kano

https://libertyjusticecenter.org/media/ab-2098/ Imagine if the government put half as much effort into averting the prospect of potential nuclear war with Russia as they do when it comes to relentlessly jabbing everyone with EUA injections that do not even stop us from getting sick or spreading the virus! A virus that probably more than half the population has already had, anyway. EDIT: Yep! https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220426/almost-60-percent-infected-by-covid

Passive cooler = very huge and still cannot handle a high power CPU. As far as the physics goes, there is minimal difference between 1 and 2 CPU fans, but a hugely massive difference if you don't have one at all.

Look at the nice shadows from monsters and projectiles dancing all around.

Nintendo will shut this down faster than you can say "copyright terms have become too lengthy and are clearly unconstitutional". On that note, Imagine if the people who are currently in charge of the Thief franchise had been open to the community, and free from-scratch mods like TDM being set in their universe. You know, like the way Sega allows free, fan-made Sonic games. The Thief franchise might not be stuck in a rut now. It certainly couldn't be worse than Thief 4! At the same time, Sega themselves are even putting out new Sonic content. But the people in charge of most franchises, even abandoned ones like Thief, are like "No, you can't play with that, even though it has been in my closet for the past ten years and I myself will probably never use it again, because last time I took it for a spin, it went about as well as flying an RC model airplane without wings."

This is probably the worst port of Doom there is, just because it is abundantly obvious that the hardware it is running on was capable of so, so much more if used correctly! There was a company that had a 3D engine properly optimized for this system and it ran way faster and smoother while having more advanced features.

Still sad no one made Doom for this machine. It would be a cool university project or something. I mean the hardware is pretty weak, but all console versions of the game had sacrifices made to them. E.g. removing other animations of monsters so that they can only face the player, removing lots of textures, etc. I think if the SNES could run Doom, this thing should be able to. It has 4 times the memory, but the thing about cartridge based games is that you can cheat by including extra processors inside of the cartridge itself (all?) 3D games on the SNES did this. You can also rapidly pull data from the cartridge to make up for lacking RAM, it's like a grandfather of the super-fast SSD, which you certainly can't do with a 1X CD-ROM drive! I know that the wizard who made SNES Doom happen released the source code for it and also did a long interview, I wonder what he would have to say on the subject of making Doom run on a CD-I.

Music design in this game is seriously excellent. Both when idle and when the player takes damage/in frantic combat mode.. at 7:15, listen to that. It's just spooky and perfect, with the darkness and the whole not being able to see 50 feet in front of your face. Had to be done like that on these old systems to prevent frame rates going into the toilet and it makes the game scarier that way, anyway.

Remember that in this game, unlike in Thief, it actually matters where you hit the AI. In combat, hitting them in the head or the face does the most damage. Watch out for helmets though, hitting the helmet does _no_ damage. Also the AI in this game are pretty quick to switch from an attack stance to a block stance. Even if you have auto-defense switched on, you have to be quick about it and counter before they start blocking.

Yep, "use" them, the same way you use the lockpicks, the health potions or the lantern. You can indeed put them down (you can put most things down in TDM that aren't crucial to completing a mission) without them being armed. That's what the drop button does. I think this is different from Thief, where even if you drop mines as opposed to shoving them out forward with the "use item" button in those games, the mines still become armed. Last thing to note is that when mines in TDM (gas/flash/explosive) have been placed in "armed" mode with the use button, you will hear them wind up and start ticking. This does not happen when it is merely dropped.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240043324/IBM-pays-for-Linux-graffiti Heard someone mention this... couldn't believe it... It was 20 years ago before I started using Linux and all I cared about was playing Team Fortress Classic all day, no wonder I didn't hear about it.

Not sure what issues people had with T2X. Personally I think it is every bit as good as the original game, even superior in some ways.

Good documentary, lots of educational info here. But music is a bit too loud.

It is my understanding that Blender Eevee uses the same shadowing algorithm as TDM, called PCF. That being said, how come, in Eevee, when you move the camera around, the shadows shimmer and "pop"? Basically it's like moving the camera causes all of the shadows in Eevee to start from a completely hard state again, and then start smoothing out from there? TDM and other games don't behave like that. What gives?

There are also some rather strange oddities about Duke Nukem 3d. For one, walking in the slime without the boots causes damage to the player, but submerging and swimming in it does not. Yes, even without the boots. Basically as far as the game is concerned, slime is no different from water when you submerge, in the areas where you can. Same rules apply about not running out of air, but other than that, swim away. The boots don't deplete while submerged, either. Also, if you happen to shrink or freeze a hatched egg, when it thaws, or goes back to normal size, it will be reset. That is, it will be unopened and happy to hatch again, spawning another enemy. Another oddity in the game, is breaking mirrors with the pipe-bombs. The player doesn't even have to detonate them, merely throwing them at a mirror causes the mirror to break. This is strange because I don't think the pipe bomb item itself causes any damage to anything until it is detonated. Would it maybe kill slimers? They are killed by anything, even other weapons that don't actually do damage like the shrinker. Hmm I've never managed to hit a slimer while tossing the pipe bombs.

This was always my favorite episode of the game because of the artwork, and it felt like you were actually in space because of the exteriors through the windows. I always referred to the slimer enemies as "eggies" when I was young. lol

Wow , the other bikers are actually polygons! Also, I love how the entire screen tilts while making sharp turns, and how the camera starts to violently jump about whenever you go on the grass, simulating the feeling of being out of control.

Much more impressive looking than other racing games that ran on hardware from the mid-80s.

Pretty good LCD quality for the early 1990s. The brightness of the OS environment demonstrates the variation in contrast that the screen can do rather well, it looks like the brightness in the actual game is set quite low. Also there is minimal smearing and the colors are good too. Running 3D games, or really any game with fast motion on a budget laptop back then generally looked like ass.

The magic is in the denoiser. In Quake 2 RTX, you can even switch the denoiser off and see all the noise in it's glory if you want to. Basically, real-time implementations rely on very few samples, and aggressive denoising, not to mention fewer light bounces, Q2RTX being limited to only 3 diffuse bounces, as they are generally the slowest to calculate, at least in Blender they are. Additionally, most games that do real-time ray tracing only use it for one or two aspects of the scene like reflections, not for literally everything, like Q2RTX does. You can even have real-time emissive textured surfaces in Q2RTX, like the screen of a monitor in a dark room, where whatever is on the screen causes accurate shadows and colored lighting in the environment. It's amazing. Of course they can't just bolt this onto Thief's game engine and call it a day, the lighting and materials would also need to be reworked to properly take advantage of it.

It's not hard to make Thief fans happy, add path tracing to Thief 1 and 2... either ala Quake 2 RTX, or with a pseudo-remake of the games. Allowing for fan missions with a path tracing engine, is a must.

(The Depths) Such a beautiful piece. It does NOT sound like SNES music. And it is 100% polar opposite in terms of mood from the track that preceded it. I never heard anything else even close to as sad-sounding from that console, and I've no clue how he got the strings to sound so perfect.

Actually I have a fitting question for this topic. As the game ages, how hard would it be for the TDM team to spit out versions of the models with more subdivisions to make them look better? I mean, since it's all open source, can't one just take the original model files, ratchet up their subdivision, and then reimplement them into the game as hardware gets more powerful? The other day I spawned a whole bunch of guards on my 5950x machine just to see what would happen to the frame rate, because I remember doing that same thing making a Pentium 4 beg for mercy, and it didn't even flinch.

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/04/20/millions-of-lenovo-devices-affected-by-bios-vulnerability/ All I wanted was the ability to physically write-protect the firmware on my motherboard in order to prevent it from being replaced by an attacker in the event that I happen to run a malicious program. Instead, the industry has made the boot process so overly complicated that you can now play Doom right in UEFI without even loading an OS. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_UEFI It's like, I ask for a door lock that actually works, and in response, they just make a more complicated door that still can't be locked correctly.