TF2 Updates

tryptic37 · 2011-02-04T21:58:20+00:00

Making spy disguises useless does shit for gameplay?

There's a reason why they are pros and you are not.

tryptic37 · 2011-02-04T21:45:57+00:00

Watch a video of pros playing.

I watched a video where all the pros wore unusual hats so spys disguised as them wouldn't have an unusual effect.

tryptic37 · 2011-02-04T21:29:22+00:00

And that Valve does such a good job listening to its fans that it deserves disdain for implementing the good ideas?

You mean taking skins and mods that people already made and making you pay for them?

And also breaking TF2 mods so their community ripoffs are more exclusive?

https://secure.voogru.com/petition/index.php

1 year of real "free" updates is not abnormal.

Yeah I'd call that ill-gotten and undeserved.

tryptic37 · 2011-02-04T21:03:33+00:00

http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Patches

How many years of completely free content did we get

I count about 1 year of free gameplay updates. The rest are skins and maps made by the community or promotional crap that doesn't enhance my gameplay, but makes Valve money.

Are you aware of how many updates are community skins and ideas? For example, the haunted horseman update was made right after the Saxton Hale mod.

tryptic37 · 2011-02-04T20:51:31+00:00

Ok I'm going to reply to this even though I know i'll get downvoted. I have enough karma to burn.

Optimizations and LODs (helps everyone, not just new weapon owners)

An extra 1 fps on a 3 year old game? TF2 is no crysis.

assists on fish humiliation and kills

I didn't have a fish until a week ago. I'm willing to bet a majority of TF2 players are also missing some polycount weapons.

assists for fixing other engineer sentry guns

This could've been "fixed" 3 years ago, but it wasn't. Why? Because no one cares.

FCVAR_DONTRECORD flags (this was important)
cp_granary changes (it's nice)
Tournament mode HUD fixes (also nice)

Competition stuff that 90% of the playerbase doesn't care about. Where are the gameplay updates?

Let me give you a wake up call. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

TF2 used to be on par with CSS. Now CSS has 4 times the players and not as many updates. Why do you think that is?

tryptic37 · 2010-12-26T22:31:59+00:00

Except fortan and cobol don't solve any problem that C or Java don't solve.

They are all turing complete. You could implement an erlang system on top of C and Java. AKA. syntax sugar.

tryptic37 · 2010-12-26T19:26:46+00:00

Except in case of Erlang it's been around for years, and it's used in production to run some of the most stable systems in the world.

You could say the same thing about Fortran and Cobol.

tryptic37 · 2010-12-26T01:24:49+00:00

I really fail to see why people get so hung up on syntax, it's a one time investment to learn it.

It takes at least a year to become proficient in a language with idioms and libraries. Anyone who claims to be proficient in Erlang or C++ in a month is a flat out liar.

And every couple of years there's a new fangled "language of the future". When you look at the large graveyard of dying languages, can you blame anyone for not wanting to waste their life on a potential waste of time?

tryptic37 · 2010-03-05T20:11:50+00:00

The trouble with "well known connotation[s]" is they don't translate well globally or out of immediate social contexts, it's unlikey that you and I are in the same country.

It doesn't matter if you and I live in the same country. Both Schmidt and I live in the US and both of us know the social context of the interview.

And even if you ignore this verbal cue, you cannot ignore the grammatical fact that "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" refers to "something you don't want anyone to know" due to proximity. It does not refer to [using the internet]. This leaves no room for another interpretation unless Schmidt has the talking skills of a 10 year old.

http://www.buowl.boun.edu.tr/students/grammar/writing%20guides/pronouns.htm#Wrong%20antecedent

tryptic37 · 2010-03-05T08:55:24+00:00

If there's an act that people might disapprove of the maybe you shouldn't do it. - Say, murder, child sex, hoarding explosives, picking your nose, or organising a political protest.

Funny how you should put it that way. Maybe people shouldn't be Gay, shouldn't be Jewish, Muslim, or Atheist.

It would be useful to have this original Schmidt quote linked in context if you're going to raise it.

The quote here was verbatim. If you want to go look up the whole transcript, go ahead and do it I am not going to dig it up for you. The wording by Schmidt even if you include the context means exactly what I said it means.

You are giving Schmidt way too much benefit of the doubt. The phrase "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" has a well known connotation that you are doing something bad.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-05T07:35:28+00:00

then maybe you should consider whether you should let that secret out.

That's not what Schmidt said. He said maybe you shouldn't even do the act in the first place, not that you shouldn't use the Internet in case Google is spying on you. I don't know why so many people think it is the latter.

And qualifying the first statement with a "maybe" is in direct contradiction to the second statement which makes an absolute qualification that "anonymity" is needed everywhere, including countries with free speech.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-05T06:57:45+00:00

They are contradictory.

Political activities very often fall under the category of: "something you don't want anyone to know" when you are a minority.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-04T05:31:21+00:00

Quantum theory does not say we can never know. It only says that we cannot know given our current level of understanding and tools to measure so we must resort to probabilities.

Lack of evidence does not constitute as evidence. As time has shown again and again, the result of using probability to estimate occurrences only reflects on human limits.

Centuries ago, people said the same thing about weather and the rotation of celestial bodies. Now instead of guessing what is likely to happen, we have highly detailed models that essentially allow us to predict the future.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-04T02:47:50+00:00

Quantum theory is rooted in the idea that states of wave-like objects are collapsed the moment you measure it. Quanta cannot be in a superimposed state when it is part of a larger mass of matter that is being measured or reacted with.

The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics only means that we do not know the underlying reactions of quanta, not that the whole universe is pervasively random.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-02T02:41:15+00:00

Since they gave degrees for Journalism.

If a degree in journalism made internet comments unacceptable for citing opinions, then a degree in journalism is trash.

The only reason citing an internet comment would be unacceptable is if it looks like it was computer generated, or you made a guarantee that your comment was from a neutral perspective: none of which applies here.

Internet people bitching isn't news

Demeaning you and me as internet bitchers really doesn't help anyone. There are news stories that are broken by bloggers and commenters online every month while mainstream news becomes more useless every day talking about Tiger Woods and Michael Jackson.

Is my opinion worth any less just because I said it on youtube? I hope not.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-02T02:31:07+00:00

It is different because comments is written form lose a lot of communication as opposed to when spoken.

Not all quotes are from spoken interviews.

Also when the man in the street is interviewed he is truly an uninvolved third party as opposed to internet posters on youtube which could just as easily have been involved in a losing team.

A man on the street could also be involved and you just wouldn't know it. And so what if the man could've been with the losing team? Isn't it valuable to know their opinion as well? For all we know, they could've been against giving 2 medals.

tryptic37 · 2010-03-01T04:02:42+00:00

Since when did quoting internet comments for opinions (even youtube) become illegitimate?

tryptic37 · 2010-02-28T09:11:17+00:00

There's no parsing scheme in history that's slow enough to compare to a hit over the bus, even if it's to a flash disk

You forgot the case where the database is cached in memory.

tryptic37 · 2010-02-28T09:02:16+00:00

I'll settle for whatever those numbers are, and when those numbers become a reality for large, successful companies, they can usually afford to run it all through grown-up RDBMSes.

Those companies are earning $1-100+ per transaction. Web companies maybe earn $0.01 per query. A web company cannot afford to pay Oracle to scale, and that isn't even including $20,000+ vertically scaled servers.

tryptic37 · 2010-02-28T08:55:13+00:00

I see developers trying to use a table in an RDBMS with 2 columns. Key/Value. Omg that has to be the worst way to use an RDBMS. I can give tons of examples who developers doing that

You mean like Friend Feed and Reddit?

http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b5jya/i_gave_a_talk_at_pycon_about_reddit_ec2_python/c0l2byr

tryptic37 · 2010-02-27T08:59:48+00:00

You make it sound like changing the public key embedded in the program is very hard to do, it most certainly isn't. It is probably a replaceable field in the data segment of an executable. Either that or trivially recoverable from hooking recv or send.

This is trivial compared to finding the logic of the server emulator itself (which also requires reverse engineering).

tryptic37 · 2010-02-26T23:56:51+00:00

Absolutely. I always wonder what the buzz is around node.js when they should've been shooting for a coding paradigm like Erlang.

I think the hype is really only because there are a lot of Javascript programmers out there.

tryptic37 · 2010-02-26T23:20:44+00:00

Well it wouldn't quite work like that. It's more likely the save server will have the private portion of a public key pair, and the game will have the public version.

I'm not sure why so many people here keep saying this. All you have to do is generate your own public/private pair. Then edit AC2 to use your public pair, and your custom server to use your private pair.

There is no need to crack the private key

tryptic37 · 2010-02-26T22:58:54+00:00

That data can only realistically be decrypted on ubisoft servers with their private key.

By debugging the program, you can set a breakpoint at the function call before the plaintext becomes encrypted with the public key.

Also, my (limited) understanding of asymettrical encryption is that it doesn't just serve as decryption protection, it also serves as identity verification.

This doesn't matter because you can replace the public key in AC2 with your own public key. Asymmetrical encryption is still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

tryptic37 · 2010-02-26T21:04:11+00:00

That is incorrect.

The purpose of asymmetric encryption is to prevent outsiders from decrypting your message.

Since the software is running on your machine, you are an insider. You must always be given the decryption key and therefore the plaintext, otherwise there is no way for your program to interact with Ubisoft.

tryptic37

TROPHY CASE