Renzatic

You might have a more recent version of XP than I do. Any disc with SP1 or 2 should have the proper SATA drivers onboard, but I have an old pre-service pack XP CD and don't have that luxury.

Simply Lightwave Their better tutorials are 5-10 hour monsters that'll cost you a bit of cash, but they have a few freebies on there that are good for a quick learning experience.

It might work with Vista, but XP requires you to have a floppy to install any 3rd party drivers during the OS installation process. It's set up like that so you don't have to remove the XP CD, but still...if it wern't for that you wouldn't have a need for a floppy drive anymore. You can get around the floppy problem if you know what you need to install ahead of time. There are a handful of programs out there that let you insert drivers on an XP installation disc. All you need to do is make an iso of the XP CD and use the program to plug in the drivers and it'll install as usual. Kind of a pain in the ass, but if I knew about it beforehand it wouldn't have been nearly as hairy as what I went through. Oh, and one thing I thought was the utmost extreme of absolute stupidity. The bootdisk drivers came on a CD. Of course in and of itself that's not too weird, but that CD's sole purpose was to copy the program from it to a floppy. Beyond that it had no other use. Why didn't they just package a floppy in with the drive and save me that extra step?

I wouldn't recommend ditching the floppy drive if he's going with SATA...not unless he has the latest and greatest CD release of Win XP SP2 or Vista. I hadn't used a floppy in years, but when I upgraded to my current comp, I had to have a disk to install SATA II drivers so the OS could recognize the drive. I could write a book about the pains I went through finding not just one, but two working floppy drives so I could make a bootable disk on one comp to install WinXP on the other. Needless to say it ended up costing me money and more than a few hours out of my life. So don't ditch the floppy, you'll end up needing it if you want to install drivers ahead of the OS or flash your BIOS.

I'm more a boob man myself....but even so, I still have no idea how she raids tombs with those sweater cows she's sporting.

Sounds tempting. Like you, I was a huge fan of the original TR, but was completely put off by it's endless parade of inferior sequels. If it manages to capture the feel and style of the original, I'll be all over it like a hobo on a ham sandwich.

What you need to do is drop the catalysts and go with the Omega drivers. I can run the game decently with my setup, textures on high, distance rendering on, grass kinda thinned out, all that good stuff basically, and maintain a bearable 15-25 FPS outdoors with my 9800Pro. Your ram is what's hurting you the most. I wouldn't even try to play this game without at least a full gig 'o the good stuff. Here's a few screenshots I've taken recently. I play widescreen since I'm an absolute whore for it.. Sunrise Renzan, my character Ruins Outside the Imperial City Another Area Just Outside the Imperial City

I thought they did a good job disguising the cloning in Oblivion. In Morrowind you could easily tell that Cave B was just a slightly altered version of Cave A, whereas in this one all the dungeons and caves have different layouts and traps to overcome. The only problem is that there isn't much variety of style to differentiate the ruins even moreso.

If you need some negativity to temper the surprise, I suggest going over to nma-fallout forums and read what they're saying about the game. 99% of the people there absolutely hate it.

The game is much, much more difficult than Morrowind. It still uses the same leveled list setup, but it seems stacked more in the enemies favor rather than yours. But if it does get too hairy for you, there's still a difficulty slider you can use to tweak it so it's easier. Really everything is revamped from MW, though it's all pretty similar. Money is harder to come by, as is armor and weapons beyond the basic set. I've been playing the game about 6 hours now and still haven't come across anything better than your basic short/longsword or battle axe. You can still steal anything that's not nailed down, but it's harder to do since the NPC's will follow you around if you go somewhere you shouldn't, and stolen goods have to be funnelled through a fence now. Like I said before, the game is basically Morrowind, but with everything tweaked so it actually works now.

Sneaksie, your problems are coming directly from your videocard. The FX series is pretty well known for sucking absolute ass when it comes DX9/SM 2.0. Think of all the hooplah Valve threw around back when they were comparing the 9800Pro to the FX series when it came to running HL2 using DX9. It's pretty much the same situation here, or worse really since Oblivion only supports DX9. My computer is well below specs for the game, yet I'm able to run it at 15-30 FPS quite easily with the draw distance maxed, the textures set to high, some other miscellaneous settings tweaked. In fact I'm actually running Oblivion about as well as I do Morrowind, which is really surprising..and it's all to do with my graphics card. To put it bluntly, the FX line is Nvidia's big mark of shame, and anyone that has one is pretty much getting the shaft right about now. If you want a better AGP card, the 7800GS is about the best you're gonna get, and probably the last high end AGP card to ever come out. It's easily comparable to the PCI-e flavors of the same card, and roughly the same price (about $300). As for as world size, Cyrodiil is slightly larger than Vvardenfell was in MW. I think a rough estimate is that MW was about 8 square miles, whereas Oblivion is close to 12..so it's about 1.5x larger. And lastly, to boil it all down, my quick synop of the game itself. Basically..it's Morrowind, albeit with alot of MW's old problems fixed and polished. It isn't nearly as easy as the previous game for one. Armor and money are much harder to come by. The NPC's, while still kinda sparse (which adds to the underpopulated feel that was so prevelant in MW), seem to have alot more life because of the spoken dialogue and scheduling...it's almost, but not quite, as good as the Gothics. The quests are FAR better, no longer just simple fed-ex deals, there's actually alot of variety and interesting situations you can get yourself into. But it's still an Elder Scrolls game, so if you didn't like any of the previous incarnations there won't be much here to change your mind. It's just that Oblivion is the most polished and well thought out of the bunch.

*Brings the beer and loose womens* WOO! HELL YEAH! _|m|

Alot of people obviously don't have their priorities straight, and equate sucess with happiness. If you were to actually spend that extra time enjoying life instead of going to the office and doing the same drudgework day after day, you'd easily find a reason to live another 40-50 years. I know I would.

Yeah, it's possible. But it does the exact same thing it does in T3Ed...it rescales the model but not the collision box. So unless you're using it for objects you'll never run across, it's about useless.

On a guesstimation I'd say the D3 maps had about 500 or so entities in it at any given time. Like Orb said, it's not really that small. You're obviously used to Dromed, and the entity max is roughly the same in it as it is in D3. I don't think any FM, save for what I've heard of the Hammerite Imperium maps, have even come close to approaching that limit.

Yeah, you can. But for health and safety reasons it's best to keep it at or around 80-90,000 tris per portal.

Downloaded and inspired. Excellent pics, Mac.

The shot from his younger years would probably do better for a Founder, I think. He strikes you as someone that's seen alot, done alot, and knows how to get something done. He has a sense of unassuming power with just a tinge of arrogance that I'd picture all the founders as having. Him older though...necromancer all the way.

I came across this guy while doing a few movie searches, and if you ask me he'll be the perfect model to base a Founder around. The Young Julian Beck Or as he came to be known later in life, and scared the hell out of anyone that was a child during the '80's... The Creepy Old Reverend... From Poltergeist 2. He definately looks the part.

That's a pretty impressive portfolio...he's got my vote as well.

That's because you didn't put the / on the closing /size...but 48 wouldn't work anyway, it only goes to size=7. I should know, I tried going to 50 with the Serious Business reply.

SERIOUS BUSINESS

I doubt they would have even if they were threatened. The Japanese were (and still are) a very proud people, and up til that point had never lost or surrendered to a foreign invader. Up til the bomb it would've been unimaginable for them to do so. Though the Emperor did ultimately surrender after the fact, there were quite a few members of his cabinet willing to kill him just for a chance to go out in a blaze of glory.

Destroying the earth was only a worry when they first tested the bomb out in the Mojave. When they dropped it on Hiroshima they were well aware of the fact that it wouldn't burn the atmosphere away. Plus I doubt very seriously that the bomb was dropped for simple revenge for Pearl Harbor...more likely it was desperation and hopes for a quick end to what was by then a very long and brutal war. The invasion of Japan would've cost far more lives in total than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Meh? What does that have to do with the subject at hand? Though to correct you, they didn't think it'd rip the earth apart, they thought it might burn the atmosphere away in a firey chain reaction.