Because apparently half the readership is gaming n3rds.
Open Thread
by John Cole| 64 Comments
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
So many bastards, so little time.
Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?
Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.
Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.
Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.
The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.
Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.
Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.
Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.
Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.
We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.
American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated
The revolution will be supervised.
He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!
I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.
Usually wrong but never in doubt
You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
Everybody saw this coming.
“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.
Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.
The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.
demimondian
“gamin” n3rds? I’ve been called many things in my life, but never a gamin.
demimondian
I want to see a real evening of B’loon Juice Paranoia. WOW guild? Phooey! _Paranoia_ is the only game for TRUE spoofs.
ThymeZone
Proud to be a member of the other half.
Krista
Only half?
jake
Republican math strikes again.
tBone
You’ll be sorry when we gaming nerds rise up and crush you with our giant thumb-muscles, pal.
Krista
It’s the male version of “gamine” perhaps? So evidently most of the BJ commentariat are not only nerdy, but also slight of build with mischevious charm.
ThymeZone
I will laugh at your tiny penises.
tBone
{Insert your own “your mother/wife/girlfriend wasn’t laughing last night” joke here.}
jake
Are we talking about some RPG that features leprechauns or are we back to the dangers of soy products?
tBone
This story should of interest to our resident gaming dorks/political junkies.
We have to fight them in Second Life so we don’t have to fight them here.
SeesThroughIt
I freely admit that I’m a nerd about certain things, but gaming isn’t one of them. So where does that place me in the BJ schism?
ThymeZone
Oh, yeah. That’s what I’m talkin about.
pharniel
gaimn nerds are usually perky or mopey goth chicks that fall for easy lines about the futility of man’s struggle against adversary.
Gaming nerds are just people who like deep strategy but alais and alack hunting people isn’t allowed in this draconian day and age where the defeat-o-crats keep a man down!
demimondian
That is either the dorkiest story I’ve ever read, or one of the fascinating…
demimondian
But…your nerdly MANHOOD is wrapped up in your gaming (at which, it must be understood, I absolutely suck. When I played D&D, my favorite player character was an animate rock. Of course, it was a trifle hard to do much during an adventure, but I could, at least, take notes as things happened. And I had an awesome AC bonus. And I did 2d8 damage when thrown by a strong enough character.)
tBone
I think it’s both.
Krista
That is absolutely unbelievable. I had considered giving Second Life a try but decided against it for two reasons. 1. It takes up way too much damn space on the computer. 2. My life is full enough as it is. I don’t have the time to make the most of a second life.
I can see how something like that would appeal to those who always wonder about the path not taken, maybe.
Keith
I’ve been stuck for 5 days in the cable-car room of Gears of War because on Insane, the lambent wretches kill you when they die. This is Bill Clinton’s fault.
demimondian
Fixed
The Other Steve
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
The Other Steve
It’s worse than that. Americas Army is used as a training game by elite Al qaeda special forces. I know, I’ve seen them playing!
The Other Steve
BTW, the Vista sidebar may just be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. When I realized it could go on top of other windows, and when I maximized them they didn’t hide underneath… Whoa.
vist
Ok, now why is the font inside this text box courier? It looks weird, like it should be green text on a black background or something.
Pb
I’m just fortunate that the new computer I built recently for myself on the cheap is beefy enough to play NWN2 decently–for the moment at least, NWN2 is a bit of a monster, especially when it comes to graphics cards (I have a 7600GS).
Andrei
Raise your hand if you made a BE female toon, took off all the clothes and started a /dance party in Silvermoon City.
Come on… I know most of you are lying.
srv
Everyone, please take 5 minutes off from your gaming circle jerk and do the world a favor:
Protect SMU from GWB’s Library
SeesThroughIt
Hey, the only D&D I ever played was Advanced D&D on my friend’s Intellivision, and that had pretty much nothing to do with D&D (you just ran around killing stuff with a bow and arrow).
Perry Como
I put an 8800gtx in my new workstation and NWN2 runs fine…
:P
Andrew
Only one?
Perry Como
Two would be silly.
Pb
I have to say, I’m mildly annoyed that NWN2 doesn’t benefit at all from a dual core CPU either, especially considering when they were writing it, and how resource-hungry it can be, especially as compared to its predecessor–which I managed to run on a graphics card from the previous millenium, incidentally.
Pb
My new workstation might very well have cost less than your new graphics card. Then again, my previous workstation was clocked slower than your new graphics card is in places, and probably had at least 3x less RAM in it, besides… I guess I’ll just hold off until they port Linux to the 8800gtx. :)
Dave
First: FOR THE HORDE!
Second: the Vista sidebar sucks, although Vista itself is passable.
Third (and back to politics)
Number of people who have died from terrorist attacks on American soil: 2,993
9/11: 2,819
Oklahoma City: 168
First WTC bombing: 6
Let’s compare that to:
Coalition Deaths in Iraq: 3024
(the rest are from random years post 9/11)
Smoking: 400,000
Drunk Driving: 16,694
Auto Accidents: 42,636
Infections: 90,000
Accidental: 97,859
…and finally religion since recorded history. I’ll leave the 20th Century death math to someone else:
809,215,732
This has been your latest installment of what to start wars over and wet your pants about.
scarshapedstar
Let’s start a PVKII clan!
Decided FenceSitter
Citizen, I do not believe that you have the required access for that information. If you were happy, you would not need to game, so you must not be happy.
Perhaps your next clone will be happy and not a commiemutantislamicfundamentalistdominionist traitor.
jake
Was your character’s name Tosser?
Keith
Because textarea’s don’t obey the CSS font if it’s applied globally (at least in IE); the textarea needs to explicitly be assigned the font, even if its parent has the font.
Jonathan
Behind Blue Eyes
demimondian
Tossee, actually. Tosser was the henchman who threw me.
Rusty Shackleford
Bear Down, Chicago Bears.
Make every play clear the way to victory!
Bear Down, Chicago Bears.
Put up a fight with a might so fearlessly!
We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation,
With your T formation.
Bear Down, Chicago Bears.
And let them know why you’re wearing the crown.
You’re the pride and joy,
of all Illinois.
Chicago Bears, Bear Down!
——————————————————-
And for fellow gaming nerds, this game sounds great! Preview here.
Paddy O'Shea
The Britishism “tosser” has quite a different meaning.
Decided FenceSitter
For the Battletech geeks out there: Gauss Cannons for the Navy.
jenniebee
OK, time to n3rd this thing up:
zomg, WSG 10-19 is full to the brim with twinked BE pallies.
Not that we didn’t know this was coming.
They have a serious need to lern2play, and no understanding of pally weaknesses yet. All in all, it’s a nice time to be an alliance hunter in the gulch.
w00t!!!1!!! 1337 n3rd!
Third Eye Open
I’ll stick w/ Tetris and Magic: The Gathering.
Can someone lend me a few ‘Man Points’, so I can get my card back?
Punchy
Or choke us with your unusually strong, lotion-encrusted right hand.
Third Eye Open
Personally, I’m waiting for the onanism attachment for my XBOX 360
canuckistani
Here on the Intertubes, Paranoia isn’t a game.. it’s a way of life. That’s why Red State is so full of ignorance.. they don’t have the clearance to have learned anything more than they need to serve their betters.
Oh crap. Did I say that out loud? Curse the Computer! Long live Beta Compl
Jake
Reeelly? I had no idea. [snerk]
Jake
Meet Bob Ney, the latest Republican Prison Princess.
Cyrus
Chronozoa and the green Concentrate are the only Planar Chaos cards previewed so far that have actually beeen interesting. Discuss.
Zifnab
You didn’t like the Black Wraith of God or the Green Thundermare?
Paddy O'Shea
Jake – That probably explains the trash can filled with enema bottles in your garage.
tBone
That would work out well, since presumably that hand would be particularly well-suited to choking. [rimshot]
dreggas
And the Left Behind game is a good primer for the jesus camp crowd.
dreggas
I had to upgrade my card for NWN2 but I was more than happy to upgrade it since I can also play oblivion. With the card I have now (nVidia 7300) and my rig I can run NWN2 with everything on high.
As for dual core, most games won’t be designed to use dual core from what I understand since the only real benefit to dual core is if you multi-task using resource hogging apps.
I do agree NWN2 is a resource hog though using half a gig of ram and full CPU (Amd Athalon XP 3200+ (2.2ghz)) but it’s a great freaking game overall and I rate the story as even better than the first.
Now if they’d just allow me to make more tweaks to character appearance and allow me to change armor and weapon appearance.
Jake
Hey now, that was supposed to be our little secret!
Guess I’ll release the photos since everyone knows.
Pb
dreggas,
However, if the app in question is at all CPU-bound (which NWN2 can be), and the task(s) involved are at all parallelizable, (like, say, splitting out the AI / pathfinding / physics / audio / video / whatnot) then it should be able to benefit from a dual core CPU (or really an extra processor in general) if it’s written properly. If none of them are, then yeah, better multi-tasking performance would be the main benefit.
demimondian
If the app runs on DX9/XNA/whatever MS is calling it these days, the audio is on a secondary thread, and the video is on a dedicated coprocessor (we call that a “video card” ;) ). The AI and physics engines, however, are almost certainly single threaded on a shared thread. In modern games, the physics is almost as hard on the box as the graphics, which is why people have started looking into GPGPU to support physics, if not separate physics processors.
dreggas
PB,
What Demimondian said regarding the physics and such. In fact I think that is the achilles heel with NWN2 when it comes to play overall. I see so many instances where the NPC’s in the party are stuck because they won’t walk around a damn door and I end up needing to manually move them. Quite frustrating when you need them as meat shields and such.
This may be do wholly to me having a 3200+ proc and not a newer one but I can deal while waiting to build my new rig.
Games haven’t even been written yet that fully take advantage of 64 bit processors either which is actually kinda crappy but then again I like being able to play everything on my 32 bit LOL.
Anyone here Play Warhammer DoW?
Pb
demimondian,
As far as I can tell / as is possible, NWN2 seems to run as a single process, or at the least, bound to a single CPU. Of course, a lot of heavy lifting does get offloaded to the GPU, but even taking that into consideration, it still maxes out
theone CPU as well.dreggas,
No, they’re probably just being stupid because of the pathfinding algorithm–if so, there’s not a whole lot you can do about that besides just guiding them past those things.
Also, yeah, the fully 64 bit stuff will take a while, starting at the OS level and working up from there–but for most things you probably won’t see too much of a difference for most things. I run Linux in 64-bit mode (Gentoo, x86_64 arch), but the (few) 32-bit apps I use in it do about as well. And XP runs fine (in 32-bit mode) on the same box.
demimondian
I’d be utterly astounded if NWN2 didn’t run as one process. Remember, on Windows, processes are expensive. Threads, by contrast, are (relatively) cheap, and fibers are cheaper still. Threads are not processor-locked, so a multithreaded program can use all the cores on a single machine efficiently. (Hell, the Exchange store runs as a single process. But, give it 64 cores, and it’ll happily gobble them up.)
The thing to know is that audio no longer puts a measurable load on a modern core, at least on Windows. (It appall me to sit here on my really beefy work machine, and see thirty percent of one processor dedicated to servicing audio. Is Linux *really* that bad on RT stuff?)
Dreggas
Is your sound on board or on a seperate card? I run mine off a sseperate card which has reduced the load on the CPU. I also use a program called XP smoker which I have turned on to permanent game boost as a result All unnecessary processes and services are DOA and very little runs on startup.
The downside, my windows XP looks like 2000 but I could care less I keep the load on mem and cpu low and can play most anything.
As for dual core my new rig is going to be single core, mainly because all I use it for is gaming and no games need dual cores.
Pb
demi, dreggas,
Then NWN2 can’t be using that many threads, then–at least not for anything serious. Not that I’d know how to inspect this for myself, mind you.
No doubt–especially if you have…
It’s on board, and it’s cheap. That is to say, it doesn’t have any of the fancy features, but it does stutter sometimes in NWN2 after a while.
No? It’s pretty awesome at it, actually. Of course, it’s better at RT stuff depending on which RT / timer / priority stuff is actually being used, if any. :)
demimondian
Yes, that’s what I think. too.
My edge is definitely gone — and it’s only been four months. I know that there’s some obscure tool other than VS express which can sniff the thread structure of a windows process. That said, most engines are single threaded; it’s just easier to write code that way.