SSL is not enabled by default these days as it adds quite a bit of CPU overhead on busy sites (or so I heard).
Plus, it's close to worthless without some kind of digitally signed certificate proving that your encrypted connection is talking to the website you want to be talking to...
Otherwise, that dodgy last layer of the Tor cake closest to the website could be talking SSL to your browser, and SSL to the website - but acting as a man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping on everything being said. Imaginatively, this is called a man-in-the-middle attack.
Episode 2 brings a lot of new tech to the series and has been in development for quite some time. It is a new title. It is made by some of the most talented people in the industry. It will, most likely, be very good.
I've played it right the way through, and it's gameplay-wise much-much-longer than Episode One, and content-wise much-much-more of a new game. Fractionally, if Episode One was Half-Life 2.1, Episode Two would be Half-Life 2.5 or something like that. Maybe Episode Three will take it all the way up to Half-Life 3.0?
Team Fortress 2 is extremely exciting to people who like fps online or who enjoyed the original (I didn't like the original much, but that's a different story). You clearly know absolutely nothing about it.
TF2 shares rough player class types, some gameplay concepts and some map layouts with, say, TFC - but otherwise it's a whole new product. It's a very different game!
And as for 'Portal is just a new set of skins on half-life with a bit of storyline' - now we know you really are just making this up to annoy people.
I'd say it was the best puzzle-oriented FPS I've ever played, but come to think of it, I can't actually think of too many puzzle-oriented FPSes. And the 'S' is a bit dubious anyway, as I can't remember much shooting...
Valve has never said they wouldn't offer the Black Box on Steam. If it bothers you that much, why not wait and see if they do release it? Maybe they are only allowing pre-orders on one box set at a time.
When I was at Valve in June, I asked about the dropping of the Black Box at retail. Apparently the standalone Episode One wasn't welcomed by retailers since, despite having high-level production values, it was effectively at a budget price - and thus was treated accordingly.
The great-big-bumper-Orange-Box is basically a compilation to bring it into full-price game territory, so retailers should be a bit more generous with regard to shelf-space, promotional material and so on.
I got the impression that the Black Box's non-appearance at retail is partly because of that, and also perhaps so that Valve can effectively undercut retail prices on Steam - I'm not sure how the games might be split up, or even if they will be - but I imagine it could be a fair bit cheaper buying just a few sections of the Orange Box that way. Plus, outside of Valve, I've read stories of retailers essentially forcing Steam prices to be as high as they are - essentially saying that if Valve sells it more cheaply online, the stores won't stock the boxed games at all...
I'd wait a week or two before writing off the Black Box (or equivalents) entirely, anyway. But perhaps this is an attempt at viral marketing of the Half-Life 2 series? Give gamers a load of unused product keys, and let 'em give em to friends who haven't played them yet...
Unfortunately, it's possible to tell it's still an onion by the time it reaches your house. And that's what this article is referring to. If you wrapped an apple in an onion (used secure public key encryption) then you have an additional layer of security.
You know, not everybody likes onions. Cake! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers!
...
You know what else everybody likes? Parfaits. Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "Hell no, I don't like no parfait"? Parfaits are delicious.
(Argh, crap - tried moderating this 'Interesting' and managed 'Offtopic' instead. Sorry - undoing all my moderation for this article. Please ignore this message!)
"Apparently they're so allergic to this strange and terrifying console that they've shoved the port onto some EA team." Wow, or perhaps its because development on the 360 is similar to the PC? And wow, Gabe said he doesn't like the console because its completely different to how they develop games for the PC.
Some people like that, I don't. I hate it when I play a game only to realize that everything that happens in the game revolves around me. I guess it makes the story interesting for the player, but it doesn't make it believable, because that's not how real life looks.
One of my favourite aspects of escapism in computer gaming is the exploration of whole new worlds - for instance, I loved Half-Life 2 not for the fact I was Gordon Freeman, but for the ability to (albeit briefly) visit this subdued, subtly described post-alien-invasion version of Eastern Europe.
Okay, so I might have been playing the hero, but that's not what interested me. I like to visit plausible worlds, not save them. Seeing an absence of hands on the main clocks in the railway station in City 17, or the carefully, uniformly cut cords on the receivers on the public payphones - those interest me.
Likewise, game box art really disappoints me. It has to be the gun-toting hero surrounded by explosions or other action, when I'd be far more interested with an abstract architectural shot. The European box art for Ico was meant to be rubbish, but I love it. The North American art? Awful!
My own Half-Life 2 mod MINERVA has, disconcertingly, been lauded for its storytelling and writing - but I've had more fun creating a semi-plausible world which is slowly infiltrated by the player. The world reacts to that presence, but it's not a sterile, empty place beforehand - I've had fun telling stories in an entirely non-verbal form too.
As for the verbal stuff? I can't stand Star Trek, and I've been more inspired by Iain M. Banks and friends than anything else. I have my own unreliable narrator - an anti-heroine of the highest proportions. But again, the world doesn't revolve around her - she is a reaction against it, and is attempting to undermine it. If she fails, it continues on without her. If she succeeds? Pretty much the same...
Why would anyone want to play a PS3 game via the use of a PSP as a remote as opposed to just playing it on the PS3?
Well, presumably in your Sony®-branded home, you'll have your Playstation® 3 connected up to your expensive and enormous Sony® BRAVIA® high-definition television. But what happens if some other member of your household wants to watch the television? Do you go without playing your wonderful games? No! Just get out your Sony® PSP® and continue from where you left off.
Potentially while sat on the bog, squeezing out a turd(TM).
(Personally, I think it could be pretty cool if this wireless-to-PSP thing is done to completion - turning the PS3 into some sort of Digital Entertainment Hub thingy for the home. Watch or play via television or PSP - but I know the reality will have hardly anything working, and it'll be more an interesting afterthought and gimmick than anything useful...)
I installed over steam, did a search for the SecuROM stuff, and came up negative.
Out of interest, which version of Bioshock do you have?
I bought the EU edition over Steam - which has left registry keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/SecuROM. I haven't downloaded the demo or anything. I'm not really bothered, but it's there nevertheless.
If anyone actually comes up with definite reason as to why SecuROM is particularly unpleasant, I may get concerned - but for now I'd rather just have fun playing the game!
(Note that I am also the same guy who, much to his friends' disbelief, left my brother to die in my apartment in Deus Ex, so maybe I have some morality issues.;)
I left that brother to die as well - for some time afterwards, I thought that it was a fight which was impossible to win. I mean, all the dialogue later in the game supported that fact, right?
When I discovered I could have saved him, I felt surprisingly guilty about it all.
For the record, I saved every last Little Sister in Bioshock and got the cute-and-fluffy ending. Is that redemption yet?
That's cool to hear. Big Daddies "Rosie" is a PIA to eliminate. Having them protect you would be wild.
Possibly my favourite plasmid - after your brave Mr. Bubbles has won all your battles for you, and is decidedly the worse for wear, leave him be for a few minutes. Despite his severe injuries and the steam gushing from the bullet-holes riddling his damaged frame, he'll valiantly summon another Little Sister to work on the corpses left from the fighting...... At which point you kill him.
The whole OMG ROOTKIT thing was nothing more than a publicity stuff. Yes its DRM, and yes it sucks, but its not a rootkit. And you don't get it if you buy it off of Steam either.
You do get the same SecuROM installed with the Steam version of Bioshock - I know this because I had a look for the 'OMG ROOTKIT!!!1' registry keys, and they were present. Apparently Steam's usual copy-protection stuff wasn't good enough.
But yes, Slashdot does seem to be pretty bad for spreading disinformation. For instance, the short-lived GPL violations with DOSBOX and the older Id games on Steam - fixed before the article was posted. And then, this SecuROM thing being branded by all and sundry as a 'rootkit'. Argh...
I do hope it gets removed sooner or later - but it does seem to have the publishers' desired effect of stifling piracy. Unfortunately, it's also rather effective at pissing off the more vocal gamers on the interwebnet. Oops.
Aren't going to happen until artists in the medium, 'good' artists rather, decide to start working for free the same way coders do. Some artists will work for publicity alone, bu they seem to be by far in the minority.
Erm... Have you seen the world of game mods? Vast numbers of artists (and programmers), ranging from mediocre to utterly fantastic, working for free - often for fun, often for publicity (making a successful mod is a great way of 'breaking into' the games industry), almost all outside the world of open source games.
I made a simple, single-player mod for Half-Life 2 - called MINERVA, it's been downloaded something like 400,000 times or something ridiculous like that. I've paid a bit of attention to first-person open source games, but beyond a couple of interesting exceptions like Sauerbraten, I haven't seen anything that makes me think "ooh, I'd really like to make a map for that." (Sauerbraten's of interest because it's a fundamentally different way of building maps, and could be a fun artistic challenge - the game is the editor, but admittedly the actual gameplay is rather generic.)
Maybe on a technical level, things work fine with Linux - but far too much open source stuff seems to rely on building a very basic, generic framework and simply assuming that other people will come and turn it into a full game. Sorry, but the technical approach isn't necessarily going to work - think of a brilliant gameplay idea, and then work on the technical aspects necessary to make that playable. And please, please stop cloning existing games - if you're programming a game from scratch, do something new - something which will attract free artists and gameplay implementers like myself!
That whatever is developed publically or privately in the US they have to develop a competitor? What about Galileo - the EU's competition to GPS? Yeah that's crashed and burned and it barely got off the ground. Andy why again?
Well, you probably haven't heard of most of the smaller, less glamorous projects funded by the European Commission. Some excerpts from descriptions of websites I've built for a couple of 'em, all in a particular subsection of industry:
"Innovative Integrated Energy Efficiency Solutions for Railway Rolling Stock, Rail Infrastructure and Train Operation."
"... will concentrate on fixed-formation passenger trains and universal locomotives capable of 200 km/h or more."
"... aims to integrate a fragmented research landscape, promote the railways' contribution to sustainable development and improve the competitiveness and economic stability of the European rail sector."
"Providing grounds for the establishment of 15,000 km of new and existing [railway] lines predominantly dedicated to freight."
"Develop modelling tools to improve the understanding of rail vehicles and passenger dynamics, particularly with respect to crash behaviour."
As you can see, there's probably about fifty million plus Euros of Commission money right there, quite obviously going into producing blatant knock-offs of American technological innovations.
Haven't touched their stuff since I grew up (I mean, became a boring old fart), but does their paint still suck like it used to?
No idea, but you've obviously never seen the spectacularly, hideously useless results obtained through attempting to paint a Citadel miniature using enamel paints intended for Airfix model planes.
Do you know if TF2 is going to be moddable or not? I'd love to bring CustomTF to it.
It's pretty much certain that you'll be able to make custom maps for it, and I imagine it will be like any other Source game in allowing Source mods to refer to its DLLs and content to build new things. (In a similar manner, the first two MINERVA maps were a mod of Half-Life 2, while the third is a mod of Episode One. It's simply a matter of changing the AppID in the gameinfo,txt...)
New code could be problematic, in that I would be surprised if Valve released source code for the TF2 game DLLs - so you'd either have to reimplement all that from scratch, or make do with the relatively limited server plugin system.
But I'd recommend waiting for TF2 to be released before making any plans - it's definitely old-fashioned Team Fortress, but friendly, unashamedly retro and with some seriously nifty graphics and sounds enhancing the whole experience. As for the seemingly horrendous cuts and gameplay changes - grenades might be gone for everyone but the demo-man, but I really didn't miss them, as seemingly much-more-powerful melee attacks are most definitely in. I think I got my skull caved in by a scout on more than one occasion...
Pyros are genuinely effective now (and possibly my favourite class), medics have been redesigned almost from scratch (and are now insanely useful in assisting assaults on the opposing team's flag^Wintelligence), while many other new features now make much more sense than the original implementations.
It's great fun, but I'm sure some hardened TF players will absolutely loathe it at first - what I'm trying to say is keep an open mind when playing it. It's still defiantly Team Fortress, and the spirit is still intact from the early versions of TF for the original Quake.
Neither - a modder initially invited over for a developers' conference and who booked all his travel straight away, only for the conference to be postponed until next year or so. Cancelling all the tickets seemed silly, so I asked nicely and now I'm a one-man mod conference of my very own...
Thus, I've spent the last couple of days playing through Valve's current catalogue of upcoming games. Such hard work.;-)
While I didn't hear anyone explicitly say that bunny-hopping (the engine-disrupting, super-speed thing) had been removed, I definitely didn't see anyone use it. Likewise, no demo-man grenade-jumping, and while I saw a bit of soldier rocket-jumping, it wasn't the fly-across-the-entire-map thing of yesteryear.
Think I'd better go and show 'em this MINERVA thing I've been working on - it's a bit of a walk from the hotel, and it's still raining, despite my attempt to sit it out...
Bunny hopping is not an exploit. Learn to hit someone.
If it's not an exploit, why did it (and all the grenade-jumping) get removed?
I really like the pace of TF2 - it's not hugely fast, and I got the impression that winning is more through acting as a team, out-thinking your opponents, and making worthwhile moves, not just fast ones.
In the middle of a big fire-fight it's still fast-paced and pretty vicious combat - there just aren't players skipping past all that, bunny-hopping along at some ridiculous multiples of the speed of light...
ESRB causes delay due to accidental partial nudity
on
Halo, Nothing But Halo
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Don't forget the partial recall, relabelling and delay of the massively underwhelming Halo 2 for Windows Vista - all caused by an error message with a Bungie developer's hairy arse mooning away at the unsuspecting user.
My new stainless steel microwave has a very nice, modern looking, lcd display, except that if you place it onto a counter you cannot read the display because of viewing angle problems; I mean not at all, until you back away several feet, stoop down, or stand on your toes. You then struggle to once again to touch the appropriate keys to start it.
I feel quite relieved with my cooker.
It does have a timer, but it's clockwork. Turn it to however many minutes you need, tick-tick-tick-bing it counts down.
Electric functions: an oven-light, and an electric grill. Both have two settings: on, and off.
Four gas burners, a gas oven. Each has an analogue controller knob, going from off to full power. To light a burner, stick a lit match in the direction of one of the nozzles. For the oven, stick lit match in appropriate orifice.
It's fantastic. I don't think I could cope with a microwave - they sound far too complicated...
3. Convoluted shower controls. I swear, every time I take a shower in a hotel, I have to spend several minutes figuring out how the damn controls work. How about faucet manufacturers stop trying to be cute and just give me one knob for cold, one knob for hot, and a control to switch from bath to shower. I can take it from there.
I encountered a shower in the USA which had a single scale - which controlled both temperature and water-flow.
No, it wasn't some fancy two-axis effort - it was a single handle, which turned around a single axis. I think there was some complex mechanical look-up function inside, to turn the one-variable input into a two-variable output. It confused the hell out of me. Plus the bog-roll holder was carefully hidden under the section with the sink - so for the first day or two I was using the complimentary tissues to wipe my smelly arse.
Still, not as bad as a hotel shower in Italy - where I pressed an unlabelled button, and it proceeded to blast me with icy-cold water from all sides. Instant wake-up.
If you came across a RISC OS machine, you'd die. There are _only_ context menus, and the mouse has three buttons!
Oh, it's something to do with Fitt's Law, or whatever it's called. Minimising fiddly mouse-movements.
Windows: Move mouse up to menu line, and no further, then left or right to the appropriate menu. Click. Mac: Move mouse up as far as it goes, no accuracy required, then left or right to the appropriate menu. Click. RISC OS: *Click!*
I felt right at home with The GIMP and its originally context-only menus, accessed with the right mouse button. Everyone else? Downright abusive. Unfair!
I'm curious, what are your options for reinstalls? Can you burn this for the future? Do you have to redownload it if you are reinstalling?
You can download your games as many times as you like, on to as many machines as you like. Technically, you can only have a Steam account active on a single machine at a time, but you could probably fudge your way round it with use of the offline mode which is invoked if no network connection is present.
You can also manually copy game data files between machines - if you've forgotten anything, it'll get redownloaded when Steam reconnects and does a file check on game startup. There's also a function built-in for neatly archiving files into CD or DVD-sized chunks, and restoring them accordingly.
Yes, ideally you do have to connect to Valve's servers every time Steam starts up (where it'll download any game updates unless told otherwise) - so if Valve and/or Steam were to mysteriously disappear, then you'd be stuck either with offline mode or with none of your games working. Valve persons have indicated that in such an eventuality a final, check-disabling update would be a nice thing to do, barring any particularly severe catastrophes.
It's not brilliant, and the need-to-authenticate-online thing has drawn a lot of criticism, but it's pretty cool once you get the hang of it. Plus the catalogue of third-party games keeps on increasing - there's a nice little line in critically-acclaimed, market-ignored titles like Psychonauts available. I'd recommend it for that alone.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, it's close to worthless without some kind of digitally signed certificate proving that your encrypted connection is talking to the website you want to be talking to...
Otherwise, that dodgy last layer of the Tor cake closest to the website could be talking SSL to your browser, and SSL to the website - but acting as a man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping on everything being said. Imaginatively, this is called a man-in-the-middle attack.
I've played it right the way through, and it's gameplay-wise much-much-longer than Episode One, and content-wise much-much-more of a new game. Fractionally, if Episode One was Half-Life 2.1, Episode Two would be Half-Life 2.5 or something like that. Maybe Episode Three will take it all the way up to Half-Life 3.0?
TF2 shares rough player class types, some gameplay concepts and some map layouts with, say, TFC - but otherwise it's a whole new product. It's a very different game!
I'd say it was the best puzzle-oriented FPS I've ever played, but come to think of it, I can't actually think of too many puzzle-oriented FPSes. And the 'S' is a bit dubious anyway, as I can't remember much shooting...
But I do remember cake, yes.
When I was at Valve in June, I asked about the dropping of the Black Box at retail. Apparently the standalone Episode One wasn't welcomed by retailers since, despite having high-level production values, it was effectively at a budget price - and thus was treated accordingly.
The great-big-bumper-Orange-Box is basically a compilation to bring it into full-price game territory, so retailers should be a bit more generous with regard to shelf-space, promotional material and so on.
I got the impression that the Black Box's non-appearance at retail is partly because of that, and also perhaps so that Valve can effectively undercut retail prices on Steam - I'm not sure how the games might be split up, or even if they will be - but I imagine it could be a fair bit cheaper buying just a few sections of the Orange Box that way. Plus, outside of Valve, I've read stories of retailers essentially forcing Steam prices to be as high as they are - essentially saying that if Valve sells it more cheaply online, the stores won't stock the boxed games at all...
I'd wait a week or two before writing off the Black Box (or equivalents) entirely, anyway. But perhaps this is an attempt at viral marketing of the Half-Life 2 series? Give gamers a load of unused product keys, and let 'em give em to friends who haven't played them yet...
You know, not everybody likes onions. Cake! Everybody loves cakes! Cakes have layers!
You know what else everybody likes? Parfaits. Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "Hell no, I don't like no parfait"? Parfaits are delicious.
(Argh, crap - tried moderating this 'Interesting' and managed 'Offtopic' instead. Sorry - undoing all my moderation for this article. Please ignore this message!)
Also, it's not as if Gabe has never made comments rather scathing of Microsoft products in the past...
One of my favourite aspects of escapism in computer gaming is the exploration of whole new worlds - for instance, I loved Half-Life 2 not for the fact I was Gordon Freeman, but for the ability to (albeit briefly) visit this subdued, subtly described post-alien-invasion version of Eastern Europe.
Okay, so I might have been playing the hero, but that's not what interested me. I like to visit plausible worlds, not save them. Seeing an absence of hands on the main clocks in the railway station in City 17, or the carefully, uniformly cut cords on the receivers on the public payphones - those interest me.
Likewise, game box art really disappoints me. It has to be the gun-toting hero surrounded by explosions or other action, when I'd be far more interested with an abstract architectural shot. The European box art for Ico was meant to be rubbish, but I love it. The North American art? Awful!
My own Half-Life 2 mod MINERVA has, disconcertingly, been lauded for its storytelling and writing - but I've had more fun creating a semi-plausible world which is slowly infiltrated by the player. The world reacts to that presence, but it's not a sterile, empty place beforehand - I've had fun telling stories in an entirely non-verbal form too.
As for the verbal stuff? I can't stand Star Trek, and I've been more inspired by Iain M. Banks and friends than anything else. I have my own unreliable narrator - an anti-heroine of the highest proportions. But again, the world doesn't revolve around her - she is a reaction against it, and is attempting to undermine it. If she fails, it continues on without her. If she succeeds? Pretty much the same...
Well, presumably in your Sony®-branded home, you'll have your Playstation® 3 connected up to your expensive and enormous Sony® BRAVIA® high-definition television. But what happens if some other member of your household wants to watch the television? Do you go without playing your wonderful games? No! Just get out your Sony® PSP® and continue from where you left off.
Potentially while sat on the bog, squeezing out a turd(TM).
(Personally, I think it could be pretty cool if this wireless-to-PSP thing is done to completion - turning the PS3 into some sort of Digital Entertainment Hub thingy for the home. Watch or play via television or PSP - but I know the reality will have hardly anything working, and it'll be more an interesting afterthought and gimmick than anything useful...)
There are another two, pre-Escapist reviews on Youtube. Which are great also.
Out of interest, which version of Bioshock do you have?
I bought the EU edition over Steam - which has left registry keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/SecuROM. I haven't downloaded the demo or anything. I'm not really bothered, but it's there nevertheless.
If anyone actually comes up with definite reason as to why SecuROM is particularly unpleasant, I may get concerned - but for now I'd rather just have fun playing the game!
I left that brother to die as well - for some time afterwards, I thought that it was a fight which was impossible to win. I mean, all the dialogue later in the game supported that fact, right?
When I discovered I could have saved him, I felt surprisingly guilty about it all.
For the record, I saved every last Little Sister in Bioshock and got the cute-and-fluffy ending. Is that redemption yet?
Possibly my favourite plasmid - after your brave Mr. Bubbles has won all your battles for you, and is decidedly the worse for wear, leave him be for a few minutes. Despite his severe injuries and the steam gushing from the bullet-holes riddling his damaged frame, he'll valiantly summon another Little Sister to work on the corpses left from the fighting...
Mwuhahahaha!
You do get the same SecuROM installed with the Steam version of Bioshock - I know this because I had a look for the 'OMG ROOTKIT!!!1' registry keys, and they were present. Apparently Steam's usual copy-protection stuff wasn't good enough.
But yes, Slashdot does seem to be pretty bad for spreading disinformation. For instance, the short-lived GPL violations with DOSBOX and the older Id games on Steam - fixed before the article was posted. And then, this SecuROM thing being branded by all and sundry as a 'rootkit'. Argh...
I do hope it gets removed sooner or later - but it does seem to have the publishers' desired effect of stifling piracy. Unfortunately, it's also rather effective at pissing off the more vocal gamers on the interwebnet. Oops.
Erm... Have you seen the world of game mods? Vast numbers of artists (and programmers), ranging from mediocre to utterly fantastic, working for free - often for fun, often for publicity (making a successful mod is a great way of 'breaking into' the games industry), almost all outside the world of open source games.
I made a simple, single-player mod for Half-Life 2 - called MINERVA, it's been downloaded something like 400,000 times or something ridiculous like that. I've paid a bit of attention to first-person open source games, but beyond a couple of interesting exceptions like Sauerbraten, I haven't seen anything that makes me think "ooh, I'd really like to make a map for that." (Sauerbraten's of interest because it's a fundamentally different way of building maps, and could be a fun artistic challenge - the game is the editor, but admittedly the actual gameplay is rather generic.)
Maybe on a technical level, things work fine with Linux - but far too much open source stuff seems to rely on building a very basic, generic framework and simply assuming that other people will come and turn it into a full game. Sorry, but the technical approach isn't necessarily going to work - think of a brilliant gameplay idea, and then work on the technical aspects necessary to make that playable. And please, please stop cloning existing games - if you're programming a game from scratch, do something new - something which will attract free artists and gameplay implementers like myself!
Start? They've already stopped!
Well, you probably haven't heard of most of the smaller, less glamorous projects funded by the European Commission. Some excerpts from descriptions of websites I've built for a couple of 'em, all in a particular subsection of industry:
"Innovative Integrated Energy Efficiency Solutions for Railway Rolling Stock, Rail Infrastructure and Train Operation."
"... will concentrate on fixed-formation passenger trains and universal locomotives capable of 200 km/h or more."
"... aims to integrate a fragmented research landscape, promote the railways' contribution to sustainable development and improve the competitiveness and economic stability of the European rail sector."
"Providing grounds for the establishment of 15,000 km of new and existing [railway] lines predominantly dedicated to freight."
"Develop modelling tools to improve the understanding of rail vehicles and passenger dynamics, particularly with respect to crash behaviour."
As you can see, there's probably about fifty million plus Euros of Commission money right there, quite obviously going into producing blatant knock-offs of American technological innovations.
No idea, but you've obviously never seen the spectacularly, hideously useless results obtained through attempting to paint a Citadel miniature using enamel paints intended for Airfix model planes.
WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE and all that. Never again.
It's pretty much certain that you'll be able to make custom maps for it, and I imagine it will be like any other Source game in allowing Source mods to refer to its DLLs and content to build new things. (In a similar manner, the first two MINERVA maps were a mod of Half-Life 2, while the third is a mod of Episode One. It's simply a matter of changing the AppID in the gameinfo,txt...)
New code could be problematic, in that I would be surprised if Valve released source code for the TF2 game DLLs - so you'd either have to reimplement all that from scratch, or make do with the relatively limited server plugin system.
But I'd recommend waiting for TF2 to be released before making any plans - it's definitely old-fashioned Team Fortress, but friendly, unashamedly retro and with some seriously nifty graphics and sounds enhancing the whole experience. As for the seemingly horrendous cuts and gameplay changes - grenades might be gone for everyone but the demo-man, but I really didn't miss them, as seemingly much-more-powerful melee attacks are most definitely in. I think I got my skull caved in by a scout on more than one occasion...
Pyros are genuinely effective now (and possibly my favourite class), medics have been redesigned almost from scratch (and are now insanely useful in assisting assaults on the opposing team's flag^Wintelligence), while many other new features now make much more sense than the original implementations.
It's great fun, but I'm sure some hardened TF players will absolutely loathe it at first - what I'm trying to say is keep an open mind when playing it. It's still defiantly Team Fortress, and the spirit is still intact from the early versions of TF for the original Quake.
Neither - a modder initially invited over for a developers' conference and who booked all his travel straight away, only for the conference to be postponed until next year or so. Cancelling all the tickets seemed silly, so I asked nicely and now I'm a one-man mod conference of my very own...
Thus, I've spent the last couple of days playing through Valve's current catalogue of upcoming games. Such hard work.
While I didn't hear anyone explicitly say that bunny-hopping (the engine-disrupting, super-speed thing) had been removed, I definitely didn't see anyone use it. Likewise, no demo-man grenade-jumping, and while I saw a bit of soldier rocket-jumping, it wasn't the fly-across-the-entire-map thing of yesteryear.
Think I'd better go and show 'em this MINERVA thing I've been working on - it's a bit of a walk from the hotel, and it's still raining, despite my attempt to sit it out...
If it's not an exploit, why did it (and all the grenade-jumping) get removed?
I really like the pace of TF2 - it's not hugely fast, and I got the impression that winning is more through acting as a team, out-thinking your opponents, and making worthwhile moves, not just fast ones.
In the middle of a big fire-fight it's still fast-paced and pretty vicious combat - there just aren't players skipping past all that, bunny-hopping along at some ridiculous multiples of the speed of light...
Don't forget the partial recall, relabelling and delay of the massively underwhelming Halo 2 for Windows Vista - all caused by an error message with a Bungie developer's hairy arse mooning away at the unsuspecting user.
You really can't make this up.
I feel quite relieved with my cooker.
It does have a timer, but it's clockwork. Turn it to however many minutes you need, tick-tick-tick-bing it counts down.
Electric functions: an oven-light, and an electric grill. Both have two settings: on, and off.
Four gas burners, a gas oven. Each has an analogue controller knob, going from off to full power. To light a burner, stick a lit match in the direction of one of the nozzles. For the oven, stick lit match in appropriate orifice.
It's fantastic. I don't think I could cope with a microwave - they sound far too complicated...
I encountered a shower in the USA which had a single scale - which controlled both temperature and water-flow.
No, it wasn't some fancy two-axis effort - it was a single handle, which turned around a single axis. I think there was some complex mechanical look-up function inside, to turn the one-variable input into a two-variable output. It confused the hell out of me. Plus the bog-roll holder was carefully hidden under the section with the sink - so for the first day or two I was using the complimentary tissues to wipe my smelly arse.
Still, not as bad as a hotel shower in Italy - where I pressed an unlabelled button, and it proceeded to blast me with icy-cold water from all sides. Instant wake-up.
Oh, it's something to do with Fitt's Law, or whatever it's called. Minimising fiddly mouse-movements.
Windows: Move mouse up to menu line, and no further, then left or right to the appropriate menu. Click.
Mac: Move mouse up as far as it goes, no accuracy required, then left or right to the appropriate menu. Click.
RISC OS: *Click!*
I felt right at home with The GIMP and its originally context-only menus, accessed with the right mouse button. Everyone else? Downright abusive. Unfair!
You can download your games as many times as you like, on to as many machines as you like. Technically, you can only have a Steam account active on a single machine at a time, but you could probably fudge your way round it with use of the offline mode which is invoked if no network connection is present.
You can also manually copy game data files between machines - if you've forgotten anything, it'll get redownloaded when Steam reconnects and does a file check on game startup. There's also a function built-in for neatly archiving files into CD or DVD-sized chunks, and restoring them accordingly.
Yes, ideally you do have to connect to Valve's servers every time Steam starts up (where it'll download any game updates unless told otherwise) - so if Valve and/or Steam were to mysteriously disappear, then you'd be stuck either with offline mode or with none of your games working. Valve persons have indicated that in such an eventuality a final, check-disabling update would be a nice thing to do, barring any particularly severe catastrophes.
It's not brilliant, and the need-to-authenticate-online thing has drawn a lot of criticism, but it's pretty cool once you get the hang of it. Plus the catalogue of third-party games keeps on increasing - there's a nice little line in critically-acclaimed, market-ignored titles like Psychonauts available. I'd recommend it for that alone.