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Prince of Kitties

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Everything posted by Prince of Kitties

  1. Hmm... Falling Stars has lots of dungeons. There's a three-level one generally tackled in mid-game, and of course the grueling final dungeon... Spears has sprawling dungeons galore. Actually the whole thing is huge and sprawling, despite its relatively low difficulty. At the Gallows I'll second the recommendation for. Lots of dungeons, lots of puzzles, plays like LotR meets James Bond. And for (IMO) lesser scenarios: Doom Moon II has lots of huge sprawling dungeons, and amazing nodework, but the plot and dialog are cartoonish. The Adventurer's Club 1, 2, and 3 have more (and more sprawly) dungeons than any other scenarios, but contain an astonishing amount of filler. The Music of the Spheres trilogy (by Brett Bixler) has some impressive dungeons if you can stomach the silly plot.
  2. IT LOOKS LIKE A PARROT IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW NOOOO
  3. Copying and pasting works for me now. Harehunter - that looks much better. Especially the ability to label SDFs.
  4. Are you using Linux and Wine? Wine and BoE have sound problems. It worked for a while in Wine 1.4.1, provided you didn't use Pulseaudio; now as of 1.5.x it doesn't work any more. Best bet is to just disable sound in the CBoE options panel.
  5. Re "it's all in your head"... For me, it really was all in my head. There was a time when I questioned my gender identity, but it became clear at a certain point that it was about what I wanted to be - an idealized concept of myself, not what I actually was. Maybe it was "just a phase," maybe it was me fooling myself; but in any case, my body image and my thought patterns match the gender role I was born into pretty much exactly. I don't like that, but it's my personality as well as my body; I can't change it. (It also occurs to me that being raised in a certain gender role may override a person's phenotype. But the mechanism doesn't really matter for me.) Anyway, point is it can be "just a phase" or "all in your head." However, what's true for one person can't always be generalized to everyone. That is the only solid rule here, I think - that it's all dependent on the person.
  6. Hmm. I think the question that gets to me most is the one about helping a transgender friend get a job in a possibly hostile environment. I would say that, yes, I would put in a word for the friend anyway. Unemployment is, as it were, serious business. But it would be tough... - Having people insulting you openly and gossiping behind your back really takes its toll. I still remember high school; and relatively speaking I had an easy time of it. - I could always try to educate my coworkers a bit (or, to put it more bluntly, tell them they were being offensive and callous). - OTOH, me going into White Knight mode would probable make things worse for the hypothetical friend, and embarrass them to boot. - Going to the management about it might work... If the management were decent, competent, and living in the 21st century. Unfortunately that is not always the case. (And that's not even touching on the possibility of physical violence, which I'm wholly unequipped to deal with. The police at least tend to be sympathetic around here, but officers arriving on the scene 5 minutes after the fact can't save the victim from getting brain damage.) Ultimately I would have to let my friend make their own decisions, and not hamper them. OTOH, I have to look out for my friends, or I can't very well call them friends can I? I would have to at least give the friend a fair warning, and try to help if things went bad, and... You get the idea. TL;DR the world would be a much nicer place if decent people didn't hold (and act on) vile ideas. Edit: "world," not "would." Stupid lack of sleep.
  7. Something I hadn't realized, but that turns out to be useful: some Mage spells break line-of-sight, thus preventing you from being targeted for ranged attacks. These spells are: - Web: Mages start with it, and it covers a wide area. OTOH monsters can tear the webs down (even if it slows them down a little). Still, useful temporary LoS blocking vs. groups. - Fire Barrier: probably the most useful. You can walk through it (for a little damage), and so can monsters, but it blocks spells and arrows. Probably very good for singletons despite the high SP cost; just beware that high level monsters can break the barrier. - Force Barrier: expensive, high level, and you can't walk through it. Otherwise the same as Fire Barrier. Probably not too useful. This stuff is mostly useful at low levels though, at high levels PCs will hopefully have enough Luck not to need it.
  8. Thanks, Tonweya. Your email didn't get through though.
  9. I feel like this topic is a repeat somehow? Anyway, like some others here, I've always been put off by the isometric graphics in Avernum. IMO they don't look good, and they get in the way of gameplay.
  10. Here is the beta! http://cdn.calref.net/files.calref/9db635c64920570a01dab8e8a41b6c2307ef8c07.exs Anyone who tests it, please PM me with your suggestions/advice/etc. (And yes, it really is supposed to be that short.)
  11. My first scenario with an actual plot. Actually it began as a tool for testing parties' combat prowess; only it got too big for its britches, and I had to add a rudimentary plot too. It's supposed to involve black humor... I think. Is there anywhere I can upload the first version though? I tested it fairly well, and I think it should be bug-free at this point. Moreover, is anyone interested at all? (Be warned, BTW, that you will need a very powerful party if you want to get to the end.)
  12. I recall that I while ago someone came up with a formula for calculating the "effective" level of a monster or NPC - basically, what it was worth in terms of experience for party members. Can anyone recall the formula, or point me to it?
  13. I'm glad you're interested in this, but do please keep in mind that the desktop is going to stay around for a while, especially as a gaming platform... IMO anyway. Hmm. C# is pretty unfriendly for Linux, IIRC, unless you take care to make it compatible with Mono. Not sure what other reasonable choices there are though. This would probably be a good idea. Then it wouldn't really be BoE any more... I do think it's important to retain a "core" of spells and alchemy recipes, so that parties can move from one scenario to another. OTOH, by far the most important part of modernizing BoE (IMO) is giving it some kind of scripting system. Special nodes are very painful to work with; I absolutely think it would be better to use scripting, even if the learning curve were steeper at first. The game UI may not be bad for touch devices as it stands. Almost everything is accessible through buttons and the pointer device. Anyway, my input... I hope you've got way more free time than I do, and are a really really good programmer. Because "huge undertaking" does not even begin to cover this. Maintaining any compatibility at all with the original BoE spaghetti code is going to be quite difficult. Not to be patronizing or anything; it's just that a lot of people have tried to modernize BoE, and called it quites after not much time. That said, I do have some good news - there is a port to C++/WxWidgets that's been stagnating for a while. See here: http://code.google.c...e/source/browse This might hopefully be of some help. Likewise the Classic BoE Win32 port (also on that link), which gets rid of the 16-bit rubbish and gives lots of variables human-readable names. In all seriousness though, good luck. And thanks for volunteering your time. Edit: Also, I should mention I might be of a little help. I'm no good with software design at this point, but I've done some coding on Angband variants and know how C works; if you could use e.g. a function written to certain specifications, I could probably do that. (Though I would need to set up a Windows VM or something. Right now I don't have any way to compile CBoE.)
  14. You can pattern-walk into a slightly different reality. In game terms, that translates into regenerating the level. This is actually very useful. Angband is full of situations where you have to turn tail and run, and instantly moving to a different level (that the monsters can't follow you to) is pretty much the best way to run away .
  15. Hey, I liked the old ToME thank you very much. (As for the new ToME, it looks highly innovative, but I've yet to get it running decently on any of my hardware.)
  16. It would be nice if we spent as much effort fighting poverty, illness, and the oppression of women as we do fighting terrorists. My suspicion is that fighting the terrorists directly is sexier because it provides faster gratification (and involves shooting things). Completely serious though: as satisfying as it is to blow up zealots, I think we and everyone else would do better in the long run by mitigating the conditions that produce those zealots. And us raining down destruction from above, upon the heads of the guilty and the innocent alike, is probably one of those conditions. Think about it. If armed robots from some foreign superpower were patrolling your skies, looking menacing and occasionally killing civilians, wouldn't you be inclined to join some revolutionary front? (Heck, there have even been bad sci-fi movies about that.) NB: The above is just my (bleeding heart liberal) opinion. Also, I'm not a foreign policy advisor to the President, just a random guy. Figured I should let you know.
  17. Hey, I'm a roguelike developer! Well, sort of. I happen to like the genre. IMO the cardinal rule for Angband is "Don't play to win, play to have fun." Most roguelikes follow the old-school tradition of winning being *hard*; it takes a lot of time, a lot of skill, and a good amount of luck, so focusing on winning straight away is not advisable if you want to enjoy the game.
  18. I'm back! Temporarily anyway. Doubt I'll be around much in the immediate future, as I have a new job starting soon that will probably eat up all my time.
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