ZylonBane

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that Arugulakamehameha thinks Doom is boring, generic, and repetitive. Which begs the question of why it was so incredibly, industry-changing-ly popular. Surely this seeming contradiction isn't due to Aru being an elitist asswipe.

It's been up and down more than a generic sexual metaphor for the last two days.

No, he means you've dragged the debate down into a quantum singularity of stupidity, leaving us with no choice but to abandon it. Or if that's not what he meant, that's what he should have meant, because that's what you just did. Serious Sam was the real spiritual sequel to Doom. Doom 3 is just something else entirely.

Oh go freg yourself. The original Doom's gameplay was fantastic. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have spawned an entire industry of imitators. Doom 3, however, does not play anything like classic Doom. The original Doom threw you up against dozens of enemies in large well-lit rooms. D3 pits the player against at most a handful of monsters in dark, cramped environments. It's a completely different feel.

Clearly you haven't played enough System Shock 2.

There is only one thing I can say with absolute certainty-- I have no idea what mike mayday's avatar is supposed to be, but I can't even look at it without wanting to shoot it between those big googly eyes and then shove the corpse into a wood chipper.

Doom 3 was not a remake of Doom. The only thing they have in common is the premise.

Pffft, you linear thinkers. Just swap the "s" around to the beginning and you have "skeehit". Yah, nevermind that you don't hit skee balls, you throw them.

Spoken like someone who's utterly failed to think the matter through. Making a game difficult is trivial. Making a game FUN is not. People who approach computer games as some sort of test of their manhood instead of a source of entertainment are a bit broken in the head, IMHO.

Billboarding is when the engine replaces a 3D object with a flat sprite (the titular "billboard") when it reaches a certain distance. Basically just the concept of LOD taken to its logical extreme. Usually used for trees, plants, etc.

So do you have to create these textures manually, or does the engine do it automatically? Definitely wouldn't work well for areas with dynamic lights.

Visportals, eh? Sounds like a more complicated, less flexible version of billboarding. I wonder what the advantage is.

The fact that the sound file is named "keehit_s.wav" was somewhat of a tipoff. From that point the empirical approach took care of the rest.

Anyone know what's up with TTLG? I can't even ping the domain from home or from work since yesterday.

Umm.... if I stand on my head, I do in fact see the world upside-down.

I've noticed that a lot of ordinary sounds can be turned into "Thiefish" sounds just by slowing them way down. Heck, the "Thooooooom" sound that starts all the Thief missions is just the slowed-down sound of a ball being hit.

Hell no. I do not want to be a fracking race car.

Your parents are hippies. Get the hell out of there! Run! While you still can!

If you want to do that, just use the lean keys. I'm only suggesting this as an optional, high-precision way of controlling your posture.

Geeze, just combine the whole mess into a "Posture Mode". Hold a key and you get: Mouse = leaning Mousewheel = height That would be pretty cool, actually. You'd get the functionality of six keys (crouch/stand/lean left/right/forward/back) built into one + mouse, and in an intuitive way.

How are doors handled, BTW? Do moving doors partially pass through the player (as in Deus Ex), or can you block a door from opening/closing all the way as in Thief? I've always liked how Thief lets you lock a door, but block it from closing so you can drop the key back where you got it before closing the door behind you. Now *that's* ghosting!

Ok, stop. Just stop. Now you're getting into System Shock 1 levels of ridiculously-precise body control. This is a thieving game, not a gymnastics simulator. Although, now that you mention it... I've been vexed many times in Thief by trying to look through a hole that was exactly between standing height and crouching height. So how about this-- have a "Height Adjust" key that, when held, lets you use the mouse wheel to smoothly adjust the player's posture between crouched and standing. Theoretically this wouldn't even require the creation of any new animations. Just have the player automatically transition to crouched or standing (whichever they're closer to) if they try to move while in this state.

That's way too reasonable a proposal. Yet another problem with allowing core equipment to be discarded before the mission even starts is that it means the game is making a tacit assertion that ALL MISSIONS CAN BE GHOSTED. This is clearly false. The purpose behind Thief's loadout screen is that each mission starts you out with what you'll reasonably need to finish the mission, then allows you to buy more stuff to support your personal play style. This is a damn good compromise between allowing freedom of loadout and ensuring that the player doesn't screw himself before the mission even starts. Suggesting that essential equipment be placed in the maps themselves is quite lame, because that reduces Our Hero to the level of incompetent unprepared scrounger.

Garrett doesn't just lean, he Keeper-leans. Woooooooooo.

I don't know about the lightgem specifically, but leaning DOES make you visible. Goggles has many turret rounds to the head to prove it.