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Where is BT lately? I thought he was back a while ago but I haven't seen him post on any of these topics. I was kind of hoping he'd be able to do #2 and #5. Solis, do any of these look like they're something you could handle?

About as long as us afaik

How long have they been working on this?

I just browsed Doom3world and there I found this sad news: http://sapphirescar.marsmodule.com/forums/...opic.php?t=1652 Well, the link is to the SS forum, but I found it on D3world first, in case you are wondering. Saphire Scar announced that they will stop production on their mod, which means that yet another one of the big mods is down.

I have purchased a plasma 42" and I'm very satisfied with it. Can't say that it lacks contrast (1:10000) and we will see how long it last. Ufnrotunately I didn't manage to hook up my computer on it. I can only connect it via the normal VIDEO OUT connection which has quite a crappy quality for the desktop. It supports also VGA standard, but somehow it doesn't work and I have to figure out whats wrong. On the other hand, for games it's absolutely amazing. I was running Need for Speed 2 on that screen and it's really a great experience on such a big screen. The conputer that I connected it to was only intended for movie viewing, so it is not really suitable for games. That's why I choose NFS2 because it's older and run well on that machine. After seeing how it feels to play on it, I really consider to move a better machine there. I wonder how it is to play Prey on such a screen. Incidently, we have a movie theater here in the town and they set aside one of the theaters for PC gaming. So you can play there on the movie screen for about 3 Euro per hour with an high-end machine. Currently they are reconstructing but when it is finished I defintely want to go there and see for myself. If you are only watching it's free so I can take a look and see how it is.

Regardless of what you may think of his parenting skills, Steve contributed more to conservation than any individual in history. He made millions form his show, and every cent he made he used to buy up vast tracts of wilderness in several countries, set up a foundation to protect wildlife in perpetuity, and educated about 500 million viewers about the virtues of creatures many people fear or do not consider the interests of, as well as setting up a state-of-the-art hostpital for injured wildlife. As far as I'm concerned he was a bloody legend, and when you have done something a fraction as worthwhile with your life as he did with his, then you can possibly criticise him. And as far as the crocodile incident goes, well I don't think he should have done it, but the danger to his son was perceived, not actual. Crocodiles are very predictable once you get to know them, and Steve had been dealing with crocs since childhood, so I highly doubt he would have palced his son in harm's way, though it was obviously a mistake to make a public show out of it. Interestingly, no one said a word when he did the same thing with his daughter several years earlier. It was just a big media beat up, blown out of all proportion. It is a shame there aren't more people like him in the world. People with that much honesty, integrity and dedication are truly rare. He was an exemplary Australian, one I think most of my fellow Aussies would feel rightly proud of. I've swum with stingrays quite a lot, and they are normally quite relaxed about being touched and approached, as long as you are gentle. I have never felt threatended by one in the slightest. They normally only flick the barb up if they are trodden on or hurt. I can only imagine Steve had the incredibly bad luck to get on the wrong side of an unusually irritable stingray. I always thought he'd get bitten by a taipan or something like that...

I'd avoid plasma - they have come along a bit, but they are still pretty shit, as they 1. don't last very long, so you will spend a shitload of money on something that will not last much longer than a cheap flourescent light bulb before you start losing pixels at a rate of knots(at best), 2., have very poor image quality when viewed up close due to the technical limitations on pixel size with plasma screens, 3., they do suffer from burn in if the same thing is on screen for a while, and 4., they generally have very poor contrast ratios. Regardless, the bigger the screen, the poorer the image quality unless you are willing to invest in a projection system. You need a room that you can make fairly dark, and a good sized wall to put your screen against, but if you do it right, it is the best way to have a really big screen. The next best thing is LCD. TVs don't generally make for ideal computer monitors, as they are designed for viewing from a distance, while monitors are designed for viewing up close, so regardless of what you get, you will be making a compromise.

Ok, so far we have the following tasks that need to be done, before we can start doing any new animations. Domarius has volunteered to do everything that anyone else doesn't sign up for, but with only one person working on these we won't be done until a year from now. Any other volunteers? 1. Current models need to have heads separated. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=4331 assigned to: Domarius. 2. Current models need to have hands replaced with low-poly hands. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=4330 assigned to: nobody 3. Models need to be resized. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...=4222&st=25 assigned to: Domarius 4. Weapons need to be removed from models. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=4332 assigned to: nobody 5. Robed characters need feet added. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=4333 assigned to: nobody 6. AI models need to be split into submeshes for armour detection. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=4335 assigned to: nobody

I'm having some problems too, everytime I want to Post or Preview in the Private Forums, a message occurs. Edit: forget it, it's resolved now (the server or the server does not like the term "g plus plus" (the compiler name with the actual plus characters)...)

It's child's play. One long pipe using a gen_texture & no seams. All of our other textures are not as versatile as these but they share similar limits. You're not understanding the purpose of gen_textures. They are "gen" as in general use not "generic", as in having the potential of being used in more than one way. They are also serve specific purposes. They can be used on maps or models. You cannot say that for other textures. I could put together a full, proof of concept map using only gen_textures. Then again, I tend to spend more time defending this idea than actually working on them. I could keep putting together examples like this post all day for counter arguments but that's only wasting my time.

What about things like support beams? The example I gave above of trying to texture a 40x40x256 block was intended to illustrate that having combined textures makes it difficult to texture things like that. What happens when the mapper needs to fit one of the engraved patterns at the top of the texture (in previous screenshots) to an arbitrarily sized block? What happens when you want to texture a simple, yet arbitrarily long pipe with one of your metal gen textures and you don't want any texture seams? It's those limits that bother me. But those weren't created with the intention of being used to texture arbitrary things. I'd be fine with the materials used for models being combined textures, but for maps combined textures are very inconvenient.

that I dont know, I listened to it last night and now Im convinced that its real. Actually, didnt orbweaver post a real review of the film a few messages back up?

I used that really simple modelling/ anim program (might have been Blender) to make a little man made of prims who ran, exported the anim as a gif, and used it in Game Maker. That was ok. Proper modelling would probably make my brain fry. Mind you I was rubbish at Game Maker. I got by, very workmanlike, the solutions I came up with were really really inelegant and long winded. I just don't have that natural skill. I like mapping though. That's really easy in comparison.

Wow, that Jesus Camp clip is really scary. The baptist/pentecostal christian movement, (i.e. Bible Belt in the states) is even here in Australia now. I went to a school where it was regular to see 'the holy spirit!!!1!!' come down and make people convulse, 'speak in tongues'(which always sounded like a load of gibberish to me) and act like they were retarded. I always thought it was hilarious, but others in the school, including most of the staff, took it dead seriously like those guys in that clip. Hell, we even went to school camps that were on similar lines. A study camp i attended (designed to teach you study techniques etc. for final exams) was mostly indoctrination and 'prayer' to do well in your exams. This non-denominational form of christianity, which I like to see as post-modern christianity, is catching on fast, with churches (like Hillsong) acting as gigantic global corporations, spreading their agenda and dogma to millions whilst making a massive profit. Using Hillsong again as an example, you're looking at a pre-reformation Catholic Church, but with seemingly more insidious methods for spreading its dogma and with much more clout and influence.

At least for the readables it would make sense to handle them as a single unit as long as the texturing of the single brushes stays unaffected. I would vote for the DoomEdit solution. I can't say if there is a case where it would be an advantage to move the child brushes of an entity independently as I've not that much experience with the Dark Mod entity types.

The origin should really be in the geometric center of the entity brushes (at least for the readables), as the code for readables relies on this value. If you placed the origin somewhere in the room next door (for instance) and frobbed the readable brushes, the onscreen readable would not show up in the center of your monitor. I can post a screenshot illustrating this if you want, I'm not sure if I'm explaining this clearly enough. This also happens when I move the readable brushes away from where the entity was originally created, as the origin value of the entity is not updated when moving its brushes (at least in DarkRadiant). The onscreen readable would not appear where you expect it to, the center would always be directed towards the entity's origin, not towards the brushes. So, at the moment I create my readable and leave it right where they are. If I need them at a different location, I delete the entity and create a new one. I also tried selecting the entity in the entity list and dragging the brushes around, but that does not work either, as the brushes are highlighted but somehow frozen as long as the entity itself is selected.

I remember coming across glossmaps on the doom3world forums & they got it working I think . I need to follow up on that to see if they actually did get it working. I was wondering if speculars could be other than grey scale I'll experiment with those.

Thanks for the virtual memory tip, Sparhawk. I should've thought of that, too. Then again, I didn't think Windows would eat up my 10GB C:\ drive partition as steadily as it has, with patches, games and programs that like to dump files on there without asking me. One other hard drive hog that I hate is System Restore. I think it's normally set to consume the max amount of hard drive space it can... ~10-15% probably. That's a gigabyte of space for my little C:\ drive. No way do I need a month or two or three of restore points. So I go into Start > Control Panel > System > System Restore Tab, and then bump the disk drive usage down on each drive. I don't know what's recommended, but I put it down to like 2 or 3%. There's a way to see how many restore points you have, or how much space System Restore is using(?). Start > Help and Support > Undo changes to your computer with System Restore > Restore my computer to an earlier time. It'll show you a bunch of restore points you can choose from. (And then just cancel out if you don't want to restore a point.) Depending on your settings, it might go back months. I personally don't want that much space used for System Restore. (Note: I'm referring to WinXP Pro in my post. I have no idea if other Windows editions have System Restore info.)

I love generalizations. Don't you? I'm sure those in the UK give a damn about Zimbabwe, and those in Germany care oodles for Kiwis, and Aussies can't sleep at night if anyone in Turkey is unhappy. But if you'll excuse me, my fast rich life keeps me busy; I'm going to go out and beat someone to death while ignoring old people being mugged. As long as I have a hot dog and a good monster truck pull, I'm happy. Where's my gun?!

Well basically, having worked in companies before, I'm naturally mindful about saying anything about the project - because you're essentially speaking on behalf of the team, which you may not be in a best position to do. To be on the safe side, I don't consider myself that way at all, and leave it to NewHorizon. Never had a need to speak publically on the forums about it. Only to people I know personally. It shouldn't be too hard to realise you're speaking publically and use the "-like" and "inspired" suffixes.

Well, yes, but then they have to look through all the skins. It's already 100 skins long, so finding a specific one won't be convenient. Plus, I'm not sure mappers would intuitively know to look outside of the 'matching skins' folder--they'd be more likely to just assume there aren't any for that model. All you need to do is put 'model [model path&file name]' in the skin entry--you can include as many models as you want.

Hah! And yet another post. Nevermind, it does work. You just have to put them in the DDS folder. So my original hunch was in the ballpark - D3 needs to be told "duh, these are DDS files." Which means we can do size optimization someday on old bloated model textures.

I had a very minor accident where I hit a patch of oil on the road as I was going around a small roundabout at about 15KpH. I was fine, as I lowsided the bike as the front wheel lost tracktion, and I basically landed on my feet running. My bike was another story - cracked fairing, several bits bent out of shape, and a ~$1500 repair bill. My insurance only kicks in when the damage is above $2000, so I had to pay out of my own pocket. I have mates who have had much more spectacular crashes where it would have cost them more to fix the bike than to buy a new one, not to mention the medical cost of spending months in hospital having extensive skin grafts and physiotherapy because they thought they were invincible and didn't need leathers. EDIT: I don't ride so much anymore now that I have a daughter - while motorcycling can be made relatively safe if you ride intelligently, it is still too risky when you have family responsibilities, IMO (read: my wife won't let me ). So I'm taking a long break from bikes until my kid(s) are older.

Even if they had guns, the government in this scenario could just use that to bolster their claim that they were terrorists - "look, they were armed to the teeth, we had to shoot them". Realisticly, you could only make so many people "disappear" before suspicions would be aroused, and society would become increasingly destabilised. People who have neighbors, friends and family will be noticed if they are missing, and sooner or later the government making people disappear would slip up and get caught in the act. If the security forces go in expecting someone without a gun, that doesn't mean it will go down silently, as a person who notices someone unusual approaching their house might take action that would at least make the security force's job more difficult, and a fair bit noisier. Oppressive governments that employ these tactics rarely last very long, becasue they simply undermine their own power base in the end (they essentially start biting the hand that feeds them). It is gernally not in the interests of a ruling power to be too covert about things, as it creates a nervous, unproductive population that is more succeptible to chaos and anarchy if a few things go wrong. This is not to say it couldn't happen in the US - US citizens have had their freedoms so eroded over the last few years in the name of "security" that the US Government could disappear several hundred thousand US citizens before anyone caught on to them, and US citizens have a general culture of selfishness that makes it easier for people to ignore what is happening to their neighbour.

As I said, this is a work in progress, wip, in the process of generating content/ideas, trying to balance art with the technical side, in the long haul of creating/realizing an idea, trying to silence the nay-sayers, etc.