Interesting note, Blizzard removed timing features from the language to prevent automated tasks. CosmoUI had one feature as a work around, but asked to remove it.
Stops that auto farming sitting in a field, like the fishing bots did. I wish I knew how the fishing bots worked, as you had to click a moving icon.
There are also 2 other UI Mods that are popular CTMod and Gypsy Mod
The XML language has made it easy for people to upload thier characters to websites like Allakhazam and Thottbot. Very nice gaming resources for WOW.
Reminds me of the days Tribes scripting took off, made many people into full time programers. Glad to see it in newer games, actually promoted by the game developers.
I noticed they dont use Strength, Reflex, Intelligence, Stamina, etc.
Are these terms copyrighted for RPGS? I Thought these where too generic, so why not use what the standard is..
Athletics (Vigor) This is a measure of raw physicality and fitness. It is used for running, jumping, swimming, or any other strength-based task not listed as a separate ability. Reaction (Instinct) This measures the quickness of a character's body and mind. It is as much "how quick the character notices something" as "how quick the character moves." It is used in a variety of situations, from who goes first in Bringing Down the Pain, to dodging blows, to noticing danger. Resist (Reason) "Resist" is the strength of a character's will, and is used to prevent compulsion of a natural or supernatural type. This includes physical compulsion: "Resist" would be used for a character to keep his cool under torture, for example. Stay Up (Special) "Stay Up" may well be the most unique ability in the game. In one sense, it answers the question, "how much damage can this character take?" Since damage isn't solely of the physical variety in The Shadow of Yesterday, though, it is as much a measure of "how much suffering this character will take before he gives up." "Stay Up" does not have an associated pool: instead, all pools are associated with it. When a character is damaged, the associated pool for "Stay Up" is the same as the associated pool for the ability used to damage the character.
Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company.
Bullshit. Gamespy use to have free versions, and gave the SDK's away so they could lock companies in. Now that they are Bigger, they cant afford to offer the SDKs You always develop the SDK and give it away for free, you make your money on the license later.
And building on OSX is much easier now, if you have a standard platform, you can cross develop a customer client that works on both. One of the nice things about OSX is games run in OpenGL on top of a unix based OS. (Can you say Linux port anyone?)
BTW, what is an alternative? Could All Seeing Eye be the replacement?
Happens in public traded companies too. They bring the company public, give themselves options at 1/10th the price. Sell the stock and then sell the company.
My favorite is when CEO's give large contracts out, then go work for the company later. [wink] [wink] nobody notices....
Really is an eye opener when you see how bad corporations can be, pet projects for friends, consulting companies for payback, buying excess equipment or wrong equipment on purpose.
Also, the multiple budgets are amazing little tricks, cant buy new hardware for X, but you have extra money in this budget Y. And then the company looses customers. They get so large they just cant operate, and have to aquire to keep alive.
I think if I ever start another.bomb, salaries would be set in stone. CEO's don't need multi million dollar golden parachutes, they should be tied to performance just like everyone else.
If it does, you can assure I won't be using it. I won't be using longhorn neither.
I will be using Longhorn, DRM wont stop me from using it. I'll just use mp3 with longhorn. Longhorn like XP will tream DRM on DRM'ed media the same now as with 98/2K/XP.
Just dont buy DRM'ed content.
Also, MP3 Surround could take over AC3 tracks on DIVX CD's for space reasons. That might a very useful.
Thats why multi reviewer ratings are good, have 10 people rate it on gfx/sound/etc, and ignore sequel ratings other than the story.
The biggest problem I have is how can they call every game a 90+ game? 90+ should be earth shatering with the most advanced in every aspect from gameplay to the graphics.
He makes good points, people rate games they dont know or novel games way to low. Tetris was a novel game, and look how that has changed gaming. And I'm not into DDR, but there are people who love that game like crazy. And for what it does, it does it well.
And btw, those 10 dollar older games on sale are worth the couple of weekends of play you get out of it. Per dollar an hour gameplay, its more than lets say than the newer titles for 60 with only 20 hours of game play.
One of the things about Wow that is VERY annoying, you pick a server in your Timezone. And you cant move characters to a server with your friends after you choose a server.
While I like the game, I'm stuck to one server after spending all my time building out one character. A true MMOPG needs to be transparent and whole, not fragemented among many servers (Like Counterstrike).
I think a true MMOPG should be big enough that everyone can see each other, talk to each other in game. None of this seperate worlds, this is suppose to be 1 world with everyone on it. There are technical problems but there are solutions and work arounds. Shame that WOW is fragmented this badly.
BTW, Im a 16 level Troll Rogue on Bloodhoof. I'd be 20 if the servers where not down for early maintenance.... Game is very fun, but after 60 you have to group, this is where you team up with friends. Of course now it has to be new friends on the same server.
Ya, they already have fishing bots written in LUA for World of Warcraft, thats why they turned fishing off in some areas. People where selling the fish for gold, then selling the gold on ebay.
Don't you just plug it in, synch it, and take around with you, so you can listen to music, and carry data around (data/calendar)?
Hacking iTunes, using it as a firewire device, converting to different formats, applescript interface for iTunes, podcasting, running cLinux on the iPod. If you RTFA you would of seen that.
Torque from GarageGames also has some new SDK's out. Not free for but 100 bux for the engine and 50 for the RTS pack, you can make some cool freeware games. Unless I read it wrong, you only have to license if you make over 250K..
BTW, I didnt care for torque when it came out in Tribes2, buggy and early release. But they kept working on it, adding new features, and the new Beta engine they showed off even have really good plantlife, the grass was amazing. And the RTS kit and content packs make it easy to do some really cool FPS's.
But for Freya, I've always wonder why not as many Bardstale old style RPG's, easy to do, and looks like a good use of it. And I bet lot lighter than the torque engine.
(Also Torque engine compiles for linux/osx and windows, so you get cross platform games)
IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention. Then to top it off there are 4 major IM's and the good multi-im clients tend to have bugs and not support all the features. There is a good console multi-IM client that works well under screen, but has proxy issues.
Email works, hell, I'd rather have an IM2mail gateway so I can use a mail client. Mail is passive and you control it, IM wants to control your life. (No this isnt a in Russia joke.)
I can also sort mail, pop web mail, attachments, etc. Mail is much more powerful. And newer IM devices include email accounts (POP or Ldap) Even ATT Wireless (Er Cingular now) the Ogo.
The last thing I want to do when I go home is... ...turn on a computer.
WTF? Who says you have to work? Play video games, listen to music, watch some videos, IM some friends, read a Ebook, or the million of other things to do on a computer.
Every top programmer I know does side projects at home. They code for the pure fun and thrill of developing new applications, many give back to OSS since they work for a Corp all day.
Also, I guess you ONLY post to Slashdot from work?
HFS+ does have defraged files, it just defrags the FS over time. So you cant say it never get defraged, it just knows how to clean up after itself. Thats a big difference than saying it never defragments.
How could you not go indepth in Resource forks? Thats the main difference between it and a normal BSD Box. Since most applications are GNU they dont care about them, and you have to use special programs to copy apple files, etc. Thats really the only annoying thing about the mac, resource forks (IMHO).. I know in theory its good to have fat binaries and such, with multiple help files, but since I'm an english only OS user, I dont need all the extra fluff.
And you can boot the system into console mode and treat it like a normal BSD box. I've become a little lazy and stopped using my Linux server and started using fink and applications under OSX. Screen, Irssi, squid, perl, etc, all the same applications and server processes I use daily are all there under OSX.
Sounds like an OK book, but I don't want to know about *nix side, I'm a unix admin already, I want to know the if's, how's of darwin hitting the metal. I dont need GNU overviews.
But thats me. I run gentoo linux on x86/ppc/sparc, but the Mac I leave running OSX.
But at 1600x1200 you have to haver a newer gfx card with a better RAMDAC to run at 85hz, if your monitor will even run at that rate.
Also, if you just change DPI, it doesnt change all programs, so things look off. DPI wont change fixed font's either, so any program like terminal programs (console anyone?) will still be 8point.
Windows have enough flaws, messing around with DPI and font settings is more pain than just dropping resolution.
I dont see this mentioned often... I use 1280x1024 instead of 1600x1200. The text is larger, and my eyes dont feel as bad after a long 12-16 hour day. I also find staring at a 132x55 black console is easier to read than bright white.
Also, a higher refresh helps, I find 85hz the lowest I'd go.
Someone who didnt read the articles would post that. The problem is the amount of people getting sick. Most people who never have gotten sick are NOW getting sick. The increase is the news.
Remember, kiddies: Playing HL2 can also cause epileptic seizures or carpal tunnel in addition to the nausea. Just like every other game out there can...
You can do a simple google search and see how many people are getting sick. This isn't people who normally get sick, we are talking hard core FPS players.
Not sure how you got modded +insightful, its pure flaimbait.
I've already seen the posts (This isnt anything new!) posts start, so since I submitted the story I'll respond.
The problem is more people are reporting sickness from this game than the past. I started feeling sick myself, and my friends also reported it. I'm an active gamer, and play in Cyber leagues, local gaming events, and lan parties. Not a n00b in the gaming department in any stretch. I've played almost every FPS since wolfenstien 3d.
What is strange, is CounterStrike Source isnt making people sick, but Half-Life 2 is. The theory so far is Half-Life 2 is so visually perfect to the real world, that its starting to trick peoples mind causing nausea.
Really, don't mod these guys +insightful, its not the normal level of people getting motion sickness. It's lots more. Do a google search, its everywhere.
BTW, I still play, just have only doing 1 hour at a time. About 2 hours and I also start feeling the same as other posts. I only posted when I saw the steam forums, planet half life forums, usenet groups and even people on IRC, way too many people saying the same thing.
My cellphone has bluetooth (Motorola UMTS A845), wish it could link up with an mp3 player and stream the music. I can put music on the phone but with 64 megs, I have to re-encode the files at a lower bitrate for more space. It really has good sound.
Also, its got a 320x240 screen, good enough for mp4 move trailers and news, would be nice to stream movies too.
Thought the idea of bluetooth was clustering, have a bunch of devices that can just hook up and use each other's resources. Sounds good anyways. Be nice to save photos over a bluetooth camera to the phone to mail or the video/mp3 player for storage.
Thinking of that, I could just plug a 30 dollar bluetooth adapter into my laptop and go. Shame, so simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow doesnt run under winex? It has native support for OpenGL, and runs in a window.
Hell, they even have an OSX version, thats basically a *nix version.
Interesting note, Blizzard removed timing features from the language to prevent automated tasks. CosmoUI had one feature as a work around, but asked to remove it.
Stops that auto farming sitting in a field, like the fishing bots did. I wish I knew how the fishing bots worked, as you had to click a moving icon.
There are also 2 other UI Mods that are popular CTMod and Gypsy Mod
The XML language has made it easy for people to upload thier characters to websites like Allakhazam and Thottbot. Very nice gaming resources for WOW.
Reminds me of the days Tribes scripting took off, made many people into full time programers. Glad to see it in newer games, actually promoted by the game developers.
Good job Blizzard.
Trust me, nerds rarely stay virgins. Chicks dig the whole "roleplaying" thing, too.
My wife has all girl D&D parties, of course booze and munchies are always required.
Shes been watching me play World of Warcraft, not sure if she wants to try an Online game, but I'm thinking it will make a nice christmas gift.
So, yes, lots of women dig RPG's, SIMS online is very popular with women. In fact, SO says they are geared towards women...
I noticed they dont use Strength, Reflex, Intelligence, Stamina, etc.
Are these terms copyrighted for RPGS? I Thought these where too generic, so why not use what the standard is..
Athletics (Vigor)
This is a measure of raw physicality and fitness. It is used for running, jumping, swimming, or any other strength-based task not listed as a separate ability.
Reaction (Instinct)
This measures the quickness of a character's body and mind. It is as much "how quick the character notices something" as "how quick the character moves." It is used in a variety of situations, from who goes first in Bringing Down the Pain, to dodging blows, to noticing danger.
Resist (Reason)
"Resist" is the strength of a character's will, and is used to prevent compulsion of a natural or supernatural type. This includes physical compulsion: "Resist" would be used for a character to keep his cool under torture, for example.
Stay Up (Special)
"Stay Up" may well be the most unique ability in the game. In one sense, it answers the question, "how much damage can this character take?" Since damage isn't solely of the physical variety in The Shadow of Yesterday, though, it is as much a measure of "how much suffering this character will take before he gives up." "Stay Up" does not have an associated pool: instead, all pools are associated with it. When a character is damaged, the associated pool for "Stay Up" is the same as the associated pool for the ability used to damage the character.
A lawyer representing the plaintiffs addresses a proposed class-action lawsuit seeking unpaid overtime from the world's biggest third-party publisher.9 98.html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/11/11/news_6112
Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company.
Bullshit. Gamespy use to have free versions, and gave the SDK's away so they could lock companies in. Now that they are Bigger, they cant afford to offer the SDKs You always develop the SDK and give it away for free, you make your money on the license later.
And building on OSX is much easier now, if you have a standard platform, you can cross develop a customer client that works on both. One of the nice things about OSX is games run in OpenGL on top of a unix based OS. (Can you say Linux port anyone?)
BTW, what is an alternative? Could All Seeing Eye be the replacement?
Wow, I just realized I had 6 of the Worst top 10 shows on my tivo season pass.
Also, Reba and Bernie Mac are on the top 10 list, I never realized that they are actually clean shows, just funny enough to watch.
Happens in public traded companies too. They bring the company public, give themselves options at 1/10th the price. Sell the stock and then sell the company.
.bomb, salaries would be set in stone. CEO's don't need multi million dollar golden parachutes, they should be tied to performance just like everyone else.
My favorite is when CEO's give large contracts out, then go work for the company later. [wink] [wink] nobody notices....
Really is an eye opener when you see how bad corporations can be, pet projects for friends, consulting companies for payback, buying excess equipment or wrong equipment on purpose.
Also, the multiple budgets are amazing little tricks, cant buy new hardware for X, but you have extra money in this budget Y. And then the company looses customers. They get so large they just cant operate, and have to aquire to keep alive.
I think if I ever start another
If it does, you can assure I won't be using it. I won't be using longhorn neither.
I will be using Longhorn, DRM wont stop me from using it. I'll just use mp3 with longhorn. Longhorn like XP will tream DRM on DRM'ed media the same now as with 98/2K/XP.
Just dont buy DRM'ed content.
Also, MP3 Surround could take over AC3 tracks on DIVX CD's for space reasons. That might a very useful.
Speak for yourself, when I see Laura Croft tv commerical, I pay attention. ;)
Thats why multi reviewer ratings are good, have 10 people rate it on gfx/sound/etc, and ignore sequel ratings other than the story.
The biggest problem I have is how can they call every game a 90+ game? 90+ should be earth shatering with the most advanced in every aspect from gameplay to the graphics.
He makes good points, people rate games they dont know or novel games way to low. Tetris was a novel game, and look how that has changed gaming. And I'm not into DDR, but there are people who love that game like crazy. And for what it does, it does it well.
And btw, those 10 dollar older games on sale are worth the couple of weekends of play you get out of it. Per dollar an hour gameplay, its more than lets say than the newer titles for 60 with only 20 hours of game play.
One of the things about Wow that is VERY annoying, you pick a server in your Timezone. And you cant move characters to a server with your friends after you choose a server.
While I like the game, I'm stuck to one server after spending all my time building out one character. A true MMOPG needs to be transparent and whole, not fragemented among many servers (Like Counterstrike).
I think a true MMOPG should be big enough that everyone can see each other, talk to each other in game. None of this seperate worlds, this is suppose to be 1 world with everyone on it. There are technical problems but there are solutions and work arounds. Shame that WOW is fragmented this badly.
BTW, Im a 16 level Troll Rogue on Bloodhoof. I'd be 20 if the servers where not down for early maintenance.... Game is very fun, but after 60 you have to group, this is where you team up with friends. Of course now it has to be new friends on the same server.
Ya, they already have fishing bots written in LUA for World of Warcraft, thats why they turned fishing off in some areas. People where selling the fish for gold, then selling the gold on ebay.
Not bad for 1 week, and already bot'ed.
Don't you just plug it in, synch it, and take around with you, so you can listen to music, and carry data around (data/calendar)?
Hacking iTunes, using it as a firewire device, converting to different formats, applescript interface for iTunes, podcasting, running cLinux on the iPod. If you RTFA you would of seen that.
Torque from GarageGames also has some new SDK's out. Not free for but 100 bux for the engine and 50 for the RTS pack, you can make some cool freeware games. Unless I read it wrong, you only have to license if you make over 250K..
BTW, I didnt care for torque when it came out in Tribes2, buggy and early release. But they kept working on it, adding new features, and the new Beta engine they showed off even have really good plantlife, the grass was amazing. And the RTS kit and content packs make it easy to do some really cool FPS's.
But for Freya, I've always wonder why not as many Bardstale old style RPG's, easy to do, and looks like a good use of it. And I bet lot lighter than the torque engine.
(Also Torque engine compiles for linux/osx and windows, so you get cross platform games)
IM clients piss me off, always in your face. They have pop ups, blink in your tool bar, whatever to get your attention. Then to top it off there are 4 major IM's and the good multi-im clients tend to have bugs and not support all the features. There is a good console multi-IM client that works well under screen, but has proxy issues.
Email works, hell, I'd rather have an IM2mail gateway so I can use a mail client. Mail is passive and you control it, IM wants to control your life. (No this isnt a in Russia joke.)
I can also sort mail, pop web mail, attachments, etc. Mail is much more powerful. And newer IM devices include email accounts (POP or Ldap) Even ATT Wireless (Er Cingular now) the Ogo.
The last thing I want to do when I go home is...
...turn on a computer.
WTF? Who says you have to work? Play video games, listen to music, watch some videos, IM some friends, read a Ebook, or the million of other things to do on a computer.
Every top programmer I know does side projects at home. They code for the pure fun and thrill of developing new applications, many give back to OSS since they work for a Corp all day.
Also, I guess you ONLY post to Slashdot from work?
HFS+ does have defraged files, it just defrags the FS over time.
So you cant say it never get defraged, it just knows how to clean up after itself. Thats a big difference than saying it never defragments.
How could you not go indepth in Resource forks? Thats the main difference between it and a normal BSD Box. Since most applications are GNU they dont care about them, and you have to use special programs to copy apple files, etc. Thats really the only annoying thing about the mac, resource forks (IMHO).. I know in theory its good to have fat binaries and such, with multiple help files, but since I'm an english only OS user, I dont need all the extra fluff.
And you can boot the system into console mode and treat it like a normal BSD box. I've become a little lazy and stopped using my Linux server and started using fink and applications under OSX. Screen, Irssi, squid, perl, etc, all the same applications and server processes I use daily are all there under OSX.
Sounds like an OK book, but I don't want to know about *nix side, I'm a unix admin already, I want to know the if's, how's of darwin hitting the metal. I dont need GNU overviews.
But thats me. I run gentoo linux on x86/ppc/sparc, but the Mac I leave running OSX.
But at 1600x1200 you have to haver a newer gfx card with a better RAMDAC to run at 85hz, if your monitor will even run at that rate.
Also, if you just change DPI, it doesnt change all programs, so things look off. DPI wont change fixed font's either, so any program like terminal programs (console anyone?) will still be 8point.
Windows have enough flaws, messing around with DPI and font settings is more pain than just dropping resolution.
I dont see this mentioned often... I use 1280x1024 instead of 1600x1200. The text is larger, and my eyes dont feel as bad after a long 12-16 hour day. I also find staring at a 132x55 black console is easier to read than bright white.
Also, a higher refresh helps, I find 85hz the lowest I'd go.
Incase you are wondering, why port WM9 to linux?
Some HDTV quality video is only in WM9, and some HDTV-DVD's also. Also for those pay music services that only use WM9.
http://www.wmvhd.com/
How is this news?
Someone who didnt read the articles would post that. The problem is the amount of people getting sick. Most people who never have gotten sick are NOW getting sick. The increase is the news.
Remember, kiddies: Playing HL2 can also cause epileptic seizures or carpal tunnel in addition to the nausea. Just like every other game out there can...
You can do a simple google search and see how many people are getting sick. This isn't people who normally get sick, we are talking hard core FPS players.
Not sure how you got modded +insightful, its pure flaimbait.
MY ISP is going to kill me but.
D3 vs HL2 vs Farcry vs World
I've already seen the posts (This isnt anything new!) posts start, so since I submitted the story I'll respond.
The problem is more people are reporting sickness from this game than the past. I started feeling sick myself, and my friends also reported it. I'm an active gamer, and play in Cyber leagues, local gaming events, and lan parties. Not a n00b in the gaming department in any stretch. I've played almost every FPS since wolfenstien 3d.
What is strange, is CounterStrike Source isnt making people sick, but Half-Life 2 is. The theory so far is Half-Life 2 is so visually perfect to the real world, that its starting to trick peoples mind causing nausea.
Really, don't mod these guys +insightful, its not the normal level of people getting motion sickness. It's lots more. Do a google search, its everywhere.
BTW, I still play, just have only doing 1 hour at a time. About 2 hours and I also start feeling the same as other posts. I only posted when I saw the steam forums, planet half life forums, usenet groups and even people on IRC, way too many people saying the same thing.
My cellphone has bluetooth (Motorola UMTS A845), wish it could link up with an mp3 player and stream the music. I can put music on the phone but with 64 megs, I have to re-encode the files at a lower bitrate for more space. It really has good sound.
Also, its got a 320x240 screen, good enough for mp4 move trailers and news, would be nice to stream movies too.
Thought the idea of bluetooth was clustering, have a bunch of devices that can just hook up and use each other's resources. Sounds good anyways. Be nice to save photos over a bluetooth camera to the phone to mail or the video/mp3 player for storage.
Thinking of that, I could just plug a 30 dollar bluetooth adapter into my laptop and go. Shame, so simple.