h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I posted a message on your latest MaW's Musings article a couple of days ago, but I guess you missed it. I'll repeat it here just for the sake of something to do.


You couldn't have timed this article better, MaW! I'm soon to be buying a GeForce of some kind soon (hopefully a GeForce 3, in which case it will have to be the Ti200 - the cheapest), and I've been looking for some info on it. Who manufactured the board?

And you're looking forward to Unreal II as well, eh? It's the very reason I'm upgrading my computer!
(Just got an Athlon XP 1600 to start the process.)


And I'll add that I'm about to open a new section at an editing site (the Ancilla Editing Network - I doubt you've heard of it) about editing for the Unreal series, including Unreal 2 when that comes out. We're looking for staff members to simply do stuff (haven't really worked out a full plan yet. ). Thought you might be interested.

Sorry, guess I haven't got around to checking the article for threads yet!

Mine's a Creative Labs 3D Blaster GeForce3 Ti200 - rather nice really, and not too expensive. however, if you want absolute performance, I hear that the cards made by Gainward are good for overclocking... they cost a bit more though.

I wish I had an Athlon XP! Mine's a Thunderbird 800, and I think it might have a little trouble with some of Unreal II's more amazing features, even though the graphics card should be able to cope. And a GeForce3 is a must for that game - without something with pixel shaders, you won't get the differing specular highlights on different materials, which promises to increase realism massively

In fairness I should point out that the ATi Radeon 8500 also has pixel and vertex shaders, and has pretty good performance too. It has been said that if they ever work out how to make decent drivers, they might equal the GeForce3. Shame the GeForce4 is coming out soon, isn't it?

When I get Unreal II I intend to play around with editing it, but until then I'm not doing any because I don't have time!!! Still, it'll be interesting to look and join in when I've learned Unreal II editing. I've done quite a bit with Wheel of Time, which is based on the Unreal Tournament engine, so it shouldn't be too unfamiliar, save for all the scripting. WoT's class heirarchy for pawns and weapons was all very different.

The card sounds cool.
I'm after a simple Novatech GeForce3 Ti200, because it's the cheapest. It's mostly the chipset that matters, and that's the same on all board... so I'm led to believe.
How much did your card cost, if I may ask?

The GeForce4's coming out soon?

I can't wait for Unreal II. The screenshots of it are absolutely amazing, as are the videos.

We'll be happy to have you join us when you want to. I'll bung a link up on my user page once the site's up - I'm waiting for the subdomain to be made available.
If you have anything of interest from Wheel of Time, I'd gladly have a look at it. Anything for some content on our site!

I thought I'd replied to this post already...

Anyway, yes, as far as I'm aware, the GeForce4 is coming out soon, but I'm not sure as to exactly when or what it will be able to do.

I've got nothing from Wheel of Time that's worth seeing really. It was fun at the time, but my level-editing skills are awful. I suspect that if I try again with Unreal II I might do better. Then again, maybe not. We'll see.

Well, whenever it's coming out, it'll have to do a lot to beat its older brother.

I'm writing a few tutorials as we speak. I might write a sort of introduction to Unreal Engine editing, based on what I did. You know, finding out all those variables I can change around with lights and other entities - great fun!

Oh yes, that's fun. I had some great times playing around with WoT's ter'angreal classes to make new weapons...

Something I'd like to do for Unreal II actually - add some weapons that are a bit like some of WoT's ter'angreal. Fireballs, that kind of thing

Oh, that does sound good! Weapon models and code... Just what we're after! We'll be glad to have you join our team once you've got to grips with editing for Unreal II.

Of course, hopefully you should be able to use our site to help you get to grips with it.

Well, WoT ter'angreal don't actually need models apart from the pickup meshes, assuming you make all the effects out of ParticleSprayer derivatives. They do need textures for the HUD though...

OK, drat - that's already over my head! My field is level editing, and I don't know how to do stuff to the HUD, or how to change weapon configurations. Anything beyond UnrealEd is beyond my skills.
But not necessarily beyond yours.

Well I'm a programmer, not an artist, so perhaps we can complement each other... and UnrealScript is a pretty nice language, although learning U2's class libraries might take a while, and I'm hideously busy at the moment.

I found something about the specs for the GeForce4 - it's got 600MHz DDR memory, and reportedly extra vertex shader pipelines... this is leaked, though, so expect more info in the future...

yum!

I've never really had a look at UnrealScript. Is it in any way similar to a well-known language? Say, Pascal.

Those specs sound great already! Pity they won't be needed for about three years.

UnrealScript is like a cross of Java and C++. Not bad really.

Hmm... I might get into C and its variants at some stage, though not just yet. Delphi suits me just fine for now.

By the way, the Unreal Editing site is up now. You can find the link on my user space.

Get into them. Good languages. Delphi's good too though * points at GuidePost *

Hmm, must find some time to write a new version of that...

GuidePost's a great project, you know. I hope you keep working on it.
(As long as you do have time, obviously.)

I'll give you a glimpse of my to-do list, shall I?

1. Pass exams
2. Sleep
3. Finish Netland White Tower VI
4. Finish re-write and improvement of Shadows of the Lost Part One: The Dusk
5. Complete port of Towel to gtkmm2
6. Do group project

But yes, I intend to fit some GuidePost in somewhere, I have some exciting ideas in this head of mine for how to work on it. It may change quite considerably, and may very well start from a totally new codebase...

I'm considering dropping the Delphi version and writing a new one in C++ using gtkmm2 as the API, once it's stable. This could be a problem for some people as I'll have to compile it with CygWin or something, but at least gtk+2 is designed from the start to work on Windows, so it should be okay. The advantages of this are that I get experience developing a big app in gtkmm2/C++, and it'll run on Linux with the same codebase

Is that a bad idea? gtk+2's TextView widget will let me do many things I want to be able to do for GuidePost quite easily, as it makes handling the whole semi-WYSIWYG editing idea so easy it'd be in the first version.

That's a good list there.
And you don't wanna know mine - I've got too much going on at the moment.

I don't know much C++, as I said, but I'm pretty sure it's better than Delphi. A WYSIWYG GuideML editor would be absolutely fab!
Give it a few years and it could become the Dreamweaver of the h2g2 community.

unlikely, gtk+2 for Windows is likely to have a very gtk look and feel, since I don't think any of the developers will want to write a GDK backend that uses proper Windows widgets. So GuidePost written that way would look and feel quite different.

And not to mention the large numbers of support libraries required for gtk+2 including:
- atk (provides accessibility, keyboard navigation etc)
- pango (international bi-directional text rendering library)
- glib (fantastic C utility library)
- gdk (the GIMP Drawing Kit)
- gtk (the GIMP Tool Kit)
- freetype2 (used by Pango)

and more... joy! I think I'll wait until I see how gtk+2 support on Windows is after the stable release.

Well, Dreamweaver doesn't look anything like what I can do in Delphi, and uses a lot of non-Windows stuff. I'm sure you could do something similar.

GIMP is that imaging stuff, isn't it? (Or have I got all those acronyms with G in all mxed up? ) I'll have to try it.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, an excellent Free alternative to Adobe PhotoShop. It's not quite as good as PhotoShop is, but it's coming fairly close and for all ordinary purposes it's plenty powerful enough.

Plus, GIMP 2 is under development and is looking very nice, with a totally re-written imaging system to enable some really, really, really amazing things to be done - or so they tell us