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phide

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Everything posted by phide

  1. We going to be able to download this via Amazon, iTunes, etc.?
  2. I, as a gamer, don't equate a game's success to its sales numbers. Consider the Thief series: critically acclaimed and extensively well-received, yet the first two games didn't sell fantastically well. You can also lump a lot of Interplay/Black Isle games in this category, like Planescape: Torment and the cult-smash Fallout. Interplay basically broke even on the first two Fallout games from what I've read. Now consider the handful of humdrum, boring-ass console titles that have outsold all expectations purely because they were well-marketed: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Halo 3, BioShock and so on. Not bad games, certainly, but formuliac and uninnovative, absolutely (though BioShock was probably worth the $50 purely because the presentation -- the visuals and audio -- is so damn impressive). The game itself doesn't change with respect to how well it's sold, so it's an irrelevant factor to me. A successful game is an enjoyable game. A game that constantly fights with me because I can't adequately control the main character? Not exactly fun. I'd rather lean on a solid tactical game like Rainbow Six: Raven Shield, which, to me, was the perfect melding of realistic tactical action and enjoyable gameplay, though it doesn't have much of a stealth element. Still, I consider Thief to be as tactical as any Splinter Cell game, just presented in a different manner.
  3. I've never understood the appeal of the MGS series. Half the game is spent watching cutscenes (that try to convince players that the game has an appealing storyline), while the other half is fighting the horrendously-stupid control scheme and camera setup. At least this was my experience with the games on the PS1 and PS2. Splinter Cell fared better on the consoles, I think, but third-person stealth-action games simply don't work. I've also read that one of the designers of this particular title has some strange objection to compressing game assets and has actually complained about Blu-ray's capacity being limiting. What an ass!
  4. Noted. No doubt I probably won't be able to satisfy your requests until after the Bridgeport release, but they're on my list.
  5. Ahh...it's good to be back. Yeah, certainly. I'll take a listen to some of my references and figure out a good way to do it.
  6. One way that works is to have little messages after you kill a critical NPC informing the player that the NPC he just killed probably ruined the game (and to have a competent quicksave system). Generally, though, if critical NPCs aren't immortal, players should generally know to be extra careful around these NPCs and to save at appropriate intervals. If players aren't aware of how critical a given NPC is, the designers haven't done their job properly. Of course, if you're the type of player that plays STALKER as if you were Rambo, then obviously no amount of "don't kill this guy!" is going to help, and designers probably shouldn't bother trying to cater for that. The lazy man's approach is the Oblivion "you can't fuck this game up because they'll just get back up" approach -- the ultimate hand-holding experience. A good middle-ground is to not allow the player to cause damage to these NPCs in the first place (don't allow the player to shoot/attack when the crosshair is on the NPC, in other words), which is a simple but effective method employed in many shooters. I'm only sort-of/quasi looking forward to Clear Sky. It's supposed to be what STALKER should have been, they say, but is what STALKER should have been a game I want to play? Tough call for me.
  7. Well thanks, but I admit I'm rarely fully alive (more like mostly dead, I suppose, to quote Billy Crystal in that one flick) After pouring over the track, Ombrenuit, I did notice one instance of a hard clip at a transistion point in the sequence and that the bass line is distorting. It isn't full-scale clipping, but it's possible that it's being clipped at the output for whatever reason. It isn't terrible (it would be a bit limiting in terms of what range I'll have to work with), and it's probably worsened by the MP3 coding, but perhaps it's something you can look in to and prevent should you record the sequence again.
  8. Most MP3 decoders won't encode to 384kbps CBR, actually, and many players won't decode greater than 320kbps. Well, typically anyway There's a great deal of additional headroom you left in Ombrenuit (4.2dB in the right channel). I can master this to boost the overall level while preserving dynamics and enhancing the obscure portions of the mix, but a lossless file would be ideal for me to work with to save it from multiple encoding passes. If you could record this again to a WAV file and upload it, that would be ideal for us, and would ensure the highest final quality. Good work though. That Juno seems to do justice to the older prized Roland models like the 106 -- quite a feat.
  9. Depends on the board and what SATA controller the board uses. In some cases, Windows XP setup will load an appropriate SATA controller driver and get things going. Just make sure to slipstream SP2 into the installer, or use an official SP2 release of XP, or prepare to not be able to format the entire drive's capacity. The new GTS 512 should be faster than the 8800 GT in all cases, but the cost might not be justifiable despite that. The performance margins between the two cards are slim to nonexistent.
  10. phide

    Lags?

    The flashlight in Episode 2 allows for the casting of shadow maps. They're fairly low resolution, but they use some sort of strange interpolation (or something) that produces some "weavelike" distortion that looks extremely strange up close. And, yeah, it's very slow -- even for a single light source.
  11. Early today, Nine Inch Nails released a 36-track, four part indstrumental album titled Ghosts. This comes in a number of flavors, from a two-disc CD version, to digitally distributed versions (high-quality MP3 as well as lossless FLAC and ALAC), to a $300 deluxe 4, high-grain LP vinyl set that includes CDs, a DVD, a Blu-ray disc, a large art book and signed prints. Now, what's interesting here is not the album itself so much, nor the method in which it was released (Reznor did a similar sort of thing for Saul Williams' NiggyTardust! album). What's interesting is that he released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. This means that, essentially, one is free to share, remix and use the original or manipulated works in noncommercial projects (such as, say, The Dark Mod). Not only that, but Reznor & Co. also created the first torrent seeds for the first volume (nine tracks) and submitted them to the major tracking sites. As far as I know, this is a first for a major indepedent music artist, and, dare I say it, and incredible gesture from such a major artist like Trent Reznor. I was so floored by the idea that I plunked down $75 for the CD/DVD/Blu-ray/art book version after listening to the first few tracks. Pretty wild stuff, I think -- and a very nice surprise for what would've been just another Monday.
  12. The only issue with it is that is buggers up the compositing (it takes multiple shots at a low resolution and stitches them together) if there's some sort of visible heat haze/framebuffer distortion going on. It's a little unfortunate id never fixed that, really. Nice shots, Haste. Rage3D has always been an ATi fanboy-type hangout. And, yeah, mental deficiency is rampant there...just like everywhere else, I guess. There are always a few diamonds in the rough, of course.
  13. What...you don't attend Cannes often, jdude? I'm with you though. I really like the whole concept, and it's something I'd definitely like to see sooner rather than later.
  14. Interesting concept. Nice work indeed. If you should ever need a boom operator/location sound guy in the L.A. area, by the way...uh...*ahem*
  15. phide

    "etc" or "ect"?

    That's proper for Oxford-worshiping, pencil-in-sleeve-pocket American English as well, but not necessarily required for informal situations (such as these extremely informal forums). To be 'ULTRA PROPER', one might even consider writing out a number such as 523. Crazy, crazy! Now, any individual caught having confused 'loose' and 'lose' should be labeled a dunce for all eternity. That's just plain deplorable.
  16. You need the 64-bit version to address all 4 gigs. I believe all you'll need to do is pay Microsoft a few bucks to send you the 64-bit version...so you can encounter even more problems with your drivers and applications! Do you have a spare XP license? If you have a license that isn't currently attached to an existing machine, you can re-use that serial on a new installation, and I believe it'll validate as being genuine (though it may request that you call Microsoft to inform them of a major hardware change). All you'll need is the CD. EDIT: Failing that, OEM copies of XP Home 32-bit are about $90.
  17. Interestingly, I think that's the lowest-quality sound in the current build of TDM. It was something Fidcal came across and committed to give TD a little ambience, and the quality is really terrible, but it exudes personality, and that's something I haven't been able to coax out of my own cat and record (though it seems like all the females are in heat this time of the year, so I might get lucky -- getting a good recording, I mean!).
  18. Alright. I wanted to take a fairly liberal approach to this, but I suppose it's in the best interest of everyone if I just go fairly conservative. I don't want to go around breaking everything -- but then that probably isn't much of a deal anyway.
  19. The win was important to the owner of the Giant's and anyone else who profits or is in a position to profit. That's about it, really. Not in my book. They're still just a bunch of guys who get paid to throw a ball around and run into each other, just as they were before they even stepped onto the field on Sunday. It's an interesting career, no doubt, but they probably accomplish about as much in their entire careers as a paramedic or firefighter achieves in a single day, and likely far, far less than that. I think oddity is pretty much bang on here.
  20. There will always be those groups of users who are 'above' other users in terms of intellect and taste. Yes, Morrowind did very well on the Xbox, yet it was also a much simpler game than its predecessor (Daggerfall), which was grander in scale, depth and complexity despite having been released much, much earlier. Morrowind was, essentially, the first "Todd Howardized" Elder Scrolls title. It got hit a bit, but not to the extent it could have. Oblivion sold tremendously well not so much because of those who were infatuated with Morrowind originally but because it was a newer, more mainstream (and visually attractive) sequel. Instead of extensive text dialogue trees, there were over-compressed VOs and few dialogue options (generally Rumors and one or two other items of no relevance). Instead of real RPG elements, there were hack-and-slash faux RPG elements such as faux leveling: the game could be completed at level 1 with less difficulty than at level 30. The interface was a massive step back from Morrowind's. And to top it all off, a good deal of the new lore wasn't even canon. The game obviously targeted half-wits, and it sold highly because a large number of console owners are half-wits. I expect the upcoming Fallout 3 to be even more Todd Howardized. EDIT: Make that canon, not cannon
  21. Such complaints are made by the typically hardcore PC RPG guys. The real bacon's in the console crowd who have little interest in anything other than graphics and tits (and Oblivion surprisingly didn't really have any of the latter, while Morrowind actually had cat tits). Entice them with the prospect of acquiring New Sword B or Shiny Armor Set C, and you've got 'em. Toss in a few lines of dialogue from Patrick Stewart and you own them. Push the game's complexity beyond what one might encounter in Windows Solitaire, and you've completely lost 'em. Let's just say they do it for the mortgage. It's a shame, too -- they could have done wonderful things with the Elder Scrolls universe. It's actually a pretty damn well-developed IP (or I suppose it once was).
  22. I watched the game. I wouldn't ordinarily, but it was a social 'event', and I tried my best to drag myself through it. It was...tedious. I just don't get it, and I imagine I never will. They throw the ball around (dropping it often), wear tight pants and fling testosterone-induced angst around. They do that for a while, then someone 'wins'. It can be a fun game to play, but what the hell am I watching it for? The high point I think was Audi's R8 commercial, and only for the brief few seconds its throaty engine was being put through its paces, playing gorgeous notes through the various bends and baffles of its exhaust system. And I'm not really much of a car guy either... And good versus evil? What the hell? I'd say someone here needs a cold, hard reality check.
  23. Snags. A few questions for anyone to answer: - underwater_bubbles, currently defined in tdm_sfx_world under the 'Musical' section (why). Are these being used in any actual manner? - frob_lever_metal_large01 and frob_lever_metal_large02 are two defined shaders with two sounds. Are these supposed to be called upon as unique events, or should they be placed into a single shader? - tdm_ambient_city.sndshd. Seems like this one's referencing files from some Dark Mod long ago. Is being used for anything present in the current build?
  24. Especially thanks to the fact that objects don't float inches above other objects as they do in Oblivion You know, I'm not sure if we even have that documented sound-wise. Hmm.
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