Profile for EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS

Error message

Deprecated function: implode(): Passing glue string after array is deprecated. Swap the parameters in drupal_get_feeds() (line 394 of /var/www/pied-piper.ermarian.net/includes/common.inc).

Recent posts

Pages

AuthorRecent posts
Avernum 4 in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 22:21 Profile #239
Staying single isn't necessary. Autosterilization is. Basically slop your jewels into the microwave and nuke 'em for 15 seconds or so, and you'll never reproduce.

(WARNING: Will probably make your nuts boil and bubble and basically give you cancer)
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
RPG Recommendations in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 22:13 Profile #43
Is this like that stupid distinction between SF and sci-fi that fat Berkeley beardos like to talk about?

A role-playing game... is a game in which role-playing is the primary focus. There's no ambiguity about that definition.

Alorael: Exile gives you at the very least the choice between villainous self-interest and noble charity.

[ Monday, December 20, 2004 22:14: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
RPG Recommendations in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 18:23 Profile #36
Or most games of its related genre, such as BoF, Chrono Trigger, and most other so-called "Japanese-style RPGs".

[ Monday, December 20, 2004 18:26: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
RPG Recommendations in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 17:59 Profile #34
Final Fantasy is not a role-playing game.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
RPG Recommendations in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 17:16 Profile #32
Plot isn't a required focus for RPGs either. Look at Daggerfall -- it's a classic RPG, and it's got the plot of a poo poking. Hell, you can miss the plot entirely if you're lazy.

The sole requirement of an RPG is that your avatar takes a role, small or large, in an ongoing metanarrative. Your choices must have an effect on your role in this narrative, although they perhaps do not affect the narrative itself. The focus is on the role, and character takes a back seat.

In an RPG, what you do is more important than who you are. The identity of the PC is only what the player imposes on it.

[ Monday, December 20, 2004 17:26: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
RPG Recommendations in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 15:19 Profile #30
quote:
Originally written by loserclassof06:

Seems RPG enough to me... turn based battles, experience points, special abilities of some sort, you're out to save the world, you have to equip weapons and armor... it's like a less flashy Final Fantasy Tactics. RPG/Strategy hybrid.
I like how none of those are inherent qualities of an RPG. Not a single one.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
RPG Recommendations in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 15:09 Profile #28
What do you mean? That is your role. You express yourself through an avatar in a fantasy world. That is the essence of roleplaying.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
Avernum 4 in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 20 2004 15:07 Profile #236
I've said it before -- having children doesn't absolve one from being unscrupulous for the sake of profit.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Friday, December 17 2004 09:55 Profile #29
I provided examples. See the link that you horrifically mangled with your failure to succeed.

You definitely need some sort of code separation when working on actual projects, not just dinky little blogs. The MVC architecture is as useful for web applications as any, if not more so.

Your quote is illuminating, really. Web applications are applications. They shouldn't be treated with any less care than any other kind of application. It's fine for your dopey blog to be a single-file hack, but real software needs to be architected. The PHP community largely doesn't realize this, mostly because it consists primarily of 14-year-old script kiddies.

My complaint about pragmas is about how there are numerous global runtime or environmental variables that fundamentally change the operation of the language. (Primary reference: magic quotes.) This requires you to develop not knowing which of those magical switches your admin flipped.

A decent programming language is consistent within itself, with no external pragmas.

[ Friday, December 17, 2004 10:03: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
THE WORST MAN EVER: Round 1 in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Thursday, December 16 2004 19:27 Profile #7
Horses are huge. And fast.

Even if Secretariat got skewered, it wouldn't stop him long enough to prevent anything he was aimed at from being pounded into slime.

Secretariat -- horse by trade, pimp by nature.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Thursday, December 16 2004 15:24 Profile #21
Keep in mind here I'm speaking of PHP 4 and below; PHP 5 is not yet deployed enough to be worth discussing.

PHP is a poorly designed language. It has a very weak module system, and almost all of the standard library is loaded by default. It takes the atrocious and ugly syntax of Perl (universal sigils, etc.) without the actual useful bits (primitive regexes). In general, you can't choose what parts of the standard library get loaded or not at runtime. Oh, and I haven't seen any evidence of namespaces at all.

Until recently, the default behavior was to automatically load CGI arguments into global variables, which is of course absurdly foolish.

PHP encourages the mixing of data and code. Some people might consider its HTML embedding to be an advantage; I consider it to be a major flaw. Any good code would eschew such obfuscation, and most significant PHP projects do.

Its object model has been historically either nonexistent or hackish. This may not be interesting to procedural programmers, but it is a major flaw in my eyes.

It depends heavily on pragmas and other global configuration settings, due to the aforementioned lack of granularity.

PHP is, in general, an ugly, hackish language that shows its original purpose as a glorified SSI system in every wrinkle and crack.

EDIT: Oh, and I found this:
http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php-sucks/

[ Thursday, December 16, 2004 15:26: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Thursday, December 16 2004 08:56 Profile #19
quote:
Originally written by ARRR-enax:

quote:
Originally written by The Dog And Pony Show:

So a guy is complaining about how hard it is to dig with a toothbrush. He goes on and on, blaming the entire digging process, the bristles, etc. Someone suggests using a shovel instead. Angrily, he replies: "We're talking about toothbrushes here, not shovels!"
...I don't see many people using Ruby. I do see many people using C++.

So you can use a (horribly designed) shovel that nobody else uses for a (less horribly designed) pick--it ain't a toothbrush and you know it--that is widely used and has genuine commercial applications.

Gee! That's a hard one.
You know, PHP is also wildly popular. Just because a language is popular doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

And Ruby is actually used widely in commercial applications in Japan. Just because it hasn't made its splash here yet doesn't mean it won't.

Care to give an example of Ruby's horrible design? Do you even know anything about language design, you poseur? You've got all the CS knowledge of my mom.

[ Thursday, December 16, 2004 08:58: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
MacNN liften me up, to drop me back down again :( in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Wednesday, December 15 2004 09:28 Profile #4
You can fill in the time with a more sophisticated game like Pokemon or something.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Tuesday, December 14 2004 13:07 Profile #16
So a guy is complaining about how hard it is to dig with a toothbrush. He goes on and on, blaming the entire digging process, the bristles, etc. Someone suggests using a shovel instead. Angrily, he replies: "We're talking about toothbrushes here, not shovels!"
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Tuesday, December 14 2004 11:19 Profile #14
quote:
Originally written by ARRR-enax:

In some cases, a modicum of OO makes sense. For graphics and such (especially with DirectX), it doesn't make sense not to use classes.

My main issue with classes is protection and inheritance. I understand the theories just fine, but I really dislike protection. I don't believe that variables that can affect other parts of the program (for example, a player's stats in a game) should be locked down and unable to be reached without functions. To me, set_health(get_health + 25); is excessive. The alternative is a modify_health routine, continuing with the example, which I feel is awkward. player.health += 25 makes more sense to me.
class Percentage
def initialize(v = 0)
self.value = v
end

def value=(v)
if v > 100 or v < 0 then
raise RangeError, "a Percentage must be between 0 and 100 (inclusive)"
else
@value = v
end
end

attr_reader :value
end

pct = Percentage.new
pct.value # --> 0
pct.value = 50 # --> 50
pct.value += 25 # --> 75
pct.value += 100 # --> ERROR
Don't blame concepts for inferior implementations.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 13 2004 20:47 Profile #11
Mostly true. Only semantic difference is that class members are private by default, and structs are public. Thus

class A {
public:
// ...
};

is equivalent to

struct A {
// ...
};

Still, if you're using a struct, call it a struct. If you're using a class, call it that. A spade's a spade.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
language? in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Monday, December 13 2004 14:40 Profile #9
Why would you use classes if you aren't using their features? Why not just use structs?
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
stupid question... in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Sunday, December 12 2004 22:00 Profile #17
Unless the game has a plot-oriented explicit or implicit time limit (the former: Super Mario Bros.; the latter: Fallout after the water chip), making the game suddenly end is a great way to really piss people off.

Most games do not feature aging, and don't suffer for it. If you wish to include aging, then make it possible to circumvent it.

I mean, you already have to suspend disbelief numerous times to play an RPG. Many games force you to believe that a person either always stands in the same place or wanders around randomly. The most realistic behavior in RPGs tends to assume that everyone does the exact same thing every day.

Your actions in most games speed along the plot -- no matter how long it takes you to get to a certain point, you always arrive exactly when the villain is stealing the golden dingus. (The cliche is that you always arrive too late.)

You have to assume that a normal person can survive being at the center of a cone of cold, a fireball, and a few axe blows in quick succession. You have to assume that people say the same thing over and over again.

There are many, many more assumptions a player must make to play even the most realistic of games. Don't let a futile desire for perfect realism ruin your game.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
Avatars in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Sunday, December 12 2004 11:27 Profile #9
I don't believe UBB supports much in terms of avatar control. This is because it sucks.

Invision (which sucks in other, different ways) allows individual users to disable viewing avatars. In addition, it actually enforces maximum pixel size, instead of just using HTML scaling.

Reasonably sized avatars don't burden even dialup connections. My magic avatar averages about 3KB (that's 64x64, PNG). With pages of 25 posts, making the wild assumption that that's 25 different users with 25 avatars... you're talking 75KB.

To give you a sense of scale here, this medium-length post, including HTML, is more than 3.5KB. That's not including posticons, etc. This page, with only 9 posts of short length, is 56KB -- again, not including any images. Thus, at worst, avatars would increase the size of a page by 50% or so. In practice, it'd be much smaller.

The main load-time issue is slow remote servers, but a good browser won't stop the page from loading while loading an image.

Of course, once those avatars are downloaded, they can be cached. Thus, further posts by those users cost no additional network traffic for avatars.

[ Sunday, December 12, 2004 11:34: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
stupid question... in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Sunday, December 12 2004 11:13 Profile #10
Arenax, 2 to the eighth power is 256, not 512. 512 would be 9 bits, and such a variable could only range from 0 to 511.

I, too, am interested in this supposed death. Is it just a sudden "WHOOPS U R DED", or is it plot-related ("TEH EVIL VAHNATAIS HAVE BLOWED UP EXILE!!!")?

Does anything similar happen in the other Exiles?

Also, to the thread parent: most games have no concept of aging. Indeed, the usual reason for a game to have "game time" is for a time limit of some sort (reference: Fallout) and thus you don't have time to age significantly.

However, if you want to have game time for a clearer timeline of events (certain things happen on certain days, at night, etc.) nobody will count it against you that people seem to be ageless. The number of games that prominently feature aging can be counted on one hand, and none of them are RPGs, really.

---

IMAGE(http://djur.desperance.net/img/wtfdrakey.png)

Windows version. If you can't read that, I'm on day 514.

[ Sunday, December 12, 2004 12:24: Message edited by: The Dog And Pony Show ]
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
I AM TEH SPAMER in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Friday, December 10 2004 09:59 Profile #20
quote:
Originally written by Wizcozski:

Major congrats, Kel! You're my little guru, now. A lap dance is in order, I believe. ;)
You know, someday someone's just going to break down, go to Berkeley, and viciously murder the two of you in bed. And I will laugh, laugh, laugh....
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
Exile tabletop RPG! in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Friday, December 10 2004 07:35 Profile #30
Names cannot be copyrighted.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
How's my new name :) in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Thursday, December 9 2004 18:26 Profile #13
Rosy obviously has been playing with fluorine.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
TaskMaker in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Thursday, December 9 2004 11:38 Profile #9
I suppose there's nothing inherently unethical about fighting abandonwarization of your old software. However, when it comes to shareware, to suddenly stop taking new registrations and go after people distributing keys makes you a class A jerkwad.

Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if copyright terms weren't so insanely broad. I firmly believe that 10 years is an ideal period for software copyright; after 10 years, your program is probably either obsolete or has been improved. Either way, Windows 95 being free wouldn't exactly damage Microsoft's bottom line.

It's my experience that a lot of game programmers would for love their old stuff to be free, but many don't own the rights to do that. It's a damn shame.

Legal abandonware results in awesome stuff like xu4.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00
Exile tabletop RPG! in General
EDWARD, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS
Warrior
Member # 5091
 written Wednesday, December 8 2004 19:48 Profile #20
quote:
Originally written by Occam's Guillotine:

I must retract the third website. Someone grabbed Avernum and took off running. The creator also has atrocious spelling (by choice or by nature) and a problem with at least two counts of intellectual property violation.

—Alorael, who has nothing more to say on the subject. It's all fun and games until someone writes Vahnatari.
The site's atrocious, but "Vahnatari" isn't a misspelling. Apparently, it's kind of the Vahnatai version of nephar -- rogue, outcast (although presumably not sterile). It's still stupid. He sort of credits Spiderweb on the front page, but not really; he doesn't out-and-out say that he ripped it off, claims differences (mostly crappy ones), and throws in a few insults regarding the GIFTS. Classy.

He horribly mutates the story in a way that somehow entirely manages to avoid changes that would put him in better legal standing. (Exhibit A: "Empire of Valorim"). Thus, the author of that site is, in essence, a saggot.
Posts: 180 | Registered: Friday, October 15 2004 07:00

Pages