Van Gundy can eat it.

Ping-pong balls are overrated.
by AC - permalink

Tonight the hometown Griz played probably the best game I've seen them play all year, gutting out a win in Los Angeles over the Lakers, effectively containing and frustrating the hell out of Kobe Bryant in the process. The Griz outscored LA by 17 in the second and third quarters and held off a charge in the closing seconds, finalizing the win via a beautiful Pau-on-Kobe block as time expired. Memphis walked into the gym without Mike Miller, their second-leading scorer at over 18 a game, starting point Damon Stoudamire, and backup point Chucky Atkins, and somehow still managed to put together a smart, cohesive, intelligent game both offensively and on the defensive end.

Junior Harrington, who played all 48 minutes, and rookie Tarence Kinsey had career nights, and along with Rudy Gay and Pau Gasol they flat-out embarrassed the Lakers tonight. I watch every televised Griz game I can -- I have since they moved to Memphis in 2001 -- and the reason I'm mentioning this one is because of what angry dwarf Jeff Van Gundy said recently. Apparently he thinks it'd be a swell idea if all 30 NBA teams got an equal shot at the draft lottery. Not for some noble, even remotely thought-out reason, but because he thinks this will discourage teams from throwing games in an effort to finish the season with the league's worst record, which would give you a one-in-four shot at the top draft pick. Yeah, he's kind of a dumbass.

I'm not going into all the reasons why making only the 14 teams who missed the playoffs eligible for the lottery, or how much of an asshole this comment makes a guy who has inherited as a coach two number one picks over the course of his career (Yao Ming and Patrick Ewing). I just want to point out that the Griz are currently in the unfortunate position of being in a race for that number one draft position with Boston, Charlotte, and Atlanta. And tonight an undermanned Memphis team fought and clawed their way to an upset win on the road over the heavily favored Lakers, starring a a guy named Bryant who's averaged more than 50 points the last five games, including a 60-point game against the Grizzlies a week ago.

Hey Jeff, guess what? NBA teams don't tank games on purpose. It just doesn't happen. And by insinuating that it does you've managed to make yourself look like a jackass on a monumental level: either you're trying to shame the league into giving you a draft pick now that you're finally back with a playoff-caliber team, or you yourself are willing to roll over and die to move up in the draft -- which probably means you've done it in the past.

Memphis made the playoffs for three straight years, and off the top of my head I know that they won 50, 45, and 49 games, one of the best records in the NBA over that span. This is not a franchise willing to tank games for any reason. There's speculation that Van Gundy's comments were directed specifically at the Celtics, who have won more championships (16) than any other team. Really, dude, isn't it enough that you're tiny and bald? Do you really want to be known as a dumbass and a hypocrite, too?

Steam gets steamier.

For better or worse, Steam rolls on.
by AC - permalink

Valve picked up another high-profile partner today as Eidos Interactive is hocking their games via Steam now. There's some good news here, as this opens up classic games like Tomb Raider, a Saturn favorite of mine, to easy PC distribution. Just Cause is also in the Eidos library, and I'm downloading the demo by way of Steam right now. By all accounts Just Cause is basically Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry-style, which sounds pretty damned good to me, but I've been hesitant about how it will run on my rig.

I'm even more excited about the original Tomb Raider. I have the Saturn version of this game, and I'm completely in love with it. This started out as a Saturn exclusive, and was ported to the much more popular PlayStation and held for a simultaneous release. It plays great on the old console, but it would be great to play it with the resolution and framerate cranked up. I don't know how it will be priced, but for ten or even fifteen bucks, it'd be worth a download.

In other me-related news, I finally got around to ripping my last couple Nine Inch Nails CDs and integrating them into my library. The two domestic Closer CDs and the Head Like a Hole maxi-single are fairly repetitive, but worth listening to, especially with the inclusion of Memorabilia on Closer disc 2. Also I'm supposed to be taking one of my dogs, Lucy, to the vet this week for her yearly round of innoculations, but I can't seem to get around to it. She's sick for days afterwards, and she's always so pissed at me for doing it. I shit you not, yesterday she overheard me say "I guess I'll take Lucy to the vet tomorrow," and she went straight under the bed and wouldn't come out. That dog is so smart it creeps me out sometimes.

Living with Flock.

The pros and cons of early adoption.
by AC - permalink

So I've been using Flock as my go-to browser for about two weeks now, and I've run into a few... issues. No deal-killers, but some annoyances. Plug-in support has been iffy. As in Firefox, you will occasionally come across a page that requires a missing plug-in, and the built-in plug-in finding wizard will invariably fail to help you. I was an early adopter of Firefox, so I've managed to manually install most or all of the plug-ins I need over the years (there are less than a dozen), but I was having trouble with Flock. I came across an entry in Flock's online help that suggested finding Firefox's nested plug-ins folder and simply copying its contents into Flock's equivalent directory. This worked for some plug-ins, but not for all of them -- notably, the Windows Media Player 11 plug-in, which is pretty prevalent. For sites using WMP for embedded video, I've had to go back to Firefox.

That was an easy one, though. A few days ago I fired up Flock and all my RSS feeds were gone. I poked around and couldn't find them anywhere. I chalked it up to a growing pains bug and tried to resubscribe to my feeds, but Flock thought every link I fed it was "invalid XML." It also failed to display the little RSS icon in the address bar when going to any site with a feed, which suggested that the browser had completely lost the ability to recognize a valid feed. I couldn't find a solution in the online help (though I didn't look very hard) and decided to completely uninstall the program -- including profile data -- and reinstall it. That fixed the issue, although another bug showed up when Flock's installer failed to prompt me to import any data from Firefox. Now, after install, the import wizard still fails to recognize Firefox as a valid import source.

Later I found this help article which might have helped me with the vanishing feed problem, but not with issue subscribing to new ones, and this article that explains how one Mozilla-based app can't import data from another when the latter is running during the former's installation. I'm not going to blame the Flock developers for this one, because I did have Firefox running when I reinstalled Flock, and I did know better from experiences installing other Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape, K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Browser, etc.). Unfortunately, there's no real workaround.

Other than these problems, I've been pretty happy with Flock. There are some nit-picks, like having the option of opening a link in a background or foreground tab, which I get in Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus extension and in Opera by default. There are also the little details changed for the better in Firefox 2 which haven't been incorporated into the Firefox 1.5-based Flock, although one of the most noticable, built-in spell-checking, is included. Also, as far as I can tell there are no alternative themes available for Flock anywhere. Granted the default theme is no nice that it's being ported to virtually every other browser, but how about some reciprocation?

Overall, though, my revised opinion of Flock has to remain positive. It's still my default browser, with Firefox 2 as backup and IE7 on stand-by. I feel a little guilty about it, because Avant Browser, a former favorite of mine, and Opera, which I've always liked for no reason I can nail down, can't even make an appearance in my start menu's recent apps list anymore. But that's how it works I guess. Build a better browser, and we'll use it. I hope Flock's user base continues to grow, because not only will it get better, all the others will have to keep pace.

Blogged with Flock

Kirk still kicks ass.

Which Kirk? Every Kirk, nerd.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to checking out Star Trek New Voyages, a series of web-only episodes of the original Star Trek series financed by Trekkies the likes of which you can't even imagine. And it's way better than I thought it could possibly be. When rumors of a Trek movie starring people like Matt Damon and Adrien Brody surfaced I realized that I don't really have a problem with new actors taking on these classic roles. I mean, the Trek canon has existed for so long that it was only a matter of time until new actors were cast in some of them. You have to accept this to watch New Voyages, which is, essentially, a fourth season of Star Trek.

Sure, Scotty only occasionally has a Scottish accent, and yes, you did see the boom mike just now, but D.C. Fontana herself helped get this project off the ground by writing the pilot, and J.G. Hertzler, aka Chancellor fucking Martok, will be directing and starring in a future episode as Harry Mudd. Oh, and did I forget to mention that Walter Koenig showed up for the death of Pavel Chekov? That's in episode 2, bitches.

With the remastered, HD episodes of the original series (we geeks call it TOS), all five Trek series are in national syndication now, and on Mondays you can see every freakin' one of them. I know, because I just did. New Voyages only makes Trek stronger from my perspective, because even when this new "reimagining" of TOS is released in theaters, a lot of us who know and love the swingin' sixties version of the show will have new episodes to look forward to online. So what if the new Kirk is clearly wearing a wig? How is that different from Shatner's Kirk in everything since 1979?

Firefox finally finds an equal.

Flock may have kicked its daddy off the top of the browser food chain.
by AC - permalink

I finally decided to give Flock a try after the release of version 0.7.11. Not because it was a particularly important release, just because I've tried everything else and nothing has really even come close to supplanting Firefox for me. Opera is very good, and getting better. But I've been spoiled by Firefox's extensibility, and the "killer-app" extension is AdBlock. Avant Browser, the best of the IE-based browsers, has native ad blocking, but is not as customizable overall, and still runs on IE's rendering engine. SeaMonkey and Netscape can use ad blocking extensions, but SeaMonkey is unwieldy and Netscape is a cluttered UI nightmare. K-Meleon is under-developed and relatively primitive compared to Firefox.

That pretty much just leaves Flock, which is currently based on Firefox 1.5. And to cut to the end of the story, it's become my default browser. It's as exstensible as Firefox, though with fewer certified extensions. But it has AdBlock, Download Manager Plus, All-in-One Sidebar, and a few others that I like. It looks great, has a ton of really nice included features, is highly customizable, doesn't eat up too much RAM, and it's well-supported. The search bar is limited to Yahoo!, but is feature-rich, fast, and surprisingly useful. I love the integrated blogging tools, and it seamlessly imported all of my history, passwords, bookmarks, etc. from Firefox. Startup time is slightly behind Firefox, but the installer package is a little above middle-of-the-pack (Flock's installer is 9MB vs. Firefox's 5.7MB, Opera's 6.2MB, Netscape's 18.3MB, and Avant Browser's 1.8MB). Flock also has a more than competent RSS viewer that equals the Sage extension I've been using in Firefox for quite a while now.

At first, I used Flock a few times, falling back to Firefox as my default browser, as I've used Opera or Netscape or whatever in the past. But eventually I realized that there was nothing I needed Firefox for that I hadn't been able to do with Flock. And not being hip to all the under-the-hood engineering differences between Firefox 2 and Flock 0.7, I decided that Flock might as well be my default choice.

So there you go. In my experience, Flock is basically Firefox 1.5 plus a bunch of social-network-type integrations like blogging, picture sharing, etc., with all of the same features and with almost equal extensibility, support, and customization. From and end-user perspective, it's an unqualified success.

Theme post: Rock out, bitches.

When did buying CDs become outdated?
by AC - permalink

I went to my (sort of) local Cat's not too long ago to look around and talk to the Record Store Guys. There aren't a lot of places in north Memphis where you can find some Record Store Guys, so you have to take advantage of the situation. These ones were plucking badly at an acoustic guitar and were way, way too into Tool. I love Tool, but at some point you have to realize that you're not actually in the band. Anyway, I ended up buying a couple of eponymous debut albums spanning 25 years: Violent Femmes (1982) and Flyleaf (2007).

The Flyleaf record isn't bad. If you like their singles, I'm So Sick and Fully Alive (tracks one and two, interestingly), you'll probably like the rest of the CD. It's short, though, only a little over 34 minutes. Personal favorite is currently track 4, Cassie. It'll probably be the next single, coming to a college rock station near you.

The Violent Femmes album is, well, Violent Femmes. Almost half the record can be found on the radio now if you count the cookie-cutter Gnarls Barkley cover of Gone Daddy Gone. I never really knew that much about the band and was surprised this record was so old. It's a timeless LP, you should go get it.

What else. Oh, DirecTV is showing the concert footage from the new Nine Inch Nails DVD Beside You in Time on channel 101. It's OK, I guess. Reznor is awesome as always, but these new musicians... I dunno. I don't want to say they suck, but they kinda suck. As far as I'm concerned, the real live NIN is T.R., Danny Lohner, Robin Finck, and Chris Vrenna.

One last vaguely music-related note, you should point your interweb browsing devices to Adult Swim's download page to grab a handful of genuine Dethklok mp3s. Metalocalypse has officially supplanted Aqua Teen as the funniest, most kickass animated show on television, and you get free death metal songs to boot. Beat that, South Park.

More demo impressions.

Try before you buy.
by AC - permalink

Painkiller Gold has just been made available via Steam, and comes complete with a playable demo. It's not bad. Painkiller was released in 2004, and although the promo material brags about the incredible proprietary 3D PAIN engine, it's a pretty underwhelming game visually, especially when you consider that 2004 also saw the debuts of CryEngine, Source, and the Doom 3 engine. Painkiller runs really fast and has nice physics, but it's all very flat and reminds me a lot of the Quake III engine. It doesn't help that there are only a few weapons in the demo, and you get a bonus for beating it using only the stake launcher. Way to add variety there. Three bad guys and optimally just one gun. But it's still kinda fun in a Serious Sam, mow-em-all-down kinda way.

First impressions of the Prey demo are positive. It looks as good as Quake IV and runs as smoothly. Good atmosphere, although it really is strongly reminiscent of Quake IV and Doom 3. Hopefully Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will finally do something original with that brilliant Doom 3 engine. Anyway, the portal effects in Prey are seriously cool, which makes it suck even more that we have to keep waiting and waiting for Valve to get around to shipping Portal only when Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 are done. I could go on a nice, satisfying rant about how Valve's episodic content plan has gone completely to hell (over a year between Episode 1 and Episode 2, and the value-pricing idea is out the window), but I won't.

I've been playing around with Screamer Radio, a nice little freeware internet radio client. It's a tiny app and comes with a decent preset list. So far I haven't heard a single stutter or skip. On the downside, at least a fourth of the presets are dead, and it gives you only a limited amount of customization. I'd have liked a sortable station list, for one thing. But you can't beat the price. So far, Sky FM is the only station I've liked enough to add it to the favorites list. First track was Bjork, second was Soul Coughing, third was Temple of the Dog. Sweet.

Steam is unintuitive.

Installing a game twice is stupid.
by AC - permalink

So now that I've got the high-speed hookup going and Steam is marginally less a pain in the ass, I thought I'd look into registering some of my games that require a CD-check with the service just to avoid having to dig out a CD whenever I want to play them. I figure the Steam-enabled third-party games aren't as likely to shove unwanted patches down my PC's throat at random intervals as Valve is. So I tried Call of Duty and United Offensive, but no go. Apparently it only works with Valve games. That's somewhat annoying.

So I took a look around my stacks of game boxes and decided to try to register Counter-Strike. I got it as part of the Half-Life Platinum Collection a long time ago, but I've never really played it. It turns out that entering a valid CD-key only activates a game -- or, in this case, a set of games -- and enables you to download them into your Steam account. Previous installations are ignored. That's also somewhat annoying.

The good news is, activating my CS CD-key unlocked not only CS and the other games in the Platinum Collection (Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, TFC, and the Ricochet mod), but also Day of Defeat and Deathmatch Classic, which is just the original Quake 1 DM maps and weapons modded into HL1. I downloaded CS and DoD, since they're multiplayer games and you can only find servers in-game for them via Steam. And I guess I'll go ahead and download Blue Shift even though it's single-player only, since it's the only game in the collection that requires a CD-check, and I fucking hate that.

In other news, my PC still hasn't crashed since I decided to pop it open, knock it over on its side, and point a desk fan into it. GPU temps are down and somewhat steady, and I'm not so gun-shy about starting massive downloads anymore. I've also been toying with the demos for the first two Splinter Cell games (the third, Chaos Theory, crashes immediately after startup) and Need for Speed Underground 2. The SC demos are interesting and look really nice, but they're incredibly frustrating. There are about a hundred ways to fail a mission and only like two ways to win, and it's just a huge amount of trial-and-error and not very fun at all. NFS Underground though, is really cool. It's just a demo, and offers no hint as to how much depth the actual game has, but just zipping around, randomly challenging people to short, tear-ass races around town is more fun than it seems like it should be. There's like half a dozen NFS spinoffs out there, and all of them have PC demos, so I'll try out most of them and I'll probably end up buying at least one.

One last thing, how come nobody is playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online? I've got the Editor's Choice edition, and it's fully patched up now, but all I can find are loads of empty servers. Lame.

Not so good with the shooting.

At least, not anymore.
by AC - permalink

I'm not sure what the intangible It is that I've apparently lost when it comes to online shooters, but whatever It is, I've lost it. Ten years ago, I used to dominate in the only online shooter anyone was playing, Quake. But now... I dunno. In the FPS's I can find a decent amount of players in -- Call of Duty 2, Halo, Quake III mainly -- I'm holding my own, but I'm getting fragged way too much. If we were talking about obscure, overly complicated gamemodes like Onslaught or whatnot it would be different, but I'm playing mostly team deathmatch, and I'm getting sniped left, right, and center, and it's getting depressing. I'm still kicking all kinds of bot ass offline, so I don't think I'm necessarily out of practice... It's like there's been some sort of fundamental, intangible shift in how to win online in these kinds of games that I've missed the boat on since I was last playing a lot around six years ago.

Whatever the case, at least I'm not crashing so much anymore. After the RAM slot-swap, I've only crashed once. I've got my box open and on its side, with a desk fan pointed into it. I think the problem was from my motherboard's orientation. The vidcard was stuck upside-down, with the fan/heatsink pointed down and with very little room for the hot air to escape upwards. Over time, I think the GPU has been damaged and can take less and less exposure to high temperatures. I would have been looking out for this, but I've never had a little mini-tower like this eMachines case before. Anyway, now not only can it vent upwards, I'm forcing the air out of the case with the fan. I haven't tried the Psychonauts demo again, but I've been able to play a lot of CoD2, as well as the F.E.A.R. demo a couple of times without a spontaneous reboot. It's progress anyway.

Back online for the first time again.

It's fast, then it's gone.
by AC - permalink

So I've finally rejoined the broadband world. We ordered the fancypants wireless network package, which meant a box full of hardware with no instructions. Luckily I used to do this sort of thing for a living, and I was able to get the whole setup humming along online without installing all the stupid proprietary software. The downside is that my PC has gone from occasionally crashing due to what seemed like overheating issues to crashing at random almost constantly for no apparent reason at all.

I've been troubleshooting this problem for months, and I finally ran out of ideas today. As a last-ditch effort I pulled out the dual 512MB PC3200 DIMMs, cleaned them off, and re-seated them in the unoccupied slots. And incredibly, it seems to be working. My PC shut itself down unexpectedly four times yesterday, but today I've been able to putter around online, do some gaming, and successfully shut down thrice. That includes an hour-long Call of Duty 2 online deathmatch session, and full-on 3D gaming has generally been a death sentence for my box lately. In fact, one of the first things I did after getting the DSL goodness going was to update my Steam client and download the Psychonauts demo. The game ran great, but twice my PC crashed after ten minutes of it. So long sessions of CoD2, CoD1, Quake III, Quake IV, Halo, and UT 2004 online are good signs.

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.