It's bascially capture the flag but also has player classes (Support, Engineer, Sniper, Heavy Weapons, etc) to encorage co-operative team play. The player classes were the most significant element IMO. There were also other level varients with things like multiple points to hold, as in BF1942 or BFVietnam.
It was somewhat 'superceeded' (not exactly, but in the eyes of many players) by the likes of Tribes (to which many TFC players jumped). I mention this as in many ways, the closest thing to a modern version of TFC these days is SOE's PlanetSide, whos lead developer worked on Tribes 2, and indeed a lot of ex TFC players play PS.
One thing I've found that it runs fairly slowly. I'm running 800x600 on a P4 1.7 with a Geforce Ti500 and 512mb of RAM and on some of the new maps there is slowdown - there really shouldn't be.
This isn't intended as a flame, but I would yes you should expect slow down on your system, even at that low resolution. I want a sophisticed engine in my PC FPS games. I don't expect games to stay stuck looking like 4 year old titles, that means they need to take advantage and embrace new hardware.
Now I haven't tried the game yet (I will likely to do tonight, as it's easy to purchase and doesn't involve a trip to a store, even if I think it looks disappointing and not like something that will hold my interest) and so I don't want to pre-judge the performance too much as I can't see just what it's rendering but I don't expect it to be a worse engine than the origional.
I am already put off by CS:CZ as it is because it looks so crue and dated compared to games like Far Cry, Crome and BF:Vietnam. It seems they are catering to the lowest common denominator with this incremental upgrade, and that the preference to much older hardware is bad enough as it is.
I understand that many people have other commitments like family, or expensive hobbies which take up most of their resources and they do not feel like spending much money on their money on a computer system, but at the same time many of these same people reguard themselves as commited gamers dispite having very outdated setups incapable of running modern games a decent speeds.
Many of us us who have invested in decent systems are sick and tired of technology being held back by users on 3/4 year old graphics cards, 2,3 or even 4 year old CPU's and very low amounts of memory due to their own tightness and entirely unrealistic expectations.
I am able to play all my games in 32 bit @ 1600x1200 or higher with 4xFSAA, or in some cases I drop the resolution to 1280x1024 for the most demanding and brand-new titles like Far Cry (though the Far Cry beta performed a lot better at 1600x1200 than the demo does for some reason). I would just hate to play at 800x600 on a PC, the jagged edges and low resolution would drive me to distraction
I don't have a cutting edge and costly P4 3.4 Ghz 'Extreme' or a 64 Bit AMD CPU, nor do I have a 'cutting edge' Radeon XT series card. ALl these are very exenspive, I'm not advocating people break the bank and go for broke, just upgrade reasonably and try to keep realistic expectations of performance.
I have a P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, Radon 9800 Pro 256 MB, 160 GB SATA RAID0, and before that it was an AMD 3200+, 1 GB RAM and Radeon 9700 128 MB with SATA, just to emphasise that system is a year old and I've given the parts away or put them in my work system to make my GL screen savers prettier under X and dispite that according the Value Survey most systems arn't even close to that, which is appaling IMO.
According the Value Survey a typical PC looks like this:
Resolution: 1024x768 16 bit Graphics card: Nvida GeForce 4 Series CPU: 1.8 Ghz Memory: 256MB-512MB
I think that's very poor. I didn't by that system as new year ago, so why are people still expecting new games to preform well on it today? I for one, to not wish to see the development of new technology stand still just so cheap individuals can play the very latest titles on PC's 2 or 3 years old without upgrading a single component. It's one thing to want to continue to use a system that's a few years old, it's another to have the expectation that the latest games will still run well on it.
Cheap 1.8 Ghz CPUs where kicking around in the Autumn of 2002, and the GeForce 4 hit the selves in early 2002 (and would have been released in 2001 but were only deliberately held back due to strong on going sales for the GeForce 3 series).
It's not expensive to keep your system upgraded every 12 months - by which I mean it's within the budget of even a college
CS, UT2003, UT2004, BF1942 and BF:Vietnam are all full of abusive, team killing, selfish morons who don't know how the play the game and appear to have a collective IQ lower than a squirrel's. The 'communities' in MMOGs are generally full of great people, but the number of repeadly abusive and purile kids is a number one thing that turns me off and had lead to me cancelling my subscription for MMOGs.
Just last night I was playing Battlefield Vietnam, which, apart from the retarded menu system, and a bug which causes you to die randomly and inexplicably when falling from short heights, is a very good game to actually play on line. At least in theory. I've been playing it for a few days, as an example of how thing go, I played two sessions each on different servers last night, this is how it went:
Server 1:
Had Team Killers runing up behind players and stabbing them firing rockets at them and generally runing the game. 3 of the players had negative kills scores, this later went up to 4 as a large number of people resorted to hunting and killing the TKers rather than playing the game (which is understandable, given how distruptive they were being). They would constantly log on and off and change names and teams so you wouldn't know if you could trust the person next to you not to turn round and kill you, or if the 'friendly' tank or helicopter instead of escorting you was going to suddenly open fire on you.
I eventually got fed up of this and found another server...
Server 2:
The player teams were constantly hugely uneaven, making victory impossible for the other team (given the nature of the game). At one point, it was 2 vrs 10 (after being like this for over a minute, that was the point I quit). I changed sides 8 times trying to keep it even, but moronic players would constantly join the server and pick the winning side, which ever side that was, it didn't matter to them, they would just pick that side making the game pointless for the already overwhelmed team. They would all refuse to change teams themselves, while asking each other to change.
So, I'd much rather play with bots and avoid the purile and abusive 'smack talk' from kids (who accuse you of 'cheating' and 'being a n00b' because you used a particular weapon to kill them with, and saying some weapons are, for whatever mystical reason 'out of bounds' and 'unfair').
Sadly, as has been already observed by other players, bots are pathetic and useless in all the EA Battlefield series. They don't understand the point of the game, don't capture points or hold them (instead drive right past them), can't drive vehicles or helicopers (they just crash them in to obstacles and run aircraft into the ground, for reasons not obvious). They also don't follow orders (dispite claims to the contrary by the blurb from EA) and are eager to take any and every vehicle going first, even though they will more than likely just drive it into a wall - or even an open space - and sit there in it (I've seen this on all difficulty levels). When playing with bots its always wise to shoot them first, then take the vehicle for yourself.
To make it even more frustrating, they don't seem to suffer from not being able to see you because your hidden in cover (I would guess they 'see' you reguardless due the the feeble 'AI'), which further ruins the atmosphere, given that a large part of this game relies on finding good cover.
Given this and the pathetically few number of levels in Battlefield Vietnam (made all the more repetative as many of them are just slightly different versions of other maps) I feel it's a rip off for what you are charged, and is worth no more than 20 USD/ 15 UKP for the content you get. It may have lots of new shiney shader effects (and it does look good and the gameplay is fun) but the shameful level of the bots and the few number of levels are appaling. This is epecially true given that in singe player games you'd have twice as many unique levels, with hand placed and well balanced enemies
>You can work out how much of that goes to the government if you want to, but that's hardly a major concern when you make a purchase.
If you're wealthy, perhaps not.
An individuals financial circumstances makes no difference to whether they care about how much VAT there is on a specific purchase when they at the cash point. At that moment they care about the total price they are going to pay, as the previous poster said.
They already know the amount is charged at 17.5% in the UK (or a rather high 25% if your in Ireland, for example). As it's a flat national percentage rate, the amount on any item is hardly going to change anyones mind about making a specific purchase, all they care about is if they can afford the total cost of the item (and as a consumer I think a system whereby the VAT inclusive price must be most prominantly displayed by law is eminently more preferable).
VAT revenue goes to pay the fatcats in Brussels, not the state government.
That is incorrect. While a portion of VAT revenue from all European member states goes to fund the European Commision a substantial amount of government revenue comes from collection of VAT on consumer goods.
It was often used to denote a pound as in a unit of mesurement for weight and used to be used in the UK (e.g. in butchers or grocers stores) until EU legislation required that the primary unit of mesurement for goods be metric, so ensure some level of practical conformity across EU member states.
I had thought the pound sign was still used in this way in the US (though perhaps not frequently, probably more commonly used in more traditional grocers and rural areas).
The draw distance is set very low by default. If your machine can handle it, turn it up all the way... it makes a huge difference in the way the world looks. I can see the Coronet starport across the ocean from my house, about 2km away. Forests actually look like forests, not a constantly spawning bunch of 4 trees around you.
I know what you mean, it's not the draw distance that's the problem though. NPC buildings appear from way in the distance (so cities, starports etc are just fine). Even certain player placed structures (Rebel/Imperial bases, Turrets, Cantinas, Player City Shuttle Ports) seem to have a different metric or system for being drawn. Not as well as perminant, non player placed structures, but enough not to be hugely annoying (they always appear first and seem last to be removed from the field of view compared to other player places structures).
For some reason it's specifically player structures like houses (of any size), mining equipment, factories, warehouses, etc. that seem to have the problem, and it happens for everybody as far as I've seen. And it's far worse on busy planets (say Tatooine, where I find it unbearable) that it is on quieter places, like LOK, where the engine is still obviously poor at handling it, but the servers seem less loaded so they provided you with the information your client needs, when you need it.
As I say these are my system specs:
P4 3.2 Ghz w/ HyperThreading 2 GB RAM (DDR400/PC3200) Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB 160 GB SATA RAID 0
(XP SP1 as the OS).
I play on a dedicated 2 MB Business DSL connection.
The engine is simply very badly written. It should be caching the location of all these buildings at all time (and just checking to see if they need to be removed when I get within a given distance and then removing them). When I look out over a player city with some 60+ structures just 200 feet away, the desert littered with structures into the distance as far as I can see, I shouldn't see simply unpopulated desert all around me.
I would find myself often on my mount or speeder bike roaming the the desert and bumping into to mines or factories out in remote locations as they appeared just a few feet in front of me. And of course then their are the hostile NPCs, a huge problem is traveling across any area on foot or on a mount and suddenly 6 Tuskan Raiders appear all around you.
At least with a busy server and dynamic NPC spawns this is remotely technically understandable, unlike the purely badly coded situation with structures, which don't get up and walk around and which are perfectly straight forward to track the location of (another way of doing it, for example, would be to provide a list of all structures at on entry to planet, which would still be a very small update (likely to be 100Kb compressed), and then just supply a diff each time they log on subsequently (2/3K) and then the client would know what to draw where and not have to drawn them 'on the fly' (though it could still check for updates 'on the fly' and _remove_ any buildings that were not supposed to be there, if you get within something approaching a visible radious).
Yes and I would add that not only do players do this, they they have multiple accounts and use 3rd party software to do it.
For example, I know two players IRL with multiple accounts, one with 4 accounts, another with 2. Both use software (e.g. Visual Basic tools) to simulate mouse clicks to 'train' characters while they are AFK, even at work (they can use VNC to check on them from time to time). They have multiple accounts because of the limitations on the number of skill points an individual character can have, and because it's so hard to find someone you want with the skill you need to team with, even at peak time. It's also a lot easier to make money in game when you are your own little production firm.
This is what the Jedi's, and those seriously chasing the unlocking of the 'Force Sensitive Slot' are doing. In fairness, it's actually the only sensible way to progress in the game, because it's such a tedious grind.
I just think, to hell with that, if I want to do that I'll spend my time writing productive, open source software, or writing battle bot scripts. I don't want to write Visual Basic scripts to play an RPG for me! It's certainly not what SWG is billed as. It's certainly not an RPG in any classically understood sense of the word. As an RPG, it's the single WORST RPG I have ever played.
It's as if someone had written a text based MUD, and all the items were so expensive, and levelling was so difficult, the only way to progress and keep up was to write a shell script to play it for you (go north until you find a troll, kill troll, retreat/use health vial if damaged, repeat). Now that can be fun in itself, but that's hardly the game it's been billed as at any point, but that's exactly what it is, and exactly what you need to do to stay even remotely competative with market prices and in Player V Player combat.
I don't think the development team have any idea how much this game is completely dominated by the behavior of power players, they don't know, or they don't care because it means players either have multiple accounts and are power players, thus earning them lots of money, or they have one account, but find it so hard to progress they are subscribed for months before they can start to get on their feet. I would be they know this is a formula which works with EQ and they have no interest in creating a 'game' in the traditional sense.
The only massively multiplayer title that SOE have that's remotely close to a modern game is the FPS game PlanetSide (and that's got it's problems atm).
I think every man and his dog is currently looking forward to World of Warcraft and hoping they get it right (they've started with a good engine, the Unreal Engine, which is a great first move). It's a shame, I _really_ wanted to play a multiplayer Star Wars RPG like the single player KoTOR. SWG certainly has the content, but not the engine or the gameplay.
Yes that's *exactly* it, and it's powergamer heaven, but dire from a gameplay perspective.
Only, you have to do other similarly tedious stuff to make money to get enough raw material or go and collect small amounts of it yourself (this would be fun and immersive, if it didn't also involve quite so much grinding in itself IMO).
I think the game has an amazing wealth of content and huge potentional, but over reliance on mission terminals has runined the game and it's not an RPG in any traditional sense IMO. You can to 'tasks' for people within the game world rather than missions, but the rewards are pitiful, often less than the cost of your transport to complete the missions themselves, and there is no visble concept of like/dislike amoung the individual NPC's (it's not like say Morrowind, or EVE, where you can visibly work you way up a social ladder), this makes doing NPC missions pointless (unless they are for a specificly intertesting 'faction' like Jabbas people, which lets you in to Jabbas Palace, something actually worth the effort).
The lack of immersive gameplay, the grinding and the very broken economy have just driven me away from it after 6 months or so.
I would also say that one of the most annoying things for me personally is graphics engine and the number of related bugs (much less than before, but still irrating). The engine is very flawed and the terrain distorts constantly as you move across it and player buildings pop in and out at very short distance (though NPC buildings are fine, it's just an issue with fetching/caching player placed buildings and structures). This may seem like a small issue, and I'm not sure how much it bothers other players, but when you know there is a HUGE player city just 100 yards away but it's not appearing ruined any immersion for me. Popup in games was something I thought went out with the PS One, though in the case of SWG it's not because of draw distance, but poor coding and a laggy server that can't send updates to your client fast enough (the problem is most noticeable on very heavily player populated worlds, and less of an issue on very sparse worlds). On that note, I've got a P4 3.2 Ghz, 2.0 GB DDR400, Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB, 160 GB SATA RAID 0, and it's performance was _still_ quite poor (while incomparison I get a quite insane 300+ FPS from games like Unreal Tournament).
I would have waited for other issues to be addressed if they had fixed this, but knowing they were happy to ship it with a fundamentally broken engine, I have no faith in them to fix it later. That's such a core part of the game, that a games release should not be considered until that's working well.
On a related note:
I've been playing EVE recently and though it doesn't have anywhere near the sheer depth of content it's a vastly more playable game. The economy works. It's easy to level up, it's easy to make money. NPC's monitor your standings. PvP is open and can occur anywhere (which puts a limit on 13 year olds talking smack but refusing to click 'Dual' and take you on), but new players arnt in real danger because of the NPC security forces in secure systems keep people in line (unless you really piss someone off so much they decide it's worth the dip in security rating). All in all it's really well designed for players, and the galaxy certainly is huge, I just hope they can add the content to keep it entertaining.
It has it's bugs and it's not perfect, and I do think that the lack of deep content means that the Player v. Player focus of the gameplay could get stale quite quickly (after you bought a huge Battleship, and worked out the best PvP tactics all that's left is the inter corporation/clan warfare, which is something a lot of players don't care for) but SWG could learn a lot about how to run an economy and provide an immersive and meaningful NPC/player relationship experience. I would also say that EVE has the best skills system of any game I've ever played.
Much like Halo, I'm sure the presenence of co-op on the X-Box but not on the PC is because with the X-Box it will be split screen multiplayer not network co-op play in any form. Obviously PC's arnt well suited to split screen co-op and this feature doesn't really have a place on the PC (and it's more than a 'bit' cramped on TV screen in any case), so it's been omitted from the PC port.
Network co-op play (on PC or console), which is a far more enjoyable and practical from a gameplay point of view, just hasn't been implimented. I'm disappointed that network co-op wasn't in the PC version of Halo (on the maximum difficulty level that could really have been a lot of fun).
(That's just to clear up people asking why it's on the X-Box but not the PC, and because it's relevent to comments below...).
I would cite an outstanding example of a multiplayer co-operative game as proof that it can be fun when in done well: Aliens Total Conversion (for the Doom engine). It was a superb co-operative multiplayer game IMO (better than the origional Doom for co-op play IMO), very atmospheric and much more fun to play in a team that just solo (especially on the Nightmare level).
I too am surprised that split-screen co-op is even being considered for the console though. Nothing I've seen of Doom 3 makes me thing it would be suited to it (both Aliens TC and the origional Doom, on the other hand, had large open areas, and/or areas where you could be in more than once place at once and still be progressing through the level, so you wern't triping over each other all the time).
Dooms 3's apparent tight maps consisting of many cramped spaces, with sparely and strategically populated levels (which I am expecting to be pretty linear in layout) strike me as being particularly ill suited to co-op. I'd have thought that if you had more than one player in the map they'd be just catching each other with friendly fire and getting in each others way (and I think that would be all the more likely if you have to play split screen on the same TV, on a low resolution display, in dark/dimily lit levels).
Yeah your right about The Getaway, what a terrible waste of time. I could see that gameplay was going to be a stinker from the start though (from the very first interviews it's clear they had no compelling gameplay-focused direction). I've been wondering about that since the games release. Granted it's not the best version ever (the version in MSR/Gotham Racing was far better IMO), but surely the companies who develop these games would want to sell the map data to other developers?
I mean it's a hell of a lot of work to build these maps and I can see it could be worth it if your going to hang on to them to release in future games (as MSR (origional title on the Dreamcast) has done with Gotham Racing 1 & 2), but with a title like The Getaway, if they don't plan on re-using and/or selling the map data, I think a manager on the project should be asking themselves why they want to go to so much bother to create a large urban environment modeled on a real life city. Surely it would be lot easier to just have an entirely fabricated layout that just had a similar feel to the city it's intended to represent (ala the GTA or Driver series).
I've actually recognised parts of New York and San Fransico and London from games and used them for navigation in these cities (specifically on the maps I'd played in MSR/Gotham Racing/which although they have been altered slightly to allow greater playbility, are otherwise excellent representations). I also recognised a few of the more well known areas of Toyko in the recent Bill Murray film Lost in Translation, because I'd seen at least two or three of the locations in MSR. I live in London and certainly think these maps are realistic, and it would be great to have access to them in other games genres (Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 style single player games, Counter Stike style multiplayer games, GTA/Driver style games, even old fashioned RPG/point and click adventure games) and of course I'm sure they could be useful for other recreational purposes such as tourism and even local planning authorities might have an interest (the police too very possibly, for practicing crowd control, crime prevention, courter-terrorist scenarios, etc).
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a company took take up making and maintaining maps of the central areas of large ubran cities with a view to reselling the data for just these purposes, though I think they'd need to have other primary sources of income too, as it's hard to see their being enough money in it in the short or even medium term. I expect that if a corporation doesn't a comminuty effort would though. It would probably be a lot easier for a community effort to provide up to date images for accurate textures too (something that's very easy for anyone with even a cheap digital camera), and to report recent changes, even provide photographs of streets to help mappers in expanding the maps (as obviously existing physical maps alone don't give nearly enough information).
Re:Bad form to reply to one's own posts, but...
on
Voice Of The Fire
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There is a God - the one in the Bible - fear and believe Him and you will be saved on Judgement Day.
Just to be clear, which Bible are we talking about here (and when exactly is Judgement Day, just so I don't cross book with a hair appointment)?
I get confused as there are so many contradictory editions and interpretations and I don't know which one is right one, if you could tell me definitively I'd be ever so greatful!
There is a God - the one in the Bible - fear and believe Him and you will be saved on Judgement Day.
Rather than continue to cower in fear from this tyrant, my plan is to overthrow God with my large and formidable army of Dragon riding battle Gnomes, who will assist me in installing a secular govener of the Universe, as is fit for the 21st centry. There will be a transational government made up of representatives from the UN until such time as a suitable canidate can be found.
Ultimately, we intend to capture him alive and take him to The International Court of Justice in the Hague to face the charges of the many human rights and war crimes violations that have been levelled against him over the course of last 2000 years.
Though I wish it were so I don't think this is what's like to happen (certainly not any time in the next few decades). If this approached worked as well in practice as it did in principle all the software we would use would be done using very high level tools (that is everyone would use Visual Basic for development of all Window applications). I think the specific requirements of each time of game will mean that developers will need fined grained access to tweak and alter the behavior at a low level.
I that in truth specific requirements mean that developers will continue to hammer out their own engines, I do agree that there will be consolidation in this - I think we'll see more an more people use 'off the shelf' 3D licences like Epic's Unreal engine (and ultimately, free open source equivolents) and I think those engines will either develop a net code base of their own suitble for a MM environment, or companies will set a netcode client & server engine which plugs in to a client side graphics engine (in the same way that some companies specialise in selling physics engines for games).
I can't see much in they way of a 'standard' being developed as it's not actually particularly nesseary for different games to talk to each other (the most they would need to do is talk to a central database to access a players auth details and profile, which is very straight forward). I think games will continue to be developed in the way SOE have done with EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies and PlanetSide - where they _appear_ to share code bases/ideas to some extent (there are certainly quite a few common elements between the games and almost certainly between the servers I should think), but the developers have actually built their own unique products on top of those ideas.
While of course it's certainly possible to build an extensible system that allowed fine granied control, the same practicle issues that have fragmented other systems over the years - from 3D libraries (Direct X, Open GL) to desktop display systems (Display PDF/PS, Windows/Direct Draw, the X Windowing System, etc) - will mean we are likely to just bumble on as before for quite some time IMO.
I can see us having a singular environment with my life time, but I would think we would need to at least all agree on a common standard for 3D rendering first, and a common (but customisable) physics engine to use, and a common client netcode model and world server engine. I think that this means practically this software would have to come from the open source community (or at least the standards would have to come from an independant body, like the W3C, just to give an example of the type of organisation), and wouldn't expect to see this sort of technology around and publically avalible for 20 years or so at best (HHOS: look how long we've had the X Window System and it _still_ isn't as good as NeXT's origional Display Postscript (no flame intended) and we are _still_ fighting over what do to about it).
I'd also disagree that small/niche worlds would be viable, as not only does it take a massive amount of work to create unique content for a game but critically you need quite a volume of players to keep a game feeling interesting and to feel anything other than barren and empty. If you have a large world then it takes a lot of players to do this (and of course, if you have a small world, then players will get board easily). I do realise this point is blown away somewhat in that there a _lot_ of older games out their with a small userbase that have been ticking over for many years now, but I think that's due to a rather special type of user and I don't think many people would be happy with smaller communities like that (but then again, I maybe wrong?). I find judging what other people like harder than judging what I think is likely to happen technologically:-)
Does anyone know any companies that specialise in providing terran / environment generation systems? I think something with the power of Sim City 3000's
Amen to this. Other than that, it's a really nice concept, but I can't belive other people are overlooking this, maybe it is a UK only thing.
This frequently annoys me - it does this all the time (and I've had it for 4 years). I have no idea how that got passed any sort of quality control. It just point blank frequently ignores what direction you press in and very often sends what's interpreted as two presses when you only pressed once.
On the same topic, the new iPods annoy me too. I vastly prefer the old interface on my origional 5 GB iPod - the tactile buttons are far superior to the new ones I feel (you can no longer feel around for the buttons in your pocket, like you could with the origional design - if you try this on a 'new' iPod it invariably results in you jumping to the next or previous track).
That's a very good point. It's amazing how many developers do make games for PCs, considering how much revenue they can get for console games, and people do seem to forget that.
Even an X-Box only title can easily sell more copies than a Windows PC title, and it's no harder to make games for the X-Box than for a PC (and it many ways, it's easier, though I'm not sure I'd say the same about doing a PS2 title).
ID, for example, have said they fully expect to make far more money from console version of Doom 3 than the desktop PC version (even though the desktop PC version will be far superior due to having better interface options and support for vastly better quality high resolution anti-aliased graphics).
The Macintosh platform has had this problem for years, and I would say the Linux marketshare is going to have to approximately double or even quadruple for it to really start showing up on developers radars (though I think Epic's work in providing a Linux and a Macintosh client for their excellent and much licensed engine is a great help in showing that's it's possible).
No, what we need is more programmers, more contributing powerusers, more people willing to understand the importance of the Free Software model. We need quality, not quantity. Quantity is just a bonus.
We welcome the normal users but saying that we need them is going too far...
I think the point the poster is making that without a larger user base it's going to be a lot harder to attract those who will contribute and ultimately improve what we have.
I think many people would disagree with you and and have different 'views' on what Linux needs, I certainly would not agree it 'does not need users'.
If it did not have a user base as large as it does, many of those who develop for Linux would instead have developed for other platforms, such as FreeBSD, and Linux would be a very minority operating system (as opposed just a miniority operating system) without the software they have contributed (GIMP, Gnome, KDE, Abiword, Gnumeric, and other more fundamental programs and libraries that came before them).
If you want to propigate Free Software and understand it's importance I'd argue you very defintely need to get it into the hands of ordinary users and that telling them they are not needed (and indicating we don't really care about them) is ultimately detrimental to the proliferation of the Free Software model.
I don't normally respond to Anonymous Coward trolls & flamebait but this was just *too* funny...
You're also a f'ing dork who lives in his moms' (they're the two old dikes that were the first to be married in SF right?) basement.
Ha, I moved out of home and into my own place at 16, and bought my first house at 19. As for my 'parents' getting married in San Fransico, that would be hard as they are not Americans (And who says Americans are insular!).
Video games are a source of enjoyment. Without sufficent enjoyment life is not worth living.
If you've given up videogames because it's not a constructive use of your time, you may as well up watching TV, reading, going to the theater and listening to music (and, as you brought it up, you may as well give up every man's number favorite past time, masturbation).
Forgoing videogames does little in the way of helping the rest of humanity, but if it's something you do enjoy it's merely contributing to makeing you a less happy individual.
You maybe tired of video games but I am highly supicious of someone would try to paint it as a personal moral victory, when it's simply something they merely no longer have the time for (often because they are married or have children).
I'm very happy with a balance in my life. I maintain an open source project on Freshmeat.net, run a 'clan'/outfit who play the massively multiplayer FPS PlanetSide and play either Star Wars Galaxies or PlanetSide very nearly every day. Just because I do one, doesn't mean I have to stop doing the other.
Hmm very interesting. Thanks checking and confirming.
The port to Windows was does by Gearbox, who've gotten a [b]lot[/b] of slating over it. While the Mac OS version was done by Westlake, who I aways remember as having a good porting history...so maybe it does have much better performance on Mac OS (which would make a very welcome change).
There is some timedemo stuff on the PC version, I don't know if you can do the same on the Mac version (I'd expect the wouldn't be quite the same though, as they are probably specifically implimented by the porter, but it's possible they have a common benchmark at request of Bungie or Microsoft), would be interesing to see comparible results on the mac.
One thing that springs to mind is that the the rendering path will be simplar on a Geforce 4, so it will be asked to do less work. Maybe that just plain better performance at this levels. It doesn't make as much difference changing the rendering paths on the PC version, but now that I think about it have heard people on the PC saying they had okay performance where as others (with newer high end, mostly Radeon cards I think) saying it was crap.
The Radeon drivers just had an update which claims to noticeably help with Halo, in the past couple of days or so. Maybe there is more room for improvement. Also, if the Mac OS version has to use Open GL instead of Direct X (which I assume it is doing) I wonder if that could be related (does one card have better Open GL drivers for Mac OS X than the other, for example). Even though it's an older card, the GeForce could be seriously outperforming the Radeon on the Mac just for this reason.
It strikes me that either (a) it's just subjectiveness (different people of course have different views of what's smooth and what looks good) or (b) that maybe it's something the rendering engine does that Radeon cards don't like (or the drivers, something nVidia have always done better than ATI). The only G4 I have is a Powerbook G4 500 with a broken screen, so not great for testing.:-(
Anyway, if you can play it nicely on your system, congrats.:-)
You should go post on the Gearbox web site, I'm sure they would be a lot of Windows users who would be very interested to hear about decent performance on a Mac port (if anything, it would make a good stick to beat Gearbox/Microsoft with...
I've got a Dual G5 2.0 with the BTO Radeon 9800 card, attached to the 23" Cinema HD display. Running Halo on it was fun, but I had to stick to 800x600 or so to get semi-decent performance, and even then fps would drop down to like 1-2 if I died near an explosion or something. UT2004 runs at the native 1920x1200 of the display wickedly fast (never noticed the frame rate getting low enough to notice), and looks great.
Interesting. I have a dual G4 800 Mac with GeForce 4 Ti and 1.5GB RAM and a 20" Cinema display (two of them accutaly) and run at the widescreen mode of 1280 or 1325 (one of the two - can't recall) and it runs very smoothly. Far smoother than UT2K3 (note: 3) at 1024x768. I have not got UT2K4 running yet.
Your running Halo at ~1280x1024 or higher and it's smooth? I'd be very surprised at that. I'm not calling you a liar but I'd be astonished if you can - because everybody else moans at it's appaling framerate performance. It's possible the mac port is better than the PC port, and specifically is able to make better use of the dual CPU power (given OS X that wouldn't be too surprising). It can say certainly doesn't run 'well' above 1024x768 on any Intel based (including Athalon, Athalon64) system.
The game has god awful performance on all systems at 1024x768 or above. They are set to bring out a huge FPS patch though, in a few weeks. It supposed to nail the performance problems that really hurt the Windows PC sales.
About 80% of the time the game is okay at 1280x1024, certainly in single player. But in some areas/maps it studdenly falls to about 5 FPS or under, especially in indoor areas and with ~4 or more of enemy on screen. Even when the performance is okay it's very poor by the standards of other Windows based PC games.
While a GeForce 4 Ti doesn't support the same rendering features, so the game isn't going to look as good as on a Radeon 9800 Pro, I'd be surprise if this advantage is enough to make it still smooth at above 1024x758. I've tried benchmarking with the timedemo's and using less sophisticated renders (something the game allows you to change) and it's better but it's still not 'good' on my system - it has this horrible performance on my P4 2.3 GHz w/Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB and 2 GB DDR400 RAM (and SATA RAID 0 HD, but it's not like it's swapping with that much ram:). It was no better on an AMD 3200+ (my previous system, w/same graphics card, just waiting for a new 3.2 Ghz P4 CPU atm).
One simple you can do to help speed Halo up include turning off Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (the Halo engine doesnt support FSAA, but having it on still slows the game down very noticeably for some reason). The lack of FSAA support is one of the reasons it's so annoying that it doesn't run well at high resolution, the non-antialised blockyness of 800x600 is something I find very distracting.
They claim the engine uses a render, that because of the way it does certian effects, like the 'invisibility cloak', means it can't do FSAA. I think that's just a cop-out and what they are really hinting at is "The game was decided to provide optimal rendering on the X-Box at a resolution appropriate for displaying via a TV. We don't have the time or inclination to re-write the rendering engine so that it behaves in a more approriate manner on a Personal Computer." I think the guys just doing the ports just wanted to shove it out the door, and Microsoft don't care because console titles make much more money than PC titles (the difference in sales figures are huge) AND they see Halo primarily as a way to sell more X-Box's, and that they are indifferent to poor performance on other platforms.
I'd love to see some time demo results on Halo for a dual G4 or G5 (any version really, just to see comparible performance).
It made references to using a visa card numerous times.
Of course it's obviously based on the character in Barclaycard commercials played by Rowen Atkinson himself, and for which he was awarded a Bafta for Best Actor. The series of adverts in which he plays a British special agent was basis of the characters and the setting for the entire episode, it wasn't as if it taken out of context. I think everybody who's seen the adverts understood the reference and got the joke.
The fact that the millenium dome was supposedly a celebration of life and culture, to see product placement in arguably one of britains finest comedies of all time ruined the experience for me.
I enjoyed the Dome though the episode of Blackadder, which is now on public release, was very weak indeed and is easily the least of all the episodes filmed. Sponsorship or nae, the references to the adverts still provide humerous unspoke reference in the form of a very inclusive 'in joke' (inclusive, as it's an 'in joke' that around 95% of British public who saw the episode understood). I would have been equally as amused by them had they not been sponsored and written in entirely for humerous purposes by the writers (as well the might have been).
I belive that appropriate sponsorship in media is actually something to welcome. Having real logos on racing cars, cola adverts on bill boards, sports apparel advertising in sports stadiums actually adds to realism and adds to the level of immersion the game can offer. It's certainly superior to seeing repeated copies of publisher/developers logo where the adverting should be (as with the older FIFA series by EA) or poorly done parodies (though I do appreciate the small number of genuinely amusing parodies I've seen).
It's also of note that many in the modding community illegally use adverts and images from real world products in their mods (Coke, Pepsi and DrPepper vending machines, Pizza Hut boxes, packs of Malboro, cans of Budweiser are all things I recall seeing) purely to enhance the atmosphere of the level/total conversion - they are of course not being paid to use these images (and as mentioned potentially breeching copyright by using them, though I can't see many companies objecting).
If at the same time as adding appropriate, unintrusive advertising that adds to the level of realisim and enhances the overall experience we can also bring down the cost of games, that's entirely to be welcomed in my opinion.
The level of advertising is dependant entirely on what the market will bear, so I don't think there is any cause for fear that the level of sponsorship will get out of hand. Games publishers are not so desperate for cash they would repeatedly jepordise sales and therefore their existance by completely butchering their games.
I think that Halo wasn't nearly as innovative in terms of gamplay as Half-Life, and that it's over rated, but I do think it was an innovative game, and still lots of fun. I don't think it's the most overrated game ever (there is a lot of competion over the years), but it's definately in my top 20.
However, it brought some great elements to the genre:
The regenerating sheild idea. This makes the game insanley fun to play, especially when mixed with the other ability of being able to pistol whip and do huge amounts of damage that way, using any weapon. Both of these are elements that would recommend to be followed as ideas in similar FPS games to come. Good NPC friendly support (that moved and acted in a realistic way), great vehicle physics (by which I mean 'fun'), excellent nighttime/lighting effects and better than previousy seen enemy AI being the least novel of these, but still worthly of mention.
I think that some games get a hard time though, like Unreal 2. I enjoyed this a lot. My only major complaint is that it was very, very short. It's true the AI was poor, far inferior to Half Life's, dispite it's age, but because of the way they were implimented, this didn't really present a problem. But what was their looked gorgeous and was very well designed and this really helped to drag you into the game by providing a high immersive environment. Some of the enemies, like the small spiders (very reminicient of StarGates Replications IMO - and that's no bad thing) made for a lot fun blasting them away. But then, I am the sort of person who loves looking round new maps and environments to appreciate the design.
I think Unreal 2 has been one of the most underrated games of late, and has been battered unfairly. I would suggest though, that anyone who wants to play it, do it on nothing less than the most difficult setting, to get their moneys worth.
I agree that, largely thanks to the licencing of engines like Epics Unreal engine, that graphic are no longer becomeing a pull, because simply few games sell well without it (there are always obvious exceptions, but that's the rule).
I don't agree with this poster though, I've been playing HL2 addons (Blueshift, etc) recently and I fired up a Quake3 total conversion today. I find that after playing games like Unreal Tournament 2K3, Unreal 2, Halo, and the Far Cry Demo, that HL is simply too full of low resolution textures and blocky, low polygon models (by todays standards) and I just get distracted and pulled out of the immersive environment. I found this with all games over the years, including the once increadibly immersive Wolfenstien and once terrifying Doom. It seems odd and illogical on the surface to think that an old Mattel game like Shark! Shark! should be less involving, and I do think that some games like Astrosmash! have held their appeal, but I think they are the minority. I assume it's just that I have higher expectation these days.
I think it would be nice, now that 3D engine technology is relatively stable and cards like the Radeon 9800 256Mb and the nVida 5900 are capeable of graphics of better quality than that of most in game CGI's done 10 years ago, for some publishing houses to go back and re-relase older games, like Half Life, but with higher quality textures and maps.
The maps would obviously take more work, but it's a lot easier to fix up maps than it is to release a new game, and with updated models, you won't have to re-do the entire engine or AI (though in the case of a complex interactive title like HL, you'd almost certainly need to give it a few tweaks to make sure the physics was okay with some of the in game 'puzzles').
I think it's too early to do this with some 'older' games (e.g. Quake3, the origional Unreal, etc) but I'd love to see publishers take games like Dark Forces (and the sequal, Jedi Knight), Bungie's Marathon series, the origional Doom Series, Half Life, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, Tie Fighter (etc.) and have them re-done using the latest engines from houses like Epic
Good idea. I vote we start a fun raiser (ala PayPal, but something less crooked) which people can annoymously donate to.
When we raise enough we can hire a contract killer to do the hit (either from a usenet group like alt.contract.killers or from an ad in Solider of Fortune magazine).
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It's bascially capture the flag but also has player classes (Support, Engineer, Sniper, Heavy Weapons, etc) to encorage co-operative team play. The player classes were the most significant element IMO. There were also other level varients with things like multiple points to hold, as in BF1942 or BFVietnam.
More info on TFC
It was somewhat 'superceeded' (not exactly, but in the eyes of many players) by the likes of Tribes (to which many TFC players jumped). I mention this as in many ways, the closest thing to a modern version of TFC these days is SOE's PlanetSide, whos lead developer worked on Tribes 2, and indeed a lot of ex TFC players play PS.
One thing I've found that it runs fairly slowly. I'm running 800x600 on a P4 1.7 with a Geforce Ti500 and 512mb of RAM and on some of the new maps there is slowdown - there really shouldn't be.
This isn't intended as a flame, but I would yes you should expect slow down on your system, even at that low resolution. I want a sophisticed engine in my PC FPS games. I don't expect games to stay stuck looking like 4 year old titles, that means they need to take advantage and embrace new hardware.
Now I haven't tried the game yet (I will likely to do tonight, as it's easy to purchase and doesn't involve a trip to a store, even if I think it looks disappointing and not like something that will hold my interest) and so I don't want to pre-judge the performance too much as I can't see just what it's rendering but I don't expect it to be a worse engine than the origional.
I am already put off by CS:CZ as it is because it looks so crue and dated compared to games like Far Cry, Crome and BF:Vietnam. It seems they are catering to the lowest common denominator with this incremental upgrade, and that the preference to much older hardware is bad enough as it is.
I understand that many people have other commitments like family, or expensive hobbies which take up most of their resources and they do not feel like spending much money on their money on a computer system, but at the same time many of these same people reguard themselves as commited gamers dispite having very outdated setups incapable of running modern games a decent speeds.
Many of us us who have invested in decent systems are sick and tired of technology being held back by users on 3/4 year old graphics cards, 2,3 or even 4 year old CPU's and very low amounts of memory due to their own tightness and entirely unrealistic expectations.
I am able to play all my games in 32 bit @ 1600x1200 or higher with 4xFSAA, or in some cases I drop the resolution to 1280x1024 for the most demanding and brand-new titles like Far Cry (though the Far Cry beta performed a lot better at 1600x1200 than the demo does for some reason). I would just hate to play at 800x600 on a PC, the jagged edges and low resolution would drive me to distraction
I don't have a cutting edge and costly P4 3.4 Ghz 'Extreme' or a 64 Bit AMD CPU, nor do I have a 'cutting edge' Radeon XT series card. ALl these are very exenspive, I'm not advocating people break the bank and go for broke, just upgrade reasonably and try to keep realistic expectations of performance.
I have a P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, Radon 9800 Pro 256 MB, 160 GB SATA RAID0, and before that it was an AMD 3200+, 1 GB RAM and Radeon 9700 128 MB with SATA, just to emphasise that system is a year old and I've given the parts away or put them in my work system to make my GL screen savers prettier under X and dispite that according the Value Survey most systems arn't even close to that, which is appaling IMO.
According the Value Survey a typical PC looks like this:
Resolution: 1024x768 16 bit
Graphics card: Nvida GeForce 4 Series
CPU: 1.8 Ghz
Memory: 256MB-512MB
I think that's very poor. I didn't by that system as new year ago, so why are people still expecting new games to preform well on it today? I for one, to not wish to see the development of new technology stand still just so cheap individuals can play the very latest titles on PC's 2 or 3 years old without upgrading a single component. It's one thing to want to continue to use a system that's a few years old, it's another to have the expectation that the latest games will still run well on it.
Cheap 1.8 Ghz CPUs where kicking around in the Autumn of 2002, and the GeForce 4 hit the selves in early 2002 (and would have been released in 2001 but were only deliberately held back due to strong on going sales for the GeForce 3 series).
It's not expensive to keep your system upgraded every 12 months - by which I mean it's within the budget of even a college
CS, UT2003, UT2004, BF1942 and BF:Vietnam are all full of abusive, team killing, selfish morons who don't know how the play the game and appear to have a collective IQ lower than a squirrel's. The 'communities' in MMOGs are generally full of great people, but the number of repeadly abusive and purile kids is a number one thing that turns me off and had lead to me cancelling my subscription for MMOGs.
Just last night I was playing Battlefield Vietnam, which, apart from the retarded menu system, and a bug which causes you to die randomly and inexplicably when falling from short heights, is a very good game to actually play on line. At least in theory. I've been playing it for a few days, as an example of how thing go, I played two sessions each on different servers last night, this is how it went:
Server 1:
Had Team Killers runing up behind players and stabbing them firing rockets at them and generally runing the game. 3 of the players had negative kills scores, this later went up to 4 as a large number of people resorted to hunting and killing the TKers rather than playing the game (which is understandable, given how distruptive they were being). They would constantly log on and off and change names and teams so you wouldn't know if you could trust the person next to you not to turn round and kill you, or if the 'friendly' tank or helicopter instead of escorting you was going to suddenly open fire on you.
I eventually got fed up of this and found another server...
Server 2:
The player teams were constantly hugely uneaven, making victory impossible for the other team (given the nature of the game). At one point, it was 2 vrs 10 (after being like this for over a minute, that was the point I quit). I changed sides 8 times trying to keep it even, but moronic players would constantly join the server and pick the winning side, which ever side that was, it didn't matter to them, they would just pick that side making the game pointless for the already overwhelmed team. They would all refuse to change teams themselves, while asking each other to change.
So, I'd much rather play with bots and avoid the purile and abusive 'smack talk' from kids (who accuse you of 'cheating' and 'being a n00b' because you used a particular weapon to kill them with, and saying some weapons are, for whatever mystical reason 'out of bounds' and 'unfair').
Sadly, as has been already observed by other players, bots are pathetic and useless in all the EA Battlefield series. They don't understand the point of the game, don't capture points or hold them (instead drive right past them), can't drive vehicles or helicopers (they just crash them in to obstacles and run aircraft into the ground, for reasons not obvious). They also don't follow orders (dispite claims to the contrary by the blurb from EA) and are eager to take any and every vehicle going first, even though they will more than likely just drive it into a wall - or even an open space - and sit there in it (I've seen this on all difficulty levels). When playing with bots its always wise to shoot them first, then take the vehicle for yourself.
To make it even more frustrating, they don't seem to suffer from not being able to see you because your hidden in cover (I would guess they 'see' you reguardless due the the feeble 'AI'), which further ruins the atmosphere, given that a large part of this game relies on finding good cover.
Given this and the pathetically few number of levels in Battlefield Vietnam (made all the more repetative as many of them are just slightly different versions of other maps) I feel it's a rip off for what you are charged, and is worth no more than 20 USD/ 15 UKP for the content you get. It may have lots of new shiney shader effects (and it does look good and the gameplay is fun) but the shameful level of the bots and the few number of levels are appaling. This is epecially true given that in singe player games you'd have twice as many unique levels, with hand placed and well balanced enemies
>You can work out how much of that goes to the government if you want to, but that's hardly a major concern when you make a purchase.
If you're wealthy, perhaps not.
An individuals financial circumstances makes no difference to whether they care about how much VAT there is on a specific purchase when they at the cash point. At that moment they care about the total price they are going to pay, as the previous poster said.
They already know the amount is charged at 17.5% in the UK (or a rather high 25% if your in Ireland, for example). As it's a flat national percentage rate, the amount on any item is hardly going to change anyones mind about making a specific purchase, all they care about is if they can afford the total cost of the item (and as a consumer I think a system whereby the VAT inclusive price must be most prominantly displayed by law is eminently more preferable).
VAT revenue goes to pay the fatcats in Brussels, not the state government.
That is incorrect. While a portion of VAT revenue from all European member states goes to fund the European Commision a substantial amount of government revenue comes from collection of VAT on consumer goods.
It was often used to denote a pound as in a unit of mesurement for weight and used to be used in the UK (e.g. in butchers or grocers stores) until EU legislation required that the primary unit of mesurement for goods be metric, so ensure some level of practical conformity across EU member states.
I had thought the pound sign was still used in this way in the US (though perhaps not frequently, probably more commonly used in more traditional grocers and rural areas).
The draw distance is set very low by default. If your machine can handle it, turn it up all the way... it makes a huge difference in the way the world looks. I can see the Coronet starport across the ocean from my house, about 2km away. Forests actually look like forests, not a constantly spawning bunch of 4 trees around you.
I know what you mean, it's not the draw distance that's the problem though. NPC buildings appear from way in the distance (so cities, starports etc are just fine). Even certain player placed structures (Rebel/Imperial bases, Turrets, Cantinas, Player City Shuttle Ports) seem to have a different metric or system for being drawn. Not as well as perminant, non player placed structures, but enough not to be hugely annoying (they always appear first and seem last to be removed from the field of view compared to other player places structures).
For some reason it's specifically player structures like houses (of any size), mining equipment, factories, warehouses, etc. that seem to have the problem, and it happens for everybody as far as I've seen. And it's far worse on busy planets (say Tatooine, where I find it unbearable) that it is on quieter places, like LOK, where the engine is still obviously poor at handling it, but the servers seem less loaded so they provided you with the information your client needs, when you need it.
As I say these are my system specs:
P4 3.2 Ghz w/ HyperThreading
2 GB RAM (DDR400/PC3200)
Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB
160 GB SATA RAID 0
(XP SP1 as the OS).
I play on a dedicated 2 MB Business DSL connection.
The engine is simply very badly written. It should be caching the location of all these buildings at all time (and just checking to see if they need to be removed when I get within a given distance and then removing them). When I look out over a player city with some 60+ structures just 200 feet away, the desert littered with structures into the distance as far as I can see, I shouldn't see simply unpopulated desert all around me.
I would find myself often on my mount or speeder bike roaming the the desert and bumping into to mines or factories out in remote locations as they appeared just a few feet in front of me. And of course then their are the hostile NPCs, a huge problem is traveling across any area on foot or on a mount and suddenly 6 Tuskan Raiders appear all around you.
At least with a busy server and dynamic NPC spawns this is remotely technically understandable, unlike the purely badly coded situation with structures, which don't get up and walk around and which are perfectly straight forward to track the location of (another way of doing it, for example, would be to provide a list of all structures at on entry to planet, which would still be a very small update (likely to be 100Kb compressed), and then just supply a diff each time they log on subsequently (2/3K) and then the client would know what to draw where and not have to drawn them 'on the fly' (though it could still check for updates 'on the fly' and _remove_ any buildings that were not supposed to be there, if you get within something approaching a visible radious).
Yes and I would add that not only do players do this, they they have multiple accounts and use 3rd party software to do it.
For example, I know two players IRL with multiple accounts, one with 4 accounts, another with 2. Both use software (e.g. Visual Basic tools) to simulate mouse clicks to 'train' characters while they are AFK, even at work (they can use VNC to check on them from time to time). They have multiple accounts because of the limitations on the number of skill points an individual character can have, and because it's so hard to find someone you want with the skill you need to team with, even at peak time. It's also a lot easier to make money in game when you are your own little production firm.
This is what the Jedi's, and those seriously chasing the unlocking of the 'Force Sensitive Slot' are doing. In fairness, it's actually the only sensible way to progress in the game, because it's such a tedious grind.
I just think, to hell with that, if I want to do that I'll spend my time writing productive, open source software, or writing battle bot scripts. I don't want to write Visual Basic scripts to play an RPG for me! It's certainly not what SWG is billed as. It's certainly not an RPG in any classically understood sense of the word. As an RPG, it's the single WORST RPG I have ever played.
It's as if someone had written a text based MUD, and all the items were so expensive, and levelling was so difficult, the only way to progress and keep up was to write a shell script to play it for you (go north until you find a troll, kill troll, retreat/use health vial if damaged, repeat). Now that can be fun in itself, but that's hardly the game it's been billed as at any point, but that's exactly what it is, and exactly what you need to do to stay even remotely competative with market prices and in Player V Player combat.
I don't think the development team have any idea how much this game is completely dominated by the behavior of power players, they don't know, or they don't care because it means players either have multiple accounts and are power players, thus earning them lots of money, or they have one account, but find it so hard to progress they are subscribed for months before they can start to get on their feet. I would be they know this is a formula which works with EQ and they have no interest in creating a 'game' in the traditional sense.
The only massively multiplayer title that SOE have that's remotely close to a modern game is the FPS game PlanetSide (and that's got it's problems atm).
I think every man and his dog is currently looking forward to World of Warcraft and hoping they get it right (they've started with a good engine, the Unreal Engine, which is a great first move). It's a shame, I _really_ wanted to play a multiplayer Star Wars RPG like the single player KoTOR. SWG certainly has the content, but not the engine or the gameplay.
Yes that's *exactly* it, and it's powergamer heaven, but dire from a gameplay perspective.
Only, you have to do other similarly tedious stuff to make money to get enough raw material or go and collect small amounts of it yourself (this would be fun and immersive, if it didn't also involve quite so much grinding in itself IMO).
I think the game has an amazing wealth of content and huge potentional, but over reliance on mission terminals has runined the game and it's not an RPG in any traditional sense IMO. You can to 'tasks' for people within the game world rather than missions, but the rewards are pitiful, often less than the cost of your transport to complete the missions themselves, and there is no visble concept of like/dislike amoung the individual NPC's (it's not like say Morrowind, or EVE, where you can visibly work you way up a social ladder), this makes doing NPC missions pointless (unless they are for a specificly intertesting 'faction' like Jabbas people, which lets you in to Jabbas Palace, something actually worth the effort).
The lack of immersive gameplay, the grinding and the very broken economy have just driven me away from it after 6 months or so.
I would also say that one of the most annoying things for me personally is graphics engine and the number of related bugs (much less than before, but still irrating). The engine is very flawed and the terrain distorts constantly as you move across it and player buildings pop in and out at very short distance (though NPC buildings are fine, it's just an issue with fetching/caching player placed buildings and structures). This may seem like a small issue, and I'm not sure how much it bothers other players, but when you know there is a HUGE player city just 100 yards away but it's not appearing ruined any immersion for me. Popup in games was something I thought went out with the PS One, though in the case of SWG it's not because of draw distance, but poor coding and a laggy server that can't send updates to your client fast enough (the problem is most noticeable on very heavily player populated worlds, and less of an issue on very sparse worlds). On that note, I've got a P4 3.2 Ghz, 2.0 GB DDR400, Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB, 160 GB SATA RAID 0, and it's performance was _still_ quite poor (while incomparison I get a quite insane 300+ FPS from games like Unreal Tournament).
I would have waited for other issues to be addressed if they had fixed this, but knowing they were happy to ship it with a fundamentally broken engine, I have no faith in them to fix it later. That's such a core part of the game, that a games release should not be considered until that's working well.
On a related note:
I've been playing EVE recently and though it doesn't have anywhere near the sheer depth of content it's a vastly more playable game. The economy works. It's easy to level up, it's easy to make money. NPC's monitor your standings. PvP is open and can occur anywhere (which puts a limit on 13 year olds talking smack but refusing to click 'Dual' and take you on), but new players arnt in real danger because of the NPC security forces in secure systems keep people in line (unless you really piss someone off so much they decide it's worth the dip in security rating). All in all it's really well designed for players, and the galaxy certainly is huge, I just hope they can add the content to keep it entertaining.
It has it's bugs and it's not perfect, and I do think that the lack of deep content means that the Player v. Player focus of the gameplay could get stale quite quickly (after you bought a huge Battleship, and worked out the best PvP tactics all that's left is the inter corporation/clan warfare, which is something a lot of players don't care for) but SWG could learn a lot about how to run an economy and provide an immersive and meaningful NPC/player relationship experience. I would also say that EVE has the best skills system of any game I've ever played.
Much like Halo, I'm sure the presenence of co-op on the X-Box but not on the PC is because with the X-Box it will be split screen multiplayer not network co-op play in any form. Obviously PC's arnt well suited to split screen co-op and this feature doesn't really have a place on the PC (and it's more than a 'bit' cramped on TV screen in any case), so it's been omitted from the PC port.
Network co-op play (on PC or console), which is a far more enjoyable and practical from a gameplay point of view, just hasn't been implimented. I'm disappointed that network co-op wasn't in the PC version of Halo (on the maximum difficulty level that could really have been a lot of fun).
(That's just to clear up people asking why it's on the X-Box but not the PC, and because it's relevent to comments below...).
I would cite an outstanding example of a multiplayer co-operative game as proof that it can be fun when in done well: Aliens Total Conversion (for the Doom engine). It was a superb co-operative multiplayer game IMO (better than the origional Doom for co-op play IMO), very atmospheric and much more fun to play in a team that just solo (especially on the Nightmare level).
I too am surprised that split-screen co-op is even being considered for the console though. Nothing I've seen of Doom 3 makes me thing it would be suited to it (both Aliens TC and the origional Doom, on the other hand, had large open areas, and/or areas where you could be in more than once place at once and still be progressing through the level, so you wern't triping over each other all the time).
Dooms 3's apparent tight maps consisting of many cramped spaces, with sparely and strategically populated levels (which I am expecting to be pretty linear in layout) strike me as being particularly ill suited to co-op. I'd have thought that if you had more than one player in the map they'd be just catching each other with friendly fire and getting in each others way (and I think that would be all the more likely if you have to play split screen on the same TV, on a low resolution display, in dark/dimily lit levels).
Yeah your right about The Getaway, what a terrible waste of time. I could see that gameplay was going to be a stinker from the start though (from the very first interviews it's clear they had no compelling gameplay-focused direction). I've been wondering about that since the games release. Granted it's not the best version ever (the version in MSR/Gotham Racing was far better IMO), but surely the companies who develop these games would want to sell the map data to other developers?
I mean it's a hell of a lot of work to build these maps and I can see it could be worth it if your going to hang on to them to release in future games (as MSR (origional title on the Dreamcast) has done with Gotham Racing 1 & 2), but with a title like The Getaway, if they don't plan on re-using and/or selling the map data, I think a manager on the project should be asking themselves why they want to go to so much bother to create a large urban environment modeled on a real life city. Surely it would be lot easier to just have an entirely fabricated layout that just had a similar feel to the city it's intended to represent (ala the GTA or Driver series).
I've actually recognised parts of New York and San Fransico and London from games and used them for navigation in these cities (specifically on the maps I'd played in MSR/Gotham Racing/which although they have been altered slightly to allow greater playbility, are otherwise excellent representations). I also recognised a few of the more well known areas of Toyko in the recent Bill Murray film Lost in Translation, because I'd seen at least two or three of the locations in MSR. I live in London and certainly think these maps are realistic, and it would be great to have access to them in other games genres (Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 style single player games, Counter Stike style multiplayer games, GTA/Driver style games, even old fashioned RPG/point and click adventure games) and of course I'm sure they could be useful for other recreational purposes such as tourism and even local planning authorities might have an interest (the police too very possibly, for practicing crowd control, crime prevention, courter-terrorist scenarios, etc).
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a company took take up making and maintaining maps of the central areas of large ubran cities with a view to reselling the data for just these purposes, though I think they'd need to have other primary sources of income too, as it's hard to see their being enough money in it in the short or even medium term. I expect that if a corporation doesn't a comminuty effort would though. It would probably be a lot easier for a community effort to provide up to date images for accurate textures too (something that's very easy for anyone with even a cheap digital camera), and to report recent changes, even provide photographs of streets to help mappers in expanding the maps (as obviously existing physical maps alone don't give nearly enough information).
There is a God - the one in the Bible - fear and believe Him and you will be saved on Judgement Day.
Just to be clear, which Bible are we talking about here (and when exactly is Judgement Day, just so I don't cross book with a hair appointment)?
I get confused as there are so many contradictory editions and interpretations and I don't know which one is right one, if you could tell me definitively I'd be ever so greatful!
There is a God - the one in the Bible - fear and believe Him and you will be saved on Judgement Day.
Rather than continue to cower in fear from this tyrant, my plan is to overthrow God with my large and formidable army of Dragon riding battle Gnomes, who will assist me in installing a secular govener of the Universe, as is fit for the 21st centry. There will be a transational government made up of representatives from the UN until such time as a suitable canidate can be found.
Ultimately, we intend to capture him alive and take him to The International Court of Justice in the Hague to face the charges of the many human rights and war crimes violations that have been levelled against him over the course of last 2000 years.
Though I wish it were so I don't think this is what's like to happen (certainly not any time in the next few decades). If this approached worked as well in practice as it did in principle all the software we would use would be done using very high level tools (that is everyone would use Visual Basic for development of all Window applications). I think the specific requirements of each time of game will mean that developers will need fined grained access to tweak and alter the behavior at a low level.
:-)
I that in truth specific requirements mean that developers will continue to hammer out their own engines, I do agree that there will be consolidation in this - I think we'll see more an more people use 'off the shelf' 3D licences like Epic's Unreal engine (and ultimately, free open source equivolents) and I think those engines will either develop a net code base of their own suitble for a MM environment, or companies will set a netcode client & server engine which plugs in to a client side graphics engine (in the same way that some companies specialise in selling physics engines for games).
I can't see much in they way of a 'standard' being developed as it's not actually particularly nesseary for different games to talk to each other (the most they would need to do is talk to a central database to access a players auth details and profile, which is very straight forward). I think games will continue to be developed in the way SOE have done with EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies and PlanetSide - where they _appear_ to share code bases/ideas to some extent (there are certainly quite a few common elements between the games and almost certainly between the servers I should think), but the developers have actually built their own unique products on top of those ideas.
While of course it's certainly possible to build an extensible system that allowed fine granied control, the same practicle issues that have fragmented other systems over the years - from 3D libraries (Direct X, Open GL) to desktop display systems (Display PDF/PS, Windows/Direct Draw, the X Windowing System, etc) - will mean we are likely to just bumble on as before for quite some time IMO.
I can see us having a singular environment with my life time, but I would think we would need to at least all agree on a common standard for 3D rendering first, and a common (but customisable) physics engine to use, and a common client netcode model and world server engine. I think that this means practically this software would have to come from the open source community (or at least the standards would have to come from an independant body, like the W3C, just to give an example of the type of organisation), and wouldn't expect to see this sort of technology around and publically avalible for 20 years or so at best (HHOS: look how long we've had the X Window System and it _still_ isn't as good as NeXT's origional Display Postscript (no flame intended) and we are _still_ fighting over what do to about it).
I'd also disagree that small/niche worlds would be viable, as not only does it take a massive amount of work to create unique content for a game but critically you need quite a volume of players to keep a game feeling interesting and to feel anything other than barren and empty. If you have a large world then it takes a lot of players to do this (and of course, if you have a small world, then players will get board easily). I do realise this point is blown away somewhat in that there a _lot_ of older games out their with a small userbase that have been ticking over for many years now, but I think that's due to a rather special type of user and I don't think many people would be happy with smaller communities like that (but then again, I maybe wrong?). I find judging what other people like harder than judging what I think is likely to happen technologically
Does anyone know any companies that specialise in providing terran / environment generation systems? I think something with the power of Sim City 3000's
Amen to this. Other than that, it's a really nice concept, but I can't belive other people are overlooking this, maybe it is a UK only thing.
This frequently annoys me - it does this all the time (and I've had it for 4 years). I have no idea how that got passed any sort of quality control. It just point blank frequently ignores what direction you press in and very often sends what's interpreted as two presses when you only pressed once.
On the same topic, the new iPods annoy me too. I vastly prefer the old interface on my origional 5 GB iPod - the tactile buttons are far superior to the new ones I feel (you can no longer feel around for the buttons in your pocket, like you could with the origional design - if you try this on a 'new' iPod it invariably results in you jumping to the next or previous track).
That's a very good point. It's amazing how many developers do make games for PCs, considering how much revenue they can get for console games, and people do seem to forget that.
Even an X-Box only title can easily sell more copies than a Windows PC title, and it's no harder to make games for the X-Box than for a PC (and it many ways, it's easier, though I'm not sure I'd say the same about doing a PS2 title).
ID, for example, have said they fully expect to make far more money from console version of Doom 3 than the desktop PC version (even though the desktop PC version will be far superior due to having better interface options and support for vastly better quality high resolution anti-aliased graphics).
The Macintosh platform has had this problem for years, and I would say the Linux marketshare is going to have to approximately double or even quadruple for it to really start showing up on developers radars (though I think Epic's work in providing a Linux and a Macintosh client for their excellent and much licensed engine is a great help in showing that's it's possible).
No, what we need is more programmers, more contributing powerusers, more people willing to understand the importance of the Free Software model. We need quality, not quantity. Quantity is just a bonus.
We welcome the normal users but saying that we need them is going too far...
I think the point the poster is making that without a larger user base it's going to be a lot harder to attract those who will contribute and ultimately improve what we have.
I think many people would disagree with you and and have different 'views' on what Linux needs, I certainly would not agree it 'does not need users'.
If it did not have a user base as large as it does, many of those who develop for Linux would instead have developed for other platforms, such as FreeBSD, and Linux would be a very minority operating system (as opposed just a miniority operating system) without the software they have contributed (GIMP, Gnome, KDE, Abiword, Gnumeric, and other more fundamental programs and libraries that came before them).
If you want to propigate Free Software and understand it's importance I'd argue you very defintely need to get it into the hands of ordinary users and that telling them they are not needed (and indicating we don't really care about them) is ultimately detrimental to the proliferation of the Free Software model.
I don't normally respond to Anonymous Coward trolls & flamebait but this was just *too* funny...
You're also a f'ing dork who lives in his moms' (they're the two old dikes that were the first to be married in SF right?) basement.
Ha, I moved out of home and into my own place at 16, and bought my first house at 19. As for my 'parents' getting married in San Fransico, that would be hard as they are not Americans (And who says Americans are insular!).
You do your country proud, I'm sure...
Video games are a source of enjoyment. Without sufficent enjoyment life is not worth living.
If you've given up videogames because it's not a constructive use of your time, you may as well up watching TV, reading, going to the theater and listening to music (and, as you brought it up, you may as well give up every man's number favorite past time, masturbation).
Forgoing videogames does little in the way of helping the rest of humanity, but if it's something you do enjoy it's merely contributing to makeing you a less happy individual.
You maybe tired of video games but I am highly supicious of someone would try to paint it as a personal moral victory, when it's simply something they merely no longer have the time for (often because they are married or have children).
I'm very happy with a balance in my life. I maintain an open source project on Freshmeat.net, run a 'clan'/outfit who play the massively multiplayer FPS PlanetSide and play either Star Wars Galaxies or PlanetSide very nearly every day. Just because I do one, doesn't mean I have to stop doing the other.
Hmm very interesting. Thanks checking and confirming.
:-(
:-)
The port to Windows was does by Gearbox, who've gotten a [b]lot[/b] of slating over it. While the Mac OS version was done by Westlake, who I aways remember as having a good porting history...so maybe it does have much better performance on Mac OS (which would make a very welcome change).
There is some timedemo stuff on the PC version, I don't know if you can do the same on the Mac version (I'd expect the wouldn't be quite the same though, as they are probably specifically implimented by the porter, but it's possible they have a common benchmark at request of Bungie or Microsoft), would be interesing to see comparible results on the mac.
One thing that springs to mind is that the the rendering path will be simplar on a Geforce 4, so it will be asked to do less work. Maybe that just plain better performance at this levels. It doesn't make as much difference changing the rendering paths on the PC version, but now that I think about it have heard people on the PC saying they had okay performance where as others (with newer high end, mostly Radeon cards I think) saying it was crap.
The Radeon drivers just had an update which claims to noticeably help with Halo, in the past couple of days or so. Maybe there is more room for improvement. Also, if the Mac OS version has to use Open GL instead of Direct X (which I assume it is doing) I wonder if that could be related (does one card have better Open GL drivers for Mac OS X than the other, for example). Even though it's an older card, the GeForce could be seriously outperforming the Radeon on the Mac just for this reason.
It strikes me that either (a) it's just subjectiveness (different people of course have different views of what's smooth and what looks good) or (b) that maybe it's something the rendering engine does that Radeon cards don't like (or the drivers, something nVidia have always done better than ATI). The only G4 I have is a Powerbook G4 500 with a broken screen, so not great for testing.
Anyway, if you can play it nicely on your system, congrats.
You should go post on the Gearbox web site, I'm sure they would be a lot of Windows users who would be very interested to hear about decent performance on a Mac port (if anything, it would make a good stick to beat Gearbox/Microsoft with...
I've got a Dual G5 2.0 with the BTO Radeon 9800 card, attached to the 23" Cinema HD display. Running Halo on it was fun, but I had to stick to 800x600 or so to get semi-decent performance, and even then fps would drop down to like 1-2 if I died near an explosion or something. UT2004 runs at the native 1920x1200 of the display wickedly fast (never noticed the frame rate getting low enough to notice), and looks great.
:). It was no better on an AMD 3200+ (my previous system, w/same graphics card, just waiting for a new 3.2 Ghz P4 CPU atm).
Interesting. I have a dual G4 800 Mac with GeForce 4 Ti and 1.5GB RAM and a 20" Cinema display (two of them accutaly) and run at the widescreen mode of 1280 or 1325 (one of the two - can't recall) and it runs very smoothly. Far smoother than UT2K3 (note: 3) at 1024x768. I have not got UT2K4 running yet.
Your running Halo at ~1280x1024 or higher and it's smooth? I'd be very surprised at that. I'm not calling you a liar but I'd be astonished if you can - because everybody else moans at it's appaling framerate performance. It's possible the mac port is better than the PC port, and specifically is able to make better use of the dual CPU power (given OS X that wouldn't be too surprising). It can say certainly doesn't run 'well' above 1024x768 on any Intel based (including Athalon, Athalon64) system.
The game has god awful performance on all systems at 1024x768 or above. They are set to bring out a huge FPS patch though, in a few weeks. It supposed to nail the performance problems that really hurt the Windows PC sales.
About 80% of the time the game is okay at 1280x1024, certainly in single player. But in some areas/maps it studdenly falls to about 5 FPS or under, especially in indoor areas and with ~4 or more of enemy on screen. Even when the performance is okay it's very poor by the standards of other Windows based PC games.
While a GeForce 4 Ti doesn't support the same rendering features, so the game isn't going to look as good as on a Radeon 9800 Pro, I'd be surprise if this advantage is enough to make it still smooth at above 1024x758. I've tried benchmarking with the timedemo's and using less sophisticated renders (something the game allows you to change) and it's better but it's still not 'good' on my system - it has this horrible performance on my P4 2.3 GHz w/Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB and 2 GB DDR400 RAM (and SATA RAID 0 HD, but it's not like it's swapping with that much ram
One simple you can do to help speed Halo up include turning off Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (the Halo engine doesnt support FSAA, but having it on still slows the game down very noticeably for some reason). The lack of FSAA support is one of the reasons it's so annoying that it doesn't run well at high resolution, the non-antialised blockyness of 800x600 is something I find very distracting.
They claim the engine uses a render, that because of the way it does certian effects, like the 'invisibility cloak', means it can't do FSAA. I think that's just a cop-out and what they are really hinting at is "The game was decided to provide optimal rendering on the X-Box at a resolution appropriate for displaying via a TV. We don't have the time or inclination to re-write the rendering engine so that it behaves in a more approriate manner on a Personal Computer." I think the guys just doing the ports just wanted to shove it out the door, and Microsoft don't care because console titles make much more money than PC titles (the difference in sales figures are huge) AND they see Halo primarily as a way to sell more X-Box's, and that they are indifferent to poor performance on other platforms.
I'd love to see some time demo results on Halo for a dual G4 or G5 (any version really, just to see comparible performance).
It made references to using a visa card numerous times.
Of course it's obviously based on the character in Barclaycard commercials played by Rowen Atkinson himself, and for which he was awarded a Bafta for Best Actor. The series of adverts in which he plays a British special agent was basis of the characters and the setting for the entire episode, it wasn't as if it taken out of context. I think everybody who's seen the adverts understood the reference and got the joke.
The fact that the millenium dome was supposedly a celebration of life and culture, to see product placement in arguably one of britains finest comedies of all time ruined the experience for me.
I enjoyed the Dome though the episode of Blackadder, which is now on public release, was very weak indeed and is easily the least of all the episodes filmed. Sponsorship or nae, the references to the adverts still provide humerous unspoke reference in the form of a very inclusive 'in joke' (inclusive, as it's an 'in joke' that around 95% of British public who saw the episode understood). I would have been equally as amused by them had they not been sponsored and written in entirely for humerous purposes by the writers (as well the might have been).
I belive that appropriate sponsorship in media is actually something to welcome. Having real logos on racing cars, cola adverts on bill boards, sports apparel advertising in sports stadiums actually adds to realism and adds to the level of immersion the game can offer. It's certainly superior to seeing repeated copies of publisher/developers logo where the adverting should be (as with the older FIFA series by EA) or poorly done parodies (though I do appreciate the small number of genuinely amusing parodies I've seen).
It's also of note that many in the modding community illegally use adverts and images from real world products in their mods (Coke, Pepsi and DrPepper vending machines, Pizza Hut boxes, packs of Malboro, cans of Budweiser are all things I recall seeing) purely to enhance the atmosphere of the level/total conversion - they are of course not being paid to use these images (and as mentioned potentially breeching copyright by using them, though I can't see many companies objecting).
If at the same time as adding appropriate, unintrusive advertising that adds to the level of realisim and enhances the overall experience we can also bring down the cost of games, that's entirely to be welcomed in my opinion.
The level of advertising is dependant entirely on what the market will bear, so I don't think there is any cause for fear that the level of sponsorship will get out of hand. Games publishers are not so desperate for cash they would repeatedly jepordise sales and therefore their existance by completely butchering their games.
No, but I've got the developer source CD's here and can confirm than from looking at them myself if that helps any.
Sorry can't back it up with URLs though
I think that Halo wasn't nearly as innovative in terms of gamplay as Half-Life, and that it's over rated, but I do think it was an innovative game, and still lots of fun. I don't think it's the most overrated game ever (there is a lot of competion over the years), but it's definately in my top 20.
However, it brought some great elements to the genre:
The regenerating sheild idea. This makes the game insanley fun to play, especially when mixed with the other ability of being able to pistol whip and do huge amounts of damage that way, using any weapon. Both of these are elements that would recommend to be followed as ideas in similar FPS games to come. Good NPC friendly support (that moved and acted in a realistic way), great vehicle physics (by which I mean 'fun'), excellent nighttime/lighting effects and better than previousy seen enemy AI being the least novel of these, but still worthly of mention.
I think that some games get a hard time though, like Unreal 2. I enjoyed this a lot. My only major complaint is that it was very, very short. It's true the AI was poor, far inferior to Half Life's, dispite it's age, but because of the way they were implimented, this didn't really present a problem. But what was their looked gorgeous and was very well designed and this really helped to drag you into the game by providing a high immersive environment. Some of the enemies, like the small spiders (very reminicient of StarGates Replications IMO - and that's no bad thing) made for a lot fun blasting them away. But then, I am the sort of person who loves looking round new maps and environments to appreciate the design.
I think Unreal 2 has been one of the most underrated games of late, and has been battered unfairly. I would suggest though, that anyone who wants to play it, do it on nothing less than the most difficult setting, to get their moneys worth.
I agree that, largely thanks to the licencing of engines like Epics Unreal engine, that graphic are no longer becomeing a pull, because simply few games sell well without it (there are always obvious exceptions, but that's the rule).
I don't agree with this poster though, I've been playing HL2 addons (Blueshift, etc) recently and I fired up a Quake3 total conversion today. I find that after playing games like Unreal Tournament 2K3, Unreal 2, Halo, and the Far Cry Demo, that HL is simply too full of low resolution textures and blocky, low polygon models (by todays standards) and I just get distracted and pulled out of the immersive environment. I found this with all games over the years, including the once increadibly immersive Wolfenstien and once terrifying Doom. It seems odd and illogical on the surface to think that an old Mattel game like Shark! Shark! should be less involving, and I do think that some games like Astrosmash! have held their appeal, but I think they are the minority. I assume it's just that I have higher expectation these days.
I think it would be nice, now that 3D engine technology is relatively stable and cards like the Radeon 9800 256Mb and the nVida 5900 are capeable of graphics of better quality than that of most in game CGI's done 10 years ago, for some publishing houses to go back and re-relase older games, like Half Life, but with higher quality textures and maps.
The maps would obviously take more work, but it's a lot easier to fix up maps than it is to release a new game, and with updated models, you won't have to re-do the entire engine or AI (though in the case of a complex interactive title like HL, you'd almost certainly need to give it a few tweaks to make sure the physics was okay with some of the in game 'puzzles').
I think it's too early to do this with some 'older' games (e.g. Quake3, the origional Unreal, etc) but I'd love to see publishers take games like Dark Forces (and the sequal, Jedi Knight), Bungie's Marathon series, the origional Doom Series, Half Life, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, Tie Fighter (etc.) and have them re-done using the latest engines from houses like Epic
Hmm what if we hire a clown to do it? No one would suspect a clown...
Good idea. I vote we start a fun raiser (ala PayPal, but something less crooked) which people can annoymously donate to.
When we raise enough we can hire a contract killer to do the hit (either from a usenet group like alt.contract.killers or from an ad in Solider of Fortune magazine).
[ HHOS! ]
* It's actually cheaper to by an xbox to do this too
(By which I mean cheaper than buying a PC for VoIP, and ultimately cheaper than lots of long distance phone calls.)