The problem is memcpy returns a void *. If this is dynamically cast, it needs to be checked at runtime and may even be set to a value the programmer never intended (say unsigned 16 bit values instead of unsigned 8 bit characters). It may be an issue with updating the code - say the code was originally written for 8 bit ASCII and got updated to, say UTF-16 (16 bit). A dynamically cast void* doesn't care what the size is, it just shoves the values in the buffer. This may work fine in basic testing even, because you never overflow the buffer with 1-2 characters, and maybe even gets past a QA team, but once you go past 1/2, you've got a buffer overrun.
As I understand it, __restrict wouldn't work in a C++ program using dynamic_cast because it doesn't know the size at compile time (sorry, I'm not sure what is done in C as I haven't kept up with the language, so I have to use a C++ example). My guess is memcpy_s does runtime bounds checking (it isn't specified on the memcpy_s page, maybe the security ref - too busy to read it though).
memcpy doesn't verify the size of the receiving buffer is large enough for the copy, so it is possible to overrun the buffer. The returned value is a void*, so checking the buffer would probably need to be done at runtime unless it's explicitly cast at compile time (and the compiler is smart enough to check for that - in C++ you hint with dynamic_cast or static_cast, but how you do it in C I believe depends on compiler).
Basically, this is a tradeoff of speed vs security. C/C++ usually took speed over security because that was more important when the languages were created. Modern languages generally prefer security over speed because processing power is much greater than it was when C/C++ was invented.
And how is this any different than MS deprecating other potential memory leak functions like string functions e.g. strcpy for strcpy_s) last year (or is it two years ago now... they were added before the old ones were deprecated I think)?
I seem to recall the next version of C++ is supposed to add some security, some official threading and built-in garbage collection (of course, some of those features have been planned and dropped in the past, so it could be abandoned again), so you could say C++ is moving toward being more like Java anyway:D
Yep - Apple didn't exist as a company until April 1, 1976. Also the PDP-11 is 18 bit and the LSI-11 is 22 bit (I admit, I had never heard of that last one until now and had to look it up), whereas I'd read long ago the PDP-11 was 18 bit.
This game played more-or-less like a video game, despite using characters. I remember playing that game (definitely a port) a LONG time ago - maybe late 1970s and probably on the Apple ][ in the 1977-9 timeframe. I know I didn't find it particularly engaging because except for a couple of adventure games and RPGs on the computer, I pretty much swore by consoles until 1981 (I had the Sears Video Arcade and later Intellivision, but I blame Sabotage for my move to computers).
Raster displays were very rare on home hardware until Woz's RF modulator (licensed and sold as Sup'r Mod) because monitors were very expensive. Most kit/home computers like the Altair usually just used LED light displays or teletypes.
dang, I didn't scroll down far enough to see your post - I said basically the same thing about Apple.
As far as 8 bit game, I have my doubts - there is way too much hardware from around that time and a LOT of mainframes before it, some of which may have been 8 bit. I know it wasn't the PDP-1 that ran Spacewar! because that was 18bit (at least I remember it had an odd bitsize and I'm pretty sure it was 18 - the other odd bitsize I remember is the Intellivision which was 10 bit). National Semiconductor had an 8 bit chip of the same line as the one Richard Adams used and Intel had the 4004, so it is even possible someone built a kit computer and a game. Woz did probably do the first 8 bit personal computer game.
I can answer first Apple game (probably first Apple ][, as well) - that would be Breakout, written by the programmer of Breakout and designer of the early Apples, Steve Wozniak. No idea about the others - I was firmly entrenched behind the Apple ][ in those days, but did play a bit with a Commodore PET, Pong system with a few other games (it wasn't just pong - had variants and a couple of other games on it), and a Magnavox Odyssey at my aunt and uncle's house.
It's illegal to traffic sex slaves, but tax evasion this way is still legal, which is why they need to close the loophole.
If you want something illegal that nearly everyone does, look no further than the millions of people that buy stuff on the internet and don't pay use tax or business taxes - I've met people that make a living on ebay and craig's list but pay no taxes.
kosher means "fit or proper". halal means essentially permissible (haraam is forbidden) and bacon is forbidden by all major religions except maybe Hinduism (I don't know the Dharmasastra food rules) - Christians see here for KJV.
So basically poster #1 wants a proper disease, poster #2 wants a permissible disease, and poster #3 wants a religiously forbidden food.
If swine flu doesn't do it, maybe quoting the Bible will drive down the price of babyback ribs...
I'd say your assertion depends on the surface and mouse - my LED optical mouse fails to read either on my glass covered kitchen table or my black computer desk. My newer laser optical mouse fails to read on the glass table but handles the black desk just fine.
From my experience, Bluetooth tends to eat more power than proprietary standards, but proprietary is less compatible than other standards. Bluetooth did come up with a low power spec recently, but I doubt there are any devices out that use it. I get about a week of use on my proprietary Bluetooth Logitech mouse (but incidentally, I have the same non-bluetooth mouse on another computer and it gets about the same). My proprietary and newer Logitech laser mouse gets about 5-6 months on two AAA batteries (the package said it could last a year).
well, in the middle of last year I found a sapphire ATI AGP card for my old machine with fairly new specs, but it blue screened even with the latest drivers. I had it replaced and it still blue screens, replaced it again and... yep, still blue screens. I had to stick my old nVidia 6600 back in. And yes, the machine has enough power - 500 Watt PSU and 400 required (and I disabled almost every extraneous thing and it still failed). I haven't tried it lately, mainly because I built a new box as a Christmas present to myself.
I wasn't at all surprised by that announcement because Microsoft said they were going to move to virtualization in Windows 7 (I don't remember the exact article, but they were talking about using the mac model) months before any official announcement because all the legacy support created by supporting and loading various versions of Visual Studio libraries was slowing the OS.
Maybe the biggest surprise to me was they are actually going to do it and not pull it out of the next 50 releases like they've done with WinFS.
Linux can have some of the same resource issues as Windows - API and ABI changes leave legacy libraries and if those legacy libraries are needed they consume memory. Just because most apps are rebuilt on newer ABIs (assuming that you don't need to rewrite to new APIs due to deprecation) doesn't mean the problem is gone entirely - if you for some reason are using an old version of, say, a proprietary app like Oracle on your Linux box it needs to bind with the old runtime libraries and consumes resources.
Personally, and from a platform agnostic standpoint I find Windows 7 beta a huge improvement over Vista and I expect many Windows users will migrate to it even though I think Linux consumer distributions are nearly equal in usability. When I try to convert them it usually boils down to gaming - even casual gaming is a pain on Linux and they argue that you can't trust new games to work. WINE is too complex and crossover costs money (even with the argument that they'll save that money by using Linux instead of Windows). You've basically got the problem of a user base that has vendor lock-in and users that refuse to change. I was an Apple ][ fanboi and then a mac fanboi before being converted in college to UNIX and to Windows after college (but never a fanboi - I've stayed pretty much agnostic since then).
Most Windows and Mac machines (I've never checked Linux, but probably there, too) can be booted to a USB drive and with the right configuration, pretty much full access to the drive unless it's encrypted. Sometimes this can be disabled in firmware (e.g. BIOS, EFI, etc), however.
The exploit you're describing is the same kind I used to get past Foolproof on the mac with a zip (and later jaz) drive 15+ years ago. It can be beaten partially by encrypted drives (you can still erase the drive and install your own OS, but you can't steal data or use programs).
This is a bit different - if I read it correctly, it may even work on a hardware encrypted drive because it is a runtime exploit and doesn't require admin. That is a bit more akin to a non-root exploit on *nix - the user that is infected has to do the bidding of the master program, but a reboot clears it up. Just because it is memory resident in user-space doesn't mean it isn't dangerous - it could, say, rewrite the startup part of any user-space applications with malicious code and always start when that user runs that program, or infect something like Word macros by identifying them and injecting code.
ha - you're right - I thought the Star was never released, but it was the Alto that was never released. According to those links it was released at a starting price of $75000 for the server (I think it said additional machines in network were $16000).
The other mistake I made that you pointed out was the Lisa was actually the first released consumer targeted (personal) computer with a GUI and not the first computer with a GUI - I misread that somewhere. I'd also read that Apple perfected overlapping windows before Xerox, but I didn't post that yesterday because I didn't feel it was correct - I remembered the footage I saw of the Star showing it having them (and again, I had those machines mixed up). It was probably something I picked up during this lawsuit
hmm - well, the fact that ANSI hasn't secured their libraries is silly, but you could always use the _ names on Windows if you're writing for Windows only. Most programmers I know found out about the existence of the _name commands from this bug where ANSI C programs would spit out warnings about the C library being deprecated (C++ had similar issues).
Not even trojans necessarily - I read that USB stick drives are the major way of getting onto government and military networks. Most people that use these drives don't use either encryption or write protection, so simply inserting one into an infected machine (like a home computer) and then inserting it into a secure network can infect the machine on that secure network and perhaps others if it is a worm. Since home users often have lax security, this is a major way to infect private networks.
yeah, but it is actually missing stuff, partially because some were failures.
MS's server software bundling in a failed attempt to kill database companies like Oracle (which was part of the cited attempt to kill server OS's).
MS's Zune and music store in a failed attempt to kill Apple's domination in that market.
MS killing Novell Netware.
I can probably think of more given time... MS also offered sharply discounted software for OEMs purchasing MS-DOS and Windows (and Office while they killed off Wordperfect), as I recall.
MS DOS was a blight, and it was picked only becasue his mother is a good friend of the then VP of IBM
where'd you hear that from? Microsoft lowballed a contract with IBM to write the operating system for the IBM PC and had no product and minimal to no operating system experience (at least that I know of). They bought the code for Quick and Dirty DOS (ok, technically it was called 86-DOS by then) for $50000, rewrote large chunks of it and rebranded it PC-DOS. Interestingly, one of the biggest things not taken from CP/M in 86-DOS was the file system, which was Bill Gates' own FAT (well, technically he and another guy I can't remember the name of wrote it). I've often wondered if that made Bill partial to it...
The Lisa was a technical marvel - the gui itself (the first commercially released GUI) solved issues the Xerox guys hadn't fully figured out yet (for instance, you could drag and drop items on the desktop - the Star relied on context menus for this, and they added conveniences like the menu bar and trash can). The Star it was based on was never meant to see the light of day as a commercial machine - it was a tech demo.
The two biggest technical problems with the Lisa were the price tag ($10000) and it felt a bit slow. The killer, however, was Steve Jobs - he tried to control the direction of the team and tried to cancel the Lisa project several times until he was told to stop interfering, so he pretty much took revenge with the mac team (which he took by pretty much ousting Jef Raskin).
um, last time I checked RPG meant Role Playing Game and has nothing to do with the character you play, and I think you missed the mark entirely. Let me elaborate before fixing that for you...
Let's look at Unreal Tournament or most other shooters: Race? check. Sex? Check. Appearance? semi-check (with skinning tools). Make decisions that define your character? Sure - do I camp and snipe, or move up to cap the flag? Level up and experience? not really, but levels and experience are not needed to make an RPG (skill based systems don't have them) and you could say the ladder is the level and player skill is experience. Acquire, Manage, and equip armor and weapons based on said skill and abilities? Check - the better you know the maps, the faster you can get to the ones you need.
So by your criteria, a shooter is essentially an RPG. I could use a similar argument to say something like Guild Wars is essentially a shooter (in PvP).
So what REALLY is the difference? RPGs tell a story and you play a character in that story. RPGs differ from adventure games because the actions you take in the story change the story. In fact, you can really say the story is the game for an RPG, where you can't really say that for other genres. Some games are hybrids and Shooter RPGs - usually these have mostly linear plots and RPG elements like character development and story (for instance, Bioshock).
Bethesda didn't actually write the engine - they took Gamebryo and built an RPG toolkit on top of it for both Oblivion and Fallout (before that they used NetImmerse, so they haven't really written an engine for a while... Redguard maybe?). The toolkit was customized for each game and after the interface was cleaned up, it was released to the public.
Funny that I think the storyline is the weakest part of both games (really, what Bethesda game has ever had a good story? - it's like asking id to write Halo or Bioshock). With Fallout 3 it is really all about the side questing and exploring. The main quest was even run by the developers in something like 90 minutes, and I was not impressed by it (I was railroaded!). Still, it was probably the best they've done, as it did have a tiny bit of character development (in the literary sense, not the point bash-sense).
Chris Avellone is head of Alpha Protocol, so it's doubtful he'd be able to join the team until later (AP is due in October). For those that don't know, Chris joined around the time the Troika team left (there were four people that left to form it as I recall, but the core were Tim Cain [Carbine], Leonard Boyarsky [Blizzard], and Jason D. Anderson [Interplay]) and is mostly known for creating the timeline and history published as the Fallout Bible. Feargus runs Obsidian, so I'm not sure how much time he has to work with the teams.
I've heard these three names: John R. Gonzalez Lead Creative Designer J. E. Sawyer Lead Designer (was Van Buren lead) Scott Everts (did maps for Fallout 1 and 2)
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The problem is memcpy returns a void *. If this is dynamically cast, it needs to be checked at runtime and may even be set to a value the programmer never intended (say unsigned 16 bit values instead of unsigned 8 bit characters). It may be an issue with updating the code - say the code was originally written for 8 bit ASCII and got updated to, say UTF-16 (16 bit). A dynamically cast void* doesn't care what the size is, it just shoves the values in the buffer. This may work fine in basic testing even, because you never overflow the buffer with 1-2 characters, and maybe even gets past a QA team, but once you go past 1/2, you've got a buffer overrun.
As I understand it, __restrict wouldn't work in a C++ program using dynamic_cast because it doesn't know the size at compile time (sorry, I'm not sure what is done in C as I haven't kept up with the language, so I have to use a C++ example). My guess is memcpy_s does runtime bounds checking (it isn't specified on the memcpy_s page, maybe the security ref - too busy to read it though).
memcpy doesn't verify the size of the receiving buffer is large enough for the copy, so it is possible to overrun the buffer. The returned value is a void*, so checking the buffer would probably need to be done at runtime unless it's explicitly cast at compile time (and the compiler is smart enough to check for that - in C++ you hint with dynamic_cast or static_cast, but how you do it in C I believe depends on compiler).
Basically, this is a tradeoff of speed vs security. C/C++ usually took speed over security because that was more important when the languages were created. Modern languages generally prefer security over speed because processing power is much greater than it was when C/C++ was invented.
And how is this any different than MS deprecating other potential memory leak functions like string functions e.g. strcpy for strcpy_s) last year (or is it two years ago now... they were added before the old ones were deprecated I think)?
I seem to recall the next version of C++ is supposed to add some security, some official threading and built-in garbage collection (of course, some of those features have been planned and dropped in the past, so it could be abandoned again), so you could say C++ is moving toward being more like Java anyway :D
Sure it didn't hit $90 million, but Paramount wanted $50 million in the first weekend, so $72 million beat its expectations.
Most of the Trekkies I know liked it so much they plan to see it again. I'm not much of a Trek fan, but I may even go with them when they do round 2.
Yep - Apple didn't exist as a company until April 1, 1976. Also the PDP-11 is 18 bit and the LSI-11 is 22 bit (I admit, I had never heard of that last one until now and had to look it up), whereas I'd read long ago the PDP-11 was 18 bit.
This game played more-or-less like a video game, despite using characters. I remember playing that game (definitely a port) a LONG time ago - maybe late 1970s and probably on the Apple ][ in the 1977-9 timeframe. I know I didn't find it particularly engaging because except for a couple of adventure games and RPGs on the computer, I pretty much swore by consoles until 1981 (I had the Sears Video Arcade and later Intellivision, but I blame Sabotage for my move to computers).
Raster displays were very rare on home hardware until Woz's RF modulator (licensed and sold as Sup'r Mod) because monitors were very expensive. Most kit/home computers like the Altair usually just used LED light displays or teletypes.
dang, I didn't scroll down far enough to see your post - I said basically the same thing about Apple.
As far as 8 bit game, I have my doubts - there is way too much hardware from around that time and a LOT of mainframes before it, some of which may have been 8 bit. I know it wasn't the PDP-1 that ran Spacewar! because that was 18bit (at least I remember it had an odd bitsize and I'm pretty sure it was 18 - the other odd bitsize I remember is the Intellivision which was 10 bit). National Semiconductor had an 8 bit chip of the same line as the one Richard Adams used and Intel had the 4004, so it is even possible someone built a kit computer and a game. Woz did probably do the first 8 bit personal computer game.
Try here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game though I don't know if that talks about 8/16/32/64 bit.
I can answer first Apple game (probably first Apple ][, as well) - that would be Breakout, written by the programmer of Breakout and designer of the early Apples, Steve Wozniak. No idea about the others - I was firmly entrenched behind the Apple ][ in those days, but did play a bit with a Commodore PET, Pong system with a few other games (it wasn't just pong - had variants and a couple of other games on it), and a Magnavox Odyssey at my aunt and uncle's house.
It's illegal to traffic sex slaves, but tax evasion this way is still legal, which is why they need to close the loophole.
If you want something illegal that nearly everyone does, look no further than the millions of people that buy stuff on the internet and don't pay use tax or business taxes - I've met people that make a living on ebay and craig's list but pay no taxes.
weird thread...
kosher means "fit or proper".
halal means essentially permissible (haraam is forbidden)
and bacon is forbidden by all major religions except maybe Hinduism (I don't know the Dharmasastra food rules) - Christians see here for KJV.
So basically poster #1 wants a proper disease, poster #2 wants a permissible disease, and poster #3 wants a religiously forbidden food.
If swine flu doesn't do it, maybe quoting the Bible will drive down the price of babyback ribs...
mia culpa - I have the older version of that mouse that takes AAA batteries (the newer version is AA).
I'd say your assertion depends on the surface and mouse - my LED optical mouse fails to read either on my glass covered kitchen table or my black computer desk. My newer laser optical mouse fails to read on the glass table but handles the black desk just fine.
From my experience, Bluetooth tends to eat more power than proprietary standards, but proprietary is less compatible than other standards. Bluetooth did come up with a low power spec recently, but I doubt there are any devices out that use it. I get about a week of use on my proprietary Bluetooth Logitech mouse (but incidentally, I have the same non-bluetooth mouse on another computer and it gets about the same). My proprietary and newer Logitech laser mouse gets about 5-6 months on two AAA batteries (the package said it could last a year).
well, in the middle of last year I found a sapphire ATI AGP card for my old machine with fairly new specs, but it blue screened even with the latest drivers. I had it replaced and it still blue screens, replaced it again and... yep, still blue screens. I had to stick my old nVidia 6600 back in. And yes, the machine has enough power - 500 Watt PSU and 400 required (and I disabled almost every extraneous thing and it still failed). I haven't tried it lately, mainly because I built a new box as a Christmas present to myself.
I wasn't at all surprised by that announcement because Microsoft said they were going to move to virtualization in Windows 7 (I don't remember the exact article, but they were talking about using the mac model) months before any official announcement because all the legacy support created by supporting and loading various versions of Visual Studio libraries was slowing the OS.
Maybe the biggest surprise to me was they are actually going to do it and not pull it out of the next 50 releases like they've done with WinFS.
Linux can have some of the same resource issues as Windows - API and ABI changes leave legacy libraries and if those legacy libraries are needed they consume memory. Just because most apps are rebuilt on newer ABIs (assuming that you don't need to rewrite to new APIs due to deprecation) doesn't mean the problem is gone entirely - if you for some reason are using an old version of, say, a proprietary app like Oracle on your Linux box it needs to bind with the old runtime libraries and consumes resources.
Personally, and from a platform agnostic standpoint I find Windows 7 beta a huge improvement over Vista and I expect many Windows users will migrate to it even though I think Linux consumer distributions are nearly equal in usability. When I try to convert them it usually boils down to gaming - even casual gaming is a pain on Linux and they argue that you can't trust new games to work. WINE is too complex and crossover costs money (even with the argument that they'll save that money by using Linux instead of Windows). You've basically got the problem of a user base that has vendor lock-in and users that refuse to change. I was an Apple ][ fanboi and then a mac fanboi before being converted in college to UNIX and to Windows after college (but never a fanboi - I've stayed pretty much agnostic since then).
Most Windows and Mac machines (I've never checked Linux, but probably there, too) can be booted to a USB drive and with the right configuration, pretty much full access to the drive unless it's encrypted. Sometimes this can be disabled in firmware (e.g. BIOS, EFI, etc), however.
The exploit you're describing is the same kind I used to get past Foolproof on the mac with a zip (and later jaz) drive 15+ years ago. It can be beaten partially by encrypted drives (you can still erase the drive and install your own OS, but you can't steal data or use programs).
This is a bit different - if I read it correctly, it may even work on a hardware encrypted drive because it is a runtime exploit and doesn't require admin. That is a bit more akin to a non-root exploit on *nix - the user that is infected has to do the bidding of the master program, but a reboot clears it up. Just because it is memory resident in user-space doesn't mean it isn't dangerous - it could, say, rewrite the startup part of any user-space applications with malicious code and always start when that user runs that program, or infect something like Word macros by identifying them and injecting code.
ha - you're right - I thought the Star was never released, but it was the Alto that was never released. According to those links it was released at a starting price of $75000 for the server (I think it said additional machines in network were $16000).
The other mistake I made that you pointed out was the Lisa was actually the first released consumer targeted (personal) computer with a GUI and not the first computer with a GUI - I misread that somewhere. I'd also read that Apple perfected overlapping windows before Xerox, but I didn't post that yesterday because I didn't feel it was correct - I remembered the footage I saw of the Star showing it having them (and again, I had those machines mixed up). It was probably something I picked up during this lawsuit
hmm - well, the fact that ANSI hasn't secured their libraries is silly, but you could always use the _ names on Windows if you're writing for Windows only. Most programmers I know found out about the existence of the _name commands from this bug where ANSI C programs would spit out warnings about the C library being deprecated (C++ had similar issues).
Not even trojans necessarily - I read that USB stick drives are the major way of getting onto government and military networks. Most people that use these drives don't use either encryption or write protection, so simply inserting one into an infected machine (like a home computer) and then inserting it into a secure network can infect the machine on that secure network and perhaps others if it is a worm. Since home users often have lax security, this is a major way to infect private networks.
or as I said earlier, Novell (Netware).
yeah, but it is actually missing stuff, partially because some were failures.
MS's server software bundling in a failed attempt to kill database companies like Oracle (which was part of the cited attempt to kill server OS's).
MS's Zune and music store in a failed attempt to kill Apple's domination in that market.
MS killing Novell Netware.
I can probably think of more given time... MS also offered sharply discounted software for OEMs purchasing MS-DOS and Windows (and Office while they killed off Wordperfect), as I recall.
where'd you hear that from? Microsoft lowballed a contract with IBM to write the operating system for the IBM PC and had no product and minimal to no operating system experience (at least that I know of). They bought the code for Quick and Dirty DOS (ok, technically it was called 86-DOS by then) for $50000, rewrote large chunks of it and rebranded it PC-DOS. Interestingly, one of the biggest things not taken from CP/M in 86-DOS was the file system, which was Bill Gates' own FAT (well, technically he and another guy I can't remember the name of wrote it). I've often wondered if that made Bill partial to it...
The Lisa was a technical marvel - the gui itself (the first commercially released GUI) solved issues the Xerox guys hadn't fully figured out yet (for instance, you could drag and drop items on the desktop - the Star relied on context menus for this, and they added conveniences like the menu bar and trash can). The Star it was based on was never meant to see the light of day as a commercial machine - it was a tech demo.
The two biggest technical problems with the Lisa were the price tag ($10000) and it felt a bit slow. The killer, however, was Steve Jobs - he tried to control the direction of the team and tried to cancel the Lisa project several times until he was told to stop interfering, so he pretty much took revenge with the mac team (which he took by pretty much ousting Jef Raskin).
um, last time I checked RPG meant Role Playing Game and has nothing to do with the character you play, and I think you missed the mark entirely. Let me elaborate before fixing that for you...
Let's look at Unreal Tournament or most other shooters: Race? check. Sex? Check. Appearance? semi-check (with skinning tools). Make decisions that define your character? Sure - do I camp and snipe, or move up to cap the flag? Level up and experience? not really, but levels and experience are not needed to make an RPG (skill based systems don't have them) and you could say the ladder is the level and player skill is experience. Acquire, Manage, and equip armor and weapons based on said skill and abilities? Check - the better you know the maps, the faster you can get to the ones you need.
So by your criteria, a shooter is essentially an RPG. I could use a similar argument to say something like Guild Wars is essentially a shooter (in PvP).
So what REALLY is the difference? RPGs tell a story and you play a character in that story. RPGs differ from adventure games because the actions you take in the story change the story. In fact, you can really say the story is the game for an RPG, where you can't really say that for other genres. Some games are hybrids and Shooter RPGs - usually these have mostly linear plots and RPG elements like character development and story (for instance, Bioshock).
Bethesda didn't actually write the engine - they took Gamebryo and built an RPG toolkit on top of it for both Oblivion and Fallout (before that they used NetImmerse, so they haven't really written an engine for a while... Redguard maybe?). The toolkit was customized for each game and after the interface was cleaned up, it was released to the public.
Funny that I think the storyline is the weakest part of both games (really, what Bethesda game has ever had a good story? - it's like asking id to write Halo or Bioshock). With Fallout 3 it is really all about the side questing and exploring. The main quest was even run by the developers in something like 90 minutes, and I was not impressed by it (I was railroaded!). Still, it was probably the best they've done, as it did have a tiny bit of character development (in the literary sense, not the point bash-sense).
Chris Avellone is head of Alpha Protocol, so it's doubtful he'd be able to join the team until later (AP is due in October). For those that don't know, Chris joined around the time the Troika team left (there were four people that left to form it as I recall, but the core were Tim Cain [Carbine], Leonard Boyarsky [Blizzard], and Jason D. Anderson [Interplay]) and is mostly known for creating the timeline and history published as the Fallout Bible. Feargus runs Obsidian, so I'm not sure how much time he has to work with the teams.
I've heard these three names:
John R. Gonzalez Lead Creative Designer
J. E. Sawyer Lead Designer (was Van Buren lead)
Scott Everts (did maps for Fallout 1 and 2)