Aran

The only one with a lethal signature, though, is Alorael. In a manner of speaking. —Arancaytar, who shall now demonstrKABOOMHEADSHOT

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Man, if any of my algorithms ever gained sentience and told me it didn't want to solve a game, I'd tell it to get back to work before I SIGKILL it. You have a lethal signature? Just so you know, SIGKILL (as in kill signal) refers to the signal that in POSIX systems (like Linux) causes a process to terminate.

There's a Going Postal film? Sheesh, what else did I miss? It's like Christmas coming early.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Originally Posted By: The Forgotten Ann/Arm I don't log in for one day, and I miss this? For someone who made a goodbye topic last month, you're awfully attached. Come on, he managed six days. The longest I've been gone after posting a goodbye topic was about... mh, six hours.

Oh, this takes me back.

Jeff's games have always worked pretty well in Wine, too (aside from the glitches mentioned, like artifacts on the italic equipped-item texts in the Exile series), even the newer games (though the newest one I actually tried was Avernum 4). I didn't try to run the native Linux Exile 3, but would be surprised if it actually still worked on a 64bit architecture with a modern kernel. That is likely one reason Jeff never made another native port.

Hey, thanks for those pointers. (I suppose I'm kind of to blame for missing things like that when I've been gone from these forums for years.) I'm trying it out now. The open-source build seems to work just as well in Wine as the old one (which is to say, good, with some minor graphics glitches). Pity I have neither the C knowledge nor the free time to help along with a native Linux version.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, shaper servile. What? how dare you! BoE FANS UNITE! I have nothing against BoE. I was merely commenting on the foolishness of purchasing a freely available game. I'm kind of glad I bought it before then, because that game is worth money just out of principle. It's sad that the open-source project didn't go anywhere. While the engine is ancient (and the whole node-based scripting the worst thing ever), I don't know any free DIY RPG platform remotely as accessible. (And on purely nostalgic terms, even the event nodes had an endearing sort of style, where the technical limits allowed for amazing artistic feats. I'll never forget the WTF of seeing an actual cut-scene in BoE.)

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Is it planned that both of you have firearms in your avatars? Tough joint, this place. It's neat, but it has nothing on this thread.

Originally Posted By: AethirWeb 2012 is coming up, I wanna hear my fellow Spiders what they think of this. you think it will be like Y2K? It's going to wreak havoc on all Mayan-designed computers, that's for sure. Civilization is bound to collapse.

Yeah, sorry about that. It turned out the encyclopedia attracted an almighty flood of spam around March this year (dozens of pages per day). I only noticed it a few months later, when the actual content was a tiny fraction of the site. I also had several exams and a presentation due, so I just shut it down until I could deal with it. Now I could, so I brought it back up and purged pretty much everything from the past half year (I checked and there didn't appear to be anything other than spam). Unfortunately, I also had to close off account creation, as the spammers have figured out how to register and apparently bypass captcha challenges. Accounts now have to be requested by email, I'm afraid. Oh, and hi! It's been a while again.

Originally Posted By: RCCCL I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the federal money given to Planned Parenthood goes to programs to help educate people to try and prevent unwanted pregnancy and STDs, as well as prenatal care for those who can't afford health insurance. You are correct. Three percent of Planned Parenthood's services involve abortion, and none of that is funded publicly since public funds are already blocked from providing abortion. This stand-off instead aims at contraception, sexual education and (who guessed) healthcare for the poor, which in turn will lead to disease and malnutrition going untreated. The capacity for doublethink that allows Republicans to demand legislation that will kill babies while calling the other side baby-killers is staggering.

eternity lies ahead of us and behind. have you drunk your fill? (Also from Alpha Centauri. I love that game.) This one from SMAC technically doesn't count, because they're just quoting Sun Tzu, but it is a quote and it is in a game. If I determine the enemy's disposition of force while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. Thus the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it or the wise make plans against it.

As a rule of thumb, if it sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel, take it with a grain of salt.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Originally Posted By: VCH Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES a good theory-relevant game like Settlers of Catan You're joking right? That game is all about getting the best spots on the board early. If you think Settlers is only about getting the best spots on the board early, then you haven't been playing against strong opponents. In fact, there actually is a Settlers of Catan World Championship. I'm not making this up.

If we can end the war by defining it as over, then didn't the war end on May 1, 2003?

Originally Posted By: RCCCL I've always felt that Catan depended mostly on the dice rolls. Only if the board puts roughly even scarcity on every resource. If all wood hexes are under 2/3/11/12 numbers, then no amount of luck will keep wood from being valuable throughout the game...

It's pseudoscience when a claim is not only not right, but not even wrong. I'm currently reading Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a book which Randall Munroe appears to have a crush on.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES That said, I agree that the delay in waiting for a code can be annoying. Usually it's extremely short, but on some occasions it does take four or five days, mainly during vacations and holidays... which are precisely the time that many people start new computer games. 15 years ago the delay was painless, but today there are a plethora of online-registration games that give nearly instant access after you make a payment. The delay is what makes SW's system imperfect, not the registration code. That one is even avoidable by automating things. It's impossible to speed up a non-credit-card transaction; that will always take days. But a credit card payment could technically result in a code within minutes. That automation would introduce complications, though, and remove the human touch from buying from SW that I've always found appealing.

I think I've finally fixed images. That was much easier than expected; it was just a missing option in the site's settings file.

SW's shareware barriers are not DRM in any commonly used sense of the term. DRM is intended to prevent you from copying and distributing the game to others, or using an unauthorized copy. The shareware barrier isn't designed to do either of these. What it does, and is intended to do, is replace the physical medium of a CD - an ordinary, non copy-protected CD - with an online form of distribution. If the Spiderweb games were distributed on CD only, without unlockable demos, then that wouldn't be called DRM. Adding the registration code mechanism does not add any restrictions, therefore that shouldn't be called DRM either. Quote: I'm not sure how Jeff can continue to provide the demos of his games that he does, and also NOT retain the password registration system. That's easy: Instead of making the demo turn itself into the full game with a code, have two separate installers for the demo and the full game. This would make the process less convenient, but would be entirely possible.

I've actually managed to install and run Exile 3 on Ubuntu, though it tends to crash suddenly without warning in combat mode. Nevertheless, I've been able to confirm by scrying: Emerald = sleep, ochre = acid.

Originally Posted By: Internet Forum Zombie Quote: Amber slimes cover everything they touch in gooey webs that make it hard to move. The muck of emerald slimes induces sleep. Mauve slimes were somehow imbued with minor spellcasting ability. The dangerous ochre slimes are composed partially of acid. Looks like someone didnt have enough caffiene before typing that. Emerald slimes are the acid ones. Ochre slimes put you to sleep. (Yes, this was on Encyclopedia Ermarian.) It would probably take a while to find out how to run Exile III on Linux, but this walkthrough makes the same statements. Quote: The creatures/people involved in this plague are: MAUVE SLIMES- These light-bluish-colored slimes have no special thing happening when they attack, but can cast level 1 mage and priest spells. AMBER SLIMES- If these manage to damage you, you'll get webbed. Be careful! EMERALD SLIMES- When you get attacked by these, there is a small chance you can fall asleep. Don't let it happen! OCHRE SLIMES- Possibly the most dangerous of the normal slimes. If you get hit by one of these, you'll get covered in acid and take damage with every step. It's possible this got changed in the Avernum series, but if we went around messing with the E/A conflicts we'd have to rewrite half of the encyclopedia.

Except the wiki was not actually editable for the past week or so. Gah, this server move has really caused issues... (Fixed now. Thanks to Milla for bringing it to my attention.)

Argh. Okay, after two hours of detective work I've tracked it down to the theme layer. For some reason, theme_field($field) works, while theme('field', $field) does not. Update: The problem is of course related to the new PHP version. Drupal assumes that a certain function works with call-by-reference, but PHP 5.3 only allows call-by-value there. Update 2: The site is back on and the problem appears to be gone. You're probably better off not knowing how I worked around the bug; "eval()" says it all.