shinRaiden

Feature, not a bug. Your game FOV is artificially narrow, this is to help you over come that limitation.

It's an RWS, why shouldn't you switch to optics?

Wow, I mean seriously, WOW... So every other acrobatic team in the world (which flies center-sticked aircraft, which is pretty much everyone) is risking flight saftey by wearing their flightsuits? I really cant see how the blue angels have figured this out whilst every other airforce is clearly operating "dangerously"... (And this is more a poke at the BA rather than at Messy ) No, it's not the position, I think the tech point there is the loading.

BattleTech has origins anime via Robotech but BattleTech itself is not even remotely close to anime. If it were you'd see mechs with swords doing back flips in mid air while they all flew around with really annoying rising sun backdrops. Plus they'd be the size of a sky scraper. BattleTech is conceptually similar but the specifics of it are all completely opposite of established anime. BattleTech is not anime. Anime sucks. NGE is n00bers on freaky shrooms, since 1995. BattleTech and Transformers were both introduced in 1984; BattleTech originally had IP legal conflicts with Macross and Lucasfilm. Macross first aired in 1982. Dunno what all this "robotech" junk is. Gundam predates all of those with first releases in 1979. Lucasfilm's prior art "droids" later trademarked, was first seen in 1977. All hail Emperor George.

In Australia a former Army member is on trial for falsifying armory records to hide his theft of 10 M72 LAW packages. Only one of the 10 has been recovered, and it was altered so as to be unable to be traced back to that particular depot. The loss was only discovered as part of an ongoing investigation into the trial of an Al-Qaeda associate who was arrested for purchasing the launcher for approximately $5000, and allegedly plotting an attack on a nuclear power plant. Rocket Launchers and other such 'exotic' destructive devices are extremely tightly controlled, and are most definitely not legal for the general public. Yet losses persist. The famous Thompson M-1 was a similar case. When Congress cracked down on private gun ownership with with the national firearms act to restrict private machine gun and destructive devices, particularly to crack down on the not all that widespread usage in organized crime, the crime syndicate's simply put 'clean' schil's into the army to leech guns and ammo out. MS-13 does that today as well in El Salvador and the US.

Based on best-available information a decision was made. In retrospect, we can clearly see that obviously the information was speculative and inaccurate, and possibly may have accentuated the risk. However, my point previously is that often it is impossible to ascertain the validity of the information in that instance, and decisions must be made on insufficient information. The only alternative to mediated action on potentially speculative information is to take draconian unilateral preemptive measures. However, you then end up in an exploitable police state where you live in constant lock down. For further information about the consequences of having to make life or death decisions based on insufficient information, please refer to the archived middle east / iraq / Global War on Terrorism Deniers threads.

Updates to reality : * Shooter was a legal resident, no criminal record, no legal reason to deny a gun purchase. * Shooter legally purchased and passed background checks to obtain the guns. * The weapons were .38 and .22 caliber semi-automatic pistols. Regulations for possession and usage are primarily on the state level, and vary by locality. * Basic model unaltered handguns are completely irrelevant to any discussion of the pseudo-assault weapons ban aka gun collectors market inflation racket bill. * Post-legal purchase, the shooter deliberately and willfully attempted to disguise ownership by filing off the serial numbers. * Numerous individuals report in retrospect observations of potential mental illness in the shooter, none of which was sufficient grounds for involuntary treatment in a legal adult. * Federal medical privacy laws are extremely strict about disclosure of doctor-patient confidential information. * Background checks may include verification of medical records regarding mental illness, however if no voluntary treatment was agreed to and no involuntary treatment was done, then there exists no records to flag.

You all are proving my point made previously, that the discussion is increasingly not about why the gunman chose to impose his irrational emotional rage on others, the 'real issue' is why weren't his liberties managed for him. Oh, and the University of Utah was mentioned previously. It's news connection is that Utah has quite lenient concealed carry-laws, and the administration policies were in violation of state law. Federal and state laws normally only extend to K-12, so there was no local legal standing for the administrative policy. It had nothing to do with the morality, it was strictly a legality issue. Rectification is a matter for the people or the legislature. And the trolley square shooting there was stopped largely due to the intervention of an armed off-duty cop at dinner. You can slap all sorts of stereotypes there - isolated immigrant, angsty teen, school problems, impoverished family, Balkans PTSD, drugs, gang culture, girlfriend problems, etc. Doesn't matter in the end, because he still flipped out and chose to vent his rage on others and refused to deal with himself himself.

So long as people are not stuffed in isolated individual cells, there remains the mathematical possibility and psychological probability that one human somewhere will inflict pain on another deliberately or accidentally. So the whole gun control debate is really about political slap fights over incompatible ideologies. Anyhoo, there's been school shootings in Europe as well, and any number of psychologically similar incidents worldwide where people feel justified or obliged to vent their frustrations on others. Taking away people's toys or tools does nothing to fix the problem, it's only an attempt at non-intervening management of the problem. There's also the factor of mental illness that could be considered. An excellent anecdotal case is one of a african-american teenager in Seattle a couple years ago. The individual's father abandoned the family, and the mother was unable to adequately care for him, let alone support his moderate to severe schizophrenia. The culture in which he was raised ensured that he was exposed to primarily irrational hatred and denial of personal responsibility. For medically sane persons, they are to an extent able to cope with the disinformation, however for this individual, when he would have an episode of heightened mental illness his behavior would in effect be an impulsive scrambled manifestation of his prior absorbed experiences. Lack of information about services available, and the legal complexity of police vs medical interventions and legal rights of the disabled to prevent against false commitments and abuses led to an unfortunate situation where the individual failed to receive proper treatment, resulting in an increase in instability and psychological swings. This culminated in the individual deliberately targeting and killing the first white man he saw while in a psychosis. It was tragic and unfortunate, because society was in one shot deprived of two (potentially) functioning individuals. The American society is not unique however, you can find similar attitudes in most if not all societies. When people refuse to take personal responsibility, when unrestrained rage is considered respectable, and irrational emotive reactions dictate our course of actions, incidents such as this can only be considered normal. Similarly, the arm-chair quarterbacking only exacerbates the problem because the whining observers engage in the same behavior as the perpetrators. "They should have done this, they should have done that, it's obvious this and that..." We don't live in a perfect world, and mistakes are made all the time that involve people's lives. I'm not arguing right or wrong, I'm pointing out that it does happen. Sometimes, or more often than not, decisions are made on the fly in seconds on gut hunches or rumors. Even with the most sophisticated of systems, sometimes it is simply impossible to intervene. You can see what's happening, you know it's happening based on the best available local information, you can see how it's flawed, but there is absolutely nothing you can do except watch as it unfolds. That's what's happened with the escalation of force we've seen since the WTO riots in Seattle in '99 subsequent to the Oklahoma City bombing. There are things worse than body count's, and everything no matter how small and silly has to be handled as a worst case situation. If they don't, someone will find something to complain about and hold an inquiry over, never mind the fact that there is nothing that they can do to bring back the dead they're arguing over.

One of the best reviews I've seen for OFP or Arma, and that's because the reviewer "gets it".

http://www.cee-gee.net/ for the main divx downloads

I don't see any proof, but I'm smelling plenty coming from this thread.

There was a lot of "blame the engine, blame the tools, blame anyone other than the modder" going around in OFP, and it was perhaps reasonable at the time. Frankly though, if the typical "high-fidelity" content from OFP is dropped in to Arma as-is, it's going to likely perform significantly worse than the baseline Arma content, not to mention increase destabilization. If it's patched up to add more eyecandy, that's only going to make things monumentally worse. Arma is not going to be nearly as forgiving I think as OFP was, you could cut a lot of corners and throw stuff at the engine and it would still slog through it. You feed arma the same type of stuff without care for professional level content development, (years of professional level training and experience, + thousands of dollars worth of proper tools before you get to the BIS tools), then Arma will be really frustrating.

Upon further analysis my conversion of the binary values to decimal values is partially misleading to those who aren't shoveling bits all day. A clarification is in order : A 32-bit value only takes up 4 bytes of space. A 64bit value thus takes up 8 bytes of space. However, as I've shown in the decimal conversion, a 32-bit index is hardly sufficient for large-scale sectored streaming engines. So you're looking at 64 bits (8 bytes) for XY pos. Multiply that by 2^32 objects, and there's 4 gigabytes just for ~4 and a quarter billion objects' 2d pos values. For another example, let's look at the OFP terrain texturing system. The next-gen method is somewhat different, and the layers skew the numbers differently. A default cell is 50m sq, so 20cm aerial imaging ( >5x better than digitalGlobe or SPOT sourced commercial data) works out to 256x256 pixel textures. PAA's for those sit around 43kb. The OFP maps were limited to 512 unique textures, but if they were unlimited, at 256x256 cells that's 2.7 gigabytes of textures. So let's step it back to 1m resolution, that's still 350mb, but well within normal people's ability to manage. For a 12km map. Push it up to a 50km map, 4x the size of Sahrani, you're up to 5.5 gigabytes. Your average home PC is going to have some difficulties moving that amount of data at any sort of speed. Also, your 32bit computer can only handle a 4 gigabyte file. So you start to get a glimpse of the headaches that come up when you start demanding and drooling over eyecandy without fairly evaluating the costs. I'll leave you with one last thought. In the winter time, I never turn the heat on. Yet my apartment is as warm as my neighbors, for the same electric bill. They run their baseboard heaters non-stop in a drafty apartment. What's the wide ranging big picture there? And who's lost parts due to summer heat? I've lost a CRT and a video card due to overheating, in a high-latitude temperate environment.

This entire discussion is missing some rather key details. We've seen already how the community has thrown fits over Arma's system requirements, and the heavy load it places on the PC. It doesn't matter how uber your engine may be, when you have thousands of objects each with thousands of polygons and multiple layers of hi-resolution textures, combined with AI, physics, and other backend systems, you must pay a scaling performance cost as the user. For the developer, each additional part or layer you have to manage results in a significant amount of costs and schedule requirements. There is also the risk of continual rework required to respond to engine updates. The end user often only sees compressed (ie paa) data, and doesn't see the raws (ie tga) that are more reflective of actual system load 'costs'. One example I like to come back to terrain environments. It's a nerd fetish of mine, and what got me started modding in OFP. Let's look at forests for starters. If you get out of the corridor model, and get into outdoor or FS scales, where do you draw your boundings limits? Take a look at the really high end systems like the E&S (Now RockwellCollins) image generators on their vegetation. Folks like to whine and complain about their big boys 'low fidelity', but if you crunch the numbers the problem actually goes the other way. A 32bit number has an absolute max value of 4,294,967,296. That works out to 512 megabytes using the proper 1024 divisor. Now let's throw in some addressing requirements as well. Assuming that we want to model real world locations, each and every object needs to be placed absolutely in real-world coordinates. The circumference of the earth at the equator is approximately 40,075.02 km. That's also 40,075,020 meters, or 4,007,502,000 centimeters. Ok, so if we want real-world positioning we can probably stick with centimeters, and not worry about going to millimeters. That's a 32 bit value for X pos. Now we need Y pos. That's another 32 bits, or 40,007.86 km circumference. And now Y pos, but our requirements don't go out into space yet. So you're looking at least at a 64bit frame to transmit a real-world pos, for a single object, whether it be a tree or a bullet in flight. Assuming we're merely stacking 32bit addresses and not going to 64bit, that's a mere 1 gigabyte value, times a million trees. (not going to bother with the CS exercises in compression and floats here, that's a whole 'nother topic. Just trying to illustrate the scale.) Ok, now let's suppose on a 50km by 50km map you cover the whole thing in moderate density temperate climate vegetation. There's going to be a rock, tree, or bush in probably every square meter. I'm not counting grass at this time. So you're looking at 2,500,000,000 objects. No roads, no buildings, and now we've got over half of a 32bit index tied up in vegetation. You can't shortcut that one, because if you push over a tree, that tree has to stay pushed over in single player or multi, or else the immersion's going to suck. The big-boy FS's get around this by breaking the databases up into georeferenced sections, then localizing the values where possible. The sections sit anywhere between dozens of gigabytes to terabytes of data. Do you have a network server that can store and stream 5TB of data to your GPU on demand? I don't. Ok, now that I've boggled your brain throwing numbers around, who's going to place all those trees? Sure, you can import GIS data, but that only works for starters. No matter how good it is, someone will have to go over it manually, acre by acre, and check every road, building, fence, and make sure they're all pointing the right direction and so on. How much time do you thing it would take to do that? Any visitor eggheads enjoy placing buildings one at a time here? Now go look at Crytek's CE2 features PDF, and look at the mission designers info. Just try counting all those triggers. Each one has to be placed and properties configured. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying the scale is impractical, thus what you will see is the continued preponderance of corridor shooters, because the costs associated with creating hi-def free range systems is mind-boggling compared to corridors. Summary : The point I'm trying to make here, is that even with all the resources in the world, to actually implement what crysis is assumed to be offering by the community is rather impractical, and involves lots of bad maths by the gamers. You can have high detail, or you can have high performance, but not both. And if you want hi-def, goodbye to ever being able to practically mod any more on a wide scale.

When you've accumulated sufficient experience reputation levels (see the single box under blackdog's avatar), you can apply for one by posting a request in this board. The process is automated. A system bot trolls the forums looking for particularly formated user posts. Due to technical requirements of the older software in use, you must type in all caps when you make the request. One you have done that, submit your post and then view it. Click on the "Report to Moderator" link on the bottom of the post to initiate the process. Thank you, Shinraiden Secretary-Generalissimo The Tenured Old Geezer's Secret Society of BIS Forum Lurkers and Opposition Party Shadow Moderators

There is a distinct difference between grass-roots activism and militancy, a distinction that is largely lost or perhaps deliberately abused by organizations that prey on the naivety of youth. There's a quote attributed to Churchill poignantly referencing this to the effect of "If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no head". The foremost problem is that your idealism in internet activism means that far from actually making your voice heard by the establishment you seek to influence, you sign on to a horde of culpable lemmings to be exploited as another reliable demographic to be pandered to in grandstanding, then casually ignored in realpolitik. Regardless of your Iraq position, this method of pseudo-activism merely stokes a vain hope that clicking a button on a web page or sending a nickel via paypal, then going back to your own bubble makes a difference. It doesn't, and you're just a gullible sucker for thinking so. Furthermore, the effect of that will entrench you in angst or apathy, making you even more exploitable to the bureaucracy.

Hmm, it seems that you're making a comment about the way this board is moderated, I suppose you want an automatic 48hr PR +2WL? @blackdog~ : There are better things than to be a mod. You've got far more fair clout and reputation not being a mod than if you were. Plus you'd have to put up with your ... benefactors ... RTM'ing you day and night.

Just make sure you keep it inaccurate enough to maintain ITAR / Wassenaar compliance, unless you want to end up in Gitmo for an indefinite period of time.

Mantis isn't deep enough to do proper meta-bugs, what you're really after would best be handled by well-organized custom fields.

The KC-135 and KC-10 have different stabilizers, so the H shape in the model is more appropiate than the V shape on the KC-135's. ref1 ref2ref3 ref3 ref4

Let me spell it out in klere engrish : The BIS tools do not do the same function as the community tools do, for the precise reason that the workflow is different in many crucial ways from how you're used to creating content. Assuming that the community tools already fill the function of the BIS tools assumes a certain position about the workflow of the content creation process, groundless assumptions which if insisted on, signficantly complicate your ability as an addon maker to make effective use of the significant platform and tools developments BIS has made. It would be unwise of Marek to release an editor before releasing a pipeline. In fact, further proof of this is in the community's interest in doing simple retextures for initial testing and exploration. Retextures by and large do not require model editing, however any and all content modifications of any sort do require proper process pipeline tools. Marek knows the tools, and why he's choosing to release them in the order that he is. To presume otherwise is to second-guess him off incorrect assumptions on how you intend to create content. ---------------------------------- On a different matter, I have neither the time nor the permission to spell out every last detail. Furthermore, it would be unproductive even if I could. Rather, my intent is to offer a more diplomatic solution, by stating "trust Marek on this one." This thread started off as a rather cranky attack on Marek's judgement, and frankly imho should have been reported / locked etc. There's no need for the community to tear itself apart irrationally, all I'm asking for the good of the community which has benefited everyone alike: calm down, chill out, turn off your computer, go outside, and enjoy some fresh air. It's only a game, and there's more to life than that.

Your underlying premise is flawed, stop making a riot when your assumptions do not reflect how the tools and more importantly the workflow process works. Further attempts to bastardize the generation two system by insisting on generation one rules will ruin the way it is intended to work. -end-

Not really possible or practical given this issue.

Suprisingly TSA didn't say boo about my suitcase stuffed with reference books on Al Qaeda, Iraqi and Saudi Arabic, Tank and vehicle identification references, and also Robert's Ridge. An excellent reconstruction documentary.