The game crashes all the time for no reason and no my system is not low end, I have an evga 7800 GT, AMD X2 4400, and 2gigs of ram. If thats a crappy system then please tell me what a good one is.
I've played through on three entirely different systems (ranging from near-obsolete to gaming-behemoth, via an Apple laptop on the way), and had no crashes or serious glitches whatsoever...
Being a Brit and having just tried that on my phone, I recognise it as "some American ditty the tune of which I recognise but can't put a name to" and now I'm racking my brains trying to remember the title and it's going to stay in my head all evening - i just know it!
"Mary had a little lamb"?
Obviously, being British you need something far closer to your heart. So, I present Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the anthem for our glorious European Union!
Mine is one that's affected. Apparently, a new one will arrive in the post in a few days, and I need to send the old one back to them. There's not meant to be any safety issues, but still...
I actually prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop (which maybe because I used it first but hey). I used GIMP exclusively for photo editing. Until that is, I bought a better camera which takes 5MB jpegs (or 40MB raw images) and I have to agree - GIMP is hopeless with these larger files.
I've opened single images approaching a gigabyte in size on my Mac in The GIMP - the trick is to increase the tile cache size, so it's not constantly swapping data to and from the hard disk. In 'File: Preferences: Environment'; put 'Tile cache size' to something like 500MB on a one-gigabyte machine. I can't remember what the default is, but it's pretty low.
If you had a dial-processor machine (like my MacBook, you can increase the number of processors The GIMP uses in that dialogue box as well. Sped things up quite a bit more on my computer...
This way, I often have iPhoto and The GIMP open with lots of 8 megapixel images from my camera, and it usually works pretty smoothly. Although I'm thinking of adding another gigabyte of memory -iPhoto either has a memory leak, or it just likes allocating silly amounts of memory anyway.
You only fought NPCs. You were in high security space the entire time.
I wasn't exactly - I flew through a couple of low-rated systems on the way to find out what a 'cynosure' was. Wasn't targeted once. Okay, so I was just flying through, but I never got a hint of any danger... (Yes, so there will be some properly dangerous systems. So I then flew to one with a few hundred ships destroyed in the last few hours. It was like a flash-mob, I couldn't find anything untoward...)
I'm sure there's some deeply fascinating strategies later in the game, but sadly I couldn't be motivated enough to find them. If anything, the fancy graphics do the game a disservice - the first hour or so, I was psyched up, expecting to be able to explore an entire galaxy while drinking in some wondrous sights - except I soon discovered it was a much starker, drier game. Reams of numbers, tabulated relative efficiencies of economies and defences and offences - not my thing at all.
I found it deeply dull. You find it amazing. My opinion obviously doesn't correlate with everyone else's - so if anyone's still on the fence, try that 14-day trial. It'll polarise unformed opinions one way or the other.:-)
Too many games out there rely on these cherry-picked screenshots as selling points.
After hearing random people ranting on about how good EVE Online was, and how it most definitely wasn't World of Warcraft (which most of my friends are addicted to right now), I thought I'd give it a try. So, downloaded the client, started the free 14-day trial thing...
First impressions: it looks and sounds amazing. For instance, the in-system hyperspace effect is brilliant - screenshots simply couldn't do it justice. It really does feel like tearing across a planetary system at many AUs per second.
Second impressions: it's a multiplayer Elite (a game I seriously enjoyed, along with Frontier) - except designed by a sodding accountant. The tutorial is *hours* long. Rather boring. And utterly vital to playing the game. I tried figuring some stuff out without it, but managed to arse things up - and couldn't easily return to where I was.
I got a really strong sense of the game being a thin, glossy 3D veneer to a very, very dull database. I could almost feel the SQL queries chugging away underneath, and the performance enhancements and caching systems were a bit obvious. The real-time systems too - compared with, say, Elite 2: Frontier, the flight system is incredibly basic. It's less flying a spacecraft, more clicking on where you'd want to go. Combat seems to involve automatically setting your ship to orbit another, then enabling your weapons. Which then shoot away at regular intervals, all aiming done automatically. Oh, and it has that arse-standard MMORPG 'foo landed a glancing blow on bar, doing 3.5 units of damage' thing. No tactics, only strategy.
Exploring places seems to involve finding your destination in a 3D map, enabling autopilot and then waiting as your ship flies (fully automatically) through a series of lovely-looking (but increasingly repetitive) stellar systems. There's no nice visual effect when travelling between systems, by the way. I suspect there's no chance of the autopilot failing (memories of having to manually fly a stricken spacecraft into dock with a fast-orbiting space-station in Elite 2 come to mind...)
Other players seemed friendly enough, although admittedly I didn't interact with - or see - that many. No Counter-Strike style griefers that I saw, anyhow.
Mining is cataclysmically dull. It's very similar to combat, except the asteroid doesn't fight back. Purchasing stuff is like using Froogle or some other price-comparison service - with potentially better prices available at increasing numbers of stargate jumps away. Which don't seem to cost anything except time. Speaking of time, things are often very slow. Yes, you might get many hours of gameplay out of it, but much of it won't exactly be gripping.
I managed nearly 24 hours before giving up. I got the impression of it being a terribly crude Elite 2 (WHICH RAN ON MY SODDING ATARI ST!) but with fancy economics, lovely graphics and multiplayer. I'd definitely recommend the free trial if you're interested - it seems a couple of friends actually paid for it, and gave up within twenty minutes or so. I persevered, and got a bit more of an opinion - although I'm sure I'll get a million satisfied EVE Online players saying I should have played for longer. Sorry, but I wasn't that enamoured with it...:-/
Isn't all that's left writing the story, placing the enemies, and scripting the events?
Absolutely. Why, personally I can build a new MINERVA episode every week or so, starting work on a Monday and releasing on a Friday. It's just throwing some pre-existing game content together, after all. The hard work has been done already, hasn't it?
... Actually, it takes me about six months to produce half an hour to an hour of gameplay. Yes, that's in my spare time, but I have to keep 90% of what I produce - I don't do the intensive testing, throwing away, redesigning and retesting that Valve designers perform. And they're introducing new gameplay devices; I'm usually just regurgitating old ones. Episode One was spectacular in its near-total lack of padding - all the new gameplay elements were carefully introduced where required, and never overstayed their welcome. Except maybe the shopping trip near the end. But still, it was in complete contrast to the usual copy-and-paste design present in games like Halo...
I used an iBook G4 almost daily for two years, and its surfaces stayed the colours they started off as being. Okay, some of the letters on the keys wore off and the track-pad got a bit shiny, but otherwise things stayed unchanged.
I'm trying not to troll here but I don't really "get" the point of Google Earth. I understand that it's cool to look around cities and famous places but is that it? Am I missing something?
Did the Atari do dynamic WYSIWYG editing? Were you able to have twenty programs running and half a dozen services at the same time?
Yep - here's the same software running on a more recent machine. My old ST ran Thing, qed, Papyrus, CAB and so on just fine - although in 640x400 monochrome. Multitasking with Geneva worked very nicely, and there was always MiNT for all the UNIXy stuff. WYSIWYG was more than possible with NVDI, which let me use Truetype fonts in all GEM applications.
I eventually saw sense and bought a PC, although I still miss that old grey wedge...;-)
Additionally, every time the Chinese engine returns censored results, isn't there a note to the effect that the document has been redacted? This would seem, in my mind, to contribute to a heightened public awareness in China as to just how pervasive the censorship regime is. This will in turn spawn more, not less, dissent, tending more towards democratic reform in the long term.
And on the other side, Google seems to be doing a very good job in getting people outside China to talk about Chinese censorship and the like. Whether you agree or disagree with Google's actions, they're definitely raising awareness of who they're dealing with.
I realised I'd misread the interview and quickly typed up another comment saying that I was wrong - and it appears I went and closed the browser before going past just the preview of said comment. Oops.
Was there an option for this anywhere that I missed?
Yup - every so often, when Steam starts it comes up with a brief message asking if you'd like to take part in the hardware survey. If you click yes, it detects what you've got, presents you with what it's found and then asks if it can send it off to Valve. If you do, it then links you to the results.
If would be greatly appreciated if you would make it work with ep1.
I have no idea if this will work, but open 'Steam/SteamApps/SourceMods/metastasis/gameinfo.tx t' and replace 'SteamAppId 220' with 'SteamAppId 380'. This should make MINERVA a mod of Episode One rather than Half-Life 2. If that makes sense.
Worth a try, anyway - let me know if it fixes it...
As a sort of related question, does anyone (Ford?) know if the episode 1 content (zombines and others) is available in the sdk? I looked last night and didn't see anything. It would be quite nice to play around with some of that stuff.
The SDK's well overdue for an update anyway, so I wouldn't be too surprised if the Episode One FGD and game configuration file gets added sooner or later. It's probably one of the smaller tasks in fixing the various broken features currently present...;-)
Site seems to be down - perhaps due to slashdotting?
Nah, more that I'm moving web hosts, and it would finally appear to be taking effect. The real site should be back up again sooner or later - but in the meantime, here's the MINERVA page on the Valve Developer Community.
Some download links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes, I'm using friends in UK academia for download bandwidth. But if old-fashioned HTTP isn't your thing, there's always BitTorrent...
Still, huge thanks for all the comments, and I guess I really should get back to the third and final part of Metastasis. (There will definitely be future chapters, so don't worry.)
(N.B.: Difficulty levels have been tweaked a bit, with an altered skill.cfg which monkeys around with the damage taken and inflicted by the enemies. Try loading standard HL2 maps through the console from MINERVA - it's like a whole different game.)
Slashdot Mirror
The game crashes all the time for no reason and no my system is not low end, I have an evga 7800 GT, AMD X2 4400, and 2gigs of ram. If thats a crappy system then please tell me what a good one is.
It's probably got overheating problems, dodgy memory, driver conflicts, or something.
I've played through on three entirely different systems (ranging from near-obsolete to gaming-behemoth, via an Apple laptop on the way), and had no crashes or serious glitches whatsoever...
Being a Brit and having just tried that on my phone, I recognise it as "some American ditty the tune of which I recognise but can't put a name to" and now I'm racking my brains trying to remember the title and it's going to stay in my head all evening - i just know it!
"Mary had a little lamb"?
Obviously, being British you need something far closer to your heart. So, I present Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the anthem for our glorious European Union!
336996321123322336996321123211 !!!
Oh, I'd be more concerned about them faking experiments completely...
... More importantly, they're doing a battery recall for many MacBook Pros.
Mine is one that's affected. Apparently, a new one will arrive in the post in a few days, and I need to send the old one back to them. There's not meant to be any safety issues, but still...
I actually prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop (which maybe because I used it first but hey). I used GIMP exclusively for photo editing. Until that is, I bought a better camera which takes 5MB jpegs (or 40MB raw images) and I have to agree - GIMP is hopeless with these larger files.
I've opened single images approaching a gigabyte in size on my Mac in The GIMP - the trick is to increase the tile cache size, so it's not constantly swapping data to and from the hard disk. In 'File: Preferences: Environment'; put 'Tile cache size' to something like 500MB on a one-gigabyte machine. I can't remember what the default is, but it's pretty low.
If you had a dial-processor machine (like my MacBook, you can increase the number of processors The GIMP uses in that dialogue box as well. Sped things up quite a bit more on my computer...
This way, I often have iPhoto and The GIMP open with lots of 8 megapixel images from my camera, and it usually works pretty smoothly. Although I'm thinking of adding another gigabyte of memory -iPhoto either has a memory leak, or it just likes allocating silly amounts of memory anyway.
Whoever came up with that movie is fricken brilliant. That is all.
... It was Microsoft.
You only fought NPCs. You were in high security space the entire time.
:-)
I wasn't exactly - I flew through a couple of low-rated systems on the way to find out what a 'cynosure' was. Wasn't targeted once. Okay, so I was just flying through, but I never got a hint of any danger... (Yes, so there will be some properly dangerous systems. So I then flew to one with a few hundred ships destroyed in the last few hours. It was like a flash-mob, I couldn't find anything untoward...)
I'm sure there's some deeply fascinating strategies later in the game, but sadly I couldn't be motivated enough to find them. If anything, the fancy graphics do the game a disservice - the first hour or so, I was psyched up, expecting to be able to explore an entire galaxy while drinking in some wondrous sights - except I soon discovered it was a much starker, drier game. Reams of numbers, tabulated relative efficiencies of economies and defences and offences - not my thing at all.
I found it deeply dull. You find it amazing. My opinion obviously doesn't correlate with everyone else's - so if anyone's still on the fence, try that 14-day trial. It'll polarise unformed opinions one way or the other.
Too many games out there rely on these cherry-picked screenshots as selling points.
:-/
After hearing random people ranting on about how good EVE Online was, and how it most definitely wasn't World of Warcraft (which most of my friends are addicted to right now), I thought I'd give it a try. So, downloaded the client, started the free 14-day trial thing...
First impressions: it looks and sounds amazing. For instance, the in-system hyperspace effect is brilliant - screenshots simply couldn't do it justice. It really does feel like tearing across a planetary system at many AUs per second.
Second impressions: it's a multiplayer Elite (a game I seriously enjoyed, along with Frontier) - except designed by a sodding accountant. The tutorial is *hours* long. Rather boring. And utterly vital to playing the game. I tried figuring some stuff out without it, but managed to arse things up - and couldn't easily return to where I was.
I got a really strong sense of the game being a thin, glossy 3D veneer to a very, very dull database. I could almost feel the SQL queries chugging away underneath, and the performance enhancements and caching systems were a bit obvious. The real-time systems too - compared with, say, Elite 2: Frontier, the flight system is incredibly basic. It's less flying a spacecraft, more clicking on where you'd want to go. Combat seems to involve automatically setting your ship to orbit another, then enabling your weapons. Which then shoot away at regular intervals, all aiming done automatically. Oh, and it has that arse-standard MMORPG 'foo landed a glancing blow on bar, doing 3.5 units of damage' thing. No tactics, only strategy.
Exploring places seems to involve finding your destination in a 3D map, enabling autopilot and then waiting as your ship flies (fully automatically) through a series of lovely-looking (but increasingly repetitive) stellar systems. There's no nice visual effect when travelling between systems, by the way. I suspect there's no chance of the autopilot failing (memories of having to manually fly a stricken spacecraft into dock with a fast-orbiting space-station in Elite 2 come to mind...)
Other players seemed friendly enough, although admittedly I didn't interact with - or see - that many. No Counter-Strike style griefers that I saw, anyhow.
Mining is cataclysmically dull. It's very similar to combat, except the asteroid doesn't fight back. Purchasing stuff is like using Froogle or some other price-comparison service - with potentially better prices available at increasing numbers of stargate jumps away. Which don't seem to cost anything except time. Speaking of time, things are often very slow. Yes, you might get many hours of gameplay out of it, but much of it won't exactly be gripping.
I managed nearly 24 hours before giving up. I got the impression of it being a terribly crude Elite 2 (WHICH RAN ON MY SODDING ATARI ST!) but with fancy economics, lovely graphics and multiplayer. I'd definitely recommend the free trial if you're interested - it seems a couple of friends actually paid for it, and gave up within twenty minutes or so. I persevered, and got a bit more of an opinion - although I'm sure I'll get a million satisfied EVE Online players saying I should have played for longer. Sorry, but I wasn't that enamoured with it...
Isn't all that's left writing the story, placing the enemies, and scripting the events?
...
Absolutely. Why, personally I can build a new MINERVA episode every week or so, starting work on a Monday and releasing on a Friday. It's just throwing some pre-existing game content together, after all. The hard work has been done already, hasn't it?
Actually, it takes me about six months to produce half an hour to an hour of gameplay. Yes, that's in my spare time, but I have to keep 90% of what I produce - I don't do the intensive testing, throwing away, redesigning and retesting that Valve designers perform. And they're introducing new gameplay devices; I'm usually just regurgitating old ones. Episode One was spectacular in its near-total lack of padding - all the new gameplay elements were carefully introduced where required, and never overstayed their welcome. Except maybe the shopping trip near the end. But still, it was in complete contrast to the usual copy-and-paste design present in games like Halo...
Also: Dance, monkey-boy, dance!
The world would be a lesser place without such comedy in power at Microsoft...
I used an iBook G4 almost daily for two years, and its surfaces stayed the colours they started off as being. Okay, some of the letters on the keys wore off and the track-pad got a bit shiny, but otherwise things stayed unchanged.
:-)
Tip? Wash hands occasionally.
I think the above moderation shows it's the Mac OS fanboys who rule the roost around here... ;-)
Or is it the Amiga-lovers? They're a true shadowy cabal to be terrified of!
I'm trying not to troll here but I don't really "get" the point of Google Earth. I understand that it's cool to look around cities and famous places but is that it? Am I missing something?
Yes.
Did the Atari do dynamic WYSIWYG editing? Were you able to have twenty programs running and half a dozen services at the same time?
;-)
Yep - here's the same software running on a more recent machine. My old ST ran Thing, qed, Papyrus, CAB and so on just fine - although in 640x400 monochrome. Multitasking with Geneva worked very nicely, and there was always MiNT for all the UNIXy stuff. WYSIWYG was more than possible with NVDI, which let me use Truetype fonts in all GEM applications.
I eventually saw sense and bought a PC, although I still miss that old grey wedge...
Additionally, every time the Chinese engine returns censored results, isn't there a note to the effect that the document has been redacted? This would seem, in my mind, to contribute to a heightened public awareness in China as to just how pervasive the censorship regime is. This will in turn spawn more, not less, dissent, tending more towards democratic reform in the long term.
And on the other side, Google seems to be doing a very good job in getting people outside China to talk about Chinese censorship and the like. Whether you agree or disagree with Google's actions, they're definitely raising awareness of who they're dealing with.
Where is the moderation option "Wrong"?
:-(
I realised I'd misread the interview and quickly typed up another comment saying that I was wrong - and it appears I went and closed the browser before going past just the preview of said comment. Oops.
I wasn't having a very good day yesterday.
Was there an option for this anywhere that I missed?
:-(
Yup - every so often, when Steam starts it comes up with a brief message asking if you'd like to take part in the hardware survey. If you click yes, it detects what you've got, presents you with what it's found and then asks if it can send it off to Valve. If you do, it then links you to the results.
Evil. Pure evil.
My poor MacBook Pro got abused in this way.
[quote=Reason58]Ssssss forgot which forum software I was on for a minute.[/quote]
You should be ashamed of yourself. With a user ID like that, you must have been on Slashdot for at [i]least[/i] a year or two!
They also seem to be focusing on making you spend over $100 on a single game.
...
... $100. Oh. Sorry, you're right. Carry on!
Maths for Idiots!
Trilogy. Three parts. Each part costing $19.95 - so that makes a grand total of
* frantic tapping away at hyper-reliable, entry-level, emerging-markets calculator *
If would be greatly appreciated if you would make it work with ep1.
x t' and replace 'SteamAppId 220' with 'SteamAppId 380'. This should make MINERVA a mod of Episode One rather than Half-Life 2. If that makes sense.
I have no idea if this will work, but open 'Steam/SteamApps/SourceMods/metastasis/gameinfo.t
Worth a try, anyway - let me know if it fixes it...
As a sort of related question, does anyone (Ford?) know if the episode 1 content (zombines and others) is available in the sdk? I looked last night and didn't see anything. It would be quite nice to play around with some of that stuff.
;-)
The SDK's well overdue for an update anyway, so I wouldn't be too surprised if the Episode One FGD and game configuration file gets added sooner or later. It's probably one of the smaller tasks in fixing the various broken features currently present...
Now that I've bought ep1, will minerva work on my machine?
Haven't a clue - it might, given that I think Episode One requires the GCFs for all HL2 maps, models, sounds and materials, but I've not tested it.
If anyone can report back one way or the other, it would be greatly appreciated!
Site seems to be down - perhaps due to slashdotting?
Nah, more that I'm moving web hosts, and it would finally appear to be taking effect. The real site should be back up again sooner or later - but in the meantime, here's the MINERVA page on the Valve Developer Community.
Some download links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes, I'm using friends in UK academia for download bandwidth. But if old-fashioned HTTP isn't your thing, there's always BitTorrent...
Still, huge thanks for all the comments, and I guess I really should get back to the third and final part of Metastasis. (There will definitely be future chapters, so don't worry.)
(N.B.: Difficulty levels have been tweaked a bit, with an altered skill.cfg which monkeys around with the damage taken and inflicted by the enemies. Try loading standard HL2 maps through the console from MINERVA - it's like a whole different game.)
One of the male guerillas asks Alyx if she's Dr. Kleiner's daughter, to which she replies that Odessa Cubbage is her father. WTF?
;-)
It's a joke - watch her sneer. It appears Mr. Cubbage is quite infamous for taking credit for absolutely everything...
Handy hint for the dark sections - your can light up zombies with the flares.
Not only does it kill them in a sufficiently amusing and gratifying manner, you can also see where you're going...