Half-Life 2's partly being sold on its ease of modification. Here's the official Source engine modding FAQ - the VERC Collective is a Valve-sponsored site with a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and 'useful' is an understatement.
I've got a bit of a complaint about computer books, in that they frequently concentrate on the latest and greatest versions and brush aside the older versions - the versions that the majority of web hosts might be running, for instance.
I was looking for a MySQL book a while back, and there were dozens of them on the shelves in the bookshop, but all based around MySQL 4 - not the ubiquitous MySQL 3 that I was trying to learn. Looking through at all the new features can be a bit dispiriting, especially when you're stuck with the older version.
I'm in the UK, and I bought my iBook from John Lewis.
They're a big Apple reseller, but definitely not Apple-only, and their 'never knowingly undersold' motto really works. If you can find it cheaper elsewhere, they'll sell it at that price.
The staff seemed knowledgeable and were very helpful, and while my local store had sold out of the particular model iBook I wanted, they delivered it for no extra cost from another.
Plus, I seem to have a two year warranty on this machine...
The bulk of the industry that put counterstrike where it is today (Microsoft, Valve, etc) are all desperately trying to kill off PC gaming and move to console gaming.
Microsoft killing PC gaming? Not really - they could easily do that by stopping development of DirectX, but that would soon destroy Windows as a competitive home entertainment platform.
Valve killing PC gaming? Again, not really - why would they completely kill the mod community that has kept the original Half-Life alive for so long? They aren't even thinking about starting an Xbox port of Half-Life 2 until it's finished for the PC.
Consoles don't do FPS, nowhere near the league of pro counterstrike. Can you imagine a professional tournament for ? Where all the contestants bring in their PS2 from home and their controllers with analog sticks? It's not going to happen. There simply isn't anything professional about consoles.
What about large-scale LAN parties with everyone bringing along their Xbox and copy of Halo? The ultimate in level playing fields, with nobody suspected of having an unfair advantage because of the mouse they're using, or the graphics card they have.
But you look at the next great generation of computer games, and even those are being ported over to the console arena. Even DooM3, the same DooM that made PC FPS gaming what it is today is being released on XBox.
Games have been ported between different systems for years. The original Doom made its way to many different consoles - the Sega 32X, the Atari Jaguar, the Nintendo 64, etc - and at no point was Id Software accused of killing off PC gaming.
PC games are going to be around for years, and will always offer things that console games can't. Console games are going to be around for years, and will always off things that PC games can't. Why must one side always take the existence of the other as an insult?
They kind of do this already - you receive a CD key when you buy Half-Life, and you use that number to create your Steam account.
If you get caught cheating by the Valve Anti-Cheat system (VAC), your Steam account gets banned for some lengthy amount of time. You get a chance to argue your case* (against full logs of what you got up to), so if you really were cheating you'll have to buy a whole new copy of Half-Life.
Getting money involved often acts as a good deterrent. It's still pretty much anonymous, but when you've got to spend your hard-earned cash when you've been banned, you might think twice...
* You've probably heard tales of people being banned for installing new drivers or using Wine etc. I'm sure there's some truth behind a couple of these stories, but judging by the Steam forums, the vast majority of people claiming they've been banned unjustly are talking absolute bollocks.
You get the people claiming it's really, honestly their CD key that's been banned for being used on many, many accounts: 'it's my CD key from my CD!' - 'so why's most of Eastern Europe using it?' - 'a friend must have borrowed it' - 'can I see a scanned picture of this CD?' - 'we don't have scanners in my country, you imperialist pig-dog!'
Then there's the excuses. 'I installed new 3dfx drivers, and got banned!' - 'so why do we have you down as having used $CHEAT, $H4X and $TEH_UPLAOD_CODEZ?' - 'my brother/aunt/pet badger must have installed them!'
Hmm. This note's getting longer than my original comment. Better shut up!
If you're seeing copied and pasted rooms, that's more due to a poor developer than due to a space limitation.
I'm a single-player mapper for Half-Life in my spare time. Stuff I've done has been fairly well received. And I can tell people this - map design for single-player games is difficult. I can spend a week perfecting something that'll last the player ten seconds. A simple room can take days to build, and this in on the original Half-Life where a suitably textured cuboid can be just about anything.
In a modern engine, the workload is increased enormously. You need 3D modellers to create the static meshes (which replace those textured cuboids of the past), texture artists to do the map-specific texturing (high-resolution now, and it can't all be photo-sourced), voice actors for the map-specific dialogue. There's scripting (which needs to be tested for all possible routes and combinations of routes - non-linearity's the thing!), there's map geometry, there's programming, there's playtesting, there's tuning...
And it all has to come together into a cohesive whole - and judging by some of the game demos I've played recently, it often isn't. Copied and pasted rooms imply that the game designers are concentrating on the wrong area of the game - graphics might be lovely, but if the map design stinks, the game's in danger.
The magic will be how they are keeping Microsoft at bay.
I'd say they've laid down the gauntlet, and are seeing what Microsoft does next.
Imagine what Microsoft would feel like, in possession of Google's crown jewels - countless millions of lines of Linux-dependent source code. It would be bloody expensive to port, and if the only way of running it is by installing Linux on zillions of servers...
Rather than listen to the same 20 current "top hit" songs play for approximately 120 times each...
What you need is Radio 4 (the original progenitor of HHGTTG, curiously). Documentaries, drama, news, comedy, current affairs... It's a bit old-person-friendly at times, but then it turns 180 degrees and does something amazing like Little Britain. Plus they're perfectly happy to use the word 'fuck' during the afternoon if so required. Go, Larkin!
The books contradict the original radio series, so no change there...
Is anyone else still pining for the continuation of the plotlines opened in the last episode of the radio series? Arthur on a vendetta against Zaphod, with me left in the middle...
(NB: I created this user account specifically for this story. Like my creator, I plan ahead...;-))
I think 'Moderate: Needs coffee -2' might be in order...
I very nearly typed up a huge rant about Rupert Murdoch and the failing US educational system. It's probably for the best that I didn't - I already look enough of a pillock already.:-)
Also space rockets only work inside the atmosphere, where there is air to push against. There was a special on Fox all about it.
Umm...
The bell-shaped nozzle of a rocket engine is designed for a particular external air pressure (due to expansion of the exhaust gases), but rockets most definitely do work in space. Newton's Third Law, and all that.
The live video fee which the BBC presented online was - er - interesting.
Do they have camera tripods the other side of the Atlantic?
You'd briefly catch a glimpse of the spacecraft, then the camera would lurch and you'd have another couple of minutes of funky lens-flares from the sun.
Unfortunately, this design is not very, well, useful other than to make Scaled Composites LOTS of money from space tourists.
Money they can potentially use to build more advanced rockets, perhaps finishing with spacecraft with orbital capability?
I'm hoping the X-prize is just the beginning - like Bleriot crossing the English Channel. Maybe sooner or later we'll end up with fully-fledged, manned commerical orbital spacecraft...
Personally, I love Safari, other than the problem with a handful of sites, such as Citibank's online banking, that only work with Camino.
Have you tried faking the user agent string to make Safari identify itself as Internet Explorer? You can do it by enabling the 'Debug' menu.
My father uses the European Citibank's online banking with Konqueror itself - it needed the user agent thing doing, and (I think) popup windows enabling, but I don't think he's had any problems with it since.
The PC version of Halo uses Ogg Vorbis for all its audio - and it's published by a certain company called 'Microsoft'...
The data's all squirrelled away in one big file (sounds.map, I think - I'm not at my PC right now) and opening it with a hex editor will reveal loads of appropriate Ogg and Vorbis headers.
One huge bonus of Ogg Vorbis as used in games is the ability to store sounds of arbitrary length. In MP3, the sample length has to be a whole number of frames, which each containing a fair number of sampled values when uncompressed - in Ogg Vorbis, you can have a precise number of sampled values. This makes looping sounds possible, as you won't have a nasty 'jump' or 'click' when it reaches the dead sound at the end of a partially silent frame, as you would with MP3.
I gather recent versions of libvorbis have the ability for looping with blending together the last few samples at the beginning and end of a sound, to get rid of any tiny compression artifacts which might cause a tiny 'click'.
I wrote a rubbish script for extracting some of the Vorbis files from Halo, and I discovered that the music is split up into many short segments (again of arbitrary length) - something like that would be horrible to do with MP3.
The complete absence of licensing fees, combined with full source code and mature libraries, make it a pretty compelling option for games use.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, but if this place went out of business, would your business to Apple computer cease? I'm guessing not.
:-)
It's probably likely to outlive Apple - it's already been going since 1864.
So they can sell a new game?
:-)
Half-Life 2's partly being sold on its ease of modification. Here's the official Source engine modding FAQ - the VERC Collective is a Valve-sponsored site with a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and 'useful' is an understatement.
Try that with a console!
PHP 5? Great!
I've got a bit of a complaint about computer books, in that they frequently concentrate on the latest and greatest versions and brush aside the older versions - the versions that the majority of web hosts might be running, for instance.
I was looking for a MySQL book a while back, and there were dozens of them on the shelves in the bookshop, but all based around MySQL 4 - not the ubiquitous MySQL 3 that I was trying to learn. Looking through at all the new features can be a bit dispiriting, especially when you're stuck with the older version.
Anyone else had similar problems?
RTFA - myostatin inhibits muscle development.
I think that's his point - and I too have plenty of myostatin to spare.
110% Lady-Proof! (tm)
I'm in the UK, and I bought my iBook from John Lewis.
They're a big Apple reseller, but definitely not Apple-only, and their 'never knowingly undersold' motto really works. If you can find it cheaper elsewhere, they'll sell it at that price.
The staff seemed knowledgeable and were very helpful, and while my local store had sold out of the particular model iBook I wanted, they delivered it for no extra cost from another.
Plus, I seem to have a two year warranty on this machine...
The bulk of the industry that put counterstrike where it is today (Microsoft, Valve, etc) are all desperately trying to kill off PC gaming and move to console gaming.
Microsoft killing PC gaming? Not really - they could easily do that by stopping development of DirectX, but that would soon destroy Windows as a competitive home entertainment platform.
Valve killing PC gaming? Again, not really - why would they completely kill the mod community that has kept the original Half-Life alive for so long? They aren't even thinking about starting an Xbox port of Half-Life 2 until it's finished for the PC.
Consoles don't do FPS, nowhere near the league of pro counterstrike. Can you imagine a professional tournament for ? Where all the contestants bring in their PS2 from home and their controllers with analog sticks? It's not going to happen. There simply isn't anything professional about consoles.
What about large-scale LAN parties with everyone bringing along their Xbox and copy of Halo? The ultimate in level playing fields, with nobody suspected of having an unfair advantage because of the mouse they're using, or the graphics card they have.
But you look at the next great generation of computer games, and even those are being ported over to the console arena. Even DooM3, the same DooM that made PC FPS gaming what it is today is being released on XBox.
Games have been ported between different systems for years. The original Doom made its way to many different consoles - the Sega 32X, the Atari Jaguar, the Nintendo 64, etc - and at no point was Id Software accused of killing off PC gaming.
PC games are going to be around for years, and will always offer things that console games can't. Console games are going to be around for years, and will always off things that PC games can't. Why must one side always take the existence of the other as an insult?
They kind of do this already - you receive a CD key when you buy Half-Life, and you use that number to create your Steam account.
If you get caught cheating by the Valve Anti-Cheat system (VAC), your Steam account gets banned for some lengthy amount of time. You get a chance to argue your case* (against full logs of what you got up to), so if you really were cheating you'll have to buy a whole new copy of Half-Life.
Getting money involved often acts as a good deterrent. It's still pretty much anonymous, but when you've got to spend your hard-earned cash when you've been banned, you might think twice...
* You've probably heard tales of people being banned for installing new drivers or using Wine etc. I'm sure there's some truth behind a couple of these stories, but judging by the Steam forums, the vast majority of people claiming they've been banned unjustly are talking absolute bollocks.
You get the people claiming it's really, honestly their CD key that's been banned for being used on many, many accounts: 'it's my CD key from my CD!' - 'so why's most of Eastern Europe using it?' - 'a friend must have borrowed it' - 'can I see a scanned picture of this CD?' - 'we don't have scanners in my country, you imperialist pig-dog!'
Then there's the excuses. 'I installed new 3dfx drivers, and got banned!' - 'so why do we have you down as having used $CHEAT, $H4X and $TEH_UPLAOD_CODEZ?' - 'my brother/aunt/pet badger must have installed them!'
Hmm. This note's getting longer than my original comment. Better shut up!
If you're seeing copied and pasted rooms, that's more due to a poor developer than due to a space limitation.
I'm a single-player mapper for Half-Life in my spare time. Stuff I've done has been fairly well received. And I can tell people this - map design for single-player games is difficult. I can spend a week perfecting something that'll last the player ten seconds. A simple room can take days to build, and this in on the original Half-Life where a suitably textured cuboid can be just about anything.
In a modern engine, the workload is increased enormously. You need 3D modellers to create the static meshes (which replace those textured cuboids of the past), texture artists to do the map-specific texturing (high-resolution now, and it can't all be photo-sourced), voice actors for the map-specific dialogue. There's scripting (which needs to be tested for all possible routes and combinations of routes - non-linearity's the thing!), there's map geometry, there's programming, there's playtesting, there's tuning...
And it all has to come together into a cohesive whole - and judging by some of the game demos I've played recently, it often isn't. Copied and pasted rooms imply that the game designers are concentrating on the wrong area of the game - graphics might be lovely, but if the map design stinks, the game's in danger.
The magic will be how they are keeping Microsoft at bay.
;-)
I'd say they've laid down the gauntlet, and are seeing what Microsoft does next.
Imagine what Microsoft would feel like, in possession of Google's crown jewels - countless millions of lines of Linux-dependent source code. It would be bloody expensive to port, and if the only way of running it is by installing Linux on zillions of servers...
Go on, Microsoft, give in to the dark side!
Hopefully they'll also make available over internet stream, though.
Quite probably - both live and through my favouritest thing ever, Listen Again.
RealAudio, but pretty high quality...
Rather than listen to the same 20 current "top hit" songs play for approximately 120 times each...
What you need is Radio 4 (the original progenitor of HHGTTG, curiously). Documentaries, drama, news, comedy, current affairs... It's a bit old-person-friendly at times, but then it turns 180 degrees and does something amazing like Little Britain. Plus they're perfectly happy to use the word 'fuck' during the afternoon if so required. Go, Larkin!
The books contradict the original radio series, so no change there...
;-))
Is anyone else still pining for the continuation of the plotlines opened in the last episode of the radio series? Arthur on a vendetta against Zaphod, with me left in the middle...
(NB: I created this user account specifically for this story. Like my creator, I plan ahead...
I think ' Moderate: Needs coffee -2' might be in order...
:-)
I very nearly typed up a huge rant about Rupert Murdoch and the failing US educational system. It's probably for the best that I didn't - I already look enough of a pillock already.
You mean you didn't include caffeine in the nutritional corner of your towel?
It would appear the towel got rotated around by 180 degrees.
I seem to have been attempting to extract caffeine from the 'second-hand curry' corner of the towel, which may explain the hallucinations.
Oooh... Vogons!
Also space rockets only work inside the atmosphere, where there is air to push against. There was a special on Fox all about it.
Umm...
The bell-shaped nozzle of a rocket engine is designed for a particular external air pressure (due to expansion of the exhaust gases), but rockets most definitely do work in space. Newton's Third Law, and all that.
The live video fee which the BBC presented online was - er - interesting.
:-)
Do they have camera tripods the other side of the Atlantic?
You'd briefly catch a glimpse of the spacecraft, then the camera would lurch and you'd have another couple of minutes of funky lens-flares from the sun.
I hope the final footage is better.
SpaceShipTwo? Where the hell did I pull that from?
Agh. Need coffee!
Unless, of course, my caffeine deficiency means I can now see into the future... Woah!
Best part, Rutan has admitted that SS1 is scalable, meaning it could become an orbital launch vehicle. Sweet.
Maybe there's something in all the naming - the project's called Tier One, the spacecraft module is called SpaceShipTwo...
What's Tier Two going to be?
Unfortunately, this design is not very, well, useful other than to make Scaled Composites LOTS of money from space tourists.
Money they can potentially use to build more advanced rockets, perhaps finishing with spacecraft with orbital capability?
I'm hoping the X-prize is just the beginning - like Bleriot crossing the English Channel. Maybe sooner or later we'll end up with fully-fledged, manned commerical orbital spacecraft...
Linus made Linux to learn 386 assembly code.
Do you think he succeeded?
With TONS of bugs and frogs, and a nonsensical japanese name
I think you're thinking of John Romero - I hear he's working on a rocket powered by nothing but his own over-inflated ego.
Id versus ego, who will win? Mwuhahaha!
Ahem.
How about linux comes out with a standard toolkit such as apple's cocoa, which allows spell check on every form element.
The text-entry stuff in KDE can do something very similar - it works in things like textareas in Konqueror, which can be incredibly useful.
Personally, I love Safari, other than the problem with a handful of sites, such as Citibank's online banking, that only work with Camino.
Have you tried faking the user agent string to make Safari identify itself as Internet Explorer? You can do it by enabling the 'Debug' menu.
My father uses the European Citibank's online banking with Konqueror itself - it needed the user agent thing doing, and (I think) popup windows enabling, but I don't think he's had any problems with it since.
The PC version of Halo uses Ogg Vorbis for all its audio - and it's published by a certain company called 'Microsoft'...
The data's all squirrelled away in one big file (sounds.map, I think - I'm not at my PC right now) and opening it with a hex editor will reveal loads of appropriate Ogg and Vorbis headers.
One huge bonus of Ogg Vorbis as used in games is the ability to store sounds of arbitrary length. In MP3, the sample length has to be a whole number of frames, which each containing a fair number of sampled values when uncompressed - in Ogg Vorbis, you can have a precise number of sampled values. This makes looping sounds possible, as you won't have a nasty 'jump' or 'click' when it reaches the dead sound at the end of a partially silent frame, as you would with MP3.
I gather recent versions of libvorbis have the ability for looping with blending together the last few samples at the beginning and end of a sound, to get rid of any tiny compression artifacts which might cause a tiny 'click'.
I wrote a rubbish script for extracting some of the Vorbis files from Halo, and I discovered that the music is split up into many short segments (again of arbitrary length) - something like that would be horrible to do with MP3.
The complete absence of licensing fees, combined with full source code and mature libraries, make it a pretty compelling option for games use.
Re:It's been said before (Score:1, Redundant)
I find something terribly amusing in a post about RAID being moderated 'Redundant'. 100% correct!
Bloody hell, I'm such a nerd...