Windows 7 RC install

I finally got around to installing the RC after the Beta started shutting down every two hours. So here goes:

As I couldn’t be bothered trying to get my PC to boot from the CD (without changing the priority), I ran setup from within the existing 7 Beta.  Yes, you can do that, you just can’t upgrade in place from the Beta.

  

The Installer can update itself to download drivers and other things they say.

 

I don’t know what it actually updated, but it’s a good idea.

 

 

A choice of Upgrade or Custom (advanced).

Obviously I can’t choose Upgrade install.  Slightly annoyingly after this screen the installer just exists.

If there is on OS already on the selected partition, the Installer will rename it to windows.old.  It actually dumped the entire contents on the partition prior to install in that folder.  (documents, Windows, Program Files, everything.)  So at least you could still get stuff back if you needed to.  I don’t know if it did this on a boot install though.

During the restarts this screen came on my boot menu: it only gave you 2 seconds to choose, but it was nice you could choose a different OS to boot into or continue with the setup. (Well, I guess you could, I didn’t try)

The initial start menu.

And the pretty login screen with flowers.

Overall the install probably took about 30-45 minutes.  Sorry about the image quality I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to take screenshots during install. 

That’s that then

Finally finished the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Developer’s Commentary. After the previous episode’s commentary mode I decided to make a mapping of the sound track from that was included in Audio Surf, as I played through the game again. [Highlight to read the mapping]

• Vortal Combat is the music with the Vorts fighting the antlions in the tunnels
• Inhuman Frequency is when you and Alyx encounter Combine Advisor in the barn.
• Sector Sweep is just after that when the soldiers come to kill you.
• No One Rides for Free seems to be when you get the RADAR car.
• Eon Trap seems to be the Ambush at White Forest Inn.
• Abandoned In Place is when you are fighting the Combine at White Forest Base that Dr Magnussun thinks are crows.
• Last Legs is the last wave of Striders in the final battle

Playing through the Commentary from Episode 1 took about half the time as playing through the game the first time.  Curiously though, playing through the E2 commentary took the same time as playing the game the first time around! I’m not quite sure what happened there, though the puzzles and combat were easier because I could predict what was going to happen, I suppose I spent more time playing with the level (physics, AI, etc.); and other game elements as you’ll see…

At times of intense combat when a song started playing I paused the game to listen to the music in peace so I could get a feel for the various elements in the game.  Then I spent maybe, five or so minutes running though the music on my laptop, trying to find the song that matches the music.  Sometimes I could narrow my guesses down to less then 3 songs based on the title and the contents of the game.  (For example, Vortal Combat matches the battle of the Antlions and the Vortigaunts).  Other times I had to listen to several songs to find the one.

Also, I noticed in this Episode there seemed to be more some commentary nodes, especially from the rather talented Merle Dandridge, whose commentary nodes were quite lengthy.  Which is really good, I quite enjoyed hearing her thought’s on the game and acting for a video game. (And so was Ellen McClain’s commentary in Portal)

So, the second time around was quite good (slightly annoying having to stop and map the music though), I’m sure I picked up some extra story elements and level design elements that I may have missed before. There were a couple of times when I anticipated particular battles ahead, and felt reluctant to continue (especially the last battle), just because I didn’t really feel like doing them again.  However they weren’t that long (I could always cheat anyway, I’d already finished (without cheating, the first time)), and it was good to redo the game to properly understand the commentary.  (And I got some neat screenies)

(Oh, I must add: surprisingly, even though I put the game on notarget mode, it was still was difficult to run over the hunters and take out the Striders in the last wave.  Props to VALVe for keeping the level still enjoyably-hard even while cheating…)

What’s next?

FEAR XP1?

Probably…

Oh, but I liked that…

About the only feature I miss that has actually been removed from Windows 7 (compared to Vista), has to be the Default Email and Internet links on the Start Menu. 

The main reason I liked this was that you could right click, say Internet and choose Internet Properties, which would take you to the aforementioned Control Panel item. 

The cool part was it even worked with other browsers, like Firefox:

Now the thing is, previously I thought that on Vista you couldn’t right click on the Start Menu, but that they had re-enabled right clicking the Start Menu.  However it seems that there is a setting to enable or disable that even in Vista.  Previously I was thinking, “Nice, they put back right clicking on the Start menu”.

Since discovering that you could use the Internet and Email items on the Start menu in this way, it has just made the removal of this feature in W7 that much worse.  Only because I thought it was cool.

Now I must add: I haven’t actually had much need for this feature, even on XP at work so to be honest I probably wouldn’t miss it.  The reason I particularly like this is that it integrates with alternative browsers not just I.E.  But so far this is the only thing about W7 that I miss (I know, I know, I don’t even use the feature) that doesn’t have much of a work around. (Yes, I know you can pin them, but that’s not the point….)

hey neat!

So I plug my Nokia phone in to Window 7 Beta, hoping it would find something interesting.  Well, it was interesting.  I plug it in go to the Device Stage and there are warning icons over several unknown devices.  (One of which it’s worked out is a “generic phone”.)  So I choose Troubleshoot, Windows thinks for a few seconds and up comes this gem:

I’m not quite sure what drivers it thought it had installed successfully, but I like it letting me download PC suite easily.  I didn’t proceed, so I don’t know what will happen.

Half-Life 2 on Intel Graphics (continued from before)

Continuing the theme of writing this blog as I do stuff, I’ve decided to download the most recent drivers for my laptop’s graphics adaptor.

Before I go to far though, I should probably state that most of my surprise at HL2 even working to the extent that it did, was due to most of the games from 2004 requiring, (that is, explicitly checking for) Hardware transform and lighting, which Intel graphics then performed on the CPU.  There were notable exceptions, Unreal Tournament 2003/4 being one.  And thinking about it more, Half-Life 2 was after all released in late ‘04, and Valve especially doesn’t want to alienate large percentages of customers.  So I guess for those two reasons I wasn’t expecting it to run at all.

OK then.   I’ll try installing these newer drivers. (14.19.50.4497 for 852/855GM, from Feb ‘06…) .  Wow, that was quick, something’s wrong, it won’t let me install them.  I’ll try something else.  So I try the automatic driver checking applet, and it says I have custom drivers installed from the manufacturer and to look there instead.  They don’t have anything.  So I have just tried installing the drivers manually using the Device Manager.  Am restarting.

So, back to City 17, AKA Half-Life 2 to see if anything’s improved.  I’ll start a new game, to see if I get the G-man. Yay, I can see him now. Though, could it just be because of a restart? 

Annoyingly the first screen with Breen still has some transparency issues.

In the game there seems to be a metal support behind the texture projection which is showing through somehow.  Oddly, when I alt-tab to the desktop and back again I don’t seem to have the issue anymore.

Unfortunately, I still don’t hear the Breencast, no idea what’s causing that, I can hear other sounds.  Maybe I’ll look into that as well.  The other thing I want to do is see how much performance I get, but that will be later.

Steam on a 5 year old lappy?

My friend suggested I try out Half-Life 2 on my old laptop so we can play LAN games at his house, I didn’t believe HL2 would even be able to run on Intel graphics.  But I thought I try it and see.  I’m writing this blog in real time, the tense change.

Understandably the Steam install is going fine, it’s currently updating itself which is nothing interesting particularly.

94%, 95%, 957%… I’d better close down my current copy of Steam on my desktop before I go logging in again….

It’s very slow to load, and download the Store… It finishes after a few seconds…

My first problem is getting any game content onto my laptop.  Trying to connect a Windows 7 machine to an XP Pro machine might be difficult…. Ahh right, easy when you know how: Disconnect lappy from wi-fi, manually configure W7 to the same Ethernet subnet as the lappy is on. Type in IP address in Explorer bar.

So I try copying Audiosurf over and see how that goes. (Because Audiosurf has minimal requirements in comparison to Source games.)  I copy over Audiosurf from its location in Steamapps/common to the same.  Steam doesn’t think it’s installed, so I get it.  Luckily it’s smart enough to realise that most of the files are intact and is currently updating to 97% in the time taken to write these last two sentences.  98% now, looking good Steam.  (BTW, it’s now 11:07 pm and I started the whole experiment at about 10:30pm (including unpacking my laptop)).

Audiosurf is ready! I click play.  It’s slower to load I’m first noticing. Though that’s to be expected. In the game, the cursor is less responsive than my desktop (obviously), but it doesn’t have any trouble calculating the level geometry from the music.  Actually playing a song – well, I really have to turn the graphics detail down to minimum and the resoulion to 640x480 to make it playable.  I don’t have any framerate measuring tools on that machine anymore, I’ll try to get some later.

So now, I’ll try HL2(!).  Wish me luck… OK then, Steam’s good enough to detect that it’s installed, all I did was copy the gcf files and rerun Steam client.  Apparently I need more hard disk space, I check it, and there’s 836MB free, “Yeah, I agree”.  So I delete about 400MB, and try again.

The moment of truth!  So, far it’s about twice as slow for the first dialog box that says loading.  Oh boy! It’s loading the main menu! (And the Valve video was ok-ish, a bit delayed though.)  Still loading the main menu… Wow!!!! It’s actually in the main menu! And these menus are real levels too.  It’s 640x480, but the mouse seems quite responsive.  Still keeping this blog in real time, following are the advanced video settings.

• Medium - Model Detail
• Medium - Texture Detail
• High - Shader Detail
• Simple reflection - Water Detail
• Low – Shadow Detail
• Disabled - Colour Correction
• None - AA
• Bilinear - Filtering
• Disabled - Vsync
• None - HDR

I’m starting a new game… Well, I can’t see the G Man, but I can hear him.. Odd.  That bit’s finished, ooh I can see the train, walk around even! Responsive enough, though I can’t hear the first Breencast for some reason.  I did hear the Scanner click though.  As I proceed through to Barney’s security room, I can hear him, and the CPs, but not Kliener on the monitor.  I wonder why I can’t hear sound on monitors, only coming from NPC's?  The most obvious graphical difference at the moment would be that objects are only rendered from a few feet away and so fade in as I approach. (And the lack of AA of course.)

Sometime later I hope to do further experimentation with HL2 to get the sound working properly, G-Man video, see if I can get it to run at the native resolution of the LCD.

New Safely Remove Hardware in W7

The Safely Remove Hardware menu has been adjusted in Windows 7, it seems to be better.

In previous versions, you could left-click to bring up a menu which listed each device you could remove, or right-click to bring up a dialog box listing more details about each device you could remove. In 7, however they seemed to have dropped the right-click menu, combining the extra details to the menu (either mouse button). (AFIAK).

If you click on the Safely Remove Hardware item, it now brings up a virtual folder (some form of Control Panel item actually).  This could be good if you have many removable devices to choose from, or you want to be able to remove several at the same time.  The only problem is that it’s not really clear how to actually remove a device, given a dedicated screen.  To actually remove a device, you still have to right-click the icon (see the next picture). (Or use the toolbar option, but this is still two clicks.)

I feel if there’s only one drive attached to the device you want to remove you don’t need a cascading menu, it’s not much more code…

Aside from that though, I’m happy with the change overall.