shinRaiden

Eh, what to you constitutes said engine?

lolwut? need to find the original filing but there seems to be some "wah!" going on. Summary : * Toyota hired Saatchi & Saatchi to do advertising. * S&S hired Meshwerks to make super-exact models for TV commercials. * Meshwerks hired Grace & Wild to do the actual modeling. * The next year, S&S contracted G&W directly instead of via MW. * MW has an emo-fest "mehbe we can has copyright for what we did not make for what we do not own?!" (sorry, insomnia commentary going, ianal etc-etc...) * I.B.3 MW was hired to visualize, rather than conceptualize existing Toyota IP. epic fail at the starting block. * Granting summary judgment often implies "duh you idiots, why you wasting the court's time? I fine you for being stupid" * 2.0.1 notes the perspective of US law, which, under the innocent until proven guilty orientation, also puts a substantial burden of proof on the accuser. While vital for just due process, in the case of civil law is easily exploited by those that can afford to stall just a little longer than the plaintiff can afford to litigate. * Imho, there's nothing really to worry about at least from this case, based on the comments made in 2.C. In fact, the judge says so : * The only part of the decision I'd question is this footnote : Again, imho, it looks rather petty and sour grapes to me given the context given in the opening summary. This wasn't initiated by Toyota or an affiliated party, it was a desperate retaliatory response by a subcontractor not re-invited for moar cake. Now in regards to the copy right factors, imho, the amount of addons here that actually seek to faithfully replicate a given item is ... substantially less than the amount of content that is an interpretive and arguably unique work. Even the BAS content in OFP, with its interpretive representation of a stylization "as-used" as opposed to "as-built" would imho come under this category. This case however does not deal with the subject of trademarks, eg Colt et. al's M4 complaints, or the greater domain of copyright licensed works such as MGM's claims over commercial exploitation of it's SG IP domain. (btw, I'm hearing rumor's the dev studio for the SG MMO is funded by a borderline ponzi scheme run by a bunch of shady folks that have had their fingers in similar stunts previous). I think there definitely is room for commercial exploitation of interpretive works, and that that is helped, not hindered, by this ruling. As an aside, most of the major (at least US-based) defense industry megacorps have extensive licensing groups within their legal departments and representation, and the interest of some of those parties in financially exploiting the gaming cash cow is indicative if you stick around for the credits in various recent games. I think though that there's some space between interpretive works and direct replication as far as commercial exploitation goes.

Or turn it around to "Independence Regained" for any number of good reasons, though it's mouthful anyway you cut it.

Sadly no, in more than one way. I do have a "Shark Tank" t-shirt thanks to the most spectacularly catastrophic project I got dumped on years ago though. And HR wonders why 'demotivators' and BOFH are so popular among sysadmins...

well, you can kinda do the math already. This is an extreme example, but not 'unreasonable'... Take your 'basic' M4/16, the only thing basic about it would be the lower receiver. The following parts would be changeable : * stock * mag * upper * scope 1 * scope 2 (scope 1 plus TI/II combo) * 4x front rail parts * bipod That's up to 10 proxies on the receiver, supposing that they're each a 'section', that's 11 sections instead of 1. Doesn't bode well for scalability.

One of the great difficulties in working with foreign policy is that you have to negotiate where there are neither terms nor room for negotiation, and moral equivalence ambiguity gets thrown under the bus for frank ambivalence. Europe is probably the only region of the world that's had wide-spread inter-cultural relations with 'foriegn' cultures and nations beyond the last 50 years, and its track record in that regard is highlighted by successes such as those in the Congo and the Balkans. Asia has not had that luxury / opportunity yet on a wide scale, and the unilateral conformist cultural mindsets often project an ethnocentric attitude, despite individual persuasions. This is reflected in policy decisions of both democratic and autocratic East-Asian governments where there is a strong tradition of cultural conformity. Policies in the PRC that in the west would be interpreted as draconian are rather interpreted as 'harmonious' locally. Although there is a measure of sustaining the ancient imperial domestic policies in an attempt to prevent the bogeyman embodied in mass peasant uprisings, a substantial part of this is a shared fear of disharmony, perhaps even equal to or greater than the fear of regime change. The peasants will put up with whatever and dutifully serve in their place, so long as they have rice, and now oil too. Some would add Starcraft, though that still tends to be a localized perversion specific to the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately this means that for those holding universal humanitarian ideals, this means that the PRC's primary domestic policy of "prevent internal disharmony at all costs" means that effectively PRC peasants are more important than Sudanese peasants in Dafur. In addition, in order to maintain their foreign policy in regards to ROC/Taiwan/Formosa, they have to support Sudan's claim that Dafur is a domestic dispute outside the purview of international concern. So on the surface, you have several problems with how to effectively engage the situation. First, the PRC's number one priority is the avoidance of domestic disturbance at all costs. That is their primary motivation. Attempting to appeal directly to the Chinese populace would be ineffective due to media controls, and would furthermore pose a risk of being seen as deliberately destabilizing. Overt threats of punitive actions likewise would be problematic for similar cultural reasons. Most likely the best effective method would a brokered disengagement, where African nations provided the security and political elements to influence Sudan, to the point that Sudan would be disinclined to request Chinese arms. This would require aligning the planets and balancing the US Federal Budget and converting all Atheists among other minor activities to accomplish. The cynical matter is that while the massacres may be atrocities, they're not full extermination genocides, they're just unrestrained suppression of insurrection, regardless of whether the populace were combatants or not. True, there's raids and villages burned and women and children machete'd, but it's not like they're sweeping the face of the earth destroying every last living thing. And so while it is a great outrage, and absolutely reprehensible, the truely insidious part is statistically, it's not that big of a deal and will eventually go away. The historical situation of the Armenians is a typical example. Great outrages and travesties in that situation, and the offenders were never brought to justice. But, the people and culture are still there, although with an understandable chip on their shoulders, and go on with life. To re-open the case now, what purpose would it serve? You can't bring back the dead, that's God's turf to deal with. That also has to enter into the diplomatic equation, the fact that a lot of conflicts blow over when the Great Leader has his number called. So while western nations may be shaking their fist over 'outrages in Dafur', fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, it'll probably sort itself out. An excellent example of this is Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge made a real mess of the place, but ultimated pushed their luck and caused a domestic uprising and got overthrown. The leaders got old and finally arrested and hauled off to prison to rot. That chapter of history is for all intents now closed. That lesson in policy, the waiting game, is one that needs to be carefully understood by all policy leaders, particularly those in countries with restive populations generally opposed to unrestricted foreign intervention for humanitarian purposes.

This pic prove's that the UH-1 predates VBS2 Same goes for the rest of the content complained about.

Let's for fun take codies at face value and pick apart the pics. They claim that the game will live up to it, fair enough, lets see what they have to offer. For reference, I'm going to work through this set of pics: http://ps3life.nl/media....gegeven #1 Recon Team supporting helo airstrike on convoy The first item of concern is multicam. Tbh, Multicam's not going to ever be taken serious on the inertial juggernaut organization scale, simply for the fact it's too trendy, not-invented-here, and they just changed utility design and patterns. The presence of multicam in their promotional material sends a (imho) clear msg that it's going to be about awesome super-soldiers. CoD4 did not make that mistake. If the door is open for trendy cool stuff regardless of actual relevance, then that is a topic for concern. The terrain and environment does not show anything revolutionary. You have high-detail ground textures with mixed clutter and placed vegetation, fading to significant vegetation in the mid-range to view clipping, with a mega-texture type terrain in the distance. Already all exists in ArmA, with ArmA2 benefiting from post ArmA optimizations in the content development process. The contrast of the helo's is out of place with the comparative range, consider it an artifact of HDR-type saturation. ---------------------------------- #2 Engagement in farm lane One of the points that Codies promotes about the rendering engine is its lighting effects. While pretty, it remains to be seen publicly if it can scale in difficult to cache non-linear directions. OFP and ArmA both use (afaik) vertex lighting, which is old and 'ugly', but scales easily out to ridiculous ranges. The animation posing across all pics (with the exception of the left 2 on #2) also isn't showing anything new, you've got generic animations appropriate to the stance and weapon. I expect, as indicated by the javelin, that there would be 'tighter' grip animations, however as all weapons are different, either they would be very limited in the practical amount of unique anims, or the system would be hobbled. Full IK and sync'd over the network is a rather dubious proposition. As for the two entities on the left, both are demonstrating an ability to interact with the environment. In both cases, they're claiming that entities can be aware of and IK to environment objects. Any less than that would be extremely limited pre-scripted 'positions' as in DoD etc which are not at all interactive environment. The subject of destructible objects in a wide-space, particularly design and development concerns, has been discussed elsewhere. The simple fact stands that either you model all the stones in that wall, or you do not. If you do not, people will complain that it doesn't work 'right'. No indication is given as to the count of stones in all similar walls across the entire map. AI engagement should also be a cause for concern. Unless it just happens to have been snapped at an 'awkward moment', 3 of the 5 are oblivious to any form of cover, and the opposing units blazing away across open ground suggests an absence of functional suppressing fire. -------------------------------- #3 Armor support of Infantry advance This tank with prominent mud splotches has been seen elsewhere, similarly dirty. The consistent nature of the mud suggests it being a static texture, as opposed to a runtime transformation. While I think it would be an interesting exercise to play with texture swapping or decal layers based on environment, surfaces traversed, etc, again the limiting factor would be practicality. Issues outstanding there surround practicality of development and distribution. Again, additional animations are shown that are not in ArmA. This is not due to a lack of quality in the ArmA animations, it is quantity. Particle effects are also made to look nice, though unfortunately there has been a recent trend to obfuscate traditional sprites with heavy shader effects. Similar effects can be done in ArmA now, it just takes time and effort to build them. ------------------------------------- #4 AT Mountain Ambush As noted, the insertion of additional animations is nice, but not new. The most significant factors here are the environment and terrain. First, the grading of the road implies a terrain significant resolution well under 10m, potentially approaching 1m. While this is in theory possible with ArmA, trying to have both large areas and high-detail terrain results in a requirement to process stupidly huge amounts of terrain data. These are problems that are academic to the GIS field. Along with that, supposing that the terrain is destructible, what's the connection latency 'cost' when a new player connects JIP and the runtime map differs substantially from the cached map? Any way you cut it, there's a non-trivial amount of trouble there. In regards to the environment, the 'shops suggest an engine capable of fogging and blurring the DepthOfField sufficiently that the user can not focus on the transition where clutter is culled. Remove much of that airbrushing and you'll find a pic looking a lot like ArmA with a lot of the shading and post-processing turned off.

The engine is picky about the the order that it finds points in for axis. Gets highly annoying until you start making template points to merge into your projects. Open the CfgModels class, and flip the value pos>neg or neg>pos. Presto, problem solved. If that's too much hassle, flip the axis points end for end.

Went to Walmart this evening for other business, they had an equal amount of Arma:Gold and Crysis. Same list price as well, $39.95 USD. Inventory / prices have been higher than I expected at Bestbuy as well. Summary : Someone's paying to have shelf space and list at those prices. If it wasn't selling, I don't think you'd see it there. I highly doubt that we'd see any actual numbers, but gut hunch is that it's not that bad as folks here like to whine about.

How many tags actually exist? I doubt over 10k. Why not just use the tag index number, and then pad 00 on the end for 100 IDD's for each of 10000 tags?

I originally posted this on the other forums in response to a quite similar topic, I think it bears repeating here. 35/95 is a fair bit hotter than what I suppose may be typical for an air-conditioned house's ambient temps, but I want to point out a couple factors easily overlooked. Additionally, there are plenty of installations where for any number of reasons actual ambient temps easily approach the operating range maximums. They don't tell you about those ranges, and they're buried in the squinty-print, but they actually are a major concern. 1 - 35/95 is the upper limit of the operating environment, it's not unreasonable to expect that imperfect or deteriorated components will have a somewhat lower upper limit. 2 - General averaged ambient temps may be several degrees lower than ambient temps in proximity to the electronics, giving a higher than average temp supply. 3 - Component placement may in some cases artificially elevate immediate ambient temps, I suspect that a significant number of red-ring xboxen may have been shoved in closed cabinents under home theater systems, I've seen plenty in unventilated locations. Unfortunately, what this all means is that you really need to be keeping the airspace around all your PC components well under 30/80 degrees, and preferably under the magic 72 degrees everyone swears by with aircon's. In addition, you need to keep all your thermally conductive surfaces squeaky clean and possibly re-grease any OEM greased heat sinks. Removing the cover really is a last ditch effort, and makes it get dirty a lot faster. You also have to make sure you have a way to get rid of that super-heated air. Another factor that you need to consider is that multiple components, such as dual monitors, placed in close proximity, can easily boost the ambient temps between the devices to well outside the operating limits. So what does this all mean? Well temps you see like those listed by the OP are generally observed at rest at the Windows Desktop. For power-saving and thermal reduction, a lot of the CPU and GPU is actually switched off at that point. The graphs in something like RivaTuner are especially effective in showing how once you 'switch on' DirectX 3D to create a render box, the power and temp loads jump 50% in some cases. Your CPU is 'resting' at 63/145, depending on the reporting method (socket vs on-chip) the actual temps may be a few to a lot of degrees hotter. You didn't indicate the CPU, so I picked at random an AMD Athlon X2 4800+. The numbers are going to vary, but the same point applies for other CPU's. Basicly, the operating range maximum is 70c, so your CPU could already be at its max if it's under-reporting, and you haven't even started MSN messenger yet. When you wake up the full CPU and start shoving data through it, it's going to jump well over warranty operating range limits, during normal operation. The same goes for your GPU and hard drives. Now if you're bored with tons of money, a water cooled super rig, or even a mineral oil aquarium is still not going to solve your problem if you vent it all inside. You're going to need to duct and shroud a vent system to get that hot air out, and run a blown A/C in the side or wherever your intake fans are. I wish the industry would make more practical cases adequately utilizing 120mm fans, but all we get is 1337 cases with atrocious airflow routing. We're all well acquainted with the false advertising rampant with PSU's (actual output down as low as 60% of rated on the label), I strongly suspect that actual thermal operating ranges are similarly suspect across the board.

Nice catch Internal team solidarity shirt, nothing significant.

Yeah, all sorts of chaos might ensue. It might even escalate to a point where BIS and Codies employees pass each other in a hall and politely smile and say hello. Anarchy follows and the world as we know it ends. What goes on at IITSEC, stays at IITSEC

I guess E3 doesn't matter any more. Activision, Vivendi, and now Lucasarts have declined to renew their membership in the industry group that ran E3 into the ground. Sounds like a good idea that BIS is not wasting money on that dead-end.

There is effectively no SP, it's more or less an MP CTZ (Capture the zone for fun and profit). So unless you have a clan or a pub server, it has little to no replayability. However, that's a shame because a lot of the underlying tech is quite incredible and well ahead of it's time. The character customization potential is very impressive, and building and terrain destruction simulation is well implemented, even if they ran out of time and funding for content. The villages are repetitive, but only because they're procedurally generated, which is its one degree of awesome. BIS could learn a lot of valuable lessons from the technical design of the different pieces. Also, trees maintain collision when you push them over into ground craters made after you punch holes in buildings.

It's quite simple, look out your apt window and count all the tree's on God's Green Earth, then figure out how to index and place them all on a map. CoD4 and Crysis look pretty, but like with BF2 the sandboxes are really tiny or narrow supporting high-detail false fronts. OFP/Arma you can go anywhere, so it all has to be detailed everywhere, all the time. Basically, you're trying to get FPS detail with an FS capacity, everyone says that should for all intents and purposes be impossible, yet BIS somehow manages to pretty much make it work. That's the absurdity of it.

Crysis - Wikipedia To build such a strong and flexible engine, which can carry the load of so much graphics, it essenstially comes down to how much manpower a company have. Crytek, for example, is a whole other level then BI, which has a little crew in compared. I think BI has come far to be so small. Who knows what it would be if they had as many as Crytek on their team, but that's not reality. You'll just have to bite the dust and let it roll, see what they come up with next time. I'm pretty sure that if you extract the various ArmA pbo's you'll find several gigabytes of textures not counting terrain, and that's assuming packed data and not TGA sources. VBS2 is delivered on two DVD's, and has several more gigabytes of textures there as well. Crysis may have the shiny, but they don't have to worry about the frankly absurd detail requirements of BIS's engine.

And if you look at the source tga textures and models you'll find that the texturing is very efficient and the texel level consistent. In many cases, you have a single 2048^2 texture for the hull, a second for interior detail, and a third smaller texture for details.

Aren't the reasons cited above part of the justification the ADF made for going to a tandem rear axle on the LRPV's? Dunno, I'm a n00ber in that area.

To aggregate your points : Lights : * Increase count of accessory lights exponentially * Use pixel lighting instead of vertex lighting if possible * Fully implement light occlusion in buildings and vehicles etc. The last would likely be extremely 'costly' in terms of development and fps load. Because everything can move around and has day/night lighting, it's not practical to pre-calc your lighting (the post-vis rad step from corridor shooters). As a result, you'd need a massive realtime ray-tracing system to even partially keep up with the occlusion calculations. Not impossible, but impractical. Intel's claiming various tech demo's, but they're regarded as highly suspect and I wouldn't put it past them to borrow hints from the processed rad data, and in any case the visual space is exponentially larger in ArmA, and dynamic to boot. Vehicles : * Store damage by selection, not whole vehicle * Add additional parameters for existing penetrability materials * More fully utilize existing parameters such as the damage controller in model.cfg. * Simulate vehicle behavior, friction and forces, centers of gravity and mass, etc, instead of simulating the position and visualizing the vehicle at that position. Something the community might want to do for kicks and giggles is play with the 'damage' controller in the model.cfg. As a quick example, use it to make 'crumple zones' by doing linear translations, instead of just hiding the selections. Sounds : * Moar quantity plzkthx * Ambient micro-noises for dynamic mixing Maps : (fill out maps as time available, instead of just 'shell' training towns.) ------------------------------------------------ @Linker Split : If some one chooses to use ArmA content of any source in VBS2, there's no way BI automatically gets to know that, and there certainly isn't anyway to do mandatory 'site audits'. The purpose of that statement has to do with convincing the customers that the 'pro' product is a simple and popular 'Serious Games' product, that it's not big and scary and locked in like old-school 'legacy Modeling & Simulation' systems. All BI can do is encourage them to use content most appropriate to their requirements.

Uh, before you go setting nil to a non-nil value, and get your legs gnawed off (or worse) by gypsie for doing that, don't. Nil is supposed to be used the other way around, ie <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">VarToNuke = nil; instead of <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">nil = VarOverWritingPubVarNamedNil; Use your own bucket, preferably a disposable private var instead.

Blackdog cannot access his account inbox any more due to spamming moderators with crappy flash videos...... Why thank you, I'm honored by the courtesy and the promotion, I look forward liberally exercising my new powers to bring a new hope for change to these forums.

The purpose of the pm posting in question was to publicly illustrate private efforts by the grief-troll to privately manipulate a public discussion through arrogance and ignorance. As this was an effort specifically targeted at affecting a public discussion, and was sent privately to disguise the sender's vitriol from public view, then by all means drag it out into the public light of day for all to see. If it's a private feud, or random crap, embedded rickroll's, or other diversions, then sure, keep it private. If inflammatory, rtm and hope they feel generous or benevolent. Without direct DB access, a properly designed board should prevent third-party view of private messages. When that liberty is abused for defamation, then the context changes. Freedom of Speech and privacy does not provide for escape from consequences of slander, libel, and malevolence. The poster has not denied the content of the posted msg's, instead they only complained about the distribution of the msg's. "Take it to PM" is to keep a topic on track. Side discussions can become heated, but when they turn to insults, they no longer are discussions. These are not slipperyjim's forums, any more than they are DM's, or Placebo's, or anyone else's for that matter. They are BIS's, to do with at their whim and pleasure. It is not a democracy, it is a virtual benevolent totalitarianism. BTW : (Offtopic) SWLBTCM2 is nearing beta stage, pm blackdog~ for more information and scoop's on the announcement.

Well that's at runtime, but in the configs... There you have it. Make your 'skin' selection, and identify it in hiddenSelections[]. Then set your default texture(s) (must match array order of hiddenSelections[] ) in hiddenSelectionsTextures[]. 1 p3d, n skins. All I can say to that is "The horror..."