Well the PS3 controller actually has analog shoulder buttons for finer control in acceleration/braking, but it's obviously still not as good as a steering wheel! When it comes to things like rally driving that basically rely on losing traction and quick opposite lock application then I find the control pad a bit easier to work with, so I had been using than in CM: Dirt. I set up the wheel for messing about with my friends and found it far more awkward trying to control the cars (of course the fact that I don't have anywhere to mount it in my living room was probably what made it awkward):p
I don't know what the GT5 wheel is like unless you're referring to Gran Turismo 5:p The G25 is a great Logitech wheel with clutch pedal and gearshift (though I don't think the gated gears mode worked in Gran Turismo, only the up/down shifter mode). If I had somewhere decent to mount it then I wouldn't have loaned Gran Turismo 5 to my mate so readily! I've already spent a lot of money on my HDTV and steering wheel for a better driving experience, I should probably build (well, get the guys out in the workshop to build it!) a little steel frame for the wheel/gearshift, then place it over my soundrocker chair for that final "home driving cockpit" touch - no matter how sad any girl is going to consider it:p I used to use the wheel attached to the edge of a chair with my laptop resting on the seat part, but that won't really work with a 42" TV!
BTW the most fun driving 'game' I have found so far is Test Drive Unlimited. It doesn't have any actual race tracks in it, but it lets you drive around a whole island, buying exotic cars, modifying them and entering road races or car delivery missions. The driving physics in it is pretty realistic, though you can crash at 200mph and your car will be fine, which isn't so realistic. I can't wait til TDU2 comes out as it will be avaiable for the PS3 - my laptop isn't very powerful so it looks pretty rubbish when I hook it up to the HDTV, and then after a while it just overheats and dies;) I could resurrect my desktop PC but I'm not too happy with the whole PC gaming scene at the moment and don't consider it worth the money to keep your machine current.
complete with the inability to break traction with too much throttle or too hard on the brakes I was playing with my G25 a few weeks ago (I've since loaned it to a friend and been playing other games on my PS3 so I only played it for about half a day..), and it seemed fine. Did you switch the settings to 'simulation', and turn down the traction control, etc? The default settings are obviously set up just for people having fun, but I found it more difficult to control the traction and not lock the wheels in braking etc when I turned the ABS off, it all seemed quite realistic to me. I had a race against a novice when we were both using control pads and it took a lot of restraint to get anything decent out of the car, I was off at almost every corner at first. My opponent had all the assists and stuff on and so was beating me for the first lap and a half until I'd got used to having to be gentle with the controls:P
Just in case you don't know, Tony Blair isn't actually the prime minister here anymore, that's Gordon Brown. I don't know what you're on about with Blair, perhaps the 'cash for honours' scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_peerages ?
I'm not saying people don't hold grudges or don't take sides just for the sake of it sometimes, but I like to think where it actually counts people would like to do what is best for the country. There are plenty of 'seats' from all different political parties and I doubt people just always vote the opposite of whoever is in power.
I know that I'm too much of an idealist at heart, so perhaps there is more petty infighting than I'd like to think there is:p I have never really liked politics and for a while just wanted to just ignore it entirely, though reading/. means I have become a little more interested in it again over the last few years. The thing is that the things that I think are actually important, like DRM/DMCA type stuff, I don't get to directly vote on. It's either "vote for this party that will restrict your freedoms" or "vote for this party that will restrict your freedoms but in a different way" etc. I'm of the opinion that it would be better if we got to vote more on individual issues rather than just vote for one political group and hope that they will do what I think is best for the country.
I don't really have a problem with the EU ruling over our country as long as for example another Hitler doesn't get into power:p
I also haven't heard anything about MPs being so petty as to oppose an idea just because it's proposed by the opposition - if it's truly beneficial to the country. Poilitical alignment of course will count and influence their ideas of what is best for the country, but we seem to be getting on okay with people from lots of different parties. In the US there's such a crazy republican/democrat flamefest going on all the time that maybe people would vote against something just because it seems too 'republican' or 'democrat' or whatever, but I don't think it's quite as extreme over here.
We're not so fussed about invading other countries or national defense here either, I'd think things like the health service, education and taxes are probably highest on the list of things that people actually care about in the UK, and it's probably a similar situation throughout the rest of Europe as we're not expecting to start any wars soon. Just pointing that out because I don't remember there being any big political fuss about our army in recent years (apart from wanting the government to pull out of Iraq of course..).
Every system has its drawbacks as you point out, but we all keep chugging along and I'm quite happy with Scotland at the moment. If our government started getting all paranoid and pushing out stuff like the PATRIOT act or worse, and I felt that this was affecting my own life, then I'd consider moving somewhere else though. I don't want to live in a culture that's so afraid that it gives absolute power its government and the military (but neither do I think that the government and military should have no powers for things like wiretapping and surveillance - there has to be a balance obviously)
I think of the word simulation referring more to the physics than things like being fixed to first person view. You can do simulations of a molecule without having to have it invisible to the naked eye, and fatigue/fluid dynamic simulations that put fake colours in there so that you can see what's going on. As far as the lateral integrity thing, well some cars have this thing called traction control:p Gran Turismo definitely handles acceleration and braking physics realistically, so I don't know what you're complaining about there. Since you're probably american and used to very torquey large engines, perhaps it would shock you to find out that a lot of european cars don't automatically fly off the road with torque steer or loss of traction every time you put your foot down?:p
The only game that I can think of that is altogether unrealistic in those regards is Ridge Racer, where you seem to be able to drift round a corner backwards and do 360 spins etc without diverting from your driving line.
Just because something has game-like elements does not mean that the physics are not realistic, which is what I thought was being debated when the word 'simulation' is being used.
Truck bombs I can agree with, but air travel has been clamped down on so massively, and the public are so paranoid about it, that it's going to be very awkward to replicate a 9/11, and it's pretty silly to focus on it rather than trying to work out any other weak links. The problem is that there are far too many opportunities for anyone to wreak havoc if they want to, and if you do stuff like shutdown tourism to one of the largest countries in the world for fear that you have a one in a billion chance of getting hit by a bomb on any one day in any city in America, that's just taking things far too far. A little fear is healthy, but you have to take risks every day. You take risks by walking down the street, driving in a car etc etc. As someone else pointed out, an airliner was probably the safest place to be post 9/11 because the terrorists had already done the airliner thing and everyone was expecting it. The whole thing has really been blown out of all proportion, and the real damage done is actually stuff like the PATRIOT act and atrocities like Guantanamo bay:/
The colours move around when you press a button, I didn't say that they are constantly moving, that would be pretty awkward if you press it just as it's going to change. If the colours were going to move in a fixed order, why are people here saying that this is a good method to spread wear across all the keys rather than just a few keys getting worn down. If it's going to be a fixed order, why change the colours at all?
Someone explained the differences between republic and democrat to me on/. a while ago a couple of months ago, I've basically forgotten already:s Even the more liberal American parties are basically in the right over here in the UK! I just find the whole idea of one person or party suitably representing any one person's views pretty absurd. It's the only way to make differences in government at the moment I suppose, apart from writing letters to your local representatives (which I have never done myself). There's so much stereotyping going on and people probably even end up believing something just because they know it's what their party is 'meant' to believe. The whole of US politics to me just seems to be a kind of celebrity match rather than having anything to do with actual leadership ability or anything like that. Being outgoing and charismatic does help with leadership in that people are more willing to go along with what you want to do, but it really doesn't make you a good decision maker..
I don't think rFactor and Live for Speed were out back then, at least I hadn't heard of them anyway. I did stop following PC racing games so much around Gran Turismo 2 though, as there weren't really any decent ones that I remember apart from TOCA, and I wasn't really into touring cars back then (I enjoy watching them on TV now).
BTW before you slag GT4 any more, go read http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article552096.ece , I just found it. For someone who really has driven probably every road going sports car in the world around tracks, he seems to think that it is quite an accurate simulation, so I don't know why you think that these other games are any better.
lol.. I meant an airliner isn't cheaper than a missile*.
Also you could probably build your own missile if you were resourceful enough and understood the aerodynamics. Getting a decent warhead for it would be more of an issue. I don't know why you made the comment about plane's fuel being more damaging than the impact, because I wasn't thinking about high velocity impact missiles, I was thinking about explosions which also tend to involve flammable materials.. there could be more energy in a tank of airliner fuel of course. But you still have to die unless you can set the autopilot accurately enough and bail out (without being mauled by the passengers. It's an incredibly dumb idea. You haven't really thought it out, have you? Just wanting to continue with the alarmism.
Uh.. you missed the part where you need to be suicidal then. I have thought it out. What chance do you think you have of hijacking a plane by yourself at the moment anyway even if you were suicidal?
A missile isn't cheaper than an airliner, unless you're able to steal one.
Crashing one airliner hardly is hardly "crippling" to any transportation system unless you're living out on a tiny island that only has one commercial airline operating out of it, or only one runway. And crashing a plane into a runway is hardly the best terrorist attack plan as you're only going to kill the passengers. Crashing into a large airport would be pretty useful of course, but again it's not going to happen these days, you're going to get shot down (by a missile!) before you even get close.
top gear didn't go for some decent driving sim What else would you suggest? Have you even played GT4 with a steering wheel setup, driving aids off, physics set to professional/simulation/whatever? I've not really played 4 but I played 1, 2, 3 and 5 and they all seem pretty good. The lap time on the game was about 4 seconds faster than he managed on the track IIRC. And even then it was because he was too scared to go quickly at that really bad chicane on Laguna Seca (which obviously is a lot easier to take quickly in a computer game like Gran Turismo because you don't care if you go airborne, and car damage is switched off by default:P
Considering the colours are moving around, how is remembering the number of times pressed going to help if they can't distinguish between certain colours?
It would work fine in theory yep, there's just the practical side like getting it into every plane, even the private ones, etc. The actual path finding stuff would probably be the 'easiest' job, the difficult parts would be accounting for wind and other practical things like a slippery runway or unexpected obstacles in the way when taxi-ing, trying to expect the unexpected..
There are a few ways you could literally have a 'water bed', so it's not exactly clear. If you go beyond the word and describe the object then yeah. I suppose it counts as prior art unless there is some glaring problem that needs to be overcome to put the idea into use.
Ah. I knew that passengers would try to help themselves, but your post doesn't mention passengers (though others do), so I thought you were just pointing out that hostages can't be used for bargaining anymore as a government would rather just shoot the plane down than let another 9/11 happen.
He was making a joke about incest. Either that or paradoxes. Be thankful your mind is innocent (I thought similar thoughts when I read the summary but I wouldn't have made a joke about it because most people would find it unfunny/repulsive:P )
That is a great version, and there's some Eric Clapton versions there too which I like. Ordered a few CDs apart from Pantera and Testament. Now that I'm thining about it, my lil bro probably has songs from all those bands anyway, he's really into his metal..:p
I just watched the Corrs version again and while I suppose it might be a silly question, I wonder what you'd make of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5rVgxmekeM . It's not got any fancy guitar but I think it's a good interpretation of the song anyway. IMO having female vocals and the irish penny flutes and fiddles actually works well:p Pretty haunting. After I found out it was actually a Hendrix song I was like ah, that explains why I liked it more than the other Corrs stuff!:p I think it still ranks as one of my favourite songs ever in fact..
It's because Twitter dislikes Microsoft and makes it obvious, but in the process he ends up being even more of a jackass than Gates or Ballmer ever were, so we all end up secretly wishing that MS would succeed just so that Twitter will cry. Gnutoo and Westbake (as well as Odder, Deadzero.. and some more that I can't remember) are Twitter's accounts too. That guy must have a really warped reality-tunnel.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the PS3 controller actually has analog shoulder buttons for finer control in acceleration/braking, but it's obviously still not as good as a steering wheel! When it comes to things like rally driving that basically rely on losing traction and quick opposite lock application then I find the control pad a bit easier to work with, so I had been using than in CM: Dirt. I set up the wheel for messing about with my friends and found it far more awkward trying to control the cars (of course the fact that I don't have anywhere to mount it in my living room was probably what made it awkward) :p
:p The G25 is a great Logitech wheel with clutch pedal and gearshift (though I don't think the gated gears mode worked in Gran Turismo, only the up/down shifter mode). If I had somewhere decent to mount it then I wouldn't have loaned Gran Turismo 5 to my mate so readily! I've already spent a lot of money on my HDTV and steering wheel for a better driving experience, I should probably build (well, get the guys out in the workshop to build it!) a little steel frame for the wheel/gearshift, then place it over my soundrocker chair for that final "home driving cockpit" touch - no matter how sad any girl is going to consider it :p I used to use the wheel attached to the edge of a chair with my laptop resting on the seat part, but that won't really work with a 42" TV!
;) I could resurrect my desktop PC but I'm not too happy with the whole PC gaming scene at the moment and don't consider it worth the money to keep your machine current.
I don't know what the GT5 wheel is like unless you're referring to Gran Turismo 5
BTW the most fun driving 'game' I have found so far is Test Drive Unlimited. It doesn't have any actual race tracks in it, but it lets you drive around a whole island, buying exotic cars, modifying them and entering road races or car delivery missions. The driving physics in it is pretty realistic, though you can crash at 200mph and your car will be fine, which isn't so realistic. I can't wait til TDU2 comes out as it will be avaiable for the PS3 - my laptop isn't very powerful so it looks pretty rubbish when I hook it up to the HDTV, and then after a while it just overheats and dies
Just in case you don't know, Tony Blair isn't actually the prime minister here anymore, that's Gordon Brown. I don't know what you're on about with Blair, perhaps the 'cash for honours' scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_peerages ?
:p I have never really liked politics and for a while just wanted to just ignore it entirely, though reading /. means I have become a little more interested in it again over the last few years. The thing is that the things that I think are actually important, like DRM/DMCA type stuff, I don't get to directly vote on. It's either "vote for this party that will restrict your freedoms" or "vote for this party that will restrict your freedoms but in a different way" etc. I'm of the opinion that it would be better if we got to vote more on individual issues rather than just vote for one political group and hope that they will do what I think is best for the country.
I'm not saying people don't hold grudges or don't take sides just for the sake of it sometimes, but I like to think where it actually counts people would like to do what is best for the country. There are plenty of 'seats' from all different political parties and I doubt people just always vote the opposite of whoever is in power.
I know that I'm too much of an idealist at heart, so perhaps there is more petty infighting than I'd like to think there is
I don't really have a problem with the EU ruling over our country as long as for example another Hitler doesn't get into power :p
I also haven't heard anything about MPs being so petty as to oppose an idea just because it's proposed by the opposition - if it's truly beneficial to the country. Poilitical alignment of course will count and influence their ideas of what is best for the country, but we seem to be getting on okay with people from lots of different parties. In the US there's such a crazy republican/democrat flamefest going on all the time that maybe people would vote against something just because it seems too 'republican' or 'democrat' or whatever, but I don't think it's quite as extreme over here.
We're not so fussed about invading other countries or national defense here either, I'd think things like the health service, education and taxes are probably highest on the list of things that people actually care about in the UK, and it's probably a similar situation throughout the rest of Europe as we're not expecting to start any wars soon. Just pointing that out because I don't remember there being any big political fuss about our army in recent years (apart from wanting the government to pull out of Iraq of course..).
Every system has its drawbacks as you point out, but we all keep chugging along and I'm quite happy with Scotland at the moment. If our government started getting all paranoid and pushing out stuff like the PATRIOT act or worse, and I felt that this was affecting my own life, then I'd consider moving somewhere else though. I don't want to live in a culture that's so afraid that it gives absolute power its government and the military (but neither do I think that the government and military should have no powers for things like wiretapping and surveillance - there has to be a balance obviously)
I think of the word simulation referring more to the physics than things like being fixed to first person view. You can do simulations of a molecule without having to have it invisible to the naked eye, and fatigue/fluid dynamic simulations that put fake colours in there so that you can see what's going on. As far as the lateral integrity thing, well some cars have this thing called traction control :p Gran Turismo definitely handles acceleration and braking physics realistically, so I don't know what you're complaining about there. Since you're probably american and used to very torquey large engines, perhaps it would shock you to find out that a lot of european cars don't automatically fly off the road with torque steer or loss of traction every time you put your foot down? :p
The only game that I can think of that is altogether unrealistic in those regards is Ridge Racer, where you seem to be able to drift round a corner backwards and do 360 spins etc without diverting from your driving line.
Just because something has game-like elements does not mean that the physics are not realistic, which is what I thought was being debated when the word 'simulation' is being used.
Truck bombs I can agree with, but air travel has been clamped down on so massively, and the public are so paranoid about it, that it's going to be very awkward to replicate a 9/11, and it's pretty silly to focus on it rather than trying to work out any other weak links. The problem is that there are far too many opportunities for anyone to wreak havoc if they want to, and if you do stuff like shutdown tourism to one of the largest countries in the world for fear that you have a one in a billion chance of getting hit by a bomb on any one day in any city in America, that's just taking things far too far. A little fear is healthy, but you have to take risks every day. You take risks by walking down the street, driving in a car etc etc. As someone else pointed out, an airliner was probably the safest place to be post 9/11 because the terrorists had already done the airliner thing and everyone was expecting it. The whole thing has really been blown out of all proportion, and the real damage done is actually stuff like the PATRIOT act and atrocities like Guantanamo bay :/
The colours move around when you press a button, I didn't say that they are constantly moving, that would be pretty awkward if you press it just as it's going to change. If the colours were going to move in a fixed order, why are people here saying that this is a good method to spread wear across all the keys rather than just a few keys getting worn down. If it's going to be a fixed order, why change the colours at all?
Someone explained the differences between republic and democrat to me on /. a while ago a couple of months ago, I've basically forgotten already :s Even the more liberal American parties are basically in the right over here in the UK! I just find the whole idea of one person or party suitably representing any one person's views pretty absurd. It's the only way to make differences in government at the moment I suppose, apart from writing letters to your local representatives (which I have never done myself). There's so much stereotyping going on and people probably even end up believing something just because they know it's what their party is 'meant' to believe. The whole of US politics to me just seems to be a kind of celebrity match rather than having anything to do with actual leadership ability or anything like that. Being outgoing and charismatic does help with leadership in that people are more willing to go along with what you want to do, but it really doesn't make you a good decision maker..
I don't think rFactor and Live for Speed were out back then, at least I hadn't heard of them anyway. I did stop following PC racing games so much around Gran Turismo 2 though, as there weren't really any decent ones that I remember apart from TOCA, and I wasn't really into touring cars back then (I enjoy watching them on TV now).
BTW before you slag GT4 any more, go read http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/jeremy_clarkson/article552096.ece , I just found it. For someone who really has driven probably every road going sports car in the world around tracks, he seems to think that it is quite an accurate simulation, so I don't know why you think that these other games are any better.
lol.. I meant an airliner isn't cheaper than a missile*.
Also you could probably build your own missile if you were resourceful enough and understood the aerodynamics. Getting a decent warhead for it would be more of an issue. I don't know why you made the comment about plane's fuel being more damaging than the impact, because I wasn't thinking about high velocity impact missiles, I was thinking about explosions which also tend to involve flammable materials.. there could be more energy in a tank of airliner fuel of course. But you still have to die unless you can set the autopilot accurately enough and bail out (without being mauled by the passengers. It's an incredibly dumb idea. You haven't really thought it out, have you? Just wanting to continue with the alarmism.
Uh.. you missed the part where you need to be suicidal then. I have thought it out. What chance do you think you have of hijacking a plane by yourself at the moment anyway even if you were suicidal?
A missile isn't cheaper than an airliner, unless you're able to steal one.
Crashing one airliner hardly is hardly "crippling" to any transportation system unless you're living out on a tiny island that only has one commercial airline operating out of it, or only one runway. And crashing a plane into a runway is hardly the best terrorist attack plan as you're only going to kill the passengers. Crashing into a large airport would be pretty useful of course, but again it's not going to happen these days, you're going to get shot down (by a missile!) before you even get close.
RROD was a feature all along!
They'll include a digital 'manners' system so that if you don't put the seat back down after you pee then you get crippling shocks to the nads..
Considering the colours are moving around, how is remembering the number of times pressed going to help if they can't distinguish between certain colours?
It would work fine in theory yep, there's just the practical side like getting it into every plane, even the private ones, etc. The actual path finding stuff would probably be the 'easiest' job, the difficult parts would be accounting for wind and other practical things like a slippery runway or unexpected obstacles in the way when taxi-ing, trying to expect the unexpected..
There are a few ways you could literally have a 'water bed', so it's not exactly clear. If you go beyond the word and describe the object then yeah. I suppose it counts as prior art unless there is some glaring problem that needs to be overcome to put the idea into use.
Ah. I knew that passengers would try to help themselves, but your post doesn't mention passengers (though others do), so I thought you were just pointing out that hostages can't be used for bargaining anymore as a government would rather just shoot the plane down than let another 9/11 happen.
He was making a joke about incest. Either that or paradoxes. Be thankful your mind is innocent (I thought similar thoughts when I read the summary but I wouldn't have made a joke about it because most people would find it unfunny/repulsive :P )
Nah, I'm sure in 6 years or so he'll be into MMOs too and then you can all play
Oh shit you just called them fat!
{ comment go here! }
was only kidding, I don't have any problems in that area.
That is a great version, and there's some Eric Clapton versions there too which I like. Ordered a few CDs apart from Pantera and Testament. Now that I'm thining about it, my lil bro probably has songs from all those bands anyway, he's really into his metal.. :p
:p Pretty haunting. After I found out it was actually a Hendrix song I was like ah, that explains why I liked it more than the other Corrs stuff! :p I think it still ranks as one of my favourite songs ever in fact..
I just watched the Corrs version again and while I suppose it might be a silly question, I wonder what you'd make of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5rVgxmekeM . It's not got any fancy guitar but I think it's a good interpretation of the song anyway. IMO having female vocals and the irish penny flutes and fiddles actually works well
It's because Twitter dislikes Microsoft and makes it obvious, but in the process he ends up being even more of a jackass than Gates or Ballmer ever were, so we all end up secretly wishing that MS would succeed just so that Twitter will cry. Gnutoo and Westbake (as well as Odder, Deadzero.. and some more that I can't remember) are Twitter's accounts too. That guy must have a really warped reality-tunnel.