Couldn't agree more. I abandoned Half Life/CS etc because of Steam. It really is aptly named - "Steam Powered" - yep. It would constantly fail to download "updates" (and I suspect that half of this was stuff I didn't really need) and had a million+1 reasons why it couldn't start Half Life, or authenticate. I have removed it from my system now.
hehe too true - most of the extra load is on on the GPU. I couldn't justify putting the 6800 in my old Athlon1200:), and conversely, it seemed stupid to build a reasonably quick machine and cripple it for the sake of the extra £200 quid. I normally hold off buying the "latest and greatest" but the little "add to cart" button was calling to me..
You really need the application to be written and compiled for SMP to get any benefit (although if you can bind all system tasks to one COU and the game to the other, at least it will get free reign of one chip). Even then though, I seem to remember quoted numbers for Q3 on an SMP set up as about a 12% performance increase? Again - depends on how CPU bound it is - if the GPU is the bottleneck, you won't get much of an increase.
If I still had the time to play as much as I used to in the old Q2 days, I'd have been tempted by the Opteron, or FX53... Not sure about 4Gb of RAM Today, but who knows what'll need it next week:)
You're a wise man Blue. I couldn't wait though and have built myself a new machine for Doom3. In honour of this historic occasion I've even splashed out on a new case! Having refilled the old hearing aid beige item 3 times I could stand looking at it no more (plus I convinced myself that it didn't have adequate cooling for the new stuff:P ) I haven't gone overboard with the new machine (I stopped short of 64bit Athlons and P4Extremes at 3 times the cost of a regular P4) and based my spec around memory, so I opted for an Abit IC7 Max3 board (Intel 875p) with 1Gb of dual channel ram and a 3.2Ghz prescott. This combination is supposed to be quite efficient according to the many web and paper reviews I read. Storage from 2 workhorse type 250Gb Maxtor SATAs in a RAID 0 array, all shoved into a nice Antec P160 with a 480Watt Antec PSU.
I await my GF6800 Ultra to complete , and at this rate Doom 3 will be in my clutches before the damm thing.
I can't see it running too well on the present card: a GF4 Ti4200, but I might need a bigger PSU for the 6800...
Purchased a copy of Windows XP (Games edition) and have 100Gb spare partitiion for... probably Fedora as soon as I can spare the time download some drivers and get it to talk to the Intel RAID controller...
Yes - the life of a PC gamer is a complex and expensive one, but hey - it's Doom!
Well, that's the nature of the best I guess - yes you could wait and get something better - but then that statement is always true. In theory, if you wait forever, you'll have the ultimate system! It's just a way for people who want to, to get some more performance now. People want to push the boundaries. It's just the way of things:)
I disagree about the V2 SLI - it was just the same back then. If you wanted to get the benefit of the 2 cards, you need to overclock your 300Mhz PII or whatever you had, and attach large numbers of fans to your case to cool the V2 cards.
A friend had this setup in 1998 with an Athlon CPU and it was forver breaking down at tournaments, but his rig did outperform everyone elses. Trouble was, six months later, his machine was the same speed as everyone elses, but his was the only one that needed half a fridge attached to the back to do it.
So - yeah from most peoples' perspective, you're bang on, but some people like to push the limits.
I am just now bulding my new workstation and have invested close to 1500 in a Prescott/875P/Dual channel RAM system in a new ally case with expensive PSU and GF6800 Ultra which is probably more spec than I really need but I'll draw the line at sticking another 400 GPU in it...
PC games are lagging behind consoles?? What causes you to think this?!
Console games are simple fun 5 minuters for playing on the sofa with your mates. They have neither the depth, or the eye candy of modern "PC" games. Sure they have lots of antialising, and are fairly smooth - but hell: they'd better be at TV resolution! If you saw that on your Pc's monitor you'd ask for your money back:)
Using multiple cards is a way of getting a "sneak preview" if you like at what the mainstream tech will do for you in a few months - like over clocking. Sure in 6 months time every PC/vid card will be just as quick, and yours will be the only one that requires a fridge strapped to it and it's own power plant - but hey - that's how stuff gets improved..
To get deep involving gameplay with good control, a decent multiplayer arrangement and a vast playing world you can't beat the PC gaming approach. That's why with every generation, consoles look more like PCs with all the boring unnecessary bits stripped out. Likewise, console hardware has always been built to shift bits for smooth play. PC's are heading that way with new breeds of video cards, better buses/memory architecture , CPU cache etc. This is largely caused by people starting to use their home machines for video realted applications (from editing home movies to ripping off commercial flicks, and integrating with the TV/stereo media centre style). Pretty soon they'll meet in the middle:) Or the video card will become a "console on a card" with it's own 1Gb ram that loads the entire game texture set onto the card at the start to save shovelling it down the PCI/AGP bus.
They start getting all kinds of false positives. My ISP started injecting re-directs into http documents as they "thought" I had a worm. It turned out to be nothing more harmful than stray CIFs messages coming from a Samba server on my network. Even worse, even with the plug pulled out of the ADSL sockets, it was still managing to re-direct browser sessions from all boxes when viewing internal web servers! The only solution was to restart every web server on my network (and every browser window).
All very clever, but a bit drastic. After all, we'd all be very secure from worms if we just chopped the plugs off the power leads, but somehow I think the solution lacks soemthing.
Indeed - and did Mr Cooper pay attention when he watched FOTR? There was the small matter of the Balrog, who dragged "the wizard" down "the hole". He didn't just fall. The two Maiar spirits then fought for about 10 days before Olorin (who was variously known as Gandalf, Mithrandir, The Grey Pilgrim etc by the peoples of Middle Earth) finally slew the un-named Balrog (known only as "Durin's Bane").
Hmm I don;t think there are those humans around. Cartinaly not in the quantities that would be required to manually guide the 1200 flights a day. We get dependent on the systems. We put the systems in because the load increases beyond the economic viability of an army of ATC guys, not to mention the communication overhead and possibility of error or mis communication. So we build a computer system to deal with it instead. That in turn allows us to up the load by an order of magnitude again. 30 years later, take the system away, and there's nothing.
In scenarios like this, where load has increased whilst the computers systems were in place, we *are* reliant on them.
Think of banks - time was when you had to almost plead on your knees to get a banck account, and they charged you for running it. This was becasue every account was written down manually in a book, and any calculations were performed by hoards of clerks. Then - computers. Now your new account is just one more record in a table somewhere, so the banks give out accounts to anyone who wants one, and do it for free. If for some reason your bank's computer system goes AWOL, there is no way they can process a month's interest calculations on the millions of balances and transactions - not to mention actually applying the transations that would now come in on bits of paper.
I do agree that in a lot of cases, there remains a perfectly useable manual method, but where the computer system has enabled geometric increases in capacity over the manual system (which has been taken up) then, if you'll excuse the pun, it won't fly.
You're right about the Y2k thing - I worked on a contract for a railway maintenance company in 1999 and the Y2K cordinator guy was tearing his hair out at the thousands of questions he got monthly such as "so, these nails, are they Y2K compliant?" He actually had solid steel track components called "chairs" that the rails sit on that had Y2K compliance stickers on them from the manufacturer. Presumably, they got fed up explaining it too, and decided it was easier to just stick the stickers on everything they made...
Hmm but surely the Java setup is also running the compilation process at run time (from bytecode to machine code)? Surely that takes up more cycles than it saves by the on-the-spot optimisations?
Or does the run time environment "cache" the compiled machine code and so run quicker the 2nd time around?
I think you're a bit late to start the moral debate over who's the greater evil: the developer of a potential weapon, or the users of the devices. This debate has been going on for some time.
I think it would be pretty damm difficult anyway, to kill someone directly with a "MAV" (although you could, with a bit of semantic jiggery-pokey define a lump of lead as a "micro flying vehicle":P)
There are far more destructive inventions up for the gold medal in this debate: nuclear weapons, the gun, TNT (old Alfred was clearly so upset when someone used *his* neat little invention for killing other people, he sponsored a prize for peace), etc etc.
We have had technology to snoop on each other from orbit for years now - our streets are lined with CCTV (well they are in the average UK city)so why get so fired up about a small aeroplane with a camera in it? Reconnaisance was after all, the first real military use for full size 'planes.
Do you really think "nothing" somes up the problem with American society Today? Surely there's always room for improvement!
Quake(world) was: Brown Quake II was: Fast moving, slow firing Quake III is: Slower moving, faster firing
There is a world of difference in the "feel" of the movement in all 3 games, but as with so many things, it depends on how close up you get. Seen from a distance - yep - they're all pretty much the same idea, but then that's no bad thing either - large numbers of Quake fans including me *do* just want the same gameplay with up to date graphics.
I'm not too fussed on the storyline thing, although I did like the atmosphere Quake II had in the single player game, which was largely down to the background sound track. For me, its yet to be bettered.
Qukae II is also top of my list for multiplayer gameplay. I like the speed at which you can move. I feel like I'm trudging about with my pants round my ankles in Quake3, although it's still a hugely playable game (to get some perspective, Half Life = Lead underpants, and shoe laces tied together ). Quake 3's weapon switch speed and faster firing rates compensate though.
This kind of "huh?" type game conversion is not new: pinball machines anyone? The pinball formula seemed to be to take any old pinball machine and affix pictures from the subject film/game etc. I mean come on - "Lord Of the Rings: the pinball machine" ?!?
I'm sure Doom the board game is Ludo or something with backgrounds from "The Shores of Hell"
One oreason (or another) was no doubt this: Its a Console Game.
Consoles are small, in terms of video resolution, ram and mass storage. They are big in terms of bit shifting bandwidth, which is what makes 100 consoles seem smoother than a 1000 PC playing the same game sometimes (that and the really low TV quality resolution). PCI archtecture is getting there recently though with 8x AGP and faster multiported DRAM.
I only played the PC demo of Halo, and this was enough to convince me not to buy it. I did quite like the aesthetic of the ringworld/Aliens dropship/Culture environment but the maps were just too small.
I played the single player thing for a couple of hours but I quickly get bored of the whole "puzzle" thing with the buttons and "keys" (or whatever they're called in the game you're playing).
I played some multiplayer - but come on, in this day and age of 3wave CS, RTCW ET, Q3TA, UT and UnrealXMP it's not really acceptable to be able to be able to wave at the enemy in their base, from *your* base! Admittedly, the demo only came with Blood Gulch for multiplayer but it's tiny! What the vehicles were for, I can only ponder on, as it was only a 30 second walk to the other base...
I thought nice look and feel, poor lighting in places, but with some class effects. Ultimately - it felt like a console game. If I wanted a console game, I'd have bought a 100 console instead of spending twice that much on my graphics card....
..Alien 4 was so badly regarded - I quite like it. Let's put this into perspective - watch Alien 3.
As for a good Firefly movie script - "The Traveller Adventure" By Miller, Wiseman, Keith et al. It's about a bunch of mis-fits on a small freighter taking on cargoes, passengers and getting involved in heists, rescues and general adventures. Oh! wait...
..these people really have no sense of the ridiculous. Makes you wonder about their other business decisions, or even how they percieve the world in general (the generally accepted colour of a clear, daytime sky is blue right?). Are these people allowed to vote?
This argument is flawed - you just can't compare books and films in that way. Sure they both tell a story, but the constraints, and media are just too different. I've read some sci-fi, well quite a lot to be honest and whilst I'd agree that the plot of Star Wars isn't amazingly twisted and probably doesn't work too well as a 1000 page book - it was perfect for it's medium: film.
Movies should evoke emotions and with the good old good vs evil, the legacy, the gimmick (the force)and the mentor/apprentice thing going on, it evoked the right emotions at the right points in the film. (Mind you I always felt Obi Wan could have put up a bit of a fight, even if he was getting on a bit:-/ )
It's a film, not a book. I'm not saying books don't translate to the film - LOTR managed it really well, but the keyword there is "translate". Peter Jackson couldn't just film every little bit and include every bit of dialogue and have the audience still awake at the end of his 50 hour flick - he and the other script writers had to tranbslate it for the screen. The same would be tru of all Sci-Fi lit with involved plots. Imagine a film of Heinlein's "Number of The beast" - I couldn't remember what the hell that was about 2 weeks after I read it, but it made sense while I was reading it.
StarWars was a nice sized plot with a bit of intrigue and some great characters. It didn't have a big budget, and Lucas chnaged the story several times to fit with the cash he had. Up until then space had been "clean" with no mving parts. StarWars showed vehicles that looked like they actually had engines and nechanical parts in them - they looked like they would work on an engineering level. And there was dirt, for the first time in a SciFi flick, ships had dirt from being used - the habitats looked lived in. My own 2 penneth on the prequels is that they lack everyday charcters - everybodies a queen or a senator or a Jedi Kight, so they all talk in a formal way which makes the dialogue seem wooden. Where are the Han Solo type characters? It's like looking at life through the pages of a history book - tales of Kings and Queens always seem regal in the books, but between the glorious and famous events recorded in the chronicles of history, I bet there was a lot of nose picking, scratching of arses and general mundane nothingness. We don't see much "life" going on in the new SW movies. In the original movies, at least there were some farmers, the odd used ship dealer (implied) and some general working class dudes you could identify with. Ep V had possibly the best script, dialogue and character development of them all - largly due to the presence of Solo and the fliting with old bun chops.
I still like the new movies though, as long as I stick my "this is not really a kids movie - you are not sad for watching this age 34" filter on. I am looking forward to EPIII - I'll watch it for what it is - and then watch the original trlogy on DVD (hopefully)!
I just had an image flash before my eyes of a 3wave Capture strike game where the red team burts into the blue base to find the blue players standing or sitting around the flag holding survey forms and sucking a pen.... "sarge - can I put this flag down?" "has anyone got anything to lean on?" "oh bugger the flags gone.."
Can't fault you logic Herulach - so perhaps a bit more explanation is in order - "rally bred" doesn't mean an actual rally car - but they tend to come with more pliant chassis and 4 wheel drive, and will usually run rings around many "supercars" down a real road. Real roads are more like a rally stage than race track (well the tarmac round here is pretty bumpy in places anyway..). A normal road car is built for ride comfort - and are very floppy around the corners which causes the car's mass to shift about. That said - you are right - many "normal" road cars will outrun a "supercar" on a real B road providing it's got enough poke under the bonnet.
As for car choices - well it's all subjective really. I've never driven a Ford GT - it might be a load of pants for all I know, but from what I've read its a decent steer - and it does look fantastic. Wouldn't turn down any of your choices either mind, although I think you'd struggle to find an XJ220 for 100K!
Re:This is pretty stupid, and not worth a /. artic
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Enderle's Ferrari Laptop
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· Score: 2, Interesting
erm.. I'm pretty sure the F1 cars are still made in the UK - along with most of the others. I remember almost literally tripping over the wind tunnel test model in the low speed wind tunnel at BAE, Bristol.
I don't think financial ownership matters that much in Ferrari's case to be honest - and hey - it's not like Fiat is not Italian too. However - Mr Banana just about summed it up - I agree with every word - Ferrari trade on their name these days - the cars are flimsy, not that well made and some are just too damm ugly man! They handle pretty well on nice smooth roads, but for real world roads - get a rally bred 4 wheel drive machine! On the cost thing though - they are worth what people are prepared to pay, and as long as there are badge snobs out there to be parted from their cash, Ferrari will keep the "exclusivity" up with a large price tag.
If I had $100K to spend on a car - I'd be in the Ford GT queue - it's one beautiful looking car. If I wasn't worried about relaibility and had $60K+, there's plenty of automative art down at the TVR toyshop.
Actually - as it happens, I don't give a stuff about reliability when it comes to performance cars, which is why I keep a Mazda RX-7 R1 in the garage to play with at weekends:)) Looks and go thats what I need:) (in the week I drive a German car - I'm not totally mad:P)
First off - there's nothing wrong with dial up for online FPS play as long as you have a decent modem. I played Quake 2 in the Uk league for years on a 56K SupraExpress. Mileage varies with the game though - Half Life was always pants on a modem - but then it ran like a 3 legged donkey at the best of times. Broadband is, of course better though.
Now then - what to play as a "casual" n00b? Don't play Quake. What can I say? Even Quake3 is way too fast to get any instant success as a player. Quake2 is even faster. (Before you all reply about the weapons, I mean the movement rate, not the firing and weapon swapping rate).
For a more sedate level of play try any game based on the Half Speed engine - like Counterstrike, or Team Fortress Classic - a game you can play whilst eating your dinner and still do well.
Similarly, RTCW (and the just as good - and free Enemy Territory) is quite a leisurely paced game with breaks (when you die) and it enforces teamplay. (teamplay in 4v4 Q2 for example requires active thought on the part of the team and it's leader - whereas in RTCW, CS and most team fortress class-type games, the whole map strategy is laid out with helpful neon pointers saying "this way to ye olde strategic objective").
Another game I found quite relaxing is Jedi Knight II CTF - just don't waste time trying to foght people with those light up sticks - there ain't no substitute for a good blast^H^H^H^H^H rocket launcher at your side kid.
UT/UT2003/U2XMP are not exactly lightning paced games either (you shuffle along like your pants are round your ankles) but boy are the weapons fiddly. You get all manner of sludge guns, explosive ball thingies and other wierdo stuff (although XMP is not so bad on that front and has vehicles too).
I'm afraid I don't agree about the level of cheating. I know cheating goes on, but I rarely see any and I play most FPS games online. Sometimes, a high level of skill may seem like cheating. The Quake2 source code was released a while back so potentially, there are many hacked clients knocking about for Q2, so if you are feeling braver than your post would suggest, make sure you install something like "NoCheat" or "Biteme!" and play on a server that actively enforces using these client validators. The All Seeing Eye (ASE) is perhaps the best way of locating servers - http://www.udpsoft/eye
I think if I had to pick one for a new player - it would be RTCW ET - free, runs punkbuster and is fairly easy to get some initial encouragement with.
When you're ready for something quicker - try 3wave Capturestrike for Q3 - full on smack! smack! smack! fzsst! bang! whack! gameplay.
Oh yeah, and just one other tip - in the words of Obi Wan Kenobi " Use the MOUSE Luke!"
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Couldn't agree more. I abandoned Half Life/CS etc because of Steam. It really is aptly named - "Steam Powered" - yep. It would constantly fail to download "updates" (and I suspect that half of this was stuff I didn't really need) and had a million+1 reasons why it couldn't start Half Life, or authenticate. I have removed it from my system now.
yeeessss..
"Oh not ours isn't a spam filter, it;s the worlds first and only Spam Firewall"
"So what's it do then?"
"well, when mail comes in, it classifies it as either spam, or non-spam.."
"and this differs from a spam filter because....?"
Yet another spam filter. Move along.
hehe too true - most of the extra load is on on the GPU. I couldn't justify putting the 6800 in my old Athlon1200 :), and conversely, it seemed stupid to build a reasonably quick machine and cripple it for the sake of the extra £200 quid. I normally hold off buying the "latest and greatest" but the little "add to cart" button was calling to me..
:)
You really need the application to be written and compiled for SMP to get any benefit (although if you can bind all system tasks to one COU and the game to the other, at least it will get free reign of one chip). Even then though, I seem to remember quoted numbers for Q3 on an SMP set up as about a 12% performance increase? Again - depends on how CPU bound it is - if the GPU is the bottleneck, you won't get much of an increase.
If I still had the time to play as much as I used to in the old Q2 days, I'd have been tempted by the Opteron, or FX53... Not sure about 4Gb of RAM Today, but who knows what'll need it next week
You're a wise man Blue. I couldn't wait though and have built myself a new machine for Doom3. In honour of this historic occasion I've even splashed out on a new case! Having refilled the old hearing aid beige item 3 times I could stand looking at it no more (plus I convinced myself that it didn't have adequate cooling for the new stuff :P ) I haven't gone overboard with the new machine (I stopped short of 64bit Athlons and P4Extremes at 3 times the cost of a regular P4) and based my spec around memory, so I opted for an Abit IC7 Max3 board (Intel 875p) with 1Gb of dual channel ram and a 3.2Ghz prescott. This combination is supposed to be quite efficient according to the many web and paper reviews I read. Storage from 2 workhorse type 250Gb Maxtor SATAs in a RAID 0 array, all shoved into a nice Antec P160 with a 480Watt Antec PSU.
I await my GF6800 Ultra to complete , and at this rate Doom 3 will be in my clutches before the damm thing.
I can't see it running too well on the present card: a GF4 Ti4200, but I might need a bigger PSU for the 6800...
Purchased a copy of Windows XP (Games edition) and have 100Gb spare partitiion for... probably Fedora as soon as I can spare the time download some drivers and get it to talk to the Intel RAID controller...
Yes - the life of a PC gamer is a complex and expensive one, but hey - it's Doom!
Well, that's the nature of the best I guess - yes you could wait and get something better - but then that statement is always true. In theory, if you wait forever, you'll have the ultimate system! It's just a way for people who want to, to get some more performance now. People want to push the boundaries. It's just the way of things :)
I disagree about the V2 SLI - it was just the same back then. If you wanted to get the benefit of the 2 cards, you need to overclock your 300Mhz PII or whatever you had, and attach large numbers of fans to your case to cool the V2 cards.
A friend had this setup in 1998 with an Athlon CPU and it was forver breaking down at tournaments, but his rig did outperform everyone elses. Trouble was, six months later, his machine was the same speed as everyone elses, but his was the only one that needed half a fridge attached to the back to do it.
So - yeah from most peoples' perspective, you're bang on, but some people like to push the limits.
I am just now bulding my new workstation and have invested close to 1500 in a Prescott/875P/Dual channel RAM system in a new ally case with expensive PSU and GF6800 Ultra which is probably more spec than I really need but I'll draw the line at sticking another 400 GPU in it...
Ah - I see. Point taken
PC games are lagging behind consoles?? What causes you to think this?!
:)
:) Or the video card will become a "console on a card" with it's own 1Gb ram that loads the entire game texture set onto the card at the start to save shovelling it down the PCI/AGP bus.
Console games are simple fun 5 minuters for playing on the sofa with your mates. They have neither the depth, or the eye candy of modern "PC" games. Sure they have lots of antialising, and are fairly smooth - but hell: they'd better be at TV resolution! If you saw that on your Pc's monitor you'd ask for your money back
Using multiple cards is a way of getting a "sneak preview" if you like at what the mainstream tech will do for you in a few months - like over clocking. Sure in 6 months time every PC/vid card will be just as quick, and yours will be the only one that requires a fridge strapped to it and it's own power plant - but hey - that's how stuff gets improved..
To get deep involving gameplay with good control, a decent multiplayer arrangement and a vast playing world you can't beat the PC gaming approach. That's why with every generation, consoles look more like PCs with all the boring unnecessary bits stripped out. Likewise, console hardware has always been built to shift bits for smooth play. PC's are heading that way with new breeds of video cards, better buses/memory architecture , CPU cache etc. This is largely caused by people starting to use their home machines for video realted applications (from editing home movies to ripping off commercial flicks, and integrating with the TV/stereo media centre style). Pretty soon they'll meet in the middle
They start getting all kinds of false positives. My ISP started injecting re-directs into http documents as they "thought" I had a worm. It turned out to be nothing more harmful than stray CIFs messages coming from a Samba server on my network. Even worse, even with the plug pulled out of the ADSL sockets, it was still managing to re-direct browser sessions from all boxes when viewing internal web servers! The only solution was to restart every web server on my network (and every browser window).
All very clever, but a bit drastic. After all, we'd all be very secure from worms if we just chopped the plugs off the power leads, but somehow I think the solution lacks soemthing.
Indeed - and did Mr Cooper pay attention when he watched FOTR? There was the small matter of the Balrog, who dragged "the wizard" down "the hole". He didn't just fall. The two Maiar spirits then fought for about 10 days before Olorin (who was variously known as Gandalf, Mithrandir, The Grey Pilgrim etc by the peoples of Middle Earth) finally slew the un-named Balrog (known only as "Durin's Bane").
Hmm I don;t think there are those humans around. Cartinaly not in the quantities that would be required to manually guide the 1200 flights a day. We get dependent on the systems. We put the systems in because the load increases beyond the economic viability of an army of ATC guys, not to mention the communication overhead and possibility of error or mis communication. So we build a computer system to deal with it instead. That in turn allows us to up the load by an order of magnitude again. 30 years later, take the system away, and there's nothing.
In scenarios like this, where load has increased whilst the computers systems were in place, we *are* reliant on them.
Think of banks - time was when you had to almost plead on your knees to get a banck account, and they charged you for running it. This was becasue every account was written down manually in a book, and any calculations were performed by hoards of clerks. Then - computers. Now your new account is just one more record in a table somewhere, so the banks give out accounts to anyone who wants one, and do it for free. If for some reason your bank's computer system goes AWOL, there is no way they can process a month's interest calculations on the millions of balances and transactions - not to mention actually applying the transations that would now come in on bits of paper.
I do agree that in a lot of cases, there remains a perfectly useable manual method, but where the computer system has enabled geometric increases in capacity over the manual system (which has been taken up) then, if you'll excuse the pun, it won't fly.
You're right about the Y2k thing - I worked on a contract for a railway maintenance company in 1999 and the Y2K cordinator guy was tearing his hair out at the thousands of questions he got monthly such as "so, these nails, are they Y2K compliant?" He actually had solid steel track components called "chairs" that the rails sit on that had Y2K compliance stickers on them from the manufacturer. Presumably, they got fed up explaining it too, and decided it was easier to just stick the stickers on everything they made...
Hmm but surely the Java setup is also running the compilation process at run time (from bytecode to machine code)? Surely that takes up more cycles than it saves by the on-the-spot optimisations?
Or does the run time environment "cache" the compiled machine code and so run quicker the 2nd time around?
I think you're a bit late to start the moral debate over who's the greater evil: the developer of a potential weapon, or the users of the devices. This debate has been going on for some time.
:P)
I think it would be pretty damm difficult anyway, to kill someone directly with a "MAV" (although you could, with a bit of semantic jiggery-pokey define a lump of lead as a "micro flying vehicle"
There are far more destructive inventions up for the gold medal in this debate: nuclear weapons, the gun, TNT (old Alfred was clearly so upset when someone used *his* neat little invention for killing other people, he sponsored a prize for peace), etc etc.
We have had technology to snoop on each other from orbit for years now - our streets are lined with CCTV (well they are in the average UK city)so why get so fired up about a small aeroplane with a camera in it? Reconnaisance was after all, the first real military use for full size 'planes.
Do you really think "nothing" somes up the problem with American society Today? Surely there's always room for improvement!
Quake(world) was: Brown
Quake II was: Fast moving, slow firing
Quake III is: Slower moving, faster firing
There is a world of difference in the "feel" of the movement in all 3 games, but as with so many things, it depends on how close up you get. Seen from a distance - yep - they're all pretty much the same idea, but then that's no bad thing either - large numbers of Quake fans including me *do* just want the same gameplay with up to date graphics.
I'm not too fussed on the storyline thing, although I did like the atmosphere Quake II had in the single player game, which was largely down to the background sound track. For me, its yet to be bettered.
Qukae II is also top of my list for multiplayer gameplay. I like the speed at which you can move. I feel like I'm trudging about with my pants round my ankles in Quake3, although it's still a hugely playable game (to get some perspective, Half Life = Lead underpants, and shoe laces tied together ). Quake 3's weapon switch speed and faster firing rates compensate though.
I think you've just about summed it up :)
This kind of "huh?" type game conversion is not new: pinball machines anyone? The pinball formula seemed to be to take any old pinball machine and affix pictures from the subject film/game etc. I mean come on - "Lord Of the Rings: the pinball machine" ?!?
I'm sure Doom the board game is Ludo or something with backgrounds from "The Shores of Hell"
HP is often on a roll. With bacon.
One oreason (or another) was no doubt this: Its a Console Game.
Consoles are small, in terms of video resolution, ram and mass storage. They are big in terms of bit shifting bandwidth, which is what makes 100 consoles seem smoother than a 1000 PC playing the same game sometimes (that and the really low TV quality resolution). PCI archtecture is getting there recently though with 8x AGP and faster multiported DRAM.
I only played the PC demo of Halo, and this was enough to convince me not to buy it. I did quite like the aesthetic of the ringworld/Aliens dropship/Culture environment but the maps were just too small.
I played the single player thing for a couple of hours but I quickly get bored of the whole "puzzle" thing with the buttons and "keys" (or whatever they're called in the game you're playing).
I played some multiplayer - but come on, in this day and age of 3wave CS, RTCW ET, Q3TA, UT and UnrealXMP it's not really acceptable to be able to be able to wave at the enemy in their base, from *your* base! Admittedly, the demo only came with Blood Gulch for multiplayer but it's tiny! What the vehicles were for, I can only ponder on, as it was only a 30 second walk to the other base...
I thought nice look and feel, poor lighting in places, but with some class effects. Ultimately - it felt like a console game. If I wanted a console game, I'd have bought a 100 console instead of spending twice that much on my graphics card....
..Alien 4 was so badly regarded - I quite like it. Let's put this into perspective - watch Alien 3.
As for a good Firefly movie script - "The Traveller Adventure" By Miller, Wiseman, Keith et al. It's about a bunch of mis-fits on a small freighter taking on cargoes, passengers and getting involved in heists, rescues and general adventures. Oh! wait...
..these people really have no sense of the ridiculous. Makes you wonder about their other business decisions, or even how they percieve the world in general (the generally accepted colour of a clear, daytime sky is blue right?). Are these people allowed to vote?
Spineless sheep.
This argument is flawed - you just can't compare books and films in that way. Sure they both tell a story, but the constraints, and media are just too different. I've read some sci-fi, well quite a lot to be honest and whilst I'd agree that the plot of Star Wars isn't amazingly twisted and probably doesn't work too well as a 1000 page book - it was perfect for it's medium: film.
:-/ )
Movies should evoke emotions and with the good old good vs evil, the legacy, the gimmick (the force)and the mentor/apprentice thing going on, it evoked the right emotions at the right points in the film. (Mind you I always felt Obi Wan could have put up a bit of a fight, even if he was getting on a bit
It's a film, not a book. I'm not saying books don't translate to the film - LOTR managed it really well, but the keyword there is "translate". Peter Jackson couldn't just film every little bit and include every bit of dialogue and have the audience still awake at the end of his 50 hour flick - he and the other script writers had to tranbslate it for the screen. The same would be tru of all Sci-Fi lit with involved plots. Imagine a film of Heinlein's "Number of The beast" - I couldn't remember what the hell that was about 2 weeks after I read it, but it made sense while I was reading it.
StarWars was a nice sized plot with a bit of intrigue and some great characters. It didn't have a big budget, and Lucas chnaged the story several times to fit with the cash he had. Up until then space had been "clean" with no mving parts. StarWars showed vehicles that looked like they actually had engines and nechanical parts in them - they looked like they would work on an engineering level. And there was dirt, for the first time in a SciFi flick, ships had dirt from being used - the habitats looked lived in. My own 2 penneth on the prequels is that they lack everyday charcters - everybodies a queen or a senator or a Jedi Kight, so they all talk in a formal way which makes the dialogue seem wooden. Where are the Han Solo type characters? It's like looking at life through the pages of a history book - tales of Kings and Queens always seem regal in the books, but between the glorious and famous events recorded in the chronicles of history, I bet there was a lot of nose picking, scratching of arses and general mundane nothingness. We don't see much "life" going on in the new SW movies. In the original movies, at least there were some farmers, the odd used ship dealer (implied) and some general working class dudes you could identify with. Ep V had possibly the best script, dialogue and character development of them all - largly due to the presence of Solo and the fliting with old bun chops.
I still like the new movies though, as long as I stick my "this is not really a kids movie - you are not sad for watching this age 34" filter on. I am looking forward to EPIII - I'll watch it for what it is - and then watch the original trlogy on DVD (hopefully)!
I just had an image flash before my eyes of a 3wave Capture strike game where the red team burts into the blue base to find the blue players standing or sitting around the flag holding survey forms and sucking a pen.... "sarge - can I put this flag down?" "has anyone got anything to lean on?" "oh bugger the flags gone.."
Can't fault you logic Herulach - so perhaps a bit more explanation is in order - "rally bred" doesn't mean an actual rally car - but they tend to come with more pliant chassis and 4 wheel drive, and will usually run rings around many "supercars" down a real road. Real roads are more like a rally stage than race track (well the tarmac round here is pretty bumpy in places anyway..). A normal road car is built for ride comfort - and are very floppy around the corners which causes the car's mass to shift about. That said - you are right - many "normal" road cars will outrun a "supercar" on a real B road providing it's got enough poke under the bonnet.
As for car choices - well it's all subjective really. I've never driven a Ford GT - it might be a load of pants for all I know, but from what I've read its a decent steer - and it does look fantastic. Wouldn't turn down any of your choices either mind, although I think you'd struggle to find an XJ220 for 100K!
erm.. I'm pretty sure the F1 cars are still made in the UK - along with most of the others. I remember almost literally tripping over the wind tunnel test model in the low speed wind tunnel at BAE, Bristol.
:)) Looks and go thats what I need :) (in the week I drive a German car - I'm not totally mad :P)
I don't think financial ownership matters that much in Ferrari's case to be honest - and hey - it's not like Fiat is not Italian too. However - Mr Banana just about summed it up - I agree with every word - Ferrari trade on their name these days - the cars are flimsy, not that well made and some are just too damm ugly man! They handle pretty well on nice smooth roads, but for real world roads - get a rally bred 4 wheel drive machine! On the cost thing though - they are worth what people are prepared to pay, and as long as there are badge snobs out there to be parted from their cash, Ferrari will keep the "exclusivity" up with a large price tag.
If I had $100K to spend on a car - I'd be in the Ford GT queue - it's one beautiful looking car. If I wasn't worried about relaibility and had $60K+, there's plenty of automative art down at the TVR toyshop.
Actually - as it happens, I don't give a stuff about reliability when it comes to performance cars, which is why I keep a Mazda RX-7 R1 in the garage to play with at weekends
First off - there's nothing wrong with dial up for online FPS play as long as you have a decent modem. I played Quake 2 in the Uk league for years on a 56K SupraExpress. Mileage varies with the game though - Half Life was always pants on a modem - but then it ran like a 3 legged donkey at the best of times. Broadband is, of course better though.
Now then - what to play as a "casual" n00b? Don't play Quake. What can I say? Even Quake3 is way too fast to get any instant success as a player. Quake2 is even faster. (Before you all reply about the weapons, I mean the movement rate, not the firing and weapon swapping rate).
For a more sedate level of play try any game based on the Half Speed engine - like Counterstrike, or Team Fortress Classic - a game you can play whilst eating your dinner and still do well.
Similarly, RTCW (and the just as good - and free Enemy Territory) is quite a leisurely paced game with breaks (when you die) and it enforces teamplay. (teamplay in 4v4 Q2 for example requires active thought on the part of the team and it's leader - whereas in RTCW, CS and most team fortress class-type games, the whole map strategy is laid out with helpful neon pointers saying "this way to ye olde strategic objective").
Another game I found quite relaxing is Jedi Knight II CTF - just don't waste time trying to foght people with those light up sticks - there ain't no substitute for a good blast^H^H^H^H^H rocket launcher at your side kid.
UT/UT2003/U2XMP are not exactly lightning paced games either (you shuffle along like your pants are round your ankles) but boy are the weapons fiddly. You get all manner of sludge guns, explosive ball thingies and other wierdo stuff (although XMP is not so bad on that front and has vehicles too).
I'm afraid I don't agree about the level of cheating. I know cheating goes on, but I rarely see any and I play most FPS games online. Sometimes, a high level of skill may seem like cheating. The Quake2 source code was released a while back so potentially, there are many hacked clients knocking about for Q2, so if you are feeling braver than your post would suggest, make sure you install something like "NoCheat" or "Biteme!" and play on a server that actively enforces using these client validators. The All Seeing Eye (ASE) is perhaps the best way of locating servers - http://www.udpsoft/eye
I think if I had to pick one for a new player - it would be RTCW ET - free, runs punkbuster and is fairly easy to get some initial encouragement with.
When you're ready for something quicker - try 3wave Capturestrike for Q3 - full on smack! smack! smack! fzsst! bang! whack! gameplay.
Oh yeah, and just one other tip - in the words of Obi Wan Kenobi " Use the MOUSE Luke!"
Pob lwc!
You guys sent a PROBE to Mars? What with all the expense and effort, why didn't you send them a decent car?!?
Geez - was it at least the V6 "GT" version?
Dude - please don't come anywhere near my car - :)
Coincidence aint that energetic!