Games

MechWarrior – rebooting?

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I just got the most awesome hyper shockin’ news of the month! I’ve been talking to people a little more about my past, and I got a notion to see if a clan I used to be friendly with was still around—turns out they just turned 10 years old hehe. On their forums I found this link: http://pc.ign.com/articles/100/1002164p1.html

It appears that MechWarrior may rise again, or die in a deep development hell. It also seems that the folks at MekTek have gotten the rights to release MW4: Mercs + Clan/IS MekPaks for free, and that MekTek MekPak 4 is in development. Me and my wings retired during the 3.xxx days, so I have not kept up with the MW4 community since diving into [SAS]. I have the game disks still, and am starting to wonder how many people still play it online.

I really wonder though, if someday I will get to see a new (and good) MechWarrior game on the market. Oh man, it could be so good… hmm, who knows maybe we might regroup someday and kick some ass again. Next time my old friends log in, I need to send them a msg lol. We’ve largely gone our separate ways but still bump into each other every now and then but have really gotten out of sync I guess. But, then again that is the nature of distance I suppose.

Who knows what the future holds.

Old remarks

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Was searching through the forums for something En4cer or Rouge said a year or two ago, when I found something I once posted about tactical fire & maneuver used in films:

* for context, IRL = In Real Life; IHW = In HollyWood

My list of differences between Real world Elite and Holiwood Elite.

IRL a 9mm probably will bounce off a windshield at 50m

IHW a 9mm will take out the engine block of a truck if its on Full Auto.

IRL a solider might not have a full mag all the time, to prevent jams. (editors note: not all are created equal)

IHW, magazines have bullets 4 a breast so you can reload off camera

IRL a [good] solider can snap off a head shot at 50m /w an MP5 as fast as they can think.

IHW, the hero can pop the running squiral in the left nut at 25m with a sling shot.

IRL, a 12.7mm M2 || M82 will make your day.

IHW, some how a pistol packs more punch then a 30mm Gatling gun.

IRL, you want strong cover like a CBS wall so bullets won’t penitrate.

IHW, you can use a lamp post or a dead guy as cover agasnt 7.62x39mm ammo.

Some how I can’t help but chuckle whenever I think about that running squirrel part xD. For some reason the Last Action Hero also comes to mind…

Todays personal training (SWAT 4)

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Where; [SAS] Training Ground US

General criteria: no tactical aids permitted, other then breaching kit.

Phase I: Old Granet Hotel, stealth to first contact then high intensity clearing; round 1: success, mp5; round 2: failure, m4. Average shots per kill: 5-6/3-4, killed by a survivor of 4 5.56x45mm to the chest.

Phase II: Children of Tarrone Tenement; stealth until compromised; round 1: failure, mp5sd; round 2: failure, carsd; Average shots per kill 9 / 3; killed by the survivors of 9 9x19mm shots to the skull and 2 5.56x45mm to the skull, respectively.

Phase III: Victory Imports Auto, stealth until first contact then high intensity clearing; round 1: failure, mp5sd; round 2: failure, mp5 (was supposed to be uzisd); Average shots per kill: 4-6; Killed by the survivors of 3 shots to the chest, and a survivor of >12 shots to the body/arms/head.

I nearly threw the freakin’ MP5 at the enemy when during an ambush against would-be bush whackers took about 20 rounds to the head and 3 more to the chest!

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It hasn’t been a very comfortable day… to say the least of it. I woke up a bit after 0600Q with a toothache and no luck gettin’ back to sleep. I remembered something a friend once said about using a moistened tablet of paracetamol (acetaminophen) to rub along the site (and iirc, push in the “hole” if such was the case). Finding a bottle of tylenol here being slightly harder >_>.

Since yesterday the phone rang, and I stupidly left my headset on the chair instead of the desk – I sat down with a crunch! So today I had to get a new headset. I can care less about the Live! related features, as long as it is decent quality and durable (even if not 160lb of ass worth, lol). In installing it, I had quiet a bit of a monkey fight to get everything working; seems that the driver disk really likes Live Call / Messenger—and lacks a required USB Audio driver for Windows XP SP3. Ok, I was saved by that annoying hardware detection dialog but at least XP no longer thinks the headset is a mass storage device! Sound quality is totally different, gunfire in RvS and SWAT 4 reminds me of listening to Call of Duty on my brothers (costly) speaker system once upon a time.

Spent a bit of time playing OpenArena, set up a skirmish on my favorite map with 3 bots for help against 4 bots. I scored nearly 70 frags, at least a dozen of which involved the “Buzzsaw”. I couldn’t get ahold of any decent weapons but the starting kit, so I decided to start chasing the pricks with a Buzzsaw, racked up a screen full of kill-icon things with it before finally getting a proper kit. I’ve also started to get better with rocket-placement – even scoring several direct hits as well as the usual splash-damage SOP.

Tried to take some time to write code but no one in this rat-fucking place would let me get work done. Combine with a nasty headache, and I said fuck it all—and just took a nap.

I feel much better now but absolutely nothing has gotten done. I have all of about 2 useful lines of documentation for the library I wanted to get done, LAST WEEK.

Wow it’s been a wildly long day!

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Fell asleep on the couch last night, so I couldn’t get to sleep early (nodded off after 0300Q), woke up around 0600Q and decided that was just TOOOOO early even for me! The doctors appointment was for 0945 and we had to be in the office NLT 0915, so I’ve been awake since around 0830.

The doctor was very kind and seems to know what he’s doing quite well; personally I like people with experience ;). He examined the toe during the usual questioning. He removed the lump of dead tissue with an angled scissors, something I had to previously convince my mother that it wouldn’t be a good idea to do at home with a table scissors. For better or worse it actually was more painful for him to get the thing in position, then cutting it away; and at least I can say, I have nice red blood lol. The Dr. then decided to put a small piece of cardboard underneath the (clipped) nail to keep it away from the injured side, leading to it falling out when he tried wrapping it in medical tape 8+). He proscribed some antibiotics, *not* slamming the damn thing anymore (haha!), plus the usual cleaning and bandaging. I’ve also instructions to pry up the nail several times a day to keep it from damaging anything, really not sure what is worse: that I have to do such a thing or that doing it doesn’t bother me in the least. The nurse was also kind enough to “pad it well” just in case, when she dressed the wound. There was errands to run afterwards and the pharmacy tor drop by, so needless to say it wouldn’t have helped to crack it apart *again*.

Got it filled and picked up some stuff while waiting on the pharmacist; dressings, tape, etc. Since by then the bill was starting to add up, I told ma if she would cover the proscription, I would pick up the tab on the other supplies; I also snatched a small pound cake on sale for like $2 before we left the store. Hey, if I’m spending money, may as well buy something to gnosh on too!

I’ve spent the rest of the day largely trying to NOT slam this freaking toe into anything else, and playing a lot of SWAT 4. It’s nice to see Rct Cara progressing well; think I owe Duke even more gratitude, for what he accomplished with [SAS] “SWAT day 2009”. I’ve been playing a lot of SWAT 4 lately, between my own operations and watching over the Trps/Rcts. At night sometimes I pop in and join the night crew (mostly fellow Americans and Canadians) for some games on our Raven Shield servers. But really, RvS has been pissing me off a lot with the bugs lately. SWAT 4 is as buggy as RvS, yeah… but at least most of the bugs are not combat critical in SWAT 4 o/.

During my break times and tonight also, I’ve been studying more bits of the DirectX Software Development Kit (SDK). So far DirectX itself seems to be an alright way of getting things done. I can’t stand the ridiculous influnces of Hungarian notation that permeates so many aspects of Windows programming interfaces… the concept is sound but the implemetations I commonly see in code, is just a load of bollocks. Naming identifier well and placing good information in them is a tricky thing at times (gets better with experience) but encoding type data in it, oy. The most useful of which I can think of is adding a ‘p’ in front for each level of *pointing used in a C app (or comparable). In one of the DX samples when I saw a variable named something like pbNoFurtherProcessing or something similiar, I nearly fainted from the stupidity of it all. The pb tells you it’s a pointer to a boolean (bool * in C++), by the time you see it’s being used with the arrow operator (->) and bears an obviously boolean name, that kind of makes it useless information. Not to mention anyone with a *decent* code editor for the last 20+ years can just make a quick jump and look up the variables type if they totally forget it – which shouldn’t happen often.

I’ve also been abusing Visual C++ Express 2008 into cooperating. Right now I have it setup, basically to just be a project and build manager – all the actual code editing is being done in Vi IMproved. MSVC/VS/etc are very very good Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and I would recommend them to anyone who wants an IDE for serious Windows development (along with a cat scan). However I am used to having UNIX as my IDE, which means powerful tools ;). With more time off work I could probably get vim semi-integrated with the IDE via the +clientserver feature in vim and maybe a plugin of some sort. Non essential though, since right now all the IDE is helping me with is not having to hand-write a makefile for nmake, which would probably have been less trouble then using the IDEs concept of solutions and projects lol.

Life’s been good to day.

OpenArena – addictive Quake III style!

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Finding myself a bit light on time today, is tarted looking again at the ioquake3 engine with an interest in playing around with it. Of course, there is nothing better then a real world example – I tested Urban Terror and OpenArena, two games based on ioquake3 and Quake III: Arena game play. Urban Terror applies modern weapons and equipments but beyond that is not really a realism game IMHO. OpenArena on the other hand, sticks close to the core—it is as Quake like as the game play lol.

OpenArena is addictive and you can just feel your brain cells rot away as you engage in the carnage! The game is fairly simple and straight forward, you spawn, you run around, you blow people apart (gibs all over), oh yeah, and there are power ups here and there. Really, there isn’t much more to say about it then that, other then it is strangely enjoyable; no wonder the Quake franchise has made millions.

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So far experiments continue with SWAT 4 performance issues. Deeper testing has shown that it is no longer connected to graphical issues, not when running on my current hardware/driver config; nice to be able to max out the graphics online *and* in single player.

What happens is periodically when moving through an area, I get a stutter-lag-warp like motion: as if the whole game stopped spinning and then suddenly unlocked. The only consistency I’ve noticed is it happens when entering a region of the map that I have not been in previously—or have not been in for a while. One thought is that perhaps it occurs when the cache must be updated with stuff that has already been moved out of the games memory cache. My machine has RAM to burn so I have been testing the game with various cache sizes, but don’t honestly expect any positive result. On modern machines, cache size shouldn’t matter to much with the Unreal Engine 2.x lol.

Atm I’m defragging a few disks, maybe that might help a little. I don’t know if it is just the much greater frequency of crashes with Windows XP, or that NTFS really sucks that much worse then FreeBSDs UFS2 system. But for one reason or another, my windows file systems always end up very highly fragmented. Although on the upside, unlike Win32: FreeBSD does kind of encourage you to fsck afterwards hehe.

Hopefully my experiments will yield some fruit, and I can stop warping all over the place lol.

More [SAS] Dept. of Agriculture

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My work on the ‘[SAS] Dept. of Agriculture’ is nearly done, I have only 3 rooms left to do major work on, plus the “special” insertions hehe.

The goal is to be able to use the fire escapes outside the records room to gain entrance, replacing one of the spawn points. I may also modify the front-entrance spawn, so that the team spawns “outside” in a armoury room rather then the reception area. The building is supposed to be a mock-up for a hostage rescue after all, not purely a traditional map: so it wouldn’t be a big realism problem :-P.

Alcomplishing those aims appears to be easier then I expected. The real challenge at the moment, is I very much would like to erect breachable “Barricades”, that will have to be shoved out of the way. Getting that working so far has been of no real luck.

[SAS] Dept. of Agriculture, continues

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I’ve been working on the map some more tonight and have made some decent progresses. The thing that annoys me the most is how many times the rat bastard of an Unreal Ed likes to crash! I have often cursed about hex editing programs into the Nth level of DooM—if the editor for Unreal Engine 3 games is as bad as all the Unreal 2 games I’ve used it with, I will start cursing about hex editing the editors development team into all levels of the DooM II megawad: Hell Revealed.

I don’t really wish to comment on the specific changes here, mostly because I want the map to be usable as a Live Operation during its unveiling :-D. Needless to say, it is still the same map but it will not be the same. As long as I can get the stuff rigged up for the fire escape spawn point, I think people will enjoy the map hehe.

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Got what’s left of this toe in a scolding hot foot-bath with some Epsom salt; I think it is healed enough that I can eercise on it but I don’t think it has been healing properly… nothing I can do about that though. On the upside, hey at least I’ve still got the nail lol. I’ve never lost an entire toenail before but I know it takes a long time for them to grow back.

At the moment I am finishing watching Midnight Run, I love the part when the three schmucks are being chased by the mobsters helicopter—and Mardukas (Charles Grodin) is shouting, “You two are the dumbest bounty hunters I have ever seen! You couldn’t even deliver a bottle of milk!”, it just tickles my funny bone xD.

Spent most of the day playing SWAT 4 as seems to be the usual for right now. During the early phase I basically had to get a bunch of inexperienced people under control, but hey – I like orderly tactics. And when I am Element Leader, people get in line or they get taken offline ;). I organized them into a basic strike, secure, cover group. 1 and 2 man would be responsible for clearing the room, 3 and 4 man for securing contacts and weapons, while 5, 6, and when present 7 man stayed in the corridor to watch our backs. Very simple clearing techniques. I found it particularly well suited for dealing with a large amount of untrained people, while trying to avoid the usual massive conga-line-of-sloppiness and massive headless chicken problems of such a situation. People soon got the idea, and within a few maps I was able to transition to using RED / BLUE team call signs for the two groups; culminating in a simultaneous take down of 3 sectors at once by a 7-man assault force (of which I was basically the only seasoned idiot). Later on after our element had shrunk back to a more manageable size (4-5 instead of 6-7), I soon was able to take a break when [SAS]_Trp_COT showed up and started his EL practice for the day.