I just thought OMFG!!! Having just killed 6 enemies in a few seconds, and saved our team from certain defeat. Man what a rush!
Called good incentive to keep on practicing until you can pull that off regularly.
I knew of one player in the HLDM community, damn guy was a natural. He had never played FPSs before and from the second he first started playing HL he was at a MINIMUM of a 200:1 kill to death ratio.
He could reguarly get into the 1000:1 kill to death ratio area. Amazing guy, named Doc. More then one person goes by that name now and I believe he stopped playing a few years ago (can you blame him? When the game is that easy. . . )
Hell I remember playing against him for a good 4 or so hour session and going from being barly a 1:1 kill to death ratio player to being a 3:1 kill to death ratio player. He was intense.
Damn nice guy too, LOL.
Man I wonder what in the hell makes somebody blessed with God Given reflexs like that? I mean the guy almost NEVER missed, in a few hours of play he may miss ONE shot. He'd swear and about it too, LOL. He was on the forfront of the power of the Tau cannon being discovered (for the first year or two few people if any at all in the HLDM community realized exactly HOW FUCKING POWERFUL those things were. WOH! Heh. Once it was discovered that they not only went THROUGH walls but killed EVERYTHING behind them. . . . well, hehe. The average life span of players in HLDM dropped dramaticaly.:) ) and was accused of being a bot long before any bots were around for HL (I can remember telling player's on servers that "There are *NO* bots for HL!" How times have changed.:(:(:( )
Man he rocked. A lot. There were some other players who claimed to be as good as he was (and might have been) but they all tended to be pompious assholes, Doc was a nice friendly guy who didn't have this huge inflated ego about being able to kick everybody in the worlds ass in HL.
Other FPSs just don't do it for me, the weapon balance is ALL off.
Half-Life had PERFECT weapon balance. And I mean perfect. Well until the Tau was discovered, then things kinda got a bit nuts, but. . ..
Half-Life Death Match was the ultmate fantasy deathmatch. You jumped off of cliffs, dodged around corners, and launched rockets that actualy well hell, felt like f*cking rockets.
Nobody died from a one hit head shot wound, (well, except for with the crossbow or charged Tau, but standing still in HLDM with a crossbow would get every played on the map out after your ass and shooting somebody in the head with a Tau earned the shooter kudos and the shootie couldn't complain. After all, they were stupid enough to not be moving fast enough to dodge the Tau shot.:) and firefights could take you all the way across an entire map and back again.
I repeat.
It.
Rocked.
Re:Okaaay, so he has routing issues
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Ugh, somebody didn't read the article. . ..
Ok explanation for the DENSE ones.
One of the possible ways he 'is' going to create this time machine that was listed was by running some fibre in a loop.
Thus my joke about a. . ..
fibre loop.
Extend that lame joke to a routing loop (its late, I forget what they are really called, you know, when some doofus has the packet banging back and forth between two routers on a network, or just being flung back and forth through whatever other goof-up was made) and you have my post above.
Overrated, sure. Lame as hell? Yah, but that isn't a moderation option (sorry).
Okaaay, so he has routing issues
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Sounds like a misconfigured network to me.
Packets keep on getting looped around.
Odd that it happened with fibre, more common with CAT5 in building LANs, but hey, if you've got the money for a Fibre LAN, why not go for it, eh?
Fractional of a second response times, dodging rockets, long jumping, flying off that cliff, launching a contact grenade at the exit that your opponet was trying to follow you out of. Doing a 180 turn in mid air and lining up an SOB in your sights and pulling the trigger before he even realizes what is happening to him, landing on the way down right outside the ledge of a doorway (what you thought I was going to fall down to the bottom of the cliff and die?) blasting two contact grenades in either direction down the hallway and running in there as you watch your kill count rise up.
Yanking out your shotgun and side stepping into the hallway to the main battle room, long jumping into the middle of the fray, *BAM**BAM**BAM* sweeping the room clear of all opponets, quickly leaping between bodies to gather your booty, fragging a late comer to the fray who realizes right before he dies that he shouldn't have taken that last left turn.
Remembering to breath.
Realizing you just got 7 frags in the last past 9 seconds.
Booleans, fun to work with, but oh man does the efficiency suck. ^_^
(seriously, umm. Maybe for some grandiose end of level boss but. . . . sheeesh!)
Reminds me of that story about, in the days of 486s, the game company who hired an artist.
"I need a faster computer, this one is way to slow for me to work on!"
The artist had a state of the art (at the time) 486 fully decked out. So the main programmer went to see what was the problem (obviously not the computer hardware).
Turns out the artist had painted one brick object and was copy and pasting it to make up an entire brick wall. As in a few hundred objects per one wall. . . . .
Not pretty.
Artist got hit with a clue by 4 and all was well, but I do believe that a serious thwacking may soon be in order.
Holy shit, 250k models PER character? Hell when I was doing the models for a MMORPG the polygon count PER SCENE was estimated at a mere 200K tops. Preferably per second if it was possible. (we figured that we could expect to have the higher end customers push 1million polygons a second maybe).
Of course the way we did things was to look at Quake2 (this was well after the Geforce2 had come out mind you, did I mention that we were aiming for conservative?:) ) and say "hey, we can do that that that that and that and have them look better and take up less polygons."
Main programmer left (kinda kills a project, eh?:) ) but I have my portfolio left over and a goodly few years of experience at ultra low polygon inorganics modeling.
Does translation software necessarily have to be able to read your handwriting?
All translated to the same internal code. If I say "dog" the software has to REALIZE that I said the word "dog" and not the word "bog".
Hmm.
Poor water on the dog, poor water in the bog. . . . BIG difference.:)
Internally right before a dictionary lookup is being done, the words are going to have the same (type of) storage in memory no matter WHAT use that they are going to have. Be it looking up the proper English spelling of the word or looking up how to pronounce the word in Spanish, if the RIGHT word cannot be looked up. . . . well what good is it?
Woohoo! Then all the poor public school Nerds using 486s (well hey the local H.S. just disposed of their 8086 lab 3 years ago so. . . . ) will be able to hack into the rich's sub-enviros and stop the oxygen supply!
Actualy I was in that instance refering to that damn ruby studded gold platted cell-phone that some/. poster has advert'ed in his Journal which is advert'ed in his sig.
Stooopid. For 20k I want a REAL analog watch in my cell phone please.:)
Besides, I would want a LED clock, not some cruddy LCD. ^_^ LEDs put off light, LCDs, err, don't they just reflect light or something? Heh. Annnnyways.
which predicts among other things the then unthinkable future cashless economic society
I believe that is called the barter system. . ..
Been around for some time. In fact it was capitolism (or some eary varient there of) that was being promoted in such a way as to insult those "evil pagans" (meaning a ton of other cultures which DID use the barter system until either romans or later x-stians forced money upon them. You do NOT have to assign non-realworld value to things. Hell even communist countries use money, for some reason that compleatly escapes me. WTF?)
and I thought digital speedometers were pointless.
What the hell is up with this move to make EVERYTHING digital? I mean seriously now, after a certian point it is just silly, like making an LCD panel to display an analog clock, why mang why???.
You seem to be upset with the current technologies available to developers simply because they aren't photo-realistic. Or, in the case of bump mapping, it's a "cheap shortcut to REAL modeling." Well, yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, used correctly, it's extremely effective. (See Star Wars:Rogue Squardon 2 for an example)
When used correctly, then yes, it CAN help, but when used IN PLACE of proper modeling. . ..
See ears on almost ANY character in any game. Horrid. Bumpmapping is used instead of putting an actual HOLE in the ear. . . . And most games have no geometric detail to the ears at all!
. And playing non-photo-realistic games has never been a problem for me, any more than watching a non-photo-realistic episode of the Simpsons.
Which is a 2d scenario anyways.:)
But yah, photo-realism is just one example.
Hell how about some realistic water colors, eh? Current systems use some VERY high end psuedo-reality modeling algorithms to make something that kindasortamabye looks like watercolor but they sure as hell are not watercolors.
Same with arcylics. Hell does anybody even know of a program that DOES simulate acrylics? Painter 6 doesn't do it and it generaly tends to have one of the more advanced (consumer level) paint simulation systems out there.
Of course some day computers WILL have the power to compleatly model the physical world (Ray Tracing is NOT a model of the real world. Raytracing is actualy backwards, light is projected from a virtual view back to the light source. VERY weird and it leaves some... glitchs behind) and this will all be a moot point as all of us will be sitting in our VR chairs growing fat and old as we party on Internet3.:)
A modeler has to be a complete nitwit to fill up 128MB with verticies, heh. Or even 12MB with vertices. . ..
It is not like verticies have to be loaded THAT often, and when they are they can often times be predicted, though how Messiah did things sucked (wow, look at that! SERIOUS texturing problems AND ass end load times AND the scripts get fucked up! Bah) but a GOOD loader can load a level dynamicaly and Not Suck.
I would MUCH rather 64*2 Megabytes of ram with a half clock seperation between them (In other words, fast ass access.:) ) then 128MB of RAM that, err, uh, costs an arm and a leg and MAY provide some future performance, but by that time the texturing units on the video card will be old hat anyways and 'everybody' will have moved up to the next best thing.
I myself will likely still be using my Matrox G400 MAX.:)
I cannot believe that some complete IDIOTS credit ATI with first having dual desktop displays. . . . grrr. Idiots.:(
This is noting that having over 32MB of memory has proven to be of NO benefit in benchmarks outside of the occasional 1 or 2 FPS difference (and when you are getting over 100FPS any ways. . ..).
Texture size is REALLY not a problem. Do you realize how fr*gin big textures can be byte wise before you get to being just plain old silly?
It is NOT the size of textures people, it is how COMPLICATED those textures can be.
Currently LOD is used in order to keep video cards from having to render full 256x256 textures when an object, say, only appears as 25 pixels in its entirety on the screen. You know, that sniper across the street with that gun? Yah that one, (duck).
This works quite well, until you get up close to the object. Shoddy unrealistic Bumpmapping (I highly disprove of bumpmapping, more on this later) can come into play at really close distances, and games like Serious Sam even make this look halfway decent, but it still is not real, or realistic.
The ONLY way to get good texturing done is to DISPENSE with the concept of textures all together. Polygons do not make this easy in themselves, and competing technologies can even make it worse. Some technologies like vertex coloring are a bit useful, but not much and they are just the texturing model relabled.
But once you DO dispense with textures, ooh yah.
Now for bumpmaps.
Bumpmaps are often times just a cheap shortcut to REAL modeling. Geometry deformation texturing is the next step, but until we get some video cards that can model each little crack and bump of an object we are not going to get anything near 100% photo-realism. Not to mention characters with actual nostrils. Yes there is a level of diminishing returns, but quite frankly, until I can model every last little crack bump and lump in a model and have it render real time on a home users computer, bumpmapping is what we are stuck with, and I don't like it.
But I repeat, I REPEAT, larger textures (and bumpmaps) are just a cheap low quality shortcut They DEFINITELY have a point of diminishing returns, and it is one that HAS ALREADY BEEN REACHED. Most new games do NOT do just plain old texturing any more, and a lot of what is happening now days in relationship to textures (Bilinear filtering and such) is just in fact ways to correct errors in the original texturing model of thinking. Or at least further refine the mathematical model used to show those textures.
But why do games look better you ask?
Mostly because video cards have any number of fancy TnL units that can independently create some rather nifty effects while working AROUND or OUTSIDE of the plain old texturing model. At the very least the texturing model of thinking has some. . . rather funky. . . math applied to it in an artistic manner with the results rendered to the screen.
Look at Nvidias werewolf model as an example.
The HAIRS on it look great.
The actual model though?
Hell looks like shit.
No it does.
Notice the face people. Horrid. The textures. It is not the modeler or textures fault, it is just a fact that, well hell, you CANNOT do realistic skin textures without using Pixar level technology.
Actualy, I recently read an article from awhile back that was an interview with someone at Pixar. They were describing the INSANE level of work that was necessary to even get something that SORT OF looked like a skin texture to render. The FF movie had kinda-sorta-maybe-ifyousquint real looking skin, it was nice, but it took a lot of work and it still was not perfect. Once again, diminishing returns.
While NVIDIA is doing good work in relation to getting various funky technologies out on the market that move around the texturing problem, as long as we rely on textures as our main source of coloring objects, we as a community of people who love to Blow Things Up are going to have problems.
Hell the very idea of textures themselves is exactly opposite to how existence works. Objects are not gray by default with colors added later. Objects are. . . . real. They exist. More or less. The color is an INTEGRAL PART of what an object is. You cannot separate the two.
I have a pentablet, not the one described in the article naturaly, but the ergonmics of it are the same.
The problem with pens is CLICKING. If the pen has buttons on it in addition to a tip, then those buttons are going to be arse end small anyways.
But just pushing down the tip of a pen without moving it off of the icon is a challenge. The pen / pencil form factor was designed for MOVING not for sitting still.
A lot of work went into the design of the mouse so that it could be both moved AND held still. Clicking with a mouse is easy, you have a nice thick base to work with. With a tool with a pen form factor you are basicaly screwed. Yes it can be done, but it is not nice. Double clicking is almost impossible, ugh.
OTM must overcome a legacy of failure for digital pens.
False. Digitabs are VERY popular.
For drawing.
DUH.
They are called digitabs because they are digital tablets. The best out there (to my knowledge) is the Wacom Intuos. Most of their other digitabs are highly over priced, but these babys rock. Of course you have to get the airbrush accessory (another few hundred) to realize their true potential.
Tilt sensoring.
w00t.
Annnyways. They rock. Ok actualy I have never USED one, but everybody else says they rock and they are kind of like a 56" trinitron screen. Yah you cannot even afford to go into a store that showcases them, but damnit, you can still drool just THINKING about them.:)
Under *nix, however, you can format all partitions except/home, thus preserving your data. Assuming of course you keep your data in/home, and/home is its own partition (as it should be).
Under windows we call that Deltree C:\windows or Deltree C:\WINNT
Actualy reinstalling WindowsNT over an old install pretty much just rewrites the system files and thats it. You do lose all of the registery bindings to programs (which is normaly what causes the problem in the FIRST place, ugh!), but quite frankly I get permantly peeved at any programmer who sees the NEED to include an assload of registery bindings just to get their program working. . ..
::growls::
The registery is really the main cause of a lot of window's more serious problems. A ton of software leaves behind crap in the registery which can have serious conflicts with, uh, other crap in the registery.
I have yet to figure out WHY the registery is really needed. A ton of it is redundent, and I am talking about on a fresh install! To make it even worse a lot of software companies have given up on even trying to make sensible names for their registery entries and instead just name their branchs randomly. . ..
I surprised one of my friends by dropping to dos and going
ipconfig/release
ipconfig/renew
a few days ago.:)
I had accidently removed the CAT5 cable from my NIC, and with how ATTBI is setup now (as compared to how @Home was setup with staticiy goodness) Windows sometimes decides freak out if you drop your connection. It does not do this all the time, but it is still a royal pain.:(
Win9x can do this too, most people just don't realize it. ^_^ DOS could rerout input and output to almost anything that you wanted it routed to, the CTTY command was what was used if I recall correctly. I have no idea what it is called now days under NT (of if it even still exists)
Mode can redirect printing but that is about it.:(
NT actualy has a TON of either undocumented or rarely known about commands. DOS has a few underutilized ones, but that is about it. Files describing "undocumented DOS commands" tend to be rather small. ^_^
Heh. I am lucky in that I get pretty much unlimited time per computer (well what else can you expect when it is a 486 running windows95 on less then a 300megabyte HD? Ick).
I do hate time constraints on fixing things, especialy since I am so often dealing with hardware problems.
I did get major kudos for bringing some power supplies back from beyond the grave though.:):):) Yah sure That Guy can walk on water, but darnit, _I_ can revive power supplies!!!! Whooopie!:)
"American intelligence, the U.N and the E.U can transmit approximately 4 implants with particle transmission. They can pick up.41 millimeters of a dime (a shaving) and beam it anywhere in the world. "
Which makes absolutly no sense since he gives no rate (uh, 4 implants a day, a second, a minute, an hour? Yeesh).
Oh well, seems like a joke page, rather old, is dead.
Slashdot Mirror
I just thought OMFG!!! Having just killed 6 enemies in a few seconds, and saved our team from certain defeat. Man what a rush!
:) ) and was accused of being a bot long before any bots were around for HL (I can remember telling player's on servers that "There are *NO* bots for HL!" How times have changed. :( :( :( )
.
:) and firefights could take you all the way across an entire map and back again.
Called good incentive to keep on practicing until you can pull that off regularly.
I knew of one player in the HLDM community, damn guy was a natural. He had never played FPSs before and from the second he first started playing HL he was at a MINIMUM of a 200:1 kill to death ratio.
He could reguarly get into the 1000:1 kill to death ratio area. Amazing guy, named Doc. More then one person goes by that name now and I believe he stopped playing a few years ago (can you blame him? When the game is that easy. . . )
Hell I remember playing against him for a good 4 or so hour session and going from being barly a 1:1 kill to death ratio player to being a 3:1 kill to death ratio player. He was intense.
Damn nice guy too, LOL.
Man I wonder what in the hell makes somebody blessed with God Given reflexs like that? I mean the guy almost NEVER missed, in a few hours of play he may miss ONE shot. He'd swear and about it too, LOL. He was on the forfront of the power of the Tau cannon being discovered (for the first year or two few people if any at all in the HLDM community realized exactly HOW FUCKING POWERFUL those things were. WOH! Heh. Once it was discovered that they not only went THROUGH walls but killed EVERYTHING behind them. . . . well, hehe. The average life span of players in HLDM dropped dramaticaly.
Man he rocked. A lot. There were some other players who claimed to be as good as he was (and might have been) but they all tended to be pompious assholes, Doc was a nice friendly guy who didn't have this huge inflated ego about being able to kick everybody in the worlds ass in HL.
Other FPSs just don't do it for me, the weapon balance is ALL off.
Half-Life had PERFECT weapon balance. And I mean perfect. Well until the Tau was discovered, then things kinda got a bit nuts, but. . .
Half-Life Death Match was the ultmate fantasy deathmatch. You jumped off of cliffs, dodged around corners, and launched rockets that actualy well hell, felt like f*cking rockets.
Nobody died from a one hit head shot wound, (well, except for with the crossbow or charged Tau, but standing still in HLDM with a crossbow would get every played on the map out after your ass and shooting somebody in the head with a Tau earned the shooter kudos and the shootie couldn't complain. After all, they were stupid enough to not be moving fast enough to dodge the Tau shot.
I repeat.
It.
Rocked.
Ugh, somebody didn't read the article. . . .
.
Ok explanation for the DENSE ones.
One of the possible ways he 'is' going to create this time machine that was listed was by running some fibre in a loop.
Thus my joke about a. . .
fibre loop.
Extend that lame joke to a routing loop (its late, I forget what they are really called, you know, when some doofus has the packet banging back and forth between two routers on a network, or just being flung back and forth through whatever other goof-up was made) and you have my post above.
Overrated, sure. Lame as hell? Yah, but that isn't a moderation option (sorry).
Sounds like a misconfigured network to me.
Packets keep on getting looped around.
Odd that it happened with fibre, more common with CAT5 in building LANs, but hey, if you've got the money for a Fibre LAN, why not go for it, eh?
The original Half-Life death match rocked.
A lot.
(still does for that matter)
Fractional of a second response times, dodging rockets, long jumping, flying off that cliff, launching a contact grenade at the exit that your opponet was trying to follow you out of. Doing a 180 turn in mid air and lining up an SOB in your sights and pulling the trigger before he even realizes what is happening to him, landing on the way down right outside the ledge of a doorway (what you thought I was going to fall down to the bottom of the cliff and die?) blasting two contact grenades in either direction down the hallway and running in there as you watch your kill count rise up.
Yanking out your shotgun and side stepping into the hallway to the main battle room, long jumping into the middle of the fray, *BAM**BAM**BAM* sweeping the room clear of all opponets, quickly leaping between bodies to gather your booty, fragging a late comer to the fray who realizes right before he dies that he shouldn't have taken that last left turn.
Remembering to breath.
Realizing you just got 7 frags in the last past 9 seconds.
Kick. Ass.
Thanks for the educational post. (aka schooling.) :)
:) ) and say "hey, we can do that that that that and that and have them look better and take up less polygons."
:) ) but I have my portfolio left over and a goodly few years of experience at ultra low polygon inorganics modeling.
:)
I am getting SO sick and tired of polygons though, ugh.
250k poly models? Holy SHIT, what the hell are THEY smoking? Must be some gooood shit, because man they are wacked out of their minds!
See why modern modeling techniques are not nearly 100% efficient.
Booleans, fun to work with, but oh man does the efficiency suck. ^_^
(seriously, umm. Maybe for some grandiose end of level boss but. . . . sheeesh!)
Reminds me of that story about, in the days of 486s, the game company who hired an artist.
"I need a faster computer, this one is way to slow for me to work on!"
The artist had a state of the art (at the time) 486 fully decked out. So the main programmer went to see what was the problem (obviously not the computer hardware).
Turns out the artist had painted one brick object and was copy and pasting it to make up an entire brick wall. As in a few hundred objects per one wall. . . . .
Not pretty.
Artist got hit with a clue by 4 and all was well, but I do believe that a serious thwacking may soon be in order.
Holy shit, 250k models PER character? Hell when I was doing the models for a MMORPG the polygon count PER SCENE was estimated at a mere 200K tops. Preferably per second if it was possible. (we figured that we could expect to have the higher end customers push 1million polygons a second maybe).
Of course the way we did things was to look at Quake2 (this was well after the Geforce2 had come out mind you, did I mention that we were aiming for conservative?
Main programmer left (kinda kills a project, eh?
Anybody need a 50polygon knife?
Does translation software necessarily have to be able to read your handwriting?
:)
All translated to the same internal code. If I say "dog" the software has to REALIZE that I said the word "dog" and not the word "bog".
Hmm.
Poor water on the dog, poor water in the bog. . . . BIG difference.
Internally right before a dictionary lookup is being done, the words are going to have the same (type of) storage in memory no matter WHAT use that they are going to have. Be it looking up the proper English spelling of the word or looking up how to pronounce the word in Spanish, if the RIGHT word cannot be looked up. . . . well what good is it?
Woohoo! Then all the poor public school Nerds using 486s (well hey the local H.S. just disposed of their 8086 lab 3 years ago so. . . . ) will be able to hack into the rich's sub-enviros and stop the oxygen supply!
Oh yes, set the phasers on stun indeed!
::evil laugher::
Compleatly offtopic but. . . .
WHY OH WHY LORD DO THE JAPANESE GET SUCK KICK ASS ADVERTS????
WWWHHHYYYYYYY
Damnit there must be something in Japan's water supply that makes right brain hemispheres grow really big.
Dude, first they got to get something that can understand ONE spoken language.
I have yet to find a speech to text translation system that will even let me complete the orientation mine as well actually WORK for me.
Damnable screw up systems. If I say library is pronounced Lye'bear'ee then when I say Lye'bear'ee it had sure as hell better write down library!
Actualy I was in that instance refering to that damn ruby studded gold platted cell-phone that some /. poster has advert'ed in his Journal which is advert'ed in his sig.
:)
Stooopid. For 20k I want a REAL analog watch in my cell phone please.
Besides, I would want a LED clock, not some cruddy LCD. ^_^ LEDs put off light, LCDs, err, don't they just reflect light or something? Heh. Annnnyways.
---end
which predicts among other things the then unthinkable future cashless economic society
.
I believe that is called the barter system. . .
Been around for some time. In fact it was capitolism (or some eary varient there of) that was being promoted in such a way as to insult those "evil pagans" (meaning a ton of other cultures which DID use the barter system until either romans or later x-stians forced money upon them. You do NOT have to assign non-realworld value to things. Hell even communist countries use money, for some reason that compleatly escapes me. WTF?)
Advantage of being poor:
Uh, cars have digital odometers?
fuuuck. I did not know that.
and I thought digital speedometers were pointless.
What the hell is up with this move to make EVERYTHING digital? I mean seriously now, after a certian point it is just silly, like making an LCD panel to display an analog clock, why mang why???.
Big Heavy Ass Leather Boots.
Hell I burn 200 calories just moving one leg over on top of the other.
-_-
You seem to be upset with the current technologies available to developers simply because they aren't photo-realistic. Or, in the case of bump mapping, it's a "cheap shortcut to REAL modeling." Well, yeah. That's exactly what it is. And, used correctly, it's extremely effective. (See Star Wars:Rogue Squardon 2 for an example)
.
:)
... glitchs behind) and this will all be a moot point as all of us will be sitting in our VR chairs growing fat and old as we party on Internet3. :)
When used correctly, then yes, it CAN help, but when used IN PLACE of proper modeling. . .
See ears on almost ANY character in any game. Horrid. Bumpmapping is used instead of putting an actual HOLE in the ear. . . . And most games have no geometric detail to the ears at all!
. And playing non-photo-realistic games has never been a problem for me, any more than watching a non-photo-realistic episode of the Simpsons.
Which is a 2d scenario anyways.
But yah, photo-realism is just one example.
Hell how about some realistic water colors, eh? Current systems use some VERY high end psuedo-reality modeling algorithms to make something that kindasortamabye looks like watercolor but they sure as hell are not watercolors.
Same with arcylics. Hell does anybody even know of a program that DOES simulate acrylics? Painter 6 doesn't do it and it generaly tends to have one of the more advanced (consumer level) paint simulation systems out there.
Of course some day computers WILL have the power to compleatly model the physical world (Ray Tracing is NOT a model of the real world. Raytracing is actualy backwards, light is projected from a virtual view back to the light source. VERY weird and it leaves some
A modeler has to be a complete nitwit to fill up 128MB with verticies, heh. Or even 12MB with vertices. . . .
:) ) then 128MB of RAM that, err, uh, costs an arm and a leg and MAY provide some future performance, but by that time the texturing units on the video card will be old hat anyways and 'everybody' will have moved up to the next best thing.
:)
:(
It is not like verticies have to be loaded THAT often, and when they are they can often times be predicted, though how Messiah did things sucked (wow, look at that! SERIOUS texturing problems AND ass end load times AND the scripts get fucked up! Bah) but a GOOD loader can load a level dynamicaly and Not Suck.
I would MUCH rather 64*2 Megabytes of ram with a half clock seperation between them (In other words, fast ass access.
I myself will likely still be using my Matrox G400 MAX.
I cannot believe that some complete IDIOTS credit ATI with first having dual desktop displays. . . . grrr. Idiots.
This is noting that having over 32MB of memory has proven to be of NO benefit in benchmarks outside of the occasional 1 or 2 FPS difference (and when you are getting over 100FPS any ways. . . .).
:)
Texture size is REALLY not a problem. Do you realize how fr*gin big textures can be byte wise before you get to being just plain old silly?
It is NOT the size of textures people, it is how COMPLICATED those textures can be.
Currently LOD is used in order to keep video cards from having to render full 256x256 textures when an object, say, only appears as 25 pixels in its entirety on the screen. You know, that sniper across the street with that gun? Yah that one, (duck).
This works quite well, until you get up close to the object. Shoddy unrealistic Bumpmapping (I highly disprove of bumpmapping, more on this later) can come into play at really close distances, and games like Serious Sam even make this look halfway decent, but it still is not real, or realistic.
The ONLY way to get good texturing done is to DISPENSE with the concept of textures all together. Polygons do not make this easy in themselves, and competing technologies can even make it worse. Some technologies like vertex coloring are a bit useful, but not much and they are just the texturing model relabled.
But once you DO dispense with textures, ooh yah.
Now for bumpmaps.
Bumpmaps are often times just a cheap shortcut to REAL modeling. Geometry deformation texturing is the next step, but until we get some video cards that can model each little crack and bump of an object we are not going to get anything near 100% photo-realism. Not to mention characters with actual nostrils. Yes there is a level of diminishing returns, but quite frankly, until I can model every last little crack bump and lump in a model and have it render real time on a home users computer, bumpmapping is what we are stuck with, and I don't like it.
But I repeat, I REPEAT, larger textures (and bumpmaps) are just a cheap low quality shortcut They DEFINITELY have a point of diminishing returns, and it is one that HAS ALREADY BEEN REACHED. Most new games do NOT do just plain old texturing any more, and a lot of what is happening now days in relationship to textures (Bilinear filtering and such) is just in fact ways to correct errors in the original texturing model of thinking. Or at least further refine the mathematical model used to show those textures.
But why do games look better you ask?
Mostly because video cards have any number of fancy TnL units that can independently create some rather nifty effects while working AROUND or OUTSIDE of the plain old texturing model. At the very least the texturing model of thinking has some. . . rather funky. . . math applied to it in an artistic manner with the results rendered to the screen.
Look at Nvidias werewolf model as an example.
The HAIRS on it look great.
The actual model though?
Hell looks like shit.
No it does.
Notice the face people. Horrid. The textures. It is not the modeler or textures fault, it is just a fact that, well hell, you CANNOT do realistic skin textures without using Pixar level technology.
Actualy, I recently read an article from awhile back that was an interview with someone at Pixar. They were describing the INSANE level of work that was necessary to even get something that SORT OF looked like a skin texture to render. The FF movie had kinda-sorta-maybe-ifyousquint real looking skin, it was nice, but it took a lot of work and it still was not perfect. Once again, diminishing returns.
While NVIDIA is doing good work in relation to getting various funky technologies out on the market that move around the texturing problem, as long as we rely on textures as our main source of coloring objects, we as a community of people who love to Blow Things Up are going to have problems.
Hell the very idea of textures themselves is exactly opposite to how existence works. Objects are not gray by default with colors added later. Objects are. . . . real. They exist. More or less. The color is an INTEGRAL PART of what an object is. You cannot separate the two.
In other words
I want molecular modeling please.
got a patent on this idea when it first occured to me 3-4 years ago, bleh.
:)
Not like it is all that ORIGINAL of an idea, the only main issue being the development of transparent LCD panels.
Still though, I wonder if my 16x+ LCD idea would count, or is it just a derivitive? Hmm.
You installed IE6?
.)
SUCKER!
;P
Actualy under win2k+ that is a coredump, but MS is "kind" enough to automaticaly reset for you. . . . bleh.
Luckily this type of thing is rather quite rare and it is actualy quite likely that it is not MSs fault (100% at fault anyways. . .
You have a SB:LIVE! by any chance?
>;)
(Heh. Or even worse. An SB:LIVE! and a SCSI card, woooh boy, did I EVER have problems making those two work together!)
I have a pentablet, not the one described in the article naturaly, but the ergonmics of it are the same.
:)
The problem with pens is CLICKING. If the pen has buttons on it in addition to a tip, then those buttons are going to be arse end small anyways.
But just pushing down the tip of a pen without moving it off of the icon is a challenge. The pen / pencil form factor was designed for MOVING not for sitting still.
A lot of work went into the design of the mouse so that it could be both moved AND held still. Clicking with a mouse is easy, you have a nice thick base to work with. With a tool with a pen form factor you are basicaly screwed. Yes it can be done, but it is not nice. Double clicking is almost impossible, ugh.
OTM must overcome a legacy of failure for digital pens.
False. Digitabs are VERY popular.
For drawing.
DUH.
They are called digitabs because they are digital tablets. The best out there (to my knowledge) is the Wacom Intuos. Most of their other digitabs are highly over priced, but these babys rock. Of course you have to get the airbrush accessory (another few hundred) to realize their true potential.
Tilt sensoring.
w00t.
Annnyways. They rock. Ok actualy I have never USED one, but everybody else says they rock and they are kind of like a 56" trinitron screen. Yah you cannot even afford to go into a store that showcases them, but damnit, you can still drool just THINKING about them.
Under *nix, however, you can format all partitions except /home, thus preserving your data. Assuming of course you keep your data in /home, and /home is its own partition (as it should be).
.
.
Under windows we call that Deltree C:\windows or Deltree C:\WINNT
Actualy reinstalling WindowsNT over an old install pretty much just rewrites the system files and thats it. You do lose all of the registery bindings to programs (which is normaly what causes the problem in the FIRST place, ugh!), but quite frankly I get permantly peeved at any programmer who sees the NEED to include an assload of registery bindings just to get their program working. . .
::growls::
The registery is really the main cause of a lot of window's more serious problems. A ton of software leaves behind crap in the registery which can have serious conflicts with, uh, other crap in the registery.
I have yet to figure out WHY the registery is really needed. A ton of it is redundent, and I am talking about on a fresh install! To make it even worse a lot of software companies have given up on even trying to make sensible names for their registery entries and instead just name their branchs randomly. . .
Grrrr
I surprised one of my friends by dropping to dos and going
/release
/renew
:)
:(
:(
ipconfig
ipconfig
a few days ago.
I had accidently removed the CAT5 cable from my NIC, and with how ATTBI is setup now (as compared to how @Home was setup with staticiy goodness) Windows sometimes decides freak out if you drop your connection. It does not do this all the time, but it is still a royal pain.
Win9x can do this too, most people just don't realize it. ^_^ DOS could rerout input and output to almost anything that you wanted it routed to, the CTTY command was what was used if I recall correctly. I have no idea what it is called now days under NT (of if it even still exists)
Mode can redirect printing but that is about it.
NT actualy has a TON of either undocumented or rarely known about commands. DOS has a few underutilized ones, but that is about it. Files describing "undocumented DOS commands" tend to be rather small. ^_^
I think this must be the only comment in this story that I have posted today that hasn't been moded up. . . . 11:50 PST time now, so. . . . LOL
Man I wish I could trade Karma in for cash. Or something. Heck anything almost. Caps with logos from my favorite sites even (yaaah!)
Heh. I am lucky in that I get pretty much unlimited time per computer (well what else can you expect when it is a 486 running windows95 on less then a 300megabyte HD? Ick).
:) :) :) Yah sure That Guy can walk on water, but darnit, _I_ can revive power supplies!!!! Whooopie! :)
I do hate time constraints on fixing things, especialy since I am so often dealing with hardware problems.
I did get major kudos for bringing some power supplies back from beyond the grave though.
Bah, I have one application that just shutdown and rebooted, NO warning!
Evil little bugger. . . .
On a related note, the google cache of their main page
E C: www.fastaxs.com/ufop.exist.html+&hl=en
:)
.41 millimeters of a dime (a shaving) and beam it anywhere in the world.
:)
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:KX_5ifyYLs
is rather hilarious to read.
"American intelligence, the U.N and the E.U can transmit approximately 4 implants with particle transmission. They can pick up
"
Which makes absolutly no sense since he gives no rate (uh, 4 implants a day, a second, a minute, an hour? Yeesh).
Oh well, seems like a joke page, rather old, is dead.
I hope its a joke.
^_^