Hollywood OS wars 3309

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz wrote on Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:14:39 +0000

For those who are interested:

which among other things mentions flashing bullets, sugar panes (!) and visible laserbeams. There is a mention of Newton's Third Law in a sidebar.

It also rates movies, from GP (good physics) to XP (obviously physics from an unknown universe); among the recipients of the latter are all Star Wars episodes, The Core, and Armageddon. (Personally, I like Star Wars and some of the Star Trek stuff; however, given what I know of Tsiolkovsky, special relativity, and physics and astronomy in general, the idea of zooming to Sirius to pick up a loaf of bread -- or visit an old but masterful Jedi teacher -- is waaaaay out there. To accelerate a ship to lightspeed would consume more than half the spacecraft, buttuming an equal mix of matter and antimatter -- and that's *before* one considers Einstein's spacetime-twisting effects. KE = 1-2 m c^2 for a Newtonian lightspeed spacecraft, after all.)

The same concepts could also be applied to some computer games. I've often wondered how one could carry 30 minirockets without keeling over in Unreal Tournament 2004, and 100 kg of sludge (older models of Unreal Tournament) would be *very* heavy in a soldier's kit. Nexuiz is enjoyable but even worse; one can (somehow!) carry 999 machinegun rounds. A 9mm weighs 115 grains, or 7.45 grams, so this isn't too out of line, but the handling of the ammo feeding the gun probably gets a bit unwieldly. (The game doesn't model clip reloading, unlike Unreal (*not* UT).)

And yes, they flash upon impact if they hit someplace near you. The interesting thing about Nexuiz is that when a player dies, he explodes into a thousand giblets (which evaporate a few seconds later).

How these magical bullets don't leave dents in the woodwork or metalwork of a typical map is beyond me...though in all fairness the engine makers can only do so much with current video cards.

But both UT2004 and Nexuiz do run nicely on Linux. :-)

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.