Can anyone give me a valid reason why games like this should even be produced?
Umm...that would be because lots of well-adjusted individuals who can separate fantasy from reality actually enjoy games like this. It's called freedom of choice. You choose not to play these games, others do. What's next on the banlist - a game where you have to check the coast is clear before you kill someone and hide the body, or maybe a book where the same thing is described.
Do we really need this kind of reckless abandon in our games?
with the great majority of people suffering more and more mental illnesses for whatever reason, do you want someone already on the edge to have this material?
(a) It's not the great majority - it may, however be an increasing minority. These games, however, are in all probability not the cause of this increase. (b) No - I want them to have the proper treatment, not to be pumped full of drugs, shunned by the state and thrown out onto the streets. Arrange the order as appropriate.
Umm - you're the original creator of minesweeper? Nope, I doubt it. You created something that is as fun as minesweeper but is neither minesweeper nor a derivation thereof? Again, I doubt it (though admit the possibility). Or are you saying that it takes two days to fully copy minesweeper, plus add some stuff in that you thought of whilst killing time sat at your desk playing the original minesweeper. (checks website linked from your profile) - yup, that's closer to the truth.
So, to summarize, 2 man days, $585 USD loss. Extrapolate to a 20 person team for 18 months.....call it 46 weeks per person per year sat at work...that's...1380 man weeks....6900 man days....a little over a $4 mill USD loss. It's not *that* out of the way for most large scale productions that fail when they hit the market.
Make a game on a shoestring or make a game with a large scale production. It's all the same risk, it just takes someone with bigger pockets to put their trust in you and your colleagues for the top flight titles.
How did this get modded insightful? Funny, maybe, with the Monkey Island reference, but insightful?
FYI, the world static apnea, or breathholding, record stands at over nine minutes. Herbert Nitsch set it at the end of last year. Last summer whilst working as a Divemaster in Cyprus I worked my way up to 3.5 minutes with comparatively little effort, so I can well believe GP capable of five.
But it should have done. Extend the "county law" analogy a little. It is illegal to sell alcohol in Bridgewater, CO. Were someone to sell you alcohol in Bridgewater, they would be subject to punishment under the law. Were a citizen on Bridgewater to travel to, say, Miami and drink, they would not be breaking the law, neither would the bartender. Should the bartender be subject to arrest were he to visit Bridgewater? Ignorance of the law is indeed no excuse - however no laws were broken by these individuals. This is the point.
As an aside, WRT the firearms, you would not be arrested for violating a law of illegal importation of a firearm. You are not importing in this case - you are exporting. This is the point. Your liability ends once the goods travel properly through customs at your end. Provided you have valid export licenses in place you're in the clear. It's precisely this manner that allowed British arms manufacturers to (allegedly) supply arms to countries on the prohibited list in the 80s and 90s - the arms would be routed through successively more lax countries so no prohibition were expressly broken.
And indeed your lack of customs knowledge astounds me.
If I order a gun from you (assuming you were in the US, though I doubt it from the flamebait at the end of your posting), the responsibility for knowing the appropriate local legislation of import and posession of that item lies with me, not you.
Now, there may be *export* regulations in the US that would apply to you, but as long as you comply with them, you are completely in the clear when landing on the soil of the country of destination (at least in the Free West that lies to the East of you). *You* may *expect* to possibly be arrested, but it wouldn't happen.
The company isn't running an online casino. Not that there's anything wrong with that in the UK. The company is running an electronic wallet service. These guys aren't even working for the company - they are shareholders. Major shareholders, admittedly, but only shareholders nonetheless. This is the equivalent of the Feds arresting shareholders of Ebay FFS! When they were running the company, what they were doing was perfectly legal at the time even in the US. This sucks. This is the suckiest suck that ever sucks.
This is the like the US introducing legislation next year making the use of the phrase "This is the suckiest suck that ever sucks." illegal on US soil, me then travelling *via* the US, and getting arrested for *this* post.
This is the suckiest suck that ever sucks! - See how I'm tempting fate here?
All the WMV videos I have seen look like shit; why would I pay for a codec?
Ah...now see, you're probably trying to view them on a linux system using wine to wrap up the native windows codecs. That could well be the reason why your WMV experience is up-til-now sub-optimal. I read somewhere about a company that was going to sell some native linux codecs. I *think* they were called Fluendo or something like that. Anyway, that should sort you out.
I believe that the difference lies in the fact that CPR-Kontoret does not actually hold both your medical records and your criminal record. The CPR number is merely a shared key-field, so that the information *can* be cross-referenced.
The problem with having the data centrally housed is that the security systems in place could be breached, and once they were it would make abuse of that breach a far greater problem.
I'm a British ex-pat, currently living in Denmark. The CPR doesn't bother me at all. This latest in a long line of Blair's policies scares the bejeezus (sp?) out of me. I'm sure that it does the same to a lot of people here on/. that are still in the UK - have you noticed how many of them have posted on this story as ACs?
It just goes to reassure me that I made the right decision to leave when I did. Now if only I didn't have to pay quite so much damned tax;-)
Also, I can't see how they can guarantee anything down to a single clock cycle, even with extremely hardware-specifc OS running the code. This is truly painful just to think about.
A dream to some....a nightmare to others! Some of the old fogies out there may remember removing the side borders on a C=64. This was achieved using exactly this method. In case you're wondering, and to give you some idea of how involved this kind of thing is, it was done roughly like this (dredged from 21-year old memories, so forgive me if I get something slightly wrong;-) )
You knew how long it took the display to h-scan, so waited for it to get to the edge of the border, flipped the width of the screen at this exact point then flipped it back one tick later. You then killed time waiting for the next line. The upshot of which was the VIC-II chip got all confused so forgot to blank the edges and would show any sprites that were "offscreen". The tricky part was when the timings changed every 8 raster lines on account of the extra data fetch for the next line of characters to display.
But basically, when you control the horizontal and the vertical (and any other hardware and software) you can pretty much do any insane things you want to, with the right mindset;-) Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my afternoon nap. And can someone get those darn kids of my lawn?
Short answer: You're wrong. Less-short Answer: Torque-X is a port of TGB sat on top of XNA. Long Answer: XNA is a gaming framework sat on XP or x360.
XNA Game Studio Express is a free (as in beer, not as in code) solution for developing managed directX applications on XP (unofficial support for Vista). You can also deploy your application on your Xbox360 if you pay MS $100 per year. (Note - this also gets you access to lots of content to use in your app).
Torque X is a free (as in scripting code, or as in all code - if you get the Pro/Commercial license, not as in beer) port of Torque Game Builder to XNA. You need XNA Game Developer Studio to develop with it (I believe...been to busy to check it out up 'til now). You don't need to pay a bean to distribute it over and above ensuring you have the correct Torque license.
These are both different things to TGB, although you can certainly release the same game under linux, x360, pc, mac. Porting TGB to ps3 linux, however, will sux0r big style as you only have access to the framebuffer, not the 3d accelerated hardware.
25.4mm is not the "old" definition - inches are still in widespread use, especially in the print industry where DPI (dots per inch) still rules. TV manufacturers notwithstanding, there is precisely one definition of an inch. This was defined in the UK Weights and Measures Acts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_unit, and for our ex-colonial cousins in the Mendenhall Order http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order. You'll see that the yard is defined as 0.9144m in both systems, and note that 1 inch is 1/36 of a yard. Incidentally, the speed of light is derived from the metre, not the other way round (hence the rather bizarre non-decimal calculation). The metre is a derivation of the circumference of the earth measured from pole to pole.
From what reality do you hail? An inch is 25.4 mm long. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=convert+1+i nch+to+mm Sheesh - you come from Britland for heavens sake. We only officially ditched imperial for metric a scant 33 years ago. What are they teaching you young whippersnappers in school these days?
Oh, and would you mind getting off my lawn? Thanks awfully.
Nintendo Wii, sexy - but white? please don't be apple - black thanks
Black thanks? No, please don't be Sony. If anything it should be DMG Gray;-) The white was IMO a really good move on Ninty's part. Nintendo are trying to appeal to the non-traditional gamer (read: your mum). Looking like Apple is a Good Thing(tm) for them. It differentiates the Wii from one of those scary hard-core console things and makes it more like an iPod. Crossing the great divide and getting non-gamers to try the thing is the first step to Ninty potentially reclaiming the market position they last had in the days of the SNES. The outward appearance of the system, especially the Wii-mote is critical to this first acceptance.
I for one welcome our soon-to-be-returning plumbing overlords!:-)
PS3, uglier and less practical than PS2 - Shiny was a dumb move but also not downright ghastly
I agree wrt Shiny. They went downhill after Messiah. I mean - the QA on Enter the Matrix was atrocious!
Xbox 360, good god - I will not purchase this for my home theatre cabinet till it comes in black, period.
Now, for every console you can generate a public/private key pair where the console holds the private key (without knowing what the public key is) and the service holds the public key (and keeps it secret). The result would be that you'd have to hack the online service in order to get the public keys to transfer the already signed rom to another console; not the easiest thing to do.
This was my point. The online service is accessable to the g.p. so would be theoretically open to t3h l33t h4x0rZ. Ninty (or anyone) would not under any circumstances what the key to fall into nefarious hands.
If you're generating a unique key-pair for each console, then this is another area of possible exploit. There'd be a difference between two identical systems based solely on this key pair. Remember that part of copy protection is protection-by-obscurity. Making it more apparent where the protection system lies is a big hint to t3h h4x0rZ as to where to look to break it.
The only redeeming factor would be that seeing as this is an online operation, they would be theoretically able to change the signing key, change the setup on you box you through a system update, and lock out any roms signed by the old system, whilst at the same time providing you with fresh shiny new copies of the legit. ones you bought. Huge bandwidth issue I grant you, but still cheaper than leaving the system wide open.
...on top of that (being that each game is only usable on one particular system) it is possible that Nintendo signs the signed code for each console when you buy a game. Now, unless the system is physically cracked, I think that it is nearly impossible to break this system.
I find it doubtful that Nintendo would do this. This would be putting the private signing key on a theoretically publically accessable network. You wouldn't believe how tightly guarded signing processes are - it's normally only 2 or 3 people in the world that have access to it. The implications for are far too great for them to even contemplate that approach. But I do agree with you that it's not going to be easily cracked, by any means.
Pretty much yeah - my guess is that even though New Line are legally entitled to make The Hobbit prior to the license revoking, given this news that PJ will film it with Tolkien Enterprises (assuming he confirms it, of course) will pretty much scupper that. After all, it's the Jackson/WETA name that would put bums on seats rather than the New Line name. I mean, which would you go to see? A rush-job put out so NL could monopolize on the license before it expired, or a piece where Jackson *and* Tolkien Enterprises paid the proper respect to the IP? Thanks for the offer of a Big Mac, but I don't want to ruin my appetite.
May I be the first to suggest that the props team make all the weaponry from Damascus steel http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/1 6/2348254. That way they can join in the rest of us with the huge collective "w00tz" at this news!
Slashdot Mirror
I think the whole point of this is that they have decided that you can't beat them.
(b) No - I want them to have the proper treatment, not to be pumped full of drugs, shunned by the state and thrown out onto the streets. Arrange the order as appropriate.
Umm - you're the original creator of minesweeper? Nope, I doubt it. You created something that is as fun as minesweeper but is neither minesweeper nor a derivation thereof? Again, I doubt it (though admit the possibility). Or are you saying that it takes two days to fully copy minesweeper, plus add some stuff in that you thought of whilst killing time sat at your desk playing the original minesweeper. (checks website linked from your profile) - yup, that's closer to the truth.
So, to summarize, 2 man days, $585 USD loss. Extrapolate to a 20 person team for 18 months.....call it 46 weeks per person per year sat at work...that's...1380 man weeks....6900 man days....a little over a $4 mill USD loss. It's not *that* out of the way for most large scale productions that fail when they hit the market.
Make a game on a shoestring or make a game with a large scale production. It's all the same risk, it just takes someone with bigger pockets to put their trust in you and your colleagues for the top flight titles.
Yeah - but it wasn't *that* funny. Not karma-earning funny, anyways.
Thanks for the warm reset, by the way.
How did this get modded insightful? Funny, maybe, with the Monkey Island reference, but insightful?
FYI, the world static apnea, or breathholding, record stands at over nine minutes. Herbert Nitsch set it at the end of last year. Last summer whilst working as a Divemaster in Cyprus I worked my way up to 3.5 minutes with comparatively little effort, so I can well believe GP capable of five.
But it should have done. Extend the "county law" analogy a little. It is illegal to sell alcohol in Bridgewater, CO. Were someone to sell you alcohol in Bridgewater, they would be subject to punishment under the law. Were a citizen on Bridgewater to travel to, say, Miami and drink, they would not be breaking the law, neither would the bartender. Should the bartender be subject to arrest were he to visit Bridgewater? Ignorance of the law is indeed no excuse - however no laws were broken by these individuals. This is the point.
As an aside, WRT the firearms, you would not be arrested for violating a law of illegal importation of a firearm. You are not importing in this case - you are exporting. This is the point. Your liability ends once the goods travel properly through customs at your end. Provided you have valid export licenses in place you're in the clear. It's precisely this manner that allowed British arms manufacturers to (allegedly) supply arms to countries on the prohibited list in the 80s and 90s - the arms would be routed through successively more lax countries so no prohibition were expressly broken.
And indeed your lack of customs knowledge astounds me.
If I order a gun from you (assuming you were in the US, though I doubt it from the flamebait at the end of your posting), the responsibility for knowing the appropriate local legislation of import and posession of that item lies with me, not you.
Now, there may be *export* regulations in the US that would apply to you, but as long as you comply with them, you are completely in the clear when landing on the soil of the country of destination (at least in the Free West that lies to the East of you). *You* may *expect* to possibly be arrested, but it wouldn't happen.
The company isn't running an online casino. Not that there's anything wrong with that in the UK.
The company is running an electronic wallet service. These guys aren't even working for the company - they are shareholders. Major shareholders, admittedly, but only shareholders nonetheless. This is the equivalent of the Feds arresting shareholders of Ebay FFS!
When they were running the company, what they were doing was perfectly legal at the time even in the US. This sucks. This is the suckiest suck that ever sucks.
This is the like the US introducing legislation next year making the use of the phrase "This is the suckiest suck that ever sucks." illegal on US soil, me then travelling *via* the US, and getting arrested for *this* post.
This is the suckiest suck that ever sucks! - See how I'm tempting fate here?
Ah...now see, you're probably trying to view them on a linux system using wine to wrap up the native windows codecs. That could well be the reason why your WMV experience is up-til-now sub-optimal. I read somewhere about a company that was going to sell some native linux codecs. I *think* they were called Fluendo or something like that. Anyway, that should sort you out.
Hope this helps,
It does - that's my point. Lovely country, great beer, just hellishly expensive. Ah well - you get what you pay for
I believe that the difference lies in the fact that CPR-Kontoret does not actually hold both your medical records and your criminal record. The CPR number is merely a shared key-field, so that the information *can* be cross-referenced.
/. that are still in the UK - have you noticed how many of them have posted on this story as ACs?
;-)
The problem with having the data centrally housed is that the security systems in place could be breached, and once they were it would make abuse of that breach a far greater problem.
I'm a British ex-pat, currently living in Denmark. The CPR doesn't bother me at all. This latest in a long line of Blair's policies scares the bejeezus (sp?) out of me. I'm sure that it does the same to a lot of people here on
It just goes to reassure me that I made the right decision to leave when I did. Now if only I didn't have to pay quite so much damned tax
That'll be primitive countries like the UK, will it?
Unfortunately the +5 funny gains zero karma, the -1 troll loses a point.
Go figure.
A dream to some....a nightmare to others! Some of the old fogies out there may remember removing the side borders on a C=64. This was achieved using exactly this method.
In case you're wondering, and to give you some idea of how involved this kind of thing is, it was done roughly like this (dredged from 21-year old memories, so forgive me if I get something slightly wrong
You knew how long it took the display to h-scan, so waited for it to get to the edge of the border, flipped the width of the screen at this exact point then flipped it back one tick later. You then killed time waiting for the next line.
The upshot of which was the VIC-II chip got all confused so forgot to blank the edges and would show any sprites that were "offscreen". The tricky part was when the timings changed every 8 raster lines on account of the extra data fetch for the next line of characters to display.
But basically, when you control the horizontal and the vertical (and any other hardware and software) you can pretty much do any insane things you want to, with the right mindset
Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my afternoon nap. And can someone get those darn kids of my lawn?
What rubbish - the only way to win is not to play!
On account of the two spelling mistakes in the one line, I'm almost certain this qualifies as a future
Short answer: You're wrong.
:)
Less-short Answer: Torque-X is a port of TGB sat on top of XNA.
Long Answer:
XNA is a gaming framework sat on XP or x360.
XNA Game Studio Express is a free (as in beer, not as in code) solution for developing managed directX applications on XP (unofficial support for Vista). You can also deploy your application on your Xbox360 if you pay MS $100 per year. (Note - this also gets you access to lots of content to use in your app).
Torque X is a free (as in scripting code, or as in all code - if you get the Pro/Commercial license, not as in beer) port of Torque Game Builder to XNA. You need XNA Game Developer Studio to develop with it (I believe...been to busy to check it out up 'til now). You don't need to pay a bean to distribute it over and above ensuring you have the correct Torque license.
These are both different things to TGB, although you can certainly release the same game under linux, x360, pc, mac. Porting TGB to ps3 linux, however, will sux0r big style as you only have access to the framebuffer, not the 3d accelerated hardware.
So....you're wrong.
Hope this helps
Ask Maria from West Side Story. She feels pretty.
25.4mm is not the "old" definition - inches are still in widespread use, especially in the print industry where DPI (dots per inch) still rules.
TV manufacturers notwithstanding, there is precisely one definition of an inch. This was defined in the UK Weights and Measures Acts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_unit, and for our ex-colonial cousins in the Mendenhall Order http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order. You'll see that the yard is defined as 0.9144m in both systems, and note that 1 inch is 1/36 of a yard.
Incidentally, the speed of light is derived from the metre, not the other way round (hence the rather bizarre non-decimal calculation). The metre is a derivation of the circumference of the earth measured from pole to pole.
From what reality do you hail? An inch is 25.4 mm long. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=convert+1+i nch+to+mm
Sheesh - you come from Britland for heavens sake. We only officially ditched imperial for metric a scant 33 years ago. What are they teaching you young whippersnappers in school these days?
Oh, and would you mind getting off my lawn? Thanks awfully.
Black thanks? No, please don't be Sony. If anything it should be DMG Gray
Nintendo are trying to appeal to the non-traditional gamer (read: your mum). Looking like Apple is a Good Thing(tm) for them. It differentiates the Wii from one of those scary hard-core console things and makes it more like an iPod.
Crossing the great divide and getting non-gamers to try the thing is the first step to Ninty potentially reclaiming the market position they last had in the days of the SNES. The outward appearance of the system, especially the Wii-mote is critical to this first acceptance.
I for one welcome our soon-to-be-returning plumbing overlords!
I agree wrt Shiny. They went downhill after Messiah. I mean - the QA on Enter the Matrix was atrocious!
A faceplate http://www.play.com/Games/Xbox360/4-/819464/Joyte
or alternatively a full skin http://www.decalgirl.com/browse.cfm/4,3974.htm should sort you out. Enjoy your shopping trip! Oh, and when you pick one up, don't forget to use it as an audio CD player - the visualiser was written by Jeff Minter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter
This was my point. The online service is accessable to the g.p. so would be theoretically open to t3h l33t h4x0rZ. Ninty (or anyone) would not under any circumstances what the key to fall into nefarious hands.
If you're generating a unique key-pair for each console, then this is another area of possible exploit. There'd be a difference between two identical systems based solely on this key pair. Remember that part of copy protection is protection-by-obscurity. Making it more apparent where the protection system lies is a big hint to t3h h4x0rZ as to where to look to break it.
The only redeeming factor would be that seeing as this is an online operation, they would be theoretically able to change the signing key, change the setup on you box you through a system update, and lock out any roms signed by the old system, whilst at the same time providing you with fresh shiny new copies of the legit. ones you bought. Huge bandwidth issue I grant you, but still cheaper than leaving the system wide open.
I find it doubtful that Nintendo would do this. This would be putting the private signing key on a theoretically publically accessable network. You wouldn't believe how tightly guarded signing processes are - it's normally only 2 or 3 people in the world that have access to it. The implications for are far too great for them to even contemplate that approach. But I do agree with you that it's not going to be easily cracked, by any means.
Pretty much yeah - my guess is that even though New Line are legally entitled to make The Hobbit prior to the license revoking, given this news that PJ will film it with Tolkien Enterprises (assuming he confirms it, of course) will pretty much scupper that.
After all, it's the Jackson/WETA name that would put bums on seats rather than the New Line name. I mean, which would you go to see? A rush-job put out so NL could monopolize on the license before it expired, or a piece where Jackson *and* Tolkien Enterprises paid the proper respect to the IP? Thanks for the offer of a Big Mac, but I don't want to ruin my appetite.
May I be the first to suggest that the props team make all the weaponry from Damascus steel http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/1 6/2348254. That way they can join in the rest of us with the huge collective "w00tz" at this news!