demagogue

I wouldn't think of Canada and Japan as developing countries ... but maybe in the world of rugby they are. I really don't know why rugby hasn't caught on in the US. I've heard friends say that rugby is too chaotic, nothing like American football which is more strategic ... and rugby fans saying American football is too slow, waiting for play after play ... just let the guy run. But personally, I can't understand it, if you like one you should really like the other; they basically appeal to the same kind of thinking and moving ... and it's much more like the kind of game we played in high school spontaneously. To answer your question, though, I wish I could be interested, but there is just no outlet to find rugby news or watch games on tv. Every once and a while they'll have an important game on a smaller sports channel, but then I don't have any context. We're lucky that classic football (soccer) is finally catching on. Hopefully you get some more promising replies than mine!

Well, so far I'm sold on LW. So far, I don't get the crashes or slow downs. I guess I've just gotten used to it after go through a few tutorials. Maybe Blender would be better to start with, for learning, but since I'm so deep into LW now there's no good reason to turn back. Also, I did a search of the models coming out for each one, and I noticed some of my favorite artists tended to use LW. So that was enough for me. Really, I am so sure at this point that it doesn't matter, though. For the kinds of models we're making. I'll just stick with what I've been using. As for the interface, I think it matches the way I think. The basic menu-structure is what you very basically want to do: create points/surfaces from scratch, move points/surfaces already there, create/delete new geometry based on what's already there (like beveling), etc. -- and then you go into more detail from there. I like thinking about it from very fundamentally -- what do you fundamentally want to do -- to more and more detailed as you go on. And then most everything has its own sub-menu to do things numerically. I think it's true, though, that you really have to explore all the different ins and outs of a series of menus before you use a function, e.g., just experimenting with each tab on the sub-menu. Then once you've seen it, you know the path to get back to it. It's hard to do something from scratch, before you've experimented with it on your own.

To be honest, even T2 didn't capture the imagination as well as T1. If you think, mission for mission, T2 was so busy trying to self-consciously create a bunch of novel sneaking experiences -- robbing a bank, following the courier, overhear a conversation, clear a path for Basso, case then rob a joint, etc, it was so busy being "technically more fun; more to do" -- that it didn't have the same purity and soul as the original, IMO ... which was more raw but more inspired, more magical. Not sure if you'll ever be able to conjure up that again. I honestly have yet to play TDS until I buy a new computer ... but since my expectations have been so lowered, I think I just might enjoy it for what it is. I won't even try to pretend it's supposed to be competing with the previous iterations. I'm also thinking that for my first run, I should go ahead and install things like the minimalist project and the upgraded textures and the difficulty mod, etc (whatever works together). So my first run through is the best the fans can get it and my first impression will be better for it.

Damn ... now all these forums are going to be in a new language I have to learn!

Today I was just doing a little brush up on the design texture for my lute, and when I saved it in Photoshop the file somehow got corrupted. I was keeping backups when I was making it, but there was this little window of time after I deleted past backups and before I made the next one. So now I lose like a week's worth of work before the last backup ... grr. (Essentially I used a photo source of a perfect looking arabesque hole, but I had to erase the strings covering the hole in the photo ... pixel by pixel). A little demoralizing, but I'll go back and do it over again, since I'm basically almost done with it, and it seems much, much faster now that I know what I'm doing with it. Just wanted to blow off some steam.

An FM author might intentionally set up this situation from the beginning, as well. I remember moments in the OMs where ropes were already attached and hanging, waiting for G to climb, e.g., in the Bonehoard and The Sword. An author could set up a horizontally grounded rope pre-set for the PC to climb across, or even something like a makeshift rope bridge ... good for variety's sake.

Pretty cool. From watching what my 7 yr old nephew plays these days, I get the idea that this kind of old-fashioned stylized look and gameplay works for kids ... sort of like a self-conscious modesty that draws them in and doesn't alienate them (or their over-cautious parents). It comes across as more harmless in comparison to what's out there.

I didn't know you guys were going to have x's in the tool set!

Congrats, this now coming from someone that has more of a philosophy background. I studied undergrad philosophy at UTexas, and law at NYU, although very much law and philosophy oriented. I have to decide myself whether I'll go for the philosophy PhD or be content with where I've gotten myself. I enjoy writing law papers ... but I have to admit it's tempting to live in two worlds doing both law and philosophy projects ... in which case, I'd have to concentrate in political/moral philosophy to make it work, although my background is more in philosophy of mind, but I don't mind. I didn't even try to get into NYU's very competitive program at the time. But I couldn't pass up the chance to stock up on as many phil courses there as I could through law school ... highlights being Tom Nagel's Moral Phil and Dworkin's Law and Phil seminar. UPenn is a good school, part of that pocket of good schools around NYC, NJ and Philly. Philosophy of science is an interesting track to start with, too. The only two names I've really read are Feyerabend, who I enjoy reading - I like his against-the-grain spirit - but seem more influenced in figuring out what I disagree with him, and Popper, who I've been much more influenced by (except for his philosophy of mind, which is just archaic). I remember feeling gratified to get a feel for how Popper's philosophy of science is related to his political philosophy. These days my bent in phil of science is a reading of Dennet by Don Ross. It'll be nice to hear some of your ideas as you start reading for this class. I have an anthology of phil of science, but have to admit it's not my strongest area (that's why I got the book, because I don't have much background in it). Keep us up to date with how it goes.

Well, nothing you mentioned, SplaTtzZ, is really news. Reactions seem to be more pro than con, so it's interesting to read a different perspective, at least. Remember this is the console version. PC version isn't supposed to be as bad, considering it had an independent team working on the interface. The object-glint is optional, as is the in-game interface instructions. The only thing irking me, like you, is the big semi-circle, which I think stays. SS2 had a simple red bar. Watching the videos, like with SS2, it admittedly looks more useful than not, so I think it's fine there's a bar; I just wish it weren't as big. But all things considered, I can live with it. The style (putting aside the size) is at least appropriate (compared to the computer-generated look in SS2). This is old news, and raised some hell when it came out. Levine tried to sell us on the point that you still get a lot of the functionality of stuff-hoarding and slot-limits in some cases, just without a unified, dedicated screen ... which I guess you either buy or not. Anyway, it's part of the whole "it's a shooter first" philosophy. Once you're on board with that, it's not as bad as it first sounds. Thief didn't have an inventory screen. Yeah, like Crispy said, this is right out of the SS2 playbook. Similarly with supplies on bodies statistically sensitive to the player's needs. A dev posted on this once that they really tried hard to get these into the game to keep a good flow but it not become obvious or distracting, not heavy-handed looking. They spent forever tweaking it to perfection. Like with the no inventory screen, I think once you get over the initial idea that it's done at all, it's nice to know that they put some thought into doing it well, and not just haphazardly. I tend to like it because it increases replayability ... basically it's the safety-net for taking out scripted fights, and I find it better than the alternative. As advertised from the beginning. You can say you don't like the genre of FPSs as much as FPS-RPG hybrids, but it's not so fair to bait-and-switch and conflate genre choice with what's good or bad gameplay within a genre. Still, I was interested in your observations, so thanks for posting that.

Gotta love a universe that flips all logic around.

Don't forget that security cameras were actually part of Thief 2. So it's not that strange. There's also the magic route. The OMs used those eyeball plants. I'd just think that magic might be good if you want to keep the thing small. Generally speaking, per the trend of some of these recent threads, I'm on the side that hopes that TDM will be friendly to a more open field of mission types for FMs, and that builders will take up the opportunity. I'm actually curious to see whether and how the character of FMs might change under TDM.

Those aren't exactly exotic image formats. Weird. Congrats on your first normal map. I was happy to figure out a grey-scale height map is good enough, because you can pretty much take any design you can make or find, grey-scale it and adjust the height by lightening or darkening it. I'm also finding orienting the textures strange. I drew my texture on a screenshot of the wireframe, but when I tried to put it on, I had to squeeze it out of proportion, basically I need to redraw it in the right proportions using the render as a reference, which I thought was strange. Doesn't the wireframe automatically have the right proportions?

I recently found this site (http://www.voynich.nu/index.html, or wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_MS) on the Voynich manuscript while following links on unsolved codes. It's one of these medieval mysticism tomes written entirely in a secret language with an unknown script of some 40 odd squiggles. Statistical analysis says it has the statistical properties of a natural language, but it's proving incredibly hard to crack. Reading through all the analysis this thing has been subjected to ... how they're making just enough progress in decoding it that it keeps it interesting, but enough mystery that there are always more questions than answers, it's fascinating.

Yeah, what are the reviews like for this Darkmod game I keep hearing about around here?

Whatever works. It'll be an interesting 2 weeks to hear the news. But I still think it'll deserve a fat cigar and a congratulations.

I'm having it crash on me periodically, but not that often. I do notice that it tends to happen when things get busy, like changing a window to full-screen.

Re the copyright question. In US law the standard for visual works is that the derivative work has the same "look and feel" as the original, pretty subjective standard ... except to say if you see it and it looks egregious, that's a red flag. If you can't really "see" the original in the derivative work, then it's on safer ground. The best thing, of course, is to just stick to taking your own pictures or public domain works from the ground up and then you don't even have to ask the question. That said, since there's nothing about displacing market value or unjust enrichment or anything like that involved, then there aren't damages ... so the main remedy is if the creator doesn't like it he can ask to take it out. Of course, consent is a total safe harbor if you just ask the owner of the website if you can use the design.

Dromed is unstable but not that unstable. It sounds like you did something it doesn't like. All of this talk is reminding me that I want to be a beta-mapper, but my laptop won't run Doom3. Have to wait until I can get a desktop that can handle it.

I prefer adventures, actually, which is why I mentioned it. They haven't really been a big genre since the old Sierra games like 15 years ago, unfortunately.

You are basically right (maybe one little footnote I put below). It's just the way LW counts polys for statistics purposes, what's visible as a poly, and I was just writing that number down because it was right at hand. ....................................... I'm learning this as I go. Here's how I understand it so far. I'll try to explain it to see if I have it right (this is more for my own sake; no questions here so no need to read it if you don't want to). The way LW works, "polygon" is more of a labeling convention than anything about the geometry per se. You could distinguish planes (of multiple polys), planar-polys, and non-planar-polys. A "poly" itself, the thing LW is counting when you hit statistics, seems to be just an internal or nomenclature thing special to how the program builds the geometry (not specifically what it results in). You build surfaces by linking a set of points (*any* set of points) together, and it draws a surface and then it calls that surface one "poly" ... doesn't matter if it's not planar, if it's contorted into some ungodly shape, a "poly" can be a single line, it can even be a single point I've discovered (although these latter two polys won't render, you can give them properties to do other things, and rendering a non-planar poly, it tries to make it look like a plane, but rotating it around you quickly notice it's just not right). The only thing that matters is that you highlight some points and press "make polygon" (or however else you make them), and it calls whatever surface results a polygon, and counts it towards the statistic-count. So at least the way LW counts for statistics purposes, when you divide one square into two triangles, it counts it as "1 poly" changing into "2 polys". That's what I meant in saying that my triangulation doubled my poly count. That's just how the program counts what it labels "polys" for its own internal purposes, even though the geometry itself isn't changing. It's just its own labeling convention. Ostensibly, it had been that doubled number all the while. What doesn't change (usually, anyway) is the plane. This is what I'm catching on to. All triangles are planar, by definition (3 points=plane). But it is possible to make surfaces in LW that it calls "polys" with 4+ points, some will be on the same plane, but others don't have to be. So when you triangulate them, the planar polys turn into triangles that are on the same plane as before, but the non-planar polys turn into triangles that are now on different planes. This is the one little footnote to what you said, because that might be more like making new polys because they're on new planes. What ultimately matters, I'm discovering, are the verticies, the points that define the plane the poly is on. This explains a confusion I had above. I naively thought that turning all those squares on the back of my lute was going to give me more polys to work with to make a smoother surface, just under the bad analogy that if you could get closer to a curve with more lines, you could get closer to a sphere with more surfaces. But actually, after I triangulated all those squares, it's just visually obvious that, even with LW telling me I have 2x the number of polys, the verticies defining the planes are exactly the same, and so I really don't have any more surfaces to work with. Bad logic. The most I could do is rearrange the space I have with those triangles to be more even, but I can't get closer to the curve than I already am. Anyway, the point is I know what you're talking about now.

That's a funny coincidence. I didn't even bother reading those Paprika reviews before I posted. I didn't even know the same guy made Millennium Actress. I just posted it as an honest recommendation after having seen it recently.

@Macsen, in a nutshell, Deep Cover is about a 1960s Cold War era tuxedo spy, and yes the emphasis was going to be on Thief style sneaking in a modern setting ... Bay of Pigs, downtown Havana, Castro's villa, a dinner meeting, escaping the Gulag, a Russian ship, and a few others. @Nyarlathotep, honestly the idea just occurred to me. I love watching those traceur videos on YouTube, and all the time it occurs to me that that would be an fun way to play Thief. I esp like that, if you read the stuff when the serious traceurs talk about it, it has an ethos to it ... efficiency, balance, being very much in touch with the environment around you. It sort of fits the Thief world (and my own personal ethos). ................................... Ok, complete OT tangent: As far as an actual playing style ... first, I don't think there's been an effort at developing a new playing style since like 2000, so it's sort of fun to even have the audacity to claim to be developing one. I suppose the most important thing would be to distinguish it from just a mere speed run. The thing I notice about parkour is that it's as much an art as a science. Ghosting is like a science. There are very clear rules you know when you've broken them. Parkour is about being creative and quick on your feet about negotiating whatever the situation is ... so too many rules sort of defeat the purpose. What separates it from a mere speed run, I'd think ... Speed runs to me, while they are "fast", look clumsy. You are running diagonally and hopping and have advance knowledge. And it's about honing the same carefully pre-planned moves after dozens of trials where you're doing the same thing mechanically over and over. With parkour, you should be thinking on your feet, you should stay in motion and not be stopping for too long, you should still be trying to "properly" sneak, and not be seen if you can, but quickly, efficiently. With a speed run, you run by the guards it doesn't matter. With parkour style, you should stick to the shadows and not be seen unless it wastes a lot of time, but even if you go in a way you'll be seen, you should be doing it efficiently, in a way that best covers yourself. I'd think it's okay if a guard sees you, it should not be a break like ghosting. But you should run around them so they don't see you if you can. Or you need to efficiently evade them if you are caught until they are definitively no longer on your tail, so in that sense it's not like a speed run where the objectives are all that matters. I'd think it should be Ironman in that you shouldn't reload either; quickly resolve the mistakes you make. Maybe, to try to crystallize the idea, and to keep its rule-less ethos, it's close to a speed run, but you get points for style. If it's clumsy or mechanical looking, or you are deliberately ignoring the guards in the interest of pure speed, it doesn't count (for much). When another person watches it, they should see it. You can have guards on alert and running after you, but they can never catch you or lay a weapon on you. But you should not put a guard on alert if it's at all possible to efficiently pass him. Now I'm going to try all of these ideas out in some OMs & FMs and try to work out how the style works. Then I'll boldly post on ThiefGen that I've developed the first new playing style in seven years and be showered with accolades as it sweeps the Thief-fan world by storm. Well, maybe not that last part... I think, to the extent this style might be fun, it would be to fraps your run and post it on YouTube, and then ask people to rate you on your style and efficiency in doing the run.

Games still on my list to get / play ... Anachronix, Stalker, Oblivion, Call of Cthulhu, Arx Fatalis, Blade Runner, Darwinia, one of the Need for Speed's. I still have yet to play DX2 and Thief 3 ... I'll get to them someday for the record, but don't feel any rush. Upcoming ... Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Mozart, The Crossing, GTA IV (for New York), maybe Spore (depending on how bling-y it turns out looking; too much and it's no sale, or at least a begrudging discount-price only sale). ............ When I was younger there were some games that the previews would make me honestly riveted. I recall that happening for some C64 games, esp "cinematic" ones, Project Firestart ... some RPGs like Ultima and Bard's Tale 2 ... some interactive fiction ... The Pawn, Guild of Thieves. I haven't felt that way in forever. One thing I remember about the old games I liked, very often they'd come with these 200+ page manuals (!) or novellas to give the game a back-story, and little nick-nacks in the box that were part of the game's world, and they'd build these stories around the game that was more than the game itself. I loved that. Today's games are just too much bling in too tight and clean a package, too much of a blockbuster mindset ... or they're indie and deliberately low-key. It seems gone are the days when games really tried to sell you the story behind the game as part of it, still very ambitious but not nearly as "clean", more messy and alive. Today, it's either ambitious but too clean, or more alive but too unambitious. BTW, by "clean" / "messy" I'm not talking about the look, e.g., how bloody or grungy or realistic it is. I mean, too self- consciously presentable to the audience as a packaged product or commodity bought to be consumed. I hate anything smacking of "bling" or a wink at the audience, or a world too self-contained like a product you buy to use up and throw out, just to get the next product. To take an upcoming game at its best ... Irrational was claiming that Bioshock was going to be a world that didn't care about the player. Looking at the videos ... I mean, I can see it's making an effort, but the vibe I'm getting is still rubbing me the wrong way on the whole ... the neon colors, even in its freedom the sandbox is still a little too orchestrated-looking. Maybe I'll feel different playing it.

You have to give yourself your own discipline to play it with a challenge ... like ghosting or, my growing appreciation, parkour style where you're really running through it as fast and efficiently as possible, with more emphasis on speed sneaking, or if you get guards running after you, fast evasion.