Quote: "Only officers carry sidearms."
American officers, in the RAF we used to have to buy our own.
In-fact most troops unless part of the infantry were only issued weapons as and when required. Not sure if it's the same for the Army mind, I know the Navy is the same though.
Quote: "FPSCx10 does use ODE. This is because of licensing restrictions with Ageia PhysX - if you make a commercial product with their SDK you have to register it through them. It's free, but required for each piece of software, and that requirement would be impossible to manage with a product like this. ODE is ideal because it is fast and has no licensing restriction. Paul Johnston made ragdolls work perfectly with ODE as well, it looks absolutely fantastic."
Although you have a point, the license actually only covers products physically using their product. This is why DarkPhysics has a different license; although even if you did have to register that you were going to retail, it is free so.. yeah wtf man.
ODE is capable, but tbh there are much better systems out there.
Newton for example is much quicker and easier to impliment with features on-par with PhysX or Havok, free license, free to use, and most importantly QUICK.
This is something that ODE really falls down on, is performance and lack of threading. Although no doubt they've heavily modified the source to allow that now, and hopefully fixed some other issues (like memory leaking and IEEE precision to stop the "infinite jitter" issue) but still just still seems silly.
The only real reason I can see them maintaining ODE (again baffled by this) is so that the source can still remain open, and that people aren't forced to purchase DarkPhysics just to modify the engine.
Still if that is the reason it's pretty weak given very few actually touched the original source thanks to Lee's intuative way of compressing the code into a single source file with absolutely no remarks and one of the most convoluted uses of the UDTs i've seen in a long long time (I mean Lee made the language surely he knows how slow doing it the way he did it all was, right!?)... plus apart from the initial release, they've not updated the source since.
Which seems quite lack-luster to the point they honestly shouldn't have bothered if they weren't going to make an effort. Atleast in my point of view.
Quote: "thanks for that sketch, i'll definately add some sort of technological enhancement on it, like night vision and/or camera feed."
np, it was a 5min thing while the boss wasn't looking.
think i need to get some more graphite on the way home though, my poor pencils are running low; and i'm still not seeing quite eye-to-eye with that wacom tablet in here.
Quote: "One of the reasons for having a second weapon, is in case your primary goes down due to malfunction (which happens often...especially in the dusty environment of the desert; I was constantly cleaning my M249)."
heh, god bless the SA80-B
the first one we had pretty much sneeze on it and it jammed, but they replaced them and they became extremely reliable peices of kit; even better was they changed the slide so there is a runner that'll block back anything that obstructs the chamber.
quite a nice feature unless you get a round physically jammed, then you've gotta unhinge the slide and hope the damn thing isn't hot.
Quote: "What are you talking about? What do you think we do on a daily basis? Counting on someone always having your back is rather foolish, as they may be thinking the same of you."
Could be a difference between our armed forces, as yeah that is pretty much what is expected. We were always taught that communication is paramount between you and you buddy, caution is better.
That said, I've not been in Iraq; only Bosnia. Can't see it being much different mind, usually when we got close enough for close-quarter fighting (within buildings this mostly happened); you'd be doubled up and more worried about civvies.
Quote: "The bottom line is; the only reason every soldier doesn't currently have a sidearm, is because the government doesn't want to shell out the money to pay for it. As far as stopping power goes, I agree...they need to bring back the M1911 and get rid of the 9mm piece of garbage."
lol, dude you guys get paid ridiculous amounts; plus theres ridiculous numbers of you. the government just isn't that rich... atleast not now.
was looking at your pay rates though, even at ensign level you get almost 30% more than our guys do. (that's taking into account exchange rates)
