Speed Demon Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 I know ive been posting a lot of new threads but this'll be a quick one i think... I was just wondering if anyone in here plays Counter-Strike or any other PC games. ok well thats all, have a nice day. :D ________ Bongs Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest theharb Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 yes i play counter-strike and C&C generals Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Speed Demon Posted June 1, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 Originally posted by theharb yes i play counter-strike and C&C generals you in a clan? you play a lot? if you want we have a clan server thats private e-mail me for IP and password if you want to play with us. ________ WATER PIPES Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 Yay, a video game thread. I played HL a lot and CS occasionally until I started grad school two years ago and that took over my life. Now I'm graduating, so I'll have some gaming time again...which means I'm picking out parts for a new gaming rig that will stand up to HL2 and Doom 3. This will be the first PC I've built from scratch - any recommendations? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knoch Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 CS has too many cheaters...i play Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Halo, eh, and a few others. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest theharb Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 DM is good, CS gets to boring though i get sick of it quickly, i'm in aus i think my ping to your server would be very bad :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest AlpentalRider Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 I play Mechwarrior 4 for the Unknown Soldiers in MWL (www.mechwarriorleagues.com). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_watkins Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 Ahh CS... I remember the days... hanging out at a buddy's, 3 of us playing CS until 4 in the morning living on taco bell and beer. That was a great summer. Dan: www.anandtech.com has pretty reliable advice imho. Their price guides are handy. Newegg.com is a reliable, reputable retailer that often has the rock bottom price to boot. Unfortunately I play games quite rarely now, aside from a little Go online. Nothing has really grabbed my interested unfortunately. I passed over a chance to work on medal of honor as I didn't wish to move to oklahoma. Now I wish I had. Grrr. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fishrising Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 I agree, Anandtech is a great site... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nils Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 I play COD and Vietcong fist alpha when I have the time! the jungle is incredible! N. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Speedzilla Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 A co-worker turned me onto a game called "FarCry", it is way cool. I haven't been into games for a while, they sure have come a long way in the past few years! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnstewart Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 I (along with at least 2 members of our snowboard team) played CS for years. I think it was around 2000-2001 mostly, but I ran a server (Dr Him's Laboratory) for years. Great game. Can't get the Steam version to work, so I've not played it in forever. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjl Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 Yeah, I got pretty addicted to Far Cry recently. Man, the graphics in games these days are incredible - full, lush jungle with no draw-in/far clipping plane, reflecting and refracting water, real time shadows and physics, at 60 frames per second. Unbelievable. Have you seen the tech demo for the Unreal3 engine (virtual displacement mapping and soft shadows in real time)? Damn. These days I am playing a lot of City of Heroes. Great fun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_watkins Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 Eh, the epic marketing dude was either mistaken or simply lied in his presentation. See http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/DynamicLight.jpg and notice the shadows generated by the archway. It appears to me light sources do project a soft shadow "cookie", (by doing a blend between cube maps). True shadows generated by the level geometry are as hard edged as anything else. It looks like stencil shadowing to me, same as doom3 and many others. See http://www.unrealtechnology.com/screens/RagDoll.jpg for an even better example. The lantern laying sideways on the table projects a fuzzy circle shadow, approximating the penumbra from the open end of the lantern's casing. That's the cookie. The horizontal shadow it generates by being obscured by the edge of the table has no penumbra at all though. That's good ole stencil buffer shadow volumes. And _everything_ is going to have normal mapping in the next 2 years. The current hardware essencially makes it free. Does look like it'll be a goofy cool game tho:D. You really wanna get goosebumps... think about how many ray-triangle intersections a gpu can do right now (about 100mil/sec). Once that's up to ~400mil/sec and the software is slightly more flexible, in maybe 5 years, the numbers will be high enough to use photon mapping real time. And then all bets are off since rendering time will finally be decoupled from the number of shadow generating light sources, as well as stuff like global illumination, caustics, scatter, etc being realizable real time. I don't think people are really prepared for how real-time digital imaging is going to get over the next decade. Let alone the kind of stuff you renderman folks are going to be doing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjl Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 Originally posted by jason_watkins It appears to me light sources do project a soft shadow "cookie", (by doing a blend between cube maps). True shadows generated by the level geometry are as hard edged as anything else. It looks like stencil shadowing to me, same as doom3 and many others. Yeah, actually the narrator in the clip I saw says as much - they are indeed lerping between a sharp and soft map of the lantern. It's an effective trick, though. Sharp stenciled shadows on everything else, yeah - you're right. And _everything_ is going to have normal mapping in the next 2 years. The current hardware essencially makes it free. Did you see the virtual displacement mapping example? It was a little later on in the demo that those screen shots are taken from. They're shifting the texture back and forth based on a displacement map to simulate parallax as the camera moves around. It was extremely effective at making it look like you have actual 3D geometry at the texture resolution while not actually having very many polygons at all. It obviously breaks down if the view angle gets too grazing, but it looks great until then, and looks much realistic than regular normal/bump mapping. (edit): I just noticed... in that second screen shot, the stones on the left wall are virtual displacement mapped - you can see about 3 stones are actually real geometry - one in the lower left is casting a shadow and one further back is disrupting the flat shadow of the table - the rest are all virtually displaced, and it looks much better than normal mapping. The stones look like they are occluding each other, and if you were to see it in motion, it would hold up much better to changing camera angles. Bad points are: none of the faked displacements cast shadows or receive shadows well, and the joint between the floor and the wall stinks. You really wanna get goosebumps... stuff like global illumination, caustics, scatter, etc being realizable real time. That's a long way off, I think :) We'll see - technology seems to be improving at a staggering rate, but the # of computations to get non-crappy global illumination types of looks seems orders of magnitude greater than the current tech, not ~4 times greater. On the other hand, gaming engine programmers seem to be extremely clever at cutting corners and getting really amazing cheats that look almost as good as the real thing at very fast speeds. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_watkins Posted June 3, 2004 Report Share Posted June 3, 2004 They're shifting the texture back and forth based on a displacement map to simulate parallax as the camera moves around. Ohh yeah, you're right, I'd missed that. Hrmm, that's a little more expensive, it requires a deferred texture read. Still, current hardware handles any pixels shaders up to about 20 slots with impressive speed. That's a long way off, I think Indeed, we'll see. I may be proven wrong, but I'm more optimistic. With irradience caching we already can generate a sufficient photon map for some reasonabibly interesting dynamic scenes in real time. The place where gpu photon mapping lags more than map density is the number of samples used in the local radience estimate. Most film quality photon map renders use 50 nearest neighbor samples. Gpu implimentations have had to settle for more like 5. Noise much? Bleh. But, there's some promising work with splatting instead: http://www.irit.fr/recherches/SIRV/VIS/Photons/docs/lavignotte-paulin-graphite2003.pdf The limit that hurt splatting most was lack of floating point frame buffer... which is now now no longer a problem. What remains for this familiy of rendering methods is just the awkwardness of the streaming ray triangle intersections on the gpu. The stuff MS has been discussing for the next major revision of Direct X looks to greatly expand the memory model... and that's what I think will be the key. Once you get to where you could visualize a decent density photon map at 60hz, everything else will come naturally. Maybe that threshold is further than 5 years out... but we'll definately cross it. The same way photon mapping suddenly made things bi-directional path tracing had done for years (with render times bordering on eons) practical and quick, we'll see that happen realtime sometime in the near future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjl Posted June 3, 2004 Report Share Posted June 3, 2004 Originally posted by jason_watkins Once you get to where you could visualize a decent density photon map at 60hz, everything else will come naturally. I can't wait for this to happen. At that point my job becomes fully artistic, instead of half-artistic and half-"plumbing and babysitting and multitasking and just getting my shots to render fast enough so that I can get more than 2 or 3 iterations on it before it has to be finalled and rendered for film". Have you seen the F-Prime renderer for Lightwave, by the way? http://www.worley.com I've been playing with it recently and it is pretty amazing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_watkins Posted June 3, 2004 Report Share Posted June 3, 2004 Nope, I hadn't heard of F-Prime. That is impressive... I mean, the idea for a caching progressive tracer has been around for ages... but the practical issues in actually making it work scare me. Lightwave must have a pretty good plugin api as well. A buddy of mine was aquainted with some newtek employes about 10 years ago back when they were in KS. I played with ancient versions of lightwave on the amiga toaster actually. Great fun. Did a little bit with later windows versions, but not much with the ones after the rewrite (version 5?). Someone showed me Messiah the other day. I gotta say, the lightwave guys *get* it. Shortening the feedback loop is so key. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Posted June 3, 2004 Report Share Posted June 3, 2004 I'd just like to digress for a moment to say that I think this thread is a good example of the difference between alpine and freestyle riders. Jeepers, is everyone here (except me) this technical? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjl Posted June 3, 2004 Report Share Posted June 3, 2004 Originally posted by jason_watkins Nope, I hadn't heard of F-Prime. That is impressive... I mean, the idea for a caching progressive tracer has been around for ages... but the practical issues in actually making it work scare me. Lightwave must have a pretty good plugin api as well. Yeah, it is revolutionary in that it is fast enough that you can actually place the FPrime window on top of your perspective wireframe window and never look at that wireframe view again. You get your first (admittedly very crappy) render pass almost instantaneously, and your next pass is still somewhere under a second, at which point you can make gross judgements on light placement and intensity, and that sort of thing. Wait a few more seconds and you can judge shadow blurriness, density, position, reflections, etc.. A few more seconds and you can even judge DOF and radiosity. Really awesome. Someone showed me Messiah the other day. I gotta say, the lightwave guys *get* it. Shortening the feedback loop is so key. I wish we got it :( Our feedback loop is dreadful. I guess we have a scalable system that is a pain in the ass to use with easy tasks, and a pain in the ass to use with hard tasks, whereas software like Lightwave is a joy to use with easy tasks and impossible to use with hard tasks. So we "win" when we have to make extremely complex movies like Finding Nemo, but sometimes it is extremely frustrating when it takes 5-10 minutes to add a light in a simple scene when you know in Lightwave it would take 5 seconds to add it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jason_watkins Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 Doh, sorry Dan, we totally geeked out here :). KJL: didn't Pixar poach one of the lead developers on SquareUSA's photon mapper? I guess you're talking more about the user experience than the rendering pipe, but maybe you'll be getting some enhancements then. Speaking of CS, I can't wait until they start making maps specificly for the HL2 engine. Good times. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjl Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by jason_watkins KJL: didn't Pixar poach one of the lead developers on SquareUSA's photon mapper? I guess you're talking more about the user experience than the rendering pipe, but maybe you'll be getting some enhancements then. Dunno - I don't know a whole lot about what goes on down in the tools or prman departments. Wouldn't surprise me, though - we haven't done a ton with global illumination yet. Any speedup in the render pipe will help the user experience. We have no preview renderer to speak of (well, we sort of have one now), so our visual feedback iteration relies on a pass through prman. Heh, sorry Dan - geeking out is what I do. Even when I'm snowboarding I'm geeking out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chubz Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 Burn your CS disc, tooo may cheaters anyway BV Tanks (4-5 types) Choppers (5-6) types Jets (5-6 types) Antiaircraft units Personnel Carriers Boats Jeeps with mounted guns Mopeds......yes Mopeds Variety of weapons choice from sniping to knifing to shotguns to setting booby traps (4 differnt character selections) If that doesnt give you stimulation I dont know what will. Simply the best first person shooter I have ever played. Well worth the investment, my wife hates it because I'm always at my desk playing. I just built my first comp a few months ago and went to www.newegg.com Built a comp I was looking at on alienware for about half of what they were asking. It screams!!! Feel free to call me on either subject 610 438 3657 Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chubz Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 In reviewing the threads, it seems it veered into another extreme techno direction on the first exchange between jkl and Mr. Watkins. You guys just took it to a level that this hill billy cannot decipher. ARGH getting brain cramp, system starting....... to..........give....... Thats a touch scary fellas, Back to BV. :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnstewart Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 Originally posted by Chubz Burn your CS disc, tooo may cheaters anyway I played a lot of BF1942, and DC, but it's kind of fallen by the wayside. BV didn't look like it was enough of an improvement to buy (after ponying up for Road to Rome and Secret Weapons already). Pretty good, tho? My favorite game (totally different genre) is Massive Assault - www.massiveassault.com. It's turn-based strategy with RTS-style graphics. Download the demo - it's awesome. Impossible to find in US stores (some problem with the distributor), so you gotta pretty much buy it direct from them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.