thestemmer

Aw, come on now. "Pure chaos"? That's an exaggeration and you know it. We aren't talking about "completely changing the game mechanics." We're talking about creating options for mission authors. It's a very easy tweak, shouldn't require anything more than a boolean statement. If you're so worried about players being confused, include a message at the beginning of the mission warning the player that certain features are disabled. Competant FM makers would probably do this anyway, but whatever. Since this is a Thief-based mod, you're dealing with a very picky player base who will appreciate the flexibility you give them. That doesn't mean you have add crazy alternative features all over the place (I'm thinking back to the water arrow vs. foaming chemical arrow discussion), but when it's a matter of adding one or two lines of code, it just seems like a no-brainer to me.

On the issue of carrying bodies up ladders-- Why not give the ladders a property that allow FM authors to determine whether it's possible to carry a body up it or not? It should be pretty easy to implement. On the same note, why not enable "body shouldering" to be toggled on or off in the mission editor? Let the mission designers decide how realistic they want it to be.

I know this has been said before, but I think it bears mentioning again: Mount&Blade. Best sword combat I've seen with any mouse-and-keyboard interface to date, and an incredibly fun game in itself. Pretty amazing, the entire project is the work of 2 or 3 people. It's in beta, but everything is fully functional, and it only continues to improve. Plus it's only $14 to get the full version of the game!

I'm not sure what you mean. It's a lot easier to level up as a zombie than a human, so there's no reason you'd have to play every day. Besides, I'd prefer playing a zombie to cowering behind barricades any day. The reason that some humans get bored with the game is that there aren't *enough* zombies--they outnumber us by a 2:1 ratio.

Join the Mall Tour '06 and cleanse it of the harman scourge for good. We launch organized attacks against Caiger almost every day and communicate through IRC. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

There's actually a very nice utility called BGTutu that converts BG1 to run on the BG2 engine. It's a bit involved getting it up and running, but it really works great--they spent a lot of time on it, and it's on it's fourth now. Along with that, there's a host of other BG1 mods that specifically use BGTutu. One is the BG1 NPC pack, which adds a LOT of new NPC banter and other miscellaneous character interaction. The writing quality for some characters is better than others, but it's worth it--they do some really great things with old favorites like Minsc, Khalid and Jaheira, as well as some unexpected ones like Xzar and Monteron. There's a fix pack that fixes many of the problems with the original game, as well as a tweak pack that offers many interesting optional changes. Go here to download BGTutu. The Gibberlings 3 is also a good site for Tutu add-ons, and can be found here.

While we're on the topic of D&D computer RPGs, I'd like second Redface's nomination of Planescape:Torment. The combat is definitely not as polished as BG or BGII, but it makes up for it with what I think is the best plot and writing for ANY video game ever made. It's colorful, unconventional, and ultimately quite thought-provoking, and makes excellent use of one of D&D's most unique settings. The voice acting is top-notch too--it's got a very strong cast, including Robert Paulson (who does Pinky from Pinky and the Brain) as well as many others. If you can find it, play it, and if you can't find it, then try harder. You don't know what you're missing.

The Urban Dead . Play it. This group's page pretty much sums up the spirit of the game in a nutshell. Also, be sure to join the fight in the titanic battle for Caiger Mall. Preferably on the side of a zambah and not a harman.

I'd just like to point out that the idea of a "realistic" thief simulator is silly in itself. In "real life," the biggest part of a master thief's job is casing out the place he is going to rob, which can easily take weeks or even months. That would certainly be no fun in the context of a game. And even if we assume all of the casing has been done ahead of time, the missions themselves would be boring. In a good robbery, there isn't even anyone present. And even if the thief had to deal with patrolling guards, he certainly wouldn't carry around a bundle of silly arrows to douse torches from a distance. There are almost no situations where something like the "gel arrow" oDDity proposed would be remotely useful. If the situation was so desparate that he needed that torch out that badly, then something must have gone badly wrong and the best thing the thief could do is to get the hell out of there. So it's really a moot point whether our thief carries gel or water arrows, since the whole idea is rediculous to start with. Personally, I like magical arrows better than oDDity's MacGuyver arrows, just because it's simpler and it doesn't feel as much like a badly justified excuse for something we know wouldn't work in real life. But again, it doesn't really matter that much. It's a game, and in a game liberties will be taken.

I actually don't like the gold at all. Have you tried doing it just in black and white? Kind of trite maybe but it gives it that kind of "old movie" effect.

That's very interesting. I don't remember ever seeing information about a security update in the readme file for any patch I downloaded, though. Are they just not normally listed? Perhaps to prevent potential hackers from exploiting code vulnerabilities? Also, you said that there are viruses out there that target specific games. That surprised me, I've never heard of such a thing. Could you give an example? The thought of somebody using my downloaded version of Pacman to gain backdoor entry into my system is frightening. I'd imagine that this could be particularly problematic for things like business network systems, where people would have reason to want access to restricted files and incentive to custom-tailor a program to do so.

Hot damn, Domarius, because of that statement I have just crossed mystery of the universe #7 out of 10 off my list. Now if only I could figure out what a "stack overflow" is...

Just a random question for all you coders out there. I'm an undergraduate student taking a course in computer programming for the first time, and after having studied Java for a semester I'm now being introduced to C for the first time. Recently I was struck by one of the professor's demonstrations, in which he showed how a poorly written C program could be easily used to access parts of the hard drive that should be beyond its security privileges. Naturally, I understood almost none of what he was doing, but I got the basic idea of what he was trying to prove. It made me start thinking, though, are modern computer games secure enough to protect against malicious use of their code? With the huge influx of very complex but shoddily programmed games into the market (games like this one come to mind), are we taking a risk installing games onto our systems? I don't know the first thing about how computer game code works, but is it possible that somebody could create a virus that takes advantage of the coding vulnerabilities of specific games? Big things like the Windows OS get updated for security vulnerabilities all the time, but I've never heard of a security update for a specific computer game. Should I be worried?

The problem with your argument, oDDity, is that all you're doing is taking the worst aspects of culture and parading them around in front of everyone. There's more to culture than nationalism and elitist thinking. You pick a culture at random, and you'll find nothing inherently harmful about the majority of customs and traditions that make up that culture. In fact, most of them help to enrich people's lives. It's the dangerous aspects of culture, the ones that as you say foster the "them and us" attitude, that have to be eliminated to make the world a more peaceful and unified place. Unless you mean to suggest that culture is at its most basic level a "them and us" paradigm, which I believe it isn't, I don't think that you can justify your statement that the world would be a better place without it.

Macsen: I like Wales. My picture is a kitty. These thoughts may or may not be related. oDDity: Wales sucks. Culture sucks. We should all dress in grey and lick salt cubes. Macsen: I respectfully disagree. oDDity: Also I hate children. Dram: WTF guys? OrbWeaver: I'm going to try and translate what oDDity is saying into English. sparhawk: DAMAGE CONTROL oDDity: Did I mention I hate children? thestemmer: I have no bearing on this conversation.

The way I see it, SLI offers future expandability for my system. I agree with you in that there's no need at the moment to have two Nvidia cards, because there's no game that currently needs that much performance. But if I find myself needing more graphics power in the future, I can just buy a second 7800 GT, which by that time will have dropped in price considerably. Besides, I got my SLI board for free as part of a very sweet deal with a discounted 7800 GT, so there's no reason for me not to use it.

You can't run an SLI setup unless you have an SLI capable motherboard. And if you're running a motherboard that's more than a year and a half old, chances are it's not SLI capable. So buying a second card is probably out of the question. Another thing you have to be sure of is what kind of video card your motherboard uses. Do you know if your board is AGP or PCI-express? Again, if it's an older board chances are it's AGP, so you'll probably want to go with an older card like the 6600 GT AGP or a Radeon. Most new motherboards use PCI-express, so I'm not even sure that you can find a card like the Nvidia 6800 that's AGP compatible. Radeon might be different, though, I don't know anything about it.

SLI is a type of motherboard configuration that basically allows you to to hook up two of the same kind of video card to your system. It doesn't quite double the performance, but from my understanding it does increase it by a significant margin. The problem, of course, is that you have to buy two of the *same* video card, which is really hard on your wallet. I have an SLI motherboard, but I'm only running it with one card right now. The idea is that I can add another card if I ever find that I need it, and by that time the price of the card that I'm running (the 7800 GT) will have dropped. It just lets me prolong the working life of my system. From what I understand, though, SLI is Nvidia technology, and most SLI boards are optimized to work with Nvidia cards. I'm not sure that you could run Radeon cards in an SLI setup

I agree with Dram, you want a reasonably priced entry-level card, go for the Geforce 6600 GT. If I'm correct and AU$200 is about US$150, I'm sure you can get it for even cheaper than that now, too. Just do some research on which company you want to buy it from, not all brands are created equal. Edit: I'm not sure how prices have fluctuated recently, but if you're going past the US$200 range, I wouldn't go for the Geforce 6800...it's based on older technology now, and if you go up one level to cards like the 7800 GT you get a huge leap in performance. I was building a new computer and I got one bundled with a sweet SLI motherboard, lucky me.

Thanks for pointing out that link to me, oDDity. Please excuse me while I wipe the drool away from my mouth.

Okay, okay, sorry for being pushy. We all know that oDDity works in mysterious ways, and I for one am willing to wait as long as need be for his work to be finished. There's no denying the outstanding quality. Just for the record, though, did I hear that there will be "some" bot models?

Alright, let me make the question a little more specific, then. What will they look like? From the previous concept art I saw, they looked a lot like the 'bots in the T2 cutscenes, which I took as a very good sign. But , of course, the concept might have changed a lot since then. (Hint, hint: a screenshot would do wonders here. Even if somebody just re-posted the previous concept art. I can't seem to find it anywhere.) Also, if you don't mind me asking, do you have any plans for different types of robots in the works?

!!!Reaching Critical Mass!!! That's just cruel. Where's Dram? He's usually good at leaking enough information to keep us loyal fans satiated.

Hello there, I know it's been awhile since I've posted, but I'm still watching your project with eager anticipation. Today I'm interested in whether you are still planning to implement an AI character similar to the robots/steam beasts of T2. I seem to remember seeing the concept art for one of them awhile back, and it made me almost wet myself because they were one of my favorite enemies in the Thief series. I've looked over old posts, and it seems there was some talk about putting them with the Inventor's Guild, but lately there has been hardly any mention of them. Are they still slated for release? And if so, are you thinking about giving them any unique Dark Mod twists?

Woah, if you're really looking for a more realistic Thief experience, I suggest picking up the Ultimate Difficulty mod. It makes the guards a bit more aware, especially to things like the player running up behind them or blackjacking somebody nearby. It's not perfect by any means, especially since the levels weren't designed with it in mind, but it's still very entertaining and playable. There's one for both Thief 1 and Thief 2. Here's a link. Edit: whoops, didn't see that you had already linked that...I'll leave it up, though, just in case anyone wants it.