A Personal Blog
Archive for August, 2004
Contributing at LockerGnome
Aug 23rd
One of the newsbits I’ve been holding off on posting is now free and clear. I am now a LockerGnome contributor.
I’ll be attempting to contribute regularly to the IT Professionals and Net Connections channels. We’ll see, maybe I’ll even hop onto the Windows Fanatics channel at some point ;-)
LG is quite the interesting little concept, it’ll be fun to work with the team there to make the site even better than it is now.
Windows Licensing … Which Port?
Aug 23rd
I’m hoping someone out there can help with this, since it seems like such an odd issue.
I’ve got a server in the DMZ. I’ve got it to join our internal network. Authentication happens just fine (people log in to the app using their NT credentials). The server in the DMZ is set to per-server licensing, so it should be able to get more licenses from the Domain Controller.
Anyways, it can’t “see” the DC, which I assume means I need to get a port or two open… After several Google searches I honestly can’t figure out which one though…
Little help?
Update: Found this list of services and ports that run on Domain Controllers. Helped a lot!
I Hate Major Nelson
Aug 23rd
I Hate Him. And I Hate Him Again.
Thankfully it’s only 3 more weeks until it comes out. But if he keeps this up every day I swear I’m going to have him killed. Twice. And then again for every day he taunts me like this.
Really Need to Deal with Comment Spam….
Aug 22nd
Just received 33,213 comment spams. In WP I have to delete these manually (the current WP plugin I have puts them in the moderation queue). Thankfully they don’t get shown. Not thankfully it’s gonna take me about 2 hours to do this.
Halflife 2 Gameplay Video
Aug 22nd
I’m just watching the newest Halflife 2 Gameplay Video. I love the real materials (wood sounds like, looks like, fragments like and floats like wood). I love the full environmental interactions. I love the facial expressions that characters can emulate.
The surfaces, refractions, etc are all fantastic. The “oohs” and “aahs” in the room are exactly what I was saying or thinking.
Just getting to the gameplay aspect of the game, but the reality is that even if the gameplay SUCKS, the fact that all of these components will be available as part of the HL2 engine, in my mind, makes it the winner in terms of engine power over Doom 3′s new engine.
Even if HL2 absolutely blows, the games that will be possible out of HL2 could easily blow our minds.
Onto the gameplay bit…
…
This section’ll be basically “sequence by sequence”, in case you don’t want to download the 550MB video. The game’s amazing. If you like FPS’s, you’ll love HL2.
Okay, the old crowbar’s back! … The “hit” effect looks awful. But beyond that body effects are great. Better than oldsk00l “ragdoll” physics.
Characters interact with you while you interact with the environment (instead of prattling on while you go about destroying their lab … which is actually much more enjoyable now *L*).
Enemy AI is great. You block a door with a table so they can’t get in, and they try and come through the window. Good stuff guys.
LOVE the new … Dunno, anti-grav gun? It allows you to hold objects in front of you as a shielf and then push them (freaking hard) away from you. Some very cool “holy *$%^”s from the audience during one such segment.
Haha, love that you can spring traps on enemies.
To be honest, I didnt’ feel that HL2 had a lot of story it could explore, but there really seems to be an even better (not that that’s hard) story to HL2 than to regular old Halflife.
Enemies on fire? Very cool. Again, though, the “hit” effects for enemies really suck (little green “star”? Gimme a break… I’m really hoping they improve that for launch, since everything else is SO cool).
Okay, some of the physics for dead enemies are still ragdollish, but I can overlook that, since they interact with the environment (an enemy gets tossed through a window, it smashes, glass clinks below, pops a balloon which pushes another piece of wood aside and a stairwell falls down…. cool).
Ooooh… controlling aliens cause they’re stupid… Love it. Rule the world!
Awww baby…. Best vehicles in a game I’ve ever seen (for physics, etc) in an FPS… Love the dune buggy :D It’s so good it feels like a driving game. Wow.
Ooooh, tracking missile (fire, and then target or target and then fire)!
Striders cool. AI cool all around. Love it. REALLY can’t wait to get my hands on this. Maybe even more than I want to get my hands on Halo 2. It all seems that much better! :-D
