Posts by Thrik

[Blocked Image: http://img358.imageshack.us/img358/134/picture43mf.jpg]

It is the best movie released in 2005 and pisses over most others from the past decade.

Yeah, mine's significantly lesser and runs it reasonably well. The only thing that'd really spring to mind is outdated drivers -- a very recent if not the most recent Nvidia driverset fixed a number of compatabilities with Source's HDR. The driverset was tailored towards DOD:S, but I expect that it covers TLC too.

You've probably got it, though.

Got a 128mb video card, Philip?

I've always been very fond of Source's water, although it only seems to really translate smoothly into an urban/busy environment where there's plenty of contrast and such for it to distort. The Farcry water wins by a mile when it comes to the edges of an island and coastal type stuff, with all the shoreline effects and such. Source water is pretty shit at that, especially when you see it going off into the distance and can see the water's texture repeating its face off.

Quote from D3ads

says a bitter man with a shitty computer

A shitty computer that manages to run Quake 4, F.E.A.R. and COD2.. yes.

There's nothing special about it seriously, more graphical features.. wooo, how about working on the gameplay instead..huh?

The only reason that you run these games is because your card simply isn't rendering the higher-end visuals. At least, unless you've upgraded since we last discussed your hardware situation. Even a Voodoo 3 can run Doom 3 at a decent framerate. The defining difference being, of course, that it looks like shit in comparison to someone enjoying it on a 6600GT.

As for gameplay, they did that pretty damn well in HL2 in my opinion, and there's a chance that Aftermath will contain good stuff too. They never claimed that Lost Coast was going to be a fun experience; it's a tech demo. Sadly, the effect is kind of lost since we've all, you know, been enjoying HDR in DOD:S for a good few weeks. [Blocked Image: http://forums.teamkilled.net/images/smilies/shifty.gif]

Even more hilarious is the potential to sit near somebody's door/house and screw with their controls. What's the range on these things?

I guess there's just a degree of prediction and intuition involved. For example, making a website that *relies* on Javascript is one huge error since a healthy portion of people do go around with it disabled. Yet, I still see many sites designed in this way.

With web design it's best to just try not to be too fancy. If you do, do it in a way that's guaranteed to work for most people. Using crazy javascript/ajax/flash navigation, galleries and whatever else may seem like a good way of standing out intitially, but a lot more people would just prefer that you stick to conventional ways of doing things as they like to use the same browsing techniques across all sites that they visit. When one site such as Snarkpit suddenly has popup screenshots which forcibly throw new, resized windows at you, it stands out. But not in a good way.

There's no doubt about it; a good TFT pisses all over a CRT's image quality in pretty much every way. Those who say otherwise either haven't used a genuinely good TFT, or are simply blinded due to their CRT frazzling their visual senses with cathode rays.

They're just so damned expensive.

Actually, Snarkpit, GameSpot and several portfolio sites are the only ones that I've seen do this -- and I get around a lot of sites. Other sites don't aggressively force the window sizing, meaning that it can sit neatly in an extra tab. It's a nice idea to have sites/pages launch in popups, but most people just find them annoying and prefer screenshots to open up in standard pages so that they can divert into a new tab (middle-click) or open in the current as they see fit.

The reason that I (and many others) use this mode is because it keeps all internet browsing in one window. It makes it 100% impossible for a pop-up ad to ever bother me, since even if one does appear it's simply diverted into a tab in the background rather than a new window.

One key to web design is to never, ever assume that a user will have a particular setup. You need to make your site 100% scalable to whatever browsing configuration a user has (unless it's unreasonable stuff like an outdated and yet readily-updatable browser), otherwise you risk pissing off that visitor and never seeing them again -- definitely not the kind of thing that you want on a portfolio!

In fact, even automatically opening new windows for users via use of a _blank target is looked down upon, and XHTML (which is ultimately set to replace HTML) doesn't even support that particular functionality. The reason? Users can choose to open things in new windows if they want to. Although a user can force a link to open in the same tab even if it's a _blank link by dragging the link onto the tab or address bar, it should work the other way around -- they should decide whether or not it opens in a new window in the first place. It's all about promoting user control, you see.

For the love of God, don't use any kind of javascript that resizes your users' windows for them. There's nothing more infuriating than using Firefox in one-window mode, only for a popup to resize the entire window, affecting all of the tabs/sites open at the time. I've had to outright stop using GameSpot's image galleries because of their recent adoption of this technique.

I wish I had the cash for a good LCD. Thanks to my desk layout/size, having a massive CRT on it is a real pain in the arse. It's also kind of blinding at times, and the flickering that lower refresh rates cause is a bastard (but necessary for some games). It also attracts glare like a mofo, the colours seem to bleed into each other because of the whole glass thing, and Jesus Christ.

Quote from Mazy

It's Duke Nukem 3D.

There's nothing sudden about it. One of the most influential studios of the early 90s (LucasArts) was derived from a film studio, and they produced some of the most realised games of all time. And as somebody mentioned in this thread earlier, Spielberg was involved with LucasArts' The Dig ten years ago.

A lot of game/film transitions are utter crap, but that doesn't mean that a genuinely talented person such as Spielberg can't apply his experience and gift to the games industry and hopefully rub it off onto other developers. The crap film-titles are generally where a publisher is only producing it for the brief profit boom that can occur following a successful film, and don't really care about what the game's about at all -- it just has to exist.

Things are progressing though, and Peter Jackson is one person who evidently has at least some respect for the games industry and gaming in general considering that he's got Michael Ancel working on the King Kong game. Things won't improve if everyone just assumes that a game with Hollywood influences will be shit, though. At the end of the day, Spielberg will probably make peanuts from this deal in comparison to the other earnings of his career. He obviously has some genuine interest.

Hipness mentality. Old people can't be interested in cool things, remember.

It's very easy for people to assume things like "Oh, he's a sixty year old film director, he clearly knows nothing about games and this is all part of Electronic Arts' master plan to destroy the gaming industry". Just do us all a favour and don't bother committing those assumptions to writing.

Anyway, this could be a pretty good move. It's a bit ridiculous to paint every single developer involved with EA with the 'care about nothing but money' brush, and I'm growing increasingly tired of seeing it. Some fantastic games have come from the EA name, and them putting down the funds to give their developers a chance to have better storytelling (even if that doesn't turn out to be the case) can't be a bad thing.

Hopefully we'll see some good stuff coming from this, although it's going to take some very intense collaboration between Spielberg and the game leads to ultimate in a truly inspiring experience. If either party try to take too much creative control then it's going to end up spiraling into a big mess. I'd like to be optimistic, though.

Quote from curman

I'll scan my design soon. It's kind of lame, but.. eh.

Sounds like a great attitude to have in preparation for permanently scarring your body with ink.

Don't be silly. Reusing components is fine as long as you check that they're actually compatible first (AMD CPU in a Pentium mainboard? Ho, ho!).

What?