"It's basically a bigger, more complex WoW"....
Clearly, you haven't played EvE for any real stretch of time (For frame of reference, EvE players tenure is measured in years, not 2 months to max level/gear like WoW).
Nice misquoting there. I have played EVE since 2003-05-15 (DoB of my first char). And you?
EvE is almost exactly what they're talking about here- a fully persistent universe with objectives that are both dependent and player-driven.
It's a more complex variant of the WoW outdoor PVP scheme, nothing else. Think about it.
You blow something up, it STAYS blown up unless someone wants to rebuild it, whereupon you shoot them down.
Most things in the game you cannot blow up, including most player-built stuff. EVE offers very limited "freedom", CCP messes with the "sandbox" rules all the time, they even remove items and structures from the "persistent" universe sometimes.
I pity the people who think that having lackluster PVE and content in general so that player initiative is required for anything at all to happen are somehow an advantage. In the early days, CCP still tried to keep things interesting with various ingame events, nowdays it's just a grindfest in empire and a pvp slugfest in 0.0. It's boring and it's also lagged to hell.
...
c. Make a PvP Game ONLY. (Already done, Play Eve-Online (http://www.eve-online.com/ Warning: You will have to "work" to do anything in game. Little to no free-be's.
(...)
The end result is that you can't have a fully persistant world, have PvE and PvP, have Full economies etc etc. all in one game since it's almost the same as putting 5 holy men of different religions into a room and asking them to decide which is better. (...)
EVE is not a pure PVP game. At least half, possibly more of the population is just grinding the (boring) PVE content in "hi sec" space (where PVP is restricted to war declarations and suicide ganking). Funnily enough, the EVE forums are full of debates about whether there should be more or less protection to "carebears" (non-PVPers) in "hi sec" space or not, people are asking for nerfs left and right (yes, even the PVPers cannot agree on one rule set, so the problem you describe is just as present at a different level of detail).
maybe from a content perspective it's not all that interesting, but ccp did something no one else could in getting the serious hardware to keep thousands of players engaged in a single world. They even rewrote some of the Stackless Python language (itself a fork of the CPython implementation) just for performance reasons. That tech is impressive.
In other news, players are complaining about excessive lag in 100v100 fights nowdays. Sorry, but the advertised tech is not there, EVE is suffering from extreme scalability problems because they cannot use more than 1 thread (CPU core) per solar system (except for the market, which can run in parallel). So large fleet fights, the "endgame" of EVE, are terrible - sometimes you see nothing for 10-20 minutes and then you are dead.
...certainly don't make the player feel like a hero...
Well, that's kind of the problem though, isn't it? You can't all be the hero.
Just referring to some earlier comments regarding the perception of MMOGs with persistence. And yes, in PVE-centric games you *can* be the hero because of the perception of your own achievements.
If some giant monster is coming to destroy the world...and you kill it...then you're done. One monster, one world, one hero. Unless you're going to come up with a new monster coming to destroy another world... But how long until that becomes a boring mini-game?
This is where changing content comes in. WoW has to add new content all the time, a "sandbox" game would have to let players create interesting content (before you ask: no, EVE has no such interesting player-generated content, it's bland and lifeless... you cannot even anchor structures wherever you want, it all follows a very strict scheme).
...It would be nothing without the player personalities and interactions...
Isn't that the whole point in playing an MMOG? I mean... If you aren't interested in the other players you could just go play a single-player game. If all you want is objectives that stay completed you can go play something like Half-Life 2 or Portal.
It depends on what people expect from a game. Some want actual "gameplay" challenges, some just want a glorified chat / Second Life environment. EVE tries to look like the former but in reality is the latter because apart from player-generated drama, not much is happening.
The whole point in an MMOG is the player interaction.
I disagree. It's still a game and should feel like one. It's sad when you have more fun on TS/Ventrilo than in the game itself because it shows that you might all as well be playing different solo games while chatting on TS.
The complaint that the PvE isn't very impressive is valid, because EVE isn't about the NPCs, it's about the players.
The players are able to dramatically shape the universe around them.
Sadly, they aren't in reality. Just like not everyone can be a hero, not everyone can be a leader either. Very few people actually have an impact on the EVE world.
You can be a hero, if you want. There are some very well-respected members of the community.
That requires mostly excessive forum posting, having unique items (that can't be acquired anymore) and things like that.
You can conquer a galaxy and build outposts to defend it. Or you you can rampage across the galaxy destroying what others have created.
You can't destroy stations, so it all feels a bit superficial. You can't even force people to undock, so much for "rampaging"...
The NPCs just kind of sit there in the background providing backstory for the folks who care about it, and an easy source of income.
Translation: "we kinda tried to make them interesting but it'd have been to hard to actually put content in the game".
EVE has basically no PVE content worth speaking of. The missions are boring mini-games and certainly don't make the player feel like a hero. All the persistent (but changeable) content is player-generated/-owned and while it does make the game interesting, it's not an achievement because anyone could choose to do that in an MMO (just throw buildable content at players and let them sort it out). It's basically a bigger / more complex WoW outdoor PVP map - you take a flag and it stays yours until the enemy takes it. It would be nothing without the player personalities and interactions.
I'd love to have a run-time configurable Linux kernel (we're far from it unfortunately, since 5% speed matters more than 500% usability nowdays) and the ability to save the current configuration to BIOS EEPROMs (to boot via LinuxBIOS/coreboot).
Even without using the EEPROMs, loading a couple of MB of kernel/OS image from a hard disk drive should take less than a second on modern hardware.
You cannot really blame Microsoft's pressure for the FOSS community's weird priorities (it's odd that they are trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of a kernel, which is then used in an OS that takes 30+ seconds to boot and 10+ minutes to configure/install the new kernel). Another reason is probably that much of the work on "modern" systems is done by people who are reinventing wheels because they've never seen/read about the decades of great engineering work that went into earlier systems. They grew up with bloated APIs on fast computers and will just produce more bloated and badly engineered stuff that - in their experience - the typical user finds perfectly acceptable.
I don't think users would like their PCs to be accessible from the 'net while they have switched them off. That's just what all the law enforcement / domestic surveillance agencies want, a perfect way to spy on people...
Similar technology is already used on mobile phones, they can be remotely reprogrammed to pretend that they're switched off while they're recording and transmitting your conversation.
We don't live in a 1984 world yet, but the usual greedy Megacorps are trying to patent the required technology already...
It's â449 in Germany and approx. 16.1% of that is VAT (rate is 19%), so it's more like $592 (Germany) vs. $399 (US). That's not terribly bad, but still a result of what most large companies are doing at the moment (including MMOs): having the rich european countries subsidize the US consumers, who are getting poorer and poorer in comparison, by sticking to a 1:1 USD:EUR conversion.
Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.
Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.
Current games are designed to appeal to an escapist audience and thus try to be more "realistic" in their gameplay. Real life is much more like FedEx quests than abstract puzzles.
T>True, but who are you to say what others due with their free CPU cycles?
CPU cycles aren't free these days (with good power management), they cost electricity and producing electricty usually leads to CO2 emissions and thus contributes to global warming.
Your pointless SETI computations are heating up my planet, so I can bloody well complain about it.
Now, finding a large prime number on the other hand, might earn me an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records...
Since the Cell processors are a couple of years old now and GPUs are being used more and more for offloading some computation, wouldn't the latter be the way to go? Or is the Cell architecture so fundamentally different that it is much better suited for some tasks than GPUs?
There's a lot more that determines pricing apart from "quality" (you mean cost) of components and greed. First and foremost, there is cost of labor (although I doubt that Apple employs expensive US/European people for assembling their stuff). Also don't underestimate the cost benefit of having efficient logistics / infrastructure for assembly.
Also, compared to most smaller market players, both Apple and Dell are outrageously overpriced in this regard.
But for the sake of a good conversation, what other "different" anti-piracy schemes have you all come across in games, such as the above mentioned "kill everything after 30s" technique?
I had the original version of Alternate Reality - the Dungeon for the 800XL, but made a (straightforward, i.e. no fancy programs) backup copy once (5 1/4" floppy disks... they never lasted long). If you booted from the copy, you'd encounter 2 FBI agents immediately, they would attack you with "the long arm of the law" and kill you.
they're making a big comeback in many so-called "civilized countries", this is just one example of many (see this for quiet Austria e.g.). It's just the logical consequence of giving governments too much power and the tools to enforce it while the public is put under curfew by the ridiculous anti-terrorism laws.
Slashdot Mirror
... the airport security dumbasses will confiscate your laptop and claim you are using a pirated version of Windows.
Nice misquoting there. I have played EVE since 2003-05-15 (DoB of my first char). And you?
EvE is almost exactly what they're talking about here- a fully persistent universe with objectives that are both dependent and player-driven.
It's a more complex variant of the WoW outdoor PVP scheme, nothing else. Think about it.
You blow something up, it STAYS blown up unless someone wants to rebuild it, whereupon you shoot them down.
Most things in the game you cannot blow up, including most player-built stuff. EVE offers very limited "freedom", CCP messes with the "sandbox" rules all the time, they even remove items and structures from the "persistent" universe sometimes.
I pity the people who think that having lackluster PVE and content in general so that player initiative is required for anything at all to happen are somehow an advantage. In the early days, CCP still tried to keep things interesting with various ingame events, nowdays it's just a grindfest in empire and a pvp slugfest in 0.0. It's boring and it's also lagged to hell.
... c. Make a PvP Game ONLY. (Already done, Play Eve-Online (http://www.eve-online.com/ Warning: You will have to "work" to do anything in game. Little to no free-be's. (...)
The end result is that you can't have a fully persistant world, have PvE and PvP, have Full economies etc etc. all in one game since it's almost the same as putting 5 holy men of different religions into a room and asking them to decide which is better. (...)
EVE is not a pure PVP game. At least half, possibly more of the population is just grinding the (boring) PVE content in "hi sec" space (where PVP is restricted to war declarations and suicide ganking). Funnily enough, the EVE forums are full of debates about whether there should be more or less protection to "carebears" (non-PVPers) in "hi sec" space or not, people are asking for nerfs left and right (yes, even the PVPers cannot agree on one rule set, so the problem you describe is just as present at a different level of detail).
maybe from a content perspective it's not all that interesting, but ccp did something no one else could in getting the serious hardware to keep thousands of players engaged in a single world. They even rewrote some of the Stackless Python language (itself a fork of the CPython implementation) just for performance reasons. That tech is impressive.
In other news, players are complaining about excessive lag in 100v100 fights nowdays. Sorry, but the advertised tech is not there, EVE is suffering from extreme scalability problems because they cannot use more than 1 thread (CPU core) per solar system (except for the market, which can run in parallel). So large fleet fights, the "endgame" of EVE, are terrible - sometimes you see nothing for 10-20 minutes and then you are dead.
...certainly don't make the player feel like a hero...
Well, that's kind of the problem though, isn't it? You can't all be the hero.
Just referring to some earlier comments regarding the perception of MMOGs with persistence. And yes, in PVE-centric games you *can* be the hero because of the perception of your own achievements.
If some giant monster is coming to destroy the world...and you kill it...then you're done. One monster, one world, one hero. Unless you're going to come up with a new monster coming to destroy another world... But how long until that becomes a boring mini-game?
This is where changing content comes in. WoW has to add new content all the time, a "sandbox" game would have to let players create interesting content (before you ask: no, EVE has no such interesting player-generated content, it's bland and lifeless ... you cannot even anchor structures wherever you want, it all follows a very strict scheme).
...It would be nothing without the player personalities and interactions...
Isn't that the whole point in playing an MMOG? I mean... If you aren't interested in the other players you could just go play a single-player game. If all you want is objectives that stay completed you can go play something like Half-Life 2 or Portal.
It depends on what people expect from a game. Some want actual "gameplay" challenges, some just want a glorified chat / Second Life environment. EVE tries to look like the former but in reality is the latter because apart from player-generated drama, not much is happening.
The whole point in an MMOG is the player interaction.
I disagree. It's still a game and should feel like one. It's sad when you have more fun on TS/Ventrilo than in the game itself because it shows that you might all as well be playing different solo games while chatting on TS.
The complaint that the PvE isn't very impressive is valid, because EVE isn't about the NPCs, it's about the players.
The players are able to dramatically shape the universe around them.
Sadly, they aren't in reality. Just like not everyone can be a hero, not everyone can be a leader either. Very few people actually have an impact on the EVE world.
You can be a hero, if you want. There are some very well-respected members of the community.
That requires mostly excessive forum posting, having unique items (that can't be acquired anymore) and things like that.
You can conquer a galaxy and build outposts to defend it. Or you you can rampage across the galaxy destroying what others have created.
You can't destroy stations, so it all feels a bit superficial. You can't even force people to undock, so much for "rampaging"...
The NPCs just kind of sit there in the background providing backstory for the folks who care about it, and an easy source of income.
Translation: "we kinda tried to make them interesting but it'd have been to hard to actually put content in the game".
EVE has basically no PVE content worth speaking of. The missions are boring mini-games and certainly don't make the player feel like a hero. All the persistent (but changeable) content is player-generated/-owned and while it does make the game interesting, it's not an achievement because anyone could choose to do that in an MMO (just throw buildable content at players and let them sort it out). It's basically a bigger / more complex WoW outdoor PVP map - you take a flag and it stays yours until the enemy takes it. It would be nothing without the player personalities and interactions.
How much more do we, Americans, have to take before we take action?
Calm down, they didn't really discontinue the Whopper!
Even without using the EEPROMs, loading a couple of MB of kernel/OS image from a hard disk drive should take less than a second on modern hardware.
You cannot really blame Microsoft's pressure for the FOSS community's weird priorities (it's odd that they are trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of a kernel, which is then used in an OS that takes 30+ seconds to boot and 10+ minutes to configure/install the new kernel). Another reason is probably that much of the work on "modern" systems is done by people who are reinventing wheels because they've never seen/read about the decades of great engineering work that went into earlier systems. They grew up with bloated APIs on fast computers and will just produce more bloated and badly engineered stuff that - in their experience - the typical user finds perfectly acceptable.
Similar technology is already used on mobile phones, they can be remotely reprogrammed to pretend that they're switched off while they're recording and transmitting your conversation.
We don't live in a 1984 world yet, but the usual greedy Megacorps are trying to patent the required technology already...
(awesome game btw., highly recommended)
Well, they could buy Sony I suppose and mop up the consumer electronics market...
That pistol controller in the box (first picture) must be great for Al Quaida's version of "educational" games like America's Army etc. ...
It's â449 in Germany and approx. 16.1% of that is VAT (rate is 19%), so it's more like $592 (Germany) vs. $399 (US). That's not terribly bad, but still a result of what most large companies are doing at the moment (including MMOs): having the rich european countries subsidize the US consumers, who are getting poorer and poorer in comparison, by sticking to a 1:1 USD:EUR conversion.
Here is some info from the FAQ:
Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.
Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.
Current games are designed to appeal to an escapist audience and thus try to be more "realistic" in their gameplay. Real life is much more like FedEx quests than abstract puzzles.
T>True, but who are you to say what others due with their free CPU cycles?
CPU cycles aren't free these days (with good power management), they cost electricity and producing electricty usually leads to CO2 emissions and thus contributes to global warming.
Your pointless SETI computations are heating up my planet, so I can bloody well complain about it.
Now, finding a large prime number on the other hand, might earn me an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records...
Since the Cell processors are a couple of years old now and GPUs are being used more and more for offloading some computation, wouldn't the latter be the way to go? Or is the Cell architecture so fundamentally different that it is much better suited for some tasks than GPUs?
Online genetic testing exposed as a scam
Also, compared to most smaller market players, both Apple and Dell are outrageously overpriced in this regard.
I doubt that, a typical Googlebotting does more than that...
After all, we've been able to plug in a decent garbage collector into sloppily written C programs for 15+ years now ...
I had the original version of Alternate Reality - the Dungeon for the 800XL, but made a (straightforward, i.e. no fancy programs) backup copy once (5 1/4" floppy disks ... they never lasted long). If you booted from the copy, you'd encounter 2 FBI agents immediately, they would attack you with "the long arm of the law" and kill you.
Ah yes, and that's something that should be built into Firefox.