'First you knock the complaints as "unsubstantiated", yet then you blurt out meaningless statistics without backing them up yourself. Well, the last time I checked, the problem rate on 360 units was in the double digits varying from 13-16%. Of course, people with problems are more likely to be vocal (and post, hit online vote tabs, etc.) but that is still a LOT of problems with a new product. Especially after Microsoft already did a merket test run with their first console the original Xbox.'
Um my point wasnt that I Was right or in any way substantiated. My point was that no one really has a clue. I read that it was 3% you seem to believe its 13-16% Ive read half a dozen others to boot. Hence me going on to say how a lot of people are making stuff up and saying
'This is a wait and see situation. Certainly wouldnt rush to get a 360 at the moment but I wouldnt rush to get any console and no one knows just how bad this launch is really. Heck Im not even sure if MS know how bad this launch is yet.'
'Yeah, but when you jar a SegaCD, the laser just skips around a bit.' Or just breaks outright... (Ive got me a MegaCD version 1 now though im careful with that fella its practically an antique.)
'The focusing element doesn't flutter and grind a physical trench into your game disc' You sure about that. I dont move my MegaCD from upright to flat too often. Makes putting in cartridges and CD's a bitch. To be fair it isnt spinning at anywhere near the speed of the 360's drive either.
My point isnt that the X-Box360 is particulalry good just that people tend to quickly forget that the older consoles also had there fair share if difficulties.
You came up with a list of problems the 360 has that is somewhat more extensive than older consoles but taking a look the points arnt entirely valid.
-Perplexing, even confusing Core vs. Premium packaging. Why even include a hard drive if they're brow-beating developers not to rely on it.
Thats a good point but not so much a problem it was a designed marketing strategy rather than a screw up. It remains to be seen whether its going to confuse people too much. That said looking at my rather extensive catalogue of X-Box games only about 2 need harddisk (Blinx + Blinx2) and Id wager even they could be modified not to need more space than RAM can provide.
-Keeping the Xbox name, but not really backwards compatible. Few games work. Even recent Xbox releases not compatible. And you need a special attachment (the HDD) to make it work if at all. I expect this will be a talking point for upset parents this Christmas, after buying "green" titles which somehow don't work on the "white" Xbox.
A little unfair. X-Box is MS's name for its console line you cant really compare it to Nintendo and SEGA whos actual company name is its console line. It was always the SEGA Mastersystem then SEGA Megadrive or Nintendo and Super Nintendo. They didnt have backwards compatibility either (Well unless you bought an add on for the Megadrive.) The only reason why they could change names entirely was because there company name was always a prefix to it. (Or in the case of the Nintendo Entertainment System the actual name of the console.) I suppose it is possible to buy an X-Box game for the X-Box360 by accident but parents who arnt in the know typically rely on the kids to tell them which game they want and I doubt there will be anymore X-Box games bought for the 360 by accident than PS2 ones. Who knows though might be the next big problem.
-Pre-orders without enough units to fill pre-order demand. (pre-orders are supposed to be for companies to gauge interest in their product, not fux0r early adopters willing to put down payments.) Undeniable fuck up. MS should have had some decent predictions on the number of 360's theyd have ready how the hell they managed to screw over so many people is beyond me and I dont believe this was a marketing trick you leave small amounts of systems issues for the shop shelf not the pre-orderers. Screwed up, b
At what point did it say we were having a big impact on nature.
Even by just reading the slashdot part it says quite clearly this is the straw that may break the camels back. I.e. nature is already doing all of the work, we are just putting that tiny tiny last bit in which could cause the whole thing to fall apart.
Incidentally he doesnt even say that for certain. He says quite clearly that its not proven but is also very hard to disprove. If the idea was 'totally preposterous' dont you think it would be a little easier to disprove?
Why is it that people always want to err on the side of 'oh my God were royally screwed'. This is just like global warming. No evidence pointing in either direction so lets just ignore it. What if in a few years time it turns out that some new discovery proves it to be true? Or in this case an Earthquake hits and kills thousands of people. You cant know for certain it wont. So why bother even take the risk?
The first home video games came out in 1972 Since then consoles remained ahead of the home computer for gaming until the 486. Heck it took half a decade for the first home computers to come out and more than a decade for the first PC's.
Even if you include the Spectrum, Commodore and Amiga, which I prefer to think of as hybrids, consoles pretty much invented home gaming. Sure the computers write the games but the consoles, and the market those games were invented for, defined them.
A heavily modified DirectX is used on the X-Box and it is the industry standard because its the only standard. OpenGL is equivalent to Direct3D but DirectX is a games API while OpenGL is a graphics API. As a whole it has no rival other than game engines built from first principles.
Oh and technical performance doesnt equal real world performance. It took my PC a long time to run games of an X-Box level of quality after I bought my X-Box despite my PC being technically much more powerful. I should think it will take a good while for PC's to out class the 360 as well. This added to the fact that it will cost you as much as the console to get a graphics card that will get you up to speed makes PC gaming somewhat less desirable and thats ignoring the fact that you have to install the game usually patch the living hell out of it and often have to bipass copy protection that makes the whole experience even more hastle. Steam, Max Payne which wouldnt work without a patch unless you cracked it..., Various games that wont load because you have daemon tools (never mind that your only using them because your lazy and not infact because your the pirate theyve branded you as), etc, etc, etc.
That said I dont think the X-Box has done a terrific level of damage the PC games market is already small in comparison to the consoles and I think the majority of the PC games market is supported because of people that need PC's for Internet, work, etc and get some games to go with it. Consoles cant do the Internet and work thing so the PC's niche remains mostly intact.
Ive no doubt there will have been a dent I know for a fact ive opted for X-Box games over there PC equivalent because I know it wont crash, need patching, need installing, need uninstalling, need an internet connection and so on, but I dont think it will amount to much more than a bruise.
Last I checked current problems with the X-Box 360 are about average for a new console. As in no more than any of the Sony or Nintendo consoles. (About 3% if I remeber right.) So I wouldnt say the reasoning is entirely insane.
There is currently no evidence to suggest the 360 is a particularly faulty product and most of the stories have no backing to them whatsoever. As one site I read said, someone claimed that they took there 360 back to the shop got a replacement and it had the same problem. The chances of someone being able to get a replacement 360 from the shops that are pretty much universally sold out, let alone get a 360 with an identical problem. Fairly slim indeed.
This is a wait and see situation. Certainly wouldnt rush to get a 360 at the moment but I wouldnt rush to get any console and no one knows just how bad this launch is really. Heck Im not even sure if MS know how bad this launch is yet.
Just as a side point but when you buy the console, and especially its games, is it not a contract between you and the shop? Not you and MS, and therefore not Microsofts responsibility to replace the console/games but the shops. I was under the impression you take it up with who you bought it off and dont ever let them side track you on to the company who manufactured it because its the shops responsibility to deal with that part of things.
Incidentally what the hell are people doing with this whole standing up, lying down there console crap. Not long ago no one bothered with this standing up malarky. Now everyones not only desperate to have a console standing up there desperate to have it fully functional while they flip it around. What next, tie it to the back of your car with a bit of string drive around then complain on forums about 'That evil MS and its, not tough enough to be tied to the back of my car with a bit of string and driven around, console. Sony wouldnt let that happen!' There comes a point when the user has to take a little responsibility for buggering it up.
Why in my day we had Megadrives that if you jarred them a little too much would go a bit funny, I dont remeber people flooding the Internet with SEGA complaints. Granted we didnt even have dial up... but thats not the point.
No one actually knows how the moon formed, the whole huge impact theory is still only a best guess.
If it was that theory that formed it then the moon will have been fairly molten at the time which is how it will have shaped itself in to a sphere as all large fluid masses do.
As for the dust. Lots of impacts + Total lack of water + No wind to even clear the dust in to dunes = Nice layer of dust across the whole surface. The actual layer of dust though is only a few centimeters deep and not really enough to highly compress it.
I thought the reason why it was considered stealing was because Xerox really had no idea what they had on there hands not that Apple actually forcefully took anything.
Kind of like you finding a bar of metal, me paying you a tenner for it, then it turns out that the bar of metal was actually solid gold.
'So basically, GTA is the same game as Quake II because they both have menus for manipulating the sound volume?' Yeah comparing a part of a menu interface between games is a lot like like comparing a huge chunk of its gameplay... The _actual_ equivalent would be comparing Quake 2's single player to GTA's single player. Oh would you look at that. Two completely different games in every single way.
'You're ignoring the fact that there is a lot in Quake II that is not in Quake 3.' No im really not. Its just entirely irrelevant that Quake 2 has loads of levels because that makes absolutely no difference to the underlying gameplay which this entire argument is based on and which between the two games is pretty much the same.
'Certainly they're similar games (they are, after all, in the same series)' I was arguing against 'Quake II is nowhere near the same game as Quake 3. The gameplay is completely different.' You appear to have just backed me up so just what the hell are you arguing??
'but saying that they're the same game based on comparing two aspects of the gameplay is downright silly.' Oh I see your arguing against the idea that there the same game. It all makes sense now... Wait no, no it doesnt because I never once said they were the same game just that there gameplay was, I guess that was pretty damn silly wasnt it... Get a damn clue bat and read the posts again from the start.
'Oh, bring up a mod in your arguments again too. That is sure to prove a point since we're talking about the games as released by iD' Cheers, captain condescending I think I will. Eraser bots, if you had intelligence enough to make the connection, was off the shelf code. Taken plugged in to Quake3 and released it was so off the shelf that they even had to patch it up to fix things that didnt translate from Quake2 levels to Quake3. You couldnt plug the AI from the eraser bot mod in to UT, the bots wouldnt work and it wouldnt work because the gameplay works differently. Its not a clear sign that the gameplay is the same just evidence to backup the point. A point that most people, apparently including yourself, totally agree with.
I agree that they messed with the Borg a bit it certainly helps to think of the borg as just a different race for the period of the film and I still love the movie if not for the borg for the stories that come up as a result of them. Picard going a bit revenge crazy, Data now with emotions being tempted, the whole beginning of warp flight.
As opposed to Voyager who just made the borg laughably lame and ignored potentially brilliant stories such what if a borg hated individuality, and I know they covered a little bit with 7 of 9 but it was for about 5 mins before, and without any real explanation, she was all. 'Yeah individuality is awesome.'
The borg show perfect democracy in action and its a facinating view that puts it right up there with communism as a terrible idea. (Before people start calling me a red im not saying communism is great just that democracy has the potential to suck just as badly. Remeber that there has never been a true democracy implemented due to the impracticality of asking every one of your several million citizens about every decision, most of which the populace wouldnt have a clue about.) ST-TNG did incredible episodes with introducing the borg and the horrors of an unstoppable unfeeling enemy. I kind of got the feeling, after that, they couldnt work out what to do with the idea.
Personally I think yours actually sounded more arogant, expressing your opinion but claiming its a fact, even if it wasnt quite so blunt as mine. and honestly, I really wish people on slashdot would stop being so sensitive I didnt even use a swear word for crying out loud.
That playground ranting out of the way this post was somewhat more balanced than your first one. In your opinion the speed and movement were different is somewhat different to your 'fact' filled first post, and of course I cant argue against what you personally thought of the gameplay. I can just point out again that the elements involved in movement within Quake3 such as strafe jumping, which is very important for getting around quickly, remain the same as Quake2 and differ very much to UT.
As for your second point comparing Quake2's single player experience to Quake3 which is essentially a multiplayer only game is a poor comparison. You need to compare Quake3 to Quake2's multiplayer to get a better impression of how they line up and as I said in my previous post Quake3 even uses the same AI for its bots that most used in Quake2. (The Eraserbot.) So again the experience is easily comparable, and completely different to UT which had a very different AI. (Personally I think a better AI. Godlike bots were really tough but also seemed more human than nightmare level quake3 bots.)
Have you ever looked in to games AI. It is truly awful.
People have this movie type image of AI how it can think for itself and may one day rule the world killing us all with its machines of chaos and destruction!!!
If that day is to come it wont be for a long long time. Currently we have rather large debates in AI on how to get from one side of a room to the other. A* most asuredly but how do you implement that? Depth first? Breadth first? Iterative Deepening? How do you make it real time? Break up the path? recalculate the whole path each tick? recalculate the path if anything at all changes?
The handful of possible answers I gave to each of those questions is only the tip of the iceberg (e.g. you can search from the thing thats moving to the target or search from the target to the thing thats moving to it or, and this is probably the best option, both.) Each solution has bonuses and flaws quite often to the point where two solutions appear just as good as each other in theory.
Oh and as I said. This is all just to get something to move from one side of the room to the other. Never mind trying to make that thing behave in a human way or making it work in a team with others its a good enough start that it doesnt get stuck in an infinite loop and try to walk through a wall for all eternity.
This is also ignoring the fact that this is kind of pseudo AI if there can be such a thing. E.g. to make a team split up around various obstacles whilst patrolling from one point to another all you have to do is have the team members get as far away from each other as is possible whilst always trying to converge them on there target point. i.e. They _must_ get to a target point but on the way they stay as far away from each other as possible. This has no reasoning to it the agents involved arnt thinking. There is no commanding agent saying. 'Hey you. Go round that way we'll go round this way.' They just do exactly what they are scripted to do. This means that you will never get a commanding officer of a squad sending a man in to a dead end by accident etc. You can of course script in that permutation but who on Earth is going to do that for all the possible mistakes and maps they could be on.
In short AI is hard. Really, really hard. There are hundreds of people particularly in the field of robotics that have spent years sometimes decades of there lives just answering the 'How do you get from one place to another.' question.
I dont know what the solution to this is but my best bet is do the same that has happened with the good ol physics engine. One of the reasons that people buy off the shelf physics engines is because they are also really, really hard. It boggles my mind that the same hasnt been done with AI which after doing some AI and Physics I can tell you for a fact AI is many, many times harder. AI has developed, but quite slowly and I doubt you will see anything ground breaking until there is a full team working constantly on an AI engine alone that can then be distributed to any game that requires it. In other words, until there is an AI version of Havoc I dont think things are going to change much.
I played Quake2 for a long long time. I like to think I got pretty good as well. Playing Quake3 wasnt exactly an identical experience to Quake2 but Strafe jumping, rocket jumping, double jumping, all translated over nearly identically. The speed and movement was very much the same and also very different to UT.
Quake2 had its single player aspects but in deathmatch multiplayer you could have given Quake2 a graphics and weapons overhaul and it would have been Quake3. Heck its one of the reasons Im not fond of Quake3 other than as an expansion of Quake gameplay. It does nothing that hasnt already been done before and it had no real single player. It even used the Quake2 eraser bot code for its AI. If ever there was a game that was more graphics engine than gameplay Quake3 is most definatly it. Oh and using Quake2 skills I went in to Quake3 and started completing levels on nightmare difficulty after only a couple of games. (Even got Xaero on nightmare that snipey son of a female dog.) I doubt I could have done that if it was entirely different gameplay.
PS1's had a recorded problem with there CD drives producing loads of jitter I know two people who had that problem and it was really annoying. The PS2 has compatibility issues with the PS1 and also has a tendancy to try burn your house down. ( http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/sony_p s2_power_recall/ ) The X-Box incredibly has the same try burn your house down issue. (Does anyone else find that seriously worrying. We know things have set things alight. Have people died or been seriously injured? Why the hell have both Sony and MS just been allowed to throw out some replacement crap. Shouldnt they both be hammered in to the ground for this?) I rember my old Megadrive had something in it that when the system got jarred would cause it to screw up. (Which thanks to an overzealous dog it did.)
I have a brick boy a NES and borrowed a SNES once. My NES fell off beds got kicked and thrown around never had an issue. My Brickboy still works and that has been punished like mad its even got a small dent in the screen from when it fell out of my bag while I was on a bike. Not a problem. The SNES that I borrowed was lugged around in a ruck sack and in my short time of owning it got a hell of a lot more punishment than my megadrive incident. It seems clear to me that Nintendo build there consoles to a high spec.
b) Although its admitedly still not as solid as Nintendo consoles the dreamcast is a tough box. The random reboots arnt a total failure and, well, hell I love the dreamcast so I can forgive it.
'You have to take the modem out and remove the top half of the DC's case, the board you want is the one to the left of the rom drive. unplug the little cable to the top left and unscrew the board now carefully unclip and lift the power supply board off the six pins near the bottom left of the DC which are the problem clean them with something like a bit of WD40 or just a gental wipe with a cotton bud or something be carefull not to mess up the serfice or leave any fluff or anything on them,if you are brave you could allso bend them slightly towards the front to ensure better contact but cleaning them should do the job.Then tair up you now invalid warrenty .
I do not think hitting the DC is a good idea but it probly dislodged the dirt.'
Its only happened to my housemates DC so far (Man did he pummel the crap out of it to keep it working see hitting point in the quote.), mine has run solidly thankfully and looks sooo good with its lovely VGA box. But Ill stop lovin on my dreamcast and getting off the topic thats already off topic.
This idea would be good in a perfect world. This isnt a perfect world and as someone has already pointed out if someone stole your book and started to make serious amounts of money whilst removing all sales you can make, I cant imagine you would be pleased.
Copyright is a brilliant thing it protects people from having there hard work immediately ripped off. It would be a terrible world in which everything of serious worth you make gets you no reward at all.
The problem with copyright isnt that it exists, its that it is being completely misused. I cant even really blame Amazon for this either because they didnt make the decisions based on the law they just asked.
Whoever gave them the copyright is at fault here, this idea isnt something that can be copyrighted. Customer reviews belong to the customer as a part of copyright law itself, the time the review is given cant matter because otherwise youd be able to copyright an already copyrighted idea only have at the start. 'Delay starting this for 10 seconds.' The way people leave reviews is just a simple message board amazon didnt invent them. In fact the people behind PHP or whichever script they use probably did and they are no doubt open. This whole thing is the equivalent of a company sending me a letter asking for my feedback on there product. Has that process been copyrighted? Of course not. So where is the new idea to be copyrighted?
Im sure someone with a better grasp of copyright law would be able to poke more concise holes in this debacle but when it comes down to it there was nothing to copyright in the first place and the only reason this has passed is because of the ignorance of the people who awarded it.
I sincerely hope that Yahoo and the like continue to use there own systems and if Amazon decides to get pissy about it they overturn this ridiculous sham.
You sound like your questioning the truth of my story.
Fair enough. http://www.spookyweb.net/c-t/inside.html The channel it happened in. Velerion should be happy for the advertisement anyhow. Hes running (Or at least trying to run.) a roleplaying game Im sure hed be happy for new members to it if you read it through on his forum.
but thats enough advertising. Click on the events and hes made a nice little card for the Brian incident. You can see the pic he sent around to everyone on the cards page under Whitney. (I think you can agree you couldnt tell he was lying from the pic.) Heck go in to the channel and ask them about it if you really want.
I think, though im not sure, that that isnt the first time one of the channels members turned out to be a different sex to what they claimed. More than once in a single small channel, doesnt bode well.
I have to agree. I own an X-Box so I wont be out of the loop for this game but that doesnt mean crap if they are going to throw this thing out as a big online game.
As a single player game I could see such massive possibilities the missions and story in such a great universe could be nothing less than epic. Now the single player appears to be stuck on to the far easier option of make a handful of levels plug in some generic AI and let people take care of the gameplay themselves in the same multiplayer experience they have had time after time after time.
I wouldnt mind quite so much but looking through there own site each screen I went to managed to drain a little more hope out of me. You have 4 characters which are essentially heavy medium light and stealth troopers. No alien races no attempt at something interesting like Alien Vs Predator.
Look at Vehicles and youve got fairly standard affair here as well the only vehicle that even begins to stand out is the siege tank which appears to be a poor mans Leviathan from Unreal Tournament ( http://www.unrealtournament.com/ut2004/vehicles.ph p ) Admitedly UT probably stole the idea from Starcraft in the first place but Starcraft has a multitude of units. Think SCV for repairing the other units in combat or any of the flying vehicles. If theyd gone to the other races it could have gotten really interesting.
Look at the psi abilities and you have a set of abilities that have been around since Doom. Nothing like the range of abilities Unreal Tournament has let alone Unreal Championship 2 which has numerous different powers for each of its dozen characters.
The weapons are equally lack luster the lockdown gun being the only thing of interest and its no stake gun from painkiller or gravity gun from Half Life 2.
Even the modes offer nothing. They have a handful of typical modes and only one expansion to these called capture the base which sounds like a cross between your normal capture and hold on to a base game and capture the flag. It could be interesting but a single additional mode of play is no where near enough.
I dont know if it will be a terrible game or a great game Ive not got a copy of it and itd be foolish to just assume. Blizzard have pulled off some of the best games around there isnt a single line of theres that I have not enjoyed, but I can safetly say all of my anticipation for this game has drained away. On the plus side if it does turn out great it will take me by surprise and be all the better for it.
Its all well and good being irritated by the reaction men have to women on the Internet, however, it is often justified.
In a small IRC channel I used to frequent a lass joined. She spoke a fair amount, and made some friends there and yes she got the 'You got pics' thing.
I dunno why people try to make out its to check the sex of the person you are talking to. Not like youve got a hope in hell of pulling someone whos usually hundreds if not thousands of miles away. I just want to check out a nice pair of... eyes.
Anyway, seedy imaturity aside, she did have pics and sent them about the place, they looked reasonable enough and nothing more was said on the matter.
For what was probably well over a year she was involved with the channel and made good friends with more than one guy there even arranging to go out with one and actually move up to his place. Only thing was, some other guy came in to the channel and started asking questions. Turns out he had a thing going on with her as well and was fairly devestated that she had gone and dumped him. She promptly vanished at this point as did both boyfriends. For a while we were all speculating on what was going on. Until the first boyfriend came in and he had apparently been doing some research. (A little worrying really, just how obsessed was this guy with some lass hed never even spoken to.) He had found that the person at the address she lived at was a guy.
Surely not! There was no way most of the channel was gonna believe this was genuine after all there were quite a few people in the channel who had been friends with her for ages. Still had a heck of a good laugh with the idea. Needless to say it was about to get funnier.
One of the other guys in the channel thought maybe he could get to the bottom of this by checking her livejournal. He was confused to find a livejournal not by her but by a bloke called Brian. A 16 year old Bisexual no less. A quick check with old and new livejournal showed that the old one had been carefully changed in to the new one with all refrences to his female persona removed or changed.
Oh and just to make damn sure non of this was wrong or fabricated we managed to get in touch with his best friend who admited she'd (Or maybe he'd who knows.) heard him mention something about the IRC channel before. Well and truly busted.
I laughed good and hard about all that (Shed persuaded the whole chanel she was a romanian hotty for more than a year!) but there was a more serious side. Ignoring boyfriend number ones stalker tendancies and the embarasment to boyfriend number 2 who I dont think has ever returned to IRC. There were quite a few people added to that group of internet users who wouldnt be ready to believe the next person to come along and claim the're a girl.
If your reading this Brian it was a laugh ill give you that, but over a year? I think you may need to see a head doctor.
Oh and an amusing concidence in all this. His IRC nickname was Whitney.
I see a lot of articles like this, I see industry experts and teams of executives coming up with the mystical answer to how to draw women in to gaming. Scientists and psychologists desperate to crack open a new market.
One of the best articles I ever read was one written by a disgruntled woman about the fact that she just wanted games developers to develop games. She was sick of her sex being singled out by the industry as if curvy women with big breasts was any worse than he-man look alikes with a penchant for baby oil. She was right.
These 'experts' can harp on about there wonder treatment of the industry but when it comes down to it, if you make a good game people will play it. It doenst matter what sex you are.
This is the only industry that makes such ridiculous distinctions between the sexes. The movie industry knows what its doing in regard to this. Sure some are chick flicks some are macho fests most are inbetween and most people dont complain. So why is it that in the Games industry no one can accept that if you just make a quality game half of the population isnt just going to ignore it because God forbid the female characters are quite lucky in the looks department I know for a fact the males will almost certainly be a Keanu Reves or Arnold Swarchnegger rip off.
The major problem with women and gaming is the fact people think there is a major problem with women and gaming.
As for the article. A lot of it is really really bad. The explanation of how you can use our ancestory to predict which games we would prefer is utter crap. Go back pre Wolfenstein and ask him to use his theories to take a look in to the future. Chances of him predicting the future game probably around the 0 area maybe a little more due to shear luck. It may tell us why we enjoy playing these games but as a prediction tool, not even close. Thats the key to why this article essentially says nothing. Im fairly sure if you ignored the sims (A game which has a wopping female following and does match up to his 'prediction') this guy probably wouldnt even have made the connection he did. I certainly doubt hes actually come up with the perfect game idea for women using this psychoanalysis. I there even is such a thing.
It was just more grittier may have just been that it was a worse graphics engine but it was like the films where they went from animatronics to CG the latter was just too polished to be scary.
As for the list good job on the guy who mentions Bloodlines man did that game deserve more kudos. (It was like another Sin, top class game taken down by stupid bugs and glitches.) That hotel bit was superb.
Re:Most ridiculous piece of hardware ever concepte
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PS3 To Run At 120 FPS?
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· Score: 1
Um the human eye can only discern between about 12 to 14 million colours 24 bit colour does over 16 million. Hence it being called true colour. (Incidentally the first time seeing that was on my Matrox Marvel though im not sure who invented the term.)
The other bits for colour are nothing to do with adding more colours they are used for transparencies and infact the bit can go even higher if you want to add even more functionality.
Your evidence of looking at a colour gradient is flawed. There is no way of viewing a gradient of all the colours on your screen because colours have 3 dimensions. RGB or HLS are the typical ones. Even if you could have all the colours there theyd have to be in a row because shifting any out of the row above it or below would create potentially visible gaps. I dont know about you but my resolution isnt 16,000,000 by 12,000,000. You can display two dimensions of the colour though.
<script type="text/vbscript"> For i=16 to 100 document.write("<tr>") For j=16 to 100 k = hex(i) l = hex(j) document.write("<td bgcolor=#00" & k & l & ">CELL</td>") Next document.write("</tr>") Next </script>
</table> <body> <html>
Shove the above in to a html file and have a look.
First off forgive me for the horrendous inefficiency of this script and the fact its vbscript. Im no scripter and I dont know how to easily convert decimal to hex in jscript. Im sure anybody who cant run it can make a version for there own setup. If it runs slowly just change one of the 100's to 16.
The display will show a range of colours and no matter how large or small you make the cells you wont be able to see lines between them because the monitor has more colour than you can percieve.
the comment about there only being 256 colours is actually a little more complicated than it first appears. There may well be 256 distinct colours. Last I checked there could be 36 to 360 wavelengths of light you can pick up. (Human eye has been estimated at picking up anything between a nanometre and 10 nanometres between the wavelengths of visible light which is 380 to 740.) however those distinct colours can be darkened, lit or mixed together. Its basically the difference between what our eye can physically pick up and what our brain percieves it as.
All of this isnt a precise science though each of us percieves colour differently some can see more some less but 16 million colours is far beyond the maximum range of colours you can discern.
On the subject of refresh. There are too many factors too truly know whether that will make a difference. How many frames we can percieve isnt the same as how many it takes to look nice for example 85hz is fine as far as im concerned but my eyes can see faster than that. They can certainly see faster than the 30fps of films but the brain is good at filling in the gaps. Ultimately it probably wont make any difference to the experience and is useless at telling us how well the games will play. (How fast a game produces a frame of information (Or timestep in the projects I did.) has nothing to do with how fast a monitor refreshes itself.)
If I did a search for anything id come up with... what I searched for. Saying thats evidence of some underhanded MS deal is ridiculous.
I put in 'Unreal 3' and 'PS3' SHOCK! Sony have licensed it as well! Its clearly a conspiracy against Nintendo...
If people actually read this article without seeing red everytime the guy says anything against anything youll find its blunt but probably for the most part true.
He slags of the prototype PS3 controller, why not when it was posted here there was a load of people saying the same things (and some amusing refrences to Batman and ziplines.)
He slags off the fact that the Nintendo controller will become a gimmick. This isnt too large a leap of faith either, youd have to be a fool to not have any fears that Nintendo's efforts are going to fall flat and like he says there almost certainly will be gimmick driven games with no substance. (Whether they will outnumber decent games remains to be seen hes just picked a side is all.)
His comments on Nintendo's market share were the only real problem with the whole article and even they arnt entirely off target. Ive seen a lot of people say if you asked who exclusively had a PS2 or X-Box it would be a similar percentage. Even if that was true it doesnt change the fact that 10% exclusivity is a difficult percentage to work with. Sony and MS have the money and backing to work with the fact there are 2 other powerful rivals vying for control. Does Nintendo? Especially as they are taking a risk with their new controller? As a criticism of the company (Which I honestly dont think it was.) it falls flat. As a point about how difficult the market has become with the current competition its spot on.
Oh and he also says that the PS3 and X-Box360 are fine consoles that wont dissapoint and that Nintendo will undoubtedly produce some fantastic games. Im certainly not seeing any problem with that.
(He probably would have said the revolution was a fine console as well but as he correctly points out they havent released the specs.)
First point. Backwards compatibility is to play old games on your new system. Thats as far as the definition goes just cause youve invented some more precise definition that excludes any upgrades to the old games means nothing.
Compatibility engine? You clearly dont have a clue how this is working the xbe's are being updated to function on the 360 even if they werent the upgrades there discussing are simple file changes (For textures) and effects added to the output the core of the game its physics its level design etc. Doesnt need to be touched.
Live has millions of users how is it a 'wrong reason'? ITs one the biggest selling points.
It wont cause compatibility issues. You keep saying BOTH as if MS are releasing entirely different things. The console in BOTH forms is an identical gaming platform. The harddrive is for additional content to those games (and media stuff). I.e. everyone can play all the games without any issues and some who dished out a bit more get more can get more content.
A PS1 game shouldnt play exactly the same on the more advanced consoles thats utter nonsense, the way it always is? You act like theres some code that they have to work by.
The PS2 didnt support advanced graphical features because of the way it was implemented not because Sony had some kind of divine rule book. They essentially plugged a PS1 in to the PS2 it was quite messy and infact there are 'compatibility issues' as you keep whining on about as some (admitedly only a very small number.) PS1 games dont work. It was a cheap and quick fix to a problem that would have required a lot of work had they decided to emulate the PS1. The PS3 will almost certainly have similar problems dont expect 100% compatibility and do expect (especially if they are emulating) older games to look a damn site better.
Sony hasnt proven crap, they are also pushing for more multimedia based consoles in fact there plans appear very similar to MS. Nintendo is taking far far more risks than either of the other two. There entire future in the console market is pretty much reliant on the single piece of innovation in there controller. (Though I cant help but hope they succeed. Who cant love good ol Nintendo.)
are people reading the same article as me or what?
This isnt the only post to have raised some issues that confuse the hell out of me but it has them all in and was the first I came to.
1. he doesnt say which order Tron came out in just that they came out, and though it is open to interpretation I read it as being nostalgic rather than derogatory.
2. Unless im missing something he never once says Doom is an X-Box game. This point has been whined about by half this damn thread. He never actually says it. In fact his comment on turning an X-Box game in to a movie comes right after talking about Halo. Which, good lord!, is an X-Box game!
I can only assume people read the blurb and made false connections without thinking to actually read the article.
3. The same site you posted says that the 30 year old gamers have been playing on average for 9.5 years. Where does that place the time they started playing... gosh its right slap bang in the 13 to 25 range.
Arguable points
1. 'DOOM heralded a paradigm shift in video games. Hardcore PC games were going mainstream.
Selling millions of copies and chalking up tens of millions of downloads as shareware, DOOM remains one of the most popular PC games ever. And the title's impact on the gaming world is still felt today.'
From ID's own site. Wolfenstein might have been the first real FPS but it was Doom that got the genre recognised.
2. He is refering to those games existing as a result of Doom. Halflife definately falls in that category. Its an FPS based on a hybrid quake 1 and 2 engine. Adding a bit of story doesnt change its origins.
Its binding the movie and games industry far more than has been done in the past.
The article was largely correct its ironic that most of the people who claim it needs to get its facts right havent actually checked the facts themselves.
Irony = Someone claiming people are arrogant and ignorant for bundling all the African nations in to one group at the same time as bundling all of the Western nations in to one group.
Slashdot Mirror
'First you knock the complaints as "unsubstantiated", yet then you blurt out meaningless statistics without backing them up yourself. Well, the last time I checked, the problem rate on 360 units was in the double digits varying from 13-16%. Of course, people with problems are more likely to be vocal (and post, hit online vote tabs, etc.) but that is still a LOT of problems with a new product. Especially after Microsoft already did a merket test run with their first console the original Xbox.'
Um my point wasnt that I Was right or in any way substantiated. My point was that no one really has a clue. I read that it was 3% you seem to believe its 13-16% Ive read half a dozen others to boot. Hence me going on to say how a lot of people are making stuff up and saying
'This is a wait and see situation. Certainly wouldnt rush to get a 360 at the moment but I wouldnt rush to get any console and no one knows just how bad this launch is really. Heck Im not even sure if MS know how bad this launch is yet.'
'Yeah, but when you jar a SegaCD, the laser just skips around a bit.'
Or just breaks outright... (Ive got me a MegaCD version 1 now though im careful with that fella its practically an antique.)
'The focusing element doesn't flutter and grind a physical trench into your game disc'
You sure about that. I dont move my MegaCD from upright to flat too often. Makes putting in cartridges and CD's a bitch. To be fair it isnt spinning at anywhere near the speed of the 360's drive either.
My point isnt that the X-Box360 is particulalry good just that people tend to quickly forget that the older consoles also had there fair share if difficulties.
You came up with a list of problems the 360 has that is somewhat more extensive than older consoles but taking a look the points arnt entirely valid.
-Perplexing, even confusing Core vs. Premium packaging. Why even include a hard drive if they're brow-beating developers not to rely on it.
Thats a good point but not so much a problem it was a designed marketing strategy rather than a screw up. It remains to be seen whether its going to confuse people too much. That said looking at my rather extensive catalogue of X-Box games only about 2 need harddisk (Blinx + Blinx2) and Id wager even they could be modified not to need more space than RAM can provide.
-Keeping the Xbox name, but not really backwards compatible. Few games work. Even recent Xbox releases not compatible. And you need a special attachment (the HDD) to make it work if at all. I expect this will be a talking point for upset parents this Christmas, after buying "green" titles which somehow don't work on the "white" Xbox.
A little unfair. X-Box is MS's name for its console line you cant really compare it to Nintendo and SEGA whos actual company name is its console line. It was always the SEGA Mastersystem then SEGA Megadrive or Nintendo and Super Nintendo. They didnt have backwards compatibility either (Well unless you bought an add on for the Megadrive.) The only reason why they could change names entirely was because there company name was always a prefix to it. (Or in the case of the Nintendo Entertainment System the actual name of the console.)
I suppose it is possible to buy an X-Box game for the X-Box360 by accident but parents who arnt in the know typically rely on the kids to tell them which game they want and I doubt there will be anymore X-Box games bought for the 360 by accident than PS2 ones. Who knows though might be the next big problem.
-Pre-orders without enough units to fill pre-order demand. (pre-orders are supposed to be for companies to gauge interest in their product, not fux0r early adopters willing to put down payments.)
Undeniable fuck up. MS should have had some decent predictions on the number of 360's theyd have ready how the hell they managed to screw over so many people is beyond me and I dont believe this was a marketing trick you leave small amounts of systems issues for the shop shelf not the pre-orderers. Screwed up, b
At what point did it say we were having a big impact on nature.
Even by just reading the slashdot part it says quite clearly this is the straw that may break the camels back. I.e. nature is already doing all of the work, we are just putting that tiny tiny last bit in which could cause the whole thing to fall apart.
Incidentally he doesnt even say that for certain. He says quite clearly that its not proven but is also very hard to disprove. If the idea was 'totally preposterous' dont you think it would be a little easier to disprove?
Why is it that people always want to err on the side of 'oh my God were royally screwed'. This is just like global warming. No evidence pointing in either direction so lets just ignore it. What if in a few years time it turns out that some new discovery proves it to be true? Or in this case an Earthquake hits and kills thousands of people. You cant know for certain it wont. So why bother even take the risk?
Um consoles pre date PC gaming.
The first home video games came out in 1972 Since then consoles remained ahead of the home computer for gaming until the 486. Heck it took half a decade for the first home computers to come out and more than a decade for the first PC's.
Even if you include the Spectrum, Commodore and Amiga, which I prefer to think of as hybrids, consoles pretty much invented home gaming. Sure the computers write the games but the consoles, and the market those games were invented for, defined them.
A heavily modified DirectX is used on the X-Box and it is the industry standard because its the only standard. OpenGL is equivalent to Direct3D but DirectX is a games API while OpenGL is a graphics API. As a whole it has no rival other than game engines built from first principles.
Oh and technical performance doesnt equal real world performance. It took my PC a long time to run games of an X-Box level of quality after I bought my X-Box despite my PC being technically much more powerful. I should think it will take a good while for PC's to out class the 360 as well. This added to the fact that it will cost you as much as the console to get a graphics card that will get you up to speed makes PC gaming somewhat less desirable and thats ignoring the fact that you have to install the game usually patch the living hell out of it and often have to bipass copy protection that makes the whole experience even more hastle. Steam, Max Payne which wouldnt work without a patch unless you cracked it..., Various games that wont load because you have daemon tools (never mind that your only using them because your lazy and not infact because your the pirate theyve branded you as), etc, etc, etc.
That said I dont think the X-Box has done a terrific level of damage the PC games market is already small in comparison to the consoles and I think the majority of the PC games market is supported because of people that need PC's for Internet, work, etc and get some games to go with it. Consoles cant do the Internet and work thing so the PC's niche remains mostly intact.
Ive no doubt there will have been a dent I know for a fact ive opted for X-Box games over there PC equivalent because I know it wont crash, need patching, need installing, need uninstalling, need an internet connection and so on, but I dont think it will amount to much more than a bruise.
Last I checked current problems with the X-Box 360 are about average for a new console. As in no more than any of the Sony or Nintendo consoles. (About 3% if I remeber right.) So I wouldnt say the reasoning is entirely insane.
There is currently no evidence to suggest the 360 is a particularly faulty product and most of the stories have no backing to them whatsoever. As one site I read said, someone claimed that they took there 360 back to the shop got a replacement and it had the same problem. The chances of someone being able to get a replacement 360 from the shops that are pretty much universally sold out, let alone get a 360 with an identical problem. Fairly slim indeed.
This is a wait and see situation. Certainly wouldnt rush to get a 360 at the moment but I wouldnt rush to get any console and no one knows just how bad this launch is really. Heck Im not even sure if MS know how bad this launch is yet.
Just as a side point but when you buy the console, and especially its games, is it not a contract between you and the shop? Not you and MS, and therefore not Microsofts responsibility to replace the console/games but the shops. I was under the impression you take it up with who you bought it off and dont ever let them side track you on to the company who manufactured it because its the shops responsibility to deal with that part of things.
Incidentally what the hell are people doing with this whole standing up, lying down there console crap. Not long ago no one bothered with this standing up malarky. Now everyones not only desperate to have a console standing up there desperate to have it fully functional while they flip it around. What next, tie it to the back of your car with a bit of string drive around then complain on forums about 'That evil MS and its, not tough enough to be tied to the back of my car with a bit of string and driven around, console. Sony wouldnt let that happen!' There comes a point when the user has to take a little responsibility for buggering it up.
Why in my day we had Megadrives that if you jarred them a little too much would go a bit funny, I dont remeber people flooding the Internet with SEGA complaints. Granted we didnt even have dial up... but thats not the point.
No one actually knows how the moon formed, the whole huge impact theory is still only a best guess.
If it was that theory that formed it then the moon will have been fairly molten at the time which is how it will have shaped itself in to a sphere as all large fluid masses do.
As for the dust. Lots of impacts + Total lack of water + No wind to even clear the dust in to dunes = Nice layer of dust across the whole surface. The actual layer of dust though is only a few centimeters deep and not really enough to highly compress it.
'Even if the Xbox 360 is a rousing success, Sony will likely still dominate the console universe.'
Is its sub heading.
Hardly shameless advertising, the recent CNN articles have actually been some of the more balanced views on whats going on.
I thought the reason why it was considered stealing was because Xerox really had no idea what they had on there hands not that Apple actually forcefully took anything.
Kind of like you finding a bar of metal, me paying you a tenner for it, then it turns out that the bar of metal was actually solid gold.
'So basically, GTA is the same game as Quake II because they both have menus for manipulating the sound volume?'
Yeah comparing a part of a menu interface between games is a lot like like comparing a huge chunk of its gameplay...
The _actual_ equivalent would be comparing Quake 2's single player to GTA's single player. Oh would you look at that. Two completely different games in every single way.
'You're ignoring the fact that there is a lot in Quake II that is not in Quake 3.'
No im really not. Its just entirely irrelevant that Quake 2 has loads of levels because that makes absolutely no difference to the underlying gameplay which this entire argument is based on and which between the two games is pretty much the same.
'Certainly they're similar games (they are, after all, in the same series)'
I was arguing against 'Quake II is nowhere near the same game as Quake 3. The gameplay is completely different.' You appear to have just backed me up so just what the hell are you arguing??
'but saying that they're the same game based on comparing two aspects of the gameplay is downright silly.'
Oh I see your arguing against the idea that there the same game. It all makes sense now... Wait no, no it doesnt because I never once said they were the same game just that there gameplay was, I guess that was pretty damn silly wasnt it... Get a damn clue bat and read the posts again from the start.
'Oh, bring up a mod in your arguments again too. That is sure to prove a point since we're talking about the games as released by iD'
Cheers, captain condescending I think I will.
Eraser bots, if you had intelligence enough to make the connection, was off the shelf code. Taken plugged in to Quake3 and released it was so off the shelf that they even had to patch it up to fix things that didnt translate from Quake2 levels to Quake3. You couldnt plug the AI from the eraser bot mod in to UT, the bots wouldnt work and it wouldnt work because the gameplay works differently. Its not a clear sign that the gameplay is the same just evidence to backup the point. A point that most people, apparently including yourself, totally agree with.
I agree that they messed with the Borg a bit it certainly helps to think of the borg as just a different race for the period of the film and I still love the movie if not for the borg for the stories that come up as a result of them. Picard going a bit revenge crazy, Data now with emotions being tempted, the whole beginning of warp flight. As opposed to Voyager who just made the borg laughably lame and ignored potentially brilliant stories such what if a borg hated individuality, and I know they covered a little bit with 7 of 9 but it was for about 5 mins before, and without any real explanation, she was all. 'Yeah individuality is awesome.' The borg show perfect democracy in action and its a facinating view that puts it right up there with communism as a terrible idea. (Before people start calling me a red im not saying communism is great just that democracy has the potential to suck just as badly. Remeber that there has never been a true democracy implemented due to the impracticality of asking every one of your several million citizens about every decision, most of which the populace wouldnt have a clue about.) ST-TNG did incredible episodes with introducing the borg and the horrors of an unstoppable unfeeling enemy. I kind of got the feeling, after that, they couldnt work out what to do with the idea.
I said 'Utter trash'
You said 'because you've got your facts wrong'
Personally I think yours actually sounded more arogant, expressing your opinion but claiming its a fact, even if it wasnt quite so blunt as mine.
and honestly, I really wish people on slashdot would stop being so sensitive I didnt even use a swear word for crying out loud.
That playground ranting out of the way this post was somewhat more balanced than your first one. In your opinion the speed and movement were different is somewhat different to your 'fact' filled first post, and of course I cant argue against what you personally thought of the gameplay. I can just point out again that the elements involved in movement within Quake3 such as strafe jumping, which is very important for getting around quickly, remain the same as Quake2 and differ very much to UT.
As for your second point comparing Quake2's single player experience to Quake3 which is essentially a multiplayer only game is a poor comparison. You need to compare Quake3 to Quake2's multiplayer to get a better impression of how they line up and as I said in my previous post Quake3 even uses the same AI for its bots that most used in Quake2. (The Eraserbot.) So again the experience is easily comparable, and completely different to UT which had a very different AI. (Personally I think a better AI. Godlike bots were really tough but also seemed more human than nightmare level quake3 bots.)
Have you ever looked in to games AI. It is truly awful.
People have this movie type image of AI how it can think for itself and may one day rule the world killing us all with its machines of chaos and destruction!!!
If that day is to come it wont be for a long long time. Currently we have rather large debates in AI on how to get from one side of a room to the other. A* most asuredly but how do you implement that? Depth first? Breadth first? Iterative Deepening? How do you make it real time? Break up the path? recalculate the whole path each tick? recalculate the path if anything at all changes?
The handful of possible answers I gave to each of those questions is only the tip of the iceberg (e.g. you can search from the thing thats moving to the target or search from the target to the thing thats moving to it or, and this is probably the best option, both.) Each solution has bonuses and flaws quite often to the point where two solutions appear just as good as each other in theory.
Oh and as I said. This is all just to get something to move from one side of the room to the other. Never mind trying to make that thing behave in a human way or making it work in a team with others its a good enough start that it doesnt get stuck in an infinite loop and try to walk through a wall for all eternity.
This is also ignoring the fact that this is kind of pseudo AI if there can be such a thing. E.g. to make a team split up around various obstacles whilst patrolling from one point to another all you have to do is have the team members get as far away from each other as is possible whilst always trying to converge them on there target point. i.e. They _must_ get to a target point but on the way they stay as far away from each other as possible. This has no reasoning to it the agents involved arnt thinking. There is no commanding agent saying. 'Hey you. Go round that way we'll go round this way.' They just do exactly what they are scripted to do. This means that you will never get a commanding officer of a squad sending a man in to a dead end by accident etc. You can of course script in that permutation but who on Earth is going to do that for all the possible mistakes and maps they could be on.
In short AI is hard. Really, really hard. There are hundreds of people particularly in the field of robotics that have spent years sometimes decades of there lives just answering the 'How do you get from one place to another.' question.
I dont know what the solution to this is but my best bet is do the same that has happened with the good ol physics engine. One of the reasons that people buy off the shelf physics engines is because they are also really, really hard. It boggles my mind that the same hasnt been done with AI which after doing some AI and Physics I can tell you for a fact AI is many, many times harder. AI has developed, but quite slowly and I doubt you will see anything ground breaking until there is a full team working constantly on an AI engine alone that can then be distributed to any game that requires it. In other words, until there is an AI version of Havoc I dont think things are going to change much.
Utter trash.
I played Quake2 for a long long time. I like to think I got pretty good as well. Playing Quake3 wasnt exactly an identical experience to Quake2 but Strafe jumping, rocket jumping, double jumping, all translated over nearly identically. The speed and movement was very much the same and also very different to UT.
Quake2 had its single player aspects but in deathmatch multiplayer you could have given Quake2 a graphics and weapons overhaul and it would have been Quake3. Heck its one of the reasons Im not fond of Quake3 other than as an expansion of Quake gameplay. It does nothing that hasnt already been done before and it had no real single player. It even used the Quake2 eraser bot code for its AI. If ever there was a game that was more graphics engine than gameplay Quake3 is most definatly it. Oh and using Quake2 skills I went in to Quake3 and started completing levels on nightmare difficulty after only a couple of games. (Even got Xaero on nightmare that snipey son of a female dog.) I doubt I could have done that if it was entirely different gameplay.
Two things.
p s2_power_recall/ )
.'
a) Your right Nintendo have great build quality.
PS1's had a recorded problem with there CD drives producing loads of jitter I know two people who had that problem and it was really annoying.
The PS2 has compatibility issues with the PS1 and also has a tendancy to try burn your house down. ( http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/09/13/sony_
The X-Box incredibly has the same try burn your house down issue.
(Does anyone else find that seriously worrying. We know things have set things alight. Have people died or been seriously injured? Why the hell have both Sony and MS just been allowed to throw out some replacement crap. Shouldnt they both be hammered in to the ground for this?)
I rember my old Megadrive had something in it that when the system got jarred would cause it to screw up. (Which thanks to an overzealous dog it did.)
I have a brick boy a NES and borrowed a SNES once. My NES fell off beds got kicked and thrown around never had an issue. My Brickboy still works and that has been punished like mad its even got a small dent in the screen from when it fell out of my bag while I was on a bike. Not a problem.
The SNES that I borrowed was lugged around in a ruck sack and in my short time of owning it got a hell of a lot more punishment than my megadrive incident. It seems clear to me that Nintendo build there consoles to a high spec.
b) Although its admitedly still not as solid as Nintendo consoles the dreamcast is a tough box. The random reboots arnt a total failure and, well, hell I love the dreamcast so I can forgive it.
'You have to take the modem out and remove the top half of the DC's case, the board you want is the one to the left of the rom drive. unplug the little cable to the top left and unscrew the board now carefully unclip and lift the power supply board off the six pins near the bottom left of the DC which are the problem clean them with something like a bit of WD40 or just a gental wipe with a cotton bud or something be carefull not to mess up the serfice or leave any fluff or anything on them,if you are brave you could allso bend them slightly towards the front to ensure better contact but cleaning them should do the job.Then tair up you now invalid warrenty .
I do not think hitting the DC is a good idea but it probly dislodged the dirt
Its only happened to my housemates DC so far (Man did he pummel the crap out of it to keep it working see hitting point in the quote.), mine has run solidly thankfully and looks sooo good with its lovely VGA box. But Ill stop lovin on my dreamcast and getting off the topic thats already off topic.
To summarise, Nintendo build quality = great.
This idea would be good in a perfect world. This isnt a perfect world and as someone has already pointed out if someone stole your book and started to make serious amounts of money whilst removing all sales you can make, I cant imagine you would be pleased.
Copyright is a brilliant thing it protects people from having there hard work immediately ripped off. It would be a terrible world in which everything of serious worth you make gets you no reward at all.
The problem with copyright isnt that it exists, its that it is being completely misused. I cant even really blame Amazon for this either because they didnt make the decisions based on the law they just asked.
Whoever gave them the copyright is at fault here, this idea isnt something that can be copyrighted. Customer reviews belong to the customer as a part of copyright law itself, the time the review is given cant matter because otherwise youd be able to copyright an already copyrighted idea only have at the start. 'Delay starting this for 10 seconds.' The way people leave reviews is just a simple message board amazon didnt invent them. In fact the people behind PHP or whichever script they use probably did and they are no doubt open. This whole thing is the equivalent of a company sending me a letter asking for my feedback on there product. Has that process been copyrighted? Of course not. So where is the new idea to be copyrighted?
Im sure someone with a better grasp of copyright law would be able to poke more concise holes in this debacle but when it comes down to it there was nothing to copyright in the first place and the only reason this has passed is because of the ignorance of the people who awarded it.
I sincerely hope that Yahoo and the like continue to use there own systems and if Amazon decides to get pissy about it they overturn this ridiculous sham.
You sound like your questioning the truth of my story.
Fair enough. http://www.spookyweb.net/c-t/inside.html The channel it happened in. Velerion should be happy for the advertisement anyhow. Hes running (Or at least trying to run.) a roleplaying game Im sure hed be happy for new members to it if you read it through on his forum.
but thats enough advertising. Click on the events and hes made a nice little card for the Brian incident. You can see the pic he sent around to everyone on the cards page under Whitney. (I think you can agree you couldnt tell he was lying from the pic.) Heck go in to the channel and ask them about it if you really want.
I think, though im not sure, that that isnt the first time one of the channels members turned out to be a different sex to what they claimed. More than once in a single small channel, doesnt bode well.
I have to agree. I own an X-Box so I wont be out of the loop for this game but that doesnt mean crap if they are going to throw this thing out as a big online game.
h p ) Admitedly UT probably stole the idea from Starcraft in the first place but Starcraft has a multitude of units. Think SCV for repairing the other units in combat or any of the flying vehicles. If theyd gone to the other races it could have gotten really interesting.
As a single player game I could see such massive possibilities the missions and story in such a great universe could be nothing less than epic. Now the single player appears to be stuck on to the far easier option of make a handful of levels plug in some generic AI and let people take care of the gameplay themselves in the same multiplayer experience they have had time after time after time.
I wouldnt mind quite so much but looking through there own site each screen I went to managed to drain a little more hope out of me. You have 4 characters which are essentially heavy medium light and stealth troopers. No alien races no attempt at something interesting like Alien Vs Predator.
Look at Vehicles and youve got fairly standard affair here as well the only vehicle that even begins to stand out is the siege tank which appears to be a poor mans Leviathan from Unreal Tournament ( http://www.unrealtournament.com/ut2004/vehicles.p
Look at the psi abilities and you have a set of abilities that have been around since Doom. Nothing like the range of abilities Unreal Tournament has let alone Unreal Championship 2 which has numerous different powers for each of its dozen characters.
The weapons are equally lack luster the lockdown gun being the only thing of interest and its no stake gun from painkiller or gravity gun from Half Life 2.
Even the modes offer nothing. They have a handful of typical modes and only one expansion to these called capture the base which sounds like a cross between your normal capture and hold on to a base game and capture the flag. It could be interesting but a single additional mode of play is no where near enough.
I dont know if it will be a terrible game or a great game Ive not got a copy of it and itd be foolish to just assume. Blizzard have pulled off some of the best games around there isnt a single line of theres that I have not enjoyed, but I can safetly say all of my anticipation for this game has drained away. On the plus side if it does turn out great it will take me by surprise and be all the better for it.
Its all well and good being irritated by the reaction men have to women on the Internet, however, it is often justified.
In a small IRC channel I used to frequent a lass joined. She spoke a fair amount, and made some friends there and yes she got the 'You got pics' thing.
I dunno why people try to make out its to check the sex of the person you are talking to. Not like youve got a hope in hell of pulling someone whos usually hundreds if not thousands of miles away. I just want to check out a nice pair of... eyes.
Anyway, seedy imaturity aside, she did have pics and sent them about the place, they looked reasonable enough and nothing more was said on the matter.
For what was probably well over a year she was involved with the channel and made good friends with more than one guy there even arranging to go out with one and actually move up to his place. Only thing was, some other guy came in to the channel and started asking questions. Turns out he had a thing going on with her as well and was fairly devestated that she had gone and dumped him. She promptly vanished at this point as did both boyfriends. For a while we were all speculating on what was going on. Until the first boyfriend came in and he had apparently been doing some research. (A little worrying really, just how obsessed was this guy with some lass hed never even spoken to.) He had found that the person at the address she lived at was a guy.
Surely not! There was no way most of the channel was gonna believe this was genuine after all there were quite a few people in the channel who had been friends with her for ages. Still had a heck of a good laugh with the idea. Needless to say it was about to get funnier.
One of the other guys in the channel thought maybe he could get to the bottom of this by checking her livejournal. He was confused to find a livejournal not by her but by a bloke called Brian. A 16 year old Bisexual no less. A quick check with old and new livejournal showed that the old one had been carefully changed in to the new one with all refrences to his female persona removed or changed.
Oh and just to make damn sure non of this was wrong or fabricated we managed to get in touch with his best friend who admited she'd (Or maybe he'd who knows.) heard him mention something about the IRC channel before. Well and truly busted.
I laughed good and hard about all that (Shed persuaded the whole chanel she was a romanian hotty for more than a year!) but there was a more serious side. Ignoring boyfriend number ones stalker tendancies and the embarasment to boyfriend number 2 who I dont think has ever returned to IRC. There were quite a few people added to that group of internet users who wouldnt be ready to believe the next person to come along and claim the're a girl.
If your reading this Brian it was a laugh ill give you that, but over a year? I think you may need to see a head doctor.
Oh and an amusing concidence in all this. His IRC nickname was Whitney.
I see a lot of articles like this, I see industry experts and teams of executives coming up with the mystical answer to how to draw women in to gaming. Scientists and psychologists desperate to crack open a new market.
6 /15/mobile_gaming_more_popular_with_women_than_men .html
. html
http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php
43% of gamers are female. In certain categories more women than men.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2005/0
The title says it all.
http://www.wi-fitechnology.com/displayarticle2212
Online games as well.
One of the best articles I ever read was one written by a disgruntled woman about the fact that she just wanted games developers to develop games. She was sick of her sex being singled out by the industry as if curvy women with big breasts was any worse than he-man look alikes with a penchant for baby oil. She was right.
These 'experts' can harp on about there wonder treatment of the industry but when it comes down to it,
if you make a good game people will play it. It doenst matter what sex you are.
This is the only industry that makes such ridiculous distinctions between the sexes. The movie industry knows what its doing in regard to this. Sure some are chick flicks some are macho fests most are inbetween and most people dont complain. So why is it that in the Games industry no one can accept that if you just make a quality game half of the population isnt just going to ignore it because God forbid the female characters are quite lucky in the looks department I know for a fact the males will almost certainly be a Keanu Reves or Arnold Swarchnegger rip off.
The major problem with women and gaming is the fact people think there is a major problem with women and gaming.
As for the article. A lot of it is really really bad. The explanation of how you can use our ancestory to predict which games we would prefer is utter crap. Go back pre Wolfenstein and ask him to use his theories to take a look in to the future. Chances of him predicting the future game probably around the 0 area maybe a little more due to shear luck. It may tell us why we enjoy playing these games but as a prediction tool, not even close. Thats the key to why this article essentially says nothing. Im fairly sure if you ignored the sims (A game which has a wopping female following and does match up to his 'prediction') this guy probably wouldnt even have made the connection he did. I certainly doubt hes actually come up with the perfect game idea for women using this psychoanalysis. I there even is such a thing.
Did anyone else think AvP1 was scarier than AvP2.
It was just more grittier may have just been that it was a worse graphics engine but it was like the films where they went from animatronics to CG the latter was just too polished to be scary.
As for the list good job on the guy who mentions Bloodlines man did that game deserve more kudos. (It was like another Sin, top class game taken down by stupid bugs and glitches.) That hotel bit was superb.
Um the human eye can only discern between about 12 to 14 million colours 24 bit colour does over 16 million. Hence it being called true colour. (Incidentally the first time seeing that was on my Matrox Marvel though im not sure who invented the term.)
The other bits for colour are nothing to do with adding more colours they are used for transparencies and infact the bit can go even higher if you want to add even more functionality.
Your evidence of looking at a colour gradient is flawed. There is no way of viewing a gradient of all the colours on your screen because colours have 3 dimensions. RGB or HLS are the typical ones. Even if you could have all the colours there theyd have to be in a row because shifting any out of the row above it or below would create potentially visible gaps. I dont know about you but my resolution isnt 16,000,000 by 12,000,000. You can display two dimensions of the colour though.
<html>
<body>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<script type="text/vbscript">
For i=16 to 100
document.write("<tr>")
For j=16 to 100
k = hex(i)
l = hex(j)
document.write("<td bgcolor=#00" & k & l & ">CELL</td>")
Next
document.write("</tr>")
Next
</script>
</table>
<body>
<html>
Shove the above in to a html file and have a look.
First off forgive me for the horrendous inefficiency of this script and the fact its vbscript. Im no scripter and I dont know how to easily convert decimal to hex in jscript. Im sure anybody who cant run it can make a version for there own setup. If it runs slowly just change one of the 100's to 16.
The display will show a range of colours and no matter how large or small you make the cells you wont be able to see lines between them because the monitor has more colour than you can percieve.
the comment about there only being 256 colours is actually a little more complicated than it first appears. There may well be 256 distinct colours. Last I checked there could be 36 to 360 wavelengths of light you can pick up. (Human eye has been estimated at picking up anything between a nanometre and 10 nanometres between the wavelengths of visible light which is 380 to 740.) however those distinct colours can be darkened, lit or mixed together. Its basically the difference between what our eye can physically pick up and what our brain percieves it as.
All of this isnt a precise science though each of us percieves colour differently some can see more some less but 16 million colours is far beyond the maximum range of colours you can discern.
On the subject of refresh. There are too many factors too truly know whether that will make a difference. How many frames we can percieve isnt the same as how many it takes to look nice for example 85hz is fine as far as im concerned but my eyes can see faster than that. They can certainly see faster than the 30fps of films but the brain is good at filling in the gaps. Ultimately it probably wont make any difference to the experience and is useless at telling us how well the games will play. (How fast a game produces a frame of information (Or timestep in the projects I did.) has nothing to do with how fast a monitor refreshes itself.)
If I did a search for anything id come up with... what I searched for. Saying thats evidence of some underhanded MS deal is ridiculous.
I put in 'Unreal 3' and 'PS3' SHOCK! Sony have licensed it as well! Its clearly a conspiracy against Nintendo...
If people actually read this article without seeing red everytime the guy says anything against anything youll find its blunt but probably for the most part true.
He slags of the prototype PS3 controller, why not when it was posted here there was a load of people saying the same things (and some amusing refrences to Batman and ziplines.)
He slags off the fact that the Nintendo controller will become a gimmick. This isnt too large a leap of faith either, youd have to be a fool to not have any fears that Nintendo's efforts are going to fall flat and like he says there almost certainly will be gimmick driven games with no substance. (Whether they will outnumber decent games remains to be seen hes just picked a side is all.)
His comments on Nintendo's market share were the only real problem with the whole article and even they arnt entirely off target. Ive seen a lot of people say if you asked who exclusively had a PS2 or X-Box it would be a similar percentage. Even if that was true it doesnt change the fact that 10% exclusivity is a difficult percentage to work with. Sony and MS have the money and backing to work with the fact there are 2 other powerful rivals vying for control. Does Nintendo? Especially as they are taking a risk with their new controller? As a criticism of the company (Which I honestly dont think it was.) it falls flat. As a point about how difficult the market has become with the current competition its spot on.
Oh and he also says that the PS3 and X-Box360 are fine consoles that wont dissapoint and that Nintendo will undoubtedly produce some fantastic games. Im certainly not seeing any problem with that.
(He probably would have said the revolution was a fine console as well but as he correctly points out they havent released the specs.)
Dear lord this post is utterly full of crap.
First point. Backwards compatibility is to play old games on your new system. Thats as far as the definition goes just cause youve invented some more precise definition that excludes any upgrades to the old games means nothing.
Compatibility engine? You clearly dont have a clue how this is working the xbe's are being updated to function on the 360 even if they werent the upgrades there discussing are simple file changes (For textures) and effects added to the output the core of the game its physics its level design etc. Doesnt need to be touched.
Live has millions of users how is it a 'wrong reason'? ITs one the biggest selling points.
It wont cause compatibility issues. You keep saying BOTH as if MS are releasing entirely different things. The console in BOTH forms is an identical gaming platform. The harddrive is for additional content to those games (and media stuff). I.e. everyone can play all the games without any issues and some who dished out a bit more get more can get more content.
A PS1 game shouldnt play exactly the same on the more advanced consoles thats utter nonsense, the way it always is? You act like theres some code that they have to work by.
The PS2 didnt support advanced graphical features because of the way it was implemented not because Sony had some kind of divine rule book. They essentially plugged a PS1 in to the PS2 it was quite messy and infact there are 'compatibility issues' as you keep whining on about as some (admitedly only a very small number.) PS1 games dont work. It was a cheap and quick fix to a problem that would have required a lot of work had they decided to emulate the PS1. The PS3 will almost certainly have similar problems dont expect 100% compatibility and do expect (especially if they are emulating) older games to look a damn site better.
Sony hasnt proven crap, they are also pushing for more multimedia based consoles in fact there plans appear very similar to MS. Nintendo is taking far far more risks than either of the other two. There entire future in the console market is pretty much reliant on the single piece of innovation in there controller. (Though I cant help but hope they succeed. Who cant love good ol Nintendo.)
are people reading the same article as me or what?
p ielberg_electronic_arts
This isnt the only post to have raised some issues that confuse the hell out of me but it has them all in and was the first I came to.
1. he doesnt say which order Tron came out in just that they came out, and though it is open to interpretation I read it as being nostalgic rather than derogatory.
2. Unless im missing something he never once says Doom is an X-Box game. This point has been whined about by half this damn thread. He never actually says it. In fact his comment on turning an X-Box game in to a movie comes right after talking about Halo. Which, good lord!, is an X-Box game!
I can only assume people read the blurb and made false connections without thinking to actually read the article.
3. The same site you posted says that the 30 year old gamers have been playing on average for 9.5 years. Where does that place the time they started playing... gosh its right slap bang in the 13 to 25 range.
Arguable points
1. 'DOOM heralded a paradigm shift in video games. Hardcore PC games were going mainstream.
Selling millions of copies and chalking up tens of millions of downloads as shareware, DOOM remains one of the most popular PC games ever. And the title's impact on the gaming world is still felt today.'
From ID's own site. Wolfenstein might have been the first real FPS but it was Doom that got the genre recognised.
2. He is refering to those games existing as a result of Doom. Halflife definately falls in that category. Its an FPS based on a hybrid quake 1 and 2 engine. Adding a bit of story doesnt change its origins.
3. No it hasnt been done before.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051014/ap_on_hi_te/s
Its binding the movie and games industry far more than has been done in the past.
The article was largely correct its ironic that most of the people who claim it needs to get its facts right havent actually checked the facts themselves.
http://www.health-care-reform.net/causedeath.htm
Haha glad to see thats working out for you.
Irony = Someone claiming people are arrogant and ignorant for bundling all the African nations in to one group at the same time as bundling all of the Western nations in to one group.