Thursday, January 22, 2004

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:31 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It is officially brutally cold up here. The Weather Channel says that it is -8F with -33F windchill. My thermometer says -12F. I just got done shoveling the snow. I had to stop three times to come in and warm up. I don't mind winter weather, but this is ridiculous. I'll try not to think that Orlando was (and probably is) at least 80 degrees warmer.

We Love/Hate Cellphones -- 10:29 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I had to chuckle when I saw that according to an MIT survey the cellphone is the most hated yet most needed piece of technology. When I was flying down to Orlando and back, I was amazed at the number of people talking on cellphones. 95% of the conversations went something like this, "I'm at the airport. The airport. No, I'm not on the plane yet. I'm still at the airport." A couple of people were conducting business too, but the majority were using theirs as a way to kill time. I whittled away my time playing yahtC or listening to MP3s on my PDA.

In a mostly unrelated note: I wonder how Chicago O'Hare airport got the woman from the opening sequence in Half-Life to do their pre-recorded announcements. It was especially odd hearing that on the moving sidewalks. Thankfully, no goateed guys with orange and black jumpsuits came running by, screaming about "containment failures."

In a absolutely unrelated note: It was interesting just to sit and listen as I waited for my return flight from Orlando. Next to me was a British man talking on his cellphone. Beyond that were two German men in black turtlenecks talking about something on a laptop. To my left was a family speaking Spanish. A little further down was a family speaking (I assume) Korean. Quite the melting pot experience. I don't get to see that much in Northern Wisconsin.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

icculus on UT2K4 -- 11:41 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ryan "icculus" Gordon updated his .plan with a few updates/corrections on the Mac and Linux versions of Unreal Tournament 2004. Here's the scoop, liberally yanked from the .plan:

1. The speech-to-text thing for talking to the bots is Windows-only. It uses a library from Microsoft. I was misquoted, I'm sorry if you were looking forward to this. Voice-over-IP _will_ work on the Mac, and work seemlessly between Windows, Linux, and Mac users.
2. I'm not promising the Mac version will be out first; it might happen by a tiny bit, but it's not going to be some sort of World Exclusive if it does. What you should be walking away with is the understanding that ut2004 will be ready with the PC version, and you don't have to wait for months and months.
3. "Halo rip-off" vehicles: okay, look, your going to see some similarities with Halo, and Battlefield 1942. Cross-polination is a way of life in the game industry, and we'd be fools to avoid things that have worked well in other titles. We aren't looking to clone Halo, honest.

My main concern was with the VOIP stuff. I'm glad (and, to be perfectly honest, surprised) to see it will be supported in Linux.

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