Trylks

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#1 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 6 days, 10 hours ago
#2 Posted by Trylks (772 posts) - 6 days, 11 hours ago

You may be able to find mods for Mass Effect like the ones you mention for Dragon Age, did you try to search for them?

In Fable games you can go through the combats by simply pressing the magic button (I mean the button for magic attacks) but I wouldn't recommend those games for lazy guys, there's too much collecting around, IMHO.

There were some games time ago that were really good in this, Monkey Island, Broken Sword and Grim Fandango are the ones I can remember at this moment. Unfortunately I haven't seen that kind of games shine again like in the past.

#3 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 7 days, 17 hours ago

I hope microsoft (and all companies) offer a great service to their customers and (as a consequence) get a great user base and a lot of money.

That is how free markets work. Companies offer products or services, people value those products or services more than the money that they cost and thus they pay for them, everybody wins, it's a win/win situation, so let's hope to see many of those in the future.

Win/win situations are good, stop the hate.

Having said that, I'll not get a console in the first 18 after it is released, because during that time they are overpriced and not very reliable. After those 18 months I'll check what product do these companies offer me for my money and I'll probably choose a Steam Box:

  • More games than in any other platform (as a consequence of openness empowering developers instead of trying to control and limit them)
  • More and better controllers than in any other platform (again as a consequence of openness of standards and market freedom)
  • Cheaper games and great deals (market freedom and competition, fuck yeah!)
  • Lots of features besides of gaming, (it's a PC!) Best of all, those features are free!
  • Digital distribution as the main model (no intermediaries means cheaper prices for the same thing, again competitiveness, openness, a quality service to the final user and nobody behind a counter trying to rip you off in the name of some company)

PD: I forgot mods, user generated content works much better on PCs too.

#4 Posted by Trylks (772 posts) - 7 days, 17 hours ago

I have a few questions related with how different systems work in terms of digital distribution.

Let's say I have an account in XBL, PSN or Steam and I purchase and download some games to play. After a while my system breaks, there is some new generation, I move to a different house and do not share the previous system or for any other reason I get a new one (new as a piece of hardware, not necessarily the next version of a console, it may be just like the old one, but new).

The question is: Can I simply log in with my account in the new system and download again my games so that I can continue playing on the new system?

I also wonder about the saved games, which may be in a HDD, is there any option to transfer them to the new system? (assuming the old one still works as to upload them to the cloud or whatever)

Thank you very much.

#5 Posted by Trylks (772 posts) - 10 days, 13 hours ago

You lost your job in Germany? That's news to me.

I don't really use Steam and I don't really like PHP, but the open source is always appreciated.

Thank you for sharing the code and good luck finding a new (and better) job! ;)

#6 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 11 days, 8 hours ago

Stories can lie. A story can go through things completely unrealistic and impossible.

While games do not need to be more realistic, they metaphorically represent reality. Theme Hospital is not any realistic (no people with giant heads around so far) but you will have a first hand experience on queue handling and queue theory with that game. Eve Online may not be the most realistic game ever, reality is not on space colonization yet, but the underlying economical principles that drive that economy do also drive the real one (which is more complex and thus harder to understand), therefore the game serves as a simplification for an easier understanding. You want to stay competitive on the labor market? You will need to do something better, cheaper or newer (different), and that is the same in starcraft and nearly any RTS game where you need to strike harder, faster or overtech your opponent, in the end it's competition again.

And so on and so forth, every game presents a fictional world where some rules apply and some lessons need to be learned, some of the rules or laws in that world will be present to a greater or lesser extent in the real world, and so the knowledge will be applicable. That is what happens with games and game mechanics, and it's not a coincidence that game theory stands by that name and settles the foundations to explain and analyse most of the problems that happen among individuals in societies. On the other hand movies and other media do not have any laws, but a script that defines what happens and it is more surprising and thus entertaining when you keep breaking the laws, it's a matter of entropy, see Lost for an example.

About the stories, they are the bad side of games, the part that is like movies and books. In the stories the hero wins, the nerd gets the girl and some morals and indoctrination is shoved inside the spectator. They are not meant to make you reflect or think about things, but to tell you what you should think, they don't pose a problem to your intellect, they give the solutions, because you are not meant to think or do anything, the spectator is meant to look and learn.

That's why games, being interactive, are much more educative and cultural than movies, novels and other passive media.

I've just remembered I wrote about something quite related in my blog some time ago: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/trylks/blog/educational-games/95761/

#7 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 21 days, 14 hours ago
#8 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 21 days, 15 hours ago

@drakhir: could you share it?

I have this for texts (GLaDOS "message received"):

https://soundcloud.com/spellrm/glados-message-received

And I have this for e-mails (terran command center "incoming transmission"):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WR2bNmt_-c

And this is my default ringtone (Koh Otani - Swift horse): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARW91qriEqw

#9 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 22 days, 13 hours ago

@liquidprince: innovation is not about being exclusive, it's about being the first, those things were done first on PCs. Pioneers in game development are usually in PCs, simply because it's an open platform and it presents less entry barriers to do whatever you want to do and is new. Even some things that are not new are not possible in consoles due to regulatory constraints (policies) and not due to technology. Try to publish some mods as free DLC in some console and see how it works. The control that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo impose on their platforms is not promoting innovation but preventing it from happening.

About optimization, optimizing is something done with mature technology, innovative optimization is an oxymoron.

http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1513451

#10 Edited by Trylks (772 posts) - 23 days, 13 hours ago

@liquidprince said:

@scrawnto said:

@liquidprince said:

I would argue that first party innovation is the space where the bulk of innovative things in software occur. Killzone runs in native 720p, Halo wants to run in 720p. Sony uses 3D, Microsoft mandates 3D. A new more efficient form of AA gets developed, the other company tries to create an even better form of AA.

@trylks: Depends on what you define as innovative. I can't really think of any ground breaking things that PC has done in recent years that the consoles aren't capable of doing, albeit on a lower scale of fidelity.

It sounds like the things you are talking about in the first paragraph that you are citing as innovations are issues of fidelity, so I don't think you can just dismiss the advances PCs have made out of hand. If resolution counts as innovative to you, the PC has got your back! It goes way higher than 720p! Seriously though, the current consoles can't even begin to tackle physics like PCs can, nor can they handle tesselation, which makes a huge difference in the detail of character models. Those things came out of PC hardware innovations. I'd say the Occulus Rift is pretty innovative too, and that is a PC thing only at the moment.

However, what I was really talking about in my previous post was game design innovation. Better AA and resolution is nice, but it's not really the sort of innovation that drives forward the medium if you ask me.

The PC does what it does through brute force. My 7970 can handle resolution, AA tessellation etc... infinitely better then the PS3/360 can. That's not necessarily the innovation I'm talking about though. That is hardware innovation. That is inevitable. The innovation in software comes from being able to create a game that looks as great as Uncharted on hardware that is pushing 7 years. I have no specific opinions on the Occulus Rift because I haven't seen it in person yet. May as well be a Virtual Boy to me, unless I see what it can do.

In PCs you have innovation:

  • in the business model: free to play games, subscription based games, micro-payments, digital distribution, ...
  • in interoperability features: online play (including MMOs), mods, level editors, browser and flash games, directx, openGL, ...
  • in the purpose of the games with all the possible variations of serious games.
  • in software: unreal engine, crytek engine and nearly all engines out there are done first of all for computers, the demos are done on computers, computers are the natural place for code to run, consoles are just crippled computers.
  • and pretty much anything you can think about.

In consoles you have innovation:

  • in pushing a very specific piece of hardware to its limits. Which is just optimization, not innovation, and it is mostly useless for any other piece of hardware. Which means that all the serendipity, synergy and positive side effects are nearly eliminated, as opposed to this: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Thus the innovation in consoles is counter-innovation, it does actually prevent innovation from happening, which is what usually happens with closed or controlled markets. Drug patents expire after some years and everybody can benefit from that innovation, because drugs work in similar ways in all humans, and the side effects are hopefully well known for any "special" human. Innovation in pushing a specific piece of hardware is completely useless and meaningless when that piece of hardware becomes obsolete, nobody benefits from that.

Use your keyboard!

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