OrbWeaver

I had my eye on the 6800 GS, which is very good for price/performance but unfortunately it's a PCI Express card and I still have AGP. Looks like I have to stick with ATI, possibly the X800 XL will be my next investment (although my current 9800 XT is still perfectly competent and faster than the stock Geforce 6600, although not the 6600 GT). Not that ATI are bad, I think their cards are probably better but they don't have quite such good drivers.

Probably in the region of $10 million, but first you need their bank details and a $5000 fee for "administrative costs".

With a graphics card like that you would do well to upgrade anyway, not just for TDM.

Are "concepts" high-poly models that will not make it directly into game? Would they be used for renderbumping, or just as inspiration?

And that's the problem. Implement silhouetting and suddenly the whole stealth advantage goes out of the window. If you want it that realistic, it would be easier just to scrap the stealth code and let any AI see you if it is looking in your direction, like vanilla D3. In real life this is more or less what would happen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4487366.stm Choice quote: "Nguyen's case has prompted intense media coverage in Australia, though a poll released on Thursday suggested people were divided over whether the death penalty was justified."

It's going nowhere because you are arguing about two different things. You are arguing that free, unrestricted access to drugs would be a bad thing, which is true. Obscurus is arguing that the prohibition on heroin as a prescription drug is inconsistent with other painkillers being permitted, which is presumably also true (although I lack the knowledge to confirm it). I don't think anybody would seriously argue that all drugs should be accessible to anybody, since the government is considered to have a duty of care towards its citizens which it would be abandoning by doing this (although

They are "actual" mirrors in that they look and behave like mirrors (or shiny surfaces) in game, but they are rendered by taking a snapshot from the mirror's perspective and applying this as a texture, rather than calculating light reflection.

True, it might not be perfect, but at least the act of forcing politicians to provide a logical justification would improve the intelligence of laws over the current level of "Terrorist! Paedophile! Danger! Evil!" waffle that we have to endure.

If I were founding a new country now, I would make it part of the written consitution that all laws passed must be supported by a published and challengable "chain of reasoning", starting from the axioms ("Human suffering should be minimised", etc) right through to the conclusion ("Murder must be illegal"). Any glaring errors in the chain of reasoning could be challenged and if successful, the law would collapse. Politicians would therefore have to pass laws that make sense, rather than using the hysterical buzzwords and emotional manipulation they use now.

Does a mirrorRenderMap use the same RTT mechanism? The performance seems fine for mirrors but maybe it uses some other kind of hack.

Normally I despise music on web pages, but that one impressed me. Downloading the demo now. Although I'm slightly put off by this from Amazon: "Frequent interludes of rapid button pressing simulate physical exertion as your character escapes a looming threat you can see catching up with you.". That sounds like the godawful attempt at "simulating physical exertion" that certain Commodore 64 games used to use by "waggling" the joystick from side to side.

I liked the door opening method in Raven Shield, where you would use the mouse wheel to carefully ease a door open or closed.

A fragment shader is totally useless for this, as it is a function performed by the graphics card at the very final stage of rendering. There is no way of getting information back from a shader into the game, and even if there were the shaders are so limited in scope that they would not be suitable for this anyway.

One has to be wary of increasing the realism to such a point that the game no longer becomes fun to play. In reality, remaining unseen in anything greater than total darkness is exceptionally difficult, but a game that was this difficult would be more frustrating than enjoyable.

OK, I thought you were suggesting that alcohol should be made illegal. If you are referring exclusively to changing public attitudes then I agree that this would be a bloody good idea, particularly in the UK where the amount you drink is as much a status symbol as anything else.

This whole argument has been about what should and should not be illegal, hence philosophical discussions of morality are both inevitable and relevant. If you only want to discuss what is and is not illegal, you can just read the statutes or ask a lawyer.

C++ is not a good language for learning the fundamentals of programming. It is complex and full of nasty things that are important in high-performance applications but not helpful in learning how to design programs. At uni we started with ML and then moved onto Java for object-oriented stuff. Personally I think Python is an excellent language for education as it is as simple to understand as Basic but with all the power of more advanced languages like Java.

Not all parents care for their children either.

It depends on the environment. What is appropriate for a night club is not necessarily appropriate for the office, and I certainly don't want to be distracted when I'm trying to work. Similarly I get annoyed when I see 8-9 year-old girls wearing skimpy outfits in public - especially when the mothers of those children are probably busy saying how much they are frightened of paedophiles.

That sounds initially appealing, but it is very dangerous. The problem is that if you make the punishment for an offence equivalent to murder, then there is no rational reason for a person caught committing that offence not to murder in order to avoid conviction. For example, some people may consider rape to be such a heinous crime that it should be punished with life imprisonment. However, if you do this, what will happen is that rapists will simply kill their victims after raping them in order to remove the witness - and they will be no worse off for it because the punishment is the same i

So why do the women wear such clothes? Because they're comfortable, or provide better insulation against cold? I don't think so. Women who wear these clothes have just as much responsibility for the "objectification of women" as the men who look at them. People who act like objects can expect to get treated like objects.

Individual choice is what makes life worth living. I see very little point in being alive if you are just a servant to some higher authority that you did not choose and does not speak for you. Also, who is "society as a whole"? There is no group of people that can be said to speak for everybody - even elected governments are not necessarily representative and have their own agendas. When you talk about "society" making decisions, in reality this is just a certain group of powerful individuals making their own decisions which other people have to adhere to. The interesting thing is that peo

I'm sure you've heard the saying "your right to swing your fist ends at my face". I respect people's right to do what they want in the privacy of their own home, as long as it is not directly harming other people. If they want to get stoned and collapse on their own sofa that's fine by me - if they try to drive while under the influence or get drunk and attack people in the street then they should be stopped. The law should take effect at the point where other people's rights are violated, and not before (this applies to everything, not just drugs). It is not hypocritical, merely balanced

I would tend to agree that drugs are a bad thing, but I don't agree that they should be prohibited. People need to be held responsible for their own choices, not protected by some arbitrarily-selected "common good" legislation which has a dangerous tendency to slip towards moral fascism (blasphemy laws, anyone?). However, I do believe people whose health problems are directly caused by drugs should be given a lower priority in the health service - why should genuinely sick people have to compete for attention in hospital with some idiot student having his stomach pumped?