C/R catches on, thats a shed load of "undeliverable" messages being fired back. Sometimes the undeliverable messages are not aimed at the reply-to address but "postmaster" or something similar. I stopped sending 550's to known spammers as well - you just get back more crap! In one case, it set up a mail loop that took down the relay.
I just let it arrive at my ISP these days, and then zap it all off with Spam Assassin. I know it's a bit of a blunt instrument, and I have it set to be more aggressive than normal too, but then if someone I know really is trying to reach me, they can phone, and I'll add them to the whitelist. The only problem with this, is that the spam is still using Internet bandwidth. Perhaps it's time to build email filters into the core routers of the Internet?
They're pretty sh*t at getting your floors clean too.
I agree with your point about the rules being different etc and yes - of course you can't translate your real life motivation verbatim. It's a starting point though - you gave the impression in your original post that you'd not come across this style of game before (which is highly likely - they're aren't many that claim to be goal-less, let alone deliver).
You are of course absolutely right when you say that you are never free to do exactly what you want, and I didn't really make any claims that EVE delivered what I wanted.
Sample motivations for your alter ego in my utopian game design might include those good old favourites - greed and power. More cash, more territory, more reputation (oh and a faster car - er.. ship!)
I agree with your last staement too - if the game *doesn't* deliver on a free format (and to date, I've tried many and none of them have) then no, it isn't fun scratching about trying to figure out the carefully hidden artficial driver. I used to play RPG's (ie RuneQuest, AD&D etc) and I found that a lot of players would fall into the trap of playing the *mechanics* of the game and could recite how many XP you got for this and that off the top of their heads. Once the mechanics of a MMORPG like EVE become visible, it's almost impossible not to "play to win"
I stand by my statement though - what I want is a game that has no artifical goals, but does provide a more interesting setting. I have no idea whether EVE will deliver on this, although from your comments - probably not. Next one please!
As a long time Traveller player - I totally agree. Most Traveller player parties crewed (and usually owned) some beat up old freighter at some point in the campaign. Some were pilots, some gunners, some mechanics and so on.
Also see the "Trader Team" books of Poul Anderson (on which Traveller, and hence "Elite" is partly based) such as "Mirkheim" (spel?) and "The Long Night"