if I remember right, the HL1 engine is a modified Quake 2 engine
Valve modified the Quake 1 engine actually, but since they took so long to release Q2 had been out for a while. Most people assumed it was the Q2 engine they based it on since it looked so good.
Well, yeah, it is silly, but in a good way. It is supposed to be a bit of playful, lighthearted fun, not a gritty realistic pirate simulation complete with veneral diseases and scurvy....
And as the article points out, they are doing quite well with that concept. Also check out the upcoming Bang!Howdy by the same team. Java based, just like RuneScape, and Wurm Online. The last one is pretty impressive considering it is made by only two developers.
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no sir."
Mar's polar ice cap is getting thinner over the last half century, thus leading credence to...um...global warming.
Mars has very little atmosphere and no biosphere, so solar activity is one of the few things that can affect it.
Amazing things are found by scientists, as long as they get their noses out of their offices.
Did you miss the part in the summary where it said that the report had been peer reviewed by 2,500 scientists? But apperently you know better than all of them...
He probably got that from the site tjuvlyssnat (eavesdropped). Some pretty hilarious and/or tragic stuff there. For instance:
Bus, Västerås
Two guys ~17 talking. Girl ~14 sits down next to them. Guy 1: Ey, what the hell is 56 minus 34? Girl starts giggling. Guy 2: What the hell, that's impossible! Hang on I'll check on my cellphone... Girl (laughing): You don't have to do that. It's 16! Elderly man (shakes head angrily): Your math teachers should be burned at the stake! Everyone is suddenly silent on the bus
I'd like to see a study that shows which cities have the most number of universities and the number of successful startups and successful large companies in it. How about which cities have the highest number of employed people with degrees...
I agree, that would be much more intersting, so I Googled for it. Didn't find one for cities, but I did find it for countries. Go wild.
I pine for the LucasArts games of old. The Monkey Islands, the Day of the Tentacles, and Grim Fandango which was more art than a videogame. [...] I pine for charm and subtle humor, for fully developed characters, for well developed plots for the denouement... for story telling and all the other things forgotten.
Get Psychonauts. Make all your friends get Psychonauts. Seriously. It's available from Steam if you can't find it in the bargain bins. DON'T just write it off as a platformer. It has all you want of that, and more. FFS, it even has the same creators as the games you mention.
The arrogance of man is to presume that the current climate is one which would remain stable were it not for our interference.
Yes, the mindboggling arrogance to suggest that an additional 7 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere might actually have an effect. How do the scientists have the nerve?
This post has been made with my current understanding of the problem; if a more informed person can correct me wherever I am wrong, I'd be grateful.
Ok. You use the logical fallacy "straw man" twice. "this is the fallacy of refuting a caricatured or extreme version of somebody's argument, rather than the actual argument they've made. Often this fallacy involves putting words into somebody's mouth by saying they've made arguments they haven't actually made"
For instance. You imply that "green eco-activists" say that CFCs are (solely) responsible for the antartic ozone hole. Most of us do NOT say that. We KNOW that ozone degradation occurs naturally. And by the way, ozone is not decayed by lack of sunlight. UV radiation breaks down oxygen molecules, and ozone molecules, so it both creates and destroys ozone. Cold however, accelerates the breakdown.
The problem is that the degradation was accelerated to dangerous levels.
And the same thing is true for global warming. We know climate goes through natural fluctuations. You are again using a strawman when you say the claim is that it has been caused by "the U.S., industry or humanity".
That is not the claim, the claim is that human activity has caused a huge increase in the rate of change.
The only animals that matter are the cow, the pig, and the chicken. They'll never go extinct from environmental factors because we humans have taken over their care and feeding (and eating.)
If you really believe that, you are staggeringly ignorant. Don't you think plants need insects to pollinate them, birds to spread their seeds for instance? Good luck feeding the cows, pigs and chickens without the plants. But even if you are only talking about large animals, biodiversity is important and more fragile than people think. Go pick up a introductory textbook in biology.
As you say, there are moral arguments to keeping animals alive. But even if someone is a Lombergian psychopath who only is able to appreciate things for their absolute monetary value, there is a huge amount of stuff we can still learn from the DNA, chemistry and physiology of animals that are to direct use to us.
Give me my damn single player game - without the idiotic party! I do not want any of that "depth".
Fine....lots of those games available for you, Oblivon for instance. I haven't tried, but it wouldn't surprise me if you can go through lots of parts of the NWN2 alone. It's not like the battles are very difficult.
Killing == bad. Always. No good character would rush to kill somebody. Never. The guy is by my estimations is neutral chaotic.
Oh, in real life I would agree with you. But: First of all, he says he always fights without weapons when you first meet him, and never to the death. He only uses weapons in self-defence.
Second, Obsidian are pretty astute when it comes to stepping outside the box and taking a look at the inherent morals of roleplaying systems. Lots of games allow you to be "good" and still massacer "monsters" as long as they have the label "evil alignment". Khelgar almost always do unselfish things (you lose influence with him if you steal stuff for instance). He just happen to like the exhileration of a good fistfight.
But since he is always starts brawls, he can eventually become evil. Though I'm sure that game would not allow that.
Well, I haven't finished NWN2 yet, so I don't know. But I thought KOTOR2 was excellent in that regard. Your actions and your influence really could change your companions. So it wouldn't surprise me if NWN2 is the same.
I agree with the criticism of the performance and the large number of bugs in this game. However, few people have mention one of the really strong points of this game - good characters and plots. Like in Kotor2 and Planescape Torment, characters have a lot more depth than is common in computer games. Talking to them at the right moment, and saying the right things (not always obvious which the right choice is) can reveal a lot about them, and open up special skills, prestige classes and long subplots/quests. Like with Kotor2, a lot of people play through the whole game without realising this.
I disagree with Zonk, the dwarf is not a sterotypical grumpy Gimli wannabe. He is actually quite cheerful, and though he loves starting fights, he is actually of "good" alignment in the D&D sense. His idea of a good time is quite similar to a soccer hooligan, he thinks brawling is good fun for all involved. He wants to join a monestary order, because he once got his ass kicked good by a bunch of monks he started a fight with. Before the monestary in Neverwinter will accept him as a student, he has to go on a bunch of subquests that develop his emotional maturity and tolerance. As Zonk said, not Shakespeare, but head and shoulders above usual gaming stuff.
I think it is interesting to contrast looks and performance between this game and, for instance, World of Warcraft. This game imports characters straight from some 3D cad program. They have a huge amount of polygons, but they don't look bland and move stiffly. Much of the interface is small and messy with forgettable icons. WoW on the other hand manages to have amazing characters and environments despite low polygon count, just through a good art department. Icons are colorful and instantly recognizable.
What's the best way to get back into using Java? I took a couple of programming classes when it was still Java 1.3/1.4 a few years ago and totally missed the jump to Java 5/6.
I actually enjoyed the Head First Java book from O'Reilly, though I'll probably get mocked for it here.... I admit, it can feel a bit "kiddie" to have a lot of pictures, do puzzles and so on, but involving the right half of your brain makes stuff stick better, and for me, makes it fun and fast to learn. Second edition has some Java5 stuff in it.
If that style of learning is not for you, or if you are too advanced for that level, the Java Tutorial was pretty recently updated with new trails for Java 5 and Java 6, so you should find an appropriate level for you quickly. Also Java 5 Developer's Notebook is a neat guide.
Multiply this experience with that of his like-minded colleagues ...of which you provided no evidence, and just throw out as a given fact. The whole article was about providing proof. If you have it, submit it.
has anybody actually said that money can't buy you friends? I thought we all agreed that it can't buy you love, or happiness, but friends was still wide open. There was always one little rich kid at school who proved that you could, in fact, buy friends.
There is an old saying, "Money and success brings you many friends. Adversity tests them."
With regards to the original article, I like this one "A fool and his money are soon parted."
The quotes in the article has to be fake, or are they really that bat-shit crazy?
I undestand that they want to protect profits, but the underlying problem - digital information can be reproduced, which removes the concept of scarcity (except for storage, network bandwidth and consumer time) is not going to go away. They are going to have to keep coming up with more and more draconion countermeasures, accept a certain amount of piracy, or move to another business.
What is next, chopping down the world's trees because it threatens oxygen manufacturer profits?
What about dynamic quest generations? Think about this. You start out, you make your character. And that's it. You don't go up to the "quest giving NPC" to get your first quest. You just start out with basic equipment and that's it. Along your travels, perhaps the very first NPC you meet, or perhaps not, THEY may come up to YOU and say something like "my little boy hasn't come home in almost 3 days! I'm really worried about him, he was playing down by the Cave that's just South of here, can you please help?" And WHAM you have a quest.
Ultima Online tried this back in 1997. Before launch, they boasted: "Adventurer kills small monsters. Big monster higher up in foodchain starves, kills farmer livestock and farmers. Farmers starve, complain to adventurers. If no adventurers step up, big monsters slowly amass wealth and experience, and eventually have children. Dynamic, meaningful adventure!"
First of all it was extremely difficult to balance the basic underlying food chains, economics and challenge levels. You had whole continents where monsters were completely exterminated. GMs had to repopulate monsters manually, and hordes of bored high-level adventures committet mass genocide on them within minutes. Or (rarely) it turned the other way, no one could beat the monsters, and they grew more powerful and numerous.
Second the quests were so very BORING. Think the most uninspired caves and quests of Oblivion multiplied by a hundred. Same whining peasants all the time, similar looking dungeons and blood drenched altars everywhere. No real plot or characters to be attached to.
People keep suggesting programmatically generated quests as some kind of panacea. It won't happen, to get any variation and keep human interest they would have to program in such a huge number of variants and parameters they might as well write the quests by hand.
That is a viewpoint I can respect, even if (as you guessed) I don't agree. But I won't get into the whole atheism/theism debate. My main point was that BadAnalogyGuy is mistaken in arguing that the burden of evidence lies on the atheists.
Slashdot Mirror
if I remember right, the HL1 engine is a modified Quake 2 engine
Valve modified the Quake 1 engine actually, but since they took so long to release Q2 had been out for a while. Most people assumed it was the Q2 engine they based it on since it looked so good.
they call Puzzle Pirates silly
Well, yeah, it is silly, but in a good way. It is supposed to be a bit of playful, lighthearted fun, not a gritty realistic pirate simulation complete with veneral diseases and scurvy....
And as the article points out, they are doing quite well with that concept. Also check out the upcoming Bang!Howdy by the same team. Java based, just like RuneScape, and Wurm Online. The last one is pretty impressive considering it is made by only two developers.
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no sir."
Mar's polar ice cap is getting thinner over the last half century, thus leading credence to...um...global warming.
Mars has very little atmosphere and no biosphere, so solar activity is one of the few things that can affect it.
Amazing things are found by scientists, as long as they get their noses out of their offices.
Did you miss the part in the summary where it said that the report had been peer reviewed by 2,500 scientists? But apperently you know better than all of them...
He probably got that from the site tjuvlyssnat (eavesdropped). Some pretty hilarious and/or tragic stuff there. For instance:
Bus, Västerås
Two guys ~17 talking. Girl ~14 sits down next to them.
Guy 1: Ey, what the hell is 56 minus 34?
Girl starts giggling.
Guy 2: What the hell, that's impossible! Hang on I'll check on my cellphone...
Girl (laughing): You don't have to do that. It's 16!
Elderly man (shakes head angrily): Your math teachers should be burned at the stake!
Everyone is suddenly silent on the bus
I'd like to see a study that shows which cities have the most number of universities and the number of successful startups and successful large companies in it.
How about which cities have the highest number of employed people with degrees...
I agree, that would be much more intersting, so I Googled for it. Didn't find one for cities, but I did find it for countries. Go wild.
I have some more to that list:
Puzzle Pirates
Bang! Howdy
Soda Play
JSettlers
I pine for the LucasArts games of old. The Monkey Islands, the Day of the Tentacles, and Grim Fandango which was more art than a videogame.
[...]
I pine for charm and subtle humor, for fully developed characters, for well developed plots for the denouement... for story telling and all the other things forgotten.
Get Psychonauts. Make all your friends get Psychonauts. Seriously. It's available from Steam if you can't find it in the bargain bins. DON'T just write it off as a platformer. It has all you want of that, and more. FFS, it even has the same creators as the games you mention.
What kind of sick language designer writes an interpreter in Java to demonstrate something related to High Performance computing ?
Someone whose knowledge of Java performance is much more up to date than yours.
I don't know why some company doesn't just put up a few Million dollars (or 10s of millions) to buy SCO .
This comes up every time....
NO. For the same reason you shouldn't give money to hostage takers. You will only encourage them, and copycats, to do more of the same.
The arrogance of man is to presume that the current climate is one which would remain stable were it not for our interference.
Yes, the mindboggling arrogance to suggest that an additional 7 gigaton of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere might actually have an effect. How do the scientists have the nerve?
This post has been made with my current understanding of the problem; if a more informed person can correct me wherever I am wrong, I'd be grateful.
Ok. You use the logical fallacy "straw man" twice. "this is the fallacy of refuting a caricatured or extreme version of somebody's argument, rather than the actual argument they've made. Often this fallacy involves putting words into somebody's mouth by saying they've made arguments they haven't actually made"
For instance. You imply that "green eco-activists" say that CFCs are (solely) responsible for the antartic ozone hole. Most of us do NOT say that. We KNOW that ozone degradation occurs naturally. And by the way, ozone is not decayed by lack of sunlight. UV radiation breaks down oxygen molecules, and ozone molecules, so it both creates and destroys ozone. Cold however, accelerates the breakdown.
The problem is that the degradation was accelerated to dangerous levels.
And the same thing is true for global warming. We know climate goes through natural fluctuations. You are again using a strawman when you say the claim is that it has been caused by "the U.S., industry or humanity".
That is not the claim, the claim is that human activity has caused a huge increase in the rate of change.
Another project which might be fun is this one porting J2ME to the PSP. I'd like to see one for Nintendo DS even more, but maybe that is coming. :-)
Aha, so you have found thee nam-shub of Enki. Please inform the cult of Asherah.
The only animals that matter are the cow, the pig, and the chicken. They'll never go extinct from environmental factors because we humans have taken over their care and feeding (and eating.)
If you really believe that, you are staggeringly ignorant. Don't you think plants need insects to pollinate them, birds to spread their seeds for instance? Good luck feeding the cows, pigs and chickens without the plants. But even if you are only talking about large animals, biodiversity is important and more fragile than people think. Go pick up a introductory textbook in biology.
As you say, there are moral arguments to keeping animals alive. But even if someone is a Lombergian psychopath who only is able to appreciate things for their absolute monetary value, there is a huge amount of stuff we can still learn from the DNA, chemistry and physiology of animals that are to direct use to us.
Bethesda bought the rights for everything EXCEPT a MMO in the Fallout universe, if I understood it correctly.
Give me my damn single player game - without the idiotic party! I do not want any of that "depth".
Fine....lots of those games available for you, Oblivon for instance. I haven't tried, but it wouldn't surprise me if you can go through lots of parts of the NWN2 alone. It's not like the battles are very difficult.
Killing == bad. Always. No good character would rush to kill somebody. Never. The guy is by my estimations is neutral chaotic.
Oh, in real life I would agree with you. But: First of all, he says he always fights without weapons when you first meet him, and never to the death. He only uses weapons in self-defence.
Second, Obsidian are pretty astute when it comes to stepping outside the box and taking a look at the inherent morals of roleplaying systems. Lots of games allow you to be "good" and still massacer "monsters" as long as they have the label "evil alignment". Khelgar almost always do unselfish things (you lose influence with him if you steal stuff for instance). He just happen to like the exhileration of a good fistfight.
But since he is always starts brawls, he can eventually become evil. Though I'm sure that game would not allow that.
Well, I haven't finished NWN2 yet, so I don't know. But I thought KOTOR2 was excellent in that regard. Your actions and your influence really could change your companions. So it wouldn't surprise me if NWN2 is the same.
I agree with the criticism of the performance and the large number of bugs in this game. However, few people have mention one of the really strong points of this game - good characters and plots. Like in Kotor2 and Planescape Torment, characters have a lot more depth than is common in computer games. Talking to them at the right moment, and saying the right things (not always obvious which the right choice is) can reveal a lot about them, and open up special skills, prestige classes and long subplots/quests. Like with Kotor2, a lot of people play through the whole game without realising this.
I disagree with Zonk, the dwarf is not a sterotypical grumpy Gimli wannabe. He is actually quite cheerful, and though he loves starting fights, he is actually of "good" alignment in the D&D sense. His idea of a good time is quite similar to a soccer hooligan, he thinks brawling is good fun for all involved. He wants to join a monestary order, because he once got his ass kicked good by a bunch of monks he started a fight with. Before the monestary in Neverwinter will accept him as a student, he has to go on a bunch of subquests that develop his emotional maturity and tolerance. As Zonk said, not Shakespeare, but head and shoulders above usual gaming stuff.
I think it is interesting to contrast looks and performance between this game and, for instance, World of Warcraft. This game imports characters straight from some 3D cad program. They have a huge amount of polygons, but they don't look bland and move stiffly. Much of the interface is small and messy with forgettable icons. WoW on the other hand manages to have amazing characters and environments despite low polygon count, just through a good art department. Icons are colorful and instantly recognizable.
What's the best way to get back into using Java? I took a couple of programming classes when it was still Java 1.3/1.4 a few years ago and totally missed the jump to Java 5/6.
I actually enjoyed the Head First Java book from O'Reilly, though I'll probably get mocked for it here.... I admit, it can feel a bit "kiddie" to have a lot of pictures, do puzzles and so on, but involving the right half of your brain makes stuff stick better, and for me, makes it fun and fast to learn. Second edition has some Java5 stuff in it.
If that style of learning is not for you, or if you are too advanced for that level, the Java Tutorial was pretty recently updated with new trails for Java 5 and Java 6, so you should find an appropriate level for you quickly. Also Java 5 Developer's Notebook is a neat guide.
Multiply this experience with that of his like-minded colleagues
...of which you provided no evidence, and just throw out as a given fact. The whole article was about providing proof. If you have it, submit it.
I wouldn't vote for Gates ...but I wouldn't mind voting for Scott Adams!
Uh, why? He has just proven himself to be the most pointy haired boss of them all.
has anybody actually said that money can't buy you friends? I thought we all agreed that it can't buy you love, or happiness, but friends was still wide open. There was always one little rich kid at school who proved that you could, in fact, buy friends.
There is an old saying, "Money and success brings you many friends. Adversity tests them."
With regards to the original article, I like this one "A fool and his money are soon parted."
The quotes in the article has to be fake, or are they really that bat-shit crazy?
I undestand that they want to protect profits, but the underlying problem - digital information can be reproduced, which removes the concept of scarcity (except for storage, network bandwidth and consumer time) is not going to go away. They are going to have to keep coming up with more and more draconion countermeasures, accept a certain amount of piracy, or move to another business.
What is next, chopping down the world's trees because it threatens oxygen manufacturer profits?
What about dynamic quest generations? Think about this. You start out, you make your character. And that's it. You don't go up to the "quest giving NPC" to get your first quest. You just start out with basic equipment and that's it. Along your travels, perhaps the very first NPC you meet, or perhaps not, THEY may come up to YOU and say something like "my little boy hasn't come home in almost 3 days! I'm really worried about him, he was playing down by the Cave that's just South of here, can you please help?" And WHAM you have a quest.
Ultima Online tried this back in 1997. Before launch, they boasted: "Adventurer kills small monsters. Big monster higher up in foodchain starves, kills farmer livestock and farmers. Farmers starve, complain to adventurers. If no adventurers step up, big monsters slowly amass wealth and experience, and eventually have children. Dynamic, meaningful adventure!"
First of all it was extremely difficult to balance the basic underlying food chains, economics and challenge levels. You had whole continents where monsters were completely exterminated. GMs had to repopulate monsters manually, and hordes of bored high-level adventures committet mass genocide on them within minutes. Or (rarely) it turned the other way, no one could beat the monsters, and they grew more powerful and numerous.
Second the quests were so very BORING. Think the most uninspired caves and quests of Oblivion multiplied by a hundred. Same whining peasants all the time, similar looking dungeons and blood drenched altars everywhere. No real plot or characters to be attached to.
People keep suggesting programmatically generated quests as some kind of panacea. It won't happen, to get any variation and keep human interest they would have to program in such a huge number of variants and parameters they might as well write the quests by hand.
That is a viewpoint I can respect, even if (as you guessed) I don't agree. But I won't get into the whole atheism/theism debate. My main point was that BadAnalogyGuy is mistaken in arguing that the burden of evidence lies on the atheists.