... In other news, the use of bugmenot has drop by ninety-eight percent, and the owners of that website can now be found at West 23rd and Broadway bumming for change.
Slyck.com has an article up on the topic, with a few more details, and a couple comments from the original Suprnova maintainer.
He (Andrej Preston) comments in the article:
"My deal with [The Pirate Bay] was that the role of SuprNova can't change much. It needs to be community orientated, but I hope they make some updates the SuprNova was sooo missing. But what they will do, it's not my thing to decide anymore. But I know they will do [well] and will try to keep the community spirit running." http://www.slyck.com/story1561_SuprNovaorg_Transfe rred_to_The_Pirate_Bay
If the rescuer is certain that the rescue-ee is suffering from cardiac arrest, then yes: skip the ventilation. However, the layperson may not always be able to determine if the victim is suffering from cardiac arrest vs. respiratory failure. In this case, the caveat, again, is that for those who don't know, the "combo" is the safe choice.
Envision a messy scene in the middle of the highway, with rain beating down, sirens blaring in the distance, and noisey intrusive confusion all around: the average Joe (like me) would quite possibly have extreme difficulty identifying if the victim is borderline slipping away from respiratory failure, or instead suffering from cardiac arrest - ie, has no pulse or a faint on-deaths-door pulse. In these real-world situations, the layperson might definitely feel safest sticking with a combo that covers the most bases.
A key caveat here is that the average joe will have great difficulty recognizing if a victim is suffering from cardiac arrest or respiratory failure: in this case, a combo is the safe approach that covers the most bases.
Absolutely - all this represents the evolutionary tree of cRPGs. Diablo in particular is quite interesting: as any roguelike player knows, Diablo was very clearly inspired and heavily influenced by roguelikes. It wasn't until quite recently, however, that I heard a story that demonstrates just direct the inspiration was.
(the following is unsourced, and comes to me from that awesome vector of "some dude at work":)
It seems that Diablo, the story goes, was originally turnbased! Some engineer had the kooky idea of converting the game over to be realtime, which noone he worked with was to fired up about. So, he did it on the side as a pet project. When finished, he checked it in and had everyone give it a shot. They of course realized they had a winner on their hands...
On the topic of roguelikes, your comments bring up an excellent issue: at what point do we stop calling a roguelike a roguelike, and call it something else (say, and RPG). Conventionally, the "mustyness" of Angband (still rocking along in development, btw) is actually part of a broad/vague definition of "roguelike."
All cRPG's pretty much have their roots in roguelikes, simply because roguelikes were early in the family tree of computer RPGs. But, in the same way that I am not a monkey, some of the games you mentioned are no longer roguelikes. This is probably a good analogy to use here, as new things branched off the old, but the old has persisted (ie, roguelikes are alive and well along side conventional cRPGs these days, in the same way that loads of other primates are alive and kicking contemporarily with us humans).
Fun article that definitely made me a bit misty-eyed for ye olde days. However, its unfortunate that the article paints roguelikes as being firmly past-tense. In terms of pure dungeon crawl hack-n-slash, roguelikes have persisted, grown in interestingdirections, and remain vibrant today.
We set Medium difficulty to be equal to the mean values, Easy difficulty to be equal to the mean minus a certain amount of standard deviations, and then Hard difficulty equal to the mean plus a certain amount of standard deviations
Wow. If this is "mathematical modelling", then me swapping the coffee mugs out for wine glasses in my kitchen cubbard would be "advanced sphere packing analysis and optimization".
Game tuning as more art than science. The goal is not to create an interestingly distrubuted difficulty curve, but to create an "easy", "medium", and "hard" amount of enjoyable challenge. Huge amounts of time can be (and frequently are) wasted focusing too-strongly on a "cool" and intriguing difficulty model that some under-experienced junior designer is all fired up about, instead of keeping the focus tightly and solely on the how the game actually feels.
Damn key point, the parent post makes - DVD's themselves have only just become sufficiently ubiquitous to bank on. The last game I finished working on a year and a half ago still was released as multi-CD because the publisher didn't yet feel that it was safe to do DVD only. We've juuust barely hit that point in the last year.
SomethingAwful.com ran into a similar problem when they set up a paypal donation fund, to collect money for the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. They intended to give the money to the Red Cross.
After more than $20,000 had been donated in a day, PayPal froze the account. PayPal insisted that they would be unable to donate the money that had accumulted before the freeze to the Red Cross, tho bizarely said they could donate it to the United Way. After finding that the United Way had a reputation for inefficiency, SA finally just threw their hands up in disgust and told PayPall to refund the money to the donaters.
Oh jesus christ, when will the carbon nano-tube apologists give it a rest? I swear, these guys are like string theorists crossed with Amiga enthusiasts.
Yes, there are multiplayer variants of a number of roguelikes. The url in name/blrb deal above is to a multiplayer Angband variant that I'm a big fan of.
Now, we all know that Diablo draws some clear inspiration from Roguelikes (randomly generated dungeons in a stack under a town, with the main bad dude at the bottom). However, I recently hear tale that originally, Diablo was turn-based! It ran, thus, almost completely like a graphical roguelike. One programmer thought it would be a fun game if it were to be made to run in real time. He didn't get much support for this, so he modified the game as a side project. Once his coworkers at Blizzard gave his realtime version a shot, they knew they had a winner.
Just yesterday I bumped into a guy who has got to represent, in my mind, the hardest of the oldschool hardcore:
He was playing MAngband via his BBS. Damn! That's so many layers of oldschool I feel like I need to go stand in the corner. And for some reason, this meant he didn't have a shift key available. Chaos hounds without being able to run?! Yikes!
I can't help but feel that this may be treading on ground somewhat already covered by zbrush, a modeling program in which the user paints in shape, mixing 2D and 3D funcitonality.
In much the same way that Windows 98 became the world's operating system due to it's relatively slim install and memory use (ie, usable on bare-bones inexpensive computers that much of the developing world uses), the Playstation 1 has become the planet's game console.
While the price for a PS2 has dropped considerably, the even cheaper PS1 is still the only real option for a person who has not much cash but want's a good console. Add in the vast pirated library of PS1 titles, and the PS1 will be an oddly vibrant video game platform for quite some time.
I sense a faint tint of "the country is going down the shitter" going on in the comments here. Let's note that the article does not mention a trend, but instead notes a point of data: our schools pump out people with X level of skills, as of the period when the sample was taken. No conclusions about a trend can be drawn from the study, leading to the possibilty that the generation before me was as much a bunch of idiots as mine.
I myself have to be reminded of this point now and then, so perhaps it's worth mentioning:
One of the most longtime supporters of Apple, and one of the most loyal (and by loyal I mean "did not bail when Apple's star was dimming at various times in the past") is, oddly, Microsoft. They have quietly kept a large selection of their products supported on the Macs over the years, even when other software companies were ditching Apple for the growing green pasturues of the Windows world.
Now, I can already hear guns being cocked, so let me be clear as to how I intend all this: we should not percieve announcements such as being discussed above as being some new drive for MS. Instead, it is actually, pretty much, more of the same type of thing they have been doing for a very long time. As for their reasons, plans, or evil coniving - couldn't tell ya, and that isn't the point of what I mention. But Microsoft, for decades, has made many of it's bits of software available on Apple computers (perhaps the plural on decade is a bit of a stretch, but you get what I mean.)
Slashdot Mirror
... In other news, the use of bugmenot has drop by ninety-eight percent, and the owners of that website can now be found at West 23rd and Broadway bumming for change.
He (Andrej Preston) comments in the article:
"My deal with [The Pirate Bay] was that the role of SuprNova can't change much. It needs to be community orientated, but I hope they make some updates the SuprNova was sooo missing. But what they will do, it's not my thing to decide anymore. But I know they will do [well] and will try to keep the community spirit running." http://www.slyck.com/story1561_SuprNovaorg_Transf
I noticed this in one of the comments on his site:
"So the gov't and Haliburton have bot infected computers just like everyone else. What else is new?"
Hah! Awesome.
Double "No", double "That's the whole point" :P
If the rescuer is certain that the rescue-ee is suffering from cardiac arrest, then yes: skip the ventilation. However, the layperson may not always be able to determine if the victim is suffering from cardiac arrest vs. respiratory failure. In this case, the caveat, again, is that for those who don't know, the "combo" is the safe choice.
Envision a messy scene in the middle of the highway, with rain beating down, sirens blaring in the distance, and noisey intrusive confusion all around: the average Joe (like me) would quite possibly have extreme difficulty identifying if the victim is borderline slipping away from respiratory failure, or instead suffering from cardiac arrest - ie, has no pulse or a faint on-deaths-door pulse. In these real-world situations, the layperson might definitely feel safest sticking with a combo that covers the most bases.
A key caveat here is that the average joe will have great difficulty recognizing if a victim is suffering from cardiac arrest or respiratory failure: in this case, a combo is the safe approach that covers the most bases.
Absolutely - all this represents the evolutionary tree of cRPGs. Diablo in particular is quite interesting: as any roguelike player knows, Diablo was very clearly inspired and heavily influenced by roguelikes. It wasn't until quite recently, however, that I heard a story that demonstrates just direct the inspiration was.
...
(the following is unsourced, and comes to me from that awesome vector of "some dude at work":)
It seems that Diablo, the story goes, was originally turnbased! Some engineer had the kooky idea of converting the game over to be realtime, which noone he worked with was to fired up about. So, he did it on the side as a pet project. When finished, he checked it in and had everyone give it a shot. They of course realized they had a winner on their hands
On the topic of roguelikes, your comments bring up an excellent issue: at what point do we stop calling a roguelike a roguelike, and call it something else (say, and RPG). Conventionally, the "mustyness" of Angband (still rocking along in development, btw) is actually part of a broad/vague definition of "roguelike."
All cRPG's pretty much have their roots in roguelikes, simply because roguelikes were early in the family tree of computer RPGs. But, in the same way that I am not a monkey, some of the games you mentioned are no longer roguelikes. This is probably a good analogy to use here, as new things branched off the old, but the old has persisted (ie, roguelikes are alive and well along side conventional cRPGs these days, in the same way that loads of other primates are alive and kicking contemporarily with us humans).
Fun article that definitely made me a bit misty-eyed for ye olde days. However, its unfortunate that the article paints roguelikes as being firmly past-tense. In terms of pure dungeon crawl hack-n-slash, roguelikes have persisted, grown in interesting directions, and remain vibrant today.
DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-861
Wow. If this is "mathematical modelling", then me swapping the coffee mugs out for wine glasses in my kitchen cubbard would be "advanced sphere packing analysis and optimization".
Game tuning as more art than science. The goal is not to create an interestingly distrubuted difficulty curve, but to create an "easy", "medium", and "hard" amount of enjoyable challenge. Huge amounts of time can be (and frequently are) wasted focusing too-strongly on a "cool" and intriguing difficulty model that some under-experienced junior designer is all fired up about, instead of keeping the focus tightly and solely on the how the game actually feels.
Damn key point, the parent post makes - DVD's themselves have only just become sufficiently ubiquitous to bank on. The last game I finished working on a year and a half ago still was released as multi-CD because the publisher didn't yet feel that it was safe to do DVD only. We've juuust barely hit that point in the last year.
The quoted selection in the post, detailing milestone payments etc., is nothing out of the ordinary, and quite standard.
SomethingAwful.com ran into a similar problem when they set up a paypal donation fund, to collect money for the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. They intended to give the money to the Red Cross.
After more than $20,000 had been donated in a day, PayPal froze the account. PayPal insisted that they would be unable to donate the money that had accumulted before the freeze to the Red Cross, tho bizarely said they could donate it to the United Way. After finding that the United Way had a reputation for inefficiency, SA finally just threw their hands up in disgust and told PayPall to refund the money to the donaters.
Wikipedia has a brief writeup of the issue in their SA article, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethingawful
Oh jesus christ, when will the carbon nano-tube apologists give it a rest? I swear, these guys are like string theorists crossed with Amiga enthusiasts.
Yes, there are multiplayer variants of a number of roguelikes. The url in name/blrb deal above is to a multiplayer Angband variant that I'm a big fan of.
Now, we all know that Diablo draws some clear inspiration from Roguelikes (randomly generated dungeons in a stack under a town, with the main bad dude at the bottom). However, I recently hear tale that originally, Diablo was turn-based! It ran, thus, almost completely like a graphical roguelike. One programmer thought it would be a fun game if it were to be made to run in real time. He didn't get much support for this, so he modified the game as a side project. Once his coworkers at Blizzard gave his realtime version a shot, they knew they had a winner.
Commune with your inner Angband variant.
Maybe after October, we can have a bake-sale for the deficit!
Just yesterday I bumped into a guy who has got to represent, in my mind, the hardest of the oldschool hardcore:
He was playing MAngband via his BBS. Damn! That's so many layers of oldschool I feel like I need to go stand in the corner. And for some reason, this meant he didn't have a shift key available. Chaos hounds without being able to run?! Yikes!
I can't help but feel that this may be treading on ground somewhat already covered by zbrush, a modeling program in which the user paints in shape, mixing 2D and 3D funcitonality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbrush
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/home/home.html
Multiple mortar attacks would explain a lot about my isp.
http://mangband.org/
I mean, how can you feel about about being addicted to ASCII?
While the price for a PS2 has dropped considerably, the even cheaper PS1 is still the only real option for a person who has not much cash but want's a good console. Add in the vast pirated library of PS1 titles, and the PS1 will be an oddly vibrant video game platform for quite some time.
Yeah, any reason not to just use perhaps a toned down version of the pages color, in a simple bar like what's already used?
Something like this (I cut n pasted a demo bar into a screen of the site)
http://i1.tinypic.com/miki74.png
I sense a faint tint of "the country is going down the shitter" going on in the comments here. Let's note that the article does not mention a trend, but instead notes a point of data: our schools pump out people with X level of skills, as of the period when the sample was taken. No conclusions about a trend can be drawn from the study, leading to the possibilty that the generation before me was as much a bunch of idiots as mine.
I myself have to be reminded of this point now and then, so perhaps it's worth mentioning:
One of the most longtime supporters of Apple, and one of the most loyal (and by loyal I mean "did not bail when Apple's star was dimming at various times in the past") is, oddly, Microsoft. They have quietly kept a large selection of their products supported on the Macs over the years, even when other software companies were ditching Apple for the growing green pasturues of the Windows world.
Now, I can already hear guns being cocked, so let me be clear as to how I intend all this: we should not percieve announcements such as being discussed above as being some new drive for MS. Instead, it is actually, pretty much, more of the same type of thing they have been doing for a very long time. As for their reasons, plans, or evil coniving - couldn't tell ya, and that isn't the point of what I mention. But Microsoft, for decades, has made many of it's bits of software available on Apple computers (perhaps the plural on decade is a bit of a stretch, but you get what I mean.)