First off check the patches over at www.planetblackandwhite.com. They've got the Defroster program that gets rid of lots of the problems, and also links to fixes for people running Athlon/GeForce/Win2K combinations. If you don't want to do that, just wait until they officially bring out the patches:-)
(btw, have people seen what they're going to add (over the coming weeks)? There are plans for soccer (for relaxing villagers), a LAN Spawn game so you don't need the CD in for multiplayer, level editors, skin editors, and all sorts of cool stuff)
10 PRINT "That number is too high"
15 PRINT "Kato is on cakcr!"
20 PRINT "That number is too low"
30 GOTO 10
Look! I've shown that the number's too high and too low, and that Kato's on crack (in an amusing style, no less!), and in the process made the 70,001st 'program' under Windoze (although not on the weekend - if I was doing it at the weekend under Linux, I'd have done this thousands of times by now).
There seems to be one main restrictive factor on current game genres - what people find realistic. As hardware is getting increasingly powerful, and graphics becoming increasingly similar to 'real life', gamers are looking for a corresponding increase in realism in their games. Most games, if not all, are set in an environment that is interactive and exciting - and we've come to a boundary.
Flight sims have been 'done', and extended into space. War games have been based in both the past, present, and future. Adventure games have pretty much exhausted the plot lines available. Companies like Sega have moved away from the reality of people, and to that of animals (like dolphins), but that's now been 'done'. The latest genre, first-person, was successful because it added a level of realism to gameplay - but now we're stuck. Where do we go from a style that is as immersive as it possibly can be?
It seems as if we've come up against a brick wall - our view on the world doesn't allow for any more genres - which is why we need to start moving away from trying to model the 'real world'.
Half Life, for example, had 'Zen' - and almost everyone I know who has played it was shocked when they entered it. Why? Because it is so different from what we expect in computer games. When you cannot predict what is going to happen, the game becomes more interesting - and Half Life plunged you directly into the unknown. Whereas Q3A, Quake, etc start you off in a 'foreign situation', Half Life went from a 'realistic' scenario, to one that was completely unexpected and unexplained.
I think there are still lots of genres waiting to be discovered, but I think game creators need to move away from scenarios that simulate reality, and instead try to find something completely absurd that breaks the mould.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like a really cool release - the Get/Set methods would be ideal for binding a class to a database. e.g.
$user->name = "joebloggs";
could automagically update the tables for you.
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned this yet, but there's an excellent node at Everything2 with books liable to give you a mind-job:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=10161It's got Iain Banks, Henlein, Stephen King, and loads of good authors.
First off check the patches over at www.planetblackandwhite.com. They've got the Defroster program that gets rid of lots of the problems, and also links to fixes for people running Athlon/GeForce/Win2K combinations. If you don't want to do that, just wait until they officially bring out the patches :-)
(btw, have people seen what they're going to add (over the coming weeks)? There are plans for soccer (for relaxing villagers), a LAN Spawn game so you don't need the CD in for multiplayer, level editors, skin editors, and all sorts of cool stuff)
15 PRINT "Kato is on cakcr!"
20 PRINT "That number is too low"
30 GOTO 10
Look! I've shown that the number's too high and too low, and that Kato's on crack (in an amusing style, no less!), and in the process made the 70,001st 'program' under Windoze (although not on the weekend - if I was doing it at the weekend under Linux, I'd have done this thousands of times by now).
HTH. HAND.
Mike
PS: Do I get my karma now? :o)
Flight sims have been 'done', and extended into space. War games have been based in both the past, present, and future. Adventure games have pretty much exhausted the plot lines available. Companies like Sega have moved away from the reality of people, and to that of animals (like dolphins), but that's now been 'done'. The latest genre, first-person, was successful because it added a level of realism to gameplay - but now we're stuck. Where do we go from a style that is as immersive as it possibly can be?
It seems as if we've come up against a brick wall - our view on the world doesn't allow for any more genres - which is why we need to start moving away from trying to model the 'real world'.
Half Life, for example, had 'Zen' - and almost everyone I know who has played it was shocked when they entered it. Why? Because it is so different from what we expect in computer games. When you cannot predict what is going to happen, the game becomes more interesting - and Half Life plunged you directly into the unknown. Whereas Q3A, Quake, etc start you off in a 'foreign situation', Half Life went from a 'realistic' scenario, to one that was completely unexpected and unexplained.
I think there are still lots of genres waiting to be discovered, but I think game creators need to move away from scenarios that simulate reality, and instead try to find something completely absurd that breaks the mould.
Nonono! If you just cat the Slashdot articles to /dev/audio, you get all of the day's news in easily digestible form!
I haven't formed any friendships yet - but I've formed a strange urge to keep pressing my refresh button... Does that count?