Niemand

Originally Posted By: Kelandon I need webspace with which to do it. Suggestions? I'd be happy to host that, or anything else within reason, for you. I've got space and bandwidth to burn. (And I need to build up my empire to rival Aran's! )

Bump. Anyone?

Kelandon hasn't disappeared; he has been posting on the forums as recently as yesterday. Furthermore, the rest of his website is still there, so it looks likely that the Archives' vanishment is just a technical problem that he may not yet have noticed. I'll send him a PM about it.

Gah. I had filled out that calendar, but I seem to have forgotten to hit the 'submit' button. Sorry about that.

Jewels' TrueSite for Blades probably has the most complete collection around aside from Kelandon's. (I might be wrong, BoE isn't something I pay much attention to, but it's a place to start.) I thought that there was someone distributing a single archive of many/all available scenarios, and I thought that it might have been W-Dueck, but his site has gotten strange and unfriendly recently, so I can't check. Maybe someone else knows.

It consisted of nonsense. Arguably, you had something you were trying to say, but your method of saying it prompted a less than serious reaction from others. As a result, Dikiyoba locked it in order to prevent the further propagation of spam.

Originally Posted By: Rowen Newegg AMD Vision Modern WarFare2 T-shirt Size Large Clearly the most vital component. Originally Posted By: Earth Empires Kingston's memories might be cheaper RAM prices are likely to have small random variations among manufacturers and retailers. Since RAM is a relatively cheap and easily replaceable component, it's probably more important in the long run to make sure that your system can be upgraded with more of it later than agonizing over the details for it now. (I really wish that Apple built in more than a factor of two of room for RAM upgrades in the their laptops. In both of the laptops I've owned I've gotten them with the minimum amount of RAM initially, then filled them up later with cheaper, third party RAM. Unfortunately, there's only room for one such step up, so now I'm stuck at 4 GB now until I get a completely new computer, which I'm not going to do for a couple more years at least.)

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha How big are small enough numbers? I dunno, I haven't done the calculation. Perhaps around 256? Maybe more. Originally Posted By: Niemand . . . in the bad case (Windows [2]), uses ~ 14*10^N nodes to read N digit numbers It uses ~7 nodes per number checked (plus a small constant number), so if you only wanted to accept numbers in [0,99], it would take a maximum of ~700 nodes, but fewer if it found a match. Ishad Nha's method would take around 80 nodes, I think, but would use two prompts and require the user to use leading zeros for one digit numbers. (In the Macintosh case, my method would be able to handle this range of numbers in a maximum of less than 50 nodes, if my quick mental math is correct.) The method of brute-force checking numbers sequentially will only be faster than the digit by digit method if there are ~5 or fewer numbers in the acceptable range. Finally, Ishad Nha's method cannot (as written above) handle negative numbers. I don't think that we're covering any new ideas at this point. Reading the character buffer is always the fastest method. Otherwise, reading digit by digit is computationally cheap but annoying for the user, whereas checking numbers sequentially is potentially computationally expensive but convenient for the user. I would conclude: Use the latter if numbers are small and you know you have nodes to burn; use the former if you find you have to.

Yes, it's a tradeoff. Your method looks like it accepts N digit numbers using N requests to the user for single digits and ~ 39*N nodes. It's relatively lightweight in terms of code use but much more of a bother to the user. My method allows the user to type out the entire number, once, and uses, in the good case (Mac OS), ~ 14*n nodes [1], where n is the number of characters entered by the user, and in the bad case (Windows [2]), uses ~ 14*10^N nodes to read N digit numbers. This is less annoying from the user, and if my figuring is correct, cheaper computationally in the good case, but far worse computationally in the bad case. Since the method is already a hybrid, if one were really hurting for nodes, your method could be substituted for my Windows fall-back code, with the helpful side-effect of punishing users of inferior computers . [1]: The reader may note that 14*6 is significantly smaller than the upper bound of 500 I claim in the notes for the code on the Blades Forge. I know I chose that bound to be an overestimate, but I'm not sure why it's so much higher than what I get now. Maybe I made a mistake either then or now, but I don't know which. [2]: For technical reasons, that I won't go into here, it appears to be impossible to apply the clever trick which makes the Macintosh code so efficient when running on Windows.

If you want to send me a bug report I'll be happy to take your findings into account. My rushing to get it (sort of) done for the contest deadline lead to a lot of the code being somewhat less than bullet-proof.

I've been meaning for some time to get my recent contest entry tidied up and released publicly, and to do so I could use the help of a few testers. The scenario is short, but I may need testers to play through it a large number of times as it likely contains subtle scripting bugs that could take me several iterations to excise. From those interested in helping I'll need the usual information: Name to appear in the credits, an email address (from persons with whom I have not exchanged email before), and computing platform information. Having at least one tester running Mac OS X on PowerPC hardware could be a good thing for completeness, but isn't strictly necessary.

BUMP. I request and require increased quantities of judging.

So, uh, I didn't miss anything?

As indicated on the calendar, I will not be able to make that time. (Unfortunately I have to help out with filming for a sort of project, and that Saturday and Sunday are the days when my group has access to both a camera and a control room.)

He's going to influence the party to make decisions quickly and correctly?

Quote: It must be something to do with copying and pasting from Photoshop to Graphic Adjustor. There used to be problems like this, which happened for this reason, because some programs didn't properly set the bounding rectangle of the copied image, but I changed Graphic Adjuster to always reset the rectangle when pasting, so it had seemed to be taken care of. You are using the latest version (2.0.4, I think), right? If you want you can send me a copy of a cmg file with a graphic that has this problem, and I can try to figure out what's going on with it. I can't guarantee speedy turn around, however, since work and school are keeping me rather busy.

That doesn't necessarily sound like Photoshop's fault. One common way that such a thing happens is if graphics are saved using a lossy format (jpeg, usually), which turns some of the white background pixels slightly off-white. The game only masks out perfectly white pixels, so one can end up with a mess. I can imagine that there are a lot of ways that incautious use of drawing tools in a paint program could also introduce pixels which look white but aren't exactly. I'm not quite sure how this is happening in your situation; could you maybe elaborate on a (preferably short) sequence of steps that leads to the problem you're seeing.

As a contestant myself (and one whose entry, as submitted, is not very polished), I say that the entries should be judged as submitted. This is what we were all, I think, expecting and it gives a reasonable approximation of fairness. I would certainly encourage all contestants to polish up their work so that the final version shared with the community is as good as possible. This is certainly what I intend to do.

Quote: Can't I modify something with a hex editor? Theoretically, probably. Discussion of such techniques is, however, not permitted on these forums due to its obvious applications for stealing games. There might be ways to mitigate your problems through less frowned-upon approaches, such as modifying your game's item definitions scripts to decrease all of the item weights. You might look in the Avernum Series forum for more information.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Physicist / neurosurgeon / test pilot / rock star. Does your physicist/test piloting involve adventuring in the eighth dimension? My job as a (student) physicist, involves remaining firmly in our standard set of four dimensions, and typing on a computer a lot. I do get to program computers which are at the south pole, though.

Quote: I honestly do not think I am asking for a lot if the DRM is so minimal it can be considered no DRM by some anyway. If it is that trivial then simply do away with it altogether. You will not be any worse off, and Jeff would gain potentially more customers. Seems like a win-win situation to me. This does not seem likely, for the reason Alorael described above: Paying requires some effort, and were there no DRM at all, the path of least resistance would be to use the game without paying. Some people would still want to do the right thing and pay, but I doubt that there would be more of them than people who just pay now.

Okay, I should have explained more clearly. What I meant was that as far as the script calls are concerned, being in combat overrides being in town, so the two calls results are mutually exclusive. Alternatively, the calls should be interpreted as (is_town()==1) => (in town but not in combat and (is_combat()==1) => (in town and in combat). If, however, the item isn't dropping, you have something else stranger going on.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that !(is_town() && is_combat()), and your creature is likely being killed in combat mode?

It sounds like you might be having color profile issues. Try opening the image with ColorSnyc Utility, and applying a different color profile (like Generic RGB), then saving, copying and pasting. That might help.

1. Niemand 2. 22 3. Wisconsin at the moment. I may soon move the not-particularly-stellar state of Illinois. 4. Green, preferably fairly dark. 5. One cheap landline phone and two identical cheap cell phones. Unfortunately, I only have one battery for the cell phones, so I just use the newer one, which was literally purchased for the battery it contains. 7. Philosophers have debated this question for literally thousands of years. The classical answer is that question 6 ceased to exist because it possessed insufficient will, or drive, to continue. More recently, new viewpoints on the problem have emerged, and I tend to side with the argument made by clinics (attributed to Elberward P. Branwait, specifically), that question 6 does in fact exist, but that it's mechanism for doing so is nonexistence. This leads naturally to a theory which extremely elegantly encompasses all states of existence and nonexistence by showing how each is constructed from the other. 8. To a period where I can learn the techniques to build more time machines, of course. If such a time period exists solely through nonexistence I might be persuaded to settle for dinosaurs. 9. I would be exceedingly grouchy and choose to use the single letter j. I would then complain bitterly and ceaselessly. This being in spite of the fact that my present PDN was a completely arbitrary choice totally devoid of specific meaning then or now. 10. If the change were to be temporary, a house cat. They seem to be able to achieve levels of comfort that other creatures can scarcely imagine. 11. Pirate nephilim. (As is doubly obvious.) Particularly after answering question 7, I feel the need to conduct another Quiz of Knowledge.