DOOM 3 vs THE WORLD exclusive + best mp3 ripper ev

After school today we were talking about decibels in class and I felt ignored by everyone in the room except for Steve so I left early. Not the maturist thing to do, but I got a hint after I accidentally said the word “bisexual” in one of my sentences. I had some trouble saying decibel. The two words don’t rhyme. The class didn’t seem to forgive me afterwards. Now when I got to school on Thursday, I’m probably going to get a slightly lower reaction from some people. I’m not going to worry about it. I find it takes much more enery to worry about it then it does to ask questions. Hmm. Which would I rather do? Ask questions or try to find out what went wrong that day? I get points for being a good student. When I felt ignored today, I remembering saying the F word under my breathe as if I were speaking directly at them. That was why I took off – I felt I like I was going to curse out loud in front of people. And that is not like me at all. I sometimes feel that other people’s “superior intellect” gets the best of them. It’s kinda like this, I start talking about fading sound or decibels and “cha-chin”, something goes wrong and now I was ignored for some reason I don’t know.

Okay, to be honest, I can take a day of this. Two days, sure. Three days would be pushing it. And a week would drive me crazy. I think there is something wrong with school if this outcast feeling continues. I want to take these classes too you know, no body is going to piss me enough to leave WITC all together. If they want to insult me by leaving me alone, than it’s their lost….not mine. Though I wished I knew someone that would talk to me more often. College is like high school….you lose most of your friends after you graduate than you make new ones in college or I was suppose too.

So I got home, and I did my usual entertainment, researching better ways to compress audio and looking for new Doom 3 information. We finally got a release date for July 2004!!! That speaks for itself. Seems that Half-life 2 and Doom 3 are going to be released 2 weeks from each other. More exciting news is available, I now know ID software is going to incorporate Doom 3 into the Geforce 6000 series. Details below: .

I find that my Doom 3 and Half-life 2 posts got a healthy dose of views. That’s why I want to bring you some more news. Doom 3 will take full advantage of the Geforce 6000! Officially, the world’s 2nd 512 MB video card. Interesting enough, not the most powerful. Nvidia Quadro series is now and forever shall be the top line, most powerful cards available on the market today. Unless, of course, Nvidia decides to stop doing Quadro all together. Remember the law of diminishing returns applies here. The graphics with current 256 MB GPUs look so beautiful (UT2004 is a great example of high polygons count models and backgrounds running at 60 FPS with little latency. The current cards do a good job handling the 80% of any game out on shelves today. It won’t be until games that require 128-MB video cards to play, we’ll see some need for Nvidia’s latest Geforce. Take Halo for example. Halo was pretty popular a couple months ago because it looked pretty, but games are coming out now that look better then Halo now. Halo has some capability issues. It runs on my Radeon 9800 XT card very well, but will not run on any of my Geforce cards. I downloaded Nvidia drivers from last month. This is shocking, knowing the extremely popular Xbox version runs on a modified Geforce 3. The 1.4 patch fails to fix the bug. Bummer.

::: Doom 3 Facts I’ll list ‘em :::

• Doom 3 is a single player FPS with a cinematic full motion video cutscenes.
• We’ll see the same items those who played Doom II used.
• Doom 3 will take the horror genre to a new level and it’s a FPS
• UK developer Slash-Damage is working on Doom 3 multiplayer (team that worked on Return to Castle Wolfenstien Enemy Territory.)
• Doom 3 will take place on Mars
• Release date July 15, 2004
• Doom 3 to use combination of Pro Logic II and Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound
• ID software is tweaking Doom 3 to forcefully run at 60 frames per second. This means if your videocard can’t do 60 at current resolution, you’ll be forced to drop your resolution.
• Xbox version of Doom 3 confirmed to have unlockable full version of Doom II. Doom II in high resolution?
• Geforce 6000s series suppose to have biggest leap in graphics performance leap from current generation to Nvidia’s next generation. That and AMD’s 64-bit processor and you’ve got a very powerful gaming rig. But what’s state of the art technology if you can’t afford it? LOL!
• I think the Geforce 7000 series to be first 1 Gigabyte video cards on the market

::: Compressing MP3s :::

Best free software available:
CDEX Audio Ripper 1.51 – http://cdex.n3.net
LAME 3.97 decoder upgrade for CDEX - www.mp3dev.org/mp3/

I had a very tough time finding MP4 audio codec for my collection. MP4 is copyrighted and therefore not being easily downloaded as a plugin. I think the web browser gets confused with MP4 and MPEG 4. MPEG 4 is compressed video. Mp4 is compressed audio. DiVX codec is mainly used to compress video for transferring over the Internet, and it’s the most popular codec in video applications. I know this because I got 60 DIVX movies and 50 DIVX music videos. This wouldn’t be so out of the ordinary for someone with broadband, but I have a modem so I treat DIVX movies like it top priority stuff. First you have to extract the VOB files to your hard drive (damn it’s too big) I started to extract Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship to my hard drive for the first 4 minutes of the movie and it already took up 90 Megabytes. When I compressed it to DivX codec for AVI, I managed to get it down to 11 Megabytes. Of course, I also had to lower the resolution to 500x500. Not to mention compressing just a few minutes took 10 minutes to complete. But what about MP4 audio? XM Radio uses MP4. It’s more compressed than MP3 I know. What happens? I can get 25 to 50% better compression on my MP3s without faintness. I tried using DIVX 3.11 audio codec with CDEX and it wouldn’t work.

DIVX video is extreme hard to manage. I had to prepare a lot for CD burning. All my videos I had fewer than 702 MB I burned to CD. That’s about 50% of everything. The remaining 50% I have to either (1) transfer huge files over 10/100 megabit Ethernet or (2) take my DVD-RW drive out and insert it into my other computer so I can burn all the music videos and movies to several DVDs. I think option 2 will be the wisest choice. I could be wrong, though option one seems to be time consuming. WASTED TIME + TROUBLE-SHOOTING = MORE WASTED TIME. It’s like a catch 22 choice. When your dealing with my Ethernet, it’s safe to say I need a major upgrade. CAT5e upgrade to everything, no more hub! I’m cashing in for a switch board…. Latest technology is cool when it works. Three GIGABYTE RJ-45 patch cables are going to be expensive, ($80 – $150) so I’ll go with only two. I’m doing this over the summer if I get an application in at Manards. I may work the morning shift 5 days a week. I also applied for Home Depot and Fleet Farm in Hudson, Wisconsin.

I am hoping that today was just an off day and I don’t miss out. I think I’ll play my new games Tekken 4 and SSX 3. Tekken is fine, but not as good as Rachet and Clank: Going Commando. Oh and case you were wondering, I stopped playing Final Fantasy X-2 partly because I got stopped at the 3rd Chapter with Blobby type enemy that can kill you in one hit. I hate those. Luckily I was smart enough to save my game before I died. Hell, it got too involved. Sure it had a deep story, but you had to work on your character a lot and make sure it was ready for up coming bosses, that took time, time I didn’t have. Final Fantasy fans know what I’m talking about. If I was smart I would have skipped the scenario all together. It wasn’t a required one; it was a side-quest. I decided NOT TO PUT MY VIDEOGAME COLLECTION PICS ON MODBLOG BECAUSE THEY ARE TOO BIG FOR VIEWING. I will post them on my personal website later today. My collection is pretty big so you’d might like to take a look. I have a total of 117 games if you count Playstation (16), Dreamcast (34), Gamecube (16), Playstation 2 (37) and Xbox (14) games combined. I counted all of them. I have a full list on my website if you care too look. I’m more a game collector than a game player these days. You know, PS2 had all the RPGs and solid Racing games I just had to get one. I had to buy Xbox and Gamecube and PSone first before I knew I “had to have” exclusive Playstation 2 RPGs. I own 10 PS2 RPGS and I only played three of them (FFX, FFX2 and Xenosaga). I don’t have time to play all of them. They are like 35 – 50 hours a piece. Final Fantasy X was my favorite, though I’m itching to find out what happens at the end of Xenosaga. The first 20 hours of Xenosaga was pretty fun until I got lost in the game’s 1 out of 1000 possible places. It seems like you have to be at the other 999 places before you find out the right place to start a sequence so you can start over again much like how it was in Final Fantasy 10. The game advances by cut scenes which I am use to now. 40 hours of Final Fantasy 10, and 20 hrs. of Xenosaga back to back makes you a little bored of the both. It’s all good though. I went back to play Diablo 2.

Another interesting note I like to mention was yesterday when I was watching the FMVs off Playstation games on my PC. Yes, you heard right….PC! I admit, I was even kinda surprised that someone figured it out. Bypassing encryption and I don’t think Playstation runs Windows…in fact I know it doesn’t. It has a bios, graphics acceleration files, and sound sound drivers, and maybe some run time files kinda like Visual C++ would have. Visual C++ is what Microsoft programmers use to compile windows code for applications. This program is called the PSX Multi Converter. Comes in both Shareware and the slightly dated freeware version. The freeware version does crash more often and you can’t go full screen with it. You will like it much more because it never expires! It’s also possible to save your favorite FMV to AVI on your desktop. It’s much better to just scan the CD for movies and play the video off the disc. I very much enjoyed watching Final Fantasy 8 and Xenogears because I can re-watch the videos with detail, just to get full understanding of the game. The last FMVs of Final Fantasy 8 were 5 to 8 minutes long so I had to watch it at least 3 times to understand everything.

PSX Multi-Converter Homepage: http://homepage2.niffy.com/~mkb/