Guild Wars 2

BETA and Launch: Deleting something had no confirmation regardless of rarity or specialty.

Players requested confirmations for deleted items of rarity and specialty.
Anet complies and gives us rarity confirmation box and specialty confirmation through typing.

July 2015: Player request all that be removed for one item inconvenience because it’s too long to type.

The mini map and chat box can be moved to the top and bottom of the window and resized; you can also change the size of interface items. That is the extent of customization.

They looked at everything we loved and requested about gw1, threw it all in the round-file, and started over from scratch like this was the first game they ever made.

Because Anet didn’t consider genealogy in-depth before adding their creatures and slayer titles.

The only thing that really counts as a plant is the Treant type: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Treant

Also known as Oakhearts. Of all the plant creatures in the game, the only one that is a plant is the reincarnated HUMAN DRUID…

If they would have taken a page from the animal kingdom chart thingy and added some coding inheritance we could be getting points for plants from all of the plant types as well as the specific creature types.

Risen would count for undead as well as their respective race/creature type as well.

But they didn’t so we only get one type for each creature and many of them don’t make sense.

Yes, you’re right on Shatterer, it’s closer to his right foot (left side facing him). It seems they inverted him horizontally because it is in the same spot just opposite.

You only get hero points from skill point locations in the world. iirc.

Only bosses on the schedule are included, but you can infer critability from the following information about the others. Humanoid types have always been critable.

Cleave: melee weapons that attack more than one target at a time in an aoe fashion.
Non-trigger aoe(area of effect): wells, firestorm, other pulsing ground targeted aoe types, etc.
Trigger aoe: traps, marks, other ground targeted aoe types that require something to be in it to fire it off.

There are 3 types of world bosses:
1. Humanoid + KQ: Maw, Ulgoth, Taidha, Karka Queen
2. BASE: Wurms, Fire Elemental, Shadow Behemoth
3. Dragon: Claw of Jormag, Shatterer, Tequatl, etc.

1. Frozen Maw: Humanoid, it crits normally from all sources.
2. Modnir Ulgoth: Humanoid, it crits normally from all sources.
3. Fire Elemental: BASE, west side, outside of the fire zone on ground, melee and non-trigger AOE only.
4. Golem Mark II: BASE, melee and non-trigger aoe only.
5. Jungle Wurm and Triple Trouble: BASE, melee and non-trigger aoe only.
6. DRAGONS: Every dragon has the same crit spot and it is melee and non-trigger AOE critable. The crit spot for Dragon types is between its legs under the base of its neck slightly to the right, look for people saying “DD/TD HERE”. (double damage, triple damage – for cleave weapons only) On Claw of Jormag there is also a pulsing light hovering above the ground at the crit spot (been there for a while) it’s at the center of the forehead of the dragon icon on the mini-map. Claw of Jormag phase 2 doesn’t have a crit spot as far as I could find.
7. Shadow Behemoth: BASE, (purple area) and only non-trigger AOE critable. Beware, this location is also near instant death.
8. Karka Queen: Humanoid, she crits normally from all sources.
9. Taidha Covington: Humanoid, it crits normally from all sources.
10. Megadestroyer: Humanoid, it crits normally from all sources.

Please list any discrepancies on the crit spots if you notice anything off.

I would rather all the the different kit types stacked to 250 instead of just selling a 250 variant of each. Would save inventory space not having all those 25 stacks…

Anet makes millions off of the gem store, they don’t, and never have needed money. They are very good at making money.
However, they act like a young company, they have split priorities, and they prototype every concept they have until one of them works out, then they go in that direction hoping that they can fit some lore into it without breaking existing lore and destroying continuity.

They have bigger issues than money, money has never ever been an issue for Anet.

If you’re doing that constantly when you swap characters, it would be faster to do it in your mouse/keyboard software as most of those can save multiple profiles.

I don’t know why you would need to do this for your characters but that’s your problem.

Oh, the answer is no, gw2 doesn’t have that functionality.

Every single argument so far assumes that you can glide UP after you started. Gliding doesn’t work that way unless there are thermals available, you always glide DOWN – it’s that thing called gravity… As far as I’m aware, the only thermals in gw2 are in HoT, as confusing as that is.

All of the maps have invisible walls, gliders wont trivialize anything as my WALKING character can already break out of most of them with the skills and jumping available to me.

What allowing gliders will do is allow me to glide around getting a nice birds eye view of the areas that I’ve already explored. Some jumping puzzles will be interesting for those who have complete control over their gliding character allowing some new options for speed running the JP. Another thing that it’ll allow me to do is avoid dying if I’m fast enough with the controls when I fall off of a PVE map cliff.

Steam golem platform after FE is above the reactor, I would love to jump off that and glide around the area. There are a few jumping puzzles that are way above the ground that I would love to glide from. Most of the mount maelstrom area can be broken out of and has some nice high areas you could jump from, the ulgoth area in harathi can also be broken out of quite easily and leads to some really high areas that would be neat gliding areas.

Nothing needs to be reworked, they just have to allow you to do it in the core maps (it’s probably just an IF statement in the first place).

Trivializing PvE is an oxymoron.

For monitors, hertz is how many times per second that it can draw an image on the screen, so a 60hz monitor can do 60 frames per second, a 240hz monitor can do 240 frames per second.
V-sync (vertical refresh synchronization) is used to make sure that one image per refresh cycle, 1hz/1frame is drawn completely before the next one starts.

V-sync will drop frames because they’re excessive. The v-sync algorithm you choose determines whether you get perceptibly smooth frames or choppy frames. If you can enable v-sync for a game in your graphics driver, it will be the smoothest – the people who make the graphics drivers get paid to make your gaming experience the smoothest and cleanest. The second option for most is to enable it in the game engine, this can result in less than smooth visual perception.

Since we’re hear talking about smooth graphics performance, I want to let you all know a neat trick to fixing choppy performance.

I use windows 7 right now and after some time playing flash videos, I noticed that gw2 is perceptibly choppy and has a slight input lag on the client side. I found that it is attributed to the Aero interface becoming more and more unstable over time during flash video playback.
Windows has a shortcut option in the compatibility tab called “Disable Desktop Composition”, what this does is turn off the Aero interface while the application is running. However, I have come to find out that it has trouble turning it back on after the application exits. So instead of using that option I have a batch file on my desktop for when I notice the choppy behavior that turns it off and back on again. This restores the performance, removes the visual problems, and is a case-by-case resolution instead of a blanket solution.

If you’re interested, copy this into a .bat file

net stop uxsms
net start uxsms

Magic find only affects DIRECT drops from monsters, some bosses are champions and thus have a champ box, direct drop, and world boss chest and bonus chest.
For those bosses it is possible to get 2 rare+ grade items without opening a single chest/box. All humanoid bosses are champs (maw, megaD, Taidha, Ulgoth) and have direct drops, all other world bosses do not have direct drops and are not champs.
Also prior to the world boss health/crit changes, only the humanoid bosses could be crit, now all the bosses can but only in very specific locations that aren’t possible for ranged characters but whatever…

Anyway, if you want your magic find to affect chests, go to pvp, those chests are affected by your magic find stat.

The moral of the story is that RNG doesn’t care about you no matter how much magic find you feed it. It’s an unrewarding one way relationship.

The very same technique is employed in the mmo Aion where you can ‘fly’ only in specific areas but you can glide – albeit just above the ground – in all areas.

What anet did was employ AREA mechanics instead of game mechanics. Area mechanics are, well, area specific and are a gimmick. I hope that one day they see fit to make it a game mechanic for at least the normal gliding. Air vents or whatever are unnecessary in the rest of the world though I don’t know why they exist in that very specific area of maguuma in the first place, is there significant hot springs – I don’t remember any in maguuma – do the mount maelstrom magma chambers really reach that far into maguuma for geothermal venting?

Anyway, it’s just a gimmick to test out a couple new technologies, which is fine but limiting its scope makes me sad. There are so many fun glider places where you’ll just plummet to your death after you’ve been playing around in HoT for a while thinking “oh right… I can’t use it here… CAN SOMEONE RES ME PLEASE, I forgot about the glider not working here.”

Yes, it is comcast. You are on a shared network type (cable) and that means you share the maximum bandwidth with all the others in your network neighborhood. Maybe you were just downloading it while everyone else was at work or in the network low time. Just enjoy it while it lasts.

So since most cloth is from plants/animals, maybe:

Plant fibers:
Jute, Cotton, Linen

Animal fibers:
Wool(grazing animals), Silk(Wurms), Gossamer(Spiders)

But if we’re going to do this, we might as well make leather come from their animal counterparts as well in addition to armors made from them.

While I enjoy having a permanent 25 stack of might and nearly all other boons at world bosses, I will reiterate that burning is a massive condition that should be toned down quite a bit. While in the train, I noticed that the health would go down smoothly for a couple seconds and then its HP would just drop by 5%, few more seconds of smooth and then another drop. We were eating bosses so fast we had to wait over 10 minutes at most bosses just for the pre event time.

Jungle wurm almost reminded me of the mesmer skill that made it kill itself all those months ago.
I noticed also that the downscaling hit me pretty hard, there was a drop into the megadestroyer tunnels that I usually take that leaves me with around 3500hp, this time it killed me. Other than my necro’s HP dropping by several thousand, I was doing about 30% more direct damage than usual as well and I’m not running a zerk build.

Oh, and the dirt textures in LA are hovering above the ground in places. fyi

Use the rocks on the right hand side like a jumping puzzle and use the spikes to catch your fall. I did this on the second run (like the rest of you, I died trying it the old way) and I made it down just fine without traits, health food, etc.

There are way too many spikes and other things in the way to kill you, you have to use the terrain features to your advantage now.

They’ll be back, be patient, they were just a preview item, exactly like the black wings were. They’ll come back and be part of a longer larger gem store update, exactly like the black wings were. Anet is nothing but predictable on the gem store.

What would be even more awesome is a way to ctrl click on your spec tree and it shows up in chat window. But until then: DA221, SA213, AB222

Humans are geared toward finding patterns, once an easily recognizable pattern is found, we associate it with something just as easy. In terms of finite list items, we use numbers.
1 high, 2 mid, 3 low

This way it wont be confused with someone making a spelling mistake, and will be more readable than a bunch of vertical lines.

Here’s the screenshot of it. It’s missing it’s localization string.

Hope I’m not the only one that noticed that Macha’s Landing looks like a lobster now? Maybe rename it to Lobster Point or something lol

At this point, you should have a key or mouse button that double clicks for you. Most of us world boss farmers and silverwastes chest runners have one for opening all the chests, I used it for the sunbeads too, I’m just glad there wasn’t a purchase confirmation on them.

I just hope there’s an expansion price for people who already OWN the game, why they had a popup in-game for players who already have the game is beyond me, that one should have shown the expansion price (without the price for the full game since I already own it). This is just an expansion, like Eye of the North, EoTN didn’t include the base game, Factions did but it also had 2 character slots and 2 new professions. HoT is not that type of expansion, it’s a simple content expansion that simply adds the areas and a lot of features we had in gw1 maguuma area… I would have prepurchased at $30 but at $50 I’d rather get a full game and wait on HoT until it was on sale.

At this price I’ll be getting Fallout4 instead of an expansion.

Anet is trying to get large guilds to do parties in Lion’s Arch on the day of the design reveal, know why? cause they’re going to slaughter us all again with karka swarms. If you did not see this coming then you completely missed all of the clues.
1. Anet pimps new changes to LA and says rebuild is almost done! yay!
2. Notice the Consortium is building LA – why? Gnashblade owns the Black Lion Trading Post, if the Consortium was truly a powerhouse we’d also have the Consortium Trading Post with which to do our trading.
3. Anet asks guilds to publicly announce party plans for the unveiling (suspicious!!)
4. Players discover karkas hiding in the platforms coming from Southsun Cove.
5. We can safely assume there will be fireworks and all kinds of noisy raucus activities with which to get our /dance on.

We’re all going to die and have to fight and rebuild again… Anet is why we can’t have nice things!!!!

Because unlike a true digital storefront, this one is completely unscalable in its current design. Imagine if they left everything in there from the beginning and continued to add to it for the next 8 years, now can you imagine how long you’d have to scroll just to see everything? That is an instant FAIL design in e-commerce.

Also, there is an innate pressure due to our commercialized civilization to buy things that were once available and taken away, marketing loves this one “limited time sale” or “Spring/summer/fall/winter sales” or STEAM SALE!!!! (btw it’s on right now ). Anet also does the flash sale where its just here for a couple days and gone again.

For some reason they think it actually increases sales when they actually have no baseline data to pull from because they’ve never actually tried leaving ALL of the items on the gemstore for an extended period of time. All it actually does is drive the price of gold→gem conversion up.

Digital items have an infinite supply but a finite demand, Anet attempts to balance the supply to the demand which screws over people who take too long to acquire the currency to get the items because currency is an infinite supply but game-time is finite and this is never balanced.

Anyway, the e-commerce team and web team and gem store team need to work together because in 8 years we’ll need Amazon to handle all the digital items we’ll have by then or we’ll never be able to have all the items. Anet did not design this game to accommodate the future and I’m hoping that one day all the interfaces in the game will get a feature pack of their own to upgrade the system so we don’t have to deal with this limited time kittylitter and taking digital items away.

Second poster was concerned with bandwidth or something, I only mentioned it because I have limited bandwidth and the streaming actually affects my gameplay. I also mentioned that I use the -image shortcut on a schedule so I don’t have to deal with it, I just happened to play before the schedule happened.

I think it’s completely blasphemous that the other races can regale in the awesomeness that is the HUMAN gods… When I can’t even wear their racial armors.

I fully expect that since we’re desecrating the Human Gods by allowing Charr to wear these outfits that we’ll also have outfits for all the Norn Spirits, Asura Colleges, and Charr Warbands, and Sylvari Dream States.

None, gw2 doesn’t even touch the native OSX, it’s running in kind of a windows emulator with directX support.

I think it’s Wine or one of the other wrappers. Anyway, the wrapper can be updated for the client rather easily once it gets it’s own update for whatever the flavor of the month apple is doing.

Title. I know I can set it as needed, idle, and max, but on a slower connection all of those aren’t good. I was hitching every few seconds – everything would stop – while it was writing the info into the .dat file, every single thing took forever to load into the scene when I had just entered a map, all of the ui stuff was slow to appear.

It also needs an info bar telling me how much bandwidth it’s using. It would be great if it would cache the downloaded stuff and pop it into the .dat file when I wasn’t doing something but not idle – which btw, no one knows how long you need to be afk to be ‘idle’. Is Idle your character not moving?, you completely afk?, is chatting ok? is doing other stuff in the UI ok? Info, you need to work on the INFO part of the game cause it’s missing a lot of that.

Anyway, I usually have a scheduled -image shortcut do the work but I logged in for the heck of it before that and got to experience the content streaming first hand and it seems to be ok for the most part but it still needs a little tlc.

it’s not always that simple, Anet doesn’t do consistency. Some things have a ‘drop’ skill, others have a ‘leave’ skill, then there’s the drop bundle arrow on the left. Those first two are in either skill slot 5 or 6.

It’s really not convenient to have multiple things that do exactly the same thing but are ‘different’ just because of semantics.

A simple redesign of the store and someone that can actually run SPECIALS and we wouldn’t have to put up with this – steam does it and makes billions… what’s your excuse Anet?

I can’t wait until the Zunlai come back, then Evon will be out of business cause they at least have infinite magical storage ability and a nice back story.

NCSoft Aion has the “Black Cloud Marketplace” — sound familiar?
They also have a “Power Lockbox” – yes, it’s the same as the Black Lion Chest, exactly the same.
http://store.aiononline.com/store/item?goodsNo=6411042
The only difference is that this lockbox only gives you one selection instead of 3 but they function the same. It’s an expensive gambling ring that provides no perceivable benefit to the gambler but still takes his real money.
Also, the Black Cloud Marketplace is something Anet should be doing instead of this limited time kitty litter stuff that you can only buy through their limited interface capabilities – or just get a proper professional web team to handle the black lion storefront.

Flex.5389:

Component Minimum System Requirements
Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Better
Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3, AMD Athlon™64 X2 or better
Memory : 2 GB RAM
Hard drive: 25 GB available HDD space
Graphics card: NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800, ATI Radeon™ X1800, Intel HD 3000 or better (256MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better)
Internet connection: Broadband Internet Connection
Input: Keyboard and mouse

If its not GPU Base and run on CPU only. why they say we need graphic card?
Most motherboards come with 256MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better as standard?

The game uses the cpu mostly because of the amount of data it has to crunch on the client, it still needs a gpu(or apu) to render the frames and those specs are because DirectX 9 requires 256mb of ram and it IS the shader model 3.0 spec.

Now on to those minimum specs:
Windows XP is a non-supported operating system by its creator – Microsoft doesn’t support it anymore (except corporate customers that can’t be bothered to enter the new millenium).
Dual core is pretty much the minimum specification to be called a computer now and they are all 64-bit architectures.
2gb of ram simply because the game is 32-bit.

I wish that we could just end the 32-bit era all at once so that all our future games could actually use our resources. Remember kids if you have unused resources on a computer, they are being WASTED. That 32gb of ram you have? yeah, it’s all wasted because your games will never use it because some of the players might be using a 32-bit operating system!

Looking forward to the big update for 64bit client and directX11+ but I think they’re saving that for the gw3 reveal – you know they’re already conceptualizing it right? I hope they get over the “we have to make our own engine” stage and use one that has decades of experience and hundreds of games backing it up like the unreal or cryengines.

pre update quality settings:
JPEG, quality: 94, subsampling ON (2×2)

post update quality settings:
JPEG, quality: 75, subsampling ON (2×2)

This info was taken straight from the screenshots, as you can see, the screenshot quality has been reduced to an unnecessarily low level even for posting on websites this is quite low.

Why Anet had to mess with the quality settings is beyond me, it does absolutely nothing to the game.

Simple work around for this starter zone issue is to just use ANY waypoint after your health is back above 75%.

And yeah it’s the NPE healing skill help hint arrow that refuses to go away even after you use your healing skill or are back to 100% health.

It’s not the sexiest site for what it is but I think this is the current go-to for crafting guides:
http://gw2crafts.net/

additionally, this will come in handy one day:
http://www.gw2db.com/

I have to assume that the “New Player Experience” is at fault here and they’re not available to you because your level is too low at the moment.

Anet has confused so many new players with this system instead of streamlining the system for new players with a nice replayable video tutorial system like other large MMO’s.

Anyway, if you find that you just “can’t” something or other, it’s because you’re too low level to do whatever it was. This unfortunately extends all the way to level 80 and you’re just going to have to grind some levels out (monster killing, crafting, maybe even some Edge of the Mists WvW play).

Good luck and have fun

Yes, you have to have the gw2.dat and gw2.exe files on your usb drive, additional files will be downloaded and placed on that drive as well on the first run.

I use gw2 on a flash drive and it works great (usb3 drive and port are best).
If all you’re doing is copying it to another drive or computer, just copy both those files and put them where you want and run it. GW2 isn’t installed the traditional way, it’s quite the portable game, just put it where you want it and run the .exe file and that’s where it’s ‘installed’, you can move it and do it again any time.

Do your best to not put it in the program files folders on a computer, permissions problems happen all the time in there, just make a new folder somewhere like C:\Games\Guild Wars 2 or put it on a different drive all together would be better.

If you’re getting the repair window then you might have a corrupted hard drive on one of the computers. Also, it will usually never destroy the .dat file, just download the files that were corrupted, it only looks like it’s downloading the whole thing again but it’s not.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the gw2.exe and gw2.dat files have to be in the same location, don’t accidentally move the gw2.exe file to your desktop as the ‘icon’, right click and drag for a shortcut to the desktop or you’ll be downloading the entire gw2.dat file to your desktop. Just leave both the files in the same place – it doesn’t matter where but not your desktop, and run the .exe file you got from the My Account page above (it’s a setup file but it’ll create the right gw2.exe file in the place where you put it).

Again, ALL of the gw2 files must be in the same directory on your hard drive or the gw2.exe file will download the entirety of the gw2.dat file to wherever the gw2.exe file is located.

Just get a 64gb usb3 drive and put gw2 on it – considering you have a usb3 port. It’s what I do, loads almost as fast as an ssd and faster than sataII drives.

Screenshot 1: Hero panel → Achievements → General → Bosses : Kill the Son of Svanir Shaman Chief during The Frozen Maw world event.

Screenshot 2: Hero panel → Achievements → General → Slayer : Kill Son’s of Svanir anywhere they are found. North and South Wayfarer Foothills and South Frostgorge Sound are good locations.

lol happy 1kbd!

7 times for me today, after it crashes completely and I log back in it puts me at some random location in the zone I was in before trying to waypoint but then it lets me go to the destination of my choice – as long as it doesn’t crash me again.
Having problems with southsun cove at the moment, it refuses to let me in no matter the waypoint when I tried to get in from Frostgorge Sound, from Wayfarer Foothills I was able to get in.

Playlists override in-game stuff. The image below is the layout.
This page will also help you: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Custom_playlist

I run my gw2 on a flash drive (usb3 is best) and update it with a shortcut just like normal. It’ll work on any windows computer I plug it into.

GW2 isn’t installed in a traditional way, it requires no external dependencies like the registry, it’s a really portable game.

Zietlogik.6208:

Razor.9872:

Zietlogik.6208:

They are trying to distract you from the imminent Karka attack!

https://imgur.com/a/3pe7C

what the?…

It’s a conspiracy I tells ya.

The consortium are building these structures in Southsun, and will be flown in infested with the things, I swear! >.>

The moment I found one of the Consortium Surveyor’s I knew that LA was screwed again…

Evon needs to get his stuff in order or the Black Lion will be taken over by the Consortium and karkafied!

Needs dueling for one and guild skirmishing for practice.
But if gw1 is any indication you’ll get racial location themes and hopefully a couple more than that.
Kryta, Maguuma, Shiverpeaks, Tropical, Ascalon, Treetop Canopy(to go with the HoT theme), Crystal Desert, Canthan, and I would really like something like Glint’s Lair.

Customization in gw1 was just buying merchants, I hope we get a lot more than that this time around.

They’re opening up the bazaar of the winds again or whatever it’s called. Or announcing that Cantha has opened up trade with the us again after they defeated Bubbles!

… Impossible to write long posts on this forum, the timeout function means that it all gets erased, doesn’t get posted, and since the back button doesn’t work it means that all your work is lost. Hate this forum so much.

I’m against naming things for individuals – every city in the US has a street named after Martin Luther King and/or Jr., my city actually had 2 at the same time at some point in history.

Lion’s Forum or Central Plaza.

Lion’s Pride for the lighthouse – or Karka Point since karka was the destroyer of it. NEVER FORGET!!

As for the fountain, I think it needs to be much more grand than that little puddle with a giant lion sitting in it. I think maybe 4 giant lions, one in each of the 4 cardinal directions facing inward shooting water into a water fountain in the center that takes the 4 waters in at the top and does interesting things with it on the way down through the central water fountain. Remember, this world has magic, I’m sure the Asura can hook us up with something grand.

As for the air field, for some reason Aerodrome sounds a little kitten to me, dunno why. Anyway, none of those names work for me and I can’t think of any useful ones at the moment.

The location of the current ‘field of the fallen’ isn’t a field, it’s a large pathway between two arching rock faces – more of a hallway – so I think something a little less demeaning to the innocents who were lost in the calamity is in order for a name. Hall of Heroes, Hall of Memories, Hall of Remembrance.

There’s a huge assortment of human, norn, and charr merchants that sell ale, whiskey, beer, and wine.
I don’t recall many asura or sylvari that do but I’m sure there are.

Yeah… I shook my head too when I realized I forgot stuff in my old age… It’s been a while since I needed to know these numbers.
Anyway the display may be capped by a 32-bit int but behind the scenes it shouldn’t be 32-bit it should be stored in a 64-bit long (9 trillion gold). The 64-bit version is quite excessive but easily available and only really needed on the server side as the client is only 32-bit (hence the 200Kgold display limit).

Had to look stuff up in my old age…

Wiki says 32 bit stuff: The number 2,147,483,647 (or hexadecimal 7FFF,FFFF) is the maximum positive value for a 32-bit signed binary integer in computing. It is therefore the maximum value for variables declared as integers (e.g., as int) in many programming languages, and the maximum possible score, money, etc. for many video games.

Wiki says 64-bit stuff: The number 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, equivalent to the hexadecimal value 7FFF,FFFF,FFFF,FFFF, is the maximum value for a 64-bit signed integer in computing. It is therefore the maximum value for a variable declared as a long integer (long, long long int, or bigint) in many programming languages running on modern computers.