Really depends on the station. Freeview channels have varying bit-rates. I don't have the exact figures, but I know that the commercial channels use lower bit-rates than the BBC does, in order to squeeze more into a given multiplex (group of channels).
I've noticed some pretty nasty banding effects on smooth gradients and the like on BBC1 - I think the reason it annoys me so much is not that it's a technical limitation, but more that there's precious bandwidth being used for junk like 'Bid-Up TV' and its many, many siblings, ITV 3 and so on. Give Auntie another multiplex (or two), I say...;-)
I don't think DVB is bad, I just feel that its advantages are being buried by designed-by-committee user interfaces and the need to pack in far too many TV channels.
(Having said all that - I know Linux has pretty decent support for certain DVB cards, but which ones are the best? And are there any cheap Firewire or USB tuners I can hook up to either a Linux PC or an iBook? Thanks!)
The price of the boxes has fallen to below £50 and the convenience they bring - such as electronic program guides and reminders, plus the significant improvement in picture and audio quality, makes them worthwhile.
My dad's got a supposedly very good Philips thing. It's a bastard to use - it took me a few moments to figure out how to switch it on (the power button on the remote control merely switches it off), it's a pain to set the video to record stuff through it, and there are so many buttons and different aspects to the UI that it's terribly confusing to anyone who isn't a 5-year-old genius.
Also, the picture quality isn't quite as good as it's cracked up to be. It's definitely better than a bad analogue picture, but it's nowhere near good analogue reception thanks to all the blocking artefacts on fast-moving stuff. Plus it's highly susceptible to interference, too...
The user-interface aspect is likely to be a big problem for some older people, who will have figured out push-button presents for all the channels on their current telly, but who would be absolutely lost when confronted with a multi-page programme guide, on-screen indicators for new channels, sub-pictures, interactivity and whatnot. And a remote control absolutely bristling with buttons.
I recently had to write up some instructions for my grandmother on how to activate the teletext subtitles on her new (analogue) telly. Subtitles are improved with a digital box (once you get your head around the idea of there being two remote controls, each with channel-changing and volume-changing ability) but there are so many other bits and pieces present to confuse people...:-/
Of course, it's also to the UK (and I guess the US's) government's benefit, since by switching off early they can sell of the frequencies earlier, and get cash sooner.
I'm wondering what is going to happen to the area of the radio spectrum previously used by analogue television when it is finally switched off - there must be a decent amount of bandwidth there, and I seriously doubt it'll be allowed to fester.
Higher bitrates for DVB (the current blocking artefacts on BBC1 etc. are ridiculous)? More digital TV channels? A big sell-off for (my hypothetical) 4G mobile phones, making £zillions for the government and near-bankrupting the over-zealous mobile phone companies again?
Still, a form of DVB which doesn't suffer from massive corruption when a lawnmower's running would be nice - it'll be annoying not having the analogue stuff as a fallback...;-)
Would you say that HL2 has substantially better physics than Halo2?
I haven't played Halo 2 (plus a PC port sounds... unlikely), but its physics would have to be bloody good to compete with Half-Life 2's.
Yes, I know it's a licensed Havok physics engine Valve used, but it's rather nicely integrated into Source. You can do ridiculous things with it in Garry's Mod for instance, like affixing a spinning wheel to each corner of a ragdoll mattress, strapping a rocket booster to it then tying it down to a broken car with rope to stop it flying off.
Okay, HL2 itself doesn't have such ludicrously over-the-top physics simulation examples as the one I've just given, but the game definitely makes intensive use of the physics engine. Basically, if it moves and it's not an animation, it's the CPU-humping Havok at work...;-)
Compare HAlo on PC to HAlo on Xbox, in terms of what you need to run it decently.
Okay - I played the PC version of Halo on the same 1.1GHz Athlon, and it worked very nicely. Highly GPU-intensive, yes (which is why it knackered all those early DX9.0 cards) but on reducing the resolution the framerate was more than acceptable.
On that same PC, HL2 could manage single-figure framerates when looking at a blank wall in certain areas. CPU intensive, anyone?;-)
However, I sincerely do believe that the Xbox is going to have some rather large problems with it. Two things that really stand out about Half Life 2 is the AI and the physics. Regardless of what else you are running on your CPU, it still comes down to the CPU having to process a great deal of physics and AI.
Having originally played through the whole of HL2 on a 1.1GHz Athlon (albeit with a fairly decent graphics card), I can definitely say that a powerful CPU is necessary for the game. Most of it was fine on that computer, but certain areas (such as the friendly squads later in the game, anything with lots of physics and that final strider battle) would really kill the framerate, even if there wasn't actually much geometry on-screen at the time.
Even turning the graphics down to an absolute minimum didn't help - I was still frequently getting below 10fps at certain points. I've no idea how this game will transfer to a 733MHz processor...
As for the graphics making their journey to the Xbox, it's mostly done with high-resolution textures (and lots of them) and lots of geometry. While Xbox games like the original Halo had lots of graphical tricks layering lots of low-res textures into highly detailed composite versions, HL2's method is to have a high-res base texture with a high-res normal map and a high-res specular map (usually the alpha map of the base texture) - it's a bit memory-hungry to say the least!
Turning on texture compression for everything (it's done on a case-by-case basis in HL2 and it's usually switched off for quality reasons), removing a lot of normal maps and reducing the resolution a bit might help, but there's still megabytes of stuff to be dealing with. And then there's the sound as well...
The long load times on the PC are partly due to the silly amounts of data the game has to deal with. I'd 'love' to see it all crammed into 64MB total...;-)
Why is it that no one uses the HTTP authentication mechanism for logins, and instead makes cookies do the job?
Because the standard HTTP authentication mechanism is a bit... Crap?
The standard, most widely supported 'Basic' version makes the browser send the username and password in plaintext on every page request. Okay, without SSL, any login mechanism will transmit the password at least once, but 'Basic' makes it a bit too easy for packet sniffers and the like.
Also, a bit more seriously, there's no standard way of getting the browser to clear its cached username and password beyond quitting the browser completely. It's as if someone entirely forgot that part of the standard, and thus it's a bit annoying.
Cookies are a useful side-route around these problems; I rewrote my standard login system thingy recently to use a cookie containing a username and a long 'hash' string - the password is only transmitted once, then that login session is tied to a specific IP address (or rather, range of addresses to take account of multiple proxy servers and similar). It's hardly hyper-secure, but it's an improvement, and it's far easier to do with cookies than with any standard HTTP authentication.
I do agree that cookies are horribly overused. I only ever set them when I absolutely need to store information client-side (and then it's only ever a reference to stuff stored in a database on the server) - other programmers seem to set as many cookies as they can, in the hope that some might be useful...
When you have a group of people acting as a unified squad, each aware of the other's actions, it's completely engrossing!
Natural Selection can be pretty cool for this, especially when playing as Kharaa (aliens). With all the hive-sight and whatnot (basically a wallhack to locate all your teammates and enemies they can directly see) there can be some amazing, unspoken teamwork emerging - it's great when a horde of skulks burst from cover without warning and annihilate a heavily-armed bunch of marines, without a single word spoken or prompt typed...
I'm not a very good multiplayer gamer - I usually get shot within seconds by some hyperactive twelve-year-old with ultra-fast reflexes. But add a bit of teamwork, and I can actually become useful.:-)
An honest question here --- could someone please explain to me why the action of EnCirca is in transgression of the "spirit of name restrictions"?
I think the point is that before, you'd register megacorp.foo and you'd effectively get all possible sub-domains for free, i.e. www.megacorp.foo, hamstermatic.megacorp.foo, www.gerbilotron.megacorp.foo and so on.
I assume what's happening is that if you register megacorp.pro, you'll need to pay for any additional sub-domains...
The sad thing is, there's not much left that can be done with an FPS other than increase the graphics, level size, number of players/monsters, and fiddle with controls and play styles.
Treat the 'FPS' thing merely as a user interface, and there are loads of possibilities. Wild examples: Deus Ex, System Shocks 1 and 2, Oni (okay, third person but used an FPS control scheme), Natural Selection (a semi-conventional FPS crossed with an RTS), Darwinia (absolutely not an FPS, but uses WASD and mouselook!) - and these are existing examples I've actually played.
I've got an idea for a single-player HL2 mini-mod with no combat whatsoever. First-Person... Something?
I realised a while ago that I can't stand most conventional FPS games. Some I do like - for plot, adventure and setting. You can't really get much more immersive than an FPS, and the control system both is intuitive and can be extended in many different directions. I wouldn't dismiss the FPS so quickly...;-)
It's not been mentioned that HDR effects aren't going to be visible on flatscreen lcd screens, because of the limitations of the brightness scales they can display.
I'm not entirely sure where you're going to get those magical extra bits of additional brightness on a conventional CRT - unless it's a Special HDR Display (tm) with Hyper-Eye-Piercing-O-Matic-Brightness (R) you'll effectively just be splitting that 0-255 range into further sub-levels.
Which would be nice, but a 24-bit output is probably good enough for the time being - and decent LCDs have been 24-bit for a while.
Heh, I recognise the statue in the first photo - I have lunch in that park with friends most days when it's that sunny:-)
Heh. I used to walk underneath the arch on the way to (and from) work, so I've seen it in a rather wide range of different weather conditions. Usually damp; it is Belgium after all.
(And I still reckon City 17 was partially inspired by Brussels, and guess who went on a Grand Texture Expedition before HL2 was announced...)
Basically, lighting in current games has very little range. A seemingly 'dark' room may actually be only slightly dimmer than the bright summer day 'outside'; in the case of lightmaps, it goes from 0 (pitch black) to 255 (as bright as possible). If you've had any experience with photography, you'll know that real life has a much greater range - for example, this was several thousand times brighter than this.
HDR can give back that variation, with lightmaps (or whatever) done with floating point, for a lighting range of 'well, lots'. Various post-processing effects are possible, such as 'bloom' and true motion-blur (specular highlights don't get turned into grey for each sub-frame) - basically, it's a much more realistic model of how light works.
Because output to the monitor is still 0-255 per channel, it gives the player an 'eye' which automatically adjusts to the ambient brightness. So, if you immediately step from a bright, sunny day into a dark monastery (for example), your eyes will need time to adjust.
Hmm. Someone needs to do a Thief-style game with HDR...;-)
Except that the vehicular control runs at a FOV of 90 degrees anyway. Normal, non-vehicle field-of-view is 75 degrees, which seems to be increasingly popular in FPS-style games.
If you want to avoid motion sickness, have a light on in the room (don't play in the dark, freaks!), sit back from the monitor, and stop driving into things. Easy...
I don't play Counter-Strike unless Steam says I can play Counter-Strike. Whether I want to play it or not is a moot point, because the Steam authentication servers have to give me permission either way.
It was like that with the old WON-authenticated Half-Life for online multiplayer stuff.
But everyone seems to forget that, along with the big WON downtimes etc...
Alyx and Barney never gave me a problem, but the squad mates drove me nuts.
I recently finished replaying HL2 with my ultra-cack-handed increased-difficulty tweaks. Somehow, that section of the game became way better. Instead of hundreds of squadmates excusing themselves as I tried pushing past them in narrow corridors, everything became... scarier.
Other things improved too, and I got to see bits of the game I didn't know existed, and saw battles how they were presumably meant to occur. The strider battles became awesomely awesome, for a start, with holes being blown in walls of buildings I thought were invulnerable, etc.
My theory is that HL2 was playtested on people not so familiar with FPS games - for instance, Combine soldiers do take cover and flank the player, but on standard difficulty settings a decent FPS player is likely to have shot them dead beforehand. Bump up the difficulty, and... Woo.:-)
I'd release my 'fixed' difficulty settings mod (basically just a tweaked skill.cfg) but I'm sure there are more numbers in the game DLL that can be 'adjusted'. But I ain't got no Windows C++ compiler - anyone want to help?
Probably the most internally consistent interpretation of the Half-Life storylines is Chan 'Ventro' K.'s summary - plus it sticks to what actually appears in the games and doesn't wander off on flights of fancy.
As for surviving the explosion - if the G-Man can muck about with time for Gordon, I wouldn't be surprised if he were to carefully remove Alyx from the vicinity of the blast as well, even if it's just back to ground-level. The Citadel's quite big, after all - in this 'ere Hammer, Combine_Citadel001.mdl is 8430 units high, and each unit corresponds to 16 inches for a skybox model, so 3.5km could help a bit...
Although I'd definitely run away, very quickly. The thought of accidentally giving a wasps' nest a good kick springs to mind - and the article suggests that some previously-unfought enemies might appear too.;-)
Since computer components run at extremely low power, the radiation shouldn't be an issue.
You joke, but I gather there were minor problems at Jodrell Bank when PCs' clock frequencies (and/or harmonics) happened to coincide with important radio frequencies used for radio astronomy.
As you say, though it's hardly dangerous - but having done an undergraduate experiment there some years ago in which an FFT of pulsar data detected nasty big peaks at 50Hz, 100Hz, 150Hz etc. (mains power...) I'm wondering if all man-made alternating currents should be banned, for aesthetic and scientific reasons...;-)
At this rate soon we will have processors that are capable of rendering real video instead of animation. Or say animation as real as videio footage.
Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors; while 3D graphics hardware has improved at a ridiculous rate over the last couple of years, there's still a long way to go before certain, everyday scenes can be rendered.
Something I'd like would be a 'city-renderer', capable of rendering a decent-sized European city (i.e. not a grid) from aerial views down to individual rooms. While a clever level-of-detail system could go a long way towards this, there would still be an utterly horrendous amount of geometry for a typical skyline shot.
Now add traffic, crowds of humans (typical FPS-style games give up after about ten or so, strategy games use crude mannequins for more), properly reflective surfaces and whatnot, motion blur and decent HDR and your quadruple-SLI Geforce 9000-Hyper-Pro-Matic setup will still grind to a halt.
Things are slowly getting there, but I'm still waiting - but like a gas, FPS-style generic corridors will expand in processing requirements until they saturate even the greatest hardware. Look at Doom 3, for example...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Really depends on the station. Freeview channels have varying bit-rates. I don't have the exact figures, but I know that the commercial channels use lower bit-rates than the BBC does, in order to squeeze more into a given multiplex (group of channels).
;-)
I've noticed some pretty nasty banding effects on smooth gradients and the like on BBC1 - I think the reason it annoys me so much is not that it's a technical limitation, but more that there's precious bandwidth being used for junk like 'Bid-Up TV' and its many, many siblings, ITV 3 and so on. Give Auntie another multiplex (or two), I say...
I don't think DVB is bad, I just feel that its advantages are being buried by designed-by-committee user interfaces and the need to pack in far too many TV channels.
(Having said all that - I know Linux has pretty decent support for certain DVB cards, but which ones are the best? And are there any cheap Firewire or USB tuners I can hook up to either a Linux PC or an iBook? Thanks!)
The price of the boxes has fallen to below £50 and the convenience they bring - such as electronic program guides and reminders, plus the significant improvement in picture and audio quality, makes them worthwhile.
:-/
My dad's got a supposedly very good Philips thing. It's a bastard to use - it took me a few moments to figure out how to switch it on (the power button on the remote control merely switches it off), it's a pain to set the video to record stuff through it, and there are so many buttons and different aspects to the UI that it's terribly confusing to anyone who isn't a 5-year-old genius.
Also, the picture quality isn't quite as good as it's cracked up to be. It's definitely better than a bad analogue picture, but it's nowhere near good analogue reception thanks to all the blocking artefacts on fast-moving stuff. Plus it's highly susceptible to interference, too...
The user-interface aspect is likely to be a big problem for some older people, who will have figured out push-button presents for all the channels on their current telly, but who would be absolutely lost when confronted with a multi-page programme guide, on-screen indicators for new channels, sub-pictures, interactivity and whatnot. And a remote control absolutely bristling with buttons.
I recently had to write up some instructions for my grandmother on how to activate the teletext subtitles on her new (analogue) telly. Subtitles are improved with a digital box (once you get your head around the idea of there being two remote controls, each with channel-changing and volume-changing ability) but there are so many other bits and pieces present to confuse people...
Of course, it's also to the UK (and I guess the US's) government's benefit, since by switching off early they can sell of the frequencies earlier, and get cash sooner.
;-)
I'm wondering what is going to happen to the area of the radio spectrum previously used by analogue television when it is finally switched off - there must be a decent amount of bandwidth there, and I seriously doubt it'll be allowed to fester.
Higher bitrates for DVB (the current blocking artefacts on BBC1 etc. are ridiculous)? More digital TV channels? A big sell-off for (my hypothetical) 4G mobile phones, making £zillions for the government and near-bankrupting the over-zealous mobile phone companies again?
Still, a form of DVB which doesn't suffer from massive corruption when a lawnmower's running would be nice - it'll be annoying not having the analogue stuff as a fallback...
Would you say that HL2 has substantially better physics than Halo2?
... unlikely), but its physics would have to be bloody good to compete with Half-Life 2's.
;-)
I haven't played Halo 2 (plus a PC port sounds
Yes, I know it's a licensed Havok physics engine Valve used, but it's rather nicely integrated into Source. You can do ridiculous things with it in Garry's Mod for instance, like affixing a spinning wheel to each corner of a ragdoll mattress, strapping a rocket booster to it then tying it down to a broken car with rope to stop it flying off.
Okay, HL2 itself doesn't have such ludicrously over-the-top physics simulation examples as the one I've just given, but the game definitely makes intensive use of the physics engine. Basically, if it moves and it's not an animation, it's the CPU-humping Havok at work...
Compare HAlo on PC to HAlo on Xbox, in terms of what you need to run it decently.
;-)
Okay - I played the PC version of Halo on the same 1.1GHz Athlon, and it worked very nicely. Highly GPU-intensive, yes (which is why it knackered all those early DX9.0 cards) but on reducing the resolution the framerate was more than acceptable.
On that same PC, HL2 could manage single-figure framerates when looking at a blank wall in certain areas. CPU intensive, anyone?
However, I sincerely do believe that the Xbox is going to have some rather large problems with it. Two things that really stand out about Half Life 2 is the AI and the physics. Regardless of what else you are running on your CPU, it still comes down to the CPU having to process a great deal of physics and AI.
;-)
Having originally played through the whole of HL2 on a 1.1GHz Athlon (albeit with a fairly decent graphics card), I can definitely say that a powerful CPU is necessary for the game. Most of it was fine on that computer, but certain areas (such as the friendly squads later in the game, anything with lots of physics and that final strider battle) would really kill the framerate, even if there wasn't actually much geometry on-screen at the time.
Even turning the graphics down to an absolute minimum didn't help - I was still frequently getting below 10fps at certain points. I've no idea how this game will transfer to a 733MHz processor...
As for the graphics making their journey to the Xbox, it's mostly done with high-resolution textures (and lots of them) and lots of geometry. While Xbox games like the original Halo had lots of graphical tricks layering lots of low-res textures into highly detailed composite versions, HL2's method is to have a high-res base texture with a high-res normal map and a high-res specular map (usually the alpha map of the base texture) - it's a bit memory-hungry to say the least!
Turning on texture compression for everything (it's done on a case-by-case basis in HL2 and it's usually switched off for quality reasons), removing a lot of normal maps and reducing the resolution a bit might help, but there's still megabytes of stuff to be dealing with. And then there's the sound as well...
The long load times on the PC are partly due to the silly amounts of data the game has to deal with. I'd 'love' to see it all crammed into 64MB total...
... a largem ferocious-looking fish with some sort of optical device attached to its head ...
Shark with laser-beams? Cool!
(Prepares CV for sending to Microsoft. I've always wanted to be a henchman...)
Cripes. These iPods are like Rabbits in Australia!
Anyone tried breeding the little bastards? You could make a fortune selling the offspring on Ebay!
Why is it that no one uses the HTTP authentication mechanism for logins, and instead makes cookies do the job?
... Crap?
Because the standard HTTP authentication mechanism is a bit
The standard, most widely supported 'Basic' version makes the browser send the username and password in plaintext on every page request. Okay, without SSL, any login mechanism will transmit the password at least once, but 'Basic' makes it a bit too easy for packet sniffers and the like.
Also, a bit more seriously, there's no standard way of getting the browser to clear its cached username and password beyond quitting the browser completely. It's as if someone entirely forgot that part of the standard, and thus it's a bit annoying.
Cookies are a useful side-route around these problems; I rewrote my standard login system thingy recently to use a cookie containing a username and a long 'hash' string - the password is only transmitted once, then that login session is tied to a specific IP address (or rather, range of addresses to take account of multiple proxy servers and similar). It's hardly hyper-secure, but it's an improvement, and it's far easier to do with cookies than with any standard HTTP authentication.
I do agree that cookies are horribly overused. I only ever set them when I absolutely need to store information client-side (and then it's only ever a reference to stuff stored in a database on the server) - other programmers seem to set as many cookies as they can, in the hope that some might be useful...
When you have a group of people acting as a unified squad, each aware of the other's actions, it's completely engrossing!
:-)
Natural Selection can be pretty cool for this, especially when playing as Kharaa (aliens). With all the hive-sight and whatnot (basically a wallhack to locate all your teammates and enemies they can directly see) there can be some amazing, unspoken teamwork emerging - it's great when a horde of skulks burst from cover without warning and annihilate a heavily-armed bunch of marines, without a single word spoken or prompt typed...
I'm not a very good multiplayer gamer - I usually get shot within seconds by some hyperactive twelve-year-old with ultra-fast reflexes. But add a bit of teamwork, and I can actually become useful.
Hmm, Microsoft security updates. Must be the 2nd Tuesday of the month.
(Double-check...)
(Triple-check...)
But it's Wednesday!
An honest question here --- could someone please explain to me why the action of EnCirca is in transgression of the "spirit of name restrictions"?
:-)
I think the point is that before, you'd register megacorp.foo and you'd effectively get all possible sub-domains for free, i.e. www.megacorp.foo, hamstermatic.megacorp.foo, www.gerbilotron.megacorp.foo and so on.
I assume what's happening is that if you register megacorp.pro, you'll need to pay for any additional sub-domains...
Although I could very well be extremely wrong.
h2g2 could have been great, but Wikipedia and e2 have it beat both in size and content quality. 7000 entries is nothing.
So should I throw away all my reference books and keep just one encyclopaedia?
The sad thing is, there's not much left that can be done with an FPS other than increase the graphics, level size, number of players/monsters, and fiddle with controls and play styles.
;-)
Treat the 'FPS' thing merely as a user interface, and there are loads of possibilities. Wild examples: Deus Ex, System Shocks 1 and 2, Oni (okay, third person but used an FPS control scheme), Natural Selection (a semi-conventional FPS crossed with an RTS), Darwinia (absolutely not an FPS, but uses WASD and mouselook!) - and these are existing examples I've actually played.
I've got an idea for a single-player HL2 mini-mod with no combat whatsoever. First-Person... Something?
I realised a while ago that I can't stand most conventional FPS games. Some I do like - for plot, adventure and setting. You can't really get much more immersive than an FPS, and the control system both is intuitive and can be extended in many different directions. I wouldn't dismiss the FPS so quickly...
It's not been mentioned that HDR effects aren't going to be visible on flatscreen lcd screens, because of the limitations of the brightness scales they can display.
I'm not entirely sure where you're going to get those magical extra bits of additional brightness on a conventional CRT - unless it's a Special HDR Display (tm) with Hyper-Eye-Piercing-O-Matic-Brightness (R) you'll effectively just be splitting that 0-255 range into further sub-levels.
Which would be nice, but a 24-bit output is probably good enough for the time being - and decent LCDs have been 24-bit for a while.
Heh, I recognise the statue in the first photo - I have lunch in that park with friends most days when it's that sunny :-)
Heh. I used to walk underneath the arch on the way to (and from) work, so I've seen it in a rather wide range of different weather conditions. Usually damp; it is Belgium after all.
(And I still reckon City 17 was partially inspired by Brussels, and guess who went on a Grand Texture Expedition before HL2 was announced...)
Is this really any different than flashbang grenades we've seen in CS?
;-)
Yes. Very different.
I've posted links to it before, but here's a great demonstration of high-dynamic-range lighting, albeit taken to GPU-bullying extremes.
Basically, lighting in current games has very little range. A seemingly 'dark' room may actually be only slightly dimmer than the bright summer day 'outside'; in the case of lightmaps, it goes from 0 (pitch black) to 255 (as bright as possible). If you've had any experience with photography, you'll know that real life has a much greater range - for example, this was several thousand times brighter than this.
HDR can give back that variation, with lightmaps (or whatever) done with floating point, for a lighting range of 'well, lots'. Various post-processing effects are possible, such as 'bloom' and true motion-blur (specular highlights don't get turned into grey for each sub-frame) - basically, it's a much more realistic model of how light works.
Because output to the monitor is still 0-255 per channel, it gives the player an 'eye' which automatically adjusts to the ambient brightness. So, if you immediately step from a bright, sunny day into a dark monastery (for example), your eyes will need time to adjust.
Hmm. Someone needs to do a Thief-style game with HDR...
Misspelling and vulgarity aside, I'd love to know how you can play HL2 with only one hand free.
;-)
More a matter of making changes to the game in a slightly incompetent manner (hey, I'm learning!) and then playing the result.
Is my English that difficult to parse? If it is, then I apologise...
People have discovered that the ability to run offline expires after a month or two. Once that happens, you must log back into steam to play again.
That got fixed a while ago.
Steam's offline mode is still a bit crap, but it's not as bad as it was. And updates are coming thick and fast...
Enable console, and type fov 90. 'nuff said.
Except that the vehicular control runs at a FOV of 90 degrees anyway. Normal, non-vehicle field-of-view is 75 degrees, which seems to be increasingly popular in FPS-style games.
If you want to avoid motion sickness, have a light on in the room (don't play in the dark, freaks!), sit back from the monitor, and stop driving into things. Easy...
I don't play Counter-Strike unless Steam says I can play Counter-Strike. Whether I want to play it or not is a moot point, because the Steam authentication servers have to give me permission either way.
It was like that with the old WON-authenticated Half-Life for online multiplayer stuff.
But everyone seems to forget that, along with the big WON downtimes etc...
Alyx and Barney never gave me a problem, but the squad mates drove me nuts.
... scarier.
... Woo. :-)
I recently finished replaying HL2 with my ultra-cack-handed increased-difficulty tweaks. Somehow, that section of the game became way better. Instead of hundreds of squadmates excusing themselves as I tried pushing past them in narrow corridors, everything became
Other things improved too, and I got to see bits of the game I didn't know existed, and saw battles how they were presumably meant to occur. The strider battles became awesomely awesome, for a start, with holes being blown in walls of buildings I thought were invulnerable, etc.
My theory is that HL2 was playtested on people not so familiar with FPS games - for instance, Combine soldiers do take cover and flank the player, but on standard difficulty settings a decent FPS player is likely to have shot them dead beforehand. Bump up the difficulty, and
I'd release my 'fixed' difficulty settings mod (basically just a tweaked skill.cfg) but I'm sure there are more numbers in the game DLL that can be 'adjusted'. But I ain't got no Windows C++ compiler - anyone want to help?
Probably the most internally consistent interpretation of the Half-Life storylines is Chan 'Ventro' K.'s summary - plus it sticks to what actually appears in the games and doesn't wander off on flights of fancy.
;-)
As for surviving the explosion - if the G-Man can muck about with time for Gordon, I wouldn't be surprised if he were to carefully remove Alyx from the vicinity of the blast as well, even if it's just back to ground-level. The Citadel's quite big, after all - in this 'ere Hammer, Combine_Citadel001.mdl is 8430 units high, and each unit corresponds to 16 inches for a skybox model, so 3.5km could help a bit...
Although I'd definitely run away, very quickly. The thought of accidentally giving a wasps' nest a good kick springs to mind - and the article suggests that some previously-unfought enemies might appear too.
Since computer components run at extremely low power, the radiation shouldn't be an issue.
;-)
You joke, but I gather there were minor problems at Jodrell Bank when PCs' clock frequencies (and/or harmonics) happened to coincide with important radio frequencies used for radio astronomy.
As you say, though it's hardly dangerous - but having done an undergraduate experiment there some years ago in which an FFT of pulsar data detected nasty big peaks at 50Hz, 100Hz, 150Hz etc. (mains power...) I'm wondering if all man-made alternating currents should be banned, for aesthetic and scientific reasons...
At this rate soon we will have processors that are capable of rendering real video instead of animation. Or say animation as real as videio footage.
;-)
Hardly. Most game-style rendering today is mostly smoke and mirrors; while 3D graphics hardware has improved at a ridiculous rate over the last couple of years, there's still a long way to go before certain, everyday scenes can be rendered.
Something I'd like would be a 'city-renderer', capable of rendering a decent-sized European city (i.e. not a grid) from aerial views down to individual rooms. While a clever level-of-detail system could go a long way towards this, there would still be an utterly horrendous amount of geometry for a typical skyline shot.
Now add traffic, crowds of humans (typical FPS-style games give up after about ten or so, strategy games use crude mannequins for more), properly reflective surfaces and whatnot, motion blur and decent HDR and your quadruple-SLI Geforce 9000-Hyper-Pro-Matic setup will still grind to a halt.
Things are slowly getting there, but I'm still waiting - but like a gas, FPS-style generic corridors will expand in processing requirements until they saturate even the greatest hardware. Look at Doom 3, for example...