Back to work. Too soon, too soon.

Hardware: choosing computer hardware is an absurd process. All I am doing is comparing two CPUs, and then adding up the cost of motherboards, RAM and a graphics card to rebuild this machine.

I really want faster rendering in 3ds max as well as the rest. So if anyone has any suggestions for similar money, let me know
According to Tom’s Hardware reviews, the Intel wins

I’m getting more enthusiastic- the more I read up on this. The Cinebench tests are the closest to 3ds max rendering times (and other 3D software). Anyway, I an downloading test software to see how much faster rendering can be. It looks like 10 times faster is a reasonable figure; just imagine, all those hour & half that could be done in 9 minutes! That really would encourage me to do more 3D animation.

Watch out- this section is for a geekiness fix. Skip it if you don’t need to get out more often.

Geforce tweeks for specific games, I didn’t know these were available on my card but here’s the explanation pasted from a Ubi forum:

Right click on desktop and select Properties menu.
Click the Settings tab & click the Advanced button down the bottom.
Click the tab that lists your vid card (6800 in my case).

This is your Nvidia controls. Go to the section called Performance & Quality Settings. In the Application Profiles box, select il2fb.exe and Il2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles from the Application and Active Profiles boxes respectively.

Now click the Modify Profile… button and select "Modify" from the two choices.

In the next box, select browse, and navigate to the Il-2 Sturmovik 1946 game folder and click on the il2fb exe icon and press Open.
(Back now in the Modify Profile window) Click OK.

Now you can tweak the Nvidia settings…

Make sure the View: Advanced Settings is selected. From the available selections, tick the boxes and set them up as per below:

X Antialiasing settings 2xQ/4x (whichever is best for you)
X Anisotropic filtering – OFF
X Image settings – Quality
Color profile (leave blank)
X Vertical sync – ON
X Force mipmaps – Trilinear
X Conformant texture clamp – ON
0 Extension limit – OFF
X Hardware Acceleration – Single display mode
X Trilinear optimisation – ON
X Anisotropic mip filter optimisation – ON
X Anisotropic sample optimisation – ON
0 Transparency antialiasing – OFF (don’t tick the box)
X Triple buffering – ON
X Negative LOD bias – CLAMP

Now click OK and the new settings should be saved and activate when you start ’46.

Finally, go to the setup tab in your ’46 folder.

Click on the Settings tab and select Custom.

Set Texture mipmap filter to Anisotropic.
Set Texture compression to None.
Unselect Dither
Select Use Vertex Arrays
Unselect Polygon Stipple

Under Extensions:

Tick: Mutitexture, Combine, Secondary color, Vertex Array Extension and Texture Compress ARB.
Leve the others un-ticked.
Select OK to close and save.

This is what I did and found my performance greatly improved over identical settings in 4.05m. If anyone has any improvments to this, it’d be great if they can share them .

Added up – this could be the shortest day. the earliest sun-set was last week- on the 13th December and the mornings will continue to get darker for a few days yet. We have 7 hours and 39 minutes of daylight today. By Saturday, we will see an improvement of 6 seconds on that. wow!

Audigy: finally got round to putting in the new soundcard in this computer. Though it still needs some setting up, it definitely makes clearer sounds as well as doing some special effects like echo and reverb on mouse-click sounds too. The biggest change should be in games- we’ll see about that.

CDs: Tom Waits, this is a triple set which leaves me wondering why he can’t release more often so they are spread out & we don’t have to wait so long?

Game: latest incarnation of the Sturmovic flight sim series. 

Which is very nice to have just before the holiday, but I have a painting to finish….

True to my word- ithe painting now finished   ….pitcha tomorrow.
The Tom Waits triple is promising- never one to make a judgement on first hearing, all the right ingredients are there.
Finally– the title comes from the sound a bird made while I was out with the Ladies (both proudly wearing their flashing LED collars).

That: seems to be it, one little setting and it works now. Next step is : get the wireless connection to work

Below is the Stalking-horse picture almost finished, the paint is still wet- hence the uneven background.

Also: read this. It’s on Agnosticism, compare with : Wiki

There must be something wrong with my Windows CD, a recent re-install of Win 2000 has left me with the same fault as the first time I put windows 2K on. Hyperlinks don’t work in compiled .html help pages. There is a peculiar solution, it is here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811630

If you have installed Service Pack 4, the fix is to open a Command
Prompt window and then run these two commands:

regsvr32 /u <drive>:winntsystem32hhctrl.ocx
regsvr32 <drive>:winntsystem32hhctrl.ocx

that technique worked last time but then I lost the file after a reformat. Funny how I found the solution – during an idle moment I searched for my name in Google to look for my oldest posting somewhere. I’m only putting this here in case I loose it gain- not an act of generosity.

Holiday soon, one week off, time for a couple of paintings, especially finish the crane-pointers plus another quick A4 one. Some animation, including the deconstruction of another element- probably something asteroidal this time. There’s no harm in planning.