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Comment Re:As it should be (Score 3, Insightful) 157

If they assert that even such tame legislation can harm 'legitimate' patent holder then it's an argument in favor of abolition of patent system altogether, because it's hard to find meaningful difference between 'legitimate' and 'troll' which makes the patent system itself more harmful than useful since any obviously existing abuses run unchecked. Each such successful lobbying effort supports the position of patent/copyright abolitionists like me :P

Comment Re:Wow (Score 2) 79

DRM is what actually makes the service better for people who choose to pirate. If you buy DRM'd official cd's you have to deal with DRM bugs and just waste time on making it work while a torrent with cracked version from tbp relieves you from those hassles. DRM only punishes people who choose to donate money to game-makers by buying games.

Comment Re:But it is! (Score 1) 642

The whole idea of geocentric vs heliocentric is utter bullshit. It's just a matter of choice of frame of reference, there's no way you could find 'evidence' for one or another. True, equations are simpler if Sun is chosen as (0,0,0), but only if you disregard gravitational influence of planets on Sun itself and planets on each other. If not, you're facing the n-body problem and choice of frame of reference is one of the least of your worries..

Comment Re:I don't think it was a malicious mistake. (Score 1) 212

No inherent problems, yes. But due to current established groupthink on how games should be made only a small subset of all possible genres and gameplay elements is actually tried. And the particular way projects are managed DOES limit game's length and complexity because it involves just tacking on more art assets made from scratch on recycled gameplay elements. Lowering graphics requirement would be a good way to save money, but it's not what the companies want. Instead, bloated artwork/sound pipelines allow them to have multi-million projects that provide more bonuses to management and less interesting things for me to explore in games themselves. I'm sooooo sorry that I'm not in any hurry to fund your CEO's personal yacht :P

Comment Re:I don't think it was a malicious mistake. (Score 1) 212

I'm talking about both. Level design definitely suffered from efficiency loss after transition to 3d. Gameplay design is a different issue. It didn't get much overall progress since 1990s and is treated as afterthought compared to graphics currently.

Employing a 3d engine imposes some limitations on design stemming from assumptions made by engine's author. They tend to be oriented for first person shooter games. And most game programmers don't have resources or skill to roll out own engine. Besides, requirements for artwork ARE a limitation too. They definitely limit the amount of gameplay elements allowed. Say, if you decided to avoid models and use 2d sprites instead you could save some work for artists. Which could lead to more creatures and objects and larger, richer locations. And GPU work itself isn't free either. It still requires assets such as textures and amount of those is limited by GPU memory. Reducing detail level of models and textures would lead to ability to have more different objects on screen at the same time.

All in all, AAA game companies given up on doing anything else than flashier graphics and I given up on AAA companies in response.

Comment Re:I don't think it was a malicious mistake. (Score 1) 212

What does arbitrary geometry have to do with level complexity? My Nintendo 64 featured games with arbitrary geometry, and games with complex level geometry usually feature invisible, lower-resolution collision boxes; from a design perspective, those "are" the level.

Having more regular geometry allows the program generate more geometry itself and level designer to specify less.

Wrong. There's absolutely no reason that the developers couldn't tack on a graphics-based display of the content in the game world, with nearly arbitrary-detail tiles, and there's no way that doing so would limit the underlying game logic. "More triangles per frame" is primarily a function of GPU power, and DF's world runs exclusively on the CPU. The world's CPU-heavy; the graphics are CPU-light and GPU-heavy.

No reason except the requirement to maintain a reasonable framerate. There exist some graphics frontends to DF but they definitely don't use photorealistic graphics. And probably they wouldn't be able to get enough art assets for more detailed graphics anyway. Another option would be to move some processing to GPGPU because DF manages to kill framerates in some cases even if you use ascii graphics only.

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