Joel Schultz

Three thumbs up! Wonders where the extra thumb came from

And speaking from personal experience, make sure your chassis fan is pointing in the right direction. Mine was facing the wrong way for three years without me realizing it; fortunately it was an Intel PII 450 which ran much cooler than my current AMD Athlon 850MHz. Chassis fans should blow in (not out) at the bottom, to promote airflow moving from the bottom-front to the top-back where it is evacuated by the power supply fan. Extra fans I suppose help circulate the air internally, assist in moving fresh (cool) air in, or venting warm air out. Never had any fans other than the CPU, chassis, PSU, and whatever came attached to the components already (e.g. chipset & video card fans), so I don't know too much about their use.

Wow, small world! Yeah, there's a pretzel stall down here still. There's a little one they maroon in the middle of the mall and larger stall in the food court, I think both are "C.K.'s Pretzel Works". Same one, SC? Latrobe isn't too far from Monroeville, I think. Most of us here know the history of BC, but still, who would've ever thought Battlecruiser would share the home of Rolling Rock Beer, even for a short time? "33" [ 07-23-2001: Message edited by: Joel Schultz ]

quote: What Mall was that Joel? It was the Monroeville Mall.

Ditto on Asus. I've only heard good things about them, they have a reputation for quality and stability. I'm on my second Asus mobo (first got retired during last upgrade due to obsolesence), no complaints on either one. Incidentally, it pays to research your mobo chipset vs. video card chipset. You'll save yourself a lot of grief sometimes by having mobo chipset driver and video card driver updates on hand and installed right away. Case in point: VIA KT133A and ATI Radeon. Without the VIA driver update, any mobo (even Asus) using the above combo can hang Windows at random intervals.

This weekend I was wandering around EB at our local mall, no particular reason other than it was near the camera shop and on my way out. Perusing the shelves for any decent bargains, I see Homeworld. Twice. On the left, we have Homeworld: Game of the Year edition. Comes with Prima Offical Strategy Guide, plus sound-track CD with latest patch and preview movie of the sequel. Two boxes down from it to the right: Homeworld, original box, nothing special. Now the prices on the boxes were $19.99 and $39.99. Given the contents of each, what would common sense tell you would be the more expensive? The one with more stuff, right? Nope! The HW:GOY edition, with all its extra goodies, was $20 cheaper than the original! My conversation (as I recall) with the cashier: Me: "Isn't that other box on the second shelf down, second from the right, the same game as this?" I point at the HW:GOY box I'm paying for Cashier: "Yes." Me: "Any difference?" Cashier, thinks a second: "I think this one HW:GOY has more features and stuff inside." Me, signing the credit authorization: "Kinda strange considering this one is cheaper." Cashier: "Huh." Me, leaving store with big grin. (Italics added for clarity) Of course, maybe the original box has some goodie worth $20 more than the game CD, manual, upgrade CD, and strategy guide book. But somehow I doubt it. Gee, I love it when you can pull a deal like that! But seriously, you'd think the store would pull the original Homeworld off the shelf since it is more expensive than the GOY edition. Or else swap the prices around. Does anyone out there have the slightest clue as to what the store managers were thinking when they put the prices on the boxes? Or put both on the shelves at once? Not that I'm complaining...

Personal VCF layout notes, HTH: Section 1 (VERSION CONTROL BULLETINS) Nothing much interesting in here. I generally ignore it. Section 2 (VERSION CONTROL) This is the meat and potatoes of the file. Here is where you will find all ongoing additions and fixes as they take place. It is organized in dated subsections, from most recent to least recent. One goofball subsection sits at the top and has an invalid date; I assume this is "current". Stuff in current seems to spill downwards into dated sections as time passes. If you want to get a developmental perspective of how BCM Beta has evolved, start at the end of section 2 with the last (least recent) dated subsection and work your way backwards through the file. Makes an interesting read, though kind of tedious. Anyway, if all you want to do is find out what's been going on now and during the past few days, you only need to bother with the top of this section. Section 3 (WORK IN PROGRESS AND DESIGN ISSUES) SC said in some post that this is where he sticks things to let the beta testers know not to yammer at him about them. Doesn't change very noticibly (it does change). Section 4 (KNOWN BUGS AND REPORTED ISSUES UNDER INVESTIGATION) This is the section we hope keeps shrinking (and it has). Unfortunately, green text keeps appearing at the bottom periodically. Oh well...

We need to make that phrase yet another confusing acronym around here: IRWIRARNIAR (It's ready when it's ready and right now it ain't ready)

Thinking about seeing it tonight (or whenever I get a chance). FWIW, proper spellings (no criticism intended, BTW): Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke, and Nausica├ñ (umlaut on that final "a", in HTML that's ä ). If FF:TSW is being compared to that film and those books (I own PM on video and Nausica├ñ in books, loved them both), I know I'm going to like it. Oddly enough, the in preview clips I've seen for it a few of the orange flying aliens reminded me of the flying insects from Nausica├ñ's world. Coincidence? Maybe I'll have an answer soon... Hey Harlocke, I'm guessing you're an anime fan from your handle, eh? [ 07-16-2001: Message edited by: Joel Schultz ]

Ditto the SC on that, and do you know if it fixes the Radeon ground texturing too?

Hey, did anyone notice this: quote: On BCM's Gold announcement, expect another announcement, related to ...a pair of trigger happy Elite Force Command operatives ....a team of renegade Insurgents .....a military outpost under siege ......a misplaced experimental craft .......one major nightmare IIRC, that bold section used to be "July 16". So, I read into it either one of two things: SC is hinting he expects it to go gold by July 16 SC knows the gold date is going to overshoot July 16 and has ambiguified (new word!) the date Gee, that sort of covers the whole calendar, doesn't it? A FPS BC shooter would be cool. Particularly if it meant I could finally wander round a cruiser (on one occassion I and some other commanders semi-eloquently ranted on the need to walk our own decks before SC told us to go walk our decks to the nearest airlock, but that's another story... ) But who knows? 'Nuff speculation. [ 07-10-2001: Message edited by: Joel Schultz ]

The ATI site is somewhat convolute. The link you need to head for, to actually begin the process of transferring your report to ATI, is here: http://support.ati.com/contact/select_region.html If you link to the Solve a Problem page at ATI, you see that the originally posted link is the step for gathering the info, and you follow it up by my first link above. I know all this because I submitted to ATI a problem report two days ago with regard to the Radeon and ground textures planetside on E2 (SC says its a driver problem). All you Radeon users out there, don't forget to file your reports with ATI too!

Did any of Square's FF games have anything to do with each other? Dumb question, maybe, but I've only seen FF7, FF8 and whatever their current one is (9 or 10). From what I remember reading, there weren't any really "continuous" plot strands or sequel/prequel deals - IIRC, they never even kept the same magic system twice... [ 07-03-2001: Message edited by: Joel Schultz ]

quote: Joel: It wasn't going to be broken up into two competing Windows companies. I knew that but that actually was one of the solutions on the table at one point. Who was smokin' what when they came up with that? I'm just relieved that breakup is now off the table, because so long as it was on, there was still a remote chance for the above lunacy. As opposed to none, now. Heh. I remember the "MS in the poo" article. Funny, you suppose MS deliberately managed to drag things out? As in drag them out long enough for a there to be an election that could potentially tip the administration in its favor? They had a 50-50 chance...literally ...and the gamble may yet pay off. [ 06-29-2001: Message edited by: Joel Schultz ]

I'm just glad they didn't break it up into competing Windows companies. It's hard enough programming for one company's various flavors of Windows, all of which are 99% compatible but its that 1% which constantly burns you. God save the Snowman...er...developers from separate companies with their own Windows flavors all competing against each other. Dunno about you guys, but this whole court thing makes me nervous from the standpoint of how it could affect my occupational future. Quite frankly, an OS monopoly can be a good thing in that it provides a standard platform to develop against and you're automatically guaranteed a large market with people would could run your software. IMO an OS monopoly promotes competition among those who develop software for the OS, and promotes a desire to develop more software for it. So its a trade-off as I see it: many competing OS's with limited software for each, with lesser competition between software for that OS or few or one OS with lots of software for it and lots of competition between that software. Remember, MS isn't being tried for being a monopoly - monopolies are perfectly legal in the US. It's being tried over accusations that it abused that power for other purposes. . . . God save the snowman, his teeth are falling out...

Ok, here's more random spewage of thoughts from me on the demo ASUS KT133A mobo AMD Athlon 850 256 MB RAM ATI Radeon 32MB DDR (other stuff omitted) OK, first up: I had an icky tearing problem on planet. BUT...SC's aware of this and its a driver problem as noted in the VCF. Although I must admit I'm curious as to why BCM isn't listed on ATI's page here yet. They do have demos listed on that site (e.g. "Oni") so I'm just wondering why BCM isn't up there too yet. I'll have to get on their case about this But I followed the VCF's instructions and started E2 with the /nd1 switch, which seemed to fix things for me. Wow. Things look a lot more interesting "downstairs" now. Stupid Insurgents from IA-02 kept blowing me up pretty quick, but I got to have some fun on the ground. Though it took me a while to figure out how to get my engine in gear - I forgot I had my throttle enabled in joystick mode and it was zeroed out for the first five minutes. Left me a sitting duck. Rather than get blown up, I hopped outside my vehicle, and promptly got lost. Couldn't remember where I parked it, though it may have been blown up. Had fun wandering around and looking at the base. I tried to get my character to do a "salute" too, since I noticed that in the FP keyboard command chart, but maybe this isn't implemented yet because he didn't. Or maybe I should have checked the keystroke list in Config to be sure it was even in there. Oh well. But I ended up putting my marine through his paces, with weapons, positions (crouch vs. prone vs. walk vs. run). Might try more sometime later. Nice model, BTW. I was blown up several more times, but it was worth it because in between blowing up I got to see the explosion effects on the ground from the stuff I blew up. Somebody else seemed to be pounding the base too, though maybe it was just my missiles finally reaching their target in the distance and blasting it, or else the enemy could have been lousy shots (low AI?) and was causing collateral damage against their own structures. But I enjoyed watching the little "sparks" of destruction that rained back to the ground from an exploded building. Also, during a (very brief) lull, I was watching one of the ground structures get rebuilt. Very weird looking, seeing things all "skeletal" and all, but nice to see how dynamic the world and everything really is. Speaking of rain...cool! Very nice effect. Having weather enabled seemed to cause framerate to drop due to HDD "stuttering", but SC seems to think this is fragmentation related. Rest assured, I will be doing that, but only after I uninstall E2 and install BCM I notices snow effects too when I managed to beach my cruiser in the arctic. Very nice effects, SC, adds to the game quite nicely. Especially the rolling thunder in the distance... Anyway, I got tired of getting blown up a lot in IA-02 so I went back to IA-01. I tried to watch the incoming insurgent carrier emerge from hyperspace as mentioned in the Readme. Odd, but the effect isn't as good as I last saw it and remember seeing it in BCStudio, not as many colored lights and that; perhaps this was a side effect of /nd1? Ditto on watching my cruiser doing planetfall. I switched to an external camera view (F9 or F10), I think, as I plummetted towards the planet. No firy reentry. /nd1 culprit? Wrong camera angle? Dunno. But hey, don't think that doesn't mean the sequences weren't good or anything. Especially leaving the planet: watching your cruiser, nose to the heavens, climb out of the atmosphere, a final flaring its drive contrails - I can just imagine that maybe that's what it really would look like in RL, if it existed. And planet infall? Same thing, just watching it plummet into the atmosphere, then seeing it slide by in level flight, that same engine flare as the drives settle down the ship into flight... Amazing. Anyway, I flew around in forward-flight and VTOL modes, but what I really wanted to do was land the cruiser so I could get a look at the female commander model. So I put the cruiser down...on the third try...and got out. Nice looking, holy big momma of a gun strapped on her back, surprised she doesn't fall over backwards under its weight . Anyway I put her through some paces like I did for the marine, crouching, prone, running, walking, holstering/unholstering weapons while in an external camera view. Very nice looking. While walking, I didn't notice any movement of ground textures, but I'm chalking this up to /nd1 since during the brief time I played groundside without /nd1, the flickering textures did seem to move appropriately for the ground. Note to self: dock at station and look for cargo including a fuzzy ol' winter coat next time I go outside in the arctic, that uniform of hers didn't look too warm. Heh. As for why I landed the BC on my third try? Well, I noticed in the keyboard bindings document that SHIFT-E activated the Computer-Assisted Landing System. So, curious, I pressed SHIFT-E. A odd sound played, and my ship dropped like a rock from 35000 feet and pancaked itself and its poor crew on impact with the ground. Oops. Wondering what happened, I tried again. Same result. Suddenly, I seemed to recall that odd sound reminding me of the engine startup sound. Looked in the keybindings, and sure enough SHIFT-E also toggles the engines - a fact I now belatedly remembered from BC3K. So that's why I dropped like a rock. For all I know, the computer-assisted landing was turned on, but fat good it does with no engines! LOL, SC you might want to look at that keyboard command doc and fix that (Lord, won't it be embarassing if I misread the doc and was pressing the wrong keystrokes, I hope I didn't do that...) Anyway, I'm an old hand at landing planes in flight sims, and VTOL makes it so easy, so I just put her down myself the third time. Out of curiosity, what would cause a launched figher, set with a waypoint in tacops on Farstar to attack an Insurgent base in "CAP" or "SEAD" mode, execute an RTB immediately after entering the atmosphere? Maybe I should have set a normal "proceed to next" waypoint outside the base, and then set a CAP/SEAD waypoint inside the base? I'm pretty sure I launched my fighters with the right armament, I had auto-arm on and launched them on CAP and SEAD profiles. I wasn't following any particular instructions, just doing my own thing, really, which was probably a bad idea since I have very little groundside experience. Groundside ops never interested me too much in BC3K; I'm a starship commander, not a ground-pounder. Anyway my groundside generaling skills...what skills?...are horrendous, I'm definitely at "newbie" level on the ground, except for deploying mining drones, ha! Maybe I ought to stick with what I know, at least until BCM comes out and I can spend some serious time trying to learn the ropes groundside. Or spend some time downstairs in BC3K. And from everything I've seen groundside -- I think it will be worth learning, downstairs seems a lot more interesting than it used to be. Zooming around in that ATV was some of the most fun I've had so far in the demos, even though they kept blowing me up I probably ought to go back into BC3K and take my ATV for a spin there. Might learn some useful things. This is what I like about the BC series, if there's a part of the game you don't care about or like, you don't have to do it. I don't have to be a general if I don't want to. But if I do...I can. BTW, I hope your "training academy" includes some groundside stuff. Then, I decided to find out how easy it would be to take out Alderon instead of defending it. Went through another beautiful planet-transition sequence. Anyway the station explosion was quite powerful, and I was a tad too close and got caught in the blast radius but survived. Alderon went down fairly quick because they didn't expect "their" ship to turn coat like that. I managed to get in a few minutes of watching it be rebuilt before some Ter/Mil ships took me out in my weakened state. Overall, I'm very impressed. The graphical effects, at least those I was capable of seeing on my system given my /nd1 restriction, looked very good. You may have convinced this commander that dirt and water are actually interesting places to go and to learn more about, but I will and always shall be a starship commander first and foremost. Tonight's misadventures will include me crashing my crusier into the ocean, and going for a swim. Hey, maybe I'll even take my favorite ATV for a spin on the beach. Dune buggy racing! Yeah! And $ilk's being a bad influence on me, I'm gonna try to land my cruiser on a carrier too! $ilk said it, I love this game, and I know I'm going to enjoy myself getting killed on the ground more times than I'll be able to count learning how to be a general (or maybe marine).

Well, gee, that was fast quote: Responding to your post in detail, would be a sordid waste of time, especially since you ask questions which you can answer yourself if you just play the demo. Ya know what, that answer kinda just hit me a few minutes after I posted, and I went up and editted my post to that effect, plus added in a few other thoughts about a couple things I remember seeing that I liked. Sorry about that, I still must be a little zonked from yesterday... Anyway, I'll be taking that suggestion as your orders, sir!

First off, I liked the new 3000AD movie. Looking good. Second, from what little I did see on the planet, it looked pretty good. Tacops view of the Insurgent base had "clouds" drifting over the view, nice touch. Unfortunately I only played the demo about 20 minutes last night (past midnight when I finally got everything together, and too tired to stay awake after long day at work). I won't be posting further impressions until I have something more than 20 minutes of half-asleep thoughts to work with... But I already have one minor opinion, which I'd like to air right now, and some follow-up questions I have out of the VCF that have to do with your last response... quote: (Epsilon 5) About the ship control, why the joystick x-axis makes me yaw in space, and roll in atmosphere? should be yaw/yaw, not yaw/roll. (SC) No, it shouldn't be anything unless I say it is so. There is reason it acts differently in both environments, or I would not have implemented it as such. I happen to agree with E5 110% on this one. SC, we all understand you have your reasons; though I am curious as to what they are (you had to leave us hanging, didn't ya ). But I'm respectfully submitting that given how wonderfully nice and easier to use the new interface is, and how many options are available on the "Config" screen, that adding an option to use your "default" (X=roll twist=yaw) setting versus the opposite (X=yaw twist=roll) would be a very well-received addition to our ability to "customize" the interface. Given that you used two different control models as E5 brings out, perhaps having this setting for each (one for space, one for atmosphere)? Realizing this is crunch time, of course, I wouldn't expect considerations like this to make it into the box, but submit it for consideration as part of the multiplayer patch. Just my $0.02 in contribution to the cause of making BCM rock... Out of curiosity, what would've happened if my joystick didn't have a twist axis? Does that mean I wouldn't have been able to steer (yaw) at all? Also, I notice this in the VCF (hey! I actually read it! pats self on back): quote: v2.0C.00 11.07.00 FIRST EXTERNAL BETA RELEASE Craft will now do a roll when on a planet/moon and a yaw in space when pushing stick left/right quote: v2.3.00 - 05.14.01 In FTOL mode, while in space the joystick X axis controls YAW and on the planet it controls ROLL. Pressing joystick button 2 swaps this YAW/ROLL mapping. quote: v2.3.03 - 06.08.01 The joystick twist axis is now implemented on supported joysticks and is used as Yaw control Now, what I get from this is that this "twist" axis deal was a latecomer. What I want to know is: will pressing button 2 swap the twist/x-axis in space? If not, what does button 2 do now? (edit: duh, wait a minute, I can experiment on that later this evening! Oh well, I'd appreciate your comments on that anyway, SC, to give this evenings experimentation some perspective) Thanks in advance for any answers, SC! Hopefully this evening I'll get more playing time in and be able to post a better "what I think" tomorrow. [ 06-27-2001: Message edited by: Joel Schultz ]

Are your video drivers up-to-date? I've seen lots of incredibly odd-ball problems from freeze-ups to crashes that were directly caused by not having the latest released video drivers. And since when did companies start charging for BIOS upgrades?! They've always been free downloads AFAIK.

ROFL! I think I would've died up there. Definitely would have hid under a rock or table to avoid the SVP the rest of the evening. Scotty, you might want to consider a nice, relaxing vacation - someplace without computers or BC...

If you build it, they will come...

ARGGH!!!! For the past two weeks every day I've been lugging around CD to burn for E2 at work. Guess which day I forget to bring it with me? I guess I'll be getting E2 tomorrow...

Let's not forget our favorite hibachi chefs either; Japanese food rocks! Has anyone tried eel on a sushi platter? Yum!

quote: (Well, give me a break, how else am I supposed to pass the time?! ) SHHHH! You're disrupting my concentration! goes back to playing Minesweeper (BOOM!)

quote: I use that list so that the testers can keep track of what not to harrass me for. Everything for the game is in. All we're doing now is general crunch mode clean-up, bug fixes (very few left, as you can tell, and mostly obscure ones) and wrapping up WIP items. In fact, I expect to promote most of that WIP section in the next 2-3 updates. I just released another VCF update to go with today's Beta release. Cool! I was wondering what that was about. Glad to hear things are at that point already. *very relieved* quote: Hey, we had the chance to be in the Beta test, and we didn't take it. We could have been talking to the SC directly about the WIP stuff, we're not. We could be... oh you get my drift. Yeah, I admit I was really tempted to join. But I write software for a living, and at the end of the day the LAST thing I want to do is test someone else's, no matter how cool it is. I'd rather enjoy it finished than not enjoy finishing it.