OrbWeaver
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Posts posted by OrbWeaver
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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).
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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?
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The lack of depth-sorting makes it pretty much impossible to do any kind of realistic windows if the player can see one through another.
I haven't heard about this - what is the problem exactly?
Applying fragment shaders as post process effects makes it impossible to do realistic water without obvious graphical glitches.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.
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Oh well, besides threatening to jail you if you say bad things about your government, what could they possible do with that info that any of us individuals would care about?
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?
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Yeah I thought that was interesting too. I don't think they said what time frame that was over though, could have been millions of years.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I have no idea what downsampling is, and quite franky I'm not too concerned about it.
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.
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Unfortunately you can't have antialiasing on when you're working in the editor for some reason. I do try to avoid the jaggies in screenshots when I can though.
Try
screenshot 1024 768 32
Then downsample to whatever your target size is. Should get rid of most jaggies.
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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.
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There is an articel about this in Scientifc American. Not about the brain surgery, but about the determination when somebody is dead. According to this, if a person is brain dead, then it is really only an empty shell with no chance of recuperation Basically, it's similar to havign a piece of meat in the fridge, only that it stays intact without the fridge.
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 still wonder about the dogs motivation. If it was not fed I can understand it, especially if the dog has to assume that it's owner was dead. On the other handm, if the dog was agrgessive, I wonder why the family would object to putting it down (is that the phrase in english to kill it?).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.
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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.
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She's not going to be the next Miss World, but it's better than nothing.
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There are certainly virtual devices that do this, I believe one of them was called Total Recorder or similar.
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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.
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AFAIK, reverse enginering this to save it as it goes along has not been very sucessful.
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.
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Sorry dude, already discussed and not on the plate.
There will be spiders though, I presume?
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The idea that copulsory voting will all of a sudden lead to compulsory everything is absurd, and is not borne out by any evidence - the beauty of compulsory voting is that it makes it very difficult for governments to get away with nasty legislation, and when they do get away with it, it is usually overturned by the next election.
It didn't save you from the "thou shalt support the government" thought-crime legislation though, did it?
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It is illegal to own a gun in the UK unless it's for a special reason, that's why we have to few. If it were legal there would be a lot more ownership.
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.
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Basically, regional FPTP voting is crap. If there are two parties, A and B, and in every region 49% of people vote for A and 51% for B, then B will have 100% of the seats in parliament even though only 51% of the population support them.
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Pretend you were in USA's shoes. Would you not want to protect yourself?
Yes I would. I would encourage rational discourse to discover what was motivating people to become terrorists and attack my country, and then take steps to address those causes to reduce the threat of future attacks.
Is there a chance you would implement policies right away that you later figure out were a little to strict?There is a chance, but this should be mitigated by having a well-structure system for implementing policies, and fostering a culture of debate in order to continually re-assess the need for them. This is, of course, rather hard to do in an environment where you get labelled "unpatriotic" for not supporting authoritarian, jingoistic policies.
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Being free to choose from a range of options does not automatically imply a freedom not to make a choice at all. There are many situations where being forced to make a decision is quite appropriate (or unavoidable), and voting should be/is one of them.
Not voting is making a choice - it is expressing dissatisfaction with the system which should be rectified by politicians working to increase their appeal to the public, not through compulsion. You already mentioned that people in Australia can make a "donkey vote" if they wish, so how is this any different to having a voluntary voting system?
I believe that everybody has a right to non-participation. The role of the government should be to STOP people from doing things that are harmful, not to MAKE them do things which it has declared are benficial. The latter sets you on a very nasty slope towards more widespread compulsion - such as compulsory donations to charity, compulsory service in the military, compulsory expressions of support for the government and its policies - all of which may be considered beneficial by some criteria but are nevertheless gross violations of the individual's right to personal freedom of choice.
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The freedom to vote does not imply a freedom from voting.
The freedom to do something implies the freedom to choose not to do it. Otherwise the concept is meaningless.
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Have a system where you rank the candidates you want in power and they take the votes, and then it has the capacity to do an instant runoff.
That's exactly what Single Tranferable Vote does. The vote is "transferable" from your first candidate to your second and subsequent candidates if the first candidate is eliminated.
Question About The D3 Level Size And Exteriors
in The Dark Mod
Posted
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.