Maximius

I think they should go on low level alert if their lunch is missing. Well maybe not, but I'm definitely things like keys, important books, or wallets. But the guards in T1/2 would also return quietly to their posts after a short while, and then you slinked out from behind something and slipped away. That shouldn't happen IMO. At the very least you should have a triple hard time getting back out after they even suspect someones around. I thin k some FMs did this or something but I cant remember now.

So can you give me an example of a map where you are NOT forced to be stealthy or to hurry? This would have to be a map of the Thiefs moms house, cause in every other environment you have AIs trying to find and kill you. And this isn't even taking into account timed missions, which I personally hate but which I make exception for when the storyline provides a strong rationale for that setting. And what does manipulating the environment even mean? Moving chairs around? Switching peoples toothbrushes? I described the difficulty settings as I did because I believe they can make the map more immersive by presenting more realistic challenges. Its unrealistic for a guard to walk through a room that once held dozens of gold cups but is now empty, and to have that guard do or say nothing. This was a constant problem in the Precursors, guards guarding empty picture frames and open, looted chests. Its also unrealistic to have a guard pass by an empty guard post and not raise an eyebrow. Thats at least partly why security forces have set schedules and assigned posts, so everyone knows where everyone else is at or should be. WHen a guard goes missing, just one guard, for longer than a few minutes, any professional security force goes on alert. It just makes sense, if you are guarding stuff and the guards start to disappear, you probably have a problem.

That general complacency finally seemed to give way for a brief period of time, long enough for the Democrats to sneak back into power. Unfortunately, thats about it in terms of moving against the powers that be. Now everyone here is clapping themselves on the back for showing those Repubs whose in charge. Meanwhile, the Democrats are throwing a few bones to their constituents and then happily getting back to the business of keeping the rich and powerful,well, rich and powerful. Don't look for major changes anytime soon. No withdrawing from Iraq, no talk of universal healthcare that I've heard of, no discussion of improving the lot of labor unions or workplace safety. In fact, the fucking coward Dems have shied far away from the notion of impeaching these idiots. Clinton got a blow job and the Reps almost had him pilloried for it. Bush lies, murders, shatters international law and the US's global image, undermines the Constitution and personal liberties and Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is off the table. The entire election process here is a sham for that matter, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out the same people that sell you toothpaste sell you your politicians. Remember too that the US is a powerful enough entity to allow a certain level of formal (read "on the surface") dissent within itself. THere are plenty of activist organizations to join here, but very few of them are pushing for fundamental changes in the way things are done . Thats why you have anti poverty organizations that happily go begging about the business community for a few scraps instead of attempting to mobilize folks against those interests. Its also why the sheeple here praise Bill Gates for combating poverty when he hands out a couple thousand free computers to schools that desperately need textbooks and structural repairs, after his corporation spends millions to avoid paying taxes, to stifle competition, to avoid environmental regulation, and to further consolidate Microshafts hold on the market by handing out free computers. I used to work for an environmental firm in Philadelphia that prided itself on having access to the offices of some of the most influential people in the state. What they failed to grasp, and what I threw in their faces after I walked off the job one night, was that access like that didn't argue for their ability to influence decision makers, it was a symptom of the level of compromise they had to make to even get their voices heard. The leaders in question knew they had to contend with these tree huggers to a degree, so they allowed them to meet with them, nodded and expressed concern about the issues at hand, then did the political calculus and continued to do what they had been doing before these dumb ass wanna be hippies stumbled across their reception area. Now, at the same time, just to show you the hypocrisy, this environmental organization was steadily screwing over its workforce, taking pay away from people who were having trouble getting members to join or renew and steadfastly refusing to allow any sort of organization in the officeplace, maintaining strict separation of management and labor to the point where some managers wouldn't even say hello to the phone bank callers as they came and went. I pointed out that mistreating the phone callers and street canvassers would have a direct impact on membership, we were afterall the front line and public face of the organization. It was me and my appeals, not the boss, that kept people sending in a couple hundred dollars a year to keep the lights on. The workforce was treated like a simple machine that one could replace at will with new parts. Well, after about a year of this crap, the calling room had to be shut down due to the fact that no new members were signing up. Even veteran callers who were raising thousands of dollars a year were losing their numbers. Rather than back off and cherish their workforce as an integral part of the success of the mission, they took the standard US business culture route of exploitation and elitism, and thusly killed the golden goose. The best part was I predicted the entire collapse, I warned the bunch of idiots that they would steadily lose support if they did not allow their workers a stable and positive environment in which to do their work. WHen you call someone and ask them for their money, you have to be relaxed, in control of the facts, and able to make a clear argument for the necessity of their donation. When you are watching the clock to avoid going over each calls time limit, when you are stressing over each and every "No!" you get because each one counts against your record whether or not you can help it, your success rate will tank. And the members start to think of you as just another tele-sales caller and they lose interest.

I suspect you are referring to a mainstream economics course here Gildoran. Not all economists were convinced that society consists of purely rational individuals working to maximize their utility within the marketplace. Its always amusing to me that status quo economics courses happily turn to the work of liberal thinkers like Mill and Locke from well over a hundred plus years ago while blithely ignoring those who keenly criticized those individuals afterwards. Utilitarianism has its points as I remember, but to my thinking its an impossible ideology to institute under a capitalist order. Inequalities in wealth are by their very nature destructive to the stability and well being of a society. A society that allows inequalities in wealth is anathema to the notion of the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. Why? Because wealth is a form of power, and when one group of folks holds too much power they will **always** use it to further their own ends at the expense of others.

This is a good point. Many of the students I teach, poor and lacking basic educational skills, speak passionately about Walmart because its the one store they can get almost everything they need from. They dont know about the long term costs to their human rights, the environment, or organized labor. They only understand that Walmart is the one place they can actually buy their kids something for Christmas. This leads to some other points. One of the strongest barriers to organizing against corporate or other kinds of power, especially in the U.S., is that the average USer is overworked, underpaid, and essentially living in a state of semi-chaos. Remember we USers have the highest levels of personal debt, some of the poorest healthcare, and one of the most stressful cultures on the planet. These are all considerations when one is asking why folks aren't up in arms.

I'm very much in favor of note taking and comparing by the guards. I say take it to the point of impossibility and then ratchet it back maybe two notches. It will allow for a great deal of tension to build up in a map. Say for example you have your AI set so that when items go missing from a room the level of alert ratchets up and that when they communicate that to one another it goes up even higher. In order to successfully clean out a mansion, you would have to essentially scout out each area before you touch a thing, closing doors behind you and all that. THen, once you have located the wealth and planned an escape route, you can begin to pinch stuff. And you have to do it fast, get in and out before the levels of excitement are too great and the place goes bananas. Mmmm, fresh baked sneaky goodness! If you start stealing stuff first, you wont get to finish because by the time you get halfway into the joint the guards will be on high alert. It seems this could also call for strategic KOs and kills, if there are two guards that are walking between two sections of a house, they have to be removed in order to stop the flow of communication between the different sections. But only a handful of guards per map, if you throw in the ability for AIs to be aware that their comrades are missing from their patrols, you are truly facing a tough nut to crack. It will come down to precise timing, careful planning of routes, and strategic use of tools that even the play in the Precursor games could not begin to touch.

People like to suffer under the illusion that we are "served" by big business, that somehow the best way to get about with our lives is to let a small group of folks get filthy rich while selling us overpriced garbage. Customers are to be exploited, they are there to give up the most while receiving the least in return. Employees are to be exploited, they too are there to give up the most while receiving the least in return. Who can defend this, except the parasites who get to sit atop the shit heap? Companies have been saying that for time out of mind. While its true that smaller companies can suffer from raising the minimum wage, the large ones have no excuse when corporate profits are at all time record highs. Here in the Plantation Nation, CEOs are making something like 400 times what the average worker brings home but everyone thinks this is the good and the right way to run things. Everytime they talk about raising the minimum wage or regulating pollution or some such, the business community screams about lost jobs, closing plants, etc. In some instances this may actually be true, but the majority of the time its simply scare tactics. Paying a living wage is an overall good for an economy, it builds stability, allows for savings, raises quality of life, and strengthens the average individual. Here in the U.S., the minimum wage is something like **26** years behind the times and already business is whining and moaning about the lost jobs and lost productivity and yap yap yap. But a well paid worker is more productive, and a growing economy can provide new jobs to replace those lost when a business cannot make it work anymore. By and large, such complaints are simply business propaganda. Ahh, but the problem there Gildoran is that CVS has bought out and shut down most of its competitors. See, unregulated business is like a tumor, it grows and grows unchecked by regulation or market forces until it swallows up all competition. A quick case in point: When I was in school at Bloomsburg State Uni. in Pennsylvania, we had the Eppley family pharmacy downtown. A CVS came in, bought out the store with promises of staying put in town and even went so far as to hire Mr. Eppley to work at their counter. The town loved the new business, and people could still walk to get their medications cause of its central location. Well, that lasted about 6 months. CVS shut down the store in town, laid off old Mr. Eppley, and built a much bigger store that was about 2 miles outside town, closer to the interstate. Great for CVS, now they can get all that highway traffic business and deliveries are easier to make and the real estate was probably a lot cheaper out there. But it screwed the townsfolk, many of them retired or sick, who now had to drive to get their meds or pay for a delivery service. This model of business can be seen everywhere over here, buy out the mom and pop store, promise the town fabulous dreams of incoming wealth and steady jobs, and then you do whatever the fuck you like and screw the local morons. In some states like New Jersey you can come to an intersection of a highway and see 3 Big Box stores marring the landscape while a few miles down the road you come to, well, another intersection with the SAME THREE BIG BOX STORES. How many of the very same store do you need in a five mile stretch? Only one if you are a resident but if you are attempting to swallow up competition by buying up available store sites you need half a dozen. Of course, they all claim its to better service their customers but any fool can see its simply big business duking it out while the little guys get pushed around or underfoot. There is a saying from somewhere in Africa, when elephants fight the grass is the loser.

Not if you are trying to squeeze more from your bottom line, it makes perfect sense to send that work to an economy where you can get away with paying workers a fraction of what you would have to pay someone elsewhere. I see this at work here in the States all the time. Down the corner we have a CVS, a pharmacy and general store. In order to keep more of the profits, corporations like CVS regularly under staff their stores and force their remaining workers to do the work of two or more people. So now, when I stop in the store at around 4:30 or 5 PM to get some papertowels, you see staff stocking the shelves and busting open crates of new products IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BUSIEST PART OF THE SHOPPING DAY. They used to hire folks to come in at night and do that work but hey, just lay off the night shift, force the day shifts to do more on their time, pocket the extra salaries you have saved and when you the customer come up to the check out counter you see fifteen people standing in line at the only register with a cashier while the other three registers are unmanned. So you wait an extra five to ten minutes while all around you staff are running about trying to get their stocking chores done AND keep the customers moving in the line. Makes no sense for the workers or the customers, but it makes great sense if you are a CVS shareholder looking to raise the value of your investment.

Heres an improved version of the temperate plant I posted last week. Its only a total of 60 polygons. Without the pot its probably around 45 or 50.

Atlas Shirked? Did you need to balance a short coffee table leg or something?

I see, I hadn't actually thought of trying to code those things, I just meant to include them as storyline props. Maybe when the beast attacks the player it will suck out blood and drain h.p., I could include a nasty squishy sucking noise or something.

Thanks, I kind of remember that texture from playing around with D3eD. But please clarify your first comment. Is it hard to create a new AI, or are you referring to this specific project. I had thought that the AI itself would simply be a matter of some new sounds, some new scripts (and nothing radically new I think), and some new textures wrapped around an AI that already exists.

Happy New Year!

Im still not clear on this. I could pop more RAM chips in my puter and D3 would run better and with no new coding. So are these accelerators like adding new RAM or will it require games that are specifically made to use it?

I need some advice about a project that I intend to carry out in LightWave 8. I want to create a new kind of AI undead, a worm lich. whats a worm lich, you say? Why, you ignorant fool, its a lich (undead sorcerer/ess) that is formed from the worms that infest an evil magic users grave. Basically you summon the lich but it uses the worms in the ground and the skeleton of the dead individual to form a body. I've already got the intro movie scene laid out in sketches, its a stormy night at an abandoned grave yard. A witch casts the final piece of the summoning and the ground around the grave begins to squirm and bubble up. Then, the skeleton begins to rise out of the ground while thousands of fat, slimy worms swarm around the bones and wrap and interweave themselves, taking the place of ligaments and muscles. When the transformation is complete, the abomination is tasked to kill a certain individual and is given an item of the individual to help identify him or her. The lich has no special unique skills, only that it can move underground and kill its targets by smothering them in a carpet of worms.... Now this is a project I am not ready to even think about beginning, I know nothing of animation yet let alone AI modelling. But I have a question about it anyway. Would it be possible to skin this thing with a animated coat of worms? Not individual worms but a layer of moving models embedded in a skin texture that would give the appearence of a human figure composed of squirming worms wrapped around weathered bones.

Bear with a techno-ignoramus please, so even if these processors were to come out to the general public, its something that a game would have to be coded for in order to use, yes?

Is it possible to tweak D3s pathfinding?

Thanks man, it needs a bit of work but I think it will be good eventually. When I get back to town Ill remake it and tweak the leaves a bit too.

Thanks, thats a good idea. Here is a sample of a temperate style plant I hammered out using flat, double sided polygons for leaves. Its crude, but it also only has about 45 polys total so it could be improved and still not bog stuff down.

Thanks for your positive feedback I'm thinking that the hedges should probably be made completely of pixel sheets after all, I constructed a hedge facade and even without the leaves its already up to 200 + polys and thats only for one five stalk section, maybe two feet in the Mod world. A maze of hedgerows would probably blow your motherboard out of the case. But I have some ideas for the pixel sheets. Briefly, Im thinking of many layers of cleanly cut out pixel sheets (of hedgerow looking leaves and branches) atop one another, with some holes for light to travel through and help bring out the sense of depth, arranged in presized "blocks" for authors to pick from. Now here is the trick, I think, if I have say a leafy section of the hedge pixel sheet I want to bend the edges around so that the player cannot come at right angles to it and see all of these razor thin edges inside the layered. Here are my notes, they got cut off at the bottom but you can get the idea I think. Im going out of town today so I probably wont be able to get anything done until next week, but Ill read up on creating those pixel transparencies.

For me, its a realism thing, I think that if you get spotted, at least in certain areas, the game should end because thats what would happen in RL. Not that everything in a game should reflect RL, I understand its a game after all, but to me it was always an illusion buster to have guards spot a Thief meddling around in the vault or the wine cellar, and then after the Thief slinks off they go right back to doodling along on their patrols. When the character is on the mission in a sensitive area, best be on your toes or its curtains. The reason I feel this way is that when such standards were made possible in the Precursor FMs, I thought of it as an immediate improvement. I cant remember if not getting spotted was a goal in the Precursor games but it should have been. Now fine, I understand the Mod is flexible enough to set various goal levels and I have no problem with that. But at the very least I will make it clear in the intro what level of difficulty I the author intended the map to be played at and will heap scorn upon those who chose the easier levels. Perhaps even make certain areas of some maps off limits unless you play it on the toughest level.

Here is an idea for hedgerows that uses both models and pixels. I figure I can build them in "blocks" of ten main stems with some sub branches, overlaid over a pixel painted background layer, then "leaved" with pixel leaves. I need some input as to whether this is worthwhile project, cause I think I can inject a lot of detail and depths over the razor sharp hedgerows I've seen in other games without blowing the polys through the ceiling. They look like boxes covered in leaf wallpaper. Here are my notes if they help explain what I want to do.

Thats the main reason I plan to make getting spotted a game ending offense, in some areas at least. Ill have to look into this scripting at some point too.

I understand, give me a few days to retool and I'll have some samples. I'll read up on making pixel sheets for trees and plants, but for right now whats a good polygon limit for a completely modeled plant? Is 160 useful or is that not yet low enough for consistent use? I realize optimization points to using pixels but what can sneak in?

Heres the beast, at about 160 polys I think it looks pretty decent even when compared to the older spider plant I posted. I realized too that I could probably take out the polys making up the vases base and just leave it open, dropping the number some more. The last photo, the midshot, I left unsmoothed so its original shape could be seen. I know the textures are ugly but its the general design I'm looking at right now.