BLuDBLoG veterans stuff, gaming and other mad ravings…

12Sep/112

We’ve got a new Falcon 4.0 Server! (BMS4)

GET THE LATEST NEWS HERE: http://www.facebook.com/FalconBMS4

We're now Hosting BMS4 Multiplayer on our Dedicated Server! Fly Campaign missions with us at VETERANS-GAMING!

How to join: (SERVER CURRENTLY DOWN PENDING FIXES BUT PLAYER HOSTED FLIGHTS ARE STILL AVAILABLE DAILY)

Server IP : 173.179.193.109

- Set your bandwidth in the UI to 128. ( Important !! )

- Disable all IVC.

- Server password can be found by asking a server administrator.

- If you are going to be AFK for longer than 5 minutes please leave the server.

- You must join one of the BMS4 TS3 flight channels to play here.

- No team killing or asset abuse; protect the airframe as best you can.

- No Hate!

- DO NOT make any changes to the Server Priorities List! DO NOT change the Target Types, Mission Types, or PAKS! Any violations of this rule will result in your immediate Ban from the Server.

- Please do not share our Server Password with anyone outside of our TS3 Server, this is to protect Server integrity for everyone.

If you're looking for a good group of people to fly with, drop by and check us out.

s/f

Filed under: Gaming 2 Comments
17Aug/113

Battlefield 3 (Ranting about Coop)

Well, it's something I've been trying to avoid because I really didn't want confirmation, but Battlefield 3 will indeed only have 2 Player Coop.

 

 

 

 

Now I've been gaming since 1998, when I was first introduced to something we call the Computer. Initially, I had no need for this thing, but my wife insisted we could use one so I relented. In no time at all I was surfing the web with the best 56k connection money could buy, making friends on Excite Chat and playing games in the MSN Gaming Zone. It was there at the MSN Gaming Zone that I met my brethren...these people that called themselves "gamers". They were a fun group a guys and they quickly took me in. Before you knew it, I was a member of The Wolf Pack (=|TWP|=) and lost in Rogue Spear night after night, playing coop based pc games and having the time of my life. It's there I learned about Coop and the fun of team play.

Now it might be because the first online games I ever played were coop based, but to this day coop gaming is my favorite. After several years of gaming, playing different genres, different game modes, etc.. I always find myself going back to Coop when I'm really looking to have fun gaming. It doesn't take long for me to get bored in servers that are "free for all" where the players care more about the points they get and the badges they earn, than they do about people they're playing with. Games with Pinball effect graphics and dizzying movement just aren't conducive to team play gamers. The pace of most games are so fast these days that what you end up with is an unorganized free for all, where everyone is just out for themselves, shooting at anything that moves. Now that may be appealing to most 12 year old's, but what about us older gamers? Are we being put out to pasture thanks to the Xbox generation?

Gaming for guys like me is not about the points or badges, it's about team play and organized effort. It's about having communication with everyone in the game and using cooridinated efforts to achieve a common goal. Coop gamers work together to accomplish the mission at hand and aren't concerned about earning points along the way, but rather how they finish in the end. Coop gaming promotes team work, tactics and more depth. IMO you don't get that with adversarial game play and some people just want something else.

So what's left for us now that BF3 is only 2 Player? Coop gamers are slowly watching the pc gaming industry put out less and less for us so we find ourselves reverting back to older games just to get that coop based gaming we're after. Games like Project Reality, Forgotten Hope 2 and AIX 2.0 are some of the "older" games we play, but at least they are 32 Player Coop!

All of those games are based from the same guys that are bringing us BF3, so why the change? Why after several successful games, to include BF2 and all it's mods, 2142, etc. (that all feature 32 player coop btw) would DICE change Coop with BF3? I'll be the first to admit, I'm not the most technical gamer and I don't pretend to know much about game design and the dynamics involved, but from a gamers perspective, why-fix it-if-it's-not-broke?

I'd like to know factors involved that made them conclude Coop would be better with only 2 players? What is related to design constraints? Did they flip a coin? How did they come to this conclusion? A Blog for another day I guess.

I'll continue to support EA and DICE because they develop some of the best games in the World. With the latest BF3 video featuring MP action from Caspian Border, BF3 continues to impress us with dynamic graphics, huge maps and lots of toys. I guess we'll have to wait and see if it delivers on team play.

Blud

30Jun/110

Launch of Atlas Rocket

Filed under: General Blog No Comments
27May/111

Behind-the-scenes look at Battlefield 3

The lead creators of the Battlefield series describe how they developed their latest achievements while making Battlefield 3.

Filed under: Gaming 1 Comment
16May/110

DCS:A-10C =VG= Training

Great new vid from our Member Bones! Awesome man, keep them coming!

Filed under: Gaming No Comments
5Mar/112

Russian WARNING: Comet under intelligent control headed towards Earth

A chilling report prepared for President Medvedev by Minister Serdyukov of the Russian Defense Ministry on the building of an additional 5,000 underground ‘bomb’ shelters in Moscow warns that even though progress is being made, the appearance of the new Comet Elenin [photo right] in our Solar System means “additional resources” will have to be added “immediately” as the 2012 timeline for completion “may not be soon enough”.

cse1 Russian WARNING: Comet under intelligent control headed towards Earth

Sparking the fears of Minister Serdyukov, he says in this report, is that based upon the new orbit calculations for Comet Elenin, it appears in “all likelihood” that this celestial object is under some type of “intelligent control” and will approach our Earth “much closer” than originally thought this coming fall season.

Comet Elenin was discovered by Doctor-Scientist Leonid Elenin on 10 December 2010 from his research facility in Lyubertsy utilizing images acquired from the 18-inch (45-cm) telescope at the ISON-NM Observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico and confirmed by Doctor-Scientists Aleksei Sergeyev and Artem Novichenko from the Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan.

Upon its discovery Comet Elenin was traveling very near the ecliptic plane at more than 4 Astronomical Units (375 million miles) from the Sun and headed inbound towards it. Its original perihelion [point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid or comet where it is nearest to the Sun] was calculated to occur well inside Earth’s orbit at about 0.45 Astronomical Units (42 million miles) from the Sun to occur on or about 5 September 2011 making it visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn skies in the Constellation of Leo.

Most ominous in Minister Serdyukov’s report is his assertion that Comet Elenin appears to be in “direct contact” with the mysterious Jupiter-sized planet discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto that is, also, headed inbound towards our Sun.

American scientists Daniel Whitmire and John Matese from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have named this mysterious planet Tyche, but as we had previously stated in our 18 February report, “Russian Leader Confirms To Pope New Planet Arrival In 2012”, the ancient peoples of our Earth new it by other names as well.

Interesting to note about Comet Elenin is that even though the American space agency NASA has said “Because of the possibility that the comet’s orbit slightly deviate from, there is no guarantee that Earth will be missed”, they have, also, in contradiction, stated that “…Comet Elenin will come nowhere near the Earth. At its closest (on 10 September 2011) it will be more than 25 million km from our planet.”

To the identity of those extraterrestrial forces controlling Comet Elenin our world had been forewarned about by the former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, who stated about them: “Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.”

http://www.ufosonearth.com

Filed under: UFO/Paranormal 2 Comments
23Feb/110

Retired Army Colonel claims UFOs are REAL

Whether you believe or disbelieve the notion that UFOs are visitors from another planet, a former highly decorated military officer now comes forward with information that may infuriate those on both sides in the ongoing ET debate.

 Retired Army Colonel claims UFOs are REAL

Retired Col. John Alexander, using his military savvy and high security clearance, spent a quarter of a century going through the top levels of the U.S. government and military searching for the group of people who were allegedly responsible for UFO information and the supposedly decades-old UFO cover-up.

His conclusions: Not only is there no such group and no cover-up, but disclosure about UFOs has already occurred on different official levels.

With so many people crying out these days for the U.S. government or the United Nations or even the Vatican to issue some sort of “we are not alone in the universe” disclosure statement, Alexander says the information has been dripping out all around us, over decades, with top officials casually making statements about UFOs.

He references this 1950 remark made by President Harry Truman: “I can assure you the flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth.”

“Disclosure has happened,” Alexander added. “It starts with former presidents Truman, Carter, Reagan and [the Soviet Union's] Gorbachev. I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say this is real?” Alexander told AOL News.

“At one time, before a lot of this information was released, I could see both the classified and the unclassified material. And I will tell you that 98 percent of the information was already in the public domain. The only things that weren’t there was stuff like sources and method, which is protected, but the information about the incident was already out there.”

Several months ago, a group of ex-military officers came forward to discuss their experiences when UFOs reportedly tampered with American nuclear missile sites. While Alexander acknowledges the events, he suggests why there was no intense intelligence investigation of these incidents.

“They absolutely happened, but when it’s a one-time event, the attitude of investigators is: If it happens again, we’ll get nervous, but since it didn’t happen, put it aside.

“It’s sort of an indictment that says, despite overwhelming evidence of interaction with strategic systems, nothing was done. And in my view, it is put, like a number of things, in the too-tough-to-handle bin.”

The 74-year-old former Green Beret A-Team commander and developer of weapons at Los Alamos, N.M., is one of many speakers presenting his views at this week’s International UFO Congress in Scottsdale, Ariz. He takes issue with both true believers (who assume any strange light in the sky is from another planet) and hard-nosed skeptics (who debunk any and all UFO reports and evidence to the contrary).

The evidence he speaks of includes the hard data of sensor technology that has frequently confirmed the reality of physical craft and the high quality of extremely reliable eyewitnesses who are “neither misreporting facts nor delusional.”"The problem is, when you discuss UFOs, we are talking everything from little balls of light to hard craft a mile or more across, and everything in between. So what is it?” Alexander asked.

“I argue that, not only are we not solving the problems yet, we’re not even asking the right questions, because we approach this wrong.

“I suspect that consciousness is a piece of the puzzle. We talk about UFOs, saying it’s a technology that’s 1,000 years in advance, but it really isn’t. If you follow the history of these things, usually it is somewhat in advance, but not beyond our comprehension by any stretch of the imagination.

3Feb/110

‘UFO’ Hovers Over Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock Shrine

A glowing orb filmed hovering over the skyline of Jerusalem has left UFO experts dumbfounded.

The circular object was seen descending slowly over the holy city's iconic Dome of the Rock before flickering and shooting skyward like a rocket. Similar clips have been seen before and debunked as hoaxes. But this latest sighting has proved more difficult to dismiss -- as it was recorded from four different perspectives.

Some UFO enthusiasts believe the videos -- which have taken the Internet by storm -- are final proof that aliens exist, while others say the unidentified object was the Hebrew god Elohim.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that flying over the Dome of the Rock landmark -- an ancient Islamic shrine -- is forbidden.

Two witnesses at the Armon Hanatziv panoramic lookout near Mount Zion filmed the object at 1am on Saturday. A little after one minute into the clip, the object descends slowly, almost to ground level.

The craft hovers there for a short while and then flickers before shooting upwards at an incredible speed.

Former Ministry of Defense UFO investigator Nick Pope said: "If these are real, they are some of the most incredible videos ever shot.

"If they are not, then this is a very well-planned and coordinated hoax designed to eliminate elements of doubt.

"The way it shoots up into the sky suggests it is unmanned, because no living thing could survive those kinds of G-forces.

"We know the Israeli army has some very high-tech drones at its disposal. If this is one, it is one of the most advanced pieces of technology created by man."

Another set of observers also uploaded their mobile phone footage to YouTube on Saturday.

They wrote: "Have fun debunking this one." In their video, the American tourists can be heard saying: "We've seen them in Mississippi like this."

Two other clips filmed from different viewpoints were posted online. Skeptics have noted the views come from perspectives that could make nearby objects seem farther away and faster-moving. Others say the whole thing was faked and have prepared several alternative versions of the videos which they say prove they are not real.

These include stabilized versions in which the brightness and contrast have been increased, which they claim highlights a major flaw of perspective.

Another is motion-tracked, and apparently shows the UFO "bouncing around like crazy" -- which, say the sceptics, shows the makers had trouble inserting it into the scene.

12Jan/110

NASA’S Kepler Mission Discovers Its First Rocky Planet

NASA's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

The discovery of this so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010.

"All of Kepler's best capabilities have converged to yield the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our sun," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and primary author of a paper on the discovery accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. "The Kepler team made a commitment in 2010 about finding the telltale signatures of small planets in the data, and it's beginning to pay off."

Kepler's ultra-precise photometer measures the tiny decrease in a star's brightness that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it. The size of the planet can be derived from these periodic dips in brightness. The distance between the planet and the star is calculated by measuring the time between successive dips as the planet orbits the star.

Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone, the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the planet's surface. However, since it orbits once every 0.84 days, Kepler-10b is more than 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun and not in the habitable zone.

Kepler-10 was the first star identified that could potentially harbor a small transiting planet, placing it at the top of the list for ground-based observations with the W.M. Keck Observatory 10-meter telescope in Hawaii.

Scientists waiting for a signal to confirm Kepler-10b as a planet were not disappointed. Keck was able to measure tiny changes in the star's spectrum, called Doppler shifts, caused by the telltale tug exerted by the orbiting planet on the star.

"The discovery of Kepler-10b, a bona fide rocky world, is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come," he said.

"Our knowledge of the planet is only as good as the knowledge of the star it orbits," said Batalha. Because Kepler-10 is one of the brighter stars being targeted by Kepler, scientists were able to detect high frequency variations in the star's brightness generated by stellar oscillations, or starquakes. "This is the analysis that really allowed us to pin down Kepler-10b's properties.," she added.

"We have a clear signal in the data arising from light waves that travel within the interior of the star," said Hans Keldsen, an astronomer at the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium at Aarhus University in Denmark. Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium scientists use the information to better understand the star, just as earthquakes are used to learn about Earth's interior structure. "As a result of this analysis, Kepler-10 is one of the most well characterized planet-hosting stars in the universe next to our sun," Kjeldsen said.

That's good news for the team studying Kepler-10b. Accurate stellar properties yield accurate planet properties. In the case of Kepler-10b, the picture that emerges is of a rocky planet with a mass 4.6 times that of Earth and with an average density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter -- similar to that of an iron dumbbell.

"This planet is unequivocally rocky, with a surface you could stand on," commented team member Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge and a Kepler co-investigator.

"All of Kepler’s best capabilities have converged for this discovery," Batalha said, "yielding the first solid evidence of a rocky planet orbiting a star other than our sun."

Ames manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development.

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data.

8Jan/110

Life’s Building Blocks May Have Been Found on Mars

NASA's Viking landers may have detected the ingredients for life on Mars after all, according to a new study.

Back in the 1970s, the two Viking probes scooped up and heated Martian dirt, then looked for organic molecules — the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it — in the samples. The landers found little, aside from two strange chlorine compounds that researchers at the time attributed to contamination from cleaning fluids.

But the new study suggests that the soil did indeed contain organics, which can have biological or nonbiological origins. They were just destroyed before Viking could detect them.

"This result is saying that there are organic molecules on Mars," study co-author Chris McKay, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told SPACE.com. "It doesn't say anything about life now, or life in the past. But it does open up the possibility of searching for organic molecules produced by life, and that's very exciting."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/07/lifes-building-blocks-mars/#ixzz1AWK2NrIv