prefect
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Posts posted by prefect
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Chess
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Episode One has been out for a while now, and I've only finished playing it a week ago.
I have to say that I really enjoyed it, as it is such a well-rounded and polished game. My only gripe with it was the hospital part. Somehow, it seemed too sterile (yes, I know, it's a hospital, but still) and repetitive. I wasn't really immersed in the game during that part. Apart from that, however, Episode One is brilliant. It pushes the story along, it's funny at times and provides an IMO nice mix of puzzles and combat. And then there's Alyx...
You spend so much time together with Alyx, and it seems to be completely natural almost through the entire game. I still think it doesn't fit Alyx's established character that she leaves you alone during the citizen escort mission, and the separation from her during the final battle feels a bit forced, but I guess those things are necessary for the player to get his heroic moments
Most of the time though, the balance between Alyx helping the player and vice versa feels perfect. It's amazing that Valve managed to pull that off, considering that NPCs are usually such an annoyance in first-person shooters.
I also enjoyed playing the game a second time through with audio commentary mode enabled. Some of the developers' comments are really interesting, especially how they iterated designs to perfect the way the story is presented to the player.
Whether Episode One is really worth €20 will be debated by many, but don't let the title "Episode" fool you. There's a lot of content in this package, and if you're even remotely interested in commentary-like features, you'll definitely play this game at least twice
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Neat
Do you know how much power this thing consumes? I've been considering setting up a home server from time to time, to act as a local file server mainly. The thing is, I'd want it to run 24/7, and then power consumption does become an issue.
According to the price listed on our power bill, running such a server would cost 11 cents per watt per month. Compare this to the prices you get for virtual servers, which have a static IP, can be reached from everywhere with much more bandwidth... so I'm still hesitating. If I go for a server at home, I'd probably build it using one of those VIA boards, but I'm interested in other people's experience.
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I am not religious. However, I strongly believe in mathematics as both the foundation and the fundamental explanation of our world. The beauty of mathematics is a center of my belief.
On the subject of God: Putting mathematics as the ultimate explanation of our world forbids the existance of an "ultimate omniscient, omnipresent, etc. God". However, (at least according to my interpretation of our existence), it also proves that Gods exist for some definitions of God (in fact, uncountably many Gods exist). On the other hand, I am rather certain from personal experience that none of those Gods is in any way relevant to my life. In fact, it is very probable that none of those Gods could affect my life even if they wanted to. Of course, I can neither prove nor disprove that in the framework of my belief.
Does that make me an agnostic?
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I've just checked, and it works in the TLA skin. The only one that's broken is the 0 A.D. skin.
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*bump*
Indeed, with the blueish WFG style, the thread HTML contains tags like
<a name="entry166687"></a>
And this tag is simply missing from the 0 A.D. skin.
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I have the same (or a similar) problem as Michael (with Konqueror, haven't tried with other browsers), maybe this additional info can help track it down:
The listing of threads of a forum has a little icon next to the name of threads with new posts. When you click on this icon, it's supposed to take you to the first unread post of that thread. This works with the WFG style (the blue one), but it doesn't work in the 0 A.D. style. In that style, it does take you to the correct page of the thread, but the browser won't jump to the first unread post. So my guess would be that the anchor tags are wrong somehow.
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I also believe that this "fine-tuning" is there simply because, if the universe weren't fine-tuned, we wouldn't be there to comment on it. The most likely explanation is quite simply that every conceivable universe exists, "at the same time" [1] as ours. And each of those universes may have different physical constants. Perhaps most of them are empty and without life, but so what?
[1] I believe (though I cannot prove it), that time itself is simply an artifact of the rules of our universe. In other words, our concept of time does not exist outside of our universe, so claiming that multiple universes exist "at the same time" doesn't actually make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, we don't have better words for this.
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Therefore, releasing this would very probably mean landslide in the game-landscape. The few OS RTS'es could easily upgrade their graphics, since the hard part, a decent graphical engine, is done. Anyone with modelling and texturing capabilities can go create a custom game. Of course this will be possible, to some extent, out-of-the-box with 0AD through modding, but still.
That's a complete misjudgement. Creating a decent graphics engine isn't the hard part, lots of projects have done it. The real problem with open source projects is creating decent graphics. Or, more specifically, getting the people who can create decent graphics engines and the people who can create decent graphics to work together. Just look at projects like Widelands if you want to know what I mean (I used to be pretty active there a long time ago).
And this is a problem that simply can't be fixed by releasing an engine as open source. After all, the Quake engine has been released as open source. And yes, there have been some entirely open games as a result of that, but have they taken off and caused a landslide? Certainly not.
Now, speaking only for myself, that doesn't mean that I'm personally opposed to open sourcing the engine - at some point in the future, once it's done. But right now, there's nothing to gain from open sourcing.
My main point is that most games and pretty much all commercial games are Windows-only. There is a pretty big gap between commercial games and OS-games. Take Civilisation 4 and Freeciv for example. Not only graphically is it a big difference, also gameplay wise, and, I'm sad to say, in favor of Civ4. Of course, this is only one game, if one looks closer, you'll find genres like RTS/Race/Adventure are underrepresented and thus underrepresented on Linux.
Don't worry about that part. The game runs on Linux, today, and that isn't going to change as long as I'm using Linux full-time
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I really don't know much about laptop hardware, but my bet is that replacing the chip is pretty much impossible. Most likely it's soldered to the mainboard.
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Shan hit the nail on the head.
As much as I hate to say it, that SiS chip is almost as bad as no 3D acceleration at all, so unfortunately you won't be able to play 0 A.D. on that laptop. You'd need a laptop with an ATI Mobility or NVidia GoForce chip for that. Maybe a high-end Intel graphics chip could cope as well, but I doubt it - better go with ATI or NVidia chips if you want a laptop for gaming.
And make sure that the laptop has dedicated graphics memory. Most laptop graphics chips use a shared memory approach where the graphics chip uses a part of the main memory for texture storage. This results in the CPU and GPU battling over memory bandwidth, so it's very slow.
Bottomline: You'd need a ATI Mobility or NVidia GoForce graphics chip with dedicated graphics memory to be able to play 0 A.D. on it.
Oh, and before I forget: As you're certainly aware, 0 A.D is going to take a while until it's ready, so don't buy hardware now just to be able to play 0 A.D. on it at some point in the future. Once we're nearer to completion, we're definitely going to give you more accurate and reliable system requirements
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Very cool new way of trying/"installing" applications on Linux (already has a repository of hundreds, if not thousands of applications):
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The second way is interesting. He seems to point out that there is a strict partial order of "efficient causes" (whatever that is). The "first cause" would be the minimum of the set C of causes (with respect to that partial order).
The question is, does the set C have a minimum (he calls this minimum "God", which I'd consider exaggeration, but why not)?
Without introducing further axioms, this question cannot be answered (both the natural numbers and the integers are partially order - the natural numbers have a minimum, but the integers don't have a minimum).
Let's define existence of something in the real world via a predicate P. Some x in C exists in the real-world sense if and only if P(x) is true. Let us further assume that the "partial order of cause" can be understood in the sense of mathematical induction, i.e. we know that "If P(x) is true and x <= y, then P(y)".
Let's examine what happens with and without a minimum in the set C. Let's say w in C is our current-day world.
Hypothesis 1: C has a minimum m. We are fairly certain that our world exists, so P(w) is true (this would have to be an axiom unless we can prove it by other means). It is true that if "God" exists, i.e. P(m), then the existence of everything else follows by induction. However, we would have to prove P(m) first. So this entire chain of reasoning isn't viable to prove the existence of "God".
Hypothesis 2: C has no minimum. Again, we would hope that P(w) is true. In order to prove that, we just need to prove P(x) for some x in C with x <= w.
In all situations, we still have a burden of proof, and it was all pretty useless in bringing us closer to a proof/disproof of God's existence. Mostly it's an mathematical rant
Seriously though, stuff like that brings me back to the first semester of mathematics, where students have to appreciate many things related to this, like the difference between minimum and infimum: a set of real numbers with lower bound always has an infimum, but not necessarily a minimum - this very simple observation can bite in very roundabout ways in more difficult mathematical arguments.
Another favorite of mine is this: Suppose you have an infinite sequence of non-empty sets M_0, M_1, M_2, ... such that M_n+1 is always a subset of M_n. It is tempting to conclude that the intersection of all these sets must be non-empty, but this conclusion is false. In fact, consider the sequence Z_0, Z_1, Z_2, ... where Z_n is the set of integers larger than n. Clearly, Z_n+1 is a subset of Z_n, and each set Z_n is an infinite set. However, the intersection of all Z_n is empty!
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I don't think anybody will seriously claim that removing mouse buttons in real desktop environments is a good idea. Having buttons that activate based on a timer or based on gestures will probably be frustrating in the long run.
However, I like this website because it shows us how much is possible without clicks. Many of the ideas, such as the elegant browsing of information without clicking, could be incorporated into real applications like file managers or type managers.
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Check out this website (Flash required): http://dontclick.it/
What do you think?
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My bad, I was just really confused
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Caesar, that's genuinely funny. You really don't have to make up jokes when life is so full of them
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Aftermath will be interesting. Apparently, you will be playing alongside Alyx for (almost?) the entire game. I don't believe any FPS has done anything like that so far with convincing characters. Valve might be the ones to pull it off...
I'm definitely going to play Aftermath once it's out, but give game developers time to do things right. Rushing it is bad for you
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It's hard to remember to type "chdir" instead of "cd" in Unix V5
You haven't used Windows in a while, have you
Having an archive like that is a Good Thing, but sometimes people get too nostalgic. Every time there is a discussion of user interfaces, for example, there are bound to be people who ramble on about how great some ancient computer from Xerox PARC, or BeOS or whatever, were - completely ignoring the many problems these systems had. And while some of the ideas from these older design indeed deserve a revival today, there really are good reasons why these computers/systems are things of the past.
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Is gcc installed? Which version? Try gcc --version in the shell.
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I would look for something like this:
CPU: AMD Athlon XP or Pentium IV 2.4 - 2.8 Ghz
Memory: 256-512MB
HD: 40-80 GB
CD writer and DVD-reader (many new media is coming out on DVD these days)
This looks mostly fine, however I'd say:
Memory: 512MB-1GB
HD: 100+ GB
As for the memory, getting more memory is often the cheapest way to significantly increase performance. You'll still be fine with 512MB today if you don't play modern games, but I seriously suggest looking at the 1GB range - or at least the option to put another 512MB stick into the PC in two or three years. If you're undecided between a faster CPU or more memory, you should almost always go for more memory.
As for the harddisk, it's actually quite difficult to even *find* desktop PC harddisks that are smaller than 100GB
If you do find such a small harddisk (assuming you're buying new and not used components), the storage/cost ratio tends to be significantly worse for smaller disks. At least that's my experience.
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EKen, do keep in mind that only some centuries ago, slavery was perfectly normal and accepted by society and even slaves themselves. Anybody who called for the abolition of slavery was a dangerous liberal. Slavery would have been called an "uncompromisable" issue. Today, even an extreme conservative would have to be out of their mind to proclaim slavery a good idea.
Over time, the same will (and does!) happen to issues like abortion that you call "uncompromisable" today. It's all part of the natural development of society.
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I'd be surprised if there was a serious distribution that didn't have SDL in its repository, so look again. Maybe the search is case-sensitive, so try looking for sdl (lowercase) as well. Also make sure that the corresponding -dev or -devel package is installed, as it contains the header files that are necessary to compile (but not run) SDL-based programs.
Oh, and try to run sdl-config --version from the shell. Maybe the configure script is just broken.
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reebash: As the guy responsible for graphics performance around here, I can answer some of your points:
5. Are the shadows cast by the weeds dynamic like the characters?
Yes, all shadows are dynamic shadows, implemented via a shadow map.
3. How is that big building constructed? Are there 'modules' that are grouped together, or is it one big model? If it's one big model, is it partitioned for visibility or is it 'if any is in view, all is drawn'?
It is one big model, unless I'm completely mistaken. There is no visibility culling (apart from viewport-based culling, obviously), and with good reason. In a normal RTS view, virtually nothing is obscured. In fact, you don't even want to have anything obscured - after all, you need to know what's going on on the battlefield. So we just throw the models at the GPU and let it do its thing, it can do depth-based culling much faster than complex visibility calculations on the CPU.
What are you listening to right now?
in Arts and Entertainment
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Apoptygma Berzerk - In This Together