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.
Is Diablo III single player? When I played it at the release, connecting to a remote server was required (which is a shame, btw. I will miss the modding community that Diablo II had).
It can be single-player, but you still need a connection to do so.
"I like to play video games. I also have a significant other, and she often walks into the room to talk to me while I'm playing a video game." Looks like the real solution would be to pause your SO ;)
I encountered this problem with babies. They definitely don't pause. My solution was the DS/3DS line of consoles... snap 'em shut, bam, paused. I've called them the consoles of choice for the discriminating father. (If you've never had kids and find yourself wondering what horrible father would be playing video games while taking care of his children, well, you see, it turns out that sometimes your child wants to sle…
Does the Xbox One not do this? I mean suspend gameplay and resume with just a touch of a button?
This 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.
That reminds me of the old "Supervisor Key" in classic early games.
This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill): kill -STOP 1234 kill -CONT 1234 killall -STOP -c "Pandora" killall -CONT -c "Pandora" A more nuanced control is to throttle down the CPU, via cputhrottle[1]. If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to wor…
Now 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.
Indeed some deep nesting here. You made me remember a quickbasic program I wrote for a class back in early 90s, where I packed the whole program in a single do-loop with about 20 indent levels at it's deepest, and I loved it. But... the prof told me to never do that again :( Anyway, thanks a lot for the flashback :)
Deep nesting always bugs me too. It's so much cleaner and easier to understand (for me anyway) to identify the else case ahead of time and stop processing immediately.
"I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip." The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.
So then every time his wife walks in to ask a question, he immediately Alt-Tabs to another window, and she thinks he's watching porn all the time.
This 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 therefore his parents uninstall the game).
These days of MMOs and other coordinated time-sinks make me miss the simplicity of pausable single-player and turn-based multiplayer sometimes.
Indeed some deep nesting here. You made me remember a quickbasic program I wrote for a class back in early 90s, where I packed the whole program in a single do-loop with about 20 indent levels at it's deepest, and I loved it. But... the prof told me to never do that again :( Anyway, thanks a lot for the flashback :)
Agreed, it's not the most elegant code, but it's so short and simple I haven't bothered reorganizing the code yet. I probably will start adding features like re-bindable pause key, etc., and I will untangle the mess a bit at that time.
"I like to play video games. I also have a significant other, and she often walks into the room to talk to me while I'm playing a video game." Looks like the real solution would be to pause your SO ;)
I encountered this problem with babies. They definitely don't pause. My solution was the DS/3DS line of consoles... snap 'em shut, bam, paused. I've called them the consoles of choice for the discriminating father. (If you've never had kids and find yourself wondering what horrible father would be playing video games while taking care of his children, well, you see, it turns out that sometimes your child wants to sle…
I was able to bottle feed my daughter when she woke up at night and simultaneous play through and finish Braid over the course of a few days/weeks. Through some sort of weird pavlovian conditioning I started looking forward to her waking up in the middle of the night (I restricted my playing to night-time feedings to give myself something to do during those times).