Commented 6 years ago2017-10-20 12:27:26 UTC
in journal: #8879Comment #67927
Neat! Looking through the files I'm seeing a few familiar constructs and file types - is this engine Quake-based, or are you coding it from scratch and just emulating a few of Goldsource's entity and mapping setups for convenience purposes?
Commented 6 years ago2017-09-17 01:52:02 UTC
in journal: #8863Comment #62962
I won't make any GPU recommendations because I don't know your rendering needs or budget, and I don't know too much about CPUs, but I can say pretty confidently you should be aiming for minimum 8 gigs of ram, preferably 16 or higher. A small SSD for your OS and a few other slow to load programs in addition to a higher-capacity standard HDD how I have my storage set up right now - the SSD is a huge time saver when booting, but you'll have to watch out for programs trying to default to C:/ (And those who don't give you a choice!) That might not be an issue for Linux, it's been too long since I've used Ubuntu to recall how installation works on Linux systems.
Commented 6 years ago2017-08-10 02:23:31 UTC
in journal: #8851Comment #62953
Condolences, man. My paternal grandmother had a stroke a couple years ago, non-fatal, but it really shook me up. Every time I go visit her these days I can't help but think it might be for the last time. Diseases suck.
Commented 6 years ago2017-08-04 16:53:06 UTC
in journal: #8848Comment #42434
I remember playing the demo waaaay back and having a lot of fun - glad to see you've got so many things crossed off the list, and look forward to the final product!
Commented 6 years ago2017-07-14 01:26:03 UTC
in journal: #8828Comment #46222
^ What they said. Crowds make me nervous and wear me down, but it looks like all involved were having fun.
Also what was that Lambda doing on that bus? Looks suspiciously familiar...
And I just had a major brain hiccup while typing this post because I got not regular deja vu, but double deja vu, to the point where I felt compelled to check your prior journals to make sure I hadn't actually seem something similar in one of them...
Commented 6 years ago2017-05-31 11:49:47 UTC
in journal: UpdatesComment #52983
Blindingly fast read and write, essentially. I have my desktop's OS installed on one, and now the slowest part of booting that machine is the BIOS splash screen. And I run Windows.
Incidentally, I had held off getting an SSD for a while because of the limited read/write cycles, but it appears that the problem is (mostly) solved now and that modern SSDs just slow down to HDD speed rather than dying after, and even then the limit is up to the equivalent of petabytes of info. I still use a standard hard disk drive for most of my data (Terabyte SSDs are expensive!) but having an SSD as your system/slow to boot program drive saves a bunch of time.
Commented 6 years ago2017-04-27 12:57:38 UTC
in journal: #8802Comment #42426
Oh, sweet, Rimrook's back!
I've been mostly trying to finish up my undergrad degree, and been chipping away at a map for Black Mesa when time and inspiration allows - now that I'm down to one final course over the summer I should hopefully have it in some state to show off bits of soonish. (Actually now that I think about it, we have a perfectly good WIP thread I could have been posting stuff into for about a year now)
Commented 6 years ago2017-04-25 00:50:25 UTC
in journal: #8800Comment #67398
I DEMAND WE KEEP CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT IMMIGRANTS OUT OF THE COUNTRY! THE THREAT OF RADICAL CHRISTIANITY IS TOO HIGH - LOOK AT WHAT THEY DID IN IRELAND!
Extremely loud sarcasm aside, I'd like to point out that Iran and Afghanistan, both Muslim-majority countries we nowadays associate with "them terrorists" were fairly peaceful, modern, and religiously tolerant societies in the 70s until two separate revolutions went in and mucked things up. And just so we're on the same page, the rulers of both countries before their respective depositions had been Muslims. Religion has nothing to do with antisocial, warlike, or oppressive behavior. It's assholes, who much of the time use religion as a veil for their actions, both for the convenient "God wills it" excuse and as a recruitment tool, who are the problem. And regardless of whether the asshole in question is using religion as their soapbox, or politics, or whatever else have you, they are always, always, presenting their actions as an "Us Vs Them" fight.
Religious extremism, Nationalism, Sports teams, it's all bullshit designed to keep the people under someone else's thumb by giving them outsiders to hate and eventually assault in order to turn the inevitable counter-attack into a positive feedback loop. (You can see this sort of loop very clearly in the Israel-Palestine conflict - at this point it's honestly less over the root causes and more for the reasons of "Yeah but he attacked me yesterday" - hence why no progress or even real attempts at negotiations have been made in 50 goddamn years) And even if the feedback loop doesn't manage to take hold, they'll just try again with another "Them" and make it seem like the villain of the hour is the One True Threat We Have Always Had To Fight.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
Commented 7 years ago2017-04-14 12:42:58 UTC
in journal: #8796Comment #66225
My Dad has smoked since he was 14 (and swears he's not addicted), so I have the same disincentive towards cigarettes as Archie does. (I've also never personally felt the need to put drugs of any kind in my body - I stick to food and drinks with occasional alcohol, and if I can avoid taking over the counter stuff, I try to as well - if I have a cold I usually just drink a lot of fruit juice, and if I'm in pain I tough it out. Bad experience with Tylenol as a kid.)
Vaping... annoys me. I can totally get behind someone trying it if they're looking to quit smoking, but in my experience (which, granted, might be a bad sample size since I'm a university student) most people who vape do it to "look cool" instead of for a practical reason. And "looking cool" apparently means blowing a giant cloud of vapour into other people's faces. Combine that with the lack of regulations for what you put in it leading to the use of things like Diacetyl and other substances that are safe to ingest but not to inhale, the cases of vaporizers exploding in people's faces due to shoddy build quality, and statistics that indicate vaping might be leading to more cigarette smoking, I'm not overly impressed with the practice.
That said, good on you Crollo for trying to quit smoking using it, and also for realizing that it wasn't working for you! It's gonna be hell for a while, but keep at it - Once the nicotine is out of your system and the withdrawl is over, I'm sure you'll feel a lot better.
Commented 7 years ago2017-03-30 17:53:40 UTC
in journal: #8789Comment #51096
Yup, that's waaaay to advanced for me to understand at this juncture. Maybe I'll crack it open after exams and see if I can make sense of it, just for my own understanding.
Commented 7 years ago2017-03-24 23:51:56 UTC
in vault item: dm_hydroelectricComment #12097
Haven't had a chance to play it with a full server yet, but a great remake of what wasn't even originally a MP map. I especially liked the radio, it adds a bit of franticness and an opportunity for players to stop fighting each other and focus on working together.
Commented 7 years ago2017-03-18 17:24:10 UTC
in vault item: CrossedwireComment #12164
An excellent remake of HLDM's most-played map. Much more room to run around in, added verticality, and additional rooms boost the gameplay possibilities. Replacing the nuke with an airstrike (and the addition of radio chatter when it's activated) give the sometimes-maligned mechanic a sense of story and logic. The visuals of the map are very impressive for goldsource, with nothing seeming more blocky than it should, or low-resolution. (Well, okay, I can't read the brand names on the vending machines, but they look so good that I also can't make myself care)
I didn't get a chance to try out the old version, so I don't know what changes were made, but since nothing seemed odd or out of place, I figure they must have been for the better.
Commented 7 years ago2017-03-13 22:32:21 UTC
in journal: #8784Comment #66215
One of my roommates has Siege on the Xbox, he doesn't play it anymore because of the netcode and lack of singleplayer.
One of my other roommates has Vegas 1 and 2 on steam, and I've been playing them a bit lately via steam sharing. Quite a fun experience, though there were quite a few very cheap feeling deaths. (And the final boss for 2 is absolutely sadistic) Have yet to find the Terrorist Hunt map I remember watching Urby and Archie playing on youtube though. I seem to recall the video being called Defusing the Convention Center, but I also remember the spawn being outside, so I dunno.
Haven't tried online with them because I doubt anybody plays 'em anymore, so I can't attest to the netcode in the Vegas games. Probably better than Siege though.
'Number of days since last incident: NULL POINTER EXCEPTION'
Great sense of humor, good brushwork, (though it is a bit odd to me that most of the facility was unfurnished rock) excellent use of puzzles and backtracking.
A bit on the difficult side, though. I'd advise making one of the depleted health chargers not (at least on medium, since it's SoHL-based and IIRC that's a thing you can do) or add another medkit or two. By the end I was scrambling past encounters just trying not to get killed as I had ~24 health and there were no supplies nearby. Also, side note - temperatures were listed in imperial, whereas even in the US scientists (and military) tend to use the metric system - so those should be in Celsius or Centigrade, rather than Fahrenheit.
Commented 7 years ago2016-10-20 21:21:38 UTC
in journal: #8763Comment #52952
HEY THAT'S MINE!
I'm pretty excited for it, to be honest. I dunno if I'll have the spare cash to get one, but if the specs (most importantly battery life) are up to snuff I think it'll be a slick piece of hardware.
Super glad they finally brought back cartridges so we don't have to worry about load times as much, or installing a bunch of game data just to decrease said times.
The controller seems a bit unergonomic, but I suppose it's harder to tell that from looks than it is from touch.
I know that if it doesn't match up with Scorpio or the PS Pro in terms of specs people will be all up in arms, but I just dropped $3K cdn on a new rig with a 1080, so if I want graphically intensive games I can just play on that. (Plus Breath of the Wild looks great, so I don't think hardware power is going to be a big deal. That particle-based grass looks super great.)
Nintendo gonna Nintendo, regardless of what everyone else is doing. And that's what makes their stuff special.
Commented 7 years ago2016-10-19 14:50:20 UTC
in journal: #8761Comment #52943
My roommate is working on a VR game for school this year, so I actually got to take a look around some of the Occulus demos today after he set up the devkit he signed out. (Sadly, no hands-on experience with the Vive or Morphe- I mean, PSVR yet) I didn't get any vertigo from the 'rooftop' demo, but the dinosaur ones made me a bit nervous, despite knowing full well that the featherless raptor wasn't real.
I think the tech has potential, but we need A) to get used to some of the design quirks, and B) Actually have a dev team make a full-on VR game instead of a series of tech demos. As fun as Horseshoes, Hotdogs, and Hangrenades, Budget Cuts, or Kingspray Graffiti Simulator look, they're not really 'full' game experiences, but rather (super neat) toys for VR.
If someone came out with something like the HL2 VR mod, I think that could be a killer app that would help get things rolling, but I'm not aware of any team working on something like that, presumably because of the monetary risk in making something that large scope for a platform that hasn't become ubiquitous yet.
We also need to get movement figured out in a way that doesn't involve teleporting or causing mass motion sickness (which apparently happens sometimes with analog stick movement), and isn't limited to the Vive's detection circle. Once that falls in place, I think VR will properly take off. But that'll be Generation 2 VR at the soonest.
Looking through the files I'm seeing a few familiar constructs and file types - is this engine Quake-based, or are you coding it from scratch and just emulating a few of Goldsource's entity and mapping setups for convenience purposes?
Time flies...
Well I'm stumped then, because you're certainly not 6142.
That might not be an issue for Linux, it's been too long since I've used Ubuntu to recall how installation works on Linux systems.
My paternal grandmother had a stroke a couple years ago, non-fatal, but it really shook me up. Every time I go visit her these days I can't help but think it might be for the last time.
Diseases suck.
Happy 26(8)th and 16(16)th!
Also what was that Lambda doing on that bus? Looks suspiciously familiar...
And I just had a major brain hiccup while typing this post because I got not regular deja vu, but double deja vu, to the point where I felt compelled to check your prior journals to make sure I hadn't actually seem something similar in one of them...
<3
Incidentally, I had held off getting an SSD for a while because of the limited read/write cycles, but it appears that the problem is (mostly) solved now and that modern SSDs just slow down to HDD speed rather than dying after, and even then the limit is up to the equivalent of petabytes of info. I still use a standard hard disk drive for most of my data (Terabyte SSDs are expensive!) but having an SSD as your system/slow to boot program drive saves a bunch of time.
Condolences.
I've been mostly trying to finish up my undergrad degree, and been chipping away at a map for Black Mesa when time and inspiration allows - now that I'm down to one final course over the summer I should hopefully have it in some state to show off bits of soonish. (Actually now that I think about it, we have a perfectly good WIP thread I could have been posting stuff into for about a year now)
Other than that it's been pretty quiet on my end.
Extremely loud sarcasm aside, I'd like to point out that Iran and Afghanistan, both Muslim-majority countries we nowadays associate with "them terrorists" were fairly peaceful, modern, and religiously tolerant societies in the 70s until two separate revolutions went in and mucked things up. And just so we're on the same page, the rulers of both countries before their respective depositions had been Muslims.
Religion has nothing to do with antisocial, warlike, or oppressive behavior. It's assholes, who much of the time use religion as a veil for their actions, both for the convenient "God wills it" excuse and as a recruitment tool, who are the problem. And regardless of whether the asshole in question is using religion as their soapbox, or politics, or whatever else have you, they are always, always, presenting their actions as an "Us Vs Them" fight.
Religious extremism, Nationalism, Sports teams, it's all bullshit designed to keep the people under someone else's thumb by giving them outsiders to hate and eventually assault in order to turn the inevitable counter-attack into a positive feedback loop. (You can see this sort of loop very clearly in the Israel-Palestine conflict - at this point it's honestly less over the root causes and more for the reasons of "Yeah but he attacked me yesterday" - hence why no progress or even real attempts at negotiations have been made in 50 goddamn years) And even if the feedback loop doesn't manage to take hold, they'll just try again with another "Them" and make it seem like the villain of the hour is the One True Threat We Have Always Had To Fight.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
Vaping... annoys me. I can totally get behind someone trying it if they're looking to quit smoking, but in my experience (which, granted, might be a bad sample size since I'm a university student) most people who vape do it to "look cool" instead of for a practical reason. And "looking cool" apparently means blowing a giant cloud of vapour into other people's faces. Combine that with the lack of regulations for what you put in it leading to the use of things like Diacetyl and other substances that are safe to ingest but not to inhale, the cases of vaporizers exploding in people's faces due to shoddy build quality, and statistics that indicate vaping might be leading to more cigarette smoking, I'm not overly impressed with the practice.
That said, good on you Crollo for trying to quit smoking using it, and also for realizing that it wasn't working for you! It's gonna be hell for a while, but keep at it - Once the nicotine is out of your system and the withdrawl is over, I'm sure you'll feel a lot better.
Also yeah, teach your nephew programming once he's old enough to comprehend it - always a marketable skill, and great as a hobby too!
Maybe I'll crack it open after exams and see if I can make sense of it, just for my own understanding.
Seems like a well-written paper, though.
I especially liked the radio, it adds a bit of franticness and an opportunity for players to stop fighting each other and focus on working together.
This is like that time years ago when I got a negative download speed.
The visuals of the map are very impressive for goldsource, with nothing seeming more blocky than it should, or low-resolution. (Well, okay, I can't read the brand names on the vending machines, but they look so good that I also can't make myself care)
I didn't get a chance to try out the old version, so I don't know what changes were made, but since nothing seemed odd or out of place, I figure they must have been for the better.
One of my other roommates has Vegas 1 and 2 on steam, and I've been playing them a bit lately via steam sharing. Quite a fun experience, though there were quite a few very cheap feeling deaths. (And the final boss for 2 is absolutely sadistic)
Have yet to find the Terrorist Hunt map I remember watching Urby and Archie playing on youtube though. I seem to recall the video being called Defusing the Convention Center, but I also remember the spawn being outside, so I dunno.
Haven't tried online with them because I doubt anybody plays 'em anymore, so I can't attest to the netcode in the Vegas games. Probably better than Siege though.
[19th, that is.]
I dunno if I can come up with anything for this, but I'll keep it in mind. Really glad to see compos are back.
That's on Valve, then.
Great sense of humor, good brushwork, (though it is a bit odd to me that most of the facility was unfurnished rock) excellent use of puzzles and backtracking.
A bit on the difficult side, though. I'd advise making one of the depleted health chargers not (at least on medium, since it's SoHL-based and IIRC that's a thing you can do) or add another medkit or two. By the end I was scrambling past encounters just trying not to get killed as I had ~24 health and there were no supplies nearby. Also, side note - temperatures were listed in imperial, whereas even in the US scientists (and military) tend to use the metric system - so those should be in Celsius or Centigrade, rather than Fahrenheit.
All in all, though, quite good, would recommend.
(Though I have to wonder, has anyone solved it, or are you just going from the fact that it's a riddle?)
I'm pretty excited for it, to be honest. I dunno if I'll have the spare cash to get one, but if the specs (most importantly battery life) are up to snuff I think it'll be a slick piece of hardware.
Super glad they finally brought back cartridges so we don't have to worry about load times as much, or installing a bunch of game data just to decrease said times.
The controller seems a bit unergonomic, but I suppose it's harder to tell that from looks than it is from touch.
I know that if it doesn't match up with Scorpio or the PS Pro in terms of specs people will be all up in arms, but I just dropped $3K cdn on a new rig with a 1080, so if I want graphically intensive games I can just play on that. (Plus Breath of the Wild looks great, so I don't think hardware power is going to be a big deal. That particle-based grass looks super great.)
Nintendo gonna Nintendo, regardless of what everyone else is doing. And that's what makes their stuff special.
I think the tech has potential, but we need A) to get used to some of the design quirks, and B) Actually have a dev team make a full-on VR game instead of a series of tech demos. As fun as Horseshoes, Hotdogs, and Hangrenades, Budget Cuts, or Kingspray Graffiti Simulator look, they're not really 'full' game experiences, but rather (super neat) toys for VR.
If someone came out with something like the HL2 VR mod, I think that could be a killer app that would help get things rolling, but I'm not aware of any team working on something like that, presumably because of the monetary risk in making something that large scope for a platform that hasn't become ubiquitous yet.
We also need to get movement figured out in a way that doesn't involve teleporting or causing mass motion sickness (which apparently happens sometimes with analog stick movement), and isn't limited to the Vive's detection circle. Once that falls in place, I think VR will properly take off. But that'll be Generation 2 VR at the soonest.