Mistah Q

Today I'm reading about esterification mechanisms. I can't wait until this particular course of study is over. I've been considering writing a book about linguistic adaptation. I've lived all over North America, and I find that I always absorb just a little bit of dialect, inflection, vocabulary, from wherever I wind up living for a period. Some sticks, some doesn't, and it's hard to explain but there almost seems to be some predictability as to what will come and what will go. I'm originally a Pittsburgher but most people would hardly recognize me as such. A number of people in my situation notice some of the same things. Interestingly, I work with a lot of ESL folks... and I've discovered that there are certain ways I can word or say things that will make better sense, and there are definitely distinct differences in how I have to approach it, depending on whether it's someone from a romance language group, Slavonic language group, Asian language group. During the week that can even be extremely difficult to shake, and it comes through in my writing and speaking to native speakers, even though I'm a native speaker myself.

Well of course. His machine should not expect to run very well Thief 4, or next generation of games. That trouble on Thief 4 is expected. But he should not be having such troubles at Witcher 2. His machine is worthy to play that one fine, so I think we can try to help him troubleshoot to what is the problem on that one. If right now he do not afford the new machine, there are still plenty games which you can enjoy from current and prior generation. Every SPiderweb game of course, and then you can check Baldur's Gate II, Titan Quest, Fable, Bioshock. (Bioshock 1 is great. Biochock 2 is subjective. Bioshock 3 is disappointment). Tropico 3 can be worthy experiment, and I'm sure members here can recommend plenty other. About building new machine: everything is ruled by your own preference of course, but I can offer a small advices: -Alienware = waste of money. If you stay interested in the future gaming, better to build stationary machine for that, and keep a tablet or notebook for travels. $2000 Alienware last year, is $1200 Toshiba this year, and $700 Viao next year. Of course every computer will face obsolescence but, upgrading and replacing the high end laptop components is far less practical than perform upgrade to stationary machine when necessary. -Solid state = overpriced right now, but if you'll patient those price dynamic will soon change. I will bet that you will see some nice sales on the black Friday and beyond. If you do not physically abuse that SSD then it is an investment, because you can keep it next time you upgrade or build new machine. They had terrible disasters couple years ago in Thailand but Moore's Law is never turned away for too long. -One place to never sacrifice the quality for a cheaper part is POWER SUPPLY UNIT (and surge protector). -Don't become too enamor by top end specs. $60 gfx card can give you same practical application as $200 one. Decide if you want performance or if you really need that last shadow from falling acorn at the distance. Same on processor... don't buy some $350 processor. You can get some bundle around $150 of motherboard and processor together, which would suit you for a good few years.

Alas you are near your power limit, but it still sounds like you have some other problem on Witcher... see if you can discover what module is causing memory leak or if some directX driver is gone awry, etc. I had some mod on skyrim where dragon becomes Macho Man Randy Savage (OHHHHHHHHHH YEAH) but it caused game locking up, had to remove it. edit: about gog. Gog is great idea but on my experience, I own Geneforge Saga on Steam and on GoG, I have it both. Steam edition, no problem. GoG have weird packager and some display issues I shouldn't expect from game with so low sys reqs.

Okay, possible Memory Leak. Is your game drm managed by Steam, or outside of Steam?

I was saying that where SSD will be better than pagefile for his game performance. SSD will make pagefile more or less irrelevant... SSD can't as good as the right graphics card or more RAM, but it will better than pagefile.

Is probably not the issue, but have you tried stripping out all old versions of DirectX and done fresh new DirectX install? Intel HD4000 is not as good as actual dedicated NVidia card but... Witcher 2 is older than your laptop, so your version, should run it good enough if you're willing to play on low graphic setting, even at normal resolution. So I have to think there must be some little issue somewhere which could be resolved. I can imagine a little more trouble with Thief 4, but no way should THief 4 run better than Witcher 2... strange Edit - can it be a memory leak? Does Witcher 2 run o.k. when you first start to play, but then it starts to break down or get choppy later?

In general this is true. But he did say he's relying on max pagefile. Where it can help is cutting down on stutter when say you enter a new area and different graphics set has to load up, etc. It's also worth asking, you say i5 but is it ivy bridge or sandy bridge?

Be on the lookout for a SSD. Prices for them should be coming a little back down to earth soon - a couple years ago there was massive floods in (Thailand I think) where most of the stuff is produced and ruint the factories. Supply issue is mostly straightened out by now, and we've got plenty of competitors starting to chip at the pricing. If anything you ought to be able to get a fantastic black Friday deal this year for once, if you hold out that long. You said you didn't want to hear this one but, if you can upgrade your RAM to 8GB that would be pretty huge. No pagefile or HDD request can ever match the speed of pulling info out of a RAM. SSD can come close, in fact SSD more or less renders pagefile (and things like readyboost) irrelevant. Only other suggestions I could think, -Consider adding Glary Utilities to your cleaning regimen -How often do you restart/shut down, even if you wouldn't need it for an update? -What antivirus/security are you using? -If you're insistent on paying for antivirus you're best off with ESET's Nod32 suite. -If you're insistent on free antivirus... forget about avast, avg, etc... they're nice sure but the best on Windows 8 is going to be Microsoft Security Essentials with Windows Firewall... it's free, unobtrusive, effective, light on system resource.

While Witcher doesn't have my favorite overall story arc, one place it shines is just the interactions with random townsfolk... and how important it can be sometimes to actually bother doing it... that kind of exploring I really enjoy, it's one of the things I love about Spiderweb Games too. If Vogel ever produced a big money game I would like to think it would be closer to Witcher than to Dragon Age or Skyrim. Except with some meaningful way to keep the combat relatively turn-based... lol.

I'm not sure whether the real reason Jeff has taken Avadon the more linear direction is because he's running out of energy but I do think it's the right decision for the mass appeal. As much as I loved loved Exile when I was a kid, I'm not sure that massive of a sandbox is what as many people want these days. I think the mixed reviews in part because in the first Avadon it can take a while until the real action starts happening. I think Jeff even wrote about addressing that in Avadon 2, and Avadon 2 has consistently better metascores... it seems most of the unfair metascores on Avadon 2 are more because "graphics" or "looks like avadon 1". I think another good thing has to be that when people are browsing Steam and looking at something like Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age there's a chance they might see at the bottom "More like this: Avernum Escape from the Pit" I know that I personally have to confess that I get excited when I see his games go on sale at Steam. I already have them all but I'll often buy a few copies of EftP or Avadon to gift to friends, who otherwise probably wouldn't try that game.

It took a long time for SW to get on steam, I figured it was hesitation, and I thought I remembered reading something about him not loving how he'd probably have to have lower prices on there to get the mass appeal. I still wonder how much sales/exposure he gets off the steam pricing constructs. The Steam regular prices are less than he charges here, plus Steam can take up to 30% sometimes. I don't know how they change their percentages during sales. But I wonder how worth it it has been, overall.

I could not find that by just going to the games page http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/geneforge5/index.html Go to the actual page for any geneforge game and you just have access to the bundle. I guess you can get there by clicking through the order form page... but unless your motivation is to really support Jeff then why pay as much for one game as you can get them all for at GOG. And since we're talking about the steam sale in this thread I doubt that's the motivation. Steam has never allowed you to purchase individual geneforge games. Avernum yes but not Geneforge. To be honest I'm surprised Jeff allows these steam sale weeks and flash sales to discount his games. He was resistant to even using Steam and GoG in the first place but gave in because of the potential exposure. I wonder what kind of sales he gets off Steam in particular.

It was like that before the sale. Look at the Avernum bundle: Avernum 4-6. Any given Avernum game just showed the price for the whole pack, which was $11.99 before the sale. When you clicked on it, it listed out that you'd be getting the whole set of games... and you could choose to either buy the Avernum pack, or actually the whole Spiderweb bundle for like $40. But if you realllly wanted you could choose to buy just that one Avernum game for $4.99. The Geneforge is like that too except I can't recall there ever having been the ability to buy just a solitary Geneforge game. You either have to get the Geneforge saga, or the whole Spiderweb bundle, to get Geneforge. It's like that on gog.com too, you can't get individual Geneforge games but only the bundle of them. As far as I can tell, that must be the way that Jeff wants it. If you go straight to the source, the Spiderweb website here itself, you can still only get the Geneforge games as a bundle. You can download individual demos but you can't purchase individually, as far as I can figure out.

I always enjoy that aspect of the game - building your own base. So it could be fun. But I wonder how it could be made to factor into the storyline? To me really the best reason to have the house was just a convenient place to store all my stuff I didn't want to trash or sell, keep it all together. My only complaint with that was I think there were not enough chests in the house to organize how I like. Except for the runestones, there is a trash barrel beside the magic anvil, take the trash out of there and use it to store the runestones, very convenient. The part that will be hardest in Avadon is that there are not too many things that respawn after you killed them already. And if you are playing on torment mode you need all the cash you could scrape for scroll, powerups, etc. I think there will need to be maybe some area with some respawns you can fight. If I remember the right way, long time ago, on original Exile games there would be some enemies on the map but they represented a group of enemies, so you touch a slime or rat, whatever, then you will enter separate battlefield with a lot of rats. It's not like that in newer versions but maybe it can be a way to add some extra gold making opportunities. Because your idea is maybe nice but I think it will cost a lot of money!

Maybe after Avernum: Ruined World and Avadon 3 are done, we'll start getting second trilogy remakes. Just imagine it - Avernum IV: Shades of Gray Avernum V: The Empire Strikes Back Avernum VI: Hunger Games Jeff will make so much money off Steam distribution network by then, that he'll decides to hire a team and make Avernum 7 and Nethergate 2. And a new property too of course: Legend of Alorael At any rate, I hope that by now, you are really enjoying Avernum 6. Very excellent game and I think with enough patience, it's possible to get a pretty satisfying ending no matter which side you chose to take.

Usually I just post in the old thread. But this one is big: Spiderweb Collection on sale on Steam for $11.99 for total package. Or you can buy the games individually: Avadon The Black Fortress: $1.99 Avadon 2: The Corruption: $4.99 Avernum Escape from the Pit: $1.99 Avernum Pack (A4, A5, and A6): $2.39 Geneforge Saga Pack (G1-G5): $3.99 Nethergate Resurrection: $0.99 http://store.steampowered.com/sub/33525/ Or load up Steam and search for Spiderweb Software. I already have all the games, but good time to introduce some friends to Spiderweb Software.

Next five hours only: Avadon 1, Avadon 2, Geneforge 1-5, and Avernum 1-6, bundle on gog.com summer sale... all those games for $7.01 http://www.gog.com/promo/summer_spiderweb_bundle_250614

Depends on if they have air conditioning and candy crush

http://lingojam.com/EnglishtoErmarianTranslator Enjoy y'all

I'll just leave this here. http://www.leekspin.com/

Same for me.

To me the most fun games have minimal randomness but instead tactical (not grinding but tactical) challenges you have to master in order to progress. Gunsmoke, Ikaruga, even platformers like Mario and Sonic come to mind (though, Mega Man is a step too far... having to make successions of ridiculous jumps just not to get a game over, it's more brutal than fun...). That's what I like about Spiderweb games too. You have to learn to master different combat situations, you can play through the game maybe four or five times and see a couple endings and then you've exhausted the replayability... but that's okay because you sure had a heck of a good time doing it. To me MMO grinding is boring and I couldn't give a rat about armor progression for its own sake. Plus time becomes an issue... WoW for example; I had fun with the game for a while sure, but I played through all the solo quests a few times now and I don't want to look at it anymore, and you know I'm married and have studying and work to worry about, so I really can almost never commit a solid four hour block to sit and grind a dungeon, just on the 5% chance of getting some slightly better hammer, so I can go start the process again on some slightly harder dungeon that doesn't realllly progress the story... especially when within two years an expansion will raise the level cap and yield "common" items that will exceed the hammer I just spent two weeks of my life trying to get. The happiest medium for me when it comes to replayability is probably going to be a game where you have to master tactics yes, but then a set number of things could happen, and their happenstance will be more or less random. Like Rise of Nations, or Europa Universalis, or (begrudgingly) Civilization. Where you've got to balance diplomacy, economy, military, etc, of your own nation, but other nations aren't going to necessarily be the same every game... tangled webs of tactics where, yes, it's a little bit random. Of course, Mario Party or a sports game can be fun, if you've got other live people in the room with you, and very replayable. But Those games are the pits to play by yourself, and I think that was kind of the point, that a CRP or such can't really be on the level of a human storyteller or GM. Just wait until we reach the Singularity. "Oh computer, Avernum 7 please. This time I want to play as the Vahnatai, and invade Lost Batishava, maximum two levels of basement for any one dungeon, and hide an easter egg of Rick Astley somewhere." "Yes Mistah Q. Generating... generating..."

This weekend I'm reading about acid catalysis of oxonium ylides in polar solvent. Who wants to trade...

If Nethergate gets remade again what can he even call it... "Nethergate: Raised from the Living"

I was on Steam today, and right now Avernum: Escape from the Pit is on sale so it's getting a bit of attention on that particular medium. Somebody posted a question (in french) on A:EftP's steam forum -- asking whether the game had a french version, and how to change it to french. I had to break the "helas" (alas) to him... But it got me thinking. Spiderweb games are of course very text intensive and I couldn't expect Jeff to go through the trouble to have worthy translations when he's basically one-man development. But has he expressed any interest in having any translation, volunteer or otherwise, done on the games? At least the newer ones, say A6, EFTP, the Avadons, and future games/remakes... I'm not a computer code person but I think I understand that all the game text can basically be extracted. If I could figure out how to do that I'm sure, though it would take me a good few months, I could probably get everything on a particular game translated into French. I imagine there are other Spiderweb fans who could pull off other languages. Is having those translations or offering it as a game option, something Jeff would even interested in?