Yes, "Doctor Who" is great in a Anglo-kitch kind of way, but for every "Doctor Who" there is a "Fat Friends" or "Space Cadets". And the BBC is absolutly monolithic in showing only the whitebread petty bougiouse government beurocrats eye view of the world. Give me commercial programing over the BBC any day.
... Of your two examples, neither of which were BBC productions. (Fat Friends: ITV, Space Cadets: Channel 4 - both commercial stations.) There's plenty of BBC-originated shit too, obviously.
Above and beyond everything wheel the "gods", hyper-intelligent collectives of extremophile nanobacteria living inside asteroids and cometary nuclei. Their power, executed by meteor, is enormous. Their first and last commandment is "KEEP THE NOISE DOWN".
If it is, we've got perhaps a hundred years before we are indeed executed by meteor.;-)
It was the fonts used that gave it away. You see, that particular font was not widely available on PC-104 keyboards at the time. Thus, either the article had to have been written on one of only a few special keyboards, which was unlikely; or the article was in fact a forgery. QED: the article was a forgery.
He's not joking, you know. Believe it or not, I've got an old IBM keyboard attached to my PC. Surprising, eh!
I actually have a problem with motion blur -- isn't that just what the ghosting on my LCD monitor does anyway?
Not really - there's a demonstration of the keep-small-amount-of-previous-frames method shown in one of the videos, and it looks genuinely horrible. The 'correct' way of doing motion-blur seems to be to effectively render at a very high framerate and merge, say, four frames together into one displayed frame. The next displayed frame will be from the next four rendered frames in the sequence, and so on.
It's a feature that I'd really like to see in 3D games, but unfortunately it's probably also the most computationally expensive. As an extreme, you'd need a graphics card capable of rendering the game at a whopping 400 frames per second for a 100Hz display. That, though, would look utterly glorious.
The depth-of-field effect looks a bit cheesy and overdone in some shots in the videos. It gives the effect of everything being miniaturised and being viewed through a macro lens - I wish my own camera would give a depth-of-field equivalent to some of the shots shown. Still, a toned-down version could actually work in gameplay - with the player's 'eye' focusing on whatever's in the crosshair, and perhaps focussing on the player's weapon when reloading, for example.
The film-grain is definitely overdone. I suspect it's going to be the next cel-shading effect!
I second that sentiment. I'm sick and tired of hearing about how the web will be the platform of the future. If the browser will be my platform, then what platform will I run the browser on?
It almost makes me want to cry, but I'm still glad they have it, if only for the week or two a year I visit them:). HD sporting events and Discovery HD Theater are so nice as to be almost completely different experiences from regular television.
Does it still have the easily-peeled-off manufacturer's information labels on it? You know, the ones most people remove within ten seconds of unpacking the device, but which certain, erm, less technically able persons leave on for the entire lifetime of the product?
(I've seen them on kettles, heaters, tellies, toasters, radios, you name it. Offer to remove one, and the appliance's owner's eyes widen in horror, as if you just suggested stripping all the insulation off the cables and then fitting several kilograms of Semtex to said appliance. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these non-HD HDTVs have such labels present too...)
What's the point of having an HDTV?? There's just not enough content out there to warrant dropping the bucks on the bling. It's status and ego. As for usability, it's not very usable. Not yet anyway..
It's so you can be 'future-proof' - yes, you can spend a silly amount of money making sure that the silly amount of money you just spent won't (necessarily) be completely wasted when HDTV becomes more common. Alternatively, you can buy a cheap telly now, and another cheap (but HDTV) telly in a couple of years - one which will most likely out-spec the top-of-the-range ones currently available.
Me, I use a 14in CRT effort. It's probably approaching 15 years old. The picture's still rather good - and it's completely free of the horrendous smearing, deinterlacing, aspect ratio and other problems present on TVs supposedly worth umpteen billion times more. Hooray for the luddites!
I'm rather fond of co-operative gaming myself (flashbacks of playing through Dooms and Quake with a friend over a null-modem cable) but the base Half-Life 2 doesn't really allow such a thing. The game's still of a Quake-style client-server design, so the necessary code really isn't that complex - and from a mapping point of view, I've been making my map sources available for everything I've released so far, so people are more than welcome to convert MINERVA to co-operative gameplay.
(The licence for the map sources? Pretty much: 'Do whatever you like. My name in the README would be nice.' Annoyingly, I haven't seen anyone actually rebuild anything of mine yet...)
The slashdot member "Ford Prefect" is Adam Foster I think, anyway, give him your love, because it's a fantastic level he's made, and I can't wait for the next installment, bring it on Adam!
Cheers! I'm not sure about the 'love' bit (aaargh! Nerds! Gerroff me!) but the sentiment is definitely appreciated.
I'd be working on the second map right now, but I've been a bit distracted by the awesome, gloriously insane DayHard single-player mod. I'm not sure how best to describe it - it's a very buggy but even funnier take on the Half-Life 2 story, complete with film and game references, lavatory humour and the inexplicable, copyright-busting presence of Jack Carver from Far Cry (may contain quizzical expressions, idiocy, covert television watching and leering at the ladies).
It's kind of like the anti-MINERVA if you like. You'll either love it or you'll hate it, but regardless, I highly recommend reading the walkthrough if you get even slightly stuck. It's a bit confusing to navigate at times - it's like some old point-and-click adventure game with some of the more cryptic puzzles.
But anyway. I've started up Hammer again, and opened metastasis_2.vmf. Back to populating this map with gameplay!
I wonder if this is in any way related to the success of Garry's Mod, which lets users build all sorts of contraptions based on Half-Life 2's engine, characters and other objects. It already supports multiplayer, and some cool users have made giant fire-breathing robots, Rube Goldberg machines, helicopters, etc.
Yup - multiplayer brings the prospect of multiplayer, collaborative (and competitive) thing-building. Plus it's got LUA scripting and stuff - it's probably the definitive sandbox mod for anything, everywhere. I really wouldn't be surprised if Valve were inspired by this very mod...
I'd love a FPS game with dynamicly recreatable terrain, say a game of CTF where every 20 mins teams spend the points they earned rebuilding their base (with basic pathfinding AI making sure there is still a possible route to the flag). It would even be possible on the Source engine if the dynamicly remapped terrain wasn't such marketing BS.
The XBoxes locking up has to do with their power supply overheating. Although I haven't heard of any incidents yet, this is indeed a hazard, and there SHOULD be a recall on the PSUs.
I thought it was more the power supply automatically shutting down momentarily when it got too hot, thus giving itself a chance to cool down - crashing the machine it was attached to in the process.
Less of a safety issue, more of an annoyance that it gets to that state so easily.
This is just people being stupid. Also the reason they dropped 'Nuclear' from NMRI.
I think it was more that if you went to your hospital and said you were in for an NMR, you might have received something other than a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scan...;-)
Perhaps they've never played Half-Life, which uses a near-continual progression (it only leaps when the story requires it, i.e. when you get captured and knocked out and when you go to Xen). It may have loading screens, but only due to limitations of the technology of the time.
Actually, Half-Life's 'seamless' transitions are a really basic, but rather clever extension of Quake's entirely separate maps. Essentially all that happens is that there are two similar-looking sections in the two maps, and when the player reaches a certain area in the first map, it does a savegame, loads the second one and places the player and nearby enemies in it with their relative positions and viewing angles adjusted accordingly.
It works brilliantly well, but it's anything but continuous progression and can't be extended far - for example, if the system loaded the second map in the background as the player approached a transition zone, it would need a heck of a lot of storage space as it would need both maps in memory simultaneously at some point.
Maybe some magical tile-based map system would work, with the system capable of storing (and rendering from) multiple tiles simultaneously, with new ones swapped in as appropriate. For an outdoors renderer, you could have low-detail placeholders in addition to the full versions of the tiles - see a town on a hill in the distance, and when you reach it it's not a couple of cuboids but a massively detailed hunk of geometry.
Something like that, anyway. I'm waiting for another test version of Metastasis 2 to finish compiling.:-)
I know you are joking but I notice that if you live in the UK you cannot get hold of an en-GB version of Firefox 1.5.
It's very rare that we get en_GB 'translations' for anything - I would be surprised if the translated Firefox has more than just a couple of words changed in it. I've been using the US version and had no problems whatsoever.
If anything, having a British English interface feels really weird, and I kind of do a double-take when I see words like 'colour' spelt correctly on a computer - my iBook's language is set to British English and it still uses American spellings everywhere apart from the default spell-checker. (Although Tiger's a slight improvement over Panther in one respect - Safari used to send a weighted list of acceptable languages in requests, and many servers got confused and sent me French or Japanese when they couldn't find the initial en_GB. Now that was a bug!)
Unfortunately, past experience has shown that great games are frequently 1-off flukes. When I first played Lemmings I thought a great new era of gaming had arrived... Now I couldn't even tell you what the guy who wrote it is doing currently.
Well, if you need portability for some graphical gadget, why not do it in Java?
I'm really not too impressed with all this Javascript-used-for-graphics stuff that's in vogue right now - okay, so this Canvas element allows much more graphical control over page layout, but if this mini-FPS is anything to go by, it's horribly slow. As a comparison, see the famously slow Java do a far more complex scene entirely in software...
Thanks for that - it's probably one of the few Clarke short stories I hadn't read. I was expecting a twist in the tail, too...;-)
: digs out his paperback collections of 1950s-1960s SF short stories again. Ace!
Re:Is any work being done to improve security?
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Short of removing all input/output functionality, people will always manage to write insecure PHP scripts. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe - SQL injection attacks on fire off the blah, blah blah...
*Ahem!*
But anyway. I'm not aware of any built-in security problems - most of what your average Slashdotters regard as 'OH THAT'S SO INSECURE WHY CAN'T THEY FIX IT????' seems to be down to shitty programming by end-users rather than PHP limitations. Idiotic PHP features like magic-quoting of input strings seem to be those added in an attempt to improve security, and have ended up acting as a crutch for poor programmers when the 'correct', unchanged behaviour might have broken things more regularly and actually taught a bit of good programming practice.
My code is immune to SQL injection attacks. It's piss-easy to write things that way. It's more a matter of understanding what's going on, rather than blindly hopping and skipping through the happy haze of 'helpful' features which can easily go wrong. I'd much rather have a PHP where I can blow my feet off with the twelve-bore shotgun of features rather than have some neutered, brain-dead, drool-proof and beginner-'friendly' mess...
Apparently a lot of the awfully strict (and downright annoying) rules regarding credit cards are as a result of banks and credit card companies - it seems that if Valve aren't extremely careful, even a small amount of fraud could cost silly amounts of money. The existing rules and regulations just don't appear to be geared up to online-only digital distribution - perhaps this is partly why nobody's really tried it on a large scale before...
You joke, but there's already a cat parasite called toxoplasma where the complete life-cycle involves using a mouse or rat as a host, in addition to the final destination of a cat. To increase the chances of that happening, the parasite appears to mess with the rodents' brains, making them more likely to take risks and even actively search for the scent of cat urine. If that rodent gets eaten, the immature parasites can break free and make themselves at home in the cat.
Disturbingly, this same parasite is known to infect humans as well, and there's evidence to suggest it might be altering our behaviour too...
Since you are correcting my understanding: if Valve decides to stop providing activation servers, how do you play the Half Life 2 game you purchased? My understanding is that the bits on the disk are insufficient to actually run the game.... Then, I'll just download a sodding cracked version.
To summarise the distribution methods which will be available once the Steam version is up and running:
Windows: you can purchase a boxed version which will be sent to you by post at the Introversion online store; alternatively you will be able to buy a download-only version over Steam.
Linux (x86): you can purchase the boxed version (which includes an HTTP download version), again at the Introversion online store. No change here.
Mac: you can download a limited version and purchase a license key at Ambrosia Software's online store. It's effectively the shareware distribution model here - there's no separate demo as far as I'm aware. No change here either.
AmigaOS, CP/M, Sinclair Spectrum: it would appear these luddites will have to get stuffed. Sorry. No change here!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, "Doctor Who" is great in a Anglo-kitch kind of way, but for every "Doctor Who" there is a "Fat Friends" or "Space Cadets". And the BBC is absolutly monolithic in showing only the whitebread petty bougiouse government beurocrats eye view of the world. Give me commercial programing over the BBC any day.
... Of your two examples, neither of which were BBC productions. (Fat Friends: ITV, Space Cadets: Channel 4 - both commercial stations.) There's plenty of BBC-originated shit too, obviously.
Oh, and the government bureaucrat's view of the world?
Who is this person?
... and why is there no link to anything useful about the machine?
;-)
He's CmdrTaco, 'editor'-in-chief of this 'ere Slashdot.
Why did they get their free loaner (to advertise here perhaps)
He's CmdrTaco, 'editor'-in-chief of this 'ere Slashdot.
He's CmdrTaco, 'editor'-in-chief of this 'ere Slashdot.
We just have to hope it's not a Ken MacLeod-style God...
If it is, we've got perhaps a hundred years before we are indeed executed by meteor.
It was the fonts used that gave it away. You see, that particular font was not widely available on PC-104 keyboards at the time. Thus, either the article had to have been written on one of only a few special keyboards, which was unlikely; or the article was in fact a forgery. QED: the article was a forgery.
He's not joking, you know. Believe it or not, I've got an old IBM keyboard attached to my PC. Surprising, eh!
I actually have a problem with motion blur -- isn't that just what the ghosting on my LCD monitor does anyway?
Not really - there's a demonstration of the keep-small-amount-of-previous-frames method shown in one of the videos, and it looks genuinely horrible. The 'correct' way of doing motion-blur seems to be to effectively render at a very high framerate and merge, say, four frames together into one displayed frame. The next displayed frame will be from the next four rendered frames in the sequence, and so on.
It's a feature that I'd really like to see in 3D games, but unfortunately it's probably also the most computationally expensive. As an extreme, you'd need a graphics card capable of rendering the game at a whopping 400 frames per second for a 100Hz display. That, though, would look utterly glorious.
The depth-of-field effect looks a bit cheesy and overdone in some shots in the videos. It gives the effect of everything being miniaturised and being viewed through a macro lens - I wish my own camera would give a depth-of-field equivalent to some of the shots shown. Still, a toned-down version could actually work in gameplay - with the player's 'eye' focusing on whatever's in the crosshair, and perhaps focussing on the player's weapon when reloading, for example.
The film-grain is definitely overdone. I suspect it's going to be the next cel-shading effect!
I second that sentiment. I'm sick and tired of hearing about how the web will be the platform of the future. If the browser will be my platform, then what platform will I run the browser on?
AJAX!
It almost makes me want to cry, but I'm still glad they have it, if only for the week or two a year I visit them :). HD sporting events and Discovery HD Theater are so nice as to be almost completely different experiences from regular television.
Does it still have the easily-peeled-off manufacturer's information labels on it? You know, the ones most people remove within ten seconds of unpacking the device, but which certain, erm, less technically able persons leave on for the entire lifetime of the product?
(I've seen them on kettles, heaters, tellies, toasters, radios, you name it. Offer to remove one, and the appliance's owner's eyes widen in horror, as if you just suggested stripping all the insulation off the cables and then fitting several kilograms of Semtex to said appliance. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these non-HD HDTVs have such labels present too...)
What's the point of having an HDTV?? There's just not enough content out there to warrant dropping the bucks on the bling. It's status and ego. As for usability, it's not very usable. Not yet anyway..
It's so you can be 'future-proof' - yes, you can spend a silly amount of money making sure that the silly amount of money you just spent won't (necessarily) be completely wasted when HDTV becomes more common. Alternatively, you can buy a cheap telly now, and another cheap (but HDTV) telly in a couple of years - one which will most likely out-spec the top-of-the-range ones currently available.
Me, I use a 14in CRT effort. It's probably approaching 15 years old. The picture's still rather good - and it's completely free of the horrendous smearing, deinterlacing, aspect ratio and other problems present on TVs supposedly worth umpteen billion times more. Hooray for the luddites!
I'm rather fond of co-operative gaming myself (flashbacks of playing through Dooms and Quake with a friend over a null-modem cable) but the base Half-Life 2 doesn't really allow such a thing. The game's still of a Quake-style client-server design, so the necessary code really isn't that complex - and from a mapping point of view, I've been making my map sources available for everything I've released so far, so people are more than welcome to convert MINERVA to co-operative gameplay.
(The licence for the map sources? Pretty much: 'Do whatever you like. My name in the README would be nice.' Annoyingly, I haven't seen anyone actually rebuild anything of mine yet...)
The slashdot member "Ford Prefect" is Adam Foster I think, anyway, give him your love, because it's a fantastic level he's made, and I can't wait for the next installment, bring it on Adam!
Cheers! I'm not sure about the 'love' bit (aaargh! Nerds! Gerroff me!) but the sentiment is definitely appreciated.
I'd be working on the second map right now, but I've been a bit distracted by the awesome, gloriously insane DayHard single-player mod. I'm not sure how best to describe it - it's a very buggy but even funnier take on the Half-Life 2 story, complete with film and game references, lavatory humour and the inexplicable, copyright-busting presence of Jack Carver from Far Cry (may contain quizzical expressions, idiocy, covert television watching and leering at the ladies).
It's kind of like the anti-MINERVA if you like. You'll either love it or you'll hate it, but regardless, I highly recommend reading the walkthrough if you get even slightly stuck. It's a bit confusing to navigate at times - it's like some old point-and-click adventure game with some of the more cryptic puzzles.
But anyway. I've started up Hammer again, and opened metastasis_2.vmf. Back to populating this map with gameplay!
I wonder if this is in any way related to the success of Garry's Mod, which lets users build all sorts of contraptions based on Half-Life 2's engine, characters and other objects. It already supports multiplayer, and some cool users have made giant fire-breathing robots, Rube Goldberg machines, helicopters, etc.
Yup - multiplayer brings the prospect of multiplayer, collaborative (and competitive) thing-building. Plus it's got LUA scripting and stuff - it's probably the definitive sandbox mod for anything, everywhere. I really wouldn't be surprised if Valve were inspired by this very mod...
I'd love a FPS game with dynamicly recreatable terrain, say a game of CTF where every 20 mins teams spend the points they earned rebuilding their base (with basic pathfinding AI making sure there is still a possible route to the flag). It would even be possible on the Source engine if the dynamicly remapped terrain wasn't such marketing BS.
Here you go!
(Okay, so it's not the terrain which can be modified, but you can still build yourself a fort for defending your flag...)
The XBoxes locking up has to do with their power supply overheating. Although I haven't heard of any incidents yet, this is indeed a hazard, and there SHOULD be a recall on the PSUs.
I thought it was more the power supply automatically shutting down momentarily when it got too hot, thus giving itself a chance to cool down - crashing the machine it was attached to in the process.
Less of a safety issue, more of an annoyance that it gets to that state so easily.
This is just people being stupid. Also the reason they dropped 'Nuclear' from NMRI.
;-)
I think it was more that if you went to your hospital and said you were in for an NMR, you might have received something other than a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scan...
Perhaps they've never played Half-Life, which uses a near-continual progression (it only leaps when the story requires it, i.e. when you get captured and knocked out and when you go to Xen). It may have loading screens, but only due to limitations of the technology of the time.
:-)
Actually, Half-Life's 'seamless' transitions are a really basic, but rather clever extension of Quake's entirely separate maps. Essentially all that happens is that there are two similar-looking sections in the two maps, and when the player reaches a certain area in the first map, it does a savegame, loads the second one and places the player and nearby enemies in it with their relative positions and viewing angles adjusted accordingly.
It works brilliantly well, but it's anything but continuous progression and can't be extended far - for example, if the system loaded the second map in the background as the player approached a transition zone, it would need a heck of a lot of storage space as it would need both maps in memory simultaneously at some point.
Maybe some magical tile-based map system would work, with the system capable of storing (and rendering from) multiple tiles simultaneously, with new ones swapped in as appropriate. For an outdoors renderer, you could have low-detail placeholders in addition to the full versions of the tiles - see a town on a hill in the distance, and when you reach it it's not a couple of cuboids but a massively detailed hunk of geometry.
Something like that, anyway. I'm waiting for another test version of Metastasis 2 to finish compiling.
I know you are joking but I notice that if you live in the UK you cannot get hold of an en-GB version of Firefox 1.5.
It's very rare that we get en_GB 'translations' for anything - I would be surprised if the translated Firefox has more than just a couple of words changed in it. I've been using the US version and had no problems whatsoever.
If anything, having a British English interface feels really weird, and I kind of do a double-take when I see words like 'colour' spelt correctly on a computer - my iBook's language is set to British English and it still uses American spellings everywhere apart from the default spell-checker. (Although Tiger's a slight improvement over Panther in one respect - Safari used to send a weighted list of acceptable languages in requests, and many servers got confused and sent me French or Japanese when they couldn't find the initial en_GB. Now that was a bug!)
Unfortunately, past experience has shown that great games are frequently 1-off flukes. When I first played Lemmings I thought a great new era of gaming had arrived... Now I couldn't even tell you what the guy who wrote it is doing currently.
;-)
Oh, you've probably heard of it...
Has anyone been 'round to the local galactic administrative office lately? Anyone?
Yes. You're all stuffed.
: grabs towel and prepares to leave!
would it be as portable as it is now?
Well, if you need portability for some graphical gadget, why not do it in Java?
I'm really not too impressed with all this Javascript-used-for-graphics stuff that's in vogue right now - okay, so this Canvas element allows much more graphical control over page layout, but if this mini-FPS is anything to go by, it's horribly slow. As a comparison, see the famously slow Java do a far more complex scene entirely in software...
Thanks for that - it's probably one of the few Clarke short stories I hadn't read. I was expecting a twist in the tail, too... ;-)
: digs out his paperback collections of 1950s-1960s SF short stories again. Ace!
Short of removing all input/output functionality, people will always manage to write insecure PHP scripts. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe - SQL injection attacks on fire off the blah, blah blah...
*Ahem!*
But anyway. I'm not aware of any built-in security problems - most of what your average Slashdotters regard as 'OH THAT'S SO INSECURE WHY CAN'T THEY FIX IT????' seems to be down to shitty programming by end-users rather than PHP limitations. Idiotic PHP features like magic-quoting of input strings seem to be those added in an attempt to improve security, and have ended up acting as a crutch for poor programmers when the 'correct', unchanged behaviour might have broken things more regularly and actually taught a bit of good programming practice.
My code is immune to SQL injection attacks. It's piss-easy to write things that way. It's more a matter of understanding what's going on, rather than blindly hopping and skipping through the happy haze of 'helpful' features which can easily go wrong. I'd much rather have a PHP where I can blow my feet off with the twelve-bore shotgun of features rather than have some neutered, brain-dead, drool-proof and beginner-'friendly' mess...
Apparently a lot of the awfully strict (and downright annoying) rules regarding credit cards are as a result of banks and credit card companies - it seems that if Valve aren't extremely careful, even a small amount of fraud could cost silly amounts of money. The existing rules and regulations just don't appear to be geared up to online-only digital distribution - perhaps this is partly why nobody's really tried it on a large scale before...
More mice have been committing suicide by cat.
You joke, but there's already a cat parasite called toxoplasma where the complete life-cycle involves using a mouse or rat as a host, in addition to the final destination of a cat. To increase the chances of that happening, the parasite appears to mess with the rodents' brains, making them more likely to take risks and even actively search for the scent of cat urine. If that rodent gets eaten, the immature parasites can break free and make themselves at home in the cat.
Disturbingly, this same parasite is known to infect humans as well, and there's evidence to suggest it might be altering our behaviour too...
Since you are correcting my understanding: if Valve decides to stop providing activation servers, how do you play the Half Life 2 game you purchased? My understanding is that the bits on the disk are insufficient to actually run the game. ... Then, I'll just download a sodding cracked version.
To summarise the distribution methods which will be available once the Steam version is up and running:
Windows: you can purchase a boxed version which will be sent to you by post at the Introversion online store; alternatively you will be able to buy a download-only version over Steam.
Linux (x86): you can purchase the boxed version (which includes an HTTP download version), again at the Introversion online store. No change here.
Mac: you can download a limited version and purchase a license key at Ambrosia Software's online store. It's effectively the shareware distribution model here - there's no separate demo as far as I'm aware. No change here either.
AmigaOS, CP/M, Sinclair Spectrum: it would appear these luddites will have to get stuffed. Sorry. No change here!