Not I.

But, I have a question for you: Are you as tall as you appear in your avatar pic? You look like you're about 7' tall!

Well, I build my own computers, so yah, you can call me a nerd. Past that, you seem to be asking what graphics card would be good.

In all honesty, you don't need to buy a super premium card. As Marcusfish said, the current crop is ahead of the curve for most games currently out there. Likely, that will remain the case for a couple of years. Past that, I don't think that one can really say whether future games will overpower cheap cards.

However, it is a fact that a couple of years ago, there were several studios that were making games that pretty much ran well only on expensive cards. The result was that they got to product introduction only to find out that few people had the hardware to make the games worth buying. Thus, the current trend is to make games that can run well on more total machines and thus have a better chance of getting a large market segment.

If you are interested in higher end hardware, then you should look to building a whole computer on your own. Then you get to pick the parts that you get. With some research, you will do better than buying from some major manufacturer such as Dell. It will cost more than a Dell box but for gaming, it may be worth the cash. It will also be cheaper than buying a boutique gaming computer from someone like Alienware.

Pretty much, if you do the right research, you will come out with a box that is in the middle of the range as far as thew price goes. You should have a computer that can take anything that you can throw at it today. Down the road, when you find that you have to dumb down the graphics settings in some future game, then you can look at a graphics upgrade, which is, of course a much less expensive deal than replacing the whole computer.

The downside is that you become responsible for your hardware on a different level. You don't have one warranty from one company. You have one warranty for each part and you need to be able to deal with that. Against that, there is a substantial nerd community where you can ask questions to help you figure out what needs to happen.

Also, I will tell you that I happen to be an overclocker. In fact, before I came to the RRS, I was on the staff of one of the larger overclocking forums. Let me clue you in on one of the secrets that may help you.

AMD is currently offering procs with either 4 cores or 6 cores. However, they really are the same product. What happens is that after the procs are made, enough of them to meet the demand for 6 core procs are tested. Those where the extra 2 cores can't be activated become 4 core chips, as do all of the untested ones.

Also, there are motherboards currently out that can activate the 2 hidden cores and for the most part, they work just fine (unless you get a bad chip but there are ways to avoid that). You can save USD 100 by getting the 4 core proc and unlocking it but the mobo that does that is going to cost like USD 50 to USD 75 more than a regular high end board.

My advice here is to get the 6 core proc and a board that can use it without any adjustments in the BIOS that may not work.

Another thing: If you see a point where you will want to use two graphics cards, you need to know that SLI and Crossfire are two different things. If you are looking at an AMD platform, you will want to go Crossfire. SLI cards can be installed and you will be able to connect multiple monitors but you will not be able to use the second card to enhance the performance of the first.

Also, if that is what you want to do, make sure that your mobo supports two 16x PCI-E slots. Many boards that claim to have two slots and 16x speed really implement the deal so that one card will run at 16x but two cards will run as 2(8x) cards.

Alienware may be expensive but I like their style!

I built my own computer too. I have an AMD - Nvidia machine but those things keep changing all the time. I would go for Nvidia though, only because I find their software better.

Nice.  I always used to try to run some RPGs wherever I lived (sometimes GURPS, since it uses D6 and not all countries provide easy access to polyhedral dice)- I haven't done so much recently.  I should start up again, but I keep moving.

Whereabouts do you live?  I travel around quite a bit; if you're in a major city, if I'm ever in the neighborhood on business maybe I could drop by for a few sessions.  Always fun to meet a new gaming group.

Perhaps you would want to write a short program to do polyhedral dice then. I have done that in qbasic, C and for a couple of calculators. By far, the calculator is the best way because you can move it around so easily. Let me give you a bit of psuedo code to get you started:

REM set up a high quality random number generator

RANDOMIZE Timer

R1=Rnd

R2=INT R1*10000

P1=1

IF P1=R2 THEN NEXT ELSE P1=P1+1 REM sets a random but longish loop to delay the next random number by an arbitrary length.

RANDOMIZE Timer

R2=Rnd

REM set a seed number for die rolls this will be a fairly large integer

R3=(INT R1*1000) * (INT R2*1000)

REM note here that it is possible to use non-euclidean solids as in a roll of 3d7 not that any normal game uses it but if you use this code, you can get different probability tables should you feel the need to do so

INPUT “how many sides to the die?;X1 REM these two lines set the roll parameters as in 3d6

INPUT “how many time to roll the die?; D1

REM time to roll the dice

TOTAL=0 REM initializes the final output

ROLL=1

For ROLL=1 to D1

RANDOMIZE Timer

R4=INT Rnd

RESULT=INT R2*R4

ROLL=RESULT MOD (X1+1) REM sets a roll constrained by the number of side on the die and the +1 is needed to prevent a roll of zero

TOTAL=total+RESULT

NEXT ROLL REM this loop does D1 rolls of X1 sided die

OUTPUT “For” D1”d”X1” The roll is “TOTAL

I may have made enough mistakes that that is borked but you should get the idea. If the output is not quite right, then you can fix it yourself. If you want to check it, wrap a loop around all of that and run it a few hundred thousand times dumping the output into an array. Then graph the output. If you get a bell curve, the you are good to go.

Nah, I would rather have real dice myself. However, you did mention that you sometimes find yourself not having access to dice, so that is one way to do it. There are of course other ways such as a spinner to get the same deal.

As far as the iphone goes, I don't use an iphone so I would have no clue if there is a program that does that. However, I would assume that it would be little different from using a website that has a dice program on it. In fact, there are a bunch of such websites and if you did not have the iphone, I would assume that you could use one of those. I have played over irc and using such a web site but that is, as you say, kind of a poor substitute.

As far as I can see, the best reason for using such a web site is so that everyone can log into the same site and see what is really being rolled. Then you know the other players are being honest. In other games where we did not have such a website going, there was a real concern because of people who seemed to get too many natural 20's. Proving that it was not a statistical fluke would be impossible as it would take several years of real time gaming to get enough data to prove that the rolls were lies but whatever.

You do make a good point about the human factor being a major part of the game though. For me personally, that is a big part of the game. Someone does something and you have to deal with what comes from that. I probably have at least as many stories as you but I will give you a small sample.

Story 1:

So I am in a mud based on the Wheel of Time novels. My character serves the Great Lord yet I am traveling with some light lover. We need to get some info from an NPC. So I just pervert the healing weaves for the purpose of torture. When that happens, my light friend decides to heal the guy.

OK, that actually works better for me. I mess with him and she heals him. I mess with him and she heals him. I mess with him and she heals him. And so on. The more she heals him, the more I can torture him. Had she not been healing him, the torture would have had to be a once through and no promise that I would not have killed him before we get what we need.

Story 2:

I am in a play by email TNG game with 150+ active players. You can't expect one GM to handle all of that. I am one of three Klingons in the group and the other two were tagged as sub GM's for the duration. Well, we also had a couple of noobs who wanted to be Kilngons as well, so that sets me up as the fleet commander.

So I give the noobs patrol routes on the Romulan border. Routes that are too large for them to cover the border. So they spend three weeks sending the main GM movement instructions that are just insane. Basically, they are going back and forth between two points on the map and never seeing any gaming action. When the GM twigs to what is going on, he runs a Romulan invasion into the Empire.

The long and short of the deal was that the GM was trying to play a “nice” star trek game and he ended up with a Klingon civil war on his hands.

Story 3:

The game from story 2 is actually part of a sequence of several games. A month before a trek convention, we play three weeks by email. Then we have a LARP at the convention. A week after the convention, we have a paint ball game.

OK, so here I am in the paintball thing with the job of carrying the artifact that can win the game around in a picnic cooler through the woods. Actually, it was a modified smoke detector that needed a C battery to activate. As luck would have it, the guy I was traveling with was a setup from the GM (probably a revenge move for starting a civil war in the previous game but whatever). Halfway through the game, this dude tagged me for the fact that he was a plant and he had taken the battery earlier and dropped in a long way away.

Honestly, this is not a problem. Here is the deal...

Since it was a C cell that I needed, any 1.5v source would do if I could field modify it. As luck had it that day, a girl on the team had a walkie talkie with a AAA cell. So I called out, “anyone have change in a pocket?” That got me a handful of coins to use as shims.

Well, chickie did not want to give up the battery. So I bring my gun up and say “Jen, field rules, I can shoot anyone more than 20 feet away. You are in a trench surrounded by a dozen or more players. The only thing that I need from you is the battery and I am backing up. When I get far enough, you are getting lit up.”

I only got about ten feet away from her before I got the battery.

Story 4:

Another TNG paintball game. This time, the scenario is a Borg invasion. The Borg cube was two bunkers side by side with surveyors tape around the area far eough out that nobody could shoot inside the perimeter in any meaningful way.

Well, halfway through this six hour game, we had found the Borg cube and we were killing the borg as soon as they came out. This included our own players who had been assimilated. Total stalemate here.

Then I realized that I had two 80,000 cubic foot smoke grenades with me. I got everyone around me to make a hail of cover fire as I walked into the cube. When I got the the center, I dropped one in each bunker. All of the people in both bunkers fled like lemmings.

At the dust off meeting later, the GM was not wanting to say what I had done. So I stood up and addressed the whole group. What I said was:

“Pete, if you check your sources, the Klingons are not signatory the the treaty of the Hague. I used chemical weapons on the Borg. No funky energy weapon thing can adapt to that.”

He had to tell us that we won.

Well, what does unlimited detail even mean?

I really doubt that they are modeling fundamental physical particles a mile or more from view. Are they modeling the world so that no matter what you see, you will not get “jaggies”? Yah, with enough video memory, anything is possible.

Sorry forgot to add the link. http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

The world needs guidos too!

I agree that con-nerds are probably not the demographic we should consider dangerous. Their worst qualities are usually their inability to realize when no one is interested in hearing them talk and their occasional lack of hygiene.

It's on my to-do list. Unfortunately the other items on the list seem to be infinitely refilling. What a jip.