metadigital

So all that abuse hurled at people who wear magnets and by Science theatre 3000 at This Island Earth for the comment about their hands being stuck like magnets was in vain? Nah ...

In context of the sentence: the Rome: Total War man / leaf / tree need only be drawn once, then that template is fed in as many times as necessary to create the myriad different types of said item; at the moment (in →DX9) each time the game engine wants to draw a little man, leaf or tree it must be drawn from scratch each and every time.

could be water and the electro-magnetic forces.

I just went out to buy some food to cook; the local Waitrose was closed (just missed it), so I went and had a Sicilian pizza from Pizza Express with a mineral water (frizante).

No.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Ah, so that's what happened to Max Payne. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Not sure about goal number three; I think it is quite common to use darkness as a mechanic in a game, even Tom Clancy games use shadow to allow the PC to hide.

Just had a four organic eggwhite omelette with some Leerdammer cheese, on organic 100% stoneground wholemeal toast with President butter.

It'll be magic, probably.

Is it possible to use a better codec and then, afterwards, re-encode the spliced file for MPEG-2? Would that help?

You're obviously not experiencing it under the proper conditions. I recommend drinking enough alcohol to kill a herd of elephants, then recovering on the sofa whilst a test match is playing on the tv; the light cycle of dozing will be pleasantly interrupted with occasional fits of excitement and replays to help you keep current. :D

I think it adds an essential political element to a game; it is rare that a player has to make a value judgment about a particular fact presented in a game: is the teller lying (to themselves and / or the PC), is there a kernel of truth in vague exaggeration, etc. Also is is incumbent upon the DM to provide information from a questionable source in such a manner that the players can't tell that it is a falsehood ... direct speech probably isn't the best way to do this. "The character thinks you should go west to avoid the ogres," or "under torture, the NPC swears that he doesn't know where the ogres are, but he was going west when you caught him." both allow for the PC's party to end up running into ogres if they go west.

My friend (the one with the two 30" monitors and a 7600 GPU) is swearing at nVidia because of the poor driver support, currently.

Uninformed opinion is unacceptable by definition.

What's his name?

The clue is that there actually was a historian called Ovid in classical times ...

The little soldiers would be causing a low-powered CPU conniptions; each little figure has to be created in the CPU, then passed to the GPU for rendering.

No.

DX10 brings re-processing into the GPU, so (for one thing) the multiple drawing of trees / grass / Rome: Total War soldiers will be done using a template model that can be re-processed endlessly in the GPU, rather than starting from scratch every time (and draining CPU resources), so perhaps the scene would look better with a DX10 driver and GPU?

Ahhh, metagaming the incomplete implementation of a spell. :D

Ha, well you wouldn't derive much joy from supporting the kiwi cricket team; the Tasmania B side could beat them with blindfolds. ;p

I was arguably as fit as I have ever been: I was swimming at least 1km, an aerobics class, weight-training three times, and running a few miles several times a week for the semester before my excavation; I lost all that fitness in that operation, and had to start again from scratch.

Dunno about the pejorative "stereotyped" adjective there; human sociological behaviour is such that if someone in the hierarchy sees their chance to gain some seniority they will take it, so long as the risk is reasonable: "reasonable risk" includes the chance that group remains relatively intact. There is no love lost for an old leader, especially one who has ruled with an iron fist.

Umami is one of the five basic tastes!

Yeah, evil incarnate is meant to encompass "Lord of Lies" and that should make finding out the truth (i.e. what everyone has been saying to everyone else) as difficult as trying to understand a David Lynch plot.

Just watching the Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires on BBC2 ... it's not too bad for a House of Hammer Horror Undead Kung-Fu film: