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I've been having a number of computer problems the last couple weeks, which I think may be related to overheating, but I'm not sure. I've noticed now, however, every time Windows boots up, it gives me the following error report (in one of those, "send to Microsoft" screens): Run a DLL as an App has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Any of our computer-savy members know what the heck this could be referring to?

No it shouldnt cause any boot problems. This is an odd error. Do you have a windows cd handy? If so cop these two files to your c: drive X:\i386\NTLDR C: X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM X being your cdrom drive. Reboot and boot from the cd. It should ask you if you want to repair an instalation select yes next if I remember right it should ask if you want to do it automaticaly or go to the recovery console. Go to the console. type fixboot and hit return type fixmbr and hit returm Hopefuly that should work. Both of the above will mess up any linux bootloader you have though.

It's not the boot drive, which is odd. No strange noises. Heating is a possible problem, but I have an external fan blasting it right now and the problems are still happening. The actual error I get when the boot process fails is: Reboot and Select proper Boot Device 'or insert bootable media' (not sure about second line) A faulty drive D: couldn't affect the boot process when Win is on C: could it?

I haven't installed anything recently, but I've been having other problems that might have caused this. Most of the time when I boot up now, the process takes a long time, pausing at the IDE detection for a full minute or two. Sometimes the boot process stalls entirely and I get a 'boot device not detected' error. Other times Windows boots up but my drive D: isn't showing up. That drive's only three months old but I'm going to try disconnecting it and seeing what happens. Luckily there's only one important thing on that drive, which I hopefully can get off.

If I were you I would NOT put together one from parts. Me and my 2 brothers all did that, and our computers all have their own wierd quirks. If you think about it, you're creating a particular configuration that's NEVER been tested in the real world before, so no one knows what's going to happen, and when you tell the PC technicians "I always get this slow bit when I do this" they're going to charge you an arm and a leg to diagnose it. I'm inclined to buy one of these pre-built ones from Dell. You pay a bit more, but they built every machine themselves and know all the ins and outs, so the warranty is really good. Any problems they'd have would have to be discovered because people would complain about them and they'd fix it and all future versions would have that fix.

I had no problems with my 9800 either, apart from the drivers, to be honest but they aren’t the best cards for doom3. The newer brand of ati card the x800's are faster at shader model 2.0, than the current nvidia cards but not by much. The opposite is the case with opengl shaders as nvidia has allot better opengl support. Nvidia also offers hardware shadow support which is or isn’t used much depending on who you talk to but there is defiantly less of a performance hit on nvidia cards when any type of shadow is in play than on ati cards. The heat thing with the 6800 isn’t a problem I’ve stressed one past 90c and it shuts down, came back up fine. Normal temps very between 50c and 80c. The newest and most expensive graphics card available is the ati x850 pe xt (the names are getting silly) But again a 6800gt can beat this in doom3. Also keep in mind that nvidia cards are a hell of a lot faster in cad and 3d apps. If you use Linux at all forget ati cards. They have just about got the installation issues done on the drivers, but to give an example, my old ti4600 gets more than twice the fps than my 9800 does in some of the 3d apps and games CPu wise. Intel have just launched a dual core cpu which should be in shops in about a month. This currently has much better support for multithreaded apps, light wave etc. but its single thread and 64bit performance is still slower than the comparable a64 chip. A normal single core Intel chip has better multitasking support, thanks to hyper threading (emulates two cores) this is not available in all of the new dual core chips, only in the extreme edition chips in fact which cost an arm and a leg. The a64 are much better gaming chips and no slouch in anything else tbh. Their dual core isn’t due out for a couple of months. Best set-up I would recommend (bearing in mind I hate ati drivers) a64 3200 or better (Winchester or better Venice core if you can get it as they just came out. the normal heat sink and fan is fine if you don’t over clock madly) 6800gt pci express MSI K8N Diamond SLI ATX AMD S-939 pci-e 1 or 2 gig of ram pc3200 or better audigy 2zs or audigy 4 (internal sound is ok but takes more cpu time than a dedicated sound card) 120bg or 250 gb Seagate HD (sata or ide. Ide is easier to setup)

I have had no problems whatsoever with my Radeon 9800 128Mb AIW Pro...dunno.

I have a Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB, and experienced the same bad tearing, but instead of turning on Vsync which kills framerate, I just entered into the autoexec.cfg seta r_displayrefresh "85" and the tearing dissapeared. Didn't have any overheating problems, and I just have once case fan.

I had to turn Vsync on or there was bad tearing, but other than that didn't notice these problems... then I again I don't play D3 all that much. Does it matter if it's the 256 version or the 128 version?

I tried to use D3 renderbump, however I've some problems with the material-shader. I tried the one from iddev.net , but always get the warning: and when I delete all '[' in the shader I get another warning. can you post your shader, fingernail? would be easier than hours of trial and error

I wanted to download everything from CVS in a clear new folder yesterday, but after several hours I stopped the download because CVS started to download the old textures, which is imho a waste of time and traffic. my darkmod-cvs folder is already > 340mb!! I've no flatrate so it really does matter for me, if I download 300mb or 600mb - every mb-traffic costs Can you please delete the old stuff sparhawk, so that I can finish my download? I don't think it'll cause any problems at all, because the files are just deleted on CVS and not on the machines of the members so the maps will still work. Regarding the nametags I've to say that I'm not in favour of these. It looks a bit strange, when you look for example into the mansion/door folder and there is a mandoor01.tga and a mandoor01sh.tga - if everybody would use nametags we would end up with a door folder like that: mandoor01bt.tga, mandoor01fi.tga, mandoor01re.tga, mandoor01sh.tga . sorry but that's complete bullshit imho We're doing teamwork here, so does it matter who created a specific file? The result would be that everybody adds his nametag to anything, so our models wouldn't be called diningtable.lwo anymore, but diningtableatbt.lwo etc.

It looks LOADS better without the NV normal pasted over it. Upload it and I'll throw it in the mansion pack. But I do sorta see what Spring is talking about. It does sorta look like the normal is inverted. Hard to tell from the screenshot, but I remember Corth talking about how Doom 3's normals are reversed. He had problems with the stone wall at first and had to invert the heightmap in the NV plugin to get it to look right.

Hmmm...don't the bottom studs look like depressions? And while the edging on the top squares looks recessed, on the bottom ones it look raised. I've been having the same kinds of problems with my doors.

I would add to the list of "realism" problems that packing more crap into the tip of the arrow makes the arrow heavier, which limits the velocity that the bow can impart to the arrow when the bow is fully drawn back. So a really heavy arrow, like one holding a coil of thin rope inside, would leave the bow with something like 1/5th the velocity of a broadhead, meaning these arrows would fly like crap... imagine shooting a Toys R US toy bow, and that would be about the performance of your shortbow firing heavy arrows.

Never enough, considerin the amount of work still has to be done. We are working each day on the mod, but there are not always news worth mentioning as some tasks take longer and we also don't want to put out ever single screenshot that we creat. There should be something for you to see that you dont know when you have the final game in hands. I'm already working as a full time programmer nad project manager. As such I don't have high ambition to get into gaming industry. Of course if the money is right, why not? Depends in which mood I am. I often enjoy doing the same stuff at home that I do at work. Of course on different problems though. But I also like to play games and I guess it is the same for most of us.

Just wanted to say that I'm "back" now. I finally got "Codename: Panzers" last Saturday and the game really managed to fascinate me so much that I didn't do anything else than playing panzers last week. I really regret that I haven't bought it already last year, cauze it's imho one of the best RTS games out there - good balance between realism and gameplay and of course awesome graphics! Now I'm almost through the 3 campaigns and getting back to "work". Unfortunately I'm having some strange problems with deepexploration and the blender-lwo exporter. Both converters don't save the uv-texture coordinates anymore for some reason. That's really strange because it used to work for months without any problem Yesterday I started to texture the 4-poster bed and it's about 70% done now - I just can't get it ingame because I changed the layout of the uvw-map to get better results (no essential changes though - I can still use the normalmap - just changed a bit the layout). So I'm trying to finish the texture of the bed today and I hope that someone else, who has deepexploration can convert the obj-file to lwo for me.

I have an email forwarding service, so that mail sent to my mindplaces.com address will be forwarded to my ISP, sympatico.ca. This past week I've been having all kinds of email problems--75% of my messages are disappearing. To try and figure out where the problem is, I created a new email address and pointed my forwarding service to it instead. The strange thing is, while most of my mail is now being correctly sent to the new address, some of it is still winding up in my old sympatico mailbox. How could that happen? As an example, I updated CVS last night, and of the three messages sent to mindplaces.com, two were correctly forwarded to the new address, and one was forwarded to the old sympatico.ca. I don't understand how that is even possible.

Taken from Readme file of UD mod's: I don't know how many FMs use custom .gam files but I know that every FM which uses custom textures must have its own one. And in many cases it's easier to make new objects in archetype compared to modifying concrete objects. So I suppose there must be quite a lot of FMs with custom .gam file. And as there are no way to mix the .gam files there is also no way to use UD mod without any problems if FM has only just one custom texture.... But of course I might be wrong because I've never tried it with any FM.

I never experienced that, or any other wierd problems. Hard helmted guys have the same effect - *CLANG!* "HEY YOU!" Your problem must be related to something else, is all I can say. The AI is way better, if they see soemthing of the "highest emergency", that is, a confirmed sighting of you or a dead body, and they don't kill you and you get away, they turn and run for help. Soon the whole place is after you The way it should be, if you stuff up.

there should be two objects in that file..a low poly and higher poly bed edit: see? i made one of them red..i can put them further from each other if you have importing problems if they are over each..

i love the stealth genre and i think thief tops the list. but there are aspects that are either don't make sense or just plain silly. like guards instantly knowing that those footsteps he just heard was a thiefs as opposed to one of his comrades. An example would be in t3 in the hammer factory trying to steal the chalice, alot of guards and metal plating, you don't see them jumping about if they hear their brothers making a noise but as soon as you do they go nuts. basically it's an ai issue, but there are other things than just the sound. visually as soon as they've seen you they know you to be a thief, ok sure the bow and arrow pointed at their head might give garret away but there are situations where guards should be a little more human. likewise you don't see guards attacking each other the minute they see each other. so guards shouldn't necessarily see garret as hostile unless he's doing something suspicous or hostile. you could do a meter to measure how suspicous your behaviour is, if it's low you could walk right upto a guard and he wouldn't attack you but might start questioning you, if it's high you got problems, disguises wont work as well or at all, your only option is to hide. if you were to make the ai smarter/more realistic in those two aspects you could introduce some hitman like gameplay elements. garret could dress up as a guard and walk in unobstructed however this may get him only part of the way for a guard couldn't get into a vault himself. you could also introduce more roleplaying to the game with dialog choices, persuasion, intimidation, bluffing, diplomacy all options the player has in discussion (noting that whether they work or not depends on what the character is trying to do). now that my rant is over, are you planning to exceed the boundary of thief 1/2/3 ai and gameplay elements? or is this factor still in discussion?

Can you be sure that Doom 3 is stable enough that it will run 17 hours uninterrupted? That is not as self evident as it may sound, because most games are done to get the stable enough to play, which doesn't include stresstesting usually. And I know for sure that I had problems in D3 because every second level exit the game crashed. I would be VERY pissed off, if I would have to replay from the last save point just because the final button causes a crash. Saving is not always because we are pussies, as some seem to think on their narrow track.

That can be aleviated with these things; Leaving the game on pause. Running back to the most recent save point and saving. That solves a lot of those problems, leaving fewer possibilities where you really have to quit and lose your place. And for times when you really have to quit, welll like other forms of entertainment, you make trade-offs on real life depending on how important it is to you. I just kill it and get back to it next time when I have more time. For me, it worth the tension I get when I see a hard bit coming up and not wanting to die because I'll have a lot to lose. When you just saved one second ago, that adrenalin just isn't there....

Thanks! As the readme says you can redistribute it without problems. I hope it will work with FMs as well.

New Horizon did a Minimalist project you can download, which IMO solves these problems, and others. Minimalist Project 1.3