Niemand

I rather doubt that everyone here has found my absence greatly noticeable, but I had. It seems there have been some changes, much to my bewilderment. (Oddly, what really gave me pause was a new member number. 5576 -> 5567 -> 3580. It seems I was more attached to that old set of consecutive digits than I had ever before bothered to think.) Anyway, now that I'm here again, I guess I have a few threads to catch up on reading.

1. Scientific Linux (used to be RHEL) 2. The sysadmins keep installing it on the work computers 3. Generic unix compatibility. It's really nice that stuff just works essentially uniformly across the Macs that most of us in my workgroup use for personal computers, the linux severs, the linux cluster nodes, and even the FreeBSD machines that certain of my colleagues insist on using. The few Windows machines are the weird, incompatible ones that don't run any of the software. 4. I'm very adapted to working on a Mac, and so from my point of view there's no suitable graphical software on Linux for almost any task. I stay inside the command line environment on the linux machines, and it's fine for the work I need to do, but I mostly view and edit my files on my own non-Linux machine. 5. I probably wouldn't notice the difference, as I'd guess that we would just use some BSD variant on our work machines, and I already use Mac OS on my own machines (and hey, that's just a BSD variant too.)

Originally Posted By: Rehctawthgin I think they're not on the docs. Or maybe I skipped them... Can't tell which, just inform me if it is actually at the docs... This stuff is covered in various of the sections of Chapter 2.8 in the Docs. For simple tasks like simple dialogue, giving and ending quests, message boxes that just display some task without asking the player to make a choice (so they offer only one option, like 'OK') can all be done without needing variables. Probably the first thing for which you'll want to use variables is a message box with more than one choice, where what the game does needs to depend on what the player chooses. However, as Enraged Slith points out, once you want to do more complex things and look at how other peoples' script do them you'll mostly know when you need variables. Until then there's no need to worry about them. If you're really keen on learning how to use variables, I would recommend studying the door script ('door.txt'). You already know how doors behave form playing the game, I'm sure, so be reading that script you can find out how the code works to create that behavior.

Nikki covered most of the high points, but it's worth noting that in Avernumscript all of the variables are declared (created) following the 'variables' statement (third line in your example town script) and nowhere else, and that on each line where variables are declared the first word is the kind of variables being declared. In your example, you can see that the two lines begin with 'int' and 'short', which mean the same thing, namely that the variables will be able to hold integers. The other kind of variable in Avernumscript is 'string' which holds a chunk of text, but most variables are integers.

It isn't completely clear what you're trying to do. When using set_char_status(), the third argument, referred to as 'how_much' in the documentation, controls how much f that status is put on the target character. You mention, however, that you are trying to make a dagger, and if you're trying to make a weapon which causes one or more effects on the characters struck with it, you cannot use set_char_status(). Instead, when defining the item type you can set the properties it_ability_1 through it_ability_4 and it_ability_str_1 through it_ability_str_4. it_ability_n controls a special property that the item can have, and it_ability_str_n controls how strong that property is. For example, to make a dagger which poisons the target, you would add ability 72 ("Does extra poison damage") to the item's definition, and set the corresponding ability strength to a value of 1 or more.

I run BOINC on my laptop to do something useful with the spare cycles and to keep my hands from freezing at work. I contribute to the Einstein@Home project because I think that detecting gravitational waves would be a great step forward for physics, and in the meantime finding pulsars is pretty cool too. Judging by the name for my computer's current work unit, it's crunching through data from the Fermi LAT, which is fun since I used to work on a gamma-ray project (although a ground based one). Since finding out my RLN is generally a trivial exercise anyway: Stats Link I've haven't been making much progress lately because I've been needing my CPU for my own work, but maybe this discussion will remind me to leave BOINC running over night a bit more frequently.

Yes, if you look at the front page down near the bottom you'll see that time ceased passing at Shadow Vale on the first of July, 2011. It made me rather sad, but there was no getting around the fact that we just weren't using the forum. Time lies frozen there. It always Then. It's never Now. So keep posting to the boards here, fill them with warmth and urgency, and keep them Now.

Originally Posted By: Arancaytar Anyway, it seems the more popular medium for some unfathomable reason is AOL. Quite literally network effects: Once a few more spiderwebbers used AIM than other services the best way to chat with spiderwebbers was AIM, so more people got AIM accounts. This is what happened for me. I only started using IRC because we use it at work for both intra- and inter-office communication.

The thing about memory is a red herring, I think. You're on Windows right? An error 11 while saving means that the game couldn't open a temporary file to write out the scenario data. Make sure that you have write permission for the directory where your scenario is located, and that there isn't another file in the way of the temporary file being written (I think the name it tires to use is scenario_name.bat instead of sceanrio_name.bas.)

I'm not certain whether that means you found it or not, but in case not it's worth noting that you have to download the old but official editor from the Spiderweb site to get the documentation. We, uh, haven't gotten around to distributing it with the 3D Editor yet. Sorry about that.

That's the script specific to that town. Section 2.10 of the editor documentation covers this, but here's a summary: The town script contains the code for all of the town's special encounters. Initialization code that does things like setting characters' names also goes there (in the INIT_STATE), as does any code that the game needs to run each turn that the party is in that town (in the START_STATE). The best way to learn how it works is to pick out a town from an existing scenario (preferably one that isn't too complicated) and read through the script and see how the parts of it match up with what you see the game do when you play through that town. "t0Fort Talrus.txt" in Valley of Dying Things is a reasonable example.

There is a loud clatter as Niemand falls through the beckoning beacon along with a number of loose items: a halberd, a backpack, some assorted short pieces of PVC pipe, a brick that appears to have been partially eaten by something, and a lantern. By luck no one is stabbed or brained. Niemand gathers up his things and pulls a folder out of the backpack. Niemand: Oh good, I was hoping Slarty would lead me to where everyone else was. Anyway, since it took me a while to get these photocopied, so we'd best get started right away. He begins taking papers out of the folder and handing them out to everyone nearby. Despite the mention of photocopying, no two of the pages appear to be alike. "If a man and a camel are fined $28 for failure to salute the city hall. . . " "You are being persecuted for your belief in the Second Coming of the Great Scurvy Epidemic . . . " "Which drapery? (The tower is eleven stories tall.)" "During your monthly blimp-attack drill, you notice that morale is not at acceptable levels. . . " Dikiyoba looks skeptically at Niemand. Dikiyoba: You know that you still haven't graded the last one of these, right? Niemand: I don't see what difference that could possibly make. Anyway, I'll start grading this one five minutes ago, so it doesn't really matter if you work together on it. Niemand moves to find a place to sit down, stepping over Tyranicus Niemand: By the way, Slarty, are you sure that portal thing of yours is working correctly? I'm fairly certain that it's turned me into a mirror image of myself.

I too would be happy to help test. niemandcw<at>gmail<dot>com Mac OS X I can of course convert the necessary files, and also send them back to you if that would be useful.

I think one could see an analogy between health care and higher education in the U.S.: In both cases that quality of what is available is generally quite good, there's a lot of it, and we've also come to expect to pay a lot for it. One could go on to hypothesize a mentality with a built-in assumption that for something important to be happening a lot of money has to be moving around too.

Seems like the right thing to do to me. I can't fathom why the difference would have ever been there.

Quote: The ones who really seem to suffer from this are professional academics: a tenured professor only makes somewhere in the area of $100,000 to $150,000. This isn't exactly below the poverty line, but that's after roughly a decade of costly post-secondary education, at least a few years at a lower salary, and that's if you get tenure and a full professorship at all. This isn't exactly the case (the 'roughly a decade part'): I'm not sure how it goes in other fields, but from what I've seen students in the sciences get a (modest) salary while in graduate school, and their tuitions come out of their advisors' budgets. So, while one isn't exactly accumulating wealth, one isn't going further into debt, either. In my case, now that I've been saving for a few years, I have enough that I'll be able to pay off my student loans from undergrad before any interest accrues.

Originally Posted By: Iffy Well. I might as drop my upcoming scenario that's ~80% finished. Ceasing work is never the answer. Get back to designing! Speed-O-Fie Hyper v2.1: It's great to hear of another designer at work; I can't wait to see the finished product.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Tuition fees in the States are insane. Originally Posted By: Tyranicus I can't speak for other states, but the in-state rate for public universities in Pennsylvania is a little more than $8,000 per annum. This is just tuition and various and sundry fees though. Housing, food, books, etc will add considerably more to this amount. I don't remember the Wisconsin in-state tuition cost, but I think it's similar, and I believe that this is fairly typical of a lot of state schools. This is in contrast to where I went to undergrad, where the tuition was ~$40000 per year while I was there, and has risen to nearly $60000 in the last four or five years. It so happens that my brother is now a student there, and between reports of the ridiculous cost increases and anecdotes about the current student body, I'm concerned that they are well on their way to making the school too expensive for intelligent students, and instead simply collecting students with rich parents. It's a good school, but it isn't good enough (and isn't improving enough) to be able to claim that this kind of expense is justified.

Glancing at Avadon and BoA, it looks like the difference is mostly more and higher quality graphics. (Avadon has 92 MB of png graphics, while BoA has less than 6.8 MB of PICT graphics.) Sounds are also a part of it, and follow a similar pattern.

Just making a universal binary is easy. Making it actually operate correctly may be more difficult than I had thought. I'm hoping that at least effort can be shared between the character editor and the game proper.

Jerakeen: I haven't been able to reproduce that bug yet, but I am working on it. Technical details for anyone who cares: The existing version of the program refuses to let me open any of the savefiles I have around for testing (I think that their file type codes may be missing). I've fixed the file loading filter to be more liberal, and while I was at it I've made the program a universal binary to get it working on OS 10.7 and up. Unfortunately, that has exposed the fact that when running as an Intel binary the program needs to do a lot of byte swapping. . . that it currently doesn't do. So there's going to be a bit of real work involved before I can even figure out what the original bug is.

I had totally forgotten about that. It still seems to work on my 10.6.8 system, but I can't test on 10.7 or 10.8.

Originally Posted By: tridash Possible Interface (i guess i should really look at the apple interface guidelines): by default resizing window changes number of columns, icon size fixed. if menu option checked resizing window changes size of icons, number of columns fixed. cmd + and cmd - increase/decrease icons sizes and changes number of columns so they fit in the window I'd been envisioning a simpler system, which just switches automatically between two behaviors: First, we give the window a minimum width, equal to the current width. Starting from the minimum width, increasing the window width allows the icons to grow wider (and proportionally taller) while maintaining the number of columns. This continues until the icons have reached their full, original size, at which point they stop growing and the number of columns is allowed to increase.

I assure you that it had much more to do with my advisor coming around and saying things like "So, how is your analysis coming?". (And I think we can let Tridash off of the hook, because he's been giving the Windows side of things attention that has been desperately needed for years.)

This is looking absolutely great Tridash! Thanks for all of the hard work. Sorry I've been totally useless for the last couple of months; I had a big bi-annual work meeting a couple of weeks ago which necessitated a big push to get stuff ready. Now that I have some breathing room I hope to pick up my activities around here. (Of course I told myself I'd start last week, and then I spent all of my spare time rewriting a piece of software for work.) At the moment all of this work is still in the Windows multi-window branch, right? How close would you say we are to being able to merge it to the trunk, slap a version number on it, and call it a release? (I'd really like to be able to give the Windows version better treatment on my downloads page.)