Soi

There looks like there is interest for this afternoon. Following Alisdair's suggestion, shall we say meet at 12?

I can do Sunday too. What time?

I want to try out some games with MLG settings. The videos on Bungie.net look excellent, and I like BR starts and no radar. So, anyone who would like a game, please add me. GT = Soi Anyone want to play some custom games on Saturday afternoon? 12-4, something like that? Otherwise, it would be great to organise a regular weeknight for custom games. There are plenty of people around who play Halo regularly, but it would be nice to get them all together.

I just burst out laughing when I saw that. Incredible.

It may be the worng place to post it, but the MLG clips currently on Bungie Favorites are awesome. Some truly crazy sniping.

It was great fun. Cheers for the games.

I've been delayed slightly, but I'll be on soon.

Great. I added you to my FL the other day. I'm free from 5ish to late, so I could play whenever. The odd thing about my post above is that I didn't write it twice. It was an odd single, double post.

Anyone want to play this coming Saturday? Anyone want to play this coming Saturday?

GT = Soi I'm on a couple of nights a week, and always up for a game. Especially customs.

I'd like to play, but Sat night is the 2nd most wife unfriendly time of the week for me to play Halo. Friday nights being the worst.

If you had a 360 and a Wii, surely you'd buy GHIII on the 360? It will look better and have achievements, online scoreboards and DLC.

Awesome work Preacher. That gametype and map is amazing. The placement of the waypoints is very well though out, and I played solidly for an hour 1v1 last night with a mate. Are you thinking of making any more maps for that game variant? The mate that I played with last night started making a Snowbound race map as soon as I went to bed. I'll be trying that this evening. If it is good, I'll send you it.

I’ve added your results to the NTSC thread. I don’t have numbers, but if you are not hosting, then your upload will always be enough. You only have to upload your own data, which isn’t great. The only situation where I’ve sent the bandwidth of non-hosts having any effect is in very large co-op games (e.g. 16 player Coop GRAW). I’m certain that the amount of drop-outs in such games is because in this situation, not only must the host send a huge amount of data (the coop data for 16 people), but each player much also download that data. As to your coop point, perhaps you have good enough connections, perhaps you don’t. The service that your ISP gives you is not constant. At busy times, it is possible that you don’t get anything like what they say they sell you. Then again, he might have a crap line (e.g. lots of errors), a crap ISP or his other half may have been uploading pictures to Facebook… Who knows. You could try getting him to find his ISP address and then pinging it. If the ping is good, then you should be fine

Sorry for the long post. In summary, upload bandwidth is often not the most important factor in determining who is the best host. There are two factors that contribute to whether you make a good Live host. The first is upload bandwidth. Upload bandwidth is important as the host needs to be able to send the every player the data of every other player. If the host doesn't have enough bandwidth, then everyone lags like hell and players tend to be dropped by the game. But if the host has enough upload bandwidth, having more doesn’t help. So for a Team Doubles game, with only 4 players, upload bandwidth is not going to be the most important factor in determining the "best" host, as everyone is likely to have enough upload to cope. Upload bandwidth will come into play with a 8v8 game though. The second, and in many cases most important, factor that contributes to whether you make a good Live host or not is latency (or packet delay). This is often misunderstood, because lots of people confuse bandwidth with "speed". So they think a "24meg" connection is fast. Leaving aside that a "24meg" connection refers to your download rather than upload, more bandwidth does not mean lower latency. Latency is how long each packet takes to get to you, and is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). You might have a huge bandwidth (the amount of data you can receive per second) but a high latency (how long an individual piece of data takes to get to you). An easy way to think of this is to consider the postal service as the Internet. The amount of letters your postman can carry is your bandwidth, and how long it takes him to get from the depot to your house is the latency. You might have a postman that can carry lots of letters but travels to your house via a long route (high bandwidth, but poor latency), or your might have a postman that can only carry a few letters but runs to your door (low bandwidth, but good latency). For a small Halo game, it isn’t the amount of letters the postman can carry at once that is that important, but how fast he can get them to you is. For large games (8v8), the amount of data being transmitted at once becomes most important. High latency may be the fault of your ISP (some are simply faster than others at routing stuff) or it may be that you are physically far away from the other players. Electricity takes time to travel around the place. For example, your data will always take longer to get to the US than it will to get to someone in the same city. I made a thread for this will people posting their results over at NTSC-UK. Thread can be found here: http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?t=71173 The interesting thing about those results is that there are quite large variations in latency. In fact the person with the highest upload bandwidth, has quite a poor latency to both the UK and the US as he is based in Norway. Conversely, a bloke with an upload of only 188kb/s has great latency to both the UK and the US. For a small Halo game with other UK players, the guy with the much lower upload will make the best host.

The only ones I've seen are: Elle Decoration gave it 9 The Lady gave it 10 What Auto gave it 10 Razzle gave it 9 Good scores all round.

Hi mate. 1) Yes 2) I use www.movietyme.com -cheap, and well laid out. 3) No 4) www.movietyme.com has a special section for import Blu-rays that work on PAL PS3s. Useful. 5) Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are encoded at 24fps (as opposed to 25fps for PAL tv and 30fps for NTSC tv). Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray by default output at 60hz –i.e. they convert the 24 fields into 60, by giggery pokery (technical term). This can cause judder (which does actually appear to be the technical term), which annoys some people. The newest tellies accept a 1080p/24 signal, as well as the “normal” 1080p/60. The advantage of this is that this does not cause judder. Lots of HD-DVD players and Blu-ray players can’t output a 1080p/24 signal, but the PS3 can with the latest firmware. So, make sure your PS3 has got the latest firmware and that the 24Hz setting is on if your TV supports 1080/24. To do this, I’ve read you Set the PS3 to “auto”, and it will work out the correct mode. You also need to connected by HDMI and you might need to connect directly to the TV and not via an amp.

Won't go down well in this thread, but how about Crackdown? Collecting orbs on huge buildings and scaling the Agency Tower are all about platforming in a 3D enviroment, and are hugely enjoyable.

A super easy way to get the shot putter achievement is to throw any dead body into the sea, from anywhere. I did this with a small throw and got it. The "sea" is a never ending pit to dead bodies, and they just keep on falling.

What makes you think that the communal, public places of PlayStation Home will be any less immune to homophobic or racist idiots than public games of Live?

My initial thoughts are "meh". I've not tried Second Life, but I bet all the fun in it comes from it being anonymous -and therefore you do stupid deviant stuff that you can't do in your "first life". I can't imagine Sony letting people getting up to naughty stuff in this. In fact, there is no chance of that at all. So the social aspects of PayStation Home, while looking pretty, seem fairly pointless. All you are left with is a place where you and your virtual friends can hang around, chat and watch advertising. Sounds really quite boring.

I don't know what the cause is at all, but it is definitely there and quite a few people have noticed it (both on AV forums, and NTSC-uk -where there are two similar threads). RR6 provides the clearest example, and I'll quote someone else's experiece (which is the same as mine basically): I found the scrolling text to jerk along even with the VGA resolution set to 640x480. Sure, the 360 games I have are perfectly playable with my VGA cable (and look marginly better on my telly), but I'd trade a significantly better frame rate in some games for a marginal loss in picture quality any day.