ZerothAngel - Slashdot User

Throwing Out the Rulebook For MMOs 245

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 22, 2009 @04:21AM from the just-as-soon-as-i-collect-these-twenty-wolf-pelts dept.

MMORPG.com's Dana Massey asks about the possibility of throwing out the rulebook for MMOs, suggesting that the next blockbuster title in the genre will be one that ignores many of the features and conventions that have come to be standards over the years. Quoting: "Who said that MMOs require hot bars? Who proclaimed that it's not a proper MMO unless you have quests? Blizzard took a formula that almost all MMOs had been using for years and distilled it down to addictive perfection. Love or hate WoW, it's a polished, polished title. It's no coincidence that on hardcore MMO sites, like this one, WoW is not the most hyped or trafficked game around. It's not that it's bad, but veteran MMO players don't have the same love for it, simply because we've all seen some variation of it before. The WoW community has always been a bit apart from the larger MMO community. Based purely on the number of subscribers, WoW articles should statistically annihilate every other game on this site, but they don't. A huge percentage of people who truly love WoW, I've always believed, do not know or particularly care about this whole world of MMOs out there. They're WoW players and that's it."

Comment Re:No - there are plenty of safer alternatives (Score 2, Informative) 486

by ZerothAngel on Friday May 15, 2009 @02:56PM (#27970899) Attached to: Microsoft To Banish Memcpy()

Have a look at strlcpy. It's non-standard, sure, having originated in OpenBSD. But it can now be found in the libc of all the *BSDs, Mac OS X, and even Solaris.

It guarantees the destination is always nul-terminated and it makes it easy to check if your destination buffer was short.

Work Progresses On 10,000 Year Clock 307

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @12:09PM from the artifexian-contrapulation dept.

KindMind writes "CNet has pictures of a planned 10,000 year clock to be built in eastern Nevada by the Long Now Foundation. From the article: 'Running under its own power, the clock is an experiment in art, science, and engineering. The six dials on the face of this machine will represent the year, century, horizons, sun position, lunar phase, and the stars of the night sky over a 10,000-year period. Likely to span multiple generations and evolutions in culture, the thinking and design put into the monument makes it a moving sculpture as beautiful as it is complex.' This was reviewed on Slashdot in 2005. Really cool pictures, including one of a mechanical 'binary computer' that converts the pendulum into positions on the dial."

Submission + - Slingshot - All New FOSS Simulation-Strategy Game (slingshot-game.org)

Submitted by

musther

on Monday July 02, 2007 @04:48PM

musther writes: "Slingshot is an all new (and open source) turn based simulation strategy game. The game consists of two spaceships whose objective is to destroy each other. Between them lies a field of planets, their gravity affecting the trajectory of the projectiles. This gravitational effect makes the game challenging, interesting, and endless fun!
We're proud to announce our first release version (v0.8p) for Linux and Windows (with Mac in a working but harder-to-set-up state). Check out http://www.slingshot-game.org for more information, screenshots, documentation and downloads."

Submission + - What happened before the Big Bang? (badastronomy.com)

Submitted by

The Bad Astronomer

on Sunday July 01, 2007 @06:01PM

The Bad Astronomer writes: "A recent Slashdot story about cosmology is timely, indeed: a new press release was just issued about an advance in Loop Quantum Gravity theory which appears to allow the mathematics of cosmology to be extended to the time before the Universe underwent the Big Bang. The press release itself is a little, um, opaque, so I wrote up a more user-friendly version on my blog."

Submission + - More Bussard Fusion Developments (eetimes.com)

Submitted by marcus on Wednesday June 27, 2007 @05:06PM

marcus writes: Dr. Bussard continues to develop his low neutron inertial confinement fusion system. The EMC2Fusion project's home page contains more information and this EE Times article has a decent summary.

Submission + - Open Source Clustering Software - soon from Sun

Submitted by

Spinlock_1977

on Wednesday June 27, 2007 @04:59PM

Spinlock_1977 writes: "In a world first, Sun will open-source its clustering code. Since the first clusters (IBM) to the generally agreed upon best (OpenVMS), clustering code has long been considered a Secret Sauce in large scale and high-availability computing installations. Does this move by Sun put pressure on other vendors such as Microsoft?

Infoworld has more details here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/27/Sun-dona tes-Cluster-to-OpenSolaris_1.html"

Submission + - Is cash no longer legal tender? (uic.edu)

Submitted by on Monday June 18, 2007 @05:57PM

An anonymous reader writes: I attend the University of Illinois at Chicago. Last semester my housing arrangements went smoothly. I put down my application fee, and my deposit just fine, got a room for the semester and life went on. This semester, because there was supposedly a large number of students who did not check into their rooms last semester, we were required to make a $100 prepayment, in addition to the application fee and deposit. No problem, I think, I see the university is trying to make a quick buck off people who don't follow through with their plans. Now I do NOT have a checking account, a credit card, or anything. I am one of the few people who do EVERYTHING in cash. I don't trust the banks, I don't trust credit card companies. I also had a trip planned for out of the country, so I get my cash, and on my way to the airport, I stop by the housing office to make my prepayment. They refuse to take cash. They will not charge my university account (so I can pay the bursar or whoever I need to) in cash, and they want a check or money order. Nowhere in their letter did they say that. I fear out of technicality I am going to loose my housing since I cannot get them their money on time because they do not take cash. Is it legal for a state-owned university, let alone any business to not take legal tender?

Top 10 'Most Influential' Amiga Games 192

Posted by Zonk on Thursday April 12, 2007 @04:51PM from the they-all-were-in-their-own-way dept.

stacybro writes "There is an article on Wired about the Top 10 most influential Amiga games. As someone who actually programmed on the Amiga way back when, I can attest to how far they were ahead of the clones when it came to graphics and audio hardware. I often wonder where the PC world would be if Amiga or Apple had had the marketing smarts (or maybe it was cut throat attitude) of Microsoft. 'Defender of the Crown (Cinemaware, 1986): Way before the Hollywood-ization of the game industry, Cinemaware evoked the era of classic movies with this game and others, such as Wings and the classic B-movie tribute It Came From the Desert. Cinemaware titles were definitely precursors of the CD-ROM era of flashy titles such as Myst and The 7th Guest. More importantly, they brought strong and realistic characterization and depiction to the world of computer games. Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'"

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