What the hell is wrong with Valve?

Patch this.
by AC - permalink

I fired up Half-Life 2 tonight after a fun couple of hours terrorizing random car-owning citizens in GTA San Andreas, only to discover a new bug, one unlike anything I've ever encountered before. It seems that now in the world of HL2, I can no longer use my mouse while holding down any keyboard key without almost constant mouse-input cut-outs.

What I mean is, mouse input freezes while using the keyboard. I tried both USB and PS2 mice, and both optical mice and ball mice. I ran dxdiag to see if it's a DirectInput bug, and I tried every other game I own to try to replicate the issue. Even HL2 Episode One works fine. It's just Half-Life 2, and it happened after yet another mandatory Source patch forced on me by Steam. I can't find any reference to this in the Steam support database or in the Steam forums. I could look into this further, but I think I'm just going to email somebody directly about this one.

I just can't wrap my head around why Valve won't implement some sort of opt-in patch functionality for Steam games. At least for their own games. Half-Life 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, but apparently to play it now I have to stand still whenever I want to look around. What the fuck?

It's not just that. I had an issue where Half-Life 1: Source would quit to the desktop as soon as it was launched. This was fixed with a special command-line string I found on the Steam support site. Not only is this no longer working, the same thing is now happening with HL2: Lost Coast. And to start an offline server against bots in Counter-Strike: Source, I now have to be online first. I can then disconnect from the internet and start as many offline servers as I want. Again, this bizarre behavior started after an unwanted and unneeded patch Steam forced me to download.

Attention Valve: I hate mandatory patches. Everyone hates mandatory patches. Steam is the reason I didn't buy Sin Episodes at retail. Don't become EA; I don't buy EA games anymore because I've had such horrible experiences with all the recent EA games I've bought. Steam is rapidly becoming a deterrent to buying new Valve games. I know that Activision has a new deal with Valve that would allow me to update games like Call of Duty 2 via Steam. Well, guess what? I own CoD 2, and I read about the patches available for it, and I was able to decide which patch I needed, and I downloaded it. So fuck you, Steam, and stay out of my CoD directory. Do you see where I'm going with this, Valve?

Bargain bin gold.

Rediscovering my Far Cry addiction.
by AC - permalink

I was looking through the PC games in a massive chain store last week when I saw a jewel case-encased edition of Far Cry for sale for just ten bucks. I was going to buy it, but I already have it. So I didn't. Anyway I couldn't find anything else I really wanted; almost bought F.E.A.R., but I decided not to fulfill the destiny I laid out for myself with my last post. I left gameless, but came home and decided to fire up Far Cry. I had a problem with frequent, almost constant crashes with the game a few months ago, but for whatever reason -- probably a Catalyst upgrade and ditching Control Center for Tray Tools -- it runs beautifully now.

And after committing myself to actually playing it all the way through to the end for just the second time in probably a dozen tries, I think I have to nominate Far Cry for the Second Most Underrated PC Shooter of the Last Three Years award. The winner is Doom 3, because fanboys love to hate it when it's actually a terrific game. Far Cry comes in second because only PC FPS diehards have ever even played it, while a lot of people have played the sub-par Xbox and Xbox 360 ports.

The PC version of Far Cry is just a really impressive game. Yes, it has flaws. One of the worst is the trigen melee damage: they can kill you fully armored in two hits, and bad melee hit-detection lets them whack you from two meters away. There's also the unfortunate choice to put you through a long, hard corridor crawling session half way through the game. But the rest of the game is beautifully open-ended gameplay-wise. I've said this before, but I found new ways to beat several missions during this play-through, even a couple of the early ones I've played many times before.

Far Cry's huge, open map structure gives you such a degree of freedom to explore that you can come up with entirely unexpected -- and unintentional -- ways of attacking almost every mission, aside from those few maps that confine you to moving from floor to floor in some hostile bunker. But even the missions that require you to reach an objective in a free-standing enemy building give you multiple angles of attack, as they all have several entry points you can assault to confuse and draw out the bad guys. One other problem with the game is missions that surround you with trigens, but I suddenly realized there's a way around that: rocks. Tossing rocks to draw away (or draw to you) one or groups of enemies is a really underutilized aspect of the gameplay that makes things a lot more manageable in intense situations where you can get overrun real fast.

Similarly, the waypoint save system is not always ideal, but you can pull down the console and use the "save_game x" and "load_game x" commands to quicksave/quickload at any time -- although you can run into severe clipping problems if you save while crouched or prone, especially in a confined space.

Anyhow, on top of the solid gameplay, you also get visuals that not only run ever-better on more modern hardware, they still look fantastic next to more recent games. Far Cry comes with a configuration utility that gives you direct access to a lot of tweaks that would normally require a lot of console-trolling and trial-and-error. The list of effects and features you'll find in it can humble even Source and Doom 3 engine games, and they're all delivered in a title that regularly serves up massive, sweeping panoramic views that can stretch for a mile or more.

And on top of everything, Far Cry takes days to finish, a solid 20 hours at least, likely more like thirty if you take a stealthy approach to it. That's pretty much unprecedented these days. Doom 3 is a long game, Half-Life 2 is even longer if you take your time and look around a lot. But Far Cry just keeps going and going. An incredible amount of work was put into the game to make it so long, and it shows. It's nearly impossible to find quality gameplay for so many hours, especially in an FPS.

I really think it's one of those hidden gems of PC gaming, something that gets a lot of critical attention but sort of fades from popular attention from all but an enthusiastic underground, like the original Ghost Recon. These days the only place I ever see Far Cry mentioned is in a hardware benchmark study, and that's a shame for a game with such a massive amount of replay potential.

Oh by the way, here's a little technical help. I have no idea why, but the Render Mode option has never worked for me; it just says "Not Supported" for anything other than Default. All you have to do is look in the default Far Cry folder (Program Files\Ubisoft\Crytek\Far Cry\) and open the "system.cfg" file. Find "r_RenderMode" and change the value to anything from 0 to 4. The render mode options are 0 for Default, 1 for Improved (doesn't seem to make much difference), 2 for Paradise (desaturates the colors a little and I'm not sure what else), 3 for Cold (desaturates a lot and gives the game a grittier look), and 4 for Cartoon (tries a sort of half-assed cell-shaded look). This is not to be confused with the Renderer setting, which lets you run the game in either Direct3D (default) or OpenGL. Again, the in-game setting doesn't usually work, and you can change it in the same .cfg file, by changing the "r_Driver" string to opengl. I don't recommend this. It's buggier under OpenGL, as the engine just isn't optimized for it.

Overreaching.

Try before you buy.
by AC - permalink

So I bought Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter last week. I dunno why. I knew it wouldn't run very well on my PC, but I guess I was thinking optimistically. I mean, I figured I could always turn the specs way down to get a good framerate, and the gameplay wouldn't be affected. I was wrong.

First off, I'm a huge fan of the original Ghost Recon. I think it's an all-time classic PC game. It took the tactical elements of Rainbow Six and added a streamlined, real-time control system, then took the whole show outdoors and set it in a military environment. When you consider Ghost Recon and its two official expansion packs, Desert Siege and Island Thunder, as a whole, you've got a good hundred hours of solid single-player tactical FPS gameplay. And the game holds up to this day, five years after its release.

When I first picked up Ghost Recon, it was with an underpowered PC that just met its system requirements. But I was able to play and enjoy the game with a small amount of in-game tweaking. Unfortunately, Advanced Warfighter doesn't scale so well. My PC meets or exceeds the quoted recommended requirements, but to be blunt, it runs like stagnant mule shit. Even after tweaking Advanced Warfighter to get as much out of my hardware as possible, the game just is not playable enough to be enjoyable. It's a game based on precision and reflexes, and jerky, stuttering framerates and jagged, blurry textures are somewhat counterproductive.

I knew in advance that this game's engine, inexplicably, does not support any anti-aliasing whatsoever. The problem is, unlike the Doom 3 engine, this is one that really needs it, especially at low resolutions. And on a system-heavy game like this, you have to run at a low res to get a good framerate. So it pretty much just has to look like shit, HDR or no.

Still, I don't necessarily consider it a bad buy. Eventually I'll upgrade my video card or CPU or whatever, and the game will run like a champ. What's disappointing is that this game was released with visuals so demanding that they virtually eliminate 90% of all PC owners from even being able to play the game at all. I mean, according to the back of the damned box, my PC should crush this game, but in reality it's so hard to find a compromise between framerate and sharp visuals that I've actually uninstalled and shelved it.

By the way, I realize that there's an official patch for Advanced Warfighter that addresses a few performance issues, including the one where the game assigns itself a high CPU priority, making itself unplayable (way to play-test that one, guys). But it's 273MB, so I'll have to borrow my neighbors' bandwidth for that and burn it onto a CD. I'll try the game again once I have it, but I really don't think it's going to make a significant difference.

Next week on One Hundred Horseless Carriages: I buy F.E.A.R. and then uninstall and shelve it.

Optimizing Quake 4 for an X800.

Radeons aren't just for Half-Life.
by AC - permalink

I did a little more tweaking to Quake 4 recently and found a nice little sweet spot for my hardware. It's the best combination of high frame rate (45 to 60+ fps 90% of the time) and high-quality visuals I can come up with. This is basically a distillation of all the performance tweaks from the TweakGuides.com Quake 4 tweak guide, hand-picked and tested for this hardware:

• AMD 64 3500+
  
• 1024MB DDR 3200 SDRAM
• ATi Radeon X800 XL PCI-e 256MB
• Win XP Media Center, SP2
• KDS 17" CRT
  

If your hardware differs slightly, you can guesstimate up or down accordingly. Here's my in-game setup:

As a baseline, I set the game to medium graphic quality. This sets up a good value for texture compression in addition to a number of settings (like AA, AF, etc.) that I overrode. Under Settings > Game Options, I disabled Show Decals, and under Settings > System > Advanced Settings, I enabled everything but anti-aliasing. After that, I opened the Quake4Config.cfg (by default, found under C:\Program Files\id Software\Quake 4\q4base) and made only five changes. You'll find three of them together:

seta image_useCache "0"
seta image_cacheMegs "100"
seta image_cacheMinK "30"

I changed these three strings to:

seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "196"
seta image_cacheMinK "3072"

I also located 'seta r_multiSamples' and made sure the value was set to 0. It's a little counter-intuitive, but you really don't need any anti-aliasing in the Doom 3 engine at any resolution over 1024x768. Unlike any other game engine I have, you just won't notice the difference between 2X and none at all, aside from the significant framerate boost. The last change was finding 'seta image_anisotropy' and setting it at 4. This is a good compromise value at 1152x864, keeping fps high without the floors and walls looking like shit in the distance.

Everything else I implemented in an autoexec.cfg, which you should place in the same folder. Here's my entire autoexec:

seta com_allowconsole 1
seta com_videoRam 256
seta com_systemRAM 1024
seta g_brassTime 0
seta image_preload 1
seta r_orderIndexes 1
seta r_useShadowCulling 1
seta r_useStateCaching 1
seta r_useVertexBuffers 1
seta r_useCachedDynamicModels 1
seta r_useTwoSidedStencil 1
seta r_useTurboShadow 1
seta r_useOptimizedShadows 1

I'm running Catalyst driver set v. 6.8, controlled by ATi Tray Tools. I don't even have Catalyst Control Center installed anymore. I'm not using Tray Tools to change anything other than forcing vertical sync. With this setup, I'm running Quake 4 at 1152 with barely a hitch or stutter. The game stays at 60+ fps almost all the time, the only exceptions being some indoor areas with a lot of dynamic lights trying to interact with each other. The best part is that I'm making almost no sacrifices in visual quality.

Anyway, this is what works for me. Your mileage may vary.

Call of Duty 2 vs. Call of Duty.

How do you feel about bump-mapping?
by AC - permalink

I've been playing Call of Duty 2 for a little over a week now. It's pretty damn good, but I have a problem with it. I've played Call of Duty and its expansion, United Offensive, to death. I love that game, and I'll probably be playing it until, like DOS games, an OS comes along that won't let me play it anymore. And it's hard to shake the feeling that CoD 2 is just another expansion for its prequel.

Just looking at the gameplay, there's no real upgrade at all. Healthpacks are gone in favor of a recharge system. I like it, because it gives you the freedom to charge into a fortified position - provided there's some cover nearby - without first scouting around for health you can backtrack to. But it's nothing that couldn't be done in the first game with a simple mod. The tank missions are back, and haven't changed at all. Using binocs to call in artillery strikes, and manning a mounted gun during a car chase on rails? Both back unchanged from United Offensive. Three episodes, one each with the American, Russian, and British forces? Check. And there's a total of two new weapons, both of which are exremely rare in the single player game. That's not counting two new mounted machine guns that are functionally indistinguishable from the old ones.

So what's new? Pretty much just the visuals, and that's only if you can run the game at a reasonable resolution and frame-rate in DirectX 9. In a very nice touch, Infinity Ward gives you the option of rendering the game with DirectX 7. This makes the game look virtually identical to Call of Duty 1, but also doubles or triples your framerate.

In DX7 mode, the game really does look like another CoD 1 expansion pack. But the good news is, it would be a really goddamn good expansion pack. While nothing really new is introduced, the maps are big and beautifully detailed, there are usually a number of varied objectives to each mission, and both friendly and enemy AI is much, much better. For the first time in a PC Call of Duty game, enemies won't just spawn indefinitely until you manage to advance to some magical, invisible waypoint. Instead, the maps have been carefully crafted to require you to advance to get the right angle or vantage point to knock out a finite, believable number of defending troops.

Now, if you can run the game under DX9, you'll see why it's more than just an expansion. I'm not sure why, but in DX7 mode, Call of Duty 2 actually runs better on my system than United Offensive at high resolutions. Under DX9, it runs even worse, forcing the res down to 1024x768. But it looks better that way, even with AA at just 2x and no AF at all. The bump-mapping brings all the map textures to life in a way the Quake III engine never could, but it's the character models that really sell the experience. Bump-mapping and specular lighting, combined with shadows you don't get under DX7, bring a feeling of realism to the game you just can't get from the original game.

But there is a catch. Out of the box, the game runs horribly on most hardware in DX9. You can either use an annoying in-game workaround or install the 1.3 patch. Going back to gameplay, there are a couple of reversions from United Offensive I don't understand. First, you can't "cook" a grenade anymore. You just toss it with its full three-second delay. This sucks even more given the new AI ability to pick it up and throw it back at you - which you can't do. Second, there's no mode-of-fire toggle now, so the Thompson and MP44 can't be switched to single-shot.

But it's still fun. I mean, look, it's more Call of Duty, and it's every bit as good as the original and United Offensive. It's also slightly longer, which is especially nice, as CoD 1 is so short it sometimes feels like an expansion itself. Overall, I say if you have a PCI-e vidcard with 256MB, just go buy it. It's worth playing, even in DX7.

Give and take.

The game gods giveth, the game gods taketh away.
by AC - permalink

I got some good news and some bad news on the PC gaming front this week. First, I tried to run Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for the first time since installing Catalyst driver set 6.8, and it won't launch. Mohaa.exe runs for a moment, then goes away. No game, no nothing. I've reinstalled the game, "repaired" the game (which is basically a reinstall), tried all sorts of vidcard settings, but it won't launch. I'd hate to revert to an earlier driver set, because overall, these work really well.

The good news is that Quake II will load properly on my old Duron PC. The only reason I paid extra for the DVD edition of Quake IV was because it came with Quake II and both Quake II mission packs. I had them years ago when I was running Windows 2000 Workstation on another box and loved 'em, so I was looking forward to that as much as Quake IV, if not more. But on this PC, Quake II saves won't load. Turns out it's a really common problem with Windows XP, and there's no fix for it. Some source ports are supposed to fix it, but not for me.

This box is running XP Media Center, SP2. My old PC has XP Pro SP2, and for some reason Quake II runs just fine on it. It's a Duron 800 with 192MB and just a 32MB ATi Rage Pro vidcard, but that's more than enough to get a game that old to hit 60fps at 1024x768.

Back on this box, Far Cry is running again, but it's still crashing every 45 minutes or so. Again, I can't figure out why, but to be honest I haven't tried too hard. I can bypass the waypoint save system with the 'save_game x' console command, and I'm not getting any visual glitches like those weird rainbow shadows, even with all detail settings maxed. And like Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and San Andreas, I can run it smoothly at 1280x960.

I think that's really why, for me anyway, it's worth putting up with the problems of PC gaming. In the end, you can get a game like San Andreas or HL2 to run at double the resolution and double the frame-rate of its console cousin. That goes for most of my other games as well, including Quake IV, Doom 3, Halo, Ghost Recon, Unreal Tournament 2004, and so on, and on.

Consoles are catching up, of course. There's no question that Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 is much smoother than it would be on my PC, and some five-star PC-only games, like Half-Life 2: Episode One, are coming to consoles soon. But then again, I can use a mouse with CoD 2, and Episode One won't be out on consoles until sometime next year, and I've had it since the first week it was released. I dunno. It's an old debate, and I think the only way to win it is to be able to afford both a new PC and all the major consoles. I'll just have to stick with a new PC and a few old (very old) consoles. Good enough for me.

Aragog strikes again.

I don't need sleep anyway.
by AC - permalink

Early this morning I was vaulted out of bed by a vicious spider bite to the right tricep. Again. I don't know why spiders hate my right tricep so much. It could be karmically linked to my insistance on killing every spider I see anywhere, but that really wouldn't be fair. I can't help being arachnophobic, it's a genetic thing. You think our monkey-man ancestors, sleeping on the ground in some prehistoric forest, kept spiders and scorpions as pets? They probably ate the fucking things.

Moving on. I'm thinking about finally getting around to buying Call of Duty 2, because, what the hell, it can't run any worse than Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, and I've already thrown away twenty bucks on that. In preparation, I blasted through Call of Duty and United Assault again. The only negative I have about that game/expansion is the last mission of the last episode of United Assault. It just sucks. You're under constant, unavoidable fire from everywhere, you have to deal with two escort sub-missions, and in the grand finale you have to take every single objective with AI squadmates so useless it's like facing an entire infantry battalion, plus armor, plus air support, single-handed. Not fun. Not any kind of fun I've ever heard of, anyway.

You have to compare it to the final mission of the first episode, where you're tasked with assaulting and holding a chateau against overwhelming infantry and armor support. In that mission, you have to scurry around grabbing health and ammo, you have to move from door to door to repel invaders, and you have to decide which weapons will be most effective from moment to moment (Panzer-schreck, BAR, sniper rifle, etc.). There's even a good deal of hand-to-hand combat involved. But here's the difference: Your AI teammates actually help. They defend the entrances long enough to cover you, and when overwhelmed, they let you know.

If Call of Duty 2 has more of that kind of action than the lone gunman, Medal of Honor-type stuff, it'll be worth buying. We'll see.

Anniversary.

Holy shit.
by AC - permalink

God, I almost missed it. I looked at the archives on a whim after publishing that last post and realized it's been 730 days since my first post on this blog. So, happy two-year anniversary, blog.

I should probably write about something. Um. Okay, I got something. Anderson Che has been experimenting with a pretty radical new format for Avant Browser, and you can try out the Avant 11 betas on the development forum. If it means anything, I have IE7 beta 3 and Avant 11 beta 5, and I use the Avant beta all the time, and can't think of a reason to fire up IE7 at all.

What else... Oh, Valve released a pretty massive Counter-Strike: Source update this weekend. I'm not sure why Valve is so stingy with the HDR updates to CS: Source maps, but this time they're also including a major gameplay upgrade involving the HUD radar screen. So like, download it and stuff. You kind of have to, anyway.

And speaking of Steam, I downloaded the trailer for Portal because I couldn't understand what all the damn fuss was about. I get it now. Watch that trailer. There are all kinds of subleties to the portal-generation system that can't really be described in a write-up, you just have to watch it in action. Portal is supposed to be included, along with Team Fortress 2, with Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and I can hardly fucking wait. But apparently, I'll have to fucking wait, because Episode 2 has been pushed back to Q1 2007. Shit.

Anything else? No? Okay, enjoy two years of archived One Hunderd Horseless Carriages, and remember, the Harry Potter books are not just for kids, and our President doesn't really like you. Goodnight.

In search of higher framerates.

Don't bother updating. Unless it works. Then update.
by AC - permalink

Lucy the wunderhund is sitting here, staring at me and wagging her tail in a tentative, attention-seeking way like I owe her something. But it's 1AM, and she's been fed, and she has plenty of water, and I just walked her an hour ago. Shit, she even has a brand new toy and Maggie the destructo-rott hasn't even ripped it to pieces yet. If I ignore her long enough, I'm hoping she'll get bored and go to sleep.

Anyway. I decided to try the new ATi Catalyst drivers, but I'm so goddamn sick of the Control Center that I grabbed a 24MB package containing the new drivers with Control Panel instead from NGOHQ.com. It turns out Control Panel hasn't changed much since the version that came with the Radeon 7200 drivers I installed in my old box to get an old 32MB Rage 32 running, so I combined the new (ver. 6.8) Catalyst drivers with the third-party ATi Tray Tools, and so far things are running pretty well.

I'm still running into that "blurry" bug in a few D3D games (GTA San Andreas and Halo, so far), but I've tracked it down. It's caused by enabling "alternate pixel centers." This kinda sucks, because this is a setting meant to get rid of flashing pixels around texture borders, something that happens a lot in San Andreas, particularly in the water. But you can't have everything.

I just installed the new drivers last night, but so far I've seen a noticable improvement in San Andreas, and Half-Life 2 has failed to crash in one or two areas where the obscenely old drivers I'd been forced to use because of other games used to throw me back to the desktop.

The only other games I've tried with this driver set are Quake III Arena and the Q3-based Call of Duty, both of which ran flawlessly with virtually all hardware and in-game settings maxed out. With this monitor, I'm forced to v-sync cap my games at 60fps at 1280x1024, but Q3 engine games generally run double that uncapped (Quake III runs on my PC at over 300fps) so that's no loss. I haven't run any other OpenGL trials yet, but I'm eager to see how Quake IV fairs. I haven't played QuakeIV since realizing that Doom 3 somehow looks abnormally good at high resolutions with no anti-aliasing whatsoever, and I'm looking forward to finding out what sort of frame-rate boost I can get from Quake IV with AA disabled.

Other than that, there's one big fat question mark to be answered by these drivers and it's hovering in the air over Far Cry. I reverted to my vidcard's original drivers for a number of reasons, but one of them wasn't for random crashes and color-inversions in Far Cry. But that's what I got. If it continues, ATi Tray Tools will probably give me enough control to nail down the problem. I hope so, because it's one of my favorite shooters ever. I'll let you know.

And I'll never know what Lucy wanted, because she wandered off to the next room and went to sleep on an old recliner. Oh, well.

It's movie time.

Building the collection.
by AC - permalink

I made a couple good movie calls this weekend. I picked up V for Vendetta on, I admit it, hype alone. I love The Matrix, I love Hugo Weaving, and I love Natalie Portman in ways I shouldn't talk about. So I was pretty much obligated to buy this eventually. But it turned out to be a pretty good film. It's talky and moody and heavy on the symbolism, but I agree with most of the veiled political statements and I can sit through well-directed exposition as long as there's kung-fu and explosions on the horizon, so I liked it.

I also got The Matador, pretty much solely on the recommendation of Ebert and Roeper. And they were right, it's the best performance I've ever seen from Pierce Brosnan. In fact, I'd nominate the guy for an Oscar for that role. Plus the movie is damn funny and features the hot as hell Hope Davis in blonde. Highly recommended on all sorts of levels.

The low-rent San Andreas tweak guide.

Easiest post ever.
by AC - permalink

If you have Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PC and you want it to run fast, here you go:

Step 1: Disable MIP mapping.
Step 2: Set Visual FX Quality to Low.

Congratulations, you've doubled your frame rate. I'll elaborate. The Visual FX Quality setting, like the MIP mapping setting, is under Options/Display Settings/Advanced. Raising it from low to medium will give you more translucent fog, which doesn't make it look much better but makes it easier to see where you're going in thick fog at night. Upping it to High or Very High will give you detailed shadows for player models and slightly increase the heat shimmer effect. But anything over low will dramatically affect your frame rate.

The MIP mapping setting is a bit mystifying. It never occurred to me to disable it before. As it turns out, disabling it does nothing whatsoever to the appearance of the game except give it a huge boost in framerate. I'm running San Andreas with anti-aliasing set in-game to 3, which I think means three passes, or 6X AA, and with anisotropic filtering hardware-forced at 16X, and even at 1280x1024 the game is rock-steady at 60fps. This is with Visual FX at Low. Any higher and the frame rate is halved, and it doesn't look any better sitting still.

I'm stumped on the MIP mapping thing because I have games like Doom 3 and Far Cry that rely heavily on it, and they run smooth as silk.

In fact, let me tell you about how I'm running Doom 3 these days. Doom 3 and Quake 4 are my only games that don't require any anti-aliasing to look good. I don't know what it is about them, but that engine just doesn't need it at all. That really helps performance, because I'm running Doom 3 now at 60fps at 1280x1024 with all in-game settings (except AA, of course) on max, and hardware-forcing 8X AF. This is on an ATi vidcard with an ancient set of drivers, and Doom 3 has always worked best on NVIDIA cards. And it looks fucking incredible.

The only wild-card here is "Truform," whatever that is. My vidcard's stock drivers give me the option of disabling it; the newer ones don't. I think that might be why I'm suddenly seeing these huge performance gains with no visual quality trade-offs. For the record, Doom 3 runs on OpenGL, so I'm also using triple-buffering. I wish more games used OpenGL over Direct3D because, I dunno, it's better.

Anyway, I finally beat San Andreas this week. I spent the next day or so moving across Los Santos systematically taking over every gang territory until I controlled the entire city. I can roam around San Andreas now spending my hard-earned $3 million without worrying about rival gangs trying to take over my territory, because all the rival gangs are fucking dead now. So I can wear my $10,000 tweed Didier-Sachs suit with green high-tops and a pink mohawk and nobody can say shit about it. How many games let you say something like that?

Carmack should just run everything.

Why not? He's got the cash.
by AC - permalink

I've got problems here. I'm getting more and more graphics glitches and crashes in more and more games. In just the last few weeks I've had issues with Far Cry, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, GTA Vice City, MoH Pacific Assault, and even Half-Life 1. I've eliminated the overheating issue that gave me some problems in GTA San Andreas and all I'm left with is video drivers and/or software. To solve that, I've tried the last three sets of ATi Radeon drivers with their corresponding CCC's (Catalyst Control Centers) but nothing is working. In fact things are getting worse. I've only had this PC since January, and that's just not enough time for WinXP to become so corrupted that a reinstall is necessary. Especially considering how well I look after my PC. I mean, this isn't fucking Windows 98 we're talking about.

But nonetheless I've started backing up installers and config files to my secondary hard drive. I could install WinXP Pro, or use my PC's factory restore disc, and I'd prefer that because it came with WinXP MCE. I don't want to go through all that shit, but I can't think of anything else to try. I've got games that ran flawlessly for months (like Far Cry and HL2) that are suddenly acting like pre-alphas. Tonight I even reverted to the drivers and software that came with my vidcard, but no, crash after crash.

What's interesting about all this, to me anyway, is that Doom 3 has been one game I've had no problems with whatsoever. In fact, I can't remember it ever crashing or having any issue of any kind. Quake IV, yes, at one point some intense lighting in one map created a weird but inconsequential anomaly, but Doom 3, in its unpatched retail form has been rock solid. That's bleeding edge tech, but you'd never know it. I installed the 1.3 patch just for the hell of it, and again, no problem.

But these other games... Far Cry, for instance. The only problem I've ever had was a weird issue where certain shadows were rainbow-colored when cast onto complex geometry that was also casting a shadow. That went away with a driver update. But then the entire game was suddenly being drawn with the colors inverted. That happened twice, then stopped for no reason I could discover. Now the game is crashing almost immediately after a level finishes loading. Again, I have no goddamn idea why. HL2 Episode 1 is doing the same thing, but I'm convinced it's because of one of those mandatory patches Valve pushed on me via Steam. Which one I don't know, because there are so damn many.

The only troubleshooting step left that I can think of is one I just can't afford: yank out my ATi vidcard and try one from NVIDIA. I have a deep, dark, depressing feeling that I could spend hours reinstalling Windows to end up with exactly the same problems I'm having now. But that's probably a better option that spending three hundred wing-wangs on a brand new NVIDIA card and still not getting any improvement.

Shit. Does anyone have an Xbox 360 they'd like to sell me?

Overheated.

Another post, another Stargate episode.
by AC - permalink

I've been running into some weird graphics anomalies recently in a few games. Specifically, it's GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, and Far Cry. After over a week of merciless troubleshooting, I think I've nailed it down as video card overheating. Moving my box from its little tower cubbyhole to on top of my desk has helped, but the problem is still coming up occasionally in Far Cry. Taking off a panel only disrupts circulation and makes things worse, so I think I'll just need faster fans. But for that, I'll need a better power supply. I'm pushing mine as it is, which is probably part of the problem. Anyway.

Getting back to San Andreas, I've been taking a different approach this time. At the first opportunity, I went around collecting all 100 tags, then all fifty snapshots, then all fifty oysters. It's an easy way to boost a number of stats (and the extra 200 grand doesn't hurt) and getting those oysters has made dating so much easier that I've actually been able to get past date 1 with Michelle, who's driven me crazy on my first two plays. Staying fat as hell helped, too. I haven't tried that girl at the Ammunation in the backwoods yet (I forget her name), but I'm at 100% muscle and I might need to use the "skinny" cheat for her. In any case, without any money cheats, I've got over $700,000 at this point (just before the flight training mission) despite buying all but two available properties and without finishing even the first vehicle export list. Not really sure how I managed that, but I'm looking for cool shit to buy.

I'm having more fun than ever on my third Far Cry play-through. Yet another testament to that game's depth. Again, I've found routes I hadn't thought of before. You know that level early on where you have to get past the huts then make your way to the communications tower to destroy it? I finally managed to sneak around from the left to man that mounted grenade launcher without alerting the entire battalion below. I took a speedboat around to the little bay on the left and cut down the defenders from offshore. After that there was just one merc on patrol to take down with the silenced MP5 (hope you picked one up on the last level). Then I hugged the cliffside and got within spitting distance of the guys guarding the launcher. Killing them will alert a bunch of guys, but you can kill them and still have time to use the launcher to wipe out the camp below before all the mercs in it can rush you. The hardest part is getting to that launcher and killing that one merc when he's far enough from his buddies not to alert them.

Almost every level in Far Cry is like that, and that's why I love the game. That, and the fact that it looks incredible and still runs over 60fps at almost any resolution I throw at it. And Jolene Blalock just showed up on Stargate, blonde hair and all, which is another reason to love that show. Unfortunately, my old Duron box is the one by the TV, so I'm going to have to settle for some Quake III while I watch.

Is there really nothing on TV?

Channel surfing keeps getting harder.
by AC - permalink

I'd heard that MTV was going to ignore its 25th anniversary today, but it really didn't strike me how weird that was until I saw VH1 Classic's six-hour tribute to MTV's "Day One" this afternoon. I realize that both channels are owned by the same massive conglomerate, but it's still off-putting that MTV is so afraid of alienating its pre-teen audience by acknowledging that it's older than they are that they actually shifted the anniversary programming not only to VH1, but to the upper-tier VH1 Classic that not many people even get, or watch. In my mind, this is MTV officially abandoning any of their original fans. Sorry, old man, we were going to have John Norris intro some Blondie videos, but it would have cut into Next and Made and Room Raiders and a lot of other bullshit we've dedicated 22 hours of the day to in place of, you know, music.

VH1 Classic is really a better channel anyway. Classic/Current is pretty cool. They play a band's first ever video and then their most recent one. And I just watched the Elvis Costello edition of Classic in Concert twice. He played an extended concert with Death Cab for Cutie, Fiona Apple, and Billy Armstrong, and it was just amazing. No, "Wake Me Up When September Ends" didn't really need the Elvis Costello touch, but his collaboration with Fiona on "I Want You" was fucking magic. I want a DVD of that concert.

It seems like all the good shit on TV is on the channels you can't get with a basic cable or satellite package. The Discovery Times Channel is at least as good as Discovery now, probably better. Times has Thomas L. Friedman Reporting, and these days that might be the most significant show on TV. It's also still the only channel where you can see Off to War.

There's also BBC America, one of the first places I check when I turn on the tube. Monty Python has disappeared, which is disapointing, but there's still a lot of guilty pleasures like Keeping Up Appearances (which, like Monty Python, you can find on PBS), Cash in the Attic, and Bargain Hunter. Bravo is still a high-tier channel, and you need Bravo if only for Celebrity Poker Showdown and six hours of Kathy Griffin every day. Actually, you might not need Bravo. But there's still IFC for uncut, often widescreen movies that average at least a thumb and a half up, and you won't get your weekend fix of Samurai movies anywhere else.

It concerns me that it keeps getting harder to find quality TV on non-premium channels, but it concerns me more that the premium channels are becoming more ubiquitous and are getting correspondigly blander as a result. TechTV, for example, has devolved into MTV2 for gamers, aka G4, and Fuse, which started out as "MTV as it used to be," is quickly morphing into "MTV as it already is."

But there's still hope. IFC has shown few signs of commercializing, and channels like Link and Current and even NASA TV prove that there's a future in TV for people with brains that still work reasonably well. And we can always downshift a gear or two and enjoy the train wreck that is Fox Reality. Watching idiots compete with other idiots for small cash prizes amid endless humiliation? Priceless. And you thought you were wasting your money on that premium package.

Mozilla and Valve have been busy.

Unlike me.
by AC - permalink

Yesterday Firefox was updated to version 1.5.0.5. It's another incremental security/stability update, fixing several flaws rated critical. As always,

If you already have Firefox 1.5, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu within at any time.

And this morning, the corresponding update to Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 was released. The auto-upgrade patch for both apps is around 500K. All of my extensions carried over without any problems.

And speaking of Firefox extensions, if you happen to have one called "Numbered Links 0.9," you might want to look into better anti-virus software because it might be a trojan horse. This isn't an extension sneaking a virus into your system via Firefox. It's actually installed into the browser by Downloader-AXM as a delivery vehicle for a virus known as FormSpy or, to the cool kids, Troj/FireSpy-A. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time the extension system of Firefox (or Thunderbird, or Moz Suite) has been used to install malware. The doom squad has been predicting that this could be a problem since day one, and it's always been an inevitability. But this particular horse doesn't look to be much of an issue, and Firefox's extensibility is still nowhere near as vulnerable as, say, ActiveX.

Valve has been busy as well, churning out update after update for Steam games and Steam itself. There have been a total of four updates and four new Steam games released in the past week, plus the availability of the Sin Episodes: Emergence SDK. That last bit is good news for anyone who might like to try actually making an interesting Sin episode. Anyway, among the updates is a major content package for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. At the same time, it was announced that RO: Ostfront will be available for free via Steam for five days, beginning August 2nd.

I've thought about getting this game, after tinkering with the original RO mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. A major issue with that mod was the dimwitted bot AI, which makes playing it offline not much of an option. RO: Ostfront is supposed to have the same problem, and that makes it hard for me to put down the money. Making things worse, for some reason the game is $25 via Steam but $30 at retail, at least where I've seen it. I know that with Steam acting as download manager, I can actually incrementally download something the size of Ostfront, even with dial-up. I did manage to download Lost Coast and several demos and massive patches. And you can back up games purchased over Steam onto blank CDs or DVDs. But I just like buying games in boxes. The problem with Ostfront is, I don't want to pay five bucks for that box.

And I'm still having all kinds of problems with Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. I left this game alone for a while, and now I remember why. It's just a massively unpolished release. Thanks again, EA. I'm still troubleshooting and figuring this shit out, and if I can get it going smoothly, I'll write a post on it. The game was just twenty bucks when I bought it, and so far it's hasn't been worth ten.

Boredom post.

Here's something to read. Enjoy.
by AC - permalink

Just a few quick notes. Thought I'd mention that the first official beta of Firefox 2.0 has been released. I'm not so big on the betas myself, especially the really early ones, cause I'm way too hooked on my extensions, and odds are that none of them will work. Firefox 2, though, has a lot of new features that make several of my extensions obsolete. Anyway, give it a shot if you want.

Here's my new favorite web site of all time. They call it the Deep Sky Frontier, and basically what it is, is a single web page measuring 22 AU to a side. If you don't believe it, click and hold the scroll down button for six or seven decades, then get back to me. It's just all kinds of trippy and more than a little mindbending, and I love it.

And that reminds me, I read the last 150-or-so pages of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos this morning while getting over a hellish headache and unable to get much else done. I already liked the book, and then Kilgore Trout showed up and I fell completely in love with it. Good as Gold is next up.

Edit: Changed my mind, I'm reading Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick next instead. Thought you should know. Because it's important. Yeah.

New desk. And so on.

I'm too tall.
by AC - permalink

So I bought a new computer desk today. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while. A couple of years maybe, if that qualifies as "a while." Anyway, it's smallish and stylish, and clearly designed for someone shorter than 6' 2". There's nowhere for my legs to go other than out the back, so I've had to pull it out from the wall farther than I'd like to. It has a slide-out keyboard tray, and I gave it a shot even though I hate them, and I was right, I hate it. I've put my keyboard on the desk in front of my monitor, where it belongs, and I feel much better now, thanks. Now it's a slide-out tray full of all the games that force you to put in a CD to play them. That is, everything but the Half-Life series, Quake III, and UT 2004. That's all. And I have a lot of games. Pain in the ass...

Anyhow, it came in a very long, very thin, and very heavy box, which should probably have told me that "some assembly is required" meant "all assembly is required." It was basically plywood, dowels, and screws, and now it's a nice little desk with a shelf and a drawer and I'm all proud of myself for actually building something.

I decided to break in the new ergonomics by playing a bunch of Half-Life 2, starting at Route Canal. I didn't break my new "play-til-it's-over" mantra because I've already finished Quake IV. I didn't realize it before, but that's a short goddamned game. I blasted through it in two days. It isn't even half as long as Doom 3. Score another point for id Software. Raven gets a point or two for "Best use of Peter Stormare," though.

I started a new Club Pogo account last week, and it's been eating up a ton of time. I'm starting from scratch in all the games I'd mastered and there are suddenly tons of badges to go after. If you've been a Pogo member long enough to rack up seven or eight million tokens, I highly recommend getting a new account and starting over again. Everyone in the heads-up games thinks you're a newbie, and you can slap 'em down nice and hard.

Desktop expansion.

Or re-expansion, I guess.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to buying a new monitor this afternoon. It's not a particularly good one, but it was cheap, and it was there, so no shipping charges. It's a 17-inch KDS flat-screen CRT. I've been using an old borrowed 15-inch CRT with a max res of just 1024, so even though this one can't go past 1280, it's still like being able to breath again. Now that I have the extra desktop space, I'm finally getting around to playing with Hammer and the rest of the Source SDK. There were some tempting LCDs, including a very nice widescreen 19-incher for just $250, but I need the resolution flexibility for gaming.

Case in point: I decided my next "I'm playing only this til I'm done" game is Quake IV, and I like to run that game at 1152. I think it's a slightly underrated game. It gets repetitive over the last third or so, and it's disappointing that getting Stroggified doesn't really change the gameplay in any way (other than the other marines telling you how much they'd like to kill you). But it's a solid shooter. There's a fantastic level just before the tank mission that slowly builds up the tension level as the building your guys have established as a base is taken over by the Strogg. And the actual Stroggification is pretty sweet, in a gruesome kind of way.

Oh, something about Doom 3 I forgot to mention. Pull down the console at the start of the game and type "g_PlayerShadow 1." You'll cast a shadow wherever you go, and it really adds to the immersion level. It works so well that I figure it was only disabled for performance reasons. The only downside is when it shows you "floating" up ladders. But it's worth that when exploding imp blasts you've dodged cast your shadow on your cover. For whatever reason, it doesn't work so well in Quake IV. It just tends to get in the way. But it's not a big deal, because Quake IV is less about atmosphere and more about killing.

And one last note. iTunes lost a cool point or two with how it handles randomizing playlists. On three occasions I started the same playlist with random turned on, and three times it put the tracks in the same order. That's not actually random, it's just a new playlist. That earns musikCube a free plug.

Doom 3 and nostalgic gaming.

My PC budget hasn't been wasted.
by AC - permalink

Quick, think about three or four of your favorite games. Imagine playing them, think about why you love those games. If you're like me, you're thinking about the first few levels, if not just the first one. When I first fire up a game that's going to turn out to be great, it's those first maps/stages/levels that stick in my memory, because those are the maps that made me fall in love with the game. So when I get the urge to start one of my games over from the beginning, I always get sidetracked somewhere around the halfway point and start playing something else between sessions, and I never get back to my last savegame.

So I decided not to play any other FPS until I'm finished with my third play-through of Doom 3. And I think it's working. I started five days ago, and I'm only about two-thirds through now, because you do tend to get numb if you try to play this game any faster than that (it's not Half-Life 2, after all). And it's working, because I'm really loving this game, more than I did even when it was new. Since I started playing it, I've played only Club Pogo and old Genesis and 32X games, no FPS, and I'm eager to keep playing it. I just teleported into Hell after BFGing my first two Hellknights. I love those guys. They're just so badass, stomping around and smacking the holy hell out of you when you get too close.

I installed the Doom 3 1.3 patch this afternoon, but I might as well not have. There's virtually no noticable difference, and looking at the changelog, it seems that's because almost all the changes since 1.0 are on the multiplayer side or are related to the expansion pack Resurrection of Evil, which I haven't bought yet. I've noticed a total of one change in single player: the game now remembers what my previous weapon was when switching to the PDA and back while holding the flashlight. Whether that was worth a 30+MB download, I dunno.

Backtracking a bit, I abandoned Gens for Fusion, a Genesis emulator that also handles Master System, Game Gear, 32X, and Sega CD roms. I like Gens, but it had serious sound issues on my system. On the other hand, Fusion conforms to the original hardware's sprite limitations and doesn't dynamically scale to any window size. But it does let me play all my old 32X games, like Star Wars Arcade and Knuckles Chaotix. The 32X was an odd little system, and it probably should never have been released, but it gave me the first version of Doom I ever owned (before the excellent PlayStation port), and I'll always love it for that. Now, of course, I have Doom 3 and Doom Collector's Edition (The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom), which I play via the Doomsday/jDoom source port. All I'm missing is Master Levels for Doom II. Now that I think about it, I should really have that.

Anyway, once I'm through with Doom 3, I'm torn between restarting Far Cry and Halo. I still haven't finished Halo, but it's because I just don't like it very much. It's actually one of only three games I own that I haven't finished, the other two being Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. San Andreas is one of my all time favorite games, but I haven't beaten it or Vice City because they were translated to the PC with missions that are completely unbeatable without a gamepad, and being a first-person shooter addict, I don't own one. Yet. I still have plans to pick one up, if not to beat those games, then to help with all my emulated 16-bit games, particularly my Genesis games designed for that legendary 6-button pad released specifically for the Genesis ports of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2.

Occasionally I think about digging up all my old consoles and games and hooking them up to my already convoluted TV/DVD/VCR/Satellite/Stereo setup, and I get a headache just thinking about it and go back to whatever I was doing. That's called preserving nostalgia, and is not at all laziness.

You only need one web browser.

And it isn't Internet Explorer 7.

by AC - permalink

I downloaded Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't install it. The first "final" beta broke my ISP's proprietary software, which pretty much made a new web browser pointless. But I decided to give the new beta a try anyway a few days ago, just before the release of IE7 beta 3. Oh, well.

Beta 2 didn't break my dialer software, so that was a plus, but I still have a major problem with it, and it's the same issue I have with Opera 9: it isn't Firefox.

I'm not saying IE7 and Opera aren't capable browsers, because they are. They're loaded with features and have useful interfaces. Their respective developers clearly have spent a lot of time studying what makes Firefox so appealing, particularly in Internet Explorer's case. From an end-user perspective, IE7 feels like Firefox inexplicably modded to include a lot of old IE6 design choices. But it still works. The problem I have with IE7 and Opera is that they lack what, at the end of the day, makes Firefox great: customization.

Firefox is open-source and extensible. Which means if it lacks a feature, or has a feature you like but with less-than-optimal integration, you can write an extension to make Firefox what you want it to be. What I'm getting at is AdBlock. I want to filter out web ads. I use Avant Browser as my secondary browser over IE7 and Opera because it sports integrated, customizable ad blocking. It's not quite as good as Firefox's AdBlock extension, but it's still there. I like Opera's style and the Opera dev team's commitment to creating a capable browser with its own identity, but I hate being force-fed gaudy, bandwidth-hogging ads on every site on the goddamn web.

Firefox and Avant give me a degree of control over the web content I access. Another Firefox extension, Sage, is the best RSS reader I've ever used. It's miles ahead of Opera's feed management, and it's only one of a number of RSS options you get thanks to Firefox's extension system.

Ever since Firefox started hacking away at IE's user base (which was, of course, pretty much everyone), the standard excuse for continuing to use IE has been, "So-and-so won't render properly in such-and-such browser, so I have to use Internet Explorer." Not anymore. Accepted web standards are here, and even the IE team has noticed. There's no longer any reason to use a web browser that isn't simply the best one. And Firefox is the best browser.

One quick disclaimer: as much as I like Apple and appreciate Mac OSX, I don't have a Mac, and I've never used Safari for more than a couple of minutes. If Apple found the time to port Safari for x86 platforms, I'd be first in line to download it. It could be the most revolutionary browser since Mosaic, but I'm way too much into PC gaming to buy a Mac just for the web browser.

iTunes vs. musikCube.

The Battle of Unconventional Capitalization.
by AC - permalink

Bad news for musikCube. I found iTunes's "browser," which duplicates musikCube's killer user interface function of giving you subwindows listing artists and albums above the master track list. This was the big UI feature that immediately showed me how much better musikCube was over older media players like Winamp and CoolPlayer.

The good news for musikCube is that it's still better at highlighting the currently playing track when switching playlists. But iTunes has an answer for that: the "now playing" window at the top of the app has a little button that will highlight the current track. It's an extra click, but that's not a dealbreaker or anything. And if desktop space is at a premium, you'll find musikCube much easier to work with, although iTunes has a mini-mode, and musikCube has a popular plugin called miniPlayer that equals it.

See my last post for more on iTunes vs. musikCube, but I have one more thing to add. musikCube eats up a little less RAM. iTunes pays for its slick interface and instant iTMS connectivity by using more memory. Both players average around 10MB, though I've seen iTunes spike at nearly 30MB. It's rare, but I've seen it happen.

But I have tons of RAM, and you probably do, too. It's hard for me to write off musikCube, because it's so small and simple and, above all, open-source and extensible. But iTunes is a very competent music player. Again, I'm not taking into account iTunes's interface with iTMS here, but even from a purely offline standpoint, it's hard to find a reason not to ditch musikCube unless there are plugins for it you just can't live without.

So there, I've said it. I'm endorsing Goliath over the David I've enjoyed for years. And I hate myself for it. I hope you're happy.

Shocked by AOL.

They've actually done something of value.
by AC - permalink

I was so bored yesterday that I actually decided to pop in one of those AOL CDs I get in the mail every few weeks, instead of chucking it under a passing car on the way back from the mailbox like I usually do. I'd gotten one months ago that had some "War of the Worlds" crap on it, so I decided to have a look at a vanilla AOL CD. I didn't autorun it or launch the setup app, but buried in a subfolder I found an installer for iTunes. I've never wanted to sit through an iTunes download because I don't really have any use for the iTunes Music Store, but I decided to go ahead and install it.

It ain't bad. I have a decent amount of music on my hard drives, considering it all came from my CD collection. It's between 500 and 600 tracks, more than thirty, maybe forty hours. With mostly complete albums and only a handful of individual tracks, mostly from compilation CDs I burned years and years ago, I've been a devout believer in musikCube. It has a really robust interface and fantastic virtual playlist generation. Plus it's open-source and extensible.

iTunes also indexes music to create virtual playlists, but you have to do more of the work yourself than you do with musikCube. But it's generally less buggy, and the equalizer is a lot easier to work with. Visualization is average. As you would expect from an Apple product, the interface is much, much better than Microsoft's competing Windows Media Player. I have Windows Media Center edition, and I still like the Media Center music player, but it's so limited from a power-user perspective that I have pretty much no use for it. If my PC were hooked up to my TV, it would be a different story.

So from a purely offline, non-iTMS perspective, I like iTunes. In fact, I killed a couple hours this afternoon digging up nearly 70 album covers online (cheers, Amazon) and attaching them to my music collection. Just because. But is iTunes good enough to give up on musikCube? I don't think so, but I'll keep tinkering with it.

Holy crap it's hot.

Pimping the temp.
by AC - permalink

So this house has been un-air-conditioned for a week now, and it's getting a little irritating. Last Saturday the fan in the consensor seized up, and we've been getting by with fans and open windows since. It wouldn't be that bad if it would stop being 90 fucking degrees every single afternoon, but this is Memphis and it's summer. There's a window unit in one bedroom, but it's so old all it can really do it slightly cool down that one room if the door is closed. So I've invested in Gatorade and beer, and keeping that on ice helps. Cooking is also a problem, since lighting a small fire in the kitchen is not generally a good idea when it's already 87 in there. So tonight it's MGD and burgers on the grill.

The new ATI drivers I installed recently seem to be pretty effective. I haven't run any benchmarks or anything, but it turns out both Doom 3 and my Source engine games are noticably smoother, and I know the Radeon drivers and Catalyst have been optimized for those engines multiple times since the old set I'd been using.

I've been replaying Doom 3 from the beginning for just the third time, and for some reason I just keep liking this game more each time I play it. Yes, it's repetitive enough that it's tough to take more than about 90 minutes of it per session, but it's an extremely long game by FPS standards, especially considering the crazy detail put into the level design and lighting. And the back third - from Hell onward - really picks up steam. Once you get you accept that long stretches are going to be uninterrupted, undifferentiated corridor-crawling, it's not a bad game.

Episode One and Ghost Recon.

New school vs. old school.
by AC - permalink

I was going to write up a fairly detailed review of Half-Life 2: Episode One tonight, but then I read this review at 2404.org. Just read that, because it's what I would have said, with only a couple of modifications. First, I don't agree that Half-Life 2 was artificially lengthened with the long vehicle sequences. They may feel a little out of place if you've played four or five dozen other shooters, but that doesn't mean those levels don't have their own merits -- and it definitely doesn't mean they aren't fun. Second, I like HL2's weapon load. I think it takes a lot of time to get used to them, but eventually you realize that every one of them is useful throughout the entire game, and the hugely diminished ammo capacity from Half-Life is, in the end, a plus. I also don't have a problem with the "bucket" weapon-selection method, but that's probably because I've spent so much time playing the original Half-Life series and Counter-Strike: Source.

In any case they made a lot of right calls in their Episode One review, so read it if you still haven't decided to get the game. After I finished it, I let it simmer for a couple of days, then plunged back in, and had a much better time with it. I tackled a couple of areas with a completely different strategy, and I'm already kicking around new ideas.

The brilliance of the gravity gun in HL2 and Episode One is how it lets you move around almost anything in preparation for an upcoming fight. You can gather explosive barrels so they're easy to reach for toss-and-bangs when the baddies advance on you, or you can strategically place them for remote detonation via pistol. Or you can move around heavier objects to create a defensive bulwark, funnelling enemies into presighted avenues. This is no tactical shooter, it's simply an action game with an unprecedented amount of depth.

But speaking of tactical shooters, I've just about finished my new campaign in Ghost Recon. I'm up to the last mission, the one at Red Square in Moscow. The depth of this game is just phenomenal, which is probably why it still has an active fan community five years after it was released. This time around I've reversed strategies on a number of missions, moving hard and fast through maps where I had previously had success with stealth, and creeping my way through the missions that had always seemed to call for full-on assaults. I also ended up taking a couple of the standard operatives - a support soldier and a demolitions guy - much deeper into the campaign. The demo tech in particular has been upgraded to the point that his stats are on par with the specialists, and in fact I'm taking him into Moscow on a tank-busting fireteam with Tunney.

I'm really going have fun with this mission. Instead of two versatile fireteams, I'm putting a stealth team of Ramirez and Grey on point, with my demo team of Tunney and Allen following to take out the tanks, and a sniper team, Ibrahim and either Stone or Galinsky on reserve to pick off distant sentries on the push through Red Square. In the past I've always used two teams with OICW-using Jacobs and Cohen leading, each with a sniper and a demo in tow. But what fun is that? If you didn't need more than one demo to clear all the tanks, you could get through that mission with just one team of three guys, and that's hard to justify realistically when you're talking about wiping out thirty or more entrenched enemies.

Besides, Ghost Recon is just more fun when you've got half a dozen armed badasses under your mouse -- especially when a fireteam you've left alone for a while unexpectedly comes under fire and cuts down all the attackers before you can even switch back to them. I love that game.

Can't get enough Half-Life.

Best... franchise... ever.
by AC - permalink

Picked up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 early this morning at Wal-Mart. Officially, I went to pick up a new 20-foot tie-down for Maggie the Abnormally Strong Rottweiller after she broke yet another one last night. Unofficially, I wanted this game. Bad. Good news is, it's all good news. I found a heavy-gauge lead this time, and I don't think our friendly little terror can tear this one apart. Plus, Episode 1, so far, is pretty fucking sweet.

Lately when the gaming itch hits me - which is every day - I've had a yen for the Half-Life series. I played through the Source edition of Half-Life (up to Xen, which everybody loathes for good reason) for just the second time. Once again, I kept wishing I was just playing regular old Half-Life, because the high-def pack that came with Blue Shift simply makes it look better than HL: Source, except for the water and that one part on the cliffside. I haven't let myself play Blue Shift or Opposing Force for a long time, because at some point I'm afraid I'll just get sick of them, and I love 'em too much to let that happen. So I've gone back a couple years and started a new campaign in Ghost Recon. I've said it before, but that really is an all-time classic game for me, especially when you consider its expansion packs, Desert Siege and Island Thunder. You can lose hours and hours to that game without even realizing it.

But getting back to Episode 1. First impression? Alyx is funny. And so well-realized that she seems more real than ever. Her character model and textures have been tweaked slightly, and animation is sharper, quicker, and more varied than in HL2. She flinches and shields her eyes when you shine your flashlight at her, and jokes around when there's a lull in the action. Best example is when you first run across combine-zombies and she calls them the "Zombine," then groans at her own pun. Most importantly, having her tag along very quickly stops feeling like an escort mission, and feels natural and real. I can't stress that point enough.

Although I'm only at roughly the midpoint of Episode 1, Alyx's AI and unexpected interaction has been so good that it actually feels like a co-op game. And I've never said that about any game I've ever played. I know, of course, that she won't seem as real on the second play-through, but this is a Half-Life game. There will be new things to discover.

In fact one of the reasons Half-Life 2 is in my all-time top five is the depth of exploration. The last time I played that game, and it must have been the seventh or eighth time, I found two new areas I'd never come across before in just the first couple hours of the game. The time before, I found two more. Once you know where the lulls in the action are going to be, you can take some time to walk around and explore, maybe gather some crates and barrels, stack 'em up, and see where you can get to. I love that.

Anyway, the HDR in Episode 1 really adds to the game, when compared to Half-Life 2. And I might be wrong, but there seems to have been some optimization done to it, as there seems to be a much smaller framerate hit when it's enabled when compared to Lost Coast. I inadvertantly played through the first section of the game - the part in the Citadel - with Catalyst forcing completely maxed-out settings for AA and AF, and it was still very playable. Reverting to just 8X AF and 4X AA for the next hour made the game silky smooth, even with HDR still on, though at the admittedly low res of 1024x768.

But there is one downside. After installing Episode 1 from the DVD-ROM, I had to wait several hours while I downloaded updates via Steam over dial-up. The retail package is only five days old, but apparently it's so out-of-date that Valve won't let you play it until you've downloaded several hundred MB's worth of updates. That really is irritating if, like me, you drove to a store, pulled cash out of your pocket for the game, and just want to play it already.

Additionally, the retail edition comes with no extras, other than Half-Life 2 Deathmatch and Half-Life 1 Deathmatch: Source, which came with Half-Life 2 Game of the Year Edition and are available over Steam for free anyway if you have even the bare-bones HL2. And Episode 1 is short. Again, I haven't finished it yet, but I hear it's very short, even for just $20. $20 really isn't much for a brand new game, but you have to keep in mind that in the world of PC games, $20 can get you a lot if you're willing to wait. I bought GTA San Andreas on DVD, Call of Duty, Halo, Ghost Recon Gold Edition, Far Cry, and Doom 3 for $20. I got GTA Vice City and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for $10, and Unreal Tournament: 2004 Editors Choice on DVD for $15.

But those were old games. I am incurably addicted to the entire Half-Life franchise, and I needed Episode 1 now. And even after playing just half of it, Episode 1 was worth twenty bucks.

Pacific Assault is iffy.

One step forward, one step back.
by AC - permalink

I saw a copy of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault sitting on a retail shelf for twenty bucks the other day, so I grabbed it. I also saw the Medal of Honor War Chest, which I thought was out of print, for thirty, but I passed. I might have been wrong about that. The War Chest has MoH: Allied Assault, which I already have, plus its two expansion packs, one of which I know is supposed to be really good, and I do want it. Just not for thirty dollars.

Anyway, back to MoH: Pacific Assault. I've been meaning to get this for a while, because Allied Assault is one of my favorite shooters, and I knew from reviews that I trust that it's pretty good, if not great, and makes some interesting and significant gameplay changes to shift more towards the realism side, and that it pushes the Quake III engine much further. After playing the game roughly halfway through, I agree with all that. But I do have some beefs.

First, though, the good stuff. The graphics really are pretty damn nice. I've never seen the Quake III engine, which was already five years old when this game was released two years ago, pushed this far. It actually looks a lot like Far Cry. Not because of the jungle settings so much, but for texture detail, especially in character models and the little detail objects. Textures look so good that at times they fool you into thinking they're bump-mapped and have specular lighting. It looks nothing like Allied Assault or Call of Duty. Pacific Assault is a breakthrough in terms of up-close detail for the Q3 engine, while CoD's expansion United Offensive created the same sense of immersion with massive battle sequences. Both deliver framerates that seem almost unnaturally high on modern hardware considering how good the games look. But that's the genius of the Q3 engine, isn't it?

Which makes me wonder why Pacific Assault doesn't support anti-aliasing out of the box. I couldn't even force it to work via Catalyst, like you can do with older games like Quake III or Half-Life, which were released before AA was a major feature. That means AA is intentionally disabled in Pacific Assault. I assume that's for performance reasons, but still, what the hell? It's the only game I own that won't let you use anti-aliasing. Turns out I'll have to download more than 220MB worth of patches to even have the option of enabling AA at any level, and even then the only options are 1X, 2X, and 16X. Since I generally use 4X and 6X, this is less than helpful. Thanks, EA.

Anyway, Pacific Assault's presentation, the game's "feel," is all nice and polished. One of my favorite little things is the wartime radio station that plays in the background of the main menu mini-map. The cut-scenes are pretty nicely done (better than Far Cry's, anyway), but are a little long and are basically just exposition for a plot that doesn't really exist. They let you get to know the game's main characters - your squad - who stick with you throughout the game. It's a nice touch to elaborate more on persistant squad members, who seem to have their own AI tendencies during a firefight. One of the things I liked about Call of Duty and United Offensive was how a number of missions kept you with the same NPC's, and how they appeared in that game's various episodes (US, British, and Russian). Pacific Assault takes that aspect about as far as I've seen in this type of shooter.

It ain't all ham and jam, however. In Allied Assault and Call of Duty, you can take down enemy soldiers pretty easily with just about any weapon, even the pistols, and one rifle shot is almost always enough. This keeps those games moving along nicely, and it's really satisfying to snapshot a bunch of guys in a row. But in Pacific Assault, it takes way too much to kill the bad guys. Submachine guns like the tommy are so ineffective that even using aim-down-the-sight, which Allied Assault didn't have, doesn't work unless you're less than ten feet away. That makes those weapons pretty much useless, because you're constantly running into situations where you're faced with a dozen or more enemy grunts, spread out behind cover and having no trouble at all hitting you with whatever weapons they may be holding - even pistols. The rifles aren't much more useful. Landing a headshot with a sniper rifle won't take down a guy wearing a helmet. That's just wrong. Is this a game or a training manual for SWAT teams?

It's this balance between realism and, well, fun, that Pacific Assault doesn't get quite right. If you get wounded, there are very, very few medpacks to pick up. Instead you have to call your medic, which you can only do so many times. And he might be busy patching up one of your squadmates, leaving you to find cover before he can help you. Even when he's coming, you might have to cover him from enemy fire. This is good stuff, but adding enemies that are almost unkillable really slows down the game and requires frequent saves and loads.

And that's another issue. Even quickloads take a long, long time. On a fast PC by today's standards, waiting so long for a two-year-old game to load gets irritating real fast. Even starting the game takes too much time, as you're forced to sit through little ads for EA Games, THX, and Intel, then spend a few more seconds reading the game's ESRB rating, and then the main menu has to load.

Pacific Assault does have its moments, though. Again, I haven't finished it yet, but so far it's the less conventional missions I've had the most fun with. Making your way through the listing and burning USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor, carrying wounded soldiers to safety - that's good times. Following the previous Medal of Honor games, you earn medals as you complete the game, but the "hidden objective" medals, like finding that captured airman in Lighting the Torch in Allied Assault, are scattered throughout every mission in Pacific Assault, and are harder to find, adding to the replay value. But some of the missions just don't make you want to replay them. You'll know you're not playing Far Cry, despite the jungle environment, when you suddenly realize you're on a corridor-crawl, leading your team down a very tightly constricted path and running into a half-dozen enemy grunts every forty feet. In fact, you might think you're playing Doom 3 in that respect - not good times.

So Pacific Assault is hit-or-miss for me, at least so far. For $20, I'd say it's probably worth it. On a technical level, it's much more impressive than Allied Assault, and on par, for different reasons, with CoD: United Offensive. But from what I've seen, it's just not as much fun.

IFC brings out my pretentious side.

I should be asleep.
by AC - permalink

I just caught myself watching a movie called Mediterranea for the second time in less than 24 hours. It's an Italian movie shot in 1991, and IFC is showing it. It's about a small group of Italian soldiers stationed and subsequently forgotten about on a tiny, unimportant Greek island in 1941, and it's a kickass little film. Incredibly atmospheric and immersive. It's not a war movie, in fact it's sort of a comedy, but dramatic as well as it follows the lives of the men essentially marooned on this idyllic little island. If you can put up with subtitles, you'll love this movie.

And that's what I like about IFC. Sure, most of the time they show stuff you've never heard of, and occasionally they air Vincent Gallo movies, and I'd kill a man if it meant I never had to sit through another Vincent Gallo shitstorm. But IFC also shows films like Reservoir Dogs, uncut and letterboxed, which is awesome. And they also go international, and when they do, it's generally a masterpiece, something we would otherwise never see in America.

In fact, the main reason IFC is on my DirecTV channel list is for the Zatoichi movies, which they run every weekend, without fail. There are at least a dozen Zatoichi movies, and they're all fucking awesome. If you've never seen one, just put it on IFC on a Saturday. They center on a blind masseur in feudal Japan, a blind masseur who is also a master swordsman. Most of the movies follow the same basic plot of A Fistfull of Dollars. Every film, every single one, is beautiful in every way a movie can be beautiful. From the sound to the cinematography to the acting to the editing, these movies are masterpieces. Any one of them is "desert island" material. Again, they're only for people who can put up with subtitles. Dubbing sucks all the life out of foreign films, literally.

And I might as well point out that I've been sucked totally back into Star Trek recently. The Next Generation hooked me during its first season, and I became a total Trek nerd for years afterward. After the death of Enterprise I slacked off and kind of forgot about it all, but G4 and Spike air Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and even the original series so often that I've been pulled back in, and I don't really watch anything else on TV but Trek now, except The Daily Show, Sportscenter, Family Guy, and anything on Adult Swim that isn't anime. DS9 has always been my favorite series, and I wish those series box sets cost less, because I love the story arc of the last few seasons, but there's no way in hell I'll pay fifty or sixty bucks for one fucking season of a TV show, no matter how good it is. Probably. Maybe. I really like that show...

I love Valve, but enough already.

Hey, it's another patch. And another. And... wait.
by AC - permalink

So here's my problem. To patch, or not to patch? Does it matter? Do you have to patch? It depends on the game, and the patch, and the developer's commitment to releasing patches that mean something. I'll give you two examples of why this whole issue makes my head hurt.

I have UT 2004 Editor's Choice. I'm not sure what build of UT2K4 I have, because there's no easy way to know, but I know it's been patched since my version. I've been trying to find the latest patch for the latest retail release, and I can't. The official site has this one patch for me, but the link is broken, like every other link on that half-assed site. Looking around at various game and software oriented download hubs led me to three different patches, all claiming to be the latest. On one site, the link was dead, and on three more all the servers were tied up for up to half an hour. So I gave up on the whole thing, because my UT2K4, ultimately, is working just fucking fine anway.

The other side of this issue is Valve Software. Look, I love Valve. They gave me Half-Life, and Half-Life 2, and Counter-Strike: Source, and more. But they also game me Steam. Steam means if there's a patch for one of my Valve games, I can't play that game unless I download the patch. No matter what it is, or how big it is, or whether I'm on dial-up and never play online and don't necessarily want to spend two days downloading a patch that will mean nothing to me, I can't play the games I've already spent $30 or $40 or $50 on until I download the latest patch that Valve thinks I should. Suddenly, I don't like Valve so much.

Some of the more recent patches for Half-Life 2 have gone a long, long way towards reducing, and at some points eliminating that infamous stutter. The game became quicker and more immersive. In addition, patches were forced on me that gave a few CS:Source maps HDR, and it looked good. I also downloaded, via Steam, the demos for Darwinia and Rag Doll Kung-fu and Shadowgrounds, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Project Gordon and other misc. freebies I get for buying HL2 retail. This all took days and days and days of background downloading over dial-up. But I did it, and thanks for the opportunity to download stuff in random increments, Valve, because it's very helpful.

But why was I forced to download the latest Steam engine update that has not only undone all the previous patches' effort to reduce that stuttering problem, but made it worse than ever? Half-Life 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and now it lags and stutters so badly that half the cutscene NPS dialog is unintelligible, and the game seems to randomly stop and start, as if it's loading new content into memory. But it isn't, because I've tweaked HL2 to use half a Gig of my RAM, and I know from playing the game for the last several months that this is plenty of damned RAM. It's this newest patch, one that I never wanted, and certainly would have surfed around looking for user feedback on whether it was worth it or not before downloading on my own.

Here's the main issue. If you release a game, it's out. It'd better work. If it doesn't, you have to make sure your users know that there's a patch that will make it better, and where they can find it. You can't just keep throwing out patches, then wait and see how it works for us before forcing more patches on us in case it's shit.

Are you listening, Valve? We are not your play-testers. We are your end-users. We've already paid good money for your games, and that exonerates us from unwillingly beta-testing for you.

As for Atari and Epic, fix your goddamned web site. Three quarters of the links to the MSU contest winner sites are broken, many due to improperly-written HTML code. And all the official download links throw up a tiny pop-up window that either goes nowhere or links to Atari's main site, which is less than helpful.

Look, I just want to play games. It's why I bought a fast PC and spent even more upgrading it. Obviously, it's why I've spent so much on games for it. Is it really too much to ask that they work? I know everyone's PC is different, but if you're going to release patches, tell me where they are, and for fuck's sake, test them. Don't make me your lab rat, and don't force me to download patches for games I already own.