Jump to content

Niemand

Moderator
  • Posts

    2,138
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Niemand

  1. Originally Posted By: Alorael 1. Not all drugs affect the brain. Or nerves in general. 2. A compound could bind to receptors anywhere on the receptor, or it could bind to the neurotransmitters themselves. And consider the relative size of a molecule and a receptor. Very definitely. In case it wasn't clear, I was merely attempting to address the narrow case of drugs which interact with receptor mechanisms in the brain, since that was what Fractal chose to comment on. Originally Posted By: Alorael Remember that applauding hard work results in more hard work, but applauding achievements results in less hard work. While I realize it isn't what you mean[^1], it sounds like your goal is to maximize wasted labor. [^1]: I now expect you to maintain that this is, in fact, exactly what you meant.
  2. Quote: Strange how for a drug to work, our brain must have receptors for it, implying that every drug in the world is also in our brain. I'd say you're thinking about it backwards. The brain contains various receptors, so any chemical which binds to one or more of those receptors can act as a drug. There can be numerous chemicals which bind to any given receptor, usually because they share common components (side-groups and whatnot); each receptor exists in the body because one or more chemicals that the body uses binds to it, but we can also find additional chemicals which will also do so, and use them to manipulate the systems which hinge on those receptors.
  3. No, that's still not it. Both use the same system: A fixed length quantity of storage (an array) is allocated statically, in which a variable length (C style) string is placed. Obviously, then, the length of this string must not be allowed to exceed the size of the array, as that would be a buffer overrun, which C unfortunately makes it very easy to blunder into.
  4. Quote: . . . dynamic arrays everywhere, that is why you have the strlens everywhere It's not a terribly important point, but no. C strings are arrays of characters whether allocated statically (on the stack) or dynamically (on the heap). They have no knowledge of their own length, so you have no choice but to use strlen() (which does nothing but march along from the pointer it's given, looking for a NUL, and counting how many steps it takes). This is the case even if the string is stored in a statically allocated array of fixed size, since the string can always be shorter than the array it lives in.
  5. It is, in fact, strictly forbidden under ITAR policies to export graduate level material on amphibians from the United States. Attempting to contact amphibian researchers directly will likely prompt the CIA to investigate you.
  6. Quote: I think the dynamic arrays of BoE are superior to the fixed-length everything of BoA. My point was that I hadn't noticed any code of that style in BoE. If it's there, good, as for cases like this it holds a lot of advantages. Quote: My understanding is that a creature can call dialog from any town in BoE, this is done solely by his personality number. Any town can have its dialog called here. Okay, then you have to do this the hard way, the way I mentioned is a bit too restricted. You could try to do it as you suggest, randomly accessing towns as needed. Personally, I'd prefer not to do this, as you would have to calculate the right places to jump to to read, and be careful about returning to where you were. My preference would be to just put in the necessary dynamic structures, load the whole thing, so as to have it all at my fingertips while writing the output. An idea occurs to me: The data structures for BoE have been significantly overhauled, and I wonder if we could make use of them as a drop-in replacement for the current reading code and storage data structures in the BoA editor. It might help us avoid some wheel-reinvention. @Celtic Minstrel: Can you comment on the merits of that train of thought? Are the new BoE data structures mature enough that we would want to use them? Are things modular enough that we could import that code easily (like via an svn external definition)? While I know there's a new generation of data structures, is the reading code actually new and improved, and in particular would it be any better suited to the purpose of loading the whole scenario at once than what we have?
  7. Monroe will be keeping his longer arm held up to optimize his circulation. It's an interesting strategy, to say the least. The most effective way to mess up my schedule would be to ensure that I get the job I'm applying for. I'll be quite impressed if Cthulhu has the connections to pull that off, outside of business hours, no less.
  8. Quote: I'll say that the sessions are forced to be in the time window of 6 PM CDT to 12 PM CDT That timing is (perhaps unfortunately) just right for me. If there are still too many people around when it comes time to begin, I wouldn't mind bowing out overly much, given that I have no experience in these things anyway. Until the time does come to begin, we can engage in a cloak-and-dagger struggle to force enough others out to ensure that we get in. To get the ball rolling, I suggest attempting to get Nayld grounded again, and visiting the public libraries near Enraged Slith and pilfering all of their Asimov texts.
  9. To the best of my knowledge this problem is pretty fundamental to BoE as well. If you want to solve the specific problem that interests you, you're going to have to fix it, at least to a degree. I assume that in BoE it's legal for dialogue in a town to refer to dialog nodes in a later town. Then, the only way to handle the problem correctly is to read all BoE dialogue data into memory, transforming it into whatever intermediate representation is convenient, and only then generate all town dialogue scripts, placing into each script all nodes which are necessary, either because they belonged to that town originally, or because they were copied. It would still be possible to hit the 200 node ceiling, at that point there's nothing you could do but abort the generation of that dialogue script and issue an error message. As long as, within a given town, dialogue can only begin at dialogue nodes which actually belong to that town, you can avoid needing to defer generation of any town data besides the dialogue script. If the above assumption holds, when writing a town dialogue script you would preserve the numbers of all nodes original to that town, correcting only the numbers of those which are copied from other towns (aside: it would be very useful for maintainability that when writing out a node, you write out a comment indicating any other nodes in other files which are duplicates), so that any nodes referred to in the town's town or creature data (essentially, where ever it is that BoE stores what node is used when the party talks to a given creature) would never need to be corrected. The most important question to ask, I would argue, is whether you consider this a worthwhile use of your time. It can certainly be done, but is anyone ever going to use it? There's very little interest in the community in porting BoE scenarios (let's not delude ourselves: it's a very small community to begin with), and there are going to be plenty of other details that really don't port well that will not be fixable in any way, or that are absurdly hard to fix (like the totally different collections of spells, or conveyor belts).
  10. Quote: Whatever happened with the last 24-Hour contest? Who won? I'm, uh, working on that. Where by 'working on' I mean I have a have finished web page and set of reviews. I need to get that finished up, if for no other reason than so I can regale everyone with my play-through accounts.
  11. To echo Cthulhu, I am greatly tempted to join in, but am not sure about timing, as I've had to miss spectating a lot of the sessions of other games due to being at work. I'm definitely rather curious to see the handling of an Asimov based setting, particularly since Asimov's own stories in that setting had (or at least depicted directly) relatively small amounts of the sort of mayhem that roleplaying game characters seem to generate and thrive on. (Such mayhem would fit right in in a Doc Smith setting, it occurs to me. I don't think I'd want to try any game implementation of zero-g space-axe combat, though.)
  12. Quote: . . . to ensure an EigenParty. . . Rather, to ensure that the party spans the space?
  13. Quote: Dialog is a potential problem because BoA dialog can only be called from the dialog script of the current town. What do you mean? What you've written is not correct; dialogue can only be contained in the dialogue script, but can be (in fact must be) initiated from other scripts. Do you mean that there's a problem accessing dialogue chains across towns? This is certainly true, and the only solution is to duplicate the necessary nodes. Is this a problem because it is more restrictive than what BoE allowed? If so it would seem that the porting tool would need to examine the graph of talk nodes in the source town and copy all nodes to the town which references them. It would be a pain to get all of the details right, but it doesn't seem like it would actually be a fundamentally hard problem.
  14. Quote: Creature attitude Hostile Type B seems never to occur in actual practice. This is not true. Quote: It needs an image makeover, starting with its own color scheme What? It already had a perfectly color scheme which was distinct from, but analogous to, the one for Hostile Type A. I do now notice that in 2D mode, the Mac editor has a bug such that it uses Type A colors for Type B creatures, so that they appear indistinguishable. In 3D mode, however, it is handled correctly. The obvious way to fix the this is to apply the same colors used in 3D mode to 2D mode. If the Windows editor merely has the same bug/oversight, it should be fixed the same way.
  15. Quote: A question, is there a reason Jeff originally had 6 boxes? It is absolutely needed or can we have 1 window to type in and a running count of characters towards the max? Because, I suspect, he found that 6 255 character paragraphs would fit reasonably well on the game screen. And yes, it can't be altered without totally rewriting the editor's custom dialog engine; the portion of the ancient UI library it uses won't handle strings of more than 255 characters. Quote: Also, as a future enhancement can we use the built-in Mac OS X spell-check functionality for intro screens? No. See remarks on horrible ancient libraries above. The above problems, and a number of others, could be fixed by rewriting the editor to use more modern Carbon libraries or to use Cocoa, but that's a really big job, since a large fraction of the code would have to be thrown out; doing the job correctly would really involve starting essentially from scratch. I'm picking away at the edges of the problem, from time to time, trying to get pieces ready to move into position, but there's a lot to do, and I don't have time to attack it head on.
  16. Jubilation! I think I have finally vanquished bug #2 from above! It turned out that the way the bug worked was pretty subtle, as it had to do with the order in which items were drawn by Jeff's code and by the OS. The dumb part was that once I figured the details of that out, it required changing a single number in the source code (from 12 to 0) to fix it. I've glanced a bit more at bug #1, and the problem isn't exactly that one can't copy and paste, just that the editor somehow has it's own, partially private pasteboard which is used. The rest of the system can see what's in the editor's pasteboard, so you can use copy-and-paste to get data out but the editor is somehow blind to data copied from other applications, so you can't get data in (despite that being the direction one is more likely to want to go). I have a bad feeling that this has to do with internally incompatibilities which have built up inside the OS which we run into by using libraries that Apple would really prefer to have people never look at again (the editor can't even be compiled except as a 32-bit PPC binary, despite the fact that I'm working on it on a 64-bit Intel machine). @Dahak: I've sent you the latest version; thanks for taking a look at it.
  17. Originally Posted By: Dahak 1. I don't know if this was ever changed, but you cannot copy text from outside the editor and paste it into the text boxes of the editor for the 3 introduction screens. 2. The cursor for the displayed text does not line up exactly with the actual position of the text. These, or at least the first, relate to the horrible, old (and deprecated) user interface libraries the program uses. I tried to fix them a while back and was forced to admit defeat. The first one I couldn't seem to do much about because components involved are basically black boxes with very few interfaces for additional manipulation. The second seems like it should be more tractable, since it is assumedly a drawing bug in the editor itself, but my attempts to correct it either accomplished nothing or rendered everything even more appallingly broken. I might take another shot at it, though.
  18. -BUMP- I've gotten the changes implemented fully, I think, with the exception of any extension of the undo system (so use that delete key with care!). If possible I'd like to get one or two people to give the latest build a try and make sure that things work consistently after the changes. (There's a lot of ugly spaghetti code that all had to be wired up just so, and I live in the perpetual fear that I may have missed some part of it.) Interested persons would need to be on Mac OS, since I haven't yet gotten to applying any of these ideas to the Windows version. Also, as a step toward not really the future, but more like the present, the editor will no longer carry around its built-in graphics as PICT resources, but as modern PNG files. That still leaves a whole pile of other types of old style resources to be modernized, but it should be a move in the right direction.
  19. Quote: I commented out the selected instance version of draw creature, it seemed to make no difference. Don't do that, that was done that way for a reason: it allows the selected instance to show as the top of a stack of things, which is quite important for dealing with piles of items.
  20. Quote: Aren't the elements of monster sheets the same size as those of terrain sheets? Yes, they are, and your suggestion sounds like a good one. A sensible extension would then be to include similar icons for undefined items and floors (technically floor graphics are the same size as creatures and terrains, but it would look a lot better and be a lot clearer to use something sized and shaped like a floor tile). It might actually be nice not to use the games question mark shaped undefined creature graphic in any of the cases, but instead to use graphics indicating the nature of the problem a bit more directly and specifically, sort of like the Last Resort font.
  21. Quote: Do you think I should see a doctor? That depends on whether there is an actual doctor, or a picture of a doctor, somewhere close to you. If not then you should probably not see a doctor at the moment.
  22. Yes, pretty much. I suppose it could be singled out from the above list for not being a single story, but I prefer to argue that it is Shakespeare who does not belong. He's not a work of literature at all*! (*Assuming one does not subscribe to any of the various odd theories which argue that he was, in fact, a work of fiction.)
  23. Quote: Numbers printed in the squares, you can read up to 81 of them all at once, without any need to select the instances concerned one at a time. Yes, but you can't tell what they correspond to if they aren't just height values as they have traditionally been. And what is there's a creature standing on a terrain script, or on a sign? It'll just be a mess, no matter what you try to do with it, I think. Quote: Giving numbers to signs and fields enables you to keep track of how many you have left, as you are placing them. Granted it does technically let the user do that, but it's very clumsy. Unless all of them are placed in one go, the user will have to search all over to find the highest numbered existing one, or place and delete an extra, to find out the count. It isn't very elegant at all, and not, I think, worth the confusion of having all kinds of extra numbers floating around in 2D mode. Quote: My help file is pretty good at explaining "Hintbook mode", I have yet to update it for the current changes. It is found at the Variant Editor download. If the changes are for your personal version, please don't merge them into the main line of the editor that we expect to release to everyone. If you want a branch in the repository to mess around in, either make one, or ask, please.
  24. Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha (SVN log) New mode: Object Display Mode Now placed specials show which special has been placed and monsters have their type number shown., Fields and signs have their numbers printed, so you can keep track of how many have been placed. I had missed reading this before; knowing how many signs have been placed could be useful so as not to run out, but I don't think that this is a good solution for two reasons: 1) It clutters up the main terrain view and 2) The user will still have to scroll all around to look for the largest numbered sign yet placed. It might be worthwhile to think about a better way to handle this, but I don't think it's a high priority. Originally Posted By: Ishad Nha (SVN log) Hintbook mode 8 now displays colored lines around signs and fields, this is useful in porting to check for errors. This sort of defeats the basic purpose of hintbook mode, namely to make screenshots which will basically match what the player will see on the automap in the game. If I recall correctly you'v now given hintbook mode a whole set of submodes, so that the original purpose can still be fulfilled, but i think this is rapidly getting more complicated than any user will want to try to remember how to use, particularly given that there is nothing to make this portion of the user interface discoverable to people who don't already know about it (which is admittedly a problem with much of the editor, but one that we should seek to combat rather than exacerbate). Ishad Nha, which part of your changes is it that you're referring to as 'Object Display Mode'? I can't quite tell from the log message.
×
×
  • Create New...