Wednesday, March 17, 2004

TMPGEnc Plus FAQs

I'm trying to "graduate" from using the TMPGEnc Plus wizard to mucking with the encoding settings directly.

FAQs and other helpful links:
TMPGEnc Plus 2.5
Original Frequently Asked Questions
VirtualDub to TMPGEnc frameserving FAQ
DVDRHelp.com - Converting to DVD MPEG2
Configuring TMPGEnc for high-quality, DVD-compliant MPEG-2

Trial and error isn't too bad, but with a 3:1 encode time (3 min to encode 1 min of source), it's not trivial either. My first few attempts resulted in non-compliant MPEG2 files, so I've had to go back to square one and figure out what I did wrong (re-starting with the provided DVD (NTSC) template.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 6:29 AM

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

Picked up the "Tom Clancy's Counter Terrorism Classics" game set today for $20. It's a 3-pack of older games in the Rainbow Six series; "Rainbow Six" (1999), "Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear" (2000), and "The Sum of All Fears" (2002). All that's inside the package is (3) CDs with no printed documentation at all (bit of a rip-off). When I purchased the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault pack (original game plus first expansion pack), that came with CDs as well as miniature versions of the printed strategy guides.

So far I'm not really impressed with Rainbow Six (after mucking with it for 40 minutes or so). I mean I realize that PCs weren't as capable back in 1999, but I didn't realize that it was that bad. The polygon count isn't too low, but the textures are low-res enough that it feels cartoonish. When you fire your weapon, there's zero recoil so you can just sit there and spray 15 rounds onto the target. Not to mention that you only hear a single round fired even if you have your weapon set to 3-shot auto (3 shots per trigger squeeze). You also can't move while crouched, and it takes a few seconds to go from standing to crouch and back.

The introduction clip isn't bad, although you can see some of the limitations of the game engine, even with the heavily pixelated (looks like 16-colors, not 16-bits) footage. But after that, there's zero mood music or background sounds to draw you into the game. (Maybe it's having trouble running on WinXP though.) Feels very sterile and switching between screens takes forever, even on a modern machine (seems like it switches screen resolutions 3 or 4 times).

The premise of the game is interesting, you can have up to 7 other squadmates on each mission, grouped into 1-4 fire teams. You spend probably 75% of your time planning the mission using briefing materials, setting waypoints and "go" points on a 3D map of the objective. Then you get to execute your plan and see how it turns out. Team members killed in earlier engagements are not available in later engagements.

I'll probably muck with it a few more times, but so far it's a wash compared to the more modern FPS.

Update: Well, it's not really growing on me. I've played with the mission planning a good bit (trying the 2-room clear with 4-6 squad members) and it's not really that engaging. Lack of a manual is probably a big reason and the online walkthroughs / FAQs / guides are pretty slim.

The game seems "abrupt". When you've successfully managed to pull off a mission, there's no "bask in the glory" phase where you can walk around and review what happened for 30-60 seconds. Instead, the screen abrubtly goes to black and after 5 seconds dumps you back at the mission results page (just a bunch of numbers, really... such as bullets fired, accuracy, kills, team status). This is tough, because half the time, you may not know what happened during training to cause the win/loss.

It would have been very nice, if after completing the final objective you could wander around and retrace your steps a bit. Or, instead, offer a quicksave / quickrestore that lets you jump back to save point without having to go all the way back to the mission planning screen. The cycle time between trying something out, finding out if it works, and then trying something new is way too long. It takes 2-3 minutes to prep for a mission (even just fine-tuning), only to see the mission go bad in the first 15 seconds. Leaving you looking at the black screen, wondering what happened, and having to wait for the slow-as-heck user-interface to let you see the mission results or take another crack at it.

Found two useful links:
[TiC] Com-F's Counter-Terrorism Guid and copy of the manual (PDF). They really help explaining the difference between the different movement types and rules of engagement. Knowing some of that information, I might take a 3rd crack at Rainbow Six (although the 5-10 second wait time between screens is a bit annoying).

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 12:19 AM

Sunday, March 14, 2004

Managed vs Unmanaged Network Switches

We're getting ready to upgrade the central hub at work to gigabit ethernet and I'm trying to decide if a small network like ours really needs to use managed switches or if we can continue to use unmanaged. The current topology is pretty poor, with multiple 10/100 hubs connected in daisy-chain fashion. (A to B to C to D to E) The first step in the new topology is to put a central gigabit switch in (24 port) and star-topology the existing 10/100 hubs off of it. (A to X, B to X, C to X, D to X, E to X - where 'X' is the new gigabit switch). In addition, we're going to put gigabit cards in all of the servers and connect them to the central gigabit switch as well. So it would probably behoove us to put a high quality switch in that important central position.

Links:
Firewall.cx Forums - Managed vs Unmanaged
A-B Journal Apr 2003 - The Ethernet Dashboard
LANTronix Network Switching Tutorial
Ethernet Tutorial - Network Switching
wireless-chat.net - Managed or Unmanaged Switches?
Network Computing - Designing and Building the Best Small Office Network From the Ground Up

Possible products:
3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4924 ($4050 at CDW)
3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 3824 24-port managed Gigabit ($1900 at CDW)

We'll probably go with the less expensive 3824 switch, and if that doesn't do the job we can always farm it out to one of the leaf segments and purchase a 4924 instead.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 11:21 AM