Julhelm

Who are "they"? Is it the Taliban or is it all muslims? If the latter you're dead wrong. In fact most muslims here come from places like Turkey or the Balkans, and they are more than happy to integrate and they're really no more religious than average Joe Sixpack. With the arabs they come from areas less developed and so are more likely to be backwards fundies, but at any rate their kids do try to integrate and what's really needed is more help from the government to reach that goal. You have to realize that those who come here as adults from say Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia are likely to be lost causes as far as de-fundamentalising goes, but their kids are not and if we can reduce whatever backwards influence the family can excert then half the battle is won. I suppose you're talking about the Taliban but it really does come across as treating all muslims as a homogenous group. There are extremists but the best way to combat them is to expose their lies for what they are.

Stopping the taliban in afghanistan will not hurt anyone because they'll just continue operating as before. Extremism is not like fighting COBRA where if you just kill Cobra Commander the whole thing comes crashing down and everything will go back to normal. The world doesn't work like that. You fight extremists with enlightenment and social integration. The best way to fight backwards people is to educate their kids, which is why homeschooling and private religious schools should be illegal. Also the scaremongers always talk about how them thar muslims will take over Europe by 2050 or so by breeding more prodigiously than we do which is absolute bollocks. All research thus far into social/cultural science indicates that once people become integrated into a well-educated society with a high standard of living, they will have less children compared to those who stay behind in backwards s**tholes.

You don't get it. The taliban and al-quaida aren't some local phenomena that can be defeated through conventional means. They're ideological causes and you cannot defeat them with military means. Has it ever occured to you that any Joe Sixpack can form his own little local terror cell that is a part of Al Quaida? Just like destroying Nazi Germany didn't kill off the nazi ideology, defeating the local taliban in Afghanistan won't put an end to fundamentalist islamist and terrorism. Look at the troubles. That didn't end through any military means, but rather because in the end people grew tired of the whole thing. The same will happen with islam, and what we see now are a few bad apples refusing to accept leaving the middle ages behind. And there are local terrorist training camps everywhere from here in Sweden to the US and they're all the same regardless of if they refer to themselves as anarchists, neo-nazis, jihadis or fundamentalist christians. They're symptoms of the same illness and the way to cure the illness is with integration, jobs and better social safety net. Hell, anytime someone loses his job and gets stuck in the unemployment trap you get a potential terrorist trainee. It's not an 'us vs them' situation that can be solved by bombs or ever more intrusive legislation and we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we fall for that kind of lies. Sure it makes politicians look good and manly when they talk about getting 'tough on terror' but it doesn't actually produce any results other than getting good guys killed for naught.

Sunk investment is a bad argument for keeping on beating a dead horse. Results are what matter and until there is a dedicated offensive on both sides of the afghani/pakistani border along with dedicated nationbuilding there won't be any viable results. And even with that once the taliban is gone they'll keeping training new batches of jihadists in some other place, and frankly the reason they're doing that is because they know islam as a religion is evolving just as christianity did from backwards fundamentalism towards moderate secularism, and these guys are adamant to stop this. This is why there are religious controllers running around in muslim neighbourhoods in our countries, just like there used to be in northern Ireland during the troubles. Instead of pouring more fuel on the fire we should be encouraging the move towards moderate secularism and instead fight the spread of fundamentalist wahabism that's exported from Saudi Arabia. Dropping bombs won't work because it's not total war against individual nation states.

Sure go for it. Tell him he can have better Vigis as well compared to what he has.

HAWX has specular mapping as well which allows for different specular properties on a single material. Which of course SF does not have. Also SF has bumpmapping, but just not on objects (so we can't make proper use of it). In order to set different specular properties one must assign separate materials to those parts that are matte and those that are shiny but the drawback here is that one gets far more drawcalls than are necessary. Basically because the engine handles materials in a totally obsolete way.

I usually fly merc or USN. If I fly USN it's usually VF-111 or random Vigi unit.

What's SDB stand for?

Unwrap and texture before separating everything into meshes or simply attach everything together for the texporter and then rigging it.

I'm having a blast with Mini Ninjas. It has really awesome art direction; much better than MW2 IMO.

That happened here as well. Lots of snow on christmas even, then all gone the day after.

Remind them to unmirror that swastika on the right side ;)

Yeah, the built in tools have everything you need like cylindrical unwrapping and smart move/stitch.

What kind of BS would that be?

Exported it into the cargoship folder so I know it'll show up for sure.

How about ingame pics?

Fubar handed that model to me for texturing, but it was such a mess that I elected to remodel it from the ground up, and here she is @ 20k polys:

If you send me the model I can unwrap and texture it. It'll take some time to do that, though.

You should've mapped most of it before cutting up all the doors and rudders. Makes life easier.

If you have the model properly unwrapped (that is, no faces mirrored or overlapping in 0-1 space) you can export it as an .obj or .3ds and then run it through xNormal using it for both high/low meshes and get a pretty good occlusion bake if you use a floor and crank the rays up to around 300. I think that'd look pretty good ingame.

You can still be of help, since due to release of our game this week I haven't had the time to go back and mess around with the pit. Do you know why the counters refuse to function? Basically what I want is for the counters to appear only when a weapon is selected.

Does such a mod exist, or how can I go about the easiest way to beef up the air defense on the stock map to where it's actually challenging?

Cool, I'm going to try this out with my already difficult custom campaign this weekend.