OK, I could use some opinions / advice here.

I honestly can't tell if I've fallen for an elaborate troll or just run across someone who is English impaired.

The top of the thread in question starts out reasonably enough, but before too long it gets very odd. Its almost like I'm arguing with a really sophisticated chatbot or something. Or like that Monty Python argument sketch. Another thought that crossed my mind is that he may be trying to do a Colbert, and playing the part of an overly enthusiastic partisan for humorous effect.

So what do you think? Am I wasting my time on a really clever troll, or dealing with someone who is language impaired, or (I suppose it's possible) someone whose subtle wit is far beyond my ability to comprehend?

Thoughts?

--MarkusQ

A friend and I are reviewing the top 50 albums from 2004 and 2005 as chosen by Pitchfork Media in an attempt to not only expand our music consciousness, but figure out if Pitchfork is the indie music messenger of the gods or a overrated poorly written music review site. We call ourselves "Useful Noise." We do 4 albums at a time, and you can check it out on Live Journal, Myspace, or a static version on my home page.

Do moderators even read the stories?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191022&cid=15709470

Finally Slashdot changes the font to plain sans-serif. Now it looks much better. Thanks!
This invalidates my previous entry.

Thanks Slashdot, for getting rid of my beautiful anti-aliased fonts. Now I am truly reading Slashdot from 1994 on my Cello web browser. You'll be getting my eye doctor bill, Taco.
Gorgeous!!

• The end of direct control

  There seems to be a move towards more twitch. Gamers are using macro's to fight enemies so we force them to twitch to grind their XP. Eh, no. If players can come up with 1 macro to fight all your enemies then there is something wrong with your enemies. Create better AI and more diverse fighting styles. Current twitch reasoning seems to follow advertisers reasoning. People are going to the toilet during the ads. Make ads longer so people will still get ads when they return from the toilet.

  I am proposin a system closer to that found in games like Jagged Alliance. Your avatar in real time will find her way to the clicked destination based on skills, stance settings, enviroment and enemy presence. Leap/climb, sneak/run etc etc.

  Direct control has problems:

  1. High bandwidth, every twitch has to be send to the server and all the clients in the same area.
  2. Low predictability in low bandwidth enviroments.
  3. Bad animation match up. If I hit you with my sword and you block that is just statistics. The changes of the animation involved reflecting the numbers is zero. Because your position and mine ain't fixed on a grid the animator can't line them up.
  4. Low enviroment interaction. Check the animation for leaping over a fence in Jagged Alliance vs ANY free 3D game. Tomb Raider can only pull the really nice moves when the animator knows where she is going to be. How many MMORPGS with melee combat have anything like the melee combat we so love in Martial Arts movies? Leaping over the heads of enemies? Let alone actuall wrestling. Not even Oni style body on body interaction is possible.
  5. Low interaction between player and game. Because you have to control every twitch of your avatar you can't chat or control other elements of your game.
  6. Low strategic awareness. You can't look behind your avatar.
  7. Some stats don't make sense. Intelligence. If your avatar is not in some control then their intelligence is never tested. Intelligence would allow an avatar to determine how save a move is. Low intellgence avatars would make more stupid moves. Effects as fear become far more realistic.
  8. Easier to deal with connection losses. Your avatar would keep fighting according to your preset orders.

  There are offcourse disadvantages as well. The most obvious is the need for really good AI. Enemy AI is meant to be defeated. If they pull an amazing stupid move then that is okay. They are meant to die. It would be far less fun if your own AI avatar blows themselves up.

  Another problem is that by definition twitch has a more instant appeal. The only reason to go for less direct control is to increase the weight of tactics and that means a steeper learning curve.

  MMORPG's on the other hand are supposed to have long lasting appeal. My belief is that a strong tactical element lasts longer. Proof? The lifespan of Counter Strike vs Quake.

  • Adjusting world areas

    A MMORPG needs to be massive. A true RPG that allows you play a wide range of roles needs to have a truly gigantic space in wich the players move. To be a lone scout you need an area that is truly remote. To be a trader you need to have multiple areas worthy to trade between.

    To create this you would need to create several areas. At start of the game some of them will designated as developed and some as undeveloped. Developed areas are were the player starts live, these areas are well patrolled. Undeveloped areas are barren and extremely dangerous. Other areas are in between. As the game develops some developed areas will become more popular this can be offset by increasing taxation. In response some underdeveloped areas will further develop.

Edit: Slashdot issued a slashback. I was too late in submitting mine, but I still like mine better.

Regarding this article: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/17/0020225

This news story is pretty clearly either a hoax or a result of massive stupidity. Sony was showing off Blu-ray and had two laptops A-Bing the new technology. But an intrepid BLOGGER went up to the Blu-ray laptop and hit "Eject" - and out came a plain old DVD+R!!! Holy shenanigans, Batman! How incriminating!

Except he was looking at the WRONG LAPTOP. Not only does an outside source identify the laptop Gearbox pointed out as the "plain DVD" (http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2939) but THEY THEMSELVES HAVE A PICTURE OF THE DVD+R - and don't say a word about "faking" a demo.

So it's pretty clearly a wrong story. But SM posts:
"Independent confirmation or negation has yet to surface, so take with the requisite grain of salt required when reading any news."

People make fun, but the editorial staff is pretty good; they just make mistakes that end up on the front page. CmdrTaco is actually a pretty bright guy. I've met him (briefly) and he says smart things on Slashdot a lot. But repeating misinformation like this is actually damaging, and really really dumb.

Well, it looks like Slashdot has a new comment system. If you're a subscriber, you can turn it on by smacking the checkbox at the top of a comments page.

Unfortunately, I give you about 5 minutes before you'll be smacking that checkbox back off. I don't know about anyone else, but I normally browse at +0 Nested. This gives me a clear view of the discussion, and allows me to quickly browse from comment to comment. Anything else (e.g. Threaded mode) tends to require too much clicking.

The problem is that this new scheme is nothing more than uber-threading mode. It allows you to see the highest rated comments, and/or fold up the comment listings of lower-rated comments. Which breaks up the discussion horribly. It might be nicer for people who *like* threaded mode, but for the rest of us it's not particularly useful. Even worse, it doesn't seem to save your changes. So everytime I go to a new story, I have to lower the threshhold to 0! Fixing this problem alone would increase the usablility by 100%.

Basically, it's a nice concept, but I can't seem to take a liking to it. Perhaps if the threading was a little less clunky, I might like it. One thing I hope they *don't* do is make the comments download via AJAX. When I use a laptop, I'll occasionally load a large page of comments and read them on the go. This can be nice for interesting topics that have generated a lot of comments while I wasn't looking.

If anything, I'd like to see the page overflow feature fixed first. The way the overflow works, comments can disappear into the ether if there are a large number of responses to a top level post. To actually see the comments, you need to muck around with the threading/flat/nested settings trying to find a way of displaying the info so that it doesn't overflow.

Final analysis: I love the attempt and I encourage Taco and Pudge to keep trying. Unfortunately, the current version isn't it. What do the rest of you think?

When it comes to Open Source games, it often seems like the selection is limited. Sure, everyone has played Tux Racer and Frozen Bubble, but what comes after that? The answer seems to be "not very much." Still, there are a few diamonds in the rough that have gone unnoticed by the majority of gamers. These are the games that you wish you existed, but are nearly impossible to find. In my latest article, I've collected a list of the top ten games that you've probably never played, but really wish you had.

After months of work, and several sleepless nights, I have finally moved. All the articles and your comments have been flawlessly imported to the new site. The Blogger.com site will soon redirect to the new site.

Don't think for a minute that my work is done on the new site, though. I have a lot of plans for expanding it. I'll update all ya' all as my plans for world conquest grow nearer.

Peace out.

Today's systems have hundreds of file formats they must support. Wouldn't it be great if we could reduce all the file formats in existence down to a single file format that could be supported across all systems?

My latest three-part article addresses this concept: The Intelligent File Format

If such a concept could be made into a standard, pressure could be put onto Microsoft and other large companies to support the format or lose massive government business. (See the recent pushes for the Open Document Format for a very real example of how this can work.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

Just critisize both major parties in the same post, and make a joke about blow-jobs for good measure..

--MarkusQ

I had a little thread going about NLP. Last entry is here. Any additional comments anyone has are welcomed.

This is a letter I'm sending to the authors of the
relevant software:

Dear Devs,

No doubt you've heard of the controversial "rootkit" bundled with
many of Sony's CDs to prevent unauthorized copying. By now I hope
you've been informed that this rootkit contains and uses code from
your Free Software projects. (LAME, id3lib, mpglib, bladenc: see
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/) I write as a concerned member of
the digital community in hopes that you will seek punative damages
against Sony, to ensure that this never happens again.

Statutory damages for copyright infringements go as high as
$150,000 per copy. Given that there are at least 20 cds, selling
hundreds of thousands if not millions of units even a modest
settlement quickly adds up to the largest copyright infringement
lawsuit ever. You all stand to earn tremendous judgements; think
of all the Free Software you could write when independantly
wealthy. But more importantly, this is a chance for the common
person to fight back.

I would urge you not to settle however. For far too long,
mega-corporations have been allowed to buy and sell the law, run
amok, and generally ruin the lives of common people. Until now,
even the largest class action lawsuit could be written off as a
cost of doing business. If we are ever to correct bad behavior
we MUST apply real punishment. A judgement that bankrupted Sony
would be a wakeup call to every corporation in the world, and
I urge you to persue this for the sake of social justice
everywhere.

It's pretty ironic that Sony violated copyright in software
designed to prevent copyright infringement. I like irony, and I'd
also like to see the irony of the media industry being bit by the
very teeth they lobbied into the law in the first place. Thanks
for reading this, and good luck.

Whew, long topic on ID. While reading through it, I was reminded of a passage from an ecology book I once read. I paraphrased it from memory, I hope its relevance to ID is obvious:

Let me tell you a little story about long shots and averages and how not understanding the two lead to an incorrect hypothesis. Some time ago ecologists were interested with the rate that trees would repopulate a volcano after an eruption. They observed the trees, and figured out the average distance that a seed would fall from the tree, and from that they calculated an expected movement of the treeline.

However this was wrong, the trees repopulated much more quickly than expected. While the ecologists had figured out the averages correctly, they failed to realize that a small proportion of seeds would be carried much further than the average. The seeds that came from these trees would have a head start and some small portion of the next generation would be carried even further.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?