Well, on the bright side, Darwin would be proud. :P In an environment with lots of pits, a creature without wings or jumping ability will be very penalized. XD
The problems I see (even if the whole OMG PIRACY would in fact be exaggerated) is that developers are "leaving" or going multi-plat, which leads to computers becomming underused as a gaming platform.
Talking to friends about all of this, most are considdering just getting a console instead and just use the PC for work stuff or chatt. They see the consoles as more "well supported" and also more ecomomical because yeah, spend $300 and it will last 5 or more years, or buy a computer for $300 and it will last 1 month... Choise is pretty obvious even to me...
But that's crazy talk. Because the PC as a platform can run every single game ever made, from ANY system ever made. And It's not like the PC can't use gamepads. And it can even run these games in higher resolutions... Not seeing the potential in all of that would be nothing but blind. But without a legal way of distributing that stuff, this in itself becomes something bad that taints the PC even further. Do people not remember when coleco or intelli or whowasit that made like an adapter so that their system would play atari games? Pretty interesting considdering that should you do stuff like that TODAY, you'd get your ass sued to hell and back - just picture like the 360 supporting wii games. It's a shame really, that gaming took such a... corporate turn. Personally, I know I would hella buy a legal version of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the PC if I could... But until that day comes I'm just gonna have my old NES connected to my TV.
Anyway, to get back to non-emulation releated piracy... I really can't imagine any crack groups helping the industry by holding of their cracks. What I can see however is that Steam and platforms like that (or perhaps MMO subscriptions...) will be the main force in making PC gaming "work" 5 years from now - unless someone comes up with something. DRM is defo not the solution because like you said pirates will just crack it and the people who legally bought the game get screwed. I've had some really bad experiences with that stuff just some year ago. I bought some songs online, and now I can't access them because the company who provided the music hit bankruptcy. I couldn't back them up, because they were DRM protected. And as the laws are right now, I can't download the songs I've bought anywhere I like, because they are considdered other copies in the eyes of the law. :P
I'm not sure the numbers of downloads are exaggerated, as there is a whole "dark" number we know nothing about for each of those games. Friends sending games to each other over IM programs, P2P programs, etc... It is significant enough to hurt the industry, or else developers wouldn't leave. But most of the people I talk to say, as you also mentioned, "if I like it then I buy it" or "the demo sucked / there is no demo and I don't want to buy the pig in the sack" and justify their piracy that way. Or they say they can't afford it anyway so the company wouldn't get that (non existant) money anyway. So there could be something to that, no doubt. But It seems the people who just download and never buy stuff are significant enough in numbers for companies to be discouraged to do any PC development.
Chrome actually helped me find a password I needed this morning. So that's pretty cool. I've imported everything from firefox and iexplorer but man, I'm still not sure. Without adblock and noscript the web just looks so cluttered. drew said:
"Xymox said:
"So... When is the google linux distro comming?"
I doubt it ever will. Looks like google is trying to move all of the programs that you need online so, in the end, there will be no real use for an operating system other than a web browser and a media player. Currently all mail mail is done through gmail, word processing through google docs, calendar through google calendar and I use google reader for rss. At the end of the day, if there's a decent multiplatform browser out there made by google, why make an OS?
FWIW, from what I understand, Google uses a modified version of Xubuntu in house but it's probably so hacked up to be geared towards what they do that it's not really that useful for the average consumer.
"
At first I thought "that's a shame", but reading on... I've never looked at it that way. You're right, but what this would mean for the future I've no idea. Having pretty much everything online means we will require less hard drive space (why use 10 GB vista when you could use a 1 GB XP or even no op system at all and just a browser? If everything you need is online... Except for games perhaps. Which could probably be streamed. Haven't heard of their in house version of xubuntu but that sounds interesting - although I'm sure, as you said, it's probably so geared to what they do that it wouldn't really be useful to others.
Total Annihilation. I'm not a very aggressive player so I just can't complete it. Stuck at one of those first levels where you're surrounded by lots of water. What can I say, I'm a builder not a fighter... Even to the point where I actually study Urban and Regional Planning at uni. XD
Hey guys, lets make something that is so massive it starts sucking up everything in its surroundings! Yeah great idea, let's do it here on earth too with no way of stopping it should something go wrong and we're all suddenly compressed to the size of an atom.
Stupidest experiment ever. Oh well, at least they won't succeed.
Tried it out yesterday and a bit today. Resizing the window is "laggy" compared to firefox. Scrolling up and down just doesn't feel right. And can't hold down the middle mouse button for scrolling. Giant bomb forums feel much slower (the page is white, and then loads everything at once instead of loading it in pieces/parts by parts) so it still has some rough edges, but I could defo see myself using it if those things are fixed. It has quite a few cool things going, like creating an application from a window. Webb-based games come to mind :o
xruntime said:
"nakratz said:
"Xymox said:
"So... When is the google linux distro comming?"
Google has stated that when they started developing the browser they wanted it on multiple platforms. What they have done so far was focus on windows to get a beta out and working, what they do not want to do with the linux and mac version is just port it over. They are currently working on using the same code that runs on windows and making it work on Mac and Linux. They have not given a specific timeframe on when these things will start working. The browser is open source and because of this I have been looking through the code and trying to contribute. Watching the update source code come in it looks to me that they are working as fast as they can to get mac and linux up. Don't expect to get it anytime soon. Also no offical time frame has been anounced."
I think you misunderstood his question. Do you know what a linux distro is?"
I think he did. I was refering to stuff like Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora etc. Google has been dabbling in pretty much everything (google earth, anyone?) so it wouldn't be that far-fetched for them to make a distro.
I'd say disable gamelinking for these concepts. To explain the concept the page is still useful.
Agreed. No need to have games connected to these things unless someone can name even one multiplayer game that doesn't lag... But the articles are nice to have.
If it's possible to render only the characters (and perhaps only a top 20 of those) and have the others when clicking (so clicking locations would load the top 20 locations...) instead of loading everything right away, that would be nice. And perhaps only have a list of 50 some games. Perhaps a "more" button to reveal the rest
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