ambrosius27 - Slashdot User

Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? 480

Posted by Soulskill on Monday February 22, 2010 @05:45AM from the risk-is-not-our-business dept.

eldavojohn writes "I have a slightly older friend who played through the glory days of Ultima Online. Yes, their servers are still up and running, but he often waxes nostalgic about certain gameplay functions of UO that he misses. I must say that these aspects make me smile and wonder what it would be like to play in such a world — things like housing, thieving and looting that you don't see in the most popular massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. So, I've followed him through a few games, including Darkfall and now Mortal Online. And these (seemingly European developed) games are constantly fading into obscurity and never catching hold. We constantly move from one to the next. Does anyone know of a popular three-dimensional game that has UO-like rules and gameplay? Perhaps one that UO players gravitated to after leaving UO? If you think that the very things that have been removed (housing and thieving would be two good topics) caused WoW to become the most popular MMO, why is that? Do UO rules not translate well to a true 3D environment? Are people incapable of planning for corpse looting? Are players really that inept that developers don't want to leave us in control of risk analysis? I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested."

IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability? 193

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 30, 2009 @03:30PM from the one-keybinding-to-rule-them-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"

Comment Down the Tubes (Score 1) 440

by ambrosius27 on Tuesday April 07, 2009 @03:21PM (#27494069) Attached to: Conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens Is Thrown Out

You might say that his conviction went down the tubes.

Comment Two Projects: 1 Cycle (Score 1) 455

by ambrosius27 on Monday March 30, 2009 @10:27AM (#27387953) Attached to: Attempting To Reframe "KDE Vs. GNOME"

Both KDE and GNOME follow the same basic cycle: large dramatic changes in infrastructure and layout are followed by years of relatively small, incrememental changes. How many years did KDE go between 2.0 and 4.0? (KDE 3.0 was a break in ABI but the infrastructure and layout were largely the same.) And how many years have there between GNOME 2.0 and the planned GNOME 3.0 next year?

The big difference right now is that KDE made their big change last year and are now incrementally fixing, improving things. GNOME, on the other hand, are working on their big change, which will land next year. The cycle is the same, but the two projects are on different parts of this cycle right now.

There are a couple smaller differences, as well. First, as I understand it, KDE developed many parts of their new infrastructure for a couple years, and this infrastructure landed for use at KDE 4.0. GNOME seems to be inserting many pieces of its new infrastructure in the GNOME 2.x cycle before putting all the new pieces together in GNOME 3.0. On the one hand, this means that the various pieces will (hopefully) get more testing, and thus more bugfixing, before 3.0. On the other hand, 3.0 becomes a little bit less exciting because piece x and piece y are not exactly new. The second difference is that Qt underwent a big overhaul for its 4.x series, which forms the basis of KDE 4.0, whereas GTK 3.0 will be cleaned up, rather than radically changed.

This does not mean that big new technologies are not going to be in GNOME 3.0. Clutter, gjs, seed, and gnome introspection, to take a few examples, are separate libraries that will form the backbone of GNOME 3.0. It seems to me that tech journalists hear the news about GTK+ 3.0 and decide that GNOME 3.0 will have no changes. That should not be the case at all: next generation GNOME shell.

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