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PC Games (Games)

Valve Trademarks 'DOTA' 141

An anonymous reader tips news that Valve Software has filed a trademark claim for the term "DOTA," fueling speculation that the company will soon reveal a new Defense of the Ancients game. Voice actor John St. John recently said he was recording for such a game in a post to Twitter. The tweet was subsequently deleted. Last year Valve hired 'Icefrog,' lead developer for the original DotA mod.

Comment Re:Come to Verizon! (Score 0) 738

i should also mention that my reasoning comes from audio engineering terminology. when you have a live show of anything using sound (can be a concert, theme park show, a play on a stage,what ever.) you have a play list of what audio to play at what time. a musical group usually just has a set list of what songs they are playing but in the case of a theater show that requires sound effects or music you would have all your sound files queued in a patch bay or playback device of some kind so when the actor starts singing or what have you, you can hit,lets say,patch A4 for what ever song. i say queue because every song you play in a live venue has to be loaded and ready to hit its mark. if you don't do it ahead of time you might have a bad bit of audio or a glitch that gos blaring over the load speakers. that being said, i don't really know what context the author was using,just the one that makes sense to me.

Comment Re:Come to Verizon! (Score 0) 738

in this case it would be queue 3 A: a sequence of messages or jobs held in temporary storage awaiting transmission or processing. the reason i say this is correct is because he says "queue the Jaws theme",in this cast you would use the version that is used in the recording/move industry to queue up a sound bite for editing before mixing down to a master recording. in other words, the stage in which you add all the music and any over dub before mastering.

Comment Re:Come to Verizon! (Score 0) 738

Queue the theme from Jaws:

Cue. It's cue. As in "This is my cue to pipe in the theme for Jaws". Granted, queue can make sense in a CS-type queuing up the theme, but....

Ah, fuck it. Go mangle the English language. I'll be curled up in bed, sucking on my language-nazi thumb.

actually queue is correct. queue is 1:a braid of hair usually word hanging at the back of the head. 2:a waiting line especially of persons or vehicles. 3 A :a sequence of messages or jobs held in temporary storage awaiting transmission or processing. B: a data structure that consists of a list of records such that records are added at one end removed from the other. cue is 1:half a farthing. 2:the spelled form of the letter q.

PlayStation (Games)

BioShock 2's First DLC Already On Disc 466

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from 1Up: "Trouble is brewing in Rapture. The recently released Sinclair Solutions multiplayer pack for BioShock 2 is facing upset players over the revelation that the content is already on the disc, and the $5 premium is an unlock code. It started when users on the 2K Forums noticed that the content is incredibly small: 24KB on the PC, 103KB on the PlayStation 3, and 108KB on the Xbox 360. 2K Games responded with a post explaining that the decision was made in order to keep the player base intact, without splitting it between the haves and have-nots."
Games

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

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."
The Internet

Blizzard Previews Revamped Battle.net 188

Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting: "When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."
Space

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Image

Music By Natural Selection 164

maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."

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