Yeah – HD genuinely looks better but I've always wondered if it's worth it enough to give in to all the hype about it …
Fallen in on a bit of a "if not broke, don't fix". That said, my dvd's look great on the new kit 🙂 The LCD telly makes them a lot sharper in a way CRTs can't manage. Had the new stuff for just over a month, wouldn't want to go back 🙂
Looks great, I just put off by all the hype …
LoL! Only being there is actually like being there! 😉
I am a total HD convert I'm afraid. I'v had a PS3 and HD TV for awhile now and I notice the difference very much when things aren't in HD. It looks a bit fuzzy and less well defined all round. Some films I have watched in HD are like watching them again for the first time but as with all things, it's only worth it if it's something that matters to you 🙂
Been enjoying HD again, well – maybe not as much as the HD Evangelists would have you think but what I’ve been watching in HD this weekend has been well worth it.
I’ve been quiet lately, which usually means I’ve been gaming again 🙂 Yep. Definitely gaming again, watching a bit too much telly too. I dunno about other people but I’m not sure how interesting it is to read when people are talking about gaming, which is why I don’t post that much nowadays about it.
That said though, the latest one is worth writing things about. It’s called Mass Effect 2, second in what’s likely to be a trilogy (with more after that probably) where you are Commander Shephard, tasked with saving the galaxy yet again. (There are games out there that aren’t centered around that cliche, honest!) It’s a very strong step forward on from the first game. Different can be Very Very Good. One of the All Time Greats in strategy is XCOM1 – Ufo : Enemy Unknown. On the heels of UFO came Terror From The Deep, which was XCOM1 under the sea, same game different graphics. Mass Effect 2 is definitely not Mass Effect 1 with different graphics. They’ve done a great job of evolving the game. It’s a much better game but the good but flawed Dragon Age.
Heh heh heh – that’s enough about the game, there will be plenty of reviews out there which will go orgasmic over this one.
YARR ! Six Nations championship started again this weekend. I don’t watch club rugby on the telly like I do county cricket but I’m always glued to the international rugby. It’s very rare that you find sport where the result is genuinely in doubt all the way to the end.
It definitely increases the excitement of watching when you don’t have a clue who’s going to win.
The Six Nations brings with it 4 teams who always have the potential to win it all, with a couple more who give it their best. And because it’s Six Nations, they all up their game considerably. We had one fairly comfortable win for Ireland yesterday, although Italy pushed them hard. England v Wales was one of the great games, not so much for the play but definitely for the “who’s going to win”. One of the best things about rugby is that there’s plenty of scoring opportunities, it only takes a split second for that clever break to happen to turn a game around.
And this weekend it’s in HD, courtesy of BBC’s coverage. I’m currently watching a bit of trench warfare with Scotland digging in against the French. Only 5 minutes in it as I type.
Ahh – HD. It is better picture quality. They’re paying proper attention to giving the signal the bandwidth it needs, so the little details aren’t being lost in the mush of data compression. I can see the pattern of the grass much better and I think I can see the matrix of the advertising boards. However, I’m not convinced it gives you that much more compared to normal telly definition. Certainly not enough to make me think about doing all the necessary to get Sky stuff in HD.
Besides, who cares about seeing the grass better or the ads clearer, I’m wanting to watch the game !
So – is it about possibly having more dots to the inch or is it about giving standard definition telly the bandwidth it needs ? It’s like those serials where the backgrounds are all pixellated because they’re not sending all of the information. I’ll quite happily recognise that HD looks better but it’s not “it’s like you’re there !” That much better.
Uhoh – it’s now 15-6 to France and it’s looking like the tipping point is coming … Time to get back to the game and hope a headache disappears before a suitability interview tomorrow. Think I may be taking advantage of the half time break to get fresh milk for the Coffee IV 🙂
Things have come a long way in the computer world.
(long one today, with a bunch of screenies that will benefit from a click to make them true size)
One of the first that caught me and gave me that “Wow” moment was called Alone in the Dark. It was an adventure game, possibly one of the first to feature full 3d movement. It was limited but an outstanding achievement at the time. I wrote a bit about it here (linked post), although there’s a Rant Warning on that post cos it was written while I was watching the extremely poor film that stole the name. Curse Uwe Boll to eternity ! And never let him near a camera too ! Muahaha 🙂
There’s a bit more about the game here too in this Wikipedia post (linked). Remember that this came out in 1992 and the game itself was smaller than your typical MP3 file. This is when home computers didn’t have enough memory to hold a picture taken by your modern mobile phone camera.
How did it look ?
(640×480 – picture grabbed from Wiki)
She’s just about recognisable as a person isn’t she ? They got the sharp, pointy shoes dead right too 🙂 Note the simple textures. More on that in a bit.
After this one, games took a bit of a sojourn into being mixed between 3d environments and sprites. In a 3d game, a sprite is like having one of those life sized cardboard cutouts, which is scaled according to how far away it is. There was no sense of depth.
Let’s leap forward a bit. A game I was passing time on last week is Star Wars : Knights of the Old Republic. It’s set 4,000 years before the films, so its creators Bioware had the opportunity to run with a fairly clean slate. They did a bang up job too. It’s a fully 3d game, taking in a form of the Dungeons and Dragons rules to run things from behind the screen.
How’s it look ?
(1280×1024 – my picture converted from bitmap to jpeg)
That’s my boy Finlay taking centre stage, with cohort Bastila to his side. The Jedi Council are in back, that’s one of Yoda’s ancestors there 🙂 He passed his English GCSE in time for this game, unlike the Yoda we know so well who only caught up last year (Newsbiscuit story).
I have all the bells and whistles and shiny things turned on and it shows in the screenie. There’s more detail in there, people look like people, aliens look like aliens and the textures allow more detail in the background. Still a bit plain though.
There’s a techie thing called Anisotropic Filtering at work here. The way a game builds up its 3d world is by overlaying textures on a frame. The frame is made up of polygons, with much of the work going into mapping textures to the polygons. And then doing all sorts of stuff to it. A lot of the detail gets lost though, which is where this Anisotropic Filtering comes in. So whereas Alone In The Dark had very simple textures, modern games have very complex textures with this filtering thing keeping the detail.
First time I noticed it was in World of Warcraft, where changing to a better graphics card let me see the stitching in the outfits that my characters were wearing. That’s anisotropic filtering at work. Before it’s mush, after it’s finely detailed stitching.
Knights of the Old Republic looked impressive stood still. The action was pretty good but the detail is a bit limited. The main character only had about 6 faces to choose from and when you talked to people, it seemed as if they had just eaten one of those things that makes your tongue swell up. Not much scope for variation here.
On to my current favourite game !
(1280×1024, pretty options to Maximum)
I’ve played Mass Effect to death and then some. It’s easy to play and has a decent storyline. Good blaster. As well as the screenie above, here’s a link to the Wiki Mass Effect screenie page.
This one gave a Wow when I first started playing it. The detail level steps up yet again. The face you see there of the main character is highly customisable, as that frame the textures are mapped to is altered. The problem some of these games can fall victim to is to look a little too stale and clinical. That’s tackled in this game by the graininess that’s deliberately introduced into the image.
It works too. The movement of the characters looks highly fluid and there’s lots of little detail in the patterns on the armour, the walls and the equipment the characters carry. There’s still some limits with the non-player characters though, short dark hair is definitely in fashion in the Mass Effect world.
But – there’s always room to raise the bar, which is where Mass Effect 2 comes in.
The first Mass Effect has you living on a frigate called the Normandy. You walk its corridors and interact with its people. The second game starts with the Normandy coming under attack my mysterious alien forces. You’re moving through surroundings made unfamiliar by battle damage and you reach the top of the stairs. The doors open, all the air escapes. There’s a subtle feeling that something’s different … Even on top of the battle damage.
And then you look up … and see open space where there used to be a roof.
It’s a definite WOW moment. I’ve only played a little of Mass Effect 2 so far and I can already see how they’ve raised the bar yet again with this one. Let’s get a screenie :
More extra detail again coming in there.
And it just continues on coming. The extra detail being added in makes it look as if you can hear the leather of the armour creaking. Mass Effect looked great but the new one just makes it look “better”. There’s much more detail in the environments you fight in too, ME was all a bit samey after a while with a limited selection of area types made different by altering the layouts of crates.
Can’t wait to give it some more playtime. I picked it up on Friday, just had time to scratch the surface so far. It has the usual Bioware touches. They have something about them, other developers produce interesting and technically good pieces of work but there’s something missing when they’re compared to what Bioware come out with.
Definitely a fan. But alas ! Bed time has come around, I’ll emerge for work in less than 8 hours, so the game will have to keep until tomorrow.
PS You’ll see another sign of the progress by comparing films like Final Fantasy, Beowulf and Avatar. FF made a good early fist of it, Beowulf did well but Avatar just raised the bar again.
Has to be chocolate chip cookies 🙂
I think my achey stuff is due to the stress making me tense up … My muscles don't like the tenseness.
New video game (Mass Effect 2) arriving very soon 🙂 Although I have a feeling that Coolshop.co.uk is going to get fired even before dispatching one order, due to failing to fulfill a pre-order done 10 days ago …
What kind of cookies do you like? My favorite are oatmeal raisin.
I have work stress,too. I keep trying to decide whether to ask for a promotion….but don't know if I want it since I hate the work anyway. Yet it has been impossible to find some place that pays me as much with the hours I need. I am very stressed and have found that I now have stress-induced arthritis (a thyroid thing).
Keep finding things to relax you…like video games. A friend has invited me to visit them…that will be relaxing for me.
Doh ! Another evening goes by where I didn’t reactivate the Eve subscription. Guess I got kinda distracted tonight :
Think I got 4 Stargates out of the way and then it was tapping in a blog post on the techie zone about my Acer laptop, bought just before Xmas. (Linky!)
I had the response back from the petition I put in about my account getting hacked. CCPs reaction here is a little behind what I’ve heard of what happens with hacked Warcraft accounts. With WoW, the account gets the money given back and trashed items appear in the mail. You lose a little from the configurable items but not really that much. With Eve, it looks like I’ll just get the money back. That’s good from some points of view as a lot of the ships that were sold, I wasn’t using anyway. But … the price to Buy an item in Eve is almost always more than what you get from Selling, so I’ll lose game cash from a couple of things :
Configurable items – will need to buy the configurable bit again
Buy/Sell difference.
My main Empire (“safe” space) ship was a Nighthawk, last time I looked they were 250 million to buy and 200 million to sell. So that’s a 50 million cost there. Plus quite a few millions for the configurable items. I’ll have to take stock when I go back in.
Can’t really see why they couldn’t dig in the backups to restore the character totally to an earlier time. Maybe it’s a policy decision, maybe it’s just too difficult to dive into backups. Smacks a bit of lack of effort on the part of the people running the game. I’ll head back into Eve soon, it just seems a waste to reactivate at 11pm at night when I’m wondering what my bed time will be 🙂 And I’ve been managing to distract myself quite well lately …
(Too much telly!)
Still don’t know where I’ll be working this time next month. Some of the support that was promised has failed to materialise. Maybe that’s a hint to get a bit more proactive ?
It’s affecting a few people and in curious ways too. I’m desperately trying not to show anything (show no weakness ethic) but I think the uncertainty stress is what’s behind my stiff back flaring up. The back has been getting more distracting lately, sometimes to the point where it makes my thinking fuzzy. Constant low level pain does very strange things to the mind.
There’s a contrast too with a couple of us. I’m not too bothered about being pushed out, as I know I’ve been on my project far too long. However, me, my boss and his boss are painfully aware that my tasks are ongoing essential tasks that cannot be neglected. So I’ve not fought the “post disestablished” thing because I knew it was time to move on but maybe it would have been better for the project if I’d dug the trench instead of escape tunnel ? The contrast comes with another person who’s being pushed out, they’re fighting to keep the post, not wanting to let go.
We have a few who are looking jealously at the people in my position cos they’d actually quite like to leave. Fewer people means the ones left behind pick up more work, which is tough to take when they’re overworked already. Despite the image the media like to give us, we civil servants work damn hard. Same as any place, there’s the lightweight waste of space passengers and the people who work themselves into early graves. One of my Mischief Campaigns is to keep a grin on one of those hard working people 🙂
Uncertainty causes all sorts of stress. It’s an unwelcome distraction that gets in the way of you focusing on what you were intending to do.
After the Norah Jones album on now (Feels Like Home – good album!) I’ll be looking for sleep … I’m needing the sleep to help me combat the stress. While I have the weight under control right now, I do tend to comfort eat. Had to stop myself from raiding even more chocolate earlier …
The uncertainty stress is hitting another of my colleagues like that too. Stress about one thing tends to make you notice the “normal” stress things more. So with me, it brings out the soreness from my broken bits. With my colleague, the uncertainty stress is bringing out what she’s most worried about, which is being bigger than she wants to be. Sleepypete’s opinion ? She hasn’t got a problem 🙂 The inner beauty still shines out just as much as it always has and she got a disbelieving look the other day with the weight thing.
And I’ve probably put enough in that last para to get me strapped in to a torture chamber (with “training room” sign on door) with the Equality and Diversity course locked into a machine.
The only way of really dealing with stress is to identify the cause. Without knowing that, you can’t begin to identify how to beat the problem. And it has to be the root cause too, like my aches being down partly to the cold but mostly they’re due to uncertainty stress. Or my foxy colleague getting conned into thinking she’s bigger than she wants to be due to the stress of Big Change Coming.
There’s a few more facets of stress I’m experiencing at the moment – uncertainty with the job is a big one but I also seem to have a clock chiming quite loudly at the moment with apparently not many options. Let’s just say I have toys I’d like to share with someone special. (Hey ! Who sniggered ?! 😉 Trouble is I don’t know who that special someone is yet.
Lol – and here comes yet another E-Harmony advert like some sort of hint 😉
Erm – I started this post talking about whether I’d be getting back into an online game didn’t I … Oops !
PS Where did I leave the cookies ?
Heh heh heh – when I had 3 credit cards, I should really have had 4. "Helpful Banking" is actually Natwest and the account I have as a condition of my mortgage means I'm entitled to a credit card with it.
Never bothered getting that card though, it would be as redundant as the MBNA card I never used 🙂
Hmm… I can't imagine being locked out of my online banking.
That widget is actually quite clever. WoW have a similar thing called the Blizzard Authenticator which is also good. I really wish CCP create one tbh for Eve Online. Its well overdue.
Was your credit card and current account not with the same bank? I have all my accounts with Natwest, not because its cheaper, but because its easier to manage. Any problems, and I can wonder into a branch and poke someone to fix it. :p
This problem’s partly of my own making but it’s had me ranting anyway 🙂
Monday night. I’m paying off the credit cards as I do every month. The first one goes through fine, I pay from the bank via a Maestro card as usual (fancy newer name for Switch). Then I go to my other card, which I only use online because I can’t find its PIN. Cos of the Eve account hack a couple of weeks ago, I have new passwords …
You can probably guess the start of the problem.
Yep – I’m currently locked out of the online banking that looks after one of my credit cards (I think it was a glitch in the security question). That should be a case of “not a problem – I’ll just ring them up”.
Nope. Nice try but not with Halifax … They only accept payments over the phone from a couple of banks, neither of which I have an account with. Again, should be a case of “no problem, I’ll send the money from my bank’s online page”.
Nope. My bank changed things a little while ago (unknown time because I never saw any warnings with this) so that to create a new payee online, you need a Widget to put a card in. And it takes 15 days for the Widget to be posted. Oh yeah, this is a bank that has the slogan “Helpful Banking”.
So, what’s the way forward to make sure I don’t get a debt collection agency ringing up to chase me for about £70 ?
1 – I get back into Halifax’s online thing. I’m hoping Royal Mail will exceed recent performance and get a letter through tomorrow that’ll let me do just that. Problem solved.
2 – Wait for Helpful Banking to send me the authenticator widget. Not an option cos debt collection will poke me first.
3 – Use Helpful Banking’s telephone service. Good option but I don’t trust the person on the other end of the phone to accurately read in 34 numbers and that’s just the ones to set up the Halifax payment.
4 – Back up plan. I like this one cos although it means I expend a couple of hours of flexi credit, I get to wander around Bristol doing some window shopping.
That’s another beef with Halifax. They used to have a branch within 5 minutes walking of where I live, with a cash machine. Gotta admit, I only went in there once to try and sort out the PIN on the card, with the result of being told to go away cos they couldn’t deal with it in there. (Poss due to me coming in 5 minutes before closing ????). That branch has gone now, taking the cash machine with it. So the closest Halifax to me is in the centre of Bristol. Option 4 would have me sharing a little angst with the people in the branch in Bristol.
Arg.
I think I may be in a Firing state of mind. Amazon have lost my faith through the Watchmen saga, now it’s the turn of Halifax. I have 2 credit cards, had 3 until recently with the 3rd being closed down through never being used. (Got grabbed by Credit Card Girl with Pretty Eyes when I had time on my hands)
This credit card thing has an upside though 🙂
I don’t use my house phone much. I had one of those Very strange coincidences though on Monday … The lockout meant I went to ring up Halifax. So I pick up the phone, think “why battery dead ?” Then I think : “this phone is kinda warm”. Before realising it was actually quite hot, with the melty sensation coming from behind the thick plastic cover of the battery compartment.
There’s a pair of AAA rechargeables in my house phone that I suspect were close to doing a Mt Vesuvius.
So – lockout of credit card leads to saving money on not needing to replace the house phone 🙂 (which incidentally lives beside my surround sound amp) I have a feeling I’ll be buying stuff on Friday though, so maybe not that much cash saved !
PS I suspect I’m not actually under that much time pressure, the payment I made almost 3 weeks ago may cover me.