Schoeler

Yeah, like I said, still too clean. The photo doesn't do it justice, but you can see the beginnings of the grunge under the roofline and along the bottoms of the walls. Also, the signage is non-uniform, and the rusty corrugated metal roof doesn't show up too well with the size limit restrictions on photos we can post here. A lot needs to be done still, in particular, the filthy metal vents on the front walls under the awnings and the cluttered objects out front. Conduit and wires need to be added, as does all the crap on the roof. I need to do the side walk out front and it needs to get much, much dirtier. All this takes time, but I have to say, if any modders out there doing environmental stuff aren't taking factors like this into consideration, then your work is subpar. Realism in the environments is the single biggest lacking feature to the game, which is why I started 3WX.

By sterility, I mean that buildings and objects in OFP are too uniform, neat and clean. There is no real world wear and tear. In realistic environments, buildings and objects are non-uniform, worn out and dirty. At 3WX, we are trying to capture that real world flavor. For example, look at this typical Middle Eastern Shop: Now, here is an early 3WX rendition of it: Still too clean, but note the dirt and stains, the non-uniformity of the features, rollup doors and signs. The wear and tear on the interior walls. I still need to do a lot of texture work to get this looking like the source photo, and all the clutter of the miscellaneous objects needs to be added too. But this is what I'm talking about. Most people doing environmental stuff for the game make it too neat and clean and that is simply unrealistic. BAS was the first team to explore doing realistic environments with Tonal, but even that was too neat and could use some enhancement. it's time consuming, but in my opinion, very much worth the effort because after all the guns and tanks and planes have been made to death, it is a realistic environment that adds the greatest depth and sense of immersion to the game.

Missions and really good, realistic environments, the current ones are too sterile.

Well I don't know much about Miller, but I'm pretty sure he didn't volunteer to stay in the Hanoi Hilton an extra five years because his fellow inmates lacked the political connections his father had. McCain has proven his integrity time and again, in winning the Medal of Honor, in pushing for campaign finance reform and in voting his conscience even if it means crossing party lines again and again. I'll not only vote for him, I'll campaign for him again. He should have won the nomination the first time.

McCain does rock. Notice how he is making nice with the party? I think he knows Bush is cooked and plans on running under the GOP ticket in '08. It's a good move on his part and I'd vote for him.

It is disturbing, but that's human nature and notjust an American thing. People are more concerned with domestic issues normally because that is what affects them directly. Most people simply don't give a damn about things that don't involve them. Also, the availability of that information varies in the U.S. depending upon where you get your news from. Fox news for example is all too happy to keep trying to connect Saddam with Al-Qaeda and to insist that the WMD may have been shipped somewhere else. It's disgusting really that they continue to portray themselves as responsible journalists when they continually slip into the role of propagandists.

Hi Ian, I just wanted to state that this kind of reaction from people is what can really disturb me, about the state of mind of the people in general. Â thousands killed upon lies and deception: Bush is not an angel realizing economy is taking a big hit: Bush, that bad man The more that I follow people's reactions to conflicts and problems, the more I can make this conclusion: what hits home, hits; what does not, does not. Â I guess if all Americans saw first hand what happened to various innocents, families etc, and had to live it, things would be different. Â Actually I don't guess, I know! Always welcome your posts Ian. Bye I can tell you right now that the war and not the economy is the issue that is going to decide this election. Whatever news you are getting over there about the economy causing shifts in the numbers is wrong. Look at the President's approval rating, it falls whenever iraq gets bad and it rises when things calm down.

I'd say you don't know anything. The senate report was the senators trying to explain why they voted for a war without any real reason. It was a political report that came to some very odd conclusions and completely left out important elements such as the Office of Special Plans. The senate report is nothing but a whitewash. And it's not because they're covering Bush's ass - they are covering their own asses. They all voted for it. So Kerry is as much to blame for the starting of the war as Bush is. Bush contributed to the post-war mess, which Kerry did not. For the starting of the war, they're on the same page. Well Denoir, that's a matter of opinion. They didn't vote for war, they voted to authorize the President to use force, which is not the same as a carte blanche authorization for war. It was largely symbolic anyway as the President could have conducted combat operations for 90 days with or without Congressional authorization. Many members of Congress went along with the program and voted for authorization while also urging that all available diplomatic means be exhausted first. Senator Kerry claims to be among that bunch. Whether or not that is true I can't definitively say. Either way, the President chose to ignore that advice. I disagree that the members of Congress are as much to blame as the President for starting the war. They didn't give the go ahead, and I distinctly recall some of them asking for us to wait or to build a true coalition first, so in my opinion, your view is a bit distorted.

Did your good friends in the war also tell you that they are being spponfed almost pure propaganda over there and that the majority of the troops believe Saddam and Bin Laden are connected because that is what their commanders have been telling them? I think you are incredibly misinformed on this issue. Kerry and the rest of Congress, did not have the same information as Bush did with respect to pre-war intel. They were given a briefing by the Pentagon that excluded sources and means, which had they been included like they were for the President, would have revealed some incredibly shaky and shady sources that at best were questionable and at worst provided zero basis for beginning an armed conflict on foreign soil. Read the intelligence commission's recently released report. They reached a bi-partisan agreement that they were misinformed. Oddly, the second half of the report is not due out until after the election, which is a little bit worrisome considering it is supposed to reveal the Administration's role in exaggerating the pre-war intel and the White House's role in cherry-picking the intel that would allow them to start the war. How coincidental. Bush may very well have lied to us, we won't know until after the election. What we do know now, is that the decision was not made with the best intel available at the time. Thanks to the Intelligence Commission report, we know the decision was made on very faulty intel gathered by community members trapped in a "groupthink" paradigm that ignored any information contrary to the purposes of finding info that would justify a war. I think you have some fact checking to do yourself. I don't want to embarass you, but I can back up these assertions i've made with evidence and i will if you are unwilling to do the research yourself, but then I will be the one making you look foolish and that really isn't something i'm interested in.

The man married into the money for Christ's sake. Don't you read?

Take a look at this: Doesn't sound like "spilled coffee" to me. His awards were indeed some of the largest from his cases, keeping about 1/3 of awards as his fee. Possible baby defects due to possible doctor negligence is frivolous? And again. He kept about 1/3 or less for fees. That 2/3 at least for the victim. That's not very much? They have never tried to hide their wealth. And where is your indignation that 3 of the top current administration officials are from major oil companies and/or backgrounds, and have taken us to war in an oil rich country? By the way: Bush=Millionaire Cheney=Millionaire Rumsfeld=Millionaire Rice=Millionaire Also for your information Kerry and Edwards voted against the Bush tax cuts which would have benefited themselves. Not as sad as the people that swallow whatever the Bush camp gives them. Try critically thinking. Baaaaa......Baaaaaa..... As someone on the way to law school, I'm astounded by how many people buy into the anti-lawsuit rhetoric being put out by big business and their trained monkey bought and paid for politicians. Look up the statistics people, the frivolous suits garner a lot of publicity, but they are far outweighed by the legitimate and rarely publicized suits that occur every day where trial lawyers defend the weak from large and negligent money hungry corporations and incompetent government agencies. The ridiculuous suits are a minsicule percentage of the total and are a small price to pay for citizens not being bullied around by billionaires and corporate monoliths that can pay to have their poltical agendas enacted. Without those trial lawyers and lawsuits, what happens the next time an Enron ruins your retirement? What happens the next time Exxon dumps 6 million gallons of oil on your beach? What happens when the local chemical company dumps toxins into the groundwater supply and your kids are born with birth defects or your wife dies from lymphoma? Trial lawyers are not the enemy folks, the enemy are the people whose anti-lawyer rhetoric you bought hook line and sinker without so much as one analytical thought that it may be propaganda designed to protect those who need no protection.

This sort of shit is likely more than half the reason you won't be seeing those addons until OFP2. Suck it up or make the damned things yourself, you are owed nothing in this world but your next breath, and you may even have to fight for that, so just get over it.

Your coalition of veterans for Bush is about as impressive as the President's coalition of nations in Iraq. I know a lot of veterans (of this war and others) who will not be voting for Bush in November. Â We'll see how gung-ho you are when you get called back as an inactive reservist. Well, You know what? These reservists shouldn't have joined up, if they didn't want to go to war, that Kind of what the Army is about. I joined the Army to fight. So I'm not some fat, annoying person challenging crap they don't know about. Don't call me gung-ho, I'm not some half-brained marine. Most of the guys I'm talking about were and some still are active duty. Â Reservists shouldn't complain, you are right, it comes with the enlistment, but what about the National Guard? Â Those guys signed up to portect their State, not fight in a foreign war? You signed up to fight? I don't know about you, but when I took my oath of service, it wasn't to fight, it was to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, serve the people and to obey the orders of the officers appointed over me. Â You say you aren't some half-brained Marine, but then you accept without challenge an order to go off and kill others or to possibly be killed yourself? Â You followed this without question? Â How did you know if it was a legal order or not? Â Do you believe you are obligated to follow every order given to you by a superior, or did you miss that particular day in recruit training? Â Every serviceman asked to fight should question the cause, even if they still do their duty, you are still an American citizen, you still have a voice and a vote and that counts for something. Â As a serviceman you should be doubly obligated as protector of our Constitutional rights to make sure they are not being violated, subverted or removed. Â You should be extra careful to watch out for the abuse of power, and a large part of the abuse of power is the deployment of people like you for no good reason, or under false pretenses. If the President had come out and said, "Hey, Saddam is a bad guy and we need to go in and get him to help the Iraqi people", I think I and a lot of other informed Americans would have less problems accepting this war, but he instead said "Saddam has WMD and he is an imminent threat to us, so we need to replace his regime". Â It turns out by all the best evidence available that the President was wrong, knew it, and decided to invade anyway, because that was what he wanted to do and by damned he was going to get his war no matter what. You say you want to fight, but do you really want to just fight? Â Is it really that mindless of an impulse that any old fight would do, or do you want to fight where and when it really matters? Â If you wanted to fight, you could have stayed home an joined a gang and skipped the Army altogether. Â I think you wanted to make a difference, like I did when I joined, not just to simply fight. Â Tell me, what difference has been made? Â Could we not have made a difference elsewhere that would have been more meaningful? Â The President's "Bush Doctrine" states that the U.S. will engage in pre-emptive action whenever and wherever a rougue nation is pursuing WMD programs, yet Iraq had no WMD and it looks now as if the President knew that all along. Â Meanwhile, nations like North Korea, Iran and Pakistan have developed WMD programs and we simply ignored that. Â Now, because the President chose to enforce his shiny new doctrine only in the nation that incidently led to the demise of his father's second term and strangely enough had no WMD and nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, you or your children will someday be standing on foreign soil with a rifle in their hands trying to do something about those nations he chose to ignore. Â Your kids will grow up under the threat of nuclear holocaust just as my generation did and my parent's did. Â You will have been the only generation to ever have been free from the threat of nuclear terror. Â All because Bush is a liar. Â It was never about WMD, if it was, we'd be in Iran and North Korea right now, we would be in Pakistan hunting down their nukes and oh, someone else if I remember correctly, who was that guy? Â Oh yeah, now I remember, Osama Bin Laden! We did nothing for the war on terror by invading Iraq, in fact, we made the world more dangerous and created legions of young new terrorists. Â We did nothing to halt proliferation by invading Iraq, instead, we kept ourselves occupied in a nation that was not a threat while other nations that posed a real threat found the time to develop unimaginable horrors that now hang over our heads and those of our children. Â We did help the Iraqi people and rid the world of an evil dictator, but at what cost? Â We will be in Iraq for another 5-10 years, by the time we leave, Iraq may be a democracy, but they will never be the friends we hoped they would become. Â We will lose even more people to the war, and our enemies will become nuclear capable anyway. If you signed up to make a difference and were willing to sacrifice your own life to do so, then you should be hopping mad at President Bush right now, because you were misled and disused. Â Your efforts and your noble intentions were wasted. Â You were used to make a difference, and that difference is that the Constitution and the people you swore to protect and the world in general are much less safe now than they were before. Of all people Rishon, you should be angriest at the President. Â He lied to you and used you to fulfill a personal agenda, not to protect the nation or rid the world of the threat of WMD.

Your coalition of veterans for Bush is about as impressive as the President's coalition of nations in Iraq. I know a lot of veterans (of this war and others) who will not be voting for Bush in November. We'll see how gung-ho you are when you get called back as an inactive reservist.

Well, not caring what others think is reason enough to elect a guy to the run the world's only superpower. You're right, wars happen, shit happens, drafts happen, nuclear holocaust happens, economic depressions happen, getting rid of the Department of Education happens. I can see the logic now, my vote has changed!

THIS is about the MOST ridiculuous statement I've seen in this thread. Guns will be banned? Â How does that happen without a Constitutional Convention blackdog? You have the 2nd Amendment, guns can't be banned, no federal law can supercede the Constitution. Â Please try harder not to sound that ignorant. Besides, Kerry is a hunter and gun owner. Â I highly doubt he would be the man to try and get rid of our guns. Quit buying the bullshit that is being spoonfed to you by desperate Bush supporters starting to fear they may actually lose this one. Show me one iota of evidence Kerry is anti-gun, or I will write you off as a robot spouting the lines the party scripted for him because he lacks the intellect to actually find things out for himself.

http://www.earthside.com/yellowstone.html Now that is scary. Kind Regards Walker Hi Walker, I was in Yellowstone last August and there is indeed increased volcanic activity. When I was there, certain parts of the lake were boiling, new hotsprings and mudpots had cropped up in the parking lot at the falls, and geysers that haven't erupted in over 100 years were suddenly erupting again. It is fascinating, but the last time that volcano erupted, that entire valley was created. The whole park is actually a caldera.

The largest earthquake in recorded history happened in Missouri, or so I read once. Â I'll have to find a source on that. Edit: Â Oops! Â The 5th largest: Biggest U.S. Earthquakes Ever. 10 Largest in 20th Century Worldwide

The Republicans are scrambling today to attack Edwards on any angle they can find, and it's not working. Â So far the only thing they can come up with is a lack of foreign policy experience, which is being read instead as a plus for Edwards in many circles given that Cheney had a ton of experience in the foreign policy arena and look where we are now. Â Attacking Edwards as a trial lawyer and touting their new committment to tort reform is also falling weakly by the wayside for the Republicans in the light of Enron executive Ken Lay's criminal indictments today and Cheney's ever more suspect relationship with Halliburton. Â The American people aren't geared up to buy the argument that Edwards was an ambulance chaser with all the evidence and his record of winning money from big corporations on behalf of the little guy. Â Right now corporate America is the evil job-exporting enemy of the middle class. Â The Bush Administration is going to have a hard time finding any takers on this attack angle on Edwards this election cycle.

I saw him in person and he is much different than the canned media soundbites you are being spoonfed that fit him into a neat little slot meant to drive up ratings and insure viewership and controversy right up until November 2nd. He's not boring. He even looks younger and better in person. I can't understand why the media insists on feeding us all crap when they used to take pride in being impartial and giving us facts. Tex, normally I would agree it's not going to happen, but from what I've heard, Bush has lost so much ground, he's going to be forced to actually debate this time around.

I can't wait to see the Pres debate Kerry in a venue where he is not given the questions ahead of time and Uncle Dick isn't there to hold his hand. I expect a lot of garbled doubletalk.

I think the Republicans are terrified of the Kerry/Edwards ticket. Â Edwards makes Cheney look like a stodgy old buffoon and there is absolutely no dirt on Edwards other than he made his money representing the little guy against the big corporations as a trial lawyer. Â I find myself laughing at the virtuous Republican efforts to bring the anti-frivolous lawsuit legislation into the light of the Senate chamber this week. Â Impeccable timing wouldn't you say? Â How noble of them and what concern for a subject that didn't seem relevant or important enough until this morning. Â

I have to agree with the Navy SAR orange color scheme as well. Of course I am a bit biased having served for six years in Uncle Sam's Never. Again. Volunteer. Yourself!

BIS has said it will come out 2005 at the EARLIEST, so that means its coming out early 2006 if we are lucky. Your math assumes the proposition that BAS is not now working on addons for OFP2. Considering BIS has said OFP2 will be backwards compatible, I don't think your assumption is safe to make.

This is a bit of a half-truth considering the Supreme Court just ruled against the Bush Administration's policies and required that the prisoners have representation and a speedy trial. Â TBA is now scrambling to get these guys lawyers and maybe even to bring them into the U.S. Hardly a stalinistic court arrangement, but this comparison of yours between the U.S. and the Soviets is about as fairminded and accurate as your continual insistence on comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany. Cute lawyers trick Denoir, toss out the comparison, say what you want to get across and then as soon as the objections come retract it, except the jury doesn't forget do they? Â It's the same rhetorical tactic.