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Archive for the ‘Simulation’ Category

Piezoelectricity powers artificial bunny

March 27, 2009 mrgnome 2 comments
B. Gillespie

Illustration by B. Gillespie

Well, maybe  not an artificial bunny but ScienceNOW Daily News Reported this on Mar. 26, 2009

Georgia Institute of  Technology researchers have built a piezoelectric effect (mechanical pressure converted to electricity) nanogenerator, the first to use this effect at the nanoscale.

This could allow microsensors and miniature medical devices to derive their electrical needs from their surroundings instead of from batteries.

Microsoft shuts down Flight Simulator Studio

January 25, 2009 mrgnome Leave a comment

Microsoft has closed down one of their most profitable and oldest studios, the ACES studio that makes the Flight Simulator series. Rumors were confirmed yesterday.

“I can confirm the closure of Aces Studio,” a Microsoft representative told GameSpot.

As a Flight Simulator enthusiast myself i think it’s really sad to see ACES go. I’m still flying FS9 and FSX will be giving computers something to think about for some more years, but loosing all this talent must mean that there is an enormous task ahead to re-take the lost momentum in the development of this franchise, should they decide to continue it.

“You should expect us to continue to invest in enabling great Live experiences on Windows, including flying games, but we have nothing additional to announce around Flight Simulator specifically at this time.” the same source told Gamespot.

Well I guess we’ll just have to see, but it’s sad indeed….

Crysis Cryengine2 vs Real Life

January 27, 2008 mrgnome Leave a comment

I keep going on about Crysis, but you need to see this. Are We talking photorealism here or what. Check this out:

Categories: Crysis, Games, Graphics, Simulation

Crysis: Enable Very High (DX10) Settings in XP, New updated hack

January 25, 2008 mrgnome 33 comments

This hack should work for Crysis Warhead Enthusiast Settings, because it is using the same cryengine 2!

Enable the “Very High” quality setting in Crysis and Crysis Warhead on your dx9 or dx10 compatible hardware without having Vista and DX10 (DirectX 10)!

After building a new PC-rig, I had to try it out with the best PC game on the market today. At least as far as near photorealisticgraphics goes, Crysis. Under Windows XP (DirectX9) you can’t select the “Very High” settings in the graphics menu. These are reserved for Vista (DX10). However I don’t know if this is because of a Vista marketing thing, but the Very High quality can easily be achieved under Windows XP (DX9) , replacing a few textfiles in the Crysis Folder. (CRYSISGameConfigCVarGroups)

This  has been known for quite some time. What it does isthat it changes crysis “High” settings to have “Very High” quality. The old version of the hack just changed this. This meant that there was no way of selecting the old “High” setting, because “High” was now “Very High” and the step below was Medium.

My version of the hack changes the “Medium” setting to high quality, and the “Low” setting to medium quality.

You are right, then there is no way of achieving low quality anymore. But if you are interested in “Very High” settings, youare probably not going to want to run that on a machine that only can display low settings…

Here is some further technical explanation:

I did a remake of the Cvar files. Instead of just copying the high settings to [3] I also renamed old [3] to [2], old [2] to [1] and removed old [1]

This way what used to be:

High is Very High
(This is all the candy!)

Medium is High
(What used to be our highest setting is now activated when we choose medium)

Low is Medium
(It doesnt go any lower since there are only 3 steps in XP i had to get rid of low settings alltogether)

Before with the old cVars “hack” if I chose to lower some settings, I actually had to go two steps to medium (from very high) now since meduim corresponds to high it’s only one step in that sense. There will of course be no Low settings, since they are now like the old medium, but I think anyone who uses thisk hack does not need to have anything set at low

Before we had 4 2 1 now we have 4 3 2 Which makes more sense.

Just like the original hack, I didn’t touch the MotionBlur file which is set to 1 (Very High Would be 3)

Results

It seems to work fine, these are screenshots taken at 1280*800 scaled to 50% and auto contrast corrected with Microsoft office image editor to sharpen them a bit.

This is Low (as standard Medium):

This is Medium (as standard High):

This is High (the tweaked mode Very High):

This means that if you install these cvars files, just go back to the menu and select “Medium” settings and everything will be just as it was previously on “High”, consequently setting something to “Low” will correspond to the old “Medium” setting.

I think you get the point

Here is the zip-file with the cvars



Unzip to the folder CRYSISGameConfigCVarGroups

“CRYSIS” represents the install folder for crysis. It might vary. Thx Jonno.

If you think this was helpful, consider buying me a cup of coffee:


)

Disclaimer: I’ve had one report of losing savegames after changing the cvars files. This makes no sense at all, because the two things don’t have anything remotely to do with eachother. Sometimes updating the game with a PATCH might make you appear you lost your savegames, just see that you load the game with the same profile as before and your savegames will be back. However this hack only changes some graphics card settings and should in no way make you lose your savegames. But of course, you should use common sense when editing gamefiles. If you don’t know what you’re doing don’t mess with it, and buy a console ;)

If you want a free way to automatically backup your savegames try 2GB Free Online Backup – Mozy

World Trade Center collapse by explosives. Documentary

September 6, 2007 mrgnome 5 comments

I just saw this documentary and I think sheds a light on some of the controversial theories about 9/11. A lot of things indicate that WTC was demolished by means of explosives in a controlled fashion, and could not have collapsed so completely and just basically turn into dust by the plane impact only.

I tried to post the video here by means of VodPod but it’s too slow with large files, please go to Stage6 to watch the video.

[EDIT: The video has been removed from Stage6, reasons unknown. But there are a lot of other 9/11 documentaries to watch, Instead i recommend this one]