I think it's a combination of both, Captain P. A combination of space saving and being easy to parse by the compilers. Also, normal + offset would increase loading times in a map editor while opening a .map file, I imagine. ^^
Commented 3 years ago2020-07-30 13:58:01 UTC
in journal: More of this...Comment #102824
This is one hell of an effort to put into a TWHL journal. I legit thought of downloading the map but I didn't have Minecraft installed. My hat's off to you. Happy birthday!
Commented 3 years ago2020-06-23 12:57:21 UTC
in journal: Bye Internet ExplorerComment #102770
Thing is, nowadays most people want things to look beautiful, and the technology behind that is way below optimal in terms of performance. Also, JavaScript. A language that got hacked together in two weeks and had nothing to do with Java itself, but was named like that because it'd get popular that way. Curse JavaScript. It is why I avoid web development and will always avoid it, until the day when I can do both the frontend and backend entirely in something like C.
And the thing is, then you got a wave of developers thinking "oh, hardware is getting better and better, we don't have to worry about making things run that well on current hardware", but also developers who are there for the money, which is basically the same thing as you've just said.
In the real world, the average user of a website cares if it works and it's a plus if it looks good. In March, when some company launched an online school platform in Bosnia, the only thing our teachers would say, whenever the website went down, or whenever there was an error, is "it doesn't work", "it's broken" and such. They didn't know how much RAM their browser was occupying when that website was loaded and didn't care, because the only other program they had opened at the time was probably Zoom or a browser tab in Facebook.
I think most of them (web developers and browser developers) will never care about people like us.
Commented 3 years ago2020-06-22 22:21:20 UTC
in journal: Bye Internet ExplorerComment #102768
"it takes a few hundred MB ram to display a simple html page. What is this madness?"
There's an engine that processes HTML and CSS code. Then there's an engine that executes JavaScript code. Then there's cached data which is loaded into memory for faster access. Then there are all the libraries and APIs that a browser will use. I wouldn't be surprised.
If only one of those were missing, your websites would either reload completely every time you visit them, or they would look like a badly formatted Word document, or they would lag a lot, or they would look like a plain text file. The crazy ecosystem of web development brought up these standards so browsers have to support them. And that carries a price to pay.
The fact that bad web developers exist also doesn't make things any better. Penguinboy is, of course, a big exception otherwise TWHL4 (and TWHL3) wouldn't exist in any good shape.
"Back in the day the entire OS would run on 256MB just fine and youtube on top of that."
Way back in the day, an entire OS and browser could run on 64MB and YouTube didn't exist. A decade before that, you could connect to a mainframe with your terminal which had 64KB of RAM. Where's your point?
Back in the day, I had a 2007 laptop with just 2GB of RAM and it ran Firefox fine. This is 2020 and frankly, a few hundred MB isn't much. Save up some money, upgrade your system, what else can I tell you? Or, program your own browser and make it the most lightweight thing ever. All webpages are gonna look like they're from 1995, lmao.
Commented 3 years ago2020-06-22 16:49:52 UTC
in journal: Bye Internet ExplorerComment #102765
On Chrome, all downloads seem to fail for me, lol. I used Vivaldi for a while, which was cool but then YouTube broke while it worked on other browsers fine. Unacceptable. Downloads also stopped showing after a while and I had to clear my download list. Never used Edge, never will. Same goes for Opera, Safari etc. Privacy is something I don't really care about. I'm 100% fine with companies knowing everything about me, so I ain't gonna judge any browser by privacy-related things.
Firefox is pretty decent. It has served me for YEARS, and it will. I don't have to update it, it'll work just fine. I don't see how it's garbage, I don't see how it's useless (it displays webpages so it clearly has a use), and I don't see how it's bloatware.
So yeah, that statement of yours is mostly invalid.
Guess how old he was when he wrote the one about vectors. 14, you can find it in the Web Archive copy of the "Vectors: An introduction" page, in the comments
That's not the point though. It was a sort of a revolutionary time for HL modding IMO. People were discovering vertex and pixel shaders, some were already integrating Cg into their Half-Life mods, people were learning about new graphics techniques and concepts which new games were about to take advantage of (e.g. normal mapping), some folks were experimenting with integrating physics engines into HL, Paranoia started development, HL SDK 2.3 got released with a certain change that I really like about it, and so on.
His articles are a living documentation of that time period and every time I read "Vertex and pixel shaders", I'd imagine how it used to be back in 2003 when a lot of that was an alien concept among us modders. Now, a lot of people know about shaders and physics engines, for example. In fact, the Blinn-Phong shading model is old news by now. We got Physically Based Rendering.
The early 2000s also saw the development of vehicles for HL mods, such as this beautiful example:
But why didn't we see any of that? Why didn't we get to play any of that, even? God knows. And that's what I wanna change.
I want to bring back some golden times, to carry one of the torches of HL modding. Don't get me wrong, HL modding is amazing, especially in this day and age where we can compile maps in minutes and people are still interested. But, I got a vision that HL modding can be far better than it is now. Which is why I started the Advanced Development Mod project.
"I wish I had done as much as you do at your age."
There are countless things I wish I had done earlier too, to be honest. 5 years ago, I made the mistake of starting to make a total conversion mod instead of deciding to learn the skills first and whatnot. Though, I gotta say, it was a good mistake. I wouldn't be doing these projects otherwise. I wish I started doing C++ stuff at least 2 years earlier, you know. But, when you think about it, maybe it's a good thing that I started it 2 years ago than 4 years ago. Cuz' those 2 years in between helped me improve my mapping skills, as well as texturing and music skills.
I think everything has its reason, even though when we think something should've been better done earlier. Sometimes, it's true, we SHOULD have done some things earlier, but at other times, maybe it was for the better, because something else happened and it was a good thing. You get what I'm trying to say.
"the world won't stop and knowledge keeps passing on."
Always gotta carry that torch. It's one of the reasons why I write tutorials.
Commented 4 years ago2020-03-21 09:56:11 UTC
in journal: CoronavirusComment #102601
Doing pretty well over here. I'm having "online" classes (where teachers just send us PDFs and Word documents of lessons), and washing my hands slightly more frequently.
Since I'm in a village and pretty much nobody is visiting us, the chance of getting infected is a bit lower here, but despite that, I'm still a worried for my grandma and my parents. Especially my grandma.
And since I get to stay at home more, I decided to use the bike a bit more often.
Commented 4 years ago2019-12-30 22:32:02 UTC
in journal: The chance is 15%Comment #102493
It's not hard at all for me. I just didn't practice often for Electronics class this semester, so I got a bit lost on the test in Thursday. Today I did that test again, successfully this time. :3
This comment was made on an article that has been deleted.
Commented 4 years ago2019-12-30 09:46:27 UTC
in journal: The chance is 15%Comment #102488
I go to an engineering school (elektrotehnička čisto da se razumijemo ), currently in the 3rd year. I plan to go to college after it, just so I can get some extra time to work on projects, so I can hopefully build up a portfolio over time.
Anyway: today I improved my Electronics score, fixing my GPA from 4.47 to 4.53. LET THE WORLD KNOW, ADMER BELIEVES IN GOD AGAIN!
Pornography, 18. Three eyes, 3. He must be 54 years old. Nah... Pornography, 18. Three eyes, 1.5 a head. He must be 29! Nah... (54 + 29) / 2 = 83 / 2 = 41.5. NAH.
AAAAH, I GET IT. It's two 3's! Happy 33rd birthday!
Pornography usually involves 2 people. "Three" eyes means a number. So... a pair of threes? I dunno, it should be about the right number though. uwu
You know, for bragging rights.
I turned 18 in February.
And don't worry, your English is pretty good. In fact, you will learn even more of it, if you talk more on the forums.
Also, JavaScript. A language that got hacked together in two weeks and had nothing to do with Java itself, but was named like that because it'd get popular that way. Curse JavaScript. It is why I avoid web development and will always avoid it, until the day when I can do both the frontend and backend entirely in something like C.
And the thing is, then you got a wave of developers thinking "oh, hardware is getting better and better, we don't have to worry about making things run that well on current hardware", but also developers who are there for the money, which is basically the same thing as you've just said.
In the real world, the average user of a website cares if it works and it's a plus if it looks good. In March, when some company launched an online school platform in Bosnia, the only thing our teachers would say, whenever the website went down, or whenever there was an error, is "it doesn't work", "it's broken" and such. They didn't know how much RAM their browser was occupying when that website was loaded and didn't care, because the only other program they had opened at the time was probably Zoom or a browser tab in Facebook.
I think most of them (web developers and browser developers) will never care about people like us.
If only one of those were missing, your websites would either reload completely every time you visit them, or they would look like a badly formatted Word document, or they would lag a lot, or they would look like a plain text file. The crazy ecosystem of web development brought up these standards so browsers have to support them. And that carries a price to pay.
The fact that bad web developers exist also doesn't make things any better. Penguinboy is, of course, a big exception otherwise TWHL4 (and TWHL3) wouldn't exist in any good shape. Way back in the day, an entire OS and browser could run on 64MB and YouTube didn't exist. A decade before that, you could connect to a mainframe with your terminal which had 64KB of RAM. Where's your point?
Back in the day, I had a 2007 laptop with just 2GB of RAM and it ran Firefox fine. This is 2020 and frankly, a few hundred MB isn't much. Save up some money, upgrade your system, what else can I tell you? Or, program your own browser and make it the most lightweight thing ever. All webpages are gonna look like they're from 1995, lmao.
I used Vivaldi for a while, which was cool but then YouTube broke while it worked on other browsers fine. Unacceptable. Downloads also stopped showing after a while and I had to clear my download list.
Never used Edge, never will. Same goes for Opera, Safari etc.
Privacy is something I don't really care about. I'm 100% fine with companies knowing everything about me, so I ain't gonna judge any browser by privacy-related things.
Firefox is pretty decent. It has served me for YEARS, and it will.
I don't have to update it, it'll work just fine. I don't see how it's garbage, I don't see how it's useless (it displays webpages so it clearly has a use), and I don't see how it's bloatware.
So yeah, that statement of yours is mostly invalid.
Now you've switched the difficulty from Hard to Realistic!
Quest unlocked: Real Life
He used to write some really nice articles on VERC before that place went down.
Bump mapping in Half-Life (2004)
Vertex and pixel shaders (2003)
Vectors: An introduction (2002)
Guess how old he was when he wrote the one about vectors.
14, you can find it in the Web Archive copy of the "Vectors: An introduction" page, in the comments
That's not the point though. It was a sort of a revolutionary time for HL modding IMO. People were discovering vertex and pixel shaders, some were already integrating Cg into their Half-Life mods, people were learning about new graphics techniques and concepts which new games were about to take advantage of (e.g. normal mapping), some folks were experimenting with integrating physics engines into HL, Paranoia started development, HL SDK 2.3 got released with a certain change that I really like about it, and so on.
His articles are a living documentation of that time period and every time I read "Vertex and pixel shaders", I'd imagine how it used to be back in 2003 when a lot of that was an alien concept among us modders. Now, a lot of people know about shaders and physics engines, for example. In fact, the Blinn-Phong shading model is old news by now. We got Physically Based Rendering.
The early 2000s also saw the development of vehicles for HL mods, such as this beautiful example:
And that's what I wanna change.
I want to bring back some golden times, to carry one of the torches of HL modding. Don't get me wrong, HL modding is amazing, especially in this day and age where we can compile maps in minutes and people are still interested. But, I got a vision that HL modding can be far better than it is now. Which is why I started the Advanced Development Mod project. There are countless things I wish I had done earlier too, to be honest.
5 years ago, I made the mistake of starting to make a total conversion mod instead of deciding to learn the skills first and whatnot. Though, I gotta say, it was a good mistake. I wouldn't be doing these projects otherwise.
I wish I started doing C++ stuff at least 2 years earlier, you know. But, when you think about it, maybe it's a good thing that I started it 2 years ago than 4 years ago. Cuz' those 2 years in between helped me improve my mapping skills, as well as texturing and music skills.
I think everything has its reason, even though when we think something should've been better done earlier. Sometimes, it's true, we SHOULD have done some things earlier, but at other times, maybe it was for the better, because something else happened and it was a good thing.
You get what I'm trying to say. Always gotta carry that torch. It's one of the reasons why I write tutorials.
I'm having "online" classes (where teachers just send us PDFs and Word documents of lessons), and washing my hands slightly more frequently.
Since I'm in a village and pretty much nobody is visiting us, the chance of getting infected is a bit lower here, but despite that, I'm still a worried for my grandma and my parents. Especially my grandma.
And since I get to stay at home more, I decided to use the bike a bit more often.
I remember when TJB once surprised me for my birthday, roughly a month after said birthday. So better late than never!
BTW a small update on the situation: I've been forgiven and I am happier than ever.
So good that it crashed my game when ribcage whacked me with a crowbar. Amazing.
It does carry a certain message and even a whole story behind it, though, but that's up to others to figure out one day.
Let's revive this hellhole.
Let's make it to 200, everyone.
GPA: 4.53
Status: passed the semester with a 5
Today I did that test again, successfully this time. :3
I plan to go to college after it, just so I can get some extra time to work on projects, so I can hopefully build up a portfolio over time.
Anyway: today I improved my Electronics score, fixing my GPA from 4.47 to 4.53.
LET THE WORLD KNOW, ADMER BELIEVES IN GOD AGAIN!
Electronics and Democracy will be known tomorrow. If I haven't done Electronics well, I'll do it in Monday.
Man, this is so intense. I like the sensation of pressure.
Pornography, 18. Three eyes, 1.5 a head. He must be 29! Nah...
(54 + 29) / 2 = 83 / 2 = 41.5. NAH.
AAAAH, I GET IT. It's two 3's! Happy 33rd birthday!
Pornography usually involves 2 people. "Three" eyes means a number. So... a pair of threes? I dunno, it should be about the right number though. uwu
3 eyes be watchin' you. òoó