oDDity

I only have my sister and her kids as reference, they annoy and fight with one another all the time, and drive her mental. I don't mind visiting, but I seriously couldn't put up with 5 kids running around the house all day, making noise, breaking things, and generally getting into mischief and annoying me.

Of course there's a difference. The difference is that the urge TO HAVE KIDS it's not instinctual, since it did not develop in animals. It's a human construct, and a very confused one. Of course there are many purely practical reasons for having kids, such as using them as cheap labour, this was a very big boon in the past, using them to cement alliances, or ensure property and wealth are kept in families (marring cousins was almost ubiquitous until relatively recently) using them to look after you when your old, etc And of course, also until relatively recently, kids were almost expected to die before adulthood anyway, so if you were doing it for emotional reasons, you were likely to be in for a big disappointment. They had to pop the things out on a production line just to make sure a few made it to age 16. Between being fucked and giving birth, women were never off their backs.

I don't think it's reasonable to compare the urge to have sex, which is an easy and immediate pleasure, to an apparent 'urge' to have children - something which won't happen for 9 months and then causes 15 years of responsibility and expense for you. As I said before, the reason sex is pleasurable is to entice people to do it, and therefore have children as a result. If there was an instinctual urge to have children, then sex wouldn't need to be pleasurable, people would do it anyway to get the babies they crave. Remember these things developed in animals, and they aren't aware that having sex causes babies, they just do the sex because it's an instinct they have no control over. Once the babies are born, THEN the mother has an instinct to look after them, but she does NOT have an instinct to have them in the first place, the sexual urge takes care of that part, and is all that's needed. Humans are aware that sex cause the babies, but you are confusing the fact that when some women see a baby they go all gooey, with the idea that they have an irresistible urge to have them.

Like I said, evolution doesn't apply to humans any more. We could just hire people from poor countries as incubators for our fertilised eggs, until we invent a mechanical womb to grow them in. More and more people don't even look after their kids once they have them, they hire other people to do it. And that is exactly my point. Our intellect easily overrides any instincts we have. We can choose whether to do things or not, we don't just do what we're programmed with, like animals, and now that women have a choice, they are choosing with their cerebral cortex, not their hypothalamus.

Just seems a bit weird to be 'upgrading' to XP for the first time, now that it's 7 years old and being phased out, like those people who were still using windows 98 in 2004. Vista is a better OS than XP, but you do need a decent system to run it.

No, the full thing. There's nothing to it. Save all your save game/config files etc from apps and games, restart, f8 to bios, set your Cd drive to boot first and HD 2nd, insert your windows CD, restart, it boots form the Cd, there are a lot of obvious questions it asks, you just delete the current partition, make a new one and format it (NTFS full, not quick) takes about 15 mintes, it reboots and windows starts to load (have your Cd key handy, unless your sing a pirate copy with no key needed), the whole thing takes about 30-40 mins, and another couple of hours to reload all your games/apps and adjust your settings how you liek them. The only essential device driver yo uneed is the one for your modem, but you should have that on a disc anyway. Anything else can then be downloaded, including motherboard drivers. sound/video card etc You end up with a computer as fast and responsive as they day you bought it. Oh, and obviously make a backup of your windows disc to make sure it's all readable. My current setup of vista was more complicated than that because I have two HDs and had to set up RAID 0 and a dual boot of Vista 64 and 32, but even that turned out to be quite simple. It's always a lot more simple that you think it's going to be.

DOn't know why you make such a big deal out of it. I reinstall every few months. It's not that much of a pain. At least I used to with XP, but it doesn't seem necessary with Vista so far. Why didn't you just go with Vista, instead of installing a and 6 year old OS. Vista is very stable, I haven't had a crash or blue screen since I installed months ago, and I'm a heavy duty user, you can run Thief, even on 64 bit. The only problem is with the latest nvidia cards and drivers making the textures a bit ugly, but it's not a vista problem.

Ha, I've met more than you little nerdlinger programmers, that's for sure, and they do not all gush and drool over babies. You're the one throwing the misogynistic stereotypes around. Now that women have a real choice in the matter for the first time in history, a large number of them choose not to have kids, and most of the diminishing number who do, make an intellectual decision, not an instinctual one.

No, that argument works for animals, but not for humans. We deal on a slightly more intellectual level of reasoning than 'aww, isn't it cute, look at it's ickle fingers and toes, I think I won't leave it to die after all'.

That's not true. In the past, sex is the reason people had kids, that's an irresistible enticement for males, and it's generally not tied to a desire to have kids. Kids were an inevitable result of that. You really think women in the past had a choice of who they married or when they were fucked? The other reasons when society evolved a little more were intellectual - economics, inheritance rights etc. Contraception has not been around long, and since it has, society has also been smart enough to know that need new generations of kids, so even if we all were programmed to find babies repugnant, we would still have introduced baby factories where people do it as a grisly job.

I don't know why people make such a big deal out of it these days. Humans alone have managed reproduction billions of times over the millennia - even slugs and cockroaches manage to do it perfectly every time. Women prattle on about how great it is being pregnant as if they are the first person ever to do it. All they are is a incubator. They could be in a coma for the whole pregnancy and the baby would still grow, that's of how little importance they are in what is an entirely automatic process.

The current mitten hands will have to be replaced, because they look terrible. There's no point compromising quality THAT much just to save a few polys. Of course the eariler ones were too high, but we can go for something in the middle. It's won't require re-animaitng everything, as long as we have al the aims in original fbx format, they can be easily applied to the re-rigged models. As for the boots, I'm be scaling the boots down on my models, because some of them are too big, and changing the proportions of the model in general, to something more like this. OF course, that doesn't mean a nobleman would be the same proportions as a guard in full armour.

Usually because their opponents are carefully chosen. Boxing is all abut bluff and hype. It's more realistic than wrestling, but not much.

You still need some variation in hue on that texture. Redder around the cheeks and nose, and greener around the beard area. It can be quickly done in photoshop. It's the tanned skin, cropped blonde hair and blue eyes that's making him look more like a perfect aryan and panzer division Oberleutenant. Not that a noble man couldn't have looked like that, but you need to caricature these guys slightly to what people expect them to look like.

There's nothing really wrong, your head modeling has improved a lot since the last time you were here. The tip of the nose is very pointed and the bottom too flat, and the diffuse map is perhaps too uniform, basically the same tan colour all over. Nobles would be very white, not tanned. A tan was not something people wanted in those days, it was only for the scum who had to work for a living.

Arachnophobia IS a joke, and an easily cured one. Do something about it, instead of expecting others to tip-toe around you.

Depends where you're from. I don't agree with that wiki article. In the UK we refer to people from India and thereabouts as Asians, while in the US 'Asian' includes chinese/japanese etc. IF you were to say 'oriental' in the UK, everyone would think you were referring to China. I'm rather bored with this stringent political correctness, and having to use the exact 'officially designated' words for someone or something, or otherwise you're a vicious racist. Are people really that easily offended? If you'd called someone from Africa 'black' in the 60's they'd have been offended by it, but now you can't use any other term. Who decides these things anyway? It all seems rather arbitrary to me.

Inventing a new language is surprisingly easy. Almost anyone could do it really. The difficult part is getting others to use it.

Please. You really think the bigwigs at EA don't have a lot of influence at crytek as regards sequels and franchise etc? Once you hook up with a massive publisher like EA, you can no longer be called independent. This industry, like any other, is all about money, not quality.

Of course it is. EA has taken over now remember, and they'll want to milk it for every last penny. Why release one long game, when you can make three times as much by releasing 3 short games.

Yes, I think it should certainly be at least manslaughter if you bully someone so much that they kill themselves because of it.

Of course others can be blamed for a suicide. Victims of bullying often end up killing themselves, and the bullies are certainly responsible. People say it's the coward's way out, but I think it's actually a very brave thing to actually go though with it. You either have to be totally mental or have a lot of guts. You have to draw a distinction between suicide attempts and actual suicides. In the former case, the people aren't really trying to kill themselves, just seeking attention.

The Thief model seems to be missing his normals maps. Great work on the galleon though. I kind of started one fro my warehouse map, but never finished it. The problem here is more that the thief always has his back to the camera, which suggests 3rd person quite strongly. You can show the Thief model without making it look like 3rd person.

Yeah but imagine if this was an online shooter, and it was you against everyone else. You couldn't last more than 5 minutes against real experienced players (the enemies are supposed to be trained soldiers after all) That's what it would be like to play against totally realistic AI. Unless you have powers 100x better than theirs, which is ludicrous, or only ever meet them one or two at a time, which is equally ludicrous. You'd basically need to be a futuristic supersoldier going in against cavemen armed with sticks and stones. Certainly you cant have the typical 'one man against an army' shooter if all the AI have realistic intelligence.

You may as well learn Sindarin or Klingon.