Baphomet

That's a pity. There was another mech type vehicle... based on some anime mecha type thing for OFP and that had some pretty poor walking animations. OFP just wasn't meant for those types of units I guess. Still it looks nice.

I didn't know it came with a trucker too. Hah. That's great. Are the towing scripts MP compatible? I mentioned before that it might be neat to have someone shooting from the back trailer whilst someone pulled it, however I'm not even sure it works in MP. Of course what with the problem of the guy flying out the back if he couldn't sort of, barricade himself in partially.

I've said something akin to this a while ago. I think in general OFP really needs to take a cue from mainstream shooters like Halflife 2 that have opted to integrate more realistic sound engine based processing (or so it appears to me). Explosions produce a nice muted "thud" sound like they would at a distance, whilst making an appropriately ear assailing "bang" at closer ranges. Kind of reminds me of this: 40mm boom There would be something seriously wrong with OFP 2 if it didn't have more realistic weapon sounds than a game like Halflife 2. In my opinion. Even listening to the rapid popping stacatto of combine soldiers spraying their MP7's at me from a distance just increases the immersiveness in ways I previously hadn't conceived. Here's the kicker though. When you play the weapon sounds in windows media player or whatever, most sound pretty generic. It's that sound processing I'm assuming that Half-life 2 does to make them sound so much better. A perfect example would be the shotgun. Normally it sounds pretty nondescript. Fire it in a close room and it seems like the sound takes on a markedly different timbre, it's more harsh sounding with a slight rattling echo depending on where you are. However I don't encourage the reliance on third party hardware for this. Such as EAX simply because instead of taking a load off the cpu to process the dynamic sounds, it adds something like 10% to the cpu load. Unacceptable in my opinion. Moreso than graphics in my opinion. OFP 2's combat ambience, and environmental realism would be increased by many more orders of magnitude with a good sound engine than it would be with fifty unkajillion poly models for everything. EDIT Wow, my 666th post. Â

That's just fucked. Now extremist Iraqis are making a concerted effort to kill civilians. Not that they might not have been before, however now it seems like an organized effort. I hate to say it, but Iraq is very quickly becoming a total writeoff. It's impossible to fight off countless anonymous would-be Saddam-like despots. It seems apparent to me that it's like trying to empty a sinking ship with a teacup. Evidence of where things will be headed after the coalition leaves was seen in Fallujah as a pocket of extremists took control of a certain area of the city and enforced some kind of perverted sharia law. I have this feeling that Bush is pushing for this election so determinedly because that essentially constitutes one less thing to do before he can find an excuse to pull out. That place will be much worse off than it was before the invasion once the U.S and what's left of the coalition leaves. Saddam at least had something to lose, which implies there's only so far the guy would go to increase tensions on an international level. He had his ego and desire for prestige and his greed. Both good reasons for a dictator to not go pissing off powerful enemies too much. These new crazies, just care about nothing more than bringing their enemies down any way they can. Unfortunately this means bringing down a lot of innocent people in their country with them.

The truck's trailer needs a box or something that a soldier can walk behind but is low enough that you can shoot over so that while the truck is driving, a guy can stand in the trailer and not worry about flying out of the truck whilst it's on the move (because the box will keep him from moving back presumably). That would make for some interesting multiplay scenarios. Not to mention that shooting from vehicles is just plain cool.

Do you have undeniable proof? Tossing of cluster bombs aside. Perhaps they used white phosphorous. Who knows. You don't exactly seem terribly impartial yourself.

Compatibility mode is shite in my opinion. I've never gotten it to work effectively with any older games. Plain and simple. Get windows 98... that's pretty much your only recourse I think. Don't even think about dos games. I've tried dosbox, and... well. If you're trying to run a dos game on windows XP... it sucks. Dosbox despite their best intentions, is crap. It will run some games, but so horribly that it's not even worth playing. I'm considering trying to build a retro PC with windows 95 on it or something. Something that was the absolute pinnacle of technology for that time. So I can get the most out of the games. Probably a really fast pentium 3. I guess. Since P4's won't run on Windows 95.

A movie with an anti american plot might not go over so well here, in other countries I would imagine it would do quite well.

No Fox won't. I mentioned in my first post regarding this that Fox has a notorious reputation for being sort of the media outlet for one-sided minded republican viewpoints, not to mention the fact that they overhype their stories. My main concern is simply toward that type of behavior, regardless of the ethnicity of who is perpetrating it. It seriously bothers me that any group of people would try to push some agenda of discord towards another ethnic group in that manner if of course that's the case. Again the credibility of Fox News is in my opinion justifiably questioned by you in this manner. It is nevertheless disconcerting.

All I can say is I'm thankful I live in a province where people like that would -not- get away with that sort of behavior. The kind of province full of rednecks and guns. I'd take pro-life rednecks over angry ethnics making certain neighborhoods dangerous to travel in any day.

That's a bit worse than people yelling in an emergency room in my opinion, however I do understand your point.

I just read this ... yeah shoot me for actually reading an article on a website like Fox News. However. If the accounts of the events in the article are true. I'd be very concerned. Even if the total of reported crimes attributed to immigrants in sweden as a whole was only an additional 150,000. Unless of course there's clear evidence to support the concept that it is just as common an occurence for ethnic swedes to be perpetrating that kind of organized violence and coercion. Then again Fox news has a history of over hyping or sensationalizing news stories for obvious reasons. If those are the circumstances which are required for Osama Bin Laden to not consider a country threatening, as mentioned in his last video broadcast in which he mentioned not having Sweden on his hit-list. So to speak. Then I really don't think those living conditions would be any better or worse than fearing an attack.

Please someone. Make sense of this. Since I'm finding that these extremists are far more out of touch with reality than previously imagined: Do you hear that americans? No ice cream for you.

that's weird, I have a 5600 in my new PC and I've not had any problems with it. I haven't run half life 2 on it but I know others who own 5600's and run halflife just fine...' As far as I know SP2 was just choke full of problems. So I haven't updated to it.

Halflife 2 needs singleplayer svencoop style grunt spawn maps. The kind that have no real specific goal. They're more or less a grunt killing fest that you can jump right into. I've become quite engrossed in the HL2 single player game, however I really would like to see some quick and simple maps that you can jump right into and start shooting. Especially now with the improved ai. It should make things a lot more interesting. Being as that halflife 2 is so new and there are so many features that haven't been used to their fullest potential. It's really got me interested to see how creative people will get. Personally I'd love to see a crow hunting map. Or a starship troopers style antlion invasion. Hm. I found an interesting article that provides sigificant proof that Valve didn't simply optimize Halflife 2 for ATI cards. They actually crippled Nvidia functionality to give a percieved advantage. Valve is becoming more and more a shady ass company. I hope BIS never sinks to this level. http://www.hardforum.com/showthr....=838630 The defence The rebuttal Good to see there's some quick witted minds at work ready to debunk unjustified arrogance on the behalf of elitist Radeon-heads. Goddamnright biyatch.

That video is somewhat inaccurate I think. I tried doing the trick with that jar on the guy with the static machinegun and I got shot to hell. I tried it repeated times. The guy could have just as easily bound a key to notarget... However. Yeah. Halflife 2's ai isn't the greatest, but at least it's better than... oh. Doom 3. Which was very unimpressive. Doom 3 had a lot of predefined events in which the ai looked like it was doing something intelligent. They use cover although not as effectively as in farcry. That one part in the vents was kind of an unfair example as it was one of those points where the AI was explicitly directed to go somewhere. As it's not as effective as using cover. They're going to get shot a bit more. I'd say other entities such as manhacks and the helicopters were much better examples of competent and convincing AI.

What's this book about exactly. Is it fiction or is it similar to Masters of Doom?

I know. But, talk of cracks and warez at all... is verboten. So I was just giving a friendly reminder. Personally I don't see the problem with discussing it. However it's better to hear it from someone else other than have a mod yell at you. Colossus kind of beat you to it by... five posts. But yeah. It's a good read.

Talk of this is taboo... for future reference. However as an aside. I have to say. That I personally believe and know for a fact that it's the end user that's getting shafted by this new brand of marketing and product protection Valve has undertaken. It's almost the reverse of how protection of software used to go. You punished the person who didn't pay for it. Now they're basically holding the gun on the consumer and saying "Well it's the pirates fault we have to do this...". Which of course is a very easy scapegoat solution to their problem. It's also a heaping load of horse shit. You pretty much don't even own the game you've bought anymore. You're simply playing it on an extended loan. I'd very much enjoy sticking pins in Gabe Newell's eye sockets for spurring on a disgusting trend like this. Anyhow. With all that out of the way. I was thinking as I played some more halflife 2. Some of the parts in the various maps are really good areas just to fiddle around in and spawn entities to fight. I was thinking maybe people who were interested could create savegames with various entities of their own placed in these parts of the map after they've cleared them or something. Everyone could try out each encounter made by a different person. It might increase the replay value of the game until some decent singleplay maps come out.

I was thinking about that. The sounds that is. I'm not sure Halflife 2 uses a doppler shift or whatever it is to modulate the sound of weapons depending on their distance. I'll have to go digging through it, but I'm pretty sure it's just various wav files for different ranges of hearing. I think OFP 2 definitely needs their sound engine really updated so you get much better dynamic doppler shift simulation. That's one of those special details that's really necessary for a military sim I think.

I was considering posting this very link as well... It makes me think even more that BIS should be entitled to take all the time they need to make OFP 2. As it seems to me that the end result will be the work of people who truly want to make a quality product. Not just churn out some binary garbage because they're running under a tight deadline. I think both the consumer and the developer would be better for it in the end. What they're doing at EA doesn't seem right to me. Read through some of the replies on that post. Some of it's just disgusting, if they are in fact truthful accounts of what goes on at EA. Besides. They published the battlefield series, and ghost recon. Enough said.

I wouldn't say Halflife 2 is the best game I've ever played, but it officially replaces the Duke series as the game which is heir apparent to extremely immersive and interactive environments. Which is basically what made Duke 3d so popular so many years ago. Some might contend that that's an innacurate characterization but Halflife 2's story isn't exactly all that and a bag of chips. It's alright. The orwellian 1984 type setting is more immersive than the story itself I think. Which at points was just cockamamie. However in general it plays like a good if somewhat cheesy interactive sci fi movie. It's fun and while many things are nice gimmicks with which to flesh out a good linear story. I still would end up playing a game like OFP more in the long run. Halflife 2 is the kind of game that holds your attention briefly, albeit intensely until it's innovations become rather commonplace, at which point you start too look with something that has a bit more substance. *coughOFPcough*. The single player experience is currently interesting me quite a bit. However I really have no desire to play any "deathmatch" type of multiplayer games. I've long outgrown my quake 2 days of circlestrafing and absorbing millions of bullets. (yes even in CS this was an issue only it was the wacky/unrealistic ballistics/aiming system that bothered me more). Doom 3 was a complete wash for me as it was pretty much a re-hash of doom/quake/UT style gameplay that's over 10 years old already. Halo is pretty much the evolution of this type of gameplay on a slightly larger scale with vehicles. Halflife 2 was a nice comprimise. Single player wise. Adding enough innovative features to allow someone to play certain scenes in different ways depending on their personal preference. This contrasted with Doom 3's persistent tried-and-boring "deathmatch every monster like it was a multiplayer bot" style gameplay. I still hate steam however and I won't support that kind of endeavor so I will -not- buy the game, I'll play my friend's copy instead. I find I couldn't in good conscience give them money for punishing legitimate end users. Which is all they're doing. Despite the propaganda.

I can't play it right now. However I was fiddling around with HL2 last night... we were messing around with the physics "cannon" which is really different from the one you saw in the halflife e3 demos... which kind of sucks. This physics cannon isn't nearly as fun. Is the old physics gun still in the game. It looks like there's a cheat to enable it. Has anyone tried?

Sooooo. Anyone know of any good end user maps that have been made yet? A friend bought it and I was trying it out at his place... Eh. It's alright. The physics are definitely the gimmick that make the game worth playing. I haven't see any especially great feats of AI yet. Which is why I was wondering if there were any small maps that featured objects and houses with which to do some interesting CQB. I found when I was being shot at in certain areas. It was really cool to be able to pick up a wooden pallet (the bullet proof kind =P) and use it as a bullet shield. I haven't tried doing this yet but it sounds cool. Shooting a  flammable barrel and picking it up and tossing it over a guard rail or something down on some enemies. I'm going to try that I think. I'm really glad that you can still modify parameters like locational damage and weapon damage and health. Edit. Wow, a whopping total of three single player maps to download at hl2files.com It's funny. Halflife is just inundated with shitty SP maps and yet because Halflife 2 is so new. Pretty much any new singleplay content might be interesting to check out... no matter how shitty it is. So long as I can plonk down some badguys and have at it.

What does this reworking of soldier models and civilian units entail exactly? Jeez. Sounds like 1.3 is slowly catching up to all the other addons and mods with higher system requirements. From what I've been reading. I'd have been content with the gameplay improvements and done without all the graphical doodads.