LostInSpace

quote:Originally posted by Soback: 1: I have Rebellion installed right now, with all the hints and a mod with better graphics (pictures). You can't beat Rebellion, well you could, but Empires at War is just not it. Will it make money? Sure. Will it be played 7 years later like Rebellion is right now? No. 2: It's easy to tell which games are good. Just take a look at Vampires Bloodlines. The company went under, so players took up the responsibility of making patches, they are on patch version 2.0 now (the official patch was 1.2). Then there's Freelancer, still being modded and added to on www.lancersreactor.com And then there's the Neverwinter Nights, HUNDREDS of player added items, quests, creatures, ect....Hearts of Iron I/II, Silent Hunter 3, IL2 Surmovik, Falcon...All those communities alive and playing those games. 3: Empires at War seems like just another RTS with a little bit of spice thrown in. Kinda like those other RTS games came out where you could fight on the surface and under ground. That novelty waned real fast. 1: I have to check that one out. I never have tried it. Not partial to RTSs myself. In fact, I try to avoid them. The only RTS I've played with any fervor is the Homeworld series. That reminds me, I should check out if anyones done anything with the Knights of the Old Republic series. I loved those ones. Though I did like the first one much much better. 2: Don't forget modders are still doing things to Freespace2 and even Privateer. The more current Privateer mod I've been playing is the total 3d conversion one. 3: Yup, you pretty much nailed it on the head. My only wish from Lucasarts is that they make another Jedi Knight but not with that damn Quake engine. God, I hate that engine. Never did like it. I've said that many times before. I even prefer their own engine they used for the first Jedi Knight(Dark forces II)/Mots(mysteries of the sith). I really liked how they implemented the force powers in Dark Forces II. You can/could actually target weapons and pull them from players hands. Once someone made a grappling hook mod for that game the fun only got better. Example: Bespin Gantry Level. Grapple your way up to the top of the wing struture and just wait for someone to come up too. Wait till they get close to the top (you can hear the grappling hook) then when the time is right use the pull command pull the hook gun from their hands and it's all the way to bottom for 'em while they type a text message "B$%^#". Ah, so much fun. I still play that one. I've also done some modding on that myself. Not much. I use a program JED (Jedi Knight Editor) mostly to make tweaks to the map. Like the gantry level I took out the Dead Zone. When you fall off the gantry towards the bottom, the default is that when you go about halfway the screen just fades and you regenerate. I took the dead zone out so when you fall you fall all the way to the bottom. Or, you could use the grappling hook and go down there and pick up goodies that people have left behind from their death falls or just go down there to hide out for a while. Also, if you turn on the map you can see where everyone is. If you notice them hanging out at the tip end of the gantry you can use deadly sight and kill them all the way from down the botton. Ack, I didn't mean to go on and on about that. But that is the definition of a long lifed and fun game.

quote:Originally posted by nomad: There is only one unbreakable thing: Quantum encryption. Hacking the rest is only matter of time, ressources & gray matter. You wanna bet that some genius would come along and crack that too.

Did anyone think otherwise. Not me. It might have been tough but I knew someone would do it eventually. Only a matter of time.

quote:Originally posted by Hellbinder: So now the struggle becomes getting over it somehow. 800$ is a lot of cash for a screen to have ghosting issues. What's the response rate. I know some Viewsonic ones are at 8ms.

quote:The district court found that Mr. Field ÔÇ£attempted to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in hopes of making money from GoogleÔÇÖs standard [caching] practice.ÔÇØWell duh what other reason would he have.

Yeah, I read that yesterday when I was looking around about other articles of the pixar disney deal. Yesterday was a strange day for news. Pixar and Disney Chris Penn WB merging with UPN to form a new network CW which will replace the WB. Not sure what's going to happen with the two seperate channels.

Sounds like a pretty sweet gaming system. Just upgraded mine too. You can catch it over here: My Rig I am going to get another gig of ram though. I only got the one right now since I wasn't too sure about it all. I can imagine the visuals you are getting between the video card and the 27" hd monitor.

Thanks for reminding me. I downloaded the demo the other day. Very nice. Typical RTS control and gameplay and the graphics are really good. I can see myself hunkering down to this game. One caution though. I was having some trouble with the downloaded demo off of various sources and turns out I wasn't the only one. I ended up at 3dgamers and tried the torrent download option and the downloaded demo worked fine.

BBC News: Walt Disney has agreed a $7.4bn (£4.1bn) deal to buy Pixar, the animation firm behind films including Toy Story and The Incredibles. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: In Google vs Government, It's Not About Child Porn Yeah, I was caught in that trap too. Instead of looking into it myself like I usually do, I relied strictly on the news media info I was getting. Idiot me. But I did correct my initial post with a follow up. The more I think about this issue the more I get mad though. Much like the issue of game violence. 1: Where the heck are the parents? 2: Should the government even be involved in this? 1: Parents are being delinquent again. There are massive amounts of tools and ways to keep their child, if they want, protected from reaching any of those sites. 2: No. Just another intrusion into private lives. Their time would be better served if they concentrate on their own ethical and moral back yard before they go around poking into others and becoming the parent.

Oh well, reminds me of the day when they cancelled the Babylon 5 game that sierra was invovled in.

Looks good.

I tried watching a few episodes. Other than the special effects, meh. Just doesn't do it for me. I'd rather watch Babylon 5 for the umpteenth time.

quote:....where the PC shelves continue to be squeezed.Don't I know it. At My local Gamestop it's getting smaller and smaller and also looking through the titles, the selection they have stinks. Where as, right across the street from gamestop is a Bust Buy with three isles full of PC games. Hence, I'm dropping my long association with Gamestop. Ex Software ect. I was a customer with them back when they first started as B.Daltons Software ect. and every owner since then. But it's the end now. Nice going Gamestop your name is perfect now.

Agreed. Maybe they ought to re-thing that FUSF tax to help underserved regions gain internet access. Who do you think would most likely be accessing the internet? The kids that's who. The very people they claim they are trying to protect. Instead of using that tax to allow access they ought to use that tax to help fund and develop better filters.

Never mind some of those statements above. It's not child porn the feds are looking for but how likely it is for a child to stumble on a porn web site. I guess to monitor the effectiveness of filters. I was just watching ABC news. They had a search engine expert. Yes there's a field in that too (pretty much what ABC said). But the concensus is that everyone is confused over this issue. Even the expert said this subpoena shows that the justice dept. doesn't know what it's doing as well. They are requesting all the data. The expert said that they need to exclude automated searches in the data they will receive. He also admonished Yahoo, MSN and Aol for caving in to this and not pushing back as well.

Thanks you saved me the trouble of posting about this issue. I was reading about it yesterday. And before anyone starts to bash Bush, from what I understand they are trying to find child pornography searches, based on a law that was passed in 1998 (Child Online Protection Act) during Clinton's reign. Most of the other search engine companies have handed over their data to the feds. Have a read over here too: Feds take porn fight to Google How do I personally feel about this intrusion? If they keep to just looking for Child Porn searches, I don't have a problem. My question is how far are they going to go other than that.

Don't forget to catch Wagner's Tristan und Isolde so you can do a comaprison. BTW: They are playing up the commericals here in NY.

(CNN) -- An audiotaped message purported to be from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden warns that plans for terror attacks in the United States are under way -- and also offers a "long-term truce." Hmmm, in my experience, once someone throws up the word truce usually means they are hurting badly. Anyone who would even consider contemplating a truce with al Qaeda should be shot. It will only benefit them and give them time to recover and reorganize. Also, if anyone pays any attention to those questionable opinion polls should be shot too.

I enjoyed the Colonial House. But I don't know if I can stand to watch due to the 110 deg temp.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: Thanks for the update. I think I'll pick up one of these boards, just so I have it lying around. You're welcome. Can't wait until the other manufacturers pick up on the ULI chipset. I know a lot of people want other brands to do their magic with it. I've had this thing going many many hours. In fact, last thursday I was pushing 24 hours straight. But no matter how long it's on, I can go into one game after another with no problem and not have to do a reboot and the temperatures are staying pretty good. I'm definitely going to pick up another gig of this PQI memory to take advantage of the hyper-transporting.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: quote:Originally posted by LostInSpace: As this picture shows, I had to put the hard drive into an upper drive bay because it was butting right up to the 1st memory chip bank. So you can only have one HDD in there then? Thats not good. I actually came across an old package (in my junk room) that contains a kit that allows one to put a hard drive in a regular drive bay. I just happened to come across it while looking for something else. I might have another one laying around somehwere just don't remember. I haven't used the kit yet been busy getting this thing back up to snuff and playing games. But yeah kind of sucks if one doesn't have a kit like that. More than not that floopy connection is the thing that really has me scratching my head. As for the initial boot up, the only thing I had to adjust was that the bios wasn't recognizing the memory speed properly which I already knew was an issue from the reviews on newegg. I had to set it manually at 400 but it was recognizing and setting the Cas Latency 2-3-2-5 properly. Haven't had any cold boot issues that a few others have mentioned also. But my board came with the latest bios version and the others who've had some issues had the previous versions. It's so far has been doing a bang up job. That's pretty much it from the hardware aspect. Oh yea one more thing, good thing I did this upgrade because I think the fan on the ATI card is crapping out. I usually keep the computer under my desk so I don't hear too much coming from it but I've had it out and next to me and every now and again when I boot into the computer I has hearing a strange noise and feeling a slight vibration on the case. I tracked it down to the video card. Put my hand on the edge of the card and yup it was coming from there. I hope the fan is easily replaceable since I've never done that one before. Anyway on a final note, I did download and try the UCAWA demo just to get a sneak peek at the game. Oy, looks like I'm out of practice with the UC game. I kept getting my butt shot off. But it runs fine.

Here are some screen shots of my rig (full size server case). motherboard 1 These three images show the AGP position to the third PCI slot: motherboard 2 motherboard 3 motherboard 4 ----------------------------------------- Full size image of case and it's guts. As this picture shows, I had to put the hard drive into an upper drive bay because it was butting right up to the 1st memory chip bank. Actually it's in a good place now because the power supply has an outtake fan and grill right there so it draws up all the heat and pumps it right out. Now for the show. I used the unregistered versions of 3dmark03 and aquamark3 for benchmarkings. 3dmark score Aquamark Score

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: In fact, has ANYONE here had ANY problem on their system related to to UCAWA using SF ProActive (which also uses drivers?). Nope. In fact Starforce is saying the same thing. They even have a contest worth $5000 to anyone that can prove it was Starforce that broke their hardware. "Prove it!" and receive $5000 from StarForce!

quote:Originally posted by Matchoo: [nope. It was the lack of 2 spaces before your next sentence that pushed me over the edge.... Oh, you're one of them nit pickers eh. Happens to the best writers too. Looks like I'm going to have to hire me a proofreader like they do.