Talk of the Day

[Quietus]

I would imagine it's a veteran mocking all of the idiots.

As for the Xbox One comment, it's shocking how it's almost universally being slated.  The impression I got was that they'd taken a group of gamers, and asked them exactly what they wanted in the new console.







And then ignored them, and did the complete opposite of everything they all said. :neutral:

[Zhs2]

Another IRC channel I visit brought up a counterpoint, and that is the fact that some of us may be vastly underestimating fanboys of Microsoft, XBox, any various popular games that are available on the XBox (looking at you, Cawadooty!), and anybody who thinks (and this would also be a larger amount of people than you might believe) that a console is either better because it plays cooler things than a computer that might be six years old or that it's more affordable than pre-built gaming computers (when in reality the smart and cheaper thing to do is build your own that will play modern games up to five years from now and upgrade one or two parts as necessary due to failure, necessity, frivolity, etc.) It's a sad, strange world we live in, and despite all of the ridiculous console claims we might still see a number of dedicated purchases. :nowai:

[Benki]

Another IRC channel I visit brought up a counterpoint, and that is the fact that some of us may be vastly underestimating fanboys of Microsoft, XBox, any various popular games that are available on the XBox (looking at you, Cawadooty!), and anybody who thinks (and this would also be a larger amount of people than you might believe) that a console is either better because it plays cooler things than a computer that might be six years old or that it's more affordable than pre-built gaming computers (when in reality the smart and cheaper thing to do is build your own that will play modern games up to five years from now and upgrade one or two parts as necessary due to failure, necessity, frivolity, etc.) It's a sad, strange world we live in, and despite all of the ridiculous console claims we might still see a number of dedicated purchases. :nowai:

It's really sad how some people doesn't look at the PC as an ultimate gaming service, but you can understand why. The availability and price causes people to turn to alternatives, and when you're 6 where are you going to get the money? Even if their parents pay for it they won't know if it's a good investment or not because they won't know if the child will even be playing games by the time they're like 7. You see it's not really that it's too "hard" or that the games are "better" it's because of the availability and the price.

Well, there's my opinion on console gaming.  :lol:

[Vismund Cygnus]

Another IRC channel I visit brought up a counterpoint, and that is the fact that some of us may be vastly underestimating fanboys of Microsoft, XBox, any various popular games that are available on the XBox (looking at you, Cawadooty!), and anybody who thinks (and this would also be a larger amount of people than you might believe) that a console is either better because it plays cooler things than a computer that might be six years old or that it's more affordable than pre-built gaming computers (when in reality the smart and cheaper thing to do is build your own that will play modern games up to five years from now and upgrade one or two parts as necessary due to failure, necessity, frivolity, etc.) It's a sad, strange world we live in, and despite all of the ridiculous console claims we might still see a number of dedicated purchases. :nowai:

It's really sad how some people doesn't look at the PC as an ultimate gaming service, but you can understand why. The availability and price causes people to turn to alternatives, and when you're 6 where are you going to get the money? Even if their parents pay for it they won't know if it's a good investment or not because they won't know if the child will even be playing games by the time they're like 7. You see it's not really that it's too "hard" or that the games are "better" it's because of the availability and the price.

Well, there's my opinion on console gaming.  :lol:

At the same time, here in Australia a console will be about $600-$800 when it first comes out, and about the same amount for a reasonable gaming computer (provided you know how to build it yourself). Combine that with the other benefits/features of PCs and it's clearly still a better investment than a console. And the argument regarding whether the child in question will be playing games the next year can still be applied (perhaps be applied even better) to consoles.
And there's my upside-down view on the matter.

[Digital_Mantra]

my opinion: consoles haven't had decent games in over 10 years

[Vismund Cygnus]

my opinion: consoles haven't had decent games in over 10 years

This.
Although, I'd say that they haven't had any good exclusive games. Or there's been such an uproar over it that they've ported it to PC (see Dark Souls).

[Quietus]

I can't agree with that, as there have been some great games that I've really enjoyed, though I do agree with people's points about PC gaming's cost.  I turned away for a fair few years because of it.  Not being able to play games at high settings makes it less appealing, and the cost of maintaining the ability to do so is very high.  It's only within the last two years that I've added my PC back into my gaming rotation.

[JAM]

I'd do the opposite. Convert PNGs to GIFs to use less space.

The power bomb images are PNGs while the missile icons are GIFs. IE6 has no native PNG support and I think IE7 does not support alpha channels in PNGs, and will look like it has a gray background. If you happen to be using one of the javascript packages that "adds" support to IE6 for PNGs, it also doesn't support alpha channels and will make PNGs look like they have a gray background.

In either case, it sounds like a client side issue. IE shouldn't be used for a bunch of reasons and even if someone is stuck on an early XP based system there are much better browser choices (which do support PNGs with alpha channels). Maybe its a buggy mobile browser, except since I've moved to android from iOS a couple years back I haven't run into that.

The problem is that when you almost have no free space, all graphics is temporarly stored as BMPs, which have no transparency. Now I've got some free space and the problem is solved. Gray BG is transparent.

By the way, I'm using IE5. 20x times faster start than FireFox v2.

[Zhs2]

Counterpoint: In addition to being able to cut palettes down to size to match gif format, png also supports compression. However, you would be correct in saying that I hadn't spent time time compressing them, which I just now did. Enjoy!

[JAM]

Check this out.

192 bytes (16 colors GIF) VS 235 bytes (PNG).
18% size loss with same quality.
This PB icon only have 10 colors. Nothing to cut at all.

[Quietus]

I'll be seriously worried if we have to start concerning ourselves with 43 bytes. :^_^:

[Zhs2]

Down from about 123 bytes when I crushed it with PNGout. I mean, I might love compression but sometimes it's a matter of triviality...

[Digital_Mantra]

I am so fucking immersed in the new Boards of Canada album it's stupid. 2 days straight nonstop listening.
Also, metroids.

[Quietus]

May as well get 'in the zone', and churn out Eris's sequel, then. :wink:

[Cloud20]

I am so fucking immersed in the new Boards of Canada album it's stupid. 2 days straight nonstop listening.
Also, metroids.

:lol:

[Vismund Cygnus]

This week I have 6 exams to distract myself from important things, like working on hacks.
The one today goes for 3 hours, which I am sure will be most joyous.  :nod:
[spoiler]Heavy sarcasm, I cannot be bothered with this cr**. Ever.[/spoiler]

[Quietus]

Echo!
Echo!
Echo!
Echo!

Sure is quite round here lately. :^_^:

[Zero One]

Sure is quite round here lately. :^_^:

Quiet so, Quiteus.

[Vismund Cygnus]

I have my last exam today!
This means I can do more important things like Metroid hacking tomorrow, yes?

[Quietus]

Yup.  We all go through it.  We get our education, and then we realise it's all pointless, and end up loafing around hacking decades old games. :heheh:

[JAM]

I'll be seriously worried if we have to start concerning ourselves with 43 bytes. :^_^:

I thought, in place where most patches are optimized to save free space, it would be good to save space of icons using GIFs. In both cases, we deal with bytes.

By the way, happy birthday, Phazar!
Finish your Metroid Super Mission hack already!

[Zhs2]

Haha, Phazar, finish a hack. Yeah right.

Also, the power was out for a very good portion of today in the fine neighborhood of fuckland, where it went out from the hours of 5:43AM to about 8AM, stayed on for the next 5 hours, then went out again at around 3PM because of a flash storm that was pushed south and the power is scheduled to be out until 4PM tomorrow. That's over a day's worth of not utility electricity! Talk about your pain in the ass storms.

[Quietus]

I basically have nothing like that near me.  The worst we have is heavy rain.  On rare occasions, we may have a little lightning.

I'm one of the few who loves the rain, however, so I don't mind at all.  I sit in my sun room with my Kindle, and listen to the rain drumming down. :^_^:

[Smiley]

A day without electricity? That's nothing, I remember a storm that caused the power to be out for a good week. We had cows when that happened, which would have meant milking roughly two dozen cows by hand for a week, but luckily we had a tractor-powered generator to power our milking machine. :^_^:
It was quite hot around here a week or so ago, but now it's been a storm after storm after storm for the last week with occassional lightning. At least all the crops are getting plenty of water.

[Zhs2]

Oh yeah, the storm that knocked out our power for 11 days back in 2011 was pretty bad. It's still annoying though when a power outage wakes you up in the middle of a sleep period and you need to call in an outage. Hurricanes have nothing on these small, quick, and devastating storms that are never announced but they manage to throw everything into disarray when they happen.

On another note, the utility power came back on at 4AM. Better than I expected, I suppose.