Pink Petal Games
Game Discussion => General Discussion & Download => Topic started by: letmein on November 03, 2009, 10:20:10 AM
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The rules:
You may, on the whole, speak about anything the admins will let you get away with. They'll let you get away with a lot.
Obvious no-no's are personal attacks on people, spamming, and general douchbaggery.
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Just to get things rolling - off of the "Micromanagement & Big Question" thread, which was horribly, horribly hijacked (blame Doc) into a conversation on spacec strategy games. Unfortunately, I've never played any of the Master of Orion series (yeah, I know, sad...), nor Galactic Civs. Its not really my genre. Basically the only one I've played is Homeworld, and that's less a "strategy" game as a "tactics" one.
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Aww, c'mon! Doc couldn't have hijacked that thread alone. I am the master off-topic commentator. You have presented me with a unique challenge here, however. How can I hijack a thread which specifically is for off-topic comments?
I shall have to ponder this. Perhaps it will be my magnum opus.
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You could try making this post about a particular something? then you could proceed to hijack it. Homeworld was a great game the story was pure brilliance. I in general prefer tactical game over strategy, which is why i really wish i could play Dawn Of War II. Many believe that tactical games are also true strategy games.
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I don't know; people get the terms "tactics" and "strategy" mixed up.
I never played DoWII, but I used to have the first one. It was OK, not great. My favorite games are still probably strategy, most notably Civ, followed by pure shooters. NOT Halo. NEVER Halo... that game is the single most overrated piece of junk, ever. For singleplayer, gotta be Half-Life (either one), for multi, CoD4 (Modern Warfare).
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It's a question of scope: tactics is for small local engagements; usually squad level, never extending beyond a single battle.
Strategy is on the scale of logistics and troop movements. A brilliant tactician can win every battle, but if his strategy sucks he'll end up stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no fuel, no ammo, and surrounded by the enemy.
You need both, though. If your strategy is reasonable, but your tactics suck, you may wind up with too few effective troops to deliver the killing stroke.
The X-Com games are good examples of both: you send in a squad to recover a saucer - that's tactical. You have dozen operative and you need to scout the aliens and eliminate them with minimal losses. You finish that and you go back to the strategic screen, which lets you build bases, set research priorities, recruit and equip agents, and so on.
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That's as good an explanation as I've heard. Of course, that's using the strict war interpretations of both: their meanings have stretched in more recent times, to apply to other realms of thought. Same basic principle, though - tactics is small-scale, strategy is large scale.
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People talk big about tactics and strategy - which is fine for games - but in the real world, logistics wins wars. He who gets resources (troops, food, ammo, equipment, etc) where they need to be most effectively wins.
WM, of course, is neither tactical, strategic, or logistic. It is a resource management game, akin to Settlers of Catan in many respects (on a game-theory level).
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I'd say that's debatable, especially as you go backwards in time. Certainly, logistics is the most important factor in modern warfare, but public support is swiftly becoming more vital - some would say, after 'Nam, *more* vital. You can have all the equipment in the world, but if you don't want to use it there's no point.
Now, going back in time, ancient warfare had many more considerations than pure logistics. Perhaps the most important one was pure morale, but I would say that before the Renaissance, the point of logistical superiority isn't the clear superior.
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The goals of modern warfare are also considerably different than they were a century ago. War used to be about conquest. Politicians could rile up the public with jingoistic speeches, get the nationalistic blood boiling. "We're better than them, we're gonna kick their asses and take their land!" was all the message they needed to get public support. Today, in the US at least, we fight wars of principle, which the public is less likely to get behind. People see the hypocrisy of invading another country so the citizens of that country can have the right to determine their own future (as if, in the act of invading them and shoving democracy down their throats, we aren't destroying any chance they have of a self-determined future - but that is a discussion for another day).
The nature of war is changing as well. In the armies vs terrorists world, it is less of a war and much more like an occupation. The US army in Iraq and Afghanistan is facing challenges similar to the Union army in the post-Confederate south, the Germans occupying France, the Japanese in China, and the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan. You can't win an occupation - the only way to end the conflict is to withdraw or outlast the insurgents - and it usually takes at least a generation to do the latter.
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Or what I'll term the Third Option: just kill a lot of people. That was, at one time, quite effective - rather frowned upon nowdays, though. At least, if you're a First World country, and not in Africa or, possibly, the Balkans. Or Tibet. But, again, different day's discussion - you make a good point in that the point of war has changed. With the advent of death on the megascale, priorities change. No one has yet been dumb enough to start a war of pure genocide (again, focusing on the First World anyhow), and the wonders of capitalism, globalism, and "public support" make wars of territory/resource gain rather moot too.
Occupational wars just get... messy. Generally, if you're in a position to occupy that means you *started* in a position where the two people's beliefs are offset, and any occupation (no matter how peaceful) won't exactly change that fact. Couple that with the rather odd trend against assimilation in modern times, and, well... yeah. On the other hand, there is one notable case of an occupation battle that was wholly and completely won: the Native Americans. Now, granted, there are some considerations there, but in the end it was still basically a long, long occupation that went astoundingly quickly given the distances involved on all sides, and the fact that the occupiers were outnumbered for a long while.
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The Native American tribes were defeated through systematic campaigns of forced relocation and genocide. The "war" (for lack of a better term for the collective efforts to wipe them out) also saw the first (and only, to my knowledge) large scale use of biological warfare, with smallpox being the weapon of choice.
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The Native American tribes were defeated through systematic campaigns of forced relocation and genocide. The "war" (for lack of a better term for the collective efforts to wipe them out) also saw the first (and only, to my knowledge) large scale use of biological warfare, with smallpox being the weapon of choice.
Nowhere even near the first. They used to catapult plague-ridden corpses into cities during sieges in the middle ages.
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People talk big about tactics and strategy - which is fine for games - but in the real world, logistics wins wars. He who gets resources (troops, food, ammo, equipment, etc) where they need to be most effectively wins.
Logistics is part of strategy. Strategy is everything that doesn't involve firing bullets. But you're right in so far as modern technology has had a profound effect on strategy, with logistics becoming comparatively more important. The days when an invading army could forage or plunder anything it needed are long gone :)
WM, of course, is neither tactical, strategic, or logistic. It is a resource management game, akin to Settlers of Catan in many respects (on a game-theory level).
It's strategic. There is conflict, and you have to make plans to win. You have no control over the tactical engagements so it's strategy. Of course, the conflict is a very minor part of the game at the moment, so resource management does fit better.
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Nowhere even near the first. They used to catapult plague-ridden corpses into cities during sieges in the middle ages.
I'm aware of that, I was referring to wide-scale deployments. Plague weapons tended to be used on a case-by-case basis when besieging cities, as a means of instilling fear, rather than a weapon intended to kill every single member of a tribe. Smallpox blankets were spread far and wide with the intent to commit genocide on multiple tribes. Plague weapons saw occasional, one-off use in small-scale deployments.
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I'm getting Flashforward flashbacks here: "Also, we gave the world Britney Spears"
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I must be missing some reference there...
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Flashforward: the FBI guy is in a German prison to negotiate the release of a Nazi war criminal. One of his team has a dig at the Germans, and the prison governor replies by reeling off a list of US atrocities, including selling smallpox contaminated blankets to the redskins.
And the FBI guy, whose name I can never remember, thinks about for a moment, and says "also, we gave the world Britney Spears" as if that was an atrocity the governor had missed.
Well, it made me smile, anyway.
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lol, yes she is an atrocity.
Also thinking back to basic training (used to be in the army), the basic definition they use is that strategy is the planing phase of an attack, while tactics is the doing, a strategy may contain many tactics for achieving the objective. This is the military definition and from that i guess its kinda simple to see why so many people may get them confused.
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Ah. Well, she's' not very good ("Toxic" is one of my all-time most hated songs), but personally, I'd put many other artists (and a few entire genres) above her in the music atrocity rankings.
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Realizing that this may be my last, best chance to ever beat Doc... I shall take this opportunity to make my ninety-ninth post, and *finally* beat him out on post count! Yay!
:dances:
...and most of those posts were even on-topic!
Actually, I might as well mention that this forum has done a pretty decent job of growing up. What are we at, now... a shade over 120 members in about a month? [looked it up: from Oct 10 to Nov 6, so four weeks minus a day] That's not too bad. I don't remember what the old forum had - not that many, since guests could post - but this one seems to be handling the traffic well. Kudos to Solo and Dagoth, for their ever-so-intrusive administrative duties. And, of course to necno, for the game - I honestly think it's better, right now (or at least, with version 1.28, this last one's a wee bit buggy ;) ) than any of poolka's myriad creations, AND their heavily altered children.
(for those of you that don't know who poolka is, he was the coder behind Slave Maker AND Sim Brothel, both of which were then taken over by fans, cleaned up a bit, and expanded. So, basically, he single-handedly created every game of this particular type that I've ever been able to find, until necno came along. He used to hang out at the funny games forums; don't know what happened to him. He quietly released a little gem called Hentai High this last summer, then dropped off the earth completely. Actually, I don't suppose anyone here knows about Hentai High, or can find a copy of it... the forum thread at funny games was killed, and with it went my link to that particular game.)
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Game Hentai High can be found at funny games sim date/rpg archives page 2.
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Realizing that this may be my last, best chance to ever beat Doc... I shall take this opportunity to make my ninety-ninth post, and *finally* beat him out on post count! Yay!
I've been coding more that posting the last couple of days, so you're probably going to stay in the lead :)
Actually, I might as well mention that this forum has done a pretty decent job of growing up.
I'll say. I was surprised by the the number of new posts waiting for me this morning. This place is really taking off.
Kudos to Solo and Dagoth
Seconded. You're doing a sterling job, chaps!
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It seems that discussion about occupational wars has ended but still I'd like to put one historical fact in it just to show that this kind of wars can only be won by genocide (even if it is slowly) but it mostly ends with retreat of occupation army. It happened in years 1772, 1793 and 1795 in small but not tiny east european country called Poland. After Swedish Invision, Cossacs Uprising and numerous wars against Russia Poland was divided three times between Russia, Prussia (todays Germany) and Austria. It was simply erased from world maps. Country was united again in 1918 at the end of I World War which makes it 123 years from the moment it was partitioned. Of course Poles (Polish people) didn't simply wait util someone liberates them. In the "meantime" they took part in many liberation wars (for example American Revolution where the most famous Pole who took part in it was Tadeusz Kościuszko) and even had a motto "for freedom yours and ours" which was supposed to mean that they were going to help you free your country while preparing to free their own. Pretty interesting isn't it? 123 years of not only occupation but also partition of both land and people and it still wasn't enough to kill "Polish spirit". Should I also add that after 1918 Polish had to fight few wars against its previous occupants to reaffirm (for example they crushed Red Army in 1919-1921). I guess if Indians had as strong connections and weren't divided into tribes American history would look a "tad" diffrent.
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Thank god I'm working with other coders now, its all getting a little larger then i expected it to get. Which of course makes me happy :D
Just have to keep coding ;)
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@frog: Thanks.
@Doc: Maybe. Mostly, I just did a marathon posting session, but that required a *ton* of other people posting at the same time too. It's no fun to just post haphazardly...
@Vanreis: Good point. Or, take a look at the Balkans - they've been subjugated on and off since the Greeks were the bad boys of the block, and they still ended up independent.
@necno: YES! Code until your fingers bleed...
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Seconded. You're doing a sterling job, chaps!
Well, I'm not doing anything :), it's mostly kudos to dagoth for lending us part of his hosting :).
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I wonder when there going to start the high jacking attempt
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I'm biding my time...I will strike when the forum least suspects it >;o)
[edit]
wow...massively belated dyslexia correction made. It's a wonder anyone could make sense of that.
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Sooo, I'm gonna go off a tangent, and ask if DocClox, or any other member of the forum, are liking the Flashforward series.
See, I have yet to watch it, and my friends keep telling me it's good...
Is it really good? Do you guys think I should make time to watch it?
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It's OK. Not an absolute must-see, but worth watching if you're up for an cop thriller with some S/F elements.
In many ways it reminds me of Heroes, except without the super-powers obviously. If that sounds fun, you'll probably have a good time watching it.
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Hey what character packs do you guys normally use when you arent play testing
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I've been using all of exodia's and EE's packs, along with the random girl expansion by (I think) sgb. I haven't tried any others yet - I haven't had time to play lately, and I'm kind of just biding time until the next release. This one isn't exactly unplayable, but its annoying enough that I've chosen to spend my insufficient free time on other, equally unproductive, endeavors. Like Mythbusters... I love that show, since I can do nothing for three hours straight and still feel like it was a good use of my time, since I learned something. Even better, I generally learned something that involves explosives, fire, large fast-moving objects, or something equally dangerous to the health of myself and everyone around me.
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Can I just say that having the f*****g Flu f*****g sucks the sweat of a dead donkey's balls?
And the f*****g doctor won't f*****g give me f*****g Tamiflu because they're "reserving it for H1N1 patients." That's a giant, festering pile of bullshit right there. I was tempted to tell the doctor to go suck a bag of c**ks when he gave me that line, but I hadn't quite developed the symptom where my internal foul language censor shuts down.
[/rant]
This message has been edited due to language. My f*****g internal censor is f*****g offline until I get over the f*****g Flu.
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Hey, there's worse things out there. The flu isn't so bad - it knocks you down for a couple days, and then you're peachy. It's actually better than a large test, in that regard - you normally are knocked out for more than a couple days on a serious exam, and you aren't done with the pain even after you've taken it... you still have to see the *grade*...
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Well, tamiflu is a vaccine, so it wouldn't do anything to help if you already have flu, it's preventive measure. Also, depending of what type of vaccine it exactly is it could even make things worse since your organism is already affected by flu :).
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Trying to get a vaccine after having already got sick is like getting a flak vest after being shot.
Sure, it'll help for next time, but it ain't going to do squat for the current situation.
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Tamiflu is not a vaccine, it's an antiviral treatment. It helps prevent the virus from spreading, but it's only effective within the first 24-48 hours. Those who take it usually get better faster than those who don't - and the frakking doctors wouldn't let me have any >.<
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There is a herbal product called Echinacea that studies have shown to reduce the severity of colds and flus and reduce the amount of time your by on average 2 days. Its very good stuff and best taken on the onset (first signs) of sickness.
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hate to point it out but the old sweat-baths also works wonders for combatting the vira
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So, saw Trans-Siberian Orchestra tonight... best concert I've ever seen.
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You lucky son of a bitch! >;o)
I am so frikken jealous...grrrrrr... >;o)
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Oh, yeah... it was absolutely stellar. Best part: the noseblood section tickets were only $30, with a perfectly decent (if far-away) view, and the concert lasted three hours. Ten bucks an hour for a concert just blew my mind...
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Oh, yeah... it was absolutely stellar. Best part: the noseblood section tickets were only $30, with a perfectly decent (if far-away) view, and the concert lasted three hours. Ten bucks an hour for a concert just blew my mind...
Pic or didn't happen =o
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I should've taken pictures, but all I had was my phone - and remember, I was way up in the boonies. They would've been crappy to begin with.
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I have no (good) reason to believe you so I chose not to =D
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[shrug]
Whatever. 'Twas a good time, and I heartily recommend anyone who can to go see them. By far the best (pseudo-)rock concert I've ever been to.
Anyone else want to start hijacking the OT thread? We could start laying bets on the next major release... :-\ ...or would that be too evil?
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I bet your (letmein) soul that it will be released this friday
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Major release, as in the one's necro does, I will say in 1 to 2 weeks.
My next release will be tomorrow, though.
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I bet the last slice of pizza from my lunch today that the next major release will be the first Friday in December (the 4th I think).
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Yeah, I was right, playing that game *was* too evil.
New topic: anyone here know of any other flash games like this that are wandering around in hidden corners of the Interwebs? I think that most of the people that end up here *probably* have some inkling of pooolka's works and their second-generation offspring, but other than those I can't think of anything quality... there was a half-started game I found long ago called "Master", but it was a little furry and that's not my thing... I think there was another one, pretty rough, that had to do with a school teacher - NOT Hent High, but something else.
Of course, there are the endless lists of mostly crappy games at Newgrounds and a couple other sites, but they all pretty much blow. SM, SimBro, and of course this game are to the best of *my* knowledge miles above and beyond the rest.
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If you're talking strictly free stuff, then I don't know of any more. There are, of course, games of a similar nature (sex slave training) produced in Japan, but they never (to my knowledge) get officially licensed for English distribution. There's probably a good reason for that (we tend to shy away from anything even suggestive of slavery here in the US), but the end result is still the same.
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Meh. I don't know Japanese anyway.
I wasn't focusing strictly on slave type games - I was thinking more of just the XXX flash non-shitty genre. Most games seem to be those damn videos (which suck), or the choose-from-three-selections type (which suck worse, because now you can fail at watching a shitty animation), or a few dating sims (which, actually, I don't think are all that bad in the main... they're just kinda rare, often frustrating, and not usually worth replaying).
Of course, there are other media besides Flash. There are a couple browser type games (which follow in the path of shitty Flash choose-your-failure modes), but there is a pretty solid bunch of AIF (Adult Interactive Fiction) games. Of course, the vast majority of these are text-only; not a huge issue. Worse than that, these are mostly prone to the same failures of normal interactive fiction, which is that they can be incredibly annoying to play. There's also a huge gulf between the best and the worst.
But, anyway, before I got sidetracked: that sucks. I was hoping that someone else here had done a better job of Googling than I did.
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In my experience, there aren't all that many good flash games out there. Some are short-term fun, but few have any staying power, replayability, or compelling story/plot lines.
If you are looking for good story games, there are some of the Hentai games that got translated into English that have rip-your-heart-out-and-stomp-on-it stories I can recommend for you.
Kana Little Sister
Heart de Roommate
Figures of Happiness (I *think* this is the one I mean, it's the only title I borrowed from someone else, so I don't have it hear to confirm)
Ever 17: Out of Infinity (not hentai or even ecchi, but a fantastic game nonetheless)
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Hmm... might have to look those up, someday.
@admin: who broke the Internet, earlier? Or was that just a fluke for me, specifically?
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It's been broken for me too.
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Having some problems with the server. Not entirely sure of the cause at the moment. Hopefully we'll stay back up now after this reboot.
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I broked the interwebs. It's all part of my diabolical scheme to take over the world. First, the WM forums, next the world!
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Bad Zodiac! Bad! Bad! No biscuit for YOU tonight!
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Awww <;o(
No biscuit for me? *tear*
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Well, everything seems to working now, knock on wood. And zodiac, if Doc won't give you a biscuit, I'll give you some bacon instead.
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mmmmmmmmmmmmm...bacon!
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See, this is why things break. How are we ever going to train him not to go breaking internets, if you keep feeding him bacon all the time?
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/run 5YearOldMentality.exe
DocCwoks, yous a meanie! Just a'cause I bweaked the intwanets doesn't mean I can't have bisskits! Poopoo head! Ppppbbbbbbbbbbbtttttt!
/break
Ok, needed to get that out of my system. My inner 5 year old has been pestering me for days.
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I don't care. I just want the excuse to make bacon, even if I end up sharing a little of it.
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speaking of which, almost time for breakfast...
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Hmmm... the forum's been awful quiet lately... someone do something exciting.
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I had my first job interview this month today. That was kinda exciting.
It was for a job I would hate doing, but on the plus side, I don't think they're going to offer it to me.
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Meh. I don't know Japanese anyway.
I wasn't focusing strictly on slave type games - I was thinking more of just the XXX flash non-shitty genre. Most games seem to be those damn videos (which suck), or the choose-from-three-selections type (which suck worse, because now you can fail at watching a shitty animation), or a few dating sims (which, actually, I don't think are all that bad in the main... they're just kinda rare, often frustrating, and not usually worth replaying).
Of course, there are other media besides Flash. There are a couple browser type games (which follow in the path of shitty Flash choose-your-failure modes), but there is a pretty solid bunch of AIF (Adult Interactive Fiction) games. Of course, the vast majority of these are text-only; not a huge issue. Worse than that, these are mostly prone to the same failures of normal interactive fiction, which is that they can be incredibly annoying to play. There's also a huge gulf between the best and the worst.
But, anyway, before I got sidetracked: that sucks. I was hoping that someone else here had done a better job of Googling than I did.
Sengoku Rance is amazingly awesome for a hentai game. And there's a full english patch. Essentially an world domination game, but with much sex along the way. Tactical fights, army management, and very well done artwork.
It's not really possible to buy it anymore, but there's a bunch of websites where you can download it.
Probably would play it as a game of its own rights. Tears to Tiara is also supposed to be very good, but couldn't ever get into it.
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I've played Tears. It was... odd. I'm not a huge fan of turn-based tactical RPG's as a genre to begin with, but Tears didn't have an especially great story (IMHO) to make up for it. They seemingly tried to make up for that by tossing in the XXX scenes, which had virtually nothing to do with anything, and overall probably just detracted from the game. Perhaps, if you're a fan of that sort of game, you would like it more. I give it a low C in my rankings.
The artwork was pretty, though.
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I didn't know there was an english patch for Sengoku Rance. I can see I'm going to have to revisit that one
Currently got Sudzukuri Dragon playing away in the background. Fantastic game: Manage your nest, terrorise the nearby towns, repel invading adventurers and have you wicked way with the captives. Lovely stuff.
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I also recommend Sengoku Rance.
Yandere Translations made a patch: http://yandere.gray7.com/?page_id=90 (http://yandere.gray7.com/?page_id=90)
It's good fun, the game is actually a game, there's some challenge even on 'normal' difficultly. There's new game+ (with multiple paths). And the writing is rather fun, they managed to make the main character both an ass and amusing. He's conquering all of pseudo-Japan for the express purpose of having sex with all the princesses.
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Currently got Sudzukuri Dragon playing away in the background. Fantastic game: Manage your nest, terrorise the nearby towns, repel invading adventurers and have you wicked way with the captives. Lovely stuff.
Hmm, sounds cool, I'll have to check it out. Downloading it now.
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I will look into those games once I clean my hard drive up. I have plenty of space, it is just that I have way too much other crap on it. Also I pray I am not coming down with something, since I really do not feel well today.
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:o - are you guys suggesting I illegally download a game? That's WRONG. Only music can be downloaded without any remorse, everyone knows that...
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If you could go out and buy it, I'd say do that. But legal purchase isn't an option unfortunately.
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I finally found a place to get Hentai High!
http://rs98.rapidshare.com/files/242812181/HentHighschool.zip (http://rs98.rapidshare.com/files/242812181/HentHighschool.zip)
I still think it's sad that no one ever took this up, as happened with Sim Brothel and Slave Maker. I'm not suggesting anything - I promise! - I'm just expressing regret. Anyway, hope y'all enjoy it if you haven't played it before. And by the way, it's a little buggy; remember, you generally get what you pay for, and this was free.
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Double-post addendum: and how come everybody keeps getting all these extra stars? I worked damn hard to earn mine, none of this "I'm going to pretend to be a programmer!" stuff. I think I'm getting rank envy... :'(
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I think I'm getting rank envy... :'(
Sounds like it. ;)
Thanks for the Hentai High download link. You don't happen to have any tips for it, or links for a manual or something, do you? Probably not, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask.
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As near as I can tell, there are no manuals or hint guides to be found. The only hint I've seen is that the colors correspond to different stats:
Red = sex
Blue = knowledge
Yellow = behavior
White = morals
Green = joy
Somehow, the bonuses are applied when teaching, and the bonus depends on either the color you pick in the teaching part of the "next semester" phase or the combo of colors you assigned. I have no idea which is the case, and I have yet to detect any correlation between the colors and the stats or pills.
Can anyone else shed any light on the subject?
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There used to be a thread at funnygames.com, but it was lost in the aether.
Here's the Cliff Notes version: you have stats, and you have the "bonus dots" (for lack of a better term). Stats are what will give you the different endings, but the dot bonuses are what let you get to do more things. You gain (or in the case of stats, lose) both during the teaching and walking around phases.
Taking a quick look at the main screen once you start a game, there are a lot of buttons. Going counterclockwise from top left:
"Buy Buildings" is hopefully obvious - there are only two options anyway. New buildings let you visit them later, which opens up new events - and in the pool's case, a new club.
"Clubs" - these cost money every year, but they also alter your stats and give bonus dots. In general, you want to activate every club available, and NEVER close them.
"Color Combination" - here's where it gets interesting. As zodiac conveniently suggested, each color in this game equates to a different stat/aspect. Here, you have to pick sets of two (or one) colors that you will use later, in the teaching phase. I'll get to that in a bit.
"Use Color Points" - this is where your bonus dots become neat things, and let you do more things.
"Lessons Book" - here, you alter the amount of 'innuendo' within each teacher's class. Generally, more loyal teachers will allow higher amounts of innuendo - this is a balancing act. Higher innuendo obviously raises the sex stat.
"Assign Teachers" - this is where you assign classes. Notice that each teacher has a specialty, and within that specialty they'll have less minus stats and more plus stats in the teaching phase.
"School Rules" - these actually have a pretty large effect on the game. The effects of each are not always obvious (and in at least one case, probably bugged with a minus sign - I forget where, though), but most of them are pretty intuitive.
"Save" - duh. Note, though, that saving a game is bugged, and screws up the whole 'bonus' system. I'd recommend just playing through the entire game.
"Load" - duh again.
"Next Trimester" - begins the teaching phase.
So, what happens after the first turn? You've followed the arrows (which don't quite point where they should, and begun the first trimester. First, you can do a school event - some of these are more useful than others - I'll get to that later. Now you see a class pop up, with a teacher and an option to pick between the colors you assigned earlier. Huh?
Well, the deal here is that the class (which was randomly picked) can be skewed to either aspect/color (which go in order as you assigned them). Doing this will effect your stats, and in some cases give you bonus points. You'll also see that your teacher either accepted your teaching manual (i.e. amount of innuendo) or rejected it, AND was either able to manage the class or not (this is a function of their authority). They may or may not have had a quote-unquote 'influence' on the class as well, which is a raise in the sex stat caused by teacher sex rating (and possibly the amount of innuendo too). Picking colors is pretty vital - some colors and classes don't combine well and end up lowering stats, others don't really do anything, and some are really, really nice. For the most part, the connections are rather obvious - math isn't joyous, sex classes aren't moral, sports is fun, science is full of learning, etc. You may or may not get a random event after this phase, which often has a choice associated with it.
After this comes the walking phase, where you have three chances to get events. These events differ based on where you went, and have lots off different effects. It's pretty obvious what to do here.
After this comes another teaching phase for second trimester, yadda yadda yadda, then the year's done and you can change class assignments, school rules, use color points, etc. You get 15 years (assuming you haven't used the bonus +5 years you can get), so there is an element of strategy here.
Speaking of that, what are some of the basic strategies to use? Well, first of all, there is one stat that isabsolutely vital: reputation. If reputation hits zero, it's game over. Don't let that happen - the problem, though, is that most sexy stuff lowers your rep. This means you'll have to spend a while building a cushion in your rep before you can start getting really wild. One way to do this is through picking the proper school events (a couple raise this stat, but not every time - experiment!), through lucky events, and just waiting since it will naturally rise if you aren't too naughty. The best way to do this, though, is to cheat - there are a couple random events that raise reputation, and if you press the "OK" button multiple times before it disappears you'll get the boost more than once. ;)
Your other priority at the start is to get joy bonus dots (the green ones). You need these for the higher sex classes, but they are hard to get to start with. In general, you'll want to get a couple of the extra joy classes ASAP.
Be mindful of how the color aspects work with classes - how you combine them in pairs makes a HUGE difference in the game. Note that the top two pairs are used twice (six slots, eight classes). You'll also have some singlets or an empty pair.
Does that help? If you have more specific questions, I'll do my best to answer.
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Just to add: the sex clubs really hammer your rep when you open them. You can get away with one or maybe two, but more than that and you're going to have problems
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If I'm guessing Hentai high is about a school where you train girls for sex?
My 3rd game planned is a dating sim, it will take place in a school but no training of girls :D. Its focus is on rumor mongering, every action you or any of the the key NPCs take may result in a rumor being spread. This rumor will affect everyone differently so friends will stick by you most of the time but say if you were seen kissing a girl your friend liked then that would negatively affect your friendship with them, also it is possible to make fake rumors to affect the image of someone at the school. Hence the game is going to be very dynamic.
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It's not exactly sex training, not in the same sense as Slave Maker anyway. It's more a game where you try to corrupt a school to produce sex-crazed students. You insert sexual innuendo into the curricula and push the PTA to let you get away with teaching more and more risque subjects until you have lessons in sex, masturbation, bondage, exhibition, gang-bangs, etc. There's alot more too it than that, but that's the basic idea.
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Sounds like fun, necno.
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For anyone interested, attached is an init save for Hentai High School with all Extras unlocked. After one successful playthrough providing very few colored orbs at the end (not even 5 in anything), I just resorted to using CheatEngine to hack the number of orbs available and unlocked everything. Whatever works, eh? :)
The file goes in the "Save" folder in your HHS installation directory.
Oh, and I went ahead and enabled small attachments on the forum here. The bandwidth crisis has abated somewhat for now, and hopefully my host will hurry up with that gigabit conversion.
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Well, the endgame bonus dots are based on the number of regular dots you have left over - it doesn't really make sense to do it that way, but whatever. This game isn't quite polished - just like the original SM or SimBro, it's more like a late beta release. Anyway, the point is, it takes a while to learn how to game the system and get the dots you need; cheating works just as fine, I guess. ;)
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It took me 4 plays through before I could unlock anything, but once you get the hang of it it gets easier. Knowing that certain colors are better for certain jobs is critical. Now if only I could figure them all out....
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By the way, about Hentai High School, I should add that if you choose any schools other than the first one, your initial savegames will be really messed up.
So, say you start a new game in a different school than the first, save your game (even after going ahead and playing through a year or 3), exit completely, and then restart it and load that save, the basic school stats and money at least will be reset to what appears to be the default values for a new game in the first school. Other things will have been properly saved, like which buildings you've bought, what year it is, and most other things. If you then play a bit and save the game again, it appears to pretty much fix the glitch with one acception; if you had the sex class upgrades already (bought or obtained through the Extras), the game will still have the cap on the Sex value for the school at 50 as if you didn't have them, but you won't be able to buy them again. A bit irritating. Buying some of the other sex-related upgrades (not sure which particular one) appears to fix this.
Makes you wish he'd made the source available. ;)
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People have asked, but pooolka got sick and disappeared before doing so. Sad.
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Hmm...I didn't experience that glitch. Did you get it to occur on all the other schools, or just certain ones?
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Hmm...I didn't experience that glitch. Did you get it to occur on all the other schools, or just certain ones?
Definitely on the last one (Hentai High), and I'm pretty sure I got it on the religious one too along with a couple of the others. The only one I know doesn't have that happen to me is the first one. I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, but I even tried installing and running it in Virtual XP (32-bit) and had the same problem.
Perhaps it's something triggered by a specific unlocked Extra or something?
EDIT: it's not triggered by an unlocked extra. I just started back with a clean slate (no Extras bought) and ran through a game which I edited to have a bunch of orbs of all colors. After running through and finishing that game to get the orbs back in the menu, I went to Extras and only bought Hentai High, nothing else. I then started a new game in Hentai High (the last school), saved the game, exited completely, started back up and loaded the game... same problem, basic school stats and money were set to the default levels from a new game in the first school, not those you get at the start of Hentai High.
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People have asked, but pooolka got sick and disappeared before doing so. Sad.
I thought someone posted the source on Hentai Palm a while back. I should even have a copy somewhere. I never did anything with it myself, partly because I had other projects on the go, and partly because someone else announced their intention to make an improved version.
I'll have a rummage, make sure I wasn't imagining the entire episode.
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Hmmm... if they did, I don't remember it. However, I don't go there on any kind of regular basis, so you could very well be correct. I just remember that the source never showed up at the initial thread.
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Attached to this post:
http://forum.hentaipalm.com/showpost.php?p=915866&postcount=84
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Sure enough.
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Definitely on the last one (Hentai High), and I'm pretty sure I got it on the religious one too along with a couple of the others. The only one I know doesn't have that happen to me is the first one. I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, but I even tried installing and running it in Virtual XP (32-bit) and had the same problem.
Perhaps it's something triggered by a specific unlocked Extra or something?
EDIT: it's not triggered by an unlocked extra. I just started back with a clean slate (no Extras bought) and ran through a game which I edited to have a bunch of orbs of all colors. After running through and finishing that game to get the orbs back in the menu, I went to Extras and only bought Hentai High, nothing else. I then started a new game in Hentai High (the last school), saved the game, exited completely, started back up and loaded the game... same problem, basic school stats and money were set to the default levels from a new game in the first school, not those you get at the start of Hentai High.
I just confirmed the bug. At some point, it no longer occurs, as in the late game you can save/load as much as you want without experiencing this bug (though the color bug is still present). I don't know what changes that makes the game not switch back to the starting default values for the base school.
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Attached to this post:
http://forum.hentaipalm.com/showpost.php?p=915866&postcount=84 (http://forum.hentaipalm.com/showpost.php?p=915866&postcount=84)
Cool. :)
I just confirmed the bug. At some point, it no longer occurs, as in the late game you can save/load as much as you want without experiencing this bug (though the color bug is still present). I don't know what changes that makes the game not switch back to the starting default values for the base school.
What fixes it is closing the game, re-opening it, and loading the save, then saving again. This seems to produce a savefile which properly stores all of the data. As long as you keep playing on the original game instance after starting a new game, even if you play through to day 15 or 20 and save, will produce a damaged save that doesn't contain the proper stats and such.
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That's bizarre.
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Ironically I think all of my favorite hentai games were mentioned here, (besides this one) Slavemaker, Simbrothel, and HentaiHighSchool.
I personally like the games you have to think, or plan at to get what you want. Sadly these 4 games are the only ones that i've found that you seem to have to do that.
And no, I hate the games that require me to be very skilled with controlling my mouse or something like that. (I guess I hate them slightly more than the ones where it's next to impossible to lose at... If I want porn I can find that easily, but I want a GAME).
ahh... we have just found one of the topics that triggers me to vent/rant.
Edit: this caused me to also jump back to page 4 to see if I had actually missed anything... and apparently I basically restated someone else's little rant. But downloading Sengou Rance right now.
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Well, I can't say these are the *only* ones I've found that do that, but they're the only ones that weren't a quarter-completed before being abandoned, or were more along the lines of "good ideas with horrible execution". Even then, among these four games, HHS never really got past beta and the latest version of SimBro is currently caught in between platform changes, and looks to be badly hung up besides. Only this game and SM can be considered real A-list material.
Although, if you're into that sort of thing, there are several very decent dating sims out there as well. SimGirl, although never finished, was moderately good - so was Ganguru Girl. Of course, you also have to name Date Ariane as very good, and there are another two or three dating sims off Newgrounds that meet my standards as well. Still, in the main you're quite right - the quality level for this sort of thing is pretty abysmal. Lots of potential game makers take their cue from the professionals, and make the quasi-linear story type games; that's fine if you have a good writer and a better artist, but even the professionals miss on those half the time, meaning that the amateurs generally do much worse. It seems like most of the creators either lack creativity, or skill, or all-to-often both.
If, however, you aren't explicitly looking for hentai, you should take a glance at the Adult Interactive Fiction (AIF) community. It's been around a *lot* longer than anybody else, and while a good part of those works don't have any pictures there are some that are very, very good in that regard too.
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Now, I do enjoy a good sex story, (jumped to that once i saw "no pictures" after "Novel") But there are some pretty good.... basically story line things where you basically click through and maybe choose a path (I enjoyed shuffle! but I think a portion of it was I found the music very catchy), there was one about some mansion or something that you get trapped in, and other people were trapped there for years but they never age until they are ready to leave (everybody has serious baggage lol), I enjoyed that, but I don't consider those games really.
now a recent one I played that I wouldn't consider a hentai game (it has a play time of about 10 hours if you read all the text but only maybe 3 minutes of sex) that I found very enjoyable (and had action/strategy rpg battles that allows me to clump it into the games category) was Utawarerumono.
HHS worked fine for me the whole way through. (good luck?)
Simbro1 I can put with the A-list.
Simbro2 ton of potential but like you said, it seems to be in a rut right now.
There are a few dating sims that I did enjoy, however I can never remember their names (mainly because I feel ashamed about playing a "Dating Sim"... which is very weird [for me to be embarrassed about] considering my normal computer activities).
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Sim Girl, Ganguru Girl, Aching Dreams, Love Hina, Twinkle Revue, Galaxy Angel... those are the only decent dating sims I can think of at the top of my head. Most of the good ones are pretty indistunguishable - there's a definate method that they all follow. Can't really complain, though, since on the whole it's a pretty good method, and it works for the genre.
SimBro1 was pretty rough around the edges, IIRC. It wasn't bad, by any means, but there were some things that were bugged, others that were just annoying, and the interface was a pain to handle. I'd put it in the same category as HHS - very playable, excellent at times, but in need of a couple dozen hours of love and playtesting to be considered a true standard.
The story line type games are OK, but I generally prefer things with at least a little replayability.
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Sim Girls is in the midst of a rewrite now. The fan base picked up the game, redid the engine, and wrote new storylines. The new engine is being beta tested now, and (if they manage to meet any semblance of a deadline) there might be new content implemented by January. I'm keeping an eye out, crossing my fingers, hoping for awesomeness to occur.
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simbro2 are currently at a standstill, mostly due to lack of programming actives but who knows, they may get it back on tracks some day.
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For anyone still interested in HentaiHighSchool, I got bored and fixed the 2 outstanding bugs I knew of, thanks to DocClox posting a link to the source. ;D
Bugs fixed:
- Initial savegames from any but the first school would not fully load properly; this was a bug in the game loading code, where it wasn't setting the current school properly and thus loading the default base data for the first school.
- Loading a game, exiting to the main menu, and then trying to load another game would result in a crash; this was due to the save/load form being trashed and not re-initialized properly next time around.
So, here's the updated executable, just drop it in your HHS installation directory (might back up the original just in case):
http://www.mediafire.com/file/zk4u3mnmynx/HHS_1.0.0.1_exe.zip
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Nice work! Now I can go finish the game. >;o)
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Yeah, I found the SimGirl forum once and saw that some people were redoing it. From what I can tell, though, they had the typical short burst of work done followed by a much longer period of stagnation; hopefully they can get past the hump and actually follow through.
As for SimBro2, well, what all these things require is a truly dedicated programmer. He doesn't necessarily have to do all the work, but there has to be one person who steps up and consistently gets things done and stays on track - WM has necno, SM2 has cmacleod42, most of the original 'greats' were done by pooolka. This applies to all amatuer games and mods as well; teams may be nice in theory, but when it comes down to it there has to be one definate leader to keep the ball rolling.
Oh, and good job, Dagoth. Very nice. Sad that no one ever did anything else with that source, though; I still think HHS had lots of potential.
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Maybe when WM is done, we can spawn a new project to either fix HHS or make HHS2. I don't want to push anything on anyone - I certainly don't have to coding skills to lead the project - just throwing the option out there.
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Eh, I may see what I can do with HHS once I get a bit more time. Kind of busy at the moment. If I do plan to do anything major though I probably will change the language up, mainly because I have not spent a lot of time learning c#. I can program in it, but I'd rather do it in either python or c++ if only for the fact I like those languages better.
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I might have mentioned this before, but take a look at Boo (http://boo.codehaus.org/). Python like syntax, and compiles into the .NET CIL. Good if you're working with .NET but don't like C# and VB.Net
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Will look into boo, I need to work with .net. For this, I was going to try to go for better multi-platform support. I know about mono, but I don't know how complete it is so I am not going to trust it.
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I wouldn't put too muchc effort into it, delta. In my opinion, the game either needs very little done to it, or a whole lot, and I'd rather see you working with necno on new games before redoing old ones. That's one of the things that kind of disappoints me about SM2 and SimBro2; there is so much effort and talent being put into them, when they were good games in their own right to begin with. Use them as inspiration, don't just keep remaking them and adding relatively minor modifications to them... that's not to say that they didn't deserve a bit of a makeover, but in the case of SM2 especially, after the original bugs were hunted out and the initial girls polished I think it would have been better to leave it, and for cmac to have started working on something new and interesting.
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All I was really planing to do for major changes was to make the schools play differently and fix bugs. Right now, there is no reason other than different starting stats to use the other schools, the first one is really all you need.
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Ah. Yeah, I could see how a a couple dozen unique events per school could be useful.
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Will look into boo, I need to work with .net. For this, I was going to try to go for better multi-platform support. I know about mono, but I don't know how complete it is so I am not going to trust it.
I can understand that. Mono is pretty cool, and mono apps written on Linux will largely run unaltered on Windows (or at least the ones I wrote in my last job did).
The problem is going the other way. A lot of windows apps call native code, which blows any cross platform capability out of the water. The Mono windows.forms support is a little ropey, too.
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Should have been when I need to work with .net.
Letmein, that and tweaking rep. Nothing to hard.
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FYI, this is now the longest thread in the forum! I'm so proud of my creation... on the other hand, it has only a quarter of the page views of some dumb thing named "Download v1.29", so that's a bummer.
EDIT: speaking of that - I told you, Doc, that I'd never get back ahead of you in post count.
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Well if you can somehow sabotage Doc Internets you will pass him in like a day or two but the main reason you guys raise your post count so high is cause you have discussions about code and stuff in between each other as oppose to me that live to live in the user mod forums
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H. High is a very neat game. I'd like to see some of the problems fixed, but I would rather see this game fixed up first like Letmein said. :p
Yeah I don't think my post count will reach Doc and Letmeins for a while either, all I do is offer ideas and my opinion. I don't know anything about code.
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Well, here is what is done so far in the next update (still much more to do)
v1.30 (including 1.29.? fixes)
- reduced pregnancy cooldown to 4 weeks
- added text to girl details to show how long before can get pregnant again
- changed intro text
- fixed problems with children aging crashing the game (and corrupting the saves)
- Added ability to change resolution see ScreenMode.txt to see how you can change the resolution
- maximum number of traits increased to 60
- updated girl management screen to handle the new features.
- girl management screen now allows multiple selection. Meaning you can select more then one girl and assign jobs to them all at once.
- updated girl detail screen to be in line with the new features
- add sorting algorithms to sort by name to girl management and inventory screens.
- add prison to town map, where you can bail out girls taken from you.
- removed the magic restriction on pregnacy.
- Drastically improved load times, as in 3 seconds ,as in 3 seconds compared to minutes with most of the girl packs.
- Various bug fixes.
- XML Format items file
- XML Format girls and random girls files
- A lot of general re-factoring - nothing visible at the user level
- Some changes in filesystem handling
- A lot of work towards a native Linux version.
- buildings now get dirty which can affect the amount of customers. You NEED to have a girl on cleaning duty to stop this.
- brothel category added to turn summary
- New ways of assinging work and new jobs available. See girl management screen.
- matron removed and replaced with girl job for the position (note that only non-slave girls can be a matron)
- new jobs partially added (this is a long process)
MORE TO COME :D
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:dances:
Sounds like exciting stuff...
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O.o
I await updates with bated breath.
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O_o Waiting for updates is fun.
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It all sounds great, can't wait for the update. :)
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I fell like i just had my christmas present early, getting all this info. Kudos to necno and all others for making this forum a live and happy place to visit.
Not only do you guys work like demons on improving the game, you also take time to keep the rest informed on progress.
Beats another forum i'm on by several horse-lengths.
:) :) :)
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We were down for a bit there again, sorry. Apparently my host was having a widespread network failure of some sort, but it looks like they've straightened it out.
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EDIT: speaking of that - I told you, Doc, that I'd never get back ahead of you in post count.
I think you came within about 2 posts of me a week or so back.
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Looking forward to it.
I like that non-slave girls are the only ones who can become Matrons. Will there be other jobs for non-slave girls or slave girls only?
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We were down for a bit there again, sorry. Apparently my host was having a widespread network failure of some sort, but it looks like they've straightened it out.
I didn't do it this time!
I can haz bisskit?
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You can has biscuit :)
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The biscuit is mine!
Now that I have the biscuit, nothing can stop me! WMAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!
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but you have no gravy for the biscuit. you must have gravy to make biscuit more powerful.
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By the way, zodiac, you lost: necno was able to hijack the OT thread before you, because he managed to post the next changelog in the ONLY THREAD that's supposed to have nothing to do with the game...
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Letmein, sorry that you will be with dial-up for a while, If it makes you feel any better I will have to use a old computer for a while to browse the forums.
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By the way, zodiac, you lost: necno was able to hijack the OT thread before you, because he managed to post the next changelog in the ONLY THREAD that's supposed to have nothing to do with the game...
It wasn't a successful hijack though...we went back off topic after a short period of ogling.
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mh, nice Log for the 1.30. did you a release Date in sight? or just like the Duke "It's Done when it's Done?" ^^
(this sounds wired weird... im bad in English Grammar o-O... sorry...)
greeZ Zeus
edith says: I'm a Idiot....
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Yes its done when its done, but hopefully not as slow as Duke.
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With a bit of luck we'll get a 1.29.3 out sometime tomorrow. Won't have the cool stuff nec's been adding, but will have the bits delta and I have been working on
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[looks pointedly at zodiac, says nothing]
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okay, thank you. btw GZ to your 300 Post, "THIS IS
SPARTA DocClox"
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Hey who here plays Kingdom of Loathing or Metroplexity or some other "MMOG"
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I played KoL a loooooooooooong time ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the interwebs. I stopped when I could no longer progress any further with any of my characters because they hadn't yet finished the game. I very much enjoyed their tongue-in-cheek/punny humor, though. The Penultimate Fantasy Airship (with its Irritating Series of Random Encounters) will live on forever in my memory. >;o)
[Edit to avoid double posting]
Bleh. I can't sleep. My mind is salivating over the Turkey of Stupendous Awesomeitude I will be roasting on Thursday. It doesn't help any that I made the brine tonight (last night? I don't even know what time it is) and now the house smells of garlic, sage, thyme, and rosemary. Drooling while sleeping is gross enough. Drooling while trying to fall asleep is both disgusting and damned distracting. >;o)~....
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Wow. Hard-on for the bird, eh? Honestly, turkey's OK, but there are better foods out there... for instance, bacon. Mmmmm... bacon...
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Turkey's a once-or-twice a year thing for me. When I get the craving, I get it bad. Then I eat way-to-frakking-much, take a turkey coma, and I don't want to see it again for several months.
Bacon is real good too, and I can eat that nearly every day. It goes good with turkey too. Turkey tips and bacon alfredo casserole....it's a heart attack and a coma mixed together in a superbly divine culinary concoction.
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Actually, the 'turkey coma' that people talk about is completely false. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it's not because of the turkonen or whatever it's called - it's just the normal downturn people have from overeating, and their energies going into digestion.
There. You learned something today.
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I used to play KoL and Forumwarz, but the only MMOG that's managed to keep my interest for longer than a few months is BvS.
Oh, and the turkey coma thing is known as "paltkoma" in Sweden (palt is sort of a boiled bun made from ground potato and wheat flour and filled with meat), and as letmein said it's simply caused by overeating. The body brings a lot of its functions to a minimum so it can focus on digesting the massive ammounts of food in the stomach.
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Something more or less on topic with MMOG's and turkeys :)
(http://www.imagesforme.com/thumb/thumb_75d38566.png) (http://www.imagesforme.com/show.php/812842_Image3.png) (http://www.imagesforme.com/thumb/thumb_55400989.png) (http://www.imagesforme.com/show.php/812841_Image1.png)
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But Solo, you cannot be on-topic whilst in off-topic? Das ist verboten!
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Hey solo Im to lazy to log into WoW do you get anything from the event or just a achivement?
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T minus 12 hours and counting until Turkey Time!
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But Solo, you cannot be on-topic whilst in off-topic? Das ist verboten!
Yes, but am I? Since this is off-topic and I'm writing about on-topic stuff does that actually make me off or on topic? Now that's a conundrum.
Hey solo Im to lazy to log into WoW do you get anything from the event or just a achivement?
You get few achievements, and when you do all of them you get turkey minipet and Pilgrim title.
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Yes, but am I? Since this is off-topic and I'm writing about on-topic stuff does that actually make me off or on topic? Now that's a conundrum.
Well, if you're on-topic in the off-topic forum you're off-topic (because the topic is being off-topic, and by being off-topic you're on-topic), but then if you're off-topic instead, you're still on-topic in the off-topic forum, and that means.... AUGH HEAD ASPLODE
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See my problem :)
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do you tell the truth or tell a lie when you say you're lying?
by saying you're lying you're actually telling the truth, but then you're lying about saying you're lying, but that means you're telling the truth about lying but then....... Head falls off in a random direction and explodes messily.
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And if I asked your friend which was the right way to go, what would he say?
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Two paths diverge in a forest. At the end of one path is wealth beyond compare; at the end of the other, certain death.
Two men stand at the crossroads; one always tells the truth and the other always lies.
Shoot one of them in the foot. If he says "Ow fuck, you shot me in the foot!" then you know he's the truth-teller. Follow his directions. ;)
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fixing the gordian knot, or shot in this case :)
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I have awakened from my turkey-induced coma. What have you guys been up to in my absence?
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"If you tell the truth, you will be drowned. If you tell a lie, you will be hanged."
"I will be hanged."
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if i told the truth, i would be lying, so i'm going to tell a lie and say i'm telling the truth.
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This statement is false.
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This space is intentionally left blank.
fnord
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The best lies have a hint of truth to them.
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Lie to Me!
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@Midnight_Amratha
I got the cure for cancer in my kitchen sink?
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I websurfed, weak and weary,
Over many a strange and spurious website of 'hot chicks galore',
When I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
"'Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my cheap hardcore!"
Quoth the server, "404".
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I am
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I am
Y'think?
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what about 1.29.3 or 1.30? this Thanks giving think is over or? ^^
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Need to get something stable to base it on. That's not always as easy as you'd think.
I'd base it off my branch, but at the moment that crashes horribly as soon as you start the game.
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I do have something stable to do a 1.29.3 on, which I could upload on monday for people, but it might have a few issues with the loading of the xml and it would not have that mcuh new stuff, just some minor tweaks and the load time fix.
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You guys updating us is always welcome( and make me specifically very happy) but we can be patient so no rush.
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I say we tag it, so we can bugfix the release if there are specific issues, and then release it. mark it as "unstable" so people know that it might have some bugs.
If nothing else, we can get a shakedown on the XML loading bugs before necno's major release.
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It will be uploaded on moday then.
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we can be patient so no rush.
Key word is "can".>:D
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Now there's a thread hijack - almost a full page! >;o)
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no not realy... ^^
um... something Offtopic... anyone else in here is Reading Discworld Novels?
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I've read most of them at one time or another. Which one are you on?
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Discworld is a great series. It's a shame that Terry Pratchet had to go and get himself a case of Alzheimer's.
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It's just an embuggerance, it's not the end of the world. Or, you know, so I'm told...
Seriously, you have to admire the man's attitude.
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Yes it totally his fault for getting the Alzheimer's =D
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I'd propose a toast, but we need some drinks first.
Garkon! Trays beers pour-favor, grassy-ass, silver plate!
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Thank you, Gytha.
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*gets up on the table and starts dancing and singing The Wizard's Staff Has a Knob on the End*
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at moment i'm reading Making Money, its a nice book ^^ i'm afraid of Going Postal the Movie. it was made this year. i Hope it get soon out here in Germany!
mh... someone allready read the new Book Unseen Academicals?
btw, what is your Favorit Character in the single Storys? I think Vetinari is one of the best.
a cool quote from Going Postal Book: "Tyrann, i can" (i don't know if this is correct. i just know the german version ^^'')
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I is now playing Dragon Age: Origins on my computer its the BOMB
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o.O new Discworld book? and me without any money to buy it with! Grrrrrrrrr.....
As far as favorite characters go, I don't think I have any. Pratchet does such a wonderful job building their personalities that I like them all.
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unseen-Academicals-Terry-Pratchett/dp/0385609345/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259510192&sr=8-1
this new one ^^ i hope this is soon translated in German... I'm a bad one in english, looking yesterday Watchmen in English with my Ex-Girlfriend... the movie is double lenght if you don't know what they talking about... (if i make to bad mistakes in the Gramma please tell ^^'')
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Your English is better than some of the native speakers I have had the misfortune to encounter >;o)
Now I have to go to a bookstore and salivate over Unseen Academicals...
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thanks, um, i try my best and try to learn in Forums like these to get better... but yesterday i realized English reading is much easier than English hearing! ^-^ may be for the dialects.... its like in German, reading is easy, but the different speaking between some guy from Berlin and some from Munich is hard...
(mh... English grammar correcter by Opera, yeah ^^ much easier!)
q.q i want too! i got in my room 18 of the Discworld Books.. or 22 if you say "Rincewind" is 4 books. just 15 leave and i got all!
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What Book do you guys recommend from a person who only voluntarily read 1 series as of now?
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*notes that Zodiac has joined the salivation army*
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What Book do you guys recommend from a person who only voluntarily read 1 series as of now?
Which one from the Diskworld series? Guards, Guards or Mort, probably. Mort was the first one where he really hit his stride in the series. Although if you're a fantasy geek and like playing spot-the-reference, the Colour of Magic and the Light Fantastic have a lot going for them. Weird Sisters is a good place to jump in as well.
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i started with Guards Guards, Carrot is the best ^^ i read the hole Guard Series in ... Two weeks or something like this.
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What Book do you guys recommend from a person who only voluntarily read 1 series as of now?
What genres are you into? I know some very good sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate history series, maybe a few good thrillers. There are some evocative (that's the best description I could come up with) urban fantasy series I've read - I wouldn't say they're good, but if you liked movies like Underworld, you may enjoy them.
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Anyone know a game called Sim School, been trying to find it but having no luck. I heard it was like the slavemaker game an wanted to give it a try.
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What Book do you guys recommend from a person who only voluntarily read 1 series as of now?
If you like fantasy and humor try M.Y.T.H series from Robert Asprin, or for sci-fi humor try Phule's Company series from the same author. Although it's not that sci-fi-ish, it's set in the future, but future is not the main point of it.
If you're more for hardcore sci-fi try something from Larry Niven, he has a large number of books set in his universe called "Known Space", start with Ringworlds series.
For starters you may read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (http://www.larryniven.org/stories/Man_of_Steel_Woman_of_Kleenex.shtml) from Larry Niven, it's also not sci-fi-ish, it's a short discussion on how hard would it be for Superman to mate :) .
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Anyone know a game called Sim School, been trying to find it but having no luck. I heard it was like the slavemaker game an wanted to give it a try.
There's Hentai High School, which was discussed a few pages back, if that's what you mean.
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I have hentai high school, this is a different game.
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Anyone know a game called Sim School, been trying to find it but having no luck. I heard it was like the slavemaker game an wanted to give it a try.
I think this is the one you're looking for:
http://www.easy-share.com/1906875727/sexed.swf
If memory serves it's a neat game but might not be entirely complete.
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SexEd isn't as incomplete as it is not balanced. It's actually EXTREMELY easy and needs some tweaks to the game play to make it worthwhile. The guy who built it was working on a revamped version, but it ended up getting corrupted and he decided to stop, which is a shame. I loved the concept of that game.
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That said, there was another game: Master.
http://www.papurukoneko.com/master/
I don't think it's been worked on since May, and it was a bit buggy, but it was functional. Might be what you're looking for.
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Thanks guys sexed one is the game I heard about but the guy called it sim school. What program do I need to open a swf, I seem to be missing it.
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Just drop it into your internet browser, it's flash file, it should open it. If not google for some flash player.
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Thanks Solo.
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http://www.irfanview.com/
It'll do flash and regular images. Great for viewing just about anything.
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All's quiet in the forums today...what's everyone up to?
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Rewriting every gold transaction in the game, at the moment. And fiddling with Training Quest 2 in between times.
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Part burn out, part school work, part the fucking cold where I'm at.
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Would anyone have a problem with me setting up a thread to talk about the other games, HentaiHighschool and the like?
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Go ahead, I would not mind.
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Whazzt? Someone asking about me? I'm staying low, biding my time, just waiting for the chance to strike... 8)
@Nu: Go ahead. Otherwise, feel free to hijack the OT thread. That's what it's here for.
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I meant starting a seperate thread, hijacking an OT thread is impossible.
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I meant starting a seperate thread, hijacking an OT thread is impossible.
Not at all. You just break into the cockpit, point a gun at the pilot, and say "Fly dese tread to Coo-ba!"
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Then you'd be promptly told "we are going to Cuba you nitwit."
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Damn. Damn! No one ever tells me these things.
So... where are you not going?
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Lots of places! Just not any place you name. Sorry.
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As long as it warm there I don't care where we go.
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I'm going to party at the Rim of Hell...wanna come?
*throws up his metal horns and rocks out to D.A.D*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wY5mqB8dU4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wY5mqB8dU4)
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Lots of places! Just not any place you name. Sorry.
Then fly this thread to any place I name!
[edit]
You know, the trouble with game development is that you never seem to play the damn game for more than 15 seconds at a time. Then it's "oops, there's a bug" and back off to the editor again...
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I'm posting to be one ahead of zodiac. Just thought y'all should know... I'm certain he will also take the evil, evil path Doc did and be permanently above me in the count from here on out. At the very least, though, I can once again take a petty pride in being the greater poster one last time. [sigh]... some day, I will make a glorious attempt to recoup my losses. I shall post once in every thread, and thrice in the OT thread, and not only will my posts be long-winded, but they shall be apt, witty, and include at least one of the following: an attachment, a web link, a smiley, or a reference to Uzbekistan. This shall happen.
Maybe.
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Just for the sake of pettiness, I'm now winning >;o)~ ppppppbbbbbbttttt!
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I'm certain he will also take the evil, evil path Doc did and be permanently above me in the count from here on out. At the very least, though, I can once again take a petty pride in being the greater poster one last time.
Nice to see you back. I was starting to get worried :)
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I was around. Just unmotivated, and with little to say. I mean, from a playtesting point of view, the last couple weeks have basically just been spinning the wheels while waiting for the next major update. No offense - I realize that a lot of behind-the-scenes upgrading has been done (especially in .3), but the very definition of 'behind-the-scenes' implies that I don't get anything new and neat to dick around with. Talking about what *might* get done is nice, but at some point there has to be some implementation and proof instead of a bunch of wankers making assumptions.
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Yeah, I know. No one thought the next major was going to take so long.
I'm currently working on some fixes that will be visible for the next release. All this financial stuff has be digging into just about every corner of the game. There may be one or two surprises in store. :)
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Meh. Delays happen; no one's ever happy about it, but most people are understanding so long as there is some small sign of progress.
@z: neener-neener! Nobody likes you because you have fewer posts. Even people in Uzbekistan are laughing at you, twice, and three times on alternating Fridays and the third Monday of the month. Eat it!
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letmein, do you like apples?
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Well I have a higher post count then you again! So how do you like them apples? >;o)
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Say whatever you want, but there's a consideration you're failing to make: the relative use of the posts. My posts are invariably essential to the argument, whereas you just go willy-nilly posting everywhere in a weak attempt to reinflate your self-worth. :-\
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Posting willy-nilly to reinflate my self worth? Who is the one who measures his self worth by post count around here?
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I have no idea what you're talking about. Wild craziness.
In other off-topic news, it's snowing a shit-ton in Wisconsin right now. The university just said it would be closed tomorrow, and that NEVER happens, EVER. We're supposed to get something more than a foot over twelve hours.
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We're gonna have weather diarrhea throughout the day here in eastern Massachusetts - snow, rain, snow, rain. It'll be a mess, but at least I won't have a foot of snow to shovel >;o)~
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Count yourself lucky. Out here in central Mass we always seem to get a couple inches more'n you easterners. ;)
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I live in the limbo zone - far enough east that I get some of the ocean-warming effect, but not enough to turn all the snow into rain. It makes weather forecasting a royal bitch here. Worcester will get 12" and Boston will get rain. What the crap can I expect then?
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getting 12" reminds me of a lame joke i once heard
"she said gimme 10" and make it hurt. So i fucked her twice and smacked her in the mouth."
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you are lucky... in germany is no Snow ...
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I live in the limbo zone - far enough east that I get some of the ocean-warming effect, but not enough to turn all the snow into rain. It makes weather forecasting a royal bitch here. Worcester will get 12" and Boston will get rain. What the crap can I expect then?
frogs and frog eggs that got swept up by the storm.
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Well, it turned out to be slush. 6 inches of slush. Now if only I had a giant syrup dispenser, I could siphon the crap off my driveway and start a business selling Slushies.
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if you like dirty slushies (and i dont mean booze)
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A Dirty Slushy....what's that? A cross between a Cleavland Steamer and the Hershey Squirts?
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"Dirty" is sometime used (at lest were I live) to say it has booze in it >.>
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I just finished playing through Kanon (now that there is finally an English patch for it). This one is a fantastic game if you actually like a good story in your hentai games.
Personally, I think Kanon would have been better without the sex scenes (they have a rather kludgy, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute feel to them), but it wouldn't be much of a hentai game if you take them out.
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Well frak me, I think I just nuked my desktop >.<
I've been trying to get Two Worlds to run without crashing every 2-10 minutes (which involved much uninstallation, cleaning, and reinstallation of drivers among other things) and now Windows won't boot at all, not even in safe mode. Dodgammit!
Well, at least I got to see some new BSoD's I'd never seen before.
Time to go backup everything I care about via the command console in the installation environment. This is gonna suck worse than being forced to watch Titanic.
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Ouch, how big is the hard drive.
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Nice, zodiac.
You know, if that were ever to happen to me, I think I'd just get an entirely new computer... really, all I need is the proper excuse. I'd do it now, but I'd feel kinda bad - my parents spent a lot of money getting me a shiny laptop, and you know, it *was* a really nice laptop. Two years ago, and if you want a laptop, which I wasn't certain about.. The thing never properly ran the games I wanted it to, and I can't do anything to update the hardware.
And of course, there's the small problem that I'm jobless and in college, and spending money is kinda a bad idea under those conditions.
EDIT: and to you programmer types, don't think I haven't noticed the 'merging' thread in the devo forum. Work faster, or face my [mostly ineffective] wrath...
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This is when I tend to reach for the Linux live CD and boot from that. You can mount the filesystem and save your files with a proper file manager. If you use something like DamnSmallLinux, it'll even run from a ramdisc, so you can use the CD drive for backups
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Letmein I'm working as fast as I can, with out going insane. Also what games do you want to run. I spent 500 dollars us on a laptop that can run oblivion at a decent frame rate after I tweaked the settings file and downloaded some performance boosting mods.
I need to get a live usb of ubuntu or damn small linux for that purpose.
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Why is it never the carrot and always the big stick? :)
If you want a USB boot, go for DSL. Ubuntu is a bit heavyweight for a USB drive. Although with the size of usb sticks these days, that's probably not as much a problem as it used to be
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Eh, I can get a 2 GB for 12 dollars and that is not the cheapest price out there, so ubuntu is fine for live usb these days.
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It's the big stick because through the magic of the Internet, people can give random threats about anything and everything. It's much harder to give random incentives, because with the exception of praise (which by definition happens after the fact) incentives require something concrete, i.e. some sort of commitment and/or physical contact. Who wants to make commitments, or - gasp! - actually try to go somewhere to meet somebody and give them a pat on the back? Nope. Thus, random and incessant threats, cajoling, ridicule, rantings, ravings, insults and various other negativities. It's just easier that way.
And yeah, I had quite a few games running just fine at one point. Oblivion, Mass Effect, Civilization IV, Half-Life 2, etc. The problem is, these all used to work properly. I came to the conclusion my laptop was actually too powerful, and the fucker overheats. The idiots that made it didn't upgrade the fan when slamming in a powerful (and, even worse, integrated) graphics card, sound card, processor et al. The small one worked OK for about two months, until things started to get a little dusty (which, due to another awesome facet of the design, you cannot get at to clean out) and old it basically didn't' work at all. I already replaced the entire melted-down motherboard under warranty at the year marker. And, sure enough, the computer worked fine again for a while, but I've put more than a year on the new board and it shows. I tried to be a little nicer on this one, but at this point I have trouble just playing music for longer than six hours.
EDIT: and USB is definately the way to go. At this point, I'm pretty sure they're actually cheaper than an equivalent amount of CD space.
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It's the big stick because through the magic of the Internet, people can give random threats about anything and everything.
Actually, that was pretty much a rhetorical question :)
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Dvd and Cd are still cheaper than usb per GB of storage. What I am waiting for to drop in price are solid state hard drives especially for laptops. Once they get to a reasonable price, say goodbye to load times for most games.
I understand the heat issue. the trick for my laptop is to put a small book underneath the back edge of the laptop and have it on the box it came with when working on my bed. It does not get too hot that way. I do need to clean the dust out though.
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If I only had a job, the first thing I would do is replace my aging desktop. I originally built it 5 years ago (well, 2 weeks shy of 5 years - its b-day is Jan 5), and since have upgraded or RMA'd every piece of the original hardware except for a pair of WD Raptors in RAID 0 (not so impressive when compared with today's high end SSD's, but it kicked ass in its day). It's like an old Olympiad who has undergone multiple joint replacement surgeries.
[edit]
Wow, I'm on a roll today. I just deleted the primary partition of a storage drive during the installation when I meant to delete the primary partition on the RAID array. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that TestDisk does as it promises and allows me to undelete the partition.
[edit 2]
Holy shit, it worked. All my data is intact. Now if only I can stop being a complete dumbass...
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http://www.sharkoon.com/html/produkte/luefter/coolbook_360/index_en.html (http://www.sharkoon.com/html/produkte/luefter/coolbook_360/index_en.html)
When I use it it stays cool enough for main fan to remain under mid speed, so it's tolerable. I've even seen same coolers under names of different manufacturers (read noname chinese). But when it comes to gaming nothing beats desktop (well, relatively, my PCs are kinda large towers, so they're on the floor :) ). I prefer to assemble them myself, since I overclock my CPUs buying name PCs is kinda out, and I like to choose parts myself :) .
Well, this is kinda gray area, but there's live XP cd's. I don't know if someone here heard of Hiren's Boot CD, latest version have live XP on them. It even works :) , so those that are squeamish of linux can try with that and get to regular explorer and other stuff. Plus Hiren's Boot CD has crapload of other useful stuff, drive imaging, partitioning, hdd testing, memory testing...
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Yeah, "laptop" and "gaming" are two words that don't go together. This laptop I bought a few years back thinking I could game on it when away from my desktop - and I could, right up until the point where the new games needed newer drivers than the ones Quanta approved for the GeForce 6600GT. It *might* work again now that I'm running the Windows 7 beta on it (with updated drivers), but the machine is so slow that there is little point in trying.
The next time I buy a laptop, I'm definitely going to skip on the discrete graphics options, unless laptop design advances sufficiently to allow me to choose my own components, rather than a limited set approved by a whitebox OEM.
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Ah yes, drivers for graphics card, I think that dell made 3 (three) for that GF4200go in that 5 years I had it. Of course, they were all released during the first year. Luckily I found http://www.laptopvideo2go.com where there were modded drivers that could be installed on mobile graphics cards. And again, of course that any combination worked. I found only few, and they were also rather dated.
But now it's different, at least for nVidia cards but I suppose same is with ATI mobile cards. My current Acer has GF 9600m GT and drivers can be downloaded from nVidia's site, just like drivers for normal ones. I'm really glad they abandoned that "contact your notebook manufacturer" crap...
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The laptop I use which uses an ATI chip set is the same, use the drivers from their site.
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OEM's used to be able to change all kinds of shit in the discrete graphics cards installed in laptops, much of which was controlled through the driver. Often times, they would disable features or reduce clock rates to cut down on heat and power. Using the drivers from Ati or Nvidia could increase the heat generated by the card and overwhelm the cooling system, causing damage to the laptop. Nowadays, I think Ati and Nvidia exert more control over what the OEM's are allowed to do, so the generic drivers will work.
[edit]
Now if I just hook up this Arc reactor to the flux capacitor, and BZZZZZZZZZZT!
It's ALIVE! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Now lets see if I can play Two Worlds without crashing...
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mh... Is there a possibility a converter for the old girl files to the new girlx files get? Thus, without the custom 1.39 GB Girls the game's fast dull ....
(Google translate ftw... ^^ its too late to thing for my self....)
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Solo's app can do what you want
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Open the old .girls files and then save them. It defaults to saving in the new format, so you don't have to do anything special to make it happen.
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So, I'm back to college. Any great developments since I've been otherwise distracted?
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So, I'm back to college. Any great developments since I've been otherwise distracted?
Yes! But we're still waiting for it.
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@Mehzerz thats probebly one of the best answers Ive seen in my whole life
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Woo-hoo! Obamacare is dead! Scott Brown (R) wins the special election for Kennedy's Senate seat here in Massachusetts!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34923900/ns/politics-capitol_hill/
I'm off to go celebrate.
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Really? I didn't think he'd make the cut, but then again, Coakley was pretty much the worst candidate ever. Let's hope Brown can get seated quickly...
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Health care reform died with kennedy. I wanted that public option damn it.
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The problem with the public "option" is that it isn't really an option at all. On the face of it, it is cheaper (due to subsidy, which comes out of your taxes, making it a wash for middle-class Americans), though with all government run programs, the quality of service (in this case, quality of care) will degrade over time as the willingness of Congress to subsidize at a high enough level to maintain affordable costs to consumers at a given quality of care. Rather than sacrifice by increasing costs to consumers, they cut the quality of care. In addition, if the cost to consumers is sufficiently below market rate, people will flock to the public option, putting private sector health care out of business. Then, when quality of care degrades, consumers are stuck with the public "option."
The government should never compete with the private sector. It should either socialize the health care system all the way or not at all. Government competing with the private sector has never ended well for anyone (see the Tennessee Valley Authority as a prime example), except the politicians and bureaucrats.
I'm all for reforming our health care system: I think health insurance is a scam, and government mandated health insurance (such as we have here in Massachusetts) is an even worse scam. In general, I think most politicians wouldn't know which hole to shit out of if they didn't have someone holding their hands through the process. Naturally, I find it highly unlikely that they are capable of reforming the health care system in any positive way, thus I must oppose their efforts at any reform, and especially at any attempt to socialize the system.
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So, you think the current system sucks but you oppose any attempt to fix it? That just confuses me.
I'm aware that the reform is sub-optimal, but at this point it can't be any worse than what we already have and I just want the government to pass the fucking thing so we can get on to other orders of business.
Then again, I'm from New York state where dysfunctional gridlock is par for the course.
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The only reason I wanted a public option was to kill the current health insurrance bussiness and get us to a full govt. run health insurance system. The thing is that the govt. has shown that it can run a health insurance system fairly well see medicare. Yes it has a few issues. Mainly the strain of all the baby boombers and the rising cost of medication.
The issue with the tennesse valley project was an issue the special interest behind the creation of the project. Kind of like what is happing with the health insurance reform bill.
I want to make the distinction clear between health care and health insurance. Health care is what you get when you go the doctor. Health insurance pays for this care.
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So, you think the current system sucks but you oppose any attempt to fix it? That just confuses me.
I'm aware that the reform is sub-optimal, but at this point it can't be any worse than what we already have and I just want the government to pass the fucking thing so we can get on to other orders of business.
Allow me to clarify then: I hate the current system, and I think the government's reform attempt will be even worse.
The only reason I wanted a public option was to kill the current health insurrance bussiness and get us to a full govt. run health insurance system. The thing is that the govt. has shown that it can run a health insurance system fairly well see medicare. Yes it has a few issues. Mainly the strain of all the baby boombers and the rising cost of medication.
If you look at the numbers behind things, you will find that Medicare/Medicaid are responsible for roughly 50% of the cost increases in health care over the past 20 years. That doesn't sound like competent management to me.
The issue with the tennesse valley project was an issue the special interest behind the creation of the project. Kind of like what is happing with the health insurance reform bill.
The special interest behind the project was FDR's desire to turn the electric utilities industry into a government run business, disguising his attempt by claiming the power industry wasn't expanding fast enough in the South so the government needed to step in. The Forgotten Man is an excellent history of the era, covering Hoover's and FDR's blunders during the depression - blunders that are hailed today as successes, and are being repeated before our eyes, with the same disastrous consequences.
I want to make the distinction clear between health care and health insurance. Health care is what you get when you go the doctor. Health insurance pays for this care.
In a single payer system, ultimately, the government will get to call all the shots. It becomes nearly irrelevant that the health care system is private if all costs are paid by the government.
One of the biggest problems in the health care system today is the disconnect between health care costs to consumers and the total cost of care. When on insurance plans, health care costs are smoothed out over time, so the perception is that payment for health care is constant regardless of the care received. Thus consumers have no particular reason to practice preventative medicine, which is a small fraction of the cost of treatment after the fact. Switching to a single payer system will only exacerbate the problem.
If given absolute dictatorial powers today, I would abolish the health insurance industry and introduce health savings plans, with tax incentives to pay into the plans and a promotional campaign to advocate for preventative medicine and health conscious living.
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Allow me to clarify then: I hate the current system, and I think the government's reform attempt will be even worse.
I buy that. Sad, but true.
My personal view is that governments suck at virtually everything. They're inefficient, wasteful, full of glory-hounds and corrupt bastards, slow, and incompetent. Thus, they should be used sparingly, and for things you can afford to suck at/be very wasteful at. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but most of those revert back to crap with time.
Now, some people would claim that democratic government is better than the rest at doing stuff. To me, it's the opposite; what idiot ever claimed that letting the people decide things was a good idea? The people that become bureaucrats in such a system are even worse glory-hounds, attuned to being popular, and competence is left at the wayside in exchange for dubiously useful charisma (example: Obama). Democracies are even slower, even more wasteful, and even more incompetent. Thus, these governments trend to the "throw lots and lots of someone else's money at the problem" method of problem solving, which has many obvious faults - but usually manages to get the job done, even if it destroys the country doing it (somewhat less radical example: the space program, which involved a terrifying amount of S.E's $ for, in the end, very little practical results).
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Now, some people would claim that democratic government is better than the rest at doing stuff. To me, it's the opposite; what idiot ever claimed that letting the people decide things was a good idea? The people that become bureaucrats in such a system are even worse glory-hounds, attuned to being popular, and competence is left at the wayside in exchange for dubiously useful charisma (example: Obama). Democracies are even slower, even more wasteful, and even more incompetent. Thus, these governments trend to the "throw lots and lots of someone else's money at the problem" method of problem solving, which has many obvious faults - but usually manages to get the job done, even if it destroys the country doing it (somewhat less radical example: the space program, which involved a terrifying amount of S.E's $ for, in the end, very little practical results).
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Democracies aren't supposed to be efficient, they're supposed to be less prone to corruption and abuse than dictatorships. Which are really the only two options, either you have elected officials/the people or you have one guy with a divine and/or military mandate making the decisions.
Also the space program is science. You do science for it's own sake and you see were it takes you. If we only did science when the outcome was known and practical we wouldn't have penicillin or x-rays or a host of other things.
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Politikal Discuss SUX! it makes best friends to worst Enemy... ^^''
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I wouldn't say that space program had very little practical results. Directly, yes, moon rocks, while interesting from geological point of view, aren't all that useful. But a lot of things we now take for granted came from research that was done for space program.
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Zodiac what numbers, because I don't believe that 50% of the increase is due to medicare. Our over use of medical services, paper work,lake of preventive care and such. As for everything else I do agree pretty much, except for the comment on the space program. They are making gains, just nothing that the public sees as gains. Lets put it this way modern communications would not be possible without the space program and putting all those comm satellites into orbit, and making sure that they can work for a long time.
Once I figure out how zodiac or whoever came up with the 50% it will let it go.
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A large amount of items were developed by nasa. Probably the most obvious would be foam matresses. The material used there was originally developed for nasa. Also, there are a significant number of experiments that require low gravity conditions. Also, if you don't like nasa, how about we get rid of all of our satilites and thus shut down all communication between the Americas and the rest of the world. Not to mention, most tv would go away. Also:
Earth won't last forever. Period. End of statement.
At the rate things are going, it may become impossible to reach space and thus advance our ability to go there and go to other planets within the next century as the world's oil supplies run dry. Simply put, the space program is do or die. Once we lose the ability to go to other worlds or to asteroids in order to keep parasitically drawing on resources, we'll collapse back into a pre-industrial revolution society.
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There's something that always bothers me about the "governments always suck" line of debate:
The argument generally goes that government is is prone to corruption, which means that well meaning legislation inevitably gets perverted so that ends up channelling public funds into corporate accounts without any benefit to the taxpayer.
But then, since (we are told) this is an inevitable flaw of government, the proposed solution is inevitably to leave whatever the problem may be to the corporate sector who just a paragraph ago were hell-bent on corrupting the government in the first place.
That seems odd to me. If it was the police force that was inefficient or corrupt, you would hardly propose to give police powers to criminals. Yet it appears to me that this is exactly the strategy that free market libertarians propose time after time.
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@DocClox:
Agreed. No reason to believe a corporate-run bureaucracy would be any better than a government-run one.
[/one liner]
ETA: Shit, while I'm posting, may as well ask this: anyone know of a good, free-to-upload uploading site where I don't need to sign up? Made a few girls, and I'd like to share them, but I don't have any accounts with any filesharing sites, nor money to join one.
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Oh, I'm not a fan of the corporate sector either. I'm not saying there's an easy solution. In any case, I'm not going to get caught up in an argument on any of this; I was simply tossing in my two cents. A way to burn time while I wait for our programming buddies to get to the point where I can start bug-testing.
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Alpa : Try Mediafire, its a good site with no time wait for free user, the most in here use it ^^
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You do have to sign up for a mediafire account, but they have a free account up to a certain limit of space.
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I think most filehosting sites have free account. Only premium one (one that gives you unlimited, or less limited, DL is what you pay for).
Funny thing about corporations, yesterday I had similar chat with my friend. What I concluded was that since corporations "came to power" there wasn't any real progress technology wise. Everything we have now is just another flavor of same old story. Power and engines would be most obvious examples. There was steam engine, then came internal combustion engine. Corporations came to power while internal combustion engine was in use, and that was it. Nothing really new arrived.
Maybe someone will say "what about electric motors", well, they're not exactly free of "old ties". When we'll be able to produce electricity for all our needs without fossil fuels then yes, but until that... If I remember correctly electrical cars are almost like regular cars in the sense of pollution. Sure, there's no smog, gas or smoke behind them. But it's simply elsewhere, that electricity that powers them comes from power plants that also pollute.
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See, now *that*, to me, is a very hard position to defend. I don't have the time ATM to name specifics, but perhaps someone else will until I can get around to it? ;)
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As an aside to the off-topic thread (Going off-topic in an off-topic thread? Whodathunkit?), mediafire was being a bit of an asswipe, but I managed to rein in its horseshit, and have successfully (I think) uploaded my pack. Any problems, let me know (as opposed to Steve. He won't know *what* to do). Oh, file is in the obviously-named thread in the User Mods section. Have fun :)
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Well, I need to raise my postcount :) .
But, not really, most technological advances were actually evolution of "old" technology. Not exactly a revolutions.
Like computers. What we have now is not something revolutionary when compared to those 20, even 30 years ago. It's just evolution of old designs. They reduced size of transistors, increased frequency and now, when we're nearing frequency limit comes new evolution thing, more CPU cores on the same die. But there's also limit to that. Currently there are problems when there's more than about 16 cores. Performance actually starts to drop. Too much time is spent to divide work between the cores so they spend more time waiting for work then actually doing it.
Now we're starting to hear about quantum computing. They're starting to see that current technology can't be milked forever so they're starting to look for new money cow. Why invest in something new if there's money in what we have? That doesn't create profit...
If it would have been less about profit and more about progress maybe Space Odyssey 2001 wouldn't have been that far off.
In case of computers this is not such a big deal (few years more until the rise of terminators :) ), but some other things could have far grimmer consequences, like pollution from need (greed) for power and our dependency on fossil fuels.
P.S.
I consider '70.-'80. the time corporations "came to power".
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The main issue is that technological progress is a slow process. 30-40 years is a short time span in tech progress. It took how long to develop steel cheaply. The main driving force for tech progress is the state of science, how can I do x faster/more accuratly/better/cheaper/safer and the brilliant mind that can figure it all out.
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See, now *that*, to me, is a very hard position to defend. I don't have the time ATM to name specifics, but perhaps someone else will until I can get around to it? ;)
Are you referring to the argument that electric cars don't help with pollution? I have argued the point before that they may or may not reduce pollution, depending on a number of factors:
- Most power comes from polluting fossil fuels, so the generation of electricity to power the cars will increase the pollution generated by power plants.
- Compare energy efficiencies: if Ec > Ep * Et * Es * Ed, where:
- Ec = efficiency of combustion engine
- Ep = efficiency of power plants
- Et = efficiency power transmission network
- Es = efficiency of battery storage
- Ed = efficiency of electric engine
then internal combustion engines are more energy efficient than electric cars, if not then electric cars are more energy efficient. - Compare pollution efficiency: if Pc * Ec > Pp * Ee, where:
- Pc = pollution per unit of fuel in a combustion engine
- Pp = pollution per unit of fuel in a power plant
- Ee = energy efficiency of electric cars (right-hand side of the previous equation)
then electric cars contribute less pollution in operation than cars powered by internal combustion engines.
The answers to these equations will change based on the power plant chosen, fuel types, car model, geographic region, etc, so calculating which is more efficient is a nightmare. If we could get our hands on some reliable data on the average values for the variables, then we could make a general statement about relative efficiency and pollution reduction.
Electric cars face a huge obstacle in deployment, though, which goes beyond any cost, efficiency, and pollution disadvantages which may or may not exist. The power infrastructure of the United States is in deplorable condition; any significant increase in power draw in the short- to medium-term (before the system can be overhauled, presuming someone is willing to pay to do it) will overload the capacity of the network, causing brownouts and possibly damaging the infrastructure itself.
Zodiac what numbers, because I don't believe that 50% of the increaseis due to medicare. Our over use of medical services, paper work,lakeof preventive care and such. As for everything else I do agree prettymuch, except for the comment on the space program. They are makinggains, just nothing that the public sees as gains. Lets put it thisway modern communications would not be possible without the spaceprogram and putting all those comm satellites into orbit, and makingsure that they can work for a long time.
Once I figure out how zodiac or whoever came up with the 50% it will let it go.
I don't recall the source off the top of my head; it was one of several nuggets I culled from peer-reviewed economic journals while writing a thesis on the efficacy of government intervention in the economy. The supporting argument was based on fixed payments to health care providers who accepted Medicare/Medicaid (which was often a condition of receiving research grants and other desirable funding from the Federal government) for services which cost the providers more than the fees they received. The overages were then passed on to the private sector by increasing pricing to insurance companies and the uninsured. This caused insurance rates to rise in turn. Inflation in the medical industry outpaced the rate at which Medicare payments increased (which, IIRC, were tied to a more general inflation index), resulting in the overages increasing at a rate which exceeded the inflation rate of the industry as a whole, which meant inflation of insurance costs also outpaced inflation in the medical industry, and in turn the general inflation rate.
Don't quote me on that, though, as I am working strictly from memory here and may very well have some of the details wrong. One rather staggering piece of information comes from the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated the cost of Medicare/Medicaid for the baby boomer generation would be approximately $57 Trillion. As a point of reference, the capital assets of the United States (our productive facilities, factories, businesses, houses, etc) were valued at about $40 Trillion (at the time the estimate was made - circa 2007, as I recall). We couldn't mortgage the whole country to pay that bill. Thankfully, our intellectual capital and labor assets are valued considerably higher, so we still have the option of selling our citizens as slaves to other countries taxing the fuck out of everyone, at punitive rates, to pay for it. Now some people want the government to involve itself even more in health care? That's just plain nuts.
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The main issue is that technological progress is a slow process. 30-40 years is a short time span in tech progress. It took how long to develop steel cheaply. The main driving force for tech progress is the state of science, how can I do x faster/more accuratly/better/cheaper/safer and the brilliant mind that can figure it all out.
You mean Dexter's Laboratory isn't a documentary? Well, I never... :)
I don't kinda consider technological progress like a linear thing. Advancing one field can help some other field to make a breakthrough. And just look at first 50-60 years of 20th century. A lot of stuff we have now has been invented in that period. Since then it's mostly leeching on those inventions.
My point was, if there weren't for corporations whose primary purpose in existence is to gather money we would probably be better off.
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Changing the subject completely, can I just say that DRAGON AGE SUCKS big time? I've just fought through to final boss fight, before giving up in disgust. Every chance they get (and I'm talking secons here) my mages switch to melee weapons and try and tank the dragon. I've checked the tactics slots and there is no "impersonate Conan the Barbarian" option there to remove, so I can only assume it's either a bug, or just plain bad design.
Furthermore:
- When I click on a character to give them orders, very often the click is ignored.
- When I do give succeed in getting their attention, orders are sometimes ignored anyway.
- The inventory system is a source of constant frustration. It fills up quickly, it takes a lot of time to get back to a shop, and you wind up having to destroy perfectly good items to make room for better ones.
- You can't drop anything. There are chests and containers, but you can't put stuff in, only take it out.
- The relentless "buy this add-on to make the game playable" nagging. There's a pillock standing in the camp with a big "!" over his head who basically says "pay for the DLC and I'll tell you about a quest". To add insult to injury, the quest in question is the one that gives you a party storage area.
- The game works hard to set up fights that you need to think tactically in order to win, and then for boss fights it pulls in your whole party and drops them in front of the bad guy in the stupidest formation possible.
- Sometime it won't let you hurt the bad guys until they've seen you.
- Enemies can often shoot you through the corner of walls, but you can't cast a fireball over a low balcony railing
- ... And if you try your mage will run through ranks of enemy grunts until he's nose-to-node with Ye Olde Damage Machine before fireballing his own feet.
- On the overland map you have a camp that you can only access at the end of a journey
- And the journeys themselves are like hyperspace jumps. Once you start, you're locked in and have to go there, even if the journey is interrupted halfway.
- On the tactical scale the areas are tiny and filled with artificial barriers to make walking around seem more challenging. (I know it's standard practice for such these games, but DA:O takes it beyond the point of sanity. In the city there's a puddle that you can't walk through, ffs! You have to go around.
- Too many cutscenes and too much talky-talky. Often mumbled and subtitles are off by default.
I swear, there never was a game that annoyed me this much that I played for this long. The Witcher came close (for many of the same reasons) but then the Witcher was fun, which never quite happened in DA:O. I've played Balder's Gate, I've played Neverwinter Nights, I played Mass Effect. None of them infuriated me one tenth as much as this turkey.
Sorry. I just needed to rant a bit.
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Never played dragon age and probably never will. The over abundance of dlc pisses me off.
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I've tried DA and I was not impressed. I played it only for a few hours, beginning and until you cross the bridge after The Big Battle (TM).
To me the game was completely cliche. First time you see a character you know what he'll turn out to be, well, maybe not every time, but two of them that looked like weasels to me turned out to be weasels. Plus generic story and the fact your head is wanted from the start made me do alt+f4 and uninstall. I would prefer some freedom (or at least illusion of freedom), like in Baldur's Gate. In short, DA looks forced to me.
Although I never finished Baldur's Gate, I still have saves, but problem is that I would stray away on some my quests and ignore main plot line. So I get bored of it and leave it. Then year-two later I continue where I stopped :) . But at least I finished Icewind Dale and ID: Heart of Winter :) .
I also tried NWN long time ago, but it was somewhat like DA is to me today, more of the same. Mass Effect was fun to me. More or less good mix of RPG and action, and what's best, it's not in medieval setting, but space (finaly!!). In next few days ME2 will come out, although I'm not sure if it'll be out on both PC na XBox360, or just X360 with PC version following in next few months.
DLCs are bugging me too. Why do they expect me to pay for the game, and then next day again pay for some additional stuff to make my game complete...
I usually play MMOs, mostly World of Warcraft. It's not the best and it has it's share of issues, but at least it has open world and it's minimally instanced. I hoped to switch to Star Trek Online, but after I tried beta I'm not so sure. The game is too monotonous. Sure every MMO comes down to basic stuff, go there, kill them, come back. But in WoW at least scenery changes, in STO surroundings are also monotonous (well, it is space...). But the the thing that irks me the most is that it's 95% of the time fighting. I expected more from something with Star Trek in its name, more of exploration. With things as they are ATM I fired more photon torpedoes and phasors from lvl1 to lvl2 then they fired in whole season of The Next Generation :P . Here's what I recorded few days ago, this is science class vessel. Funny thing, but it can stand the most fire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niT0vVOGn6g (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niT0vVOGn6g)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxVaNrw47A (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxVaNrw47A)
Beside MMOs, two other games I played recently were Borderlands, it's kinda first person shooter Diablo, pretty fun, too bad multiplayer is made in substandard way on PC and Fallout 3. Fallout 3 has same problem like Baldur's Gate, I overturned every rock on the map exploring and doing side quests except the main one :) , which I still haven't done :) . And there are some fun mods for it, try searching for animated prostitution mod and playthings mod :) .
Ouch, this turned out to be wall of text.
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haha, did you know they're releasing a full expansion for DA already? Not even six months after it hit the shelves they're asking people to pony up more cash without even having fixed some serious technical issues and bugs. I agree the whole thing was just disappointing. I've played through Baldur's Gate 2 about 6-7 times now. The only time it has left my computer's drive is when I built a new system. After finishing DA once, I'm just about ready to uninstall it. There just isn't any compelling reason to play through it again. The story is meh, the only likable characters are Allistar and Sten (all of the party banter involving him is awesome), and the combat quickly becomes a joke once you get certain mage spells.
And I agree the in-game DLC salesman is the most obnoxious thing I've seen in a game so far. What happened to you Bioware? You used to be cool. Oh, right; you sold your souls to EA. I think I'll pass on Mass Effect 2 if this is what the current Bioware team considers to be as good as Baldur's Gate was.
Fallout 3 has same problem like Baldur's Gate, I overturned every rockon the map exploring and doing side quests except the main one
Now, I don't really see that as a 'problem'. That's the way a cRPG is supposed to be. You don't have to do the main quest until you're damn well good and ready. You're supposed to have the freedom to tell the BBEG to fuck off - there could be more loot in that strange building and you're not going anywhere until you've checked it out.
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Recently I've been spending way too much time play rouge-likes.
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Roguelikes are fantastic games to play at
work home. They can be played for short play sessions, and games don't last that long as it's only a matter of time before the game decides it's time to screw you over.
Heard about Star Trek online sucking. It's too bad really, but I didn't have high hopes when I heard Cryptic was involved.
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I have yet to beat one with out resorting to wizard mode that was not made for the ds. :D
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You mean Dexter's Laboratory isn't a documentary? Well, I never... :)
I don't kinda consider technological progress like a linear thing. Advancing one field can help some other field to make a breakthrough. And just look at first 50-60 years of 20th century. A lot of stuff we have now has been invented in that period. Since then it's mostly leeching on those inventions.
My point was, if there weren't for corporations whose primary purpose in existence is to gather money we would probably be better off.
Alright... back to srgue discuss the issue!
First off, you're completely ignoring software in your base claim. Most notably, the Internet - and all the neat innovations that have come with it. Wikipedia, Google Earth, browser searching, file sharing... and on and on.
Aside from that, I generally agree that there have been very few revolutionary inventions in the last, oh, 25 years or so. However, there are some caveats there. You have to determine what you mean by a, as you termed it, "breakthrough". If you replace the old-style Walkmans with an iPod Touch, have you made a breakthrough? Most people would say no, BUT if you had made that change over the space of three months instead of three decades, what would you say then? Constant innovation can, in the long run, serve the same purpose as sudden invention.
I also have to object to your arbitrary time for the "rise of corporations". Take a look at the Gilded Age, and tell me that corporations weren't more influential then than now.
I'm excited about ME2. Sad, that Bioware seems to have dropped the ball on DA - but I'm not too concerned for the next Mass Effect, since it's substantially the same team of people as ME1.
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Changing the subject completely, can I just say that DRAGON AGE SUCKS big time? I've just fought through to final boss fight, before giving up in disgust. Every chance they get (and I'm talking secons here) my mages switch to melee weapons and try and tank the dragon. I've checked the tactics slots and there is no "impersonate Conan the Barbarian" option there to remove, so I can only assume it's either a bug, or just plain bad design. Unless you're constantly having your mage sit beside the enemy and then run out of mana, I don't see why they would change from their staff to melee damage. I never had this problem.
Furthermore:
- When I click on a character to give them orders, very often the click is ignored. Try pausing before you switch between characters or click on their portrait
- When I do give succeed in getting their attention, orders are sometimes ignored anyway. You can change the character's default actions fairly easily in the tactics area
- The inventory system is a source of constant frustration. It fills up quickly, it takes a lot of time to get back to a shop, and you wind up having to destroy perfectly good items to make room for better ones. Buy more backpacks every time you see one and then sell stuff every time you get a chance to do so, I rarely ran out of rooms
- You can't drop anything. There are chests and containers, but you can't put stuff in, only take it out.
- The relentless "buy this add-on to make the game playable" nagging. There's a pillock standing in the camp with a big "!" over his head who basically says "pay for the DLC and I'll tell you about a quest". To add insult to injury, the quest in question is the one that gives you a party storage area. Can't say much about that, I got the special eddition that came with the current dlc.
- The game works hard to set up fights that you need to think tactically in order to win, and then for boss fights it pulls in your whole party and drops them in front of the bad guy in the stupidest formation possible. If you don't plan on playing tactically, play on easy. If you read the description of the difficulties, easy is intended for those who don't plan on playing tactically.
- Sometime it won't let you hurt the bad guys until they've seen you. Generally, this is because some bad guys have a speaking line before you fight them, even if it is only minor. In many instances, this is because they might of a speaking line depending on the circumstances and it wants to check first before allowing you to attack them.
- Enemies can often shoot you through the corner of walls, but you can't cast a fireball over a low balcony railingYou need a line of sight to launch spells like that, and railings block that. Also, railings will block, on average, 50% of all arrows fired at them.
- ... And if you try your mage will run through ranks of enemy grunts until he's nose-to-node with Ye Olde Damage Machine before fireballing his own feet. You told the mage to find a line of sight to send out the spell, this is your fault.
- On the overland map you have a camp that you can only access at the end of a journey You can access the camp at any time you can choose the destination. Given that you only have one encounter per trip between locations that don't include your camp, and complaining about when you can access your camp is rather silly. Essentially, you can access your camp before you start traveling, and after, with only one event in between. It would be odd to go to your camp in the middle of an event.
- And the journeys themselves are like hyperspace jumps. Once you start, you're locked in and have to go there, even if the journey is interrupted halfway. The journey is always interrupted half way. That's the gimmick for traveling. You get one random encounter. Besides, why would you want to turn back just because you had one random encounter?
- On the tactical scale the areas are tiny and filled with artificial barriers to make walking around seem more challenging. (I know it's standard practice for such these games, but DA:O takes it beyond the point of sanity. In the city there's a puddle that you can't walk through, ffs! You have to go around. I have played through the game many times, and I prefer playing in the tactical scale, it's much easier. If you don't play in the tactical scale, that might be why you keep missing characters with your clicks.
- Too many cutscenes and too much talky-talky. Often mumbled and subtitles are off by default. I never had problems hearing the characters, although I have turned on subtitles. Plus, if you've ever played a game by this company, you should know they do this much talking. That's how rpg's work.
I swear, there never was a game that annoyed me this much that I played for this long. The Witcher came close (for many of the same reasons) but then the Witcher was fun, which never quite happened in DA:O. I've played Balder's Gate, I've played Neverwinter Nights, I played Mass Effect. None of them infuriated me one tenth as much as this turkey.
Sorry. I just needed to rant a bit.
Comments in blue. Frankly, I loved Dragon Age.
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I didn't like DA either. I liked their other games a lot more. KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect. I've been hooked on Demon's Souls lately. That game is too fun.
Mass Effect 2 is coming in a few days, not to mention White Knight Chronicles, and Star Ocean 4 (for those of us who haven't played the 360 version) For us PS3 gamers.
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KOTOR was phenominal. Sad, that KOTORII wasn't finished properly... but I'm more disappointed that KOTORIII (or whatever it's called) is going to be a MMO. I hate MMO's.
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KOTOR III just isn't going to be, according to everything I've heard. They're making a MMO called The Old Republic but I don't believe there will be any tie ins with the KOTOR series. And I agree, MMO's suck the sweat off a dead donkey's balls.
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Comments in blue. Frankly, I loved Dragon Age.
The game definitely has its fans. And the potential for greatness is there, no doubt about it. But I think it needed another 6-12 months debug time before it was ready for prime time.
Unless you're constantlyhaving your mage sit beside the enemy and then run out of mana, I don'tsee why they would change from their staff to melee damage. I never hadthis problem.
Lucky you. The last time I had this was fighting the dragon. I was trying to keep their mana levels up and keep them at a distance so they could keep frezing the dragon. Didn't make any difference - they'd switch to daggers and charge the dragon. It wasn't just the mages either. Fighters would switch from bow to sword and charge when the enemy was miles away, and after I'd set them to use bows explicitly. I'd set rogues to skirmish or backstab, give orders to another character, and when I look back, they've changed target and are charging someone else.
Buy more backpacks every time you see one and then sell stuff every time you get a chance to do so, I rarely ran out of rooms
Bought as many backpacks as I can find and I still run out of room. Usually when I'm halfway thought a dungeon and miles from anywhere where I can sell stuff.
If you don't plan onplaying tactically, play on easy. If you read the description of thedifficulties, easy is intended for those who don't plan on playingtactically.
I'm sorry, but what? I spend half an hour scouting an area and luring monsters away one by one, and then when I get to the big boss, my stealthed rogue enters the room, miles ahead of the rest of the party and suddenly everyone is teleported to six inches away from the monster and my rogue is de-stealthed to boot. How is this my fault for not playing tactically?
Sometime it won't let you hurt the bad guys until they've seen you. Generally,this is because some bad guys have a speaking line before you fightthem, even if it is only minor. In many instances, this is because theymight of a speaking line depending on the circumstances and it wants tocheck first before allowing you to attack them.Enemies can often shoot you through the corner of walls, but you can't cast a fireball over a low balcony railing. Youneed a line of sight to launch spells like that, and railings blockthat. Also, railings will block, on average, 50% of all arrows fired atthem
You know the encounter with the Tevintar mage in the Alienage? At the end there's a balcony with a low railing, waist high at best that in no sane universe could be considered to block the line of sight. Nevertheless, internally it's a wall. It's not even as if the rules are applied consistently. At the landsmeet, you can spell-cast and snipe over a pretty much identical barrier. It's sloppy lazy level design as much as I can see.
And the goblins can still shoot through corners when I can't.
Given that you only have oneencounter per trip between locations that don't include your camp, andcomplaining about when you can access your camp is rather silly.Essentially, you can access your camp before you start traveling, andafter, with only one event in between. It would be odd to go to yourcamp in the middle of an event.
You want to know what's silly? Forcing me to go to a village to rest up before we start the quest, and then not letting me rest there - that's silly. Not letting me change my mind halfway down a road is silly. Not letting me say "well, we may have been ambushed, but as it happens we're right next-door to Encounter X. Instead of carrying on, why not go there instead" that's silly. Not being able to drop out of long distance travel when you realise you forgot to save... none of this is sensible.
I understand you liked the game, but I can't say I shared your experience. I've played a lot of cRPGs over the years, including a large proportion of Bioware's output and nothing has left me with quite this feeling of constantly having to fight the computer interface as well as the monsters
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Though I enjoyed playing DA (mostly) it isn't the game I was waiting for... "the heir of BG 2", as bioware likes to say. Not only the story was simple as hell, the gaming was also a huge let down... most combats in medium-later game can be won with the use of a few spells (fireball for starters, mass paralize and mass sleep when they come running, ass-rape them one by one)
For me, it was like if they had spent months of work designing the world, the creatures, every single detail, and then took the campaign module from KOTOR 2 and changed the names (tutorial start, four places to visit for the main quest and a quick end that lets you thinking "wha??? is that it???")
And the DLC is just armed robbery... Warden's keep consist of a castle with three rooms and a minor quest that can be ended in less than an hour, and what else do you get? A chest to keep your things (which you'll want to be in your campment, not in a tower in the other side of the map), ooooooooh yeah.
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Alright... back to srgue discuss the issue!
First off, you're completely ignoring software in your base claim. Most notably, the Internet - and all the neat innovations that have come with it. Wikipedia, Google Earth, browser searching, file sharing... and on and on.
Aside from that, I generally agree that there have been very few revolutionary inventions in the last, oh, 25 years or so. However, there are some caveats there. You have to determine what you mean by a, as you termed it, "breakthrough". If you replace the old-style Walkmans with an iPod Touch, have you made a breakthrough? Most people would say no, BUT if you had made that change over the space of three months instead of three decades, what would you say then? Constant innovation can, in the long run, serve the same purpose as sudden invention.
I also have to object to your arbitrary time for the "rise of corporations". Take a look at the Gilded Age, and tell me that corporations weren't more influential then than now.
I'm excited about ME2. Sad, that Bioware seems to have dropped the ball on DA - but I'm not too concerned for the next Mass Effect, since it's substantially the same team of people as ME1.
Software is just something that runs on hardware, it's dependent on hardware. Internet, or better said, interconnection/networking is important, but as we all know, internet came from arpanet which transfered it's first message somewhere around 1969. It's been mostly evolution since then. As more computers connected and speeds rose it had ability to do more. While internet did have major impact on our lives, then again, I said "most technological advances" :) . But we all know why the internet was invented (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNARJPNz2CA) :) .
To me breakthrough is something new, something that will change our lives and give us ability to do something we couldn't do before, or to water it down a little, to do something we could do before, but radically better. An example for the latter would be, let's say, solar panels that would have high enough efficiency and would be cheap enough to replace our current power plants (to stay somewhere within our current limits and not to call on vacuum (zero-point as some call it) energy :) ).
To me, our greatest hurdles at this moment are power source and propulsion. Power concerns really wouldn't appreciate if someone would discover something cheaper and more efficient source that would take them out of business (some conspiracy theorist (OK, loonies) even think that "they" hid some Nikola Tesla's works that would do exactly that). And in a way, propulsion is linked with power source, you can't really make something new that runs on gasoline :) . Plus, if we switched to something other than fossil fuels what would all those poor petrol conglomerates do? How would they make artificial islands then? :)
Yes, I know, I watch to many sci-fi (well, more like read) but chemical propulsion is not that practical for space flight. It's also not really nature friendly either, since basically that's what we also use on ground. And not necessarily for colonization of our galaxy and/or giving anal probes to unsuspecting martians but to even build stations in orbit or on the moon. Cost of current way is to the moon :P .
I'm not exactly sure what you mean with "Gilded Age", at first I thought you meant age of guilds, but google says it's late 19th century in the US. I'm not that familiar with US history (being from ye olden continent) but from what figured while skimming through the article there were technological advances during that time. But there's one pretty big difference with now and then. And that's globalization. They could perhaps influence US, but not exactly the whole world as they do now. I said "perhaps" because my impression was that companies of that time actually competed who could do better, and that's where the difference is. Today if you come up with something new they'll just buy you and swallow you up.
On topic of games, you know, it's kinda related to corporations and money :). You have PCs and consoles. Before there were games for consoles and games for PCs. So why not put them together and make the same game for both :). Problem is, PCs and consoles don't have the same audience and there's pretty big chance that said game wouldn't be well accepted by one or the others. And if it fails on PC blame it on piracy :P.
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Actually, there are a couple nice alternatives to oil power - or rather, one: nuclear. However, no one wants to use it (can't imagine why - and don't give me any BS about Chernobyl, there was really no excuse for that... the Russkies were obscenely lax on their security precautions). Even then, coal is the preferred means for the same reason gas is used for cars. It's dirt cheap, and much more efficient than anything else we can come up with.
Now, of course, there are some exceptions to that. In power, for instance, hydro plants are pretty decent - but they require some rather specific natural features. Geothermal power is even better (note: Iceland), but it's even harder to find the right set of natural features (note: Iceland). Solar, wind, tidal, and even nuclear power will never come close to coal's combination of cheap and efficient. Oil might come close, but it's used elsewhere.
Speaking of that, the same argument goes for vehicle propulsion. Oil is amazingly dense, energy-wise, and we aren't going to find anything better. Batteries, by definition, are wasteful - you always get less out than you put in, and all they can do is store energy.
You make a good point about globalization, but I don't really agree about the competition thing. Those companies were even bigger than today's, and true monopolies in many cases (even if only within one country).
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Actually, there are a couple nice alternatives to oil power - or rather, one: nuclear. However, no one wants to use it (can't imagine why - and don't give me any BS about Chernobyl, there was really no excuse for that... the Russkies were obscenely lax on their security precautions).
You say that, but I imagine a thousand reactors, all build by the lowest bidder, all under pressure from head office to make savings, many of them employing minimum wage workers and/or skimping on staff training. I imagine this and I am not reassured.
The trouble is that while the odds of disaster may be long, they are never going to be zero, and the potential scale of a nuclear tragedy is horrifying. You don't even need it so go critical - just having it vent highly radioactive gas would be enough to cause widespread suffering.
Of course, we are assured that the new generation of reactors are foolproof and that any disaster would be impossible. The trouble is no-one designs a reactor they think is unsafe. I expect the designers of Chernobyl said the same thing. And so I expect did the people responsible for Three Mile Island.
I understand where you're coming from, truly I do. But nuclear power brings the NIMBY in me, I'm afraid.
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The game definitely has its fans. And the potential for greatness is there, no doubt about it. But I think it needed another 6-12 months debug time before it was ready for prime time.
Lucky you. The last time I had this was fighting the dragon. I was trying to keep their mana levels up and keep them at a distance so they could keep frezing the dragon. Didn't make any difference - they'd switch to daggers and charge the dragon. It wasn't just the mages either. Fighters would switch from bow to sword and charge when the enemy was miles away, and after I'd set them to use bows explicitly. I'd set rogues to skirmish or backstab, give orders to another character, and when I look back, they've changed target and are charging someone else.
Which dragon? Also: why do you have knives equipped to the mages? There is no real benefit unless you're pressed for inventory space. As for the random orders: check your tactics settings. Some characters start off with their basic orders being to attack the enemy the player is attacking.
Bought as many backpacks as I can find and I still run out of room. Usually when I'm halfway thought a dungeon and miles from anywhere where I can sell stuff.
I'm sorry, but what? I spend half an hour scouting an area and luring monsters away one by one, and then when I get to the big boss, my stealthed rogue enters the room, miles ahead of the rest of the party and suddenly everyone is teleported to six inches away from the monster and my rogue is de-stealthed to boot. How is this my fault for not playing tactically?
The game's idea of tactical playing is to pause after every attack someone makes and then to assign them a new attack. Essentially, if you are playing in real time, that is not playing tactically by the programmer's definition.
You know the encounter with the Tevintar mage in the Alienage? At the end there's a balcony with a low railing, waist high at best that in no sane universe could be considered to block the line of sight. Nevertheless, internally it's a wall. It's not even as if the rules are applied consistently. At the landsmeet, you can spell-cast and snipe over a pretty much identical barrier. It's sloppy lazy level design as much as I can see.
I had a one on one duel at landsmeet and not a all out fight, so I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about.
And the goblins can still shoot through corners when I can't.
You want to know what's silly? Forcing me to go to a village to rest up before we start the quest, and then not letting me rest there - that's silly. Not letting me change my mind halfway down a road is silly. Not letting me say "well, we may have been ambushed, but as it happens we're right next-door to Encounter X. Instead of carrying on, why not go there instead" that's silly. Not being able to drop out of long distance travel when you realise you forgot to save... none of this is sensible.
There are very, very, very few things that occur that make it neccessary to save during the middle of long distance travel. Besides, what long distance travel really is, is a cover up for loading screens. A good deal of the loading between outside areas is done during long distance travel.
I understand you liked the game, but I can't say I shared your experience. I've played a lot of cRPGs over the years, including a large proportion of Bioware's output and nothing has left me with quite this feeling of constantly having to fight the computer interface as well as the monsters
Comments in Red because it stands out better. Also, try playing it on easy. Easy is dragon age's normal. Also, there was a patch released a while back that fixed the encounter scaling. There were a handful of encounters that didn't scale and were set at maximum difficulty. Those were the only ones that I couldn't handle on normal.
Back to the mages: I still don't really know what you're talking about... My favorite party set up is main character(mage), The mage from the tower (Mage with healing focus), Leliana (Rogue), and Alistar (Warrior). So, even with two mages, I don't have that problem.
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You're talking to a nuclear engineer, Doc. Or, a nuclear engineer-in-training. The point is, the more modern nuclear reactors that are being built or planned aren't exactly foolproof, but they are disaster proof. No one can completely cut out human error, but you can set up systems with enough redundancy to localize the issue. As I said before, Chernobyl was pretty inexcusable - they were trying to test a safety feature, but while doing so they were operating without any kind of safety margin. There were a couple other issues as well, and yes, there were a couple design faults. However, these faults were really more like quirks, and could have easily been worked around if the operators had respected their safety margins. Another example is Three Mile Island: mistakes were made, but in the end nobody was hurt, and everything was fixed. All the safety designs worked perfectly.
Personally, I'd much rather have a nuclear plant nearby than pretty much any other type of plant, except possibly hydro. Wind and solar are big and ugly, coal and oil are bigger pollutants (nuclear waste is 100% contained; the only pollution is waste heat).
But, again, nuclear will not be anything other than a subsidized backup to coal plants. Partially for cost reasons, and partially because of other power-related reasons. Nuclear plants give pretty constant rates of power, but power demands fluctuate over the course of a day - that's why you need other plant types.
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The Chernobyl disaster could have been mitigated if they designed the plant with a containment dome (every nuclear power reactor built outside the Soviet Union has a one); the meltdown would have at worst released a bit of radiation. The disaster could have been prevented entirely if the test which caused the which caused it had been performed by the engineers who had trained for it under the conditions it was specified to have been run (instead, due to outside circumstances, the test was delayed to the night shift, which had not been properly trained to run the test and which ran the test far outside safe operating conditions).
Three Mile Island, widely considered to be the second-worst nuclear accident in history, had next to zero impact outside the reactor itself, except that fear stoked by environmentalists put a hold on all new nuclear plants then being considered, with no new plants being proposed until the current energy "crisis" arose. The irony is that coal plants release more radiation into the environment per watt-hour of electricity than nuclear plants do (see this (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste) article in Scientific American).
Modern reactors have a near-perfect safety record, higher efficiencies, and better control and safety systems. At the very least, we should replace or refit the old reactors (almost all in the US are over 30 years old) with new models, even if we don't add new nuclear power capacity.
Hydroelectric dams are environmentally devastating and generally cause tons of problems in the long run, even if they produce cheap, reliable power. Solar farms are hideously expensive, unreliable, and inefficient. Wind farms are unreliable, take up tremendous amounts of space, and are saddled with the NIMBY effect (nobody wants them nearby, as they are ugly and noisy as hell). Coal, oil, and gas are relatively cheap now, but will get more expensive in the future as fuel supplies are exhausted, and they pollute as well. Geothermal is promising, especially if some of the ideas floating around academia pan out, but if they don't it becomes too geologically dependent to make a dent in our energy needs. What really intrigues me is the idea of tapping tidal forces for power, as there is a shit ton of ocean hanging around where you could lay out 1000 square miles of power plant and nobody but the uninformed environmental freaks would give a shit.
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Couldn't have said it better, z. Although, on the whole, I'm probably more skeptical about tidal power than you seem to be - it has many of the same problems as simple hydro. You can't do it everywhere, and you'll likely need a significant visual impact even if the rest of the environment is mostly untouched.
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It depends on the implementation. The current systems are geographically limited to certain oceanic topographies, but even then, there is enough space to deploy systems to provide a significant portion of the world's energy needs, without creating much of an environmental or visual impact. The visual impact is reduced or eliminated (again, depending on implementation) as the systems are mostly or entirely submerged. A great deal of research and development still needs to be done, though, before they can be widely deployed.
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I'm still not sure the area-to-energy density can be made efficient enough to be worthwhile. It could very well become something akin to wind farms. Of course, as you said, a lot depends on the implementation.
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Actually, there are a couple nice alternatives to oil power - or rather, one: nuclear. However, no one wants to use it (can't imagine why - and don't give me any BS about Chernobyl, there was really no excuse for that... the Russkies were obscenely lax on their security precautions).
The biggest reason is the waste more than anything. Nuclear power actually produces less waste than burning fossil fuels - but you can't really do anything with nuclear waste save stick it in a box and then never get near it ever.
Well, that's not true. You can reprocess the stuff, and that works really well... except for how reprocessed nuclear waste is really, really easy to turn into nuclear bombs. It's like if you could collect the smoke from the coal plant's smokestack and then use it to wipe out New York; sure, the power is nice and all but how about we not run that risk.
Mind you, I'm not sure I agree with all of this reasoning - I think you can adopt more nuclear power with minimal risk, so long as you do it intelligently. It's not a Magic Band-Aid, though, and won't be until we figure out reliable, practical fusion power.
Tidal power is promising, but what worries me is power transmission. If you build the things too close to land the environmental impact will be ugly (and don't give me any 'no one cares but the tree-huggers,' I'm talking about practical concerns like 'all the fish we like to eat die'). If you build them out in the middle of nowhere the environmental impact is significantly lessened and that's cool, but now you have to get the power over to the mainland, and it's tough to do so efficiently enough to make the setup cost-efficient and effort-efficient, not to mention that maintenance on high-capacity power lines is enough of a bitch on land.
There're plenty of alternative energy sources out there, and good ones, but none of them is the magic bullet; the key is to use them all in concert.
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Comments in Red because it stands out better.
I wish you wouldn't. Apart from anything else it means I have to manually cut and paste quotes for my replies.Which dragon? The archdemon.Also: why doyou have knives equipped to the mages?
Why not? A dagger is traditionally as much a mage's weapon as a staff, and there is an alternative weapon slot. Not giving them a secondary weapon may be a workaround, but it's still a very annoying bug.
As for the random orders: checkyour tactics settings. Some characters start off with their basic orders being to attack the enemy the player is attacking.That is entirely possible. I more-or-less gave up on the tactics screen after the tower in Ostragar. I didn't know about the H key and was trying to get the rest of the squad to hold in place while I went kiting for monsters. So I'd set them a custom "do nothing, always" slot. After each and every encounter the blasted game would reset it. So I decided it was probably as buggy as the rest of the game and resolved to do without the damn thing if at all possible.I don't think they did a very good job of the default tactics settings.The game's idea of tacticalplaying is to pause after every attack someone makes and then to assignthem a new attack. Essentially, if you are playing in real time, thatis not playing tactically by the programmer's definition. I was playing it tactically, then. By the game's definition. It didn't help.I had a one on one duel at landsmeet and not a all out fight, so I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about.Try telling Anora you're going to support Alastair. She'll speak out against you at the landsmeet and sway one crucial noble over to Loghain's side. Then they order your arrest, Redcliffe says "you won't take us without a fight" and an alighty brawl breaks out which only ends when you kill Loghain. Them in true DA:O style the chantry break up the brawl, Loghain is restored to full health and you get to fight him in a duel anyway, only with fewer potionsThere are very, very, veryfew things that occur that make it neccessary to save during the middleof long distance travel.
I'd say there wasn't anything that made it necessary to save in the middle of a journey. Except forgetting to save before you set off for an encounter that probably won't let you save. There's also changing your mind because you've spent so long watching the map take the most counter-intuitive route imaginable that you've had a better idea about what to do next.Besides, what long distance travel really is,is a cover up for loading screens. A good deal of the loading betweenoutside areas is done during long distance travel.
Then it sounds like the game has a problem with loading times. It's not an unreasonable expectation. Balder's gate IIRC used to let you hit escape on long distance travel. Sometimes I'd do it just to see where I wound up. Although, if the travel process didn't take so damn long, I wouldn't worry so much about it. Also, try playing it on easy. Easy is dragon age's normal.
I was playing it on easy. I downgraded from normal when it became apparent that I would have to fight the interface every step of the way.Back to the mages: I still don't really know what you're talking about... My favorite party set up is main character(mage), The mage from the tower (Mage with healing focus), Leliana (Rogue), and Alistar (Warrior). So, even with two mages, I don't have that problem.
Maybe it's because you don't give them daggers.
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Sorry for the double post, but they are utterly unrelated subjects.
As I said before, Chernobyl was pretty inexcusable - they were trying to test a safety feature, but while doing so they were operating without any kind of safety margin.
That's the thing, though. The problem wasn't technological, it was operational. And there's no reason to suppose that managers in the west won't wind up being pressured into making the same sort of decision.
Imagine this: Head office (which may not even know it's in the nuclear power business) decides that all business units need to improve productivity by X% or his bonus won't cover his annual cocaine bill. This gets passed down through the heirarchy until the manager of a reactor somewhere gets told he needs to improve by X% or they'll find someone who will. Sooner or later, someone is going to either skimp on staff training, or else push the thing past safety limits because "those things are way over-engineered anyway".
And the would be an inquiry, and heads would roll, and regulations would be re-worded to say the same thigng but with much more emphasis. And there'd still have been an incident.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is: it's not that I don't trust the engineers who design reactors. It's more that I don't trust the management structure that's going to run the things for 50 years.
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Since we off topic-ed the off topic to nuclear power :), how about fusion reactors? If I remember correctly current technology is fission based. Fusion should be a lot safer since it requires certain conditions to run and if containment is breached those conditions are also disturbed and fusion reaction stops. In case of fission that's not the case.
Problem is we still don't have fusion reactors, technology is not there yet. And why spend money into it if we have other sources that doesn't require research :P.
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My general understanding is that while cold fusion (that being, fusion that can be done at low enough conditions to generate more power than it took to perform) is awesome, it's also a pipe dream barring some amazing breakthrough.
I'd be all for nuclear power, once someone provides an answer on what to do with the waste. Design a process that will reduce it to lead in 30 years, or find a way to fission some lower numbered element than breaks into something that is or will be stable within a lifetime and I'll sign on.
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The archdemon.I was curious because I know of 3 large dragons. The archdaemon, the high dragon, and when flemeth goes all kill bill dragon on you.
Why not? A dagger istraditionally as much a mage's weapon as a staff, and there is analternative weapon slot. Not giving them a secondary weapon may be aworkaround, but it's still a very annoying bug.Daggers deal less damage than staves when mages use them, and there is no benefit to mages using them either because if the mage doesn't have the staff out, their spell power drops.
I don't know what to say about the control difficulty you're having though. It always seems to work fine and be fairly intuitive for me, so... I don't know.
As for nuclear fusion: cold fusion is a pipe dream. By it's very nature, you don't get cold fusion.
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I guess what I'm trying to say here is: it's not that I don't trust the engineers who design reactors. It's more that I don't trust the management structure that's going to run the things for 50 years.
If you pulled out all the stops and put a modern reactor into maximum overdrive while killing the safety and coolant systems, you would have a total reactor meltdown - and a highly contaminated containment building. I would have no qualms standing right outside a modern reactor undergoing a total meltdown.
As far as nuclear waste goes, there is promising research being done on spent fuel processing that will allow used fuel to be separated into uranium that can be re-enriched to commercial grade fuel (through breeder reactors) and fissile products that can be separated by element and isotope and then bombarded with neutrons to create stable, non-radioactive isotopes.
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If you pulled out all the stops and put a modern reactor into maximum overdrive while killing the safety and coolant systems, you would have a total reactor meltdown - and a highly contaminated containment building. I would have no qualms standing right outside a modern reactor undergoing a total meltdown.
I find your lack of lack of faith ... disturbing.
Seriously though, no one ever said "I'm going to design a reactor that will contaminate half a million square killometers of real estate, but only under certain circumstances. Foolproof systems are like bug free programs. You can get very, very close but there's always going to be something you didn't allow for.
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Yeah, if the Hulk smashed through the containment dome, you could have some issues, but short of bunker busting missiles, I don't think we have much to worry about when it comes to dome integrity. I suppose there is the possibility that some idiot could build one in an earthquake zone, which would present its own hazards, but someone with an IQ above 0 should put a halt to that rather quickly.
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Yeah, if the Hulk smashed through the containment dome, you could have some issues, but short of bunker busting missiles
Yeah, that or Anything Else You Haven't Thought Of Yet. That's the problem.
No one builds a bridge so it can collapse. No one builds a space shuttle to explode. No one thinks their reactor can go disastrously wrong.
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On fusion: it's a neat theoretical possibility, but don't hold your breath. We've been a decade away from workable fusion for about fifty years now, and I don't expect that to change for another fifty. A better option is to make fission cleaner by recycling the spent fuel.
On reactors, well, the latest ones are designed with some very effective and completely passive backups. If you want to compare to, say, bridges, the latest reactors are something akin to bridges that stand only two feet off the ground. Sure, something might go wrong, but the damage afterward will be very minor. I won't say nothing bad can happen, but there is a pretty low maximum amount of bad. I'd be much more concerned with a maximum-security prison nearby than a reactor, or with a wind farm. Did you know wind turbines can explode?!? Tell that to the environmentalists.
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Well, safe unless it's a british reactor. My dad and his mates at an engineering consulting firm all grew beards so they couldn't be assigned to Sellafield, where they left waste in open "containment" pools that overflowed in heavy rain.
(According to regulations, beards made it impossible to wear the safety gear. True or not, it got them assigned to a steelworks instead).
And about fusion, there was a quote about ITER in the economist recently, that went along the lines of "we've spent x decades and y billion dollars studying Tokamak (style of fusion) reactors, and basically all we've discovered is that they're bloody useless."
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Doesn't surprise me. Terry Pratchett used to be press officer for Sellafield and you can get a good idea of his impression of nuclear power from reading the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic.
He's been quoted as saying he could write a book about his experiences, if anyone would believe it.
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"Call it" *flip*
*sigh*... "edge"
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...and Favre blows another playoff game. 'Atta boy, Brett!
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...and Favre blows another playoff game. 'Atta boy, Brett!
Tie Game... 3rd Down... 20 seconds left in the game... We're in field goal range... "Let's throw the ball!"
???
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Actually, the Vikings were about three or four yards outside Longwell's range.
I'm a Packer fan, mate, and I can tell you that every Sconnie in the state was just waiting for Favre to remember the good old days, and start tossing the ball liberally and stupidly. Only some arcane act of God let him get through the regular season without doing so... and seriously, given how his last NFC Championship game went, you had to know which way kharma was going.
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Heh, so his defeat was all the more sweeter for you. :D
Only team I really wanted to win today was The Jets. I don't really care for the other three.
That said...
DaBears!
Now if only we had a QB... :(
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I was torn in today's games - I hate the Jets quite a bit, but I hate Indy even more (don't care one way or the other about the Vikings/Saints game). Since Indy won, I have to cross my fingers and hope the Brees kicks the shit out of Manning in the Superbowl now...
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Hahaha! Bears fans... I hate to say it, but you guys long ago left the "hated" category in my book, and this year got you through "pathetic". I honestly feel bad for you guys now. I mean, Lovie Smith? Matt Forte? Jay Cutler?!?! You poor, poor bastards.
I was kinda rooting for the Jets too, but everyone's known who was getting to the Super Bowl this season. A lot of people tried to forget, but i didn't. It was Colts/Saints since week six, and the last couple weeks of play notwithstanding nothing ever happened to make me think otherwise.
My hope is for the Saints, but my bet would be the Colts. Manning is just ridiculous.
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Manning is a whiny little shit who throws his teammates under the bus at the first sign of trouble. I frikken hate players like that.
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Perhaps. But when he's good, he's very, very good. You can't deny that.
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Does he have talent and skill? Yes, but that doesn't mean he's a good player.
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I despise Peyton Manning - but then, as a Patriots fan I kinda have to.
(And don't gimme that look. I've been a Pats fan since the FIRST time Pete Carroll tried coaching in the NFL, which is why I look forward to his abject failure with glee. I remember back when Pat Patriot was the logo instead of the Flying Elvis head they have now. I'm old-school, I've paid my frickin' dues. ;))
That said... he's a good player. He's a GREAT player. He is not, so far as I can tell, a good PERSON, but his effect on the field can't be denied.
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My QB rankings put him at the top, followed by Rodgers (because there is NO other QB that could do what he did, while being smashed into the ground every other play), Brees, Favre, and Warner. After that, it gets murky. I've always felt Brady is overrated (with his supporting cast - and especially his O line - any halfway decent QB could become awesome), Rivers hasn't quite hit his stride yet, neither has Flacco, and I dare anyone to suggest Romo with a straight face. Or, even worse, Cutler - he's the twisted love child of McNabb and Favre, with all of their bad points, and under Lovie effing Smith. Ugh.
However, as good as Manning is, I think that Rodgers, Rivers, Flacco (and, I know this is heresy, maybe Sanchez) could eventually catch up to him in quality. Rodgers might do so as early as next year (although three is more likely).
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Brady is - or was, pre-injury, we haven't seen him return to form just yet - a superb QB for a certain style of play, which is to say short slant/screen passes and game management. He's never going to be the deep threat that other QBs are, but in the short and midrange he's always had pinpoint accuracy, and you can't credit that entirely to his O-line. Hell, when the Pats won the Super Bowl the first time - the year Brady came in to replace an injured Bledsoe - Bledsoe had the same line and couldn't do squat with it. 'Course, part of that was that Bledsoe 'scrambled' the way a tree sloth would... but he had a cannon arm.
I dunno how high Sanchez' ceiling is but it certainly looks high. Flacco, though? I don't think he's ever gonna get there.
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I think Flacco's better than, say, Schaub - but, again, he plays on the Ravens, and thus will forever be a merely OK QB. I also forgot Roethlisberger.
As for Brady, he's by no means a bad QB. I just don't think he's as the epitome of awesomeness that he was said to be doing the Patriot's heyday. He's good, not stellar.
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So, anyway, it's been getting a little quiet around here... what did everyone think of Hentai High 2? I thought the new guy did a pretty good job of taking mostly the good from the original, and making it a bit better. It's not a lot better (yet, anyway), and his presentation leaves a little to be desired (although the original HHS wasn't great either), but all in all I'm just happy to see another person making a go at this sort of game.
I'm not exactly sure what to call the genre - the HHS, WM, SM, SimBro group. Perhaps "pooolka-like", since he is directly responsible for so much of it. My only bugaboo is that no one seems willing to try something completely new (necno being the great exception, of course), but the remakes mostly seem to be upgrades at least.
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HH2 is alright for what it is... it definitely needs more work, I wouldn't even call it a beta. I still can't find the website/forum where it's hosted at though.
As for the genre, Ero-Strategy pretty much fits the bill. And honestly, that genre is the best type of Eroge and it's a shame there aren't as many being made these days by the big publishers.
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Or Ero-Management.
HH2 looks promising, as all of them do to my eyes.
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Despite removing the weird and unexplained color system. HH2 is pretty fun, there's not a whole lot there as of yet. and the layout is pretty messy. The whole change makes more sense, but I enjoyed it for what it is. I can't wait for a more developed and fine toned version.
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I never really minded HHS's system. Once the bugs are cleaned out, it makes a certain sort of internal sense, and more importantly it is novel. Even if it's not the greatest setup, it was well worth the attempt.
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I like the HH2 concept, but the execution is still very, very early days yet. Still, there's a lot of promise there.
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Is it just me or the forum is getting less active?
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It because we haven't had anything shiny and new to break in a while. :D
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Must CRUSH..... Must DESTROY.... Must........... Oooooohhh SHINEY!!!!!!!!
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Must CRUSH..... Must DESTROY.... Must........... Oooooohhh SHINEY!!!!!!!!
Shiney? WHERE?!?!?! I COMMAND YOU TO TELL ME THE LOCATION OF SHINEY!
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Any way I just found out about the second part of the star war gangsta rap yesterday and Ive been watching the storm trooper dancing ( single best part of the vid)
http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/sw_gangsta_rap_chronicles/
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Yeah. We're all still around, we just have nothing to comment on.
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random zomby spammer: Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnsssssss. ;)
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random redneck spammer: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!
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New RE5 DLC is out, and I have TONS of homework. Just gives me an excuse to keep waiting till 1.30 before I release anymore girls. :p
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Oh noes. I was waiting for your girls... XD
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Any way I just found out about the second part of the star war gangsta rap yesterday and Ive been watching the storm trooper dancing ( single best part of the vid)
http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/sw_gangsta_rap_chronicles/
Meh, this one is better and it is even better if you have a passing knowledge of spanish in which case you might end up ROFL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEscBG5cJ3E
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Meh, this one is better and it is even better if you have a passing knowledge of spanish in which case you might end up ROFL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEscBG5cJ3E
Really didnt like the song at all (weird song about vader being a ass chaser) I did like the clips do (storm trooper shuffle)
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It's good to see a wee bit more life around here... although I guess I can't complain overmuch, since I haven't exactly been the most verbose person hanging around either.
On a more off-topic note, I finally got around to trying the latest version of HHS2 (last one I had was like .55, or something). It's gone quite a ways since then. Nice to see another game of this "type" that's actually being quickly developed; it seems like all the other pooolka-remakes are in the midst of existential crises. Not that it's a *bad* thing (there's more to love when the releases finally show), but it's neat to see how tons and tons and TONS of tiny updates can actually become quite meaningful.
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How true. It wasn't too long ago the same could be said about this game. Devs just have WAAAAY too much on their plate for this one.
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But to be fair... HHS2 is a lot less... complicated.... and polished. Way too much blank and wasted space, odd design choices, and much simpler gameplay, not surprising he can churn out updates. He needs to let someone clean up his text at least.
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IIRC, there are supposed to be a couple guys slowly working on that over at the Palace. the dev is not a native English speaker. Either way, adding polish can be done anytime, whereas getting the core mechanics down is best done quickly while you're still highly motivated. I can't fault the priorities.
You could argue that WM took the same route, somewhat. The original version I played (and hell, even the current one) has some idiosyncracies of style and design, which are mostly ignored by everyone in favor of making the mechanics better.
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Not to be that guy, but I've been working on an HHS remake myself. I'm trying to stick it a little closer to the original. Aztek (I think that's his name) seems to be just riffing on the general idea of HHS, and doing something much more original. I'm trying to mostly recreate Pooolka's game, and change out a few things I didn't like, and grow some different mechanics. It's quite far from feature-complete, but I'd be happy to post a link if anyone's interested.
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Post away, the more games/projects the merrier. ;)
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Ditto to that.
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http://anonym.to/?http://www.4shared.com/dir/29450247/fd361b90/sharing.html
It's only version 0.1, so there's plenty missing. Also, you gotta poke around a bit to get the feel for it. The interface isn't documented. There is no help file. Your gods have abandoned you. Etc.
I'm more than happy to answer questions or fix whatever you find.
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Checking it out now. Just for completeness' sake, you may wish to cross-post it to the "Other Games" thread.
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Looks like an excellent start, to me. No obvious bugs after finishing twice.
[hopefully] helpful comments:
"Picture" events don't seem to do much beyond lose you a rep or two, on rare occasions, and only from the gym. Is that true?
Money isn't balanced. It's pretty good in the first 5-10 years, when you really need to consider what to use it on, but from then on you hit the point where you literally can't spend it fast enough. Likely solution: get more stuff to buy, perhaps through building expansions.
On that point, you can't expand the school... I'm assuming this bit is still in development?
I'm not sure it's possible, or even desirable, to get all the teachers. I certainly never came close - and I found that getting a new teacher was more annoying than helpful once you had ~4 of them, since they were untrained.
No new classes yet? Or rather, you can't get any but the starting ones?
Interface seems pretty intuitive and mostly smooth, while following the original HHS 'feel'. Definite plus on that point, IMHO.
Nice job on finding some new pictures that blend well with the old ones.
My general feel is that it's very good, and even as-is it's playable. It's a little sparse, but at least a person will sit and play through the whole 20 years. I can't wait to see what this becomes in another couple months.
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Glad to hear you liked it so far. Just as you were mentioning, buildings are next on the list. It should bring in the too-much-money-nothing-to-do issue, as they are both purchasable and upgradeable. The upgrades to buildings will make for automagical increases in stats every quarter, which will in turn allow you to push the teachers and naughty levels higher.
I'll keep an eye on the value of starting teachers. I have a 'currency' system coming soon. Kinda like those big dots along the top of the interface in the original. Upgrading the starting stats of all teachers would be a great thing to purchase.
The events having little effect is intentional for now. I'm planning on variously rarity classes for events. About half will be neat little pictures and nothing else. The more rare classes will have decisions, and actual stat changes (among other things). All that is planned though. I'm really happy the interface worked out for you. That's been my main worry so far.
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http://anonym.to/?http://www.4shared.com/dir/29450247/fd361b90/sharing.html (http://anonym.to/?http://www.4shared.com/dir/29450247/fd361b90/sharing.html)
It's only version 0.1, so there's plenty missing. Also, you gotta poke around a bit to get the feel for it. The interface isn't documented. There is no help file. Your gods have abandoned you. Etc.
I'm more than happy to answer questions or fix whatever you find.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
It's definitely a great start, and feels very much like a sequel to the original HHS. There are a few gameplay issues I have a problem with though.
First, The between quarters activities are a bit overwhelming at first. Maybe start with only a few, and then unlock more as the player progresses through the seasons/years.
Second, All the teachers seem to be the same with just different names, it'd be nice if the teachers each had a specialty like the first HHS where they would teach better in that class.
Also, each year pretty much feels like the first one, progression just seems too slow in the game. About the only thing you need to worry about is running out of money.
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Finally, if you want to keep using this forum to discuss your game, and each new version, might I suggest creating a new thread dedicated to it? Or point us to another forum where a dedicated discussion thread can be found.
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I really like your idea of cutting back on the quarterly selections. For instance, the leftmost three on the bottom row (starting with standardized tests) give reputation based on how high your academic stats are. Since they are always crap int he beginning, those three buttons are just traps for beginners. I'll take those out until you raise them to a reasonable point. Also, I'll try to find a good level to bring in the teacher conferences for the same reason. That should make it a touch less daunting on the first playthrough.
What you mentioned about the teachers is true, and I have plans to greatly improve their levels of interesting as development goes on. Most of the drive to play from one turn to the next will come from the visit events (the naughty bits), which need to grow considerably both in variety and in complexity. I want to get some of the decisions and repercussions the original had there, and add more. The whole dullness thing will get much better as I add different school policies, clubs, buildings, and the such to get some complex decisions in there.
As for making my own thread, I'm new here. I don't know if that'd be cool with the admins. After all, this is at heart a board dedicated to WM. I'd hate to be too aggressive at hawking my game here and step on toes. Do you think it'd be cool if I make my own little thread here?
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As for making my own thread, I'm new here. I don't know if that'd be cool with the admins. After all, this is at heart a board dedicated to WM. I'd hate to be too aggressive at hawking my game here and step on toes. Do you think it'd be cool if I make my own little thread here?
"It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." ;)
That said, I look forward to seeing more from your version of Hentai High School.
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Real quick, I've updated the code to reflect the changes I mentioned above. The bottom four buttons in quarterly selections don't appear unless they are at all reasonable to use. For instance, you can't give standardized tests until you have at least 30 intelligence. I kinda like the design space this opens up for later, with very neat little events you can select as your stats get higher. I can just picture some very fun ones when your naughtier statistics are up there.
The download is on the same 4shared site I've been using all along.
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Don't worry about making a thread. You need to set up shop somewhere, after all, and while this forum is nominally about WM having another programmer around, even one that's working on something else, is never a problem.
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necno's said in the past he has no problem with other games being developed on this board - I was going to do the same with Skin Trade until I found myself working flat out on WM.
Create your own thread. No one is going to object :)
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My only issue is that I'd rather have the game uploaded to mediafire
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@DocClox
Is Skin Trade still in development? I was moving files around last night and came across a copy of it on my hd and thought "that was a good idea...I wonder if it's still going." :)
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I've not given up on the idea, but between coding WM and now having a paying job, it's not been getting a lot of love.
I hope to finish it one day, it's just making the time :)
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Now I've got to ask... What is "Skin Trade" and where do I find a copy of it? :D
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so I was was experimenting with photoshop again and tried putting tentacles into a picture.
(http://www.mediafire.com/imgbnc.php/ff329fdaea8f336721bee941b0185f8f2g.jpg) (http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=xn2z0ixw2dt&thumb=5)
be honest, what do you guys think?
(also I second what graen said)
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so I was was experimenting with photoshop again and tried putting tentacles into a picture.
be honest, what do you guys think?
Not bad for bio-luminescent tentacles... though try to keep their thickness consistent. (Either thick at the origin and tapered down, or a consistent diameter throughout their length.) You might want to give them an out-line to define them a bit more, especially where they overlap, such as the coil on the girl's arm.
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so I was was experimenting with photoshop again and tried putting tentacles into a picture.
Use a hard brush not a soft one. You can use dodge and burn tools for adding lights and darks. (If you didn't already) Outline isn't a bad idea it'll keep it more consistent with the girl (you may not need it. I'm not sure, I'd have to see it.) If you have access to a tablet try using that. It's a good start... lot of work I imagine.
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I thought I had a thread for Skin Trade on here - must have been on the old board. Give me a minute or two... ;)
[edit]
OK, recreated the thread. Skin Trade (http://pinkpetal.org/index.php?topic=302.0).
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Hey everyone, I'm back! Didja miss me?
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Did you even notice I was gone? *sniff, tear*
Got a call from my mom last week: "Surprise! You're driving us to Florida for a week!" Driving 1500 miles each way sucks royal ass, but I got a free vacation out of it, so no complaints here >;o)
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Look at it this way: At least they didn't ask you to drive to Hawaii. That could have been messy.
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And again, I'll go off topic in off topic thread...
I just watched documentary on Discovery channel called "I was bitten", it's about the people who were bitten by (mostly) poisonous animals. This episode was about snakes, spiders and bees. And I figured something. Most of them are hypocrites, animals I mean. For instance, the guy that was bitten by brown recluse spider while sleeping in his own bed. You're sleeping, little asshole decides to go on adventure and is walking all over you. If you happen to move the way it doesn't like, it bites you and you can loose a whole limb because of it's poison. Then another guy who had snake crawl in his sleeping bag. Of course, it bit him. So you're keeping it warm and cozy, and when it get's bored it bites you as a farewell.
Now, I don't have anything against biting stupid humans who poke their noses where it isn't their business, but as I see it this is the opposite, they poke their noses where it wasn't their business and then felt insulted when they got accidentally touched or shaken. If that isn't hypocritical I don't know what is :P . It's like robber suing the bank because he "had to" shoot the guard :P . I'm all for self defense but this isn't it, this is attack, not defense. Maybe there's something even more sinister here, conspiracy even ??? .
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I'll have what he's having! ::)
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So you're keeping it warm and cozy, and when it get's bored it bites you as a farewell.
That part kind of reminds me of the story about the scorpion and the frog.
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It's like robber suing the bank because he "had to" shoot the guard
Techincally, wouldn't it be like the robber suing the bank because the guard shot HIM? And the sad part is, animals who attack people who were asking for it get killed. You could kick a pitbull in the face, get rightly mauled by it in retaliation, and somehow it's the pitbull that gets put to death. ???
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Well, in the case they showed, guy was just sleeping and that recluse spider went under his bed sheet and got onto his leg. The guy rustled a little and got bitten. It wasn't like spider was in danger. He just didn't like that his "carpet" moved a little. That's why I made that comparison, the robber (spider) wasn't even "shot" at.
As pit bulls go I'm not really a big fan. There are breeds that will go on a killing spree if it hears leaf falling the wrong way :P. Like in the joke, what's that, has four legs, a tail and an arm? Pit bull on child's playground.
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I think that seven months without a post is quite long enough...
In celebration, zombie thread time!
Love to see that necno's working on something new. WM could maybe use a bit of polish here and there, but it's substantially a complete game and have been for a while - it's better that he's getting some new creative juices flowing.
Any other news of interest I've missed, here or elsewhere in the naughty-games-verse?
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Well, as far as I'm concerned...
- I've agreed to step back from WM development once I've got a couple of outstanding items finished.Necno wants the game finished, and some of my plans to take the game forward proved a little controversial
- I've got a lot of planning and a fair chunk for code for Clonemaster, which is sort of S/F Whoremaster.A lot of the things I wanted to do in WM will probably end up in there
- I managed to spend most of the summer in hospital. Lost time and momentum from that.
- And I'm now fiddling with some code to run a turn-based multiplayer arena game set in Crossgate
And just to stop this being all "me, me, me" I recommend looking at Otherworld (http://daisystrikesdk.blogspot.com/):
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Yeah, I took a glance at that. I like where it's going, but right now it's got lots of polish but not quite enough content IMHO. Seems like the update schedule is pretty good, though, so by the end of the year who knows?
Sucks about the hospital, mate. Hope you're feeling better, and it's good to see you working on fun new things too!
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oh by the way, gratz for the special mention on Daisy_Strike's blog Doc! I have STILL yet to play Otherworld but I'm all for a combat engine in my H-Games and I definitely dig your proposal very FF1, looks great.
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This rang a few bells:
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3809
I want one.
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(http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTdxGbV_cjDRfGQR-RLVXtkjjP-fqNoSm0MUsP2NUB4scuSXzZuYA)
this rang a few bells.
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this rang a few bells.
And is considerably further off topic than my posting. Which is a good thing, in this thread :)
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well you were talking about ringing bells, how could i NOT post quazimodo?
also
(http://cdn0.knowyourmeme.com/i/000/036/584/original/billymays.jpg?1263926401)
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Wouldn't it be kind of funny if there were a WM type game in the style of Erotical Night? LOL