Have you guys seen the older shots? It's not the graphics that excite me but the player physics.
While some games let you see your legs and do some slightly fancy moves, the majority of FPS games are just running and jumping. This is different because you can do all sorts of crazy moves, hence the parkour comment above, in an FPS. The shots I saw and storyboards in Edge Magazine a few months ago looked awesome.
No, I agree with Buddy. The aesthetic quality of Crysis' characters clearly far exceeds that of those in Half-Life 2, but I think Valve better executed the art of moving the muscles in a realistic way (helped by them getting actual face doctors or some shit in). Crysis' characters seem more like scarily realistic robots rather than living, breathing characters. I've played Crysis and this is something that stood out to me immediately -- I'm not just basing it on your screenshots.
That's a really poor example of Half-Life 2, though. The lighting in Episode Two is infinitely better than the shitty model viewer, and bridges the cap between looking like a low-resolution mess and the ultra-high-resolution Crysis detail a bit. Alyx in particular has great facial animation in Episode Two.
One thing I'll say is that resolution makes a big difference in Crysis. On something like 1920x1200 you can actually see all this immense detail especially during cutscenes, while on lower resolutions it's kind of blurred out. Just a shame that resolution makes it run about -50 fps unless you turn everything down. 
After a lot of serious pissing around (this current host is seemingly falling apart) I've managed to get the forum files and database duplicated onto my own superb hosting. I've never been able to get the virus/trojan/whatever messages to appear myself so I need you guys who got it before to test it:
http://mapcore.ryanjohnwilliams.com/
If you still get it on there then we can be sure that the forum files themselves are the cause; if not, then it's the web host.
Just have a look around, do things that caused the trojan errors before, etc.
Feel free to test in whatever way you like there because the database will inevitably be wiped. Nothing you do should have any affect on the real forums. Just don't get confused and screw around on the real forum by mistake -- look at the address bar.
No it wasn't. The new RAM he bought that didn't work was Samsung RAM, not Corsair. The Corsair RAM was the old RAM he had that worked fine. Taking out the Corsair RAM completely still didn't make the Samsung RAM work, so I think it's fair to say it was nothing to do with the Corsair RAM. 
I didn't overreact. I just reacted. 
Your statement seemed a bit unreasonable because we already know exactly what Black Mesa is: it's a remake of Half-Life 1. I'm not sure what exactly you expect them to release other than the occasional screenshot of how they've recreated certain areas.
They can't exactly release it unfinished like a multiplayer mod, so all they can go is keep trucking on with the monumental task of reproducing the whole game. Bear in mind that Half-Life 1 is a pretty fast-paced, linear game, so all these beautiful environments they've spent hours on will only be seen for less than a minute by each player, which is much different to a multiplayer map where you spend ages obsessing over each detail. With that in mind, they've done a great job.
If you're going to post stuff consisting of "This shouldn't impress anybody, it's worse than the older media, mods like this should burn in hell" (that's pretty much all your post said) then perhaps you just shouldn't bother. Whether joking or not, it helps nobody and is liable to do nothing but hurt the feelings of those MapCore members who've spent months upon months working on it.
Burn in hell? Jeeze, chill out. It's not like they've even made a big deal about the media release -- they just added a bunch of new shots to the gallery and then posted about it on their blog.
What do you expect them to do, just not say anything? There's nothing wrong with a bit of 'PR'; without it, the mod ends up with nobody hearing about it. After spending years working on this, can you imagine anything that'd crush them more? Why not ask the Fortress Forever guys? Is it wrong for them to want to show bits of their three-year-long project?
I'm not sure I'd agree that the new media is worse than the old media, though. The majority of screenshots there are old; are you sure you aren't just looking at old media?
BTW, bear in mind that multiple mappers who produced the Black Mesa levels are seasoned MapCore members, so please engage your brain before being unreasonably critical. This is covered in the MapCore rules.
Sure, but I don't think that makes my test any less effective. If it's the files themselves that're infected it'll show up on the other host too; if it doesn't, that's a sign that the server software itself.
The Thrik's 100% correct predictions:
1. Blu-Ray will become the dominant form of media
2. Drives that play CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVDs will be used everywhere
3. HD-DVD will die but be supported for at least one additional generation
4. The next standard will be multi-layer Blu-Ray discs (they already have triple-layer working: 150GB per disc)
Updating the BIOS is generally a good idea as it can fix all sorts of compatibility/performance problems. However, this is coming from someone with a modern Asus motherboard that has a very simple BIOS update routine (put it on a USB stick), whereas older motherboards didn't.
If neither sticks are working I think you can confidently rule out the RAM being broken. It's very unlikely two sticks would be wrecked, and if they work in another computer they're definitely not wrecked and you can safely say it's a motherboard/RAM incompatibility.
Mojo's given me some logins so I'm going to try putting a duplicate of the forums on my own hosting and ask some of you to go there to see if the problems occurs. Then we can rule out whether it's something embedded in the forum files itself or a server/host-level issue.
I'll aim to get that done tomorrow while I'm at work.
Nice curve. 
If the RAM slots in then it should be compatible. If it isn't, it won't physically go in. I've had a brief look at your components and on paper there are no clear compatibility issues.
The worst that usually happens is all the RAM runs as slowly as the weakest link. If you can't even get it to boot with the new RAM in there by itself, it seems more likely that you do indeed have broken RAM. Have you tried putting both new sticks in individually and seeing if one or the other fails to boot? If it's just one of them, that's pretty much a guaranteed sign of broken RAM.
Putting unidentical sticks together can throw up very random compatibility problems that're impossible to resolve, however it's still dying for you when you take the older sticks out altogether so you've ruled that out. This is clearly a case of either the RAM itself being bad, or it not being compatible with your motherboard for some imperceptible reason.
Trying the RAM sticks in another computer is always the next step after exhausting your ideas. If you don't do it, a repair shop will (and charge you for the privilege).
Definitely Valve.
I've not played a single Valve game that I haven't enjoyed, and in almost all cases I've enjoyed them a lot. I also really admire the way they've almost made frustrating game patching a thing of the past, as well as a centralised way of finding servers and following friends into them.
It might seem normal in today's world of Xbox Live and shit to have match making and stuff all sorted out, but I bitterly remember the days of not even knowing a patch was out until you tried to play online, having to install it like a program, having to download something like All-Seeing Eye to get a good server browser, having to use something like GameTiger to find your friends on servers, etc. Not fun at all. 
I found the teleport turret absolutely hilarious.
The Pyro blinding and Scout jamming is lame, though. I have to tell people to stop doing that all the time on the superb Wireplay servers I play on.
Definitely an improvement. 
Although making the buildings you play in look a bit more realistic would be good. Try to think of why they might actually exist, and theme them to fit. Textures alone will help a lot, but so would a bit of detail. For example, you have those ramp platforms going around the body of the tallest building -- why not put railings there?
It looks good for HL1 I don't think anyone will deny that, and for that you deserve praise.
However, I don't know of pressing ahead with the whole mod is going to be a good use of your time considering how much effort is needed to make it look competitive with the likes of Source. Imagine how good a Source map you could make if you applied this same level of dedication to one?
Regardless, this is a nice portfolio piece. Just get some newer stuff done, even if it's alongside this.
Quote from BlunkkaI sometimes like to think of it as being "more realistically" lighted. Human eye can see a dynamic range of about 10000:1 while a digital camera only captures 400:1.
Nice images
The eye cannot see the whole range at once though, and similarly to a camera still has to adjust the light exposure. HDR images are designed to show the detail in all areas as if the camera could adjust the light exposure for all levels of light simultaneously (this is impossible).
Yeah, same. I think it's because HDR photographs aren't really very realistically lighted (our eyes aren't HDR), which of course makes your brain think of the way CGI looks.
