Saturday, January 27, 2007

You Effers

I hope hope hope hope that Jon really like the game of Combat Commander (dare I offer a suggestion to pick it up from Thought Hammer for much cheaper than $80), because the designer does a lot of playtesting and whatnot at the Endgame on boardgame night. You guys should go and do it! I would if I could!
West Coast Melee X

Does anyone have any interest in joining me for a weekend, or even a day, of ASL madness at the West Coast Melee? It is an all ASL convention put on by the SoCalASL Club; I went last year and the quality of character is very high among all the players, as well as the willingness to help teach and play with n00bs.

It is at the Crowne Plaza in Irvine, runs from Feb 22 - 25
and would be fun to attend with an AT compatriot. Do it!

Friday, January 26, 2007

Alas, Poor GenCon, We Knew Him Well

So it is official, as well as no surprise to the astute Action Team, GenCon SoCal is no more. Petey has closed the books on what was a fun event, but one that was abviously struggling to maintain attendance, and interest in the mean streets of LA. Now I suppose that the Con of Cons is Kublacon, which again we all know is one of the best con experiences evar.

So lets all raise our 40's and pour some for our fallen gaming homies, and remember the fun of BachelorCon, WarmachineCon, EmptyCon, WeCantStopItsTooDangerousCon, and WoodenDisksOfSadnessCon.

Maybe we branch out and check out a ConQuest or two sometime. Either way, I look forward to Kubla and hope to attend this year! Huzzah!
Wow, that was weird.. all of a sudden.. there's posts to read! I thought our computer discussion had suddenly made all Action Team members spontaneously combust.

Dr. Cockburn,

If money is less of an issue and you want a card that can 'do it all', then I'd strongly recommend staying in the Nvidia/ATI families and get their professional-grade card. That will get you all of the gaming performance of their top of the line cards (and then some), PLUS the professional power you need for other applications. You can go totally apeshit crazy and buy professional cards that are insanely hot.. but I doubt it'd be mission critical for you to do so.

My recommendation (assuming money isn't much of an issue).. have them spring for the Nvidia Quadro 1GB card. It ain't cheap, but it's the best. I tend to prefer Nvidia to ATI and recommend them for users who aren't tinkerers (like myself). ATI cards give you more power for the dollar and can be tweaked out.. but I've never been a guy who likes fooling around with shit. I want to put it in and have it work, period.

Grab the high end Intel Duo chip and 4GB of low latency RAM.. throw in a sweet Creative Labs audio card.. a gigantic 10,000 RPM hard drive.. and you'll have yourself the OMFG BEST COMPUTER EVAR!

Of course, that's if budget is totally not an issue. Hehe..

Also, if you haven't made up your mind about a monitor.. you may want to consider a bulky and ugly CRT monitor despite the lack of sexy appearance. The flat panels are neato but they lack the ability to change resolution without dramatically screwing up performance/appearance. About the best you can do is 1600x1200 (which ain't bad, don't get me wrong) .. and you're going to pay out the ass (which I understand may not be an issue). If you want to go flatscreen, my recommendation is to stick with the highly-reputed manufacturers. Monitors are one place where you don't screw around.. you get what you pay for. ViewSonic is always my first choice. Samsung makes a nice monitor, too. You can get 1600x1200 flat panels for $600-700 or so at a 21" diagonal.

Anywa.. kind of rambling. But the bottom line is CRTs offer better picture quality, no ghosting, no dead pixels and superior color/resolution. The flat panels are sexy, small, and light.. but more fragile, have the possibility of ghosting, losing pixels, color wash.. yadda yadda. That being said, you probably won't notice THAT much of a difference unless you're doing very detail-oriented work and need the absolute precision.

That being said, if you do go flat panel, just make sure the response time is under 10ms. That's a big one.

edit: how many times can you say "recommend" and/or "that being said.." in one post?

Sigh.

Fuckers.
Lunar Pages

Apparently the good folks at Lunarpages "sent" me an email detailing that they were resetting everyone's account information to fight off some brute force attacks they were suffering. Yeah well, they never sent it to me, but I now have it, and everything should work peachy now.
Dang Eric, maybe we should also roll some dudes over on this other server cause the creator of Monkey Island started a MI-Themed guild! Might be cool just to go and say "wassssup" to the guy cuz I know IVE gotten a ton of enjoyment from his games.

PS - I thought Art's post on video cards just induced a massive case of the *crickets* but I see all these posts. FIX TEH BLORG~ I think maybe it has to do with it moving over fulltime to google. Today i had to switch over to my gmail account to even use it and maybe there's somethnig getting lost in the transitionlation. Bad-ass new word, huh!?
testing testing.. teh blogger is being tempermental
I defy you to watch this clip and not laugh:

http://klipps.no/tidenes_latterkrampe/

Thursday, January 25, 2007

We Need A Logo!

- ...because then we could make Action Team Custom Dice from Chessex! So cool! Maybe some sort of convention memorabilia, or the next of us to get married should have these as their wedding table goodies, or each entrant in the Whitey Snakebitey Cup could get a commemorative set, I don't know, but man! So cool!

- Our house is officially on the market as of 11.00am friday, the sign is in our yard, the house looks immaculate, and our storage units are bursting at the seams.

- Combat Commander has a vassal mod made for it that is the worst piece of crap ever. They tried to cram too much into too small a space/program and the product suffers big time. Rudy and I couldn't even manage to make it through the play of 2 cards without quitting. Such a shame. The designer of the mod said he will be releasing a scaled down version which should be better. More later as the facts reveal themselves.

- Still have not beat Hangar 18 on expert. Still have two working guitars, though I tried to break one on the soft recliner, but to no avail. It still works.
Vat ist deal mit blog?

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Don't worry that it won't post, Myke, the blog has been acting weird lately. I usually see about two hours elapse between when I write my brilliant prose and when it is released to the masses.

It Was the WoW-EQ Comparison That Did It

All right you guys, at eighty bucks $$expensive, or US$2.66 LDs, Combat Commander better be the best game of all time!

I'm kinda excited to have a chit-type game. I have been meaning to buy one for years now but just haven't found the right one. Hope this one is fun!

Monday, January 22, 2007

Thanks O-Rugs and E-ron for the suggestions on the video cards. Since there are some advantages to a professional card and a gamer card would it be advisable to get one of each? Obviously this is all still contingent on STFU being willing to pay, but a high tech setup was a component of my hire negotiations so I should be able to get something nice.

Neither of you will know the answer to this probably, but do you think one or the other will help with any other kinds of numerical crunching? For instance I use a type of software called GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and one of the things that I do is essentially ray-tracing but not in a true 3D environment. As far as I understand it, it's simply number crunching. I'm still not clear on what graphics cards do... but I assume it's simply the 'graphics' end of things that they assist in.

I'm not planning on making films (but you never know...), but I probably will be doing a number of 3D stills with lighting. Maybe therefore the professional card ain't worth it? Since I won't be getting another rig for a while out of my job, I should probably shoot for more than I think I'll need for the next few years too.

More advice? I really appreciate the help.

Edit: Why can't I get this to post?
Re: Rendering / 3DS Max

Essentially, it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish. As Aaron said, if you're looking for single-frame rendering (either as a true single-frame render, or as a frame in a sequence of animated shots), you'll see a bit better performance with the professional-grade cards that are built to crunch heavy numbers, especially as you get into ray-tracing and other ridiculously crazy rendering scenes. I had a single-frame image at 640x480 take my machine about 40 minutes to render because it had a light source refracting and ray-tracing through a glass with ice cubes on it.

Additionally, if you're looking for game-engine performance, then you'll be better off with a high end 'gamer' card. Plus, the highest-end gamer card you can buy is still going to be under $1000, whereas the professional-grade cards are thousands of dollars. I don't think you'll see the increase in render times as a significant benefit given the dollars involved.. unless you're rendering animated sequences / movies. I've seen a difference of an hour-plus between a commercial rendering card and my 6800gt on a simple 3 second render (90 frames). So, if you were going to render out a short movie or even a long movie at medium-to-high resolution.. you might see a big enough difference to make it worth your while, but I guess it comes back to what you need it to do for you.. and if time is critical.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

For someone who isn't the BIGGEST wargaming fan out there, I gotta say Combat Commander is a LOT of fun. Let's see, you could say it's like this: ASL was to EQ as Combat Commander is to WoW. Really. Take the good from ASL and add in all kinds of streamlining and a REALLY fun and tight interface. It's a blast. We played a game today. I dunno - I think I need to come over earlier sometime so we can play 2 games back to back. We always get through one and then I need to leave. Get it jon!

Playing through WoW again is pretty fun. Totally not the same level of addictiveness that it once had, but I still think it's one of the greatest games of all time. Taking it slow going through the new content and really appreciating it. I really doubt the next batch of MMORPGs coming out are gonna have much effect on WoW's dominance.

Man, I played Quake 1 after you emailed me for like 3 minutes and had to uninstall. I didn't like it when it came out (and I remember watching you play it down in your room back in the day haha) and I still can't stand it. There's just something that really puts me off about it (not taking into account it's dated-ness at all.) Say la veeee. :)
Thanks! If Combat Commander is better, than I'll probably pick that up next time I'm at the game store since it's cheaper and I wouldn't have to paint the pieces. I've read around about it a little and it sounds like a lot of fun! Not to mention the glowing reviews on the Day of a Million Games spreadsheet!

I "found my copy" of Quake and am playing through it; I'm on the last level now. Man, what a GREAT game. It's funny but now that time has rendered the graphics to be garbage I think I appreciate the game even more. The level design is stellar. The first time I played through that game it was on my parents' 486/25 which was well below the system requirements. I had to shrink the window way down and still only got about 10 fps. It was still awesome though.

If anybody's looking for a good flick, Children of Men is really good.
Flames of War

What I know is this:

1) It is also known as Warhammer 1944 because it plays a lot like a Warhammer-ish game, but with WWII models. Lots of dice rolling, lots of shooting, lots of mass assaults, etc.

2) It has absolutely top notch support, models, and sourcebooks.

3) It is very popular, and REASONABLY low priced to get into.

4) It is 15mm (Hooray!)

I have the rules and a few sourcebooks (army lists), as well as some of the minis. Denis and I actually made two armies once and I had them all based and primered, then I massacred them for use with our new PBI armies, which I then massacred so i could easily fit the figs in a baggie for storage/moving purposes.

Appendix

a) I could be convinced to play this if the interest is the same as with Warmachine. Though I gotta tell ya, ASL and Combat Commander are better games!
Enron, I will page j00 with my home number.

One-second movie reviews

Slither
Not that good.

Rudy
Okay.
3ds Max and Paint

MotoMyke: I did a bit more research last night and the general consensus on the Autodesk forums is that SLi/Crossfire does not appear to aid in the performance of 3D Studio Max. The other bit of information that I garnered is that the professional level cards such as the quadro cards will provide a boost for some types of fly through renderings, but they are temperamental and comparatively slow with consumer based 3D rendering such as the gaming engines. Finally I was able to determine that single shot renderings are more CPU intensive while fly through videos are more video card intensive. So to make a long story short, I think a powerful consumer based video card is the best choice for your needs.

jr0n: If you need to borrow my crack pipe I have one for you. Its in my pants. OH shit! Seriously though, I think I am probably going to be a bit crappy tomorrow judging by how I feel right now, but I bet Tuesday would be a good day to get our painting groove on. Maybe we can get together Wednesday too and have Myke join us for some power painting. How do I get a hold of you since your cell is dead?

D>M>
I had a dream the other night where I was playing WoW again, and it was soooo fun. Must... stay... away.

I'm a bachelor for the next two weeks while the ladyfriend jet-sets around the world on luxurious business expeditions. I fully expect her to come back engaged to some Saudi prince. Ah, such is my love that I would be content to be her lowly stableboy, polishing the golden horseshoes of her golden horses. But anyway I am looking to celebrate my time off with lots of hookers and crack. So anything I post the next two weeks, keep in mind it is under the influence of one of those two things.

Aeryk, do you know anything about Flames of War?