You personally check the brakes before every drive?
Well, I ride a motorcycle so it's easy.
I certainly won't argue against the fact that I statistically has a much larger chance of dying (especially on a motorcycle), but I still feel much safer when I'm the one in control. I guess I'm a job for a shrink:)
I feel more safe driving myself since I like being the one in control. When I fly I put my life in the hands of a huge number of people I don't know; mechanics, pilots, air controllers. Heck, even terrorists who might decide to blow up the plane and I can't do anything about it.
When I'm driving myself, I've personally checked the brakes and all the other essential safety mechanisms. I know that if I hit a tree it's my own fault. Sure, some random asshole might do something unexpected in the traffic, maybe involving me in a serious accident, but even in that case I know I'd still have a slight chance of avoiding the situation if I'm alert and doing my best.
For the record, I don't mind flying that much, I'm just slightly uncomfortable putting my life in the hands of other people to such a degree.
I doubt this is going to be a major cause of future security problems.
As far as I'm aware, WebGL is only allowing shaders to be specified in GLSL which is a pretty high level shading language. Obviously there's no such thing as pointers, and unlike something like javascript there's no interaction with complex objects. Shaders form a very clean and thin interface, basically just being a bunch of floating point vector operations. The only complex objects you're really going to interact with is various texture samplers.
It's easy to make a dangerous bug in a javascript interface to a complete HTML DOM object (or whatever else you can do in javacript these days), it's much harder to make a dangerous bug in a function that calculates a dot product. Sure, shaders are more complicated than that, but you get the drift.
Diablo is clearly heavily inspired by roguelikes, but there's really not that much of the original gameplay left. It would be like if I made a real-time strategy game with units like "pawn", "queen", and "king" and said it was a chesslike.
I don't understand all the e-hate directed at Blizzard for this in these comments.
In order for the game to be viable for competitive play, the game needs to be extremely balanced. If it wasn't the case, Blizzard would lose the favor of a huge number of competitively minded players plus the whole of Korea:P.
Keep in mind that the title of this slashdot news post is clearly designed to troll you. Multiplayer SC2 is fun because it's so balanced. The skill cap of SC2 is insanely high because of it. If you want to play with "fun" units, there are loads of special unbalanced units in the singleplayer campaign. Furthermore, there's a huge number of custom maps with custom units available on battle.net.
Even if you for some reason don't like SC2 multiplayer, the singleplayer campaign still offers as much content as any similarly priced PC game.
Seen from a technical point of view, first person shooters are some of the easiest games to make, provided you're using an existant engine. The bulk of the man hours needed goes into making graphical content like textures, maps, models, and animations.
Provided your team got an efficient pipeline for producing art assets, stocked with skilled artists, there's really not that many things which can delay the project unexpectedly.
On the other hand, if the project involves building an entire engine from scratch (like in the case of Half Life 2) you got yourself an endless source of unexpected bugs and problems you'll need to deal with. It's much easier to predict how much work is needed to create a model of a zombie than to predict how long it will take to code a core component of a game engine.
Can someone name me some actual real world, large software projects based on functional programming? (Projects led by university professors don't count.)
Dismissing OO completely because it is "anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature" seems kinda strange to me. I write parallel and modular OO software all the time... Maybe it's just me misunderstanding something.
You know, people said that about EverQuest, when WoW came out. That the idea of WoW beating EQ was simply absurd because there were so many people playing EQ who wouldn't want to simply switch.
I'm pretty sure that it was a different kind of people who played EverQuest. The appeal of WoW is just so much broader. I'd say the current WoW has more in common with FarmVille than Everquest:P.
Of course, GuildWars doesn't have to sink WoW to win. It just has to have a large enough player base to succeed financially. And that's going to depend on the quality of the content and gameplay. And if it's good enough, then it will slowly win out over WoW...
You're right, as far as I know, none of these "failed" WoW-killers actually turned out as big financial losses. They usually start out with a huge amount of preorders and a couple of months of insane growth, mostly from WoW-players who are tired of the game and want to try something new. But after a few months these people often realize how good WoW actually is and go back to play that again (or quit MMORPGs completely). I've seen it so many times.
I'm not sure what it is going to take to keep these players hooked more than a few months, but sure, if some company figures it out then they might win over Blizzard in the long (very long) run.
It's a ripple effect. No game is going to kill WoW overnight. But sooner or later, a game will come along that brings WoW down. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
As you say, people usually quit in groups because nobody wants to play anymore if all their friends have stopped.
Basically my entire guild quit the game shortly after WOTLK was released, but for every people who stops playing, either a new casual player wants to try the game or an old WoW veteran is drawn back by nostalgia. If you check out the WoW subscription numbers, they've been remarkably stable since WOTLK.
Another thing we shouldn't forget is how much we've changed ourselves. Personally I like to complain about how WoW isn't like in the "good old days", but thinking about it, it's probably mainly because I'm out-MMORPG'd. When I finally cancel my WoW account (probably soon since I'm not really playing the game anymore), I don't think I'll go on to another MMORPG, and I believe a lot of other players feel the same way.
I've played WoW since release and I share your view that the game is going downhill (since end of TBC). The reward/effort ratio is simply too high for the average old-school MMORPG player. But we need to realize that we're a tiny minority, nobody cares if we stop playing. We can go play Rift or Guild Wars 2 or whatever, Blizzard isn't going to notice it.
WoW caters to a huge spectrum of player types. The cartoonish style of the game appeals to casual players ranging from young kids to housewives. Just looking at the screenshots of Guild Wars 2 I can tell you that it's not going to have the same impact. Realistic looking hot chicks? I don't think the average casual housewife is going to enjoy that the same way as nerds like us.
Sure, if you read the MMO-champion forums you'll easily get the idea that all WoW-players hate WoW and want to quit... But it's just a (very) loud minority. WoW isn't going anywhere in the near future.
There's just no way any MMO is going to "beat" World of Warcraft, except maybe Blizzard's next one. Maybe Guild Wars 2 is going to be a better game in every way possible, it's not going to matter anything... It's like if I sat down and made a "social network" site that was better in every way than facebook, and then expected that everyone would stop using facebook and use my service instead. It's just not going to happen, the momentum is too big.
Trying to market a large fantasy-themed MMORPG at the moment is naive at best.
I don't think many (if any) game developers are using either OpenGL 4 or DirectX 11 at their full potentials yet. Especially DirectX 11 is designed to allow a lot of multithreading and decoupling the GPU pipeline from the CPU.
If you implement a naive rendering engine with OpenGL or DirectX, sure, you'll find that most of the time you're just sitting around waiting for synchronization and buffers flushing. But if you design your software around multithreading and the new API features, you can squeeze a lot more juice out of the system.
Also, I'm sure there's a lot of geometry shader pipeline tricks waiting to be discovered, which will further decouple the GPU from the CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if we "soon" see the merging of the vertex and geometry shader pipelines, might even together with compute shaders. When that happens, the differences between OpenGL and DX is propably going to be very minor (and very, very close to the hardware layer).
World of Warcraft uses a TCP protocol (would post a link to the reverse engineered protocol information as proof, but Blizzard seem pretty aggressive at hunting such sites down so couldn't find it on Google:P)
So, where in your code would you put the delay in order to be sure that it won't cause the game to feel less responsive?
Just after the rendering? How exactly will you determine the duration of the delay? How about timing accuracy? Sleep() on Windows is in milliseconds. And how will you deal with frame rendering time suddenly dropping or rising?
I know it doesn't matter in the menus of Starcraft II, but I can promise you that some crazy Koreans will care a lot if Blizzard put an (unnecessary) Sleep() in their main loop.
Of course this needs to be an option (which it is).
There's a difference between learning what does what and learning how to use every skill you have effectively. A lot of players fail at the first step, only learning what 5-6 skills they'll use the most and ignoring the rest. The result is Paladins who don't heal others, Warriors who tank in Berzerker Stance with a 2H, and Druids who aren't aware they're different from Rogues.
I also find it quite strange that people continuosly bash WoW for being so incredibly easy, and how everybody can learn to play it in a matter of minutes.
How can it be then, that a very large percentage of random groups you do instances with, fail miserably because someone don't know how to play?
Even if the instance run is successful, it could always have been done faster and more smooth.
I think many people believe they play perfectly, even though that's not the case. And unfortunately most people are reluctant to point out these people's weaknesses - the most contructive criticism that usually comes accross is in the style of "OMG L2P noob, WTFBBQ!!? LOL LOL you suck!!1". Which of course not is taken seriously by anyone.
And no, it's not just about having good gear. A player with good gear can still go total pew pew on some mobs, outaggroing the tank by miles, and maybe think he's the best player in the world because he's on the top of the damage meter. Etc, etc.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're
overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese
needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous
type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around,
the gorillas simply freeze to death.
One of the main reasons why I'm considering upgrading my 233-MHz laptop, is not because it's slow at doing heavy calculations (like Matlab, etc), but because it will soon to be impossible to surf the 'net. Not only are webpages growing larger and larger kB-wise, but they're also using increasingly more CPU resources when loading. Why is it necesary for my poor laptop to run at 100% CPU usage for a long time, just because I want to view a website? When gmail just came out it worked perfectly fast on my computer, but more and more javascript have been stuffed into it, so now it's almost useless for me. The tendency is same for many, many websites.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's okay for me to rip off things created by Disney, as long as I'd be making more money than them?
Actually they have been shrinking since the LIA, Little Ice Age, but that was well before anthropogentic CO2.
*rabble rabble* Climate change denier! *rabble rabble*
"Encrypted passwords" is just a lay man's term for hashing and salting. I don't think anyone would be silly enough to use encryption for this.
Sounds very inefficient and expensive to me.
You personally check the brakes before every drive?
Well, I ride a motorcycle so it's easy. I certainly won't argue against the fact that I statistically has a much larger chance of dying (especially on a motorcycle), but I still feel much safer when I'm the one in control. I guess I'm a job for a shrink :)
It's not just about overall statistics.
I feel more safe driving myself since I like being the one in control. When I fly I put my life in the hands of a huge number of people I don't know; mechanics, pilots, air controllers. Heck, even terrorists who might decide to blow up the plane and I can't do anything about it.
When I'm driving myself, I've personally checked the brakes and all the other essential safety mechanisms. I know that if I hit a tree it's my own fault. Sure, some random asshole might do something unexpected in the traffic, maybe involving me in a serious accident, but even in that case I know I'd still have a slight chance of avoiding the situation if I'm alert and doing my best.
For the record, I don't mind flying that much, I'm just slightly uncomfortable putting my life in the hands of other people to such a degree.
I doubt this is going to be a major cause of future security problems.
As far as I'm aware, WebGL is only allowing shaders to be specified in GLSL which is a pretty high level shading language. Obviously there's no such thing as pointers, and unlike something like javascript there's no interaction with complex objects. Shaders form a very clean and thin interface, basically just being a bunch of floating point vector operations. The only complex objects you're really going to interact with is various texture samplers.
It's easy to make a dangerous bug in a javascript interface to a complete HTML DOM object (or whatever else you can do in javacript these days), it's much harder to make a dangerous bug in a function that calculates a dot product. Sure, shaders are more complicated than that, but you get the drift.
Diablo is clearly heavily inspired by roguelikes, but there's really not that much of the original gameplay left. It would be like if I made a real-time strategy game with units like "pawn", "queen", and "king" and said it was a chesslike.
I don't understand all the e-hate directed at Blizzard for this in these comments.
In order for the game to be viable for competitive play, the game needs to be extremely balanced. If it wasn't the case, Blizzard would lose the favor of a huge number of competitively minded players plus the whole of Korea :P.
Keep in mind that the title of this slashdot news post is clearly designed to troll you. Multiplayer SC2 is fun because it's so balanced. The skill cap of SC2 is insanely high because of it. If you want to play with "fun" units, there are loads of special unbalanced units in the singleplayer campaign. Furthermore, there's a huge number of custom maps with custom units available on battle.net.
Even if you for some reason don't like SC2 multiplayer, the singleplayer campaign still offers as much content as any similarly priced PC game.
but i doubt a guy who can write assembly code would have any problem with this kind of finer grainned controls. he might actually like it better.
My assembler comes with a clutch.
Seen from a technical point of view, first person shooters are some of the easiest games to make, provided you're using an existant engine. The bulk of the man hours needed goes into making graphical content like textures, maps, models, and animations.
Provided your team got an efficient pipeline for producing art assets, stocked with skilled artists, there's really not that many things which can delay the project unexpectedly.
On the other hand, if the project involves building an entire engine from scratch (like in the case of Half Life 2) you got yourself an endless source of unexpected bugs and problems you'll need to deal with. It's much easier to predict how much work is needed to create a model of a zombie than to predict how long it will take to code a core component of a game engine.
Can someone name me some actual real world, large software projects based on functional programming? (Projects led by university professors don't count.) Dismissing OO completely because it is "anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature" seems kinda strange to me. I write parallel and modular OO software all the time... Maybe it's just me misunderstanding something.
Your colleague should have kept a small shrubbery at the side of her desk to cushion falling objects (assuming that's the morale of the article).
You know, people said that about EverQuest, when WoW came out. That the idea of WoW beating EQ was simply absurd because there were so many people playing EQ who wouldn't want to simply switch.
I'm pretty sure that it was a different kind of people who played EverQuest. The appeal of WoW is just so much broader. I'd say the current WoW has more in common with FarmVille than Everquest :P.
Of course, GuildWars doesn't have to sink WoW to win. It just has to have a large enough player base to succeed financially. And that's going to depend on the quality of the content and gameplay. And if it's good enough, then it will slowly win out over WoW...
You're right, as far as I know, none of these "failed" WoW-killers actually turned out as big financial losses. They usually start out with a huge amount of preorders and a couple of months of insane growth, mostly from WoW-players who are tired of the game and want to try something new. But after a few months these people often realize how good WoW actually is and go back to play that again (or quit MMORPGs completely). I've seen it so many times.
I'm not sure what it is going to take to keep these players hooked more than a few months, but sure, if some company figures it out then they might win over Blizzard in the long (very long) run.
It's a ripple effect. No game is going to kill WoW overnight. But sooner or later, a game will come along that brings WoW down. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Indeed.
As you say, people usually quit in groups because nobody wants to play anymore if all their friends have stopped.
Basically my entire guild quit the game shortly after WOTLK was released, but for every people who stops playing, either a new casual player wants to try the game or an old WoW veteran is drawn back by nostalgia. If you check out the WoW subscription numbers, they've been remarkably stable since WOTLK.
Another thing we shouldn't forget is how much we've changed ourselves. Personally I like to complain about how WoW isn't like in the "good old days", but thinking about it, it's probably mainly because I'm out-MMORPG'd. When I finally cancel my WoW account (probably soon since I'm not really playing the game anymore), I don't think I'll go on to another MMORPG, and I believe a lot of other players feel the same way.
More than 10 million people are playing World of Warcraft, all with social connections within the game.
Sure, maybe in a few years only 5 million people will be playing, but it will probably still be the biggest MMORPG out there.
Of course the game isn't going to live forever, but the idea of Guild Wars 2 "beating" WoW is just absurd.
I've played WoW since release and I share your view that the game is going downhill (since end of TBC). The reward/effort ratio is simply too high for the average old-school MMORPG player. But we need to realize that we're a tiny minority, nobody cares if we stop playing. We can go play Rift or Guild Wars 2 or whatever, Blizzard isn't going to notice it.
WoW caters to a huge spectrum of player types. The cartoonish style of the game appeals to casual players ranging from young kids to housewives. Just looking at the screenshots of Guild Wars 2 I can tell you that it's not going to have the same impact. Realistic looking hot chicks? I don't think the average casual housewife is going to enjoy that the same way as nerds like us.
Sure, if you read the MMO-champion forums you'll easily get the idea that all WoW-players hate WoW and want to quit... But it's just a (very) loud minority. WoW isn't going anywhere in the near future.
There's just no way any MMO is going to "beat" World of Warcraft, except maybe Blizzard's next one. Maybe Guild Wars 2 is going to be a better game in every way possible, it's not going to matter anything... It's like if I sat down and made a "social network" site that was better in every way than facebook, and then expected that everyone would stop using facebook and use my service instead. It's just not going to happen, the momentum is too big.
Trying to market a large fantasy-themed MMORPG at the moment is naive at best.
I don't think many (if any) game developers are using either OpenGL 4 or DirectX 11 at their full potentials yet. Especially DirectX 11 is designed to allow a lot of multithreading and decoupling the GPU pipeline from the CPU. If you implement a naive rendering engine with OpenGL or DirectX, sure, you'll find that most of the time you're just sitting around waiting for synchronization and buffers flushing. But if you design your software around multithreading and the new API features, you can squeeze a lot more juice out of the system. Also, I'm sure there's a lot of geometry shader pipeline tricks waiting to be discovered, which will further decouple the GPU from the CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if we "soon" see the merging of the vertex and geometry shader pipelines, might even together with compute shaders. When that happens, the differences between OpenGL and DX is propably going to be very minor (and very, very close to the hardware layer).
Wind power isn't completely without its dangers. Wouldn't want to be near that. :P
World of Warcraft uses a TCP protocol (would post a link to the reverse engineered protocol information as proof, but Blizzard seem pretty aggressive at hunting such sites down so couldn't find it on Google :P)
So, where in your code would you put the delay in order to be sure that it won't cause the game to feel less responsive? Just after the rendering? How exactly will you determine the duration of the delay? How about timing accuracy? Sleep() on Windows is in milliseconds. And how will you deal with frame rendering time suddenly dropping or rising? I know it doesn't matter in the menus of Starcraft II, but I can promise you that some crazy Koreans will care a lot if Blizzard put an (unnecessary) Sleep() in their main loop. Of course this needs to be an option (which it is).
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
One of the main reasons why I'm considering upgrading my 233-MHz laptop, is not because it's slow at doing heavy calculations (like Matlab, etc), but because it will soon to be impossible to surf the 'net. Not only are webpages growing larger and larger kB-wise, but they're also using increasingly more CPU resources when loading. Why is it necesary for my poor laptop to run at 100% CPU usage for a long time, just because I want to view a website? When gmail just came out it worked perfectly fast on my computer, but more and more javascript have been stuffed into it, so now it's almost useless for me. The tendency is same for many, many websites.