You know why? Windows users don't tend to care. They don't read Windows news sites daily, they don't subscribe to mailing lists that send out warnings as soon as a vunerability is found. They don't patch when Windows tells them to.
Sudden thought - is there much of a Windows 'community', or has it all fragmented into myriad different areas?
That's possibly one aspect in security that's often overlooked; for instance, when the recent Mac OS X vulnerabilities became known, word went around the Mac community very quickly, and people discovered new aspects of the problems, created workarounds like Paranoid Android...
There's something very similar with Linux as well - but is there a Windows equivalent of, say, Slashdot? Do Microsoft-oriented community discussion sites exist, complete with flamewars over widget styles in Microsoft Word, etc etc etc?
Or do you have to be an underdog for such a thing to exist?
Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.
POV-Ray's a bit different from usual 3D rendering and modelling software, in that a lot of the effort has gone into making a programming language which can then be used to generate objects. Typical renderers strive to render as many triangles as possible as quickly as possible, while POV-Ray gives you an entire programming environment. For instance, while a typical 3D modeller might laboriously hand-craft a tree out of triangles, shaders and alpha-blended foliage textures, a POV-Ray user would effectively write a program for generating trees.
A different approach giving different sorts of results, and while POV-Ray might not be suitable for, say, modelling, animating and rendering feature films, it can be used to create some quirky, glorious images. Who cares if it's not some carbon-copy of Maya or Renderman - an alternative approach is always appreciated.
People are always complaining about 'programmer art'. With POV-Ray, programming is visual art.:-)
I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran, creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...
While they may have taken a few features from Quake 2, the underlying engine in Half-Life is still Quake I, albeit heavily modified. Half-Life is missing a lot of features Quake 2 has, such as area portals (doors that block visibility), detail brushes, surface properties... The way textures are used in Half-Life is much more similar to Quake I (although the WAD files aren't usually compiled into the maps), and so on.
There's still quite a lot of new, very Windows-specific code in the Half-Life client, such as the user interface, the recently added VGUI, and so on. It wasn't written with portability in mind - I've seen the source code for the text-only WAD file utility, and it's still full of Windows stuff.
Yes, it's a shame that the client's Windows only, but apparently some people have had a lot of success getting it to run on Wine. I haven't tried myself, but I will do as soon as I upgrade my Linux installation to something that can run a recent Wine release.:-)
Ford Prefect
I've done something a little like this
on
The DeCSS Haiku
·
· Score: 1
For the university's freshers' week, I designed some fliers for the Computer Society on my old Atari ST (running Papyrus and NVDI 4, incidentally...) The fliers looked perfectly innocuous, but the background consisted of a large number of faint, grey ones and zeros, grouped into 8-bit bytes. These of course made up the most important function of the DeCSS code - difficult to read, but it was all there.
Hundreds of copies of the fliers were made and handed out at the freshers' fair - I imagine most of them have been thrown out by now, but somewhere there'll be fliers nestling among other papers, forgotten but still holding the secrets of DeCSS...:-)
You can see a version of one of the fliers here - some of the digits are hidden, but it would probably be possible to figure out what they are, helped by some of the other fliers based on the same background.
Original 300dpi GIF produced entirely on an Atari ST, BTW - printing to image files is a really useful feature.:-)
Sorry - I really should have put a spoiler warning on it. The trouble is - I wasn't too sure which game titles I should put in said warning - I'm sure there'll be many more games in the future using this standard plot...:-/
I've posted this on Slashdot before, but what the hell...
Doom: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and Hell. Generic gun-toting, solitary marine goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into the other dimension to kill more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly brain).
Quake: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and various undefined dimensions. Generic gun-toting, solitary marine goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into the other dimensions to kill more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly jelly).
Half-Life: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and a mysterious alien world called Xen. Generic gun-toting, solitary theoretical physicist goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into Xen to kill yet more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly foetus thing).
Back to the present day...
As for Oni - I discovered what the plot was before the game was released, thanks to the dialogue subtitles to the whole story being left in the datafiles for the demo. (Mwuhahaha!) Pretty good it was too - although I'm really looking forward to Halo's plot (is it connected with Marathon in some way, and if so, how?)
Bungie games (well, apart from Gnop and Minotaur) have good examples of well-written game plots. They're actually integrated into the games, and not just something told in cutscenes and similar. Might this be due in part to the level designers and programmers being a big part of the story-writing process?
There is still some sort of corruption issue with the users table.
That might explain the weirdness that's been going on with my account today. Apparently, I've got a karma of 31337, and I've also got access to several other features I haven't seen before.
Could someone explain what happened, before I click on this 'promote Anonymous Coward posts to +5' button by accident?
Ford Prefect, posting at +1 (instead of +10) so as to remain inconspicuous.
I can't agree with that. while the Campanile film is stunning, it seems to require a handcrafted 3d model onto which to wrap the multiple images.
Actually, if you read his thesis, you'll discover that a large proportion of the modelling process was done by the computer. A number of photographs from different angles were used as the source, and lines traced on them by a human operator. The actual three-dimensional structure and proportions were then determined from those by the computer, and relevant, direction-dependent textures recovered and applied.
Pretty interesting reading - a very different procedure to that described in the posted article, but who cares.:-)
You might have seen it already, but a forerunner of this technique more suited to getting a 3D model of architecture is described at Paul Debevec's Home Page, with the famous Campanile film. It's pretty amazing what can be done - perhaps one day digitised actors can stroll around a digitised building, with various other additions made to it...
Discover the true story behind the Microsoft takeover, thanks to the Bungie Webmaster.
...
"So," I began, "not to display a sudden collapse of faith in your business acumen or anything, but is there any particular reason we've hopped in bed with a company that might as well use "Squeal like a pig" as their corporate motto?"
"I figured you would be skeptical," said The Man, "and I have prepared a short educational video which explains what we hope to achieve with this decision." He pushed a button on his desk and the office lights dimmed while a projection screen descended from the ceiling.
We watched the video. It was both entertaining and spiritually fulfilling. Afterwards I had only one question.
"So are we represented by the Alien, or by John Hurt?"
"Oh, we're definitely the Alien."
"Good."
Microsoft haven't assimilated Bungie - Bungie have assimilated Microsoft. Just remember that...;-)
AFAIK, there are few engine differences between Marathons Two and Infinity - and what few there were were reimplemented by the Aleph One coders. So, you can play Marathon Infinity as much as you like...
While Counter-Strike isn't open source, it is pretty open. For example, if you want to design a map for it, just download the relevant.FGD for WorldCraft, look at the mapping specs, and get mapping. Use existing textures and ambient sounds, or add your own. Modify existing textures if you like - but remember to give credit to the original creators.
If the map's considered good enough, and you're lucky, there's a chance that the completed map will be included in the next official version of Counter-Strike. If it isn't, then there's absolutely nothing stopping you playing it with friends, or putting it up for download.
Every single map in Counter-Strike (apart from the debatable exception of the two Barking Dog ones) is a third-party map, designed by someone who enjoyed the game.
You can make other modifications as well - there's a thriving community making replacement player and weapon models. I think some of the official detail models (helicopters, wine bottles, etc) were made by third parties too.
For a closed source game based on a commercial engine, it's remarkably open, and a real testament to what people can create in their free time.
The Dreamcast compatibility was apparently hinted at by an 'anonymous source'. Microsoft and Sega spokespersons deny everything.
It's just some half-baked rumour - there's loads going around relating in some way to the Xbox. Like Halo for Windows and Mac apparently being cancelled (this rumour was described as 'a load of bollocks' by a Bungie spokesman...)
So, take everything you read with a pinch (or two) of salt...
You realize that there are certain things that men are genetically talented at and there are certain things that women are genetically talented at.
I was under the impression that human males and females were near-identical from a genetic point of view. While some on Slashdot may not believe it, there aren't two distinct species of human.
A little less whining and a little bit more productive output would do this world a hell of a lot of good.
Well, it's just that when women do try to do something 'productive', they usually get paid less, aren't promoted as much, and can often be badly treated compared with a man in exactly the same job. Wouldn't you complain if you were in a situation like this?
Also, what exactly are these jobs that men are so vastly superior at? If you investigate, you'll probably find that supposedly low-ranking females in male-dominated professions are often doing remarkably well despite adversity and hostility from people with opinions like yours.
Actually, I'm working on a set of single-player maps which seem to have acquired quite a bit of the atmosphere described by this infiltration malarkey. Players will get the chance to explore various grimy, semi-abandoned Cold War-inspired buildings and structures, in a quest for survival and escape set in some of the less well known areas of the Black Mesa complex.
I'm trying to give the maps a realistic feel - I think up cool structures, and tailor the gameplay around them. Recently, I've been building a nuclear silo, and I've got ideas for stations, machinery complexes and so on.
It's called Half-Life: Parallax, and it might be released at some point in the next year or so...:-)
Just a possible explanation - perhaps the big sockets at the back of the Matrix inhabitants heads are also hooked up to the various parts of the brain and brain stem responsible for such autonomic activity. So, the Matrix gives your conscious mind some passable explanation as to why you could have died, and then switches off your heartbeat, etc.
The supposed l33t h4x0r rebels might have taken some of the hardware from the Matrix, and adapted it for their own use, but not particularly well, or something, leaving the 'kill' signal in. Neo's supposed superpowers could turn out to be due to an incorrectly wired up neural interface, and not some mystical 'One-ness'. Kind of takes the magic out of it...
You see - everything can be put down to incompetence of one form or another.:-)
Ford Prefect, who is surprised he just rationalised all that.
I've been using 1.1.26 for a while, and I've found it to be very stable. I work mostly with small images (around 256x256 maximum, for Half-Life texturing purposes), so do take that as a caveat. I think it's only crashed once, when a load filter got a bit confused as to what format a file was in, and attempted to create a ridiculously large image, making my PC run out of swap. Not something that's likely to happen, though, unless you like feeding incorrectly designated files into it...
As for the program itself, it's quite an improvement over the 1.0 series. The user interface is a little more consistent, and there's now a menu button in the top left of image windows, in case you don't like the RISC OS-like context menu. It's a lot quicker and easier to change things like the brush and fill pattern, and the new drawing tools are pretty handy. It seems to have a lot greater support for graphics tablets, something I haven't been able to test since I don't have a graphics tablet...
Anyway, it's well worth a download, and is a great set of improvements to an already great program.
I must confess to putting an AOL CD in a microwave - it looks great, with with sparks going through the metal interior. It'll all be over in less than a second - so either have a number of CDs, or look very closely...
Anyone for long-exposure photography of such an event?
And as for destroying the microwave? AFAIK, it didn't do the microwave any harm; I think the microwave died some time later in a completely unrelated incident involving microwave popcorn being left in for about half an hour. It wasn't me...
I just discovered this a few minutes ago, but it's a pretty impressive-looking plugin for the Gimp that can automatically remove objects from images - I imagine it works in a vaguely similar way.
It's here. I haven't tried using it yet (I'm not at a Linux box, sadly) but it looks like it'll be bloody useful for texture manipulation for Half-Life stuff.:)
I've never played Marathon, but it sounds pretty cool. Is it reasonably easy to get hold of second-hand? I've got a couple of (admittedly elderly) Macs at home I got for free from my dad's office, but I doubt that a 32MHz 030 is quite enough. Is a PC version available?
Anyway, Halo sounds great - and I've got a moderately powerful PC to play it on.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You know why? Windows users don't tend to care. They don't read Windows news sites daily, they don't subscribe to mailing lists that send out warnings as soon as a vunerability is found. They don't patch when Windows tells them to.
Sudden thought - is there much of a Windows 'community', or has it all fragmented into myriad different areas?
That's possibly one aspect in security that's often overlooked; for instance, when the recent Mac OS X vulnerabilities became known, word went around the Mac community very quickly, and people discovered new aspects of the problems, created workarounds like Paranoid Android...
There's something very similar with Linux as well - but is there a Windows equivalent of, say, Slashdot? Do Microsoft-oriented community discussion sites exist, complete with flamewars over widget styles in Microsoft Word, etc etc etc?
Or do you have to be an underdog for such a thing to exist?
Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there, but definitely usable for the rank amateurs among us.
:-)
POV-Ray's a bit different from usual 3D rendering and modelling software, in that a lot of the effort has gone into making a programming language which can then be used to generate objects. Typical renderers strive to render as many triangles as possible as quickly as possible, while POV-Ray gives you an entire programming environment. For instance, while a typical 3D modeller might laboriously hand-craft a tree out of triangles, shaders and alpha-blended foliage textures, a POV-Ray user would effectively write a program for generating trees.
A different approach giving different sorts of results, and while POV-Ray might not be suitable for, say, modelling, animating and rendering feature films, it can be used to create some quirky, glorious images. Who cares if it's not some carbon-copy of Maya or Renderman - an alternative approach is always appreciated.
People are always complaining about 'programmer art'. With POV-Ray, programming is visual art.
I suppose no article on POV-Ray is complete without a link to the work of Gilles Tran, creator of some utterly amazing works in his 'Book of Beginnings'. It's art, it's programming (check out stuff like his Pipes macro), and it's literature - all the pictures are accompanied by am intriguing, often tangential short story, which abruptly ends mid-sentence...
Highly recommended!
While they may have taken a few features from Quake 2, the underlying engine in Half-Life is still Quake I, albeit heavily modified. Half-Life is missing a lot of features Quake 2 has, such as area portals (doors that block visibility), detail brushes, surface properties... The way textures are used in Half-Life is much more similar to Quake I (although the WAD files aren't usually compiled into the maps), and so on.
There's still quite a lot of new, very Windows-specific code in the Half-Life client, such as the user interface, the recently added VGUI, and so on. It wasn't written with portability in mind - I've seen the source code for the text-only WAD file utility, and it's still full of Windows stuff.
Yes, it's a shame that the client's Windows only, but apparently some people have had a lot of success getting it to run on Wine. I haven't tried myself, but I will do as soon as I upgrade my Linux installation to something that can run a recent Wine release.
Ford Prefect
For the university's freshers' week, I designed some fliers for the Computer Society on my old Atari ST (running Papyrus and NVDI 4, incidentally...) The fliers looked perfectly innocuous, but the background consisted of a large number of faint, grey ones and zeros, grouped into 8-bit bytes. These of course made up the most important function of the DeCSS code - difficult to read, but it was all there.
:-)
:-)
Hundreds of copies of the fliers were made and handed out at the freshers' fair - I imagine most of them have been thrown out by now, but somewhere there'll be fliers nestling among other papers, forgotten but still holding the secrets of DeCSS...
You can see a version of one of the fliers here - some of the digits are hidden, but it would probably be possible to figure out what they are, helped by some of the other fliers based on the same background.
Original 300dpi GIF produced entirely on an Atari ST, BTW - printing to image files is a really useful feature.
Ford Prefect
(Not very much text here either...)
Sorry - I really should have put a spoiler warning on it. The trouble is - I wasn't too sure which game titles I should put in said warning - I'm sure there'll be many more games in the future using this standard plot... :-/
Ford Prefect
I've posted this on Slashdot before, but what the hell...
Doom: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and Hell. Generic gun-toting, solitary marine goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into the other dimension to kill more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly brain).
Quake: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and various undefined dimensions. Generic gun-toting, solitary marine goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into the other dimensions to kill more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly jelly).
Half-Life: Experiments involving dimensional portals go wrong, creating a rift between our world and a mysterious alien world called Xen. Generic gun-toting, solitary theoretical physicist goes on a rampage, killing lots of nasties, and travels into Xen to kill yet more nasties before killing the big evil overlord monster (a great big wobbly foetus thing).
Back to the present day...
As for Oni - I discovered what the plot was before the game was released, thanks to the dialogue subtitles to the whole story being left in the datafiles for the demo. (Mwuhahaha!) Pretty good it was too - although I'm really looking forward to Halo's plot (is it connected with Marathon in some way, and if so, how?)
Bungie games (well, apart from Gnop and Minotaur) have good examples of well-written game plots. They're actually integrated into the games, and not just something told in cutscenes and similar. Might this be due in part to the level designers and programmers being a big part of the story-writing process?
Ford Prefect
There is still some sort of corruption issue with the users table.
That might explain the weirdness that's been going on with my account today. Apparently, I've got a karma of 31337, and I've also got access to several other features I haven't seen before.
Could someone explain what happened, before I click on this 'promote Anonymous Coward posts to +5' button by accident?
Ford Prefect, posting at +1 (instead of +10) so as to remain inconspicuous.
I can't agree with that. while the Campanile film is stunning, it seems to require a handcrafted 3d model onto which to wrap the multiple images.
:-)
Actually, if you read his thesis, you'll discover that a large proportion of the modelling process was done by the computer. A number of photographs from different angles were used as the source, and lines traced on them by a human operator. The actual three-dimensional structure and proportions were then determined from those by the computer, and relevant, direction-dependent textures recovered and applied.
Pretty interesting reading - a very different procedure to that described in the posted article, but who cares.
Ford Prefect
You might have seen it already, but a forerunner of this technique more suited to getting a 3D model of architecture is described at Paul Debevec's Home Page, with the famous Campanile film. It's pretty amazing what can be done - perhaps one day digitised actors can stroll around a digitised building, with various other additions made to it...
Ford Prefect
Discover the true story behind the Microsoft takeover, thanks to the Bungie Webmaster.
;-)
...
"So," I began, "not to display a sudden collapse of faith in your business acumen or anything, but is there any particular reason we've hopped in bed with a company that might as well use "Squeal like a pig" as their corporate motto?"
"I figured you would be skeptical," said The Man, "and I have prepared a short educational video which explains what we hope to achieve with this decision." He pushed a button on his desk and the office lights dimmed while a projection screen descended from the ceiling.
We watched the video. It was both entertaining and spiritually fulfilling. Afterwards I had only one question.
"So are we represented by the Alien, or by John Hurt?"
"Oh, we're definitely the Alien."
"Good."
Microsoft haven't assimilated Bungie - Bungie have assimilated Microsoft. Just remember that...
Ford Prefect
AFAIK, there are few engine differences between Marathons Two and Infinity - and what few there were were reimplemented by the Aleph One coders. So, you can play Marathon Infinity as much as you like...
Ford Prefect
The tru7h behind Bungie's real plans was revealed last year - on a t-shirt...
Bungie's 7-Step World Domination Plan
[X] Start independent gaming company.
[X] Dominate Mac platform; launch assault on Windows platform.
[X] Announce killer gaming title.
[X] Acquire strangely addictive Chinese food company.
[X] Recover Ling-ling's head.
[ ] Stage bloody coup of new parent company.
[ ] Take over world, shoot enemies into the sun with giant slingshot.
Ford Prefect
It's a conversion of the original Marathon demo to Aleph One - great if you want to find out how it all started, and want to do so in glorious OpenGL.
Ford Prefect
While Counter-Strike isn't open source, it is pretty open. For example, if you want to design a map for it, just download the relevant .FGD for WorldCraft, look at the mapping specs, and get mapping. Use existing textures and ambient sounds, or add your own. Modify existing textures if you like - but remember to give credit to the original creators.
If the map's considered good enough, and you're lucky, there's a chance that the completed map will be included in the next official version of Counter-Strike. If it isn't, then there's absolutely nothing stopping you playing it with friends, or putting it up for download.
Every single map in Counter-Strike (apart from the debatable exception of the two Barking Dog ones) is a third-party map, designed by someone who enjoyed the game.
You can make other modifications as well - there's a thriving community making replacement player and weapon models. I think some of the official detail models (helicopters, wine bottles, etc) were made by third parties too.
For a closed source game based on a commercial engine, it's remarkably open, and a real testament to what people can create in their free time.
Ford Prefect
The Dreamcast compatibility was apparently hinted at by an 'anonymous source'. Microsoft and Sega spokespersons deny everything.
It's just some half-baked rumour - there's loads going around relating in some way to the Xbox. Like Halo for Windows and Mac apparently being cancelled (this rumour was described as 'a load of bollocks' by a Bungie spokesman...)
So, take everything you read with a pinch (or two) of salt...
Ford Prefect
You realize that there are certain things that men are genetically talented at and there are certain things that women are genetically talented at.
I was under the impression that human males and females were near-identical from a genetic point of view. While some on Slashdot may not believe it, there aren't two distinct species of human.
A little less whining and a little bit more productive output would do this world a hell of a lot of good.
Well, it's just that when women do try to do something 'productive', they usually get paid less, aren't promoted as much, and can often be badly treated compared with a man in exactly the same job. Wouldn't you complain if you were in a situation like this?
Also, what exactly are these jobs that men are so vastly superior at? If you investigate, you'll probably find that supposedly low-ranking females in male-dominated professions are often doing remarkably well despite adversity and hostility from people with opinions like yours.
Ford Prefect
Actually, I'm working on a set of single-player maps which seem to have acquired quite a bit of the atmosphere described by this infiltration malarkey. Players will get the chance to explore various grimy, semi-abandoned Cold War-inspired buildings and structures, in a quest for survival and escape set in some of the less well known areas of the Black Mesa complex.
:-)
I'm trying to give the maps a realistic feel - I think up cool structures, and tailor the gameplay around them. Recently, I've been building a nuclear silo, and I've got ideas for stations, machinery complexes and so on.
It's called Half-Life: Parallax, and it might be released at some point in the next year or so...
Ford Prefect
Just a possible explanation - perhaps the big sockets at the back of the Matrix inhabitants heads are also hooked up to the various parts of the brain and brain stem responsible for such autonomic activity. So, the Matrix gives your conscious mind some passable explanation as to why you could have died, and then switches off your heartbeat, etc.
:-)
The supposed l33t h4x0r rebels might have taken some of the hardware from the Matrix, and adapted it for their own use, but not particularly well, or something, leaving the 'kill' signal in. Neo's supposed superpowers could turn out to be due to an incorrectly wired up neural interface, and not some mystical 'One-ness'. Kind of takes the magic out of it...
You see - everything can be put down to incompetence of one form or another.
Ford Prefect, who is surprised he just rationalised all that.
As for the program itself, it's quite an improvement over the 1.0 series. The user interface is a little more consistent, and there's now a menu button in the top left of image windows, in case you don't like the RISC OS-like context menu. It's a lot quicker and easier to change things like the brush and fill pattern, and the new drawing tools are pretty handy. It seems to have a lot greater support for graphics tablets, something I haven't been able to test since I don't have a graphics tablet...
Anyway, it's well worth a download, and is a great set of improvements to an already great program.
Oh, and here's that Half-Life stuff. :-)
Ford Prefect
I must confess to putting an AOL CD in a microwave - it looks great, with with sparks going through the metal interior. It'll all be over in less than a second - so either have a number of CDs, or look very closely...
Anyone for long-exposure photography of such an event?
And as for destroying the microwave? AFAIK, it didn't do the microwave any harm; I think the microwave died some time later in a completely unrelated incident involving microwave popcorn being left in for about half an hour. It wasn't me...
I just discovered this a few minutes ago, but it's a pretty impressive-looking plugin for the Gimp that can automatically remove objects from images - I imagine it works in a vaguely similar way.
:)
It's here. I haven't tried using it yet (I'm not at a Linux box, sadly) but it looks like it'll be bloody useful for texture manipulation for Half-Life stuff.
Ford Prefect
I've never played Marathon, but it sounds pretty cool. Is it reasonably easy to get hold of second-hand? I've got a couple of (admittedly elderly) Macs at home I got for free from my dad's office, but I doubt that a 32MHz 030 is quite enough. Is a PC version available?
Anyway, Halo sounds great - and I've got a moderately powerful PC to play it on.
Ford Prefect
Nah - Gordon Freeman must have been a theoretical physicist. It explains why the experiment went so utterly and totally wrong...
Ford Prefect