There was a document leaked a while back showing the fund raising strategy of the professional fund raising company from new york who was hired by this Alliance - and the strategy biols down to "Don't bother with the poor or middle class - raise money from the ultra-rich" -- the rich who don't have to suffer from energy crisis that we are going through, or some who even get richer because of it.
This statement causes me to ask "so what?" Fund raising strategies should be selected to...umm...successfully raise funds. It isn't surprising that environmental causes would target "the rich" since "the rich" tend to have more disposable income/savings than "the poor."
In addition, you act as if you aren't part of the energy crisis. Who, precisely, owes you oil for a convenient price? Or gasoline? Or electricity for that matter? No resource is a right. You negotiate with a seller to have it. Your view on access to cheap energy is no different than the Alliance's view on spoiling THEIR cheap resource--beautiful scenery.
Go bust the artery. Maybe this kind of discussion will get us all thinking about how nowthing is OWED us in life. We make it into what we want it to be through commerce of thought, action, and trade. TANSTAAFL.
Ya mean like constantly expanding the range of copyright laws so that nothing ever actually goes into the the public domain, so the free money cow never dries up?
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
I can see it for shared works of commerce such as open source software where ALL participants agree to pool their interests for the public good. But I don't see it for art. While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
You might also point out that other nations directly censor content of video games must more harshly than WalMart. When I worked at Microprose, for instance, Germany wouldn't allow distribution of SKUs that showed red blood.
But the greatest censor of all of content is the whim of the RETAIL buyer. What the buyer doesn't buy eventually doesn't get sold. Of course, there are niche markets that could sustain some of the content, but even Hollywood is changing its product mix in response to economist analysis of various ratings.
Simply put, even when you take artistic expression into account, media entertainment is commercial art. If you can't sell it, it doesn't get done.
The original MechCommander is a FASA/Hasbro owned source base. MechWarrior3 was created by Zipper so it's also FASA/Hasbro. I suspect the reason neither of those have been/will be released is that Hasbro has to be asked since they were created during Microprose days.
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer
on
World of Queuecraft
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· Score: 1
Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox) only died on me a couple of times. The more important "feature" of KOTOR was that it would ONLY save to the xbox hard drive. The save files were too big (even one) to save on the xbox memory card.
While I'll easily stipulate that it was unnecessary to have a save file that was that large, something tells me that Bioware found it convenient.
to create a Central Bank of Everquest, setting the interest rates at which players can borrow money and thus controlling prices through monetary policy.
The rough equivalent of the "fed" in EQ is the code that determines, presumably randomly, the value of currency and items that drop from mobs and resource mines.
The only way to have meaningful control over the money supply would be to do what was done in UO originally: put a finite amount of money and resources in the game.
As it turns out, that led to hording in UO including a person that had a fantastic number of shirts squirreled away (according to an online interview with Raph.)
Hording diminishes the money supply and dropping more cash would cause an unvirtuous cycle where seeing more cash come into the economy could cause more hording OR it could cause more spending. The unpredictability of either course of action leads to an unstable economy.
But the concept is cool. One approach that would help all around would be to have cash limits for how much characters of various levels could hold (a la Diablo 2). That would put a maximum on the money supply and the number of item slots puts a maximum on the resource supply. THAT system could be very workable.
I would turn that completely around. There was no game in there. It was pure promise. The magic that was there when I first attempted to play it (as I held my nose past the stinkeroo of a premise that the islanders worshipped me by worshipping a creature) was clearly missing when I attempted to repeat the experience.
In other words, all hype and no game. If you played Populous in any of its incarnations, you have played a better game with a better implementation of the premise than B&W. Populous had the "Bullfrog" feel as the designer carefully ramped you threw how the game worked and expanded the challenges. B&W lacked that. Populous had you "hinting" to your worshippers how to do things. B&W had you dealing with some stupid avatar that you couldn't control very well. There were times I wanted to send a lightning bolt down and destroy the avatar just to show the villagers that the "god" behind the avatar wasn't nearly as annoying as the avatar itself.
I guess that was the philosophical conclusion I reached by playing B&W: if you judge an invisible God solely on his followers, you probably are making a HUGE mistake. That conclusion satisfies my soul. B&W didn't.
I for one am very glad that this whole debacle is over. I think it's somewhat ridiculous that people are angry at Rockstar. AFAIK, GTA:SA is rated M for violence and sexual content. Why must it be AO now? This certainly wasn't hardcore porno, it was not even as bad as what you see on cable late at night.
The reason for the uproar is what Senator Hillary Clinton said. The ESRB rating is self-regulation by the industry so that they don't get regulated by the government. When you game the system like Rockstar did, you abuse the trust of the public. It would be roughly the equivalent of a movie studio showing one version of a movie to the MPAA for rating purposes and then printing a different version for distribution.
The game company is REQUIRED to reveal content that could affect the rating as part of the submission process. Rockstar failed to do that. The uproar actually isn't that bad compared to what it could have been. They KNOW that the major retailers won't distribute "AO" or unrated SKUs. The producers winked and nodded at putting it in OR they didn't do their job in monitoring the submission to the ESRB.
All of the/. handwringing over this is because we equate freedom with license and we have a distaste for negative consequences, thinking they somehow are an evil plot on the part of someone to make our lives miserable. What happened is what should happen when you abuse the trust of the public.
What an administration nightmare. Blah. Good luck with this little project.
If the kids are there to get educated, shouldn't using a computer be second nature when they graduate? And how can you make it an extension of their minds unless it is central to the learning process?
And what if it happens to engage children more to use a computer to learn? The main problem most of my friends had in high school was hating showing up every day. What if your education was meaningful, practical, and you were fully qualified immediately out of high school for better pay because of computer skills being second nature?
I see this as a step away from silliness and towards reasonability. Precisely how useful ARE textbooks? And isn't the control over the textbook as a source of philosophy and slant one of its major problems?
Switching out stale, dry textbooks might not work, but it has the advantage of perhaps invoking the Hawthorne Effect: changing the environment sometimes will cause an improvement in productivity simply because the people think you are watching and interacting with them more seriously.
You'd need the source code to make that kind of statement with any certainty.
I've reviewed the source code of the AI for Civ 2. I also was the producer for Microprose Austin's MP version of Civ 2 that we cancelled and of the Civ 3 version that was cancelled when they shut down the studio. Civ 2 cheated more on harder settings.
There is precisely one product that I am aware of that has ever been created with "perfect" (non-cheating) AI. The person who did the AI for the Microprose product 1830 (Russ Williams) made this claim to me at the Microprose Austin studio.
I just spoke with Ken Burd (programmer/designer/play-balancer for MOO, MOM, and MOO2) and he filled in that the 1830 computer-controlled players colluded heavily but did not cheat. He said that if he had been playing real-life opponents that behaved the same way, he'd probably slap them around and tell them he wouldn't ever play with them again, but it wasn't precisely cheating.
Steve Barcia (MOO/MOM/MOO2 chief designer and founder of the SimTex / Microprose Austin studio) insisted that it didn't matter whether or not the game "cheated" as long as the illusion of well-thought-out play was maintained. Clearly if you see something like the same unit warping from one city to another or enormous resources appearing, inexplicably, out of thin air then that suspension of disbelief is lost and the sense of immersion of the game is lost.
> Just face it, technology and AI research is just not capabable of pulling it
> of. Just say that instead of 'well, you really wouldn't want it'.
Why would I (or the OP) want to say that? It's not true.
Games are entertainment. While you MIGHT be able to create perfect AIs, the scope of the game might be limited or the cost of the supporting hardware might be prohibitive/unmarketable. There is a tradeoff between art, visuals, game richness, and smoothness that must be made. The game developer has to make that choice somewhat artistically and somewhat in response to market expectations. Over-emphasizing AI purity is unlikely to improve the success of the product.
Proof of that last statement? How many of the readers of this post were aware, before I made the post, that there was ANY game that could claim a non-cheating AI??
Slashdot Mirror
This statement causes me to ask "so what?" Fund raising strategies should be selected to...umm...successfully raise funds. It isn't surprising that environmental causes would target "the rich" since "the rich" tend to have more disposable income/savings than "the poor."
In addition, you act as if you aren't part of the energy crisis. Who, precisely, owes you oil for a convenient price? Or gasoline? Or electricity for that matter? No resource is a right. You negotiate with a seller to have it. Your view on access to cheap energy is no different than the Alliance's view on spoiling THEIR cheap resource--beautiful scenery.
Go bust the artery. Maybe this kind of discussion will get us all thinking about how nowthing is OWED us in life. We make it into what we want it to be through commerce of thought, action, and trade. TANSTAAFL.
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
I can see it for shared works of commerce such as open source software where ALL participants agree to pool their interests for the public good. But I don't see it for art. While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
Imagine shipping 1 billion DVDs for one cent cheaper.
But the greatest censor of all of content is the whim of the RETAIL buyer. What the buyer doesn't buy eventually doesn't get sold. Of course, there are niche markets that could sustain some of the content, but even Hollywood is changing its product mix in response to economist analysis of various ratings.
Simply put, even when you take artistic expression into account, media entertainment is commercial art. If you can't sell it, it doesn't get done.
The original MechCommander is a FASA/Hasbro owned source base. MechWarrior3 was created by Zipper so it's also FASA/Hasbro. I suspect the reason neither of those have been/will be released is that Hasbro has to be asked since they were created during Microprose days.
Actually, the only real answer is a real answer.
Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox) only died on me a couple of times. The more important "feature" of KOTOR was that it would ONLY save to the xbox hard drive. The save files were too big (even one) to save on the xbox memory card.
While I'll easily stipulate that it was unnecessary to have a save file that was that large, something tells me that Bioware found it convenient.
to create a Central Bank of Everquest, setting the interest rates at which players can borrow money and thus controlling prices through monetary policy. The rough equivalent of the "fed" in EQ is the code that determines, presumably randomly, the value of currency and items that drop from mobs and resource mines. The only way to have meaningful control over the money supply would be to do what was done in UO originally: put a finite amount of money and resources in the game. As it turns out, that led to hording in UO including a person that had a fantastic number of shirts squirreled away (according to an online interview with Raph.) Hording diminishes the money supply and dropping more cash would cause an unvirtuous cycle where seeing more cash come into the economy could cause more hording OR it could cause more spending. The unpredictability of either course of action leads to an unstable economy. But the concept is cool. One approach that would help all around would be to have cash limits for how much characters of various levels could hold (a la Diablo 2). That would put a maximum on the money supply and the number of item slots puts a maximum on the resource supply. THAT system could be very workable.
I would turn that completely around. There was no game in there. It was pure promise. The magic that was there when I first attempted to play it (as I held my nose past the stinkeroo of a premise that the islanders worshipped me by worshipping a creature) was clearly missing when I attempted to repeat the experience.
In other words, all hype and no game. If you played Populous in any of its incarnations, you have played a better game with a better implementation of the premise than B&W. Populous had the "Bullfrog" feel as the designer carefully ramped you threw how the game worked and expanded the challenges. B&W lacked that. Populous had you "hinting" to your worshippers how to do things. B&W had you dealing with some stupid avatar that you couldn't control very well. There were times I wanted to send a lightning bolt down and destroy the avatar just to show the villagers that the "god" behind the avatar wasn't nearly as annoying as the avatar itself.
I guess that was the philosophical conclusion I reached by playing B&W: if you judge an invisible God solely on his followers, you probably are making a HUGE mistake. That conclusion satisfies my soul. B&W didn't.
Saeul
I for one am very glad that this whole debacle is over. I think it's somewhat ridiculous that people are angry at Rockstar. AFAIK, GTA:SA is rated M for violence and sexual content. Why must it be AO now? This certainly wasn't hardcore porno, it was not even as bad as what you see on cable late at night.
The reason for the uproar is what Senator Hillary Clinton said. The ESRB rating is self-regulation by the industry so that they don't get regulated by the government. When you game the system like Rockstar did, you abuse the trust of the public. It would be roughly the equivalent of a movie studio showing one version of a movie to the MPAA for rating purposes and then printing a different version for distribution.
The game company is REQUIRED to reveal content that could affect the rating as part of the submission process. Rockstar failed to do that. The uproar actually isn't that bad compared to what it could have been. They KNOW that the major retailers won't distribute "AO" or unrated SKUs. The producers winked and nodded at putting it in OR they didn't do their job in monitoring the submission to the ESRB.
All of the /. handwringing over this is because we equate freedom with license and we have a distaste for negative consequences, thinking they somehow are an evil plot on the part of someone to make our lives miserable. What happened is what should happen when you abuse the trust of the public.
If the kids are there to get educated, shouldn't using a computer be second nature when they graduate? And how can you make it an extension of their minds unless it is central to the learning process?
And what if it happens to engage children more to use a computer to learn? The main problem most of my friends had in high school was hating showing up every day. What if your education was meaningful, practical, and you were fully qualified immediately out of high school for better pay because of computer skills being second nature?
I see this as a step away from silliness and towards reasonability. Precisely how useful ARE textbooks? And isn't the control over the textbook as a source of philosophy and slant one of its major problems?
Switching out stale, dry textbooks might not work, but it has the advantage of perhaps invoking the Hawthorne Effect: changing the environment sometimes will cause an improvement in productivity simply because the people think you are watching and interacting with them more seriously.
I've reviewed the source code of the AI for Civ 2. I also was the producer for Microprose Austin's MP version of Civ 2 that we cancelled and of the Civ 3 version that was cancelled when they shut down the studio. Civ 2 cheated more on harder settings.
There is precisely one product that I am aware of that has ever been created with "perfect" (non-cheating) AI. The person who did the AI for the Microprose product 1830 (Russ Williams) made this claim to me at the Microprose Austin studio.
I just spoke with Ken Burd (programmer/designer/play-balancer for MOO, MOM, and MOO2) and he filled in that the 1830 computer-controlled players colluded heavily but did not cheat. He said that if he had been playing real-life opponents that behaved the same way, he'd probably slap them around and tell them he wouldn't ever play with them again, but it wasn't precisely cheating.
Steve Barcia (MOO/MOM/MOO2 chief designer and founder of the SimTex / Microprose Austin studio) insisted that it didn't matter whether or not the game "cheated" as long as the illusion of well-thought-out play was maintained. Clearly if you see something like the same unit warping from one city to another or enormous resources appearing, inexplicably, out of thin air then that suspension of disbelief is lost and the sense of immersion of the game is lost.
> Just face it, technology and AI research is just not capabable of pulling it
> of. Just say that instead of 'well, you really wouldn't want it'.
Why would I (or the OP) want to say that? It's not true.
Games are entertainment. While you MIGHT be able to create perfect AIs, the scope of the game might be limited or the cost of the supporting hardware might be prohibitive/unmarketable. There is a tradeoff between art, visuals, game richness, and smoothness that must be made. The game developer has to make that choice somewhat artistically and somewhat in response to market expectations. Over-emphasizing AI purity is unlikely to improve the success of the product.
Proof of that last statement? How many of the readers of this post were aware, before I made the post, that there was ANY game that could claim a non-cheating AI??