Advil

I guess there's two sides to this coin. Knowing how you develop your games, I understand the reasoning and don't have a problem with it. I feel like everything that we rightfully deserve as a consumer is in the box. So I say scrap it and concentrate on the next one. Your game builds on itself from one to the next, so I'd rather see a bigger leap and more features in the next one rather than you trying to support two or three separate MP games. That said, there were a lot of promises of multiplayer for BCM, and the manual even references it a few times. A lot of average gamers who don't follow your development and even worse a lot of the press may try to crucify you for not (in their point of view) completing the game. Your call. Your core fans are fine with it, you just have to decide what you think the external fallout will be like.

My personal guess is that all the deployments you've been hearing about for the last few days aren't going east to Iraq but west to North Korea. I think with the new situation developing there we won't hit Iraq until we're sure we can deal with NKor at the same time.

For those who like to screw up their machines with beta drivers... The 42.01 beta drivers are available on www.guru3d.com and have been working well for me for the past couple of days. No more missing menu options. The current release drivers on Nvidia's page don't work for squat with BCM. Either use the older ones or risk the beta. And for the love of god don't anyone tell the SC I recommended you use beta drivers. You can always use the older ones. I don't like airlocks and have managed to stay out of one so far.

Alive and lurking. Sort of. Hey at least I'm keeping track of the game's progress.

Barring a shortage of available ship, I like to protect the homeworlds in a Stormcarrier.

I know no one will believe me, but we all have our fear factors completely backwards on this issue. Brutus is correct, a small bullethole or two has a TINY probability of bringing a plane down. Even if you lose an entire window and have very sudden decompression, people will survive this with the aid of the masks. Heart attacks are a bigger immediate problem. We should all be MUCH MORE AFRAID of the terrorists on the plane killing us than of armed pilots / armed passengers killing us. When you take a deep breath and think about it, it makes sense. I'd take my chances with pilots or passengers trying to do the right thing any day over trusting the terrorists to bring the plane down safely.

Lol! That was a great series. A friend of mine owns the whole thing on DVD and I sat down and watched them all in order in one weekend. Awesome. The shrooms episode was my favorite I think.

Good news, my local GameStop where I preordered it says they'll have it in tomorrow morning! Also, for those of you having trouble with the sniper rifle... the game does seem to intentionally make shooting difficult. The best use of the sniper rifle seems to be to let the crosshairs "settle" for a few seconds before shooting, and always shoot at a STATIONARY target and only in the head if you can help it. Anywhere else in the body does little damage. If you are going to be in a running firefight, the sniper is useless.

For those of you playing this game, the MP patch was just released.

I've been doing good this year in general. Just a couple minor colds. One was a two day sore throat. And right now I'm on the 3rd day of a minor cold. Considering what all my friends and coworkers have been going through this year, I'll cope with the ones I've had with a smile.

(edited for grammar) I won't get the ATI either. The speed is a horrible temptation, but it's easy to fight the temptation since ATI's drivers never work as well as NVIDIA's. It's exactly the same reason why I always used to buy 3DFX. Nvidia was gaining ground on them fast at the end, but 3DFX's drivers and game support was consistently better. I like top performance as much as the next guy, but not if it takes me hours to figure out how to make each game run correctly. Or if I have to wait weeks for a patch for new games to make them work. [ 09-03-2002, 08:18 PM: Message edited by: Advil ]

I've owned my own business for almost 6 years now. I got a year and a half into college, while I worked a part time job at a local computer store. I was miserable. One day my parents looked at me and said "You look really unhappy with where you are going." Do you want to do this for a living? Do you think you can? I said yes and four of us started up Pace Computers, Inc. The rest is history. Some days it's stressed hell and some days it's bliss, but no matter what happens we are the captains of our own corporate ship. Much better than being a lackey of the corporate world. Maybe someday I'll do something else, maybe not. But I've learned a lot in the last few years. Succeed or fail, at the end of my life I'll know I tried to reach all my dreams. And a faith in Jesus is what ties it all together. All the stuff in the world, relationships, family... they all let you down hard at some point. Everything in this world passes away eventually, no matter how secure it looks. God is the only one who won't. He's the rock that all the other dreams in life build off of. That's my perspective.

Checking in. I'm still alive. If only I could retire young and go back to playing games as much as I used to. Looks like development is going slowly but steadily here. Good to see you still around Jag.

Interesting thread, but do any of you really appreciate how much computing power and graphics power would be necessary to produce a perfect simulation of the real world, and any circumstance that could happen? Frankly, I don't. Something on the order of 100 times the CPU power we have today, with god knows how much wider data pipeline. And frankly, I've heard numbers bounced around for number of polys needed per second to make you think "you're there" but really we don't know what it's going to take. The geforce3 is impressive, but it's not even remotely "photo realistic" in it's capabilities. All I'm saying is, there's no end to it. At least no inside our lifetimes, or just to protect myself, not in the next 30 years.

XP is still a bit new for the capture drivers to be mature. I had to go find the version 1.05 WDM capture driver to get it working on my Nvidia card with Svideo in. And there were still one or two quirks I had to work around.

All I can say is, if they had released all 3 movies at once and the only way you could see it was to sit there for all 8 hours non stop, I'd do it. Then I'd turn right back around (maybe after a snack and pit stop) and do it again. Incredible.

There is an option to request a tow ship for help. I have limited experience with this option. If it works everywhere, then you have a way out when your ship gets too far gone to fix in space. Does it work if you are in enemy space at the time? (Havn't tried it so I don't know)

Here! ...Well, sort of. Cable still down at home, trying to remember to bring my reg code to work so I can register. Man I'm hating this. I'm going to have to call an OTS strike on the AT&T world headquarters if this keeps up. Am I allowed to pull the defense fleet for personal vendettas occasionally?

Does that say a celeron 633 on a 440LX motherboard?!?! That's one old Mobo, and I'm surprised (impressed) a 633 celeron works on it. Anyway, your CPU is your biggest bottleneck. Remember, that celeron is only a 66mhz bus. There's only so much blood you can squeeze out of it. Save up. Your next upgrade before anything else should be a motherboard and CPU.

Hey SC, to add my 2 cents... I think it is clear the forum has been a source of stress. Since you want to lead, then LEAD by turning the whole thing over to your moderators and wash your hands of it. Just read the fun stuff you want to read, and skip over the bad knowing that your mods will handle it. Whenever they get too soft, just tell them to be more aggressive, but don't do things for them unless it's really necessary. This way, the only people you have to get really hands on with at all are your moderators and the tech forums. The way you are doing it now, you're feeling personally responsible for every problem and personal attack on the board. You shouldn't have to deal with it. Let it go, let your people handle it. Read what you want to read, respond to the good FUN stuff, and let your people handle the problems. It's not their life's work that's being attacked with words, so they won't feel nearly the stress you do in dealing with it. If the president had to deal with every single person who said something nasty about him or his job, he'd go crazy, even if it's only 10% of the country who doesn't like him. So what does he do? He puts in staff between himself and the people. This way he goes to the engagements he wants to or needs to, but leaves the day to day affairs to others. Do the same with this board. You do actually have the right to pass off the small crap to other people. The benefits of leadership. I think that from a business standpoint your game NEEDS a community center like this. Im not sure the potential customers will understand why it should be shut down. So it would be a good idea to do what it takes so you can enjoy it and not hate it. Well, good or bad, that's my suggestion.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. Around day 3 or 4 a technician did show up at my house free of charge. (A day early I might add which was the only pleasant surprise so far) He did all the usual tests, determined it wasn't my problem, then spent 2 hours on his phone trying to contact someone to edit my account. He couldn't contact anyone, and got so frustrated at his own people he slammed his cellphone on my desk a few times. He was very good at his job and the soul of courtesy to us, he just couldn't fix it.

I had DSL briefly when it first became available. Actually I switched to cable because of the crappy DSL connection I had. At the time, I had the 384k up & down package. It should be capable of downloading up to 48k per second. Unfortunately, I never got more than 16. This was totally unacceptable. I had them look into it. They spent 3 weeks supposedly working on it, couldn't figure out why, and told me to live with it. I canceled just before my first month was up, which I had to do or I was going to have to pay the whole year contract. I know things have changed a lot with DSL in the last year, but my cable was working VERY well right up until this fiasco started. I just needed to vent some serious frustration.

Time for another rant. /rant on My cable connection (AT&T) has been down for 13 days now. The problem has had nothing to do with their acquisition of @home, my service worked fine for almost a week after the conversion. The problems started when I decided to switch to a cable modem that I purchased. This is supposed to save you $10 a month. The procedure is clearly listed on their web page as something you can do and should be "no problem." Well, the first person who put the paperwork through screwed something up. My service ended up disconnected. So we started calling tech support. For the first several days we were speaking with Level 1 support, and the hold times were well over an hour each time. Then we started getting routed to the level 2 support. This is insane, because to get to them you have to talk to level 1 first and give then your service number. So you spend around 1 hour on hold to talk to level 1, and then up to 3 hours on hold waiting to get through to level 2. We have made calls to level 2 several times, and our total time on hold must be well over 15 hours by now. It getts better. It wasn't until the last 4 days (of 13 so far) that our problem was actually sent to be worked on, according to the last tech I talked to. They were supposed to have a person call me back twice so far during all this, and have not. This all built up to the last call I made to them last night. The guy told me: 1) We don't know when we will get you turned back on. 2) I can't tell you who knows that. 3) I can't give you the phone number for anyone in sas (the network division) 4) You will get an automated phone call when its resolved, not a human one. 5) There is no one past me in tech support, even for unique problems. 6) I have no boss that you may speak to. 7) There is no complaint department for you to call. I'm not really angry yet, what's the point? There's no one for me to yell at, but if I get asked if they need their monopoly of the cable system broken, I'll vote hell yes. If I treat one of my customers even half this badly, I'd be lucky if all they did was go somewhere else. /rant off

Also related to @home going bankrupt... LordDavid & Jaguar, sorry I've been completely silent lately. My @Home cable internet has been down for the last 7 days. It's a long story, but it should be back up in the next day or two. They are SO screwed up at AT&T Broadband right now it's unbelievable. I spent over 3 hours on hold last night. So for now I'm limited to the occasional post from work.

He probably meant the TI 200. I havn't seen any TI 500 cards in that price range, even on sale or with rebates. As far as which one I recommend? If your budget allows, the TI 200. They can be had for under $200 all over the place. If all else fails and you have to spend well under $100... a GF2 MX 32MB or 64MB still work. Not incredible, but they work.