Achievement Unlocked: Bad Coder

[chungy]

I thought it was bad enough Garry's Mod has achievements, but Microsoft takes it to a whole new level by adding them to Visual Studio: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio

Seriously, why would you do that?

[Quasar]

I could be confused but is this not a third-party addon? :P

[Gez]

what

[chungy]

Quasar said:

I could be confused but is this not a third-party addon? :P

It's developed by Channel 9 Team, which is part of Microsoft.

[TomoAlien]

chungy said:

Seriously, why would you do that?

For fun. I wish someone wrote an achievement plugin for Doom Builder 2 :P.

[Reisal]

TomoAlien said:

For fun. I wish someone wrote an achievement plugin for Doom Builder 2 :P.

Achievement Unlocked: That's a Shit-ton of lines
Build a map utilizing at least 30,000 linedefs.

[fraggle]

Achievement unlocked: braindamaged API

[Kaiser]

Source ports should have achievements

[eargosedown]

You Have Big Guts!: Fist a Cyberdemon.

Impse: Fist an Imp.

Busting Balls: Fist a Cacodemon.

Conjugal Visit: Fist a Player.




Yeah ya know, nevermind on doom achievements.

[chungy]

Kaiser said:

Source ports should have achievements

I've had that idea before, it's not a bad one really.

Are you nuts?! -- Beat nuts.wad

[Sporku]

eargosedown said:

You Have Big Guts!: Fist a Cyberdemon.

Impse: Fist an Imp.

Busting Balls: Fist a Cacodemon.

Conjugal Visit: Fist a Player.




Yeah ya know, nevermind on doom achievements.

I'm pretty sure Doom 2 for XBOX Live Arcade has an achievement for fisting a cyberdemon to death. :P

[Remilia Scarlet]

eargosedown said:

You Have Big Guts!: Fist a Cyberdemon.

Impse: Fist an Imp.

Busting Balls: Fist a Cacodemon.

Conjugal Visit: Fist a Player.

I almost spewed minestrone out of my nose when I read these.

I'm waiting for when operating systems have achievements.

EDIT: Actually, I take that back. I'm surprised someone hasn't written something similar for Emacs.

[chungy]

Wouldn't be too hard to make it for Emacs either, but there's not really any use for it... (nearly all of its features stem from an actual use someone had for the feature)

[Trilinear]

This is actually quite a cool idea. I see it as being a clever way to educate mainstream developers on good programming practices (note the acheivements harness FXCop, Microsoft's static analysis tool), as well as being a bit of light-hearted fun, given some of the more tounge-in-cheek "acheivements".

[Craigs]

I just got the killing spree achievment. Type 10 lines of code in a row without pausing

[Nomad]

fraggle said:

Achievement unlocked: braindamaged API

I read that as "Inept." I'm slightly buzzed, but I bet I'm not far off.

[Maes]

Craigs said:

I just got the killing spree achievment. Type 10 lines of code in a row without pausing

...that's considered an actual achievement?

[Enjay]

I believe that "achievements" are one of the blights of modern gaming, pandering to the short attention span generation who need a pat on the back every 3 minutes.

For me, an achievements is reaching the end of a level or killing a boss or solving a puzzle... I don't need some additional - almost randomly allocated - virtual medal for doing what I would be doing anyway.

Having achievements in programs like this thread is discussing is taking it to a whole new level of ridiculousness.

[DoomUK]

Enjay said:

Having achievements in programs like this thread is discussing is taking it to a whole new level of ridiculousness.

I'm sure it's supposed to be satirical. But I agree with you on what you say about achievements in games.

[Maes]

Enjay said:

For me, an achievements is reaching the end of a level or killing a boss or solving a puzzle... I don't need some additional - almost randomly allocated - virtual medal for doing what I would be doing anyway.

TBH, some older video games did have a secret system of achievements that governed certain apparently random or rare events. TAITO games were choke-full of those. E.g. in Bubble Bobble, jumping over a bubble a certain number of times, caused the appearance of certain bonuses, blowing a certain number of bubbles would cause the appearance of others, etc. Those were actually programmed-in, not glitches.

However, when they worked, you simply saw their effect, not some big flashing text saying "YOU THE MAN NOW DAWG!".

[Gez]

I think the only worthwhile aspect of achievement is to give to players an idea of how much of the game they've seen. Like, if they finished it but only got something like a third of the achievement, then it probably means that the game can be replayed in a different manner.

This doesn't apply when achievements are dumbass things, like "finish the game using only the starting pistol and bring a garden gnome with you up to the end".

Doom has had its own series of fan-made achievements, by the way:

(15-15): The DOOM Honorific Titles
==================================

DESCRIPTION:
        When you think your DOOM skills are solid and that no monster in
hell can be a match for your shotgun, you have two basic ways of getting
street credit.  One is to win lots of DeathMatches against well-known
players, and the other is to get one or more "DOOM Honorific Titles".
The DHT is a rating system that awards top players with standardized and
universally recognized titles. If you feel proud and/or silly enough,
you can include the relevant letters after your name in your .sig and
impress your fellow DOOM players.

There are four titles to be conquered:

     DOOM Master (DM):               can complete any level on Ultra-Violence.

     DOOM Grand Master (DGM):        can complete any level on Nightmare.

     DOOM Tyson (DT):                can complete any level on Ultra-Violence
                                     using nothing more than fist and pistol.

     DOOM Grand Ass Kicker (DGAK):   has the combined skills of a Master, a
                                     Tyson and a Grand Master.

The titles are awarded by passing an examination. As with most
examinations, this will only be a random sampling of your
capacity. You won't be required to complete all 27 episodes to prove
that you can do it.

You will be your own judge for the results. You will receive the text
of the examination, which tells you what to do to be awarded the title
you think you deserve; from then on you just have to produce the
corresponding LMPs and upload them to a specific public place in a
specific format to be able to call yourself a DM, DT, DGM or DGAK. There
is no time limit. The LMPs must be produced especially for the
examination -- you can't just send in your old ones. This is because
there is an authentication mechanism which prevents people from
recycling other people's LMPs.

[eargosedown]

Enjay said:

I believe that "achievements" are one of the blights of modern gaming, pandering to the short attention span generation who need a pat on the back every 3 minutes.

For me, an achievements is reaching the end of a level or killing a boss or solving a puzzle... I don't need some additional - almost randomly allocated - virtual medal for doing what I would be doing anyway.

Having achievements in programs like this thread is discussing is taking it to a whole new level of ridiculousness.

Depends... Achievement systems can lead to a fun side-line of puzzles in a game once you've finished the core content, if you're a completion freak. Of course, many games these days just have cut and dry achievements like "Beat the Fifth Level!" which completely defeats the point...

Achievements in programs can actually be a funny little poke about stuff, especially if they're well thought out.

[fraggle]

Nomad said:

I read that as "Inept." I'm slightly buzzed, but I bet I'm not far off.

When Microsoft added TCP/IP networking to Windows, they imported the Berkeley sockets API, which they named "WinSock". There are a few things that are subtly different between Berkeley sockets and WinSock (for example, having to call closesocket() instead of close()) but in general they're mostly the same, which is useful if you want to write cross-platform software that will run on Windows, Unix and any other operating system that supports Berkeley sockets (ie. everything).

Now we're (supposedly) moving from IPv4 to the brave new world of IPv6, the sockets library needs some changes to support the new IPv6 addressing scheme. As an example, there's a function called inet_ntoa, which because of its design can only support IPv4 addresses. So the IPv6 folk created a new function called inet_ntop to replace it.

Operating system vendors have steadily been incorporating IPv6 support, and all of them have been incorporating the new IPv6 functions. It's really nice that, even though IPv6 support is a monumental amount of effort, people have been able to agree on common APIs for it. This makes programmers' jobs easier because we don't need to worry about one operating system behaving subtly different to others.

Microsoft added inet_ntop to Windows, as well, except it changed the name. On Windows it's called InetNtop. You can see that in a comment on the documentation page: "The ANSI version of this function is inet_ntop". So programmers now have to deal with an utterly needless inconvenience, because the function name was changed for no reason. Presumably they're doing it to comply with some internal set of rules that Microsoft has for naming functions. But basically it's braindamaged. It needlessly inconveniences programmers who use it while simultaneously making their own API ugly and inconsistent.

/end of obscure, offtopic programmer rant

[Gez]

Nothing that a little #ifdef MSISDUMB #define inet_ntop InetNtop #endif won't fix, right?

[Enjay]

Maes said:

TBH, some older video games did have a secret system of achievements that governed certain apparently random or rare events. TAITO games were choke-full of those. E.g. in Bubble Bobble, jumping over a bubble a certain number of times, caused the appearance of certain bonuses, blowing a certain number of bubbles would cause the appearance of others, etc. Those were actually programmed-in, not glitches.

However, when they worked, you simply saw their effect, not some big flashing text saying "YOU THE MAN NOW DAWG!".

Yes, I suppose you are correct. Those are similar to present-day achievements. I guess the difference between them and most of the modern achievements that I am thinking of is not only did you have to do something to trigger them, they actually affected the game. Therefore, deliberately trying to trigger them allowed you to modify the gameplay in some way. Compare that to a little message and sound popping up and awarding you a medal for doing something (like walking a certain distance or whatever) that you were doing anyway and had no idea that an "achievement" was associated with.

It's interesting that achievements have now become an "essential" part of gaming. I've heard people discussing games and quite early on people will ask what achievements are in the game or which ones the person speaking has earned. Although I haven't heard anyone say it, I bet there is a school of thought somewhere that believes a game isn't worthwhile if it doesn't feature achievements.

[Gez]

I think that the console crowd is greatly responsible for this.


Cheevos become a useful shortcut for e-bragging. People can just look at your profile and see your collection of trophies. Inventions like the "gamerscore" only encourage this further. The underlying idea is an example of evil genius applied to marketing: console players are encouraged to buy games not to play but to inflate their score by earning achievements. If your game has a ton of easy achievements ("Achievement Unlocked: Tied your own shoelaces"), then it's attractive to people who won't care about the game itself but about how quickly they can increase their score so as to earn a higher place on the great ladder of never-leave-basement dorks.

Which is also why modern gaming sucks. If you make a shitty game that's over in ten hours, but provides its 1000 gamerscore points by then, it's a good game for the pro-bragger.

TL;DR: consoles are the reason why modern gaming sucks. :p

[Jodwin]

Achievements are barely different from having games keep score. The only real differences are that with scores you have have a huge scale where your personal achievement can fall to and that with achievements you can give points for various different things (of course, in similar vein there are games that give points for doing different things as well, in NES SMBros you get more points the more enemies you knock down with a shell, today you'd get an achievement for knocking down five enemies).

That aside...I don't get the hate on achievements. They don't remove anything from the game (the game, as it is, will be great or shitty regardless of whether it has or doesn't have achievements), whilst for some people they do add something extra to do after beating the main game.



Edit: Also, modern gaming doesn't suck. Modern "AAA titles" do suck, but there's plenty of good new games out there. If you think the opposite you simply aren't looking in the right places.