Erkki

I tried to push some things but the bouncing back every time you touch an "object with physics" is just plain annoying. Especially if you get between too of those cupboards you can let go of your mouse and keyboard and watch yourself bouncing for about 20 seconds. I've never played CounterStrike anyway nad probably not going to start out, just tried it to see what the Source engine looks like. But I hope that bouncing is not in HL2.

For me it was more than 5 minutes... but I bought it now. The Bronze version because I forgot to include the tax when I calculated how many EEK I should transfer to the account I use for online purchases... Actually, that's good because I didn't want HL: Source that badly anyway nor the back catalogue.

Disclaimer: this post may seem a bit messy. I started with a bit of a different topic, but it got long enough that I deleted a good portion of the beginning and changed the title. And then I finally ended up nearly where I started but that's another story. I read somewhere, in relation to game stories, about a hypothetical future "drama engine" that in an open-ended game (with a dynamic story) would gently push the player towards a story event (or vice versa). If Mohammed won't come to the mountain then the mountain will come to Mohammed. I thought of a hypothetical game -- very dynamic and open ended where you could, among other things, run some kind of business. Umm... think of Fable + Morrowind + something else + a good dynamic story. You are managing your business and making profit, disregarding the main story for a while. But all this time the drama engine makes sure that you hear rumors of a quest that is waiting for you somewhere else, while on a smaller scale maybe making local life interesting. Finally you decide to take the quest, but you still want your business to make money for you, so you hire a friend you've made in that place to manage it while you are gone. You return some time later. But the drama engine knows that the main story is going on far away and has decided to give you more motivation for leaving this place behind. So now you find that your friend has spent most of your money on drinking and hookers and your business is bankrupt. Umm... what was I trying to say here... details like these could probably make a game more interesting and more emotion-provoking, especially if it would be dynamic and you could do it completely differently next time and still having an interesting story presented to you. the player could probably be very frustrated by this. Maybe even enough to load a saved game from before taking the quest, selling the business and then going on the quest, thus still having the money when after completing it. But this would take the palyer out of the game and destory the suspension of disbelief for a while, even though he might later think that this kind of "random" event was 'cool'. if the designer would want to avoid this player frustration, wouldn't it be better to not let anything this bad happen to the player at all? but wouldn't it be boring if only good events happened in such a way? what could be done to make the player be angry at that "friend" NPC who drank away his money and make him react to the situation in the game world, instead of being frustrated that the game took his hard-earned money away from him? or is that up to the player and not in the designers hands because of the very medium -- in a book (or a movie) when something like this happens you can't turn pages back and hope that things will turn out better, but in a game you can always load a saved game (if you know that it's non-linear and think that maybe this is one of the things you can change). In such an open-ended game, as a designer, how would you make the player accept all the consequences and continue from there? Assuming that accepting consequences would somehow be an important part of the game design. I suspect that I personally would play that kind of game so that if something went otherwise than I desired, I would load and try to do things differently. The only partial solutions I can think of are: 1) disable saving/loading completely and let there be no permanent death -- this creates too many other problems 2) make the possibilities (seem) infinite and equally important so that the player learns early on in the game that even if something goes wrong, it is not some kind of lesser side path, but it will open up new options and may be even more interesting. But what if for example you had a companion from the beginning of the game (like Yorda in ICO) that you grew attached to and at one point she died. Would any player accept that if he knew he could go back (to a save game) and change this and play the rest of the game with the companion still alive. But maybe this is not the designers business at all how the player reacts in such situations. I mean -- I was the one who said that I don't really care about playing "the way designers intended" in the quicksave thread. Umm... I think I now arrived at the question I wanted to ask in the first place -- could there be games in the near future where the player couldn't tell which part of the story was created explicitly by the game designer and which part generated or pieced together by the drama engine? So that no matter what happened, to the player it would seem like that is the correct way through the game, even if there are actually many ways.

Wait, so the game IS out already? I seemed to read that earlier in this thread but couldn't find that place... and GameSpot still says Q1 2005.

Finally managed to come second in the dirt track. The computer drivers were better than me at some bends (or curves? or what do you call em?), but I managed to block their way often. But in a big crash I always seem to be the loser i.e. the one who ends up facing the wrong way And this game is one of the few where I've seen computer drivers crash without my involvement (I don't play that many racing games any more though, NFS Underground was the last I played, and Porche Unleashed before that, plus some demos every now and then). And one driver aggressively tried to push me against some object on the side of the track. This game is good. How many tracks are there in the full game? [edit]Oh, 45 tracks. In 8 locations. Some of the cars are front wheel drive, right? I never really liked to drive rear wheel drive cars in games.

The more I think about this, the more it doesn't really sound like a good idea...

I just had the idea that maybe experimental games like I proposed earlier could be made -- even by amateurs -- if the "low-level gameplay" (probably just made that up) like moving in the world and shooting things would be removed and the player would have interfaces and maybe a 2D map of the world like in many strategy games. This would probably destroy much of the drama potential, but could be a great way to make creating such a game manageable and experiment with things without having to bother with much of the work that goes into creating a big 3D world. But would anyone play such a game nowadays?

Yeah, it seems their developement filosophy is quite a bit different, using methods of agile software developement. Not that I know if other devs don't do that. Reading that feature, made me really hope HL2 will be the best game ever (or one of them) and I definitely want to buy a version through Steam (it's already pre-loaded anyway). Maybe even Silver, to get HL:Source, but can't afford the gold...

I have the following extensions installed: - IEView (adds a menu option that opens the link in IE, just in case) - FlashGot (for FlashGet integration -- FlashGet has a better UI than any other download manager IMHO and I use it for downloading demos & trailers etc.) - ConfigurationMania (I had this for a long time since version 0.7 or something, but I don't really use it).

I was just coming here to post that... Well, at least I can fix the link http://www.gamespot.com/features/6112889/index.html I've only read the fist too pages so far, which mention that valve is going to reveal some things in the feature, about the code theft, the delays and more.

How about tasty? PS. Baconian, I plan to read that thesis of yours as soon as I get a chance.

Yeah, that's one of the only flaws I've found with FireFox so far. It's kind of stupid.

I upgraded to Firfox 1.0 and that started working. (previously was using 1.0 preview release)

Whoa! Well, if I were a pessimist, I'd think: Damn, more than a million people in the UK alone are playing it and I still can't. This was to be expected of course, but that number still dazzles me. What was the previous record? It was set by The Sims 2 recently, wasn't it?

Happy Birthday!

I'm thinking about maybe doing the first designer challenge. If only to improve myself as a hobbyist game designer. So far I've got lots of ideas but I've done very little and maybe I need a little external push like that.

Actually, I tested some more now and it seems that only rules that are for a specific account, i.e. not for 'Local Folders' get applied automatically. Makes a bit sense, actually.

No, the 'run now' is to manually apply the rule. and outlook had that too. And outlook had a setting 'apply rules when new mail arrives'. TBird doesn't have such a setting or I haven't found it and the rules DO NOT get applied. I'm curious what you did to make them always applied? Yes, I did that. But it kind of feels like a work-around. The constraint I used was 'status' 'is' 'new' or something like that. Wait... maybe that was the problem. I tried a different rule and it did get applied automatically. and I didn't test the other ones because something seems to be wrong with the other mail server.

Well, I looked at all the options and the only way I found the filters where applied was when I selected 'run filters on folder' or opened the filters window, selected the filter and clicked 'run now'. I'm subscribed to 4-5 lists and one of my accounts gets ~100 spam mails a day so I really like when the messages appear in their proper folders immediately. And it would be nice if you could make a filter that says 'if received mail is from [this account] move it to [this folder].

Cool... now make the RSS display the number of comments and it will be even better.

Well, Outlook Express is actually better than Tbird for me because it has better Filter features. I just installed Tbird though and I was amazed that it managed to import everything from Outlook except the rules/filters. Now if I could make it understand that it needs to apply the filters right when the messages arrive, I'd switch over immediately...

Do you mean Outlook or Outlook Express? I use Outlook Express so I voted for "Other". I'm planning to switch to Thunderbird though, maybe.

That Halo 2 is selling so much is indeed scary. How many games that have come out this autumn have made some kind of sales records? The Sims 2 (or was it? I can't remember), Fable, San Andreas, Halo 2, Half-Life 2 very soon now.

I tried Halo PC and it managed to run very slow while looking incredibly washed-out and low-detailed and ugly. So the gameplay couldn't have seemed good. I couldn't even play for 10 minutes. But I should try it again someday now that I have a better PC (at least, I hope I tried it on my old PC. Can't remember)

I use Azureus and eMule (that indeed sucks a bit though, but I've not found anything better that isn't BitTorrent). I guess I should try that soulseek for music.