Bodolza wrote on Nov 14, 2016, 13:04:

Creston wrote on Nov 14, 2016, 11:33:
Why is everyone pretending this is somehow worse under Trump than it would have been under Clinton? Am I missing something?

Because we listened to what Trump said, and we remember what it was like during the last Republican administration. The Repubs are in charge again, which means the moral police will be out in force. Trump has repeatedly said he's very pro "Law and Order". Combine that with legislation that will be out to ban anything on the internet the Repubs don't like, and you're looking at a big crack-down on internet freedom. The Patriot Act was passed under the last Republican administration. Obama has been slowly dismantling it piece-by-piece, but I expect it to come back even harder now.

We've also seen how vindictive Trump is, and with no respect for the Constitution. I'd expect his administration to go after anyone who slights them with all the power they have, including your internet history.

You mean the patriot act. With one dissenting senator and 66 dissenting reps in the house? Being "dismantled" by Obama how? You mean the built in sunset dates put in by a republican? What has he done to dismantle it?

You mean during the last republican administration where tons of people said a whole bunch of things and nothing bad happened to them for it? Much like the Current administration who did nothing.. Oh wait.. who sent the IRS after people who disagreed with him and his party.

And the Morality police? Are these any more numerous or rabid than the social justice warriors?

Hillary has respect for the constitution? The DNC does? We'll crank the censorship time machine dial back, and look at Good old Al and Tipper Gore. Her PMRC campaign and the man himself actually advocated for curtailing the first amendment. Wind it to today, and we have Obama who decided talking about guns on the internet falls under ITAR and thus is regulated trade in arms, no protected speech. You have Hillary, with plans publicly available in via the Clinton library form teh last go round, that wants to repeal the lawful commerce in arms act to use government funded lawsuits to ban the manufacture of most if not all guns. Like or hate the 2nd amendment, there are rules and laws, and that is NOT how it is supposed to work.

I suspect part of the reason for the uptick is that Clinton's email problems underscore that email is very, very vulnerable.

The problems of an increasingly militarized police state administered by an executive branch that has been radically expanding it's powers over the last 30 years is party independent. Who wins just shifts the demographics of who is in peril a bit.

GFACE - possibly game face? I'd guess either a face/expression engine for license, or a means of getting real life player images onto game avatars. IIRC isn't someone using one of the crytec engines for an MMORPG?

Just a guess.

Oh yes, because we know that Democrats haven't ever proposed laws against video games...

Sure they have. Including this on. The only Wright in the NY state assembly is Keith L.T. Wright. Who is a democrat.

That must mean it is about time to start over again then.

I'm sure that announcing that the spec is obsolete before it even hits paper is going to encourage solid drivers for it and development around it.

the march to irrelevancy continues.

I think Carmack jumped ship when he decided to focus on developing for consoles. Now he's all DX to make Xbox development easier.
I kind of miss 90's Carmack, who would smack talk the video card devs for shitty drivers, and push the API of his choice (OpenGL at the time) with an informed, technical argument that MS couldn't really fight.
Now he's just 180-Carmack, who seems to embrace whatever the large companies shove towards him. Sucks.


Nah, at first he made his well reasoned technical points about the drivers, and people listened. Then he made well reasoned technical arguments about the ahrdware, and people listened. Then he made well reasoned technical arguments about the API layer, and ARB told him to sit down and shut up while microsoft asked him what else he had to say.

Is apple smarter? It was. Their timing was better, they took less itme doing it, but most importnatly they ship with an out of the box config that is fairly secure and set up to make it so you have to educate yourself somewhat to make it insecure.

Is OS X more secure. Probably not. Mostly it enjoys greater security by being less popular. We are starting to see that portection wear thin.

Is OS X elegant and intuitive? No. It's got some ok design, but the ergonomics of the interface stink. Seriously, if you ahven't memorized hotkeys, measure how much you have to move the mouse to do somthing. Unless it is taking up the whole screen, you move the mouse less under windows to get the same job done. On top of that, apple starts everything less than full desktop size so you run smack dab into this stupidity. Sure, it largley vanishes if you memorize the keyboard shortcuts, but what is intuitive about that? Or maybe even a consistent method of installing applications? In windows and linux, I never find myself having to do it wrong once just to figure out which way an app wants you to install it. OS X does have some moments of elegence, but it has TONS of stupid stuff too just like every other OS. Windows, on the other hand, is content to just get the job done. That's what you expect of your computer, so it seldom impresses.

Frankly if you want to talk elegant and inspired interface refreshes to get stuff done quickly, look at the various big 3d apps like maya, 3ds MAX, etc. Nobody is doing it all right, but many of them have some awesome ideas for making stuff intuitive and efficient while using the point and click interface.

And the author's prediction of the great abandonment of windows? Not likely anytime soon for reaosns good and bad.

I do detest the level of arrogance that just oozes out of mac zealots now that their OS isn't a complete joke, and their hardware isn't brutally overpriced.

But with popularity will come more exploits, and tools to make it easy for end users to screw up their nice safe default config.

Oh yeah, and most importantly with popularity, apple will no longer be cool and stylish. That's going to be a big hurdle to overcome. Not everyone can be the cool kid. That's inherently part of what makes cool cool.

I view game review scores like judging in gymnastics. If you get below a 9, you basically walked out there and took a dump in your pants.

This comment was edited on Aug 15, 13:04.

"There's a stronger (and equally inane) arguement that the Simpsons inspires bullying by having Nelson & co."

I know I always envied nelson's manly laugh as a teenager, and it drove me to horrible, horrible things.

It's the second quarter of take-two's fiscal year. Which in calandar terms means january-march of 2006.

well, the car image I can believe from in game. The footbal scene is at best from an in-engine cut scene, and at worst FMV that the box pushes to screen.

Mainly the texture detail, the ammount of facial animation for the expressions, and the grass.

The texture detail would require a lot more ram than even double what they give you now, and ram prices ahven't fallen off that much in the last few years. Especially for nice fast ram. The facial expressions seem to fit the scene too well, and would be less reusable if you are going to have famous faces in the game. You might be able to paste a walk or run cycle on 40 different players, but not a glare/eating turf expression. Well you could, but it would look like crap.

You could pop the grass procedurally as part of the scene LOD, but it would be useless in anything but a cut scene or close up replay kind of situation.

yeah, i wouldn't woot. cool or not, they are absically looking at the expected gameplay, Turn those hours into dollars, and take one cent off.

For a first person shooter, that would be a very solid value. For an RPG, not so much.

any mirrors? the max of 15 users has been hitting the ftp site for a while now.

"There are a quadrillion things shooters could do to create a whole new game experience, but nobody has the balls to do anything."

Ok, name one. If you have that many original ideas, write up proposals, I'm sure you'll wind up employed making them.

Or you could keep on whining that someone else isn't out there making the increadibly imaginitve games you just KNOW have to be possible somewhere.

the thing that kills me with both doom3 and these HL2 screenshots is that they are both at extremes. The HL2 screenshots are almost completely matte looking. Whereas D3 was like everything had been laminated.

in the HL2 shots the matte finish on everything is fine except for the damn bugs.. they need some good specular highlights and shine.

the thing that kills me with both doom3 and these HL2 screenshots is that they are both at extremes. The HL2 screenshots are almost completely matte looking. Whereas D3 was like everything had been laminated.

in the HL2 shots the matte finish on everything is fine except for the damn bugs.. they need some good specular highlights and shine.

well, fileshack has the demo if people are looking.

The play is kind of like a very arcady freelancer mixed with KOTOR's on the gorund interaction but simplified and dumbed down. Character interaction when landed just cycles through a script without any branches (at least in the demo). You apparantly don't have any stat management other than customizing your ships. anti-aliasing doesn't seem to work, at least 4x driver forced doesn't work for me. Framerates suck for what is on screen unless they aren't doing LOD for them. Also, on the ground the models look nice, but for some reason when flying your ship looks like ass. very pixelated and just BAD looking. Which isn't good since you likely spend the majority of the game with it taking up 25% of the screen. The voice acting is a mixed bag, some good, some pretty bad, and some where the acting is fine but inappropriate (i.e. director told them to do X, they did it fine, but it's jsut not rightwhere it got put). Also, the cut scenes are a mixed bag, some of them would have been a LOT better looking done in engine (in fact they look like screen caps of someone running the game at 640x480 with bad settings), some of them are actual renders of higher res models, and justify a pre-rendered cut-scene. Oh yeah, and the mouse lag doesn't seem to be resolution related, there just seems to be something wrong with the mouse sensitivity settings when you put them past a certain point.

I had heard about this a while ago, and was looking forward to it, but the demo is pretty disappointing. The art direction is good, but the nature of the models makes AA not working just suck, and cranking it up to high res gives me frame rates dipping into the 30s with a gig of ram, a BFG GF6800gt, and dual 2.4Ghz xeons. Both of which makes it hard for you to enjoy the eye candy. The story has the possibility of being good, but the demo is just too short to tell. Even if it is, unless the demo is misleading, you are just bassically trudging your way through it with little impact other than how long you take to do the next task.

If you think VU is going to miss the holiday shopping season because of some bugs, you are sadly mistaken. If valve gets an RC to them, VU QA will make sure the first 4 hours of gameplay work, that it installs on a large number of test systems, and not much else. Steam is bad for VU, the only good thing it does for them is offer a level of anti-piracy protection which si only really functional if you are forced to use steam. Easiest way to do that is have bugs (like they can really be avaoided completely anyway).

It would be bad for all involved if this shipped after black friday.

yeah, but does it fix the stupid ass sound bug where you have to basically turn off hardware acceleration for everything but audigy series cards?

One, the bill hasn't been passed. It's in comitte in both house and senate.

Two, it was introduced by democrats. It's not being pushed by the presidential administration.

Three, in the senate it has NO co-sponsors and is getting bounced from committe to committe.

Four, in the house the co-sponsors are 14 democrats. Very liberal, and some of the most vehement opposers to the bush presidency even before the war.

This is just a bill floated so that the democratic party can say george bush wants to draft you.

Well I ahte to tell you, but the democratic congress critters want to draft you. have a nice day.