1. If you can make me a better game from day 1, I'd love to see it on day 1. Why should I have to wait out 3-4 years of (relatively) crappy graphics before I can actually experience of what my hardware can offer?
2. It also means that game developers are wasting time they could be spending adding features or improving their game on figuring out all the quirks of the hardware, documenting them for other developers, etc.
3. Games on the Xbox 360 improve graphically anyway. I mean, it'd be a really tough case to say that, for example, Soul Calibur 4 doesn't look better than Dead or Alive 4 that was a launch title.
Then by that reckoning, the pink and blue un-photocopy-able sheets they used to include with old games, where you had to type in a code before you could play, are DRM and not copy protection. After all, anybody could copy the disk, but you needed the sheet to actually use it.
Personally, I think the entire concept of separating "copies people make and can use" from "copies people make but can't use" is retarded. Either way, it's DRM.
So if it prevents you from making a copy by making the copy unusable, it's DRM. If it prevents you from making a copy by preventing you from making a copy somehow, it's copy protection.
While I admire your excitement, most likely, Amazon will just use the same old crappy text-to-speech that was already old-hat in 1985. BTW, ATT has an excellent text-to-speech system that sounds very close to a real person, but it's so expensive to license it's only really used in big phone tree systems.
No, you didn't. You called *COPY PROTECTION* "copy-protection". You didn't call DRM anything because DRM didn't exist.
But wait, people on this site call Windows Genuine Advantage activation DRM, and that's just copy protection. You can't have it both ways, if you're going to consider those two things two different things.
There's quite a bit of the tribes spirit alive and well in Blood Frontier. Try double jumping and impulsing. Basically, the direction you impulse in in the air is determined by the direction you are holding and the direction you are looking.
Uh, Tribes doesn't have that, and I don't see how it's in the Tribes "spirit." I don't know what "impulsing" is, since there's no tutorial or help of any kind in the game, and I don't know what "the direction I am holding" is, but it doesn't sound like anything in Tribes. (Although it does sound kind of like the booster pack beacons in the Tribes Shifter v.1 mod.)
Tribes is famous for their quirky physics model that allowed "skiing" down angled surfaces. Later Tribes games added that as an established feature. And its use of jet packs.
"Hey, here's this great thing you should try! You like FPS games! And it's free! Download today!"
"Ha ha, sucker, turns out it's impossible to download, the game is broken in many fundamental ways, and the UI is unreadable and confusing. Also nobody's playing, so even if you look past all those flaws, it's not fun at all."
It's a classic bait-and-switch. Why wouldn't I be upset? Why wouldn't I be a jackass?
If you need a troll on Slashdot to point out errors like, "the website doesn't work" or "changing resolution in the game doesn't work," I think you might be in the wrong business.
Most users want better performance, useability, and security. I don't see anything like that on the list.
Which list are you looking at? I think you clicked the wrong link. Making the Start menu render faster is a performance improvement. Most of the items on the list, for example the "needy icons" tweak, are usability improvements. Requiring a UAC check to change settings in the UAC control panel is a security improvement.
He also described exactly what Windows 7 and Windows Vista do... so I don't really know where the miscommunication is. The change is that Windows 7 shortened the number of "pulses" (it doesn't flash, the color kind of pulses in and out) to 3 instead of whatever Vista uses (10 I think, not sure though.) To make the effect less subtle, they changed how the color changed to be more linear, and they increased the number of pulses back to 7 (less than Vista, more than it was previously.) Once the 7 pulses are done, the icon permanently gains the "halo" mentioned above.
Maybe you should stick to reading what I actually type instead of things I "imply." ("Imply" in this case meaning, apparently, "stuff I made up then attributed to you.")
I never said the PS3 is a failed product. I never implied it was a failed product. Stop replying to things I never said, please.
Actually, and surprisingly, the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii and the PS3 for the past 4 weeks. That could simply be explained away by every gamer in Japan already owning a Wii, and nobody anywhere being particularly excited for the PS3, but it's still a pretty interesting development.
Writing a FPS game without having played Tribes is like directing a movie without having seen Citizen Kane. Or painting a portrait when you have no clue what the Mona Lisa is. Calling the creators of Tribes retarded is an insult to the entire industry, just as calling Orson Welles retarded would be an insult to the film industry.
If you want to add chat, add chat. Don't add IRC; IRC is a usability nightmare, and you're missing out on tons of opportunities for integrating the chat into your game. Just off the top of my head, you could highlight what team the chatter is on, or highlight people chatting who have killed you a lot of times (nemesis) or that you've killed a lot of times (newbs). Make so people don't have to remember arcane slash commands to quit or change channels. Allow voice. Etc.
I'm not "tearing it down." You asked for bugs, I'm giving you bugs. I give you bugs, your team (greeves) ignores them because I didn't stay on an empty server long enough. I can't give you what you're looking for, because I don't know what it is, and frankly: I don't care. The fact that there were only 3 functioning non-me server seems to tell me that nobody else cares, either.
The first step is making people care. A working website, for example, might go a long way towards this. Fixing the blatantly obvious bugs (resolution switching not working, for example) before asking people to test it might also. These are all things that most software teams would do *before* heavily promoting their product.
Oh wow. It's like 18 miles below the fold. That doesn't change my opinion of "does not work", since there's no way a normal human being would scroll down that far after hitting the link. Thanks, though.
Wait, I played, according to your IRC log, 11 minutes on an EMPTY SERVER (a server with NO OTHER PLAYERS), and I didn't give it a chance? What's the typical user behavior when joining empty servers? Sticking around for an hour? Three hours? What's the cutoff for me having "given it a chance?"
Look, I'm trying to test a multiplayer game, there's no players. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to download the damned thing. As pointed out in the issues I brought up, which you apparently don't care about despite (most of them) being valid bugs, the usability of your game is abysmal. Arguably the two most important functions for a game (changing to Windowed mode, and changing the game resolution) simply *do not work.* The menu text is impossible to read. Maybe I'm an old fogey with bad eyes, but it's impossible to read.
We're talking about a game that is, supposedly, in beta and you don't even know what the NAME of it is. ("BloodFrontier?" or "Blood Frontier?")
I think I've jumped through about a dozen more hoops than anybody should EVER have to jump through to test a beta product, and you just come back with: "oh well you only played for 11 minutes." Dude, 11 minutes of this shitty game with no players is an ETERNITY.
Oh well, just like every experience with open source, it just encourages me to never, ever help open source programmers. You simply do not give a crap about the quality of your product. Someone points out tons of low-hanging-fruit bugs, and you just reply with "oh well you weren't serious." Screw that.
The download link, on the website, does not work. The website. It's HTML, it's the same for every platform. It doesn't work. Does. Not. Work. Clicking it does not begin a download, instead it takes you to the release notes. Every platform's download link does this. If you think the download link works, you're living in some bizarre fantasy-land full of flowers and daisies. How is that not useful feedback?
It took me something like 15 minutes to figure out how to download the game. But since I did, WTF, here we go:
1) Is the name of the game "Blood Frontier" or "BloodFrontier?" The website has it one way, my Windows Start menu the other way. 2) On first startup, the game sets the resolution of my main monitor to... something, and also blanks out my secondary monitor for no reason whatsoever. Despite changing the resolution, it still runs in a letterbox, which prompts me to ask what the hell the point of changing the resolution was. Kudos on it correctly handling Alt-Tab, however. 3) When I'm typing in my username, and I press shift to capitalize a letter, my "character" seems to duck down, even though I'm typing in a username and not actually playing... WTF? 4) When I'm done typing in my username, nothing happens? I think I'm in a game, but there's no other players, and no way of figuring out how to get to the menu. (Turns out escape, or walking up to the bank of monitors, does it. If I were new to the world of FPS games, I'd have no idea either of those two options existed.) 5) The font used for menus is almost unreadable on my monitor. It has some kind of shadow effect, and it's really tiny. 6) Turning off "fullscreen" in options/display does nothing. (Although the option stays unchecked.) 7) Changing the game resolution in options/"gfx" does nothing. The resolution you check doesn't even stay checked. 8) Some quality settings are in "gfx", others are in "display" with no apparent rhyme or reason. 9) You can't simply set all options to "slow and pretty" by clicking the text that says "slow and pretty" in options/"gfx". That would be too easy. So would auto-detecting what my hardware is capable of, apparently, since it's running at 120+ FPS in the default configuration. 10) The radio buttons in options/mouse are backwards. For some reason, the COLUMNS are labeled "fixed, panned, free" yet the rows are labeled as the specific mouse mode you're setting. Actually, this might make sense if it were presented as a single table of radios instead of three columns next to each other, but as-is it's pretty unusable. (You also have to ask: how many people will change this? Seriously? I doubt it's enough to warrant the code to support it.) 11) While speaking about options, the tabs at the top don't give any sort of mouse "grace period", therefore it takes very deliberate mouse movements (vertically straight down, then left) to interact with the options. If you move your mouse quickly, like a normal rational person does, the tab will be accidentally changed before your mouse pointer reaches the option you want to change. 12) Also, there's no tooltip telling me what the hell some of these options are. "Absolute mouse?" "Mumble positional audio?" "stencil bits?"... uh, WTF are those? "Yes, please, I'd like the positional audio to mumble. I hate it when it's too clear." 13) Autoexec.cfg? Seriously? Did I go back in time 15 years to when this crap was acceptable? 14) To start a bot match, I go to "Game" and click "Vote?" WTF. 15) And why is there a "mystery map" in the middle of the maps list? Does this mean randomly select a map? If so, why is there a text field next to it? What do I type in the text field? "Yes, I would like a random map please!" was my guess, but it did nothing. 16) The "Get online support" option under "Help" does... some... confusing... thing. I suppose this is the IRC interface? (It's hard to tell because I can't read the damned font.) 17) It says "if you do not agree please part now." Part what? Do you
We'd probably even start seeing "mp3" players that can play raw PCM
Virtually every MP3 player can play WAV files, and the most popular one in the world (the iPod, in case you're on Mars) not only can play uncompressed audio just fine, but it can play Apple Lossless compressed audio as well. This isn't even remotely new, BTW. Apple Lossless was added as a format, what, 5-6 years ago?
The download link on the website doesn't work. It took me 15 minutes to find how to download the game, and that's only because I was deconstructing how terrible the website actually was (so I could talk about it to some co-workers.)
In short, what did you expect would happen? You couldn't be bothered to test whether your own website works, and it's *our* fault you're seeing negativity.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but... who cares? Three points:
1. If you can make me a better game from day 1, I'd love to see it on day 1. Why should I have to wait out 3-4 years of (relatively) crappy graphics before I can actually experience of what my hardware can offer?
2. It also means that game developers are wasting time they could be spending adding features or improving their game on figuring out all the quirks of the hardware, documenting them for other developers, etc.
3. Games on the Xbox 360 improve graphically anyway. I mean, it'd be a really tough case to say that, for example, Soul Calibur 4 doesn't look better than Dead or Alive 4 that was a launch title.
Then by that reckoning, the pink and blue un-photocopy-able sheets they used to include with old games, where you had to type in a code before you could play, are DRM and not copy protection. After all, anybody could copy the disk, but you needed the sheet to actually use it.
Personally, I think the entire concept of separating "copies people make and can use" from "copies people make but can't use" is retarded. Either way, it's DRM.
So if it prevents you from making a copy by making the copy unusable, it's DRM. If it prevents you from making a copy by preventing you from making a copy somehow, it's copy protection.
What the fuck ever.
Fortunately pictures of me look like this (a bit old though), and I'm not the only one who looks that way.
Not on Second Life, which basically caters towards furries and strange Internet sexual obsessions. But in real life... ugh. Just ugh.
While I admire your excitement, most likely, Amazon will just use the same old crappy text-to-speech that was already old-hat in 1985. BTW, ATT has an excellent text-to-speech system that sounds very close to a real person, but it's so expensive to license it's only really used in big phone tree systems.
No, you didn't. You called *COPY PROTECTION* "copy-protection". You didn't call DRM anything because DRM didn't exist.
But wait, people on this site call Windows Genuine Advantage activation DRM, and that's just copy protection. You can't have it both ways, if you're going to consider those two things two different things.
There's quite a bit of the tribes spirit alive and well in Blood Frontier. Try double jumping and impulsing. Basically, the direction you impulse in in the air is determined by the direction you are holding and the direction you are looking.
Uh, Tribes doesn't have that, and I don't see how it's in the Tribes "spirit." I don't know what "impulsing" is, since there's no tutorial or help of any kind in the game, and I don't know what "the direction I am holding" is, but it doesn't sound like anything in Tribes. (Although it does sound kind of like the booster pack beacons in the Tribes Shifter v.1 mod.)
Tribes is famous for their quirky physics model that allowed "skiing" down angled surfaces. Later Tribes games added that as an established feature. And its use of jet packs.
I don't like having my time wasted.
"Hey, here's this great thing you should try! You like FPS games! And it's free! Download today!"
"Ha ha, sucker, turns out it's impossible to download, the game is broken in many fundamental ways, and the UI is unreadable and confusing. Also nobody's playing, so even if you look past all those flaws, it's not fun at all."
It's a classic bait-and-switch. Why wouldn't I be upset? Why wouldn't I be a jackass?
You win the Slashdot award for Most Crotchety Post! Congratulations! (I'll get off your lawn now, oldtimer.)
Who said you did? You're kind of doing the whole strawman thing here, making up something nobody actually said, then arguing against it.
Where I work, we have tons of servers (mostly IIS) running on Windows XP.
If you need a troll on Slashdot to point out errors like, "the website doesn't work" or "changing resolution in the game doesn't work," I think you might be in the wrong business.
Most users want better performance, useability, and security. I don't see anything like that on the list.
Which list are you looking at? I think you clicked the wrong link. Making the Start menu render faster is a performance improvement. Most of the items on the list, for example the "needy icons" tweak, are usability improvements. Requiring a UAC check to change settings in the UAC control panel is a security improvement.
He also described exactly what Windows 7 and Windows Vista do... so I don't really know where the miscommunication is. The change is that Windows 7 shortened the number of "pulses" (it doesn't flash, the color kind of pulses in and out) to 3 instead of whatever Vista uses (10 I think, not sure though.) To make the effect less subtle, they changed how the color changed to be more linear, and they increased the number of pulses back to 7 (less than Vista, more than it was previously.) Once the 7 pulses are done, the icon permanently gains the "halo" mentioned above.
When's the last time you used Windows? That was fixed in Windows 2000. (With one exception: somehow IE still manages it from time to time.)
Maybe you should stick to reading what I actually type instead of things I "imply." ("Imply" in this case meaning, apparently, "stuff I made up then attributed to you.")
I never said the PS3 is a failed product. I never implied it was a failed product. Stop replying to things I never said, please.
Who are you replying to? I never said the PS3 was a failed product. (I did say it's an unexciting product.)
Actually, and surprisingly, the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii and the PS3 for the past 4 weeks. That could simply be explained away by every gamer in Japan already owning a Wii, and nobody anywhere being particularly excited for the PS3, but it's still a pretty interesting development.
Writing a FPS game without having played Tribes is like directing a movie without having seen Citizen Kane. Or painting a portrait when you have no clue what the Mona Lisa is. Calling the creators of Tribes retarded is an insult to the entire industry, just as calling Orson Welles retarded would be an insult to the film industry.
If you want to add chat, add chat. Don't add IRC; IRC is a usability nightmare, and you're missing out on tons of opportunities for integrating the chat into your game. Just off the top of my head, you could highlight what team the chatter is on, or highlight people chatting who have killed you a lot of times (nemesis) or that you've killed a lot of times (newbs). Make so people don't have to remember arcane slash commands to quit or change channels. Allow voice. Etc.
I'm not "tearing it down." You asked for bugs, I'm giving you bugs. I give you bugs, your team (greeves) ignores them because I didn't stay on an empty server long enough. I can't give you what you're looking for, because I don't know what it is, and frankly: I don't care. The fact that there were only 3 functioning non-me server seems to tell me that nobody else cares, either.
The first step is making people care. A working website, for example, might go a long way towards this. Fixing the blatantly obvious bugs (resolution switching not working, for example) before asking people to test it might also. These are all things that most software teams would do *before* heavily promoting their product.
Oh wow. It's like 18 miles below the fold. That doesn't change my opinion of "does not work", since there's no way a normal human being would scroll down that far after hitting the link. Thanks, though.
Wait, I played, according to your IRC log, 11 minutes on an EMPTY SERVER (a server with NO OTHER PLAYERS), and I didn't give it a chance? What's the typical user behavior when joining empty servers? Sticking around for an hour? Three hours? What's the cutoff for me having "given it a chance?"
Look, I'm trying to test a multiplayer game, there's no players. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to download the damned thing. As pointed out in the issues I brought up, which you apparently don't care about despite (most of them) being valid bugs, the usability of your game is abysmal. Arguably the two most important functions for a game (changing to Windowed mode, and changing the game resolution) simply *do not work.* The menu text is impossible to read. Maybe I'm an old fogey with bad eyes, but it's impossible to read.
We're talking about a game that is, supposedly, in beta and you don't even know what the NAME of it is. ("BloodFrontier?" or "Blood Frontier?")
I think I've jumped through about a dozen more hoops than anybody should EVER have to jump through to test a beta product, and you just come back with: "oh well you only played for 11 minutes." Dude, 11 minutes of this shitty game with no players is an ETERNITY.
Oh well, just like every experience with open source, it just encourages me to never, ever help open source programmers. You simply do not give a crap about the quality of your product. Someone points out tons of low-hanging-fruit bugs, and you just reply with "oh well you weren't serious." Screw that.
Dude.
The download link, on the website, does not work. The website. It's HTML, it's the same for every platform. It doesn't work. Does. Not. Work. Clicking it does not begin a download, instead it takes you to the release notes. Every platform's download link does this. If you think the download link works, you're living in some bizarre fantasy-land full of flowers and daisies. How is that not useful feedback?
It took me something like 15 minutes to figure out how to download the game. But since I did, WTF, here we go:
1) Is the name of the game "Blood Frontier" or "BloodFrontier?" The website has it one way, my Windows Start menu the other way. ... something, and also blanks out my secondary monitor for no reason whatsoever. Despite changing the resolution, it still runs in a letterbox, which prompts me to ask what the hell the point of changing the resolution was. Kudos on it correctly handling Alt-Tab, however. ... uh, WTF are those? "Yes, please, I'd like the positional audio to mumble. I hate it when it's too clear."
2) On first startup, the game sets the resolution of my main monitor to
3) When I'm typing in my username, and I press shift to capitalize a letter, my "character" seems to duck down, even though I'm typing in a username and not actually playing... WTF?
4) When I'm done typing in my username, nothing happens? I think I'm in a game, but there's no other players, and no way of figuring out how to get to the menu. (Turns out escape, or walking up to the bank of monitors, does it. If I were new to the world of FPS games, I'd have no idea either of those two options existed.)
5) The font used for menus is almost unreadable on my monitor. It has some kind of shadow effect, and it's really tiny.
6) Turning off "fullscreen" in options/display does nothing. (Although the option stays unchecked.)
7) Changing the game resolution in options/"gfx" does nothing. The resolution you check doesn't even stay checked.
8) Some quality settings are in "gfx", others are in "display" with no apparent rhyme or reason.
9) You can't simply set all options to "slow and pretty" by clicking the text that says "slow and pretty" in options/"gfx". That would be too easy. So would auto-detecting what my hardware is capable of, apparently, since it's running at 120+ FPS in the default configuration.
10) The radio buttons in options/mouse are backwards. For some reason, the COLUMNS are labeled "fixed, panned, free" yet the rows are labeled as the specific mouse mode you're setting. Actually, this might make sense if it were presented as a single table of radios instead of three columns next to each other, but as-is it's pretty unusable. (You also have to ask: how many people will change this? Seriously? I doubt it's enough to warrant the code to support it.)
11) While speaking about options, the tabs at the top don't give any sort of mouse "grace period", therefore it takes very deliberate mouse movements (vertically straight down, then left) to interact with the options. If you move your mouse quickly, like a normal rational person does, the tab will be accidentally changed before your mouse pointer reaches the option you want to change.
12) Also, there's no tooltip telling me what the hell some of these options are. "Absolute mouse?" "Mumble positional audio?" "stencil bits?"
13) Autoexec.cfg? Seriously? Did I go back in time 15 years to when this crap was acceptable?
14) To start a bot match, I go to "Game" and click "Vote?" WTF.
15) And why is there a "mystery map" in the middle of the maps list? Does this mean randomly select a map? If so, why is there a text field next to it? What do I type in the text field? "Yes, I would like a random map please!" was my guess, but it did nothing.
16) The "Get online support" option under "Help" does... some... confusing... thing. I suppose this is the IRC interface? (It's hard to tell because I can't read the damned font.)
17) It says "if you do not agree please part now." Part what? Do you
Your cat reads the newspaper while eating breakfast?
I'm impressed.
We'd probably even start seeing "mp3" players that can play raw PCM
Virtually every MP3 player can play WAV files, and the most popular one in the world (the iPod, in case you're on Mars) not only can play uncompressed audio just fine, but it can play Apple Lossless compressed audio as well. This isn't even remotely new, BTW. Apple Lossless was added as a format, what, 5-6 years ago?
The download link on the website doesn't work. It took me 15 minutes to find how to download the game, and that's only because I was deconstructing how terrible the website actually was (so I could talk about it to some co-workers.)
In short, what did you expect would happen? You couldn't be bothered to test whether your own website works, and it's *our* fault you're seeing negativity.