lost_soul

I checked my messages and I don't seem to have a link to the private forum. Here are a few more thoughts.

Yeah, I don't have insane resolution requirements either... just 1280x1024 I'm surprised that a lot of old video cards still sell for quite a bit of money. I saw a Geforce 9800gt for $80! Always figured gamers would be selling their older cards for $40 so they can play the hottest new game.

What about this card? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162062 With rebates, it is only $60 and should handle TDM maxed out .

I had a buddy tell me today that he is not going to buy BF3 because of EA's recent decisions. It is ironic and amusing that these companies try and try to get more control, yet push customers away. "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems slip through your fingers."

I had to crank the gamma way high to see the buildings, but it is late afternoon, the worst time to be a taffer. I noticed that

I'm a Linux user, and I can help out too.

Yep. Sadly, I can't allocate more memory to the video than 256 MB out of the 8 gigs. I suspect the performance limitation is because of fill rate, not texture quality.

Just because I'm a maniac, I tried TDM on the onboard graphics. They're a Geforce 7025 and not a 6150 by the way. I was surprised when it made it into the game without crashing... and the picture wasn't corrupt or anything. it is actually *almost* playable. I get about 15 or so FPS... much faster than I thought it would be. It is pretty damn impressive actually that this came with the $55 board "for free" and doesn't require extra cooling. I'm sure it would do nicely for older games. and it actually *is* playable at 640x480, though text is hard to read at such low resolution.

Yeah, I figure it shouldn't take *too much*, because I played TDM on a laptop with 64 cores and it ran great at 1024x768.

That GT430 definitely looks like an option. It only says 300 watts required. Besides, even if I decide to upgrade the card later, it is always good to have an extra video card around for testing things. I really wish ATI's linux support was better. They frequently have faster products for the price than NVidia.

I just assembled my backup machine today (Geforce 6150, 8 GB DDR3, Phenom II 955) and I only used an old 400 watt PSU. Is there a cheap video card I can use that won't destroy this PSU and can play TDM reasonably well? I don't really care about other modern games because I have my main box with the GTX460, and besides most PC games these days are malware-laiden garbage anyway. This thing of course has PCI-e 16. It replaces the P4. My buddy has a Geforce 9500GT. Maybe he'll sell it for $30 or so. I think that would solve my problem.

Well, if you ever do decide to make a hook, you should use the physics from the open source Nexuiz. It has the best hook physics ever. Basically, you are pulled toward where the hook goes, but you still have momentum and can swing around. Compare this to something like Quake 2's grappling hook, where the players are just dragged to the hook with no ability to move or do anything fancy unless you disengage the hook.

"Secure Boot" : coming to a computer near you. There's no way this would ever be abused or misused, right?

I agree with trying to find more mappers. The coders and artists have done an excellent job, but there are still lots of resources (especially sounds) that haven't even been used yet in missions. If you're a naughty person like me and you checked in the PK4 files, you know what I mean. *ever since discovering hidden conversations in DX, I've listened to game audio files after completing them when possible.*

Maybe he wants to do something like T2x where only part of the mission is on the train. That was pulled off *really* well. You could also do some cool easter eggs in a mission like this. I remember in Blood where I walked down the train tunnel a long way and it said "maybe this isn't such a good idea.". I kept going and then it said "You really should turn around.". I still kept going and then I heard the sound of an on-coming train. Then I of course tried to turn and run but I went splat. It cracked me up and I'll never forget it.

Sounds interesting. As long as I can knock out AIs and toss them off, it should be lots of fun. If I were to attempt building something like this, I would make the world move and have the train teleported back to a certain spot so as not to have it stretch on forever. You could just have an open area with no trees and then it wouldn't look jarring when the teleportation occurs. You could even have multiple teleport points so it isn't the exact scenery over and over again. Games have been able to do this whole train thing as far back as Blood, though I'm not sure how they pulled it off. I think Monolith really loved train levels.

I wonder how long it will take for the code to come out. Rage is due out on Oct 4, and they said to expect it this year, but after Rage ships. Does that mean in a couple of weeks, or some time in December (hopefully not)? Also, any plans on when TDM 1.07 will be released? Is it remotely close? This will probably be the last version of TDM to come out without having Doom 3 code access.

http://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html As someone who played a lot of Quake 1 on-line and Thief, I always figured they were distant cousins somehow. The textures had a similar look, and apparently the similarities go even further than that.

If you try to play normal Doom 3, does it ask you for the CD key? If it doesn't ask for one, the CD key is still saved on your hard drive and if you lost the case, you should write it down ASAP because hard drives can fail at any time. That said, if your HDD fails, you probably have bigger problems than not being able to play TDM. Anyway, the CD key is usually stored in your doom 3/base directory in a file named DoomKey. I would write the contents of that down so you don't lose it. I don't know if the base directory where this is stored is the main doom3 directory, or the one for the local user on Windows because I haven't used the Windows version of the game in forever. Hopefully I didn't just confuse you with that last bit.

always_remember.xm It is a very sad piece of music... especially when you read the accompanying text inside. That is one of the neat things about these music files which are made by average people. Many of them actually contain text describing what was going on or what they were thinking about when the author created it. The saddest part is realizing that we will all eventually be in this situation. It isn't a question of "if", it is a question of "when". EDIT: Spent the last two hours listening to Nicollete.xm . I fell in love with this track at the part where the harmonica started playing and then the trumpets kicked in. Other parts I love are the drum sounds at 2:15 and the distant "cracking" that can be heard at some points (especially the way it pans between speakers). The transitions between sections of the song are also smooth and natural. There is a strange lyric that says "this is song two, on the album, burn the album!". --Recommended to listen to with headphones that can deliver good bass and treble.

Well I know many of them are still around. There's Bikerdude, who voiced both a guard and a servant. There's also BrokenArts (female voice) and the guys who made the NHAT campaign. I wonder who provided the thug voice though?

They actually did have netbook sized machines back then, but they were about eight times as expensive, and ran at about 400 MHz. I remember playing with one at a Fry's and wishing I could have it.

Yep, and I have no problem with that as long as they officially remove it when they "dump" support for the old game. None of the id games require a disk in the drive to play with official patches. None of the 3D Realms games did either. Neither did any of the older great Epic games like Unreal/UT/UT2004 after official updates.

Obviously any product that ships on a CD requires a CD-ROM drive *at some point* to install. Nobody would debate that. However, I expect the things I buy to not be artificially sabotaged. E.g. Windows requires a CD Rom to install, but it will run with out one. So will Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Doom, etc. I can install these games to a USB thumb drive and then play it on the thing with no problems. The real problem is that I live in a corporate craphole where I could potentially be sued for using "unofficial" methods to get this game to work. This is the primary reason I don't buy games anymore. I'm actually trying to install Windows 95 into a VM right now... but I'm having trouble. It keeps hanging and causing disk corruption, making scandisk necessary. (just like on real hardware!)

Speaking of EA, I just spoke to someone there again today. I called in reference to getting one of my favorite old games (NFS high stakes) that has a disk check to work on a netbook. The guys talked to me for a wile and eventually transferred me to a tier 2 agent. This agent looked around and then told me that they don't have information pertaining to a patch or solution for this old game. The guys also checked to see if this game was available on the Origin store for me, but of course it is not. So, once again the honest customer gets ****ed over. There was nothing on the package indicating that a disk was required to be in the drive to play. Should I try and escalate this to a manager?