Posts by Jetsetlemming

Shadowrun on the Genesis, it took me weeks of daily play to figure out how to get through the game's plot, with a lot of going on random runs and working stats. I nearly maxed out my stats by the time I gathered the courage to go explore the wilderness outside the city and further the plot, and then the story missions seemed to all quickly fall together and within a week I had reached the ending. I had spent so much time playing the game that I didn't want it to end, even though I loved the ending.

So I just replayed it. Ended up playing through Shadowrun like five or six times after that, getting the story down so it could be gotten through entirely, including doing side missions for cash and rep, to like four or five hours. I only stopped when I got a copy of Gunstar Heroes.

Started replaying STALKER: Call of Pripyat with a translated version of the "SGM Mod", that replaces the main storyline, ups enemy spawns and in general makes the game harder, adds a bunch of new equipment (for example there's a dude in the barge town selling hacking software and upgraded binoculars), and a bunch of other stuff I don't know because while the mod itself has been translated to english, the readme wasn't. It's pretty cool so far.

Quote from barrakid

The truth is actually the opposite of what you said, the probability of two HD failing simultaneously is really, really low. I've never seen it happen in my experience, neither did my co-workers.

Power surges are really not one of the main causes of HD failure, it's really unusual for it to happen, and you should be using a UPS with surge suppression anyway to protect your other components. The biggest cause of HD failures is in fact dust. If particles of dust get inside the HD drive you will start to get lots of bad sector warnings, and eventually the read/write head will stop working making the HD useless.

And again external hard-drives are not as reliable as you might think, most of the enclosures don't keep dust away from the inside, if you ever open a external hd you will find lots of dust in there, and the fact that people carry them everywhere causes much more physical damage than having a internal HD properly secured inside your computer case. The circuit boards inside external HD also break very easily, but that's because most companies use really cheap components and bad manufacturing processes to build them. Like i said before I've 3 of them sitting in my desk at the moment which are completely dead.

I'm sorry to insist on this but you really shouldn't be misinforming people about proper ways to secure their data. RAID1 arrays are a standard in any system in which data protection is important these days, along with having a (usually) off-site backup server (this only applies to companies), and doing regular backups to an external support to quick fixes.

I don't mean power surges as in external ones, but internal ones from other bad hardware. I've seen every single piece of hardware inside a computer, down to external things connected by USB, destroyed by a dying PSU, and when you're giving computer advice to people who don't really know about hardware, you can't count out low budget PSUs, motherboards, etc.

RAID1 is still not a favorable solution to just using external storage, IMO. Above all else, it's cheaper, portable, and uses less space than backing up every individual thing like system files. There was a 2TB "green" Western Digital drive on sale on Newegg for just $100 a couple days ago, and the external enclosure I use personally only cost $15.

It's near completion? Then where's the rest of the footage?

The two most common cause of HD failures are the hd living out its lifespan and failing (once the warrantee period is up), and power surges. The likelihood of something random happening to damage one hard drive to the point of making its data unrecoverable while not happening to another hard drive inside the same machine is roughly in the "struck by lightning"/"win the lottery"/"Get rich quick for reals" level of odds.

Being in an external HD enclosure will give the hard drive far less stress than constant usage, keep it away from dust, and make it immune from the effects of other hardware failure.

That GPU is way more power than you need unless you're using the eyefinity feature. If you are, then great, but if not you can still get fine performance out of a card two hundred dollars cheaper.

And SSDs are here but only for the newest models, and properly set up. Then they're worth it if you've got the extra cash. It's a very low priority expense though.

Edit: For the OCZ ram:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 20-227-495

A full 1/4 of the reviews are one egg "Didn't work" posts.

Quote from barrakid

One of smart things to do these days is to buy a small (32 or 64 GB) SSD (Solid-State Drive) where you install the SO and other "heavy" applications, since SSDs are substantially faster than regular HDDs you will get a significant performance boost while runnings the applications installed on them. You then set two 500Mb/1Tb HDDs in a RAID1 array for storage. Using a RAID1 array your files will be saved on both HDDs at the same time (one of the HDDs mirrors the other) so when one of them fails (and they will fail) all your files will be safe in the other HDD. The only downside is that the writing speed decreases when using a RAID1 array, but it's the best way to avoid loosing important files. Off course you should to keep doing regular backups to an external hard drive just in case As for brands/models, for the SSD I would choose a model from the Kingston SSDNow V Series (they are more reliable), and for the HDD I personally prefer the Western Digital Caviar or Velociraptor series (depends on your budget), but the Samsung Spinpoint series are also a good choice.

And don't buy a cheap motherboard or power supply, buy the best you can from a brand with good reputation (usually Asus motherboards and Corsair PSUs are the best choice). Buying a cheap MB or PSU usually leads to a unstable system and can damage your other components.

RAID is not a backup. It is not file protection. Do not use RAID expecting it to save your shit. Running two drives at once, putting them both through the exact same workload next to each other inside the same computer, attached to the same power supply and motherboard, means that if one has catastrophic failure most likely both will. Take that extra HD and stick it in an external enclosure. Keep it off unless you're actively using it and make backups every time you do something worth backing up.

Quote from dux

Honestly, the list I made is what you want to look at having in your PC. It's good for everything. Same for Serenius.

Except for the mediocre ram brand and massively overpriced gpu?

I'd say do not get OCZ brand memory if you're getting DDR3 (unless you're on a super tight budget you should be getting ddr3) as they've been having significant QC and mobo compatibility problems lately with their DDR3 line. Though this doesn't really matter if some company is building the computer- obviously they're gonna deal with RMAs and stuff like that. It'll probably delay when the computer's ready though.

Quote from twiz

I too have heard the Intel Core processors are the bee's knees.. I went newegging to see how much it'd be to upgrade my system, and decided against that rather quickly $300 for the cheapest core i7's.. up to a grand+ Then I looked at some AMD processors and a quad-core 3ghz is a hundred bucks, great reviews, take well to overclocking, etc... Unless you have cash to burn, seems to be the smart way to go! You get an L3 cache with the i7's, but I've read the performance increase is minimal for the additional cost. An AMD Phenom X2 quad core, 3.4ghz with a 6mb L3 cache is $150, just about half as much as the i7 you have specced.

I've also heard really good things about the Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, fast and quiet. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152185

$5 more expensive than your specced drive, but it has a better Newegg rating, fwiw. Occasionally they'll go on sale for ~$60, so maybe snap one up during one of those sales.

I see dux has mentioned the spinpoint already

Don't compare the Phenom X2s to the i7s, compare them to the i5's. Intel's i7 push is practically trolling typical computer buyers with extreme high end shit completely inappropriate for anyone not using their computer to cure cancer or make videogames.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115215

That's a quad core i5 for $195. $30 more than the Phenom ii but benchmarks notably better, and that's before OC'ing it to equal clock speed. It also uses far less power.

Oh, and I wanna say because a few people in the thread said Nvidia hasn't been good lately: They haven't, but the Geforce 460 is a massive turn around for them and is basically the best card for the money in the ~$200 price range. It's very near the ATI 5850 in performance, while seventy bucks cheaper, and typically better software support (also CUDA and PhysX if you care).

What are you doing with this computer? Is it a workstation, or a gaming PC? If you're not using shit that supports hyperthreading (no game does), the i7's a waste of money. Over 4GB RAM is also unneeded unless you're going to be making massive maps in level editors and using photoshop and a 3d editor at the same time. For general use, an i5 and 4GB and a Geforce 460 1GB is essentially top of the line and far cheaper than the highest end components possible.

I barely ever play TF2 anymore. I don't think I've mentioned it either

Occasionally I'll go play spy on a random pub server but really playing, eh. I go to l4d first for random multiplayer.

Just as long as you use an external program for voice (we're using steam chat, it works perfectly for ptt voice com). I hate gfwl's terrible handling of mics. Automatic broadcast is terrible. Same issue made Borderlands's in-game voice useless too, when I played through that with a group of four we all used vent and muted ingame voice.

Was playing Resident Evil 5 Coop with a friend last night online. We got to a puzzle room with a laser beam (an ancient mystical sunlight-based laser beam lol) and some mirrors and we had to reflect the beam by rotating mirrors. We got the puzzle almost complete, with the two of us on opposite sides of the room, separated by laser death beams. I told my friend to turn the last mirror to get the puzzle figured, and he does so... cutting the beam across me as he rotates the mirror, killing me. We laughed hard and decided to call it a night.

Quote from Warby

its pretty funny but that kind of bug you can find in every game that uses ragdolls so its nothing special really !

I dunno why you're getting defensive over it considering it happens in basically every game with ragdolls ever, but it's not special because it's a ragdoll flapping around, it's "special" because of the chance pose it ended up in which is funny.

Actually though, KL2's ragdolls seemed a bit more active than most games. Half the time I looked at one the head was slightly rocking back and forth, or something like that.

[Blocked Image: http://i38.tinypic.com/14wddon.jpg]

Wanted a quick dinner tonight

Really like the fourth place 3d, except for the aliasing.

Quote

":s7gmbwg0]Mmm, yeah i understand that, still i think you might be missing my point mate.I don't mean if the leafs casts accurate shadows, if they wave with the wind, have sub-surface scattering, parallax in the floor, bla bla, I don't mean any of that tech stuff. That's pretty much been there done that for me in Crysis.

I meant ART Direction!

I meant the smart use of colors, varied and stylized environments (from interiors to exteriors, from a snowy mountain to a city, from jungles to dungeons, etc), detailed and hand crafted geometry and textures so they fit the art directors vision, and so on!

I think I'm trying to get at the same thing. The technical stuff helps the illusion, but the design of the mountains and rivers and shanty towns and how they fit together and look. It's like the same way KL2 treats Shanghai, I guess. Far Cry 2's illusion of Africa helps to further magnify that guilty feeling they're trying to instill in you for being an asshole profiteering on tribal warfare and the lawless nature of the region.

That illusion completely goes away if you play some nice up tempo music while playing and instead it's just an awesome "Let's shoot people and burn down plains and forests!" sim.

I'd post some examples of what I find to be top notch art in Far Cry 2 but the game doesn't screenshot well at all (the grass shadows in stills ends up looking like a bunch of artifacts), and recording FRAPs makes my framerate pretty unhappy. I find FC2's environmental art, stuff like massive plains of grass with every blade moving and casting a shadow, and rivers and waterfalls and forests, to be unmatched, even by Crysis's jungles. I only played Uncharted 2 in demo form, and then on an SDTV, so I'm not in any position to really compare the two though.