cfgauss

Close, I do theoretical physics, string theory, and mathematical physics stuff. Understanding details and noticing mistakes can be the difference between crazy crackpot and 500 citation paper here .

I'm running the windows version. It's possible that there'd be differences between the mac and windows versions, but it would be odd if there were. I know some windows programming, but I don't know how macs are different, so there's a possibility there's some strange difference that could cause, e.g., the list generated in searching through nodes to have a one-off error, or a minus sign problem, or something. But that would seem less likely to me than a poorly designed algorithm. Although it is my job to notice details (and to be overly harsh about mistakes!) so it may be that I am just more observant . Plus, you know, once something irritates you, you tend to notice it more and more often!

I suspect that's related to not knowing how strong the effect against you is / your potions are. Edit: Okay, I've noticed a few times in playing that I will be right next to an enemy, click on them to attack, and my character walks *around* them to attack from a different side. How do you even do this?! I simply can't comprehend how someone could even write an algorithm that makes that possible. And, yes, I didn't misclick, I know since my character attacked after his ridiculous voyage to the other side of the bad guy.

Depends on what you mean by "simple." It's simple in the sense that you can look it up in a textbook, or use google to find a hundred permutations of various implementations, and can even find papers and talks given by experts on how it's done in fancy sophisticated modern games that need to do it the most efficient way possible. It's also especially simple in this case, because Avernum's tile-based system is literally identical to the setup given in every single introductory A* article. I mean, the very first google result is about this. It even talks about altering terrain costs to do this right when you have, e.g., enemies who could slow you down, and performance problems...

I notice that problem a lot too, but haven't complained about it because it does not typically result in my death . Although I'm sure in some alternate universe there are some angry sliths writing letters to someone about this...

Takayuki Hoshino & Shinji Matsui, Himeji Institute of Technology, for shrinking the enterprise to microscopic size without the aid of Q. http://www.zyvexlabs.com/EIPBNuG/2003MicroGraph.html Some other cool pictures, (too big for image tags) Pollen, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Misc_pollen.jpg Snow flakes, which apparently look amazingly artificial on the ~1mm-.1mm size range http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LT-SEM_snow_crystal_magnification_series-3.jpg And a gold plated insect and spider, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_insect_01_Pengo.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Spider_SEM_sample.jpg which I swear are gold plated for totally scientific reasons. Although IIRC the gold plating is only ~micrometers thick, and is used to increase contrast by increasing conductivity. And, yes, I'm absolutely sure once they're done with them they end up in someone's office, or some grad student makes some totally awesome jewelry for their girlfriend out of them . I don't do science that typically produces fancy pictures (until we can take 11-dimensional pictures) so I have to be content with just looking at how awesome other science's stuff is!

Originally Posted By: waterplant It would seem Gauss that you and me get different things from playing this game. I quite like having to be switched on enough to know when I can safely click on an opponent to attack and when I need to make a deliberate square-by-square move. But...the point is... that you don't know.... You can be two squares away with nothing in between you and the guy you want to attack, and your character decides to try to walk around him or something insane. It's not about paying attention, or knowing what's going to happen, the problem is the fundamental impossibility of knowing when the algorithm will do something nuts. The only solution is to exclusively move one tile at a time, which is what I mostly do, but that's kind of a crappy solution when, e.g., increasing the number of steps / decreasing the size of the steps in the algorithm (assuming the algorithm isn't totally nuts) should fix this. Of course, the problem may be the algorithm is totally nuts, or that it has something like O(n!) run time or something stupid, but basic pathfinding is like a first year CS student problem and there's really no reason for there to be this much of a problem with it. Quote: Also with the Searing Lightning having to be tactical when I use Curing Elixir as they are pretty rare and using one only to be hit again is a bit crap. As you can see in this thread, it's not exactly common knowledge that this is even possible. You can't be "tactical" if you don't know it's possible. And yeah, then there's the making it useless by being attacked with it 10 times in a fight... By the time the fight's over, you can just heal until it goes away. *sigh*

It's kind of like how steak and carrion are similar.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Dikiyoba doesn't like the fact that searing lightning is uncurable. Dikiyoba doesn't mind uncurable freezing so much since the series builds up basilisks enough that it justifies the game mechanics. However, Dikiyoba doesn't like running across random enemies who have a freezing ability with no explanation. Yeah, I've found that annoying, too. Although I prefer Exile's basilisks. They were much scarier. If you don't kill them quick, you know that only instant death awaits! They seem to've been toned down, and had their numbers increased a lot, which I don't like, it makes them much less special.

Originally Posted By: Locmaar Having your mage attacked by fiends he just attempted to kill is something that I find quite understandable. Protect your mage better. That is a tactical element that makes both sense and the game more entertaining. To an extent, yes, but it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to run past a bunch of fighters to get to the guy hiding in the back. Plus this contradicts the idea that you have to be near everyone to use group heal / cure. So you can't really protect your spellcasters effectively when area of effect spells make everyone try to flock toward him. Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity ...total transparency of the game world is hardly an essential requirement for every possible game. I mean, how on earth is a young and inexperienced soldier supposed to know just exactly how strong the slow spells cast by a weird cave demon thing are? True to an extent, but, hey, your characters are introspective enough to assign an exact number to their health, they should at least be able to rate their tiredness on a scale of 1-10 . But, really, the issue is not not knowing how things work, but being killed by the lack of possibility to know. Even when I have played enough to have a general idea of how much, any specific encounter does not need to match the general one, and doesn't do me any good in terms of figuring out if it's going to be useful to cast haste until I'm unslowed or deal with the skipping of turns that I don't know how often will happen. Originally Posted By: monolith94 Sounds like you don't like having your party die, gauss. *shrug* I've gotten used to it. I have no problem with dying--like I mentioned earlier, when I've played, e.g, Portal or HL2 I found most of my deaths hilarious or amusingly surprising; and because I was killed by the enemies instead of by the gameplay mechanics. The problem with Avernum 6 is the gameplay mechanics are what kills me. Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Whoa, wow... Okay, most of your complaints are simply a case of not having read the manual. Seriously, there's not excuse for not reading it. Like mentioned, thee things either aren't in the manual, or are poorly, confusingly, or incorrectly explained. Geeze, you could at least give the guy who does string theory enough credit to assume he's at least looked at the instructions . Originally Posted By: Other Also, for enemies debuffs, I have found that their spells usually seem to be less powerful than yours. If I haste and go into a battle, the enemy will usually have to cast slow two or three times just to take away my haste, and not actually to slow me. For random enemies, this is largely true, but for tough enemies, magic enemies, mini-bosses, or bosses it may or may not be true. Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Quote: Almost every single enemy attacking with acid or poison. Just seems like terrible lazy game design there. Honestly, it's far better in A6 than in A5 or G5. Maybe, didn't play A5 or G5 past the demo areas. Though I do remember similar problems in the other GF games, but not as bad. Quote: If you aren't watching the text area, you should be. It tells you what's going on. Some of it is still too weird (such as the wild beast/spines thing that Student of Trinity brought up) and it still takes trial and error to figure everything out, but it makes learning what everything does much faster. Yeah, I do, but it's easy to miss things there when you're distracted, and in fights things can be scrolled up by other notices before I have a chance to read them. I know I can scroll up, but if I don't know I have to, I will miss stuff. Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity The pathfinding algorithm never does seem to switch with other party members. Up to a point this might make sense; maybe the player, and not the algorithm, should really decide whether a second figure ought to move or not. But it can be super annoying, all right, when the algorithm does something utterly idiotic instead of the obvious simple thing. These are actually the only bad experiences I've had with pathfinding, though. It's always been that the algorithm did something stupid because the non-stupid thing would have involved switching places with another character. That's part of what goes on, yeah, but I've had other weird problems, where there was actually a shorter path, but my character took a longer path, or there were two equal paths, and it took the one that went past an enemy. This is especially noticeable in bottlenecks, where there can be gaps, but your characters will to backwards to try to go around because the algorithm can't find the gap. Mostly, I move one square at a time now, but they'll still do crazy things moving two or three squares away sometimes . Especially when the area they're in is somewhat crowded. Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity What? Man, that would sure have been nice to know. Not even Divine Restoration does that. If only you'd have read the instructions!

Yeah, but I want to like it! And A1-3 were so good! And so were several of the geneforges. A6 just seems to have somehow managed to combine all of the bad things of the previous games together with all of the good things... And it's frustrating that it doesn't have to be bad, it's not like these are some kind of fundamental design flaws here, there're really things that should've been caught by good playtesting. It's very close to being good in some metrics, but in others, so far!

You know, I was playing through A6, which I unfortunately just bought, hoping it would get better after the demo zone, and man, there are just so many things that makes this game horribly unfun. I wrote down my thoughts going through one small area (some I'd mentioned before, some not): Almost every single enemy attacking with acid or poison. Just seems like terrible lazy game design there. HORRIBLE path finding. I simply can't comprehend how this could have ended up so bad. The game is played on gigantic tiles for god's sake! It isn't that hard! Enemies unrelentingly attacking the person who attacked them last, regardless of it makes any sense. I'm sick of having my mage being killed because he used an area of effect spell and is swarmed by like 10 people the next turn (before my fighters get a turn of course). The complete inability to tell what the effects of spells are against me. Handcuffs? Skull face thing? Great, I get to figure it out by context. I know it's in the help somewhere, but there could at least be a mouseover that tells me what they are. And it's impossible to tell what strength spells cast against me are, apparently. Is it going to slow me down too much? Will this guy have a turn next time? Am I going to die of acid/poison the next turn? It's a mystery! What spells do I have that will counter them? Does bless cancel handcuffs? Haste? There are lots of effects that seem to randomly slow me down. What effects what? How strongly? UNFUN. Figuring out the damned gameplay should not be a puzzle! Haste being useless. I haste, maybe, randomly, some people can go more than once. In instances where I am fighting something hard enough to actually need to haste, I'm slowed, so it doesn't do me any good. I could cast haste again. But, how many times will I need to to get hasted again? Who knows, because I don't know how strong the slow spell cast against me was! Why the hell do enemies almost always get to attack twice, even at low levels, when, even at higher levels, I am lucky to attack twice, even while hasted? Why can enemies use cool spells, like fling huge rings of fire away from themselves that damage almost everyone on the screen significantly, when the best I can do is throw some lightning at some people I don't even get to pick all of? Are there any scrolls to get rid of mind effects? Because every time my priest gets mind controlled or frozen in a fight when I actually need him I'm just screwed. Can I even undo being frozen (cf above)? Why are there so many fights where the enemies all around them are totally trivial to kill, but the boss kills all of my people in like three turns? What the hell do the random dots and sparkles around my character represent? I already know there's a status effect on me! Red dots don't make the skull face any more clear! Seriously, there are 31 status effects. And you can do better than the back-pain and toilet paper icons. Really, though, the real problem is that I don't know how strong the effects are. Oops I was one space too far away to cast group heal on everyone, now someone's dead. Resurrect scrolls don't always work properly. I get a message telling me there wasn't enough room to revive everyone when I'm standing in a large open area with plenty of room. Thanks for wasting a scroll. I finally am lucky enough to get 10ap, but, oops, the enemy moved one space away and now I can only attack once. (of course, this moving was because it had to swarm my spell caster who just attacked it). Why do enemies have to have the same icons as my characters? THIS IS LAZY AND CONFUSING! Yeah, I know they have blue health bars instead of red ones, but still. Would you want your traffic lights to all be green, except for tiny blue or red bars below them? No, you wouldn't. And I don't want to be killed by poor traffic laws or poor UI design! I'd love to summon monsters to help me, but oops! Too far away from the enemies and now they just stand there like morons. And I can't summon more because apparently the "it takes too much concentration" also applies to people who didn't actually summon anyone. Not only do I not know strengths of effects, I don't even know who's slowed enough to have a turn. Can I heal next? Can my fighter move to catch any of the 5 spiders now going for my mage? Who knows! (Answers: No, and no) Why do so many enemies run so far away? I can't do some fights without annoyingly splitting my party in half, separated by like an entire screen because four archers wouldn't let me catch them. Tiny tiny get item radius. Very irritating when I want to pick things up from all the people I just killed in the battle that sprawled across several screens. Why don't some items stack? In principle I can carry 36 non-stackable pieces of paper or 36 non-stackable boats. But god forbid I carry 36 pieces of paper and one boat, that' just out of the question. I realize this is like an RPG staple, but really, it isn't 1986 anymore, we can spare the memory for a few extra counters. And to clarify here, I don't really have a problem with the graphics, except as they are ambiguous, annoying, or otherwise cause gameplay problems. Also, I LIKE the little details, like a random mage found dead in a room with scorch marks, that was occupied by bad guys. Why do wands that have a "base damage" of, eg, "25-100" consistently do <10 damage? It's not fun to find out as a surprise, that the things you've been careful to keep for an emergency are actually almost totally useless. It's like buying a car that has a "base speed" of 100mph, but never finding any place where you can go faster than 10! UNFUN! And what is even the meaning of all the base damages and percents given? They seem to make little sense. It seems like the equations that determine everything are needlessly complex, when I can equip a seemingly better weapon and do worse with it than with what I had before. How am I supposed to know if, eg, the +1 strength or anatomy I get for one weapon is enough to offset the slightly less "base damage" of another weapon? I can try it on one enemy, but the calculations seem to be complex enough that it's not consistent across multiple enemies... Again, making the gameplay a puzzle--NOT FUN! And all of my characters were just killed instantly by a ghost living in someone's basement, so I'm done for now. This stuff is only from one area, and there are certainly more complaints to be had... but these ones are fairly canonical as far as the problems I've been having. Overall I rate this game two broken shields and a bad back. But you won't know exactly how much I dislike the game because I won't actually tell you how strong those effects are. I will probably finish the game, only because I don't want to have wasted the money on it...

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity If this thread is going to constitute a significant component of your market research, then this is probably not a wise venture. Nothing has ever gone wrong with asking a random internet forum for advice on something they don't know about! Never. I cannot think of one example. But at least it's not a "hey should I get this checked out by a doctor" thread. And for the record, I hate hot dogs. Except corn dogs, which are inexplicably delicious.

I recall seeing someone boil water in a plastic container on one of those discovery channel survival shows (I forget which). I think they wrapped it in green leaves or something though. Originally Posted By: Niemand Quote: rigorous, double-blind thought experiments Those are ones where you don't know what you're thinking, and your thoughts don't know who's thinking them, right? It works wonders for eliminating biases, but collecting the results is rather tricky. I'm reasonably sure this is the method most students in the classes I've taught / TAed use.

Originally Posted By: Vituperation Free Albemuth —Alorael, who doesn't see what's wrong with the averages here except implication. There's no need to build multiple plants in a day. There's just the need to build a whole lot of plants in parallel, which is the sort of thing that happens constantly at all construction sites worldwide. How many buildings do you think are built per day? Yeah, the biggest problem is the implication, but the averages are a problem too because by themselves they aren't very meaningful. The whole point of an average is to remove information, which is useful when the information is, e.g., random error, less useful when you really should be keeping this information, like in the above case, when you really need a whole multidimensional distribution (so you really should be keeping infinitely more numbers than just the one average ).

Originally Posted By: Frozen Feet I'm not arguing nuclear fission is bad way of producing energy; just that it to cover all our future needs isn't necessarily more feasible than any other way. Notice the wording, as it also goes the other way around; other forms of energy aren't necessarily more feasible than fission. Many are less. But the point is that fission is like an order of magnitude better at least than most other sources. No other known technology is better than fission, and none except fusion are expected to be able to more efficient based on fundamental physics (unless you want to include exciting stuff like accretion of matter into black holes which can be very efficient!) Quote: I also don't get why you insist averages don't tell anything. Because of my years of training as a physicist, where I see averages used correctly and wrongly all the time . Plus my background in math where I had these things beaten into my be various mathematicians. Quote: Compare that to those 25 000 we'd need. Laugh. And compare that to the number of other power plants that are being built, the rate they're built at, and the cost-effectiveness of building them vs. power plant type, and laugh again, this time, realizing how wrong your other arguments have been. edit: Originally Posted By: Lilith Well, we can always revive the plan to dam the Yukon River. Sure, it'd create an enormous inland sea in the Arctic Circle with unpredictable effects on global climate, and the power generated would be in a frigid, marshy wasteland thousands of kilometres from where it would actually be needed, but... If I've learned anything from years of sci-fi, it's that science requires needless, unpredictable risks for progress (and results in needless, nonsense results). So let's do it! We'll awaken a huge, ancient sea creature in the process, but hey, we'll grow, learn, and the main character will inexplicably end up with the hot only-other-girl-in-the-story! What better ending could you ask for?

Averages don't tell you about the scope of anything. Check out the chapter of any good stats book that covers this for examples of how averages are "misleading" (and the equivalent chapter in any advanced book to understand precisely what they do mean!) And replacing our energy with fission is many orders of magnitude more plausible for the reasons we have already mentioned. There were thousands of pyramid workers, but there are many more construction workers today! If you would calculate the average number of new buildings built on earth per time, you'd get many per second. Not that one could quickly replace energy with fission, but it's possible. Remember, your claim was Quote: Currently, mankind uses ~14 TW of energy yearly; in 30 years, this is estimated to rise to 40 TW. To get that additional 25 TW, we'd need to build 25 000 new plants each producing 1 GW of energy; that's 833 per year, or 2.3 plants build per day. Not happening. How is building enough coal, wind, solar, or hydroelectric plants more possible than this, considering you have to build many more of them to get the same energy as a nuclear reactor? Your argument of increasing energy being "too hard" to meet used to easiest way to meet those requirements, then claimed it's impossible! It has to be done one way or another! And building the most cost effective power plants (which in many regions is nuclear) is, in fact, the most cost effective way to meet power demands! It's so easy it's almost tautological!

I've been meaning to play some of the indi games they mentioned in the awards. Some of them look really awesome. Kotaku has been posting brief (~3 minute) interviews with some of the award winners if people feel like checking them out. I was annoyed at the webcast for the awards, though, they screwed up and did not show Gabe Newell's fake BSOD :-/. I had to wait for pictures to find out the new obscurely delivered information I really already knew!

Originally Posted By: Niemand There are certianly good reasons to develop other power technologies. Solar power can be great for smallish devices that need to operate in remote locations, or that you just don't want to string tons of cables to (including all sort of things from portable programmable road signs such as are used at road construction zones to mars rovers). Hydroelectric power is great if you happen to ahve a good sized river nearby and a good area to trap it in (the Colorado river works well for Nevada, Arizona, and California, but it would be hard to find any good place to put a dam on the Mississippi, which is why no one has as far as I know). Either form of nuclear power is good for taking care of an area like a city where a lot of power is needed in a small area, particularly if there's nothing else handy nearby. Absolutely. The best and most economical thing to do is what's convenient for your location, and that your location can bear the burdens of maintaining. Quote: Fission may actually remain the best alternative here for some time, though, as it is already highly sucessful for submarines (which are, after all, very like spacecraft), and it's looking more and more like the only way to make fusion work is to build big (look at a diagram of ITER and check the scale) to make it run at all. Definitely the case. Fission can be made very small and efficient, since we've been doing it for a very long time, and thinking about it even longer! Fusion, some day, I'm sure will be made compact and efficient somehow, but it won't be portable for a very long time! (But how cool will it be when you can carry a tiny star around with you?)

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity This is the difficulty we face in weaning ourselves from oil. There is really a LOT of energy to be had from burning oil. [...] It's not easy to come within a factor of ten of matching it. Yes, exactly. That's a great analogy. Originally Posted By: Frozen Feet NEEEEEE... wrong. Nuclear fission isn't anymore the magic solution than others mentioned. No one said it's a magical solution, simply the only single one that's actually physically possible. And the calculation above by Niemand and the adding in of other factors I did later are pretty basic physical calculations. There's really no way around them. It's simply physically impossible. edit: And the kinds of claims like "you'd have to build x number per day" are horribly misleading. For example, you hear the UFO conspiracy people claim Egyptians could not have built the pyramids because they'd have had to have laid like 10 blocks per second on average. Well, yes, they would, but that number is so large because averages don't really characterize most processes!

Well, physics disagrees with the idea that we can get all of our energy from the sun . The assumptions above used ~40% efficiency so even if you could increase efficiency to 100% that's simply not a large decrease in area. The best solar can do is provide surplus power. Particularly, meeting power needs that increase with sunniness, like air-conditioning, as I mentioned before, or in areas with lower needs for power and poor access to other sources (desserts, etc), or in areas where you need something to run autonomously (weather stations, possibly street lights, satellites, etc). But as a general solution, it simply doesn't work. With current technology, in fact, no single technology can hope to meet current energy needs except nuclear fission. edit: Not to mention the technical problems with solar that've been ignored. E.g., efficiency decreases with time, so if a panel lasts ~10 years, you need to replace your entire system every 10 years, so your massive multi trillion dollar cover the earth in solar panels project has a 100s of billion / year maintenance attached to it.

This is definitely false. As mentioned above, we'd need ~5000km^2 for just the US's current energy requirements. The world's energy consumption is ~10^22 J / year, which is two orders of magnitude larger than the US's. So we'd expect to need 5000x100=500,000 km^2 to do this. Sure, the earth is ~500,000,000 km^2, but a half million square kilometers is just stupidly huge. We simply could not reasonably produce that many solar cells. Not to mention that if you distribute this evenly around the Earth, you need at least twice as much, since it's always half dark and all... Not to mention that higher latitudes become less efficient as ~sin(latitude), too. Not to mention weather. So you'd really need to cover at least ~1% of the earth in solar cells, to meet TODAY'S energy needs. So this is well outside of the range of conceivable things to do, even in the fairly idealized case I gave above. edit: I should note, the effective things to produce are (roughly) the ones with highest energy density per dollar. J/(area*$). Solar clearly fails here since both the area and $ values here are quite large. This is why nuclear always wins. edit2: Also note, if you want to do something more exciting like building a Dyson sphere, you run into other problems of your sphere coming into thermal equilibrium with the radiation, and no longer being able to extract energy from the star!

Combustion reactions are oxygen plus some other reactant, often made of some hydrocarbon in the usual kinds of ones we see... So, no, there's no reaction of H2O + O -> stuff. There is however, a reaction, 2H + O -> H2O + heat So you can burn hydrogen to give you water. But water will not burn in that sense. edit: Some about the chemistry of water on wikipedia's better-than-average but still disorganized and not so well-written page on H2O, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2O

Turn based games are nice because they let you think more strategically than real time ones, which often evolve into wildly attacking until everything's dead. I mean, how do you think real-time chess would work out? Not well. (Non-Euclidean chess, on the other hand, is awesome. On the other other hand, Euclidean time chess is oddly confusing...)

I disagree that a 2d game can't be as immersive as a 1st person 3d one. I can think of plenty of examples to contradict this; Exile 2, Baldur's gate, Fallout 2, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, etc, etc. I don't think that my complaints can't be addressed by Jeff, though, there are plenty of small indi game makers out there who manage to do much better in the gameplay realm without much trouble. It's just a matter of learning to understand the subtle things that can be glaringly obvious / irritating / unnatural to people that are hard to notice when you're the one designing them (just like you'll never notice the sign error that makes you think you discovered new physics until someone else points it out to you). And I know there're a billion textbooks out there on UI design, so tricks to make good gameplay design can't be a big secret, either.