Profile: Wain
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• • I need a mmo

  • -removed-  I was being too cynical.

  • Posted: 9/17/08 1:31 PM
    General Discussion
• • The three things I want based on seeing the trailer (my complaints about graphics and stuff)

  • Now I'll be playing Darkfall regardless, I'm dying to see if they can come up with a game even close to their proposed subject...if they can it will without a doubt be worth it.  But after seeing the trailer I have three things that stick out to me.  Yes, 2 of them are graphic issues. 

    I think bitching about graphics is generally a waste of time, and also not particularly important unless they severely take me out of immersion.  2 of these items do that for me.  For the rest of you, they may be completely unimportant garbage points, but if people are going to complain they should a least take the time to point out exactly what's bothering them.

    Explosions/fire/magic collisions - they look like they were made with the oval drawing tool in MS Paint.  I don't need motion captured/video-recorded fire masked into the game in terms of quality, but something that looks like it should have the word POW in the middle of it like an old batman rerun isn't very exciting.  Particularly if this is something I'm going to see a lot...it's distracting and doesn't make me panic, it makes me giggle and think the game and players don't take themselves seriously...Which makes me think the characters should be looking more cartoony.

    Knock/blowback - The characters fly away in beautiful arcs at breakneck speed, with no variation on any of it, either the arc, or the speed throughout.  It makes them look weightless, and instead of making them look like they're falling, the instead look like they're landing.  As if a guide-wire connected to the heavens suddenly lifted them up and placed them somewhere else.  This sort of thing will screw with my anticipation of my own landing, or others in gameplay.

    Avatar faces - When ever you see a character cheer or emote in some way that makes the mouth move, they look like an overstuffed kids toy.  When the big orc creature is cheering or threatening it shouldn't be "cute."

     

    These are not make or break issues by any means, but they do add to the immersion of the game heavily, and solutions to things like this aren't going to create massive strain on a system.  Really the problem isn't that things as they are currently are bad, they just look out of place with the feel and look of the rest of the game, I couldn't give 2 craps and a free toaster about particles, specular lighting, or massive numbers of polygons, I just want the look of the game to not teeter between two distinct styles...particularly when one of those styles looks relatively amateur.

  • Posted: 9/11/08 11:22 AM
    Darkfall
• • Sager?

  • Sager sells rebranded Clevo laptops (as many other laptop boutique companies do).  Most companies that sell laptops actually buy from a small handful of other companies and rebrand them.  My Alienware laptop (before Dell bought them) is actually a clevo that Sager also sold and I have had no complaints with it whatsoever...I should mention that the only reason I bought Alienware was that it was actually the cheapest at the time of the different companies who sold the model I wanted....which completely blew my mind.  I have had no issues whatsoever with my (now 2-3 year old) laptop.

     

    I cannot testify to Sager's customer support, or overall practices with consumers, but if you dig around, you'll find that in many cases once you find a laptop you like you can find the same laptop with a different brand name across several different companies, so don't be afriad to shop around further if you cant' find out what you're looking for.  FWIW, everything I've heard about Sager has been pretty good...but I have no direct experience with them.

  • Posted: 8/21/08 1:57 AM
    General Discussion
• • liquid cooling VS standard cooling

  • Watercooling is in nearly all cases, completely unnecessary, but it does have some benefits.  First off, as no-one on here has actually disagreed, you will get a better cooling performance, though in nearly all cases, the benefit is relatively minimal over high quality HSFs...there are exceptions, but It is not generally worth the price increase. 

     

    The primary point being that water can move a great deal of heat away from the unit very quickly, which means, if you're the type who likes to overclock everything in his system, you may find some advantages to the temperature your various processing units peak out at under load when using watercooling over air.  Devices these days are built to be overclocked however, and even stock HSFs can usually cover quite a bit of ground...and the hi end ones will usually keep you cool right through everything that you'd be able to be stable at regardless.

     

    Mind you, I have been running watercooled systems since 2001, I do not do this strictly for the cooling benefit as much as I do for the combined benefits of cooling and noise reduction...with the exception of my hard-drives, my computer is virtually silent.  Mind you, I need this as I do professional level sound recording in a small home-studio where I cannot afford to build separate rooms with baffles and sound proofing and high end control consoles and the like.  In my case, it's worth it.  This isn't to say I couldn't get the same benefits from a rack-mount, open case and large passive cooling devices, it's just that I do also tax the system as well, and prefer to make sure everything will be fine.

     

    You have to drive the hardware to extremely high levels to see any real benefits from watercooling over HSFs, and these days HSFs are usually good enough that the levels you'd have to drive everything at to see that benefit would most often lead to system instability regardless of your temps.

     

    If you're spending $4000 on a new system and then you're planning to try to overclock it as far as it will go, sure, may as well throw in the extra cash for watercooling, but otherwise, I don't honestly recommend it unless you really need the quiet...and even then, if you're not careful designing your system, you'll wind up with a machine that's jsut as loud as one with air cooling (which usually isn't very noisy to begin with).

     

    Any upgrade I do to my machine costs at least an additional $100 for a new waterblock.  Adding and removing anything from my motherboard is a complete pain in the ass because of all the tubing that's been cut to length that interconnects most of my devices (my CPU, GPU, NB, and Hard Drives are all watercooled in my system to reduce the need for airflow as much as possible, it's excessive, but it works).  Regular maintenance actually isn't that bad, you're supposed to do it once every 6 months, to once a year, I tend to do it about once every 2 years and it takes about 20 minutes of my time.

     

    The four times I have completely switched out my motherboard for a new one, with new CPU and other hardware, the watercooling has added generally between 4-6 hours onto time spent trying to get everything laid out and set up.

     

    Also, I had a waterblock break on me in the middle of the night once while my computer was on, fried my video card, then the PSU blew.  That was beyond scary and not fun.  The system had been running fine for about 1.5 years, then all of a sudden one morning there's a pool of blue liquid on my floor and my machine I left running overnight is off.

     

    It's really late and I'm exhausted, hopefully this post will still make some sense in the morning.

  • Posted: 8/21/08 1:41 AM
    General Discussion
• • Obama's Arrogance in Dissing Hillary Clinton Will Lose Him The Election

  • If Obama selected Hillary as his VP I would no longer vote for him.  I don't know anyone who was an Obama supporter from the start who wants Hillary in office.  The only people who seem to be uppity about her needing to be VP in order to win were the people who were behind her in the beginning...the same people who were quite sure she was going to defeat Obama in the first place...not exactly people with a proven track record thus far of accuracy in their voting opinions.

     

    Unfortunately, Hillary has repeatedly shown herself to be a politician in a very classic sense...saying one thing to one group, and saying the opposite to another, which wouldn't actually bother me too much if she ever said anything I agreed with to either side of a debate.

     

    She has repeatedly shown herself to be anti-technology, anti-privacy, and pro-censorship (all in the guise of *THINK OF THE CHILDREN* ) .  While Obama has issues that concern me, I am significantly more comfortable with him than any of the alternatives, and I absolutely do not want to see her in office, as far as I'm concerned she's a moderate republican at best, which does nothing to impress me.

  • Posted: 8/20/08 6:22 PM
    General Discussion