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 |
Recent posts
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| Author | Recent posts |
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| Geneforge 3 - Problems and Lankan in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 5 2007 10:52
Profile
No, Litalia slaughtered these youngsters in training, while you were looking at the splash screen. You may eventually decide to join her, but you don't have to approve of all her actions, let alone commit them yourself. And anyway, of all Litalia's actions, killing a schoolful of Alwans is perhaps the most militarily legitimate. An 'abort this quest' button is something I've wanted in the games myself; but it has a problem: there may need to be some way to change your mind, and re-accept a quest after deciding to abandon it. As the game progresses, you may learn that the quest is either more advantageous or less objectionable than it at first seemed. I guess for me what would make more sense than a cancel quest button would be a hide quest button, that would make quests disappear from my quest list. I could then hit a new button to show all the hidden ones, so I could unhide one if I wanted to. If I were really sure that I wasn't ever going to complete a quest, and I really wanted to make it impossible for myself to do it, I should just be able to return to the quest-giving NPC and tell them to take their quest and reabsorb it, sideways. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Geneforge 3 - Problems and Lankan in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, September 5 2007 07:24
Profile
I wouldn't say the characters are badly written; they're just not all enlightened Trakovites. Greta got kicked out of the Shaper school, so she naturally has some resentment towards them. But those students hardly count as innocent: they are oppressors-in-training. Lankan doesn't object to magical power, but to the failure of the Shapers to use their power to protect his people. He wants a chance to do better himself. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, September 4 2007 05:26
Profile
Now I'm thinking maybe we should all leave scriptwriting to the trained professional. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| New Spiderweb product idea in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, September 4 2007 05:23
Profile
A simpler publicity gimmick would be just a widget that lets you click on a canister and get the sound effect. It could display a message that you gain a point in some random ability — not necessarily a Geneforge ability. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| New Spiderweb product idea in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, September 3 2007 21:29
Profile
Friends, Romans, countrypeople; fellow travelers on Spaceship Earth: I have had the most awesome idea. It occurred to me in the Geneforge series forum, but it demands a wider audience. Jeff must begin selling coffee mugs that look like Geneforge canisters. That is all. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Episode 4: Spiderweb Reloaded. Something like that anyway. in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, September 3 2007 09:35
Profile
It's DV in his kilt. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Geneforge 3 - Problems and Lankan in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, September 3 2007 09:19
Profile
This is a typical complaint about G3, and it's a fact that the game doesn't permit all the options that ought to make sense. But if you're willing to squint a bit, in order to make the game more fun, you can try to see it like this. There's a war on, son. The time for sweet reason is past; now, it's kill or be killed, and compromise is treason to either side. Once you reach this stage, black and white is how things are, like it or not. Nothing can stop everything from falling onto one side or the other. Most people are panicking, so the hottest heads automatically have the most support, and they will have the last word, no matter how senseless it is. It's the hawks' hour; the doves are all dead. Choose your side, slam down the hatch, and put the pedal to the metal till there's nothing left to shoot. Then you can start thinking about which opinion would really be the best. Only then. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| noob info in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, September 2 2007 22:17
Profile
quote:This might require some people to post here full time, which is a lot to ask for nothing in return but the meaningless approbation of one's peers. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G2 - of all things, why Thrusting Gauntlets? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, September 2 2007 11:19
Profile
I seem to recall inner Gazak-Uss seeming a little tricky; though with 18 AP and very high Parry, this was probably some sort of illusion. Though the place had definitely been a bit scary my first time through it, with an Agent who kept running out of energy at the most inopportune moments. Likewise the Inner Crypt from G1 always keeps me on my toes. When you know what you're doing, nailing Danette's shade isn't so hard. But if you leave combat mode and just start waltzing around the joint, it will punish you. The basic fact is that Jeff is not in the business of providing truly challenging combat, since this would mean games that were frustrating for most of his customer base. He tries to make his games more challenging on Torment setting, but there is a point at which the rapidly proliferating options available to an intelligent player simply overwhelm any reasonable opposition, unless you can build a truly intelligent AI — which is out of Jeff's league. So in most of Jeff's games, the truly challenging fights are usually somewhere in the mid-game, where you push yourself to do something you shouldn't really be able to do for a few more levels. The resulting reward then makes the rest of the game easy. There are some exceptions. I had an Agent once in G3 who totally stormed the second half of the game, using high Quick Action; then at the very end it turned out that Akhari Blaze was a mite quicker. It made for a tricky final battle. The Alpha Creator in the Monastery Caves was also no joke. The last battle in A4 is one of the tougher ones in the game, I believe. And G4 does a pretty good job of making the final battle memorable, whichever side you take; while the Titan is again pretty formidable. None of this is to say that beating Spiderweb games makes you a chessmaster. Once you know what you're doing, you can slaughter every living thing without too much stress. The main point of the games is the story, for which the battles are mainly a sort of participatory illustration, or sometimes a sort of thematically relevant puzzle. But Jeff did begin to do a bit better at building interesting fights after G2. Come to think of it, that was actually the last Spiderweb game of the old style, in which monsters just sat in their designated spaces and whacked at you when you showed up and whacked at them. G2 is the last and perhaps greatest of a certain style of game, I suppose. A style in which a lot of pretty ancient conventions about how a CRPG should work were taken for granted. The player is a tourist in a big strange world, in which everyone else sits patiently waiting for the player to show up and either fight or talk. A few times in the game someone gives you a big mission, which you can accept as a goal, or ignore; other than that, you're on your own. Within those rather peculiar conventions, G2 is a masterpiece. Starting with G3, Jeff began introducing scripted elements into battles, and also began using more than a sparse handful of text boxes to carry the long main story arc in the game. In general he just started making the game's plot, and the main NPCs, more aggressive in interacting with the player. The transition to a new style of game didn't completely click for G3. Jeff had a story more directly expressed in the gameplay, with recurring NPCs, and a clear and present dilemma at every step; but he lost the wide-open feel of the old games. People seem to have appreciated the upgraded technical features but resented being run through the game on rails, and sales suffered. In A4 Jeff had the guts to keep on trying to make his new and more sophisticated game style work, but he hedged his bets by making sure he had a huge world to explore freely, and a lot of good fights. He achieved this combination, within the time frame his business demanded, by using a very simple plot. Critical response from his old fans was a bit harsh, but sales were great, and Jeff hasn't looked back. G4 was a major step forward for Spiderweb games, in my opinion. Instead of the old style of story and game in loose association, it's a plot that you play through. But it's a complicated enough plot, with enough options and issues, that you don't feel railroaded. And Jeff pulled off Ghaldring, against all expectations. That's where you see the new style beginning to really pay off. That of which we may not speak, because we have signed non-disclosure agreements, we must pass over in silence. But A5 looks like Avernum's turn to get the G4 treatment, and maybe then some. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G2 - of all things, why Thrusting Gauntlets? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, September 1 2007 01:22
Profile
Since this is G2, and you will still gain some levels: pump Parry. At high levels it makes the game rather too easy. Also, collect artifacts. Various skilled craftspeople around the game will make amazing items for you, if you find and bring them the right exotic components. In particular the Emerald Chestguard will make the game a lot easier once you get it. And try to get speed. Speed pods, speed spores, maybe even try to get enough intelligence to cast the speed spell on yourself. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, September 1 2007 01:08
Profile
The message I take, from bits like the bears eating the kids that taunted Elisha, is not that God really sends bears to eat kids who taunt prophets, but that the ancient Hebrews thought God would have taunters eaten by bears. On the one hand, this is a typically barbaric ancient way of expressing the real fact that mocking God is dangerous — not really because God is snippy, but because mocking God is as foolish as mocking gravity. On the other hand, it shows the brutality that God had to deal with, in the multi-millennial project of growing a cultural context for revelation. These are both important points, which I can believe God would want to convey. I take most of the apparently God-sanctioned atrocity in the OT in this way. The iconic story for me is the final twist in the life of the supreme prophet, Moses. From the manslaughter that was his first recorded act and which drove him from Egypt into the exile where he found a burning bush, the story of Moses shows him consistently reacting with uncontrolled violence whenever he gets sufficiently provoked. Exodus seriously portrays him, this tremendous prophet, as having a deep psychotic streak. To suppose that he performed all his massacres because that was what God wanted is reading into the text, at least in all the cases I can remember. Certainly the text never asserts that Moses was infallible. And in the end Moses himself is not permitted to enter the promised land to which he led his people for forty years. The reason is that at one crucial point, when the people were perishing for thirst in the desert, God told him to speak to a certain rock, telling it to release water. Instead Moses struck the rock. The water appeared, but Moses forfeited his entry visa, and died with only a sight of the land of promise. My reading is that Moses's fault was not this one reckless act, but the persistent habit of violence that made that reckless act typical of him. Of course it remains the case that, then as now, God evidently finds many horrible events to be the best course for history to take, for whatever reasons. (If the psychotic violence was Moses's rather than God's, still it was God who accepted Moses as a leader.) And the Biblical message on this problem, as given in the penultimate passage of the book of Job, is simply that humans are not qualified to judge the administration of a universe. Nobody has to accept that as a satisfying answer, but it is hard to deny that it might be true. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, August 31 2007 22:42
Profile
Abusus non tollit usus is the old rule. Practically speaking, good luck showing that the Bible causes net badness in the world, let alone such a preponderance of badness that we ought to let the abusus toll anyway on pragmatic grounds. Some of the OT laws are just wacky by modern standards, but some are remarkably enlightened for their time. Many of them seem to compress into the criminal code what we now distinguish as criminal investigation. So for instance what is classed as fornication or worse if it occurred in a settlement is deemed to be rape if it occurred far from witnesses, because the woman is presumed to have cried out for help. And beating a slave so badly that he dies on the scene is presumed to be intentional homicide, while causing an eventually fatal injury allows some possibility that there was less than murderous intent. Modern western law still recognizes this principle in distinguishing degrees of murder or manslaughter; it just allows a more elaborate procedure for determining intent. OT law is a rough and ready instrument, but many of its principles are still accepted. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G2 - of all things, why Thrusting Gauntlets? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, August 31 2007 04:48
Profile
I'm afraid I don't remember what sort of best weapons are available early for a Guardian, but I can point out that the lame reward from Zakary is intentional. Sort of makes you wonder whether you've backed the wrong horse, doesn't it? The other factions may be dangerous lunatics or whatever, but they do seem to have a little more power to throw around ... -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Park rangers are cute in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, August 31 2007 02:06
Profile
Biologists are eager to study recordings of the squeaky voices.  [ Friday, August 31, 2007 02:07: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 30 2007 21:21
Profile
Who says the Bible should have been a moral manual of foolproof clarity, to bring about peace on Earth? There have been a lot of simplistic moral manuals, and they're not much good for anything. And we know that no existing God can have peace on Earth as first priority, because wars are not stopped by miracles. Jesus explicitly disavowed the mission of bringing peace. I don't know what God's overriding aim is, for the Bible or anything else. I'm not sure I could know, any more than a paramecium could understand my aims. So I'm not buying arguments that the Bible fails to fulfill some assumed purpose. -------------------- 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 Thursday, August 30 2007 11:12
Profile
Saying that i transcends sequential numbers was presumably not invoking the mathematical meaning of 'transcendental'. But e to the power of (i times pi) is equal to -1, so i is close friends with some transcendentals. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Questions again in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 30 2007 04:05
Profile
As far as animations are concerned, attack graphics are an obvious option. The problem is that they would be a fairly minor change in the A4 engine, since the character sprites are rather small. Yet they would be a lot of work, because practically everything in the game would need several new animations. I think that smoother elevation changes, or eye candy like better water and steam and lava effects, would be a better investment of Jeff's time. Work on some nice environmental chrome like this would make some attractive screenshots to help sales, and would offer a more obvious result than just, 'If you look closely you can notice that your Slith just swung his spear instead of jabbing with it.' -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A5 Questions again in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 30 2007 02:52
Profile
The previous thread wasn't really bad. Ephesos is just the Eliot Ness of spam. And it's high time somebody took a stand like that around here. I remember when there was no spam at all, on my abacus. But seriously, folks. What Jeff does is incrementally upgrade his graphics, adding a few features each game. A4 got higher resolution and a seamless world, G4 got some nice spell effect graphics, A5 screenshots show that it is getting elevation. It's almost certainly way too late now for him to change A5 graphics much further. But if there were a consensus here about some more incremental changes for G5 or A6, he might well listen to it. [ Thursday, August 30, 2007 02:59: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, August 30 2007 02:35
Profile
quote:I guess I pretty much agree about this. But I find that after putting aside some of my baggage of naive ideas about how to read the Bible, it frequently surprises me with its relevance, to the point where I find it a useful tool in trying to see if God has anything relevant to say to me today. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 22:39
Profile
Christians generally do try to live by the Bible as God's guidebook, but they mostly do not interpret the guidebook in the very simplistic way with which you are familiar. They read the trivial contradictions you point out, and conclude that God must not in fact be so concerned that we know all that historical trivia exactly. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Lutherans, most Presbyterians I believe ... are not into literal inerrancy. And these groups make up the overwhelming majority of Christians in the world. Moreover, it is not at all that Christianity began with literalism and then reluctantly abandoned it in the face of evidence. The oldest styles of interpreting scripture were even freer than we now tolerate, being quite happy to wrench verses out of context to read into them symbolic meanings. Literalism is a late development. The Bible, like the world, is a jumble of history, full of all kinds of apparently extraneous detail. We are supposed to discern the meaning within and underlying all the detail, yet without simply scorning the detail as worthless husk. A symphony is the score, not the acoustic detail of Stradivarius's famous resins; yet the symphony is supposed to be realized by a string section that sounds like violins. We are supposed to be able to distinguish tune from tone, appreciating both. Being disturbed by trivial Biblical contradictions, as if they were the content of God's message, is like failing to make this distinction. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 21:29
Profile
Synergy, there are lots of people, particularly in the US, whose beliefs and practices do seem to me to fit your description of Christianity. But dude: Christianity is a two thousand year old transcultural religion followed by well over a billion people. If you'll pardon the metaphor, you are a blind man approaching one particular rearward portion of the elephant's anatomy, and drawing a false conclusion about the whole elephant — which is not really adequately mitigated by one little throwaway line about how 'significant portions of the elephant do not smell so bad'. -------------------- 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 Wednesday, August 29 2007 21:04
Profile
The analogy between eternity and imaginary numbers is interesting. But I'm not sure I buy it. For one thing, i can be represented as a 2-by-2 matrix of real numbers, and if you understand matrix multiplication, then there is no trouble with a matrix squaring to minus the identity matrix. I don't know of any comparable explicit representation of eternity in terms of more familiar concepts. If you want to stick to single-component objects, though, then i is indeed a bit weird. It is supposed to be some kind of number, that can be added and multiplied and so on, but it doesn't correspond to a quantity in any usual sense. It is nevertheless defined quite effectively, I would say, by the arithmetic rules that we give for it. It is defined by its role in the 'game' of multiplication and addition. And a lot of higher mathematics is about defining things in this rather indirect way. One might try to define eternity in similar fashion. But here is where I see the big difference: the game that defines i is a comparatively rich one. We can do a lot of arithmetic with i, and it is all self-consistent. We can even prove astounding theorems about the exponentials of imaginary numbers being cosines and sines. We can learn how to evaluate gruesome integrals, of ordinary non-imaginary functions, using analytic continuation into the complex plane. With i, there is enough gameplay that the definition-by-role seems to work. Play with i enough, and you get used to it, and come to feel that you do know what it means. It becomes a familiar gamepiece, even a useful tool. And here is where eternity seems to suffer in comparison. Its game consists of a few isolated statements: eternity is that which comes before the beginning of time, or after the end of it, etc. And that's about it. I can't take eternity off to my room and play with it for myself. All I can do is parrot the few sentences written by the teacher on the board. So I don't think it's the same. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Maddness or Genius??? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 20:46
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quote: -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Man or God in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 12:22
Profile
I think I believe all three options at once, so I cannot vote. A book may both be and not be a message from even an ordinary human author. The author presumably intends the entire book, and in that sense it is a message from the author; but the characters and even the narrator may not be expressing that message. The author's actual message may even be that what is stated explicitly in the text is false — some books have unreliable narrators. So the literal text of the book may not be the author's message, even if the properly understood meaning of the book is. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Educational Segregation in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, August 29 2007 09:27
Profile
So we need PE segregation. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |