Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-1496755-20180927201710

Now would be a great time to think about some efficient sound insulation, then. Won't be absolute silence, of course, but it could surely drown out most of the noise.

There actually is a bigger hassle than hpones - students coming in when they shouldn't, e.g. when I am obviously busy with something else, or in the middle of my lunch break. There have been several cases when someone walks in and asks if we can stamp some documents. I'd just quietly look towards whatever I was just eating and they'd suddenly realize it's not the proper time. Still an annoying loss of 10 seconds. So what do you tell the pizza guys - "I'd like a very sad pizza with a depressing topping, and a side dish of despair and self-loathing, Please make sure it's badly burned and bitter."

Wildest test I've done with DOSBox was getting Windows 3.11 to run in it... it was pretty fun. Like a time machine, though I had still forgotten so many things about working with this primitive thing. It is theoretically possible get Windows 95 running in there (using a virtual hard drive image), though I don't know how well it would perform. My intuition tells me it's better to use PCem for setting up entire operating systems.

Sure it is more painful - that's why they hid it... Having grown up with Doom, I usually consider Nightmare to be either a gimmick mode or a special challenge for the crazy fans, while Hard is the highest "official" difficulty. This is the case with Ultra-Nightmare in id Software's modern releases - it's absolutely intended to be a challenge above and beyond common gameplay, adding special new limitations and other handicaps for the player.

Heh, I got so used to playing WoW left-handed, that I sometimes mix my hands nowadays. I'd walk around with the arrow keys and click on stuff with the left hand, and it went pretty smoothly. WASD can also be used for wlaking, though A and D turn instead of strafe (that is done with Q and E) and this goes against my FPS habits. Ugh.

Add to this the fact that this was one of the earliest GL games out there, so it probably utilized this technology in some arcane way that is never used nowadays :P

Harmony indeed - none of the new features was intrusive or gameplay-derailing. Even dying due to telefragging backpacks was a lot more amusing than annoying. Only the solid corpses created issues occasionally, but we could easily solve this with a well-placed shot.

I was often in a strange juxtaposition of being the "fun guy" but also the "dark guy" simultaneously. This could really confuse people at times, heh. Naturally, I'd often hear the usual "you are too fun to be depressed, cheer up" that we're so familiar with. "Other people have it much worse than you" popped up occasionally as well - somne folks can't understand that one thing could seem minor to them, but be a huge problem to me or someone else.

Yes, we are the kind of people who have very few friends... but at least we know they are genuine. And that's a lot more enjoyable than people who swear they'd never forget you... and completely forget you about a year later. Ooops :P

The episode structure was primarily used to accommodate the shareware game model - a clearly defined first episode is the free-to-play version and the rest is the full game, which could be further broken up into episodes for story-telling reasons (the oldest shareware titles were even more fragmented - each episode having its own separate executable and data files, effectively making them individual games in their own right). In some rare cases, all the levels of the full version could be bundled into one solid episode (Shadow Warrior did that: just two episodes, the first being the shareware portion, and the second - the rest of the game). With the end of the shareware era, the episodic structure was retired, though shooters would still sometimes organize their levels into thematic units or chapters (like Quake 2 does).

Oooh, yes, you are right - Greg was indeed telling us how he had hoped to add a boss battle to his last map of his Aftershock episode. Doom followed a similar system too - many of the functions activated by killing a boss creature were hardcoded to only activate on specific maps and under specific conditions, while the boss monsters themselves could be freely put wherever you wish without any issues. Other games from this era had more specifically coded bosses, which couldn't be placed anywhere. And we even have bosses that are blank and are entirely controlled by scripts within the map itself (Hexen's final boss was this - you can place him on a map but he would be completely inert without the scripts to drive him).

Oh, back on my old laptop I could only use a virtual drive that used two image types - ISO and NRG, which meant all CUE/BIN combos had to be converted. Quite annoying. Luckily, I don't have this problem with Daemon nowadays. NRG seems to be rarely used nowadays, I see lots of ISO and sometimes CCD/IMG packages (these are created by CloneCD). Windows 10 has some sort of built-in image mounting, though I'd still prefer Daemon, to be honest. Sometimes people really don't make it easy - I get really pissed when I run across IMZ files; it's some sort of compressed floppy image (what's the point of compressing a 1.44 MB thing anyway?!?) and it can only be opened with ONE program. Bonus: it's one of those annoying programs that limit your usage unless you enter a registration code. So what I did was extracted all IMZ stuff I needed and then repackaged it as normal images. And then I got rid of that horrible program :)

Oh well, manuals (especially in the early 90's) were usually more about in-game stuff - story, weapon, item and enemy descriptions, etc., while the more technical info was in readme and FAQ files. Doom's readme was exactly this - technical info and some troubleshooting tips. I think X-Wing used the same thing too, there's that READ.ME file with misc info that was not included in the printed manual and other technical stuff. As the late 90's unrolled, manuals started to become more technical, while info on in-game stuff became quite limited; it is spoilers, after all, so the manual would, at best, mention some of the weapons and/or enemies that you encounter in the first few levels, the rest is up to the player to discover on their own (examples: Half-Life, RtCW and Doom 3 manuals). Readmes still played a big role, though, providing latest info (since manuals are usually printed a bit earlier) at the time of game release. And nowadays manuals are pretty much a rarity - it's not unusual for them to be just 2-3 pages, featuring: an epilepsy warning, a disclaimer about violence and some contact info for tech support. And that's all. Technical info and anything else is now found online... if it is even available. As for registration cards - these usually provided discounts on future purchases (if you're lucky) or, more often, just updates in the form of product catalogs and occasional demos. I remember we got a god mode cheat for sending the Spear of Destiny registration card (complete lack of internet made this a valuable thing back then).

When it comes to excessive documentation, I believe this is more of a 80's thing, you know. Printed materials were still an easier and more accessible option than any electronic readmes.

P.S. YOU MUST REGISTER!!!