GMT

has anyone stumbled over Kerbal Space Program yet? It's a WIP game of building spaceworthy vessel, launching, flying and bringing them back safely... Right now there's pretty much a sandbox only version of it and it's $15 or a less complex free demo of it. What you basically do is, from a variety of modules you create a rocket or a spaceplane (or both) and either launch it from a launchpad or runway and then fly it to space... and hopefully safely back. But you gotta consider things like aerodynamics, mass, inertia, stability and so on what puts the game very far into the simulation genre, although I must say the physics engine isn't the best yet. As of now, all you can do is build a thing and fly it w/o limitations, but it's planned to become a full fledged space program simulation with missions, limited funds and whatnot., and you can clearly distinguish this game as an early, but playable alpha I tried it and just can't get enough, worth a try for everyone http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/ EDIT: oh and it's custom content friendly already now in it's alpha state, there's already plenty of custom content available throughout the community. not something you see every day...

manley is quite a space game nerd, in a good way. his ksp videos are very very helpful for those like me that just can't get it right because of being too crazy

so I updated to 0.17 yesterday and I like the improvements and new parts. best thing is the "cockpit" view... but never the less I don't get beyond the "fool around with it" status... BUUUUT I'm able to get my Kerbals back to Kerbin with almost no fatalities... most of the time...

no big fuzz it's available both as an mcedit schematic and a minecraft world. so you either download the world file and place it in the "saves" folder in your minecraft directory (enter %appdata%\.minecraft in the run window or go to the folder via username\appdata\roaming\.minecraft, but keep in mind that appdata is hidden so you must change the visibility options first). just place the entire folder you downloaded into the "saves" folder and you get yourself a new world with the ship at the spawn. the other way, with mcedit is to download the schematic file and place it in the "mcedit-schematics" folder in the mcedit directory (for ease of use, I placed mce in the minecraft directory) now in mcedit, after opening a world, you select the 4th icon from the right (left of the head icon, looks like a crane with something attached, tooltip says import) and then an explorer window opens where you can select the schematic you want to import. all you gotta do now is to place it where you want, affirm it with enter and then save the world. note tho that mcedit can only display chunks you've previously visited in game (in short: it only displays what you've explored in game) EDIT: off topic, you might want to rework half of the ship... especially the doors...

of course it's hyped a lot, it's GTA after all, the 7th best gaming franchise and best action game franchise (unless you'd call Mario and Pokemon action games) there is, by sales figures. I might add that I don't like this list because Mario leads it with allmost half a billion copies sold considering everything Mario, just ahead of Super Mario with 270 million, but the latter is included in the Mario listing aswell so this is already misleading imho. further, this list also consideres games that are delivered with the respective console, a policy Nintendo does almost all the time, leading to Wii and Wii Sports being in the Top10 aswell... maybe another reason why Mario games lead it on, I never got myself a Nintendo console which didn't come with a Mario game... But after all it's nice to note that there's only 2 action games in the Top10... anyways, R* reacted the same day this leak came up and officially announced the game for said date, and in turn also confirmed that it'll be an xbox360 and ps3 launch with a later pc port, like always: Newswire EDIT: Seemingly supplied by a Future Shop clerk - at least a R* letter explaining details to "Dear Future Shop Employees" - here's some pictures from a preorder gadget you can get if you run in early to preorder the game on Nov 5th. Next to a poster, you get one of 5 GTA-themed picture viewers showing one of the below, exclusive screenshots from igta5.com, thanks to whoever Future Shop clerk was cool enough to take and share these pictures Another note, Game Informer has released 2 more artworks in high resolution to rattle the advertisement drums on a personal matter, it's December issue (release Nov 8th) has a big - I heard it's 18 pages - GTA cover story. These, in total, 4 artworks are btw the inlay of the preorder boxes: from igta5.com, thanks to whoever Future Shop clerk was cool enough to take and share these pictures And last, but not least, R* confirmed there's a second trailer in the launchtubes for November, but due to Sandy, which cut power supply to R*'s NYC office, will be delayed. I'm so exciiiiited, I just can't hiiiide it Quick heads-up: new trailer on Nov 14th

now, double posting is a bad thing, but this one earns it's own: look forward to SPRING 2013 source

you're a bit unclear... is it an object or is it an entire world with the ship in it? maybe you should provide the link

not so shy my dear, not so shy... of course it's hard, long work with a lot of trial and error... even the self-declared airport-guru - that's me - works a lot with trial and error. perfectly fine given the vast amount of puzzlepieces and resulting possibilities. but if you have about a glimpse of what you want to end up with, and consulting reference material (namely the mapping services I listed; I personally love to use google earth for the ruler function) you'll get a decent, if not astonishing result... after a 72hrs shift don't worry. the time is worth the effort in the end.

the only way I can think of right now - and probably one of the easiest - is to use mcedit. it's a 3d terrain editor which has an option to select and export/import minecraft objects. I love this handy tool I must say. you can't do much wrong with it either, if you wanna be 100% safe, make a backup of your world before fiddling around. afaik there's also a bunch of forums with some sort of an exchange for so-called "schematics", which is what I was just talking about. I wouldn't hesitate to ask in a minecraft forum tho, guys there probably know more ways

c'mon... google maps, google earth, bing maps, even ios maps if you own apple. all offer sattelite imagery that gets you close enough for that purpose...

not just did R* tease us with the first official artwork for V, they also promise lots of information for november. IGN already makes noise for a coverage as well as Game Informer, where V will be the cover story of the upcomming issue... looks like the pr campaign finally goes serious

The European Union... http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/12/world/europe/norway-nobel-peace-prize/index.html?hpt=hp_t1 now, apart from being totally over my head for sort of being a nobel peace prize winner as a EU citizen, I sort of don't know how to feel about this decision... to be honest, I think it's just a measure to calm down the tensions that come with the € crisis and I doubt that, from all the 200something nominations, the EU was really the best choice. your ideas?

your making it too easy. cyber-bullying is as much a problem as face to face bullying. maybe even worse because modern communication means offer quite a sense of anonymity. while bullying in the past was more or less confined to a certain place like school or work and the occasional call, today you can easily just go on an take on your victim on facebook, twitter, myspace and other such "places". and thanks to the afore mentioned anonymity such places may offer, the bullying could get even worse. it's in fact a pretty similar thing to the entire respect-on-the-internet debate. oh so many people open one's trap ever so widely on the internet, calling you and your family the worst names and be as offensive as can be... and most likely the same persons wouldn't even dare to look you in the eyes in a face-to-face situation. bottom line is, being a bully on the internet is a hell of a lot more easy than being one in real life, of couse with the result that being a bullied turns out to be much worse on the web. and like I said it in my previous post, that safe haven called home breaks apart. back in the days it was like once the door shuts behind you, you can consider yourself pretty safe from any bullying, at least in the majority of cases. nowadays you can be pretty sure your "problem" goes on even then, as you're still exposed on the internet. now the big but (with one t): officials must make a clear difference between free speech including critizism and actual offensiveness or bullying. yet another example hitting the lines of abuse of authority on the internet: just yesterday we had a nice article in one of our big newspapers: on a country road, a static speed camera was installed. so far so good. now a woman who regularily checks the overall speed camera situation on such a facebook page covering her vicinity (especially because of the mobile systems), sees that just ahead of the mentioned static system, a mobile system waits to cash in. in her understandable anger she commented that these guys should be thrown eggs at for being such con man. (on a sidenote, the whole speed camera thing in germany is pretty much a pain in the behind because ever to often they're used to make cash rather than the streets safer, but explaining the whole deal would go too much off topic). and guess what happened: the next day she received a letter from the local authority threating her to take a psychological test for "showing an aggression potenial that has no place on the streets". a clear abuse imho. first of all, this psychological test can only be ordered because of offensive driving behavior and not as a "precaution" or for ranting off on the internet. secondly, this is an obvious abuse of position of the respective authorities personnel, such actions are not within their authority, period. and thirdly, this particular case lies far away from any law that would grant any form of prosecution, real or threat. and even tho this is really off topic: you underestimante how easily people can be manipulated. I wanna make this as short as possible: from a psychological point of view, even the sanest of a person can be driven to do things one wouldn't do normally. Of course you can force them with threats of punishment. easy. no, I'm talking about NO punishment. and this is something, videogames suggest. killing people in a shooter is framed to be no crime because that's the mission, no matter if your on the right or wrong side of the law, as right or wrong in entertainment media (and unfortunately history aswell) is always a matter of perspective. think of robin hood. a thief committing crimes. period. cause and effect doesn't make him or his deeds legal. but to the audience, he's the one who does right because he's the protagonist. and just like hood gets away with it, almost all video game characters get away with whatever they do because thats the story told. don't even think of robin hood getting away with it if the story was told from the sheriff of nottingham's perspective. so far for this. now, every character and mind is a different and copes different with a sitiuation. this also includes perception of our surroundings and - most important in this case - classification of fiction and reality. and just like a child get's totally lost in a virtual reality when playing, a similar effect can be seen when people play videogames. to most people this is just another form of escapism just like reading a book (as reading a book is about as immersive as playing a game because it's not as condensed as a movie would be), but others start to identify themselves with the character a little bit too much (there's studies revealing the mechanics behind the acceptance of virtual characters). while it is perfectly fine to develop some sort of a relationship to the character you follow in a book, movie or game and in fact makes up for the most part of the enjoyment of the show, an overdevelopped relationship (which most likely happens with videogames because you are in fact the actor, not the character you play) is one of the reasons why a certain amount of people start to have problems in spacing fiction from reality. the socalled tetris-effect enhances this problem (the effect in short: when excessive interaction with one particular thing makes you think about it even if you don't interact with it; eg dreaming of a game you played all day) and this all - of course given a certain fragile character/mind - at a certain point lead to a total loss of sense for fiction and reality. things get mixed up and bam, someone starts shoting his way through the mall because he/she did it a billion times in GTA and got away with it. of course this is not the regular case even tho certain people and media wanna make us believe it, but it happens every now and then. my personal view is, these people would snap sooner or later anyways, videogames just enhance this. games and movies are not the sole cause, never, but always play in favor of this. wow... not as short as I wanted it to be...

I've highlighted the critical point here. yes, bullying - virtual or not - should be fought against. but being critical or ranting off and bullying are two pair of shoes. and abusing an anti-bullying policy to take down free speech is about the worst thing that can happen to an "educated" society. like wiecher just said it, you can say whatever you want in real life, why not on the internet? for instance, I can position myself in the middle of a crowd and shout out whatever rant comes to mind, barely anyone would care, let alone react any other way than considering my grade of sanity... further, who is do decide what is offensive and what isn't? when does criticism turn to an offense? even worse, how much do "victims" provoke it? an example from my life: In a different forum there was quite a nice racism-campaign against me... just for sharing some points of criticism to the whole immigration debate in germany. at no point I was a racist in what I said but my opinion was quite different from the oh-happy-day point of view from most forum members and bam, I was the racist to fight against... so who's the one to blame? me for being critical or the others for being unable to take or even think about the critique? now with the german history in mind, people are over-reactive in this particular matter, but also they are too approving out of a false understanding of historical responsibility; pretty much sums up what I said back then...) as for face-to-face bullying, I was bullied in school aswell but I faced it. Now I know every character is a different one and I can consider myself a strong personality while others are much more vulnerable and can't cope with it very well, but still I insist that many are just to thin-skinned thus leading to a chronical state of feeling offended by everything and everyone, even without reason, and this in turn makes their whole lives a hell, not just throughout school, so "building" a persons character is not just a problem with the bully to be toned down but also the bullied to be toned up. it's some sort of a balancing thing. Don't get me wrong here. I'm not trying to say everyone who's bullied is a weak brat that should grow up and face it like a man without crying like a little girl getting her lollypop ripped of by the neighbors dog. What I'm trying to say is that many people are just over-reactive when it comes to these things and point their fingers at a possible bulling case while it just was "normal" pranks between kids. (an analog case with the burn-out debate, not everyone feeling down automatically has a burn out... or another case I was confronted with in my childhood: ADHD. It was THE diagnosis in the late 80s early 90s. every child that was even a little frenzy was automatically diagnosed ADHD and medicated against; luckily my parents refused it) now being offensive is not a form of bullying unless it turns systematic. and what the above linked articles suggest is - despite the disgusting statements by the respective persons - just a plain overreaction and to a certain extent a limitation to free speech under the wrong legal assumptions. the telegraph article pretty much sums up my opinion. what extremes this can summon could actually be seen in with Malala Yousufzai in Pakistan at the moment. A girl speaks her mind and gets shot by taliban for doing this. Now from our point of view, the girl was right and the taliban wrong. but if you look at it from a little distance, except for the form of punishment, it's unfortunately not too different from what happened with the commenters in the articles linked. quite alarming if you'd ask me... long story short: while it is absolutely ok to raise awareness when it comes bullying, especially since we're all inter(net)connected nowadays so the save havens are radically reduced, people should also be aware of the fact that uber-awareness doesn't help either, it just swings the balance to the other side. of course, being offensive is not the best thing to do, but same accounts for feeling offended which to me seems to be a new trend that comes with the rise of the whole political correctness thing - something I see all to often abused to dismantle any form of criticism.

since everything else has been said, I'd like to go a bit off-topic: given how frequent threads concerning the game's performance on modern computers/laptops are opened lately, I'd like to suggest to the staff to create a sticky thread with the most relevant information and fixes concerning the matter at hand

but you do have high wealth jobs, do you?

its not about the size, it's about airport itself... the runway markings, taxiway layout, utilities... to be completely honest and looking at it from a realsim point of view, pretty much everything is wrong here. for instance, I spot like 8 VOR/VORTAC antennas... IF there's any at an airport at all, it's just one. Or a tower, airports with such traffic MUST have a tower... consider what the airport should be like, eg hobby flying, small regional or big international and then go ahead and look at real life counterparts and gather info... you call it metro international airport. no look at airports like frankfurt, amsterdam, heathrow, new york jfk, los angeles lax, san francisco, atlanta and the likes. also I'd suggest to take a look at the show us your airport thread, there's plenty of inspiration and a lot of realistic designed airports

it's a pretty weird sign anyway, not following the rules. In fact, "Bundesstraßen" are signed yellow and are different from "Autobahnen" (highways) as they don't follow the architectural requirements to be an "Autobahn" Blue signs, in turn, are reserved for "Autobahnen" (highways). Also, the symbol on the sign is that of an "Autobahn" (the 2 lane road with the bridge crossing which in fact looks like an A... for Autobahn)

now with the first "real" gameplay footage, I must say I feel a little bit better about the game. I still don't like the direction they're taking, my favorite would have been to start with SC4 and improve on that somehwere along the direction the modding community takes. But I must honestly say I really like the graphics and the gameplay sort of holds a certain appeal if I look at it completely neutral. It seems to take care of a wide variety of stuff to manage for a city without going too much into detail which would scare off the casual gamer, which is about 99% of all gamers out there. Yet this is what I consider a city building GAME and not a city building SIMULATION like I wished the new real sim city to be...

I like the overall layout of it and the possibility to expand the airport. nonetheless I'd like to suggest you familiarize yourself with the very basics of an airport construction as your work is basically good, but shows big flaws in terms of realism which ruin the good design ideas

3D curves no chance

the 5pm flight from Heathrow just passing Hohokam Expressway, with Papago Park in the back... that being said, it's landing, not taking off... good god I miss it...

because it feels too clogged up, both with buildings and cars. the more ppl you condense on a small area of land, the worse problems you get, especially with traffic. even worse with roadside parking. everyone has a car nowadays, necessity or luxury. either way, the more you turn into medium/high density, the more cars are parked roadside because you very rarely have enough dedicated parking space, surface or garages. in turn, with the small european roads (in my town of 250k, you can literally count roads having more than one lane per direction with one hand, no other picture in the surrounding suburbs; the burb I live in counts 35k inhabitants and sports exactly one such road at the very outskirts where it's not at all needed) sick traffic jams are programmed. For instance, in non-rushour traffic it takes me 7-10min to drive the way from my house to downtown, in rushour traffic the same way easily ends up at 25-30 mins. and we're talking a 3 mile travel. why? hell because almost all arterial roads are 1 lane per direction... for LA, 12 lane highways are a blessing. ever followed rushour traffic reports from LA? stop and go in the entire basin. Like I said already, I like the american surburbia, especially southwestern usa, because it's the complete opposite of what I am used to here in Germany when it comes to urban planning. I spent a couple of months living and working in Mesa, AZ during my training, so I can compare both the clogged up european and the space-wasting us-american concepts pretty much side by side and I must say the latter has much much more appeal to me. Of course, you're screwed without a car because you won't get anywhere since public transport is not as sophisticated as I am used to from Germany. And especially with shrinking oil reserves worldwide and a lack of suitable - and payable - alternatives, condensing everything so the need for transportation becomes less has a certain positive idea. But bear in mind that this is a twist. Here in europe, with the starting rapid growth of cities a couple 100s of years back in the medieval time, people were desperate to live in the cities because there was work. with the rise of the industrialization and effective transport, people literally fled the cities because they became too clogged up, dirty and expensive. Today, with everrising transportation costs (especially in europe, we are already well beyond $10 per gallon!) people start to leave the beautiful suburbs and countryside to live in the cities again. already now you can see how prices for property skyrocket because the demand far outweights the offer. Granted, we are not yet in a situation like asian metropoles where people live like hens in laying batteries and give their selfresperct and last shirt to pay the rents, and with the decaying population I doubt we'll ever get there. But still, affordable property in the city is either in areas you wouldn't wanna live unless you're carrying, or a very very lucky catch.

dusting is always a great way to keep the system in shape, you won't believe how much dust collects in these boxes. earlier this year I completely disassembled and dusted my pc for the first time in over a year and good lord I wonder how that thing was able to cool itself at all... the heat exchanger of my water cooler was pretty clogged, same for other parts supposed to be in freeflow air. applied some meshes here and there aswell to at least give some shielding against larger stuff like hairs (my cat has hazardous hair). and of course keep track of your mods, the wrong mod in the wrong place and a smooth game turns into a slideshow. happened to me very often with other games (mostly bethesda's wellknown titles). always gotta be picky when it comes to graphical mods, many give you only a slight difference in gameplay experience but really bring your hardware to it's knees. things like 50% fps drop for betterlooking clouds or other stuff you barely appreciate in regular gameplay are something to think about a second and third time...

yep that's one of the ways described in the forum I linked above. according to it, you can export directly from Solidworks to Autocad via a certain file type both have in common and then pretty much directly from Autocad to 3DS. but judging from a couple of Solidworks tutorials on youtube, it isn't really that much of a difference to a real 3d modeling tool like 3DS. tbh, I think there'll be only little difference between learning to use 3DS - especially since you're already familiar with SW - or fiddling around with converting model files back and forth between SW and 3DS and the related hurdles to take...