OrbWeaver
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Posts posted by OrbWeaver
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here was no moonlight that night, we lived in the country and there are no outside street lights.
Why was there no moonlight? Was it because the moon was not visible at that time of the month, or because it was a cloudy night (and can you be totally sure you remember)?
If the moon was obscured by clouds, then a brief gap in the cloud could bring about the phenomenon you describe, especially if there was a small gap in the blind somewhere (there are a lot of windows in that room, you cannot be certain every single one was light-tight unless you are a photographer and regularly use it as a darkroom).
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I'm not sure why you all want to jump on the blender bandwagon, It's only good point is that it's free.
That's a pretty strong good point for those of us who are unable or unwilling to shell out thousands of $CURRENCY for a professional tool.
Also, as most professional artists do not use free tools such as Blender, your sample is biased in favour of the tools that are used by professionals, who are on average going to be better artists.
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Blender rocks. It's free, fast, small and more than capable of any D3-related task you might throw at it. It is also developed very rapidly and it is not uncommon to have major features (such as softbody dynamics) implemented during a single point release.
It's UI also looks very slick if you use the Rounded theme rather than the default (especially with those semi-transparent menus).
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ok. But the main thing about this was that it almost doubles the age of the universe
Yep, that's one of the "some scientists" I mentioned...
You are right though in essence, there is an awful lot we don't know about the origin of the universe, and "what came before?" is still an open question. There is plenty of room for the influence of god(s), if you were predisposed to believing in them, which makes me wonder why fundamentalists don't focus their attentions there rather than spouting drivel like "fossils were put there by Satan to test your faith" or whatever pseudo-argument they currently favour.
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Anyways, the most interesting thing so far is that the time of the big bang was proven to be false (not the theory mind, just the date). They aimed a telescope (dont know which one) into a dark part of the sky or whatever and found systems there. These systems are of course so far that their distance in relation to us proves them older then the big bang.
The actual date has never been determined with specificity. It all depends on the Hubble constant, for which different cosmologists have different values. I think the generally-accepted range for the age of the universe is between 10 and 15 billion years, although some scientists may assert values outside of that range.
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The thing that amuses me about "souls", is that the soul is assumed to have all the same faculties of the physical body. It can see without any eyes, it can hear without any ears, and it can operate in the world without the physical abilities that we possess.
In which case, what is the point of having a body at all?
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I'm not going to try and convince anyone that spirits or whatever you want to call them exist but I don't think it's fair to say something someone has experienced is complete crap.
Nobody is saying the experiences are crap, they are saying the conclusions drawn from the experiences are crap.
The witnessing of ghosts that you have described are (amongst other things) consistent with stimulation of the temporal lobe, such as by an electromagnetic source or internally through epilepsy. They can also be explained by self-suggestion or the intake of certain substances, intentionally or otherwise. Many experiments have been performed to successfully induce such experiences in test subjects.
Assuming that any subjective experience is evidence of something strange or supernatural when there is a plethora of tested and well-understood phenomena that would produce that exact same experience is simply irrational.
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But why would he have a hinch against Voldermort? He didn't like the Malfoys, though.
I'd be willing to bet that Borgin hated the Death Eaters for some reason or another - you could see that he wasn't exactly friends with them during Malfoy's exchange with him (when Malfoy apparently showed him the Dark Mark as a threat), and as sparhawk pointed out, Voldemort used to work in that shop so there is definitely history between them.
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My money's on Borgin, of Borgin and Burkes. His first name is not mentioned and he would be exactly the kind of person who would be interested in Dark Objects like horcuxes.
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It's headmaster in my Welsh copy, and in the English films if I recall correctly.
Yep, Headmaster is the traditional term for the head of a British public school (which actually means a private school, as in one which is not funded by the government).
In the state education system, I believe the term Headteacher is more commonly used.
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With regard to the portrait, it is interesting that it is described as Dumbledore "slumbering" - unlike all of the other portraits which have animated active wizards in them, Dumbledore's appears to be a normal portrait, which could suggest that whatever condition is required has not in fact been met in his case.
The Unbreakable Vow is also interesting because although one assumes that it was related to Malfoy killing Dumbledore, the precise task was never actually stated during the vow, it was just like "will you carry out the task he has been ordered to perform if he appears likely to fail", which could be just about anything.
Either way, Rowling has left a lot of unanswered questions and open possibilities for almost anything to happen in the final book.
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I think that Snape is still good, and that Dumbledore is not dead. There are a number of aspects to the ending with which I am suspicious.
* At no point does Snape fire any curses or hexes at any of the good guys, even though he is a very competent wizard who would have been able to take out most of the children single-handedly. When a Death Eater attempts to perform Cruciatus on Harry, Snape stops them with the excuse "Harry belongs to the Dark Lord, we are to leave him". Even when Harry is attacking Snape, Snape only blocks the curses, he does not return them.
* Dumbledore says some very strange stuff when drinking the evil potion ("I know I did wrong, please don't hurt them" etc.). He does not explain to Harry what the potion was or what effect it actually had on him. I suspect that drinking the potion caused something "evil" to enter Dumbledore, and Snape actually "killed" the evil thing rather than Dumbledore himself (eariler on in the book we are told that Avada Kedavra does no harm to the physical body).
* During Dumbledore's "funeral", the magic flames "rise up to obscure the body", and then a large tomb appears. Dumbledore's body is never actually seen to be destroyed. During the funeral Harry thinks he sees a phoenix rise up into the sky, which I am sure is significant (perhaps Dumbledore is an Animagus).
One suggestion I heard was that Dumbledore also had a Horcrux, although I doubt this since it would seem to be against his character to have murdered somebody. I also think we will find that Dumbledore had a much better reason for trusting Snape than is given in the book.
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also, demigod has been working on some pretty nifty particle effects, so as a beta mapper you dont just have to map or whatever. im using some of his particles atm hehehe
The division of labour in a mod (or even a full-blown game) like this has always interested me - for example, if a mapper has a need for a new model in his map, does he have to raise a request for a modeller to produce it, or can he just create one himself? I remember oDDity saying that they have loads of modellers but not enough skinners, which I find surprising since to me creating the model and its associated texture are one and the same process.
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I've just been reading about the differences between "Beta mappers" and "Team mappers" in Squill's application thread and am wondering if people can migrate between the two, i.e. apply as a beta mapper and then upgrade to a team mapper at a later stage (if they are good enough)? I've been doing some Thief-like maps in D3 which are nowhere near good enough to be campaign maps, but it would be a lot more inspiring to develop them from the point of view of a Thief rather than running around with your fists and machine gun.
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Doom 3 even has that warped glass in the Hitech Sci-Fi Mars station.
It's a pity Doom 3 did not make more of the refraction effect. I was very impressed the first time I played HL2 and came across a door with ribbed glass that refracted the scene behind it just as a real one would, not least because I had previously assumed refraction to be impossible without ray-tracing.
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I don't understand why people care whether an engine is "outdated" or not.
If it looks good now, it will still look good even if there are newer games on the market. The appearance, performance and playability of a game or mod do not just disappear the minute something "better" comes along.
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Who cares? TDS was fun, we will have TDS FMs, but The Dark Mod is the future. Go Dark Mod!
Sure, but we're going to have to wait a bit. If TDS had been of a comparable quality (engine-wise) to Doom 3 then we would already be seeing the first Dark Mod quality FMs appearing.
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id software is a company that "gets it". Open, editable text formats are easily manipulated and usable by the community, unlike proprietary binary formats like those used in TDS. If only the management at Ion Storm had understood this and produced a powerful and flexible game engine, rather than crippling the design in order to sell out to the X-Box market (and largely unsuccessfully to boot).
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Cue inevitable ultra-realism versus playability debate in 3...2...1...
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GPFs are normally caused when something is corrupt - either due to a software problem (bad install), or a bad hard disk or bad memory. Since this is a new computer with a fresh install I would suggest running some diagnostics like memory tests and hard disk scans first off.
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The ending of the third film was truly awful.
I don't think it even had an "ending" as such, it just sort of stopped with "and they all lived happily ever after".
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Meet Joe Black - boring sentimental melodramatic tosh
Deep Impact - the same (despite all the hype about how much more "human" it was than Armageddon).
The Day after Tomorrow - just embarrassingly stupid
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Concerning the "morality" that is one thing I'm pretty annoyed of in most children movies these days.
It is not just these days. I remember being read some enormously tedious story when I was about six, something about a girl losing her temper and falling out with her dad and then they make it up, or similar garbage. It was so imbued with axe-grinding moral messagery that I more or less switched off.
I cannot be the only one that has a violent aversion to being manipulated. If you want to teach a child something, why not just explain it to them?
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No, we're going to pay id $500,000 to licence the engine, and then give to you for free.
You might not need to, if id open-source the D3 engine before TDM is released.
Ghosts
in Off-Topic
Posted
Very slim. But we don't know they saw exactly the same thing, unless each of them individually described it in detail in a sealed envelope without any prior communication. As soon as people start talking to each other ("Hey Mum, can you see that light shining over there?"), suggestion comes into play and the witnesses are not independent.
Scientific rigour is very important, if extraordinary phenomena are being postulated.