Ross Scott

To be fair, Ross, I've honestly heard it used to describe an inept person. it may be a culture/dialect thing. in any event, it's still a very vulgar term to describe an inept person.

It doesn't mean it's not used that way, but all I can say is the dictionary backs me up on both words.

I hope you realize that it also mean an inept person.

No it doesn't. That's "twit."

Hey, just wanted to say thanks a bunch for so many submissions. I'm going to be VERY slow going through all these, this was a gift I was planning on lasting a long time.

Planning on this is still preliminary. The basic idea is we want to show up with potentially thousands of players and have a way of loosely coordinating everyone. I have some ideas on this, but still need to plan things out. Also I can't guarantee anything yet, but it's looking less likely we'll have the Vanu as we want whatever faction is the easiest to understand for players used to regular FPSs, and they're the most exotic out of the 3.

There's been some "news" recently that Pascal is currently problematic (Not that I trust news like this with my life): http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-trouble/

 

I still don't know if they're going to implement HBM like they said they were, or should I say 3D VRAM. Some say they're just going to use GDDR5.

 

It's certainly going to be a game changer once games start using DirectX 12, that is WHEN they're going to use it... We're already at the point where graphics cards have DirectX 12 feature sets but just can't use them. It's like having a big block Chevy V8 with a Blower on top but no supercharger... Well that's more of an analogy you'd use for a lack of overclocking ability, but you get the idea. It's something that's missing from the equation.

 

Then you have this crap: http://www.droid-life.com/2016/01/12/report-htc-vive-cost/

 

The news just sours the milk in my cereal at this point.

 

I feel jaded knowing that everything we want in this world that could potentially give us a nice enjoyable and enthusiastic experience gets rained on by news... And lack of horsepower to gallop.

Urg, I hope the Pascal stuff isn't delayed too badly. As for DirectX 12, I think adoption will be slow. They're linking it to Windows 10, it's the same crap with DirectX 10. DirectX 9 worked for Windows XP and 9x. We had DX9-only games in under a year after release. DirectX 10 required Vista. We didn't have DX10-only games until 3 years later, but things didn't really start abandoning DX9 until 6 years later. Game developers don't like shutting out potential buyers, but that's what happens when it's linked to the OS.

Ross great job as always. The other guy eating jelly beans during the middle of the podcast was where I lost interest. I hated the price of the Rift as well but hey I want it to succeed so I bought one. Here's hoping to the future.

May want to wait man! According to PCGamer, the Vive has a better FOV:

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/tested-oculus-rift-vs-htc-vive-pre/

 

The real test will be how it translates to gaming, but that really makes me want to hold off. Plus if you're concerned about price, I think Asus and Gigabyte is going to be cheaper.

To be fair, the Kane and Lynch controversy also didn't have the huge backlash of being simultaneously censored across the internet (which happened even on 4chan, fricken 4chan of all places!) and mass condemnation by news media all throwing video-gamers under the bus. I'd argue that it was the mass censorship that caused this to become the firestorm it was (something known as the Streisand Effect, in which attempts to censor something tend to cause it to spread faster, especially on the internet), as a ton of gamers got super paranoid about what was going on. I'd guarantee that if web communities and the media didn't react the way they did, the initial controversy would have blown over before the end of that month. As for why the whole thing sparked interest in the first place, it's mostly just because sex scandals tend to spread pretty quickly, especially when an element of corruption is at play. Just look at how ridiculous the Clinton controversy was back in the 90s.

 

Meanwhile, I'd argue that the anti-feminism thing came up because it was basically thrust upon them, since that was the mass accusation made against gamers, and thus they began to see that movement as the enemy. By and large, I'd say most of the mainstream members of GG aren't against feminism's core principles, just the authoritarian rhetoric that has become common in the movement as of late. From my own observations, I recall that most GGers consider themselves "equality of opportunity egalitarians" more than anything, or at least that seemed to be the common consensus on the larger pro-GG communities I've seen. Just saying "anti-feminist" is a bit of a misnomer, since it implies just flat out "anti-women", which I wouldn't consider the case, personally. After all, some old-school feminists have even come out in support of GG (the most known of which is the somewhat controversial Christina Hoff Summers) because they dislike the tactics of a lot of modern feminist movements as well. That said, I would agree that this standpoint has bogged down the movement as a whole, but it's been difficult to steer the group in a different direction, since the anti-GG side never lets up with the accusations, which make pro-GG folks inevitably feel like they have to fight back in response. Funnily enough, the most recent season of South Park addresses this problem directly, and made a lot of good points while doing so.

Well that is a good point about the censorship across major sites, I forgot about that. Stuff like that only gives more credence to the collusion accusations also. I still try to get away from the feminism side whenever I can though, since 1. I figure both sides have some good points on that and 2. It just draws attention away from exposing collusion and changes the nature of the debate. Regardless of what's being said or the intent, that debate itself functions as a diversion tactic.

 

Ross, these are questions for February 2016's video-chat.

Just a reminder, people can still post these. I actually got confused earlier and answered one in the thread, noot realizing it was for the videochat, but I'll try and tally them for the video.

Ross man i seriously love the vids you do ( no one on channelawesome makes me laugh like you), but please never compare NIN to coldplay again lol ( and yes I know you were joking). I can respect the fact that not everyone shares the same taste in music i have but listening to NiN and basically anything Maynard James Keenan is connected with is about the equivalent of a religious experience for me.

Ha ha, I went too far with that joke huh?

 

Ross's hyping up of VR is making me suspect that he's a secret employee of Oculus or HTC. Normally I wouldn't care about "VR" and dismiss it as another gimmick (especially since I'd need an upgrade or a new PC to run the Rift), but Ross does sound like a true believer of the hype... and I've never even tried 3D gaming, so.

Hey, I'm not ruling out Asus or Gigabyte either. I'm certain it's not a gimmick, though it may not get mainstream appeal anytime soon either. The difference is gimmicks die out. I think VR at worst, would be equivalent to steering wheels, or multi-monitor gaming setups. Rare, but still a dedicated market to them. As for needing a new PC, I'm convinced it all depends on the programs. I read VorpX got Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005) working in VR, I'd be surprised if your system couldn't handle that game at high resolution / framerate.

I'm beginning to wonder if Valve has basically become the Willy Wonka of video game developers.

That might be the best analogy I've heard describing Valve.

 

As much as i would love more Ross, specially on podcast form, i wouldn't like it to be with VNN, the sheer amount of unnecessary hype and misinformation it spreads really does not help either valve or the community. /rant

Tyler seems like a good guy from talking to him, but if he's spreading misinformation, feel free to call him out on it. I know he does speculate, but that's not really misinformation, it's speculation. Afterall, while it's in slow motion, that's why I have the followup episodes to Game Dungeon, in case I really screw up on something.

So Ross, is the PS2 thing gonna happen on one of the EU servers, or on a US server?

It would probably be be east coast USA to have the average lowest ping.

 

Also Ross I have two questions I would like to ask. First what's your opinion of Steam's Christmas caching error incident? There's a video made by a guy named Tom Scott who describes what happened fairly well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkSslseq9Y8. Does it make you even more paranoid about what doors DRM leaves you vulnerable to? Second what's your opinion on cracks? I know in the past you mentioned that you crack all of your games. I think outright piracy is wrong but cracking an exe of a game that you legitimately purchased should be entirely legal. I have a game that I purchased and due to the nature of it's DRM I can no longer play it. Sounds fair right? Gosh it's horrible how much games publishers screw over their customers. They force DRM into a game and sometimes completely destroy the game to save their bottom line. There's one article in particular that got under my skin. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/165784-No-More-Pirated-Games-in-2-Years-Says-Cracking-Foru

m. It is nothing but kissing the publisher's ass and justifying the DRM they put in to their games.

Honestly, part of me expects something like this to happen over a long enough time period. As for cracks, of course I advocate them. I'm actually not strictly anti-DRM. I'm fine with DRM, so long as the company will guarantee playback of the game over a timespan. For example, Warcraft 3 had aggressive CD checks for the time, a couple years after the game was out, they removed it completely in a patch. Companies protecting their initial sales with DRM I think can be a good thing actually. Companies that don't give a damn and allow games to become unplayable without cracks down the line I feel like should face legal actionn and be fined heavily. Unfortunately, the vast majority seem to fall into that category, thus cracks are absolutely crucial to game preservation. So yeah, from a theoretical standpoint, I'm open-minded about DRM, but I'm an absolute extremist about a game being playable or not killed and I think it overrides everything else if it's not being addressed.

 

Anyways if Ross or anyone else is interested in reading some more about Corruption in games journalism a particularly handy website Deepfreeze contains a database on corrupt journos and some loud cases of ethics violations (like the Kane and Lynch debacle) without needless sensentionalising.

I have seen that before, but it strikes me as a collection of references and I haven't seen a very good composition boiling down GG's strongest points. For example, sensationalism from a single source doesn't mean a lot by itself, it needs to be used to show a pattern for a larger publication. Even then, a larger publication is just one outlet. That's why I thought the GameJournoPros list was such a big deal, it was showing an actual behind the scenes connection across MANY different outlets, which I think is bad news. Also since you brought it up, I think the Kane & Lynch incident indirectly throws anti-GG a bit of a bone. Meaning I think the Jeff Gerstmann firing was a MUCH bigger deal as far as illustrating corruption than anything with Zoe Quinn. But Quinn got way more of an internet uproar, which lends some credence to the observation that at least a PORTION of GG is focused on things because of the involvement of women. Still, the mistake I think anti-GG makes is just because some information comes from potentially unpleasant people, their demeanor doesn't automatically invalidate it. That's why I'd really like to see a more objective assessment of the stuff GG has turned up regarding journalism corruption, INDEPENDENT of the feminism issues. I literally have not seen this, almost everything seems to drift towards condeming one side or another. I'm not saying both sides are innocent, on the contrary, I'm just trying to look at this the same way a judge in a court would.

One of the issues I have with Gamergate is that it seems like a fairly unimportant aspect of the games industry. I think in terms of other problems the games industry is having like killing games, games becoming abandoned and forgotten and nasty DRM games journalism ranks has the lowest priority in my mind. In the grand scheme of that is the games industry what does games journalism influence within it? It doesn't, the games industry holds a stranglehold over most games journalism sites in exchange for range, power and money that these game companies will provide. This agreement is incredibly circular and self-feeding.That is a massive obstacle to try and overcome if it's even possible. I don't think most of games journalism has any impact on games industry at all outside of consumers possibly. But then some savvy consumers already know not to trust most games journalism sites except for a few independent press outlets/individual personalities. These savvy consumers are few in number compared to the unchanging majority and unchanging majority will most likely not change/not care about what they read/view. I gonna go out on limb and say that the audience of the few independent press outlets/individual personalities are largely the same people reading/viewing their content over and over again. There are people who these few independent press outlets/individual personalities can convert into watching well-informed content and making well-informed decisions. But that means the audience changes/grows at a snail's pace and they can't convert all of them which where the main problem in games journalism lies. These few independent press outlets/individual personalities lack the range of their larger more powerful competitors. I'll be honest this task seems downright Sisyphean and I don't think a whole lot of value in accomplishing it. The only real value I can see is if you're a journalist who's trying to legitimize journalism itself. But you gotta realize that you're working on the entirety of journalism and not the games industry because journalistic corruption isn't unique to the games industry it encompasses all of journalism.

Well there's some spillover to this is the problem. When corruption or collusion is ignored, that creates problems elsewhere. Again, the Brandon Boyer incident had evidence where it showed a judge for the IGF had money invested in a game he was voting on. That means other indie games that could really use the exposure weren't necessarily getting a fair representation. So there could be (and probably are) some great indie games out there nobody knows about because of people with a conflict of interest in journalism. Or moreover, what I care about the most, killing games, doesn't get much coverage at all. If most journalists are on the same page and they don't care about it or even report on it, then that influences a lot of other people. Conversely, if a one journalistic outlet DID care about that and would ask questions to devs what their end of life plans were for new games that had online requirements, that's something that could more slowly take hold.

 

So yes, I agree directly it's a lower priority, but the more corruption that is exposed, the better things can potentially be. This mentality hardly ends at gaming journalism either, you'd be amazed how many problems corruption in general causes that wouldn't even exist in a more vigilant environment. I always love to bring up the example of HSBC. A bank laundered billions for criminal organizations like the drug cartel, Al-Qaeda, etc. for over a decade, there were mountains of evidence against them. So naturally, the department of justice only fines them 5 weeks' worth of profit, nobody goes to jail. They were indirectly funding terrorism. For all we know, people could still be alive if we had a government that did its job instead of playing ball with big money interests. There's just no end to amount of problems corruption causes, so I'm glad when people go after it, even if it's something comparatively harmless.

Off topic Jcw87... Don't need to talk about it on this thread or continue on with that discussion. If you're serious about it, create a thread in the Serious Discussion forum.

@Everyone else: Let's keep this thread focused on Writer Auditions only. Thank you.

I'm alright with people talking about it here if they want, it did get brought up in the chat.

Well, looking at the specs for the Pascal cards, it appears the system should be capable of directly accessing the GPU memory for use as fast system RAM... Whether that will be something anyone actually implements... I hope they do. (80BG/s communication rate beats most standard system RAM)

They're going to have a die shrink and an architecture change, the CEO was saying it can have 10x the performance of Maxwell, it should be pretty huge. Now, because I'm cynical, my guess is it CAN be that fast, but they'll just make sure it's just 15% faster than whatever AMD's offerings are, and just trickle down upgrades over several years.

Valid points, but that does not make up for what GamerGate has done and what it stands for. Even at their worst the anti-GamerGate side never pulled even a quarter of what the pro-GamerGate side has.

 

So again, while I am all for combating corruption in gaming journalism and in the gaming industry in general, and there are points to be made and battles to be fought on that front, GamerGate is far too hostile to support, and the gaming community has been harmed by GamerGate far more than it has been helped.

Well the basic problem is NO ONE ELSE seems to be doing anything regarding the corruption and it's obviously there to various degrees. I personally wouldn't mind having an organization focused solely on that, that's divorced from the feminism / misogyny issues, but best I know, GG is the only game in town.

Hey Ross, I have made a crude 3D model of a concept I thought of.

Well it's easy to see what the model is doing, although I don't know if I'm quite sold on the shape. While it does give me enough buttons, it seems like the right-most ones are relatively flat, whereas a more natural resting position for my hand has somewhat of a curve to it.

 

so you could just try to make one that has the buttons on the right side for your thumb, and then design your own weird ass button placement for your ring and pinky for the left side!

Wow, you really can have buttons on both the left and right side and they'll work? Some ambidextrous mice will have buttons on both sides, but the software will force you to pick one side or another. Zowie mice do this a lot.

 

Anyway, I have pics and some measurements for everybody, hopefully this will help. I tried to show my hand in a normal resting position, though it's possible a mouse that's slightly more concave than how my hand is might work better, not much though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can't say I agree with you on the bionic augmentation front; I want to be as much robot as possible. Related question: which Unreal Tournament 2004 character did you use?

Mr. Crow.

Will age be a deciding factor? Like if some of us happen to be around 17-18.

No.

 

What kind of communication will you use for the PlanetSide 2 meetup? Will it be text chat or mic chat? I don't have a mic.

Don't know yet, you probably won't need a mic.

 

Which empire will I need to be in to join the meetup? I'm guessing it's the Vanu Sovereignty maybe? Also should I start playing PlanetSide 2 before the meetup so I can get some experience with how the game works?

I don't know yet and you won't need any experience, though it won't hurt you any.

 

Also about ther topic of video: Car.

I seriously cant agree with Ross about not having a car, especially in Poland. It not cost that much as most of people think, mostly because they look at car in wrong way.

The guy asking me was already struggling with money. In USA, between insurance, repair budgeting, and gas, a car can add a couple hundred to your expenses each month. That's just not feasible for a lot of people who have financial difficulty.

 

Ross, I strongly advise you to do more research on GamerGate, as evidence has been pretty clear that GamerGate is little more than a misogynistic reactionary subculture in both gaming and the internet. Make no mistake, I'm all for combating corruption in the video game industry, but at the same time I cannot in good faith support GamerGate due to their frankly terrible track record. Here's a helpful timeline of events kept by RationalWiki and here's a really good and really detailed rebuttal against many of GamerGate's claims (it is incredibly long though, so heads up). I hope you take some time to look through these and see for yourself what GamerGate actually is. Thank you for your time.

Well like I said in the video, the side of Gamergate focused on countering feminist claims isn't the part that I'm particularly interested in. I don't have a strong opinion on that either way, I figure both sides probably have some points, but might be wrong about others. I didn't even pay any attention to any of this controversy until the GameJournoPros leak. From the article you linked me:

 

"GameJournoPros was a mailing list set up by Kyle Orland of Ars Technica just to be able to let people at other websites keep in touch, possibly to even bounce ideas off each other and suggest new freelance writers to hire"

"Everyone else from the outside looking in saw the list as completely benign in nature."

"The only people seeing any issue with GameJournoPros are Gamergaters who were already prejudiced to think there was something resembling collusion and corruption going on"

 

Those last two statements are hyperbolic. What's more is, they use an article written by Kyle Orland as the citation for making them.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/addressing-allegations-of-collusion-among-gaming-journalists/

 

This already doesn't work well for me as good journalism. First off, I DO think it's kind of alarming that there was a secret mailing list among game journalists, which they admit is used to help select which writers to hire. In my eyes, that already makes it an "in" club as to who stands a chance at becoming a more mainstream journalist. Then they're saying "everyone else" finds this completely benign and the only people seeing any issue with this is Gamergate. I think statements like that are intellectually dishonest, because they're speaking in absolutes, not allowing for the possibility of someone seeing this mailing list as problematic. Furthermore, to state that and then cite Kyle Orland, the founder of GJP as the source for these being factual statement is poor journalism. You can't be a character witness for yourself, but that's how the article you linked is structured. Anyway, this doesn't mean all the information there is necessarily wrong, but it does make the the defense of GJP look very poor, and evidence of corruption / collusion is the part I'm most interested in.

 

Also your article doesn't even mention the leak of Phil Fish's records showing that Brandon Boyer invested money in Fez prior to judging it for the IGF. Don't get me wrong, there's a LOT of noise associated with Gamergate, but when valid points like this are glossed over and dismissed, I think that makes the anti-GG side look very bad. Anyway, the bottom line is I don't want gaming media looking like this anymore than it does already and GJP is certainly a step in the wrong direction:

 

 

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On to the list can it be a track ball? used to have a slick 5 button hand shaped track ball.

Sorry, my brain's wired for a mouse. I associate trackballs more with certain old school arcade games.

 

Ross have you considered possibly changing the way you hold a mouse? The way I hold my mouse only leaves my pinky finger out. I put my thumb on the side of the mouse, index finger on the left mouse button, middle finger on the scrollwheel and ring finger on the right mouse button. I was thinking this method of holding might make using regular three button mice a lot more appealing for you if you have no other options.

Yes, but I didn't like it, since I was always giving up functionality for my pinky finger out. The way to look at it is can you type without using one of your fingers? Probably, but it certainly won't help your performance any.

Well this was interesting. This kinda made me finally open an account here. Planetside 2 vet and long time watcher, so emailed to Ross about the relevant point.

I've gotten a few emails so far, I'll try to respond to people before too long.

Having multiple writers will almost guarantee "cohesion" problems with the story. How come you don't want to sculpt everything yourself in order to keep in perfect line with the vision and direction? It's not like you're George Lucas.

 

“ ' The team threw a Hail Mary to George, saying the game would have more credibility if the apprentice had a Darth title,' a Force Unleashed team member says. Lucas agreed that this situation made sense for Sith royalty, and offered up two Darth titles for the team to choose from. 'He threw out "Darth Icky" and "Darth Insanius." There was a pregnant pause in the room after that. People waiting for George to say "just kidding," but it never comes, and he just moved on to another point.' "

I see weaknesses in almost every video I've made. I think I can get a lot of things right, but sometimes aspects can come across a little flat or awkward (not in a good way) than what I was aiming for. For the parts I want filled in, I'm not having obvious insight about what should be written in there, and I'd appreciate having some fresh ideas. Put it like this: if I'm not satisfied with applicants or suggestions I get, I won't use them and I will write everything myself. But I feel like additional help is at least worth exploring. My ego for this is a non-issue. I'd much rather have a better script than to be able to say "I wrote all this myself." Don't worry about cohesion. I'm still directing this, I'll make sure whatever is added fits the movie well and I'm satisfied with it. Afterall, if the cohesion was poor, I wouldn't be satisfied with it.

 

Besides, a Hollywood production is an entirely different animal than an independent one. I won't have producers insisting on dumb changes or heavy politics related to who is writing what. The bottom line is just to make it the best movie I can.

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

 

 

 

Here's the latest videochat with the audience. I was a little late getting this one out since there were sound sync problems in the recording that I wanted to fix before posting this on Youtube. This one was a little more structured than previously as I tried to answer a lot of submitted questions, though it reverted to the old chaos by the end. I cover a lot of topics, including Planetside 2, budgeting advice, more produdction aspects about the movie, Gamergate, the new Star Wars, and career and school advice amongst other things. I ramble a lot, but I think it was slightly more coordinated than the previous times.

 

The next videochat will be on Feb 7, 4pm EST again. I don't know yet if it will be on twitch or another chat service, I have to do more research first. I'll have an announcement on that ahead of time if I do change venues. Also if you have questions / topics you'd like discussed in the next videochat, either email [email protected], or else reply in this thread.

 

- - -

 

AUDITION FOR ASSISTANT WRITERS:

This is mentioned in the video also, but I'm cautiously considering any applications for being an assistant writer on the movie script. I have the main plot and many scenes established, but I'm interested in help with smaller scenes and subplots to help tie everything together. This is going to be for an adventure-comedy with a mystery element also. I more or less have the "adventure" part laid out and have lots of good comedy, but I really want to have this script be the best it can be and I think having additional writer could definitely benefit the movie as a whole.

 

If you have background in comedy writing (mysteries are also a bonus) and are interested in having a shot at writing part of the movie script, send me a sample of your comedic writing to my main email address ([email protected]). If I like your style, I can consider you for the movie itself. I do want to emphasize that this will be THE hardest position to get in the movie and I will be absolutely merciless in considering applicants. So odds are, you'll be rejected. Afterall, I'm looking for someone who can write some of the scenes BETTER than I can. I won't be mean to anyone, but I consider the script the single most important aspect of the movie, so it's not an area I'm willing to compromise on. That said, you don't have to worry about typos or minor mistakes, it's your content and style that I'll be most interested in.

 

Finally, something I forgot to mention in the videochat, a lot of the download links to Civil Protection and other videos were down, those have since been fixed, so they should be working again.

 

COMMENTS

Ross, please be careful with nearest neighbor filtering. If the size you are trying to scale is not an integer number like 2, 3, 4, n times you will get distortion. some lines or columns may appear bigger than others.

I'm fully aware of this, the thing is, I'm thinking down the road. Say you have a 4k monitor where the source image doesn't divide evenly. The off-integers are going to look closer and closer to the original the higher your resolution is. With bilinear filtering more resolution makes it WORSE. Regardless, if I'm just playing the game for myself, I would rather have the slightly less accurate image, but sharper look, then the bilinear blur everywhere. I would still keep it accurate for official videos.

 

And yes, I did have the distortion in the video to show the difference more clearly. For game dungeon I upscale past the display resolution with nearest neighbor, then use bicubic or lanczos to bring it to 1080. So if the source is 320x200, I scale it to 1920x1200, then back to 1728x1080.

 

Well, I can also elaborate a bit about that. Actually the problem is a bit more complex - a virtual CPU works _exactly_ like a normal one, so if a normal one may perfrom a MSAA/FXAA pass, than a virtual can do this as well, no problem. That's the whole point. So if we are talking about software emulation rendering here - we are scored. Antialiasing in an emulator (a "hard mode" emulator, such as VirtualBox, VMWare and such) should work out of box! Except that no antialiasing works in software emulation (no hardware acceleration).

 

Sooo, we are moving to the root problem - hardware acceleration. How do one emulate a hardware acceleration? That's right - by not emulating it! The only way to hardware accelerate an emulated program is to pass all the GPU commands and data back to the host OS (the one which is running an emulation software, such as VirtualBox, etc) and perform it on the host OS, using host drivers on a host real GPU. And it works fine, except for the DirectX games, because no-one knows exactly what DirectX actually does under the hood. So all DirectX games are running through some soft of API/driver emulation in the guest system which tries to behave like DirectX, but usually fail miserably (for instance - VirtualBox hardware emulation actually translates all DirectX calls into OpenGL using code from the Wine project), due to numerous undefined behaviours, uses of undocumented or poorly documented DirectX features, driver gotchas and stuff like that. And driver-mode MSAA/FXAA (and we are talking about OLD games here, way before sharers era) is just a black magic that generally does not work even natively, so most emulators just ignore it, because it's such pain in the ass.

 

That said, it might be possible to enforce antialiasing for a game within a guest system by the same means as you enforce antialiasing for a game within the host system, via drivers. As for the host driver it's the same thing as a native application (it doesn't really care what's coming in and how it's get there) it will enforce antialiasing for it anyway. MXAA is a fat chance - it's a bit too complex to enforce, but a fullscreen one is just fine - it's just rendering in n times bigger resolution and then scaling the image down. But you may want to rename exe files for an emulator software into something else. Or somehow tell your drivers not to use any stupid hacks and quirks it might be using for a given application (usually detected by exe name), such as disabling antialiasing.

 

I do generally prefer playing old games in Linux under WINE. I do find it much easier and more convenient than running VirtualBox with Windows XP within Windows whatever else. I also think that it should be possible to enlarge a Wine window to match your resolution with whatever filter you want (it sounds like a more convenient "Screen Zoom" application). Never tried it though. But if you are interested in running Wine I may try to find or patch it.

 

And, BTW, if we are talking about a windows "fullscreen mode" - it actually changes your resolution to a lower one. Which means that filtering stuff is not a videocard's job anymore, but your monitor's one. You should check your monitor's menu/drivers for a filtering config. Mine doesn't have such a feature, but I know some monitors have it.

I'm not expecting miracles, but we have NOTHING right now. Here are some thoughts:

 

-I was actually thinking more of dumb supersampling rather than MSAA. MSAA doesn't do anything for alpha textures anyway. It may not make any difference at all (I don't know), but I would think SSAA would be easier to implement since it wouldn't have to seek for edges, but rather render the whole scene at a higher resolution, then scales it back down.

-You mentioned how virtualbox will translate DirectX protocols into OpenGL anyway and that hardware acceleration isn't emulated, but is instead passed on to the host system. Fine! I haven't used Virtualbox in a long time, so maybe this does work, but in VMware, if I force AA through the hardware control panel on the host system, it STILL doesn't do anything. Is this not the case with Virtualbox? If the virtual machine would just accept the overrides from the host system, this wouldn't be an issue for me at all.

-While it's my last choice, being able to apply FXAA or SMAA to the virtual machine would also be at least another option than we have now. Again, I've tried forcing this to no avail. If it's just being applied broadly, the content being pre-shaders shouldn't matter, since these methods don't use any geometry to apply the "AA" anyway. It's just looking at colors and brightness.

I plan to upgrade to one of the Pascal cards when they come out, which I'm guessing won't be too far behind the Oculus release, but who knows, it seems like everyone keeps pushing dates back. I'm still on my 660 Ti, I almost got the 970 last year, but reports of coil whine scared me off from it.

 

I would consider AMD, but I've seen better antialiasing compatibility from Nvidia, plus they've announced the "auto stereo" feature which could bring VR support to a ton of older games, which I would love. I can't say I'm fond of some of the business practices Nvidia is doing, but I care too much about some of the features they have over AMD.

Hey Ross, I don't have anything yet of course, but in case I find myself with too much time on my hands, could you provide some basic measurements of your hands? Nothing too crazy, finger length and palm height/width, just to have some reference.

A few people asked for that, I'll try and get them when I can. My hands aren't especially freakish, just a little on the large side. I feel like with the right design, my measurements wouldn't matter so much as long as the shell was kind of large.

 

If you could link a couple base mice with the number of buttons you desire and give an adequate description of the size, shape, and placement of the buttons, number of buttons, it would be much easier to design something.

I'm not an expert, but if I were to pick one, I might go for the Steelseries Raw. I haven't used that one specifically, but I've used the Xai and Kana and in both cases the software and sensors worked well for me. There might be better choices in terms of durability out there though. The scroll wheel snapped on the Xai and the left mouse button went "mushy" on the Kana. Alternately, I tried the Madcatz RAT 7, which gave me some sensor issues, but I love the thumb scroll wheel that thing had.

 

Hey Ross, I can fabricate a custom mouse for you, given enough time of course.

Since we're getting a few offers, it sounds like someone should maybe put some designs out there. I can't always tell what's comfortable from looking at them, but I can spot some things that aren't. In general, I like a mouse that basically fits your hand in a relaxed or slightly spread position, mostly low hump, gradual slope in the back, I'll try and get some more details later.

 

Hi Ross, Have you tried using a vertical mouse?

No, although I'm not sure that would fit my style super well, it seems like to have a button for every finger, you would have to have the middle finger resting on the scroll wheel with the remaining two spread out.

 

Just registered to let you know:

 

Roccat has this new mouse, its ambidextrous and you can switch out the side panels, they ship with several different ones but the neat thing is, you get the 3d printing software shipped too and so you can pretty much design your own side panels , print them out and stick them on your mouse. They also provide a 3d library, where you can just copy designs from other users and print those out

I think that still has the same problem where there are no buttons for the pinky and ring finger are there?

 

There's no pinkie finger button, unfortunately, because the human pinkie is a wimpy little bitch and frankly who even needs it.

 

Here's how I'd tackle this. Start with a lump of clay, as big as a mouse. Warm that stuff up in your hands and slap it down. Mold the clay with your actual hand. After all, if you're going to go custom, go really custom. Once you have the shape the way you want it you have 2 options. Scan the clay and 3D print it, or bake it and mold a sheet of thermoform plastic around it with a heat gun or even vacuform it. Then use an existing mouse and make it happen. 3D printing is cool 'n all, but it doesn't have to be the only solution. Vacuforming is also very cool.

I'm open to anything people want to try. It does sound like the next step is to get dimensions of my hand and show an ideal usage position. In the meantime, you probably won't go wrong mimicking The Claw.

I'll try out sizer later. It feels like Mike Matei is advising me on this. And for the record, I absolutely prefer to run stuff in fullscreen.