OrbWeaver

I don't understand why people care whether an engine is "outdated" or not.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.

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.

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).

Cue inevitable ultra-realism versus playability debate in 3...2...1...

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.

I don't think it even had an "ending" as such, it just sort of stopped with "and they all lived happily ever after".

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

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?

You might not need to, if id open-source the D3 engine before TDM is released.

It doesn't do this for each frame though, otherwise the FPS would be in low single figures. The resources are loaded at level start (and possibly at other times during the game; I am not sure if D3 does on-demand loading or not), so any change in FPS must be due to something else. It is not just the speed of disk access either - retrieving lots of small files from all over the disk is much slower than unpacking them from a single archive file, due to filesystem overhead.

That also works, but I find the Flesh renderer easier to use since it provides all of the functionaity of the Unreal renderer (including wireframe and full-bright modes) but never crashes (in my experience, YMMV).

Make sure you use the Flesh renderer rather than the Unreal renderer when subtracting brushes with a Radeon. The Flesh renderer is activated by clicking the "ION" button above the 3D viewport (NOT the one on the main toolbar), and you will see that it is active because the rendered view looks like it does in game.

Don't expect too much in terms of stability from Radiant either. The editor is fantastically powerful, but it still crashes just as much as other game editors (i.e. quite a lot compared to commercial or mature software).

...both of which can be exported to from Blender (to fill in the missing link )

Yes, but science actually gets the answers right. Thunderbolts are sent from god? Wrong. The Earth is flat? Wrong. The Sun is dragged across the sky by a guy in a chariot? Wrong. The Sun will not rise unless thousands of human sacrifices are made everyday? Wrong. You can reach god by building a very tall tower? Wrong. Grand mal seizures are caused by demonic possession? You get the drift. A large and increasing proportion of religious "answers" have subsequently been proven wrong through scientific analysis, but there has never been a case where a scientific theory has been demonstrated incorrect by religion. Personally I prefer to base my understanding of the world on a sphere of knowledge that is constantly being expanded, rather than once which never does anything but shrink.

I think it is unfortunate when people try to ascribe motives that do not exist. Scientists do not try to "desperately prove" anything, they draw hypotheses from observations and then test those hypotheses through experiment or other analysis. The reason science appears to "turn a blind eye" to ID and other beliefs is that they are not supported by credible scientific evidence (which is different from the "circumstantial" evidence you mention). and are therefore not currently worth considering. Ultimately however, all such discussion is worthless, since science and religion do not address the same questions and therefore cannot be directly compared.

Their motivation is a combination of guilt and empathy - guilt coming from society's teaching that life should be protected, and empathy coming from the fact that most people don't want to die. Essentially they save the child to stop themselves from feeling bad for not doing so.

Trade is pretty competitive, and can often be aggressive. The "core" is still there, it is just being expressed differently (or perhaps just controlled effectively).

Aggression, competition and dominance are the inevitable and necessary by-products of the evolutionary process. If it weren't for these characteristics none of us would be here. Unless we start genetically modifying humans, there is nothing anybody can do about it.

What is the actual situation with respect to copyright ownership of TDM content? Do contributors assign their copyrights to an entity representing the mod (like with GNU tools) or do they retain copyright and grant an irrevocable distribution license to the mod team (like with the Linux kernel)?

I don't mind helping out with this. As you say it's not particularly glamourous, but if it needs to be done and it's all valuable experience... I have GIMP, Blender and D3.

Not only that, but it would make the game a lot more difficult - unnecessarily so in my opinion. There is such thing as too much realism. One thing I have been wondering about visibility is the relationship between the light gem and r_shadows. If you have shadows turned off, will the light gem be affected or is the visibility code independent of that of the renderer?

Whereas, for instance, every death metal track is 100% original and unique? All music is "derivative" of other works in its genre, and any genre you do not like or are unfamiliar with will sound pretty homogeneous. Music is just like software - it evolves and builds on previous ideas, rather than inventing something completely new at each step. That depends on your taste. I enjoy listening to Hans Zimmer's soundtracks, while Howard Shore's LoTR work was superb.

A couple more models... http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/5650/chair8xi.jpg http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/446/chairhi5vo.jpg (High-poly rendering of chair model) http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/2198/table3tg.jpg http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9382/tablehi0pi.jpg(High-poly table model, vertex cols but no skin) http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/7587/scene6wq.jpg Apologies for somewhat low-res screenshots, I cannot get D3 to take them in anything other than 1024x768 without AA (even if graphics mode is higher).

Yes it is certainly the case that FM makers need to optimise their maps (just like with TDS). You need to turn off shadows if individual lights don't need them, avoid overlapping light volumes, subdivide large surfaces if they are illuminated by many lights (more than 3), use caulk wherever possible, keep the on-screen polycount down to a sensible value (about 60k - 70k is recommended) and use visportals to divide the map into zones. Doom 3 is more optimised than TDS, but the editor won't do any of these things for you - authors have to take responsibility themselves for making the map run well.