TF2 Bandwidth Usage

For having 20 players in at one point, we only peaked at 1.5 Mbit outbound, a lot less than I expected. I don't know for sure if that's due to a QOS cap that kicked in at 1.5 or not, but even so, you can see the average was closer to 1 Mbit of traffic.

Inbound traffic hovered around 0.5 Mbit while gaming, but spiked to 8.2 Mbit when I was installing TF2 :-)

Goodbye, ATI

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday said it will remove the ATI name from its products by the end of the year, killing a brand name synonymous with graphics enthusiasts for 25 years.

AMD offers a range of graphics products under the ATI brand, including the Radeon, FirePro and Eyefinity offerings. The chip designer will instead attach the name AMD to those products by the end of the year, said Drew Erskine, an AMD spokesman.

The change in brand name won't affect the company's graphics product offerings or plans, Erskine said.

University of Florida Starcraft Class

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/university-of-florida-introduces-starcraft-class-28-08-2010/

Those who enroll in the class are expected to use what they learned in a business practice or when the Zerg come tearing across the solar system bent on mankind’s destruction.

Hide Your Wife!

You'll be happy to know that Antoine Dodson is "Riding YouTube Out Of The 'Hood'".

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129381037

Hey, a guy'll take a break anywhere he can get one, right? So hide yer wife! Hide yer kids! Hide yer husband!

CS:Source Server (#2)

Okay, so here's what I've done to the CS:Source server:

Administration tools are installed. Bind a key to sm_admin and a menu will pop up when you hit it. If you don't have some level of admin and think you should, I need your steam ID and can set that up. At the very least an ITOE member should be able to kick and change maps.

Weapon restrictions automatically restricts the AWP (one-shot kill scoped rifle.) Once the noobs like Messiah are used to the game, we can always unrestrict it.

Other temporary weapon restrictions are available from the admin menu.

A bomb timer was installed for the noobs ;-) It will announce with a voice and text at 30 seconds and count down to explosion.

A team auto-balancer is installed. It is supposed to balance the teams based on size and skill and will also restrict joining a team with more players. This may need some tweaking after we get rolling with it.

If someone gets out of control on the server there's admin punishments available like setting them on fire, etc.

Fast downloads are enabled through a server on an entirely different Internet connection and everything is compressed for fast downloads.

Map rotation should work now. Cross your fingers.

I've very carefully not installed anything that would impact the actual gameplay or balance except for weapon restrictions.

CS: Source in Linux

I run a dual-monitor Ubuntu 10.04 system for work. It actually has two dual-port nVidia cards in it, but I'm only using the 9800 GT right now.

I used a utility called PlayOnLinux to install steam and tweak my WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator - it emulates Windows programs for Linux. Yeah go figure on the name, that's geeks for ya!)

Installing steam and CS:Source was easy enough. Tweaking it to work since I have two monitors was a challenge. If you only run one monitor, none of this would be necessary.

First, I had to tweak my Xorg file to make sure it knew what to do when a Windows program asks for full screen. It was as easy as changing one line in the xorg.conf file from:

Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0"

to:

Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0; DFP-0: 1920x1080 +0+0"

Notice it has two pairs of setups now - one for dual-head, and one following the semi-colon for full screen that only uses one monitor.

Next, I tweaked my launch options for CounterStrike to the following:

-fullscreen -width 1920 -height 1080 -heapsize 1048576

Again, due to the dual-head issues, things went slightly strange before forcing it to 1920x1080. The heapsize option lets it take advantage of all the extra RAM I have to improve performance, but I'm not sure it actually did anything for me.

Everything runs just fine - I get around 100fps with moderate detail. I've tried several video options but I do seem to be able to see light sources through the walls. Here's a screenshot from de_nuke while connected to Dizzle's server:

A compilation of Mafia II reviews

• Destructoid 6.5/10 
• G4TV  (4/5) 
• Game Informer 9/10 
• GamePro 3.5/5 
• Gaming Nexus B 
• IGN 7/10
• Joystiq 3.5/5
• Planet Xbox 360 9.3/10 
• VG Revolution 7.6/10 
• WorthPlaying 8./10 

The metascore currently stands at 80.

Brink developer diary

Splash Damage is making a lot of promises that I'd love to see them deliver on, but I just don't see how their execution is going to live up to their ambition.  Such is the nature of the hype-machine:

Portal 2: "Wheatley" trailer

Good news for CoD: Black Ops

As reported at ArsTechnica and elsewhere, the game will have a dev console, dedicated servers, and mod tools (in some form, at least).

It should have been a given, but this is still a welcome reversal of the "creeping consolization" that has plagued PC gaming for the last few years.  Valve gets it, Id (mostly) gets it, and it seems that Treyarch gets it, too.  Good on them.