One of my aims in life has been to construct a properly redundant RAID array of inexpensive disks - namely, floppy disks!
Floppy drives are really cheap at the moment, so it shouldn't be too difficult to build up a decent amount of storage. Also, it should be possible to build a custom interface so that the whole assembly can be connected to one of these modern iPod things - I'm guessing you could add several hundred megabytes of storage in this manner and still have something fairly portable.
Any thoughts? I'd really like to get this project off the ground, so to speak!
I'm carrying on playing, because this is potentially very, very cool technology indeed.
It's interesting, but more in a dog which can talk kind of way. It's not what the dog has to say, it's the fact that it can talk at all.
There's some fairly impressive AJAX stuff about, but if you were to consider, say, the Google Maps interface as an offline, desktop application, it's not so great. Look at Google Earth as an example of what can be done in a modern application - similar data, a considerably more advanced interface. Try doing that in DHTML.
The main, useful aspects of AJAX applications are that you don't need to download and install a particular program, they're (by definition) network-connected and multi-user, are vaguely cross-platform and can be used simply by going to a particular web page. For some things, such as webmail, this is great - for others, like the linked word-processor and spreadsheet, the whole thing seems more like a giant hack.
I remember there being loads of work-in-progress office suites based on Java some years ago, and they seem to have almost completely died out - despite Java being a considerably more capable platform than DHTML.
If you want to use advanced software on the move, buy a laptop or install VNC or something. AJAX is useful, but it's not some grand panacea which will solve all the world's problems...
You do realise a significant proportion of high-end CAD and film animation is done using Linux workstations?
They've kind of pushed out the old SGI boxes in that they're (a) considerably cheaper, and (b) considerably faster. Have a random example from Google...
I am a voice in their choir... the Many sings to us...
Argh! I really liked how the fear-factor in SS2 worked on numerous levels - there was the usual darkness-with-monsters, zombies and so on, but also the horrible sense that you were utterly alone, surrounded by the subverted, horribly repurposed shells of your former colleagues. Most disturbingly, they were obviously still conscious of what they were doing, but the Many had turned them completely... Ugh.
As for a game making me cry - the closest any game has got so far is Darwinia. Yeah, its age rating is '7+', but learning about what had happened to the victims of the Soul Destroyers at the end really got to me. There's also a piece of text in one of the intros (a modified Conway's game of life with built-in, guaranteed extinction) which made me shiver. Something along the lines of 'it was agreed by all on the Darwinia Digital Life project that the Darwinians should be taught as soon as possible the meaning of their own mortality', with the writhing grid of green Darwinians in the background slowly fading away to nothing...
There's already a Pirates, Vikings and Knights mod for Half-Life 2. I think someone didn't follow your game-generation rules properly...
P.S.: Yarrrr!
Re:Looks... pretty much the same as everything els
on
Review: Darkwatch
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There is plenty of space to innovate on current hardware, but developers insist on pushing polygons over promoting plot.
It's often not even polygons new PC games are pushing - rather, intensive shader operations are used for surfaces like plain walls when a bog-standard texture would do.
I thought about this a lot when I played the demo for F.E.A.R. a few weeks ago. Despite crushing my not-cutting-edge Geforce 6600 under its boot, it still didn't exactly look pretty, and didn't manage environments beyond horrendously cliched, incredibly simple alleys and corridors. I think there was also a small warehouse in there too.
Deus Ex: Invisible War did something similar. Where the first game had some pretty huge, nonlinear maps, its sequel had tiny, cramped levels with a couple of characters wandering round. But it had completely real-time lighting, so that makes things okay! Apparently.
I've got a fairly powerful PC. It can run older games at ridiculous framerates and resolutions. I'd much rather developers made better use of the resources available, and presented gamers with good design rather than graphical buzzwords. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't bother with stencil lighting, expensive shader operations or whatever, a typical, generic PC of today could manage some gigantic maps - a whole city block instead of a few alleys, crowds instead of two or three characters, a decent-sized island instead of a Rockall-with-trees.
Or whatever. I still reckon today's incredible hardware is wasted on rendering corridors and crates...;-)
First and formost are the crashes, I mean come on some times I only get 20 or 30 minutes of work in and it crashes.
Have you considered purchasing a new computer?;-)
I've had The GIMP 2.2.6 running for weeks on end on my iBook. The only things that will stop it are me quitting it for a reboot because of a system update, or Mac OS X hard-crashing*. Otherwise, it's now very solid.
It used to be a bit crashy when using the text tool, but I haven't seen that one for a while, possibly since I upgraded to Tiger...
(* Celestia still does that if I don't disable a lot of OpenGL features, I got a kernel panic when using the modem once, and it didn't resume when I closed the machine up while compiling a gigantic panorama in Hugin and enblend. Oops!)
Powerful open source applications? Have you tried doing anything in GIMP on a Macintosh? It will only run through Apple's X11.app, and it makes a 386 running Windows XP look fast.
It's pretty terrible when you're trying to open large images on a Mac with very little memory (I used it on my iBook when it had 256MB and it was slow).
Since I bumped up the memory to 640MB and The GIMP's tile cache to something like 400MB, it's a whole lot faster. It still gets bogged down when working on gigabyte-sized, many-layered panoramas but I think that's more the iBook's very slow hard disk at fault.
As for this 'GimpShop' thing - is there any chance of something to convert Photoshop into something more usable for us GIMP users? Admittedly I've never had any problems in brief uses of Photoshop after years of absence (embarrassingly, I'm usually better with it than the actual owner of the software) but the really quaint, 'friendly' filter and tool names amuse me.
But I'm sure that Adobe couldn't change said names to something more correct, since the millions of dribbling idiots^W^W Photoshop experts would raise a public outcry!;-)
Seriously, theyve been talking about this SINGLE LEVEL for quite long enough.
I think the current conspiracy theory is that they're having to wait until ATI releases graphics cards capable of running it in all its Pixel Shader 3.0 glory. It was originally called the 'ATI level' or something like that - I've no idea if there was some financial deal behind the scenes, but ATI had better bleddy hurry up...
But I never finished the game. Why? Because all the eye candy in the world couldn't make me put up with the frequent yet lengthy loading delays.
... Buy a marginally less crap PC?;-)
I've seen people complaining that the first of my own MINERVA maps takes a couple of minutes to load on less modern PCs (for 30-45 minutes of gameplay - it's a big map) while on my not-cutting-edge-PC it doesn't take long at all.
It does take around four hours to do a full compile of metastasis_1 and a couple of minutes to build cubemaps and the AI network, but you don't get to see that bit. Fortunately...
Part of the problem is that Valve actually tried some of that streaming-content thing in initial versions of HL2, but it would appear that on many lesser PCs the transfer of large amounts of data to and from the hard disk during gameplay caused those notorious audio stuttering effects. So instead, it caches as much as possible when a map's initially loaded. It takes longer, but you don't get the pops and farts whenever you see a new texture, hear a new sound or fight a new monster.
Ok, so I can see how "d" gives you d-link, but how the heck did "s" become McDonalds?!?!
At a guess, it's matching the apostrophe-S at the end of 'McDonald's'. There are other sites like 'Hoover's' and 'Tom's Hardware Guide' in there as well; presumably the processed animal-tissue-derived foodstuffs vendor has the higher page-rank, or something like that.
The Firefox 'feature' can be very annoying. At one point I had a broken desktop shortcut in some Linux distribution which meant that Firefox always started up with some odd, dodgy-looking generic e-business portal-type page, without it being specified in any configuration file or similar. It turned out it was doing the single-letter search thing, and wasn't a case of the Mozilla Foundation selling out after all.
Re:Nope, Not offtopic!! Re:What the fuck is Galler
on
Gallery 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So that those who prefer SP games don't get their hopes up,
IT'S MULTIPLAYER ONLY
Of course, if you want some single-player HL2, there's always my episodic MINERVA (less cryptic site), which had its first chapter released just over a week ago.
And yes, the first map is a bit of a homage to Halo's Silent Cartographer (it was originally nicknamed 'Flatulent Geographer' for a start), but they should all come with a liberally Marathon-flavoured dollop of mystery and intrigue, through text messages sent by an unnamed third party which guide, goad and cajole the player through the story.
Entirely different approach to Dystopia too: while they've got some immensely talented modellers, texture artists, sound engineers etc., I'm repurposing existing HL2 content for my own needs. There is some new music, but that was an unexpected gift from someone who really liked the look of the mod when first publicised by Valve themselves. Everything else is done by me - it's the closest you'll get to a one-man mod these days...;-)
Still, there's half-an-hour to an hour of gameplay there, so do have fun!
There's a prime-time television programme in the UK called 'It's Me or the Dog' - one of the never-ending succession of formats involving things like unruly children and the taming thereof, unhygienic students and the fumigation thereof, infectious kitchens and the incineration thereof, ad nauseam...
It's sponsored by 'Nintendogs'. I've no idea if the game's even available in the UK yet - but I still couldn't help but think of Penny Arcade's approach...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
$5 is probably a heck of a lot more than they make off the commercials one person sees during an episode ...
;-)
Yes. It quite probably is.
One of my aims in life has been to construct a properly redundant RAID array of inexpensive disks - namely, floppy disks!
Floppy drives are really cheap at the moment, so it shouldn't be too difficult to build up a decent amount of storage. Also, it should be possible to build a custom interface so that the whole assembly can be connected to one of these modern iPod things - I'm guessing you could add several hundred megabytes of storage in this manner and still have something fairly portable.
Any thoughts? I'd really like to get this project off the ground, so to speak!
Germany runs the name services for .dk
Poor Denmark!
It does look like hot hardware to me - I think this is what the 'blistering' refers to.
Just make sure your PC has adequate cooling and is kept away from flammable items!
OK smart-ass, how do I play it on my MacOS X platform?
I doubt anyone's going to read this, but try downloading the MacOS X Bink player and opening the EXE with it.
I played one of the old Half-Life 2 Bink videos on my Linux machine like that a while ago, so I presume it'll work in a similar manner...
I'm carrying on playing, because this is potentially very, very cool technology indeed.
It's interesting, but more in a dog which can talk kind of way. It's not what the dog has to say, it's the fact that it can talk at all.
There's some fairly impressive AJAX stuff about, but if you were to consider, say, the Google Maps interface as an offline, desktop application, it's not so great. Look at Google Earth as an example of what can be done in a modern application - similar data, a considerably more advanced interface. Try doing that in DHTML.
The main, useful aspects of AJAX applications are that you don't need to download and install a particular program, they're (by definition) network-connected and multi-user, are vaguely cross-platform and can be used simply by going to a particular web page. For some things, such as webmail, this is great - for others, like the linked word-processor and spreadsheet, the whole thing seems more like a giant hack.
I remember there being loads of work-in-progress office suites based on Java some years ago, and they seem to have almost completely died out - despite Java being a considerably more capable platform than DHTML.
If you want to use advanced software on the move, buy a laptop or install VNC or something. AJAX is useful, but it's not some grand panacea which will solve all the world's problems...
Someone is smoking some heavy things at microsoft...
..."
I think this site should be used as a counter-example whenever Microsoft is suggested as a solution to anything.
"Upgrading to the latest version of Office
"LOOK! PSYCHEDELIC TALKING RABBITS!"
"... ASP.NET would be an ideal platform for - "
"LOOK! THE RABBITS! THIS ONE LIKES CARROTS!"
And so on. The whole site is embarrassing...
Why would a Linux user need a 3D graphics card?
You do realise a significant proportion of high-end CAD and film animation is done using Linux workstations?
They've kind of pushed out the old SGI boxes in that they're (a) considerably cheaper, and (b) considerably faster. Have a random example from Google...
There is Malicious Code in Parents Sig. Conforming to his sig will cause chaos to your web browser and all unsaved work will be lost.*
;-)
...
Yet again in computer security, Apple is ahead of the pack!
(Presses Control-W multiple times on his iBook, yet nothing happens...)
Hmm. What's this Apple key for?
I am a voice in their choir ... the Many sings to us ...
Argh! I really liked how the fear-factor in SS2 worked on numerous levels - there was the usual darkness-with-monsters, zombies and so on, but also the horrible sense that you were utterly alone, surrounded by the subverted, horribly repurposed shells of your former colleagues. Most disturbingly, they were obviously still conscious of what they were doing, but the Many had turned them completely... Ugh.
As for a game making me cry - the closest any game has got so far is Darwinia. Yeah, its age rating is '7+', but learning about what had happened to the victims of the Soul Destroyers at the end really got to me. There's also a piece of text in one of the intros (a modified Conway's game of life with built-in, guaranteed extinction) which made me shiver. Something along the lines of 'it was agreed by all on the Darwinia Digital Life project that the Darwinians should be taught as soon as possible the meaning of their own mortality', with the writhing grid of green Darwinians in the background slowly fading away to nothing...
Or if you're feeling particularly adventurous, try Fahrenheit instead.
...
:-]
Yeah, it's the same game, just not trimmed for American prudes.
There's already a Pirates, Vikings and Knights mod for Half-Life 2. I think someone didn't follow your game-generation rules properly...
P.S.: Yarrrr!
There is plenty of space to innovate on current hardware, but developers insist on pushing polygons over promoting plot.
;-)
It's often not even polygons new PC games are pushing - rather, intensive shader operations are used for surfaces like plain walls when a bog-standard texture would do.
I thought about this a lot when I played the demo for F.E.A.R. a few weeks ago. Despite crushing my not-cutting-edge Geforce 6600 under its boot, it still didn't exactly look pretty, and didn't manage environments beyond horrendously cliched, incredibly simple alleys and corridors. I think there was also a small warehouse in there too.
Deus Ex: Invisible War did something similar. Where the first game had some pretty huge, nonlinear maps, its sequel had tiny, cramped levels with a couple of characters wandering round. But it had completely real-time lighting, so that makes things okay! Apparently.
I've got a fairly powerful PC. It can run older games at ridiculous framerates and resolutions. I'd much rather developers made better use of the resources available, and presented gamers with good design rather than graphical buzzwords. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't bother with stencil lighting, expensive shader operations or whatever, a typical, generic PC of today could manage some gigantic maps - a whole city block instead of a few alleys, crowds instead of two or three characters, a decent-sized island instead of a Rockall-with-trees.
Or whatever. I still reckon today's incredible hardware is wasted on rendering corridors and crates...
First and formost are the crashes, I mean come on some times I only get 20 or 30 minutes of work in and it crashes.
;-)
Have you considered purchasing a new computer?
I've had The GIMP 2.2.6 running for weeks on end on my iBook. The only things that will stop it are me quitting it for a reboot because of a system update, or Mac OS X hard-crashing*. Otherwise, it's now very solid.
It used to be a bit crashy when using the text tool, but I haven't seen that one for a while, possibly since I upgraded to Tiger...
(* Celestia still does that if I don't disable a lot of OpenGL features, I got a kernel panic when using the modem once, and it didn't resume when I closed the machine up while compiling a gigantic panorama in Hugin and enblend. Oops!)
Gimp has skew/stretch distor thing that is pretty nice. It renders a grid in real time over the layer so you can see what it will look like.
That's changed a bit - it'll now do real-time distortions of the image itself!
I think Photoshop has something similar, but stupidly hidden^W^W very usefully placed in the 'Crop' tool or something like that...
Powerful open source applications? Have you tried doing anything in GIMP on a Macintosh? It will only run through Apple's X11.app, and it makes a 386 running Windows XP look fast.
;-)
It's pretty terrible when you're trying to open large images on a Mac with very little memory (I used it on my iBook when it had 256MB and it was slow).
Since I bumped up the memory to 640MB and The GIMP's tile cache to something like 400MB, it's a whole lot faster. It still gets bogged down when working on gigabyte-sized, many-layered panoramas but I think that's more the iBook's very slow hard disk at fault.
As for this 'GimpShop' thing - is there any chance of something to convert Photoshop into something more usable for us GIMP users? Admittedly I've never had any problems in brief uses of Photoshop after years of absence (embarrassingly, I'm usually better with it than the actual owner of the software) but the really quaint, 'friendly' filter and tool names amuse me.
But I'm sure that Adobe couldn't change said names to something more correct, since the millions of dribbling idiots^W^W Photoshop experts would raise a public outcry!
Would you perform any critical action (open heart surgery, nuclear power plant control,...) based on Wikipedia's information?
... At least, I would if my doctors let me near sharp cutlery. :'-(
I have, and I'd do it again!
Seriously, theyve been talking about this SINGLE LEVEL for quite long enough.
;-)
I think the current conspiracy theory is that they're having to wait until ATI releases graphics cards capable of running it in all its Pixel Shader 3.0 glory. It was originally called the 'ATI level' or something like that - I've no idea if there was some financial deal behind the scenes, but ATI had better bleddy hurry up...
Sincerely, an Nvidia user.
But I never finished the game. Why? Because all the eye candy in the world couldn't make me put up with the frequent yet lengthy loading delays.
... Buy a marginally less crap PC? ;-)
I've seen people complaining that the first of my own MINERVA maps takes a couple of minutes to load on less modern PCs (for 30-45 minutes of gameplay - it's a big map) while on my not-cutting-edge-PC it doesn't take long at all.
It does take around four hours to do a full compile of metastasis_1 and a couple of minutes to build cubemaps and the AI network, but you don't get to see that bit. Fortunately...
Part of the problem is that Valve actually tried some of that streaming-content thing in initial versions of HL2, but it would appear that on many lesser PCs the transfer of large amounts of data to and from the hard disk during gameplay caused those notorious audio stuttering effects. So instead, it caches as much as possible when a map's initially loaded. It takes longer, but you don't get the pops and farts whenever you see a new texture, hear a new sound or fight a new monster.
Unless you have a really poor PC!
Ok, so I can see how "d" gives you d-link, but how the heck did "s" become McDonalds?!?!
At a guess, it's matching the apostrophe-S at the end of 'McDonald's'. There are other sites like 'Hoover's' and 'Tom's Hardware Guide' in there as well; presumably the processed animal-tissue-derived foodstuffs vendor has the higher page-rank, or something like that.
The Firefox 'feature' can be very annoying. At one point I had a broken desktop shortcut in some Linux distribution which meant that Firefox always started up with some odd, dodgy-looking generic e-business portal-type page, without it being specified in any configuration file or similar. It turned out it was doing the single-letter search thing, and wasn't a case of the Mozilla Foundation selling out after all.
Try the second sentence of the article summary?
So that those who prefer SP games don't get their hopes up,
;-)
IT'S MULTIPLAYER ONLY
Of course, if you want some single-player HL2, there's always my episodic MINERVA (less cryptic site), which had its first chapter released just over a week ago.
And yes, the first map is a bit of a homage to Halo's Silent Cartographer (it was originally nicknamed 'Flatulent Geographer' for a start), but they should all come with a liberally Marathon-flavoured dollop of mystery and intrigue, through text messages sent by an unnamed third party which guide, goad and cajole the player through the story.
Entirely different approach to Dystopia too: while they've got some immensely talented modellers, texture artists, sound engineers etc., I'm repurposing existing HL2 content for my own needs. There is some new music, but that was an unexpected gift from someone who really liked the look of the mod when first publicised by Valve themselves. Everything else is done by me - it's the closest you'll get to a one-man mod these days...
Still, there's half-an-hour to an hour of gameplay there, so do have fun!
The point of mods is that you can make whatever you want to.
;-)
But ideally not using somebody else's trademarks and intellectual property (yes, a dirty, dirty phrase!) without permission.
I really liked games such as Marathon and System Shock. But you don't see me making Marathon: Source or something equally silly...
There's a prime-time television programme in the UK called 'It's Me or the Dog' - one of the never-ending succession of formats involving things like unruly children and the taming thereof, unhygienic students and the fumigation thereof, infectious kitchens and the incineration thereof, ad nauseam...
;-)
It's sponsored by 'Nintendogs'. I've no idea if the game's even available in the UK yet - but I still couldn't help but think of Penny Arcade's approach...
By 'editors', I mean 'editors of 1UP', of course. Duh me!
Have a biggie:
Biggie no. 1: Valve want a new HL2 episode every 3 months and a seasonal box set of them for 56kers and philistines.