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As it is, the engine is pretty modular. If you want to make a mod that uses all of HL2's base weapons, textures, etc, you just want to include maps, then there's practically no coding involved, you just have to make the maps. See Minerva or Combine Destiny. On the other hand, if you wish to create a mod from scratch, that's perfectly possible too. See Eclipse or Insurgency. (note: Eclipse isn't even an FPS per se, so it's possible to even do genre changes)

I actually recommend trying out some map-making in the Hammer Editor. If you follow a tutorial, it's fairly easy to get something like an Iceworld clone (or an "orange" map), and if you turn out to be good at it, then maybe you can even join a mod team!

Valve has never said they wouldn't offer the Black Box on Steam. If it bothers you that much, why not wait and see if they do release it? Maybe they are only allowing pre-orders on one box set at a time.

Some people like that, I don't. I hate it when I play a game only to realize that everything that happens in the game revolves around me. I guess it makes the story interesting for the player, but it doesn't make it believable, because that's not how real life looks.

Aren't going to happen until artists in the medium, 'good' artists rather, decide to start working for free the same way coders do. Some artists will work for publicity alone, bu they seem to be by far in the minority.

My boxed copy came with a T-shirt.

If you really want to design video games, the best thing you can do is make them yourself. You won't be able to make a super AAA title that way, but you'll have full creative control over your work and something to show for it in a portfolio.

Power conversion is tough - most plugs for PDAs are 100-240 volt and 50-60 Hz (it will say on the plug). A kit with four or five adapters should be enough to get you through.

The tripod isn't a terrible idea, but I found the latest superzooms with image stabilization let you do pretty long hand holds, and with a little leaning against doorframes (-not- against the 1000 year old carvings, please) you'll never need the tripod, and that leaves you with more space for underwear.

Although on the whole the Wii is more powerful than the original XBox, and Source did appear on the XBox in the form of Half-Life 2, Valve has stated (although I can't find the quote) that Half-Life 2 will not be coming to Wii.

From someone who actually owns one of these things, I really can't imagine how painful it would be to attempt to use one as a general-purpose telephone. It was awkward enough to get my Belkin Skype phone to talk to my wireless router - and the bastard thing crashes and restarts when I'm not looking. It's working quite well as a cordless Skype phone now, but I really wouldn't want to use it for anything remotely serious. Business contacts have not been given my SkypeIn number; that's for family and friends only.

When I go anywhere, the Skype phone stays at home, while my proper, Nokia GSM phone goes with me.

Actually, I liked the original, Someplace Else, a lot better. (Minerva is a sequel to Something Else; Minerva seems to be distributed as a full mod, whereas Something Else was pretty much just a map for the original Half-Life.)

Off topic: Are you still working on Minerva at the moment, or any new projects you're working on?

Off topic: Are you still working on Minerva at the moment, or any new projects you're working on?

I've had no problems at all with the original Half-Life, and its sequel, on a dual-core machine.

From a modding point of view, the Source map compilation tools are fully SMP-aware - so I guess someone at Valve knows about multithreaded programming. Seeing both processors pegged at 100% is great, as is hearing the whooshing noise from my laptop's fans. No belching of flames quite yet, fortunately.

(Actually, the compilation tools will scale up to running in a distributed manner - apparently at Valve, even the receptionist's PC contributes processor time. But the necessary glue code isn't available for us modders, alas.)

Actually, this Mac user decided to installed Windows XP on his MacBook Pro, and discovered he had a completely serviceable Windows gaming machine hidden away in his work laptop.

Considering I switched to Mac laptops to escape the horrors of getting Linux to work on random PC laptop hardware anyway... ;-)

After seeing all those PC games at Gamestop, we might amend that to say ""Apple makes wonderful machines that work. Dell machines that not only work, but they play also."

In which case, there's something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro.

I think most games are not capable of teaching the dark side of violence. I hate to keep going back to it, but GTA is convenient here. You get points for killing. Other, less controversial games, too. Most FPS's, to an extent. Even that one racing game (Burnout?) where one game mode involves causing as much damage as you possibly can. Most games depict a cartoonish, unreal, detached violence.

DEFCON is that, but to an extreme - you are so utterly detached from the millions of people you are killing that somehow the mind fills in the blanks, and makes things far worse. The soundtrack contributes a lot to this - but the imagination does most of the work.

*SHUDDER*

haha, those comments are awesome. That's your mod? I really enjoy the two episodes released so far and can't wait for the third. Any idea when that will be?

Yup, it's mine - final part of Metastasis should get released by the end of the year. Or something. Before Episode Two, anyway. ;-)

Actually, despite being in a very much corporate environment right now, I think I'll reboot this 'ere MacBook Pro into Windows XP, and let the office ring with the sound of gunfire. And other noises associated with MINERVA development. Bonus points if random co-workers look at me strangely...

"Despite the website that oozes more angst and self-hatred than an emo concert at an emo convention, this is worth downloading."

"That pompous, cliche tone gave the sense that a smarmy Brit with two dictionaries, three encylopedias and a latin textbook shoved up his ******* was faxing you orders. That might fly in Far Cry or some other attempt at remotely-located-brainiac-is-playing-God/head-game s-with-you, but not the HL2 universe in which this is situated."

"A second-rate Half-Life 2 mod."

"i made a box map with a giant penis that has better lighting that this shit"

"So the deal is I am going to break up with my girlfriend, stop going to college, quit my job and make the best game in history, and make fun of adam foster in the credits for his use of shoddy worksmanship which has befuddled you all."

I never said OS X was without flaws. The fact that I got a kernel panic is evidence of a significant bug somewhere. I just see them -much less often- on Mac OS X than on other PC based OSs I've worked with (since 1978, when I bought my TRS 80 Model 1).

I get a kernel panic on my MacBook Pro around once a month or so - usually caused by very different things. I tried enabling wireless on a train once, just to see how many networks were zooming past - and then tried connecting to a network to see what happened. Oops. Kernel panic. That's me taught! Also, even iPhoto's also caused one (the problem-reporting thing which appeared on startup reckoned there was a problem with the ATI graphics drivers), I've even occasionally had ones out of the blue while web-browsing (see photo)...

The bugs responsible might be in the process or being patched out every time there's a MacOS X update, but I've no real way of knowing. It's still a pretty stable machine, although worse than my old iBook (which still locked up every so often with the multilingual messages). But, embarrassingly, it's nowhere near as stable as my Windows XP desktop machine - which I do Half-Life 2 mod development stuff on, so seriously stretch the graphics card, memory, processor etc.

My crashy-crashy-shite-machine is that same PC running Linux. Rock-solid in Windows XP, it locks up all the time in Linux. A recent-ish 64-bit SUSE release. And yes, I've updated everything, downloaded new nVidia drivers, blah blah blah, and it still locks up at random whenever I do anything graphics related.

Kind of a turn-around from some years ago, when I reckoned Linux was uncrashable, Windows a disaster and Macs I could crash by standing nearby... ;-)

I actually prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop (which maybe because I used it first but hey). I used GIMP exclusively for photo editing. Until that is, I bought a better camera which takes 5MB jpegs (or 40MB raw images) and I have to agree - GIMP is hopeless with these larger files.

I've opened single images approaching a gigabyte in size on my Mac in The GIMP - the trick is to increase the tile cache size, so it's not constantly swapping data to and from the hard disk. In 'File: Preferences: Environment'; put 'Tile cache size' to something like 500MB on a one-gigabyte machine. I can't remember what the default is, but it's pretty low.

If you had a dial-processor machine (like my MacBook, you can increase the number of processors The GIMP uses in that dialogue box as well. Sped things up quite a bit more on my computer...

This way, I often have iPhoto and The GIMP open with lots of 8 megapixel images from my camera, and it usually works pretty smoothly. Although I'm thinking of adding another gigabyte of memory -iPhoto either has a memory leak, or it just likes allocating silly amounts of memory anyway.

Isn't all that's left writing the story, placing the enemies, and scripting the events?

Absolutely. Why, personally I can build a new MINERVA episode every week or so, starting work on a Monday and releasing on a Friday. It's just throwing some pre-existing game content together, after all. The hard work has been done already, hasn't it?

...
Actually, it takes me about six months to produce half an hour to an hour of gameplay. Yes, that's in my spare time, but I have to keep 90% of what I produce - I don't do the intensive testing, throwing away, redesigning and retesting that Valve designers perform. And they're introducing new gameplay devices; I'm usually just regurgitating old ones. Episode One was spectacular in its near-total lack of padding - all the new gameplay elements were carefully introduced where required, and never overstayed their welcome. Except maybe the shopping trip near the end. But still, it was in complete contrast to the usual copy-and-paste design present in games like Halo...

Was there an option for this anywhere that I missed?

Yup - every so often, when Steam starts it comes up with a brief message asking if you'd like to take part in the hardware survey. If you click yes, it detects what you've got, presents you with what it's found and then asks if it can send it off to Valve. If you do, it then links you to the results.

Evil. Pure evil.

My poor MacBook Pro got abused in this way. :-(

Hope nobody minds, but here's a link to my own MINERVA - more single-player Half-Life 2, but entirely unofficial and apocryphal. And with more than a passing nod to a certain Marathon...

Valve likes it, anyhow. And yes, I'm a complete fanboy!

Hope nobody minds, but here's a link to my own MINERVA - more single-player Half-Life 2, but entirely unofficial and apocryphal. And with more than a passing nod to a certain Marathon...

Valve likes it, anyhow. And yes, I'm a complete fanboy!

Crates? Barrels? Yes, but what are the civilian applications?

I did a comparison with my desktop PC (an AMD Athlon 64, 3200+ running at 2GHz, 1GB of speedy memory) versus my MacBook Pro (Intel Core Duo at 1.83GHz, 1GB memory) with VRAD on the second MINERVA map, with the Source SDK running on Windows XP Pro.

VRAD definitely takes full advantage of the dual-core nature of the Intel processor - typical compile times on the desktop PC were around 50-60 minutes, while on the laptop they were just over 30 minutes. It's a fairly artificial test, admittedly (although I'm really happy with the increased speed) - but it certainly shows it's a rather fast processor at certain floating-point-intensive tasks, anyhow.

Yup. And it works really well. Really, really well. Better than on my desktop PC.

At the Valve Developer Community, a few of us are logging how Valve games run on these new Macs, so if you've got any new information, feel free to contribute.

I do think it will kill most native MacOS gaming, or at least cause a major shake-up. But I'm not surprised - paying through the nose for years-old ports of PC games just didn't appeal to me, to be honest.

But what I've got now is a Universal Computer, capable of running Mac software (both PowerPC and Intel), UNIX stuff (thanks to Fink and X11.app) and now Windows stuff. I've been dual-booting on my PCs between Linux and Windows for years, so I'm familiar with the drawbacks, but the advantages are great. By day, for work and for my photography, I have a high-powered Mac laptop, and by night, for gaming and modding stuff, I've got a high-powered PC laptop.

Not bad!

My favourite game reviews site is probably Eurogamer - surprisingly, it's Europe-centric (conveniently for me), and I've found that the reviews (and previews) are usually well worth reading. It's helped get me to broaden my gaming horizons a bit, too - I bought Darwinia on the basis of the Eurogamer review, and found it to be one of the best games I've ever played.

As for GameSpy, someone from one of their sub-sites recently asked if they could make my MINERVA mod the level-of-the-week, or something. Unfortunately, there was a corporate-mandated requirement - that in the review, there had to be a Fileplanet download link.

To their credit, they did ask (the MINERVA terms of distribution coincidentally forbid mirroring on subscription-based download sites without permission) - but awkwardly for them, I said no. Citing a sheer distaste for Fileplanet, its queues, its Win32-Internet-Explorer-only download system, etc.

I never got a reply. And I've yet to see a review!

Teh Hammre? Oh wow, I uploaded that ancient in-joke to the Valve wiki a while ago, after extracting it from the Hammer (née Worldcraft) documentation. It may (or may not be) the entire reason for Worldcraft's renaming... ;-)

(Oh, and single-player Half-Life 2 fans: the new MINERVA map is released! Have fun...)

The only there keys keyboard you will ever need is this one.

They've already thought of that... ;-)

(Screenshot because the site seems intent on dying horribly. Wonder why?)

OMFG! Please don't let this guy write another sentence ever again. My eyes are bleeding...

You should play this mod. It's one of a handful of good single-player mods out there which is something I am much more interested than yet another multiplayer mod featuring zombies. It's played over a single map, and it's not very long. Ehh ok some good points, it's a good difficulty, the map is very well designed and feels very professional, and it's been written into the same world as Half-Life 2 is set, a good excuse to use combine grunts and their familiar technology. It's a sort-of followup to "Someplace Else", a mod for Half-Life 1 by the same creator, but having now played the previous mod I can safely say it doesn't really shed any light on this new episode. I personally can't wait for the second episode to be released. Grab Metastasis and some interesting backstory here: http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/phosphenes.shtm l

But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.

Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.

Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.

Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again - go on, tell me which one's which. ;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!

And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.

Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...

But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.

Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.

Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.

Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again - go on, tell me which one's which. ;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!

And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.

Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...

But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.

It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.

Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.

Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.

Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again - go on, tell me which one's which. ;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!

And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.

Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...

The monkeys. Don't forget the monkeys!

You're stuck in some dark loading bay with approximately three bullets left, and you can hear a monkey gasping and grunting, then as you cautiously creep forwards, it and another monkey start screaming and howling, and you're absolutely sure they're approaching and they're screaming and you know their skulls are sliced open and they're screaming ... They're looking for you and they're screaming ...

Ahem!

The last time I was anywhere near that terrified was in the latter part of the first MINERVA map for Half-Life 2. Underground in some World War Two bunker that's been commandeered by the Combine, and there's ... stuff crawling around. There's very little combat at first, just music, a whole lot of atmosphere, the murdered, decomposing corpses of some prior occupants and some off-world presence ranting into your ear about your past mistakes, and that stuff crawling around again, coming to get you...

Embarrassingly, it was me who built the map, and that bit still scared me silly! :-D

Powerful open source applications? Have you tried doing anything in GIMP on a Macintosh? It will only run through Apple's X11.app, and it makes a 386 running Windows XP look fast.

It's pretty terrible when you're trying to open large images on a Mac with very little memory (I used it on my iBook when it had 256MB and it was slow).

Since I bumped up the memory to 640MB and The GIMP's tile cache to something like 400MB, it's a whole lot faster. It still gets bogged down when working on gigabyte-sized, many-layered panoramas but I think that's more the iBook's very slow hard disk at fault.

As for this 'GimpShop' thing - is there any chance of something to convert Photoshop into something more usable for us GIMP users? Admittedly I've never had any problems in brief uses of Photoshop after years of absence (embarrassingly, I'm usually better with it than the actual owner of the software) but the really quaint, 'friendly' filter and tool names amuse me.

But I'm sure that Adobe couldn't change said names to something more correct, since the millions of dribbling idiots^W^W Photoshop experts would raise a public outcry! ;-)

But I never finished the game. Why? Because all the eye candy in the world couldn't make me put up with the frequent yet lengthy loading delays.

... Buy a marginally less crap PC? ;-)

I've seen people complaining that the first of my own MINERVA maps takes a couple of minutes to load on less modern PCs (for 30-45 minutes of gameplay - it's a big map) while on my not-cutting-edge-PC it doesn't take long at all.

It does take around four hours to do a full compile of metastasis_1 and a couple of minutes to build cubemaps and the AI network, but you don't get to see that bit. Fortunately...

Part of the problem is that Valve actually tried some of that streaming-content thing in initial versions of HL2, but it would appear that on many lesser PCs the transfer of large amounts of data to and from the hard disk during gameplay caused those notorious audio stuttering effects. So instead, it caches as much as possible when a map's initially loaded. It takes longer, but you don't get the pops and farts whenever you see a new texture, hear a new sound or fight a new monster.

Unless you have a really poor PC!

Well, I had much more fun with Minerva and Antlion Troopers, but I would agree those are not so much mods as sophisticated maps and scripting.

So that those who prefer SP games don't get their hopes up,

IT'S MULTIPLAYER ONLY

Of course, if you want some single-player HL2, there's always my episodic MINERVA (less cryptic site), which had its first chapter released just over a week ago.

And yes, the first map is a bit of a homage to Halo's Silent Cartographer (it was originally nicknamed 'Flatulent Geographer' for a start), but they should all come with a liberally Marathon-flavoured dollop of mystery and intrigue, through text messages sent by an unnamed third party which guide, goad and cajole the player through the story.

Entirely different approach to Dystopia too: while they've got some immensely talented modellers, texture artists, sound engineers etc., I'm repurposing existing HL2 content for my own needs. There is some new music, but that was an unexpected gift from someone who really liked the look of the mod when first publicised by Valve themselves. Everything else is done by me - it's the closest you'll get to a one-man mod these days... ;-)

Still, there's half-an-hour to an hour of gameplay there, so do have fun!

I have practically downloaded every free mod available for HL2. So far they all feel very beta-ish. Plan of Attack, Garry's physics mod, strider mod, you name it... it seems like the HL1 mods were much more fun.

Well, if you look at the first year of single-player maps for the original Half-Life, for example, there wasn't a huge amount of quality content appearing. A couple of classics, such as USS Darkstar and ETC, but even they seem somewhat lightweight when played now.

Half-Life 2 is undoubtedly a great modding platform, but everyone's been very busy figuring out how it all goes together. Until recently, the documentation was a bit lacking (it ranged from a little being great to the majority being non-existent) but fortunately the Valve Developer Wiki has changed the situation tremendously.

I've been learning single-player Half-Life mapping since about late January - I assumed it would be easy (the software is superficially similar to the original Half-Life) but some months later I'm only now feeling proficient enough to consider releasing the map I've been working on (less cryptic version!)...

The best part of a year for around 45 minutes of gameplay? It's hard work!

Of course, the second map's going to be far easier, and I suspect Valve themselves are finding something similar now they've learned how to operate their Source engine...

Not to be anal, but isn't it cyan, magenta, yello (CMY)? Blue is part of RGB. There is a difference IIRC.

Even if it is a three-colour CMY ink cartridge, that's not particularly advanced - my fairly basic Epson Stylus Photo 1290 uses five-colour CcMmY cartridges along with the separate black one, the lower-case initials being lighter versions of the 'pure' colours.

If I printed a bit more, I'd buy one of those continuous ink flow systems as mentioned earlier - but they're terribly expensive!

From my own experience with cheap photo paper and cheap, non Epson ink in off-the-shelf cartridges - the colours are awful, the printing can be fuzzy, and I've no idea how long the printouts will last. So I just stick with the Epson stuff...

(Oh, and Spider Blog: when I started work this morning, the spider was waiting on my mouse-mat (actually a coffee-stained iBook manual). I moved my friendly arachnid out the way, and it's currently trundling around some paperwork on my desk. Wahey!)

While not as big as these, David Johnston has some of his own HL2 Panoramas that I think are a little better.

More importantly, he's found an incredibly straightforward way of creating them. I think I might make use of this trick for my own stuff - thanks!

It seems to me that each project should feel free to proceed as they see fit. Who knows, maybe in the future Apple will come back to KHTML in order to get that stable base again.

I hope so. I've found bugs in Safari's rendering which aren't in recent Konqueror releases - one I've seen a lot involves CSS-defined borders on table cells creeping out from where they're supposed to be.

Here's a rather nasty example I've plucked from a site I've worked on - excuse the awful HTML!

On Safari 1.3 on MacOS X 10.3.9, there's a green line which extends right along the top of the large month cell at the bottom - this doesn't happen in IE, Firefox or (last time I checked) Konqueror.

It sounds unlikely that Apple's WebCore will ever be 'synced' back to KDE's KHTML, sadly, and they do sound as if they're diverging pretty quickly...

More happened in HL2 in 13 hours than happened in doom 3 in 20 hours.

Interestingly, it seems that a fair amount of content was cut from HL2, and then what remained polished up for release. Very little from the E3 2003 stuff got into the game intact, for instance.

A game I played recently that was in dire need of some editing-down was Far Cry - there was one point where I thought I'd almost finished the game (rescuing what's-her-name from a war-torn bunker) but it turned out I was only about half-way through, and I almost ended up playing as quickly as I could just to finish the damn thing. I'd probably have appreciated it a bit more if I'd known roughly how much game was left...

Half-Life 2, despite its faults, had an 'ending' you could see from almost the very beginning of the game, that being the Combine Citadel. As you approached it, you knew just how much story (and therefore game) there was left - there was a definite sense of 'direction' to the player's actions which is frequently missing from FPS games.

One thing I'm building at the moment is a single-map HL2 mini-episode set on an island, in a similar vein to my HL map Someplace Else. I rather like building these single-map adventures - the plot and gameplay has to be boiled down into half an hour or so of action, and there's absolutely no excuse for 'filler' or arbitrary corridor-crawling. (Before anyone asks when Phosphenes will be done, the answer's of course 'soon'...)

I'd much rather have half an hour of 'great game' than several hours of boredom...

Heh, I recognise the statue in the first photo - I have lunch in that park with friends most days when it's that sunny :-)

Heh. I used to walk underneath the arch on the way to (and from) work, so I've seen it in a rather wide range of different weather conditions. Usually damp; it is Belgium after all.

(And I still reckon City 17 was partially inspired by Brussels, and guess who went on a Grand Texture Expedition before HL2 was announced...)

Is this really any different than flashbang grenades we've seen in CS?

Yes. Very different.

I've posted links to it before, but here's a great demonstration of high-dynamic-range lighting, albeit taken to GPU-bullying extremes.

Basically, lighting in current games has very little range. A seemingly 'dark' room may actually be only slightly dimmer than the bright summer day 'outside'; in the case of lightmaps, it goes from 0 (pitch black) to 255 (as bright as possible). If you've had any experience with photography, you'll know that real life has a much greater range - for example, this was several thousand times brighter than this.

HDR can give back that variation, with lightmaps (or whatever) done with floating point, for a lighting range of 'well, lots'. Various post-processing effects are possible, such as 'bloom' and true motion-blur (specular highlights don't get turned into grey for each sub-frame) - basically, it's a much more realistic model of how light works.

Because output to the monitor is still 0-255 per channel, it gives the player an 'eye' which automatically adjusts to the ambient brightness. So, if you immediately step from a bright, sunny day into a dark monastery (for example), your eyes will need time to adjust.

Hmm. Someone needs to do a Thief-style game with HDR... ;-)

Is this really any different than flashbang grenades we've seen in CS?

Yes. Very different.

I've posted links to it before, but here's a great demonstration of high-dynamic-range lighting, albeit taken to GPU-bullying extremes.

Basically, lighting in current games has very little range. A seemingly 'dark' room may actually be only slightly dimmer than the bright summer day 'outside'; in the case of lightmaps, it goes from 0 (pitch black) to 255 (as bright as possible). If you've had any experience with photography, you'll know that real life has a much greater range - for example, this was several thousand times brighter than this.

HDR can give back that variation, with lightmaps (or whatever) done with floating point, for a lighting range of 'well, lots'. Various post-processing effects are possible, such as 'bloom' and true motion-blur (specular highlights don't get turned into grey for each sub-frame) - basically, it's a much more realistic model of how light works.

Because output to the monitor is still 0-255 per channel, it gives the player an 'eye' which automatically adjusts to the ambient brightness. So, if you immediately step from a bright, sunny day into a dark monastery (for example), your eyes will need time to adjust.

Hmm. Someone needs to do a Thief-style game with HDR... ;-)

At this rate soon we will have processors that are capable of rendering real video instead of animation. Or say animation as real as videio footage.

Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors; while 3D graphics hardware has improved at a ridiculous rate over the last couple of years, there's still a long way to go before certain, everyday scenes can be rendered.

Something I'd like would be a 'city-renderer', capable of rendering a decent-sized European city (i.e. not a grid) from aerial views down to individual rooms. While a clever level-of-detail system could go a long way towards this, there would still be an utterly horrendous amount of geometry for a typical skyline shot.

Now add traffic, crowds of humans (typical FPS-style games give up after about ten or so, strategy games use crude mannequins for more), properly reflective surfaces and whatnot, motion blur and decent HDR and your quadruple-SLI Geforce 9000-Hyper-Pro-Matic setup will still grind to a halt.

Things are slowly getting there, but I'm still waiting - but like a gas, FPS-style generic corridors will expand in processing requirements until they saturate even the greatest hardware. Look at Doom 3, for example... ;-)

I've bought well over a dozen LCD montitors from Apple, Dell, and Philips in recent months and I have not seen a single dead pixel on any of them.

I've got an iBook G4. It's got several dead pixels. Except they're almost impossible to spot - there's an always-off red pixel a little below the middle-right of the menu bar, for instance, which I've just spent the last minute finding again. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of apparently-dead-pixel-free screens were like this.

Dust on the screen is a bigger problem for me.

I think you'd need to assess dead pixels on a case-by-case basis, though - my digital camera's got an always-on red pixel in the middle of its screen and it's terribly obvious and highly distracting. The pictures it takes are fine, of course, but if the sole purpose of the device was to show pictures (or video or games) on its screen, then I'd be pretty annoyed, and with good reason.

Sony seems to have the right idea - people complaining about a tiny dark or off-colour speck should certainly be discouraged, but there remains an avenue for those with the real horror stories to tell...