On 6/10/2010 10:53 AM, Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> My point is, it's not a standard-sized stereo that you can just replace.
>
> I doubt that's true. I suspect ifyou pulled the dashboard off, you'd see
> one of the standard-sized holes with a standard-sized radio with lots of
> trim making it fit smoothly into the dash.
>

Yep. It's the same as my civic, probably. Only apparently the civic you 
can't actually remove the radio because it has part of the computer 
system for the dashboard. You have to relocate the head unit somewhere 
else if you want to use an aftermarket unit.

Usually shops that sell radios will have a dash plate that has an 
opening designed to fit a standard radio. It looks just like the OEM, 
only it's got a standard rectangular hole where the radio goes.

-- 
~Mike

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>> That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
>>> next to impossible to play.)
> 
>> I've found it takes getting used to, and some games manage it better than 
>> others. I can't drive in GTA (which is kind of ironic), but shooting in most 
>> of the games seems OK to me once I play the game a bit, even tho I agree 
>> it's a lot harder than on the PC with a mouse.
> 
>   I tried the demo of Battlefield: Bad Company, and while the game looked
> great, it was almost impossible to play. You need pixel-level accuracy to
> hit anything, which is basically impossible with the controller. With a
> mouse it wouldn't be a problem.
> 

I know that with the Call of Duty series, you get a little auto-aim help
when firing from the hip in that the game just corrects the bullets
path. If you shoulder the weapon, or aim down the sights, or what ever
else the game has, it would snap the cross hair to the target. Both of
those are options that can be disabled per player. And both are disabled
in online-multiplayer, much to my annoyance.

You can get used to a joystick control. It's not impossible, it just
shares nothing with the skills used when using a mouse.

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"Phil Cook v2" <phi### [at] nospamrocainfreeservecouk> wrote:
> And lo On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:50:05 +0100, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> did
> spake thusly:
>
> >   Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
> > kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360.
>
> Scab! Heh. OOC why the Xbox and not the PS3? I'm not fan-boying or
> anything I'm genuinely curious.

I guess it's because of the 2006's revolutionary-game hype around the
XBox-exclusive "Alan Wake".  If he gets hugely disapointed, I'd point him to
"Red Dead Redemption" from Rockstar, with its huge open-world set in the old
west.  Much more mindblowing stuff, with hardly any hype at all...

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nemesis wrote:
> Much more mindblowing stuff, with hardly any hype at all...

Which ZP has also reviewed this week. Very amusing, as always.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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On 6/10/2010 10:09 AM, Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> Sony ever fixed those issues
>
> Ahahaha. At least then, when it was still partially Verent, you got the
> "Sorry, citizen, but you are not allowed to do that in our game. We are
> going to 'fix' this problem." They have moved from, "fixing bugs in ways
> you hate." to, "use this micro-transaction to give us more money."
>
> I did hear the quest got a kludge fix. Anyone can just start it in the
> middle, without the petition for citizenship paper.
Lovely.. Took me about 20 minutes looking through the code for the 
non-SOE server to find and fix all the issues with it, and even without 
testing all of it, I am pretty sure it got included in the most recent 
patches, and all of it works. It wasn't that damn hard to figure out. 
All you do is look through to see what they expect, what they give you, 
to give to the next guy, then make sure you can go back to the last one 
and get a new one, as long as a "flag" that tracks your progress shows 
you finished up to that point. Heck. I didn't even have to add my own 
bloody flag. The key one needed is already there, there just wasn't code 
in there to say:

if flag = 1 & !inventory_contains("thingie"){ \\i.e. you finished to 
this point.
   give "thingie";
   say "Someone found this laying around. Try not to lose it again.";}

Someone half brain dead could fix it, never mind people that code quests 
all the time for SOE. About 90% of all the changes I made where *all* 
basically those 3 lines, with small variations. Same with the class 
agents, which all used *identical* code, with the exception of some 
wording, since it was the *same* item they all gave you at that critical 
point.

Thankfully.. They seem to have been less sloppy with "most" things in 
EQ2. Though, I still have a "dark side" quest with some clown (which I 
can't complete because of it) that breaks another quest, if you are on 
it, unless you first delete the offending quest. Same NPC for both, but 
he won't progress the others, if you are already on the evil one you 
have to talk to him about, but can't, if you are not evil. Its quite 
absurd..., but its like 1 out of 3000+ quests that I have done, which 
has had a serious problem. Luclin in EQ1 on the other hand... was a 
bloody total damn mess. lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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On 6/9/2010 7:51 PM, nemesis wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>    This is what we get with consoles. People making games work perfectly
>>> fine on *that* hardware,
>>
>> Which is exactly the reason companies like consoles. :-)
>
> yes, and there's really no point in trying to optimize games for PC when
> consumers can just throw more hardware at the issue.  Typical PC gamers are not
> really running Pentium 4 these days.
>
> Plus, it's much easier to cope with a single static architecture like a console
> than the sheer variety of hardware and drivers for PC.  It's always amazing to
> see the swann songs for consoles pushing it to the limits than seeing Crysis
> running at 2x1080p, 64FSAA, 120FPS by running on a cluster. :)
>
> and then, consoles are typically about shared familiar entertainment on the
> living room rather than a lone experience on the basement PC... :P
>
>
Sigh.. No. That isn't how it should bloody work. If you can optimize it 
to run well on something that has one core, less memory, and barely any 
HD, it makes no damn sense that you can't take *that* optimization, then 
just support the ability to self-tweak the damn thing to take advantage 
of everything the machine *can* do that the console can't. Its like 
buying a damned steering wheel cover for your car and discovering that 
its been "optimized" in such a manner that it works fine on a hybred, 
but placing it on an SUV will cause the engine to take 10 minutes to 
actually start, sets the maximum speed to be 3mph, and all the seats to 
rearrange themselves so you now only have room for yourself, and one 
very small pet, say.. a hampster, sans cage.

It simply doesn't make any damn sense at all that this should happen. 
Its the computer equivalent of attempting to empty the contents of a 
puddle, and finding that, by the time you have to drained the contents, 
it has mysteriously grown to fill a 150x50x12 foot swimming pool... 
These games **should** run on hardware that is 10 years older than what 
I have, based on the console its running on, but its using up enough 
resources, processor power, and storage, to require something only 1 
year older, and but 10 times the cost of what I actually own.

It has jack to do with the "difficulty of optimizing for a PC". The 
consoles **are** PCs, and the hardware they are running is usually 3 
generations older than the shit they "optimize" the PC version to run 
on. This is **de-optimization**.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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> It has jack to do with the "difficulty of optimizing for a PC". The 
> consoles **are** PCs,

Yeh, apart from the fact that the CPU and GPU share the same RAM (eliminates 
the biggest bottleneck in PC games)

Or that the CPU has additional instructions for games (parallel vector math 
stuff)

Or that the GPU has way higher bandwidth than even the latest nVidia cards.

Simply put, if you're optimised your game for xbox it probably will not run 
at decent frame rate on even a modern PC out-of-the-box.  You're going to 
need to make some huge changes to your design to get it working well on a 
PC.

For a start you need to get rid of all the CPU<->GPU interactions per frame, 
and try to make more use of the GPU shaders.  This is not trivial, some 
effects might not even be possible to transfer.  Next you probably need to 
scale back on some of the full-scene post-processing stuff, as PC GPUs 
simply don't have the bandwidth, maybe you can try to figure out other ways 
to acheive the same via more complex shaders.  Then you probably need to 
re-optimise your vector math code for PC CPUs (or maybe the compiler does 
this automatically, IDK).

Anyway, it's not very simple like you make out.

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> It's almost like those companies that sell you a printer for £20 and then 
> charge you £80 for the ink...

Exactly.  The ones who don't charge 80 for their ink have to sell their 
printers for 40 to make any profit.  Then nobody buys it because it's double 
the price of the competition.  In both cases they rely on the fact that 
people only consider the "initial" or "base" price displayed in big flashy 
font.

> My point is, it's not a standard-sized stereo that you can just replace.

Yes I understand that, most cars are like that now.  It doesn't mean you 
can't take it out though.

>> My point is the electrical connection is probably right there behind 
>> *your* head unit, you just need to connect three wires to it.
>
> I severely doubt it.

So it would be more than a 12p audio socket then?

> If their intention is to force you to expend money, they will presumably 
> have made this is difficult as humanly possible to prevent you not 
> expending money.

They wouldn't put much effort in to it, believe me.  Heck you can even spend 
a few hundred pounds to modify the ECU to get the same performance as the 
next model up, they could easily prevent that if they could be bothered.  In 
reality not enough people do anything like this to make it worth their while 
working on it.

> As far as I can tell, none of the 4 available models has an audio socket.

Ah ok, so it probably doesn't exist then.  Sorry I misunderstood, I thought 
it was an option to have one installed.

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>> It's almost like those companies that sell you a printer for £20 and 
>> then charge you £80 for the ink...
> 
> Exactly.  The ones who don't charge 80 for their ink have to sell their 
> printers for 40 to make any profit.  Then nobody buys it because it's 
> double the price of the competition.  In both cases they rely on the 
> fact that people only consider the "initial" or "base" price displayed 
> in big flashy font.

Personally, when *I* buy a printer, I tend to look for one that looks 
like it isn't going to break after 3 uses, which usually rules out all 
the £20 printers. But apparently that's just me...

>> My point is, it's not a standard-sized stereo that you can just replace.
> 
> Yes I understand that, most cars are like that now.  It doesn't mean you 
> can't take it out though.

I'm sure you can take it out. The problem is that you can't put anything 
else in its place, because it won't be the right shape and won't have 
the custom Renault-specific connectors. (They're probably different on 
every model of Renault too, just to stop you taking the stereo from an 
expensive car and putting it into a cheap car.)

>>> My point is the electrical connection is probably right there behind 
>>> *your* head unit, you just need to connect three wires to it.
>>
>> I severely doubt it.
> 
> So it would be more than a 12p audio socket then?

I mean they've probably got all the connections in one of those big 
block terminals to prevent you from knowing which connection is which. 
(That's assuming there even *is* an input to the amplifier other than 
the tuner and CD DAC inside the head unit itself...)

>> If their intention is to force you to expend money, they will 
>> presumably have made this is difficult as humanly possible to prevent 
>> you not expending money.
> 
> They wouldn't put much effort in to it, believe me.  Heck you can even 
> spend a few hundred pounds to modify the ECU to get the same performance 
> as the next model up, they could easily prevent that if they could be 
> bothered.  In reality not enough people do anything like this to make it 
> worth their while working on it.

Just courious now, but... Does a Renault Megane actually *have* an ECU?

>> As far as I can tell, none of the 4 available models has an audio socket.
> 
> Ah ok, so it probably doesn't exist then.  Sorry I misunderstood, I 
> thought it was an option to have one installed.

Fair enough.

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> I mean they've probably got all the connections in one of those big block 
> terminals to prevent you from knowing which connection is which. (That's 
> assuming there even *is* an input to the amplifier other than the tuner 
> and CD DAC inside the head unit itself...)

I would imagine all the electronics are in the same box, it will simply have 
speaker output on the back, plus some connector for the optional CD changer. 
The CD changer probably has analogue inputs there, but you'd also need to 
supply the correct signals to allow the head unit to switch to it.

> Just courious now, but... Does a Renault Megane actually *have* an ECU?

Probably a good dozen or two for various stuff, like controlling the 
emissions and fuel consumption, the antilock brakes, the onboard diagnostics 
(OBD) etc.  All cars have been been required by law to have an OBD port for 
about the last 10 years, which kind of requires they have a CAN bus and 
associated ECUs to generate and collect the data.

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