Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-1496755-20161208230331

I suddenly remembered my college roommate's Russian girlfriend. Any time you disagreed with her, she'd go "Why are you so mean?" :P

It's kind of weird it lacks the dynamic settings. Well, I can tolerate the black lines because there is one thing that I hate more than them - a stretched image. I'm glad DBox emulates the original 4:3 ratio instead of stretching things. Quake comes from an age when widescreen monitors were science-fiction.

Indeed - having an audience is a bit of a stress, even when they don't comment all the time. And there will be plenty of new stuff to try and experiment with, so it will be delightfully unpredictable. Saturday sounds fine - just specify which Saturday, December 10 or December 17 (to avoid any chance of a mess up). Also, don't forget to specify the hour. Don't worry - there is a whole world of Windows games out there to explore. If you like Hex1, you can continue to Hex2, which is a pure Windows game as there never was a DOS version, plus it has a GL version, which works exactly the same way as GLQuake (it's derived from it).

Perhaps I would try Minecraft some day. Creating or exploring virtual worlds is something I love - it's one of the things that attractedme towards Arena and Daggerfall (even if they are just random-generated stuff).

Oh yes, Doom 3 is a very good example. I had seen demanding games before it (stuff like Tomb Raider 3 or Heretic 2) which could only be run on relatively low settings, but at least they could run stable and with a good framerate throughout. Doom 3 was like a monster - in fact, I've read that in 2004 its Ultra quality setting could only be used with video cards that had not even been available for sale (!) at the time of the game's release. So you basically had to wait for a future upgrade to even try that! I remember foolishly trying to run D3 on my old laptop - surprisingly, it actually runs, but it looks utterly horrible. The lighting was all bugged out and all characters were divided into two distinct halves - one lit and the other dark. Naturally, it also ran very slowly and crashed very often. It was a lost cause but I just had to give it a try... for the sake of experimentation. My first D3 playthrough was on my roommate's computer, on the Medium setting, with the extra effects (anti-aliasing and Vsync especially) firmly turned off (some other minor effects were not working as well, simply because the video card did not support them). There inevitably were some parts with lower framerates. Today, it's the exact opposite - not only can I run it on Ultra (with all extra stuff turned on), but I can even go beyond that - completely turning off all kinds of texture/specular/bumpmap compression and downscaling, to get the absolute maximum possible experience out of D3. And the same applies to Quake 4 as well, since it is the same engine and it can be tweaked in the same ways. There is also the newer Doom 3: BFG Edition (2013), though, ironically, you can't achieve the same level of texture quality there due to more restrictions (it's the bane of contemporary gaming - robbing of you of the freedom to tweak your game as much as you like to!). And this is despite the fact that D3 BFG supposedly uses a superior texture storage method that is more high-fidelity than the original's.

So yeah, I can live without those reflections - the mere fact that a modern game runs so smoothly and that most settings can be safely cranked up to Ultra is enough to make me happy :)

Heh, we had a 5.1 surround at the college dorm. It was my roommates' and they did get fined a few times for "unberable loud noise". But that never stopped them from, using it again. We used it for gaming too - first time I played Doom 3, it was exactly with this sound system. Makes the game even scarier than it already is.

Eh, no, ponnies are not my thing. It's TMNT - the first series (the one I grew up with) started in 1987. The second - in 2003 (your era) and the latest is from 2012.