Game engines already exist. People already develop content though you kind of need a working and enjoyable game first, with some content, before people will develop more content for it.

Who funded Linux development in the early days, answer, noone? Would need to be a volunteer effort to some extent.

Hopefully Carmack will be disillusioned with working for Facebook soon and do it for love of gaming and graphics programming.

Kickstarter is the obvious answer if you really want cash.

There is a pretty obvious solution to the steep decline in modern games. Its the same solution that was found to over priced, proprietary, commerical operating systems.

We need an open source gaming system. Its probably the only escape from eternal damnation to over priced, poorly designed, crap games.

Some critical issues need to addressed up front for it to work.

For starters you need to settle on an open source gaming engine. Torque3D would be one possibility, people here could probably name others. It needs to be capable, open source and multi platform, with as few licensing restrictions as possible. You need high caliber game developers, like Carmack to emraced it and work on it, with someone like Linus holding it together.

You need to develop a small number of core games based on the essential archetypes, FPS, MMORPG, Space battle/trading, racing.

You need to create councils for each game selected from game developers and excellent players who set rules, direction, maintain order and hold the game economy together.

As always if a game/council fails to satisfy their constituencey a solution is a fork but you want to ACTIVELY discourage forking when it leads primarily to fragmentation and wasted resources. You want as much wood behind one arrow as possible.

Each game needs to actively support and leverage mods and user developed content. In fact that will be the primary source of content.

The core games need to be designed for extreme longevity, its the content that needs to constantly changing and growing.

Councils need to design intelligent tournament systems and leader boards that actually put the most skilled players at the top, where they belong, not the grinders, scammers and cheats.

I'm a long time gamer who no longer plays games, because the games I loved the most died at the hands of corporate greed and stupidity. In particular they died because decisions were made by executives who were for the most part not gamers and made decisions that were all wrong.

If I could, I would probably still be playing the original EQ, the original WoW and Battlefield 2, Karkand Infantry only.

Battlefield 2, Karkand Infantry only was, in my mind the pinnacle of PVP. If you had evenly matched teams, with evenly matched gear, fighting a battle decided by 1 point there was no better adrenaline rush and it never got old. The map never changed, the rules seldom changed, the thing that constantly changed was the people playing it, their skills, their tactics and strategy. Developing huge maps like PS3 where you can never find an even fight, or in game purchases that allow the fools with the most money to win, developing massively too dense graphics, that are way to expensive to develop, require to much graphics power to run and add no FUN to the game, and adding too many gimicky weapons and gear that cause nothing but unbalanced matches, are just some examples.

If I could have kept the original EQ or WoW and just added a never ended series of new dungeons, quests gear and battlegrounds I would probably still be playing them. The first rule is you NEVER raise the level cap, because as soon as you do the game turns in to a pointless treadmill. New dungeons, gear and PVP is all a game needs to stay fresh.

I'd still be playing BF2 if there were any servers left that didn't suck.

Tesla's 3rd generation car is supposed to be a mass market vehicle that may disrupt the "automotive order" if Musk manages to build it. The giga battery factory he is looking for a home for is a critical component since it is critical to have enough affordable batteries for a mass market electric car.

Tesla today wont disrupt NADA, but Tesla in a few years very well may, they know it, so they are trying to nip it in the bud.

I dont think these rich, tech executives are trying to reform illegal immigration from south of the border.

They are trying to reform immigration so they can import as many engineers as possible in to the U.S. from other countries.

You don't think most of them got rich by actually writing code did you?

They mostly get rich by hiring/funding engineers to write code for them. The more engineers they have to choose from the happier they are because they have more startups to choose from and they can suppress engineering salaries which improves profitiability and the value of their stock portfolios.

BF2 64 man Karkand Infantry Only probably the best PVP game ever, and I doubt it will ever be topped on the sick trajectory PVP shooters are on.

Sad to see it go, though there is only one server left. Big E, and the Big E admins suck so it was effectively dead already anyway.

All of EA's lame COD knock offs since simply don't capture what makes multiplayer PVP intense and fun, nor does COD:

A. Teams need to be evenly balanced
B. Teams need to be in a confined space so there is immediate contact
C. Needs to be some tactics and strategy but not a lot, versus aimless COD styling circling, killing and being killed
C. Weapons need to be equal, simple, skill based. No air, no armor
D. No stupid gimmicks
E. No excessively dense, expensive graphics. Simple graphics is actually better and you aren't forced in to a constant hardware upgrade just to play games that are immensly fun even if the graphics are simple. Excessive graphics also drive up costs needlessly.

If EA had just kept fixing the bugs in BF2, spent more effort controlling hacks, did new maps occassionaly, did minimal refinements, someone like Twitch promoted a competition system around it, someone provided some professionally admin'ed servers to get away from clan based bias, it would've gone on forever like Starcraft.

Apps are becoming progressively worse, not better, over time. In the early days there were a lot of cool apps written by people who just wanted to write cool apps for a cool new tool.

Now with the preverse incentives of the app market, the app store is saturated by apps trying to squeeze a maximum amount of money for a dwindling amount of useful application.

In app purchases, in particular, are well on their way to completely destroying gaming at all levels.

Every free app you download any more is ususally worthless until you shell out significant amounts of money in IAP to make it usable, and then its still usually still not good

I'm all for paying software and content developers for their efforts but the methodologies for achieving this in app stores and on the Internet in general has completely failed.

Increasingly the only thing I use my tablets for is an ereader. They excel at that, but for just about everything else the app comcept has failed.

Until the Chinese actually try to live on the moon for any period. Horrible temperature profile, little to no water excepting maybe at the poles, some of the nastiest dust in existence getting in to everything, hard vacuum.

Mars is a paradise compared to the Moon which is why if you are talking about a colony it makes a lot more sense than the moon or just about anywhere else in our solar system Only problem is the transit time.

Chances of NASA sending an astronaut anywhere are approximately zero at this point so whether is ethical or not is kind of a moot point.

Uh. . . . . don't nuclear power plants GENERATE electricity? All you would need to do is cut them loose from the transmission lines and put in the control rods until the event is over.

Someone should probably generate contigency plans to safely cut transmission lines at as many key points as possible and they could mitigate the effects of this kind of disaster.

Also helps that a lot of our long distance communication infrastructure is fber optic now and immune to this kind of event.

Either that or you are all just really good at doing ptich fork weilding mobs, an Internet tradition since 1999.

If you want to boycott it, then boycott it which means stop using it, not defacing it. What you are doing is a DDOS.

Its their website since Cmdr Taco sold out. If they wanna trash it then, tell them you don't like it, stop using it and let them wipe out their investment if they are that stupid. It would probably be better if someone with a heart and a sole started a new version anyway. Slashdot has been pretty much soulless since Taco sold out to VA Linux anyway.

If the people that run the site have are as malevolent and clueless as you say, this little mob isn't going to save it in the long run anyway.

Uh yea, but if you continue actively wrecking the site for as long as you are proposing, if they do cave, there wont be anyone left here to use Classic anyway.

If you login in they aren'ty forcing anyone to New Coke anyway. I've never actually seen it. Its mostly only the anonymous cowards who are suffering with it.

It would be better if you declare a cease fire, you guys stop trashing comments, they leave the Classic mode switch in permanently. Then people vote with there feet for the one they prefer. If everyone votes for Classic and they can't fix New Coke then eventually they give up.

The comment section is what made this place great in the 1990's when I joined. Its already a pale shadow of what it once was with the insightful being swamped by a rising ride of pointless and stupid. With you guys completely trashing it with the boycott there is seriously almost no reason to bother coming here any more.

Just curious, on the course this boycott is currently taking are you seeking to kill the beta or kill /. ?

I doubt there is going to be anything or anyone left here to come back to when its over, win or lose.

This coming from a 5 digit UID, not some recent arrival.

This is one of DeepMind's recent papers, Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning [PDF]

The problem with remotely piloted vehicles is the up and down links are the weak link. If you take out your opponents comm links with jamming or by shooting down their relays you take out their entire drone capability at least until you can restore the comm links.

If you are going to depend on drones the only solution is they have to be autonomous. The only other solution is they have to be manned and introducing pilots entails increased cost, lowers mission duration, increase risk of loss of life and capture.

I would think there probably are already autonomous offensive drones flying, they are probably just restricted to targetting predetermined GPS locations. They desperately need the ability to discern people or vehicles (cars, armor, ships, planes) which are the desired target without having to rely on a comm link or pilot.

It is nearly an inevitable technological evolution now that drones are out of Pandora's box. If the U.S. doesn't do it everyone else will.

Yea, but look at the pretty, well dressed, blond haired blue eyed CEO⦠as I wave in the general direction of Marissa Mayer and you are slowly hypnotized in to forgetting about everything else Yahoo does wrong.