There's a video here showing some non-marketroid shot in-game footage of ET:QW. I looked at it and I'm still reeling from disbelief. It can't be that bad, can it?
I mean first there's the basic graphics. It looks like Planetside. It looks like Half-Life 1. It looks fucking old. I mean sure there's an argument to be made for keeping it simple to keep the framerates up but this thing is not a patch on Battlefield to say the least.
It's not just the actual graphics engine though, it's the artwork. It's absolute gash. Whoever worked on the art team for this game wont be using it on their CV any time soon I should think. Ridiculously sparse, boring, derivitive-looking buildings and landscape. Concrete and more concrete, flat walls yadda yadda. Then there's the animation, my god it's desperate. Characters have what looks like Quake 3 style running anims, just something made up by a really bad animater rather than anything that looks remotely like human movement. Or alien movement, whatever.
Then there's the seriously crap derivative looking weapons, the apalling sounds, zero absolutely zero effort on the audio side. The actual gameplay itself, the graphics, the whole game looks like it's five years old and this has the Quake name associated with it?
Splash Damage are clearly incompetent game developers. This game is no labour of love at all, it's pretty much a tick-box implementation of Battlefield with some sort of Doom engine hacked up job. Shame on Splash, shame on Id for licensing the name to such utter turd.
PC multiplayer seems to be slippage after slippage. Still no Team Fortress 2, still no Unreal game. It would have been better if we'd never looked forward to this abomination. Edit: It turns out Splash damage are Brits. Nice one, the only well known multiplayer FPS to get developed on these isles and you make a steaming pile of dogshit. What a great hip hoorah for Britsoft you are.
Sunday, 24 June 2007
Tuesday, 12 June 2007
finding a use for an old Mac [Shedir]
I had an old g4 mac (800mhz, 1gb ram) with OSX kicking about under the stairs. With it's flatscreen it was origionally for the kids to potter about on, but they weren't interested. I landed a wee pc laptop for them and the wife to use but had this big mac left doing nothing.
Now I RDC from work to home daily to chat on the IRC channel with ma homies, but that was onto my dual core gaming rig. Seemed daft to wear that machine out, so I popped the mac in the downstairs cupboard with the boiler.
Now Apple remote desktop is a bastardised version of VNC, it's slow and shitty. However vineserver is actually quite neat, it runs as a service and has been rock solid for a month or more now. Connect to vineserver with the usual VNC listening app.
I've still to configure ssh on that mac actually, must get onto that.
Once I set the res to 1024 I popped the screen off and put a vga cable in, that lets it run headless as well. Anyone else wanting to do this change your dock settings so that the swirly thing doesn't happen. Thats a proper PITA. minimize using scale effect and untick animate opening applications
For grabbing linux distros (ha) azureus works fine, a bit slow but transfer rate is actually faster than the pc upstairs quite often.
IRC was a problem, I used colloquy. That was slow as a week in the jail at rendering the conversation. I moved to X-Chat Aqua and thats the dogs, light n fast it's working superbly.
thunderbird and firefox handle web and email really well. It's also handling the sharing of media to my xbox with xbmc over SMB without any problem either.
Putting the mac to sleep is a godsend too, I can log into my router over https on a specified port and issue a Wake on Lan instruction the mac and it pops up ready for akshun.
As I say, I've been using it for a month or so now and it's a big boost to passing the time at work ;) Plus as it's only got 1 hard disk, it'll probaby consume less power than the beast upstairs (which has 3). Hear me Al, I'm saving the world too!
Now I RDC from work to home daily to chat on the IRC channel with ma homies, but that was onto my dual core gaming rig. Seemed daft to wear that machine out, so I popped the mac in the downstairs cupboard with the boiler.
Now Apple remote desktop is a bastardised version of VNC, it's slow and shitty. However vineserver is actually quite neat, it runs as a service and has been rock solid for a month or more now. Connect to vineserver with the usual VNC listening app.
I've still to configure ssh on that mac actually, must get onto that.
Once I set the res to 1024 I popped the screen off and put a vga cable in, that lets it run headless as well. Anyone else wanting to do this change your dock settings so that the swirly thing doesn't happen. Thats a proper PITA. minimize using scale effect and untick animate opening applications
For grabbing linux distros (ha) azureus works fine, a bit slow but transfer rate is actually faster than the pc upstairs quite often.
IRC was a problem, I used colloquy. That was slow as a week in the jail at rendering the conversation. I moved to X-Chat Aqua and thats the dogs, light n fast it's working superbly.
thunderbird and firefox handle web and email really well. It's also handling the sharing of media to my xbox with xbmc over SMB without any problem either.
Putting the mac to sleep is a godsend too, I can log into my router over https on a specified port and issue a Wake on Lan instruction the mac and it pops up ready for akshun.
As I say, I've been using it for a month or so now and it's a big boost to passing the time at work ;) Plus as it's only got 1 hard disk, it'll probaby consume less power than the beast upstairs (which has 3). Hear me Al, I'm saving the world too!
Tuesday, 5 June 2007
Kids in captivity [Slim]
The BBC rightly brings to our attention the depressing situation regarding our childrens freedom.
BBC NEWS | Education | Analysis: Rearing children in captivity
I had an extremely free upbringing, we lived close to a large unused bit of wasteland and spent all day there with the local kids from miles around building stuff, breaking stuff, jumping over stuff on our bikes and an awful lot of doing bugger all but being with our mates. I used to cycle to school too, hell I used to cycle everywhere, to the shops, to me mates house, it was my way of getting about.
Yet my kids aren't allowed any of those freedoms, their limits are the garden gate, everywhere else they must go accompanied. We only cycle on off road paths, never on the road, and never ever do they do it alone.
What's changed? The bbc's firming pointing the finger at over protective parents, they report less kids go missing now than in the 70's, and road safety's very much improved now than back then, meaning far less child fatalities on the road. Are they missing the point entirely? Are these figures showing how safe the country is a result of our newly over protective ways? If, as they say, only 9% of kids walk to school now rather than 80% in the 70's, this is going to skew the safety figures enormously. My back of the fag packet bollocks maths show that if theres half the fatalities on a fifth of the walkers our letting our kids walk to school would result in many more deaths than in the past, right?
There must be a catalist to this change, there's a reason why we're doing it. We're bombarded with child safety reminders daily, we're bombarded with images of missing kids, we're told about child sex offenders in our own neighbourhoods and we're told that more kids used to die when they walked to school.
What are we supposed to do when presented with these figures? I'd love to give my kids the freedoms I had, but can I do it with a clear conscience? I don't think so.
BBC NEWS | Education | Analysis: Rearing children in captivity
I had an extremely free upbringing, we lived close to a large unused bit of wasteland and spent all day there with the local kids from miles around building stuff, breaking stuff, jumping over stuff on our bikes and an awful lot of doing bugger all but being with our mates. I used to cycle to school too, hell I used to cycle everywhere, to the shops, to me mates house, it was my way of getting about.
Yet my kids aren't allowed any of those freedoms, their limits are the garden gate, everywhere else they must go accompanied. We only cycle on off road paths, never on the road, and never ever do they do it alone.
What's changed? The bbc's firming pointing the finger at over protective parents, they report less kids go missing now than in the 70's, and road safety's very much improved now than back then, meaning far less child fatalities on the road. Are they missing the point entirely? Are these figures showing how safe the country is a result of our newly over protective ways? If, as they say, only 9% of kids walk to school now rather than 80% in the 70's, this is going to skew the safety figures enormously. My back of the fag packet bollocks maths show that if theres half the fatalities on a fifth of the walkers our letting our kids walk to school would result in many more deaths than in the past, right?
There must be a catalist to this change, there's a reason why we're doing it. We're bombarded with child safety reminders daily, we're bombarded with images of missing kids, we're told about child sex offenders in our own neighbourhoods and we're told that more kids used to die when they walked to school.
What are we supposed to do when presented with these figures? I'd love to give my kids the freedoms I had, but can I do it with a clear conscience? I don't think so.
Friday, 1 June 2007
Carbonsplifferous [Am]
The climate. You know it’s really serious when the US starts agreeing to finding targets for emissions. If you weren’t frightened before, which you should have been, I reckon it’s proper frightening that they’ve turned round the mother of all self-denials.
Anyway. It’s happening and stuff has got to get done. I think I’ll probably kill myself the first time I see Fiona Philip’s revoltingly sincere gormless face talking about how we all need to do better but so be it if the populace will listen. Morons.
And as for carbon approbation, the Lurker has discontinued referencing me as ‘G-Man’, swapping it out for ‘C-Man’ which is slightly distressing, if only for the fact that I can’t launch headcrabs at him any more. Now, we’ve all established that actually children are a major contributor of lifetime carbon, so in fact the real crim is Slim with 3 and KV with 7, albeit by different mothers, however the Lurker is obviously poking a little bit on my 3.2 litre car which I do 600 miles a week in (sorry) and Chateau Amnesia.
So obviously the real deal is to use less energy and lack of heating in the east wing may help but more has to be done. To this end I will be swapping to train when the new lines come in. I may also well end up getting a hybrid for a motor although one has to note problems with certain levels of hypocrisy and lack of detail here. The Lexus 430h may be hybrid and therefore is Congestion Charge free in London but puts out several times more emissions than a little Smart Car which has to pay it. This is pretty basic stuff which TfL should get right, right?
Moreover there is a lack of accurate data on the whole-of-life carbon contributions of products in general. Ok your Prius may do a lot of miles but just how much did it take to make the batteries etc? You could do whole blogs on these individual issues so I’m not going into detail here but it means that choices are not as clear as they should be.
And then, since I do have a larger house and a larger car, although we recycle, I wanted to make some effort to address the stuff that we do inevitably put out. Even if I reduce by a quarter (which would be huge) I’m still putting out 75% of what I do now and for each of us, that is many tons of CO2 a year. So this brought into mind carbon offsetting….
There have been some doubts raised about the efficiency of carbon offset providers – is it really efficient / does it really work / is it a rip off / will credits be double sold etc? So I did a little investigation and found a 44 page report by the not-for-profit organisation Clean Air Cool Planet ‘A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers’ which can be found off this page; www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/information/factsheets.php . A cup of coffee and a read later this turned out to be a fairly serious look at the issue and inspired some confidence.
The CACP paper is a due diligence report on 30 global offset providers ranking and rating them for their efficacy. It does highlight why research matters and you might be interested to know that about 70% of the providers do not make it to ‘Tier 1’ status. However, CACP does recommend five ‘Tier 1 Providers’ in Europe; www.drivinggreen.com , www.atmosfair.de , www.carbonneutral.com , www.climatecare.org , www.co2balance.com . These provide multiple schemes to carbon offset in a number of different ways, from energy efficiency to funding alternatives, anaerobic digestion schemes to reforestation in geographically sensible places etc etc
So choosing a couple from this list (Driving green and Carbon Neutral) and knowing that all these schemes and one’s calculations are likely to be subject to some pretty large rounding errors I have bought credits to 150% of our family’s output. So am I an environmental paragon? Hardly. Carbon negative even? I doubt it really. But I’d rather be a G-Man than a C-Man….
Anyway. It’s happening and stuff has got to get done. I think I’ll probably kill myself the first time I see Fiona Philip’s revoltingly sincere gormless face talking about how we all need to do better but so be it if the populace will listen. Morons.
And as for carbon approbation, the Lurker has discontinued referencing me as ‘G-Man’, swapping it out for ‘C-Man’ which is slightly distressing, if only for the fact that I can’t launch headcrabs at him any more. Now, we’ve all established that actually children are a major contributor of lifetime carbon, so in fact the real crim is Slim with 3 and KV with 7, albeit by different mothers, however the Lurker is obviously poking a little bit on my 3.2 litre car which I do 600 miles a week in (sorry) and Chateau Amnesia.
So obviously the real deal is to use less energy and lack of heating in the east wing may help but more has to be done. To this end I will be swapping to train when the new lines come in. I may also well end up getting a hybrid for a motor although one has to note problems with certain levels of hypocrisy and lack of detail here. The Lexus 430h may be hybrid and therefore is Congestion Charge free in London but puts out several times more emissions than a little Smart Car which has to pay it. This is pretty basic stuff which TfL should get right, right?
Moreover there is a lack of accurate data on the whole-of-life carbon contributions of products in general. Ok your Prius may do a lot of miles but just how much did it take to make the batteries etc? You could do whole blogs on these individual issues so I’m not going into detail here but it means that choices are not as clear as they should be.
And then, since I do have a larger house and a larger car, although we recycle, I wanted to make some effort to address the stuff that we do inevitably put out. Even if I reduce by a quarter (which would be huge) I’m still putting out 75% of what I do now and for each of us, that is many tons of CO2 a year. So this brought into mind carbon offsetting….
There have been some doubts raised about the efficiency of carbon offset providers – is it really efficient / does it really work / is it a rip off / will credits be double sold etc? So I did a little investigation and found a 44 page report by the not-for-profit organisation Clean Air Cool Planet ‘A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers’ which can be found off this page; www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/information/factsheets.php . A cup of coffee and a read later this turned out to be a fairly serious look at the issue and inspired some confidence.
The CACP paper is a due diligence report on 30 global offset providers ranking and rating them for their efficacy. It does highlight why research matters and you might be interested to know that about 70% of the providers do not make it to ‘Tier 1’ status. However, CACP does recommend five ‘Tier 1 Providers’ in Europe; www.drivinggreen.com , www.atmosfair.de , www.carbonneutral.com , www.climatecare.org , www.co2balance.com . These provide multiple schemes to carbon offset in a number of different ways, from energy efficiency to funding alternatives, anaerobic digestion schemes to reforestation in geographically sensible places etc etc
So choosing a couple from this list (Driving green and Carbon Neutral) and knowing that all these schemes and one’s calculations are likely to be subject to some pretty large rounding errors I have bought credits to 150% of our family’s output. So am I an environmental paragon? Hardly. Carbon negative even? I doubt it really. But I’d rather be a G-Man than a C-Man….
Thursday, 31 May 2007
Sexbox 360 [Slim]
Woo, my frankly shit hot wife bought me an Xbox 360 for my birthday this week. I'm a bit late to the next gen, although I've got a pretty nice PC to play the latest and wizzy stuff on. The 360 seems like a sweet deal at the moment, it's priced considerably lower than the ps3, it's got more waft than the wii and has a more complete library than both.
Anyways, hows the 360 to a latecomer? It's ok! Live is, as everyone knows, very impressive and almost seamless. It's var too easy to blow lots of money on daft little games, but the demo's are so well put together that you only blow your wad on daft little games that you've tried and like. The networking is a piece of piss, only had a slight issue sorting NAT out on my router, but a quick google fixed that sharpish.
My hot sexy twin sister in laws (hoping for some google love of that!) bought me Gears and Crackdown, both are great fun, and dead easy to get online with too. MSN messenger computability means I've got a nice full mates list as the service recognizes who out of my contacts is on Live already and hooks me up with em. Anyway, it was easy enough that I got a four player game of gears with some mates going on my first night with me new box, and had a right blast in the process. Gears looks fucking amazing on my big telly, and the 3rd person cover&fire-em-up is a really nice break after playing PC fps's online for the last ten years.
First game I bought off Live Arcade is Catan. A chilled out turn based board game that's a total change of pace from what I was expecting off Live. Never played the real version but it looks quite fiddly with counters and hex cards, this plays a treat with the game taking care of the housekeeping. The sofa's easily a better spot to play board games than my PC desk, so I'm hoping for more games like this on Live. I hear carcassone (fuck knows if I've spelt that right?) is coming soon.
There's some bonkers restrictions with it though, voice comms is seamless and effective, but limited to your team mates only and you can also only voice com out of the game with one person at a time, fucking bonkers. I like to hear the bleat when I'm killing someone! You can talk to everyone in the lobby, but it's just not the same.
Other downers: the lack of a browsers a bit silly, even me wii has one of those. The tiny 20gb hard disk is filling up alarmingly fast with demos. Oh and the box sounds like a fucking Server, what's that all about? Seems to be connected to the DVD drive, as the dashboard and Live Arcade shit plays almost silently but when you bung the gears disk in it sounds like a twatting hovercraft.
Anyway, I'm chuffed with it, I'll just have to turn the volume up!
Anyways, hows the 360 to a latecomer? It's ok! Live is, as everyone knows, very impressive and almost seamless. It's var too easy to blow lots of money on daft little games, but the demo's are so well put together that you only blow your wad on daft little games that you've tried and like. The networking is a piece of piss, only had a slight issue sorting NAT out on my router, but a quick google fixed that sharpish.
My hot sexy twin sister in laws (hoping for some google love of that!) bought me Gears and Crackdown, both are great fun, and dead easy to get online with too. MSN messenger computability means I've got a nice full mates list as the service recognizes who out of my contacts is on Live already and hooks me up with em. Anyway, it was easy enough that I got a four player game of gears with some mates going on my first night with me new box, and had a right blast in the process. Gears looks fucking amazing on my big telly, and the 3rd person cover&fire-em-up is a really nice break after playing PC fps's online for the last ten years.
First game I bought off Live Arcade is Catan. A chilled out turn based board game that's a total change of pace from what I was expecting off Live. Never played the real version but it looks quite fiddly with counters and hex cards, this plays a treat with the game taking care of the housekeeping. The sofa's easily a better spot to play board games than my PC desk, so I'm hoping for more games like this on Live. I hear carcassone (fuck knows if I've spelt that right?) is coming soon.
There's some bonkers restrictions with it though, voice comms is seamless and effective, but limited to your team mates only and you can also only voice com out of the game with one person at a time, fucking bonkers. I like to hear the bleat when I'm killing someone! You can talk to everyone in the lobby, but it's just not the same.
Other downers: the lack of a browsers a bit silly, even me wii has one of those. The tiny 20gb hard disk is filling up alarmingly fast with demos. Oh and the box sounds like a fucking Server, what's that all about? Seems to be connected to the DVD drive, as the dashboard and Live Arcade shit plays almost silently but when you bung the gears disk in it sounds like a twatting hovercraft.
Anyway, I'm chuffed with it, I'll just have to turn the volume up!
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
Driving Me Mad [Spiro]
I passed my test many, many moons ago, but as I was living in London I had no need to drive a car. Now I find myself, several years later commuting in and out of Cardiff daily, a round trip of about 80 miles.
This was made a lot easier with the purchase of my new car a Ford Focus 1.6 TDCI Sport. I’ve been driving this route since November 2006 and its very easy, basically you follow the A470 all the way. It’s a lovely road, nice tarmac; beautiful bends and nice long straights make for a fun ride in. Driving at about 75 for most of the 1hr drive, compared to London driving it’s a joy.
Except for the rest of the fuckers on the road. I’m right now putting up the Welsh as the worst drivers in the world ever. One of my early morning duties before driving is to switch on the local radio and make a note of all of the accidents on the roads on my way in. This can be anything from 3 to 14, I shit you not, one day on the way home, 14 accidents and the same road, all within 2ish miles. I’ve actually watched a man drive his car straight into the back of the car in front, even though he had more than enough room to stop.
The inside lane seems to be a mystery to the Welsh; I think they’re under the impression that as long as you’re doing over 60 you must drive in the outside lane. But of course the speed limit is 70 so we must be safe and stick to 60 whilst we’re there!!! FFS, move over, the outside lane is for overtaking! The odd few who do pull over when they finally notice you behind them (mainly because my full beams have been on for a while) will then swerve violently across the lanes with out indicating or (guessing here) checking their mirrors.
When pulling out into the outside lane your average Welsh driver will again not indicate or check their mirrors and will have absolutely no fucking idea that them driving at 40 could ever possibly be a problem for the car (whom they’ve just cut up) coming up behind them at 70, all I’ll say is thank god for ESP and ABS.
Another thing is the rain, it makes the roads slippery and it reduces visibility. My new car is Black, as a rule I tend to drive with side lights on (even in full daylight) and if visibility is reduced dipped lights. I’m amazed and shocked and the number of Welsh drivers who will never turn their lights on, no matter how bad the weather. What do they think? using their lights is going to wear them out? Part of my route is through a mountain pass and it’s a twisty turny road especially at night. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve encountered cars travelling the opposite direction with just sidelights on in the pitch black! Not only does this not give them enough light to see but it also reduces the distance that I can see them coming from.
Roundabouts! IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO INDICATE THAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY GOING RIGHT AND NOT STRAIGHT ON! I’ve almost had two nasty accidents because of this, the car is coming round with no indication so I assume they’re going straight on. I’ve started to pull out or in one case actually had pulled out to find they’re almost on top of me. The worst in this situation is, it’d be my fault.
One last bitch, parking, if you can’t park take some extra lessons. I’d love to name and shame the fuckers who park in the free parking next to the cricket ground just off Cathedral road in Cardiff. The bays provided are capable of holding four cars easily, there are no white lines to separate the individual parking bays but surely common sense will tell you that you’re taking up one and a half spaces? I’ve never seen such a bad display of parking ever. Those of you who have lived in London will know parking is precious and you learn very quickly how to squeeze your car in to the smallest space possible.
STOP BEING SO FUCKING SELFISH! MAKE ROOM FOR OTHERS.
And yes I’m talking to you the lazy bitch in the red Kia who can’t park to save her life, get some lessons and sort your shit out.
I have my flaws, I drive far to fast when I can, I can drive aggressively, sitting on your arse till you move, flashing my lights, forcing you to stop to let me out. But I can Park, Indicate, use my mirrors and If someone is coming up faster then me I PULL THE FUCK OVER.
I’m sure there are worse examples than the Welsh, but I’ve yet to meet them. I also probably have more issues and bitches but I’m so angry after having been cut up again this morning I had to rant.
Anyone else have a contender or another driving complaint?
This was made a lot easier with the purchase of my new car a Ford Focus 1.6 TDCI Sport. I’ve been driving this route since November 2006 and its very easy, basically you follow the A470 all the way. It’s a lovely road, nice tarmac; beautiful bends and nice long straights make for a fun ride in. Driving at about 75 for most of the 1hr drive, compared to London driving it’s a joy.
Except for the rest of the fuckers on the road. I’m right now putting up the Welsh as the worst drivers in the world ever. One of my early morning duties before driving is to switch on the local radio and make a note of all of the accidents on the roads on my way in. This can be anything from 3 to 14, I shit you not, one day on the way home, 14 accidents and the same road, all within 2ish miles. I’ve actually watched a man drive his car straight into the back of the car in front, even though he had more than enough room to stop.
The inside lane seems to be a mystery to the Welsh; I think they’re under the impression that as long as you’re doing over 60 you must drive in the outside lane. But of course the speed limit is 70 so we must be safe and stick to 60 whilst we’re there!!! FFS, move over, the outside lane is for overtaking! The odd few who do pull over when they finally notice you behind them (mainly because my full beams have been on for a while) will then swerve violently across the lanes with out indicating or (guessing here) checking their mirrors.
When pulling out into the outside lane your average Welsh driver will again not indicate or check their mirrors and will have absolutely no fucking idea that them driving at 40 could ever possibly be a problem for the car (whom they’ve just cut up) coming up behind them at 70, all I’ll say is thank god for ESP and ABS.
Another thing is the rain, it makes the roads slippery and it reduces visibility. My new car is Black, as a rule I tend to drive with side lights on (even in full daylight) and if visibility is reduced dipped lights. I’m amazed and shocked and the number of Welsh drivers who will never turn their lights on, no matter how bad the weather. What do they think? using their lights is going to wear them out? Part of my route is through a mountain pass and it’s a twisty turny road especially at night. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve encountered cars travelling the opposite direction with just sidelights on in the pitch black! Not only does this not give them enough light to see but it also reduces the distance that I can see them coming from.
Roundabouts! IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO INDICATE THAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY GOING RIGHT AND NOT STRAIGHT ON! I’ve almost had two nasty accidents because of this, the car is coming round with no indication so I assume they’re going straight on. I’ve started to pull out or in one case actually had pulled out to find they’re almost on top of me. The worst in this situation is, it’d be my fault.
One last bitch, parking, if you can’t park take some extra lessons. I’d love to name and shame the fuckers who park in the free parking next to the cricket ground just off Cathedral road in Cardiff. The bays provided are capable of holding four cars easily, there are no white lines to separate the individual parking bays but surely common sense will tell you that you’re taking up one and a half spaces? I’ve never seen such a bad display of parking ever. Those of you who have lived in London will know parking is precious and you learn very quickly how to squeeze your car in to the smallest space possible.
STOP BEING SO FUCKING SELFISH! MAKE ROOM FOR OTHERS.
And yes I’m talking to you the lazy bitch in the red Kia who can’t park to save her life, get some lessons and sort your shit out.
I have my flaws, I drive far to fast when I can, I can drive aggressively, sitting on your arse till you move, flashing my lights, forcing you to stop to let me out. But I can Park, Indicate, use my mirrors and If someone is coming up faster then me I PULL THE FUCK OVER.
I’m sure there are worse examples than the Welsh, but I’ve yet to meet them. I also probably have more issues and bitches but I’m so angry after having been cut up again this morning I had to rant.
Anyone else have a contender or another driving complaint?
Monday, 21 May 2007
How's your mouse? [Lurks]
Ever since the Counter-Strike revival starting with our first proper LAN parties, I've never been happy with how my basic point and shoot stuff has worked. Not as happy as I was with it way back in the day before Source, and all that jazz. Maybe that's just me getting old, I thought, but really I couldn't aim properly at a barn door if my life depended it as it frequently does.
So today I started a bit of monkeying around. I'm equipped with a decent Logitech G5 mouse on one of those fancy textured mats. I run at 2000dpi setting and really no amount of messing with the in-game 'sensitivity' setting made stuff how I liked, so I just kept messing with it sure that this was all that was wrong. After all the rest is good right?
I did a bit of Googling and it seems there's a fair whack of people out there that swear that Logitech's swish mouse stuff is a bit shit. Here's the thing, you generally want this on because it gives you a couple of cool things such as the ability to set mouse sensitivity and, vitally, mouse acceleration in Windows and in game quite seperately. Basically mouse acceleration in Windows is pretty cool. You turn down your overall sensitivity and then you just get to the other side of the screen by moving your hand faster. Probably most people use it, MS calls it 'enhance pointer precision'. Unfortunately if you enable it in Windows, it's enabled in games. In games it's basically fucked because you want to do a smooth 180 kind of independent of how fast you might do it.
I have no doubt some elite gamers somewhere get this right and have mouse acceleration in in game. In theory this would be better. Enhanced precision for sniping, faster movement with a minimum of hand movements for manouvering but I'm just not one of those people.
The thing is though, getting back to people saying the Logitech stuff is shit. I turned it off and selected 'OS implementation'. Turned off mouse acceleration in Windows, whacked down the pointer movement speed loads (soon as you turn off enhance pointer precision you need to) and then went into CS. Bugger me, this is what my mouse used to be like. This is exactly what I had in mind... I was just blindly trusting Logitech to have this shit right, after all it just defies any logic that they'd make gaming mice, make this Setpoint stuff and get all this wrong. However this does seem to be almost an established wisdom if kiddies posting on forums is any indication.
It's probably a personal thing but I'd urge you to try it. Now I can 180 like I used to do and sniping with a rifle isn't so painful as it was with the setpoint implementation. Eg. I'd have my mouse set to 2000dpi, I'd be running on sensitivity around the 15 mark and yet if I moved the mouse a little bitty bit to snipe or whatever, it wouldn't move at all until the mouse moved a bit. That's just broken, it strikes me?
What do you guys use? Mouse, settings, all that jazz.
So today I started a bit of monkeying around. I'm equipped with a decent Logitech G5 mouse on one of those fancy textured mats. I run at 2000dpi setting and really no amount of messing with the in-game 'sensitivity' setting made stuff how I liked, so I just kept messing with it sure that this was all that was wrong. After all the rest is good right?
I did a bit of Googling and it seems there's a fair whack of people out there that swear that Logitech's swish mouse stuff is a bit shit. Here's the thing, you generally want this on because it gives you a couple of cool things such as the ability to set mouse sensitivity and, vitally, mouse acceleration in Windows and in game quite seperately. Basically mouse acceleration in Windows is pretty cool. You turn down your overall sensitivity and then you just get to the other side of the screen by moving your hand faster. Probably most people use it, MS calls it 'enhance pointer precision'. Unfortunately if you enable it in Windows, it's enabled in games. In games it's basically fucked because you want to do a smooth 180 kind of independent of how fast you might do it.
I have no doubt some elite gamers somewhere get this right and have mouse acceleration in in game. In theory this would be better. Enhanced precision for sniping, faster movement with a minimum of hand movements for manouvering but I'm just not one of those people.
The thing is though, getting back to people saying the Logitech stuff is shit. I turned it off and selected 'OS implementation'. Turned off mouse acceleration in Windows, whacked down the pointer movement speed loads (soon as you turn off enhance pointer precision you need to) and then went into CS. Bugger me, this is what my mouse used to be like. This is exactly what I had in mind... I was just blindly trusting Logitech to have this shit right, after all it just defies any logic that they'd make gaming mice, make this Setpoint stuff and get all this wrong. However this does seem to be almost an established wisdom if kiddies posting on forums is any indication.
It's probably a personal thing but I'd urge you to try it. Now I can 180 like I used to do and sniping with a rifle isn't so painful as it was with the setpoint implementation. Eg. I'd have my mouse set to 2000dpi, I'd be running on sensitivity around the 15 mark and yet if I moved the mouse a little bitty bit to snipe or whatever, it wouldn't move at all until the mouse moved a bit. That's just broken, it strikes me?
What do you guys use? Mouse, settings, all that jazz.
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