[quote]Remember: most of the time, these ships will be maybe 64x64 pixels in size.[/quote] Stardock has repeatedly increased the texture resolution on their ships, and currently the textures are way overkill for a 64x64 size. At full screen 1600x1200 with the ship nearly filling the screen it's obvious the textures are high-res and very detailed. There's no way Stardock is content with making it look decent only at 64x64 size. They want it to look good zoomed in as well. In an
After running more tests, here is my take on global illumination: Flat ambient lighting is not desireable pretty much no matter how you look at it. It makes the shadow areas either look stark black, or if you add an ambient term, a very flat color. Even in space, this is unrealistic and not very pleasing to the eye. Ambient occlusion with a virtual, invisible "sky" to create ambient light may be unrealistic, but it still far more pleasing to the eye, and may be
[quote]No organization of your start menu, no way to switch between users easily, no way to add extra bars intuitively[/quote] Clutter = the number of items you see , especially when the desktop is loaded and you haven't clicked on anything yet. I agree "All Programs" needs a lot of work. That is cluttered. I've been harping on Windows fanboys about this for as long as I can remember, and it drives me crazy that, just like Linux fanboys defending Gnome's defaul
[quote]Doh, dangit, I meant Impulse. Also, some more information: I've tried both the 6-meg installer and the full installer.[/quote] That's odd. I installed it in Windows 7 myself, no problems. What other programs do you have installed in Windows 7? A clean install seems to work. Also, it this the most recent Beta of Windows 7, with all of the latest updates?
[quote]Yes, but due to the empty nature of space, you're only going to one one or two bounces before the light simply disappears.[/quote] Okay, so there is no atmospheric scattering and no ground plane. So yes, that will certainly mean that the lighting will be different. That does not mean, however, that any light bouncing between the surfaces on a complex object will have no impact on the image. In any case, since there is no ground plane and no atmospheric lighting to accou
[quote]GNU/Linux has a far more intuitive interface on where to find your applications than windows which simply dumps everything in the start menu and/or under each developer's company's name[/quote] I would agree that Windows would greatly benefit from categoriztion and centralized package management. For being an OS that likes to center on customization, however, sometimes Linux does seem to be a bit on the complex side. Take moving around the icons on the bars/pane
[quote]Yes, but in space, there's nothing for light to bounce off of.[/quote] You are correct in that it won't be receiving any light from atmospheric scattering. It is still possible, however, for light to reflect a few times between the panels of the ship. Depending on the ship's design, it may bounce more or less times. A design with a lot of concave surfaces, holes, and crevices could see a lot of reflections between the surfaces. In addition, a ship near a planet or star
[quote]Um, FYI: in space, there's no "ambient" light.[/quote] In real life, there's no "ambient" light, either - it's simply the effect of light bouncing around a gazillion times. Many of the ships from the Show off your ship designs posts are fairly complex, and at least a rudimentary illimination pass would, IMHO, improve the accuracy of the lighting. I don't know if you've noticed it, but when you add a "light" to a ship, it doe
By "Stardock," do you mean Stardock Central? Stardock Central isn't supported in Windows 7, and it's very unlikely that they will add support for Windows 7, as they are replacing SDC with Impulse. Try Impulse instead.
In all honesty, all of today's OSes are mature. They all perform all of the basic functionalty the user expects, and they all provide powerful APIs that the developer can use. It's mostly a matter of the UI these days. Mac OS is the easiest (from what I've heard; I haven't really tried it). Windows will be getting easier with Windows 7. Linux - well, Linux is easier than it used to be, but that's not really saying much. Linux is admitedly very flexible from a technical standpo
Since most everybody else has already mentioned the gameplay improvements, I'll go a bit to graphics: More visible damage to the ships. I wanna see the scars after the fight. More shaders. Add some reflection, self-shadowing, real time ambient occlusion . Procedural textures. If you use shaders to calculate them during rasterization, you won't need to pre-render it to a texture.<
[quote]I wasn't specifically addressing the ribbon[/quote] True, but stuff like that is where Microsoft seems to be headed - the person who came up with the Office Ribbon was moved to the shell team for Windows 7, hoping to improve the experience with the Windows shell.
[quote]NTFS is an inferior filesystem no matter how you look at it.[/quote] How many Linux file systems offer all of these features: Access Control Lists Alternative Data Streams Sparse Files Reparse Points Hierarchal Storage Management Volume Shadow Copy Native File Compression Single Instance Storage Encrypting File System Ever y</st
[quote]And no, many of the better programs available for GNU/Linux do not exist for Windows, unless you can somehow use K3b, Amarok, Evolution and others. [/quote] There are alternatives to all of those programs, some for free, some at a cost. If you want to go the free of cost route, you can in Windows. Basic CD/DVD burning is standard with Windows, and all DVD burners come with their own software for Windows. As far as music players go, take you
[quote]No... no double click...[/quote] You can configure Windows for a single click as well; that's just how I have it set up. [quote]Disagree. Example: cp /tmp/ninja.png ~ You cannot do this with less keyboard + mouse clicks in a GUI, regardless wether the GUI is KDE, Gnome, Aqua or Aero.[/quote] Using Windows Explorer in Vista (Aero is a theme, not a shell) Windows+E to open a new window (2) go to temp folder (about 3) "ninja.png" in the se
[quote]Ubuntu Linux (and a dozen other distros) can be used without touching the command line. As you play around with Linux, you'll find that terminal commands make certain tasks, such as burning .iso files, incredibly easy and efficient.[/quote] As incredibly fast and efficient as double clicking a file? Because that's all I need to do in my current OS. To be honest, there's nothing really "slow" about drag and drop. The only time when it can be slow is when you have to auto
[quote]a friend of mine owns a local computer shop and he refuses to sell or install vista.[/quote] That's an amazingly poor way to run a business. Just because he doesn't like it doesn't mean he shouldn't sell it. That's pretty much shooting yourself in the foot, especially if there's a demand for the product. [quote]In the Mojave commercials, none of the "converted" are nerds. That's as simple as I can state it.[/quote] I have to break it to you, but Microsoft's tar
Of course, this leads to the question of what types of games you play. Sure, it'll play 2D games, emulate games for ancient OSes, and perhaps even play some of the older 3D games. But it won't be able to play the latest 3D games.
[quote]XP eat your heart out, no upgrade from XP to 7, [/quote] Do we know this for sure? In any case, sometimes it's good to reinstall anyways. Especially since you'll likely want to upgrade to the 64 bit version, which I'd highly recommend for future memory expansion and increased security measures such as PatchGuard. [quote]and others, it would seem, are afraid they don't have the mental capacity to learn a new OS.[/quote] With Seniors, this could certainly
[quote]Best way to learn....from doing, not from reading.[/quote] Amen. That's the way I've learned much of what I know :). That's also why I don't follow the opinion of the crowd when it comes to Vista. I now have Windows 7 installed for dual booting. Had to go to low resolution mode because it didn't set up my monitor right the first time, but installing the latest drivers and setting the resolution manually fixed it :). Looks very nice so far, no complaints
[quote]And to confirm, I could care less aout graphics.[/quote] Depends on the games you play. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to play a game at [quote]I wonder how the Nvidia Ion will run games.[/quote] From the specs, I'd say about as poorly as a low end gaming laptop, perhaps a bit less. I'd say the Ion is mostly for video rather than gaming. The CPU (Atom) is certainly going to be quite weak, and I wouldn't count on having much memory. Take the or
[quote]Surely it keeps the good aspects of vista[/quote] It does, because it's based on Vista. The rumors that Microsoft was going back to XP's code turned out to be completely false. [quote]when is Windows 7 set for release?[/quote] So far everybody is guessing 2009, but Microsoft officially has their lips sealed.
No. You must have a decent graphics card to run games, and a netbook is pretty much defined by stripping it down to the bare essentials. It's a re-invention of the dumb terminal, for all intents and purposes. It's designed to connect to the Internet, and that's about it. It may be able to play 2D games decently, but it'll likely give you a slideshow on all except the oldest 3D games. Even notebooks are generally poor at gaming. I wouldn't trust anything that didn't have dedica
Note to those whe want the QuickLaunch toolbar back: You can still do it :). Windows 7 does allow you to create new toolbars! What this basically means is that if you really wanted to, you can indeed make it act just like previous versions of Windows. You'll have to create a new toolbar, unlock the task bar, move it, change the settings to not show the text/title if you desire, lock the taskbar again, and if you so desire unpin the existing items and
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