I did a comparison with my desktop PC (an AMD Athlon 64, 3200+ running at 2GHz, 1GB of speedy memory) versus my MacBook Pro (Intel Core Duo at 1.83GHz, 1GB memory) with VRAD on the second MINERVA map, with the Source SDK running on Windows XP Pro.
VRAD definitely takes full advantage of the dual-core nature of the Intel processor - typical compile times on the desktop PC were around 50-60 minutes, while on the laptop they were just over 30 minutes. It's a fairly artificial test, admittedly (although I'm really happy with the increased speed) - but it certainly shows it's a rather fast processor at certain floating-point-intensive tasks, anyhow.
Not sure if it's anything you worked on, but a lot of GEM source code was released under the GPL a few years back. Hope it's of some use to someone, anyway!
There are alternative editors, but Papyrus seems like the fastest word processor to me. Also, it's available for different systems, not just for Macs, and they have cheap licenses, I think.
I think part of the reason for its speed is that it was originally designed for Atari computers - I used to use Papyrus 3.66 on my 8MHz, 4MB Atari ST in the mid-1990s, and did all my A-levels stuff with it. That was the version written in GFA Basic (but you'd never have guessed from the speed, full WYSIWYG and NeXT-inspired interface), subsequent versions were based on a full rewrite in C.
The programmers behind it definitely know how to produce fast, portable code...
My work now means I need to use Microsoft Word for everything (Papyrus's import and export features are a bit basic), but if you simply need to print or save as PDF, then Papyrus is well worth a try. There's a near-full-functional demo after all, and once the full version is purchased it's a 6MB download.
"... it is expected to create a hole 16 feet deep and send up a 2.2 million-pound (998,000-kg) plume of debris"
I think they're most likely ballpark figures for a 5 metre deep crater, and 1000 tonnes of debris. Convert these to imperial measurements and back again without thinking too much, and you gain many significant figures of accuracy!
What I'm looking for, and hopefully will shortly see on your wiki, is a comparison between the two CPU choices on the mini. I had originally settled on a Single Core with 1Gb of RAM as the best set-up for me, but if Dual Core is going to make a difference to gaming, I might stretch the credit card a little further.
My father's got a single-boot, single-core Intel Mac Mini, and while it's a great little machine for MacOS X stuff, from what I've heard from web forums and the like the graphics system on both Mac Mini models is fairly low-performance. While it'll run HL2, you wouldn't want it as a gaming machine.
Probably only the iMacs and MacBook Pro will be any use for PC gaming purposes due to the faster graphics chips in them, but they're probably only recommended if you want a Mac which can also run PC games, rather than a machine for games only. There's no possibility of replacing a graphics card at a later date, for example.
Still, I'm happy with this MacBook Pro. I bought it as a high-speed Mac laptop, and amused to find it's also a high-speed PC as well. I'm not complaining...
Yup. And it works really well. Really, really well. Better than on my desktop PC.
At the Valve Developer Community, a few of us are logging how Valve games run on these new Macs, so if you've got any new information, feel free to contribute.
I do think it will kill most native MacOS gaming, or at least cause a major shake-up. But I'm not surprised - paying through the nose for years-old ports of PC games just didn't appeal to me, to be honest.
But what I've got now is a Universal Computer, capable of running Mac software (both PowerPC and Intel), UNIX stuff (thanks to Fink and X11.app) and now Windows stuff. I've been dual-booting on my PCs between Linux and Windows for years, so I'm familiar with the drawbacks, but the advantages are great. By day, for work and for my photography, I have a high-powered Mac laptop, and by night, for gaming and modding stuff, I've got a high-powered PC laptop.
Try the mirror-widget-hack. Download the Mirror widget, start it up in Dashboard for a few seconds, then close it. Your machine will then be silent until it's next rebooted. Battery life will be slightly reduced, but not by much.
There was a run-on-startup utility available from somewhere with the same effect, but apparently 10.4.6 has broken that.
This is why I got a MacBook Pro - a much larger desktop than my iBook, so I can fit more icons on!
...
My PC has two monitors. I know it's time to start clearing up the desktop when the crap starts creeping on to the second monitor. Right now, it's at 144 items. I wish I was joking.
From RTFA, they chose not to release anything until 2 weeks before they released it. Very nice - as a fan of mods, it's disheartening to see the number of mods that never hit beta, much less release.
I'm wondering if the episodic approach of my own MINERVA mod for HL2 was in any way an influence - I'm finding it to be an incredibly good way of actually releasing single-player stuff, with projects that don't turn into some multi-year slog with no end in sight.
I haven't got Max Payne 2, so sadly won't be able to play this mod - but it looks a very polished project and I hope it gets the recognition it deserves, and that they get the important second episode out sooner or later...
Remember when people used to play online games on PC, and there was thousands of Maps, Models, and complete game Mods available for free on the internet.... And such free downloads would only exist because some people actually enjoyed building them.
Probably 90% of my enjoyment as a PC gamer comes from building stuff myself. I don't buy that many games (I don't play very many; I'm not pirating anything) but can get many hundreds of hours of fun out of constructing my own maps, textures and worlds.
I kind of see console gaming as Lego sets with all the parts glued together at purchase. Okay, it might be fun to play with to start off, but it's completely fixed. And being able to buy extra pieces (at excessive cost) with pre-defined uses doesn't really change my perceptions...
I noticed that too - I eventually figured it out to be a fan whirring up, then stopping. And not a stray bovine wandering around nearby (did you know a computer can throw its voice?)...
Mine must be one of the very earliest MacBook Pros (serial number beginning W8608), and while I've noticed strange, intermittent whining, mooing and hissing noises and the occasional flicker when the screen is dim (it doesn't always happen), they aren't exactly killer issues. I've used PCs which have such behaviour as standard!
Having said that, I'd still advantage of any replacement programme - the issues I've found are like nasty, pus-filled pimples on the face of an angel. They're a bit... distracting.
For something which doesn't hard-crash recent versions of Quicktime, you might prefer the official Xiph.Org QuickTime Components. I haven't seen an official Universal build for use on Intel-based Macs, but I'm sure that's just around the corner.
My favourite game reviews site is probably Eurogamer - surprisingly, it's Europe-centric (conveniently for me), and I've found that the reviews (and previews) are usually well worth reading. It's helped get me to broaden my gaming horizons a bit, too - I bought Darwinia on the basis of the Eurogamer review, and found it to be one of the best games I've ever played.
As for GameSpy, someone from one of their sub-sites recently asked if they could make my MINERVA mod the level-of-the-week, or something. Unfortunately, there was a corporate-mandated requirement - that in the review, there had to be a Fileplanet download link.
To their credit, they did ask (the MINERVA terms of distribution coincidentally forbid mirroring on subscription-based download sites without permission) - but awkwardly for them, I said no. Citing a sheer distaste for Fileplanet, its queues, its Win32-Internet-Explorer-only download system, etc.
I never got a reply. And I've yet to see a review!
Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book)...
Which line would that be? I have a suspicion I know what it might be, anyhow. Something to do with... the night sky?
I liked The Algebraist - I don't think it was my favourite book of his (that's between Use of Weapons, Inversions and Feersum Endjinn), but I did think it had a bit more weight than Look To Windward, which had some great ideas (dirigible behemothaurs!) but kind of ran flat at the end.
Back to the Algebraist, for some obscure reason it really reminded me of the Crow Road, albeit set in a giant EU-style galactic empire. I wasn't convinced by the Dwellers, though - I'd been expecting something more genuinely inscrutable like the aforementioned behemothaurs. But if a sequel ever appears, I'll definitely go off to buy it as soon as it's available!
For regaining that missing... energy, I reckon he should write some more short stories. Get down on to paper some of those ideas I'm sure will be furtively scurrying around in darkened corners of that messed up brain of his...;-)
What do you Sci-Fi buffs make of Stephen Baxter? Just curious...
I really liked some of his earlier stuff (Raft and Flux were great, and his collected short stories were good fun), but the last book of his I read (I forget the name, 'Manifold Time', or something) seemed... derivative. Recycling ideas from his previous work, and from films - there seemed to be whole chunks lifted from the Andromeda Strain.
Still, I highly recommend Flux - I don't recall anyone else writing a book about humans living inside a neutron star, swimming freely in the superfluid below its crust...;-)
I can't watch any news about the western world's increasingly paranoid and delusional wars any more without being reminded that, in warfare, the biggest danger is of becoming indistinguishable from your enemy.
Oh, and Eric Blair. Not a science fiction author, but wrote a certain book which is still a brilliant work of science fiction in my eyes. Of the Ballard-style observation of a civilisation readjusted in some horrifically plausible manner...;-)
Excellent idea, but it really needs a catchy name to take off, something, well, friendly... How about "Amiga"?
Well, the Amiga kind of took off at first, but then stalled, nose-dived and then smashed headlong into a concrete car-park, belching huge clouds of black smoke from its wrecked carcass.
Except, nobody really noticed, apart from a couple of people who are still fighting tooth-and-nail over the shredded remnants of cadavers thrown from the wreckage, insistent that any second now, the Amiga will be reborn and the followers of modern hardware shall cower in terror...;-)
Having specialised hardware is great, except when you suddenly realise the hardware design is cack, and not really suited to ongoing expansion. If the Amiga had any future, it would only have been through abandoning the implementations behind most of its original 'innovations'.
(Oh, and in case you're wondering whose side I'm on: Atari ST forever!!!1;-) )
As for the apparent lack of performance on the eventual PC port of Halo when it was released - that could have something to do with the original Xbox version of the game being designed to take full advantage of the hardware it was running on. On the Xbox, you got ~30fps at 640x480 on approximately a GeForce 3.5, yet people expected the game to somehow magically run at silly resolutions on roughly equivalent PC hardware.
Lots of computationally expensive shaders, and all that.
There are many valid criticisms of Halo and its eventual port to the PC, but bizarre conspiracy theories don't really work when you look at the game's evolution. A game which languished in development hell for years, with no real direction to it - suddenly being given a powerful new games platform and a huge budget (and deadline) to work with. All things considered, it's amazing it turned out as well as it did.
Shame about the bloated, ending-less sequel and its years-overdue, deliberately limited platform PC port...;-)
For Tron's special effects -- The Super Foonly F-1. I bet it had a phat exhaust, blue downlighting, a killer sound system with a 16 inch subwoofer, and a stylish fibreglass skirt fitted to the front of the reel-to-reel cabinet.
Are you by any chance the dude who created the Minerva mod? I see the link in your tag...... is that you?
Unfortunately, yes - and since I'm frequently on business trips abroad, and thus away from my desktop PC, I'd really like the ability to do MINERVA stuff without having to lug extra hardware around too.
Also, the MacBook's considerably higher-spec than my desktop PC anyway.:-)
The only thing to complain about is the high price of non-OEM Windows. If you want to run Windows games on your Mac, you still have to pay a few hundred dollars for Windows XP to run them on.
(For that route, you still need to buy new hardware. Although a mouse is classified as an 'integral system component'. I need a new mouse anyway - this Logitech effort looks a bit manky.)
Stuff like VMWare will do a great job of running applications, but for stuff that requires access to modern hardware, dual-booting is probably the only real answer.
I've been doing it for years on my PC, after all - serious stuff gets done in Linux, but when I want to mess around with modding Half-Life 2 then I quickly reboot into Windows XP, and instantly get 100% software compatibility. If something gave me the ability to dual-boot my new MacBook in a similar manner, then that would be great - I'd essentially have both a Mac and a PC in one shiny laptop case.
This latest news makes me happy - it's like I bought a very fast Mac, then just over two weeks later I received a very fast PC of equivalent specs for free. What is there to complain about?
Slashdot Mirror
I did a comparison with my desktop PC (an AMD Athlon 64, 3200+ running at 2GHz, 1GB of speedy memory) versus my MacBook Pro (Intel Core Duo at 1.83GHz, 1GB memory) with VRAD on the second MINERVA map, with the Source SDK running on Windows XP Pro.
VRAD definitely takes full advantage of the dual-core nature of the Intel processor - typical compile times on the desktop PC were around 50-60 minutes, while on the laptop they were just over 30 minutes. It's a fairly artificial test, admittedly (although I'm really happy with the increased speed) - but it certainly shows it's a rather fast processor at certain floating-point-intensive tasks, anyhow.
Not sure if it's anything you worked on, but a lot of GEM source code was released under the GPL a few years back. Hope it's of some use to someone, anyway!
There are alternative editors, but Papyrus seems like the fastest word processor to me. Also, it's available for different systems, not just for Macs, and they have cheap licenses, I think.
I think part of the reason for its speed is that it was originally designed for Atari computers - I used to use Papyrus 3.66 on my 8MHz, 4MB Atari ST in the mid-1990s, and did all my A-levels stuff with it. That was the version written in GFA Basic (but you'd never have guessed from the speed, full WYSIWYG and NeXT-inspired interface), subsequent versions were based on a full rewrite in C.
The programmers behind it definitely know how to produce fast, portable code...
The website!
My work now means I need to use Microsoft Word for everything (Papyrus's import and export features are a bit basic), but if you simply need to print or save as PDF, then Papyrus is well worth a try. There's a near-full-functional demo after all, and once the full version is purchased it's a 6MB download.
Highly recommended.
"... it is expected to create a hole 16 feet deep and send up a 2.2 million-pound (998,000-kg) plume of debris"
I think they're most likely ballpark figures for a 5 metre deep crater, and 1000 tonnes of debris. Convert these to imperial measurements and back again without thinking too much, and you gain many significant figures of accuracy!
What I'm looking for, and hopefully will shortly see on your wiki, is a comparison between the two CPU choices on the mini. I had originally settled on a Single Core with 1Gb of RAM as the best set-up for me, but if Dual Core is going to make a difference to gaming, I might stretch the credit card a little further.
My father's got a single-boot, single-core Intel Mac Mini, and while it's a great little machine for MacOS X stuff, from what I've heard from web forums and the like the graphics system on both Mac Mini models is fairly low-performance. While it'll run HL2, you wouldn't want it as a gaming machine.
Probably only the iMacs and MacBook Pro will be any use for PC gaming purposes due to the faster graphics chips in them, but they're probably only recommended if you want a Mac which can also run PC games, rather than a machine for games only. There's no possibility of replacing a graphics card at a later date, for example.
Still, I'm happy with this MacBook Pro. I bought it as a high-speed Mac laptop, and amused to find it's also a high-speed PC as well. I'm not complaining...
Yup. And it works really well. Really, really well. Better than on my desktop PC.
At the Valve Developer Community, a few of us are logging how Valve games run on these new Macs, so if you've got any new information, feel free to contribute.
I do think it will kill most native MacOS gaming, or at least cause a major shake-up. But I'm not surprised - paying through the nose for years-old ports of PC games just didn't appeal to me, to be honest.
But what I've got now is a Universal Computer, capable of running Mac software (both PowerPC and Intel), UNIX stuff (thanks to Fink and X11.app) and now Windows stuff. I've been dual-booting on my PCs between Linux and Windows for years, so I'm familiar with the drawbacks, but the advantages are great. By day, for work and for my photography, I have a high-powered Mac laptop, and by night, for gaming and modding stuff, I've got a high-powered PC laptop.
Not bad!
Try the mirror-widget-hack. Download the Mirror widget, start it up in Dashboard for a few seconds, then close it. Your machine will then be silent until it's next rebooted. Battery life will be slightly reduced, but not by much.
There was a run-on-startup utility available from somewhere with the same effect, but apparently 10.4.6 has broken that.
This is why I got a MacBook Pro - a much larger desktop than my iBook, so I can fit more icons on!
...
My PC has two monitors. I know it's time to start clearing up the desktop when the crap starts creeping on to the second monitor. Right now, it's at 144 items. I wish I was joking.
From RTFA, they chose not to release anything until 2 weeks before they released it. Very nice - as a fan of mods, it's disheartening to see the number of mods that never hit beta, much less release.
I'm wondering if the episodic approach of my own MINERVA mod for HL2 was in any way an influence - I'm finding it to be an incredibly good way of actually releasing single-player stuff, with projects that don't turn into some multi-year slog with no end in sight.
I haven't got Max Payne 2, so sadly won't be able to play this mod - but it looks a very polished project and I hope it gets the recognition it deserves, and that they get the important second episode out sooner or later...
Remember when people used to play online games on PC, and there was thousands of Maps, Models, and complete game Mods available for free on the internet. ... And such free downloads would only exist because some people actually enjoyed building them.
Probably 90% of my enjoyment as a PC gamer comes from building stuff myself. I don't buy that many games (I don't play very many; I'm not pirating anything) but can get many hundreds of hours of fun out of constructing my own maps, textures and worlds.
I kind of see console gaming as Lego sets with all the parts glued together at purchase. Okay, it might be fun to play with to start off, but it's completely fixed. And being able to buy extra pieces (at excessive cost) with pre-defined uses doesn't really change my perceptions...
I noticed that too - I eventually figured it out to be a fan whirring up, then stopping. And not a stray bovine wandering around nearby (did you know a computer can throw its voice?)...
... distracting.
Mine must be one of the very earliest MacBook Pros (serial number beginning W8608), and while I've noticed strange, intermittent whining, mooing and hissing noises and the occasional flicker when the screen is dim (it doesn't always happen), they aren't exactly killer issues. I've used PCs which have such behaviour as standard!
Having said that, I'd still advantage of any replacement programme - the issues I've found are like nasty, pus-filled pimples on the face of an angel. They're a bit
For something which doesn't hard-crash recent versions of Quicktime, you might prefer the official Xiph.Org QuickTime Components. I haven't seen an official Universal build for use on Intel-based Macs, but I'm sure that's just around the corner.
My favourite game reviews site is probably Eurogamer - surprisingly, it's Europe-centric (conveniently for me), and I've found that the reviews (and previews) are usually well worth reading. It's helped get me to broaden my gaming horizons a bit, too - I bought Darwinia on the basis of the Eurogamer review, and found it to be one of the best games I've ever played.
As for GameSpy, someone from one of their sub-sites recently asked if they could make my MINERVA mod the level-of-the-week, or something. Unfortunately, there was a corporate-mandated requirement - that in the review, there had to be a Fileplanet download link.
To their credit, they did ask (the MINERVA terms of distribution coincidentally forbid mirroring on subscription-based download sites without permission) - but awkwardly for them, I said no. Citing a sheer distaste for Fileplanet, its queues, its Win32-Internet-Explorer-only download system, etc.
I never got a reply. And I've yet to see a review!
Still, it's hard for me to type a message that would denegrate Against A Dark Background (for one line 2/3rds of the way through the book) ...
... the night sky?
... energy, I reckon he should write some more short stories. Get down on to paper some of those ideas I'm sure will be furtively scurrying around in darkened corners of that messed up brain of his... ;-)
Which line would that be? I have a suspicion I know what it might be, anyhow. Something to do with
I liked The Algebraist - I don't think it was my favourite book of his (that's between Use of Weapons, Inversions and Feersum Endjinn), but I did think it had a bit more weight than Look To Windward, which had some great ideas (dirigible behemothaurs!) but kind of ran flat at the end.
Back to the Algebraist, for some obscure reason it really reminded me of the Crow Road, albeit set in a giant EU-style galactic empire. I wasn't convinced by the Dwellers, though - I'd been expecting something more genuinely inscrutable like the aforementioned behemothaurs. But if a sequel ever appears, I'll definitely go off to buy it as soon as it's available!
For regaining that missing
What do you Sci-Fi buffs make of Stephen Baxter? Just curious...
... derivative. Recycling ideas from his previous work, and from films - there seemed to be whole chunks lifted from the Andromeda Strain.
;-)
I really liked some of his earlier stuff (Raft and Flux were great, and his collected short stories were good fun), but the last book of his I read (I forget the name, 'Manifold Time', or something) seemed
Still, I highly recommend Flux - I don't recall anyone else writing a book about humans living inside a neutron star, swimming freely in the superfluid below its crust...
Iain M. Banks.
;-)
I can't watch any news about the western world's increasingly paranoid and delusional wars any more without being reminded that, in warfare, the biggest danger is of becoming indistinguishable from your enemy.
Oh, and Eric Blair. Not a science fiction author, but wrote a certain book which is still a brilliant work of science fiction in my eyes. Of the Ballard-style observation of a civilisation readjusted in some horrifically plausible manner...
Excellent idea, but it really needs a catchy name to take off, something, well, friendly... How about "Amiga"?
;-)
;-) )
Well, the Amiga kind of took off at first, but then stalled, nose-dived and then smashed headlong into a concrete car-park, belching huge clouds of black smoke from its wrecked carcass.
Except, nobody really noticed, apart from a couple of people who are still fighting tooth-and-nail over the shredded remnants of cadavers thrown from the wreckage, insistent that any second now, the Amiga will be reborn and the followers of modern hardware shall cower in terror...
Having specialised hardware is great, except when you suddenly realise the hardware design is cack, and not really suited to ongoing expansion. If the Amiga had any future, it would only have been through abandoning the implementations behind most of its original 'innovations'.
(Oh, and in case you're wondering whose side I'm on: Atari ST forever!!!1
Actually, when the game moved to the Xbox the engine was almost completely rewritten - it went from being a slightly naff heightfield based effort on the PC and Mac to a rather nifty arbitrary geometry renderer on the Xbox.
;-)
As for the apparent lack of performance on the eventual PC port of Halo when it was released - that could have something to do with the original Xbox version of the game being designed to take full advantage of the hardware it was running on. On the Xbox, you got ~30fps at 640x480 on approximately a GeForce 3.5, yet people expected the game to somehow magically run at silly resolutions on roughly equivalent PC hardware.
Lots of computationally expensive shaders, and all that.
There are many valid criticisms of Halo and its eventual port to the PC, but bizarre conspiracy theories don't really work when you look at the game's evolution. A game which languished in development hell for years, with no real direction to it - suddenly being given a powerful new games platform and a huge budget (and deadline) to work with. All things considered, it's amazing it turned out as well as it did.
Shame about the bloated, ending-less sequel and its years-overdue, deliberately limited platform PC port...
Actually, I think Strong Bad would love the ability to retrieve deleted emails... ;-)
For Tron's special effects -- The Super Foonly F-1. I bet it had a phat exhaust, blue downlighting, a killer sound system with a 16 inch subwoofer, and a stylish fibreglass skirt fitted to the front of the reel-to-reel cabinet.
... And Professor Frink at the controls. M'hey!
Are you by any chance the dude who created the Minerva mod? I see the link in your tag...... is that you?
:-)
Unfortunately, yes - and since I'm frequently on business trips abroad, and thus away from my desktop PC, I'd really like the ability to do MINERVA stuff without having to lug extra hardware around too.
Also, the MacBook's considerably higher-spec than my desktop PC anyway.
The only thing to complain about is the high price of non-OEM Windows. If you want to run Windows games on your Mac, you still have to pay a few hundred dollars for Windows XP to run them on.
;-)
Or you could, y'know, buy an OEM copy...
(For that route, you still need to buy new hardware. Although a mouse is classified as an 'integral system component'. I need a new mouse anyway - this Logitech effort looks a bit manky.)
Why?
Games.
Stuff like VMWare will do a great job of running applications, but for stuff that requires access to modern hardware, dual-booting is probably the only real answer.
I've been doing it for years on my PC, after all - serious stuff gets done in Linux, but when I want to mess around with modding Half-Life 2 then I quickly reboot into Windows XP, and instantly get 100% software compatibility. If something gave me the ability to dual-boot my new MacBook in a similar manner, then that would be great - I'd essentially have both a Mac and a PC in one shiny laptop case.
This latest news makes me happy - it's like I bought a very fast Mac, then just over two weeks later I received a very fast PC of equivalent specs for free. What is there to complain about?
Have you ever tried to scroll through a few hundred photos in Picassa?
:-)
Yes, I have scrolled through nearly a thousand photos in Picasa. On a 333MHz machine with 192MB of memory. Running Windows 98.
All I can say is that I wish iPhoto could do things as smoothly, even on far faster hardware.
You forgot the Tile Game!