Now we know why the screen savers by 3DPlaneSoft have huge load times. ;) I'm not complaining of course. It's more than worth the wait for some of the ones they've done.

The SereneScreen logo and maybe a few bubbles will be a great lead-in. ;)

keep up the good work. :TU:

Sounds like Jim is making significant progress. :) :TU:

Persistence pays off ! :jester:

I know you hate these questions Jim, but at least its not a time question. :)

Overall in your estimation how much have you gotten done on MA3?

40 percent? 50-60 percent? more/less?

He will probably answer that question, in October! ;)

I think I know what Jim's response will be:

In my best Jim voice: Because it is so difficult to estimate how much time each part of the aquarium will take, it is impossible to assign a percentage of completion. What I mean by that is - he could be *almost* done - and get hung up on one tiny detail that could take a huge amount of time to finish. ....or, feel that he is about 99% done, yet that last 1% takes about as long as the 99%.

Of course, I'm often wrong - so he could be typing up a post right now that says he's 80% done. ...maybe I should just keep my mouth shut. ;)

hehe, this is why I dodn't mention time in the equation ;)

He might be 70 percent done, but still take longer than he figured to finish. :) Basically what I am asking is pertaining strictly to the physical program mechanics. ie. 60% of the textures are in place. 50% of the mechanics are in place, so maybe slightly over 50% in total.

he is @ 99% he told me this on the phone.

Ah. Thanks for that, Highlander. Meanwhile, I've got this really cool bridge you might like to buy!

lol@mark (saw it on eBay, btw.)

lolzor

I had a bad day yesterday, but got things straightened out last night. My daughter brought her laptop home from college because it seemed to have a virus. The symptom was hanging during boot-up, and reporting that files were missing or corrupt. The last two times I saw this happen, a rootkit virus wiped out the hard drive so badly that we had to buy new computers. In one case I paid $700 to recover about 20% of the files on the drive.

So this time I had told her not to try any further boots, and just bring it home. I removed the mini-drive from the laptop, got an adapter cable and mounted it in my machine as a second drive. I let Norton Antivirus work on it for several hours, then copied all the files to my drive. After re-installing it in her computer it booted fairly normally, with the message that Windows had recovered from a serious error.

Having that problem out of the way, I tackled her second complaint: that the computer has not been able to connect to the Internet for the past several months. After trying several different combinations of router settings, cables, and reset sequences, I lost all Internet capabilites for all our computers. The whole day was spent trying to troubleshoot this. It's no wonder that nearly 50% of all routers are returned to the store because they are just TOO HARD to get working. And this was a router that was just working a few minutes before. Well, after about 10 hours of trying I finally got the right combination of settings, cabling, and startup-sequences.

I even (accidentally) found the problem with her Internet capability. MSN Explorer just WOULD NOT connect even though the system seemed to have a strong wireless signal. Out of desperation, I happened to click on Mozilla, and Bang!, it connected. So I did a Google search for "Why will my computer connect to the Internet with Mozilla, but not MSN Explorer?", and amazingly, got some valuable hits. One mentioned proxy server settings, so I researched how to check those. There was an IP address set as a Proxy in Internet Options, so I removed it. The problem instantly disappeared.

A very frustrating day, but at least it's over and I'm back to work on MA3.

Now you are making us all feel guilty... :o

Any how! ... Welcome back to normality! :)

Oh my, what a terrible experience! I can relate to some of it, the router and data lost from viruses.

Today is another day, and hopefully a more productive one.

Jim,

As you know, all of those are signs of malware. If you ask me (insert joke here), your daughter's computer is still compromised. There are so many kinds of malware, you never know what they actually do. Besides, anti-malware products might be able to remove the malware, but rarely actually fix the damage to windows, IE, etc. In the furture, she will probably have some quirky things happen. Reformat and reinstall.

Well, I could spend a couple of days doing that, or working on MA3.

Have her do it. :TU:

I've read about people who could actually do things for themselves, but I've never actually known any. My whole life, I've always had to do everything for everybody. :)

OMG, I can relate to that one. That is until Lauren, that little girl can do anything that I teach her to do.

If the computer techies keep asking me reinstall and reformat without scrutinous fixing virus invasion on my operation system. I am going to choke his neck instantly. It always has solution doing that,reinstall and reformat is the last resort and easy way out.

Actually Celine, reformatting can be a tedious task if you have a lot of data to backup and programs to reinstall. Normally I would agree with you, but like I said, once someone has been infected with a lot of malware and/or virii, there is absolutly no way to be sure that all of it is cleaned out and windows is repaired. Why? Because all of the tools that we have access to are not 100% effective.

At least we now have her files backed up on my hard drive, all 130,000 of them. Amazing how quickly they accumulate. The computer is only a year old.

Ironically, I think this is the only item I've ever purchased an extended warranty for - from CompUSA, which is now an empty building in Redlands.

I feel your pain but I sincerely hope you hooked her drive up to a secondary computer not in any way connected to your work rig. Otherwise it sounds a lot like kissing someone with a cold.

Virii spread themselves...

I just implemented fade-in-from-black when the Aquarium first starts up. On most of my machines, I use 16-bit settings because of the enormous speed advantage I get with the weak ATI and Intel chips. With dithering, the image is virtually indistinguishable from 32-bit, but the background does show a very slight flicker when fading in from black.

When I tried testing this on my new machine with the nVidia 8500 GT card, I found that dithering didn't seem to be working at all. Whenever I switched to 16-bit color, there was severe banding of the background. I couldn't find any switch in the nVidia Settings screen to turn dithering on or off. A quick Google search didn't reveal anything useful regarding lack of dithering on nVidia cards.

Switching between 16 and 32-bit on the new machine did not seem to make any difference in the frame rate, so the point may be moot, but I'd still like to know is dithering capability has been removed. Do any of you have the same problem with newer nVidia cards?

This is a quote from a forum discussing dithering problems with newer nvidia cards: "Nvidia probably made some significant hardware changes which limits 16 bit rendering. Sadly reduced backwards compatibility is inevitable when technology changes. Therefore I doubt this issue will ever be fixed!" I have a 7800 geforce and am having the same problem with older games. The only work around that people have found is to install an older card with the new one and swithch back and forth depending on what application is being used. I do not have the luxury of owning two graphics cards. And besides, switching back and forth would ruin my wonderful disposition. Some people are saying that ATI cards handle dithering a little better than Nvidia. But from what I can deduce, 16 bit dithering is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Thanks, that info helps.

I think any project like this "may" have to say that the next project will only support x hardware and x bit resolution and let the project move on.

MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) tried in the past to keep everyone happy but realised that to move the project along they had to take a technical decision that if the project was to tackle higher spec arcade machines they would need to move to a more complex emulator core....which means older PC's would lose out on some games which worked 100% with no loss in fps.

With base units only costing £300 here in the UK from MESH with very decent specs, its perhaps time some people upgraded their PC's.

* Intel® Pentium® E2160 Dual Core Processor(1.80GHz,1MB Cache,800MHz)
* Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium Edition
* New MESH Mini-Tower Micro ATX Case +250W PSU
* PCI-Express Mainboard - Pentium® D/Core™ 2 Duo - Micro ATX
* 1GB DDR2 667MHz Memory - (2x512MB)
* 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
* LightScribe Super Format 18x Dual Layer DVD Writer +R/-R/RW/RAM
* 256MB Integrated On-board Graphics (SMA)
* 5.1 High Definition onboard sound card - 6 Channel Cinema sound
* Free Microsoft® Works® 8.5 + 60 Days Microsoft Office Trial
* Multi-format Memory Card Reader
* Silver - 1 Year On Site Service - UK Mainland Only (Home Service)
* Free Cyberlink Video Editing Suite - 7 titles (oem)
* 6x USB 2.0 Ports (8x possible on motherboard)
* 1x Gigabit LAN (onboard)

The project is moving on. Rather rapidly, in fact.

Music to my ears. ;)

WOOOO-HOOO! Go Jim, Go!

http://smileyonline.free.fr/images/g...535672_gif.gif That's great to hear buddy.

nice to hear that.

Any idea when we may expect the first screenshots from WIP ?

"....Rather Rapidly....."

That sounds good to me...

I hate to rain on your parade, Dirk, but Jim hasn't exactly been frivolous with WiP screenshots in the past...

Hehehe i know , wel i can try dont i ?

:)

I'm working on really boring stuff right now - nothing which even shows on the screen. File and database loading and organization. It turns out that the MS example code creates a whole separate texture in memory for each material in each object. So if an object has 20 materials in it, all of which use the same texture pic, there are 20 copies of that pic clogging up the system. No wonder MA3 was taking so long to load! I'm re-writing it so that one copy of each texture is loaded into a master list, then each object just references that copy when it needs a texture.

It's boring, but it feels good to trim things down. Kind of like waking up one morning and weighing 150 pounds instead of 300.

One of the many reasons I like you, Jim. (the re-writing part, I mean :lol: )