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chris330

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Posts posted by chris330

  1. Posted

    if your happy to play Arma2 on low settings you can get a 8800GT for around 25pound (here at least at computer club/site) or a little higher @ around 100pound a:

    normal:

    http://tweakers.net/aanbod/283190/club3d-nvidia-gtx465-1-gb-dx-11.html

    http://tweakers.net/aanbod/283051/msi-n260gtx-t2d896.html

    http://tweakers.net/aanbod/283105/sapphire-vapor-x-hd5770-1gb-gddr5-pcie.html

    cheap:

    http://tweakers.net/aanbod/283178/xfx-9800gt-met-zalman-vf950-led.html

    http://tweakers.net/aanbod/282899/asus-en8800gt-g-htdp-512m.html

    sry for the dutch site but its just to show you some 2th hand options available for me (local is better then Ebay sinds it cheaper)

    That's great thanks for your help! I've just ordered one, cheers ;)

  3. Posted

    Hi had to re-post this I posted in the wrong section - haven't been around here for a while :p

    ****

    Hi :)

    I'm looking to start playing wwiionline again, but I've sold all my old hardware :rolleyes:

    I know a bit about code but bugger all about hardware. I'm looking for a middle of the road graphics card and straight forward PSU to back it up. I don't want to spend a load of money on some fancy Corsair PSU again if I don't need to.

    Can anyone recommend a reasonable power supply unit and graphics card to go with it? I'm a bit worried about buying PSU's which are not 'single rail' as I've heard these are prone to problems, but I wouldn't have a damn clue what any of it means. I'm thinking of a PSU up around 500W with just a basic card costing around £40.

    Any ideas - thanks for any help offered ;)

  4. Posted

    Hi :)

    I'm looking to start playing wwiionline again, but I've sold all my old hardware :rolleyes:

    I know a bit about code but bugger all about hardware. I'm looking for a middle of the road graphics card and straight forward PSU to back it up. I don't want to spend a load of money on some fancy Corsair PSU again if I don't need to.

    Can anyone recommend a reasonable power supply unit and graphics card to go with it? I'm a bit worried about buying PSU's which are not 'single rail' as I've heard these are prone to problems, but I wouldn't have a damn clue what any of it means. I'm thinking of a PSU up around 500W with just a basic card costing around £40.

    Any ideas - thanks for any help offered ;)

  5. Posted

    Did they ever get round to this yet? I always wanted to write AI takeoff scripts and stuff and maybe try out some collison detection and some physics but if I recall whenever using the command the disables simulation it knocked everything out, killed the engine, made some weird camera stuff happen and all kinds.

    All we really need is something to just knock out automatic engine core collision detection and physics simulation. Everything else being left in would open up scope for a community made flight simulator and other stuff.

    I'm heavily into C++ game coding right now and it would help alot on the future to have an easy platform I'm familiar with to use as a stage for some physics code and stuff rather than have to use my own engine, which will not have an easy to use editor like this game does.

  6. Posted · Edited by chris330

    Well I was thinking of paying the folks who made them. They are of professional standard in my opinion and I'm sure many others think so too.

    Maybe it's not such a good idea. Thanks anyway ;o) No need to start a witch hunt. I'll just make my own.

    I might still make an extraction tool so folks can edit binarized models though. Or I might just dick around with code to open up an existing file for the hell of it. I'm undecided at the moment ;)

    ---------- Post added at 06:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:46 PM ----------

    Might still do it actually if any author's are willing. I was thinking of around £100 a model for a good one. I don't think that's an unreasonable price.

    Depends how it fits in with the fact that they've been made with Bohemia software though. That might exclude any possibility for some reason. No doubt someone will be more than enthusiastic enough to point that out if it's true *sigh*.

    It has been pointed out to me by a mate in the last few min that if I'm willing to spend £100 a model I might as well buy from Turbosquid. And that's what I'll probably do.

    Shame though. I think some of the community made stuff for OFP and Arma is easily good enough to be sold - and isn't available anywhere else....

  8. Posted

    Maybe a few visual aids would be nice so people can actually see what you have been making. Sounds very interesting though, hats off to you for involving yourself in such a large task!

    Ok I go it in the end :) Here's a link to a short video on youtube showing a landscape scene with a vertex shader going around it to mimc sunlight or moonlight but speeded up alot.

    This should be ok I managed to run this on the on-board card which is the Intel G33/G31 I think. Was clocking about 30-40 Fps at the time even though the counter says 99 for some reason.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWBpOX2dKZA

  9. Posted

    Some good replies there thanks to you both.

    Deadfast:

    Thanks mate I think I'm just about with that one, but how they can they appear so fast on client machines? Does that mean that when I see someone shoot on screen in reality they actually fired about half a second ago? (client to server then server to me - 200ms + 200ms).

    So do most client machines just try and follow the server's absolute sort of rippling up and down trying to chase the average all the time - in respect to game events?

    I get the feeling there must be some pretty good prediction code going on. I've thought alot about it over the years. Something I once saw in industry might work well here.

    I'm not getting too worked up about it yet though. I'm still yet to successfully send data from one program to another - on the SAME computer!! :mad: ;)

  10. Posted

    Hi,

    I'm going to post this elsewhere too perhaps a more appropriate site. I always come here first though just in case I can catch the eye of a wandering expert. I've generally found over the years that the help I get on here is alot better than most other sites.

    My question is about UDP versus TCP data transfer in networking. I'm sure someone on here will know something about this. I was checking my ping to the USA last night and discovered a latency of around 167ms when downloading. I was wondering then how on earth do multiplayer games ever manage to effectively render small arms fire accurately across all client machines? Surely if you had to wait anything up to 300ms the game would be horrible to play.

    I'm wondering therefore are ping times here produced because of the use of TCP during the transfer? Is UDP effectively a much faster ping? If one client shot a machine gun and that's all their machine had to tell the server would this information go alot faster than 'normal' ping times if using UDP rather than TCP?

    I know about packets arriving out of order and duplicated with UDP and that the application (read 'game') has to have error checking code using a timestamp with any data that's sent and received across the network. But assuming things arrived ok does UDP drastically reduce data transfer time? Surely you couldn't ever have a game with pings like 300ms if you were making an FPS action game!

    I don't really know though to be honest. So I'm asking ;) Thanks.

  11. Posted

    Hi just to let you know thansk for the help I have now got a very good reflective (specular light) shader file to run and understood it top to bottom too. Even had to fix a major error in the online tutorial's shader file that wasn't returning proper data from the function that displays stuff onscreen.

    Pretty much nailed now to be honest. If I need any more depth into shader files I'll be ok myself from here on in. Thanks again, this forum always feels like *home* in some weird way ;)

  12. Posted

    Thanks for the replies you three chaps/chapesses ;) Sure deal I'm trying to find help as this is actually going somewhere now. But not having much luck. Did have a great artist over the Christmas period who was really keen and has worked in the industry. Sadly he went back to drink and got beaten almost to death somewhere locally. I think he's now brain damaged for life :(

    I'm also off work due to mental illness so got lots of time to work out my 'area' if you know what I mean. But I'll need someone else to help in the others sooner or later.

    @Dadl

    I bought a cheaper book on Algorithms than the one you recommended me in the thread I started sometime back just to get me started. But I've favourited the one you did recommend and I'll buy it as soon as more money comes through from social security.

    Thanks!

  13. Posted · Edited by chris330

    I'm not sure - I'll head over. Normally if I have an question I always come here first. Always. The expertise on here is amazing and the attitude of posters very good. Not always the same elsehwere sadly. I'll go over there and re-post it.

    ---------- Post added at 12:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:35 AM ----------

    Ok thanks pal I posted it over there. Be interesting to see what replies come. I did get a shader to run in the end. Looks very nice. Still got a long way to go before I understand them properly though.

    To be honest I'm surprised more people who make addons for the Operation Flashpoint family of games don't get into this. I've made some addons in 2003, and it was very difficult. I never got anywhere near the levels of complexity some people reached in later years either.

    On balance to be entirely truthful, although it sounds complex I'd say it's probably not been any harder so far doing this than making a complete working addon in OFP. Sure I could bask in the limelight of all these new concepts and terms I've learned but to be honest it really isn't that bad.

    Here's the link to the site I got started with. The first 10 lessons are free then it's only a one time £20 fee for access to all the others.

    http://www.directxtutorial.com/index.aspx

    Thanks again;)

  14. Posted

    Hi thanks for the reply. There's not that much to show yet to be honest. I'm devoting much more time to learning than making anything. I could if I wanted to start making all sorts of things but I'd rather not until I've covered all the theory and code I'll need to get started properly.

    Most of it has just been developing things beyond the tutorials. I could post a few things up but they'd look mundane, whereas in actual fact what's going on behind it is quite deep and that's the bit I've been learning to understand which I now mainly do. Took alot of time but anyway I'm not that far off being able to start in earnest on generating terrain and things like that.

    Pixel shaders are a new thing to me though. I found out my on-board emulator does have support for pixel shading up to level 2.0. However the damn things still refuse to run even when just rendering the good old Teapot mesh. Seems shaders above a certain level crash the program whilst those those beneath it will actually run without crashing but the light effects don't render. I just see a black screen or whatever colour I cleared the back buffer to.

    I'm very much hoping I don't *have* to use pixel shaders to get shadows! Or perhaps I will yet figure them out and find out they're not so bad. I have my reservations though.

  15. Posted · Edited by chris330

    Hi,

    I'm in the process of actually making a game. It has finally happened after many years of waffling and talking stuff that sounded good.

    I've pretty much got to the end of my DirectX learning curve for now I can do most things I would want. I can load an animated mesh with the Hierachy function and allocation class, load textures, load models, select objects on screen, make a game display make lights all that stuff.

    I'm also ok with physics and stuff now having spent alot of time thinking and reading about it and I'm also into collision detection. Pretty familiar with the game loop and hierachy layout and how all this happens after being called from within a windows function. Great.

    But. The last area of my DirectX learning has wandered me into pixel shading. The correct term I believe is HLSL - High Level Shader Language. Seems now it allows one to address the graphics card processor directly to produce nice effects. Ok fine. It also however means extra compiling to be done and I'm worried about this might be happening at run time as it's quite an abstracted language above even C++. Ok but modern processors should be able to handle this right?

    The further thing I'm worried about is compatibility. I do have the money to get another graphics card if I want but I intentionally have run all my directX stuff so far without a graphics card using the processor to do all that emulating stuff.

    I wouldn't have been worried but the first time I tried to compile and run the C++ source file with the effect file (the effect file is a .fx file which holds the shader language) the machine went blank, nothing showed and windows complained of a problem and had to close the application (program). No doubt because of a bad communication between the shader language and on board card simulator being run by my processor. I thought however shader language was supposed to hold a technique function. The shader file I have does have one yet for some reason it could not properly source an acceptable technique for my on board card emulator and crashed the program.

    So with that said here's the deal:

    The game I'm writing is based on out and out gameplay. Having played WWIIOnline I've seen just how much market there still is for very basic graphics (by today's standards) provided they're backed up by amazing gameplay - which World War II Online (also termed BattleGround Europe produced by Cornered Rat Software) definitely has. So I'm wondering do I *really* need to use HLSL and pixel shaders? The DirectX effects I've seen so far looked very good to me and quite capable of rendering an acceptable game world that's lit very nicely and accurately. They also give access to all required texture filtering such as Anisotropic and all that stuff.

    I do not want to write a game which irritates users at the sharp end by refusing to run due to compatibility problems. I've also noticed that with DirectX I can access pixel level I believe so I could even code my own basic stuff into that for things like blur effects or haze effects usng some sort of circle around which a mean average of pixel values was took, and this average was then redistributed back to the pixels - creating a blur. I really don't need my models to look like they're covered in crude oil during a gorgeous sunrise.

    So to summarise my two camps of thought:

    1) Leave pixel shaders alone.

    Pros

    - Big bonus in compatibility and speed.

    - Can do everything I'd want to anyway.

    - Avoid what looks like a giant non-standardisation based mess in the industry.

    Cons

    - Can't have easy to use special effects.

    - I'd have to make any effects I wanted myself.

    - Game doesn't look as pretty especially around water and stuff.

    2) Use pixel shaders.

    Pros

    - It's reasonable to expect a gamer to have a low level card.

    - Easy to use effects.

    - Extra nice looking game for not much effort.

    Cons

    - Get drawn into compatibility mess caused by multi manufacturers. Maybe some cards (no matter how expensive) may not work at all if they don't support a specific shader no matter how powerful.

    - Risk irritating customer base and forcing them to spend money (which is something I don't believe in doing when you're supposed to be providing a paid for service to someone).

    So there it is. I'm not sure what to do. I have LOTS of sympathy with people on a budget or having to use their friends/parents/aunties machine. I do not want them to be excluded. At all. I'd prefer a less nice looking game with more time spent on improving gameplay rather than just drafting in 3rd party made shader files to make the game look good so it sold and then dumping the responsibility of that onto the customer by making them having to pay yet more money to get it to run (which is something I'm sure is rife in the industry at present). :rolleyes:

    So please can someone help me out here? I just want the best compromise between nice effects and compatibility, but very much leaning towards compatibility.

    Thanks ;)

  16. Posted

    Hi just to add I have followed some of this up and I've been learning about C++ and DirectX. Here's a link to a compressed file that contains source and ready to run binaries (they run fine on my PC anyway). They're very basic DirectX programs. But I tinkered with them successfully eventually.

    They're slight modifications to some of the lessons on the DirectX Tutorial site.

    http://rapidshare.com/files/394991506/Read_Only_Completed_Programs.zip.html

  19. Posted

    Ahh thankyou! Thou art indeed correct. I set up a mission and found AI C-47's available, they even have the Bristol Blenheim!!!:cool:

    Thanks pal. I could use some help regarding prop pitch and mixture theory. Does anyone understand this well enough to help me out here? If so I'll fire a few questions away. This really is a great game.;)

  22. Posted

    Hi,

    I'm missing being able to fly quite alot right now, was wondering if you chaps could give me some ideas of the best flight sim to have a go at. I used to do alot of rough ground landing stuff in wwiionline but I hope I never go back to that fiasco again. I do miss that really engaging low flying stuff though and landing big-ish planes like C-47's and Ju52's on rough ground.

    As such I'm looking for a decent flight simulator. But I have no idea what all the latest stuff available is. Here's what I'm looking for:

    1)Very realistic simulator definitely nothing whatsoever arcadey.

    2)Chance to fly transport planes like Dakotas and such like.

    3)If possible chance to fly a fighter and dogfight - this is not so important.

    What do you reckon? Anything will do even games a few years old will suit me fine, and hurt my wallet less too! Any ideas? Thanks :o

  25. Posted

    Hi,

    I'm purely curious and I know some of you on here can anser these questions. I'll just fire them off, thanks:

    1)How much is the rental cost for one of these things? I'm wondering specifically how much do big games like Battleground Europe, Planetside and the like pay for their server hire?

    2)Are MMO games based on FPS style with Physics systems/engines more demanding on their servers than MMORPG's?

    3)Is there any way code of a game can be written to specifically run well on a large MMO server or do the normal rules of well optimised code just apply in a standard way?

    4)Do MMO servers handle any Physics code or is that all client side?

    Just interested. If anyone can offer some insight thanks ;)

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