oDDity

No, I'm not just saying that games aren't a good storytelling medium, but that they shouldn't try to be. The full potential of the gaming medium had not been realised yet, and will not be for another 10-15 years. The one crucial element needed to achieve that true ongoing dynamic experience that games are perfectly, and uniquely, suited for, is exceptionally good AI. Basically human-like AI that can be interacted with in real time, on the fly, much as we might chat on IRC. In such a game, there would be no plot, no quests, no linear storytelling, but it's the AI's interaction with each other that create dynamic content in which things happen that the player can get involved in, much like reality. I believe that is the real potential of the gaming medium, it has nothing to do with plot or story, and it's actually small-minded to think of games as just a slightly different form movie, which is exactly what it has been used for. Well have to wait a while for it though.

Well I contend that it is inherent in the medium. Any medium where the person interacting with that medium is in charge of what's happening and free to do what they will, can't really tell you a story, and the problem is that if you suck control away from the player in order to really tell him that story, then it's not a true interactive game any more, and that's even worse. I hate games where you spend half the time looking at cutscenes and the other half being directed along a certain course by the plot. Games are just not an adequate storytelling medium, and if you force it to be, you're taking away the unique essence of what games are. The very point of a story is that it's one person telling another what happened. It's a fixed idea. You can't have that person interacting and messing with it while you're trying to tell it. Games have to be a different thing, an ongoing dynamic player-controlled experience, and that has little to do with storytelling.

I have played the demo. Same old, same old crap. Nothing to see here, move along please... The real sci-fi fans at the time hated Star Wars, and called it exactly that - cheap mass market space opera trash. It dragged the sci fi genre back 30 years, and spawned a plethora of cheap imitations, it made sci-fi massively popular, but dragged the general quality of it into the gutter. If Star Wars had been released as a book, it would have read exactly like a 40's Sci Fi yarn, published in Astounding Stories! or something. Cyberpunk was a backlash against that sort of Star Wars trash.

Ha! You're joking right? All the Star Wars plots were cheap, predictable, good guys win, space opera, mass market trash. Anyway, give me a list of games where the story isn't a silly, unbelievable ripping yarn, and I'll give you all my money.

Even I've played it (several years ago) I remember I actually finished it, which means I must have liked it.

I see plenty of ambient in those shadows already. Some of you guys need to adjust your monitors. And remember, at night there is virtually no ambient light anyway when you are dealing with moonlight and flames, which are basically point light sources.

"thanks for the info, judgind by the screenshots, I really thought it was just some mod for thief 3. They really nailed the look. I just hope all the thief 3 levls will be done soon." These are the sort of retards he hangs out with apparently.

No, I know quite a few american accents. Probably 6 or 7. As well as the ones you mention, There's a distinct West coast one I think, a Maine-area accent, and there's a weird one from around the North East coast area, where they say things like 'duh instead of 'the', or 'day-er' instead of 'there', and there's a clear difference between real southern drawl accents and one from a place like Missouri. I don't think there is big marked difference in accents everywhere you go in the US though, it's generally quite subtle. In the UK you only have to travel 50 miles to get a completely different sound. Ebonics is not a term used by linquists. Interestingly, the sound of black speech in the US is most heavily influenced by various regional British accents. It's simply a very weak form of creole.

I've never heard either of those before, or any such outrageous spelling, even div kids in remedial classes where I live had a greater grasp of the written word than that - anyone spelling as badly as that would have to be genuinely dyslexic, so you've no right to by annoyed by it, and furthermore, you're living in the US, where institutional butchering of the English language, both spoken and written, is already rife. I don't think you can legitimately complain about such things . Isn't your first amendment, or one of them (they're all pretentious nonsense, since they clearly mean freedom for you to walk all over every one else as long as you're OK yourselves) include freedom of speech, which can be interpreted as freedom to spell whatever damn way you want? Hooray for American independence!

It's a way of using the phrase without actually swearing or blaspheming. Another substitute is 'For goodness sake' It's like say heck instead of hell.

Well, you only spend about half your sleep time in REM anyway, so you still get plenty of rest, and also, you dream 5 or 6 different dreams per night, so you only control one of them, say at the end of the night when the REM period lasts longer (up to an hour). As for being lame because you know it's not real - well, it is real in a sense, to your brain it's the same deal, you can touch taste smell etc just as in real life. After all, you interactions with the world are all dealt with internally by the brain anyway, you experience of the world IS your brain, it takes external stimuli and then translates them into your senses. For example, if you can imagine being scared strongly enough, your brain reacts in the same way as if you were really scared, and releases the same hormones etc. Your brain really doesn't know the difference between thoughts and external reality.

So which technique do you use?

It's only easier because that's what you're used to. Americans have big problems understanding many spoken accents other than their own. Take the many differing accents from around the UK. I can understand them all easily, because I'm used to them from TV shows over the years. So if it was normal for people to write in their accents, we'd all be used to it, and it'd be as easy as reading in this generic, uniform way. Think of it like reading a novel, where some characters speak in a strong accent, so the author actually types in those accents. One major americanism you left out of your spelling there was changing mid-word t's to d's. 'Fonedicalee' 'bedder' (better)

The method I'm going to practice is WILD I think we've all woken up thinking we've heard a loud noise, but that is actually part of the hypnopompic and hypnagogic stages of going in and out of conciousness. And we've all experienced sleep paralysis, which is also a normal part of dreaming, since if your brain did not 'switch off' your voluntary motor functions, you'd perform the same action in real life as in the dream. The only part of you that does that, are you eyes, and some trained lucid dreamers can communicate with researchers while they are actually dreaming by using eye movement signals. So, there's no point using that technique when you first go to sleep at night, it should be used when you wake up in the night from REM sleep, and then when you fall asleep you will go straight back into REM. Techniques for remaining in the lucid state longer: I've had quite a few that I can remember actually, without trying. Perhaps 6 in the last few years. I do generally tend to use them for nefarious purposes of course, since there's not really much you can do that's constructive in a dream, and you dont' have much time.

Anyone get them? I had one last night, and used it to fly around my neighbourhood like Superman - except better, since I could float through walls like a ghost as well. The only problem is they tend not to last very long, since you tend to wake up as soon as you realise you're dreaming. It'd be great to be able to induce them at will, but it's a very difficult technique to master. I've been reading up on some techniques no wikipedia which I'm going to practice.

Well, as long as it's a comedy, anything goes.

As different as that was from regular english, I could read and understand it fine, and of course, the point is, that if you did it all the time, people would get used to it. It's interesting that it's more difficult for you to type in your own accent that to type some generic spellings. But of course, you don't have to type every word phonetically, just the smaller pronouns and prepositions are enough to give it some character, because even people who have no accent would have to change a lot of spellings if they started to write phonetically. No one speaks english the way it is written.

We would understand one another as well as if we were speaking in real life, and that's enough. In practice, context takes care of most ambiguities. Even if you would just type 'ze' instead of 'the' and 'und' instead of 'and' (though phonetically it should be 'unt' I suppose)and swap your 'v' and 'w' around, it would make things more interesting. I like accents. Incidentally, my accent would read quite a lot like the way dwarves speak in fantasy games, since a Northern Ireland accent is quite a bit like Scottish accent. 'I'll punch yer face in ye twat'

As I keep pointing out, how the spoken word is written is an entirely arbitrary invention. The idea that you actually get annoyed or irritated because things aren't being written down exactly as you were taught in school, is laughable. I think people should start writing phonetically according to their accent, instead of this boring uniformity. Imagine how boring it would be if everyone's voice sounded exactly the same.

? Is this some in-joke that only geeks get?

Well, I guess it's a cultural thing, it certainly isn't a normal one in the UK. Anyone with a name like that would regularly get the shit kicked out of them in school

Hard to tell much from such a short trailer, but it looks slick enough from that fleeting glimpse. I don't hold with the basic fantasy concept that Death decides how people die though, since it excludes any possibility of free will, and that's a no, no. What did you do in this production? You're not Don Bitters III are you? That's possibly the most pretentious name I've ever heard, but then, I suppose that's what the entire Hollywood movie industry is about, so it should serve you well.

The same thing also happens in fantasy novels. There will be some evil magic which seems unstoppable, but at the last minute, someone will find a new bit of magic or ancient artefact lying around, which will counter the evil magic, or discover that the dark lord has some weak spot which no one noticed before. That's the nature of entertainment. Of course, the reason for this is very simple - the sort of people who are capable of writing really intelligent satisfying plots, do not waste their lives doing so. It's generally people who are as thick as pig shit who end up writing stories..

The only people worse that people who make these mistakes, are grammar nazis like yourselves of course. How a spoken language gets written down is entirely arbitrary, and only about 200 of the 6000 languages in the world even have a written form, yet we're all expected to stick to whatever (quite often illogical and unintuitive) method of writing that's been handed to us, which is largely because the spoken word changes far more rapidly than the written word.

The subtle, but common mistake I was referring to was the contraction 'there's'. 'There's (there is) going to be 3' can be used in certain contexts, such as confirmation, but people generally write 'there's (there is) going to be 3' when the correct grammar should be 'there are going to be 3'. 'There is' and 'there are' are not always interchangeable (unless you're a black character from a 1920's movie set in the American deep south )but since there is no contraction for 'there are', people get lazy.