ginsengavenger

i went with the a64, so you can tell my preference~ i nearly bought an intel for the hyperthreading and better rendering performance, but that was about all that it could hold. the amds outperformed em in enough other tests that i flipped the fence at the end. you should get a better price point vs performance if you go with a 3000+. that's what i bought--the 3400 is indeed better but it's not *that* much better. look up the benchmarks. at least that was the case a couple months ago :x i would read up on the reviews, it's worth the time invested. even if you forget it after you buy your system at least you can make an informed decision and feel good about it

what's wrong with the cutscenes is the way they stream the resources in... the thing starts playing before everything is even loaded so you get the pop when the higher detail stuff gets in D:

guys who've played through it say it's cool, better than the first... better cinematics and more coherent generally and less repetetetetive levels. tbh though i didn't think halo1 was all that great. it did set the bar but consoles are still really far behind in a lot of respects.

i've got a lot of the same/similar stuff in my system. get the neo2 and get a good heatsink--i grabbed the thermaltake heatpipe thing and it simply rox. if you're using the onboard raid controller you better get sata drives. i dunno about infineon; corsair or crucial or mushkin are the reputed names for memory where i come from. i don't know if you really need a soundcard, the onboard is working well for me at least. i just love the sonata case, and it's good you're getting the second fan. rig it up to pull air straight through, and you can keep the fans quiet with the psu's lower voltage outputs. that's a kickass box dude

very cool, well done... the one thing that strikes me is the repetition. you've got the rollup doors, the brick texture, the windows, the plant things... hell even that white brick tex on the left which seemingly wasn't even meant to tile vertically. repetition is a good thing but not when it's so brazen. the walls and vertical spaces appear very well worn but the paving stones don't seem to be that old. remember the first thing to wear out is the ground. my last criticism would be the general lack of life... it's nice to be a bit dour but it would really benefit from something as simple as a few flowers on those plants on the walls.

kewl, gotcha.

right, it's a fourth channel, a third again larger than a plain RGB image... but still. what i wonder is if it's an issue because all that empty space can be compressed away or not? because this has effect on how i build my own maps.

yesh that's right~ I asked because that mask looks like an awful lot of wasted texture space... if it can be RLE'd then at least you aren't wasting too much bandwidth in release, sending it back and forth over the net. I don't know enough about video cards, and if they can handle that type of compression either, but if it were me I would probably have UV'd the alpha stuff onto a separate map so the mask could be small as well, and get some more texel density into the remaining majority of it. Though maybe that's a bad idea for other reasons ..enlightening thoughs, anyone?

can VMTs carry over a TGA's RLE?

needs more katamari.