Maximius

This is right on the money IMO. True hunting rifles can be used to kill people and can kill accidentally, I think hunters should be made to keep them at secured hunting clubs or something similar, farmers and those who really need firepower can apply for licenses to carry one all the time after a substantial background check. But hunting rifles are nothing like a semi automatic pistol that shoots two shots a second. You cant hide them as easily, and you cant fire and aim them as easily. Hunting rifles and non automatic shotguns are made for game, hi-tech pistols like Glocks or Berettas or military hardware like AKs or Uzis are made for killing people. They should be nearly impossible to get your hands on. Here in Philadelphia, they are fairly easy to get, just go to Virginia. Thats what the gangs do. I'm really really interested in gun issues these days. About four months ago, I was held up at gunpoint about 100 feet from my house while doing laundry. Two young men, one about 18 one about 14, ran up to me early in the evening and put a pistol to my head, took my wallet and keys, and ran off. It really fucked me up. Not physically but mentally. I've had to take medical leave from work, due to nightmares, insomnia, anger attacks, paralyzing bouts of fear, etc. I used to teach in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Philly and I could not continue to return there after the robbery. Everyday I saw things that brought it back, gangs of kids about to get into a pistol fight, prostitution, crack smoking teens, faint pistol shots in the neighborhood, angry, pissed off poor people everywhere. The other night, I was talking to a friend who was sitting in his car on my street and we were interrupted by eight semi auto pistols shots about four blocks north of where we sat. He witnessed a pitched gun battle a few weeks back while talking to a friend and told me they simply looked at the shooters about two blocks down and stepped behind a corner to finish their talk. In some parts of the city its fairly commonplace to see such things. The cops blame the families, as if Mom can stop Junior from doing what hes going to do when hes got a fucking pistol in his waistband. Though I cannot blame the average cop for being defensive, no one told them they would regularly face firepower equal or sometimes superior to their own in the street. The state politician wring their hands not wishing to offend their voters in rural Pennsyltucky, the ones here now running for mayor make big promises, the morons in the sticks refuse to support any kind of gun measures that might impinge on their right to buy countless numbers of guns, more than they can hunt with, more than they can ever really need or use. The arms industry and the NRA have made it their business to propagate myths about gun ownership and US history and have created a ready pool of consumer drones to buy buy buy new guns for their "collection." Not a useful collection, not a practical or historically valuable collection, just a collection to insure that more guns will get sold. Like some people have to buy every Franklin Mint collectible plate, some people need dozens of firearms sitting around. We cannot get a simple law passed in this state to limit people to only buying one gun a month. Only one a month, and you should have heard the hue and cry about "rights" being trampled and gun enthusiasts "suffering" under this burden. Guns are tied into sexual identity issues, they are s rite of passage into manhood for the dullards who need such tokens. And so nothing really changes, children die every week, ten murders last weekend alone and we have broken last years record for Spring already. My last adult education student Maria had a fourteen year old son shot in the shoulder while he sat on his front porch, no reason just got targeted randomly by a roving gang of boys who should have been in school. But oh, the schools are rotting apart, filled with vermin, lacking necessities like supplies of toilet paper and lightbulbs, who wants to hang out there. More fun to wander the streets and raise hell, I would have done the same thing were I in their shoes at their age. Marias boy survived but has fragments embedded in his shoulder and neck. The boy who shot him was sixteen. The problem has multiple causes and influences but one thing is clear: making guns cheap and readily available is one of the worst. But it won't change anytime soon, not until enough well off white people get killed and then we will see some sort of crackdown. Meanwhile, I hide in my house most days, drink and smoke too much, and drive my girlfriend half nuts.

Can't both exist at the same time in equal measure in an activity? For example, Im a big time home cook, there are lots of correct and incorrect things to do in any given preparation. But I can say that art, free expression, plays a constant role as well. Aesthetic changes in color, texture, and taste are bounded but not defined by technique. I see the two as twined about one another rather than as contradictory. Sometimes an incorrect technique leads to new creations, as in the time I made a spaghetti sauce in a pot I had make teriyaki beef in the night before. I left the dirty pot on the stove and the next morning tossed my ingredients in and let it rip. This is certainly not the technique for making anything, clean tools are rule number one, but the sauce was incredible.

I have to admit Im not as familiar with lichs as some other character types. I can see them being loners from the world but surrounding themselves with other simple undead, zombies and maybe some haunts to protect their lairs. Are they really always a match for a lich? I tend to agree with your description of vamps but a necromancer is a powerful foe as well and I would think that a master of death magic would have some abilities versus the undead, even if he was undead himself. Lichs as I have encountered them are still sentient, unlike zombies and haunts, and would seem quite capable of defending themselves against a vamp. Vampires can get too soap opera-ish but they can be toned down, made less sexy and more unnatural. And their can be rankings of vamps, its one thing to bump into a young local vamp dwelling in a sewer tunnel and lurking in back alleys, terrified of a mob with torches and stakes, and another to crawl into the tomb of a seven hundred year old vampire who can crush you with a glance. I like your fm idea, it sounds like a good time trying to fight to survive then have to desperately seek out your kit to escape. BTW you will be interested in this, a few years ago at a book sale here in Philly I found the two book set of the adventures of Varney the Vampire, a character from the British "pennydreadfulls" from the late 19th century. The books were reprints obviously but they look really neat, I never read them but Ill drag them out now.

These are some interesting ideas Hammer but I tend to agree with Gildoran, for the purposes of immersion I think magical processes are either best left unexplained OR by appealing to explanations that dovetail with popular conceptions of magic. For example, the elemental theme of the Precursor games was a good fit for me, cause elemental magic actually exists in the RL world (the practice anyway) so most are familiar with it and its the right mix of woo and actual explanation. Enough to see larger patterns but not enough to give one a sense of any deeper understanding. Now, if you were to make an FM that had a engineers text describing such theories, or some wizards scrolls, or an alchemist lecturing some students, that would be a nice addition. I don't want the Thief world explained to me too much, but if some of its inhabitants try to explain it, thats really good detail IMO and would only accentuate the atmosphere.

I agree, vamps and lich are too "rich" of an undead character to have them running about like zombies. They are much more powerful and probably territorial to a degree. I think they can work if they are major characters with clearly defined roles. But I dont understand why you think vamps aren't part of the main TDM universe. If there is a main universe. I think they fit well into the Precursor inspired maps that will come out, I for one really love undead, the creepier the better, inverted hammers and speaking backwards gibberish. A map idea: a lich and a vamp are fighting for control of a castle and one hires the Thief to infiltrate the castle to steal a powerful object and turn the tide of the battle. Once accomplished, the Thief finds himself betrayed by the victor and cast into a horrid dungeon to await death. He manages to escape but then has to rearm bit by bit throughout the castle and then confront his betrayer. Basically a Constantine scenario but shorter storyline.

For several years, I forced myself to think about everyone I looked at, including myself, as a chimpanzee. What I mean to say is I tried to see the ape in the human, intentionally see someone scratching their butt as a chimp might, men arguing, people lifting stuff, doing work, watching people eat food is fascinating this way, some are so careful and delicate and others look like the ape-men in the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey ripping flesh from bone. Porn is really recast from this point of view, you see human faces and ape bodies slapping and grinding, limbs splayed and hands clutching automatically, its a bit disconcerting at times. The point of all this was to break down some of my culturally hard wired perceptions of people and it worked to a great degree, people are so much more animalistic to me now and I think its perhaps a somewhat clearer image of what we are. I don't mean animalistic in a negative sense, I mean natural, living, organic and less of the trappings that we load onto our ideas of ourselves.

I've taken porn to an art form, I like to think. I'm applying for a grant from the National Well-Endowment for the Arts for my new one man show.

Can u not do this with lightwave?

Dom I was not being critical really, I thought maybe they had some new techniques or something for trees that were low poly.

How are they getting away with this, or are they just ignoring older computer systems totally? Mines fairly new and I doubt it would run well.

Wow, how did they make those trees? The leaves don't look like the normal alpha test style, thats for sure.

Ok that makes sense, the side missions/core missions idea especially. I just felt damage like that sometimes added a bit of realism but I guess you would have to set it up to repair the health almost immediately, which would look contrived. But I still want to make hard FM side missions then, some real ballcrushers like umm, that insane asylum FM for T2, with NHs tweaks applied. It was freakishly hard, took me like two nights of inching around from shadow to shadow, it was great. Not that every FM needs to be that way I guess. Zylon, go to your room!

If you can successfully build one, Ill buy it from you for good $$$. Keep us informed.

I think damage should be crucial because the FM should be so goddam hard that you cannot finish it without damage. If Items are in the game, they should be there because you practically have to use them to finish, if you dont have to pat yorself on the back but why place items or have them at all if the situation never really demands using them? In the Precursor games, one of the things that started telling me the games were getting old was that I was finishing them will buckets of tools/resources. WHen I place a healing potion in a game, believe me, the player is going to fall on his/her knees when they find it because it will seem like a gift from God and not a moment too soon. I like jumps, drops, etc that take a few health away from you. Its more realistic IMHO, makes it seem like you are getting your hands dirty, taking real risks.

I believe this image captures the trend of this particular thread: http://img75.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lo...pace7arswe9.jpg

Fuck buying a new tv, im getting a digital projector and making my TV/Monitor anywhere I want.

Check out this good stuff! http://www.guerrilla-productions.org/Merchandise.html EDIT check out their complete collection, looks like some good indie film stuff here, more lovecraft stuff too!

I mapped a tiny bit before jumping onto modeling, its challenging but really not that agonizing once you get going. Sure as fuck easier than modeling.

Ah yes, of course. I've heard it called "bifurcated thinking" holding two or more contradictory thoughts in ones head as being true. It tells me too that at least in some schools, a rigorous understanding of the philosophical aspects of scientific inquiry are lacking. When I worked at the APS museum here in Philly a few years back, I met two Christian fundie scientists, a microbiologist and a mammologist. What a pair of whack jobs. We had some Darwin pieces up, they took the tour as an opportunity to preach about how wrong Darwin had been. I was speechless, not at their silly points which even I as a non scientist could refute, but at the fact these chimeras existed at all.

The fact that you can recognize a logical truth and then shape your actions accordingly is the freedom of our wills. Consciousness cannot make independent decisions, or in the language of analytical philosophy indetermined decisions, but that ability is not a viable concept of freedom anyway. The reason is that the opposite is also true, if our consciousness were to make decisions independent from the rest of our brain (an impossibility) then why could we claim these independent decisions were free? We, as living organisms, want our actions to be shaped by our senses and our thoughts. People who cannot make decisions based on these sources of data are considered highly defective and certainly lack freedom in many ways. Free wills are not free from deterministic causes. We must set that idea aside, I don't think it has a scrap of merit. Im not picking on your points, they are good points for a non-specialist but they are also an old part of the free will debate and have been dismantled as I see it. In fact, I am writing a thesis that attempts to do exactly that, undermine such notions of independent freedom while presenting a picture of dependent freedom of the will. (Kudos to you for intuitively arguing them however.) However, humans are free to produce new sets of deterministic causes, namely reasons, which our consciousness recognizes and acts on, making them our wills. There is no "I" to sit and look back on this process, hoping to jump in and do something freely. This process literally is you, your consciousness (taken as an experiential whole, not its components) is this reason producing mechanism. Determined causes come in and cause the machinery to do its thing, freedom comes when we reflect on those causes and in doing so open the path for creating new causes, new reasons, sets of determining influences that move us to actions that we want.

Whats truly scary is the degree of mushiness in terms of superstitious beliefs amongst some of the most highly educated technically advanced people over here. I dont know how it is in Europe, but over here we have a significant portion of our scientific community talking about the need to respect faith as a form of knowledge, about how you can have both a scientific model of the world and still believe in hocus pocus shit. I used to work with a guy, degrees in astrophysics and (even more unbelievably) philosophy who was a Christian. We got along pretty well but were careful to avoid *that* particular conversation. He could brow beat our colleagues about his faith but he knew better than to fuck with me. To my thinking, this individual is little more than a technician, not a scientist or even a student of science. If you have any understanding of the scientific method, you can instantly see how it dissolves belief systems based on faith, let alone disintegrating the silly particular beliefs involved. How do these people get so far without these contradictions exploding in their faces?

I think this is an important point in terms of FM design. Even just a seemingly unimportant detail like too many guards guarding too little stuff can be an immersion destroyer. I can see a powerful and wealthy lords mansion having a big guard force but now that you mention it many of the Precursor FMs had exactly that problem, namely fifty guards watching over an empty house with a few treasure pieces. Any sensible AI would simply store his or her stuff somewhere else and sack the extra guards. In other words, it comes across as contrived.

I think the ability to conceive of things like logical truths is exactly what gives us a degree of freedom of our wills.

This last part has been answered for me at least, it is the peculiar structure of our mechanism, our ability to abstract things like the idea "I want to do X" then "I want to want to do X" and most crucially "I want to want to do X and I want to make it what I actually do." that captures the free formation of our wills. Desires arise from elsewhere and flow through our consciousness, everything from hunger to the highest intellectual abilities, but even as they do they are subject to a scrutinizing second look in the mind as abstracted objects themselves. We think our thoughts, and we think thoughts about them, and some of those secondary thoughts are that some of our thoughts become our actions, what we actually want to do. Its a picture of the mind as a filter, a sieve that holds back some desires from becoming actions and lets others pass. The question is not whether we are conscious or not of this process, we are this process, to question whether we are in control of this process is to ask if we can be in two places at once. I can see how neuroeconomics would have great value for animals and for some human behavior but Im curious about the line it draws between culture, personality, and these deeper functions. The arrangement you have described seems to imply that even the most irrational of actions would have to have some rational basis, as this "optimization" mode is the first, fundamental mode through which all behavior must pass. I would posit that its more mixed up then that, with reason and unreason sometimes flowing into and informing one another. But maybe Im reading too much into your post. I remember some of this from my brief neuroscience readings and its very interesting but Ill dash off two short points and then to bed. For one, Im leery of economic explanations in general, in my experience they are abused as being the sole source of understanding certain phenomena much as science is. The three levels of function you describe are also of interest but I wonder about the arrangement. Anyway, I have to get to sleep, Ill edit and re-respond tomorrow night.

Thats a neat idea, AT, but way beyond my meager skills. It sound power intensive though, generating all those little particles must take up a lot of juice, and if its a forest, you get the idea...