Comments

Was baselessly accused of revealing secrets regarding cat. 0 stars.

Map is alright, I guess. 1 star.

EDIT: I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT. FIVE STARS.

I feel special! Much love to Pebs and TWHL. <3

Contragalation!

Not sure what I'm looking at, Striker...

And I do, always and everyday, Arch.

This is true.

Thank you for looking at my thing!

I love how it's me that people have to put up with, DESPITE THE FACT that Scoots is there.

Curse you, Archie!

SnC is in turmoil for at least a month now.

Cruel, Strideh. Cruel.

Season 2 will be much closer to our original vision for this series, but there was much lulz in season 1 to toss it away completely.

Which one? They all sound like twats.

Get that goddamn dirty Aussie out of SnC!

(Seriously amazing work though, Arch!)

Love doing this kimd of stuff. Don't get to do it often, but it's always a blast.

QA is a rather thankless task, unfortunately, but I do think you'll be able to turn that into something great.

The LEGO games are great, too.

Congratulations and best of luck!

You can never have too many guitars!

I'm gonna be that guy and say "...stuff that OS X has had for years!"

Agree with Pebs. The Windows 8 start menu has a couple of things going for it, but it mostly fails as an user interface by not only trying to be all things to all people, but also by cramming in a huge amount of functionality under obscure actions and menus and not telegraphing it particularly well to users. Put someone in front of the Windows 8 start menu and ask them to shut down the computer. See how long it actually takes for them to do it, if they've never used the interface before. Let's not also forget that Microsoft stuck a more traditional desktop environment underneath that menu, with its own set of UI rules and conventions, as well as a horrific blend of metro style design elements with the glassy, Aero look of Windows 7.

Microsoft finally cottoned onto the fact that the tablet and the PC are two vastly different paradigms. You cannot possibly expect the same interface to excel in both environments: either one of those environments has an advantage over the other, or they both suffer.

I'm all for updating UI (I am a designer, after all), but Windows 8 was truly a step in the wrong direction. I'm glad that Windows 10 is properly segmenting the interfaces, and will definitely be stepping up from Windows 7 - it'll be great to finally get the advantages of Windows 8 without having to tolerate a truly terrible PC UI.

Everyone running Windows 7 will get it for free.

Welcome back!

As someone who has an interest in prop replicas and the time and effort that goes into them, those prices are really to be expected.

Welcome back, good sir!

Congratulations Urby!

Just as a basic explanation:

Goldsource = the name of the Half-Life game engine
Source = the name of the Half-Life 2 game engine
Spirit of Half-Life = an extension to the Goldsource engine made by the community that bolts on useful engine and rendering features.

Wow, we really went without a single news item in 2014?

Congrats!

The easiest solution here is to buy a cheap SATA enclosure for the hard-drive in that computer and just pull the files off it through your laptop.

I'd maybe try reseating some stuff as well, like the RAM and the CMOS battery.

12 years for me, which is really tripping me up. It's exactly as Tetsu0 said though: there's a camaraderie with the members of this site to the point where I'm sure I could physically go visit a bunch of you and it'd be a grand ol' time.

You nerds.

9975 for me.

Trim up some capsicum, little bit of basil and it'll be delicious.

For a number of reasons, but generally because you're bridging an electrical connection that isn't meant to be bridged. Hence the term "short" circuiting. Take a simple electrical circuit that has a power supply and a resistor. Ordinarily, the power would run through the circuit, hit the resistor and then continue onto its destination at a reduced flow. A short circuit caused by something conductive (like water) could bypass that resistor entirely, meaning that the flow would not have been reduced, potentially damaging whatever is meant to be receiving the power.

The more common short circuit is just water delivering power to areas that don't require power at all.

Washing electronics is an inherently stupid idea, regardless of whether its on or not. I know this journal is a joke, but the chance of someone knowing that a circuit board, with all its minute nooks and crannies, is 100% dry before plugging it all back in is virtually impossible. All it takes is a tiny drop hidden somewhere on the board for you to be taking the express train to short circuitville.

This is definitely one of those times!

...did you literally wash PC parts or am I missing something here?

I'm not sure HL3 is a credible example, Archie. I think that Valve's open-plan hierarchy is a massive hinderance at times. There's more than a few accounts of ex-Valve developers who have openly criticised the lack of structure and its inefficiencies in keeping projects on track and organised. Granted, those accounts may or may not be biased, and we'll probably never know the full story, but a lot of what they say makes sense. Few games that are in development for this amount of time end up demonstrating where all that time went.

Going to have to agree with Archie and Penguinboy here. I'm not particularly enamoured with the various choices that Valve makes (Steam is a DRM; a very wooly refund policy that either doesn't strictly adhere to local laws or obfuscates the process; etc), but the Workshop concept is a massive boon to the creators and the players.

I especially disagree about the changes to the Goldsource engine. The fact that I can quite easily play a game released in 1998 on a 2k resolution on my Mac, or Windows machine is fantastic. And saying AA is unnecessary seems a bit over the top, particularly when you can just turn it off if the aesthetic is not to your taste. Furthermore, it feels very unreasonable to me that Valve should be expected to ensure 100% backwards compatibility with every mod ever released, particularly after they've provided better tools to developers to update their mods. Valve choose to support modding out of general goodwill, not obligation. They could've easily updated the Goldsource engine and completely locked out modding as well. Instead, they simplified the distribution and installation of mods and gave creators a chance to earn some money back on the content they produced. As Pebs said, there's really no downside to this.

I'll be jumping up to 10 from 7: it's bringing all the advantages that 8 had, without the mess that is the Start screen. Win-win.

Everyone starts out like that. For some reason.

Why not wait for 10? It'll be free, too.

Welcome to quarter life!

Absolutely right DiscoStu. The problem is, a lot of people entering the industry at the moment aren't digging enough into Spielberg and the like to see the influences. They're not learning about the art of filmmaking; they're learning about the process of filmmaking.

(Archie, none of this is related to you!)

I get really heavily into a director's mindset, particularly when I watch student films, and find all these things that I would've done completely differently had it been my film. The constant trap that I see student films get into is trying to be overly ambitious, which always results in efforts that are stretched far too thin across multiple aspects of the production.

My half-assed theory behind this is that the tools and equipment needed to create something vast in scale have become incredibly accessible to a wider audience. It becomes less about cutting and altering a script or shot to suit the resources that are on hand and more about just cramming everything in because the tools are on hand. The Spielbergs and Abrams of the day had nothing but constraints to work against, which necessitated an alteration in scope. Most of the time, these constraints actually worked to their benefit as they could focus more of their effort on other aspects of a now smaller production (this also supports my theory that giving a director unlimited and unfettered scope results in a much weaker result - Avatar, the Hobbit trilogy, the Star Wars prequels).

Furthermore, their diet of films was completely different to ours. They were raised on films that valued the subtle: character interactions and minimalistic filmmaking were key. They learnt about pacing, tension, visual comedy, framing, staging because that's all those films had. We were raised on, well, Spielberg, where visual spectacle takes over and a lot of students tend to gloss over the intricacies of what's happening in his films outside those big effects (and there is a lot).

Goddamnit, I really want to make some shit.

Not bad: the effects in particular were marvellous. I feel that it does have problems as a whole though, mostly down to what I assume is the way it's been shot.

I think I'm fairly safe in saying that this was a single-camera shoot, but I may be less safe in saying that for each angle that was shot in any given scene, a full run-through of the script wasn't done - rather, the camera was set up for each of the actors and they ran through their lines individually. It feels a bit stilted as a result. There's also a lot of audio inconsistencies that contribute to that feeling as well.

It also needs a bit more creativity with the cinematography - stuff like the megaton punch sequence, for example, needs to amp up the action with close-ups, quick cutting, motion, etc, not only to make the sequence more exciting, but also to make the juxtaposition between the charge up and the result all the more funny. As it stands, you're transitioning from one static shot to another, which dulls the impact and reduces the comedy.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World does this incredibly well (in fact, every Edgar Wright film does - the guy is a friggin' master of comedic juxtaposition. I would be very surprised if Wright didn't grow up with Looney Tunes because a lot of the visual comedy techniques he does comes directly from them). Comedy is 100% about timing, and that's something that doesn't just come across in the script. It's found in editing, in audio cues, in camera movements - there's an incredible pile of tools to find comedy in a scene.

I hope this doesn't seem too harsh! Let me know if you want something clarified.

Shh, otherwise he'll bring back retro TWHL...

D'awww, you're a darling. <3

And yes. Yes it is. Old images too for those websites. Will get Pebs to amend that at some point. >_<

Thanks for the comments, The_(c)Striker. I am going to tweak the single author articles slightly so they're not quite as wide.

I do understand your thoughts for the most part. My design aesthetic is heavily skewed towards minimalism and clarity, because I think that makes a far bigger impact than the overuse of effects and components ever could. I'm a fan of it because it allows the content to really shine, and it's what you want your audience to concentrate on.

I think this kind of design came through as the audience grew. To people like us, a forum is a completely normal aspect of life on the internet, but to a layperson, it's an extra layer of abstraction that doesn't have a clear parallel in the real world. Skeuomorphism is a kind of design 'no-no' at the moment, but it's actually a very sound concept that successful designs tend to embrace: it's not about making a literal representation of a real-world object in a digital context, but instead about conveying a digital concept with a grounding in real-world concepts and conventions.

And yeah, everything Cameron has done since T2 has sucked. Well, that's a little harsh, but certainly nothing as perfect as T2.

Duelling articles is definitely staying, we're just doing more on top of those. Pebs and I don't always see eye-to-eye on topic choices, so having different article types means we can easily branch out.

Touché, Archie.

We're laughing alright.

More about your inadequacies than your system's.

ba dum tish

Would it be worth utilising an iPad instead, perhaps? A lot of retailers here (particularly small cafés and the like) are using POS software driven by an iPad.

Kerbal Space Program!