Here's a quick summary for anyone who is not familiar with the Mass Effect series. Mass Effect is a 3 part RPG shooter series of blockbuster video games developed by Bioware, which is owned by Electronic Arts. The first 2 games were very popular and loved by fans. The 3rd and final game was recently released. The majority of the story and gameplay were well received by pretty much everyone, but many fans of the series are upset about how the game ended. There's almost universal disappointment on on-line forums (though people who liked it are probably less vocal). A couple of complaints are
1. Despite the series being based on players being able to make different choices that affect the story, almost nothing the player does throughout the series affects the ending.
2. Although players have a choice of 3 different options during the ending affecting the fate of the galaxy, the only thing that changes in the following cutscenes is the color of some explosions (green for one choice, red for another, blue for the last)
3. The ending felt like a deus ex machina and wasn't satisfying
Lots of fans have expressed their criticism on-line, with many hoping that Bioware will "fix" the ending or release a DLC that alters or extends the ending. This is Bioware's first response as far as I know.
Compounding the trouble, Casey Hudson, the series' mastermind, did tons of press wherein he describes the game as having several endings that will vary significantly based on the player's decisions. He claimed that it wouldn't be as simple as being able to say "I got ending A, B or C." So that sets expectations pretty high.
The reality was that at the end of the game, you walk to one of three areas, and then get ending A, B, or C.
Casey Hudson 17.05.2011 http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/bioware-on-how-your-choices-...
"More personal or more moral choices about how to deal with things… those things will ultimately affect part of the end game, which is pretty amazing."
"If you really build a lot of stuff and bring people to your side and rally the entire galaxy around you, and you come into the end game with that, then you’ll get an amazing, very definitive ending."
Claim unwavering dedication throughout all three games would allow the most hardcore fans to get an "amazing" ending and then not delivering?
I feel really, really bad for all the coders and artists that contributed to that project over the past several years to have it all thrown away on those supremely lazy ending cutscenes.
It wasn't so much that. The issue was that Bioware promised something completely different than what was delivered. It was like being given a trailer for Inception, then finding out the movie you were actually seeing was Toy Story. It's still a great movie, but it wasn't what I paid to see. The game itself is a fantastic game - I'd give it a 9/10. But buying one product and being given another is just shady business.
Great site. But if you're interested in roguelikes I'd suggest starting with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead (http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/). Nethack's really showing its age these days and is missing a lot of key features. Crawl is more accessible to newcomers and is less tedious to play. But it is very much a roguelike in the spirit of Nethack.
I agree. NetHack has heritage (and nerd-cred) going for it--but in terms of raw playability, DCSS has it beat, hands-down. Crawl might also be the most active modern roguelike in terms of development (a rotating cast of a dozen+ active developers working consistently over several years), whereas, to my knowledge, all the modern NetHack forks are the works of lone developers.
For players new to roguelikes, I'd also have to recommend DoomRL (http://doom.chaosforge.org/) as a fantastic game, and its shorter length might appeal to more casual players.
Seeing as comments turning into a list of roguelikes:
ADOM is one of the best roguelikes. It's closed source but very deep and high quality.
http://adom.de/
POWDER is a little graphical roguelike targetted at portable game consoles and PDAs. But you can play it from PC. It's reasonably quick and have a very fun and orthogonal skill/spell/item system.
http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release
TOME (http://www.te4.org) is ADOM-ish (reputedly, haven't seriously played ADOM) and pretty fun. I found the level generation a bit repetitive, though.
I'd like to add that the crawl devteam is really friendly and receptive to patches. Development is very active and I find it tremendously good practice to read a codebase that's been developing for the past 14 years.
Just today the team took a patch of mine to simplify poisoning!
I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning curve.
A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game
1. The endgame is too easy and boring.
2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots
3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically)
4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, and polypiling are too powerful
5. The game is nearly unbeatable without spoilers
6. Sokoban is boring after you've played through it a few times
7. There's a bunch of cheap tactics like pudding farming
8. It's too generic and boring to put together an ascension kit. There are very few trade-offs you need to make in choosing what armor and weapons to use
9. The religion aspect is too simplistic
10. Combat gets tedious in the endgame. Most of the time you're just plowing through monsters. This results in tons of "battle spam" with you getting several messages like "You hit the minotaur!" every turn, forcing you to not read them and possibly miss important information
11. The game requires several patches to be playable (menucolors, sortloot, hpmon, etc.)
12. The default options are pretty bad
13. Traveling and exploring can be boring
Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I only write so much because I care :) I had a lot of fun beating nethack and and it's one of my favorite games of all time. I'm possibly prouder of beating nethack than of my MS degree :)
This is all true. However.. how many years of gameplay did you have to put in to learn it?
Speaking for myself, I've been playing nethack since the 80's. How many other games can you name that will keep an audience interested for 20 or 30 years?
I'd count that as a fantastic success in game design.
Despite that, I do agree that the game has its weaknesses and could stand to be improved quite a bit. One of its greatest weaknesses is its glacial pace of development. The last release was in 2003.
Eh--I had my first ascension (Val) about four months after I started. I've done so another three times since. (Wiz, Arc, Rgr).
I think that there's a possibility that it's not as difficult, in relative terms, for people around my age who grew up with similar games, and fairly hard ones at that.
If you want to stay with Nethack, but want those flaws addressed: Try Sporkhack, a fork of Nethack. The author tries to make the game harder in the endgame, but not harder and possibly easier for beginners.
Not sure if this is what johnswamps was referring to, but the two big things that come to mind are the Sokoban levels (there are only two fixed variants which can only guarantee you one of two things, and a lot of the time if people don't get the thing they want (usually the bag of holding), they end up restarting since the odds of getting it anywhere else in the game are pretty low after that) and the fact that you can do things like pudding farming to obtain items/corpses easily. A lot of actions in Nethack are formulaic and based on tricks, whereas DC:SS encourages things like unknown item use more. In the end, I love Nethack and it was my first roguelike, but DC:SS is just a lot more fun.
I actually prefer getting the amulet of reflection from Sokoban, and bags of holding get randomly generated relatively often. But start scumming is damnable anyway.
I don't think that's true. There's 51 volumes of 400-450 pages, or ~23,000 pages. Let's say you can read half a page a minute, or 7.5 pages per day (at 15 minutes of reading per day).
(23,000 pages)/(7.5 pages / day) = ~3,000 days or a bit over 8 years.
Or to put it the other way around, supposing you have seventy years of reading (from the day you learn to read 'til the day your eyes give out), then you'd only have to read 0.89 pages per day to read the whole thing. If it takes you fifteen minutes to read less than a page then you really need to work on your reading speed.
Or, take 4 months out of your life, go somewhere remote with the collection, and spend about 4-5 months reading 6-8 hours a day to complete it.
Or, perhaps this could be a business -- host a Harvard Classics Resort where everything is taken care of. You supply the ideal environment for reading (whatever that may be), including a small community to discuss the books with.
You could teach a few speed-reading and self-study courses for an additional cost.
Very interesting. Did you or do you know anyone who has attended St John's? Any idea if it's particularly successful in terms of students exiting with an impressive understanding of themselves and the world?
I'm friends with a girl that is currently enrolled.
In a lot of ways it's much like any other college or university in that it can be gamed and you can graduate without putting forth a great deal of effort. They do have interesting mechanisms to weed out those who truly don't belong there (Don Rags, enabling), but if you're willing to read and write you can make it through four years.
It's a great place to get a liberal arts degree if you take on the curriculum with the intention of absorbing the material and building the foundation that they're laying out for you. I've been told that post-graduation it is often necessary to complete undergrad credits elsewhere before most grad schools will look at you - not sure how accurate that is.
It's an extremely romantic idea. I'm satisfied with my current education, but I still find myself envious of the environment they are at least trying to create and what that has to offer.
I think the main filtering mechanism would be the structure of the degree itself. I think most of the people who turn up specifically want that kind of education.
Not much attraction for a kid wanting a job ticket.
A friend of mine went and thought it was very good, but couldn't afford to stay. He took a few years off, saved up, and went back to finish. Very smart guy, always had some really out-there question for you in lieu of hello. Made for really good and atypical convo.
I just had a quick look at the website. On some level it sounds tempting. On another level, paying forty-three thousand dollars a year to sit around reading Homer doesn't sound like that great a use of money and time.
The value isn't in knowing which books to read, but rather is in the Socratic classroom learning environment with 2 teachers per classroom and a 1-8 teacher-student ratio. Assuming the teachers are of good quality (and it sounds like they have the correct focus -- being "tutors" or discovery partners rather than lecturers, and don't have a well defined plan for each day), the amount of serious inquiry and a nearly ideal environment for feedback on your thoughts daily by knowledgeable and hopefully intelligent and wise individuals, would be massively awesome and beneficial for any person ENGAGED and caring to learn.
In the case of a person attending this university just because their parents made them -- I feel very sorry for both the parents and the students for the waste of money and lost hours of amazing opportunity.
It's not for everyone, I agree. But I'd like to go there because it looks like the education of a lifetime, over and above the education of a career or profession.
It only takes a summer to do this? Suddenly I don't feel so depressed about the NPR article on the sad fact that we won't get the chance to read almost everything:
Yeah, the same thing happened to me a couple of years ago and at the time I thought I was the coolest guy on the planet when I recovered most of my data. I had accidentally deleted all my chat logs. Luckily, all the chat logs had a timestamp in them, so I just searched for all timestamped lines on the disk and dumped them to a file. I then wrote a script to group and sort all the logs based on the date and who I was talking to and recreate all the files. It worked better than it had any right to especially since I was doing everything on a live disk!
In actual content, it's convenient that you had timestamps to work with. That eliminates a lot of the need to trim off trailing bytes. Kudos to you for the epic save, and on a live (mounted?) disk too? Living dangerously :)
The counter is a large image with every possible score (http://ndruger.lolipop.jp//hatena/20110429/css_game/images/c...). Initially only the top of the image is shown, but as the radio buttons are clicked it makes visible some spacing elements which move the image so the next score is shown.
Clearly any semi-decent programmer can mentally translate 5 * 60 * 1000 into 5 minutes. So what? This is nonetheless a more intuitive and less error prone way to write times. This is about making readers of your code spend less cognitive effort figuring out what your code does, decreasing the chances of bugs (oops, I missed a 0 or screwed up a conversion factor), and making your code easier to modify. You seem to think this is a plugin for programmers too dumb to use milliseconds; it's not. Stop making excuses for bad code.
That said, sure, this isn't exactly a huge issue that's plaguing the javascript community. I probably won't use this plugin.
For the small benefit of making timeout calls slightly prettier, I incur the small-but-probably-net-greater risk that there is some bug, subtle or otherwise, in this code, along with a motley assortment of other issues I usually gloss over but start being significant when we're talking about such small benefits, like adding a dependency and having to worry about the licensing situation. (Even just having to worry about something that turns out to be "public domain" is something to judge.) Net net I'd personally judge it a loss; YMMV, no sarcasm. I would generally analyze any NIH solution that solves such a small problem in the same way. It is, perhaps, one place where NIH is appropriate.
That would be difficult to implement in javascript, I think. Once you zoom in far enough using a float/double doesn't give you enough precision to calculate each pixel accurately. The typical solution is to switch to some sort of bignum library. That's going to be really slow in javascript.
In general though, infinite zoom mandelbrot programs do exist (don't know of any off the top of my head though), they're just trickier to implement.
Look at the old fractint programming. Like the name implies they used ints [0] for their computation, and this could give you basically infinite zooming, and fast calculation even on a 386. (There's also a linux version called xfractint or so.)
1. Despite the series being based on players being able to make different choices that affect the story, almost nothing the player does throughout the series affects the ending.
2. Although players have a choice of 3 different options during the ending affecting the fate of the galaxy, the only thing that changes in the following cutscenes is the color of some explosions (green for one choice, red for another, blue for the last)
3. The ending felt like a deus ex machina and wasn't satisfying
Lots of fans have expressed their criticism on-line, with many hoping that Bioware will "fix" the ending or release a DLC that alters or extends the ending. This is Bioware's first response as far as I know.