Forum posts

Elliott Smith was a passionate lyricist, one who hasn't been superseded by anyone else I've listened to. His music was deeply personal, which was reflected in the structure of his songs. He wrote music with no concern for achieving critical success, but rather to keep himself from going utterly insane.

Try Kings Crossing, Son of Sam, Alameda, Bled White, Coming Up Roses...

So many brilliant songs.

The Delgados - [Universal Audio - #04] - Come Undone

Indeed.

Scott Walker - [Scott 4 - #07] - The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)

Better to listen to one fantastic artist than 10 shitty ones, LEWL!

Songs: Ohia - [The Magnolia Electric Co - #04] - Almost Was Good Enough

Man rowleybob, wtf.

Nelly Furtado before and now Justin Timberlake?!

Elliott Smith - [XO - #11] - Bottle Up and Explode!

srry: Yep.

Changed it now.

As many of you guys know, TWHL currently has a HL1DM server, kindly provided by MuzzleFlash. Now, in conjunction with the folks over at the Snarkpit, Orpheus has organised a friendly bit of competition between the two sites, in the great game of HL1DM.

Beginning Saturday February the 10th at 3pm British time (GMT +0), there will be a 12 hour team based competition. Members of both sites will be able to participate. Here's some details in a tidy list form for y'all:

Goal: Team Deathmatch games between Snarkpit and TWHL.
Server: MuzzleFlash's server at TWHL. 84.244.130.45:27015 (Please take a moment to check out the ping and such)
Server Capacity: 4 per team.
Server Rules: The "Good Sportsmanship Rule" will be strongly adhered to. This goes for within the server, and the forums proper.
Current maps: n/a

Ill feelings posted in the forums will be strictly governed by myself here and the admins on the Snarkpit, so be warned.

Further details:

There will be a possible 6 or more maps in rotation. Half chosen by each team. For simplicity, default maps would be preferred, but custom maps are acceptable as long as an outside link is available. The maps in the current rotation will be displayed in this post, in the details section. This will include download links to any custom maps. Map downloads will be disabled during the games to reduce download ping issues. The maps will be played by the two teams, each having a pre-designated model. Since members joining may be members of both sites, playing on either team is perfectly acceptable. Weapons stay will be on. Friendly fire will be set so everyone can take damage by any ammo fired. If the server is filled to capacity, it will be expected that anyone playing give another member a chance to join after a couple maps played. As long as there are open slots, you may play till you drop. The server will be run for 12 hours. This will allow a good range of people to play, because of the time zone differences. You may frag anytime within that 12 hour period. This event will continue each Saturday until the novelty wears off, or until the owner decides its time to end.

This event is 100% for entertainment purposes. Anyone not interested in playing please keep your negative ideas to yourself. Anyone interested in playing please remember that its all for fun. Scoring isn't of the highest priority. Half-Life 1 is old. It is hoped that this will renew some of the flagging interest. Being inter-site, this might also promote some interaction and dispel the preconceived notion's each site shares about the other...

- Orpheus

Muzzle has a couple of server mods such as fireworks mod, entmod and adminmod. They will of course be disabled to improve ping, except adminmod, for administration purposes.

Should you find a huge issue with something, you may post your feelings in this here thread. Possible points of contention may include:

• How many maps and of what type.
• What day of the week.
• How many hours played.
• Starting time.
• Password.
• Frag limit/Time limit.

Last of all, enjoy!

Which Rimrook has done.

Be glad he did, because it's a long and boring process.

David Arnold - [Casino Royale - #11] - Dinner Jackets

David Arnold - [Casino Royale - #01] - African Rundown

Eric Serra - [GoldenEye - #13] - Dish Out Of Water

Santana - [Shaman - #01] - Adouma

So damn catchy.

Are all noobs a form of cyclops?

You can have multiple maps, yah.

Opera's SSR fixes that, but seriously, RagingGoblin: link to the image, don't post it in the forums, it breaks everything.

If people have used the original HL maps in proper mods, it generally means they've rebuilt it. From scratch.

Santana - Adouma [Shaman - #01]

Paul Oakenfold - James Bond Theme [Die Another Day - #02]

The legality of this all comes into question, particularly if you're ripping off work from a mod to shove it into another mod. Map owners don't exactly like their work being mangled.

Longcat breaks the forums.

Elliott Smith - A Question Mark [XO - #12]

The latest release of OpenGL is version 2.1, released August 2006.

Songs: Ohia - I've Been Riding With The Ghost [The Magnolia Electric Co - #02]

m0p: So I was sorta right.

Because Windows runs on it's own core, not a previously existing one (iirc). Stuff like OS X and Linux and all the other distros run under Unix. Windows came out of DOS, while 2000, XP and I'm pretty sure Vista run under Windows NT.

Quasi - Good Time Rock N Roll [Hot Shit - #03]

Here's some memorable points from the article. I've removed some of the more techy bits.

The same issue that affects graphics cards also goes for high-resolution LCD monitors. One of the big news items at CES 2007 was Samsung's 1920x1200 HD-capable 27" LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T, released at a time when everyone else was still shipping 24" or 25" monitors as their high-end product. The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S- Video, and component video) secure enough. So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except view HD content on it.

...

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content.

...

Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, "slightly fuzzy", a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale

...

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

...

The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels will have their images degraded (there's even a special status code for this, STATUS_GRAPHICS_OPM_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH), but conveniently omit to mention that this resolution, roughly 800x600, covers pretty much every output device that will ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum requirement for Vista Basic are listed as 800x600 resolution (and an 800MHz Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM, which seems, well, ?wildly optimistic? is one term that springs to mind). However that won't get you the Vista Aero interface, which makes a move to Vista from XP more or less pointless. The minimum requirements for running Aero on a Vista Premium PC are ?a DX9 GPU, 128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0, and minimum resolution 1024x768x32?, and for Aero Glass it's even higher than that. In addition the minimum resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is 1024x768 for a 15" LCD, and to get 800x600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-old 14" CRT monitor or something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel requirement means that everything will fall into the degraded-image category.

(A lot of this OPM stuff seems to come straight from the twilight zone. It's normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things like ?display quality too high?).

There's plenty more. I'll post more after you've read that.

Older games won't, but games that require DX10 will.

Fuck you Microsoft, seriously.

The complaints about Vista go well past it's stupid interface. It's the intrinsic and mostly unknown operations that work underneath the surface that are cause for alarm. The most pertinent examples are people not being able to play content they've already purchased, having to play what MS call "Premium Content" on outdated hardware, stuff like the S/PDIF protocol being completely disabled...

Read the damn article and then see where all this 'flaming' is coming from.

Sia - Sunday

I'd try reading that article before posting. It gives concrete reasons why Vista sucks ass. XP didn't have any where near the same level of DRM bullshit that Vista does. Read that article: it will make you scared of Vista.

The only reason games are going to become Vista only is because Microsoft went and made DX10 a Vista only development, which is just greedy. Totally and utterly.

The fact that Vista users are getting Halo 2, a game that's been on the Xbox for freakin' ages is ludicrous. And guess what: it's apparently Vista only! Thanks Microsoft, I'm sure people would love to pay a full RRP on a game that's how many years old now...

An interesting point that was made on that article was that when you think "High Definition", your mind doesn't instantly then think "Windows Based PC". You're more likely to go towards more consumer based electronics, like TVs, DVD players and the like.

Saying that "Hollywood forced them" is just shit: Microsoft doesn't need Hollywood, Hollywood needs them.

That article that Alex linked to is a good, fairly non-biased and somewhat amusing outline of the flaws of Vista's content protection system. In particular, the section at the end which highlights some of the responses Microsoft sent, which don't deny the attacks on the OS, but instead confirm them.

An interesting read, if a bit tech-y.

Eric Serra - GoldenEye Overture

Nah Jobabob, DRM is great! It protects from all those nasty BitTorrent critters that invade your PC using programs called trojans which hackers use to gain access to your personal files. Also, DRM helps prevents viruses and eliminates the need for a firewall.

I was fairly excited when XP launched, because it didn't really contain any of the controversial points that Vista does. As well as that, it wasn't a huge departure from ME (and let's face it, ME sucked balls). It was far friendlier looking, and it removed the need for driver discs (for the most part).

Yeah, stuff like that will be incredibly simple.

The only reason anybody should CONSIDER getting it is for DX10, which somebody will probably crack and port to Win2K/WinXP anyway, totally defeating the purpose of Vista.

I can only pray for that day to come.

For a start: five fucking different versions? That's just utterly ridiculous. Two, Vista is, iirc, still built on WindowsNT technology, which just wasn't developed for this shitty graphical crap. Third, the theme looks terrible and uninviting. Fourth, they ripped off a crapload of stuff from OSX. Fifth, Internet Explorer 7, which, after how many freakin' years of developement, still can't render stuff properly. Sixth, DRM for the lose. Seventh, it's incredibly expensive. Need I go on?

When I'm absolutely and totally FORCED to upgrade to Vista, I'll get a cracked version. Not paying for that level of crap.

Before: The Dandy Warhols - Godless

Now: Elliott Smith - Amanda Cecilia

<3

Yeah. I've extensively planned out how the new tutorial system will work, which will make for a far quicker turn-around of drafts to a published tutorial.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [DVD]

build cubemaps, actually.

Which one?

I can't exactly say that the Wii had a stellar range of launch titles, but I can say that it was better than the GC launch.

Coralie Cl?ment - Ta r?v?rence

Elof: Hehehe

This is the third version of the Unreal Engine, which is now called "Unreal 3" iirc.