Posts by Kosmo

Yeah but standards don't come from companies, most of the time they come from organizations like W3C and DVD Forum, comittees gathered from major players in the industry, still some companies even having their representative in an organization they want to do their own pantents to cash it in just like Sony with UMD (they get royalties from every game/movie/record sold on those discs) and Memory Stick DUO, they don't give shit about customers comfort.

The one who grabs most money is the winner, not the one who facilitates a patent worth a standard from a non-profit organization. Besides if it is internet or computer technology we are talking about, it's almost charity with standards, royalties from CDs and DVDs go to various other organizations watching the interests of the artists who made the product, be it a record or movie. But standards also makes these things cheaper for consumer because of the competition on the market, no one having the monopoly over one thing, it drives down the costs to make mediums like DVDs and at the same time drives down the price of the final product making it harder to make big fat payroll from them.

These things are why corporations are pissed at designers who use GPL and CC licences, they "eat" the profits from them when they invent codecs and different technologies or designs and let people use them for free under certain licences just so they wouldn't get ripped. Open source was just the first step, now after Creative Commons are being used by moviemakers, photographers, designers and in growing numbers they are at the same time eating away the cash flow.

These things should not be ignored, these things should be recognized and honored.

Quote from DaanO

Well, i try to fuck them right back in the ass as much as possible. The only time their strategy ever worked is for buying new memory cards for digital camera's.

That is why god created black market and piratism

sensee you are not just ignorant, but you are a retard aswell if you really think that way.

The same thing can be seen in the web standards, a big company with lots of volume pushes their own products to market, not giving a shit about people who buy the products, and they very well know how hard they are making consumers life, forcing them to buy several different hardware/software with different medium.

This is what we call "ripping off" or "fucking in the ass" in common.

But who can stop Sony? Who can stop Microsoft? The only one who can stop them is the customers, they have the power to vote with their wallets. This is a serious issue when it comes to decide next standard, like the new "DVD" standard issues, do we go with blu-ray or HDDVD or something else, you can't actually go with anything since all these big companies still go where ever they want blatantly ignoring standards.

If you'd develop anything then you'd really know what I'm talking about.

Now if you are using 3dsm make hard body out of it, put a wind modifier in behind it and make it blow like 10000 feet/min and look if it really flies.

OR you could do a cloth modifier on it, simulate and post the render of the results.

Hmh.. apparently Prey has been in development from 2001 (unless people on the 3dr forums are retars, which they pretty much are), I'm wondering why D3 engine and why they are so heavily influenced by D3 art on their product.

What else is bothering me is that 3dr isn't using D3 engine for their DNF project so why they are "working" on two separate engines, since 3dr are using/creating their own engine based on Unreal engine 2.5 (or so I remember, correct me if I'm wrong). Besides, HH Studios is announcing ATI as their partner in crime and D3 engine was done brown-nosing nVidia AND Havock and other physics engines are coming more and more popular, D3 uses in-house physics engine so does ANYTHING in this project add up?

An article at Tom's Hardware Guide about new medias being implemented to use or in use right now (Sony UMD for PSP), so if you are bit concerned please read and post your opinions.

Quote

After seeing some new developments in the gaming world, I am not having much fun. We are about to repeat some of the same things we went through during the dawn of the PC era in the mid 1980s. Do you remember way back when with copy protected software, and incompatible disk media formats? Do the names Ashton Tate and DEC's Rainbow mean anything to you?Gaming company executives need to study up on these and other spectacular failures of the PC era, or they will suffer similar consequences. Sony's PSP and the new game sampler DVD from Sapphire are just examples of where they are going astray.

When the Apple II first came out, one of its biggest innovations was a 5.25 inch floppy drive. Before this, you had very cumbersome mechanisms for loading software, including using cassette tapes that took forever to get your software loaded. The 5.25 floppy quickly became a standard fixture on many PCs, and was so ubiquitous that it was one of the last things to go from that era.

IBM and Microsoft made the floppy a standard format, and it was adopted by most of the PC manufacturers, except for one notable example: DEC. Back then, DEC was a proud company with its own computing history in minicomputers, but not in PCs. Their engineers thought of a better way to store more data on their floppies. Trouble was these were incompatible with the IBM standard. These better floppies were featured on their version of the PC, called the Rainbow. You could read and write IBM-formatted floppies in the Rainbow, but not the reverse. And while we are talking about spectacular failures, I should point out that the Rainbow had two floppies that were stacked on top of each other, but you inserted one upside down from the other. That sort of usability disaster was just the icing on cake.

The Rainbow had a lot of other innovations, including specialized graphics hardware, a special monitor cable (a precursor to some of the things that Jobs' Next PC tried out too), dual CPUS to run multiple operating systems, and special dedicated keys on its keyboard. None of these ideas took hold and the Rainbow quickly became a dinosaur.

What does this have to do with today? Well, Sony's new data format for the PSP uses media called Universal Media Disc. The oddly-shaped disc is smaller that the standard 5.25 CD/DVD media that we have all grown accustomed to, and unlike the smaller CD-Rs that Sony has in some of its cameras, it won't fit in any existing CD/DVD drive. But this is nothing new for Sony, who keeps trying to move the world towards its own media formats: the Memory Stick, its ATRAC format for music files, and now UMD. Sorry guys, this is broken and while there is a lot to like about the PSP, having to buy all new media to play games and watch videos isn't one of them. Rainbow alert!

Trymedia.com has teamed with Sapphire Technology graphics cards to produce a series of special "sampler" DVDs with various game software titles on it. These DVDs are include in the box with the card, making it easy to try out the games. Or so in theory. Using the Sapphire Select system, the full version of each game can be played for exactly one hour without purchasing it. If you decide you like the game and want to buy it, Trymedia's copy protection scheme, called ActiveMark, will allow you to enter your credit card information and purchase the game and activate it for your use.

As my staff at Tom's Hardware found out when they tried out this system, this procedure has its faults. You can't play the game on any computer other than the one you just activated it on. If you have mods or updates, you have to wait for the ActiveMark system to deliver them to you - if you try to do it yourself by downloading them from the game's Web site, you will break the copy protection and the game won't load.

Now, this is a terrible system. Let's go back in time to the mid 1980s, please, and learn from history. Back then, we had the major software publishers of the day, including Lotus and Ashton-Tate, who tried to foist their version of copy protection on the unsuspecting computing public. As quickly as they developed schemes, the public found ways around them. I had my "unlock" disks that I carried with me in my role as corporate IT support because invariably some user in distress had deleted his or her copy of the software and couldn't reinstall it. One memorable visit was over the weekend to our CIO (we didn't call him the CIO then but that is what he was) because his version of Lotus Symphony wasn't working. My unlock disks came in very handy, and I knew that this idea was bad then. It is bad now with games, and needs to be nipped in the bud.

It's too bad that Sony and Sapphire can't learn from these mistakes of the PC past. But maybe if enough consumers steer clear of these products, they will get the message.

David Strom

Editor-in-Chief

Tom's Guides Publishing

Display More

And not just any Nazi, a Gestapo officer

Obviously your camera doesn't have Macro shoot on it.

The company of heroes site has gone live, and you can check some screens from there and I must say it could possibly be the most coolest RTS game ever. Like DoD but with more people on the battlefield and RTS view.

Company of Heroes

Yeah, but I don't recommend jumping straight to CS2, maybe you should buy your time and wait for a while, since I'm not so sure things are going to be the same after they start fukcing with Macromedia technology and merging it with Adobe products you know.

We are here at the office waiting for things to cool down and some proper information about the future of Adobe/Macromedia products before we go and buy shitload of new licences.

Some (2 actually) screens have popped up at gamespot.com so be sure to check those out.

If you check the design in this game could be bit more "original" than what it was in the past, but don't expect nothing more than few lessons learned from the copycat Painkiller, and actually it somehow brings Duke nukem to mind, don't know why or how.

It's oulu for meh, not that sweet, nor not that big, but it's mine, all mine!

[Blocked Image: http://paskakaupunni.com/kuvat/1112509662.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://paskakaupunni.com/kuvat/1083843131.jpg]

[Blocked Image: http://paskakaupunni.com/kuvat/1066157960.jpg]

You can see more pictures at http://paskakaupunni.com/

Ahem, it's not in news.bbc.co.uk site, the link just says so, kinda like

http://groups.msn.com/_Secure/0QgAdA…315747618678598

Quote from Pericolos0

so where did they get this amazing idea to make it look exactly like doom3

From posty.

The mug in 3rd screen looks like Skaarj, the graphics are like Doom3 and in the 3rd screen behind the Skaarj char there is a portal that looks exactly like Stargate, so they ripped few ideas, but I think it's still ok :roll:

[Blocked Image: http://www.kosmov.net/img/gasp.gif]

Just to spice things up!

Man that game looks wicked cool! I'm so allover that game now!

[Blocked Image: http://www.kosmov.net/img/stormy.gif]

My room mate has a book about the norwegian metal skene[sic], there were some crazy shit going down there. I got sick to my stomach reading that book, those guys had some serious issues.

One of the bad bunch I have been waiting for a while, tho I'm not that impressed by the "upgrades" I have been reading about. Not nearly as impressive as Age of Empires 3 and Rise & Fall, but original EE was nice, so I'm going to check this out.

Not good news is that already there has been a patch to the game. And the developer Mad Doc software hasn't really done anything impressive since ever.

I'm a huge RTS fan so I'm on the look for every RTS piece there.

D3 I have always loved the Floyds - Dark side of the moon, but don't know if it is the best first record to listen, other ones are Whis you were here, and Animals. But some early work could do good aswell, Piper at the gaes of dawn or Saucerful of secrets.

All I can say is that, Floyd is the greatest band/musical experiment ever.

1) Do you use custom Photoshop Brushes? As in do you go onto deviantart and download some to make your job easier? I've only used brushes so far for blood..

I use them when I see the place for one, usually make my own, bloospatters are best done with this simple tutorial, take white paper, take ink, take old toothbrush, dip it in to ink, rub the brush with your finger so that the ink spatters across the paper, scan the paper, fiddle with levels and use different parts of the "splatter scale" in your work. It asks alot of creativity to come up with some of the stuff.

2) Photo Ref. to start? To you usually take a photograph of something you're doing and minorly tweak it on Photoshop? I been trying to do photographs lately with the polaroid border and I found myself using a real-photo that I touched up a bit. (I can post later)

Depends, mostly I try to work without photo reference, it taints the texture you are making to look like that photo, even if you didn't mean it to be like one.

3) When you do a site, do you're layout first in Photoshop at 800x600 then I'm assuming slice it for Dreamweaver? That's what I've done so far.

I don't do site layouts in photoshop, I draw them on to a paper, then starts the fun part, CSS coding, takes up to 5 hours to make it work and 2 hours of tweaking to make it look the same on every browser. Don't think about one resolution, think about what people with 1600x1200 resolution see when your page is made for 800x600 resolution, a smal box in the middle of their screen with lots and lots of white. It goes both ways, you have to give them both a good experience about your page.

4) Could someone point me to a site mainly for texturing, or a thread with a long list (besides phong.com though I love it)

Umm... try search at cgtalk.com, other than that I don't know.

5) What version of Photoshop you use mainly?

Every time new PS comes out I upgrade to the newest version.