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I still haven't fixed the noisemaker reverb. My apologies. While tweaking the noisemaker sound, though, I created this clockwork winding/unwinding sound that might work for a camera or something. It winds up at the beginning, and winds down at the end; and has some randomness built-in throughout it to make it sound not completely like a simple, cheesy loop. My intent was to have this running in the background of the noisemaker arrow's clicks, but it sounds a little to electronic for that, imo. Which is why I mention it maybe be used for a video camera or something. It's purposely quiet so it is subtle. I was re-thinking the time duration you made the noisemaker last, Ishtvan, and it being like 20 or 30 seconds is actually a good idea. I remember the time seeming too short in T2 sometimes. It's really necessary to distract the attention of guards for a while, because you have to sneak around (move slowly) in Thief. My revised noisemaker looks like it was going to go for about 30-35 seconds. Anyone have any problems with this? Anyways, here's the clockwork sounds... * Clockwork - Winding (OGG version) -377 KB * Clockwork - Winding (MP3 version) -663 KB

Well, if you have in-game effects of injuries, then you also need to balance it with ways to heal, and in that case most decent players will not just reload any time they get injured, but will use the healing methods. I'm not just talking about swinging poitons here either, but bandages, stitching, splints, etc. Ayway, people are as likely to load their last save with the current system when they see they are low in health and have no healing potion. And what do you know about game mechanics yourself? All you want to do it copy the mechanics directly from every other game youv'e ever played, because you're scared to try anything new.

Crap, I've been pulled in. I have only myself to blame! To keep it short: tax law is more complex than just "I give this, I get that" though, there are literally tons of incentives - both government driven and other - for giving away money as a corporation. I won't pretend to know all the ins-and-outs though. Heck, I just found out last week I can write off part of my rent and computer expenses because I frequently work from home. There's a lot of stuff out there. Agreed! Absolutely. I don't think they're all bad. I don't remember the donation figures exactly, but I think one year I read that microsoft corp donated something like 14 billion (!) to certain causes. That out of a value of 108 billion. I could be screwing these figures up... anyway, it was generous. You've just got to expect there is motive in there somewhere though, yes? .Again, agreed. And a lot of that is happening increasingly. There are successes and losses there, though. You've got stuff like openGL which gets squeezed out of the limelight by MS, and Firefox which is taking "some" of the IE market. The problem here is, a corporation is headed by someone making the rules. Masses of non-united geeks have a lot more trouble getting organized. That's part of the reason we need consumer's unions so that big business will stop walking on our faces, shoving products that... okay, that's getting off on another topic, and I don't want to be typing all day. There will be no 6-8 times performance increase. It won't happen. Think about it - a game that currently gives you 30 FPS will be capable of 240 FPS on Vista? I know that's a linear example, but hey - "6-8 times," right? We'd be lucky to see 6-8%. Anyway, a lot of this is just fun banter and only some is true despising of them. I'm not 100% anti-MS. (just 90% ) Okay enough of this garbage... back to Oblivion!

Yes, I've read you statute. Dark Mod "protects applicants and employees 40 years of age or older from discrimination on account of age in hiring, promotion, discharge, compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment", right? Silly me. I should have written that I'm 67. So you all have grandchildren? Can I see the photos in your wallets? Please. BTW, how does it work? What should I do in order to get the toolset? Each team member should vote or state his/her opinion? I'm eagerly waiting for your questions... Nothing will scare me know: I'm moving to another town in July, therefore I had an application meeting last week. I was interviewed by five persons for two hours before I got the job. And it was not because I don't have qualifications or something. It's just that there are dozens of qualified candidates for one position in Poland. We have some serious job problems here.

Not without intervening effects. You don't suddenly become disabled when you lose your last drop of blood, . You feel the gradual effects, and I wouldn't mind if those effects of bloodloss an shock were included in the game, becasue if they were then we still wouldn't need a stupid meter, but no one seems to want in-game effects of ill health.

I've been learning how to build outdoor locations in Radiant for the last few days. Here's my second "room" in Radiant: Almost everything is made from brushes and patches. I was wondering how dangerous (free) rotated brushes and patches are. Should I avoid free rotation tool?

Apparently YOU don't understand that this is not the way how FREE projects work. You can not demand anything. You can say "I don't like it and therefore I wont use it." or you can say "It sucks that X is not included so I implement it myself" And that's where your options are ending (excluding variations where you find somebody else to do it for you). That may be. But it still means not much. In the end it depends on how many user dis-/like it. If there are enough users who like it and use you will have a hard time getting your requests through. You are right. Of course I don't mind if somebody has good ideas, but this would not be enough to give him a special status. If enough people think this, there should be some people motivated enough to implement it. I certainly wont spend time on a feature that I don't even like. There are some limitations on such a project. One is that we simply can not do anything. Another is that we simply dont WANT to do everything. And another one is, that we have to set priorities to determine what is absolutely needed and what not. Sound propagation is an absolute must, so we must implement it, if we ever want to be able to claim that we can create Thief style games. The same is true for the lightgem. Both are absolutely needed for the core. Without these two features, it will not be anything resembling Thiefstyle gameplay. Search algorithm for the AI falls in the same class. Now the next big thing, in terms of development time, is the fighting. Even though this is an important part to make it believable, it is in no way essential. You can create fully playable maps without letting the AI fight, because you can create an objective that says that you should not be spotted by the AI, which would completely remove the need for fighting. In fact some such maps even exist in the original games, so this would really be a thiefstyle gameplay, even though it would be quite severly limited. The climbing gloves are absolutely low on the list. They were not existant in the original games and were introduced much later. This already shows that real Thiefstyel gameply doesn't even come close to needing it, and therefore there is no need to implement them. If somebody says he absolutely must have them, then he can do it himself. And yet another important restriction is motivation. This is a free project, and as such we have to motivate ourselve mostly on the fun it provides to create this mod. Praise from the audience is certainly an important factor, but it would never be enough to keep on going for several years. Of course I can only talk for myself, because for others it may be different. Now, considering that, how do you think I should moptivate myself to implement a feature, that I don't feel a need for, takes a lot of time to properly implement AND I don't even like it. Do you really think I would spend several months on such a feature for free? Of course there are other features which are also boring to do, but as long as they are neccessary for the overall gameplay, it helps to go through. Adding a feature that is pointless (in my opinion, not yours) will not give me ANY motivation at all, and consequently I will not do it, unless you pay me for it. Not really surprising. After all, there are a lot of ambitous mods, with a lot of featuers that are promised and closed down after a short time. I think it is neccessary for a mod to be ambitious to get started with it, though. That is not really much of my concern. After all, I don't do this for the community, I do this for my own selfish reasons. I'm not so altrusitic that I would spend this much time on a project just for the benefit of others. I think that mods, that start with such an attitude as their primary motivation, will not last long in most cases. Thx.

I think you have our priorities the wrong way around Raven. People don't go about creating mods primarily 'for the community' (if so I wouldn't bother, as most people in the community appear to be either grumpy gits or lame brained little twerps). People create mods because the concept excites them, they are engrossed by their work. If you have a big ego to satisfy it's possible you would work on a mod so that the fan community worships you. But no one is going to work on a mod for free just to satisfy other people. I'm only speaking for myself, of course, but while working on the Hammerite Imperium project I have not once thought 'I shall selflessly work on something I hate for the good of the community', instead I just like to do some creative work and have the satisfaction of seeing it come to fruitation. Of course public support of the project is important because that tends to keep the team together, but it's usually the last thing on my mind. Maybe I'm just selfish and evil (or honest).

You don't have to do anything you don't want to. Considering WinXP is going on 5 years old, I think they're entitled to progress forward. After all, PlayStation 3s are coming out and you'd have to buy a PS3 to play the new PS3 games. If I want the latest/greates graphics on my PC, I have to buy a new video card and other hardware. It's the price you pay; and it's not any one particular company-centric. If MS doesn't t want Halo 2 playing on cheesy systems like mine because they don't want people having a less than optimal gaming experience (like I'm having with Oblivion), or if they don't want to have to apply the time, energy and resources toward testing the game on every hardware configuration under the sun, then that's their choice. I'd much rather they put that money into making a quality gameplay experience than patching hardware-oriented bugs for the last year of the development cycle.

That's exactly the anti-MS talk I figured you'd have, Sparhawk You're quite predictable Wow! Thanks man! I was looking around last night and almost bought one of these! I figured I should do more research, but since you're confident it will help, that's awesome. I would have more faith in my purchase. Yeah, my FX card has been pretty good; but have never really been impressed by it like I have with past video card upgrades. Oh well. I just might have to get this 7800GS card, but I may wait a while before doing so. I noticed a few manufacturers made them, like XFX, eVGA, Albatron, MSI, BFGTech, Leadtech. Is there a certain 'brand' I should go with? It looks like XFX (Core clock: 440MHz, Memory Clock: 1300MHz) and eVGA (Core clock: 430MHz, Memory Clock: 1300MHz) have the highest speeds. I assume I should go with one of them? Are they reputible? eVGA's is about $25 cheaper after doing a mail-in rebate ($299 minus $15 mail-in). Maybe that's the best bet? XFX is $309. Opinions welcome.

Sneaksie, your problems are coming directly from your videocard. The FX series is pretty well known for sucking absolute ass when it comes DX9/SM 2.0. Think of all the hooplah Valve threw around back when they were comparing the 9800Pro to the FX series when it came to running HL2 using DX9. It's pretty much the same situation here, or worse really since Oblivion only supports DX9. My computer is well below specs for the game, yet I'm able to run it at 15-30 FPS quite easily with the draw distance maxed, the textures set to high, some other miscellaneous settings tweaked. In fact I'm actually running Oblivion about as well as I do Morrowind, which is really surprising..and it's all to do with my graphics card. To put it bluntly, the FX line is Nvidia's big mark of shame, and anyone that has one is pretty much getting the shaft right about now. If you want a better AGP card, the 7800GS is about the best you're gonna get, and probably the last high end AGP card to ever come out. It's easily comparable to the PCI-e flavors of the same card, and roughly the same price (about $300). As for as world size, Cyrodiil is slightly larger than Vvardenfell was in MW. I think a rough estimate is that MW was about 8 square miles, whereas Oblivion is close to 12..so it's about 1.5x larger. And lastly, to boil it all down, my quick synop of the game itself. Basically..it's Morrowind, albeit with alot of MW's old problems fixed and polished. It isn't nearly as easy as the previous game for one. Armor and money are much harder to come by. The NPC's, while still kinda sparse (which adds to the underpopulated feel that was so prevelant in MW), seem to have alot more life because of the spoken dialogue and scheduling...it's almost, but not quite, as good as the Gothics. The quests are FAR better, no longer just simple fed-ex deals, there's actually alot of variety and interesting situations you can get yourself into. But it's still an Elder Scrolls game, so if you didn't like any of the previous incarnations there won't be much here to change your mind. It's just that Oblivion is the most polished and well thought out of the bunch.

OK. Close your eyes, and think back very hard to the last time a software update from Microsoft resulted in a 6-8x performance increase to something which is primarily hardware-based... Anything? At all? Didn't think so.

I've been learnig bsp, texturing and patches in Radiant for the last few days. Here's my first room in Radiant. It's the first thing I managed to build with the use of additive geometry. Perhaps it doesn't look nice, but I am not going to build Doom FM, so this room goes into the wastebasket eather way. I'm only interested in building Thief levels. The whole room is made of brushes and patches (with the exception of doors and barrels in the distance). Now I'll try to build some outdoor location and learn sky boxes. I should also start lights-in-Radiant lesson, because, as you can easily see, I'm not very familiar with Radiant lightning techniques. I hope that such excercises will at least allow me to start trying to get the DM toolset for beta mapping. I hope you still won't mind me asking questions.

heh, well that's the whole point of my system. THe fatal blow doesn't come as a result of a lot of minor injuries building up, and culminating in one last minor injury meaning you're dead. THE fatal blow happens because it's a hard hit in the right place, and would kill or incapaciate you outright whether you had any smaller injuries or not. You can be killed instantly with the very first damage you recive in the level, there is no farting about with hit points, no comfort blanket, no safety net. It's up to you not to recieve any damage. You're not a fighter, and if you want to fight you'll be dicing with death.

I wonder how that's going. Last I recall their most recent great leap forward was deciding on a tagline.

Unfortunatelly correct material names in model and in *.mtr files is not enough to force model to work with Radiant. And, what is most strange, not always. Sometimes it works sometimes it not works. "Sometimes" Bug? But at last I found solution. Every part in model (talking about *.ase from 3dMax) with different material should be named as full path to this material: Lets say that we have materials: //base/textures/wall_brick1 and //base/textures/wood_dark1 And the model with two parts: covered by wall_brick1 textures and by wood_dark1 textures First part of model should be named: textures/wall_brick1 Second part of model should be named: textures/wood_dark1 Since I've started to use "path" names everything working good.

I'm not going to get involved in a slanging match, since it detracts from the relevant argument. My system is quite simple. I know no one likes the 'R' word used in games, but it's justified in this case, given that randomness plays such a big part in real life damage. When you fall 20 feet, all you can do is hope that you twist your ankle instead of break it, when someone shoots an arrow at you, all you can do is try to flinch out of the way in the split second you have, and hope it either misses, glances off you or hits a non-vital spot. Melee combat has more skill involved, obviously, but when it comes right down to you making a mistake and being hit, luck is still there deciding how bad an injury you recieve from it. IF you watch a boxing match, the knockout blow can come in the first round or the last round, it' is not dependant on how many smaller blows the man has taken. Incapacitating or fatal blows come at once in a single hit, and are not a result of a combination of smaller hits. Boxing matches often go 12 rounds, with each man recieving hundreds of blows and still being fine at the end. As far as I'm concerned, you don't need to know about, a tally of aggrigate minor injures, you either recieve a fatal/incapacitating blow or you don't. With this system, you never know if the next blow you recieve will incapaciate you or not. You have no hit points at all, there is just a chance that the next hit will be 'the one', or it won't. There is a multiplier however, and this still simulates a kind of aggrigate injury system, which means that the more hits you have taken, the higher the chance is that the next hit will be a fatal one, and if you are taking many hits in a small time period, which would mean you're fighting multiple enemies, then the multiplier rises even faster. Remember this is not a fighting game and you are not a fighter. Under this system, arrows are very deadly. There is virtually no circumstance under which you could be periced by an arrow, even in the arm or leg, and not be incapaiataed to such a degree that you coudn't carry on. There will be a small chance that the arrow glances off you and does no damage, but essentially, you really want to stay clear of archers, and dodge like hell if one draws a bow. There will be no taking 4 or 5 arrows in the chest, stabbing the archer, and then sauntering off and swigging a heath potion in my system. The accuracy of archers will be the main thing here that decides if you get hit or not, and this will vary wth the difficulty level. As for falling and other things like steam and fire, it's pretty much the same random multiplier system. With fire/steam, there is cetain safe level, and after than the damage mutiplier rises rapidly with the longer you stay in the heat, but is always still random, so you can never safely predict how long you can do it. Falling - you get a safe distance of say 1o feet, and after that, with every foot, the chances of doing a serious and mission ending injury to yourself increases, and also with every successful lucky jump, the multiplier goes up, so you can't continue to make huge leaps and your luck will eventually run out. This random damage system, with a mutliplier, is far more realistic, far less gamey, far less intrusive, and far more exciting than the current system.

I don't have bad days; other people sometimes have better days than me! I think it helps that I haven't been trained up from a young age to enter in competitions and aim to be a professional musician or anything; that's only really happened in the last year or so. I've just enjoyed music up until then, and I'm taking it seriously because it's a big opportunity, but I won't be devastated if I don't win, I just don't have that kind of ultra-competitive mindset. Which isn't to say I'm not competitive, but I do realise that it's not the end of the world to get to the final and then not win.

I don't think it's something we will have time to impliment ourselves. There are far more important systems to code and tweak in a Thief inspired mod. If we are able to impliment a basic Thief 1 and 2 style sword combat system, we will have accomplished a great deal. Don't underestimate the amount of work that we have ahead of us. It's great to dream big, but reality dictates a whole different set of terms. Find us two or three more coders to spread the work amongst, and I'm sure we could impliment what you're looking for. Considering that combat is a last defense in this type of game, I think it's safe to say that the standard Thief 1/2 type system will suffice.

Die By The Sword has a combat system that never gets old, and I heartily support a robust combat system in The Dark Mod - directional blocking, for example, creates a fun challenge when you need to get out of a sticky situation alive (rather than simply holding a 'block' button). I think a successful combat system emphasizes defense and keeping your guard up, which is appropriate for the situations our thief character would use the sword in (last ditch defense / escape tool). Mount & Blade is another excellent example of first person melee combat - http://www.taleworlds.com It has blocking / attacking by mouse movement: hold block / attack while moving the mouse left, right, up or down to either block or ready an attack in that direction (down is thrust). As a practicing swordsman, it feels very natural.

I had set a goal of reaching 100, but when I was out walking one evening last summer...I decided that only seventy more summers just wasn't enough time. I've upped my goal to 120.

I had a dream last night where I was working on a mission, however I was placing large stones and hills down, etc., like the Morrowind Construction Set. I might give it a shot (should be easy enough, though everything beyond the creation of the actual model is Greek to me), but if anyone else is up for general requests, I think something like this might be useful for quick 'n dirty terrain construction. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying TDM should be built up like Morrowind - but it could be a simple thing which makes building natural settings look better, come together quicker, and doesn't force someone to know the ins-and-outs of modelling things in D3. Suggested items would include: small stones big boulders very big boulders natural arches cave entrances hilly slopes (as seen in and around a hilly city) mounds buttes (here, I imagine a single sided butte/platform could be placed side by side, and make for instance, a castle foundation) And I'm sure there are many more possibilities. The great thing is, they could probably be relatively low poly too. With the right texture, a box can almost look organic. Thoughts?

Just to complete my thought, and then I'll shut up about it (Sorry about length. If you read nothing else, read the last paragraph about my suggestion if back-picking is to be done): I've thought more about this back-picking possibility and think my primary gripe with it is the following. Authors often want to make pick-opening a lock a more-or-less long, tedious process, modulating the difficulty to build tension or whatever. But back-picking a lock to locked wouldn't make sense unless it were relatively quick. If it were long and tedious, then who would ever want to use it because you mainly use it to lock an AI inside, which will normally be in motion, so players would want the interface to let him act quickly or they'd be legitimately annoyed if they couldn't. The alternative is it would tempt people to start back-picking and they'd have to stop. You'll very likely get a volley of annoyed comments (if asked about it, anyway) saying "why won't you speed up the back-picking so I can actually use it when I need it??!!11" (By the way, an aside, what happens to a half-back-picked lock? A half-picked lock remains unlocked until it's fully picked, and that makes sense. But does a half-back-picked lock remain unlocked until it's fully back-picked? And you can come back to complete the back-pick later?? And what about a half re-picked lock after back-picking? Issues may vary depending on the answer to these questions; generally it would lead to cases of half back-picked locks ambiguously lying around, but all this is an aside to the general grumbling slow back-picking would create in any event.) So I'm thinking that there will be pressure to speed up the process in the face of a bunch of grumbling if it isn't, the alternative being a persistent feeling that the function is just frustratingly off if it's left slow, or at best the feeling that it's just irrelevant to normal gameplay because it's so slow. But the *real* problem I'm thinking about is what happens if back-picking should be made to be relatively quick to cater to the legitimate desires of players, that is, to make sense in implementing it in the first place. That will tempt players to quickly back-pick a lock to get out of a sticky situation only to discover that it's a long and tedious process to re-pick the door unlocked when they need to get in there. Generally speaking, I frown on gameplay features that seduce the PC into making on-the-fly decisions that make his life particularly troublesome later on. It isn't irreversible, of course, but it sure is a pain to have to spend another minute to re-pick a lock after the 10 second on-the-fly decision to back-pick it locked (esp if it's a central part of the author's design to make that lock difficult enough to take a minute to pick for whatever reason). You might answer that PC's should just keep that in mind before they start back-picking, but I don't like that answer when it involves the sort of on-the-fly, half thought out decision which is almost always going to be involved with back-picking in the first place: trap this moving AI in this room. It's an invitation to later frustration. But the key point I'd make here is that this situation will occur essentially *every* time a lock is back-picked. It's much different than the half-second decision to re-lock a door which only involves another half-second decision to re-unlock it. So whether the back-picking is fast or slow (the only 2 options you have), either way it's an invitation to legitimate gripes of annoyance or frustration for players, or a feeling that it's just irrelevant to their gameplay (in a way that key-relocking isn't), so not worth the trouble to implement it. So, like I said before, it just rubs me the wrong way. At least some real thought should go into these issues before thinking about doing it. For example, maybe once a lock if fully picked as tediously as the author intended, *then* both back-picking and re-picking would be relatively quick, or maybe even automatically like a key (to stay away from the trouble of half back-picked and re-picked locks)... Then you have for all practical purposes transformed the lockpicks into a key or key-like once the door is fully picked the first time. It's not greatly intuitive, but that would probably be the best way to do it if it's done at all, IMO. Actually, the only real gripe I'd have about this way is that it's unintuitive and might just look odd (you can imagine someone asking: why does picking a lock take 1 minute the first time and 1 second the next?), but at least it avoids the above pitfalls.

That's what my proctologist told me on my last visit.

Well, I've been playing with Doom3Edit for the last few days. I'm starting to like it. I'd like to know if there are any limits in this editor. How many entities? How many brushes? How many polygons in object? Etc. Is there any info on this?