Dintiradan

Last book I read was The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Meh, its age shows, I think. Went to the second hand bookstore today and bought Neuromancer by William Gibson, Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell, and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams. But before I start those I have to finish off my Crichton backlog - Next and The Terminal Man.

I can see it now - "sudo Considered Harmful".

It's been a while. I've been going through a stack of second hand books that have been collecting dust in my room for the last year. Finished Dune a while back. The previous comments about Herbert's treatment of politics holds. Earlier on in the book, right after the fall of House Atreides, Paul gets high on spice and starts ranting about how he'll take over the universe with the Fremen. Dude, you've just lost all your military, political, and financial backing, and you're already dreaming about overthrowing the galactic government with a nomadic force who only specialize in desert combat, despite the fact that you have yet to make any contact with this force? One could excuse Herbert for this if the scene were portrayed as Paul being overcome with spice-induced hubris. But no, that's exactly how things turn out. I suppose I should have wrapped spoiler tags around this, but it wouldn't have done any good. The book is completely predictable (though perhaps this is a feature - one of the major themes in the book is predestination and inevitability). Other gripes about the book include the lack of character depth (I am the fat and evil Vladimir Harkonnen! I am the sadistic and evil Feyd-Rautha!) and the pacing. The entire book gave off the feeling that Herbert was rushing to finish it. Thing is, the book isn't even that long. It felt like Paul spent way to little time with the Fremen. The climatic conflict with the Emperor's forces quite literally lasts several chapters. I wanted to enjoy the book, I really did. The overarching theme of the deliberate development of a messiah was something I liked. And the Worms are undeniably cool. What says the rest of the Spiderweb population? Do the later Dune books improve? Or would they not be worth my time? After Dune came Fahrenheit 451, which I loved. Some genres have certain works that are required reading. Any fantasy aficionado must read Tolkien, any lover of poetry must read Shakespeare. But I think everyone in this day and age must read Fahrenheit 451, if for nothing else then for the kick-ass dialogue with Captain Beatty. Started paging through God In The Dock, which is a small collection of short essays by C.S. Lewis. Meh. Aside from a few doctrinal differences, I've never found Lewis particularly rigourous, and it is less lucid than the only other work of non-fiction I've read by him: Mere Christianity. Not very fair of me to be judging the collection from the first two essays, but still... The next work of fiction I'll be moving onto will probably be something from Michael Crichton. I have a copy of The Terminal Man from the aforementioned second hand bookstore, but I'll probably read Next first, which I picked up at St. Jacobs last week. I was underwhelmed by Prey, but Next seems to be interesting, for the format at the very least. (Can you tell I'm not in school right now? That reminds me, I don't think I've plugged The Puzzling Adventures Of Doctor Ecco here yet, at least not in this thread. A fun read if you like learning discrete mathematics through puzzles.)

His Infernal Majesty?

By Nemesis: Quote: I started A Spell for Chameleon, the first book in Piers Anthony's Xanth series, a couple of days ago. Now I just need to find time to read it. No. Don't. The Xanth series is a bottomless mire that will suck dry your very soul. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. I remember the first few being all right, in a campy sort of way. But they just don't end, and all the jokes and plotlines get recycled after a while. I don't remember where I quit, but a quick visit to Wikipedia tells me he's over thirty now. -------------------- No, Lister, what makes us different from animals is we don't use our tongues to clean our own genitals. - Rimmer (Red Dwarf)

Beginning PHP5. Youpi. -------------------- (Rez.)

'Snot your fault - no one ever sees the punchline. -------------------- "The dancing bologna wins every time."

Echoing what Nioca said - isn't the usage of StuffIt supposed to be deprecated now anyway? And while I would probably be capable of hacking out a Windows port (at least, I'm capable of learning new APIs, which I'd have to do for GUI programming for Windows), I'm currently Bogged Down™. Oh, the joys of mapping out a process's available memory by trying a read/write on every single page and checking to see if a segfault was caused. I'd still be doing it, but apparently the BSD servers shut down at 12:30. Maybe I'll have More Time In The Summer™. -------------------- Next up: testing whether blunt objects make your head sore by repeatedly striking your head with a mallet! Guaranteed a good waste of a student's time!

Y'know, I think very few game wikis have the same level of fanwank that the EE does. In any case, there's no need to make the tone of the entire wiki the same. Take the FreeSpace wiki. It's hardly monolithic - there's mission walkthroughs, modding instructions, in game descriptions of races, characters, etc., stats listings for all ships, and so on. The whole point of a wiki is the ability of average users to post what they want for the benefit of the whole. So long as a page isn't incorrectly categorized, I can't see why it would be a problem for the Geneforge wiki to be more than just a walkthrough, or just in-game descriptions, or whatever. -------------------- Beernuts!

By BenS: Quote: P.S. Thanks for the old-time D&D nod. "Vesna" the lich. Heh heh heh... Please tell me there's an artefact known as "The Head of Vesna". --------------------

Disclaimer: my sense of aesthetics is far from good. #1: Good if the area is meant to be vibrant/happy/well-looked-after. #2: Unlike the other three options, has a good mix of trees. They're not all conifers though, which looks like what you're trying with the other three. #3: Probably my least favourite, at least these trees by themselves. #4: Thick, bushy evergreens; nice for an rough, unkempt forest if that's what you're trying for. Maybe throw in a few from #3 for variety. Meh. Can't decide for sure. #2 fits in best with the other colours of the screenshot, but the edge is very small. The crowd has obviously spoken for #1, though. -------------------- Identify with the proverbial pot much? - Roy (OotS #146)

A bit more general of a question: what will be the final main purpose of the Forge? Right now, it's just doing what existing sites already do, albeit using the user-submitted content paradigm. Don't get me wrong, I think a user-driven site is needed. I had just thought that Blades Forge would be analogous to Source Forge: a revision control system for scenarios. For designers: will you use the Forge in your beta testing? Or even use it to release unfinished scenarios before they're ready to be beta tested? -------------------- "Or it could just be that most people don't view urination as a valid problem solving technique."

I seem to remember you saying that you use Objective-C. Is that Mac only? If not, how much of the code is OS-dependent? Maybe if you put the source in a tarball or a zip... Course, my knowledge of standard C/C++ is limited, and getting rusty. I'm hoping to spend some time refreshing during the Christmas break. -------------------- Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected! - Hong Kong subtitle

Quote: Alorael, who thinks your two requests are worth separating. Firstly, you want many choices of how to handle challenges. Charge in with drawn swords, sneak and stab, negotiate, lure, or whatever. Secondly, you want characters to be fragile and magic to be rare and difficult to use. The first is laudable but difficult to implement. The second is a game style decision, and it's one that is far from uncontroversial. Seconded. The first point stems from the tabletop RPG verses CRPG disparity. You just can't do everything in a CRPG; not only are there engine limitations, but the designers themselves aren't able to write up results for every single situation. On the other hand, a GM is not only able to respond to every situation, but is also able to gauge what the players are interested in and direct the gameflow in the right direction. As for the second game: the closest game I've played like that is A Game of Thrones, a d20 game based off of George R. R. Martin's books. Among other things, it has (warning, d20 specific rules follow): * Almost no magic (Martin's books are low magic, and the RPG has magic used at GM's discretion). * The above implies no healing. PCs can get the Heal skill (which is expensive for most classes), that allows a PC to slow blood loss on the battlefield, and stop it out of it. HP gain requires bed rest. * All PCs have a Shock value, initially based of their Constitution. If PCs are dealt more damage than their Shock value, they have to make a Fortitude save based on the damage dealt or be stunned. Additionally, they get blood loss damage every round equal to the amount that the damage exceeds the Shock value. * Called shot rules, most of which traded accuracy for extra damage, crippling effects, or automatic criticals. Also, there were sniping rules; get a circumstance bonus to your shot if you wait a round and aim. The verdict: way too much accounting for a tabletop RPG. Combat was slowed to a crawl, and player death was too high a price to pay given the time it took to roll up a new character in AGoF's more complicated system. AGoF also had a greater focus on skills than D&D, but this also lead to the lowest common denominator problem - it doesn't matter how sneaky your Hunter and Knave are, the Knight and Man-At-Arms are still clanking around enough to spoil the needed ambush on those wildlings. Sure, you can split up the party, but even without the higher risk of fatality, party splitting is one of the greatest cause of player boredom. Student of Trinity: For what's it's worth, games like Neverwinter Nights 2 has a roster of PCs, though I don't think it's quite like what you have in mind. You have to keep 'your' PC in the party, and changing party members becomes too much trouble when you're far away from your base of operations. Besides, I prefer to use the PCs I acquired at lower levels over the ones I acquired later; the party members complement each other better if your able to level them up yourself than if you have a higher level PC dropped in. -------------------- Who gave you the nerve to get killed here? - Hong Kong subtitle

Well, it's taken a few years, but it looks like the Blades Megasite will be ready in a short while. -------------------- As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture. - John McCarthy

There's one included with Blades of Avernum. On the main menu, it's the second last menu item, right above 'Quit'. However, if you haven't registered Blades of Avernum, you won't be able to access all the options (though you will be able to do most). If you've disabled it, you can reactivate it following these instructions . As far as I know, there aren't any third-party character editors. A while ago, I tried to reverse engineer the .sav format (with the eventual goal of extracting a character from one save and putting it into another save). I gave up after a short while. -------------------- I have never had my cheeks altered or my eyes altered. I did not have my lips thinned, nor have I had a dermabrasion or a skin peel. - Michael Jackson

Forgive my possible ignorance, but wouldn't plain and simple A* work here? Collisions with NPCs aside. EDIT: Ah, we're talking about moving across the entire grid. Duh. -------------------- If you think about it, all philosophical debates can be made more enjoyable with someone on the sidelines chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!"

One technique I thought up a while ago was to alter basicnpc.txt itself. Wrap the default behaviour in an else, and then add your own scripting in ifs that test for the desired condition. For instance, before the default else, test to see if the creature's number is X, where X is the creature number for Hank the Hireling. I have yet to get around to implementing it, though. -------------------- I wouldn't shake his hand if I were you. I hear he licks his thumb.

My pet theory that Look & Feel is the most important criterion after basic functionality for the average end-user gains more support. Nothing inherently wrong with that, just realize that Jeff Vogel probably has bigger priorities when he's programming his games than maintaining separate engines. If I was him, I'd do the same thing - one engine for any games of the same genre. I didn't mind the different engine, but then again, I haven't played the Geneforge series, so I haven't developed the emotional attachment to each engine. -------------------- Work is the curse of the drinking classes. - Oscar Wilde

Quote: except for the rat quest because I couldn't find enough rat parts and ran out of rats to kill. Go back to the places where you found rats before (storerooms, if I recall correctly). They respawn. Quote: I can fight at most 2-3 cauldron zombie things ... And I have been too scared to try the honeycomb yet.. so if I should do that first, please let me know. Yes, you need to go into the Honeycomb first. If you talk to some people in Mertis, you'll learn that there's someone in the Honeycomb who has dealt with the zombies before. He's in the north-west corner. You can get a map of the Honeycomb here . By the way, have you done the Eastern Gallery quests yet (bandits and chitrachs)? -------------------- Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that. - Lady Bracknell

If a thread is locked, there's a reason. Your best bet is to send Ephesos a private message instead of starting a new topic. ( http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=private_message;u=00004153 ) -------------------- If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being immensely over-educated. - Algernon

I'm not sure about OBoE, but supposedly it's nigh impossible to get Spiderweb games to work on Wine. I haven't tried it myself, but the problem might be there. -------------------- "You sure you don't want the tent we consumated our marriage in?"

By Ephesos: Quote: Speak for yourself. And if you really do crave these "better grphics," then go play Gears of War or something. I agree that graphics aren't everything, but they are something. I don't think graphics will ever be a major selling point for Spiderweb (unless there will be games developed on a licensed engine, which would be a diffent story), but that doesn't mean that Jeff should strive for low-end graphics. (Though I do agree that extended attack animations don't have a place in Spiderweb's turn-based, tactical-minded combat.) -------------------- I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. - Gwendolen

Solberg's first name was clearly Monte. -------------------- As it turned out, Synergy decided to either give me a bath, lick my face off, or give me a ton of kisses. - Nioca

By Tyran: Quote: So it's all the Mac testers' fault, eh? The Windows testers weren't supposed to notice it? My reports shortened drastically once I realized that the only problems I brought up that Jeff acknowledged were widescreen rendering bugs. Apparently if the occasional punctuation slip-up and missing outdoor walls aren't caught by the Mac beta-testers, it's too late. -------------------- He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. - Oscar Wilde