>> I must confess that I play the commercial, proprietary Civ IV more
>> than FreeCiv, though.
>
> I understand. I rarely play either one at this point, primarily due to
> the insane amount of time I've been known to dump in to it in the past.
I hear you. I've been known to lose entire weeks on single games. :-/
>> It makes me feel sad and conflicted, but I've yet to see an
>> open-source game project that brings the sort of unified vision and
>> cohesion of art assets, audio, storyline, gameplay etc. that a good
>> (in the sense of capability, no moral connotations) proprietary game
>> company can.
>
> Yeah, I hear you there.
>
> I make do by discounting all the art and audio. This leaves just
> storyline and gameplay. The 3D models, art, music and sound effects
> are all developer intensive. If you cut them out you need far fewer
> developers -- however you still need a good design.
True that.
There are plenty of FLOSS games with good gameplay.
Do you know of any FLOSS games that have good storylines?
>> > However, I believe that abstraction is a valued part of gaming. I value
>> > putting things back in to the imagination and simplifying the playing
>> > pieces. I also acknowledge that I am a minority.
>>
>> Psh, I bet you still read *books*! ;-)
>
> Recently I've been really enjoying podiobooks.com. I can listen to a
> story while working on my projects.
Yeah, that's a great service!
> Interestingly, even written books and audio dramas are fairly
> significantly different media. I was listening to the audio drama
> 'Space Casey', and the author mentioned that some of her choices were
> specifically made for her media.
Oh, yeah. It's like with Audiobooks; some companies do them well, some
not so much.
I've found, with audiobooks, that a good book read badly is just as
bad (if not worse) than a bad book read well.
>> What makes a game worth playing is the fun, not the flash. I sometimes
>> want the flash, though. And sometimes, though not often, well-done
>> flash can add to a game.
>
> Yeah, it can add to the game. I admit that. Some games do really well
> with the added flash. Some of the horror console games, in particular,
> really come off creepy due to their flash.
Good example! Doom has always given me the willies, and the 3-D flash
in Doom 3 made it exponentially creepier than Doom 2.
> There are times when you just want the flash. I admit that, too.
> Sometimes you feel like smashing and killing things. In these cases,
> graphics are nice, and you're frequently willing to forgo some of the
> finer details in the plot and game design.
>
> My gripe is just that it would be a lot easier to focus on game play,
> plot, and design if people stopped focusing so exclusively on the
> pictures and audio.
Perhaps the "problem" is that pictures and audio are sexier, more
immediately gratifying, and more easily accessible than engaging
storylines and well-balanced gameplay.
For what it's worth, the kids became immediately more engaged in my
Python class when I brought out the livewires library (a wrapper for
Tkinter) which let them make 2-d graphics as opposed to just working
with text.
And then there's Alice. I saw a roomful of middle schoolers become
completely absorbed in Alice right off the bat. I can't pretend the
3-D movies had nothing to do with that.
So, I mean, as a teacher, I have to value that quality of the flash.
My kids learn better if they're interested, even if what hooks the
interest up front is *really* just window dressing.
(P.S. the new turtle library that comes with Python 2.6 and later is
absolutely *awesome*. I got to see the developer (a math teacher from
Vienna) show it off at PyCon.)
(P.P.S. the turtle library, in short, implements Logo in Python)
>> For example, in Civ IV (it's the only 3-d game I play regularly, sorry
>> for beating it to death), the flash really does add a LOT to the game
>> experience in terms of usability. Civ-type games can become insanely
>> huge and complex, in terms of the information you have to manage and
>> juggle in your brain, so any added usability is awesome. I'd say the
>> Civ IV flash helped me to appreciate aspects of the game that I didn't
>> notice in the earlier (and alternative) 2-d incarnations.
>
> While I played Civ IV, I didn't really notice that the 3D aspects played
> any part. There were some cut scenes here and there, but... I just
> didn't notice it too much.
The 3-d models in Civ IV convey information. Because it's 3D, zooming
in and out smoothly and continuously lets you choose the level of
detail you're wanting to look at right now in a very intuitive way.
For instance, I'll start each turn with a good high-level survey of my
empire (which is sometimes so big I can't see it all for the curvature
of the planet, thousands of land squares on the screen), as the turn
progresses I usually find myself zooming in to inspect continents or
regions (hundreds of land squares on the screen) and, in wartime, it's
not unusual for me to be zoomed in on an area smaller than a
chessboard, contemplating my next move.
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
> Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07 78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E
>
>
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Cheers!
Simón
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