STiFU

Yeah, and I guess it takes a whole lot of tweaking and testing to make it look right. Sure, this feature had to come eventually but I am still amazed that those guys managed to implement it already. I mean, what else do we need now regarding ingame-physics? The only thing I can think of is proper liquid simulation (like big oceans and authentic watersplaters/-falls and stuff), but maybe DMM will also be capable of that in the end... That being said, I am assuming there woun't be very many new developments in the physics-department anymore, but instead ragdolls will be apllied to many more objects and more forces will be introduced, like wind and leaves of a tree. What do you think?

Oh yeah, I just had a quick look at it, so I must have overseen that Euphoria and DMM are for different purposes. Anyway, Euphoria is awsome as well...

Yeah the Euphoria physics-engine. Saw some awsome stuff of that one. You should also check out the indy jones videos. I saw a man on a hanging bridge trying to balance it. AWSOME!!

You forgot to mention, it's also a 2d-platform jump'n'run (DOS-game). I prefered sticking to singleplayer with that game though, because switching between the chars was awkward with always one player blocking one (random) char. It would've been a lot better if it was three-player-coop. Since we are offtopic here now anyway, has anyone of you played a little bit of Splinter Cell in coop? I really loved it, although my step-bro's gaming style and mine weren't quite compatible. He's only playing shooters so I had to cool him down very often!! Gears of War worked a lot better with him, of course. That game can be pure fun too, if you let it get to you and don't be too picky. The gfx just rock, but the gameplay is basically just arcade shooting.

Three vikings? You can only talk about the fabulous Lost Vikings 1 and 2. Those three were the heroes of my childhood! But waiting for your partner to revive you, or waiting for your partner to free you from jail makes no difference to me, only that the jail is much more realistic and creates bigger immersion again. Great idea! About thievery, I tried it with another thief fan on a lan once, but we didn't manage to do any shit! It was way too hard at that time and I normally also semi-ghost thief FMs on expert. With the guards always runnig around (and never walking), you have to stay away from them in a much bigger radius. Blackjacking was impossible to us. Maybe we were just too tired, I don't know. I'd like to see a pro play that mod though.

Hehe, good one! ;D When it comes to respawning I prefer the "Gears of War"-way, where you have to run to your parnter to revive him and if you don't manage to do so in time the game is over. The time has to be a lot longer than in average shooters, because levels in thief are much bigger and the players should be alowed to split up as far as they wish. This concept is not very realistic too, but much more than simple respawning and it also makes gameplay more immersive.

Yeah, for a (non-shooter-)game to be coop it needs real coop features, which worked perfectly in the coop maps for Splinter Cell. There are no coop features in thief 2, but that doesn't mean it woun't be fun at all to play it all the way through together. It really depends on the players. If you do a little teamplay, it will be interesting, but if you end up following your partner most of the time it will become boring. There is enough room for teamplay on thief maps, because they are so unlinear. Anyway, I don't think it will be finished either, but it's still interesting and astonishing that someone made an attempt in finishing Thief 2's netcode.

Hilarious, just hilarious! I don't get it oDD. Some of your posts are very good and I totally agree with them and if not they are at least based on rational explanations (which I must admit is the case in most of your posts), but then sometimes it seems like you just have to be a rebell and strike out against the majority to show everyone how odd you actually are. I know you don't care what people think about you, but it seems a bit like you never tried to be gentle... Maybe you'd like it or the results of it. Anyway, grats and good luck in your future career, GIMG.

Yeah, I had somehow overseen Gildoran's explanation, but thanks again. I know from quake 3 how those mirrors work. I remember one time, we played one of my q3-maps online and somebody said "Wow nearly the whole level is rendered twice, that is bad!". Well, I had a couple of mirrors on the floor of some strafepads and the level was openair... But by that time it was already totally possible to create such a performance killer. Only on really slow machines it didn't run very well, but then they could just disable the skybox ingame and it was a lot smoother already, since I used a very big skybox.

I am running a quadcore here myself (q6600 2,4GHz) and Crysis clocked at about 12 to 19 fps (+/- 5 fps in worst- and bestcase-szenarios) under Vista and full detail at a resolution of 1680x1050, so my GTS apears to be slower than your GTX. =)

WHUT?! That's totally new to me. From what I have read so far, the 9800 gx 2 will be 40 % faster than the 8800 ultra at much (!!!) lower costs. Please post some of those reviews, because I was going to buy that card as soon as it's released here. My GTS is way too slow. I was looking forward to crysis so much and I was really pissed that it didn't run properly, so I have to buy a new card... Edit: Forgot to mention that there are also problems with the xp-driver for the GTS (vista drivers work though). The scaling does not work properly, so that I can only play in my screen's naturaly resolution, without stretching. So in the end, the GTS isn't that much of a runner...

I don't know whether it's a fact or just an urban-myth, but it's said that the 8800 GT is working better on lower resolutions and since you are going to buy a 22'' widescreen the GTS would be more suitable. I can't imagine though, that this is true. Anyway, waiting for the 9800 GX2 would be the best way to go at the moment, because it's also going to be cheap and faster than the 8800 ultra (while remaining cheaper than that GPU).

Best wishes from Dortmund.

Ah I see. But I still don't think that HDR would be useless! You can realise much more with it than just bloom and it always makes every game look an inch more realistic (if it isn't overused).

Yup, they "stole" the style from TF 2 and the idea of a free shooter from ID (quake zero). EA actually only confirms my oppinion about them. They always follow the mainstream...

The only advantage of the source engine is the HDR-rendering I think. On that thought, I wonder why nobody ever introduced proper HDR to Doom 3. I mean, they also implemented relief-mapping, so why not HDR. I guess it's impossible, because I only saw a few fake-HDR mods for Doom 3 which use the bloom and some other things, but nothing special. But hey, I played a couple of alphas/betas and most of them didn't run as smooth as the final product. (Not even close) So I wouldn't worry about that. Besides, when you guys will finally have finished TDM, everyone has a supercomputer with 20 Ghz at home and can easily play it...

It still looks awsome!! Very nice. I can't remember anything similar in any other game so far besides water surfaces of course. Or I just never looked out for it.

... as well as in Quake 3. =)

Looks ok. It takes a bit until you get uv-mapping right. But once you've learned it's done much faster, while still being annoying!!! The best thing is to add a normal uv-mask before that fits your model the best way (e.g. a cuboid or a cylinder) and tweak the uvs manually in the unwrap editor afterwards.

It's an RPG... I played it quite a bit actually. But I lost the interest. All my friend considered it to be awsome though, so my advice to everyone would be to give it a try. Maybe it's just me having a weird gaming-taste... =)

I didn't like it at all somehow. I don't know why. I like RPGs and I like Star Wars, but to me KOTOR was boring...

Wow, first time it's not "Unstoppable" to announce a release! ^^ I guess I am going to check out NOMBZ. Thanks for the news.

Don't consider my suggestion to be serious. It was just fun. But everyone can add the reliefmapping by himself, only with those generated heightmaps, so I wanted to know how to combine multiple rendertechniques.

Sparhawk: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilo

Since the ambiet-fix washes out the normals, why not settle over to heightmaps and use reliefmapping instead?? It's not that intensive actually, but still it won't run on most machines of course. I tried it in vanilla Doom 3. It didn't look very good, because the heightmaps were just generated from the normalmaps, which can be incorrect, but not neccessarily and also it looks really awkward from the sides, because there is nothing similar to uv-mapping, so the texture is stretched if you look at a surface from the side. But since a professional is here: how could I combine two interaction.vfp files, say your ambient-fix and one that comes with reliefmapping?