I'm a big D&D fan, to be sure, and I like playing Dungeons and Dragons. But...by myself? Are you serious?
Oh, yeah, you can do a lot of wonderful things like fighting Zombies and stuff.
Seriously, though, there have actually been solo modules - not sure if the most recent D&D offerings have these, probably not. Admittedly these are not as much fun as group ones, though...
The solo mods are typically "choose option and jump to a numbered chapter" kind of deals. I've seen two for Classic D&D (the above pictured module, and the introductory adventure for a later edition of D&D), and one for GURPS (likewise an intro mod, in the Basic Set).
These days, if you want to play D&D with others without leaving your home, I recommend IRC, or something like OpenRPG, or Neverwinter Nights with a DMed game arranged through neverwinterconnections.com.
...anyone managed to beat it in less than 1:30 with the cutscenes included? That would be mighty impressive.
Anyway, this is kind of strange. I don't have the money to buy the game until next week, and some other people are already beaten it and are making freaking speed demos! Last time it was NWN:Hordes of the Underdark, the game wasn't released here yet and some people had already beaten it. Suppose it's the downside of having games with only ~20-30 hours of play time. =)
Porting Doom series to Ultima VII engine might bring a whole new level of insight to "You want to quit? Then, thou hast lost an eighth!"... and Electronic Arts might find the game marketable enough to justify the rerelease of the whole series. Who knows!
Just be extremely paranoid when deserializing from client.
evJ00l Hax0r: "Hey, this guy stores complete data structures in cookies. Wonder if he minds if I stick system("cat/etc/apache/htpasswd");' in the end?"
The problem is that SCO's own server software is so 1970s that the whole server crashes if some process does syslog(LOG_ALERT, "Thou hast lost an eighth!");...
I always found Ultima music to be top notch, mind you it required a decent midi enabled soundcard (Roland MT32), which was one of the best midi cards out there.
Noticeably was. Ultima VII music through TiMidity (in Exult) sounds far better than the MT-32 version in my opinion. Even playing the MIDI files with the bundled crappy 8-meg GM soundfont on SoundBlaster Live sounds better. (And with a custom sound bank, the music sounds just plain mighty...)
MT-32 might have been great at the time (maybe, maybe not), but, well, there are better MIDI synths these days.
My general idea is that if a pre-built binary is available, unless there's a good reason not to use it, I use it. The pre-built binaries are not always 100% cool, at least according to some people, but they tend to work for me in most of the cases.
I'm usually using prepackaged binaries if they're out there in a reasonably well-documented repository - that is, included in Debian, in some rare cases I might even consult apt-get.org.
For stuff that Debian doesn't yet have, or that absolutely insists that I build from CVS, there's always GNU Stow for easy management of stuff. I also build kernel from source using make-kpkg (because, once upon a time, it was a great Heresy to use the Pre-Packaged, Unoptimal Kernel, and building the kernel seemed to be everyone's baptism by fire so to speak).
The reason I'm often relying on pre-built binaries is that I'm a very patient person except when installing software (having had a share of installing proggies for friends and relatives tends to hurt one's very being), and I just prefer to have a quick and easy installation.
Building from source always seems to involve installing required development kits, and then million and one little bits and packages in semi-random order. There have been some pathological cases like mp1e / rte / whatever the hell it was that seemed so complex and convoluted that I needed a week's rest after that, or something like that.
Then there have been cases where I haven't been even able to build the things due to system constraints. Back in the early days of GNOME, it was hell to try to compile MICO on my Pentium 166MHz when I had meager 32 megs of physical memory, and trying to grab the last available bits of swap space from my 6 gigabyte disk... Oh, and this happens ocassionally even on recent times: I was unable to build Ardour on my current machine. Glad I found it from apt-get.org, and it's now in main Debian tree too.
I'm just secretly hoping that Debian goes i586 instead of i386 some time...
Fireballs don't fire from Mario's stomach. There is a distinct fireball-throwing frame.
Also, the thing that annoys me most: People keep remembering that Mario hit the bricks with his head. Nope, he raises his fist as he jumps, hitting the bricks with it.
Or that's the theory. The bricks will shatter whether Mario hits them with with his fist or the head, but the idea is what counts.
(And now I'm off to play this weird SMB ROM I found today. No idea if this is some weird hacked ROM or if it's a bug in FCEU. =)
Commodore 64 game "Army Moves", 1987 Imagine/Ocean. People probably remember this for the amazing music. It's just that back in late 1980s, it was not at all unusual to make a game where you control an army jeep that jumps. In big arcs. While shooting a lot of missiles. When I presented this game to the new gamer generation (that is, my sister), the laughter was nearly unstoppable. (The second level is boring. The helicopter you control just flies and doesn't, for example, turn into a kamikaze tomato in mid-flight and carpet-bomb the nameless enemy.)
Then some more. "Artura", 1988 Sentient Software/Gremlin. Crappy game. Mostly notable for its great music (surprise surprise!) and the fact that King Arthur marches around and flings about a million axes at the enemy with a single button press.
And that's just a random sample from the "A" section of C64 game selection =) The Nintendo Logic might have been odd at the time, but some C64 games were a few orders of magnitude weirder...
Re:minor display change is slashdot fodder?
on
Google Updates Its Face
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Minimal importance? Sure. People change web site designs all the time.
But, you know, zillions of people probably went "What the hell is THAT? Oh. New page layout." today. It's just that certain web sites have to stay the same, because if there's something new, people get scared.
I expect a lot of people calling tech support: "I think some hacker got to my computer. Google looks different now!"
Of course, majority will probably realize Google is just another web site, but...
Suppose the thing might have been known to happen if the control rod had been moved too much. "If you move this single rod a bit, the thing goes ka-plaw." Printed at the end of the chapter 1 of every employee's "Welcome to the SR-1 site - Idiot's guide to nuclear reactor maintenance" booklet.
Now, I'm making a good assumption that the reactors weren't manned by crazy scientists who, knowing this little fault of the thing, would go "good, nice ot know if I want to assassinate my ambitious, backstabbing coworkers who probably lust after my wife too". At very least, I'm assuming there was someone working there with a relatively sane mind.
Assuming there was a completely sane engineer around and s/he knew that the reactor could go critical if one rod would be moved too much, hey, what would they have done? Maybe tell their superiors? Over the coffee: "Oh, by the way, I don't think this thing is exactly safe because a single slip might make the whole thing explode? Shouldn't we tell our superiors?"
Quite honestly, I don't think anyone specifically knew the reactor could have been made to explode that easily!
It has formations. There's even a button next the map to turn them on and off.
Okay, so there is a formation.
How about Myth-style formations? Line formations (short, long, staggered), box formation, rabble, circle/halfcircle/vanguard... Nope, I don't think so.
And even before that: Myth II (1998) didn't have just special units, but most importantly every unit accumulated experience (and thus combat skill) - and the veteran units got to the next mission/netgame.
And I just finished installing GIMP 1.2 on MacOSX! (Fink 0.6.2's idea of requiring X11 SDK to recognize X11.app's existence was just plain weird...)
Actually, just as I walked home from the university I was hoping Slashdot would have actually interesting stories today, like, GIMP 2.0's release or something like that. Wow. A pretty good coincidence... =)
The last few 2.0pre versions have been pretty damn good, at least on Linux, and these are really a great leap forward from 1.2. Many things I always found slightly frustrating have been fixed. Even one feature I long ago wished would be incorporated is there. (Initialize a new layer mask to grayscale copy of the layer.)
I haven't used 2.0 that much yet, but I hope they have also managed to get there the rock-like stability of 1.2 series. Well, the 2.0pres have only crashed for me once so far... =)
Photoshop also supports color management through and through- GIMP never has out of the box and never will, because there's no such thing as color management under linux; it's not builtin to X, there are zero calibration devices for linux, etc. Even gamma is something of a mess under Linux.
What's wrong with X11's gamma settings? Can tune gamma on all three channels, or all at once, with pure and simple command line tool.
X11 has color management extensions. It's just that apps don't seem to care. (Sounds familiar, huh?) GIMP, however, does do CMS, via littlecms library (which is also used by other cool Linux graphics/typesetting apps like Scribus these days).
Not sure about high-bit-depth graphics formats though, I'm a plain old-fashioned SLR & el cheapo scanner kind of photographer, digital cameras are not in my price class. Maybe Cinepaint?
Operation Flashpoint. (Quite a surprise to open up the game music datafile and get back a bunch of.ogg files, or read the modding guides and see them referring to Oggdrop... Regrettably, the game was released wayyyy before Vorbis 1.0, but the audio quality in the music and sound files is still more than decent. And the GOTY budget release also has red book audio tracks...)
Serious Sam 2 (I've heard; not seen this personally).
Yeah, especially the oil companies. For many of us, "just buy the CD at the store" translates to "just drive to the store", while "just buy the song online" translates to "just double-click on that icon while slashdotting at leisure".
You can buy CDs online, too... this one CD I bought most recently was only available through a web store. Okay, it took two days to deliver it, and there was still the trip to the post office to pick it up, but I got uncompressed music and higher quality music videos than the ones I had downloaded. And physical media and clever cover art and all that stuff. =)
Seriously, I would love to see one of these programs that just turns the victims internet connection OFF. Granted, I don't think it would spread very well.
When there was this last weird Linux worm that had remote execution and command relaying capability, people were using commands like "Wait for 30 seconds, then disinfect and shut down". If I recall correctly, the worm tried to pass the command to all hosts it knew, then executed the command itself.
If not, you might have to create a/etc/clue.conf for your system
Creating/etc/clue.conf doesn't do much unless you have user-space tools installed. (You can, of course, mess with the settings through/proc if you're really desperate.) Don't forget to install clue-tools. (Be sure to get at least 1.4 if you're using 2.6 kernels.)
Oh, and in Debian you don't need to even load the module in boot. Install clue-tools, the new kernel and clue-module (built automagically with make-kpkg if you do make-kpkg modules_image with clue-kernel-source installed - by the way, it's not a patch anymore, it's a stand-alone module, and has been that way for months now!), and the init scripts will automatically modprobe the module if needed. You can still stick it in/etc/modules though.
Wouldn't think so. Let's see how Virtuous we can find Perl:
Humility: Perl fails here, as everyone knows Hubris - striving to write programs that are good so that no one can find anything to complain, and getting people to praise the author for good hackery - is the virtue of Perl programmers.
Compassion: Likewise, Laziness and Impatience could lead to lack of compassion. Also, fans of the language - well, any programming language - tend to ignore and belittle other languages, showing certain lack of understanding.
Sacrifice: Getting better. Perl makes it easy to sacrifice any part of the design goals (be it readability, efficiency, maintainability, portability or whatever) to enhance others.
Honor: The openness and open-source ideas lead to honorific use of the language and libraries, even the sharing of source code.
Justice: Open Source, of course, leads to un-be-lieveable rantfests in Slashdot YRO and other sites that discuss the nassss-ty laws and such. Using Perl develops the sense of justice.
Valor: Who wouldn't feel valorous with a powerful programming language in their hands? Even the mightiest and most difficult programming tasks seem simple. Onward!
Spirituality: Put some rabid Perl geeks and Python geeks in the same room and come count the bodies the next day. Unwavering faith here, folks.
Honesty: "Yes, I know this language sucks. It just sucks less than other languages."
That's six out of eight?
(Note: The above analysis is not accurate and contains severe vague interpretations of the true natures of the Eight Virtues. Don't take this as a guide if you are going to play U4 some day.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah, you can do a lot of wonderful things like fighting Zombies and stuff.
Seriously, though, there have actually been solo modules - not sure if the most recent D&D offerings have these, probably not. Admittedly these are not as much fun as group ones, though...
The solo mods are typically "choose option and jump to a numbered chapter" kind of deals. I've seen two for Classic D&D (the above pictured module, and the introductory adventure for a later edition of D&D), and one for GURPS (likewise an intro mod, in the Basic Set).
These days, if you want to play D&D with others without leaving your home, I recommend IRC, or something like OpenRPG, or Neverwinter Nights with a DMed game arranged through neverwinterconnections.com.
...anyone managed to beat it in less than 1:30 with the cutscenes included? That would be mighty impressive.
Anyway, this is kind of strange. I don't have the money to buy the game until next week, and some other people are already beaten it and are making freaking speed demos! Last time it was NWN:Hordes of the Underdark, the game wasn't released here yet and some people had already beaten it. Suppose it's the downside of having games with only ~20-30 hours of play time. =)
Porting Doom series to Ultima VII engine might bring a whole new level of insight to "You want to quit? Then, thou hast lost an eighth!"... and Electronic Arts might find the game marketable enough to justify the rerelease of the whole series. Who knows!
Just be extremely paranoid when deserializing from client.
evJ00l Hax0r: "Hey, this guy stores complete data structures in cookies. Wonder if he minds if I stick system("cat /etc/apache/htpasswd");' in the end?"
The problem is that SCO's own server software is so 1970s that the whole server crashes if some process does syslog(LOG_ALERT, "Thou hast lost an eighth!");...
Noticeably was. Ultima VII music through TiMidity (in Exult) sounds far better than the MT-32 version in my opinion. Even playing the MIDI files with the bundled crappy 8-meg GM soundfont on SoundBlaster Live sounds better. (And with a custom sound bank, the music sounds just plain mighty...)
MT-32 might have been great at the time (maybe, maybe not), but, well, there are better MIDI synths these days.
My general idea is that if a pre-built binary is available, unless there's a good reason not to use it, I use it. The pre-built binaries are not always 100% cool, at least according to some people, but they tend to work for me in most of the cases.
I'm usually using prepackaged binaries if they're out there in a reasonably well-documented repository - that is, included in Debian, in some rare cases I might even consult apt-get.org.
For stuff that Debian doesn't yet have, or that absolutely insists that I build from CVS, there's always GNU Stow for easy management of stuff. I also build kernel from source using make-kpkg (because, once upon a time, it was a great Heresy to use the Pre-Packaged, Unoptimal Kernel, and building the kernel seemed to be everyone's baptism by fire so to speak).
The reason I'm often relying on pre-built binaries is that I'm a very patient person except when installing software (having had a share of installing proggies for friends and relatives tends to hurt one's very being), and I just prefer to have a quick and easy installation.
Building from source always seems to involve installing required development kits, and then million and one little bits and packages in semi-random order. There have been some pathological cases like mp1e / rte / whatever the hell it was that seemed so complex and convoluted that I needed a week's rest after that, or something like that.
Then there have been cases where I haven't been even able to build the things due to system constraints. Back in the early days of GNOME, it was hell to try to compile MICO on my Pentium 166MHz when I had meager 32 megs of physical memory, and trying to grab the last available bits of swap space from my 6 gigabyte disk... Oh, and this happens ocassionally even on recent times: I was unable to build Ardour on my current machine. Glad I found it from apt-get.org, and it's now in main Debian tree too.
I'm just secretly hoping that Debian goes i586 instead of i386 some time...
Also, the thing that annoys me most: People keep remembering that Mario hit the bricks with his head. Nope, he raises his fist as he jumps, hitting the bricks with it.
Or that's the theory. The bricks will shatter whether Mario hits them with with his fist or the head, but the idea is what counts.
(And now I'm off to play this weird SMB ROM I found today. No idea if this is some weird hacked ROM or if it's a bug in FCEU. =)
Commodore 64 game "Army Moves", 1987 Imagine/Ocean. People probably remember this for the amazing music. It's just that back in late 1980s, it was not at all unusual to make a game where you control an army jeep that jumps. In big arcs. While shooting a lot of missiles. When I presented this game to the new gamer generation (that is, my sister), the laughter was nearly unstoppable. (The second level is boring. The helicopter you control just flies and doesn't, for example, turn into a kamikaze tomato in mid-flight and carpet-bomb the nameless enemy.)
Then some more. "Artura", 1988 Sentient Software/Gremlin. Crappy game. Mostly notable for its great music (surprise surprise!) and the fact that King Arthur marches around and flings about a million axes at the enemy with a single button press.
And that's just a random sample from the "A" section of C64 game selection =) The Nintendo Logic might have been odd at the time, but some C64 games were a few orders of magnitude weirder...
Minimal importance? Sure. People change web site designs all the time.
But, you know, zillions of people probably went "What the hell is THAT? Oh. New page layout." today. It's just that certain web sites have to stay the same, because if there's something new, people get scared.
I expect a lot of people calling tech support: "I think some hacker got to my computer. Google looks different now!"
Of course, majority will probably realize Google is just another web site, but...
According to some porn filters, yes, pictures of GWB are vile pornography. =)
Murder case?
Suppose the thing might have been known to happen if the control rod had been moved too much. "If you move this single rod a bit, the thing goes ka-plaw." Printed at the end of the chapter 1 of every employee's "Welcome to the SR-1 site - Idiot's guide to nuclear reactor maintenance" booklet.
Now, I'm making a good assumption that the reactors weren't manned by crazy scientists who, knowing this little fault of the thing, would go "good, nice ot know if I want to assassinate my ambitious, backstabbing coworkers who probably lust after my wife too". At very least, I'm assuming there was someone working there with a relatively sane mind.
Assuming there was a completely sane engineer around and s/he knew that the reactor could go critical if one rod would be moved too much, hey, what would they have done? Maybe tell their superiors? Over the coffee: "Oh, by the way, I don't think this thing is exactly safe because a single slip might make the whole thing explode? Shouldn't we tell our superiors?"
Quite honestly, I don't think anyone specifically knew the reactor could have been made to explode that easily!
Okay, so there is a formation.
How about Myth-style formations? Line formations (short, long, staggered), box formation, rabble, circle/halfcircle/vanguard... Nope, I don't think so.
And even before that: Myth II (1998) didn't have just special units, but most importantly every unit accumulated experience (and thus combat skill) - and the veteran units got to the next mission/netgame.
And I just finished installing GIMP 1.2 on MacOSX! (Fink 0.6.2's idea of requiring X11 SDK to recognize X11.app's existence was just plain weird...)
Actually, just as I walked home from the university I was hoping Slashdot would have actually interesting stories today, like, GIMP 2.0's release or something like that. Wow. A pretty good coincidence... =)
The last few 2.0pre versions have been pretty damn good, at least on Linux, and these are really a great leap forward from 1.2. Many things I always found slightly frustrating have been fixed. Even one feature I long ago wished would be incorporated is there. (Initialize a new layer mask to grayscale copy of the layer.)
I haven't used 2.0 that much yet, but I hope they have also managed to get there the rock-like stability of 1.2 series. Well, the 2.0pres have only crashed for me once so far... =)
What's wrong with X11's gamma settings? Can tune gamma on all three channels, or all at once, with pure and simple command line tool.
X11 has color management extensions. It's just that apps don't seem to care. (Sounds familiar, huh?) GIMP, however, does do CMS, via littlecms library (which is also used by other cool Linux graphics/typesetting apps like Scribus these days).
Not sure about high-bit-depth graphics formats though, I'm a plain old-fashioned SLR & el cheapo scanner kind of photographer, digital cameras are not in my price class. Maybe Cinepaint?
Aaah. Thank you. I probably shouldn't believe everything they tell in Slashdot comments. =)
AAC is the sound format used on video DVDs. Video DVDs often do at least 5.1 if available. So, um, yeah, it does surround audio. =)
No, but I can remember similar collection for Commodore 64. It came with a tape port adapter that was connected to a CD player.
Other games that use Ogg Vorbis:
You can buy CDs online, too... this one CD I bought most recently was only available through a web store. Okay, it took two days to deliver it, and there was still the trip to the post office to pick it up, but I got uncompressed music and higher quality music videos than the ones I had downloaded. And physical media and clever cover art and all that stuff. =)
Yeah, gone are the days when F-Secure folks unceremoniously categorized everything over 10 kb or so "huge and technically uninteresting" =)
When there was this last weird Linux worm that had remote execution and command relaying capability, people were using commands like "Wait for 30 seconds, then disinfect and shut down". If I recall correctly, the worm tried to pass the command to all hosts it knew, then executed the command itself.
Creating /etc/clue.conf doesn't do much unless you have user-space tools installed. (You can, of course, mess with the settings through /proc if you're really desperate.) Don't forget to install clue-tools. (Be sure to get at least 1.4 if you're using 2.6 kernels.)
Oh, and in Debian you don't need to even load the module in boot. Install clue-tools, the new kernel and clue-module (built automagically with make-kpkg if you do make-kpkg modules_image with clue-kernel-source installed - by the way, it's not a patch anymore, it's a stand-alone module, and has been that way for months now!), and the init scripts will automatically modprobe the module if needed. You can still stick it in /etc/modules though.
Wouldn't think so. Let's see how Virtuous we can find Perl:
That's six out of eight?
(Note: The above analysis is not accurate and contains severe vague interpretations of the true natures of the Eight Virtues. Don't take this as a guide if you are going to play U4 some day.)