Oh, hey, I found it. To download the game, instead of choosing "Download -> Windows" from the website's menu (you foolish person!*), you have to actually select "Browse All Packages". You then get to a scary-looking table of... things, where you need to click "Blood Frontier Beta 1". Then you get to another scary-looking table with two "i386" downloads and one "Mac Universal" download. I can only assume one of the "i386" downloads is the Windows version, but even as an advanced computer user I have no clue which one.
Ah, but if you look closely at the table, it lists the filenames too... and all of the filenames list an OS *except* the last one, which by process of elimination (and because it uses the word "setup" and is an ".exe" file), must be the game. Good luck trying to get anybody without decades of computer experience to successfully download the damned game.
I particularly love the unlabelled "size" column. 267845779 whats? Bytes? MB? Football fields? Who knows! Oh, and obviously "architecture" is such a more important field than "OS" that you can exclude OS altogether. Is my Intel Core 2 Duo computer a "i386?" I'm a complete computer nerd, and I neither know nor care.
* To paraphrase a Microsoft article a few days ago: "We didn't anticipate users using the Download page to download software."
- It has an IRC client built-in? The only other game I've seen be that nerdy was Uplink. (I could have misread the summary on this fact.)
I've posted this further down the thread, but Tribes had an IRC client built-in. Nobody used it. Tribes 2 had even more 'community features'. Nobody used them. Ever. That's not a "game feature" that's a "waste of implementation time that distracts from game features."
The fact that these guys aren't learning from Tribes' example (especially considering that Tribes is, by far, the best team-based FPS ever made) does not bode well for Blood Frontier.
Oh, another thought: once the download link works, you might want to actually put up some screenshots that are: 1) Of the most current version, instead of the Alpha version 2) Are bigger than postage-stamp size.
The article can serve as a good demonstration of horrible web design, and why never to ever use Sourceforge.
For example, what's the point of this entire exercise if the download link doesn't work!? You click download, and it takes you to the exact same release notes you were at before. (And not just the Windows download, every platform's download link is broken.)
Well, I can't download the game, let me hit the "Help" link at the top of the page and see if it has instructions for how to make the download link work...
Configure download page
The download page is a landing page for users who click on the green Download button on the project summary page. It has the ability to autodetect end-user platform details and help direct the user to the proper files for their platform (Windows, Linux and Mac OS are auto-detected and directed to the proper page, other OS users can manually select an alternate landing page if created).
To update the download page:...
That's very insightful, shitty website, but that's help for the person making the website (apparently), not for the visitor. Hell, why does the visitor even see this link? I'm not logged in to anything.
Blood Frontier people, just a thought here, why don't you make the goddamned website work before wasting all our time with this Slashdot article? For a short while, you actually had me talked into downloading the game-- then pissed that opportunity down the drain by making it impossible to download. Congratulations.
(That said, I don't necessarily blame you for anything except choosing Sourceforge as a host. I've yet to have a single good experience at Sourceforge, between their buggy-ass CMS, their impossibly-vague error messages, their shit-tastic bug reporter, it's deeply-engrained anti-user attitudes... why anybody uses them for anything is a mystery to me. It's likely you have it all set up correctly, and Sourceforge is just fucking it up per usual.)
Although I never figured out why the hell it did. In Tribes 2, they went a step further and added an entire non-Internet browser system to the game which I don't recall ever using, or ever seeing anybody use. And which was probably being the cause of that game's completely unfinished release, as they spent so much time developing some weird forum/browser thing that nobody used instead of, say, getting the vehicle physics right.
Anyway, point is, don't be proud of features that other companies have already tried and rejected. Not only have they been, uh, rejected, you're also not getting any innovation points for being the *second* game to have it.
Is your post a joke? We should switch tovmetric because the Bible says to!? The Imperial system caused the economic downturn!? You're crazy, truly crazy.
The classic enviroment runs maybe two thirds of OS 9 apps, at the cost of 50% of you CPU and halving your laptops battery life. It was a shitty piece of software that barely worked, not even close to acceptable.
Whether or not Microsoft has switched architectures or not is completely irrelevant. If Apple gave a shit, they could have made the PPC to x86 switch as easy as the switch from 68k. (not to say it was perfect, but with the x86 switch Apple isn't even bothering to try.)
What "mess" is Microsoft in exactly? They sell tons of copies of Windows and Office specifically because of the attention they pay to backwards compatibility. I bet Apple would love to be in that mess.
And for the record, the Classic enviroment was *not* acceptable. It worked maybe two thirds of the time, and if you were lucky enough that it worked with you apps, you still couldn't leave it running because it drained CPU and battery life like crazy. Anybody outside Apple would be embarressed to release something like that as the customers only recourse to run their existing software.
My favorite bug in System 7.0.0 was that they did away with the Font/DA Mover utility application, now all you have to do to install a font is to drag it into the Fonts folder in the System folder. Of course, if you tried to get rid of a font by dragging it out of the Fonts folder into the Trash, the OS would permanently corrupt itself and never boot again. Seriously. And since Font/DA Mover no longer worked, you couldn't delete a font at all without permanently corrupting your OS install. To make things extra-special, since this was pre-Internet, I corrupted 3 copies of System 7 in this way before I figured out what was making it happen. (It didn't happen right away, not until you rebooted.)
System 7 also broke Carrier Command, one of my favorite games.
Anyway, this is totally off-topic, mod accordingly.
No, I do understand. I've been using Macs my whole life. Apple moved from 68k to PPC without *nearly* the application breakage they've had moving from PPC to x86. The difference isn't the CPUs involved, the difference is that Apple simply does not care. Not even as much as they did a decade ago when they moved from 68k to PPC.
68k chips are a lot more different from PPC chips than PPC chips are from Intel chips. What technical reason is there that the Classic environment can't run in an PPC emulation layer? None. (Other than the fact that the Classic environment barely ever ran in the first place; it was a terrible hack that any other software vendor would have been too embarrassed to release.)
Of course you got modded up with your "correction" by pro-Apple moderators.
You could say the same thing about old Windows applications, but imagine the Slashdot outcry you'd get in response: "Microsoft is so bad you need two machines to run old applications! Man Microsoft sucks! I'm going to start spelling it with a dollar sign, I'm so upset about this!"
Face it, it's silly to complain about OSes that don't focus on application compatibility while using the one OS *most* famous for breaking old applications.
I used to do word processing on a 386! And it was fast!
No it wasn't. Nostalgia kills rationality.
Tell you what, get our your 386 and try typing up a few pages-worth of document. Time yourself. Then time yourself doing the same on whatever modern desktop you use. If you seriously find the 386 is faster, I'll eat my hat.
I'm not a huge word processing guy, but I can guarantee that a typical spreadsheet app on a 386 is TONS slower than a modern one. You used to have to wait for values to refresh, it wasn't instantaneous like it is now.
Here's a challenge: try to run a MacOS 9 application on your beautiful, shiny Macintosh. Can't do it? Hm. Weird, I can run like 95% of apps that old on Windows. Heck, try to run a MacOS 6 application on MacOS 7 and odds are good it wouldn't even come close to running right. (Yes, I'm still bitter about System 7.)
I mean, the funny thing is that I basically agree with you, but you holding that position and then using a Mac as your main computer is pretty mind-bendingly oxymoronic.
But to be fair, it's a story about web servers. The most mundane of all implementation details-- who even slightly gives a crap whether a site uses IIS, Apache, or Bob's Discount House of HTML Hosting?
Nobody is debating global warming, but there is a natural reaction against the kind of melodramatic "end of days" crap you're peddling. Yah, it's an expensive satellite, yah, it's valuable to science (whether or not it supports the global warming view), but it's not the freaking end of the world! Relax. The few years it takes to build another one won't make any difference.
Silent Running had a moronic premise. Even so, I agreed with the other crew members: if everyone on earth is fed and happy, who gives a whit about forests? Hell, we have tons of forests now and we can barely keep a third of the world fed and happy.
You'll notice I didn't mention Flash as an alternative, I mentioned Silverlight. I know that Flash is shit when it comes with interacting with JS, unfortunately I'm subjected to it all the time at work.
Well, ok, but that doesn't change the fact that Mozilla's own website says the technology is bloated and abandoned. If the guys who *make the browser* think that, then why would I use it?
And more people have Java than Silverlight, true. But Java's a long distant also-ran from Flash. Sun's Java software is a gigantic piece of shit, I refuse to install it on any computers I'm in charge of. For that reason, Java's basically dead on the web.
Why would they keep a information box on their website, then, saying "this technology is shit?" Either that's the worst marketing ever (which wouldn't surprise me), or the technology is actually shit. Either way, my point 2 still applies, and Silverlight works just as well in IE as it does Firefox.
It can't be removed because the Help system relies on it, oh, and about a thousand applications both Microsoft's and third party's, would break. It has nothing to do with it being integrated with the kernel. I'm saddened that Slashdotters, of all people, don't know this.
The registry is a horrible idea, you make one mistake in the registry and your computer might not boot. At least with the configure file system, you can screw up a lot and you will still be able to boot at least into recovery mode
And yet, on the other hand, Microsoft has sold millions and millions of copies of Windows to corporations because of Active Directory-- the Registry being used to support Active Directory's functionality. Oh, and Netware? Their competitor? Yeah, Netware had a registry, too.
In any case, the Registry is far superior to the.ini files it replaced. The.ini file format sucked ass, and most applications screwed it up anyway.
1. The Registry is required for a Active Directory-like network. OS X Server and Novell Netware have a registries for the same purpose as Microsoft's. (Arguably, Microsoft puts way too much stuff in theirs-- but every setting in the Registry is one that can be controlled by Group Policy, and increases the value of the whole system.) DLL Hell exists on every system, except Classic Mac (due to huge standard libraries combined with the cultural tendency to statically compile applications.) ActiveX was implemented on Win32 first, so the VMS security model has absolutely nothing to do with it. It was a mistake, it's gone now, get over it.
2. Java's penetration is maybe 75% of browsers, but I'd wager it's less than that. It took a huge nosedive when Microsoft stopped including it in IE by default, and considering how few sites use it anymore, I'd be surprised if it's recovered much from that. It also doesn't help that Sun's Java is crap.
Java runs as a browser plug-in in its own layer, so it's not well-suited to interact with the browser itself. It's actually integrated much less than, for example, Silverlight is-- and Silverlight can not only do most of what Java can, it can actually interact with the Javascript on the page. (And vice-versa.) If you're trying to push this technology, you should be pushing Silverlight, and not Java. (Of course, I'm sure you're violently anti-Microsoft, so you'd never do that, but eh.)
Microsoft didn't fight against Java, they embraced it. Sun got pissed when Microsoft added extensions to Java to make it work better with Windows, there was legal action, and Microsoft pulled their VM out of Windows altogether. Which is a shame, because Microsoft's was small and fast and didn't crash nearly as much as Sun's.
Viruses are much older than Windows. Microsoft hasn't done anything to encourage viruses more than anybody else, except being popular. (I used Macs back in the day, you wouldn't believe the viruses on Classic Mac OSes. It had hundreds.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, hey, I found it. To download the game, instead of choosing "Download -> Windows" from the website's menu (you foolish person!*), you have to actually select "Browse All Packages". You then get to a scary-looking table of... things, where you need to click "Blood Frontier Beta 1". Then you get to another scary-looking table with two "i386" downloads and one "Mac Universal" download. I can only assume one of the "i386" downloads is the Windows version, but even as an advanced computer user I have no clue which one.
Ah, but if you look closely at the table, it lists the filenames too... and all of the filenames list an OS *except* the last one, which by process of elimination (and because it uses the word "setup" and is an ".exe" file), must be the game. Good luck trying to get anybody without decades of computer experience to successfully download the damned game.
I particularly love the unlabelled "size" column. 267845779 whats? Bytes? MB? Football fields? Who knows! Oh, and obviously "architecture" is such a more important field than "OS" that you can exclude OS altogether. Is my Intel Core 2 Duo computer a "i386?" I'm a complete computer nerd, and I neither know nor care.
* To paraphrase a Microsoft article a few days ago: "We didn't anticipate users using the Download page to download software."
- It has an IRC client built-in? The only other game I've seen be that nerdy was Uplink. (I could have misread the summary on this fact.)
I've posted this further down the thread, but Tribes had an IRC client built-in. Nobody used it. Tribes 2 had even more 'community features'. Nobody used them. Ever. That's not a "game feature" that's a "waste of implementation time that distracts from game features."
The fact that these guys aren't learning from Tribes' example (especially considering that Tribes is, by far, the best team-based FPS ever made) does not bode well for Blood Frontier.
Oh, another thought: once the download link works, you might want to actually put up some screenshots that are:
1) Of the most current version, instead of the Alpha version
2) Are bigger than postage-stamp size.
This: http://sourceforge.net/dbimage.php?id=181100 simply ain't gonna pull in the players.
The article can serve as a good demonstration of horrible web design, and why never to ever use Sourceforge.
For example, what's the point of this entire exercise if the download link doesn't work!? You click download, and it takes you to the exact same release notes you were at before. (And not just the Windows download, every platform's download link is broken.)
Well, I can't download the game, let me hit the "Help" link at the top of the page and see if it has instructions for how to make the download link work...
That's very insightful, shitty website, but that's help for the person making the website (apparently), not for the visitor. Hell, why does the visitor even see this link? I'm not logged in to anything.
Blood Frontier people, just a thought here, why don't you make the goddamned website work before wasting all our time with this Slashdot article? For a short while, you actually had me talked into downloading the game-- then pissed that opportunity down the drain by making it impossible to download. Congratulations.
(That said, I don't necessarily blame you for anything except choosing Sourceforge as a host. I've yet to have a single good experience at Sourceforge, between their buggy-ass CMS, their impossibly-vague error messages, their shit-tastic bug reporter, it's deeply-engrained anti-user attitudes... why anybody uses them for anything is a mystery to me. It's likely you have it all set up correctly, and Sourceforge is just fucking it up per usual.)
Although I never figured out why the hell it did. In Tribes 2, they went a step further and added an entire non-Internet browser system to the game which I don't recall ever using, or ever seeing anybody use. And which was probably being the cause of that game's completely unfinished release, as they spent so much time developing some weird forum/browser thing that nobody used instead of, say, getting the vehicle physics right.
Anyway, point is, don't be proud of features that other companies have already tried and rejected. Not only have they been, uh, rejected, you're also not getting any innovation points for being the *second* game to have it.
In the imagination of paranoid Linux geeks? Yes. To anybody at Microsoft? No.
Is your post a joke? We should switch tovmetric because the Bible says to!? The Imperial system caused the economic downturn!? You're crazy, truly crazy.
I'm not a retard, I've used Macs my whole life.
The classic enviroment runs maybe two thirds of OS 9 apps, at the cost of 50% of you CPU and halving your laptops battery life. It was a shitty piece of software that barely worked, not even close to acceptable.
Whether or not Microsoft has switched architectures or not is completely irrelevant. If Apple gave a shit, they could have made the PPC to x86 switch as easy as the switch from 68k. (not to say it was perfect, but with the x86 switch Apple isn't even bothering to try.)
What "mess" is Microsoft in exactly? They sell tons of copies of Windows and Office specifically because of the attention they pay to backwards compatibility. I bet Apple would love to be in that mess.
And for the record, the Classic enviroment was *not* acceptable. It worked maybe two thirds of the time, and if you were lucky enough that it worked with you apps, you still couldn't leave it running because it drained CPU and battery life like crazy. Anybody outside Apple would be embarressed to release something like that as the customers only recourse to run their existing software.
Ok, if it was so great, then why aren't you using it right now?
My favorite bug in System 7.0.0 was that they did away with the Font/DA Mover utility application, now all you have to do to install a font is to drag it into the Fonts folder in the System folder. Of course, if you tried to get rid of a font by dragging it out of the Fonts folder into the Trash, the OS would permanently corrupt itself and never boot again. Seriously. And since Font/DA Mover no longer worked, you couldn't delete a font at all without permanently corrupting your OS install. To make things extra-special, since this was pre-Internet, I corrupted 3 copies of System 7 in this way before I figured out what was making it happen. (It didn't happen right away, not until you rebooted.)
System 7 also broke Carrier Command, one of my favorite games.
Anyway, this is totally off-topic, mod accordingly.
No, I do understand. I've been using Macs my whole life. Apple moved from 68k to PPC without *nearly* the application breakage they've had moving from PPC to x86. The difference isn't the CPUs involved, the difference is that Apple simply does not care. Not even as much as they did a decade ago when they moved from 68k to PPC.
68k chips are a lot more different from PPC chips than PPC chips are from Intel chips. What technical reason is there that the Classic environment can't run in an PPC emulation layer? None. (Other than the fact that the Classic environment barely ever ran in the first place; it was a terrible hack that any other software vendor would have been too embarrassed to release.)
Of course you got modded up with your "correction" by pro-Apple moderators.
You could say the same thing about old Windows applications, but imagine the Slashdot outcry you'd get in response: "Microsoft is so bad you need two machines to run old applications! Man Microsoft sucks! I'm going to start spelling it with a dollar sign, I'm so upset about this!"
Face it, it's silly to complain about OSes that don't focus on application compatibility while using the one OS *most* famous for breaking old applications.
I used to do word processing on a 386! And it was fast!
No it wasn't. Nostalgia kills rationality.
Tell you what, get our your 386 and try typing up a few pages-worth of document. Time yourself. Then time yourself doing the same on whatever modern desktop you use. If you seriously find the 386 is faster, I'll eat my hat.
I'm not a huge word processing guy, but I can guarantee that a typical spreadsheet app on a 386 is TONS slower than a modern one. You used to have to wait for values to refresh, it wasn't instantaneous like it is now.
Wait... you think that, and you use a MAC?!
Here's a challenge: try to run a MacOS 9 application on your beautiful, shiny Macintosh. Can't do it? Hm. Weird, I can run like 95% of apps that old on Windows. Heck, try to run a MacOS 6 application on MacOS 7 and odds are good it wouldn't even come close to running right. (Yes, I'm still bitter about System 7.)
I mean, the funny thing is that I basically agree with you, but you holding that position and then using a Mac as your main computer is pretty mind-bendingly oxymoronic.
But to be fair, it's a story about web servers. The most mundane of all implementation details-- who even slightly gives a crap whether a site uses IIS, Apache, or Bob's Discount House of HTML Hosting?
Nobody is debating global warming, but there is a natural reaction against the kind of melodramatic "end of days" crap you're peddling. Yah, it's an expensive satellite, yah, it's valuable to science (whether or not it supports the global warming view), but it's not the freaking end of the world! Relax. The few years it takes to build another one won't make any difference.
Silent Running had a moronic premise. Even so, I agreed with the other crew members: if everyone on earth is fed and happy, who gives a whit about forests? Hell, we have tons of forests now and we can barely keep a third of the world fed and happy.
You'll notice I didn't mention Flash as an alternative, I mentioned Silverlight. I know that Flash is shit when it comes with interacting with JS, unfortunately I'm subjected to it all the time at work.
Well, ok, but that doesn't change the fact that Mozilla's own website says the technology is bloated and abandoned. If the guys who *make the browser* think that, then why would I use it?
And more people have Java than Silverlight, true. But Java's a long distant also-ran from Flash. Sun's Java software is a gigantic piece of shit, I refuse to install it on any computers I'm in charge of. For that reason, Java's basically dead on the web.
Why would they keep a information box on their website, then, saying "this technology is shit?" Either that's the worst marketing ever (which wouldn't surprise me), or the technology is actually shit. Either way, my point 2 still applies, and Silverlight works just as well in IE as it does Firefox.
1) The very page you linked me to says it's bloated and being abandoned. So... that doesn't fit my description of "works just fine."
2) It doesn't work on the browser 80% of people use, so it's useless for the web-in-general.
It can't be removed because the Help system relies on it, oh, and about a thousand applications both Microsoft's and third party's, would break. It has nothing to do with it being integrated with the kernel. I'm saddened that Slashdotters, of all people, don't know this.
The registry is a horrible idea, you make one mistake in the registry and your computer might not boot. At least with the configure file system, you can screw up a lot and you will still be able to boot at least into recovery mode
And yet, on the other hand, Microsoft has sold millions and millions of copies of Windows to corporations because of Active Directory-- the Registry being used to support Active Directory's functionality. Oh, and Netware? Their competitor? Yeah, Netware had a registry, too.
In any case, the Registry is far superior to the .ini files it replaced. The .ini file format sucked ass, and most applications screwed it up anyway.
1. The Registry is required for a Active Directory-like network. OS X Server and Novell Netware have a registries for the same purpose as Microsoft's. (Arguably, Microsoft puts way too much stuff in theirs-- but every setting in the Registry is one that can be controlled by Group Policy, and increases the value of the whole system.) DLL Hell exists on every system, except Classic Mac (due to huge standard libraries combined with the cultural tendency to statically compile applications.) ActiveX was implemented on Win32 first, so the VMS security model has absolutely nothing to do with it. It was a mistake, it's gone now, get over it.
2. Java's penetration is maybe 75% of browsers, but I'd wager it's less than that. It took a huge nosedive when Microsoft stopped including it in IE by default, and considering how few sites use it anymore, I'd be surprised if it's recovered much from that. It also doesn't help that Sun's Java is crap.
Java runs as a browser plug-in in its own layer, so it's not well-suited to interact with the browser itself. It's actually integrated much less than, for example, Silverlight is-- and Silverlight can not only do most of what Java can, it can actually interact with the Javascript on the page. (And vice-versa.) If you're trying to push this technology, you should be pushing Silverlight, and not Java. (Of course, I'm sure you're violently anti-Microsoft, so you'd never do that, but eh.)
Microsoft didn't fight against Java, they embraced it. Sun got pissed when Microsoft added extensions to Java to make it work better with Windows, there was legal action, and Microsoft pulled their VM out of Windows altogether. Which is a shame, because Microsoft's was small and fast and didn't crash nearly as much as Sun's.
Viruses are much older than Windows. Microsoft hasn't done anything to encourage viruses more than anybody else, except being popular. (I used Macs back in the day, you wouldn't believe the viruses on Classic Mac OSes. It had hundreds.)