OrbWeaver

fero ut hoc conloquium in lingua latina agatur.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php

Again, that is a problem with the forced single-player authentication. If Steam was only required for online play, you could still sell the game for personal use, or you could give away your userid/password along with the game for online use (as long as you don't use the same userid for multiple games).

As a technology and a distribution medium I do think Steam is a good idea. It is just the compulsory use of it to authenticate during single-player gaming that I have a problem with. Make it available, make it voluntary, make it required for online play - but don't make me ask permission to play a game on my own computer.

The difference with children is that they are (or have the potential to become) our equals. We enjoy watching them develop into something quite like us, and in most cases we want them to develop some sort of independence rather than blindly worshipping their parents. This is in contrast to the Judeo-Christian ethic of "we are absolutely nothing when compared with our supreme and omnipotent Creator, whose wishes are the Divine Truth that must not be questioned". That is why I mentioned ants rather than higher life-forms like dogs and cats - the gap between us and God is often considered to be

Interesting, I will try that. It is amb_start.ogg in TDS if anyone is looking for it.

If this was in the US, they would. In countries like Malaysia and China you do what you're told, even if you are a corporation.

I think the sounds are one aspect of the originals that people do not get bored of, especially the ambient sounds. Even TDS kept some of the sounds from the first two games, including the "boom" sound that signifies the start of a level.

Q2 was the only shooter I ever enjoyed; all the following ones seemed to revolve around deathmatch play and felt like arcade games. There was something very addictive about the juicy Q2 weapons and the way enemies would get pulverised when you unloaded the chaingun into them. The main thing that puts me off getting Q4 is that I might start mapping for it and not want to go back to D3 if the performance is that much better (the same way I haven't touched T3Ed since discovering Radiant).

The lack of the demonic angle is something that puts me off watching the film, because on some level I can't help thinking that the reason it was left out was to appeal more to the Fundamentalists. However, given how much I disliked the Doom 3 version of "demons" (i.e. with Earth techology like rocket launchers - that is more like Quake in my book), perhaps they were better left out.

If I had to accept the existence of God (i.e. it was proven somehow), my money would be on a malevolent or indifferent God. After all, we don't give a rat's ass about what ants or insects do (unless we are entomologists), and we certainly don't love them, so why the hell would God feel the same way about us?

I'm sure there's a business opportunity there somewhere.

This functionality could be integrated into GarrettLoader. If the Thief games were already installed, and GL knew about them (which it would), it could automatically copy the SND.CRF into the right place. If not, it could prompt the user to insert the Thief CD and copy the files itself.

If we are talking primarily about the ambient sounds, then I think a script to convert SND.CRF into something.pk4 would be the best way forward. It would have to create a new zip because the WAVs need to be under /sounds (I think), but this is certainly possible. However, as ZB points out, who the hell is going to care (or even notice) about some old Thief sounds being distributed in an FM? Perhaps the tool could be used by an author to get access to the sounds, but they could still be "unofficially" distributed with the FM.

I can see two sticking points with this approach: 1) If the mission author was to avoid copyright infringement by distributing his mission, it would be necessary for all players to have the Thief game installed as well as Doom 3 and the Dark Mod, which seems unduly burdensome when the author could just have used original content and avoided the issue. 2) The old Thief assets would be noticeably inferior in quality to what players familiar with the Doom 3 engine are expecting. Textures and models would be a non-starter, while sounds might be OK but even those are probably poorer quality to

Why? Dead or unconscious bodies don't scream in real life. It would have been better to get the animations right as oDDity points out, rather than masking their deficiencies by sacrificing yet more realism.

Wow. The Microsoft PowerPoint of level design.

I meant it did not look very good, not that it was too slow. I found that the light in the sky seemed to expand and contract in a very unconvincing manner as I looked around, although perhaps this was how it was meant to look.

Anyone played this yet? The HDRI does not really work on my Radeon 9800 but it looks nice in Bloom mode. There were also some nice shiny effects on some materials - I guess this would be available through the gloss map mod in D3. Pity it was so short though, the outdoor environments in Source look really nice.

I'm guessing that the response of "we are doing it all locally" will apply no matter who the requestor is.

That depends on the athiest. I don't believe in god, but I certainly don't presume to tell others what they should believe, and I accept the possibility that there could be a god that nobody knows about.

Not true. Being against organised religion does not mean being against the idea the possible of god(s). In fact it would be possible to have a strong belief in a supreme being and still be against the idea of earthly institutions telling other people what to believe.

But you don't have to be high up to be able to abuse power. I have worked in the Civil Service doing IT support, and with a root account I could view anybody's files or email in the whole department if I had wanted to. Although the particular department I worked for had little relevance to the ordinary citizen, imagine if I had been supporting the ID card database or something. That's the problem people don't consider - not senior managers calling in favours and wielding their power, but lowly grunts with access to information that could be abused.

Exactly. But the masses don't understand that. I was actually discussing this issue with my brother once, and he simply would not believe that the government would ever abuse its powers, because they would just have to be trustworthy with something so important. People have this perception that the government is a sort of superentity - a supreme being without human weaknesses. They totally ignore the fact that the government and authorities are staffed by ordinary people who can, do and will abuse the powers they are given to do their jobs.

A lot of people just believe the propaganda - they are that stupid. The number of posts on the BBC "Have your say" section in defence of this kind of stuff is astonishing. They just trot out the retarded old argument "the innocent have nothing to fear" as if it was actually true. What they really mean is "only people who look like Muslims have something to fear", which is largely accurate. I bet if the terrorist attacks were committed by rich white guys their opinions would be very different.