Off-Topic:

[zodiac44]

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.

[DocClox]

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?

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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.

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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

[sablecaballero]

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.

[Solo761]

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 .

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 .

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 .

[letmein]

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).

[DocClox]

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.

[Alugere]

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.

[letmein]

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.

[zodiac44]

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 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.

[letmein]

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.

[zodiac44]

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.

[letmein]

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.

[dcb42]

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.

[DocClox]

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.

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Which dragon? The archdemon.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 potions

There 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.

[DocClox]

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.