Posts by Defrag

Hi merk! Long time no see Splendid map.

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I believe (can someone confirm?) that when you are running very high res screens the extra ram on the card really helps performance

Yup. With AA at high resolutions the ~320MB versions can struggle on modern games. If you don't crank up the AA then it won't be much of an issue, though.

I wouldn't waste your dosh on a dual graphics card setup. Driver hassle, power supply cost, electricity costs. If you can afford a 8800 GTX then it'll do the business for you whatever you play. Notice how much the 320MB cards drop at the higher resolutions compared to the GTX. A GTS would do me fine, but your monitor will probably demand a GTX

http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphics/ ... S-320MB/p4

Yeah it's blooming ridiculous these days.

I almost bought 2 x Dell 2007FPs about half a year back, but the deal was scuppered in the end. I ended up getting a single Viewsonic 20" instead (I'm skint now so it's just as well I didn't get the 2 Dells) and I must admit I wish I had dual screens.

Modelling with the concept on the other monitor must be great. Same deal for level design with ref images open and programming with help files or tutorials / e-books.

This is the

Dunno, but trying to sell the game is always a good idea

It's the same as anything, really. People spend weeks working on throwaway content for E3 etc.

They just needed the Quake3 arena announcer to finish that video.

"Impressive."

"Impressive."

"Impressive."

"Impressive."

"Impressive."

"Holy Shit."

Some of those features made my mouth hang open. Amazing. They need to do a student version, too!

Looks pretty cool

I liked it when he the dude went "wait, we can blow up any-thang?" :monkey:

Or liberally sprinkle it with decals

That crane is ace.

Very cool. Thanks.

If you're playing at such a high resolution with a 3 year old card then that's probably why. Even in uncomplicated scenes, my swapbuffers can hit ~3-5ms with a 6800GT @ 1600x1200 using high quality + AA.

AFAIK it indicates you're fillrate bound. I.e. too many / complex per-pixel calculations going on such as refractive & reflective water, specular reflections, normal calculations etc. It also tends to go up a lot when you're running high levels of AA and your graphics card can't keep up.

Try doing mat_specular 0, mat_bumpmap 0 (can't remember the exact command for that) and turning off AA to see if it improves. If it does, then see what you're using in your map that could possibly be causing it. If you're just randomly getting this framerate death, then it's probably some kind of weird glitch (pretty sure I've seen the same thing at one time or another). Try sending your map to someone else and see if it happens for them too?

Still playing BF2 on and off.

- It's still the most fun I've had in ages. If it weren't bug riddled it'd be the best FPS around on the PC in ages.

Gears of War on my buddy's Xbox360

- Refreshing and fun. Unfortunately it's overrun by pre-pubescent Americans on XBox live. The chainsaw is one of the greatest realisations of violence ever. There was some dude stalking another guy while the other guy was running for what seemed like a few minutes (everyone was dead so we were just watching) when suddenly the hunted jumps out from behind a shipping crate and chainsawed the guy while everyone screamed over VOIP haha. I bet he shat himself.

Crackdown demo

-I liked it a lot and the mechanics are really nicely done (shooting fuel tanks, going for headshots etc) and the jumping around is brilliant but uh... story? Seems like this one could've been so much more. It probably outdoes GTA in the mayhem stakes, but that can only sustain your interest for so long. When you get bored in GTA, you have the missions & story to work through in addition to pretty much the biggest assortments of side missions to do for fun, though they are not integral to your success.

Also, anyone else really fed up of collecting shit in games? "Collect 100 tokens to get a bigger willy, agent!" -- why not just integrate it with the missions rather than have people running around collecting them? It really, really annoys me when I'm forced to perform mundane tasks just to "level up". IMO intertwining the ability increase with the missions makes it a lot less tedious. E.g. you could have a mission where you have to climb up some tricky series of jumps and level up in agility as a result. I haven't played the full game so maybe they did this in the full game and I just don't know about it yet, though. Incidental levelling is fine by me (shooting bad guys constantly = better aim) but when you have to actively go out of your way to do monkey boy work it really gets old.

DoD:S & CS:S

- Still fun, though I just dally now and then these days. The new CS:S pricing model sounded like a good idea, but it's pretty clear that it's gone bananas now. You can only balance the prices so much without changing the guns themselves. TMPs & mac-10s are practically free now ($200 for a mac-10, lol) yet barely anyone still uses them short of a pistol round surprise. Kevlar & Helmet now costs something like $4000 and the Deagle costs a zillion dollars, too... In other words, old habits die hard. People's insistence on playing just like they used to is artificially driving up/down prices. It's good in some ways, but I think they need to tweak the shitty guns up a little bit to make these prices calm down. Unfortunately they're in a bind because they can't touch the old favourites (ak, m4, deagle, awp) too much or people will go bananas and burn down Valve HQ. They could also introduces a max pricing bracket depending on the gun type. E.g. pistols can't exceed $1200, sub machine guns can't go lower than $700 or higher than $2500, rifles can't go lower than $2000 or higher than $4500 (sniper rifles excluded) and so forth. I bet no-one at valve expected it to go this bonkers.

Man I need to get more games.

Games are sometimes (often?) horrible to play until the last months before the release. If the leaked version is ancient then it's not really going to be worth looking at to determine whether the final product will be any good. It's amazing what a few months -- let alone a year or two-- can do to a game; verything can come together in the most remarkable way. Or maybe it can't. Let's find out when it's released

It depends. AFAIK if you put $nocull in a material file then every single polygon with it rendered regardless of whether it is facing the camera. This is fine for purposely designed 2-sided things like trees, plants, alpha'ed support struts etc. (where pretty much every face needs to be 2-sided, so having no back face culling makes sense) but it is not fine if your model uses the same material on the rest of it, but only a tiny proportion of the polys actually need the two sidedness.

If that's the case, then you have two other options:

A: Add the polys to the model -- not a big deal

B: Use a different texture/.vmt for the two sided bit -- possibly even slower as state changes are pretty inefficient at the driver level, but I'm not sure how HL2 works in terms of switching from material to material

Most graphics cards are fillrate limited these days (complicated shaders and materials etc.) so it's no big deal to add a couple of extra faces here or there -- it won't kill the framerate. I'd personally just add the faces that you're missing rather than go any of the other routes. $nocull is convenient for a lot of things but I wouldn't use it willy-nilly, especially on complicated geometry that doesn't strictly need it.

I'd throw a lot more faces at some of those arches.

I agree with Hourences. I bought a wacom intuos A5 last year and it's really nice, but I've honestly not had a lot of time to use it. More often than not I tend to just use the mouse for bog standard photoshop stuff (like textures). When I do use it to paint highlights and other free flowing stuff, it's great, but it is non-essential unless you spend a lot of time in PS doing stuff that really needs pressure sensitivity & free flowing lines.

I've no idea how it works in England, but in Scotland you do three years for your basic degree, then a fourth to obtain honours. If you leave after third year and get something like >60 or 70% I believe you can get a degree with distinction (or something along those lines) but most people stay on 'til 4th year to get an honours classification.

>70% = first class

>60% = upper second class

>50% = lower second class

>40% = third class / bare pass

I think I'd kill myself if I got anything worse than upper second class because, in all honesty, even a pleb can can get a degree so long as they stick it out and put in the work. So if your degree classification is lower second class or worse, then it doesn't really say much about you other than you managed to finish the course and achieved a basic level of proficiency

It's easy enough to edit texture .vmt files to get what you want.

[*][*:x7k1vzjz]Extract the .vmt from the DoD .gcf
[*:x7k1vzjz]Edit it the .vmt appropriately (remove the $model or whatever command that is giving you problems)
[*:x7k1vzjz]Resave it as whatevernameitwas_ferret.vmt
[*:x7k1vzjz]Drop it into the DoD materials/yourmapname/ folder, then distribute it with your map when you release
[*:x7k1vzjz]Use this texture in your map instead of the old one[/list]

flashback looks tremendous. I love your style, erratic! However, it says "failed to open mapcore.wad" when I run the map. Was this a standardised .wad used for the contest? If so, it'd be a good idea to include it with the map DLs so that random internet people can grab the maps without issue.

Great work everyone.