BTW, that handy feature where the video card drivers restart after they crash? The drivers do that, not Windows Vista and higher. It worked on XP too.
Under XP, the video driver had to be programmed specifically to do that if the graphics hardware stopped responding.
Under Vista and newer, the OS itself will do it if the graphics hardware or graphics driver stop responding. The reason for this?
According to the crash analysis data collected during the Windows XP timeframe, display drivers are responsible for up to 20 percent of all blue screens.
Oh but I might mention that Steam needs between 10 and 25% of CPU even with all windows closed and doing nothing at all. So better learn to use cpulimit or your battery will be empty in no time.
The Steam Client was updated about 14-16 hours ago and one of the fixes listed was that it fixes a bug where it was taking far too much processing power on Linux.
It hides what it is doing. Why do you think it has to have constant super-user status? It abuses that status to mess with things that dont belong to it and to obfuscate and hide what it is doing from the system. Just like every other rootkit out there.
It... doesn't?
I'll admit, I haven't run it on Linux, but on Windows it certainly doesn't require superuser access to run it. Mainly because it's smart enough to change the directory permissions for its own directory structure when you install it. That and Windows locking down the Program Files directory is why installing it requires superuser privileges.
So you are using an appeal to authority argument using a comedian as your authority. You really have an interesting logic pattern
Even better, (s)he's using a strawman as well, as Tridus's "a treaty" is likely referring to the current ITU one, but "the treaty" in girlintraining's direct reply to that post is (by his/her own admission later down) referring to "the UN treaty about disabled people."
I would be plenty happy if Steam would just redirect and store all the games files to a specific folder in the steam directory, much less implement a hypervisor. As it is now, installing a number of games from steam poops data all over my hard drive. I have game saves, settings and common files in My Document, "My Documents\My Games", AppData\Local, AppData\Roaming, AppData\Saved Games, steamapps\user and probably in other places I discovered yet.
Steam's not involved in all aspects of the game... most are just C++ compiled against DirectX and the like. It's up to the game to write the saved games to the correct directory. As I recall, officially it's supposed to be "AppData\Saved Games" in Vista and newer. Which isn't even used by Valve themselves.
While i'm at it, another nice feature would be for steam to be a unified DRM scheme. Install steam and buy a game and install only the game (and necessary libraries such as XNA for windows). Somewhere along the line I didn't pay enough attention and now I have junk like SecureROM and that Rockstar Social Club crap.
The publishers are at fault for that, and you have to actively watch Steam's store pages for the words "3rd Party DRM" to see which games have crap like that.
the XBOX 360 is basically Dx 9.1 with a bit of shader stuff from 10. Why would the heck the minimum requirement be DX11 on PC ? I smell a rat here, as I doubt they will make a new DX11 only engine. i think they simply set it so as to avoid supporting XP or Vista.
I assume it requires hardware Tesselation support.
I just hope they do it better than Arkham City did... enabling Hardware Tesselation brought my framerate down to an inconsistent amount around 40fps on a Core i7 2600K with dual nVidia GTX 570s running in SLI. I'm sure I could have lowered the graphics from the "Ultra" setting to make it work, but isn't that missing the entire point of doing things in hardware?
You'd need a browser that was somehow optimized to do an incredible amount of parallel processing to get such benefit. Plus on average the data is coming in slowly across some pipe, or being sent to a non parallelized JavaScript module (which must run synchronously to various other things [WebWorkers are the exception and very little web content uses them]) -- parallelization is really only usefully available on the per window-domain boundary (used by IE and Chrome). Also by splitting things up into distinct processes, it makes Garbage Collection easier....
What data do you think the browser is actually moving around in such clock cycles? Note that WebGL is special since it just sends all the data to the GPU which does things its own way anyway.
Fun fact: x86-64 programs have access to twice as many CPU registers as x86 programs do.
I don't think this is too much of a problem for WoW, since you can always start up an alt that's a different class/faction. (And of course hours and hours of grinding on one of your max level characters)
To put this into perspective, WoW has 13 playable races (Alliance: Human, Dwarf, Gnome, Night Elf, Draenai, Worgen; Horde: Orc, Troll, Forsaken, Tauren, Blood Elf, Gnome; Both: Pandaren) and 11 playable classes (Warrior, Monk, Paladin, Rogue, Hunter, Druid, Shaman, Mage, Warlock, Priest, Death Knight).
The problem is that there are only so many choices for zones to level up. This is particularly obvious once you enter Outlands at around level 60... your only zone choice is Hellfire Peninsula in Outlands. I suppose you could skip straight to Zangermarsh or Terrokar Forest, but if you try to skip too far ahead, the enemies will outlevel you.
At least Outlands has separate quests for each faction, which can't be said for most of the level 55-60 quests. Hell, Silithus hasn't changed since the end of the opening of Ahn'Qiraj event in 2006. At least Blasted Lands (the other 55-60 zone) got a makeover in Cataclysm.
That is true, however, you're talking to someone who has ~2000 hours of L4D playtime in. We don't do it for the gear (there is none!) -- we do it because the core game play is _fun_ with friends. If the old content is obsolete you need to ask WHY? Why aren't the old dungeons dynamically scalable? I'm not saying this is a trivial problem, or that only Blizzard doesn't get it -- the flaw is with the design decision of MMOs in general. Why would I waste time "grinding" for gear, when every expansion pack all your gear is immediately obsolete?
It's funny that you'd say this. L4D itself is obsolete since the entire game has been ported to L4D2.
Actually no, since Microsoft let Sinofsky go and put in charge the woman directly responsable for the metro interface.
It could have been worse. They could have put the woman directly responsible for the Microsoft Bob interface in charge.
I thought Gabe Newell was the project manager in charge of that project. Which goes to show that one bad product doesn't necessarily mean the person in charge of it will continue to create bad products.
idTech 4 is from 2004, the same year Source was released. Not only that, but idTech 4 was saddled with one of the shittiest FPS games in recent memory: Doom 3.
As for the other engines you mention, all of them are newer than Source, so it's not surprising that they would look better. As a reminder, UE3 was introduced with Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007. Crytek was introduced with Crysis in 2008.
Then again, if you're saying Source is bad, you may want to look at newer games made in it, such as Portal 2, rather than relying on Half-Life 2 from 2004. Source is an iteratively designed engine and newer Source games use newer iterations and thus newer technologies.
As for Team Fortress 2 (mentioned by the GGP), it's non-realistic even compared to Valve's other games. This is intentional... it makes heavy use of Phong shading to make the art style appear as if it were an early 20th century magazine ad, ala Norman Rockwell. Which also offers a clean, uncluttered look... just the opposite of the other Source games. Which works quite well for a multiplayer FPS game that relies heavily on silhouettes like TF2 does.
I wonder if they'll call other games silly things like Counter-Strike: Source 2 and TF: Source 2
Given that they have Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 already, your names seem a bit off... it's be Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: Source 2 and Team Fortress 2: Source 2.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, that handy feature where the video card drivers restart after they crash? The drivers do that, not Windows Vista and higher. It worked on XP too.
Under XP, the video driver had to be programmed specifically to do that if the graphics hardware stopped responding.
Under Vista and newer, the OS itself will do it if the graphics hardware or graphics driver stop responding. The reason for this?
According to the crash analysis data collected during the Windows XP timeframe, display drivers are responsible for up to 20 percent of all blue screens.
(WDDM Spec)
Oh but I might mention that Steam needs between 10 and 25% of CPU even with all windows closed and doing nothing at all. So better learn to use cpulimit or your battery will be empty in no time.
The Steam Client was updated about 14-16 hours ago and one of the fixes listed was that it fixes a bug where it was taking far too much processing power on Linux.
It hides what it is doing. Why do you think it has to have constant super-user status? It abuses that status to mess with things that dont belong to it and to obfuscate and hide what it is doing from the system. Just like every other rootkit out there.
It... doesn't?
I'll admit, I haven't run it on Linux, but on Windows it certainly doesn't require superuser access to run it. Mainly because it's smart enough to change the directory permissions for its own directory structure when you install it. That and Windows locking down the Program Files directory is why installing it requires superuser privileges.
A gamer with old hardware? Maybe you should be plugging that controller straight into your XBox :)
Going from "older hardware" to "antiquated hardware" isn't exactly an improvement.
And yes, I know you're referring to the 360 not the original Xbox.
Good luck trying to get these corps who just blew $10,000,000 upgrading to IE 8 in the last 6 months
I certainly hope that if they were spending money to upgrade in the last 6 months that it'd be to upgrade to IE9, not 8.
So you are using an appeal to authority argument using a comedian as your authority. You really have an interesting logic pattern
Even better, (s)he's using a strawman as well, as Tridus's "a treaty" is likely referring to the current ITU one, but "the treaty" in girlintraining's direct reply to that post is (by his/her own admission later down) referring to "the UN treaty about disabled people."
Apple did support & help Google from the very start - how exactly do you think Google maps got so good?
Google's Street View cars. You'd be amazed at how much accuracy improves when you have people actually driving down various roads world-wide.
I would be plenty happy if Steam would just redirect and store all the games files to a specific folder in the steam directory, much less implement a hypervisor. As it is now, installing a number of games from steam poops data all over my hard drive. I have game saves, settings and common files in My Document, "My Documents\My Games", AppData\Local, AppData\Roaming, AppData\Saved Games, steamapps\user and probably in other places I discovered yet.
Steam's not involved in all aspects of the game... most are just C++ compiled against DirectX and the like. It's up to the game to write the saved games to the correct directory. As I recall, officially it's supposed to be "AppData\Saved Games" in Vista and newer. Which isn't even used by Valve themselves.
While i'm at it, another nice feature would be for steam to be a unified DRM scheme. Install steam and buy a game and install only the game (and necessary libraries such as XNA for windows). Somewhere along the line I didn't pay enough attention and now I have junk like SecureROM and that Rockstar Social Club crap.
The publishers are at fault for that, and you have to actively watch Steam's store pages for the words "3rd Party DRM" to see which games have crap like that.
The most successful java game
"most successful java game" != "well written java game"
That is, assuming you're referring to MineCraft as the most successful java game.
I think Java is the only one that compiles to a foreign binary and lets the VM run the binary,
Java does it. .NET does it. To a certain extent, Python does it (that's what .pyc files are).
The section you're looking at is for DX 11.1, which isn't the same as DX 11. For one, DX 11.1 is only available on Windows 8.
Also, recall that Windows XP only officially supports DX9 and older... although someone figured out how to get DX 10 working on it.
the XBOX 360 is basically Dx 9.1 with a bit of shader stuff from 10. Why would the heck the minimum requirement be DX11 on PC ? I smell a rat here, as I doubt they will make a new DX11 only engine. i think they simply set it so as to avoid supporting XP or Vista.
I assume it requires hardware Tesselation support.
I just hope they do it better than Arkham City did... enabling Hardware Tesselation brought my framerate down to an inconsistent amount around 40fps on a Core i7 2600K with dual nVidia GTX 570s running in SLI. I'm sure I could have lowered the graphics from the "Ultra" setting to make it work, but isn't that missing the entire point of doing things in hardware?
I hope you pointed out that iOS is UNIX based too..?
"It's a UNIX system! I know this!" -- The girl from the Jurassic Park when viewing a non-command line interface
Seems they have found a lot of new Humble Bundle supporters, and all in one day.
No, they've found people who were looking for cheap games.
It'll take until the next bundle comes out to see how many supporters stick around.
That is, if any sites other than their own actually bother to announce their next bundle.
The computer I use most now is built out of the following things:
A used copy of Ghouls n Ghosts for the Sega Genesis.
So... does it die a lot?
Browsers aren't actually written this way.
You'd need a browser that was somehow optimized to do an incredible amount of parallel processing to get such benefit. Plus on average the data is coming in slowly across some pipe, or being sent to a non parallelized JavaScript module (which must run synchronously to various other things [WebWorkers are the exception and very little web content uses them]) -- parallelization is really only usefully available on the per window-domain boundary (used by IE and Chrome). Also by splitting things up into distinct processes, it makes Garbage Collection easier....
What data do you think the browser is actually moving around in such clock cycles? Note that WebGL is special since it just sends all the data to the GPU which does things its own way anyway.
Fun fact: x86-64 programs have access to twice as many CPU registers as x86 programs do.
Yeah, I wonder how long other features like Speed Dial, or Tab stacking will last before someone copies them.
Chrome already copied Speed Dial.
I have a lot of PC games... hundreds on my Steam account, at least another 30 on GOG... and those two numbers continue to increase over time.
So, my problem isn't with Linux not supporting one PC game, it's with it not supporting every PC game I have or want/plan to buy.
Whoops, I was under the impressions that Parallels was OSX-only as its host machine.
I don't think this is too much of a problem for WoW, since you can always start up an alt that's a different class/faction. (And of course hours and hours of grinding on one of your max level characters)
To put this into perspective, WoW has 13 playable races (Alliance: Human, Dwarf, Gnome, Night Elf, Draenai, Worgen; Horde: Orc, Troll, Forsaken, Tauren, Blood Elf, Gnome; Both: Pandaren) and 11 playable classes (Warrior, Monk, Paladin, Rogue, Hunter, Druid, Shaman, Mage, Warlock, Priest, Death Knight).
The problem is that there are only so many choices for zones to level up. This is particularly obvious once you enter Outlands at around level 60... your only zone choice is Hellfire Peninsula in Outlands. I suppose you could skip straight to Zangermarsh or Terrokar Forest, but if you try to skip too far ahead, the enemies will outlevel you.
At least Outlands has separate quests for each faction, which can't be said for most of the level 55-60 quests. Hell, Silithus hasn't changed since the end of the opening of Ahn'Qiraj event in 2006. At least Blasted Lands (the other 55-60 zone) got a makeover in Cataclysm.
That is true, however, you're talking to someone who has ~2000 hours of L4D playtime in. We don't do it for the gear (there is none!) -- we do it because the core game play is _fun_ with friends. If the old content is obsolete you need to ask WHY? Why aren't the old dungeons dynamically scalable? I'm not saying this is a trivial problem, or that only Blizzard doesn't get it -- the flaw is with the design decision of MMOs in general. Why would I waste time "grinding" for gear, when every expansion pack all your gear is immediately obsolete?
It's funny that you'd say this. L4D itself is obsolete since the entire game has been ported to L4D2.
The difference being that the GeForce 6000 and 7000 are from 2004-2005 rather than 2008-2009.
Actually no, since Microsoft let Sinofsky go and put in charge the woman directly responsable for the metro interface.
It could have been worse. They could have put the woman directly responsible for the Microsoft Bob interface in charge.
I thought Gabe Newell was the project manager in charge of that project. Which goes to show that one bad product doesn't necessarily mean the person in charge of it will continue to create bad products.
idTech 4 is from 2004, the same year Source was released. Not only that, but idTech 4 was saddled with one of the shittiest FPS games in recent memory: Doom 3.
As for the other engines you mention, all of them are newer than Source, so it's not surprising that they would look better. As a reminder, UE3 was introduced with Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007. Crytek was introduced with Crysis in 2008.
Then again, if you're saying Source is bad, you may want to look at newer games made in it, such as Portal 2, rather than relying on Half-Life 2 from 2004. Source is an iteratively designed engine and newer Source games use newer iterations and thus newer technologies.
As for Team Fortress 2 (mentioned by the GGP), it's non-realistic even compared to Valve's other games. This is intentional... it makes heavy use of Phong shading to make the art style appear as if it were an early 20th century magazine ad, ala Norman Rockwell. Which also offers a clean, uncluttered look... just the opposite of the other Source games. Which works quite well for a multiplayer FPS game that relies heavily on silhouettes like TF2 does.
I wonder if they'll call other games silly things like Counter-Strike: Source 2 and TF: Source 2
Given that they have Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 already, your names seem a bit off... it's be Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: Source 2 and Team Fortress 2: Source 2.