Posted 10:04 PM by Eric
I dunno if I should keep CS in or install OFP. I really want to make a really cool mission in OFP but I wanna be able to play CS with Dan. Oh well I'll figure it out later.

At the orthodontist's office I was reading PC Gamer. I was looking at the Dell XPS ad. It had the basic and the really high one and it was like P4 3.2ghz, 1 Gigabyte RAM, 128mb video card (I forget what Dell uses, Im pretty sure its nvidia but it might be ATI.), and a 240gigabyte hardrive. Thats a huge hardrive. Thats the first I've seen one that big. Those are really expensive though around 3100 dollars. I'm not really sure if I would want a XPS or Alienware though, I would be so nervous about screwing it up I would never install much. I kinda just want a computer like dan's, something like a Dell 8300.

Posted 9:02 PM by Mark
Hmm, I think Activision is a publisher, right? Day of Defeat was a Half-Life mod that was developed independently by fans, I thought. So then Activision probably negotiated with the fans who made it to publish it so they could make money off of it. I think, at least.

Anyway, the lengths of cord has no effect on the speed of the connection. Actually, it's kinda funny, I think that there's a common misconception about speed and bandwidth on the internet - a lot of people think that if you have a faster connection, then the data travels faster from your ISP to your computer. Which is dead wrong, of course, because internet data packets are electrical impulses, and all electricty travels at the speed of light, which is like 75,000 miles per second or some insanely high speed like that. The actual data that is traveling across the internet is moving along the transmission lines at exactly the same *speed* - the speed of light - whether you're on a 56k dial-up modem or a broadband connection. The difference between them isn't speed, it's *bandwidth*. Cable modems are "faster" because they have more bandwidth, which means they are able to process more information at the same time; not because data physically moves faster. It's like a pipe carrying water: if you need to get more water through it, you don't make the water travel faster through it, you just make a wider pipe. And that's why we use the term band*width*, instead of like bandspeed or something like that. So yeah... I got off on a tangent there. Anyway, if you had a longer cord, you would still send and receive data at the same rate. It might take longer for data to reach the other end of the cord, but it would be however long it would take light to travel those few extra feet, like on the order of tenths of nanoseconds or something. And still, it wouldn't affect the *rate* of transfer - it would still come out at the same rate on the other end of the cord. The only thing that is bad about long cords is that if they lie around the place, depending on where they're placed, they could be more likely to have interference from other cords or power sources or stuff like that. But that's not really all that big of a concer. You can just roll them up and keep them in one place away from any possible interference.

Posted 12:40 PM by Eric
Yeah I have heard about 802.11g, we have 802.11b. I doubt my dad is gonna buy a new router though. I wonder If I ran a 20ft ethernet cable along the wall. Do you think to longer the cord the slower the connection? I wonder if a 20ft ethernet cable is slower than a 802.11b connection...

DoD doesn't work really, when I join a server I get an error that says I have been "timed out". That happens in Socom every once in a while, I emailed activision tech support to see if they know what to do.

Hey Activision made Call Of Duty right? and on the box of Day of Defeat it says actvision and Valve. It's not alot like CoD though, they both have the word of in it though...

Posted 12:31 AM by Mark
Hmm, you know what I just realized? THX, which MOHRS uses, is a LucasArts technology. And when EA canceled MOH: Fighter Command, LucasArts was the company that then announced Secret Weapons Over Normandy, basically taking the MOHFC concept and making the game themselves, including even getting Michael Giacchino, who was already working on a Fighter Command soundtrack, to write the soundtrack for SWON. Huh...

Anyway, I agree with you about how MOH is getting kinda stale. It's weird - I assumed that after MOHAA the series would start to emphasize the Allied part of Allied Assault and we'd see more and more missions where you'd work together. But Frontline and Rising Sun were both steps back in that sense, and Rising Sun especially tries to be all cinematic and stuff with the cutscenes and the story and all that. Maybe that's why after making Allied Assault, a lot of that development team left EA to make Call of Duty - they didn't like the way the EA team was taking the franchise. The other thing about RS is that I don't really like any of the levels. None of them are really all that cool - the only special thing about it is that there are trees now. I mean, Frontline had that Nazi Manor House Rally mission, and then Sturmgeist's Armored Train, and the Gotha mine, and bombed-out Arnhem - I've gotten about halfway through RS and I haven't really seen anything all that cool yet, except for that one with the canyon and you had to take out the artillery. Have you unlocked any of the storyboards? I got the storyboard for that mission, and the story that the drawings laid out was actually a lot better than what it ended up being in the mission itself - it was a lot more scripted, but it was quite dramatic - the explosives guy actually had lines to say and it was pretty cinematic and really cool. It would've actually added to the "allied" theme, but apparently the development team couldn't implement what they had planned to include in the missions, or didn't feel like it or something.

That's cool about Counter Strike - I've never played Half-Life or any of its mods. Yeah, your download speed is probably slower because you're on a network. Although I've heard the new standard, 802.11g or whatever, is faster. And you're right - there are a lot of cool games coming out this year. Yeah, there are a lot of sequels, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Gaming's been around for a while and the genres are pretty well defined now - it would be very hard to come up with an entirely new concept for a game, you know? I mean, new games are usually evolutionary, not revolutionary, and I think that's just a characteristic inherent to the medium. It's not like movies, where a lot of studios just make sequels to milk as much money as they can out of us - it's harder to come up with a totally new form of gameplay than it is to write an original script. Plus, games are developed by teams that tend to stick together, unlike a movie, where one person decides to write a screenplay, and then some random director will happen to read it, and then he'll decide to make it a movie and go out and hire whatever actors who he thinks will work well and all that. So sequels and game franchises allow video game development teams to stay together more easily and develop ideas and game concepts more efficiently.