216.216.216.216 would be a more sensible hellish IP address - 6*6*6 and all that.
More appropriately, it actually appears to exist - it's owned by a 'New Edge Networks' based in Vancouver, WA, USA. The machine of the beast has an ISP!
Oh, and on a side note, I thought that HL2 characters could be fed lines and they would automaticly speak them as well as forming the proper mouth movements....
Not really - the game uses recorded speech files (from flesh-and-blood voice actors) which are then run through various external tools to extract phonemes and visemes.
I remember seeing someone's HL2-related work on text-to-speech a while back - it appears to be the same system being used for this News at Seven thingy. One nifty feature:
There also exists C++ code to produce lip-synched speech truly on the fly, which is then spoken externally, but concurrently with, the HL2 engine. Essentially, there is a function in the codebase that takes a string to say, speaks the string through the TTS engine, and lipsyncs the actors' lips as the text is being spoken. With this technique, for example, you could have a cute multiplayer mod where any messages sent textually are actually pronounced on the other clients' machines.
After seeing all those PC games at Gamestop, we might amend that to say ""Apple makes wonderful machines that work. Dell machines that not only work, but they play also."
In which case, there's something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro.
Which I wonder why, when the Library level itself could have been reduced to no more than maybe 8K. 7K for the basic layout, and 1K for all the locations of all the repeated places that first 7K goes to.
I think you're being a bit generous there. The Library could have been reduced to just four bytes - 0x53, 0x48, 0x49 and 0x54...
Why don't valve just make it so HL2 on the Xbox is as moddable as the PC version. So mods would run natively on both?
The 'code' portion of a Source mod is just an Windows x86 DLL, compiled from a load of C++. There's no sandboxing or anything, so a mod can happily corrupt the game's memory, call operating system functions, you name it. Disadvantages, yes - but the advantages are extremely high performance and versatility as to what the mods can do.
The original Half-Life operated in a similar way, and later mods for that did all sorts of things which would have been impossible in a sandbox. Like, alternative rendering engines, doing everything through OpenGL - or improved networking, sound or whatever.
In the case of the Xbox 360, I seriously doubt that Microsoft would allow such control over their hardware - they might as well send out free devkits and code-signing signatures to everyone.
It's kind of like a law, give them space, and it will be filled.
Yup. Take the original Halo for the Xbox as an example. Makes full use of the DVD storage - so much so that it almost fills a disc. Numerous gigabytes of content, with a fair amount duplicated between different maps.
Now compare with the PC version of Halo. Comes on a single CD - and contains more content too. Much less than a gigabyte, thanks to heavy compression, reuse of textures, sounds and models between maps, etc. Much more efficiently laid out, but requires a decent amount of processing grunt to decompress to a computer's hard disk. This could have been done with the Xbox version, but there simply wasn't the need. There was space available on the DVD, and there wasn't so much content to justify more aggressive compression...
It'll be more interesting to see how a blockbuster PS3 title of, say, 2010 might fill that 25 or 50 gigabytes of space. Assuming, of course, that Sony hasn't collapsed into bankruptcy and the ColecoVision 3000 isn't ruling the roost with its authentic rat-neuron-powered parasympathetic whatsit-matic gameplay.
For example, instead of using true type fonts that use vectors, and would look nice at any resolution and scale, they still used plain old bitmaps.
Truetype fonts for text and other graphical elements? That's solast-generation...
Also, don't stab me in the eyes for this - but Flash could be an interesting addition for a game's controllable panels, interfaces and so on. Doom 3 was nearly there, but if you manage to get the game to run at a high resolution, you'll soon discover that it's all based around relatively low-resolution bitmaps.
If one of these über-games-consoles dedicated a core to rendering Flash elements where necessary, then there'd be loads of new possibilities. And, being an excessively common design target already, everyone knows how to design Flash animations anyway...
Sounds great - and in the meantime, could I thank you for maintaining Gimp.app? Contrary to all the nay-sayers here on Slashdot, I've been using it just fine for work and photography stuff. Hardly high-end, but it works well for me!
Web hosting's pretty cheap these days - for instance, I get loads of disk space and about a terabyte of monthly bandwidth on the vaguely-reliable, cheap-and-cheerful Dreamhost. [NOTE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF AFFILIATE LINK!]
I've no idea if there are any off-the-shelf, open source 'podcasting' packages available (any suggestions, anyone?), but RSS is very simple and it could be worth learning just enough PHP to write your own, incredibly basic system for generating it yourself.
But wait, this is the difficult solution, isn't it?
(*) - yes, it really is 9% alcohol beer. It's called La fin du monde which is french for The end of the world
Oh noes, 9% alcohol beer?
Move to Belgium, where many beers start at 8% alcohol. The strongest I've seen so far was about 11%, where the yeast finishes poisoning itself with it ethanolic effluent...;-)
As for insane, I've got a bottle of Mort Subite* Oude Gueuze in my fridge, as recommended by a friend. Nominally 7% - but there's a load of crud washing around in the bottom of the bottle, so if I put it in a warm place, who knows... Source of yeast? Basically, anything which was floating around in the brewery's atmosphere at the time. Lambics are famous for their complex mix of bacterial and fungal species. So perhaps encouraging that lot to ferment a bit more is risking life and limb? Who knows...
Having said all that, I was impressed by all the beers (and the relaxed attitude to such) in Seattle. The produce of local microbreweries being sold in fish-and-chip shops? Ohyes!
Civil disobedience is not doing something you think is wrong because you can get away with it. Civil disobedience is doing something you think is wrong, and get punished for it so people can see the fallacy of the laws.
Civil disobedience isn't downloading dodgy free copies of computer games in a near-anonymous manner.
If visiting your favourite bittorrent site and downloading the latest game crack resulted in an immediate knock on the door from the police, would you still do it?
One of the many Amiga magazines offered instructions, how to build a midi port for the Amiga. It was very easy to do, and enabled me to keep ridiculing those horrible Atari's. Oh, the fun we had in those glorious days.
It might have been easy to add MIDI ports to the Amiga, but their presence-as-standard on the Atari was enough impetus for high-level audio software to be developed for the ST. Software that's still aroundtoday, despite having long since left the Atari platform.
It might be one thing having splendidly capable hardware and operating systems, but having actual, worthwhile, not-available-anywhere-else applications is the thing which gets people to use a particular platform.:-/
For instance, if my web forms want UTF-8 encoded output, is the user sending me UTF-8 encoded data? Or if I want the name field to be a maximum of 50 chars in the database, does the encoded string fit?
Try harking back to the good old days of programming, when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri knew how to write functions. Write something like this:
And I've seen the "oh-sh*t" face on a couple of developers after demonstrating to them that their software is vulnerable to SQL Injection. In both cases the vulnerabilities exposed the customers to the posibility of serious financial damage.
Have you seen the 'oh, that's not a problem, we're using SSL so it's completely secure' face yet?
As for stupidest work-arounds - a site I was doing a vague security audit for (sans source-code, alas) was (is) rife with SQL injection vulnerabilities. On attempting to explain this to the programmer, with very simple code examples, I was confronted by some increasingly complicated 'solutions' to the problem.
It was an integer database ID. But strings would go in. I suggested converting it to an integer. But no, programmer decided to do a search-and-replace on SQL keywords in the string.
So I used lower-case SQL keywords, and strongly recommended converting to an integer.
Programmer added lower-case SQL keywords to his search-and replace routine.
So I used mixed-case SQL keywords, and told him to stop being silly and just convert to an integer.
Last seen, the code was replacing non-digits with . Okay, so it removed SQL injection attacks from that particular variable, but AAAAARGH.
IMHO, any web application should be written to accept both GET and POST.
No. Web applications should use GET and POST where appropriate - GET for idempotent requests (showing database records, search results, those kind of recurring, non-database-changing things) while POST should be used for things which actually change data, user state, and so on.
Using GET in the wrong places can lead to all kinds of irritations and miniature security problems. Imagine sending an email to your web application administrator containing something like the following: <img src="http://example.com/webapp/user_admin?action=e dituser&username=me&accesslevel=administrator" width="0" height="0">...
Many web applications do get the two horrendously mixed up (I've seen search results done via POST, which is subtly, incredibly annoying) but they're definitely not interchangeable.
For simply displaying a non-password-protected package shipment page, GET would probably be the best solution. But blindly accepting both isn't a good alternative.
Is it strange that I keep seeing that game being plugged everywhere?
Not really. It's by a miniscule British games development... studio? Development bedroom might be more accurate - whose previous games have been lauded as both artistically interesting and retro-innovative in gameplay. The official marketing budget is probably around £2.50 (which they'll probably spend down the pub) - so in the spirit of helping the apparent underdog, everyone seems more than happy to help them out.
And to make it all worthwhile, it's a brilliantly fun little game. It's a simplified RTS, but with an inexorable fall and escalation towards the end of the world. You can't make back your losses, but you can use your remaining assets in a last-gasp attack on your opponents. Assuming you're not already radioactive slag.
... And there I go into instant-unofficial-salesman mode. Oops. Introversion does that to people - if it was some giant media conglomerate with the exact same games, I'm sure things would be entirely different...
I think most games are not capable of teaching the dark side of violence. I hate to keep going back to it, but GTA is convenient here. You get points for killing. Other, less controversial games, too. Most FPS's, to an extent. Even that one racing game (Burnout?) where one game mode involves causing as much damage as you possibly can. Most games depict a cartoonish, unreal, detached violence.
DEFCON is that, but to an extreme - you are so utterly detached from the millions of people you are killing that somehow the mind fills in the blanks, and makes things far worse. The soundtrack contributes a lot to this - but the imagination does most of the work.
The actual storylines of Half-Life and its sequel are practically non-existent. The worlds are brilliant, however, as is the manner in which they are presented to the player. And to be honest, I'd prefer that to a typically bloated game story with endless cutscenes and exposition getting in the way of the actual gaming; being immersed in a realistically portrayed world where everything has its place is much more interesting to me.
I suspect the demo version is simply the retail version without a key - the emergency-download-mirrors email I was sent by Introversion a few minutes ago has FileFront as one of the mirrors. Download from there if you like - I guess the other mirrors are equally public...
The manual is available on the Steam website - usefully, it also contains information on building your very own fallout shelter, survival kit and fallout suit, and on surviving a nuclear blast if caught out in the open.
Duck and cover, everyone!
Now, to stock up on Jammie Dodgers. Do Jaffa Cakes count as a viable alternative?
Secondly, the only system that supported compressed textures in hardware was the Gamecube, the XBox and PS2 both had to uncompress their textures prior to rendering a polygon with that texture on it
Given that the Xbox's graphics chip is an Nvidia Geforce 3.something in disguise, it's not surprising that the Xbox does do texture compression. I think the Geforce 2 did, or maybe even earlier.
The original Xbox is pretty much a DirectX 8 device - the shaders are fairly programmable, and are much more versatile than the Gamecube's fixed-function system. It's still utterly crippled these days by the total of 64MB of memory, however - games like the Half-Life 2 port look pretty naff and blurry compared with the PC originals.
Slashdot Mirror
216.216.216.216 would be a more sensible hellish IP address - 6*6*6 and all that.
More appropriately, it actually appears to exist - it's owned by a 'New Edge Networks' based in Vancouver, WA, USA. The machine of the beast has an ISP!
Not really - the game uses recorded speech files (from flesh-and-blood voice actors) which are then run through various external tools to extract phonemes and visemes.
I remember seeing someone's HL2-related work on text-to-speech a while back - it appears to be the same system being used for this News at Seven thingy. One nifty feature:
After seeing all those PC games at Gamestop, we might amend that to say ""Apple makes wonderful machines that work. Dell machines that not only work, but they play also."
In which case, there's something seriously wrong with my MacBook Pro.
Which I wonder why, when the Library level itself could have been reduced to no more than maybe 8K. 7K for the basic layout, and 1K for all the locations of all the repeated places that first 7K goes to.
I think you're being a bit generous there. The Library could have been reduced to just four bytes - 0x53, 0x48, 0x49 and 0x54...
Why don't valve just make it so HL2 on the Xbox is as moddable as the PC version. So mods would run natively on both?
The 'code' portion of a Source mod is just an Windows x86 DLL, compiled from a load of C++. There's no sandboxing or anything, so a mod can happily corrupt the game's memory, call operating system functions, you name it. Disadvantages, yes - but the advantages are extremely high performance and versatility as to what the mods can do.
The original Half-Life operated in a similar way, and later mods for that did all sorts of things which would have been impossible in a sandbox. Like, alternative rendering engines, doing everything through OpenGL - or improved networking, sound or whatever.
In the case of the Xbox 360, I seriously doubt that Microsoft would allow such control over their hardware - they might as well send out free devkits and code-signing signatures to everyone.
I'm 26, almost 27 - and my first hard disk was a thundering 230MB.
Okay, I was a bit late in buying it - but it was a SCSI device attached to an Atari ST. What do I win?
It's kind of like a law, give them space, and it will be filled.
Yup. Take the original Halo for the Xbox as an example. Makes full use of the DVD storage - so much so that it almost fills a disc. Numerous gigabytes of content, with a fair amount duplicated between different maps.
Now compare with the PC version of Halo. Comes on a single CD - and contains more content too. Much less than a gigabyte, thanks to heavy compression, reuse of textures, sounds and models between maps, etc. Much more efficiently laid out, but requires a decent amount of processing grunt to decompress to a computer's hard disk. This could have been done with the Xbox version, but there simply wasn't the need. There was space available on the DVD, and there wasn't so much content to justify more aggressive compression...
It'll be more interesting to see how a blockbuster PS3 title of, say, 2010 might fill that 25 or 50 gigabytes of space. Assuming, of course, that Sony hasn't collapsed into bankruptcy and the ColecoVision 3000 isn't ruling the roost with its authentic rat-neuron-powered parasympathetic whatsit-matic gameplay.
For example, instead of using true type fonts that use vectors, and would look nice at any resolution and scale, they still used plain old bitmaps.
Truetype fonts for text and other graphical elements? That's so last-generation...
Also, don't stab me in the eyes for this - but Flash could be an interesting addition for a game's controllable panels, interfaces and so on. Doom 3 was nearly there, but if you manage to get the game to run at a high resolution, you'll soon discover that it's all based around relatively low-resolution bitmaps.
If one of these über-games-consoles dedicated a core to rendering Flash elements where necessary, then there'd be loads of new possibilities. And, being an excessively common design target already, everyone knows how to design Flash animations anyway...
Sounds great - and in the meantime, could I thank you for maintaining Gimp.app? Contrary to all the nay-sayers here on Slashdot, I've been using it just fine for work and photography stuff. Hardly high-end, but it works well for me!
DCOP?
It's not the 1970s any more...
Web hosting's pretty cheap these days - for instance, I get loads of disk space and about a terabyte of monthly bandwidth on the vaguely-reliable, cheap-and-cheerful Dreamhost. [NOTE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF AFFILIATE LINK!]
I've no idea if there are any off-the-shelf, open source 'podcasting' packages available (any suggestions, anyone?), but RSS is very simple and it could be worth learning just enough PHP to write your own, incredibly basic system for generating it yourself.
But wait, this is the difficult solution, isn't it?
(*) - yes, it really is 9% alcohol beer. It's called La fin du monde which is french for The end of the world
;-)
Oh noes, 9% alcohol beer?
Move to Belgium, where many beers start at 8% alcohol. The strongest I've seen so far was about 11%, where the yeast finishes poisoning itself with it ethanolic effluent...
As for insane, I've got a bottle of Mort Subite* Oude Gueuze in my fridge, as recommended by a friend. Nominally 7% - but there's a load of crud washing around in the bottom of the bottle, so if I put it in a warm place, who knows... Source of yeast? Basically, anything which was floating around in the brewery's atmosphere at the time. Lambics are famous for their complex mix of bacterial and fungal species. So perhaps encouraging that lot to ferment a bit more is risking life and limb? Who knows...
Having said all that, I was impressed by all the beers (and the relaxed attitude to such) in Seattle. The produce of local microbreweries being sold in fish-and-chip shops? Ohyes!
* Sudden Death.
Civil disobedience is not doing something you think is wrong because you can get away with it. Civil disobedience is doing something you think is wrong, and get punished for it so people can see the fallacy of the laws.
Civil disobedience isn't downloading dodgy free copies of computer games in a near-anonymous manner.
If visiting your favourite bittorrent site and downloading the latest game crack resulted in an immediate knock on the door from the police, would you still do it?
One of the many Amiga magazines offered instructions, how to build a midi port for the Amiga. It was very easy to do, and enabled me to keep ridiculing those horrible Atari's. Oh, the fun we had in those glorious days.
:-/
It might have been easy to add MIDI ports to the Amiga, but their presence-as-standard on the Atari was enough impetus for high-level audio software to be developed for the ST. Software that's still around today, despite having long since left the Atari platform.
It might be one thing having splendidly capable hardware and operating systems, but having actual, worthwhile, not-available-anywhere-else applications is the thing which gets people to use a particular platform.
In what way is that post flamebait? What the fuck was I being inflamatory about?
;-)
Saying that the Amiga was better than the ST?
For instance, if my web forms want UTF-8 encoded output, is the user sending me UTF-8 encoded data? Or if I want the name field to be a maximum of 50 chars in the database, does the encoded string fit?
Try harking back to the good old days of programming, when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri knew how to write functions. Write something like this:
sql_string_sanitise( $string, $encoding, $max_length );
And you can do stuff like that, easily!
And I've seen the "oh-sh*t" face on a couple of developers after demonstrating to them that their software is vulnerable to SQL Injection. In both cases the vulnerabilities exposed the customers to the posibility of serious financial damage.
Have you seen the 'oh, that's not a problem, we're using SSL so it's completely secure' face yet?
As for stupidest work-arounds - a site I was doing a vague security audit for (sans source-code, alas) was (is) rife with SQL injection vulnerabilities. On attempting to explain this to the programmer, with very simple code examples, I was confronted by some increasingly complicated 'solutions' to the problem.
It was an integer database ID. But strings would go in. I suggested converting it to an integer. But no, programmer decided to do a search-and-replace on SQL keywords in the string.
So I used lower-case SQL keywords, and strongly recommended converting to an integer.
Programmer added lower-case SQL keywords to his search-and replace routine.
So I used mixed-case SQL keywords, and told him to stop being silly and just convert to an integer.
Last seen, the code was replacing non-digits with . Okay, so it removed SQL injection attacks from that particular variable, but AAAAARGH.
IMHO, any web application should be written to accept both GET and POST.
e dituser&username=me&accesslevel=administrator" width="0" height="0">...
No. Web applications should use GET and POST where appropriate - GET for idempotent requests (showing database records, search results, those kind of recurring, non-database-changing things) while POST should be used for things which actually change data, user state, and so on.
Using GET in the wrong places can lead to all kinds of irritations and miniature security problems. Imagine sending an email to your web application administrator containing something like the following: <img src="http://example.com/webapp/user_admin?action=
Many web applications do get the two horrendously mixed up (I've seen search results done via POST, which is subtly, incredibly annoying) but they're definitely not interchangeable.
For simply displaying a non-password-protected package shipment page, GET would probably be the best solution. But blindly accepting both isn't a good alternative.
You must drive one of these "fast, expensive cars", don't you?
I don't even have a car. What does that mean? I must know!
Is it strange that I keep seeing that game being plugged everywhere?
... studio? Development bedroom might be more accurate - whose previous games have been lauded as both artistically interesting and retro-innovative in gameplay. The official marketing budget is probably around £2.50 (which they'll probably spend down the pub) - so in the spirit of helping the apparent underdog, everyone seems more than happy to help them out.
Not really. It's by a miniscule British games development
And to make it all worthwhile, it's a brilliantly fun little game. It's a simplified RTS, but with an inexorable fall and escalation towards the end of the world. You can't make back your losses, but you can use your remaining assets in a last-gasp attack on your opponents. Assuming you're not already radioactive slag.
... And there I go into instant-unofficial-salesman mode. Oops. Introversion does that to people - if it was some giant media conglomerate with the exact same games, I'm sure things would be entirely different...
I think most games are not capable of teaching the dark side of violence. I hate to keep going back to it, but GTA is convenient here. You get points for killing. Other, less controversial games, too. Most FPS's, to an extent. Even that one racing game (Burnout?) where one game mode involves causing as much damage as you possibly can. Most games depict a cartoonish, unreal, detached violence.
DEFCON is that, but to an extreme - you are so utterly detached from the millions of people you are killing that somehow the mind fills in the blanks, and makes things far worse. The soundtrack contributes a lot to this - but the imagination does most of the work.
*SHUDDER*
The actual storylines of Half-Life and its sequel are practically non-existent. The worlds are brilliant, however, as is the manner in which they are presented to the player. And to be honest, I'd prefer that to a typically bloated game story with endless cutscenes and exposition getting in the way of the actual gaming; being immersed in a realistically portrayed world where everything has its place is much more interesting to me.
Demo version? End of October?
How about now?
I suspect the demo version is simply the retail version without a key - the emergency-download-mirrors email I was sent by Introversion a few minutes ago has FileFront as one of the mirrors. Download from there if you like - I guess the other mirrors are equally public...
The manual is available on the Steam website - usefully, it also contains information on building your very own fallout shelter, survival kit and fallout suit, and on surviving a nuclear blast if caught out in the open.
Duck and cover, everyone!
Now, to stock up on Jammie Dodgers. Do Jaffa Cakes count as a viable alternative?
Secondly, the only system that supported compressed textures in hardware was the Gamecube, the XBox and PS2 both had to uncompress their textures prior to rendering a polygon with that texture on it
Given that the Xbox's graphics chip is an Nvidia Geforce 3.something in disguise, it's not surprising that the Xbox does do texture compression. I think the Geforce 2 did, or maybe even earlier.
The original Xbox is pretty much a DirectX 8 device - the shaders are fairly programmable, and are much more versatile than the Gamecube's fixed-function system. It's still utterly crippled these days by the total of 64MB of memory, however - games like the Half-Life 2 port look pretty naff and blurry compared with the PC originals.