As as side note, I use (as do many others) a program called sidetrack,... which allows you to place regions on the track pad to support up to an additional 4 buttons, and v/h scrolling on the edges of the pad.
There's also iScroll, for two-finger-scrolling on older iBooks and Powerbooks.
The absence of a second mouse button (or scroll-wheel on many of my mice) doesn't bother me - what does annoy me is when the hardware's there but not the software. A non-functioning scroll-wheel is far, far worse than the absence of one, but fortunately MacOS X doesn't have that problem when you plug appropriate hardware in.
If Apple is developing a two-button mouse, expect it to have some unique 'innovation' which (supposedly) justifies the development and waiting time. Like, say, a special, magical lever sticking out the side which does the equivalent of the Control key on the keyboard when clicking. Or something equally infuriating...;-)
Or how about global illumination lighting effects? Truely emissive surfaces and area lights? As a hobbyist map maker, I would kill to have an engine that supported these; imagine being able to just tag the sky as an emmisive surface and have the entire level lit up and shadowed accordingly without having to painstakingly add bounce lights everywhere and tune them till they looked correct.
Erm... Half-Life has been doing these (with full radiosity too) since about 1998 or so, using code based on that which went into Quake 2.
Yes, it's all done with precalculated lightmaps and is therefore terribly old-fashioned, but it's still my favourite lighting model in terms of practical realism. I'm not sure raytracing is necessarily the right route for a fully dynamic version of this - my experiences with POV-Ray and radiosity, for instance, were time-consuming to say the least...
Probably been mentioned already, but a work-around for one of the major limiting factors for the Hubble's lifetime has already been found, that being the number of working gyroscopes available.
After repair, the telescope has six gyroscopes (used for pointing and stabilising the device, without any messy reaction mass involved), and it needed at least three to point accurately. There are currently only four working ones left - they're somewhat unreliable.
However, a way of pointing the telescope with just two working gyroscopes has been tested recently, which should extend the lifespan a little - possibly until 2008. I still doubt that a full-scale repair mission will be launched, but this might help in filling the gap until a replacement is finalised...
... If there's some little, independently produced game that you like the look of, or have enjoyed playing the demo of, then buy it.
Not only will you be financially helping the developers, who are probably strapped for cash at the best of times, you'll also get an indescribable warm and fuzzy feeling of smugness that you've done so.:-)
Admittedly the average laptop buyer probably doesn't care about Latin or the Roman army, but perhaps that's how the name was derived?
People keep asking me if my Latop has 'Centrino'. Given that it has a big Apple logo on it, I feel obliged to explain what Centrino is - it's not WiFi in general, just an Intel chipset. Maybe AMD were hoping for a bit of that brand-name to rub off?
I'm pretty curious about this one and I haven't seen many reviews about it. Would you mind doing a bit of a writeup about it?
Well I would, but apparently expressing a positive opinion about some random, recently released game is a definite no-no on Slashdot. One must winge, grumble and bear grudges indefinitely - cynicism and paranoia are the only acceptable behaviours!
Heh. Anyone would reckon we were astroturfing, but we're not!
At least I'm not, anyway...;-)
As for different platforms, the Linux binary will apparently be a free download compatible with the Windows data files, and there's also a full, commercial port to the Mac being done by Ambrosia Software.
Sadly, no news of any port of the game to a stand-alone Protologic 68000, assuming anyone still has one of those peculiar machines in working order...
Yes the Mossman betrayal was foreseeable from the E3 demo more than a year before the game was even released.
But was it a betrayal?
Play through the section where you oversee her conversation with Breen again - what she actually says is somewhat more ambiguous than it first appeared, and it's mainly due to Alyx fearing the worst that you assume that Mossman has completely turned to the Combine's side.
Naive, yes, used by Breen, definitely, but evil? Perhaps not. Turning in a rather nasty, violent thug-for-hire in return for her and Eli being left alone by the Combine doesn't seem so bad after all. Abandoning Alyx at the teleporter was foolish, but perhaps Mossman wanted to plead with Breen for a non-violent capture and release?
It's definitely not a perfect game, and some of the dialogue is admittedly a bit cheesy, but personally I can't fault the world, the plot and its portrayal. If anything, its telling is just too subtle - noticing that the clocks in the railway station were all lacking hands messed with my brain far more than yet another lame zombie attack in Doom 3...
... And the Prefect Award for Awesome goes to Darwinia, by Introversion Software.
Bought a copy yesterday, and have been really enjoying it. It's a bit glitchy and buggy, but I've been grinning almost constantly while playing it - they've definitely managed to nail that elusive 'fun' concept, for me at least.
I'd describe it as a cross between Cannon Fodder, Lemmings and an early Command and Conquer, all overseen by a god-like figure blatantly inspired by Sir Clive Sinclair. The Darwinians themselves are probably my favourite game characters in ages - I get really emotional when they get munched by a Virus...
Darwinia is pretty cool - in a unashamedly retro-gameplay kind of way. Kind of Cannon Fodder meets Tron, with a liberal helping of Space Invaders along the way.
I had great fun playing the demo last night, but I can't decide whether to get the full game or not. The demo seemed a bit glitchy, and it felt more like an incredibly polished, atmospheric shareware game than a 30-quid one. Still, it really reminded me of when I first discovered computers, where the bugs in games could be overlooked thanks to the sheer enthusiasm of it all...
Phosphenes is my 'teach-myself-HL2-mapping' map so I've no idea when it'll get finished, but it's going very nicely. The outdoors geometry is effectively all done and just needs scripting and entity work, and I've made a start on the indoors, underground stuff. And just in the last few minutes, I've finally decided what the Horrible Dark Secret is going to be. Woo!
It's a single map, but will probably take half an hour or so to play - I'm already notorious for a particular single map with lots of gameplay. Plus, it'll hopefully be part of a series - I'm trying the 'episodic' route as I've started plenty of big projects without finishing them, so I really want something completed...
"Yo' codebase's so fat, when it get in a lift it has to go down!"
"Yo' codebase is so bloated, it's got its own dialling code!"
"Yo' codebase's so big, NASA includes it in orbital calculations!"
Etc. etc., ad nauseam et infinitum...
Software rewrites may be considered harmful, but at which point do you declare that enough is enough and start again, breaking it down into smaller, easily tested modules? Big, old projects (like, say, OpenOffice.org) can get so appallingly baroque that there must be vital areas of code which haven't been modified (or, more importantly, understood) in years - how do you test those?
That does raise a good point - if it were developed for, say, Tenebrae, it could be a completely free game. Why do modders insist on sticking to Half-Life and leave their creations to be trapped under Valve's licensing?
Because it's far easier to start with a working engine and a game's content than (almost) from scratch?
NS may be a near-total-conversion for Half-Life, but there's still a fair amount of Half-Life content in there. I remember from its development that much more Half-Life stuff used to be used as placeholders.
Also, the licensing for mods under Valve games is pretty decent. Yes, I'm not allowed to sell anything I make without Valve's permission, but I do retain copyright on it. It's not the 'all your mods are belong to us' approach present in some games - if Valve wanted to sell my stuff (yeah, right!) they have to get my permission...
There is an awkward silence when the subject of the final episode is broached. "I don't know where to begin with that one," [Jolene Blalock] finally stammers. "The final episode is... appalling."
Should this quote have had spoiler tags? Although, for me it'll probably be the best episode ever, in that I simply can't stand Enterprise. Or Star Trek in general, to be honest. Although I'll probably get flamed to death for admitting so...;-)
...the concept of optimizing how we talk to people has developed further throughout history. From Aristotle to Heraclitus to Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Keller to George Bernard Shaw...
Actually, as I discovered recently, Hellen Keller was (in)famous for being a highly influential author, speaker, socialist and possible communist. It's amazing what can be written out of history because the truth is not a comfortable, heart-warming view of how someone 'should' have been...
This is how British politics works. In the UK, there is a knee-jerk reaction to like more taxes, however unfair and unwise, just as in the US there is an automatic tendency to like tax cuts, however unfair and unwise.
With TV's its pretty simple, you have this massive aerial plus they can pick up signals off your TV (or so they claim), does anyone know if PC's give off any types of signal like this?
Try using an FM radio near a PC, and scan through the frequencies. All sorts of buzzing, shrieking, farting and so on can be picked up - some of the fun harmonics chatter and clunk as the screen updates or the hard disk is accessed.
On my old Atari ST, I could even tune into the sound chip, and listen to whatever it was playing at the other side of the room. And I wondered why it was called a 104.0 ST FM...
Admittedly, TV detector vans are mostly a myth, and this proposed 'computer tax' is about as realistic - but do read up on Tempest radiation - they'd have plenty of signals to play with if they wanted to.;-)
Grumble grumble already paying 17.5% VAT on anything and everything with a transistor in grumble grumble computer prices already terribly high in the UK grumble grumble...;-)
If the issue is that people will one day (heh) be able to watch the telly thanks to broadband internet at home, why not have a small but compulsory licence fee on home internet connections? It's not like conventional TV where any old bit of wire can pick up the transmissions, you'd need a suitably authorised ISP and whatever to connect to the giant BBC media servers, and people can easily opt out by, um, not using broadband. Or something!
I was a bit disappointed with the linearity of Half-Life 2 as well - it does seem like a deliberate design decision, but I hope the release of Far Cry has shown everyone that multiple paths are possible, and that they can be fun.
When I get more familiar with HL2 mapping, I'm going to be doing plenty of experimentation. It's definitely not an engine limitation...;-)
A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable.
I'm a modder, and my experiences with Source so far have been great. See my signature - so far I've built the geometry for a large, complex island map in just a few weeks of free time, starting from no knowledge of HL2 mapping whatsoever. I'm currently populating it with gameplay, and the new Hammer is far, far more streamlined than the old one. The new entity inputs/outputs system is brilliant, for a start, and there are loads of other minor improvements and tweaks that are greatly appreciated.
The Source SDK documentation gives a fairly good description of the basics, but it's a bit lacking in stuff like HL2 entity descriptions. Fortunately, though, there are the sources for quite a few of the single-player maps available, as well as map sources and full DLL code for HL2 Deathmatch, so there are plenty of examples to work from. The entity configuration file (FGD) for HL2 has a lot of useful entity-specific help for use in Hammer - as a result, I'm managing to learn how things work rather nicely.
There are also the VERC forums where a fair number of Valve developers actively contribute, answering coding and mapping questions.
It hasn't all been plain sailing, though - Hammer still has serious issues on non-NT-based Windows, and needs a pretty high-spec machine to work well, for instance - and Steam updates have a tendency to temporarily break SDK stuff (usually easily fixed, though). Plus, some key utilities like GCFScape have had to be written by third-parties - but there's just about everything needed already available, and it's only a few months into the lifetime of the game. Plus, Valve has recently provided source code for many of their content production tools as well...
Compared with some of my experiences with other games, things have been blissful. UnrealEd was just plain rank, Halo was an exercise in frustration and disappointment, and Doom 3 is a bit... dead.
For multiplayer games, Unreal Tournament 2004 is definitely a good base for mods and a worthy contender against Source, but for lone-mapper, single-player projects like my own, I can't really hope for anything better than Half-Life 2 at the moment. I get some brilliant artwork to play with, a pervasive, realistic universe and back-story to work on, and a quirky but undeniably capable engine. I'm happy, anyway.:-)
I was beginning to think we'd go an entire day without having Katamari Damacy shoved down our throats.
Sorry - I was trying to pre-empt the inevitable 'why wasn't KD mentioned? Waah!' posts. I've never played the game, and while it does sound like fun it doesn't sound as if it would be quite worth importing a suitable PS2 and whatever to play it...
It was nice, however, to see another low-budget, high-concept, word-of-mouth success being rewarded, that being Halo 2. Zonk perhaps understandably edited what I originally had to say about it - the sarcasm was probably just a tad too strong...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
No. Aliens will look at the pictures and wonder what:
:-/
"ÿØÿà" means, when they open it in a text editor
Solution - ASCII-art!
Unfortunately, Slashdot's lameness filter pre-emptively reports: 'Don't even think about it.' Spoilsports...
As as side note, I use (as do many others) a program called sidetrack, ... which allows you to place regions on the track pad to support up to an additional 4 buttons, and v/h scrolling on the edges of the pad.
;-)
There's also iScroll, for two-finger-scrolling on older iBooks and Powerbooks.
The absence of a second mouse button (or scroll-wheel on many of my mice) doesn't bother me - what does annoy me is when the hardware's there but not the software. A non-functioning scroll-wheel is far, far worse than the absence of one, but fortunately MacOS X doesn't have that problem when you plug appropriate hardware in.
If Apple is developing a two-button mouse, expect it to have some unique 'innovation' which (supposedly) justifies the development and waiting time. Like, say, a special, magical lever sticking out the side which does the equivalent of the Control key on the keyboard when clicking. Or something equally infuriating...
If you find out let me know too. I would cosine. ;)
At which point, the discussion goes off on a tangent...
Or how about global illumination lighting effects? Truely emissive surfaces and area lights? As a hobbyist map maker, I would kill to have an engine that supported these; imagine being able to just tag the sky as an emmisive surface and have the entire level lit up and shadowed accordingly without having to painstakingly add bounce lights everywhere and tune them till they looked correct.
Erm... Half-Life has been doing these (with full radiosity too) since about 1998 or so, using code based on that which went into Quake 2.
Yes, it's all done with precalculated lightmaps and is therefore terribly old-fashioned, but it's still my favourite lighting model in terms of practical realism. I'm not sure raytracing is necessarily the right route for a fully dynamic version of this - my experiences with POV-Ray and radiosity, for instance, were time-consuming to say the least...
Probably been mentioned already, but a work-around for one of the major limiting factors for the Hubble's lifetime has already been found, that being the number of working gyroscopes available.
After repair, the telescope has six gyroscopes (used for pointing and stabilising the device, without any messy reaction mass involved), and it needed at least three to point accurately. There are currently only four working ones left - they're somewhat unreliable.
However, a way of pointing the telescope with just two working gyroscopes has been tested recently, which should extend the lifespan a little - possibly until 2008. I still doubt that a full-scale repair mission will be launched, but this might help in filling the gap until a replacement is finalised...
... If there's some little, independently produced game that you like the look of, or have enjoyed playing the demo of, then buy it.
:-)
Not only will you be financially helping the developers, who are probably strapped for cash at the best of times, you'll also get an indescribable warm and fuzzy feeling of smugness that you've done so.
Turion ... Centurion ... Centrino?
Admittedly the average laptop buyer probably doesn't care about Latin or the Roman army, but perhaps that's how the name was derived?
People keep asking me if my Latop has 'Centrino'. Given that it has a big Apple logo on it, I feel obliged to explain what Centrino is - it's not WiFi in general, just an Intel chipset. Maybe AMD were hoping for a bit of that brand-name to rub off?
I'm pretty curious about this one and I haven't seen many reviews about it. Would you mind doing a bit of a writeup about it?
...
;-)
Well I would, but apparently expressing a positive opinion about some random, recently released game is a definite no-no on Slashdot. One must winge, grumble and bear grudges indefinitely - cynicism and paranoia are the only acceptable behaviours!
Ahem!
But anyway, there's a couple of reviews on Gamerankings and there's the demo for download somewhere. I imagine it's a bit of an acquired taste - there's an interesting article from Edge magazine explaining in part why the game's so utterly peculiar.
I think I'd better shut up now, lest anyone accuses me of yet more dodgy activities...
Heh. Anyone would reckon we were astroturfing, but we're not!
;-)
At least I'm not, anyway...
As for different platforms, the Linux binary will apparently be a free download compatible with the Windows data files, and there's also a full, commercial port to the Mac being done by Ambrosia Software.
Sadly, no news of any port of the game to a stand-alone Protologic 68000, assuming anyone still has one of those peculiar machines in working order...
Yes the Mossman betrayal was foreseeable from the E3 demo more than a year before the game was even released.
But was it a betrayal?
Play through the section where you oversee her conversation with Breen again - what she actually says is somewhat more ambiguous than it first appeared, and it's mainly due to Alyx fearing the worst that you assume that Mossman has completely turned to the Combine's side.
Naive, yes, used by Breen, definitely, but evil? Perhaps not. Turning in a rather nasty, violent thug-for-hire in return for her and Eli being left alone by the Combine doesn't seem so bad after all. Abandoning Alyx at the teleporter was foolish, but perhaps Mossman wanted to plead with Breen for a non-violent capture and release?
It's definitely not a perfect game, and some of the dialogue is admittedly a bit cheesy, but personally I can't fault the world, the plot and its portrayal. If anything, its telling is just too subtle - noticing that the clocks in the railway station were all lacking hands messed with my brain far more than yet another lame zombie attack in Doom 3...
... And the Prefect Award for Awesome goes to Darwinia, by Introversion Software.
Bought a copy yesterday, and have been really enjoying it. It's a bit glitchy and buggy, but I've been grinning almost constantly while playing it - they've definitely managed to nail that elusive 'fun' concept, for me at least.
I'd describe it as a cross between Cannon Fodder, Lemmings and an early Command and Conquer, all overseen by a god-like figure blatantly inspired by Sir Clive Sinclair. The Darwinians themselves are probably my favourite game characters in ages - I get really emotional when they get munched by a Virus...
That, and biscuits!
Darwinia is pretty cool - in a unashamedly retro-gameplay kind of way. Kind of Cannon Fodder meets Tron, with a liberal helping of Space Invaders along the way.
I had great fun playing the demo last night, but I can't decide whether to get the full game or not. The demo seemed a bit glitchy, and it felt more like an incredibly polished, atmospheric shareware game than a 30-quid one. Still, it really reminded me of when I first discovered computers, where the bugs in games could be overlooked thanks to the sheer enthusiasm of it all...
Thanks for the comments! :-)
Phosphenes is my 'teach-myself-HL2-mapping' map so I've no idea when it'll get finished, but it's going very nicely. The outdoors geometry is effectively all done and just needs scripting and entity work, and I've made a start on the indoors, underground stuff. And just in the last few minutes, I've finally decided what the Horrible Dark Secret is going to be. Woo!
It's a single map, but will probably take half an hour or so to play - I'm already notorious for a particular single map with lots of gameplay. Plus, it'll hopefully be part of a series - I'm trying the 'episodic' route as I've started plenty of big projects without finishing them, so I really want something completed...
"Yo' codebase's so fat, when it get in a lift it has to go down!"
"Yo' codebase is so bloated, it's got its own dialling code!"
"Yo' codebase's so big, NASA includes it in orbital calculations!"
Etc. etc., ad nauseam et infinitum...
Software rewrites may be considered harmful, but at which point do you declare that enough is enough and start again, breaking it down into smaller, easily tested modules? Big, old projects (like, say, OpenOffice.org) can get so appallingly baroque that there must be vital areas of code which haven't been modified (or, more importantly, understood) in years - how do you test those?
That does raise a good point - if it were developed for, say, Tenebrae, it could be a completely free game. Why do modders insist on sticking to Half-Life and leave their creations to be trapped under Valve's licensing?
Because it's far easier to start with a working engine and a game's content than (almost) from scratch?
NS may be a near-total-conversion for Half-Life, but there's still a fair amount of Half-Life content in there. I remember from its development that much more Half-Life stuff used to be used as placeholders.
Also, the licensing for mods under Valve games is pretty decent. Yes, I'm not allowed to sell anything I make without Valve's permission, but I do retain copyright on it. It's not the 'all your mods are belong to us' approach present in some games - if Valve wanted to sell my stuff (yeah, right!) they have to get my permission...
...the concept of optimizing how we talk to people has developed further throughout history. From Aristotle to Heraclitus to Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Keller to George Bernard Shaw...
Actually, as I discovered recently, Hellen Keller was (in)famous for being a highly influential author, speaker, socialist and possible communist. It's amazing what can be written out of history because the truth is not a comfortable, heart-warming view of how someone 'should' have been...
This is how British politics works. In the UK, there is a knee-jerk reaction to like more taxes, however unfair and unwise, just as in the US there is an automatic tendency to like tax cuts, however unfair and unwise.
British counter-example.
With TV's its pretty simple, you have this massive aerial plus they can pick up signals off your TV (or so they claim), does anyone know if PC's give off any types of signal like this?
;-)
Try using an FM radio near a PC, and scan through the frequencies. All sorts of buzzing, shrieking, farting and so on can be picked up - some of the fun harmonics chatter and clunk as the screen updates or the hard disk is accessed.
On my old Atari ST, I could even tune into the sound chip, and listen to whatever it was playing at the other side of the room. And I wondered why it was called a 104.0 ST FM...
Admittedly, TV detector vans are mostly a myth, and this proposed 'computer tax' is about as realistic - but do read up on Tempest radiation - they'd have plenty of signals to play with if they wanted to.
Grumble grumble already paying 17.5% VAT on anything and everything with a transistor in grumble grumble computer prices already terribly high in the UK grumble grumble... ;-)
If the issue is that people will one day (heh) be able to watch the telly thanks to broadband internet at home, why not have a small but compulsory licence fee on home internet connections? It's not like conventional TV where any old bit of wire can pick up the transmissions, you'd need a suitably authorised ISP and whatever to connect to the giant BBC media servers, and people can easily opt out by, um, not using broadband. Or something!
Maybe this is what's used for the other games where you get glimpses of Freeman on trams and running into portals?
:-)
Nope, it's this version of Gordon, screenshot courtesy of the Half-Life Nostalgia Project.
Yes, some of the old Half-Life content is unintentionally hilarious.
I was a bit disappointed with the linearity of Half-Life 2 as well - it does seem like a deliberate design decision, but I hope the release of Far Cry has shown everyone that multiple paths are possible, and that they can be fun.
;-)
When I get more familiar with HL2 mapping, I'm going to be doing plenty of experimentation. It's definitely not an engine limitation...
A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable.
... dead.
:-)
I'm a modder, and my experiences with Source so far have been great. See my signature - so far I've built the geometry for a large, complex island map in just a few weeks of free time, starting from no knowledge of HL2 mapping whatsoever. I'm currently populating it with gameplay, and the new Hammer is far, far more streamlined than the old one. The new entity inputs/outputs system is brilliant, for a start, and there are loads of other minor improvements and tweaks that are greatly appreciated.
The Source SDK documentation gives a fairly good description of the basics, but it's a bit lacking in stuff like HL2 entity descriptions. Fortunately, though, there are the sources for quite a few of the single-player maps available, as well as map sources and full DLL code for HL2 Deathmatch, so there are plenty of examples to work from. The entity configuration file (FGD) for HL2 has a lot of useful entity-specific help for use in Hammer - as a result, I'm managing to learn how things work rather nicely.
There are also the VERC forums where a fair number of Valve developers actively contribute, answering coding and mapping questions.
It hasn't all been plain sailing, though - Hammer still has serious issues on non-NT-based Windows, and needs a pretty high-spec machine to work well, for instance - and Steam updates have a tendency to temporarily break SDK stuff (usually easily fixed, though). Plus, some key utilities like GCFScape have had to be written by third-parties - but there's just about everything needed already available, and it's only a few months into the lifetime of the game. Plus, Valve has recently provided source code for many of their content production tools as well...
Compared with some of my experiences with other games, things have been blissful. UnrealEd was just plain rank, Halo was an exercise in frustration and disappointment, and Doom 3 is a bit
For multiplayer games, Unreal Tournament 2004 is definitely a good base for mods and a worthy contender against Source, but for lone-mapper, single-player projects like my own, I can't really hope for anything better than Half-Life 2 at the moment. I get some brilliant artwork to play with, a pervasive, realistic universe and back-story to work on, and a quirky but undeniably capable engine. I'm happy, anyway.
I was beginning to think we'd go an entire day without having Katamari Damacy shoved down our throats.
;-)
Sorry - I was trying to pre-empt the inevitable 'why wasn't KD mentioned? Waah!' posts. I've never played the game, and while it does sound like fun it doesn't sound as if it would be quite worth importing a suitable PS2 and whatever to play it...
It was nice, however, to see another low-budget, high-concept, word-of-mouth success being rewarded, that being Halo 2. Zonk perhaps understandably edited what I originally had to say about it - the sarcasm was probably just a tad too strong...