keira

Futura is hands-down the best sans-serif typeface for print. Anyone who says otherwise is a dolt and a heretic.

I'm hardly an expert on middle eastern politics, but ISIS seems to be the result of a lot of different regional issues, ranging from strife between religious sects going back ages, and the obligatory US meddling. If I'm honest, though, I'm more worried about what's going on in Eastern Europe than an overgrown band of thugs that, at this point, the entire rest of the world has united against.

As someone who works in a business that's pretty much dealing with international travelers daily, I hope it doesn't go airborne. That would kinda suck.

As it is right now, as long as you don't roll in ebola-infected fluid, you're pretty much fine, as I understand it.

Don't really have the time to learn a new system, but look forward to spectating!

@Goldengirl If it's the interface that you don't like, you can also use the calref chat via Pidgin or any other XMPP/Jabber client. (there's also a special chat channel for AimHack to keep the general rabble away). There's a simple howto here (slight language)

No, we'd prefer any signature links not have blatant advertisements for unrelated things. In addition, please keep it short and formatted nicely so it doesn't stand out (no bold, red color, or taking up ten lines).

If you have further questions feel free to shoot myself or another staff member a PM. The tech support forum is for support for the games or the technical side of the forums, not policy.

Talk to a global mod or an admin. (Coloured name)

I don't have much time but if it's smaller I should be able to fit it in.

Sylae Corell

sylae@calref.net

Win7 x64

(Didn't send a PM)

The ellipses issue is due to your text editor turning three periods '...' into U+2026 '…', a special glyph which represents an ellipsis as one character. The reason it appears malformed is because BoA and your text editor aren't using the same character set. OSX uses UTF-8 iirc, so your text editor should by default as well. BoA, on the other hand, almost certainly does not.

The solution is to just disable this 'helpful' feature provided by your text editor (or possibly by your OS?

Also, just to play on the safe side, make sure your text editor is saving files as UTF-8 without a BOM (this may also be called ANSI as UTF-8).

If you are making music, look for a pad with larger diameter fans -- they move more air at slower speeds than their smaller counterparts, and slower fans mean less background noise to filter out when using a mic.

i guess i'm less neurotic now. and less open. and more jobiness? i dunno

Since the code has been open-sourced the community has collectively been modernizing Blades to run on most modern systems. You might want to try out this version and see how it works for you (I have yet to see it crash on Win7 x64, personally). There's links in the forum header.

Out of curiosity, what version are you using?

All things considered, I'd recommend the Adobe suite of things. Especially with their newish creative cloud option, you get access to all of the CS for a couple bucks a month. A pretty good deal when that includes everything from color grading to 3d renders on top of premiere itself.

I actually looked for DLWH first, but it seems to have been entirely forum-wiped.

That's strange, canopy is definitely in the code. Did it appear in the final results, by any chance?

For those not around in 2009, Northern Isles was a mildly-popular forum game similar to Mafia, set in the Exile/Avernum universe.

Anyway, long story short, I'm thinking about bringing it back. It'd most likely use the same rules and roles as game 12 did. Anyway, if there's enough people interested, it'd most likely begin sometime next week.

Poll's above and all that. What do y'all think? Is there enough interest to make this happen?

Everything is done client-side; nothing is recorded so you'll have to copy-paste. I'll see about implementing that exclusion thing.

I had a moment of spare time, so I made copy-pasted some code and made a little Blades of Avernum scenario sorter. It gives you pairs, and you pick which one you think was better, and eventually you get an itemized ranking of the best scenarios.

It's located here: http://blades.calref.net/misc/boasort.html

(uses the code from this utility, because the only sort algorithm i bother to know is php's sort() )

If I compare that to the Starcraft 2 editor which is a lot more complex, I get the feeling that a lot less actually playable maps are created with it, because it's just too much work.

Part of this is undoubtedly true, but time also plays a big part into it. Back in the day with games like War3, there wasn't (relatively-speaking) a lot going on in the market. If you wanted to play something online you weren't exactly spoiled for choice. The reason modded maps went so well back then was because making a "real game" wasn't much of an option. In addition, if I were to make a War3 map, my audience would end up being all online war3 players. They already have the game, they know how the basic controls work, and so on. Whereas, if I were to vomit out my own made-from-scratch game I'd have the whole marketing process to do.

The primary reason there seems to be less user-created content is simply because people have moved to just making their own game. The barrier to entry is much lower (what with Steam and the vomit of libraries available now) so a lot of the people who would have made these maps and mods back in the day are deluded into thinking that they can make a buck off of it because "dota did it" or "something something mojang early access bleeegghg".

If you ask me, War3's WorldEdit (notably the Frozen Throne variant) is probably the best editing tool I have seen. Making the physical map was so easy a two-year-old could do it, and the script/node engine functioned in a fashion similar to BoE's, but was actually intuitive and could do many things in the right hands. It put the basics front and center so anyone could make a pretty good map.

Unfortunately the golden age of mapmaking is long-gone. Everyone is either making naked mods for skyrim or trying to fight their way to the top of steam greenlight.

making a scenario in BoE is easy. Like, really easy. Making a good one is harder, but even making utter crap is pretty simple.

There's a much higher bar for BoA. You have to at least know the basics of scripting, how programming works, to be successful in BoA. Even if it's not that much harder than BoE, it's still going to draw a lot of people away. BoE was successful because any fool could smash a keyboard for a week and have something playable. It'd suck, but it'd be playable. Due to how BoA is set up it's a lot less forgiving, so a lot less people designed for it. Less scenarios to play means less people buying the game.

clearly the solution is for everyone to go play blades

go on, then

1. What is your age? (Be approximate, if you'd like)

20.

2. What part of the world do you live in? In which part of the world were you born? What countries have you lived in?

Denver, Colorado, United States. Only lived in the US

3. What is your native language? In what languages are you proficient?

English. A know a handful of spanish, but that's pretty much it.

4. Describe your ancestry.

Northern European, I guess. Think there's some german leaking in.

5. Describe your gender identity and sexual orientation.

Female*, pansexual

6. Do you have any religious or spiritual beliefs? If so, describe them. In what religious tradition(s) were you raised, if any?

Religion-agnostic. It's too much bother worrying about that stuff, I'll just try to be a good person and if the god(s) get mad i didn't do it in their name, then they can shove it.

7. What is your relationship status? Do you have any children?

In a relationship. No, and I don't plan on having any, partially because I can't.

8. Describe your social class. Have you always been in this class?

Lower. Pretty much always been that way, but as it is I'm slowly working my way into being not-poor.

9. Have you ever served in the military? If so, what division?

No. I think the military is a wonderful profession that, under other circumstances, I'd be willing to do. As it stands, I cannot in good conscience fight assorted wars I don't believe in for reasons nobody believes in. Not that they'd have me, anyway.

10. What is your occupation (or former occupation)? What is your highest level of education (and your degree, if applicable)?

I currently work front desk at a hotel. Formerly did manual labor. As far as education goes, I have a high school diploma, and that's pretty much it for formal education. Plenty of informal/self-taught though, mostly tech-related.

I'd recommend the GIMP. It's FOSS, pretty easy to get started with, and can easily do advanced things once you're ready for that.

Personally, all I ever use is GIMP and Adobe Camera Raw (for working with my camera's nef files). Anything else and you're wasting your dollars and/or time.

Double posting assbeaver here:

The readme is corrupted, and so is every reference i could find (not many) on the internet. Therefore, I'll be going with the HLPM's author name, "Otto Helman".

Yeah, that's definitely an issue. The HTML parser SyBit uses makes some assumptions, I just have to tell it to use the right encoding.

Of course, it came to me malformed. Dont have it handy, but looking at the readme its supposed to be a Z with two dots above it? (Sorry, mobile ). Can a Nordic/Finnish person confirm?

EDIT: "Otto HalmŽn", and that readme is rife with encoding errors.