New Year!

Well, it's the 31st. I've kept my pc working for the LAN party. I've avoided all urges to overclock, my CPU and Ram, update my BIOS, or do anything which could potentially go horribly wrong. Except of course buy a new Case, PSU and Graphics Card. The Graphics card, which was dead on arrival, got collected today, and I should have a new one the day after this one arrives at their returns department. It should arrive there today, but I'm not sure if they work on new years day, so I'm hoping to have one on Wednesday, however, I wouldn't say no if they tried to give me one tomorrow. A £200 Graphics card is a £200 Graphics card. The sooner the better.

Yesterday I fitted 2 friends new hardware for them. My friend Owen got a new case and Graphics card for christmas, so I fitted them. The case was an Antec P190. It a behemoth of a case. It barely fitted under his desk. But despite it's size, and the 5 Case fans, plus the 8800GT fan, and the Cpu fan, it's almost silent. It's pretty damned heavy too. I like it overall, but I think I'll stick to my Nine Hundred case. It looks like it's got a lot of raw power in it, no matter what you've got in there. Although, by Wednesday, I will have alot of raw power in there.

Another friend, Kai, bought himself, some new Ram, a new Mother Board, and a new CPU. Although that didnt go as smoothly. I put it all together. Somehow got T.I.M in my hair. Plugged it in, and WHOOSH! Nothing happened. The fans came on, but nothing hit the screen. No BIOS beeps. Nothing. Tried the old graphics card, since this happened to my 8800GT, but that didn't work. So, I took it all apart again, put the old stuff back in, and it all worked. Except the HDD got a windows error, and refused to boot up. So, we're going to take his HDD, put it in my pc, back it up, then format the disk, and do a complete reinstall.

I'm hoping that everything goes smoothly tonight. I've checked the Ring main, and we can support the PC's power requirements. I've got a 24 Port LAN switch, even though there's only 2 other people Pc gaming. I've got a few other people hopefully coming along later on to indulge in some Guitar Hero. I'm sure everything will be fine...

Graphics Card Trouble

Well, my stuff arrived. The case is brilliant, the PSU works wonders, and the graphics card is bricked. Dead on Arrival. I've tried everything, I've cleared CMOS, I've tried it with bare minimum hardware installed. I've tried using a seperate PSU just the the graphics card. Nothing works. I'm borrowing a friends old Motherboard and Cpu, and testing it out in that. If that works, I'll buy a new Motherboard, if it doesn't, I'll send it back to eBuyer, and ask for a new one. This is really quite annoying, since I need it for New Years Eve. I'm hosting a LAN party, and being the host, being able to run the games is a fairly normal thing to expect, but at this rate, it looks like new years eve could be a bit crap.

Mmmmmm... Christmas

Well, seeing as it was me who wanted one, Scan ran out of 8800GT's, so I got the money to buy one when they come back in stock. Which happens to be now. So, With the money for that, and some extra money I got from family, I'm buying an XFX 8800GT Extreme, which has the pre-overclocked Memory, GPU core, and Shader Clock. Should run Crysis nicely. I'm also buying a new 700Watt Arctic Power PSU. It has Dual 22Amp rails, and another rail which I forget the ampage on, but it's the Dual rail which matters to me. The 8800 needs a combined ampage of 26A across all rails, so the 44 + whatever from the other will work nicely.

I'm also buying a new case. It's a really nice case, an Antec Nine Hundred. I was toying between a Cooler Master Stacker, an Antec P182 or 180, or the Nine Hundred. I decided on the Nine Hundred. I've got a P180 sitting in my room which belongs to my mum's boyfriend, which at some point, will come out of the box, and turn into an epic gaming rig. I like it, but I don't really want to open the front to access my drives. So I went against that. The Stacker has a £140 price tag, so that's out of the question, and according to alot of reviews, the Nine Hundred is a very nice case. I like it alot, and the deep blue L.E.D's on the 2 front 120mm fans look cool. Most coloured fans look cheap and nasty, but these are nice, they're a very deep blue, and aren't too bright or over the top. It also has a side window which looks pretty cool. It has a 200mm fan on the top too. and has a nice big inside volume, with separate cages for the PSU, HDD's and main component's. So cooling is very good.



I was also given Crysis, which I've been playing. I really like it. The game area's are huge compared to Farcry, and even on lowest detail, it still looks fantastic. My frame rate in huge gunfights in the middle of forests are questionable, but given the age of my current system, it's still pretty impressive, and mostly playable. I'm ooking forward to Unreal Tournament 3, World in Conflict and Quake War's, which I'll be purchasing tomorrow. Then, in the coming weeks, I'll upgrade my Mother Board, RAM, and Processor. I've got my eye on a Core 2 Duo E6850. It's a damn good piece of kit, and is the best money can buy without jumping into the small fortune range.

Particle Tests

I was having a play with 3DS Max, and figured out how to do particles. Yay me.





They both took forever to render. I know there nothing special, but it's the first time I've gotten particles working, and I'm happy with them.

Moar Models

I was working on another model last night. I started playing with ideas for a handgun. It's turned into something which looks a fair bit like a desert eagle. This is by no means a final model, just me playing with ideas. You've probably noticed that my models have a tendency to not be skinned. I'm not too hot at skinning, so I'd rather leave them un-skinned then make them look crap with a poor skinning job.

Modelling

I've been slowly working on a mod for the source engine called UnDead Warfare: The Beginning. It's a prelude to a full game me and a small team are hoping to make. Since I've finally had some free time, I've been working on a few assets. I've been working for it over an evening, and have come out with 2 textures and 2 models. The models need skinning, but the models themselves are finished.





The models are tables for the first scene. Basically, you wake up in a small lab/hospital, and have a flashback to how you got there. Then you get to explore the base your in. Then the alarms sound, and a swarm of zombies rush into the base, and you run for shelter. You then get news over the radio that the base is out of control, and the army are going to nuke the installment, and you hear fighter jets overheard, then a deafening explosion, and bright light fills the room, and the mod ends. I'm toying over making it playable, or a machinima. I think making it playable would be pretty cool, being able to explore the base, and seeing the inner goings on of the base, but a machinima could be better for getting the idea across to people better, as everyone would get the same experience, so everyones on the same page as to whats happening.

Mattrach's the man

Another great guitarist. This kid is only 16(15 when he recorded this). To be so good at a young age is incredible.

Guitarist and Carol Singing

Well, a friend of mine sent me a video of some guy who plays various themes from video games on his guitar. This guy is really, really good, and has obviously been playing a long time.



This is Eternity Lightwaves from Final Fantasy X-2. Really nice song.

Tomorrow I'll start the carol singing round for this year. Last year, I went quite late, but in the space of 3 evenings, we made just over £300. This year we're going for much longer, obviously the closer to Christmas we go, the more we make, but it's all money. I'm hoping to get hold of an acoustic guitar this year, the extra effort will really increase the amount we make.

1st December...

It's the first already. 23 and a bit days till Christmas. Well, I'm getting an Nvidia Geforce 8800GT for Christmas, so I'll be set up for the next big line up of games coming out. Yay me!

I went on an all night gaming session last night. Playing lot's of Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes and Crysis. Crysis is great fun on LAN. The nano suit adds a whole other element to game play. You can activate speed and run and jump like the million dollar man, activate shield and become bullet proof to a degree, Stealth and become a chameleon, and Strength, which makes you the equivalent of Chuck Norris on Steroids. The strength enhancement is great fun. As an enemy jeep is hurtling towards you, jump out the way and punching out it's back tire, then watch it hurtle out of control over a cliff is very satisfying.

Company of Heroes is good fun too, although multiplayer consists mostly of, rapidly click the build infantry button, tell them to stand outside the enemy base, then whore artillery for the rest of the game. It kinda takes away the tactical element, and turns it into a game of who can get their units outside each others base the fastest.

Supreme Commander was quite funny. The normal Real Time Spamming guy's didn't like it as much since they didn't like the idea that 1 unit actually cant take on the biggest super power in the world and win hands down. In this, you really have to plan your base well, since if you don't, your mass and power will go into the red whenever you build, and something which should take 10 seconds to build ends up taking 10 minutes to build. The engine is very well made. It can handle upto 1000 units without any slowdown(if your running at least dual core, but it still runs well on a single core cpu), and the units can be huge. There's these flying fortress', which I like to call "doom doughnuts", which hover around and fire sprinkles at enemies. there's also some pretty cool spider things which stomp around and look really menacing until some air units come along and start shooting it, which is quite concerning. This is, after all, very far in the future, and this is my army's best weapon ever built, yet it has no kind of air defense on it what so ever.

I played some more Stalker. That's fun on LAN too, if a bit unbalanced. You get no money until after you spawn, which to buy things, you need to buy it before you spawn, which is pointless. To level up and get better guns, you have to die loads. Meaning if you're a really good player, with lots of kills, and you want to keep your K/D ratio up, you can't. If somebody gets a good sniper riffle, and gets to a good tower, he's guaranteed to win, since the good sniper riffles are one shot kills. Never the less, if you can stay live to get some kills, you'll have fun playing it.

Apparently Guitar Hero 3 is out on PC now, so I'll be swiftly scooping that up. I really like Guitar Hero. I played it on 360 at Video Games live, where I was the first person to play it, EVER! I liked it, but the controller is a bit different. The strum bar is longer, but it sticks out less, so you slip off it much easier. The frets are smaller, which reduces fatigue alot, however, the stickers on them make them sticky, which is a bit strange when playing. The guitar is a bit heavier, Which is nice. It feels alot stronger and well built. It also doesn't creak when you move it too fast, unlike the old one. It's a good fun game. The Pc version doesn't have the nice new Les Paul guitar, it has the old explorer, but I guess it doesn't really matter, I'm more interested in the game than the guitar. I think it'll be best on Pc, since there's bound to be a mod community spring up for it. Custom songs for it will be much appreciated. I used to play Frets on Fire a while back. It's a Guitar Hero clone which comes with 3 songs, but you can add your own, and rip the Guitar Hero song's from the disk. It had a huge community, with loads of custom songs for it. So I'm hoping the community will welcome GH3 too.