My comment was not intended to imply that he is lazy, but rather that I think his time would be better spent working on some cutting edge next gen stuff, not revisiting old code to re-invent the wheel because someone has a patent on 'round wheels'.
It seems to me such a trivial task for such a great mind, altho I suppose it is not for me to dictate how he spends his time. For all I know he could be using the exercise to implement something groundbreaking that he has been thinking about for years.
Or maybe he just needs a break from blowing our minds.
That does not seem like a very simple solution, considering how current suits are designed around pressurization issues and are basically impossible to get into or out of by yourself. Unless of course, the 'suits' are large mech like robots, which again does not seem like a very simple solution.
>Why tell potential targets how big a bomb you have and how deep it will penetrate? They can just go deeper and pour more concrete.
First point I would like to make is that most statistical data about active weapon system is classified, and any publicly available numerical descriptions of said data is pure misinformation. For example, the speed of US aircraft carriers is top secret. Nimitz class carriers are stated as having a speed of over 30 knots but few people know exactly how fast they can really travel. Most people agree they can go at least 40, but I have heard some claims that they can travel at up to 50 knots.
Second point is even if someone knows what they are up against and develops a defense against the weapon system, it will only help so much. Static defenses can only mitigate damage, not prevent it. Plenty of armored vehicles have armor thick enough to stop say a 30mm cannon shell. But the GAU-8 Avenger anti-tank minigun can shoot 4200 of those 30mm rounds per minute and it just might get lucky. On average less then 2% of rounds fired will penetrate armor but even if none of the shells manage to make it inside, a target vehicle's external systems will be trashed, the crew will be stunned from the impact, and the vehicle will likely be immobilised.
I was asleep on the sofa at my girlfriends house the morning of 9/11. Once my girlfriend learned of the news she turned on the television and attempted to wake me up.
Her : "Wake up, we are under attack!"
Me : "Attack?Who is attacking us?"
Her: "I don't know! There are explosions all over new york, they hit the trade center!"
Me: "Nukes?"
Her: "What?"
Me: "Are they using Nukes?"
Her: "No."
Me: "Wake me up when they start using nukes."
^This. My own system was state of the art 3 years ago, when I built it myself from parts I bough off newegg. It was specifically designed as a high end system to play the most advanced games available on the highest detail settings. Since that time, no game has had higher system requirements. Every new game is targeted to the mid range celerons and geforce 7s found in the xbox and ps3.
The next time I will need to upgrade my PC will be in 3 years when game developers start making games for the next generation of console.
I think the truth is that the basics of the wheel, at least as far as consumer transportation systems go, are now almost 2000 years old. There's been an incredible amount of change in the capabilities of the average transportation system, I think its time that we put the effort into re-inventing the wheel.
You see this sort of thing happen in every market so it must be a good idea. Burger King within a block of Mc Donalds and Taco Bell. Shell Gas Stations on one corner, Mobile across the street. CVS Pharmacy right next to a Right Aid Pharmacy. Think about malls; you will have 5 or 6 stores that sell the exact same type of stuff, all within walking distance. If it didn't work then they wouldn't do it.
I spend a lot of time in the arcade when I was young, and I was always drawn to the multiplayer fighters for this reason. My favorite arcade had a Namco System 11 running Tekken 2.5 set to 3 round victory and 125% health. The machine was a total meat grinder with long drawn out battles and as such lines of people would always be at it. I would see someone would crack open a roll of quarters and place a row along the edge of screen on the arcade cabinet, and me a poor boy would walk up and put 25c into the machine and stomp them. into shit. I would play for hours on a single quarter.
Which is good since most days I did not have many quarters so I would just hang out, watch other people play, and bum smokes.
First Person Dungeon crawls are huge today, for example Skyrim is a AAA title that will feature a large amount of dungeon crawling. The reason you do not see old school grid style first person dunegon crawls is because true fps style dunegon crawls are much more realistic and immersive.
It is the same reason you don't see many AAA 2d sprite based games anymore; 3d animation has a smaller filesize, is faster to create, and scales better then 2d animation. The old style games remain popular on portable devices but for anything without a hardware constraint it is just an artificial limitation on the game design.
I have developed several projects in flash on both a professional and a personal level, and I must say the player has had some pretty serious flaws. About a two years back I was brought on to company to port a complex Java application to Flash.
Project requirements included a realtime sub milisecond multidirectional video stream; if you think something along the lines of a control system for remote drones you will have an idea about the kind of mission critical application we are talking about. Which is a stupid thing to do, and I told them before they hired me that I did not think it was a good idea, but I took the job anyway.
I got the project working easily but if the flash player was left open for long enough the video streams would eventually become unsynchronized. I did everything I could think of trying to trace the source of the drift and find a solution to the problem, including optimizing the Actionscript bytecode. But the best I could manage was 3 hours live before the streams desynched by more then 1 second. It turns out flash player leaks memory, and after exhausting everything I could think of I came to the conclusion that I just could not make it work. So I decided to find someone who could.
I ended up in text chat with a key architect of the Flash Player, and had the opportunity to ask some questions about the fundamental design principals of flash. Basically I was told that flash player was not designed to do that sort of long running operation. It is optimized for typical usage patters, which was a high number of concurrent small short executions; it was designed to be used in an environment where you refresh the page every once in a while.
It is great if the flaws with Flash Player were addressed, then the platform would become more viable to developers. But I have already decided that all of my personal projects going forward are to be based on open source technology.
>I hate games where you know there are an unexplained and unlimited supply of dumb enemies.
I have seen games where it is terrible, but if done correctly the mechanic provides a sense of urgency as well as an incentive to avoid detection. System Shock was another game that I thought used an unexplained and unlimited supply of AI to great effect. Like in Farcry, unlimited waves of enemies would spawn if an alarm was sounded but the player had a way to stop the alarm or avoid it entirely. It adds an extra layer to the gameplay, as protracted firefights would drain your supplies of ammunition as well as degrade your weapon quality increasing the likelihood of critical failure.
Although at the end of my last system shock 2 playthrough I ended up tripping alarms just to farm. Turns out you can buy a whole lot of ammunition with 20k nanites.
I will agree with you that Operation Flashpoint is awesome though. Both it and Farcry are on my personal list of all time best shooters, and for the same reason; the openness of the mission design, the variety of gameplay options, and the expansive environments available to explore.
I thought Farcry and Farcry 2 were phenomenal on the harder difficulty settings. I picked them both up at budget price and I totally enjoyed the hours spent crawling through the jungle trying to stay under cover and not make any noise, lining up the perfect sniper shot before fleeing retaliation, kiting responders through a gauntlet of traps, thinning their number just enough to double back and hit the objective before the endlessly spawning waves of backup arrived to overwhelm me. The first game had huge open levels that you could approach from multiple angles, and the sequel had an innovative free form mission structure with target locations spread out over a huge open zone. At points it felt like playing a sandbox shooter.
I doubt ID will release any more source now that Bethesda is calling the shots. Also I doubt that there will be any Linux ports of this or any future ID games.
There are more pirates currently living on the earth then ever before at any other time in history. And I am not talking about pirates dowloading music on the internet; I am talking about pirates boarding ships then looting, raping, and killing in places like Somalia and Indonesia. I know you think pirates are funny, but it is really not funny, and certainly not informative. Thousand of people were killed this year alone by pirates on the high seas, and tens of billions of dollars have been lost.
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds came out in 1993. While all the people played 2d top down linear turn based jrpgs on their consoles, I was exploring the most realistic and immersive realtime 3d dungeon simulation that has ever been created.
While you pressed x to see the npcs one line of non-interactive text then paced back and forth around an empty field grinding random encounters for exp, I was running and jumping and sneaking through dungeons, conversing with npcs in a complex branching plotline filled with political intrigue and betrayal that I had a direct impack on, learning new languages to converse with NPC's who didn't speak the King's English, and foraging for food so that I didn't starve to death.
While you were grinding the same mobs over and over to afford new spells and gear from vendors, I was experimenting with different runestones to create entirely new undocumented spells, crafting and enchanting my own weapons, and bartering with NPCs for best prices on components.
Yeah FF3 was good, but it was not even close to being the best game of its time, let alone ever.
Like you I built my PC from parts from Newegg, back when the XBOX 360 and PS3 were new. I got top of the line parts, and for the last 5 years I have been able to run every game at full detail settings.
This current generation of consoles has effectively halted all advances in the PC industry with their 10 year lifecycles. People have no need to upgrade to the best computers when all the developers are targeting 10 year old mid range cpus and gpus like the celerons and geforce 7's like are in the xbox 360 and ps3.
People don't buy new computers to use new software anymore, they buy new computers when their old ones physically break. Consoles killed the upgrade treadmill.
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My comment was not intended to imply that he is lazy, but rather that I think his time would be better spent working on some cutting edge next gen stuff, not revisiting old code to re-invent the wheel because someone has a patent on 'round wheels'.
It seems to me such a trivial task for such a great mind, altho I suppose it is not for me to dictate how he spends his time. For all I know he could be using the exercise to implement something groundbreaking that he has been thinking about for years.
Or maybe he just needs a break from blowing our minds.
That does not seem like a very simple solution, considering how current suits are designed around pressurization issues and are basically impossible to get into or out of by yourself. Unless of course, the 'suits' are large mech like robots, which again does not seem like a very simple solution.
>Why tell potential targets how big a bomb you have and how deep it will penetrate? They can just go deeper and pour more concrete.
First point I would like to make is that most statistical data about active weapon system is classified, and any publicly available numerical descriptions of said data is pure misinformation. For example, the speed of US aircraft carriers is top secret. Nimitz class carriers are stated as having a speed of over 30 knots but few people know exactly how fast they can really travel. Most people agree they can go at least 40, but I have heard some claims that they can travel at up to 50 knots.
Second point is even if someone knows what they are up against and develops a defense against the weapon system, it will only help so much. Static defenses can only mitigate damage, not prevent it. Plenty of armored vehicles have armor thick enough to stop say a 30mm cannon shell. But the GAU-8 Avenger anti-tank minigun can shoot 4200 of those 30mm rounds per minute and it just might get lucky. On average less then 2% of rounds fired will penetrate armor but even if none of the shells manage to make it inside, a target vehicle's external systems will be trashed, the crew will be stunned from the impact, and the vehicle will likely be immobilised.
I don't know why he doesn't just remove the offending code and release the rest as-is. It is open source. The community would develop a fix.
I was asleep on the sofa at my girlfriends house the morning of 9/11. Once my girlfriend learned of the news she turned on the television and attempted to wake me up.
Her : "Wake up, we are under attack!"
Me : "Attack?Who is attacking us?"
Her: "I don't know! There are explosions all over new york, they hit the trade center!"
Me: "Nukes?"
Her: "What?"
Me: "Are they using Nukes?"
Her: "No."
Me: "Wake me up when they start using nukes."
^This. My own system was state of the art 3 years ago, when I built it myself from parts I bough off newegg. It was specifically designed as a high end system to play the most advanced games available on the highest detail settings. Since that time, no game has had higher system requirements. Every new game is targeted to the mid range celerons and geforce 7s found in the xbox and ps3.
The next time I will need to upgrade my PC will be in 3 years when game developers start making games for the next generation of console.
I run Blackbox on Linux. And on Windows I run Xoblite, a Blackbox clone.
I think the truth is that the basics of the wheel, at least as far as consumer transportation systems go, are now almost 2000 years old. There's been an incredible amount of change in the capabilities of the average transportation system, I think its time that we put the effort into re-inventing the wheel.
I think it is a prerequisite for religious people to fail at reading comprehension.
All it takes is a quick reading of some of the holy texts to make an intelligent person not believe in higher powers.
Nope, you are wrong. Einstein was a good American who believed in the christian God with a capital G. Who's belief is naïve now?
You see this sort of thing happen in every market so it must be a good idea. Burger King within a block of Mc Donalds and Taco Bell. Shell Gas Stations on one corner, Mobile across the street. CVS Pharmacy right next to a Right Aid Pharmacy. Think about malls; you will have 5 or 6 stores that sell the exact same type of stuff, all within walking distance. If it didn't work then they wouldn't do it.
They should have made an xbox phone instead of a windows phone. Then maybe people would buy it...
I spend a lot of time in the arcade when I was young, and I was always drawn to the multiplayer fighters for this reason. My favorite arcade had a Namco System 11 running Tekken 2.5 set to 3 round victory and 125% health. The machine was a total meat grinder with long drawn out battles and as such lines of people would always be at it. I would see someone would crack open a roll of quarters and place a row along the edge of screen on the arcade cabinet, and me a poor boy would walk up and put 25c into the machine and stomp them. into shit. I would play for hours on a single quarter.
Which is good since most days I did not have many quarters so I would just hang out, watch other people play, and bum smokes.
First Person Dungeon crawls are huge today, for example Skyrim is a AAA title that will feature a large amount of dungeon crawling. The reason you do not see old school grid style first person dunegon crawls is because true fps style dunegon crawls are much more realistic and immersive.
It is the same reason you don't see many AAA 2d sprite based games anymore; 3d animation has a smaller filesize, is faster to create, and scales better then 2d animation. The old style games remain popular on portable devices but for anything without a hardware constraint it is just an artificial limitation on the game design.
I have developed several projects in flash on both a professional and a personal level, and I must say the player has had some pretty serious flaws. About a two years back I was brought on to company to port a complex Java application to Flash.
Project requirements included a realtime sub milisecond multidirectional video stream; if you think something along the lines of a control system for remote drones you will have an idea about the kind of mission critical application we are talking about. Which is a stupid thing to do, and I told them before they hired me that I did not think it was a good idea, but I took the job anyway.
I got the project working easily but if the flash player was left open for long enough the video streams would eventually become unsynchronized. I did everything I could think of trying to trace the source of the drift and find a solution to the problem, including optimizing the Actionscript bytecode. But the best I could manage was 3 hours live before the streams desynched by more then 1 second. It turns out flash player leaks memory, and after exhausting everything I could think of I came to the conclusion that I just could not make it work. So I decided to find someone who could.
I ended up in text chat with a key architect of the Flash Player, and had the opportunity to ask some questions about the fundamental design principals of flash. Basically I was told that flash player was not designed to do that sort of long running operation. It is optimized for typical usage patters, which was a high number of concurrent small short executions; it was designed to be used in an environment where you refresh the page every once in a while.
It is great if the flaws with Flash Player were addressed, then the platform would become more viable to developers. But I have already decided that all of my personal projects going forward are to be based on open source technology.
It was the Star Wars Holiday Special that survived due to piracy...
Snow White and Cinderella are in the public domain.
>I hate games where you know there are an unexplained and unlimited supply of dumb enemies.
I have seen games where it is terrible, but if done correctly the mechanic provides a sense of urgency as well as an incentive to avoid detection. System Shock was another game that I thought used an unexplained and unlimited supply of AI to great effect. Like in Farcry, unlimited waves of enemies would spawn if an alarm was sounded but the player had a way to stop the alarm or avoid it entirely. It adds an extra layer to the gameplay, as protracted firefights would drain your supplies of ammunition as well as degrade your weapon quality increasing the likelihood of critical failure.
Although at the end of my last system shock 2 playthrough I ended up tripping alarms just to farm. Turns out you can buy a whole lot of ammunition with 20k nanites.
I will agree with you that Operation Flashpoint is awesome though. Both it and Farcry are on my personal list of all time best shooters, and for the same reason; the openness of the mission design, the variety of gameplay options, and the expansive environments available to explore.
I thought Farcry and Farcry 2 were phenomenal on the harder difficulty settings. I picked them both up at budget price and I totally enjoyed the hours spent crawling through the jungle trying to stay under cover and not make any noise, lining up the perfect sniper shot before fleeing retaliation, kiting responders through a gauntlet of traps, thinning their number just enough to double back and hit the objective before the endlessly spawning waves of backup arrived to overwhelm me. The first game had huge open levels that you could approach from multiple angles, and the sequel had an innovative free form mission structure with target locations spread out over a huge open zone. At points it felt like playing a sandbox shooter.
I doubt ID will release any more source now that Bethesda is calling the shots. Also I doubt that there will be any Linux ports of this or any future ID games.
A B-25 Bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building towards the end of the 2nd world war. The building suffered minor damage.
There are more pirates currently living on the earth then ever before at any other time in history. And I am not talking about pirates dowloading music on the internet; I am talking about pirates boarding ships then looting, raping, and killing in places like Somalia and Indonesia. I know you think pirates are funny, but it is really not funny, and certainly not informative. Thousand of people were killed this year alone by pirates on the high seas, and tens of billions of dollars have been lost.
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds came out in 1993. While all the people played 2d top down linear turn based jrpgs on their consoles, I was exploring the most realistic and immersive realtime 3d dungeon simulation that has ever been created.
While you pressed x to see the npcs one line of non-interactive text then paced back and forth around an empty field grinding random encounters for exp, I was running and jumping and sneaking through dungeons, conversing with npcs in a complex branching plotline filled with political intrigue and betrayal that I had a direct impack on, learning new languages to converse with NPC's who didn't speak the King's English, and foraging for food so that I didn't starve to death.
While you were grinding the same mobs over and over to afford new spells and gear from vendors, I was experimenting with different runestones to create entirely new undocumented spells, crafting and enchanting my own weapons, and bartering with NPCs for best prices on components.
Yeah FF3 was good, but it was not even close to being the best game of its time, let alone ever.
There is nobody in charge, so there is nobody to suffer from a cia assisted suicide.
Like you I built my PC from parts from Newegg, back when the XBOX 360 and PS3 were new. I got top of the line parts, and for the last 5 years I have been able to run every game at full detail settings.
This current generation of consoles has effectively halted all advances in the PC industry with their 10 year lifecycles. People have no need to upgrade to the best computers when all the developers are targeting 10 year old mid range cpus and gpus like the celerons and geforce 7's like are in the xbox 360 and ps3.
People don't buy new computers to use new software anymore, they buy new computers when their old ones physically break. Consoles killed the upgrade treadmill.