Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat

I don't know about all your traditions, genetics, penises, but I like women in boiler suits. and lab coats.

In case anyone's interested my most powerful computer is a PCI nVidia 5500 256MB video mem (not PCIe mind you) with only 256MB of RAM and 1.2 GHz Athlon and Windows XP. Although my main computer is a dual processors Pentium Pro 200MHz with 512KB on-die L2 cache each running debian. Yes, I'm a cave-man. I will buy something with at least 16GB RAM and dual processor dual core as soon as I get a real job. maybe SLI with both cards installed. I think the secondary processors should be used for things like AI and physics. Regarding Garrett's special keeper training alowing him to do what we can't do in RL: I always thought that the majority of his skill lies in mind manipulation of surrounding people, masking his thoughts and diverting their attention sort-of; and he can't do what some people can do in real life, look at the post here on the forums about the google video of russian climbing - if he could do that he wouldn't need rope arrows. editing, just rememberd what I wanted to say, though not how it connects to the thread. A possibility is to use inexpensive USB "VR" gloves on both hands combined with a goggle display or surround monitors to eliminate the old "press forward to run, backwards to backstep, turn, strafe left, etc" buttons replacing it with touch here on the wall, slide your hand here, hold your fingers steady on the cleft, etc. Just look at the russian climbing video on google video how the guy runs and jumps. To an outsider, of course, a thief-player or more correctly a modded darkmod player would look like a freak waving his hands about and doing various mudras.

Garrett is a recurring character very similar to Bond indeed. I think that most people have a sense of knowing his personality more than was revealed mostly because controlling him was more intuitive and had many more degrees of freedom than other game characters that existed up to that point. That last video inspired me that indeed a new athletic but not so magical (rope arrows) character would be nice who can jump and climb walls like in the video and has many more degrees of freedom than Garrett.

It was rather strange to see only burricks and nothing but the burricks, and later a few rats in the game. They are only one of many possible animals, and common animals like cats and dogs seem to be more important: imagine a suspenseful atmosphere and cats suddenly screeching and clawing somewhere on the roof, or dogs barking in the distance for no reason (remember hush sweet harlot?) The best option in my opinion would be to facilitate the creation of various animals (ostriches anyone? isn't it tiring of seeing the lord's exotic pet to be a spider?) and then have a common place to post those animals (chicken1, chicken2, dog, cat3, etc...) for people to grab for their own mission creating follies.

I mostly joke. Although given enough time/money/people/willpower anything is possible. I think given 1 or 2 years a single person who has a not too demanding job can successfully mess with the hardware and D3 to make it work.

I think everything should be active at all times, and scenarios should exploit that feature. Furthermore, Since gamers already shell out $300 for a decent video card to run D3 and stuff, they could just buy an additional physics card. Can't remember the name of the company at the moment... Another thing that I've been thinking about for the last few months. What is the measurement system? The dromed units were ok for making imaginary missions but will it be possible to use metres, feet, radians, degrees, etc? The plan: go around {victoria college, trinity college, the protestant church on bloor and university, etc...} with a measuring tape and a photo camera recording all dimensions and textures, and then re-create that exactly in DM. Or, go around {same set} with a mini-sonar sensor and a digital camera connected to a pda or a laptop with appropriate software and very quickly copy the building into DM and then file off some corners, stretch somethings, and otherwise optimize the polygons. Without having normal measurement dimensions in dromed it was rather hard to re-create houses. Since the sound propagation was shortened in distance to compensate for the wide-angle rendering view I suppose that everything is natively in metres and this question is redundant.

Two quite similar questions/concerns on the same topic. Assuming a person knows how to use a 3D program like Blender or 3Dmax, how hard if possible is it to have dynamic objects in the game with realtime effects and 3d animation? example: A jar of fireflies, A well-rendered tarnsparent-glass jar with glowing green fireflies flying a la brownian motion inside, either the jar emitting a collective light source, or each of the (not so many) fireflies is a small-radius monochromatic light emitter. An added bonus: the motion of the fireflies is scripted to be dynamic, after some time the jar is resting on the ground or the table some of them settle down on the ground and glow less, after a short agitation, they all starting flying, with intense agitation they spread and glow maximally. In addition, the sound frequency changes with the flying pattern, and propagation is correct (like torches or fireplaces) when you approach. What amount of texture packs and voice packs might there be? Will there be enough voices for enough occasions? Should there be? The admins said they don't need offers for voice-acting and prefer local-to-them highly controlled voice-recording. I was riding on the train recently and I heard a guy with a very unique voice talking on a phone. He sounded exactly like the exaggerated (gay?) noblemen in T2. I got his email address, and turns out he's an artsie who already did voice-acting for a few things and is willing to do voice-acting for this for free. I have a feeling there's 99.6% chance he will never do voice acting for darkmod.

Ok. I get the idea. I'll just look at the code if something concerns me and see if I can do anything about it.

sparhawk, don't be too snappy. We all understood what you said about the physics regarding crates. What I meant when I said that stacking crates is very important in thief was humour in reply to "unless you are planning to build a stacking level". It's just that the crates were ever-present in most levels before and some people have gotten very adept at it.

Yes, stacking crates is a very integral part of the thief experience. Sharing of resources for mission is without question... First of course there must come a time when I have a few weeks free.

In thief 1/2 when you run and jump into a square window on a wall, you sort of sit there ducked. You can't crouch or lean into or enter the building - you can only jump off. The window is clearly large enough to enter - in real life. Are such artefacts absent in darkmod? And I'll presume here that I can recode the physics part of the distribution to include some of my engineering knowledge and release my missions with "upgraded" physics...

Sure, there's potential in LOTR. Just the ambience of the tavern on the edge of town is priceless. I still think however that the biggest potential in terms of novels comes from the works of Sir Doyle and O. Henry: the atmosphere, the times and the people...

polygons schmolygons.. things should be built to take the most powerful hardware to the limit. Some people spend their time on their career and have the money for the latest machine but have no time, some people have tons of time, but no money. And, yes yes, huge castles, huge cities are good. Moody architecture is good. I'm still in shock from playing TDP the first time. I have a few castles and old Victorian and Edwardian monoliths standing around my town - maybe I'll someday have time to grab my camera and go for a walk around town. By the way, here's an idea: invest a couple hundred man-hours into assessing the feasibility of running Darkmod, flushed with polygons on linux-beowulf combo with software pre-processing and gigabit ethernet. ;-)

My biggest concern about flying is the frame rate. As far as I know it is not possible to render real-time and fly in a CITY at the same time. Unless there was a patch to the rendering mechanism which fed it everchanging meshes of static pictures of the city below. Since playing Thief TDP in 2001 I have been dreaming and planning of creating a giant city. With a complex story and relationships between people and events. I was planning that lots of work will be required to make enterable and real as many apartments, rooms, halls and houses as possible. I also thought it was a must to have a good sewer system. I still have those sketches of the whole city overview map in my filing cabinet. Doing chemEng at UofT unfortunately affords no time for pleasures like this.