Airship Ballet

Well, I meant more the process of making them. The smaller and more fiddly the patches, the more graphical bugs and disappearing brushes I see. Like I said, correlation if not causation as I've no idea how the renderer works.

There was certainly a lot of that, but I did get told that worldspawn to seal with a func_static surrounding it wasn't ideal and when I got it off RJ it had been removed too. The worldspawn was snapped to the grid, just that the sealing geometry was maybe 4 or so thick rather than 8. It was some of the smaller parts in a bar I built that were off-grid after being worked on, as well as some wall trims. They were the cause of things disappearing in the end. The general sense I get is that the more tiny, complicated func_static objects you make with patches, the more likely you are to get things not rendering, sometimes even once it's all completely on-grid. There's definitely correlation, if not causation.

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/16093-disappearing-worldspawn/?p=340778 and onwards. Some other advice I'm glad I didn't follow, too

I got told off for doing that! I'd done it everywhere but apparently it would cause huge problems, so I snapped everything in the area to the grid and it was fixed. Do so in the area where brushes are disappearing, and (as has been said) check everything around it afterwards or hide everything you don't want snapped beforehand. I've found it also helps to fiddle around with what you've built. If it's not sealing, try turning it back to worldspawn or making it func_static if it is already. As far as I know, the requirements for something to disappear like that are very slim, so typically moving things around a bit, changing which parts are statics and which are worldspawn and just generally toying with it will fix it with little to no change. If all else fails, rebuild it and you'll usually find it's fine.

My fault!

Oh, that's it. I wondered why I was second-guessing myself.

No, he just never shuts up in that tutorial.

I always got the same impression from LaBerge as I did anyone talking about lucid dreaming: I'm with them up to a certain point and then it really breaks with what I'm willing to believe. Granted, he's done a lot of research to reinforce what we take for granted as fact today, but at the same time the empirical output is still very lacking the further you read. You can follow it as far as what we now know and it all rings true: the outside world feeds into dreams, you can communicate with and influence sleeping people and so on. After a point, though, it once again falls to anecdote, which is the point at which they also begin to sound properly fantastical. Writing on lucid dreaming always shows a negative correlation between progress and scholarliness: the more new ground it breaks the thinner the research becomes. I don't imagine we'll ever find a way to verify those kinds of accounts through eye movements so, until technology progresses, the extent of our abilities when lucid compared to the original nature of the dream remains a grey area.

No, I just fucked up in formatting it and ended up essentially saying I believed Freud was a psychic. The one thing I came away from modules on sleep and dreams with was that we really need to be funding it more because all I'd really learned was a bunch of conflicting theories with cherry-picked proof. I think what is empirically measurable is the recounting of experiences and the trends between them. Since the majority of information is from simple word of mouth, the accounts earn their credibility from sheer quantitative surveying. I'll readily believe the commonly reoccurring experiences because of how consistent they are, but I'll never put everything on red if an isolated or contained group of people told me I was going to win. Open-mindedness is essential with something so subjective, but too much benefit of the doubt is definitely destructive to the process in my eyes. The lack of empirical proof doesn't mean rejecting people on their lack of evidence, but the crazier and more contradictory to the norm an account is, the more skeptical I become. Maybe that way of thinking isn't appropriate here, but I think the moment we start taking down everyone's claims as both true and accurate is the moment records become as useful as a televangelist's word. More like "there's an isolated island out in the Pacific where nobody equipped to carry out a conclusive study can make land. The avocados there are made of solid gold but turn to sand when you leave. I saw it though, with my own eyes, and so did others on the internet." Not only does it sound too wonderful to be true, but there's also no way to verify it with the technology we have. I'm not convinced: whenever I read about it while studying it was said to be simply a case of RNG as to whether you end up flying from coast to coast or having a panic attack in your bed. Yes they're referred to as something different and they're categorically not the same thing, and you'll have to forgive my strong response, but if sleep paralysis is as common a result as it seems then it's genuinely dangerous to pursue it. They're obviously about different topics of differing natures, but they're tackled in a similarly unproductive manner. One person will stick to their guns and produce anecdotes and faith while the other can't possibly produce anything that will disprove it.

It's great fun! I had to stop playing because I realised I'd been drawn into one of those traps, the kind where I was grinding towards nothing in particular and just playing to see numbers go up. It's a bit easy, too, but still really entertaining all the same.

You may jest, but...

Hon hon hon!

It's that time again...

It's the kind of babble I was trying to avoid because I've been told off for derailing threads with jargon before, but yeah, it was one that stuck with me. It was already very much grounded in the observation of LTP resulting in the strengthening of synapses between two neurons being fired regularly and in tandem, and any foothold like that was welcome after being told "don't believe anything we tell you because we know nothing". It was also supported by the hypothesis that Hebbian potentiation is evident when awake and the pre-existing knowledge that global downscaling occurs in sleep. A point against it was that the period of 'recent use' typically didn't stretch as far as Hebbian links were observed as enduring, so while there was some correlation it obviously wasn't anywhere near approaching conclusive, as always. I always hoped that we'd get to the bottom of it in my lifetime thanks to the ridiculous progress we've been making in all fields, but now I have real doubts. Makes me wanna actually take the degree somewhere rather than parroting lecturers over the internet. I'm still not here by the way. I just got baited with science.

I was always taught that it's the context that denotes whether someone's speaking for everyone or themselves rather than the pronouns they use. I wouldn't assume for a second that somebody talking about something as wobbly as this considered themselves the voice of fact on the matter. I wouldn't take all the anecdotes in the thread as people giving their insight into the concrete nature of lucid dreaming, but that's not because of the person they refer to. Still, I'll jump out of this thread. The anecdotes are ridiculous when stood against what I've experienced and read. Similar to a religious debate, for as long as it's about lucid dreaming I've really nothing to offer that isn't skepticism.

The problem with debating sleep psychology is that barely anything is proven. Like I said, until we have empirical evidence feeding back from dreams, it's all up in the air. You needn't assume I have ulterior motives in simplifying what I was saying to avoid jargon: it wasn't arrogance or delusion at all. Nobody has the authority to declare anything with regards to this without their own widely ranging study to back them up, which none of us have. All I can do is say what I know and what I learned through the years of studying it in uni, and that's what I did. I bunched together the things we control and the things we don't into conscious and subconscious and used them in an analogy to illustrate what appears in our dreams. It's not all there is to it but it facilitates discussion with people who haven't studied the subject. It's also the way we were taught to see it in a class that assumed we all wanted to become therapists. Granted, I could have surrounded it with [anecdote] tags, probably should have. It's incredibly cynical to see arrogance in that. Stupidity, maybe, but I'm on an insomnia bender. Sue me. With regards to WILD, I've only ever heard bad things. Every experience I've heard or read about is people ending up paralysed in a waking nightmare because they got carried away, which is sleep paralysis. People talk about out of body experiences and the whole world becoming their lucid oyster which is amazing, but again there's no proof. If you succeeded, great, but having experienced the worst-case scenario of it I can't warn people away from it enough: the gain doesn't outweigh the risk in my eyes. I'm skeptical of the extent people say they've taken it to as well, but again it's just he-said-she-said. All it is to me is a nifty way to get yourself hallucinating. I can't get inside people's dreams, but what I know about their nature dictates that truly conscious thought within them is a paradox. I've never seen proof to the contrary, but I'd love to know I can be the architect of my own world without waking up immediately. Don't get me wrong: I don't consider anything in this realm to be fact, but you can't rebuke me for going off the commonly accepted rather than the fanciful and the ideal. I've not once heard of somebody being able to achieve real, proper sandbox mode in their dreams that I trusted as far as I could throw them. I don't pretend for a second that that means they definitely didn't happen, I just don't believe they did. Everything I know about the nature of dreams goes against that being a possibility, so sure I'm skeptical when I hear it. Since Paprika has yet to become a reality, it's a moot point to debate on anyway. @Lux I've had plenty of lucid dreams. My BA thesis was based partly on research I conducted myself with regards to the effectiveness of various reality checks. Over the course of the year I made myself develop several nervous habits that were common reality checks: pinching myself, clearing my throat in a certain way, drumming my lap and so on. The dreams were consistently washed away after maybe 30 seconds of being self-aware. Pinching was the most effective method, and I got what must have been nearly 20 lucid dreams over a couple of months. I would always realise I was dreaming, start trashing the place or going exploring or whatever, and the more I did against the status quo of the dream, the faster I woke up. Like I said, you can't do much with your freedom: you're in a pre-determined context and the more you reject that context the faster you wake up. I'm willing to believe that there's a trick that would allow someone to extend that further than I could, or that it just requires immense control or practice or whatever. All the same, the dream world is the dream world, and what I know doesn't support the presence of 100% conscious thought within it.

"You're a nice guy, you're a nice guy but that don't fuckin' cut it..."

[hurp durp Freud was a genius durp hurp I don't proof read]

I was petrified, kept thinkin' ah could never liiiive without you by my side.

Thanks for the feedback, it means a lot. All the problems with design you bring up are completely valid, and I was aware of them while building it. I essentially had to hold myself back when making it. If I started with a medium-sized mission and promised that they would be increasingly impressive through the campaign, I'd end up making something crazy for the final one. All I could really do was join up set-pieces, with little room for miscellaneous places to explore. In the end, the important areas feel more like individual levels of a puzzle game than a cohesive sneaking mission. It suffered and ended up fairly heavy-handed thanks to my keeping it small, so I'm having a riot with the next one along: the AI are passing and walking with one another so often that you'd need a notepad to keep track of their paths. As you say, however, I think it turned out pretty fun regardless

Sweet! I can't see myself needing more than one skybox, but it's good to know.

I don't think you can have more than one sky box, but you can definitely have more than one ambient light with the use of the location system.

I think the ideal outcome is to create a game that rewards a person based on skill rather than a particular binary approach. The balance is pretty much there in this: a skilled player can clean a place out loud or quiet and the outcome is the same. Like you say, what you don't want to do is encourage or condemn any particular play style.

I'll take decent gameplay over fidelity any day, and 'decent' obviously isn't synonymous with 'complex'. In terms of reality, if a person is smacked into unconsciousness and allowed to fall naturally and hit their head on the floor, they're quite likely to be dead anyway. If they're still alive, they won't be the same upon getting up and they certainly won't be walking again any time soon. That aside since I said realism isn't king, knocking somebody out and dragging them into the dark is as complex as it needs to get. On top of that, somebody groaning and laying on the floor would almost always be seen before being heard, and it'd have to be a very loud moan for it to be propagated to nearby AI. Anything more than the sight of the body is redundant, even if it's just for show. Speaking of the visible, another option to discourage KOs would be to drop a small blood spatter the passing AI have a chance to spot, or even a chance to drop a blood spatter that's always spotted. While I'm all for KOing everybody in sight when learning a map and key hunting, it'd be nice to make the decision to blackjack a bit less of a no-brainer. It'd also make the gas arrow that bit more useful for clean knockouts