test comment!!
Show HN: Universal Pause Button
81–90 of 174 posts
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#82You can do this to any process in Windows' Resource Monitor too - the one you can open from task manager. On the CPU tab you can right click any process and suspend it.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#83That's interesting. However, I wonder ... don't you think it can be abused in some games that try to compensate lag? For example, what if they use a code similar to: delay = currentFrameTime - lastFrameTime playerPosition += direction * delay I know that some games (such as Diablo III) may automaticallt ban you if you happen to run a program that may be used to cheat (they detect that via a background process check).
It could be considered an exploit in games like Dark Souls where other players can invade. Just pause the game for a few seconds and their connection will drop.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#84Now if only there was a Universal Skip Button for those games with unskippable credits, intros or cutscenes!
This actually is sort of possible, you have to mess with the system clock as seen by the program, to make it think much more time has passed than really passed. It will run those scenes at hyperspeed. Then give back the time later (if you need the clock to match the real clock) when it's waiting for input.
There was a program called cheat engine that let you drag a slider for program speed, as well as generally dig around RAM.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#85This should be a basic requirement for all games. Even before I was married my mom would call or someone would ring the doorbell. And when I was a kid I had to go down to dinner or take out the trash.
I'm still having nightmares of someone interrupting me during those long and unpausable metal gear solid cutscenes
MGS 4 is like 50% cutscenes. You can pause them though - thank fuck, the ending cutscenes are over an hour in length or however long it was.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#86This should be a basic requirement for all games. Even before I was married my mom would call or someone would ring the doorbell. And when I was a kid I had to go down to dinner or take out the trash.
"Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus [ http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mac-Game-Programming-Gurus/dp/1... actually dedicated about a paragraph or two to the topic, driving home the point that a game that cannot be paused is leaving N% of potential players on the table right out of the starting gate (and I believe they even had a hypothetical about "little Jimmy" not being able to pause to take out the trash and the…
One problem with real-time multiplayer games is also the sensitivity to latency. It can very easily be impossible to play any game that is sensitive to latency together with people from several continents. I'd wish there'd be more games that don't rely on fast connections. CIV 5 is good exception, with it's well though-out multiplayer modes.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#87Damn, I thought this was for real life.. could've used one of those. Better than hitting snooze 10 times.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#88I would love this for Mac, not for games but for all browser tabs. Find whichever tab I'm playing music in, and pause it, whether it be SoundCloud, YouTube, or some other streaming something. Fantastic idea though!
At WWDC, they announced that the new Safari version would be able to do something like that.
That's only muting tabs, which Chrome has been doing for years.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wrote it's useful for singleplay games that have an intro. If you use it in multiplayer games you certainly will simply drop out of the game as you will loose the connection or what you described depending on the server implementation.
That doesn't just apply to multiplayer, though. OP said Diablo 3, which is multi OR single player. Many games now use those phone-home anti-cheating measures (or drm measures) even when you aren't actually playing with anyone else.
Diablo 3 is an always-online game; the reason is that you can take the items you earn in single player and use them for your multiplayer character (and vice-versa). Their security is extra tight because up until recently, said items could be traded for real money. And you don't want anyone to be able to generate things like that offline.
Although they did, there were some item duplication bugs. And even that was irrelevant, since there were quickly popping up small armies of item / gold farmers; every once in a while they'd get banned, but by then they would've earned enough money to buy another fifty copies of the game and continue.
Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button
#90Great idea, will be helpful. Now, I only need a similar tool that kills the process with the highest CPU and MEMORY load with a short cut. Reasons: Sometimes a process leaks memory and fills up 16GB RAM and opening a new process like taskmgr is impossible to severe paging-IO. Sometimes a full screen application crash and spawns a modal crash dialog behind the full screen window so only taskmgr and keyboard usage work…
If it's a specific program that's doing this, maybe you can wrap it with a script that executes ulimit.