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I don't have a lot of sympathy for such a player. If you are provided with a lantern at the begining of the game, it's a fair assumption that it will be useful somewhere. Dropping it somewhere that you can't get it would be pretty stupid. It's like being given a combination on a piece of paper at the start of a mission and throwing it away before you find out where to use it. And, as Ish said, the lantern isn't the last option for getting through dark areas. You can go back and pick up another light source from somewhere, or try your best to feel your way through.

And... think of a "Light arrow" that works as a lantern while holding in hand before shooting it. And it could be fired and stick to a wall so it could be like a torch and last for a while.

The concept is that the FM author can rely on the player always having the lantern as a light source, so they can freely create spooky dark areas and not worry about the player being stuck with a black screen, unable to move anywhere because they can't feel their way around like you can in real life. Making it undroppable is also up to the FM authors discretion, for the same reason above, but in spite of this, all the other guys on the team simply cannot accept the idea of the lantern being undroppable by default :/ They want it droppable by default. So yes, unlimited fuel, waterproof - its going to have to be magical. Or maybe not - we can just say the fuel is longer than any mission is likely to last. That's all trivial.

I think there are more screen shots of maps in development, they are very good, don't know why they aren't on the site yet Yeah Ishtvan has done all the Sound Propagation programming himself and it is awesome, sound propagates correctly through windows, around corners, no through doors that are closed but will go through when open, etc. Guards come searching for you yeah. Sophisticated Zombie is going to implement higher level behaviours, such as running for help etc. I programmed the script for the weapons so far - blackjack, sword, and basic arrow system which all arrows can be based off. Fire arrow was easy, just create an explosion instead of a retreivable arrow Ishtvan has created different surfaces so depending on what texture you put on a surface, an arrow may destroy or sink in. I think there is a new model for the bow since you last looked. The other arrow types haven't been done but a large part of their functionality is based on the "stim system" which is the way AI interact with other objects. Sparhawk has been working on this and its progressing steadily.

Having a sword out underwater to bash open grates and fight off mean fish was being debated internally, last I checked. The bow underwater is not that believable though and will probably not be included (although AFAIK you'll be able to fire a bow when wading in water that's not over your head). I doubt you could fire very well even when floating on your back, since your upper body has to kind've turn to one side when drawing a bow.

well i doubt a Screen light level analysis every 1/4 of a second or 1/2 second would seriously impact preformance much... like if the average light level over the last 50 shots was 50 or so (of 256) rampu up the gamma to make it 75 over the course of say... 10 seconds or so.

None of the models should be pointing to the material file, at least from the procedure I had go through to fix the black models last time. This is the walkthrough I made to get rid of black models. 1. Model resides in its own folder. In this case models/props/furniture/armoire 2. Textures are stored in models/props/textures 3. Material files should look like this. This is the correct setup for the models in lightwave. They should all work though...since I set them up so models could be put anywhere. I'll look into it and see what's wrong sometime today.

I set the sound to loop for the duration of the noisemaker. We can tweak the noisemaker duration to whatever we want, right now I think I have it set to 25 or 30 seconds. We'll want it to last for some time so AI can home in on it, since they won't know exactly where it is when they're still a few rooms away.

D3 renders triangles in an arbitrary order, as do a lot of engines. (ok, technically speaking the order isn't entirely arbitrary, I've heard that visportals tend to affect it) With opaque triangles, this is perfectly fine, because the depth buffer is used to ensure that only the pixels nearest to the player are rendered. In general, the order in which you render opaque triangles has pretty much no effect on the resulting images. With translucent surfaces, however, that doesn't work. Translucent surfaces need to know what's behind them in order to be properly rendered. For this reason they're rendered after all the opaque surfaces have been drawn. However, there's still the problem of overlapping translucent surfaces. Consider the image of the two windows. If the far window is rendered first, then by the time the near window is drawn, everything behind it has already been drawn, allowing it to be properly rendered. The image will look correct. If the far window is drawn last, it will be rendered over the near window, causing the near window to look like it's behind the far window. Hence, it's important to make sure that translucent triangles are rendered in descending order of distance to the camera. (arguably it's not that simple, since translucent surfaces may intersect, but I'll ignore that) Doom 3 renders them in a more-or-less arbitrary order (probably for performance reasons) resulting in overlapping translucent surfaces looking wrong. With the gas arrow screenshot, the gas is being rendered first, and the window is being rendered in front of the gas, despite being behind it.

I got the timeline wrong, Enron (not Haliburton though) was already cranking California before Arnie came along. But as to the relationship between Arnie and Ken Lay/Enron and the recall effort, check out the first one especially it has a bibliography of its sources at the head: http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/13.html http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0817-07.htm Heres a good book about the mess which I havent read: "Conspiracy of Fools" by Kurt Eichenwald A webcast about a new documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room": http://www.againstthegrain.org/audio1.31.06.mp3 Here are some more sources dealing primarily with the energy shortages themselves. One is a private study done by some energy consulting firm that lays at least some of the blame on market manipulation: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/us/ca/How_We_Go...ergy_Crisis.pdf The others are journalistic sources: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1062 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/01/...ain620626.shtml http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...1455EDT0645.DTL http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1972574.stm Im going to post one last article by Paul Krugman after this post, its a NY Times article and I cant find the link anymore. So I maintain that there was a political conspiracy, yes a >>conspiracy<<, people meeting in secret to discuss things which are illegal and immoral, as well as a conspiracy to jack energy rates in California. It seems that Reliant energy was an even bigger player than Enron, Halliburton I did not find a mention of though. And the source of the blackouts was hardly attributable to Davis attempting to regulate the market, de-regulation had plunged it into chaos a few years before it. If Im reading your response correctly you are arguing that his tampering killed "incentive" for the energy companies to sell because they would fail to make enough profits. I would argue that they already WERE making record profits and Davis was attempting to reign in a run away train. Not that Im a fan of Davis, Im sure he is a shit bag.

(about lack of depth-sorting:) Here's a screenshot of two slightly translucent windows. Their triangles are always drawn in a specific order, regardless of your position. They don't sort things so that the nearest translucent triangle is rendered last. From one direction things look fine, but from the other it becomes obvious what's going wrong. Needless to say, this is bad if you want to have a lot of transparent surfaces. (team members & beta mappers: this gas-arrow screenshot is another example of lack of depth-sorting; it's why the windows look so dark and out-of-place)

Oh, I'm not worried because of that. I'm just surprised, because the engine is now released little more than one year, and it seems people already consider it outadet. Not this particular guy, that was just the spark that caused me to write the posting. The price is dictated by the market. If a game sells bad it will be sonner in the bin then others. So that HL2 can still be sold at high price means that it is indeed sold pretty well and continues. Not sure though, because I seem to remember that I read in the last Gamestar issue that it is alos going to the bin now. I totally forgot about this. Just remembered this because they complained that Steam is not removed now. Did you EVER see a copyprotection mechanism that worked well and caused prices to drop? We heard the same for CDs, for DVDs and we hear it all the time. "If people wouldn't pirate we could sell at lower prices." but when CDs came out it was claimed that the previous titles had to be recovered so the prices couldn't drop. That's just a marketing crap to give people a bad feeling.

As far as I'm concerned, there's only two things that could make the D3 engine be considered outdated: the lack of real depth-sorting and inability to use fragment shaders except as post-process effects. (I might be wrong about this last limitation) The lack of depth-sorting makes it pretty much impossible to do any kind of realistic windows if the player can see one through another. Applying fragment shaders as post process effects makes it impossible to do realistic water without obvious graphical glitches. Aside from those two major deficits, I really love the D3 engine, and I think it can scale up quite nicely as time goes on.

As soon as you mentioned "some things may become transparent", I immediately remembered some photos I saw from japan of girls wearing tops that became seethrough with a special lens. Just as you described in the last paragraph. That was all a very interesting read. I wonder if in the future we will mod ourselves to see UV, just like we innoculate ourselves against certain viruses as a "must do" thing. If so, I'm sure there would be big changes in the textile industry. Hehe.

Well, voting for a party only does so much. Once you have cast your vote, it is up to the elected government to keep their promises, which they usually don't. The problem is that the current government won both the upper and lower houses of parliament. The senate has proportional voting, and traditionally, most Australians vote for the opposite party in the senate to the one they vote for in the house of Representatives, as a bit of a safeguard. Yet still the Liberal party got the SenateCompulsory voting or not, Australians voted the current government into an unprecedented level of unfettered power. So now they are passing all kinds of laws that they never campaigned on in there pre-election platform, doing things they said they wouldn't do. None of this is because of compulsory voting. Compulsory voting makes it more difficult for governments to get the numbers in both houses to carry out this kind of legislation,but it doesn't make it impossible. In a democracy - any form of democracy - the critical weakness is that people can collectively make a poor decision, which is what happened in Australia at the last election. The irony of having a single party in power however, is that now minor players in the party are starting to dissent and exert their own power now - effectively one party starts to become a parliament full of independents once each politician realises the position of influence they hold. The proportion of Australians wo don't cast a legitimate vote in elections is very low, below 15%. Compare that to the US, where often more than 50% of the population don't vote. Compulsory voting encourages people to think about their governance more. Making things voluntary encourages laziness and apathy. Don't confuse two separate issues: levels of voting vs how people vote.

Sniper Elite is one of the best games I've played last year. I really liked the stealthy aspects and also the graphics were surprisingly nice:) Also a cool function is the bullet cam, when you will get a one shot kill the camera follows the bullet in slowmotion to the point of impact. Another good thing is that the AI tries to flank you and sneak up uppon you from behind, and not straight running towards you:) Only drawback is that there seems to be noo Karabiner 98 in the game, kind of a pitty, like that rifle very much. But starting with a G43 makes up a lot:) Hidden and Dangerous II is one of the best games I've played ever. It's nice and realistic, and you can snipe as much as you want. Cobra 6

Just wanted to update here. The following models still show black (no texture): crate01.lwo crate02.lwo font1.lwo castironsign1.lwo Finger, I'll add the .mtr myself if you just give me the name of the material for the last two. All of the models in the pipekit also currently show black, even though there's a material file for them. These models used to work, but now have no texture since the reorganization: props/decorative/orchid.lwo props/decorative/vase1.lwo architecture/rail1.lwo architecture/dome1.lwo -- most of the textures show up, but the railing wood does not. edit: Finger and I managed to fix the sign-holder. The rest are still black.

Well, perhaps I should have clarified that as 'the US thinks it needs a war every 20 years or so....'. Nevertheless, I think you are underestimating the importance of the arms trade in the world economy. It is a false economy, of course, and we could well do without it, but the perpetual mass manufacture of arms keeps quite a few people very rich. Now, if those weapons aren't used, they won't sell any more bullets, or grenades, or land mines etc. If you want to get wealthy quick, and sell more ammo and guns, here is how to do it: send agents to infiltrate a couple of neighbouring countries, to stir up any animosities between them you can find, and make sure it escalates into a full scale war. Then sell weapons to both countries, as they use them up, they buy more and more. Of course the general 'real' economy could well do without guns 'n' ammo, but the military-industrial complex, especially in the US, is almost a whole separate econmomy, closely tied to governments. About 18% of the US annual budget comes from arms sales - vastly more than any other nation. In real economic terms, all of this weapons production is a huge drain on the global economy, but since it generates a lot of wealth for a few individuals who have a very close grip on politicians, it is very difficult to get rid of. I know wikkipedia is not always the most reliable source of information, but it is easier to link to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_trade Max: Some links. J. R. Saul was most recently the husband of the last Canadian Govenor General (ie, the Vice-Regal Consort), but is primarily noted for his novels and essays. I disagree quite a bit with some of his views, but his analysis of many issues surrounding global economics, politics, history and the global arms trade is very insightful, near flawless on occasion. http://afr.com/articles/2004/02/19/1077072774981.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ralston_Saul

Ish: The issue of taking people's guns away is not so simple though. Many view the constitutional right to bear arms as one of those freedoms that you are so worried about the gov't taking away. One of the reasons the right to bear arms was included in the constitution was so that citizens would have the ability to overthrow the government if it became oppressive. Max: The right to bear arms is an anachronism frankly. The rhetoric of the "right to guns" crowd is a useful tool for promoting right leaning political agendas but little else. The notion that this country was birthed and nurtured by armed citizens is a myth in fact, the VAST majority of early U.S. colonists did not own weaponry as they were extremely expensive and often quite dangerous to the bearer. It was not until the U.S. industrial revolution that standardized processes for making arms brought down the price and raised the safety level for the user, and even then they were not as commonplace as everyone assumes. The Wild West image of the gun slinger was largely apocryphal as well, although they were undoubtably more common then during the Colonial period. (This myth makes for great flicks though!) The people with the most guns has always been, and is today, the government and wealthy private interests. Big surprise. The time when armed citizens could toss off the U.S. government is long gone, if it ever existed. I dont care how many hunting rifles or assault rifles or automatic pistols you own, you will be crushed by the Imperial Army in a split second. Ask the Branch Davidians from Waco, Texas. Or ask a survivor of the MOVE bombing here in Philadelphia back in the 1980s, the only instance of a government using artillery against a civilian group since Hitler bombed a socialist workingmens beergarten in Austria. The notion that a group of armed citizens could withstand such an assault is pure fantasy, and even if the whole damned nation rose up in arms, who would coordinate such an attack? There is no cohesion to this "force for liberty", and any military strategist will tell you that a disorganized military force can be whipped by a much smaller but better organized force. Thats why they still study Hannibal at Cannae, he was heavily outnumbered but he used his assets wisely and trounced the Roman legion, who thought themselves invulnerable due to their numbers. Your average SWAT team could handle the majority of small groups that may attempt to use armed force to accomplish some goal. And immediately after they got done, the media would be there to trumpet the defeat and ridicule further notions of throwing off the power of the Man. So lets imagine that the stout gun owners of America have risen up to defend themselves against the Federal Tyrant. After slaughtering a few groups, and arresting hundreds more, they would be paraded on television and radio as an example to others. You can see a form of this media manipulation right here and now, just turn on "COPS" or "AMERICAS MOST WANTED." The constant message being implicitly beamed to the viewers is "We are everywhere, we are all powerful as well as righteous, to resist us is stupid at best and suicidal at worst." They dont have to come out and say such things, the video images do that well enough. Or another gem of popular media culture "WORLDS STUPIDEST CRIMINALS." This is another form of soft oppression, no need to pull out the gun to keep folks in line when you can parade examples across their T.V. screens 24/7. Barry Glassner discusses this in depth in the wonderful book "The Culture of Fear." If there were a revolution in this country, which would more than likely a rightward reaction instead of a leftward revolution, and things got so shook up that privately armed citizens could make a difference, then the government has been pushed there by forces far outside the control of the average Joe and his gun collection. Governments tumble due to systemic causes, the armed insurrections that often follow are simply one group seizing the reigns from an already dead hand. Governments that are healthy, in control of their military and police assets as well as the hearts and minds of at least a chunk of the population, can only be knocked down by outright war with a co-equal or a collection of such, long term economic illness, or combinations of the two. Ish: That's the whole point of metal detectors at schools, to make sure that people don't bring in guns in the first place and prevent something bad from happening. Second, this is not true at most schools in the US. It's true mostly at massively overcrowded inner-city public schools, where some failure of the education system has already taken place. I agree it is depressing nonetheless, and I don't think anyone in America thinks of this is a good thing. Max: If you see my post above this one, I discuss the arms industry around the world but I did not mention that its busy as hell here too. A recent attempt to bring accountability to companies who dump cheap handguns into the streets , weapons whose only purpose is to kill other humans, failed of course. The arms industry has powerful allies on both sides of the aisle. Its simply not enough to erect metal detectors everywhere, we have to get these things off the streets. And consider this, all the major school shootings in the last few years, Columbine and its kin, occured at mostly white, middle class suburban schools, not in urban mostly minority schools. True, the educational system is failing the inner city schools, failing them miserably to our deep shame as a nation. But its relatively well off white children who have taken up arms against their fellow students and the schools. I would argue this is another aspect of the fetishized, mostly mythical gun culture, a culture largely created by the arms industry itself and private dealers and buttressed with stiff doses of nationalistic/patriotic superstitions.

I have to agree that voting should be "compulsory" in that if you don't you pay a voluntary tax. If someone is too lazy to vote then my taxes should be lowered and their increased It only makes sense after all. And writing I abstain doesn't mean much, it would be better to write Jimbo Jenkins, if he is some random guy that happens to actually support the policies you like. The politicos will see that as a measure of what the electorate actually wants. I did a write in for president last time myself.

As I already explained, compulsory voting prevents people from rigging elections to a large degree as it means they unable to prevent large sections of the population from voting. Why should you have the right not to participate in your society's government making process? Rights always come wth obligations. There is a big difference between turning up at a polling booth and casting an invalid vote by writing "I abstain" on the ballot and simply not turning up. The former says you care, but find all of the choices offered unacceptable, while the latter says you are either too lazy to participate, or don't care how you are governed. These statistice are gathered at the end of every election, and political parties build their policies on them. There is a strong correlation between voter apathy and governments introducing very draconian, far reaching legislation. Governments formed in a climate of a high level of voter turn out and interest are much less inclined to make laws that would look bad under close scrutiny. governments do what they think they can get away with, and if they know they are being watched closely, they will behave. The best way to tell them you are paying atention is to vote, and to follow your vote up by writing to your elected representative on issues that concern you and your fellow citizens. Compulsory voting gives a much more accurate expression of the collective will of the people. In voluntary voting systems, governments clearly target their policies towards the sort of people who are likely to vote, and research over the last century or two makes it very easy to predict whether or not someone will vote. You can predict whether or not someone will vote in the US on the basis of their socio-economic background, location and 'race' with over 80% accuracy, which is more than enough for political candidates to base their policies on. Voluntary voting countries form governments that look after the interests of those who vote, not those who don't. Compulsory voting is about protecting the rights of those who would be disenfrachised form the political process, not about forcing some unfair burden on people. The idea that copulsory voting will all of a sudden lead to compulsory everything is absurd, and is not borne out by any evidence - the beauty of compulsory voting is that it makes it very difficult for governments to get away with nasty legislation, and when they do get away with it, it is usually overturned by the next election. For example, a party that went to an election in Australia with compulsory military service as wone of their policies would be demolished - after the Vietnam debacle, there is little chance of compulsory military service being introduced, as all politicians know that the Australian demographic overwhelmingly oposes it. @Napalm I am not pulling things out of any orifices, nor am I spreading 'propaganda'. It is very well known that only a small percentage of under 25 year olds vote - even in Australia, with compulsory voting, the vast majority of people fined for not voting are young people between 18 - 25 who don't realise the value in voting (aside from not being fined), and haven't learned to care yet. People in this age group generally take more risks (reckless driving etc) and have a very self-centred outlook on life, and it is not at all surprising that they don't vote, no matter how educated or informed they are, they often are just not interested. The demographics of who vote and who doesn't are very well understood, and very predictable, so predictable that the differences in politics in compulsory voting nations and voluntary voting nations are very obvious, and the policies formed by parties in voluntary voting states are quite clearly targeted towards those most likely to vote.

Maya is the correct app for animating doom models, so you're fine there. I'll give them to you in mb format. There is no exporter for maya 7 though, maya 6 is the last version you can export from. We really only need animations from you ATM, so no need to worry about anyting else.

Yeah, I'm not thrilled about it, especially since the whole reason I got this one was to replace the LAST HD that was causing me problems. This one doesn't list any bad sectors (yet), but every now and again it will suddenly stop being able to read files and crash. Anyway, I'm still a little confused about the direct copying thing. Currently, if I were to move my Doom3 folder to somewhere else on the same drive, it wouldn't work because Windows wouldn't know I moved it. So if I install XP on a new HD, then just directly copy all my software from one drive to the other, I'm unclear how things like shortcut icons, paths, etc, will transfer over. Or is that covered by copying all the windows folders from my original drive as well?

It is a modest estimate based on figures from Pilger, Chomsky et al. It could be wrong, but if it is, it is more likely too low. It is based on the last 100 years, but whether the deaths occured as a concentrated short term action, or a drawn out, insidious policy is not really relevant.

An apt comparision. There is a really good interview with a Canadian professor of education ( a former U.S. citizen) who argues that American culture has taken a turn towards fascism in the last few decades. His arguments have four key points: the rise of free market fundamentalism (which of course cares nothing for free markets, only markets where power and privilege have a free hand), the coopting of the media by a handful of gigantic corporations, the attack on public education (a necessity for even a formally democratic society) and the worst of the lot the dismissal of reason based thinking in favor of religious superstition. Heres the link: http://www.againstthegrain.org/audio1.03.06.mp3