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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| Boo in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, October 31 2007 13:48
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Can't say I admire vandals much myself, though. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hero of old spell in Nethergate | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, October 30 2007 21:24
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But for everyone who wants the super item, there seem to be several who will complain that it 'breaks' the game. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Name Choice in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, October 30 2007 13:43
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I don't think Ephesos (or in Turkish, Efes) is really a current Turkish city. But the ancient city has been being excavated and semi-restored for several decades now. The project will take another half-century or so to complete, but it's already a heck of a place to visit. They really didn't live so badly there, in the early centuries AD. An important tip for enjoying such a place: think of the swarms of other tourists as though they were simply the population of the city, which in its heyday was crowded with people from all over the then-locally-known world. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| problem in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, October 30 2007 13:35
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Here we see the naiveté that no mod can afford. Spambots these days think nothing of growing cloned younger brothers, in advance, for exactly this purpose. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Fan Art in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, October 30 2007 13:27
Profile
Not to criticize the drawing itself, which is very good, but the pose kind of looks as though the Drakon is helping the Guardian adjust his new outfit: Rebel Eye for the Shaper Guy. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| problem in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, October 29 2007 23:26
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Aran's policy on multiply owned accounts is Don't Ask, Don't Tell. -------------------- 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, October 29 2007 23:10
Profile
Corn flakes tasted funny this morning, did they? Sheesh. No lives hang on this issue, so maybe we could save the donnish excoriations for our comments on Synergy's next term paper. And if every dream of better things were scorned for being vague and incoherent, we'd all still be hooting at the hyenas in the cavemouth. Gradually hacking away at monsters is a staple component of an awful lot of gaming. It's like Pizza Hut: some tasty toppings, but underneath there's always this massive slab of bland dough. I think this is really just the micro end of the grinding issue on which Jeff himself has recently called crusade. Hacking is filler. It's easy to design, and including a lot of it in the game you design lets you stretch the playing time a lot. No-one will mind, because the phenomenon is accepted without question. What alternatives are there? Scylla and Charybdis. If you somehow manage to make combat short and decisive without making it horrible, you make a short game that plays thin. If you make combat intricate and realistic, then you have to design a novel swordsmanship challenge for every orc, or else all you've done is mounted a steep learning curve onto the front end of a game whose plateau is still effectively just hack and slash. Ordinarily there's just no substitute for detailed creative design. If you want to replace half a game's playing time with something more interesting, you've got to put twice as much effort into designing it; or else hope to sell a game half as long for full price. The only way I can see to escape this dilemma is to invent chess. Come up with a combat system which has a manageably small number of elements, but offers endless scope for tactical skill, and stubbornly resists reduction to a few optimal strategies. Beautiful challenges, which yet can be solved in a few tries by average customers, can be concocted in this system without effort or limit — and without needing Neuromancer for your game's AI. Now you're set. [ Monday, October 29, 2007 23:16: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G3-why do you dislike it in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, October 29 2007 22:19
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That's quite true, and in one sense G3 is much less linear than its predecessors. The others allow a lot more flexibility, but only because the actual plot of the other games consists of only a few crucial actions. G3 has at least a rudimentary storyline, with a sequence of actions that have meaningful consequences at least on their respective islands. So although in fact you seem to have fewer paths through the game than in previous versions, your several chances to switch sides seem more significant than simply chatting to Learned Darian. It is still a problem, however, that many of the restrictions on your actions in G3 do seem arbitrary. The waters around the Ashen Isles must be strange indeed, if you can't possibly sail from one to another without acquiring a new boat in between. And if a simple fence can defeat a mighty Shaper, then we know the ultimate horror that lies beneath even the Monastery Caves: you must face the gazebo alone. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| problem in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, October 29 2007 11:17
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Native to Texas and goodness knows where else, the peccadillo is more properly referred to as the needle-nosed armadillo (Sagittaria Varminta). -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G5 wishlist. in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, October 28 2007 11:02
Profile
Sometime before G4, I had a discussion with Waylander, I believe, about Shaper competence. I argued that Shaper society, and the Shaper Council at its peak, were stumbling through the minefield of history, irresponsibly continuing to build secured labs and develop new techniques, when their vaunted discipline and control were actually and manifestly inadequate to prevent disaster after disaster after disaster. I also held it against the Shapers that so many of their apparently top people kept going rogue. Waylander, on the other hand, felt that the disasters we had seen were representative only of the frontier areas, where Shaper control was inevitably weak. G4 still hasn't quite clarified this issue. So it would be nice indeed if G5 could show us some of the Shaper empire's most civilized areas. In that discussion with Waylander I also presented another possibility, which I think is also still open. That is that in the Geneforge world, shaping may be extremely hard to master, but all too easy to learn. So there may be Monarchs, or at least mini-Monarchs, cropping up all the time. The Shapers have no choice but to accept a lot of borderline unstable characters into their ranks, because otherwise all those Teks and Agathas and Hoges and Barzahls and Goettschs would just have been Monarchs anyway. Putting them into trefoil robes at least offers some chance of keeping the lid on them. And the Shapers put the best face on things that they can, trumpeting their discipline and restraint as though saying often enough that all Shapers have those qualities might begin to make it so. What other choice do they have? Ever since shaping was discovered, they have had a tiger by the tail. They hang on because their hanging on is the only thing keeping the world from being devoured by Monarchs. Collectively they are nowhere near as competent or responsible as they pretend. But this pretence is part of the hanging on that they need to do, for everyone's sake. In this sense, what seem like Shaper incompetence, irresponsibility, and hypocrisy, may really be Shaper tragedy, even Shaper nobility. I don't necessarily want G5 to settle this issue either, but it would be nice to see it somehow addressed. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| best creation combos for lifecrafter in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, October 27 2007 23:52
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Wingbolts do sometimes run out of energy at inopportune moments, but all Wingbolts is probably quite doable nonetheless. For variety, though, I had fun with an additional Rotghroth, or even two. They didn't have the quick takedown power of the Wingbolts, but they never run out energy, they're very tough, and their acid accumulates even on hard targets. Maybe I was just imagining it, but it seemed to me that they gave me more control over battles. I could tie things up in melee with my Rotghroth, and count on them staying busy. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, October 27 2007 22:11
Profile
I expect you'll have to take the book a bit seriously for your midterm, but for after the Kool-Aid wears off, you should keep in mind that David Deutsch's role in quantum information research is a fittingly paradoxical superposition of grand old man and goofy mascot. Whatever he says about the fabric of reality (I have not read the book myself) should be taken with a grain of salt. His technical contributions are solid, though by no means towering. I think his best known achievement is the construction of one of the handful of quantum algorithms that solves a problem faster than any classical algorithm can. Unfortunately the problem that Deutsch's algorithm solves is a simple and artificial one with no known practical relevance. And it has not even yet yielded, to my knowledge, any significant broader insight into the power of quantum algorithms. Deutsch has been a life-long crusader for the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Overall this view is not really popular among physicists, though there are always a few folks who flaunt it to prove their tough-mindedness or something. I find it myself to be an absurdly huge violation of Occam's Razor: walnuts are observed to shatter spontaneously, so we postulate an undetectable sledgehammer. There are also some serious technical issues with MWI. Firstly, parsing the components of a quantum state into alternate 'worlds' implies a preferred choice of basis in state space. Re-writing a particle's position space wave function in momentum space, for instance, would totally reshuffle the worlds. So MWI needs somehow to introduce a preferred basis structure into quantum mechanics. It then needs an axiom to state that superpositions in this basis are experienced as probabilistic alternatives. MWI rhetoric likes to sweep this last step under the rug, treating it as though it were obvious in light of some 'natural' theory of consciousness or something. However you want to spin it, though, in formal logic an additional axiom is required here, or one simply cannot derive conclusions that agree with observations. When its preferred basis and probabilistic alternative axioms are made explicit, MWI seems to me to be logically identical to the standard Copenhagen interpretation, with its axioms about measurement and wave function collapse. So I don't see that MWI represents any logical reduction whatever. And in that case its many worlds are simply the undetectable sledgehammer. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G5 wishlist. in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, October 25 2007 22:22
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Igor made a good point in the G4 survey thread: we never really see much of the good that shaping can do. So far the Geneforge series has made the Trakovite cause look appealing, because we've seen lots of shaping disasters. If G5 is going to end the series, then it will probably have to feature the Trakovite option prominently, since that would make for a real conclusion. But it would definitely raise the stakes of the game if we also saw shaping doing some unambiguous good — and not just in undoing damage done by shaping. Some idyllic place that had been howling desert before the landscape was shaped. Some gravely injured or handicapped people, perhaps so from birth, restored to health by shaping. Maybe even some intelligent creations that are neither slaves nor monsters. Something that makes shaping more than just a bad genie that should obviously be put back in the bottle if only that were possible. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. 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 Thursday, October 25 2007 09:49
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The ruins of Harston, no longer a town, are in Avernum 4. It is reasonable to suppose that New Harston is a new version of Harston. Just where it is, though, you'll have to wait to discover. As Jeff indicated months ago, A5 is set in Avernum, but in a previously unexplored set of caves. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Consider This Catharsis in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, October 24 2007 22:15
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Indeed, quantum computation is not non-deterministic Turing machines. A quantum computer is parallel and capable of exploring multiple inputs in a single run, but it does so within the tight constraints of quantum mechanics, which is not simply arbitrary parallelism. It has its own rules, and exploring just what those are is an interesting new angle on understanding quantum mechanics in general. It is also of some interest as an extension of classical computer science. It is far from clear that quantum computers will ever replace classical computers wholesale, but it is quite likely that quantum engines will be available as oracles for specific types of problem within our lifetimes. Which is why people have been doing advanced research on quantum computation theory for quite a few years now, mostly in physics departments, sometimes in computer science departments, and in a few cases at large companies (IBM and Microsoft are the ones I know). Basic research always looks far ahead. It also looks wide to the sides, considering things that don't seem at all likely bets for application in the foreseeable future. That's what you have to do, or the human race is just stumbling blindly into the future, hoping things will work out. And there are billions of us, after all. Throwing a few hundred thousand humans into basic research, around the world, is a smart investment. Most of their research never really pays off in practical terms. But a tiny fraction of the ideas they generate are the biggest practical payoffs humanity ever gets. Basic research is like a lottery where the tickets are expensive and the odds of winning are low, but the prize is disproportionately enormous. It pays to keep playing. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Consider This Catharsis in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, October 24 2007 11:53
Profile
Wikipedia told me that verifiability in polynomial time with a deterministic Turing machine is logically equivalent to solvability in polynomial time with a non-deterministic model. Hence the otherwise awkward name 'non-deterministic polynomial'. Evidently the non-deterministic solvability concept was the first one introduced, historically. But this is part of my question. Are non-deterministic Turing machines of any real interest, or were they just a notion people passed through on the way to realizing that verification was what they really wanted to discuss? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Consider This Catharsis in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, October 24 2007 10:54
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I am interested in understanding better the complexity class NP. I had always supposed that NP stood for 'non-polynomial', meaning problems for which no algorithm running in polynomial time exists. I have just learned (via the usual oracle call) that NP is 'non-deterministic polynomial', and refers to the 'non-deterministic Turing machine', which seems to be essentially the Turing machine that a god of luck would purpose-build for any problem. As pre-payment for any information on the topic, I offer my own modest but non-trivial insight in the general theory of problem solving. Some problems are in the class NC, which stands for No-one Cares. Worse are problems in the class NC-Complete, which no-one will ever care about, because if they cared about any one of them, they would have to care about all the others too. The insight is that you should avoid working on these problems. *(laugh here) You should not laugh. *(and here) -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Book or Movie? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, October 22 2007 09:54
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The quality gap may indeed be just how I value things, and not an objective phenomenon. Of course strictly speaking it couldn't possibly be otherwise; but I mean that my theory may be even less arguable than it could be. Nevertheless I believe something of the effect I describe really exists, even if it doesn't go so far as to make a quality gap for everyone. Once something is good enough, it starts to affect the standards by which it is judged, and tilt the field in its own favor, automatically. Heck, I think it works for coffee: at first you get to like coffee because it's just plain good, but once you appreciate coffee, it can be good by being good coffee. Coffee becomes a genre, with its own standards, instead of just having to abide by some external standard. I suppose I may be particularly prone to identifying genres in this way. I can often see many several sides to an issue, perspectives from which it looks better or worse. But if I like it enough, I start to automatically look at it in every most favorable light, so that what would otherwise be its flaws all melt away. Not everyone needs to read this way, but I can claim this advantage: I have quite a few perfect books on my shelves. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G3-why do you dislike it in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, October 22 2007 03:38
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I defend G3 as being the right game for its point in the story. But I suppose I can still concede that that point in the story is kind of depressing. It's about the narrowing of the range of options, once open war has broken out, and that's a necessary part of the story; but as a game it's still kind of frustrating. Constraint and frustration is really a motif in G3: you can't get off the islands, you can't get to a forge, the conflict can't be resolved, the army won't march, Khyrryk won't do anything, the Geneforge isn't ready. Obstacles are the stuff of all games, of course; but in G3 the frustration factor is amplified just that bit too much. The small islands force you to focus more on whatever is blocking you at the moment, and as a more official agent of either the shapers or the rebels, you are directly involved in the frustrations more than in earlier games. And your range of options is narrower. In many ways this higher focus and involvement is a good thing in a game. If there were only a bit more success possible in G3, so that you could turn the long string of frustrations into satisfying victories, then I think it would be much more popular. As it is, all the G3 victories are modest at best, whichever side you take; and I think that's maybe what gets people down. People feel bad about being constrained, because they feel bad that no option leading to great success was available. That's one thing that G4 does better, I think. You have a sequence of major and important tasks that you can actually achieve, and as you knock each one down, an authority figure pats you on the back and sends you urgently onward. -------------------- 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, October 22 2007 03:17
Profile
To some extent, Synergy, you seem to be asking simply for a better game, rather than a better game system. A lot of what you want can be done in pen-and-paper games with a live referee, almost regardless of what system is being used. A referee can fine tune the level of challenge of monsters to the individual party, making enemies that hit harder, but fall quicker, with less risk of random auto-kill. I guess I do agree that too much whacking gets old, and that a few more easy kills late in the game would somehow be satisfying. I'm not sure I see any room for commercial CRPGs to do much more than just tweak the hacking down a bit, though. A good pen-and-paper campaign would probably do the full job. Maybe a BoA scenario could come close. It might not appeal to many, but those who liked it would like it a lot. -------------------- 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, October 21 2007 22:30
Profile
If you want realistic simulations of medieval combat, you're looking at a very different type of game, not a revision of FRPGs. Short of that, the goal is not realism but fun. Suspension of disbelief is an important ingredient in fun, to be sure, but you can achieve that just by changing how you think about the game. Whereas the mechanics changes Synergy suggests would, I think, make a game that was outright infuriating. I have played tabletop games with combat systems more like what Synergy suggests, as well as the classic D&D 'to hit' plus hit points system. The old sci-fi game 'Traveller' was basically similar but had no separate hit point total; instead, damage was applied temporarily to your primary stats, so getting shot would drop your strength or your dexterity. The typical amount of damage that things did would frequently drop any one stat low enough for penalties to make you very ineffective at anything, until you got healed — which was not easy. No doubt this was somewhat realistic, in that one wound was definitely bad. But since the same rules worked for your enemies, the effect was that it was essentially impossible to totally incapacitate anyone with one shot, no matter how big your laser rifle was: you could drop the cyborg's DX to 3, but it would still be shooting back with some chance of doing damage. And it was infuriatingly easy to have your character rendered virtually useless for the rest of the game session, because a hit had dropped your DX to 3. I also played a session or two of 'Stormbringer', set in Michael Moorcock's world of Elric and Melniboné. This was rather similar to Traveller, except worse, in that bad hits had a fairly good chance of permanently maiming or crippling you in some way. It wasn't really much quicker or easier to kill anything than in D&D, but by a couple of hours after roll-up our whole party was a pack of gimps. Accumulating injuries seemed to degrade your characters faster than experience points could improve them. These may just be two bad examples, although Traveller at least had quite a following. But I think there's a general lesson. Combat systems featuring slow erosion of hit points ensure that losing a battle is something you can see coming, in time to do something about it. Run away, or pull out that super-wand you've been saving, or whatever. Combat systems that allow deadly things to happen suddenly effectively mean regular random auto-kills. Or at least, like Traveller and Stormbringer, regular randomly-inflicted severe handicaps. The randomness is essentially impossible to avoid, because RPGs cannot afford to devote hours to recreating combats in detail, with the player choosing every feint and dodge. All of that has to be covered by random rolls. If a player wonders why they just lost an arm, the in-game reason is that they sidestepped when they should have shield-shifted, or something like that. But the player didn't make that mistake; it was just a die roll. This is not fun to have to accept. Of course, it is realistic; but that's just it. The essential piece of fantasy in an RPG is the possibility of heroes: one to six awesome individuals who accomplish the entire saga. In reality this just does not happen. Fighting a battle is like Russian roulette even when you're maximally skilled and talented, and the only characters that can be counted on to survive a long campaign are the generals who stay out of the fray. If you want an RPG instead of an RTS, you need a combat system that lets heroes survive and prosper through an unlimited number of battles. So to make heroes possible, you need hit points. What I tried to do, when I was DMing, was to justify them. The idea was that only your last few points actually meant physical injury of any kind. The rest was all a symbolic quantification of fatigue, luck running out, chi getting drained, or whatever. A hero's hack-fu is strong. In fact I souped the system up a bit more than this, with four tiers of hit points representing more and more substantial effects, and taking longer to heal. But the point was that killing a 100-hit-point beast in 30 rounds with a d8 weapon wasn't really a matter of bruising it to death. It was wearing it down, fending it off, probing its weak spots, maybe all without even touching it; and only finally delivering a deadly thrust. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Do you like changes in Avernum or not in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, October 21 2007 07:01
Profile
Hmm, perhaps that would work. Perhaps you should run it by Jeff. The question is whether reaction-diffusion on a grid of order 100 square (whatever is the visible area in a Spiderweb game) could relax to steady state every turn, without slowing the game. Matlab on a workstation, doing nothing else, would probably be pretty quick. But for Avernum 6 on a low-end machine, I'd be a bit worried. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The noob language in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, October 21 2007 05:08
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They burned our crops, tilted our windmills, slashed our tires and slipped toxic waste into our gin and tonic. On their way out they rustled our cattle, and next day when we counted the silverware we were short six forks and a butterknife. All their smileys were cross-eyed, and their signatures reeked of cheap whisky. They were bad. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Political Compass (Armed and Dangerous) in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, October 21 2007 04:56
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Why are the graph's two axes so correlated? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Do you like changes in Avernum or not in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, October 20 2007 11:54
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Anti-objects may be great, but the difficulty of finding a short path between two points appears to stand. To chase Pac-Man, you can have Pac-Man leave a scent and pursue the scent. But a mouse-click leaves no continuous trail, so you can't follow its scent. The entire problem is simply minimum distance with fixed endpoints, and this is hard. Moreover, for Spiderweb games you don't necessarily need minimal travel time, but you don't want stupidly long time. Although 'not stupidly long' is logically weaker than 'minimal', it is much harder to specify. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |