Niemand

Quote: there might be some kind of process that involved turning frozen H2O into something that is not water that I do not know of You could bombard it with gamma-rays to photodisintigrate the atoms into different elements (the oxygen anyway, you can't really photdisinitigrate protium), or do something similar with neutrons to split nuclei or build them up into different nuclides. Aside from the fact that you would probably break up the molecules anyway, since the atoms would no longer be hydrogen and oxygen the resulting material would not be water. Transmutation of elements is really simple, just also really impractical.

Quote: I hope Jeff's new series uses something other than OpenGL. It put a sizable portion of his non-Apple clientele at a disadvantage. So he should use some other cross-platform hardware accelerated drawing system? Which doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, exist? The only alternatives I'm aware of are proprietary, single platform libraries like Core Graphics/Core Animation (which just use OpenGL anyway) and Direct 2D/Direct 3D. Alternatively, are you arguing that he should back off significantly on the complexity of his graphics, such that he doesn't need hardware accelerated drawing? As I understand it, particularly from reading reviews of Jeff's games, he has been being badgered for many years to make his games fancier graphically. In his more recent games he has been taking definite steps in that direction, resulting in some improvement in review results (although I note recent review still whine that his graphics are 'low budget' (example)) and sales. So, I argue that this doesn't seems like a viable solution, particularly given that the hardware requirements for recent games are still rather modest. I've noticed that recently (the last year, maybe two) more and more topics have cropped up in the Tech Support forums about problems people have had trying to run Spiderweb games on junk 'netbooks' that they've been lured into purchasing, almost solely, I'd guess, on the basis of very low price. I continue to be amazed at what that class of computers fails to be able to do, and frankly it looks to me like a there would be little to gain from working hard to thoroughly support such machines. It would place a lot of stringent constraints on what Jeff could have his games do, which would run counter to his attempts to change the perception of his games from being 'antiquated' looking. OpenGL should be a perfectly good basis for building a game on essentially any operating system on any reasonably capable hardware manufactured in at least the last 5 years, probably more. I really don't think that depending on it is a fundamentally bad move on Jeff's part, as whatever he chooses will leave someone unable to play his games ("What, you mean G5 won't display properly on my VT100 terminal?!") and he needs to maintain a balance between the time it takes him to prepare a game and the audience to which it will be available. EDIT: Just tested and found that Jeff already provides a DirectX-based version of at least some of his newer games (G5 being the one I was looking at) and that I can in fact play G5 using the main (assumedly OpenGL) version on my ~8 year old pc running Windows 2000, if not terribly well (which is not surprising, given it has only 25 MB of RAM left over for anything besides the OS).

With Oxygen and a spark, about the same as anything else. It's pretty darn easy (at least in our Oxygen-rich atmosphere).

Why wouldn't it be? The software claims that there are more than 134000 posts still extant; and it seems plausible that there have been around 70000 posts deleted in past cleanings.

Quote: I liked that idea of giant solar arrays in space, beaming down energy as microwaves to Earth. Has this been nixed? I assume it's innificient, but hey, it's not like we'll run out of room in space tor more arrays. I don't; think how much energy you would be spending just to lift the things up out of the gravity well. Then you have to consider the vast amount of material required to build all of the collectors. No matter how well you build them they will need some kind of regular repair or replacement. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Energy usage of the United States, P: 1.05e20 J/yr = 3.33e12 W (ref) Luminosity of the Sun, L: 3.84e26 W (ref) Distance from the Earth to the Sun, r: 1.5e11 m (ref) Best solar cell efficiency I could find mentioned: .43 The power density of solar radiation at earth is then L/(4*pi*r^2) = 1.36e3 W/m^2. The collected power density, with an efficiency of .43 is then n = 5.85e2 W/m^2, and so the required collecting area is P/n = 5.69e9 m^2. That's more than 5000 square kilometers of solar cells to collect enough power for the U.S. alone, ignoring the efficiency of transmitting (from the collector) and receiving (on the ground), and assuming that the equipment used is at least as good as the best available today, not in mass production, but as prototypes or at best small scale production. Anybody want to try to estimate how long it would take to manufacture those solar cells?

Quote: I've sometimes thought of the alpha/beta/gamma radiation vs. electromagnetic radiation distinction as being confusing before. My favorite is delta radiation or delta rays. Aside from specifically referring to secondary particles it's charmingly redundant.

The proper solution, I still believe, is to split apart the function buttons from the palette above them. This is what I did in the Mac editor, and it worked very neatly. I've tried three times now to do the same thing with the Windows code, but every time I can't get get the newly added offscreen buffer to blit to the screen properly. I can't figure out what I've done wrong, since the existing code, which works the same way as my added code, has no problems.

@Triumph: Dang, that was fast. Click to reveal.. I sure hope that this involved examining the list at least a little more, rather than the fact than the symbols for elements includes no 'j's being a fact so widely known (to everyone but me) that it was a natural first guess. Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Isn't it wonderful how programmers unconsciously use words like this? In this case it was very deliberate. Notice that it appears parenthetically, as I added it later so that there could be no ambiguity about how the the construction was done. In general, I think that I tend to use words like this in about this way in an effort to be precise, and in fact I really like such words for their specificity.

What allow? He (or Mariann or Linda) did it, I suspect, given that they linked to it from their official news page.

Quote: Also, I think the current copy/paste function that's in the Mac editor would suffice. I agree, we just need to make buttons so the user can use it. (The code should already be in the Windows version, but I really can't figure out how to rearrange the UI to change the function buttons to match the Mac version. )

Looks like you've got it there, Slarty. The only difference from my reference solution is that it looks like you have a pair of digits switched in the billionth number. Obviously there are multiple ways to construct the given set of numbers which would give different results outside the range I gave; one could, for instance, always fit a sufficiently high degree polynomial through the points. The pattern you and SoT have found is, however, the one I was looking for. Quote: The second problem is ridiculous and stupid. I do not disagree, but then really, so is the first. They're both pretty useless. Quote: Odd...there are no J-words in your list... There are not, in fact, there are no 'j's anywhere in it. The second problem was devised while stuck in a lecture hall after finishing an exam, so, as originally noted, I'm not sure if there's any way to really move toward solving it, although I was hoping somebody might think about it. (Also, the set of words in question turned out to be larger than I had hoped and suspected.) At any rate, here's a hint, as to the nature of the selection criterion: The words in the set are only those which can be constructed (by concatenation) from a much smaller set of components. That set of components is, itself, rather well known, if not in the context of spelling. If it still proves intractable, or it seems that no one's interested, I may retract the second puzzle and instead create another more along the lines of the first.

Quote: Eyedropper selects either a floor or a terrain type, according to current drawing mode, not both at once. Why? I can see that this might be useful in some situations, but is it really better than the old behavior all that often? Quote: F4 duplicates the Space shortcut, while F3 moves backwards through the drawing modes. (This may require clicking on the screen to get it properly redrawn whenever you change mode.) This is rather different than the Mac editor, and particularly if it doesn't work properly, please don't commit it just yet. For consideration, the way the Mac editor currently switches modes is: space cycles forward by one, Command+1 - Command+5 jump directly to a mode by number. Shortcomings are that I haven't gotten around to making the latter shortcuts into proper menu items, at the moment their, just caught at a low level, and there is no way to cycle back a mode. What if we combine the two schemes, so that Command/Ctrl+Number jumps directly to a mode, space cycles forward, and Shift+Space cycles backward? Quote: Alphabetical shortcut keys: removing references to selecting terrain when in floor mode and vice versa. (Why are they there in the first place anyway? You can't paste terrain when in floor mode and vice versa.) I can see this one as being better justified than the eyedropper change, and I think I'm tentatively in favor (as the old behavior was weird). Still, do you think that it's worth subtly changing part of the user interface from the way its been, probably since the first release? (Unless there's evidence to the contrary, I'd guess that that chunk of code was originally put there by Jeff.) EDIT: I really need to pay closer attention to the lower email inboxes. . . I struck the phrase above since the code's already committed, although in future it might be best not to to put stuff in that's partially broken.

Here are a pair of puzzles. 1. These are the first 21 numbers in a sequence: Click to reveal.. 1 6 7 4 5 26 27 24 25 30 31 28 29 18 19 16 17 22 23 20 21 What are the 22nd, millionth, and billionth numbers in the sequence? 2. Here is the first half of a set of words (selected according to some criteria from my /usr/share/dict/words file): Mystery Words. Which of the following words belong to the second half of this set, and which do not? Click to reveal.. overfond progress radiator rebirth refrain salamander sublime teaspoon thatch treaty unwritten usual verity whoosh The first problem can be solved with careful thought and a reasonably good calculator or just pencil and paper. The second one may not be solvable in any practical way, and even if it is, that way might require using a computer to analyze and condense the data. But, hey, I already know the answer, so that's for you to figure out.

I have accrued 7 points. Excellent.

Should each of those 'i = target;' lines be 'target = i;'? Because i'm fairly sure that target only gets assigned to in the INIT_STATE. Quote: Also, I couldn't get the call dist_to_char(i) to work properly Could you show how you tired to use it? As far as I recall that call should work, and in a pretty straightforward manner. Quote: Finally, almost all of a monster's attacks seem to only be prompted by a do_attack call. All except one... When a character moves away from a monster and the two are hostile to each other, the stationary monster always gets an attack of opportunity, regardless of what the script has to say about this. If I have a character who move away from a turret, the turret can attack my character. This is of course silly because a stationary robot turret should not get an attack of opportunity, but there's little to be done about it except to either set the turret's strength to 0 or set it to do burning damage. Unless someone has any idea what else to do about this. There is, sadly, no way known, I think, to turn this off. The best you can do is change the creature so that it will always miss or do no damage. This is why the tables in Echoes: Renegade will, in some way that is unclear upon reflection, try to strike unwary enemies during a certain fight.

Let's not get unnecessarily upset. We do have a lot of people who post about problems which arise from not realizing how limited their graphics hardware is, so Earth Empire's was not a totally unreasonable response, and he was acceptably civil. He did, admittedly, miss the point that you were trying to inform others since you understood, had already overcome your problem, and that it did not specifically stem from having too poor a graphics card. Thanks for trying to make this information available to others, as it's rare that we have a clear answer to a problem handy to provide to people who may need it.

Quote: . . . showing up so late, that there are few players left. The number of players really hasn't shrunk all that much; I'd guess maybe a factor of 2 at worst. Keep in mind that the fraction of players who will write a review is also a good deal less than one; I think the SV CSR only ever had around a dozen active reviewers, almost none of whom reviewed anything like all of the scenarios.

Quote: I find myself thinking "If what you want is a computer, get a computer." This thing, whatever it is, is not a computer. I think that I basically agree with this. No, computing isn't about typing, it's about having an adaptable tool; that is, it is a means, not an end in and of itself. It so happens that the computer has proven to be such an adaptable tool that it is typically used for all sorts of tasks which seem superficially bizarre: Why use a (very complicated) adding machine[^1] to store pictures, or send and receive messages? Devices like the iPad are aimed at people who do not need or want a highly capable adding machine, but instead want to look at pictures, read text fetched from far away, listen to music, play interactive games, and maybe do some simple composition, storing a relatively small amount of simple data that they generate. This is a very different use case from myself, my colleagues at work, and I think a lot of people around the forums here. To start with, I personally write a lot of little bits of software, just single or few use tools to get my work done. 'm constantly writing scripts that generate whitespace delimited data, which I check over in a text editor, and then turn into plots with another quick script. The point I'm getting at is that the way I use a computer involves a good deal of adapting the computer's behaviors so that I can generate and manipulate data that is often in forms that are directly meaningful only to me. It seems to me that the iPad is geared towards people who are only interested in manipulating data the can be relatively narrowly categorized into forms that are common to all such users; web-pages, pictures, music, and so on. As a result it is both possible to treat each type of data largely independently, such as with a single dedicated program, and preferable (for these users) to do so, as the mechanisms which make current computers more flexible, like hierarchical filesystems, cause confusion by adding more choice than these people have a use for. Taking this idea to an extreme, I'd guess that a lot of users have virtually no use for the ability to put both pictures and music into a single directory. Devices like the iPad do, frankly, worry me somewhat, in that I'm concerned that they will nontrivially displace the 'real' computers on which I consider myself dependent, for the simple reason that I suspect the number of people for whom such a device (suitably well refined, I don't claim the iPad's first incarnation or any other device in the immediate future is necessarily it) is really a better fit outnumber those of us who to some degree want to get our hands dirty using the computer as a for computing. However, it's not as though anything is going to happen overnight, and there are enough people who do 'serious' computing work that the capacity to do so certainly won't totally disappear, if nothing else, there has to be some way to program for iPad-like devices, given that they are not themselves suited to (and in Apple's conception do not allow) software development. [^1]: I just want to note that I'm not happy with this sentence fragment. The parenthetical portion is supposed to be optional, such that its removal would leave a correct and meaningful sentence, so I can't put the article inside it. However, the presence of the parenthetical portion necessitates a modification of the article, specifically, making it shorter. There's no good way to specify that if the parenthetical portion is omitted, an 'n' should be appended to the preceding word. Argh!

There's a paragraph about the software being purchased by the U.S. government, with subparagraphs for the Department of Defense and N.A.S.A. It's in the license for BoA, and I assume it appears in the ones for other games as well.

I like what I hear. Release something like 13-15 months seems reasonable. It won't be a huge gap, since it's only today that A6 is officially completed, so Jeff has a couple of months during which a big chunk of his audience will still be busy with a brand new game. Hopefully this means he'll have enough time not to rush anything; assumedly the new engine is heavily based on A6, being his current state-of-the-art, but it can likely benefit from tuning up and specializing to the details of the new game. Likewise, I'm hoping that the comment about improved graphics means that he'll be able to use some of the time to add substantially to his graphics assets so that the new game can have a look and feel that is truly its own.

Quote: I suppose one could just put in a button during scenario creation that would, if checked, start the scenario with a custom objects script from the Base. That sounds like a nifty idea to me; wish I'd thought of it years ago. I'll look into it.

It's not impossible, but it would require a good deal of work. To do it, one would first have to pick apart the existing AI code, which from what I recall of glancing at it is rather. . . monolithic. The next step would then be to try to implement improvements. The main thing that would be difficult about that would be to break down methods for making good combat choices into steps simple enough to be coded without having the complexity get so out of control that it's impractical to write the code or that it's overly slow for the game to run. Honestly, the first step is what's most likely to prevent anyone from making a serious start on such a thing (because it's boring), even though the second has most of the real challenge. Even if you don't yourself want to dive into the code, but you want to try to contribute to better AI, you could work on more rigorously defining rules that could actually be coded. That is to say, answering questions like (based on your suggestions above): -How should a priest determine when it's worthwhile to sacrifice itself to heal an ally. In particular, how would you identify an ally deserving of this? -When exactly is it to be considered advantageous to try to 'block the PCs in'? (This requires keeping in mind that the game doesn't view groups of characters as shapes the way the human brain does, all it has is a list of coordinates, from which it would need to determine whether the groups of allies and enemies are well enough separated that a wall could divide them.) -When exactly is one attack spell more preferable than another, given the relative costs of the spells and the target's resistances or immunities?

Quote: . . . you forgot to mention about fl_ed_which_sheet/icon, and I wondered why it doesn't show up in editor Oh well, it's working and that counts. You wound me, sir! I quite seriously considered mentioning those properties, and decided not to clutter up my post by going into such detail. I regret that I guessed wrong, and caused the very sort of confusion I had sought to avoid by omitting them.

The game has some graphics built in that aren't used by any of the default floor definitions. The ice water graphics are icons 0-3 on sheet 752. So, just write your own floor definition with the special property mentioned above and those graphics (using fl_which_sheet, fl_which_icon, and fl_anim_steps) and you'll have it.

You need to use the set_name() call from a script to set characters' names. The usual way to do this is to put it in the INIT_STATE of the town script. You can see examples of this in pretty much every scenario. EDIT: For future reference, the Blades of Avernum Editor forum is the best place to put questions about creating scenarios, as opposed to playing them, although this is mostly just an organizational thing.