I think I've settled on a desktop.

Completing my Boring Post Trifecta, here's what my desktop will look like for the foreseeable future:

Windowblinds theme is Rapture XP, Rainmeter configs are MKG Plus and Black and Red, and the wallpaper, I found on Deviantart. "Darkness" by Amystikal.

Anyway, Jenny just got home from school. We're watching NCIS. Or at least she is, as I'm headed off to bed. End of post starts.... now.

Roll-style updated.

Okay, so now this is how I roll:

I found that wallpaper on DeviantArt months ago, but I replaced a Deftones album cover with a pic of Jenny. I changed the Rainmeter fonts. Running WinAmp instead of Xion. Moved the two quicklaunch areas a bit. Oh, and the weather changed, apparently. It's "fair" now. Yeah, I'm bored.

Still, looks decent, no?

This is how I roll.

Now that I have a 21-inch CRT, I have acres of desktop space to play with, and numerous resolutions to choose from. So I've been playing around with some relatively advanced desktop customization to take advantage of my hardware. As of ten minutes ago, my workspace looks like this:

It's a combination of Windowblinds 5.51, Rainmeter, and Xion. An hour ago, it looked completely different; as I said, I'm still trying to settle on something I'm comfortable using all the time. I tend to waver between an austere, minimalist feel (as shown) and a much more organic, stylish, natural look (like the one I had set up a few minutes ago). I'll probably end up with a couple of configurations that I can quickly switch between.

By the way, if you're still reading this self-indulgent pointlessness, congratulations, you're me.

Sometimes a loss is still a win.

Yes, I'm still a homer.
by AC - permalink

The new-look Griz lost their season opener Wednesday night, and I haven't been more encouraged by a loss since they were robbed in Detroit a few years ago during the Hubie era. They played their asses off, and could easily have beaten the defending champion Spurs were it not for some new team chemistry-caused turnovers, questionable time out management, and bad officiating down the stretch. I don't really blame the refs for the latter, as the Spurs are notorious for browbeating ref crews into giving them calls, and Wednesday night it was no different. The San Antonio Floppers Spurs left the Forum with a win, but the Griz earned a highly documented moral victory, taking an elite team to the wire. Not bad for the team with last season's fewest wins.

Darko was awesome. Rudy was solid. Lowry was fearless. Pau, Damon, and Miller showed why they deserve their new Team Captain badges. It was a terrific game, and the first thought I had when it was over was that if these guys play this hard this season, they're going to win a lot of games. This is a heavily-overhauled team, and the lineups that played Wednesday have really never played together before other than in practices. As the season progresses, they will only get better. If they started the season by nearly beating an elite, Western Conference powerhouse, they may be a lot better than even the most optimistic of us thought they could be.

Moving on, I have a lot of work to do this weekend. I tried to get way ahead in my web programming course by finishing my second test a week early, but I ran into a couple of doc-level sub-classes I've never heard of before. I'm positive we never went over this in class, and I can't even find anything similar on the web. I wanted to get this thing done because I have a huge amount of PERL to write, and it's incredibly time-consuming. I should probably be working on it now, but I'm just too tired. The only reason I'm up so late is I'm waiting to see a friend on channel 5 at 4am. She sent out a text message reminding me of it, and I made a mental note to TiVo it. Then I made another mental note to buy a TiVo, but I never got around to it.

I guess I'll fill the time with some gaming. Taking the advice of Koroush Ghazi of TweakGuides.com, I decided to move my cache file (virtual memory) to my secondary hard drive and increase it from 1.5GB to 2.5GB, and it seems to be working. I haven't run any really system-taxing games yet, but Unreal Tournament 2004 ECE and Call of Duty 2 (in DX7 mode) have been flying along without any hitches. I'm going to jump back into Far Cry and Half-Life 2 to see if there's any difference there.

More thoughts on Tomb Raider: Anniversary

It's good. There, now you don't have to read all this.
by AC - permalink

I've put in some more time with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and I realized pretty quickly that it's a damned addictive game. It's actually hard to stop playing it. Most of this is probably because it's my first play-through, so I'm having to figure out all the puzzles (lot's of "Oh, I see" moments). Very few -- if any -- of the puzzles I've seen so far have been lifted straight from the original. I'm in the early stages of the second episode, taking my time and looking around a lot.

The combat is still a little wonky. I was more than halfway through the t-rex battle by the time I finally started to get a feel for the "adrenaline dodge" mechanic. In crowded quarters, against multiple enemies, it's even trickier. In fact, other than the rex fight, I think I've only managed to pull it off three times. Then again, like the original, the majority of the gameplay is exploration and solving environmental puzzles, which is definitely a positive. But there's a bright side to the combat, courtesy of Dragon's Lair: several cut-scenes feature quick-reaction controls, where you'll have to stab a direction to dodge an attack. It took me off guard at first -- I got my face torn off by a velociraptor (though judging by its size, I think it may actually have been a utahraptor). It's a new gameplay element for me, but I like it, and I think it bridges TRA's engine-driven cut-scenes with the gameplay brilliantly.

On the graphics front, the motion blur is becoming less distracting, and it's worth it for the distance fogging effect that makes the larger areas just stunning. In fact, I'm more and more impressed by the visuals the more I play. There's a slight bloom effect in open-air areas that works beautifully. TRA is so resource-light that I can run with all the eye candy enabled and a little anti-aliasing with 8X anisotropy at well over 60 FPS. It's just a really well-optimized engine, because it still looks great even without any bump-mapping (if there is some, I haven't seen it). Water effects are subtle and realistic, both from above and below. Poseidon's key room in St. Francis' Folly is particularly notable for that reason. Lara has a ton of animations that are generally pretty seamless, and her character model doesn't lose any quality the closer the camera gets to her.

TRA is also notable for its load times, or lack thereof. New levels and saved games load exceptionally quickly, and not just as compared to recent games. I'm talking three to four seconds, better than Quake III, and for the record, that game is eight years old. It's a far cry from games like Far Cry, or Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Quake 4, where loading a new map can take upwards of twenty seconds, and even loading a quicksave can take as long as five or six. While TRA has no quicksave function, checkpoints are numerous, and if you die or take a wrong step soon after finding one, it takes only moments you quit your current game and continue from the last via the main menu. More evidence that this new engine is just brilliant.

Digressing completely, I want to mention a work-around for Half-Like 2: Episode One that seems to be working, though I'm not terribly happy about it. After beating HL2 with only a few crashes by, apparently, unloading WindowBlinds, I decided to try my luck with HL2 E1. First try, I watched the opening cinematic, Dog pulled me from the rubble, and it crashed. Classic looping-sound crash. I noticed a texture setting that was different in my HL2 and HL2 E1 config files, so I changed it, completely syncing up the settings for the two games, and tried again. This time I got a looping-sound crash during the black screen before the cinematic even started. Lovely.

I didn't want to do it, but I tried running the game in DirectX 8.1 mode (as opposed to 9.0c) and it works. There's no bump-mapping, which is okay except when pointing your flashlight at things in the dark; Alyx in particular looks downright creepy. There's also no HDR, although bloom works, and Source HDR is so system-taxing that I tend to just use bloom anyway. Other than that, the game looks just fine, although running in DX 8.1 mode means the graphics settings reset themselves every launch, so you have to reset resolution and just about every advanced setting each time you start the game. But that only takes about thirty seconds.

As an added bonus, with no bump-mapping the game runs at what seems like nearly double the framerate (I was playing with v-sync enabled, and didn't run any benchmarks). Just lightning quick, even in big, complex areas with a lots of light sources, and even during combat in those areas. It's a trade-off, and may be worth it if you prefer high framerates to having every possible graphical extra turned up.

The bottom line is that I was able to play through the entire game without a crash, and that's kickass. Alright, almost the entire game. For what I think was the third consecutive time, it crashed during the train ride at the very end of the game, immediately before the citadel blew itself to hell. I don't know what that's about, because it used to work fine. Whatever.

UPDATED: June 23, 1:00am-ish

How to not crash the Source engine.

Are you kidding?
by AC - permalink

After putting it off and putting it off, after playing all the way through nearly every game I have, I finally gave in and just had to try to play some Half-Life 2. I love this game. It's one of my favorite shooters ever, but the instability that seems native to the otherwise brilliant Source engine makes it hard for me to even launch it. I know it's the engine and not just the game because Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life: Source have the same problems. Source games have crashed my PC more spectacularly than any games I've ever played. But I may have found the problem.

Before starting another HL2 campaign, my first with my new CPU and PSU, I tried, yet again, to troll through the Valve support site and forums for some overlooked magical cure-all. In the middle of this year-old post, I noticed the following:

"Tuneup WinStyler Theme Service has been found to cause a crash with the Steam client application and WindowBlinds may cause crashes with Source games."

It can't be, I think to myself. WindowBlinds? Seriously? I've been using WindowBlinds for almost a decade. I'm a registered user. I paid twenty goddamn dollars for WB 5 (now 5.5), I look for new themes literally every day. I've never had it interfere with any game I've ever played. But I unloaded WB, shut down a couple of iTunes-related running processes that I've never been happy with (ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe [I don't even have a fucking iPod]), and launched the game. And I played for two hours and it didn't even blink. Later in the day, after a reboot, I went back into HL2 and played for about 15 minutes before it crashed, and once again locked up my PC in the process. Then I realized WB is in my startup. I rebooted, unloaded WB again, and started HL2. I've been playing for over an hour.

This is insane. "Game freeze or crash with looping sounds" has got to be the most common Source issue ever, and of all things, I can fix it by disabling WindowBlinds? What the fuck? Obviously, I'll keep playing the game, and I'll update if anything else happens (like a crippling crash with no obvious cause).

Moving on. Seems Ars Technica agrees with pretty much all my complaints about the new Windows-compatible Safari 3 beta. They also raise an interesting question: if Apple is hoping apps like Safari (and iTunes) will sway Windows users toward switching to Macs, this is not the way to do it. Sure, Safari behaves on Windows just like it does on a Mac. But it's weird and inconsistent with the rest of my OS. That makes it annoying, not attractive. And releasing it with at least two downright dangerous security flaws is not especially compatible with Mac OS's image as the most secure mainstream operating system on the market. Don't get me wrong, gaming aside, I'd love to have a Mac as a second computer. But I think I'd rather run Firefox or Camino as my main browser.

The San Andreas sweet spot.

I love it when hardware and software meet in the middle.
by AC - permalink

I think I may have finally found the perfect set-up for GTA San Andreas for my PC. Before upgrading my CPU, something about the way the game handled the in-game shadow and fog effects forced me to run with the "visual fx quality" set to low to get over 45 fps at any resolution. It's probably the 1MB L2 cache, but whatever the reason (and I don't really care), with my new 4000+ I can hover right around 60fps with any fx quality setting. Unfortunately, my cheap and rather shitty monitor can only manage a 60Hz refresh rate at 1280x1024, which makes enabling vertical sync, which I almost always do in all my games, not very effective, as the framerate keeps jumping back to 45.

But I found a lovely solution. In a game like San Andreas, with rather low-quality textures and low-poly models, dropping to 1152x864 makes no difference at all during gameplay. You do lose some clarity and aliasing becomes more pronounced, but the upside is my monitor can hit 75Hz at 1152, which means I can turn of v-sync and get very little noticeable tearing because the framerate, even with that visual fx setting turned all the way up to "very high," stays well over 60fps almost all the time now. The only slow-downs are in the middle of Las Venturas, for whatever reason, but even then it's only in the 45- to 60-fps range.

To sum up. In-game, all settings maxed, except resolution at 1152x864, and AA at "1," which means 2x. This is very low, obviously, but moving up to 4x doesn't look much better and it's dramatically slower. Hardware side, anisotropy is at 8x, and refresh rate forced to 75Hz (after checking that my monitor can support said refresh at said res). End result: seamless framerate way over 60 90% of the time with virtually no evident tearing, and no jarring fps switches from 60 to 45 to 30 and back, while the game looks damned good compared to the console versions. And keep in mind, high framerates means easier gameplay.

I should have bought a new CPU a long time ago.

Blogged with Flock

Living with a working PC.

Shouldn't something be going horribly wrong?
by AC - permalink

A week after installing my new CPU, its cooler, and my new power supply, I'm adjusting to life with a PC I don't have to constantly monitor and mollycoddle. I've been watching my CPU, GPU, and ambient temps closely, and finally felt comfortable enough to run closed-boxed for several hours this morning. I'm still popping the case open and employing the desk fan when running games, as it still lowers the GPU temp by a good 10 to 20C under load, and my vidcard, running solely of the PCI-e slot's power, doesn't have much of a fan. The good news, though, is that the new AMD 4000+ CPU has made for some noticable improvements in some of my games over the old 3500+ chip.

I've seen the most gains with GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2. They both hover right around 60fps at high resolutions now with all the bells 'n whistles on, which means annoying drops to 45 and 30fps with v-sync on. My cheap monitor can only handle 60Hz at 1280x1024, but a sudden brainwave led me to try running them at 1152x864 with a forced 75Hz with no v-sync, and they look fantastic. This doesn't work for slower-paced games, like Doom 3, when the tearing is much more pronounced, but with my new CPU it's even more rock-solid over 60fps, so it still looks badass.


Going back to GTA, though, I did a little more research into the LOD issue I was having with Vice City, and eventually I came across this thread at PlanetGTA, which pointed to this thread at the DriverHeaven.net forums. And as unlikely as it seems, altering the shortcut to run in Win98 compatibility mode worked perfectly. Unfortunately, while I'm in love with Vice City for its ambiance and music, San Andreas makes the control scheme and mission layout feel frustrating and limited. But whatever, I only paid ten bucks for it.

Not to digress completely, but I want to mention the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, which I bought last week. It's fucking awesome. If you've heard With Teeth, it's sort of like that, only much more awesome. And it... well, it's hard to say this about a NIN disc, but it's got a groove to it. Not a groove on par with something like Definitive Swim, but it's definitely the most accessible NIN album since Broken. I still think The Fragile is the best NIN LP ever, but Year Zero is now easily third behind The Downward Spiral.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Halo, Half-Life, headaches.

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:

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.

Work, sleep, and GTA

In that order.
by AC - permalink

So I haven't been able to put aside much time for the blog lately. Somehow all my conscious free time has been sucked into a black hole called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I knew it was supposed to be good on the PS2, but nothing, not even GTA Vice City, prepared me for how all-consuming the PC version of San Andreas would be. It just pulls in your entire life and leaves your brain with nothing but spinning maps of Los Santos and Red County and San Fierro, etc. I got my first GTA: SA girlfriend up to 100%, while my real-life girlfriend -- let's pretend for a moment that I have one -- is left wondering why doing drive-by's is such a great third-date activity.

That 30fps problem was caused by the Frame Limiter in-game setting. It sounds like a vsync setting, but it actually caps the game at 30fps. Which is fucking insane. It's 2006, and I have 256MB of vidram, and I absolutely refuse to play any game at 30fps. Uncapping that, and hardware-forcing 4xAA and 16xAF still gives me over 60fps, so suck on that, Rockstar North. I mean, they're Scots and my people by blood, but come on. I want to kick 'em all in the neck for that shit.

Anyway. A developer-release alpha of Firefox 2.0 was released last week. Don't install it unless you're serious about beta testing and know that this bears virtually no resemblance to what 2.0 final will be. Similarly, don't use Internet Explorer 7.0 beta for any reason at all. It's feature-incomplete as well, but also sports some major security vulnerabilities and can break explorer. I tried to use it once, and it broke my ISP's proprietary dialer software. The latest word is that it won't integrate itself into explorer and will function like any other stand-alone browser (like Firefox or Opera). Frankly, I think that's a load of bullshit. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I'm just going by Microsoft's track record.

I've dropped both Firefox and Opera on the POS box at work and started using Avant Browser. So far it's been flawless. Just to recap, it's an old IBM Pentium III rig with 64MB of RAM running Win98, and as far as I can tell, it's never been reformatted. Installing AB definitely helped extend it's useful life, and I mean that literally. Another couple weeks of forcing that fucking thing to run Firefox, or even IE, and I would have thrown it into the goddamn dumpster as hard as I could. You have no idea how close I've come to that, or how many times.

I don't really have any new DVD's or games on my radar at this point. Thinking about ordering System of a Down's Mezmerize and Hypnotize, but that's it. GTA III is just ten bucks, but I've got more than enough GTA than I can deal with as it is.

Halo is overrated.

Another console-to-PC port? Muy, muy idiota.

by AC - permalink

I finally got around to grabbing the last, battered copy of Call of Duty: United Offensive off the shelf from the Walmart up the street before it was packed off with the other overstock, and for no particular reason I went ahead and picked up Halo PC (also $20). So far I'm not particularly impressed. I beat United Offensive pretty much right away, not because it's so much shorter than Halo (which it is, of course), but because it's just so much faster-paced and more fun to play. Halo has been... underwhelming.

I'm not that far into it, and it's not bad. It's a decent PC shooter. Graphically it's not quite on par with, say, Quake III Arena, which, for the record, is eight years old. Gameplay reminds me of Quake IV, or a spacey, low-rent Half-Life. Art direction and design is original and looks cool, but the big outdoor environments feel artificially constricted. Nearly every metal surface seems to have a shader on it, which is good or bad, depending on how you look at it. There's supposedly a lot of bump-mapping at high detail levels, but I've yet to see any evidence of it. The game itself clearly has high production values and looks nice and polished. It's the presentation that sucks.

That's because everything about Halo PC feels like a console game, from the not-even-close default key bindings to the fact that the newly-printed retail copy I bought contained the original, unpatched version of the game. Virtually every legit review I read said the controls were translated perfectly, but really, there are a lot of issues: the x-axis mouse sensitivity drops when strafing; the FOV is severely limited, forcing my mouse speed up even higher; vehicle control is primitive and needlessly restrictive compared to newer shooters like Far Cry and Half-Life 2.

And it's not just the controls. I know this game is a notorious system hog, but seriously, I've got a Gig of RAM, a CPU rated at 3500 MHz, and a 256MB PCI-e vidcard with 16 pixel pipes, and the v-sync chugs down to 30 FPS when a fair amount of geometry has to be drawn, even with no special lighting or particle effects active. Granted, I've got everything turned up high, but at just 1280x960 and only 2xAA and 8xAF, I should get more from a three-year-old game. It's just a poor job of optimizing an existing game engine for a new platform, and that's especially disappointing coming from Gearbox, who handled the transition. These guys brought us Opposing Force and Blue Shift, expansion packs so good that they did the impossible and actually made the original Half-Life better.

I'm not saying Halo PC isn't playable. It still runs well enough -- if it runs at all. Microsoft's support database for Halo is huge. Not because they're being so thorough, but because the game has so many issues. Most of the fixes are so complicated that an average user probably couldn't even be talked through them. I personally couldn't even start the game out-of-the-box. I spent a few hours tracking down a fix before noticing the auto-update utility in Halo's program directory (no shortcut is created for it). The latest patch fixed the game for me, but if the support forums are any indication, not for a lot of other people.

So I don't know. I haven't actually decided if I'm going to keep this one or not (also $20 at Walmart: GTA San Andreas and Lego Star Wars). I'll play through another couple hours and see if it gets much better. I'm very aware that I've played virtually nothing but first-person PC shooters since about 1999, and the "problems" I'm having with the game can easily be considered "quirks" that I just need to get adjusted to. But for me, here's why Halo is disappointing: it was originally released for the Xbox in 2001 and was ported to the PC in 2003. I have a number of PC shooters that were released before or around the same time as Halo that are simply better games, at least in my opinion (Quake III, the original Half-Life series, Ghost Recon, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty). Halo has repeatedly been put into the pantheon of all-time great shooters by the gaming media, but I'm just not getting it.

Grand Theft Auto: Addict

I finally get it.
by AC - permalink

So I ran by the local Walmart on my way home from work this morning to pick up Halo PC. I intentionally left home with only 25 bucks in my wallet because I missed a couple days work this week with chronic migrains and I didn't want to tempt myself with the $40 Call of Duty 2 (see the comments to this post). But there were no more Halo's. Walmart was Halo-less. I wavered for a while, tempted to buy the United Offensive expansion pack for Call of Duty, but I've been dealing with some visual anomalies with Quake 3 Engine games lately, and I just didn't want to deal with that. So I picked up GTA: Vice City for ten bucks.

First things first. I stand by my stance that the GTA games look like shit on the consoles. I will never back off that point. On the PC, however, the visuals get upgraded to "mediocre." At 1280x1024x32, even the max draw distance is way too short, models are blocky, and buildings are all blurry and rectangular. But force AA to 6 and AF to 16, and things look up somewhat. The framerate stays at 60-plus on my box (AMD64 3500+, 1GB 3200 DDR, ATI X800 XL 256MB), gameplay is still tight and fluid. There are a lot of little things that annoy me about GTR, but I'm fucked if it still isn't pretty damned addictive. For the first couple hours I honestly didn't know what was going on or what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing, but it was still way too much fun.

I'm still planning on posting complete rundowns of how I've optimized performance for all those newer games on this midrange rig. I might save it for when that new Google pages web service goes live, because it should allow for about a hundred megs of free webspace for screenshots, etc.

Oh, and I picked up Troy used on DVD the other day. Not bad, but not great. Still worth owning for great scenes from Peter O'Toole. Also, General Veers is in it. Look for him, he's in there.

Opera is better than Firefox. Or not.

If your PC sucks, do we have the browser for you.
by AC - permalink

At work I'm forced to use this tired, overworked, under-serviced old Celeron box with Win98 and 64Mb RAM. It generates a DOSkey error in post, the PS2 ports randomly fail, and BSOD's are a regular feature. And it just won't run Firefox.

It seems like a memory leak to me. Running more than one tab for ten minutes or so, sometimes less, bogs down the system more and more until it's unable even to restart. It has IE5.5, but this is 2006, and I'm not using fucking IE5.5. But it turns out Opera runs like a champ. Sure, there's nothing to be done about all the massive banner ads slammed all over everywhere that AdBlock had erased from my memory, but it works.

It's nice, because I installed Opera 8.5 on my new PC two weeks ago and haven't opened it since. I like Opera. I just don't generally need it for anything.

I went out intending to spend twenty bucks on Call of Duty or Halo for PC, but I went ahead and spend fifty for Half-Life 2 GOTY edition. Fuck it, why not. It took around an hour and a half to install and download all the damn Steam updates and patches (dial-up), but the game runs a lot better than I expected with that onboard X200 IGP. I turned the res down to 800x600 and lowered the texture quality one notch to medium, and I'm getting a framerate consistantly between 45 and 60. That's with geometric detail, shadows, water, etc. all on high, but without anisotropic filtering or blooms. In other words, it's visually slightly better than the Xbox version of Half-Life 2, with tighter controls. Which is all I wanted in the first place.

I know the Source engine lets the CPU do a lot of the heavy lifting, which probably explains the decent performance despite my vidRAM bottleneck (my T6425 came with an AMD64 3500+). A patch was released just this week optimizing HL2 and the Source engine for AMD64 CPU's, which should help even more. And I'm leaning towards an ATI Radeon X800 GTO-based midrange vidcard. The goal is to max out all or most the gfx options in HL2, Doom 3, etc. at somewhere between 1024x768 and 1280x960. That's good enough for me.