Lazarus.

My favorite series to quote is probably Mass Effect. The games are full of great lines from Commander Shepard ("I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite shop on the Citadel.") But Mordin actually steals the show, and earns my award of best video game quote, with his scientist salarian song. Also many of his "nothing new to say/too busy" lines are hilarious. And favorite SMAC quote: "If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself."

If I'm thinking of the same demo disc as you are, then I think it was called "Over 1000 Games." A google search reveals that it was published by nodtronics. The info I could find about this version sounded about right, but I couldn't find a screenshot of the disc or a list of the games on it, so I'm not sure if it's the right one. I first got hooked on Exile 3 from this disc. I was like 7 at the time and had no idea how to go about registering the game, so I would just replay the demo version over and over. Except I never figured out how to beat either of the 2 available plagues. Ah good times. Edit: I went and asked my sister for a second opinion, and she thinks the disc was called "1001 Games." It sounds kind of familiar to me, and she has a ridiculous memory for detail, so that's probably it. But I couldn't find it on google, so I'll post more info if I can find the original disk.

Oh! I also use stain hacks at one point to mess with lighting. I don't think those port properly, so god knows what this will do when a mac user plays. If anyone knows how to port this let me know, otherwise this might have to be removed if it causes crashes or something for Mac users. Edit: Oh hey, Niemand posted this at blades forge. I'll have a new version of t25.txt up in a moment, for mac users. Edit2: Ok I have it ready, but don't have anywhere to upload it. I'd appreciate it if a Mac user would volunteer to repackage it for me. Let me know and I can email it.

Thanks Tyran, and I hope you aren't disappointed. The mac version has been added to the Blades Forge.

Well it's been about 4 years since I worked on this, so I figured it was about time I admit defeat, cut my losses, and ship out what I have done. So I present you with Threnody: Chapter 1. What you get is about 25 finished towns, lacking pretty much just filler dialog and some polish. The final scenario would have had about 3 more chapters and probably been 80+ towns, so this is kind of just a teaser. I didn't bother trying to give it an ending, because there was really no way to do so. I think that the Prologue and Chapter 1 are good enough to stand alone as a scenario, but just keep in mind that even if you like the scenario you're probably just going to wind up pissed off that there's no ending. Sorry. Also I didn't bother beta testing (*gulp*) so beware of typos and possible errors. If there are any glaring things that prevent you from finishing the game, let me know and I'll fix it if it's not too big of a pain. Anyways here it is: http://blades.ermarian.net/scenario/blades-of-avernum/threnody-chapter-1 (Note that I don't have a Mac version yet, but the forge requires that you include a mac file. So both downloads are just the windows version. If someone could convert it that'd be awesome.)

Oh hi, send this to me.

I'm with Alo on this one, the way I read this it looks like it's intended to allow companies to show you more of their game without actually giving it away, rather than a way to screw you out of what little demo you're already getting. I think the reason people here aren't feeling it is because they have spiderweb's demos in mind when reading this. And yes, I think this idea would suck super hard if applied to an RPG or adventure game or something similar, where you basically would have a set amount of time to experience as much as you could before the demo diminishes to nothing. But when applied to a shooter or simulator or sport game, where the attraction isn't really experiencing something once but rather doing the same thing over and over, I think it has potential.

I didn't have any problems with the auto-dialog, but there were some other issues. A lot of your intro dialogs are broken, I believe you need to set personalities in the editor to make them work properly. Also I noticed in the editor that Keria's father is supposed to appear in the manor, but he definitely didn't show up when I played. Good work overall though. I had some issues with the narrative, but I suppose I'll save those comments for a review if I get around to putting my thoughts in words.

Well the point wasn't really to demonstrate the workings of a thermostat. Anyway Thuryl is right of course; just imagine if you were to go on vacation for a week and turn off the heat while you were away. When you return you have to heat the house back up to 25 degrees or whatever temperature you previously had it set at, but obviously you saved energy in not running your heater for an entire week. The same applies when you turn it off for a single night. Edit: Well that's what I get for taking a phone call while posting. Anyway.... Yay energy balances!

If we assume that all the heat loss in your house is from conduction through the walls, then the energy lost would be directly proportional to the temperature difference between your house and the outdoors. So 14 vs 25 degrees at -30 outdoor temp would save about 20% in energy costs.(I'm not sure how accurate this is, I suppose it depends on how good the insulation is in your house and whether you leave your doors open a lot or something.) The technician doesn't know what he's talking about, because there's certainly no way that there's zero difference between 25 and 14 degrees. Edit: Actually now that I think about it I'm a bit more confident about that 20% number. I can't think of any way that your house could be losing heat that isn't dependent on temperature difference, and the difference is always going to be 20%. Edit2: Conduction not convection, although the statement still holds true. Niemand threw me off by bringing up Newton's law.

You know, you were a handful of deaths away from finishing the Arc with Tomorrow. Maybe you should just release a modified version where the few characters who survive don't, call it a tragedy, and be done with the thing.

I may stop by and see what's going on if this is taking place over winter break. Not so sure about participating though; I didn't follow the Labyrinth and I'm not familiar with the ruleset.

No, it makes sense the way it is. To paraphrase: it's difficult enough to pirate Jeff's games that people will choose to register it, but it's simple enough that you won't have to worry about signing in online every time you play or some such garbage.

Low level scenarios are a good way to solve this problem if you don't want to go the more intrusive route. Low level parties have the advantage of being more predictable, in terms of gear and stats, than high level parties that have played god knows how many scenarios filled with overpowered loot. The tradeoff is that making interesting combat for low level parties is tougher, since they have fewer available strategies. A simple breath weapon monster can wipe the floor with low level parties, so you can guess what will happen when they fight that super cool boss that's scripted to radiate fire damage and shoot ice beams. On the plus side this means you don't need to know how to script as well to write decent combat, the downside is that while you can easily make difficult combat you can't as easily make it interesting. Or you can always overhaul the party. I think everyone knows which option I'd advocate, but it's true that this isn't universally popular. If you're feeling particularly benevolent you can even give them their spells and items back at the end of the scenario, which may go some way to appeasing folks. If you wish to compromise, you can always assume that the player is going to bring in a slightly overpowered party, and balance with that in mind. One option would be to have a bunch of shops or some sort of beginning side quest to get underpowerd (or appropriately powered I guess) parties up to snuff. Or you could make them suffer it out-- that'd be fun.

I don't really know too much about the developer's program, but unfortunately I believe it would be illegal. From what I've heard Microsoft has a big say in the prices on downloadables, and they definitely aren't in the business of distributing free open source programs. Selling BoE is illegal unless you're Jeff, so that kind of rules out Xbox live. It would be kind of cool to try to bring the game to such a wide audience, but besides the potential technical difficulties (which I can't really comment on), there's the issue of the xbox controller. Exile doesn't really lend itself to play without a mouse, or at least a keyboard. Managing the inventory, casting spells, dialog-- that would all be have to be overhauled or else it'd be pretty clunky.

Originally Posted By: Dantius So you would prefer to rather have a cure for a disease than a house, a building to work in, a church, a bridge, a ? Oh, and if I use the real definition of a structure, "that which bears a load", then there goes your chair, desk, bed, car, sofa, table, and so much more. Yeah, I'll stick with engineering. Well no, obviously lacking basic needs like shelter will kill you long before cancer does. But humans have known how to create shelter for quite some time now, I think we've got that pretty figured out. True if I were building a skyscraper I'd want a civil engineer to tell me if it's going to fall down, but I could provide simple shelter for myself without an engineer telling me how. I definitely wouldn't be able to treat my own cancer though.

I'll take a cure for cancer over a sturdier bridge any day. Except for the few minutes where my car is passing over that bridge-- then I'll give props to civil engineers. Seriously though, ranking the importance of sciences is pointless. Especially since we all know chemical engineering wins hands down.

First of all it's silly to state that genetics, or any particular scientific discipline, is somehow superior to "engineering as a whole." Genetics may be able to help us terraform planets, but you're still going to need spaceships to get off the earth. Some day dna computers may be practical but without computer engineering you won't be able to make them do anything. In short it's obviously an exciting field, but claiming that it's somehow more important than all other scientific discovery combined is clearly false. Hopefully we'll some day know enough so that the things you mention become possible, although I hope we can come up with something more useful than genetically engineered war slaves or guinea pigs for space exploration. You know, like cures for diseases or something...

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity About Google's surprising result for 100 - 99.999999999: Google is, of course and as always, perfectly right. In reality there are quite a few tiny corrections to the simple arithmetic you learned in elementary school — from relativity, radiative corrections and renormalization, unit conversion factors, micro-fees, inflation, taxes, and so on. The modern precision of Google's calculator puts them in explicitly. If you want, you can usually ignore them, and stick with the crude rule-of-thumb addition and subtraction that does, after all, suffice for most practical purposes. I dunno, it seems that Thuryl's explanation for Google's odd result makes more sense. That is, it's a result of Google's loss of precision due to storing in binary form. Either a terrible sarcasm fail, or you're on a wavelength of subtlety far outside my visible spectrum. Edit: It seems my avatar died with geociites. *Sob*

Set all your door scripts to run every turn. Then set your creature scripts to broadcast a message of radius 1 after every turn. When a door receives a message it responds within radius 1 with 1 for locked and 0 for unlocked. If a creature has a message it will assume that any door within stepping distance is locked, otherwise it assumes all are unlocked. The only problem that jumps out at me is if there are two doors within a 3x3 square. That's not too difficult to avoid if you lay out your towns well though. Edit: Hmm you already figured out the range idea, so how about this for working around multiple doors in range. Creature broadcasts message 1 with radius 1. First door responds with 2 for unlocked, 3 for locked. Second door gets message and responds with 4, 5, 6, or 7 (4 if locked and other door is not, 5 if locked and other door is, etc.) Now you can tell the arrangement of up to two doors, and if you know which order the scripts are in you can know which door is which. I believe terrain scripts run from first to last, so you'd have to lay all your door scripts in a set order. For example door script numbers increase from left to right and top to bottom. This would be a pain in the ass. I don't know if message values are limited, but if you can go up to 256 then you can have info on what, 8 doors? Edit2: And message lag shouldn't be an issue, since terrain scripts can be set to run even in between combat turns. Edit3: And if message values can go up to 32768, then you can cut some corners by deciding to never put more than 1 door in a 3x3 square, and having each door broadcast its x/y/locked status in binary. Oh and have each creature broadcast its own number, that way you can't get "crossed signals."

I think you need to be more specific about what these AIs exactly are before we can come up with ways to punish them. Most of the previously mentioned punishments are analogous to human punishments (imprisonment, torture) but does an AI care about any of these things? Does a computer, which presumably has a near infinite lifespan, care about being sentenced to 30 years of number crunching? As for downgrading its components, I'm not sure how much more "humane" this is. The analogy here would be to, say, chop off a human criminal's limbs, which some people would view as worse than killing them. And then we have the issue of practicality. Presumably these AIs were made to somehow serve humanity, so deliberately downgrading them or imprisoning them is a waste of valuable hardware. We'd be better served either by reprogramming them or scrapping them for parts. Or perhaps, as Thuryl suggests, the AI has some other desires that can be used to reform them without actually rewiring them. We can't really guess what that might be, though, without knowing the nature of the AI.

I like Create Illusions as well. It's cheaper than the higher end summoning spells like Arcane Summon, but you can still get powerful spellcasters like vampires etc. The only tradeoff is that they die after taking one hit, but if you get some sort of spellcaster that summons more creatures then you have a self replicating meat shield. Or they could cast fireblast or something. And yeah, offensive magic is total trash in BoA. My mages almost always have priest spells, that way they can actually do something while they wait for the odd physical immune monster to come along. Whenever they aren't healing/buffing they might as well be summoning. Also I think one of the third party scenarios (possibly Canopy) gives level 10 illusion or something, which keeps the spell useful. I can't think of any scenario that awards (or even sells) high level arcane summoning. I guess that shouldn't really be considered when debating whether a spell is broken or not though.

I'd get at least 12 for CoB, and possibly 16 for divine restoration. If you think CoB is cheap, or don't plan to use it, then you probably don't need more than 7 for move mountains. I rather like archery on my singletons, so that's another thing to consider spending points on.

IP board is weird about posting permissions. Mod status determines whether you can perform the usual mod actions like editing/deleting posts, but doesn't determine whether you can do simple things like view/post in a forum. That's done with permission masks. So any member can have the CSR Mod permission mask and be able to create topics. But an actual mod without the mask can't post. It's pretty stupid. Anyway Salmon should be able to post now. Edit: Now I'm sure it's right...

I'm going to have to agree with TM here, I have no idea what the other reviewers see in "Warp." Town design was average, nothing like what we're used to seeing from Eph. Plot and gameplay were poor. I wanted to avoid pointing out plot holes in a time travel scenario (I understand that some suspension of disbelief is always going to be needed here) but I really feel that I have to mention that... A potentially interesting concept, but a big disappointment. [rating]Substandard[/rating]