noooooo! It's Markspaces! Plural! Apostrophe is possessive!
Markspace's implies that there is something belonging to one Markspace. Markspaces' implies that there is something belonging to multiple Markspaces. Markspaces implies that there are multiple Markspaces.
Please donate all excess punctuation to the needy.
The top rank (14) will only be awarded to.1% of all the total population, which translates to 1 out of every 1000. For a server with 30,000, that means only 30. For a smaller server with 10,000, only 10(!!!) will be able to acheive rank 14 and be awarded the big gear.
So? Convince everyone to double their number of alts, and you're up to double the high-rankers. Considering how easy it is to make alts (is there a cap?); and how many people won't be trying for top-level, and you can reduce the odds significantly.
OTOH... there is a point to having this awesome gear be so narrowly available. It means it's actually valuable; something to strive for. Striving makes the game more fun.
I'm fairly sure I picked that up from a/. sigline, where it looked like a quote; I don't take it all that seriously (I continue to buy apple products because I do a fair bit of media work, I'm used to it, and all my stuff is on it at the moment; I'm sure if I had started out with MS products I'd have the same reasons to whatever extent) but it's just one of those things that catches your eye and sticks with you.
To clarify - I certainly wasn't trying to taint the article; I would like to fully encourage microsoft and indeed any other company to do good things like this, as small as that encouragement is compared.
It's nice to have your preconceptions kicked around a bit once in a while (makes things a whole lot more interesting), and when you've got a forum where you can step across and make a point for the other team - no matter that the wording wasn't great (hey, this is/.), it's a step towards stoppin the hatin. Which'd be nice.
Anyway, from your reply I can clear up a misconception, so thanks:)
Hey, that's two steps to making the world a better place!:D
This is the second time in about a week that we're seeing Microsoft doing something that puts it up against a greater evil. And to make it even more boggling, they're doing it open-source.
Did Microsoft hire someone new? Or did they take a look at their image and try to make amends? As much as I know my view of them is biased both by my history as a mac fan and the rants I've seen of others complaining and complaining about problems with microsoft (note I'm not trying to start an argument here, just pointing out that my view is biased); I know that Gates has funded new CompSci departments for universities like Cambridge (UK) - it's just a surprise to see what has seemed such a stereotypical corporation taking these steps against something in this way. Gates' view that open source is evil has been overtaken by the view that child porn is worse. I completely agree, and as strange as it is to say it - good work, Microsoft.
More seriously, I'm surprised by the size of it. It seems like an RC light powered plane with inbuilt gizmos in the wings - I had seriously expected the Pentagon to be a huge amount smaller than this, with a vague thought of hover. I guess without the wireless power (see the/. story, NASA prizes) available yet these things have to carry their own fuel, and then the structure needs to be larger and more supportive, enough physical strength to support power loading, and space for the gizmos. But... 13 inches. And since I don't have a concievable way of saying it without innuendo... that's BIG.
"Servo" - as in 17 servos, used in the article - is short for Servomechanism. Remote actuation. Service, on the other hand... and you can bet that they've already thought of more than 17 ways to use it. I have, and I haven't even had coffee.
We know the masses of a lot of the atoms (though there's a lot more than 1000 isotopes). Molecules are a completely different matter; there's an infinite range of possible molecules, because you can put them together in a lot of different ways; chain molecules (like DNA (hey, there's 5 billion different molecules - and that's only counting humans!)) are difficult to untangle and sort out; when you can weigh them, you can use the masses of atoms to try to calculate how many of each atom is in the molecule, and from there you can try and work out which configurations of atoms are possible.
This is the next step from a process called mass spectroscopy, where a molecule is given + or - one electron, then fired through a calibrated magnet to hit a target. If the magnet is calibrated so that a single charge on a molecule of weight W deflects by exactly n degrees, then if the molecule weighs W it will hit the target, and you know the mass of your molecule.
It's more trial-and-error than TFA, but with a sweep across the calibration settings you get lovely graphs showing how much of a mixture is which compound. It's fast (seconds for a full-range mass chart), which I somehow doubt TFA is quite up to yet - maybe for a single molecule, but something in the description rankles of a slow process.
I find this stuff incredibly interesting. The presentation there tries to reverse-engineer the concept of fun. In one of Terry Pratchett's recent books, the Auditors reverse-engineer everything to atomic level to attempt to gauge appeal, and it gets lost. Although Raph's talk is trying to break things down into atoms, there is also an insight from realising there's certainly more there than just atoms and associated verbs - the atoms in themselves are pointless. You can press a button, you can move a mouse, you can get the timing right. But it only begins to matter when you make atom-agglomerates - molecules - that it begins. His timing sequence for a quake gib is a molecule. It's a sequence of events where each atom is connected in a particular order and in a particular way. These molecules can all add up in his parallel - multiple occurences of sequences, some work, some don't; the target there is to get as many viable molecules as possible, and from that 'win'. Or they can go in series - a polymer molecule, where the win comes from how long you can make your molecule; the argument there is then whether a beautiful molecule is a pure chain, or a branched chain, or sheet, or however. We're going a little deep into this analogy, but it still makes sense.
He says in the presentation that he hasn't got a clue what to do with it. I wonder if I could get hired by the first crew who do, because I bet it'd be an incredibly interesting way to make a game.
Previous posters... sheesh.
from TFA, we see that you need to beam power to a robot climbing a cable, being judged by the amount the robot is able to carry while going.
Batteries and LCRs are probably out. They suggest directed microwave or similar, if any of you are interested.
Puzzle Pirates is a developmentally odd game; there's about 12 or so puzzles currently in game, with full functionality and game completeness. Occasionally a new puzzle is released to fit one of the other 8 or so crafting houses that still require a puzzle to match the craft; this has a lot of feedback from the community (people kept asking for spades in the forums (why the association between pirates and card games? Seems completely unintuitive to me, if anyone has a reason please explain!)) so they went ahead and put it in)
They have an open request for suggestions for these remaining puzzles; they're very thorough in doing these puzzles, and it's obvious that a lot of work has been done in creating puzzles that fit with their ranking systems (from 'booched' (botched) through 'fair' 'good' 'excellent' 'incredible' depending on how skilled your completion of the puzzle was relative to the others in the game - it's very dynamic and nicely sorted out), so that every single puzzle is playable by most, but still with a difficulty gradient that requires you to have serious thoughtpower and/or skill to master.
The game garden seems very much a way of getting more ideas - taking your idea to the game to try to have it incorporated as a puzzle is difficult, because they're limited in how it's implemented, has to be scorable to allow the player rankings, has to be both easy and difficult, etc etc... the game garden seems a great way of getting more of these ideas to be playable without actually putting them into the full game. This is a great idea for Three Rings, as it allows them to vet games far more easily, it allows the non-ThreeRings game designers to get their games out to others even if it doesn't get into Puzzle Pirates, and it allows the players to play more puzzles (there's a link in-game that takes you to the website too).
Ok, there's a certain attraction to it... but I for one will refuse to ever trade for an item I like if it has a name like "OMGT3H 1337BR1NG3Rz0r" or "Your MOM" or "boobies". multiplayer game moderators already seem to have trouble enough keeping tabs on player names, and adding item name customisation when there's 10 or more usable items per person would mean they simply wouldn't moderate them.
Unless the item names were changeable - THAT I could deal with.
I suppose with item naming and inspection you'd also be able to tell what kind of literature the person is into and have the ability to treat them appropriately:)
Essentially, this would be an extension of the current customisability rush we're seeing with characters at the moment; currently crafting is limited to preset recipes (examples d2, WoW); in d2 we see random bonus mods on crafted items, in WoW they've given a huge list of items to which you can add one custom mod in the form of a patch. Customisability would remove the element of chance of getting great mods at a lower level compated to d2; however it would reduce the time needed to spend on these items.
I'm biased on this - I think it's a good thing that you can get what you want, but I think it may be a bad thing that you get what you want straight away. As soon as there's a recognised best item, everyone will strive only to make that. Randomness drives a lot of trade as some players value some bonuses over others; getting what you want without steps in between seems to me like it'll take a bundle of fun out of these kinds of games. This applies as much to non MMOs, even SP games; I think the reason d2 continues to live as long as it does is the item-luck. I certainly still play d2 SP, and the crafting is still interesting because I never know what I'll get on the items I make.
Hooray for customisability - but I hope the game makers have the sense to keep an element of chance in there, and that the best items can't be made.
And don't forget what may be fairly important... don't allow free naming of items, please! I wince to think what we'll see otherwise...
I'm completely in line with this - the first thing that came to mind was photoshop, and the hundreds of megs per file that always happens with files that have been worked on for a while. Remote access? No thanks. Second that came to mind was gaming - java games are all very well, but they have their problems; games like puzzle pirates, designed for all-platform use, based on java, still have fairly large load times - and this is with most data on your computer. Getting all that kind of information remotely on top of the current stuff would require huge improvements in bandwidth. Third thing that came to mind was privacy issues (with the recent security incidents), hacking attempts (this'd be a tempting target to the scum that take pleasure from targeting useful systems), and so on.
It's a nice idea to improve the current stuff with the JS+XML we're seeing - and there's some neat stuff; multimap's mouseovering with image/map combination; this neat thing that you can click on when you recognise a book cover; yeah, it's nice to look at, nice to use, but we're left with: "Variety is the spice of life", and there's something BIG to be said about keeping seperate platforms and utility. Competition leads to better stuff, where uniformity leads to stagnation.
When Black and White came out, it wasn't an entirely new genre - we're all used to god games from games like populous, but it did a lot of cool things. The graphics handling at the time was "Wow!" stuff, being able to zoom from overview of the world to looking at the face of one of your minions in seconds of smooth rolling. It presented a good duality of storyline quests and side-quests; it was girlfriend-friendly, and it introduced gestures.
Ok, gestures didn't get very far, but they were an interesting idea at least. But lionhead also took part in worms 3d - oh so playable! More black and white stuff came out. Fable was also massively commended (yes, if you rush through it you can complete it fast. But it's a good game nonetheless.)
So, with the stuff they've produced so far, I'm looking forward to seeing and playing whatever they come up with next.
With the incredibly large hard drives you can get these days, this seems a very illogical step. With most consoles, granted, there's less hard drive space available, and you're used to swapping CDs when you want to swap games.
I don't want to attempt counting how many games I have. They're all installed on my hard drive, and I can access each one with 3 keypresses (thanks to a nifty app called iKey); I don't want to rootle around in the geeky mess that is my room trying to find the single disc I need to be able to play a game. That's what hard drives are *for* - to fill up with Stuff.
Also, having playable discs means there isn't the available space for larger or more files (graphics, sounds - all the small things that help make up a game) - installers and compression mean you can get lots of data on your HD from less data on the disc. More files means more beautiful.
Magnetic tape (music, presumably data too) was duplicatable by a dual tape deck. I'm fairly sure that would be illegal, since it'd only take one person with a dual tape deck (and a lot of blank tapes) to undercut all the music vendors.
Fwict, a clarification of the legality is that 'if you make a copy, it's ok'.
ie if you take the original (ie download the file) and DON'T leave a copy behind on the server (!), it's illegal. If you leave the copy on the server, it's legal.
Which crazy drunk wrote that law?
How do you detect a PC? Unlike TVs, which use recievers, PCs are largely selfcontained. If they're going to do anything, it'd have to be a connection tax - detect wifi signal, and charge the ISPs. Separately? Complicated.... and what will happen to the BBC if TV licenses are removed?
Why does 'cartoon violence' mean 10+? From what I remember of the kiddie cartoons (tom and jerry, coyote vs roadrunner, etc etc), they're about 70% violence and 30% preparation of violence; it's funny,(Laugh.) because it's toon violence.
And now the games industry says only ten year olds and older are the appropriate category for it? What? This also implies that before now, it was higher? (Yeah, where have I been. I just never needed to look at or understand the reasoning behind)
If kids watch cartoon violence regulated by their parents, the same levels should be taken to games. As the cartoons become more realistic, then sure - but as the adult is still the regulator, this 10+ seems incomprehensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Markspace's.
noooooo! It's Markspaces! Plural! Apostrophe is possessive!
Markspace's implies that there is something belonging to one Markspace.
Markspaces' implies that there is something belonging to multiple Markspaces.
Markspaces implies that there are multiple Markspaces.
Please donate all excess punctuation to the needy.
The top rank (14) will only be awarded to .1% of all the total population, which translates to 1 out of every 1000. For a server with 30,000, that means only 30. For a smaller server with 10,000, only 10(!!!) will be able to acheive rank 14 and be awarded the big gear.
So? Convince everyone to double their number of alts, and you're up to double the high-rankers. Considering how easy it is to make alts (is there a cap?); and how many people won't be trying for top-level, and you can reduce the odds significantly.
OTOH... there is a point to having this awesome gear be so narrowly available. It means it's actually valuable; something to strive for. Striving makes the game more fun.
I'm fairly sure I picked that up from a /. sigline, where it looked like a quote; I don't take it all that seriously (I continue to buy apple products because I do a fair bit of media work, I'm used to it, and all my stuff is on it at the moment; I'm sure if I had started out with MS products I'd have the same reasons to whatever extent) but it's just one of those things that catches your eye and sticks with you.
To clarify - I certainly wasn't trying to taint the article; I would like to fully encourage microsoft and indeed any other company to do good things like this, as small as that encouragement is compared.
It's nice to have your preconceptions kicked around a bit once in a while (makes things a whole lot more interesting), and when you've got a forum where you can step across and make a point for the other team - no matter that the wording wasn't great (hey, this is /.), it's a step towards stoppin the hatin. Which'd be nice.
Anyway, from your reply I can clear up a misconception, so thanks :)
Hey, that's two steps to making the world a better place! :D
This is the second time in about a week that we're seeing Microsoft doing something that puts it up against a greater evil. And to make it even more boggling, they're doing it open-source.
Did Microsoft hire someone new? Or did they take a look at their image and try to make amends? As much as I know my view of them is biased both by my history as a mac fan and the rants I've seen of others complaining and complaining about problems with microsoft (note I'm not trying to start an argument here, just pointing out that my view is biased); I know that Gates has funded new CompSci departments for universities like Cambridge (UK) - it's just a surprise to see what has seemed such a stereotypical corporation taking these steps against something in this way. Gates' view that open source is evil has been overtaken by the view that child porn is worse. I completely agree, and as strange as it is to say it - good work, Microsoft.
More seriously, I'm surprised by the size of it. It seems like an RC light powered plane with inbuilt gizmos in the wings - I had seriously expected the Pentagon to be a huge amount smaller than this, with a vague thought of hover. I guess without the wireless power (see the /. story, NASA prizes) available yet these things have to carry their own fuel, and then the structure needs to be larger and more supportive, enough physical strength to support power loading, and space for the gizmos. But... 13 inches. And since I don't have a concievable way of saying it without innuendo... that's BIG.
Swatting a 13-inch wasp is unlikely. Scream and run away, or possibly even cower and say "I for one welcome our giant robot wasp overlords"...
"Servo" - as in 17 servos, used in the article - is short for Servomechanism. Remote actuation. Service, on the other hand... and you can bet that they've already thought of more than 17 ways to use it. I have, and I haven't even had coffee.
Then again, how can you be sure that the irony was intentional? This doesn't prove that they understand it ;)
We know the masses of a lot of the atoms (though there's a lot more than 1000 isotopes). Molecules are a completely different matter; there's an infinite range of possible molecules, because you can put them together in a lot of different ways; chain molecules (like DNA (hey, there's 5 billion different molecules - and that's only counting humans!)) are difficult to untangle and sort out; when you can weigh them, you can use the masses of atoms to try to calculate how many of each atom is in the molecule, and from there you can try and work out which configurations of atoms are possible.
This is the next step from a process called mass spectroscopy, where a molecule is given + or - one electron, then fired through a calibrated magnet to hit a target. If the magnet is calibrated so that a single charge on a molecule of weight W deflects by exactly n degrees, then if the molecule weighs W it will hit the target, and you know the mass of your molecule.
It's more trial-and-error than TFA, but with a sweep across the calibration settings you get lovely graphs showing how much of a mixture is which compound. It's fast (seconds for a full-range mass chart), which I somehow doubt TFA is quite up to yet - maybe for a single molecule, but something in the description rankles of a slow process.
I find this stuff incredibly interesting. The presentation there tries to reverse-engineer the concept of fun. In one of Terry Pratchett's recent books, the Auditors reverse-engineer everything to atomic level to attempt to gauge appeal, and it gets lost. Although Raph's talk is trying to break things down into atoms, there is also an insight from realising there's certainly more there than just atoms and associated verbs - the atoms in themselves are pointless. You can press a button, you can move a mouse, you can get the timing right. But it only begins to matter when you make atom-agglomerates - molecules - that it begins. His timing sequence for a quake gib is a molecule. It's a sequence of events where each atom is connected in a particular order and in a particular way. These molecules can all add up in his parallel - multiple occurences of sequences, some work, some don't; the target there is to get as many viable molecules as possible, and from that 'win'. Or they can go in series - a polymer molecule, where the win comes from how long you can make your molecule; the argument there is then whether a beautiful molecule is a pure chain, or a branched chain, or sheet, or however. We're going a little deep into this analogy, but it still makes sense. He says in the presentation that he hasn't got a clue what to do with it. I wonder if I could get hired by the first crew who do, because I bet it'd be an incredibly interesting way to make a game.
I don't know what's worse, that you made that comment or that I got it ;-)
Previous posters... sheesh. from TFA, we see that you need to beam power to a robot climbing a cable, being judged by the amount the robot is able to carry while going. Batteries and LCRs are probably out. They suggest directed microwave or similar, if any of you are interested.
Puzzle Pirates is a developmentally odd game; there's about 12 or so puzzles currently in game, with full functionality and game completeness. Occasionally a new puzzle is released to fit one of the other 8 or so crafting houses that still require a puzzle to match the craft; this has a lot of feedback from the community (people kept asking for spades in the forums (why the association between pirates and card games? Seems completely unintuitive to me, if anyone has a reason please explain!)) so they went ahead and put it in)
They have an open request for suggestions for these remaining puzzles; they're very thorough in doing these puzzles, and it's obvious that a lot of work has been done in creating puzzles that fit with their ranking systems (from 'booched' (botched) through 'fair' 'good' 'excellent' 'incredible' depending on how skilled your completion of the puzzle was relative to the others in the game - it's very dynamic and nicely sorted out), so that every single puzzle is playable by most, but still with a difficulty gradient that requires you to have serious thoughtpower and/or skill to master.
The game garden seems very much a way of getting more ideas - taking your idea to the game to try to have it incorporated as a puzzle is difficult, because they're limited in how it's implemented, has to be scorable to allow the player rankings, has to be both easy and difficult, etc etc... the game garden seems a great way of getting more of these ideas to be playable without actually putting them into the full game. This is a great idea for Three Rings, as it allows them to vet games far more easily, it allows the non-ThreeRings game designers to get their games out to others even if it doesn't get into Puzzle Pirates, and it allows the players to play more puzzles (there's a link in-game that takes you to the website too).
Plus, it's free to play them. Nice.
Ok, there's a certain attraction to it... but I for one will refuse to ever trade for an item I like if it has a name like "OMGT3H 1337BR1NG3Rz0r" or "Your MOM" or "boobies". multiplayer game moderators already seem to have trouble enough keeping tabs on player names, and adding item name customisation when there's 10 or more usable items per person would mean they simply wouldn't moderate them.
:)
Unless the item names were changeable - THAT I could deal with.
I suppose with item naming and inspection you'd also be able to tell what kind of literature the person is into and have the ability to treat them appropriately
Essentially, this would be an extension of the current customisability rush we're seeing with characters at the moment; currently crafting is limited to preset recipes (examples d2, WoW); in d2 we see random bonus mods on crafted items, in WoW they've given a huge list of items to which you can add one custom mod in the form of a patch. Customisability would remove the element of chance of getting great mods at a lower level compated to d2; however it would reduce the time needed to spend on these items. I'm biased on this - I think it's a good thing that you can get what you want, but I think it may be a bad thing that you get what you want straight away. As soon as there's a recognised best item, everyone will strive only to make that. Randomness drives a lot of trade as some players value some bonuses over others; getting what you want without steps in between seems to me like it'll take a bundle of fun out of these kinds of games. This applies as much to non MMOs, even SP games; I think the reason d2 continues to live as long as it does is the item-luck. I certainly still play d2 SP, and the crafting is still interesting because I never know what I'll get on the items I make. Hooray for customisability - but I hope the game makers have the sense to keep an element of chance in there, and that the best items can't be made. And don't forget what may be fairly important... don't allow free naming of items, please! I wince to think what we'll see otherwise...
I'm completely in line with this - the first thing that came to mind was photoshop, and the hundreds of megs per file that always happens with files that have been worked on for a while. Remote access? No thanks.
Second that came to mind was gaming - java games are all very well, but they have their problems; games like puzzle pirates, designed for all-platform use, based on java, still have fairly large load times - and this is with most data on your computer. Getting all that kind of information remotely on top of the current stuff would require huge improvements in bandwidth.
Third thing that came to mind was privacy issues (with the recent security incidents), hacking attempts (this'd be a tempting target to the scum that take pleasure from targeting useful systems), and so on.
It's a nice idea to improve the current stuff with the JS+XML we're seeing - and there's some neat stuff; multimap's mouseovering with image/map combination; this neat thing that you can click on when you recognise a book cover; yeah, it's nice to look at, nice to use, but we're left with: "Variety is the spice of life", and there's something BIG to be said about keeping seperate platforms and utility. Competition leads to better stuff, where uniformity leads to stagnation.
When Black and White came out, it wasn't an entirely new genre - we're all used to god games from games like populous, but it did a lot of cool things. The graphics handling at the time was "Wow!" stuff, being able to zoom from overview of the world to looking at the face of one of your minions in seconds of smooth rolling. It presented a good duality of storyline quests and side-quests; it was girlfriend-friendly, and it introduced gestures. Ok, gestures didn't get very far, but they were an interesting idea at least. But lionhead also took part in worms 3d - oh so playable! More black and white stuff came out. Fable was also massively commended (yes, if you rush through it you can complete it fast. But it's a good game nonetheless.) So, with the stuff they've produced so far, I'm looking forward to seeing and playing whatever they come up with next.
With the incredibly large hard drives you can get these days, this seems a very illogical step. With most consoles, granted, there's less hard drive space available, and you're used to swapping CDs when you want to swap games.
I don't want to attempt counting how many games I have. They're all installed on my hard drive, and I can access each one with 3 keypresses (thanks to a nifty app called iKey); I don't want to rootle around in the geeky mess that is my room trying to find the single disc I need to be able to play a game. That's what hard drives are *for* - to fill up with Stuff.
Also, having playable discs means there isn't the available space for larger or more files (graphics, sounds - all the small things that help make up a game) - installers and compression mean you can get lots of data on your HD from less data on the disc. More files means more beautiful.
Magnetic tape (music, presumably data too) was duplicatable by a dual tape deck. I'm fairly sure that would be illegal, since it'd only take one person with a dual tape deck (and a lot of blank tapes) to undercut all the music vendors.
Unless that's what music vendors were.
I for one welcome our illusionary earthsized tadpole overlords.
Fwict, a clarification of the legality is that 'if you make a copy, it's ok'. ie if you take the original (ie download the file) and DON'T leave a copy behind on the server (!), it's illegal. If you leave the copy on the server, it's legal. Which crazy drunk wrote that law?
How do you detect a PC? Unlike TVs, which use recievers, PCs are largely selfcontained. If they're going to do anything, it'd have to be a connection tax - detect wifi signal, and charge the ISPs. Separately? Complicated. ... and what will happen to the BBC if TV licenses are removed?
Why does 'cartoon violence' mean 10+? From what I remember of the kiddie cartoons (tom and jerry, coyote vs roadrunner, etc etc), they're about 70% violence and 30% preparation of violence; it's funny,(Laugh.) because it's toon violence.
And now the games industry says only ten year olds and older are the appropriate category for it? What? This also implies that before now, it was higher? (Yeah, where have I been. I just never needed to look at or understand the reasoning behind)
If kids watch cartoon violence regulated by their parents, the same levels should be taken to games. As the cartoons become more realistic, then sure - but as the adult is still the regulator, this 10+ seems incomprehensible.
Ooh. Nope, but it's exactly the same idea. Presumably that also relied on software?