Soldat is INSANELY fun. I've played online and on LAN on the cybercafe i work now and it's a riot. It's one of those games you pick up in minutes but becomes very hard to master.
If you like 2d side scrollers and CounterStrike, you owe to yourself to give it a try.
PS: I'd kill for a linux version.
A pair of beated up speakers my ex-gf was ready to toss to the garbage. They work just fine; they only had a dust dome pushed a bit inside.
An old 400w AT PSU someone at work was using as a doorstop (literally) on his garage. I just cleaned it up a bit and now it's running along my ATX psu on my main PC.
I also had a PII-233 that ran overclocked unadvertedly for almost 4 years. It wasn't by much, but it made it ran pretty hot. Never gave me a problem.
In another news, RenderWare software, out of the blue and without a rational explanation, drops 20fps, crashes time after time and "inspires" a series of mediocre movie adaptations and sport games. The dev team at Criterion is still trying to figure it out.
Not hindering. The original D3 engine was supossed to do all sound processing and mixing through the CPU; there's good techincal reasons for this (sound would be the same no matter your setup, with little impact on CPU usage). The game would sound as good with your onboard sound as it would on your brand new Audigy.
Through this bogus patent, Creative has effectively blackmailed iD into adding support for their hardware.
You can access EXT3 partitions via some utilites in Windows; through it's not suported directly.
Try a search on http://www.download.com/ ; there were a few there but i can't recall their names.
I'm not moving away from EXT3 any time soon. I have tried other filesystems (including Reiser and XFS), but nothing can touch the rock solid stability of EXT. I don't mind if it's a tad slower, i can sleep easily knowing my data won't disappear overnight unless a lighning hits the HD. Directly.
Yes. Like you said, onboard sound have became "good enough" a long while ago. In fact, in a decent onboard audio controller (like, say, nForce), the only real advantage you get from an audio card is a lower noise floor.
I have a SiS onboard controller myself, and noise and lack of hardware mixing are the only problems i've found with it. It sounds excellent otherwise, and this is from a guy who builds his own audio gear.
...or wasn't the D3 engine supposed to do all audio processing on the CPU rather than the soundcard? Lately, the only advantage Creative had over other soundcards was hardware EAX support; i can live without it. That's good, because on modern processors the CPU usage hit is minimal and ensures the engine will sound the same everywhere.
If the only reason they decided to do otherwise is because of a bogus patent, i'm not buying Creative hardware anymore. There are better quality (and cheaper) soundcards out there. Hell, even my integrated SiS audio sounds quite good.
The C64 is one of the best personal computers in history, no doubt about it. The things that people managed to do with it are mind-boggling, specially when you consider the machine limitations - 64kb of *total* memory, so RAM was less than that, 1MHz clock, very limited resolution and color palette, and a very basic sound synthetizer chip (even when most of it was top-notch hardware back then). Check http://www.lemmon64.com/ for all your C64 need, there's a lot of gems laying arround.
I recently fired up the VICE emulator for C64 and digged an old cd with 200mb of games and demos... and had a blast, i don't mind admitting it. It's weird when you have more fun playing Uridium or Tapper than modern games.
As other posters said, it will never happen, even if Microsoft finds there's a viable market for it. The reason? Because it legitimates Linux as a viable alternative in the eyes of their consumers.
On the server market it's a whole different story, but Linux is (still) not a real threat to the Windows dominance in the desktop - why bother? It would do more harm than good to them.
As it is, X.Org is not at all different from the latest "non-crippled" XFree release - i'm running it in my Gentoo box and besides beeing just a tad faster, it's the same. It has minor patches applied and a few configuration files names changed. The upgrade is as painless as it can be; even my nVidia linux bnary drivers worked perfectly.
The thing with XFree it's been the attitude of it's developers (David Dawes in particular, do a google search of Usenet groups for some fun) - and this translated to the project in being very hard to submit codes or patches and had them approved. XFree has then been quite stagnant in the recent past; the licence fiasco was simply the cherry on the top.
X.Org has a much more open developement and i expect it to become quite different (advanced) of XFree in the future; stuff like Cairo and other X extensions (check http://www.freedesktop.com/) will at some point be incorporated onto X.Org giving us a nice, nifty OpenGL accelerated desktop.
What's being discussed here is like if a car poked you with a needle to extract blood and match your DNA in order to start the iginition. Yes, it might stop car burglary, but it sure as hell will piss off your customers. Don't be surprised if they don't buy your cars anymore.
This is exactly how i feel. If someone is willing to download a game, he *will* download it. Why even count it as a 'potential sale'? In a way, it's a price of doing buisness for the game industry, because the moment a CP scheme annoys a legal customer, is over the line, and the truth is it won't really solve much of the problem. Having to occupy the CD player with a game disc after installing 5gb is insane.
In fact, would it hurt sales a lot if the game was released without CP? If the same game came in two flavors, which one would you buy? Would it matter, since you have actually paid for it, as you intended in the first place?
I have downloaded games, for the sole intention to try them before buying. I agree with you, i'd love if most demos where available before the game release, just like the UT2k4 one.
Sadly, this guy has a point. Something's not right when a game you just downloaded off Kazaa is less of a hassle to play than the same game off the box. The "copy protection" craze has gone to far; no matter what, digital content of any kind *will* be copied and used illegally. You just can't get arround it, CD-Key, DMCA, Dongles, or whatever. Instead of fighting an uphill battle, software publishers should focus on making the game good enough so people will happily buy it. As this guy said, this is rarely the case nowadays.
As for the patching issues, i didn't mind when patches were minor or to improve the overall experience, but most PC games are so buggy and slow lately that patching is mandatory. Again, if the product needs work, move the deadlines forward a bit and focus on delivering a quality product.
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Hmmm, it won't connect for some reason. Maybe the game isn't NAT-friendly?
I'm emerge-ing it; be there in 5'!
Soldat is INSANELY fun. I've played online and on LAN on the cybercafe i work now and it's a riot. It's one of those games you pick up in minutes but becomes very hard to master. If you like 2d side scrollers and CounterStrike, you owe to yourself to give it a try. PS: I'd kill for a linux version.
My FX5200 *will* play it and look amazing to boot! We love you John!
A pair of beated up speakers my ex-gf was ready to toss to the garbage. They work just fine; they only had a dust dome pushed a bit inside.
An old 400w AT PSU someone at work was using as a doorstop (literally) on his garage. I just cleaned it up a bit and now it's running along my ATX psu on my main PC.
I also had a PII-233 that ran overclocked unadvertedly for almost 4 years. It wasn't by much, but it made it ran pretty hot. Never gave me a problem.
In another news, RenderWare software, out of the blue and without a rational explanation, drops 20fps, crashes time after time and "inspires" a series of mediocre movie adaptations and sport games. The dev team at Criterion is still trying to figure it out.
Not hindering. The original D3 engine was supossed to do all sound processing and mixing through the CPU; there's good techincal reasons for this (sound would be the same no matter your setup, with little impact on CPU usage). The game would sound as good with your onboard sound as it would on your brand new Audigy. Through this bogus patent, Creative has effectively blackmailed iD into adding support for their hardware.
You can access EXT3 partitions via some utilites in Windows; through it's not suported directly.
Try a search on http://www.download.com/ ; there were a few there but i can't recall their names.
I'm not moving away from EXT3 any time soon. I have tried other filesystems (including Reiser and XFS), but nothing can touch the rock solid stability of EXT. I don't mind if it's a tad slower, i can sleep easily knowing my data won't disappear overnight unless a lighning hits the HD. Directly.
Yes. Like you said, onboard sound have became "good enough" a long while ago. In fact, in a decent onboard audio controller (like, say, nForce), the only real advantage you get from an audio card is a lower noise floor.
I have a SiS onboard controller myself, and noise and lack of hardware mixing are the only problems i've found with it. It sounds excellent otherwise, and this is from a guy who builds his own audio gear.
If the only reason they decided to do otherwise is because of a bogus patent, i'm not buying Creative hardware anymore. There are better quality (and cheaper) soundcards out there. Hell, even my integrated SiS audio sounds quite good.
Sorry, make that http://www.lemon64.com/!
The C64 is one of the best personal computers in history, no doubt about it. The things that people managed to do with it are mind-boggling, specially when you consider the machine limitations - 64kb of *total* memory, so RAM was less than that, 1MHz clock, very limited resolution and color palette, and a very basic sound synthetizer chip (even when most of it was top-notch hardware back then). Check http://www.lemmon64.com/ for all your C64 need, there's a lot of gems laying arround. I recently fired up the VICE emulator for C64 and digged an old cd with 200mb of games and demos... and had a blast, i don't mind admitting it. It's weird when you have more fun playing Uridium or Tapper than modern games.
As other posters said, it will never happen, even if Microsoft finds there's a viable market for it. The reason? Because it legitimates Linux as a viable alternative in the eyes of their consumers.
On the server market it's a whole different story, but Linux is (still) not a real threat to the Windows dominance in the desktop - why bother? It would do more harm than good to them.
So damn true.
I'm still eager for D3 benchmarks on low and mid-end systems. Anyone knows of any? I'd love to know if it'll be playable on my FX5200.
You can never, EVER, download porn fast enough. There's no such thing as "enough bandwidth".
Seriously. I like Lucas, but he fooled me twice already.
As it is, X.Org is not at all different from the latest "non-crippled" XFree release - i'm running it in my Gentoo box and besides beeing just a tad faster, it's the same. It has minor patches applied and a few configuration files names changed. The upgrade is as painless as it can be; even my nVidia linux bnary drivers worked perfectly.
The thing with XFree it's been the attitude of it's developers (David Dawes in particular, do a google search of Usenet groups for some fun) - and this translated to the project in being very hard to submit codes or patches and had them approved. XFree has then been quite stagnant in the recent past; the licence fiasco was simply the cherry on the top.
X.Org has a much more open developement and i expect it to become quite different (advanced) of XFree in the future; stuff like Cairo and other X extensions (check http://www.freedesktop.com/) will at some point be incorporated onto X.Org giving us a nice, nifty OpenGL accelerated desktop.
Can't wait for that myself.
I think i'll just bash my head to the wall until i fall in a coma. That will help me get through these two weeks.
The wait is killing me!
What's being discussed here is like if a car poked you with a needle to extract blood and match your DNA in order to start the iginition. Yes, it might stop car burglary, but it sure as hell will piss off your customers. Don't be surprised if they don't buy your cars anymore.
This is exactly how i feel. If someone is willing to download a game, he *will* download it. Why even count it as a 'potential sale'? In a way, it's a price of doing buisness for the game industry, because the moment a CP scheme annoys a legal customer, is over the line, and the truth is it won't really solve much of the problem. Having to occupy the CD player with a game disc after installing 5gb is insane.
In fact, would it hurt sales a lot if the game was released without CP? If the same game came in two flavors, which one would you buy? Would it matter, since you have actually paid for it, as you intended in the first place?
I have downloaded games, for the sole intention to try them before buying. I agree with you, i'd love if most demos where available before the game release, just like the UT2k4 one.
Sadly, this guy has a point. Something's not right when a game you just downloaded off Kazaa is less of a hassle to play than the same game off the box. The "copy protection" craze has gone to far; no matter what, digital content of any kind *will* be copied and used illegally. You just can't get arround it, CD-Key, DMCA, Dongles, or whatever. Instead of fighting an uphill battle, software publishers should focus on making the game good enough so people will happily buy it. As this guy said, this is rarely the case nowadays.
As for the patching issues, i didn't mind when patches were minor or to improve the overall experience, but most PC games are so buggy and slow lately that patching is mandatory. Again, if the product needs work, move the deadlines forward a bit and focus on delivering a quality product.