Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go!) - XTC

Quote from J.B. :

If by normal, average and nice you mean boring, shy people that have such problems with their social skills that they hardly have any real friends and have zero experience with the opposite sex then yes.

That could still be a description of the average teen But yeah, reading a bit more- he's being portrayed as a loner with an obsession with guns and an extensive horror movie collection. I think you're right- some kids just fall off the social radar, and are tagged as normal because nobody really knows anything about them. It's a far cry from directed abuse perhaps, but still very damaging.

What a horrible mess.

Quote from Klutch :

No one will ever understand what its like until you, yourself have been in the same situation.

The reports I'm hearing is that the guy was a model definition of normal and not a victim of bullying and abuse.

Isn't that a recurring theme with a lot of these killers- that they're mostly normal, average, nice guy types?

Quote from SamH :

The sim mentality has always been a niche market.. small in numbers, and generally a bit geekish. I think the desire for a realistic physics simulation is something that comes from deep-down in someone.. perhaps even at the genetic level, and I honestly don't think that a person with that "sim gene" would ever be satisfied with NFS or GTA etc.

Isn't it more of the case that games in general used to be more of a niche market, with a higher proportion of geeks playing them, and sims being on more of an even footing with the other genres of the day?

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My beef is that people are getting so dumbed down in what they expect from a title. The masses want graphics and "pick up and play games" and the sim communities will naturally suffer as a result.

I don't think games are necessarily getting dumber, or people are getting dumber. I think games are probably easier to play and to understand, and in many cases much easier to beat.. but it doesn't mean they aren't complex games. Probably the main reason I don't play a lot of games of old (I have gigabytes of old C64 games on the HD), is because the overwhelming majority of them are such simple games. We expect more these days because everybody has matured, and the industry has matured. Offhand I can't think of any older games which could match the complexity of a BFII for example, an arcade game.

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Any other speculation on what LFS is, or what people think the devs should be doing with LFS, is just pointless. The devs know exactly what their aims are, and they know exactly how they want to approach the process of achieving them.

This is the main point, I think. Ever since I joined LFS, there has been much too much forum talk on the subject of how the community can 'help' speed development. The perennial concern being that three people just isn't enough to develop a game these days, and that in order to remain relevent the devs require additional support, whether from outside in the community, or as new members of the develepment team. The dev response- that they really don't need or want any kind of help whatsoever, is to be respected, but it is also probably sometimes felt as dissapointment by anyone in the community who imagines that they might be able to contribute something of worth to the project. Maybe that's why the same arguments get bought up again and again- people want a different answer to the one that's been given time and time again.

But Sam is right, and keeping the same arguments circulating is just a waste of time, no matter how angry or dissilusioned people want to get about things. Maybe what needs to happen is some sort of disclaimer by the devs as a sticky in the forum- an official statement that makes things clear on this subject for everybody. Of course that sounds like I'm telling the devs what they should do, and I don't want it to sound like that.

Anyway, this is my last post on this- because I'm completely bored of this whole topic, and I'm sure everybody else is as well.

O.K. - well I got the beta installed on the new partition finally! There are a few things in Windows 7 that seem to be an immediate improvement imo- I especially like how your open windows automatically organise nicely into those bottom left icons- much tidier now and also much easier to navigate to the window you're looking for.

My main problem is that I can't work out how to access the other partition of my C: drive (all my docs and files). I named this new partition I: but Windows 7 calls it C: again. There's only 6 gig remaining on this new drive so I'll need to be able to access the other partition to make things workable. (edit: figured it out - link to solution here)

Haven't tested any games yet.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Fri, 6 Mar 2009 12:28.

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I canot think of a good -' reason for why the devs won't let us help them out a little.

They don't need a reason. They just don't want any help.

When I was a kid, my wildest fantasy regarding the future evolution of computer graphics for games went no further than something that might have looked like 'The Last Starfighter'. I don't think anyone back then imagined that graphics like these (above) could ever be possible.

For probably that reason alone, I refuse to join the cynics who downplay the enormous leap in graphics technlogy over the last 2 decades or so.

Quote :

have you taken a look at your drive with a defrag program?

I'm not using the default Vista defragger, but Ultimate Defrag. Actually, now I think of it, that must be the problem- because it puts rarely used programs and files on one side of the disk, and stuff you use a lot on the other. So there are probably no big free chunks of space anywhere. (perfect disk is probably a better choice, because as far as I remember it crams everything together)

Thanks Shot

Velociroun- yeah, that's what I thought.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sun, 1 Mar 2009 17:21.

Thanks for all the help guys

hmm, booting from the DVD, I can't click on the 'new' button when trying to create a partition for C: (the new button is greyed out) screenshot below.

One quick (and stupid) question- do i need to reinstall all my programs for beta 7 on the new partition? Or can it access them from the old C drive? If the former, then it's probably a good idea to create a much larger partition- say 100 gig or so? And if the latter, then 10 gig (or rough minimum for the install) should suffice? (I've never used 2 OS's at the same time before)




in this screen...

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sun, 1 Mar 2009 07:27.

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While installing, in beginning it gives you option to partition. Very simple and easy.

I've tried to do a partition using the inbuilt program for Vista- I've got 213 gig to spare but when I want to shrink the C drive down for partitioning, the program says that only around about 6 gig is available to be shrunk. (i've disabled the pagefile and still only 6 gigs for shrinking)

I've definitely decided to not do an upgrade install, so having a working partition is my only option. You sure there's an option to partition when installing the beta? Does it come after you choose which drive you'd like to install on? Because I don't really want to wipe my C drive, or have everything moved to a windows.old folder where I can't access vista after the beta has expired.

Sorry, just getting a little jittery

Am about to start installing windows 7 beta. Has anyone done an upgrade installation and did you have success? Recommended or not?

I'm a bit confused that if I partition my HD, I will lose data- I'm not confident with partitioning as never done it before, so I'm thinking about more simple option to upgrade install.

Quote :

Originally Posted by Danowat
Talking of Phillip K Dick, A scanner darkly was a terrible film too.

The film version of Scanner is very close to the book as far as I can remember- I wouldn't be surprised if it was almost a scene by scene re-enactment. I really enjoyed both so I'm not complaining.

I'm still waiting for some film adaptions of some of Neal Stephenson's books. I've read 'The Diamond Age' a few times and I always come away thinking it would make a great movie, especially with someone like Spielberg at the helm, although I lost a lot of faith in him as a director since his version of War of the Worlds.

Southland Tales sounds interesting, will surely hunt it down.

PS, I've always loved PKD's 'God in the trash' theme- that the miraculous could really be disguised as an old can hiding in an alleyway somewhere- I think in VALIS there's a great line or two where one of his characters talks about that. I made a short animation in 3D last year loosely PKD inspired around that image.


PSS, MataGyula- BenX sounds like it's worth checking out as well

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:11.

Sorry Sam, I didn't mean for it to come across like that. I don't know what Vic is up to apart from the online stuff, which of course is an incredibly important part of what LFS is. I just assumed for the sake of strengthening my point that Vic doesn't have much to do with the production of the actual game. I don't really believe that myself (Vic seems quite a multi talented guy), although it makes sense to me that Scawen and Eric do most of that work.

Kuba_m

Your point is well understood by a lot of players here, but the fact is that the devs themselves feel they have a good working team. There are no deadlines for LFS and therefore the idea that it is falling behind is pretty much irrelevent. Scawen and the others don't need to say 'sorry' for anything because they've never promised anything. All they are doing is providing a game, that's currently in the stage of development that it's in.

My 3D teacher at school, who used to work for Atari, recently said that he calculated that for one person to make a modern game it would take something like 85 years (he calculated from everyone at Atari involved in the production of the game being worked on at the time).

That LFS is at the stage it is at now, with 3 people working on it (you could probably discount Vic as he seems to be more of a web guy) - is impressive to say the least.

I was playing a lot of Trackmania before finding LFS. Was so nice to go from those outrageous arcade physics (great game though) to the realism LFS offered.

You might also be able to start an LFS thread at the official TM forum, but I'm not sure what the policy on other games is there.

- Experience and History

Grew up learning classical piano, made it to 6th Grade Pianoforte.

Different highschool bands, including the local Citizens band, playing Eb tenor horn, but I was more into playing rock with my friends in various incarnations of a cover band we had going. We did stuff from Led Zep, AC/DC, The Doors, etc.. I was too young to go to pubs but I got to play in them all the time.

These days I'm more into more fringe/experimental music, also I've been a member of a Javanese Gamelan Orchestra at Melbourne Uni, as well as playing in different bands of friends and doing the odd recording. A couple of days ago I played at a friends wedding- 'The Ship Song' by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. A few years ago I recorded with a band called the Sugar Sea Sound, which was a great popish rock band, nice catchy tunes..

I've done a bit of orchestral soundtrack music (Reason) for a stupid movie my friends and I made, and work on composing for myself every now and again, but I can never get anything finished.

Also had a little techno night going with a friend from Singapore, but that didn't have anything to do with actuall playing music. I wasn't even the DJ.

If Bioshock was a little more polished in the weapons/combat department I think that would have really lifted it over the top. I thought the feel of the pistol and machine guns was very off... on the other hand the grenade launcher and chemical thrower were lots of fun. The wrench would actually cause me some discomfort, I would actually grimace a bit when laying into enemies with the wrench, it was really brutal!

A good game overall but certainly not the revolution it was made out to be.

Quote :

with so many "strings" that you no longer actually have a life, then tell me what the point would be. Prison is still prison no matter how comfortable.

It's like these ads which are playing on aussie TV atm, where young olympic champion swimmers caution youth about the dangers of alcohol. The take away message is something like 'live life to the full' which seems incredibly ironic coming from those people as they would necessarily have to be spending almost every waking moment down at the pool!

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 5 Feb 2009 15:44.

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I don't think it only works in a cinema.

The big set pieces (like the cross sectioned cardboard submarine) work much better on the big screen- you had a better sense of the artificiality of everything which was a big part of the humour in TLA. There are some wonderful scenes- such as the end encounter with the jaguar shark, and preposterous 'rhinestone tuna', (I couldn't really pick out the jewels when watching for the second time on TV) which I think really benefit from having that greater sense of scale.

I'm sure a nice projector helps though

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 5 Feb 2009 15:36.

Son of Rambow. Great film The two young leads are perfect in their roles, neither having acted before.

I was expecting to resonate more with the 80's nostalgia on offer but actually I didn't really vibe with it too closely. It's possible that the strength and quirkiness of the main characters was simply a bit too much to allow for that generic 80s kind of representation. Maybe it was just the english accents getting in the way?

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 5 Feb 2009 15:13.

It's not about the person, it's about how the image of that person is presented to the public. Typically, people don't like too much ambiguity ('winners don't do drugs') so sponsors automatically become uneasy whenever something like this happens which could confuse the clean cut image they're trying to project onto people- the simpler the image ('winner'), the more forceful it is as an advertising aid. That's why the advertising world is a world of perfect surfaces and brilliant white TV smiles- it's just simpler that way.

Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring [Esa-Pekka Salonen]

Quote :

Religion is indeed a very good excuse for justifying wars.

So is evolution (cultural).

Evolution theory might be the best idea we've got about the formation of biological life on earth, yet even in the sciences widely held 'beliefs' are routinely being turned over, world views are shattered- there's always the possibility (probability) that we've got something wrong somewhere along the line.

Anyway, as Mark Twain was fond of saying, and folks are fond of quoting...

'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.'

I try to live by that and I seem to get along o.k. It's the people who are so certain about things who make me nervous, wherever they're coming from.

One of my favourite scenes from Tenenbaums..

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=obycGT3Wg-U



I haven't seen Rushmore, will look out for it