You take the bad to get to the good.
by AC - permalink
I'm taking a break from GTA this weekend to get back in touch with all my first-person shooters. I started by finally getting around to downloading Half-Life 2: Lost Coast via Steam. With dial-up, that's a long, long process, so we'll come back to that. After getting that going on Thursday morning I started playing through the Call of Duty expansion pack United Offensive again. Compared to more recent games like GTA San Andreas and even Half-Life 2 and Quake 4, United Offensive is still a damned good looking shooter. At 1280x1024 I can max out all the AA and AF settings, and I continually stop to look around at all the pretties. The Quake III engine is just one of the all-time great shooter engines.
Anyway, I also decided to revisit Halo PC. I started over with a new profile, on a lower difficulty setting. I dropped it to Normal, not because it was too hard, but because it was too hard with a 70-degree FOV with those crappy Halo guns. I'm sorry, but most of those weapons are all nifty and whatever, but they're inaccurate and too short-ranged. So I finally got around to looking for an FOV mod, and thirty seconds later I had this FOV/third-person mod I found at Filecloud. It's just a little executable you launch before running Halo. It lets you toggle between the default FOV and one you select in the app (like 90, the gold standard since, I dunno, fucking Doom), and also lets you switch to third-person with on-the-fly camera adjustment. Finally, Halo for PC is playable and fun. Still too resource-heavy, but a resolution like 1152 is good enough, I guess.
Eventually, after almost three days of off-and-on downloading I had Lost Coast. So I launched it, and... Error: "Failed to lock vertex buffer in CMeshDX8::LockVertexBuffer." Then, "The instruction at '0x241fe49b' referenced memory at 0x0dacf438'. The memory could not be 'read'." Oh, that's cute. It's actually almost the same error I've been getting when trying to run Half-Life: Source. So I checked the Steam support site and got a long list of fixes I'm not going to try, because I know enough about this shit to know they won't work. At the bottom, though, was this:
by AC - permalink
I'm taking a break from GTA this weekend to get back in touch with all my first-person shooters. I started by finally getting around to downloading Half-Life 2: Lost Coast via Steam. With dial-up, that's a long, long process, so we'll come back to that. After getting that going on Thursday morning I started playing through the Call of Duty expansion pack United Offensive again. Compared to more recent games like GTA San Andreas and even Half-Life 2 and Quake 4, United Offensive is still a damned good looking shooter. At 1280x1024 I can max out all the AA and AF settings, and I continually stop to look around at all the pretties. The Quake III engine is just one of the all-time great shooter engines.
Anyway, I also decided to revisit Halo PC. I started over with a new profile, on a lower difficulty setting. I dropped it to Normal, not because it was too hard, but because it was too hard with a 70-degree FOV with those crappy Halo guns. I'm sorry, but most of those weapons are all nifty and whatever, but they're inaccurate and too short-ranged. So I finally got around to looking for an FOV mod, and thirty seconds later I had this FOV/third-person mod I found at Filecloud. It's just a little executable you launch before running Halo. It lets you toggle between the default FOV and one you select in the app (like 90, the gold standard since, I dunno, fucking Doom), and also lets you switch to third-person with on-the-fly camera adjustment. Finally, Halo for PC is playable and fun. Still too resource-heavy, but a resolution like 1152 is good enough, I guess.
Eventually, after almost three days of off-and-on downloading I had Lost Coast. So I launched it, and... Error: "Failed to lock vertex buffer in CMeshDX8::LockVertexBuffer." Then, "The instruction at '0x241fe49b' referenced memory at 0x0dacf438'. The memory could not be 'read'." Oh, that's cute. It's actually almost the same error I've been getting when trying to run Half-Life: Source. So I checked the Steam support site and got a long list of fixes I'm not going to try, because I know enough about this shit to know they won't work. At the bottom, though, was this:
14. Put this CVAR in your HL2 launch properties and see if it helps:
-window +mat_forcehardwaresync 0
It helped. It's enough to get the app running, anyway. I can then just go to the video options and set it back to full-screen at whatever resolution I want. So I played through the first 45 minutes or so of Half-Life: Source, because it's still so damn fun even after, what, eight years? I only played through Lost Coast once, with HDR on full, because I know it was really all about the HDR. Unfortunately, this shit monitor I'm trying to use now made it way to dark to really appreciate. I got the odd sensation of appreciating how cool it should probably look, but doesn't quite. The more muted HDR in CounterStrike: Source's de_dust looks a lot better. But visuals aside, there were some really interesting gameplay moments in there that I didn't see in Half-Life 2, and have me looking forward to Episode I more than ever.
Oh, and I also downloaded the Darwinia demo via Steam. Again, it's overly dark with this monitor and the app has no brightness settings, but I played through the tutorial, and it's just like nothing else I've ever played. Of course, the last RTS I played was Centurion: Defender of Rome for the Sega Genesis, so I might have missed something. The entire game is under 40MB, but I'm not yet sure it's actually worth $20 to download.
And one last note. Apparently I'm still in my compulsive DVD buying mode, because last week I picked up Jarhead, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for no real reason. I used to have a copy of Master and Commander and I thought I had it out of my system, but no. I just love that movie. It's in my all-time top ten, I think. I put off buying 9/11 for a long, long time, because I knew it would just piss me off. All of Michael Moore's movies are terrific, but they piss you off because you wonder why someone had to make a movie to point out all this awful shit that's happening right under our noses. Well, except for Canadian Bacon. That pissed me off because it was just kinda stupid. I bought Jarhead because I just love war movies that don't actually glamorize war, and I think Jarhead could be this generation's Full Metal Jacket. Sure, it would've been better with R. Lee Ermey, but we can still get our Ermey fix with Mail Call on the History Channel.
By the way, the Title tag on his web site, rleeermy.com, says, "Welcome to R. Lee Ermey.com NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 25!" That's fucking awesome.
And one last note. Apparently I'm still in my compulsive DVD buying mode, because last week I picked up Jarhead, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for no real reason. I used to have a copy of Master and Commander and I thought I had it out of my system, but no. I just love that movie. It's in my all-time top ten, I think. I put off buying 9/11 for a long, long time, because I knew it would just piss me off. All of Michael Moore's movies are terrific, but they piss you off because you wonder why someone had to make a movie to point out all this awful shit that's happening right under our noses. Well, except for Canadian Bacon. That pissed me off because it was just kinda stupid. I bought Jarhead because I just love war movies that don't actually glamorize war, and I think Jarhead could be this generation's Full Metal Jacket. Sure, it would've been better with R. Lee Ermey, but we can still get our Ermey fix with Mail Call on the History Channel.
By the way, the Title tag on his web site, rleeermy.com, says, "Welcome to R. Lee Ermey.com NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 25!" That's fucking awesome.
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