Cutts

George Galloway is a British politician who does things his own way. He's the slightly mental one who stood in front of a US senate subcomittee and shouted "THEN CHARGE ME... CHARGE ME!" when they were accusing him of perjury about his ties to Iraq, a few years ago. Anyway, for the funny bit, skip to 21:40. I broadly agree with his opinion, but he just has a very funny way of putting it. Transcript excerpt:

One other thing... be very careful about bad quadrilaterals... they're REALLY easy to make, if you start moving vertices about individually! If you really want to make one, chop it into 2 triangles instead.

OK... I've had this problem a lot. Its fucking annoying! First up - please dont let this stop you from mapping - I lost a shed load of work this way twice when I started. Yes, its pretty heartbreaking, but what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger! I considered not bothering to carry on, but I came back a few days later when I wasn't quite as annoyed any more, and I rebuilt everything that was lost... and made it better! Basically, its really easy to create an invalid brush, without hammer telling you about it. If you save a map with such a brush, and then try and load that map again, it will give you a message about the number of bad brushes and will remove them. Typically, all entities and vis-groups also get deleted, and everything else gets stuck into a single visgroup. I haven't found a solution to this problem, but I have changed the way I work to minimise it: 1) Save often and append a new number to the end of each save. This way, you can reload a version up to about half an hour ago (or the latest save which isn't fucked), and also reload the newer "fucked" version, then copy/paste any bits you can salvage from the fucked version back into the older working version. Tip: delete everything except the new stuff in the fucked version, surround it all with 1 big brush that is snapped to a course grid, group it, copy it, paste it into the working version, then align the surrounding box where needed, ungroup, then delete the box. 2) Save in particular before you do any fiddly brush work, especially with the vertex tool. Watch out when merging vertices... sometimes that can create a bad brush. 3) In general, try and avoid and vertex having any non-integer coordinates. If you use the clipping tool, or you rotate / resize something, its easy to end up with fractional vertex coordinates... whilst these aren't necessarily a problem in themselves, subsequent modification of that brush can cause weird errors, resulting in bad brushes. 4) Watch out, again, with the vertex tool... it is possible to get two or more vertices, VERY close to each other so that when zoomed out they look like they're in exactly the same position but they aren't. This can result in quadrilaterals where all 4 vertices are not on exactly the same plane (which is mathematically impossible). To make matters worse, if you try and select just one of them in any 2d view, it will select both of them. To fix this, you can zoom close up in the 3D view, select each vertex in turn, and manually align each to the grid at 1x1 scale. Or, alternatively, rip out that brush and reconstruct it carefully - you might save yourself a headache. 5) After you have finished the fiddly brush work, save again with a new number, and then close and reload the map to check if there were any errors... it make sense to check just after, so you dont press on with more work only to find you made a mistake hours earlier! 6) Avoid using carve tool. No really - just build it by hand. The carve tool does some retarded stuff, especially if you're trying to carve very complicated shapes. After a while, I kind of got a sense of when I was sailing close to the wind with this problem, so I now know when to save, and rarely do I lose any work now... at most it will be 15 minutes worth, rather than 5 hours worth! I hope that helps!

Fuckin' Chuck Norris!

I'd just like to point out as an outsider, in regards to page 1 of this thread, that there is no comparison between MSNBC and Fox News. MSNBC is certainly a dumbed down news outlet, with a left leaning stance. However, Fox News is so massively biased to the right that it has become an international joke. It is so extreme, it leaves one wondering if there is a team of democrat comedians running it as an elaborate parody of the republicans; unfortunately, it is actually representative of what the majority of republican voters believe... or if they don't believe it yet, they soon will because Fox told them. This is pretty fucking disgraceful, and its something that terrifies many people outside of the US who pay attention to US politics... and I generally lean to the right.

This is why you shouldn't frape people:

I get this quite a lot... my ping is usually in the 120 area, which isn't too bad, but sometimes jumps as high as 200. If I get shot at by another european player with a ping of 200, then the combined latency means an effective ping difference of 400 between us. That is almost half a second, which is an age in a fast paced game like DODS. Its kinda annoying I suppose, being shot "round a corner" but you have to remember that the networking code in source engine games (all games these days) reinterpolates incoming data packets from places with different pings, and retrospectively reorders them to even up the playing field. So, the server lets you run around the corner, and a fraction of a second later recieves data telling it that the guy shot you in the head, so it figures out how many miliseconds ago you should have died, kills you and undoes anything that you did in that time. In effect, although it looks like you're shot round the corner, on his screen, you were shot straight through the window and never made it around the corner! Also... you probably regularly come face to face with an enemy, and put a rifle shot right in their head or chest, only to die straight away and discover you did not damage them. In this case what has happened, is your game client fired the gun, and you heard the shot, but unfortunately during that time the server decided that you died, so the shot never gets counted, and no-one else ever hears/sees it happen. The server cannot, however, go back in time and tell your client not to play the gunshot sound / animation!

Dunno Gardner... it might be the laptops onboard sound that does it. I've had this problem before with integrated soundcards, so depending on the laptop it might that causing the problem (he's using an audio-jack style headset, not USB). Do you have a USB headset Gardner? If so, then it wont be using your laptops soundcard to input your voice, so you wont get this kind of problem. Anyway... I've elaborated on that in the MSO.

Also... don't call me Sir!... I work for a living!

Ok, first up a couple of standard fixes: 1) Make sure all your drivers for your soundcard and motherboard are updated. It could be a known issue that has been fixed by the manufacturer in the latest driver. 2) Is your mic plugged into a front panel or into the usual back panel? If in the front, try it in the back instead. It might be as simple as that. 3) Check if it works in ventrillo, because if it does its possibly an issue with valve voice, which I have suffered from before. Valve voice is a bit weird; I'm not certain, but I think it uses sound hardware a bit differently to many other programs, and I believe this can cause issues with certain sound cards, particularly onboard ones. If it does seem to be an issue with valve voice and your onboard sound, you may well need a USB headset. Do you have a mate with one you can borrow? If so, try it out and it may well not suffer from the issue (this will confirm where the problem is). If your onboard sound does turn out to be the problem, the easiest fix is to buy a headset that works... there may be some other way of doing it, but I never found it when I had this problem. I throw that open to anyone else who may have experience?

Since then, Kanon has directed me to the right page, so here is his steam id: STEAM_0:0:8207750 http://1stmarineraiders.gameme.com/playerinfo/82352

Name: 'Spiro' or 'Spire' (spelt with a weird character instead of the o/e) Steam I.D: He quit before I got the steam ID (I fucked up), but I assume its extractable from the demo? Reasons for the Ban: Intentionally teamkilling after being warned. Killed at least 3 in spawn then quit. Recommended duration of ban: As long as possible. Demo Provided?: Yes. Last minute contains the bit of teamkilling I got on record. Recorded Demo

I'm not expert on this sort of thing, but I know we'll need a bit more information to help, so to start the ball rolling: First, what sort of problems are you actually having? Low levels inbound/outbound? Crackling? Background hum? Etc.? Second, is it intermittant / partial? Eg, does this happen all the time, just in one game, or on-and-off? Third, does your headset/mike use USB, or a pair of 3.5mm audio jacks? This makes a lot of difference... devices which use audio jacks are essentially using analogue lines into and out of your sound card, and analogue signals can be degraded by interference from other nearby electronics. Almost all analogue headsets suffer from background hiss, and often crackling, due to all the other high-frequency electronic shit inside your PC! A USB device will typically handle all the audio digitally on board the headset device itself, so doesn't usually suffer from such problems. Fourth, if using 3.5mm audio jacks, what is your soundcard? If you don't know, we can probably deduce it from the Dell model numbers. ----- Just as an aside, I used to have crazy problems with an analogue headset... no matter what I did I couldn't get rid of a lot of hiss, and intermittent crackling. I realised that the audiojack I was plugging into was just an extension cable in the case, and the cable ran directly past pretty much every single component on the motherboard. If all 4 CPU cores were running, the crackling would get worse! The best solution was to ditch it, and just buy a new USB headset instead, which has worked flawlessly since then. Mine is a Corsair HS-1, which cost about £70 (somewhere just under $100, I expect). Corsair aren't particularly known for audio equipment (more known for RAM and other core components), but I must say it sounds great, it's absurdly comfortable, and it just works which is the most important thing! Other brands that are supposedly good, are: Sennheiser (in my experience they have unbeatable sound quality, but often break quite quickly and usually quite expensive), Creative Labs (one of the most solid PC-audio brands around... always acceptable, sometimes amazing), Plantronics (I have an old one of theirs... its taken quite a beating and still works) But anyway, before you start shelling out cash, give us a bit more info, and maybe we can help fix the stuff you already have! - Cutts

Mike is a total boss, not an intern!!

Indeed... felicitations on this most momentous of days!

GRAPEFRUIT!!!!

I simply searched for "evil duck" on google images, selected large images, and that came up. No idea what it is... but it seemed appropriately inappropriate!

On the theme of Ducks, and evilness, this image is quite sinister:

Yama, you just suggested all 3 that I was going to suggest! I particularly like Where Eagles Dare, because of the absurd number of Nazis that Clint lights up with dual MP40s. Is anything cooler? And A Bridge Too Far contains practically every British actor working in the 1970s Also Kanganis has it right... Inglorious Bastards (the original one) is amazing... It also has some really funny dubbing at various points, particularly when they steal the nazi's motorbike.

LMAO.... the basket on the head trick is awesome. I had to sneak past some guards, and get upstairs into a house, and then get some key off a guy. Unfortunately he was cowering in the corner, looking at me, so it was going to be impossible to pickpocket. Basket on head, bish bash bosh, key stolen!

Heeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy.... sexy lady!

That was amazing, thanks!

Yeah... it works if you follow it through to youtube.... dunno why embedding is disabled.

Yeah... that song is awesome... reminds me of this: (Its my dick in a box!)