lost_soul

Well the brand new version of Blender (2.70) has a feature I have been hoping for forever, but I never actually asked for. Quake-style controls in fly mode!!! This makes it SO much easier to position your viewpoint!

Wow... I predicted it... I fucking predicted it! "I wonder which country it is? Who's gonna get it next?" More importantly, who is doing it to you? I've heard rumors that spy agencies cooperate to skirt the rules. For example, agency_a is not allowed to spy on nation_a, and agency_b is not allowed to spy on nation_b. So, agency_a spies on nation_b, and agency_b spies on nation_a! Then they can just compare notes at dinner time!

Correct me if I'm wrong but...

I like the idea of heightened senses a few seconds after you pickpocket an AI. He will be like "Wait, where'd that go?" and he will take a quick look around. He wouldn't alert anybody or stay this way but for a few seconds. This way, if you do pickpocket somebody and you don't retreat to the shadows, you will be busted, but it still doesn't punish the player for doing the pickpocket in the first place because that's part of the game. The TDS AIs just mumbled about something being missing, but they did *nothing* about it at all.

Well, if they are doing this behind the scenes currently, I imagine the biggest issue for them is digitizing the audio data... Its not like they have sound cards with millions of inputs, lol. However, the PSTN will begin switching to digital soon, and when that happens, they would have a much easier time gathering all that audio data and feeding it into their clustered computers for compression and archival because it would already be digital when it reaches their facilities. And when I say my machine is lowly, I mean lowly compared to what kinds of computers the agencies have.

Did you know you can record over 10 years of voice-quality audio on a single terabyte hard drive? If you don't believe me, let's do some calculations. I compressed over 18 and a half hours of voice data (from The Nameless Mod) into about 85 MB using the Opus codec. Reason being, I wanted to see what this thing was capable of. Now, let's multiply that by 10. So, we have 850 megabytes, and over a week of voice recordings. Multiply this by 52 to get a year, and its a tiny 52 gigabytes holding a year of audio! Of course, if we multiply our 52 GB = 1 year of audio by 10, we get 520 GB for 10 years of audio. So, now you can see that you can fit 10 years of speech on a single hard drive with LOTS of room to spare. It doesn't sound great, and it aint "HD", but that doesn't matter. Its just a single channel at 16 KHz. Now, look at me with a straight face and tell me that they aren't secretly recording all of us, all of the time. Whether it is legally or morally permitted doesn't matter. All they have to do is say it is for our protection and most people will be too busy hugging their slightly shinier smartphone this year to care. Oh yeah, and for those who think they would need super computers to do the above in real-time on a massive scale: A: They *have* super computers! B: My lowly six-core machine encoded the TNM audio at 60x the speed of real-time, using a single CPU core. This means that, in theory, my machine would be able to handle a few hundred streams simultaneously.

This topic is all about discussing anything regarding Blender. As a n00b, it is amazing how a single bad setting can make your cycles renders require extreme levels of sampling to get rid of noise.... and still not look perfect. Today I learned how critically important the "multiple importance sampling" option is if you have an HDRI background with strong sunlight in an area. It reduces the number of necessary samples, and as a result, also reduces your rendering time while producing a MUCH cleaner looking image. Also, the new version that is just about to come out (2.70) will increase cycles rendering speed on the CPU by about 30%. That is pretty awesome.

Whoever did the music in the beginning/briefing of this mission, its awesome! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoGy2o8rUzI

There used to be a console variable in id tech engines called s_mixahead, or snd_mixahead. I can't remember if its still there in Doom 3. You can try checking for it in the console and seeing if changing (decreasing) it helps. Note that if you decrease it too much, you will get stuttering/choppy sound because the sound buffer will be too small.

... and another! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBLreMdJSpk

http://www.zdnet.com/goto-apple-gnutls-falls-foul-of-ssl-certificate-verification-issues-7000026957/ "woops"... Would this have been planted by somebody with an agenda?

Yep, you can relock doors just like Gman says. I had a guard investigating noises I made and I ran into a closet and locked myself in. I heard him try to open the door and he was unsuccessful. Note that mappers can supposedly override this, allowing a guard to unlock the door even if you stole his key (like magic).

Anybody else notice that occasionally, the guards refuse to fight you? I've seen this happen twice now (in different missions). I would get busted by a guard, he would come after me, take a swing or two at me, and then just stand there in his combat stance, not blocking or bothering to attack me any more. He would still run up to me, he just wouldn't attack or block. This is different from the old problem where they just ran into you constantly. If there's anything I can do to help with this, let me know. I've seen it on Inn Business and WS3

Actually, the "footsteps while you turn in place" sound like a cool idea. In real life, you cannot turn completely around without making some noise. TDS was too forgiving when it came to footsteps because you made NO noise on any surface as long as you moved in a crouch. This makes me think of the spy in TFC, where if you play dead and look around while you're laying there, the other players will see your character still move.

Thief isn't Madden or COD: We do not get a new Thief game every year, or even every half a decade. Modding tools would keep the game alive for much longer than a year because the community would make missions for it.

I personally think that if they wanted people to be able to mod, they would have made it so. Any effort spent on finding ways to create mods regardless would be better spent on TDM. TDM is "our" game and you can mod it however you like. Besides, all they would have to do is send a C&D letter, thereby making any effort you put in pointless.

There used to be a place here where you were able to go play games like Half-life and Unreal Tournament. It was a local used game shop, which recently shut down sadly. I had fun doing that fourteen years ago. I remember playing a deathmatch with the store manager. Good times! This was back when they had Viper V770 cards... lol

I certainly do. If you personally think this game has massive problems and yet you still pre-order/buy it, you are rewarding bad behavior. Its like giving your pet a treat when he craps on the carpet and saying "good boy"... If you reward poor quality content, increasingly poor quality content is all you will get.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jqp746UZQs Some parts of this song are outstanding, some are kinda boring. Great parts-- 5:25 8:12 16:29 18:50 (this last part is the best)

Not a problem. Glad I could help.

Well, I'm quite sure you've fallen into the same trap that I posted about a wile ago. In short, you probably installed TDM to a restricted location and this is happening to you as a result. Here's the solution/explanation. http://forums.thedar...ere-is-the-tdm/ -- you're not supposed to run TDM as administrator because you don't need to. It just needs read/write permissions to the folder in which you stick it.