Aran

Originally Posted By: Actaeon a) Fear of spiders is among the more common phobias. One (or more) of the mods might happen to be. c) It's ironic. It's okay, I was already browsing this topic in lynx. Cute animals can't be trusted. (Especially tapirs. [/hanners])

Once again I am sad that SV is closed. The obelisks look more like decorations than pieces, though. Maybe crystal souls...

The web idea sounds good. I'm not sure if there is software for that out there. (If there isn't, it might be a fun project to do in PHP or Python or something, maybe jQuery for the UI.) An AIM bot would be neat too, but require algebraic notation as input (even if it prints out the board after each move).

Originally Posted By: Sylae Originally Posted By: Actaeon In the old days, member number showed right up front. It made such things relatively simple. This. Cool! Of course, for those who've been here long enough, there's the upgrade shift. It starts at +1 for Spidweb and gradually decreases; it's -9 for me (2984->2975). Before 2008 I had many people's IDs memorized (Nikki was 3442, Diki was 6600, Tyran was 6489 and 391, Marlenny was 5654), but I've not bothered to relearn them. Edit: Also, I'm guilty of mentally equating any five-digit ID with "newbie". Yes, that includes everyone since August 2007. Yes, that is ridiculous.

Originally Posted By: Master1 This. Nikki has a custom title, making him easier to identify. I, on the other hand, have refrained from ever changing my PDN because I'm not exactly recognizable. Who are you again?

Originally Posted By: Actaeon "Once More With Feeling" Arancaytar: The best episode of everything ever. Maybe including Doctor Who. Quote: Restless I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Nethergate, Avernum 1-3, BoA, and N:R all use the same basic chassis. There are some big changes made along the way, especially the addition of Avernumscript in BoA and the new dialogue system in A1 Wow, I had completely forgotten that. I had to redownload the old Nethergate to see it used keywords, and the old Avernums to see they don't use even the data definition part of Avernumscript. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan I've actually gotten pretty good at identifying users by their PDNs, looking at the most recent post listings on the main page, just by the style of name. It's less of a challenge now that Slary doesn't change names anymore, though. I've grown used to recognizing custom titles. I've used that method for a long time, which means at first I mistakenly believed all Cartographer accounts belonged to the same person ("Silveriiburache" )

Hah, that means the Nethergate engine could have sparked the Avernum remake, as (to a lesser extent) Geneforge influenced A4-6. I haven't played Avadon or A6, so I don't know whether Avadon also introduced significant innovations over A6 which made it into A:EftP. If so, then the pattern is that Jeff invents new worlds using new engines, and then reintroduces those engines to the Avernum world.

I actually clicked.

I'm speaking as someone who hasn't been in AimHack in around two years (nor played more than three real-life sessions - 2* SR, 1* WH40K - in the past year), but I'd go further and say it's more fun if your party doesn't consist of optimized characters who play perfectly. As you say, SoT, the gameplay is refereed by an intelligent arbiter. Obvious stupidity can be punished, but even spectacularly OOC-stupid actions may be brilliant and daring in-character. And even IC-stupid decisions may be made for good in-character reasons. There needs to be room for that. You play the game; it doesn't play you. It's not an MMO skinnerbox.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity By the very logic of free market capitalism, education is something that makes sense to run communistically. It's in everybody's interest for everybody to be educated. +10^10. Originally Posted By: Alorael If I recall right, a decade ago or so, maybe a bit more, there were demonstrations in Germany over students having to pay at all for schooling. There were concerns about the perpetual student class. There was anger about having to pay for something as essential as education. Well, in 2005, a federal law against public school tuition fees was defeated in court. Since then it's determined by each state. It's also in flux, and a very current topic. Hesse, where I live now, had no tuition costs at all from about 1949 to 2007. Then they introduced fees in the range of ~1000-3000€ per year (depending on study time). It led to the biggest student protests in over a decade. They got rid of it less than a year later.

... wow. My fees (public school) are about €600 per year; most of that pays for public transport. I know I live in a den of old European socialism, but I didn't realize I had it this good.

Does Nethergate predate Avernum 1, by the way?

Originally Posted By: Randomizer I think Avernum 2 remake will continue to diverge from the older storyline. Has he actually said he's doing that? The announcement on the webpage implies the next thing will be an Avadon sequel.

First series played: Exile. Favorite series: Avernum 1-3, but Exile's a close second before the rest.

To be honest, I could do with a little less animation. The ones directly relevant the game are nice (hey cool, the loot does this nice flip into the air before being dropped!) The spell animations are pretty too. And okay, my character screens sparkle when I level up. But when I walk close to a sign, why does that dialog box have to emit dancing lights? And whenever I toggle combat mode, the Peace/Combat symbols do this "grow huge and fade" sequence, as if that were a momentous event. This inflation of sparkly special effects makes an awesome and deep game almost resemble some cheap Zynga app.

This reminiscing starts to infect Arancaytar as well, despite it being in an inner monologue he wasn't supposed to actually hear. He himself didn't pick up an Exile game until late in '99 or early in 2000, when Exile III was included on a shareware CD in a software magazine. His own arrival on the internet came years later.

I'm running the game in Ubuntu using Wine, and it works really great. Unfortunately it runs like molasses in combat mode. Ever so often, it will suddenly speed up for a few moments and then get bogged down again - it gets particularly bad during the magic animations (which I can't seem to switch off even by disabling the extra details), and go to something like 0.5-1 frames per second. Has anyone found a way to get around this - possibly by installing some proprietary graphics drivers or something? Edit: I've partly managed to alleviate the problem using the DirectX version instead of OpenGL.

Arancaytar joins Dikiyoba to see the Arena as well. Aside from basking in the nostalgia, he hopes to learn a bit more about the incredibly complex, intricately layered and often self-contradictory or paradoxical body now called the Arena canon. It has long ago been deprecated in the encyclopedia proper for rewriting too much of the world and being insufficiently self-consistent, but it is nonetheless part of the great story of Ermarian, and its influences extend into some of the early Blades scenarios.

Quote: There haven't been ANY public meltdowns, venomous fights, hateful rants, or the like, in nearly two years. It's a little bizarre. Maybe the community is already dead, and we're just shambling around animated by nostalgia and ouroborosis.

That's what authority is all about!

Originally Posted By: Mysterious Man *The hangover is slowly fading... Mysterious Man seems to be getting his wits about him* MM: SLARTY! WHAT ON EARTH DID YOU DO TO MY BUS? (http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/topic/1/1248) Your bus?

By the way, does the retrioactivity and nostalgia we build up in these topics carry over to the RP? Because then we'll have that bus running in no time.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Slartucker without firebrands like Ghaldring and ET around (in their many incarnations). It wasn't really general troublemakers like ET and Ghaldring who made debates unpleasant, though, was it? They made things unpleasant in normal threads and in Geneforge faction debates (which don't count as controversial topics), but I don't really remember them in debate threads. I remember people like Stillness and Synergy (and Infernal on the topic of Israel) as the ones who made debates an issue. Dikiyoba. Ghaldring and ET were somewhat unpleasant in debates as well. However, it's possible that these posts fall into the void between the board upgrade and the 2009 purge. I haven't tried to find them yet.

I'm surprised to find that I actually have a CalRef account. Posted with it, even. Once. "Hi.".