I don't think it'll be that bad. It is all procedural. That entire world might be a couple of megabytes in size as opposed to one texture taking up that same amount of space in a regular game. There will definitely be a lot of computation involved but AMD has a processor that can do over 27 billion calculations per second. I think Spore is going to be the first game that actually takes advantage of all that to improve gameplay and not graphics.
The game I've seen the most hype for lately is Spore and it goes in the opposite direction as far as graphics are concerned. It looked good, but graphics weren't really important at all. During demonstrations nobody was talking about how good the graphics were, they were talking about this new, innovative way of making games. While it's hard to sell a game that doesn't look pretty it looks like it's going to be pretty easy to sell a decent looking, completely innovative game.
Has Google Talk finally been integrated with AIM? I heard about that last year and I'm still waiting for it to happen. As soon as it does I'm ditching AIM completely, but I haven't heard anything new on the AIM front for a while. In fact, the last thing I heard was that there wasn't going to be complete integration. Here's a good summary
If the last time this was happened was thousands of years ago even though human beings were alive, we weren't using electricity. Who's to say that this won't crash everything plugged into an outlet? We have no data on what it will do to all of our precious computers.
One more thing to think about. You're feeling now the way you felt just before Black & White was released. It's currently the beginning of May in the year 2006 and Spore isn't slated to be released until 2007.
Is it any wonder that of all the illegal products that can be shipped through the mail, the ones with the largest number of political lobbyists are getting special measures to ensure they're legitimate? This is really a case of money being used to influence politics. This is a huge invasion of privacy, and a nonsensical one at that. There's no way for these dogs to differentiate between legitimate and copied DVD's, and illegal DVD copies and legal DVD copies. Another case of the RIAA treating customers as the enemy. Makes me have no pity for them when they complain about being stolen from. Maybe if they gave their customers (you know, the people paying them) a little respect they might be able to get some sympathy and work with people to solve this problem. As it is, I think they're just contributing to it.
As far as I know, formal advertising has yet to start. All the hype right now is coming from those 10+ minute videos. I'm sure there will be much shorter videos released closer to when the game comes out (it's not slated to be released till 2007). If I was you, I'd ignore it for now. Wait until the holiday season to start checking it out. Getting as excited as a lot of people are this far in advance of the games completion sounds a lot like a recipe for disaster.
Content will be download from other players, but just like in the Sims there will be content filters. All of the same innapropriate content problems Spore will face have already been dealt with in the Sims and the way I understand it that process will just be moved over in whole to Spore. I can't remember exactly where I heard that, but I know I've heard it from multiple sources. Check the Gaming Steve podcast #48 (I believe) for a summary on how that's going to work.
No real new information other than that progress on the game is... well, progressing. The screen shots look absolutely amazing. My only fear is that all this publicity will do the game in. I think it will be a great game but even I realize that my expectations are so flagrantly high that there's almost no way he'll be able to meet them. Maybe we should all take a step back, remember that this game will not take the place of wives, kids or food and give the game a chance to be succesful. Because with expectations running as high as everybodys are right now, there's no way it will be able to meet them.
Good point, and I might have to plead guilty to jumping the gun. I've written software that was definitely too difficult for anybody who wasn't me to figure out on their own; I think most software developers have. Responsibility is two-fold, it falls on both users and programmers. Programmers have to take the time to make sure their software is intuitive and not confusing, but users have to learn the basics. I can't tell you how many of my friends (really smart people) can't download a file, then find it later. They just click OK, they don't know what a file extension is. I jumped the gun I admit, but I think I still made a valid point. Better driver education was needed in the 1960's. It could still stand to be improved today, but you're right in that it's not the only problem.
The issue I have with your comment is that knowing that you're not going to be having these same problems in 2, 5, 10 years doesn't relieve you of the responsibility to solve them today. If nobody worries about solving todays problems because they're not tomorrows problems, we never get to the next set of problems. Windows, IE, and ActiveX all still have a huge market share. Just because you (a linux using technophile) don't have those problems doesn't mean the rest of the world still doesn't and still won't for quite a while. Yes, things change quickly in the computer industry. There are new things being developed all the time, but a lot of the stuff I'm talking about transends that. I just used examples that were too specific. If you change it to 'Don't run programs from sources you don't recognize or trust, keep yourself safe by not letting people you don't know have access to your computer, know what a firewall is.' That's all pretty basic stuff, but there are a lot of people (really smart people) who just don't know it.
Oh, and the ubiquity if not the duration is already there. How many slashdot readers download foreign exe's, trust spam, and leave an unprotected system on the internet? The ubiquity is there for people with technical knowledge, and that's where I look for it. If there's massive disagreement over whether or not something is good within the tech community, then I'm not likely to trust it. But when 90%+ of techies recognize certain things as unsafe, I think that's ubiquitous enough to start teaching to people without the necessary background to know that it's unsafe.
We should spend lots of time educating noobs. No matter how simple we try and make it, it'll always be foreign to somebody who doesn't know how to use it. Foreign, unknown and difficult. The last thing I'm saying is that we should make interfaces more complicated. I'm saying that there will always be people who don't understand them and that we should devote time to showing those people how to use them. Give a man a fish (aka fix his computer after he hoses it) and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you make him self-reliant
There are lots of problems with Windows that I'm holding Microsoft completely accountable for, but there's a lot of stuff users do to make it even worse. I've run across people who go to porn sites every day and just click OK whenever there's a pop-up until their computer are so slow they have to be hosed. I know users who honestly don't know how to use MS Word, don't know how to see what file extension something has (much less save something as any non-default file format) download attachments from emails that are obviously spam. I'm sure you've heard horror stories (and if you haven't, go here).
I think that macs make it much more difficult for users to hurt themselves and that that's why so many people fall in love with them, but I don't think that's the solution. The world will eventually make a better idiot and I think it's a losing race to try and make software more idiot proof. I'd rather make less idiots.
What the article is basically saying is that we have to teach people how to use their computers. >85% of all the computer problems I encounter are PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). It's like the old saying goes, make something idiot proof and the world will make a better idiot. If people just learn how to use their computers (you shouldn't download exe's from people you don't know, a firewall is a good thing to have, ActiveX controls aren't safe and your default response shouldn't be to install them no matter what IE says) a huge number of problems would be eliminated. Like it or not, users are the biggest computer problem today. The problem shouldn't be usability, it should be user-ability.
If these are engineers, start them off with what they're comfortable with: emphasize putting together a structure that works. I once had an assignment to write a paper on how to make a PB & J sandwich. I actually flunked it, but it was the first thing that really got me thinking about structure and how to write clearly. Since then the most important thing I've found (not only for writing, but for coding as well) is that practice at trying to find the backbone of what I'm trying to write (the central thought, of which all points are branches) and going from there makes whatever I write much better. One of the prerequisites for doing things that way is knowing what you're talking about so I also absorb material better. All it really takes is practice thinking that way. It took me three years of in-class essays to get to the point where I felt comfortable with it (something I don't think you have time to do), but you can definitely be the PB & J story for the people in your class.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not advocating creating another human language, I'm just saying that there's more work being done in the area of finding a way to make machines interpret human writing as it is. It is easier to make machines do things than it is to teach human beings (machines are much less fickle). And besides, I don't want to change my lifestyle to accomodate a computer. My life may change because of them, but I'd be pretty scared if the way I lived my life started being dictated by the limitations of computers rather than the way I use my computer being dictated by the limitations of my life.
The publicity (hopefully) won't change the game at all, but it'll have a huge effect on your perceptions when you play it. If you're expecting total nirvana, and only get greatness, you're going to be dissapointed, and people don't enjoy/play/spread the word about games that they were dissapointed in. On the flip side, if you're expecting next to nothing and you get greatness out of a game, you're going to go rave about it. Same game, two totally different reactions.
I don't think that a lot of effort has been made to develop a different language for people to communicate with machines. I think most of research time in that area is spent in improving handwriting recognition, ie changing what machines do rather than changing what we do.
I think Spore looks like an absolutely amazing game, but the worst thing that could happen to it is all this publicity. Even I realize my expectations are so high right now that Will Wright needs to go to the future and get a microchip to plant inside my brain (for total immersion) for this game to meet my expectations. As much as I love seeing it covered on Slashdot, I think all this publicity will lead to massive disapointment when a million people all fire up their computers, realize it's a great game, but it's not the end all be all of gaming.
On the other hand, part of me really believes Will Wright has a time machine in his backyard.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the fabled Google Internet. If Google's servers are getting full with all the pages of auto-generated content, why not just not list them? Create your own internet without all those and suddenly Google has more than enough space and bandwith. That quote (flaky though it is) is the best 'evidence' anybody's been able to find to support such a theory.
You think that just because it's a joke it's OK? Do you apply the same logic to racial jokes? Holocoust jokes? It's a joke, therefore it doesn't hurt anybody? You think that Latinos aren't bothered when somebody makes a joke about how they're all gardners? How it doesn't hurt when people assume that they'll know how to use a mower when nobody else does? You want your sense of humor to be based around discriminating and insulting others? And you think I should pay money for such a thing? Open your eyes and get a clue, man. That's not cool.
anybody else depressed that the first two comments on this article didn't have anything to do with ratings, with their unfairness, with how it would affect people buying the game. All they said were 'how can I get this' and 'OMG BOOBIEZ!!!' I think the lack of female gamers is more because of completely insensitive male gamers than anything else. If I were a girl, and I wanted to go to a LAN party, or a guild, or anything with other people, I don't want all the guys there constantly talking about breasts and how they can see them. That's just not an environemnt I'd want to play in. So, in the future, if we could not jump on, grab, or otherwise molest every article with the word 'breast' in it, we might have a much better (and safer) environment for everybody to game in.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it'll be that bad. It is all procedural. That entire world might be a couple of megabytes in size as opposed to one texture taking up that same amount of space in a regular game. There will definitely be a lot of computation involved but AMD has a processor that can do over 27 billion calculations per second. I think Spore is going to be the first game that actually takes advantage of all that to improve gameplay and not graphics.
The game I've seen the most hype for lately is Spore and it goes in the opposite direction as far as graphics are concerned. It looked good, but graphics weren't really important at all. During demonstrations nobody was talking about how good the graphics were, they were talking about this new, innovative way of making games. While it's hard to sell a game that doesn't look pretty it looks like it's going to be pretty easy to sell a decent looking, completely innovative game.
Has Google Talk finally been integrated with AIM? I heard about that last year and I'm still waiting for it to happen. As soon as it does I'm ditching AIM completely, but I haven't heard anything new on the AIM front for a while. In fact, the last thing I heard was that there wasn't going to be complete integration. Here's a good summary
If the last time this was happened was thousands of years ago even though human beings were alive, we weren't using electricity. Who's to say that this won't crash everything plugged into an outlet? We have no data on what it will do to all of our precious computers.
One more thing to think about. You're feeling now the way you felt just before Black & White was released. It's currently the beginning of May in the year 2006 and Spore isn't slated to be released until 2007.
Is it any wonder that of all the illegal products that can be shipped through the mail, the ones with the largest number of political lobbyists are getting special measures to ensure they're legitimate? This is really a case of money being used to influence politics. This is a huge invasion of privacy, and a nonsensical one at that. There's no way for these dogs to differentiate between legitimate and copied DVD's, and illegal DVD copies and legal DVD copies. Another case of the RIAA treating customers as the enemy. Makes me have no pity for them when they complain about being stolen from. Maybe if they gave their customers (you know, the people paying them) a little respect they might be able to get some sympathy and work with people to solve this problem. As it is, I think they're just contributing to it.
As far as I know, formal advertising has yet to start. All the hype right now is coming from those 10+ minute videos. I'm sure there will be much shorter videos released closer to when the game comes out (it's not slated to be released till 2007). If I was you, I'd ignore it for now. Wait until the holiday season to start checking it out. Getting as excited as a lot of people are this far in advance of the games completion sounds a lot like a recipe for disaster.
How boring does: 1. Hack 2. Slash 3. Repeat sound?
Content will be download from other players, but just like in the Sims there will be content filters. All of the same innapropriate content problems Spore will face have already been dealt with in the Sims and the way I understand it that process will just be moved over in whole to Spore. I can't remember exactly where I heard that, but I know I've heard it from multiple sources. Check the Gaming Steve podcast #48 (I believe) for a summary on how that's going to work.
No real new information other than that progress on the game is... well, progressing. The screen shots look absolutely amazing. My only fear is that all this publicity will do the game in. I think it will be a great game but even I realize that my expectations are so flagrantly high that there's almost no way he'll be able to meet them. Maybe we should all take a step back, remember that this game will not take the place of wives, kids or food and give the game a chance to be succesful. Because with expectations running as high as everybodys are right now, there's no way it will be able to meet them.
That's probably my biggest peeve with Windows, and I make it show me file extensions on every computer I sit down at, whether it's mine or not.
Good point, and I might have to plead guilty to jumping the gun. I've written software that was definitely too difficult for anybody who wasn't me to figure out on their own; I think most software developers have. Responsibility is two-fold, it falls on both users and programmers. Programmers have to take the time to make sure their software is intuitive and not confusing, but users have to learn the basics. I can't tell you how many of my friends (really smart people) can't download a file, then find it later. They just click OK, they don't know what a file extension is. I jumped the gun I admit, but I think I still made a valid point. Better driver education was needed in the 1960's. It could still stand to be improved today, but you're right in that it's not the only problem.
The issue I have with your comment is that knowing that you're not going to be having these same problems in 2, 5, 10 years doesn't relieve you of the responsibility to solve them today. If nobody worries about solving todays problems because they're not tomorrows problems, we never get to the next set of problems. Windows, IE, and ActiveX all still have a huge market share. Just because you (a linux using technophile) don't have those problems doesn't mean the rest of the world still doesn't and still won't for quite a while. Yes, things change quickly in the computer industry. There are new things being developed all the time, but a lot of the stuff I'm talking about transends that. I just used examples that were too specific. If you change it to 'Don't run programs from sources you don't recognize or trust, keep yourself safe by not letting people you don't know have access to your computer, know what a firewall is.' That's all pretty basic stuff, but there are a lot of people (really smart people) who just don't know it.
Oh, and the ubiquity if not the duration is already there. How many slashdot readers download foreign exe's, trust spam, and leave an unprotected system on the internet? The ubiquity is there for people with technical knowledge, and that's where I look for it. If there's massive disagreement over whether or not something is good within the tech community, then I'm not likely to trust it. But when 90%+ of techies recognize certain things as unsafe, I think that's ubiquitous enough to start teaching to people without the necessary background to know that it's unsafe.
We should spend lots of time educating noobs. No matter how simple we try and make it, it'll always be foreign to somebody who doesn't know how to use it. Foreign, unknown and difficult. The last thing I'm saying is that we should make interfaces more complicated. I'm saying that there will always be people who don't understand them and that we should devote time to showing those people how to use them. Give a man a fish (aka fix his computer after he hoses it) and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you make him self-reliant
There are lots of problems with Windows that I'm holding Microsoft completely accountable for, but there's a lot of stuff users do to make it even worse. I've run across people who go to porn sites every day and just click OK whenever there's a pop-up until their computer are so slow they have to be hosed. I know users who honestly don't know how to use MS Word, don't know how to see what file extension something has (much less save something as any non-default file format) download attachments from emails that are obviously spam. I'm sure you've heard horror stories (and if you haven't, go here).
I think that macs make it much more difficult for users to hurt themselves and that that's why so many people fall in love with them, but I don't think that's the solution. The world will eventually make a better idiot and I think it's a losing race to try and make software more idiot proof. I'd rather make less idiots.
What the article is basically saying is that we have to teach people how to use their computers. >85% of all the computer problems I encounter are PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). It's like the old saying goes, make something idiot proof and the world will make a better idiot. If people just learn how to use their computers (you shouldn't download exe's from people you don't know, a firewall is a good thing to have, ActiveX controls aren't safe and your default response shouldn't be to install them no matter what IE says) a huge number of problems would be eliminated. Like it or not, users are the biggest computer problem today. The problem shouldn't be usability, it should be user-ability.
If these are engineers, start them off with what they're comfortable with: emphasize putting together a structure that works. I once had an assignment to write a paper on how to make a PB & J sandwich. I actually flunked it, but it was the first thing that really got me thinking about structure and how to write clearly. Since then the most important thing I've found (not only for writing, but for coding as well) is that practice at trying to find the backbone of what I'm trying to write (the central thought, of which all points are branches) and going from there makes whatever I write much better. One of the prerequisites for doing things that way is knowing what you're talking about so I also absorb material better. All it really takes is practice thinking that way. It took me three years of in-class essays to get to the point where I felt comfortable with it (something I don't think you have time to do), but you can definitely be the PB & J story for the people in your class.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not advocating creating another human language, I'm just saying that there's more work being done in the area of finding a way to make machines interpret human writing as it is. It is easier to make machines do things than it is to teach human beings (machines are much less fickle). And besides, I don't want to change my lifestyle to accomodate a computer. My life may change because of them, but I'd be pretty scared if the way I lived my life started being dictated by the limitations of computers rather than the way I use my computer being dictated by the limitations of my life.
The publicity (hopefully) won't change the game at all, but it'll have a huge effect on your perceptions when you play it. If you're expecting total nirvana, and only get greatness, you're going to be dissapointed, and people don't enjoy/play/spread the word about games that they were dissapointed in. On the flip side, if you're expecting next to nothing and you get greatness out of a game, you're going to go rave about it. Same game, two totally different reactions.
I don't think that a lot of effort has been made to develop a different language for people to communicate with machines. I think most of research time in that area is spent in improving handwriting recognition, ie changing what machines do rather than changing what we do.
I think Spore looks like an absolutely amazing game, but the worst thing that could happen to it is all this publicity. Even I realize my expectations are so high right now that Will Wright needs to go to the future and get a microchip to plant inside my brain (for total immersion) for this game to meet my expectations. As much as I love seeing it covered on Slashdot, I think all this publicity will lead to massive disapointment when a million people all fire up their computers, realize it's a great game, but it's not the end all be all of gaming.
On the other hand, part of me really believes Will Wright has a time machine in his backyard.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the fabled Google Internet. If Google's servers are getting full with all the pages of auto-generated content, why not just not list them? Create your own internet without all those and suddenly Google has more than enough space and bandwith. That quote (flaky though it is) is the best 'evidence' anybody's been able to find to support such a theory.
I'm comparing the attitude that allows one to exist to the attitude that allows the other to exist. But apparently that's flamebait.
You think that just because it's a joke it's OK? Do you apply the same logic to racial jokes? Holocoust jokes? It's a joke, therefore it doesn't hurt anybody? You think that Latinos aren't bothered when somebody makes a joke about how they're all gardners? How it doesn't hurt when people assume that they'll know how to use a mower when nobody else does? You want your sense of humor to be based around discriminating and insulting others? And you think I should pay money for such a thing? Open your eyes and get a clue, man. That's not cool.
anybody else depressed that the first two comments on this article didn't have anything to do with ratings, with their unfairness, with how it would affect people buying the game. All they said were 'how can I get this' and 'OMG BOOBIEZ!!!' I think the lack of female gamers is more because of completely insensitive male gamers than anything else. If I were a girl, and I wanted to go to a LAN party, or a guild, or anything with other people, I don't want all the guys there constantly talking about breasts and how they can see them. That's just not an environemnt I'd want to play in. So, in the future, if we could not jump on, grab, or otherwise molest every article with the word 'breast' in it, we might have a much better (and safer) environment for everybody to game in.