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
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
|---|---|
| A Strange Chill in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, December 12 2006 05:24
Profile
Yes, randomly. Keep checking that spot. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| 8000: Pseudoscience Postravaganza in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, December 12 2006 02:49
Profile
Apart from his dubious ideas of what constitutes adequate evidence for a startling theory, the problem with Velikovsky is that he replaced all we know and have thoroughly tested about gravity, with his own arbitrary ideas of how planets could move and affect each other. He made no effort to think this through, and consider what other enduring evidence there would have to be for the events and the mechanisms he described, apart from his beloved myths and legends. Perhaps most to the point, the revision of gravity he implicitly assumed was so drastic, that his planetary pinball game becomes irrelevant as an explanation even for his legends: if we're going to consider such drastic revisions of physics, then there are tons more parsimonious explanations than Velikovsky's for every legend you could want. Insofar as I am correctly remembering what I learned in a course taught by a Newton biographer, the sense in which Newton was an alchemist is not that he played with chemicals. Perhaps he did a bit, but this was not his main point. A big part of the alchemical world view was the idea that the ancients knew everything, but recorded their secrets in secret ways. So alchemists would pore over ancient texts of all kinds, looking for codes or allegories for deep principles of natural philosophy. Newton did a lot of this 'Bible code' kind of stuff. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| So this is goodbye in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 22:30
Profile
Well, there's econophysics, why not physics of administration? Parkinson's Law with calculus, that sort of thing. Our goal of course is to conquer all thought for physics. We will bury you. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Is the Shaper Camp unbeatable? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 22:16
Profile
Turabi is by no means undoable, if you kill the sentinels before they can sound the alarm. Then the endless hordes of summoned creations do not come, and you just have to deal with the normal guards, whom you can whittle down because once killed they stay dead. (The Agent and the Shaper summon Ur-Glaahks and Wingbolts respectively, which are bad news; but if you lure one of these people out separately with crystals, then you can deal with the summons very nicely with Charm.) The sentinels, however, respawn, so you have to catch them each time you go back here. My problem with this zone is that after all that work, I got to the SW chest, the one by the summoning platform, and found it empty. Where's my nice essence-infused skin? I think I killed everybody using a preliminary version of 1.0, but when I installed 1.0.1 and reloaded, even exited and re-entered the zone before touching the chest, it was still empty. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| another environmental topic in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 13:20
Profile
1 and 3 sound plausible, so are probably worth thinking about, but the arguments given are not conclusive, just 'hey, what about ...'. 2 I have thought about some already. There seem to be two main issues: the Fairtrade idea itself, and the efficiency of the implementation. The second issue is kind of a detail; if the basic idea is good, we can find companies that don't skim off too much of the premium. So is the basic idea good? From what I have read about the history of the coffee business over the past 200 years or so, it looks awfully risky. Previous schemes to stabilize coffee prices with guarantees — and their have been a few — have worked well for up to 10 years or so, then imploded, as encouraged overproduction made the market price drop so low, the guaranteed prices became unsustainable. There are probably ways to avoid such problems. A lot of agriculture in rich countries has a rigid quota system, for instance. My cousin the Canadian dairy farmer owns a valuable herd of cattle, and an almost equally valuable amount of milk quota. He can sell that much milk to the provincial Dairy Board at full price, but if he overproduces, he gets paid substantially less. If he wants to expand his operation profitably, he has to buy more quota, and it isn't cheap. Moreover, the total amount of quota available is regulated by consumer demand, not by what farmers might want. So the farmers have a decent price pretty much guaranteed, but have strong disincentives to overproduce. Why can't that sort of thing work for coffee? In principle I don't see any reason why not. In practice I suspect this kind of thing might be a lot more workable in a rich country than a poor one, where giving more dirt-poor folks a shot at reasonable prosperity is bound to seem better than locking in the privileges of the few commodity kulaks who can afford quota. But if you try to spread quota more evenly, you end up either setting your quotas too high to sustain prices, or you give everyone so little quota that nobody is really helped. Certainly rich people can afford to pay a decent price for the coffee they love. And maybe there is enough coffee demand in the world to make Fairtrade coffee a major development tool. But maybe not; maybe a workable version of Fairtrade coffee is just never going to benefit sustainably more than a relatively small number of coffee growers. Sure, better to benefit some poor people than none. But then the necessary quota system really would mean boosting a few poor (or not-so-poor) people over the wall into prosperity, and locking out their neighbors. And unless and until their neighbors can all find some route to prosperity other than coffee-growing, this is what is probably a hard sell. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Keeping items in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 12:30
Profile
If you don't mind more spoilers, you can also learn what Shaped items should be kept for turning into artifacts. It's not the same set as G3. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ridiculous droppings in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 12:25
Profile
I have long been suspicious of the Geneforge random number generator. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Insidious Infiltrator in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, December 11 2006 12:05
Profile
Not only is it bogus, it's ambiguous. The same sums of percentages can give different products. EDIT: This is not nearly as big an effect as I thought, once you have a few pieces of armor that add up to anything decent. So just adding them up is maybe not so crazy as a rule of thumb; just don't think of the total as a true percentage. It's just a sort of 'armor level', and it has a built-in soft cap effect. [ Monday, December 11, 2006 12:10: 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 Insidious Infiltrator in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 10 2006 22:41
Profile
This is the point I tried to make earlier, that simply comparing numbers can be very misleading because different builds play so differently. It's really more like comparing apples and oranges. It is indeed easy to conclude that Serviles make better Serviles than Infiltrators, and vice versa. This, though, is not the point. Add that to the fact that a small advantage is actually huge if it is sitting right at the game's challenge level. Killing everything with one shot, versus not quite killing anything, is a big difference, but it can be caused by a couple of points. In effect, those couple of points are worth mucho; but it's hard to tell in advance which two points they may be. Which of your points are the tipping points can even depend on where all your other points have been distributed. Whereas massive overkill is worth nothing, and pitiful failure is really no worse than just barely failing, and so many of your skill points may be practically wasted, despite giving good effects on paper. Then there are different definitions of optimality. Do you prefer a character who requires fewer save loads when aggressively pushing the envelope to attack enemies who aren't supposed to be takeable yet? Or is it more important to you to have an untouchable character who can stroll through the game according to schedule with no chance of dying at all? Do you mind if your build requires you to resort to tedious measures to defeat some opponents? Do you get upset if your creations die? Different answers to these questions make different builds better. I think the Infiltrator can be as good a build as any, though a different kind. In fact to me that is the real definition of how good a class is: does it make the game different without making it frustratingly hard? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Hoax? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 10 2006 22:10
Profile
quote:If they work together enought that you have depth perception, it should be possible. Have you considered a monocle? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Suggestions for a nOOb? in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 10 2006 00:51
Profile
Keep the difficulty set to Normal (it's under Preferences in the in-game menu) or even Easy, at least until you start finding all the combats too easy. A debate is currently raging over which class is the best, but it doesn't matter much. They're all workable, and they make the game pretty different, so it's not always easy to compare. Consensus seems to be settling now that Serviles and Lifecrafters are the most powerful, but some people like Infiltrators. The big difference is whether you're going to prefer playing with a half dozen or so creatures in your party, which you have to control, or with just a few, or even just your player character. If you want the mob, play a Lifecrafter. This also makes the game most different from other CRPGs. If you want to blast and hack things mainly yourself, with perhaps a bit of support from creations, then take a Servile (more hacking) or an Infiltrator (more blasting). Otherwise, look at the Strategy Central thread on this forum, for links to other strategy topics here. Good luck, and welcome to the boards! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Artifact component in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, December 10 2006 00:40
Profile
SPOILER 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 77 7 7 77 7 7 Trickly little forest path to west of the central clearing. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Shock Trooper - Part II in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, December 9 2006 08:57
Profile
Is it suboptimal even in its own niche? That is, does it give a playing experience that can be duplicated, except with the game being a bit easier, with another class? Or does it give a somewhat harder but distinctive way of playing the game? I'd tend to expect that latter, since it should have the Int and Essence to make the sort of really large creation army only a Lifecrafter can match. A troop of fewer and smaller creations, such as most classes can manage, may be great, but it's a different game to play. And then the ST would be differentiated from the LC by having a much more combat-involved PC. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Future of Blades of Avernum in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, December 9 2006 08:51
Profile
It's not as though Spiderweb's board of directors will get fired by the shareholders if they don't squeeze in every cent of profit possible. If Jeff's newer games don't sell so well, he'll have no choice but to hang on to whatever he can, no matter what longer term benefits he might thereby forego. If they do well enough, he can afford to release BOA on a whim, either as an act of pure philanthropy, or as a calculated publicity stunt whose value in increased sales of newer games would exceed the BOA sales lost. I'd like to think it could be a reasonable idea (one that somebody else suggested first, though I don't remember who), in a sufficiently upbeat business climate for Spiderweb. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Future of Blades of Avernum in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, December 9 2006 06:16
Profile
A good point, but on the other hand the intention was probably to show in the demo that you can use BOA to make manageably small scenerios instead of the original epic-length games. A better case might have been to cut half-way through ASR, thus giving away more of the built-in game, but not giving away any 3rd party scenarios, of course. And of course this could still be done. Heck, even I played VoDT, precisely because I could see one whole story for free. I was averse to buying BOA because there was no way I'd have enough time to design anything, but if I owned the game I wouldn't be able to resist trying, and would soon have wound up in the gutter offering to solve differential equations for food. Offering me half another scenario at that point might have sucked me in nonetheless. Thank goodness, I guess. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Where is the Crystalline Fibers? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, December 9 2006 06:07
Profile
Yeah, actually I sort of remembered that, but wanted to suggest eathing them anyway. But I still sort of also remember having leftover fibers. Are there maybe three in the game? There is definitely one artifact you can make two of, after making all the others. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Future of Blades of Avernum in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 23:29
Profile
What about releasing the source code to BOA, so the community could mess with it? If it's bringing in negligible money, and Spiderweb has moved on to much more advanced engines, then it would seem that giving the BOA source away would be a cheap gift to the community. And it would tend to expand Jeff's world of Avernum. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| The Future of Blades of Avernum in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 23:25
Profile
Edit: see post below. UBB glitch (I guess) whereby Kel's post seemed to have obliterated mine in mid-air, so I wrote a shorter replacement, only to see the original materialize after all. [ Friday, December 08, 2006 23:32: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Blm Crsts Alpha in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 15:51
Profile
I just can't help guessing it makes a magical explosion that curses all your battle alphas. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A good idea in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 15:46
Profile
I don't imagine it's very complicated. There are banjos and kumquats. What's not to get? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Sie beissen auf Granit. in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 15:28
Profile
We may be glorious, we may be obscure, we may be sesquipedelian. But healthy we are not. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Sie beissen auf Granit. in Richard White Games | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 12:40
Profile
They have attacked the honor of the secret order. They are biting on granite. Or else maybe on: Poll Information This poll contains 1 question(s). 20 user(s) have voted. You may not view the results of this poll without voting. function launch_voter () { launch_window("http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=poll;d=vote;pollid=QWOVAhRjjvQx"); return true; } // end launch_voter function launch_viewer () { launch_window("http://www.ironycentral.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=poll;d=view;pollid=QWOVAhRjjvQx"); return true; } // end launch_viewer function launch_window (url) { preview = window.open( url, "preview", "width=550,height=300,toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status,menubar=no,scrollbars,resizable,copyhistory=no" ); window.preview.focus(); return preview; } // end launch_window   -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Where is the Crystalline Fibers? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 12:23
Profile
Unfortunately, the only thing you can do with a second set of fibers is eat them for a health boost. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Servile vs. Everyone Else in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 11:13
Profile
NPCs make a few extra comments here and there, but you don't get any chances to do things that the other classes can't. It's basically just chrome. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Geneforge 1 carnisters? in Geneforge Series | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, December 8 2006 08:42
Profile
Not really. It is possible, but since without canisters you can't get any creations, or any magic other than one point in Firebolt, it isn't much fun. The conflict you're used to, between shaper loyalists and corrupt canister-abusers, has not yet started in G1. You're just a lone apprentice, stranded on a dangerous island, and you've never even heard of canisters before. You don't really have any choice but to use them. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |