metadigital

I think it is an obvious position for the largest producer/developer in the market to press their advantage, namely: graphics. You said it yourself, better graphics costs BIG BUX. That is their discriminating feature in the market, their size gets them the leverage to add super-graphics, cheaper than anyone else. So he is just towing the company line, using the Microsoft Propaganda technique: hoping that if EA say it long and often enough, people will believe it and be forced to spend more than they can afford on an area of the game that EA has a natural advantage. I think you are forgeting to use your marketing filter to dsicriminate the boatloads of BS he his heaping on top of the reader ...

Bloody Franko-Germanic time-stream polution! Anything to get the advantage in their never-ending warfare with each other. How many centuries have these tribes been at war? Twenty? Thirty? (Should be a good brouhaha, though ... )

Baley, when are you going on holiday?

Don't forget dynamic range lighting, as in Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast. I hear there are other developers working on similar improvements, so I would expect Quake V to have some sort of variable bloom and darkness effects over distances.

I knew it! You're a thought thief!

True. It was a plot triggered event. I like to encapsulate the concept we are all dancing about as: consequences. There should be many and varied immediate, mid- and long-term consequences for all aspects of the character chosen by the player. If you want to play a smarmy scoundrel? Fine and dandy for the ladies, but against a a Hutt, expect to be squashed, etc. Maybe that female character might become disenchanted with your lecherous behaviour, and become an asset for the opposition; similarly, the Hutt may not help you with a simple task and make you do things the hard way ...

Don't you start with all that "canon" nonsense. Edit: Now GoA is stealing my thoughts! Is my brain leaking?

Me either; I concur with you. Who reloads to get different loot? That was a low blow .... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Just post in little, easy to digest chunks, rather than enormo-stomache-distending gasto-nightmares. Or lots of white space, different fonts or even an Executive Summary at the top (or bottom), if you really MUST post such large amounts of text. It's not that it isn't worth reading, just that it is difficult to read large swathes of writing on the Forum.

The laws are laws, yes. And gravity does not have a will, correct. I was asking for some clarification on WinterSun's ideas of the capital "F" Force as a small "f" force. The definition of a will is not just a secret agenda. We can ultimately discover the behaviour of laws (even more abstruce ones, like quantum entanglement) because they are consistent, so just like in cryptography, security by obscurity si no security at all. To show evidence of sentience, there must be an arbitrary component. The Force must arbitrarily help DS or LS according to some secret (i.e. unknown and unknowable to us) agenda. I was talking about two different concepts, because it appeared that you had regarded the captial "F" Force as just a small "f" force, like gravity. Okay?

I will be impressed only after seeing it in action, and it is a good game (in other words, well in excess of my expectations, which are pretty mediocre). I've just about had a gutful of poor game conversions.

It is also extremely difficult to establish a causal link between a single factor (like violent images) and an eventual outcome (violent behaviour) because of the almost limitless variables. Some doctors have insufficient numeracy skills to comprehend statistical variances; e.g. the just struck-off Professor Sir Roy Meadow, whose evidence wrongly convicted several innocent mothers of killing their babies because of an illness he was championing "Munchhausen by Proxy", and he admitted that he had "a weak grasp of statistics", yet he quoted figures like "a million to one" and "winning the lottery".

Yep. When Gordon meets the Professor, and Alyx uses the teleport (the first teleport of the game). The Gordon gets in to follow her, and ... well everything begins from there ... I'd provide my source (ha ha!), but I think it might have been a recent (post release) game magazine ... I could look through them all, I suppose. I think it was the PC Gamer where they revealed the Lost Coast and Aftermath expansions. (June? August is due out any day.)

You loved my idea. Admit it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Ok. You loved my idea.

It's the lovechild of Kilroy and Ziggy.

To prove to your dreaming self that you are dreaming: As soon as I use this test, I can start flying (if I haven't been already), because I KNOW I'm dreaming. Your flying will get better with practice. I can do all sorts of stuff, now. Just like Neo.

I find it can have a short-term negative effect, but it does in the long term help to understand human nature. I strongly believe that, given the right environment, humans are capable of practically anything. Warning, don't go to this link if you are squeamish at all (and I'll probably delete it shortly, anyway): bad1 worse one: infantiphagia

... And how would we spot other members without following the pouches of dice ..?

I found it quite tedious and uninstalled it.

There was an article written about the little peck on the cheek that Alyx gives her father after she is teleported; it took weeks of development time to get it just right: all for less than a second of screen time. But it works really, well, combined with the Half-Life 2 engine's rendering of their faces, it looks like characters in a film. It can be done, with enough will and effort.

Half-Life. Opposing Forces. Half-Life 2. But most of all: Deus Ex (PC only).

Use the same functions that are in use now, for choosing which player kicks the ball / tackles / etc.

Send it back! Get a new card! Capture the daughter of one of the receptionists, and cut her finger off and send it to them, and say you'll keep sending bits until the exchange your video card for a new one ...

I wish my logic could take over. I've had dreams where things have been so crazy that M.C. Escher's drawings look tame and logical by comparison. Hell, even when my dreamworld starts exhibiting non-euclidian geometry, nothing seems out of the ordinary. The worst part is that I used to have lucid dreams all the time, though that was when I was pre-pubescent, so I missed out on all the best stuff. Strangely, though, it never once occured to me to fly when I had Lucid dreams. In fact, I usually spent most of my Lucid dreams trying to wake up. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Do you want an easy technique to help you realise you are dreaming?

I dunno. I have one of those books in my house, and I've never once found that the things described in the book as meanings having a relation to my life in some way that wasn't pretty vague. And the things connected to the meanings are pretty vague. Like, if water is an emotion, does that mean if I dream of an ocean, or if I happen to drink a glass of water in my dream? Would dreaming of meeting Queen Victoria have a different meaning than dreaming of meeting Queen Elizabeth, other than indicating what period the Strategy game I'd played before going to sleep was set in? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The missing ingredient is always the dreamer. I find the reference books are useful. Why? Probably because we all have some common archetypes (either group unconscious, as Jung hypothesized, a genetic race memory that is passed on like the BIOS of a new computer, and our lives are built with an OS and applications on top; or perhaps it is just the commonalities of our nurturing). These archetypes mean the same thing to all of us. Water equals emotion. Yes, a glass, or an ocean. Drinking the water would connote some sort of swallowing of a reaction. For example, I dreamt of flying over an ocean. It was difficult to leave the water once I was in it, but I could (as I was lucid dreaming). That tells me I was distancing myself from some large emotion. The specifics are up to me, the dreamer, to unwind, but I find that if you have a prompt (like: strong emotion) then you can make some sense of an otherwise random vision. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That sounds suspiciously like Discordian theology's Law of Fives. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> ... That's probably where they got it from ...

The end of SoU was pretty disapointing. Aside from that, I thought it was good. The HotU expansion was pretty cool, it just got silly with the ph4t lewt magic at the end.