Serpentine

Heh - being a pretty good mainstream gamer that has got quite a bit of cash from tourneys... I was actually surprised by UT3, I am the hugest fan of UT2k4, and with the chances they pushed in, I thought they would completely destroy the game by making it dumbed down.... but its not like that at all. I am very surprised and with a bit of work it could be one hell of a tourney game, even with dodge jumping removed shame we have to get rid of good elements to let n00bs play and not get completely dominated. Also the engine seems very very quick... I am very impressed with that above all. Crysis on the other hand seems a bit of a mystery to me... the MP beta I was part of a few weeks ago made me want to never touch the game... but I did go and get the demo... and once again I am sort of conflicted. The engine really doesnt seem amazing to be completely honoust, its slow and clunky at quite a few things, the sandbox editor is... different... and I feel like it could be a large killer of the modding potential... compared to UT3 where it takes a few weeks and a general "lets bang stuff together and make something completely different(UT2k4 has things like metaball.org, uskaarj rts, alienswarm tactical etc etc.)"... I dont think Crysis will ever have that. The actual game was a mix of "hey lets take cool elements from every game and throw them together" mixed with "hey lets throw in so many new and out of place effects that are pretty pointless but rape a rig"... that I really dont know what they want out of it. The story seems to be slightly tarded and the feeling was that it was FarCry1.9... that said, FarCry 2 is looking like it actually has a story this time! crazy stuff. Anyway... I do think that they should have swapped to a more content aware development scheme, a lot of the details and heavy rendering tasks are used all of hte time, when they are not required at all to make it look good. Also the blatant abuse of HDR makes me feel like my eyesight is going, cant play with it at all. Protip : MP sucks as I said. But I might expect different MP from what you do

Heh, not that I watch Rugby or anything like that, but it was a close game... the play by our guys wasnt all that good at all, lotsa errors and such - but it was good to watch As for quota's and all the rest - those have been around since 1995 odd, on and off in all the sports, soon as we start getting dominated and a few coaches leave they drop the issue for a while and we pick up again. But its the same everywhere, they seed black managers into huge companies and stuff, then the companies start failing hard... a few months later they are all removed or given "special" jobs that keep them out of direct management and the company bounces back, happens far too often (maybe I am being general, but meh). As a white male, I cant even stay and work in my own country when I am done with my degree, because someone less qualified, less suited for the job will get paid more and placed ahead of me to take it. Also the pay is like half what it is in the UK (All your London are belong to us) :/ Atm we're just liek a breeding ground for the rest of the world's talent *cough* how many of the english team ? anyway... slight vent there

*cough* Yes I know I shouldnt be poking around the content forums - but its eve-online downtime and I'm taking the evening to relax! Could glass not be done in a slightly more fancy way? I mean, sure glass like that is okay for low settings - but wouldnt some pretty water-like shader look a whole lot better? I was thinking a sort of startic water like shader with low and wide bumps. Like impure and old glass you find in ooold houses, nothing too busy so that it looks like the refraction is going everywhere, just a slight curve here and there I think that would be quite damn good looking for display cabinets and stuff. Anyway - donno too much about shaders and the doom3 engine yet, but I will get there Just my 1.99c Serp

Because its for the most part based on UE2.5 with just the graphics coming from UE3. Also, quite a few full UE3 titles were released back in 2006 already (GoW, RB, R6-Vegas), UT3 has taken time due to the content creation, take a look at the demo maps and you will understand just how well mapped the game is - then think that they want like 45 maps in the release with more official maps coming post release. Personally the DM maps are almost too real to be DM maps. Anyway, if you're interested in the Bioshock dev and time etc - take a look through the video I linked in my "A few arb things" topic in "off-topic".

Yup, graphics artifacts like that will be caused by thermal issues or timing issues with the vmem. The actual core of the 9800 can take 95-100 degrees for a good few years, but the area around it tends to get nailed if you have poor airflow in your case. I'd make sure you have a nice working front fan blowing back under the card and up towards the cpu area, at the cpu, make sure the psu and back system fans are also in happy working condition - the psu fan is the important one with venting the hottest air from inside, while the back system fan makes sure the airflow from the front is working nicely. You may want to think of taking the stock cooler off of the graphics card and giving it a good clean, replace the thermal paste on the core (silver etc are good) and the paste on the memory around it (silicone/zinc compounds) - Yes, memory cools better with the cheap white paste than with expensive stuff. Also unscrew the heatsink cover and clean it out, those thin copper fins get really messy after a few years. I seem to remember the 9800XT's had good diodes on them, so you can most likely get some temps off them with ATi Tray Tool, http://radeon.ru/downloads/att/attsetup.exe , under hardware monitor. But yeah, think just a good cleaning and stuff will make it all happy again

Heh, aside from the RT related talk... LanMan stuff is pretty weak and very silly in most places. A simple hash replacement can easily allow a person to gain entery if they have physical access. If you're on a network with non-hardened security boxes... theres always fgdump/pwdump to get you the hashes. A bit more on topic was cracking the actual hash - a nice cracker that's easy to use an gives you loads of options as to the attack type would be http://www.oxid.it/cain.html (good cracker, faster than anything else I have used in windows/nix), I'd make a few hashes and test out the speed - quite relevant to the OT ... and then theres always something like http://nsa.unaligned.org/index.php ... *drool*

Hey there, Just a quick topic about a few things. *A wiki link on the front page: Could we get a wiki link stuck on the front page? even though it's pretty much all development linked, its kinda nice to have a link somewhere visible *BioShock Video Post-Mortem (thanks to BU) "Christopher Kline of 2k Boston runs through the entire BioShock production in an hour and twenty-three minutes. Starting from the beginning, he shows off lots of great video of tech demos and early prototypes, giving a pretty clear and fascinating picture of the ups and downs of the development cycle."(133mb/1h:23m) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4508664361400518462 or http://tinyurl.com/35uahw (flv for watching offline in a decent 3rd party player, with some nice post-processing) Quite interesting, altho a fair bit is about completely irrelevant sections - it does sort of raise a few good points that you generally dont hear the devs talking about. I felt it was time well spent *Paint.NET http://www.getpaint.net/ A few posts about alpha channel issues and what applications correctly support them etc made me think of what I do when testing image stuff.... and I generally just use paint.net. It's around 4mb and comes with some pretty damn decent tools, good resizing, awesome UI and design. Its not going to replace your Photoshop, but it does a great job for a quick doodle or to check out a final version of something in another app *ATi Tray Tools & AMD Drivers http://radeon.ru/downloads/att/attsetup.exe I'v noticed quite a few people using ATI/AMD gpu's around here - and specifically some people with crashes during OpenGL renders are running. A strange thing happened a while back when I removed the .net framework completely from windows(err... dont ask), the OpenGL driver would refuse to run or crash a lot while doing certain odd things. Completely removing the driver, installing .net and everything went back to normal. Anyway, I did find one thing that really helped when I was having the random crashes was to not use the CCC/CP release of the driver and instead opt for the Driver only package (14mb odd), crashes completely stopped in the OpenGL renders that I could open without .net. Anyway - ontop of all that, the tool that's insanely handy to have around without a CP etc (and is way more handy anyway) is ATT. Has everything you could ever want from a graphics card and more, while staying very minimal in memory requirements etc. Highly recommended. Dump CCC. (just disable the FPS overlay, kinda irritating most of the time ) ***** And that concludes my 3am babbling on about random topics that I though of this week while reading the forums and lurking If there are parts that dont make sense etc, drink + 3am + too much studying = this. Serp

Hey there, No problems my side - I'v co'd the svn from sf. Just taking the time to get comfy with where everything is - and how everything is stuck together and working. Also reading the forums(and bugtracker!) as you will notice my nick chilling at the bottom quite often As I said to greebo, doing a year's worth of uni work in the space on a month (because why work for 9 months of the year when you can cram it into a few weeks and get away with it :/) Today I have looked at maths for about 30 minutes... and then watched about 5 hours of series and movies to avoid looking at it, its now 2am and I feel guilty as hell... so I'm gonna go read astro in bed

I have to agree with the feelings so far. Playing FF seemed true to its roots, from the old quake TF down to TFC - it just feels right. The nades missing from TF2 really kill it for me - I wasnt much for the movement aspects of them in TFC (which is odd, because I use advanced movement in everything else). The rather lackluster gameplay I have experienced in TF2 has actually stopped me from pre-ordering the Orange Box deal, unless Portal is amazing and Ep2 is decent, theres no way my hard earned student cash is going to it

Heh, thats the wonderful thing about Africa - any professional grade stuff costs way more than a non-professional can afford A Intuos3 9x12 costs R4200 or $610 - excluding shipping. For that reason I have my trusty Acecad PoS tablet, 6x8... which cost about $50 I also have a genius one... but no clue what it cost. No way students can afford nice toys around here :/ The ex had a frigging nice one down in her graphics studio... should have "liberated" it when she left the place Anyway, damn that thing was nice for sketching. No matter how much tweaking and playing around I have done with my tablets, There's just no way to get that kind of result :/ The main problem with normal tablets is that the pressure sens is just so poor that its either 0%, 5% or 100%, in which case you cant sketch at all A strange thing that I have noticed is that colouring in photoshop with a tablet uses a lot less resources than with my mouse(Razer Copperhead) (Yes, I checked the stepping and polling, they are equal), donno if anyone has ever seen that too.

Yeah - Pretty much played aroudn with it and stuff, I did that ages ago tho because I didnt hear back from some people that dont read inboxes, I didnt go much further with it as I thought I wasnt really required I will be giving it a go at compiling and prelim reading tomorrow, taking the night off for some gaming because my head isnt happy with thinking at the moment greebo - you have a PM

Hey there DarkRadiant & The Dark Mod dev's and content people Lets get down to it (skip this part if you don't care about a brief bio) : I have no clue what is really wanted from me in a bio - so I'll hit it up AOL style : <AOLer> omg hi, asl? <Me> 21/m/Cape Town, South Africa <AOLer> omg you must be hot, cyb0... K well we'll leave it there, I'm a student and a gamer - I'm a fairly decent had at anything that involved a PC, been working on them since I was _so_ high and as such I decided to follow it as a career path. I am mostly passionate about what I deem to be "good" software. I have a distinct interest in interfaces and user interaction. Gaming wise, I enjoy my games quite slow and well thought out, T1/T2 along side SS2 and DE2 would be my most enjoyed games of this action/adventure mix. I enjoy fast games too, with very decent rankings in games like UT2k4, CS:S and SupCom(yes, its a fast damn game... even if its RTS, still one of my fave). I have all the usual draws to Thief and thats the reason that I am here - I want to keep people like me busy with enjoyable gaming I'm pretty much a typical CompSci student, however I am the geek side and not the nerd side of it. I will take joy at modifying hardware and stuff, tinkering with an OS and generally breaking things to see how it all goes together. That said my academics are shady, I have recently moved Universities and lost two years worth of credits. However the great thing about it is that my new course is C++ based, while for the past two I was working exclusively in Java(Grrr). As you can see, I haven't mentioned being an amazing developer or some project leader or anything - this is the first serious project I have linked to as anything more than a user/contributor. While I may not have mountains of experience, I am very quick to learn new things, and have no problem reading code and fixing problems in software, I enjoy bug hunting. I have patched a few Miranda-IM plugins when dev's were missing or there were small touch up's's needed, but I pretty much just have academic experience. I look forward to getting to grips with the DarkRadiant code before actually doing much with it - this is mostly to do with my current situation. I have my exams coming up in October and I haven't really bothered to open a book this year - so for the most of October I will just be focusing on understanding and disassembling the code that is already in place and thinking of ways to help improve it. Over my vacation from November through to February, I will focus on fixing the known bugs and seeing what improvements I can make to it(with loads of feedback hopefully ). So yeah, that's pretty much it from my side - I don't write the best bio's or stories ever. If I left anything out or you want to know anything about lil ol me, shout. - Serp

A PC. Because paying more for less is well... stupid. Back in the day when Mac's were PPC based, they did have a nice performance edge in things like Photoshop work and some rendering engines - however since today they are nothing more than a pretty looking PC running OSX, they have little to no performance difference, and in most cases the Windows box wins due to the poor software dev'd for Mac's these days. Then people go on about how amazing the OS is. If you're paying that much for a Mac's OS while everyone moans about the price of Windows, I fail to see why you are buying it in the first place. Also, most people that then go on about running away from M$, once they get to the pretty white Macland, go out and buy M$ Office and install the old Mac IE6 to do banking. That said, I would not touch Vista with my own boxes. I would take the money you are spending to buy a "pretty" Mac box and buy some vastly superiour hardware for less. If you dont _need_ windows, I would take a walk into one of the big nix distros, if you want the Mac happy interface, something KDE friendly is most likely to be a good option, specially with KDE4 around the corner. Running beta 2 of KDE4 on my FreeBSD box next to me - I like a nice DE when I want to be lazy - but it's really impressed me, even for a guy that loves being minimal. Compiz-Fusion + KDE4 is really something imho. Anyway, thats me done : Stick with paying sane prices for hardware, even if you're going to run the hacked OSX on it, at least you didnt get ripped a new one and you have all the options

And there went basically the whole of today... 3 weeks til exams and a whole years worth of uni that I havent looked at Im fairly impressed, taking on the big name of Quake, mixing it with BF2 and Tribes. I would say thats no small feat, and it is quite playable The graphics were slightly sub-par, but I think the textures are low res due to it being a small demo (*cough* Bioshock). But thats all good because the gameplay is very smooth. Strogg are awesome to play, love the movement of the vehicles and player when playing them... however the Human forces are a tad... shite. Humans need a massive boost in some way, I think they are too reliant on the vehicles to balance things. Still havent worked out how the Strogg melee thing works, I tried to knife a few people with it and it didnt do anything... hmm Over all, I think its got some very good gameplay, but a lot of issues that are in the way of something really awesome. Next week is TF2 and Portal tho... I should really start studying :/

I have no clue what panel will arrive, which is a bit dodge... The S I am using atm, the friend requested that that people he was buying for try and find one and they did I did the same, but havent heard anything yet... let alone when my one arrives. If you can get your local crowd to have a look for you, its about the best price you can get

I went an got myself a Samsung 226BW today... because I keep feeling cramped on a 17" with an IDE and a few other windows open. Its a pretty little 22" wide screen LCD, with a VERY attractive price. However, Im not too sure when it arrives and in the mean time I am using a friends spare one of the same model. It has the all important S panel which gives the best colour and contrast etc... I have just been playing a few games to check it out and it confirms my fear that the quality of dark games isnt as good as my Viewsonic CRT's, there is a slight wash out of the black even with the best tweaking I do. That said, few CRT's come close to having a black as dark as my old Viewsonics, not even the Cornerstone I have running. I would advise you to try and check an LCD out before you buy it... there are many out there that have poor panels and leak a lot of the backlighting etc. BeHardware (http://www.behardware.com/) are a GREAT source of unbiased and well tested LCD reviews - I would check what they say about latencies and stuff before buying. XbitLabs are also pretty good with LCD stuff. All in all, I am quite impressed by the current generation of LCD's when it comes to dark games - but I am looking forward to techs like SED which will bring along a much impoved quality Bottom line : I'd always check the panel before paying.

Hey, Was just slapping together a spec for a friend - budget performance sort of thing. Just realising some of the things that most guys dont think about these days, but if you do it can make a pretty big difference to performance later on. People seem to think that more RAM is better all of the time. if you're looking at budget performance, more than 2gb is a complete waste. Most of the time you will end up with 4 DIMM's and the resultant lack of performance will no doubt cancel out any gains you would have got. This will change in the future, but specifically if you have an oldish rig, 4 DIMMs will eat about 5-10% performance. (I havent tested the latest Core2 mem controller, but the same should apply) Graphics cards, ATi in the past has a waaaaaaaay better track record with aging. A lot of my friends that upgraded to 9800's back in the day are only upgrading now due to this, while my friends that bought 6800's a generation after the 9800's upgraded about a year ago. I dont mean to sound fanboyish, but the benches will show you whose cards stand the test of time. That said I dont really know how the 2900's are going to age, but I expect better than the 8800's. Hmmm, and always check mid range gfx card performance... nV at the moment is ripping the world off with 8600's, while the far cheaper AMD card easily cleans it, some people still buy on price and brand :/