oDDity

Think yourself lucky. Now imagine you're a nurse in a medical center, and you get those same smelly, diseased 'dregs of society' shuffling in, but now you have to strip them and touch them in intimate places.

It's caused by a build up of lactic acid in you muscles.

Well, that's all employment is really. You are literally selling your mind and body to someone for a certain number of hours per week for a set amount of money.

Trying to make customers spend as much money as possible. Pretty standard practice in any retail industry. It is a business after all, and there's no room for conscientious objectors - just because you watched 'Supersize Me' doesn't mean you can get all uppity about company policy.

Ahh, the joys of being self-employed... I would never work in, or even eat in, any franchised outlet. However, since such rudimentary, repetitive low paid jobs (which could literally be done by a simple robot) are only for those without the skills or qualifications to get anything better, you can hardly blame the management for treating the staff like imbeciles. Once you get skills and qualifications in whatever it is you're studying, then you can get a job which has some serious decisions for you to make. That's really all payscales are. Company directors get paid more than the rest of the staff combined, because the decisions they have to make are more important then anyone else's, and a mistake could cost the company millions.

Well, not really. The Dark engine managed to work around that. The only Thief game with real shadows was shit. Anyway, fuck the Source engine, if we were going to move the project anywhere, it would be to the quite amazing upcoming Crysis engine.

Well then, the question is why does windows uses such sloppy hashes. Reading up on that link to wikipedia, apparently it's becasue windows doesn't use 'salts', which means that rainbow tables don't work.

I suppose it's like that idea of putting one coin on the first square of a chessboard, 2 one the next, 4 on the next, etc. It doesn't sound like much, but by square 64 it adds up to more money than there is in the world. OF course people don't use quality passwords. Never random. They're usually dictionary words, names of pets, birthdays etc. They want to make it easy to remember, but therefore it is a lot easier to guess. Still, I just found is surprising that they could get virtually all passwords in a few seconds with that program.

Why has a bow aiming gizmo suddenly appeared?

I was just wondering (in the general direction of you maths gurus) what the chances are of guessing a password (say you have some sort of program to do the guessing for you) What you know is that the characters in it could be anything on the standard keyboard and it could be anywhere from 6-64 characters in length. Say in this case the password is 24 characters long and just random letters, digits and symbols. Even if it billions to one, surely a dedicated app can run though millions of combinations a minute, so it should eventually be guessed, right? There's this password cracker app on sourceforge for example "Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman's original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds." 99.9% of passwords in seconds?

Adding on to my previous post, the worst reasons for doing anything are: 1 - It's traditional 2 - It's what people expect 3 - x game did it like that Sums up the current shambles of a games industry, which consists entirely of about 6 game ideas being endlessly repeated with slightly better graphics each time. That's also a perfect description of the current Dark Mod of course...

Well, it's an easy solution to that. You can still have a final objective of 'get to exit point', but when you get to the exit point, the map doesn't have to auto-end. The only reason for doing that is tradition, and thats' the worst reason or doing anything. This is to make sure the player isn't being chased by AI when they reach the exit area, and are therefore using it as an exploit. The player should have to get to the exit, and then leave the map when they choose. The mission is only counted as complete when you exit. Exiting the map or loading should be disabled when AI are chasing you. If you get spotted, you should be forced to escape or die.

Come on, polarisation was never your style. You surely remember the loot objective from Thief? The very discrete 'objective complete' text that came up on the bottom of he the screen, accompanied by a loot-like chime? That's all that's needed to say 'mssion complete' as well. There's no need to make a song and dance about it, a separate screen flashing up a neon MISSION COMPLETE!!! YOU DA MAN!!!' sign, with a horde of angels singing a chorus of 'hallelujah'. (two can play at that game) Mappers should not just throw in a 'get to a x area as your last objective' as a matter of course. Only if they actually put some thought into it, such as the Life of the Party ending, so then it's actually worth doing and a serious part of the mission. That's very rarely the case. I can assure you that the majority of people who've played Thief, blackjack the crap out of anything that moves, and quite a high percentage play it like a bow and arrow shooter. Ghosters are by far the minority.

It doesn't say much I didn't already know, but it's obvious to anyone who's every watched any war documentaries that the Japs were total fanatics and nurtured to be psychopaths. Those facts and figures at the bottom of that page about the Japs are pretty startling. I remember one other thread here when someone was talking about rape simulation computer games which are freely available in Japan. Of course, we all know Stalin killed more people than the Nazis anyway, and was as bad as Hitler, whether there had been a war or not, but you can't blame people for allying with Russia in the circumstances. Russia did not show any sins of aggression before the war, but it gave them a great chance and they took it.

Yes, there's lots of little mannerisms that could be included randomly in the s/r system, none of which you would see very often. (though the lack of real fingers on the guards obviosuly reduces the rude gestures they're capable of by at least 2) Also there's talking gestures which can be used while the AI are in conversation, though this would have to be for scripted events only. Anyone who's played Gothic will have seen the sort of gestures I'm referring to.

If you had a city watch captain patrolling around a building, and so he was passing the same city guard repeatedly, then it would not make sense to see a salute every time, but that's the point of setting up the random parameter in the s/r, so you would have quite a low chance of ever seeing a salute. The salute would also have an appropriate bark, such as 'good evening, sir', 'good evening, my lord/lady' etc. However, I can modify that one from a salute into a 'standing up straight' animation. It would make sense for a slouching guard (and their default idle posture is a slouch) to stand up straight every time a superior comes near. It'd also be great to time it to a bark from a superior saying 'you there! stop slouching!', and then he straightens up to attention. This sort of arbitrary interaction between the AI is essential to breath life into the world, otherwise they're just bots patroling around.

Not on an individual basis, but it's certainly crystal clear who the good and bad sides were in WW2, and that's what he means. In recent wars it's not so clear, but then it's never clear what the true motivations of the US army (or rather, the politicians that tell it who to kill) are.

What's the difference. When you have to make it to a certain area to end the mission, you are also magically whisked away to safety, even if you are trailing 10 guards behind you. The only map where I remember this idea working well, was Life of the Party, where they actually added more guards looking for you on the way back, thereby making it a different challenge. Normally, you just have to retrace your steps, back through the same map with the same guards, and let's face it, most people play the game by blackjacking everything in sight anyway, so they're just running back through an empty map to get to some arbitrary area so they can finish the mission. 99 times out of 100 it's not a real objective with any meat on it, just like the stupid loot gathering objective.

Can't you read Sparhawk? I said TWICE that it would be for regular guards to salute their superior officers, which is perfectly realsitic. I wasn't suggesting we should have spiders saluting every time they walk past a belcher. If you guys are all going to start animating now, then do different models. There's no point everyone working on the city watch guard, since I'm doing a complete set for him, and they can mostly be shared with the other regular guard types. We need female ones, some builder ones, some for the elite guards types, some archer ones, some for the general public, etc All of those sets need not only some specific animations of their own forthe specific group, but even individual charcaters. I see 5 animators looking for something to do here now, so those groups could all have their own sets of the basic anims like walking and idles as well. What have all your animators been doing in the 18 months since I've been away? There's currently about 6 usable animations in the game as far as I can see.

I dont' see what's strange about a city watch guard saluting a superior officer on any map, or a builder guard saluting the inqusitors (though the priests would probably bow) Interaction between the AI is always nice to see, and this is one simple way of adding it.

Hip movement only comes from either weight shifting in the legs, or torso rotation, but as I say, neither of these things is required to simply raise your hand to your neck. Anyway, a lot of these idles can be played only on the torso channel over the base_idle.

I thought it could be used in some stim/response way for when an elite guard passes by a regular guard.

Rhohipnol?

I'm careful about how much torso movement I include, because it's hip and shoulder movement that make a walk take on personal characteristics, such as arrogance or grooviness or jauntiness. Your walk I think has too much side to side swing (and that swing seems totally linear in nature) and is too floaty, due to no real dip when the front foot contacts, which considering the big macho strides that are being taken, should be considerable. The root of that problem is that the legs never straighten out. GIMG pointed out the IK pop in my legs, but at least that means they do straighten before the drop, and you get a sense of weight. I don't think the pop will be noticeable in-game. I prefer to err on the side of a pop, and thus, straight leg, than a Groucho Marx gait. No hip or leg movement, or weight shifting, is required for such a move. It's not necessary to make every action a big theatrical performance. If I have the fbx file, I should be able to use any animation on the new rig. HEre's a Salute

There's one in Thief like that though, which looks a bit weird as well, because you only shade your eyes like that in bright light, but to keep the Thief vibe, the choice is there to use it, or use a more normal one like this with no raised hand. Peer