If it's being shot on film then it's 24,000 words per second. PAL and NTSC just duplicate some of those words and then mix them back in to give the appearance of more words per second.
If someone casts speed, make sure your mage can cast it too. You can protect against level drains I think, I can't recall the exact mechanisms. There are potions that reverse it and also some druid(?)/cleric spells.
BG is 2nd edition D&D. You really have to read through and understand the whole magic system to stand any chance whatsoever but, when you do, it becomes insanely fun.
The only thing that saved the original Neverwinter Nights in my opinion was the last expansion, Hordes of the Underdark.
NWN was always about the user generated content. Even before HotU was released, the best stuff came from the mod scene. HotU only stood out from the OC and SoU because it was basically a plot free awesome dungeon crawl and the writing in the other two campaigns was poor.
I've played a lot of RPGs since Baldurs Gate, and few of them have been as polished as that title. Maybe that's just my nostalgia goggles talking...
No, I went on a big BG trip last year (see my other post in this topic) - it really was that good.
I'd not say it was the worst RPG ever, but it was definitely a step down, and only gets closer to BGII in quality after downloading the very best user generated content.
Which, to be fair, was what was promised. I'd been hearing about NWN for ages but only really got excited when I heard about how it was all focused on user generated content. On that basis I decided to wait until a couple of months after release and was rewarded with stuff like Penultima (which if awesome if you're into that style of fantasy humour).
The names of the other great mods escape me but the fact there's a Linux client (no rebooting!) meant I spent ages in NWN.
I never played Ascension as I'd already completed ToB when I'd first heard about it. I actually took what ended up being about a month out of my life to play all of BG1+2 in succession at the age of 18 when I finished 6th form, I had 10-12hr days just playing Baldur's Gate, discovering everything for myself without the help of Gamefaqs.
Ascension was my goal when I did my BG1+2 mod install last year. Trying to play it again made me realise just how epic those games are, it actually makes me laugh when people criticise RPGs of today for being too short - I think they'd complain even more if they had games the length of BG! There's no way I could ever hope to complete a saga like BG these days, I just don't have enough time.
When I retire I'm going to take about six months out of my life to complete all of BG1+2+mods (no doubt there'll be even more released in the next 40 years). Thankfully, even though it's xmas, I'm not drunk enough to try to start playing again. I've got plans for my free time this coming year!
Debian Sid is fine with the Nvidia drivers too. No conflicts with Mesa as long as you use the packages from non-free. Apt also recompiles the kernel driver every time you install a new kernel!
Check out the mod section on Pocketplane.net, there's all sorts of mods. Probably the most popular thing to do is to bring BG1 into the BG2 engine along with the classic BG1 mods like DSotSC, this allows you to play the whole saga+mods as one giant game. I'd reckon about a 400+hr experience!
I did that about last year, (un)fortunately I managed to screw it up somehow by installing a few other smaller mods as well. I got about 50hrs in and when I attempted the side quest mod in question it caused a crash. My previous good save was more than 10hrs old so I lost interest, thereby saving all my weekends for what would most likely have been all the past year and probably a year ahead too!
While MP3 has some of the best FPS controls on a console it still doesn't touch M&KB. Show me an alternative control mechanism that'll let you do a 360 spin with a flick of the wrist (trackballs count as mice for this!) and then I'll be happy.
I accept that's not realistic but most FPSs don't attempt realistic movement, they just make you turn around really s l o w l y.
Lots of console games are released with major performance problems. The Last Remnant is one of the latest culprits; from the language in that review (the game is "outstanding", the voice acting is "excellent") I reckon Gamespot would've given that game at least an 8 rather than a 6.5 if not for the frame-rate issues. I'm waiting for its release on PC in the spring, even if they don't optimize the game I'm sure my PC can handle it as it's far more powerful than my 360!
It's unusual for an otherwise high quality game to be released in that state but it's not unusual for publishers to cut their losses and just drop an unfinished game in shops with broken gameplay and major technical/performance issues.
Here in the UK you can walk into just about any branch of Game, HMV or even local independent video game stores and the PC game section is a tiny fraction of the console sections.
If you connect your PS3 controller to your PC and run jstest you'll see it actually has an incredible 28 axis and 19 buttons. The buttons are pressure sensitive so count as axis. I think the 360 controller has a similar number of inputs, again due to pressure sensitive buttons; it may have less axis as I think some of those axis are the motion sensors.
What we do need badly tho, is for console games to support mouse and keyboard
PS3 and 360 both support M&KB. Not all games support the use of them - UT3 does and maybe some others - but on PS3 and 360 you can use a KB for all text input situations. UT3 on the PS3 also supports limited mods! You have to "cook" them for the PS3 using the PC editing tools and you can only use UnrealScript (no custom dlls) but you can do total conversions within those limits.
You can actually buy an adapter, the XFPS, for 360 that converts a M&KB setup into a regular controller for games that don't support it directly. You can also find a PS3 controller that looks like a mouse on a mouse pad with a Wii style nunchuck for your offhand, although I can't remember the name.
I think that Microsoft isn't quite ready for the general public to realize that that $399 'gaming' machine is perfectly powerful enough to run an office suite.
Why not? I'm sure MS would love to be in the same game as Apple, especially now that they're making a profit on the hardware and the reliability issues are (mostly) behind them.
But looking at the UK Apple stores' iMac page I'm guesstimating (wow, that passed my spillchucker first time!) that you're paying from £200 to £400 over the odds for a similarly specced commodity system. The premium on the 2Ghz Mac Mini is mental.
I accept that these things are produced in lower volumes and are well designed but still, Apple still has a huge margin on its hardware.
Homeowners associations are pretty much the antithesis of socialist housing. As the GP said, at least go and Google before you go making comments.
I recommend Marxists.org, they have a great introductory section. Sorry for helping this thread go so far off topic, it's just that Marx really is one of the most influential yet misrepresented thinkers in human history. I don't mind if people disagree with his ideas (in fact disagreement is an integral part of Socialism, why the left never gets anywhere in fact!) it'd just be nice if people criticised Marx for things he actually believed and not the totalitarian ideas that have been labelled "Marxist" by people in power in a collective attempt to slander his name.
As Marx himself said, "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist"!
Those machines were basically just a PC and a Megadrive (or Genesis as you USians knew them) in the same box. I seriously doubt you could get away with integrating a console into a PC as an expansion card because then you'd need to start testing games on umpteen different mobo combinations to be sure of compatibility, negating one of the major benefits of using a console in the first place.
Also, I don't see how it would stop MS or Sony loosing money on hardware at the start of a generation (I believe 360 hardware now turns a profit?). A company like Dell isn't going to shoulder a loss for Sony as they're not going to see any licensing revenue from games. Consumers would see an integrated box that is more expensive than two separate boxes and vote with their wallets.
You'd almost think that TFA was written as flamebait to generate maximum pageviews and that comment based news sites like/. were carrying it for the same reason!
That LWN writeup is far better too though, TFA is terrible. LWN makes it clear that this adds device checksum support, i.e. if your SATA drive supports adding checksum data to blocks this patch will enable that functionality.
No, I believe that justice implies a certain equality. When it's possible for one side to win just because they have more money, regardless of what really happened, then justice has failed.
Not often, but maybe twice a year I misjudge how much power I have in my laptop. I don't use OS X but as someone who often has flash memory of some form plugged in I could see how that could be annoying.
If I were in the FSF shoes then I'd go for every penny I could get. They need to drive home the message that if companies want to play the Free Software game, they have to give back. If companies think they can rip off GPL software and then get off cheap five years later then they wont respect the GPL. Remember Cisco would have gained significant advantage in terms of saved development costs by ripping off the GPLed software named in the suit.
I don't think that would scare too many firms away. The no-licensing cost aspect of GPL software makes it too tempting for firms who don't necessarily gain any advantage from using proprietary software. Much easier to just slap something together using Free Software and pay a programmer to customise it for whatever product it is you want to sell.
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If it's being shot on film then it's 24,000 words per second. PAL and NTSC just duplicate some of those words and then mix them back in to give the appearance of more words per second.
If someone casts speed, make sure your mage can cast it too. You can protect against level drains I think, I can't recall the exact mechanisms. There are potions that reverse it and also some druid(?)/cleric spells.
BG is 2nd edition D&D. You really have to read through and understand the whole magic system to stand any chance whatsoever but, when you do, it becomes insanely fun.
The only thing that saved the original Neverwinter Nights in my opinion was the last expansion, Hordes of the Underdark.
NWN was always about the user generated content. Even before HotU was released, the best stuff came from the mod scene. HotU only stood out from the OC and SoU because it was basically a plot free awesome dungeon crawl and the writing in the other two campaigns was poor.
I've played a lot of RPGs since Baldurs Gate, and few of them have been as polished as that title. Maybe that's just my nostalgia goggles talking...
No, I went on a big BG trip last year (see my other post in this topic) - it really was that good.
I'd not say it was the worst RPG ever, but it was definitely a step down, and only gets closer to BGII in quality after downloading the very best user generated content.
Which, to be fair, was what was promised. I'd been hearing about NWN for ages but only really got excited when I heard about how it was all focused on user generated content. On that basis I decided to wait until a couple of months after release and was rewarded with stuff like Penultima (which if awesome if you're into that style of fantasy humour).
The names of the other great mods escape me but the fact there's a Linux client (no rebooting!) meant I spent ages in NWN.
I never played Ascension as I'd already completed ToB when I'd first heard about it. I actually took what ended up being about a month out of my life to play all of BG1+2 in succession at the age of 18 when I finished 6th form, I had 10-12hr days just playing Baldur's Gate, discovering everything for myself without the help of Gamefaqs.
Ascension was my goal when I did my BG1+2 mod install last year. Trying to play it again made me realise just how epic those games are, it actually makes me laugh when people criticise RPGs of today for being too short - I think they'd complain even more if they had games the length of BG! There's no way I could ever hope to complete a saga like BG these days, I just don't have enough time.
When I retire I'm going to take about six months out of my life to complete all of BG1+2+mods (no doubt there'll be even more released in the next 40 years). Thankfully, even though it's xmas, I'm not drunk enough to try to start playing again. I've got plans for my free time this coming year!
Debian Sid is fine with the Nvidia drivers too. No conflicts with Mesa as long as you use the packages from non-free. Apt also recompiles the kernel driver every time you install a new kernel!
Check out the mod section on Pocketplane.net, there's all sorts of mods. Probably the most popular thing to do is to bring BG1 into the BG2 engine along with the classic BG1 mods like DSotSC, this allows you to play the whole saga+mods as one giant game. I'd reckon about a 400+hr experience!
I did that about last year, (un)fortunately I managed to screw it up somehow by installing a few other smaller mods as well. I got about 50hrs in and when I attempted the side quest mod in question it caused a crash. My previous good save was more than 10hrs old so I lost interest, thereby saving all my weekends for what would most likely have been all the past year and probably a year ahead too!
While MP3 has some of the best FPS controls on a console it still doesn't touch M&KB. Show me an alternative control mechanism that'll let you do a 360 spin with a flick of the wrist (trackballs count as mice for this!) and then I'll be happy.
I accept that's not realistic but most FPSs don't attempt realistic movement, they just make you turn around really s l o w l y.
Lots of console games are released with major performance problems. The Last Remnant is one of the latest culprits; from the language in that review (the game is "outstanding", the voice acting is "excellent") I reckon Gamespot would've given that game at least an 8 rather than a 6.5 if not for the frame-rate issues. I'm waiting for its release on PC in the spring, even if they don't optimize the game I'm sure my PC can handle it as it's far more powerful than my 360!
It's unusual for an otherwise high quality game to be released in that state but it's not unusual for publishers to cut their losses and just drop an unfinished game in shops with broken gameplay and major technical/performance issues.
Anecdotes don't prove anything, but...
Here in the UK you can walk into just about any branch of Game, HMV or even local independent video game stores and the PC game section is a tiny fraction of the console sections.
If you connect your PS3 controller to your PC and run jstest you'll see it actually has an incredible 28 axis and 19 buttons. The buttons are pressure sensitive so count as axis. I think the 360 controller has a similar number of inputs, again due to pressure sensitive buttons; it may have less axis as I think some of those axis are the motion sensors.
360 comes with a headset. I wish PS3 came with one too, it's mental that it insists on using bluetooth headsets.
What we do need badly tho, is for console games to support mouse and keyboard
PS3 and 360 both support M&KB. Not all games support the use of them - UT3 does and maybe some others - but on PS3 and 360 you can use a KB for all text input situations. UT3 on the PS3 also supports limited mods! You have to "cook" them for the PS3 using the PC editing tools and you can only use UnrealScript (no custom dlls) but you can do total conversions within those limits.
You can actually buy an adapter, the XFPS, for 360 that converts a M&KB setup into a regular controller for games that don't support it directly. You can also find a PS3 controller that looks like a mouse on a mouse pad with a Wii style nunchuck for your offhand, although I can't remember the name.
So yea, M&KB for console - it's already there.
I think that Microsoft isn't quite ready for the general public to realize that that $399 'gaming' machine is perfectly powerful enough to run an office suite.
Why not? I'm sure MS would love to be in the same game as Apple, especially now that they're making a profit on the hardware and the reliability issues are (mostly) behind them.
And, in my case as a civil servant, a freaking huge payoff :)
But looking at the UK Apple stores' iMac page I'm guesstimating (wow, that passed my spillchucker first time!) that you're paying from £200 to £400 over the odds for a similarly specced commodity system. The premium on the 2Ghz Mac Mini is mental.
I accept that these things are produced in lower volumes and are well designed but still, Apple still has a huge margin on its hardware.
Homeowners associations are pretty much the antithesis of socialist housing. As the GP said, at least go and Google before you go making comments.
I recommend Marxists.org, they have a great introductory section. Sorry for helping this thread go so far off topic, it's just that Marx really is one of the most influential yet misrepresented thinkers in human history. I don't mind if people disagree with his ideas (in fact disagreement is an integral part of Socialism, why the left never gets anywhere in fact!) it'd just be nice if people criticised Marx for things he actually believed and not the totalitarian ideas that have been labelled "Marxist" by people in power in a collective attempt to slander his name.
As Marx himself said, "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist"!
Google seems to think that the Toshiba dive silencer can be installed on any PC. Why not give it a try?
Amstad MegaPC and the Sega TeraDrive, both obviously failed.
Those machines were basically just a PC and a Megadrive (or Genesis as you USians knew them) in the same box. I seriously doubt you could get away with integrating a console into a PC as an expansion card because then you'd need to start testing games on umpteen different mobo combinations to be sure of compatibility, negating one of the major benefits of using a console in the first place.
Also, I don't see how it would stop MS or Sony loosing money on hardware at the start of a generation (I believe 360 hardware now turns a profit?). A company like Dell isn't going to shoulder a loss for Sony as they're not going to see any licensing revenue from games. Consumers would see an integrated box that is more expensive than two separate boxes and vote with their wallets.
You'd almost think that TFA was written as flamebait to generate maximum pageviews and that comment based news sites like /. were carrying it for the same reason!
That LWN writeup is far better too though, TFA is terrible. LWN makes it clear that this adds device checksum support, i.e. if your SATA drive supports adding checksum data to blocks this patch will enable that functionality.
No, I believe that justice implies a certain equality. When it's possible for one side to win just because they have more money, regardless of what really happened, then justice has failed.
Mac freak /.ers already have supported a company, Psystar, that violates the license, and thus the copyright, of another company, Apple.
Fixed that for you. They're a derided subculture even around these parts, real /.ers are Free Software True Believers!
Not often, but maybe twice a year I misjudge how much power I have in my laptop. I don't use OS X but as someone who often has flash memory of some form plugged in I could see how that could be annoying.
If I were in the FSF shoes then I'd go for every penny I could get. They need to drive home the message that if companies want to play the Free Software game, they have to give back. If companies think they can rip off GPL software and then get off cheap five years later then they wont respect the GPL. Remember Cisco would have gained significant advantage in terms of saved development costs by ripping off the GPLed software named in the suit.
I don't think that would scare too many firms away. The no-licensing cost aspect of GPL software makes it too tempting for firms who don't necessarily gain any advantage from using proprietary software. Much easier to just slap something together using Free Software and pay a programmer to customise it for whatever product it is you want to sell.