I'd like to second (or third, or fourth) this. I switched to mousing left-handed more than 10 years ago after a bout of tendonitis in my right wrist. I haven't had a recurrence. It took a few weeks to get comfortable, and the first couple of days were awkward. Persistence paid off, though. Now I can mouse either-handed. I didn't bother to change button locations.
I like the speed of selecting a region of text with my left hand while doing a command-key combo with my right.
Tiny level size and long load times were the real killer for me with DX2. Drove me nuts every time I saw that confirmation dialog. (The original had fast load times, with no immersion-breaking dialogs.)
Agreed, though I'll point out that it's one of the *only* mods for Unreal 2. It's the UT2003 engine that has all the mod attention at the moment.
U2XMP is the only multiplayer game I play at the moment-- reminds me a lot of Tribes2. (Which of course suffered a similar fate when Sierra axed Dynamix.) I wonder if they'll manage to distribute the XMP patch they've been working on. Or the Linux server they also said was in progress.
I was a little unclear. The kernel crashed because of the bad disk. After replacing the disk, rebooting, and replaying the journals, we found Reiser had corrupted data on other, still-good disks. I would certainly expect to lose data that had been scheduled to be written at the time of the crash. I did not expect to have files on good disks essentially shuffled up with each other, which was the form of the data corruption.
Yes-- this is far too late to save ReiserFS on my installation. I moved all our disks to ext3 a few months ago after experiencing extensive file corruption. A scsi disk went bad. When it went down, all files that had been active at the time were corrupted. Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr.
My husband and I do most of our gaming together. We tend not to like the "sit next to each other and share a keyboard" thing. We prefer networked games we can each have a character in. I like hardcore FPSes more than he does, but we've played a lot of Team Fortress Classic together. System Shock 2 was one of our favorites, because it could be played through cooperatively, and of course it was a great game by itself.
There aren't a lot of games that allow networked cooperative play out at the moment, so recently we've been playing MMORPGs together. We had stints in DAoC, SWG, and now FFXI. SWG is pretty good for very social players who can put up with bugs in exchange for an interesting virtual world sort of thing.
Recent team shooters like Wolfenstein:ET and maybe even America's Army could also be fun.
That's not really where the development time and money is going. The killer is the increasing complexity of the art assets. The 3D models with their ever-increasing polygon counts and their ever-larger textures. The ever-growing environments. Doing all the content creation to meet the eye-candy demands of modern gamers can take a lot of bodies and budget.
I think if Epic were really serious about promoting modding their engine, they'd release some documentation for it. The only useful documentation I could find is the Unreal Wiki, provided by frustrated mod developers. That plus the source scripts for the UT2003 games is enough to get started, but only for the dedicated. A few focused and annotated source examples would go a long way, and some reference documentation would be gold. Why not put more content on the UDN technical wiki that isn't for engine licensees only?
The card is a PNY, a brand I wouldn't exactly recommend. (My husband bought one at the same time, but his identical box contained a GF3 card. He returned it and got a non-functional GF4. Third box worked.) I am running the nVidia Detonator drivers, which I would recommend. Did you try only the drivers that came with your card? That might have been the key.
I'm sharing an HD Cinema Display with my G4 and my PC. I bought one of the Apple dvi -> ADC converters, which I assume you're using with your TiBook to drive the display. My PC has a gForce4Ti 4600 card in it, which worked just fine with no fiddling right out of the box. (I upgraded from a gForce2 that had no dvi out.) Now I just need a dvi switcher and I'll be living in luxury.
Gee thanks. That's all we need. They haven't even released the client for Linux yet, and already you're telling people how to rip them off.
Er, those are the instructions from Bioware's own readme for the Linux server. Doing this is required for getting the Linux server going. Only the server is out, not the client, and the server does not require a CD key or a separately purchased copy. One assumes that, like Valve and Id, Bioware realizes that having a lot of free Linux servers out there is good for the paying clients on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
Tabbed browsing Pop-up suppression Anti-aliased text
Not to mention page rendering that draws table-heady slashdot flamewar pages instantly. I've done side-by-side comparisons with IE and Chimera loading the same slashdot page. I can read a fair way into the Chimera version before IE gets around to rendering the main page table. It's a startling difference.
No kidding. You're pretty hilarious, Jill. A polite, pleasant, "hey did you know this was in print again?" approach would have won friends. It's still not too late for you to step back, take a deep breath, and realize this.
Four lines from a longer work, in turn a part of an even longer book, correctly attributed, probably mis-remembered by David, qualify as fair use. People like him reciting Frederick Winsor's poems to each other are what kept the market for that book alive through the years it was out of print. Without his recitation to me, recorded in the journal entry, I would never have known those delightful poems existed. I've still never seen a copy.
Remember this if you're lucky enough to see your reprint reviewed in a local newspaper, and the reviewer quotes a similar four-line snippet. The law of the United States gives the reviewer the right to use brief excerpts, and you know what, Jill? It's to your benefit. Tasty previews like that are good advertising. They're like the people at your local supermarket with the cheese samples cubed up in bite sizes. Mmm, delicious, the reader says, and ponies up the dollars for more. Think like a salesman, Jill!
What's wrong with the Unreal engine? Serious question. I have been reading a bunch of UnrealScript docs and I'm tickled that most of UT is written in UScript that I can read and tinker with.
I'll agree with the "token elements of gameplay" zinger at Myst. But I do want to point out one thing that Myst did: it used music and graphics to create an emotional reaction in its players. Channelwood was unbearably creepy to me. One also had a sense of discovery of a story, of a large and complicated world that one was getting a tiny glimpse of. These are powerful attractions to human beings. I think they're what attracted non-gaming people to an otherwise pretty trivial puzzle game. (And I loved the Infocom text adventures!)
These two ingredients-- atmosphere and story-- were definitely present in Looking Glass Studio's games. The Thief games and System Shock 2 were both creepy, tense experiences. Those guys understand atmosphere and sound design.
That kind of cheating (using a walkthrough in a solo game) is more like flipping through the deck one card at a time in solitaire. It should take some satisfaction out of solving the game for the player, but it doesn't affect anybody else. The kind of cheating described in that excellent Gamasutra article is all multiplayer game cheating, where one person's actions do affect other people. I definitely understand the satisfaction of figuring out the game and its data structures and making the cheat work. But I don't get the satisfaction of *using* the cheats. If I can insta-gib anybody, so what? I'm not having fun killing helpless victims.
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I'd like to second (or third, or fourth) this. I switched to mousing left-handed more than 10 years ago after a bout of tendonitis in my right wrist. I haven't had a recurrence. It took a few weeks to get comfortable, and the first couple of days were awkward. Persistence paid off, though. Now I can mouse either-handed. I didn't bother to change button locations.
I like the speed of selecting a region of text with my left hand while doing a command-key combo with my right.
Tiny level size and long load times were the real killer for me with DX2. Drove me nuts every time I saw that confirmation dialog. (The original had fast load times, with no immersion-breaking dialogs.)
Agreed, though I'll point out that it's one of the *only* mods for Unreal 2. It's the UT2003 engine that has all the mod attention at the moment.
U2XMP is the only multiplayer game I play at the moment-- reminds me a lot of Tribes2. (Which of course suffered a similar fate when Sierra axed Dynamix.) I wonder if they'll manage to distribute the XMP patch they've been working on. Or the Linux server they also said was in progress.
I was a little unclear. The kernel crashed because of the bad disk. After replacing the disk, rebooting, and replaying the journals, we found Reiser had corrupted data on other, still-good disks. I would certainly expect to lose data that had been scheduled to be written at the time of the crash. I did not expect to have files on good disks essentially shuffled up with each other, which was the form of the data corruption.
Yes-- this is far too late to save ReiserFS on my installation. I moved all our disks to ext3 a few months ago after experiencing extensive file corruption. A scsi disk went bad. When it went down, all files that had been active at the time were corrupted. Mostly that was several dozen mail spool files. Didn't I switch to a journaled file system in part to avoid this sort of thing? Grrrrrrrrrr.
My husband and I do most of our gaming together. We tend not to like the "sit next to each other and share a keyboard" thing. We prefer networked games we can each have a character in. I like hardcore FPSes more than he does, but we've played a lot of Team Fortress Classic together. System Shock 2 was one of our favorites, because it could be played through cooperatively, and of course it was a great game by itself.
There aren't a lot of games that allow networked cooperative play out at the moment, so recently we've been playing MMORPGs together. We had stints in DAoC, SWG, and now FFXI. SWG is pretty good for very social players who can put up with bugs in exchange for an interesting virtual world sort of thing.
Recent team shooters like Wolfenstein:ET and maybe even America's Army could also be fun.
That's not really where the development time and money is going. The killer is the increasing complexity of the art assets. The 3D models with their ever-increasing polygon counts and their ever-larger textures. The ever-growing environments. Doing all the content creation to meet the eye-candy demands of modern gamers can take a lot of bodies and budget.
I think if Epic were really serious about promoting modding their engine, they'd release some documentation for it. The only useful documentation I could find is the Unreal Wiki, provided by frustrated mod developers. That plus the source scripts for the UT2003 games is enough to get started, but only for the dedicated. A few focused and annotated source examples would go a long way, and some reference documentation would be gold. Why not put more content on the UDN technical wiki that isn't for engine licensees only?
> but marketing is a funny thing and you have to
> give them the chance to try to create a big
> buildup if they want.
I don't *have* to give marketers anything.
The card is a PNY, a brand I wouldn't exactly recommend. (My husband bought one at the same time, but his identical box contained a GF3 card. He returned it and got a non-functional GF4. Third box worked.) I am running the nVidia Detonator drivers, which I would recommend. Did you try only the drivers that came with your card? That might have been the key.
I'm sharing an HD Cinema Display with my G4 and my PC. I bought one of the Apple dvi -> ADC converters, which I assume you're using with your TiBook to drive the display. My PC has a gForce4Ti 4600 card in it, which worked just fine with no fiddling right out of the box. (I upgraded from a gForce2 that had no dvi out.) Now I just need a dvi switcher and I'll be living in luxury.
Really? I always pronounced it "uh hash uv java".
Er, those are the instructions from Bioware's own readme for the Linux server. Doing this is required for getting the Linux server going. Only the server is out, not the client, and the server does not require a CD key or a separately purchased copy. One assumes that, like Valve and Id, Bioware realizes that having a lot of free Linux servers out there is good for the paying clients on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.
So relax already.
Tabbed browsing
Pop-up suppression
Anti-aliased text
Not to mention page rendering that draws table-heady slashdot flamewar pages instantly. I've done side-by-side comparisons with IE and Chimera loading the same slashdot page. I can read a fair way into the Chimera version before IE gets around to rendering the main page table. It's a startling difference.
Good. I like a role model who has the sense to use the best tool for the job, and who doesn't waste his time with inferior tools.
Four lines from a longer work, in turn a part of an even longer book, correctly attributed, probably mis-remembered by David, qualify as fair use. People like him reciting Frederick Winsor's poems to each other are what kept the market for that book alive through the years it was out of print. Without his recitation to me, recorded in the journal entry, I would never have known those delightful poems existed. I've still never seen a copy.
Remember this if you're lucky enough to see your reprint reviewed in a local newspaper, and the reviewer quotes a similar four-line snippet. The law of the United States gives the reviewer the right to use brief excerpts, and you know what, Jill? It's to your benefit. Tasty previews like that are good advertising. They're like the people at your local supermarket with the cheese samples cubed up in bite sizes. Mmm, delicious, the reader says, and ponies up the dollars for more. Think like a salesman, Jill!
What's wrong with the Unreal engine? Serious question. I have been reading a bunch of UnrealScript docs and I'm tickled that most of UT is written in UScript that I can read and tinker with.
I'll agree with the "token elements of gameplay" zinger at Myst. But I do want to point out one thing that Myst did: it used music and graphics to create an emotional reaction in its players. Channelwood was unbearably creepy to me. One also had a sense of discovery of a story, of a large and complicated world that one was getting a tiny glimpse of. These are powerful attractions to human beings. I think they're what attracted non-gaming people to an otherwise pretty trivial puzzle game. (And I loved the Infocom text adventures!)
These two ingredients-- atmosphere and story-- were definitely present in Looking Glass Studio's games. The Thief games and System Shock 2 were both creepy, tense experiences. Those guys understand atmosphere and sound design.
That kind of cheating (using a walkthrough in a solo game) is more like flipping through the deck one card at a time in solitaire. It should take some satisfaction out of solving the game for the player, but it doesn't affect anybody else. The kind of cheating described in that excellent Gamasutra article is all multiplayer game cheating, where one person's actions do affect other people. I definitely understand the satisfaction of figuring out the game and its data structures and making the cheat work. But I don't get the satisfaction of *using* the cheats. If I can insta-gib anybody, so what? I'm not having fun killing helpless victims.