Not really. Those 75 cents could be spent on something else instead, improving people's living standards and the economy wouldn't be in any worse shape. If that was a rhetorical question, then this reply is directed to those who take your post at face value.
I don't have it installed any more, so I can't verify. But I distinctly remember that you could only put attribute and skill boosting magics on items as constant effects. I don't know about the spells on a stick, but those suck anyways. If I want to cast spells then I cast spells, no point in using battery powered items for that.
So did I. I meant when someone sees you do something illegal and the police immediately knows and sometimes teleports next to you. It makes the NPCs feel less like individuals, and more like members of the borg collective.
The reason Oblivion gets boring in a hurry is the lack of complexity compared to Morrowind and other RPGs. Some of the more annoying features:
- The robotic NPCs with their 2-3 different one-liners and their limited dialog options gets very annoying after hearing the same thing for the hundredth time. - The omniscient godpolice, that teleports into a shop to arrest you for stealing. - Annoying main quest. Those oblivion gates get very old after you clean out the third gate, after that I just started running to the end to avoid all that dremora grinding and grabbed the stone to quickly close the gate. - Stupid autoleveling of enemies. You never got challenged because anywhere you went, you only met enemies of your level. This resulted in a lack of dangerous areas that you avoided until you were of a higher level, like for example the dragons in BG2. - Other limitations to player freedom, like indestructible NPCs and unpickable doors. What's the point in trying to make a free world if you then try to limit the player so he doesn't break some quest? - Enchanting items. This was the biggest disappointment, as the range of items you can create is limited compared to Morrowind. I want boots of waterwalking, or a ring of burden (that beggar is going to regret finding my ring and wearing it...:). Or why not a hat of giant size, that makes your character huge, so I can play golf with the guards?
Of course someone might make a mod that fixes these, and hopefully someone will someday. That doesn't change the fact that normal Oblivion gets boring after the novelty wears off and you realise how limited the freedom really is.
Woah, no need to go all rabid-AMD-fanboy-in-rampage-mode on me.:P
I was talking about desktop systems, as that's where Intel is the faster one now. I don't think there are any Core-based server processors yet? I do agree that Opterons wipe the floor with Xeons. And for the record, I have an AXP system, and am in the process of moving on to a 3800+ X2 AM2-based system. I did consider going the E6300-route, but paying a 30 euro premium on the CPU and a 100(!)euro premium on the motherboard didn't really justify the ~10% performance advantage E6300 has over 3800+.
Hmm, did you mistakenly swap Intel and AMD in your post on a couple of points? Because it makes more sense that way, as the GP claimed AMD is desperate, and because Intel is the one with a quad-core first to market in Q4'06.:P
Anyways, AMD is releasing K8L next year, and K10 in the near future (2-3 years), so I wouldn't count them out either. But for the immediate future Intel holds the performance crown, though not necessarily the price/performance crown.
If many customers are prepared to pay real money for items and characters in a MMO, then don't the items then have store value to the customers? That doesn't necessarily mean that entities outside this economic system have to accept items from these customers as payment. Lots of people think paper money stores value, but if I decide that it isn't worth the paper it's printed on, then you can't force me to accept it as payment. Therefore, virtual gold has store value to those that believe it has, but it doesn't mean that Blizzard has to accept virtual gold as payment because to Blizzard virtual gold is worthless. I.e. store value is a perceived value.
No, it specifically says that there is more store value to the account than to the credit card used to pay the subscription fees, for a lot of the customers out there. Obviously you're not one of those customers (neither am I), but there are people out there to whom their account is worth a lot more than the subscription fees they've paid for them.
If that was really true, MMO's would let users pay their monthly fees with virtual gold.
Read the quote you copied again. Some of the customers value their MMO characters more. If a customer values rocks more than dollars, does it mean Dell will sell him an laptop for rocks? Of course not. To a MMO customer virtual gold is a limited commodity, and involves grinding and work to create. To Blizzard virtual gold has no value, as they can create it in unlimited amounts with a press of a button.
I don't think you need to be worried of any mass-exodus to linux anytime soon. Those who buy their games will buy vista, and those who pirate their games will pirate vista. I'm sorry but linux has no advantage (to gamers) over vista.:)
I recommend BF2. I used to play a lot of CS:S, but after BF2 the maps just seem so tiny, not to mention that in BF2 people actually help teammates out (some of it is because of medics/engineers/supports that want more points to get their next unlock, but they're still helping you as well:) instead of going fraghunting solo like most CS:S players on public do. Also the fact that you earn promotions that give new weapons as unlocks is pretty nice, and gives the game continuity. Some people prefer BF1942, but I've always liked modern warfare more, WW2 guns feel like toys in comparison. I have never played in a clan in either of the games, so this is purely the POV of a casual public player. I doubt this radar change will make a difference, and it is in fact a poor copy of the spotting system of BF2, where you press a separate button to spot instead of standing somewhere staring at somebody.
For a guy who doesn't think the Holocaust happened, he sure seems comfortable using the same rhetoric and early tactics.
If one believed the holocaust never happened, then wouldn't that make it easier to use Goebbels' tactics?
Anyways, I have no doubt in my mind that he knows that the holocaust happened, he is just playing the propaganda game. But some of his comments have also been taken out of context, like "The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets, (It) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet." which to me sounds more like typical religious banter that prioritises a fictional god over the real world, and a veiled criticism of our double standards of free speech, because of how holocaust deniers are given jailtime here in Europe. He's also said a couple of times that Israel should be "wiped off the map.", which sounds bad, until you read the other comment he made at the same time: "If you have burned the Jews, why don't you give a piece of Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to Israel", i.e. he wants to wipe the state of Israel off the map, not it's inhabitants.
But it doesn't change the fact that he is an idiot. Any president who blathers on about god, prophets and religion as if it was in some way important, should be locked up, including that one guy with the cowboy hat. I just want to remind people that you shouldn't believe everything you read, the propaganda machinery is at full speed on both sides.
Assumably one will be able to target multiple revisions simultaneously, i.e. you make a game that supports 10, 10.1 and 10.2 depending on the graphics card. This way developers have it easier as a card that supports a higher revision has to support all the lower ones.
As the other poster already pointed out, DX8 is the first version that supported shaders. Also, using more advanced shaders do not grow the size of the game by "too many gigs of space", shaders are quite tiny, usually under a few kbytes in size. In fact, if a game uses some of the more advanced procedural shaders that become a realistic possibility with DX10, the size of the game will decrease as some of the art is generated at runtime instead of being handcrafted and stored in the game data. Otherwise agreeable.
Well if they had a clue maybe they'd realize that gamers really couldn't care less what operating system they're using as long as it runs the games. If game companies started basing their products on a stable Linux core instead of that flaky Windoze shit we'd start to see gamers switching overnight.
And why should game developers care? As far as they are concerned, it would be better if all Linux/Mac users would switch to windows, this would ensure that they have the maximum possible number of potential customers.
Do you really think they get done playing their newest game only to fire up Microsoft Office or some other proprietary Windows applications? Gamers use their $3000 computer like a $3000 video game console, nothing more, nothing less.
...
I'd love to see a new standard for video games that used bootable Linux DVDs to play games just like a console rather than having to load up the Windoze bloat before launching the game.
Now that is an interesting thought, and it could have pretty good performance. But I think I'd pass, it would mean that I have to turn off all my other programs like xfire and utorrent to play games, and that's not really acceptable to me. Also, rebooting the computer to play a game would lengthen the load times a lot which would also be very annoying.
The really silly thing with the HDCP requirement is that eventually the bluray format will be cracked, and then people will be able to watch bluray movies with this player on a pc that hasn't got any kind of hdcp support. So in the end it's the legal bluray viewers that end up buying new monitors, videocards and bluray drives to satisfy the hdcp requirement, while the pirates can watch them with whatever hardware they want. The media publishing industry has to be full of retards, there really isn't any other explanation.
h.264 encoded matroska at 600 mb or so an hour can do the job of these overbloaded and DRM ridden things.
On this I disagree, because AFAIK both of the next-gen DVD formats support h.264 encoding. I think this first batch of movies uses MPEG-2, but when the movies start using h.264 they will definitely look better than 600 mb h.264 files. Looking forward to DVD-sized h.264 rips of bluray/hddvd movies so that I can go out and buy the Philips DVD player that supports h.264; this way I get the best of both worlds.:)
There is an easy way to get around this, equate civilians with military targets. It was common in WW2, Vietnam and now the terrorists do it.
In WW2 it was a way of demoralising the enemy, and usually the industries were located in population centers where labour was available, bombing them caused collateral damage to civilians. The difference is that Iraq and Afghanistan have already been defeated, and demoralising their population will only increase resistance. For an WW2-era example, consider the anti-german resistance movements. You'll note that the more the Germans tightened their grip on the occupied areas, the stronger the resistance got. Starting to kill off civilians is a good short-term solution to the insurgency, but it will assuredly ensure that the puppet government in Iraq will collapse the instant the U.S. pulls out.
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Not really. Those 75 cents could be spent on something else instead, improving people's living standards and the economy wouldn't be in any worse shape. If that was a rhetorical question, then this reply is directed to those who take your post at face value.
It's not just about throughput. WiMax is going to have increased range, and I'm more excited about that. Bring on the P2P mesh internet already!
I don't have it installed any more, so I can't verify. But I distinctly remember that you could only put attribute and skill boosting magics on items as constant effects. I don't know about the spells on a stick, but those suck anyways. If I want to cast spells then I cast spells, no point in using battery powered items for that.
So did I. I meant when someone sees you do something illegal and the police immediately knows and sometimes teleports next to you. It makes the NPCs feel less like individuals, and more like members of the borg collective.
The reason Oblivion gets boring in a hurry is the lack of complexity compared to Morrowind and other RPGs. Some of the more annoying features:
:). Or why not a hat of giant size, that makes your character huge, so I can play golf with the guards?
- The robotic NPCs with their 2-3 different one-liners and their limited dialog options gets very annoying after hearing the same thing for the hundredth time.
- The omniscient godpolice, that teleports into a shop to arrest you for stealing.
- Annoying main quest. Those oblivion gates get very old after you clean out the third gate, after that I just started running to the end to avoid all that dremora grinding and grabbed the stone to quickly close the gate.
- Stupid autoleveling of enemies. You never got challenged because anywhere you went, you only met enemies of your level. This resulted in a lack of dangerous areas that you avoided until you were of a higher level, like for example the dragons in BG2.
- Other limitations to player freedom, like indestructible NPCs and unpickable doors. What's the point in trying to make a free world if you then try to limit the player so he doesn't break some quest?
- Enchanting items. This was the biggest disappointment, as the range of items you can create is limited compared to Morrowind. I want boots of waterwalking, or a ring of burden (that beggar is going to regret finding my ring and wearing it...
Of course someone might make a mod that fixes these, and hopefully someone will someday. That doesn't change the fact that normal Oblivion gets boring after the novelty wears off and you realise how limited the freedom really is.
I fear for Fallout 3.
No, but they can throw artifical feces and write works of Shakespeare if you give it a robotic typewriter.
Woah, no need to go all rabid-AMD-fanboy-in-rampage-mode on me. :P
I was talking about desktop systems, as that's where Intel is the faster one now. I don't think there are any Core-based server processors yet? I do agree that Opterons wipe the floor with Xeons. And for the record, I have an AXP system, and am in the process of moving on to a 3800+ X2 AM2-based system. I did consider going the E6300-route, but paying a 30 euro premium on the CPU and a 100(!)euro premium on the motherboard didn't really justify the ~10% performance advantage E6300 has over 3800+.
Hmm, did you mistakenly swap Intel and AMD in your post on a couple of points? Because it makes more sense that way, as the GP claimed AMD is desperate, and because Intel is the one with a quad-core first to market in Q4'06. :P
Anyways, AMD is releasing K8L next year, and K10 in the near future (2-3 years), so I wouldn't count them out either. But for the immediate future Intel holds the performance crown, though not necessarily the price/performance crown.
Evolution isn't a scientific truth. It's a theory.
So are Newton's laws of motion. Doesn't stop things from falling down though.
If many customers are prepared to pay real money for items and characters in a MMO, then don't the items then have store value to the customers? That doesn't necessarily mean that entities outside this economic system have to accept items from these customers as payment. Lots of people think paper money stores value, but if I decide that it isn't worth the paper it's printed on, then you can't force me to accept it as payment. Therefore, virtual gold has store value to those that believe it has, but it doesn't mean that Blizzard has to accept virtual gold as payment because to Blizzard virtual gold is worthless. I.e. store value is a perceived value.
No, it specifically says that there is more store value to the account than to the credit card used to pay the subscription fees, for a lot of the customers out there. Obviously you're not one of those customers (neither am I), but there are people out there to whom their account is worth a lot more than the subscription fees they've paid for them.
If that was really true, MMO's would let users pay their monthly fees with virtual gold.
Read the quote you copied again. Some of the customers value their MMO characters more. If a customer values rocks more than dollars, does it mean Dell will sell him an laptop for rocks? Of course not. To a MMO customer virtual gold is a limited commodity, and involves grinding and work to create. To Blizzard virtual gold has no value, as they can create it in unlimited amounts with a press of a button.
It's located in Sweden, so that's not a problem.
I don't think you need to be worried of any mass-exodus to linux anytime soon. Those who buy their games will buy vista, and those who pirate their games will pirate vista. I'm sorry but linux has no advantage (to gamers) over vista. :)
I think he is actually a combination of all six. So maybe #7 is "all of the above". :P
I recommend BF2. I used to play a lot of CS:S, but after BF2 the maps just seem so tiny, not to mention that in BF2 people actually help teammates out (some of it is because of medics/engineers/supports that want more points to get their next unlock, but they're still helping you as well :) instead of going fraghunting solo like most CS:S players on public do. Also the fact that you earn promotions that give new weapons as unlocks is pretty nice, and gives the game continuity. Some people prefer BF1942, but I've always liked modern warfare more, WW2 guns feel like toys in comparison. I have never played in a clan in either of the games, so this is purely the POV of a casual public player. I doubt this radar change will make a difference, and it is in fact a poor copy of the spotting system of BF2, where you press a separate button to spot instead of standing somewhere staring at somebody.
For a guy who doesn't think the Holocaust happened, he sure seems comfortable using the same rhetoric and early tactics.
If one believed the holocaust never happened, then wouldn't that make it easier to use Goebbels' tactics?
Anyways, I have no doubt in my mind that he knows that the holocaust happened, he is just playing the propaganda game. But some of his comments have also been taken out of context, like "The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets, (It) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet." which to me sounds more like typical religious banter that prioritises a fictional god over the real world, and a veiled criticism of our double standards of free speech, because of how holocaust deniers are given jailtime here in Europe. He's also said a couple of times that Israel should be "wiped off the map.", which sounds bad, until you read the other comment he made at the same time: "If you have burned the Jews, why don't you give a piece of Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to Israel", i.e. he wants to wipe the state of Israel off the map, not it's inhabitants.
But it doesn't change the fact that he is an idiot. Any president who blathers on about god, prophets and religion as if it was in some way important, should be locked up, including that one guy with the cowboy hat. I just want to remind people that you shouldn't believe everything you read, the propaganda machinery is at full speed on both sides.
Why not use a virtual computer? It's not like DOS games need a lot of cpu power, so running them in a VC would still be very fast.
Assumably one will be able to target multiple revisions simultaneously, i.e. you make a game that supports 10, 10.1 and 10.2 depending on the graphics card. This way developers have it easier as a card that supports a higher revision has to support all the lower ones.
DX10 supports multitasking of the GPU. How do you propose to do that without changing the drivers?
As the other poster already pointed out, DX8 is the first version that supported shaders. Also, using more advanced shaders do not grow the size of the game by "too many gigs of space", shaders are quite tiny, usually under a few kbytes in size. In fact, if a game uses some of the more advanced procedural shaders that become a realistic possibility with DX10, the size of the game will decrease as some of the art is generated at runtime instead of being handcrafted and stored in the game data. Otherwise agreeable.
Well if they had a clue maybe they'd realize that gamers really couldn't care less what operating system they're using as long as it runs the games. If game companies started basing their products on a stable Linux core instead of that flaky Windoze shit we'd start to see gamers switching overnight.
...
And why should game developers care? As far as they are concerned, it would be better if all Linux/Mac users would switch to windows, this would ensure that they have the maximum possible number of potential customers.
Do you really think they get done playing their newest game only to fire up Microsoft Office or some other proprietary Windows applications? Gamers use their $3000 computer like a $3000 video game console, nothing more, nothing less.
I'd love to see a new standard for video games that used bootable Linux DVDs to play games just like a console rather than having to load up the Windoze bloat before launching the game.
Now that is an interesting thought, and it could have pretty good performance. But I think I'd pass, it would mean that I have to turn off all my other programs like xfire and utorrent to play games, and that's not really acceptable to me. Also, rebooting the computer to play a game would lengthen the load times a lot which would also be very annoying.
The really silly thing with the HDCP requirement is that eventually the bluray format will be cracked, and then people will be able to watch bluray movies with this player on a pc that hasn't got any kind of hdcp support. So in the end it's the legal bluray viewers that end up buying new monitors, videocards and bluray drives to satisfy the hdcp requirement, while the pirates can watch them with whatever hardware they want. The media publishing industry has to be full of retards, there really isn't any other explanation.
h.264 encoded matroska at 600 mb or so an hour can do the job of these overbloaded and DRM ridden things.
:)
On this I disagree, because AFAIK both of the next-gen DVD formats support h.264 encoding. I think this first batch of movies uses MPEG-2, but when the movies start using h.264 they will definitely look better than 600 mb h.264 files. Looking forward to DVD-sized h.264 rips of bluray/hddvd movies so that I can go out and buy the Philips DVD player that supports h.264; this way I get the best of both worlds.
There is an easy way to get around this, equate civilians with military targets. It was common in WW2, Vietnam and now the terrorists do it.
In WW2 it was a way of demoralising the enemy, and usually the industries were located in population centers where labour was available, bombing them caused collateral damage to civilians. The difference is that Iraq and Afghanistan have already been defeated, and demoralising their population will only increase resistance. For an WW2-era example, consider the anti-german resistance movements. You'll note that the more the Germans tightened their grip on the occupied areas, the stronger the resistance got. Starting to kill off civilians is a good short-term solution to the insurgency, but it will assuredly ensure that the puppet government in Iraq will collapse the instant the U.S. pulls out.