Minor annoyances

[pozorvlak]

A guy on Reddit pointed me at this article today. It's the Wikipedia biography of the Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies. Like my father, he was from the Rhondda Valley; he was the co-inventor of packet-switched networks (like this big one you're using right now); and he once found a bug in Alan Turing's code, before the first computer had been

Comments

[mrkgnao]

I feel like I'm the only person in the world who hasn't played Portal. This makes me sad.

[necaris]

Nope, I haven't either. Yes, I realize this admission destroys what geek-cred I have ;-)

[pozorvlak]

But do you have access to a Windows machine at the moment?

I'm not a gamer, ordinarily - I hadn't played a first-person shooter since Quake I - but Portal looked so cool I had to try it :-)

[necaris]

I do -- in fact I'm stuck with one till I get my loaned-out Linux box back -- but it's my work machine so I'm slightly wary of dropping random software on it...

[michiexile]

Portal spoiler alert!

One place you'll find "The cake is a lie" is in the shooting range - once you get past the first few turrets, there's an extended panel and some boxes around it. Behind that panel, there's a tear in the netting that you can crawl through. Behind it, there's a lot of scrawlings on the wall - including "The cake is a lie!" repeated over one wall as well as a hint for how to get rid of the turrets.

[pozorvlak]

Aha, thanks! I'll go and look.

I was pleased to discover last night that there's an active modding community for both Portal and its predecessor Narbacular Drop, producing extra levels - Thinking With Portals appears to be the place to start.

[evath]

Indeed most of the secrets are OOB of the level. Places your able to go, but the story would suggest your not meant to be there.

[pozorvlak]

Yes - I found quite a few, but obviously not that one :-(

The cake is illegible

[ext_89374]

If your graphics card is a bit wimpy like mine, maybe "the cake is a lie" was just illegible - look at that place with low detail textures and it's just a blur.

Re: The cake is illegible

[pozorvlak]

That's almost certainly it - there was a lot of graffiti I couldn't read. Hmmm. I wonder if it's possible to turn high-detail textures on independently of video resolution? Trying to change the resolution just makes the game crash :-(

Re: The cake is illegible

[pozorvlak]

I tried this, and it worked! The graffiti's now legible, the whole game looks subtly nicer, and the animation actually appears to be slightly smoother. Also, it's fixed the "magenta chessboard" problem I was having with Half-Life 2 :-)

So, thanks a lot!