Kelandon

Originally Posted By: Dantius fairer, richer, income more equitable distributed, more peaceful, less corrupt, less criminal, more democratic Wait, uh, wtf are you talking about. Almost none of these things are true. "Fairer" is too vague to evaluate, so whatever. "Richer," sure, we have the highest GDP and near the highest GDP per capita of any country. Income more equitably distributed? You're nuts. Our Gini coefficient is middling at best. More peaceful? If you mean that we haven't had a war on our territory since the 1860's, sure, but we just got out of one prolonged war of aggression and are winding down another. There are a lot of other countries that have done better. Less corrupt? Maybe, but it depends on your definition. I think that a lot of what is legal in the U.S. is corruption, even though it's not officially so. Less criminal? I think not, unless you have a weird definition of it. Quick Googling yields that our intentional homicide rate is lower than in a fair number of countries, but it's many times typical rates in Europe. I rather suspect that most other crimes follow the same pattern. More democratic? This, too, depends on your definition, but I think it's fair to say that democracy could be viewed as equality of political power, and again there we lag behind a variety of other countries. Your point here is tenuous at best.

I'm not sure why Jeff would have to be anyone's father in order to say most of these things to him. Indeed, they seem more like things that a fan would say than a son or daughter. I feel like, if I ran into him in Seattle, I'd offer to buy him a beer for all the good times. The guy's responsible for a lot of fun that I've had.

It's strange that it's taking you a long time to walk from one place to another. That might be indicative of a technical problem. It should take maybe 5-10 seconds at most to walk across an entire town, and there's something in almost every room, so when you're initially exploring, that shouldn't be an issue. You should check your settings and stuff to make sure that you don't have something set that slows the game down dramatically. Sorry that I can't be more specific, but I have no idea what that would be.

Originally Posted By: Terror's Martyr's Ghost's Ghost —Alorael, who will rephrase this way: Jeff is a competent game designer, but if he were making adventure games they'd be true gems. And he could probably get retro-chic graphics to evoke LucasArts nostalgia. Actually, he should really give this a test run sometime, see if he can't make a few quick bucks on a quickly banged-out mini point and click adventure. If I'm not mistaken, adventure games depend on puzzles, and Jeff's puzzles have... well, come to think of it, though they've been rare, they've been kind of fun. I can't recall the last one that he did, but I liked the few in Nethergate and that general era that I can remember.

No Alint makes Kel a useless designer.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Also there are a couple of people who completely flip out when you so much as suggest that offering a bunch of unplayably bad options might not be good design, because I guess they want to feel superior to others through their amazing ability to look up optimal builds on the internet before playing. Even the partially-automated stat gains of Avadon and A:EftP prompted a torrent of complaints. So there's that to deal with as well. I don't get the attitude that I think you describe accurately here. To avoid spoilers, I tend not to look anything up on the boards before playing the game, and as a result, I've stopped playing Spidweb games on harder levels. The engine just isn't intuitive enough for reasonable guesses to play out well in the long run. The problem that I have is not so much that I make bad decisions; it's just that if you don't make optimal decisions, you're neutered by mid-game. In Avadon, at least you don't go too far wrong and get a retrained, but in some of the GF games, you might as well quit and start over, because you can't proceed. I like the leveling system of A1-2, which basically made you game-breakingly strong by the time you got to the end if you did all the sidequests. In the recent games, it's hard to accomplish anything even if you do all the sidequests; character build counts vastly more than exploration effort, and good character builds require a heck of a lot more knowledge of the game mechanics than I've ever bothered to build up (and sometimes depends on getting one or two specific special weapons). I liked Avernum 1 before I ever joined these forums, and I liked Avadon after having been a member of these forums for a long time, but I'm not sure that I would've liked Avadon had I not been a member of these forums. It just didn't reward the sorts of things that I thought it should. (That is, poking around in every corner of the game, rather than reading up on the right skills to train before starting play.) I'd been trying to figure out what had been driving me crazy about Jeff's more recent games for some time. I'm glad this topic finally got me to realize what it was. (And don't get me wrong: I've liked every Spidweb game I've ever played. I just liked some more than others.)

Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha I hear these days the Mac Editors are very good indeed, you may notice all the improvements put into them by Niemand and Kel. They are quite good, but I deserve no credit at all. I just posted ideas and requests and other people implemented them. Welcome back, Thralni!

Originally Posted By: Niemand I do have the source code for the command-line version of Alint, and I use it as a part of AScript. The copy on my website won't work, though, because AScript is compiled as a universal binary but its internal copy of alint is ppc. Another thing to recompile tonight. EDIT: So I found all of the relevant source code for Dialogue Editor and alint, and i even succeeded in properly integrating alint into AScript so that the source code is used to compile it rather than just copying in the ancient, revered, and nearly-irreplacable binary file. (I am thinking most unkind thoughts about whoever wrote "This . . . may change behavior in other minor ways." regarding the behavior of the -y flag for bison, as the changes I ran into didn't seem to be 'minor' at all.) I could put AScript up on my website now, but unless anyone urgently needs it I'd rather not; there are a few glaring problems I need to fix (like the reference index that points to reference pages I haven't yet written) and I'd like to iron those out so that people have something nice to use. Dialogue Editor. . . may take some work since I'll have to either install Eclipse again (and I'd rather not), or figure out a way to get Xcode to compile it (which should be possible, but is a thing I've never tried before). In summary, I've already stayed up too late tonight, I'll work on this stuff on the weekend. Hey, about that update to AScript... I want it. Just upgraded and was sort of horrified that I can't use Alint anymore.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel I'd be more worried about other sorts of issues, like game balance; new traits could make hard scenarios suddenly easy if you have the right ones. I imagine that's more of a "let the player beware" issue than anything else. If new traits were implemented, they'd just have to be marked as new and potentially balance-upsetting.

In case anyone's interested, my failure at a 24-hour scenario is still in progress. I'm about two-thirds done. It's a little larger than LP or Nobody's Heroes, which is why it didn't get done in 24 hours. I starting designing, and the scenario just came out bigger than expected. Uh, it also makes most sense if you've played Exodus.

Of course you know that (since we have a tradition about everything around here) it's traditional to be back the next day after your goodbye topic. So see you tomorrow.

Originally Posted By: Death Knight Im of the belief that the first remake series of Avernum 1-3 was my favorite of the avernum series. I thought the new remake was cool and did a good job but i prefer the originals. I am wondering if anyone ever did make any modifications to those set of games graphics wise. I happen to think that if avernum 1-3 could be altered to look like avernum 4-6, that would be even better. But of course this is a lot of work. Has there ever been a modding base of fans for these games? Am I understanding you right that you're saying that you like Avernum 1-3 more than Avernum: Escape From The Pit, but you like A:EFTP's graphics more? Then what did you like better about A1-3? It would be possible, I think, to use some sort of resource editor (and a graphics editor) to insert A:EFTP graphics into A1, though it wouldn't make it quite look like A:EFTP. And it would be sort of a pointless exercise.

Here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_cluster That was the colliding galaxy cluster that I vaguely remembered. Wikpedia probably does a better job than I did of explaining why it makes a modified gravity theory really hard to sustain.

There have been several attempts to explain away dark matter by, among other things, modifying gravity not to need dark matter. Some have been more promising and some have been less. As we get more data, it's getting harder and harder to design a new theory of gravity that dispenses with the need for dark matter. I last paid attention to this issue about three or four years ago, but where we stood at that point was as follows. Just as the Moon goes around the Earth and the Earth goes around the Sun, so too the Sun goes around the galactic center (a "supermassive" black hole). All the other stars in the galaxy do this, too, so the galaxy rotates. You can calculate fairly easily with Newtonian mechanics (specifically, equations of gravity) what this rotation should look like; with a little more trouble, you can calculate with general relativity (the most advanced theory of gravity we have at present) what this rotation should look like. Then, when you look up at the sky, it turns out that the rotation doesn't look like that at all. And basically it looks as though there's a whole lot of mass up in the sky exerting gravity that you can't see. Since you can't see it (it doesn't emit light, unlike regular stars, etc.), we call it "dark." Hence, dark matter. Now, at first people just thought that there was something else going on. Maybe general relativity was wrong. Maybe there are more neutrinos (which don't interact electromagnetically, so they don't emit light) than we thought. Maybe we could fix this somehow. But gradually the evidence began to pile up. One of the more interesting things that we had just recently found was two galaxies that were colliding (or galaxy clusters — I forget), such that their dark matter was overlapping. I think maybe the light-emitting matter hadn't collided yet, only the dark matter halos (dark matter around the outside of the galaxies), and yet we could see, because of the gravitational effects, that the dark matter was doing exactly what you would expect dark matter to do: it was pulling on everything nearby gravitationally. It just didn't look like screwy gravity; it looked like more mass. It was really hard to explain this one away without dark matter. As I understand it, this particular find is that there are tendrils of dark matter connecting galaxies, even ones that aren't colliding but are just near each other. I'm not sure, but I think this is really hard to explain away with a new form of gravity.

They're hopeful, I should add, because while it looks like this Higgs boson is pretty close to the simplest possible Standard Model Higgs, it's not quite, and those "not quite" aspects might lead to some good new advances. Of course, they don't really know much for sure yet, other than that they saw something, and they hope to have enough data by the end of the year to be able to say something more when it's all analyzed.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Maybe; but I have a hunch we could do a big step better than we're doing now. For instance, most of the theories I've heard of seem to be like Aristotelian physics. You look at how things are now, and that's supposed to tell you immediately how things are going to change. But I think that human perception of how things are is itself a big factor, and it always lags. So in effect there is inertia in economics, and a more Newtonian approach would probably be better — second order dynamics rather than first. As I tell my students, the real content of Newton's Laws was only one thing, but it was huge: that the laws of nature are about accelerations. That is of course not to say that we'll ever predict the economy like the motion of a satellite. But framing everything in second order terms is a basic conceptual change that can make a qualitative difference. Or you could go higher order still. At some point, you're just adding unlimited fudge factors, but I think that there might be a disproportionate amount of explanatory power to be gained by going one or two orders further. What, exactly, would this mean for economics? It sounds good, I guess, but the literal analogy (talking about rates of change rather than current values) is already a significant part of economics.

This is a rant that Paul Krugman does on an almost weekly basis in the New York Times at this point (in between his "WTF Europe" rants and a few other pet topics). I've tried to find sensible criticism of the argument, and while I can find complete nonsense, I can't find something that seems rational and contrary to his fundamental message. It seems like we figured out what to do about this around 80 years ago. So why aren't we doing it?

Originally Posted By: Dantius Oh, I agree with decriminalization. I just think that it's a bad idea to simply "look the other way" because a lot of people don't like the law. If something is illegal, and that's causing problems, it should be decriminalized. Until that happens, it is still illegal and the law should still apply. You might naively think so, but it doesn't quite work this way. There's a thing called "prosecutorial discretion." So many crimes get committed that it's impossible to prosecute them all with the limited resources that we have, and frankly, many of them don't need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, because American criminal penalties are absurdly high. This means that prosecutors get to choose which crimes to go after and which ones to ignore. Prosecutors are part of the executive branch, which is generally in charge of enforcing the laws, and the president is the head of the executive branch. Every president's job is to decide enforcement priorities (always, no matter who's in office). So Obama does have a choice whether to, say, crack down on California's medical marijuana dispensaries or not; if he doesn't, it's not that he's flouting the law, but that he's decided that other things are more important. If he does, then he's prioritizing this. And he has. Which means that he's prioritizing this. Which is probably the worst call he's made, as far as policy, in his first term. Originally Posted By: Randomizer Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim It seems like fixing debt is insurmountable, when all that is done about it is paying one debt with another. The debt went down under Clinton until we were finally running a budget surplus. Then the Republicans got into power and decided to spend like mad to buy voters. Drunken sailors objected to the comparison since they didn't spend borrowed money. Terms! Terms! The deficit went down under Clinton. The national debt has not gone down, in absolute dollars, since the Eisenhower administration. At the end of the Clinton administration, there was a budget surplus, but we didn't use it to pay down the debt. You can see that, e.g., here. Bringing the short-term deficit down is more of a party trick than it is sound fiscal policy. The U.S. is still paying incredibly low interest rates on its debt, because it's still the safest place to put your money. We've never really defaulted on our debt (other than a few blips here and there), and we're never going to, unless the Tea Party takes over. So we can continue to borrow almost for free, without any limit in the near future. Also, there's no expectation that we ever pay the debt down to near zero. There's no reason to. As long as the interest payments are not so excessive that they take over too much of our budget, the debt is unimportant. It's only when the interest payments begin to eat up so much money that we can't put that money towards other things that really need it that the debt becomes a problem. And we're not even close to that yet. However, if we don't get the long-term fiscal problems in order, then we're in trouble, especially if we can't get some solid growth out of the economy, too. Borrowing some amount one year isn't really a problem, but borrowing that same amount ten or twenty years in a row with minimal growth is a problem. That's the sort of thing that makes interest payments eat up too much of the budget, which could lead to a default, which could be really bad. Short of that, I haven't heard any reasonable articulation as to why we should care about the debt. It's mostly irrelevant, at least in the short term.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon And perhaps we can make a new poll with all of the Spiderweb games (and Richard White if we're feeling generous) at some pint in the near future. I'm pretty sure the Spiderweb games deserve the poll and the Richard White games deserve the pint. Richard White was also a leading character in the BoA scenario Exodus. (Kind of.)

From the other thread: Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Dantius Plus, you know, all the progressive things he's done. Stances on gay marriage, healthcare reform, Dodd-Frank, DADT, etc. his healthcare reform plan is hardly "progressive"; it does a few good things but it also hands roughly half a trillion dollars to private insurance companies. republicans have been pushing for something like it for literally decades. they only started opposing it when a democrat started to support it Conservative! Dantius surely meant that the health care reform was in the column of conservative things that Obama has done. Because any other description of it — a market solution to a social problem — would be ludicrous. And Dantius would never be ludicrous.

Status check? I'm hoping that I'll be done with what I'm doing with one more day of all-day work (on Wednesday). I haven't really been following the 24-hour thing at all, just trying to get a quick scenario out. It's been interesting, given that I started with literally no plan at all when I sat down at the computer.

Anyone else in for this weekend? If not, I'm going to be a little bit less specific on the 24-hour deadline and just try to finish it by the end of the 4th of July. Hell, that sounds more fun anyway, so I think I'm going to do that anyway.

After life intervened for a bit, I finally got around to finishing A5. The Dorikas fight at the end was okay. Somehow I enjoyed the A1-3 end battles better, maybe because they seemed more... different. Dorikas just seemed like a particularly long boss fight, but he wasn't fundamentally different from any of the previous boss fights. Garzahd in A2 was fundamentally different (you use Demonslayer or it doesn't work). Rentar in A3 was fundamentally different (you fight your way to a control panel, but you can't kill Rentar). Dorikas was just the end boss. Fortunately, it didn't suck, the way that fighting Redbeard in Avadon sucks. Everything else reminded me so much of Avadon that I was worried that it was going to turn out the same way, but it didn't. Overall, a good game. Not Spidweb's finest, but not its worst, either. It was a little hit or miss, but I'd rank it somewhere well above A4 and a little below A1-3, GF1, and Avadon.

The key thing, I think, is that you can get a kind of urgency and narrative with a linear game that you can't as easily get with a nonlinear one. LIkewise, you can get a sense of wonder and exploration in a nonlinear game that you can't as easily get with a linear one. I liked Avadon for the tight plotline; I liked A1-3 for the exploration. Basically, this: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/34937/2

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity You don't necessarily need a full degree to get into med school. Two years of pre-med can be enough. In principle, this is possible, but in practice, I don't think it happens really ever. Each year, slightly over a quarter of people who take the MCAT (and therefore are serious about applying to medical school) actually get in. It's so competitive that I have to think that such circumstances are basically nonexistent. I've occasionally wondered if the way that we teach physics might itself deter women more than men. The examples that we use are awfully violent. People trapped on an icy lake, people shooting monkeys, cars crashing into each other, people hanging off the edge of cliffs and falling... it's pretty hazardous to be in a physics problem. I wonder if the wanton violence might be more annoying to women than to men. If anything, I imagine it's a small effect, but this is probably a problem with more than one cause (lack of role models and peers, contrary social pressures, lots of other things).