msazad

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity How many folks want to voluntarily accept life in prison without parole, which is what life on a generation ship would probably be like, just so that the great-grandchildren they might never see could try to live on a new planet? I would of course. Lots of people would. I don't understand why there is the slightest doubt about this in your mind. And not only for a settlement attempt. I'd be worth it just for an expedition. People give their lives for much less worthy causes all the time. A prison without screws in which you raise children ain't a prison. Humanity may never be able to launch a manned interstellar expedition to a worthy target anyway. It would be so costly that sending a machine that can raise human children might be less of a stretch. If humanity ever shoots for the stars, it will definitely start with machines.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer NASA has been on a death spiral in importance ever since the first Bush put his vice president, Dan Quayle, as the White House representative. The two shuttle disasters and delays in launching haven't helped. NASA has always been one of the first agencies to take budget cuts. share of the Federal budget != importance Technical advances means more can be achieved with less. The Shuttle was a money pit. The most important thing it did was Hubble. This was a much better use of funds than Appolo or the ISS but was still way too costly. Originally Posted By: Triumph Within my lifetime, I haven't (as a common layman ) had the sense that NASA had much of goal. Before my time, there was the goal of getting to the moon. I would argue that NASA has, in a sense, been in decline ever since them. What NASA has done since Appolo was so much more important than that putting people on the Moon (what has that achieved exactly?). You have no idea! NASA has a communication problem. Science in general has a communication problem in the USA. Originally Posted By: Triumph There is a sense of decline because NASA and space exploration once induced so much excitement and interest, and now NASA does not. Let's be honest: it's not space exploration that induced so much excitement but the pointless competition with the USSR. Now the cold war is over and NASA has naturally fallen way down the priority list behind such grand endeavors like Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Student of Trinity's analysis is basically solid. My main objection is that workfare isn't a redistribution of wealth, much less communism. The Chinese state is obsessed about controlling the populace and wary of discontent. Obviously hero-and-villian stories are BS. The US could take advantage of China's export-oriented growth game. To the mercantilist mind, China's policy is bad for the US. But mercantilism died long ago. And the US isn't even exporting precious metals to China, only worthless dollars. See this for all manner of economic cleverness: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/international_trade/ And check the Wikipedia for "mercantilism".

Loom is one of the first modern computer games I played as a kid. I love that game but I had no idea kids could get into something like that these days. It brings a tear to me eye... Loom heralded a bunch of really cool games made in the early ninetees. Maybe Future Wars was released before Loom though. I have fonder memories of Loom anyway. Now you say Loom is old but to me old is like Ultima IV and I wouldn't play games which are that old (except perhaps for IF and even then my favorite titles are more recent) as much as I had fun with Pirates! as a kid. I looked up the release date and I remember playing Loom before it was released. It's strange that I remember being a bit younger than I was when I discovered that game in particular. I got the other release dates I checked about right, which means that Future Wars was the groundbreaking one. Here's the place to discuss old games I guess: http://forum.homeoftheunderdogs.net/viewforum.php?f=3 It's probably not what it was (not by a long shot!) but at least it's alive now.

I'm not seeing any way to fix the thread title. Oh well. Originally Posted By: Slarty Nephil's Gambit had some not particularly explained potential wrong turns in the plot at Flickering Keep that looked like bugs, but weren't. For one thing, depending on what you do in the dream sequence it is possible to have your PCs *actually* die and not come back to life. You may be doing it wrong. Maybe we've been using different versions. And perhaps you could be more specific as to what I should be doing. I checked and there's a raise dead node that's executed no matter what I do. Are there any conditions in which such nodes are supposed to have no effect or what? If not, I'd call that an engine bug. Maybe there's something wrong with the options or something that makes it fails. I have no noding experience whatsoever but I'm not seeing the paths that Slarty is talking about. Also... if someone could fill me in as to how saved games work and such (see my first post), that would be swell. EDIT: the text is implying that the PCs didn't really die as well.

Hi folks, My PCs are not brought back to life when they should be (after the dreaming thing). Is this a known bug? I figure it should be reported if it's a BoE-Ormus (does this build have a proper name?) issue. I fooled around with the editor to fix that but I was initially stumped... after spending more time than I should have trying to figure out how the node thing works (how to I get the town text string number from the number used in nodes?), I discovered that the reason my edits weren't doing any good is that BoE was using a mix of the original and edited versions of the scenarios! So my bonus question for you gurus is: what's stored in those saved games? Is this stuff documented somewhere? Is there a FAQ or something? EDIT: While I'm at it... why am I seeing guillemet quotes instead of (if memory serves) apostrophes in the dialog? I haven't played any other scenarios seriously enough to be bothered by this so, again, I'm not sure where the problem is coming from.