Gorth

Also one of the hardest problems to address. Find out why people want to willingly lobotomise themselves and convince them that getting all "recreational" is not the best answer. Entirely anecdotal, but I've never met a susbstance user (short of tea and coffee) face to face that struck me as particularly sympathetic.

Thanks Gromnir So "brief emotes"... just like the adventure games of old, where you would pick context sensitive keywords from a menu. Not exactly a novelty (except the concept is probably older than most gamers, so they would have no memory of it).

I don't know how they made the video, but that was bloody awesome

Some day, somebody is going to be able to explain to me exactly what is new in the "dialogue wheel". Is it just that it is round instead of linear (probably easier for a controller than hitting the number keys on a keyboard) or is it just that it presents a topical answer (like a bunch of old 8bit games did 20 years ago)? It feels a bit like arguing who invented fire.

I don't buy anything that requires Steam, but I've sort of fallen in love with gamersgate. Probably because the downloads don't require installing any proprietary software. Not to mention that they have a boat load of games, I've never heard of, much less seen in retail stores. Went on a spending spree yesterday as 1C (a publisher) games were at a 75% discount. They warn you too, in big bold letters when looking at the new Ubisoft titles, requires permanent online connection to play, so at least you get a warning before you buy, no nasty surprises after a completed transaction

I believe the common way is "milestone billing"? The developer get paid pro-rata of a pre agreed amount for each milestone reached, plus bonuses, minus penalties. Probably a bit of initial funding too to get the project started up.

I have a facebook account. Stripped of everything except my name and an email address (one of the 'expendable' email addresses, in case it gets compromised). Mostly for old friends in other parts of the world to have a portal to get hold of me. I visit the place about once every second month. On special occasions maybe several times within a day (when a few messages get exchange). I made the mistake in the beginning of putting up two email addresses, which of course, despite being marked as "not visible" got spammed right away by scammers. So I knew from day 1 that facebooks "privacy" was an outright lie.

As if anybody could possibly doubt the words of a psychic octopus

It was strong winds, 6-7 degrees and a constant drizzle when riding home from a client yesterday night. I lament the fact that I don't have waterproof pants and never got around to buy some decent gloves. I'm probably never going to feel warm again

Moved to Kotor related forum.

I don't know what the PC version looked like, but the Amiga version had big, blocky "tiles" that offered less of an overview. I was more of a "wargamer" at the time than a roleplayer, so I liked having as much minute detail on the screen as possible. What I loved about Ultima IV was, that the world felt consistent, with its own laws of magic and physics. Probably the only time in a game that I enjoyed trying to figure out new spell compositions based on the available raw materials. I hadn't played party based crpgs before, so I didn't miss that either. Its one of those things you can't explain to people who haven't experienced it, but the story was the one I wrote through my actions, completely non-linear exploration of islands, oceans, balloon flying, dungeon crawling, investigating towns etc. A kind of freedom in a game I hadn't experienced since Lords of Midnight & Doomdarks Revenge. By comparison, my first impression of Ultima VI was "cluttered", and I traded it away shortly after. I probably didn't appriciate that kind of radical change at the time, which was 20 years ago now?

Is this the point where I have to break down and admit that I've probably never played Ultima V? Checking its release date, I see it was about the time I retired my c64 and focused on my Commodore Amiga. I missed the game altogether (it was Ultima VI I had in mind). I blame Quicksilva for starting that 3D Isometric fad with Ant Attack (1984). Suddenly all games needed to join the band wagon and if it wasn't isometric 3D, it wasn't good enough for the publishers. They completely ruined perfectly good 2D top-down gaming >_

Pauls Cooking...

We should make a top ten... most popular fraud attempts From top of my head, what regularly ends up in my mailboxes is the treasurer who needs help to move an ex-presidents money, the hbsc bank that needs me to verify my account, I won the big prize in the UK lottery, I have a job offer collecting money from debtors and I get to keep 10% of the money, plus a handful of others who are variants of the first one (aka '419' or 'Nigerian' scams). I used to trace most of them back to their true origins by investigating the headers, but these days I'm getting old and lazy, so I just dump them into spamcop who does the hard work and generates reports for abuse contact information.

The original Ultima V was what made me lose interest in the franchise. Too much fancy graphics at the expense of the rest of the game. Never bothered to complete it Now, if they were to remake Ultima IV instead...

Starting with the second question, yes. The difference is measured in astronomical units. I didn't do it so much for the superior cooling as for the less noise. Otherwise, think car engines. You are likely to find more liquid cooled car engines than air cooled ones. Overclockers swear to liquid cooling too (although I don't really do the overclock thing), for its superior cooling capacity. Extreme geeks use liquid nitrogen, but as I said, it was mostly just noise reduction for me. For the first question, depends on how "ambitious" you are. Do you want everything watercooled? Just the cpu? I didn't go there, but you can get water cooled power supplies and hard drive enclosures too Following my own advice, I would take a look at what I want to indlude in a "water cooling loop", decide on a tube size. Then look for a decent water block(s) for the component(s) I want covered. Last bits are a pump, a reservoir and the radiator that does the actual heat dissipation. Size and type depends on how much heat you want to dissipate. My current setup specs can dissipate a 1000W constant load (yes, thats a LOT of heat). Checklist: 1. Decide what parts you want to cover (there are specialised 'blocks' for just about every type of CPU, Graphics Card, Motherboard etc. so the specifics depends on your existing hardware) 2. Decide tubing size (US or European standard. Don't necessarily go for where you live, but where you want to buy some of the other parts from. Most parts have no barbs/nozzles, they are bought seperately and comes in all sizes (usually). 3. Shopping list: Tubing Waterblock (one or more) Pump & Reservoir (there are several "combos" out there, that combines pump and reservoir into a single handy unit, often fitting in a 5.25 drive bay) Radiator (fans if it isn't a passive cooling one) barbs/nozzles/clamps Demineralised water/Cooling liquid (Depending on system, it will last 1-2 years before it needs changing/refilling) 4. Plan everything out on paper. Make sure the stores have the parts that fit together (see my mishaps regarding weird tube sizes) There are also starter kits out there that includes everything to get started with CPU cooling. It can then later be expanded to include more parts. I decided that it was too easy. Best way to learn to swim is to jump into a river with a concrete block on your feet The waterflow looks like this (for my system): (the little '--->' arrows are the waterflows/tubes) Reservoir ---> Pump ---> Block 1 (Motherboard) ---> Block 2 (CPU) ---> Block 3 (GFX Card) ---> Radiator ---> Back to reservoir (Creative individuals also fiddle around with splitters and parallel waterloops, but I'm not *that* much of a geek) I'll see if I can't get a picture taken of it one of these days. --- Edit to add: If you are truly curious, I could add a collection of links to product pages for each and every part that went into my particular system, leaving out the duds that either were no good or did not fit

The H2O Story. Not really a blog, but I get the feeling that I am the only one around here dabbling in water cooling, so I thought I would share my experiences, my victories and my downfalls so far. Who knows, somebody else might be tempted to walk my path some day, might as do what I should have done and not what I did. It all started about two years ago, with my quest to build a new silent computer. My reasoning for starting dabbling in water cooling back then was, that the most noisy part on a computer was the fans, so the fans had to go. Found a nice All in One thing from Zalman, that was convenient, had the waterreservoir, passive cooling radiator and a silent pump all built into one external unit. Came with tubes and a CPU cooling block too, so all you needed to get started was there. I later added a GPU waterblock to the loop and all was good. Fast forward about two years and things were not all good anymore. My graphics card started acting up and I decided to upgrade numerous components on my PC. With new CPU sockets and new graphics card, my old cooling system no longer fit and new blocks were needed. The Gigabyte motherboard was already equipped with a cooling block for the chipset, so that was an added bonus, which I wasn't aware of before buying it. But this is where the fun starts... First thing on order was a block for the graphics card. The sinlge most power hungry and heat generating thing in my system. Having had good experiences with EK Waterblocks, I ordered one for my new, shiny ATI5970 card. It came without barbs, but that was Ok, the ones from my previous block (from the same company) were reusable. Next thing, was a CPU cooling block. While the old one was adequate, the backplate and mounting mechanism was for LGA775 sockets only, so it had to go. I considered one from EK Waterblocks, but the shipping is quite expensive from Slovenia, so in the end I decided to try a Swiftech Apogee XT. While being an American product, it is carried by Australian resellers and while being comparatively priced to the EK one, it was somewhat cheaper in S&H. Suffice to say, it was a major disappointment. Crappy production values, resulting in malformed screws, overall "tin can" quality reeking of lack of QC, I did a bit of digging around on the net. Yeah, made in China allright with all what that implies. Lesson learned: Do not buy Swiftech if you want high quality Decided to scrap it and then buy the EK one which I should have bought the first time. Made in-house by the company, who has their own manufacturing and QA/QC, it was magnitudes better. I also ordered some barbs, and this is where it gets a bit fun. The barbs on my motherboard and the ones on my other blocks were not the same size. Turns out that there are two standards, depending on whether you live east or west of the Pacific. Since the majority of my barbs now were 3/8" (US standard) and my old tubing was 8mm (European standard), I decided to replace the tubing with 3/8" through and through. Not knowing good from bad, I ordered two different kinds, something called Masterkleer and something called Tygon. The Masterkleer was so "thin walled", that it was unusable. I could try to buy additional wrapping (essentially a metal coil) to prevent kinks and "flattening" inside the tube that would restrict waterflow, but I would throw more money at something I didn't want to pursue. Lesson learned: Do not buy Masterkleer if you intend to use it without further support/tube wrapping. So, the Tygon tubing it was. Awesome quality, bending like a contortionist, even in small spaces, without any problems. So, while having fun with that, my old Zalman external unit died on me. It probably didn't like the constant high working temperatures (65-75 degrees C), so I don't really blame it. It did leave me with a need for a new pump, a new reservoir and a new radiator. Not finding anything in Aussie stores that appealed to me, I looked overseas. A company in the US, Koolance made some nice Reservoir/Pump combos that fits in a 5.25 bay. Unfortunately, their radiators were all aluminium (yes, thats the correct spelling), and I wanted something better. EK Waterblocks to the rescue again with copper based radiators. This time I remembered to add barbs to my orders. I also added 3 fans (Noiseblocker Blacksilent PWM). Shipments arrived from all over the world and I discovered my mistakes. PWM fans can not be controlled by the Koolermaster instruments, only voltage regulated fans can. While the barbs were the right size, I had forgotten that my Tygon tubing was not the usual 10mm ID - 13 mm OD, but a staggering 16mm outer diameter. None of the tube clamps that I had could be used. Same thing for the two pair of Quick Disconnect connectors that I had bought from Koolermaster. Lesson learned: Plan your tube size as the very first thing you do, taking note of ID (Inner Diameter) *AND* OD (Outer Diameter), THEN, go shopping for everything alse keeping those measures in mind. Lesson learned: Read the fine print when buying fans. Together with a complete set of spares from my Antec Case, I now have enough fans on my shelf to start my own fan club! Anyway, I ordered tube clamps of an appropriate size, ordered more tubing, Quick Disconnect connectors suitable for the slightly unusual dimensions (apparantly Tygon tubing is not uncommon, if not exactly standard). Also ordered 3 Coolermaster silent fans (with "Disco" LED) and some UV reactive cooling liquid (since I have some UV LEDS lying around). While waiting for these last bits to arrive, I decided to test my current system for leakage and used a bit of wire to shortcircuit pin 4&6 on the ATX Power cable. After 20 minutes I discovered a leak on the Pump/Reservoir, as unseemly force appeared necessary to tighting the O Ring on the barb. Ah well, the wrench is your friend. Leaving the water circulating for 60 mintues, I decided to try it with the power switched on for real. Computer started up nicely, but I just run it "in neutral", since I don't have enough air movment through the radiator yet (still waiting for those last bits mentioned to arrive). Otherwise, it ran nicely for 30 minutes, then my screen suddenly turned black. I was like "WTF?" and my computer was like "HAHAHA!". Then I noticed the puddle of water gathering under my powersupply and switched off the computer. Grabbing a torchligt, I found the leak in the second attempt (my poor water logged graphics card)... The tube did quite have a hold on the barb on the MB Chipset block, so when the water got warmer, the tubing slipped a bit. Lesson learned: Do not just test your loops for leakage with cold water, try it with warm water too. Now waiting for those tube clamps so I can get the system tight for good and start stress testing it under pressure. People who buy ready made PC's just don't understand how much fun they are missing out on Sounds like an aweful lot of hassle, and it probably was. Wasted quite a bit of money on things I shouldn't have bought either. Yet... even with a few external (silent) fans, the difference in noise levels is just too much of a benefit for me to pass up on. I hope somebody else some day will feel encouraged to try it out. Just remember the few lessons learned and save some blood, sweat and demineralised water

Senior artist on Defender?...

Mann, Deutsches Fussball uber alles! That was a pleasure to watch. The second game of the night was just too late (at 4:00 in the morning local time), so I only caught the after action reports on the news sites.

Sandra Bullock has nothing on or

Aren't you mixing up bad design features with actual bugs a bit? We could probably dedicate an entire forum to what we think is badly designed mechanics and balancing

Yes... in Master of Orion 2. The dreaded "enemy AI tries to retreat when you have a warp dissipator" bug which crashes you back to the desktop. So does saving a game without selecting a save slot The missing children in Fallout 2 made me want to pee on Interplay's grave already back then. The bad walk meshes in Mass Effect 2, that often leaves you floating in the air, reaching for the reload menu. The bugged Jaheira story line in the original, unpatched BG2 Kotor2 Plenty of bugs to go around in games, but those are the most recent ones I remember as particularly aggravating.

Well, if you get struck down and disabled by meningitis, then you've obviously led a wicked life and deserves punishment. Don't you dare apply for disability status!

Happy birthday Shryke

I know, best $10 I ever paid for a game (bargain bin at EB Games). I've been trying to follow Vicky 2's development, but failed miserably. Only so much online time to go around