morse

Wow, a game by akella. I would say that's all you need to know to stay away from it . Actually, it was fun looking at it. The very moment I saw a bat on the guy's shoulder I thought to myself "hm, somebody must've read volkodav lately", and sure enough, somebody did. I never watched the movie, but I did read the book. To my taste the witcher is better. Volkodav was written by 40-something single woman, and it shows. She desperately needs a man, but not just any man, a perfect man with a broken heart, which she can heal with the power of love... I think I need to puke. So anyway, nice game. I wonder how does it sound in Russian. I always prefer the original sound, even if I don't understand it. I don't trust the localizations, more often then not they are just cheap. Maybe it's the case here. Also, fun fact, did you know there was three games based on that movie? This one was the best, and the only one published outside of russia. Also, as another fun fact, you said that games based on movies usually suck because the publishers rush it to meet the release. Not the case. This one was actually ready before the film premier, and was lying on the shelf for half a year.

Actually, steam DRM is also something that the game developers enable or disable in their games. Steam just provides the API, but it's the game that uses it. Steam can't just disable the DRM in some arbitrary games, because it's not steam that put it there. As for "old OS support", and how gamedev should make the games playable forever, I have another one for you: how about old hardware support? Let's take "glide" for instance. To run properly the game written for glide, not only do you need the old OS, but also the old hardware. It is impossible to run such game on modern system, even if you manage to install the old OS on it. So what do you think the developers need to do in this case? Right now we have a new graphic API named vulkan. I can imagine that in 5-10 years it will replace completely both DX and OpenGL. The newer hardware won't even have the driver support for the older API, like they do not have glide support right now. ALL the games we have now will be unplayable, unless you have old OS, old drivers and old hardware to run it. So I think it's just impossible to make a game that will be runnable forever.

Hm, you're definitely right about US being more expensive than Poland. In fact, I think there are not very many countries that are cheaper But I believe you once said you live in Gdansk? If you considering a move, you may want to look for smaller towns, maybe even a village. You workplace is your computer, and if the clear air is all you need you might be better there. It'll also cut your price.

I would argue that even that is more recent. Especially in Germany. Atomic energy was always considered the future energy by many nations. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl never changed it. Well, much. TMI was largely without consequences, and Chernobyl... Well, maybe the west didn't believe in the soviet technology, I don't know (which would be wrong BTW, the technology had nothing to do with what happened there, but it's a long story). Also, Chernobyl happened after the 1982. But it is the recent years, when we see the rise of various eco-freaks. Greenpeace, global warming hype, anti-atomic movement - all that. My theory is, that it started after the fall of the soviet union, when the leftist propaganda all over the world suddenly needed the new ideology. Before that it was the capitalists oppressing the worker class. Now it's the capitalists oppressing the environment. They all started to tell us what sinners we are for not loving the nature like they do. I hope they all die some day, like the communism did. Preferably, without rendering 200 million people to a complete misery, like the communism did. Atomic energy in particular only recently become the target of eco-biggotry. Specifically, after the fukushima disaster. Which happened in 2011. And this game was released in 2012. Hm, do I smell a political message here? Now to the technical part. First of all: reactor meltdown is not the same as atomic explosion. People rarely understand that. Meltdown actually has nothing to do with explosions at all. It is, as the name suggests, a meltdown: part of the reactor melts down. Period. There was indeed an explosion in Chernobyl, but it had nothing to do with the meltdown or atomic fuel, and more to do with zirconium control rods and water dissipating into hydrogen and oxygen. Which leads us to second: the biggest problem with such a disaster is not an explosion, but the pollution. Usual atomic reactor has a fuel capacity of 50-100 metric tons of uranium. That is A LOT. If you throw it in the atmosphere (like in Chernobyl), or dump it in the ocean (like in fukushima), you'll get a fucking problem. But beats me how such a thing can cause a rainforest fire. Or global warming. Or whatever. And finally, pollution and radioactive waste. And that's why I particularly hate eco-freaks. Atomic power plants do not increase pollution, they decrease it! You can live 100 meters away from an atomic plant and be okay and healthy. Have you ever seen a coal power plant? It's a fucking death zone. You better not approach it closer than 50 km. But what about radioactive waste? Surely the disposal sites are the hellholes of earth? Well, that is partially true. You sure can't make the dumps clean. But here's the fun fact, which most people don't think about for some reason: atomic plants don't produce waste out of thin air. They produce it from fuel, which is as much radioactive as the waste. And which was also not produced out of thin air by the evil capitalists. It was mined from the earth. So atomic plants do not increase the amount of radioactive materials on the planet. If anything, they decrease it. So we take the radioactive materials from all over the earth, and dump it inside one well-equipped facility (or not so well-equipped, if we're talking about the Chelyabinsk dump site, but this is again, another story). Now tell me it's a bad thing. I can understand that maybe the atomic energy is not the best, but in absence of the magical energy algae, that's what we got to use.

At one hand I am the same age as Ross, so my teens are long forgotten. On the other hand, when I was a teen, I was listening to classical music. Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky... And stuff like this never ages. I think if you REALLY want to tell everybody "I'm an artsy nonconformist, and I don't give a shit about trends and opinions of others" - that's what you should go for. Apart from the obvious reason that classical music is just very good (it has centuries of time-test, nothing else doesn't even come close) and that it will nurture a good taste in music in you, apart from that I can guarantee you, that you'll be the only person in your class (hell, maybe even in the whole school, including staff) who'll be listening to something like that.

We must be overjoyed actually, we are witnessing the first steps of the AI right here But regardless of the quality of that particular AI, I don't see the issue here. Of course AI will never properly categorize "artsy" and "obscure" things, but youtube is a commercial organisation, not a patron of arts. Advertisements are not some manna falling from heavens, the business companies order it, and they decide for themselves what kind of clips they want to pay for, and youtube just tries to match their requests. If it does that good it will be profitable, which is it's ultimate goal. If not, the competitors will eat it in a snap, the e-business is very mobile. So, if you're an artist who seeks the new creative ways to express himself - ask your fans for help, and remember, that most artists lived in poverty. And if you want that sweet lucrative deal from the corporate business, well, too bad, you have to conform to the mass-media standards.

Also, fun fact: the MIDI files containing music are not actually supposed to by all piano! The tracks inside the files are marked like this (world2 midi file as an example): Sequence: twinkle1 Track name: twinkle2 Track name: flutes Track name: bassoon Track name: clarinet But the instrument is indeed set to be "grand piano" for all (which is the default for midi). It shouldn't be hard to actually modify the instruments to the ones the track names suggest. It won't make the music less sombre, but it'll at least be less piano

Oh, no, I'm not worried about legality in a, well, legal sense. I meant "gameplay means". How are you supposed to unlock them without, you know, hex editors As for providing the save - sure. But keep in mind that this is for the DOS version. The windows version seem to not go well with wine, and I don't have a windows box I can screw with right now. If anyone can send me a sample savefile from the windows copy, I can try something with it too. Unpack the content of the file into the GAME folder, rewriting everything. This should create the player "morse" with no password and every level unlocked. dos_baldies_save.zip

I downloaded the file with the idea to mess a little with everything. Forget the game! Out of ~500MB of the disk content the win game occupies ~80MB and the dos version of game ~90MB. And in each case about 50MB of them is the single file which looks like a video. Everything else is nice collection of some ancient software, like netscape navigators 3 and 4, directx 4.0, acrobat reader 3.0 and some weird educational materials about the late 90s internet. UPD: OK, I had a little fun with the dos version of the game. Just as I suspected, the savefile format wasn't very complicated. Just a bit of hex edit magic, and I have all the levels available. And guess what! This game has a shitton of bonuslevels! I have no idea how to enable them legally, or even if you can really play them at all, but at least knowing they exist is a start.

Hm, so you're familiar with GitS and Akira? And even mention some stock anime poses. I guess game dungeon on "Oni" is not far away

And now humble bundle is selling the sources of uncanny valley for just $12.29! Now who wants to turn this game into a masterpiece?

Nice episode. I can see you put a lot of effort into it. Yet, I kinda sorry to say that I don't understand the point. You spent 40 minutes explaining to us why this game is bad. Is this what "game dungeon" is about? The game wasn't bad in any particularly bizarre way, just bad gameplay. The voice-acting was funny (the REAL eastern-european accent for once, hollywood should take a note ), but it doesn't warrant a 40-minutes episode. There are hundreds of games with bad gameplay, especially diablo-style action RPGs. Why exactly did you pick that one? So, I think this episode doesn't answer one important question: why should we care about this strange game we never heard about? And this undermines all the efforts.

It's not negativity I'm filled with, but rather pragmatism. Chances of a source code being released are pretty much nil. ID software remains the only company in the industry who is reliably releasing the sources to it's engines. And while it brought the company the unanimous love of all the opensource community, it never gave them any commercial success. The practice of opensourcing your games is not viable in the current videogame industry. So with that in mind, I think it's not fair to call Daybreak "evil". They didn't commit any sins, they probably did what they could, keeping PS1 running even though they could probably shut it down as soon as PS2 got released. The task of committing developers to the end-of-life plans for their games is already very big. But if it includes changing the attitude of the entire industry towards opensourcing their software, then it goes from the "very hard" category right into the "nigh impossible".

Is it? It's debatable. I will agree that it's at least NOT WORSE. For example, I'd prefer to not play a game at all, than to play a buggy parody (I was much younger when I played L2 ), but that's me. But then again, better for whom? Certainly not for the developers, who I guess want to increase the number of PS2 players. Yeah, like that's ever gonna work. NCSoft was trying for years to shut down the russian L2 servers. All they managed to do was to learn some fancy russian swear words. Releasing a source code, especially the one that wasn't designed to be released, is a very complicated process. It's like opening a pandora box, who knows what kind of legal landmines are hidden there. And once found, you can't just "close" the code and politely ask everybody to unsee it for old times sake. And let's not forget that a) they are probably using a good chunk of PS1 server software for PS2, so it's not abandoned yet, and b) lots of code can be just licensed, they don't own it in the first place, so they certainly can't release it to public (one of the landmines I mentioned). You're speaking "The people who actually fired this game up" like it's a sure-thing to happen the moment the sources are released. Suppose they release the sources. Just dumped the whole thing to public in one giant archive. It requires dozens of people working full-time and knowing what they are doing to just run this thing, what are the chances that a couple of people with no knowledge of the software sort this out at their free time? I'd say the chances are slim. The chances that the competitors will use the code to their advantage is on the other hand very real. And don't get me wrong - I'm all pro-opensource. I participate in a couple of GNU projects myself, and when any company releases some code to public, I cheer for that company, even when this company is microsoft. But here, I just don't see how this can work out. Well, maybe we have a misunderstanding on the meaning of the word "play" or "enjoy". Being able to run around the game world reminiscing about the times when there was something to actually do there isn't something I'd call "fun". While I support the idea of end-of-life plans for the games, I still think that there are games for which the end-of-life plans are simply impossible. BTW, there was one item I wanted to note for some time. There is this game called "Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet". It's interesting because it was made for one purpose: to incorporate the artwork of Michel Gagne. It was sponsored by microsoft and released as an XBox exclusive, and later ported to this unholy abomination "games for windows live". It got a couple of awards and then was mostly forgotten. A couple of years later GFWL finally died, and what was my surprise, when I found out that ITSP was ported to steam. Achievments, network and all that, all now use steam. It made me to beleive in better in people, even if the small studio which was tied by microsoft contracts managed to port it's small indie game three years after it's release, then not all is lost

You can try the IR lamp for the "dark gameplays". You'll need to remove the IR filter from your webcam though.

As an amateur programmer and system engineer (I worked as one for a whooping 20 days ), I disagree on the topic of PS1 kill. You think of a game as a program. As of a set of ones and zeroes that can be just stored on a hard drive and then easily launched anytime from anywhere. It's not. Not in case of MMO at least. It's infrastructure. Login servers, play servers, databases, monitoring tools. A lot of people with a dayjob of keeping all this shit together. As well as support. And of course a player base, which is also important for a MMO. You can't just "release" all this. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that lots of that infrastructure is hardcoded in so many places, that it would be easier to develop a new server software, than to adapt the old one for a general use. When you tell "don't kill a game" you most likely mean "preserve the game in the same state it is now". You wish to "be able to play it", but a word "play" means a little more than just "launch". You want a gameserver populated by lots of players, you want a flawless technical performance. maybe even some support. Have you ever played on "pirated" MMO servers? I did. It was "Lineage 2", before it was officially localized here in russia (so it was a "fair" pirating by your terms, we couldn't play it any other way ). Granted that even in it's perfect condition L2 is a korean grindfest, the experience we had was... not the best. Broken geodata. malfunctioning skills, constant server reboots, occasional wipes and fallbacks (the situation when the database gets reversed by 1-2 weeks depending on when the last backup was made). And as the cherry on top - the epic items which server admins were selling for real money (they also wanted to eat occasionally). For 50-100$ you could buy yourself a "kill all" button. But at least we knew it was a pirated server we were playing on. Now imagine all this labeled as "an official PS1 server". How do you think, do Daybreak want this kind of image to be associated with the "PlanetSide" brand? Especially since they still use it. "Oh, you want me to play PS? I heard PS, it's a shitty MMO shooter with laggy servers and a pay-to-win monetary policy. You say PS2, not PS1? Is there a difference? Well, it was made by the same company, so I still think it's shit".

Good if it does. And if it provides enough ACLs to manage all these people. But I actually doubt it. ~200 people talking together means tens of MB/s of bandwidth, which I doubt would be provided for free. Mumble sells servers for 200 people for $70/month, so I'm afraid there is a catch with this supposedly free discord.

Not if we will only relay one person's messages, and not a bunch of people. It will definitely beat the broken phone with some intermediates. But as I said, it's all academical unless we find another ~5 servers.

Or, if we find several voice-chat servers, we can chain-link them together to relay the messages from one-another. Did you know you can do this? We may not yet have flying cars, but at least the message relaying is something our computers can do on their own (well, mumble can, I never used teamspeak or ventrilo). But that's all just theory. Unless there will be some other servers available it's not gonna work. By the way, Ross, can you say what was the average number of listeners to your monthly chats? This should give a rough number of players to expect.

Hm, so serious, almost like you forgot that this is the game I don't know about the rest, but I definitely will be there only to hear your (and other people's) comments on the major clusterfucks that will inevitably happen. I mean, what's the point of advertising this as a "playsession with fans" if you are going to distance yourself from the actual playing as much as possible? So I really encourage you to at least setup some one-way voice chat. Twich is not very good at that, because it eats bandwidth for image, that no-one in play really needs, and it has a noticeable lag. I also think that this have some potential as a video feature, provided that the voicechat will be recorded: some funny moments together with people's reaction. This can be fun. Are there any other people with the access to some voice-chat servers? Mine alone won't support several hundreds, but if we divide the load between 5-6 it might be feasible.

I'm actually the one of them that "launched it once or twice, and then never came back". Interesting to know I'm not alone in this. On the technical side: what kind of communication is planned for this? So you'll have twitch, but that's for viewers, not for players. How do you plan to communicate with other players? Does PS2 support voice chats? Do you have any voice-chat servers? I have a private mumble server, but I never tested it on more than 3 players, I doubt it'll support even 50. But it'll be good for at least a couple of squads, I guess. Although it's located in russia, and perhaps won't be that good for US players. But in any case, I can donate my server for one evening if some sort of voice communication is planned. Tell me if you're interested.

And now the reality itself decided to enter the spotlight and gently explain to us that robots overthrowing the humans is only a matter of time. A matter of hours to be precise http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/microsoft-terminates-its-tay-ai-chatbot-after-she-turns-into-a-nazi/

I'm terrible at "pretend". I also would be much better in putting my thoughts into words in russian, since these are not a simple thoughts, and I'm not used to to philosophical debates in english. But I'll try. For starters, the economy is a very complex thing, it will react unexpectedly (at least for us, dilettantes) to even small changes, and if we change something really BIG the probability for us to predict anything in fine detail is pretty much nil. But let's try to make some broad predictions. If the relatively expensive humans will be replaced with relatively cheap machines, that means that the production costs will drop. The goods will become cheaper, and there'll be more of them. That alone should ensure that nobody dies of starvation. More products means more GDP, more money. And while yes, most of these money MAY end up into the wallets of 1%, it's not necessarily mean that poor people will become poorer. Billionaires are generally not bath in their money like some uncle scrooge, they invest it. Which means they give it back to economy, and in this perspective, it doesn't really matter in which wallet money end up, they will always work for society by opening new projects with new jobs. Actually, I can tell you a story. Two stories to be precise, of a world drastically changing, twice, in a course of just 20 years. It won't have robots in it though, but I doubt you'll read these stories anywhere in non-russian language. First story happened in 1991, when USSR ceased to exist. For us, it was literally the end. USSR was not only a country, it was an economical and ideological model. Contrary to the popular foreigners belief, it was not communism. Communism was our export product, nobody inside USSR never actually believed in it at least since the 70s. But it was an idea of a total equality and of a total government control. While Orwell taught us to believe that this is a bad thing, some people actually thought it was good: you don't need to think, you don't need to make decision. The party will decide for you: it'll give you an education (for free!), it'll provide you with a job and with an apartment. The job will be lousy and the apartment will be even more so, but it'll be given to you without you moving a finger. Your life is settled, and you don't need to do shit. And now imagine, that one day this system just collapsed. Several generations of people who didn't even know that you can actually quit your job, let alone how to find a new one, were suddenly left alone, one-to-one with the western capitalistic model. That was BIG! No robots will ever do anything like that in a million years. Based on my experience, there was a clear demarcation line between the people who adapted to the new world, and the ones that didn't. It was a line between my father and mother, both physicists, both graduated from one of the best universities, both were working in the same military-driven science that collapsed together with the country. My mother was 35 and my father was close to 40, and it was it. My mother and all her university pals adapted, learned a new specialty (totally unrelated to physics) and went in business, my father and all his pals became drunks of various degree. Which brings us to second story, which won't have an ending, because it's happening right now. So, the ninetieth, the time of wild freedom, crazy money and quick and painful deaths. Kinda like a wild west, only with armored mercedeses and rocket launchers (does the armor protect from an RPG7? no, it's not). And then the fun time ends, and the age of prosperity starts in about 2001-2002. Why? No, not because of mr. putin, but because of the oil prices. The price went from $15 to $100, and the whole country started to bath in money! I was 17 at the time, and I saw how the people of my age started to dream about a job when you do nothing, but gets a ridiculously big salary. There were such jobs! Lots of them actually. Young and upcoming people without any real skill started to earn a way more that their old and experienced and skilled and educated parents. They usually said: "that's because you can't adapt to the new world, but we can". A whole generation of people, who do not really know how to do anything, except for look solid and respectful. A generation of university graduates, who didn't make anything out of their alma mater other than a big and shiny (and useless) diploma. But all the good things end fast, and now our economy is in it's usual position riding downhill, which is more like a freefall by now. All these solid and respectful people got fired quicker then you can read the name of the universities from their shiny diplomas. And... I'm watching right now how they adapt. They do, because most of them are 30 now, they have time. So to conclude my overly lengthy stories, I don't know how people will adapt, but I don't think that you need to overly worry yourself with robots. Robots are the best that can happen to us

An odd topic for a rant... Sorry Ross, but I'm afraid the european leftist propaganda got into your brains. The idea that the government SHOULD provide people with jobs, or that it SHOULD pay them just for being people is dubious. Government does not have it's own money, only taxes. If government is paying someone for not having any job, that money goes right out of the wallet of the people who do have a job. Even the most advanced robots will not have an income of their own, and will not pay taxes, people will. I don't think that the strategy of encouraging the unemployed people at the expense of employed is good in the long term. Also about robots being cheap and working for free... There is a reason why in the chinese factories it's people who reel up the magnetic coils and not the robots. And it's not because the chinese government ordered it so. Complex robots are complex, and even if you can replace the coil reelers with robots, and only have one educated engineer per ten robots, this educated engineer would still be more expensive. Not to tell that robots need to be bought, and need spare parts, and the precise machinery operates only in very VERY clean environment. Again, there is a reason why on WV factories all the personnel wear suits, and the production workshops are as clean as a surgery. Try to achieve this kind of cleanness in McDonalds! So, my points are: 1. I don't think there will be less job opportunities for educated people. If anything, the number of programmers and engineers will increase. In germany alone there is already a starvation for engineers of about 100k people a year. 2. I don't think the low-tier workers are at risk too. Their advantage is versatility. Rearrange boxes, swipe the floor and help the old lady to find the grocery. Each task is easily done by a robot, but to be able to do them all and to understand what exactly must be done now is a task the consumer robots will not soon learn to do. 3. About 40% GDP is generated in the services, not products. Waiters, hairdressers, actors and teachers are all humans, and will remain humans. Butlers will not be replaced by robots not because the robot can't do a butler job, but because being a human IS a butler job. 4. And finally, the responsibility. Even the most advanced robots is not responsible for it's actions. No company will ever sell a robot without a clear statement that it requires a human supervision, and that this company is not liable for any damage. The robots will always be just tools. As for the robots controlling nuclear missiles, read about a "dead hand" system when you think you're not scared enough As a person who was born in USSR in a family of two physicist working for military I, of course, know something even more scary than the information that is publicly available, but I think even the publicly available information should be enough for starters

Did you ever try livestreamer? https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer Don't know about mobiles, but all the desktop OSes semm to be supported.