The Last Best Article On How to Fix the Olympics!

The Last Best Article On How to Fix the Olympics!

I dont just spend my time writing games. I have interests. I have passions. And that is why, every two years, I plop my well-rounded self onto to couch for several weeks to watch an abusive amount of the Olympics.

And were serious about it in this household. We were dumb enough to renew our Tivo subscription for the Winter Olympics, just so we wouldnt have to sit through commercials like animals.

Of course, those who feel that they are oh so superior to any mere sporting event have totally tuned me out by now. Good. They dont deserve the Olympics. Sure, the event is expensive, commercialized, and occasionally full of corruption, stupidity, and incredibly tight-assed officials. But there is an awesomeness there that the bad parts simply cant obscure.

However, speaking as a game designer, the Winter Olympics could really, really use some tightening up. There are countless ways to make the events more interesting for the people who count. That is, us. At home. But Im not going to suggest, as some have, dropping sports. That is cowardly and Unamerican. Also, if some young, strapping lad has spent his short life wrecking his body to be best at something that is almost surgically absent of interest, Im not going to be the one to tell him that his sport sucks beyond redemption. Even if it does.

So here, offered free and out of my pure love for humanity, are my ways to make the Winter Olympics much more cool and watchable. Im not the first to make up such a list, but I plan to be the last.

Downhill Skiing, Speed Skating, Slalom - Heres a rule. Any sport where you cant tell with the naked eye who is winning is dumb. These events are always decided by a margin of three squintillionths of a second, periods of time too small for the human brain to process them, and only magic, time-telling robots can tell us who won. And maybe the robots are lying. Because robots hate us.

My game designer powers tell me that this is an easy fix. Just add a factor that will cause a greater variance in the finish times for the athletes. A polar bear randomly wandering halfway down the course should solve the problem. And, for extra exciteness, put a ribbon on the bears tail. Pull it off on the way down and we shave five seconds off your time.

Ski Cross, Snowboard Cross, Short Track Skating, Any Four-Person Roller Derby On Ice - These are how downhill skiing and speed skating should be done. Fast races. You can see who won. Awesome crashes.

And in Short Track Skating, on average, 90% of the skaters are disqualified. Anyone can win! Heck, I just got a Bronze for the mens thousand meter, and I never left my house!

Anything With Ski Jumping That Doesnt Involve Lots of Nifty Flipping In an XTREME Manner - These are the most tedious sports to watch that dont have the word "luge" somewhere in the name. Every jump looks exactly the same. Also, these sports are harder to fix, as the slope doesnt really have a good place to put the polar bear. The only way to fix this is to change the rules and equipment to make ski jumping exactly identical, in every way, to snowboard halfpipe and hope that nobody notices.

Any Event With a Snowboard - Thank God for XTREME sports for keeping the Olympics watchable. Enjoy it while it lasts. Give it a decade or two and the Olympics-fun-sucking-machine will have its way with them. Remember, a snowboarder got booted from the Olympic village for getting photographed displaying his bronze medal in an (ahem) erotically suggestive way. The fun window is closing fast, folks.

Hockey - Basically soccer on ice. Which means its boring. The best way to fix it is to force the players to play 60 minutes straight. No rests. No interruptions. Watching their desperate efforts to flail the puck into the net around the 50 minute mark will be awesome. Also, the profound fatigue will make it much harder for them to keep away from the polar bear.

Figure Skating - The perfect sport for the Winter Olympics. No sense of fun or spontaneity. Comically corrupt judging for us all to argue about. And sparkles, sparkles, sparkles! Plenty of excitement, but not the sort that is ever, you know, exciting. Perfect viewing for those of us with cardiac issues.

Theres still room for some minor changes. First, no skaters under eighteen. I want to be able to watch some contestant pull out her sultry Salome dance without feeling like my name should be on a list somewhere.

Second, three nights isnt near enough for Ice Dancing. We need a minimum of eight nights to fully appreciate the splendor of whatever the hell that is. Oh, and finally, the entire current pool of judges could perhaps be removed and replaced with ANYONE AT ALL.

Bobsled - In my brave future world, everyone in the bobsled will be forced to switch places halfway down.

Curling - There is a general progression that goes on with curling. People hear about it and go, "They do what? What brooms? That sounds dumb!" And then they sit down to watch it for a few minutes, hoping for a good laugh. And then they say something like, "Wow! How lame! Theyre just playing shuffleboard with brooms. And they ... Ooh. That was a nice shot. And the shouting and the snacks and theyre all middle aged. This is so dumb. And ... Sweet. Completely knocked their rock out of there. ... Where was I? This isnt a sport. This ... This ... ... ... SWEEP HARDER, BITCHES!!!"

Curling is the ultimate sport of the Winter Olympics. It moves relatively quickly, compared to, say, hockey. A lot of points get scored. There is strategy. You can tell who is winning with the naked eye. And there is an eccentric, low-tech charm to the thing, an "I could do that" air (even though you really cant) that makes it far more approachable than watching wiry, teenage pixies jumping eighty feet into the air.

So to fix curling? Show more of it. Especially the woman. A lot of them are totally hot in a kind of naughty librarian sort of way.

Oh, and One More Thing - The best way to fix the Olympics is to get rid of the tight-assed, suffocating self-importance of the Olympics. After the Canadian hockey-women won their gold medals, they took to the ice and drank champagne and smoked cigars. Look at the pictures. They are awesome! And so some officials got angry and made them apologize. Hey, we arent talking someone performing an act of love on a bronze medal here. Its celebrating your hard-earned victory by cracking a cold one on the back of a Zamboni.

The Olympics is about (i) insanely dedicated young people (ii) doing crazy things (iii) for our enjoyment and then going off to have (iv) mind-bogglingly athletic sex. Anything that does not directly contribute to one of those four key factors must be destroyed without mercy. Preferably before 2012, when the next Real Olympics will happen.

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The Sims 3 Bugs How to fix Stuck leaving work school invisible

The Sims 3 Bugs How to fix Stuck leaving work school invisible

In the middle of the night, after a few hours i resolved a stuck problem sims with the tent in Egypt. Now i faced to finished another bugs, that things actually make me mad, but reeally thanks to this forums to give me some backup to resolve this problem... (http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/51811.page)

This is some of the picture ive taken which simply describe the problem (not all of problem, but some problem ive had today).

Kids and teenagers forced to leaving their school, then get stuck. They cannot going anywhere (stuck) , even we command them to do an activity.

A working sims also forced to appeared in front of their office. Same with the kids and teenagers out of the school, they cannot going anywhere. Sometimes they get stuck with each other.

When that thing happened in my town, there were some foreign sims come to town and also get stuck.

Believe it or not, how to resolve this problem is very simple !

Look at this picture:

STEP 1 :


YOU JUST COPY THE TROUBLE TOWN,

example : if your town named "Sunset Valleythree", just copy it and the copy will be named "Sunset Valleythree2". Look at the picture, right beside "Sunset Valleythree2" (the copied town) theres my "Sunset Valleythree" (the original town with bugs).

STEP 2 :
UPDATE YOUR PATCH TO THE LASTEST VERSION
Thanks to will.max on Kaskus, he updating all of the patch and you can download every version of the patch here : http://www.kaskus.us/showpost.php?p=525652917&postcount=26

As my experience this night, try to working with removing the school buildings and work buildings -> it wont give you any help at all. Theres some disadvantage from this :

1. Your teenagers who have a part time job will losing their job.High school newly started look like a part time job, so you must leave your teenagers "fired" from their early part time job.

2. Another bugs will coming -> invisible sims and stuck sims for active household.

3. Even its not a trouble at all, this also take effect -> working sims will not losing their work grade, but your kids and teenagers will lose it. They will started their school again in C Grade.

UPDATED (20 November 2011) :
1. I have copied the town and after 1 day i played it again, the trouble were back and more worst, so i try to update the patch and seems updating the patch is the only one solution.
2. Check your video card, is it compatible with the game or not? The video card located in Device Manager Folder,named "Display Card"

I suggest to people -> dont started to fix this problem with "resetsim firstname lastname  ", cause it dont fix the bugs anyway.

Hope this post helpfull~=]

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The Ultimate Fix Your Broken Game Checklist

The Ultimate Fix Your Broken Game Checklist

(This is the third of three articles about providing tech support as a small business. The previous chapters are here and here.)

I get two sorts of requests for tech support for my games. First, theres the familiar problems, the things that are my fault or that I know how to fix. I love these. I tell the victims how to get out from under their burden, they get on with their lives (dazed that an actual human read and processed their request for help), and everyone is happy.

And then there are the gremlins. The weird problems. The sorts of issues that are reported by exactly one person out of many thousands. Problems whose cause and fix are a total mystery. These are, alas, most of the problems reported to me. Most of these problems will be caused by incompatible software, hard drive corruptions, wonky graphics cards, or free-floating evil spirit manifestations. Sadly, as the hardware industry seeks out ways to cut corners and make computers ever cheaper, these sorts of afflictions only grow more common.

(Of course, some people say that every problem with a game, ever, is the result of the programmers sloppiness and error. As if video cards never break and Windows is a flawless piece of software. These people want you to spend limitless time chasing bugs that dont exist. For a sample of this line of thinking, read the comments for my last post. While I acknowledge that some problems end up my fault, wasting energy trying to fix problems you didnt cause and cant fix is a Bad Thing.)

When I get one of these weird problems, I send out a standard list of troubleshooting steps. I have spent years assembling and perfecting it, and it honestly fixes the vast majority of problems. If you are a small developer, I invite you to steal and adapt it. If you are suffering from misbehaving software, I suggest trying these steps. At the risk of sounding slightly arrogant, if everyone would just drop everything, listen to what I have to say, and follow it without question, the world would be a much better place.

Spiderweb Software Tech Support Checklist

1. Restart your machine and try the game again. Run the game when no other applications are running. A lot of glitches and crashes are one-time things and dont happen again.

When someone runs one of my games, it is far from the only moving part in their system. There is the OS. The drivers. The many background processes. The other programs that are running. Any one of these programs might have a bug that messes up sections of memory. (Not to mention the fact that RAM can be corrupted on its own.) The longer a computer runs without a reboot, the more likely that things might get messed up. Then the system goes down and comes back up, and everything is nice and clean again.

Most problems only happen once, due to weird and unreproducible effects, and never happen again. If you get a crash, dont immediately freak out. Take a deep breath, reboot your machine, and try again.

2. Sometimes, game files can become corrupted. Try uninstalling, redownloading and reinstalling the game. This fixes a surprising number of odd problems.

The key step. Any program can become corrupted while being downloaded, installed, or just existing on the hard drive. This step is a surefire way to fix any such flaws. I am constantly amazed by how often I can fix a catastrophic, recurring problem by simply telling the user to uninstall and reinstall. No other mucking about with settings, saved games, or whatever.

This step also has the bonus of making sure the user has the newest version of the software.

One warning note. This step has three parts. Uninstall. Download clean copy. Reinstall. Be sure the user doesnt skip a step, or the beneficial effects are lost. For example, if you install without uninstalling first, the installer might leave the existing (corrupted) files alone instead of copying over them.

3. (Windows Users) Your video card driver files might be out of date or damaged. Get the latest versions of video card drivers and reinstall them. Even if you are currently running the newest version, the files or settings might be corrupted or damaged. Reinstalling might fix the problem.

I always hate telling users to install new drivers, for two reasons. First, they often think that Im just doing it to blow them off. After all, this is what ALL developers tell them to do. Second, unlike the previous steps, identifying your video card, finding the manufacturers web site, locating the newest driver, downloading it, and installing it requires a reasonable amount of technical skill. Odds are, your grandmother wont be able to figure out how to reinstall drivers.

And yet, I tell people to do it for one reason. It works. Weird, glitchy graphics? This is probably the answer. If new drivers dont do it, a flaw in the actual video card is probably the answer.

Lately, many of my users running 64-bit Windows 7 have had tons of problems that were solved completely by getting the new drivers. Several of them swore up and down that they were using the newest drivers. They werent.

I strongly believe that the ugly situation with video cards and drivers is one of the key reasons for the huge shift in gaming from PCs to consoles. Its really not good.

4. (Windows users.) If random crashes happen during gameplay, try turning the sound off. If this helps, reinstall your sound card drivers too.

Were getting to the bottom of the barrel now, and this step isnt near as necessary as it used to be. As sound engines have improved, most of my weird crashes from sound card/engine issues faded away.

However, it does eliminate one more set of drivers to work with, and not using sound reduces the amount of memory the game needs. Every once in a while, this fixes a problem.

5. (Windows users.) Sometimes, reinstalling DirectX solves unexplained crashes.

And it does. Very, very rarely. It happens, but seldom enough that Im considering removing this step from the list. Also, all of our newest games use OpenGL.

And Thats It

If its a problem or crash nobody has reported before and the user goes through these steps (or claims to have done so) and the issue isnt fixed, I give a refund. Im out of answers.

I do hang onto the e-mails, though, in case other people pop up with the same problem later on. Sometimes a working program gets bushwhacked by another, poorly-written program. For example, on the Mac side, there was once a version of Quicken Scheduler that caused games to stop being able to see the keyboard. When I got the second report of keyboard failures, I sprung into action. Having the earlier report around helped a lot in figuring out the problem.

Steps I Dont Suggest

There are two steps for fixing mysterious problems that I almost never suggest. I feel that they are very extreme, involving too much work (and perhaps expense) to be worth it just to play my little game.

1. Reinstall the Operating System

This is the nuclear bomb, the way to purge your system of all manner of corrupted files. Its also a huge pain in the neck. I generally only suggest this if the user mentions he or she is seeing a lot of nasty problems while using a number of different applications.

2. Get a New Video Card

Video cards break. Seriously. Its happened to me. Sometimes they fail and you need to get a new one. However, I only recommend looking into this if the user mentions having similar problems over a wide range of games and swears up and down that fresh, up-to-date drivers are installed.

In Summary

Tech support is necessary, time-consuming, and aggravating. It tests my patience more than anything else I do. And yet, doing it well will, in the long run, make your customers love you and earn you money.

Be as patient and kind as you can possibly manage. Only fight battles when you have a chance of winning. Consider, with humility, that a problem might be caused by a bug. Also remember that, very often, it wont be your fault. Respect how shoddy and cheap and poorly maintained computers frequently are. And, always, try to treat your customers they way you would want to be treated.

You will always be amazed at how messed up things can get. Good luck.

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The Sims 3 Fix Error Code 12

The Sims 3 Fix Error Code 12

This image i got from google. I have no time to printscreen my game and save it as image while i cant save my game. :(

I got same as this thing when i started to save my game and not a while something popped-out that i cant save my game because of error code 12. It told me to read the readme file to see what happens.
When i go to readme file, it shows me like this :
01: No save file information.
02: No active world.
03: The save path is empty.
04: Cannot save directory.
05: Cannot find the requested file.
09: Failed to create header record.
10: Failed to write header record.
11: Pre-save callback failure.
12: World file save failure.
13: Post-save callback failure.
14: No load/save manager found.
15: Other error.

Error code 12 as shown is something failure with the world file. Since i know nothing and i dont understand it, i search on google and find some ways to fix it. But unfortunately for me, every ways that was given by some forums didnt help me at all. But the condition maybe different for you so i decided to write it one by one here :

1. Go to Edit Town, click "just continue" if the message prompted. Change one thing in your town and then go to save it as usual. This method rarely can fix the problem, but for some of you it maybe helped.

2. Minimize your game (ALT+TAB) or quit on your game. Then go to C:DocumentsElectronics ArtsThe Sims 3Saved, move all of your save game to another folder (i suggest dont place them in C: drive). Leave the "saved" folder empty. After that you can restore or go back to your game and saved it. This step for me not helped at all, but some of you maybe have different possibilities, so i hope it resolved your problem.

3. Pause the game, then save your game as "save as" and change the name of the town. If the original "sunset valley" you must renamed it "sunset valley 2" or something. Some people around the world have resolved the problem with this, but im not. I not guaranteed it to 100% fix your problem.

4. Check your system requiptments. For me, i have played sims 3 with average system requipment with minimum VGA card. But i didnt have some serious problem with my computer system requipment, i can still play the game without any loading.

5. Erase all Mods. I didnt try this step cause my game dont have any mods in it.

6. Check your sims, if they get stuck or something (cant move), try to resetsim by clicking on the cheatbox "resetsim (firstname) (lastname)". I did this step because when i got the error code 12, i realize that one of my sims get stuck and cant move. So i try to did it and continue to save the game. But unfortunately, it didnt worked.

These all the ways and steps i found on google that cant give me any help to fix this problem. But.......Thanks to God that i clicked on the right forum and found this one, DEP (Data Execution Prevention) problems. (http://ask.brothersoft.com/how-to-stop-error-code-12-in-the-sims-3-77003.html)
This thing really solved my problems !!! And now i can save my game again. You must try this too if all of the steps/ways on list above didnt resolved your problem.

Turn off DEP

1. Enable an exception in DEP for the Sims 3 by right-clicking "Computer" and then left-clicking "Properties." Data Execution Prevention is a service that protects your PC from viruses and other attacks. Some programs and games will shut down or display errors when DEP is turned on.
2. Find "Performance" and examine the DEP settings under the Advanced tab. If it says, "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select," Click "Add."
3. Browse to the Sims 3 executable. This file is found at "C:Program FilesElectronic ArtsThe Sims 3GameBinTS3.exe." If youre a 64-bit user, look at "C:Program Files(x86)Electronic ArtsThe Sims 3GameBinTS3.exe."
4. Click "OK" to confirm the change. If DEP is set to "Turn on DEP for essential Windows programs and services only," leave it as is. This setting doesnt affect your game

Ill explain it with my way if you still didnt understand it :
1. Right click "My Computer", then click properties.
2. Go to advanced tab, click "settings" button on the performance, then after something popped-out go to data execution prevention.
3. Click add button, then find TS3.exe (for me it name TS3W.exe, cause i have Pets Expansion Pack), located in C:Program FilesElectronics ArtsThe Sims 3GameBinTS3.exe, then click OK.
4. For me, i choose "Turn on DEP for all programs and service except those i select. And then i checklist the sims 3 box under it.

I hope this post can help you fix this problem. Since i can fix it with turn off the DEP, i feel happy that i can play my game again, i hope this post will help you too as i am.

Good Luck~=]

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