collecting toilets

 
Long before I encountered gamemodding I already had fallen in love with desktopmodding. The better part of which can more accordingly be called -tweaking, as most of this discipline's alterations do not dig too deep. Instead they scratch the surface, sometimes very effectively, sometimes only on the level of cosmetic surgery. Above you can see the result of my very first attempt at customizing the looks and feel of the graphical interface—replacing the recycling bin by a big white telephone. I keep that toilet bowl since years, through time it migrated to every new machine of mine—though a lot of useful things were lost in these processes—and I still use it today. It may sound a little farfetched, but tweakers' and modders' favourite items and topoi are those which socially are declared forbidden, or sacred, which are a no-no—taboos. As the metaphor 'restroom' already proofs, toilets belong to said items, but are situated at the soft-gloved end of the 'socially-sanctionized-things spectrum'. Besides playing with taboos, collecting is another passion of modding- and gaming-culture. So it's little surprise that someone indeed started to collect ↑screenshots of gamespace-toilets.

In its ↑overview of Max Payne, Wikipedia has aptly put it: "The games' stylish cinematography and choreography is combined with heavy film noir and pulp fiction influences in characters and dialogue." In ↑Part I, Chapter Six: "Fear That Gives Men Wings" there even is a citation of ↑Pulp Fiction—one of the movie's countless memorable moments is restaged ... and a toilet is involved. When I—as Max Payne—for the first time entered that on first glance empty apartment and saw the orphaned submachine gun lying on the kitchen's sideboard I immediately knew that behind the closed door there was a guy, pants down and missing his weapon. And I was right. Allusions, citations, ↵easter eggs—that is cyberculture.

Allow me to add some other toilets not yet in the fine ↑gamespace-toilets collection. TheHunted, top-mapper of ↑New Dawn fame once showed me his rendition of a pissoir in ↵MP1-gamespace.
 

 
And as stylish like seen below will be the restrooms in the hard-worked on ↵MP2 ↵TC ↑Rogue-Ops. Besides myself being a proud member of the ↑Rogue-Ops team, there are good reasons to check out the website. With the gracious help of ADoomedMarine it has been completely overhauled, now is regularly updated and already features a lot of material on the project.
 

 
Staying in style, here is one of the most famous pre-release promotion pictures for ↵Doom3—surprisingly not yet in the collection. The screenshot has a clear message to teach: Be careful when planning to pay a visit to the restroom, as ↑Here There Be Tygers.
 

 
initially via entry at boingboing

multiplayer bullet time

 
In ye olde days of ↵MPHQ, multiplayer for Max Payne was an issue. First the possibility of making a mod comprising a multiplayer mode was seriously discussed in the forums. [Then the topic became a nuisance, and finally a running-gag played on ↵n00bs.] Quickly it became clear, that it was impossible to achieve for certain reasons: from the technical side lack of access to the source code was a powerful argument, the problems arising with ↑bullet time another. The essential knack lies in the very concept itself. A player going into bullet time gets the decisive advantage from it, because the gameworld around him/her slows down, but the player still can act—aiming the weapon has to be named here—in real time. Imagine a multiplayer game featuring bullet time. Say six players are together in one map. Every instance one of them goes into bullet time, in consequence the other five only can act in slow-motion. There will be no fluent gameplay possible anymore. Nobody would want to play a game like that. Dramaturgically it would be ideal if gameplay would not slow down for the other 5, but the actions of the bullet-timer would appear to them superhumanly fast. But then the gameserver would have to handle at least two time-lines and ultimately achieve the feat of looking into the future to be able to synchronize the actions inside and outside bullett time. Impossible! Impossible? Not quite, as it seems. The ↑NewScientist reports on Finnish researchers [who else?] ↑Jouni Smed, Henrik Niinisalo and ↑Harri Hakonen having developed a way to achieve the bullet time effect in real-time multiplayer-games. Like in ↑The Sting and in ↵IRC-black-magic, lag is the word of the hour:


The three heroes have published a paper called "Realizing the bullet time effect in multiplayer games with local perception filters" (↵2004, ↵2005). The abstract reads:


screenshots from MP2-mod project The Agents