Deleted163104User

Pretty sure a few of my participants have come from here, so many thanks to those peeps - greatly appreciated. I'm currently up to 67 completed surveys. The survey closes at the end of this month and I'd really like to hit triple figures if at all possible! Many thanks to anyone who can give us a leg-up!

Many thanks for the responders so far. :smile: Well, it's currently just a master's thesis but I'm hoping to potentially get it published in a journal, even as a pilot study. Hey, I'm just a forensic scientist - I don't know anything about any of that! :tongue: To be honest, for the purposes of my MSc project my criteria was 'has working eyes' :tongue: From my own background (police and forensics) I hadn't really considered astronomers. My project deadline is/was too close for going for this - I was just going to take the 'law enforcement/forensics' people out as a separate group just to see if they were any better at it (previous studies say they're actualyl not. Asset protection people are no better at this than Average Joe, except they might recognise the crim - and recognition > identification every time. Even passport checkers are just as prone to error as Average Joe. I would certainly say I agree with you on that. From experience it's pretty easy to make two people indistinguishable through postprocessing or compression (if the footage is bad enough, it's useless. :tongue: ) yes, at certain resolutions and distances, the pixels can resemble someone else, such that certainty of identification cannot be achieved. Bog-standard CCTV camera. CCTV cameras tend to have wide angle lenses - that isn't a transform :tongue: I basically scrounged a couple of old IR-capable cameras out of the company storeroom. A future study will be using more modern cameras and much less compression. Yeah, the camera isn't great. :tongue: Wow, that will be some serious cash being spent on those cameras. Far more than Joe Shopkeeper will be likely to spend...and certainly far in advance of what I am likely to see at work in the near future. I'm lucky to get 25 frames per second let alone glareproof cameras... what you're talking about is military-grade here, certanly above my paygrade! :D Hmm, thanks for the advice but I don't want to intrude off-topic (especially since, being a lurker I was hesitant to post this here :tongue: Well they will insist on a login for big files! If I don't have anything to contribute to the forum, why make me register? :tongue:

Hi all, I appreciate not many people know me around here (I'm more of a lurker than a poster!), however I wonder if I could beg a few minutes of your time to assist with my Masters research - don't worry, nothing too onerous and it'll take maybe 8-10 minutes: I am currently undertaking a MSc in Forensic Mark Comparison at the University of Wolverhampton - the focus of my study is to determine whether infrared 'night vision' CCTV affects one's ability to identify a subject from the imagery. The study itself involves looking at a series of 15 short clips and attempting to identify the filmed individual from a series of photos. From the results I've already had, it should take no more than 8 minutes and it would greatly contribute to my eventual result. The link to the survey is: https://www.classmarker.com/online-test/start/?quiz=t765903dd4aeac29 . The front page contains more detailed information. Many thanks in advance for any takers!

Never mind - fixed it. Seems that optimisation kit is more a kill kit. Manually doing the big five (following old advice) was the way forward. Mods can close this thread now please?

Hello all, I have recently rekindled my desire to play this epic game following a fairly long lull brought about by severe game instability. I ran a rather mod-heavy game with FCOM among other things. Blimey, the technology has changed somewhat since then and I've spent a bit of time trying to get up-to-date apps and mods before I started out. And quite quickly, I hit a hurdle which I'm struggling to surmount even in spite of a number of threads and not-inconsiderable looking-into of the problem. I installed Oblivion, the official DLCs, OBSE and OBMM no problem - the game runs, I can fly through the tutorial dungeon and leave into the real world; off to a flying start, or so I thought. Following the advice of numerous others across the Oblivion scene, I decided to pyffi the Oblivion and SI meshes - something I've previously done without harm. I'm struggling with the new pyffi though. I tried the very latest version (2.2.2) to no gain as it refused to acknowledge Python 3.0's existence on my computer. So I got the next-oldest version (2.1.11) which would work with Python 2.6 and newer (I have Python 2.7 installed). I used the Oblivion Pyffi Optimization Kit and after an initial hiccup with Pyffi asking what Python I wanted to use (I told it Python27, which is correct and it worked), it happily set about doing its thing over my Oblivion and SI meshes. Some time later I put these files into .BSAs. I did this by first merging the 'out' directory of the Optimization Kit with the 'in' directory, overwriting anything it asks to, in order to ensure that anything ignored by Pyffi would still remain within the new optimised .BSA. I used these .BSAs to replace the original Oblivion - Meshes.bsa and DLCShiveringIsles - Meshes.bsa. And here I hit my first problem: While I can run the tutorial dungeon from start to finish just fine, it CTDs when I attempt to go through the gate into the overworld. If I replace the meshes with the originals, it works again. If I put the extracted Meshes folders in loose, having done no harm at all to the original .BSAs, it CTDs. I can therefore conclude that Pyffi (or a badgered mesh somewhere) is what's screwing things up. What I can't work out is why. Am I better off not using the Optimization Kit, and just instead doing the architecture, clutter, dungeons (etc) folders as was the way the last time I dabbled in Oblivion mods? I was led to believe that this was outdated advice. Is it my version of Pyffi which is bugged, or is it something to do with the meshes I have tinkered with? Any help or suggestions appreciated. If there is a download of the pyffied BSAs out there, that'd be a bonus although I imagine for piracy reasons this cannot be provided. I'm happy enough to do it myself - just struggling with the doing right this minute. Many thanks :)

Hmm, that might be worth making a batch file for. :) As an aside, does anyone have an idea what the State="" tag does in that .xml file? I've been having a look through and I tried changing the value (usually 2) to other numbers without any change.

Just don't forget to take them off your NPCs. Otherwise it's a case of 'So long and thanks for all the gear! :3 '.

1 and 2, I can help with. :-) 1) DAO Mod Manager's as easy as extracting to a folder (any folder - it will automatically find DA:O's install directory for you from wherever it is), running the exe and dragging into the window any .dazip or .override files you want to install. Once you've dragged in, it'll ask if you want to add it. Click 'yes'. Then right-click on them as they appear in the bottom half of the DAO Mod Manager window and click 'install'. They'll appear in the mod list on the top left. To uninstall, right-click on their entry in the top left and click 'uninstall'. I'm sure it has other features besides but those are the only ones you're likely to need to work with other people's mods. 2) Either use the method above for .dazip or .override mod files, or if the files are loose, they go into your My Documents/BioWare/Dragon Age/Packages/Core/Override folder (I run XP - for Vista/Win7 I imagine it's a similar path, but I think instead of My Documents, it's just Documents...not sure). It matters not if you put them straight into that folder, or into a subfolder of your own making - DA:O checks subdirectories equally, so you can keep your override folder neat, making it easier to deal with conflicts :) Any specific instructions would be given in the readme, just like Oblivion. If anything, DA:O is more receptive to mods than Oblivion (read: Doesn't crash every 5 seconds). I wouldn't presume to be an authority on building a good character, though - I'll defer to the judgement of more experienced souls in that regard. Mine works for me, but then I'm a lamer who doesn't play on hard. XD

Probably it's just because it's a fantasy make-believe world we're escaping to. If we wanted realistic levels of prettification, we'd try to make our avatar look exactly like ourselves (or as much as the game permits). I don't like doing that (indeed, my characters are distinctly very diametrically opposed to me, in look and manner, not least because they're often female, where I am not). We all love pretty things, I don't see this as necessarily a bad thing. The obvious corrolary question is why there are so many nude mods for these games. Rule Thirty-Four, or All Gamers Are Perverts? You decide :P

http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showtopic=190180 Be advised, not every mod will work. Also, no offence, but the search facility might've helped here. I'm a newb too but I found it. Was right there on page one of the Modding section.

Changing the ExtendedModuleUID will make sure that you can't load the add-in in DAO anymore because now the extended module is Awakening. The ExtendedModuleUID just sets if you want to get the add-ins in Origins or Awakening working. So, if I were to copy and paste the relevant entry, and modify the ExtendedModuleUID on only the cloned entry, I presume that would permit me to have the No-Helmet hack work for both Origins and Awakening, correct? (I want no helmets, but I don't want to have to change the addins.xml every time I want to play the original campaign)

Heh, funny I should find this thread. I just wrote an article for a local mag railing against the horrible trend towards 'realism' in gameplay. I mean, I loathe modern FPS games, particularly those set in the war, in the present or the near-future, because they amount to little more than glorified hide-and-seek, with the two finest-aimers popping off everyone else who, with their non-sniper type weapons, can't hit a barn door even if they're leaning on it. I know I'm probably a n00bar for saying so, but I think Dragon Age's Easy difficulty is far too easy, but Medium is too hard. I wouldn't even begin to try out that difficulty mod the OP mentioned... I mean, where's the fun in being gunned down by an enemy who's so far away the engine hasn't even bothered to draw him (I'm looking at you, Operation Flashpoint), or where you have to bandage to stop yourself bleeding out, and can only take like two shots? This makes you paranoid. Gaming becomes either a chore or an aversion, as you really don't want to take on 'that one mission' again because you've lost the past 50 times because you lost a pixel-hunt competition against the AI. It's just not fun for me. Neither is crazy hard difficulty; I'd sooner feel a game was fairly-weighted with a reasonable curve than be frothing at the mouth every time. I don't necessarily want to feel godlike in a game, but I do want to feel as if I'm up to the task. And there has to be acceptable breaks from reality (hunger/thirst mods in Oblivion for example) - there are no bathrooms/privies/baths in Oblivion because, as a gameworld, it doesn't really need them. Hunger and thirst mechanics were left out because they'd be too much of a burden on most players. I know the immersionist camp exists but I couldn't think of anything more tedious, personally. I want to be slaying dremora and minotaurs, not calorie-counting. This isn't The Sims...I play games (particularly fantasy RPG, FPS, etc) to do things I can't do IRL. :wallbash: Sorry for the novel-esque length of this post. I get a little heated. :whistling:

I had a couple of issues with 1.00, mostly in FMVs being choppy with a lot of tearing (sort of like how KOTOR used to be on an ATI card). I downloaded the 1.01a patch, and it's been fine ever since. The only thing I've had since was occasionally a character might forget to leave combat mode when a cut-scene's involved, so they walk and move funny until you next finish a fight. 1.01b might've squashed that bug though. This is probably the most bug-free-on-release game I've encountered in a while. That says more about the state of gaming than anything else...