A very immersive and artful environment. Water effects are indeed beautiful, but beyond that the graphics remind me of Doom3 (even though the engine is Unreal's). The combat is classic FPS like DoomIII, but the devious AI and funky weapons give it a sandbox-ish twist. You can hack (via mini-games) other drones and shit to get them to help you.
Kind of a freaky story though... kind of encouraged to kill zombified 10 year old girls as part fo the struggle you are dropped into.
I have used it for a dozen full screen games, and have never it had it steal focus. Granted it has never had issues with my NAT boxes either. It has only disconnected twice, when the server was upgrading. But I don't think I was gaming then so I dont know what would have happenned.
When they say said it would stay focused on building a community for game players, but its technology might be adapted for broader network services.
what do you think that will entail? I am concerned about bloating.
Xfire is an amazing program, and most people I know online use it constantly, but it's memory footprint has been growing far too quickly. Right now it's using 25MB RAM. For most people who run demanding games, this is a significant chunk of RAM.
The only reason I have heard people not using this program is because of it's use of RAM.
I am concerned 'broader services' will mean this problem will get even worse. One can only hope they make some optimizations to dynamically grab more RAM when they need it. I only use tha basic components of xfire, like the friend status list and the test messageing. They support a myriad of otehr features like voice chat and video, etc, but I dont want those features loaded!
WOW this takes me back. I played the exile series back in the days. They were great fun.
I will never forget the journey past the waterfall...travelling onward for such a long time and, alone in a new map zone... running out of food but I knew I had to keep trying. Literally in the last moments as my food ran out, finally meeting the valahalla (sp? (unknown race)) envoy which introduced me to the ancient unknown race and blossommed into the second half of the game. The tension had me worried sick and the timing of it made my journey seem epic.
Crystal Souls (Exile 2) was fun, but it was too tempting to spend loads of time trying to trap super high level creatures or npc's in the crystal for future use.
Also, it was cheap how I could send one warrior in to a hostile town but keep the rest of my party outside the town walls...they would cast Bless (etc) on the warrior over and over and this rambo-esque guy could wade through enemies like he was the t1000...never taking a scratch of damage. He killed everyone. That blood is on your hands.
Anyway, the games grabbed me for months at a time when I was young, in my early to mid teens.
I finally hit the register-now wall, and then I learned the true power fo the internet... you can pirate anything! I posted a call for help and was amazed to find the next day someone had posted the mathematical sequence for generating registration codes from the client ID. It was long and complex, but it worked! I never had to pay a dime! It was the start to an ongoing illustrious career in avoiding paying for software. My emotional bonds to the Exile experience almost make me regret pirating it.
These days I actually do pay for some software because playing online virtually requires it. If I could still stomach the graphics you use I would be willing to check it out. I have turned into something of a 3d-graphics snob from playing FPS'es, and if I want RPG's neverwinter nights is the place I will turn to.
Best of luck to you Jeff. Your story generation skills are great, the puzzles were cool, and the game-blanace was well done. Regarding the dollar bills flying out the window, you should try to join in with some other commercial team who makes a current-gen game engine. Whatever type of game it is, you have the ability to bring some great story-line to it. With the right team I just might pay for it.
Yes, funny was the wrong mod for parent. People CAN believe that god created a lower organism and allowed for (or planner for) our evolution. People can choose to believe that all they wish. It's effectively a new religion at that point.
The reason this is news is because it flies in the face of what the prevailing religions mandate as the the Ultimate Truth.
No that's not the problem. Valve would still raise legal issues wether the advertising campaign was in-your-face or a more 'contextual' ad placement system. They want to be paid to give the ad agancy access to it's service/customers.
In general, it seems that the very first model ATI releases in a new series is a baseline model, or at least not the Pro or Platinum or XTX ot whatever. Usually they wait a month or two and release a decked out-version of the series.
Seriously, why does ATI marketing feel the need to prematurely boost the suffixes all the way to unheralded 'XTX' when the 1900 series is being introduced? At least there has been some reasonable pattern to follow for a while in their naming scheme....now they have caved to their profit desires and taken adavntage of our familiarity with their naming scheme.
The new maps are the big thing here. The new weapons and vehicles are not really going change anything in terms of basic gameplay. EA has to officially realease maps for them to be available on 'ranked' servers.
For those who don't know, bf2 has a point-tracking sytem that lets you rank up and earn new weapons/badges, etc. EA makes a HUGE profit on renting ranked servers. They have to be officially managed, and cost several times the normal cost per slot vs. unranked servers.
They will be releasing whatever kind of booster packs they can to try and keep people hooked on the 'ranked' experience as long as possible....keep milking that cash cow. They will be facing some stiff competition in the coming few months as a few MAJOR mods (as in free) are released. Those mods will of course be unranked, so this actually might make for some good competitiveness in the mod/xpack market. EA will be trying to keep us hooked with good content at an appropriate price, otherwise we will all be switching to Desert Conflict (desert combat of bf2) or POE2 or Battlegroup2 or Pirates2 or whatever.
Lets see what EA/Dice can offer up. I'll try the first one. Funny, because I never bought any of the xpacks for original bf1942...
Ummmm ya. The article itself has this information. On that same linked page with the pictures. It says near the bottom: "Now we have succesfully ran graphics card beyond the 1 GHz barrier in 2D-mode and next we are looking to do the same in 3D-mode."
This article concluded that the AMD64 3700 was an "odd duck" and maybe try to avoid this one. It usually scored lower than the 3800. The biggest difference I saw between these two was that the 3700+ had twice the L2 cache of the 3800 (1MB vs 512k). It was lower in absolute performance for most of the Games benchmarks. But, I noticed in the appendix that for Farcry, the 3700 scored better fps than the 3800!
Can someone explain why doubling the cache would hurt many performance benchmarks?
It is opposite from my own experience: I have two AMD 2600+'s at home. One is a Barton (which has double the L2 cache), and it is clearly a better gaming machine. (I have tested them against eachother extensively)
This is terrible, potenetially. I hope Valve was hard-nosed during negotiations, otherwise $EA$ will be pushing unfinished crap out for unrealistic deadlines. Anyone following what they did AGAIN with the battlefield series is shuddering at the thought of there slimy finger all over a nice game like HL2
The reson it scares them is based around issues of security. If they have some easy, cheap, and relatively low-tech way of engineering this virus, whats to stop someone from making a human-attacking virus? It could be used for terror, either threatened or just USED. Scary.
I need some new games for my TI-85 now thats its overclocked to 4.5x the original. When its computing heavily (complex graphing...etc)the screen dims like 50% and then comes back when done.
Some company in Hong Kong is grabbing up tons of domain names. I let mine lapse for a month and they stole it! What can I do to get my vusiness website back? (www.chrysalisguitars.com
Ever heard of "UltimateSearch?" Apparently I accidentally let the registration expire by a little bit, because all of a sudden someone else (UltimateSearch) snatched it up. One day, typing in my old domain name (www.chrysalisguitars.com) brings a page with 'common search results' which are all paid sponsor links. Bastards running hijacking scripts is my guess! What can I do?? The copyright on their page says 2000-2004.Lies. WHOIS results: -Domain name: chrysalisguitars.com -Created: -Expires: -Admin istrative Contact: - Ultimate Search - Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com) - +1.85225379677 - Fax: - GPO Box 7862 - Central, 000000 - HK -Billing Contact: - Ultimate Search - Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com) - +1.85225379677 - Fax: - GPO Box 7862 - Central, 000000 - HK -Technical Contact: - Ultimate Search - Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com) - +1.85225379677 - Fax: - GPO Box 7862 - Central, 000000 - HK -Status: registrar-lock -Name Servers: - NS1.ULTSEARCH.COM - NS2.ULTSEARCH.COM So these guys are hiding in Hong Kong. What does registrar-lock mean? How do I right this? Do I contact network solutions, ICANN, VeriSign, or what?
I searched for them and found a forum of similar complaints from another set of victims. they used to be jksc.com, but as a result they changed to jksc.org - shouldnt be that way. Do i need to just buy it back form them? Please respond here and/or my email:
Ever heard of "UltimateSearch?" Apparently I accidentally let the registration expire by a little bit, because all of a sudden someone else (UltimateSearch) snatched it up. One day, typing in my old domain name (www.chrysalisguitars.com) brings a page with 'common search results' which are all paid sponsor links. Bastards running hijacking scripts is my guess! What can I do??
So these guys are hiding in Hong Kong. What does registrar-lock mean? How do I right this? Do I contact network solutions, ICANN, VeriSign, or what?
I searched for them and found a forum of similar complaints from another set of victims. they used to be jksc.com, but as a result they changed to jksc.org - shouldnt be that way. Please respond here and/or my email: petekw2(at)yahoo.com
We just recently upgraded our sound system with the purchase of a FM transmiter. Now we can tune into our mp3 playlist as we get close to home on the drive back from work! This means:
Crisp, stereo sound for us and our neighbors, No puching holes in walls, No long cables dangling around.
You dont have to do anything else because most audio units come with a decent fm tuner - even alarm clocks...aaaahhhhhh techno in the morning. We bought a cheap one off hobbytron.net ( the UK-222), and it does a nice job.
Do any of you have any suggestions for how to go about getting your community access to pre-existent fiber lines?
I live in a small New Hampshire town with no options for high speed internet access besides a personal sattelite hook-up. We are just too far from commercial or population centers for cable or DSL infastructure to be feasible. The frustrating part is that according to some public records, there are already massive amounts of fiberoptic cabling running right through the town center...they just never physically pop up into an access box. It just seems to me that if there was a fiber junction box in the town center, it could easily be adapted to the existing copper (for DSL) or to the existing cable (for cable duh)
What methods would you reccomend to convince/force/help the regional telcos involved to give access to our community? There are a couple of local computer user groups...maybe an effort through them? Maybe a town-endorsed subsidy to help with the cost of creating access points?
Seriously, how does this qualify as a "new gaming development? Since when is it groundbreaking for a bunch of gamers to chant "kick him kick him!" towards some attention-deprived kid running off the oh-so proverbial potty mouth?
Oh wait, they must have been referring to the tendency of veterans to kill the 'noobs'(gee, whatever that means...my mom uses AOL for christ's sake and she figured out the 'noobie' slang about 5 years ago)...
What's going to be funny that this article doesnt touch on is the response from some parents association when they hear their poor young Stewie exchanging uncencsored trash-talk with the rest of the world on their innocent xmas present!
it makes sense, becasue if you assume like 4 people per houshold, and if one in five people own a pc, then statistically a good a mjority of all households should have compputers
Slashdot Mirror
ok it is weird.
A very immersive and artful environment. Water effects are indeed beautiful, but beyond that the graphics remind me of Doom3 (even though the engine is Unreal's). The combat is classic FPS like DoomIII, but the devious AI and funky weapons give it a sandbox-ish twist. You can hack (via mini-games) other drones and shit to get them to help you.
Kind of a freaky story though... kind of encouraged to kill zombified 10 year old girls as part fo the struggle you are dropped into.
I have used it for a dozen full screen games, and have never it had it steal focus. Granted it has never had issues with my NAT boxes either. It has only disconnected twice, when the server was upgrading. But I don't think I was gaming then so I dont know what would have happenned.
When they say said it would stay focused on building a community for game players, but its technology might be adapted for broader network services.
what do you think that will entail? I am concerned about bloating.
Xfire is an amazing program, and most people I know online use it constantly, but it's memory footprint has been growing far too quickly. Right now it's using 25MB RAM. For most people who run demanding games, this is a significant chunk of RAM.
The only reason I have heard people not using this program is because of it's use of RAM.
I am concerned 'broader services' will mean this problem will get even worse. One can only hope they make some optimizations to dynamically grab more RAM when they need it. I only use tha basic components of xfire, like the friend status list and the test messageing. They support a myriad of otehr features like voice chat and video, etc, but I dont want those features loaded!
WOW this takes me back. I played the exile series back in the days. They were great fun.
... running out of food but I knew I had to keep trying. Literally in the last moments as my food ran out, finally meeting the valahalla (sp? (unknown race)) envoy which introduced me to the ancient unknown race and blossommed into the second half of the game. The tension had me worried sick and the timing of it made my journey seem epic.
I will never forget the journey past the waterfall...travelling onward for such a long time and, alone in a new map zone
Crystal Souls (Exile 2) was fun, but it was too tempting to spend loads of time trying to trap super high level creatures or npc's in the crystal for future use.
Also, it was cheap how I could send one warrior in to a hostile town but keep the rest of my party outside the town walls...they would cast Bless (etc) on the warrior over and over and this rambo-esque guy could wade through enemies like he was the t1000...never taking a scratch of damage. He killed everyone. That blood is on your hands.
Anyway, the games grabbed me for months at a time when I was young, in my early to mid teens.
I finally hit the register-now wall, and then I learned the true power fo the internet... you can pirate anything! I posted a call for help and was amazed to find the next day someone had posted the mathematical sequence for generating registration codes from the client ID. It was long and complex, but it worked! I never had to pay a dime! It was the start to an ongoing illustrious career in avoiding paying for software. My emotional bonds to the Exile experience almost make me regret pirating it.
These days I actually do pay for some software because playing online virtually requires it. If I could still stomach the graphics you use I would be willing to check it out. I have turned into something of a 3d-graphics snob from playing FPS'es, and if I want RPG's neverwinter nights is the place I will turn to.
Best of luck to you Jeff. Your story generation skills are great, the puzzles were cool, and the game-blanace was well done. Regarding the dollar bills flying out the window, you should try to join in with some other commercial team who makes a current-gen game engine. Whatever type of game it is, you have the ability to bring some great story-line to it. With the right team I just might pay for it.
Yes, funny was the wrong mod for parent. People CAN believe that god created a lower organism and allowed for (or planner for) our evolution. People can choose to believe that all they wish. It's effectively a new religion at that point.
The reason this is news is because it flies in the face of what the prevailing religions mandate as the the Ultimate Truth.
No that's not the problem. Valve would still raise legal issues wether the advertising campaign was in-your-face or a more 'contextual' ad placement system. They want to be paid to give the ad agancy access to it's service/customers.
Just to have fun at Valve's expense, and cause it's funny, everyone make their CS custom spray a Subway Ad!
In general, it seems that the very first model ATI releases in a new series is a baseline model, or at least not the Pro or Platinum or XTX ot whatever. Usually they wait a month or two and release a decked out-version of the series.
Seriously, why does ATI marketing feel the need to prematurely boost the suffixes all the way to unheralded 'XTX' when the 1900 series is being introduced? At least there has been some reasonable pattern to follow for a while in their naming scheme....now they have caved to their profit desires and taken adavntage of our familiarity with their naming scheme.
The new maps are the big thing here. The new weapons and vehicles are not really going change anything in terms of basic gameplay. EA has to officially realease maps for them to be available on 'ranked' servers.
For those who don't know, bf2 has a point-tracking sytem that lets you rank up and earn new weapons/badges, etc. EA makes a HUGE profit on renting ranked servers. They have to be officially managed, and cost several times the normal cost per slot vs. unranked servers.
They will be releasing whatever kind of booster packs they can to try and keep people hooked on the 'ranked' experience as long as possible....keep milking that cash cow. They will be facing some stiff competition in the coming few months as a few MAJOR mods (as in free) are released. Those mods will of course be unranked, so this actually might make for some good competitiveness in the mod/xpack market. EA will be trying to keep us hooked with good content at an appropriate price, otherwise we will all be switching to Desert Conflict (desert combat of bf2) or POE2 or Battlegroup2 or Pirates2 or whatever.
Lets see what EA/Dice can offer up. I'll try the first one. Funny, because I never bought any of the xpacks for original bf1942...
Ummmm ya. The article itself has this information. On that same linked page with the pictures. It says near the bottom:
"Now we have succesfully ran graphics card beyond the 1 GHz barrier in 2D-mode and next we are looking to do the same in 3D-mode."
So there it is.
This article concluded that the AMD64 3700 was an "odd duck" and maybe try to avoid this one. It usually scored lower than the 3800. The biggest difference I saw between these two was that the 3700+ had twice the L2 cache of the 3800 (1MB vs 512k). It was lower in absolute performance for most of the Games benchmarks. But, I noticed in the appendix that for Farcry, the 3700 scored better fps than the 3800!
Can someone explain why doubling the cache would hurt many performance benchmarks?
It is opposite from my own experience: I have two AMD 2600+'s at home. One is a Barton (which has double the L2 cache), and it is clearly a better gaming machine. (I have tested them against eachother extensively)
What is the deal here?
This is terrible, potenetially. I hope Valve was hard-nosed during negotiations, otherwise $EA$ will be pushing unfinished crap out for unrealistic deadlines. Anyone following what they did AGAIN with the battlefield series is shuddering at the thought of there slimy finger all over a nice game like HL2
The reson it scares them is based around issues of security. If they have some easy, cheap, and relatively low-tech way of engineering this virus, whats to stop someone from making a human-attacking virus? It could be used for terror, either threatened or just USED. Scary.
I need some new games for my TI-85 now thats its overclocked to 4.5x the original. When its computing heavily (complex graphing...etc)the screen dims like 50% and then comes back when done.
Some company in Hong Kong is grabbing up tons of domain names. I let mine lapse for a month and they stole it! What can I do to get my vusiness website back? (www.chrysalisguitars.com
It seems they are more hardcore about cs and a few other games (strikeforce, etc), and they get technical with the maps.
Ever heard of "UltimateSearch?" Apparently I accidentally let the registration expire by a little bit, because all of a sudden someone else (UltimateSearch) snatched it up. One day, typing in my old domain name (www.chrysalisguitars.com) brings a page with 'common search results' which are all paid sponsor links. Bastards running hijacking scripts is my guess! What can I do??n istrative Contact:
:
The copyright on their page says 2000-2004.Lies.
WHOIS results:
-Domain name: chrysalisguitars.com
-Created:
-Expires:
-Admi
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-Billing Contact:
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-Technical Contact:
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-Status: registrar-lock
-Name Servers:
- NS1.ULTSEARCH.COM
- NS2.ULTSEARCH.COM
So these guys are hiding in Hong Kong.
What does registrar-lock mean?
How do I right this? Do I contact network solutions, ICANN, VeriSign, or what?
I searched for them and found a forum of similar complaints from another set of victims. they used to be jksc.com, but as a result they changed to jksc.org - shouldnt be that way.
Do i need to just buy it back form them?
Please respond here and/or my email
petekw2(at)yahoo.com
Results from moniker.com:
Domain Name: CHRYSALISGUITARS.COM
Registrar: VIVID DOMAINS, INC
Whois Server: whois.vividdomains.com
Referral URL: http://vividdomains.com
Name Server: NS1.ULTSEARCH.COM
Name Server: NS2.ULTSEARCH.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 15-jan-2004
Creation Date: 13-dec-2003
Expiration Date: 13-dec-2004
WHOIS Search Results
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain Name: CHRYSALISGUITARS.COM
Registrar: VIVID DOMAINS, INC
Whois Server: whois.vividdomains.com
Referral URL: http://vividdomains.com
Name Server: NS1.ULTSEARCH.COM
Name Server: NS2.ULTSEARCH.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 15-jan-2004
Creation Date: 13-dec-2003
Expiration Date: 13-dec-2004
Ever heard of "UltimateSearch?" Apparently I accidentally let the registration expire by a little bit, because all of a sudden someone else (UltimateSearch) snatched it up. One day, typing in my old domain name (www.chrysalisguitars.com) brings a page with 'common search results' which are all paid sponsor links. Bastards running hijacking scripts is my guess! What can I do??
-Administrative Contact:
:
The copyright on their page says 2000-2004. Lies.
WHOIS results:
-Domain name: chrysalisguitars.com
-
-Created:
-Expires:
-
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-
-Billing Contact:
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-
-Technical Contact:
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-Registrant Contact:
- Ultimate Search
- Ultimate Search (dns@ultsearch.com)
- +1.85225379677
- Fax:
- GPO Box 7862
- Central, 000000
- HK
-
-Status: registrar-lock
-
-Name Servers:
- NS1.ULTSEARCH.COM
- NS2.ULTSEARCH.COM
So these guys are hiding in Hong Kong.
What does registrar-lock mean?
How do I right this? Do I contact network solutions, ICANN, VeriSign, or what?
I searched for them and found a forum of similar complaints from another set of victims. they used to be jksc.com, but as a result they changed to jksc.org - shouldnt be that way.
Please respond here and/or my email
petekw2(at)yahoo.com
We just recently upgraded our sound system with the purchase of a FM transmiter. Now we can tune into our mp3 playlist as we get close to home on the drive back from work! This means:
Crisp, stereo sound for us and our neighbors,
No puching holes in walls,
No long cables dangling around.
You dont have to do anything else because most audio units come with a decent fm tuner - even alarm clocks...aaaahhhhhh techno in the morning.
We bought a cheap one off hobbytron.net ( the UK-222), and it does a nice job.
Do any of you have any suggestions for how to go about getting your community access to pre-existent fiber lines?
I live in a small New Hampshire town with no options for high speed internet access besides a personal sattelite hook-up. We are just too far from commercial or population centers for cable or DSL infastructure to be feasible. The frustrating part is that according to some public records, there are already massive amounts of fiberoptic cabling running right through the town center...they just never physically pop up into an access box. It just seems to me that if there was a fiber junction box in the town center, it could easily be adapted to the existing copper (for DSL) or to the existing cable (for cable duh)
What methods would you reccomend to convince/force/help the regional telcos involved to give access to our community? There are a couple of local computer user groups...maybe an effort through them? Maybe a town-endorsed subsidy to help with the cost of creating access points?
Seriously, how does this qualify as a "new gaming development? Since when is it groundbreaking for a bunch of gamers to chant "kick him kick him!" towards some attention-deprived kid running off the oh-so proverbial potty mouth?
Oh wait, they must have been referring to the tendency of veterans to kill the 'noobs'(gee, whatever that means...my mom uses AOL for christ's sake and she figured out the 'noobie' slang about 5 years ago)...
What's going to be funny that this article doesnt touch on is the response from some parents association when they hear their poor young Stewie exchanging uncencsored trash-talk with the rest of the world on their innocent xmas present!
(The mute feature rules!)
fpfpfpfp
Should have expected the contact info from a place like this to be registtered in TX....
it makes sense, becasue if you assume like 4 people per houshold, and if one in five people own a pc, then statistically a good a mjority of all households should have compputers