Slashdot Mirror

Yeah until you see Modern Warfare 2 at 1920x1200, highest setting on an LCD monitor. It looks so sharp and the spectral and bump mapping and huge texture resolution really blew me a way. The hundreds of particles from various fires in the game, for instance the tree on fire in the sub urb map is an amazing sight I've never seen before. At 120hz for a more solid experience when you look around.

But yes gameplay is just as important. Monsters in Doom 1 and 2 that had pixelated blood splatters around the walls, and being stunned when hit is something i've missed in current FPS games. Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey are pretty dumb. Red puffy sprites as blood and no depth in the gameplay. Destructive environments we had a long time ago, and been missed. The depth of games like System Shock 2 and Baldur's Gate might never come again. Many courses to choose, several ways to complete a level, hundreds of character development options. Add in an incredible story, excellent voice acting and exceedingly well written sentences and dialogue. Dragon Age is childish in comparison and not worth a "Baldur's Gate spiritual successor" in any means.

http://jooh.no/web/bloodshot_sprite_texture_puff_quake_3.jpg
http://jooh.no/web/Doom2_pixellated_blood.png
http://jooh.no/web/XCom_UFO_what_went_off_here_640.png
http://jooh.no/ss_baldurs_gate.html

Yeah until you see Modern Warfare 2 at 1920x1200, highest setting on an LCD monitor. It looks so sharp and the spectral and bump mapping and huge texture resolution really blew me a way. The hundreds of particles from various fires in the game, for instance the tree on fire in the sub urb map is an amazing sight I've never seen before. At 120hz for a more solid experience when you look around.

But yes gameplay is just as important. Monsters in Doom 1 and 2 that had pixelated blood splatters around the walls, and being stunned when hit is something i've missed in current FPS games. Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey are pretty dumb. Red puffy sprites as blood and no depth in the gameplay. Destructive environments we had a long time ago, and been missed. The depth of games like System Shock 2 and Baldur's Gate might never come again. Many courses to choose, several ways to complete a level, hundreds of character development options. Add in an incredible story, excellent voice acting and exceedingly well written sentences and dialogue. Dragon Age is childish in comparison and not worth a "Baldur's Gate spiritual successor" in any means.

http://jooh.no/web/bloodshot_sprite_texture_puff_quake_3.jpg
http://jooh.no/web/Doom2_pixellated_blood.png
http://jooh.no/web/XCom_UFO_what_went_off_here_640.png
http://jooh.no/ss_baldurs_gate.html

Yeah until you see Modern Warfare 2 at 1920x1200, highest setting on an LCD monitor. It looks so sharp and the spectral and bump mapping and huge texture resolution really blew me a way. The hundreds of particles from various fires in the game, for instance the tree on fire in the sub urb map is an amazing sight I've never seen before. At 120hz for a more solid experience when you look around.

But yes gameplay is just as important. Monsters in Doom 1 and 2 that had pixelated blood splatters around the walls, and being stunned when hit is something i've missed in current FPS games. Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey are pretty dumb. Red puffy sprites as blood and no depth in the gameplay. Destructive environments we had a long time ago, and been missed. The depth of games like System Shock 2 and Baldur's Gate might never come again. Many courses to choose, several ways to complete a level, hundreds of character development options. Add in an incredible story, excellent voice acting and exceedingly well written sentences and dialogue. Dragon Age is childish in comparison and not worth a "Baldur's Gate spiritual successor" in any means.

http://jooh.no/web/bloodshot_sprite_texture_puff_quake_3.jpg
http://jooh.no/web/Doom2_pixellated_blood.png
http://jooh.no/web/XCom_UFO_what_went_off_here_640.png
http://jooh.no/ss_baldurs_gate.html

Yeah until you see Modern Warfare 2 at 1920x1200, highest setting on an LCD monitor. It looks so sharp and the spectral and bump mapping and huge texture resolution really blew me a way. The hundreds of particles from various fires in the game, for instance the tree on fire in the sub urb map is an amazing sight I've never seen before. At 120hz for a more solid experience when you look around.

But yes gameplay is just as important. Monsters in Doom 1 and 2 that had pixelated blood splatters around the walls, and being stunned when hit is something i've missed in current FPS games. Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey are pretty dumb. Red puffy sprites as blood and no depth in the gameplay. Destructive environments we had a long time ago, and been missed. The depth of games like System Shock 2 and Baldur's Gate might never come again. Many courses to choose, several ways to complete a level, hundreds of character development options. Add in an incredible story, excellent voice acting and exceedingly well written sentences and dialogue. Dragon Age is childish in comparison and not worth a "Baldur's Gate spiritual successor" in any means.

http://jooh.no/web/bloodshot_sprite_texture_puff_quake_3.jpg
http://jooh.no/web/Doom2_pixellated_blood.png
http://jooh.no/web/XCom_UFO_what_went_off_here_640.png
http://jooh.no/ss_baldurs_gate.html

Fatal1ty seem to disagree

- Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel only plays with CRTs. The problems for him are afterglow and the lower frequency of images. The main fault of LCDs is the restriction in frequency and consequently fps. The possibility of having a 120 Hz LCD like Samsung, CMO and LG-Philips particularly interested him. If LCD really displayed 120 Hz, yes he will probably change to LCDs. We will have to verify if the first monitors of this type will truly display 120 different images per second or if they will display twice the same image with a black one between the two.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/613-8/the-last- crt-survey.html

I've never seen a game competitive event with LCDs, and there seems to be a lot of CRT at The Gathering too
http://jooh.no/web/CRT_at_TG07.jpg

Just trying to show people there might still be a market for CRT :)

Personally I've tried quake3 @ 60fps+hz on my CRT and it's awful.
(I used com_maxfps 60 and r_displayfresh 60)
Also, when the entire scene changes, for instacne look around with the mouse, I can clearly see difference between 100hz/fps and 120hz/fps

The best would be to fix the monitor refresh to the games max FPS, or a multiple.
UT 2004 - 85hz
Battlefield 2 - 100hz

BTW What poll rate is your mouse at?

In vista, does the file system explorer and UI stuff that comes with the OS take advantage of directX 10?

The only thing that uses Direct3D hardware accelleration is the borders and the animation and frame-buffering of program windows. Everything inside the window like icon and image resizing is very slow and CPU intensive and sometimes cheaply filtered like the resizing of the wallpaper.

This is done for easiest legacy compatibility I think. New programs written exclusively for Vista might have more UI stuff done in hardware accellerated heaven.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_wallpaper_f iltering.png

If you thought Luna was hilariously bad (I still don't get how Windows fans defend that theme), wait until you come across the puke-worthy blue and seagreen EVERYWHERE in the Vista interface, complete with a 1980s-style animated ribbon swoosh in the corners of the windows.

I still don't get how people can't love the non-glossy and "toyful" blue task bar and green start button. The roundness and matte bluish is very calm and whenever I see a PC with that theme I feel home. Call it toy-ish but I love working with that theme after I've turned off window animation, common tasks in folders, smooth-scroll listboxes, slide-open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons and everything else that is non-productive.

Ubuntu is also very nice and soft, Suse/KDE I don't have much liking for.

http://jooh.no/prog_ubuntu.html

But I agree Vista UI is a disaster. It's slow even on a 3GHz Core 2, the black and glass-glossy theme of Vista is cold and un-inviting and applications columns have many small details and hard edges. With the new toolbar system applications get another line that has a different color and looks out of place making the UI even more messy.

If you try and make it less white by changing window color in classic controls very few windows actually get changed. Very inconsistent, hopefully theres a workaround as white is hard on my eyes and I don't wanto increase the gamma in games and movies then they look washed out.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_task_manage r.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_on_black.pn g
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_brackground _unchanged.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/window_background _nastyness.png

If you thought Luna was hilariously bad (I still don't get how Windows fans defend that theme), wait until you come across the puke-worthy blue and seagreen EVERYWHERE in the Vista interface, complete with a 1980s-style animated ribbon swoosh in the corners of the windows.

I still don't get how people can't love the non-glossy and "toyful" blue task bar and green start button. The roundness and matte bluish is very calm and whenever I see a PC with that theme I feel home. Call it toy-ish but I love working with that theme after I've turned off window animation, common tasks in folders, smooth-scroll listboxes, slide-open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons and everything else that is non-productive.

Ubuntu is also very nice and soft, Suse/KDE I don't have much liking for.

http://jooh.no/prog_ubuntu.html

But I agree Vista UI is a disaster. It's slow even on a 3GHz Core 2, the black and glass-glossy theme of Vista is cold and un-inviting and applications columns have many small details and hard edges. With the new toolbar system applications get another line that has a different color and looks out of place making the UI even more messy.

If you try and make it less white by changing window color in classic controls very few windows actually get changed. Very inconsistent, hopefully theres a workaround as white is hard on my eyes and I don't wanto increase the gamma in games and movies then they look washed out.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_task_manage r.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_on_black.pn g
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_brackground _unchanged.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/window_background _nastyness.png

If you thought Luna was hilariously bad (I still don't get how Windows fans defend that theme), wait until you come across the puke-worthy blue and seagreen EVERYWHERE in the Vista interface, complete with a 1980s-style animated ribbon swoosh in the corners of the windows.

I still don't get how people can't love the non-glossy and "toyful" blue task bar and green start button. The roundness and matte bluish is very calm and whenever I see a PC with that theme I feel home. Call it toy-ish but I love working with that theme after I've turned off window animation, common tasks in folders, smooth-scroll listboxes, slide-open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons and everything else that is non-productive.

Ubuntu is also very nice and soft, Suse/KDE I don't have much liking for.

http://jooh.no/prog_ubuntu.html

But I agree Vista UI is a disaster. It's slow even on a 3GHz Core 2, the black and glass-glossy theme of Vista is cold and un-inviting and applications columns have many small details and hard edges. With the new toolbar system applications get another line that has a different color and looks out of place making the UI even more messy.

If you try and make it less white by changing window color in classic controls very few windows actually get changed. Very inconsistent, hopefully theres a workaround as white is hard on my eyes and I don't wanto increase the gamma in games and movies then they look washed out.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_task_manage r.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_on_black.pn g
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_brackground _unchanged.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/window_background _nastyness.png

If you thought Luna was hilariously bad (I still don't get how Windows fans defend that theme), wait until you come across the puke-worthy blue and seagreen EVERYWHERE in the Vista interface, complete with a 1980s-style animated ribbon swoosh in the corners of the windows.

I still don't get how people can't love the non-glossy and "toyful" blue task bar and green start button. The roundness and matte bluish is very calm and whenever I see a PC with that theme I feel home. Call it toy-ish but I love working with that theme after I've turned off window animation, common tasks in folders, smooth-scroll listboxes, slide-open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons and everything else that is non-productive.

Ubuntu is also very nice and soft, Suse/KDE I don't have much liking for.

http://jooh.no/prog_ubuntu.html

But I agree Vista UI is a disaster. It's slow even on a 3GHz Core 2, the black and glass-glossy theme of Vista is cold and un-inviting and applications columns have many small details and hard edges. With the new toolbar system applications get another line that has a different color and looks out of place making the UI even more messy.

If you try and make it less white by changing window color in classic controls very few windows actually get changed. Very inconsistent, hopefully theres a workaround as white is hard on my eyes and I don't wanto increase the gamma in games and movies then they look washed out.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_task_manage r.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_on_black.pn g
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_brackground _unchanged.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/window_background _nastyness.png

If you thought Luna was hilariously bad (I still don't get how Windows fans defend that theme), wait until you come across the puke-worthy blue and seagreen EVERYWHERE in the Vista interface, complete with a 1980s-style animated ribbon swoosh in the corners of the windows.

I still don't get how people can't love the non-glossy and "toyful" blue task bar and green start button. The roundness and matte bluish is very calm and whenever I see a PC with that theme I feel home. Call it toy-ish but I love working with that theme after I've turned off window animation, common tasks in folders, smooth-scroll listboxes, slide-open combo boxes, slide taskbar buttons and everything else that is non-productive.

Ubuntu is also very nice and soft, Suse/KDE I don't have much liking for.

http://jooh.no/prog_ubuntu.html

But I agree Vista UI is a disaster. It's slow even on a 3GHz Core 2, the black and glass-glossy theme of Vista is cold and un-inviting and applications columns have many small details and hard edges. With the new toolbar system applications get another line that has a different color and looks out of place making the UI even more messy.

If you try and make it less white by changing window color in classic controls very few windows actually get changed. Very inconsistent, hopefully theres a workaround as white is hard on my eyes and I don't wanto increase the gamma in games and movies then they look washed out.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/vista_task_manage r.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_on_black.pn g
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/white_brackground _unchanged.png
http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/window_background _nastyness.png

Actually, the official requirements for Vista emphasis the graphics processor more than the CPU as they should. Of course, this won't prevent computer salespeople from using Vista to sell Quad-Core systems....

Why should they? Because most of the GUI is bitmaps and vectors stored and rendered on the GPU? Then why is resizing an IE7 window so CPU intensive? Why is icon listing and resizing with File Explorer so jerky in Vista?

I had hoped Vista had a true 3d accellerated GUI but I've tested RC1 with a GeForce 7800 GS 256MB and its much more tearing and jerky then Windows XP is. It seems Vista just adds a texture with transparency, blurring and cubemapping ontop of the old GUI. I get 100% CPU usage in "classic" mode too. Using RC1 drivers from nvidia.com.

http://jooh.no/root/Vista_Report/resize_cpu_usage. png

How about playing it with a slow-motion button so you can study the physics in greater detail?

http://jooh.no/clips.html

Just add this
bind "g" "host_timescale 1.0"
bind "q" "host_timescale 0.3"
to
Steam\SteamApps\username\half-life 2 episode one\episodic\cfg\config.cfg
You may need to enable cheats, add a sv_cheats "1" line too.

If this is software then I'm really excited about what a PPU like Ageia PhysX can do. Wreak havoc with explosive projectiles and bullet-time ability among hordes of monsters with no dip in framerate or realism. Of course, as business must grow, GPU makers like nVidia and ATI doesn't want consumers to shift focus on a dedicated physics processor and discover the fact that GPUs aren't much more then antialasing and texture effects. Gameplay is king, imagine Battlefield 2 with improved physics and twice the framerate.
Sorry off topic but us single-issue activists love to have our hot buttons pushed.

Just get it: you are monkeys that can vocalize a little.

You already tried Eposide 1? I'm going to finish Half Life 2 with SMOD and
bind "q" host_timescale "0.3"
bind "g" host_timescale "1.0"

All people should enjoy Half Life 2 physics (from Havoc?) before commenting on "needing" a PPU or real-physics capable GPU.

http://jooh.no/clips.html

Trusted Computing to the rescue!

And why isn't this innsight in more of those motherboard factory tours? As every
other consumer I have responsibility for what I buy, but it seems I am part of very few that is actually clearly aware of that every time I choose a product.

If people would spend less time on religion and more time interested in planet earth and things like these (when I say planet earth I mean everything also humans), the world might get better. Sure, 99.9% of such caring may all be rediculously futile and a waste of time, but with power comes responsibility, and in time we might get extremely effective of stopping evil companies.

Tommy Hilfiger busted again for use of slave workers in Mae Sot
http://nrk.no/programmer/tv/fbi/3296787.html
http://jooh.no/root/text/Tommy_Hilfiger/email_to_h ilfiger.txt

Maybe I should start a religion and hammer these few words into the cheep so they would think about it in their daily acts. For now I'll post the parents simple and insightful sentences here and there. Someday a company might start up and stamp their products "built in fair work conditions" and enough brainwashed people will actually buy them and the rest is history.

For now buy Intels lead-free NICs.
http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products /pro1000gt_desktop_adapter.htm

Some anti-idealists may say don't stress about it but don't listen to them. You are either part of the problem or part of the solution.

The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.

And that has not happened. The monsters in the newer quakes, dooms and the likes are as daft as in the original. There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.

The slashdot crowd is absolutely bloody right to expect that 10 years later something with the visuals of Quake and the level of game AI complexity of Nethack should have been written released and shipped.

And that has not happened. The monsters in the newer quakes, dooms and the likes are as daft as in the original. There is no random or even pseudorandom level generation.

I actually prefer programs to store their settings in ini files and the user data in their own directory. You see, hunting in the registry for settings before I reinstall Windows is very time consuming, and some crazy programs (Outlook Express) store user settings in different places in the registry too. Incredible.

I have a list of programs that does this, and I just put them in D:\Programs and after a Windows XP format/reinstall I just create a shortcut and all my settings and programs are there.

Multi-user is fine, just create a D:\Username\Programs.

http://jooh.no/programs_on_d.html

I don't agree to any of you. I mean Windows should be cleaned of

- windows media player
- internet explorer
- outlook express
- windows messenger
- anything else they might come up with

And make it illegal for OEMs to bundle any of these software. Instead they would bundle Firefox, Opera, Realplayer (ewww), Thunderbird, Trillian (yes I know it is a memory performance hog 1.).

Then we can have som real competition. You can go to the store and buy your bread without the butter-and-knife bundle. You know, choose what comes with it. Wow maybe we'll see more programs in a computer store... Isn't Microsoft the pirate here?

1. http://jooh.no/prog_trillian_mem.html

Yes but we don't like very skinny girls

http://www.overspun.com/?p=1204

http://jooh.no/web/anna_kournikova_thin.jpg

I can't even play Japanese movie-fests. Star Control makes you feel like you're a part of something. It's pretty amazing really. Funny, exciting, rich in interesting characters, difficult and has a great battle engine (you can play melee against your friends for hours).

It's easily in my top 5 games of all time, along with MOO2, X-COM, Fallout 2 and Buldar's Gate 2, none of which are 3D.

No, the solution really is to lock down the way the OS lets programs hook into the OS itself. Programs shouldn't be able to hide from the user, neither in their operation nor in their storage on media. It shouldn't have to be a long and troublesome hunt to clean out every instance of that spyware.

You mean like forcing programs to use the directory where they are installed for settings and libraries, and not be allowed to touch the system. Any system-level features of the program would still not be installed in the system partition. Just a folder where the OS scans at start-up.

3rd party drives same thing.

The result would be just delete content in these folders and your system is clean again.

As a bonus, reformant of the system partition and reinstall of the OS and you won't loose any program settings and data.

http://jooh.no/programs_on_d.html

This used to be true with Linux, a seperate partition for user files and settings. Lately however they seem to put everything on one partiton except the swap file.

Seems not to be clear enough among the commoners (many of you ...slashdot guys... too).

I'd love a windows XP compile that doesnt have the system restore, double up of DLL files, registry, 1 hour instal/setup time.

I've lots of programs that keep their settings in their own dir and I just run opera.exe and browser windows, login sessions (cookies), history, favourites, menu config, skin everything is right there.

Keep it at d:\programs\opera and I can format c:\ no need to "export" settings and cookies with "file transfer wizard." http://jooh.no/prog_winxp.html