Kaftan Barlast

We, if the rumour mill and hints that MS have been giving out about Windows 7, the successor to Vista, then they got the point and are going for a lean and fast OS instead of a huge bloated mess.

BioWare are somewhat protected from an onslaught of angry users using a buggy pirated release, since you need to actually own the game to post in their support forums. But I dont think there is any chance of ME PC going the same way as TitanQuest, as the cash is already in the bank from the 360 sales. But there is no doubt that the DRM and the bug-rumours comming from the pirated versions will scare alot of potential customers off.

I just checked and there are already several different releases available for download from the major torrent sites. EA might aswell have taken the money they spent on that DRM and flushed it down the toilet for all the good itll do em.

I just wanted to announce that BioWare and EA's copy protection scheme has ALREADY failed. A fully-functional, cracked, pirated release has been in circulation for several hours already. Way to go EA, you spend tons of cash on a DRM that does nothing except harass your own customers.

Well, despite the presence of both, it looks like there will be no specular for the convention build, which has to be finished by tomorrow. The programmers are still working (its 00:30 here) but us graphics lads went home, my computer is being used to render ambient occlusion maps on right now. But despite less-than-ideal visuals, the game does work and is very stable on our test machines. It does sting a bit though, as an artist, not to be able to show off your game in its full glory.

I made a tiny mod that rebalanced all the guns to give a much more realistic feel to the game, but I think there are alot of people out there who have done the same but better. STALKERS original weapon settings were horrible, I doubt they had any time at all to actually playtest it and tweak it before release.

Now we've done it again. We are a little more than a week from the convention and the graphics are f*cked up. The programmers tried to make it seem less of a crisis than it is, but we lost all specular(what normal people would call shininess or glossiness) in the game and noone knows why. It doesnt work if we use old code or new one, its dead. So everything in the game that dosnt run on a special dedicated shader like the water, is now matte and dull and very ugly and our flashy HDR lighting doesnt work properly if it doesnt have any specular highlights to work with. The clues we have to go on thus far is that any attempts to use DDS textures result in 0% specular, while TGA textures results in ~100% specular. Our specular data is stored in the alpha channel of said maps. That could indicate that the engine somehow fails to read the alpha channel correctly, OR that the specular code in the renderer is broken somehow. Unfortunatly, the latter seems more likely at the moment.

Jerk. p.s

I cant say for sure, but it seems to be a combination of levels and story events. It works, thats the important thing.

Fable was crap, and everyone who disagrees is a stupid-head!!

I just want to say that the Unreal3 engine that Mass Effect uses is very optimized and fast, so unless your computer hasnt been upgraded since 1999 it shouldnt be a problem. It runs on 1280x1024 the friggin xbox for cryin out loud! I can play Gears of War PC on my laptop, which is equipped with a very slow lowbudget graphics card(geforce 8400-something). ME is not Crysis. I see alot of people pass up good games because they've bought into this whole hardware-scare, and thats really stupid. The DRM stuff is a direct result of BioWare being purchased by EA. And as usual it will end up hurting the consumers, and not the pirates. The game will be available to download from all the torrent sites within days of release, or even earlier.

Witty germans? Tee-hee *giggles* ...and Gothic2 is poo :D

Mass Effect in 1920x1200 with max on everything > 720p with 64mb of texture memory and no FSAA

Im very much against localization myself. Its very expensive, unnescessary and takes a long time to do. Non-english speakers shoud consider themselves spoilt rotten if they got as much as poorly translated subtitles.

Mass Effect will be comming out for the PC on June 5th, and I was just wondering what people are planning. Its kind of a smallscale investigation as to why some multi-platform games sell less copies of the PC version. Is it because people dont want to wait? Is it piracy? Is it because they cant afford a gaming PC? This poll is multiple choice so you can click everything that applies to you. Personally, I would like to get it because the PC version is going to be alot better, prettier and feature proper controls (also in order to support PC gaming) but Ive got the 360 version so its a bit much to spend 500kr(USD 84) on a game I already own. Even if its among the most awesome games Ive ever played.

I like omelettes as long as theyre not made by aliens or peter molyneux. ...we actually had a woman from Lionshead visit us a while ago, I swear she didnt go two sentences without mentioning "Peeeeeetaaaaaaarrrh Molly-n

For the pre-alpha/vertical slice/demo build there are no story elements. But the game is a comedy about a young librarian, who becomes invovled with an mysterious old order working within the library. In a metaphysical accident, the fabric of reality breaks and the collective imagination of mankind opens into the real world, allowing characters and creatures from the books in the library to travel freely from one "bookworld" into another using our world as a bridge. Now, the problem is that certain enterprising and rather naughty characters from famous litterature begin to travel from book to book, causing all sorts of mayhem in their wake. So, our hero is equipped with various esoteric gadgets and sent across the border to unreality to sort things out. Hee hee! A friend of mine actually did this version here http://share.ulfben.com/apkaramell.swf just to mock me. Im the guy in black and the other one is one of the programmers.

Fable is a horrible game. But its amazing how Peter Molyneus managd to create not an RPG, but an RPG-simulator. Its like an alien was watching a chef make an omelette, and then tried to make an omelette himself using plastic and chewed paper.

I dont know if we would actually save any performance by hiding the player char when you switch cameras, but its definently something that will be looked into later. Right now we have so much stuff to fix that we dont have time to optimize, we use the old trick of having a behemoth of a demo computer instead But the game is definently no resource hog, even with late night "accidents" like putting a water shader in the mainloop, or loading 500mb of random junkfiles into the RAM, the debug build still does around 75fps on a lowly ATi x800 card. We fixed those problems obviously, so its faster now. And thats with polycounts of about 10,000 for every character and large 2048x2048 textures (we have relatively efficient culling)

Im terribly sorry, Ive just become a bit too lazy the last few weeks. We're now about two weeks away from the pre-alpha we're going to be presenting at the convention, and its not going entirely as we had imagined it. Design-wise, we did the bad sort of compromising that means no one is really happy about anything. I cant say for sure why, but I think it has something to do with the team comming from different "schools" of gaming. When you take a PC fellow like me, and put him in the same room as a nintendo-gamer and tell them to agree on a game design plan, then you will have problems. But on the fun side, its beginning to look really good. Our programmers managed, to us artist-types great delight, to write a real HDR-lighting system so now we can have all kinds of cool lighting stuff. We also have some fun and cool bugs: 1) "ooh, look at that weird mirror!" - through some magic miscoding, we have really cool water with reflections and so on, but the game world ended up on the wrong side of it, so what you see in the reflections is what the world is supposed to look like.. and whats above the surface is what should be in the water. heh. 2) "I left my eyes over there" - you can switch view from 3rd person to 1st to improve aiming, but since that view is linked to the gun, switching over to that view when your not holding the gun results in you seeing whatever the gun is pointed at when its lying on the ground or in a box or whatever. If you run in 1st person view, and suddenly drop the gun, you will see yourself running past. its awesome.

I think the system of sentence that both you americans and us swedes have is a bit strange. Reason and logic dictates that the punishment must be relative to the crime and unless youve killed a whole bunch of people and eaten their brains for breakfast, theres no way that you deserve 82 friggin years in prison.

I just wanted to point out that Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with the kde GUI instead of gnome, is even more user-friendly and IMO much better.

Oh, I thought that you had to manually run infected files in 32bit mode for the malware to actually work. Dang.

The major differance is that a 64bit OS can use up to 16.8TB of RAM, while 32bit systems are strictly limited to a maximum of 3.5GB of RAM. This is not a windows thing, its just the way bits and bytes work. This is the main reason why you use 64bit in workstation and servers, where you need enourmous amount of memory. But the only game Ive ever heard of being releasd in a 64bit version was FarCry, so its quite useless to have a 64bit gaming rig. Sure, you can run 32bit applications including games, but you wont get any performance increase. ...but there is one more advantage thats useful for a common user; 64bit systems are immune to virtually all viruses, trojans and other malware in existance.

I dont like DRM's messing up my OS anymore than anyone else, but if its a good game I'll buy it anyway. But the one truth about all DRM's is that they always end up hurting the legal users, not the pirates. In a way, its encouraging people to dowload cracked versions, instead of paying for something thats filled with more malware than a russian porn site. Kind of like "Dudes, If we make all the candy taste like ****, people will stop shoplifting! Hooray!" It means that the songs wont play anymore, since the player authenticates with the servers everytime you start it. and MS did not plan to compensate users, but since this whole thing has causd quite an uproar, they might have to in the end.