Niemand

From your first question I assume that you're using the editor downloaded from Spiderweb. If I'm correct about this, you should seriously consider using the newer 3D editor (which is a modified version of the original editor, created by the community). You can find it on this page. To address your questions: Quote: 1: Is there any way to scroll around the map slower? Scrolling by clicking the edges is not only inconvenient, it's bad for precise moving due to the speed it moves. Not in the Spiderweb editor, no. In the 3D editor, in 3D mode scrolling is a bit less frenetic, and in the Mac version the arrow keys are now used to scroll in either all modes (Option+arrow keys is then used to move the selected object). EDIT: Does the Windows version now scroll with the arrow keys? I either missed when that change went in or I've forgotten. Quote: 2: What is used to open the blades of avernum docs? It seems to have defaulted to wordpad, but that's not working at all. I'm downloading adobe reader, but I'm not sure... I think that the Spiderweb docs are distributed in two forms, PDF and MS Word. The former can be opened with any PDF viewer, while the latter may only display correctly in Word itself, although other word processors may manage to display it. I'm guessing that you're problems are with Wordpad failing to handle advanced formatting in the Word version. EDIT: I should mention that the portions of the Spiderweb supplied documentation which describe the editor interface are becoming increasingly out-of-date with regard to the 3D editor, since those of us who work on it keep adding and changing things. An effort was underway to make a properly updated version of the documentation, but I sort of dropped the ball on moving it along a few months ago. Oops. Hopefully we can make some more progress on that from this summer. Quote: 3: When I clicked one of the scroll things on the same square of a door, it gave me a list of these things called "Memory Cells". Memory Cell 0 seems to equal 0 for two of the doors in the inn, but another door has Memory Cell 0 equal to 5. Since that's the only door with an item behind it, I'm guessing a value of 5 for Memory Cell 0 means the door is locked. But on the the point: where do I learn more about Memory Cells, and are there memory cells for things other than doors? Once you're able to view the documentation you'll be able to learn more about this, but here's a quick overview: In BoA doors are implemented as terrain scripts. Both terrain scripts and creatures have memory cells which are just integer variables whose initial values you can set in the editor. What those variables mean depends on the script in question; for doors this is usually door.txt, and it's customary for each script which uses memory cells to contain a header comment detailing what it uses them for. In the case of door.txt the value of cell 0 defines how difficult a lock the door has (with a value of zero implying that the door is not locked), the value of cell 1 is the special item number which is to be treated as a key which unlocks the door, and cells 2 and 3 are used to give the coordinates of a Stuff Done Flag to be set when the door is unlocked, so that it can remember and unlock automatically the next time the party enters the town. Quote: 4: Is it okay to use a self-edited version of warrior's grove in one of my scenarios? The answer boils down to 'yes'. Jeff put Warrior's Grove in for people to tinker with, and I highly doubt Jeff would care even if you did claim to have created that one town entirely from scratch. If you feel that your conscience won't rest without giving proper credit just put a note in your scenario's Readme file along with credits for any other resources you use.

That's odd, since I've found Avadon to be possibly Spiderweb's most efficient game yet. To get an idea of whether Avadon is really to blame, I'd suggest using Activity Monitor to find out what the processor is up to.

I wasn't thinking clearly, and forgot that you might be on Windows (or using the '2D' editor directly from Spiderweb). The 'latest' version to which I referred was the latest Mac version of the 3D editor, made by me, whose features differ from the latest Windws editor.

This depends on what version of the editor you're using. If you're using the latest version (1.1.1 or 1.1.0) it's easy (but I'm way behind on getting out an up-to-date version of the documentation to describe it ): Use the selection tool (shift+s) and click on the town entrance to select it. Then press delete. If you're using an older version it's a lot more round about (although I think it's covered in the documentation from Spiderweb): Use the edit town entrance tool, click on the entrance you want to delete, and in the resulting dialog box, press 'Cancel'. (This exactly the right place for questions like this, so no cause for concern there.)

Right, the lottery it is: If you're losing money on the lottery, perhaps you need to use more advanced techniques.

Originally Posted By: The Mystic When I was an income tax preparer, I did a return for a man who made only $20,000, and he felt insulted when the tax preparation program asked him if he wanted information on applying for some kind of government aid. I also did a return for a couple who made a little less than $125,000, and they couldn't understand why the government didn't consider them destitute. They all believed themselves to be somewhere in the middle class. While I find the people with a combined income of over $1e5 considering themselves 'destitute' rather strange, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that all of these people considered themselves middle class. In particular, the salary ranges you give describe myself and my parents, respectively, and I consider it quite reasonable to say that both I and they are in the middle class. We have essentially identical standards of living, but my parents have much higher expenses deriving from things like sending my brother and I to college. As a young single person I have very few medical expenses, don't have to spend anything to raise children, and only need a small space to live in.

There's already a link to the Alexandria database in the header for this forum.

I think Miramor meant Character Editor, not Scenario Editor, since what you want to edit is the party, not the scenario.

From what I've seen in scientific papers the format of citations doesn't follow strict rules in near the way that my high-school english teachers wanted it done. Within the text there are only numbers, referring to the items in the numbered bibliography at the end. The bibliography items are sometimes incredibly cryptic, like using apparently unique (or nearly so) abbreviations for journal titles. Even the non-cryptic entries always virtually always omit the title of the work being cited, in order to save space. Most of the citations follow a standard format, but there are a good fraction that don't, and I have on some occasions encountered bibliography entries which I was unable to decode. One of the more odd cases I recently encountered was a paper in which the authors mixed footnotes into the bibliography.

PB = PowerBook In the System Profiler you may want to select the Airport item in the Network section; if you just look at the summary given by selecting Network it appears to say 'Airport' for me, whereas within the Airport item it reports the card type more specifically as 'Airport Extreme'. You might also want to check the 'Supported PHY Modes' line, since it descibes which of the variants of 802.11 networks your card knows how to talk to.

Actually, I think that this requirement in the games may date from when old Macs would run by default in less than their full possible color depth (glancing at Wikipedia it seems likely that this was for memory reasons; at higher color depths machines with only a small amount of VRAM could only support lower resolutions than at lower color depth). My parents' old LC II did this, it would boot using 8 bit grayscale (if I remember correctly), so for various uses it had to be manually switched to color mode, which could be at either 8 or 16 bit depth. The issue with Spiderweb games is that Jeff seems to have overlooked the possibility that there could ever exist a machine which would support only greater than 16 color depth, and so the check (which used to exist in the BoA editor, for example) looked for exactly 16 bit color being supported. On new machines which only use 32 bit color this check failed, causing the program to erroneously conclude that it couldn't run. Of course this had been causing annoyance for years anyway when it would try to switch color depth from 32 bits down to 16, but it becomes a real problem when it completely stops the software from running.

I haven't actually been helping out with the BoE code in some time (so an authoritative answer from Celtic Minstrel may be more useful), but it looks like the bulk of the work is already done. (BoE was better prepared for this than the BoA editor since it already expected to deal with files of either endianness.) It looks like about the only thing left to do is thrown the switch and tell the compiler to build for i386 as well as ppc (which I've already done in my working copy, more or less).

Originally Posted By: VCH You know, I don't think I've ever written a book report, in school or otherwise. hmmm Odd. When I was in elementary school I had to write them frequently, up to once a month in fourth and fifth grade. They were really just summaries to show that you had read a book and could describe it comprehensibly, so it was really pretty easy. When I was in fourth grade the rules governing book reports required that the book be at least one hundred pages in length, and, somewhat bizarrely, each additional hundred pages counted as another book and book report. This meant that most months I did three or four book reports, by official reckoning, and I was quite proud at the time that in one month I reached six.

The reason that this is happening is simple: The game sees no reason not to show that node any time dialogue reaches state 9. Probably the best way to solve this is to allocate another SDF to keep track of whether the party has been given the quest or not. Then, alter node 13 so that: 1) It has a condition that it should only be shown when the new flag is zero, and 2) At the same time as the toggle_quest call to start the quest it also sets the flag so that you have a record of the quest being started.

A couple of weeks ago I read Endless Blue by Wen Spencer. My feelings about the book were somewhat mixed, as there were some elements I didn't care for and others which I had the nagging feeling could have been explored further. I really felt like writing up a report on the book, which follows. Click to reveal.. (Book Report) The book is set in the context of an interstellar war between the human race and an alien race which seems to attack without any discernible purpose besides causing destruction. An important detail is that the humans have genetically engineered a subspecies of themselves referred to as 'reds' for use as shock troops. The two main problems of the novel are the need to win or end the war and the problem of the treatment of the reds, who though trained to behave brutally, are of fully human intelligence. The story opens with the discovery that a failure mode of the faster-than-light propulsion technology which had been presumed to be totally destructive is not; the engine of a ship which had disappeared a decade before reappears without explanation (and without the rest of the ship), but encrusted with coral growth and dead sea creatures. The protagonists are selected to deliberately induce failure in their starship's propulsion to attempt to travel to the location of the lost ship (and presumably many other ships which had been lost in the same manner). The location turns out to be a spherical space, referred to as the Sargasso, containing an ocean on its inner surface. Orbiting above the ocean (at smaller radii) are large rocks which present significant navigational hazards to the few spacecraft which manage to avoid hitting the water initially. It turns out that many ships belonging to a number of intelligent races have crashed in the ocean and the survivors of the wrecks have formed permanent communities which are mostly peaceful to each other. Click to reveal.. (In which there are actual spoilers) Shortly after arriving the heroes find that unlike in the larger human civilization, the reds have been allowed to interbreed with unmodified humans (as have 'blues', another genetically modified group created for. . . rather less warlike purposes). This demonstrates the artificiality of the distinctions among the subspecies, and most of the bad-guys are characterized by a desire to maintain the enslavement of the genetically modified individuals. To short-circuit a chain of information which takes the protagonists the entire book to work out fully, it turns out that their enemies in the war (the nefrim) are not present in the Sargasso because on arrival they are transformed into the insubstantial seraphim. The seraphim are attempting to return to normal space an object, called the Shabd, whose absence has driven insane the nefrim still in normal space. To do so, the seraphim have directed a group of other beings (some humans and other aliens) to modify surviving spacecraft engines to be able to leave the Sargasso again. (The appearance of the engine at the beginning of the story is a result of this research.) The main antagonist is a power-hungry human military commander who wants to control the technology to escape. Eventually the shabd is recovered, the bad-guy vanquished (by the concentrated memory of his own evil deeds, no less), and the heroes return to normal space and end the war. One of the things which irked me most about this book was that the author does a pretty nice job with inventing a strange setting, but then does very little with it. On the one hand he has the excuse that the protagonists aren't really in a position to research the details of the Sargasso's nature, but designing something like that and then explaining nothing about it is maddening. What keeps the rocks in orbit? Why is the volume filled with water and air? How is it lit? Is there night time? How big is it? The answers to some of the latter questions might have been covered; indeed I'm baffled about how they could not have been, but it's been a few weeks since I read the book, and perhaps I missed or forgot them. I didn't care for the substantial number of sex scenes which appeared in the book, although I'm willing to agree that at a number of points they were important to furthering the subplot relating to the humanity of the modified humans (or rather the recognition of their humanity by the unmodified humans). One key aspect of the plot that felt underdeveloped to me, or perhaps handled in a less than ideal way, was the interpretation of the situation of the nefrim. In the text this was mostly discussed using terminology borrowed from buddhism, but I mostly ignored this because I was reminded of ideas from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and I mostly looked at it in that light, namely that the nefrim appear to be working toward technological singularity, using the Shabd to integrate their individual minds into a single, overarching consciousness. In A Fire Upon the Deep a group of humans attempt to jump-start their work on achieving technological singularity using equipment found at an old alien installation. Disaster occurs, however, when the resulting construct seizes control of its creators (or awakeners) and embarks on galactic conquest. The resulting super-intelligence, rather than withdrawing out of the galaxy as others habitually do, seeks to subjugate the many lesser intelligences within the galactic disc (and is only stopped by a counter weapon of similar antiquity which alters the structure of space in the region of conflict to both prevent faster-than-light travel and greatly curtail the scope of intelligence). The situation in Endless Blue is different in that the nefrims' malevolence results not from achieving a unified intelligence but because of the disruption of the process, apparently the shock at being forcibly separated from their increasingly deeply connected mental network. This is, then, a treatment of a different aspect of technological singularity, asking 'What could go wrong in the attempt?' rather than 'What will be created by success?' The latter question is possibly addressed somewhat with the Hak, another alien race who appear in a somewhat oracular capacity. The Hak have a physical appearance equivalent to large tortoises and spend nearly all of their time meditating; they claim, or their statements are interpreted by the humans to mean that they claim, to be more thoroughly enlightened than any other race present. Uniquely among the races presented, there is no evidence that the Hak arrived in the Sargasso accidentally or even that they require spacecraft at all. On the other hand, there is only the lack of evidence, never evidence to the contrary. The Hak never demonstrate any capabilities beyond those of the other races, besides having a more clear picture of what has happened to the nefrim. I'm not sure how ambiguous the author intended the Hak to be, since they could they should be interpreted either as having transcended (and so being mostly concerned with problems and ideas beyond the grasp of the other races) or as another race working toward that goal. It's a bit late here (or early, really), so hopefully the above is fairly coherent. Also, I now have an unfortunate craving to reread some Vinge books.

I read Slarty's claim as a statement of an empirical observation rather than an reference to a standard, or supposedly so, rule.

It doesn't sound like the RPG would need to be MM[1] and O[2]; merely M[3] would suffice. In particular a game which is both MM and O is unlikely to be modifiable by its players. However, an MMO would take care of the aspect of allowing a family to play as a group, provided they don't mind potentially having to deal with a large number of other players as well. [1]: Massively Multiplayer [2]: Online [3]: Multiplayer I'll confess that this post was mostly an excuse for abbreviations and footnotes. I like abbreviations and footnotes. I'll stop now, though.

Originally Posted By: Master1 Yes. Would this increase or decrease the speed of the browser? Of course it doesn't make the browser actually process data faster (technically it will make it slower), but it makes it process less data. On some pages the ads can be many hundreds of kilobytes when the page itself is nearly all text and a few repetitive images (which can be cached effectively) and so only needs a few tens of kilobytes. Include the consideration that the ads are frequently on other servers and so extra DNS lookups and connections have to be made, and you can see that just by deciding not to load the ads you can get some very worthwhile gains. EDIT: Just for fun I tried that download and upload speed test page. While the numbers it got seem rather high compared to what I typically observe (for loading many small items), it will be quite fun the next time AT&T calls to beg me to buy their 'high speed' internet service to question how it compares to my current 100/65 Megabits per second for download/upload. (According to the glossy, multipage catalogue they sent me last week, which I just pulled back out of the recycling sack, their fanciest option promises download speeds of 'up to' 6 Mbps) There are some definite advantages to living in university owned housing.

I have a very similar laptop (17 inch PB, 8 years old, I think) which I'm obliged to use from time to time (when my newer laptop is unavailable). It's still running 10.4, and I just use whatever is the last/latest version of Safari it can run. There's no discernible difference in speed when loading pages from my 2008 Macbook Pro, although it start struggling rapidly when there's a lot of Javascript, or worse, Flash on the pages.

On the other hand it is really difficult for private citizens to get hold of modern, heavy weapons. For example, if I remember correctly it's flat-out illegal for any war plane made after something like 1970 to be privately owned[^1][^2], and while it's possible to do a lot of fighting with weapons like machine guns and rocket launchers it would be very hard to win against warplanes and warships. This is roughly what's been going on recently in Libya, where the rebels have many weapons, but are struggling against the government's heavy wepaons, even after the best of those have been removed. [^1]: I learned about this rule because the government enforces it quite rigorously. My dad works for an aircraft company, and several years ago they wanted to test out installing a new cabling system in a fighter jet. The plan was for them to get the fuselage of a decomissioned plane (the metal of which was considered to be too badly stressed to be flown again). The idea had to be abandoned when it was discovered that the rule about private ownership of planes was considered to apply here, even though it was a fuselage without wings, engines, or most of the internal equipment (to say nothing of weapons), and the company in question was the manufacturer of the plane. [^2]: I suspect that there's a similar rule for armored ground vehicles as well, so while it's not uncommon for a citizen to own a WWII era tank it's probably not possible to get modern model. While a WWII era tank (if armed) would be virtually unstoppable for ordinary police force, it would be basically a joke in an open war, I suspect.

Originally Posted By: Sarachim The US has had no budget deficit several times in its history, most recently during the last few years of the Clinton administration. There's a difference between not having an annual deficit and eliminating the cumulative total of previous annual deficits. People aren't very careful, but when they say 'the deficit' (or 'the national deficit') they usually mean the total accumulated deficit.

You're on Linux, I assume (since otherwise you wouldn't be using Wine)? I think that OProfile might be what you're looking for, or perhaps CodeAnalyst. If the problem also exists on Windows, though, it might be easier to solve it there (for someone who has Windows).

A few people were using really annoying and distracting avatars, and rather than trying to make fuzzy guidelines about what was reasonable and what wasn't, the rule was simply enacted that there should be no animated avatars at all.

The case you describe would be more like an acceleration, Nikki. Velocity still isn't the right word, though, particularly since rate of posting doesn't have a direction (since posts are not deleted, at least not by the poster, it is always a positive quantity, even). The correct word is of course frequency, since what Dantius is talking about is a scalar quantity with dimensions of inverse time.

The whole point is that a Windows executable is already compiled, which means to my knowledge (and outside of Microsoft's labs) that it consists of x86 instructions. To run the same program on a non-x86 processor one must either recompile the program from source code or use emulation. To do the former one must have a suitable compiler and all necessary libraries must also be available compiled for the target architecture. To do the latter one must take the compiled instructions and transform them into instructions for the target processor, which can be done either by an interpreter or by a sort of recompilation (although I'm not sure if I've ever heard it named as such). Any emulation approach will suffer from the overhead of doing the translation at the same time as or just before trying to run, and will tend to end up with much less efficient code since the original compilation process discards a great deal of information about what the program means. Furthermore, to do emulation any libraries with were not linked statically into the executable will also need to be available.