I believe they're talking about a game whose designed game modes are not nearly as fun as the glitches that people figure out how to do in it.
Saint's Row comes to mind.
I've always had nearly as much fun trying to break a game as I have playing it. I still remember Secret of the Silver Blades for PC and my first experiments in hex editing savegames.
Was I trying to cheat and give myself crazy stats? Not exactly... I was trying to give myself items with implausible names:
There really is no reward for finishing a game either, nor is there for playing it. It's all an arbitrary reward structure to make you want to consume the content in the game.
I find that the best-designed trophies and achievements are ones which cause you to explore playing a game in a style different from the one you would have originally chosen - perhaps you're normally gung-ho and charge through the whole game on twitch reflex power alone. An achievement which makes you get through the levels without killing anyone or without being seen rewards you by presenting you a new way of playing, and it incentivizes that play with the minor recognition that the trophy provides. How many people dumped hundreds of dollars into their local Donkey Kong machine just to show up on the top score table? How is that any more noble than hunting after every flag, finding every hidden pigeon, ranking #1 on a server for 3 rounds, or successfully jumping your car over a skyscraper?
It's frequently worth it - the challenge modes in Portal are tough enough that I'd have never done it on my own, but the achievement that at least recognizes I did it was enough to make me do it... and I'm glad I did. I'd do the same with any Portal sequels even without the achievement, just for the satisfaction.
If all you want is constant fast action, I have to second the AC below and go for Serious Sam, or even Painkiller if you have to.
If you want a non-repetitive thinking game stacked on top of that fast action as well, try Portal, then try Portal's challenge modes. Some of those required the sort of split second timing that no NES game was ever so sadistic to require (except maybe Battletoads.)
Point taken. I'd expect to have to do some finger math anyway; I'd be getting aggregate numbers since there's no way to tell the profiler what a "frame" is.
If a portion of my rendering code is called 300 times per frame, that isn't particularly meaningful if it's already reasonably optimized.
I'm more concerned with the thing that gets called once a frame which ends up taking 30ms instead of the 5 it'd need to, thus dragging the thread it's in out of synch.
I understand that it's good to know as a rough guideline of where to optimize how many times a function gets called, but I'd rather see how much time a function takes out of the total execution time. Without it, the profiler's only telling you things you already know if you knew what you were doing when you wrote the code in the first place.
I'd honestly like to see the two work together to produce some sort of sickeningly powerful rendering setup.
A processor which was good at preprocessing a scene for maximum performance on the GPU hardware and built-in support for multiple display adapters, plus an on-board chip which handles outputting the resulting images via the digital-link-du-jour.
This sort of setup would mean that rather than having to update your GPUs every two years (you could just buy another one to run in parallel) - the graphics card manufacturers could get better at producing the hardware with a larger profit margin due to longer product lifetimes, the CPU manufacturers could get in on the action like they so clearly want to, and the motherboard chipset manufacturers could get in endless bidding wars to produce the best output signal pipeline and video decoders.
Nobody would come out a loser, and the whole thing would be more friendly to consumers in a depressed economy, which I've no doubt customers would respond to.
Re:It's called DOS, and it was done a long time ag
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it worked out just fine.
So well, in fact, that some people didn't switch to windows at all until 2k.
I'm sorry, was that a troll?
People don't pay for high bandwidth plans so they can guarantee high speed and reliability for everybody but themselves - they pay for high speed and reliability for themselves. That's why they're willing to pay a premium for it.
The trick here is that people are paying more money for a faster service and getting the same service that the people paying rock bottom are getting - practically nothing.
Your choice is either pay for slow DSL, barely better than ISDN, and never worry about usage caps, or pay for high speed and get cut off regularly if you ever decide to use it.
You seem to be making a claim that it's ok for companies to charge more for a service that they elect not to provide because using that service hurts the other customers. It's decidedly not. If they can't provide the service to all of their customers who are paying extra for it without hurting all of their customers, then they shouldn't be offering that service.
Nobody would be complaining very hard or making a big deal about it if Time Warner opted to discontinue their high-bandwidth plans in areas with excessive traffic volume. What people are angry about is that Time Warner seems to believe they can get away with selling a service they have no intention of providing, all the while redefining the words "unlimited," "bandwidth," and "guaranteed."
People aren't angry about not having their internets - they're angry about paying for internet service and being told by the company that they're naughty people for using the service in a fashion that any sensible person would expect is all right - consuming legal content online.
I'd imagine the best customers for a product like this would be resorts, cruise lines, some businesses which attend seasonal attractions, and people scouting dive locations for SCUBA tours.
In other words, people for whom this is an investment, rather than people who have money to spend on something like this for fun. That being said, I can virtually guarantee there will be Hollywood and music industry people who will snatch these up.
We're lagging behind in many if not most other technological fields as well.
Our cellular networks frankly suck and so do the plans they offer us.
Our telephone infrastructure is still bad enough that there are semi-populated areas in which there is no telephone service at all
Our broadband proliferation is very nearly the worst in the developed world.
Voting machines are still a new thing to us, and rather than use the ones provided by companies outside the US who have been supplying more technologically advanced nations for years, we get ours from companies whose engineering pedigree typically has such wonderfully complicated technologies as vending machines and credit card paypoints.
Our gas-burning automobiles are less efficient than what is considered a minimum requirement in Brazil.
Our electrical power infrastructure is inadequate to the task of supplying electricity to certain parts of the country during summer months without rolling blackouts and regular brownouts - even in cities under a hundred miles from major hydro plants.
Keeping the US at the top of the technological food chain hasn't been popular ever since the end of the Cold War. American corporate culture has changed since the grand old days where keeping their customers happy, cheerful, wearing the best damned clothes, driving the best damned car, and using the best damned newfangled icebox were all that mattered. Brand loyalty used to be the real currency which kept business afloat. I'm not old enough to have seen these supposed glory days, but I'm old enough to have watched its decline.
The banks have no incentive to improve their service or security, as their competitors aren't doing it and the worst that could happen is that a few customers would become angry and leave the bank. This used to be considered a terrible thing. Now they can just shrug and continue shafting their other hundred million customers. It's nothing more than an attitude shift, but it's a pretty destructive one, and helps explain why so few people buy US-made products outside the US (except in the few industries where there is no other option).
I don't think that traditional cultural definitions of sanity have any value when considering the sort of people who would be able to live in a tiny insular community of no more than a few dozen people isolated from all other humanity.
There are plenty of people on Earth who have found no reason to live on Earth who would gladly spend the rest of their lives doing something useful in an environment where their individual skills would make a difference and they would find it possible to excel in one talent.
You get those sort of people in MMORPGs all the time - they take the time (often thousands of hours) to become the best craftsman doing boring repetitive tasks which nonetheless require development of a complicated specialized skill set to succeed in. This sort of energy could be easily channeled to performing useful work in a colonist environment.
It's worth pointing out that the people who colonized the "new world" were for the most part psychologically imbalanced religious zealots who were incapable of living in a society which honestly demanded very little of them. They moved because their ridiculously rarified lifestyle to which they adhered beyond religiously was made illegal or at least socially unacceptable.
In all likelihood your "taxdollars" are not being used for that.
Their parents are likely paying through the teeth on tuition for it. Your tax dollars don't go very far when it comes to universities, and the universities tend to seriously gouge the students on tuitions, fees, "optional contributions," and fines in order to fund their projects. In return, they offer students these "perks" which cost the university very little money but make them feel better about how badly they're being dicked in the process.
In my state, the total governmental contribution to my education was only about 1/2 of the tuition - and this is a cheap land-grant university. About 1/3 of the governmental contribution was a state need grant. The other half of my tuition was paid for with student loans. Presumably if I'd been younger when I attended, that half would have been covered by my parents.
Your tax dollars are really at work treating the administration like royalty in all likelihood.
Actually the article never says it will be used for RPGs. Bad summary.
The use I thought of immediately was a game like Bushido Blade. This was a samurai movie style game where a single well-placed attack on an unguarded opponent could kill them - a hybrid of pure action, good old fashioned fight tactics and a balancing act between opportunism and the code of Bushido.
I would really like to see a controller like this added to the mix, where the computer detected your tension and made your opponent act like a duellist would - taking advantage of feints and short jabs more often when you are getting nervous and jumpy, detecting your tension and using it against you.
Seriously, why is this surprising to anyone? In the US of A it's always been about the bottom line, at least as far back as the railroads. We're a country which, culturally speaking, wants to get something for nothing, be totally financially independent and not have to work particularly hard to either get on top or stay there once we get there.
So naturally, the first thing we look at is cost - we can pay $1500 per seat for all of our software, or get free alternatives for about half the stuff. We're wired like that. Maybe we're not all so cavalier about it or proud of the idea, but, uh, let's reverse the situation from reality to prove a point. Show of hands, anybody born and raised in the USA:
Who would pay extra for a product which came with the source code if you could get closed source freeware which did the same thing?
I don't see anywhere in the article that they bother giving numbers on preference or who in "Europe" they were talking to. Speaking purely in terms of cultural mindset diversity, saying "Europeans" is rather like saying "Asians..." Not particularly illuminating. Depending on what part of Europe you're talking about, you may be talking about a much smaller, far more technically savvy populace who have been programming since they were 10 or 11. Of course access to the source would be important to them. But that's not to say that if they had to pay to get the source, they'd necessarily still consider it a bargain.
The question isn't one of greed, it's of expertise and interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe they're talking about a game whose designed game modes are not nearly as fun as the glitches that people figure out how to do in it.
Saint's Row comes to mind.
I've always had nearly as much fun trying to break a game as I have playing it. I still remember Secret of the Silver Blades for PC and my first experiments in hex editing savegames.
Was I trying to cheat and give myself crazy stats? Not exactly... I was trying to give myself items with implausible names:
There really is no reward for finishing a game either, nor is there for playing it. It's all an arbitrary reward structure to make you want to consume the content in the game.
I find that the best-designed trophies and achievements are ones which cause you to explore playing a game in a style different from the one you would have originally chosen - perhaps you're normally gung-ho and charge through the whole game on twitch reflex power alone. An achievement which makes you get through the levels without killing anyone or without being seen rewards you by presenting you a new way of playing, and it incentivizes that play with the minor recognition that the trophy provides. How many people dumped hundreds of dollars into their local Donkey Kong machine just to show up on the top score table? How is that any more noble than hunting after every flag, finding every hidden pigeon, ranking #1 on a server for 3 rounds, or successfully jumping your car over a skyscraper?
It's frequently worth it - the challenge modes in Portal are tough enough that I'd have never done it on my own, but the achievement that at least recognizes I did it was enough to make me do it... and I'm glad I did. I'd do the same with any Portal sequels even without the achievement, just for the satisfaction.
If all you want is constant fast action, I have to second the AC below and go for Serious Sam, or even Painkiller if you have to.
If you want a non-repetitive thinking game stacked on top of that fast action as well, try Portal, then try Portal's challenge modes. Some of those required the sort of split second timing that no NES game was ever so sadistic to require (except maybe Battletoads.)
Point taken. I'd expect to have to do some finger math anyway; I'd be getting aggregate numbers since there's no way to tell the profiler what a "frame" is.
Honestly, why?
If a portion of my rendering code is called 300 times per frame, that isn't particularly meaningful if it's already reasonably optimized.
I'm more concerned with the thing that gets called once a frame which ends up taking 30ms instead of the 5 it'd need to, thus dragging the thread it's in out of synch.
I understand that it's good to know as a rough guideline of where to optimize how many times a function gets called, but I'd rather see how much time a function takes out of the total execution time. Without it, the profiler's only telling you things you already know if you knew what you were doing when you wrote the code in the first place.
I'd honestly like to see the two work together to produce some sort of sickeningly powerful rendering setup.
A processor which was good at preprocessing a scene for maximum performance on the GPU hardware and built-in support for multiple display adapters, plus an on-board chip which handles outputting the resulting images via the digital-link-du-jour.
This sort of setup would mean that rather than having to update your GPUs every two years (you could just buy another one to run in parallel) - the graphics card manufacturers could get better at producing the hardware with a larger profit margin due to longer product lifetimes, the CPU manufacturers could get in on the action like they so clearly want to, and the motherboard chipset manufacturers could get in endless bidding wars to produce the best output signal pipeline and video decoders.
Nobody would come out a loser, and the whole thing would be more friendly to consumers in a depressed economy, which I've no doubt customers would respond to.
Actually, it worked out just fine.
So well, in fact, that some people didn't switch to windows at all until 2k.
How is this not obvious?
Sure they're not going to buy the same product once they decide it's great. That's not the point. If:
The pirate is more likely to buy that book than if they didn't know you from Adam.
Slow cable I meant, not DSL.
Proof reading tirades is evidently not one of my strong suits.
I'm sorry, was that a troll? People don't pay for high bandwidth plans so they can guarantee high speed and reliability for everybody but themselves - they pay for high speed and reliability for themselves. That's why they're willing to pay a premium for it.
The trick here is that people are paying more money for a faster service and getting the same service that the people paying rock bottom are getting - practically nothing.
Your choice is either pay for slow DSL, barely better than ISDN, and never worry about usage caps, or pay for high speed and get cut off regularly if you ever decide to use it.
You seem to be making a claim that it's ok for companies to charge more for a service that they elect not to provide because using that service hurts the other customers. It's decidedly not. If they can't provide the service to all of their customers who are paying extra for it without hurting all of their customers, then they shouldn't be offering that service.
Nobody would be complaining very hard or making a big deal about it if Time Warner opted to discontinue their high-bandwidth plans in areas with excessive traffic volume. What people are angry about is that Time Warner seems to believe they can get away with selling a service they have no intention of providing, all the while redefining the words "unlimited," "bandwidth," and "guaranteed."
People aren't angry about not having their internets - they're angry about paying for internet service and being told by the company that they're naughty people for using the service in a fashion that any sensible person would expect is all right - consuming legal content online.
That's nothing, just imagine how bad it'll be during the paternity hearings.
Depends on what I'm watching.
I'd imagine the best customers for a product like this would be resorts, cruise lines, some businesses which attend seasonal attractions, and people scouting dive locations for SCUBA tours.
In other words, people for whom this is an investment, rather than people who have money to spend on something like this for fun. That being said, I can virtually guarantee there will be Hollywood and music industry people who will snatch these up.
We're lagging behind in many if not most other technological fields as well.
Our cellular networks frankly suck and so do the plans they offer us.
Our telephone infrastructure is still bad enough that there are semi-populated areas in which there is no telephone service at all
Our broadband proliferation is very nearly the worst in the developed world.
Voting machines are still a new thing to us, and rather than use the ones provided by companies outside the US who have been supplying more technologically advanced nations for years, we get ours from companies whose engineering pedigree typically has such wonderfully complicated technologies as vending machines and credit card paypoints.
Our gas-burning automobiles are less efficient than what is considered a minimum requirement in Brazil.
Our electrical power infrastructure is inadequate to the task of supplying electricity to certain parts of the country during summer months without rolling blackouts and regular brownouts - even in cities under a hundred miles from major hydro plants.
Keeping the US at the top of the technological food chain hasn't been popular ever since the end of the Cold War. American corporate culture has changed since the grand old days where keeping their customers happy, cheerful, wearing the best damned clothes, driving the best damned car, and using the best damned newfangled icebox were all that mattered. Brand loyalty used to be the real currency which kept business afloat. I'm not old enough to have seen these supposed glory days, but I'm old enough to have watched its decline.
The banks have no incentive to improve their service or security, as their competitors aren't doing it and the worst that could happen is that a few customers would become angry and leave the bank. This used to be considered a terrible thing. Now they can just shrug and continue shafting their other hundred million customers. It's nothing more than an attitude shift, but it's a pretty destructive one, and helps explain why so few people buy US-made products outside the US (except in the few industries where there is no other option).
I don't think that traditional cultural definitions of sanity have any value when considering the sort of people who would be able to live in a tiny insular community of no more than a few dozen people isolated from all other humanity.
There are plenty of people on Earth who have found no reason to live on Earth who would gladly spend the rest of their lives doing something useful in an environment where their individual skills would make a difference and they would find it possible to excel in one talent.
You get those sort of people in MMORPGs all the time - they take the time (often thousands of hours) to become the best craftsman doing boring repetitive tasks which nonetheless require development of a complicated specialized skill set to succeed in. This sort of energy could be easily channeled to performing useful work in a colonist environment.
It's worth pointing out that the people who colonized the "new world" were for the most part psychologically imbalanced religious zealots who were incapable of living in a society which honestly demanded very little of them. They moved because their ridiculously rarified lifestyle to which they adhered beyond religiously was made illegal or at least socially unacceptable.
In all likelihood your "taxdollars" are not being used for that.
Their parents are likely paying through the teeth on tuition for it. Your tax dollars don't go very far when it comes to universities, and the universities tend to seriously gouge the students on tuitions, fees, "optional contributions," and fines in order to fund their projects. In return, they offer students these "perks" which cost the university very little money but make them feel better about how badly they're being dicked in the process.
In my state, the total governmental contribution to my education was only about 1/2 of the tuition - and this is a cheap land-grant university. About 1/3 of the governmental contribution was a state need grant. The other half of my tuition was paid for with student loans. Presumably if I'd been younger when I attended, that half would have been covered by my parents.
Your tax dollars are really at work treating the administration like royalty in all likelihood.
Actually, they're called mosaic patterns.
Actually the article never says it will be used for RPGs. Bad summary.
The use I thought of immediately was a game like Bushido Blade. This was a samurai movie style game where a single well-placed attack on an unguarded opponent could kill them - a hybrid of pure action, good old fashioned fight tactics and a balancing act between opportunism and the code of Bushido.
I would really like to see a controller like this added to the mix, where the computer detected your tension and made your opponent act like a duellist would - taking advantage of feints and short jabs more often when you are getting nervous and jumpy, detecting your tension and using it against you.
I'd say something snide, but it's considered in poor taste to make fun of minorities. *coughsmartpeoplecough*
This just in: Americans like money
Seriously, why is this surprising to anyone? In the US of A it's always been about the bottom line, at least as far back as the railroads. We're a country which, culturally speaking, wants to get something for nothing, be totally financially independent and not have to work particularly hard to either get on top or stay there once we get there.
So naturally, the first thing we look at is cost - we can pay $1500 per seat for all of our software, or get free alternatives for about half the stuff. We're wired like that. Maybe we're not all so cavalier about it or proud of the idea, but, uh, let's reverse the situation from reality to prove a point. Show of hands, anybody born and raised in the USA:
Who would pay extra for a product which came with the source code if you could get closed source freeware which did the same thing?
I don't see anywhere in the article that they bother giving numbers on preference or who in "Europe" they were talking to. Speaking purely in terms of cultural mindset diversity, saying "Europeans" is rather like saying "Asians..." Not particularly illuminating. Depending on what part of Europe you're talking about, you may be talking about a much smaller, far more technically savvy populace who have been programming since they were 10 or 11. Of course access to the source would be important to them. But that's not to say that if they had to pay to get the source, they'd necessarily still consider it a bargain.
The question isn't one of greed, it's of expertise and interest.
I hear if you do that, Richard Stallman appears and steals your soul.
I believe you have something in common with Sir Mixalot.
That'd be a great name for a hair band.
The cost of acquiring that extra arm goes up non-linearly, too.
It's a paradox, is it not?