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The whole point of this is that it's a timeline of the games. It doesn't matter if we think something isn't the most sensible option; if the games are quite clear that that's what happens, well, that's how it is. Time passing within each game goes in that category.

Well, X3 tracks the number of days that go by. Maybe the counter isn't 100% realistic, but completing most of the game content typically takes less than 360 days. So I dunno. If this stuff happened in real life it would take longer -- but most of this stuff would never happen in real life in the first place.

Looks like you pulled up some good stuff! Did we ever set an approximate date for A5? I can't remember. Given that previous games have all been assumed to (or maybe there's evidence to say so - I think for X2 there was) take place during just one year, we should probably continue that if we are using the same timeline. I don't see anything about the in-game part of A6's story that would require more than a year. Obviously, the Blight and the Slith invasion span longer timeframes.

Originally Posted By: waterplant People learn their native language only how they're taught it - if taught incorrectly then one will speak that way. People aren't taught native languages: native languages are languages you learn growing up, by observation and experience. Some parents and schools may seek to enrich this learning, but children learn languages to complete fluency without any instruction. Quote: I live in a country where I don't really speak the language Which means it's not your native language. Right? Quote: and also I didn't learn so much the parts of speech at school and what they are called. So when I try to assemble a sentence myself in German I often get the order wrong, however I can get it right, if I've learnt a particular phrase, by keeping the structure of the phrase and substituting the words I want. When someone tries to explain to me why a sentence is how it is grammatically my brain fogs up since I didn't learn grammar that way. Yes, but you are clearly 100% capable of assembling sentences fluently in English, so you can tell nouns and verbs apart (and a million other things -- see below). Analysis of language is one thing and actually learning and speaking it is something else. Most language learners mainly learn the latter, and most textbooks mainly teach the latter. Quote: When you speak of 'building blocks' of language I think they are more varied and fundamental than you mention - being able to distinguish between nouns and verbs only gets you so far and could be equated with, say, addition and subtraction. Certainly true -- if anything, an understatement. Language is incredibly complex. Quote: There are a myriad of other things that you have to be made aware of and actually learn, same as learning that there is a square root and the what, how and why's of it. It's not the same. When learning a new language, you learn a lot of vocabulary that you can use just like the vocabulary in your old language, and you learn a lot of grammar, most of which is also parallel to the grammar in your old language. When you study math, you constantly encounter concepts that are -not- just another flavour of a category of things you already how to use, but rather are totally new things that require you to understand them differently. If you are talking about learning grammar or linguistics in the abstract, then yes, I'd agree that's very similar to learning math. However, that is also quite different from the goals of most foreign language learners and courses.

I don't think I was explaining myself very well as far as the ease of translating (not literally) the building blocks of language. Let me try and explain it more concretely with one example: If you are a fluent, native English speaker (or a speaker of most any language), you know how to distinguish nouns and verbs grammatically. You know how to do this even if you never learned what a noun or a verb is. In fact, you know how to do this correctly even if you were taught incorrect definitions ("action word" and "person, place, or thing"). You might not be able to answer technical questions about nouns and verbs on paper, but you can USE them correctly -- even in unusual and intricate situations. You understand those two categories of words, even if you don't have the vocabulary to talk about them. So, when you learn a foreign language, when you are putting together the paradigm for that language in your head, you can -- and do -- reuse most of the parts of the English paradigm. So if you get no explanation, or a bad explanation, of how nouns and verbs work, it doesn't really matter, because you already have the mental tools to use them. On the other hand, if you get no explanation, or a bad explanation, of what exactly the square root of negative one is, it takes a lot more work to make up that ground yourself. Many people can do that on their own, but not everybody -- and that's the difference with languages.

I dunno, some of those beta testers complain an awful lot on these forums. I think it's more an issue of Jeff's cost-benefit analysis of the time it would take to make such changes differing from ours.

The thing that makes this so frustrating is that the games are BUILT to encourage you to try out different paths, and also different character builds.

The entire save/load interface is atrocious, and has been since Geneforge 1. It wasn't before. I don't know why it is now. I find it incredibly irritating that the only way to change the name of the game you are saving (if you want to note something about it -- very useful given that there is NO other way to organize saved games under this system) is to hit delete once for every character in the original filename. You can't even hold down delete... you can't select the text with the cursor and clear it with a keystroke, you can't hit a button to clear it... this is especially stupid since saving in a new slot defaults to the name of the save that was already in that slot, not the name of the save you are working from. *sigh*

There are a lot of underlying structures that are common across languages, even when the surface forms look fairly different. There are also some structures that are actually different in more significant ways. So I would agree that certain pieces of grammar structure -- including both the ones you mention, use of word order vs. affixes because it has far-reaching impact, and use of determiners like "a" because it's complex and idiosyncratic -- would have the same issues as some math concepts. But I hold that most pieces of language have an antecedent to aid in their uptake, even if it isn't at all apparent. With math you eventually get to topics where almost everything needs a brand new box, there's nothing to compare it to. So maybe negative one, that you can connect to what you know about objects or scores or money, but the square root of negative one, well, that's a unicorn.

Ratt: Hmm. A good question. I think the difference is as follows: anyone learning a foreign language has already picked up at least one language. However unconsciously, they already have the structures to mentally grasp what a word is, ways that words can be combined, how different speech sounds can be combined, etc. The specifics are all different, of course, but except for radically different pieces of grammar, the structures all exist and don't have to be built from the ground up. However, I doubt that most people have any pre-existing structures to slide negative numbers, logarithms, or derivatives into, when they first learn about those topics. Dantius: That's not what I was saying at all. What does separating vocabulary and grammar have to do with a progression of knowledge?

Originally Posted By: cfgauss Quote: In fairness, some preprints and even published textbooks or monographs can be as poorly written and presented. Mathematicians as a class are not noted for their communication skills (clearly this is a generalization, and there exist counter examples). Yeah, I would argue that the vast majority of math, and of physics texts are not so good. Still, much better than wikipedia, though. I would argue that the vast majority of all textbooks are pretty bad. I think it's mostly inherent to the conflict between how textbooks are written and how humans actually learn things, rather than stemming from writers with poor communication skills (though that may sometimes be a factor too). Meaningful learning is a process of building up information, applying your own thinking to it, making connections, sorting out patterns, and building up your own internal understanding of the subject. Textbooks tend to provide information discretely and disconnectedly. IMHO, most textbooks would be better off in the form of a story or a novel, with periodic breaks for exercises and the like. (I know of one example of this: Sophie's World, a novel about the history of philosophy written by a high school philosophy teacher. But it's a good novel on its account, too.) The one major exception I can think of is foreign language textbooks: while there is plenty of fluff out there whose curriculum is dictated by a café menu, there are also a lot of good language texts. I think this is because the content of languages isn't up for debate. Some books will present infinitives right away and others will save them for later, but an infinitive is an infinitive, a noun is a noun, and how you say it is how you say it. There is nothing to interpret and there are no value judgments to make. Compare this to, say, history textbooks. For secondary school books, what gets included is either totally arbitrary and unscholarly (ancient history) or rigidly politically determined and unscholarly (national history) -- and in neither case is anything interesitng said. It's harder to overlay a clear-cut structure like "vocabulary here, grammar there" onto other subjects. I think I'm going to stop here before I rant any further.

Dominov -- if you can provide actual numbers -- a few examples of damage with each weapon against the same demon enemy, along with your character's skill levels -- we might be able to try and deconstruct it.

The thing that's useful about Wikipedia is its organization of information, in one place, in a coherent and uniform fashion. What is relatively undeveloped is its discernment of what is and is not useful information -- it does this to basically the same degree that craigslist polices its listings. I like that analogy because, much like craigslist, wikipedia is a very useful service despite the existence of scams and frauds and illegal activities. To the degree that you have knowledge about a subject, these may be easier or harder to spot. For example, somebody from elsewhere in the world who looked at a random apartment listing would not think anything special of a Beacon Hill studio listing for $500 a month, but for someone with basic knowledge of Boston apartment prices and craigslist advertising trends, it is an obvious scam. Similarly, I'd like to think that I have enough general knowledge about U.S. military history not to be taken in by the Upper Peninsula Wars, but I wouldn't trust my evaluation of a physics article.

What was the error?

The level cap is 60 or 61 (I forget which) and the max level you are likely to reach during play is much lower -- in the 30-40 range. Edit: There are level adjustments to practically all XP awards in the game, and I am fairly sure none of the non-adjusted ones are repeatable.

When wikipedia has good citations, it's as good as a book with good citations. When it doesn't, it's as good as a book without good citations. The reason it doesn't usually make sense to cite it in a paper is that wikipedia doesn't ever present original research, so you can typically cite something more direct. Somebody did a study of science articles a few years ago (before the big push for citations on wikipedia) and found that there were more errors in Encyclopedia Brittanica than in Wikipedia.

Remember how there used to be PGP keys? Pretty good privacy. We should revive that acronym. PGP. Pretty good pedia. Not unbreakable, but good enough for industrial use.

Mystic: Different pronouns may seem like a game to you, but they certainly don't to people who are not included in the masculine, feminine, and neuter trichotomy. Also, I don't know about you, but I would be offended if you referred to me as "he/she/it/whatever."

Conceited, arrogant, and magnificent bastard. Hoo boy.

There is a skill topic, which is titled what you would expect, AND stickied in the forum, which has the info on riposte listed right there.

Yes, there is a cap. A4 didn't have a cap on it (or it was atrociously high, I forget) but in A5 and A6 the cap is quite low and easy to reach. Anatomy can contribute to FA, but because of the cap it is usually irrelevant.

Ballpark guesses, unfortunately, are not your friends. For both A4 and A5, there were lots of obscure but specific references that demolished the timespans most people guessed.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Language is not necessarily a limit on conquest. The Romans conquered the Mediterranean world, yet couldn't say "the," (at least not in Latin) a fact that still astounds me. This is not entirely accurate. The Romans could say "the" in Latin -- they just didn't use a word to communicate the ideas we communicate with the word "the." The English articles "a" and "the" are examples of determiners, a broad group of words and particles that tell you where its attached noun sits within a particular semantic domain that deals with existence, quantification, and so on. However, in splitting that domain, they crisscross it in arbitrary and lurching ways. Determiners are one of the trickiest bits of grammar to master, which is why you will often hear otherwise proficient English learners who grew up speaking a language that does not use articles the way English does (like Russian or, if it were still spoken as a primary language, Latin) leave out articles altogether. Different languages put different delimitations around the particular meanings of articles and other determiners. But which concepts are and are not conveniently packaged in a given language is quite arbitrary, and there are always times when a non-packaged element is important and has to be described in some other way -- that's true in any language. In other words, Latin can certainly express the various characteristics specified by the definite article in English, despite the fact that it does not use a parallel article. Since we translate words based on parallel meaning and not based on precisely parallel grammatical structure, we can indeed translate "the" to and from Latin, and it is not quite true to say that the Romans couldn't say "the."

That hasn't been updated since Avernum 5. The way to get a date for 6 would be to exhaustively check all references to time relative to older events, mentioned in A6, however brief or vague, and then figure out what best fits everything.

Death, or pseudopods; cynicism, or spam.