I recall using 'goo' as a username for a similar result. The version that a friend had (hacked, unsurprisingly) came with a bank account viewer/editor too, but I'm not sure that it came stock with the game or not.
I've been playing with two gigs of RAM since CoH went live. I've played it with nothing but nVidia hardware (a 5200 FX, a 6600 GT, and a 7600 GT), and each time I've upgraded piecemeal, the only thing that's given me any noticeable benefit is a faster CPU.
As for 'it's a beta', that does nothing to explain why little has been done to improve what's still there. I wouldn't have commented on any of that, save for the fact that things like the sour spot, and Grandville's godawful geometry and the like are such common complaints that they've become running jokes... much like 'it runs fine on my machine' 'rebuttals'.
City of Foozles is also extremely CPU bound, and from experiences in the CoV closed beta I strongly believe that their art team has carte blanche to implement stuff without optimization or consulting with the coding teams.
It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps is semi-transparent, so occlusion culling has a markedly reduced effect than it does on other indoor maps) and the geometry holes that are still there to this day. New content like the Universities are particularly awful-- when I enter one on my machine, the poor thing chugs for a minute while the shaders visibly load in texture by texture, and repeat the process when I turn to survey the scene.
Before the universities became active, there was a bug that would allow you to fly under the geometry in one of the city zones where there was one; CoX simulates indoor chambers in world zones by placing them under the accessible map, so by going under the geometry you could see the inside of a store, with NPCs standing around and PCs flitting about willy-nilly. Using that bug, I flew over to the University for a sneak peek... and as soon as I was close enough for it to load, my frame-rates dropped right into the toilet.
I had the same experience in the beta, to be honest. It was extremely pretty (and the tutorial instances were jaw-dropping), but the gameplay really didn't grab me at all.
They do have an interesting take on PVP though, one that would allow you to literally play the other side-- maxed-level monster characters, that could be improved with points earned by doing things in the contested, max-level region. No starting off as a level one hatchling or any of that stuff-- you're spawn of Shelob (or a particularly rabid warg, or what have you), and you're already a threat to whatever comes into your domain. PCs know that they're in for a fight when they see a named monster (or a whole swarm of them...) out there, because there aren't AI weaknesses to exploit... just the crafty mind of another player. Sure you have to hit level ten with a regular PC, in order to get access to that stuff, but that's a far cry from having to get to level forty (or whatever) as a PC. Hop on, join some other monsters in fighting the bad fight, and log off for dinner. No battleground waiting lists, no grinding-to-gank, no having to worry about having the best gear to survive.
Seriously. Turbine has had one real success-- Asheron's Call. Its sequel bombed spectacularly, D&D Online is basically a Guild Wars with a monthly fee, and while LOTRO is barely out of the gate, its questing and lore structures are as turgid as its source material (which is great if you're a Tolkien fan, granted).
Star Wars Galaxies has gone from 'flawed, but promising' to 'what has science wrought?!' over the course of its existence, a stunning reversal of the usual trend to launch with missing content and patch in later, to launching with missing content and tearing most of what's left out later. Servers are ghost towns, good going there, guys.
Anarchy Online has had more ups and downs than a roller coaster (abysmal beta, spectacularly awful launch, promised lore/television/multimedia tie-ins that failed to materialize... and a free year of basic play offer to bolster subscription numbers), but at least Age of Conan has some interesting gimmicks planned for it.
WoW may be simplistic compared to its predecessors and competitors, but it's been as well-produced as any other Blizzard product-- that is to say, polished to an eye-searing shine. In order to pull the same thing off, their competitors will need to get out of the 'launch first, patch later' mindset, which will absolutely require the trust of the people that fund the projects. Without that element of risk-taking on their part, there's no way that any development team will be able to pull the same thing off. All of that development and polish takes time and effort, which are fueled by money... and the precedent of shipping something that runs, rather than something that shines is still much stronger than WoW's literally phenomenal success.
Given that fans of Myst: Uru constructed an island that recreates the Neighborhood and one of the Ages remarkably faithfully, I'd say it's entirely possible that no Square/Enix employees or funding were involved with SL's Midgar parcel.
No kidding. "Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?" What the Hell kind of question is that? Story-wise, something like Unreal Tournament Foo has about as much story as the booklet that came with a Berzerk cartridge, while games like Ultima V (playable on Apple II, CGA-equipped PC and other beyond-elderly hardware) kick the unholy Hell out of cliched fantasy crap like Neverwinter Nights' original campaign.
A commercial endeavour would be a more difficult strategically, Mr Chatani admitted, because users would be loathe to let companies use the power of their PS3 Cell processors for free.
Well, duh. If someone's making money at my expense (bandwidth costs, electricity, wear on components...), as negligible as those expenses might be, I'd want to see some sort of return.
If Sony really wants to push it though, they'll just include the functionality in a firmware update and claim that the money's going to subsidize new game development. Their online entertainment arm has been pulling that sort of thing with Planetside and Matrix Online for ages now.
Over here in Ontario, we have a similar system to presumably support fairness: several days before the election, all candidate signage comes down, all of the related commercials stop airing, and the candidates' phone drones stop calling. Campaign websites (if any) stay up, but there's a difference there-- unless you've been infected with a politically savvy trojan, you're not likely to be randomly exposed to a candidate's website or Youtube archives of their commercials.
The only issue that I could see is if this fellow's supporters are astroturfing in order to expose more people to his Youtube spots, and even the effects of something like that would be debatable.
Seriously, for a machine intended as a user-friendly, entry-level computer, its form factor left much to be desired. It was squat, would pitch a fit if the mouse wasn't connected on boot (a first for consumer PCs at the time), and its front edges looked like a cartoon shark. Saw-toothed flanges halfway down the front of the main box, hard and sharp-looking corners, and a weirdly sock-bent monitor screamed "I'll bite you!" and "Don't try to pick me up!" It was like the Hyde to the Mac's Jekyll.
Given the abysmal sales and retention rates of Auto Assault, and the server consolidations that have resulted from both, I'm really surprised that anyone was crazy enough to finance their pursuit of such a lucrative license.
No. Sorry, but no. This is nothing more or less than a profound appeal to improper authority, the authority being the editor in question. I'd like to know how many times his 'credentials' have been called upon as proof in Wiki arguments, or the number of times that people have agreed with him on the false assumption that he was playing things straight.
His username is a pseudonym. His claimed credentials are a fraud.
I'm not sure why people make this claim, because turn-based and automatically-pausing-simultaneous-activity are not the same things. I'll reiterate: By the time a spell effect goes off in the Infinity Engine, most of the targets have already vacated the area. That may be realistic, but it's not D&D.
This is probably going to get me modded as flamebait, but I felt the same way about their spiritual descendants, the Baldur's Gate series. They were ostensibly Second Edition AD&D to begin with, but used rules that were heretofore only found in the Basic D&D ruleset (weapon mastery and such), had heavily modified critters (mustard jelly is not green slime, and neither of the BG variants are anything like the ones statted in the Monstrous Manuals) and made a travesty of D&D combat by making everything real-time and eliminating any sense of range or radius. There isn't much point in casting a fireball when everything on the screen is halfway toward you by the time you begin to cast, and completely out of the blast radius by the time the effect goes off. Meanwhile, missile weapons have no trouble following fleeing targets around corners and far out of normal range. PC spellcasting was a fool's errand, and THAC0 was clearly the hand of destiny.
D&D has always had its roots in wargaming, from complex range, movement and initiative rules in earlier editions, to the numerous tactical combat examples in 3E and 3.5. In that way at least, the Gold Box games were true to that.
This has basically been SOP for many MMOGs, especially the ones that come out of Sony/Verant's stable. Asheron's Call 2, Anarchy Online, Everquest several times over the years, Star Wars Galaxies... If the players are lucky, the developers will admit that things need to be fixed and will actually work to fix them. If they're not, then they'll get to sit back and be told that 'X is working as intended', where X might be the Plane of Mischief, the Sleeper's Tomb, unlocking a new race for play, or the ability to smuggle contraband.
From one perspective, unfinished content or wonky mechanics might be considered acceptable: no plan survives contact with the enemy, and only long-term exposure to players will reveal flaws that need correcting. Unfortunately, timelines for fixes and adding content rarely survive contact with the players either-- dedicated groups of players are notorious for blazing through content at staggering speeds, and just as notorious for raising six kinds of Hell when they find the equivalent of an animated 'under construction' gif in place of their endgame content.
Sure, but when run of the mill bandits are running around in a king's ransom worth of equipment, and perfectly mundane animals are suddenly a match for an entire conscript army, there's a teensy problem with your design. Welcome to a lazily balanced tabletop D&D game.
...because it was developed using Chinese labour, and we all know how well that one turned out. No creative spark, no real connection with the audience, and a bunch of guys working to the rule without question or concern. That's fantastic for mass-producing (or knocking off) consumer goods, but rather less so when trying to develop something that appeals to emotion like game-play.
Politics and gaming? No, this is more like politics and politics-- the near-forgotten scandals of Reagan's Iran-Contra shenanigans, mated to more recent rumblings about class-based conflicts and paranoid militias. Really, the only thing that this guy's done is replace the usual lousy hodge-podge of space-alien myths with slightly more down-to-earth conspiracy theories.
You're shooting at American soldiers. Ooh, edgy. It's not like we haven't been gunning virtual marines down since Half-Life.
Come on, this should be a no-brainer. Google, Youtube and Amazon are privately owned, privately administered and privately funded organizations. They are no more obligated to keep the videos of controversial speakers on line, or engage in conversation with people who have animal-rights concerns than anyone is obligated to read this post, or Slashdot is obligated to prevent it from being deleted. There is no contract implied here beyond a social one; said speaker can take his videos to other sites, and people who have a problem with Amazon selling cock-fighting magazines can take their business elsewhere. If Slashdot banned me for whatever reason, I could continue to post on Kuro5, or Digg, or any other equally private site that would let me in.
Not the last that I heard. If Valve is crossing their fingers and hoping for a worthwhile number of users to switch to Vista, they're aiming a howitzer at their collective foot.
That's the part that they'd rather not have you think about, because under the banner of copyright and intellectual property that they wave, things become rather... murky. Murkier still than LL data-mining in-game instant messages and conversations, and somehow even murkier than them handing out summary bans for suspicion of L$ laundering or anything else that puts a bug up a Linden's ass.
In a word? Joe Schmoe is fucked. If he has the script code, the textures and the other components of whatever he made in SL on his hard drive, then there's nothing stopping him from translating it into another program or medium... aside from the lack of similar environments, that is. If he didn't cash his virtual earnings out before being banned, then they're stuck in limbo-- on a similar note, Linden Labs doesn't give refunds for prepaid in-service land (read: server storage) fees either.
Ideally though, Joe Schmoe is a good Second Citizen who doesn't perpetrate Grey Goo attacks, sim crashes or other antisocial acts. On the same tack, Joe's neighbors are not inclined to press the complaint button at the slightest nudge, or frame him for any of the numerous things that the Lindens don't care for. Joe had better take care that he doesn't attract the attention of a Linden while he's at it, because several of their live support team members (read: GMs) have proven to be less than ethical when it comes to people that they take a dislike to. And on the off chance that Joe is banned, he'll need to find himself the phone number of Philip Linden or one of the high-ups in support, because Linden Labs has a history of ignoring e-mails from banned persons and their phone-drone support leaves much to be desired as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall using 'goo' as a username for a similar result. The version that a friend had (hacked, unsurprisingly) came with a bank account viewer/editor too, but I'm not sure that it came stock with the game or not.
As for 'it's a beta', that does nothing to explain why little has been done to improve what's still there. I wouldn't have commented on any of that, save for the fact that things like the sour spot, and Grandville's godawful geometry and the like are such common complaints that they've become running jokes... much like 'it runs fine on my machine' 'rebuttals'.
It took them close to a year to clean up the mess that was Arachnos laboratory maps-- in every one, there was a 'sour spot' that would cause virtually any machine to hang for ten to thirty seconds, presumably as a combination of poorly optimized textures, LoD nightmares (much of those maps is semi-transparent, so occlusion culling has a markedly reduced effect than it does on other indoor maps) and the geometry holes that are still there to this day. New content like the Universities are particularly awful-- when I enter one on my machine, the poor thing chugs for a minute while the shaders visibly load in texture by texture, and repeat the process when I turn to survey the scene.
Before the universities became active, there was a bug that would allow you to fly under the geometry in one of the city zones where there was one; CoX simulates indoor chambers in world zones by placing them under the accessible map, so by going under the geometry you could see the inside of a store, with NPCs standing around and PCs flitting about willy-nilly. Using that bug, I flew over to the University for a sneak peek... and as soon as I was close enough for it to load, my frame-rates dropped right into the toilet.
They do have an interesting take on PVP though, one that would allow you to literally play the other side-- maxed-level monster characters, that could be improved with points earned by doing things in the contested, max-level region. No starting off as a level one hatchling or any of that stuff-- you're spawn of Shelob (or a particularly rabid warg, or what have you), and you're already a threat to whatever comes into your domain. PCs know that they're in for a fight when they see a named monster (or a whole swarm of them...) out there, because there aren't AI weaknesses to exploit... just the crafty mind of another player. Sure you have to hit level ten with a regular PC, in order to get access to that stuff, but that's a far cry from having to get to level forty (or whatever) as a PC. Hop on, join some other monsters in fighting the bad fight, and log off for dinner. No battleground waiting lists, no grinding-to-gank, no having to worry about having the best gear to survive.
Star Wars Galaxies has gone from 'flawed, but promising' to 'what has science wrought?!' over the course of its existence, a stunning reversal of the usual trend to launch with missing content and patch in later, to launching with missing content and tearing most of what's left out later. Servers are ghost towns, good going there, guys.
Anarchy Online has had more ups and downs than a roller coaster (abysmal beta, spectacularly awful launch, promised lore/television/multimedia tie-ins that failed to materialize... and a free year of basic play offer to bolster subscription numbers), but at least Age of Conan has some interesting gimmicks planned for it.
WoW may be simplistic compared to its predecessors and competitors, but it's been as well-produced as any other Blizzard product-- that is to say, polished to an eye-searing shine. In order to pull the same thing off, their competitors will need to get out of the 'launch first, patch later' mindset, which will absolutely require the trust of the people that fund the projects. Without that element of risk-taking on their part, there's no way that any development team will be able to pull the same thing off. All of that development and polish takes time and effort, which are fueled by money... and the precedent of shipping something that runs, rather than something that shines is still much stronger than WoW's literally phenomenal success.
Given that fans of Myst: Uru constructed an island that recreates the Neighborhood and one of the Ages remarkably faithfully, I'd say it's entirely possible that no Square/Enix employees or funding were involved with SL's Midgar parcel.
The W-Hat crew in Baku region have had a two-way IRC-SL link for ages now.
No kidding. "Was simple gaming better, or are you a story in games fan?" What the Hell kind of question is that? Story-wise, something like Unreal Tournament Foo has about as much story as the booklet that came with a Berzerk cartridge, while games like Ultima V (playable on Apple II, CGA-equipped PC and other beyond-elderly hardware) kick the unholy Hell out of cliched fantasy crap like Neverwinter Nights' original campaign.
If Sony really wants to push it though, they'll just include the functionality in a firmware update and claim that the money's going to subsidize new game development. Their online entertainment arm has been pulling that sort of thing with Planetside and Matrix Online for ages now.
The only issue that I could see is if this fellow's supporters are astroturfing in order to expose more people to his Youtube spots, and even the effects of something like that would be debatable.
Seriously, for a machine intended as a user-friendly, entry-level computer, its form factor left much to be desired. It was squat, would pitch a fit if the mouse wasn't connected on boot (a first for consumer PCs at the time), and its front edges looked like a cartoon shark. Saw-toothed flanges halfway down the front of the main box, hard and sharp-looking corners, and a weirdly sock-bent monitor screamed "I'll bite you!" and "Don't try to pick me up!" It was like the Hyde to the Mac's Jekyll.
Given the abysmal sales and retention rates of Auto Assault, and the server consolidations that have resulted from both, I'm really surprised that anyone was crazy enough to finance their pursuit of such a lucrative license.
How did things go against the World Crime League, Mr. Banzai?
His username is a pseudonym. His claimed credentials are a fraud.
I'm not sure why people make this claim, because turn-based and automatically-pausing-simultaneous-activity are not the same things. I'll reiterate: By the time a spell effect goes off in the Infinity Engine, most of the targets have already vacated the area. That may be realistic, but it's not D&D.
D&D has always had its roots in wargaming, from complex range, movement and initiative rules in earlier editions, to the numerous tactical combat examples in 3E and 3.5. In that way at least, the Gold Box games were true to that.
From one perspective, unfinished content or wonky mechanics might be considered acceptable: no plan survives contact with the enemy, and only long-term exposure to players will reveal flaws that need correcting. Unfortunately, timelines for fixes and adding content rarely survive contact with the players either-- dedicated groups of players are notorious for blazing through content at staggering speeds, and just as notorious for raising six kinds of Hell when they find the equivalent of an animated 'under construction' gif in place of their endgame content.
Sure, but when run of the mill bandits are running around in a king's ransom worth of equipment, and perfectly mundane animals are suddenly a match for an entire conscript army, there's a teensy problem with your design. Welcome to a lazily balanced tabletop D&D game.
...because it was developed using Chinese labour, and we all know how well that one turned out. No creative spark, no real connection with the audience, and a bunch of guys working to the rule without question or concern. That's fantastic for mass-producing (or knocking off) consumer goods, but rather less so when trying to develop something that appeals to emotion like game-play.
You're shooting at American soldiers. Ooh, edgy. It's not like we haven't been gunning virtual marines down since Half-Life.
GameFAQs has done that as a matter of course, for a very long time now. It isn't a conspiracy to keep people from finding the script.
Come on, this should be a no-brainer. Google, Youtube and Amazon are privately owned, privately administered and privately funded organizations. They are no more obligated to keep the videos of controversial speakers on line, or engage in conversation with people who have animal-rights concerns than anyone is obligated to read this post, or Slashdot is obligated to prevent it from being deleted. There is no contract implied here beyond a social one; said speaker can take his videos to other sites, and people who have a problem with Amazon selling cock-fighting magazines can take their business elsewhere. If Slashdot banned me for whatever reason, I could continue to post on Kuro5, or Digg, or any other equally private site that would let me in.
Given that the setting and trappings of God of War are Classical greek, chances are that he's fighting the original colossus.
In a word? Joe Schmoe is fucked. If he has the script code, the textures and the other components of whatever he made in SL on his hard drive, then there's nothing stopping him from translating it into another program or medium... aside from the lack of similar environments, that is. If he didn't cash his virtual earnings out before being banned, then they're stuck in limbo-- on a similar note, Linden Labs doesn't give refunds for prepaid in-service land (read: server storage) fees either.
Ideally though, Joe Schmoe is a good Second Citizen who doesn't perpetrate Grey Goo attacks, sim crashes or other antisocial acts. On the same tack, Joe's neighbors are not inclined to press the complaint button at the slightest nudge, or frame him for any of the numerous things that the Lindens don't care for. Joe had better take care that he doesn't attract the attention of a Linden while he's at it, because several of their live support team members (read: GMs) have proven to be less than ethical when it comes to people that they take a dislike to. And on the off chance that Joe is banned, he'll need to find himself the phone number of Philip Linden or one of the high-ups in support, because Linden Labs has a history of ignoring e-mails from banned persons and their phone-drone support leaves much to be desired as well.