random_n00b

I'm outta control! Woohoo!

Yeah, driver support is definately impressive for where they're at with the system. Vista had drivers for my nForce 2 NIC, and was able to get the rest from Windows Update (except for my printer, but I wouldn't expect that). The only device that failed to install was the game/MIDI port for my Sound Blaster. One thing I was really impressed with was how well the rollback feature works now... After I had installed the latest ATi drivers, I was presented with a large amount of corruption on odd things like the background in Solitaire and anything with pixel shaders in Source. So, I hit the rollback button in the device manager, the hard disk chugged for a while, the display flicked once, and it was done. No reboots - Windows never even mentioned it as a suggestion - and I was back with the stock display drivers working as expected. Now, they just need to make an uninstall routine that reliable and effective which works on applications, and I'd be thinking more highly of Vista... just imagine... Oh, you've got SearchBarDoublePlusGood installed and giving you popup ads? Just go to Add/Remove programs and take it out. It'll work as long as you didn't disable that uac crap. Maaaybe someday.

For me personally, I don't see any benefit to using it just yet. The user account protection is certainly on the right path, but it's presently too annoying to use (they are working on it though). I currently still prefer taking a standard NT5.x limited user, granting write access to Program Files, HKLM\Software (except HKLM\Software\Microsoft), and delete access to the All Users\Start Menu areas. Pretty much everything works properly, it takes surprisingly little time to set up, and you still get most of the limited user security benefit (ie; no system drivers can butt themseleves in). I suspect that a lot of what UAC provides will be incentive to software developers to make things work properly in limited user mode, which will be retroactively beneficial to NT5. The visuals are nice, but I'm more of a Windows Classic fellow. Pretty much the only style I've used for a long amount of time is Wurp, with the dark style. The glass in Vista is okay for the window borders, but I think that it looks pretty bad in the picture viewer and in Windows Media Player where there are interface elements on top of the glass. The performance sucks, but being a beta, is easily forgivable. It gets better after a little while though (I'd suppose after the indexing service finishes doing what it does), and it's certainly not unusable slow. I suppose it's not much worse than an out-of-the-box XP install, but I'm picky, and I'll start ripping things out over the next few days to see how quick it can really go. IE 7 is good, and certainly looks better than IE 7 on Windows XP. Having it run in a minimum privilege account is undoubtedly the best idea Microsoft has had for securing that thing in a long while, and they've done a really good job of making it transparent to the user. The games manager is promising, and while I haven't had much chance yet to test it out, it did automatically added Quake III in for me after I ran an already-installed copy on another partition (must've grabbed the cover art and rating info off of the Internet). Pretty slick. Last, the one thing I really miss here is an option for a greyscale-based ClearType. The subpixel antialiasing on all the text looks bad with a CRT, and the whole thing looks terrible with no text antialiasing (the default system font, Segoe UI, is heavily geared toward being rendered with ClearType on). Linux's FreeType system has a great level of customizability, and Microsoft really needs to meet their competitors here. Overall, I really don't find it so much better than the current Windows and Linux offerings, and it certainly doesn't impress me like Apple's OS. I figure that with the added security and protections, it won't fall apart so easily under the management of uncaring users, but as a computer geek, I don't yet feel the need for Windows Vista.

HDR = High Dynamic Range... I think Gabe and his crew explains how the whole thing works in the Lost Coast map better than I could here - just turn on the commentary and give it a run. The reason HDR maps take longer to load though, is pretty simple: the textures have more data in them. It's not more data in the usual height, width, or detail though - it's more data in colour depth (kinda like 256 colour GIF vs 24-bit JPEG). That's why you get a framerate boost from turning off HDR (your system won't render it), but the map still takes long to load (because it still uses the same larger HDR textures). Now, tuning your system for optimum map-loading performance can be a fair bit of work. Still, perhaps the easiest and most effective tweaks are the simplest! If you don't care too much about a visual quality loss, then put in mat_specular 0 and mat_bumpmap 0 in your configuration. Those are two very large sets of textures that you won't have to load, but they're unfortunately a large part of what makes Source visually stand out from the old Half-Life engine. Here's a few other things that can speed loading performance: -Faster hard disk -Better partitioning - dedicated Steam, Windows, and Swap partitions near the start of the drive -Best IDE/SATA drivers available for your motherboard/controller card -Windows tweaks - there's a million of 'em, and but they will add up eventually -Different OS - Windows 2003 and XP64 are better at disk I/O and memory management I used to get bumped out of the CS:S server at the end of a map because people could join halfway during the mapchange and still beat me into the game! Now I'm often the first one in, and that's still on an IDE drive, too!

Lesee... one.. that's January.... seven... hey! That's today! Now all I've got to do is ignore the telephone for a while, and I might actually see mapnight for once.

You can always check that +showbudget graph. On my machine, in all but the most complex scenes, the "client animation" bar is the largest - which is a CPU bound resource. Not surprising considering my now-humbled Athlon XP 2800+ is running the task, but I don't really mind if the framerate isn't always top notch. I wanted to buy a new sound board (you know - to upgrade something that isn't broken for once), but now I have to get a monitor since this one is getting an awful flicker in the bottom-right and top-left corners. Hopefully my college has some they'd like to get rid of for cheap .

Actually, that trial version of WinRAR works indefinately. You just have to deal with a simple nag screen after 30 days. The open source project 7-Zip can deal with RAR files as well, and that is freeware. I just don't think it's quite as nice as WinRAR. .....man, this download is taking it's time....

I wouldn't mind seeing this map take the boot in the later hours of the day - it just isn't fun when the server only has a dozen people in it. Now, what I wouldn't mind seeing around once in a while is cs_compound. Certainly not as every fifth map, but maybe a couple times a night would be nice.

I'm still convinced that "Auto Join" button is just another way to say "Terrorist"... o_0

Desert Eagle - if you need more than seven bullets, you've already lost.

ATi numbers go Year.Month - so they kind of screwed themeselves a bit. Either the nine months out of the year sound like dumb little revisions going 5.01, 5.02... or three months out of the year look out of place going 5.10, 5.11, 5.12. No matter what though, once you understand it, figuring out what driver was from when is a WHOLE lot easier than when it was when they were using a four digit software version scheme (from the early Radeon, pre-Catalyst days).

Well, I can see everybody's quite content here with Valve's skin , but it would be silly of me to mention this and not post the finished creation. So: Linky

...is ugly (in my humble opinion). I thought it could use a little fixerrupper, so I started hacking about with the new skinning format, and it's actually very flexible. There's still all sorts of things I need to change (like the settings/server browser/full view, and possibly colours), but I think this is the style I'm going for. If anybody's interested, I could post it up when it's done (probably Friday, time permitting). Whatcha think?

Too Xtreme for the letter E! Sounds like fun (that means I'd like to sign up )

Y'know, computers can die all by themselves given enough time... I'd get on that backup. And regarding the iPod... I don't really have a problem with digital piracy and whatnot, but stealing people's physical property - that's just not cool in any way, shape, or form. You should at least point the poor guy over to Gunman's link.

Hey, that's kinda cool. Like those silly shaders you can set in the ATI control panels, but the hud stays coloured. Nifty Now, if I could figure out why mine crashes (memory could not be "written") when I join a server now, I'd be all set. It worked with the update this afternoon, but they updated something again this evening and now it's broke. Ah well, I've been playing HL2 again anyways - it runs so much better now .

Haha. Nobody would ever fall for that ploy!

<drive>:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\<username>\counter-strike source Dump the whole "counter-strike source" folder. This is where Steam keeps its configuration settings (among other things) for CS:S. If you dump that folder, Steam will regenerate it and provide you with a fresh config set. Only things you should lose from that is any screenshots you've taken, custom stuff you've downloaded (maps, skins, etc)... and perhaps a MB or two of bandwidth while Steam fetches what's gone missing. Feel free to back up your custom stuff, but don't move anything back until everything is running smooth. If problems persist, then work from there. For the most part, though, the defaults are pretty good.

I saw something along those lines, but perhaps a little noobier... The bomb was planted at site B on Aztec, but the CT's moved in and were able to dispatch with the Terrorists. There was enough time to defuse, but not without a kit. Thankfully, one of the remaining CT's comes in with a kit and gets on the job pronto - no fuss - the round was in the bag. All you could hear was the soft rain and a rhythmic beeping while everyone waited for the little orange progress bar to make its journey. Then, not more than a second before the defuse would've been done, some guy who the defuser TK'd (which must have happened over half a minute ago) gives him a great big slap. He goes flying and about the time he hits the ground, the wonderful little green present goes off. "Terrorists win"

It's a good map, but when it come up in the late night four-map rotation and the server's "status" output lists the connection count reaching 3000, the map just kills the server. It will take five minutes before the map even begins to load locally, and quite some time after that before you actually get into the map. I gave up this last time, and the Steam server browser listed the server as not responding for at least seven minutes. Lag between rounds while the objects are reset is nasty to watch if you forget to bring your spec-camera to a full and complete stop (and even still it's a lengthy delay with beans to do. So, of course, what may have been a near full server becomes a very vacant server when this map comes up, and that's a real party pooper. Maybe cs_office or something would make a good replacement, eh?

aww. I remember I originally wanted to use port 666, but I looked up if something else important used it, and found out that every trojan written since AOL was released used that port Oh well

Wait... was that 3333 or 33333? because if it's the former, then I have to change my remote desktop port . It was such an easy number to remember...

I'm not sure if it will work for the 518, but if it does, then be sure to get LogiGamer. You can set profiles to load for certain applications and bind ANY mouse button to any action desired (not just the regular 5 buttons that CS recognizes). Might as well put the whole mouse to work It's pretty stinkin' good for Photoshop too