I call B.S. I grew up with 1st edition. 4th has countless modifiers to every aspect.
It wouldn't be a new edition if it was the same...
Another ridiculous characteristic is a large number of "powers" for melee classes. Give me a break. I look at my wizard, and see my daughter's Ranger has a similar number of powers. It's garbage.
This is intentional. Spellcasters don't need to sleep after every encounter to recharge spells any more, weapon-focussed classes now have some choice about what they do each turn (instead of "I attack the closest guy" "I attack the closest guy again" "I attack again" "again" "again" "again"... "ok bored now"). It's a massive improvement. I'll grant you that some of the "powers" for melee classes are a bit dodgy, smelling suspiciously like magic, but mostly they're a welcome choice.
4th edition is modeled closely to MMOs and similar games. Every one has a tray of "powers", and you are a striker, healer, aoe caster, or defender.
Garbage.
It's modelled closely on successful RPG systems. The fact that they are mostly computer games is beside the point. The "roles" are just guidelines, to help new players understand the classes, you can largely ignore them.
I'm not trying to change your opinion of the edition, just stating the popular opinion about it. If you prefer 1st ed, feel free to keep playing that (if you can find anyone else who agrees with you).
So placing a DLL in the same folder as the associated file doesn't do anything. You have to put it in the same folder as the executable, which is (as of Vista and Windows 7) write-protected.
With XP it is a lot easier because the Program Files directory structure is not protected and it was common to have applications writing stuff there, so you couldn't protect it. As of Vista the rules changed and you can't write there anymore.
Actually it's write-protected in XP as well, as long as you don't use the FAT32 filesystem (so per-user file permissions actually exist) and as long as you're not running as admin (which nearly everyone did on their home PCs, but in organisations most people aren't). Vista basically changed the system from "local admin user = root" to "local admin user = sudoer".
For 4e I use the 3 core books, and the adventurer's vault for magic item ideas (the core books are a bit lacking on this). I got the first campaign (keep on the shadowfell, before the 4e core books were released?), but we never finished it. It's so much more satisfying to play a free-flowing campaign that the DM makes up, than a pre-written one.
What would be really nice though, for when I run a minatures-based game, would be being able to buy a pack of e.g. "10 zombies", instead of those damn random packs. Especially with the "minion" monsters in 4e, that encourage larger encounters.
Roleplay isn't something you can really put in or take out of the rules. Whether you get roleplay or not depends more on the group you're playing with. For example, one of the (4e) encounters I set up for a group recently went something like this: Party is doing the usual killing thing in a ruined keep, and finds a note in a chest revealing that someone is to meet with a cultist that night to hand over an artifact (elsewhere in the ruins was an excavation, down into a room below that was now empty. Hint hint.). They decide that the best way to proceed is to make a fake artifact (not knowing what it looks like didn't stop them), go to the meeting, and try to get some more information out of the cultist guy. They even try to get the reward for handing over their fake, but narrowly avoid being stabbed instead. Then they tie the cultist guy up, borrow his cloak and pretend to be him when the guy with the real artifact comes.
They could have handled it several other ways, including attacking him to get the artifact, or following him back after he gets the artifact and stealing it, etc. but they chose the roleplaying route and it worked out amazingly well for them. The fact that it was 4e wasn't a barrier to the roleplaying at all, despite what people say about d&d having been made into a hack&slash.
Equally good at everything != Awesome at everything.
He absolutely sucked at a lot of non-combat skills, his AC wasn't great (wizard, can't use metal armour, though thick dragonborn skin helped) and combat wise he was much better used against swarms of minions than against stronger individual enemies (typical wizard). When I say hitting with his staff was as strong as most of his spells, that's ignoring the range and area effects on the spells, and I should be clear that hitting with his staff comes nowhere near what a true fighter is capable of.
He wasn't some kind of super do-everything-awesome character, I'm just saying he had flavour, and you don't have to stick to the expected class for a race to get a good character.
I meant to do something with the idea of the pit being illusionary. Or the spikes. I'm not saying the players wouldn't die, just that it wouldn't be straightforward:)
And you don't have to look at a dragonborn and think "well they're only good for being a stupid fighter type", the classic "race that can only really be one class". I played a dragonborn wizard for a while, a character who could do as much damage hitting someone with his staff as he could with most of his spells. At one point he was chained up, and escaped by breaking the chains holding him through a sheer feat of strength. Not many wizards can claim to have done that XD
Extra standard action, which can be substituted for a move or minor action as per the usual rules. Though you normally get some other effect with it, like temporary health, and some abilities allow for spending them to cause other effects (IIRC).
I tend to play without them, because people always forget about them anyway, and it's hard to explain exactly what they're supposed to be.
Yes it means "Integrated Drive Electronics", not it doesn't mean any drive with a circuit, or even any drive with an onboard controller. It was the name of a specific interface, which is also known these days as Parallel ATA.
1: MicroSD only goes up to 32GB, and is actually the limit of MicroSDHC. The standard to go above that (expected to be MicroSDXC, based on SDXC) is yet to exist. 2: The MicroSD interface is limited to 100Mb/s, so the 160Mb/s couldn't be had from MicroSD at all
Other than that, yeah, it's just the same data chip as they probably already had but with a sata device-side chip integrated.
What about Diablo II? Server-side persistent characters, servers can't be hosted by players (at least officially), both PvE and PvP play...
No, the true definition of an MMO is very large numbers of players being in the same game world at once. In a strategy game that could be ownership of small territories on a large world map. In an RPG it means literally many characters in the world.
I have: email password (unique) work password (unique, fecking secure) secure password (used for home pc and websites which have my debit card details saved or otherwise need really strong security. Should probably separate this into more than one password) insecure password (used for forums etc. Not actually insecure, but so many sites know it I should probably consider it compromised and start using a new one)
Maybe google's just setting up a dedicated link between themselves and Verizon? The article basically just says "google will be paying verizon to speed up youtube".
That would be entirely benign, and the article is so vague that it could include this.
It's easy in WIndows if you know what software to download, assuming that you know that you need to. On a Mac it's brain dead easy since the software is included.
Windows 7 can burn ISOs out of the box. As it's the most-sold version of Windows at the moment, making an ISO of the recovery disk available would work.
My comment on clocking cores higher was in reference to "Many games need strong core-individual performance". Multi-core chips now have this, where before the choice between a 3GHz single-core and a 2 GHz dual-core (for running single-threaded games) would have been easy.
As for memory bandwidth starvation, that isn't an issue if only one core is in use. It's not like idle cores use memory bandwidth just for the sake of it. And if all the cores are loaded with a memory-bound task, performance is no worse than if you had fewer cores...
No wonder there's not the problem there once was with IRQ conflicts, because there's not enough slots to make conflicts!
Also there are more IRQs (typically 24), IRQ sharing, and auto-assignment of IRQs. In this pc, the first 16 are all legacy device IRQs (this pc lists two ATA channels, the smbus controller, a "Numeric data processor" and two high precision timers), and the rest are PCI / PCI-e IRQs, with every PCI-e device on IRQ 16, and the USB controller (s?) using several IRQs. Out of those, only the onboard sound has an IRQ to itself, and yet there are no IRQ conflicts. Isn't progress great?
There are a couple of errors in what you've said: 1: The newer CPUs can switch between one fast core and multiple slower cores based on demand (they call it "turbo boost" / "turbo core"). This means that there isn't really any speed loss for a higher number of cores any more. 2: There would be no point in hyperthreading if it gave a guaranteed cut in performance like that. If only one of the two "virtual" (actually "hardware") threads is in use, the other one runs at full speed.
This adds up to meaning that there isn't normally a cut in single-thread performance for getting a cpu with more cores, unless you actually use them. And if you do load the other cores, the performance drop is much less than if you put that much load onto a single cpu core...
Wow, someone who knows what setting processor affinity is actually for: Fixing programs that break on a multicore machine.
I've seen it advertised as a way to increase performance in a single-threaded game, but it doesn't. If anything, it'll run a few fractions of a percent slower. Why? Because it's impossible to stop Windows using that core for anything else. Something will end up scheduled onto the "game's" core temporarily, kicking the game off, and instead of resuming immediately on another idle core (or the first to become idle) it will sit suspended. If you really screw up you'll have a cpu that handles hardware IRQs on one core, and you'll have set the game's affinity to that core, causing it to get interrupted constantly.
The real issue I see is memory access. Even with a single core did we run into memory bandwidth/latency bottleneck; with 4-6 cores those are 4-6 times as much. In the long run we have to give up Neumann architechture; it simply can't scale to our needs. A NUMA might be an acceptable compromise [...]
Perhaps inspiration needs to be taken from GPUs (specifically the recent GPGPUs). The GeForce GTX 480 is a 480-core gpu, divided up into 15 32-core "multiprocessors". Each multiprocessor has a small amount of local ram (64kB), which can be split between cache for main-ram and actual local-ram. It's not full NUMA, there is still a main large ram bank, but the processors also have extremely fast local memory.
I have two google accounts with the same email address. Specifically google docs...
I'll give you a moment to think about how that could have happened...
Give up?
The answer is that the email address is for a domain that uses google-apps for email and google docs, but didn't always have docs enabled. I already had a google account (for google docs) open with that email, so I now have one account in actual google docs and one in google apps docs for that domain.
As proof, if I click on the "documents" link inside the google docs email interface I get a page asking which docs account I want to go to (sorry, I blanked the actual email address).
This kind of problem seems to follow me around, because at one point I had yahoo, msn and google messenger accounts all with the same (BT) email address, which caused a lot of fun when the yahoo and msn networks were joined and I started losing messages because they'd go to the wrong messenger network.
Not sure you can compare this to Naruto. The anime show is following an already-written manga story, so there's no writing involved.
You're forgetting just how much of Naruto is "filler" stories, which do have to be written to keep up with the one-a-week schedule. They're actually a better comparison, because they are really short stories which don't depend on each other much, some only being one episode long.
For the actual development, they use a lot of tricks. They reuse graphics and soundtrack a lot.
I would imagine that there would be an incredible amount of asset re-use in STO, and using the same mission objectives as the ordinary missions (go here, kill these guys, scan that, etc) which makes for nearly total code re-use. And unlike a TV show, they don't have to record anything. There will be no new sounds, voice, video or animation data in these missions, you can count on that. (well, they might find the time to do a voice snippet or two)
They use tons of review and flashback scenes (as much as 5 minutes out of 20 sometimes; they get away with it if you watch one episode per week but it's ridiculously annoying if you save up several episodes and watch them back to back).
And an MMO can get away with padding missions with "walk to here" and "long grindy fight". There will be a lot of that. The missions will have only 5 minutes of real content, even if they take an hour to play!
They do lots of scenes that are 90% still images and the illusion of action is created by animating just a person's mouth and panning the "camera" around.
Compare with MMO NPC-dialogue boxes, where you just sit there and read through text. You won't even get the illusion of action, you'll be lucky if they bother to move the person's mouth.
Not to mention that the hi-tech animation techniques nowadays are very "grindy", repetitive and often automated.
Compare to a dev tool where you place down a few dozen spawn points and it does the work of making the enemies actually spawn and attack the player. It's also mostly automated, with just a little tweaking required to get it right. The backgrounds (levels) will either be re-used or have to be made, but that's no different either.
By contrast, STO would have to at least write and implement that new script every week. Whether they'd also have to do programming depends on how flexible their engine is. If it's been designed to be highly flexible they only have to use its features to set up the script. If it needs expanding each week... then they may have a problem.
There's no way they'll need to do programming every week. There will need to be a little mission scripting, and perhaps bugfixes in the mission code, but the vast majority will be shared. As for coming up with enough scripts to do one every week, either do multiple-week arcs (just stretch out the story!) or just have enough people submitting story ideas. Not only can you queue up finished missions in advance, but you can queue up scripts too. I wouldn't be surprised if when this launches they have enough missions for the next few months, and enough scripts for months more after that.
As you can see, the fact that I think they can do it doesn't mean I have any faith in it being any good.
Slashdot Mirror
I call B.S. I grew up with 1st edition. 4th has countless modifiers to every aspect.
It wouldn't be a new edition if it was the same...
Another ridiculous characteristic is a large number of "powers" for melee classes. Give me a break. I look at my wizard, and see my daughter's Ranger has a similar number of powers. It's garbage.
This is intentional. Spellcasters don't need to sleep after every encounter to recharge spells any more, weapon-focussed classes now have some choice about what they do each turn (instead of "I attack the closest guy" "I attack the closest guy again" "I attack again" "again" "again" "again"... "ok bored now"). It's a massive improvement. I'll grant you that some of the "powers" for melee classes are a bit dodgy, smelling suspiciously like magic, but mostly they're a welcome choice.
4th edition is modeled closely to MMOs and similar games. Every one has a tray of "powers", and you are a striker, healer, aoe caster, or defender.
Garbage.
It's modelled closely on successful RPG systems. The fact that they are mostly computer games is beside the point. The "roles" are just guidelines, to help new players understand the classes, you can largely ignore them.
I'm not trying to change your opinion of the edition, just stating the popular opinion about it. If you prefer 1st ed, feel free to keep playing that (if you can find anyone else who agrees with you).
So placing a DLL in the same folder as the associated file doesn't do anything. You have to put it in the same folder as the executable, which is (as of Vista and Windows 7) write-protected.
With XP it is a lot easier because the Program Files directory structure is not protected and it was common to have applications writing stuff there, so you couldn't protect it. As of Vista the rules changed and you can't write there anymore.
Actually it's write-protected in XP as well, as long as you don't use the FAT32 filesystem (so per-user file permissions actually exist) and as long as you're not running as admin (which nearly everyone did on their home PCs, but in organisations most people aren't). Vista basically changed the system from "local admin user = root" to "local admin user = sudoer".
For 4e I use the 3 core books, and the adventurer's vault for magic item ideas (the core books are a bit lacking on this). I got the first campaign (keep on the shadowfell, before the 4e core books were released?), but we never finished it. It's so much more satisfying to play a free-flowing campaign that the DM makes up, than a pre-written one.
What would be really nice though, for when I run a minatures-based game, would be being able to buy a pack of e.g. "10 zombies", instead of those damn random packs. Especially with the "minion" monsters in 4e, that encourage larger encounters.
Roleplay isn't something you can really put in or take out of the rules. Whether you get roleplay or not depends more on the group you're playing with. For example, one of the (4e) encounters I set up for a group recently went something like this:
Party is doing the usual killing thing in a ruined keep, and finds a note in a chest revealing that someone is to meet with a cultist that night to hand over an artifact (elsewhere in the ruins was an excavation, down into a room below that was now empty. Hint hint.).
They decide that the best way to proceed is to make a fake artifact (not knowing what it looks like didn't stop them), go to the meeting, and try to get some more information out of the cultist guy. They even try to get the reward for handing over their fake, but narrowly avoid being stabbed instead. Then they tie the cultist guy up, borrow his cloak and pretend to be him when the guy with the real artifact comes.
They could have handled it several other ways, including attacking him to get the artifact, or following him back after he gets the artifact and stealing it, etc. but they chose the roleplaying route and it worked out amazingly well for them. The fact that it was 4e wasn't a barrier to the roleplaying at all, despite what people say about d&d having been made into a hack&slash.
Equally good at everything != Awesome at everything.
He absolutely sucked at a lot of non-combat skills, his AC wasn't great (wizard, can't use metal armour, though thick dragonborn skin helped) and combat wise he was much better used against swarms of minions than against stronger individual enemies (typical wizard). When I say hitting with his staff was as strong as most of his spells, that's ignoring the range and area effects on the spells, and I should be clear that hitting with his staff comes nowhere near what a true fighter is capable of.
He wasn't some kind of super do-everything-awesome character, I'm just saying he had flavour, and you don't have to stick to the expected class for a race to get a good character.
I meant to do something with the idea of the pit being illusionary. Or the spikes. I'm not saying the players wouldn't die, just that it wouldn't be straightforward :)
And you don't have to look at a dragonborn and think "well they're only good for being a stupid fighter type", the classic "race that can only really be one class". I played a dragonborn wizard for a while, a character who could do as much damage hitting someone with his staff as he could with most of his spells. At one point he was chained up, and escaped by breaking the chains holding him through a sheer feat of strength. Not many wizards can claim to have done that XD
Extra standard action, which can be substituted for a move or minor action as per the usual rules. Though you normally get some other effect with it, like temporary health, and some abilities allow for spending them to cause other effects (IIRC).
I tend to play without them, because people always forget about them anyway, and it's hard to explain exactly what they're supposed to be.
Hmm, illusionary spike pit...
Might have to do something with that idea.
Yes it means "Integrated Drive Electronics", not it doesn't mean any drive with a circuit, or even any drive with an onboard controller. It was the name of a specific interface, which is also known these days as Parallel ATA.
1: MicroSD only goes up to 32GB, and is actually the limit of MicroSDHC. The standard to go above that (expected to be MicroSDXC, based on SDXC) is yet to exist.
2: The MicroSD interface is limited to 100Mb/s, so the 160Mb/s couldn't be had from MicroSD at all
Other than that, yeah, it's just the same data chip as they probably already had but with a sata device-side chip integrated.
Counter-strike doesn't have a lobby...
What about Diablo II? Server-side persistent characters, servers can't be hosted by players (at least officially), both PvE and PvP play...
No, the true definition of an MMO is very large numbers of players being in the same game world at once. In a strategy game that could be ownership of small territories on a large world map. In an RPG it means literally many characters in the world.
I have:
email password (unique)
work password (unique, fecking secure)
secure password (used for home pc and websites which have my debit card details saved or otherwise need really strong security. Should probably separate this into more than one password)
insecure password (used for forums etc. Not actually insecure, but so many sites know it I should probably consider it compromised and start using a new one)
hmm
Maybe google's just setting up a dedicated link between themselves and Verizon? The article basically just says "google will be paying verizon to speed up youtube".
That would be entirely benign, and the article is so vague that it could include this.
It's easy in WIndows if you know what software to download, assuming that you know that you need to. On a Mac it's brain dead easy since the software is included.
Windows 7 can burn ISOs out of the box. As it's the most-sold version of Windows at the moment, making an ISO of the recovery disk available would work.
It even has some simple yet useful features I wish Visual Studio (my normal world) would copy.
As someone who's barely used Eclipse, but uses VS pretty much constantly, what am I missing out on?
My comment on clocking cores higher was in reference to "Many games need strong core-individual performance". Multi-core chips now have this, where before the choice between a 3GHz single-core and a 2 GHz dual-core (for running single-threaded games) would have been easy.
As for memory bandwidth starvation, that isn't an issue if only one core is in use. It's not like idle cores use memory bandwidth just for the sake of it. And if all the cores are loaded with a memory-bound task, performance is no worse than if you had fewer cores...
Don't forget top speed, and 0-60 time. There's not a single important statistic about a car (and different stats matter to different people).
No wonder there's not the problem there once was with IRQ conflicts, because there's not enough slots to make conflicts!
Also there are more IRQs (typically 24), IRQ sharing, and auto-assignment of IRQs. In this pc, the first 16 are all legacy device IRQs (this pc lists two ATA channels, the smbus controller, a "Numeric data processor" and two high precision timers), and the rest are PCI / PCI-e IRQs, with every PCI-e device on IRQ 16, and the USB controller (s?) using several IRQs. Out of those, only the onboard sound has an IRQ to itself, and yet there are no IRQ conflicts. Isn't progress great?
There are a couple of errors in what you've said:
1: The newer CPUs can switch between one fast core and multiple slower cores based on demand (they call it "turbo boost" / "turbo core"). This means that there isn't really any speed loss for a higher number of cores any more.
2: There would be no point in hyperthreading if it gave a guaranteed cut in performance like that. If only one of the two "virtual" (actually "hardware") threads is in use, the other one runs at full speed.
This adds up to meaning that there isn't normally a cut in single-thread performance for getting a cpu with more cores, unless you actually use them. And if you do load the other cores, the performance drop is much less than if you put that much load onto a single cpu core...
Wow, someone who knows what setting processor affinity is actually for: Fixing programs that break on a multicore machine.
I've seen it advertised as a way to increase performance in a single-threaded game, but it doesn't. If anything, it'll run a few fractions of a percent slower. Why? Because it's impossible to stop Windows using that core for anything else. Something will end up scheduled onto the "game's" core temporarily, kicking the game off, and instead of resuming immediately on another idle core (or the first to become idle) it will sit suspended. If you really screw up you'll have a cpu that handles hardware IRQs on one core, and you'll have set the game's affinity to that core, causing it to get interrupted constantly.
The real issue I see is memory access. Even with a single core did we run into memory bandwidth/latency bottleneck; with 4-6 cores those are 4-6 times as much. In the long run we have to give up Neumann architechture; it simply can't scale to our needs. A NUMA might be an acceptable compromise [...]
Perhaps inspiration needs to be taken from GPUs (specifically the recent GPGPUs). The GeForce GTX 480 is a 480-core gpu, divided up into 15 32-core "multiprocessors". Each multiprocessor has a small amount of local ram (64kB), which can be split between cache for main-ram and actual local-ram. It's not full NUMA, there is still a main large ram bank, but the processors also have extremely fast local memory.
I have two google accounts with the same email address. Specifically google docs...
I'll give you a moment to think about how that could have happened...
Give up?
The answer is that the email address is for a domain that uses google-apps for email and google docs, but didn't always have docs enabled. I already had a google account (for google docs) open with that email, so I now have one account in actual google docs and one in google apps docs for that domain.
As proof, if I click on the "documents" link inside the google docs email interface I get a page asking which docs account I want to go to (sorry, I blanked the actual email address).
This kind of problem seems to follow me around, because at one point I had yahoo, msn and google messenger accounts all with the same (BT) email address, which caused a lot of fun when the yahoo and msn networks were joined and I started losing messages because they'd go to the wrong messenger network.
Or this: http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/100709.html
Not sure you can compare this to Naruto. The anime show is following an already-written manga story, so there's no writing involved.
You're forgetting just how much of Naruto is "filler" stories, which do have to be written to keep up with the one-a-week schedule. They're actually a better comparison, because they are really short stories which don't depend on each other much, some only being one episode long.
For the actual development, they use a lot of tricks. They reuse graphics and soundtrack a lot.
I would imagine that there would be an incredible amount of asset re-use in STO, and using the same mission objectives as the ordinary missions (go here, kill these guys, scan that, etc) which makes for nearly total code re-use. And unlike a TV show, they don't have to record anything. There will be no new sounds, voice, video or animation data in these missions, you can count on that. (well, they might find the time to do a voice snippet or two)
They use tons of review and flashback scenes (as much as 5 minutes out of 20 sometimes; they get away with it if you watch one episode per week but it's ridiculously annoying if you save up several episodes and watch them back to back).
And an MMO can get away with padding missions with "walk to here" and "long grindy fight". There will be a lot of that. The missions will have only 5 minutes of real content, even if they take an hour to play!
They do lots of scenes that are 90% still images and the illusion of action is created by animating just a person's mouth and panning the "camera" around.
Compare with MMO NPC-dialogue boxes, where you just sit there and read through text. You won't even get the illusion of action, you'll be lucky if they bother to move the person's mouth.
Not to mention that the hi-tech animation techniques nowadays are very "grindy", repetitive and often automated.
Compare to a dev tool where you place down a few dozen spawn points and it does the work of making the enemies actually spawn and attack the player. It's also mostly automated, with just a little tweaking required to get it right. The backgrounds (levels) will either be re-used or have to be made, but that's no different either.
By contrast, STO would have to at least write and implement that new script every week. Whether they'd also have to do programming depends on how flexible their engine is. If it's been designed to be highly flexible they only have to use its features to set up the script. If it needs expanding each week... then they may have a problem.
There's no way they'll need to do programming every week. There will need to be a little mission scripting, and perhaps bugfixes in the mission code, but the vast majority will be shared.
As for coming up with enough scripts to do one every week, either do multiple-week arcs (just stretch out the story!) or just have enough people submitting story ideas. Not only can you queue up finished missions in advance, but you can queue up scripts too. I wouldn't be surprised if when this launches they have enough missions for the next few months, and enough scripts for months more after that.
As you can see, the fact that I think they can do it doesn't mean I have any faith in it being any good.