Monthly Archives: May 2004

Rallisport Challenge 2

After having finished the “career” mode of Project Gotham Racing 2 (on bronze admittedly), I picked up Rallisport Challenge 2 this Friday. I was a bit afraid that changing from a city-racer to a rally game would cause problems, but these fears were unfounded — after about 10 minutes the new racing model took hold and always feels right. The graphics are amazing to say the least: I don’t know how DICE have managed, but it runs at a rock-solid 50 (or 60) fps and is at least as pretty as PGR 2 (which runs at half that). I have never spent this much time in a game just watching the replays of my driving. The particle effects in particular are awesome.
The sound is very nice (but at home I don’t have my 5.1 setup but I expect it to be fine there as well — no Xbox game has yet disappointed me in that regard). I wonder why my Ford Focus is squeaking when I release the throttle, though… 😉 The music is very fitting as well (heavy-ish) but there could be a few more tracks for aural variety.
The damage model looks nice but doesn’t seem to have much of an influence on the actual driving, and the driving itself is focused on fun and not gobs of realism (though I can’t say for sure as I’ve never played any of the supposedly more realistic Colin McRae-games). You still need plenty of skill in any case (so I’m glad PGR 2 taught me the value of proper braking).
In the past two days, I’ve finished the Amateur- and Pro-Championships and enjoyed that immensely. The races in Nordic countries are rather difficult because it’s hard to see the course, night-time races are similarly difficult (but the headlights look amazing), but both never cease to be fun so far.
Haven’t touched live or multiplayer, but there’s not much that can go wrong there. Highly recommended.

Lazyness and Legacy

I’ve uploaded vStrip and the Wavelet Kompressor (upper right corner). The old links (at least from the imported Blogger entries) are probably invalid as they were relative to a different site-structure.
Update: Actually went back and fixed the links from the blog. They should work now…

Postfix

I’ve been trying to set up my mailserver in a way which blocks virii. That worked reasonably well by blocking executable attachments except for those pesky NetSky-variants that come inside ZIP-archives (which some idiots obviously do open).
In any case, I’ve now installed a proper virus scanner (AntiVir MailGate which is free for personal use in all its variants). It’s easy enough to set up (as long as you can read instructions ;)) and seems to work well.
The net effect of all this is that I have reduced my daily email traffic from about 10meg to approximately 1meg. If your mail is among the 9meg that got left out, I must have misconfigured something… 😛

Default Template

As SixApart has announced their new pricing scheme for MovableType 3 (which I incidentally read about on the WordPress Dev-Blog), I am quite glad I didn’t install MovableType.
The “fear” of a multitude of default WordPress templates popping up in many places may be well-founded, but I moved before that 😉 (and plan on changing the template eventually — I still need to integrate some static pages (vStrip / Wavelet Kompressor most prominently) — the same goes for ev1l.net which replaces the stolen log0.org).

Moving is (NOT) fun!

Seems like the server move has happened… Still are things very preliminary around here (and knowing myself will probably only get better very slowly), and most content is still offline.
In any case, I’ve gotten rid of Strato, which is reason enough to celebrate. Email probably is (was?) flakey, so apologies for that. Not that the 183 virii that got bounced care…