ZylonBane

I prefer to think of myself as adaptive. When debating with someone, I iteratively scale down to successively more and more blunt instruments in an attempt to penetrate the target subject's thick skull. You've proven to be quite impervious to the entire scale of discourse. At this point there's nothing left but to slag you off for our own amusement.

Oh it's all good now. Arumakani just failed his PC gamer cred test.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Your suggestion has been considered and rejected. Well duh, of course it is. It's viable in the sense that it makes the game MUCH EASIER.

If you want to feel godlike, go play a god game. Difficulty which arises from a shortcoming of the game engine is the BAD kind of difficulty. In conclusion: You suck.

Do you also want a satellite with a laser that can scratch your ass from space?

Wasn't it Randy Smith who's gone on and on about how the key to Thief's gameplay is the ability to manipulate a hostile environment to your advantage? Unpredictable AI behavior would seem to work against that goal. I suppose it comes down to what you define as unpredictable. If I fire a noisemaker down a hall, I certainly don't want the AI to walk toward me instead of the noisemaker. That would piss me off.

"GPL" means "I don't know how to use Google".

It incubates within the mapper the proper mindset to begin TDM mapping.

Then learn DromEd.

What the hell do either of those questions have to do with third-person in TDM?

The whole point of videogaming is that you're NOT engaging in physical activity. Those poor crazy bastards over at Nintendo are in for a rude awakening.

Ents.

As long as the interface is physical, which is likely to be for a long, long, long time. I certainly wouldn't want a car that you had to control by waving your arms in the air.

I'm no longer excited about using pedals and a steering wheel to operate my car, but you know what? That's probably the best solution there is.

How about instead of Keepers, you have the opposite-- Criers. They make sure there aren't ANY secrets!

Just activate your night-vision aug. And your skul gun.

Considering that a decent real-time algorithm would just average the difference between frames with and without the player image, it doesn't really matter whether they're occluding a direct or indirect light source.

There is no difference. A silhouette, by definition, occludes something lighter than itself. It doesn't matter whether the something is a direct or indirect light source. grinningman's malfunction is that he seems convinced that the amount of back-lighting required to create a distinct silhouette is equal to the amount of front-lighting required to make the player directly visible.

Considering the reasoning skills you've demonstrated thus far, that's most likely for the best.

Yah, the D3 engine doesn't do ray-tracing. Even if it did though, the lightgem would not indicate silhouette conditions. It is true that when you're standing in front of something bright, more photons are hitting you than when you're standing in front of something dark (seeing how as that's pretty much the definition of the difference between bright and dark). However, in general this difference does not add up to a significant amount of illumination. As I noted above, it's all about the CONTRAST. Consider this extreme example-- Say you're outside at night, not a cloud in the sky, no moon, and miles away from any artificial light sources. There's starlight, but for all practical purposes, there is no illumination. So look up at the stars (oooh, pretty). Now if something large were to obscure your view (say, a blimp), you'd see it. Specifically, you'd see a large blimp-shaped hole in the sky. That's how silhouetting works.

You can do that in first person just fine.

But, alas, it is. The reason silhouette recognition work so well in real life isn't because of illumination, it's because of CONTRAST. Under exactly the same lighting conditions, someone in dark clothing standing against a light background will be much more visible than if they were standing against a dark background. This is why adding silhouette recognition to a game engine would pretty much require a render pass from the perspective of every AI near the player.

As long as you continue thinking of "your character" instead of "yourself", you will fail.

Where's Oddity? This seems like the sort of "realism vs gameplay" discussion that he's usually all over.