Squad-based gameplay. A lot of the time you will be fighting as part of a squad.
I just hope to god the squad is more sensible than the travesty of HL2 -- whoever decided that having a bunch of people following you around in confined spaces would be fun ought to be shot.
Vehicles! They show a really cool outdoor shot of a bunch of Strogg (I think) fighter jets blasting everything.
Again, this had better not suck as much as the vehicle sections in HL2 did; as far as I could tell they were designed soleley to make the game take longer to finish...
As this is the third high-profile follow up to a hugely successful but old FPS (assuming you ignore Quake 3, which apart from the name had nothing to do with Quakes 1 and 2), I hope it doesn't follow the same cycle of "being hyped beyond all imagining, getting delayed again and again, and completely licking balls when it's finally released" that plagued DOOM3 and HL2.
We run a torrent tracker at LAN parties -- there are always a million and one patches, map packs, mods, etc., that need distributing, so all of us involved in organising the LAN seed a copy of each of the files on one or more of our machines. The only "single point of failure" is the machine with the.torrent files and tracker on, but the traffic for that is negligible; we can't afford to spend money on any sort of high-powered server or fancy switches (we're a not-for-profit deal) so BT is a nice way of distributing the load with little effort and no investment.
"Steam's latest client update on the 14th of December broke support under Transgaming's Cedega software, however, as stated on the transgaming forums the latest 4.2 build of cedega includes a fix for Steam." Any chance of them fixing it for Windows users too?
Sarcasm and anti-Steam sentiment aside, does anyone have any insight in to whether this was a deliberate breaking or just a random side-effect?
Re:Works on Nvidia too
on
Far Cry Tech Demo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It appears that on nVidia cards the depth-of-field shader is offset horizontally, so instead of the masked areas being over foreground objects it misses them, causing them to be partially blurred and eaving a non-blurred area of background.
This an "easy" fix, but I suspect that what with it being an ATi tech demo they're not going to bother. (Kinda like VALVe's deliberate crippling of DX9 on nVidia cards in HL2 by ignoring low-precision shader hints. Collusion in the gaming industry? Revenge for nVidia's previous "cheating" in 3D-Mark?)
Happens for me with Firefox, IE and Opera, so something's not right... (To avoid too much mucking about I just used *gasp* Acrobat to scrape the site -- the link to the download is here if anyone else gets problems. {Dialup users beware: 161Mb!))
And also don't forget that if you bought the retail boxed version, not only must you have an internet connection to authorise/decrypt the files, but you still need the disk in the frickin drive to play. And woe betide anyone who uses a no-CD patch, for you shall be cast in to the fiery pits of hell...
Far from this Steam activation deal encouraging me to buy the game rather than use a warezed version, it's done precisely the opposite. I was going to buy the boxed version of it to avoid the horrors of Steam (have you ever READ the T&Cs for it?), but now it transpires that it's Steam or no HL2 I guess it's no HL2 for me. For starters my gaming PC is not, nor will it ever be, connected to the internet, but that's not the only thing:
One, Valve's LAN-gaming policy is retarded -- you have to apply a month in advance if you want to play a Valve game at a LAN-party, but at the moment it's not enforced. However, all they need to do is disable the "offline play" mode on Steam...
Two, what happens if at some point in the future Valve go belly up? What good then your $60 piece of software?
Three, this is just another step towards some sort of stupid broadcast flag/induce act piece of moronicity.
Four, the only people inconvenienced by this (along with every other piece of product activation ever created) are people who paid for it. People with warezed versions are saved the hassle (and in the case of the CS:Source Emporio release, occasionally get extra features).
So long, Gabe -- I waited years for HL2, but I guess I'll never get to play it now.
I seem to recall from earlier investigations into the technology, it involves crossing two high-frequency sounds, with the "output" modulated on to one of the beams. The HF carriers "cancel out", and what's left is what you hear, apparently emanating from nowhere...
Amen to that. It appears that many of the posters here are completely unfamiliar with "the scene" and the amount of technical and artistic effort put into these things. So it's not Unreal 2004, and yes, it uses Direct X, but given that UT2k4 is nearly 60,000 (yes 60,000) times bigger it's no surprise.
So "x %" bought fewer CDs, and "y %" bought more (where x>y)? Great, but unless we know how many CDs x and y bought, this is a completely meaningless observation. If x only ever bought 2 anyway, and y bought 3,000, then this is a spurious argument.
Me, I probably bought 20 in my whole life, so the fact that I don't buy so many any more is hardly of note. Dammit, I have 100s of LPs, and I'm buggered if I'm going to re-buy them on CD; after all, all I own is the license to listen to the music, so I should be able to transfer that to another media for no more than the cost of a blank CD. The fact that they won't do this forces me to download MP3s, and they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Why don't the RIAA/BPI/whoever face facts: most "bands" they promote these days bite the bag, CDs are stupidly overpriced -- it's not like the whole 10-15 goes to the person who actually created the music -- and no matter how many people you sue we're still going to use KaZaA, eDonkey, or whatever. Stop suing your customers, and sort your damned lives out!
I had one of those for my Amiga 500; it was a long time ago now, but IIRC I could get about 200Mb onto a 3-hour tape. I'm pretty sure it plugged in to the parallel port, but I might be mistaken...
I use ABC which is pretty idiot proof; Azureus is also pretty good. Still, as it stands the regular ABC client doesn't really need "setting up" per se; just install it and it should associate itself with.torrent files, and that's that.
I for one second that. If Random P Musician and His Beat Combo comes up with a catchy little tune that I like, I'd happily pay him for his troubles. What twists my melons is that if I bought the song on CD from a shop, Random P gets a tiny percentage of the money I paid, and some fat-assed loon who did nothing but "lend" Random P some money to record it and then press a bunch of almost worthless plastic disks and send them to shops gets the lion's share. Remunerate the talented, and leave the dinosaurs out to die!
With WMV9 being touted for possible inclusion in the HD-DVD spec, they'll have to hand over details of how it works. It's almost worth having the next generation of DVD players infested with MS software if it forces them to open up some of their secrets to the world at large...
I own a bought and paid for copy of NT4, 2K, XP, etc., so in a roundabout sort of way the source code is just another copy of what I already have. Ok, so it's in a slightly different form, but why is having WinSock source any different to having the compiled version? Providing I make no commercial or nefarious use of the source, I don't see a problem...
I have a device fitted to my house to prevent damage from hailstones. I call it a roof. It's silent, consumes no power, and also protects against rain, snow, intense sun, falling birds, and a whole host of other things...
I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve with this, really. At the risk of re-stating what's already been covered, all they do is irritate legitimate owners of the game. Anyone with a "pirate" copy will have a no-CD patch thus rendering the whole exercise futile, and it just means that people who bought the damned thing have to run the risk of losing or damaging their CD, or maybe even burning out their CD drive.
Will UbiSoft replace damaged or lost CDs free of charge? Will they replace any CD drives burnt out by excessive use? Will they provide external CD drives for laptop users who want to play the game on the road and use an additional battery pack? I suspect the answer to all those questions is "no", so why stop legitimate users from exercising their legal right to use a backup copy of the software? It's not going to sell any more copies -- they've already bought it -- and it may dissuade other people from buying this and future UbiSoft titles. (Me, for one. I was looking forward to Splinter Cell 2, but they can now go smoke my pole...)
Since its release in the UK, many mobile operators have been giving it away if you sign up for a contract, but even this doesn't seem to have persuaded people to get one. The way I see it, for people who want a phone it's too big and unwieldy, and for people who want a portable gaming device the GBA is a much better bet. I think Nokia may have produced a bit of a lemon here...
Until you asked, it hadn't occurred to me, but for the most part it turns out that yes, I do rely on it rather too heavily. In fact, at times I find myself automatically Googling for something when someone asks a question even if, with a minute or two's thought, I could have answered it myself. It's pretty much replaced my brain entirely...
To paraphrase Desi, "Tim Berners Lee, you got som splainin to doooo!"
Slashdot Mirror
Squad-based gameplay. A lot of the time you will be fighting as part of a squad.
I just hope to god the squad is more sensible than the travesty of HL2 -- whoever decided that having a bunch of people following you around in confined spaces would be fun ought to be shot.
Vehicles! They show a really cool outdoor shot of a bunch of Strogg (I think) fighter jets blasting everything.
Again, this had better not suck as much as the vehicle sections in HL2 did; as far as I could tell they were designed soleley to make the game take longer to finish...
As this is the third high-profile follow up to a hugely successful but old FPS (assuming you ignore Quake 3, which apart from the name had nothing to do with Quakes 1 and 2), I hope it doesn't follow the same cycle of "being hyped beyond all imagining, getting delayed again and again, and completely licking balls when it's finally released" that plagued DOOM3 and HL2.
...only old people have extremely impractical and potentially life-threatening exoskeletons.
We run a torrent tracker at LAN parties -- there are always a million and one patches, map packs, mods, etc., that need distributing, so all of us involved in organising the LAN seed a copy of each of the files on one or more of our machines. The only "single point of failure" is the machine with the .torrent files and tracker on, but the traffic for that is negligible; we can't afford to spend money on any sort of high-powered server or fancy switches (we're a not-for-profit deal) so BT is a nice way of distributing the load with little effort and no investment.
"Steam's latest client update on the 14th of December broke support under Transgaming's Cedega software, however, as stated on the transgaming forums the latest 4.2 build of cedega includes a fix for Steam."
Any chance of them fixing it for Windows users too?
Sarcasm and anti-Steam sentiment aside, does anyone have any insight in to whether this was a deliberate breaking or just a random side-effect?
It appears that on nVidia cards the depth-of-field shader is offset horizontally, so instead of the masked areas being over foreground objects it misses them, causing them to be partially blurred and eaving a non-blurred area of background. This an "easy" fix, but I suspect that what with it being an ATi tech demo they're not going to bother. (Kinda like VALVe's deliberate crippling of DX9 on nVidia cards in HL2 by ignoring low-precision shader hints. Collusion in the gaming industry? Revenge for nVidia's previous "cheating" in 3D-Mark?)
Happens for me with Firefox, IE and Opera, so something's not right... (To avoid too much mucking about I just used *gasp* Acrobat to scrape the site -- the link to the download is here if anyone else gets problems. {Dialup users beware: 161Mb!))
And also don't forget that if you bought the retail boxed version, not only must you have an internet connection to authorise/decrypt the files, but you still need the disk in the frickin drive to play. And woe betide anyone who uses a no-CD patch, for you shall be cast in to the fiery pits of hell...
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes
Far from this Steam activation deal encouraging me to buy the game rather than use a warezed version, it's done precisely the opposite. I was going to buy the boxed version of it to avoid the horrors of Steam (have you ever READ the T&Cs for it?), but now it transpires that it's Steam or no HL2 I guess it's no HL2 for me. For starters my gaming PC is not, nor will it ever be, connected to the internet, but that's not the only thing:
One, Valve's LAN-gaming policy is retarded -- you have to apply a month in advance if you want to play a Valve game at a LAN-party, but at the moment it's not enforced. However, all they need to do is disable the "offline play" mode on Steam...
Two, what happens if at some point in the future Valve go belly up? What good then your $60 piece of software?
Three, this is just another step towards some sort of stupid broadcast flag/induce act piece of moronicity.
Four, the only people inconvenienced by this (along with every other piece of product activation ever created) are people who paid for it. People with warezed versions are saved the hassle (and in the case of the CS:Source Emporio release, occasionally get extra features).
So long, Gabe -- I waited years for HL2, but I guess I'll never get to play it now.
I still stand by my prdiction that CDs will never catch on. :)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2okbn1%24hp2% 40sefl.satelnet.org&output=gplain
I seem to recall from earlier investigations into the technology, it involves crossing two high-frequency sounds, with the "output" modulated on to one of the beams. The HF carriers "cancel out", and what's left is what you hear, apparently emanating from nowhere...
Amen to that. It appears that many of the posters here are completely unfamiliar with "the scene" and the amount of technical and artistic effort put into these things. So it's not Unreal 2004, and yes, it uses Direct X, but given that UT2k4 is nearly 60,000 (yes 60,000) times bigger it's no surprise.
So "x %" bought fewer CDs, and "y %" bought more (where x>y)? Great, but unless we know how many CDs x and y bought, this is a completely meaningless observation. If x only ever bought 2 anyway, and y bought 3,000, then this is a spurious argument. Me, I probably bought 20 in my whole life, so the fact that I don't buy so many any more is hardly of note. Dammit, I have 100s of LPs, and I'm buggered if I'm going to re-buy them on CD; after all, all I own is the license to listen to the music, so I should be able to transfer that to another media for no more than the cost of a blank CD. The fact that they won't do this forces me to download MP3s, and they're shooting themselves in the foot. Why don't the RIAA/BPI/whoever face facts: most "bands" they promote these days bite the bag, CDs are stupidly overpriced -- it's not like the whole 10-15 goes to the person who actually created the music -- and no matter how many people you sue we're still going to use KaZaA, eDonkey, or whatever. Stop suing your customers, and sort your damned lives out!
I had one of those for my Amiga 500; it was a long time ago now, but IIRC I could get about 200Mb onto a 3-hour tape. I'm pretty sure it plugged in to the parallel port, but I might be mistaken...
I use ABC which is pretty idiot proof; Azureus is also pretty good. Still, as it stands the regular ABC client doesn't really need "setting up" per se; just install it and it should associate itself with .torrent files, and that's that.
I for one second that. If Random P Musician and His Beat Combo comes up with a catchy little tune that I like, I'd happily pay him for his troubles. What twists my melons is that if I bought the song on CD from a shop, Random P gets a tiny percentage of the money I paid, and some fat-assed loon who did nothing but "lend" Random P some money to record it and then press a bunch of almost worthless plastic disks and send them to shops gets the lion's share. Remunerate the talented, and leave the dinosaurs out to die!
With WMV9 being touted for possible inclusion in the HD-DVD spec, they'll have to hand over details of how it works. It's almost worth having the next generation of DVD players infested with MS software if it forces them to open up some of their secrets to the world at large...
already be /.ed. Is that some kind of record?
I own a bought and paid for copy of NT4, 2K, XP, etc., so in a roundabout sort of way the source code is just another copy of what I already have. Ok, so it's in a slightly different form, but why is having WinSock source any different to having the compiled version? Providing I make no commercial or nefarious use of the source, I don't see a problem...
I have a device fitted to my house to prevent damage from hailstones. I call it a roof. It's silent, consumes no power, and also protects against rain, snow, intense sun, falling birds, and a whole host of other things...
I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve with this, really. At the risk of re-stating what's already been covered, all they do is irritate legitimate owners of the game. Anyone with a "pirate" copy will have a no-CD patch thus rendering the whole exercise futile, and it just means that people who bought the damned thing have to run the risk of losing or damaging their CD, or maybe even burning out their CD drive. Will UbiSoft replace damaged or lost CDs free of charge? Will they replace any CD drives burnt out by excessive use? Will they provide external CD drives for laptop users who want to play the game on the road and use an additional battery pack? I suspect the answer to all those questions is "no", so why stop legitimate users from exercising their legal right to use a backup copy of the software? It's not going to sell any more copies -- they've already bought it -- and it may dissuade other people from buying this and future UbiSoft titles. (Me, for one. I was looking forward to Splinter Cell 2, but they can now go smoke my pole...)
Since its release in the UK, many mobile operators have been giving it away if you sign up for a contract, but even this doesn't seem to have persuaded people to get one. The way I see it, for people who want a phone it's too big and unwieldy, and for people who want a portable gaming device the GBA is a much better bet. I think Nokia may have produced a bit of a lemon here...
Until you asked, it hadn't occurred to me, but for the most part it turns out that yes, I do rely on it rather too heavily. In fact, at times I find myself automatically Googling for something when someone asks a question even if, with a minute or two's thought, I could have answered it myself. It's pretty much replaced my brain entirely... To paraphrase Desi, "Tim Berners Lee, you got som splainin to doooo!"