The Game A/V Page - News for the week of 11/16/97

12:10 AM
Another IE 4.0 bug fixed
The bugs just keep flying out, don't they? This bug allows a second site to capture authentication information when a browser is redirected to it from the first site (where the user must have entered some info). The fix is at http://www.microsoft.com/ie/security.

Video CD creation
I'm going to try to create a Video CD of some South Park episodes using my Rainbow Runner and Adaptec Easy CD Creator 3.01. I think I probably will be able to fit about 3 episodes worth on a CD. This should be pretty interesting. By the way, the 2GB file size limitation on AVI's stinks to deal with. At decent data rates, you can't even capture for an hour before you run out of room. Video CD creation is probably going to be less demanding, but I still won't be able to go for more than about 25 minutes without stopping.

9:41 PM
The World's Scariest Police Chases 3
I guess some might consider this a pretty low form of entertainment but just admit it, it's pretty entertaining to watch! Anyhow, a couple of you mentioned to me that this show would be on and that it also seemed to feature the crash that I had captured and taped over the summer. One of you requested a video of one of the crashes, a Corvette slamming into the back of a 18-wheeler at 165 mph. The most amazing thing about this show is how many of the freaks driving those cars get away with barely a scratch! Anyhow, click on the videos section if you want to see this one.

Dragon Systems's Naturally Speaking
I got the chance to try out a copy of NaturallySpeaking and I'll let you be the judge of how "good" it is.

Hi. I am attempting to dictate to you this portion of my Web Page via Dragon Systems' software Naturally Speaking. As you can see, after training it for about 30 minutes by reading an extremely long passage from some bad humor from Dave Barry about "Cyberspace," it is still incredibly useless and mangles nearly everything I try to say. I can't understand how anybody can use this crap to get work done and after 30 minutes my vocal cords hurt like a bitch. I drank some water out of a sport bottle and that helped a little. I would attempt to curse at the software but it can't recognize curse words so I guess we're just flat out of luck there, huh? I'm going to be deleting this piece of shit off my computer as soon as I'm done with it. I can't believe I wasted this much time on it. It also appears as if this software lacks any kind of context-sensitive intelligence whatsoever so that just makes it even worse. It can never figure out the bin. The bin. The bin. The Recycle Bin. That was me threatening the software with where I'm about to send it. As you can see, it doesn't understand me so that's why it's not scared, I guess.

It Hyatt mime attempting to dictate this Porsche my Web page you by Dragon Systems software NaturallySpeaking. As you can see after training for about 30 minutes by reading an extremely long passage for some bad humor from Dave Barry about cyberspace it is still incredibly useless and mailed nearly everything I try this a. I can understand a anybody can use a scrap to get work done an after 30 minutes by vocal cords her like a bitch. I'd ranks and water out of us for bottled and that held a little. Out a tent occurs of the software but can recognize curse words like us was flat outlawed thereon? I'm going to be deleting this piece of shed off by computer is designed done within. I can Levi wasted this much time on it. It also appears as if this offer lacked anytime context sensitive intelligence whatsoever so that just makes it even worse. It can never figure out the been the been the been the recycle been. That was me threatening the software with wear on about the Senate. That you can see and understanding so that's why it's not scared against.

2:33 PM
3COM announces USB modem!
Wow! It's going to be shipping just in time for me...that is, around December. The damn thing is, NT 4.0 doesn't have USB support yet, so I'm not sure how I'm going to get the thing working just yet. I hope Microsoft can slip it into Service Pack 4. The product is the U.S. Robotics 56K Voice Faxmodem...one especially cool thing about the product is that it includes a full-duplex speakerphone built into the modem that is operational even when your computer is off! Meaning it's just like having a real speakerphone in addition to a modem. This definitely looks like a must buy for Win95 users...without NT support I probably won't be able to use it, which really gets to me!

Virtua Squad 2 demo
Well, it's better known as Virtua Cop 2, I don't know why they changed the name for the home version. This is the first example I've seen of a Sega Model 2 game being done with 3D acceleration (actually Direct3D) and I am not disappointed. It looks awesome on my 3Dfx. Well, I guess ManxTT was out before but somehow that didn't really do it for me. This is much better. Of course, you can't use a light gun (why doesn't somebody develop one of these things for the PC?!?!) but it's actually not all that bad with a mouse. Sega Touring Car Championship is also out...if I remember this game correctly it's like Sega Rally on race tracks.

4:38 PM
Windows NT 5.0 delayed
Sniff! Bill Gates confirmed that NT 5.0 would be slipping past the 1st half of 1998. Instead, beta 2 will coming out around that time. Well, I guess we can always look forward to Service Pack 4?

Voice recognition software
I've been looking into this recently. I have this vision in my head of being able to tell my computer to go to my favorite web sites or open my most frequently used applications. Seems neat, doesn't it? Anyhow, great strides have been made recently in the field of voice recognition, enabling continuous speech recognition instead of discrete. Discrete means you have to pause a little after each word, which, as you might imagine, sucks. Continuous is much better because you simply talk as usual (or at least, more so than discrete).

I've been looking for information as to which products are the best out there...I've come up with Dragon Dictate by Dragon Systems and IBM's ViaVoice Gold. Many packages only enable dictation; I guess the voice command features are extra. It's interesting to note that the packages I've seen all include headsets...I guess you can't really get away with a cheap microphone.

It seems that NaturallySpeaking by Dragon Systems even won the PC Magazine Technical Excellence awards for software. That seems pretty cool. However, I also saw that Ultima Online was a finalist in the After Hours category. Umm...ambitious, perhaps. Technically excellent? Not a chance in hell. Read the blurb describing the incredible virtual economy and the complicated notoriety system and you'll quickly begin to wonder if the editors made the same kind of ill-informed judgments about the other finalists/winners?

4:48 PM
New Creative Labs products
Creative Labs introduced two very interesting products today at the beginning of Comdex. The first is a Voodoo 2 product, nothing special, really. The second is Creative Labs's first PCI audio solution, the Sound Blaster AWE64D. It will feature hardware accelerated 3D positional audio and supposedly full Sound Blaster real-mode compatibility. Sounds nice, but I don't see anything about multi-stream audio.

2:40 AM
Riva 128 alpha OpenGL drivers for Win95
If you are still running Win95 exclusively (why? for the love of God, WHY?!?!), then I guess you will be needing these to see what the Riva 128 looks like with OpenGL games. That is, basically Quake and any game based on Quake. The website below seems to have them first, take a look.

Tanarus impressions
I played this game today and got a little pissed off. Well, first the good news. I was able to get Tanarus to see my 3Dfx card by reinstalling Win95 completely once again. Boy, was that fun. Anyhow, I got it up and running, graphics are pretty nice. Well, we played a game for a while basically being outnumbered by these guys. We were able to hold them off from capturing our flag but other than that we really couldn't get anywhere.

I was really pissed off by the end of the game, though. Let me tell you why. I was getting killed quite a bit, but OK, no problem, I'm new. I chalked it up to my not knowing when to run. In most games, a good amount of skill can let you hold your own against other people. Not in this game...it's all about teaming up on people. That's OK, of course, it's just not entirely what I'm used to. Don't get in 2 on 1's, etc.

Here's the part that got me. I would go head to head with the people on the other team in my tank and lose. So I took a Devastator (the biggest tank) and loaded it up with shields, shield boost and a plasma cannon. I went head to head with a smaller tank (the Vanguard), which had a Mark IV with a phase multiplier. The short of it is, I died, and I didn't even get close to dropping his shields! I also went head to head with some other guy on the same team. I dumped about 10 AP shells into him (which ignore shields!). I died, he wasn't even smoking.

Now as far as I can tell, this should be completely impossible, unless those guys were cheating or I don't understand something about the game. I was in a bigger tank, head to head, one on one. There is no way they could have won. I asked "Is is possible to cheat in this game?" in the chat room, and one Sony guy said, "We're still working out the bugs." I don't know what that means...it sounds like he was confirming it. Another guy said that if somebody is lagged, they won't take damage, like in the game Subspace. He said that he didn't know of any way to outright cheat, though. However, it seems to me that if you can be lagged and not take damage, you can cheat.

The end result of this is that I'm very discouraged, and I'm probably not going to touch the game again until I can be assured that that kind of stuff won't happen.

On another note, I think my 3Dfx card needs replacing. It crashed Tanarus on me twice today...once while I left it sitting at the chat screen and once while I was actually playing. I've done everything I can to avoid problems with it but it still locks up my computer if I leave it running a game for too long. It's done this ever since I got the thing back in around March of last year, so it's not a surprise to me when it crashes. This hasn't really been a big issue for me because I haven't played that many 3Dfx games. Or rather, I have, but I haven't really been getting a lot of mileage out of them.

Bloated registry
A couple of days ago I looked in System/Control Panel and discovered that the size of the Administrator profile was an incredible 150 megs! Obviously something is wrong, although it doesn't seem to be harming my system. I'm looking for answers and, in particular, I'd like to find exactly where all that bloat is going in my registry. However, I don't know of any tools that can display the size of all the registry keys in a branch for you. So I'm pretty much stuck until I find a utility like that or somebody comes up with an answer on the newsgroup.

7:36 PM
Xing MPEG encoder and MP3 files
You'll recall that a week or two ago I mentioned that Xing MPEG Encoder Version 2.1 had added the ability to encode Layer III files. I finally tried it out today. It's shockingly fast. I encoded a 5:10 song in 1:12, and the program is not even multithreaded! That's right, less than 1/4 of real-time. Quality of the resulting MP3 is almost indistinguishable from command line l3enc using high quality. Strangely enough, I encoded the same song on my friend's Pentium-II 300 and it only finished 4 seconds faster. I figure it must be limited by his hard disk or something. I'm pretty positive the encoding process is not taking advantage of MMX, but still, the process should have gone around 40-50% faster on his system.

I had a hell of time trying to create the profile for an MP3 audio stream though. Every time I tried to create a profile from scratch, it would encode the file at 64kbps mono, no matter what changes I made to the profile. Finally what I ended up doing was renaming an existing 128kbps joint stereo MP3 to .mpa and extracting a profile from that, which works just fine. Xing MPEG Encoder likes to assume that all MPEG audio streams are named with the extension .mpa. So whenever you create an MP3 with it, you have to rename the file to .mp3. Other than that, it works fine. The speed is far, far beyond anything else I've seen to date.

2:37 AM
Tanarus 0.93
The latest revision of this network tank game (kinda like Tokyo Wars on the Internet with 20 people, if you've ever seen that arcade game) is out. I was watching my friend play it for a while on his Riva 128 and it looked really cool. I spent most of the night trying to get my computer to run it, but I have a doozy of a problem. Tanarus absolutely refuses to see my 3Dfx card. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that my Mystique also hardware accelerates D3D. Tanarus is good enough to try to present you with a list of choices to pick from...it just isn't showing me the 3Dfx! I even got a Sony development guy on the phone from the chat room who walked me through a whole bunch of stuff to try (none of which worked, unfortunately). He was pretty cool, we were talking about all the different plans Sony has for Tanarus and other net games like EverQuest. We also talked about Ultima Online (and how everybody turned to pkilling to have fun in that game).

Oh well. Bottom line is, I probably won't be getting my 3D card working unless they come up with some sort of fix or something. The game is pretty neat, and there are a lot of different ways to configure your tank (stealthy, long-range, etc). It definitely has potential.