ZylonBane

Realistically, while walking the streets Gareth would just stow his equipment, throw his hood back, and look like any other random mercenary. Speaking of which, are there plans for modeling non-armored combatants? Street thugs, soldiers, that sort of thing?

Are they the optimized weather-effect type of particles that only emit in a moderate radius around the player, or do you have to saturate an entire map with particles?

Ahem. "Pedestrian".

And lots of really annoying post-production effects.

I've raised that point before. IIRC, the conclusion was that -- since the Thief resource files are just ZIP files -- one could simply copy SND.CRF (or something like that) into the TDM install folder and it would be able to read the voice files directly.

The Dark Engine is exponentially older, and people still don't have a problem playing FMs on that.

Check out the D3CDIT test videos. They have a full day-night cycle implemented, among other things.

Name one person besides yourself who would think, let alone say, such a retarded thing.

For Half-Life/SS2 style "overlapping" map load areas, you'll also need a system for defining the area in which objects and AIs will be transported to the new map, and a system for tagging objects as transportable/non-transportable. You wouldn't want your deco objects getting cloned over along with any stuff the player's dropped on the ground.

Umm, ahem. 1000008.0 is, you may have noticed, an integer. Even with only single-precision floats you can precisely represent any integer all the way up to 16,777,216.

No no. They'd call it "lummy". Just like with "telly" and "footy" and "ninty", etc.

Ummm... could you say that again in English?

What I object to are people who, to be fair, probably aren't actually mentally retarded, but act for all practical purposes as if they are.

Say hello to Doom's target demographic. "Woe" indeed.

Anyway, 90% of the benefit of a silhouette system could be conferred by just giving the player a stealth bonus when standing against a wall. As an example of how this might be implemented, TDM could continuously cast, say, six rays out from the player's position in a circular pattern for a distance of about a foot. If three or more adjacent rays strike terrain, the player would be considered to be "wall-hugging", and their visibility would be slightly decreased. Something like that.

Is it possible to selectively apply bloom to fogged regions? That would actually look more realistic. Might be expensive though, since the degree of blooming/blurring would have to be linked directly to the degree of fogging (depthwise). Dunno if you guys have sufficiently low access to the render pipeline for that sort of thing.

If the belchers are going to have the same gas-wave attack as burricks, they just don't look like they have the lungs for it. If the chest was capable of puffing up before a belch, that would look pretty good, IMHO. It'd also give the player ample warning to get the hell out of the way.

So you've finally figured out that what most gamers want is to play games. Wow, congratulations herr doktor. What a discovery. The next time I see someone playing chess I'll berate them for not doing anything of merit or consequence.

To clarify, he seems baffled by the developers' decision to implement save-anywhere functionality, but then require manually modifying a text file to enable it.

No, moonbat, the reason you don't see quicksaving in Tetris is because it's a trivial little arcade game where each game rarely lasts for more than a few minutes. There's no quicksave because nobody wants or needs it. Save-anywhere is a TOOL, which is up to individual players to use responsibly, or not. Banning save-anywhere would make exactly as much sense as banning, say, knives. Sure you can hurt people with them, but they have far too many legitimate uses to do without.

Christ, not this fanatic douchebaggery again...

Well... no. When I say pupil dilation simulation, what I'm describing is a mechanism by which the "f-stop" of the scene adjusts dynamically to the current light level in the player's field of view. You know-- like the human pupil does. Simulated pupil dilation is something that sits on top of the system you describe above, dynamically twiddling the knob as needed. For example, say you have an HDR range of 0-1000. When you're outside, staring at the sun, yadda yadda, you'd probably want to scale this range so that 900 maps to 255 (the brightest value your monitor can display), and anything over that burns to pure white, giving a nice overbrightening effect. Compressing such a wide dynamic range down like this would cause areas of low brightness, like shadows, to appear more-or-less pitch black, just like in real life. But then, say you step into a mostly dark area. The engine detects this, and adjusts the scaling so that something lower, like 500, maps to 255. Now anything over 500 will burn to pure white (don't bother looking out that window!), but the low end of the dynamic range will have expanded, allowing the player to discern details that were previously indistinguishable. Again, just like what happens in real life when your eyes adjust to a dark area. There's something in Thief I'm occasionally guilty of, and I doubt I'm the only one here that's done it. Sometimes, when I'm sneaking through a particularly dark area of a mission, I'll tap the ol' gamma-adjust keys to brighten the view, then knock the gamma back down when I'm in a well-lit area. This is generally regarded as a mild form of cheating, but really, it's just manually doing what our own eyes would do automatically in this situation.

No, it wouldn't be pointless. HDR allows the rendering engine to perform much more realistic operations on everything that involves lighting, by allowing luminance values beyond the range 0-255 to be processed internally. This article provides an excellent practical example of the value of HDR rendering. Basically it allows overbright light sources to stay overbright, even after passing through all the various transparency/refraction/reflection filters. Unlike LDR, where 255 is the brightest you can be, and it only degrades from there. With LDR you could stick a light source that's supposed to represent a star going supernova on the other side of a tinted window, and it'll end up looking no brighter than a desk lamp. When the engine dynamically adjusts the brightness of the scene based on the brightness of the player's surroundings, that's pupil simulation. The glowing effect is bloom, although human eyes do perceive similar effects naturally when going from a dark environment to a brightly-lit one. Ever been out at night, then look directly at a full moon? The moon appears as a featureless white disc until your eyes adjust.

Just to clarify, that's pupil simulation he's describing, not HDR.

That's impossible without modifying the physical characteristics of the monitor.