Messages

1

Paintball 2 Discussion / Re: Grave 2 : Competition Time!

« on: January 06, 2011, 08:55:05 PM »

Blimey, I suppose this has been in development hell for a ridiculously long time, huh?

Like T3RR0R15T says, I do intend to finish it someday, although spare time is at an all-time low right now unfortunately. I'm not sure it's as straight-forward as simply passing on the mapfile; the map geometry is essentially finished, but there are some problems which I found it difficult to solve. Not to bore anyone (and I'm aware that this isn't the mapping section), but the basic gist of it is:

- There is a lighting bug which creates crazy shadows on the underside of the church roof, which is really distracting and doesn't look great. I can't figure out how to fix it (nor have I really tried - I prioritised other tasks given how long it takes to compile, vis and light this map).

- I created a fair few of the textures from photographs I had taken. In particular, I created a pretty in-depth alpha-channel enabled Ivy texture for the outside of the building. Unfortunately, these are huge (I remember at least one of the textures was 76mb. Obviously, this is ridiculous). Along with generating the headstones and their messages (programmatically), essentially I have a problem with the map and its assets being rather huge.

- Model creation - I can't make models, and I don't really have the time or inclination to learn it anymore, so I'm having trouble sourcing the models I'd like for the map. Specifically, I was going to include a Bell and some chandeliers for the inside (I may drop the chandeliers if the r_speeds get much worse, they are already sky-high).

- Finally, I moved to LA, and I don't have my PC or any of the map files here. This is a problem.

I'm glad you guys are still interested in it, like I told T3RR0R15T, I'm going to try and get my hands on the files again soon and I might be able to appraise what needs doing and whether its feasible to finish it myself or pass it on.

Take care chaps.

Dag

2

Other Stuff / Re: Fallout 4 - New Vegas

« on: May 19, 2009, 02:14:45 PM »

Fallout 3 was pathetic - in the storm of hype and media attention before and after its release I felt like I'd arrived on another planet. It's the most incredible case of The Emperors New Clothes I've ever seen, very few media establishments seem capable of recognising the clear deficiencies in Fallout 3. Oblivion was ok for what it was, but Bethesda win the prize for most ham-fisted pig-ignorant adoption of any intellectual property as far as I'm concerned.

Slightly more on-topic, I don't know what to expect of Fallout 4. On one hand it has much more of the true fallout spirit in it's blood than Fallout 3 ever could, what with Obsidian taking the reigns, but on a 12-month development timescale I don't know whether to expect much more substance or innovation than F3. Time will tell I guess, but all I know is it can't be much worse.

- Dag

3

Other Stuff / Germany to ban Paintball...

« on: May 09, 2009, 12:09:37 PM »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/5291891/Germany-to-ban-paintball-in-wake-of-high-school-shooting.html

Jeez, what a crazy story. I can't stand it when people make rash and knee-jerk reactions to alleviate pressure from not-necessarily rational lobby groups.

Can any of our German community comment on how likely they think these laws are to pass into stone?

- Dag

4

Paintball 2 Discussion / Re: Grave 2 : Competition Time!

« on: April 18, 2009, 08:31:00 AM »

That's about the size of it, Reed!

At the risk of going further OT... I don't have too much time these days to dedicate to mapping, I've been dividing the time I have spent on mapping between Grave 2 and an as-yet unnamed map project. Abnormal, you're right - I'm not sure the exact figure, but by now it's substantially over a year! Perhaps posting this thread was a bit premature...

Clipz, you've got a fine point - I think the idea behind Grave and some of the incidental details that have made it popular are bulletproof for pub play. It's easy to understand and pick up - it's got essentially instantly-understandable mechanics. When Reed made Grave, both our mapping abilities were in their infancy, now I think I can do it justice. When it comes to the principles of map-making I have some quite strong beliefs about quality and quality control, things that take quite a lot of time.

If I could ask you guys to hold off posting about the map too much for a bit, I'll post a proper discussion thread in the mapping section with some more media soon enough.

Cheers!

Dag

5

Server Discussion / Re: The End of an Era (Graffiti Taggez)

« on: April 15, 2009, 10:15:25 AM »

Oh boy, I couldn't believe it when Reed told me about this.

I can safely say one of my favourite periods in the time I've spent in the DP community was playing on the Graff servers while on the GT Vent server. Reed and I still talk about your (Snipens) amazing jokes (definately all in the delivery!). Thanks for having spent all that money for us ingrates all these years, I know I definately wouldn't be here without the GT servers.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

6

Other Stuff / Re: Need Networking Lab Ideas.

« on: March 27, 2009, 05:37:04 AM »

I'm only vaguely aware of the name and concept of Tor, a quick wikipedia search has some interesting info about it.

Seems like high-bandwidth applications like streaming TV might be a bit heavy for it (I'm not sure what the latency is like either, and depending on the streaming application you're using you might find that it's not consistent enough to stream smoothly).

Here in the UK our largest streaming IPTV services, BBC iPlayer and 4oD (Channel 4) are based on the Kontiki streaming media platform which is essentially bit-torrent based, so if your app is similar, you might have problems too.

If you are interested in network security/security in general, you should check out Bruce Schneier's blog: http://www.schneier.com/blog/
It's very interesting and almost always has thought-provoking and interesting articles on.

He's written an article on Tor here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/anonymity_and_t_1.html

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Need Networking Lab Ideas.

« on: March 25, 2009, 12:48:53 PM »

Hey guys,
Sorry for the bump (I'm way out of the loop, no internet access at my new place yet!) but I was reading the question and wondered how you got to your figures knack - I count 14 desktops + 2 servers + 1 WAP that require a switchport (17 in total) then add the 5 expansion = 22 switchports total. A 24-port managed switch would do (the 24-port version of the Cisco 2950 Knack suggested would be fine), by my reckoning.

Because it is a switched LAN, it will be a physical and logical star topology (the switch in the center with all the workstations/WAP connecting to that directly. The only quirk is that the laptops would connect to the LAN using the WAP, so would be physically unconnected to the switch, but shown related to the WAP.

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Trip to Connecticut

« on: March 01, 2009, 10:03:38 PM »

I took Re's advice and took the train down to NYC today - I'm really glad I did, its a really fantastic place. Its absolutely freezing here at the moment but I got to see a load of the sights like the view from the rockafella building, etc...

anyway, thanks for your suggestions, I'm really enjoying the US so far!

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Trip to Connecticut

« on: February 21, 2009, 03:50:31 AM »

why are you going to connecticut? out of all places in the united states why there?

I go where the company tells me, it's a week long training course at the branch in CT.

1. Make sure that you either check your laptop or remove its hard drive. darn TSA WILL check your laptop for inappropriate material.

2. Same goes for any other electronic device that you might have.

Hmm, that sounds a bit scary. I was thinking of only taking my ASUS eeePC netbook to pass some time and check my emails. I'm an electronic forensics analyst so it seems a bit ironic to be on the receiving end that kind of search!

I'm really hoping that I can make time to see NYC while I'm there. How much do you think it would be on the train down to NYC / how long would it take?

Ho-Ho's snack cakes, International House of Pancakes and seafood it is!

Dag

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Other Stuff / Trip to Connecticut

« on: February 20, 2009, 06:16:22 PM »

Hello boys and girls,

I'm crossing the pond in a week on a business trip to Westport, Connecticut - I'm wondering if you guys have any recommendations of fine american institutions that I could sample while I'm out there. I've already been tasked with bringing back some Twinkies (which I only know of through the Simpsons), perhaps you have some ideas about what I should endeavour to experience on my first trip to the US?

Dag

11

Other Stuff / Re: Super Card Lite Help: Games

« on: February 20, 2009, 06:12:15 PM »

Kind of an odd forum to be asking about this, and flirting pretty close to warez/piracy discussion.

I'd suggest you post about it on the Supercard forums, provided you own a legitimate copy of the original games.

- Dag

12

Server Discussion / Re: Tarts Dirty Den - New UK Server

« on: February 18, 2009, 03:14:37 PM »

Nice to see more Brits playing the game, and thanks for going to the trouble of putting a server up!

When I popped on it there were just a couple of bots running about, but I hope to see some fellow limeys knocking about on it sometime soon.

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Mathematics: The only true universal language

« on: February 18, 2009, 03:06:33 PM »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message is a famous attempt at communicating with advanced non-human life.

Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Your Absolute favorite music video!

« on: February 13, 2009, 02:12:28 PM »

Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwFS69nA-1w&feature=related

Another video which always sticks in my mind is Sigur Ros - Svefn-g-englar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWiJWLiSKro&feature=related

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Gravity Bone

« on: February 08, 2009, 05:43:11 AM »

As a mapper, I rather liked how some scenes were built. The clearing bit in Barista 2 was very well constructed, the r_speeds are impressive and it looks great. Things like the butterfies aren't really possible in DP yet (I don't think) - I think models are statically lit at runtime based on the light value on where their origin is placed, while in Barista they seem to lighten/darken depending if the butterfly is in light or not. I think it must work by actually moving the model around the map with some preset path (as opposed to making the range of motion and path as part of the animation in the 3D modeller itself), something I don't know if it is possible in DP. Similarly, in Gravity Bone, there is a tram which goes overhead when you're in the outdoors-platform-jumpy bit which suggests that they can change the orientation of func_trains at path_corners.

I think these things would let those mappers with a mind to making a pretty nicely polished map to use some clever implementations of such techniques to give an extra level of ambience to their maps.

I just played through Barista 1, which was basically just a marathon clone (but quite a fun one). These games kind of remind me of the weird nature of some of the background stuff in Max Payne 1 and 2, which could be really strange and abstract (like the Address Unknown stuff with the weird flamingo).

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Gravity Bone

« on: February 07, 2009, 05:14:28 AM »

I just played the 3 games you mentioned and quite enjoyed them all. I don't think any of them really had much 'game' to them (apart from maybe Grotto King). To me they seemed like pretty cool and quirky tech demo's, there are lots of features in them that I'd like to see available to us in DP. I don't think any of the stories made much sense though.

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Photography...

« on: February 04, 2009, 03:24:43 PM »

That looks amazing, how did they achieve it?

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Need Networking Lab Ideas.

« on: January 30, 2009, 05:13:09 PM »

Good link, that emulator is pretty good (although it might be a bit complicated for you guys to get running, I had a bit of a nightmare with it - in the end I gave up, I had about 20 7206VXR's with NPE-G2's to play with downstairs in the lab). Also I think you need a relevant IOS image for it, which at the time I tested it was easy to get hold of for me - if you don't have a CCO account with Cisco, you might have trouble.

I understand getting funding and stuff for things like this in education can be ropey, but the kit Knack suggested is pretty cheap for its equivalent teaching value in the classroom, honestly. Then again, getting funds out of faculties can be like blood from a stone, in the 4 years I studied it, they only just got in nice new equipment a month before I graduated!

for reference, this is the kind of router you'd be looking for: here

Which is cheaper for 2 than a lot of home broadband routers!

I'm presuming here that you do have I.T. facilities available to you - if you don't have a dedicated networking lab, I would at least propose that 2 or so PC's are given a second ethernet card each, with which to use any switches/hubs/routers with. This way the techs won't be annoyed you're just unplugging computers from the school network willy-nilly, and you can run a virtual machine like VMWare and boot Linux distributions in that, using the second adapter in your experiments (the techs would probably be a bit annoyed you were booting different OS's on the machines natively too!). This is how we did a lot of networking practicals because we could just install Windows Server and stuff onto a virtual machine and play with all the features in a safe environment.

I guess there's no way you can get around spending at least a little money, although if you use things like VMWare 60-day trials and stuff, perhaps you can get what you need out of trial versions (education/business licenses for this kind of software can be very expensive, I'll speak to my friend who is pretty knowledgeable on virtual machines to see if he knows any similar free/cheap alternatives).

You can demonstrate a lot of networking stuff with command prompt applications. eg, use commands like 'route PRINT' to see your local machine's routing table. Pretty useful when explaining concepts like default gateways, loopbacks, subnet masks and routing metrics!

It occured to me that i'd forgotten to mention a really valuable (and free) tool - a packet sniffer! Wireshark is a free and very powerful packet analyser, I can't think of a better way to show things like ARP messages, TCP/IP 3-way handshakes, error handling and ICMP messages. The way the packets are broken down by field and lets you examine the payload is a VERY effective demo of how protocols work. Especially when you can do fun things like fire up MSN and read the messages straight out of the packets or load up DP and look at how the global login's challenge-response handshake works. Get it here.

If your guy would prefer it if you could give him some more definate suggestions and prices (so he has something to take to his boss), with explainations and reasoning, I'm sure Knack and myself would be more than happy to help you compile that for him. I think it's great that networking itself is becoming a much more accessible route earlier in education - I'd never even seen any Cisco kit until University!

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Need Networking Lab Ideas.

« on: January 30, 2009, 10:51:37 AM »

Great suggestions from Knack there, with that kit you could definately make some headway with the concepts you learn on the CCNA (your school probably won't shell out for your class to do the actual certification though, I know mine didn't!). You could do allsorts with it, I can think of a few ideas off the top of my head to show some basic hands-on demonstrations of how networks work and behave.

Network Standards:
 - Knacks suggestion of using home-made crossover cables for your mediums is a good one as with the onboard ethernet ports and the T1 cards, you could show how the different standards use different pin-outs and the same RJ-45 connector (but how the principles are the same/similar). Also how crossover cables differ from straight through and why, and how most modern networking hardware autodetects the cable configuration.
 - Even cooler if you guys could get taught how to make the cables up yourselves, it's a pretty useful skill to have, even for non-networkers!
 - If you can get some E1/T1 Co-Axial/BNC cables, you can see how cat5e cables and wireless didn't always rule the LAN world.

IP Addressing:
 - A lot of this is theory, but with some hardware to play with you could do things like set up 2 machines with no DHCP (linux is really cool to do this on as you get to see whats actually happening) and manually configure the network adapters statically (with IP's and Subnet Masks which you and your class have worked out beforehand. All you need for this is a switch or hub and the machines I imagine you already have - plug them all into your hub/switch and pair up with someone else in the room, figure out your IP address and subnetting scheme (not classful, use VLSM because it's way more interesting) between yourselves and configure the machines, and see if you can ping each other.
 - Variable Length Subnet Masking can be a bit scary at first, but it's quite simple as long as you think about it the right way - and it's a strong skill to have when going into networks! This might be a bit dry for you though.

Transmission Basics
 - I guess by this you mean looking at signals and stuff, this is kind of hard to demonstrate without scientific equipment like oscilloscopes and stuff. This one will probably have to stay on the chalkboard, I'm afraid. Having said that, I learned a good few lessons about how fibre-optics work by just working on them, but I imagine this will be WAY too expensive.

Network Protocols
 - Again, this is a bit tricky to clearly demonstrate physically, but you could do things like a little set up to just send pings and traceroutes constantly (programs like the free WinMTR: http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/ let you do extended traceroutes and pings with a nice GUI) and have your teacher explain how those 2 commands work, i.e. the ICMP protocol, to show how important information like Round Trip Time etc... is used. If you had something like the SmartBits traffic generator boxes (expensive) you could show how packets are formed and even how things like WRED work, but that's probably a bit too indepth.

Subnetting
 - This is basically just part of the IP Addressing one, you'd demonstrate it at the same time. What you might want to do is set up a simple routing protocol like RIP up on the 2 2600's to show how connected network information is shared around the network, and why subnetting is very important to this.

Networking Hardware
 - Understanding the roles of each type of networking gear is pretty easy when it's all laid out infront of you, I can't think of a better way than to set up some of the CCNA lab type experiments with the gear Knack suggested.

Networking Security
 - This could be a bit expensive to show with dedicated hardware, and I'm pretty sure a PIX firewall or whatever is way overkill. What you could do though, is show how you can use Access Lists to control user access and network access on specific ports, etc...
 - NAT is an important thing to think about when you're talking security, so an explaination/demonstration of how that works and how it helps protect you from outside threats would be cool.

I can't really think of much else, if your teachers don't respond too well to 'buy a load of cisco kit', I'm sure we can come up with some cheaper (but not nearly as good!) options.

- Dag

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Other Stuff / Re: Attention Programmers or people who know java

« on: January 30, 2009, 09:59:23 AM »

I'm going to be a DYNAMITE old man, gathering all the neighbourhood youths round and telling them stories of when computers used to be so big they had to go under your desk instead of these new fangled nanoscale brain implants, and when DP2 was Alpha 6, and not Alpha 3261 (stil backwards compatible to Alpha 003).

- Dag