Kelandon

Originally Posted By: Lilith seriously if you honestly think "to go boldly where no man has gone before" sounds better than the alternative you should probably not tell anyone how to write anything ever again Face it: you love meter. Especially iambs. Oh, sweet iambs.

I'm virtually never on AIM. You want tomwatts5 (at) gmail ((dot)) com.

If you'd like to contribute your version of the HLPM library, send me a PM or email. I've wanted to update it, but I know nothing about scenarios from the last year or two.

For reference, I started work on Exodus shortly after I released the port of Nine Variations on Point B in April '05, and I didn't finish until November '06. It took over a year and a half. Long scenarios take, well, a long time.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel EDIT: I may have discovered the reason for this... is it removed when you exit? IIRC, this is the reason.

I fail at reading the BoA forums. While I do suspect that I will be pulled back to Spidweb for at least a little while in the not-too-distant future, it hasn't happened yet. As for whether the final scenario in the Slith Homeland Trilogy is actually going to be made, well, I have a choice when I come back. I can either make a sequel to Nobody's Heroes, which would be substantially easier and lighter. Or I could make the final trilogy scenario, which would be substantially more ambitious, more draining, and more work. I haven't decided which to do. I will say that my idea of the plot of Homeland (the third scenario) has changed somewhat in the nearly four years since I released Exodus. There have been some hints (in Nobody's Heroes) about what happens in Homeland, and a lot of the plotline was foreshadowed to some extent in Bahssikava and Exodus. But I do think I have a surprise or two that I could pull out for people. Either way, it's very likely that I'll at least replay Bahs and Exodus and release revised versions.

The solution is not to replace oil and coal with one energy source. The solution is to diversify our energy sources. Solar has a role to play in that (duh), as does nuclear, as do a few other methods. The basic pattern of demographic transition has been the following: 1) high birth rates and high death rates, so population is more or less stable; 2) death rates plummet due to improving food supply, medicine, etc., which causes population booms; 3) birth rates plummet due to empowerment of women, rising costs per child and more careful family planning, etc., which causes population decline (sometimes more and sometimes less marked). There are several reasons that getting the rest of the world (other than Europe, the U.S., and a few other areas) to the final stage sooner makes things easier to handle once we get there, and in the long term, this might be a significant factor in what the solution for our consumption/energy needs might look like.

Wow, I'm kind of pleased to see that someone's still playing this old thing. I've always intended to go back and fix it up a little bit. Was my first real scenario. Has some things here and there that I'd change now, a few years later.

I had a similar idea way back in my NK0:P days (around the same time as I had the Bahssikava/Exodus/Homeland idea) and even starting making a BoE scenario to this effect. I think LP was also sort of an offshoot of this, taking the Nethergate graphics and setting rather than the Avernum graphics and setting for a BoA scenario. If I were to make another scenario, it would be a sequel, not another new series, but if I actually finished the Bahssikava trilogy and made the sequel to Nobody's Heroes that I keep tossing around in my head, my next thing probably would be Arthurian. I'm convinced that the idea is promising. BoA-ers could pull off an Arthurian scenario (or a series) well, I'm sure. Whether Jeff should do it or not is another thing, though. I'm looking forward to seeing what Avadon turns into.

Sounds interesting enough that I'll play it. I've been a little away from Spidweb for the most part lately (failing to complete GF4 basically killed my Spidweb playing days, and then I got distracted by the awesomeness that is ScummVM, which took me into the Monkey Island series, which...), but a new series is likely to bring me back.

The comparison that followed my post killed the point of my post. Let me say more explicitly what I meant. Unlike some of the other personalities on Fox News (notably Bill O'Reilly, who, whatever else you may say about him, has a degree from the JFK School of Government at Harvard and is a smart guy), Glenn Beck has no education or training in politics. He started as a sort of radio shock jock with no more than a high school education, and worked his way up the entertainment ladder until someone completely missed the boat and gave him the job of being a news analyst on a "real" news station (though that characterization of Fox News might be overly generous). The fact that he's got the job that he does is shocking. Fox News has proven (yet again) that it cares more about ratings than about being taken seriously since it keeps him on the air, being who he is. That's shocking, and appalling, and embarrassing. What he says, given who he is, is not. It's the entirely predictable result of giving that person that job. So as long as Glenn Beck is on Fox News, I'll enjoy Jon Stewart and the like making fun of him, but I can't get too riled up about what he says, because I expect no more of him. It's when Bill O'Reilly says awful things that I'm really disappointed, because he ought to know better (and usually does).

Or Jon Stewart's famous parody (Huffington Post? I don't know, it was just the first place I found it), for that matter. Glenn Beck is an entertainer, not a news reporter, by trade and by training. The fact that he's presented as if he were an analyst is shocking, but his statements aren't once you recognize what he actually is.

Am I right in thinking that totalitarianism normally comes from civil war or total economic collapse? The Soviet Union arose from a civil war during WWI. Nazi Germany came about because of total economic collapse (among other things). China went communist in a civil war, and so did Vietnam and North Korea (though Korea was more under the influence of the Soviet Union than under its own power, really). Italian Fascism ascended under economic collapse as well. That's not every totalitarian regime in the 20th century, but that's a good number of them, and it seems compelling. I did wonder idly at one point in the past year or two how bad it would have to get before the United States faced the prospect of revolution. We'd probably need at least 20-30% unemployment first, among other things. So we hit the level of pain, but nowhere near the level of throwing the system in jeopardy. I imagine that the same is true in Britain right now.

The recent level of partisan hatred in the U.S. has made me wonder a little about the electoral process that we have, and the British election is affecting that in ways that are not immediately processable for me (lacking a political science background, I suppose). It seemed as though the British voters didn't like the Labour leader, didn't like the Conservative platform, and didn't take the Liberal Democrats seriously in the end. So Labour lost a bunch of seats, the Conservatives didn't pick up as many as they expected to, and the Lib Dems somehow managed to lose seats in an election that was supposed to be the game-changing victory for them. If there could ever be an election in which all three parties lost, this was that election. I'm sure that American voters would love to do the same right now. If we could just vote against everyone who's ever run for office or ever would think about running for office, we would. But what is the cause of voter dissatisfaction, and it is really justified, at least to the extremes that we're seeing it right now? I'm not sure that I totally have a handle on this. Is it just that the economy is suffering? That seems flimsy.

Hey, it's Drew! It's been, what, over a year?

A4 saved Spidweb because it was another Avernum game, not because it was amazingly good. Start with Avernum 1. Or start with Geneforge 1. In fact, play the demo of A1, and if it doesn't strike you as great, play the demo of GF1. Then buy whichever one you like better and start there.

I've had this thought (people should recycle engines more) quite a lot. I'm working through a bunch of the old SCUMM games now from LucasArts — ScummVM is an awesome, awesome program — and am quite enjoying watching the engine slowly progress from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Monkey Island to Monkey Island 2 to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. (Yes, I know it started with Maniac Mansion and didn't end until many years after Indy Fate, but I haven't gotten there yet.) That was a great engine development in the style of Spidweb. I had a similar thought playing through Myst IV recently. Unbelievably awesome game, on an interface that isn't terribly dissimilar to that of the original Myst. (Presumably the internals radically changed, but the parts that the players see didn't much.)

Dude, we should just mod Alcritas and be done with it. Would right a wrong from ages past. Uh, anyway, thank you for your service, Diki. You've made enough of an impression on me in your time as a member that I now do not think of you as a red/green/blue dinosaur. I don't suppose that has anything to do with your being a moderator, but still, it's something.

I imagine there's no problem adding features that can be turned off.

Originally Posted By: Taslim Originally Posted By: Taslim Re-re-re-reading the Wheel of Time...It's been three days and I'm already halfway through TGH. This is what happens when my Internet access is removed. Two days later, I'm on Book 4. This might not be the best idea...I'm starting to see things. Yeah, I'm thinking it's about time to re-read at least part of this thing again. I re-read all of it last year for the release of Book 12. Probably not that again. Am tempted to start back up at Book 8-ish, just to get the stuff that I didn't really pay attention to the first time, but probably won't... will probably just re-read 11 and 12 now and again right before Book 13 comes out near the end of the year. I think I said it earlier in this topic, but man, Brandon Sanderson saved WoT for me. Reading his take on the later WoT books made me like them much, much more.

If you want to make jokes about scenarios or comment on reviews or something, make a thread in the regular BoA forum, not a ratings post. Ratings posts are ratings posts. The goal is to help players figure out which scenarios to play, and to give designers feedback. If you're not doing that, do whatever you're doing in BoA discussion, not ratings. Since, after all... Click to reveal..

In my last semester in college, I finally came upon some reasonable explanations to a question that is tangentially related to the science in this thread: why didn't the Ancient Greeks invent science, when they had all these astronomers looking at exactly the same things that Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were looking at? Why did the Scientific Revolution happen in the 16th and 17th centuries, and not in the 1st and 2nd centuries? At first I thought that it was something to do with culture. So many ancient writers cared primarily about authority and not data that it was hard to get anybody to care about what was actually going on in reality. The way that Ancient Greeks conducted research was to think about things. They sat down and thought, and they came up with ideas that seemed sensible. They were not terribly empirical. However, this was not universally so. Hipparchus, for one, was emphatic about his models matching the reality of the sky better than other lame natural philosophers who didn't really know what they were talking about. There were empiricists back in the day, just as there were in the Enlightenment. The real answer seems to be that Ptolemy's model was too good. Ptolemy's model was a massive synthesis of virtually everything that anybody knew about the positions of stars in the sky and how they changed over time, and, as SoT points out, it's startlingly accurate as an empirical model. The theoretical explanation had to do with perfection of spheres and such, which isn't scientific theory in the way that we recognize it, but it's at least some sort of stand-in. Ptolemy's model worked for fifteen hundred years before deviations from the predictions started becoming so bad that people really cared. Seasons were a couple of weeks off after a millennium and a half. At that point, people became frustrated with the model, which was infuriatingly complex, and decided to trash the system of equants, epicycles, and so forth, and start over. It was only the advantage of a distance of one and a half thousand years, at which point the model was beginning to fail, that people were able to say, "Okay, let's start over." And it was this "starting over" idea, this sense of tossing out the bad model that didn't make sense anymore and looking to see what was really going on, that led to Tycho Brahe's ridiculously precise naked eye measurements. It was this sort of feeling that made people want to invent the telescope, and then, once it was made, look into it. This focus on true empiricism, testing hypotheses against reality instead of just thinking about them, was what made science happen when it did. At least, that's what I put together as my own narrative once I read enough on the borders of this question. I'm sure I'm glossing over some important points or mis-representing some details here or there. But it was an interesting thought, anyway.

AAAHHH MASS PANIC RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE (Just trying to fit in.)

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Next question. Did this bonus dungeon make it into Avernum 3? Yes, and yes, you get there the same way.

See the header that says "Bonus Dungeon" here: http://www.cheatbook.de/files/exile3.htm