lost_soul

The other day, I was looking at some old computers from the early '90s and '80s. It makes me appreciate having an abundance of spare machines from the P4 era around, which are still perfectly adequate for most tasks sands new games. The Apple Lisa was about $10,000 when it came out and only had 1 meg of RAM for example. That would be over $20,000 today! The abundance of P4s floating around for cheap can still play Hulu, Youtube, music, browse the web, do school work, and almost everything else. What kind of computer hardware have you owned in the past? Were you impressed with it at the time? I was first given an old 386-33 MHz around 1994 or so. It was fun to play with, but couldn't do much in terms of gaming. I got Rise of the Triad going on it, but it wasn't pretty. It couldn't handle Doom or Descent without a memory upgrade, which I never got to do. Then around 1997, my step-dad's brother built and gave me a Pentium 100. Sure, it was a little old even at the time, but I loved it! It ran all of the games I wanted to play (Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, etc very well. Of course by 1999, the P100 didn't cut it anymore with Thief and Unreal around. We put together a K6-2 400 machine from cheap parts at a local Fry's. We reused an old case and power supply to save cash. I had a Permedia 2 video card in there that I had been given by a teacher who had recently gotten a Voodoo 2 or something. That card ran Quake 2 engine games well, but it struggled with Unreal and Quake 3. I eventually saved up and got a Voodoo 3 3000, which was a HUGE improvement. I had that K6-2 system until 2002 or so, when it couldn't run many new games anymore. I got a P4 2.53 GHz machine that year, with a gig of RAM and a Geforce 4 ti4600. That was a fantastic machine, up until around 2005. Then I scraped together a cheap Athlon 64 3200+ system with a real DX9 capable video card. This was around the time PC games started going down hill. I've had that Athlon 64 machine ever sense. In 2008, I got a new laptop to replace my 2002-era laptop. I wanted one with NVIDIA graphics, so performance in Linux wouldn't be terrible. This laptop is my current TDM machine and best system at the moment. I've also got a Parallel Zip drive, which I purchased new in 1997. It still works to this day. I put some important files on the disks that I don't want to lose, boxed it up, and shoved it in my closet. If it lasted thirteen years, it may last another ten, by which point my main hard drives may be dead. It never gave me any trouble, and spent the past eight years sitting out in the open on a shelf.

What? no universal arrows? We could have the player find boxes of "arrow dust", which magically gets transformed into the type of arrow the player tries to use. :)

Absolutely. I too have been looking for FM playthroughs for TDM on YouTube. Not only would it promote the mod, but it would give stuck players a place to turn for helpful walkthroughs in finding things they may have missed. Even if I've finished a mission, it is nice to see how someone else does it. Think of it like a modern FAQ/walkthrough for an FM. It is easier and faster for someone to do that than write a walkthrough for the various missions.

I must admit the screens on the EEE PCs are quite good too. I think these are LED back-lit. They have very good darks. Pretty incredible considering how completely terrible the screens on $1500 laptops were in 1997.

I've seen AIs get killed by the environment while flopping around as a ragdoll. The other day, I was playing The Alchemist. I knocked out the guy upstairs sleeping as he was standing up and his body started going crazy. It was flopping around like a fish out of water. Then it slammed into the treasure next to him and/or the wall, and I heard his death cry. I reloaded and was able to do this several times, laughing histarically the whole time. So, apparently movable objects *can* kill??? or was it the wall that killed him? These are the things that would make great youtube vids.

I used to notice things like this when I played Thief in the dark on a CRT too. I think it is pretty normal. For example, if you're in a dark room (in real life) and you shine a flashlight at a CRT, that particular area will continue to glow when you turn the light off. It is usually not that noticable, and I would rather have that than the constant backlight of an LCD any day. I recently went to my mom's house, hooked up my eee pc to an old CRT and played some Thief. I too forgot how great the picture on those things are. The darks are well... dark! The picture looks the same from all angles! Perhaps my forced-switch to an LCD is the reason I don't enjoy games quite as much any more. (Mine died and I canot afford a new one right now.) I saw a CRT monitor at a garage sale for $1 the other day... If only it was bigger! (only 15 inch)

A game is also in the works. http://sintelgame.org/ Looks cool. The only suggestion I have is to add some more polys to the feet. Right now they kind-of look 1999-ish (square).

Apparently there is a 4k resolution version floating around... That's insane! I saw someone talking about it in the comments on youtube.

The reason I see this as a big deal is because Carmack's engines have always used cross-platform APIs. Any game that uses his engine will work great in Linux, even through Wine. This was a big blow to cross-platform gaming... Linux in particular. Maybe Frictional Games can step up to the plate and fill the chair id is apparently leaving behind.

I just wanted to share that there are console commands "savegame" and "loadgame". We can save a game called "john" by typing "savegame john" into the console, and load it by typing "loadgame john". This could be useful for anyone who experiences savegame related crashes. Now you don't have to go through the hassle of using the menu to save or load that other game! We can bind the f2/f3 keys to extra saves and f10/f11 to load them. "bind f2 savegame slot_2" "bind f3 savegame slot_3" "bind f10 loadgame slot_2" "bind f11 loadgame slot_3" Sorry if this information is already known.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/id-tech-5-will-not-be-licenced Apparently they won't let third-party game developers make games on the engine unless it is published by their parent company now. This is the sort of thing that really disappoints me. In the past, id has made great engines, but the quality of games has been somewhat controversial. Sure, Doom 1, Quake 2, and Doom 3 are great. Q3a was kind of shallow though. The modding community fixed that. I miss the days when lots of games used the id engines. The third-party devs came to the table with a much better single-player experience. I'm talking about SiN, Soldier of Fortune, RTCW, and countless others. These were all based on the id engines. I had so much fun with these games. As a consumer, I don't want to see the Unreal engine completely take over. I think id should stay competitive and provide engines for third-party games. Competition is always good. Sure, id tech 4 wasn't so successful. I was expecting them to come back and reclaim a position with this new engine though. These are the sorts of tactics that will only drive production-costs up.

This was a very nice film. It is amazing what computers can do. It is also nice to see people creating content and releasing it to the public in its entirety. Someone could use the assets to make a fan-created sequel to Sintel for example... or a game. If I wasn't strapped for cash right now, I would buy the DVD to support them. Perhaps in a few months... Compare this to the mainstream entertainment industry, where the only goal is to lock up and control every aspect of the content for ever. I would be much happier to pay the Sintel creators than any TV or movie studio for this reason. Now, some questions. Is there a video card on the planet that could do this in real-time? I doubt it. I remember being completely stoked when the Doom 3 stuff was shown in 2001, but the amount of polygons in this movie is pretty staggering. Also, since this is completely CG, you could "re-shoot" the film from any camera angle at any resolution you wanted, right?

Looking forward to this! I recall seeing some cathedral shots for a TDM level floating around a year ago. Was that yours? I think it was over on TTLG.

So rope arrows cause as much damage as broadheads do? Does this mean we can shoot an AI with a roap arrow, say "get over here!" in that deep voice from mortal Kombat, and pull the body back to us? Whenever i get items from a chest, I always lean forward because it is easier to grab them. It seems easier to pretend you have an invisible crosshair in the very center of your screen for tiny little ones.

I know on Windows you can use EAX 4.0 or whatever it is called, but there doesn't seem to be anything for other platforms. Could reverberation be implemented in TDM through software when the source code is opened? Other games did this in the past: see Unreal. In that game, when you're outdoors and shooting, you can hear it bouncing off of the mountains in the distance. When you're in a cave, it has a much stronger/noticeable echo. Even Half-Life had amazing audio effects when you went under water that didn't require any fancy hardware to do. It doesn't have to be nearly as advanced as one of those hardware solutions, but if a large church hall were to bounce sound around differently than a street, it would add to immersion IMO. Id engines have never really been known for stunning audio capabilities (they used only 22 KHz sound up until Doom 3). That was one area where Epic blew my mind... 48 KHz... 32 simultaneous channels... Dolby Surround... all in 1998! Any thoughts?

How's 1.03 going? Any chance we'll see it in October? This thread hasn't been updated in a month, and I'm just curious.

Some of my all-time favorites: Thief 1: The Secret Way - Large mission, multiple points of entry, lots of places to go, custom vocals. Shunned - Creepy. Great atmosphere. Returning a Favor - Casts Garrett as a detective in a hammer temple. Great fun! Circle of Strain 1/3 - All three are quality missions. One is a very nice looking daytime heist. Thief 2: Heist Society - Huge mansion to explore, multiple entry points, rewards different skill levels. Saturio Returns Home - another big mansion with multiple entry points, including an underground crypt. Wicked Relics - Another mansion with multiple ent... lol In case you can't tell, I'm a fan of mansions with multiple entry points.

"Looks like I'll be playing T4 on my XBox. Likely the next generation of game console won't work without a permanent internet connection monitoring what I'm doing and charging for it and selling that info on so the only games left will be indies." More likely they will require you to go online when you buy a new console game to "tie" it to your hardware. This would prevent lending, used games, and rentals. I had actually sent a few e-mails to some game publishers, asking them to sell some 4+ year old games on gog. Never got a reply. I'm perfectly happy to pay for a product that doesn't contain malicious software, and I've got boxes of PC games here.

Yeah I was gonna buy Blood 1 + all expansions for $5.99, just after I find the time to beat the Blood CD-ROM that I picked up for twice the price used last year.

For those who don't know, this is (was") a site that sells classic PC games at good prices, free from the malware infestations that plague many modern games. Apparently they've shut down. I purchased many games from these guys, (like Rise of the Triad, Blood 2, Duke3d, Descent 1/2, and others). I was smart enough to save my games locally, and they've promised to let people re-download their purchases. I'm not upset about that, I just want to see these guys succeed and stick around/get bigger. They were the last place where I would bother to support the mainstream game industry at all, unless you count the used market. So, hopefully this is a joke or something.

Your wine directory is usually .wine. It contains a drive_c folder, where the game should be located. Keep in mind that filenames and directories are case-sensitive in Linux, and don't forget that you can use tab-completion. cd ~/.wine/drive_(tab) will give you drive C if that is the only thing named drive_* in the directory for example.

I would love to see health benefits from food, but health regeneration sounds too much like modern mainstream games... blehh. (no offense meant) With any form of health regeneration, if I get in a tight spot, I can just walk away and let the health recover.

Yep, sounds like Linux isn't treating it as a Windows executable, but rather trying to launch it as a native one. You can set it to open with wine, or open a terminal, cd to the game directory and type wine setup.exe. Are you using gnome? This can be configured from right-clicking on the exe file. I haven't messed with KDE in at least a year though. I also bound hotkeys to turn on and off the advanced 3d effects. I use the magnifier quite a bit, but I want them off while playing games... so I set shortcuts where ctrl+f2 turns them off and ctrl+f3 enables them. The more I use this system, the more I find things I like. I also set it where ctrl+alt+f1 and ctrl+alt+f6 can change my screen resolution to whatever values I desire. (currently 640x480 and 1280x1024)

Snow... now there's an idea! I can picture a large mansion mission somewhere up in the hills away from the city... where the only night sounds are the raging wind and possibly some very soft music. The player could be tasked with breaking in and retrieving something, or assassinating another character. For the record, I think the best snow environment ever in a game was that level from Goldeneye 007 in the dark outside the bunker. The music and sound of wind really make you feel like you're there when playing with headphones on. Imagine being inside the mansion and hearing the wind outside... possibly shutters banging too. Sadly, I don't really have the patience to map.

I've actually been wondering what a new contest would be about. "Vertical" was a good idea, but I personally would love to see more mansion missions. Obviously you couldn't have a "Best Mansion" contest, because most people would get bored/turned off of that constant environment. Vertical was a good idea, because it gave the mappers freedom to build whatever environment they wanted, while still maintaining similarities throughout the missions. Maybe we should start brainstorming ideas for a future contest. My vote is for "Best usage of ambient sounds".