shinRaiden

... If it looks, smells, tastes, and feels like chicken and if the chicken says "cluck" - it probably is a chicken... So, in other words, I'm failing to see you're point. The 'point' is that the chicken is not allowed to be 'labeled' a chicken because that would be incompatible with biased agendas. When vindictive anti-zionistKBRbush / black-whisper-helicopter / katerina-bodies-in-swamps agendas take priority over the defense of simple life and liberty, there's nothing to discuss further. There are several very valid reasons for 'sticking that label' on the topic. First, it references an ongoing problem in multiple nations with relations with immigrant and minority populations. These communities are established by respectable and honorable individuals. However, for a wide variety of factors, needs and values of those communities have not been integrated with the majority demographic population. As a result, you have responsible respectable parents as upstanding citizens, and their children are left vulnerable. Liberal well-intentioned naivety has ironically entrenched segregation and ghettoization of the communities, instead of enabling them, by turning them inwards on themselves, the populations have been deliberately isolated from opportunities to defuse explosively dividing problems. Take your 'somali rape' example. Plenty of people within the community would be outraged by it, but to what extent would / could they turn to a 'foreign' (resident nation/community) source for resolution to an offense within the community? Pick your minority, anyone, anywhere, and that problem is systematic. Secondly, there are ill-intentioned individuals and organizations that deliberately target for exploitation the vulnerabilities of the minorities. When kuffar and infidels make allegations that 'honorable' charities entrusted with sacred alms are in actuality funneling those funds to groups for the purpose of butchery and destruction, the tendancy is to be self-defensive, rather than introspective. The 'persecution' of the community instead 'motivates martyrs' rather than causing the community to be introspective. Serving federal indictments and successful prosecutions only further puts the communities on edge, rather than forcing them to reassess the integrity of their neighbors. As a result, the brother, the cousin, the nephew is protected in community honor, while their actions may be abhored. Those principles are not conducive to law and order in stable societies. So long as that continues to be the rule, there will continue to be bloodshed and destruction. And that blood will in part be on the hands of those politically correct owners of the urban sharecropping plantations. There will be blood on the hands of the parents that put their family relations and public honor ahead of neighborly association and community stability. And there will be plenty of blood for those that revel in it until even their gluttonous lusts are repulsed. Islamic doctrine's been argued lots of places, it's not going to be effective or allowed in this thread. What is certain though is that 'independent third party' opinions would not be considered credible by both Muslims and kuffar or infidels.

NPR Editorial: @Baddo: Whatever irrational delusions you likewise cling to in a dogmatic fashion to support your own beliefs packaged with the misapplied label of reason, it's still evident that those points still are based on negotiable objectives. Whether it be imperialism or economic greed etc, those are points of which there has always been negotiable premises. My point was that it is quite clear that this was different. No negotiable demands were made, the only questions asked were to prioritize the execution of people for the sole purpose to kill them. Not to control them, not to plunder them, just to kill them. Why? Because they had no 'right' to live solely for being born in the first place. It is not a negotiable point. "Forfeit property / liberty / associates" - those are terms of negotiation. This was not a case where any negotiable demands were made or intended. Not only that, but there were no self-centric points either "your cause is futile; save yourself" etc points either. The terrorists sole objective was to slaughter, with the fringe benefit of terror. You can't toss in a phone and say "Let's talk, you want money, land, what?" - because the only answer would be "I want you dead". So let's run with that then, as truly irrational it is. So you let them purge yourself, then what? The job's not done, so the killing goes on. It's solely kill or be killed. It's not a classic crime/punishment discussion, it is an immediate parasitic matter. You attempt to make the argument that this being religiously motivated is a dubious or debatable matter. I believe you have your terminology rather confused. There is a possible argument that this is an extra-denominational case. Fair enough, we don't have enough information on that. But I will disagree in part because it clearly is a dogmatically based event, because the discerning factor in the known targeting was based off of the identification of the victim's self-existence, rather than their tangible assets. To assault someone or something for personal gain without regard to the victim's own humanity is to a point a matter of rational prioritization. To assault someone however for the cause of their self-existence without concern for personal gain for self or loss of property or liberty to the victim, is inherently a matter of a belief system. To invoke Godwin's Law, the historically argued 'worst case' was based on the dogma of 'Untermensch'. That was an argued, taught, and believed belief system. When the dogma is in place in that manner, points of negotiation become unnecessary and actually become encumbrances. -edit- Fixed a typo.

The Request for Quote was posted publicly, though I can't find a direct link to an archived version presently. A general summary though: PEO STRI requested proposals from interested vendors for a product to be used as an immediate-need replacement for Ambush! as a common platform training system. Quotes needed to comprise completed products as well as administrative services, with capability demonstrations to immediately follow the close date of the RFP window. How this product is to be used is beginning to become apparent from recent press articles published recently. PEO STRI is establishing a new primary sub-group specifically tasked with leveraging COTS technology for training and simulation requirements within Army training requirements. The implication of course is that it would primarily target the Gaming entertainment industry, due to the obvious need for combined entity simulation and visualization. Looking at the known public history of both Ambush! and America's Army, it's significant to note that both products were not developed or managed by training groups. In the case of Ambush!, it was originally handled by DARPA, which has a specific research orientation. While some of the day-to-day management has transitioned, that 'ownership' still affects the usage and maintenance. With America's Army, it was a recruiting command initiative, that while successful in its original tasking, has never successfully been repurposed into an effective common training platform. Additionally, fundamental technical limitations of AA due to its nature as a 'cave/corridor' shooter significantly restrict its ability to provide the flexibility for adaptive training. This compounded by the administrative overhead of the myriad contractors and complicated partnerships and history have unfortunately hobbled it from becoming a broad-base flexible training platform. The most significant aspect of this group creation is that this is a Simulation and Training owned and oriented endeavor. The primary purpose is strictly training. Combined with the administrative backend to provide comprehensive end-to-end support Army-wide as a fundamental training tool for all units world-wide, this represents a significant new endeavor for training tools and methodologies. -edit- @Dwarden / 4 IN 1: The RFP for the phase one immediate requirement was pretty clear that only fully functional 'deliverable' software packages would be eligible for consideration, eg a demonstration of deliverable requirements was scheduled for the week following the proposal close date. That rules out any development proposals or 'engine' projects. Additionally, from what I've heard, the internal AA version is not substantively different from the public version, only a few slight performance parameters might be tweaked, and they have hooks to various hardware devices and additional models and maps. One project I heard of a few years back was a group (again, research, not training orientation) got their hands on iirc several thousand session recordings of a given AA map, I can't remember if they said it included public sessions or not. Anyway, they shoveled all the sessions into a data warehouse, then mashed them together and did a stats analysis. The result was that they could then generate an overlay to determine the optimal method to 'pwn' that scenario most reliably. It was interesting to listen to, but I also have some concerns about thinking that figuring out how to optimally run a route being the orientation of the analysis. @Twisted: I wouldn't say that that is that much of a clue, but the rest of the technical requirements are well within the capabilities of the Real Virtuality 2 engine, and products based off of it.

All other items aside, this is pretty much a "strike 3" proving a point that the objective is subjugation and liquidation, not negotiation. They didn't go into the hotel to take hostages and make demands. The only demand was to see passports, and execute desired targets. They had nothing to negotiate over, and no interest in negotiating. For people who have a tangible grievance, principles of COIN apply. For these cases, it is kill or be killed. There is no other option. You can argue over causes and responsibilities all you want, that makes no difference at all at this point. Your actions and beliefs and opinions do not matter. Your very existence is a blight on the planet and must be purged as the cancer you are. There is no negotiation, no tolerance, no ambivalence, and no equivocation. It is not a matter of stretches of irrational thought presuming conspiratorial links that supposedly the 'civilians' made themselves targets by supporting, condoning, and funding 'imperialistic adventures'. The contrivance of a 'self-defense' causi belli is mere packaging. Now there are those of you here that will try and twist my words there to twist into logical backstabbing for personal political grudges. Keep that in mind the next time you and your neighbors and friends and acquaintances are targeted for liquidation solely for who they are. This is evil, and the longer you deny that reality, the harder it will be for you to cope and repel it.

Step down your resolution. DX9 is hard-limited to maximum dimensions of 4096x4096. Yes you can go higher on your desktop, but in full-screen, those be the limits.

SVN's fairly easy to self-host, and there's also a number of low-cost hosting providers that have it integrated as well. However, for game content development work, you need to understand the whole SVN server-side and client-side process, and have a really good plan for content management, even for a small project. Of course, none of this is of any use if the data's not stored on a RAID system and regularly backed up. If you're using a non-mirrored (ie striped) RAID, does your controller have a battery installed, or a mechanism to recover the RAID configuration profile?

That's not a custom box, that's a stock Clevo D900/901C. The OEM's got a past history rebadging for Alienware and others.

Yay! A BIS Forums flamefest and whine-a-thon! In before the lock! To those who don't think that the world revolves around themselves, please consider the actual realities of most community projects listed here. We have here quite a pestilent infestation of projects headed by 'experienced managers' actively soliciting designers and artists and [euphemism redacted]'ers. While it is true that much of the vaunted open-source lemming buffet, er I mean free-love-and-coding environment provides read access to large swathes of the unwashed masses, to actually contribute requires vetting by the Dear Leader. The intartubes are a virtual tyranny, and blessings are bestowed by the benevolence of the Dear Leader's at their whim and pleasure. In many cases, designers may have resources to develop new and wonderful things for the thankless masses, but have not the time, patience, or other resources to hold back the barbarian hordes intent on trampling their works. For that cause, many successful mod teams tend to heed closely to the lessons learned the hard way by older teams such as BAS and go underground. Those who have not heeded the lessons of past history have had their works and reputations dragged through the zombie infested morass of addon hell where incompatible derivative versions forked along each stage of the evolutionary ladder by well-intentioned but impatient third-parties essentially drag the original developer's work to a halt. Socially, the enthusiasm of the horde is ironically counter to the expressed desires of the same horde. From a technical standpoint, I suppose that much of RKSL and UNN's proposed system may in fact still be open for interpretation and redesign. So if the core is not locked in, could anyone possibly explain how it would be a good idea to create derivative works from an un-set foundation? We'd get a lot more results if they could focus on innovation, instead of maintenance of legacy-mode code. At the end of the day, ArmA modding is gaming a game. It's just that, nothing more. The most effective mod teams judged by the ability to churn out comprehensive batches of content are those that run like a business and keep things close to avoid nuisance interference. That environment however isn't 'fun' for a lot of other people, so they decline to play that game. Fair enough, but you not liking it doesn't make it any less real. I have yet to see any evidence of RKSL etc screwing over the community. True, there are insinuations that he has friendly connections to unsavory types such as DeadmeatXM2 and Messiah, both known war criminals and child abusers, but then again the complaints have typically been made by juveniles posting while under the influence of huffed paint that had been stolen from their daddy's garage.

Laptop upgrades in order of easiness: * Memory * Hard drive - Provided you can either use the original as a second internal or you have a external enclosure, and you have all the drivers pre-downloaded and on hand. You also don't want to change the hard drive model too much, to avoid thermal problems. * CPU - Not much more difficult than desktops, but you have to be extra cautious, and will likely void your warranty. * Video - Sourcing replacement MXM-variant cards can be very difficult and expensive, and certain to void your warranty. The Laptop's likely only designed to thermally handle what you had in it, so replace, don't upgrade the video card.

The principal issue here is that EA is in their benevolence granting you the user a license for the privilege of either using their software, or for n sessions of using their software. This is just a natural evolution in this direction. For me, there's two major concerns. 1 - Windows being inherently unstable, needs regular reinstalls. This by nature fundamentally destroys the foundation essential to DRM. Creating a Virtual machine exclusive for the single application is a non-viable option as the portability implied by very nature runs counter to the aims of DRM. 2 - I have multiple machines, but only play on one at a time. This should be carefully considered by all the anti-steam rabbleling mob, in that I can install all my Steam games concurrently on sll my computers, and play them on which ever machine I prefer to at the time. Additionally, I can re-install at any time that I desire as well.

The solution over here is quite simple, toss him into solitary if he's screwing around, if he does make a serious suicide attempt then it's off to the psych ward. If he's not crazy, he will be. If he is, then he'll get the treatment he needs.

BIS developed their own system close to 10 years ago, see setMimic as well as wav2lip, which was posted on the Flashpoint editing site on Sep 27, 2001. Codemasters just got around to throwing money at someone else's work here.

The analogy I use typically is that the rest of the products on the market are like a prefabricated sandbox. They do exactly what the box says, and nothing more. And to a degree, Arma as well falls into that category if you only consider the 'out of the box experience' - standard fare if you browse the forums here. VBS on the other hand I suggest is like a truck-load of sand. What you do with it, and the results you get from your implementation, are entirely up to you. Possible usage case scenarios : * Rapid-prototype virtual multimedia presentations * Blending of presentations and interactive training * Group procedural training * Visualization of externally simulated entities * Visualization in support of systems training * Common platform for diverse systems So rather than an 'off-the-showroom' rally car, I'd suggest it's more like a truck load of parts to be used to create an entire driving event.

Er, you're welcome to develop your own project, and ask the USB key vendor for a quote for your own software, and then you'll find out how little the USB key contributes to the actual cost. But simple business logic suggests that an auxiliary component like that should not be more than a trivial percentage of deliverable cost. By and large, the vast bulk of the content development for both VBS1 and VBS2 is just that, it's all content, meaning maps, scripts, configs, models, and textures. While there is some engine tweaks for convenience, in several cases the BIS developers have developed in parallel their own 'competing' system that has nothing to do with the scripted code used by the BIA version. Case in point is the Battlefield Clearance system. BIA had a version already in development prior to SLX's ArmA community version, and now BIS is creating one for ArmA2, independent of BIA's or SLX's code. If all you understand is the end-result presentation, then undoubtedly you're going to be much happier with OFP2 than ArmA2. CM is shoveling money by the bucketload to make sure it measures up to the Codpiece4 level of shiny. BIS has never made it a priority to deliver the last 1% of the shiny, instead they have made a platform, where in OFP, the community content typically was exponentially 'better' than what BIS delivered, because BIS's focus was on the platform. If that is still not obvious to you, then you need to rationally reassess your fetish with what isn't what you think it is. It's been said quite a few times before, but as I'm beating a dead horse here I might as well state it again. VBS2 uses the ArmA1 engine, with various relatively trivial tweaks. ArmA2 uses the newer engine, with its renderer enhancements and other improvements. It's not a linear progression, VBS branches off of the game trunk to specially focus on its unique requirements.

Agreed, but one thing that seems universaly agreed is that ArmA II will need alot of work before it can claim to be a 'realistic' game You missed that part when quoting.

Hmm... mixed feelings about that post... 1/2 - Markus Kurzawa, aka Rastavovich, previous to BIS employment, was one of the lead designers for the DKM mod team, and has been working for BIS for several years as a config designer and content architect. I'd say he knows a thing or two about the engine, how it works, and how all the pieces fit together. CM sends out the suits, BIS sends out the designers, and all BIS gets in return is accusations that they don't know what they're talking about. 3 - Was the presentation about ArmA, OFP, Commander Keen, or Pong? No? Why pander to your meta-griefing complaints then? Conclusion for me: Overly pessimistic emphasis on the obvious faults neglects the reasons behind why those faults exist in the first place. The AI acts strange because it has autonomy. The physics are screwy because they have to be calculated. The animations are stiff and un-varied because they are real. If I understand you correctly, you'd love a game where all the AI ride a rail like static popup sprite targets, pre-respond visually to linearly subsequent inverse kinematic impulses, and flop like a gelatinous homoculous? That sounds like a whole lot of innovation I don't want more of, there's plenty of leprous zombies already infesting BF2/GRAW/CoD-piece.r4 et al. Sure there's issues with this coefficient and that exhaust pipe placement. If you insist on belaboring those points at this stage, you guarantee that you will be disappointed no matter how unrealistically, unreasonably, and irrationally the developer panders to you. Instead, try to take a 'look on the bright side of life' for a change. You've got a platform now approaching it's third released generation that gives you the opportunity to make your own experience in. The game's always been about what you put into it. Every other game has been about what babble is thrown to the ravenous ab/users. What you get out of it, is what you put into it.

The point expressed by the prior few posts is fueled largely by the self-congratulatory emphasis on the 'intellectual property'. Replay all the recent interview videos and official CM spokespeople and others who should know better keep applauding 'their' past success with 'their' IP. Fact : The substance of the original game was developed under the auspices of an entirely unrelated string and absence of publishers. Fact : The CWR content is derived in significant part from original game content, supplemented by Xbox version variances where appropriate for technical reasons. This is all subsequent to the split from CM. Fact : The VBS1 EULA for copies of VBS1 (including repackaged original game content) manufactured and distributed by Coalescent during their period of licensure makes no reference to IP interests of any party other than BIS and Coalescent. This was well in advance of any split from CM. CM has a name, and that's it as far as they have 'IP' for the original game vision. They're not going out of their way to clarify that distinction in the way that BIS is obliged to though. Ancient interviews of interest to data trolls (all locatable via basic google searches, still posted publicly): http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2005/08/03/virtual-victory.php http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=102189 http://www.cbw.cz/phprs/2006061208.html http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/10/05/making-of-flashpoint/ http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011219/spanel_03.htm The gamasutra article is a comprehensive post-mortum, and has interesting nuggets such as this:

Er, OTOY is actually the distribution network infrastructure, not the 'engine' like the lemmings prefer to fawn over. The 3D tech-demo's everyone's fawning over actually are a 1-to-n aggregation of a render farm. Expanding that out into 'games' was covered up with the concerning suggestion of edge-oriented P2P, which imho is not really practical for a variety of reasons.

Part of the problem is that a lot of folks really don't know what they're talking about when they start flinging the mud around. For all intents and purposes, OpenGL itself is little more than a structure to communicate primitives to the hardware. How those primitives are constructed and managed is a higher order problem. Again to reference Carmack (someone needs to codify a Godwin's Law equivalent) OpenGL gives you the freedom to implement your renderer as you see fit, but you have to do it in its entirety. Conversely with Direct3D, you have a literally massive SDK that you can leverage to widget together your product. The downside though of D3D is if you are obsessive about doing things your way because you do indeed know better, you can't mod the D3D core, and plus you have the pleasure of updating your renderer to reflect the latest and greatest Monthly Microsoft Madness updates to the DirectX SDK. A more appropriate comparison to make would be to take a higher-level scene-graph SDK for OpenGL, and compare that to DirectX. It's still not apples to apples, but with the amount of horse apples being flung it's not like that would make a whole lot of difference anyway.

That series of zombie threads and their posters was banned. Don't go there. Generally, models on TurboSquid look pretty, but are not designed for the OFP/ArmA engine. The amount of rework required is such that you would be better off starting from scratch.

I know its possible to mod openable car doors in OFP/ArmA, but I was not refering to mods. I was refering to the dev version of the game and simply saying since we can't even open doors (something thats much easier to do, but not in the game), its unlikely the devs would add wipers. And how/why would the dev's do it any different? Unless you're referring to a hope/expectation that every last bit of functionality was modeled in place in the delivered version. Marek and Ondrej have both made repeated comments explaining that they have to make practical business decisions limiting how much work can be done, to maintain budgets and schedules. Ultimately, a whole lot of people are going to be 'unsatisfied' in one direction or another, because at some point you have to close the project and move on. Them's the facts of life in the gaming market. I suppose that if BIS focused more of their attention on additional point-release content, there could be more shiny, but at the cost of decreased budget for on-going maintenance and patches etc. With game market development, you have to beg and borrow your money up front, which comes with all sorts of strings attached. Those limitations then get transposed into content deliverable limitations. One of the points made by codemasters in their presentations is this whole foundation. Basicly, while they're not admitting they're evidently still having issues getting the rendering system shiny and stable with heavy loads, they have emphasized that they've shoveled truckloads of cash to create exponentially more content variety. There's no innovation there yet in tech that they're bragging about that doesn't already exist to a degree in ArmA, early prototype tech demos, or even OFP for that matter. That's one of the problems with the traditional business model, it may have worked in the past, but now it breaks down with newer projects because they're too big for that system. Dude your really reading way to much into what I was originally saying... I was just pointing out to Casimir, that since nothing else on cars other then lights works, its very unlikely there would be working wipers. Thats it... My only other point was that early game2 previews said doors/hoods would be fully functional, and I do believe they are in VBS2... so its possible they would in fact be in Game2. Where you got into this debate about how they would actually be done, or big business debate is really beyond me VBS2 uses the ArmA engine, not the ArmA2 engine. There is no reason why you can not put doors, animations, and user actions in on ArmA vehicles. Many have done so already, read the addons in progress and released threads. The only reason then why more doors are not implemented would then be a time/money business decision. If an artist is making doors, then they are not making a new object, or fixing bugs with another. Community modders can say "when it's done", businesses can not. Hoods would be no different at all.

I know its possible to mod openable car doors in OFP/ArmA, but I was not refering to mods. I was refering to the dev version of the game and simply saying since we can't even open doors (something thats much easier to do, but not in the game), its unlikely the devs would add wipers. And how/why would the dev's do it any different? Unless you're referring to a hope/expectation that every last bit of functionality was modeled in place in the delivered version. Marek and Ondrej have both made repeated comments explaining that they have to make practical business decisions limiting how much work can be done, to maintain budgets and schedules. Ultimately, a whole lot of people are going to be 'unsatisfied' in one direction or another, because at some point you have to close the project and move on. Them's the facts of life in the gaming market. I suppose that if BIS focused more of their attention on additional point-release content, there could be more shiny, but at the cost of decreased budget for on-going maintenance and patches etc. With game market development, you have to beg and borrow your money up front, which comes with all sorts of strings attached. Those limitations then get transposed into content deliverable limitations. One of the points made by codemasters in their presentations is this whole foundation. Basicly, while they're not admitting they're evidently still having issues getting the rendering system shiny and stable with heavy loads, they have emphasized that they've shoveled truckloads of cash to create exponentially more content variety. There's no innovation there yet in tech that they're bragging about that doesn't already exist to a degree in ArmA, early prototype tech demos, or even OFP for that matter. That's one of the problems with the traditional business model, it may have worked in the past, but now it breaks down with newer projects because they're too big for that system.

Yes you can open doors in ArmA, you just have to have the following in place: * Doors modeled * Doors selectioned * Doors animations model-config'd * User actions config'd You could do that even in OFP, it's hardly a 'z0mg secret VBS hax'. It just takes time and effort. Windshield wipers in all fairness is a bit trickier. You could in theory make the windshield a hidden selection and swap screens based on the state of a var controlled by a useraction and checking the weather, though you might run into z-buffer alpha-sorting, not sure. It would definitely go wonky if you tried to stack multiple hiddenselection alpha's to create a pseudo-blend.

DX10 was never about performance, it was about DRM, and a bit of shiny on the side. There's various new functions, but that's to provide more for programmers to glomp onto their render boxen. Any performance boosts are coincidental. Crysis is not the only one, the promised DX10 rebuild for Supreme Commander was also pulled as well.

The actual LCD inside both could well be made by the same plant, the 24" Dell's I have both have samsung panels, so it's just a matter of best purchase deal for you.