[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

How does that water cannon work anyway? If they are already frozen it must be hot water that comes out and melts them. Maybe that is boiling water that makes the sound when you have the water cannon in your hand. lol So it wouldn't freeze the ground unfortunately.

yeah it must be hot water and it's a very powerful weapon. i constantly switched to it once i got used to the low range. i also thought it would shoot cold water and found that rather odd, considering that all the enemies crave the cold, but then someone actually wrote it was hot... that makes sense, since you can also see steam rise up when it's being used. also, since it's sooo cold in there, the water would cool down and freeze quickly you know the outcome of that famous experiment where you put equal amounts of boiling water and ice together? what will happen?

Originally Posted by shaq

I beat the game before the patch came out and it was missing a lot of the effects that were in the benchmark last year. There weren't any blue sparks and a lot less water was in the game. I believe only on the walls and none dripping from the ceiling and none from any of the pipes. Also the locker doors weren't movable and none of the extra cans and barrels. I don't think you could even knock the barrels and shovels off of the wall. So it is much better now than before.

wow, how limited. great patch then!

Originally Posted by shaq

One of us needs to see if we can add more enemies at least to add more tension to the game. It should be definitely possible to decrease the players health to make it harder and maybe less damage per shot.

i think the player's health is fine. meddling with that might also throw the game off balance in sections that are designed that you barely make it through alive. for example the outside areas, where your health can drop to zero quickly. i also think that the power of the shots are fine. after all it takes 3 bullets to even a simple servant down. just upping the numbers of enemies should be enough to keep the game interesting. the more important question is, whether or not the enemies could deal with the cramped space if suddenly like 5 or more would gang up on the player. they might get stuck

Originally Posted by shaq

Did you get CM10? I downloaded all 10+GB of it the last two days. lol There is a beta3 patch on top of the 9GB base file.

oh no. somehow i never had the urge to mess with it. i'm not much of a mod fan unless it comes to the cinematic mod.

Originally Posted by shaq

I don't see why you need 64-bit Windows though as I only see it use up to 450MB so far. I already preordered it for $50 so I just use the RC. I got it since I only have XP and Windows 7 has DX10 and 11 so I had to get it. And $50 is crazy cheap for an OS.

yeah, that is really cheap. may be even the cheapest windows there ever was (and most likely will be). as for 64bit, ram consumption has little to do with that. the memory allocation limitation is limited to single applications or services. windows itself uses dozens, with explorer being the biggest. yet, it rarely gets over 200MB, so there is enough headroom for that. 64 bit operating systems have other strengths, e.g. you can utilize the full power of your 64bit cpu, meaning that windows can access additional hardware supported features, instead of emulating those through software, or not being able to utilize them at all. using a 32bit OS on a 64bit cpu forces it into 32bit mode and making it deactive its 64bit enhancements. it's like driving a car. using 32bit would equal driving in town. you'd disable the 4th and 5th gear, because you can't drive that fast anyway (in this case technology limits your speed and not the law lol). 64bit would be driving on a highway which would allow you to use your full potential and full speed. other important features are practically getting rid of the limitation of memory paging, because each page can now be up to 18TB in size, while in XP those were limited to 4MB. if you load a game like cryostasis in xp and it eats 1gb of ram, then that gb will be split to 250 pages and handling those is much slower than accessing only 1 big page with all the data in it. but enough for that...microsoft released a many thousand pages thick document that lists all of vistas new features, of which many include performance enhancements for 64bit architecture. no way to give an even slightly comprehensive list here... only consider this: always update, because newer software can usually make the best use of newer hardware

Originally Posted by shaq

There is an RC of Batman? Where? Where? It's still a month away, but Wolfenstein will be out next week. I have to get that one. And don't get me started on next year. About 20-30 really good games are scheduled to come out. lol It will be almost as good as 2004 was for gaming.

just kidding i once saw a video of wolfenstein a year ago and it looked only merely better than return to castle wolfenstein. i hope that was just an early beta and the game gives me a good reason for having a high-end gfx-card

Originally Posted by shaq

I actually like the water though. Have you tried it at 20,000 through the whole game? I am halfway through and I am liking it. There may be a hard limit to the overall number of particle effects and it could be determined by the engine itself. Did you try lowering everything else before you upped the water value? It might make a difference.

oh yes, as i said earlier, i beat the game unmodified first. but i also remember using lower shader settings through half the game. btw, i uploaded another pic with half the particle count (check the post above). the pic looks like there wouldn't be much of a difference, but it looked a lot worse animated. you could clearly see those thin sparks, that are only present when you deactivate advanced physics.

there is a way to modify values in ram. i guess this would be the only way to reliably check for a cap. having to re-start the game after changing the values is just too tedious. the alternative would be to use a level cheat to directly jump into a water-heavy level.