Blzut3

The big difference being the audacity situation was completely overblown by people who just see the word telemetry and normal legal boilerplate and assume it's all part of some massive conspiracy or something. (Seriously, I do not understand why that blew up as much as it did.) These fees on the other hand, especially as originally announced, had real implications on the viability of using the product.

I too have no idea how anyone came up with the premise that a game designed for a 486 would inherently run better on XP. In terms of officially supported by the hardware manufacture, that would be an Ivy Bridge (3rd gen Core) with an Nvidia Maxwell GPU (only 960 officially) or AMD GCN 2 (R7 260X officially). But an adventurous person with driver hacks and third party drivers you can go beyond that.

It's inevitable that the interface to buy content would at some point not be worth maintaining. The Xbox 360's situation is a little bit interesting since they have the backwards compatibility stuff, which I assume if you buy would still be playable on the 360? There will probably be a point where the download servers shut down as well, but of course it's fair to expect those to be maintained much longer. In regards to the content on the store that's not available for backwards compatibility, one thing to remember is that the offerings for these old stores was slowly dwindling as publishing licenses expire (which happens for a wide variety of reasons). People forget that even though digital distribution doesn't have manufacturing costs, it doesn't make licensing issues/costs go away. Even if Microsoft kept the store up forever eventually the content available on them would be next to nothing. I would assume the stuff which has no licensing restrictions could have been made available on the new store already.

The thread magicsofa linked provides a perfect opportunity to demonstrate why it's futile to even try, most of your posts are probably on the Internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230806174016/https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/134974-we-should-be-able-to-delete-our-posts-ourselves/?tab=comments

While you're technically correct here (the best kind of correct), extending UDMF in the specific way that would be required to have a complete inline 3D floor support would be honestly more convoluted than just using reference sectors. The UDMF standard doesn't support nested structures and you need pretty much a whole sector plus some other data. So you'd be doing some fake array thing (which is done for multiple sector tags for example), or literally just allowing sectors to reference otherwise unused sectors. That doesn't even account for other useful properties of reference sectors like not needing special support for them in the line specials. Like you said, solving problems no one has, but also creating new ones that we didn't have. I don't think calling it a map format limitation is unfair. I have no doubts that this is the case for the microbenchmark of adding a 3D floor, but are you accounting for the fact that doing interesting architecture with 3D floors typically involves creating more sectors that would be unnecessary with portals? Depending on the structure there may or may not be optimization loss from the lack of 1 sided walls that could otherwise be there.

I feel like by your use of the terms "magic" and "tricks" that you're thinking 3d floors are something they're not. They actually do exist physically in the coordinate space they appear to be in. The reference/dummy sector exists because you need to store the data about the partitioned space somewhere in the map. You could of course throw away the map format and all the tooling that was created for them, but then what is the difference between that and just using Quake? Put another way having a map format that allows you to create "platforms" in the way you're imagining wouldn't change anything except you wouldn't be able to use a Doom editor to make said map. Presumably the reason you have any interest in this question is because you want to use those tools.

Yeah it leaves a lot of questions for lawyers to figure out. I personally doubt they can change the license on already shipped builds (my understanding is the current license is royalty free?), but they probably have the right to stop issuing new engine licenses (i.e. no new builds can be made under the old royalty free terms). In effect your options would be to terminate use immediately or accept the new scheme. I would guess they can still require you to carry out your commitment period though, but would be interesting to see what lawyers make of that.

I guess DRM free physical releases are out with this since I have no idea how you'd track installs of that?

Can you cite the laws that were broken? I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe that holding an innocent man that couldn't make bail for 10 months is by itself illegal. You would need to be able to show exactly where the improper behavior is. (Be it the bail was set too high based on factors the law considers, or finding a way to prove the suspected malice done to try to force a conviction.) We all feel like there has to be something there, but you'd have to actually prove it. That and knowing what to file against whom is what lawyers are for. I don't believe he said, but given his situation I imagine he was talking to lawyers that work on contingency. Surely someone would take the case if paid ahead of time regardless of result. But if the lawyers had a good reason for thinking Laz wouldn't win then it's hard to say it's worth dumping money into.

You can, but without expertise in the law good luck. In this case the people that are supposed to be experts in the area apparently don't think it has enough of a chance of winning to be worthwhile, so I doubt going alone will get anywhere. That's for the defense when accused of a crime (criminal cases). Laz already won that using a public defender. If you want to sue for damages (civil cases), you're on your own.

It's far simpler than that I'm sure. Timelines vary from location to location, but if you don't pay the bills for 10 months it's entirely possible for things to be considered abandoned property. This is why I consider the unreasonable bail the worst part of the story since at least if Laz was on bail with a restraining order, while it would still suck going through all the proceedings, at least he wouldn't have had to lose everything in the process (along with all the other stuff that happened while held). I'm quite shocked there wasn't something in that for the lawyers to jump on.

Results vary a lot by server when you go above 1 gig. ISP claims the limits are on the server side of things since this is the result when connecting to their instance. Nominally I'm on their 5 gig for $99/mo plan, but they don't have a throttle in place. Municipal fiber is awesome. For the record I only have multigig Internet since they put their 1 gig plan behind carrier grade NAT, but multigig is not.

There's definitely a couple of different cases, one of them is enforced tedium. Most typically found in games without save states where something can be difficult simply because it takes some number of minutes just to get another chance to retry. In fact, you've played the lead up so many times that you're 100% consistent with it, it simply takes time. The difficulty is "fake" because if you had save states you could easily learn the patterns, the encounter may just be plain easy once learned, but you're simply being denied the opportunity. These games could be rendered easy by simply practicing on an emulator and then transferring the learned knowledge to a single segment run. Games with poor controls are often considered artificial difficulty. For example a game which uses an unusual control scheme compared to others in the genre is not actually more difficult, it just exploits muscle memory and someone who hasn't established that muscle memory wouldn't find this challenge to be present. Finally, as mentioned here a few times, when the difficulty stems entirely from luck or poor communication with the player. For the luck case there's no challenge to overcome, you simply need to play the game until it lets you pass. I've grouped this with poor communication, which is where the difficulty is negated simply be knowing some weird fact (i.e. something like hit box location is not where it appears to be), since sometimes very unclear mechanics are mistaken for being luck until someone reverse engineers the game to figure it out. To me key to "artificial difficulty" is that there's no actual challenge to overcome. If it were removed, the game would not fundamentally require less skill.

"Reroute all the dehacked into zscript" is vastly overstating the amount of ZScript in kdikdizd. The mikoportal conveyor belt is basically just a short drop in block of code (effectively just an opt-in to supporting the trick). Most of the rest of it is just opting out of enhancements done in the 90s when we thought doing things like adding transparency to vanilla actors was a good idea. The one actor that is rerouted I'm not entirely sure off the top of my head what technical reason prompted the need for that. The point being it's not too far from a script you could just blindly drop into a vanilla mod to opt into extra compatibility. Unfortunately changing the defaults on many things would just break hundreds of other mods developed assuming the status quo defaults so it's a no-win situation. It gets dismissed every time, but I personally still believe a lot of this has to do with Team Eternity's insistence on not doing any kind of user friendly marketing. Even though the issues with access should be solved for some reason the old Doomworld website is still running (and if you're going to keep it up at least put a notice that it's a historical thing, but frankly I don't know why it's still hosted). The current website for it (the wiki) could really use a presentation overhaul to make the experience less raw (see Chocolate Doom). There is a very interesting subset of features common between GZDoom and EE that mod authors can use, but this hasn't gotten a whole lot of traction probably since EE's market share is too small. Perhaps due to too much focus on EE being a GZDoom competitor instead of a PrBoom+ competitor. (To be clear I'm not saying EE isn't a GZDoom competitor, but rather that for day-to-day use EE's feature set is still far from GZDoom's making it a poor substitute. On the other hand those that daily PrBoom+ will be more likely find EE to suit their needs.)

The discussion here would be in regards to the Genesis by itself vs the Sega CD w/ cartridge (trying to take advantage of the faster/second 68k, possibly the scaling hardware, for higher frame rates). Bringing the 32x into this discussion is pointless since I'm fairly sure the CPUs in there vastly out class the 68ks and there's obviously already a port of Doom. The amount of work necessary to coordinate that disparate of hardware to boost frame rates would surely eat up any benefit. I would agree, in that scenario the Sega CD wouldn't be useful for much more than what 32X Resurrection already uses it for.