Re:All new 3D Shooters are missing one thing...
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What ever happened to Co-op mode?
Scripting killed it. Back in the day when the most dynamic thing happening was a door opening somewhere or a block falling down to reveal a passage, having multiple players crawling around blasting things was easy enough to support.
That said, even in the Doom days there were plenty of levels that would break if one player did something when the others were in the wrong area, such as sealing off the starting area so that when you died you faced a brick wall rather than empty corridors.
As things became ever more complicated it seemed to become harder and harder for the developers to ensure that there were no catch-22 type setups and after Hexen II and (IIRC) Quake II it pretty much seemed to vanish from games, Serious Sam excepted.
my guess is that a Windows XP computer with 256MB of ram probably enters swap city whenever he tries to burn a DVD
That comment made me check the 7-year-old PC in the other room, which is running XP Home with 256MB RAM. It uses 124MB after booting, leaving plenty free for things like browsing the Web, using email or even running older games. Nero certainly wouldn't be a problem, but encoding times on a P3-450 would be prohibitive.
Having said that, there's nothing much running in the background on that PC, my experience with a friend's PC (running 120MB of stuff on a 64MB Win95 machine) shows that some people don't know the meaning of "uninstall" (or even clicking "no" on "do you want to instakk junk_spyware01?" popups....)
I thought that the 2005 episodes may have been shot in HD because of the 16:9 aspect ratio
Most TV in the UK is in 16:9 format (broadcast as 4:3 with a "flag" saying it's anamorphic content) and has been for a few years now, but very little is shot in HD. I'd imagine Dr Who is the same.
Living in the UK, we had a notable cold spell in the 80s. When I was growing up snow was common during the winters, yet during the late 80s and through most of the 90s it was almost entirely absent. Indeed, the five inches of snow we had earlier this year was the first time I'd seen more than an inch on the ground since early 1997 - there were kids who'd never seen enough snow to build a snowman, or have a decent snowball fight!
The November just gone was a below average month temperature wise in the UK, the first one since July 2004.
I believe global warming is happening, but damn it - I'd still expect to see a few below average months a year even if temperatures rose a degree or two, but it's a rare event to see a below average month at all these days. The problem has been the jet stream ploughing away to our north, dragging mild air across much of Europe over the past few winters - it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario.
Coincidentally I believe the USA hasn't seen anywhere near as much warming in the last 20 years as Europe has...
The first PC I put together kept resetting during use, for no real reason that I could find. Other times it wouldn't boot, unless you pushed on the top of the (desktop) case when turning it on.
It was only after several weeks of this that I realised I'd only used half as many standoffs as you're meant to, meaning various parts of the motherboard were touching the chassis. Ouch.:(
Another annoying thing was the CD-ROM drive on the 486 I owned back in 1994 - it was a crappy 2x Longshine drive (bonus points if you've ever heard of the manufacturer). Anyway, just after a year (ie out of warranty) the wretched thing wouldn't eject if you didn't have a CD in the drive. You had to push on the front of the drive while pressing the eject button, as usually that would eject the tray. Eventually, it trapped my Windows 95 CD in the drive and wouldn't eject it. So I did what any frustrated user would do - grabbed a screwdriver and forced the tray open. Funnily enough, that killed the drive.... Of course, most CD/DVD drives now come wit emergency eject holes, but I've not had to use one since.
Say no to Media Player 7 - just run mplayer2 instead!
(For some reason, even Windows XP still comes with mplay32.exe (a port of the Media Player shipped with Video for Windows years ago); mplayer2.exe runs Media Player 6 which can play pretty much anything that 7 can.)
I imagine there's quite a great deal more overseas
I live a mile away from a tacky seaside village here in Kent, England, and there's half-a-dozen arcades here. Only one of them has any pinball machines, though, but at least they're cheap - 5 games for a pound. They're pretty old machines (Addams Family is a typical example) but they're pretty popular still. Having said that, the racing/shooting games are still more popular as are the 5p slot machines and 'coin cascaders' (which have a wodge of coins that you try and make overbalance by inserting more coins).
This is by no means unusual - pretty much any touristy English seaside resort will have several arcades.
The main problems here in the UK are the low bandwidth currently used (sub 3Mbps isn't uncommon) and the weak signal (only 5KW for digital compared to around 30MW for analogue from my nearest transmitter).
The bandwidth will improve (instead of 6 channels sharing 24Mbps, it will be 4 channels sharing 18Mbps in the Autumn). The transmitter power will also effectively increase, due to a switch from 64QAM to 16QAM (less data transmitted, but much more resiliant).
Although there were level editors and graphics modifiers for Wolf3D, IMO Doom is the game that brought modding to the masses.
The original Doom level editor was based on a Next cube, and the game itself was meant to be closed.
It was only after the efforts of hackers (in the proper sense of the word) that loading external WADs was introduced (in version 1.2 IIRC) - at least id realised what was going on and actively encouraged it.
Later came Dehacked - lots of things were hard coded into the EXE, but with a small DEH file you could change rates of fire, animation frames and add extra effects. No wonder that id made these things easier to change in Quake onwards - again kudos to them for realising that fans like open games.
At the last count, there were tens of thousands of extra wads, ranging from simple level replacements to total conversions where barely anything from Doom remains.
Windows 3.0 was the first version to have Solitaire included, back in 1990. I used to play it (slowly) on an IBM XT with a VGA card - although I never could get Windows 3 running in colour, and mono solitaire isn't as much fun:(
Actually, Doom II added extra textures and removed others, introduced the double-barrelled shotgun and megasphere, as well as the chaingun dude, mancubus, revenant, pain elemental, archvile, hell knight, arachnotron as well as cameos for Commander Keen and the SS Gaurds from Wolf3D.
Even though it added a fair bit, it 'only' took 8 months after Doom before it was released.
Yes another technology that, although useful to people in rural areas, will be restricted to towns and cities. (Well, Tele2 here in the UK could bring broadband to rural areas (ie 30 miles away from London) but they've instead chosen to concentrate solely on cities. Whoopee.)
...as we don't have high definition TVs (unless you jump through hoops to obtain one, but there are no HD broadcasts to use with it).
Therefore, the new D-VHS will remain a niche thing (if indeed it's ever released here), meaning DVDs have a long life ahead of them here, and throughout Europe.
Oh well - if they stop making DVDs over in the States, at least you'll be able to import them from Europe;)
I've got a noisy card, too - the original Voodoo Graphics cards make a loud 'clunk' noise when you used them. Not as worrying as a continuous high pitched noise, though:(
....as I can't see the el-cheapo manufacturers in Taiwan wanting to comply with this.
What's the betting that equipment from the Far East will come with DVD player style hacks to turn off watermarking?
This makes me sad. I was kind of looking forward to this one since I kept hearing about the multiplayer cooperative aspects of the older Dooms
As others have said, putting co-op in today's scripted games is a hard thing to do. I used to play a lot of co-op Doom a few years back, and even then you'd find your buddy had pushed a switch that caused a block to come down behind them - and if they died, you were all up the creek and had to quit and restart (losing your weapons in the process).
For those wanting to play 'real' co-op Doom, I'd suggest downloading ZDeamon (www.zdaemon.com) and using the launcher to join any co-op games running. There are usually a few going at weekends.
Seen zero decrease in telesales calls.
One of my friends took a job as a kitchen sales telemarketer a few years back - their method was to rip a page from the BT Phone Book and give it to the telemarketer.
This meant that they'd often ask for Mr X only to be told he'd died a few months ago; he even had a script along the lines of:
Callee: Sorry, not interested
Marketer: Okay, how about we send a rep round to you tomorrow at 7PM, then?
Awful company, that - and if companies don't register with the TPS then there's nothing stopping them (legally) from spam calling you.
It's a federal law, telemarketers are not allowed more than 4 rings, 5 rings is harrasment.
If only that were the case in the UK - I've lost count of the number of times I've rushed downstairs to answer the phone only to find it's a junk (windows) call.
Re:Salon.com's review of nVidia, 3Dfx, and MS stan
on
The Age of Nvidia
·
· Score: 1
nVidia's NV1 wasn't their first product
It was indeed their first product - it was the main chip on the long-forgotten Diamond Edge 3D card, which as you say had an audio chip onboard. It cost an arm and a leg back in 1995 and was the only way to play Virtua Fighter PC (yes, Sega had an agreement with Diamond that they would port their Sega Saturn games to the Edge - you could even plug Saturn controllers into the Edge for that console experience).
The plan fell apart when Sega decided they could run Virtua Fighter entirely in software - they managed to find a loophole in their contract with Diamond, which left the Egde without a 'killer app'. What a waste of £300 if you brought one when they first came out.....
Usually to be found 'cheapjack' shops, such as Poundstretcher.
They usually cost less than £20 and include 20 to 100 games - they're probably illegal, but they're so cheap no-one cares.
Yes, Doom supported 2 or 3 screens initially. They removed that feature as of version 1.2, when the networking code was rewritten so as not to use broadcast packets. Shame in a way, as it was ahead of its time...
Slashdot Mirror
That said, even in the Doom days there were plenty of levels that would break if one player did something when the others were in the wrong area, such as sealing off the starting area so that when you died you faced a brick wall rather than empty corridors.
As things became ever more complicated it seemed to become harder and harder for the developers to ensure that there were no catch-22 type setups and after Hexen II and (IIRC) Quake II it pretty much seemed to vanish from games, Serious Sam excepted.
Most TV in the UK is in 16:9 format (broadcast as 4:3 with a "flag" saying it's anamorphic content) and has been for a few years now, but very little is shot in HD. I'd imagine Dr Who is the same.
Living in the UK, we had a notable cold spell in the 80s. When I was growing up snow was common during the winters, yet during the late 80s and through most of the 90s it was almost entirely absent. Indeed, the five inches of snow we had earlier this year was the first time I'd seen more than an inch on the ground since early 1997 - there were kids who'd never seen enough snow to build a snowman, or have a decent snowball fight! The November just gone was a below average month temperature wise in the UK, the first one since July 2004. I believe global warming is happening, but damn it - I'd still expect to see a few below average months a year even if temperatures rose a degree or two, but it's a rare event to see a below average month at all these days. The problem has been the jet stream ploughing away to our north, dragging mild air across much of Europe over the past few winters - it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Coincidentally I believe the USA hasn't seen anywhere near as much warming in the last 20 years as Europe has...
Windows 95 ran well enough on my old 486SX/33 and 486SLC2/50, neither of which had an FPU.
The first PC I put together kept resetting during use, for no real reason that I could find. Other times it wouldn't boot, unless you pushed on the top of the (desktop) case when turning it on.
It was only after several weeks of this that I realised I'd only used half as many standoffs as you're meant to, meaning various parts of the motherboard were touching the chassis. Ouch. :(
Another annoying thing was the CD-ROM drive on the 486 I owned back in 1994 - it was a crappy 2x Longshine drive (bonus points if you've ever heard of the manufacturer). Anyway, just after a year (ie out of warranty) the wretched thing wouldn't eject if you didn't have a CD in the drive. You had to push on the front of the drive while pressing the eject button, as usually that would eject the tray. Eventually, it trapped my Windows 95 CD in the drive and wouldn't eject it. So I did what any frustrated user would do - grabbed a screwdriver and forced the tray open. Funnily enough, that killed the drive.... Of course, most CD/DVD drives now come wit emergency eject holes, but I've not had to use one since.
(For some reason, even Windows XP still comes with mplay32.exe (a port of the Media Player shipped with Video for Windows years ago); mplayer2.exe runs Media Player 6 which can play pretty much anything that 7 can.)
I live a mile away from a tacky seaside village here in Kent, England, and there's half-a-dozen arcades here. Only one of them has any pinball machines, though, but at least they're cheap - 5 games for a pound. They're pretty old machines (Addams Family is a typical example) but they're pretty popular still. Having said that, the racing/shooting games are still more popular as are the 5p slot machines and 'coin cascaders' (which have a wodge of coins that you try and make overbalance by inserting more coins).
This is by no means unusual - pretty much any touristy English seaside resort will have several arcades.
The bandwidth will improve (instead of 6 channels sharing 24Mbps, it will be 4 channels sharing 18Mbps in the Autumn). The transmitter power will also effectively increase, due to a switch from 64QAM to 16QAM (less data transmitted, but much more resiliant).
Although there were level editors and graphics modifiers for Wolf3D, IMO Doom is the game that brought modding to the masses.
The original Doom level editor was based on a Next cube, and the game itself was meant to be closed.
It was only after the efforts of hackers (in the proper sense of the word) that loading external WADs was introduced (in version 1.2 IIRC) - at least id realised what was going on and actively encouraged it.
Later came Dehacked - lots of things were hard coded into the EXE, but with a small DEH file you could change rates of fire, animation frames and add extra effects. No wonder that id made these things easier to change in Quake onwards - again kudos to them for realising that fans like open games.
At the last count, there were tens of thousands of extra wads, ranging from simple level replacements to total conversions where barely anything from Doom remains.
Thanks, id!
Windows 3.0 was the first version to have Solitaire included, back in 1990. I used to play it (slowly) on an IBM XT with a VGA card - although I never could get Windows 3 running in colour, and mono solitaire isn't as much fun :(
Actually, Doom II added extra textures and removed others, introduced the double-barrelled shotgun and megasphere, as well as the chaingun dude, mancubus, revenant, pain elemental, archvile, hell knight, arachnotron as well as cameos for Commander Keen and the SS Gaurds from Wolf3D.
Even though it added a fair bit, it 'only' took 8 months after Doom before it was released.
Yes another technology that, although useful to people in rural areas, will be restricted to towns and cities. (Well, Tele2 here in the UK could bring broadband to rural areas (ie 30 miles away from London) but they've instead chosen to concentrate solely on cities. Whoopee.)
Wow - I wonder what one of those would look like? ;)
ssasasaasfdfdsgrewrfasdagfgadfgatvhetaisutvhnausio vtanoysithdfajsvsdnhtuidascfhniasdofhvasduingfhudn safuhvdfunasdkhfasdjfhsdjhfdasiuryoewiavyeiuoryaiu wrvyaweuiorvyaeuiworuaysiucsfdjasduoivfhdusiofhuvi eroterytuiynfasdiuhvfasiodufhnasdviufhuaisdohgfuih gfuighufioghdfugniaudfhguivgdihngudofgnxhcgvlkdfhg idufoguidfhnguiosifudgdsfoiguvniodfuvgahiugovnihdf uioghuvgiodfgahnioghfdgidfoguhdfuioghuifoadhgufdog iudfhgniufdaghdfgndfihuiovhnudfhogiudfnhgvuiohgadf huioagiufhunfgohioafghunanhonfiifnghadfugoiudfghoa fdighdfiugnuiifguadighnadfuhgniuadfhnagiodufgnuifa dghifdghadfuoghfjkghaflhguoaygurioqtyeru6yu45uo3q4 sdhnrf34759fn874f6n59834a7tm897fgt78rft575fgrtf76h 7yuj89r23473s5owfhserogt7jtduthsgioho638g9wh89egtp hg9e58gp689anbp938q47q3pf5jg8q394p57gq34j8p587g34p q5gj45pqbn98eqpr9t8fq7jerjp98tb7ert89qfj7p5897fq35 9v0q9tnw8e7ftjm857mnt8er790jf789340vt7ertjsdfgojdf lgdfkhgkjsdh6456n97g389q406n53nq534785n450q3fw5nw0 ercnase9rnca78seprc7wenrpfnsdoufinosdpgudipaouy4n8 905fa3n4d5f7s8erftyroariyuty4389500wa7nfoisaytuir5 ya43789tnrweuiogtueriwtyq9328y5t409tn23045n4657903 4nqtwq07t6n34780
OH, yes!
...as we don't have high definition TVs (unless you jump through hoops to obtain one, but there are no HD broadcasts to use with it). Therefore, the new D-VHS will remain a niche thing (if indeed it's ever released here), meaning DVDs have a long life ahead of them here, and throughout Europe. Oh well - if they stop making DVDs over in the States, at least you'll be able to import them from Europe ;)
I've got a noisy card, too - the original Voodoo Graphics cards make a loud 'clunk' noise when you used them. Not as worrying as a continuous high pitched noise, though :(
....as I can't see the el-cheapo manufacturers in Taiwan wanting to comply with this. What's the betting that equipment from the Far East will come with DVD player style hacks to turn off watermarking?
I felt like trying this newfangled 'buying MP3s' thing out, only to end up with an 8.4MB, 9 minute 128K MP3.
As others have said, putting co-op in today's scripted games is a hard thing to do. I used to play a lot of co-op Doom a few years back, and even then you'd find your buddy had pushed a switch that caused a block to come down behind them - and if they died, you were all up the creek and had to quit and restart (losing your weapons in the process).
For those wanting to play 'real' co-op Doom, I'd suggest downloading ZDeamon (www.zdaemon.com) and using the launcher to join any co-op games running. There are usually a few going at weekends.
This meant that they'd often ask for Mr X only to be told he'd died a few months ago; he even had a script along the lines of:
Callee: Sorry, not interested Marketer: Okay, how about we send a rep round to you tomorrow at 7PM, then?
Awful company, that - and if companies don't register with the TPS then there's nothing stopping them (legally) from spam calling you.
If only that were the case in the UK - I've lost count of the number of times I've rushed downstairs to answer the phone only to find it's a junk (windows) call.
nVidia's NV1 wasn't their first product It was indeed their first product - it was the main chip on the long-forgotten Diamond Edge 3D card, which as you say had an audio chip onboard. It cost an arm and a leg back in 1995 and was the only way to play Virtua Fighter PC (yes, Sega had an agreement with Diamond that they would port their Sega Saturn games to the Edge - you could even plug Saturn controllers into the Edge for that console experience). The plan fell apart when Sega decided they could run Virtua Fighter entirely in software - they managed to find a loophole in their contract with Diamond, which left the Egde without a 'killer app'. What a waste of £300 if you brought one when they first came out.....
Usually to be found 'cheapjack' shops, such as Poundstretcher. They usually cost less than £20 and include 20 to 100 games - they're probably illegal, but they're so cheap no-one cares.
Yes, Doom supported 2 or 3 screens initially. They removed that feature as of version 1.2, when the networking code was rewritten so as not to use broadcast packets. Shame in a way, as it was ahead of its time...