Maximius

Da-dum....TNNNG! Thank you, don't forget to tip yur servers!

Yes, Svankmajer always pulls a little trick on the viewer, in the darkest scenes there is usually a bit of humor, albeit dark humor thank Bog. The scenes of the summoning of Mephisto are wonderful though, I'' have to work that into a FM at some point in the future.

I just watched Faust by Jan Svankmajer again last night, I cannot recommend it highly enough. For the uninitiated, Svankmajer is one of the worlds foremost animators. He uses human actors, marionettes, claymation, and stop action techniques and it all comes together into something very, very disturbing but usually with a lot of humor woven in. I also recommend his version of "Alice", about Alice in Wonderland, and "Little Otik" an adaptation of an old Czech myth about a monster that devours all it sees. There are lots of short films of his around as well in collections.

You are quite right, NH, I was just throwing some ideas out there for consideration. I tend to exaggerate a bit too, I don't want the killing to be impossible but it should be laden with difficulty and consequences. Just like bringing up the topic of killing AIs in this forum is laden with consequences.....

A related question, would it be possible to make the blood stains from a fight "surface sensitive"? For example, if I stab an AI in the back on a wooden, dirt, or marble floor I can (theoretically) wipe it up or wash it with a water arrow (an idea I don't like that much myself). But what if the AI bleeds on a carpet? Is it possible to basically make the blood a stain on certain surfaces? I'm just curious, it would seem to add a dash of realism as well as another obstacle to successfully killing AIs, which should be as hard as hell anyway IMHO.

I always thought it would be cool to dump the moss arrows, or keep them for smothering guards or choking the air intakes on bots, and giving the Thief a pair of velvet slippers in which to sneak silently. No new animations really need to be added, merely have the slippers in the inventory and when the player uses them, the Thief can creep silently. The drawback, so that the Thief cannot just keep them on, is that they make the Thief slip if he walks or runs, so he has to creep with them on. Imagine running about as a kid with your socks on, you are quiet but you can also bust your ass if you run with them on linoleum or marble flooring, same idea. I have nothing against moss arrows in particular, but I did always find it annoying that guards didnt mind that an enormous moss growth suddenly sprouted in the chapel or the treasure room. Sounds like that problem is under control though.

What about Aliens 4? Human/alien crossbreeds that just need some TLC from Mom, humans cloned from a scrap of DNA that retain full memories of their former lives, Ripley in a Astro-Dominatrix costume, standard issue for space stations in the 22nd century. Why did anyone even bother to make that thing?

That makes sense, thanks!

Ok, so then I take it I would actually have to physically place two images back to back to make an image appear two sided?

I've been cutting out sections of plant images in GIMP to construct my hedgerows with, I was wondering if I make an alpha map of greenery, can I make it automatically double sided as in LightWave or will I actually have to "glue" two alpha maps back to back or draw the other side by hand?

Don't forget that human females are prepared to mate year round, IIRC most other apes only reproduce twice a year. You should read Greg Benfords hard sci fi piece "Comet", its about humans colonizing Halleys Comet, finding life there, and eventually branching off into three distinct species of human.

Your right oDD I do prefer living in a modern, Western society with its creatures comforts and longer lifespans but I'm taking the point of view of the species survival here. I'm really criticizing the argument that having lots of complex technology or a particular kind of political system is a good standard by which to claim one societies superiority over another.

IIRC from my ancient world history classes, the worlds first universities were located in Africa. Some groups in Africa had complex communication networks that spanned miles and miles using runners and drums to transmit information, at a time when Europeans were still dwelling in caves. Equatorial Africans were aware of the benefits of inoculation long before Europe, it was african slaves who taught their masters to dap bits of pus from dying smallpox infections onto healthy slaves, so that weakened smallpox bug infections would trigger the immune system to protect against even worse infections later on. (They didnt know all that but they knew enough to do it.) The list is long, but unfortunately much obscured by the history of slavery and imperialism, historical revisionism (such as Napoleon shooting the nose off of the Sphinx because the notion it was made by Nubian blacks ruling Egypt was too much for him to bear), as well as racism blinkering our views. Africa was the birthplace of humanity, although not much evidence surives it seems very likely it was home to many firsts for the species. China and Mesopotamia always get the credit but thats probably mostly due to the fact that those cultures left behind more durable objects than many african cultures, which can be attributed to the resources they used to make those things, i.e. using plant based papers to write on versus clay tablets like the Babylonians or builiding houuses from stone or wood versus hay or thatch.

thank you sir! (Will that be check or money order?) Let me add one more point. If we are talking about physical superiority, lets look at a few negatives on the male side. For one, lower thresholds of pain, although I dont have the studies on hand I understand that women can withstand higher levels of discomfort than men can. Might have something to do with that birth thing they do. Secondly, lets look at long term survival. Males tend to be much more aggressive than females. Great for getting into fights and staying involved until completion. Really bad cause, well, you get into fights and stay until completion. So although aggression can make you a good defender of the group, to an extent, because of your willingness to confront adversaries or potential adversaries, its a real detriment to the individual male who is much more likely to get hurt or die and then fail to reproduce its genes. As to intellectual abilities, I am not personally aware of any body of evidence that points to men being mentally superior to women.

I want to make a few general points: Part of the problem with trying to determine the particular characteristics of one group or another is that the tests used to make those measurements are often heavily biased by the culture of the group that produced the tests. In the U.S., in the early part of the 20th century native americans were often tested using tests that asked questions like "How many miles does the milk delivery man have to travel if the highway is five miles, the state road is three, and the dirt road is one mile?" This question was presented to a people who didn't drink milk, drive trucks, and who may not know the difference between highways and dirt roads. Little distractions like these are terrible obstacles to a student, even if they can do the simple addition the unfamiliar terms and ideas can throw them for a loop. I see this happen daily in my own classroom. Also, historically marginalized groups, like women, ethnic minorities are often denied access to the basic education necessary to successfully take such tests. If you have poor literacy skills, you may be very bright and still fail a test on reading comprehension. I have seen this firsthand too. I understand some efforts have been made to change this, my brothers girlfriend is actually getting a masters in special education and she administers these tests to children. She tells me they are ridiculously skewed towards white, Euro-centric culture. Race is a bankrupt concept. It has its origins in the European/US. slave trade and the attempts of pro-slavery intellectuals to find a rationale for slavery in the face of religious and ethical condemnation of the practice. Race was predicated on a supposed set of charactersistics that human beings could be divided up into. Superficial attributes like hair type, skin color, and the shape of facial features were used classify people, and then other attributes like intelligence and moral capacity were piggy backed onto these categories. The one enabled the other. We have a much better, scientifically based method of organizing people according to their characteristics, or rather the blueprint of those characteristics, thats called genetics. Genetics has dealt a heavy blow to the notion of "races." Why? Because it turns out that members of some groups are farther away genetically from their supposed racial colleagues. So some people of the black race are related to members of the white race or asian race more so than other members of the black race. Claiming that one group of people is more evolved than another is problematic too. No living thing is "more evolved" than another, this implies that evolution is some sort of goal or race, which it is not. Rather, it is a process of change in response to environmental pressures. A microscopic plant in fact may be much more evolved than a human, in the sense that its species is much older and has changed a number of times to accomodate its environment while humans have only been humans for about a million + years and have only undergone a relatively few changes in that time. When we are talking about human societies its gets even trickier. If one group of people overcomes, subjugates, or exterminates another (or is trying to justify why its trying to do so) its commonplace to say that the victors were "more evolved" in terms of physical traits or in terms of cultural characteristics. So for example, we in the U.S. are fond of saying that Muslims are violent and irrational while Westerners are clear headed and ethical. The implication is that Western civ. is more evolved than Islam, I think this is the famous "Clash of civilizations" crap being touted about today to help rationalize U.S. imperialism. Supposedly, the rational, moral West is clashing with the barbaric East in a struggle (survival of the fittest) to lead the world. The implication is that this clash is inevitable and that the West is basically the good guys/white hats while Islam and the East wear black hats. The whole pile of shit uses evolutionary ideas to attempt to justify itself. But lets look at it closer. Imagine you have two groups of people with vastly different cultures that are in conflict with one another. One group has an advanced technical civilization, radios and automobiles, while the other is still mostly agricultural and underdeveloped. Who is more "evolved?" Well, it would have to be the hi-tech culture, right? But consider this. What if that culture has vast problems with poverty, with human suffering, with the strong exploiting the weak? What if all that technology was actually poisoning those people, killing their children, killing their land, killing the animals and plants they depend on. The second group has a "slower" pace of development and tech, no doubt, but they are also much more in step with the demands of the natural world, things like sustainability of their culture and the stability of their future prospects. They don't have automobiles, but then they also dont have smog, cancers, wars for petroleum, high rates of traffic death, jammed roads, etc. So what standard are you going to apply to judge who is more evolved than whom? Both cultures have pluses and minuses, and no one can tell which may actually survive in the long run. A high tecch culture may let individuals live much longer but it may poison its nest in doing so, wrecking the long term survival for the short term life extension of its members. A low tech society may watch its individuals die at fifty but the society itself is resilient and doesn't destroy its future for a happier present. So which society is more evolved?

Are you guys planning on including a battering ram to replace mine? I don't want to be left out, ya know!

Dominator: Ah but I think they lacked the technical ability to focus the energy into a single beam. Just as Eidos lacked the technical ability to focus TDS into a coherent game!

hehe, true! I wasn't dissing Star Trek BTW, Im not a huge fan but its better than most sci fi television out there.

Just for kicks I guess. I wasn't thinking of it as a permanent part of the Thiefs armory or anything like that, rather something mission specific. I've been dreaming of this FM for a while, the Tower of Time, and Iwould like much of the mission to take require climbing (or flying) up the inside of an enormous tower That would be a nice touch as well. Perhaps a mission in which the Thief must navigate the ancient sewer system of the City. Mmmm, ancient sewer systems.........

hehe, is this a reference to those moronic star trek pistols the keeper assassins carried in TDS? Set phasers to anti-immersion!

No no, let nothing interrupt the Builder's work! Its just a pleasant whim...

That mod looks like fun, Ill have to try it. A question: Seeing that D3 can become a "flying" game so to speak, could this ability be transmogrified into an aspect of the Mod? I mean in the context of a flying potion, or carpet, or on the back of a flying creature? Imagine taking a magic carpet, procured in a prior mini quest, to a sorcerers cloud fortress or to an otherwise inaccessible mountaintop. Would this have to be some sort of "invisible" rail system or could the player (when using an item that enables flight) have total freedom of movement, as I did when I used noclip or whatever in D3? Such a powerful item would need lots of balancing, I think, something to keep the Thief from parking above a group of AIs and whacking them all with arrows or mines or something, perhaps potions would be time limited while carpets and flying steeds would be less than steady mounts, swaying with breezes or the beating of wings.

I've been playing the demo version of "thinktanks" from the link I posted, its actually a lot of fun, real simple but entertaining.

http://www.garagegames.com/demos/browse/game/ If anyone else has any good freebie game links please post em!