lost_soul

"this demonstrates the idiocy of the patent -- the workaround added four lines of code and changed two." And here I was afraid this would take days (or weeks) to find a new solution to. Very cool man.

What about all the other engines that have real-time lighting and are open source? I'm talking about the Blender stuff, HPL engine, ET-Xreal, etc.

I'm in the first two categories. I like to replay my favorite missions, especially if there are new things to find. Some of the mission updates have made the world feel much more alive, like having female characters in St. Alban's Cathedral. With television, the same thing always happens in an episode, whereas multi-player games are very dynamic. Fan missions for TDM and Thief fall somewhere in between these two opposites.

Bingo... I knew this would happen. Hey John, we really appreciate this. Thanks for re-writing the affected code and not just throwing your hands up and saying "forget it, I have better things to do". I was beginning to wonder what was the hold up... At least now we know.

Somebody should promote TDM here: http://www.osnews.com/story/25328/The_State_of_Linux_Gaming_2011 They should know that there are over FIFTY missions to play and that this is nothing at all like Doom 3.

I'm all the way over in northern California... If unable to meet in person, it would be cool to hang out on TeamSpeak or Mumble (open-source alternative) some time. Both systems are entirely cross-platform, as far as I know. I've actually been watching some "Let's play TDM" videos on Youtube. Here's Alberic's Curse. Sadly I cannot understand the Finnish dialogue. SPOILERS (obviously) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozvltODt-ek&feature=related I also recall seeing some Japanese TDM players on Youtube as well a wile ago.

@OrbWeaver: I figured I would get in to trouble if I used tar to back up the system because of things like /proc and /dev. These are virtual file systems, so I don't know if they would make the process more complex.

Well said... and yes, K3B is a very nice program. Even as a Gnome user, K3b is what I use when I (rarely) burn disks. Fortunately I found I had a backup of my prior Debian install on the hard drive before I switched to SSD... so I just "dd'd" it back over to the SSD and I'm good to go. Also, I learned something new. You can use resize2fs to resize an image of a partition. Let's say my root fs is 10 GB but the partition on my SSD is only 8 GB. I can create a copy of the 10 GB HDD partition to a file and then use resize2fs -M to shrink it to the minimal size so that it will fit on the SSD. Then after copying it to the SSD, I jsut blow it up to the 8 GB size of the SSD partition.

But on a simpler level, I really don't understand why developers do this. They spend years working on something, get it to the point where it works great, and then chuck it out the window to create something new. It would be like if the TDM developers decided to turn TDM into a 3D fighting game ala Tekken.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=72366&start=0 It is nice to know I'm not alone in this world... There are others who feel the way I do!

I do somewhat agree with BikerDude. This is because as a computer gamer, Steam is virtually forced on me these days. There are more and more games which (legally) are unplayable unless we become part of the system... and more and more games will only start requiring Steam. This is the primary reason I don't buy computer games anymore. I spend more of my free time these days doing free computer repair jobs for people instead. It is more challenging and fun than most of the mainstream games coming out anyway. But I really don't understand why so many gamers feel obligated to support companies who don't treat you in the manor you expect. Hypothetical Analogy: If you hired me to come fix your new computer and I install Windows 95, would you still pay me even though you obviously didn't want W95? I didn't provide the service you originally wanted, therefor I don't deserve payment. I can't suggest doing what you mentioned later in your post, but I recommend buying a console and getting all of the games used.

Tonight I did a dist-upgrade on my Debian Wheezy machine. I was perfectly happy with my fully functional gnome 2.x desktop, which had flawless sound and a UI that was exactly tweaked to how I wanted it. Now I end up with Gnome 3 and the pain-in-the-*** that is PulseAudio. These two were precisely why I left my last distribution. After the upgrades, I go to launch TDM and I get no sound. My UI is completely changed. Why do people insist on forcing unwanted software/changes on the user? Before you say "You're using a testing distribution", this will be the only current distro in a year or two. Those of us who prefer Gnome 2 and a functional (ALSA) sound system will be screwed.... or we can stick with a 2.6.32-era distribution. Long story short: Respect the wishes of users. You can keep packages for "gnome2.x" in the repositories along with the Gnome.3x packages which require a broken audio system. That way, everyone is happy. This isn't really directed at anyone in particular, because almost every distro is doing it. Now I'm reinstalling Debian 6, knowing that I will be screwed in a short wile and be forced to use whatever packages someone else decides to deploy across distributions.

"naturalistic"? You mean like how many mainstream games have bodies that fade out of sight five seconds after they die? A lot of times now they don't even wait for the player to look away. I think the Thief guards also played their standard damage sounds when under water.

I've also heard them coughing while under water. Interestingly enough, they do play a drowning sound when their health runs out.

I love undead missions as long as they capture the atmosphere, and house/mansion robbery missions too. I especially love large missions that feature a little bit of everything: city streets, crypts, cathedrals, house robbing.

Finally casted my votes. I went with 5, 5, and 4 respectively. The only reason I gave a 4 in the last category was that there were

Hopefully a lot of "good enough" assets can be scraped together from other OSS game projects to fill in at least some of the holes. For example, OpenArena had some pretty good textures (especially gothic ones).

Darn... I made plans to go out this evening. Guess I'll have to wait until late tonight to play this FM... but on the positive side, that should help the atmosphere!

I know somebody around here has a time machine, so... When the source code comes out, will we be able to just compile Doom 3 and expect TDM to work as it currently does with the proprietary version? My guess is the TDM team will have to do a little work to get TDM compatible with the open source version, because I would imagine id has changed some things for the OSS version of Doom 3. For example, I'm sure Punkbuster is gone and they may have had to change the shadowing algorithm. @NH: I was so close to making a comment like that, but I managed to restrain myself. lol

So, this probably means "a matter of days", and not "a matter of weeks (or months)" Great news!

I'm also glad that they went with SD as the storage medium... mostly because I already have a 16 GB SD card sitting here.

@Melan: I agree