metadigital

I think I went a bit further than the article (since it made no allusion to the "future of capitalism"), but pertaining to the part you quoted, yeah. The you are guilty of reductio ad absurdum.

Buddhism is optimal for chocolate ... the imaginary reality of the perceived is perfectly congruent to the sublime delights of chocolate. :D

Adoption allows the adoptee to join a family that actually WANTS them. Unlike most children, who are born to people who could take or leave them.

If i had the choice, I'd have NPC & PC interaction taking place via spoken word, speech recognition, and an NLP driven text to speech with full cause and effect. The world would be more procedurally generated and probably not have much designer input in dialogue, but more in scripting personality profiles for characters. But i am also not stupid enough to expect this any time soon. The problem is that to achieve this requires more than the intellectual capital to imagine it, and the finance to underwrite it ... just like any capitalist vehicle, the reward must be greater than the investment. This would require a whole new game engine, where the actors (NPCs) would literally be given virtual personalities and agendas, rather than pre-scripting ... that means EVERYTHING in the game world would need to be created on-the-fly, and balanced (like Oblivion was) to prevent the protagonist from becoming just the closest member of the audience. The downside? Untried technology (would it work, how well, when would the developers know that it was "finished"), which equals unreliable estimates of return on (an inestimable) investment; not only that, but this potentially creates a virtual world that can be replayed ad infinitum without repetition ... so there goes the franchise as IP! (I'm exaggerating a bit on this point, as it is perfectly feasible to implement an episodic approach, like EA does for sports games.) This would require a developer to create an INNOVATIVE engine, beyond that which has even been dreamt of so far. Think VALVe and Half-Life 2, although they were creating a FPS on the rail, or Duke Nukem Forever. Then they have to sell this idea to a publisher. There are too many unknowns in the financial balance sheet. The only way such a novel approach will ever eventuate is via VALVe: i.e. a large company (with stacks of reserve cash for emergencies) that self-publishes. It's a crapshoot of the order of Half-Life 2. On the positive side, it sounds like STALKER has a lot of elements that might eventually lead to this sort of game engine, so perhaps a small, dedicated bunch of programmers will be prepared to go without life for a few years in order to bring about glory.

He could put himself up for adoption.

I wouldn't worry about it. My list of failed missions is huge. I'm even failed some main story missions. The game keeps right on going. With respect, that's not the point, though. It isn't difficult to have a boolean variable that stores the status of a mission ... having a real-time check on the bandit population (in this case) to see if all the bandits have been cleared (as per the mission) is patently ludicrous, given the respawn rate. Either tone down the respawn, or use a flag.

JE made a comment to the effect that it was a limitation of the design decisions made early on in the design life cycle (I'd search for it, but I'm lazy).

The sign indicates the end of local traffic conditions. Also, you wouldn't have to pay any ticket you got. Last time I checked, even the voracious Chancellor of the Exchequer doesn't extradite foreigners for unpaid speeding fines, and there's no way to apply penalty points to a foreign licence.

What's my prize?

Where did you get that idea? Did you read the article I linked? So you are just parroting their opinion? Is this your opinion, or not?

I see you have not seen Alien Versus Predator.

I have two elder brothers and, during my upbringing, my family spent many a long weekend on our boat playing cards (think of it as equivalent to watery camping), primarily 500. I was a blackjack croupier for a few years (whilst I was studying at university), so I have an interest in the underlying mathematics of card games, as well as an interest in psychology. Both of these I can appreciate with a game of poker.

No, it would be Fallout 3. Fallout came out in 1997. Maria CaliB4NzZZZ0rZZZdD :D I spent many Saturday morning hours watching their adventures! :D

The "head and hairstyles" are part of the Electron engine. They won't change.

Just because there are different opinions, doesn't automatically mean all opinions are of equal worth.

The "parametric skeletal animation" sequence shows that they have been taking note of the way bodies balance about their centre of gravity, as Leonardo da Vinci investigated and detailed in his copious notes. Giant arthropods are anatomically impossible, as they don't have a circulatory system. When insects were larger, back in the Dinosaur days, the Earth's atmosphere contained about twice as much Oxygen per volume.

I wasn't criticizing your Barbarian build. I was simply making an observation about the level of charisma. I would think that uncharismatic toughs, even in a gang, wouldn't have friends. They aren't that meritorious, typically. The most charismatic becomes the leader ... the toughest will just be the gimp character that is brought out at the critical battle moments.

Goodie goodie more formula ..!

Where did you get that idea?

So it can come back as an undead blog? ... Zombie Art Blog FTW ..!

Yeah, I wouldn't like to name names, but good design in a consumer culture behooves built-in obsolescence ... after all, what's the point in building a mobile telephone (for example) that lasts for twenty years when the consumer will be tossing it out for a new one after 18 months?

I was going to suggest that you must have been fiddling with the BIOS (boot order of attached disc/ks), but as you fixed it I'll just add it as a postscriptum.

ASUS PM17TE is a 17" LCD for

I see you've added this to the appropriate topic, that has been conveniently stuck to the top of this forum. So I'll close this.

But ... you have a new puppy! Yes. NO WAI You aren't doing anything wrong. She is.