Dantius

"Fomorians" has four syllables. How about "Sylak keys"?

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S As well as lots of other holidays that do not belong to the 2 approved state religions of the United States. Let's not get overdramatic now, Slarty.

On the fifth day of Vlishmas, My Shaper shaped for me Five canisters Four battle betas Three ur-glaahks Two growling thahds And a wingbolt in a dead tree.

To sort of reiterate what Slarty said, randomly generated games really only work when the vast, vast majority of the game is focused on essentially combat and exploration, like Rogue. I mean, sure Rogue was one of the best, most innovative, and most challenging CRPG's of all time, but it was also made in the freaking 80's! Games have advanced a lot since then, and it has largely been in making a game more like a book, rather than more like a randomly generated board game (think Settlers of Catan). It would be pretty much impossible to make any modern AAA game randomly generated (even Skyrim's supposedly "radiant" system only accunts for like 20% of the total quests, and it accounts for exactly 0% of the interesting ones), and you couldn't even try to make Mass Effect or Dragon Age randomly generated. And moving back to my book analogy, Jeff has always, always fallen heavily on the "book" side of the divide, simply because plot- and character- driven RPG's don't lend themselves to random generation. Even back in the days of yore that was 1993 (1994?) when he released Exile, the game had way, way more talking and exploring towns and world maps than it was combat (or at least ti was for the first couple hours I played it, it might have changed later on). And when you fast forward to his Geneforge games, there were literally over 100,000+ words of text in them, which is more than a small novel! You can't randomly generate that and hope to have it work! So while I guess that, as a game mechanism, random generation would work for games with no characters and only the barest sliver of plots, like Roguelikes or Dwarf Fortress, the rest of the gaming world has long sense moved on, and it would be financial suicide for Jeff to try to recapture a niche that was dead when I was in my 20's, so don't expect Jeff to try them any time soon.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Dantius Buying a European History textbook and replacing "Muslims" with "Qunari", "Jews" with "Elves", "Catholic Church" with "Chantry", "France" with "Orlais", "England" with "Ferelden", "Vikings" with "Chaisend" and "Romans" with "Tevinter", and then redrawing the map in the back and submitting it as your design document does not make for an interesting and novel fantasy world. EDIT: No, wait. My bad. You replace "Romans" with "Dwarves" and "Byzantines" with "Tevinter". Mass Effect making the Quarians into space gypsies wasn't exactly progressive either seriously what is up with that accent Well, at least they didn't blatantly stereotype a species as short, ugly, and only concerned with making money off of other people's misfortune... Oh. Wait. The Volus.

Originally Posted By: ...No, wait. No days in caves! No exception for the original Dragon Age? At least that's a throwback to more BG-like times, and I give the designers a lot of credit for making half of the possible romances rather important to the plot. Buying a European History textbook and replacing "Muslims" with "Qunari", "Jews" with "Elves", "Catholic Church" with "Chantry", "France" with "Orlais", "England" with "Ferelden", "Vikings" with "Chaisend" and "Romans" with "Tevinter", and then redrawing the map in the back and submitting it as your design document does not make for an interesting and novel fantasy world. EDIT: No, wait. My bad. You replace "Romans" with "Dwarves" and "Byzantines" with "Tevinter".

Originally Posted By: Mistb0rn It certainly isn't Kotor 3, at least not as I would have wanted it. My first beta weekend was very disillusioning, but - even though some of the MMO elements are quite distracting at first and it's so different from Kotors 1&2 - I'll still play it, enjoy it for what it is, and quietly mourn its lost potential. As I haven't played Dragon Age 2, I can't specifically answer that fear. I do know people who won't play TOR after having seen what it's like, and I'm guessing you might fall into that category. I guess I'll just cry in a corner after failing to get Baldur's Gate or NWN running on my win7 machine and no longer having access to classic BioWare games that aren't dating sim games in disguise.*

I'm leery of getting it, since there's a chance that my hopes of KOToR 3 will be dashed when the game turns out more along the lines of Dragon Age 2. Besides, it's not like I have time to do MMORPG's now...

People on the Internet sure get offended easily. It's like the offhand comments of a random stranger who lives thousands of miles away who you interact with for five minutes a day is all that matters to us.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Dintiradan ... An ugly beholder. ... ugly by beholder standards adorable by human standards actually thanks for reminding me to go back and edit that pic into their character sheet So it's an adorabeholder, then?

Originally Posted By: Triumph Yes, that was Phulax (played by me), teleporting at no stamina cost, sometimes with a high degree of accuracy, and nothing overpowered or gamebreaking. Well, yeah, but that's because you wouldn't abuse it. If it fell into the wrong hands, something like this could happen!

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Originally Posted By: Dantius I did an analysis of this a couple of months ago here. TL;DR, Alorael averages around 5.5 posts per day over his membership, Randomizer 5, Lilith 4.5, myself 4, and most of the other top posters from 2-3. Your averages were "since account creation" and not "over his membership," which means your daily post averages are only accurate for users who have been around constantly since their account creations. You brought this up in the thread when I first posted those numbers. I just think somebody's disappointed that my posting rate was 50% larger...

I did an analysis of this a couple of months ago here. TL;DR, Alorael averages around 5.5 posts per day over his membership, Randomizer 5, Lilith 4.5, myself 4, and most of the other top posters from 2-3.

Why have I suddenly walked into the Spiderweb Twilight Zone? What is this I don't even... Locking threads about quotes is kosher, but this thread about... whatever... goes on for 22 whole posts? Somebody lock it, please.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter snip Oooooor you could just assume infinite structural strength with the density of steel like Dinti said, and then use a trivial amount of basic math to solve a cubic and get "a side length 369.815 m", since I highly doubt a high-schooler is expected to be well-versed in solid mechanics or tensor calculus or stress analysis or any sort of structural principles beyond maybe Hooke's law.

Originally Posted By: Actaeon I'm tempted to create a forum where we discuss the line between posting games and actual discourse, but I suspect it might not be quite meta enough to avoid closure. Discuss the difference between intelligent discourse and posting games here. Use a sequence of at least five words from the prior post in yours!

Originally Posted By: Thin Gypsy Thief Then quit whining about it and just don't show up. I was given to understand what whining about pointless things is the favorite pastime of the Internet, though...

It's actually quite easy to talk about food, it's just that you just come off as a pretentious snob whenever you try to say something like:

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Hollandaise is pretty good, Béarnaise sauce is really good, but all those egg-yolk-based sauces are the devil to make. I've tried a few times, succeeded about one time in three, and the other times ended up with either a horrible mess of curdly stuff, or a thin and runny sauce that's almost as bad. Even done right they are pretty much pure evil, healthwise: saturated fat held in suspension by cholesterol. But okay, you can eat oat bran for a week before and after, and it's probably worth it. Whenever I try to make eggs Benedict, I always just wind up with poached eggs with lemony scrambled eggs on top. It's good, but not really what was expected. All dishes that require precise temperature micromanagment to cook properly are evil (I'm looking at you, caramel!). They'e all so delicious, but I can never make them come out right.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan It's still an interesting question. While I know a decent amount about computing, I only have the vaguest idea how a transistor works. I certainly don't know how vacuum tubes work, and I'd never get Babbage's engines to work. Babbage's Engine would be your best bet, though really it would only be "useful" for computing very accurate approximations of functions with Taylor series; it certainly isn't logic based like actual computers are, so its practical functionality would be limited to things like navigation and such that require extremely precise measurements.

Originally Posted By: Trenton-Eye I meant everything. Imagine that there was a huge nuclear war that BLEW EVERY FRICKEN THING UP! And you had yourself and everything you needed. However nothing was assembled. You had to put chips together, the green thing on which all the dots and tube looking things, you had to assemble those. Everything is separate. You would have to do the welding. You would have to make your own monitor, cut the glass, make the buttons, make the electricity. I meant it was impossible from EXTREME scratch Some dude made a toaster from extreme scratch. Mine the ore, forged the metal, everything. I don't know what he was trying to prove, other that industrialized production of consumer goods is the best thing ever.

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit Originally Posted By: Top in a Duck Hat That being said, the only HP drawback is the boatloads of crapware they send with their stuff, but all prebuilt computers have that, and it's easy enough to remove. Not true, and you can probably guess which computer manufacturer does not load their computers with crap. And yes, their computers will certainly run Windows. That's not really a helpful suggestion. Given that: Originally Posted By: Thin Gypsy Thief [it] needs to be capable of running modern games and likely to run future ones. and Originally Posted By: Thin Gypsy Thief I would still hope to keep the price around $1000. , Mac's don't fit the bill. When you consider that the 11-inch Air is "on sale" for $900, and you'd need to sink upwards of $2k into a Mac before you started getting comparable hardware specs to a dv7t costing half that; combined with the fact that you wouldn't be able to play most modern games without partitioning/emulating, a very simple cost/benefit analysis would show that getting any Mac would be a very sub-optimal solution in this case.

I advise having HP custom-build one for you- it's base costs are very cheap, and you can pick and choose where you want hardware upgrades. I'd recommend picking up a dv6t (or even dv7t if you don't mind the extra cost) Quad Edition and tossing in a GPU and processor upgrade, which they install and ship for you. Plus, you can probably get free shipping or some such with all the sales going on.

Originally Posted By: waterplant fat floats doesn't it? In what? Helium floats in air, fat floats in water, and pretty much everything floats in mercury...