Wow. Take it to the next level. Whenever you're not online, your character has some other personality that actually works towards a _different_ and possibly contrary set of goals--instead of grinding XP, maybe he goes out and harvests fish or shoots puppies or something. Of course, the more time you spend online, the harder your character works against you when you're offline (just to keep it fair for the casual gamer). Man, that'd be hard to balance, but why do games always _require_ that you're in more or less total control of your character? If you're going to give them an "offline" life, why not do something _interesting_ with it? Imagine logging back in only to find that some naked newbie's character is locked in your apartment's bathroom. Total riot.
From what I've read, NIH-funded projects tend to do most of the "discovery"-type work, leaving Pharmaceuticals to purchase the licenses after the fact... So, if this is true, then the Pharmaceuticals aren't going to discover the cure, period. They'll be happy to charge $10000 per dose to make up for their overwhelming research budget, I'm sure.
It's possible that a governmental body might try to do an end run around the patent, if they decide that AIDS is "epidemic enough" for that sort of thing.
Also, I don't have any good numbers right here to back this up, but I don't think that today's "standard track" is even as rigorous as yesteryear's "fast track," and I don't think that "fast tracking" is as uncommon as you might think. The FDA is _woefully_ understaffed and underfunded considering the bulk and weight of what they do. Can anyone close to the FDA on here back me up on this?
OK, so, combining a "Power Glove (Nintendo)"-like device and this vertical mousing device should produce the greatest peripheral known to mankind. Thud your hand down on the mousepad and drag it around to point. Twitch fingers to click. Flick thumb across wheel in palm to scroll.
where everything down to the colors of the clothes is predetermined
This is why I refuse to get into WoW or most MMOs these days. In FFIX, without spending extra gil--and we know how much of a problem that can be in that game for those of us who didn't buy it--you couldn't get unique-looking armor.
Hell, _Quake_ had the ability to dynamically change certain colors of the skins--I don't know if it's hard to implement or what, but why do so many games not take advantage of this? This is a game that came out in 1997--almost 10 years ago now! Morrowind could use it so that folks wouldn't have to churn out eight different base colors of their popular clothes mods. Planetside could use it so that "oh but we'd have to make more art" wouldn't be a barrier to doing something interesting in the game--like letting players spawn enemy MAXes. Grinding FFIX would've been much more interesting if folks could at least _color_ their scale mail so that everyone in the party didn't look substantially similar.
Big Religion is sane. Mostly. The problem is--shock, shock--people using religion as a lever or a wedge to do what they want to do anyhow. Hah--lever and wedge. You can't even talk about the DEBATE without using physics.
Last time I had my retinas photographed, the flash used was so intense as to be painful. Lest you accidentally "overexpose" yourself (say, having to take many shots due to by missing or being out of focus--I don't think most people could accurately aim a camera at the back of their own eyes) I really recommend not trying this out at home.
It didn't bother me to see the Burger King product placement in Back to the Future, but for some reason it pissed me off to see that same thing (to a lesser degree, even) in Minority Report. The strange thing is that both of these movies were set either in real or pseudo-real locations where you'd expect to see "real life" ads. Maybe if you're sufficiently enjoying the experience, a little ad whoring doesn't bother you too much.
Isn't the solution to that problem more like using more creativity in designing fake ads? Is it really so difficult to come up with fake companies with fake pitches? they don't _have_ to be cute or effective, they simply have to be on-theme. Ideally, they'd show a little effort, too, but I'd much rather see a variety of crappy fake ads than a variety of "professional" ads for real-world stuff.
I've never actually used voice chat in an (Internet-play) video game. I mean, I've _heard_ it, but I don't talk. I also don't type. I'm not there to chat. Even in team games, I just type (if I bother with communication at all on the pubs). Practically this entire article was meaningless to me.
I've found that communication doesn't usually matter in public (read: non-clan) multiplayer games. You can be dead quiet in ET, CS, any deathmatch, SWBF2--any FPS, really, and things usually go fine. Talking leads to idiots replying; idiots replying leads to anger; anger leads to elevated blood pressure, which is something I don't need from a video game.
About the VS bug: I never heard about that one. Of course, I didn't really know about the shotgun bug, either, until the other day. What'd the big VS bug entail?
Re:As a former planetside player....
on
Planetside For Free
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Let me clarify: what I've heard is "up to BR 8." When you get out of training, you should be at BR 4--that means you pick up four points along the way.
I think a guy down there posted a better recap. The point is that you are limited in no way except the number of certs (and not being able to access expansion content--I assume on that, though). There's also command rank, which I think you can progress in from CR0 (no bonus) to CR2 (some bonuses). Paid members can get up to CR5 (which I hear takes _forever) but has some very nice bonuses. Of course, what's the point of _everyone_ being a CR5? Too many bosses and not enough fighters--people just want to lay orbital strikes.
More bitching follows:
For a game where teamplay is so important, I see a lot of people who doesn't seem to get the concept. I see veteran pilots complaining about a new anti-air light scout fighter, saying how it'll ruin dogfights. Well, my take is that you aren't up there to dogfight. You're up there to either bomb the crap out of people on the ground, to scout, or to shoot at other things in the air. When I hear "dogfight," I think of folks going up and looking for other fighters to swerve and loop against. My impression is that the anti-air fighters will be more useful for shooting down heavy transports, bombers, mobile repair transports, and that sort of stuff. As is, I don't think there's any aircraft in the game whose _purpose_ is anti-air--there's a bomber, a dropship, a light scout (which can dogfight, but doesn't appear to be intended to do so), a groundpounder (always seemed like a Warthog sort of thing to me, useful for camping outside of doorways rather than shooting down aircraft), and a mobile repair/transport craft. They're also adding in a gunship (think Spectre gunship from, say, C&C Generals), but I didn't hear much about that one, and I imagine it could chew through a few aircraft as well. I imagine that the air game would center around: flying transports/dropships, defending transports/dropships, hunting ground units, or defending against flyers hunting ground units. I don't see how just cruising around looking for individual pilots to dogfight really helps the team. I hear similar things about snipers: "snipers are only good against other snipers." Well, then, what's the point?
As a former planetside player....
on
Planetside For Free
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I thought new players were going to be able to level up to BR 8, which should get you at least 4 cert points, right?
Or have they changed _everything_ since the beta in the name of balance?
Besides, it's called the "fodder" program. These people will be around to give the remaining vets more moving things to shoot at. Does anyone have any stats on maximum connections to PS servers at one time?
Pointless stuff follows:
I really, really, REALLY wanted to like this game. An FPS environment seems like it would solve a lot of the repetition and grinding issues that the MMORPGs always face. Even with my OK computer and a good Internet connection, though, I had lag and FPS problems--sure, it's a beta, but things didn't improve much when I came back later. Weapon balance seemed, well... spotty. I played back in the Beta days with a room mate of mine, and even with us both in the same room yelling things at each other, we didn't have all that much success--and we're both at least decent FPS players. Vehicles were fun, but the weapons felt very underpowered--we'd both shoot that Lancer anti-vehicle gun at even a Lightning, and it felt like forever before the thing blew up. Maybe it was lag. I remember trying to get back into the game for a while, but even after doubling my RAM (to 512) I still had problems. I'm also not keen on Clans--small tactical teams I can do, but Clans seem to always end up full of annoying elitists. It seems like it'd be pretty hard to find a good squad without joining a clan.
Lastly, I've heard that there're still pretty serious bugs. Like vehicles randomly becoming invincible, and major weapons randomly doing no damage (like, all the shotguns--and one whole faction's infantry weapons more or less revolve around shotguns).
Write both of your own state's senators AND this guy. There's no reason to keep your letter-writing campaign limited just to the guy who introduces the bill. Hit up the chairs of the committees it's sent to as well.
Now, I'm not saying Fallout 2 was overburdened with cutscenes--it sure as hell wasn't, and since most of those that I can remember involved nuclear explosions, I think we can easily overlook those. However, it had one cutscene of unspeakable unimportance, awkward placement, and inane length: the tanker launch. Yes, it's significant in that the tanker takes you to the final area of the game. Yes, it's a lot of work getting the taker going (relatively speaking--nothing in FO2 was all that much work). Yes, it's slightly impressive to watch the tanker take out half the dock because the dipshit player forgot to unhook the mooring lines, whatever. Yes, the water was somewhat well-rendered.
You still spend a very, very long time watching an old rust-bucket tanker _slowly_ trawl off into the sunset while overly dramatic music plays. No characters are visible. No dialog. No real action. I understand that they want to build tension, but a long scene involving an incredibly slow-moving object really doesn't do that for me. It's probably the single most pointless cinematic scene in a video game--they could've cut its length by two-thirds and nobody would have shit a kitten. My point isn't that it wasn't skippable or that I don't have the patience to sit for a two-minute movie. Rather, I think it's sad that they spent money and time developing such a long and pointless rendition of an unimportant scene. Now, the cinematic where you finally arrive at your destination is much less pointless, even though it also has some needlessly drawn-out parts. They could've spend that money giving another NPC a "talking head." Vic or Cassidy or Goris could've used one.
Can anyone else think of other examples of uninteresting or criminally unimportant cutscenes from video games?
(Heh. Criminal Insignificance. "Peter Gibbons, you've lead a trite and
meaningless life. And you're a very bad person.")
Forgot to put this in the first time--duh duh stupid college graduates, right?
Anyhow, how difficult is it to calculate tips? 20% is divide by five, or double and move the decimal point if that's easier. For 15%, just calculate 20% and 10% (you can calculate 10% while doing 20% if you're so inclined) then guess at--I mean, estimate an average. Who cares about hitting 15% on the cent?
My problem is remembering _who_ to tip and _how much!_
On an unrelated note, if there was just one skill that I wish I would've learned back in middle school, it would be dimensional analysis. I constantly see people struggling with unit conversions trying to remember if they are supposed to divide or multiply by the factor. Dimensional analysis is simple, universal, and would banish all these conversion problems to the land of wind and ghosts... assuming people can remember the conversion factor.
I have to wonder how private colleges would compare to public. The article mentions that the sample used (seems like a small sample size to me) included results from both schools. It seems to me that it might be worthwhile to sample each of those pools separately. Of course, it's hard to say if that would point to the caliber of students one type admits relative to the other, or if it ends up being a "quality of education" deal. I know that I never took "Table Comprehension 100," but just about _every_ class required the abilty to read a table and get information from it. Hell, though. In nuclear physics, we had to use a chart of nuclide decays, which is a little harder than looking down and across on a spreadsheet.
You know, would people complain so much about Star Trek if someone could do to it what was apparently done for Battlestar Galactica? I haven't seen any of the new BG, but I hear that it's pretty good sci-fi.
Keep phasers, keep Sovereign-class and all that, but revamp the crappy parts. Still Star Trek, only it doesn't suck. I guess Enterprise wanted to do that, but that fell on its face. That's what people would want to see: their familiar canon in a decently re-envisioned sci-fi series. I wouldn't want anyone to close their minds to it just because "it's Trek." Of course, Trek as it is might be too deeply entrenched to be recast this way. I don't know.
Even after I stopped playing console games, I still subscribed to NP. I don't really know why. There's a bunch of issues of it next to my right foot that I don't think I've ever even seen, let alone read.
For some reason, I feel compelled to go look for the old Final Fantasy strategy guide and read about Warmech. Again, I really, really don't know why. I didn't even get past the Elf Kingdom in Final Fantasy. I'm more of an FFIX guy myself.
Slashdot Mirror
The long and short? People never learn.
Wow. Take it to the next level. Whenever you're not online, your character has some other personality that actually works towards a _different_ and possibly contrary set of goals--instead of grinding XP, maybe he goes out and harvests fish or shoots puppies or something. Of course, the more time you spend online, the harder your character works against you when you're offline (just to keep it fair for the casual gamer). Man, that'd be hard to balance, but why do games always _require_ that you're in more or less total control of your character? If you're going to give them an "offline" life, why not do something _interesting_ with it? Imagine logging back in only to find that some naked newbie's character is locked in your apartment's bathroom. Total riot.
Or, if you want to see G.I. Joes IN Transformers, go watch MASK.
(Credit to, uh... someone else for that one.)
From what I've read, NIH-funded projects tend to do most of the "discovery"-type work, leaving Pharmaceuticals to purchase the licenses after the fact... So, if this is true, then the Pharmaceuticals aren't going to discover the cure, period. They'll be happy to charge $10000 per dose to make up for their overwhelming research budget, I'm sure.
It's possible that a governmental body might try to do an end run around the patent, if they decide that AIDS is "epidemic enough" for that sort of thing.
Also, I don't have any good numbers right here to back this up, but I don't think that today's "standard track" is even as rigorous as yesteryear's "fast track," and I don't think that "fast tracking" is as uncommon as you might think. The FDA is _woefully_ understaffed and underfunded considering the bulk and weight of what they do. Can anyone close to the FDA on here back me up on this?
OK, so, combining a "Power Glove (Nintendo)"-like device and this vertical mousing device should produce the greatest peripheral known to mankind. Thud your hand down on the mousepad and drag it around to point. Twitch fingers to click. Flick thumb across wheel in palm to scroll.
where everything down to the colors of the clothes is predetermined
This is why I refuse to get into WoW or most MMOs these days. In FFIX, without spending extra gil--and we know how much of a problem that can be in that game for those of us who didn't buy it--you couldn't get unique-looking armor.
Hell, _Quake_ had the ability to dynamically change certain colors of the skins--I don't know if it's hard to implement or what, but why do so many games not take advantage of this? This is a game that came out in 1997--almost 10 years ago now! Morrowind could use it so that folks wouldn't have to churn out eight different base colors of their popular clothes mods. Planetside could use it so that "oh but we'd have to make more art" wouldn't be a barrier to doing something interesting in the game--like letting players spawn enemy MAXes. Grinding FFIX would've been much more interesting if folks could at least _color_ their scale mail so that everyone in the party didn't look substantially similar.
So, in short:
Big Religion is sane. Mostly. The problem is--shock, shock--people using religion as a lever or a wedge to do what they want to do anyhow. Hah--lever and wedge. You can't even talk about the DEBATE without using physics.
Last time I had my retinas photographed, the flash used was so intense as to be painful. Lest you accidentally "overexpose" yourself (say, having to take many shots due to by missing or being out of focus--I don't think most people could accurately aim a camera at the back of their own eyes) I really recommend not trying this out at home.
It didn't bother me to see the Burger King product placement in Back to the Future, but for some reason it pissed me off to see that same thing (to a lesser degree, even) in Minority Report. The strange thing is that both of these movies were set either in real or pseudo-real locations where you'd expect to see "real life" ads. Maybe if you're sufficiently enjoying the experience, a little ad whoring doesn't bother you too much.
Isn't the solution to that problem more like using more creativity in designing fake ads? Is it really so difficult to come up with fake companies with fake pitches? they don't _have_ to be cute or effective, they simply have to be on-theme. Ideally, they'd show a little effort, too, but I'd much rather see a variety of crappy fake ads than a variety of "professional" ads for real-world stuff.
I've never actually used voice chat in an (Internet-play) video game. I mean, I've _heard_ it, but I don't talk. I also don't type. I'm not there to chat. Even in team games, I just type (if I bother with communication at all on the pubs). Practically this entire article was meaningless to me.
I've found that communication doesn't usually matter in public (read: non-clan) multiplayer games. You can be dead quiet in ET, CS, any deathmatch, SWBF2--any FPS, really, and things usually go fine. Talking leads to idiots replying; idiots replying leads to anger; anger leads to elevated blood pressure, which is something I don't need from a video game.
Combine this with standard treatments. I'm not a doctor, but I would guess you can irradiate these types of tumors.
Someone messed up in the summary. The Pubmed abstract (first link) says 20 kHz meaning kilohertz.
I think anyone using kelvin-hertz as a unit--for whatever unholy reason--would at least have the decency to write Hz-K or K-Hz to remove ambiguity.
About the VS bug: I never heard about that one. Of course, I didn't really know about the shotgun bug, either, until the other day. What'd the big VS bug entail?
Let me clarify: what I've heard is "up to BR 8." When you get out of training, you should be at BR 4--that means you pick up four points along the way.
I think a guy down there posted a better recap. The point is that you are limited in no way except the number of certs (and not being able to access expansion content--I assume on that, though). There's also command rank, which I think you can progress in from CR0 (no bonus) to CR2 (some bonuses). Paid members can get up to CR5 (which I hear takes _forever) but has some very nice bonuses. Of course, what's the point of _everyone_ being a CR5? Too many bosses and not enough fighters--people just want to lay orbital strikes.
More bitching follows:
For a game where teamplay is so important, I see a lot of people who doesn't seem to get the concept. I see veteran pilots complaining about a new anti-air light scout fighter, saying how it'll ruin dogfights. Well, my take is that you aren't up there to dogfight. You're up there to either bomb the crap out of people on the ground, to scout, or to shoot at other things in the air. When I hear "dogfight," I think of folks going up and looking for other fighters to swerve and loop against. My impression is that the anti-air fighters will be more useful for shooting down heavy transports, bombers, mobile repair transports, and that sort of stuff. As is, I don't think there's any aircraft in the game whose _purpose_ is anti-air--there's a bomber, a dropship, a light scout (which can dogfight, but doesn't appear to be intended to do so), a groundpounder (always seemed like a Warthog sort of thing to me, useful for camping outside of doorways rather than shooting down aircraft), and a mobile repair/transport craft. They're also adding in a gunship (think Spectre gunship from, say, C&C Generals), but I didn't hear much about that one, and I imagine it could chew through a few aircraft as well. I imagine that the air game would center around: flying transports/dropships, defending transports/dropships, hunting ground units, or defending against flyers hunting ground units. I don't see how just cruising around looking for individual pilots to dogfight really helps the team. I hear similar things about snipers: "snipers are only good against other snipers." Well, then, what's the point?
I thought new players were going to be able to level up to BR 8, which should get you at least 4 cert points, right?
Or have they changed _everything_ since the beta in the name of balance?
Besides, it's called the "fodder" program. These people will be around to give the remaining vets more moving things to shoot at. Does anyone have any stats on maximum connections to PS servers at one time?
Pointless stuff follows:
I really, really, REALLY wanted to like this game. An FPS environment seems like it would solve a lot of the repetition and grinding issues that the MMORPGs always face. Even with my OK computer and a good Internet connection, though, I had lag and FPS problems--sure, it's a beta, but things didn't improve much when I came back later. Weapon balance seemed, well... spotty. I played back in the Beta days with a room mate of mine, and even with us both in the same room yelling things at each other, we didn't have all that much success--and we're both at least decent FPS players. Vehicles were fun, but the weapons felt very underpowered--we'd both shoot that Lancer anti-vehicle gun at even a Lightning, and it felt like forever before the thing blew up. Maybe it was lag. I remember trying to get back into the game for a while, but even after doubling my RAM (to 512) I still had problems. I'm also not keen on Clans--small tactical teams I can do, but Clans seem to always end up full of annoying elitists. It seems like it'd be pretty hard to find a good squad without joining a clan.
Lastly, I've heard that there're still pretty serious bugs. Like vehicles randomly becoming invincible, and major weapons randomly doing no damage (like, all the shotguns--and one whole faction's infantry weapons more or less revolve around shotguns).
Write both of your own state's senators AND this guy. There's no reason to keep your letter-writing campaign limited just to the guy who introduces the bill. Hit up the chairs of the committees it's sent to as well.
Now, I'm not saying Fallout 2 was overburdened with cutscenes--it sure as hell wasn't, and since most of those that I can remember involved nuclear explosions, I think we can easily overlook those. However, it had one cutscene of unspeakable unimportance, awkward placement, and inane length: the tanker launch. Yes, it's significant in that the tanker takes you to the final area of the game. Yes, it's a lot of work getting the taker going (relatively speaking--nothing in FO2 was all that much work). Yes, it's slightly impressive to watch the tanker take out half the dock because the dipshit player forgot to unhook the mooring lines, whatever. Yes, the water was somewhat well-rendered.
You still spend a very, very long time watching an old rust-bucket tanker _slowly_ trawl off into the sunset while overly dramatic music plays. No characters are visible. No dialog. No real action. I understand that they want to build tension, but a long scene involving an incredibly slow-moving object really doesn't do that for me. It's probably the single most pointless cinematic scene in a video game--they could've cut its length by two-thirds and nobody would have shit a kitten. My point isn't that it wasn't skippable or that I don't have the patience to sit for a two-minute movie. Rather, I think it's sad that they spent money and time developing such a long and pointless rendition of an unimportant scene. Now, the cinematic where you finally arrive at your destination is much less pointless, even though it also has some needlessly drawn-out parts. They could've spend that money giving another NPC a "talking head." Vic or Cassidy or Goris could've used one.
Can anyone else think of other examples of uninteresting or criminally unimportant cutscenes from video games?
(Heh. Criminal Insignificance. "Peter Gibbons, you've lead a trite and meaningless life. And you're a very bad person.")
Maybe that's because the lawyers they train might have to fight for either party in a potential dispute.
Forgot to put this in the first time--duh duh stupid college graduates, right?
Anyhow, how difficult is it to calculate tips? 20% is divide by five, or double and move the decimal point if that's easier. For 15%, just calculate 20% and 10% (you can calculate 10% while doing 20% if you're so inclined) then guess at--I mean, estimate an average. Who cares about hitting 15% on the cent?
My problem is remembering _who_ to tip and _how much!_
On an unrelated note, if there was just one skill that I wish I would've learned back in middle school, it would be dimensional analysis. I constantly see people struggling with unit conversions trying to remember if they are supposed to divide or multiply by the factor. Dimensional analysis is simple, universal, and would banish all these conversion problems to the land of wind and ghosts... assuming people can remember the conversion factor.
I have to wonder how private colleges would compare to public. The article mentions that the sample used (seems like a small sample size to me) included results from both schools. It seems to me that it might be worthwhile to sample each of those pools separately. Of course, it's hard to say if that would point to the caliber of students one type admits relative to the other, or if it ends up being a "quality of education" deal. I know that I never took "Table Comprehension 100," but just about _every_ class required the abilty to read a table and get information from it. Hell, though. In nuclear physics, we had to use a chart of nuclide decays, which is a little harder than looking down and across on a spreadsheet.
You know, would people complain so much about Star Trek if someone could do to it what was apparently done for Battlestar Galactica? I haven't seen any of the new BG, but I hear that it's pretty good sci-fi.
Keep phasers, keep Sovereign-class and all that, but revamp the crappy parts. Still Star Trek, only it doesn't suck. I guess Enterprise wanted to do that, but that fell on its face. That's what people would want to see: their familiar canon in a decently re-envisioned sci-fi series. I wouldn't want anyone to close their minds to it just because "it's Trek." Of course, Trek as it is might be too deeply entrenched to be recast this way. I don't know.
Even after I stopped playing console games, I still subscribed to NP. I don't really know why. There's a bunch of issues of it next to my right foot that I don't think I've ever even seen, let alone read.
For some reason, I feel compelled to go look for the old Final Fantasy strategy guide and read about Warmech. Again, I really, really don't know why. I didn't even get past the Elf Kingdom in Final Fantasy. I'm more of an FFIX guy myself.
justin bailey
______ ______
, anyone?
(I tried to put the code in caps, but the filter caught it.)