Tutorial - Chibi Anime Eyes
Someone requested this, so I made
it. Check it out here,
or find it in the Tools/Tips section.
Tutorial - Rock Textures
Since I've been putting together a
ton of new textures for Paintball
II, I thought I might as well make some tutorials for them as I went
along. Here's one on
how to make rock textures from scratch (also linked in the Tools/Tips section).
New Anime Sketches
Dug up some more sketches out of my
notes. :) I also reorganized the Art/Anime
section a bit.
Photography Section
A completely new section has been
added under the Art category.
School Life
It's pretty sad that I haven't updated
since I started school. I've been keeping myself pretty busy -- 7
compsci classes and physics. :) I've managed thus far without buying
ANY books. money.save(300); I had to buy the whole series of
physics books for the first physics class I had, so that took care of physics,
and compsci books... those are generally a waste of money. Last semester
I opened one compsci book once and it didn't even have what I was looking
for, so I was like, "You know what? I'm not going to bother ever
buying a compsci book again."
It looks like I'll be out of college
in a year. Hopefully then I can be a more productive member of the
gaming community. ;)
New Computer - Cut by the Cutting Edge
Another demon has been spawned from
the bowels of hell to possess my hardware and haunt me at night.
Either that or it transferred itself over from my old computer. I
don't know. I need to hire an exorcist.
I think I made two basic mistakes here:
1) Purchasing new hardware with cutting
edge technology (8x AGP and whatnot).
2) Purchasing an ATI video card (not
entirely ATI's fault. Lots of software just has poor/no ATI support).
One would think that a video card that
promotes 8x AGP would, naturally, work with a motherboard that promotes
8x AGP. Well, to my surprise, the only 8x AGP motherboards on the
market did NOT work with the only 8x AGP video cards on the market.
After about 2 weeks of reading bboards, installing different drivers/patches/bios
updates, and playing with different settings, I've gotten it mostly stabilized
(still locks up every once in a while). Sheesh. Why can't I
just have a computer that works like it should right off the bat?
It was rather funny, now that I think
back on it, reading the rage3d
bboards. Some people treat ATI like a religion. "Boo! Hiss!
nVidia! Evil! The dark side!" or "You complemented nVidia.
We must kill you and sacrifice you to the ATI gods now." or "HAHAH NV30
WLILL SUXr> ROFLMAO." There are some places where logic and reason
do not apply. Reminds me of some avid mac users... :)
Oh, here are the specs of my new machine,
btw:
Abit SR7-8x
Intel Pentium4 2GHz
Mushkin 512MB PC3000 DDR ram
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Liteon 48x CD-R drive
IBM 120gig HD. (plus a 40gig drive
I transferred from my old comp).
NFS:HP2 MiniReview
Since I've been doing a lot of testing
on my new system, I thought I'd start some minireviews of games my roomies
and I have been playing. First up is Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
2.
I must say, the car models in this
game are downright impressive. The tracks are pretty cool too.
It runs very smoothly on my new system, even with antialiasing on (minus
a lockup here and there, but I blame my hardware) -- looks great. :)
The gameplay is pretty fun too.
I can't say how realistic the handling is because I've never actually driven
any of those cars, much less driven them at 140+mph. I used the z-axis
on my joystick for steering and my nostromo speedpad for gas and gears.
It doesn't seem as if the manual transmission gives you much of an advantage.
I raced all the championships in manual, but I got basically the same lap
times racing the maps in automatic. I abused the cars in manual mode
though, so it was all good, "Who needs breaks when you can DOWNSHIFT!"
<engine whine>. The damage is obviously unrealistic, but who wants
realistic damage anyway? I like being able to continue the race after
smashing into a wall or doing some insane thing like this.
:)
The sound is cool as well. It's
fun to honk the horn while driving through tunnels (this may only work
with a 3D accelerated sound card). The only thing that really bugs
me about this game (other than the lockups) is the fact that the menu is
in a different resolution than the game. That's a little pet peeve
of mine. I hate the sound of my monitor switching resolutions.
I could do without the intro videos and unnecessary number of keystrokes
to get past all that stuff too. Overall, though, I give it a big
thumbs up. I recommend driving in first person with some type of
analog (joystick, wheel, etc.) controller.
Battlefield 1942 MiniReview
This was one of the reasons I got
my new computer. Of course, by the time I got my new computer WORKING,
the newness of it had died down, so I feel like I kinda missed out on that.
It was fun watching people get run over by a jeep and carried halfway
across the map while their arms flailed about though. When I got
my computer stabilized, I had to change renderer.allowAllRefreshRates to
1 in Settings\VideoDefault.con before it Battlefield would work.
That seems rather odd. I think it should default to 1. Why
should the game care what refresh rate you use? Anyway, when I got
it all working, I took to the air with my roommate. It's insanely
easy to fly in that game (with a z-axis joystick anyway). It's not
realistic, but that's ok since it's supposed to be fun. There's nothing
quite as satisfying as zooming over a large group of people, dropping bombs,
and watching the entire message list fill up with people you've blown up.
:D Well -- perhaps that's on the same level as seeing the list fill
up with people you've just run over with a tank. The cool thing about
that game is the variety -- planes, boats, tanks, snipers, bazookas, etc.
The game is definitely oriented toward fun gameplay.
On to the stuff I dislike about it
-- you have to have a beast of a system to run a server with bots, and
if the server lags EVERYONE lags. I think the client side code should
at least allow the players to control their movement if there's a lack
of data from the server so you don't crash your plane into a building whenever
the server hiccups. I'm guessing that network code would make it
really hard for modem players. I could be wrong though.
Another thing I don't like is the lack
of smooth transitions into vehicles and the like. Either you're in
or you're out. There's no in between. The player animations
also seem kind of stiff and off balance, and the game in general is a little
glitchy/buggy like it was released a bit prematurely.
Overall: Thumbs up on the gameplay.
I just wish I had more time to play it. :)
UT2003 MiniReview
Somehow I was expecting something...
more. Don't get me wrong; the graphics are really impressive, but
that's about the only thing it has that's new. As far as gameplay
goes, it feels like just another first person shooter. I guess that's
what it was designed to be. It's fun, but in all honesty I think
I'd rather play Quake2 deathmatch (maybe because I'm just used to the movement
in Quake2).
This game is almost entirely dependant
on the CPU. It's even playable on a Geforce1 if you have a fast enough
CPU. If your CPU is lacking, however, it doesn't matter how powerful
your video card is -- it's still going to be sluggish.
One thing, other than the graphics,
that I really like about UT2003 is the skeletal deformation. It makes it
fun just to repeatedly suicide on maps like DM-Gael. About as fun
as the stair
dismount game. :)
Overall: Great graphics. It looks
like it'll be a nice engine for mods.
Jackass the Movie MiniReview
LOL! Ouch! Eww.
Doom III Alpha MiniReview
Just kidding. :)
ATi RefreshFix
Last update I posted a link to a tool
fixing the WinXP refresh rate issue on nVidia cards. Now here's
one for ATi cards. Away with the evil 60Hz!
Random Thought
"I have patience; I just don't have
time."
Malfunction of the Moment
This is an odd one (aren't they all).
I opened up a file in notepad, and some of the lines were in a different
sized font. I've only seen it do this with Terminal size 6 font,
but it's consistent. Every time I open the file, the font is smaller
on the same lines. Here's a screenshot:
Spam of the Second
"No Matter What The Problem Is!"
What if it's spam?
Link o' the Day
Learn your ABC's. |
