Joel Schultz

And here I thought you were just posting about the PC game... but a movie?! They didn't leak any guesstimates on the release date, did they?

Update! (Well, if anyone was paying attention, this was news on July 9 ) Jack Thompson recommended for permanent disbarment

Give it enough time and somebody will make a PS2 emulator for the PC like they already have for the PS1, Super NES, etc.

I use: Avast Ad-Aware I used to use Norton Antivirus, but it is dog slow compare to Avast. Kind of overkill too. My PC's behind a router with a NAT so it's effectively firewalled already, making Norton's stuff there redundant...

Casual gaming list for the past two months: Minesweeper. House rule: thou shalt set the Minesweeper high scores on any new computer. Call me eccentric. Heavenly Sword. Only when I'm over at relative's house who has a PS3, provided no one is using it, which makes progress rather slow. The Experiment. Currently playing, not finished yet, but liking thus far. The Adventure Company puts out some intriguing titles and I'm a sucker for good stories and interesting characters. The Experiment is actually the first medium-length game I've probably played in several months. Life's kept me busy since the start of this year, not necessarily in a bad way, but busy. And sometime I really ought to finish Suikoden III on my PS2.

This is at risk of getting a for resurrecting a WAY dead thread, but I wondered about the music question too at the time. Four years later, the answer: Juno Reactor, "Masters of the Universe", from the album "Shango" in 2000. (Or maybe one of the singles remixes.)

My brother saw it first and thought it was stupid because of...well, I don't want to give away the plot but he thought the ending was far-fetched. Now that I've seen it, I think my reply to that is: HELLO! This is an Indiana Jones movie! When is the plot not just a bit far-fetched? The Ark killing Nazis? A centuries-old knight? Who cares?! I thought this latest foray was quite good, but it didn't seem to have the magic of the original three. I did appreciate the references in it to things in the trilogy. 8/10

Ditto for my stick. It doesn't help either that my stick's yaw rocker is a bit "loose" and so needs a larger dead-zone. Bingo. That's another reason why I like my personal joystick profile with the axis swap. /me trying to drag the topic back in the direction I had originally intended for it to go Say, does anyone know of free downloadable joystick profiling tools (or even not-free)? If you do, please post a link for those ones out there who perhaps don't have a "proprietary" profiling software for their favorite stick that supports axis swap. If anyone else knows of proprietary joystick software (other than Logitech) that can swap axes, please also post.

So there you have it, straight from the SC himself. If you need it dumbed down due to years of conditioning flying oppositely on other games, driver tweaks like with the Logitech Profiler is the only way to go, period. Personally, I don't care which way is wrong or right. For flight sims, give me the realistic "right" flight controller. For space/starfighter sims, give me the "wrong" one. I like the one I like because I like it like that.

Hello, Haradrim. You might want to read this recent post by me. HTH

One of my long-standing gripes about 3000AD joystick support for 3-axis joysticks (X/Y/twist) is that it operates unfortunately realistically from a flight control perspective. That is, X-left is roll-left, X-right is roll-right, Y-forward is pitch-down, Y-back is pitch-up, twist-left is yaw-left and twist-right is yaw-right. Again, this is realistic from a flight control perspective. And if I was playing a flight simulator I wouldn't have any problem with this scheme. But if you're like me, you've had who-knows-how-many years experience playing X-Wing, TIE Fighter, or Freespace drill into you that the starfighter flight control scheme should be X-left is yaw-left, X-right is yaw-right, twist-left is roll-left and twist-right is roll-right. For whatever reason, as soon as that space cockpit flashes up on the screen all flight simulator experience suddenly vanishes and I'm back in the old-school starfighter mindset, rolling and yawing like a n00b who couldn't fly towards his crusier if it was parked directly in front of me. (Actually, this is one of the reasons I like the commander career because as commander, I don't have to pilot my own ship. ) SC, despite a few requests (including some from me), has chosen not to implement a feature in the game itself to flip the roll/yaw axis mappings for joysticks that report X/Y/twist capabilities*. So the odds aren't good that we'll see an enhancement to the the games themselves. However, his games have to talk to the joystick and do that via drivers, which are software. And that's where the "rescue" is. I personally have a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick. I hadn't updated my Logitech software since 2004, so I downloaded the latest Logitech gaming software from their website (www.logitech.com). It turns out that their Profiler application has some nice features. First of all, it can load up certain "configurations" when it automatically detects a specified game being launched. For my purposes, I created a profile for the "GCES.exe" executable from the GCES preview. The really cool feature that the Profiler has is that not only does it allow you to assign (keystroke and other) commands to buttons but it also allows you to assign axes, including altering the axis identity of what the axes will report in as. Thus, for GCES I told the X-axis to report in as twist-axis and twist-axis to report in as X-axis. Voila! Now when playing GCES (or UCAWA now for that matter as soon as I create a profile for it), I can actually fly again! Yaw is where I like it on the X-axis and roll is on the twist axis. Anyone else with a Logitech joystick who has the same "pilot's block" I have can do this trick. Presumably other joystick manufacturers also have "configuration tools" to permit tweaking of how the joystick reports is data back to the computer to achieve the same result. Happy flying! * For two-axis joysticks, there does appear to be a toggle to switch the roll of the X-axis. That doesn't seem to help if you have more than two axes, though.

First impression: ffdshow rears its head asking about video codecs for playback. Um, what? Oh yeah, my bad. /me remembering why I have ffdshow installed (h264/matroska) and figuring out what to tell it about GCES. Second impression: Great music. Very nice menu -- fades are a nice touch. Tried ramping up to 1280x1024, but my framerates stink when I tried to start off a quick mission, roll back to 1024x768. May need to tweak a little more. Joysticks work better when plugged in. Note to self: look into more RAM, maybe better video card, maybe bigger SATA HD too... Third impression: Whoa, space looks COOL! Why doesn't NASA have photos of earth like that? Holy cow, everything looks good: Earth, space, the models, you name it. I can't wait to go earthside sometime and check out the planetary scenery. The cockpit feel reminds me of the good old days of Freespace and X-Wing. I really, really like that the help system and tutorials are so readily available (H/CTRL-H/ALT-H). I wish that I had noticed that microscopic (exagerrating) blurb at the top that says to press H to exit and arrow keys to navigate -- it took me about five minutes to figure out how to get out of that screen. I also wish there was a way to jump more than one page at a time or that it remembered I was on page 23 when I come back. (I probably ought to just print the thing instead.) The UCAWA keystrokes I remember still work (yay!). Oooo... I just discovered what has got to be one of the neatest effects. In one of the cockpit views, you can look down towards your legs and out the windows and the cockpit is still visible but at an angle. You can see the TRS on the left, and it appeared to be updating itself with realtime radar data even in that view. Whoa! I suppose now I had better read the tutorial and manual and figure out what I'm doing here before the combat part of the mission starts up and I get chewed up. No, I didn't read it yet; I'm a bad, bad person! P.S. I did notice the intriguing option regarding "high combat AI". Resnig said he senses some major butt-kicking in my future and bet Kendrick his next month's salary that I'll pummel the enemy. That's got to be some kind of kiss of death, right?

Resnig must've found some ancient MacGyver reruns from the 20th century.

This takes your gaming screen and makes it a portal into a 3D world like it never was before. Just wait till you get to the part where he puts the sensor bar below his camcorder. It blew my mind. http://gizmodo.com/337068/wii-headtracking...-window-display And as a follow-up building on his work, Minority Report in real life. http://gizmodo.com/347479/wiimote-hack-con...crosoft-surface

But they call the second a "sequel". Does that mean movie 1 == "The Hobbit" and movie 2 == something else?

There are also requirements regarding having system profile information in the signature so we know your hardware without having to ask. Not having that information there can be grounds for deletion too.

Wait a sec... I know the plot of that one pretty well (I remember reading all the Narnia books). I'm not sure I remember some of those scenes. Particularly the opening. I thought I was watching "The Last Battle". Looks awesome, but they better not have totally screwed up the book. They did an excellent job on the first movie, but that trailer had me wondering when it started. EDIT: well paint me green and call me Gumby, I totally forgot about Prince Caspian starting out that way. I'm getting that confused with Last Battle and Voyage of Dawn Treader. Looks like maybe sometime I ought to reread those books before I post stupid comments again

I've updated the UBB-to-Invision transition tips area. I had mentioned the icon fading there under tip #7, but didn't think to capture the icons themselves until I saw Charles's post. Thanks for the idea!

I dunno. That article was snot funny to me. And that pun is your penance for posting it.

Yeah, been there, done that. All I have to say is thank goodness for browser history and offline mode.

Hey, this is sort of funny. We have some sort of spacetime dimensional inversion going on in the news feed forum: negative reply counts!

I thought so too, but didn't want to be the one to pin my own topic. Bad form, you know.

I'm (re)starting this topic because if you're like me, the forum change may seem a little bit intimidating and you're wondering about where some common stuff went. Here are some quick starter tips on where to find certain things we were all used to (some of these are obvious as you bumble your way through, but these tips may help you find them a lot faster, others were not as obvious): 1. How to find your personal profile information. The "My controls" link immediately below the header graphic at the top of the screen will take you there. I could've sworn there used to be a link to one's registration information in UBB too, but I don't see that link. Nor do I see a link to "READ THIS FIRST" and the like. Maybe this board is still in the process of configuration but for now I don't know how to get to that information. If anyone with mod privileges can find the link to the topic about profile registration, could you edit into this post with that information? Or anyone can post a reply. Thanks! 2. Personal information in your profile. Once you follow "my controls" on the left sidebar there is a "personal profile" section. "Edit personal information" will allow you to set things like your date of birth, gender and other information. 3. Signatures. Once you follow "my controls" on the left sidebar there is a "personal profile" section. "Edit signature" will take you to the sig editor. To insert the all-important system profile link, there's a green button that looks like a green triangle with a red "+". This allows you to create a hyperlink to your system information page. (You may have to enable scripted windows in your browser.) More information on your system profile can be found in links within the "welcome" note here (provisionally; permanent link on new board coming later according to SC). The registration database is currently down, so you may not be able to access your pages at the moment. 4. Where'd my avatar go? (My avatar wasn't set when I first logged in.) Once you follow "my controls" on the left sidebar there is a "personal profile" section. "Edit avatar settings" will take you to avatar customization. All the old UBB avatars are under "preinstalled avatars" "custom avatars" section. There are also 3 other avatar galleries plus the ability to upload your own. Not to be confused with "personal photo", which is another "personal profile" edit option. 5. E-mail, privacy and security. Once you follow "my controls" on the left sidebar there is a "personal profile" section. Under the "Options" subsection is "Email settings". This permits you to hide your e-mail address from others and (un)subscribe to various notifications related to the board. Note that to change your e-mail address you need to go to "Change email address". "Change password" is right below there too if you need it. 6. Time zone (mine was wrong when I first logged in) and other controls affecting board appearance and functionality. Once you follow "my controls" on the left sidebar there is a "personal profile" section. Under the "Options" subsection is "Board settings". Among the useful things here are settings for your "time zone" and "daylight savings time" if your country does that. Plus some useful stuff that affects things like whether you want to see avatars in posts, use "fast editting" by default and so on. 7. "Get daily", finding unread posts and marking posts read. "Get daily" is now apparently known as "new posts". The "view new posts" link immediately below the header graphic at the top of the screen will take you to a list of all new posts since your last login -- a step up from the "get daily" UBB function. Threads with unread posts will have a little orange square next to the topic you can click on to go to the first unread post in that thread. A highly visible link ("Mark all forums as read...") at the top of the threads list will (obviously) clear the unread flag on the threads and posts. Also the "forum options" button on the header bar of a subforum has a pulldown menu that permits "mark all read" types of functionality for that subforum. The little Invision logo next to forums will also be dimmed if there are no unread messages within that forum. Hovering your mouse over the logo will tell you what it's supposed to mean. If anyone knows how if there is a user-setting to make Invision show the first few lines of the last post in a thread, something UBB did, please reply because I'd sure like to know how to turn that back on for myself! 8. Linking to topics/posts within this forum is different than in UBB. In UBB you inserted a hyperlink to the topic -- basically you'd cut and paste the URL in the browser. Invision handles this more elegantly. If you notice, the "topic ID" is part of the URL after the word "showtopic=". If you use the syntax (remove spaces around square brackets; I put a space after '[' and before ']' so Invision wouldn't "interpret" them!): [ topic="####" ]linkie text[ /topic ] You can link to the top of the topic. Likewise, all posts have a "Post #" link at the top of the post. If you over over it, or click on it you'll find a "post ID" following the word "p=" at the end. If you use the syntax: [ post="####" ]linkie text[ /post ] You can link directly to that post. If anyone else can think of helpful tips to ease the UBB-to-Invision transition, feel free to add on.

Wow, that's a pretty impressive feature set. I just went through their feature tour and it looks a little more polished than the UBB system in use here, actually. Out of (idle) curiosity, will the avatars be moving too or are we going to have to find all new ones for ourselves?

It looks really, really nice. I like the left-right-navigation/center-content layout a lot. It makes the site somewhat similar to other home pages of the same kind, giving it a "familiar" feel.