I agree. I don't think the point is that generated content is boring, but that HG's generated content depth was quite shallow.
As stated in the article, if they doubled the size of the art team, they could have had hundreds of times more models from which to generate creatures.
The possibilities could be near-endless but the execution in NMS was poor because clearly not enough effort was spent on building up the assets. The author believes that it would be madness to create such a full-featured engine and then abandon it so soon. I'm inclined to agree, until HG or ASA say otherwise, and then folks will probably start knocking out the NMS clones.
I'm struggling to understand why. It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.
Dropbox is currently indispensable for iOS users. Most iOS people I know use Dropbox as the clunky-but-works app-to-app sharing mechanism. Dropbox is not as popular on Android because apps can integrate more naturally.
iCloud may be easier and is the probable successor, but Apple has only recently gotten its cloud game together and its free option is only 5GB.
Eventually the platforms are going to make using a third party obsolete (arguably already so on Android) so I predict we're at peak Dropbox usage. Especially considering Google's new Pixel phones will store all photos at full resolution for free, I'm sure Apple will at least have to increase their free storage tier.
I'm confused by your comment... I'm a recent convert to iOS from Windows Phone, and I've just kept on using OneDrive for my documents. I'm not even sure what "app-to-app sharing" means. Dropbox definitely isn't indispensable to me.
Dropbox tends to sync more reliably than other services. This isn't something that affects every user. But a sync solution that doesn't work well enough for you despite being cheaper, easier to setup, space etc, isn't that useful.
Dropbox is the only service (I know of) that supports Linux. While it may not affect you directly, it does affect who you can interoperate with. For example in a startup with developers using Linux, you'll need something that works for them too.
> It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.
That's three major questions begged in a single sentence, followed by 3 more in the next. Perhaps if you tried to back up each of those claims, you'd have an easier time understanding.
“Poor business model” would be the first place to start since Dropbox has ton of users and they tend to be loyal: learning why would tell you whether you're making the right comparisons.
“Security” is a judgement call but it's certainly not true that this is accepted conventional wisdom. Sure, there's the occasional hyperbolic blog post which makes the rounds before someone looks into the details and debunks the conspiracy theories but Apple and Google certainly get those, too.
Continuing the trend, the pricing also does not support your claims:
Even if the pricing wasn't the same for all three services, that's a relatively small amount of money to pay for a service which many people rely on heavily and you couldn't say anything meaningful about pricing without talking about the different features. If you valued a particular feature or related service (e.g. Google Photos, Dropbox's cross-platform support & integration with a wide range of mobile apps, etc.) many people will consider it worth paying a small amount more per month to get their favorite choice – we're talking numbers well under what many people spend at Starbucks in the same time-period, after all.
One point in particular you should think about is the reason why I've heard so many non-IT people favor Dropbox: it's easy to setup, syncs reliably (as opposed to iCloud's same-week synchronization), and they always have a full copy of their data on every computer. It's really easy to forget how much people value the idea that they will never be in the case where a network error or billing screwup prevents them from accessing their files. That doesn't have to be a common event for people to want to avoid it.
Poor business model: I refer to their freemium offering which is poor compared to competitors.
Security: If you think that's a judgement call, fine, if you think that the dropbox hack is a judgment issue.
Pricing: For Joe Bloggs, 100GB is generally enough. Google handily offers that for $2. With Dropbox, there's a cliff - a few gig for free or a terabyte for $10/m. Why no middle ground? Both Apple and Google offer scaled plans, why doesn't Dropbox?
> Poor business model: I refer to their freemium offering which is poor compared to competitors.
Okay, that's a start, do you think you can explain some of the analysis backing the opinion which you assumed everyone else shared?
> Security: If you think that's a judgement call, fine, if you think that the dropbox hack is a judgment issue.
If we stopped using any company which has had a security problem, we wouldn't be using computers. That's why I said it was a judgement call: one incident years ago is not much of a trend line so different people might reasonably have different comfort levels.
> Pricing: For Joe Bloggs, 100GB is generally enough. Google handily offers that for $2. With Dropbox, there's a cliff - a few gig for free or a terabyte for $10/m. Why no middle ground? Both Apple and Google offer scaled plans, why doesn't Dropbox?
Oh, now there's a valid question about the business model: perhaps they should have a middle tier. That's what you should have said instead of claiming that Dropbox was more expensive or whatever “the storage for the price just doesn't add up” was supposed to mean.
Psychic mode is/was amazing. I used to love freaking people out when I saw the 'You feel a disturbance in the force...' message and quickly type 'Hi!'.
I love Pidgin so much. It's such a shame to see things move from "one client to rule them all" to hundreds of isolated, willfully incompatible clients.
I can't imagine any sane person actually blames him for his work and not the company that decides to put one developer in charge of writing such an important game in such a short space of time.
An impressive demo, but I'd like to see this being done with photos of varying quality and see how the performance fairs. I've got a Chrome extension that I could probably use this with...
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