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darint

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Everything posted by darint

  1. Well, that is annoying and sadly similar to problems I have had with them in the past with other games. I sometimes have had some success by emailing them about the problem.
  2. As one of their weekly deals, the Epic Game Store is offering Geneforge I - Mutagen for free from June 30 - July 7 (Mac and PC). Now the Epic Game Store is not my favorite place (I only use it for the MTGA mac client, and it is rather flaky), but free is free!
  3. Aside from knowing why some games you "can't stand" and others are "tedious", it might be useful to know which games you like. I personally make better recommendations when I can point to a similar game rather than a pile of dissimilar games. Otherwise I may land on "Well, backgammon isn't like any of those games. Try that."
  4. Great tip! Will definitely consider it if I ever decide I need to up(?)grade from Mojave.
  5. From the version numbers I suspect you have "Avernum the complete saga", which are the original Avernums that won't run on Catalina. If you must run Catalina (some app or your mac needs it or you have no backup) and you have a lot of 32-bit GOG apps you could consider something like Crossover to run the 32-bit Windows versions in a bottle. It's an expensive solution, and often tricky (or for some apps impossible) to get running, but depending on how many old apps you have it could be worth it. Edit: They do have a demo version, so you can try it out for a short time to see if the apps you need can run.
  6. Granted. It is now forbidden to harm or interfere with Ornks due to their religious status. Soon they multiply, spreading disease, eating all of the food and causing famine. I wish to be able to play as a male Agent in the Geneforge reboot.
  7. Granted, and as a QoL improvement it works automatically, on the door to the pen in the zoo containing that hungry tiger. I wish for this game to end.
  8. Well, given that the smallest window in the drop-down list is 1024x768, and assuming 32-bit graphics it would seem that 24 MB VRAM might be enough if the game isn't doing anything special to use more. So maybe the minimum requirement is more of a suggestion, assuming the ginormous monitors that are popular today. Just a guess.
  9. Yeah, the town gates don't open so clicking on them when you are next to them doesn't do much, which is confusing. To leave a town/dungeon the important thing is to click on the dark-shaded area that marks the edge of the town/dungeon.
  10. At the border of all three vassals you will find a battalion of Haven soldiers, camped next to a fort/forest you need to clear to proceed. At this point you will be prevented from going further by the Demo Demon (or whatever).
  11. Cleopatra Jones, another fictional Cleopatra. Lyndon Larouche, because he always was running for president for some reason. David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, Derek Smalls, because a topic this weird needs some Spinal Tap. Boudica (I've seen her name spelt many different ways, so I'll go with the wiki spelling) Princess Leia, to fill out the Star Wars set a little
  12. I think you can only have a certain number of courier (not normal job board) quests at a given time (maybe four?). So if you already have the maximum number of courier quests if you attempt to take more before you clear at least one of them they will not be added to your quest list and can not be completed.
  13. With no lead time, ending early, particularly if I find out after I am already awake that day. Once I get started in the morning I will never be able to fall asleep for another hour, so the hour will be wasted putzing around. I would much rather just start the day on schedule and end early. If I have a lot of lead time, then I suppose it doesn't matter.
  14. I should preface this by saying that this post is not meant to pick on you or anyone else in particular. Since this thread leads off with the issue of randomness in Avernum 2: Crystal Souls, I thought it a good place to respond. To me, there is a huge difference between an event being certain (0% fail) and not certain (> 0% fail). But once an event is uncertain, the exact maximum caps matters a lot less. And the difference between a 95% cap and 90% cap is frankly trivial, no matter how you look at it. Let's put some simple numbers behind it. Suppose you have an attack that does 1-10 damage with a 95% accuracy cap at the accuracy cap. You do 5.225 points of damage on average with this attack. And if that same attack has a 90% accuracy cap? You average 4.95 points damage, a frankly trivial difference. And of course if you are not at 90%+ accuracy there is no difference at all. And the entire "difference" applies in at most 5% of attacks. Honestly, in beta testing the game I played through various times and never ever noticed the cap at all. The first time I even knew about it was on the forums. And as for wildly-variable damage, I'm not even sure what that means. What I can say is that in general players never complain about their attacks having too much damage too much of the time. If you are supposed to have 5% critical hits and a bug makes it 10%, no one ever complains. But if it is 4.8%, you can expect a statistical analysis and a full explication of the bug. To me, randomness and variability are what make combat interesting in a game like Avernum 2. If I know that I will always succeed in a combat in the same way every single time, I really don't even need to be there. A robot could take my place and get the same result, and what's the fun of that? Strategic planning means being able to plan for unexpected contingencies, like your awesome spell attack not quite wiping out that boss like you expected. And it cuts both ways. While a bit of bad luck means you have to scramble a bit, a bit of good luck can rescue a difficult situation.
  15. A few omissions: Far-Fletch Clan (after curing neph village): Bows and Sharpshooter (pretty average) Almaria - Julio: Dual Wielding and Lethal Blow (expensive) Mage spells: Erika: Slow to Arcane Blow (exorbitant) Fort Remote - Thompson: Minor Summon to Arcane Blow (exorbitant)
  16. Do you enjoy discussing controversal topics? Despite the fact I am posting here, generally such discussions generate far more heat than light, so no. Where do you stand concerning the laws centered around LGBT? Full advocate, blah blah. But I wonder, what exactly are LGBT ideals? Do you believe (in the existence of) extraterrestials (life). As written, probably not, but I haven't actually met any extraterrestrials, so maybe that isn't fair. But with these edits, yes, provided we are talking about the most minimal definition of life. Sentient life, much less likely but possible. If you mean if I think that such extraterrestrial life fly around in spaceships that visit our particular planet frequently, mostly in sparsely populated areas, frequently doing unspeakable things to cattle and humans and usually leaving such humans (but not the cattle) alive enough to be able to describe the experience, then no. (I answered yes to the poll).
  17. There is a newer fork of Chengband by the same author called PosChengband, which I was able to compile on 10.6.8 with relatively minimal fiddling. One of the bits of fiddling I had to do was remove GCU support, so it needs X11, XQuartz, or similar to run, and one needs to run it from the command line. After compiling and playing it for a bit I remembered why I don't like the Zangband-like variants so much. I guess my favorite at the moment is Sil. No town, no spell casting (instead one sings and forges items), with an emphasis on interesting choices in combat and skills. It has a steep learning curve which I am currently climbing without great success, but it is a lot of fun.
  18. I vaguely remember that in Exile 2 you could capture soul on Ur-Basilisks, and since Exile 2 monsters didn't have stoning resistance one could spam Ur-Basilisks to defeat any opponent.
  19. 91% Stein 87% Alexander 87% Obama
  20. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan I get the complaints about falsifiability, but the big question is whether or not there's a 'better' approach to use. Originally Posted By: darint To give an example, researchers have been measuring gene expression in tumors from cancer patients, with one of the goals being to find prognostic gene expression signatures to be able to predict which patients have rapidly growing tumors which might be suitable for more aggressive treatment regimens. This is certainly a laudable goal. This has led to a cottage industry of gene expression signature papers where each group working on the problem takes the same set of data, finds a prognostic signature, and proves that their method of finding the signature is good and useful by being able to predict patient survival based on the signature. The problem is that all of the published signatures have very little in common with each other, and one also observes that when people have tried to validate these signatures on independent sets of patients, the results have generally been disappointing. Last year a group did an analysis based on a very commonly used data set to make these predictions, and found that even randomly selected sets of genes used as a signature could be used to predict patient survival, and that the majority of published signatures did no better than a random selection. If the reviewers had demanded falsifiability in these cases, the worse performing of the signatures would have been rejected before publication, which probably would have been a good thing. Huh. I don't know genetics or medicine or anything like that, but I do know machine learning, and you're making it sound like the researchers are testing on the training set (or, slightly worse, always using the same testing set). If that's the case, then of course overfitting is going to happen, and they need to do something to mitigate it. I'd have to actually read the paper to see if that's the case, though. (To be fair, the researchers likely have to deal with a very small sample size with a high number of features, and it's very, very tough to learn good models in such situations.) The original signatures came from 47 independent publications, so it is a bit hard to generalize. But many attempt to do some sort of cross-validation, even if it is the rather pathetic "leave-one-out" style that is hardly any better than not doing any at all. Some attempt to do some independent validation, but it is usually on very small sample sizes. And one is never sure if they had several signatures that they found originally and only published the one that independently verified on their small reproducibility set. This happens more often than you would think.
  21. Originally Posted By: Lilith the problem with falsifiability is that it's a mirage. no matter what evidence people find to "falsify" a hypothesis, you can always explain it away or make an ad-hoc modification to your hypothesis. in fact, if you have an otherwise compelling theory that explains a bunch of stuff and makes useful predictions, sometimes doing one of those things is the sensible thing to do. falsificationism lacks adequate criteria for judging when and in what ways it's legitimate to adjust a theory in the face of contradictory evidence; as such, it's prone to throwing the baby out with the bathwater An "ad-hoc modification to your hypothesis" can also be viewed as an improvement to the hypothesis to better reflect the current state of knowledge. And while I agree that making useful predictions is a good thing, using it as the only basis for judging a hypothesis can have its pitfalls. For one thing, it makes it very difficult to compare the validity of competing hypotheses. To give an example, researchers have been measuring gene expression in tumors from cancer patients, with one of the goals being to find prognostic gene expression signatures to be able to predict which patients have rapidly growing tumors which might be suitable for more aggressive treatment regimens. This is certainly a laudable goal. This has led to a cottage industry of gene expression signature papers where each group working on the problem takes the same set of data, finds a prognostic signature, and proves that their method of finding the signature is good and useful by being able to predict patient survival based on the signature. The problem is that all of the published signatures have very little in common with each other, and one also observes that when people have tried to validate these signatures on independent sets of patients, the results have generally been disappointing. Last year a group did an analysis based on a very commonly used data set to make these predictions, and found that even randomly selected sets of genes used as a signature could be used to predict patient survival, and that the majority of published signatures did no better than a random selection. If the reviewers had demanded falsifiability in these cases, the worse performing of the signatures would have been rejected before publication, which probably would have been a good thing. If anyone is interested, here is a link to the article: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002240
  22. Thinking about the unsellable items, which actually don't bother me so much, there is a feature in Angband that could be useful. In Angband you can 'squelch' items. In most of the recent versions the squelched item is still there, but it isn't visible. And there are ways to set and to add to the classes of items which are squelched. It may not be so hard to code that into future games. One problem I see with this feature is the matter of worthless quest items. I suppose at the start they would be invisible and would start appearing when you get the quest. But if you know about the existence of the quest it is less convenient to hoard the items in anticipation of the quest. And of course between the Junk Bag and squelching worthless items, the game could become a bit of a scrounger's paradise, which may or may not be a bad thing.
  23. I think you need a key as well. It would be in a cave NW of Spire.
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