I can't get enough of this game, I only wish the aircraft was a little easier to control but I'm starting to get the hang of it.

I can't understand anyone that says the graphics are dated, have you played it on full settings? It looks stunning. Granted it doesn't look as good as Crysis or UT3 but to say it looks dated because it's not as good as 2 games on the market is a little short sighted. Look how many games out there it looks far better than...

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The sound issue in Oblivion can be caused by a couple of things.

Firstly, how fast is your hard drive? When a game plays a sound, it loads it off the hard drive on the fly since there would be far too much information to pre-cache in most cases. If your hard drive speed is low then it could be having difficulty loading the sound quick enough.

Second, is your sound card built into the motherboard of your PC or is it a PCI sound card? This can also make a difference due to motherboard embeded sound relies on the CPU to process sound data whereas a PCI sound card uses local chips to do this, making for better quality sound and freeing up the CPU.

The second will most likely be the case, it has the biggest effect. You can only really get away with on board sound with a really fast CPU if you're not too bothered about sound quality.

As for your second question, Gary's mod is basicly a sandbox "do what you want to do" mod where you play around with the physics in the game. You can spawn a car and drive around or spawn a door and put wheels on it, and drive that. It's a lot of fun but it's very short lived, after you've done everything silly like attaching baloons to a door and soring into the sky, it gets boring.

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D9-THC is absolutely correct about CSS, this method of bullet calculation is also true for a lot of games. The current trend is to use a physical object and calculate impacts with the actual playermodels via the physics engine. Engines that do this are Doom3Engineand Unreal Engine 3 off the top of my head, I also hear that Crysis uses a similar method as well.

With physics controlling the collision with bullets, you actually need to aim slightly ahead of the enemy to accomodate for bullet travel which is far more realistic than the CSS method of instant detection. You'll also notice in the screenshot that D9-THC posted that the hitboxes are larger than the player model, which is obviously not very realistic.

Most games that actually use the physics engine to calculate bullet collisions don't draw a bullet as such, they might draw a line to indicate something moving fast like has already been mentioned but only Max Payne and Fear that I can think of actually draw a bullet model. I'm not sure but I think Fear only draws a bullet when in slow motion though.

Personally I think it's much better using the physics engine because it increases the realism in the game which makes the game more believable, but it can get frustrating sometimes when you just can't hit anyone.

aussieboy911, calulating the bullets in physics doesn't harm performance at all. Physics calculations are very optomised these days, I believe the Havok 2 engine in HL2 is capable of calculating 400+ solid body objects in real time without harming the FPS. The PhysX on the other hand can do many thousand solid body collisions as well as many other effects like cloth and liquid. Though the PhysX requires added hardware.

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Ubisoft released a press statement saying that the console versions are on target for November but the PC version is being pushed back to "early 2008". I'd guess we'll see Assassins Creed in March 2008 (NOT official, just my best guess).

I'm still confused as to why Gamespot and various other websites are still saying November for PC version, while Amazon of all places is reporting January. Amazon are known for their release date guesses though, wait until Ubisoft announce a solid release date before getting too excited about Assassins Creed, it's going to be a long wait for us PC gamers.

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This is normal, if your motherboard temperature hits 70C then you have a problem. Intel CPU's tend to run around 40C but if it hits 50C then you might want to look into better coolant.

You've got nothing to worry about.

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Game for Windows LIVE is very poor, Xfire covers pretty much all the friend communication features and you can just google for downloadable content. So no, it's not worth doing unless you want to start PC gaming with good graphics, but since a lot of big titles are coming to Xbox360 and PC you could just stick to Xbox360 gaming and still get a good experience.

This link will tell you everything there is to know about Games for Windows LIVE.

http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/Live/Pages/AboutLive.aspx

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For me it will depend on whether buying a Geforce 9 will give me noticably better performance than a second Geforce 8. In the past, two of the last generation have been rather close in performance to one of the latest generation. If it's a toss between £180 ish for a second Geforce 8800 (when Geforce 9 is released the 8's should come down to this or lower...I hope) or a Geforce 9 at £350 + to get the same level ofperformance, it's a no brainer. But if the performance is staggeringly higher then I'll go with a Geforce 9, but not straight away, I'd wait until my Geforce 8800 starts to cry when it sees new games.

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Depends what kind of hype, if you mean the publisher pimping the game and shoving it down everyones throat then Halo 3 is without competition. But if you mean developers telling everyone how "revolutionary and a new era for gaming!" kind of hype then I would have to go with Assassins Creed.

I can't think of any other game in production that had so many videos and trailers spamed into websites as Assassins Creed. Don't get me wrong, I want Assassins Creed but with the hype that's built it up I'm fairly certain I'll be dissapointed and it will have no replayability.

Crysis is a very close second though, my main problem with Crysis is that they've only shouted loadly about the graphics, the rest they havn't said quite as much about. Every feature mentions graphics but only a few mention the other aspects which just sound pretty standard. Sure I'll enjoy it when it's out though.

And I think the less said about Halo 3 the better.

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Well at least it looks like the game will pick up later, thanks everyone for your replies.

I do have the latest patch, it's the first thing I always do.

I'll have to check out some mods for the weapons I think, I don't like the reasoning of Buffalo_Soulja that "The guns are innacurate because that's how guns actually behave." :) I guess you're right, but I like to think the character is good enough to put a bullet where it's aimed.

DaLegend - "You played for a couple of hours and still didn't get any weapons besides a pistol? What did you do all that time?"

I er...died and started again a few times, I don't save, I usually leave saving to the auto save in games as they are usually well placed enough. After getting killed by the guards under the rail line and having to start again from the beginning I was a bit grumpy but it was my own fault, I did try to take on a group of guys with rifles on my own with a pistol :P I was asking for it really.

I agree Nitros2O, it is an ambitious game which is what drew me to it in the first place.

I'm just hoping a mod will relieve my gun woes, with that I think I'll be happy enough to finish this game.

Thanks everyone.

Have fun.

Is it just me or is STALKER unfinished? I just got it today and played it for a couple of hours and the feeling I got was it's about a year away from being finished. Some conversations have voice actingbut most don't, either have no voice acting at allor all conversations with voice acting, doing just some like the main story line conversations is just lazy. And Half Life 1 had better lip sync.

As for the story line, I'm bewildered, it gives you no background or introduction beyond "I found this guy". The manual does have somebackground that just dribbles on for two pages when it could just say "There was a big bang, then it happened again, and some guys turned up to look for stuff", that just about says it all. I also liked the mistake "160,000 peopleleft without thinking they would never see home again", gotta love a double negative.

While the graphics are alright I can't say they are strikingly realistic, there aretons of effects and detail in there but somehow they've managed to make it look mundane.

I've played a lot of FPS games (mostly recently actually) where firing normally is a waste of time, if you don't use the iron sights you might as well throw your shoes at them for all the good it will do. But with STALKER it's even worse, point blank range down the iron sights, in the head and the guy just turns round and starts shooting me. I admit I've only played for a couple of hours so I only had a pistol at the time but thats still bad. I don't mind a game where the accuracy is bad at a distance, I can understand that, but when it's bad up close you're out of options.

I will continue to play it in the grim hope that it gets better, I can look past the bland graphics and odd narrative but I can't get past the poor weapons. I'm just hoping that there are better, more accurate weapons later on, I might put up with it for now in that case. I'm also praying that the story line picks up, I like a game where I can get involved and feel a part of it, I like it when I actually give a damn about the characters and want to know what happens next. So far I'm not gripped by STALKER.

Had anyone else felt like this or am I just overly picky?

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