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).
Admittedly, Half-Life has a few more plot details which are pretty cool, but it's still remarkably familiar...:-)
I've only played the demo (right through, though, unlike some people) and I was somewhat underwhelmed. I always compare FPS games with Half-Life, admittedly my favourite game ever (have a look here for what I'm doing with it), so be warned...
The game looks alright, although the coloured lighting is overused at points. The enemies look fairly good, although they don't seem to have many triangles compared with other games. They do look reasonably solid, unlike some. Graphically, not bad - but that's not the problem.
It's the enemy AI. The enemies in Doom are more intelligent than these ones. They get stuck around corners. At one point, I stood just round a pillar while a load of robotic mosquitoes piled up, unable to navigate eight world units to their right in order to fly around. They're stupid compared with Doom's enemies, and utterly brain-dead compared with Half-Life's.
When an enemy in a computer game attacks, I don't want it to advance straight towards me where I can gun it down before it reaches me, I want it to show at least some hint of realistic behaviour. I love fights where I have to plan what to do beforehand, and probably take cover and retreat if necessary. Daikatana did not require any such strategy - just mindless standing and shooting. Occasionally I would move to the left or right while shooting, just to add a bit of variation, but it was rarely necessary to do so.
Daikatana's first, swamp-based episode specialises in ultra-annoying enemies that sneak up and nibble on you. Incredibly annoying to kill - they move reasonably quickly and are difficult to see. Contrast this with Half-Life's headcrabs, which move very slowly, then pounce at your face - you can actually see when they're attacking.
The sidekicks aren't quite as bad as some people keep making out - although I imagine they could get pretty stuck in places, and get in the way in others. It's a nice idea, but by no means original. Half-Life had scientists and security guards, while its Opposing Force mission pack put you alongside soldiers which would fight with you. The sidekick AI in Daikatana seemed similar to the Half-Life security guards, which was fine for short periods, but would be pretty annoying for an entire game...
In a way, it's intriguing to compare Half-Life and Daikatana. Both are first games, both were dramatically behind schedule, both attempt to tell a story, and change the way we think about FPS-style games. Unfortunately, while Half-Life succeeds in a spectacular manner, Daikatana fails miserably...
Oh well. Time to wait for the release of Half-Life 1.1 and Worldcraft 3.3...:-)
The Sherman Project is yet another Half-Life mod under development, but unlike many, this one looks pretty good. It looks like it's trying to be ultra-realistic, with a damage model that makes Counter-Strike look forgiving, as well as a 'fatigue meter'.
I've got moderation points, and I was wondering whether I should moderate this comment up or down. Moderate up, because it's funny, or moderate down, and see you in court.;-)
To free myself from this conundrum, I posted to the thread...
Yes, the screenshots are very impressive, but it does seem a little too much like vapourware at the moment.
I've got a question to ask - is there really going to be just one version of the X-Box, like with, say, the Playstation, Dreamcast and so on. I can't help thinking that if the X-Box is based on standard PC hardware, there will be a lot of temptation to upgrade the hardware at frequent intervals. The Playstation has stayed the same over the last couple of years, but PCs have advanced considerably.
It won't be that long until the X-Box's abilities, although impressive now, will be outdated. Games companies, porting their very latest PC titles, will probably have to simplify things considerably to get their games to run on the outdated hardware, negating the benefits of the X-Box being based on PC hardware. Instead of being a straight recompile with minor tweaks, the entire game will have to be redesigned, like with PC to console ports at the moment.
Of course, Microsoft could bring out a new revision of the X-Box every year or so, but it'll probably annoy the owners of older models when they find that the latest games need an X-Box 2002 to run properly, while they only have the 2001 model.
Not exactly the same, but there's always the Simpsons equivalent, starring Troy McLure.
The Matrix musical sounds dire. I saw the film on Sunday for the first time (yes, I know, I'm very slow) and the thought of it being a musical fills me with dread.
I know about the ridiculous patent problems with GIFs - the main thing there is that they let everyone create software using the offending compression algorithm before attempting to restrict its use.
With the new MPEG standards, things are a lot worse - they're restricting the use of the relevant algorithms before they get popular. This means that a lot of the possible software won't be created, and the industry will almost certainly be set back a couple of years.
Oh well... Perhaps an equivalent of PNG will come along eventually, so free software users can join in the fun as well.
Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to accept that in the near future, computers will be dealing with high-quality video in a similar way that today's computers deal with pictures and sound.
Ten years ago, just displaying a high quality image was a novelty, today your computer is doing it all the time with banner advertisments. In ten years time? Perhaps broadband internet will be prevalent, and banner advertisments will be full motion video. And in another ten years? Who knows...
What the industry really needs is a standardised, open multimedia format, much like the JPEG is a standard format for pictures today. Just imagine how the WWW would have developed if anyone wanting to write a program that could read or write JPEGs had to pay large royalties - this is what's happening today with systems such as MPEGs 2 and 4. The technologies may be esoteric now, but soon they'll become commonplace, and it would be best if they weren't encumbered by such restrictions.
The main reason for this post is because I've just been playing with DivX;-), watching the trailer for the Matrix. The video quality for a small file was astounding - we need this thing for Linux...
K6-2 450, 128MB, Linux and Win95, G400. K6-2 333, 64MB, Linux and Win95, G200. 14in monitor, 15in monitor on the desk. Two elderly Macs used as a footrest. They do work - I got them for free, but without keyboards, mice or monitors so I can't use them. A huge pile of tangled cables and power supplies. Not to be confused with the tangled cables at the back of the computers... An Atari ST with green composite monitor used as a dumb terminal and Lemmings machine on the floor - not enough space on my desk. Boxes full of ancient computer junk - from a dead Spectrum to a fully operational NEC laptop thing with a massive 16KB memory, and a Microsoft operating system. A very early, dismembered Philips cassette player. Horrendously over-engineered, with levers, pulleys and linkages all over the mechanism. Lots of empty beer bottles, of slightly unusual beers. ('Beer' as in 'ale', BTW.) A pretty good Russian microscope, complete with slides, lenses and wooden carrying case. And a dissection kit (don't ask - I'm a physics student.) A huge stack of New Scientist and Scientific American magazines. The result of subscriptions since 1994. A chunk of satellite (carbon fibre and aluminium foil honeycomb) and a satellite solar cell. A sheep skull. Again, don't ask. A 386-16, complete with monitor. Still works, but is pretty much useless compared with the ST. Several hundred floppy disks, mostly 720kB. NASA and ESA posters from the mid to late 1980s. Where can I get some newer ones? All this done without linebreaks to simulate the clutter.:-)
And that's just some of the more interesting stuff - I'm still accumulating it all, and I'm only 20...
Ford Prefect
Simulcast on Crazy People's Fillings
on
Hump Day Quickies
·
· Score: 1
I found it very amusing because, being in the UK, I watch Futurama in (somewhat illegal) MPEG form. Some people use the MPEGs for producing Video-CDs for playing in their DVD players, long before the show has been broadcast in their native country. And no, I'm not saying where to get said MPEGs - people can work it out for themselves.
icebox.com which has various Flash cartoons, some of which are created (and voiced by) people behind The Simpsons and Futurama. They seem pretty good - and somewhat politically incorrect.
Wow, so it's shoehorning a modern motherboard into an older machine. Nothing like the old days of hardware upgrades, when you could upgrade your processor by soldering daughterboards straight on to the original motherboard (which invariably wasn't designed to be upgraded in any way).
I know Amiga people got up to loads of stuff (including PowerPC upgrades), but the Atari people did quite a lot too. here is an example of a modern Atari upgrade; there were lots more in the past. One popular example was putting a 32MHz 68030 into an 8MHz 68000 machine (requiring lots of new circuitry), while others included the addition of modern PCI graphics cards, faster serial ports, HD floppy support in older Ataris, switchable OS upgrades, and so on.
My old ST at home has a 4MB memory upgrade (that involved soldering wires on to the surface-mounted MMU, my ST being of a particularly perverse design) and a TOS 2.06 ROM upgrade (great fun that - a daughterboard soldered directly on to the 68000 itself, and a tiny software utility to switch between the old TOS 1.02 ROMS and the new TOS 2.06 ROM, for compatibility with old games etc). It also has a SCSI host adapter (it looks just like a normal cable, except there's a custom chip inside the SCSI plug end).
It gets on my nerves when people say how brave they were coping with, say, a 50MHz machine. I used my old 8MHz ST for useful stuff, and until recently it was being used by my mum for word-processing with Papyrus. By that I mean full page layout, WYSIWYG, a modern, non-modal interface, TrueType/Speedo vector fonts, 300dpi output (usually) keeping up with a DeskJet 600, etc etc etc. And all fast enough to keep up with my mum's very fast typing. If a program was released for Linux which had an identical interface and identical features, I would get it straight away. And imagine a lot of other people would, too.:-)
The ST was only retired because the keyboard doesn't work so well after 12 years of constant use - the space bar's a bit dead.:-/
Ford Prefect
Radiosity Lighting and Level Designers
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 1
Level designers don't like radiosity lighting? Well, here's one who loves it. I've been doing some level design for Half-Life and I must admit that radiosity lighting is probably one of my favourite features. It makes ultra-realistic lighting embarrasingly easy to do.
I don't know what these claims of 'fuzzy shadows' are about - I get nice, sharp shadows where I want them, and diffuse shadows where I want them. And simulated diffuse reflections off floors, light underneath tables, light going round corners, indirect lighting, smoothed lighting around 'curved' objects... And all by placing a couple of light textures in relevant places.
I'm amazed that radiosity lighting was dropped from Quake 3. The poor lighting in Quake was one of my least favourite features (simulating radiosity lighting with multiple light entities wasn't fun, and no inverse-square was a joke).
Oh well... Time to wait for Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2.:-)
... any model you design will require slightly more pieces than you actually own, making you buy more real-world lego if you actually want to build it.
They've really got this one sorted...:-)
Are there any similar packages for Linux? I seem to recall something involving Postscript, although I'm probably imagining things again.
It appears that the main reason the TiVo has a telephone connection is to get television scheduling information. In the UK (and I think most of the rest of Europe) you can get such information (and a lot more) through teletext, a gloriously old-fashioned system transmitted in the space above the television picture. A TiVo-like device could either use the standard listings, or the manufacturers could 'buy' space on one channel for specially formatted listings. No phone line required...
The UK probably the world leader in digital television, BTW - there's two main providers, OnDigital, which is received through a standard aerial, and Sky Digital, which needs a new satellite dish. There's also digital cable television, and internet access through television sets is rapidly becoming a reality.
One disturbing feature about the Sky Digital system is that you must connect it to your phone line for a minimum of one year, so it can report back information like viewing habits and pay-per-view channels. If you don't, they'll cancel your contract. Big Rupert Murdoch is watching you...
I've been experimenting with very basic colour support, using a kind of look-up table. The program has a list of ANSI foreground and background colours, along with various characters to print, and roughly what RGB values they correspond to. It's very messy, and doesn't work too well, but the colour is vaguely acceptable...
You can see some really bad screenshots here, here, here, and here - the first two were of the initial, really bad colour support, being developed over telnet, naturally... The third is the new colour support with a very small lookup table, and the third is with a slightly larger lookup table (still very small though).
I considered 'detail' support, but I'm a terrible programmer and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
I've also got the program to display frames in sequence - it's almost semi-watchable...:-)
I must confess, I was the person who thought this whole thing up. I'm really very, very sorry about it.
I'm a terrible programmer, but in half an hour of mucking about I came up with something interesting. There's some very crude screenshots here and here. I'm currently working on some working scaling code (to get the aspect ratio right), 'aliasing' (,,, ''' etc), and possibly some way for the program to do the grabbing itself. Image grabbing is currently done by Xawtv's streamer program.
There's a smallish article in March's Scientific American about how Matthew Golombek, project scientist for Mars Pathfinder, was a science consultant for the 'Mission to Mars' film, along with two NASA astronauts.
The article isn't available online (although they've got lots of other fascinating stuff about Mars from the same issue), so I can't provide a link to it. Anyway, Golombek seems to have had doubts about many of the major plot points; but apparently he felt that 'the exaggerations do not detract from the real value of the film: to convey the sense of adventure in Mars exploration and, just maybe, to galvanise the public.'
Unfortunately, if the film's as bad as people are making out, perhaps we should expect massive funding cuts to anything Mars related in the immediate future...
Personally, I'd be embarrassed being involved in a science fiction film that ignores the science so much. One facet of good SF is the use of science to provide plot points and a rigid framework to work in - it's all the more enjoyable when there's that hint of plausibility in even the most fanatastical situations. Look at, say, Steven Baxter's 'Raft' and 'Flux' for examples of this.
I think I'll avoid the film when it eventually makes its way over the Atlantic...
I went to see Toy Story 2 a few weeks ago (it was great), and saw the trailer for that Dinosaur film. I almost puked - something about the flickery, jerky motion and the huge, slightly fuzzy screen... Anyway, that trailer was followed by one for another film - Chicken Run. No fancy computer graphics here - pure plasticene. It looks brilliant. It's from Aardman, makers of such wonders as Wallace and Gromit and Rex the Runt.
I'm in Win95 testing Mozilla M14 at the moment (can't run it in Linux because I haven't got glibc2.1), so I can't give you specifics, but have you tried putting your font paths followed by:unscaled in your XF86Config? Also, have you got the URW outline fonts installed?
There's more details at http://www.gimp.org/fonts.html - I think modern Linux distributions have all the relevant bits done automatically. It'll help some people suffering from blocky fonts at any rate...
The Windows version of Mozilla M14 seems very nice - it gets better with every release. Soon it'll replace Netscape as my standard browser.
Apparently my graphics card (an 8MB Matrox G200) will have overlay support when running in 32bpp (I usually run it in 1024x768x32 anyway). Which sounds very nice, but for one thing. What the hell are overlays? They sound interesting - is it for overlaying, say, video from a card or MPEG player, or for something completely different?
Overall, XFree86 4.0 looks pretty good - the older version I'm using storms along at 2D stuff and has 3D acceleration thanks to Utah GLX; 4.0 will probably be even better.
Slashdot Mirror
They're all pretty similar, really...
:-)
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).
Admittedly, Half-Life has a few more plot details which are pretty cool, but it's still remarkably familiar...
Ford Prefect
I've only played the demo (right through, though, unlike some people) and I was somewhat underwhelmed. I always compare FPS games with Half-Life, admittedly my favourite game ever (have a look here for what I'm doing with it), so be warned...
:-)
The game looks alright, although the coloured lighting is overused at points. The enemies look fairly good, although they don't seem to have many triangles compared with other games. They do look reasonably solid, unlike some. Graphically, not bad - but that's not the problem.
It's the enemy AI. The enemies in Doom are more intelligent than these ones. They get stuck around corners. At one point, I stood just round a pillar while a load of robotic mosquitoes piled up, unable to navigate eight world units to their right in order to fly around. They're stupid compared with Doom's enemies, and utterly brain-dead compared with Half-Life's.
When an enemy in a computer game attacks, I don't want it to advance straight towards me where I can gun it down before it reaches me, I want it to show at least some hint of realistic behaviour. I love fights where I have to plan what to do beforehand, and probably take cover and retreat if necessary. Daikatana did not require any such strategy - just mindless standing and shooting. Occasionally I would move to the left or right while shooting, just to add a bit of variation, but it was rarely necessary to do so.
Daikatana's first, swamp-based episode specialises in ultra-annoying enemies that sneak up and nibble on you. Incredibly annoying to kill - they move reasonably quickly and are difficult to see. Contrast this with Half-Life's headcrabs, which move very slowly, then pounce at your face - you can actually see when they're attacking.
The sidekicks aren't quite as bad as some people keep making out - although I imagine they could get pretty stuck in places, and get in the way in others. It's a nice idea, but by no means original. Half-Life had scientists and security guards, while its Opposing Force mission pack put you alongside soldiers which would fight with you. The sidekick AI in Daikatana seemed similar to the Half-Life security guards, which was fine for short periods, but would be pretty annoying for an entire game...
In a way, it's intriguing to compare Half-Life and Daikatana. Both are first games, both were dramatically behind schedule, both attempt to tell a story, and change the way we think about FPS-style games. Unfortunately, while Half-Life succeeds in a spectacular manner, Daikatana fails miserably...
Oh well. Time to wait for the release of Half-Life 1.1 and Worldcraft 3.3...
Ford Prefect
The Sherman Project is yet another Half-Life mod under development, but unlike many, this one looks pretty good. It looks like it's trying to be ultra-realistic, with a damage model that makes Counter-Strike look forgiving, as well as a 'fatigue meter'.
:-)
Sounds pretty good, if you like realism.
Ford Prefect
I've got moderation points, and I was wondering whether I should moderate this comment up or down. Moderate up, because it's funny, or moderate down, and see you in court. ;-)
To free myself from this conundrum, I posted to the thread...
Ford Prefect
Yes, the screenshots are very impressive, but it does seem a little too much like vapourware at the moment.
I've got a question to ask - is there really going to be just one version of the X-Box, like with, say, the Playstation, Dreamcast and so on. I can't help thinking that if the X-Box is based on standard PC hardware, there will be a lot of temptation to upgrade the hardware at frequent intervals. The Playstation has stayed the same over the last couple of years, but PCs have advanced considerably.
It won't be that long until the X-Box's abilities, although impressive now, will be outdated. Games companies, porting their very latest PC titles, will probably have to simplify things considerably to get their games to run on the outdated hardware, negating the benefits of the X-Box being based on PC hardware. Instead of being a straight recompile with minor tweaks, the entire game will have to be redesigned, like with PC to console ports at the moment.
Of course, Microsoft could bring out a new revision of the X-Box every year or so, but it'll probably annoy the owners of older models when they find that the latest games need an X-Box 2002 to run properly, while they only have the 2001 model.
Ford Prefect
Bollocks - I got my American politicians mixed up. They're all the same anyway...
Ford Prefect, looking a right fool
... along with Stephen Hawking and some other people.
:-)
Could be good.
Ford Prefect
More importantly, how many people-hours are lost due to reading Slashdot each week? :-)
Ford Prefect
Not exactly the same, but there's always the Simpsons equivalent, starring Troy McLure.
The Matrix musical sounds dire. I saw the film on Sunday for the first time (yes, I know, I'm very slow) and the thought of it being a musical fills me with dread.
Ford Prefect
I know about the ridiculous patent problems with GIFs - the main thing there is that they let everyone create software using the offending compression algorithm before attempting to restrict its use.
With the new MPEG standards, things are a lot worse - they're restricting the use of the relevant algorithms before they get popular. This means that a lot of the possible software won't be created, and the industry will almost certainly be set back a couple of years.
Oh well... Perhaps an equivalent of PNG will come along eventually, so free software users can join in the fun as well.
Ford Prefect
Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to accept that in the near future, computers will be dealing with high-quality video in a similar way that today's computers deal with pictures and sound.
;-), watching the trailer for the Matrix. The video quality for a small file was astounding - we need this thing for Linux...
Ten years ago, just displaying a high quality image was a novelty, today your computer is doing it all the time with banner advertisments. In ten years time? Perhaps broadband internet will be prevalent, and banner advertisments will be full motion video. And in another ten years? Who knows...
What the industry really needs is a standardised, open multimedia format, much like the JPEG is a standard format for pictures today. Just imagine how the WWW would have developed if anyone wanting to write a program that could read or write JPEGs had to pay large royalties - this is what's happening today with systems such as MPEGs 2 and 4. The technologies may be esoteric now, but soon they'll become commonplace, and it would be best if they weren't encumbered by such restrictions.
The main reason for this post is because I've just been playing with DivX
Ford Prefect
On, under and around my desk at home:
:-)
K6-2 450, 128MB, Linux and Win95, G400. K6-2 333, 64MB, Linux and Win95, G200. 14in monitor, 15in monitor on the desk. Two elderly Macs used as a footrest. They do work - I got them for free, but without keyboards, mice or monitors so I can't use them. A huge pile of tangled cables and power supplies. Not to be confused with the tangled cables at the back of the computers... An Atari ST with green composite monitor used as a dumb terminal and Lemmings machine on the floor - not enough space on my desk. Boxes full of ancient computer junk - from a dead Spectrum to a fully operational NEC laptop thing with a massive 16KB memory, and a Microsoft operating system. A very early, dismembered Philips cassette player. Horrendously over-engineered, with levers, pulleys and linkages all over the mechanism. Lots of empty beer bottles, of slightly unusual beers. ('Beer' as in 'ale', BTW.) A pretty good Russian microscope, complete with slides, lenses and wooden carrying case. And a dissection kit (don't ask - I'm a physics student.) A huge stack of New Scientist and Scientific American magazines. The result of subscriptions since 1994. A chunk of satellite (carbon fibre and aluminium foil honeycomb) and a satellite solar cell. A sheep skull. Again, don't ask. A 386-16, complete with monitor. Still works, but is pretty much useless compared with the ST. Several hundred floppy disks, mostly 720kB. NASA and ESA posters from the mid to late 1980s. Where can I get some newer ones? All this done without linebreaks to simulate the clutter.
And that's just some of the more interesting stuff - I'm still accumulating it all, and I'm only 20...
Ford Prefect
How about here?
I found it very amusing because, being in the UK, I watch Futurama in (somewhat illegal) MPEG form. Some people use the MPEGs for producing Video-CDs for playing in their DVD players, long before the show has been broadcast in their native country. And no, I'm not saying where to get said MPEGs - people can work it out for themselves.
Ford Prefect
Assorted odds and ends which might be of interest...
:-)
Yet more Futurama stuff including a clockwork Bender. I want one.
icebox.com which has various Flash cartoons, some of which are created (and voiced by) people behind The Simpsons and Futurama. They seem pretty good - and somewhat politically incorrect.
The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, a blatant plug to my utterly crap web site. Do not expect useful content.
Ford Prefect
You really don't want to...
Wow, so it's shoehorning a modern motherboard into an older machine. Nothing like the old days of hardware upgrades, when you could upgrade your processor by soldering daughterboards straight on to the original motherboard (which invariably wasn't designed to be upgraded in any way).
:-)
:-/
I know Amiga people got up to loads of stuff (including PowerPC upgrades), but the Atari people did quite a lot too. here is an example of a modern Atari upgrade; there were lots more in the past. One popular example was putting a 32MHz 68030 into an 8MHz 68000 machine (requiring lots of new circuitry), while others included the addition of modern PCI graphics cards, faster serial ports, HD floppy support in older Ataris, switchable OS upgrades, and so on.
My old ST at home has a 4MB memory upgrade (that involved soldering wires on to the surface-mounted MMU, my ST being of a particularly perverse design) and a TOS 2.06 ROM upgrade (great fun that - a daughterboard soldered directly on to the 68000 itself, and a tiny software utility to switch between the old TOS 1.02 ROMS and the new TOS 2.06 ROM, for compatibility with old games etc). It also has a SCSI host adapter (it looks just like a normal cable, except there's a custom chip inside the SCSI plug end).
It gets on my nerves when people say how brave they were coping with, say, a 50MHz machine. I used my old 8MHz ST for useful stuff, and until recently it was being used by my mum for word-processing with Papyrus. By that I mean full page layout, WYSIWYG, a modern, non-modal interface, TrueType/Speedo vector fonts, 300dpi output (usually) keeping up with a DeskJet 600, etc etc etc. And all fast enough to keep up with my mum's very fast typing. If a program was released for Linux which had an identical interface and identical features, I would get it straight away. And imagine a lot of other people would, too.
The ST was only retired because the keyboard doesn't work so well after 12 years of constant use - the space bar's a bit dead.
Ford Prefect
Level designers don't like radiosity lighting? Well, here's one who loves it. I've been doing some level design for Half-Life and I must admit that radiosity lighting is probably one of my favourite features. It makes ultra-realistic lighting embarrasingly easy to do.
:-)
I don't know what these claims of 'fuzzy shadows' are about - I get nice, sharp shadows where I want them, and diffuse shadows where I want them. And simulated diffuse reflections off floors, light underneath tables, light going round corners, indirect lighting, smoothed lighting around 'curved' objects... And all by placing a couple of light textures in relevant places.
I'm amazed that radiosity lighting was dropped from Quake 3. The poor lighting in Quake was one of my least favourite features (simulating radiosity lighting with multiple light entities wasn't fun, and no inverse-square was a joke).
Oh well... Time to wait for Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2.
Ford Prefect
... any model you design will require slightly more pieces than you actually own, making you buy more real-world lego if you actually want to build it.
:-)
They've really got this one sorted...
Are there any similar packages for Linux? I seem to recall something involving Postscript, although I'm probably imagining things again.
Ford Prefect
It appears that the main reason the TiVo has a telephone connection is to get television scheduling information. In the UK (and I think most of the rest of Europe) you can get such information (and a lot more) through teletext, a gloriously old-fashioned system transmitted in the space above the television picture. A TiVo-like device could either use the standard listings, or the manufacturers could 'buy' space on one channel for specially formatted listings. No phone line required...
The UK probably the world leader in digital television, BTW - there's two main providers, OnDigital, which is received through a standard aerial, and Sky Digital, which needs a new satellite dish. There's also digital cable television, and internet access through television sets is rapidly becoming a reality.
One disturbing feature about the Sky Digital system is that you must connect it to your phone line for a minimum of one year, so it can report back information like viewing habits and pay-per-view channels. If you don't, they'll cancel your contract. Big Rupert Murdoch is watching you...
Ford Prefect
I doubt anyone will read this, but who cares...
:-)
I've been experimenting with very basic colour support, using a kind of look-up table. The program has a list of ANSI foreground and background colours, along with various characters to print, and roughly what RGB values they correspond to. It's very messy, and doesn't work too well, but the colour is vaguely acceptable...
You can see some really bad screenshots here, here, here, and here - the first two were of the initial, really bad colour support, being developed over telnet, naturally... The third is the new colour support with a very small lookup table, and the third is with a slightly larger lookup table (still very small though).
I considered 'detail' support, but I'm a terrible programmer and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
I've also got the program to display frames in sequence - it's almost semi-watchable...
Ford Prefect
I must confess, I was the person who thought this whole thing up. I'm really very, very sorry about it.
I'm a terrible programmer, but in half an hour of mucking about I came up with something interesting. There's some very crude screenshots here and here. I'm currently working on some working scaling code (to get the aspect ratio right), 'aliasing' (,,, ''' etc), and possibly some way for the program to do the grabbing itself. Image grabbing is currently done by Xawtv's streamer program.
Well, as I said, I'm very sorry about all this.
There's a smallish article in March's Scientific American about how Matthew Golombek, project scientist for Mars Pathfinder, was a science consultant for the 'Mission to Mars' film, along with two NASA astronauts.
The article isn't available online (although they've got lots of other fascinating stuff about Mars from the same issue), so I can't provide a link to it. Anyway, Golombek seems to have had doubts about many of the major plot points; but apparently he felt that 'the exaggerations do not detract from the real value of the film: to convey the sense of adventure in Mars exploration and, just maybe, to galvanise the public.'
Unfortunately, if the film's as bad as people are making out, perhaps we should expect massive funding cuts to anything Mars related in the immediate future...
Personally, I'd be embarrassed being involved in a science fiction film that ignores the science so much. One facet of good SF is the use of science to provide plot points and a rigid framework to work in - it's all the more enjoyable when there's that hint of plausibility in even the most fanatastical situations. Look at, say, Steven Baxter's 'Raft' and 'Flux' for examples of this.
I think I'll avoid the film when it eventually makes its way over the Atlantic...
I went to see Toy Story 2 a few weeks ago (it was great), and saw the trailer for that Dinosaur film. I almost puked - something about the flickery, jerky motion and the huge, slightly fuzzy screen... Anyway, that trailer was followed by one for another film - Chicken Run. No fancy computer graphics here - pure plasticene. It looks brilliant. It's from Aardman, makers of such wonders as Wallace and Gromit and Rex the Runt.
Ford Prefect
I'm in Win95 testing Mozilla M14 at the moment (can't run it in Linux because I haven't got glibc2.1), so I can't give you specifics, but have you tried putting your font paths followed by :unscaled in your XF86Config? Also, have you got the URW outline fonts installed?
There's more details at http://www.gimp.org/fonts.html - I think modern Linux distributions have all the relevant bits done automatically. It'll help some people suffering from blocky fonts at any rate...
The Windows version of Mozilla M14 seems very nice - it gets better with every release. Soon it'll replace Netscape as my standard browser.
Ford Prefect
Apparently my graphics card (an 8MB Matrox G200) will have overlay support when running in 32bpp (I usually run it in 1024x768x32 anyway). Which sounds very nice, but for one thing. What the hell are overlays? They sound interesting - is it for overlaying, say, video from a card or MPEG player, or for something completely different?
Overall, XFree86 4.0 looks pretty good - the older version I'm using storms along at 2D stuff and has 3D acceleration thanks to Utah GLX; 4.0 will probably be even better.
Ford Prefect