But, there are no gaps in the "evolutionary chain", unless you really want to see an unbroken line of parents and children stretching back to amoebas. I don't understand why people say that. The line between fish and amphibian is pretty blurry when you go back far enough, and there are fossils to prove it.
Two recommendations for titles that are a bit rare and hard to find, unfortunately, but worth it when you do.
for brainbending: Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney
for throw-the-controller (and kill-the-patient) twitch difficulty: Trauma Center: Under the Knife
both games are truly awesome, and very much worth the money if you can find them. I'm on the final case in Phoenix Wright now, and all I can say is "wow." This game is really awesome. Bonus points if you play it on a bus or other public place where you can get odd looks from people when you suddenly shout "Objection!" (you can also hit a button on the touch screen if you're too embarassed to yell)
CRTs always have and always will. Computer monitors do the same thing. LCDs don't have the scanning electron gun, so they don't produce the same sort of noise.
What I want to know is, does anybody ever hear the electricity in the walls when it's quiet in the house? All the time when I was a kid, if I was alone in my room I would know if somebody turned on an appliance of any kind (not just the TV) because I could hear the frequency change in the wall. I always wondered if it was actually coming from the conducting wires or if somehow the wall was transferring some sort of sound from elsewhere in the house. It seems more likely to be the wires though.
Loom is really awesome, you should play that next.
Just make sure you listen to the audio CD (or cassette tape, if your copy is old enough) before you start the game - the audio is the background story, if you just start the game without knowing the story you lose some of the coolness.
Wonderful, wonderful game, I just replayed it a couple of months ago - I hadn't been able to play it since I switched to Linux until I found out about ScummVM, then I had to.:)
> In response to this whole paragraph, I have a question. If we assume that at some point in time God did actually give His Word to man, then why in the world would he not ensure that the stuff that matters would remain uncorrupted?
Well, if that were the case, he's done a very poor job of it. Did you know that the books which make up the Bible do not have any mention of hell at all in the originals?
Hell is entirely a Christian concept, it has no place in Judaism, and it was invented some time around 400 AD if I recall correctly (although any actual Biblical scholars, as opposed to me who just has interesting conversations with them once in a while, feel free to correct this).
There are two words in Hebrew, one is sheol, and the other is something else. These two words are translated in the King James version almost randomly into THREE different words, which are grave, death, and hell. Try reading any passage that mentions hell and replace it with "the grave" or "death" and you will find that the line scans perfectly well. That's because that was the way it was actually written.
My brother has a mythtv box he set up, he's done what you're talking about, I think. He showed me once that he could cat/dev/video > file.mpg and it would automatically create an mpeg-2 file. I think you might need a card that does hardware-encoding for that to work though.
But before he got the card that did mpeg-2 in hardware, he had a software driven one that worked as well. Unfortunately I don't know any specifics myself, I've never set one up. But it is possible! Check the mythtv forums for info on your card, perhaps.
Toadstool is her family name, Peach is her first name - she's normally referred to these days as "Princess Peach" the same way we say (said) "Princess Diana" instead of "Princess Mountbatten-Windsor".
But even though it may make sense, I still call her Princess Toadstool.:P
> No, it's crazies like you that can't be allowed into a rational debate. You're too busy sucking on the tits of Mother Gaia to actually look up and try to understand the basics of things like "empiricism". Which makes you no different than any other loony religious nut, come to think about it - you've just replaced an old god with a new one.
As a fellow crazy, I must take exception to this: Gaia is a much older deity than YHVH - I believe monotheism is a relatively recent trend.:)
It's odd that you like FF7 so much if you dislike Square's minigames, because that's the one that actually started the minigame trend. Prior to FF7 there weren't any actual "minigames" in any of the Final Fantasy games (not that I recall, at least).
off the top of my head: Motorcycle race, Submarine fight, Casino games, Chocobo racing, Chocobo breeding, Snowboarding...
The minigames you mentioned are optional, they don't actually advance the plot in their respective games. The snowboard, the motorcycle race/fight, and the (first set of) chocobo races are REQUIRED to beat FF7.
I've got no problem with minigames myself, but I'd say that this is something the newer games get right more than FF7, the fact that they're all optional.
You are aware that you can download the development version of Cedega for free from their CVS server?
It doesn't include support for copy protection, but if you're trying to pirate Cedega, I assume you have installed copy protection disabling patches for all your games anyway.
Yeah, but remember the change that prompted this; you updated your operating system kernel. The reason you don't have to reinstall drivers under Windows when you upgrade your kernel is because you CAN'T upgrade your kernel.
If you could upgrade to the newest bug-patched and feature-spiffy Windows kernel whenever you wanted, then you would find that, yes indeed, you need to reinstall drivers that are provided by third-parties.
If you're clipping the viewport through the head or torso of the character model when you rotate it, you need to lean the torso forward or back some with the angle the character's looking at.
It's more realistic to do so anyway. When you want to look straight down in real life, you don't just turn 90 degrees at your neck; 1) it's physically impossible, and 2) attempting to do so hurts:P
You have to lean the model's torso and head out slightly to compensate for the size of the viewport, otherwise you'll see the inside of the mesh. This looks kind of weird. ^^
#3 Why can't I see my feet, Damn it. Still working this one out. I do know some of the reasons now.
Been there, done that.
My solution was to make a separate class of object called "camera" which can be attached to any mesh, has attributes of a quaternion that's the angle it's pointing at, a quaternion "fixed point angle" and quaternion "fixed point distance" that hold the position from the center of the mesh that it attaches to, and a GL viewport number (in case you're using multiple viewports for some reason, like split-screen multiplayer).
Then you float the camera.0001 GL units in front of the eyes of the character model (how big a unit is depends on what scale you're drawing your game to, of course) and attach your GL viewport to that camera.
Relatively simple, if you're already doing 3d engine stuff.:P
There aren't any hidden genitals revealed by the original Hot Coffee mod either. The models "having sex" are fully clothed.
There is a new version out that replaces the textures in the minigame portion with nude skins; that would in fact be content that the modder added, regardless of whether you want to split hairs over the original version.
Also, did you miss the fact that the guy responsible for the furor over this is now actually going after The Sims for having "nude skins"? He's a bullshit artist, pure and simple.
> All the games you mentioned were released five years ago, ya tard. Try using current technology to prove your assumptions.
The reason I mentioned Quake, Quake 2 and UT specifically is because the source code is available for them and you could see for yourself.
But no, it's much easier to flame somebody with no prior knowledge of the subject.
Also, if you think PunkBuster has ANYTHING to do with developers using client-side hit detection you are completely off your rocker.
> As for your NWN experiences from back in the bad old days before there was colour and flying metal birds: well duh, how many online RPGs keep the character files on the client side now?
That was my point exactly; modern games don't trust the client BECAUSE it's proven that you can't. You're the one trying to argue that trusting the client to do all your calculations is perfectly fine and everybody does it. Why didn't you say something retarded like "WOW does keep all the client data in memory on the client and trust the client's copy of it absolutely, PunkBuster is the amazing new technology that allows it to work this way!!!111!"?
Have you read the source to Quake, Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament? All of the above do exactly what I'm talking about, because their developers aren't morons.:P
The server has to know when somebody's firing a bullet, it's not any harder for the server to do the hit detection than it is for the client; why on earth would you let the client tell you whether it's been hit or not?
The last online game I played that didn't do things this way was Neverwinter Nights. Not the Atari produced one that came out a few years ago; the original one on America Online. Know what happened to the community on there? I'll give you three guesses. They're all right.
1) everybody who downloaded a simple utility called Game Wizard (or a custom written "trainer" for the game that came out later) was invincible. 2) they had infinite money. 3) they could produce items that did not actually exist in the game.
A year or so before the game was taken off AOL they implemented a server-side CRC that would "jail" your character if it detected an item that wasn't a real item that you could get in the game. Didn't help too much because even though you couldn't create a shield that would automatically hasten you when you entered battle, you could still make yourself a "common" Plate Mail +3 pretty easily.
Sorry, try again; this is a well known problem and has been for many years. If venturing a guess I would have to assume that it is in fact you who are not a game developer.
Slashdot Mirror
But, there are no gaps in the "evolutionary chain", unless you really want to see an unbroken line of parents and children stretching back to amoebas. I don't understand why people say that. The line between fish and amphibian is pretty blurry when you go back far enough, and there are fossils to prove it.
Two recommendations for titles that are a bit rare and hard to find, unfortunately, but worth it when you do.
for brainbending: Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney
for throw-the-controller (and kill-the-patient) twitch difficulty: Trauma Center: Under the Knife
both games are truly awesome, and very much worth the money if you can find them. I'm on the final case in Phoenix Wright now, and all I can say is "wow." This game is really awesome. Bonus points if you play it on a bus or other public place where you can get odd looks from people when you suddenly shout "Objection!" (you can also hit a button on the touch screen if you're too embarassed to yell)
CRTs always have and always will. Computer monitors do the same thing. LCDs don't have the scanning electron gun, so they don't produce the same sort of noise.
What I want to know is, does anybody ever hear the electricity in the walls when it's quiet in the house? All the time when I was a kid, if I was alone in my room I would know if somebody turned on an appliance of any kind (not just the TV) because I could hear the frequency change in the wall. I always wondered if it was actually coming from the conducting wires or if somehow the wall was transferring some sort of sound from elsewhere in the house. It seems more likely to be the wires though.
C-z suspends the running process and gives you a prompt.
If it's something you want to keep running, type bg at the prompt to continue it in the background.
When you're ready to continue in the foreground, type fg.
DJB may write some decent software, but I'm pretty sure he's off on this.
I've heard many reports of ISPs offering IPv6->IPv4 gateways for their clients. It's pretty easy to set one up yourself even.
I thought I remembered seeing this on HotU a while back, and I was right.
o om-audio.zip
If the box is missing the tape, here's an MP3 of it.
http://www.the-underdogs.org/games/l/loom/files/l
Holy crap, there was an expansion for Die By the Sword?
I might have to look for that and see if I can find my copy - it ran pretty well under Wine back in the day, can't see why it wouldn't work now...
or you know, you could just download their development version from CVS and compile it for free. Geez, the windows user mentality around here...
Loom is really awesome, you should play that next.
:)
Just make sure you listen to the audio CD (or cassette tape, if your copy is old enough) before you start the game - the audio is the background story, if you just start the game without knowing the story you lose some of the coolness.
Wonderful, wonderful game, I just replayed it a couple of months ago - I hadn't been able to play it since I switched to Linux until I found out about ScummVM, then I had to.
> In response to this whole paragraph, I have a question. If we assume that at some point in time God did actually give His Word to man, then why in the world would he not ensure that the stuff that matters would remain uncorrupted?
Well, if that were the case, he's done a very poor job of it. Did you know that the books which make up the Bible do not have any mention of hell at all in the originals?
Hell is entirely a Christian concept, it has no place in Judaism, and it was invented some time around 400 AD if I recall correctly (although any actual Biblical scholars, as opposed to me who just has interesting conversations with them once in a while, feel free to correct this).
There are two words in Hebrew, one is sheol, and the other is something else. These two words are translated in the King James version almost randomly into THREE different words, which are grave, death, and hell. Try reading any passage that mentions hell and replace it with "the grave" or "death" and you will find that the line scans perfectly well. That's because that was the way it was actually written.
My brother has a mythtv box he set up, he's done what you're talking about, I think. He showed me once that he could cat /dev/video > file.mpg and it would automatically create an mpeg-2 file. I think you might need a card that does hardware-encoding for that to work though.
But before he got the card that did mpeg-2 in hardware, he had a software driven one that worked as well. Unfortunately I don't know any specifics myself, I've never set one up. But it is possible! Check the mythtv forums for info on your card, perhaps.
Toadstool is her family name, Peach is her first name - she's normally referred to these days as "Princess Peach" the same way we say (said) "Princess Diana" instead of "Princess Mountbatten-Windsor".
:P
But even though it may make sense, I still call her Princess Toadstool.
Ha, I've been using that in my .sig for years!
> No, it's crazies like you that can't be allowed into a rational debate. You're too busy sucking on the tits of Mother Gaia to actually look up and try to understand the basics of things like "empiricism". Which makes you no different than any other loony religious nut, come to think about it - you've just replaced an old god with a new one.
:)
As a fellow crazy, I must take exception to this: Gaia is a much older deity than YHVH - I believe monotheism is a relatively recent trend.
So why don't you get it for PC for $50 or so instead of getting it for Xbox360 at a total cost of $450 for a version with fewer features?
The choice seems pretty clear to me.
The answer is, remotely smart US citizens either a) didn't vote for Bush, or b) were already involved in the administration's corruption.
It's odd that you like FF7 so much if you dislike Square's minigames, because that's the one that actually started the minigame trend. Prior to FF7 there weren't any actual "minigames" in any of the Final Fantasy games (not that I recall, at least).
off the top of my head:
Motorcycle race,
Submarine fight,
Casino games,
Chocobo racing,
Chocobo breeding,
Snowboarding...
The minigames you mentioned are optional, they don't actually advance the plot in their respective games. The snowboard, the motorcycle race/fight, and the (first set of) chocobo races are REQUIRED to beat FF7.
I've got no problem with minigames myself, but I'd say that this is something the newer games get right more than FF7, the fact that they're all optional.
I agree, although maybe I'm an outlier but my taste runs toward normal size or slightly smaller breasts.
As an aside, my ex-girlfriend and her sister loved DOA Beach Volleyball.
You are aware that you can download the development version of Cedega for free from their CVS server?
It doesn't include support for copy protection, but if you're trying to pirate Cedega, I assume you have installed copy protection disabling patches for all your games anyway.
Yeah, but remember the change that prompted this; you updated your operating system kernel. The reason you don't have to reinstall drivers under Windows when you upgrade your kernel is because you CAN'T upgrade your kernel.
If you could upgrade to the newest bug-patched and feature-spiffy Windows kernel whenever you wanted, then you would find that, yes indeed, you need to reinstall drivers that are provided by third-parties.
I should have clarified something:
:P
If you're clipping the viewport through the head or torso of the character model when you rotate it, you need to lean the torso forward or back some with the angle the character's looking at.
It's more realistic to do so anyway. When you want to look straight down in real life, you don't just turn 90 degrees at your neck; 1) it's physically impossible, and 2) attempting to do so hurts
You have to lean the model's torso and head out slightly to compensate for the size of the viewport, otherwise you'll see the inside of the mesh. This looks kind of weird. ^^
#3 Why can't I see my feet, Damn it. Still working this one out. I do know some of the reasons now.
.0001 GL units in front of the eyes of the character model (how big a unit is depends on what scale you're drawing your game to, of course) and attach your GL viewport to that camera.
:P
Been there, done that.
My solution was to make a separate class of object called "camera" which can be attached to any mesh, has attributes of a quaternion that's the angle it's pointing at, a quaternion "fixed point angle" and quaternion "fixed point distance" that hold the position from the center of the mesh that it attaches to, and a GL viewport number (in case you're using multiple viewports for some reason, like split-screen multiplayer).
Then you float the camera
Relatively simple, if you're already doing 3d engine stuff.
There aren't any hidden genitals revealed by the original Hot Coffee mod either. The models "having sex" are fully clothed.
There is a new version out that replaces the textures in the minigame portion with nude skins; that would in fact be content that the modder added, regardless of whether you want to split hairs over the original version.
Also, did you miss the fact that the guy responsible for the furor over this is now actually going after The Sims for having "nude skins"? He's a bullshit artist, pure and simple.
> All the games you mentioned were released five years ago, ya tard. Try using current technology to prove your assumptions.
The reason I mentioned Quake, Quake 2 and UT specifically is because the source code is available for them and you could see for yourself.
But no, it's much easier to flame somebody with no prior knowledge of the subject.
Also, if you think PunkBuster has ANYTHING to do with developers using client-side hit detection you are completely off your rocker.
> As for your NWN experiences from back in the bad old days before there was colour and flying metal birds: well duh, how many online RPGs keep the character files on the client side now?
That was my point exactly; modern games don't trust the client BECAUSE it's proven that you can't. You're the one trying to argue that trusting the client to do all your calculations is perfectly fine and everybody does it. Why didn't you say something retarded like "WOW does keep all the client data in memory on the client and trust the client's copy of it absolutely, PunkBuster is the amazing new technology that allows it to work this way!!!111!"?
You're kidding, right?
:P
Have you read the source to Quake, Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament? All of the above do exactly what I'm talking about, because their developers aren't morons.
The server has to know when somebody's firing a bullet, it's not any harder for the server to do the hit detection than it is for the client; why on earth would you let the client tell you whether it's been hit or not?
The last online game I played that didn't do things this way was Neverwinter Nights. Not the Atari produced one that came out a few years ago; the original one on America Online. Know what happened to the community on there? I'll give you three guesses. They're all right.
1) everybody who downloaded a simple utility called Game Wizard (or a custom written "trainer" for the game that came out later) was invincible.
2) they had infinite money.
3) they could produce items that did not actually exist in the game.
A year or so before the game was taken off AOL they implemented a server-side CRC that would "jail" your character if it detected an item that wasn't a real item that you could get in the game. Didn't help too much because even though you couldn't create a shield that would automatically hasten you when you entered battle, you could still make yourself a "common" Plate Mail +3 pretty easily.
Sorry, try again; this is a well known problem and has been for many years. If venturing a guess I would have to assume that it is in fact you who are not a game developer.