Midnight

If I'm hostile towards bigots, does that make me a bigot? Assuming bigotry is a mental disorder.

Crispy never said you did, just that your reasoning that both sides of this particular debate should be given equal validity was flawed. This discussion isn't about anyone's personal views, those are personal and everyone is free to them, this is about laws enforced to create peaceful and equal (as far as is possible) societies. This is very much something that can be right vs wrong, as in the example of racist legislation. I'm not arguing that gays should have the right to be married in a church (this is a religious decision surely), but they should be allowed a civil union whereby the benefits that the state gives is equal to a hetero married couple.

Woohoo, welcome Saturnine! The 7th Crystal was one of those watershed moments in FM history, and Rose Cottage was just, well I'll run out of expletives if I had to describe how good it was! Really looking forward to seeing what you can do in Dark Radiant (if you do take the plunge that is).

That would be great for a large campaign, this is similar to what T2X did with their menu, but I don't have a problem with the menu as it is (except maybe the one thief character model that looks like it isn't posed properly). I'd rather the world is created in the players mind through playing the FMs, having pictures of the city in the background of the menu would require a level of design consistency that is impossible to be carried through to individual fan missions from hundreds of different authors (which is why it would be more likely to benefit a campaign instead).

Loot slowing down the player sounds like a mechanic that might work well as described in a multiplayer thief-vs-thief game mode, not sure about single player though. It would probably just get irritating after a while. Cool idea about leaving a loot stash around the place though.

I was thinking a raven would be perfect for one of the mission ideas I have, but not necessary of course. It would be nice if there was an animation where you could have the raven peck at a corpses eyeball. (there doesn't seem to be a suitable smilie for how cool/gross this would be!) Is the difficulty with flight to do with creating something dynamic, i.e. an AI path? If the idea is just to have a couple of birds fly away when disturbed, could this be done using a spline type arrangement, where they simply follow a predetermined path while a 'wing flapping' animation is played?

That's a nice site, thanks Nosslak. I found a pretty interesting q3 single-player puzzle map (!) that I'm going to try out later. Here's the link.

A google search for "q3 map archive" brings up a couple torrent downloads for G-L Disc 1 and 2 (I've no idea where this release came from, but they each contain quite a few maps). If you're going to be firing up q3 maps, can I suggest you try out 'The Doom That Came to Dunwich', by Ikka Keranen and Rich Carlson. Thief fans should recognise those names as former LGS employees, and the level design also has a nice medieval feel to it.

Should have got it off GOG. Not played it myself, so I look forward to your impressions of it.

Is it anything like this bad boy? From Gizmodo When I saw that, I thought "now this is something the TDM inventors guild needs". Sorry to hear about your wrist BC. I sprained mine when falling off a roof as a kid, hurt like hell, but I've never broken anything, touch wood. At least since you're ambidextrous you can still do most things. Hope you heal up soon.

This has been discussed before. Enjoy!

I don't know, looks pretty real to me. My guess is it was taken with a fish eye lens and then corrected fir distortion.

Easter doesn't really fit the theme of the dark mod universe though, does it How about a valentines day theme? I can see it now, "the romantic exploits of Farrell, master thief and lover extraordinaire".

Minecraft is a good example of how old school original ideas are still around, in the indie scene. Due to server problems minecraft is currently free (until the server gets sorted), so get it now if you want to try it out. I hope that gog isn't actually shutting down, it's possible that they've simply decided that DRM free isn't feasible for all games and are going to offer a mixture of both DRM free and DRM games (ie for new titles as some publishers may be reluctant to offer their new games without DRM).

This idea sounds a bit like The Chain Project done in T2, where successive authors would take the unfinished mission and contribute to it in some way. I've not played it, so I don't know if this results in a very good mission, but at least they finished it! Sounds like a fun idea, but not really suitable for a contest since each contribution will be of varying complexity, and if an objective spans across multiple parts, who gets the vote for plot, story etc.

That reminds me of one of my favourite features in Dromed. Time! You can send a brush forwards or backwards in time because all the operations are persistent (i.e. a subtraction doesn't create child brushes, the original brush is retained). I tried UnrealEd but can't remember if it had this feature or not but it was helpful in some cases when dealing with subtractive editing (actually it is only helpful for subtractive editing, and wouldn't be useful in DR). Anyway, don't want this to become a Dromed vs DR thread. Back on topic, how thief-ish does this look? Unfortunately the website doesn't say where this is.

Christmas theme would be nice, but I have the feeling that these sorts of themes (Xmas, Halloween) are going to come naturally anyway. I'd like to see a Sunlight contest, where every mission has to take place completely in daytime. There were a few daytime missions made in TDP and TMA (Stowaway was one that really shows how good a thief mission can look in sunlight).

@demagogue: Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't previously realised the two were as compatible as that before. Of course the mechanisms of evolution cannot be stopped, the question is whether a species can reach a stage where their control over the environment minimises the effectiveness of evolution to the point where it hardly registers. My take is that civilisation is simply too complex to be able to rely on real stability for the great length of time, so it could be that in those changes is where we will find natural evolution (maybe leaning to more mental changes than physical). It's still the case though that technology and how it affects us is going to overtake long term evolutionary changes. A little OT but that reminds me of a about artificial life and evolution, where this was discussed (not in great depth). It was interesting that the majority of a-life never reached maximum age, and this is true in human history. It's only recently, with better medicine and access to an abundance of food (in some parts of the world at least) that humans are reaching old age. I think the driving force behind the ageing gene was likely to have had to do with sexual reproduction, by creating a long term clock perhaps that the body can work by. It is absolutely advantageous to speed up ageing in order to pass genes on to the next generation, but only after enough time has passed to test those genes within the environment.

War is indeed silly, and until the Iraq war I would not have thought that wars of adventure were going to be a feature of our modern times, but there you go. With dwindling available resources, changing climate and the inevitable growth of the under-developed world, China and India, I don't think that discoveries in psychology will be able to prevent future wars. Well, even within an evolutionary equilibrium you're still going to have genetic adaptation due to predator prey cycles which result in an evolutionary arms race. Humans have possibly outgrown this stage of evolution long ago, but I was more interested in the idea that it may in fact be natural for any species of a certain stage of advancement to leave behind evolution and advance further solely through technological development. I also think that it isn't entirely arrogant to suggest that humans have over the last couple centuries had a unique impact on evolution. We've created completely new species that would not have ordinarily evolved through domestication of animals. We've developed methods of killing animals on a much larger scale than any single or pack of predators could previously have done, and aren't limited to the types of animals that we are able to influence. Still, I think your point was that on massive geological scales it is foolish to suggest we can know whether we can fully adapt to whatever changes come our way, and I'd completely agree with that. Scenario 3?

I think a 'realistic' argument in this case is more along the lines of... "There's more important things to be working on".

Well, to be honest I don't think that either method is actually more or less intuitive since a subtractive editor like Dromed can be used in a purely additive way (i.e. create your void to begin with and then go ahead as if you're using any other additive editor). Yes, if you create something like a doorway and the frame using a subtractive method then it's not very intuitive, and worse you could end up with badly aligned textures. If it's a question of ease of building, then again it's a mixed bag. Just as another example, to create a simple vaulted ceiling in Dromed would simply be a case of placing two intersecting subtractive cylinders laying on their side. They would automatically create the 'vaulted' centre of the ceiling. Nice and easy for a newbie, and easier and faster than using patches with DR. But then you're limited to a basic vaulted ceiling, as far as I know there isn't a way to create a ribbed vaulted veiling in Dromed (the example above I assume is an object, otherwise I just gave up to easily ). So there are definite benefits to each method / editor.

As someone who has used Dromed a fair bit (not released anything yet tho ) I can say that without doubt there are some things which are much easier for a total newbie to quickly grasp in a subtractive editor like Dromed. Take this image of Galata tower in Turkey for example: It would be simple to create this in Dromed by creating a solid cylinder and then cutting away at it with cylinders and rectangle brushes to create the arches. I can see how I might do this in DR, but working with patches (and specifically creating end-caps for arches) has been a bit hit and miss in my experience. Half the time when I use patches I'm either gobsmacked at how powerful they are, or immensely frustrated that the vertices don't line up etc. All this can be overcome with time and patience of course, but I still maintain that the learning curve for stuff like this is much steeper in DR (and presumably Hammer) compared to Dromed. Edit: Since you were talking about how you would create advanced architecture... being able to make something as impressive as Rose Cottage is obviously the result of years of experience with Dromed, and although the tools are very primitive, you learn to use those primitives in very clever ways over the years. When I started with Dromed, any time I walked down a street I would be looking at architecture and thinking of ways to recreate certain features using subtractive techniques. After a while it becomes second nature.

And now for something completely different. I was interested to find out that our brains are just about as complex as the physical structures of the brain itself will allow. In other words, although there are admittedly varying levels of 'intelligence', there is a hard limit to how interconnected our brains can become and how fast we can process information, and some think this limit has already been reached. I've been thinking about this for a while, and started thinking about evolutionary processes in modern civilisation as well as technological advancement and what this could mean for the future and came to the conclusion that it was likely that human evolution had all but stopped. This isn't new, a google search for 'end of evolution' will return an interesting discussion about this topic, with one of the main proponents of this idea, Steve Jones, taking part. The basic idea is that the historic pressures that have resulted in human evolution, are now no longer applicable. As an example, genetic mutations that previously may have made it difficult for an individual to survive into adulthood would have, due to natural selection, slowly over time been less common as you were less likely to pass on these genes. In modern society, these pressures are largely non-existent. We have medicine to either treat or compensate for these problems, and altruistic behaviour going back thousands of years (likely due to evolutionary pressures on social interactions) has led us to care for the disabled, even if dis-advantageous to the individual (selfish gene, un-selfish animal). Sexual selection still takes place due to preferences for certain traits etc, but if anything our smaller world is going to result in less genetic variety as time progresses, except for cases (and I can't think of any suitable current examples) where large groups of populations do not mix. Therefore, evolution is slowing down, and will eventually stop as we humans continue to use technology to shape our environment and become biologically homogenous. The argument against this is that evolution is such a slow process and that environment does change quite radically, so evolution may have just paused, but will continue when the environment again changes drastically enough. I would agree with this, except for the fact that since the last ice age our ability to adapt to new environments may have in fact caused this slow down in human evolution. We can't know the future, but it would be surprising if existing and future technologies would not allow us to adapt to any changes that would ordinarily help evolutionary processes. Putting these thoughts together led me to think up a couple scenarios for the future. Scenario 1: The third world catches up to the first world, capitalism continues as ever and society worldwide is largely separated into a few rich elites and the poor majority. Sexual selection continues to occur, but less between the two groups, creating two more or less distinct human species. Again, not my idea, and not entirely convincing as a probable scenario once given enough thought, but interesting and I would think entirely possible given the right conditions. Scenario 2: As above, society is divided into two distinct groups / classes due to financial inequality, but the timescales for any noticeable evolution to take place cannot compete with the advances in technology which have a much more immediate effect. The rich are able to afford new technologies (whether genetic manipulation, or bio/tech implants) to increase intelligence, strength etc, whilst the poor cannot hope to keep up with these developments and languish into a sub-species (i.e. us). Scenario 3: Civilisation as we know it fails, either from human direction (i.e. war, revolution), or environmental causes (i.e. natural catastrophe of some sort). We revert to a state before civilised society, where violence is more likely to get you somewhere and small tribal groups again becomes the norm. Evolution due to these pressures continues (slowly) until the next form of civilisation takes shape, at which point we begin again to order our world around us and end up back where we started (if we're lucky). I'm no expert in evolution etc but wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on this as well as whether anyone could offer up any alternative scenarios. Just for fun, of course. (And to help forget the drivel).

Is that a problem? It requires skill to perfectly hit a torch on a wall from the side. I think it's a little more difficult than T1 and T2, but the fact that you can aim at the wall above the torch (or even the ceiling directly above a flame!) balances the difficulty out quite nicely. Have you tried pressing the Lantern toggle key ('L' by default)? I've mapped this to the 'F' key as it's easier to reach and I use the lantern so often. I look forward to a toggle for the Spyglass as I also use this all the time. It's funny, even though there was a zoom feature in T2, I never used it, hardly used the scouting orb either, but the tools in TDM are so easy to use you can't help but take advantage of them.

Have you tried these forums? http://blenderartists.org/forum/ http://www.game-arti...ods-volunteers/ http://www.3dbuzz.co...forum/forum.php It would also be a good idea to check out the ModDB recruiting forum and also their jobs board. If you posted a couple decent images of the original Arx characters with your request it might inspire someone to take up the challenge of making a better looking version for a modern engine. It's a little disappointing that there are so many mods based on the same old FPS theme, and most of the modellers are presumably busy on these projects. It wouldn't surprise me though, if there are a few modellers who would jump at the opportunity to make interesting fantasy characters rather than the standard commando type. One thing I would ask though is that if you're struggling to get modellers at this stage, could you not just include placeholder AI for now, and then replace the model and anims once someone is able to contribute these?