jay pettitt

You won't want to read Rock Paper Shotgun then...

I guess not hearing about TDM is allowed. Maybe write them a quick note thanking them for the time and explain that TDM is already a real thing, but always growing as fans make new missions and adventures etc etc.

I think folk sometimes forget how frequently stuff in Windows doesn't work for lots of people. You know - oh my computer has gone slow, oh I can't get my printer to work etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Computers are complex, openly modular, legacy devices. I'm not saying things can't or shouldn't be better - but I certainly don't think Linux is a worse experience compared to Windows. And if you absolutely must have a faultless consumer friendly experience, get an ipad.

It's like a new FM, but different, and in the Inspiration thread.

download

Not to mention that it's a first person game. Maybe there are lots of mirrors.

This is sweet...

I'm not sure if this is more or less gruesome than the thing with the sausages.

Give an infinite number of spam bots and infinite number of forum posts and who knows what might happen.

Look, someone fixed it. http://youtu.be/YFINNbu2_Vo

My money is on a nasty accident in a flash bomb factory, rendering new Mr G. hyper-sensitive to light.

Jay couldn't find an embedening button

Apparently boys and girls will make wonderful additions to Mr Mandus' product line. Mmmmmm. Sausages.

Interestingly, LGS's demise turns out to be not quite as thought. http://gambit.mit.edu/podcasts/lgs/podcast10_neurath.mp3 Not that it alters your argument much. LGS didn't fold because Thief sold poorly.

I winced. Oh, it's like a posh car brand.

There are pictures. http://vk.com/album-49981920_170847341 Jay's not a fan of what he sees - but others may be.

In the EU we've been installing electric light switches for a while now. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

Actually, I'm wondering what the intention was too. Not in a judgemental way, just wondering. Looks more like it was supposed to be a glamour shot. Slightly homoerotic perhaps. Portrait of older brother maybe? But yeah, I am slightly confused by it. What is going on there? Anyone who makes pictures is awesome in my book.

You did indeed. I'm just not I'm as confident as you are that 'variations' of a patent counts for squat. It's not as though the patent is for specific code that you could rewrite or tweak. I fear you'd need a fundamentally different approach to calculating TDM's shadow volume geometry to avoid the patent's evil gaze.

So what are we saying. Please don't play The Dark Mod in the United States? If Id has gone to the trouble to take out the patented Z buffer check and you've gone and put it back in again, then personally I think it'd wrong to try and redistribute the code under the banner of Id Tech 4.

It might be a problem if there were a patent on that. BFG has real time shadows aplenty, just not from the flash-light. If there aren't fresh spanners in the works and if they are indeed things that BFG addresses then freedom from potential law suits and a shader implementation that's usable might make BFG a viable choice for new projects, if not TDM, in a way the original OS Tech 4 release hasn't been.

That. The OS engine's real time shadow code ~ already a major bottleneck ~ has to compute 3 times as many polygons to achieve the same results as the original version. The other major issue is that the Tech 4 shader implementation predates common shader languages and is beyond mortal understanding and thus a barrier for hobbyists and OS projects. At least that's what I heard from someone who seemed sensible at the time. No idea how things will shake out for TDM becuase I'm guessing we're already wedded to the old forward renderer - but for any new projects the OS BFG engine might (assuming those are issues it addresses) become a viable choice in a way that OS Tech 4 wasn't.

The Open Source Tech 4 render was borked. That's a fairly major blockage right there. Hopefully the BFG renderer will enable some open source projects to get started without being crippled from the get-go. There's some nice stuff in Tech 4.

Jay suggests a screenshot competition - mayhaps over at the TTLG FM fora where there are actually more than 6 people. Or at RPS or Sneaky Bastards. Jay also suggests that technical details matter much less than how awesome the screenshot looks - which has far more to do with colour, contrast, composition and such. The minimum technical bar should be pretty low I reckon. Someone who does a lot of screenies for Thief/TDM might be able to put a little primer on how to tweak for darkness etc. I don't do photoshop, but I'd happily do one for GIMP that was woolly enough to be transferable to other graphics packages - though these day's the hip kids probably use web apps for that sort of thing.