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Kelandon

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Posts posted by Kelandon

  1. 45 minutes ago, Noman said:

    yes, that is what i thought. Thank you.

    Just to be clear, your original post compared Geneforge 2: Infestation (2024) to Geneforge: Mutagen (2021). Those are completely different games, albeit with similar engines. Geneforge 2: Infestation (2024) is a remake of an earlier Geneforge 2 (2003). My understanding is that Geneforge 2: Infestation (2024) has a largely similar plot to Geneforge 2 (2003), but a substantially tweaked engine.

     

    So if you're playing Infestation and thinking it's similar to Geneforge 2, yes, it's a remake. If you're playing Infestation and thinking it's similar to Mutagen, I guess sorta? But not really.

  2. On 2/22/2023 at 6:39 AM, sails From lamplit havens said:

    These first three things that you point out are blatantly incredibly similar between all three games, compared to other games that are out there.  How easy this is to quantify varies, but let's start with the easy one -- what difference in "features available" are you suggesting there even is between these three games?


    I'm genuinely confused as to how somebody could play all three games and conclude that there are even moderate differences between them in the categories you listed, compared with the genre at large.

    Given that early Blades community savaged the plot and pacing of E3/A3 while praising the same aspects of E2/A2, I'm not sure that your opinion that they are "blatantly incredibly similar" is universally held. 

     

    More generally, to Aventari's question, from Jeff's occasional statements about his business methods, my understanding is that Spiderweb does very little (nothing?) in the way of market research. So it's entirely possible that Spiderweb knows differences in game sales and has little more than conjecture to answer why those differences exist.

  3. AAHHHHH I am very close to breaking through my Chapter 3 block. This thing wrote like absolute garbage in the first drafts, and the combat design is probably even worse, but nothing that a few rewrites during alpha testing won't fix. I have a little ways left to go—basically a town and a half of combat—and then I can go back and try to fill in little bits and pieces and some of the more important side quests before I start alpha testing.

     

    I've done enough rewrites on the ending of Chapter 3 that it reads well. It is long, and I will have to see during alpha testing whether it drags on. But the first version of it was bad, and I've managed to rewrite it to not be bad. I'll have to do the same to the rest of Chapter 3.

  4. If the game predates the use  of scripts (as Nethergate probably does), then the Mac version stores the text in a way that a resource editor can access, if you can find a resource editor that still runs. Not sure how it's stored on Windows.

  5. If you're playing only an hour or so at a time every now and then, and you don't want a lot of options, I'd probably recommend the Avernum series. Geneforge and (I think, didn't get very far) Queen's Wish have lots of choices that affect the way things unfold. Avadon might be confusing, frankly, because the setting has lots of factions and places and it's easy to lose track of it all. I think that at least Avadon 1 is best played as a single immersive experience—like a binge-play over a weekend. I think you could pick up Avernum for an hour at a time every few days and not lose the thread of what you're doing.

     

    Nethergate is also excellent, but I'm not sure whether it even runs on modern Macs, and like Avadon, it might be better if played more continuously.

  6. I've started tinkering again. I'm working on the Ihrghthen sequence. If I can just design some combats, I should have the main quest line for Chapter 3 more or less created and ready for testing. Loads of side quests still to create, though. We'll see how far my current momentum takes me.

     

    I did manage to register both a Mac version and a Windows version of BoA, so—for the first time—I should be able to reproduce Windows-only bugs. Another nice thing about the new setup is that I can just suspend the virtualization exactly where it is—meaning that when I come back, all the programs and files that I need are open, just where I left them. I use about five different applications to design for BoA, and some of them requiring three or four different files, so this is a significant convenience.

  7. Unfortunately, I got extremely busy and basically haven't been able to work on this for the past six months. On Tuesday, I took a major step I'd been avoiding for a while—I upgraded my operating system to something that won't run BoA or any of the scenario design tools anymore. But I did so only after setting up VMWare Fusion to run OS 10.7, which will run BoA and all of the tools. So I should still be able to work on this as soon as time clears up. I honestly don't know when that will be, but I am hoping it will be soon. I have a much clearer head about where I want to go with the rest of Chapter 3 at this point, whenever I get time to work on it.

     

    By the way, the sheer amount of emulation/virtualization on my computer at this point is overwhelming. I have BasiliskII running OS 7.5.3, SheepShaver running OS 8.6, VMWare Fusion running OS 10.7, and VirtualBox running Linux. I also dual-boot OS 12.3 and Windows 10, and I have emulators for nearly every major console from the '90s. Plus ScummVM.

     

    One update is that, over the past year, I've been learning C/C++. And now I know that the interesting thing about the special spell/ability system is not that I was using states as functions, which lots of people do in BoA. What's interesting is that, without knowing it, I was using states essentially to take the place of structs. A special spell/ability has a whole bunch of associated values—energy cost, required skill level, etc. But since a scenario script 1) doesn't have structs and 2) can't use more than 10 variables overall, I stored all the variables for each spell/ability in its own state and called that state when I needed to load that spell/ability's values—essentially loading that struct into memory. It ended up pretty complex because, owing to the limitations of BoA, I could only have one struct in memory at a time, but nonetheless it is a lot better than what I did in Exodus.

  8. On 1/8/2022 at 3:05 PM, Epopt Art said:

    I think part of the issue here may be different senses of what "offending people" means.  I guess I'm used to hearing that argument in sort of a don't-clutch-your-pearls context, where it's set up as a counterpoint to free speech -- and often used to minimize and dismiss arguments that something is causing material harm by pre-emptively dismissing it as "hurt feelings" rather than assessing and analyzing the argument itself.

    That's probably significant. Some things are offensive because they are bad. I don't think a woke mob of antifa/BLM surrounded the creators of D&D and forced them to change their ways against their will. I do think that different sensibilities are in charge now that would at least think twice before, for example, releasing something called "Oriental Adventures" in the present day because the term "Oriental" might be offensive to a large number of people, probably for good reason.

  9. 12 minutes ago, Epopt Art said:

    Completely agreed, Kel.  Indeed, this was the spirit of my question.  The claim I was responding to was that same question in statement form: that some things were changed specifically "to make them less offensive."

    Well, no, that's different. You can change something to make it less offensive (i.e., with the purpose of making it less offensive) but do so not solely because people were offended by it. Purpose and cause aren't the same thing, and moreover, having a purpose and attributing sole cause are not at all the same thing.

  10. 4 hours ago, Epopt Art said:

    I asked for something changed "solely because" people were offended by it.

    Big institutional decisions (like the overall portrayal of women in a large franchise like D&D) rarely have a single cause, so this seems like a goofy question, tbh.

  11. 7 hours ago, Epopt Art said:

    Trying to parse this out.  Does raising an objection to something, because you think it's bad, automatically qualify as being offended by it?  Or is there a distinction?

    I mean, I'm just looking up words in a dictionary, but they're different (though overlapping). "Offend" is defined as "cause to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful." There are things that I object to as bad but which don't make me upset. There are things that make me upset but aren't necessarily inherently bad.

     

    Grossly inequitable nudity/near-nudity is probably both both bad and offensive, and I would guess that most of the people who object to it as bad are also offended by it.

  12. 22 hours ago, Epopt Art said:

    These new players and attitudes are hardly offended by nudity; rather they object to the inequity of having a huge proportion of scantily-clad women, and very few scantily-clad men.

    Isn't that also being offended? Offended by nudity vs. offended by inequity... seems like it's still being offended.

  13. 7 hours ago, Sokhbep said:

    I need help understanding whether the weapon should be called "Acidic Longsword" instead and retain its acid damage, or should the wrong bonus damage type instead be corrected from acid to cold?

    Presumably the latter.

    7 hours ago, Sokhbep said:

    Found out that "Ring of Speed" and "Nimble Band" have the exact same abilities. I think I'm going to change "Nimble Band" to increase Tool Use instead of giving one extra action point, otherwise one of these items is completely redundant. Probably rename it to "Locksmith's Band" instead.

    As a change for a scenario, that would be fine. As a change to corescendata, that seems problematic because scenarios give out that item assuming that they know what it is, and you'd be changing game balance in unexpected ways.

     

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