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.