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Morgan

WFG Retired
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Posts posted by Morgan

  1. ... but as long as it's right, I'm happy. :P

    "A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant." -- Manfred Eigen

    We're not working with theories of hoplite sandals. We're using models based on incomplete information, commonly known as history. You may be right that hoplites did not wear shoes; however, whether hoplites wore shoes is irrelevant. Our hoplites have shoes. In addition, all the historical evidence supports the model that even the Greek hoplites weren't sufficiently foolish to rush into battle without protecting their feet from the environment and the weaponry discarded about the battlefield.

    As for feet being worn to death by walking on rocks and the like all the time - I beg to differ. Living in the country, I often have to walk barefoot quite a lot myself - it's something you can get used to, but not the kind of thing I'd want to do all the time.
    You're forgetting the weight of the bronze and iron equipment that hoplites endure through all terrain in all weather conditions for any number of kilometers deemed necessary by the brass. The pressure alone from the equipment weight is enough to wear even the toughest man's bare feet. Combine that pressure with unfriendly terrain. All those little cuts from sharp rocks are enough to allow bacteria to disable your feet prior to the battle and possibly prevent you from reaching the destination with the rest of the army. The pain from slivers and other injuries are also enough to distract you in battle, which would ultimately lead to your death. Greek hoplites, I think, were smart enough like most people to not travel long distances for extended durations without footwear. In battle, on the front lines, is another story. The weight of the armor may have been enough to give the sandals traction; on the other hand, the sandals may have proved uncomfortable under the weight of the equipment.
  2. Interestingly enough, I managed to get this quote from their article about Greek footwear:

    "Greek warriors or hoplite wore body armour with heavy leg greaves but no shoes."

    Cameron Kippen also writes, "Greek Gods and heroes were often depicted barefoot with at least one notable exception i.e. Aphrodite." That's patently untrue. I provided you the resource merely for the general overview of the History of Sandals to support the logic that "of course, anyone in their right mind would wear shoes when available". On the other hand, Greek sandals weren't known for their traction, so it's possible that the Greek hoplites at the front lines whose duty was to 'push' the enemy either removed their shoes or didn't wear any at all. Both are logical options in consideration of the fact that those at the front lines throughout military history were never expected to live beyond the initial conflict. I'm in favor of the removal option since armies travelled by foot for hundreds of miles. Military commanders certainly wouldn't want their troops to be incapable of maneuvering on the battlefield, and warriors certainly wouldn't travel hundreds of miles without some form of shoe covering their bare feet.
  3. Sandals are one of the earliest types of shoes. Around 8,500 calendar years ago, prehistoric people of the Midwestern United States wore sandals. Some sandals were strapped to the feet while others were slip-ons. Ancient people even used padding in their sandals for comfort. Three centuries ago, Egyptians wove sandals from papyrus. King Tutankhamen wore calf-leather sandals. In 6th Century B.C., the Etruscans used iron to form the frames of their sandals. Roman patricians wore red-leather sandals while lesser yet important people wore black-leather sandals. Hermes, Perseus, and Theseus of Greek mythology all wore sandals. Later aristocrats created highly decorative loafers, adorned with gold to constructed of silver. Peasants were often barefooted, or used whatever from wood to leather to cover the soles of their feet. Throughout history, shoes signified the importance of the individual; in fact, even today your shoes affect your social status. (The hording of shoes by women isn't a modern phenomenon either.)

  4. Outlook to manage e-mail accounts and contacts, organize important documents, manage tasks and calendar items, and create notes. Document management via Outlook can be configured with basic version control.

    Excel for everything else. Sometimes tasks are more easily managed using Excel. I don't really like the Outlook Tasks UI. I like to be able to modify everything at-will, but I enter important business-related tasks into Outlook because I use Outlook so often.

  5. Igor, an international naming and branding agency, describes Wii as "brilliant" on its blog. Why?

    Because we don’t believe that Wii is the real name. We think Nintendo is setting you all up to be Punk’d at E3, generating a massive amount of positive buzz when the scam and the real new name are announced.
    I wouldn't be surprised. The viral marketing concept has been hitting companies hard. I hate that term, by the way.
  6. All with a 2006 budget defecit of $371 billion, and a trade deficit that requires $1 billion dollars of external financing per day, and a national debt owed to foreign banks of $8.4 trillion :D Good days for the US defense industry, but as an accounting student it makes me cringe.
    Dennis Miller: The deficit doesn't even bother me that much. ... They talk about us owing like $400 billion or something. I always think, 'Do we actually owe somebody that?' And if we do, you know, don't pay 'em. Nobody pays us! There ya go, I just solved the deficit."
    :)
  7. I'd disagree with that. Games are (/should be) designed to benefit the players, not the developers.

    The game was developed for the players, not the debug utilities. Enabling cheating (i.e., the breaking of the rules of the game) should never be allowed. Emergent gameplay is the holy grail of game design, but bear this in mind: cheating is neither emergent gameplay or result of such emergence.
    (I don't know about testing, though I wouldn't want to be the person who has to spend two hundred hours playing every quest, with each possible character class and at every skill level to make sure it's all balanced, without any cheats to adjust skills and travel instantly :shrug:)
    On the other hand, I'm happy that I'm not the person who has to spend four-hundred hours fixing bugs, including the bugs caused by those fixes. ;)

    From the QA perspective, debug tools cause problems in the development cycle. Any in-game tools available should either be ignored or extensively tested. If the latter option, then Development needs to commit to ensuring that tools that are supposed to facilitate testing will not break the software. With untested implementations of debug tools and the freedom to use such tools, testers will report issues that are usually strictly tools-related. These false reports increase build turnaround time as well as the effort used to track and fix the problems caused by the debug tools. This results in effort and time wasted on software functions that do not affect normal gameplay. The development and testing of online games, such as EverQuest II, unfortunately necessitates debug tools since the gameplay environment is incredibly massive. Testing an MMO title using the console-quality gold standard of near perfection would consume a legendary number of years. Single-player games (including games that are primarily single-player) and console games have the honor of being testable to a state of near perfection (or better known as "reasonable confidence in the quality of the software".) Both Oblivion and 0 A.D. are titles with that honor. (For the record, I don't believe in the attitude that bugs are okay in computer games because they can be fixed later with patches. In my book, shipping a defective product is unnecessarily premature.)

    When debug tools, untested or tested, are made readily available to players, players will be affected by game-breaking negative experiences. These experiences should always be avoided in design.

  8. While Oblivion is fun, there are several improvements that could be done...

    Smarter AI

    The AI-driven entities remain stupid; although, they do have daily routines. These routines are scripted and triggered by time, at least they appear that way in the Construction Set. There are instances where the player will wonder why didn't the AI respond appropriately.

    For example, if your character runs and jumps around a pub and trashes the place, the host will not ask you to leave. The NPCs who are eating or drinking also will not attempt to brawl you for ruining their dinner.

    If you cast an offensive spell on a Guard, the Guard will chase you down and ask whether you'd like to Pay a Fine, Resist Arrest, or Go to Jail. Tell me: when have you ever shot a cop and been offered these options? This dialogue appears for every observed crime. Guards should hint at bribery for small crimes, allow you to resist arrest without choosing a menu option, and haul you off to jail for major crimes (e.g., killing someone in their sleep.) In some cases, Guards should just try to kill you.

    There are also obvious AI mistakes that ruin the experience. For example, you can steal from certain NPCs that will either respond with "I don't need it anyway" without reporting you, or respond by following you. If you happen to get the latter prior to a scripted conversation where you lose control of your character, during that conversation, the NPC will circle you... over and over.

    No Command Console

    Players (and testers) should never have access to the command console. This makes cheating too easy and failure to thoroughly test more likely.

    Easier-to-use Construction Set

    Bethesda, take a lesson from RPG Maker 2000. Scripting, pathing, and dialogue creation can be much easier.

    Crashes

    This game will crash often with vertical sync (vsync) and/or HDR enabled. This instability is what results when too much of the budget is spent on A-list voice actors than on QA...

  9. As I said, the top glass scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass strongly believes that glass is a fourth state of matter, and he has believed so for more than 40 years. I'm inclined to agree with him. Here's an article from the Corning Museum of Glass: Does Glass Flow? And here's more information on glass than you ever needed to know; although, there is some nice history involving some 0 A.D. cultures. :shrug:

    I also don't care which authority believes what unless their primary field is glass. My dad, a lifelong scientist and extremely knowledgeable man, has Master degrees in Physics and Engineering. He maintained that glass is a liquid and that he can prove that fact with an experiment he devised. That is, he maintained that position until I provided him a copy of the 1962 article from the Journal of Glass Studies titled "A Note on the Scientist's Definition of Glass". Now, he mostly agrees that glass is not a liquid.

  10. Glass should be a very dense fluid (liquid), iirc... :P

    Actually, if you observe very old window glasses, you can notice a sort of "melting" with the bottom part of it thicker than the upper part...

    One common misconception is that glass is a super-cooled liquid of practically infinite viscosity when at room temperature (see Amorphous solid). Supporting evidence that is often offered is that old windows are often thicker at the bottom than at the top. It is then assumed that the glass was once uniform, but has flowed to its new shape.

    The likely source of this belief is that when panes of glass were commonly made by glassblowers, the technique that was used was to spin molten glass so as to create a round, mostly flat and even plate (the Crown glass process, described above). This plate was then cut to fit a window. The pieces were not, however, absolutely flat; the edges of the disk would be thicker because of centrifugal forces. When actually installed in a window frame, the glass would be placed thicker side down for the sake of stability and visual sparkle. Occasionally such glass has been found thinner side down, as would be caused by carelessness at the time of installation.

    Source: Wikipedia

  11. Established by the Entertainment Software Association, the Video Game Voters Network "exists to empower Americans who play video games to take action against threats to this entertainment medium and to stay informed about the latest issues that could affect our choice in video game entertainment."

    The issues highlighted by the ESA affect you, me, and everyone involved with video games as consumers and developers. I strongly advise readers of this news entry to visit the following links and take advantage of the resources provided. While the Video Game Voters Network caters to Americans, those residing in other nations should learn about these issues and recognize when similar legislation emerges locally.

    Video Game Voters Network

    www.videogamevoters.org

    Entertainment Software Association

    www.theesa.com

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