There are many reasons the school keeps choosing Source for its senior projects. First, there is a history of successful projects at the school using the engine. The faculty and staff are familliar with it, they know both its strengths and its flaws, and that allows them to better guide students through a project. Second, if you look around at job postings you'll find a lot of companies want new employees to have familiarity with the Source engine, sometimes regardless of what the project would actually use. Thus, even though I personally would have preferred a more open / cross platform solution, in the end, having knowledge of Source will help me get a job, and that's ultimately why most students (including myself) came to the school. Finally, Source has a lot of tools developed by the community that save a lot of time on the projects' tight schedules.
As far as the other engines you mentioned, they have been used at the Guildhall for various other projects. Unreal Tournament 2004 has been repeatedly used for students' first 3d team game, and usually ends up being some sort of team based multiplayer game. DooM 3 and Quake 4 have been used for individual assignments given to level designers.
Ultimately however, as short as development times are in the school - these two projects above were built in 6 months while we had other individual projects running in parallel - there would not be time to test across multiple platforms anyway. Heck, it's difficult to find time to fully test the game on graphics hardware that we're not using in our development machines.
"I wonder if the guy who coined the advice "turn it off" would cut off his arm if he got a zit on the elbow ? Same thing.. "
That is an utterly absurd comparison. The only way that would make any since was if:
1. A zit could kill you (bring down the rest of the system). 2. Removing an arm is painless, resulting in merely a few days of inconvienience. 3. You could re-attach an arm painlessly in mere seconds once the "zit" was removed.
Bottom line, this advice is a temporary solution so that, while the FireFox devlopers work on fixing the actual problem, your system can remain safe.
I've noticed that "bot"'d characters programmed to do nothing but farm money and items has become a growing problem in WoW. Farming bots can frequently be spotted in the game, and I have evern personally recieved in-game mail spam advertizing mmobay.com . What do you plan to do to curb this issue that is eating away at the economy and atmosphere of your realms?
I'm a gamer, and a game developer in training. Personally, I have found very few LCDs that I can tolerate.
My primary gripe is the depth of black - on an LCD, a pure black looks more like a dark grey, where on a CRT a black looks, well, black. Go play DooM 3 on a CRT and then on an average LCD and you'll see exactly what I mean.
Furthermore, most LCDs tend to wash colors out a bit. Taking the game Morrowind as an example, on my six year old Samsung 19" CRT, the colors are deep, saturated, and the world looks full of life. Moving to either of the two LCD displays I have (both on laptops - one Dell, one Toshiba), the game world looks like someone sprayed Chlorox on everything.
And this is without going into the blur that occurs during high end action games. It's gotten a lot better over the years (remember "dual scan" LCDs?), but it's still noticable compared to a CRT.
The only LCD's I've seen that have been acceptable to me have been some of the ones on Sharp laptops. Those give me some hope that LCDs can eventually make it to a point where I wouldn't mind using them, but for now, I'll covet my Samsung CRT. If anyone knows of any good LCDs that solve these problems though, I'd love to find out I'm wrong =)
I do not know the numbers, you'll have to google for it, but you can find out through the system profiler. It will show your drive's model number, and if you google that, you'll find a supplier (or a mac site dedicated to the Mini) that will tell you what RPM the drive is.
The form factor sold the machine for me - I don't want to go adding an external drive to the machine, even for a performance boost. I knew I wouldn't be playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 or DooM3 on the machine, I bought it to have a small form factor desktop in addition to my laptop.
That said, the findings of improved speed with an external firewire drive is hardly surprising. Laptop hard drives (which the Mini uses) are notoriously slow, and if you're one of those who got a 4200 RPM drive with their Mini it's even worse than normal.
Still, nifty to know it works.
I'm curious though - has anyone replaced their mini's hard drive with a higher RPM laptop drive? Did that help matters much? I wouldn't mind going for a speed upgrade if I can keep the sleek, tiny form factor =)
The reason MMORPG's arent used for benchmarking is because, unlike most FPSs, you can't record a "demo" and then benchmark from that. The FPS demo files used for benchmarking ensure that no matter how many times you run the test, the computer is doing exactly the same thing - processing the levels from the exact same angles, the exact same number of objects, etc. You can't do that in MMORPGs, so you can't possibly have an accurate benchmark from one.
That said - I wish MMORPG developers would change that. How cool would it be to record that massive PVP raid for prosperity? =)
While I am no slouch when it comes to Linux, Mandrake is the only distribution I will use. I refuse to spend hours of my time editing config files which I can simply click Mandrake Control Center and have everything working in 5 minutes. Out of at least a dozen systems I've installed Mandrake 9 to, in each case, after install, the system was 100% usable, all hardware autodetected, autoconfigred, etc. Saved me tons of time. Why anyone would WANT to piddle with config file when they don't have to is beyond me - and if config file editing is your thing, what's keeping you from doing that in Mandrake?
3d issues? I've never had a problem with 3d in Mandrake. I download the Nvidia RPMs and go. On my ATI system, the dirvers were automatically installed. I've never had a problem running games such as UT2003, RTCW, or Counter-Strike (through WineX).
If Mandrake dies, I will be faced with a tough choice. I had problems with RedHat (plus I'm a KDE nut),SUSE refused to work properly with my video card (an nVidia card), and I don't think I'd like Lindows or Xandros (though I'd try them if Mandrake died). I would probably end up going to Windows, something that I swore I would never do.
So, all of you wanting Mandrake dead - just remember that if Mandrake dies, a LOT of people (their employees as well as their users) will be left out in the cold.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many reasons the school keeps choosing Source for its senior projects. First, there is a history of successful projects at the school using the engine. The faculty and staff are familliar with it, they know both its strengths and its flaws, and that allows them to better guide students through a project. Second, if you look around at job postings you'll find a lot of companies want new employees to have familiarity with the Source engine, sometimes regardless of what the project would actually use. Thus, even though I personally would have preferred a more open / cross platform solution, in the end, having knowledge of Source will help me get a job, and that's ultimately why most students (including myself) came to the school. Finally, Source has a lot of tools developed by the community that save a lot of time on the projects' tight schedules.
As far as the other engines you mentioned, they have been used at the Guildhall for various other projects. Unreal Tournament 2004 has been repeatedly used for students' first 3d team game, and usually ends up being some sort of team based multiplayer game. DooM 3 and Quake 4 have been used for individual assignments given to level designers.
Ultimately however, as short as development times are in the school - these two projects above were built in 6 months while we had other individual projects running in parallel - there would not be time to test across multiple platforms anyway. Heck, it's difficult to find time to fully test the game on graphics hardware that we're not using in our development machines.
-Amich
Are other browsers going to be effected by this as well? Apple for Safari, Opera, Mozilla / FireFox... What are the widespread implications of this?
"I wonder if the guy who coined the advice "turn it off" would cut off his arm if he got a zit on the elbow ? Same thing.. "
That is an utterly absurd comparison. The only way that would make any since was if:
1. A zit could kill you (bring down the rest of the system).
2. Removing an arm is painless, resulting in merely a few days of inconvienience.
3. You could re-attach an arm painlessly in mere seconds once the "zit" was removed.
Bottom line, this advice is a temporary solution so that, while the FireFox devlopers work on fixing the actual problem, your system can remain safe.
-Amich
I've noticed that "bot"'d characters programmed to do nothing but farm money and items has become a growing problem in WoW. Farming bots can frequently be spotted in the game, and I have evern personally recieved in-game mail spam advertizing mmobay.com . What do you plan to do to curb this issue that is eating away at the economy and atmosphere of your realms?
Marukah
24 night elf Druid
Silverhand
I'm a gamer, and a game developer in training. Personally, I have found very few LCDs that I can tolerate.
My primary gripe is the depth of black - on an LCD, a pure black looks more like a dark grey, where on a CRT a black looks, well, black. Go play DooM 3 on a CRT and then on an average LCD and you'll see exactly what I mean.
Furthermore, most LCDs tend to wash colors out a bit. Taking the game Morrowind as an example, on my six year old Samsung 19" CRT, the colors are deep, saturated, and the world looks full of life. Moving to either of the two LCD displays I have (both on laptops - one Dell, one Toshiba), the game world looks like someone sprayed Chlorox on everything.
And this is without going into the blur that occurs during high end action games. It's gotten a lot better over the years (remember "dual scan" LCDs?), but it's still noticable compared to a CRT.
The only LCD's I've seen that have been acceptable to me have been some of the ones on Sharp laptops. Those give me some hope that LCDs can eventually make it to a point where I wouldn't mind using them, but for now, I'll covet my Samsung CRT. If anyone knows of any good LCDs that solve these problems though, I'd love to find out I'm wrong =)
-Amich
I do not know the numbers, you'll have to google for it, but you can find out through the system profiler. It will show your drive's model number, and if you google that, you'll find a supplier (or a mac site dedicated to the Mini) that will tell you what RPM the drive is.
-Amich
The form factor sold the machine for me - I don't want to go adding an external drive to the machine, even for a performance boost. I knew I wouldn't be playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 or DooM3 on the machine, I bought it to have a small form factor desktop in addition to my laptop.
That said, the findings of improved speed with an external firewire drive is hardly surprising. Laptop hard drives (which the Mini uses) are notoriously slow, and if you're one of those who got a 4200 RPM drive with their Mini it's even worse than normal.
Still, nifty to know it works.
I'm curious though - has anyone replaced their mini's hard drive with a higher RPM laptop drive? Did that help matters much? I wouldn't mind going for a speed upgrade if I can keep the sleek, tiny form factor =)
-Amich
The reason MMORPG's arent used for benchmarking is because, unlike most FPSs, you can't record a "demo" and then benchmark from that. The FPS demo files used for benchmarking ensure that no matter how many times you run the test, the computer is doing exactly the same thing - processing the levels from the exact same angles, the exact same number of objects, etc. You can't do that in MMORPGs, so you can't possibly have an accurate benchmark from one.
That said - I wish MMORPG developers would change that. How cool would it be to record that massive PVP raid for prosperity? =)
It's obvious this sort of thing is an outrage, and we should stand up and do something better than preaching to the choir on Slashdot.
1 08675 . I'm sure if enough donations piled up, PearPC's authors would go after CherryOS in court.
This story made me decide to donate to the PearPC project http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=
While I am no slouch when it comes to Linux, Mandrake is the only distribution I will use. I refuse to spend hours of my time editing config files which I can simply click Mandrake Control Center and have everything working in 5 minutes. Out of at least a dozen systems I've installed Mandrake 9 to, in each case, after install, the system was 100% usable, all hardware autodetected, autoconfigred, etc. Saved me tons of time. Why anyone would WANT to piddle with config file when they don't have to is beyond me - and if config file editing is your thing, what's keeping you from doing that in Mandrake?
3d issues? I've never had a problem with 3d in Mandrake. I download the Nvidia RPMs and go. On my ATI system, the dirvers were automatically installed. I've never had a problem running games such as UT2003, RTCW, or Counter-Strike (through WineX).
If Mandrake dies, I will be faced with a tough choice. I had problems with RedHat (plus I'm a KDE nut),SUSE refused to work properly with my video card (an nVidia card), and I don't think I'd like Lindows or Xandros (though I'd try them if Mandrake died). I would probably end up going to Windows, something that I swore I would never do.
So, all of you wanting Mandrake dead - just remember that if Mandrake dies, a LOT of people (their employees as well as their users) will be left out in the cold.
-Jim
"Amich"