A photon's own reference frame? I didn't think you could consider things from the perspective of a photon and still achieve physical results. In a photon's frame of reference, it and all other photons would constantly be at rest, since they all move at the same speed. That doesn't make any sense, though, since photons always travel at the speed of light and can never rest.
I think Thunderbird, specifically, has an option that automatically removes HTML and images from messages that are marked as Junk. I have that enabled for sure, but I don't have the program move or remove any spam--it just marks it as Junk. I still hardly ever see any junk these days.
Comcast was my ISP until a little while ago, and it's also my primary mail server. Does anyone know if they've been taking any measures to try and reduce the amount of spam that their customers recieve? Given Comcast's poor service record, I'd be very surprised if this was the case.
- Didn't Goldeneye have a system where the stick controlled movement, and the C-buttons looking around? Imagine what that game would've been like if the N64 controller had two sticks. - Old PC games also had autoaim because it was hard to aim with keyboards. A real step forward for consoles would be an aiming system that's as precise as the mouse. - This is a subjective opinion on a gameplay decision, and not a revolution in gameplay. System Shock 2, for one, also forced the player to make strategic inventory decisions. - Kept the player in the action by periodically forcing him out of the action? Imagine what, say, Duke Nukem 3D would've been like if there hadn't been any drive to go hunt for secret areas full of megahealth and outrageous weapons and the like. - Team Fortress had a similar grenade system years before--and that was with six or seven types of grenade, each complementary to the style of the player class. - The only thing frustrating about server browsers is that companies seem to have so much trouble creating decent interfaces for them, and then keeping them working when they patch. Eliminating a browser is just a cop-out.
Personally, I'd call Marathon more genre-advancing than Halo, because the former had, like, a plot, and at least one interesting character.
Considering that it's mandatory to have Vista to take advantage of DX10, and considering that DX has become a de facto standard in the gaming industry, lots of people are going to eventually be forced to port over to Vista.
You (should) still be immune to phishing scams if you refuse to give _any_ personal information out unless _you_ initiated the contact (and then only with known-good contact info for a business, such as calling a number printed on your phone bill). If you get an email like this, _call the company._ Yes, I know that it's usually impossible to get through, but even if you can't or don't, nothing bad will happen.
It may not be invasive, but I bet it takes a hell of a toll on you. Part of the procedure used to implement this test protocol was chemotherapy to disable the immune system--and I'm not an M.D., but I don't think that's very much fun. Now, the payoff may be worth it (well, it IS worth it if the treatment takes), but I still imagine it's nearly as trying as standard modalities, especially for cancer patients who've already had surgery or radiotherapy or the like.
Myself, I hope that you contacted the previous owner and informed him what happened so that patient's data would perhaps not be placed at wanton risk again.
"Although the user interface was tailored well for PC first person shooter fans, you could whip through Halo in about half the time it took many console players. The UI conversion may have been too good."
So, instead of either:
a) Taking advantage of the unique features of a PC to "enhance" a console-game experience with added content--and I DON'T mean just a multiplayer mode OR
b) Porting fewer games and instead focusing on developing games that play off of the strengths of their systems
... we should instead cripple the PC ports by forcing them to "play at the same level" as the consoles? I don't think I understand what the author is trying to imply with that assertion. It's a fact: PCs have a more robust control scheme barring applications that benefit greatly from analog input (joystick games such as flight sims aside--I'm talking about "tilt stick to walk" applications). If your game is hard on consoles but easy on the PC, then you've likely developed a game that's hampered by a poor control layout or simply wasn't meant to be played on a gamepad.
I'm no economics expert, but if a guy could find a way to emulate mouse control on a gamepad, he'd probably have his idea ripped off by Sony and make them a ton of money. Wiimote, I'm not looking at you because I'm unconvinced, based on what I've observed of your mode of operation, that you'll be any good for FPS.
With simple classes (e.g. Priest, Warrior, Hunter etc) but allowing players to further customise those roles for their play style (E.g. Priest healer or Priest for damage)
Great, so I have slightly more ways to be pigeonholed. I can be a "healing priest," or a "damage priest," or a highly ineffective combination of the two that will get me killed endless times and put me at a huge disadvantage to specialized priests in PvP.
Naturally, some "builds" have to be more useful than others, but in modern MMOs there's woefully little in the way of innovation when it comes to player skill sets. Barring changes after patches, hardcore players VERY quickly filter out the most "respectable" builds, which then begin to propagate themselves among the players. Everyone wants to get their player's various numbers as high as they can as fast as they can, and so they settle down into a variety of the most effective builds. The players who aren't savvy to these builds will clunk along, having various amounts of success depending on the way the game is designed. If I want to play a Wizard that has a morbid aversion to fire, but all the "good" Wizard spells are fire-based, then my Wizard's going to have a hell of a time finding people who'll put up with his "useless" Freeze Orb + Mystic Heal combination when--as EVERYONE knows--you MUST have Hell Dagger + Burning Pee in order to kill Trogdors in the Highlands. Why kill Trogdors in the Highlands? Because they drop the only sword that a Chevalier should ever use: Cloudbranch.
That's going to lead into the whole damn field of item builds, which I don't wanna get into since I've basically gotten completely away from my point. I will say that total randomization of item character would go a long way to preventing the "must have" mentality that plagues so many MMO builds--e.g. your Bow-Using Amazon (in Diablo 2) _must_ use this certain ultra rare Bow to have a snowball's chance in hell in PvP.
I'm missing something here...
on
Bob Saget 2.0
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Sometimes, someone will send me a link to a video on YouTube that's pretty funny. From there, the "similar videos" function lets me find other humorous videos in the same vein (e.g. Stephen Colbert clips, MST3K clips, whatever).
However, when I approach the site's front-end, the "most X" (where X is popular, viewed, voted on, or whatever) lineups are jammed full of webcam clips, in-jokes, and episodes of anime. It's a bizarre disconnect.
How are you supposed to promote a game character whose name is probably the most infamous naughty word in standard American English?
Moreover, and this one kinda depends on how prominent Fruit Fucker is in the game, how will the public handle the fact that a "cartoon video game" actually contains such an adult theme? Cartoons and video games are, after all, for children and only children!
Off the top of my head, here's one substantial difference. Television is strictly one-way communication, used to deliver a message to a segment of population (i.e. advertising). The Internet is two-way, capable of being used by nearly anyone for nearly any purpose.
Well, seeing as I've only been here about a week (new grad student) and I'm not technically in the "physics" area so much as the "health science" area (the offices of which are in the Civil Engineering building, of course), I can't really say as I have. Sorry.
That's awfully rude. What has the derivative of acceleration ever done to you? You owe someone an apology.
(NB: Yes, I know that jerk is a real descriptor of a physical quantity--I'm a physics student. Coincidentally, that also explains why I found it necessary to make so lame a joke.)
If we ever got to the point where a video game was driven by an artificial intelligence so advanced that it could itself become a citizen of a country, then couldn't we literally have a movie _starring_ the video game itself?
"Based on the hit video game 'Chessmaster 3035,' Chessmaster 3035 stars in: 'Chessmaster 3035, the Movie.'"
The problem I have with your statement is that it's quite possible for a very bad console to have a very good game. That one good game could be choked into oblivion by, for instance, a ludicrous price-point for the console--way more than people are willing to pay.
Consoles are a delivery method for video games. The games themselves are the end result: you want to play the good games. When a bad console "dies," it takes the good games that may have been released for it along with it, and that's very sad. Imagine being unable to pick up a wonderful book that someone has recommended to you because it's in a dead language, one you can't read and couldn't ever hope to read without paying a specialist tons of cash just to translate that one book. That, or you'd have to rely upon a clunky, home-brewed piece of software to make the translation for you--and, of course, it can't translate every book properly, and the software itself may or may not be completely legal.
When a console "dies," it's really bad for _gamers,_ because they lose out on the individual games--the little quanta of fun--that were meant to be played by or were in the planning stages for that system. Gamers lose out, because a part of their gaming "history" is lost. The business of the games industry in this case gets in the way of--yes, I'm going to say it!--the _art_ or even just the _appreciation of_ the video game as a medium for entertainment.
Please note: I'm not saying that every single Virtual Boy-scale failure out there has irretrievably wrecked every possible means of playing the games for that system. For the average gamer, though, to play some excellent Sega CD (for instance) game (if there were any--I don't know for sure), would require a lot of work, most of which is either expensive (trying to eBay up a working unit) or illegal (emulation).
"X MMO already takes Y hours to do Z, where Y is greater than 10!"
MMOs don't count, since their business model pretty much thrives on protracting the amount of playtime put into the game. The longer it takes to do something, the less often people will be able to do it, the longer they'll have to keep paying for the game in order to do it more than once.
"You don't have to play all 10 hours!"
I can imagine that individual games will have "lull" periods, say about 3 hours in, where no new players want to join because they know there's no way they'll have time to bring the game to its conclusion. Unlike something like WWIIOnline, where there's, say, several days to several weeks in between "games," you can actually make a significant impact on the "world-game" by playing even relatively short sessions--relatively short because it can take half an hour to drive to your battle. Basically, people will rush to join games that are almost over because they'll want to "win the game," or at least be in near the conclusion. If they happen to get in on the losing side near the end of the game, they'll probably just leave, knowing that there's no chance in hell they'll ever win. Think about CS matches where one team's been winning round after round: the losers just can't stage a good comeback if there's no attrition from the winning team.
Of course, very often the game will probably end in much fewer than 10 hours as the team that appears to be losing gradually suffers from morale-induced attrition: "why should I waste all this time if I'm just going to lose anyhow?" This is assuming that 10 hours is an estimate based on scope, and not a necessity of the mechanics--that is, it takes fifteen minutes to "transfer" ownership of a base. In this latter case, then folks will probably stick around for a small number of "captures," and maybe stay longer if they're close to the end. Unless there's almost constant pitched fighting--more importantly, no feeling of hopelessness as one looks at a 5-hour game that one can't win--people will probably get bored pretty quickly. Crysis isn't trying to attract the MMO crowd, here.
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A photon's own reference frame? I didn't think you could consider things from the perspective of a photon and still achieve physical results. In a photon's frame of reference, it and all other photons would constantly be at rest, since they all move at the same speed. That doesn't make any sense, though, since photons always travel at the speed of light and can never rest.
"Some disassembly required."
I think Thunderbird, specifically, has an option that automatically removes HTML and images from messages that are marked as Junk. I have that enabled for sure, but I don't have the program move or remove any spam--it just marks it as Junk. I still hardly ever see any junk these days.
Comcast was my ISP until a little while ago, and it's also my primary mail server. Does anyone know if they've been taking any measures to try and reduce the amount of spam that their customers recieve? Given Comcast's poor service record, I'd be very surprised if this was the case.
Everyone's noticed the recent flood of image spam...
I haven't. I can't even remember the last spam message I've seen, period--not even in my throwaway accounts.
- Didn't Goldeneye have a system where the stick controlled movement, and the C-buttons looking around? Imagine what that game would've been like if the N64 controller had two sticks.
- Old PC games also had autoaim because it was hard to aim with keyboards. A real step forward for consoles would be an aiming system that's as precise as the mouse.
- This is a subjective opinion on a gameplay decision, and not a revolution in gameplay. System Shock 2, for one, also forced the player to make strategic inventory decisions.
- Kept the player in the action by periodically forcing him out of the action? Imagine what, say, Duke Nukem 3D would've been like if there hadn't been any drive to go hunt for secret areas full of megahealth and outrageous weapons and the like.
- Team Fortress had a similar grenade system years before--and that was with six or seven types of grenade, each complementary to the style of the player class.
- The only thing frustrating about server browsers is that companies seem to have so much trouble creating decent interfaces for them, and then keeping them working when they patch. Eliminating a browser is just a cop-out.
Personally, I'd call Marathon more genre-advancing than Halo, because the former had, like, a plot, and at least one interesting character.
Considering that it's mandatory to have Vista to take advantage of DX10, and considering that DX has become a de facto standard in the gaming industry, lots of people are going to eventually be forced to port over to Vista.
Right?
You (should) still be immune to phishing scams if you refuse to give _any_ personal information out unless _you_ initiated the contact (and then only with known-good contact info for a business, such as calling a number printed on your phone bill). If you get an email like this, _call the company._ Yes, I know that it's usually impossible to get through, but even if you can't or don't, nothing bad will happen.
I wish we could get more people to realize this.
It may not be invasive, but I bet it takes a hell of a toll on you. Part of the procedure used to implement this test protocol was chemotherapy to disable the immune system--and I'm not an M.D., but I don't think that's very much fun. Now, the payoff may be worth it (well, it IS worth it if the treatment takes), but I still imagine it's nearly as trying as standard modalities, especially for cancer patients who've already had surgery or radiotherapy or the like.
Popular does not imply genre-advancing.
Myself, I hope that you contacted the previous owner and informed him what happened so that patient's data would perhaps not be placed at wanton risk again.
"Although the user interface was tailored well for PC first person shooter fans, you could whip through Halo in about half the time it took many console players. The UI conversion may have been too good."
... we should instead cripple the PC ports by forcing them to "play at the same level" as the consoles? I don't think I understand what the author is trying to imply with that assertion. It's a fact: PCs have a more robust control scheme barring applications that benefit greatly from analog input (joystick games such as flight sims aside--I'm talking about "tilt stick to walk" applications). If your game is hard on consoles but easy on the PC, then you've likely developed a game that's hampered by a poor control layout or simply wasn't meant to be played on a gamepad.
So, instead of either:
a) Taking advantage of the unique features of a PC to "enhance" a console-game experience with added content--and I DON'T mean just a multiplayer mode OR
b) Porting fewer games and instead focusing on developing games that play off of the strengths of their systems
I'm no economics expert, but if a guy could find a way to emulate mouse control on a gamepad, he'd probably have his idea ripped off by Sony and make them a ton of money. Wiimote, I'm not looking at you because I'm unconvinced, based on what I've observed of your mode of operation, that you'll be any good for FPS.
Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the institution of science in the US as Bush has?
With simple classes (e.g. Priest, Warrior, Hunter etc) but allowing players to further customise those roles for their play style (E.g. Priest healer or Priest for damage)
Great, so I have slightly more ways to be pigeonholed. I can be a "healing priest," or a "damage priest," or a highly ineffective combination of the two that will get me killed endless times and put me at a huge disadvantage to specialized priests in PvP.
Naturally, some "builds" have to be more useful than others, but in modern MMOs there's woefully little in the way of innovation when it comes to player skill sets. Barring changes after patches, hardcore players VERY quickly filter out the most "respectable" builds, which then begin to propagate themselves among the players. Everyone wants to get their player's various numbers as high as they can as fast as they can, and so they settle down into a variety of the most effective builds. The players who aren't savvy to these builds will clunk along, having various amounts of success depending on the way the game is designed. If I want to play a Wizard that has a morbid aversion to fire, but all the "good" Wizard spells are fire-based, then my Wizard's going to have a hell of a time finding people who'll put up with his "useless" Freeze Orb + Mystic Heal combination when--as EVERYONE knows--you MUST have Hell Dagger + Burning Pee in order to kill Trogdors in the Highlands. Why kill Trogdors in the Highlands? Because they drop the only sword that a Chevalier should ever use: Cloudbranch.
That's going to lead into the whole damn field of item builds, which I don't wanna get into since I've basically gotten completely away from my point. I will say that total randomization of item character would go a long way to preventing the "must have" mentality that plagues so many MMO builds--e.g. your Bow-Using Amazon (in Diablo 2) _must_ use this certain ultra rare Bow to have a snowball's chance in hell in PvP.
They had the CG Enterprise left over from... Enterprise, and wanted to get their dollars back out of it?
And so while ship-scale phasers will be beautiful, hand phasers and transporters will still look like cotton candy?
... a Lake Express snow (11) storm.
(Yeah, yeah. I'm _really_ stretching this one.)
Sometimes, someone will send me a link to a video on YouTube that's pretty funny. From there, the "similar videos" function lets me find other humorous videos in the same vein (e.g. Stephen Colbert clips, MST3K clips, whatever).
However, when I approach the site's front-end, the "most X" (where X is popular, viewed, voted on, or whatever) lineups are jammed full of webcam clips, in-jokes, and episodes of anime. It's a bizarre disconnect.
How are you supposed to promote a game character whose name is probably the most infamous naughty word in standard American English?
Moreover, and this one kinda depends on how prominent Fruit Fucker is in the game, how will the public handle the fact that a "cartoon video game" actually contains such an adult theme? Cartoons and video games are, after all, for children and only children!
Off the top of my head, here's one substantial difference. Television is strictly one-way communication, used to deliver a message to a segment of population (i.e. advertising). The Internet is two-way, capable of being used by nearly anyone for nearly any purpose.
Well, seeing as I've only been here about a week (new grad student) and I'm not technically in the "physics" area so much as the "health science" area (the offices of which are in the Civil Engineering building, of course), I can't really say as I have. Sorry.
Right now? I'm at Purdue, in Health Science. It's physics! Really, it is. Medical physics.
The jerk is the derivative of acceleration.
That's awfully rude. What has the derivative of acceleration ever done to you? You owe someone an apology.
(NB: Yes, I know that jerk is a real descriptor of a physical quantity--I'm a physics student. Coincidentally, that also explains why I found it necessary to make so lame a joke.)
If we ever got to the point where a video game was driven by an artificial intelligence so advanced that it could itself become a citizen of a country, then couldn't we literally have a movie _starring_ the video game itself?
"Based on the hit video game 'Chessmaster 3035,' Chessmaster 3035 stars in: 'Chessmaster 3035, the Movie.'"
Love to see Uwe Boll try to tackle that one.
I hardly think it is appropriate for NASA to have a Captain of Orion when "Master of Orion" obviously outranks him/her.
Time to start that grassroots letter-writing campaign! Where's my petition-drafting pen?
The problem I have with your statement is that it's quite possible for a very bad console to have a very good game. That one good game could be choked into oblivion by, for instance, a ludicrous price-point for the console--way more than people are willing to pay.
Consoles are a delivery method for video games. The games themselves are the end result: you want to play the good games. When a bad console "dies," it takes the good games that may have been released for it along with it, and that's very sad. Imagine being unable to pick up a wonderful book that someone has recommended to you because it's in a dead language, one you can't read and couldn't ever hope to read without paying a specialist tons of cash just to translate that one book. That, or you'd have to rely upon a clunky, home-brewed piece of software to make the translation for you--and, of course, it can't translate every book properly, and the software itself may or may not be completely legal.
When a console "dies," it's really bad for _gamers,_ because they lose out on the individual games--the little quanta of fun--that were meant to be played by or were in the planning stages for that system. Gamers lose out, because a part of their gaming "history" is lost. The business of the games industry in this case gets in the way of--yes, I'm going to say it!--the _art_ or even just the _appreciation of_ the video game as a medium for entertainment.
Please note: I'm not saying that every single Virtual Boy-scale failure out there has irretrievably wrecked every possible means of playing the games for that system. For the average gamer, though, to play some excellent Sega CD (for instance) game (if there were any--I don't know for sure), would require a lot of work, most of which is either expensive (trying to eBay up a working unit) or illegal (emulation).
"X MMO already takes Y hours to do Z, where Y is greater than 10!"
MMOs don't count, since their business model pretty much thrives on protracting the amount of playtime put into the game. The longer it takes to do something, the less often people will be able to do it, the longer they'll have to keep paying for the game in order to do it more than once.
"You don't have to play all 10 hours!"
I can imagine that individual games will have "lull" periods, say about 3 hours in, where no new players want to join because they know there's no way they'll have time to bring the game to its conclusion. Unlike something like WWIIOnline, where there's, say, several days to several weeks in between "games," you can actually make a significant impact on the "world-game" by playing even relatively short sessions--relatively short because it can take half an hour to drive to your battle. Basically, people will rush to join games that are almost over because they'll want to "win the game," or at least be in near the conclusion. If they happen to get in on the losing side near the end of the game, they'll probably just leave, knowing that there's no chance in hell they'll ever win. Think about CS matches where one team's been winning round after round: the losers just can't stage a good comeback if there's no attrition from the winning team.
Of course, very often the game will probably end in much fewer than 10 hours as the team that appears to be losing gradually suffers from morale-induced attrition: "why should I waste all this time if I'm just going to lose anyhow?" This is assuming that 10 hours is an estimate based on scope, and not a necessity of the mechanics--that is, it takes fifteen minutes to "transfer" ownership of a base. In this latter case, then folks will probably stick around for a small number of "captures," and maybe stay longer if they're close to the end. Unless there's almost constant pitched fighting--more importantly, no feeling of hopelessness as one looks at a 5-hour game that one can't win--people will probably get bored pretty quickly. Crysis isn't trying to attract the MMO crowd, here.