Zoraptor

Yeah, I think if I were to sum it up it would be all about the implementation. Something like HDR is a 'real' visual effect and should make things more realistic, but its usage in games tends to be so over exaggerated that it often makes things look less realistic. I'm not really sure about normal and bump mapping not so much because they don't (generally) improve things but because I'm not sure whether I'd class them as being trivial or not. The 'intermediate' step of something like full colour per pixel transparency/ alpha channel tgas (as opposed to something like pallettised gifs with 0 entry full transparency) or equivalent I'd certainly take as trivial. Completely agree about animations though. At least the more ridiculous early ragdoll problems such as in Deus Ex: Invisible War have largely been fixed. The other areas I'd cite is audio occlusion and the like, bitrates and the like go up but implementation and 'realism' wise something like Thief 2 is still superior to most recent stuff, certainly including Thiaf- and AI, albeit that in particular is a very difficult area where huge amounts of effort could be expended for little practical benefit.

Probably more appropriate here than in 'what you're playing', so I'm shifting it here. Ignorance. Lol. Could just be a difference of opinion, y'know. I clearly don't hate old graphics so long as they do the job, after all. No, I think most of those are trivial, or if you prefer a synonym for trivial: 'simple'. Much like colour depth and resolution- I clearly wasn't making an exhaustive list there. Indeed, of those I'd definitely say that dynamic lighting and antialiasing are trivial; as is the move to 3d and higher poly models since they are inevitable improvements as much as are resolution and colour depth. SSAO in particular I'd already dealt with, every time I've seen it all it does is stick an unrealistic dark outline around stuff. Can't speak for anyone else but to me that isn't realistic in the slightest. And sadly, when I think of bump/ normal mapping I end up thinking of things like the Bioshocks where they were used to make models that were decent enough technically look like some sort of dampened plasticene caricatures, more technical wizardry but also far less visually realistic even than plain old 'flat' but hi res textures. Frankly the most realistic graphics- ie graphics that most closely resemble what I see in real life- in games that I've seen are still probably from Stalker, albeit Stalker with some custom shaders. Other games like TWitcher 2 have better graphics, but the insistence on having lashings of effects for the sake of it all too often does not actually make it more realistic, often it just makes it less realistic but more complicated and more taxing on hardware. Though of course, no doubt there are effects that do work and I don't really notice because they're properly understated.

Sadly, Mugabe has better democratic credentials than many African leaders- you just don't tend to hear about most of them until they get overthrown because they tend to not rock the boat vis-a-vis western economic interests. That's why you only hear about Burkina Faso's French supported dictator when he runs away on a french helicopter just in front of the mob he'd been oppressing for decades, or never hear much at all about dictators in places like Equatorial Guinea who have been fleecing their countries of oil wealth while their people live in poverty. Mugabe on the other hand has very much rocked the boat on western interests so you do hear about him. Previous recent heads of the AU include Ghaddafi albeit when he was a nice pro west guy, said president of Equatorial Guinea, and the leader immediate previous to Mugabe was installed by military coup... Don't get me wrong, Mugabe's no true democrat and has sacrificed being remembered as a genuine freedom fighter and father of his nation on the altar of cronyism, corruption and a desperate need to maintain control and power. It would just be nice if the Beeb etc applied those criteria evenly instead of only ever against people the west doesn't like for other reasons than their democratic credentials.

For graphics whatever works, works. I find it far more important that there is a consistent art direction and style than any specific technical criteria. I'd tend to have three classifications: good, OK and badly implemented. Something like Fallout 1 would be OK as an example, it wasn't very technically advanced even when released but it does the job, sets the scene consistently and has no really jarring problems that break immersion. Something like TWitcher 2 would be good because it does what Fallout does but looks better, while something like Oblivion- despite having many technical advancements over, say, Fallout- would be badly implemented because it had numerous issues that broke immersion such as the poor hdr/ bloom implementation, massive LOD/ texture pop issues etc that always said 'this is a game you are playing, do not forget it' In the context of a pseudo European forest I'd agree, I've never seen a Euro forest of that type either live or in pictures, but it is quite similar to the sort of subtropical forest you get here or in Australia. Enough so that I would think it was based on that rather than the more well known tropical rainforests.

I actually have difficulty thinking of a single* 'graphical realism' effect that consistently makes graphics look more realistic beyond the trivial ones like better resolution/ colour depth. Bloom/ hdr all too often ends up with people looking like they've been living in the Chernobyl Sarcophagus/ been smeared in vaseline or has objects that are quite matte in reality that shine like a localised supernova if there's so much as a candle nearby; SSAO puts weird black outlines around everything and lens flare is used in situations where it shouldn't occur at all and in a manner that would shame JJ Abrams. And motion blur... well yeah, not exactly what I experience in real life, albeit my eyes are pretty borked. No doubt there are effects that do work and I don't really notice because they're properly understated, but yeah, it really does seem like the programmers and artists doing video games really do want to make sure you notice all their effort rather more than they want their effort to give a realistic visual result. *Fog and weather usually seems to be OK, but even then there have been some rather prominent overdone examples.

In significant numbers, yes. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there were more FSA chaps there than Rohirrim, just not significantly more. Reason is, the YPG and FSA don't like each other much. The FSA sees the YPG as barely better than collaborators with Assad as they have barely fought Assad at all since he (pragmatically) withdrew his troops from most of Syrian Kurdistan, they don't have particularly compatible aims as the FSA is explicitly anti Assad while the YPG is pro Kurd and anti anyone (including the FSA since they want territorial integrity) who opposes that, and perhaps most significantly the YPG remembers how a large number of 'FSA' people became ISIS people as soon as they became the most well armed and successful group.

I don't have any particular problem with the article in general, as the FSA stuff is minor and I haven't looked at the other stuff in any depth. But it is another example of the so very easily exploitable reference rules which allow incorrect, non independently confirmed or biased information into an article so long as it has a citeable source- rules which are open to everything from simple mistakes to gross and deliberate manipulation as a result. Whether there is any way of actually fixing that which isn't worse than the current situation, well, I cannot readily think of one except the rather specious one of having unbiased and critical editors- realistically I know perfectly well that my idea of unbiased will clash with other people's even with perfect good faith by all parties.

There is no back pedalling, there cannot be any back pedalling (for a year, at least), the decision is final, the votes are counted, the fat lady is sitting back down having a Gin & Tonic while letting her vocal cords rest, the janitor is picking up the empty popcorn containers: it is over*. In any case Ryulong self ejected before the ban was official- his attempt to get the Adland article deleted was probably a pre emptive kamikaze once he saw which way the wind was blowing and his user page now has the same message that NBSBaranof put on his. *Which may not stop people from trying to re-litigate it, but under wiki rules it's a final decision by their equivalent of a Supreme Court.

The wikipedia article is, well, rubbish when it comes to FSA involvement. It cites Facebook (!) and otherwise every single source for FSA involvement resolves to being an FSA one thus not independent and with a vested interest in over exaggerating any contribution made by them. Which is of course one of the primary problems with wikipedia, their main concern is getting citations from trusted secondary sources not getting unbiased or accurate information so for them 'CNN quotes FSA leader as saying they have a millionty billionty soldiers in Kobane' is an accurate source because it comes from CNN- not because there actually were a millionty billionty FSA guys there. At least the graphic used YPG pennants for the areas captured, but there really isn't any justification in using the FSA one beyond PR.

They've published the final decision and he's gone. The main anti-GG arb member even voted to ban in the end probably due to him trying to get a moderately GG related page deleted. Pretty sure it always had a right to appeal after a year clause and that has not changed, but they are otherwise permanent bans:

It doesn't set one. The pilot is a legit pow and was captured legitimately, he isn't a kidnapped civilian. Doing a swap for a kidnapped civilian encourages more kidnapping, doing a swap for a pow encourages them to take prisoners rather than line any captured combatants up in the desert and execute them, as was their prior modus operandi.

EA's quarterly report has DAI being the most successful launch of a Bioware game ever. So congrats Bioware, I guess.

The something else being Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, not Advanced. I suspect that Bruce is getting a kick out of everyone parroting his (no doubt deliberate) mislabelling as if it were accurate.

Ryulong has been saying pretty much exactly the same thing in multiple sympathetic places- someone fast tracked his membership onto neogaf and of course he's been sponsored by/ posting on 'ghazi for a while. His and NBSBaranof's reactions illustrate almost perfectly why they shouldn't be editing something that is supposedly a dispassionate encyclopaedia, the level of emotional involvement is too high by far. And of course if they weren't so emotionally involved they wouldn't have edit warred and ended up banned in the first place.

Shame we don't have the Sexy Men thread still active, else I could post those pictures of Sting as Feyd Ruatha in his ludicrous posing pouch. Instead I'll just link to a google image search with a mild nsfw warning: budgie smugglers detected. (I say posing pouch/ budgie smugglers, but groinal batarang is probably a better description).

FSA flag, don't make me laugh. May as well put the flag of Gondor or Rohan there too, they contributed only slightly less than the FSA did.

Quen is the 'shield' power. Aard is the 'wind' power.

Looks like the two biggest editors of the gamergate wikipedia page (Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof) have both been topic banned now. There's not much more left to happen from that arbitration, by the looks of things. Of the four biggest edit makers two have been topic banned, one exonerated and one giving a warning only.

Agreed, Gamersgate is about ethics in selling you games, not about disseminating personal information. At present they want me to buy 'Dead Island' which I hear had a totally non sexist bloody-yet-shapely-bust-of-a-bust as part of its physical collectors' edition which appalled the delicate flowers at RPS so much they got it pulled. Unfortunately it's a steam key like most of the stuff they try and sell me and I suspect I'd find the gameplay trivial and repetitive, so I will decline.

Helix S1 was... interesting. At times it felt like they'd shot 1 hour episodes that had been crudely cut down to 42 minutes so it was kind of nonsensical but it was entertaining enough (and had at least one completely random but wildly entertaining wtf moment) and I watched the whole thing. The elevator muzak theme and setting giving me a System Shock vibe was one of the main factors though. S2 isn't (so far) related much at all to the setting of S1, apart from obviously being in the same continuity and using most of the same characters it is in a completely different place with a different disease.

In some truly random gaming related news the Greek economist who designed Valve's economic model designed to fleece obsessive compulsives of their cash is set to fleece Germans of their cash become Greece's new finance minister. Expect the Euro crisis to be solved by selling a plethora of regional hats, achievements (1% annualised growth unlocked!), trading cards and gamifying everything under the sun.

Interesting dichotomy between the two versions of what the psychologists did, and from the psychologists themselves at times. Mitchell himself has simultaneously said he didn't have much to do with abuse and that he did and it was a success anyway: Not really sure how to reconcile the two statements unless he is explicitly using the 'enhanced interrogation techniques torture by trained professionals is fine, by amateurs is highly irresponsible' definition of abuse. Still, for a reported 81 million dollars I suspect there'd be a fair number of respected medical professionals whose ethics would suddenly become more elastic let alone if their patriotism were appealed to- and you basically have to believe that you're better than and got the good oil for a better cause than Saddam Hussein, Heinrich Himmler, Hideki Tojo or Laurentiy Beria's torturers who were just plain thugs.

To explain: it's sticking the question marks at the end of aggressive statements that to my mind pushes it from being a reasonable response to being passive aggression, I have no problem with your responses, as illustration, nor with the original question Enoch asked which was entirely reasonable. I don't even have a problem with Gromnir's responses here even if I may disagree with them, and he's someone I'm very likely to find subjective or objective fault with, if fault is there. Specifically, question marks imply a desire to continue engagement and actively invite a response when the (sensible) response- and the one he suggested himself- really ought to be to state your opinion, if wanted (already done), and then leave the thread and subject you don't like. To ask a (hopefully not aggressive, and mostly rhetorical) question myself: what's the point of asking a question if you don't want a response or the thread to continue, and specifically what is the point of asking an aggressively worded question if you don't want said response? It just increases the likelihood of your disliked thread continuing on and you aren't going to get an answer you like because, well, you already know it's a subject you don't like. It is at best classic make work, asking questions for the sake of putting out the person you're asking, at worst it's fishing for a- specifically aggressive- response. Those are both recognised traits of passive aggression. (I've got no problem with Enoch himself, I just think that particular technique is utterly unconstructive and wastes everyone's time)

I'm finding it hard to be upset, to be honest. Yeah, you can avoid it if you want to but at the same time it's trivially easy to get the same content from other sources, indeed I suspect most of the images came from Google Image Search as it was. On most gaming sites the thread would never have been allowed in the first place, nor would a lot of those on the front pages- and any public disagreement with the moderation team would be met with deletion and bans. And there were several moderational notes previous about it skirting the line in terms of acceptability and asking for no bikini shots etc that were adhered to for a week or so and then ignored. I was quite surprised it lasted as long as it did. Fundamentally though, there's no expectation of free speech on company property: their place, their rules.

For some reason I thought the MiG 15's designation was given to a soviet missile, not a fighter. How stereotypically Freudian of me.