Wistrik

Over a million views. It cracks me up every time I watch it, but I've always enjoyed animal expressions. Having a horse find me while I was hiding is so far one of the funniest things I've ever seen. This isn't a horse, but I still like it. I posted this earlier in the movie thread where it doesn't really belong. Still cracks me up. The people he spoofs are one of the big reasons I stopped playing online multiplayer games. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3br1q5wIQ

My only "sweet" ride is my car (indeed, my only means of transportation outside of walking) so I can't post about it here. I work with/know several motorcyclists but I'm in no position to post details about their rides. None of them would visit this forum and post about their rides. You may not get much of a draw on this thread with such a narrow topic of discussion. I'm glad you like your bike though. Edit: various structure corrections, sleepiness, etc.

There aren't "memory leaks" in areas, but there can be scripts that become stuck in loops that kill performance. On my older computer some areas managed to kill performance due to the number of sounds they had playing at one time. The game plays well on modern computers, but the engine isn't very efficient with its resources. Unless you know IE scripting and are familiar with the contents of any mods you have installed, I doubt you'll find the problem. But I'm 99.9% sure it's a script issue. I played HL2 last night, for lack of a desire to do anything but shoot things. I modified one or two config variables that give me grass/shrubs as far as the eye can see (further in this game than in NWN2, that's for sure), and it looks nice (no screenshot; I thought about it but didn't get beyond that). It always bothered me that I could only see grass out to about 60 feet, with new grass popping into view as I was traveling. Not anymore. Well, it still pops into view now, but so far away I can't see it happening. Certainly helps eliminate the naked terrain look.

I'm with Gabrielle. I mean, not literally, but as far as the IE graphics go. I think they convey the scene well enough. They are, after all, well-painted backgrounds with various tiny 3D objects positioned and fixed onto them. Of course, I used to think Pong and Tank Wars were cutting edge, once up on a time.

Ima go over there and HUG my girl friend in public.

I meant having the disc present in the drive so the game's copy protection could see it, not the swapping that comes from partial installs. I never do partial installs. Sure it takes lots of space, but I still have 400Gb free on the ol' hard drive.

Nah. I see patterns like that all the time. Terminsel was slightly more difficult in BG2, but only slightly.

Interesting, his name is an anagram of Blizzard employee Pat Nagle, after whom Diablo 2's unique Naglering item was named. Blizzard does that a lot in some of their games.

That's what I did for all of the IE games. It's too annoying to swap discs every time I want to fire up a game, and if I'm modding across games, I tend to fire up different games often. Of course, I don't trust stuff I download, so I did file compares (DOS' FC still works great for this) of the original and NO-CD EXEs and noted the differences, then implemented the patches without any excess. I always keep a backup of the original EXE and other critical files so I can avoid having to do a re-install if I mess up.

HAve you tried running it in windowed mode? Enter Full Screen=0 (space between Full and Screen) in the baldur.ini file, under the Program Options header.

BG/IWD won't display properly, if at all, beyond 640x480, and BG2/HoW/IWD2 look best at 1024x768; go beyond that and you either end up with a mangled GUI or the engine doubles the size of GUI elements (the rendered world appears at the chosen resolution). After trying several settings, I decided 1024x768 was best; no GUI scaling and I can still see more of the game world than I used to years ago. I always have the IE games installed for modding purposes and whatnot, so I tend to fire them up whenever the mood strikes me, regardless of what thread is created.

Edit: response to WITHTEETH I'm not surprised. The EXE shows signs of obfuscation/compression and other security methods (entire segments devoted to Securom), etc. They also use some wacky segment names. In 1.05 a large segment was named Bibendum, after the Michelin Man. Now it's named Artem, whatever that refers to (rings a bell but I can't make a connection). It's a shame the devs have to waste resources on security code. It's a two-edged sword, as your experience shows. When it bites the legitimate user, it's gone too far. The game starts up okay for me, with a Samsung DVD r/w unit, but it spends a few seconds examining the disc. It's irritating, and I'm glad NWN doesn't do this.

Sounds like you work for EA, but it could be anyone this day and age. Gone are the peaceful days of the 80s and the lone programmer. All you can do is your best. Time will tell if that's enough. Make sure to put all your accomplishments into an updated resume, just in case.

Kids That takes me back to LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon), a precursor to today's MMOGs. Each child (by birth or adoption) gave the parent/guardian an extra forest fight, and each forest fight granted experience and gold if you were successful. The game didn't include aging as a factor, but time went on. My 'wife' was a girl across town (BBS was cool because we all knew each other in person) and we had a few kids of our own in the game. She'd 'give birth' and announce it to me, then we'd agree on a name together. Adopted children remained nameless (as I recall). I really enjoyed the family aspect of the game. The added XP from all the kids was nice too. I think level should remain, as it is a measure of our accomplishments, which tend to occur at a faster pace than the aging process. I mean, even taking my time in BG1, I only manage to age maybe three months of game time. A person might invest as many as 10 game years in a MMOG, which wouldn't really have a big impact on their character's performance. In an RPG I would factor in age by means of AI scripting. Older creatures would be wiser than younger creatures, even though they might perhaps be at the same level of accomplishment, so a younger creature might waste spells and use incorrect attacks and counterattackes, while an older creature would be a greater challenge because it would use its abilities more efficiently. This is impractical for player characters because the player is in charge. In that sense, a new player is far less of a threat than a veteran player who's invested a year or more into playing the game. Thus player character age doesn't need to be incorporated into the game any further than perhaps incrementing it by a year after X amount of active play time.

I just installed the 94.24 drivers. Oddly enough they claimed lack of XP certification for my 7950GT despite being shown under the 79xx > XP/2000 category. Time will tell if this set of drivers causes me trouble. NWN2 is probably the most GPU-intensive game I play, but it hasn't been able to hold my interest for more than a few minutes at a time so I doubt I'll run into trouble there. If I do see anything like what you've experienced, I'll roll back; 93.71 was working just fine. I watched a 2-hour DVD after installing the newer drivers, and that went without a hitch.

Unforgiven I love this movie, but then I love most Eastwood movies. Hackman: "You just shot an unarmed man!" Eastwood: "Well he shoulda armed himself, if he's gonna decorate his saloon with my friend."

Syberia This game only runs at 800x600 resolution, which means it's slightly blurry on modern high-resolution LCD displays. Fortunately it responds better than older games (like TLJ) to graphics tweaks. For example, Syberia's AA option has no apparent effect so I used nHancer to create a Syberia profile and then enabled 16x combined (multi + super) sampling FSAA. Jaggies went bye bye and now Kate and other characters blend in better with the rest of the scene. There doesn't seem to be a built-in screen capture feature so I used the old trick of pressing PrtScn and then firing up PSP and going to Edit > Paste As New Image. This image reflects how she looks after my tweaks. She had very jagged outlines before (alas, I didn't take a 'before' shot.) Kate must have deep pockets in her coat, because she stuffs them with everything she finds. If I let her stand still long enough, she does a self-inspection animation that's exactly like April Ryan's in The Longest Journey. The hallway outside her room looks almost identical (in shape/layout) to the hallway outside April's room, and their rooms are both on the right side of the hall. This gave me a strong feeling of deja-v

Went shopping for some DVD playback software (ended up with InterVideo WinDVD 8 ), and I got Syberia while I was at it, since Lady Crimson mentioned it favorably some time ago. I looked at F.E.A.R. while I was browsing, but to be honest FPS games aren't my favorite. I like HL2 mostly because of the environment, and combat tends to be more sparse than in many FPS games.

Interesting. Is it good enough that you could recommend it? I've seen Krull, Legend, Beastmaster, Sinbad (the various movies), etc. I like fantasy movies as long as they aren't too stupid. Of course, I was a kid when I saw most of those, so they impressed me more. Now I'd be more critical if I was to watch them again.

Watching the Hunt for Red October DVD on my computer. I love some of these old classics. My 7950GT KO has hardware video playback abilities which help immensely.

Fired up NWN2 to download the patch(es) for 1.06. Re-applied my 2DA modifications. Except for improved specular lighting and seemingly better colors, I didn't notice much. My sorceress/DD finally made it to Neverwinter and we stopped for the night.

Overclocking can produce this as well. BFG cards tend to be overclocked slightly, from what I've read about them. Sooner or later, unless you've got very adequate cooling, the system is going to act up and crash.

(oops, replying to Guard Dog's post) That's the impression I get from reading posts by Obsidian folks. Some of the games I alluded to include the Ultima single-player series and the Bard's Tale games. SSI's gold box games (Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, etc.) were also truly golden, and as far as I'm concerned were the closest CRPGs ever got to PnP D&D gaming. I have no interest in modding DA for D20 rule support. Rather I want to be able to fix/report the inevitable data bugs, and perhaps at some point add NPCs and quests. Time will tell just how modifiable the DA engine is. I'm not beyond writing an editor if none are available.

Dragon Age, so much more so after reading Maria's "what is known" sticky on the forums. Some of my favorite RPGs weren't based on D&D rules, so I'm able to like what I see about this game's rule set. I'm not suggesting anything on the forums because developers seem to ignore me (their loss). Instead I'll wait for the game to come out and then look at the modding potential for it.

The Wild Mage and Wild Magic are detailed in the Tome of Magic for 2nd Ed. AD&D (copyright 1991 by TSR). While BG1 mostly focuses on the core rulebooks, BG2 draws from the various supplemental books for things like Wild Magic, kits, and high level abilities.