Comments

...dammit! You win this round...

If Striker posts his gif image in here again, I'm going to ban him!

Greater than or equal to 11 years old.

Officially old.

Guys, it means he's changed his legal name to "old".

Android tablets have the Google Play store (though Amazon and a few others have their own stores), and you don't need to root an Android to side-load apps, you just have to enable the option to allow unsigned installs.

I have a Nexus 7, my most used apps are:

• FBReader (ebooks)
• ES File Explorer (browse & watch videos from your network filesystem)
• VLC (play videos)
• Firefox (screw Chrome! :P)

Game recommendations:

• World of Goo (perfect for touch screens)
• The Room ('room escape' style puzzle game)
• Plants vs. Zombies (the first one, ignore the new sequel when it comes out on Android if it's still full of microtransactions like it is on iOS)

Also, subscribe to the Humble Bundle emails and wait for one of their Android bundles to go up. They always have some great indie games in their bundles. Avoid free-to-play and stuff from big publishers, they're a waste of time and money.

For battery life, I couldn't say. I doubt what app you're using makes much of a difference when you're watching a video as they're all hardware decoded. VLC serves my purposes quite well. MX Player is another option if you want to try multiple apps.

I doubt power usage is very different on a per-app basis, it all depends on what they're actually doing. Games obviously suck the battery dry, and movies are pretty good at that too. E-readers don't do much processing but they still require the screen to be turned on so you can't really avoid it.

I boot Ubuntu on my HTPC and my NAS runs Debian, but I use my main PC primarily for gaming and programming. Linux/Mac just aren't good enough for gaming (yet), and until my programming language of preference changes from C#, Windows is my best environment for programming as well.

My conclusion is that for me, Linux is the correct choice for a specialised box or a server, but Windows is the only option for a general purpose computer. Hopefully that changes in the future

Windows 8 is silly, with all the shoving tablet interfaces onto a desktop environment. 8.1 is a tiny step forward, but not enough to convince me to upgrade. Hopefully MS see the light and fix 8.2 or 9 or whatever to not be crap

Change your ISP to one that offers static IPs

I have trouble eating regular fish, let alone fermented fish. You can keep all your Surströmming for yourself

You forgot to convert the first N into a B.

Haha, I'm going to leave it

(I'm also going to edit my comment to make Suture look silly!)

It just seems like the textures are too high resolution, except a couple of them are super low resolution. Might just be my eyes playing tricks.

BTW, The image code is:

I changed all your images to display inline because they weren't linked and then somebody came in after me and changed them all to links

For the screenshots themselves, there seems to be something weird going on with the lighting and textures. Maybe the texture resolution is wrong? I can't put my finger on it but it just seems off.

The heavy aliasing doesn't do it many favours, either - turn your settings up to maximum!

I did fairly well with ODE's back at uni but because they have absolutely no useful application in programming, I've forgotten pretty much everything about them.

Nice
Ant's the only (former) TWHL member that I've met. Who else has done a TWHL meetup? Maybe people in similar areas could organise some more!

Yep, and in incredibly poor taste. I stand by my original comment.

Ugh, frankly I find that post rather sickening what with all the stupid legal threatening and so on. If I was involved in a team that pulled that shit I would be outta there faster than... something really fast.

I've never been in a house with a basement. It's not really a thing in Australia.

When I was in grade 9 one of our assignments was to maintain a city in Sim City 3000 Best assignment ever. Also a reminder of how ridiculously pointless school can be at times.... We had another year where the assignment was passing levels in The Incredible Machine

I didn't have any jam so I tried a peanut butter and honey sandwich instead. It was pretty nice, would have again. I'll get some strawberry jam next time I shop.

A good game crippled by terrible DRM. Has there ever been ANY game that requires constant Internet connection that HASN'T been hit with huge downtimes and server issues at launch? Sim City, Diablo 3, Ubisoft's couple of games with it (AssCreed 2, Settlers 7), pretty much every popular MMO launched recently.... There's probably many more too. What a terrible, terrible DRM scheme, especially since Sim City has always been a purely offline experience. It's a shame too, the game itself looks really good.

Chocolate. I can't bring myself to do the American PB&J thing but I sure as hell enjoy peanut butter and a chocolate hazelnut spread in a sandwich. It's not just that, either. Pretty much anything chocolate (as long it doesn't have other flavours mixed in) goes great with peanut butter. Chocolate bars with peanut butter in them are a big American thing, the closest you get to that in Australia is a Snickers bar.

Hmm, it depends really. I usually incrementally upgrade my computer parts so I'm not really sure how long it would last without making any changes. A new build usually lasts around 18 months until I get the urge to upgrade it, but building computers is a hobby of mine so usually it's just because I feel like it rather than any need to actually upgrade

My choices would be:
Motherboard: Bottom one (assuming that's cheapest), you don't need any SLI/Crossfire stuff.
PSU: The Corsair 650W. Under no circumstances choose one of the top 3 unbranded ones.
Fan: I would stick with the standard one. No overclocking means no need for a different cooler.
Sound card: I wouldn't bother, onboard audio is fine in my opinion.

And it depends on how the company builds their PCs, but yes I would choose the SSD as your first hard drive and the other one as the second. It makes sense logically for the OS to go on the first hard drive when they set it up, and it makes even more sense to put the OS on the SSD. Perhaps if you are allowed to enter comments, put something in there about how you want the OS on the SSD, just to make sure they do so.

If you install the OS yourself, it doesn't matter which order you choose. When you install Windows you are given the option the pick, then Windows configures the bootloader to boot into that drive, no extra work necessary.

This is what I would buy if I was building a gaming PC for myself today (and taking your requirements into consideration). I'm listing my prices in AUD, so you'll need to look up what they are over there. You don't seem to want to build it yourself, but it might help you out anyway.

Case: I really like Fractal Design's cases. $150 for their mid-size case in black or white.

PSU: I always go with Antec. 650W should be enough for any standard gaming setup. The best reference for choosing a PSU is on this site. I'll choose one of the Antec 650W models for around $100.

CPU: As much as I like AMD, Intel CPUs are winning out right now. I'd probably move towards the i7-3770, $310. Don't get the more expensive "K" versions of Intel CPUs unless you plan on overclocking. CPU Benchmark is a good site to compare value and performance of CPUs.

RAM: 16GB is where it's at. Stu is correct that balance is better, but omitted the fact that there's no issues with empty slots. The general sensible guidelines are to keep the same sized DIMMs in all slots, and keep an even number of DIMMs (unless you are using triple-channel RAM!). 2x8GB is good because it's leaves you open to add a nice upgrade later! RAM is cheap after all. I'll pick 2x8GB Corsair 1600MHz DDR3 for $110.

Motherboard: Intel CPUs are painful because they change their socket every six months. Take careful note of the socket of the CPU you get. The 3770 is socket 1155. These days it doesn't really matter what motherboard you get unless you have special requirements, they should all have the inputs and outputs that you want. Be sure to check the manufacturer website to check the compatibility of the CPU and RAM speeds with the motherboard, though. I like Gigabyte motherboards, so I'll choose their "GA-Z77X-D3H" because it's available at my store, and costs $150. Don't be suckered in by expensive $300+ boards.

GPU: The Nvidia GTX670 looks like the one I would go for. It's somewhat pricey at $450, so maybe the GTX660 is an option as well (see Video Card Benchmark). I usually go for Asus or Gigabyte video cards.

HDD: I'm not a fan of SSDs, I think they're still too expensive and error-prone for an everyday PC. But I have a OCZ Vertex3 in my HTPC, so let's choose the 120GB one (that's plenty for an OS drive IMO, you might need a larger one if you plan on putting apps and games on the SSD) for $120. For the regular hard drive, how about two 2TB Seagates at $95 each?

Disk: Disk media is dead, but you never know when you'll need an optical drive. I would just choose a cheap DVD burner drive for $20. Add another $100 if you want a Blu-Ray drive.

Windows: I'm a lucky bastard with an MSDN subscription and so I have a free copy of Windows 7 Super Ultra Mega Ultimate 64-bit to install on my new computer.

And I think that's it for a very high-end gaming box. It ends up being $1600, which is a bit rich for my tastes. I would start cutting it down at this point, I think first the CPU and GPU would get cut down a bit, then I would see how much it was then. For me, my budget for a new gaming PC is usually around $1200-1300.

Looks good! I have a similar setup except with models from about 18 months ago. I love upgrading my computer though, it's so fun to get new toys.

Thanks guys, you're all awesome

@Jeff: I think it remembers the dimensions on a per-tool basis, which means that the brush tool might not remember the select tool dimensions yet. I'll have to check it out.

@Tetsu0: If you know C, you've pretty much learned all the major languages. Aside from object oriented stuff which is pretty easy to pick up, C covers pretty much everything in most other popular programming languages. So it might not be too difficult to pick up something else

@CapT: Eventually the plan is to get a proper plugin system going, so brush up on those coding skills

Thanks for the feedback guys. Would love to know other people's thoughts.

@Rufee any anybody else: Write those ideas down, once I get a stable release going, I'll be asking everybody for feature ideas
As Daubster said, it's all written in C#.

I'd sooner live in Britain than in the US!

Another reminder to everybody: Back up your important work! Upload it to the net, put it on a thumb drive, email it to yourself, however you want to do it. Most of the time, the actual important work you need to back up is small in size (unless you're editing video or something) and easy to back up.

No you can't Stu, because:
1. I'm not proud of it, and
2. I'm hosting TWHL on my own server and don't want to expose any of the potential security risks that are almost certainly to be in there.
I am, however, hosting the framework that will be behind TWHL4 on my website.

If it was me, I'd release the sources. Not just to this guy, but to everybody under a Creative Commons license. But then I'm a huge fan of open source.

The trailer you saw was for Pacific Rim. It looks like a live-action version of Evangelion. I'd watch it!

Cool. What kind of jobs do you get after a Computational Physics degree?

FEAR is not a horror game, neither is Dead Space. They're action games with horror elements. A bunch of amateur HL2 horror mods do not define a genre, that's a pretty poor choice for examples.

I'm no authority on horror games (Strider is), but if you really want to experience the genre you should probably point yourself towards Amnesia or Silent Hill. I don't know of any "normal" environment horror games, because by definition, normal isn't scary. Sounds like you want a horror game that has no horror in it However, Strider might know of some games like that.

Incidentally, as somebody who doesn't like being scared by games, I blogged about my experience with the more actioney horror games last year.

I often accidentally try to save my web browser after typing a post on a website. I press Ctrl+S so many times throughout my day

This looks really cool, nice work

DD/MM/YYYY (or YYYY-MM-DD) is the rule in everywhere except the US/Canada. America's backwards date formatting is about as wide spread as its backwards imperial measurement system. As in, nobody else uses it.

Oh... and happy birthday Jeff! I'll forgive you for formatting your dates backwards.

But...There's only 12 months in a year.