Posts by Defrag

  • BTR-70 APC

    Did a bit more and I think it's ~done, or at least I can't think of anything else to do to it (short of texture it, which I ain't gonna do). Here's some clay renders.

    [Blocked Image: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~msimp2k2/portfolio/images/models/thumbs/btr_01.jpg] [Blocked Image: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~msimp2k2/portfolio/images/models/thumbs/btr_02.jpg]

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  • AH-1W Super Cobra Helicopter

    ~~Updated. Btw thanks a lot for those blueprints, Seldoon182. I didn't even notice them when I first read your post. Thanks to the much better blueprints, I was able to correct a lot of the proportions and cleaned up the mesh a bit. The nose could still do with being pinched in a little and the cockpit isn't 100%, but I think it's good enough as is now. I'll do the cockpit interior at some stage but I don't have time right now.

    [Blocked Image: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~msimp2k2/portfolio/images/models/thumbs/super_cobra_01.jpg][Blocked Image: http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~msimp2k2/portfolio/images/models/thumbs/super_cobra_02.jpg]

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  • School shooting, now hitting europe (and games are involved)

    Quote from curman

    Do you feel you would be a more effective killer because of games? Yes, I think I already touched on this, but from what I learned from video games teaches me to be a more affective killer. There is no doubt in my mind if there was a scientific test between a video-gamer and a person who had no gaming experience (With first person shooters), and they went to a firing range or some type of gun-firing course. Without a DOUBT the video-gamer would win. It's simply because they already know how to do even the littlest things like holdin' a pistol properly. To break it down simply in math. Video games for years, mostly First Person Shooters and gun games + Mentally unstable, depressed, bullied, retarded, or whatever = More likely to kill someone.

    Again, a fair point, but I'd argue that such advantages would be nominal at best unless the game was extremely realistic and taught you how to take the safety off etc. I doubt whether anything I've experienced in video games would set my knowledge apart from someone who only watched TV/Films, but then again I only really play arcade-ish shooters. On the contrary, I think a war film fan would know a lot more about how to hold, aim and service weapons better than me.

    I think the argument definitely does become a little more interesting when you are talking about very realistic games, but at the moment there aren't too many of them out there and, again, the control systems are abstracted away to the point where you're not really 'experiencing' the feel of doing the real life action. Most of the shooters I play involve me moving around at an unrealistic speed strafing with a shotgun then healing people with a medpack

    Plenty of people have come out with examples of how video games can be analogous to army training, but I generally find it hard to believe that the vast majority of shooters really fit that categorisation. If a game is realistic, then I think games can potentially teach things about leadership and combat tactics (flanking, taking cover, using the right weapon for the correct situation). This requires that the game be very realistic and with strong AI, though. I haven't really played a game that could claim to have such levels of realism & AI. Maybe America's Army or some of the army-funded 'games' could make that claim, but I haven't played them so I can't really comment on them. I don't really have the patience to play a game that is so anal in its quest to be realistic and nor do most other people. It'd be very interesting to see what happens if someone who played AA or some other overly realistic game went on the rampage. Most of us usually roll our eyes when we hear Doom & CS mentioned by the media in the same breath as "school shooting", but what if a game funded by the army were to be implicated? It could be very embarrassing for certain people.

    To give an analogy: Is there any way that I would be able to fly & land a plane if the pilot died and all I'd played was an arcade flight game? Most likely not. I wouldn't know what the hell I was doing. Too much is omitted, the flight model isn't realistic enough, I wouldn't know where any of the switches were or any of the processes. However, what if I was someone who was very well acquainted with Flight Sim 200X and I had a realistic joystick at home and knew the flight controls & aircraft inside out? I think I'd have a much better chance. However, the chances of me being an obsessive fan of flight sim 200X is negligible because I, like most people, don't think it's much fun. I.e. if you can take pleasure in playing an overly realistic game that sacrifices fun for realism (and the game actually exists), you could potentially learn skills, but such games are few and far between. That's probably the reason you never hear about people playing AA shooting up a school. If they're a gamer, they're more likely to have played one of the more popular (and unrealistic) shooters.

    Regardless, I don't really agree that a game can reinforce the action of aiming at and shooting a human being without thinking about it due to the current way of interacting with games. That's the cornerstone of military training -- reducing the severity of the action of taking a life to the point where it is an automated response to a stimulus.

    So basically what I think is that games do have a potential capacity to make someone a more able killer, but at the moment they don't live up to the sensationalist billing that the media so often resorts to. Once we're all playing games in holodecks using realistic guns, that's when you start to worry

  • School shooting, now hitting europe (and games are involved)

    Curman, it's a plausible argument but, in my opinion, you have to lump games in with other forms of media. Let's face it, does any form of media do slick & glamorised killing better than films & tv shows? Currently, I don't think so. However, games get much more criticism purely due to a lack of understanding & the fact that the media is always looking to blame society's latest perceived ill.

    More to the point: Do you feel you would be more inclined to resort to violence just because of games? Do you feel you would be a more effective killer because of games? Would it be specifically because of games or because of violent media in general? I do think that exposure to violent media can have an effect on people (particularly disturbed people who are looking for something that is 'in tune' with their, shall we say, tastes). Could a game potentially fuel their fantasies and delusions? I think it could. However, I don't think that, in the majority of cases, a game can make a person violent. If the person is already violent or mentally ill, it may reinforce or fuel their behaviour. However, by that stage I think pretty much any form of violent media would do the same. I'm sure you've all read about weirdos who get arrested for murder, then the police search the perpetrator's house and recover a large quantity of extreme slasher flicks & horror masks.

    Your own thoughts about shootouts etc. could come from anywhere. Some of my own more lucid thoughts have actually been as a result of reading --rather than watching or playing-- something. I find it very hard to get involved in something when I'm moving a mouse to aim my gun while staring into a monitor. It's fairly ridiculous. As games get more and more realistic and newer, more immersive methods of interaction arrive (VR, wiimote etc.), this debate will probably shift gears, though. For example, I could well believe that playing arcade gun games could teach a person to react in a certain way. Physical action & co-ordination + stimulus = learned response. Remember FPS doug and his "every time I pick up a gun, it automatically points at somebody's head?" speech? It's not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. It is ridiculous if you play FPS games using a mouse, though. I can't really picture myself instinctively aiming a gun due to playing FPS shooters. There's a total disconnect between gaming & the physical reality unless the controller is akin to the real tool you'd use to carry out the action, IMO. My brother has a fairly realistic & heavy BB handgun and holding it feels alien to me. I've played thousands of hours of FPS games and it doesn't feel at all comfortable to hold or aim a realistically sized gun.

    If I were a nut-job who was out to do maximum damage, I'd probably do something physical like airsoft or paintball to learn the ropes. Fairly realistic guns + physical activity + adrenaline. BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW!1

  • HL2 sdk update tomorrow morning

    Quote from Psycho

    I bet Mike's "testing" involves 2 kegs of beer and a blindfold.

    I doubt Mike gets an army of testers and it seems that (pre-release) beta SDK rollouts have been permanently canned. Ever since Steam arrived Valve has been fairly lax about releasing well-tested SDK updates, partly because they potentially have the ability to fix whatever they break without delay. Unfortunately, "potentially" is the operative word. It's a pain in the ass when Hammer breaks, but I guess it goes with the territory these days. If we want the new engine stuff, Valve has to update the SDK & Source SDK Base stuff and we just have to deal with the problems that go with it.

    Anyone remember the Hammer update that would close your map without warning when editing displacements? It went unfixed for months. That was good stuff. Various other things remain unfixed; namely over-brightened specular reflections in the 3d viewport and broken overlays in the 3d shaded viewport.

    Could be worse I guess. We could have no SDK / Hammer updates

  • School shooting, now hitting europe (and games are involved)

    The media needs to sort itself out, too. When anybody can have their posthumous 15 minutes of fame -- simply record your deranged 'manifesto' and pose with some guns, then make it accessible after your death -- it's sending out the wrong message to these people. It seems every killer who leaves a cache of videos & (I use the term loosely) writings gets them aired on every single network going. It would be enough to state that the person involved left rambling notes / videos and then pass them on to the police / court enquiry to be used in evidence. Shining a spotlight on someone who doesn't deserve any kind of platform for their views is just an all round bad idea. I'm not saying that removing the platform will eradicate or even significantly reduce the killings, but it's surely the decent thing to do. Do we really need a video of someone aiming a gun at the camera and spreading their message of hate to millions of people? If a handful of viewers harbour fantasies of doing the same thing, it may just give them the impetus and belief to go through with it.

  • Microsoft, Direct X 10

    Quote

    Or OpenGL 2.0 because it's in fact better optimized than DX9 (needs less calls for operations) and it's platform-independent. The OGL 3.0 specs are coming out soon, and with it, cards that support 3.0. Smile

    There's some complicated thing that happens when you issue a driver call with DirectX (drawprimitive, set texture etc) that results in a CPU performance drain, meaning you spend more CPU time using DirectX than when using the corresponding OpenGL calls. You can attempt to minimise this overhead by the grouping of draw calls, but unless you're pretty damn clever, it can be quite complicated to figure out how to group by texture/shader/vertex/index buffers etc.Afaik DX10 fixes the main overhead associated with driver calls, meaning you don't have to worry so much about all of that stuff.

    Wiki page on what I'm talking about.

  • Microsoft, Direct X 10

    lol, that's hilarious. DX10 definitely has some cool features, but at the moment most of the games with DX10 support aren't really doing much that can't be done with DX9. Why? Pretty obvious -- developers are increasingly tending towards developing multi-platform game engines & games. Consoles don't have DX10 support or features. Why bother spending a disproportionate amount of time & effort creating DX10 stuff that you can't roll out to the majority of your customers? In fact, the amount of people with Vista and a DX10 card right now makes up a tiny proportion of PC gamers (Valve used their hardware survey to get the information and, iirc, it was something around 5%). Because of this, even if people are developing solely for the PC, most developers aren't going to go balls deep with DX10.

    I've looked at some of the graphics papers & videos of DX10 effects and you can do some nice stuff, but until most people have access to DX10, it won't be important to developers. Maybe Microsoft will live to regret trying to force people to buy Vista just to get DX10 because, at the moment, it looks like most developers & gamers aren't at all interested. Have you heard of anyone gushing about DX10 and vowing to upgrade their PC & OS just so they can get a slightly nicer water shader in some game or other? I've heard some people saying they wanted to upgrade their PC so they could run Crysis, but that's about it.

  • THIS IS SICK! 3DRipperDX

    Tools already exist to do this (pix & NVPerfHUD) but those tools required any given application to cooperate. I.e. if the game wasn't set up to allow it, you couldn't use the tools. Developers typically enable cooperation in their application during development and then disable cooperation for the shipping version. I've used NVPerfHUD before and it's an incredible bit of software; it helps you to visualise & analyse the rendering process and figure out where all of your frame time is going.

    It seems this is basically a shadier version of these tools with an emphasis on reverse engineering a scene as opposed to optimising etc. Shady as it may be, it's impressive that someone (one person?) has figured all of this out and put together such a plugin. I think most people can figure out how a particular effect is achieved without having to reverse engineer an application. Also, there's a lot of developers that, far from being secretive, actually write papers on some of their cutting edge stuff and there's various books out there like GPU Gems & ShaderX. On the flipside, the devil is sometimes in the detail and there also exist plenty of companies that don't want to share anything

    Interesting stuff.

  • Showbudget

    What fonfa said. You don't really need to know what is 'acceptable' for brush and model polycounts because it's all based on the context / makeup of a scene.

    In HL1, you had wpoly and epoly because that's all there was to it, really. You had brush rendering and entity rendering.

    Source is far more complicated. If you had wpoly and epoly then what would it tell you? It wouldn't give you any idea about whether your scene was bogged down by transformations, pixel shading / fillrate, animation, detail props, static props, regular models etc. It's all about balance. I don't really care if my world rendering is hitting 5ms if the rest of my scene is taking a negligible amount of time, just the same as I don't care about my prop rendering if the world geometry's simplicity makes up for it. The only complaint I can make about showbudget is that it forces you to rely on your own system setup to extrapolate how your map will run for other people. However, even if it did give some kind of readout (polys, shader complexity, whatever), it probably wouldn't even help you much. Graphics cards supported by HL2 are hugely varied. There's no real way you could gage whether scene x will run acceptably on graphics card y other than by estimating or extrapolating from your own system. It's not like HL1 where T&L was done on the CPU and the whole engine would start quivering after you hit 1000 wpolys HL2 allows a much bigger polycount (for both wpolys and models) and modern graphics cards burn through high poly models anyway.

    I.e. what I'm trying to say is that it's no longer about sticking to absolute limits for a couple of areas -- it's all about the makeup of a level in its entirety.

    I make my maps with a target framerate in mind and, if performance dips to a point where I'm not satisfied, I look at showbudget and figure out what I need to optimise.

  • Swap Buffers

    Off topic: Wow, that guy's portfolio is amazing.

    On topic: http://mapcore.net/forums/viewtopic.php ... wapbuffers

    If your PC hasn't changed and you're still playing at high res, then you're still going to have the problem. The more pixels your graphics card has to push and the more complicated the shaders, the slower the framerate. Try reducing AA, AF and HDR if possible. The best thing to do is reduce your resolution to something your graphics card can actually handle.

    What is your PC specification & video settings?

    The valve wiki now has some more useful info on it, too:

    http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... ap_buffers

  • Lets talk about circumcision shall we?

    Quote from killertomato

    i seriously dont understand all the sudden hate against people who decide to circumcise their boys.. ffs let it go.. also, there's a thin line with being against circumcision and offending circumcised people's parents. why not respect it? if you feel like bettering the world so much, why not spend your energy on taking care of poverty? :S

    Needlessly chopping off part of someone's dick qualifies as pointless mutilation -- it's pretty obvious why it raises people's hackles -- you cannot defend it with any kind of logic, so why do it? We live in an age of supposed enlightenment, but people are still persisting with this totally archaic practice due to ignorance and the fact that, "everyone else has it done". You ask why opponents don't respect the views of those who advocate it? It's obvious really; it's a needless procedure carried out on someone who is too young to choose of their own free will. I'm not going to respect a parent's choice to needlessly chop off part of their child's anatomy "just because" it's apparently the done thing. If it offends them, too bad. Circumcision offends me.