demagogue

Yeah, I only said that in case you really wanted heaps and heaps of Thiefy material to keep your motivation up. There's obviously more freely available material for Dromed than Doom 3. I was just trying to suggest something to keep you motivated in the process of becoming a betamapper, after which you can get all the TDM material and game on. But there's probably enough for Doom 3 to make some very thiefy stuff also; so maybe your motivation won't flag in any event. And if it's a matter of learning one or the other editor from scratch, then of course Doom 3 is much closer to your end goal; so by all means go with that.

If you want to just build Thief stuff and it's just Doom 3 material that you don't like, I recall that it's perfectly fine to submit Dromed work to show your stuff -- I'm pretty sure I read that. Not only does that show you can do basic mapping, but it also shows you have some experience to fairly compare Dromed with TDM, since probably most users will be coming from Dromed. So if could submit some Dromed work if you have it.

People are still making weird AI for dromed (link) ... so this fits right into the sort of things fans do on the sidelines. I think Springheel is on the right track ... If you (Plutonia) want to see something in particular, something idiosyncratic (not likely to be made), then use a 3D modeler (like Blender if you want a free one) and try to model it yourself. It's not as hard to learn as you might think. I'm teaching myself to model to contribute some stuff. I think you should go for it if you feel strongly about it. I thought both of these creatures were evocative, and they come up in FMs now and then.

Putting aside the G-word issue, I'm not such a big fan of body-awareness. Although granted it's nice to know where your feet are in some situations, so I can see some functional uses for seeing some body parts, and you already need something for shadows and reflections ... but as an aesthetic in and for itself ... for me personally I feel like it would pull the character away from me. And something like the hood in particular seems a little odd, esp if you've got different people using different screen dimensions. Also the physics of seem a little odd ... if I wear a hood and turn my head, I don't feel like I'd see that. Or what I might see, it's like seeing the side of your nose ... it's more of a distraction. Anyway, all of this is just my own opinion. Now having the head-bob in sync with different gaits and landing from a jump makes sense and might look cool and natural.

My guess is a video card thing, because going back in time to lower cards and less ram, cards start hitting the limitations sooner. Anyway, I know that the card is my limitation. Re: two in-editor lighting modes, that's not too different from Dromed. For ~90%, or whatever, of the building you're doing it all quick-lit, and usually it's just when you want to work on the lighting or some shadow effect, you do ray- or object-casting. And if it's a complex level you have to wait forever for the whole level to be lit to see the lighting changes ... and even then you can just me-only the room you're working on, so it goes by fast. So you learn to build with that in mind, and it's not such a big deal. I know it's a little different, but anyway, it won't be unfamiliar if you do it that way.

Is it really that much of a challenge? You've got so many improvements in there so far, but I guess the renderer is its own beast.

All of this sounds exciting. An Thief(esque) editor that is actually inviting for once! I can't wait to start building in it.

I remember the Cowboys - Dolphins game a few weeks ago (I'm originally from near Dallas and am a fan). Let me see if I can dig up that article that summed it up. Ah, here it is. Eek. To be conciliatory, that game must have been infectious, because the week or so after this game and its four or so turnovers by Miami, Tony Romo had an awful number of turnovers against Buffalo, like 5 interceptions and a fumble or 2, tying a record for most ever by a Dallas QB in a game ... and they still won on a fluke! And he still gets the $60 million contract deal yesterday, third highest ever in the NFL. Almost feels like we've got that old 90's magic back ... even when they screw up massively they get lucky. But, yeah, Miami ... you've got the curse of Ray Finkle again. You could use a little more luck yourselves.

It can work for some games, MMO games for example, where there is no real stopping point. I saw an interview for WoW where they talked about building one huge level that maybe only 1% of users would ever reach. And the interviewer asked what's the point, and they gave a similar reply ... it's something to aspire to, and it rewards the people that have really stuck to it, and it keeps people knowing there's a much bigger world out there they haven't seen yet, so they keep subscribing. But I don't think WoW is the kind of game Oddity had in mind ... since it's not really the difficulty that's stopping you, just the experience level, which is basically a transparent cover for how long you've played (i.e., how much subscription fee you've paid), which sort of taints the whole idea.

Really? Ok ... I'll at least get a copy and see what happens, then.

Inspiron 5100 laptop, XP, Pentium 4 CPU, 2.66 GHz, 384 MB Ram, Radeon 7500 video card. I don't know that it can't run. I just found this quote (link) ... ... and it made me worried.

I'd love to be a betamapper -- you can look at my area in The Chain Project T2 FM to see how I build -- but unfortunately my rig won't run Doom 3. The day that I get a new computer, hopefully not to far away, I'll apply. I can still make models, though. This should be good motivation to finish off my lute and learn the ropes modeling. Maybe I can even learn how to animate them ... Lightwave can do that, can't it?

Well, they aren't really being paid for their skills per se, not in absolute terms. They're getting paid for the amount of fans they can draw, and the market involved in that (ticket sales, tv commercial advertising). Any individual or group whose combined talents can draw 10s of millions of people to pay attention for literally hours in a single night, really doesn't matter what the talent is ... throwing a ball, punching another man, strumming a guitar, luke-warm acting and a few dumb jokes, or how good it is in absolute terms ... they are the draw in relative terms (which of course, brings talent back in through the back door, if the fans are that discerning about it, at least), so the market says they deserve a big share, and even then they often don't get the lion's share. Their talents are almost uniquely bringing in 10s of millions of dollars a night from a very passionate crowd, but they don't get the biggest share ... it goes to the managers. Some might say they are actually being shortchanged. It's hard to argue they're overpaid, at least, since one punchline of the history of the free market is that the pressure is to consistently devalue the contribution of labor. If there's unfairness, it's not about the market, or the talent/salary relationship, it's why individuals in our culture choose to give things like ball throwing, man punching, guitar strumming, and dumb joke telling so much of their time and attention. And I have a sneaky suspicion that, at least in its modern mega-stadium/national t.v. form, it's something that's been cultivated and created with a lot of money over a long time, to create an self-reinforcing expectation that we should be. Or something.

Wow. Now we're starting to play a game here. WIP stuff aside, this was all levels of awesome.

Oh, you're just trying to lower us all to the lowest common denominator!

Interesting coincidence ... a project I'm working on right now is on Philippine military sponsored killings & death squads. They are taking out leaders in the Leftist opposition parties ... politicians, activists, their families, priests. It's unfortunate how that country, while it makes so much progress on some things, keeps back-sliding. The gov't is running an investigation into the killings, but it's a "fox guarding the hen-house" sort of situation.

I'm watching the news and apparently some statistical report just came out saying that the highest rate of depression in jobs this last year was young people in food service. So I guess it's official. Worst job of our times? If you count it as a job, maybe crack dealers... "Studies show that timber cutters, the most dangerous job according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, have a 1-in-200 chance of being killed, while the Black Disciples gang of Chicago's crack dealers have a 1-in-4 chance of being killed while earning a salary of $3.30 an hour (well below the minimum wage, and the reason crack dealers live with their mothers)." (link) That's just pathetic.

So is that the Eating Mammoths or the Essen (city) Mammoths? I first read it the first way and it sounded pretty funny ...

While stumbling on Firefox just now I ran into this site (http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/wwii.html). At the end of the time line it has bullet points about the good and bad about each state in WWII, and it reminded me of this thread. I don't believe that. I do think that military units are especially impressionable to having a "culture" develop in them. I think once Pandora's Box was opened in the Japanese, Nazi, and Soviet treatment of Chinese, Jewish, E. European/Russian-dissident civilians, it sheltered a culture of impunity that grew on itself and encouraged solders to take their frustrations out on civilians, and shunted disagreeing soldiers to keep their mouths shut. But that's a different point. Like Oddity said, my original point wasn't about specific persons (people are people; everyone has their own values, and that's the proper judge of a person), just the ideology of the sides they were on. Actually, it wasn't even about "sides" per se. It was a neutral observation that "history" makes it safe and convenient to hate Nazis and Japanese fascists with a clear conscious because Nazis and Japanese fascists don't exist (as part of the power structure) anymore ... So it's not in anyone's interest today to muddy the waters with equivocations about which side was really bad (whatever country you're from). We'll all just agree, for gaming purposes, it was the Axis; and even when we shoot "good" German / Japanese soldiers, we don't think the soldier is evil, just the cause he's been forced into fighting for. More recent wars don't have this advantage as clearly because it's not as convenient to come to this sort of "shared understanding", not e.g., when the 'bad guys' are still running a government. I wasn't really trying to make commentary on any side or people in WWII ... just making a neutral observation about contemporary people's attitudes, and how that feeds back into why there's such a glut of WWII games coming out. I was trying to explain that.

I think there's more than a little nostalgia for a war with clear good guys and bad guys these days, so you can feel upstanding in doing the good work in kicking ass. Many of the wars since then have blurred the line of who was really the good guys on the moral high ground. So when people get an adolescent craving to shed blood, they'll feel better doing it in a WWII context than anything else. That's my theory.

Yeah, I remember this game when it came out. I love parsers and Nat'l Lang Generation stuff, and this game is still the most sophisticated thing out there, for a game. And even then it's really limited. But still I'm glad they're trying to push the boundaries. I would love to program a game like this someday (no delusions of grandure that it would be good; I'd just do it for the learning experience).

Monkeys are awesome.

I was trying to think about what keeps me interested in the potential of episodic content, in spite of all the downsides that this thread is bringing up. I keep thinking it might be like t.v. (good tv, like with cable series, Entourage, Rome, Deadwood, Carnival, The Tudors, Sopranos...), where you get invested in following the story, and it's a damn good story, and it's polished and looking good. But then you have to factor in the long development time just to get out single episodes. And then the admittedly swarmy idea that, when it's a game, it comes across as "milking" ... if they can give us all these great additional levels, why not just package them into the original game we're paying so much to buy. But I still can't completely let go of the idea of a nice potential in the tv analogy. The one way I thought that it just might fly is if they had episodic content packaged as a subscription service (like cable; I seriously doubt it could ever be like network tv where advertising alone could carry the cost ... although that might work for some indie game, but not a polished game, but anyway, that would also probably make the episodes suck like network tv. I'd rather them be cool like cable series.) But also like cable, it shouldn't just be one game, but a couple of series packaged together ... and maybe they can share development costs (using the same engine and certain assets, although they are in different genres) to reduce costs for all of them, again like cable service. And then there's the idea that they could just bundle themselves with cable tv altogether, so that they add an option to HBO service to has HBO Game series as well ... and they promote and write them like the excellent tv series they have going. Somewhere, swimming around in all of that, is something that just might have the potential to be something cool, and something that I wouldn't pay too much extra for by itself, but wouldn't mind paying a little more to add it to my HBO service, and that gives me more than just one game. And they'd have to be damn good. But I still don't know if it will fly.

What happens to the rope arrow if the falling crate shatters when it hits the ground? (...if they can shatter; crates in T2 could.) I think normally a person would want to retrieve their rope arrow in any situation like this. (I can imagine a lot of situations where someone is just trying to get up into a loft and doesn't realize he's hit a crate instead of a fixture the until it falls down.)

It's cool to see his perspective. What do we think about "episodic content"? (not that his idea is going to have any purchase with the higher-ups, but hypothetically...) Sounds like a series of missions coming out every few months. I want to feel like the community would lap them up. But then again, I feel like there's going to be another surge of FM making when Darkmod comes out, the community is not all that big, and it's the PC people that are liking the stand-alone missions (FMs), not the console crowd ... so not only is the market tighter, but the scrutiny would be higher, etc. I'd be very interested to see it happen, though. If the story gets really involved and interesting, then I might follow it like a good tv show. But I wonder if it would really fly.