Ross Scott

I'm going to make a post with some news on stuff probably tomorrow, I'll talk more about it then. The short version is that I'm skeptical as to how functional this will be outside of a TF2 environment and if it has anything to offer over UDK.

I can't stand playing a game without anti-aliasing. For me, having a game on high without using AA defeats the purpose of using the high setting.

I'm with you 100%, for me AA is one of the best things ever to happen to 3D graphics.

 

That's what FXAA is for... 1-3 FPS drop for very decent AA...

It's definitely a boon to the industry, due to its compatibility and its speed, but I'm really hoping things just don't stop there. The big problem with FXAA is that the coverage is uneven. In some areas it's as good as high-end supersampling, but in other areas of a scene, it may as well not be turned on at all. So for me personally, it makes my eyes call attention to areas that aren't getting smoothed out, because my brain is filtering the ones that are. That said, MSAA + alpha texture SSAA is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Due to the sheer amount of incompatible shaders, deferred rendering, or flat out incompatibility, their coverage often won't work at all on many modern games. Nowadays I feel like things are moving towards varying degrees of supersampling (which takes a ton of speed no matter how you slice it), or shader-based solutions (FXAA, MLAA, SMAA, etc.), and that's it. It's also huge divide between the kind of power you need to achieve either method too. So your options are pretty much a shader based solution with negligible speed drops, or else an absolute powerhouse to get full SSAA.

If you can't get the loops to work in-game, I'd say your only option is to do it manually and stack the same animation over and over in the timeline for the duration you need. You might want to have quick ramp fades to make sure the transition isn't too abrupt.

It's not that simple, I've done a TON of research on monitors. Here's a breakdown:

 

CRT:

+scalable resolution (looks better than non-native resolutions on a LCD)

+NO input lag

+better response time than LCDs

-heavier

-low level radiation

-hard to find now

-picture not quite as crisp as LCDs

 

As for the eyestrain, that's only true if you run your monitor at the default 60Hz. If you run it at 85Hz or above, it shouldn't be an issue.

 

LCD TN panel (the vast majority sold in outlet stores are these kind):

+Cheap

+sharp image

+better input lag / response time than IPS panels (but not CRTs)

-poorer color reproduction

-poor angle viewing (if you shift up and down in your seat, the whole image becomes darker or brighter)

-images look worse at non-native resolutions

 

LCD IPS panels and in some cases VA ones (LCDs, but completely different technology than TN's, usually have to order these)

+Excellent color reproduction

+Excellent viewing angles

-input lag / response time not as good as TN panels (but some are good enough for twitch gaming anyway)

-more expensive than TN panels

 

 

There's also something in monitors you'll want to look into called standard and wide gamut, which have to do how saturated your colors are. People have different preferences, but in my opinion, I like the look of standard gamut better.

 

In my opinion, you may not be happy with a store bought TN LCD panel if you're coming from a CRT, you'll probably notice a lot of their flaws. I would try and find an e-IPS panel, these tend to have the best of all worlds. The color reproduction and viewing angles you can expect from a CRT, the sharpness of a LCD, and still fast enough for gaming. It's your call though, you can always see TN panels on display in a store and decide for yourself what you think of them.

Can a sapphire HD 7770 handle bf3 on highest ?

Only if you're going to get 2 and run them in Crossfire... Then again, that's the same with everything lower than the 7970... (or the GTX 670 for Nvidia) You're gonna get I haven't played it, but at high quality with AA , Tom's Hardware is reporting closer to 30fps, 45 with AA off:

 

 

Not sure if they're reporting on a skewed situation, but that's over double the speeds you're claiming. So it just depends on how smooth you want it. At 1680x1050, you get about a 5fps boost on top of that.

 

EDIT: Never mind, looks like these are for high and he was talking about ultra, I wasn't aware of the divisions for BF3.

I wouldn't worry about PCI express 3.0:

 

http://www.overclock.net/t/1188376/hardwarecanucks-hd-7970-pci-e-3-0-vs-pci-e-2-0-comparison

Since so many people are interested in the meetup idea from the earlier poll, I've decided to split things up into TWO meetups instead. I don't have all the details yet, but I wanted to give people as much notice as possible on the dates and locations, so here they are:

 

 

It's over!

 

 

Location: Carowinds - Charlotte, North Carolina

Date: August 4th

Price: $41 for August 4th if you use this link to purchase tickets. ($36 + $5 BS "processing" fee.)

 

My apologies about the prices of these places, these were really the minimum I was able to get the ticket prices down to after a lot of phone calls.

 

-Freeman's Mind and Civil Protection T-shirts will be for sale!

 

-More detailed info will be up soon!

Ha, this is a little tangential, but I just had to post this after the "better business practices" comment:

 

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/linus_torvalds_tosses_f-bombs_middle_fingers_and_general_disdain_nvidia

 

Again, ATI is no saint either, they both have their pros and cons.

It could just be overheating. Try taking the panel off your computer case and blowing a fan at it and see if the problem still occurs.

Looks like a pretty good starter system, though I'm amazed the CPU price is so high. I actually have that exact same CPU and got it around $120 USD at the time (with VAT). You might want to see if there's another vendor or maybe another CPU slightly slower to see if there's a substantial price dip there. If not, then I guess you're kind of screwed there, but it seems way more proportionally than your other parts in NZD. Also you're right, for Battlefield 3 in particular you won't see much if any benefit from going to an Intel CPU:

 

 

Also as for the PSU, the two places you generally don't want to go too cheap are the PSU and RAM. Even if you only need a 500W PSU, running a PSU closer to its maximum can actually shorten its lifespan some. So if you only need 400W, then a 650W PSU should last longer running that than a 500W, particularly if you have a name brand like Corsair. Also for your RAM, you can go with a lesser known brand, but I would make sure you have some sort of warranty then.

Yeah... If I end up having to wait, I'll be going for the GTX 700's. (not a fan of AMDs video cards at all, and Nvidia has much better business practices)

I plan on going to to the 600 series at some point too, but I've used cards from both companies before and really it comes down to AA quality that determines which cards I gravitate towards. I'd argue Nvidia EASILY has better high-end AA options and compatibilty options, but only with 3rd party tools, and mostly just for DX9 or below. ATI has more AA options out of the box than Nvidia, but less overall. This DX10/11 supersampling is a wildcard however, since so far I haven't been able to get SSAA to work in DX11 games at ALL with Nvidia cards. If I had to make a judgment today, I'd say Nvidia has better AA options for DX9 and below, but with these new drivers, AMD has better AA options for DX10 and above. It's an interesting split.

 

As for better business practices, I'd say both companies (ATI v Nvidia) have done sleazy things before, both companies have had big software issues, and both companies have come out with innovations the competition simply didn't have at the time. I don't think there's enough evidence to really say one has better business practices over the other. For every good / bad thing you name about AMD / Nvidia, I can probably name something else from the other camp. I think it really only comes down to specifics as to which side is better at what.

It will have RPG elements

Found Item: Dry socks

+20 against foot rot

No effect against water

 

 

Also the Christmas Update will allow you to cross over the trenches and make peace with the enemy until you're ordered back into your side by an admin.

Awesome episode as always, but I have to ask....

 

I was googling Ross Scott and one of the results was "Ross Scott Karate."

 

Ross, I have to ask, are you a karate champion? I could see it happening but I just had to make sure.

No, I only know 2 self defense moves. I can share Freeman's lament about not knowing martial arts, especially with the meetup coming up.

Okay, working on the subtitles for this damned thing. Does anyone know what Freeman is saying when

he's searching the dead scientist's pockets and says something like, "Well, don't expect any fair for caring from me"? "Fair for caring"?

 

 

Maybe it's slang and I've never heard the term before.

 

Charon

 

 

At long last, here's the next episode of Freeman's Mind. Your enjoyment of this episode may be proportional to how much you like dams. As a bit of a spoiler, I didn't intend for the helicopter encounter to go quite how it did, but I'll just keep moving forward with the game.

 

As I mentioned in the last episode post, I kept a log of how long the entire process for creating this episode took (image below). This ended up being an ideal episode to pick for this experiment. This turned out to be a pretty average episode I think in terms of time. It wasn't especially long and some minor mistakes happened, which always adds to the time. Also I already had the existing titles and flyby intro created, which also cut down on the time.

 

This episode was also such a good choice for measuring the time because it perfectly illustrates why I CAN NOT promise release dates. If you look at the log, you may notice that one entry stands out a little bit more than the others, by about about 4 weeks. I thought I was going to have this episode done about 3 weeks ago. That's obviously not what happened. While in the earlier episodes I did EVERYTHING myself, nowadays I depend on volunteer help in various areas. While I COULD do all the sound editing myself, it's really worth it for me not to. Even though the sound editor (Otto) took a long time on this episode, during that time I was learning more of the Unreal 3 engine and making some progress on the movie project. That's time I didn't have to spent scouring for sound effects and editing. And before people start forming lynch mobs against Otto for taking so long, I really have to come to his defense. He CAN be quite fast, having had a turnaround of about two days or so before. Also he does an OUTSTANDING job on the sound effects, better than I think even I can do now, and better than other volunteers I've worked with (though I appreciate their help too). Finally, out of the people who have assisted me as long as he has, I can easily say he is the MOST RELIABLE volunteer I've had during that length of time. That should give you an idea of some of the other people I've worked with. That said, I'm open to having more sound effects help on Freeman's Mind. If you have experience with that sort of thing, go ahead and email me and I can arrange a trial test for you.

 

Now you business majors out there may look at this time log and think "Why, with a fast sound editor Ross could make an episode every 2 days!" While that's been true once or twice, it only happens under certain conditions. First, I have to be in a good mood to think up lines; otherwise I won't have anything funny and nobody wants that. Second, when an episode has a lot of shouting, I need several hours for my voice to recover during recording sessions. Finally, I can't be working on ANYTHING else, and most of the time I'm working on several different things. Usually I only spend a couple hours each day on Freeman's Mind. If I was good at improv comedy, this process would be approximately 50x faster, but I'm not.

 

Speaking of other things, before I progress too far on the next episode, my next goal is to update a LOT of the movie links and get a bunch more MKV copies of the older videos up on the site. I don't think I'll fix everything, but I plan to spend a lot of time getting the videos more organized on the site.

 

 

ADHD version: This episode took a while. Expect updates to the site soon.

The episode is up here, but I can't make a post about it on the front page because the database is screwed up and I can't contact anyone for help. I'll have a real post on this later:

 

WeTurbxoeE4

I guess this is old news, but I only recently heard about it:

 

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst122precertifieddriver.aspx

 

Apparently Radeon 7000 series cards now support supersampling antialiasing in Directx 10 / 11 applications. This is good news all-round for trying to improve image quality in gaming. Nvidia doesn't support SSAA at all officially. It's capable of it with the program Nvidia Inspector, but I've never been able to get it to work in DirectX 11 game. While I think with enough tweaking, Nvidia cards have greater AA compatibility than AMD ones for DirectX 9 games and below, this may push AMD ahead for better AA compatibility on DX11 games.

 

If anyone out there actually owns a Radeon 7000 card and is willing to make some screenshot tests, please message or email me, I'd love to compare the quality or see how compatible it is.

Well I think if you had people that you were paying competitively to develop ALL your assets, textures, models, animations, and all, the total would definitely run in the millions. As it is for my movie, I plan to use as much content from other games as is practical, it's mostly just characters that will be custom developed. Also marketing will eat up as much money as you're willing to throw it.

 

I haven't seen Iron Sky, but I've heard of it, I didn't realize they had finished.

Well for a project with 18 million in funding, I'm pretty damn sure I could be persuaded to go back to Source and find enough help to get all the problems with it fixed. I can guarantee the Source engine they'll be working with is not what I've been working with.

 

I'm really curious on how they are going to spend all that money.

Probably on modellers, animators, higher end motion capture, and marketing.

 

This also kind of shows the divide between costs of an animated movie. They're operating at 18 million, which is considered economical in Hollywood terms. So far I think the donations page has raised over $1,800, most of which will go towards the movie project. While that's more money then I've ever had to put in a project in my whole life, that's still 0.0001% of the budget for what's considered "economical" for normal computer graphics movies. Guess we'll see who gets done first!

If you're thinking of gaming, I would highly suggest getting one of the newer Seagate 1TB/platter hard drives. They beat out all but 180 of the best SSDs in existence for about $0.10/GB.

I haven't looked into those, but unless it's a hybrid drive, I can't imagine them coming to close to SSDs in terms of random writes and reads, which really is the biggest bottleneck of mechanical drives anyway.

Man I don't get why the hell someone would convert already compressed audio to lossless instead of leaving it as-is. I'll try and upload the extended soundtrack sometime.

If you remember a post where Ross said that his heatsink had somehow become loose from his cpu. He said he was using an intel chip

You've got your facts wrong. It was a motherboard Northbridge chipset where the heatsink came loose and caused the problems, the processor was fine. Also the last Intel CPU I had was clocked at 450mhz. Nowadays I go with AMD for 3 reasons:

 

1. While Sandy Bridge has shaken things up a bit, for a LONG time AMD has had the best price to performance ratio, especially at the range I buy at. I haven't checked lately, but it used to be if you were looking at a CPU in the $80 - 120 range, AMD was pretty much the best option period.

 

2. It depends on what you do, but for a lot of CPUs, the performance gains between a cheaper AMD chip and a more expensive Intel one are pretty small on most games, especially considering the money jump. While there are exceptions, Far Cry 2 being a notable one, the majority of games today are GPU-bound, not CPU-bound. For Unigine there's almost NO performance difference between a top-end AMD CPU v. a top-end Intel one. So the extra $100 - $200 you spend on an Intel chip is likely to get you somewhere between 5-10 fps on most games, whereas if you put that same money into a beefier GPU, you're talking anywhere from 20-50fps more. If you're a gamer, it's hard to justify the Intel premium unless you have extra cash to burn, and even then you get a better payoff putting it into the videocard first. If you do a lot of other CPU intensive chores however, Intel CPUs likely pay off more.

 

3. Intel has proven they are BASTARDS. They've engaged in predatory pricing, monopolistic practices, bribing and blackmailing vendors, a lot of business abuses all round. Back in the early 2000s when AMD was actually kicking Intel's ass, AMD gained almost NO marketshare despite having better products out. Intel was actively engaging in all sorts of illegal practices to supress them and it paid off. Even though they got fined later by the European Union for $1.45 billion , it's really a slap on the wrist compared to all the money they made during that time despite having an inferior product. If they had actually played fair and not broken the law repeatedly over the past decade, then who knows. AMD might have gained more revenue and the market as a whole might be more competitive instead of Intel dominating again. For this reason, unless Intel gains a de facto monopoly again so there are no competitive options, I try to avoid Intel CPUs in general. AMD to the best of my knowledge hasn't done anything shady at all in their business (not counting the GPU department, which is really just ATI rebranded). In fact, they were a supporter of manufacturing computers at rock bottom prices for children in impoverished regions. I think they're overall just a more honest company to give money to.

Alright, I will sell my house, and pay my ticket to travel from Argentina to USA.

 

But, my house costs $2 ... so.... have fun.

Well this is just an experiment right now. Who knows, after I finish the movie, if I actually have enough money (which is a big if), I could see traveling to different locations to do this sort of thing if there was enough interest.

Acting on the philosophy of "It's better to regret something you have done, than regret something you haven't done", I've had an idea for a while to see if anyone was interested in doing a meetup for Accursed Farms. You would get to meet me, maybe F.C. Meixell (voice of the shadow man from CP), and maybe Craig Mengel (voice of Dave from CP) although Craig may decline on account of him thinking you people are psychos. Right now I have no solid plans at all, I just wanted to see if there was any interest in this. I was leaning towards going to an amusement park as a venue for this. That way if nobody shows up, I still get to go to an amusement park. If hundreds show up, I don't have to worry about facilities to handle that.

 

I currently live in Blacksburg, Virginia, so you can look that up on a map to figure out where a good location for everyone might be. The farther away from me the location is, the less likely I want to travel there for this; especially since I don't currently have a car, but I can try to figure something out for that. Again, there are no definite plans for this right now, I don't know when, where, or if it will happen, but if there's enough interest in this, I'm up for it.

 

Finally, I was hoping to have this post after the next Freeman's Mind was released, but since that's gotten delayed a few weeks due to a sound editing hold-up, that unfortunately won't be for a little while still.

 

EDIT: It looks like there's definitely enough interest, I'll figure out specifics and have a new post with the details later on.

 

[poll id=6]

I like Google Streetview because it can give a good idea of what a place looks like. I'd love to look at more areas I may or may never visit. What I hate about Streetview is if you don't have a stellar connection it can take several seconds to load, then when you move forward, there's an animation played, then it takes several more seconds for your new location to load. So if I want to see an area of a street it may take me a minute of loading and navigating.

 

What I would LOVE would be a way to plot out a route (or select an area) along the roads it has covered and tell my computer to cache every image stored from Streetview along that route. Then once it was done downloading everything, be able to navigate it via keyboard with instant transitions like a slideshow.

 

I did find this:

 

http://www.labnol.org/internet/street-view-time-lapse/20504/

 

though the methodology the guy describes means that when a road makes a turn, the camera will stay cocked at the angle it was before that. Also you can only go in a straight line, but that's not a bad start.