Tuesday, July 22, 2008 (15:55:19) Article by: devil
We have opened up recruiting for our CS:S team which will be competing in CAL Season 12. If you are interested in joining the team please post in the Recruitment forum or if you are an existing clan member contact the new captain for the CS:S team Dominance.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 (00:13:26) Article by: devil
As promised here the computer specs section of registered members profiles have been deleted. We did give clan members ample time to move their specs over to their player profile. Currently computer specs are for team members only. Not to worry. So everyone doesn't feel like they are losing out on customized profile information something is in the works to give you the capability back (GamerSpace) though it is going to take a while.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 (00:08:29) Article by: devil
All XFire Signatures have been deleted. You'll need to go in and recreate your signature again. There was no way around deleting them and I'll tell you why doing so is such a good thing for the sake of the website.
I spent the last 6 hours completely recoding the custom XFire Signature editor. You won't notice any changes hopefully. It took me 1 hour to move the code and the next 5 hours recreating it exactly how it was so that no one feels like they lost any capability.
Here's how the signatures used to work up till 6 hours ago. All information for the signatures was tied directly to your user profile. That means whenever any information is pulled anywhere on the site all of those useless queries are being called too...and there were over 100 fields associated with the signatures. That was a shit ton of unnecessary overhead on the server cpu. I've moved them out of the profile so that they are only called when you edit your signature. That's 100 less database queries per page.
blah blah blah ok so what does all this mean for you? A lot of sections on the website should be much faster including the index (News) and the Forums. The downside is for those that use our custom XFire signatures you'll have to redo them. Small price to pay for optimized queries and a faster site.
Monday, July 21, 2008 (13:10:00) Article by: devil
There has been a flury of news around the net about Dell's recent decision to collude with the RIAA and Microsoft to completely disable your stereo mix. You will no longer be able to record what you hear coming out of your speakers. New Dell owners were completely perplexed to learn they were missing the option to do so in their new computers. It's obvious that things have been ramping up towards this in tiny increments very discreetly and with no publicity from online computer news aggregates.
I've recently learned that even my own computer has a diminished capacity to control recording levels per input device. After a lengthy discussion on abit's forums and from doing research online it's obvious who the real culprit is. It all comes down to Microsoft's new WHQL/WDM policy. Realtek was forced to program their drivers without certain basic abilities in order to have their drivers Microsoft Certified for the new universal HD Audio architecture. This new architecture is touted as universal because it will force all audio driver manufacturers to have the same capability... or in the case of this issue of no stereo mix... the purposeful lack of the abilty.
This affects most of the newer motherboards since they are all shipping with the HD Audio drivers by default. It definitely affects OEM computers that ship with Vista but there is a work around by "showing hidden devices". That only works for some retail versions of Vista. Definitely not Vista shipping with the new Dell's.
You can't use old drivers from the regular AC97 in XP and to make matters worse the new Windows Update to Service Pack 3 (SP3) will install the HD audio bus and will potentially kill off your ability to set individual recording levels for all of your devices. With XP you will still have the ability to use stereo mix but it will be somewhat crippled in the ability to adjust the volume on the fly making it very inconvenient to use. This could be considered Microsoft's slow phasing out of stereo mix. Chances are extremely good if you've purchased a motherboard within the last year you will be affected by the new policy.
This is literally RIAA doing some magical work in order to prevent you from ripping music. At the same time it will making live gamecasting completely pointless (you won't be able to hear in game sounds only commentary).
At this time there is no registry fix or hack you can do. The motherboard manufacturers are content with shipping their motherboards with Realtek drivers and the abusive policy of Microsoft to stem music piracy. As long as no one knows about it and public outcry is loud as a mouse fart they'll just continue to surprise consumers when they get their new computers home with the removed capability. Literally no one is covering this news. Maybe they don't know? Maybe they don't think it's a big deal? Who knows. It is a big deal when a computer manufacturer can take away such a basic property of computing without so much as a peep from sources such as /. or INQ. Those sources are covering the whole Dell and RIAA thing but what they fail to mention is the drivers for your old motherboard are being targeted too.
If you have the ability to record in stereo mix save those drivers and never lose them because the next update for your sound drivers might just make your stereo mix magically disappear!
If you want to see if you are affected by this then open up your volume control panel and see if your recording sliders are greyed out except for the master recording volume control.
Saturday, July 19, 2008 (08:55:25) Article by: devil
All team captains now have full autonomy to administrate their team rosters, create and report matches, edit their rosters, and give forum access to their team members. Teams are now fully automated!
Our site admins can always step in to help captains with autonomy issues but for the most part they are expected to run their teams and keep their own events updated.
This will give me extra time to devote to other areas such as broadcasting or coding new features for the site. The less maintenance work I have to do the more time I can dedicate to coding new features.
If you have a server and are looking for a dedicated clan consider opening up a new team and expanding LG into new games! We now offer full team autonomy, match tracking, and a large variety of community based features to make you and your team feel right at home. We are not a team sponsor but we do allow new team creation and integration of other clans as long as:
1. You can provide your own server.
2. You can field a competitive or public team.
3. Your attitude and personality are friendly enough to represent us.
If you have what it takes to start a new team and expand our organization into new games we would love to hear from you.
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