Posts by twiz

  • Dungeon Keeper 1 for Windows 7

    Awesome, thanks for the tips! I'll try page up/down and control + arrow keys.

    Yes, I've installed the mod. Searching around to figure out the bits I still don't quite get, so I don't bother you guys with persistent questions about a 15 year old game

    Decided to read the manual.. that helps I'm so used to having every feature taught to me via tutorials, I forgot about reading the manual! That's kinda sad.

  • Dungeon Keeper 1 for Windows 7

    Ok, played the first 3 or 4 levels of the sp campaign, its a lot of fun! I don't feel like I'm in any kind of control during the battles, pretty much just dump all my guys there and let them hack it up... Try to heal randomly.. which is fine, building/training the army is my favorite part of an RTS, less so the battle itself (if I've done my job properly, it shouldn't be a battle - should be a massacre!)

    One question... A few times when looking at the map, if I click on it, my view changes from isometric to straight-on.. .and I can't figure out how to get it back to isometric!! Any help? Is there a list of controls somewhere I can't find?

    It's very disorienting for your entire view of the world to be rotated 45 degrees mid-game...

  • Cheap gaming laptop?

    I've got an HP Elitebook 17". Very high quality build. Had it for about 2 years now and its still in great shape and runs like a champ.

    It has a firepro in it, a M7820. My understanding of "workstation" graphics cards vs gaming graphics cards is the way it handles certain items - the focus is on raw polygon handling rather than "gaming" stuff like shadows/lighting/etc. They're designed for CAD systems where you basically want to max out how many polygons it can handle so the model looks smoother, but lighting & shadows don't really matter much (or at least they are incredibly simple).

    That said, this computer can run games just fine. I guess the most recent things I've played on it is SC2... which isn't that GPU-intensive, but it did run well with maxed out settings. Also played counterstrike on it.. again far from Cryengine... but it is a 2 year old laptop.

  • GTA V

    That link to the petition to keep a PC version from being released because PC gamers are pirates is full of links in the comments to pirated Xbox torrents.. lul.

  • Mad Max

    Yeah, might as well have been a compilation video of in-game screenshots. Just shows a few ways you can kill people. Really doesn't say anything about gameplay... Or story... besides its post-apocalyptic, and there are cars. Most of them look like in-game cinematic sequences.

  • iOS 7

    I really, really dislike the current IOs appearance. It just looks old, early-2000s, and just way too "bubbly" for me. Gradients everywhere, drop shadows, etc. I like simple.

    But they went way too far. By making everything so clean and bright, with no edging whatsoever, everything just blends together into a jumbled mess. Some screens I like - particularly the ones where things have borders (phone dialer, enter passcode... weather is okay... ) but most of them take me way too long to recognize what is going on.

    And yes, pretty much every app icon looks like shit.

  • Computer Requirements

    I think your processor is overkill for dev stuff. Raw processing grunt isn't that in-demand unless you do a bunch of renders. I think a 2600k would probably be fine for a few years at least, and have plenty of potential for overclocking.. and are only $300, not $1000.

    That gfx card is $4000 by itself... I understand what you're saying about potential issues with maya with gaming graphics cards, but.. I don't think hardly anyone here runs workstation gfx cards, and I don't think there are that many issues to warrant a $4k card. I have a workstation card in my work laptop, but an ATI FirePro 5280(?) I think. It does fine for me.

    And yeah, I concur with everyone else... 64gig is about 8 times too much. I have 8gb in my workstation and the only time I've ever seen it get consumed is when Solidworks locked up and started devouring memory. I usually am at around 4gig used, occasionally up to six if I have large assemblies open and a fifty tabs in chrome. Maybe get 16 if you are really feeling like going for some overkill.

    And yes, SSD. If you're willing to spend that kind of cash, get a nice 512gb ssd and be done with it.

    But hey, if you've got $14k burning a hole in your pocket and you already have a nice car.. sure, why not!

  • Fallout (New Vegas)

    Quote from killertomato

    that's harsh... i'm no specialist on this subject, but shouldn't Obsidian have ringed a bell about this before? seems a bit shady though to put into a contract that a bonus is being given based on some random value rather then a part of the gross revenue's.

    That seems like the most logical way to do it, and the way most companies operate... profit sharing. Sounds like obsidian got screwed on that contract.

    On the other hand, it distinguishes the publisher's job from the developer's job. In the profit-sharing scheme, if the developer makes a wonderful game that doesn't sell because the publisher didn't advertise it well, they essentially get punished for the publisher's fuck-up... and I'm sure this has happened many many times.

    And if the developer makes a crappy game and the publisher advertises the hell out of it and still manages to sell a lot, despite being an awful game.. then the publisher deserves the bonus, not the dev.

    If they both do equally well or equally shitty, then profit sharing is fair. If one does significantly better, then they get slighted, in a way. They still get more of a bonus, but the bonus isn't as fairly divided.

    Ideally it'd be a combination of those things... something like a relatively low fixed percentage profit sharing, and add in a scalar metacritic bonus, so they get an extra percent of the profit for every point their metacritic score is above 80.

    The really sucky thing for Obsidian is that they lost a lot of points for bugs.. If you take off the two lowest scores, the two 65's from GameZone and Armchair Empire, they have an 85 average. Both of those review's main complaints is it was released too early and therefore was buggy, in order to be out in time for the holidays... which is a result of publisher pressure. I'm not removing fault from Obsidian, they should be able to meet deadlines.. But it is crappy that the publisher rushed them in order to make more money by having it on the shelves for the holiday, and then the dev doesn't even get a slice because the initial amount of bugs was too much for some reviewers to handle.. due to the rush... and I'm sure they had to crunch really hard to meet that deadline at all.