Your computer being stolen is preventable? Have you or anyone you know ever been robbed? You've never heard of an airline losing luggage? You've never accidentally dropped or scratched a CD in your life?

Everyone knows that you should make at least 3 backup copies of all pieces of software you own, and store at least one of those copies in a safe-deposit box at the bank. Duh.

As a game, it is very enjoyable, if a little repetitive. But doesn't every game suffer from that?

No.

V: You know what they call Space Hack in the UK?

J: They don't call it Space Hack?

V: No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Space Hack is.

J: Then what do they call it?

V: They call it "Maximus XV Abraham Strong Space Mercenary".

J: WTF?

Sophia Coppola ruined the third movie.

I really need more than those 12 hotbuttons. probably more than 24, especially because of pvp.

Don't bother learnign to change the UI unless you want to start making your own mods. There are plenty of UI mods out there already. A quick google search turned up this page with a comprehensive listing:

http://www.insurgenceguild.com/insurgence/ui_mods.php

(cosmos and CTMod are probably the best right now)

Anyone have any tips on Crew Morale?

Nonstop pillaging. The best way to keep your people happy is to have a continuous flow of money coming in from looting ships and sacking towns. Sail down the coast attacking every ship and every town you can defeat and they'll be happy for a long while. Take a break by sailing for months across the sea and they'll become unhappy.

No matter what, they'll become unhappy eventually. It's unavoidable. Large crews get unhappier faster (probably because they get less loot per person), so feel free to thin out your ranks in combat every once in a while.

I have a question for anyone that has hooked a Radeon up to a TV. Is there any trick to this?

Never done it on Win98, but I've always had a problem with the video card detecting my TV on Win2K and XP (on both an nVidia and ATI card). The ATI control panel that comes with the driver includes an option to "force tv detection" or something like that. I have to enable this option, and then the overlay/clone settings become available. I have always used an SVideo cable, too, if that makes a difference.

As for where the setting is... hmmm. It's buried in the options somewhere. I can't check where it is until tonight.

Did a quick search and found this page that mentions the setting:

http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_8.html

Oh yeah, and I'm Lucky Poodle-Fairy.

It interrupts the game, puts the computer into some fucked up mode that prevents you from using the keyboard/mouse normally even after you quit the game, and even though you can disable it, it keeps re-enabling itself. Anyone know how to fix permanently?

In the control panel, there's an option called "Accessibility Options". Go in there and there'll be a keyboard tab. Uncheck all those options. In the "Advanced" settings, uncheck everything too. Similarly you can press shift a bunch of times rapidly and it'll do the same thing. I hate that.

If you're on a PC on some company network or something, the settings probably won't stick because your PC may get that setting from network server that controls it each login.

Sometimes, certain 3-key combinations won't work.

The reason is because despite each key being individually laid out on the keyboard, the circuitry that detects key presses actually uses one wire to detect key presses for more than one key. So imagine that when you press a key, a signal goes down the wire saying "hey, the user pressed a key" (note that the message doesn't say what key is pressed, only that a key is pressed). Now if you have multiple keys on the same wire and you press 2 or more of them down, the keyboard won't know that you pressed the others down. Basically your 2nd key press is lost because the wire is already in use telling the computer that the 1st key is held down.

In reality, you have a keyboard matrix, with rows and columns. You have multiple keys attached to each row, and multiple keys attached to each column. However, when you press a key the keyboard gets the "hey, a key is pressed" signal on the (row, column) pair, which the keyboard controller can use to figure out which key you pressed. Therefore, when you press 2 keys in the same row, it won't matter because they're also attached to a different column, so the keyboard can detect that you've pressed 2 unique keys.

But the problem is that even in this matrix format, there are key combinations you can press such that the keyboard can't figure out what keys you have pressed. Modern keyboards actually know when you do this, and they tell the computer to beep to tell you that the computer didn't read your key press.

I just did a search and found a good site that talks about this behavior:

http://www.idevgames.com/articles/programming/id154/

And this site links to one that goes into much more depth:

http://www.dribin.org/dave/keyboard/one_html/

Don't encourage new keyboard layouts, Blue! I have yet to find a completely normal keyboard at work, and I hate them all.

I figured that there are a decent amount of college-age folks on this board, so I wanted to pick your brains about where to buy used textbooks on the cheap.

Cheap textbooks? India. http://www.firstandsecond.com/

If you're lucky, they'll have the cheap version of the books you're looking for. For example, Engineering Physics (ISBN 812591384X) is 150 rupees. That's about $3.00.

The books are all soft cover, with thin (lower-quality) paper, and black and white. The shipping will inflate the price, but if you get a bunch of people to order together, you'll come in way under any book price here. I know a number of people who have purchased books here, and they haven't had a problem. No firsthand experience though.

It's sort of concerning to me. The game has just hit retail for less than a month and there are already hacks for the game that work. Is it a sign of things to come, or a blip on the radar?

I'm sure all the cheat developers waited until the game was retail before developing cheats instead of doing so over the year or so of (closed) beta...

Well, even windowed with no AA i still get shitty performance.

Assuming that your CPU isn't the bottleneck, run dxdiag and make sure that all your hardware-acceleration features are on. Start->Run, type dxdiag, press enter. Click the Display tab. Make sure all 3 accelerations are enabled.

Other than that, could be anything. I doubt the bad performance is because your video card has only 128 MB RAM though.

Okay, simple question: How long does it really take you guys to restart Steam?

Simple question, but completely irrelevant. If I didn't check Blue's News, I'd never know when a new game type or patch was released because I let Steam run all the time and rarely reboot. I've never had Steam tell me about an update (or even that Half-Life 2 was available when it came out) without me restarting it, which is annoying. It's like Valve designed Steam as an app you can just keep running, but then completely removed the functionality that makes running the app continuously worthwhile.

To answer your question though, it takes 2 seconds once I find out about the update.

Is it as kiddied up as it looks though, or is it at least somewhat deep?

Pirates is definitely as kiddied up as it looks. It's pretty fun but the fight scenes make me want to vomit.

More turret SST:

The first turret area was pretty easy and I learned that you could hold onto a turret and it would still shoot.

The best way of discovering this is the way that I did. I picked up an enemy turret while it was facing toward me, and it proceeded to shoot me up while I held it in my hands. Messy.

I never played the original either, and the appeal of the dvd version is it contains the original...

If they just packaged up Pirates Gold, I hope they took out the lame requirement that you have to run in 256 color mode. x|

Based on the sharp decline in posting activity the past few days, he's not the only onw I figure is all WoW-ing themself.

I'm saying it's the holidays. I mean, I can't be the only one who plays in windowed mode and reads Blue's News during the boring parts.

If they spent more than a million creating this software, they have only broken even. However, Valve doesn't get all the money from retail so their cut is significantly less. I hope they will realize that stopping 20,000 pirates isn't worth hiring a team of people to create an anti-piracy "service" disguised as a "content delivery system."

Assuming that they created Steam only for Half-Life 2 and never plan on using it again... But that's a pretty dumb assumption.

I'm thinking I'm going to buy the Bronze edition off of Steam.

Go for it. I kind of feel ripped off by the Gold Edition I got (with $40 off because I had a half-life 2 voucher from someone else's video card) and really would have been satisfied with the Bronze edition. Although I like the hat and the postcard, everything else included was disappointing.