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Topics - Qhimm

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1
Announcements and site development / Forum upgrade
« on: 2010-06-19 01:21:22 »
I upgraded the forum software from SMF 1.1 to SMF 2.0. The transition was not 100% clean, so please have a look around and report any problems or issues here (in this thread).

2
Archive / Unstable forums
« on: 2010-02-10 18:34:55 »
Time sure flies... it's been 3.5 years since this topic, and now it's maybe that time again. The server that hosts these forums has become overloaded and very unstable lately, and the hosting company is on and off blaming it on these forums. I'm not that keen on upgrading to semi-dedicated hosting (at six times the cost) just to host a personal hobby forum though... but the server seems to have more problems than just my site as well, so it's not exactly certain that a more expensive hosting plan is really needed.

For now, both I and the hosting company is monitoring the server and this site to try to get to the bottom of the problem. In the mean time, you may continue to experience intermittent downtime of the forums, but please bear with it.

If it turns out that more powerful hosting is really needed after all, I'll have to reconsider how to proceed I guess, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

3
Archive / Forum split
« on: 2007-04-30 10:51:54 »
Since Game tweaking has grown to be one of the largest and most active forums, we're splitting it up into Game tweaking (for mods and patches) and Tech support (for problems running the game). It should be rather obvious what kind of posts should go where, but just in case I have ordered my ninja moderators to assassinate offenders on sight.

;)

4
Acting on the initiative of Antipiratbyrån (Sweden's lobby organization for the media/software megacorporations), Swedish police today entered the server storages and homes of the maintainers of The Pirate Bay, confiscating any servers and computers and bringing in the people for questioning. Piratbyrån (Swedish grass roots organization arguing for the right of free sharing) and other, unrelated web hotel customers also found themselves shut down since their servers were in the same physical location as The Pirate Bay. Fifty police officers were involved in the raids, which occured simultaneously at several places in the country. This happening at the same time as tons of investigations into actual theft, beatings and murders remain unsolved or simply abandoned due to lack of police manpower.

The Pirate Bay's activities have been take to court on earlier occassions and found to be legal according to Swedish law, but warrants to search the various premises were still issued, statedly in order to "put The Pirate Bay's legality to the test".

If you ask me, as an observer I cannot help but think that the earlier rounds in court already tested what needed to be tested in terms of legality, and until those laws are rewritten to make generic distribution of information illegal (or make data providers responsible for the legality of all contained traffic), the police should have better things to do than harass legal businesses on the order of foreign corporate interests. What organization would tolerate having their people and property detained and put out of business "just in case" they are later deemed illegal? No, first you suspect people of a crime, then you call the police. You don't detain people at whim while you try to figure out how to make them criminals. "Violating copyrights" my ass; that has already been in court, and unless I'm very much mistaken, nothing has changed since then -- neither the relevant laws nor Pirate Bay's activities.

Regardless of which side you support in the "filesharing is good/bad" debate, it becomes rather apparent that this has been a travesty of justice, where the courts and police have bypassed their own laws for the sake of a "greater good" dictated by lobby organizations. Shame on you! :x

5
Announcements and site development / Temporary forums
« on: 2006-05-08 09:09:06 »
I've switched forum software to SMF, currently running a default install. This will mean there are a whole bunch of new features you can use, but which I strongly recommend against using (moderators can step in if you do). The point here is to try to minimize server stress, because quite frankly it looks like we've gotten a bit too big for my hosting account to handle (MySQL-wise).

Currently all accounts and posts are intact, but I will sometime soon take steps to move older topics to some archive of sorts, again to minimize server stress. Memberlists will also be culled, search bots will be blocked, etc. etc. Also the forums themselves will be customized whenever I have time, to reintroduce things like warnings, etc. Note that all old warnings are still intact, so you have not gotten a clean slate because of the switch. ;)

Also the subject requires some further explanation. These forums are temporary, and if it turns out the server is getting overloaded (again), they can be disabled without warning. Good luck to us all, because the next level of hosting is 3-4 times more expensive than my current hosting plan.

6
Archive / Possible downtime [April Fools]
« on: 2006-04-01 09:44:31 »
It seems my current employer (a software company wishing to remain undisclosed) is having some issues with me maintaining and being involved in a reverse-engineering community, as it possibly violates my employment contract and/or NDA by putting me in a situation of conflicting interests regarding company policy and trade secrets. I am currently in negotiations trying to convince them there is no such conflict, but since legalese is not my primary language the outlook is not 100% optimistic.

Therefore you should all be aware there's a risk I might have to step down as administrator of this site and refrain from actively participating in the community, as the sad, financial motivated truth is that my job takes priority. However, this does not mean this site will end, as I've been talking with one of my Japanese friends about letting him take over as maintainer of Qhimm.com -- as a backup in case I need to back away on short notice. He will keep a purely passive role and not interfere directly with the current way of things; the other administrators and moderators of the forums will remain as usual. There shouldn't be any real problems, but if he needs to formally take over there might be a short downtime as the site is transferred to his account.

If you need to get a hold of him for site business (like custom ranks etc.) or just welcoming him aboard, you can reach him at [email protected].

EDIT: Yes, it's that time of year again. April Fools, though of course I wouldn't expect any of the regulars of this place to fall for such an easy one. ;)

7
Seriously, are you so devoid of creative thinking that you can't think up a name for yourself without resorting to copying a well-established one? What is it that drives you, are you hoping that Sephiroth's "coolness" will rub off on you? Are you so oblivious to the fact that when other people see you they're usually think "Geez, here comes another moron"?

The reason for this little outburst is not purely ideological (we've had "Sephiroths" around since the old days), but more of a practical one. At this moment, we have 22 people using a simple variation of the name "Sephiroth" as their user name (and probably a few more using a bad spelling). It's not only uninnovative, it's downright confusing. So the following people should strongly consider changing their user name to something we can actually recognize you by, before the management decides to do some culling of the herd:

Sephiroth
Sephiroth 3D
Sephiroth the Dragon
Sephiroth 1311
Sephiroth2000
sephiroth2045
Sephiroth398
Sephiroth7777
Sephiroth_98
sephiroth_nightmare
Sephiroth's heart
SephirothEX
Great Sephiroth
The Great Sephiroth
TheGreatSephiroth
(oh for fuck's sake...)
0_sephiroth_0
_Sephiroth_
akthamissephiroth
NeoSephiroth87
Psycho_Sephiroth
Seraph_Sephiroth
xXSephirothXx

On a similar note, there are also 20 Clouds, six Squalls and three Zacks. If either of you want to have an actual identity, you might consider the same.

8
General Discussion / News from Square Enix Party 2005!
« on: 2005-07-30 12:40:53 »
Spent the day today visiting the Square Enix Party 2005, sort of like a mini-Tokyo Game Show arranged solely by SE. Needless to say, they showcased most of the upcoming games and movies. I haven't really landed from it yet, but I'll try to make a few comments. I'm not sure how much of this is actually news, but SPOILERS AHEAD!


Kingdom Hearts II (trailer and playable demo)
Well I haven't really kept up with the previously released story bits, but Sora is back, the people in black capes are plentiful, the girl from Chain of Memories plays a part, and a lot of the characters from KH make reapperances. New ones include the cast of Pirates of the Caribbean (sp?) and Auron from FFX. A prominent villain(?) is a guy wrapped in red straps/bandages, who seems to make appearances by projecting himself with technology. When Sora attempts to attack him, his keyblade passes through him, merely distorting his image in a code-like pattern. Cloud and Squall is at one point seen fighting back to back, with Cloud in his new Advent Children-look (the clothing, that is). The gameplay hasn't changed that much from KH, your main task through the battles still seem to be whacking against enemies, but some new bits include special actions in specific situations by pressing triangle, and the ability to assume various modes ("Drives"?) as well as merging/comboing with your battle partner (in the case of the playable demo, Beast).

Final Fantasy VII technical demonstration for PS3 (trailer)
Nothing new to report, I assume you've all seen it. Let me just inform you that it's amazing to behold in high resolution projected on a big screen. So was all of the trailers. :P

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (trailer)
Nothing new here, they showed the same trailer that's available on the new (albeit with no English translation, the bastards)...

Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus (trailer and playable demo)
Didn't really find out much about the story, mostly due to my weak Japanese, but all the more about gameplay. Vincent has limit breaks where he morphs into beasts (like in FF7), various different guns (handgun, rifle, machinegun) and can cast magic if the gun is equipped with materia. The controls were a bit icky, and I couldn't play long enough to see if you actually got used to them. Left analog stick controls Vincent's movement, right stick the view angle. Press R1 to enter aiming mode, after which you control the aim with the right stick and fire with R1 (or L1 for magic), until you cancel aiming with X. The game is just screaming for a mouse for aiming, but it does help you with some degree of autolocking to target the correct enemy. The game is filled with friendly characters, and it's your job you make sure they don't get killed by Deep Ground forces. Later on, you also have friendlies fighting alongside with you, and of course you shouldn't shoot them. With only a small stick to aim it sounds complicated, but the game does help you tell people apart and only shoot the bad guys. The demo played reasonably smoothly within areas, with small load times whenever you moves between them. The areas do feel rather small though, but this could actually be a sign that Midgar itself is rather small (during the small demo opening mission, you rather quickly move what appeared to be between the outer areas of the inner ring to what appeared to be the center (presumably the Shinra HQ ruins). I never had time to actually get to the end though. Vincent is watched at the beginning by the girl you've seen in trailers (who says "found you"), she's actually sitting in a computer room, connected with cables to her helmet. I theorize she's in communication with all the Deep Ground forces, who appear to be either computer-enhanced or computer-controlled (or both). Also, I noticed pretty much everyone of the FF7 cast making cameos, either ingame or in CG sequences; Yuffie is seen talking to Vincent, Barret and Tifa is driving a truck under attack by the big guy with blue hair, Cid shows up too etc. Cloud himself seemed to be missing, at least I didn't see him anywhere. Remember that this takes place after AC and we don't know what actually happens to him (see below). The trailer also revealed quite clearly that Dirge of Cerberus will feature online play, with demonstrations of what looked like some form of co-op mode. Oh, and I saw Reeve get shot through the chest. Wonder how they fix that bit of a story hole, eh? Eh? Hole? Get it? Hah hah hah...

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (NEW trailers)
The one you were all waiting for? Well I did too, I stood in line for two hours to get in, and I was probably one of the luckier ones. I'll try to recall some of the points:
  • GOD it's beatiful to behold on a big screen.
  • They make a really big deal of the white-caped man (Rufus?) revealing his face, cutting several times to Kadaj's surprised face. Either there is still some lingering secret about the white-caped man, or Square is trying to misdirect our attention. Kadaj is moments later seen at an explosion (same scene? did Rufus blow them up?) where he screams "Mother!" and jumps off the building. Presumably he's trying to catch the small box containing Jenova that's plummeting towards the ground.
  • New poster image of Cloud carrying an unconscious (dead?) Kadaj in his arms. Don't know what relevance it has to the story, but with Sephiroth around Kadaj might turn out not to be such a bad guy in reality. A second poster (which I want but it wasn't for sale yet) showed Cloud looking up from his bike, with a nice faded half-side-image of Sephiroth in the background. EDIT: It's the same as the reported limited edition DVD cover.
  • Loz fights with some special power that lets him move extremely fast, in a blue flash of light. This is how he gains the upper hand on Tifa during their fight, after taking a bit of a beating at first.
  • Yazoo and Loz fight with amazing teamwork, more so than is revealed in the official trailer. First at the bike chase, Yazoo actually shoots (and hits!) Cloud in the head, upon which his bike goggles are smashed and we see some blood. Later in the crystal forest, Cloud also seems to be fighting a valiant but losing battle against the duo. They release powerful attacks and complement each other, at one point Loz throws Yazoo at Cloud which can't fully dodge the speed of the attack...
  • The airship you see is not the original Highwind (remembering that it was damaged badly in FF7), or at the very least it's been extensively rebuilt. Cid refers to it as a "new model", and I may have heard the name "Ciel"-something for it (not at all sure though).
  • Sephiroth definitely doesn't appear to be a flashback or vision, despite the rather out-of-context scenes he's appeared in so far, namely the destroyed building and the dark sky. New shots show him as quite real, talking with Cloud (sorry I couldn't get most of the dialogue! T_T), in warm sunlight (like some of the battles with Kadaj). Sephiroth looks at Cloud in a dark, taunting manner, raises his arm behind him and summons a vortex of dark clouds, which rise up and create the dark setting we've seen flashes of Sephiroth in before. They get ready to fight, Cloud makes some assumably noble comments including the word "death", and Sephiroth coldly replies "That's right... your death." (guessing Cloud could've said something like "I'll fight you until death"; or maybe it's actually something deeper). They then launch at each other at lightning speed, in a furious sword fight. It's a veritable über-duel, all you percieve are brief flashes and clashing swords. Sephiroth is presumably bringing down the building at Cloud, and at one point they're seen fighting; Cloud at the side of the falling building, Sephiroth standing at a 90-degree angle against a falling chunk of concrete, still furiously exchanging sword blows.
  • Kadaj still makes references to "wanting to bring back the old you" when speaking to Cloud. Unsure how important this is.
  • I hope this trailer becomes available in high-res, because it was bloody wonderful. I was set to buy AC anyway, but seeing this and the other FF7 trailers in person has reinforced my firm position as Square's bitch. Each of these projects look promising enough to be a good game on its own, throw in the nostalgic payload of FF7 and you'll be damned I'll buy it.
  • Finally some of what sounds like the final soundtrack. Plenty of metal, for presumably plenty of fights, and a completely remade One Winged Angel (NOT the music heard during the public trailer, which was just OWA with extra guitar tracks). This is a fresh one entirely, and it even sounded like some of the lyrics where updated, all recorded in superb quality with instruments really matching the setting. Since I can't describe the music better than that, I'll just mention that I will be picking up the OST as soon as it becomes available.
  • The limited box will be priced just under 30,000 yen, which is fucking expensive, but it does contain at least some cool stuff. Apart from the movie, there are interviews, "making of", a special version (Venice?), the Last Order OVA, Cloud&Fenrir figurine, some more goods, reprinted FF7 International (with nice renders of Cloud, Aerith and Sephiroth as CD covers) with an additional 4th CD called "Perfect guide" (IIRC) which I think I overheard contains special stuff like images, character renderings etc. (edit: this is presumably the same fourth disc as included with the original FF7 International, possibly with the new character renderings). The whole thing is packaged up in a black skin-clad box with an embossed wolf logo.[/list:u]
    Final Fantasy XII (trailer and playable demo)
    I haven't followed the trailers much actually since I don't want to spoil the story this early, but the demo was rather cool. There is no longer any distinction between field and battle, the same menu, controls and screen is available through-out the game. You can run around freely even in battle, though in order to actually fill up your ATB bar you have to stand still I think. You typically only control the main character, and he/she will continue doing attacking until you tell him/her otherwise. The other party characters will attack/defend/whatever according to some speficied strategy, unless you specifically take control of them to issue direct commands. The gameplay feels much more like, say, Star Ocean in that way. While your ATB is filling up, it also seemed like you could switch the set command to something else. Items seemed to be useable instantly (though they reset the ATB bar). There were also summon-like creatures, which were, well, massive. Clearly this game is pushing the PS2 hardware to its limits. Finally there's something called the "Gambit" system, but from the extensively Japanese description I couldn't figure out how it worked. As a side note, March 16th was given as a (Japanese) release date.

    Oh, and I saw Final Fantasy XI running on an Xbox360, at the breakneck speed of 4-5 fps. Progress is amazing. ;)



    That was pretty much a summary of my day. I looked at some other games too (Grandia III, Full Metal Alchemist 3, Blade Master Musashi, etc.), but didn't feel they were needed in this "short" post. If you want details, you can always ask :)

9
...I'm strongly considering adding a minimum IQ/common sense requirement to be able to post on the forums. Jesus.

You know, this place started small, and for a long time it consisted mostly of a group of sensible people I very much liked to call friends. What is it now? A goddamn daycare center for people who shouldn't be allowed to interact online, or even own a keyboard for that matter.
  • At least five members now are using the forums to talk to each other instead of calling or meeting outside (or in cases, the goddamn living room).
  • At least two permanently banned users are semi-secretly back posting as if nothing happened.
  • Most of the few people who were capable of having a decent intellectual conversation are gone or driven insane by the rest of the members.
  • Maybe one or two percent of the registered users are actually contributing towards the intended goal of these forums.
  • There exists maybe a handful of people who actually behave as regulars, the rest (including many long-time members) are still acting like dyslexic newbies who just post for the hell of it.
  • There are maybe five or ten different topics alive, which are endlessly repeated since people can apparently not read anything posted before they thought of the idea.[/list:u]
    I seriously don't care anymore.

    If anyone thinks they can make a difference, let me know and I'll make you a moderator. I'm tired of cleaning up this mess, if you people are interested in this place as anything else than a random crap dump then maybe you should start actually working for it.

10
Archive / Notice: If you registered recently...
« on: 2005-05-13 15:52:23 »
...your account may have been deleted if you didn't post anything (zero post count). I apologize for this inconvenience, but there's been many dead (unused) accounts as well as some account creation spammers, so I had to clean out. This does not affect users who posted in Completely Unrelated and had their posts pruned, only users that never posted.

Again, sorry for any trouble this caused honest people who just registered.

11
Thanks to the FF8 battle model viewer that floated up a while ago, I was able to make some important progress on the decoding of FF8 models. I have made my own battle model viewer which improves on the original viewer in a couple of ways, most importantly the elimination of visual artifacts and correct display of transparency and additive blending.

Also, inspired by mirex' Biturn, I've tried to implement ASE exporting to the viewer, which is really the point of this topic. Now it's 7:42 in the morning here (and I'm not up early), so I'll limit the explanations to that these images are 3DSMAX renders done a few minutes ago.





I shall now sleep.

12
General Discussion / Slight change of location
« on: 2004-09-06 03:00:47 »
I'm currently typing this at an Internet café at Arlanda airport, Stockholm, Sweden. It's 5 in the morning, in a few hours my flight will leave for Paris, and a few hours after that I will be on the flight towards my final destination: Tokyo, Japan.

Much of my work will be on hold until I manage to set up a laptop and an internet connection, and I might thus also be gone from here for a while. Fear not, though. I will from time to time keep an eye on you all, even without a high-speed connection. ;)

P.S. Beware of wandering the central Stockholm train station at nighttime. I was trying to find my way to the airport and ended up being escorted away by armed security guards... :oops:

13
Due to the general disregard for the rules evident lately, I'm upping the stakes a bit. Frankly I'm getting damned tired of dealing with the idiots, and have considered closing the Unrelated forum entirely.

From now on, there will be no warnings for trolls (instant ban). There will also be instant bans for bitching about a moderator's decision (of course, a well-based argument is okay). Moderators will be given the right to ban users, and pure trolling threads (like the ATTN: Aaron threads) may be deleted without warning. Guest posting has been disabled for all forums. Users who return after a ban (by registering a new account) should be referred to an admin, which will then ban their entire IP range.

That is all.

14
Archive / DoS attack
« on: 2004-06-13 14:57:45 »
As some of you may have noticed, Qhimm.com was recently down due to depleted bandwidth. This was caused by a denial-of-service attack launched at the site between June 9 and June 12. The attack was a brute-force undistributed flooding attack launched from two computers, being the equivalent of some 400,000 visits to the Qhimm.com main site.

The attack was launced from two locations, from a total of three IPs:
12.215.121.137, located near Ottawa, Illinois, US
209.112.208.228 and 209.112.215.55, located near Anchorage, Alaska, US

Appropriate action is being taken.

15
Archive / Avatar rule enforcements
« on: 2003-08-09 22:08:59 »
Due to recent evidence of blatant disregard for the rules regarding avatars, starting now any user with an avatar breaking the rules will lose the ability to use avatars indefinitely.

The names of the users having broken the avatar rules will be continuously added to this list:

16
Archive / FAQ: Avatar PNGs and script errors
« on: 2003-06-08 09:29:19 »
As some of you may or may not have noticed, the forums contain a code snippet for IE to correctly process transparency in PNG files. Thus for example, Sephiroth3D's avatar is on a transparent background instead of boring gray.

A current problem is, however, if someone is using a broken PNG link as their avatar, in which case the code will go BLEH and cough up errors. I believe the current issues with this were spawned from Aaron's avatar, which the last time I checked was broken.

The problem will be looked into, albeit not right now. Patience is requested, either that or go poke Aaron. :wink:

EDIT: I have disabled Aaron's avatar for him, so you might not want to poke him too much...

17
General Discussion / A very special date...
« on: 2003-04-01 18:17:13 »
To commemorate this date, I've hidden a small surprise somewhere on the site... it shall be interesting to see if any of you are able to find it. :)

It is publically available (it might be visible or in HTML code or similar), and is stored under Qhimm.com (qhimm.com, forums.qhimm.com or ttg.qhimm.com). Should you pursue it, good luck.

18
Archive / The Big Two
« on: 2003-03-01 13:38:42 »
Wow, seems the main site visitor counter passed 200,000 sometime early this morning (local time). That's quite impressive, considering the blatant lack of updates lately... *bows head in shame*

Anyway, I wish I had something to celebrate this event (like, oh, a new release), but sadly I have not. But fear not, most of what little spare time I have is being channeled into a certain project.  :)

19
Archive / Site downtime
« on: 2002-11-20 17:24:30 »
The site was down for at least 12 hours last night, apparently due to a corrupted configuration file. I apologize for any trouble caused by this, but also claim there just isn't much I can do about it.

Also, I recently upgraded phpBB to version 2.0.3. Unfortunately, this seems to have completely broken compatibility with newer Netscape versions (don't know why). I'm looking into this.

20
Archive / First logo suggestion
« on: 2002-08-18 21:19:47 »
As you've probably noticed, there's a new logo up there. This is the first logo suggestion for the new design / T-shirt. Comments, feedback, suggestions? Feel free to post them here.

21
Archive / Poor uptime
« on: 2002-08-11 11:32:56 »
As many of you are probably aware by now, the current host for this site has gotten to be rather unreliable. Unexplained downtime of several hours at a time, often several times a week! And now this latest downtime of 24+ hours where the DNS server suddenly failed, rendering qhimm.com inaccessible.

As a result, I've begun to look into other hosts that offer the same features at roughly the same price. I've found one or two, however these are a bit more expensive than my current hosting. Hence this poll. Please participate in full honesty.

*spelling error in vote option - SaiNt* :P

22
Archive / Avatar sizes
« on: 2002-05-18 21:13:47 »
I did say I would allow free dimensions on the avatar pics, but you people are pushing it. Seph, Jedimark: Shrink it down a bit, okay? You're gonna outweigh the post content if you make it any bigger.

23
General Discussion / Game Pop Quiz #3!
« on: 2002-05-02 20:57:54 »
New topic, new quiz, new style.
Quote

Enjoy, hope it lasts *a bit* longer than the last one :)

24
Archive / User levels
« on: 2002-05-01 19:11:13 »
You might have noticed every user now has a level, display next to their rank in the post. At the moment, this level is calculated solely on a user's post count, but it will be extended in the future to prevent flooding just to get better levels. Also, expect further trinkets that'll help enhance the feel of the board  :D

25
General Discussion / Game Pop Quiz #2!
« on: 2002-04-29 14:19:00 »
Alright, a slightly different style this time.

Code: [Select]
 E L B I
G L E V E B
E A 1 2 R E
N T 3 2 6 H
E I O N 1 T
  S I S 3

I have a secondary chiffre in store, in case no one gets it right. But really, you *should* get this one.

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