I know many nerds want to give MS a kick on the nose but all they do with this is helping them fine tuning the Palladium technology.
"So they did the most amazing distributed computing feat of the millennium and cracked the key", says MS. "Let's just generate another key."
Cracking 2048-bit keys is pretty hard - and I think that no matter how many computers try to crack the key, by the time that key gets cracked, the XBox platform is well obsolete. (I'm not a crypto expert. Was it before or after the universe was said to collapse?)
DVDs were cracked because they invented their own algorithm that used too short keys. MS has picked good, proven crypto algorithms (RC4 and RSA) with absurdly long keys, which means they won't be cracked as easily. Palladium will undoubtedly be based on such state-of-the-art algorithms; there's really nothing left in Palladium to "tune".
And as for "tuning", cryptography algorithms are not "tuned". Cryptography if anything is a black art in the grimmest sense of the word - If you don't know what you're doing, you'd better stick to the proven algorithms, and the algorithm isn't proven until it stands decades of analysis. You just don't invent a cipher and be done with it.
Re:Another great strength of linux is
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(it could do with support for non gregorian calanders for example)
*cough* Emacs *cough*... some interesting support. If it does Mayan calendar, it has to be good. Too bad it doesn't do what 'ddate' does. =)
Yeah, I have been using Linux long time and Windows mostly for games - and a few years ago, I got a faster machine and a TV card for video captures, but later I found out that the video editing in Linux Just Isn't There Yet, while in Win98SE it's very much doable. A bit ago I found a program that captures video off the card and does not drop most of the frames and keeps audio almost in synch. Then the editing app...? Cinelerra is clumsy and doesn't know a thing - Every time I tried to open a file to it, it either crashed or said it has no idea about the format.
I hope gstreamer stabilizes soon - once gstreamer is done, the video framework on free *NIX world will be a reality. But until then, there just isn't any nice programs to mess with, and I have to consider VirtualDub the Video Editor Built For My Use... =/
OK, it's a bit optimistic, but you CAN get your windows-using friends/relatives/coworkers to try mozilla without too much effort.
Yep. And I've noted advertising the popup killing / image blocking features often raises interest in the program immediately. =)
One thing is to sneak the browser in while doing "maintenance" and if anyone asks anything, say "the Internet" starts by clicking on the "Mozilla" icon, but otherwise it's more or less the same. When my father's computer had a severe case of Hosed Win98itis, I reinstalled the thing and also installed Mozilla. I asked a while ago how it worked. "Oh, just fine", was the reply. =)
And I was also surprised that on my mother's computer - a P166 with Debian - Galeon actually feels at times much faster than Netscape 4! Even Mozilla raw was tolerable enough, just took an ungodly time to start (a couple of minutes).
How many times I've been thinking "Oh, people are again Tuning with some expensive and clumsy programs, if they would have been using *NIX this would have been a lot easier."... well, in this case, they actually did the Obvious Thing: used dd to copy image of a drive. =)
"If I had been making an image of the disk, I would have used dd... oh, wait, they used dd. Never mind."
Hey! I keep my old 2600 & ET cartridge around just so I can scare young children.
Actually, the game isn't that scary. Previously, I had heard of this game for 2600 that was so horrible that no one bought it and they buried the rest in some desert. That sounded pretty bad... About an year ago, the curiosity finally won and I downloaded the ROM and tried it. It was horrible, yes, but it didn't felt that horrible.
I think ET serves best as a scary story. Actually playing the game kills the illusion =)
Actually, to be pedantic, I believe there is a rule in D&D that you can only go up one level for any given encounter. I'd have to look it up to make sure that isn't just a house rule we made up long ago, but I'm pretty sure it's an official rule.
You know, I just started getting my sister interested in Real Games, and I started with nothing else but my copy of Classic D&D (I have this boxed set from 1991...) and there is a rule that goes like "if you get loads of XP per session, the total can't be more than x-1, where x is the xp required for advancing from the next level up - that is, advance only one level per session".
I remember that when I DMed the games first time in 1994 or so, finding this rule was nice. In our introductory adventure, our intrepid heroes found loads and loads of gold, and getting *both of them* up from level 1 to level 6 would have meant that they missed a lot of nice "basic set" adventures. I only had one old gigantic "expert" ruleset adventure module (X1 Isle of Dread) and felt like arranging it would be a big headache for me, so it was nice that I could cap them at level 2 and let 'em play B7 Rahasia instead =)
Since I'm a poor student with only a recently sparked interest in D6amp;D 3rd Edition (I hear they actually produced a role playing game this time! =) I don't know if the modern rules have this feature.
if EA came out with a game like Madden for people like me, i'd give them a lot o my coin. say, instead of Madden, they had Fiercesome Librarian 2003. or Raging Geeks League Slide Rule Competition '02 (RGL '02).
Oh, but I'd pay them if they'd stop prouducing games with "year" versions. I don't want to buy a football game that's built to last for an year or supported beyond that. I'm not a sports person, but would like to play football on computer every now and then... next time may be near.
Where is the Generic, Customizable Soccer Game??? =) No yearly upgrades - just random names and customizable players. No "hit the button and it's a GOAAAAAL" style playability - make playing the game a damn science. How about multiplayer - the net game side doesn't seem too wide in EA's games? Many companies make great soccer games for Playstation and like, but I have a computer, and for computers, there's only EA Sports.
Internation Soccer published by Commodore in 1982 has stood the test of time and it's name hath been engraved in gold letters to the History... Where's the PC's answer to that, may I ask?
Electronic Arts is in the video game industry making sound business moves and producing disposable rubbish for an eager consumer base.
Columnist Niko Nirvi in Finnish game mag Pelit described this kind of games as "burger games", which is pretty accurate - Junk food, indeed! The strange thing is, he's an experienced game journalist and been ranting about the death of innovation and How Going To The Stock Market Tends To Kill Creativity (A quote from a good column in Pelit 9/2000, "Any company that is involved in creative activity, but that summarizes its goal with the always popular slogan 'the only purpose of the company is to bring profit for the shareholders', is going down."), but there has been very little reaction until recently. Must have published the stuff in a too small country and in wrong language. =)
Yeah, the 64 may be sturdy, but how many joysticks have you burned through?
Personally, none. A few sticks (cheap Spectravideo sticks) I have are *feeling* like they'd be falling apart any time soon, but my Suncom TAC-2 is still as good as new. It's indestructible. It cannot fail. It cannot be harmed. Its connectors are pure simplicity. It is the sole undefeated champion of the joystick world.
Leaf switches snap on the first week. Microswitches die after decades. TAC-2 is solid like a rock.
Umph... of the Infocom games, I have Zork II, Zork III and Suspended for Commodore 64. Bought them ages ago. Never figured out why Zork I was sold out and people paid ridiculous prices for it for - I got these for (I think) 50 mk (uh, about 8 euros?) each, and this was early 1990s for Christ's sake. I mean, if it was a hugely popular and a well known game, surely they produced large amount of them? =)
And surely the originals can't be that sought after if only some years ago I could buy a big collection with almost all of the Infocom games, and Activision used to even give Zork series free from their web page?
(Speaking of Zorkish puzzle games, I need to finish Zork Nemesis some day...)
Mozilla - very good, feature packed, but no way near as good as IE - it pains me to say it, but everyone harps on about the fact that IE doesnt support all the standards that Mozilla does. But if people dont seem to be coding in those standards, and are using the broken Microsoft ones, then what the hell is the point?
Actually, this all doesn't matter. People whine about "standards incompatibilities" because they can't get DHTML working cross-platform. So, every sane web designer don't use DHTML. The web is no longer about technology race or feature race. The HTML is stabilizing, the CSS is stabilizing.
Now, only browser features matter. And in this area, Mozilla wins. Mozilla is a better browser feature-wise. As far as HTML and CSS go, they work on both. Bleah.
Every well disciplined web designer knows that the Web was supposed to be browser-independent and techniques that depend on browser "features" (such as DHTML/Javascript) are not to be used. Everyone knows that if you're making a website for general audience, it should not depend on particular browser version - because if you do that, it's a maintenance mightmare and users will complain.
Most serious corporate web sites are thrilled enough to use Javascript for link rollovers. Wow. And in my opinion, that's as far as "bleeding edge technologies" should go.
The whole, "Lest get our your CD-ROM and Mouse Drivers to fit in 22K adventure" in Untima 7 was Brilliant.
And they called it the "Voodoo memory manager". And the kids these days, they just throw the Voodoos in their computers and it *automatically* installs the drivers with a few mouse clicks! Back in the DOS, Voodoo really meant Dark Arts! It's this damn commercialization of mysticism and magic and these "look, I'm wearing an ankh" wicca-wannabes that make me yearn for the gone days... so imagine my joy when they no longer sold Voodoo and now teach the kids to follow the path of Science (laws of physics and these "G-forces" and stuff).
Oh yeah, the sheer magic in Voodoo part was truly something spectacular back in the day. But I was thrilled when the game itself was even better than that! Ultima 7 is really, really great game, I love it even today. (And today it runs on Linux without need of that odd DOS mysticism... the magic was Mighty but also painful, which is why it's better left as an once-a-lifetime experience.)
My guess is that it's just a program that's on a data track. Windows notes there's a data track, The autorun "feature" runs whatever it tells it to run, and *boom*.
So no, it won't work if you rip it - after all, when you rip a CD, you just copy data and convert it to your format of choice, not run it.
And believe me, sane people disable autorun in Windows. I know that helped my mental health a great deal. =)
If they really meant for NWN to run on platforms other than MS, they would have used OpenGL, SDL, and maybe a little OpenAL for sound(for 3D sound, that is).
Actually, NWN already uses OpenGL for 3D, and the Linux dev folks were reportedly messing with OpenAL. In win32 DirectX is used for stuff like controllers.
How do I know? They specifically said it's OpenGL, and besides, my D3D8 setup is so screwed that if they had used D3D8, I'd be staring at "can't use 1024x768 @ 0 hz display mode" error message - but NWN works fine. =)
If you consider the entire 3rd Edition rule-set to be lite,
Heck yes. Classic D&D weighs grams, AD&D was half a kilo, 3rd Edition is a few kilograms, GURPS is a few tons. =)
(GURPS is a pretty complicated system if everything is taken into account, so we haven't played it "properly" yet. But the source books sure are cool...)
Because the game comes with the movies in the Bink format. Even if they recreated the movies in another format the people who already paid for the game would have to spend a lot of time (and bandwith) to get the new versions of the movies. I know I would prefer a simple converter script over that.
Ever tried converting a Bink movie to MPEG? You can download RAD Video Tools to convert.bik to.avi, and TMPGEnc or bbMPEG to encode the.avi to.mpg. I haven't done exactly that, but I did convert a few Smacker videos to MPEG once (Smacker is the predecessor of Bink). MPEG encoding takes a lot of time and results are not as good as in the original (well, Smacker was 256 colors only so maybe it was pretty much messed up to begin with =)
So, either you spend a lot of time converting the movies from Bink to MPEG, saving bandwidth and getting tolerable-but-not-perfect results, or a lot of time downloading newly made MPEGs, which is slow too (but often not as slow) and eats bandwidth.
Then again, the NWN cutscenes weren't that amazing. Maybe they should just make movie playback wholly optional =)
The problem is that MPEG doesn't have the same performance as BINK does. Just making the files MPEG doesn't mean that NWN-Linux will magically have the same video performance as the Windows version.
Perharps, perharps not, but we must also remember the target machines. NWN as a game already requires (says so in the box) a pretty heavy processor. P2-450MHz can decode both Bink and MPEG-1 pretty effortlessly. It also requires a fairly recent video card, so we can hope the machine has hardware video scaling. I have one game here at hand - Mechwarrior 4 - which says it requires 300MHz and it has full-screen MPEG cutscenes that play just fine...
And for what it's worth, on my machine (P3-600), NWN movie playback was extremely choppy, while VideoLan Client and MS Media Player can play MPEG and DivX movies quite effortlessly. Then again, my DirectX install is pretty much hosed, that may be a factor =)
Re:try using something that already works...
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Why not using divx and mplayer (a downsized version, of course) to play the movies?
SDL already has MPEG support... And interestingly, Myth II was a similar case: Original Myth II had (AFAIK) Smacker video files, which was the previous video codec from RAD (makers of Bink), and the solution was that Windows and Mac versions of the game used Smacker and Loki's version used MPEG.
The site was at http://www.cgi5-ebay.cc/eBayISAPIdll/signin.html. Obvious to any experienced computer user as a scam.
A sneaky semantic attack, but sorry, no cookies for the spammers... I received a few spams that had that kind of thing, except that it was about PayPal. http://www.whatever.paypal.com@longlistofstuff...
I mean, it was *very* loosely copied and they had not removed the code inserted by whatever they used to save the page with. The form used someone else's unsecured formmail.pl to send the credit card info to a Yahoo! address...
I mailed about this to the originator, ISP, the formmail's host (I think, been a while) and Yahoo, and I heard the stuff was closed... Yahoo! address was closed within the next day, I think.
Of course, some time later I got very similar message. Spammers are like mythical monsters: Cut off one head, and more heads will grow... but luckily the intelligence won't grow =)
Oh yeah, there is a plugin for winamp that lets you play songs backwards and search for satan, cthulhu, or other evils.
And the feature is also in any self-respecting sound editor, such as Audacity...
"sox" tool in *NIXes even says the sound reversing feature is specifically included for finding Satanic subliminals =)
But this stuff is so '80s. Somewhere in late '80s, when CDs were really getting hot, the fundies started listening to CDs right way around. And they could find the word "fuck" very easily and it was even printed in the lyrics!
And times keep changing. These days, it's much cooler to find hidden pictures in song spectrograms (like this one in the second track of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker single... don't know of any other examples.)
Yeah, sure it works for you. The thing is, snd-seq-oss doesn't work here. And that's the gigantic problem, because I know it'd work just fine if I only could get that loaded. Kernel log says "can't register device seq", and modprobe says "init_module: Device or resource busy". cat/dev/sequencer gives me "No such device or address", and is a character device (14,1).
It'd be thrilling to know precisely what is making which part of the sound system busy... this fails even when lsmod says there's 0 users for all snd* modules, and when snd-emu10k1-synth even says (unused).
Twisted, I say, twisted.
And the question remains: why the heck do I need to use an OSS-specific tool to load a soundfont to the ALSA driver? Why sfxload isn't bundled with the ALSA tools (even when some people say it is bundled in alsa tools, but I can't see it anywhere even in the source tarballs!) and why doesn't it use ALSA API?
Even enabling debug won't say any more about the cause of the module thing... well, at least it says "Device or resource busy" - if this would happen in Windows, the best response I'd get would probably be "Sorry, can't do that." =)
Games are more of a "gimme now" effect - usually the first version of a game released for any console does the best.
There are two kinds of games. The "gimme now" games, and the "gimme all the time" games. Personally, I prefer games that are built to stay. Not all games are.
For the games that are supposed to be one-shot art experiences, the first platform to play them on is sufficient. But for games that are supposed to be actually played and played and played endlessly, it makes sense to port the game to many platforms and buy the game for all platforms that you're playing it on.
Loki had the sense to port only the latter kinds of games.
I've played Nethack for almost as long as I have been using PCs - on DOS, Windows and Linux. I've played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri since I got the game for Windows, and was happy to buy the Linux version to enable me to play it in Linux, too. (And also because the Windows version was a budget release, Linux version was a full-price game, and this is the kind of game I really wanted to torture myself with by paying the full price =) =) And undoubtedly I'll be downloading the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights once it's out, because that's again a game that will stay around.
And yes, I'm getting Linux versions of the games precisely because excessive rebooting is excessive. The single reason I'm not an NWN addict is that I haven't bothered to reboot to Windows that often to play it =)
If only they would add decent wavetable synth support to Linux I would ditch Windows without thinking about it twice.
I already have decent wavetable MIDI synth support - it's called TiMidity++... =)
I have some odd problems with hardware (EMU10K1 == SB Live!) MIDI synthesis under ALSA 0.9, though. (I have had this problem since 0.5...)
The ALSA synth modules are loaded perfectly. (yep, snd-emu10k1-synth is up there in lsmod, real nice, and/proc/asound/card0/wavetableD1 says the thing is right there.)
I can't modprobe snd-seq-oss, though. It doesn't give any substantial information about why it fails, other than "for you idiots out there, there may be a hardware conflict, I don't know."
Worry not! pmidi supposedly plays MIDI files through ALSA, no need for compatibility layer.
But to play anything, I need to load a SoundFont to the card. Hmm.
Docs say: "Use sfxload, my friend, use sfxload! Yeah, even when it says it doesn't support Live and will only work on OSS!"
sfxload completely fails to work on ALSA.
After a long search I find a version of sfxload, modified for ALSA. Except that it's from 1999 and made for a proto-ancient version of ALSA API, so it doesn't work at all.
Bah! need to stick with timidity++ and sucky software synthesis, thank you so much...
Anyone have any ideas on how to proceed??? I have seen people being able to load soundfonts on Linux... I'm deeply envious... and please DON'T tell me to go back to the official OSS driver because OSS is a Horror from the Past. =)
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"So they did the most amazing distributed computing feat of the millennium and cracked the key", says MS. "Let's just generate another key."
Cracking 2048-bit keys is pretty hard - and I think that no matter how many computers try to crack the key, by the time that key gets cracked, the XBox platform is well obsolete. (I'm not a crypto expert. Was it before or after the universe was said to collapse?)
DVDs were cracked because they invented their own algorithm that used too short keys. MS has picked good, proven crypto algorithms (RC4 and RSA) with absurdly long keys, which means they won't be cracked as easily. Palladium will undoubtedly be based on such state-of-the-art algorithms; there's really nothing left in Palladium to "tune".
And as for "tuning", cryptography algorithms are not "tuned". Cryptography if anything is a black art in the grimmest sense of the word - If you don't know what you're doing, you'd better stick to the proven algorithms, and the algorithm isn't proven until it stands decades of analysis. You just don't invent a cipher and be done with it.
*cough* Emacs *cough* ... some interesting support. If it does Mayan calendar, it has to be good. Too bad it doesn't do what 'ddate' does. =)
Yeah, I have been using Linux long time and Windows mostly for games - and a few years ago, I got a faster machine and a TV card for video captures, but later I found out that the video editing in Linux Just Isn't There Yet, while in Win98SE it's very much doable. A bit ago I found a program that captures video off the card and does not drop most of the frames and keeps audio almost in synch. Then the editing app...? Cinelerra is clumsy and doesn't know a thing - Every time I tried to open a file to it, it either crashed or said it has no idea about the format.
I hope gstreamer stabilizes soon - once gstreamer is done, the video framework on free *NIX world will be a reality. But until then, there just isn't any nice programs to mess with, and I have to consider VirtualDub the Video Editor Built For My Use... =/
Yep. And I've noted advertising the popup killing / image blocking features often raises interest in the program immediately. =)
One thing is to sneak the browser in while doing "maintenance" and if anyone asks anything, say "the Internet" starts by clicking on the "Mozilla" icon, but otherwise it's more or less the same. When my father's computer had a severe case of Hosed Win98itis, I reinstalled the thing and also installed Mozilla. I asked a while ago how it worked. "Oh, just fine", was the reply. =)
And I was also surprised that on my mother's computer - a P166 with Debian - Galeon actually feels at times much faster than Netscape 4! Even Mozilla raw was tolerable enough, just took an ungodly time to start (a couple of minutes).
How many times I've been thinking "Oh, people are again Tuning with some expensive and clumsy programs, if they would have been using *NIX this would have been a lot easier." ... well, in this case, they actually did the Obvious Thing: used dd to copy image of a drive. =)
"If I had been making an image of the disk, I would have used dd... oh, wait, they used dd. Never mind."
But yes, still hardly newsworthy.
Actually, the game isn't that scary. Previously, I had heard of this game for 2600 that was so horrible that no one bought it and they buried the rest in some desert. That sounded pretty bad... About an year ago, the curiosity finally won and I downloaded the ROM and tried it. It was horrible, yes, but it didn't felt that horrible.
I think ET serves best as a scary story. Actually playing the game kills the illusion =)
You know, I just started getting my sister interested in Real Games, and I started with nothing else but my copy of Classic D&D (I have this boxed set from 1991...) and there is a rule that goes like "if you get loads of XP per session, the total can't be more than x-1, where x is the xp required for advancing from the next level up - that is, advance only one level per session".
I remember that when I DMed the games first time in 1994 or so, finding this rule was nice. In our introductory adventure, our intrepid heroes found loads and loads of gold, and getting *both of them* up from level 1 to level 6 would have meant that they missed a lot of nice "basic set" adventures. I only had one old gigantic "expert" ruleset adventure module (X1 Isle of Dread) and felt like arranging it would be a big headache for me, so it was nice that I could cap them at level 2 and let 'em play B7 Rahasia instead =)
Since I'm a poor student with only a recently sparked interest in D6amp;D 3rd Edition (I hear they actually produced a role playing game this time! =) I don't know if the modern rules have this feature.
Oh, but I'd pay them if they'd stop prouducing games with "year" versions. I don't want to buy a football game that's built to last for an year or supported beyond that. I'm not a sports person, but would like to play football on computer every now and then... next time may be near.
Where is the Generic, Customizable Soccer Game??? =) No yearly upgrades - just random names and customizable players. No "hit the button and it's a GOAAAAAL" style playability - make playing the game a damn science. How about multiplayer - the net game side doesn't seem too wide in EA's games? Many companies make great soccer games for Playstation and like, but I have a computer, and for computers, there's only EA Sports.
Internation Soccer published by Commodore in 1982 has stood the test of time and it's name hath been engraved in gold letters to the History... Where's the PC's answer to that, may I ask?
Columnist Niko Nirvi in Finnish game mag Pelit described this kind of games as "burger games", which is pretty accurate - Junk food, indeed! The strange thing is, he's an experienced game journalist and been ranting about the death of innovation and How Going To The Stock Market Tends To Kill Creativity (A quote from a good column in Pelit 9/2000, "Any company that is involved in creative activity, but that summarizes its goal with the always popular slogan 'the only purpose of the company is to bring profit for the shareholders', is going down."), but there has been very little reaction until recently. Must have published the stuff in a too small country and in wrong language. =)
Personally, none. A few sticks (cheap Spectravideo sticks) I have are *feeling* like they'd be falling apart any time soon, but my Suncom TAC-2 is still as good as new. It's indestructible. It cannot fail. It cannot be harmed. Its connectors are pure simplicity. It is the sole undefeated champion of the joystick world.
Leaf switches snap on the first week. Microswitches die after decades. TAC-2 is solid like a rock.
Umph... of the Infocom games, I have Zork II, Zork III and Suspended for Commodore 64. Bought them ages ago. Never figured out why Zork I was sold out and people paid ridiculous prices for it for - I got these for (I think) 50 mk (uh, about 8 euros?) each, and this was early 1990s for Christ's sake. I mean, if it was a hugely popular and a well known game, surely they produced large amount of them? =)
And surely the originals can't be that sought after if only some years ago I could buy a big collection with almost all of the Infocom games, and Activision used to even give Zork series free from their web page?
(Speaking of Zorkish puzzle games, I need to finish Zork Nemesis some day...)
Actually, this all doesn't matter. People whine about "standards incompatibilities" because they can't get DHTML working cross-platform. So, every sane web designer don't use DHTML. The web is no longer about technology race or feature race. The HTML is stabilizing, the CSS is stabilizing.
Now, only browser features matter. And in this area, Mozilla wins. Mozilla is a better browser feature-wise. As far as HTML and CSS go, they work on both. Bleah.
Every well disciplined web designer knows that the Web was supposed to be browser-independent and techniques that depend on browser "features" (such as DHTML/Javascript) are not to be used. Everyone knows that if you're making a website for general audience, it should not depend on particular browser version - because if you do that, it's a maintenance mightmare and users will complain.
Most serious corporate web sites are thrilled enough to use Javascript for link rollovers. Wow. And in my opinion, that's as far as "bleeding edge technologies" should go.
And they called it the "Voodoo memory manager". And the kids these days, they just throw the Voodoos in their computers and it *automatically* installs the drivers with a few mouse clicks! Back in the DOS, Voodoo really meant Dark Arts! It's this damn commercialization of mysticism and magic and these "look, I'm wearing an ankh" wicca-wannabes that make me yearn for the gone days... so imagine my joy when they no longer sold Voodoo and now teach the kids to follow the path of Science (laws of physics and these "G-forces" and stuff).
Oh yeah, the sheer magic in Voodoo part was truly something spectacular back in the day. But I was thrilled when the game itself was even better than that! Ultima 7 is really, really great game, I love it even today. (And today it runs on Linux without need of that odd DOS mysticism... the magic was Mighty but also painful, which is why it's better left as an once-a-lifetime experience.)
My guess is that it's just a program that's on a data track. Windows notes there's a data track, The autorun "feature" runs whatever it tells it to run, and *boom*.
So no, it won't work if you rip it - after all, when you rip a CD, you just copy data and convert it to your format of choice, not run it.
And believe me, sane people disable autorun in Windows. I know that helped my mental health a great deal. =)
Actually, NWN already uses OpenGL for 3D, and the Linux dev folks were reportedly messing with OpenAL. In win32 DirectX is used for stuff like controllers.
How do I know? They specifically said it's OpenGL, and besides, my D3D8 setup is so screwed that if they had used D3D8, I'd be staring at "can't use 1024x768 @ 0 hz display mode" error message - but NWN works fine. =)
Heck yes. Classic D&D weighs grams, AD&D was half a kilo, 3rd Edition is a few kilograms, GURPS is a few tons. =)
(GURPS is a pretty complicated system if everything is taken into account, so we haven't played it "properly" yet. But the source books sure are cool...)
Ever tried converting a Bink movie to MPEG? You can download RAD Video Tools to convert .bik to .avi, and TMPGEnc or bbMPEG to encode the .avi to .mpg. I haven't done exactly that, but I did convert a few Smacker videos to MPEG once (Smacker is the predecessor of Bink). MPEG encoding takes a lot of time and results are not as good as in the original (well, Smacker was 256 colors only so maybe it was pretty much messed up to begin with =)
So, either you spend a lot of time converting the movies from Bink to MPEG, saving bandwidth and getting tolerable-but-not-perfect results, or a lot of time downloading newly made MPEGs, which is slow too (but often not as slow) and eats bandwidth.
Then again, the NWN cutscenes weren't that amazing. Maybe they should just make movie playback wholly optional =)
Perharps, perharps not, but we must also remember the target machines. NWN as a game already requires (says so in the box) a pretty heavy processor. P2-450MHz can decode both Bink and MPEG-1 pretty effortlessly. It also requires a fairly recent video card, so we can hope the machine has hardware video scaling. I have one game here at hand - Mechwarrior 4 - which says it requires 300MHz and it has full-screen MPEG cutscenes that play just fine...
And for what it's worth, on my machine (P3-600), NWN movie playback was extremely choppy, while VideoLan Client and MS Media Player can play MPEG and DivX movies quite effortlessly. Then again, my DirectX install is pretty much hosed, that may be a factor =)
SDL already has MPEG support... And interestingly, Myth II was a similar case: Original Myth II had (AFAIK) Smacker video files, which was the previous video codec from RAD (makers of Bink), and the solution was that Windows and Mac versions of the game used Smacker and Loki's version used MPEG.
A sneaky semantic attack, but sorry, no cookies for the spammers... I received a few spams that had that kind of thing, except that it was about PayPal. http://www.whatever.paypal.com@longlistofstuff... I mean, it was *very* loosely copied and they had not removed the code inserted by whatever they used to save the page with. The form used someone else's unsecured formmail.pl to send the credit card info to a Yahoo! address...
I mailed about this to the originator, ISP, the formmail's host (I think, been a while) and Yahoo, and I heard the stuff was closed... Yahoo! address was closed within the next day, I think.
Of course, some time later I got very similar message. Spammers are like mythical monsters: Cut off one head, and more heads will grow... but luckily the intelligence won't grow =)
Until they fix the camera angle in EQ (and remove the monthly fees while they're at it) I'm sticking with NWN. =)
And the feature is also in any self-respecting sound editor, such as Audacity...
"sox" tool in *NIXes even says the sound reversing feature is specifically included for finding Satanic subliminals =)
But this stuff is so '80s. Somewhere in late '80s, when CDs were really getting hot, the fundies started listening to CDs right way around. And they could find the word "fuck" very easily and it was even printed in the lyrics!
And times keep changing. These days, it's much cooler to find hidden pictures in song spectrograms (like this one in the second track of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker single... don't know of any other examples.)
Yeah, sure it works for you. The thing is, snd-seq-oss doesn't work here. And that's the gigantic problem, because I know it'd work just fine if I only could get that loaded. Kernel log says "can't register device seq", and modprobe says "init_module: Device or resource busy". cat /dev/sequencer gives me "No such device or address", and is a character device (14,1).
It'd be thrilling to know precisely what is making which part of the sound system busy... this fails even when lsmod says there's 0 users for all snd* modules, and when snd-emu10k1-synth even says (unused).
Twisted, I say, twisted.
And the question remains: why the heck do I need to use an OSS-specific tool to load a soundfont to the ALSA driver? Why sfxload isn't bundled with the ALSA tools (even when some people say it is bundled in alsa tools, but I can't see it anywhere even in the source tarballs!) and why doesn't it use ALSA API?
Even enabling debug won't say any more about the cause of the module thing... well, at least it says "Device or resource busy" - if this would happen in Windows, the best response I'd get would probably be "Sorry, can't do that." =)
There are two kinds of games. The "gimme now" games, and the "gimme all the time" games. Personally, I prefer games that are built to stay. Not all games are.
For the games that are supposed to be one-shot art experiences, the first platform to play them on is sufficient. But for games that are supposed to be actually played and played and played endlessly, it makes sense to port the game to many platforms and buy the game for all platforms that you're playing it on.
Loki had the sense to port only the latter kinds of games.
I've played Nethack for almost as long as I have been using PCs - on DOS, Windows and Linux. I've played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri since I got the game for Windows, and was happy to buy the Linux version to enable me to play it in Linux, too. (And also because the Windows version was a budget release, Linux version was a full-price game, and this is the kind of game I really wanted to torture myself with by paying the full price =) =) And undoubtedly I'll be downloading the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights once it's out, because that's again a game that will stay around.
And yes, I'm getting Linux versions of the games precisely because excessive rebooting is excessive. The single reason I'm not an NWN addict is that I haven't bothered to reboot to Windows that often to play it =)
I already have decent wavetable MIDI synth support - it's called TiMidity++... =)
I have some odd problems with hardware (EMU10K1 == SB Live!) MIDI synthesis under ALSA 0.9, though. (I have had this problem since 0.5...)
Anyone have any ideas on how to proceed??? I have seen people being able to load soundfonts on Linux... I'm deeply envious... and please DON'T tell me to go back to the official OSS driver because OSS is a Horror from the Past. =)