Section_Ei8ht

Remember Ubisoft placed Securom in SCCT. Are you still holding a grudge against them for this? If you look at the big picture, no one gives a damn, or remembers any of that.

Actually, it wasnt Securom, it was StarForce3, which is worse. And Ubisoft got off my shit list because after all the complaints, they voided their contract with StarForce and stopped using it (ironically, switching to Securom, but that was before the version of Securom that Bioshock uses, which is shit. Securom was a great DRM scheme until version 7).

Also I'm not talking about myself, I bought Bioshock on Steam Ah Yeah

Steam version still comes with Securom (which is also pointless, because Steam IS a DRM scheme).

I'm never buying another 2K game again unless its DRM free. I've had enough trouble with my damn Bioshock. You know something is wrong when you have an easier time with the pirated version then you do the legitimate version.

(Note: I don't condone software piracy, but come on. This is fuckin' ridiculous)

Where I live (the Midwest between Chicago and Milwaukee), at least the cities, all the dedicated butchers operate out of larger grocery stores.

From the sounds of it, a lot of people here are around the quarter-life crisis stage. I think mine ended a week ago

Good start. The lighting can be a lot sexier (sorry, couldn't find a better word) and I'd throw in some more junk to make this place seem really abandoned and condemned.

Pretty much what everyone else said. It's good, but its not great. Nothing about it screams UE3. It seems more UE2/Source-y.

Keep it up, though. It's got definite potential.

good post section_8! UML was kind of boring at uni for me, but maybe you get more into it because you work on a project while we only had a single semester with small exercises. operating systems is a cool course! i had it last semester and it was really interesting to get the basics of a modern operating system (no i am of course not talking of windows based systems!). learned a lot about process synchronization and file management.

i once worked on a flash based application in the old fashion way. highly procedural fucked up code. though AS seems to be a bit shitty for debugging, but it is a powerful tool once you got into it. this semester i have to work out an application of my choice and maybe i will make a small kids game. technologies are yet to be decided, but flash would be in consideration (besides Ogre which is maybe too complex, but we will see )

The great thing about AS3.0 is that it's incredibly Object-Oriented and Event-Driven. It was just weird for me having used AS2 for around four years, then giving AS3 a go and and wondering why the old hacks no longer worked.

The Pong game I wrote is very procedural and not very OO, but thats the great thing about flash and AS3. You can hack together some quick code to get the job done or you can make it OO and very efficient. Small kids games are great to do in flash if they're not graphically intensive. Heck, it's why I used flash for my Pong clone. I figured I could do it quick in flash to help myself understand the functionality of the game and how the game logic and everything works without having to focus on specific implementations of API's or memory management. Now that I have an understanding of the game logic, I can port it to C++ and OpenGL or something to take that next step.

BTW, this thread is awesome. It's great to attach a greater sense of personality to all this text. I love reading everyone's stories. Really reinforces the feeling that I'm not alone anymore

My fourth year of college is starting up this Wednesday. I'd like to say its my last, but I'm on the five year program (might even stay a bit longer to get a second major). I'll be glad to be back in school because I'll actually get stuff done. Most of the classes are programming related and I'm really looking forward to the operating systems and software engineering classes (get to learn about multi-threaded programming, UML, and spend the semester converting a board game into a software product. I'll probably work on the GUI and throw some 3d in there.)

I'm really glad that this last summer is finally over. It was pretty rough, mostly because all my good friends graduated college and are off in some other place in the world working, making a family, making a life, and here I sit in a closed off room never feeling more alone. That and it's been about two years since my last relationship, and every decent girl around this dank little shit town is already taken. After about a month of a lonely and boring summer, I really started questioning my faith and my life, and I started drinking heavily. I'll admit, I went a bit emo on the inside (not outside, though).

In the last week though, things have really started to turn up. I've stopped drinking (when I'm alone, at least ) and I've actually been able to do a few things that are productive. Over labor day weekend I decided to learn ActionScript 3.0 (Flash CS3), so to help myself make the jump from AS2 to AS3, I made Pong in flash (it's funny. I'm trying to become a game programmer, yet I've never made Pong). I had a programming binge that went for about 7-8 hours and man, did I ever feel alive. I guess it's kind of nerdy to admit that one of the only times I truly feel alive is when I'm programming, but it's the truth. I actually was able to take a lot from making a complete game from start to finish, regardless of how small it is. I've never done that before, and now I want to keep going. It's a beautiful feeling; going from feeling like you're in the gutter to feeling like you're on top of the world.

I guess the biggest part of my problem over the summer was the fact that I just didn't want to grow up. I didn't want anything to change. I wanted to stay in college with the same group of friends forever because hanging out in the computer lab with people I could relate to was one of the greatest highs a guy like me could ever have, and when they all left to go their separate ways and live their own lives, I went into withdrawals. But over the past few weeks I've been able to get over that fact and realize that this is my life, things change, things will change, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. And the change can either be for the better, or for the worse, but no matter which it is, things always come around one way or another.

So here I am, back in a good position (even though I wasted most-of-if-not-all my summer being a drunken depressed emo [i'll admit it]). College starts up tomorrow, I'm back on my feet, and my faith is restored. Enough of me being emo. Never again! There is work to be done, a life to be lived, and games to make!

Edit [to comment on Grin's post that was posted while I was writing my post]: Grin, sounds like you have a pain I know all too well. My last relationship ended with her leaving me for some guy I never met, and her becoming a stripper and a crack whore. Got me drinking, too. Don't worry man. Things will shape up for you.

Best of luck! Major props for making the decision broaden the horizon and do what you love.

10/10

3/4

The lizard one on the bonus round got me.

PC > All.

More freedom and modability. Plus keyboard and mouse.

I do own numerous consoles, though

Aye, my bad. I just cant help but talk about it, and noone has finished it but me Sad

I would have finished it by now if I could fucking play it! (grrrr PC)

These people who say they're only pirating to make a stand against the copyright stuff? Absolute bollocks. They pirate anyway, and have done for years. The only reason the companies are taking more drastic measures is because their software is getting thrown all over BitTorrent hours after release.

And even with these drastic measures, the games still get thrown all over BitTorrent hours after a release. So far the record for longest time between retail release and scene release is Splinter Cell Chaos Theory with 422 days using StarForce 3. On that 422nd day, the release came with reverse engineering instructions for the entire StarForce 3 framework, rendering it useless.

The only thing the protection does is prevent legitimate users from enjoying the product that they paid for. Rather than get a product that installs out of the box and they can play in a matter of minutes, they get something that is crippled with DRM (in the case of this version of securom, something that irreversibly modifies the system registry without telling you). The choice is between paying for something that fucks with your computer and probably wont work, or getting something that doesn't and is free.

I buy my games because the dev's need (and in most cases, deserve) the money, but I usually don't buy it until there has been a crackfix that removes the DRM from the game because I don't want that shit on my PC. Of course, there are unobtrusive forms of DRM, like Steam or earlier versions of Securom that didn't do anything like what it's doing now.

I bought the game on Steam. The reason I bought it on steam was beause I thought Securom would be removed since Steam uses it's own DRM scheme. I'm not going to play the steam version, but I'm going to play the pirated version because it doesn't fuck with my registry without telling me.

I paid for the game, it should play where I want when I want. The retail version doesn't do that, but the pirated version does.

Now I just have to ask: Does pirating a game I already bought make me a bad person?

It seems the copy protection on this game is super

There is no such thing as good copy protection.

Installed the latest drivers for everything and updated my windows, and the damn thing still crashes. I can't even load a level now, and I've tried tweaking my settings to damn near every possible permutation. I am quite pissed. I would get a refund, but I bought it through steam and steam = no refunds (although I don't blame steam for that, I understand why they don't). Hopefully a patch will fix all these problems.

Securom and 2K Games just made my shit list.

Halo is nothing more than a generic shooter, but what makes me play through it and want to play Halo 3 is the universe and the story, which are top-notch.

I bought my copy off steam. Got home today and played it for a bit and from what I played, it was fantastic. Only problem is that I can't really play the game because it keeps crashing. The longest I've been able to play without it crashing is about 15 minutes. So far I've had one bluescreen, two bioshock.exe crashes, one steam.exe crash, and one hey-lets-make-both-your-monitors-stop-responding-resulting-in-a-manual-cold-restart.

I have a 7800GTX and the latest drivers. I must say that I'm quite disappointed. Makes me wish steam had a refund policy.

Hopefully this gets sorted out with a patch.

[edit]Oh yeah, and I'm not using Vista.

I've unlocked the old Lara model from the original game, I don't remember her looking that bad...

Her boobs were all of 3 polygons.

Commander Keen

yeah, I bought the id super pack on steam. Man, this takes me back.

tighten up the graphics? What does that even mean?

Imagine Sam Fisher would have died in SC2 or 3 and they could have made up a new cool story in Double Agent with some kickass guy who is not "mr. save-america" and give him new aspects. sure it would not sell just upon the name but if it is as kick ass game it would sell without stretching series...

That's like saying they should kill off Jack Bauer and have Mike Doyle be the lead in next season of 24. We didn't start to see the human side of Fisher until Chaos theory. There is so much more of the Sam Fisher character to explore.

I heard that ubisoft was pushing for an october of this year release, but that can be taken with a grain of salt.

Either way, I can't wait.

congrats!

I wrote this as a note on my facebook. If I had a blog, I would have written it there.

So for vacation every year, I go to a thing called Quakecon. It's a 3-day 3,000 person LAN party sponsored by all the computer hardware major players and id software (the guys who made the Quake, Wolfenstein, and Doom games). This year is my third year attending, and it is the best vacation a geek can get.

In this day and age, what do you do when you need directions from Point A to Point B? Well, you could get out the atlas and do it by hand, or you can go to either Google Maps or Mapquest and have them do all the work for you. Being the geek that I am, I trusted Google Maps to get me from Kenosha, WI to Dallas, TX. We printed out directions and disembarked for the 16 hour drive that was ahead of us.

The drive went well through all states (Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas) until we got to Texas. The first incident was hardly anybodies fault, unless you want to blame Mother Nature. Quakecon decided to schedule itself for the one week of this year where the ourskirts of Dallas are underwater. And by that I mean: About 70 miles outside of Dallas (on the home stretch of the trip), it started raining... Then it started pouring... Then... rather than the old man snoring, the fucker decided to chug 30,000 Gallons of water and take a massive piss. It felt like we were driving through a hurricane. I could not see but 5 feet in front of me, and all that I could see was the ghost of the tail-lights of the car in front of me. At one point, going over a bridge, I got splashed by the car in the adjacent lane, and blinded me for about 10 seconds. Here I am, on a bridge, in the middle of what seems like a tropical storm, with a guardrail on my left, and a car on my right, and I can't.see.shit. I thought I was going to crash into something, but lucky, my hands locked on that steering wheel and it didn't budge. We decided it would be best to pull into a gas station and wait for the storm to die down, which we did. We waited for about 30 minutes until it died down, and then we continued onward.

With only about 20 miles to go, we entered downtown Dallas. For those of you that have never been to downtown Dallas, it becomes a cluster-fuck of highway exchanges, but never fear! I had my trusty Google Maps directions to guide me! So we follow the directions to the tee, and when we get there... wait... where's the damn hotel? What the fuck? It's the same hotel as last year, why isn't it here? I remember what the hotel looks like... but it's not fucking here! At this point, I started freaking out. We checked our trusty atlas, figuring out where the hell we were, then called the hotel to ask for directions.

Turns out that Google Maps though the hotel was in a different place. Now, I understand that Google Maps can be slightly off. You know how you look on the satellite photos of your house, and Google Maps says it's the one three houses down? Well, in this case, it wasn't three houses down, or even three blocks down. Google Maps was off by FIFTEEN fucking miles. Unless the hotel decided to move itself 15 miles north, and then change its mind, all within a period of one year, Google fucked up. We had the directions from Mapquest for the previous year still in the car (why we didn't just use those, I don't know, but using Google Maps was my idea). Mapquest was right, Google Maps was wrong. FIFTEEN FUCKING MILES wrong, and in downtown Dallas, in a rainstorm, during rush-hour, fifteen miles takes awhile to make up.

But, we eventually made it, and now I'm in the Quakecon BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) LAN party, and it's a blast. Time to stop ranting on facebook and start playing some games (I already got quite a few free t-shirts and shit, but the LAN is still young).

Peace.

Anyone else ever been lead astray by Google Maps? I've been talking to a few friends and they've told me some stories about Google Maps being completely wrong in the directions.

BTW: Quakecon this year is awesome. In a few hours, I'm gonna check out the Left 4 Dead beta

Saw it before. Cool stuff. It was made by the same demoscene guys (.theprodukkt) who made .kkrieger (the FPS in 96K)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger