As you certainly know by now, the big hit in video games for the PC platform is expected to by Crysis which should be ready by November 16th according to the designer. However, the demo which was announced earlier is now postponed to October 26th. We hope that this is not created by a real problem to finish what should be one of the biggest First Person Shooter games of the decade.
In the mean time, I propose to give you a few useful elements. First, we had inside information about the minimal PC configuration to run this game. We all know that the bigger will be the better (and if you want to go multiplayer, Crytek wants you to have DirectX 10 and matching high-end graphics card) but it will start at a much more reasonable level. Minimal requirements:
CPU: Intel P4 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent (2800+)
DRAM: 1GB
Graphics card: 6800GT (256MB) or ATI/AMD Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB)
HDD Space: 16GB
OS: Microsoft Windows
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible
As we can see, the video card is still quite affordable (I even have two such cards at home). Nobody said nothing about the exact performance you’ll get then. Certainly, most of the effects will be denied to the low-end user, but it is nice to see that the CPU and RAM requirements seem quite reasonable.
If this was not sufficient to have your mouth watering, here is a tutorial (thanks to GameTrailers) that will prepare you for your deadly mission in Crysis.
I can’t hold my breath until November to go and buy my own copy (for those of you Crysis lovers who thought that being a web site designer would allow to have Crytek sending free copies to me, I am deeply sorry to say that the reality is grimmer in blog-land; But it’s still fun to write here).
But if you want to see nice pictures and high-quality graphics, do not forget to check (whatever your game style) BioShock, Team Fortress 2, World in Conflict, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal Tournament III.
This month we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the agreement that led to the one-minute nag at the beginning of all DVD. We all have to watch at this no-fast-forward page of information about piracy.
As if this had any impact on pirates. As if it was good practice to annoy 100% of your customers.
How to meet the amateur photographers? Nowadays, you must go to the Internet. Even better, Nikon decided that the right place was were most amateurs were naturally going: Flickr. Nikon decided to venture into direct information inside Flickr ; They opened a kind of photo club on the web site:
This is a quite good idea: Go and create a kernel of passionate users in love with the yello logo brand where they assemble most easily. Go and organize meetings, exchanges, courses around the common photographic hobby, the Nikon Digital Learning Center.
THe news of the week on the CPU front line is definitely the arrival of new triple-core CPUs from AMD. There is an obvious wish to take the marketing and technical lead again on a ground where Intel was starting to appear as the unchallenged leader. But there is also an interesting technico-industrial approach.
When you manufacture a quad-core CPU, it is quite common to find on that it not working properly during the tests. So, what do you do with this slice of non-functional silicon that you cannot sell as a quad-core CPU? A triple-core CPU! Instead of loosing the silicon slab that they wanted to sell to the highest bidder, they can sell it for a definitely lower price while grabbing a lot of media attention. It puts AMD on the fast track again!
RAID storage is a good way to ensure a good security for your data: Two or more discs are used to give some redundancy and be sure that in case of a single drive failure you can still access your files (it will not protect you against deleting the files, though). However, the problem is often that RAID storage is very expensive or very complex (buying an expensive appliance, setting up a complex PC configuration). So much so that a normal user (a photographer willing to protect her zillions of digital images, a student willing to give reliability to his MP3 and DivX files, etc.) will not do it.
Now, Iomega is proposing a solution for an external RAID at a bargain price (It’s available in a 500 GB model with street pricing as low as $240). Tom’s Hardware’s SmallNetBuilder is giving it a run and tells us all about it: Tiny Terabyte RAID: Iomega 1 TB StorCenter Network Hard Drive Review.
It’s been quite a question: What will DirectX 10 bring that DirectX 9 will not have? For the Multiplayer Crysis, the answer seems to come from Total Crysis (they have a Crytek press information).
Physics and day and night cycle: With DirectX 9, you will not be allowed to break havoc on the trees and other vegetation (it seems that it is not really related to the capacity of DirectX). Time-of-day changes will not be implemented for DirectX 9 servers.
All of this is a matter of development choice and you have to wonder what pressure Microsoft put on Crytek to make such choices… that will help sell Windows Vista (the only OS officially able to run DirectX 10).
This is the calculation done after a poll realised by ORB, the British poll company in Iraq, and asking the following question to 1481 people aged 18+: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”
The answers:
None 78%, One 16%, Two 5%, Three 1%, Four or more 0.2%
If you use the last census figures (more than 4 million homes in Iraq), it allows to reach 1,220,580 deaths (more than a million, right).
Unfortunately, this is well in line with the figures published at regular intervals by The Lancet (medical journal) that presently evaluates the death toll to around 600,000 from medical data.
The original Deltoid article applies a few additional checks to ensure that this is not skewed and it stays in line with reality (you should always have that kind of caution with statistical data), but it is easy to understand why Irakis are not happy with the presence of troops from US, UK and allies. Since 2003, they are reliving the nightmare of the Iran-Irak war, but they are under occupation. Go wonder why they are not receptive to the arguments from the Bush administration…
You wanted to be able to produce those pro presentations with PowerPoint. But Microsoft Office seemed to expensive to buy it, so you decided to download an illegal (but free) version. No! Hold your horses. Real solutions are appearing all over the place.
Up to now, you had the possibility to use Open Office (which just went to version 2.3). This free desktop suite is compatible with Microsoft file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and gives you the ability to do nearly everything that PowerPoint does. And -we have to admit that- we do not use a lot from PowerPoint (bullet lists and titles).
But Google joins the race with the arrival of Google Presentations, which their online answer and free again (and more legal than any botleg copy downloaded from BitTorrent, DirectConnect or similar P2P network). There was already a Google Docs application suite; It is now complete.
Have fun with your free download of… PowerPoint competition products.
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