Briareos H

Hi, will this work with the official 209 release? I'm looking into getting back into TDM and this looks ace.

Geek porn from the seventies, complete with leather, gloves and mustache (assembling and testing one of the first automatic communication switches). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uMbpaFp3i4

If anything, I think TDM is largely under-represented on TTLG and everywhere else for that matter. I wonder where you got that silly idea.

I mean: My only point was to highlight that too short a frob distance would create problems, which is independent from whether it is finely manipulated ("analog") or frobbed ("digital").

@grayman: Because the ways of doing it are either: Make the door non-solid while it is being opened by the player character: looks like shit, feels like shit. Push the player aside with a realistic motion curve so that they side-step enough for the door to swing open, then get them back into the door frame while walking them forwards slightly: may feel like too much control is taken from the player, can play tricks with the physics system / other objects, lots of testing to get it right, requires long and clever code to make it work nicely from every angle. Do nothing and just expect the player to navigate around the swinging door with their movement keys: the closer they are from the door initially, the more difficult it is for them to back off without hindering it, doesn't feel very fluid and pretty far from the "fine-tuned movement" I was talking about. EDIT: I was not talking about analog door manipulation, which is absolutely fine in my book

I'm among those who think BS2 was the best, because I thought it rather toned down the in-your-face plot elements and big twist that were going to be unsatisfactory anyway, while improving on the straight FPS gameplay. And, although the communism vs. capitalism theme was uncalled for, I liked the rather simpler backstory about family ties much more than the objectivist bullshit of the first one. IMO the original game had a superb setting, excellent aesthetics and audio direction coupled with shallow game systems, clunky UI and a misplaced scope because of an annoying, assertive plot which didn't manage to bring anything to the experience. The sequel at least acknowledged its failings (although it only refined them without trying to change things around too much) and managed to make the shooting itself fun. I haven't played Bioshock Infinite because the tutorial dragged on so much without managing to pique my interest that I gave up.

I don't see how it's different from manipulating objects. If anything, mapping this new analog mechanic to the 'manipulate' button would make the doors behave more consistently with other frobbable+physics objects while leaving the existing mechanic in place. Back to the original topic, I think we've all exploited the unrealistic frob distance for doors and containers in Thief or TDM at some point. The problem I see with making it more realistic is that you might get a faceful of door often enough for it to become annoying. The closer you need to get to an object in order to interact with it: the more claustrophobic the visuals become: lack of detail, uniform textures and inability to locate yourself in the environment might break the illusion of a 3D space for a few instants; the more jarring the animations and sense of place feel: a person seldom stares at a door handle before opening it because their motion is fluid and mostly hard-wired in the brain at that point. The fluidity of the motion also shows when opening a door towards you: you instinctively move your body so that it doesn't get in the way of it opening with the sort of fine-tuned movement that would be difficult to get right in TDM. Incidentally, this is one of the few things the new Thief game got right. I'm not saying that these will be strong enough to break immersion, but there might have to be a lot of playtesting and fringe cases to take into account to get the frob distance right and not jam the player into the door every time they need to open one.

They already ruined the interface and inventory with 'console gamey-ness' in TW2 so I wouldn't put that past them.;;;

As far as we've discussed in an other recent thread, the longer part of the loading sequence does indeed involve the CPU over anything else: loading from disk to memory and from memory to VRAM is pretty fast on most systems. But besides that, the game does a lot of calculations (I'd guess texture decompression, loading and setting up the script engine and entities, pre-calculating other stuff?) which, AFAIK, are not threaded. Which means that to improve these loading times, you'll need faster CPU cores: going from dual core to quad core shouldn't change much, instead try to get a higher-clocked (or overclocked) CPU. Nevermind that. Hadn't seen SteveL's post, which instantly reminded me that on my ATI card that part of the loading had once improved tremendously by switching to a different driver release -- that unfortunately completely botched the rendering. So maybe it's some sort of long, unoptimized loop of calculations between the game thread and GPU driver. I wonder if something could be done to help with that.

Digital only, for the same reason that I don't buy CDs when there's a vinyl+download option available: CDs and modern game boxes are utterly devoid of soul and aesthetics, take lots of useless space and most of the time have no collecting value. I only get that sense of ownership with LPs or older game boxes, I suppose the feel of paper is important to me. And because 1. an optical media backup is less reliable than a properly conceived hard drive solution 2. most games require online authentification anyway, I made the jump to full digital a long while ago.

Sure! Except the plate is at the top of the screw in this model so there's no way it can do anything, it should be at the bottom

I don't have the faintest idea on how this press works.

That'd be great to see the authors being given the possibility to use a female protagonist. Wynne's VO in T2X is excellent but we could surely find someone else!

Congrats Moonbo!

My physics are very rusty but if I had to prove that equation I'd definitely use Gauss's law (which is basically one of the Maxwell's equations -- only not in a vacuum) which states that div E = density of charge / epsilon. But if you use its integral form flux = charge / permittivity you can deduce the continuity of the tangential component of E at an interface. I remember being asked to prove it once, if I had to do it again I'd integrate on an infinitesimally small surface at the interface using the E wave in its exponential form: the k_x components get thrown away, the density of charge eliminated on both sides of the equation and the wave numbers come out of the exponential upon integration. Something like that.

Ads- and tracker-blocking plugins such as Ghostery are a godsend in that regard. About your original post, I agree with some reservations. The ability to execute local code provided by the server is crucial for rich interactive experiences. Without it you wouldn't get the blender website you linked to just two posts ago. Playing unity games in the browser requires hooking keyboard and mouse events and that's not a bad thing per se. It's just that, as you wrote, the original standards and first implementations of JavaScript were a wild mess. All of it, good or bad, survived until today without anyone intervening and imposing healthy rules to JS interpreters such as not getting to hook the mouse actions / go fullscreen / play sounds / access the filesystem unless a flag has been set by the user. And I certainly wouldn't blame Google for that, like Serpentine did. Chrome has been more and more about setting up sandboxes for scripts to execute safely in. Still, remnants of old times such as scripts preventing right-clicking or highlighting in standard HTML content could have been tackled by them long ago.

Even if I agree with the concept, it sounds like an intellectual cop-out to me. .. is what I would naturally think of the subject. Suppose you build a computer simulation of an universe where physical laws similar to ours are implemented. Suppose one aspect of the underlying framework implements a rule that requires correlations that are instantaneous for an inside observer. That observer being superdeterministic would be akin to saying "well I'm in a computer, everything is pre-programmed so these instantaneous correlations can only be natural". Well no shit, but that's not an answer or any kind of meaningful remark. The fact that everything does indeed run as a deterministic program doesn't remove the fact that there is a piece of the source code that requires and implements explicitely these instantaneous correlations: trying to determine which and how they are written is what science is about. EDIT: That's what I get for only reading the OP and not the subsequent replies. Demagogue's first answer is exactly what I'm trying to say, sorry for paraphrasing.

This was a fantastic mission, packed with excellent ideas and moments that will be remembered for years to come.

You can grab the torrent here.

The original map was also much bigger, had drivable vehicles and several more quests (more factions too, I believe?). Tons of screenshots were released as the development progressed and the game got repeatedly pushed back, so many people followed the game closely with very high hopes. The end result was good and unique, but severely cut-down from the original concept.

You can still get an offline map in the latest version by navigating to an area, hitting the search bar, scrolling down to the end of the list and choosing 'Make Available Offline', although the exact area it downloads to the cache isn't very clear. Still doesn't excuse the removal of other features such as My Places, Labs, route elevation & distance measurements. And you could never use the GPS car navigation in offline mode anyway.

@Airship Ballet: I own a mid-range smartphone (old Galaxy Nexus when the Nexus 4 started replacing it, before that I kept my HTC Desire for a few years). I don't use it for multimedia, and I'll always keep a dedicated Rockboxed music player in my other pocket -- same goes for my camera, but a smartphone is still very useful for replacing other things. With it I can: Check bus, metro and train stops around me, know when the next one is leaving, calculate routes: replaces paper time tables and maps; Check a map at any time, locate myself with precision, follow routes: replaces city maps and street guides; Calculate navigation routes when driving: replaces GPS navigation systems for cars [downside: online]; Record my walks and jogging runs, from pace to path, from profile to heartbeat, even without internet access: replaces dedicated sport devices and GPS navigation system for hiking [downside: battery life]; Search for points of interests, restaurants, bars, parks, concerts: replaces paper weekly guides; Manage my server through SSH from anywhere, surf the internet, check my bank account, read and send email: replaces a PC with internet access [downside: screen size]; Send MIDI messages over wi-fi to the computer: replaces an additional control surface for my DAW; Tune with very good precision my instrument: replaces a costly high-performance tuner; Translate from almost any language to another, including pronunciation: replaces heaps of dictionaries; etc. You get the gist of it. It's very useful every day, a lot of those things can be done more efficiently than if I had to use a laptop, because they can be done on the go without downside, have dedicated interfaces ('apps') and only require one hand. The important thing is not to rely on it too much and whip it out at every occasion like most people unfortunately do, as it should replace existing tools, not brains. But used smartly, it's a great thing to have. Anyway, that CyanogenMod phone sure sounds nice and cheap but it's far too big for me. I already find my Galaxy Nexus too big. Plus we all know it's going to have terrible battery life, like everything else. Battery life is so bad in smartphones that it made me consider forgoing them altogether at least twice.

Exactly what I expected from my recent adventures with a SSD. For people who want to shorten their loading times, your last paragraph is the heart of the matter: only half (or less than half) of the loading process is bound by the speed of your hard drive. While it is always worth it to upgrade to a SSD, you won't see huge improvements in loading TDM missions if you have a somewhat slow CPU, because on those systems, the "Preparing to launch mission" always takes more time than proper loading from disk. Would it be possible for someone familiar with the code to tell us roughly what is being calculated during that second phase of the loading?

I dunno, I really like how it was done in Thief. If I'm not mistaken, the original games mostly allowed kills even on expert (the goal was "kill no innocents" most of the time) and relied on complex objectives / loot goals to increase the difficulty. I don't like forced ghosting unless it really makes a lot of sense and the mission is very special, the problem is not so much with not being able to KO every AI around but to be able to do it sparingly on a mostly-ghost run, which is how I like to play along with expert goals. I like missions where only a limited amounts of KOs is allowed on expert.