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Well, good for you, Mr "I have a wife and kids". For the rest of us that dont; Obsession The domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc. By having the belief that something else happens afterwards, I remove the fear, so I think about it LESS. Since you want to give your family as a reason, then I ask - aren't you afraid of how THEY will feel after you die, Mr selfish?

Unicorns aren't going to make me feel better about death though. I know it's hard for you guys to understand but it's a point I'm constantly trying to make. If I'm wrong, I die without fearing that I'll just become nothing. If I'm right, w00t. That's it. That's my reason. I've never claimed any substantial proof that it's true - that's why it's a belief.

Yes - neither desicion is appropriate, so you are free to wander. That's my point - your mind is allowed to wander when there is no logical reason not to. oDDity places so little value on this, and chastises people for doing it. But this is the same process by which we can experience some unexpected and sometimes useful things, such as inspiration. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. All the times I had deja vue, I wasn't quite 100% sure the memory actually happened, I couldn't quite "get a hold of it" in my head.

I just tried it, and it worked. The reason why I thought it doesn't work is because it doesn't do what Doomedit does. The brushes that I tried already had the same texture, but they are not aligned. What I mean is this. Create a normal room in Doomedit and put some textures on each wall. Now they are not propely aligned. Then select one of the brushes, and MMB on the other brushes. You can see that they get aligned perfectly now. Even though they are 90 degree to each other, they still present a single smooth transition of the texture across the brushedges. DR is not doing that. It jsut copies the selected texture onto the new brush, but it doesn't align it. So at the moment I can see the edges because the textures don't meet properly there. If the brush is aligned with the other brush, then the edge is seemles, but not if the brushes are angled. If you want I can provide some screenshots tomorrow. Not sure if I explained it good enough.

That's always a good reason Agreed

I believe we're generally in favour of it, provided it's not one-way. No particular reason to limit it to just trees and bushes, is there? I can't think of a lot of other things that we could share since the settings are quite different, but I'm sure there's something. Miscellaneous props, maybe some textures.

I wasn't even aware that sprites were in Doom3, but maybe that's just because I was assuming particles were just regular textures? Are these sprites as in games from 20 years ago, or a different evolution of sprites? Anyway, if particles are sprites, then I can confirm they can be lit - set up a dark room with a light in it, and put a fly swarm half in and half out of the light. In the dark, only silhouettes are visible. In the light, you can make out wings, eyes, etc. The timestop command helps to see it. Are we talking about the same thing? I've actually wondered if this might be part of the reason rain and snow particles are so... damn... slow. Maybe they're lit, and that's almost definitely unnecessary...

Good reasons? I'm sorry, but you can't know. You just can't. You can't monitor his brain to see if he's thinking about doing that sort of thing, and generally, these sorts of things are the only clues we have. Oftentimes, evidence only means something in retrospect because evidence alone can't predict the future. Only past behavior can predict the future; if this went unpunished and he shot up the school, America would be screaming "Look! All the signs were there!" So that brings into question, do homicidal people provide good reasons to believe they are homicidal? Or is this the best forewarning we get? Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean he will do it, but I don't necessarily think its an over reaction. Why? Because obviously he did something to get it noticed. Making a map of your school is one thing (I mapped out my school in a fantasy mud once heh) but how would anyone find out? The point is, he did something to get it noticed and someone was concerned enough to report it. A ) It got attention. Attention seeking behaivor is oftentimes a sign of a call for help. It doesn't mean it is. But it's a sign. He flaunted it or some such, showed it off to his peers, who knows? B ) Someone got concerned. This doesn't mean it was a parent or an outsider, it was most likely someone close to him. And if someone who knows him gets concerned enough to report it, then I think they have more justification to make the call than we do. I feel like if it was reported, then that's reason enough to be concerned. I agree with Springheel. This sends a message that this sort of thing isn't appropriate, and I agree, it isn't. Thought crime? There are limits. Although it's a slippery slope, and a blurred line, I feel like games like Postal and Manhunt should be banned. That doesn't mean I feel like games like GTA should be banned or God of War. What separates them? Hell if I should know. The former just seems disturbing as hell and wrong as well as sadistic and twisted. I think making such a map screams poor sense of judgement in this day and age. It was a stupid thing to do and I feel like he should have known better. I don't feel like expulsion is unjustified or surprising, but expected. He needs to take responsability for his actions and realize that this sort of thing isn't exactly socially acceptible. They aren't throwing him in jail, mandating counseling, and assigning him a probation officer. That would be going too far, but I don't believe that expulsion is that unreasonable. Sure it's harsh. But I wouldn't call it a shocking punishment given the shadow of Virginia Tech.

Don't know if this has already been mentioned, or is planned. What I would like to have in DR is a display list filter. The purpose would be to filter stuff that can be seen based one certain characteristics. So for example, I want to be able to switch everything off and only show lights. Or only models of a certain kind. Or only brushes that use a certain texture. I know we have discussed display groups, but this would be a different feature, although it would be rather similar implementationwise. The reason why I think this would be usefull is, because I often look in other maps for some features that were done there. I guess that many mappers, especially beginners will do this as well. However in a decently sized map, it's quite hard to find anything, especialy if you are not the author of it. Another feature that would go in a similar direction is, to position the camera by specifying an entity or absolute world coordinates. So I can look in the mapfile for the name and then find it in the editor. For this it might be usefull to have a function in the SDK that tells you the name of an entity you are looking at. Not sure of this already exists. I once wrote a function that shows you the distance to an entity you are currently looking at, so if such a function is not available, it would be easy to add and a supplementary function in the editor would make finding an entity quite easy.

Wrong. Large scale wars first started when large town and city states developed. Diplomacy developed as a way for weak people or states to buy off more powerful states. If they are strong and know they can take what they want by force, then diplomacy is useless. All of the great early nations saw war as a good thing, they relished it, and they didn't do it reluctantly. Right up until the Spanish and English empires, and until slavery was abolished, it was seen as perfectly acceptable and natural law for the strong to take from the weak though force. That is our natural state, to use aggression against the weak, and we are only forced to use diplomacy against the strong because we have no choice. Of course we have lots of laws telling us not to be bad and commit crimes, but those are not natural laws, they are artificial, because we are smart and realise that having people running around in your own streets raping and murdering does not make for a strong society. However, the main reason we wanted strong societies was so we could go and rape and steal from and murder other societies.

I think you are contradicting yourself here. I agree that I also don't think that people are born with the innate desire to commit violence. After all we a re a social species, no denying that. But the problems that they try to resolve are not neccessarily made by themselve and some of them are simply to big to address on an individual basis. This is the reason why violence is seen as valid answer. If you have so many problems and you are unable to resolve them properly, then violence CAN be a means to achieve that. And considering the inbalance between poverty and rich in the US, it's no big surprise that this effect is much stronger there, then in middle european countries, where this border is not as extreme. Yet.

IMO this is a typcial politician retort. We hear the same from our politician in many cases, but of course only if it suits them. Austrian goverment is usually very keen to do the same as the german. Doesn't matter how stupid it is, but if the german do it, we also have to do it. Of course this is done when it suits them. And the rationalization for it is "The german did it as well." BUT if it does NOT suit them for one reason or the other, we suddenly hear "You can't really compare this, because germany is a TOTALLY different country." Sorry that I don't buy this kind of reasoning. It's not black and white. Criminals only become criminals when they do something criminal. If you raise the bar, less people will be criminals, because it also takes some effort, not everybody is willing to exert it. Of course you wont affect the hardcore criminals, but you can affect a lot of people which are on the border, which already reduces the total amount of criminals. I mean, personally I find it quite funny, I saw a movie, which was filmed after an actual event called "45 minutes". It was about a bank robbery, where the robbers, used AK-47 and bullet proof vests. They were finally shot down after about 45 minutes of gunfight (hence the name of the movie). The reaction of the politicans was not to try and reduce the danger coming from weapons. No! Insread they equipped the police with more heavy weapons. Makes totall sense. LOL. Next time, if a criminal uses nuclear power, I guess that police will also equipped with nukes just so they can say they have the same fire power and don't have to feel insecure. That's quite a big fallacy. After all, if his fellows, which are NOT convicted, can acquire guns easily, it is for him as easily as for them. See above. Because violence is not as cherished as in the US I would say. And of course, because the balance between extreme poverty and average is not as extreme as in the US and education is generally higher. But our politicians are working on that to "improve" the situation towards the US. As long as this Bushwhore Merkel and her braindead followers (like Schäuble) are in power it will become worse. Not that the SPD is any much better though. Of course they have guns, and there is a black market. But it's not a problem, because apparently almost nobody seems to use it. If somebody is bent on bank robbery he will acquire a gun. Not as easy in the US but it is definitely possible. When I still lived in Vienna, I also knew where I would have to go if I wanted one. I guess if you live in a town, you probably know such things. But since guns are outlawed, you are already taking a risk just with buying it, and in most cases this is not even warranted.

This is right on the money IMO. True hunting rifles can be used to kill people and can kill accidentally, I think hunters should be made to keep them at secured hunting clubs or something similar, farmers and those who really need firepower can apply for licenses to carry one all the time after a substantial background check. But hunting rifles are nothing like a semi automatic pistol that shoots two shots a second. You cant hide them as easily, and you cant fire and aim them as easily. Hunting rifles and non automatic shotguns are made for game, hi-tech pistols like Glocks or Berettas or military hardware like AKs or Uzis are made for killing people. They should be nearly impossible to get your hands on. Here in Philadelphia, they are fairly easy to get, just go to Virginia. Thats what the gangs do. I'm really really interested in gun issues these days. About four months ago, I was held up at gunpoint about 100 feet from my house while doing laundry. Two young men, one about 18 one about 14, ran up to me early in the evening and put a pistol to my head, took my wallet and keys, and ran off. It really fucked me up. Not physically but mentally. I've had to take medical leave from work, due to nightmares, insomnia, anger attacks, paralyzing bouts of fear, etc. I used to teach in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Philly and I could not continue to return there after the robbery. Everyday I saw things that brought it back, gangs of kids about to get into a pistol fight, prostitution, crack smoking teens, faint pistol shots in the neighborhood, angry, pissed off poor people everywhere. The other night, I was talking to a friend who was sitting in his car on my street and we were interrupted by eight semi auto pistols shots about four blocks north of where we sat. He witnessed a pitched gun battle a few weeks back while talking to a friend and told me they simply looked at the shooters about two blocks down and stepped behind a corner to finish their talk. In some parts of the city its fairly commonplace to see such things. The cops blame the families, as if Mom can stop Junior from doing what hes going to do when hes got a fucking pistol in his waistband. Though I cannot blame the average cop for being defensive, no one told them they would regularly face firepower equal or sometimes superior to their own in the street. The state politician wring their hands not wishing to offend their voters in rural Pennsyltucky, the ones here now running for mayor make big promises, the morons in the sticks refuse to support any kind of gun measures that might impinge on their right to buy countless numbers of guns, more than they can hunt with, more than they can ever really need or use. The arms industry and the NRA have made it their business to propagate myths about gun ownership and US history and have created a ready pool of consumer drones to buy buy buy new guns for their "collection." Not a useful collection, not a practical or historically valuable collection, just a collection to insure that more guns will get sold. Like some people have to buy every Franklin Mint collectible plate, some people need dozens of firearms sitting around. We cannot get a simple law passed in this state to limit people to only buying one gun a month. Only one a month, and you should have heard the hue and cry about "rights" being trampled and gun enthusiasts "suffering" under this burden. Guns are tied into sexual identity issues, they are s rite of passage into manhood for the dullards who need such tokens. And so nothing really changes, children die every week, ten murders last weekend alone and we have broken last years record for Spring already. My last adult education student Maria had a fourteen year old son shot in the shoulder while he sat on his front porch, no reason just got targeted randomly by a roving gang of boys who should have been in school. But oh, the schools are rotting apart, filled with vermin, lacking necessities like supplies of toilet paper and lightbulbs, who wants to hang out there. More fun to wander the streets and raise hell, I would have done the same thing were I in their shoes at their age. Marias boy survived but has fragments embedded in his shoulder and neck. The boy who shot him was sixteen. The problem has multiple causes and influences but one thing is clear: making guns cheap and readily available is one of the worst. But it won't change anytime soon, not until enough well off white people get killed and then we will see some sort of crackdown. Meanwhile, I hide in my house most days, drink and smoke too much, and drive my girlfriend half nuts.

OK. But how many astronauts are going to space for that? I'm, not talking about a man or woman who is jealous, we are talking about the mad people who try to kill for some "good" reason.

The whole hunting defense is pretty much a straw man anyway. I don't think many people who support gun control honestly care about rural people owning hunting rifles or shotguns. I grew up in a house with three or four such guns because my family raised livestock and had to deal with the occasional hawk or wolf. But there's a big difference between a single shot hunting rifle and an automatic assault rifle, or an automatic handgun. There is absolutely zero reason to own one of those unless you're intending to kill people. The "they'll find something else to use" argument is also pretty weak. Yes, indeed they might try, but I'd like to see someone kill 32 students at one time with a knife, or even a shotgun. A bomb might work, but as others have said, they are harder to make and are rarely used in revenge killings, since you don't get a chance to see what happens to your victims.

I think it would be usefull to have this information, if you want to look into the map directly for some reason. Info like this would be mostly usefull when something is not working properly and you have to investigate it.

Well, if you're going to use arbitrary geekspeek acronyms, you can't expect normal people to know what they mean. . I can remember once with the wall sticking bug in Thief 2, even remember the map, it was precious cargo, but that's it. The reason I still remember after 5 years is because of it's rarity. Any map that forces you do do some stupid jumping puzzle as the only way to complete the map isn't worth playing, period, and shouldn't even be included in the statistics.

Ahh, so you think that it's a fair trade then - people can have a bit of harmless fun shooting animals (good use of guns) Vs sometimes they also use them to shoot other people (bad use of guns) That's a good balance you think? The problem with that argument, is that I don't trust anyone who enjoys shooting anything. I'm of the opinion that we should have moved on a little from our caveman ancestors by now (and they didn't even kill animals for fun, but for survival), and if you're the sort of person who has the mentality to go out and shoot a deer in the haed for fun, and enjoy it, then the only thing stopping you from shooting people in the head at the slightest provocation is the law, and I don't trust anyone who's only reason for not doing something is because it's illegal. Most of the 60-70 million gun owners in your fair land would no doubt still go out on nigger-hunts if it hadn't been made illegal. Now, this personal defence argument. No one in the UK has a gun for personal defence, and the number of people (ordinary people, not gang members etc) murdered every year is microscopic, and of those, how many would have been saved if they'd had a gun? I mean, unless you carry it fully loaded on you at all times, and have good warning of any attack, it's not really much use for defence. The rest of the world doesn't want the sort of vigilante culture (someone breaks in to steal your TV, you shoot them in the head, your neighbour makes a little bit too much noise one night, so you snap and shoot them in the head) that America enjoys.

No, moonbat, the reason you don't see quicksaving in Tetris is because it's a trivial little arcade game where each game rarely lasts for more than a few minutes. There's no quicksave because nobody wants or needs it. Save-anywhere is a TOOL, which is up to individual players to use responsibly, or not. Banning save-anywhere would make exactly as much sense as banning, say, knives. Sure you can hurt people with them, but they have far too many legitimate uses to do without.

To use the example above, the reason you never see a version of Tetris with quicksaving (despite the myriad of variations of it), is because quicksaving would ruin Tetris's core gameplay; that save-methods would have such a huge impact on Tetris's gameplay shows that saving is not a meta-gameplay mechanic.

Basically SVN stores files as you store them on your disc, and then it replicates them to all clients that are using it when they synchronize with the server. Only the server sees the full history of everything. A client only gets always the newest version of a file, which replaces the old version. So if you upload a textfile with 1024 bytes, and then you replace one character with another and upload this new version, on the server it will take a little bit more space then 1024 bytes, because the server needs to remember which versions existed. But on any client machine it will always only use the 1024 bytes as before, because they don't keep all the history. A client only downloads this older versions on request. For example, suppose you upload a model which you consider finished, and then make some changes to this model on your disc. But a few days later you think that this changes are not so good after all, but you can not get back to the older version, because your application doesn't store undo history over saves, then you can still download the old version from the server by specifying which revision you want to retrieve. For this reason it is important to always write a small description of what you changed, when you upload a file, because this allows you to easily keep track of which version chanegd what. The SVN application will prompt you for such a description everytime you upload a new version. You don't need to write extensive texts in there, just a short summary. So for example, when I modelled a wheel and in the next version added some nails to it I just wrote "Added nails to the rim" as a comment.

Not necessarily. If the new character comes with his own ethos and, more importantly, his own name (as I personally think he should), I don't see why people wouldn't want to call him by his own name. There isn't any necessary reason why the gameplay has to be irrevocably linked to the name Garrett and the old Thief world names. People get the idea of multiple worlds these days, and this is just a different world. But esp if the name comes as part of the package, then that's the name you use for that guy. I mean, it's my intuition that once the name and things about the new world get into circulation it will catch on. It's fun to get a new story once and a while and I think momentum will build for people to play along and run with it. It's what branding is about, and if the world is set up thoughtfully then it sells itself.

Star Wars is littered with inconsistencies throughout the movies and extended literature. What's so impressive is that it is so consistent despite the plethora of writers--many of whom take the time to fill in these plot holes. There's actually very little reason why maps should be inconsistent with the setting if it's properly enumerated. For the most part, it's fairly easy to present a consistent, well-explained setting without being restrictive. For example, explaining necromancy as the exploitation of existing natural forces (like my radiation explanation for zombies) doesn't force a mapper not to use magical, necromantic dung in their story. Or we could just assume that everything done by outside mappers is non-canonical by default. Mappers tend to stick pretty closely to canon when it is given and consciously depart from it only when it suits their purposes--and generally very wildly when they do. Generally speaking, whenever a story revolves around explaining the origins of something differently than how it has already been explained, it's usually presented by fallible characters or as deviating from the normal setting already. Just look at D&D. All sorts of things in the setting(s) have been explained time and again by its creators, but there's still huge room for DM's to tell their own stories. DM's only ever directly contradict the source material when it suits their own purposes--they've changed the setting, and with the exception of house rules, it's to create their own variation. Nobody ever assumes that because a particular DM made it that way, that it applies to the main world.

You can edit the vertices of the lightfrustum? Did you guys add that in DarkRd? I made a little test myself and was surprised, I get backprojection in GtkR too. I think the only reason I didn't recognise it earlier is that Radiant culls Brushes that are behind the frustum. I never placed a light that close to a wall that this effekt would show Anyway, that shouldn't be much of a problem. Try painting the left or right half of a falloff map black, it should mask out the front/backprojection. Irrc the doom3 falloff starts in the middle of the falloff-texture, so the center of the texture is the lightvalue for zero distance, left should be negative distance, right positive. I changed that for my engine slightly: Zero distance is the left edge, max distance the right. That way I can use the full colorprecision when using a 256 pixel falloff-map. The fallofftextures have CLAMP_TO_BORDER enabled which adds a "virtual" border to the texture. This little trick kills backprojections since everything with a s-texcoord < 0.0 ends up on the black border.

Without any rules you may be right, without some you have a game still. It just happens to be a different one. Rapist have to have someone to rape. Another individual is being harmed. Who is harmed when someone cheats in a singleplayer game? Is hopping onto a ledge cheating? How do you know the map maker intended you have access? What if the AI cannot deal with it? Ever watched Q2DQ? Was that cheating? That is still only your opinion unfortunately. There is no possible way to play a game as you suggest unless you email the developer and ask them what they intended. Worthless scum is not usually a title applied to persons that did nothing wrong, yet what wrong is there in cheating in a singleplayer game to begin with? Is it wrong or right? The question I find more relevant on this topic is what provides an interesting challenge? That is what I desire from a game. He could walk by himself. He had to move slow and be careful, and it was greatly beneficial for him to have help to move faster, but he definitely could walk slowly and carefully, kind of like the "thief" sneaks about slow and careful...He was punished with pain, and sometimes people faint from that I suppose... And why is it inappropriate to have help? In game worlds people don’t or should not help others? Fine, but is there a point? I don’t profess to know why people play games in every case, but I do assert that part of the reason is precisely to escape their mortality and become some ridiculous hero. Further death in game already means something, you just want it to mean something more. It has been tried and the plebes (or whatever silly thing you called those who support the videogame industry) did not approve. If you have such an abundance of cash why don’t you develop your own game? You can pay your underlings to build it exactly like you want. Then you can proudly show how well people have taken to your idea. There are many beautiful things that are not feminine faces, the human form, or psyche. Beauty of the human form has been studied and beaten to death, but what of the beauty of a mountain? Is the paramount the quintessential mountain? The Eiger? People tend to disagree on such issues. Some think a swamp is beautiful others a desert or grassland. They do not necessarily agree.