what work ethic?

I would eat quesadillas with ketchup

beaner

call-out threads are against the rules

ban your mom

Yee, what's effective in Time Trials and Races is completely different.

*watches time trials*

I'm dumd, I forgot there were two patches at the start >.>

this song's been stuck in my head all day


my excuse is that I'm a fag

Quote from: Cup-O on December 08, 2015, 06:48:40 AM

Quote from: I slam Islam on December 08, 2015, 06:09:58 AM

Quote from: rc on December 07, 2015, 08:59:11 PM

Quote from: I slam Islam on December 07, 2015, 02:59:07 PM

Quote from: Tsirist on December 07, 2015, 12:42:18 PM

Quote from: I slam Islam on December 07, 2015, 05:59:15 AM

Been reading about this and no, definitely not. The cons (pretty much giving up one of your constitutional rights) far outweigh the benefits.

It should go without saying that purposely putting vulnerabilities in encryption schemes is idiotic. It defies their very purpose, and it will in no way hamper the ability of hostile elements to communicate without our knowing considering the huge number of workarounds they have access to. It puts the public at greater risk as a side-effect. Whether or not it's a constitutional right is not even relevant in my opinion.

Well the problem with your little rant here is that they wouldn't be putting in "vulnerabilities", they'd be putting in a back door for authorities and intelligence agencies.

There are good uses for this, and it sounds like a good idea on paper. But the reality of all this is much more complicated.

back doors are, by definition, vulnerabilities

They're not making it vulnerable. They're making it so it can be cracked so authorities can access it.

It's not about making their encrypted shit vulnerable.

The entire point of a backdoor is to create a vulnerability where there otherwise wouldn't be one.

Quote

A backdoor in a computer system (or cryptosystem or algorithm) is a method of bypassing normal authentication, securing unauthorized remote access to a computer, or obtaining access to plaintext while attempting to remain undetected.

Obviously it's technically a vulnerability.

My point is they're not making it encrypted then creating vulnerabilities, as if they're fucking retards.

Actually, that's exactly what they want to do.

Quote from: Cup-O on December 07, 2015, 01:04:38 AM

actual picture of OP

I enjoy scrubbing my boy for dinner

oh

um

Am I insane, or is Warzone giving out fewer REQ points for each match now?

chabge

Quote from: Cup-O on December 06, 2015, 08:52:39 PM

The argument goes that the government can't access encrypted communications, unless they have a way in.

They have a way in legally through a warrant served to the company, who have access to their own encrypted data. I can't think of a single compelling reason why the government should be allowed access to any private data without a warrant.

Yeah, pretty much. And even if a bad guy were to use encryption, they'd probably give out information in so many other ways that would minimize the effectiveness of encryption. They're not going to 'going dark' without bending further backwards than most people realize.

There is at least one company that decided to shut down rather than reveal its customers' private keys.

The debate is also about encryption programs made by a company but used by consumers, such as Apple's FileVault hard drive encryption for Mac, or the messenger app Signal. As the Fifth Amendment protects an accused individual from having to reveal their encryption key, even under warrant, the government wants to work around that with backdoors instead.

also I got my Damage Boost cert yesterday, yey

Quote from: Snowtrap on December 05, 2015, 02:40:57 PM

YouTube

Holy shit my sides. This guy normally does Dark Souls content but apparently he plays Halo as well.

Apparently speed boosts stack

yup

Not sure.

How so?

Beware, long post ahead.

>.>

It's not even worthy of mention. It's minutiae. A piece of trivia. You dedicated two sentences to it in your post.

You're right, I should expand on that.

It's important for all stories to maintain a 'suspension of disbelief', where the rules of the world are explained to a reasonable satisfaction of the reader. A story can be fantastical, but it also needs to be somehow relatable to the audience with at least some basis in reality. If at any moment, because of a misstep (an intentional action doesn't count) on behalf of the storyteller, the audience is reminded that they're watching a movie, or reading a book, or playing a video game, the suspension of disbelief is ruined, and the storyteller has failed.

Even the more 'gamey' games like the Mario series attempt some sort of suspension of disbelief. Super Mario 64 has the 'camera' explained away by a mostly-unseen character recording the events as they're happening; Super Mario Bros. 3 frames itself as a stage play. 64 shows Mario get thrown out of the painting when he 'dies'; SMB3 'death' is like the actor flubbing their stunts. There's also a shit-ton of craftsmanship that goes into the 'art' of making something fun. Not just the graphics or music, but everything else, from the controls, to the physics, to the level design, to anything that makes up that game. (But they're not really narrative experiences, which I'll get to in sec.)

One can learn some of the necessary programming skills from school or a book, but one can only really be good at making a game through experience, and thus trial and error. Everyone's first game goes through various iterations before settling on the one that 'works.'

More recent games like Dark Souls ditch 'gamey' conventions like a 'score' or 'levels'. A lot of them try to ditch loading screens entirely, aside from the initial loading screen when starting the game. They're more like films, where each scene flows into the next without interruption. There's more that's required to sell that sort of experience; the player not dying is the best way to keep their mind engaged, but there's still the problem of dying and restarting going completely unexplained.

It's especially disorienting to someone who's never played a game before, and expects the coherency of a novel or movie or play. They'd be confused upon restarting after death, because that doesn't make a lick of sense in the world that's been established. There is no explanation to tell this person other than "it's because it's a video game." Suspension of disbelief has been broken.

A game like Heavy Rain will have a character permanently dead without retries (mostly Fire Emblem too, if you're playing it that way). Dark Souls weaves death and undeathinto the main conflict of its story and lore. Returning to life at a checkpoint 'because you're cursed with undeath' is a much better explanation than 'it's a game.'

I mean, taken to extremes, even having a controller that exists outside of the story's world to control the character could break suspension of disbelief, but that goes beyond the scope of this argument.

Quote from: Cup-O on December 06, 2015, 07:08:56 PM

Well, I mean, even though Dark Souls may not have necessarily been the first to feature some of these ideas, it did start at least a few trends and affected games that are more mainstream to follow suit.

RE: seamless solo/co-op, I never understood the argument that 'well it's not a big deal in this case, because something else would have come around and done the same thing and made it popular.' The fact is, they didn't.

Why I'm so hung up on 'player death explanations' is that no other storytelling medium lets itself get away with unexplained 'resets' within the same continuity and story because the narrative didn't go the way the storyteller wanted. I think more games should care about maintaining suspension of disbelief and immersion in general.

I don't find trendsetting particularly impressive, or worthy of adulation. Especially if the trends are bad.

The point of the "something else would have come around" argument is just to point out that Dark Souls isn't special. Sure--maybe they pulled it off first. Who cares? It's not a competition--or at least, it shouldn't be.

The death explanation thing is cool and all, but I just wouldn't consider it a great selling point. It's not important--it's a small detail, and most people don't give a fuck (because why should they). You can cite it as a positive trait all you want, but if you're gonna tout the game has one of the greatest of all time, I think you need something a little bit more substantial than that. That's all I'm saying.

I think these trends are alright. Seamless solo and multiplayer experiences fulfills the desire to have both, but without needing to segregate them behind a central menu screen. And it doesn't force the player to inexplicably switch between 'the Hero' and 'some inconsequential random who only exists in the multiplayer', because now they're both the Hero. It's all part of one continuous sequence that's also sufficiently explained in the story.

Yeah, I don't know about that part. It's subjective, I suppose. It's special to the people whom it influenced.

In the bigger picture, how Dark Souls handles death is admittedly not a big deal on its own, because like you said, most people really won't care. But for the folks who do care, I'd say it's a small but important detail.

~~~

*whew* But all of that said, I don't really like the idea of games as art. They're often emotionally shallow experiences that rarely ever try to develop their characters sufficiently. Games mostly just exist to fulfill some sort of basic satisfaction. There's rarely any 'food for thought', rarely anything deeper than the surface. In many games like Dark Souls, I really don't have any reason to give one shit about the fate of the protagonist. Instead, there's just a big world to explore, and stuff to fight on the way there.

There's nothing in video games that has anything close to the emotional depth or artistry or validity of something like The Godfather or the Mona Lisa.

Dark Souls, by giving a rational explanation for death and repetition, inches video games just a tiny bit closer to what can be called 'art.' But there's still a very, very long way to go.