My New Car

I bought a 1999 Miata a few months ago, it's black with a hardtop.

 

 

Sky Tower Pictures

I recently went to New Zealand, one of the coolest things I did while there was go up the Sky Tower in Auckland. At first I thought it was going to be pretty lame, it's just another tall building, but the view up there is amazing. They have glass floors you can walk on, it took a lot of nerve, but eventually I was totally comfortable walking on them, check out the picture below. I took a lot of pictures up there, including nine I stitched into a panorama.

• Panorama @ 100% (4.6MB 15010x2160)*

* To view the whole panorama at 100% you will need six 30" monitors.

My trip pictures

I finally finished putting all the pictures from my trip to Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, and New York into web galleries. There are over a thousand pictures, unless you are extremely bored your best bet is to just look at My Favorites, if that is interesting enough check out the Top 200. I didn't delete any pictures, that means if I accidentally hit the shutter button and took a picture of the sidewalk, that picture is somewhere in the galleries. All of the pictures were taken with a Canon S70 at 3072x2304, mostly Raw, if for some reason you would like a high res version of a picture please let me know.
Image Galleries

Photoshop CS thumbnails are back!

If you installed Photoshop CS from scratch, not the case with an upgrade, you probably noticed something very disturbing. PSD's don't have thumbnail previews in Windows, not even in Photoshop's Open dialog! It turns out Adobe left out a DLL called psicon.dll do to crashes on some peoples systems. Well I for one find it extremely annoying not to have thumbnails in Windows, fortunately the solution is simple. Download psicon.dll and place it in  C:/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe/Shell. That's it, they are instantly back.
Thanks to notestips.com and dlldump.com.
Want thumbnails of Canon Raw files? Head here.

I'm in New York City

Here's a picture of a subway station at rush hour:

Here are pictures of the Gates in Central Park:

 

 

European Vacation

I recently got back from about a month in Europe, I hit Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam. I took over 700 pictures, and I plan on posting some, along with a little trip writeup. So look for it in the future...

Deathmatch coming to HL2 *UPDATED*

A post by Valve's Adrian Finol, on the steampowered.com forums, indicates Valve will be adding DM to HL2 soon.

Update: Half Life 2: Deathmatch in now available through Steam :)

Ahhhh, Half Life 2

I bought HL2 the day it came out, over a week ago, and I haven't even tried to play it yet. I did try Counter Strike: Source today, and it was pretty fun. The graphics were nice, but the game still seemed behind the times. No scope or iron sights on most of the weapons, just the cheesy zoom. No lean or prone. Not enough menu options, Valve could learn from Epic how to do menu options right. And I'm not a fan of buy systems for weapons, but CS:S is the most balanced buy system I've tried. CS:S is supposed to be the MP component of HL2, but HL2 does have its own MP code. You would normally have to use console commands to access it, but justbi0 combined some mods from other people into a nice package giving you menu options and a server browser. There are no servers listed, and the maps suck, but it's worth a shot. Find other HL2 mods at halflife2.filefront.com.

Half Life 2 is GOLD!

No, really! Vivendi has even announced a release date, or as they call it, "a planned retail street date of November 16th, 2004." In other HL2 news, ClanBase has closed down their CS:S ladders do to built-in cheats and unfair gameplay, with no way to stop it. I really hope Valve uses Punkbuster, Valve's in-house cheat detection just isn't good enough. November 16th is also the release date of Eminem's new album, now I know how to spend those two Best Buy Bucks I got from McDonald's.

DOOM 3 SDK is out

So now you can make things... and stuff. From filefront.com. It's only 10MB.

Men of Valor MP Demo

The MoV MP demo is out, it's really nothing special. If your CPU is below 1.3GHz it won't even load them game, which is complete BS. My 1.2GHz (Dual) Athlon MP can certainly hold its own against a 1.4GHz P4 any day. To get around that arbitrary rule, add -CPUSPEED=1400 to the end for the Target field of the shortcut properties. I was able to play at 1280x1024 at the highest detail the demo allowed, without even a jitter.

Updates and demos

The DOOM 3 1.1 patch is out, you can grab it at FileFront. It's pretty much the same as 1.05 beta. The SDK is not included. If you don't have DOOM 3 yet, try the demo.

There are lots of new UT2004 files, including new demos for PC, Mac and Linux. And an Editor's Choice Bonus Pack from Epic, it has 4 new maps, 3 new vehicles, and 6 new characters. You'll need the 3323 patch to use it.

An MP Demo for Tribes: Vengeance has been release. It's not my cup of tea, but many people are big Tribes fans. It's only 472MB :)

The latest in Futuremark's bi-annual series of "I need a new computer" benchmarks is out. You can get 3DMark05 from FileFront.

You may be wondering why I link to FileFront. Well, even with the short wait they sometimes have, I still find it the fastest place to get game files. They can always max out my 3Mb connection.

DOOM 3 1.05 Beta Patch is out

An unsupported beta of the DOOM 3 1.05 patch has been released by id. It includes improved widescreen support, and a bunch of tweaks/fixes, mostly multiplayer. According to Robert Duffy's .plan the final version of 1.05 will include the SDK(Software Developers Kit), and a future version will include PunkBuster anti-cheat software. He also mentions the DOOM 3 demo is coming soon... who doesn't have DOOM 3 yet?
The beta patch is only 17.3MB, you can grab it from:

• FileFront
• 3DGamers
• FileShack

Doom 3 Tips

To benchmark Doom 3 use the command timedemo demo1 from the console(~). See the previous post for accessing the console.

Some people claim increasing image_cacheMegs to 96, 128 or even 256 makes the game run smoother. Benchmarking with demo1 shows no difference for me. So what's it do? "maximum MB set aside for temporary loading of full-sized precompressed images"

If you want to increase the maximum players on your server above 4, add +set si_maxPlayers "x" to the shortcuts target line, where x is the max players.

Doom 3 cvars and commands

I've posted a list of Doom 3 cvars and commands. It's in the download section, or just click here. To use the cvars/commands you will need access to the console. I recommend creating a new text file in Doom 3/base/ and renaming it "autoexec.cfg". In it put the line:

seta com_allowConsole "1"

Now you can use the tilda(~) key to access the console. You can also put any other cvars/command/scripts in autoexec.cfg and they will be loaded everytime the game starts.

New NVIDIA Drivers and DirectX 9.0c

If you have a high-end NVIDIA card you will want these newly released versions. Forceware 61.77 for Window XP/2000 can be found here. This new version adds support for the Geforce 6800 series and DirectX 9.0c. After installing the drivers head over here for 9.0c. I played America's Army for a couple hours with these versions and all went well.

Far Cry 1.2 Patch Released *UPDATE*

Ubi has released a patch for the retail version of Far Cry. Changes include tweaks to most of the weapons, quicksave added to singleplayer, run speed increased, sprint lasts longer, a bunch of Punkbuster fixes, and lots more.
The official Far Cry site has links to the 65MB patch, and so does 3DGamers:

• http://www.farcry.ubi.com/
• http://www.3dgamers.com/dl/games/farcry/farcrypatch12.exe.html

---

***UPDATE*** Ubi has now withdrawn the 1.2 patch due to "unexpected behaviour on specific hardware configurations." FileFront is still hosting the patch here.