I really doubt the advantage of the 486's and 386's over the gaming consoles. When i was 18 i worked at a computerstore where we sold both consoles likes the SNES, Megadrive and PC's like 386 SX/DX's and early 486's (the SX-20 and DX-something). Of course i neglected customers to play games on both platformtypes. We used to drool over the multilayered parallax scrolling of SNES and Megadrive games whereas the PC's of those days were hardly capable of doing a smooth scroller with only one layer. Okay, there were exceptions like the brilliant Xenon-2 port for the PC by the Bitmap Brother, Broderbund's amazingly fluent Prince of Persia character animations and some 'cracktro's' done by the Humble Guys et cetera. But on the most part the consoles kicked the PC's butt when taking into account games like UN Squadron and so on. Maybe that's the reason why we all sought refuge in our Atari ST's and Amiga's;-)
The 2BL (bootloader2/secondary boot loader) is responsible for decrypting/decompressing the main KERNEL image and 'jumping' to it.
When 2BL starts, it is executing in a CPU address region from 090000-095FFF. It first sets up some simple page-tables (with what appears to be a one-to-one mapping of virtual to physical addresses), copies itself to CPU address region 400000-405FFF, enables paging, then 'jumps' to the copy of 2BL that it created based at 400000.
Next, the MCPX internal boot sector is 'hidden' (since it is no longer needed), and the PIC 'watchdog reset' is disabled (without doing this, the PIC chip will force a CPU reset after approximately 200ms of execution). The original decrypted copy of 2BL at CPU addresses 090000-095FFF is erased.
Some unknown initialization of video registers (memory-mapped based at CPU address FD000000) is done next, followed by some unknown PCI initialization.
Now for the 'guts' of 2BL: validation/decryption/decompression of the KERNEL.
The encrypted/compressed KERNEL image is located in Flash, "below" the KERNEL initialized data segment, which is located just "below" the encrypted 2BL (which starts at CPU address FFFF9E00). The size of the compressed KERNEL image is stored at offset 005FD8 into the 2BL, and the size of the KERNEL initialized data segment is stored at offset 005FDC into the 2BL. Using this information, the 2BL can find the start address/size of the encrypted/compressed KERNEL image.
First, a SHA-1 hash validation is done on the encrypted KERNEL image. The hash also includes some other items, like the RC4 key used to encrypt/decrypt the KERNEL, the unencrypted KERNEL initialized data segment, and the beginning of the Flash image up-to/including the MS copyright message (MCPX initialization, X-code, etc). The hash is compared against a 20-byte stored digest at offset 005FEC-005FFF into the decrypted 2BL image.
Next (assuming SHA-1 has was valid), the KERNEL image is decrypted to a temporary RAM buffer using an RC4 key stored at offset 00008C-00009B into the decrypted 2BL image. Note that this is not the same RC4 key that was used to decrypt the 2BL.
The KERNEL image is then decompressed to RAM starting at CPU address 80010000. The compression used for the KERNEL is a modified ".cab" (Microsoft CABinet) compression. See the Microsoft CABinet SDK for more detailed information (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsamples /cab-sdk.exe).
CAB compression allows for different types of compressions. The compression used for the KERNEL is "tcompTYPE_LZX" (Microsoft LZX). The CFHEADER, CFFOLDER, and CFFILE structures have been eliminated (since it's a single 'file') - only the CFDATA section is used. A slight modification to the CFDATA structure has been made: the 32-bit checksum ("u4 csum") stored at the start of each block has been eliminated. What remains are "cCFData" blocks of compressed data: each block starts with a 16-bit size of compressed data ("u2 cbData"), 16-bit size of uncompressed data ("u2 cbUncomp"), followed by a stream of "cbData" compressed data bytes.
The 2BL knows the value for "cCFDATA" (number of compressed CFDATA blocks) by adding-up the "u2 cbData" values from each CFDATA block header, until the total is equal to the total compressed KERNEL size (found at offset 005FD8 into the 2BL).
The decompressed kernel is a PE-format executable ('xboxkrnl.exe'). Once decompressed, the 2BL grabs the entry point address from the PE header and jumps to it. Two arguments are passed to the kernel entry point function: a pointer to string 'arguments' to the KERNEL (only used in debug kernel), and the base address of two 16-byte encryption keys. One of the keys is the EEPROM key (offset 00006C into 2BL), the other is the certificate key (offset 00007C into 2BL).
"On the other side of the globe, nearly two kilometres beneath the earth, in a cold, gloomy chasm, you can find a small slice of Australia."
At first i thought they had descended through the whole of the earth to emerge at the other side. Kangaroo's and other wildlife were happily humping around the cave's exit. Word from an australian spokesman "We are very happy with this tunnel from Australia to Georgia. Free trade through the tunnel is to be expected starting soon."
I shouldn't drink so much coffee before going to bed, i am sure...
Aww poor people, they not only need huge funding to hire storage room for all their precious vintage machines but they will also have huge hosting bills to pay for the bandwidth used by thousands of slashdotters visiting their site. Hehe, you go, Slashdotters! Slashdot is always a helping hand in times of need.
Okay i know raytracing provides far more realistic visual representations of a 3D modelled scene than actual scanline polygon rendering. But - and here comes the but - i miss a lot of things in this raytraced Quake movie. All the shadows are really really crisps, one would expect that when light bounces off walls and objects a few times its reflected light would soften those crisps shadows. E.g. it would result in softened gradual shadows.
I guess they limited the path of the ray they calculated so it bounced only two or three times off an object before they stopped calculating it. (If they stopped after one pass you wouldn't have seen those reflective glass balls like you did, which need multiple passes to look like they do).
I also miss colour bleeding on the surfaces. E.g. when you have - let's say - a white surface next to a red surface, some of the red will bleed on the white because light coming from the red surface will fall on the white surface and light it in a red hue. You would have seen this with a proper raytracing engine where the light bounces multiple times from an object and where the colour of the light is affected by the colour of the object.
I think those are the main reasons why the video doesn't look as realistic as i hoped for. (Then again how realistic is walking through a building where they have decorated the place with gruesome wallpaper taken from a horror movie and gigantic brains on mechanic spider legs walk around...;) )
That doesn't neccessarily have to do with a variable clockspeed. It could be that the CPU has a constant clockspeed but when it doesn't receive any instruction it starts an IDLE cycle to save on batterypower.
We are so spoilt with all the multi-gigabyte data that fits on modern media like DVD's. If we would go back to cartridge based games we would have to sacrifice all that FMV goodness and the orchestrated multi-track soundtracks that are able to fit on a DVD. Producing a cartridge is a lot more expensive that producing a DVD. You will have to manufacture large quantities of ROM chips to imprint with the game information to equal the storage capacity of a DVD. I don't think people are willing to pay that much more for a cartridge based game.
What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot. Something i can't say about some of my older Sierra cd-rom games on my PC.
"The gameplay footage clearly showed that Ultima X will be powered by Epic's Unreal engine (indeed, Epic's Tim Sweeny and Mark Rein also were there at the launch event last night) with some awesome looking outdoor environments across a wide range of setting (forest, snow, and more). The character models in the game are also highly details but what was most impressive in the gameplay footage is the fact that this game will be very action oriented with player character going up against large and varied enemies, from two headed ogres to sexy looking female demo types and more."
HomeLan missed a chance here to post some screenshots or photographs of the game. Now we have to make up our own images with only this textual description of the game. Does anybody have any links to pictures from the gameplay footage to share?
Again that proves we are not interested in verbal content, just give us some screenshots to drool over.;)
There's a dutch "new-media" designoffice that bears the name Lost Boys. They were the main sponsor for the Arrows team btw in the F1 season two years back. But as far as i know LB only does e-commerce and bussiness solutions. I think the reason the guys who are now known as Guerrilla Games had to change their name because Lost Boys already was owned by the beforementioned office.
Gabe Newell has silenced the rumours about problems with the nVidia (non FX cards) on Halflife2.net this morning. Here's what he had to say about it:
"Since people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue, I thought I'd update everyone.
1) How bad is the problem?
With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light maps from other polygons.
This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Daikatana, Sin, Elite Force, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on the X-Box, or any game that uses packed lightmaps with multi-sample anti-aliasing.
You would see these artifacts on polygon boundaries where the wrong lightmap is being sampled. It will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a polygon.
Gary McTaggart brought this up in an email because he is being pretty hardcore about graphics quality right now. This is not a new problem. If you've run a game that uses lightmaps with anti-aliasing turned on, then you've been seeing these artifacts the whole time.
Artifacts may show up more frequently in Half-Life 2 simply because we've eliminated lots of other artifacts, and because we have a lot of variation in scene lighting due to our art direction.
To put this in perspective, not doing tri-linear filtering on mipmaps is a lot worse.
2) What are potential solutions?
Support Centroid Sampling
Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinates
Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series. The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.
There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.
Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0.
3) How will this look?
We'll release one of the demo movies with the anti-aliasing artifacts in and one with the anti-aliasing changes."
You can find the whole post here: http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread. php?s=& threadid=3071
"We found ourselves unable to maintain multiple AAA teams and were forced to release some of the most gifted game developers back into the industry's talent pool. "
- quoted from Tom Mustaine, vice president and director of development at Ritual.
That has to be the most beautiful way to put. Don't think of yourself of feeling worthless, sitting at home skimming through the employment ads in the newspapers after a night of beer and crisps (the only thing you CAN afford) while playing your old PSone titles over and over, but think of yourself as swimming in the tropical talent pool of the gaming industries. Now where are the plastic palmtrees when you need them?
Funny how the Microsoft site says the minimum requirements to play FS 2004 are:
Windows PC 2000/XP â" 128 MB Ram 98/Me â" 64 MB Ram Processor:450 MHz minimum Available hard drive space:1.8 GB DirectX 9 or later (included with Microsoft Flight Simulator: A Century of Flight) Video card: 8 MB/3D with DirectX 7.0 or later drivers Other: mouse, joystick/yoke, sound card, speakers/headphones Online/multiplayer: 56.6 kbps modem or LAN
But if i see those screenshots i am hardly sure if it will run fluently even anything but a P4 3,06 Ghz with some insane nVida or ATI gfx. When you really have a 450 Mhz machine you will probably settle for good old FS 98, because FS 2004 with all the eye candy turned off will look like that for sure.
I think a lot of people will complain that the fighting game is basically a 2D scrolling fighting game and not a fancy 3D enviromental fighting game. But judging from the videos it all runs very very smooth, the sprites are nice and big, the moves are good looking and the action is fast paced.
Since i still play Samurai Shodown on my NeoGeo with i enjoy even more so than most 3D fighting games (Street Figher EX, Tekken, Virtua Fighter) i certainly don't have a problem with using, what people might call, an outdated game concept. I am sure that a lot of people will get into the game, and not only because they licensed the characted from the popular SNK and Capcom games. 2D Fighting games still are going strong.
The mod was made possible due to the fact that the guys at Rockstar had already implemented a multiplayer code into the game. But since they couldn't finish it due to time and coding complications they disabled it. The dev teams that made the two multiplayer mods that are available today just enabled the old mp code and wrote a whole shell around it while fixing the code fragments that Rockstar didn't finish.
I don't know if Vice City was built upon the GTA3 engine or that the original engine was completely rebuild. In the former case we can expect there to be a multiplayer mod soon.
One word of warning with the multiplayer mod. I have played it and it's really buggy. Lots of syncing problems and you have to do strange things to get the games synced on all machine on beforehand. But nonetheless i expect a complete groundbreaking multiplayer experience when the mods have matured.
It's completely coincidental but just two days ago FreeDO (a 3DO emulator dev team) released the public beta of the first 3DO emulator to see daylight. I haven't tried it because I don't have any original 3DO games anymore nor have i access to bootlegs. I am really interested in the quality of the emulated games because i really think the 3D0 console is one of the most underestimated consoles of the early nineties. Back in those days it was pretty hip, just like the NeoGeo, but it suffered from the same drawbacks. That big black box was darn expensive for kids! Anyway it's really weird when you think that for almost every console there has been built an emu while the 3DO had to wait till 2003 before somebody compiled a working emulator! You can find the emulator and information about it here:
If you use the OS X bit torrent client below you will help and share the game for all us leechers ehm slashdotters.
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/bit torrent/BitTorrent_OSX_3.1.dmg
Brought back from the dead with LEGO?
on
The Mac Made of Lego
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Building a case from LEGO for a working PC / MAC is something I can believe. But bringing back a dead Powerbook solely with LEGO? Somewhere the article must lack an explanation... Otherwise i am going to revive my dead ultraTNT2 gfx card with LEGO! Overclocking with LEGO anybody?
Chu Mei-Feng at #20
on
Web Zeitgeist
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They can't really explain it properly on Lycos, but Taiwanese politician Chu Mei-Feng was ranked #20 on the Lycos search charts over the last year. Personally i have never heard of him, and i think the majority of the non asian people here too. Makes you figure how much asian sites and users make up the whole of the internet while we (read: I) surf only those pages with our western fonts.
Does somebody know what happens to the people who started Napster? Will they spend the rest of their life paying off their debts? Will no bank ever going to supply them credit again? Does setting up such a groundbreaking company and failing affect the rest of your life?
If it does, i suggest them writing a book "The Woes of Napster - The Secrets revealed";)
I played the original coin-up, and although the graphics and sound were perfect, the gameplay was hell. All action scenes were static and only required good timing when pressing the control buttons. The walkthrough looked something like this "press left, right, right, jump, right, left, straight, left, right and then quickly left again". The feeling only rivaled years later when practicing those fatalities in Mortal Kombat... And we now know how many people were driven insane by that ritual.;)
And then i even forget scenes like this:
"Wow, this castle room is beautiful! Giant gold inlaid doors on the left and right! Wow!"
*presses left*
*dies by falling into pit right after door*
"Hmmm, odd, i could have sworn that door looked safe, let's retry...."
"Wow, this castle room is beautiful! Giant gold inlaid doors on the left and right! Wow!"
*presses left*
*dies by falling into pit right after door*
"Hmmm, i think i am actually learning something here, let's restart..."
"Wow, this castle room is beautiful! Giant gold inlaid doors on the left and right! Wow!"
*presses right*
*enters room with hostile knights*
*fails to press left button within 2 split seconds*
*dies*....
While Pushback technology can help the servers to stay online, they literally push the network load off to another branch of the network where it can congest normal networkconnections. For important servers like the nameservers that have been attacked last week - where they (btw) used a similar technique of pushing requests e.g. network data off to another part of the network - this is a good method. But you run the risk of creating congestion somewhere else on the network. So people working upstream from the attacked server will probably suffer from poor accesibility. It's just a choice what you want to sacrifice, either the targetted servers or the people upstream. But i agree this technology is a step forward towards an appropriate security answer to DDOS attacks.
When using rigour ways of cooling like just pouring LN over your board usually the capacitors give out first. Since they always attract moisture like crazy (remember those old radio's used to die because the capacitors were leaking electricity due to moisture in them?) there's always a small ammount of moisture in them. Now you don't want to have icecrystals forming in there. But still it's amazing what those boards can take. I have seen an old BX motherboard bent at an odd angle by someone pouring LN over it and still working. (Due to the immense temperature differences in the upper and lower side of the board the upperside folds inwards as material shrinks when the temperate is decreased) I guess the soldering is really done well. The same thing must have been happening at this chip btw. The underside of the GPU must have been warmer (a lot warmer) than the upperside so i don't want to even think about the massive ammount of material stress going in.;) Well.... just keep up tweaking those GPU's and CPU's, it's always fun for us to watch.
I remember those old Sierra-On-Line error messages:
"OOPS! You did something we didn't think of"
and then some advice to restore your last saved game. And there were those creative people from Origin that made my Wing Commander game crash sometimes with the enigmatical message:
"Error: Forgot to salt the fries..."
I never figured out what that meant.
Okies, it's a sort of doom sounding topic, "Nimda worm celebrates 1st birthday" But what i would think is interesting is wether the worm still infects that much servers as it used to? I bet - with all the patching of server software - it should have been died out by now more or less. Or is the world of system administrators turning slower as we all think?
Slashdot Mirror
I really doubt the advantage of the 486's and 386's over the gaming consoles. When i was 18 i worked at a computerstore where we sold both consoles likes the SNES, Megadrive and PC's like 386 SX/DX's and early 486's (the SX-20 and DX-something). Of course i neglected customers to play games on both platformtypes. We used to drool over the multilayered parallax scrolling of SNES and Megadrive games whereas the PC's of those days were hardly capable of doing a smooth scroller with only one layer. ;-)
Okay, there were exceptions like the brilliant Xenon-2 port for the PC by the Bitmap Brother, Broderbund's amazingly fluent Prince of Persia character animations and some 'cracktro's' done by the Humble Guys et cetera. But on the most part the consoles kicked the PC's butt when taking into account games like UN Squadron and so on.
Maybe that's the reason why we all sought refuge in our Atari ST's and Amiga's
The 2BL (bootloader2/secondary boot loader) is responsible for decrypting/decompressing the main KERNEL image and 'jumping' to it.
s /cab-sdk.exe).
When 2BL starts, it is executing in a CPU address region from 090000-095FFF. It first sets up some simple page-tables (with what appears to be a one-to-one mapping of virtual to physical addresses), copies itself to CPU address region 400000-405FFF, enables paging, then 'jumps' to the copy of 2BL that it created based at 400000.
Next, the MCPX internal boot sector is 'hidden' (since it is no longer needed), and the PIC 'watchdog reset' is disabled (without doing this, the PIC chip will force a CPU reset after approximately 200ms of execution). The original decrypted copy of 2BL at CPU addresses 090000-095FFF is erased.
Some unknown initialization of video registers (memory-mapped based at CPU address FD000000) is done next, followed by some unknown PCI initialization.
Now for the 'guts' of 2BL: validation/decryption/decompression of the KERNEL.
The encrypted/compressed KERNEL image is located in Flash, "below" the KERNEL initialized data segment, which is located just "below" the encrypted 2BL (which starts at CPU address FFFF9E00). The size of the compressed KERNEL image is stored at offset 005FD8 into the 2BL, and the size of the KERNEL initialized data segment is stored at offset 005FDC into the 2BL. Using this information, the 2BL can find the start address/size of the encrypted/compressed KERNEL image.
First, a SHA-1 hash validation is done on the encrypted KERNEL image. The hash also includes some other items, like the RC4 key used to encrypt/decrypt the KERNEL, the unencrypted KERNEL initialized data segment, and the beginning of the Flash image up-to/including the MS copyright message (MCPX initialization, X-code, etc). The hash is compared against a 20-byte stored digest at offset 005FEC-005FFF into the decrypted 2BL image.
Next (assuming SHA-1 has was valid), the KERNEL image is decrypted to a temporary RAM buffer using an RC4 key stored at offset 00008C-00009B into the decrypted 2BL image. Note that this is not the same RC4 key that was used to decrypt the 2BL.
The KERNEL image is then decompressed to RAM starting at CPU address 80010000. The compression used for the KERNEL is a modified ".cab" (Microsoft CABinet) compression. See the Microsoft CABinet SDK for more detailed information (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnsample
CAB compression allows for different types of compressions. The compression used for the KERNEL is "tcompTYPE_LZX" (Microsoft LZX). The CFHEADER, CFFOLDER, and CFFILE structures have been eliminated (since it's a single 'file') - only the CFDATA section is used. A slight modification to the CFDATA structure has been made: the 32-bit checksum ("u4 csum") stored at the start of each block has been eliminated. What remains are "cCFData" blocks of compressed data: each block starts with a 16-bit size of compressed data ("u2 cbData"), 16-bit size of uncompressed data ("u2 cbUncomp"), followed by a stream of "cbData" compressed data bytes.
The 2BL knows the value for "cCFDATA" (number of compressed CFDATA blocks) by adding-up the "u2 cbData" values from each CFDATA block header, until the total is equal to the total compressed KERNEL size (found at offset 005FD8 into the 2BL).
The decompressed kernel is a PE-format executable ('xboxkrnl.exe'). Once decompressed, the 2BL grabs the entry point address from the PE header and jumps to it. Two arguments are passed to the kernel entry point function: a pointer to string 'arguments' to the KERNEL (only used in debug kernel), and the base address of two 16-byte encryption keys. One of the keys is the EEPROM key (offset 00006C into 2BL), the other is the certificate key (offset 00007C into 2BL).
"On the other side of the globe, nearly two kilometres beneath the earth, in a cold, gloomy chasm, you can find a small slice of Australia."
At first i thought they had descended through the whole of the earth to emerge at the other side. Kangaroo's and other wildlife were happily humping around the cave's exit. Word from an australian spokesman "We are very happy with this tunnel from Australia to Georgia. Free trade through the tunnel is to be expected starting soon."
I shouldn't drink so much coffee before going to bed, i am sure...
Aww poor people, they not only need huge funding to hire storage room for all their precious vintage machines but they will also have huge hosting bills to pay for the bandwidth used by thousands of slashdotters visiting their site. Hehe, you go, Slashdotters! Slashdot is always a helping hand in times of need.
Okay i know raytracing provides far more realistic visual representations of a 3D modelled scene than actual scanline polygon rendering. But - and here comes the but - i miss a lot of things in this raytraced Quake movie. All the shadows are really really crisps, one would expect that when light bounces off walls and objects a few times its reflected light would soften those crisps shadows. E.g. it would result in softened gradual shadows.
;) )
I guess they limited the path of the ray they calculated so it bounced only two or three times off an object before they stopped calculating it. (If they stopped after one pass you wouldn't have seen those reflective glass balls like you did, which need multiple passes to look like they do).
I also miss colour bleeding on the surfaces. E.g. when you have - let's say - a white surface next to a red surface, some of the red will bleed on the white because light coming from the red surface will fall on the white surface and light it in a red hue. You would have seen this with a proper raytracing engine where the light bounces multiple times from an object and where the colour of the light is affected by the colour of the object.
I think those are the main reasons why the video doesn't look as realistic as i hoped for. (Then again how realistic is walking through a building where they have decorated the place with gruesome wallpaper taken from a horror movie and gigantic brains on mechanic spider legs walk around...
That doesn't neccessarily have to do with a variable clockspeed. It could be that the CPU has a constant clockspeed but when it doesn't receive any instruction it starts an IDLE cycle to save on batterypower.
We are so spoilt with all the multi-gigabyte data that fits on modern media like DVD's. If we would go back to cartridge based games we would have to sacrifice all that FMV goodness and the orchestrated multi-track soundtracks that are able to fit on a DVD. Producing a cartridge is a lot more expensive that producing a DVD. You will have to manufacture large quantities of ROM chips to imprint with the game information to equal the storage capacity of a DVD. I don't think people are willing to pay that much more for a cartridge based game.
What i do like about the cartridge is the fact that they will stand the test of time much better than our slowly corroding DVD and CD media. I think all my old Atari 2600 carts will still boot. Something i can't say about some of my older Sierra cd-rom games on my PC.
The quotes spikes my interest:
;)
"The gameplay footage clearly showed that Ultima X will be powered by Epic's Unreal engine (indeed, Epic's Tim Sweeny and Mark Rein also were there at the launch event last night) with some awesome looking outdoor environments across a wide range of setting (forest, snow, and more). The character models in the game are also highly details but what was most impressive in the gameplay footage is the fact that this game will be very action oriented with player character going up against large and varied enemies, from two headed ogres to sexy looking female demo types and more."
HomeLan missed a chance here to post some screenshots or photographs of the game. Now we have to make up our own images with only this textual description of the game. Does anybody have any links to pictures from the gameplay footage to share?
Again that proves we are not interested in verbal content, just give us some screenshots to drool over.
There's a dutch "new-media" designoffice that bears the name Lost Boys. They were the main sponsor for the Arrows team btw in the F1 season two years back. But as far as i know LB only does e-commerce and bussiness solutions. I think the reason the guys who are now known as Guerrilla Games had to change their name because Lost Boys already was owned by the beforementioned office.
Gabe Newell has silenced the rumours about problems with the nVidia (non FX cards) on Halflife2.net this morning. Here's what he had to say about it:
. php?s=& threadid=3071
"Since people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue, I thought I'd update everyone.
1) How bad is the problem?
With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light maps from other polygons.
This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Daikatana, Sin, Elite Force, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on the X-Box, or any game that uses packed lightmaps with multi-sample anti-aliasing.
You would see these artifacts on polygon boundaries where the wrong lightmap is being sampled. It will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a polygon.
Gary McTaggart brought this up in an email because he is being pretty hardcore about graphics quality right now. This is not a new problem. If you've run a game that uses lightmaps with anti-aliasing turned on, then you've been seeing these artifacts the whole time.
Artifacts may show up more frequently in Half-Life 2 simply because we've eliminated lots of other artifacts, and because we have a lot of variation in scene lighting due to our art direction.
To put this in perspective, not doing tri-linear filtering on mipmaps is a lot worse.
2) What are potential solutions?
Support Centroid Sampling
Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinates
Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series. The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.
There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.
Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0.
3) How will this look?
We'll release one of the demo movies with the anti-aliasing artifacts in and one with the anti-aliasing changes."
You can find the whole post here:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread
"We found ourselves unable to maintain multiple AAA teams and were forced to release some of the most gifted game developers back into the industry's talent pool. "
- quoted from Tom Mustaine, vice president and director of development at Ritual.
That has to be the most beautiful way to put. Don't think of yourself of feeling worthless, sitting at home skimming through the employment ads in the newspapers after a night of beer and crisps (the only thing you CAN afford) while playing your old PSone titles over and over, but think of yourself as swimming in the tropical talent pool of the gaming industries. Now where are the plastic palmtrees when you need them?
Funny how the Microsoft site says the minimum requirements to play FS 2004 are:
Windows PC 2000/XP â" 128 MB Ram
98/Me â" 64 MB Ram
Processor:450 MHz minimum
Available hard drive space:1.8 GB
DirectX 9 or later (included with Microsoft Flight Simulator: A Century of Flight)
Video card: 8 MB/3D with DirectX 7.0 or later drivers
Other: mouse, joystick/yoke, sound card, speakers/headphones
Online/multiplayer: 56.6 kbps modem or LAN
But if i see those screenshots i am hardly sure if it will run fluently even anything but a P4 3,06 Ghz with some insane nVida or ATI gfx. When you really have a 450 Mhz machine you will probably settle for good old FS 98, because FS 2004 with all the eye candy turned off will look like that for sure.
I think a lot of people will complain that the fighting game is basically a 2D scrolling fighting game and not a fancy 3D enviromental fighting game. But judging from the videos it all runs very very smooth, the sprites are nice and big, the moves are good looking and the action is fast paced. Since i still play Samurai Shodown on my NeoGeo with i enjoy even more so than most 3D fighting games (Street Figher EX, Tekken, Virtua Fighter) i certainly don't have a problem with using, what people might call, an outdated game concept. I am sure that a lot of people will get into the game, and not only because they licensed the characted from the popular SNK and Capcom games. 2D Fighting games still are going strong.
For the people who want to know more information on the upcoming Sam & Max title, check out
http://www.samandmax.net/
It's the number one source on everything related to Sam & Max. Keep an eye out for that site!
The mod was made possible due to the fact that the guys at Rockstar had already implemented a multiplayer code into the game. But since they couldn't finish it due to time and coding complications they disabled it. The dev teams that made the two multiplayer mods that are available today just enabled the old mp code and wrote a whole shell around it while fixing the code fragments that Rockstar didn't finish.
I don't know if Vice City was built upon the GTA3 engine or that the original engine was completely rebuild. In the former case we can expect there to be a multiplayer mod soon.
One word of warning with the multiplayer mod. I have played it and it's really buggy. Lots of syncing problems and you have to do strange things to get the games synced on all machine on beforehand. But nonetheless i expect a complete groundbreaking multiplayer experience when the mods have matured.
It's completely coincidental but just two days ago FreeDO (a 3DO emulator dev team) released the public beta of the first 3DO emulator to see daylight. I haven't tried it because I don't have any original 3DO games anymore nor have i access to bootlegs. I am really interested in the quality of the emulated games because i really think the 3D0 console is one of the most underestimated consoles of the early nineties. Back in those days it was pretty hip, just like the NeoGeo, but it suffered from the same drawbacks. That big black box was darn expensive for kids! Anyway it's really weird when you think that for almost every console there has been built an emu while the 3DO had to wait till 2003 before somebody compiled a working emulator! You can find the emulator and information about it here:
http://www.freedo.org/
If you use the OS X bit torrent client below you will help and share the game for all us leechers ehm slashdotters. http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/bit torrent/BitTorrent_OSX_3.1.dmg
Building a case from LEGO for a working PC / MAC is something I can believe. But bringing back a dead Powerbook solely with LEGO? Somewhere the article must lack an explanation... Otherwise i am going to revive my dead ultraTNT2 gfx card with LEGO! Overclocking with LEGO anybody?
They can't really explain it properly on Lycos, but Taiwanese politician Chu Mei-Feng was ranked #20 on the Lycos search charts over the last year. Personally i have never heard of him, and i think the majority of the non asian people here too. Makes you figure how much asian sites and users make up the whole of the internet while we (read: I) surf only those pages with our western fonts.
Does somebody know what happens to the people who started Napster? Will they spend the rest of their life paying off their debts? Will no bank ever going to supply them credit again? Does setting up such a groundbreaking company and failing affect the rest of your life?
;)
If it does, i suggest them writing a book "The Woes of Napster - The Secrets revealed"
I played the original coin-up, and although the graphics and sound were perfect, the gameplay was hell. All action scenes were static and only required good timing when pressing the control buttons. The walkthrough looked something like this "press left, right, right, jump, right, left, straight, left, right and then quickly left again". The feeling only rivaled years later when practicing those fatalities in Mortal Kombat... And we now know how many people were driven insane by that ritual. ;)
And then i even forget scenes like this:
"Wow, this castle room is beautiful! Giant gold inlaid doors on the left and right! Wow!"
*presses left*
*dies by falling into pit right after door*
"Hmmm, odd, i could have sworn that door looked safe, let's retry...."
"Wow, this castle room is beautiful! Giant gold inlaid doors on the left and right! Wow!"
*presses left*
*dies by falling into pit right after door*
"Hmmm, i think i am actually learning something here, let's restart..."
"Wow, this castle room is beautiful! Giant gold inlaid doors on the left and right! Wow!"
*presses right*
*enters room with hostile knights*
*fails to press left button within 2 split seconds*
*dies* ....
While Pushback technology can help the servers to stay online, they literally push the network load off to another branch of the network where it can congest normal networkconnections. For important servers like the nameservers that have been attacked last week - where they (btw) used a similar technique of pushing requests e.g. network data off to another part of the network - this is a good method. But you run the risk of creating congestion somewhere else on the network. So people working upstream from the attacked server will probably suffer from poor accesibility. It's just a choice what you want to sacrifice, either the targetted servers or the people upstream. But i agree this technology is a step forward towards an appropriate security answer to DDOS attacks.
When using rigour ways of cooling like just pouring LN over your board usually the capacitors give out first. Since they always attract moisture like crazy (remember those old radio's used to die because the capacitors were leaking electricity due to moisture in them?) there's always a small ammount of moisture in them. Now you don't want to have icecrystals forming in there. But still it's amazing what those boards can take. I have seen an old BX motherboard bent at an odd angle by someone pouring LN over it and still working. (Due to the immense temperature differences in the upper and lower side of the board the upperside folds inwards as material shrinks when the temperate is decreased) I guess the soldering is really done well. The same thing must have been happening at this chip btw. The underside of the GPU must have been warmer (a lot warmer) than the upperside so i don't want to even think about the massive ammount of material stress going in. ;) Well.... just keep up tweaking those GPU's and CPU's, it's always fun for us to watch.
I remember those old Sierra-On-Line error messages: "OOPS! You did something we didn't think of" and then some advice to restore your last saved game. And there were those creative people from Origin that made my Wing Commander game crash sometimes with the enigmatical message: "Error: Forgot to salt the fries..." I never figured out what that meant.
Okies, it's a sort of doom sounding topic, "Nimda worm celebrates 1st birthday" But what i would think is interesting is wether the worm still infects that much servers as it used to? I bet - with all the patching of server software - it should have been died out by now more or less. Or is the world of system administrators turning slower as we all think?