STiFU

Interesting, I didn't know about that plasmonic antenna aproach so far. Aparently google didn't return anything usefull. The best hit was the plasmonic laser antenna with a wavelength of approximately 0,8µm, which would be pretty sucky for ICs. Do you have a paper of some sort about it? I've done some investigations and it apears like the current theoretical lower bound for the componentresolution is 5nm using the nano-imprint-lithography, which would be just one order of magnitude smaller than the current technology. But we'll see what time will bring...

From what I've heard Tomshardware is not impartial. So I wouldn't give too much about what they write. And about the lithography again, I am not an expert myself, but our professor told us, that the limit will be breached sooner than we think. There isn't much way left to go... But of course we haven't hit the limit 'till now, so you're right about Moore's Law.

I guess you are talking about the newly found basic electronic component called "Memristor". So far processors mostly consist of Transistors, which basically are just bi-directional voltage controlled switches. The Memristor also functions like that with the addition, that it can remember passed voltage-potentials somehow. (I don't know how it works exactly) This is said to be a great advance in technology because using this component a very big amount of storage capacity can be introduced directly to the processor, reducing RAM-access latencies and so on... This is the amateur explanation for what they are planning to do and I don't have any further information either. The practical limit you are talking about is also as good as reached with the current technology. The frequency of the processor is directly linked to the distance, which the electric signals have to travel. So we have to make our Chips smaller and smaller. This is were we'll hit the the limit, because in some creationprocesses light is used to build the structures and as soon as the size of the structures is in about the same scale as the wavelength of the light, diffraction prohibits accurate working. So if that Memristor thing doesn't work out, I guess it's up to the programmers to make better use of the potential of multicore systems, to make our computers faster...

Hey Stormbringer, DX 1 was fabulous indeed. But here is a quick hint for you: Don't destroy your good oppinion of the game by playing DX 2. It's actually a totally different game and a pure disappointment, if you wanted to play a real Deus Ex 2. Someone without any expectations might even consider the game to be good, but I can't see that. My gaming-spirit has been broken by that game and since then - like all the other realists here - I prefer to skip the ride on the disappointment train...

Agreed!

Well I didn't say the game was too hard. It was just too hard in the beginning 'cause I skilled wrong at first, but didn't wanna restart the whole thing. Later I even switched the difficulty to high and managed to rape the whole Citadel. In the end I really missed the challenge a little.

Austrian version of course: German + Violence! Especially in the high-budget-department of games you always got a really good localization. I also liked it in Bioshock or Oblivion for instance, but I don't make many friends with that oppinion I guess...

It actually uses Securom, which fucks around if you have daemon tools or similar installed. But you can hide those tools with YASU and you're ready to go. (I'd like to emphasize that this is no talk about cracking or anything. You just have to use that tool if you don't wanna uninstall your prefered dvd-emulation software)

A giant super-mutant? Where? I only saw those normal sized ones stronger than the regular super-mutants. I actually never realized a random spawn and my guess so far was, that the spawning is triggered after a couple of ingame days. The corpses are really lying around quite some time. There is a mission, where you're supposed to sneak in somewhere and plant a device without killing anybody(I'll keep it as general as possible). That was no problem at all because a few ingame days earlier, I already cleared that place out... Kinda sad, that the game didn't realize that, but well, nothing's perfect. Basically my only critique on that game is that you cannot do a quickjump to the actual game from the beginning. You always have to do the tutorial combined with answering a couple of questions like in oblivion and morrowind to define your character.

"Slow door-opening while creep", I like the sound of that. But combine it with the mousewheel technique like eigenface suggested and I'd perform a naked raindance for you! Free movement while slowly opening the door via mousewheel, triggered by simply holding creep during frob? -> Awesome!! This was also done very well in Splinter Cell, but in first person without bodyawareness you can't implement it that way, I guess.

I hardly watch any TV because of commercials and mostly crapy program, so I missed that spot. The link is down aparently but I just found a new one. Nice spot, considering it's Saturn we're talking about here. The commercials of that company are usually rather simple and seem to be adressed to rather simple people too... It's actually one of the companies I'd name first, if I were to give examples for bad marketing! But then again, I am not expert in this field, so I'll just shut up.

You could also just rely on us. After all, we're all thief fans, so we got a decent gaming-taste I guess...

Well as I already said, it's a lot better than oblivion, but not too well comparable to it. Basically the only thing both games have in common is the engine. The Roleplaying-system is different and the quests as well. In oblivion you mostly had smaller quests, but very many of them. Here you got really long questlines which can become very immersive, but on the other side, there apear to be too few. Altough it's possible I missed out on a bunch of them. Also there is some awesome action going on in this game. Totally worth buying. (I am trough too by now by the way) And for the hardcore players among us: A mod for disabling the questcopass (similar to oblivion) has already been released.

I had a blast when the first mini-nuke blew up in my face! The Scene when you go to GNR was simply awesome... =) I didn't finish the game so far though. I spent about two hours trying to get surround sound to run. With no success aparently...

Wow, I spent the last two days playing fallout 3 non-stop, but with little sleep and eat breaks of course. It's absolutely fabulous... I think bethesda learned a lot from the mistakes they did in oblivion. The fights are very intense and it's a nice level of difficulty. I must say though that I skilled a little wrong at first for my playstyle, but as I realized that I didn't want to start all over again. The only critic I have is that the controlls are clearly layouted for consoles and I hope there will soon be some interfacemods to get rid of that pipboy or at least create direct shortcuts to its submenus.

Yeah, you're right, the oldschool highlight is more powerfull, but if I were to choose, I'd still pick the (greyish-tweaked) TDS-method just for the visual effect... It looks awesome on unconscious/dead bodies and doors etc.

I also started with Thief 3, but I hated the default loot glint, whereas it was acceptable with John P.'s Texture pack. It was a little more subtle then... But I agree that it is not an option for The Dark Mod. After all, it's a PC game and let's just leave all that highlighting crap to the consoles. But I must say, that the frob highlight was very nice in T3. Sure, the color needed adjustment and toning down, what John P. also accomplished, but the idea was nice and it looks a little less boring than just lighting the whole object up. Why not put the normals to some use here?

Well the files are actually in the pk4, so you didn't need to create them manually again. But that still shouldn't cause the problem...

Since we are kinda on the loot-topic here, I found it really hard to tell the difference between loot and regular junk a couple of times, for instance the two greyish bottles in the Armory. I must admit though, that I always had this problem with the thief titles too, besides part 3 of course. Basically you had to learn what to loot by trial&error and that shouldn't be the main task of a stealthbased game. So it would be nice if you guys made it a little bit more obvious what kind of things are loot and which are not. I am not talking about a T3-glitter here, but either more specularity on loot or texturing consistancy(only gold,copper,silver,gems for loottextures) could be a solution.

Fraps worth!!

I have just been playing around with the bloom settings a little to find a setup suited for my sophisticated eyes. I found that lowering the r_gamma setting and raising the r_bloom_src_mult instead results in a better/different contrast. (I used values of 1 and 1.7) This of course is just a question of taste. The world is rendered a little bit more fable-like with this adjustment, but I think it really fits into the overall atmosphere.

Oh yeah, sorry, I am a little out of it today, but now I remember. It was a feature of the Maximum Graphic Mod. (Which looks astonishing by the way) The .vfp files are in place and the patch was correct too. I assume there's another .mtr file missing which defines the afx shaders. Edit: Darn, why do I always see your posts too late... The other .mtr files didn't exist indeed and it works now. I guess you should provide a seperate download for these files or alter the SaintLucia.exe . r_bloom was actually the first thing I tried, when launching the demo. Thanks for your help!

Still a black screen, but at least he finds those two textures I mentioned earlier. My Pc is still not finding the following files in the textures/afx folder: afxweight, afxmodulate, afxadd . I am running WinXP SP2 with a Geforce 8800 GTS here. I also had Bloom running on my previous install of doom 3 and in thief's den (I think). I just tried to enable it in base-doom3 and was pretty suprised to find out, that the command r_bloom didn't exist. I am going to download the patch your linking to and check out if the patch I had on my hdd is somehow corrupted.

I asked about the bloom in another thread too, because I am having a problem with it. When I enable it the screen turns black. The console says that textures are missing e.g. blurx1024, blury512. I patched Doom 3 to 1.3.1 number 1304. So everything should be fine. How come the textures are missing on my installation?

Wow, I wonder, why there is no such big hype as there was, when you guys released the first demo. This new one is just so much bigger, better, faster... Absolutely loving it! The Object rotation is (still) really good too. These days you just can't pull it off to make stuff like boxes etc a hud-item after you frobbed it, like the first post seemed to suggest. Realistic object manipulation was born in Trespasser and needs to live on. There is just one aspect, that no thief-title managed to succeed in so far and I hope you guys eventually will: The Inventory management. The Player's Invetory always ends up cluttered which consumes an unnecessary amount of playtime. Because of this, I always try to keep my Inventory as clean as possible and so I noticed that you can't drop any keys. This is just a minor issue, but I can't see any reason why TDM should disallow it. Also, the switching of inventory groups isn't working properly. Sometimes you still have the none-moving compass on the screen when browsing through your other items. The problem is gone after you browsed to the "hung up" item (the compass in this example). Anyway, the map was designed really well featuring an oblivion-like visual quality, but with better textures of course. I guess only HDR-rendering is missing now... (On this concern: What was the general deal about r_bloom again here?) Edit: Anyone got all the loot? I am still missing 500...