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I agree most horror movies are crap. The majority made in the Imperial States of America are these stupid moralistic tales where a bunch of teenagers engage in some hanky-panky, either sex, drugs, or something similar and are summarily executed by the monster/psycho. The hero is almost always the character that is "good", the one who says "Hey guys its not a good idea to smoke pot and have group sex in this abandoned psychiatric hosptial thats rumored to be haunted." S/he will almost certainly be the only one left standing to confront the killer in the same formula, a long chase, some close calls, and finally a battle of wits out of which the hero emerges. And then, of course, the last second of the film lets you know that the evil is not really dead, its only waiting for a new chance to rise again. In the form of a sequel. One exception to this was the Japanese flick "Dark Waters" about a haunted apartment complex in Tokyo. Its REALLY SPOOOOOOKY! I understand there is a version made in Hollywood but you wont catch me watching it. Some of the Exorcists and Omens 1, 2, & 73 had some scary moments but they cannot maintain it and they are suffused with Christian mysticism, something the world needs less of. Another great movie is Tarkovskys "Stalker", its a sci-fi piece. I wont go on with the details of it but suffice it to say Tarkovsky achieves a higher state of immersion than the average Hollywood clunker with NO special effects other than some bullets flying and masterful dialogue/cinematography. the man was hardcore, he once reshot a scene for another movie something like 27 times, each time repainting the set and repositioning the actors until he felt the setting was perfect for the script. The care comes out in his films, each scene is like viewing a painting, sometimes I just stop the DVD and soak up the images for a few seconds.

Logans Run is a really good movie. And Matrix is an all time favourite. Only the first part though. The second one is ok and the last is ... what was it about again? Memento is also a really cool movie und Das Boot (don't know an english title for this).

One of my favourite comedy shows was Blackadder... and Drop The Dead Donkey always had me in fits of laughter. I generally get bored with comedy movies, because it is very hard to sustain the laughs for the length of a movie - comedy movies usually die in the last hour, but there are a few good ones, like the Monty Python (Life Of Brian is my favourite of those). A half-hour TV comedy show is the best format to present comedy IMO... I regard the Horror genre as comedy - there are very few that I find even remotely scary, but most of them either bore me to tears or make me piss myself laughing. Mostly because the premise of a typical horror movie is so ridiculous, the characters so stereotyped, and the plot so predictable that you would have to be of a pretty nervous disposition to be frightened by it. And since I am all for demons and monsters killing stupid American teenagers, I am usually on the bad guy's side, so I tend to get a bit of a giggle out of them. I like movies where the bad guy wins, I wish people made more movies like that, there aren't enough. Is anyone here actually scared or creeped out by horror movies, or do you usually find them either amusing or boring like me?

Plan 9 from Outer Space - a classic. A couple of under achieiving comedies I like are Planes, Trains and Automoblies and The Tall Guy - which was written by Richard Curtis, of Blackadder fame, before he want on to write blockbuster like Four Weddings. My favourite genre is comedy, but to be honest, movies are blown away by the wealth of TV comedy the BBC has shown over the years here in the UK. I can't think of any comedy movies made in the last 50 years that really have had me in stitches apart from the Monty Python movies. My favourite comedy of all time is the League of Gentlemen, a UK TV show, any of you who don't live in the UK should download it. If you like dark comedy and a weird disturbing freakshow with your laughs, then this is for you, and I guarantee it'll be nothing that you've seen before if you live in the US and have been brought up on a diet of 'Friends'. You can get the torrents from digitaldistractions for one. I pretty sure you couldn't buy the DVDs in most foreign countires. There are 3 series, 18 episodes in all.

Ok, I've got all my equipment and hopefully can put these problems behind me tomorrow (fingers crossed). One (hopefully) last question: how important is it to add thermal grease to a cpu when you're moving it from one mobo to another? The instructions I've got say you should add some, but that's going to add some time to the whole procedure tomorrow, since I don't have any and I'm not entirely sure where I'd go to get some around here. Is it a major thing, or one of those over-the-top precautions that manuals include, like wearing a grounding bracelet while working?

Okay if the AI is good: Make a mistake, go hide in the water/climb ladder to pointless bit you can't access elsewhere/mantle up a bit, the AI guard follows you. He could stay guarding, shoot, get help. You go back to the place you messed up at -Oh no you can't because there was a small army waiting for you to get down/out and they killed you. D'oh! Or did you get around the army, maybe using a water arrow, invisibilty potion or flashbomb (I would actually use those last two in that situation, I never needed to in Thief, always found plain stealth better somehow, even if it meant reloading). Of course this could increase chances of quickload but if you gave an Ironman bonus or 3 reloads and under bonus (no benefit just a Well Done) in the finish screen that would be cool. I would do it. Or optional objective. Just for fun really, like setting myself a 1 or 0 blackjack limit on T2x missions.

I'm not sure if you were just adding to my point, or responding to a point you think I was trying to imply. Either way, it's a valid point. I'm not a "creationist", but the last I heard, the "evolutionary process" was still just a theory and has yet to be substantiated as absolute fact. Sure, there's a bunch of circumstantial data that "suggests" it "might" be a "probable" fact. But not even Evolutionary Science will come right out of it's mouth and say, "Alright, everyone, here's where we came from". Just recently, archeologists on different sides of the planet discovered three new "branches" of our "evolutionary tree". One they call "Giant" (from whom, they are now convinced, we all sprang), one whose name I can't remember, and one called "Hobbit" who lived about 20,000 years ago...that's right people...according to Evolutionary Science, we are modern decendants of Middle Earth. Tolkien was right all along.* Do I think Evolutionary Science has merit? Absolutely. But I think it unfortunate that the sciences have put so much effort into trying desperately to prove this particular theory, that they have turned a blind eye to any others. Believing that monkeys made fire and became human is just as ridiculous as an invisible man in the sky creating us from dirt, Extra-terrestrials extracting us from thier DNA and dropping us on planet earth, or that our "junk" DNA is runoff from when we were Lizards...All of which, given enough time and circumstantial evidence, I could prove were fact. Even carbon dating, past a certain threshold in time, cannot "accurately" deliniate anything about "when" something lived and died. Fifty years ago, science said is was impossible to travel at the speed of sound, and now we go several times faster than that. At one point, it was pretty much an established fact that the world was flat. Once Science makes a "theory" without evidence into absolute fact, it becomes little more than mythology. And we don't need yet another religion. And just as an aside, I don't believe there is any such thing as "true Altruism". In it's strictest sense, altruism is an action taken without a benefit given...however, if the altruistic person gains a sense of pride or satisfaction at the action taken, the benefit given is pride or satifaction, therefore, the act is not altruistic. To me, any act of altruistism is, in fact, a wholly selfish one. Jus my op, nillas. *EDIT: I finally took the time to read the SIN 2 thread, and saw that obscurus already posted about the three humanoid variants found recently. Just wanted to give Ob the credit, since he wrote it first...I didn't want to sound like I was ripping him off.

oDDity knows. Last I heard, we were still debating the usefulness of AI even being able to swap weapons.

I don't like the thought of our thief lugging a lantern around, so I tried to devise something that's not as clunky. I know some of you out there probably don't want more crystal things, but alas. If you could imagine our thief carrying a pocket full of little sticks and some crystals, when he needs light he could just attach the two together and voila... LIGHT! The light it gives off could be uneven, in that it could maybe flicker in and out a little like a flame, or something else... I think it would be neat to see the thief using these to light his way a little. Not too bright, not too dim. It's subtle, like a glow. It's lightweight and more of a tool a nimble thief would use. The crystal would only last about 15-20 seconds and then it goes out and you have to drop the stick/crystal on the ground. If a guard is coming and you need the light to go out right away, then you need to drop it or throw it against a wall. In doing so, it will give a gentle and pleasing glass shatter noise and extinguish.

I'm obsessed with playing this. I think I've learnt more geography in the last few weeks of fiddling with this program that in the other 21 years of my life combined. You can sneak a peek into the back garden of Japan's Emperor, spy on Kim Jong-Il, and look for Noa's Ark on Mt. Ararat. Bliss... You can get it Here! I only wish they had more detailed satellite pics for Wales, so you could see me waving from my garden. Type 'll55 4bj' in search to find my present location...

Obscurus: For example, blindsight, where a person can see, but they are not consciously aware of being able to see. Or when you drink large quantities of alchohol, and you behave in ways contrary to what your normal "will" would dictate. Or a tumor pressing on part of your brain that controls self restraint, causing you to have uncontrollable outbursts of rage. Or a hormone imbalance that makes you clinically depressed, and think scuicidal thoughts. All fine examples of times when the will is compromised if not totally dominated. No one thinks that the will is always free, sometimes you are drunk or in a rage and you lose it. Rather than thinking of it as a black/white point, I prefer to view it as a spectrum of freedom, a small but dynamic range of actionable desires that swells when we are clear headed and everything is in order and which shrinks when we are ill or drunk or too tired or whatever. It really doesnt matter if some of this thinking takes place "unconsciously" for that matter, its still your neurons, shaped through your sensitive collecting of information of the world as you learn and grow, that produces this will. And the distinction between conscious and unconcious thinking is not nearly as clear as you may think. In one sense human intelligence is a personalized filter through which our desires and therefore our wills are shaped. The desires that become our wills are action forming. There is no distinction between "you" and these desires/actions, they ARE you. As is the intricate brain architecture which gave rise to those desires, and the memories stored there. O:Your will is dictated from the outside in. Absolutely correct. And one of the dictating authorities is our own minds, both its "concious" and "unconscious" aspects. So our wills are formed according the the desires to be found there. Nothing more, this is freedom in a determined universe. O:In the complete absence of all sensory input and memory, there would be nothing for your "will" to work on, and you would be conscious of nothing. Even the feedback of your conscious thoughts back into the unconscious is controlled unconsciously. Again correct. Our desires are shaped by the senses and memories, plus a zillion other things, and in turn coalesce into our will. Freedom comes with our ability, as Harry Frankfurt put it, to "want our wants (or not) and to make those meta-wants our will." O:Have you ever done something and wondered why you did it? This is the illusion of self control, the illusion that you have a disninct will, breaking down. Have you ever done something and known exactly why you did it? You did X and not only did you want to do X for a host of good reasons, determinants!, but you also wanted to want X. You can desire something but at the same time critically examine the desire. Have you ever wanted something and then at the last second reminded your self of an even greater desire that precludes enjoying the first desire? Thats freedom. O:Free will is an illusion, a pleasant one granted, but an illusion nonetheless. We have no more free will than a worm does, just more complex neurological processes and a tendency to think too much of them. Nonesense. Worms have wants, not that they think about them but we can say they have wants, but worms cannot sculpt their wants and change their wants and even stop their wants as we can. They cannot want, or not want, their wants as we can. They have no second tier of desires, to want or not want ones will at any given time.

Updates are posted regularly on the website. The last one was about three weeks ago.

Just this last week, I received a financial aid notification, that included not only the student loan, but the parent loan (which i don't want) as well. I called them up about it and they said both loans had been somehow "nullified," after trying to get in contact with a particular counselor for a week, it turns out that the student loan was probably never canceled in the first place.

That's my point, he doesn't have to have a way to disable them. He can sneak around them. That's the difference between a stealth game and a shooter. I want to see enemies in the game that the thief is powerless against, and has to simply stick to the shadows and sneak around. IT is not a requirement of the game that the player has to have the ability to kill or disable every single AI, or is there a secret games rule book somewhere that I haven't seen? Kevin, if you take the head for the main bot in oyur first post, take the legs and spinning wheel from the second on in your first ost, and add that little back wheel form the main bot in your last post, I think it would work, with some more clockwork detail added. Wu;ld make an excellent sentry.

Hooray! Diversity of Opinion! By the way, just as a sort of appeasement, oDD, I agree very much with Finger - that slicing off one set of fans just for the sake of the other half is silly and pointless when you can please both at the same time. If you were to release a campaign that prevented me from killing, then I'd play and enjoy it, as basically it is Thief's gameplay I like. I'd probably prefer a campaign that allowed killing in some form, but I don't actually have the virtual bloodlust. It's not that I find killing special in some way, or that I have a deep seated psychological desire for death (at any rate if I do I haven't found out about it yet... ) It's the choice that is more important - if being able to fish were an easy to implement, widely supported method of completing thief that was balanced and fit in with the gameplay, then I'd support its inclusion. However, last time I checked... I don't think it was

kmfccall - that is super awesome how you thought of the spotlight feature for that first sentry. That will use D3's dynamic lighting to good effect. A totally heart jumping moment that couldnt be created in T2, when you suddenly have a visible shaft of light pointed on you. To me that is an obvious tip for the player to tell them how to disable them, not the designers admitting it was a stupid idea. Games are full of these tips and Thief is no different. "Last time I saw my gold watch I was swimming in the pool in the court yard. Perhaps I look for it later."

It's true though - for some people, killing is "just another option" rather than a last resort. Thief always struck me as a very realistic game, and I've always felt compelled to play it with the same moral judgment calls I might make in real life. Initially it was out of vague suspicion that it would have an affect somewhere else in the game, but now even though I know some things won't, its just fun to play that way. Easily the main reason I keep doing it is because it often ends up to be the most sucessful way to play. I get plenty of tense moments being caught and being chased, so the more I avoid, the better. There really is never a need for me to even risk sniping someone.

When you say something is better than something else, you have to qualify it by saying what it is better for. Saying X is better than Y is an inherently meaningless statement, because it is incomplete - you need to say X is better than Y because of Z reason, and only in the narrow context of Z does the statement make sense. You can also say that X is better than Y for Z reason, but Y is better than X for W reason - context is the key. Complexity does not inherently make something better - it is just a difference that can be advantageous in certain circumstances, and disadvantageous in others. You say "better", I say "better for what?" In terms of a better communication system - there is none that is better than another - communication in whatever form exists to maximise the reproductive success of organisms. So a fiddler crab waving it's claw to signal to other crabs is just as good for it's particular needs as our languages are for ours. On an idividual level, complexity generates a greater likelihood of defective neural wiring for example, leading to psychosis, neurosis etc - the more cognitively complex organisms are, the more often they develop mental diseases, or behave in self destructive ways. On a population level, we create all kinds of problems for ourselves as a result of defective thinking. Since in terms of pure mass, the simplest bacteria make up 90% of all life, and in terms of pure numbers, bacteria make up 99.999% of all life, the brief evolutionary success of our species is nothing to crow about. Our population is dwarfed by the number and mass of cockroaches, rats and mice on the planet.. Our domination is not complete, and our domination is unsustainable, so iis unlikely to continue for much longer. We have used the resources of our planet at an unsustainable rate, we have destroyed many of the ecosystems that underpin our surival, we are grossly overpopulated, we have proliferated nuclear weapons that could destroy our planet if a few of them were accidentally discharged, causing a nuclear exchange... I could go on, but really, I shouldn't need to... And that is the problem - the planet can only sustainably support about 2 billion of us tops. Human beings are a large omnivorous mammal that consumes a fairly large amount of food, and needs a lot of resources just to survive, let alone the wasteful consumption of modern civilisation. The average human individual requires about 20 hectares of land to provide enough food to keep them going, and when you factor all the services that various living organisms in ecosystems provide us, and the excess we consume, you start to realise that we are already consuming more than we can afford. We have already overfished the oceans, and within 60 years or so, the effects of that are going to be felt when huge numbers of fish species go extinct, and ocean ecosystems collapse. The more land we take for ourselves, the less room there is for the ecosystems that sustain us. We are living on borrowed time, and borrowed ecological space, and we are going to have to pay back the debt pretty soon. Supposing we expand into space, we have a chance at surviving, but the problem is, we are running out of time to do that before the global ecosystems collapse around us, taking us with them. I don't think you really understand how much we depend on complex, varied, diverse ecosystems for our survival. Viewing the earth as a commodity at our disposal is the sort of short-sighted thinking that will destroy us, and that is the price we pay for being overly intelligent. There is nothing to suggest that creatures like us are inevitable. If the circumstances are right, then the niche for an obligate tool using ecological generalist will open up in any ecosystem, and provided there happens to be something that can quickly fill that niche before it closes up again, you might just get a similar creature to us popping up from time to time. But the fact that there have been many failed contenders in the Eaths history, for example the Troodontid theropods of the Cretaceous era, the several species of hominid from before the last ice age, the odds are heavily stacked against creatures like us persisting long enough to develop all those fascinating artifacts of civilisation are remote. The fact that no extraterrestrial civilisation has contacted us in any way (whether aggressively or out of curiosity) suggests that the likelihood of a civilisation developing to the point where it can travel through space is vanishingly small, even if such creatures are common through the universe, so if you think that we can exist by sucking one planet dry and moving on tho the next one, think again.

Nice, sounds promising! As for getting the houseguard ingame, I've been talking to Corth about that, and last I heard there were some issues with getting the scale of the houseguard model right. Is that still being resolved?

CC: obscurus So you mean to tell me that you believe there is no important difference between the premeditated human activity of agriculture and the automaton like behaviour of farming antsa? Come on. And human agriculture did NOT start out like the behaviour of ants, although it certainly did not begin as a science. Pure chance, evolution, sure, but it was pure chance combined with the evolution of an abstract thinking ape that led to human agriculture. Perhaps the ants are better at their farming then we are at ours, given our stupid mono-culture and dependency on chemicals/high energy input to low caloric output. Thats besides the point, the question is to what degree to ants get to play a critical role in the development of these behaviours? The answer is zero, zilcho, nada. Let me ask you this, could a non-farming ant species suddenly decide to farm, outside of the realm of some mutation that suddenly gave it that particular "hard wiring?" Could a farming ant species decide to alter the way it conducts its farming, because it had discovered a better way of doing things? No, and no. These are possibilities only for reflective beings who can look at their own actions. This does not necessarily make our agriculture better as I stated above, but it certainly makes it vastly different. Now what you are describing the elephants doing, well that sounds a lot more like how early humans began to engage in agriculture. Nothing ant-like about elephant behaviour, if you had to chose between placing it closer to our behavior and ants behavior which side would you choose? And no, wheat and cattle have NOT farmed humans, though they have certainly co-evolved with one influencing the other as much as vice versa. Again the difference is that there was no critical input from the cattle/wheat, you may as well say the E. coli in my guts have farmed me as well. CC:FishFace I can give you a few clues to look for when searching for a human style intelligence: culture, dynamic technology, mass production/extraction of resources, complex written/stored information systems, division of labor, to name a few. Again, I am not arguing for the superiority of human intelligence, as such standards are incoherent given that every intelligence is different from every other. I was simply pointing out that ours is vastly different from any other yet found on the planet, its artifacts are in fact re-writing the face of the planet. No other intelligence can make such claims, unless there is a non-human civilization living in the Marinas Trench. And elephants are certainly self aware, they may be discussing anything but they have not taken to writing those thoughts down, or building a library to house them. I wasnt saying that emergent behaviour per say makes us different or special, I WAS saying that our particular emergent behaviour is both different and special from any other. Better? No, again such standards are not coherent. But definitely different and special. Or do you know of any ants with the hubris to try to reach other planets? Or to consciously redesign their genetic patterns? You are describing a fatalistic universe, which does not exist, at least for conscious beings, a point I forgot to add yesterday. Although there may be only one path, that path was at least in part generated by conscious decisions that you made. Determined, yes, your choices were both determined and determining, but not fatalistic, otherwise you would have had no real choices. This is an important distinction because you do have real choices deeply embedded within layers of utterly deterministic influences. In short, your conscious mind is a determining factor, as determining of your will as any other influence, but it is utterly YOUR factor, in fact it IS you. Consider the example of a man who has fallen into a hole from which there is no escape. He is doomed, no one is around to help and the walls of the hole are too steep to climb. Is his situation determined or fatalistic? As limiting as such a hole may be, it is still only a determining influence as there is still room for him to make decisions even trapped within the hole. He made chose to suffocate himself and speed up the process. He may thank the gods for digging such a huge grave for him. He may spend his last few days singing or crying, as suits his beliefs. The hole can hold him but it cannot utterly limit all of his choices, and this is the crucial distinction. Which is why we are NOT automata. Automata are fatalistically doomed to do whatever their hardwiring tells them to do. They cannot alter their consciousness and therefore alter the one determining factor they have control over. Some try to bring in q-physics in order to give us a "dice roll" in our heads to escape what they see as the fatalism of being governed by consciousness but consider that statement again closely, being " governed by consciousness" To be conscious, as we term it, is to be both self aware and aware of ones external environment. Do we not wish to be determined by our consciousness? I dont mind that my will is determined by my mind, would anyone wish to have a will that was NOT determined by their own thoughts ? Abstraction is being able to generalize information from the concrete to the specific. We could say that the wasp is operating under concrete conditions, hard wired in fact, it truly is an automaton. Its instinct compels it to search out the burrow, but it cannot decide to do it or not, it cannot say "ahh, im tired today, im going to skip the inspection part today." It cannot say hey there must be a better way to search this burrow, it cannot move from its concrete actions to the abstraction of "What does it mean to search a burrow?" Language is an abstraction, its using a symbolic sound or mark to inform others or oneself about the world. Human langugage appears to be the most abstract that has arisen on the planet, it has more ways, and more dynamic, adaptive ways, of transmitting information, than any other. Does this make it better? Again, no, because such standards are inapplicable. It does make it vastly different though. And as to differences of scale, I believe that the notion of emergent behaviour demonstrates that differences of scale can develop into vastly different behaviour. So small d differences can add up to big D differences.

These days that isn't a problem - most Micro ATX boards have so much integrated into them already that you would be unlikely to use any of the extra PCI slots. And if you shop around you will have no trouble finding one that will take 4 RAM sticks, as well as having onboard LAN, SATA etc. The Micro ATX form factor is just the same as ATX, just cut down after the fourth PCI slot - all the mounting holes. backplane and PCI slots will line up just fine, just use blanking plates on the last three PCI slots on the case. Micro ATX has some advantages - it is smaller, and so will fit into a smaller case (though a normal ATX case is fine), uses a bit less power, and are usually cheaper than full ATX cases. If you are not likely to fill up all the available slots on a full ATX board, you might as well save a few bucks and go with a Micro ATX mobo. If you find your current case is taking up too much space, or you want to take your rig to LAN parties, a Micro ATX case and mobo is the way to go. The Aspire X-QPack is a good Micro ATX case, as is the Antec Aria, though the smaller cases do require more atttention to airflow and cooling, especially with a High end P4 + decent graphics card.

I didn't know whether or not to make this a vote thing so I didn't cause last time I got yelled at. lol. But seriously for people who are in the market for a new computer what advise would you give them?

I hear you, baby!! The proceeding news story was on yahoo just last year, October. It's probably old hat to most of you. I have always, and forever shall, believe that this is the next step in cpu's. Early on, the main problem with this tech was the size (obviously), but more importantly (and they don't really go into this in the article) was the quality of light, believe it or not. Hurray for photons and polaritons!!!! Hylix. Edit: Small clarification.

Hey guys, you conveniently ignored the fact that in a single mission, there is no point collecting loot, cause you can't spend it. So you need an arbitrary objective. This is Thief, it's about stealing for christ's sake. I hate scavenging for that last 5% more than anyone I know, but I would never support not having a loot objective all together. Not having a loot objective only makes sense in T3, where you get to spend it, so you can collect for your own needs and not some arbitrary objective.

The options are the least of our worries and should go last.