Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Across the Universe? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 9 2007 00:02
Profile
In the first place fetuses growing on Earth aren't exactly getting a lot of weight-bearing exercise, so I don't expect their bones would develop all that differently on Mars. Fetuses do kick around a fair amount (once they're big enough that it would be silly not to call them babies), and maybe they need to train against this resistance; but this is about inertial mass, not weight, and that doesn't change on Mars. Once born, people growing up on Mars would indeed probably grow differently. Kim Stanley Robinson envisaged them all growing very tall and slight. But this wouldn't mean that people couldn't live on Mars; just that it would be tough for someone raised on Mars to visit Earth. On the other hand, there's this essential difference between Mars's weak gravity and the microgravity of orbit or interplanetary space. You don't need to build a centrifuge on Mars to raise your weight to what you're used too. You just need to wear lead. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Revised political-geneforge sympathies poll in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 8 2007 23:53
Profile
I think a lot of analogies between Geneforge and real world politics are fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the most basic feature of real world politics is that almost all humans simply are roughly equal, in physical capability. So power is about persuading large numbers of other humans to follow you. Even technology hasn't changed this fundamentally: no nation yet has ever fielded an army that could defeat its entire civilian population, if they behaved as a suicidally determined mob. So even regimes based on force are really based on intimidating most people, while retaining the loyalty of the troops. In the Geneforge world this is not so. Talented individuals can personally acquire magical power with no apparent limit, or control mindless armies of monsters, also with no apparent limit. (Particular individuals may have limits, but there is no known limit to what the next mad Shaper might be able to do.) So while the goals of Geneforge characters may be compared to the goals of real world figures, the means available to the former are radically different. And in fact the distinction between ends and means is not really sharp, because means shape ends. Politics is the art of the possible, and the possible of Geneforge is very different. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Across the Universe? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 8 2007 21:27
Profile
What would be the problem with fetal development? A fetus is small and lives in fluid, where it tumbles around a lot. So neither orientation nor structural stress seems to be an issue. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Revised political-geneforge sympathies poll in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 8 2007 13:15
Profile
Meta-Godwin's Law, however, is another story. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Across the Universe? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, November 7 2007 22:50
Profile
Someone recently pointed out to me that the argument about Earth deteriorating through pollution or overpopulation is weak: the Earth would have to deteriorate one heck of a lot before it became a worse place to live than Mars. But I think eventually we'll do it just because we can. There'll be a bunch of excuses given at the time, but huge as the project is, it will only require a tiny effort on the scale of the entire human race, so the underlying reason why we will go there will just be that it will be cool. And eventually — centuries from now — I think there will be a sizable human population on Mars. People won't go there to mine minerals or anything like that, though there will probably be mining on Mars. People will go there for the same reason they go to New York City: just because enough people are already there. The big advantage Mars has over the moon is that it does have an atmosphere. It's very thin, and low in oxygen even at that, but you can pump it up to breathable pressures in a dome, without having to bring it all from Earth and worry about it running out. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Left or Right? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, November 7 2007 11:01
Profile
Sort of. I was in the Canadian Militia, which is pretty closely the Canadian version of the US National Guard, for several years. That was long enough ago that when I first joined there seemed to be a chance I might suddenly find myself facing Soviet armor in western Europe somewhere, but in fact I never came remotely near any form of combat, and in retrospect the chances that I ever would have were essentially nil. The training was nevertheless very interesting, but it took a lot of time. Eventually I decided I needed to give it up if I was going to survive grad school, and it was like pulling up anchor in my life, to have that much more time for everything else. But part of me still misses it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Left or Right? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, November 7 2007 02:03
Profile
I've done very little pistol shooting, and for most of that I pulled the trigger with my right hand, but held the weapon with both. With a rifle or SMG, handedness in the actual shooting doesn't make so much difference, but the bolt, magazine release, and safety catch are generally set up for right-handed shooters, and it's quite weird to have to adapt to this if you try to switch hit. On the Browning M2 .50 calibre machine gun, and lighter guns of similar design, the trigger is actually a symmetrical push-plate that you typically press with both hands at once, but the bolt is again on the right hand side. It isn't easy to move that thing even with your dominant hand, so I imagine it would be a bit of pain for lefties. On the 84mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle the sights are on the left side, so you have to fire right handed. Handedness doesn't matter with a mortar. The Brown Bess musket has the cock on the right side, so firing left-handed is possible but awkward. I think that's as far as my experience extends. But I haven't fired a shot in years now. [ Wednesday, November 07, 2007 02:05: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Original names in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 6 2007 03:42
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I never thought I'd be a geisha. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 world in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, November 6 2007 01:02
Profile
I hereby bend my NDA far enough to reveal: no. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Left or Right? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 11:59
Profile
If I had a dollar for every real number, and everyone else had dollars only for every natural number, then if someone bet his entire stack, everyone else could call; but I could raise. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 11:37
Profile
Careful lest the old fashioned bullets-for-food exchange program become a better analogy. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 09:46
Profile
Probably this just isn't near creative enough, but in theoretical physics we always like to squeeze as much juice as possible out of trivial generalizations, before facing the need for real work. So I've been thinking of a game with D&D-style combat, plus a disguised clone of D&D-style combat. Some quantity other than health, which is nevertheless represented with something analogous to hit points; some class of items or attributes other than weapons and spells, which can lower the non-health-hit-points of adversaries; etc. There could be minor tweaks to the combat-clone system, but the main difference would just be in what it is supposed to represent. So for instance I could imagine a game in which characters have both physical and spiritual health. When your spiritual health drops to zero, you lose the ability to perceive and act 'on the spirit plane'. Various talismans and rituals might offer offense or defense against spiritual adversaries. There would be a whole parallel game system of spiritual stuff. The default could be that the spiritual and physical games do not interact at all, but tailor-made plot items could relate them in specifically controlled ways. Some vital piece of information might be accessible only spiritually; some physical defenses might protect a powerful spiritual talisman. If the system ever began to seem workable, one could gradually turn on more linkage. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Left or Right? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 05:07
Profile
Darned lawyers, trying to keep those of us who don't already have lots of infinity from multiplying ours. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 04:57
Profile
Well, we don't have to create life here. D&D-style combat is a pretty robust and well-understood sandbox module. We could try adding one more modest chunk of things to it, and then round up the few fringe elements of hell that broke loose. With luck maybe we could gradually invent chess, as I suggested before. After all, they did it with Starcraft. Or we could accept to have several separate sandbox simulation games, and bundle them together in a story that ran on rails, text-adventure-style, with relatively few branchings, camouflaged to look freer than it is. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 04:09
Profile
Automatic safeguards against such things are what I mean by sandboxing. It's still all too easy in a hack-and-slash combat game for some unanticipated combination of tactics to break the game, by making it possible to do > X damage to monster Y. But the number of combinations is finite, and a reasonable amount of beta testing can catch a reasonable proportion of such problems. It's when you don't dig in the sandbox, such as by simulating even such a simple real-world activity as moving objects and climbing on them, that you get bizarre loopholes that nobody anticipates. Evidently sandboxing itself is quite non-trivial. There will probably always be a chance that it might break down unexpectedly and badly. But lives aren't at stake here, and as long as we can keep the catastrophes rare enough, we might get a few good new games. One thing that these examples do illustrate is that sandboxing is not trivially extensible. I mean, stacking and climbing would be a perfect sandbox if an entire game was built around them: a few simple rules and items. But attach this as a module to a larger game, with lots of walls that are supposed to be obstacles in a complicated plot, and the sandbox is broken. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, November 5 2007 03:24
Profile
It's worth pointing out that text adventures have come a long way since the Collossal Cave era. Knowing what to do, but having to struggle to find the right words to get the game to do it, is nowadays considered a major flaw which good games are expected to avoid entirely. The constraints in the best modern text adventures are much more subtle, but still inexorable. A good modern game will give sensible responses to all kinds of attempted actions with the tapestry on the wall. But unless the designer deliberately makes the tapestry part of a possible solution to some puzzle, these responses just won't go anywhere. The tapestry is not really implemented as an object with fixed properties, so it can't be picked up and put to unforeseen use later in the game. Text adventures are primarily stories, rather than simulations. This means that it would actually be very bad for a text adventure to allow you to do all kinds of detailed things with every random object mentioned in the text. That would swamp the game with infuriating red herrings. Simulation games, among which only flight simulators really spring to mind, are only supposed to simulate. Everything which is included in the game in any way is supposed to be fully manipulable. The fact that it can require hours of learning just to be able to take off and land is not considered a flaw. RPGs are somewhere in between. There's a finite sandbox of rules and items, within which something like simulation is expected. Outside this, it's fine to have no implementation at all. You simply can't interact with the tapestry sprite; you don't even get a generic 'that isn't interesting' message. (As a visual analog to the deft diversions of modern text adventures, though, I think of the wonderful Pajama Sam kids' games, in which a lot of things in every frame can be clicked to produce silly vignettes.) For some reason this sandboxed simulation concept is accepted for hack-and-slash combat. Perhaps that idea wouldn't seem nearly so obvious without forty-odd years of tradition dating back to tabletop wargames with lead figures. So is there any other kind of thing or situation, besides hacking, that might be amenable to sandboxed simulation? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Original names in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, November 4 2007 22:24
Profile
The funny thing is, I can almost always recognize Alorael even in the "Last Post" column on the main boards page. His PDNs change, but his style is consistent. Which is probably just to say that he is the only person with enough PDNs to have a PDN style. Though TM was getting there. Of course, it could just be that any unfamiliar name is more likely to be Alorael than anyone else. [ Sunday, November 04, 2007 23:00: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, November 4 2007 22:12
Profile
Somewhere between reflex naysaying, and blanket invocation of dreamer's license, there could be a useful discussion of what might actually be possible in a CRPG, if we abandoned some of the genre's staple conceits. So: one could definitely do something bad along Synergy's lines, but even a game dominated by realistic tactical problems that required many save-loads to solve might still be salvageable. For instance, a classic in infantry tactical training is an old pre-WWI short story entitled The Defence of Duffer's Drift, by one E.D. Swinton. A young British platoon commander dreams that he has to hold a position against canny Boer attackers. His defence fails, but each night he gets to repeat the dream differently until, after learning a lot, he succeeds. The story is quite absorbing, and something like it might well be realizable in a game. But a game of standard length could only consist of a few such battles. And the modern classic text adventure Varicella (scroll down past the straitjacket picture), by Adam Cadre, requires so many save-loads to win that I coined the term 'iterature' (as far as I know) just for it. The thing about both these successful implementations of the save-loaded tactical puzzle is that they use much more restrictive media than the usual CRPG. In a story the reader has no input, and in a text adventure it is sharply limited (though Cadre is perhaps the genre's greatest master at concealing the limitations, giving an illusion of total freedom). Now one can also make a CRPG in which the player's actions are tightly constrained. Indeed CRPG's are inevitably very constrained in any case, because everything that happens is supposed to be represented graphically, and the graphics can only handle a rather narrow range of events. You can't seize a tapestry off the wall and smother a monster with it, in any CRPG I've ever heard of. But somehow the constraints inherent in CRPGs, and the constraints needed to make a tactical puzzle decently solvable without having to channel the designer's spirit, don't seem to me to be very compatible. Why don't they seem compatible? I'm not sure and I'd like to know better, because this might point a way to combining them after all. Or at least I would learn something more about how games and puzzles work, which I also find interesting. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Revised political-geneforge sympathies poll in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, November 3 2007 23:55
Profile
Since Canada is a constitutional monarchy, rather than a republic, a Canadian Republican party would have to be about getting rid of the monarchy. No doubt that measure will grow in popularity, especially once Charles succeeds. (Whatever his personal merits may be, the idea of having a hereditary head of state living in another country needs all the support from familiarity, and respect for the incumbent, that it can get.) But the vast majority of Canadians would rather have a Martian as their head of state, than vote for a party named after a major American one. [ Saturday, November 03, 2007 23:56: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Sky Is Falling...? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, November 3 2007 14:56
Profile
It is absurd to suggest that these anecdotal episodes of thread destruction, even if they do represent a long-term trend, can possibly have been caused be the actions of any of us puny humans, insignificant as we are in comparison with the vastness of UBB. In fact, I hereby propound the Gaea Hypothesis of UBB. Far from being an inert engine, UBB has a mysterious synergetic wisdom. It knows what it needs, and takes accordingly. Sometimes it needs threads, or at least parts of them, to enrich the soil from which new threads will spring. Apparently, just now it needed a few pages of this stuff. So we should not mourn or complain. And definitely not taunt. [ Saturday, November 03, 2007 14:58: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G2 sect simpatising in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 2 2007 13:54
Profile
The official Awakened doctrine may be moral, but as I've argued before, the Awakened in practice are clearly and rapidly becoming what they beheld. Learned Pinner is a nice old lady, and their only really major player is the canister-addled demon-summoning Tuldaric. Their great plan is to hold off the Shapers with an army of enslaved Drakons, while modifying themselves into magery, and so giving both the Barzites and the Takers good runs for their money. Survival in a world of Shapers requires power, but that power doesn't just corrupt. It is corruption. The Awakened refuse to recognize this dilemma. They're not standing on the moral high ground; they just have their heads in the clouds, while their feet are rushing down the same slope as everyone else. This means they have a good chance of producing the worst disasters of all, and so they stand not for moral wisdom but for moral folly. It is understandable to want them to be the good guys. But if you pay attention to what they're actually doing, I think you see that they really aren't. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Thoughts on Custom Titles. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 2 2007 04:57
Profile
quote:FYFYT. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Thoughts on Custom Titles. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, November 2 2007 01:43
Profile
quote:FYI. [ Friday, November 02, 2007 01:45: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fantastical Thoughts On RPG Game Mechanics in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 1 2007 22:51
Profile
The multiple PC thing might be doable. I'd imagine a game where the real protagonist is a group or cause. Players control one or a few of the group's members at a time, each doing their part in some long campaign. If the entire game were still about the standard length, then this would mean a kind of braid of shorter stories, instead of one long saga, as far as individual characters were concerned. This would pose some challenges. With each character having less screen time in which to gain levels, gaining levels would become a much less significant feature of the game. That might be fine, though. Perhaps more importantly, there would be less time for each individual character to develop personality. But there would be some interesting features added by running a stable of PCs, as opposed to the usual singleton or fixed party. Some of them, or even many of them, might be bound to die along the way. So the game could be made quite a bit more 'realistic' in this sense. Really interesting: there could be possibilities for some of the characters to betray the group they initially represent, and join or start another one. Unless some very clever plotting were managed — which might be possible — then some combats between player characters — in a one-player RPG! — could occur. To make this work would need either an engine that could handle playing-both-sides fights, or an AI so good that it could credibly manage a character that would be a PC in other stages of the game. Or else, I suppose, the game could simply convert PCs into NPCs if they went off the rails. Maybe getting a good ending would require that the player exercise leadership, in ensuring that their stable of PCs actually stayed committed to the cause and did not all turn into NPCs. Well, there are some interesting options here. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Left or Right? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, November 1 2007 08:15
Profile
Counterclockwise at first, and couldn't get it to change for a while. Then like others I focused on the shadow, and this made it easy; I can switch back and forth at will. The clockwise motion looks less natural to me than the counter-clockwise. Counterclockwise looks like a real dancer might do that, clockwise looks as though she's a bit too much out of balance. The fact that there can be a difference in this is an interesting arrow of time problem. I don't buy for a moment that this test has anything to do with being right- or left-brained. The only visual asymmetry I believe in is that people do usually have a 'master eye'. The check is to focus on some small object across the room, then quickly block your view of it with your thumb, at arm's length. You should be able to do this instinctively, or think you can if you do it quickly; but in fact you can't simultaneously block the view from both eyes this way. By closing one eye then the other, without moving your thumb, see which eye's vision has actually been blocked. This is your master eye. I believe your master eye is usually on the same side as your dominant hand; but I don't think it is always so. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |