I'm a short ways into Star Wars: The Old Republic now, and gosh, is there ever a lot of evil on the Sith side. And I don't mean the "we have an alternative but valid viewpoint" evil, or the "we're a misunderstood but honorable people" evil, like we get in some video games. SW:TOR has you torturing prisoners and purging the impure as newbie quests.
It struck me that if (in some alternate reality) I had kids, I would absolutely not want them playing a Sith character. You aren't just told to torture someone in SW:TOR - you are told to question someone, and you have the option of torturing them. It's a Star Wars form of torture - zapping someone with lightning bolts from your hands - but torture nonetheless, and it's a valid story choice. You get "dark side" points for the action, which is technically a reward in this game.
Somehow it feels to me as if giving you the option to do something horrible in a game is worse than just presenting it as an objective. Many, many games have you slaughtering your way through an endless series of living beings, but here in this game, based on a largely child-friendly franchise, you are put in front of a prisoner who is strapped to a table and asked whether or not you want to torture him.
The game is labeled "T for Teen"; is this a valid label? Is it worse to show naked breasts or red blood than it is to allow the player to practice torture (even cartoon torture)?
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
I heart conservatives
For those of you who know me well: I have not titled this post with any sense of irony or sarcasm. I am, however, choosing a very particular meaning for the word "conservatives".
I can sympathize with political conservatives, who believe that the role of the federal government should be restricted, and that more power should be at the state level. Different states have different needs: different industries, different resources, different demographics, different mindsets. It makes sense to assert that a state government is better able to address the needs of its constituents than a large, overriding federal government trying to please everyone at once.
I can sympathize with fiscal conservatives, who believe that federal spending needs to be reduced. I am quite certain that the federal government is wasting appalling amounts of my tax money, due to inefficiency, corruption, lack of oversight, or some combination of the three. I'm also absolutely certain that the government is spending a lot of money on policies that I am strongly opposed to.
What bothers me are the so-called "religious conservatives," which seems to be just another way to say "Christian hardliners." There are reasonable and interesting ideas coming out of the right wing, but they're being drowned out and tainted by the attempts of the religious right to impose their faith on the entire nation. The fact that religious freedom is one of the founding principles of America seems to have been utterly forgotten, and it's been forgotten by the same people who seem to keep stressing a return to Constitutional values.
Your faith is not my faith. You and I may have some congruent moral values, but you cannot expect to impose all of the trappings of your faith on me. Would you expect to pass laws enforcing fasting during Lent? Three hours of silence during Good Friday? Church attendance on the Sabbath? No? Of course not. That's a violation of the division of church and state, isn't it?
So stop trying to legislate your faith-based values concerning contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. If you have to go to the Bible to defend your convictions, that's a sure bet that you're endorsing something of religious origin that has no basis in our legal code. "Because I believe it's a sin" or "because God told me so" is not a valid reason for passing laws that must regulate the behavior of this vast, multi-cultural country.
I think the political landscape of this country would be much different if the GOP could divest itself of its evangelical baggage and concentrate on real political and fiscal issues. I think we would have a much more productive debate between the two parties; I think we could spend more time addressing the hazards of the 21st century, including the side effects of a global, information-based economy on the average person's financial health, and the side effects of an ever-growing industrial population on the health of our planet.
I wish for a lot of foolish things like this.
I can sympathize with political conservatives, who believe that the role of the federal government should be restricted, and that more power should be at the state level. Different states have different needs: different industries, different resources, different demographics, different mindsets. It makes sense to assert that a state government is better able to address the needs of its constituents than a large, overriding federal government trying to please everyone at once.
I can sympathize with fiscal conservatives, who believe that federal spending needs to be reduced. I am quite certain that the federal government is wasting appalling amounts of my tax money, due to inefficiency, corruption, lack of oversight, or some combination of the three. I'm also absolutely certain that the government is spending a lot of money on policies that I am strongly opposed to.
What bothers me are the so-called "religious conservatives," which seems to be just another way to say "Christian hardliners." There are reasonable and interesting ideas coming out of the right wing, but they're being drowned out and tainted by the attempts of the religious right to impose their faith on the entire nation. The fact that religious freedom is one of the founding principles of America seems to have been utterly forgotten, and it's been forgotten by the same people who seem to keep stressing a return to Constitutional values.
Your faith is not my faith. You and I may have some congruent moral values, but you cannot expect to impose all of the trappings of your faith on me. Would you expect to pass laws enforcing fasting during Lent? Three hours of silence during Good Friday? Church attendance on the Sabbath? No? Of course not. That's a violation of the division of church and state, isn't it?
So stop trying to legislate your faith-based values concerning contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. If you have to go to the Bible to defend your convictions, that's a sure bet that you're endorsing something of religious origin that has no basis in our legal code. "Because I believe it's a sin" or "because God told me so" is not a valid reason for passing laws that must regulate the behavior of this vast, multi-cultural country.
I think the political landscape of this country would be much different if the GOP could divest itself of its evangelical baggage and concentrate on real political and fiscal issues. I think we would have a much more productive debate between the two parties; I think we could spend more time addressing the hazards of the 21st century, including the side effects of a global, information-based economy on the average person's financial health, and the side effects of an ever-growing industrial population on the health of our planet.
I wish for a lot of foolish things like this.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Sims Social
Due to a serious and common hazard of 21st-century life in America (I was bored and had access to the Internet) I recently clicked on an enthusiastic Facebook link inviting me to join "The Sims Social", which is the Facebook version of The Sims. I had previously heard this game described as an embodiment of the worst characteristics of Facebook games; a faithful implementation of the archetype that Zynga uses to stamp out their never-ending series of soulless timewasters.
After some play time, I do agree that yes, the game consists of little more than clicking your Sim, telling him/her to do stuff in order to gain resources which you can then spend to unlock stuff and get more things to click on so you can do more stuff, and so on. But then again, The Sims was always like this. From the beginning, it's basically been an interactive dollhouse with a few RPG elements built in. The Sims has never been about action or strategy or any real test of skill; it's always been a toy where you can click on stuff and stuff happens. So while there's not a lot of game to this game, in this respect, it's also being faithful to the original.
In order to Facebook-ize the game, they've implemented an "energy" mechanic which should be familiar to any of you who have ever tried to play a Facebook game. You get a certain amount of energy; when you want to do something meaningful in the game, you expend energy; your supply of energy replenishes itself gradually over time. This effectively limits you to a few short play sessions a day - unless you pony up some real-world cash to buy more energy. "I apologize, sir," the game tells you, wringing its work-calloused hands, "but you see how things are for us; you see what we must work with; we are just a poor Facebook game, and Grandmother, well, you know how things are with Grandmother ... so it is difficult for us, very difficult, but you are our friend, a good friend, so for you, perhaps, we can arrange something. Perhaps if you could help us with our expenses, just a trifle, just a small micropayment, then for you, our good friend, we will leave our doors open..."
I'm sure that this sort of thing helps to regulate network traffic and reduces the load on the servers, so that you don't have millions of Sims addicts clicking away 24/7 and bringing the game to a crashing halt. But the primary reason for the energy mechanism, obviously, is to get you to pay to play the game. Many of these games will even arrange things so that you get a fairly substantial amount of energy for free, right out of the gate, so you can get good and hooked on the game (they hope) before they start passing the hat.
The other way that games like this "help you" to get more energy is by persuading you to get your friends to sign up for the game as well. Then you can send each other "gifts" which you can use to improve your play experience. Again, this helps the bottom line of the game developers, since more players equals a greater chance that one or more of you will pony up for that free energy refill or that marvelous virtual hat.
The Sims Social stresses this latter mechanic (which should be no surprised, based on the name) by making many of the in-game tasks and quests either virtually or actually impossible to complete unless you have a large pool of friends who are also playing the game. They can't entirely ostracize the solo player, though - can't pass up an opportunity for revenue - so they help out social players by providing a free imaginary friend. The imaginary friend they provided for my character (and possibly for all players, or all male players, I haven't bothered to check) is Bella Goth.
It's probably not advisable to spend too much time thinking about the life stories of imaginary video game characters, but I can never seem to help myself, and so I find myself pondering the peculiar life of Bella Goth. First of all, although you would expect Bella to be, well, goth, she seems to be anything but. When I joined the game, EA was trying to get players to buy "Roaring Twenties" style furniture and clothes, and so Bella was dressed as a flapper, and her house looked like a speakeasy. Currently EA is pushing "Arabian Nights" gear, and so Bella has the best in "I Dream of Jeannie" attire and lives in something like a cross between a caravanserai and a Middle Eastern restaurant. So how did she get the name "Bella Goth"? One assumes it wasn't by choice, and that she was saddled with the name by parents who themselves had an unfortunate surname, and who had the tremendous bad luck to choose the name "Bella" for their daughter, leaving her to hit early adulthood right about the time the Twilight books started getting big.
Bella has two functions in the game; to help walk you through the tutorial by allowing you to practice various social actions with her, and to allow you to accumulate social points during the game even if you don't have actual friends to interact with. So you can visit her any time you like, and chat, and listen to her radio, and use her restroom (Sims have to use the bathroom a lot) and she's always happy to see you, and she doesn't mind if you leave abruptly.
So who is this Bella person, who likes to flirt, but who always keeps you permanently in the Friend Zone? Does she have a boyfriend she's saving her affections for? What does she do with her time? She never seems to work - how does she afford to completely renovate her home every two weeks? For that matter, even though your own Sim needs to eat and sleep, Bella doesn't ... possibly she's a vampire. Though it seems to always be light outside in the game, you never really see the sun, which makes some sense, since if there was a sun, it would go down once in a while. Is the entire Sim nation artificially lit, perhaps by some vast array of airship-mounted artificial lights? This would make the area the perfect choice of residence for a vampire.
She must really hate that Stephanie Meyer named a character after her.
As I was coming to the end of writing this article, I wandered onto a Sims wiki, and discovered that Bella actually appears in several of the Sims games, and that she actually has something of a backstory which has evolved over the many Sims iterations. Her life seems to have taken a number of disturbing and tragic turns which utterly belie her easygoing and cheerful appearance in The Sims Social. I think it's far more pleasant to continue to believe that she's just some cheerful, fantastically wealthy vampire, who wants nothing more out of her unlife than polite neighbors and the eternal artificial glow of the airships, circling far overhead.
After some play time, I do agree that yes, the game consists of little more than clicking your Sim, telling him/her to do stuff in order to gain resources which you can then spend to unlock stuff and get more things to click on so you can do more stuff, and so on. But then again, The Sims was always like this. From the beginning, it's basically been an interactive dollhouse with a few RPG elements built in. The Sims has never been about action or strategy or any real test of skill; it's always been a toy where you can click on stuff and stuff happens. So while there's not a lot of game to this game, in this respect, it's also being faithful to the original.
In order to Facebook-ize the game, they've implemented an "energy" mechanic which should be familiar to any of you who have ever tried to play a Facebook game. You get a certain amount of energy; when you want to do something meaningful in the game, you expend energy; your supply of energy replenishes itself gradually over time. This effectively limits you to a few short play sessions a day - unless you pony up some real-world cash to buy more energy. "I apologize, sir," the game tells you, wringing its work-calloused hands, "but you see how things are for us; you see what we must work with; we are just a poor Facebook game, and Grandmother, well, you know how things are with Grandmother ... so it is difficult for us, very difficult, but you are our friend, a good friend, so for you, perhaps, we can arrange something. Perhaps if you could help us with our expenses, just a trifle, just a small micropayment, then for you, our good friend, we will leave our doors open..."
I'm sure that this sort of thing helps to regulate network traffic and reduces the load on the servers, so that you don't have millions of Sims addicts clicking away 24/7 and bringing the game to a crashing halt. But the primary reason for the energy mechanism, obviously, is to get you to pay to play the game. Many of these games will even arrange things so that you get a fairly substantial amount of energy for free, right out of the gate, so you can get good and hooked on the game (they hope) before they start passing the hat.
The other way that games like this "help you" to get more energy is by persuading you to get your friends to sign up for the game as well. Then you can send each other "gifts" which you can use to improve your play experience. Again, this helps the bottom line of the game developers, since more players equals a greater chance that one or more of you will pony up for that free energy refill or that marvelous virtual hat.
The Sims Social stresses this latter mechanic (which should be no surprised, based on the name) by making many of the in-game tasks and quests either virtually or actually impossible to complete unless you have a large pool of friends who are also playing the game. They can't entirely ostracize the solo player, though - can't pass up an opportunity for revenue - so they help out social players by providing a free imaginary friend. The imaginary friend they provided for my character (and possibly for all players, or all male players, I haven't bothered to check) is Bella Goth.
It's probably not advisable to spend too much time thinking about the life stories of imaginary video game characters, but I can never seem to help myself, and so I find myself pondering the peculiar life of Bella Goth. First of all, although you would expect Bella to be, well, goth, she seems to be anything but. When I joined the game, EA was trying to get players to buy "Roaring Twenties" style furniture and clothes, and so Bella was dressed as a flapper, and her house looked like a speakeasy. Currently EA is pushing "Arabian Nights" gear, and so Bella has the best in "I Dream of Jeannie" attire and lives in something like a cross between a caravanserai and a Middle Eastern restaurant. So how did she get the name "Bella Goth"? One assumes it wasn't by choice, and that she was saddled with the name by parents who themselves had an unfortunate surname, and who had the tremendous bad luck to choose the name "Bella" for their daughter, leaving her to hit early adulthood right about the time the Twilight books started getting big.
Bella has two functions in the game; to help walk you through the tutorial by allowing you to practice various social actions with her, and to allow you to accumulate social points during the game even if you don't have actual friends to interact with. So you can visit her any time you like, and chat, and listen to her radio, and use her restroom (Sims have to use the bathroom a lot) and she's always happy to see you, and she doesn't mind if you leave abruptly.
So who is this Bella person, who likes to flirt, but who always keeps you permanently in the Friend Zone? Does she have a boyfriend she's saving her affections for? What does she do with her time? She never seems to work - how does she afford to completely renovate her home every two weeks? For that matter, even though your own Sim needs to eat and sleep, Bella doesn't ... possibly she's a vampire. Though it seems to always be light outside in the game, you never really see the sun, which makes some sense, since if there was a sun, it would go down once in a while. Is the entire Sim nation artificially lit, perhaps by some vast array of airship-mounted artificial lights? This would make the area the perfect choice of residence for a vampire.
She must really hate that Stephanie Meyer named a character after her.
As I was coming to the end of writing this article, I wandered onto a Sims wiki, and discovered that Bella actually appears in several of the Sims games, and that she actually has something of a backstory which has evolved over the many Sims iterations. Her life seems to have taken a number of disturbing and tragic turns which utterly belie her easygoing and cheerful appearance in The Sims Social. I think it's far more pleasant to continue to believe that she's just some cheerful, fantastically wealthy vampire, who wants nothing more out of her unlife than polite neighbors and the eternal artificial glow of the airships, circling far overhead.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
L.A. Noire - Final Thoughts
Finally finished L.A. Noire, and I have to say that I'm no longer as impressed with it as I was when I started. First of all, the "driving around L.A." parts of the game got to be so tedious that I started skipping them whenever possible. I was doing the chase scenes, but any time when I was just driving from point A to point B, I'd skip it. It's a very pretty re-creation of L.A., but I really don't want to invest hours of my life sitting and waiting for imaginary traffic signals.
Second, the interrogation scenes started to get pretty arbitrary. In the last third of the game, it seemed like there was no logical connection between what the characters were saying and what option I had to choose to "win" the interrogation. It turned into a lot of wild guessing for me, and as a result I was only getting about 1 out of 3 questions right ... with no penalty or negative effect. Sure, maybe I wasn't getting as much XP, but the game still let me advance the story even after fumbling an interrogation, and leveling up my character turned out to be mostly useless anyway.
Which leads to my third problem, which is that there really wasn't much skill involved in finishing the game. Didn't do well in an investigation? No problem, you'll always get at least the important clue you need to proceed. Even if you screw up a really critical interrogation, they'll let you do it again until you get it right. Can't handle an action sequence? After a few tries, the game lets you skip it. About the only part of the game you aren't allowed to screw up is the clue-finding part, which got really annoying at one part of the game, where all the hints were indicating I had to do one thing, whereas the actual clue was somewhere else, and I eventually had to give up and hit the web looking for someone to point me in the right direction.
So, whereas the story was nice, and the scenery was fantastic, there really wasn't a lot of challenge here, since there was never any real penalty for failure. So while I did finish the game, I don't really have the sense of accomplishment I would normally get when I've battled my way through a typical video game.
And I know I keep bringing this up, but I think using a Grand Theft Auto kind of engine as the base for this game was completely the wrong way to go. This isn't a free-roaming, open-world game; you have to do missions in a pretty linear order. Sure, there are a few random "police band radio" missions you can pick up while driving the streets, but there's no real incentive to go around and explore, unless you absolutely think you have to find all the different hidden cars and landmarks. All the work they did to create a virtual 1940's L.A. was basically for no good purpose. There are thousands and thousands of fantastically realistic buildings and streets and such that you will glimpse only briefly as you pass by, or possibly never see at all. They could have easily just created maps for specific mission areas, modeling the entire city for this kind of game was a terrible waste of resources.
My next game is going to be Fallout: Las Vegas, which I expect to enjoy a great deal more. It's another game with a vast and detailed environment, but if it's anything like Fallout 3, it's going to be a challenge the whole way, and it's going to reward exploration of every last radiation-soaked square meter.
Second, the interrogation scenes started to get pretty arbitrary. In the last third of the game, it seemed like there was no logical connection between what the characters were saying and what option I had to choose to "win" the interrogation. It turned into a lot of wild guessing for me, and as a result I was only getting about 1 out of 3 questions right ... with no penalty or negative effect. Sure, maybe I wasn't getting as much XP, but the game still let me advance the story even after fumbling an interrogation, and leveling up my character turned out to be mostly useless anyway.
Which leads to my third problem, which is that there really wasn't much skill involved in finishing the game. Didn't do well in an investigation? No problem, you'll always get at least the important clue you need to proceed. Even if you screw up a really critical interrogation, they'll let you do it again until you get it right. Can't handle an action sequence? After a few tries, the game lets you skip it. About the only part of the game you aren't allowed to screw up is the clue-finding part, which got really annoying at one part of the game, where all the hints were indicating I had to do one thing, whereas the actual clue was somewhere else, and I eventually had to give up and hit the web looking for someone to point me in the right direction.
So, whereas the story was nice, and the scenery was fantastic, there really wasn't a lot of challenge here, since there was never any real penalty for failure. So while I did finish the game, I don't really have the sense of accomplishment I would normally get when I've battled my way through a typical video game.
And I know I keep bringing this up, but I think using a Grand Theft Auto kind of engine as the base for this game was completely the wrong way to go. This isn't a free-roaming, open-world game; you have to do missions in a pretty linear order. Sure, there are a few random "police band radio" missions you can pick up while driving the streets, but there's no real incentive to go around and explore, unless you absolutely think you have to find all the different hidden cars and landmarks. All the work they did to create a virtual 1940's L.A. was basically for no good purpose. There are thousands and thousands of fantastically realistic buildings and streets and such that you will glimpse only briefly as you pass by, or possibly never see at all. They could have easily just created maps for specific mission areas, modeling the entire city for this kind of game was a terrible waste of resources.
My next game is going to be Fallout: Las Vegas, which I expect to enjoy a great deal more. It's another game with a vast and detailed environment, but if it's anything like Fallout 3, it's going to be a challenge the whole way, and it's going to reward exploration of every last radiation-soaked square meter.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
L.A. Noire
I'm fairly deep into L.A. Noire for the PS3, and for the most part I'm enjoying it. I like the investigation and interview sections; you really feel like a detective at these times, finding clues, conducting interrogations, getting confessions. It's during these parts of the game that you get into the lives and the stories of the people whose crimes you're investigating.
The shooting and fistfight components are okay, though you do seem to rack up a heavy body count. Three-quarters of the random street crimes you encounter end in you putting a few holes in someone. I haven't had any luck trying to turn a gunfight into a fistfight; even if I creep right up on someone who has a gun out, I don't seem to get the opportunity to sock him one. The game seems to have pre-decided which fights are going to end in a fatality.
The platforming elements seem misplaced. Your character seems to be a regular acrobat, shimmying up walls and leaping across rooftops like a parkour master. Some points in the game take this to extremes, which I really dislike; if I wanted to play a platformer game, I would have bought one.
The part of the game I hate most is the driving parts. Yes, I know, this is a Rockstar game, and they're all about the realistic cities and realistic cars and driving all over the place. And they did make 1940's Los Angeles awfully pretty, and it is sometimes very immersive to be driving around at sunset, passing palm trees and billboards, listening to period music on the radio.
The problem is that they've made the driving bits too realistic. There's traffic on the roads, and traffic lights. If you wait for the traffic lights, it can take an awful long time for you to get from one place to another. This is anti-fun for me. I don't have a Playstation so that I can pretend to be sitting at a standstill in traffic. You can always run the red lights, but this sort of breaks the suspension of disbelief for me, and also winds up with me crashing into a lot of cars and pedestrians.
You can run the siren, which helps to get folks out of your way, but every so often some other vehicle will drift into your path as you're blasting through an intersection. You can turn the driving over to your partner, but then you miss out on the random street crimes, and so you're skipping a lot of the game content.
When there's an actual car chase happening, then the "real driving" experience makes sense. It's part of the challenge then; a high-speed chase through crowded streets, trying to avoid injuring innocents while not letting the bad guy get away. But the rest of the time? It really gets tedious going back and forth, block after block, mission after mission. Not to mention that the camera actively attempts to screw you up by spinning around when you shift from forward to reverse; a slow spin that throws off your sense of direction and keeps you from seeing either straight forward or straight back for a few long critical moments.
I also have issues with a few of the story decisions that the main character makes, which I won't get into for spoiler reasons, but overall, it's an excellent game. I just wish they could have taken away more of the Grand Theft Auto elements and focused more on the noir/detective elements.
The shooting and fistfight components are okay, though you do seem to rack up a heavy body count. Three-quarters of the random street crimes you encounter end in you putting a few holes in someone. I haven't had any luck trying to turn a gunfight into a fistfight; even if I creep right up on someone who has a gun out, I don't seem to get the opportunity to sock him one. The game seems to have pre-decided which fights are going to end in a fatality.
The platforming elements seem misplaced. Your character seems to be a regular acrobat, shimmying up walls and leaping across rooftops like a parkour master. Some points in the game take this to extremes, which I really dislike; if I wanted to play a platformer game, I would have bought one.
The part of the game I hate most is the driving parts. Yes, I know, this is a Rockstar game, and they're all about the realistic cities and realistic cars and driving all over the place. And they did make 1940's Los Angeles awfully pretty, and it is sometimes very immersive to be driving around at sunset, passing palm trees and billboards, listening to period music on the radio.
The problem is that they've made the driving bits too realistic. There's traffic on the roads, and traffic lights. If you wait for the traffic lights, it can take an awful long time for you to get from one place to another. This is anti-fun for me. I don't have a Playstation so that I can pretend to be sitting at a standstill in traffic. You can always run the red lights, but this sort of breaks the suspension of disbelief for me, and also winds up with me crashing into a lot of cars and pedestrians.
You can run the siren, which helps to get folks out of your way, but every so often some other vehicle will drift into your path as you're blasting through an intersection. You can turn the driving over to your partner, but then you miss out on the random street crimes, and so you're skipping a lot of the game content.
When there's an actual car chase happening, then the "real driving" experience makes sense. It's part of the challenge then; a high-speed chase through crowded streets, trying to avoid injuring innocents while not letting the bad guy get away. But the rest of the time? It really gets tedious going back and forth, block after block, mission after mission. Not to mention that the camera actively attempts to screw you up by spinning around when you shift from forward to reverse; a slow spin that throws off your sense of direction and keeps you from seeing either straight forward or straight back for a few long critical moments.
I also have issues with a few of the story decisions that the main character makes, which I won't get into for spoiler reasons, but overall, it's an excellent game. I just wish they could have taken away more of the Grand Theft Auto elements and focused more on the noir/detective elements.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Welcome back, Java
My previous job was almost entirely C++; my new job is almost entirely Java. I think I answered an interview question recently by saying that I like both languages equally, and the one that I choose depends on the needs of the situation.
Of course, I said that having not actually used Java for quite a while. Getting back into Java again reminded me that I do really prefer it to C/C++; that when I first got to use Java, it was liberating, exhilarating; that I couldn't believe I'd dealt with the hassles of C/C++ for so long when Java had been out there, waiting for me.
Say what you want about the relative benefits of both languages; for me, I could make quite a long list of the things that make me prefer Java, but I'll just mention two: one annoying, one more critical:
1. Header Files. Having to maintain header files alongside your source code files in plain C is bad enough. Having to maintain a header file for every class file in C++ is just tedious. And then add how you have to put #ifdef blocks around the content of every header file because C++ can't figure out how to resolve the situation where the same header file is included multiple times. Listen, if I have to add the exact same #ifdef structure to every header file to cope with a reasonably common situation, this ought to be solved by the compiler somehow so I don't have to type the same hacky solution over and over again. Sure, a modern tricked-out IDE will autogenerate all of this code for me, but this is just the IDE glossing over inadequacies of the language.
2. Memory Leaks. As a C/C++ programmer, you cannot ever focus entirely on the desired function of the code, because at least part of your attention always has to be on memory management. Sure, it's possible to write applications that never ever need to explicitly delete or free, but in my experience this is more of a theoretical paradise than a real-world result. I always seem to wind up having to get my hands dirty with pointers and with memory that's my responsibility. It's a profound relief to be able to say "new" in Java without having to immediately make sure that there's a matching "delete" somewhere that will absolutely positively execute.
So goodbye stdio.h, goodbye cout, goodbye char*. You'll always have a special place in my heart.
Of course, I said that having not actually used Java for quite a while. Getting back into Java again reminded me that I do really prefer it to C/C++; that when I first got to use Java, it was liberating, exhilarating; that I couldn't believe I'd dealt with the hassles of C/C++ for so long when Java had been out there, waiting for me.
Say what you want about the relative benefits of both languages; for me, I could make quite a long list of the things that make me prefer Java, but I'll just mention two: one annoying, one more critical:
1. Header Files. Having to maintain header files alongside your source code files in plain C is bad enough. Having to maintain a header file for every class file in C++ is just tedious. And then add how you have to put #ifdef blocks around the content of every header file because C++ can't figure out how to resolve the situation where the same header file is included multiple times. Listen, if I have to add the exact same #ifdef structure to every header file to cope with a reasonably common situation, this ought to be solved by the compiler somehow so I don't have to type the same hacky solution over and over again. Sure, a modern tricked-out IDE will autogenerate all of this code for me, but this is just the IDE glossing over inadequacies of the language.
2. Memory Leaks. As a C/C++ programmer, you cannot ever focus entirely on the desired function of the code, because at least part of your attention always has to be on memory management. Sure, it's possible to write applications that never ever need to explicitly delete or free, but in my experience this is more of a theoretical paradise than a real-world result. I always seem to wind up having to get my hands dirty with pointers and with memory that's my responsibility. It's a profound relief to be able to say "new" in Java without having to immediately make sure that there's a matching "delete" somewhere that will absolutely positively execute.
So goodbye stdio.h, goodbye cout, goodbye char*. You'll always have a special place in my heart.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Why Vampire Hunters Aren't Cool Anymore
Well, not the modern stereotypical vampire hunters, in any case. I didn't even realize there was a stereotype until I saw it on television this morning. We were watching the beginning of some vampire movie (I don't recall the title) and there was a scene of the vampire hunters discussing some upcoming raid, and I realized that I'd seen all this before. Here's the checklist:
- A bunch of edgy, misfit, gung-ho loners, dressed in t-shirts and tank tops
- A clandestine meeting location, cluttered with the tools of the trade
- The "tools of the trade" mostly consist of a mixed collection of firearms and medieval weaponry
- A prevailing attitude of "the cops/public can't deal with this, so we have to"
- Bonus points if there's a misunderstood vampire on the team, helping the good guys
And it struck me: why should this be the winning mix of ingredients? If there are enough vampires hidden around the world to give a small pack of vampire hunters a constant stream of work, is the "garage band" model really a model for a successful team?
First problem: if there are that many vampires, and it's possible for a pack of underemployed twenty-somethings to find them on a regular basis, the vampires really can't be that well hidden. Which means that the proper authorities would have found them by now, and that teams with proper government funding would be working the problem. Unless, of course, the government is "in on it" or something.
Second problem: what these DIY vampire hunting teams seem to be involved in is a continuous series of special forces raids against a foe that's highly resistant to conventional weapons. It seems to me that this team would require serious combat training (as opposed to on-the-job training, which would be suicidal). You need to be able to handle weapons and maintain discipline and coordination under the worst possible conditions. You also need to be able to give and receive bloody injuries on a regular basis without losing your sanity, which requires serious mental training. Yes, history has shown that rag-tag teams of rebels can make an effective fighting force. But what kind of losses do these real-life backyard commandos experience? Out of a team of a half-dozen or less individuals who gave up their barista jobs to fight vampires, how many of them would take themselves out of action from fumbling their weapons in the first few months? And how many lost to friendly fire ("Wow, sorry, Joe")?
It seems to me that a more effective team would look like a team of special forces operatives, with iron-clad discipline and chain-of-command, with standardized and well-maintained modern weapons and by-the-book tactics, supported by a substantial team of surveillance agents, doctors, intelligence experts, and so forth.
What I'd really like to see, though, is a return to the Peter Cushing style of vampire hunter. The intellectual hunter with a deep and well-rounded education, who went into a fight with nothing more than a few doctorates, a sharp stick, and impeccable manners. I'd like to see the kind of guy who has the fight won through strategy and preparation before he even steps into the vampire den, and who doesn't need five minutes of slo-mo gun-fu martial-arts action to defeat his foe. Vampires are typically represented as stronger, faster, and more durable than human beings. It seems to me that you want a hero who can out-think the nosferatu. That's the movie I'd like to see.
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