Are you seeing any benefit from that 9600GT? My complaint about physics in games is that because not everybody has the hareware for it, the developers have kept the number of physics objects down to a bare minimum (a create here, a rock there, sometimes a ragdoll deadguy), so you really don't get a feeling like there is physics in the world, just sometimes bodies will flop around and boxes will bounce a bit. Because of this, dedicated physics hardware goes to waste almost all of the time.
It would be cool to have a game where nearly everthing was physics enabled, and you just spent most of your time applying forces to objects to get stuff done--Oh' no! a badguy! I'll stop time for a second, apply a push to a nearby door, and cause the door to slam open in his face. Or maybe a clock will fly off of the wall and bonk him in the head. Maybe I'll knock a bookshelf over instead. And not in the pre-scripted "Hmm, I just got my gravity gun, and oh my, apparently a woodshop exploded over the town and littered the place with sawblades..."
This is a risky thing to do IMHO. It's too easy for an attacker to lock out the admins when they start attacking a host. You have to be careful to whitelist at least one of your own hosts so you can get on the machines in an emergency.
As you noticed, the portal gun really can't work in HL2, the areas are just too open and people would end up outside of the map in no time (or it would have to only work in a handful of specific areas).
It seems more likely to me that Gordan will rescue Chell and she'll make prescripted portals for him while he escorts her past the combine and does all of the gravity gun stuff.
The dialog should be really interesting:
Gordan:...
Chell:...
Gordan:...
Chell:...
Although to be fair, Chell never talks in Portal because there is nobody to talk to.
To be fair, HL2 Ep1, 2, and 3 were supposed to be a single game broken up into three parts and released as they were completed. Episode 3 is taking a very long time to come out.
I've always suspected that most of the bigger scalpers are in league with Ticketmaster. Heck, the ones in this article might have been hit just because they didn't pay Ticketmaster the proper kickbacks on their scalping operation. It just didn't seem feasable to me that someone stuck going through the same slow overloaded crappy interface as everybody else would be able to snap up all of the good tickets within milliseconds of them going on sale (who am I kidding, they were all gone well before ticket sales opened up) otherwise.
You really have no idea how venues work do you? You can't just say "Oh, I need another week worth of shows" once the tickets start to go on sale. The Venues have been booked up for months by that point. You also have appointments in neighboring cities a couple of days later. Artists don't just show up at the Pepsi center and go "I'd like to have a concert on Wednesday."
I've always harbored fantasies that some day Ticketmaster/Live Nation will be hit by a federal antitrust lawsuit and be forced to loosen the deathgrip they have over event ticketing.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Bullets fired straight up in the air tend to tumble, which robs them of their killing power. That said, a bullet fired in an arc can come down miles away and still deadly.
OTOH, I tried to get the online play of Super Smash Brothers on the Wii to work. It never did, and since I can't hack the console to figure out what it's trying to do, I'm stuck.
I'm more curious why LL gives a damn about MAC addresses. It's not like they'll see them on their end unless you've hooked up your computer to their server LAN. Do they key permissions off of your MAC? That seems unlikely since you can log in from any machine by just downloading the client and supplying a password. Can you lock content down to specific machines (or more precisely: specific network cards)?
Yeah, the cities "lose money", but it seems to me that a lot of that is due to the city moving up civil works projects that were otherwise on the back burner just because they want to put on the best face for the Olympics. Plus, at the very least you tend to get a bunch of Olympic level venues that the locals get to use after the games are over. Heck, Rio is even reusing the housing in the Olympic village as low cost housing for the poor. Low cost housing is something that they would have lost money on anyway.
So we have a service designed from the start to attract internet trolls from one end and propaganda ministries from the other. What could possibly go wrong?
I like the concept, but the real world is going to interfere with the execution.
I've always loved the hate for "carebears" in MMOs. It usually boils down to "I poopsocked my way to the top of the griefing food chain, and most of the targets are hiding away in safe zones! Why aren't they letting me kill them and camp their corpse repeatedly? This isn't fair!"
The bluescreen may be painful, but it is far less painful than having your information stolen by criminals. Assuming of course the people who own the machines are savvy enough to properly install their firewalls and virus protection next time.
The only game you know is Crysis? Most PC games these days are console ports, and even low end GPUs are way more powerful than what you find in the latest generation consoles. I'm using a card from 4 years ago and I still max everything out at 1600x1200 in most games.
Heh, I still have an 800MB and a 1.2GB WD HDD that are still kicking. The 800MB one doesn't even support DMA. I could replace them both with a thumb drive now, but the machine they're in has been happy and content for so long that I don't even want to touch it.
Maybe one can argue that at least with speculation you're putting that money in the hands of small (or large) businesses that might do something with it, instead of casino or online gambling where you're just putting money in the hands of organized crime. Even when it's legal it's really the same types running it (just look at Vegas or Atlantic City).
Unless it's Indian gaming, maybe we should make a law that allows reservations to run online gambling websites. It would make about as much sense.
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Are you seeing any benefit from that 9600GT? My complaint about physics in games is that because not everybody has the hareware for it, the developers have kept the number of physics objects down to a bare minimum (a create here, a rock there, sometimes a ragdoll deadguy), so you really don't get a feeling like there is physics in the world, just sometimes bodies will flop around and boxes will bounce a bit. Because of this, dedicated physics hardware goes to waste almost all of the time.
It would be cool to have a game where nearly everthing was physics enabled, and you just spent most of your time applying forces to objects to get stuff done--Oh' no! a badguy! I'll stop time for a second, apply a push to a nearby door, and cause the door to slam open in his face. Or maybe a clock will fly off of the wall and bonk him in the head. Maybe I'll knock a bookshelf over instead. And not in the pre-scripted "Hmm, I just got my gravity gun, and oh my, apparently a woodshop exploded over the town and littered the place with sawblades..."
This is a risky thing to do IMHO. It's too easy for an attacker to lock out the admins when they start attacking a host. You have to be careful to whitelist at least one of your own hosts so you can get on the machines in an emergency.
As you noticed, the portal gun really can't work in HL2, the areas are just too open and people would end up outside of the map in no time (or it would have to only work in a handful of specific areas).
... ... ... ...
It seems more likely to me that Gordan will rescue Chell and she'll make prescripted portals for him while he escorts her past the combine and does all of the gravity gun stuff.
The dialog should be really interesting:
Gordan:
Chell:
Gordan:
Chell:
Although to be fair, Chell never talks in Portal because there is nobody to talk to.
To be fair, HL2 Ep1, 2, and 3 were supposed to be a single game broken up into three parts and released as they were completed. Episode 3 is taking a very long time to come out.
They're probably talking about camwhores.
What are you talking about?
I've always suspected that most of the bigger scalpers are in league with Ticketmaster. Heck, the ones in this article might have been hit just because they didn't pay Ticketmaster the proper kickbacks on their scalping operation. It just didn't seem feasable to me that someone stuck going through the same slow overloaded crappy interface as everybody else would be able to snap up all of the good tickets within milliseconds of them going on sale (who am I kidding, they were all gone well before ticket sales opened up) otherwise.
The scalpers would just write a bot to bid in every single auction.
Venues already know what seats are best. That's not a problem.
You really have no idea how venues work do you? You can't just say "Oh, I need another week worth of shows" once the tickets start to go on sale. The Venues have been booked up for months by that point. You also have appointments in neighboring cities a couple of days later. Artists don't just show up at the Pepsi center and go "I'd like to have a concert on Wednesday."
I've always harbored fantasies that some day Ticketmaster/Live Nation will be hit by a federal antitrust lawsuit and be forced to loosen the deathgrip they have over event ticketing.
I don't think they want multi-million dollar fines over something that is, in the end, just a hobby.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Bullets fired straight up in the air tend to tumble, which robs them of their killing power. That said, a bullet fired in an arc can come down miles away and still deadly.
OTOH, I tried to get the online play of Super Smash Brothers on the Wii to work. It never did, and since I can't hack the console to figure out what it's trying to do, I'm stuck.
I'm more curious why LL gives a damn about MAC addresses. It's not like they'll see them on their end unless you've hooked up your computer to their server LAN. Do they key permissions off of your MAC? That seems unlikely since you can log in from any machine by just downloading the client and supplying a password. Can you lock content down to specific machines (or more precisely: specific network cards)?
Yeah, the cities "lose money", but it seems to me that a lot of that is due to the city moving up civil works projects that were otherwise on the back burner just because they want to put on the best face for the Olympics. Plus, at the very least you tend to get a bunch of Olympic level venues that the locals get to use after the games are over. Heck, Rio is even reusing the housing in the Olympic village as low cost housing for the poor. Low cost housing is something that they would have lost money on anyway.
So we have a service designed from the start to attract internet trolls from one end and propaganda ministries from the other. What could possibly go wrong?
I like the concept, but the real world is going to interfere with the execution.
Wow, for something that reads like an elaborate troll, that guy sure is dedicated.
I've always loved the hate for "carebears" in MMOs. It usually boils down to "I poopsocked my way to the top of the griefing food chain, and most of the targets are hiding away in safe zones! Why aren't they letting me kill them and camp their corpse repeatedly? This isn't fair!"
Instead of something that putters around at 30mph and bores its driver to death before running out of fuel.
The bluescreen may be painful, but it is far less painful than having your information stolen by criminals. Assuming of course the people who own the machines are savvy enough to properly install their firewalls and virus protection next time.
The only game you know is Crysis? Most PC games these days are console ports, and even low end GPUs are way more powerful than what you find in the latest generation consoles. I'm using a card from 4 years ago and I still max everything out at 1600x1200 in most games.
Heh, I still have an 800MB and a 1.2GB WD HDD that are still kicking. The 800MB one doesn't even support DMA. I could replace them both with a thumb drive now, but the machine they're in has been happy and content for so long that I don't even want to touch it.
Maybe one can argue that at least with speculation you're putting that money in the hands of small (or large) businesses that might do something with it, instead of casino or online gambling where you're just putting money in the hands of organized crime. Even when it's legal it's really the same types running it (just look at Vegas or Atlantic City).
Unless it's Indian gaming, maybe we should make a law that allows reservations to run online gambling websites. It would make about as much sense.
It's the same password on every device. No tech wants to go around looking up passwords for everything he connects to.