Official Pixelopolis Off-Topic Thread

[Chilly]

Man, I've been idle here for far too long.... ...


Need to get some action going soon or my head is gonna melt!! @_@

[goat]

*sticks bl00's head in the freezer*

[Blick]

Is there anyone graduating this year? I don't here about too many people and their completion of post-secondary school/college.

I will be graduating, if I finish this correspondence course before Friday. Yes, this Friday. I have to turn in all the written work (little of it is done  ) and I will have to pass every class. If I pass all my classes this year, that'll be a personal best. It's sad, really.

If I do graduate this year, I will either join the Navy or go to college at UAF. I'm not sure yet. I personally think the Navy is better in that it'll put my life on track straight out of high school, but the people whose thoughts on the subject I care about most are saying to go stay here. If I do stay, I don't know what I'll be doing. Which kind of irks me.

I prefer to worry about my correspondence course presently. If I don't get that done, then there's no use to be thinking ahead just yet. Even if I don't finish it by Friday, I still have until August before it expires so I'll definitely graduate (assuming I pass all my other classes), but I won't walk at the ceremony is all.

[Rox]

I'm gonna need the words of some tech people here. After half a year of puzzledness, I found out what's wrong with my computer, what makes it overheat when I play certain games. The fan that sits on the actual graphics card itself is completely and utterly pulverized. (And I didn't even know I had a fan there! Why won't anyone ever tell me about these things?!)

Apparently it's a little 40mm fan with a two-pin connector thingy, sitting on an ATI Radeon X600/550 thingy. So, does anyone have any advice on what fan to buy, and.. how to freaking get the old one out of the way, 'cause it's kinda stuck there.  x.x


[edit] Kay. Radeon X600 Pro is what I'm looking at here. I've got a few options... The only thing confusing me still is that every dang fan I've seen has a connector (that's what they're called right?) with four wires/pins... mine's got two. Is there... um... something to do about that? [/edit]

[Rawsushi]

I'm sure someone out there knows of a website that explains the limitations of the DS (as far as restrictions on tiles, palette rows, etc.)
I can find nothing. I'm used to GBA stuff, but I'm sure the DS is a different beast altogether.

[ptoing]

The DS has 2 processors and one is a bit better than the gba and one actually a bit worse for whatever reason.

If you are in 2D mode the restrictions are basically the same as on the gba but you can have an extended palette where you have 16 256 colour palettes for sprites instead of just one but that's not really efficient in terms of visual ram. Another problem is that the screen is bigger on the DS. On the gba you could have a background that tiles and is 256 pixles wide so you are always 16 pixles ahead or you have a buffer of 8 pixels on both sides left and right. On the DS that's not possible so scrolling in 2D is actually more expensive afaik.

Also the 3d capabilities are a bit crap. you can only have 2000 visible polygons per frame which is not much and the alpha stuff is meh.

BUT if you use 3D for 2D that's rocking. in 2D mode you can only have 128 sprites i think (maybe 256 not sure) and only 32 rotating/scaling ones. In 3d however you can just map a texture  on a quad and treat it as a sprite,works with animation as well and you get free rotation and scaling one 2000 sprites in theory. Same goes for backgrounds, just make them in 3d and intead of 4 backgrounds you can have 8 (there can't be more than 8 visible polygons on top of each other until the z-sorting fucks up)

Yeh, i could gather more knowledge if anyone is interessted.

[Xion]

What's afaik mean?

[Rawsushi]

Yeh, i could gather more knowledge if anyone is interessted.

Pretty please.

I'm actually attempting some background art for the system, and I'm used to the GBA. What I have so far looks okay, but still very GBA, and I know that the DS can handle more than that.

[Blick]

What's afaik mean?

As far as I know.

[ptoing]

Basically when if you wanna make a PURE 2d look game you should use the 3d capabilities of the DS, it's way more powerful. I am quite sure that everything in advance wars ds is based on texturemapped quads. I will look up some more info. Do you have MSN monsoon?