Crispy

Are you allowed to run tdm_update.exe (which you have already downloaded) on your work computer? You don't need to install TDM properly, just put the PK4 and other files in a folder somewhere and run tdm_update to get the updated files. We haven't discussed making a torrent for the update. If there's sufficient demand, it might get done.

Awesome. I've never liked gardening anyway.

You can turn off shadows, but it will mess with the lightgem and screw up gameplay. Which is why it's not on the menus. Keep in mind that TDM is more resource-intensive than Doom 3 even without shadows; our AI is much more complex so there's a bigger CPU load. Also, the levels tend to be built with more modern video cards in mind; Doom 3 was released six years ago(!), so most people have upgraded their video card at least once since then.

Even in singleplayer there is subtle variety which does enough to keep things fresh, at least in the best shooters. Fundamentally they're all about movement and timing, which are gaming staples. Just about every classic arcade game can be described purely in terms of its player and enemy movement rules (hence ROM CHECK FAIL, which is required playing do it now). These days all the good shooters add additional elements like environmental manipulation. Half-Life 2 has the gravity gun + explosives + spinning razor blades of death. Tricking a Big Daddy from Bioshock into taking out your opponents for you is a lot of fun (and I can think of at least 3 ways of achieving that, off the top of my head). And you can't go past setting a group of splicers on fire and then electrocuting them when they dive into water to extinguish the flames. Instant kills all round! Just make sure there isn't a neutral Big Daddy in the same pool of water. In terms of mods, of course, TDM unquestionably deserves to be on that list. But them's the breaks.

Scaling time is a killer feature for all kinds of in-game debugging; I've used it in Unreal before, but didn't realise Doom 3 had it. Nice find! I've found slow motion very useful for checking out animation glitches, etc.

Somewhat ironic that one of the nominees is essentially a Doom 3 remake. Some seriously massive bias there for sure. Just the nature of the ModDB audience I guess. Most highly-moddable games are shooters, so a site centred around mods will naturally attract more shooter fans than fans of other genres.

We're not experts on this particular problem. We don't know what causes it, so we can't know what the most likely solution is. Sorry. Trust me when I say that if we could help, then we would.

Give the trillion dollars to me, I'll go sit near a dock with a camcorder and watch the ships disappear over the horizon. And then I'll write a paper about it and be in all the newspapers.

I agree it makes very little sense to go to all the trouble of adding a user toggle and making sure it works properly and so on. Voiceovers are an integral part of the experience created by a mission author, why would anyone ever want to switch them off? And of course the mission author has full control over them since they'd all be manually placed and triggered in levels.

noclip lets you fly through walls and other solid objects, so it's useful if you get stuck in level geometry and can't free yourself.

That roadmap is misleading as it isn't properly maintained - not all tasks are tracked on the bug tracker, and the tasks that are there are not necessarily required for a release. The team still has some packaging issues to sort out, and then there's testing and such. No ETA yet.

tdmlauncher wasn't working quite as well as intended with Steam on release. I fixed that internally a few weeks ago, so it should be fixed in version 1.01 (assuming the team remembers to ship a new tdmlauncher.exe).

I definitely agree on Moon, but completely disagree on Avatar and District 9. All three totally knocked my socks off, mostly for different reasons. If you're watching Avatar for the plot, of course you're going to be disappointed. The plot is really not the point. The visuals are utterly spectacular, and watching the final battle scene in 3D gave me an eyegasm. It helps if you sit close to the screen (or see it on a MASSIVE screen) so it fills your entire field of vision. And I say that as someone who normally doesn't care for explosionfests. The recent Terminator movie (the first one; I didn't bother with the sequel) had me yawning during the "climax".

Somewhat off-topic, but my work PC (running 64-bit Vista) has 12 GB of main memory, compared to my home computer's 2 GB. When I discovered this I was all like "OMGWTFBBQ". It's a beast. I have no idea how one can even use that much memory at once.

@Haplo: Oh, right. I forgot about that. Shouldn't be any technical problems then (although you may need to change the audio format, I don't imagine Thief 1/2 reads OGGs). @Melan: Perhaps. I'm always wary of second-guessing the legal system, personally. But if you want to rely on that assumption, that's your call/funeral.

The CC-BY-NC-SA Unported 3.0 licence used for most TDM art assets allows you to use them for other stuff for free, subject to the specified conditions (do read them, they're important). However, it's possible that it may not be compatible with the EULAs for various games. Best to check the EULA first. If in doubt, avoid. Note that TDM assets may not be suitable for use in Thief 2, at least not as-is, because all TDM models and textures use normal maps and specular maps, which Thief 2 doesn't support. So textures will look flat unless you bake the normals into the diffuse texture first (which is possible). @Melan: The issue as I understand it is that the T2 EULA requires you, as a modder, to assign copyright of your mods to some third party (probably LGS or their publisher originally; I'm not sure if that transfers to Eidos now or not, but probably safest to assume that it does). You are not allowed to assign copyrights you don't own, so it might be constituted as fraud or something on your part. I'm speculating here; IANAL, this is not legal advice, YMMV, take or ignore my advice at your own risk.

That's very cool. Nice work greebo.

Hehe... been there, perpetrated that. (Though not for TDM or Thief. And I did learn my lesson pretty quick, after getting feedback. Not doing that again!)

The somewhat hand-wavy explanation I've always heard is that it simplifies the maths (bit-shifting is a lot cheaper to implement in hardware than multiplication and division; pretty much free, in fact, just re-route some wires!) and memory management (banks of memory are always POT, for good reasons relating to hardware addressing schemes; so having POT data as well ensures ideal memory alignment and easy addressing with no wasted memory). Mipmaps is another good reason. NPOT textures were indeed not supported at all back in the day, though all decent graphics cards have supported them for many many years. Not sure about some Intels though. And they're still less efficient, even when they do work.

Player shadow is not supported, and body awareness is not planned. Getting either to work properly would take a lot of animation work. For example, consider TDM's advanced movement, like mantling onto surfaces of arbitrary height. You can't have a single animation for that. It wouldn't be impossible to animate but it would take a lot of very careful tweaking. Body awareness is very tricky to get right; just look at Thief 3 to see why. I'm sure nobody want's TDM's smooth movement to become that clunky overnight. Of course it can and has been done really well (Mirror's Edge being the obvious example), but you need significant time and resources which we just don't have.

Yeah, that's what I meant (re: lights). If you reckon this is the most efficient way to do it, be my guest. Happy to be proved wrong.

Alright, thanks for the advice everyone. I went ahead and ordered a Sennheiser HD 215 and a Sennheiser HD 228, since they were relatively cheap, got good reviews on Amazon, and are available from PC Case Gear (I've used them before, they're good and cheap). Will compare and see which one I like better, and a relative can pay for the other one. I grabbed a couple of cheap clip-on mics for $4 each as well. (There was a choice between $3.95 and $8.50. If they don't work out, doesn't matter at that price.)

OK, I see. In that case, I would say just use lights for that, unless you can get the checkboxes done really quickly.

I just don't see the point in going to all this trouble merely so players can manually check things off on a GUI. Firstly I'm not convinced that people will actually do it. Secondly, for the rare player that does want to, just make them use paper or something. (Real-life paper, I mean!) Having selection buttons and "currently selected" lights does 90% of what you're after with 10% of the effort. You could also set the light brightness to, say, 25% of normal when it turns "off", to indicate that it's a previously-visited state. While that doesn't allow players to manually track which drills they've actually completed (just started), it does provide an automatic approximation which should be close enough.

Sure you're not overthinking this? Why can't the player just look at a poster on the wall and track their own progress? It would be a lot easier and quicker to set up, leaving you free for other things.