OrbWeaver

http://www.bbc.co.uk/youngmusician/competi...s_strings.shtml Looks like May for the final (http://www.bbc.co.uk/youngmusician/competition/final.shtml).

Like the fact that silhouetting would require a render from the point of view of every AI in the scene, rather than from a couple of fixed directions like the lightgem?

Besides, you could accomplish a hell of a lot more than a weapon with 100 hours of competent developer time.

The latter.

That sounds like it's linked to the lightgem. It wouldn't be a lot of effort to link the code that brightens or darkens the lightgem to the modify the entire hud as well.

What resolution are you using for the captured image? Presumably it can be quite small if all it is doing is calculating a light level. Perhaps a tweakable option could be provided to adjust the resolution for lower-performance users?

I remember trackers, I used to produce music with Impulse tracker on DOS. They are very much a "techi" solution, the Assembler of music production. The main advantage of them is the internal sample processing which means you don't have to use external samplers or anything. What I would like is a tracker with a sequencer-style interface, to combine the best of both worlds.

It is actually a very good design - using the game's own render code to process animated textures rather than having to re-implement everything and attempt to match what the game is doing. The drawback is in the implementation, due to an underlying limitation of the game code which only allows the rendered image to be passed back over a local socket (which is not a high-performance way of doing things). It doesn't seem to present any problems so far though, in fact for me the lightgem feels a lot more responsive in TDM than in any of the Thief games.

That's what I thought. Thief seems way too primitive to have the sort of semi-advanced image integration code necessary to calculate an overall brightness and adjust for it. Besides, if you're using hardware rendering the game code doesn't even have access to the rendered image without special tricks (*cough* renderpipe *cough*) I reckon they just have monitors with poor voltage regulation.

Generating sounds is analogous to generating image textures in many ways: 1) There is a large variety of tools available, from professional studio apps to bits of freeware that are good for one or two specific jobs. Typically a selection of tools will be employed, starting from "generation" tools and ending with a final "composition/mastering" utility (PhotoShop, Sound Forge, Cool Edit, etc). 2) A combination of "painting from scratch" or layering existing samples can be used. 3) By using high-quality original samples you can generate a very good result with relatively little work. 4) You don't need any special hardware (MIDI keyboards/graphics tablets), but more experienced artists/composers may find that their workflow is quicker with one.

Aren't they? I can't remember the last time I snogged another man or shared a bath with one.

Presumably in order to work properly it has to project an image from every side onto its opposite side. The whole surface would need to be made up of cameras and projection lenses interleaved with one another.

Many people don't understand that. I was once discussing what a load of crap Freud's pseudoreligious psychology "theories" are, and my colleague responded "but Freud invented the field of psychology". True, but it would still have been invented by somebody else if he hadn't got there first.

It means both, although these days you would get some funny looks if you used "queer" to mean "strange". Actually "gay" itself used not to have anything to do with homosexuality, it used to mean "happy".

I don't believe it myself - as I said previously I think that homosexuality is just an "acceptable margin of error" in the evolutionary mating "code". I was merely pointing out that oDDity's suggestion that homosexuality had a role to play in preventing overpopulation was inconsistent with his previous suggestion that it is a "disease". If something doesn't harm the individual AND benefits the species in some way then it cannot be considered a disease at all.

If it has evolved to prevent overpopulation and thus has a specific, positive impact upon the health of the species then is does not qualify as a "disease" by anyone's definition.

Says who? Most psychologists agree it is a continuum - most people are at one end or the other (homo or hetero), some are slap bang in the middle (bi) and some are in the middle with a bias towards one end or another (bi with a preference for men or women).

The existence of sexual behaviour is certainly genetically predetermined. My point is that the determination of which sex to be attracted to is the final step in the chain, which may only be specified with a certain probability. For instance, a given set of genes which is present in all humans might represent "attraction to the opposite sex with a 90% probability of success". While the failure of this step in the process MAY be genetically predetermined, it may also be a random factor of development in the same way iris patterns or fingerprints are. Indeed it would be, which is why I'm not saying this. As long as the genes that produce sexual behaviour work in most cases, there is room for random variation or anomalies that do not harm the species as a whole so long as they are relatively infrequent.

Or no genes at all. I'd be willing to bet that it is possible to find pairs of identical twins, one of whom is gay and the other heterosexual. Not every single last detail of behaviour is completely specified by DNA, as this would require a massive amount of DNA with no particular evolutionary advantage.

If you knew what service provider the friend was on you might find that they had an online directory of their own email accounts, which you could try searching. I know hotmail has something like this, for instance.

Whether or not there as some genetic basis, given that homo/bi/heterosexuality is a continuum the idea of a single gene which switches it on or off is absurd.

You mean, actually genetic as in "carried by genes made up of DNA", or are you referring to "gay by nature" as opposed to a lifestyle choice? I am well aware that sexuality is considered inherent, in that people cannot simply choose a different sexuality, but I am unaware of any research which has identified homosexuality as a hereditary trait caused by DNA.

I don't like the use of the word "disease" not because of the connotations, but because it doesn't fit with my concept of a disease as something which causes harm or suffering to the host. There are many things which may affect the likelihood of reproduction, but if they don't cause harm to the individual I would not consider them diseases, even if they are "flaws" from a Darwininian standpoint. I didn't point this out - what I pointed out is that there are many heterosexual people who are not going to have children for numerous reasons, and these people are never considered "diseased" by anybody. Also, as yet I am unaware of any evidence that homosexuality has any genetic background whatsoever. Given that men and women are actually very similar in appearance and anatomy, I find it amazing that far more people aren't bisexual - it may be that homosexuality is just a minor bug in the "identify suitable mate" routine which has a pretty difficult job to do in some cases.

Nope. I am unsure why you even mentioned grammar or spelling, because I certainly didn't. That was the point. If you try to avoid arguments by having a set of "rules" to help you decide, there is still scope for argument about which rules should be used and how they should be defined.

Those three properties would be contradictory for this example - "most normal" would be to have everything droppable, "most precedented" would be to have weapons and quest items undroppable but equipment droppable, and "most user-friendly" would make everything undroppable unless there was a particular gameplay need to drop it.