Except you are still giving complete control over your games to a third party. [...] They hold every game I ever bought on there for ransom and there is nothing I can do about it.
A handy tip: cracks work with Steam games just like retail ones.
I knew SR2 would be a bad port, but I still bought it because it was only three euros. Bad idea.
The game runs so badly that as a programmer I find myself taken in wonder; how is this performance physically possible on my hardware?
The most heinous problem is the constant stuttering. When the game is loading world data - ALL THE TIME, this is an open-world sandbox game - it hangs for at least half a second. In fact at least 10 minutes out of every hour will be spent involuntarily watching a still picture.
Bear in mind that this game was ported from the Xbox 360, where it streams from a 12x DVD-ROM drive with an 18MB/sec best-case transfer rate. And it doesn't stutter. The PC port reads directly from the HDD, a device with five times the transfer rate and half the seek time. With this five-fold improvement, they manage to leverage a performance gain of negative infinity. Great job!
Then there's the graphics. The game's rendering speed is appalling, and it's not for the sake of fidelity. The graphics are on par with a PS2 game. I can live with ugliness or slowness, but not both.
To put it in perspective, I have hardware that can comfortably run Crysis at settings beyond what you can choose in the GUI. I can play other shitty ports and have an enjoyable experience with a modicum of visual appeal. But this game? It's just too much.
You can turn down the settings of course. For the record, at any setting below maximum it looks considerably worse than the 360 version. The settings go lower than most games; lighting is optional for example.
Oh yes. Allow me to elaborate: unlike any other modern game, this runs so badly that there's actually an option to turn lighting off entirely. Not just a reduction in quality, but literally nothing, not even uninterpolated flat shading. No shaders, no lights, no shadows, no bump-maps, nothing - and it still runs like fucking dogshit.
That's pretty impressive when you think about it. They made rendering unshaded polygons with a single low resolution texture more computationally demanding than protein folding.
Mysteriously the game runs just fine on the 360, despite having something in the region of one-sixth the GPU horsepower my computer has. I guess in that version they forgot to include sleep(100) in every inner loop the renderer has.
The worst thing of all is knowing that there's a good game underneath the mound of technical failure. The game supports mouse and keyboard and controller simultaneously and properly. Online play is fun and works well; you can join anyone's game any time because the entire game is cooperatively multiplayer. The game is hilarious and fairly well designed.
The average user would be a hell of a lot less retarded if there were actual computer education in mandatory schooling, as opposed to what they have now: Microsoft Office training.
How good would you be at mathematics if you were taught how to solve a single equation? Never given a glimpse into general problem solving? That's computer education right now. Worse than useless.
There are other reasons. In America, corporate fines happening in other countries are not generally reported in the news unless the fines are being applied to an American company. To the casual observer it creates the illusion that only those companies are being fined.
In short, be aware of just how insular the news is, or you will be severely mislead.
Last I heard, one is currently in human trials. It works by replacing the bacteria responsible with a different strain that doesn't create lactic acid, and therefore doesn't cause caries.
In tests on rats, it provided a permanent solution. Here's hoping it works out for us too.
Emotions are only adequate for decision making in areas with which you have had considerable experience.
Outside this very small domain they are worthless. Worse, they will instill you with the same confidence in their analysis irrespective of experience.
In other words, in almost all significant circumstances in the modern world they are beyond useless.
Much of human history is a grotesque tale of incomprehensible suffering, ruin and loss brought about by our own poor decision making, innate inability to rationally analyse the world, and our susceptibility to emotional manipulation.
Which, touching upon the point of the parent, is exactly why marketing works as well as it does.
That would require consumers to objectively evaluate it. Never happens. They will buy it because marketing said it's awesome. They'll want to believe it too, having spent so much.
Comparing processors by clock frequently is meaningless. Different architectures do differing amounts of work each cycle.
It's like evaluating the speed of a runner by how many paces he takes each second. One guy may be a dwarf and the other a giant. Not taking into account the length of their pace means you incorrectly choose the dwarf. So it is with CPUs.
I doubt it. In such a situation they might not even have the legal right to do that. Their servers cost money to run, serving millions of people each day. I can't see it being in their publisher agreements either.
Fortunately there are already such patches in the form of cracks. They work on Steam games just as well as retail ones. Thanks to them I don't need Valve's mercy to have absolute control over my games.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's because of the executable compression. You get the same type of generic false positives from many ultra-small demoscene programs.
People don't seem to cop that Generic.Generic.Win32.Generic doesn't mean "YES SIR WE'VE GOT SOME MALWARE HERE, 100% CERTAIN MY FRIEND".
Wow, that's awesome.
Except you are still giving complete control over your games to a third party. [...] They hold every game I ever bought on there for ransom and there is nothing I can do about it.
A handy tip: cracks work with Steam games just like retail ones.
The control can be yours, if you want it.
Since when did a major title like this EVER not make a ton of money? They all do, regardless of piracy.
I knew SR2 would be a bad port, but I still bought it because it was only three euros. Bad idea.
The game runs so badly that as a programmer I find myself taken in wonder; how is this performance physically possible on my hardware?
The most heinous problem is the constant stuttering. When the game is loading world data - ALL THE TIME, this is an open-world sandbox game - it hangs for at least half a second. In fact at least 10 minutes out of every hour will be spent involuntarily watching a still picture.
Bear in mind that this game was ported from the Xbox 360, where it streams from a 12x DVD-ROM drive with an 18MB/sec best-case transfer rate. And it doesn't stutter. The PC port reads directly from the HDD, a device with five times the transfer rate and half the seek time. With this five-fold improvement, they manage to leverage a performance gain of negative infinity. Great job!
Then there's the graphics. The game's rendering speed is appalling, and it's not for the sake of fidelity. The graphics are on par with a PS2 game. I can live with ugliness or slowness, but not both.
To put it in perspective, I have hardware that can comfortably run Crysis at settings beyond what you can choose in the GUI. I can play other shitty ports and have an enjoyable experience with a modicum of visual appeal. But this game? It's just too much.
You can turn down the settings of course. For the record, at any setting below maximum it looks considerably worse than the 360 version. The settings go lower than most games; lighting is optional for example.
Oh yes. Allow me to elaborate: unlike any other modern game, this runs so badly that there's actually an option to turn lighting off entirely. Not just a reduction in quality, but literally nothing, not even uninterpolated flat shading. No shaders, no lights, no shadows, no bump-maps, nothing - and it still runs like fucking dogshit.
That's pretty impressive when you think about it. They made rendering unshaded polygons with a single low resolution texture more computationally demanding than protein folding.
Mysteriously the game runs just fine on the 360, despite having something in the region of one-sixth the GPU horsepower my computer has. I guess in that version they forgot to include sleep(100) in every inner loop the renderer has.
The worst thing of all is knowing that there's a good game underneath the mound of technical failure. The game supports mouse and keyboard and controller simultaneously and properly. Online play is fun and works well; you can join anyone's game any time because the entire game is cooperatively multiplayer. The game is hilarious and fairly well designed.
What a goddamn shame.
My pet peeve is people calling the Internet "My Internet". I always ask them how they could afford such a thing. :)
Yeah, it isn't in Windows 7. That tripped me up the other day...
The 50kb executable was just taking up too much room in the 12GB install, I guess.
The average user would be a hell of a lot less retarded if there were actual computer education in mandatory schooling, as opposed to what they have now: Microsoft Office training.
How good would you be at mathematics if you were taught how to solve a single equation? Never given a glimpse into general problem solving? That's computer education right now. Worse than useless.
There are other reasons. In America, corporate fines happening in other countries are not generally reported in the news unless the fines are being applied to an American company. To the casual observer it creates the illusion that only those companies are being fined.
In short, be aware of just how insular the news is, or you will be severely mislead.
No shit it needs more work. What do you think the money is for?
That's quite possible actually, and not terribly difficult to implement either. Good idea.
That's a product of having high dynamic range, not bad range. It's a good thing.
You may be able to reduce the dynamic range using a compressor. Provided you're willing to re-encode the movie and all that jazz.
I've solved one. But then my girlfriend gave me one with numbers instead of colours... Still haven't managed that one.
Solves all symptoms. The problem remains.
What does it mean? It means whoever said it needs to be slapped in the face until they die.
XP runs fine on them. Windows netbooks run like shit by default because:
- They have McFatty AntiSpeed running
- They have more programs and services running than the mind of god, especially at startup
When I fixed those two problems on my netbook, it became downright pleasant to use.
It consumes electricity but electricity isn't "a consumable" in this context since the device can't exhaust it. That's equivocation.
Hopefully they'll steal every job on the entire planet.
I have better things to do with my life than working.
why we don't have vaccination against caries
Last I heard, one is currently in human trials. It works by replacing the bacteria responsible with a different strain that doesn't create lactic acid, and therefore doesn't cause caries.
In tests on rats, it provided a permanent solution. Here's hoping it works out for us too.
You'll finally get to use that +5 Wand of Fucking.
Let's hope it isn't cursed.
Emotions are only adequate for decision making in areas with which you have had considerable experience.
Outside this very small domain they are worthless. Worse, they will instill you with the same confidence in their analysis irrespective of experience.
In other words, in almost all significant circumstances in the modern world they are beyond useless.
Much of human history is a grotesque tale of incomprehensible suffering, ruin and loss brought about by our own poor decision making, innate inability to rationally analyse the world, and our susceptibility to emotional manipulation.
Which, touching upon the point of the parent, is exactly why marketing works as well as it does.
That would require consumers to objectively evaluate it. Never happens. They will buy it because marketing said it's awesome. They'll want to believe it too, having spent so much.
1.0 Ghz processor versus 1.66 Ghz processor
Comparing processors by clock frequently is meaningless. Different architectures do differing amounts of work each cycle.
It's like evaluating the speed of a runner by how many paces he takes each second. One guy may be a dwarf and the other a giant. Not taking into account the length of their pace means you incorrectly choose the dwarf. So it is with CPUs.
I doubt it. In such a situation they might not even have the legal right to do that. Their servers cost money to run, serving millions of people each day. I can't see it being in their publisher agreements either.
Fortunately there are already such patches in the form of cracks. They work on Steam games just as well as retail ones. Thanks to them I don't need Valve's mercy to have absolute control over my games.
Why? They were already cracked in 0 years.