Moonbo

Hey Biker, I'm sorry to hear about this - you were a great and genuine help to me as I was learning how to map, a true mentor. None of my missions would have turned out anywhere as good as they did if it hadn't been for your help and guidance. I hope this is just a temporary turn of events, but regardless you've left an indelible mark on this community and those of us in it.

Honestly I'm enjoying your reviews as is. While images are always nice, if it'll slow you down I don't think they're necessary.

I'd subscribe to that thread .

Yep, go ahead and dispute it .

Hey Aluminum, Yes, Leo is a friend and was the composer I worked with to make the custom soundtrack for Requiem. So this is just another false strike. -Gelo

Hey Alkalide, The process that nbohr just went through *is* that process :-). Basically there is an invsible octahedron where the player is. Every time the player litness needs to be calculated a camera looks at that octahedron (from the top and bottom), checks the pixel brightness of that octahedron and uses that to determine how well lit the player is. I actually cobbled together a similar system in Unity (which I ended up not using), so it is definitely possible to do something like this in Unreal, but keep in mind it is a little bit clunky because natively neither Unity or Unreal has the ability to get lighting data from shaders so you end up having to do something like what TDM does (having a separate camera look only at a player object and read the screen pixels to determine brightness). Edit: when thinking about litness detection, it's important that you delineate baked lighting from dynamic lighting. With baked lighting you can (at least in Unity) do the exact same thing that the original Thief games did - raytrace to the lightmap and grab the color of the pixel. With dynamic lighting (and all TDM lighting is dynamic) there is no light map to pull data from so you have to resort to these sort of hacky tricks (like a separate camera looking at a model such as TDM does, or using triggers to create "light volumes" to detect when the player enters a light,etc). If you're using a mix of both baked and dynamic lighting, you might have to have two systems working side by side to get the most consistent results. An added wrinkle: both Unity and Unreal have different tricks that they use (such as manually placed light probes in the case of Unity) to illuminate dynamic objects with baked lighting - this can create a bit of annoyance because it means that how well lit the player model is won't necessarily match up to the baked lighting at their feet.

Hey Thiefette, Wow, thank you for your kind words :-). I'm glad you enjoyed the mission! -Gelo

I gotta say, this is about 100% the opposite of the type of level I like to play - sprawling high-stress interconnected level that's easy to get lost in with little story, but there parts that were really clever.

Sebastian's work is great. Unity also has an official tutorial on how to create a stealth game from scratch which I found pretty helpful in my current indie game project (which is a stealth game in Unity ).

Well, we've veered pretty far off course from the initial discussion, so I'd be happy to continue this one via PM if you're up for it otherwise I think we're finished talking about the undeniable contribution of Christian thought to the anti-slavery cause, but I'd just say that yes: the most important things in life are exactly the things that people will disagree the most about. And honestly I'm not sure a more legalistic, detailed list of does and dont's (like the Old Testament) is really the best way to go about it anyways. But you know, in general these things don't need to be either-or. Human understanding has definitely gone beyond the point where anyone except the most devout believers thinks that the totality of understanding can be gleaned from a single source (and I would include various atheists in that - I met a Marxist once who treated Das Kapital with as much reverence as a fundamentalist Christian does the Bible), but that doesn't mean that those sources can't be an important source in people's lives, enriching them, giving them more understanding, and guide them to a better place.

You're fixating on this issue through a much too narrow lens: the problem of differing interpretations of an idea isn't a religious problem, it's a human problem. Let's take Shakespeare (or you, if someone decides to comb through your forum posts in the future) - was he trying to say something with his works? Yes. Are there mountains of people with differing opinions about what he was trying to say? Yes. Is there one best way to determine what he was trying to say? Maybe? Does this mean that relativism is true and that he wasn't trying to say something? No. The point I was making is that while people can reach agreements through argument and presenting facts, or seeing the benefits of an idea in action (people do indeed form a general or "mainstream" consensus on things, at least for a while), they probably won't all agree, especially the farther away you get away from the level of atoms and math. I was saying that as a practical way of living, given that reality, it is a much better way to live your life to apply your consequences of your ideas in your daily life and see if the the results justified your convictions, instead of spending all your time arguing with people that your interpretation is the best.

Hah! That's a question that plenty of people throughout history have asked, and not just about religion (after all, both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx were atheists - that didn't stop them from drawing pretty different conclusions about how the world works). Not to wax too poetic but all you can say about an idea (religious or otherwise) is do you find it convincing and if so, then how will you express it in your life. You will inevitably run into people who agree with your idea but have totally different interpretations of it, and express it in totally differently ways in their lives. Just because that happens, does that mean that the idea is wrong? Probably not - you could have ten people look at a dot on a piece of paper and get ten explanations as to what it is. So I suppose you could spend all your time in debate to try to get everyone to agree on a certain interpretation of the facts (some people do this), but in the end, the worth of any idea to an individual is going to boil down to those two initial factors: how convincing is it to you, and how will you express it in your life. As time passes, if you can look back and see that idea has guided you and those you love to a better place, then at the least you can say it was a good idea to embrace it. And most likely that's the idea that will spread, even if you don't spend all your time debating it.

If you can show me an ideology or doctrine which doesn't have people swearing to it and drawing wildly different conclusions from it I'd be shocked (or for that matter agreeing that an ideology has a conclusion and then ignoring it - you don't need to go to slavery for that, adultery and murder work just fine). Even with that being the case it takes an extreme ideological nihilism to say "ideas don't have consequences", which is basically what you'd have to do by ignoring the large numbers of people who, even when it was unpopular, stated that their Christian convictions inspired their anti-slavery positions. And totally unrelated, but I really enjoyed the new TDM intro mission! The quality of the modules really added a lot to the immersiveness of the whole thing .

Hey Springheel, Definitely true that anti-slavery sentiment within Christianity developed over time - like you mention Gregory of Nissa was somewhat of a radical, but he was a first and it was his religion that brought him to his conclusion. Even Seneca had something more akin to Paul's view on slavery (he says you should be nice to slaves because you yourself are a slave to various lusts and forces, but a few lines down from your quote he says "I do not wish to involve myself in too large a question, and to discuss the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are excessively haughty, cruel, and insulting. But this is the kernel of my advice: Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters. And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, remember that your master has just as much power over you." - that seems to be his crux - be nice to your slaves). Regarding how much influence Christianity had on Christian anti-slavery, there's always going to be a multitude of forces at play in any opinion, but all a historian can say is that the Christian abolitionists themselves (like Gregory) were pretty convinced that it was Christian principles that brought themselves to their convictions - Mortem Desino has a pretty nice compliation of quotes to that effect.

Hey Springheel, It took me a while to find the writer I was thinking of, and I could be wrong but I believe it was Gregory of Nissa: http://www.iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/#H7 , interestingly while I was looking for it I found an interesting reddit post about the stoics and cynics and slavery: . If there are pre-Christian greek writers advocating for the abolition of slavery (and not just discomfort, or picking around the edges) I would genuinely love to read them if you can provide links. And my bad on not saying "Judeo-Christian" instead of Christian. But in general, I do have to ask what exactly the thesis is: "Christian ideas had a negligible impact on the abolition of slavery?" It was late last night when I made my post, but that was the sense I was getting which made me roll my eyes.

I generally don't like to engage in internet debate, mostly because in my experience it doesn't really ever serve to change people's minds, but I've really got to shake my head on this one. Anti-slavery sentiment within Christianity starts very early, and the first ever anti-slavery document was written by an ascetic monk. As for the Catholic Church, the article in wikipedia is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_slavery . While agreement was never uniform, anti-slavery sentiment was there long before the 1870's, starting from "in-group" anti slavery, i.e. opposing the enslavement of Christians (with exceptions mostly being made for out-groups such as Muslims and non-Europeans) and moving out from there to encompass more and more people until universal abolition was reached. I mean, it really takes a very narrow minded anti-Christian mentality to produce a stupor of the all-pervasive sort required not to notice that it was only Christian civilizations that abolished slavery and that every single prominent historical abolitionist was a Christian of some stripe who laid out their claims on explicitly religious grounds. Was anti-slavery universal? Obviously not, but there seems to be something within Christianity which historically engenders an anti-slavery sentiment which became so strong that in time it succeeded in completely eliminating the institution. I'll just end by saying that in these sorts of debates it's a credit to ones intellectual integrity to give credit where it's due even if you don't agree with the ideas that produced a beneficial historical work.

I had a similar bug where I was getting visual errors with the texturing on a patch making up a pillar, which I was able to fix by changing the subdivisions (I increased the subdivisions running up the pillar). Not sure if that'll help in your case, but might be worth a shot.

That's a bit concerning. The only wind sounds in both FMs are the stock TDM ones. Are content strikes on FM videos common?

Hey Aluminum, I just checked and nope, no custom wind sounds. Thankfully I made sure to document where I got each custom sound in the soundshader files bundled within the pk4 and in Requiem all the custom sound effects are just remixes of existing TDM sounds.

Congratulations! TDM is greenlit!

Maybe I'm just hearing things but... https://youtu.be/XQDw1hlU99E?t=5m5s

I will say though that I had similar thoughts to Hourences in the mid 2000's about the gradual death of modding, but while the gap between the hobbyist mapper and the AAA mapper (mapper teams really) has grown ever wider, the modding scene seems to be doing fine. There's still enough games being made with hobbyist accessible tools (such as the Bethesda and Source families of games) and to the extent that AAA quality games can't be made by non-professionals any more you have a whole layer mid-range games which still can be. And that's not even mentioning the rise of middleware game development tools like Unity and GameMaker that allow the hobbyist not just to modify games made by others but to make games all on their own. So yeah, I think the death of the hobbyist creator (whether as a modder or as an indie game dev) isn't coming to pass anytime soon .

Hey Assembler, Thanks for taking the time to let me know you enjoyed the mission! -Gelo

Glad you enjoyed it Gerberox!

Really looking forward to it Goldwell :-).