alanschu

I thought Painkiller still had pretty nice graphics personally. I didn't care for the expansion though.

Not necessarily. Many people already question expansion packs since they get the impression that stuff was left out simply to make more money. To be fair, most of these people still buy the expansion.

And here I thought Pool of Radiance was the one that deletes your sh*t. ^_^ <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Only if you use the uninstall. I prefer just to delete all of its files manually. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Have you tried taking off and nuking the hard drive from orbit? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's the only way to be sure Boo to metadigital for missing the Aliens quote

I don't get the feeling that there's an expansion coming out. If there is, it'll likely wrap up the series like Throne of Bhaal did. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, as KOTOR 3 could be a fresh start then.

I don't mind happy endings, but most of the time I actually find them implausible (War of the Worlds). For the most part I actually prefer an unhappy ending. It's far more emotional, and therefore memorable, to me.

Unlikely. It'd be neat, but I think if the patch had contained that stuff, it would have been mentioned. Also, any programming work is never in vain. The stuff learned by the people working on the code is invaluable, and can be applied elsewhere. The only unfortunate thing is that they won't have this "released" which would be great on the resume.

How would that work? I would imagine that it'd probably just kill the user as the sudden emergence of a huge gravitational field will probably fuxx0r things up.

Accessing Virtual memory should not crash your computer.

Not necessarily. In fact, given the Star Wars name, it's probably not likely. My cousin went to an art school down in Calgary (Southern Alberta), and the classes he was in actually had people from Bioware recruiting new talent for their upcoming game (which was KOTOR). In any case, I guess one of the things mentioned is that the artist had to be willing to part with the rights to their work (which apparently is the only way to get jobs, since they require their portfolio). The reason was that Lucasarts was obtaining the rights to any of the artwork acquired, not Bioware. They also assured that such a thing was unusual, but accepted for the opportunity to work with the SW license. I wouldn't be surprised if the code also is subjected to Lucasarts' domain.

I'd like the game to require some sort of sacrifice. Cool moments where the player has two friends in peril, and the NPC had the chance to save one, and only one, type stuff. Maybe a moment where ultimated the best thing to do would be to sacrifice his beloved Bastila Although I could see it making sense, Revan as darkside showed he understood what it takes to win a war. okokokok, I'm just not as much of a Bastila fanboy, so I thought I'd throw that in there

I remember there being a jeepathon, but it was kind of crude. The engine didn't seem to support driving very well. But Half-Life 2 does support driving, as well as vehicles with weapons. So here's hoping!

Are those drivable vehicles?

I would think the GPUs are entirely too specialized to simply have them become the general purpose chip to be utilized for the FPU performance. Furthermore, if GPUs were that versatile and powerful in their FPU performance, I doubt CPU manufacturers would worry about having strong FPU performance if they felt developers would utilize the GPU instead. GPUs are exceptionally powerful, but they're still one trick ponies. Their entire deisgn is around graphics. Worrying about all the geometry, transformations IS floating point extensive, and it's finalized with the integer-intensive rendering. But the instruction set and design is specifically geared towards graphics. If it was as easy as you indicate to merely offload the instructions, then they'd already be doing it for Physics. Physics is also floating point extensive, and as we get to game environments with destructable terrain (like Company of Heroes, which is going to be excessively destructive), then the physics load could get quite expensive. But they don't talk about offloading that stuff onto the graphics card. It's why there's design plans for a Physics Processing Unit (coined PPU). If they could just offload onto the GPU....they would. It also makes an assumption that the GPU has resources to spare, given the state of graphics today. Hence why CPU manufacturers look to improve it. Also, analyzing how much of the code is integer and floating point does not tell the entire story. You are correct in stating that a floating point operation take more cycles. If you have a game with 20% of its code floating point instructions and 80% integer instructions, and I work some magic and create a silly scenario where those 20% are all division, and the 80% are all addition, you'll still get a CPU load that spends way more time on floating point instructions rather than integer instructions. Of course this example is a little far fetched, and the same can be said for integer division (divison sucks....it's like 39 clock cycles per division). I also think it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy with floating point and integer performance. Simply stating that code for games is X floating point and Y integer could very well be a reflection of the CPU. With all the work done to help improve floating point performance through SSE/3DNow! as well as architecture approaches such as allowing non-related floating point operations to be prefetched prior to instruction to keep the FPU in use, I would bet that games today feature far more floating point operations than they did 10 years ago (ignoring graphics). As more FPU performance becomes available, the necessity to abstract a floating point problem into an integer problem becomes less necessary. They also would allow for better machine learning (i.e. statistical AI). Analyzing Probability Distribution Functions and their implementations for decision making is not just "simple choice strings." Go to an AI conference and make that claim. It'd be like going to an Astronomy conference and saying how much you like Astrology. And besides....isn't AI really just making realistic choices? And even still, he still said the PS3 is more powerful. "There's no question about that."

I think all the ones that one the big ships are compensating.

OMG taht wud B teh r0x0rz! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I award two thumbs up for this post :thumbsup: :D

In Lucasarts' case, I don't think it was so much profits, but mere capital to stay alive.

I think there's some sort of association with AO and explicitly not being able to sell to minors or something to that extent. Kind of like the infamous NC-17 rating in movie theaters.

Sorry, but what's GI? I can't put a name to it.

By judge perhaps I mean more "ass-monkey" that convinced the ESRB to buckle and change GTA's rating.

I remember hearing about all the hoopla of Alberta's eugenics history. Interesting stuff, and certainly walking the highline of controversy.

I would bet that if a society existed that favoured homosexual relationships, and only used heterosexual intercourse for procreative purposes, then I'd say we "choose" to be straight, in that it's affected a lot by the environment. Just speculating...although I do remember reading up about tribe that used homosexual relationships as a rite of passage to manhood. I won't get into the details, it is "colourful"

She like Counterstrike?

I dunno. I don't think taking on Electronic Arts is a good idea. They have huge money, and have friends like Sony and Microsoft that also have huge money. EDIT: Good thing the Judge ruled in favour of Thompson. Now he can go on a moral crusade against anything he doesn't like. Training pedophiles, my GAWD!

ROFL!!!!!

Everybody likes a good sacrifice.