Re:Why don't you prove us wrong then?
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
Have you actually played the game? Telling us that that image comes from Myst is an insult to the artists who worked on the game.
Yes, I've actually played the game! One of the images from the page you provide is simply a rotation of the image I linked to: the Myst garden. Yes, the artwork *is* good. But it's *still* texture-maps on wireframes, as the text of the very page you link to plainly states, and it's *still* just 640x480 bitmaps done with 256 colors, which *any* 3D-rendering program could accomplish on modern desktops. I don't get how my example image was an insult while yours was a compliment. In any case, story, animation, sound effects, atmospheric music and a whole lot of polish COULD be done - nowhere did I say that we are all Myst artists, only that the EQUIPMENT that the average desktop user has rivals a whole studio from 15 years ago. See dictionary definition that I provide downthread.
Because I *will* juggle snowballs in Hell before I give up such a STUPID debate just because I was shouted down by people who can't goddam READ:
Original quote:
These days, any one of us could crank out Myst classic inside a month on our desktop.
could 1. pt. of 'can'. 2. an auxiliary verb generally equivalent to 'can', expressing especially a shade of doubt: 'it could be so'.
That's not "any monkey chained to a keyboard could write BSD Unix in a month" nor "we are all as talented individually as the entire Cyan development team" and most definitely not "I could outdo the Myst team myself". It also wasn't "there's no art to the development of Myst" nor "Myst sucked" and while we're at it, not any of the other random phrases that the voices in your head were whispering while you were reading my words.
This phrase amplifies to: "Given:
five extremely talented, creative, gifted users who want to write a game, have written games before, have nothing else to do with their time, and have no physical problems like their arms chopped off or dying of dysentery,
one month,
Five quality (by 2005 standards) computers running the better Linux distributions and the best of Linux development software,
There arrives a possibility that you COULD complete the project, because these machines have increased their processing power and software quality greatly in the past 15 years, and since they have been made available cheaply to the general public and were previously only accessible (financially speaking) to big-time production studios 15 years ago, this empowers each of us home users to be PHYSICALLY ABLE to produce a similar work. The fact that the actual code of a Myst-level program itself would be trivial to write, and that the technical aspects of the game are very basic, lends support to this argument as well."
Do all you Mensa-busting, Fulbright-scholarship-waving, intellectual heavyweights now have the entire idea wrapped up inside your volumous minds all at once?
God, either there must have been some good dope in town this weekend, or everybody's cranky because there wasn't any!
it may not be feasible for all but I try to live without attaching myself to many things,
Heed well, young 'uns, poster speaks Heap Big Wisdom.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
But yeah, the ability to program a game like Myst is simplistic by today's standards, no one can argue that.
ITYM nobody but some of the more bull-headed/.ers!
Fine, it's impossible. Go snivel!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I gather that I'm amongst a real nine-to-fiver crowd, here. The assumption must be that I've never touched a computer in my life, or something. Well, folks, I'm telling you what *I* know about.
Why don't you go to
http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page:
http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm
and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here:
http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg
and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a.png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)
But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)?
http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html
Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.
Go to this page and tell this guy:
http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723
that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."
And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
I have open office, therefore I can crank out an award winning book within a week, tops.
Robert Louis Stephenson wrote Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde in three days flat, then re-wrote it in three more days. So, he's God, right, because he did something impossible?
I said it COULD...
could
--}Could{-- be done, i.e. it is possible.
Re:We could re-do "real artists"...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
Sweetheart...I have been trying to *very* *gently* clue you in...see the link at the bottom of this post? That's my blog. I post 3D, ray-traced images there. No, I don't declare myself a master artist. Yes, I'm pretty much run of the mill. But I *do* ray-trace, belong to boards with other people who ray-trace, use POVray and KPOVmodeler and Gimp and Blender and so on. My blog has gotten to over 100 images. I did them all this last month, since July 30th. In my spare time. The best, most photo-realistic image I've monkeyed up in six hours. (I have just completed a donut tray which admittedly has taken me all day on and off, but ISOsurfaces with high reflection trace slow). Plus, I can save the object files, and re-use them in other scenes. Hence, another angle of the scene that takes me all day takes ten minutes the second time around.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
Speaking of Quandary...
http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723
this article makes much the same point that I did,
so can we all jump on that article and off of my cheerful naivette? Myst classic, not RealMyst or Exile or Uru, was a "slide-show" game. In particular, to quote from the article:
" Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them.
More seriously one can feel as involved with a 2D game as with a 3D game. It's a question of accepting the limitations of the medium, and letting one's brain fill in as necessary. You don't have to do any more than you do when you pretend a picture in a gallery is a 3D scene. For us to see a 3D scene in a 2D picture takes a lot of sophisticated mental image processing - optical illusions came about from this. "
So that's the kind of thing I was talking about. So, OK, give it 2 months? Hee hee...3?
My line is, one of the main things I hear about Why Linux Doesn't Catch On is the classic complaint about the lack of really good games. People rave about Myst to this day. I say, there's a gold-mine waiting to be tapped for the person who brings immersive adventure (even a 2-D slideshow) to the Linux desktop.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
What made Schizm the best game for me (second only to the complete Myst series), and killed it for everyone else, was the difficulty of the puzzles. One puzzle actually requires the use of trigonometry to solve. Another requires you to first crack a code on two seperate tablets, then translate the numbers from base 12 in order to derive meaningfull co-ordinates (you have to discover what base the numbers are on your own). Yet another actually required you to win two games in a row playing the logic game "bridges" against the computer - no kidding, with artificial intelligence playing against you... and since the reward is to raise both ends of a bridge, you get to the other end and discover the *same* puzzle there, too! Like Riven, you had your choice of puzzles to solve at any given time, and ended up doing a lot of running around picking at them individually. The game got a handfull of glowing reviews, an avalanche of frustrated people declaring that they'd given up on it or downloaded the cheat guide, and vanished off of store shelves within the month...as in 'discontinued' not 'sold out'.
Re:We could re-do "real artists"...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
why artists aren't falling all over themselves to join the OSS movement.
But Uncle Anonymous, I *is* fallin' all ovah myseff tuh join de OSS! Been in it fer years!
....I hope that doesn't make me enemies with other artists?
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
Having the tools to do the art is one thing; the artists' work is another -- and that's very time-consuming and takes a lot of talent.
Yes, as the graphics in my blog in my sig shows, I've begun to explore some of that.
Sorry to come off like such a wet-nose - I *have* programmed quite a bit on the hobbyist level, and have produced a few simple games, though nothing fit for release. As I recall Myst, the graphics weren't all that special by today's standards. Now Riven, I suppose I could just barely crank out a passable scene. Exile, I don't think I'll be able to match for a long time, yet. But I've seen countless stills that are at Myst level - Myst ran on my old 640x480 desktop in Quicktime, with no problem at all! Static shots, and in SDL (which handles mice quite nicely) you just display the picture and designate an x/y rectangle where a click will produce action, said action being "show the next picture". There were very few animations - in fact, I remember the game impressed me with how much it did with so little. That's the hard-to-capture story aspect.
OK, I realize I might have been belittling the genre too much, and I didn't mean to. I was talking about the technical aspects.
Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 1
In some ways, modeling 3D is more difficult than 2D work
Yes, I agree, as the work on my blog in my sig shows, I have been exploring some of this area.
We could re-do Myst...better, even!
on
Cyan Worlds Closes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
These days, any one of us could crank out Myst classic inside a month on our desktop. KPOVmodeler and Blender for graphics stills, Audacity for sounds, gcc with the SDL game programming library. One month, tops. A small five-person Sourceforge team could do it with *style* in a month, at the very least. What I don't get, is why this genre is so often praised and so seldom successfully imitated?
Of course, the only game I ever saw match the Myst series was Schizm - but then, as the only person on the planet who bought, played, finished (without cheats!) and enjoyed Schizm (or even heard of it), I *would* say that.
I scanned the whole article but found no trace of humor - except for the CEO of the World Largest Company coming off like Joan Crawford in whiteface screaming about wire coat hangers.
If I haven't fallen for some kind of gag: this is a shame, but also a sign that Microsoft, no matter how many times it gets kicked in the nuts, will simply never learn. It seems they believe that you can *never* have too many enemies!
Celestial mechanics lately makes my head fuzzy. Thanks for setting me straight. I think I need to get back into "hard" science reading again and quit reading Terry Pratchett.
The decision here amongst us Slashdot posters seems to be split down to the last hair between the yeahs and nays. What *I* saw when I went to the page was just a button that said "play burgertime". Didn't know there was site ad and credits in the game itself. I still think Fuddrucker's webmaster did something inappropriate. I also say that the guy has the right to do anything with his site that he wants to. It's not like this is just a sound file or a web button - we're talking a *whole* *game* here. If you've ever written a program, you will appreciate that it's a little more personal than, say, hotlinking the silly sign at http://www.danasoft.com/ (which this author encourages you to do, by the way).
But with thye hung jury and persuasive arguements on either hand, I'm not so sure what I think anymore. I'll be a wuss and allow myself to be surfeited by the peer pressure and wallow in mob mentality. I resign. You win!
I always wondered about this. How could Mars have once have supported life, when it's so far out of the ideal temperate zone, the range where the planet is close enough to the sun to support life, but not so close it burns up?
How about if it turns out that the planets move outward over time, and new planets split off from the sun? Then eventually, Earth would move out to Mars' position, and Venus would be where we are, with that planet cooling off from it's volcanic uproar and shedding it's heat in time for the water vapor to condense into seas...and so on...
OK, science buffs, shoot down my theory. Science fiction fans, tell me which story you've read that has that premise. I'm sure somebody's thought of it before...
In the first place, Fuddruckers' page leaves guests with the impression that they did the game themselves. Meanwhile, they make money off of somebody else's work, without credit, acknowledgement, a link to allow visitors to return traffic to the host's site. But wait, there's more...
As the author points out, they didn't download the game and host it themselves on their own server. So in his web stats, he's getting "false hits" that don't actually represent a visitor to *his* site...only a booby trap that springs every time somebody clicks the link to the game on the Fuddrucker's site.
This drains his bandwidth as well, taxing his servers for constant reloads of the game code while contributing nothing. Imagine if your site were down because it was Slashdotted, but only by bots who clicked on none of your ads or benefitted you in any way.
This wasn't just casual theft. This is to theft as breaking and entering is to ransacking, cleaning out the fridge, maxing out the credit cards and the pay-per-view, having your way with the family pet, turning every light, water tap, and gas jet in the house on full blast and leaving them, and then waiting for the tenants to get back so you can steal their car and drive off, stopping only to knock off the mailbox on the way out.
Or modding a question like this "insightful"...
Now, I know what you're thinking, you'se go: "'Ey, but Hosiah, yah gots a link right in your sig with your wallpaper site." Yes, and it's free for the world to download and use (even rotten people) keyword is *download*, and if it's used for a commercial purpose, all I ask is a link or credit in return. Building your webpage by merely hotlinking the background to my page *would* be dumb, because how do you know I'll keep that image there?
Lately it just seems like they're trying too hard, and not succeeding.
Humor is a difficult art, a fact I didn't discover until I undertook to write a satire column for an obscure publication. Funny is easy when you're spontaneous, wired, and fresh; but hardly anyone can sit at a desk for eight hours day in and day out and be brilliantly witty every single time.
The reactions to the storm show characteristic American resistance to clues, including the idea that touchy-feely-Linux can make it better. These people need the necessities, and once we get the necessities handled, it will be time to worry about communications. Of course, if it gets put to the use of helping rescue effort's communications co-ordinating food drops and matching up survivors, then I suppose it can't be all bad.
But some posters are correct in stating that at least some of the terminals will get looted. Folks, we have nearly a whole state existing in Anarchy. Right now, it's packs of people roving around with nothing but survival on their minds. You know how cranky you get when you miss breakfast? Multiply that times a thousand per person.
I know that in their place right now, I'd be in a state of panic to save the lives of my family, and about ten million times as impatient with stupidity as I normally am. Anybody handing me anything but food and water and medical supplies at that moment might get killed out of pure pique. Anybody obstructing me would get swatted out of the way like a bug. *That's* how these people feel, and they can't help it. Survival instincts are still hard-wired, despite generations of American sheep-conditioning.
Jesus! The logic being that you have to dog-paddle outside the building hoping some food floats out and then it's OK, but if you reach inside: "That's a looter! Shoot to kill!" ???
Friday Flamewar? Oh, goody! *Grabbing his nachoes and beer, putting on flame suit*
OK, you are in a maze of twisty postings, all different. You hit the Windows troll with a Linux rant. You miss. The Windows troll hits you with a snotty retort. His snotty retort hits you for three karma points. Your fan hits the Windows troll with a meta-moderation. He strikes a glancing blow, modding the troll -1 "over-rated". A MacIntosh poster joins the melee, hitting everyone with a Scroll of Impeccible Logic. You recover with a Potion of Hackerly Wisdom....
They're powerless until they can come up with a color-coding system for the National Natural Disaster Threat Advisory System. They don't want to use the same colors for the Terrorist Threat System (currently at orange) because it'd be too confusing. All the other colors look too "swishy".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I've actually played the game! One of the images from the page you provide is simply a rotation of the image I linked to: the Myst garden. Yes, the artwork *is* good. But it's *still* texture-maps on wireframes, as the text of the very page you link to plainly states, and it's *still* just 640x480 bitmaps done with 256 colors, which *any* 3D-rendering program could accomplish on modern desktops. I don't get how my example image was an insult while yours was a compliment. In any case, story, animation, sound effects, atmospheric music and a whole lot of polish COULD be done - nowhere did I say that we are all Myst artists, only that the EQUIPMENT that the average desktop user has rivals a whole studio from 15 years ago. See dictionary definition that I provide downthread.
Original quote:
These days, any one of us could crank out Myst classic inside a month on our desktop.
could 1. pt. of 'can'. 2. an auxiliary verb generally equivalent to 'can', expressing especially a shade of doubt: 'it could be so'.
That's not "any monkey chained to a keyboard could write BSD Unix in a month" nor "we are all as talented individually as the entire Cyan development team" and most definitely not "I could outdo the Myst team myself". It also wasn't "there's no art to the development of Myst" nor "Myst sucked" and while we're at it, not any of the other random phrases that the voices in your head were whispering while you were reading my words.
This phrase amplifies to: "Given:
five extremely talented, creative, gifted users who want to write a game, have written games before, have nothing else to do with their time, and have no physical problems like their arms chopped off or dying of dysentery,
one month,
Five quality (by 2005 standards) computers running the better Linux distributions and the best of Linux development software,
There arrives a possibility that you COULD complete the project, because these machines have increased their processing power and software quality greatly in the past 15 years, and since they have been made available cheaply to the general public and were previously only accessible (financially speaking) to big-time production studios 15 years ago, this empowers each of us home users to be PHYSICALLY ABLE to produce a similar work. The fact that the actual code of a Myst-level program itself would be trivial to write, and that the technical aspects of the game are very basic, lends support to this argument as well."
Do all you Mensa-busting, Fulbright-scholarship-waving, intellectual heavyweights now have the entire idea wrapped up inside your volumous minds all at once?
God, either there must have been some good dope in town this weekend, or everybody's cranky because there wasn't any!
Heed well, young 'uns, poster speaks Heap Big Wisdom.
ITYM nobody but some of the more bull-headed /.ers!
Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a .png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)
But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)? http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.
Go tell a literary scholar that it was impossible for Robert Louis Stephenson to write "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" in three days: http://www.the-wow-experience.com/resources/NEW_Pu blic_Domain_Products.htm
Go to this page and tell this guy: http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723
that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."
And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.
Robert Louis Stephenson wrote Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde in three days flat, then re-wrote it in three more days. So, he's God, right, because he did something impossible?
I said it COULD... could --}Could{-- be done, i.e. it is possible.
Sweetheart...I have been trying to *very* *gently* clue you in...see the link at the bottom of this post? That's my blog. I post 3D, ray-traced images there. No, I don't declare myself a master artist. Yes, I'm pretty much run of the mill. But I *do* ray-trace, belong to boards with other people who ray-trace, use POVray and KPOVmodeler and Gimp and Blender and so on. My blog has gotten to over 100 images. I did them all this last month, since July 30th. In my spare time. The best, most photo-realistic image I've monkeyed up in six hours. (I have just completed a donut tray which admittedly has taken me all day on and off, but ISOsurfaces with high reflection trace slow). Plus, I can save the object files, and re-use them in other scenes. Hence, another angle of the scene that takes me all day takes ten minutes the second time around.
" Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them.
More seriously one can feel as involved with a 2D game as with a 3D game. It's a question of accepting the limitations of the medium, and letting one's brain fill in as necessary. You don't have to do any more than you do when you pretend a picture in a gallery is a 3D scene. For us to see a 3D scene in a 2D picture takes a lot of sophisticated mental image processing - optical illusions came about from this. "
So that's the kind of thing I was talking about. So, OK, give it 2 months? Hee hee...3?
My line is, one of the main things I hear about Why Linux Doesn't Catch On is the classic complaint about the lack of really good games. People rave about Myst to this day. I say, there's a gold-mine waiting to be tapped for the person who brings immersive adventure (even a 2-D slideshow) to the Linux desktop.
http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=414
I was being sarcastic about being the only one to have heard of it, but darn near close! It's ancient history, now.
What made Schizm the best game for me (second only to the complete Myst series), and killed it for everyone else, was the difficulty of the puzzles. One puzzle actually requires the use of trigonometry to solve. Another requires you to first crack a code on two seperate tablets, then translate the numbers from base 12 in order to derive meaningfull co-ordinates (you have to discover what base the numbers are on your own). Yet another actually required you to win two games in a row playing the logic game "bridges" against the computer - no kidding, with artificial intelligence playing against you... and since the reward is to raise both ends of a bridge, you get to the other end and discover the *same* puzzle there, too! Like Riven, you had your choice of puzzles to solve at any given time, and ended up doing a lot of running around picking at them individually. The game got a handfull of glowing reviews, an avalanche of frustrated people declaring that they'd given up on it or downloaded the cheat guide, and vanished off of store shelves within the month...as in 'discontinued' not 'sold out'.
But Uncle Anonymous, I *is* fallin' all ovah myseff tuh join de OSS! Been in it fer years!
Yes, as the graphics in my blog in my sig shows, I've begun to explore some of that.
Sorry to come off like such a wet-nose - I *have* programmed quite a bit on the hobbyist level, and have produced a few simple games, though nothing fit for release. As I recall Myst, the graphics weren't all that special by today's standards. Now Riven, I suppose I could just barely crank out a passable scene. Exile, I don't think I'll be able to match for a long time, yet. But I've seen countless stills that are at Myst level - Myst ran on my old 640x480 desktop in Quicktime, with no problem at all! Static shots, and in SDL (which handles mice quite nicely) you just display the picture and designate an x/y rectangle where a click will produce action, said action being "show the next picture". There were very few animations - in fact, I remember the game impressed me with how much it did with so little. That's the hard-to-capture story aspect.
OK, I realize I might have been belittling the genre too much, and I didn't mean to. I was talking about the technical aspects.
Yes, I agree, as the work on my blog in my sig shows, I have been exploring some of this area.
Of course, the only game I ever saw match the Myst series was Schizm - but then, as the only person on the planet who bought, played, finished (without cheats!) and enjoyed Schizm (or even heard of it), I *would* say that.
If I haven't fallen for some kind of gag: this is a shame, but also a sign that Microsoft, no matter how many times it gets kicked in the nuts, will simply never learn. It seems they believe that you can *never* have too many enemies!
Celestial mechanics lately makes my head fuzzy. Thanks for setting me straight. I think I need to get back into "hard" science reading again and quit reading Terry Pratchett.
You need to get laid more often.
The decision here amongst us Slashdot posters seems to be split down to the last hair between the yeahs and nays. What *I* saw when I went to the page was just a button that said "play burgertime". Didn't know there was site ad and credits in the game itself. I still think Fuddrucker's webmaster did something inappropriate. I also say that the guy has the right to do anything with his site that he wants to. It's not like this is just a sound file or a web button - we're talking a *whole* *game* here. If you've ever written a program, you will appreciate that it's a little more personal than, say, hotlinking the silly sign at http://www.danasoft.com/ (which this author encourages you to do, by the way).
But with thye hung jury and persuasive arguements on either hand, I'm not so sure what I think anymore. I'll be a wuss and allow myself to be surfeited by the peer pressure and wallow in mob mentality. I resign. You win!
How about if it turns out that the planets move outward over time, and new planets split off from the sun? Then eventually, Earth would move out to Mars' position, and Venus would be where we are, with that planet cooling off from it's volcanic uproar and shedding it's heat in time for the water vapor to condense into seas...and so on...
OK, science buffs, shoot down my theory. Science fiction fans, tell me which story you've read that has that premise. I'm sure somebody's thought of it before...
Wake me when they decend into "Wife Valley"
In the first place, Fuddruckers' page leaves guests with the impression that they did the game themselves. Meanwhile, they make money off of somebody else's work, without credit, acknowledgement, a link to allow visitors to return traffic to the host's site. But wait, there's more...
As the author points out, they didn't download the game and host it themselves on their own server. So in his web stats, he's getting "false hits" that don't actually represent a visitor to *his* site...only a booby trap that springs every time somebody clicks the link to the game on the Fuddrucker's site.
This drains his bandwidth as well, taxing his servers for constant reloads of the game code while contributing nothing. Imagine if your site were down because it was Slashdotted, but only by bots who clicked on none of your ads or benefitted you in any way.
This wasn't just casual theft. This is to theft as breaking and entering is to ransacking, cleaning out the fridge, maxing out the credit cards and the pay-per-view, having your way with the family pet, turning every light, water tap, and gas jet in the house on full blast and leaving them, and then waiting for the tenants to get back so you can steal their car and drive off, stopping only to knock off the mailbox on the way out.
Or modding a question like this "insightful"...
Now, I know what you're thinking, you'se go: "'Ey, but Hosiah, yah gots a link right in your sig with your wallpaper site." Yes, and it's free for the world to download and use (even rotten people) keyword is *download*, and if it's used for a commercial purpose, all I ask is a link or credit in return. Building your webpage by merely hotlinking the background to my page *would* be dumb, because how do you know I'll keep that image there?
Humor is a difficult art, a fact I didn't discover until I undertook to write a satire column for an obscure publication. Funny is easy when you're spontaneous, wired, and fresh; but hardly anyone can sit at a desk for eight hours day in and day out and be brilliantly witty every single time.
But some posters are correct in stating that at least some of the terminals will get looted. Folks, we have nearly a whole state existing in Anarchy. Right now, it's packs of people roving around with nothing but survival on their minds. You know how cranky you get when you miss breakfast? Multiply that times a thousand per person.
I know that in their place right now, I'd be in a state of panic to save the lives of my family, and about ten million times as impatient with stupidity as I normally am. Anybody handing me anything but food and water and medical supplies at that moment might get killed out of pure pique. Anybody obstructing me would get swatted out of the way like a bug. *That's* how these people feel, and they can't help it. Survival instincts are still hard-wired, despite generations of American sheep-conditioning.
Jesus! The logic being that you have to dog-paddle outside the building hoping some food floats out and then it's OK, but if you reach inside: "That's a looter! Shoot to kill!" ???
OK, you are in a maze of twisty postings, all different. You hit the Windows troll with a Linux rant. You miss. The Windows troll hits you with a snotty retort. His snotty retort hits you for three karma points. Your fan hits the Windows troll with a meta-moderation. He strikes a glancing blow, modding the troll -1 "over-rated". A MacIntosh poster joins the melee, hitting everyone with a Scroll of Impeccible Logic. You recover with a Potion of Hackerly Wisdom....
They're powerless until they can come up with a color-coding system for the National Natural Disaster Threat Advisory System. They don't want to use the same colors for the Terrorist Threat System (currently at orange) because it'd be too confusing. All the other colors look too "swishy".