Niemand

I assume, you mean Snow Leopard, since it has already superseded Leopard? I never really had any issues besides the window ordering bug, which still remains (I don't consider the various hackish bits of software I had breaking to be the OS's fault, and most people don't install many such things in the first place), and I've heard very few stories of any sort of actual problems. I'd say that if you feel like upgrading, go ahead; there shouldn't be anything to be overly worried about.

Maybe I was interpreting 'idling' the wrong way; according to my thinking and usage that usually corresponds to having at least 10 graphical processes running (leading to about 15% at idle on my much newer machine), also, I could have sworn he'd said 20%-30%, not 30%-50% (as he in fact did). It might be worthwhile to watch Activity Monitor a bit and figure out which applications are taking up the processing time and whether their actually worth keeping open.

Quote: It's about $45 for a 1GB card That's really not a horrible price, I'd say; a little on the high side for a relatively small chip, but as you say it's a bit old. Quote: Also, my processor is kind of slow. I idle with 30-50% used out of 1.25GHz. When I actually do stuff, it's not uncommon for the processor to spike at 100% Both of these things are fairly normal, in particular the going to 100% temporarily is a relatively good thing: When you want something done, you want the computer to use all available resources to get it done right now. Ideally, any task should utilize the processor to full capacity, but for a very short time. Obviously as the computer is somewhat old, so the width of the spike is big enough to notice. Personally, I would recommend that you go for the RAM, but not bother about anything else. The RAM is relatively cheap, easy to install, and will let you do more things with the computer you've got. Replacing the logic board would be costly (glancing around, it looks like about $500 for the part), significantly more difficult (if you install it yourself, more expensive if you pay a repair shop to do it), and would be like upgrading your old computer to a slightly newer, but still thoroughly out-of-date model. So, if you can hang on with what you have until you can get a totally new one, I'd say do that. I followed almost the same pattern that you have except that I got my PowerBook G4 about a year later, and ended up getting a Macbook Pro about a year and a half ago when I went off to grad school.

No, that way would be painful and ugly, giving a flood of information to be waded through, and simultaneously poor granularity. There's a reason modern debuggers have a feature for this exact purpose.

A better way to do this would be for someone (a developer) to run the program under the debugger with a watchpoint set on that variable.

To your first question, I have never had such problems with the Mac version, although I don't think most people have with the WIndows version either. I'm afraid that I don't have the experience to answer the second question.

How's this? I'm not entirely sure I'm happy with the frame timings (some of your frames are really text heavy), but it's already over 12 seconds long as it is. Also: Hooray for GifBuilder! It's UI may be terrible, but it gets the job done pretty well. Also, Quicksilver, for getting me out of the ugly spot of 'Oh, crud, those frames are bmps, not gifs', with a single command.

I'll have easily finished playing the scenarios by this weekend, that's no issue. (And as Salmon noted I can just not read any reviews sent to me. I've been avoiding the ones on the CSR for months now, and can continue to do so. As to the discussion time this weekend: Given the lack of a time zone specification, that could be almost any time. I'm assuming that Salmon meant Pacific U.S. time, which will probably work for me (I think that would make it 8 my time), depending on whether I meet with people to do homework that day and how long we keep working if I do. At the very worst I shouldn't be more than a bit late. With regard to a small number of judges: There are only three contestants, so we very much do not need a large number of judges. I see no reason to turn away anyone who volunteered to help with it, but neither do we need desperately to seek them out.

I would prefer a discussion among the judges, possibly to at that time determine how to award or assign rankings. With only three entries a rigid ranking doesn't necessarily seem required, and we had repeatedly discussed before making this contest less formal.

Quote: BMP graphic sheets for any scenario that has solely megs These would be fairly simple to generate if you can send me/direct me to these scenarios. I looked in the current version of your archive, but all of the .meg files in it that I checked seemed to be ruined, and in addition I did not, at a glance, see any scenarios for which there was a .meg but no .bmp. Also, an hour? It took my machine only 16 seconds to re-compress to either zip or gzipped tar format with the system already busy; either you could use a newer computer or 7-zip is seriously slow! ( )

Am I correct that the list of entries is The Eternal, Incorruptible, and Turn That Frown Upside-down?

Well, I for one have not looked at any of the entries yet, as I was waiting for there to be some organization to the judging process. I guess that was wishful thinking on my part. So, I'll get down to playing through them and taking some notes.

I would like to argue that nuclear bombs are a virus which does have the potential to kill all of humankind (along with anything else on Earth that doesn't live at an undersea thermal vent). Nuclear bombs, obviously, cannot reproduce by themselves. However, merely with their presence nuclear bombs cause humans to construct additional bombs, in much the same way that viruses cause cells to construct additional viruses. Interestingly, if we extend the metaphor of bombs as an infection of human society and take countries to be the analogue of cells, we see that unlike viruses, which cause they cell they enter to build viruses, bombs cause countries adjacent to those directly infected to build bombs. Also, no carbon-based virus will ever rival the destructive power of serious nuclear devices. Nuclear bombs with yields in excess of 10^40 Joules not only exist, but are common. The fact that they happen to weigh at least several solar masses and take millions or billions of years to arm is irrelevant.

It's useful directly if you know you're writing a script for a creature that will be on the party's side, or a terrain that you know will be a tool for the dungeon boss. . . Of course you can just decide dynamically which to use depending on the current creature's attitude toward the party. Code: //set i to the nearest character friendly to meif(get_attitude(ME) == 3) i = get_nearest_good_char(radius);else i = get_nearest_evil_char(radius); This would still run into trouble if you need to have both hostile types A and B in play. In that case, you probably just want to write your own search loop. (I always write my own loop anyway, since I pretty much always want to impose additional conditions on the character I select.)

The editor uses the games graphic files for its look-and-feel. Why on earth would you alter them? The blue border and title bar on the dialog window are due to the appearance settings for Windows as I would imagine you have noticed all your windows look on Windows look that way with the default blue Luna theme. Fixing the window sizes does seem important, but doing the job right might require detecting what OS version or even what theme are in use, since I think it may work correctly as it's currently coded for older versions of Windows, and might look correct on Windows XP set to appear like Windows 98/2000 as well.

Case sensitive matching is your friend for such tasks.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel So, there are three possible methods, not including hidden groups (because this is, in fact, a custom summoning spell). Though... you can resurrect monsters, right? So a hidden group could be possible if the location it appears on is a constant; but I was going to randomly select a location, so that doesn't work. This would necessarily require a constant location as much as a constant creature type; you can always relocate the creature somewhere else after you reveal it, but the only creature you'll be able to reveal will be the type you place in the editor. Also, you'll only be able to have one of it, which might or might not be appropriate. Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: Niemand I think that you can work around this by determining the first unused summoned creature slot before doing the summon, to know what number it will end up with when summoned; I seem to recall that's what other designers have done in the past. So, how is this done? Looping through characters starting at 6 until char_ok() returns false? Or something else? You don't want to start at 6, but instead at the lowest number (86) that a summoned creature can have. Numbers [6,85] can only be creatures placed in the editor, so even if you find an empty space in the range it won't be the one the game chooses for your summon. See "How Characters Are Identified" in section 2.8 of the Editor Docs. Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: Niemand (Another method, although not one I'd recommend depending on, as it can be flaky unless you're very careful, is simply checking what creature is on the space where you placed the summon after you do the summon. This will go badly wrong if for any reason the game decided to place the summoned creature on a slightly different space than the one you specified, but is otherwise simple.) But wait... if you tell the game to spawn a creature on (x,y), it will be spawned on (x,y), right? (If all goes well, it'll also be guaranteed that there's no creature on the randomly selected location.) If you are very careful you can ensure that the space is clear before you request the summon, and so it will be placed on that space, but it's easy to make mistakes. For instance, since there are no calls to check whether a given floor type is passable*, you'll need to check the floor type 'manually' to make sure you can place a creature on it. *This just gave me an idea that I'm now itching to implement. Sadly, it will have to wait until after classes and work.

I agree that hidden groups are the answer, if and only if the creatures you want and the places where you want them are constant. This won't help you if you want to do something like a custom summoning spell, where the type and location of the creatures depend on parameters not known until runtime. If that is the case, more advanced methods are needed. (Another method, although not one I'd recommend depending on, as it can be flaky unless you're very careful, is simply checking what creature is on the space where you placed the summon after you do the summon. This will go badly wrong if for any reason the game decided to place the summoned creature on a slightly different space than the one you specified, but is otherwise simple.)

I'm greatly annoyed when people insist on putting the integration measure right after the integral sign, rather than after the rest of the integrand. I can see that this method has merits, but it is less pleasing to my eye, and when the people who use it then follow it up with poor use of parentheses it can be impossible to tell how much of the rest of the expression is the integrand and what belongs to other terms outside the integral. I am also (rather more pointlessly pedantically) annoyed when people say 'parenthese' when they mean 'parenthesis'.

Quote: f I'm spawning a creature, there's some way of getting its number for further calls, right? Ha, ha, ha; no. I think that you can work around this by determining the first unused summoned creature slot before doing the summon, to know what number it will end up with when summoned; I seem to recall that's what other designers have done in the past. Quote: Also, if you give a creature an item in the editor, does it count as part of their inventory, or is it just something they might drop? For example, if I give a wand in the editor, will it (possibly) use it? I think so, but I'm really not sure. You might just have to run some (a lot) of tests.

A lot of it apparently has to do with the fact that the game needs to unload and load scripts to do the move, including needing to unload the script which it is running. It's not that it's an impossible task, but it's annoying, and a lot of important details might change if the call were allowed to be used in more complicated ways. My understanding is that Jeff restricted its usage to minimize the trouble he would have with implementing it.

On average? Probably. Absolutely? I doubt it, as almost all of Alaska is north of England; compare Climate of England with Climate of Alaska.

Is the state executed by the party stepping into a special encounter rectangle? (move_to_new_town() won't do anything otherwise). Or, have you tried having it print out the value of choice right after you set it (print_num(choice)? At a glance your code looks correct to me, but you might want to make sure that the value that you're getting is the one you expect.

I read one book by Dan Brown (Digital Fortress). I hated it. I do not intend to read anything he writes, ever again, having confirmed my suspicion that it was trash.

When I was going to go to the grocery store this afternoon, I got as far as backing my car out of its space before realizing that I had forgotten to bring my grocery bags. On putting the car back to go get the bags, I discovered that I had disturbed a rodent who had built a nest in the space where the front of my car hung over the curb. When I pulled the car back in, it ran and hid under it. I brought back my camera along with the bags, and was able to get some pictures of it while in the process of chasing it out from under the car. After that, it hid in its nest, secure in the knowledge that if it couldn't see anyone, no one could see it.