Jonathan

Well, Compet-n movement rules always forbade anything not possible with a standard mouse+keyboard setup. As the relevant section says: And this was enforced by checking of suspicious demos with LMPC and other bespoke tools, I believe. Now, this was probably intended more at catching people manipulating demo files via LMPC or hacked .exes, but it wouldn't surprise me if Adam Hegyi etc. were also aware of the possibility for some obscure controllers to produce unusual movement.

I actually discovered the original MAP16 glide using ZDoom. At first I figured it was probably a ZDoom-specific engine bug, but then discovered I could do it in vanilla as well, and the rest is history. Rocket jumping is so-named because a "jump" in Doom parlance, at least in vanilla speedrunning, has always referred to running off one edge and landing on another. Doing so with a speed assist from a rocket allows you to travel across larger gaps, and is therefore termed a rocket jump. Speed assists from strafe-50 movement are strafe-50 jumps. The existence of Arch Vile jumps muddies the water a little, but basically, in Doom speedrunning, "jump" in no way implies vertical movement. I guess maybe it's a bit misleading if you're mainly familiar with rocket jumping in other games with vertical jumping and damage boosts. "Rocket boosting" or "rocket pushing" might be a little more descriptive of how it works in Doom. But amongst speedrunners its meaning is well understood, and personally I think it's a nice link to the legendary Quake speedrunning scene, which was a huge inspiration for many runners.

Every time there's a high-profile boxing match like this, it always seems to end in some highly dubious decision, or at least that's my impression as a non-fan. So I'm going to predict that Mayweather will get the better of it in the ring, but then Pacquiao will be declared the winner, or perhaps vice-versa. The media and internet will go crazy complaining about how corrupt the sport is, how it needs cleaning up, etc. then it'll all die down and be forgotten about, until the next hype fight rolls around.

I have no sympathy with those people throwing a fit and organising petitions at the thought of having to pay for any mod at all. Seems like yet another example of whiny and entitled "gamer" culture run amok. That said, I do think there were plenty of valid criticisms about this initiative, which I don't need to repeat here. I hope Valve try again at some point in the future once they've thought more carefully about fair compensation, and ways to avoid rip-off or low content mods, and freeloading on others work. One highly amusing bit from the Bethesda blog caught my eye though: That's right. Bethesda's studio members' salaries are so poor, and so detached from the subsequent success of the games they're working on, that's possible it out-earn them just through a 25% percent cut of a mod's sales.

I agree that contact by intelligent aliens would be a huge deal. People would certainly give a shit about that. But even when huge and crazy stuff happens, social and religious structures don't just disintegrate. Look at the situation in places like Ukraine, Iraq or the Palestinian territories. These are societies with a perpetual backdrop of violence and destruction, but they remain functional. People continue living their lives, even when they know that they, or someone they love, could be the victim of an attack or a suicide bombing any day. That's not to say that they don't notice what's going on or care deeply about it, just that things don't just fall apart as a consequence.

NASA has already announced the discovery of extraterrestrial life in the Martian meteorite Allan Hills 84001. It wasn't some small scale thing either, Clinton made a televised address about it. Other scientists have since disputed the claims, but there was absolutely zero religious or social upheaval at the time, or since. People didn't give a shit. Your understanding of religion, society, science and human psychology appears to have zero basis in reality, and be instead by informed by the worst Reddit garbage, and your own arrogant prejudices. Religious and social structures are not so fragile that they would collapse based on some inconsequential scientific discovery. Even if intelligent life came to Earth and gave a speech to the UN, 99.999% of people would get up and go to work or school as normal.

E2M2 to win, just so Ling has to write a valedictory blurb explaining why that cratey melange is the best level in the game.

There's already an Emscripten port of PrBoom available. So, it's definitely possible? It would be fantastic to have a server that always provided the latest version of Freedoom running on an Emscripten version of Chocolate Doom.

Quake 2 used Id Tech 2, which was an evolution of Id Tech 1, which was developed for Quake. So Quake 2's engine is just a modification of Quake's engine, in the same way as Goldsrc. And it benefitted from one year's less development. Furthermore, classically Id never used sequels to push the boat out on technology. Id Tech 2 consolidated the advances that had been pioneered on top of Quake: Client-server networking, and hardware accelerated graphics, but otherwise doesn't seem to have been intended as a great leap forward technologically. Most likely, Carmack postponed the biggest, riskiest improvements for the next engine, Id Tech 3, which was introduced for Quake 3 Arena. Q3A was released in 1999, one year after Half Life, and I think it's fair to say it blows it out of the water in graphical quality.

It's the 20th anniversary of Duke 3D's release next year, so presumably this is going to be some promotional thing around that.

The first sentence of your first post was "I'm honestly curious what kinds and flavours of gun control advocates there are out there." Now you're saying you do know what types of gun control advocates are out there, and you really just want to survey the individual opinions of Doomworld forums posters? Do you see how this might seem contradictory? Clearly, Doomworld forums posters are not a representative sample of gun control advocates. Nor is anybody here, on either side of the debate, particularly well informed or active in actual advocacy efforts. Asking for in-depth opinions therefore seems about as useful as asking people to weigh in on their favourite flavour of String Theory. It's just a recipe for more useless noise. It took me all of 5 minutes to find the list of gun control advocacy groups on Wikipedia that I mentioned, and the site smartgunlaws.org that one of them runs. Any genuine curiosity that you have would seem to be far better spent educating yourself on actual gun control proposals produced by actual gun control advocacy groups.

He literally just posted a condescending denial of this in the post I was replying to.

Since you refused to answer my questions, what other conclusion can we reach? I'll ask again: If you're "honestly curious" about this issue, why didn't you do basic research?

If you're "honestly curious" about gun control proposals, why didn't you begin by researching the proposals of gun control advocacy groups? The Wikipedia category on Gun control advocacy groups in the United States or some of the advocacy group's own websites would seem like far more obvious places to start investigating this topic than a Doomworld forums thread. I'm not sure what you expected to achieve by posting this thread? Are you too lazy to do the research yourself, and want to others to do it for you? Are you just looking for a chance to engage in lazy pontification and receive validation on your views from like-minded posters? Are you just looking to start an argument?

It seems like you are falling prey to special pleading here. When a shift towards away from physical delivery and towards digital is observed across so many entertainment markets, you need a more convincing argument than you've given that games are a rule to themselves. Existing purchasing behaviour hasn't prevented similar shifts in other markets. Why should gamers be more resistant to digital delivery than people who buy and rent books, music and DVDs? Saying "behaviour and expectations ... are very different" isn't an argument. What are the specific differences that make games and/or gamers less amenable to this shift? Likewise, the need to buy a physical device hasn't served as a bar to digital delivery of music, video and books, so why should it in the case of games consoles? As for GameStop, they are making money, but their revenues have been flat since 2009, even has the games market overall has grown. And the share of their profits earned from pre-owned games and non-games items is growing at the expense of new games sales. Where's the market growth going? Into digital sales. While GameStop aren't about to collapse anytime soon, as Fraggle said, the writing is on the wall for physical purchase. If and when bandwidth and data-caps become a non-issue, this trend will likely accelerate.

I think talking about games misses a more important issue: 4K video. People are stating to buy 4K capable displays, and will want content to watch on them. However, the average 4K movie is 50GB. If people expect to be streaming 4K content from Netflix every night, then clearly current broadband capacity isn't going to cut it. If ISPs and content providers can't reach an agreement on net neutrality and who foots the bill for network upgrades, then maybe we'll see a shift back towards physical media. But I suspect they will, and games will piggyback on those improvements.

I think it can be useful to provide some structure to a debate, but can easily be taken too far, in which case it becomes very destructive. However, unlike many dishonest debating tactics, it's not always obvious that someone doing it is being deliberately awkward or arguing in bad faith. As others have said, the problem is two-fold: First, it often involves nitpicking about points of grammar and word definition that bog down the argument and shift it away from what is actually at issue. Secondly, it easily ramifies into an exponential number of sub-arguments, as people respond to one point with many, and so on. This ramification is compounded when it's a debate between multiple people. Everyone ends up responding to everyone else's points, and the result is an explosive web of debate that's impossible to untangle. I also think it isn't a very efficient way to argue, either for the people arguing or anyone reading along. It appeals to the superficially analytical geek in all of us: The idea of forensically breaking down an argument and responding to each point in turn. But it also makes it difficult to build a single, persuasive and coherent line of argument. Instead, both sides end up repeating themselves and firefighting on minor issues. I think the best way to deal with it is to make a distinction, even if its just to yourself, about what topic is at issue, and what isn't. Respond to points that are salient to the topic, and ignore ones that aren't. You need to pick your battles, which can easier said than done if someone is trying to provoke you with nitpicking, irrelevant shit, etc. And, just as people can break down what you've said and respond sentence-by-sentence, it's just as easy to do the reverse: Collect their points together and respond with a single paragraph.

My original response to Memfis was solely about the idea of a black lead character being inherently comedic. You were the one who interjected and started talking about "2014 American progressive values pushed in every piece of media for brownie points these days". You were the one who made this about a general progressive agenda. Now you're trying to row back and say it's specifically about this trailer, when you were the one talking about "every" piece of media. The fact that you wrapped it in quotes in an attempt to attribute it as being my opinion doesn't make it any less your words, it just demonstrates what a chickenshit you are. Frankly, It doesn't matter whether someone thinks a black character is inherently funny in this single case, or believes it is fan service as part of some wider progressive agenda. Both are stupid, racist reactions to a guy being cast in a movie. The point is that I didn't introduce the "taboo word" (your phrasing), Memfis did, demonstrating he knew his words could be interpreted that way. In which case, it's up to him to defend and justify his point of view, not for you to attack me for making the accusation that he apparently expected.

It's the idea that casting a black character in a lead role can only be a sop to "progressive values" that is racist. Seeing everything through a lens of bullshit whinging about affirmative action or rampant liberalism or whatever is racist. Jumps can be funny, sure. Race can be funny too, in the right context. But laughing at a black character, simply because they are black and you assume any black character is symptomatic of some progressive agenda is not the right context. Memfis began by suggesting he would be called a racist. I only did what he apparently thought he deserved. Saying, "I'll probably be called a racist for this..." is not a get-out to then spout racist shit. Someone said in this thread that it looked like "it [is] attempting to be a 'cool' action movie". My point was that it actually looks different from the typical modern action movie, of which Transformers is the prototypical example. Anyway, sorry if my flowery prose is too impenetrable for you. I'll try and dumb it down a bit: "Every shot is well composed and interesting." Composition is the way elements are arranged in the frame of a visual medium, such a painting, photograph or film. Many films suffer from poor composition, including an inability to understand the concept "less is more". A serious problem in the prequel trilogy was Lucas' tendency to just throw as much shit as possible onto the screen, with the end result being a mish-mash of blaster bolts, CGI robots and other background noise. At the same time, his choice of camera angles and movement, especially for sequences involving actual actors, was usually stilted and bland. In contrast, the shots in this trailer are well composed: They have a clear focus of interest, whether its a person riding a speeder, a trio of X-Wings or a Sith Lord striding through a forest. There is a clear separation between foreground and background, without extraneous clutter to distract you. All of this is well illustrated by the "special edition" parody video. And little things, such as having John Boyega's character stand up into frame, or having the Sith in the woods walking away from the camera, are the difference between interesting shots and boring ones. "an aesthetic that both invokes the feel of the original trilogy and innovates in terms of lighting and camera movement." The look of the environments and props like the droid looks closer to how things appeared in the original trilogy than the bland digital wash of the prequels. But there are also things in the trailer, such as the flickering lighting in the Storm Trooper show, the X-Wings flying over water, and the camera following the Millennium Falcon that are a stylistic evolution over anything the original films attempted. Blah, blah, blah. Grow up.

You find the concept of a black lead character inherently comedic? Yes, you're a racist. Seriously, how people on DW can have positive reactions to that Jurassic World hamster ball garbage and then think this looks at all bad is mind-boggling. It's just a teaser, sure, but every shot is well composed and interesting, with an aesthetic that both invokes the feel of the original trilogy and innovates in terms of lighting and camera movement. It couldn't look any more different from the prequel trilogy, or the confused jumble of CGI shit in the Transformers movies that is standard "action movie" fare nowadays.

This looks bad, or at best screamingly mediocre. The CGI in the trailer is ropey. The dialogue is banal, and awfully delivered by Pratt. He's done OK in straight roles in the past, but here he sounds like Andy from Parks & Rec doing a cheesy action hero impression. And the GM dinosaurs idea suggests a lack of confidence and imagination. If you can't make dinosaurs scary or interesting without throwing in some cliched plot multiplier like genetic enhancement, then there's something wrong.

Fuck the macho-hipster cult of Hemmingway and fuck this prescriptive bullshit. If I want to write adverby prose, in the passive voice, that employs baroque synonyms and long, windy sentences that seem to go on forever, then I will, and I don't want the software I'm using to nag me about it. Writing should be fun. It should be about expressing yourself in your own style, not in someone else's.

Heh, well clearly no respectable lawyer would ever be associated with as insalubrious a place as DW.

Ahhhh, yeah. Hope Day of the Tentacle shows up soon. Plus any re-release of Fate of Atlantis is a excuse to listen to this again. Grim Fandango is being remade/remastered by Double Fine for PS and PC as we speak, so I wouldn't expect to see it show up until that's complete.

Four Blackwater guards found guilty in 2007 Iraq shootings of 31 unarmed civilians