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| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20445 |  larsig (501) May 09, 2008 - 03:13 pm
| | Hehe.. I remember trying to get away in a pick up on 3 stars... yeah. Turn a corner, WHAM, I get two cop SUV's rammed up my ass and my body is flying away from a giant fireball. Although, using something like an SUV is funny. Aww, the little cruiser wants to face me head on? woops, I got a cop splat on my windshield. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20445 | larsig (501) May 09, 2008 - 03:06 pm
| | I don't even consider the drive noise an issue on the 360 anymore cause.. you know.. it's always present on the 360. No point in complaining about it for every game. Microsoft really should have gone for a quieter drive seeing as games constantly read from disk since they can't assume hard drive space to store temp data on and there is limited RAM. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20443 | larsig (501) May 07, 2008 - 04:05 pm
| | Really? I've found that things seem to be older than I thought they were with age... Heck, the reminder that Starcraft is now over a decade old shocked me into sitting there for a few minutes counting my fingers, believing that subtraction has finally failed me. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20443 | larsig (501) May 07, 2008 - 03:54 pm
| | No kidding, my computer is gonna die trying to do all that. But aside from the graphics, which weren't bad for the first one but weren't fantastic, I meant the AI stuff and the living world. They wanted to do so much more, like having actual NPCs that wandered around in the world and interacted with you and other NPCs even when you weren't there. If you watched carefully you could see gaps in how the world works that indicate those missing features. Probably the most obvious one was the PDA's ranking feature which never changes in the game. Initially they wanted the player to compete against other STALKERs, but that obviously didn't work out. I'm hoping those features will get implemented in this game. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20443 | larsig (501) May 07, 2008 - 03:13 pm
| | If they spend the time to add to their engine all they left out of the first I wouldn't mind waiting a few more months past August. If only time wasn't such an issue with the first one they could have made the world so much more realistic. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20425 | larsig (501) May 02, 2008 - 12:13 pm
| | Right... minority. You always assert that the 360 has an insanely high failure rate (50%+), yet I have yet to see anyone's 360 fail in real life(I'm not saying it doesn't happen). Just maybe you should stop sticking your 360 in an oven. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20425 | larsig (501) May 02, 2008 - 06:17 am
| | True - I should rephrase what I said since it makes me sound like I'm denying the 360's problems. Although, I don't think it's as widespread as some people make it seem. I haven't met anyone in real life that has had that problem with the 360, but that's not much of a sample size. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20406 | larsig (501) Apr 25, 2008 - 01:07 am » Edited on Apr 25, 2008 - 08:16 am
| And I weep for those that say Vista is "unusable" and is a "downgrade from XP". Ignorance is a disease...
Edit- And there you go changing the entire meaning of your comment... Well, since that is the case, I do agree that it is good news that Microsoft may continue supporting XP. It shows that they're not always the giant evil corporation that so many make them out to be, they do listen to their customers once in a while. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20372 | larsig (501) Apr 17, 2008 - 09:06 am
| | Have we grown so lazy or dependent on others telling us what to do that we can't just go outside and run around a little? or goto the gym and work out? Or get a bike and go out for a ride? Are we so dependent that we need a freaking game system to tell us how to exercise? With every passing year I die a little on the inside when people seem to grow stupider. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20366 | larsig (501) Apr 16, 2008 - 10:56 pm » Edited on Apr 16, 2008 - 11:03 pm
| Perhaps you don't understand what it means to write software for an OS. It is not a universal consensus between those parties, it IS unilateral. Microsoft is the one that holds the rights to the software and are the ones spending money to maintain it. Microsoft has NO requirement to listen to developers on any of their opinions in the matter. That DOES NOT mean that they don't, Microsoft did. And this was the solution to the issues found in the old model. And Microsoft tried their damnest to make the transition as painless as possible. It is not their fault that some other companies refused to take advantage of it. And stop making it look like Microsoft isn't allowing Vista to use old drivers just because they felt like it. They didn't simply because it can't, for either a technical or security standpoint. Allowing for the old driver model to work side-by-side would defeat the purpose of the new model.
If you want a real example of an OS that provides little backwards compatibility, look at Apple. They have a horrendous track record with that, and no, running an emulator for an older OS does not count. Microsoft is far from being a company that ignores compatibility issues. It may take them some time to fix the issues, but they do work on it.
Edit- Forgot to mention this, but Microsoft does not make changes like this lightly. It's not as though the engineering team woke up one day and went "Oh, lets remake the driver model because we feel like it." They decided to change it because they are the MOST familiar with the OS, and also the MOST qualified to find problems. They know of the faults of the model and after years of it working in the wild they decided that the old model was inadequate and insecure. The changes were made to benefit the consumers, not to satisfy some evil twisted motive to cause pain and suffering to everyone. And as plans with multiple independent parties go, many of the parties decided to not bother providing new drivers for existing hardware or write working drivers for new ones. By no means is Microsoft responsible for those choices since they have no say in it. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20366 | larsig (501) Apr 16, 2008 - 01:32 pm
| It is NOT Vista's fault for those drivers failing to work. Microsoft gave hardware manufacturers plenty of time and support to create drivers that will work for Vista. But, many refused to upgrade older hardware and some didn't even write working drivers for future hardware (ie Nvidia).
If Microsoft had compromised Vista's security to enable lazy manufacturers to run bad drivers on the OS, there would have been no reason for the driver model overhaul. It would be exactly the same as before. It IS in fact the manufacturer's fault because Microsoft gave them plenty of time and support to turn out working drivers. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20366 | larsig (501) Apr 16, 2008 - 01:24 pm
| | That's not you being forced to by Microsoft... That is you being forced by hardware manufacturers because they deemed it unprofitable to provide support for an old OS. Seriously, do people NOT realize that it isn't Microsoft making drivers? It is up to the hardware manufacturer to provide support for an OS, it is THEIR choice. Just like Nvidia refused to turn out working drivers for Vista despite the assistance they were getting from Microsoft, it is not Microsoft's fault. Besides - Windows 98 is part of a DEAD branch of Windows. It's even more pointless for manufacturers to continue development on that line. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20366 | larsig (501) Apr 16, 2008 - 01:17 pm
| | IBM - Can't beat them, little pricey though. And when I say a little pricey, it is not overpriced like mac. It's cause you're paying for among the best service in the industry rather than feeding lies or easily misunderstood statements to the public. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20363 | larsig (501) Apr 15, 2008 - 08:03 am
| | Great, more corrupt politicians looking for money to invest in their personal interests. Fuck you governor of Illinois, fuck you. First you waste millions of state money on crap programs, siphoning it out of higher education. Then you propose to waste several million dollars to destroy and rebuild a perfectly functional, although tragic, building at NIU, money the state CAN'T afford by the way, just to save you already fucked up career. This is why I hate politicians. And I'm not even going to go into the scandals and putting millions in religious schools. Did I mention that he's siphoning money from state universities? Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20366 | larsig (501) Apr 15, 2008 - 07:49 am
| People will have to switch sometime... Considering the significant difference between Vista and XP hardware drivers, I doubt many hardware makers want to continue to make XP drivers (Assumming Microsoft even lets them). Just look at NVida, it took them how long and how much money to get workable Vista drivers?
Plus this split is bad for game devs. DX10 and games on Vista require assumptions on how resources are managed that are different from XP to perform at their best. The reason many current DX10 games have performance issues is because they are still essentially DX9 engines with DX10 features appended, and they don't take advantage of Vista's resource management. Until we see pure DX10 games this is gonna continue. And that's not gonna happen unless most people adopt Vista. And people will continue to use XP if there is no reason to go to Vista. Wow, how often do you see a deadlock like that in software. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20360 | larsig (501) Apr 14, 2008 - 06:52 am
| Don't give up hope :) Doesn't hurt to be optimistic.
I do hope they succeed with this, and soon. I hate being constantly worried about my laptop's hard drive being damaged due to movement and so on. Sometimes ignorance is bliss... I'd love to use sold-state drives, but they are expensive and I'm pretty sure I'll wear the thing out very quickly. Flash has a life span issue, and ignoring things like virtual memory, I do a lot of disk I/O operations since I develop on my laptop frequently. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20360 | larsig (501) Apr 14, 2008 - 06:39 am
| | Not necessarily. Military's not always cutting edge, but they do have tech that is beyond the reach of what is available to the average civilian cause they're kinda... expensive. Besides, why do you think the military does so much research? That stuff they're not about to give to the populous to test out. An out dated example, but nukes. Civilians didn't get access to that research to test it out, the military kept that thing as secret as you can make nuclear explosions in the desert... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20357 | larsig (501) Apr 12, 2008 - 03:37 pm
| Don't forget about the all important floating point math that 3d graphics require. The CPU sucks at floating point calculations, that's why the need for a graphics card rose in the first place. A gfx card is a floating point beast, a modern CPU is simply unable to compare to a GPU's raw power with floating point numbers.
And as for the guy that you replied to, don't try claiming that you can write 3d games that don't make heavy use of floating point numbers. The math is not pretty if you are stuck with integers. The number of calculations needed to just draw a simple triangle on a 1280x1024 screen goes well into the millions (mostly because of the resolution, over 1.3million pixels to calculate). When you consider that modern games take hundreds of thousands of vertices to the screen, plus textures, lighting calculations, shaders, it is impossible for a CPU to do the math to be able to draw a min of 40 of those per second. And don't forget about handling input, game logic, the OS, memory, and physics. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20355 | larsig (501) Apr 11, 2008 - 01:29 pm
| | Apple's worse. Seriously, who programs a kill date on a cell phone? I know people who have almost lost jobs and internship opportunities cause of that. This happened on ALL developer iPhones cause Apple fucked up. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20360 | larsig (501) Apr 11, 2008 - 01:19 pm
| | Yeah. A lot of these large companies do a lot of R&D that few people know about or even hear about. Seriously, do people just think they take all the money they get and stuff it down their pants? No, they do something with it, which results in something useful. IBM doesn't just make workstations and servers for companies. Hell, IBM was one of the companies that worked on developing the Cell processor that is used by the PS3. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20355 | larsig (501) Apr 10, 2008 - 09:39 am
| | What I don't get is why people don't just get a 360 or ps3 for this purpose. I mean hell, apple's piece of crap costs about the same and you can't play games on it and you can't play dvds or hd-dvd/blu-ray. I don't even know if it lets you stream media from your pc like the ps3 and 360. It'll probably be much easier and safer for blockbuster to join forces with either Sony or Microsoft rather than go off on their own. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=20332 | larsig (501) Apr 09, 2008 - 09:32 pm
| | In case you haven't noticed, a lot of people hate big companies. There's a reason why so many people hate Microsoft despite some of the things they do like investing so much money into R&D or contributing GOOD software for educational purposes. They can be fucking saints (Not saying they are) and people would still label them as the devil only because they are big. Hell, Apple has turned into some crusader for the small but their business practices are hardly more moral than Microsoft's, less so in many cases. Flag this | Edit this post |
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