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plasticman

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Everything posted by plasticman

  1. From the looks of it they are using a virtual retinal display for the Google Glass Project. This kinda explains the tech and as you can see it doesn't look much different in this recent presentation of the Google Glass. Since the picture is projected more or less directly on the retina there seems to be no problem with it being to close to the eye. However, technical problems aside, when this augmented reality stuff takes off and merges mobile phones, social networking and GPS-Tracking it will surely become an interesting technology for completely new kinds of games, as well as surveilance. But all this stuff is completely different to VR. The fun part in VR is that you don't see the real world. I tried one of these devices (as some of us it seems) at a fair in the late 90s (Cebit, Hannover). It had the usual three ingredients: headphones, motion sensors and two LCDs (640x480), which appeared like a large stereoscopic screen about 2 meters on front of you. It was fascinating allthough there were clearly issues to be adressed. You could play some hacked version of Descent as a demo, it was nice to see it in "real" 3D but completely awkward to control a spaceship via a headtracking device. Also, it was not that immersive since the screen only covered a limited area of the natural field of view. What excites me about Carmack's take on it is how he adresses all those little things and takes it to what it should have been in the first place. What could turn out to become a problem that's less easy to fix is that you can't see your input devices with the display completely covering the view. It would be fine for me, my left hand knows it's way around "w,a,s,d" and I could move any beverages far away from my mouse before playing -- but for wide adaption that's a no go. For headtracking as an input I think it comes down to how (and if) it is used. Controlling anything else than in-game head movement does not sound like a good idea, and as Rich pointed out, in an FPS it adds another level of diffculty since head movement compromises your mouse aim. But when it comes to flight sims -- when I wore these glasses back then I wanted nothing more than play an X-Wing game with them.
  2. Seems to get viral, even in the non-techie media: Behind closed doors John Carmack showed a VR Headset at the E3. There are some videos available, I'd pick this one (for sound quality, [giantbomb.com]). The device itself seems to be a prototype of an upcoming DIY-kit developed by someone called Palmer Luckey. There's a long thread about it (with Carmack occasional posting). One technical interesting part is, the optics are kept simple while the software compensates for the lens distortion. In this case, the software is nothing else than the upcoming BFG-Edition of Doom3. The dream is: Carmack will succeed, in about one year there will be affordable headsets for the consumer that do not suck; the added code pieces that are needed will become open source; "someone"TM puts it into DarkMod. I don't really think, we will get there...
  3. Unfortunately, there is no such a thing like "the last version". When Orbweaver updates the Launchpad repository I get the new binaries automatically, and the previous ones are like gawn forevar! But my guess that all the distributed binaries are broken could be falsified at least. Orbweaver has a working version and I just tried it on a fresh Ubuntu 11.10-install, where I spent like 10 minutes dragging and resizing a brush because I could do it and it felt so good after all this time... The same test in a fresh 10.10-VM however shows the bug, just like on my real system. But there is no point in doing any updates for the maverick Meerkat anymore, since it is officially dead for a week now. I plan on doing a reinstall when the Pangolin arrives at the end of the month. We will see how things go from there. Anyway, thanks for all the work you put into this.
  4. The resize bug Tels ran into -- I can see it on my system as well. It has been there for months and makes for a very limited DR experience (i.e. renders DR completely useless). I think bug #0002952 and bug #0003021 are related to that. To me it looks like DR on Linux is basically broken (and has been for a while). People just don't complain that much because there are not that many Darkmodders on Linux with most of them beeing players not mappers. The remaining few are either the geeky kind that go through the hassle of building the editor themselves and succeed or the less geeky kind that fails to do so and sticks with a broken version from the PPA (me).
  5. plasticman

    Doom4 Hyrra

    Matt Hooper does a little rumour control via twitter: "Those images have nothing to do with what you're gonna see in Doom4." He's not denying they originated from Doom, but I guess it's good advice not to read too much in a few screenshots.
  6. plasticman

    Doom4 Hyrra

    This isn't even Kansas Mars anymore!
  7. Yes, rope swinging needs love. I usually prefer walkthrough videos without some annoying kid's voiceovers. But this guy isn't a kid for sure and he doesn't annoy me at all. The only minor issue: he is a little too jumpy with the mouse. It's a different kind of art to play a game or to record a screencap -- in the latter you should act more like a cameraman, slower and smoother movement etc.
  8. Try [F3] with your file manager (nautilus) in focus.
  9. +1 The original RttC gave me a constant 15 FPS and despite several attempts I never got very far. The updated version was quite rewarding and is still one of my favourites. In general I agree that updating means bugfixing, performance optimazations and a little more polish here and there. Changing the plot and turning it into a different experience can also be nice (like revisiting a place in a campaign, for example), but that's not updating.
  10. "Not professional" meant PA is not suitable for audio production environments, where low latency is required. That's what Jack is for, and there is nothing to prevent the professional guy from running Jack alongside with Pulse in Gnome 3 or any other DE. Older distributions that are not outdated yet, like Ubuntu 10.4 LTS or Debian 6 (Stable). There is also a Gnome 2 Fork, the "Mate Desktop Environment", but I don't think it will prosper. To me the approach from the Linux Mint people seems more promising, they are developing a classical user interface for Gnome 3. An alternative would be using another DE like XFCE od LXDE, both are more gnome2-like than Gnome 3. To get rid of the sound lags it should be possible to bypass Pulse, as long as TDM/Doom is the game giving you issues. Looksie here.
  11. The just released open suse 12.1 ships with KDE3 packages for those who prefer it over KDE4. I think this pretty much shows the mess the Linux desktop has become. Be it KDE4, Gnomeshell or Unity -- there is nothing wrong with inventing new stuff -- but in the Linux world it always seems to follow the same pattern: burn the old bridge first, then cross the river. If you can't swim, there will be a bridge we are going to build right after we burned the one we started working on right now. Guess I'll stick with Ubuntu 10.10 and Gnome 2 until support ends...
  12. Thinking of people who will discover TDM in the upcoming years: the more polished the mission catalogue is, the better will be the overall reception of the project. So updating is definately useful.
  13. A big thank you to our hoster! I don't see any major bugs, just small things: my profile photo is no longer there, seems the upgrade rebuilt it based on my avatar. And while composing this message I noticed a missing smiley, the angry one: We propably won't need it anyway as long as banning still works...
  14. Thanks for the feedback. Looks like a surround setup. I did not try this, but according to id's Doom 3 Linux FAQ s_numberofspeakers is either 2 for stereo or 6 for 5.1-surround. Not sure what happens with arbitrary numbers...
  15. Yep, ATARI! The most sophisticated and powerful home computer system of the late 80ies, vastly superior to those C= toys labeled "AMIGA" which essentially served as a substitute for a real girlfriend for those poor fellas who happened to buy one. I guess I was trying to point out that these system wars are a phenomenon , because nowadays we can change our system by a simple reboot when needed. It is no longer an exclusive decision you have to make before you buy. Used to be true for years, but things changed. I am having the issue of a randomly freezing system which is caused by the proprietary nvidia driver. While there are bug reports all over the usual places I haven't seen a fix for it over a year now. It happens not that often, maybe once every two months -- but a complete lockup on a linux system is something that is not supposed to happen at all unless your hardware fails. My next video card will be AMD. They did change their linux policy over the last years, so I do have some hopes at least and kernel based modesetting is a nice thing to have. Let alone Fermi's ridicoulous high power comsumption...
  16. So, we're back in operating system wars again? -- Fine. IMHO TOS 2.06 pwns pretty much anything!
  17. Just watching screenshots from a shacknews review, this caught my eye: link. If there are plenty of little details like this, it will be worth a look.
  18. - - - - - derailing - - - - - - snip here - - - - - - - - - Just the Garrett part would have been "okay", though not a match for the "perfect" performance Stephen Russell did in TDP and TMA (he wasn't on par in TDS from what I remember). The FAIL is, that the german actor speaks Garrett, Karras and the "Children" with almost the same voice, wich is nothing less than ruining the game. Said Stephen Russell did an absolutely awesome job for Karras and it is even hard to believe both parts, Garrett and Karras are spoken by the same actor. - - - - - derailing - - - - - - snip here - - - - - - - - -
  19. I was assuming it doesn't do multithreading at all and this was one of the things to fix after the open source. @NH: I don't doubt your findings. Just saying -- and this is purely academic -- it's comparing apples to oranges. Or more like comparing something in a little black box that could be oranges to something in a very similar box that could be apples. The drivers are closed source. Even when you have the same driver version on both systems it says nothing about what happens internally. I didn't know we had any...
  20. Can someone please enlighten me, why it is so important that this little extra work is done by the mapper? When it is just a few minutes changing texts, wouldn't it be the same for a translater to start here? Or, let me guess, the idea is to provide one identical mission release that is sepearated from the language data, right? I think the heated dabate is partially due to a minor cultural difference. There are countries where all the movies and shows get dubbed with a local language version, quoting Wikipedia: "The Germanophone dubbing market is the largest in Europe. Germany has the most foreign movie dubbing studios per capita and per given area in the world. In Germany, Austria and the German speaking part of Switzerland, practically all films, shows, television series and foreign soap operas are shown in dubbed versions created for the German market." When you grow up here in germany you get so used to it, that you take it for granted. While this surely provides access to a wider audience it is also true that in many cases the artistic value suffers from it. Games have a history of getting litterally raped by low-cost localizations. You know, Stephen Russell did Karras as well as Garrett, so in the localized German version of TMA they used the same poor voice actor for Garrett, Karras and his "Children", so all of them were permanently talking with "your" voice. Just stating my opinion: I can absolutely understand when a mapper has an interest in keeping control over what happens with her/his work after release. When someone intends it to be in english and wants it to stay english only I am completely fine with it. I wouldn't be interested in a german translation anyway (which is -- no offense, rly -- the same attitude tels had just a year ago). I think in most western countries it is not necessary to provide a translation. Anyone who lives in germany learns english in school. If your english is not sufficient enaugh to enjoy a fan mission, you do have a bigger problem than playing TDM. Like, what are those funny words all over the internet there. However, I have a different point of view when it comes to countries where there are big communities that can not be blamed for their lack of english, thinking of russia, but mostly china. I may be completely wrong, but I think there is a potential of TDM getting picked up there and prosper. So I am all for providing the infrastructure in the mod. We will propably be happy about it, when it comes to translating all those awsome chinese FMs into English.
  21. When it comes to performance I think it is a myth that TDM performs better on Linux. Things like that depend on the graphics driver for the most part, any update can shift your fps a little up or down. While it's at least difficult to make a "fair" comparison between Windows and Linux performance -- who knows what's in those drivers anyway -- I don't think there will be major differences on the same hardware. If so, something is very wrong with the driver. I am on Linux for years now. I am not going to change that anytime soon, but I would not recommend it to everyone -- there are always issues. You can fix them, but the next upgrade will break something else. What is happening in Ubuntu right now -- and this started around the time when they changed the theme and moved the window buttons to the left side -- is basically a redesign of the system. I have no worries about the Ubuntu project doing it but they should have advertised it more clearly. In the last few upgrade cycles they changed from grub to grub2, init got replaced by upstart, HAL by udev, PulseAudio was implemented (in a wrong way at first, what PA-author lennart peottering, who works for red hat, complained about in public, because he got all the hate mails), OSS got thrown out -- so what they do here is changing a running system while I run it. Oh, and I didn't even mention obvious things like the unity desktop . . . When it comes to TDM -- back to the original topic -- I have hopes for future improvements. Even installation on Linux is painful right now: at first you need Doom, which involves running an install script and copying files. Then you need to know how to make a file executable for the TDM updater and launcher. In contrast, the standard way of installing things in Ubuntu is via the quite comfortable software center, choose the app you want and click install. Maybe there will be a darkmod ppa eventually. Further it would be nice to have the sound system working properly from right from the start. When you google it you will find that all the id tech 4 games are causing trouble on linux systems.
  22. I updated the linux sound lags part in the FAQ. It's based on what it looks like on my system and some reading about Pulse, OSS and ALSA I did in the last few days. I do not recommend to "simply" uninstall PulseAudio, since it is not exactly the elegant way of doing things. Changing the defaults your distribution ships with will likely cause issues, like "Cool, I can play DarkMod now, but where went that volume control on me desktop?" For the major distributions it looks like OSS is the past, ALSA in conjunction with PulseAudio the future -- It's not going away anytime soon, so we'd better explore strange new ways of dealing with it . . .
  23. Picking up where I left: I got it working, no lagging on Ubuntu 10.10 via ALSA and without suspending pulse audio. It is like they say on id's doom on linux site: "A lot of Alsa installations have a misconfigured default device." There is a cvar called s_alsa_pcm with the default value default. Instead of default, which seems to be error prone, you can put the ALSA playback device of your choice there. Make sure s_driver is set to "best", s_numberofspeakers to "2" (for stereo). To determine your playback devices, open a terminal and type aplay -L should give you something like this: [ . . . ] dsnoop:CARD=Live,DEV=3 SB Live! 5.1 [sB0220], Multichannel Playback Direct sample snooping device hw:CARD=Live,DEV=0 SB Live! 5.1 [sB0220], ADC Capture/Standard PCM Playback Direct hardware device without any conversions hw:CARD=Live,DEV=2 SB Live! 5.1 [sB0220], Multichannel Capture/PT Playback Direct hardware device without any conversions hw:CARD=Live,DEV=3 SB Live! 5.1 [sB0220], Multichannel Playback Direct hardware device without any conversions plughw:CARD=Live,DEV=0 SB Live! 5.1 [sB0220], ADC Capture/Standard PCM Playback Hardware device with all software conversions [ . . . ] This is the name of the device (1st line) followed by a description (lines 2 and 3). The complete list contains all the audio stuff on your system, so it can get pretty long (on-board-sound, soundcard, hdstuff from the videocard etc.). From the ones above on my system I can use plughw:CARD=Live,DEV=0 or hw:CARD=Live,DEV=0, which is because PCM Playback is what we want to do. You can pass these unconvenient device names via the command line, in TDM I added +set s_alsa_pcm hw:CARD=Live,DEV=0 to my dmargs.txt. This seems the preferred solution to the problem since it avoids OSS in the first place, so there is no need to rely on an OSS-compatible kernel (which are soon to be extinct) or emulations like padsp, aoss or ossp. Linux and audio. It's a real mess.
  24. The 1.06-Update leaves me with a second darkmod-folder. After launching the game I can see no missions at all, after exit I have: ~/.doom3/darkmod and ~/.doom3/darkmod Note that you can't see the space after the second one. The "new" darkmod -folder contains an empty /fms-directory, sometimes a missions.tdminfo. Folder gets recreated when deleted. I guess there is a typo in some config file. Any ideas? I am -- still -- on Ubuntu Maverick (10.10) 32-bit. edit: removed "darkmod " once again and recreated it as a symlink: ln -s darkmod 'darkmod ' Quick and dirty fix on my end, but I still think there's a typo or something in the mod . . .
  25. The idea is to provide a different input method for search in general. It tries to provide useful links in the first place while offering visually similar images as an option. Seems to be quite handy when you need a higher resolution of an image you already have, or -- and this is powerful -- you like to identify images. Art, for example. If your input is RIPPOFF4.GIF as provided in TMA, it discovers the original source for you. I haven't seen a feature like this before. Next step will be you hum a melody and google tells you which song it is.
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