Pyronick

Also, if you don't exploit it first. Someone else will eventually.

Does it also "block" the sun? :D

It is possible that Valve will release a native Linux and Mac Steam client this year. That would make it a lot cheaper for BIS to develop binaries for those games as that saves them a lot of distribution problems.

What about precompiled packages, with the game running in a VM like id Tech engines do?That would make porting and developing a lot easier. It could mean the end of Wintel!

Typical.And they don't consider the fact that IE6 support is bad for their own economy and stimulating external economy aswell. Here in Holland we have a motion in our government since 2004 which states that every software solution should be free and open-source if possible. Yet most government departments are still stuck with ancient Windows, Internet Exploder, Oracle, Exchange, etc.

In the best scenario, they entire ArmA 2 executables and libraries should be recompiled with the latest SSE extensions and Hyperthreading support. The Intel compiler now has various AMD extensions, so no reason to not use some crappy FOSS compiler anymore.

DirectX has better documentation and the SDKs are easier to use.But OpenGL gives you more hardware access, you can extend OpenGL features which you can't with DirectX. I think it's got to do with only 2 things:- Different user interface - Lack of commercial software (i.e. games, Live Messenger, Microsoft Office and various programs) But I'm sure Google will change that soon enough. Just pray that XMPP will be the de facto IM protocol. That's the entire issue behind modern day software developing.Software in it's ideal form is built modular, divided over various components which can be replaced by a module which is written completely different, using different API's (DirectX, OpenGL/OpenCL/OpenAL, etc) and file formats. These modules should preferably have their own threads aswell for safety and performance reasons. Look at Chrome(/Webkit) for instance, which has a thread per tab and plugin. That is the direction software should be heading. A *nix distribution is built in modules aswell, seperating kernels, firmware, terminals, window manager, desktop environments. And they don't necessarily have to fully integrate to work, they can be exchanged easily. Don't strip DirectX out of a rendering engine. Just make sure you don't integrate it, use it as a seperate module.

Firefox 3.7 mockup One of the Firefox 4.0 mockups with Windows Aero support, Omnibar (Awesomebar + Search bar in one) and tabs-on-top. Looks really Chromey, I like it.

Wait until SAS2 spec SSDs are released. These are just SATA SSDs on a SAS1 backplane. That might give you 144 theoretical Gbps or about 18 GBps with 24 of these in super striped mode.

What game/API is that? Desyncs usually are caused by high pings or bad values or the lack of error correction.

You really don't want to do massively parallel floating point calculations on a CPU. At least, not until 2011.

Most (nearly all) games don't synchronize trajectory and final location.We're reaching the point that bandwidth and latencies are good enough to synchronize trajectory, final location and final pose. Only the software hasn't been written yet, most middleware physics packages are still fully client-sided. Those that are synchronized usually are modified physics engines. (Source, Second Life, etc) The progression of physics engines hasn't been that great the last years. nVidia has a monopoly on GPGPU accelerated physics, Intel owns Havok and cooperates with AMD but a competing physics engine hasn't been released yet. Developers don't want nVidia PhysX middleware because it's nVidia hardware exclusive.

The only reason why Intel is so big is due to foul play.I think in the next 3 years AMD and VIA will finally "breakthrough". The Cell was revolutionary, as was the DEC Alpha. You can see that the way X86 CPU's are going, the future is fusion.Unfortunately for Intel, they will need to invest in their graphics devision to keep up with that trend. And by the looks of it, they'll need to work hard on it considering Larrabee has been postponed.

Try two SSDs in stripe (RAID0) on a SAS backplane. I've even seen RAID configurations with SAS HDDs and SATA SSDs combined in a double-stripe where the SAS HDDs were used for their sustained speeds and the SSDs acted as some form of cache. That all for an Oracle database... :D Anyway, if you have the cash. Get a SAS-2 controller, it's superior over SATA-3 due to it's intelligent commands (auto-TRIM instead of software TRIM) and dedicated processor and cache memory.

I fear your GPU is way too slow for ArmA 2.It's a low budget type GPU of 3 generations ago, which is two extremes. Also, the T2050 doesn't meet the needs to play ArmA 2 at all. Next year a new batch of mobile CPU's en GPU's will be released by Intel and AMD. If you want to upgrade you might want the Mobility HD 5850 and a 820XM/920XM or Phenom II N930/X920 BE. That ought to run ArmA 2 properly. But do keep in mind the portable devices often lack power, and ArmA 2 is incredibly power hungry. A desktop system is more suitable and cheaper as a gaming platform albeit less portable.

I think the new generation of "superior" x86-based CPU's will be AMD. Why? Well, they are slowly moving toward heterogeneous processing. Using two parallel integer units and a wide 128-bit FPU and in the future (2011-2012) the IGP for floating point operations. Somewhat like the Cell Broadband Engine, only that flopped because there were no abstract languages like OpenCL or DirectCompute to use that power. The only thing Intel has is Hyperthreading, which often doesn't work as it's not really parallel multithreading and needs too deep branch prediction pipelines. Also the disadvantage of having a year of delay on production technology will be undone by the GlobalFoundries' fabs.

The legislation and administration offices of the European Union are switching over to open standards. Even big car manufacturers like DaimlerBenz (Mercedes-Benz), BMW Group and VAG (Volkswagen) are using Linux workstations and supercomputers. Also Intel abuses their monopolist position, which hurts AMD. And AMD has various locations in Germany. And Germany has the biggest population in the EU. To us Europeans Intel (Microsoft and General Motors aswell) is just a bag of hurt. Not only for the consumer market, but also politically.

I've read a discussion about terrain grid density a few years ago on an IRC channel. One of the developers was trying to develop a grid system which can dynamically split up grid density only on places needed. Some kind of dynamic quadtree in which a single node can split up in four nodes in which a single node can split up in four nodes in which a single node on it's turn can split up in four nodes and so on and so on. But they couldn't develop such a thing since they were building a Source mod and they needed access to the engine code. This should add the details needed without the extreme excessive details of a high density static grid. It sounds very complex though and not optimal either, but maybe it's interesting to experiment with for the developers? It could not only add the possibility of reasonable accurate/details deformation, but terrain topographic/geometric details aswell.

It is released under the MPL (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Public Licence) which means it's public property. In other words, it's open source and maybe be used for non-open source/proprietary software for free as long as the copyrights are in the game. This could be implemented if the code base is the same. It would take some engine alteration as it will have to serve as a backend to an existing rendering engine.

I don't think it's really interesting. The Athlon II is basically a Phenom without L3 cache memory, a Phenom isn't all that great when it comes to performance in ArmA 2 terms not to mention without that low latency cache memory. A fast clocked (MHz/GHz) dualcore is faster then a low clocked quadcore. It's best to get a fairly high clocked quadcore as it will be more futureproof. You want anything Intel Core i7, i5 750+ or AMD Phenom II X4 940 or higher. Also, there is no graphics card mentioned. This is a vital piece of hardware, you'll need a pretty quick one. Anything similar or above nVidia 8800/9600/250 (not 9400 or 240) and ATI/AMD HD 3870/4770/5750 (not 4650, 5650, etc) should work, avoid anything with onboard graphics/integrated graphics processor (IGP).

I guess he had a valid reason to believe that.I share his opinion. I hate proprietary "standards", they tend to increase pricing and halt progression. Physics offloading to a GPU (or DSP or even a dedicated physics chip) is of course good progress, unless it can only be used on graphics hardware from a specific brand which overprice their stuff.

Hardware tessellation can only be done on ATI GPU's using specific proprietary APIs or through Direct3D 11.I'm hoping for a Direct3D 11 render path, as proprietary standards suck. Luckily the BIS developers agree with me on this. Otherwise we'd have nVidia PhysX in the game, the horror! It doesn't depend on the shader instructions.The problem is that you need dual precision FPU's, otherwise you must wait until the single precision FPU's have done multiple cycles to get the same needed precision. Since the nVidia 8000 series and the ATI HD series, 128-bit HDR should be possible. Isn't that header tag already implemented in the engine?The Windows thread scheduler and memory allocator sucks, hell the whole kernel sucks!

Sounds like "640 kilobyte ought to be enough for everyone" to me.Microsoft is powerful due to it's monopoly position and abuse (vendor lock-in). I.e. DirectX, Internet Explorer, GDI, .NET, etc. The only reason why Windows is so succesful is because it was one of the very first OSses which had backwards compatibility with DOS. Which was stripped out at a certain time aswell. If this wasn't the case we'd probably use *nix-based OSses, OS/2, Amiga OS, BeOS or even Solaris/Java. Windows is the worst of all those. Windows Vista/7 isn't actually backwards compatible with previous NT-based kernels (Windows XP, Windows 2000), instead it's all done on an in-kernel virtual machine. Microsoft is just mindfucking us all. Don't get fooled by Apple either.

The whole driving model should be changed. In this game, most land-based vehicles drive either too easy or too difficult. Instead of increasing the turn radius linear with speed, there should be genuine under- and oversteer in the game. Nothing really complicated though as it still should be a milsim, not a driving sim. Braking distances should be bigger aswell, and proper acceleration should be in the game too.

I like localization, but I hate localized voice acting. It just doesn't sound right. Especially when you see a big Afro-American talk Dutch, German, French when he has a USMC patch... Subtitles, captions and localized UI elements are enough localization for me.