lost_soul

Well, I suppose it would depend on what operating system the machine is running. If it is running Windows 98, it would DMap for about 49 days, then promptly crash. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641) If it was running Windows 95, it would continue to function until it hit the line "C:\con\con" somewhere in the code, and then probably do this.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concon

Another idea would be to have a nice "splat!" sound when the player does something stupid and falls to his death (as I often do). That way, when we fall off a high ledge and hit the bottom, we hear more than just the scream.

Your concerns are valid. The other day, I fired up my netbook and was also prompted to update Flash. I also make sure nothing I install gets to run in the background 24/7. After checking in msconfig, I didn't see any flash stuff listed. This pissed me off slightly, because I don't like things running without my permission or phoning home without my permission. You wouldn't let a stranger come into your house and start making phone calls to unknown third-parties, so why should software running on your machine get to do whatever it wants in this regard? I think the weak-links here are both ignorance and lack of willingness to sift through all of this crap: just as you said. The average user doesn't want to learn how to disable unnecessary services, or even know the many reasons why this is a good idea. Nobody reads those EULAs too. There isn't enough man-power to deal with it all. As long as things work, almost nobody cares what is going on behind the scenes. My solution to the problem was switching to Debian. I don't have games secretly installing services in the background, apps updating themselves, or anything like that. Unfortunately, flash under Linux on netbooks is a bad joke. It is like watching videos on a 486. Even Ubuntu will begin sending "I'm alive!" pings back to Canonical in the future. http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/70652.html?wlc=1282254967 What are your thoughts on Steam in this regard? I recall seeing a story about Valve changing something in the Dam level in an update because many gamers had trouble there.

Thief 1/2 are the only two games binding me to Windows at this point. Though they play on other platforms with WINE, the loadtimes are painful. We're talking upwards of 10 seconds to reload after detection by a guard. Somebody on the TTLG forums plays on a Mac, and I play on Linux. We both have this problem, so it must be a WINE thing. Is there anyone else interested in this that may have the skills to find some sort of solution? Other games like Deus Ex and UT don't have this problem in WINE. I was thinking it may have something to do with the animated loading graphics in the menu. Perhaps I could try disabling them or replacing them with blanks to see if that makes it load faster. Also, T1 doesn't seem to suffer from this nearly as badly as T2 does. I saw on the WINE Wiki that 2D acceleration is lacking. This is what gave me the above idea. Any ideas?

Well this restores a little of my faith that they will release the Doom 3 stuff after being bought by Zenimax. I expected to see no more open-source after that. Hopefully TDM can have a native 64-bit build, or dual-core/hyperthreading optimizations to increase performance when the D3 stuff is released. At LEGION: I absolutely loved SiN 1.

I'm in northern California.

Tonight I nuked my Ubuntu install and "dd"d the debian image over it from the external hard drive. Now I don't have that annoying sound latency problem in TDM with the ALSA driver. True, you can just use OSS to work around it, but then your system can't play other sounds while TDM is running. I like to be able to hear people sign onto IM and stuff via text-to-speech while I am in a game.

I forgot to say that you have to be crouching to do that sword trick. Well, don't feel bad. At least TDM doesn't have bugs like this! My favorite T3 glitch is at 1.00. This video is guaranteed to make you laugh.

On NHAT1 (maybe on other missions too), if you aim at about a 40-degree angle between straight down and in front of you, walk forward and thrust the sword forward, you'll take damage! I was able to kill myself several times by doing this.

Yes, I was thinking it might have to do with mod updates, because I've been playing since v1.0

Yes I do.

Some good choices: The Crown of Penitence The Chalice of Kings Awaiting the Storm Living Expenses

For example, in Living Expenses, the guards just stand there and don't patrol. If I get their attention, they just stand there, shout at me, and only attack if I get close. Sometimes they shake their sword, but they don't throw anything or come after me. This only seems to be a problem on some missions, and I've never seen spiders or undead fail to do their jobs. The spiders and undead patrol and attack me just fine. What's with the guards? I'm on Ubuntu 10.4 64-bit.

This is a pretty large mission. Thanks!

I've only played Hitman 2 and 3. 2 was a real treat (soundtrack and all). 3 just didn't hold my attention. Perhaps I should give it another chance. I've got it and my PS2 still here.

If you need an Ogg Vorbis encoder, OggDrop for Windows is another good free choice. It does batch-encoding. As for normalization, ecanormalize is a good Linux choice. It does batch-normalization on tuns of files at once. I used ecanormalize to normalize a bunch of s3m/xm/mod files that I converted to OGG for my mp3 player.

I've been using Ubuntu since 2005. I am becoming less happy with it as time goes on. From unnecessary bloat/anti-features like notify-osd, to an audio subsystem that I have to constantly work around to enjoy my games, it is time to go somewhere else. A first choice was Arch, because of the extreme customization. You only get what you want. It does require more maintenance though and I'd rather be playing TDM than doing that. My new choice is Debian Testing. I installed it today to an ESata hard drive and it is great! I started with just a command-line and installed a base gnome environment. The memory usage in GNOME is less than 150 MB! You also don't have to use PulseAudio, so there won't be latency issues. Do any of you use the testing branch? Have you had the system break from time to time as a result? So far, the plan is to plug this hard drive into my main system and run from it for a day or two to see how Debian's performance compares with my current system. Then I can make the call whether or not to format and reinstall with Debian. It is also nice to have an external HDD with a ready-to-go system so I can show it to a friend who is interested in Linux, or use it to recover data from the next toasted Windows system I get called to look at. There were some packages I used in Ubuntu, which were not readily available for Debian, so I took them and installed them anyway. Am I asking for trouble by doing this? I once changed my Ubuntu sources.lst to point at a newer version of Ubuntu and then installed a new kernel. T'was not a pretty sight! The C runtime library was updated along with the new kernel, and was no longer compatible with the rest of the software that was on the machine. This resulted in a whole lot of segfaults. oops

First things first, this isn't meant to flame or insult anybody. After playing many FMs though, I've noticed that some have much lower FPS than others on a good C2D system with 4 gigs of ram and a GF9800GS. For example, I get about 30 FPS in the church at the end of the first mission in NHAT, while other FMs run perfectly smooth. Does anyone else experience this? I do as the wiki says and close doors after I traverse them. I also ran the benchmark demo, and got 73 FPS whether I played in 1024x768, or 640x480. It doesn't seem to be a video card bottleneck. Does it have to do with how the map is sectioned off? The training map runs very well, and it also looks great. I suspected it had to do with the number of AI, so I just ran "killmovables" and killed them all from the console to see how that impacts things. There was no difference. Any thoughts?

True, unless you want to use SSDs. I may get one with my next PC. I use an external eSATA 1 TB drive I put together for less than $100. The drive can't even saturate the connection (unlike USB 2.0) and it was a lot cheaper than a USB 3 enclosure.

I've done a bit more research. Both systems have 800 MHz FSB speeds. The one with the crappy geforce6200 has faster RAM though (400 MHz). I think the RAM in the AMD system with the X1600XT is only 333 MHz (if that). It was very old RAM from early 2002. So, if I take the RAM from the gf6200 machine and put it in the X1600 machine, will I get higher FPS in The Dark Mod? I'm sure load times would be faster, but will the FPS? Thanks. Here are the two systems. X1600XT (AMD system) http://www.superware...d/K8N/ps/440624 Pentium 4 3.0 GHz (gf6200 system) http://reviews.cnet....7-30904887.html Apparently the P4 has 1 MB cache, where the Athlon 64 3200+ only has 512 KB. I bet the P4 is faster.

Not really an advert, but a wile ago I was doing research to see how long a filling would take to fully harden. I stumbled on a dentist's website which contained spelling errors. It made me chuckle.

This system looks pretty good. http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Mega_Special_IV/ Core i7 930, 6 gb DDR3/1333 RAM, a 1TB hard drive and a gtx460 for $1160 I don't need a new system right now, but if I did, I would buy this. TDM is generally the only modern game I care about playing. It also has SATA3 and USB3.

I ran this test on my G50Vt-X1 laptop and got around 73 FPS at 1024x768 on high with no AA/AF. I'm not really a fan of the AA/AF, as they just make a blurrier image IMO. Same goes for bloom.

http://www.techspot.com/review/14-visiontek-radeon-x1600xt-agp/page6.html Interesting... Radeon 1600xt vs 7600GS. @bikerdude: There are 2 "lost souls" at TTLG. I am lost_soul, not lost soul. Both cards are 512 MB, but I think the x1600xt is 800 mhz, while the 7600gs is only 400 mhz. The main reason I've been using the 7600gs is because of the superior Linux support. Perhaps I should give the x1600xt another chance though.

I was always into both games. I got Thief when it came out, as did I doom 3. At the time, I had no idea TDM was coming. First-person games (of any kind) have always been my favorite genre. It is also cool to see what the latest engine technology can do. That said, I still play tuns of games from the 1990s.