Journals

I started writing a novel this week.

It's a historical fiction based on a family friend set in WWII China.

I just played some Russian military mod of HL. The USA invades your counttry and you have to fight them back. Prepare to get heavily wrecked by the US army and their troops, light and medium tanks, and worst of all, the machine gun nests. I swear, those machine gun nests added at least 20 hours to the gametime since I didnt quicksave as often as I should have.

The mapping is alright as you can see in the screen shots, but what you dont see is that the mapping is actually extremely sloppy. Loads of areas to get stuck in and visual glitches. Instructions appear as on screen game_text and in some cases you have about 5 seconds to read it or fail to know what to do. Alot of doors are breakable(but they dont open) so if you dont whack every door you see you will get stuck too.

The mod contains all of the base op4 assets but I suspect the biggest reason the author used op4 is for the friendly soldiers.

I must say this mod is pretty unforgiving. Combat is very tough even with the op4 weapons in stock. There are many US soldiers coming and they wont hesitate to rush at u from any direction or hide in some dark area and ambush u. Expect every US soldier to carry grenades or noob tubes. And the worst is how they can see you perfectly from behind thick plants where you have no hope of seeing them. Same goes for the tanks. Did I mention the machine gun nests? They will reck u hard. They dont work like normal machine guns, they spray shotgun shells extremely fast from extra long range. Dont even THINK about rushing them or even picking at them from long range. You will have to be extremely careful. Not only can they take you to school at extra long range, they can actually bend at a 90° angle to spray you when you think you are save. And there's a random weaponstrip somewhere in the mod so don't bother saving ammo or whatever.

It says theres 2 endings, but really there's almost no difference between them. Basically one 'ending' will let you get to an extra level which I thought was unfinished, because nothing happens in it. And another map was about 2 seconds long. About 7 or so maps are copied due to the routes splitting between the two endings, but there are no differences between them.

Overall I think this mod is very different from you standard mod. If you are looking to get recked by US soldiers then this is the mod for you. It's difficult, but not impossible and you might make it to the end if you be careful and find a way thru.

(I wish someone would stream this mod so you can see how tough it is, lol)

"She'll never drown with those floatation devices on her chest."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2codXzXtc30

btw. a great vocal trance song

I use XT9. It may or may not be the best option out there, but it works for me. I like it because words require less key presses than the length of the word being entered, and also because since there are less keys (or touch-screen equivalent) they are bigger than on a Qwerty keypad, giving me more area per key and making it less likely to press the wrong key.

Now, I'm not an expert in phone software, but if I had to do an XT9 parser, these are the rules I come up with without much thought:

• Look for words matching the current input;
• Of the above, prefer complete words that match the length of the current input;
• Of the above, or if there are no direct length matches, pick the most used;
• Give the other words in a list sorted by frequency of use.

• If you don't want to keep track of the user's frequency of words, there are statistics on word usage for pretty much any language to help with that.

It's not particularly hard, right? I haven't put a lot of thought into it and I'm pretty sure the above rules would do a pretty decent job. The Samsung phone I had generally got it right. But the current Android keyboard and any alternate keyboards I try prefer to do it this way:

• Look for words matching the current input
• Ignore one-letter words (trying to write "I" results in "g" unless I tap the letter I from the list)
• Of the word matches found, disregard frequency of use and instead:
• - Pick any words with special characters (such as áäéëíïóöúüñ)
• - If none have special characters, prefer the longest word available even if there are other words matching the length of the input
• - Pick the least likely word possible. The statistics will help achieve this.
• If a valid word is entered and it isn't one of the above, autocorrect-substitute it with one of the above.
• Finally, provide a list of alternative words following the above rules. If you run out of screen space, leave out the common words. You'll auto-correct them out anyway.
• For inputs over a certain length, don't bother matching or suggesting, just spew out the gibberish the user obviously wanted to type.

Which do you prefer?

I don't know about you, but i'm 22
In other news there might be a TWHL Tourney around the corner.

It's time for another "Buying a new PC build journey" at TWHL ^^

Many months has passed since the death of my old desktop PC and I'm stuck with my "development" laptop. It was an already built PC by Medion bought from an ALDI shop. I had a lot of great times with it until the motherboard started to do weird things, we tried everything to save it, but there was nothing we (me and my brothers) could do about it. I couldn't use a PC that had constant BSoDs on clean installations of Windows 7 and even "kernel panics" on any Linux distribution. Here are the specs of it just for reference :

CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 2,88 Ghz
GPU : NVIDIA GeForce GT 230
RAM : 4 Gb
HDD : 640 Gb

As I said, I'm stuck with a Medion laptop (because Medion is a good brand) which the main usage is for university. But since it's the only PC I have left, kinda everything is on it. Here are the specs of it for anyone :

CPU : Intel Pentium 2020M 2,4 Ghz
GPU : Intel HD Graphics (no dedicated AMD/NVIDIA GPU)
RAM : 4 Gb
HDD : 1 To

To give you an idea about how much pain I have with this laptop for gaming : Killing Floor 2 refuses to launch until I pass the magic "-dx10" in the command line to force DirectX 10.1 instead of DirectX 11. There is no in-door lighting (everything is black) and I run the game at 20-30 FPS on the lowest settings at 800x600. But since Killing Floor 2 is an Unreal Engine 3 game (UDK to be precise), I spent a lot of time tweaking the INI files and disabling everything that consumed a lot of CPU/RAM : texture streaming, lighting, shadows, M.E.A.T. ("Massive Evisceration And Trauma" aka the gore system), FPS cap and I even reduced the "screen percentage" to 50%. With all those tweaks, the game runs at 60-70 FPS max and 30-50 FPS in average. But I think you've guessed it, it looks horrible. If I want to, I can go up to the 110 FPS if I set it up to "Quake Competitive Mode", take a look at this video to see what I mean : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEuN_iYIcjY.
League of Legends run at 60 FPS on Medium which is quite good. Insurgency at 40 FPS in low. PARANOIA set to High with the "hacked opengl32.dll" at 20 FPS and Unreal Tournament 4 at 20 FPS and a screen percentage of 25% aka "very Minecraft style pixelated mode". And the worst for the end : I was chosen to participate in the Closed Technical Test of Battleborn (Gearbox Software's FPS/MOBA) : 10 FPS in the menus and 1 FPS in-game. I also had an access to the beta of Paragon (Epic Games's MOBA) : 30 FPS in the menus, 1 FPS in-game.

So I've said myself that enough is enough, I took my courage and started looking at building and mounting my own PC. I want to step aside from the already built PCs because I don't want my PC to last 5 years or wait that the warranty void to clean the inside of it. I think that already built PCs are good for people who have no experience in PCs and they don't know somebody to guide them if something goes wrong. Furthermore, have you opened the case of an already built PC ? They put stuff in it to annoy the hell of you if you need to do something on it. I'm going to take my girlfriend's Packard Bell as an example : she had a problem with corrupt/damaged RAMs and we had to replace those by fresh ones. When I opened the case for the first time, my heart was close to stop and my anger level was almost reaching the 100%. Her power unit is located at the middle back of the case and there is some kind of "bridge structure" to hold it with the front part, below it, you have all the cables (SATAs, fans, power...) tied by a clamping collar and below, the RAMs. Even worse : her CPU and cooler was behind the power unit, and if you want to remove the power unit, you unscrew the first 2 screws at the top and there are 2 more behind. Either you need a ninja screwdriver or you need to saw the case if we want to access the CPU/cooler and the screws that hold the motherboard. From easy unscrewing to EXTREME HARDCORE IMPOSSIBLE UNSCREWING OF DEATH.

I want my new PC to work for years, I want to play the games released nowadays and the future games that will be released in the next years without any problem. I also want a PC that can be easily upgraded, if I need to change the GPU then I just want to change the GPU not the whole PC, this was one of the issue I had with my dead Medion. If I wanted to change one part, I had to change everything. Without any further addition, here's the build I've found after many weeks of searching :

CPU : Intel Core i7-4790K 4,0 Ghz
GPU : Gigabyte GV-N960IXOC-2GD - GeForce GTX 960 2 Gb
RAM : G.Skill XM Series RipJaws X Series 16 Go (2 x 8 Go) DDR3 1600 Mhz CL9
MB : Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H
DVD : Lite-On iHAS124-14
HDD : Western Digital Red Desktop 1 To SATA 6 Gb/s
SSD : Corsair Force Series LS 60 Gb
Power : Corsair Builder Series VS650 80PLUS
Case : Zalman Z3 Plus Black

For the CPU, I prefer to stay on the 4 cores side for the moment. The amount of applications and games supporting more than 4 cores is very low these days and I think I'll be fine for years with this i7. A lot of people think that i5 is enough for gaming but I think that statement is going to be wrong in the next year(s) because games will demand much more in the future. Why an Intel and not an AMD ? I agree that AMD is way cheaper than Intel, but one of my first PCs had an AMD Duron and this CPU died after 4 years of service. It seems that AMD has fixed this nowadays but I told myself : "better safe than sorry" hence why I'm staying on Intel's side.

The GPU was very hard to find. First of all and to be clear, don't mention AMD/ATI. I had a Radeon 9550SE in the same first PC and it was HORRIBLE. Old drivers = everything runs fine but can't change the brightness in id Tech 3 games (Quake III Arena, Call of Duty 1, 2...). New drivers = drivers crashes, can't run anything, the ATI OpenGL fix for Hammer didn't worked. I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago and he wasn't very happy of his Radeon too, I think you've guessed it, I stay at NVIDIA's side even if they cost more than AMD/ATI. One of the problem I've found out with NVIDIA is that you need to look very closely to the GPU's specs because a lot of people think that 7XX beat a 6XX and they are wrong. Sometimes, a 6XX beat a 7XX for the same (or lower) price. The GTX 960 from Gigabyte is the only GPU that I've found which allow me to avoid this trap, the GTX 960 from other vendors were just a GTX 740 with the name changed.

The RAM was very easy to find unlike the CPU and GPU. 1600 Mhz is a good frequency in my opinion, CL9 because lower latency is better and 16 Gb is enough for my purposes. One friend told me to stay away from Kingston because he had issues with it.

The motherboard was a nightmare to find. Before the Gigabyte, I've found some kind of low cost MSI motherboard but the problem that a friend of mine spotted is that I've chosen the wrong PCI Express version for the GPU. So I changed it for another correct MSI motherboard but when I have chosen the case, there was not enough connectors for the fans. And I've found another MSI motherboard but there was again a problem with it. One client bought it and tried to install the same RAM of this build, and he reported that the space between the CPU and a RAM slot is too short making it "useless" for RAM with a radiator. And after more searches, I've found this Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H which this time seems to be perfect.

The DVD burner is the cheapest I've found and I don't care too much about it because the only time I will use it is to (re)install old games and Windows 7/10. Hooray for the USB boot ! ^^

One friend highly recommended me the Western Digital for the HDD. 1 To is likely enough for my needs and I'm an organised man so I won't come short in terms of disk space. When I saw that the Red versions of Western Digital are more designed for NAS, I was like "WTF ? You want me to use a pro-NAS HDD on my PC ? Are you high or something ?". He reassured me that he's been using it for years and no problems at all, he also told me that previous versions (Green and Blue) weren't good for performance but rather for energy saving, so I'm trusting him on this.

This is gonna be the first time I'll be using a SSD and I'm quite hesitant about it. I've done a lot of research and found out that there are some very important steps to do after Windows installation (like preventing "defrag.exe" to run on it). I'm considering of installing my Windows 10 (and maybe the root partition of an Arch Linux) and all softwares on that SSD (Google Chrome, Steam, Mumble, Visual Studio...) and keep all the games and data on the HDD. Is my "SSD usage strategy" correct or I am going the wrong way ? Anyone here has a SSD and tell me his experience with it ?

I think 650W for the power unit is gonna be enough for this build and for potential future upgrades, this Corsair Builder Series VS650 80PLUS is the only 650W power unit that I've found to do it's job properly for a good price. At first I started looking at 700W power units but I think that's a little bit too much.

And finally the case, this Zalman Z3 Plus Black is the only case I've found that has a dust filter and 3 fans included for a very low price. Many people seems to like it as well.

The price of this build is 995,95€ without shipping costs. For french folks here : I'll buy this build if everything is fine and I'm 100% sure about it on LDLC. Concurrents like Materiel.net, GrosBill, CDiscount and Rue du Commerce are way too expensive and their catalog is shorter as well.

And this conclude the first part (or entirely) this "Buying a new PC build journey". Before probably some day buying this build, I would to hear about your opinion. Do you think my build is correct for my needs ? Do you suggest more interesting components ? Feel free to tell me, I appreciate in advance for the comments, suggestions and all.

DREAM TIME

So last night I had a pretty horrific dream. I figured I would write it all down as best as I can recall so anyone who cares can look over it, say "meh" and move on.

The dream starts with me waking, face down in a bed, not my own and in a room I don't recognise. I immediately feel uneasy, as if somebody is watching me. I roll over and sure enough, my heart skips a beat as I see a ghostly white woman standing at the foot of the bed, who looks unsettlingly similar to my wife. She is draped in rags that flow as if she is underwater and her eyes are completely blacked out. She raises her arm, pointing to a nearby window and whispers; "The tractor is coming"

Within seconds I can hear a distance sound, an engine, drawing closer. It continues to get louder and louder until everything goes black.

Suddenly, I am driving along a country road in the dead of night, sure enough on an old fashioned tractor. The lights barely light the road ahead and I can just make out that there are thorn bushes either side of the road, about six feet tall. I hit a bump and realise that something is shifting behind me. It turns out that I am pulling a heavily loaded trailer. I turn to see if everything is still in place and to my horror, the trailer is piled high with dismembered and disfigured human corpses. Another jolt sends the heap tumbling off the trailer with a sickening wet sound as they fall onto the road. I keep driving.

Up ahead now, maybe 150 metres, I can see a single street lamp on a wooden pylon. Below it, standing on the grassy curb just in front of it are two figures, silhouetted by the bright light. On of them stood firm, like a stone while holding the other by the back of the neck. They are clearly distressed, thrashing and trying to break free of their grip. I hit another bump and the motionless figure looses it, brutally hacking at the squirming figure with a cleaver or hatchet, eventually beheading them. Their body remains upright, blood shooting up like a fountain. I hit the breaks, stopping the tractor instantly. Both figures stop, motionless, the beheaded figure still standing and squirting blood from it's neck... then they both take off, sprinting straight for me, screaming and gurgling. They vanish into the darkness between myself and the lonely street light. I put the tractor in reverse, look over my shoulder and see all of the disfigured and mutilated bodies from my trailer are now standing behind me, staring right at me.

The engine cuts out, the lights click off... and I wake up.

this++
Because I'm lazy.

Paint nite!
Yes that's the correct spelling, silly Americans and our butchery of the English language. It's a company name, so that's all their fault.
Anyway, at a Paint nite event, you have a few glasses of wine / beers / your favorite liquor, and you follow along with an artist and paint something.

Last night was a cat sitting under a tree:Cute right? Kinda lame though, and I'm not a fan of pink.
I was following along well enough up until about halfway through:Looks alright. My tree upon the empire of dirt. Everything's grey-scale for now.
It came time to draw the cat and I thought to myself: "Nah, let's do something cooler".T-REX RAWRRRRR!

Might be my optimistic fan feeling, but despite what I used to hear a lot a few years ago, it looks like Goldsource modding is absolutely not dying, but alive and well instead.
I've for long thought that the only reason other people and I were sticking with this engine was the laziness to move on something new/nostalgia/die-hard fanaticism and that we were a slowly disappearing niche of irrational fans refusing to realize that moving to a more recent engine can only be better.
Now I think it's utterly wrong: to stick with Goldsource is a reasonable choice in its own right. The time tested graphical aspect and gameplay are enjoyed by many people, some of them just discovered the engine recently. Modding is far more simple than with some other recent engines.
The community is active: Sledge, Jackhammer, Xash, Cry of Fear, Paranoia 2 are relatively recent projects. Not to mention mods currently being developed.
And it isn't simply an active community of die-hard fans. Goldsource gets a fairly decent media coverage: Half-Rats has been featured in a British media, Sven Co-op got a large media coverage and an unprecedented number of players for its 5.0 release, Goldsource mods frequently get featured in ModDB and RTSL awards…

TL;DR

Don't waste your money on this, it's the worst HL2 mod I've ever played.

Long version

Here's my review of the newly released Prospekt.

For those who don't know what Prospekt is, it's a fan made suite of Half-Life Opposing Force whose author decided to send to Valve along with his C.V. to get hired. The author wasn't accepted but Gabe liked the mod so Valve ended up helping him and ended up being a paid HL2 mod after buying the licenses. Now on to the review.

My first disappointment is going to be the level design. I expected the maps to reach the same quality HL2 had or even HL2:EP2. I think I good portion of the maps could be recreated within GoldSource with "env_model" and sometimes there are no "clue" or "hint" to guide the player. For example, you arrive at an area where you have to press a button, then you have have an infinite antlion spawning behind your ass and you end up wasting 3/4 of your ammo before running everywhere and finding out you have to play Super Mario Bros to reach a ventilation shaft.

Second disappointment is the gameplay, you just run, shoot a lot of Combines, solve puzzles, listen to Shephard's flashbacks, repeat. There are very few variety in enemies, 98% of Combine, 2% of Headcrab, zombies, antlions. I was playing in Hard but I had to go down to Easy because the mod's author had the "great" idea of giving twice health to NPCs and not a little bonus for yourself. Seriously, emptying a clip of pistol in a Combine's head don't kill him on Hard. And speaking of weapons, the only arsenal you have is the standard HL2 weaponry without some weapons like the crossbow and RPG. I've finished the game (almost by speed-running) in almost 2 hours so I expect professional speed-runners finishing it in 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Third disappointment is the story, you are told at the beginning to help Freeman stuck in Nova Prospekt and you just hear some Shephard's flashbacks of his story before he get involved in the Black Mesa incident, that's all. Where is the powerful narrative element that we all loved in Half-Life ? There is none. There isn't a single friendly NPC.

Fourth disappointment concern technical aspects, I've already tried to validate the game cache and all but it seems that when you run the game on Low settings, you get the magnificent black/purple texture of Source, and let's not forgot how my eyes just bleed when looking at the game files.

I tried to find positive things to note but I didn't found any. Prospekt is just a paid map pack and a huge disappointment for those who liked Adrian Shephard and wanted to have a good time with him.

x=x-1 -> 172+-832/4298+x=y-998289=98813+x-y+7 99+x-y=2x-87

It's my birthday

I noticed I had a bunch of Steam trading cards, which by themselves are completely useless. Some time ago I put a few on the market and made a whopping $0.22, so I thought, why not selling ALL of them? Maybe it'll add up enough to get me a new game. After all they're completely useless otherwise.Wait, what? Maybe do it from the market page.Fuck you too, Steam.

So i made an impulse purchase a few days ago. I bought a $65 windows 8.1 touchscreen tablet pc that came with a bluetooth keyboard.
it ran half life ok but playing with your finger sucks... bought myself a cheapo bluetooth mouse and voila! i can map and play half life anywhere i want

Doug Wood left Valve.

http://www.valvetime.net/threads/half-life-animator-doug-wood-is-retiring.252587/