Doug’s Blog

04.8.09

Whoa, lookit awl dat joos

Lots of stuff has been floating about lately. I’m officially completely off my SWG addiction (seemingly I wasn’t after last post for about a week or two). I’m kinda in that stage where I have all these projects to continue, all these games to play, and all these things to do, but I don’t know which to turn my focus to right now. There’s ToH, EXGN/RP, Espionage Inc, and the periodically reoccuring  3D modeling and animation thing. I know I said I’ve made plans for the new updated EXRP script, and I will get around to that sometime soonish, but I think for now I’ll try to focus on Espionage Inc. Thing is, with such a small team of developers, we all have to do our part–And in some cases, we all have to do multiple parts. Especially me, for some reason. While coding and design are probably enough to keep me occupied, I’m still aiming for a pretty quick development cycle. I’ve started to model again, this time with Modo. It’s really amazing compared to anything else out there. Max was alright, but I didn’t like the way that the modifiers worked. You never really had any real geometry due to them, and when you come down into the technical stuff (and even trying to export things to Source) that was a real pain. Maya was a lot better, but I found it really glitchy. It absolutely loves to bugger out and go completely batshit insane when you hand it some backfaces. Now I’ve started looking into other things, like Blender for instance. Pretty powerful, stable, well-rounded tool, however I just horribly dislike it’s interface and viewport controls. Waaaaaay to complicated and unconventional. Houdini looked nice as well, but it’s node system is just completely unnecessary in my opinion. Lightwave is nice too, but it feels like just more of the same. So eventually I came across Modo, which has this whole philosophy about every concept and control just coming naturally and working how you’d expect them to work. And that’s true, Modo is by far the easiest to use modeling program I’ve ever used–besides Wings, but that’s a bit outdated I think. It’s pretty good at other things to, like texturing, sculpting, and rendering. It has a pretty primitive pivot-based animation system, which is great for smaller things, but for organics I just can’t see it happening. You can, however, animate in an external program and import the MDD. I’ll be doing this if I ever want to do animation (which I will) with another nice program called Messiah. Very very nice animation tools there. Anyway, in addition to modeling I’ll also be taking on the daunting challenge of creating a soundtrack of sorts. I’ve been looking into Reason, which looks really good actually, but the only problem for me is that you really do need a MIDI device for that. Actually, not too big of a problem as I already have a very nice keyboard, but it’s rather large and I’ll have to find a lot of space for it. Plus I’ll need a MIDI input card for my computer, and frankly I know nothing about those. I’m sure it’ll all work out though, I honestly can’t wait until we start getting some more content out.

01.18.09

Espionage Inc

I’m extremely proud to announce the development of Espionage Inc–the SourceMod I was talking about in my last post. We started last Monday, and I just added the page for us on ModDB on Friday night. There’s been a lot of development given this small amount of time, and I’d like to keep it that way. At this rate we’ll have one of the quickest development cycles out of any SourceMod out there right now–but don’t get me wrong, we’re not going too fast. The problem is just that other development teams are going way too slow, especially so since most of them have around 10-20+ people. We just have 5 of us with one person specializing in each field, other than modeling where we have two people. It helps the pipeline, really. All we need is someone to do audio, whether that be in terms of VO’s, music, or sounds for gunfire and whatnot. Let me know if you can help. Anyway, you can check out our progress and such at espionageinc.net, which has our link to ModDB as well as a bunch of screenshots.

On an unrelated note, I officially love Vista. I’ve been playing around with it since I installed it on my new rig and I absolutely love it. Every negative comment you’ve ever seen about Vista is just someone jumping on the bandwagon. The menu layout takes a little while to get used to coming from XP, but once you do it just makes so much more sense. Aero does NOT run when you’re in-game, and I find Vista to hog less resources than XP. Slap some VistaGlazz on there and this baby comes pretty damn close to putting OSX to shame when it comes to visuals. Overall I’m really happy–and I didn’t think I would be. Have a screenshot of my current setup. I still need to take a picture of my actual rig/desk/monitor/area.

 

In other news: I’m officially keeping up with my blog at one post every 2-3 days. Yay! Now if only I could remember to tag my posts…

01.11.09

It’s over 1400!

I’m not quite sure where to start. As always, I’m a bit late with my blog posts. I keep saying to myself, “I’m going to do blog posts more often”, but I never do. Ah well, at least that means I’m keeping busy, right? Anyway, as usual, lotsa stuff to throw out into this post. The post obvious I think would be the new blog design–do you like it? I thought it was time for a bit of a change, as the default theme is… Well, default. Nobody wants to read a blog that has a default theme. So yeah, here’s the new blog design, I hope you find it as visually appleasing as I do. I’ve also gone through and tagged all my posts, and I find it kinda funny how some of the sizes came out. For example, ‘exrp’ is bigger than ‘coding’, but usually all my exrp posts have to do with coding in some way. Well, the way I tagged it, I didn’t tag things as ‘coding’ unless there was actually some technical talk in them; if it was just concepts or ideas, I didn’t tag it. I guess that makes sense. Also, ‘exgn’ is only like one post. That’s crazy, seeing as it’s such a big deal.

Lets put a couple of those tags up though, shall we? EXGN’s been great lately. Even if I’m not on any of the servers, there’s always someone on them. The CSS server seems to be used occasionally by some random group of people, I can only assume friends, and that’s nice since it doesn’t require any immediate attention to get traffic. The TF2 server has been a bit less fortunate, but I’m planning on adding more SM plugins sometime soon to keep things a bit more fresh, so that should help as per popularity. I’ve shut down the L4D server since nobody was really using it, and since there’s literally no server customization available besides the hostname and MOTD–so any server would do if we decide to play it as a group again. Hell, even a listen. GMod is the one that’s really been thriving lately, which is great. EXRP Lite is still a little bit buggy, but I’ve been working with a community-maintaned bug tracker to get things done and that’s proven to be very useful. I’ve come across a few bugs that make literally no sense at all and shouldn’t ever be happening, as they seem to be physically impossible, but I’ll figure it out sooner or later I’m sure.

I guess the really big news right now is my new computer: It’s great. Really, it’s just amazing. It was delivered in two boxes right before I left for my aunt’s house on Christmas eve, and I started checking things out the next day. Then I realized that Windows goes apeshit when you change the motherboard, but you just have to use the repair disk. Uhh, problem! I don’t have a Windows disk, my previous computer was preassembled. So I went to Newegg and found a nice OEM Vista Home Premium for $99, which is great since it’s usually like $200-$400 retail. I also got more RAM since it’s Vista, but the warranty on the RAM I originally got didn’t let me return, so I guess I’ll just have to live with 6GB. The case is amazing, too. There’s so much room in there, cable management was a breeze. Also it comes with like 6 big fans mounted all around the case, so this thing is really cool–literally. Anyway, specs below. Picture coming soon.

• E8400 Core 2 Duo processor
• Gigabyte UD3R motherboard
• 6GB DDR2 Corsair RAM
• GeForce 8800GT GPU
• Antec 900 case

 

Also for Christmas I got The Force Unleashed, which is a great game but it can be really frustrating how the combos work and how inconvenient the save points are; Mirror’s Edge which is also amazing, especially due to it’s fresh concept, but you really need to know what to do before you do it–especially when ninjas are chasing after you. Lots of dieing and level restarts on that one, but I guess that’s what EA calls replayability. I also got Fallout 3 and Oblivion, which I haven’t played either too much since I haven’t had a lot of time, but they’re both amazing. No complains so far. I also recieved The Ship, which is what I’m going to focus on here. It’s a bit old, from 2004 or 2005 I think, and not that many people seem to still play it–I can’t immagine why, though. It’s simply an amazing game with an outstandingly original concept, utilizing a very unique art style. You might say the same style as Grim Fandango, but not as blocky–more like The Incredibles, but less high-rez of course. If you’ve never heard of it before, you’re  on a 1930’s cruise ship where you get a quarry to kill at the beginning of every round, and you need to go around and find things that can be used as weapons (wrenches, screwdrivers, umbrellas, even actual weapons like guns) and you score by killing your quarry. However you’re also someone else’s quarry, so you have to avoid being killed at the same time. There’s a security camera/guard and witness system that prevents you from killing people just anywhere, so that adds a lot to the game. I don’t know, this kind of game really makes me want to go out and make my own SourceMod. Anyway, I also got Ironman, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Chocolates, LEGOs, and a couple calendars. (Jet fighters and Monty Python, if you’re curious.)

I’m definitely trying to get into the serious indy scene right now. I don’t know exactly what to do though, but I am. Son, Viro, and I are planning (if not already started) making an FPS similar to Goldeneye as per theming, The Ship’s art style, and Hitman: Blood Money’s kind of “go here and do this, but you figure out the in-between” kind of mission-based gameplay. We’re calling it ‘Espionage’ for now, but there’s no way to know if it’ll change later. We’re either thinking of using the Source SDK to make it a SourceMod, or just making it a standalone game in C4.  Anyway, back to what I was talking about. We want to use Source since it’ll get a lot more attention due to being a SourceMod, opening us up to the wide audience that is the HL2 community, but of course there are a lot of setbacks. As far as SourceMods go, it’s a bit hard to make something that doesn’t just seem like a reskin of HL2 in the end result. The code isn’t very well documented and there are literally no guides or tutorials out there to help get you started, so either you know exactly what you’re doing or you don’t at all. I’ve had C4 for a while, and it’s really starting to get really amazing lately with all their updates. It’s like Crysis in terms of power and features, now. Essentially C4 would be the better choice, especially since it’s a lot easier to use and build things on, but we may have a lot harder of a time getting recognition. The map editor is a lot more confusing than Hammer, which is Son’s job, so he’s playing around a bit to see if he can get used to it. Though another nice deciding factor is that if we get good, we can sell it with C4–something we can’t do with Source. I’m really not sure which to use, still. Think you can help me out? If you would, please vote in the poll and provide your insight in a comment below.

[poll id=8] 

And to conclude the first long blog post of the year: Gravitybone. It’s a weird indy game built on the Q2 engine that’s kinad like a mix of Grim Fandango, Portal, and Hitman–amongst other things. There’s literally no possible way to describe this game, so you might as well just try it out for yourself. Go download it over here. It’s a really short game, but it’s also really fun and unique. Stuff like this really gets my mind thinking about making my own game, even if it’s just a strange little thing like this with programmer graphics. You know, like Noby Noby or World of Goo. Yes, I’m still stuck on WoG. Damnit, brain, think of something else! Anyway, that’s it for me today. Remind me to make more, smaller blog posts more often and we can avoid this whole ~1400 word count thing, mmkay?

10.27.08

Damnit, get rid of that extra dimension!!

First up on my list of things to discuss: World of Goo. It’s so great to see a game that breaks all the rules and is actually fun for once. I mean, look at EVE Online; it’s a pretty decent game, but you have to work for two months to get some big omfg super lazor battle ship only to get it destroyed in one small raid. That happened to an acquaintance of mine on Xfire, and he literally was crying when that happened. Really, what part of ‘fun’ is being misinterpreted by game developers nowadays? Back in the day you had new games coming out all the time like Megaman for the NES, Fantasy Zone for the SEGA Master System, hell even Zero Wing was original enough to be called fun. Now all we have is a bunch of crappity crap that’s made exclusively to be monetized, and while it may seem fun in the beta, it’s then raped so “casual gamers” find it enjoyable. For the latter, see Spore. Seriously, what the hell is this shit? Somewhere along the lines, developers completely lost the meaning of the word “fun”.

Anyway, enough of my rant; back to Goo. Simply put, it’s an amazingly fun game. I’ve always had a thing for physics games and games that have stories and settings that make no sense. I think Earthbound fits into that category, so that must be why I like that a lot too–minus the physics. World of Goo is a refreshing reminder that games can be fun. It’s also an even more refreshing reminder that games do not need DRM. (Take the hint, EA) I don’t really know how to describe WoG, so just watch this video I made.

World of Goo on Xfire

Now, tell me that isn’t an amazing game. Come on, do it! Ah, see? You can’t. Overall, I highly recommend World of Goo to anyone that likes games, and most especially developers. This is what a fun game should be like. In fact, lets use it for an example. So, what exactly is World of Goo in terms of development? Well, it’s 2D… It’s a physics-based game… It has nice music… Oh, and of course, it’s very fun to play.

Well now, what do we have here? Oh, I see! It’s my own 2D game! It’s physics based, has nice music, and is v–ah hell, who am I kidding, it isn’t even done yet; how is it going to be fun to play if it isnt anywhere near complete? Basically, I’m eventually going to be turning this into a 2D multiplayer sidescrolling GMod. I discovered a 2D game engine today called LÖVE which uses OpenGL and–get this–Lua. It’s written in C++, but you make your actual games in Lua. You can also compile them to an EXE to make a standalone game, which is great. As for my game, all it is right now is a landscape with barrels that you can spawn by right clicking, move by dragging left click, and explode into particle-y goodness by shift-clicking. For such a simple engine, it has pretty damn good physics. I just hope I can continue to get 60+ FPS with an assload of physics simulations going on at once, like you’d expect in a multiplayer sandbox game. There will be a spawn menu and stuff where you can spawn some premade ‘props’, as well as scripted ones like explosive barrels (which are quite buggy right now), or you can create a custom prop by inputting the width and height of your desired rectangle and it’ll put it there. Physguns will work just by clicking and dragging, and there will be guns and jumping and stuff. Pretty much, anything you’d expect from a 2D sidescrolling multiplayer sandbox game. More on this later, but here are a couple screenshots. Feel free to ask me on Xfire or Steam or something if you’d like a copy to try out.

And about to wind it up… I got my XCM and a buncha cables this weekend. Apparently UPS delivers on Saturdays, so that was nice. I’ve gotten my 360 and Wii working perfectly with it, all I need is my TV tuner card (which arrives tomorrow) so I can record and broadcast. I can still play now, but it’s more fun when other people can laugh at you over the internet. Meh, just a theory. That’s just about it, then. I’ll keep you posted on the sandbox game, as long as you keep giving me suggestions. Now, back to testing Son’s epic GMod map. And when I mean epic, I really mean EP-

10.22.08

Cables Galore

I’ve done some more work for my dad, this time a shopping cart-based IPN script for use with Paypal. Basically, a person clicks the “add to cart” link on one of his client’s sites, then it, well, adds to their cart. Then they can checkout using Paypal and it automatically sends them a dynamic download link to the e-book they bought. Anyway, pretty nice project–I like working with PHP. It’s something I enjoy doing, and I get paid for it.

This time my payment was a bunch of cables. I know you’re thinking that I’m lame, but hear me out: These cables are so I can play and record console games on my computer. I plug the console into a splitter, and basically one end goes to the monitor and another goes to a tv tuner card to record/broadcast. Pretty neat, I think. Took me a while to figure out the best way to do it, too. For that reason, I have provided you an expertly-made diagram. Yes, it’s Paint.

All in all: I bought an XCM composite to VGA adapter, component coupler, and two component cables. I also needed to get an s-video cable so I could record/broadcast my PC without lag by plugging the GPU directly into the tv tuner, but I forgot. I also forgot the RCA audio y-splitter, but I can just pick these up at any Radioshack anytime. Total, this hit me about $130; but I had $45 left over from when I returned my original 360 VGA cable, so it actually run me $85. Pretty good investment if you ask me, 1080p on my monitor and the ability to record for machinimas and broadcast for shits a giggles–it’s all good, it’s all good! TV tuner was quite cheap, too; only $30. Component tuner cards usually $60 or more, around $100 if you want to get a good one–so I got a good deal there. I had to order everything from different sites though which really sucked, it’d be nice if I could’ve gotten them all from just one site but oh well, couldn’t find them. Only downside is multiple shipping charges, as well as the fact that everything will arrive in ‘pieces’. Should be coming in late this week or early next week, though, so don’t fret; you’ll be able to watch me play old games on a Justin.TV stream real soon.

Anyway, for the upcoming holiday season and my birthday in February, I’ve compiled a list of games I’d like. I also put in a PS3 since I don’t have one, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting one. And for that reason, none of the games on the list. LittleBigPlanet looks awesome though. The problem is that it’s not worth getting a $400 console just for one game, and nearly all of the other good games for the PS3 are multiplatform with the 360 or aren’t even out yet. Meh. I don’t know about Sonic Unleashed for the 360 though, as most sonic games since SEGA disbanded sucked. Hopefully it’ll break the cycle, though. As for the Wii, I’m really disappointed in Nintendo right now. So much shovelware, so little good games.

360

• Dead Space
• Fable 2
• Gears of War
• Gears of War 2
• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
• Bionic Commando
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
• Indiana Jones
• Sonic Unleashed
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

PC

• Far Cry 2
• Left 4 Dead
• Call of Duty: World at War
• Mirror’s Edge
• Diablo III
• StarCraft II

Wii

• The Conduit

PS3

• a PS3
• LittleBigPlanet
• Infamous
• Velvet Assassin
• Killzone 2
• Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

10.17.08

Sound Card is back

…Let the ear orgasm continue…

10.1.08

Sound Card

My latest sound card died. I’m really angry. I hope it’s on warranty still so I can get a replacement. Grrrrrr…..

07.31.08

EXRP Classic

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “Didn’t you just finish EXRP-Script?” The answer to that is, well, ‘yes’. However while EXRP-Script was in development, a few things went wrong. It all started out as an upgrade from LightRP. I got the idea to put in a character selection screen, and put that in. That upset the whole balance of the potential RP, so I made it save jobs. But if jobs save, what will I do with cop and stuff? Create a company system. But then we need a way to do blah blah, so I added blah. It just keeps on going, and ultimately EXRP-Script is now nothing like what it was supposed to be in the first place. It has way too high a learning curve, and is a bit bloated; has a lot of features that aren’t really needed. I posted a poll on the EXRP forums the other day asking if people think the same, and the response I got was overwhelmingly affirmative. Looks like I’ll be going ahead with this, then.

As I said before, EXRP-Script was supposed to be a recode of LightRP with all the EXLRP modifications, with money saving and inventory tacked on. That’s it. And that’s all it will be. I won’t go into detail about what won’t be making it from EXRP-Script to EXRP Classic, but you can read about that in this forum thread. For the basics, we have doors, money, admin system, chat commands, class-based scripted job system, day/night and time. As for the specifics, we have the F1 menu, the F2 “action key”, F3 to holster/unholster, and F4 to drop your weapon. In the F1 menu we have four tabs: Character, Inventory, Jobs, and Store. Under the character tab you can change your character name, model and job description. Inventory is the same as before, except it will be a bit cleaner in terms of the front-end, functionality, and back-end code. Jobs will be a list of scripted jobs you can have such as Mayor, Chef, Police, and Thug. Clicking on these will start a server-wide vote to see if people don’t mind you being in that scripted job. Scripted jobs are lost every map change or disconnect. The store is exactly like the buy menu except with some cleaner VGUI. Since we’re using classes for scripted jobs now, you will no longer be able to buy class-specific things.

Pretty much all the SWEPs will be coming back. Radios, flashlights, papers (although optimized), food, etc… I’m debating whether to bring back the realism guns, as some of them fire too fast and are too strong. If anyone wants to help me fix this, I’ll be more than happy to fork over the code for these so you can fix them for me. Otherwise, I may just go back to all the Night-Eagle SWEPs. I don’t know yet. Also, yes, Chefs will have an extreme discount on food–they will also be able to combine different food SENTs to create bigger and better ones. I’m debating if only chefs should be able to buy food altogether, but we’ll see. Last character name, job description, and model will save in a text file on the server using the player’s SteamID as a reference. This is much more efficient than a MySQL, as the power and capacity is not needed for such a small scale operation–Plus this is a lot easier to code. Money will save to the player’s SteamID as well.

The F2 menu will now be the “action key”. When looking at various types of objects, this key will do various things. While pointing at a door, it will own/unown the door. While pointing at any kind of physics object, it’ll carry is. If you’re carrying something, it’ll drop what you’re carrying. When pointing at the world (or nothing), it will open up the radial menu for character animations. As to the rest of the door actions, these will be commands. Keys will replace the unarmed SWEP, and will function just like before. I think this new “action key” method will make things a lot easier to comprehend and remember.

That’s just about it. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please take a look at the thread I linked to a few paragraphs above, as well as the news thread. This will be a lot easier than EXRP-Script for several reasons: I already have 80% of the code needed, I know exactly what I’m doing this time around (I won’t get side-tracked again), and it’s just a lot simpler than EXRP-Script. I expect this to take a couple weeks.

As for regular blog-type stuff, I got a new monitor the other day. It’s a 22″ flat-screen LCD with a 10000:1 contrast ratio and 2ms response time. I love it. It doesn’t tilt though which kinda sucks because the top 20 pixels or so are slightly darker than the rest of the monitor, but that’s fine. I’ve looked around, and not that many do–especially with these specs. If they do tilt, they don’t tilt enough. Also, I’ve reformatted and reinstalled XP. Everything is so much faster, it’s amazing. I can play CSS and CoD4 on max settings at 1680×1050 (my monitor’s native resolution), it’s great. There’s just so much detail that I haven’t noticed in these games, especially in their textures. I don’t know whether you can say I’m still on mental vacation or not as I’m coding again, but I’m still playing a lot more games than usual–and pwning. It feels good to pwn at games you haven’t played for two years. A physical vacation should be coming soon, probably to Disneyland. I wouldn’t mind going to Toronto to see my grandpa (he was diagnosed with cancer again after not having it for a few years) and friends and stuff. The Pure Pwnage premier is on the 9th, so it’d be pretty cool to see that with PP and possibly other people too. I’m also planning on building a computer sometime soon, probably sometime after Christmas with present money. It’s a wild shot, but I think I’m ready. The only ‘hard’ thing will be the thermal paste, as it gets all goopy and you have to put on the exactly right amount. Then I’ll go all OCD and try to spread it evenly on the thing.

I don’t really have any more to say, unfortunate you. Be sure to let me know what you think about EXRP Classic and give me as much feedback and suggestions as possible. I really appreciate it.

07.11.08

Fax me up, Scotty!

I went to have dinner today with my uncle, aunt and her family at Texas Roadhouse. It’s actually really good. I’ve never been there before, but I was pretty impressed. I had a medium well 11oz sirloin, and it was just right. Well done can be good sometimes, but most of the time it’s charred so much it isn’t juicy and tender anymore. 11oz was the perfect size for me–filled me up, but didn’t make me explode like some other steaks do. Then again other steaks are probably bigger… The salad was nice too; I went to Applebee’s for the first time a couple weeks ago and was highly disappointed, their Caesar salad was just a bag of lettuce with Hidden Valley dressing poured on top. No croutons, no cheese, dressing not mixed up. The food wasn’t that great either, but the salad really got me. That’s irrelevant though, the point is: Texas Roadhouse is very good and I would eat there again.

After eating my uncle gave us a printer/fax/copier in exchange for toilet paper. He didn’t want to stop by a store to get some, so we brought some with us. Although I initially wanted to walk into the restaurant with the toilet paper, I decided it might be a better idea to do the trade after we eat in the parking lot. It’s a very nice combo though–most seem so plasticy and flimsy you know they’ll break very easily, but this one doesn’t. Very fast printing, copying, yadda yadda. Good quality too. To test the fax I found a number of HP’s that receives faxes and then sends them back to you. Never knew something like that existed. Lets just hope it’s automated and there’s not someone sitting there all day pressing the fax button.

It was a pain in the ass to get it working across the LAN though. It’s plugged into my dad’s computer, which is Vista, and the rest of the computers in the network are XP. That was incredibly frustrating. First I had to turn the firewalls down a notch so we could share crap through the network–but just that didn’t work. I had to add the IP range 192.168.0.100-192.168.0.255 to the firewalls’ “trusted zones” so it would accept connections from them without freaking out and asking me if I want to allow every single packet of spooling data. That didn’t work either. I then had to click the “share this printer” button on my dad’s computer–which, you guessed it, didn’t work. After some reading online, I figured out you have to manually specify the network path to the printer under the ports section of the printer’s properties window. Why would you have to do this? I’m already sharing the printer! So there I go, I typed the network path in manually. But no, of course that didn’t work either. I had to go through the gazillions of menus in Vista to find the hidden network connection settings and enable everything from “share printers” to “broadcast shit through network”. And that finally worked… But then it started asking me for a password to the printer. What the hell? I didn’t even specify a password! Now I have to go through the deepest, inner-most hidden menus of Vista to disable passwords on networked printers. Why would this be on default? Ah well who cares, it works now. And of course, I spoke to soon. It went to the print queue, but it appeared to spool for eternity. After dicking around pretty much every single setting in the printer properties screen, I finally figured out that adding the network path to the ports window disabled it from using USB to contact the printer. Okay, so I just check the USB port’s enable box and I’m on my way. *click* Wait, now the network port is disabled. Apparently you can’t have two ports enabled. After more dicking around, I found the advanced port settings window that allows me to “pool printers”. What the hell does this mean? I click it and it allows me to select both the network port and USB port, and now it finally works. But what the hell is “pool printers”? Why is this disabled by default? Why is this even an option?

Now, I for one have learned a valuable lesson here: Get a Mac. I’ve been researching more about them, and it looks like I’ll be going for the 24″ 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, but upgrading the RAM to 4GB. It’s $2400 versus $3100 for the MacBook Pro I was looking at earlier (17″ 2.5GHz with significantly less hard drive space), so it’s well worth it in my opinion. More bang for your buck. Plus the new Montevina MBP’s are going to be coming out sometime near September, so it’s not good to buy one now because it’ll become outdated really soon and it’s not good to buy one right when it comes out because you’ll have to put up with repairing it every Sunday because you were foolish enough to get the first generation of something, which always has an obscene amount of bugs and hardware defects. So, one iMac for me please. I love how simple everything is in OS X. To use a printer, you just plug it in. To use a printer on the network, just click “search for printers” and it’s magically there. No installing drivers, no dicking around settings that don’t seem to be labeled properly and have no possible use–just plug it in and it works. The interface is most definitely a lot more simplistic and you have a lot less control over different settings, but that’s the good thing I think. You don’t have a cluttered up settings window with random crap, you just have the settings you need and will ever need, and that’s it. Even with everyday things like opening a program, it’s right there on your dock–you don’t have to click the Start button or minimize to your desktop. Sure that’s just a simple mouse click away, but that’s still one unnecessary mouse click that OS X has done away with. Now take that simple mouse click, and apply the same principle to every single thing in Windows and OS X. Everything you do in OS X takes double the effort in Windows, whether it be double the mouse clicks, double the lag, or double the frustration. I’m not saying this applies to everything, but for the most part, it does.

Right now my parents and I are at a point where we can either go on vacation or get me an iMac. Sure I’d like an iMac, but my computer now still works. Albeit it’s a bit laggy and I’m done with all the frustration Windows has to offer, it still works and that’s all that counts. Hopefully we can go to Disneyland later this month, then when we come back we can look into an iMac. I’d like to get one before the summer ends because I won’t have the time to switch from two completely different operating systems when school is back, since all I’ll want to do when I get home is something productive like playing a good game of StarCraft or coding something useful. During a vacation, I find myself with a lot more time than I can deal with, which leaves me with a lot more time to play around in OS X and figure out how to work it properly. Changing the subject a little: The one problem I have with Macs is with their userbase. It seems as if the majority of Mac users are so pompous that they don’t care what the question is, the answer is always “get a Mac”. On forums I see people asking Windows-specific questions like “how do I add an admin user for UAC”, and of course the pompous Mac fanatics come in and say “get a Mac”. Well what if he doesn’t want to get a Mac? You don’t see Linux users spamming “get Linux” about on forums, and you most definitely don’t see that with Windows users. Perhaps a little Mac bashing, but at least the question is still answered.

07.6.08

Macs

For a while now I’ve been thinking about what OS to use. Quite frankly, I’m tired of Windows. It’s too laggy, too buggy, and too slow–plus, what the hell is with the registry? It’s useless. For my next computer, I have two options really: Vista, or take the plunge and go UNIX. I for one really hate Vista, as does everyone, but for me it’s to the point that I refuse to use it. I can’t find any XP CDs in my house, and the only torrents are crap ones with a load of preinstalled viruses. As you know, I was trying Ubuntu Linux a couple weeks ago and I really liked it. I’ve been dualbooting and using it for a while now, and I’ve come to a conclusion: It’s great, far better than Windows, but there are a few things that drive me away from it. For one, you have to use the command prompt for a lot of otherwise every-day tasks. Installing things VIA .deb files are great, but apt-get can be a bit of a pain after a while, and it’s really slow. Plus you have all these dependencies to download for a 2mb application–that’s a real annoyance. Another thing is how a lot of programs are only distributed as source code for Linux, so you have to figure out how to compile it yourself. Overall I loved Linux, but it’s just not good for everyday use for me. Too many loopholes to go through, which inevitably slows down productivity.

The other day when I was watching WALL•E I still had the whole “what OS to use” thought in my mind. I still can’t get over how great a movie that was, but I digress. I’m sitting there watching WALL•E soak up the sun with his solar panels, and when he gets his battery fully charged he makes the OSX startup sound. Heheh, that’s neat. Wait, OSX! For the longest time I’ve hated Macs–or at least, PowerPC-based Macs. I completely overlooked the fact that Macs now run on Intel chips, and are therefor somewhat better. As for the actual OS, the only versions I’ve used ate OS8 and below, so surely they’ve upgraded since then. And they have, to OSX10 “Leopard”. I tried it in VMWare, and I must say that I’m impressed. Long story short: I think I want to get one. A MacBook Pro to be precise. The only problem is how they’re so expensive, and since I want to upgrade the RAM and hard drive to be faster (as a desktop replacement), that’ll cost me another extra penny. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and have even compiled a list of my most frequently used applications on Windows and their alternatives on OSX–or if they run natively or VIA Crossover. Since Macs are Intel-based now, you can easily emulate Windows applications through different emulation programs like Crossover or DarWINE (Mac WINE port), but then you can always use BootCamp to dualboot to Windows. You just need a Windows disc, which my dad has of Vista when his hard drive crashed not too long ago.

Everything on my list is either native or has a very nice alternative; besides Steam and GMod, though they can apparently be emulated quite fine with Crossover. I’ve never liked Macs before, but maybe that was just because I wasn’t unhappy with Windows. Of course years ago they weren’t Intel based and didn’t have a lot of software, so they’re better now, but still. It’s strange to think that I’m actually considering a Mac after years of disliking them with a passion. Problem is they’re so damn expensive. If only they could glitch and develop a personality like WALL•E, that’d be a good selling point to get my dad to help me pay for one.

As for other stuff, nothing much to say. That’s all that’s been on my mind lately.