At my secondary school, connected to a bunch of crumbling Acorn Archimedes computers were some rather cool trackballs. Enormous things (a fair bit taller than the keyboard and deeper too) with giant balls about 5cm diameter. (Fnar.)
The angular momentum involved meant you could flick the ball with your fingers and have the mouse pointer spin right across the screen, at which point you'd put your fingers back on to it to stop. This came complete with a rumbling noise akin to a higher-pitched Raiders of the Lost Ark big-crushing-stone-ball.
Can you still do this with modern trackballs (the ones I've used since have been tiny and hopeless)? The miniaturisation of computer technology is terribly disappointing...
Say you create a PowerPoint presentation and then open it in OpenOffice or NeoOffice or whatever, it then is mangled by the program. You save it in its mangled state and then open it on PowerPoint again. This mangles it even more.
Actually, it was more a comment on the horrific aesthetic sense of some of the people producing the documents. I would have been happy with a '+1 teh Funney' but the moderators thought otherwise...:-)
what was more embarrassing is how badly open office mangled the powerpoint presentation, and you KNOW it did.
Powerpoint presentations usually look pretty mangled anyway. I had endless problems with NeoOffice/J seemingly scrambling the formatting of work-related presentations, documents and so on, until I borrowed a Windows machine with Microsoft Office and discovered that was how the documents were supposed to look...;-)
Obviously it only affects a lower class of user. I, with excellent karma, have all sorts of benefits made available to me, merely starting with the absence of any 'captcha' images when posting comments.
A 'Post Comment' page for one of us elite users is a wondrous sight, bedecked with jewels, carefully sculpted ornamentation, additional, powerful checkboxes and radio buttons... Ah! But you are too lowly to even comprehend such things.
Wasn't Natural Selection supposed to be the most anticipated HL2 mod? Is it me or is the mod community really slow with any HL2 addons?
Well, given that everyone has to figure out how all the new modding stuff works, practice with it, learn how to make the higher-quality content expected for Source, actually produce said content, test it, program stuff, design, alter, monkey around and generally do a full-time job in whatever free time they have available, I don't think things are going too badly...;-)
Oh come on! There should have been a panorama of inside the citadel. It was my favourite part and it has ammazing design and graphics.
*SPOILERS AHOY!*
The two 'train' rides in the citadel were probably my favourite sections of the game by far - atmospheric, utterly terrifying, and startlingly well-designed.
I'd read a review before playing the game which quietly alluded to this section - while playing, I assumed there'd be a train ride back from Nova Prospect into a war-torn City 17 (now that could have been pretty cool!) but got something entirely different instead.
I think these VRMAG panoramas are interesting in that they're on a non-games site, so many non-gamers are likely to have seen them - it could be nice to know what some of the reactions were. A lot of people seem to assume computer games are either slightly advanced versions of Space Invaders or sub-Tolkien wizards-and-elves trawls devoid of artistic merit, but the panoramas are a rather sexy way of demonstrating otherwise, alongside various other pieces of art and photography...
But, the data is sorted into accounts in such a way that I don't think you can simply copy the folder from Program Files to a friend and have them login under their own account...
You can copy stuff directly - I think it's just a matter of copying the whole Steam installation (via Ethernet, carrier-pigeon, floppy disk, IP-over-flatulence, whatever), deleting clientregistry.blob, starting Steam again and logging in with the new account.
Oh, one more thing -- if you're going to embed stuff, embed GOOD stuff. Do NOT depend on Internet Explorer.
Okay, so I loathe IE with a passion, but it's probably a better idea to rely on something that's guaranteed to be available on all Windows machines than an optional 3rd-party browser like Firefox, or including a potentially-outdated Mozilla rendering engine.
The above managed to stay in my head for the best part of a week, and should be capable of displacing absolutely anything. Amarillo has nothing in comparison.
it does look a bit too good as well and quite possibly prerendered/composited...
I've had a look at the Gran Turismo trailer, and while it's impressive it actually looks like it could be capable of being rendered in real-time. The lighting looks pretty straightforward (when a car goes into shade, the whole car seems to get darker, for instance), the shadows (cast against the ground) are slightly soft, but no harder than e.g. HL2's, the pit-lane staff are distinctly low-polygon, etc.
The Gran Turismo 'difficulty' looks more to be of content production rather than rendering. The motion-blur is an expensive effect, and it'll be interesting to see if it makes it into final PS3 games, but there doesn't seem to be anything inherently impossible on view. The Grand Canyon might be some high-quality photo-sourced textures mapped on to a very low-poly mesh - it's probably more like a 3D skybox than anything 'real'.
If GT was pre-rendered, it's still likely to be a fairly good indication of how a final game could look.
And to Killzone. Straight off, there's volumetric clouds, ultra-detailed face textures, non-flat realistic hair, ultra-high-polygon characters casting soft shadows upon each other and their vehicle, volumetric explosions, an ultra-high-polygon city from above, characters casting incredibly soft shadows from indirect light, looking more radiosity-based than anything else, character animations which are absolutely perfect for the action, etc...
The only problems I could see where rather simplistic lighting from the 'burning' soldiers under the bridge, and odd lighting on the buggy near them - everything else, though, looked just a bit too good to be true.
The GT demo looks 'possible'. The Killzone one, unfortunately, looks 'unlikely' for a mere next-generation console. I'd love to be proved wrong, but it does seem a bit dubious...:-/
it was also pointed out (by KDR_11k (778916)) that it's being argued if the trailer is pre-rendered or in-game here
There's even a still from the video showing 3D animation compositing errors - ooer...
The reason I'm so intrigued by all this is because I saw a 'PS3' screenshot in the mainstream news. The graphics nerd in me thought 'that's a bit good', so I had to investigate - it seems it was indeed a bit too good to be true...;-)
Except they look a bit too good. Almost, dare I say it, pre-rendered. Has Sony done the ultimate and presented a completely non-PS3, non-game 3D animation as actual gameplay?
An aside: I remember reading once that Jeff had got into this stuff after reading a book by the guy who did the visual effects in the trippy scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Does anyone remember the name of that book? I have a nasty deeling it's out of print now...
Dude. I've been around gaming since PONG, and I've never heard of either of those games!
I think Mr. Yak's problems are that he has an uncanny knack of choosing hardware platforms which are doomed to utter failure.
Witness his numerous games for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and then the Atari-commissioned Llamazap for the Falcon 030. If you've never heard of that particular Atari computer, then that should indicate how successful it was.
He wrote Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. Then another version for the Nuon. Which you've probably not heard of either. Oh, and he was working on Unity for the Nintendo Gamecube, but presumably some Nintendo bigwigs sensed that impending-doom vibe - the game got cancelled instead of the console.
So, basically, Minter on Xbox 360 means that the Xbox is going to die a horrible, horrible death in the marketplace...;-)
It seems to me that each project should feel free to proceed as they see fit. Who knows, maybe in the future Apple will come back to KHTML in order to get that stable base again.
I hope so. I've found bugs in Safari's rendering which aren't in recent Konqueror releases - one I've seen a lot involves CSS-defined borders on table cells creeping out from where they're supposed to be.
Here's a rather nasty example I've plucked from a site I've worked on - excuse the awful HTML!
On Safari 1.3 on MacOS X 10.3.9, there's a green line which extends right along the top of the large month cell at the bottom - this doesn't happen in IE, Firefox or (last time I checked) Konqueror.
It sounds unlikely that Apple's WebCore will ever be 'synced' back to KDE's KHTML, sadly, and they do sound as if they're diverging pretty quickly...
Imagine some cretin in the cattle-class seats on a jet trying to open one of these things up.
If you ever do have to put up with such behaviour, just be thankful that the aforementioned cretin will most likely get somewhat comprehensively sterilised thanks to the testicle-toasting heat pumped out by the 'laptop'...
In short half life 2 is very gamer friendly, starting off with extremely simple gameplay and introducing one new gameplay element at a time. You just don't notice it because the game rocks so much, you don't really think about how the game isn't a frag fest from frame 1.
I've been decompiling some of the HL2 maps (in order to learn how various things are done), and I've noticed there's often a lot of very subtle scripting which quietly helps the player along.
As a rough example - relatively early in the game, there's a section where you've had to leave the airboat to open a large lock-gate. You fight your way through, past a Civil Protection outpost containing some armoured cars, and eventually get outside again to where the lock control is, only to discover that it's broken, but instead you notice a pile of explosive barrels next to a large hunk of metal bars suspended from a crane - a battering ram against the lock-gate!
As you go outside, birds fly up from near the barrels making a clattering noise, and you turn to look at them, only to see the barrels. That's scripted, as I found from my decompiling-escapades.
The game's full of small, near-subconscious hints like that. You don't realise quite how much the player is a puppet of the mappers at Valve until you've had a look at the maps in an editor. I find it all terribly impressive, anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Good lord, man. Had to remind myself you were talking about a pointing device, and not a horse!
Just for you, I found a picture of one. Hubba hubba!
(Yes, that's a terribly rare BBC Domesday Machine, not an Archimedes - but it's what my prescient Google keywords turned up...)
At my secondary school, connected to a bunch of crumbling Acorn Archimedes computers were some rather cool trackballs. Enormous things (a fair bit taller than the keyboard and deeper too) with giant balls about 5cm diameter. (Fnar.)
The angular momentum involved meant you could flick the ball with your fingers and have the mouse pointer spin right across the screen, at which point you'd put your fingers back on to it to stop. This came complete with a rumbling noise akin to a higher-pitched Raiders of the Lost Ark big-crushing-stone-ball.
Can you still do this with modern trackballs (the ones I've used since have been tiny and hopeless)? The miniaturisation of computer technology is terribly disappointing...
Say you create a PowerPoint presentation and then open it in OpenOffice or NeoOffice or whatever, it then is mangled by the program. You save it in its mangled state and then open it on PowerPoint again. This mangles it even more.
:-)
Actually, it was more a comment on the horrific aesthetic sense of some of the people producing the documents. I would have been happy with a '+1 teh Funney' but the moderators thought otherwise...
what was more embarrassing is how badly open office mangled the powerpoint presentation, and you KNOW it did.
;-)
Powerpoint presentations usually look pretty mangled anyway. I had endless problems with NeoOffice/J seemingly scrambling the formatting of work-related presentations, documents and so on, until I borrowed a Windows machine with Microsoft Office and discovered that was how the documents were supposed to look...
I relieze that, but why effect logged in users.
Obviously it only affects a lower class of user. I, with excellent karma, have all sorts of benefits made available to me, merely starting with the absence of any 'captcha' images when posting comments.
A 'Post Comment' page for one of us elite users is a wondrous sight, bedecked with jewels, carefully sculpted ornamentation, additional, powerful checkboxes and radio buttons... Ah! But you are too lowly to even comprehend such things.
So, begone!
Wasn't Natural Selection supposed to be the most anticipated HL2 mod? Is it me or is the mod community really slow with any HL2 addons?
;-)
Well, given that everyone has to figure out how all the new modding stuff works, practice with it, learn how to make the higher-quality content expected for Source, actually produce said content, test it, program stuff, design, alter, monkey around and generally do a full-time job in whatever free time they have available, I don't think things are going too badly...
Oh come on! There should have been a panorama of inside the citadel. It was my favourite part and it has ammazing design and graphics.
*SPOILERS AHOY!*
The two 'train' rides in the citadel were probably my favourite sections of the game by far - atmospheric, utterly terrifying, and startlingly well-designed.
I'd read a review before playing the game which quietly alluded to this section - while playing, I assumed there'd be a train ride back from Nova Prospect into a war-torn City 17 (now that could have been pretty cool!) but got something entirely different instead.
I think these VRMAG panoramas are interesting in that they're on a non-games site, so many non-gamers are likely to have seen them - it could be nice to know what some of the reactions were. A lot of people seem to assume computer games are either slightly advanced versions of Space Invaders or sub-Tolkien wizards-and-elves trawls devoid of artistic merit, but the panoramas are a rather sexy way of demonstrating otherwise, alongside various other pieces of art and photography...
While not as big as these, David Johnston has some of his own HL2 Panoramas that I think are a little better.
More importantly, he's found an incredibly straightforward way of creating them. I think I might make use of this trick for my own stuff - thanks!
...The other mainland European countries actually think it's a real contest!
I'm not so sure about that - how else can you explain the success of a certain Dana International a few years ago?
(Yes, Israel won the contest thanks to the performance of a male-to-female transsexual. You can't make this up!)
But, the data is sorted into accounts in such a way that I don't think you can simply copy the folder from Program Files to a friend and have them login under their own account...
;-)
You can copy stuff directly - I think it's just a matter of copying the whole Steam installation (via Ethernet, carrier-pigeon, floppy disk, IP-over-flatulence, whatever), deleting clientregistry.blob, starting Steam again and logging in with the new account.
Oh, one more thing -- if you're going to embed stuff, embed GOOD stuff. Do NOT depend on Internet Explorer.
Okay, so I loathe IE with a passion, but it's probably a better idea to rely on something that's guaranteed to be available on all Windows machines than an optional 3rd-party browser like Firefox, or including a potentially-outdated Mozilla rendering engine.
Although having access to IE does allow for some interesting additions...
I do advise agaist searching for the vid though. Its one of those songs that gets trapped in your brain and remains there for the day.
;-)
Oh, I've heard worse...
The above managed to stay in my head for the best part of a week, and should be capable of displacing absolutely anything. Amarillo has nothing in comparison.
it does look a bit too good as well and quite possibly prerendered/composited...
:-/
I've had a look at the Gran Turismo trailer, and while it's impressive it actually looks like it could be capable of being rendered in real-time. The lighting looks pretty straightforward (when a car goes into shade, the whole car seems to get darker, for instance), the shadows (cast against the ground) are slightly soft, but no harder than e.g. HL2's, the pit-lane staff are distinctly low-polygon, etc.
The Gran Turismo 'difficulty' looks more to be of content production rather than rendering. The motion-blur is an expensive effect, and it'll be interesting to see if it makes it into final PS3 games, but there doesn't seem to be anything inherently impossible on view. The Grand Canyon might be some high-quality photo-sourced textures mapped on to a very low-poly mesh - it's probably more like a 3D skybox than anything 'real'.
If GT was pre-rendered, it's still likely to be a fairly good indication of how a final game could look.
And to Killzone. Straight off, there's volumetric clouds, ultra-detailed face textures, non-flat realistic hair, ultra-high-polygon characters casting soft shadows upon each other and their vehicle, volumetric explosions, an ultra-high-polygon city from above, characters casting incredibly soft shadows from indirect light, looking more radiosity-based than anything else, character animations which are absolutely perfect for the action, etc...
The only problems I could see where rather simplistic lighting from the 'burning' soldiers under the bridge, and odd lighting on the buggy near them - everything else, though, looked just a bit too good to be true.
The GT demo looks 'possible'. The Killzone one, unfortunately, looks 'unlikely' for a mere next-generation console. I'd love to be proved wrong, but it does seem a bit dubious...
it was also pointed out (by KDR_11k (778916)) that it's being argued if the trailer is pre-rendered or in-game here
;-)
There's even a still from the video showing 3D animation compositing errors - ooer...
The reason I'm so intrigued by all this is because I saw a 'PS3' screenshot in the mainstream news. The graphics nerd in me thought 'that's a bit good', so I had to investigate - it seems it was indeed a bit too good to be true...
There's a utterly spectacular Killzone video doing the rounds, along with some rather pretty screenshots.
Except they look a bit too good. Almost, dare I say it, pre-rendered. Has Sony done the ultimate and presented a completely non-PS3, non-game 3D animation as actual gameplay?
What was the point of the Amiga's RF shielding?
Umm... To stop RF getting out?
Not everyone wants to pick up a computer's internal squawks and burps on their television or radio...
I saw an elderly IBM PC at a riding stables once. Basically the whole machine from the monitor down was filled with powdered horse-shit.
Still worked fine, of course.
I've no idea if it was a Model M keyboard attached, but I wouldn't be surprised...
Your nasty example works fine under Tiger Safari 2.0 (412)
Three cheers for the fix, but sadly it sounds like it might have been fixed independently of KDE's KHTML.
It's the possible duplication of effort that seems so unfortunate...
An aside: I remember reading once that Jeff had got into this stuff after reading a book by the guy who did the visual effects in the trippy scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Does anyone remember the name of that book? I have a nasty deeling it's out of print now...
Okay, so it's not the book or its title, but have some Slit-Scan photography, including the 2001 imagery unwrapped!
Dude. I've been around gaming since PONG, and I've never heard of either of those games!
;-)
I think Mr. Yak's problems are that he has an uncanny knack of choosing hardware platforms which are doomed to utter failure.
Witness his numerous games for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga, and then the Atari-commissioned Llamazap for the Falcon 030. If you've never heard of that particular Atari computer, then that should indicate how successful it was.
He wrote Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. Then another version for the Nuon. Which you've probably not heard of either. Oh, and he was working on Unity for the Nintendo Gamecube, but presumably some Nintendo bigwigs sensed that impending-doom vibe - the game got cancelled instead of the console.
So, basically, Minter on Xbox 360 means that the Xbox is going to die a horrible, horrible death in the marketplace...
It seems to me that each project should feel free to proceed as they see fit. Who knows, maybe in the future Apple will come back to KHTML in order to get that stable base again.
I hope so. I've found bugs in Safari's rendering which aren't in recent Konqueror releases - one I've seen a lot involves CSS-defined borders on table cells creeping out from where they're supposed to be.
Here's a rather nasty example I've plucked from a site I've worked on - excuse the awful HTML!
On Safari 1.3 on MacOS X 10.3.9, there's a green line which extends right along the top of the large month cell at the bottom - this doesn't happen in IE, Firefox or (last time I checked) Konqueror.
It sounds unlikely that Apple's WebCore will ever be 'synced' back to KDE's KHTML, sadly, and they do sound as if they're diverging pretty quickly...
Imagine some cretin in the cattle-class seats on a jet trying to open one of these things up.
If you ever do have to put up with such behaviour, just be thankful that the aforementioned cretin will most likely get somewhat comprehensively sterilised thanks to the testicle-toasting heat pumped out by the 'laptop'...
screenshots, anyone?
I installed it on a sacrificial Windows machine, and the results were something like this. Eww!
In short half life 2 is very gamer friendly, starting off with extremely simple gameplay and introducing one new gameplay element at a time. You just don't notice it because the game rocks so much, you don't really think about how the game isn't a frag fest from frame 1.
I've been decompiling some of the HL2 maps (in order to learn how various things are done), and I've noticed there's often a lot of very subtle scripting which quietly helps the player along.
As a rough example - relatively early in the game, there's a section where you've had to leave the airboat to open a large lock-gate. You fight your way through, past a Civil Protection outpost containing some armoured cars, and eventually get outside again to where the lock control is, only to discover that it's broken, but instead you notice a pile of explosive barrels next to a large hunk of metal bars suspended from a crane - a battering ram against the lock-gate!
As you go outside, birds fly up from near the barrels making a clattering noise, and you turn to look at them, only to see the barrels. That's scripted, as I found from my decompiling-escapades.
The game's full of small, near-subconscious hints like that. You don't realise quite how much the player is a puppet of the mappers at Valve until you've had a look at the maps in an editor. I find it all terribly impressive, anyway...
Or perhaps 1 048 576 flaws.
That would be a Mebi-Patch.
Although I have to admit there's no 'maybe' as to whether I should install this latest Apple patch or not - I'm off to get my iBook in a minute...
Please make sure your next generation of processors aren't as atrocious as the Prescott, as AMD is making you look pretty silly right now.'
I still haven't figured out why anyone would want to name a processor after John Prescott, British Deputy PM and Eater of Pies.
What's next? The Intel Widdecombe? The mind boggles.