Here is a table of the PC version of Skyrim's Low, Medium, High, and Ultra quality presets that you can select in the Skyrim launcher. At the bottom are screenshots showing each setting, with both an indoor and an outdoor environment comparison.

At some point when programming you probably realized that collision testing every object in your game is rather inefficient. A better way is to group objects based on their physical location in the game, and only collision test the bounds of the whole group. A quadtree does this, and can be used in 2D games to greatly speed up both collision detection and rendering.

You can adjust the field of view in-game by bringing up the developer console (press tilde "~") and typing in fov XX, where XX is the desired numerical value. Try values ranging from 80 to 110 to see what works best for you. Skyrim appears to save the FOV setting in the save file. Once you change it using the developer console and save the game, it should "stick" for that save file and any created after it.

Well, maybe not quite, but I did find it interesting that you can cover ground faster by strafe jumping in Rage. It seems to be very forgiving as well, not requiring the precise timing or angles that Quake 3 does (although you can't achieve near the max speed that you can in that game).

You can disable the three intro videos in Rage, decreasing the amount of time it takes to get to the menu, by setting the variable com_skipIntroVideo to 1. You can do this in the Steam launch options by adding:

Creating this folder can speed up performance on some systems when playing Rage. At the very least, it won't hurt.

Since the patch on October 8, 2011, you can edit the field of view setting in Rage directly. This is done by adjusting the g_fov variable in the developer console (temporary) or by adding a Steam launch option (permanent).

Enabling the developer console is done by setting the variable com_allowconsole to 1. You can do this in the Steam launch options by adding:

UPDATE: Installing AMD 11.10 Preview 3 drivers improved performance a bit more. The game is now finally running very good, with only minimal texture pop-in.

I just installed Rage and everything went smoothly. Fired up the campaign mode, watched the pretty intro movie, and then proceeded to get severe stuttering at the onset of the first level. It was completely unplayable for the few minutes I attempted to play it. Since I have an AMD/ATI video card (HD 6850), I decided to give the patch AMD just released specifically for Rage a try: AMD Catalyst - Rage Performance Driver.

Update: Firefox now includes the "http://" when you copy-paste from the address bar.

Firefox recently decided to remove the "http://" from the URL bar, similar to how Chrome has it. The problem is, when copy-pasting a URL into somewhere that requires the http://, you have to manually add it.

This guide is outdated now and only good for Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.2. To use newer versions, you may want to consider WAMP.

Here's a basic guide on setting up an Apache server with PHP and MySQL on your Windows computer to use as a developer environment.

This is a comparison of desktop computer 7200RPM 3.5" SATA hard drives. Prices were obtained at Newegg and include shipping and discounts where applicable (mail-in rebates not included). All drives have a 70% or greater 5/5 egg rating. The Ratio is the number of gigabytes each dollar purchases, so the higher the better.

If your site accepts user input, it's a good idea to understand the differences in newline characters between platforms and how to handle them (and it's just good to know in general). Say your site is running on a Unix host and receives comments or posts from Windows clients. Any HTML textarea form input sent from the Windows clients will contain newline characters that do not match those native to the Unix host. Likewise, if your site runs on a Windows host, the occasional Linux or Mac user will be sending non-native newline characters as well.