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Spoiling Myself


ascottk

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No, what I was doing was responding to this completely baseless claim;

 

Each leave is not made of a dozen polygons, and of course "they" have a regard for poly counts because my computer doesn't run slower with the mod installed, and "they" also released a low poly mod.

 

I've never seen anyone so argumentative, you're always at it with someone on this mod. Even when someone makes a lighthearted quip like that, which would obviously be insane if it were true -12 polygons per leaf in a huge oblivion forest - you have to make a serious debate out of it.

If Zylonbane is the founder of The Pedants Society, and Nyarlathotep is the chairman, then you're the boy who makes the tea.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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Have you seen it in motion? The forests are absolutely gorgeous and the leaf swaying works to good effect, for one thing. It's pretty next gen looking to me

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Every time I see Oblivion I can't get over how... Morrowind-y it is. Except for pumped poly counts and longer view distance, it's basically the same thing again. Taking out the realtime light and shadow really killed the 'next gen' look of it. Way to go, Bethesda.
I think the shadows are real time & they seem to be softer shadows. I haven't played it in a few days but I remember watching some of the AIs' shadows & they were dynamic.
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I think far cry had better environments than this.

The only reason oblivion has better characters and models is because of the huge poly counts they have. A character in armour can be over 15000 polys.

I don't think making everything high poly counts as being next gen.

Consdiering how well this game runs on my old computer, it's certainly not next gen.

Crysis is next gen, and I'd be surprised if it even runs at all on my computer.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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Hmm next gen. I'd say Gears of War is considered next gen to me. Age of Conan as well which is a PVP MMO type game. Those are the only two I could think of. Haven't played Oblivion but it does look next gen don't mean it is next gen. Company of Heroes I consider that next gen because of the quality it is. World of Warcraft definately because it set the bar really high for next MMO's.

 

Currently i'm playing Dark Age of Camelot. Not sure if any of you have played it but there is a free trial at fileplanet.com. I consider this title next gen because no other MMO does what it can do. It's 3 realms vs each other. You can capture, destroy keep doors or the keep itself, build siege weapons, hire guards, and a bunch of other stuff. It ties into PVE really well and you can level off PVP if you want by turning in bounty points for xp. Killing players gives you xp. There's also a TON of classes to play around with. Plus 3 realms are distinctly different. So you get 3 games in one. That's a game I consider next gen =D.

 

If you dedcide to join daoc you can get all expansion for 30 bucks plus free 30 days. My referall id is "UNSTOPP" with two p's so make sure to give me credit ty.

Edited by Unstoppable
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I bought DAoC 5 years ago when it was released, after I quit EQ, but I didn't play it long. It seemed like more of the same old crap to me, just like every other MMO. That was a waste of money. I also bought Star Wars Galaxies on release. Another waste of money. I've totally had it with MMOs. They're all exactly the same crap, and I don't care to hear about which minor differences any particular one introduces. They're addictive, that's for sure, but that's not the same as being good.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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Have you seen it in motion?

Yep, played it at a friend's for about 2 hours. It does look better of course, just not much. It doesn't look like the original hype-machine shots from way back, when all light and shadow was realtime (recall the tutorial movie where everything in the prison cell was casting real, soft shadows - no more). Aside from character polycounts, it's not all that different from Morrowind (look at Dom's shot above and think of some of the more 'plush' Morrowind scenes from way back).

 

I think the shadows are real time & they seem to be softer shadows.

Used to be, but they removed them at some point during development which raised quite an outcry in the community. They were getting terrible performance (as can be imagined - full realtime light and shadow, plus softness, plus huge world with far distance view...? They aimed too high). The bad part is, this was after getting everyone's woodies going for the game. Now whatever's there is faked HL2 style stuff, from what I've seen and read.

 

The worst part is, at least to the community's knowledge, is that apparently they removed the functionality completely! They didn't just disable it by default so that people with faster machines in the future could enjoy it; they apparently removed it. Argh! I would sincerely hope that's misinformation.

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when i first played oblivion i had to use "oldblivion" cause' my video card sucked. after i upgraded things looked sooooo amazing. my brother stoped playing after he upgraded his video because he "couldnt see anymore" (when he played with a crappy VC the lights didnt work right, everything was completly lit, no darkness in dungeons.)

-Lord Vergider, The lit torch

Funny last words:

-Lets split up, we'll cover more ground...

-Hey yall watch this!

-The odds of that happening have to be a million to one!

-Why is the rest of the Star Trek landing party wearing a different color?

-Pull the pin and count to what?

-Which wire was I supposed to cut?

-What duck?

and finaly:

"Why yes, a bullet-proof vest!"

(Last request before the firing squad.)

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You should give daoc another try on classic server. No buff bots and no trials of atlantis which use to require a lot of time but now it's soloable.

 

Also there are task dungeons which you just do over and over to gain xp fast. Right now i'm gaining a 300% bonus in a certain zone called odin's gate because mythic screwed up so they giving us 300% bonus on everything in one zone. Crazy good. :ph34r:

 

As you say though they are addicting and are almost all the same. Also in DAOC you get one free level for every level earned about every 5 days which is nice. Plus you don't have to be high level to pvp there are battlegrounds for all levels.

 

WoW stole a lot of ideas from MMO's before it. If you look at the interface for Lineage 2 it looks just like WoW's interface.

Edited by Unstoppable
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Every time I see Oblivion I can't get over how... Morrowind-y it is. Except for pumped poly counts and longer view distance, it's basically the same thing again. Taking out the realtime light and shadow really killed the 'next gen' look of it. Way to go, Bethesda.

No way. The quests are way more "personal", and you actually care about the people involved and the desicions you make. Especially where you have to use your own moral judgement to decide what should happen. Everything has been scaled down to provide a more entertaining experience and less cookie cutter repetition. The quest where you go into a "painting" verision of Oblivion, comes to mind. There are some other similarly very different experiences but I can't remember them right now.

 

@oDDity - ah, its okay for you to goad people, but not for them to retalliate? I'll try to remember that from now on :) As for this being a "serious" debate, perhaps you should imagine smileys on the ends of all my posts?:):D:wub::rolleyes:

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"Every time I see Oblivion... light and shadow... next gen look..."

In other words, the graphics. ;) I don't have enough experience with the game to comment on the rest (although I have strong personal doubts that they improved quests and interaction much if at all - I'm not knocking Morrowind, as I like it just fine, but let's face it - it's about a generic and repetitive as a respectable game can get.)

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Oh okay - well trust me, they have improved the quests a darn sight. The other thing I just remembered, is that characters having a conversation about sensitive information will suddenly stop talking if you approach and are not hidden, and there is one quest I've experienced so far that requires you to do this - and you have to follow the guy around the whole day, watching him go about his daily chores etc. and I was perched on a grave stone to listen in the dark, and then i heard him mention someone's name when he was talking to a friend - the name I needed to hear, and I crept forwards in excitement and fell off the grave stone - it was the smallest sound and they were several meters away, but they changed topic immediately, to something generic :o its much harer to eavesdrop in Oblivion than Thief. I had to follow him around for another whole day to get the information I needed! As greuling as it was, it was a unique game experience and I'm glad to have gone through it.

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I started to play Morrowind a few times some years ago. I was admiring the sunsets and the scenery which really looked great. But I soon got lost, because there is absolutely no system to keep track of what to do, and then your are running around in that big world without any clue. So I gave Oblivion a try a few months ago, and the starting was quite good. But then, when I emerged from that starting dungeon, I somehow got lost again, so it was basically the same experience as with Morrowind. Maybe I give it a try again and see how it plays, maybe I find my way into the actual game sometime.

Gerhard

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Yes, Oblivion is MUCH improved as far as quality interactions go, but even so it still eventually can get stale.

 

As far as graphics, the biggest improvement may be the normal mapping, but I'm completely in love with distant land, it adds to the immersion massively for me.

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The distant land feature and the active/in-progress/completed quests listings (which Morrowind suffered hugely from the lack of - I hated paging back 20+ pages in the journal to see if I still had any unfinished quests. Worst game UI design EVER) are probably the two biggest advances of Oblivion over Morrowind. Everything else is just icing.

 

Still, it's only a matter of time before I get totally bored with it, just like I did with Morrowind.

My games | Public Service Announcement: TDM is not set in the Thief universe. The city in which it takes place is not the City from Thief. The player character is not called Garrett. Any person who contradicts these facts will be subjected to disapproving stares.
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I started to play Morrowind a few times some years ago. I was admiring the sunsets and the scenery which really looked great. But I soon got lost, because there is absolutely no system to keep track of what to do, and then your are running around in that big world without any clue. So I gave Oblivion a try a few months ago, and the starting was quite good. But then, when I emerged from that starting dungeon, I somehow got lost again, so it was basically the same experience as with Morrowind. Maybe I give it a try again and see how it plays, maybe I find my way into the actual game sometime.

The problem I had with Morrowind in this area was that eventually, just through talking to random people, I ended up with a shit load of petty little courier type quests that I didn't care about, cluttering my quest screen. (Though I didn't play it with the Tribunal add-on, like Komag just said)

 

But with Oblivion, I found the quest interface to be much more friendly this time around and easy to keep track of what's going on - it lists all active quests on one page, but only lists the most recent event of them. If you click into one, it takes you to the detail page where you can review all its events. This also makes it the "active" quest, which means all waypoints on your map now pertain to this quest. So you can click into your quest you're most interested in and then go to the nearest waypoint and get it done, and when you complete a quest, it gets shunted to the "completed quest" screen, away from the others.

 

Also its easier to keep focused on just a few quests because they are more interesting this time around, and I can't remember any stupid "courier" type quests off the top of my head. They've all been pretty good so far.

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I found Shivering Isles to be much more interesting and immersive than Oblivion itself.

 

It's beautiful (I love Crucible), consistent (one big quest), funny (Sheogorath!) and... similar to Morrowind (Dementia landscapes). ;)

Cartographer's Note FM: in production.

Download Old Comrades, Old Debts FM or Mistrz Effects demo and see my old projects!

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  • 2 weeks later...

The insanity continues . . .

 

As some of you know in another thread I bought a satellite a135-s4527 laptop for $769:

* Intel® Pentium® dual-core processor T2080 1.73GHz, 1MB L2, 533MHz FSB, 1024MB PC4200 memory

* Mobile Intel® 943GML Express Chipset

* Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 8MB-256MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory

* 120GB (5400RPM) Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive

 

Then I added an m-audio firewire 410 for $299:

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/FireWire410-main.html

 

* 2 x 8 24-bit/96kHz analog I/O; 192kHz stereo out

* 2 mic/line ins w/ preamps and phantom power

* 8 line outs to mixer or direct surround output

* S/PDIF digital I/O w/ PCM, AC-3, and DTS support

* 1 x 1 MIDI I/O

This thing is awesome! It works on my laptop even though Vista drivers are not available yet ;) (installed the drivers with compatibility mode with XP SP 2) It can be powered by a 6 pin firewire connection (currently like this on my desktop) so I can keep my ac adapter with my laptop. This thing already saw some action over the weekend because my sister wanted me to record audio from some video tapes. I was worried about it because reviews on the internet said the drivers really sucked but so far it works excellent.

 

Today I bought the MXL 2001/603 anniversary pack (two condenser mics) for $99.

http://www.mxlmics.com/condenser_mic/condenser_index.html

I've been reading positive reviews about these mics so I'm looking forward to working with them B)

 

I'll probably need a gig bag to hold all this stuff, as well as pop filters and shock mounts . . .

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  • 1 month later...

I've been having fun with the Sanyo Xacti C40 especially with taping a couple layers of undeveloped negatives over the lens B) :

 

http://picasaweb.google.com/ascottk/NearInfrared

 

SANY0011.JPG

SANY0010.JPG

SANY0005.JPG

 

& some other nature photos:

 

http://picasaweb.google.com/ascottk/NaturePictures (many taken with Fuji Finepix cameras):

 

Pic_2000_0825_133625AA.JPG

Pic_2000_0908_112805AA.JPG

DSCF0002.JPG

DSCF0009.JPG

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