Everything you wanted to know and more about the hardware in this fresh console.
(Link courtesy of slash and dot, a charming buddy movie coming soon to a theater near you)Monthly Archive for November, 2004
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Hoo, boy. The game is done!
I got my money’s worth. However, for the sake of those who haven’t finished the story yet, I’m not going to say anything more than this: The ending was even stranger than I had expected. Yay! Now on to a more difficult setting, or CS:S, or HL:S, or CS:CZ… Yeah, got my money’s worth all right. The game is good enough to make me want to play straight through again already — but I’m going to wait at least a few days before diggin in again. I’m also going to be watching the mod community. They have some powerful stuff here, and those guys will know what to do with it.I took Saturday off from Half-Life 2. This was not my intention, but I had to kick-start my career as a semi-pro wedding photographer. (More on this later, undoubtedly.) Tonight, I’m back into it (duking it out with way-overpowered enemies in “Follow Freeman”) and the game has crashed on me twice.
I checked my Gaming Karmometer, and it tells me that I’m straining the system, and should probably turn off 4x FSAA and let my system breathe a little bit while it’s rendering World War 6. I’m going to oblige it and see if that helps. update 2004.11.22 @01:07It seems that FSAA parameters are not being correctly interpreted by my system, and changing these settings has no impact on the game’s performance. Going back to Trilinear filtering helps a lot, though.
I’m two or three chapters away from the end of the game, and I needed a break, so I started my own little HL2 experiment. I’ve been playing with the following video settings, which were the recommended settings:
Res: 1024x768 Mode: Full Screen Aspect: 4:3 Model: High AA: None Tex: High Filter: Trilinear Water: Simple Shader: High Shadow: High VSync: Disabled
This gets me about 60fps in the video stress test, and very smooth gameplay.
Just for kicks, and because I felt my luck hadn’t been pressed enough, I turned this sucker up to 11:Res -> 1152x864 (my favorite resolution -- hard to explain that) AA -> 4x Fil -> Anisotropic 4x Wat -> Reflect all
This still left me above 40fps, and so far it’s been very playable. I guess I really didn’t need to worry about upgrading my card at all, at this rate.
update 2004.11.20 @00:43Yeah, I even took it to the bridge on “Highway 17″ and it still ran smoothly. I think Source is my new favorite game engine. (I’m a big enough dork to have a favorite game engine. And a favorite resolution. :S )
I have to admit a certain fondness for electronic music. I know that’s pretty non-specific, and I could get more specific, but let’s just say that I like heavily tracked and effected, electronically-performed music. I also happen to like most video game music. Naturally, this makes me a REZ fanatic.
So, I’m listening to the Area 5 music as I struggle with an evening task at work. My job requires me to stay later than everyone else, so I can play just about anything I like after they leave, and tonight it’s the REZ soundtrack. Once I hit the “Area 5″ track, I don’t jump off it. I’m on 1-track repeat. Here’s the thing, though. I used to have an audiophile co-worker who made fun of electronic music fans: “Oh, man, the song is 26 minute, but there’s a note at 9:05 that I just love. Makes the song.” And he’s not far off, at least as far as I am concerned. REZ, by its very nature, is very deconstructionist, and the songs are therefore pretty deconstructionist. I really like the “Area 5″ song for about 20 seconds at 3:20, and some of the breakbeat stuff between that and a repeat of the 3:20 theme a couple minutes later. The theme itself is a string section riff that sounds almost like a hoedownesque Copland piece, and the breakbeat sections contain the only lyrics for the entire song “Fear is the mind killer / killer of the mind” (and it gets serious bonus points for those lyrics). They also have some low-range pad work with these weird atonal glissandos that sounds like it wants to be a NIN song… I think all I ever really liked about NIN was this sort of pad work. So, I rev up Audacity, import the MP3, clip out 4:53 from the middle of the 10:54 song, trim up the ends so it will loop well, and export a new MP3. Suck it back into iTunes, and I’m loving it. It gave me ten minutes to regroup my thoughts about this task and shake my headache, too. From virtual mix tapes/playlists on my iPod to freeware for rapid audio editing, I’m loving 21st century music listening.
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