Posts by Thrik

  • Can it run Crysis?

    I think it's safe to say a superb job has been done of cramming Crysis's amazing visuals into the metaphorical box that is current-gen consoles. Anyone who disagrees can go shove their head up a giraffe's ass.

  • Battlefield 3

    Well I'm sure Conquest will come into its own with the final release, there's a lot of veterans waiting for that shit. Besides DICE can make that mode in their sleep so who's worried really?

  • RAGE

    God that EGM review annoys me. Exactly the kind of ass-kissing tripe that made me stop liking video game reviews in the first place. I mean I want to believe Rage is great and all, but it's so wishy-washy and its praise it might as well be written by the game's marketing department.

    Joystiq's review is very critical but based on the tone of some of the others I think it's going to sit at the harsher end of the review spectrum — a place it usually shares with Destructoid, EDGE, and Eurogamer. The game seems like it's definitely going to disappoint in some key areas which were played down prior to release (only 8–12 hours long, exceedingly linear, thin on story) but excel in those we'd expect an id shooter to do well in (gameplay, visuals, pace).

    I was hoping for a very immersive story considering the game's based on the real albeit slim chance of Apophis hitting us, the government wanting to reclaim control from those who survived afterwards, and there being lots of warring factions wanting the world. Sounds like it very much falls flat in that area sadly, other than briefly explaining the things I just said.

    We'll see though, obviously I'm going to buy id's latest shooter.

  • Can it run Crysis?

    There were brightness sliders in Crysis that made it look much better than those screenshots above, they look quite washed out. With that said I work in the middle of a forest which is pretty much exactly like those screenshots and when I look outside the reality is closer to the proper Crysis screenshots (especially if you increase the contrast a touch) than the modded/re-release screenshots. While the latter are aesthetically pleasing they aren't necessarily realistic, as real life doesn't produce that kind of intense contrast and bloom. To my eyes the original screenshots hit much closer to what I'd call convincing.

    But hey I'm not saying any particular way is correct, just observing how Crysis clearly switched from 'beauty comes from perfect recreation of reality' to 'we prefer it like this'.

  • Can it run Crysis?

    Oh I enjoy the new lighting in many areas, it's definitely aesthetically pleasing. I was just saying that the lighting was more realistic before (although it looks exceedingly bland in that screenshot above compared to how I remember it, perhaps due to not being on 'Ultra') whereas in the re-release it's gone more towards the stylised end of things — much like Crysis 2. Clearly Crytek's approach has shifted a little.

  • Can it run Crysis?

    Wow that looks great. The tree is obviously less bushy and you can see how certain things have been culled but the overall scene looks superb. Interesting that Crytek's old mantra of having no artistic direction and instead striving for pure reality is no longer followed with regards to lighting, though.

  • automatic log in

    It is possible if you have really old cookies they're causing issues, as the cookie domain was changed quite some time ago and if both exist in your cookies folder there's potential for trouble — try deleting any mapcore.net and forums.mapcore.net cookies. Other than that I'm not sure at this point what might cause it.

  • Battlefield 3

    I think the main problem with Rush is that most veterans haven't given Rush much of a chance, nor considered that its BF3 incarnation is most likely going to play a lot better than BC2's because, well, it's BF3.

    With that said I still think Conquest was the more fun mode in BC2 and thoroughly expect that to remain the case. It's quite simply the definitive Battlefield experience for me, giving everything the game can offer and offering maximum choice in play style. Hopefully it won't have been neglected in favour of Rush.

  • Deus Ex 3

    I honestly can't understand why it was outsourced at all, as if they weren't capable of making a few decent bosses — I mean I've never heard of something like boss fights being outsourced. And even if it did happen you'd then ask: why fucking them? Some retarded producer or something doing a favour?

  • Looking for a good international web host

    Yeah, GoDaddy are dickheads. I have some domains with them that I haven't transferred away yet out of convenience more than anything, but every time I renew they routinely try and cram a load of extras onto my purchase, make me believe I'm saving (ie: paying the same as everywhere else) by doing it early, etc. Just very deceptive and sub-par service.

    My advice having used a huge number of web hosts (50+) on each end of the market during my time as a web designer is to forget about bandwidth because once you get above 50–100GB it might as well just say 'infinite'. At that point hosts will stop limiting you by bandwidth, instead focusing on your CPU and RAM use. If your site is actually using 100s of GBs of bandwidth then they'll generally either shift you to a much slower server where all the high-use sites go, or they'll cut you off altogether citing excessive resource usage.

    Instead, concentrate on things like the locality (European visitors = European host) and performance of the host in question. I generally install a blank WordPress on a web host I use to see how it measures, and I've seen it range from 1–5 seconds to process a page (Dreamhost) to 0.2–0.8 seconds (EuroVPS, Linode). Generally the very popular hosts that throw endless bandwidth at you like Dreamhost, HostGator, Bluehost, etc will be very restrictive when it comes to the actual performance of your sites because they pile so many people on each server to cut costs. The moment your site gets Dugg or featured on a large site like Kotaku you might as well forget about it staying up.

    Often you'll find that hosts that are reasonably generous with bandwidth but not extravagently so are optimal. For example if a host has a 50GB, 200GB, and 500GB plan you'll often find they don't overload the servers for each level and you'll generally get better server performance. Whereas if you use a host that gives you 1,000,000GB on even the lowest plan the chances are they'll all perform like ass and there's no real degree of performance difference between them. A well-managed and high-performance host simply won't give out crazy amounts of bandwidth because it's unsustainable without compromising elsewhere.

    Of course if all you want is somewhere to dump files these hosts can be rather reasonable, but if you're putting together a serious site for a serious project forget about bandwidth because the chances are you'll never hit the limit. If you do have large files like videos and music you're better off using dedicated hosts like YouTube for those things anyway as you can't compete with their network/performance and it's better for social marketing. Instead look for hosts that are known to deliver fast performance and don't overcrowd their servers.

    With all that said you can get lucky. I once had a site Dugg on Dreamhost and remarkably it stayed up, but it did take 30–90 seconds to load the pages and who knows how many visitors I lost as a result. I then got featured on a whole bunch of gaming sites simultaneously (Shacknews, Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid) at a later date but this time with Media Temple — you wouldn't even know anything was happening despite the traffic being roughly equivalent (40GB for a HTML page and some images in the space of an hour or so).

  • Looking for a good international web host

    Pretty much every web host I've ever used has allowed international billing — generally as long as you have a VISA (or just as often PayPal) you're good. Off the top of my head you can try EuroVPS or UK2 for European hosting, but really there's loads and those aren't necessarily the cheapest/best (although EuroVPS's web hosting is based on a very powerful cloud so is going to guarantee excellent performance).