OrbWeaver

I think you misunderstand Ishtvan's comment about using C++. C++ is not being used in order to be like Carmack, but because the mod is being written for a game that uses C++ and there is no option but to use the same language to extend it.

Except that the average users are not the ones making the decisions, it is the developers of the games. I can almost imagine it: "Sorry Mr Carmack, OpenGL is outdated and possibly can not keep up with current demands so you should use the much modern DirectX interface...click...hello?...hello?"

I doubt Microsoft will break OpenGL too thoroughly though, as it would be a major embarassment if Vista users lost the ability to play all of id's current titles. Even if Microsoft don't support OpenGL anymore, somebody else will provide the special support you mention.

I didn't realise they did support it - I thought it was a function provided by the graphics cards and their drivers.

Doom 3 does not use DirectX, neither will any future id games I imagine. Carmack is very much in favour of open standards so he uses OpenGL for his games. This also means they can be easily ported to Linux which is not the case for DirectX applications.

It is not so much the rendering performance as the memory usage that is important. You could always make bigger levels by having simpler architecture and lower-res textures, but that would look rather poor by comparison with today's games.

It's all a question of detail. Thief 1 and 2 maps were very un-detailed by modern standards, therefore they could be made very large without too much memory impact. Once you start adding the detail expected in modern games the memory footprint increases and the effective maximum size diminishes. This is a trade-off you have to deal with for any engine, although some engines have specific optimisations for certain kinds of scenery (e.g. Far Cry).

I wondered what was wrong with the gas arrow screenshot. That water looks cool apart from the distortion artifacts - are you using a foglight to make the water look green underneath?

I haven't heard about this - what is the problem exactly? The funny thing is, I haven't seen the "water distorts stuff in front of it" effect for some time now, perhaps this is a fluke or maybe I am using some shader configuration that does not cause the problem.

Realistically they are unlikely to do anything significant. Nevertheless, I wasn't aware that the US government has a unilateral right to demand whatever data it wants from private corporations without a warrant from a judge relating to an ongoing lawsuit. Would you want them to just demand your financial or personal information as well, because it might help them with some campaign to create yet another piece of religious-bullshit legislation?

They never do. People always talk about the "chances of something happening" without realising that the probability depends on how long you wait. As in, "it's a question of WHEN not IF there is a terror attack in London". Of course it is, if your time period is infinite.

It always amuses me when creationists spout "What use is half an eye?" Apparently quite a lot of use since our own eyes are less than half as good as many other animals.

I don't think that seeing UV would be all that useful. Seeing infra-red, that's a different matter. All matter gives off some varying amount of IR radiation, so seeing in this part of the spectrum would indeed give you the abilitiy to see in what other people would consider absolute darkness.

It's basically an improved resize algorithm that interpolates pixels to avoid scaling artifacts. This is essentially what anti-aliasing does: taking more samples of the scene than are necessary for the screen resolution and then blending them to produce a smoother result.

Try screenshot 1024 768 32 Then downsample to whatever your target size is. Should get rid of most jaggies.

I think there are some humans that have extra colour receptors - women who are carriers for BOTH red-green and yellow-blue colour blindness end up with an extra frequency of cone, IIRC.

The problem is that it is difficult if not impossible to determine if somebody is truly brain-dead while they are still alive (hence the Terry Schiavo case). People do wake up from comas, and you wouldn't want to wake up and find somebody had removed your face. I think the dog was actually trying to wake her up - it might have panicked because its owner appeared unconscious. Even a well-trained dog may not understand the damage it can do through its jaws, and based on the woman's lifestyle I would not be very confident that the dog was well-trained.

The dog was put down against the family's wishes. The donor was brain-dead, but there is an ethical question regarding whether a relative can authorise the removal of the face of a brain-dead but still living person.

She's not going to be the next Miss World, but it's better than nothing.

There are certainly virtual devices that do this, I believe one of them was called Total Recorder or similar.

There is generally a trade-off between low-light sensitivity and colour perception, due to the proportion of rods and cones on the retina. Also, a tapetum reduces resolution by causing the same image to pass across the retina twice, with a slight difference in position each time.

There used to be a program called Streambox VCR that would do this, but I think it was shut down due to legal issues. Technologically there is nothing to prevent streamed data from being saved, but software that does this is open to DMCA-style actions.

There will be spiders though, I presume?

It didn't save you from the "thou shalt support the government" thought-crime legislation though, did it?

Gun ownership for use in shooting clubs used to be legal, until the Dunblane incident (where a gunman went mental in a primary school and shot about 16 children), after which the government had one of their typical knee-jerk "oh the poor little children" episodes and banned the possession of guns. I am not aware that the ban has made any difference to gun crime however, since the process for getting hold of a gun was so rigorous (you had to have a home inspection to make sure it was stored securely, and all sorts of other things) that the criminals were already getting guns on the black market.