I'd appreciate it if someone could clue me in to Mozilla's features. I know I'll get moderated down as a troll as soon as I post this because I'm an unashamed Windows user, but I'd like to know. I followed Netscape very closely and used their products exlusively until one day they decided they didn't need to support anything new, I'm just wondering, do they do DHTML, CSS, all the new junk?
Esperandi I know its not Netscapes fault, they would have reamined strong if AOL had realized that the best programmers didn't HAVE to continue working anywhere and as soon as they made it unpleasant they'd jump ship (I would have too)
But if you waste your time playing games, you're not submitting to the will of the collective! Yu're not sacrificing your life to giving the community more applications as Open Source dictates that you do. The Reverend is simply taking the ideas of the majority of Slashdotters and thinking them through to completion.
Bwahaha, if the reader of/. only knew that you're following their viewpoints to a logical conclusion with this "sacrifice for the will of the many, progammers need not be paid" shit.
Selfish individualism indeed.
Esperandi I am the thing that we were born to hate.
I haven't read the book but I believe you misunderstood (which doesn't say much for the book) what they were talking about. In every thing I've ever read about game design, one of the principle things is not to look at up-and-coming technology. The simple reason is because you'll never STOP looking at uo-and-coming technology. Imagine this scenario: You're writing a game, pushing all the pixels around manually, doing wonderful things with linear algebra and trigonometry, bending the laws of mathematics at your will. The Voodoo card hits the market. 3D acceleration is the wave of the future. Scratch what you've done. Spend 3 months learning the Glide API. Begin rewriting your engine. The Voodoo2 is out with a better featureset! Spend a month re-learning Glide. Begin incorporating the cooler Glide features into your engine. Uh-oh, a lot of people are talking about Nvidia and how DirectX and OpenGL are fighting for the lead in the market. You keep working on your engine.. almost done... Oops, looks like people were right, Nvidia is doing pretty good with that TNT! You spend 8 months learning DirectX, DirectPlay, Direct3D Immediate Mode (cause you simply can't use Retained, its too slow!) You begin rewriting your engine. DX5 comes out. Relearn. DX6 comes out. Relearn. DX7 comes out. Relearn. You hear DX is going to soon be a thing of the past and everyone will be using something called Fahrenheit, so you decide to just sit around and wait, why even frigging bother with the engine?
I find it hard to believe you'd be able to make a payroll if that's how your company worked.
I find it odd that you call yourself a software developer and yet you think code is relevant in games. Of course its not. Gameplay, balance, presenting a comprehensive requirements document to the client, being able to whip up a rapid prototype in VB or something similar, having an all-encompassing design document, THESE and many similar things are the important stuff, not the engine below. If you've got gameplay, you can beat the guy next door who took 6 months to get his game to run in a higher resolution at the same speed as yours...
Well, there are roguelikes. You can beat them in theory, though I've been playing them for 10 years and never have. They're some of the msot fun I've ever had in games, most notably Angband. The variants of Angband are good too (only play Zangband if you don't mind it getting harder every damn weak... the mantra of the development team is "the game is too easy" when only a handful of people can beat it). Recently in rec.games.roguelike.development someone has been talking about a new roguelike he's making that sounds similar your yours, random planets with random creatures on it and such stuff...
Esperandi Roguelikes are #1 for replayability without a doubt. Tetris doesn't even come close;)
Well, a lot of game players I've talked to say 'I don't know why its fun, it just is". They can usually give you a rundown of what they hate, but you ask what they like and they either draw a blank or spit out a bunch of completely useless crap. "Well, I liked it because it wasn't too easy and it wasn't too hard" is NOT helpful. They're telling you its a good game and that's not what you need to create your own good game.
I think game designers need to start being paid more than programmers and need to have a lot more responsibility and such on their head. There should be majors in game design and such. Right now in most cases they're just some guy who says "I want a game where a hamster has to find his kidnapped sister. I want it to look like Quake 3, but you shoot forks and knives at vegetables instead of bullets at other people. Oh, and throw in some puzzles" and then halfway through the project they walk in and say "Scratch the hamster, bring back the bullets, we're searching for a sodomized stick of cellery in the basement of the Muppet's kitchen. Make them jumping puzzles, like the ones that pissed everybody off in Half Life.". We don't need that. We need someone who UNDERSTAND things like if you want to make a massively multiplayer online game you provide the ability for players to form a community around the game but in *NO* circumstances do you make it mandatory (like it is in Everquest which is why EQ is only a tenth of the game it could be).
Without these kinds of people, there won't be much innovation in the game industry. technological innovation is SO unimportant when compared to innovation in gameplay and such, so the designers ought to get the big bucks.
Be careful, if Carmack is anything like the total wanker Mr. Devine that works for him, he'll say that if you like anything but FPS games you're an antisocial nerd with bad taste. I figured Carmack would be more open minded but in the interview posted on/. awhile ago, he sounded like he echoed this view, that people who play RPGs and such like that are geeks (in a bad way) and that the future is cocaine-induced games in which every split second, keypress, and mouse click of a game is an orgasm of pleasure.
Esperandi I love Carmack and admire him deeply, but him and his employees need to learn that just because their game is good doesn't mean all games unlike it are bad.
Don't bother, it'd be much less work to port it to 6502 asm for the NES, assembling it and mixing it together into a NES image file and running it through a NES emulator.
Emerging trends are not apparent trends. If you look HARD, you will see a trend. Fatbrain.com eMatter... Adware... Amazon zShops...
The future IS single-person or small teams, selling their products online. A cult following will be required in the beginning but eventually, if you want a game, you hop online and spend $10 and play a game all night or for months...
Go have a look at the roguelike community. They've got more fun, more replayability, and (for the most part) more game balance in their left testicle than in every other game company combined. If they'd wake up and sell their games online, they could make some money.
The code is completely irrelevant in the book just like its irrelevant when you're making the game. The book is about the design of the game and the process. The things like "Okay, the most powerful sword in the game will be on level 1 and you'll be able to kill every creature in the game with one hit except the end guy who is next to impossible". That's really bad game balance. That is much more important than whether you use OpenGL or anything like that.
Also, there are no open source projects that are done correctly. They're just people doing their thing, they do not follow the software lifecycle model that you will HAVE to follow in the gaming industry or you'll end up way behind on the times. Also, you have to consider that most of the goals of these things disappear when you're doing open source stuff. In this case, you want people to LOVE your game so they'll buy it and you can meet payroll and keep your programmers around for another couple months. In the open source environment you really don't give a rats ass if everyone in the world hates it because you won't make any money either way, you just want to do it because you find it fun personally...
Esperandi If there are any open source projects out there that have SQA teams, have requirements, specification, design, and all those huge ultra-overly-detailed documents, feel free to tell me about them, but I don't believe they exist.
Yeah, you can use a middleware product designed 2 months ago in your new projects... if you don't mind being laughed at by everyone who passed on your project and is using the new guys product who went and made his own in a new and innovative way... game programming involves constant innovation. Unless you build a brand name and depend on your fans simply wanting more of the same, you have to be out there to do even mediocre. Then once you've got the technology that knocks their socks off you've gotta figure out how to make the game fun enough, how to build in replayability, how to make it balanced so its not too easy or too hard, etc, etc, which are the things that really build a game.
Esperandi Not an engineer unless you mean a software engineer
The least important thing in a game is its coding methods. Sure, it needs to run fast enough to not be aggravating but there are certain concepts which are eternal in games and are far more important that any code. Gameplay. Balance. Etcetera. For instance, Everquest is a game that is coded quite well, and yet there is a very great deal lacking from their gameplay because they chose to shove inter-player interaction down everyones throat instead of letting it happen on its own. These are the kinds of things that people need to learn, not code. Someone who codes an accounting package can't just jump over into games. They won't have any concept of how to make the game FUN.
Which is why people say the game companies lag behind others in following the lifecycle model and crap like that. FUN is not ISO9000 compliant. Managers hate that, but its why game companies will need to remain places where the coders can work whenever they want, sleep in their offices, all that stuff you hear about. The minute they start coming 9 to 5, having QA sessions every day at noon, and all that crap the people working on a word processor do, their game will die.
Esperandi ISO9000 will eventually encircle the globe, standardize the production of every software project, then it will move into families and standardize familial activities.. from there, it will move on to the molecular level - surely physics isn't efficient, it doesn't document itself!
Remember back in the day when they were trying to decide bout BBS, about where the crime really took place if someone sent material from a place in which the material was acepted by community standards to a place where it wasn't? Well, way back then the courts decided they would mimic mail order policy. The sale takes place where the seller is, more importantly, where the SERVER is. Now, if they simply keep this law the same and implement Internet taxes, everyone will merely move their servers to another country and be immune to state and federal taxes on the sales. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will also be lost unless there is a programmer and sysadmin exodus to wherever the new servers are going to be placed.
So, they will probably try to change the law so that if you buy something over the net, it is taxed based on which state you buy it from. This removes inventive to move the servers compeltely. However, logically, mail order laws would have to be changed as well. Also, the laws about transmitting indecent material will change. Now if you live in New York and someone from Bumfuck, Idaho goes to your site and its offensive by their community standards, you've just committed a crime. Across state lines.
This could get very, very messy. I'm so not-worried about paying taxes on the stuff, I'm worried as hell about all of the fallout and all the things that this will make illegal by consequence.
I'm not a coked-out Linux zealot, but I do realize that there are a *LOT* of standards organizations like this that only make their standards and work available to their members. Well, why doesn't someone start either a Linux coalition of just an Open Source one. People join by signing up on a website and when a set of standards like these require membership, everyone sends in the couple bucks or so and they all get a copy of the standards. As long as they're all official members of the coalition, the coalition can be a member. Hell, you could even elect a representative to go to the various conferences and deal on the behalf of the coalition. You could probably even raise a decent salary for the person if you got at least 10,000 people who wouldn't mind paying like a $1/mo dues fee...
Well, I found out today that my watch doesn't handle leap years.... I can't even set it to Feb 29th... have to wait till tomorrow to clock it back and make it right...
Esperandi But I have canned food and a generator, so I'll be okay, right?
Actually, a company is starting a sort of free-hardware-for-free-code exchange program. If you've got extra hardware and wanna "give back", send it to the company. Then they wait until an open source project comes around that can use it and they give it to the programmers.
It's really a very interesting concept, there was an article in Wired News about it a month or so ago (I submitted, Slashdot rejected)
So we're supposed to believe that since companies don't have to pay for the core design, a lot of small companies will be building fabrication plants and making their own chips?
If a company can afford to MAKE chips, I imagine the license is the cheapest thing they ever buy.
Esperandi This is like saying we could get more poor people on the net if we bought them a $10 keyboard. Surely they can do the rest?
Ahhh, but the point is, when you play FPS games, you're not acting violently... you're pressing keys, moving a mouse. FPS games only scare people who have never dealt with violence in the real world, have never held a.44 and blasted away at something. They assume its just like the game and people learn it from the games. Nope.
Most people that get shot in the face die from their neck breaking, not the obliteration of their brain. That's a little fact most people don't know and don't think enough about the real side of gunfire to realize... If you know anything about guns, you usually laugh at violent movies and games because the guns just aren't used correctly. When you "cock" a shotgun, it ejects a shell, yet on many movies you see people cock the shotgun multiple times before firing.
I almost wet my pants watching an old episode of the X-Files when Scully goes to Mulders apartment where someone shot at her (the one where Mulder has his aprtments water spiked with LSD) and pulls out of the wall not a slug, but a CASING! A *CASING*... the thing that gets ejected onto the ground or stays in the gun (if its a revolver). It would not be stuck in a wall.
Just remember, there are no mazes with cheese at the end in nature, running rats through them proves nothing.
Comparing people who type with people who fire real firearms is not valid either.
i thought for a minute that one of the Lone gunmen were goin to get into the game and get killed off just so there couldn't be a Lone Gunmen spinoff like people have theorized (and if they wanna keep the X-Files alive its their best bet, trying to replace Mulder OR Scully would be rejected even if it was done spectacularly, and they simply couldn't replace both of them well.)
Think of how it COULD have stunk, tho... they were saying all this stuff about how the chick in the game was designed to fight male agression... what if Scully had warped into the game and pillow-talked Ms. Afterglow to oblivion?
Esperandi Was expecting that scenario or something very "Waiting to exhale"-ish...
Oh wait, I had a question... did Gibson assist on this X-Files episode? I hope not... of so, he shoulda left it on that self-aware killer trailer, THAT was a cool episode (just sit around and consider how much a computer could do if it was self-aware along these lines. Maybe not take over an orbiting missile launcher, but it could order all kinds of crap over the net, make the money to pay for it by launching a web design firm, etc... interesting conversation fodder that first Gibson-assisted X-Files was)
I don't know who Straffe is, I'm assuming you mean STRAFE, or side-step... anyhow, when I saw them run up to the bunker I too said out loud (I was at a friends place, I wasn't talking to myself... that time) "Its like paintball!" Well, sorta like paintball, strafing is not a good idea... its a great idea in traditional FPS games, but in a really real environment, strafing often leads to falling on your ass and getting nailed;)
And anyone who thinks paintball is for crazy Vietnam vets or militiamen is missing out on an absolute BLAST of a time!
We are closer than you think, the only thing we don't have yet that was on the show was the graphics quality. We already have photorealistic renderers and such, so as soon as they get optimized enough or processors are able to trace the light rays fast enough - boom - we're there. We already have chestplates that make you feel like you got drop-kicked, we have that inner-ear thing that makes you feel like you're moving, all the rest of it...
I contest that vote, I'd have to say the worst X-Files episode ever was that episode with the wolf-woman, the crazy one that valued the lives of wolves more than humans... it was just terrible in every aspect I could imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd appreciate it if someone could clue me in to Mozilla's features. I know I'll get moderated down as a troll as soon as I post this because I'm an unashamed Windows user, but I'd like to know. I followed Netscape very closely and used their products exlusively until one day they decided they didn't need to support anything new, I'm just wondering, do they do DHTML, CSS, all the new junk?
Esperandi
I know its not Netscapes fault, they would have reamined strong if AOL had realized that the best programmers didn't HAVE to continue working anywhere and as soon as they made it unpleasant they'd jump ship (I would have too)
Yeah, in fact if you DO upgrade you're screwed because Linux won't support the newest stuff until its old enough for unpaid programmers to afford it!
Esperandi
Everytime I upgrade my computer I think of getting Linux again and then i find out 90% of my peripherals won't work with it.
But if you waste your time playing games, you're not submitting to the will of the collective! Yu're not sacrificing your life to giving the community more applications as Open Source dictates that you do. The Reverend is simply taking the ideas of the majority of Slashdotters and thinking them through to completion.
Esperandi
Bwahaha, if the reader of /. only knew that you're following their viewpoints to a logical conclusion with this "sacrifice for the will of the many, progammers need not be paid" shit.
Selfish individualism indeed.
Esperandi
I am the thing that we were born to hate.
I haven't read the book but I believe you misunderstood (which doesn't say much for the book) what they were talking about. In every thing I've ever read about game design, one of the principle things is not to look at up-and-coming technology. The simple reason is because you'll never STOP looking at uo-and-coming technology. Imagine this scenario:
You're writing a game, pushing all the pixels around manually, doing wonderful things with linear algebra and trigonometry, bending the laws of mathematics at your will.
The Voodoo card hits the market.
3D acceleration is the wave of the future.
Scratch what you've done.
Spend 3 months learning the Glide API.
Begin rewriting your engine.
The Voodoo2 is out with a better featureset!
Spend a month re-learning Glide.
Begin incorporating the cooler Glide features into your engine.
Uh-oh, a lot of people are talking about Nvidia and how DirectX and OpenGL are fighting for the lead in the market.
You keep working on your engine.. almost done...
Oops, looks like people were right, Nvidia is doing pretty good with that TNT!
You spend 8 months learning DirectX, DirectPlay, Direct3D Immediate Mode (cause you simply can't use Retained, its too slow!)
You begin rewriting your engine.
DX5 comes out.
Relearn.
DX6 comes out.
Relearn.
DX7 comes out.
Relearn.
You hear DX is going to soon be a thing of the past and everyone will be using something called Fahrenheit, so you decide to just sit around and wait, why even frigging bother with the engine?
I find it hard to believe you'd be able to make a payroll if that's how your company worked.
Esperandi
I find it odd that you call yourself a software developer and yet you think code is relevant in games. Of course its not. Gameplay, balance, presenting a comprehensive requirements document to the client, being able to whip up a rapid prototype in VB or something similar, having an all-encompassing design document, THESE and many similar things are the important stuff, not the engine below. If you've got gameplay, you can beat the guy next door who took 6 months to get his game to run in a higher resolution at the same speed as yours...
Esperandi
Well, there are roguelikes. You can beat them in theory, though I've been playing them for 10 years and never have. They're some of the msot fun I've ever had in games, most notably Angband. The variants of Angband are good too (only play Zangband if you don't mind it getting harder every damn weak... the mantra of the development team is "the game is too easy" when only a handful of people can beat it). Recently in rec.games.roguelike.development someone has been talking about a new roguelike he's making that sounds similar your yours, random planets with random creatures on it and such stuff...
;)
Esperandi
Roguelikes are #1 for replayability without a doubt. Tetris doesn't even come close
Well, a lot of game players I've talked to say 'I don't know why its fun, it just is". They can usually give you a rundown of what they hate, but you ask what they like and they either draw a blank or spit out a bunch of completely useless crap. "Well, I liked it because it wasn't too easy and it wasn't too hard" is NOT helpful. They're telling you its a good game and that's not what you need to create your own good game.
I think game designers need to start being paid more than programmers and need to have a lot more responsibility and such on their head. There should be majors in game design and such. Right now in most cases they're just some guy who says "I want a game where a hamster has to find his kidnapped sister. I want it to look like Quake 3, but you shoot forks and knives at vegetables instead of bullets at other people. Oh, and throw in some puzzles" and then halfway through the project they walk in and say "Scratch the hamster, bring back the bullets, we're searching for a sodomized stick of cellery in the basement of the Muppet's kitchen. Make them jumping puzzles, like the ones that pissed everybody off in Half Life.". We don't need that. We need someone who UNDERSTAND things like if you want to make a massively multiplayer online game you provide the ability for players to form a community around the game but in *NO* circumstances do you make it mandatory (like it is in Everquest which is why EQ is only a tenth of the game it could be).
Without these kinds of people, there won't be much innovation in the game industry. technological innovation is SO unimportant when compared to innovation in gameplay and such, so the designers ought to get the big bucks.
Esperandi
Be careful, if Carmack is anything like the total wanker Mr. Devine that works for him, he'll say that if you like anything but FPS games you're an antisocial nerd with bad taste. I figured Carmack would be more open minded but in the interview posted on /. awhile ago, he sounded like he echoed this view, that people who play RPGs and such like that are geeks (in a bad way) and that the future is cocaine-induced games in which every split second, keypress, and mouse click of a game is an orgasm of pleasure.
Esperandi
I love Carmack and admire him deeply, but him and his employees need to learn that just because their game is good doesn't mean all games unlike it are bad.
Don't bother, it'd be much less work to port it to 6502 asm for the NES, assembling it and mixing it together into a NES image file and running it through a NES emulator.
Esperandi
Hell, run it on a BBC B emulator!
Emerging trends are not apparent trends. If you look HARD, you will see a trend. Fatbrain.com eMatter... Adware... Amazon zShops...
The future IS single-person or small teams, selling their products online. A cult following will be required in the beginning but eventually, if you want a game, you hop online and spend $10 and play a game all night or for months...
Go have a look at the roguelike community. They've got more fun, more replayability, and (for the most part) more game balance in their left testicle than in every other game company combined. If they'd wake up and sell their games online, they could make some money.
Esperandi
The code is completely irrelevant in the book just like its irrelevant when you're making the game. The book is about the design of the game and the process. The things like "Okay, the most powerful sword in the game will be on level 1 and you'll be able to kill every creature in the game with one hit except the end guy who is next to impossible". That's really bad game balance. That is much more important than whether you use OpenGL or anything like that.
Also, there are no open source projects that are done correctly. They're just people doing their thing, they do not follow the software lifecycle model that you will HAVE to follow in the gaming industry or you'll end up way behind on the times. Also, you have to consider that most of the goals of these things disappear when you're doing open source stuff. In this case, you want people to LOVE your game so they'll buy it and you can meet payroll and keep your programmers around for another couple months. In the open source environment you really don't give a rats ass if everyone in the world hates it because you won't make any money either way, you just want to do it because you find it fun personally...
Esperandi
If there are any open source projects out there that have SQA teams, have requirements, specification, design, and all those huge ultra-overly-detailed documents, feel free to tell me about them, but I don't believe they exist.
Yeah, you can use a middleware product designed 2 months ago in your new projects... if you don't mind being laughed at by everyone who passed on your project and is using the new guys product who went and made his own in a new and innovative way... game programming involves constant innovation. Unless you build a brand name and depend on your fans simply wanting more of the same, you have to be out there to do even mediocre. Then once you've got the technology that knocks their socks off you've gotta figure out how to make the game fun enough, how to build in replayability, how to make it balanced so its not too easy or too hard, etc, etc, which are the things that really build a game.
Esperandi
Not an engineer unless you mean a software engineer
The least important thing in a game is its coding methods. Sure, it needs to run fast enough to not be aggravating but there are certain concepts which are eternal in games and are far more important that any code. Gameplay. Balance. Etcetera. For instance, Everquest is a game that is coded quite well, and yet there is a very great deal lacking from their gameplay because they chose to shove inter-player interaction down everyones throat instead of letting it happen on its own. These are the kinds of things that people need to learn, not code. Someone who codes an accounting package can't just jump over into games. They won't have any concept of how to make the game FUN.
Which is why people say the game companies lag behind others in following the lifecycle model and crap like that. FUN is not ISO9000 compliant. Managers hate that, but its why game companies will need to remain places where the coders can work whenever they want, sleep in their offices, all that stuff you hear about. The minute they start coming 9 to 5, having QA sessions every day at noon, and all that crap the people working on a word processor do, their game will die.
Esperandi
ISO9000 will eventually encircle the globe, standardize the production of every software project, then it will move into families and standardize familial activities.. from there, it will move on to the molecular level - surely physics isn't efficient, it doesn't document itself!
Remember back in the day when they were trying to decide bout BBS, about where the crime really took place if someone sent material from a place in which the material was acepted by community standards to a place where it wasn't? Well, way back then the courts decided they would mimic mail order policy. The sale takes place where the seller is, more importantly, where the SERVER is. Now, if they simply keep this law the same and implement Internet taxes, everyone will merely move their servers to another country and be immune to state and federal taxes on the sales. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will also be lost unless there is a programmer and sysadmin exodus to wherever the new servers are going to be placed.
So, they will probably try to change the law so that if you buy something over the net, it is taxed based on which state you buy it from. This removes inventive to move the servers compeltely. However, logically, mail order laws would have to be changed as well. Also, the laws about transmitting indecent material will change. Now if you live in New York and someone from Bumfuck, Idaho goes to your site and its offensive by their community standards, you've just committed a crime. Across state lines.
This could get very, very messy. I'm so not-worried about paying taxes on the stuff, I'm worried as hell about all of the fallout and all the things that this will make illegal by consequence.
Esperandi
I'm not a coked-out Linux zealot, but I do realize that there are a *LOT* of standards organizations like this that only make their standards and work available to their members. Well, why doesn't someone start either a Linux coalition of just an Open Source one. People join by signing up on a website and when a set of standards like these require membership, everyone sends in the couple bucks or so and they all get a copy of the standards. As long as they're all official members of the coalition, the coalition can be a member. Hell, you could even elect a representative to go to the various conferences and deal on the behalf of the coalition. You could probably even raise a decent salary for the person if you got at least 10,000 people who wouldn't mind paying like a $1/mo dues fee...
Esperandi
Well, I found out today that my watch doesn't handle leap years.... I can't even set it to Feb 29th... have to wait till tomorrow to clock it back and make it right...
Esperandi
But I have canned food and a generator, so I'll be okay, right?
Actually, a company is starting a sort of free-hardware-for-free-code exchange program. If you've got extra hardware and wanna "give back", send it to the company. Then they wait until an open source project comes around that can use it and they give it to the programmers.
It's really a very interesting concept, there was an article in Wired News about it a month or so ago (I submitted, Slashdot rejected)
Esperandi
So we're supposed to believe that since companies don't have to pay for the core design, a lot of small companies will be building fabrication plants and making their own chips?
If a company can afford to MAKE chips, I imagine the license is the cheapest thing they ever buy.
Esperandi
This is like saying we could get more poor people on the net if we bought them a $10 keyboard. Surely they can do the rest?
Ahhh, but the point is, when you play FPS games, you're not acting violently... you're pressing keys, moving a mouse. FPS games only scare people who have never dealt with violence in the real world, have never held a .44 and blasted away at something. They assume its just like the game and people learn it from the games. Nope.
Most people that get shot in the face die from their neck breaking, not the obliteration of their brain. That's a little fact most people don't know and don't think enough about the real side of gunfire to realize... If you know anything about guns, you usually laugh at violent movies and games because the guns just aren't used correctly. When you "cock" a shotgun, it ejects a shell, yet on many movies you see people cock the shotgun multiple times before firing.
I almost wet my pants watching an old episode of the X-Files when Scully goes to Mulders apartment where someone shot at her (the one where Mulder has his aprtments water spiked with LSD) and pulls out of the wall not a slug, but a CASING! A *CASING*... the thing that gets ejected onto the ground or stays in the gun (if its a revolver). It would not be stuck in a wall.
Just remember, there are no mazes with cheese at the end in nature, running rats through them proves nothing.
Comparing people who type with people who fire real firearms is not valid either.
Esperandi
i thought for a minute that one of the Lone gunmen were goin to get into the game and get killed off just so there couldn't be a Lone Gunmen spinoff like people have theorized (and if they wanna keep the X-Files alive its their best bet, trying to replace Mulder OR Scully would be rejected even if it was done spectacularly, and they simply couldn't replace both of them well.)
Esperandi
Think of how it COULD have stunk, tho... they were saying all this stuff about how the chick in the game was designed to fight male agression... what if Scully had warped into the game and pillow-talked Ms. Afterglow to oblivion?
Esperandi
Was expecting that scenario or something very "Waiting to exhale"-ish...
Oh wait, I had a question... did Gibson assist on this X-Files episode? I hope not... of so, he shoulda left it on that self-aware killer trailer, THAT was a cool episode (just sit around and consider how much a computer could do if it was self-aware along these lines. Maybe not take over an orbiting missile launcher, but it could order all kinds of crap over the net, make the money to pay for it by launching a web design firm, etc... interesting conversation fodder that first Gibson-assisted X-Files was)
I don't know who Straffe is, I'm assuming you mean STRAFE, or side-step... anyhow, when I saw them run up to the bunker I too said out loud (I was at a friends place, I wasn't talking to myself... that time) "Its like paintball!" Well, sorta like paintball, strafing is not a good idea... its a great idea in traditional FPS games, but in a really real environment, strafing often leads to falling on your ass and getting nailed ;)
And anyone who thinks paintball is for crazy Vietnam vets or militiamen is missing out on an absolute BLAST of a time!
Esperandi
Wipers suck.
We are closer than you think, the only thing we don't have yet that was on the show was the graphics quality. We already have photorealistic renderers and such, so as soon as they get optimized enough or processors are able to trace the light rays fast enough - boom - we're there. We already have chestplates that make you feel like you got drop-kicked, we have that inner-ear thing that makes you feel like you're moving, all the rest of it...
Esperandi
I contest that vote, I'd have to say the worst X-Files episode ever was that episode with the wolf-woman, the crazy one that valued the lives of wolves more than humans... it was just terrible in every aspect I could imagine.
At least this one had some really nice ass shots.
Esperandi