Joel Schultz

Aye, you non-programmers don't know how to count right. 0 0++ (0++)++ . . .

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. And anyone who watches the Tonight Show's "Jaywalking" segments knows that Americans can be no better...

An interesting article over at AVault about the way gamers can become completely and antagonistically polarized over games. Given that 3000AD's BC/UC franchise seems to be the mother of extreme gamer opinion polarization I thought I'd post the link. Among my favorite quotes (and boy are these observations the truth): quote: No incentives seem to exist to promote civility and restraint in our exchanges about games on the Internet. Those who express their views in modest, limited ways are still misinterpreted or mocked. Loud bullying in many ways appears to succeed more than soft subtle remarks. Some even seem to be proud of their inability to spell or use grammar or punctuation correctly, as if primitive modes of expression were somehow a badge of honor. When someone crudely hammers someone else into the ground, animalistic grunts of approval emerge from onlookers. quote: Most of the forum discussions I have read have involved the most close-minded expression of preferences I have ever seen in any context. Belittling those who disagree is commonplace. People insult each other and never seem to modify strong views in light of arguments they hear from others. There is clearly no correlation whatsoever between playing ability and civility. Some readers and contributors become so frustrated that they will permanently leave a forum - or an entire game site - because of the pain or hurt they have suffered, or the moronic comments they have witnessed.Who of us here at the 3000AD forums hasn't witnessed that in discussions of BCM/UC on other game sites? /remembering days of VE3D forum evilness... Ugh, give me a civilized, open-minded and rational debate on merits/demerits any day.

Thank you, SC! I had all but given up on figuring this out. So the thing did have a temporal aspect to it after all. No wonder I was getting nowhere; I guess I wasn't patient enough. Anyway, you da man! And it only took, what, 331 posts or so for us to figure it out. Sounds like there's a joke lurking in there somewhere ("How many commanders does it take...") Thanks are also in order to all those who valiantly (and otherwise ) contributed to the SR thread. Yunz also da men!

quote: Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: What is facinating to me is that most folks have figured a ton of undocumented aspects of the games, find new and creative ways of doing the most unimagineable things; yet, can't [by observation] figure out what exactly the SR does, why and when. Thats just funny to me. Funny for you, frustrating for us... Well, here's me begging for a teeny little hint: is the effect of adjusting the SR power immediately perceivable (ignoring that sending more power to it immediately deducts from the available energy pool) or does the effect occur over a period of time? Maybe that'll will narrow our search parameters a bit. Personally, I'm leaning toward "period of time". I would think that any immediate effect would have stood out and bonked us on the head by now.

Off topic: quote: Theory. Hypothosis. Experiment. Results. Answer. Conclusion. Not to be picky, but the order should be: Hypothesis (statement what you think is true). Experiment (test of hypothesis). Results (result of experiment). Theory (if results supportive, hypothesis now has a more solid, factual basis and gets "promoted" to next level). Conclusion (summation of the above process and thoughts for future work -- new hypotheses! -- or if results unsupportive, new hypothesis as to why -- again, future work). and maybe... Answer (theory proven irrefutably true -- which is why there are many theories and few answers in science). /nod to Mr. Parker, 8th grade science teacher who drilled this into his students' brains till we can still remember it more than a decade later... Back on topic: I'm pretty sure I tried shutting down the NRC (you can turn it off from main interface) and reducing SR power from Logistix to 0. However, IIRC I still got power from the solar panels -- it depended on ship attitude relative to the sun.

To any fence sitters who elect to disable SP2 delivery as noted by SC above: should you elect to sit on it, 120 days after 8/16/2004 MS will tilt the fence so you fall off into SP2 land, so to speak. Delivery disablement is temporary.

quote: Originally posted by jamotto: quote:Originally posted by Joel Schultz: That said, there are also a lot of dumb patents out there too. I have a feeling that is what most of the patent infringements are in this case. I don't doubt there are a few dumb ones in there. The problem is that I doubt all of the patents are dumb, that even overturning the dumb ones is very expensive, that they won't get open-source-friendly licensing terms for all the patents that stand, and that viable workarounds can't be created for all the ones they can't license.

Or else we'll figure it out, and then SC will change it just to mystify us further...

Yeah I read that on a slashdot article earlier (here, links to another article here). Kind of disturbing, but what you would expect when you have umpteen-zillion more-or-less independent contributors with no oversight. Patent infringements can happen even when you do have strong oversight... That said, there are also a lot of dumb patents out there too. They usually get overturned, but that costs money. I think the statistic from the article was 50% of all patent litigations end with an overturned patent.

AFAIK IE always has done that under certain conditions. I think it has to do with identical file name collision avoidance, possibly in the Internet cache folders. You can also get [2], [3] etc too. It may also have to do with how the download is being conducted too. I never made a study of this... IMHO its dumb. Why couldn't MS just have done ye olde "File exists. Replace existing file? Y/N" box?

I live in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A nice place, friendly neighbors, lots of convenient access to local stores and shopping malls, and easy access to several major interstates and highways. There are several interesting attractions here, from art museums honoring a local artist (Andy Warhol), two nearby Frank Lloyd Wright homes, our two new sports stadiums, concert ampitheaters, the Carnegie Museum of Art and Natural History, Science Center, Sports Center. Even a small local amusement park which is a historical landmark along with a newer water park. We have flower and bird conservatories too, along with a so-so zoo. Oh yeah, we are in driving range of Seven Springs, a nice ski resort in our area. Unfortunately, Allegheny county is home to some of the highest tax rates in the country, not to mention Pittsburgh is dead broke due to what appears to be a decade or more of officials burying their heads in the sand. The city is getting state aid in a last ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy. Not to mention that Pittsburgh interstates were built before someone came up with the concept of "beltway" and the geography (sitting at the confluence of three rivers surrounded by hills) presents major traffic infrastructure headaches (read: sit on the aptly named "Parkway" interstates for an hour trying to get in and out of the city for work each day, a problem which I am thankful to not have).

Amen, Takvah. I really liked this movie. The only thing I really didn't like was the Saxon king/commander, Cerdic. His quiet, soft-spoken demeanor just seemed out-of-place amidst his people. He needed to be a bit more, I dunno, lively or something, but not over-the-top... 8/10

Holy cow, what have I spawned here? 151 replies...and still none the wiser Whatever the SR power settings do, it isn't obvious to me. And if it turns out that it really is obvious, then it's so obvious I don't see it. Obviously.

Instruct your FC/SC's to Return To Base...only to have them take damage when they smack into your CC because you forgot to allocate power to Launch Control.

Sounds like a good story to me. I used to read the RP forums a lot but many of my favorites there seemed to have left. I'm surprised no one has done a BC novel.

OK, once upon a time, somewhere in this forum (and no, I don't care to locate it), I said I didn't like console games because I could count on one hand the number of games I like. Sadly, I have betrayed my loyalty to my trusty PC because I am now the owner of a Playstation 2 my wife bought me for a first anniversary present. You know something, surprisingly there's quite a few "family" kind of PS2 games out there that we can enjoy together... And I need at this point at least two hands to count [*]Robotech Battlecry [*]ATV Offroad Fury 2 [*]SSX Tricky [*]Dynasty Warriors 3 [*]Trivial Pursuit Unhinged (wife will play!) [*]Jepaordy (ditto) [*]Wheel of Fortune (ditto again) [*]Beyond Good and Evil (own the PC version, but man, it's like watching a movie when playing it on TV...) [*]NBA Streets (right name?) [*]Tekken 4 [ 06-01-2004, 11:47 PM: Message edited by: Cmdr Chavik ]

I'd definitely be buying it if it weren't that I had so many other games in my personal playing queue right now.

Hey, maybe when Knightblade comes out you'll be able to do that. -- except maybe Resnig isn't part of that crew. Oh well, you know what they say, the universe's two inexhaustible resources are hydrogen and idiocy; Resnig's spiritual cousin will probably be on board there to shove out the door. (Off-topic) Personally, I'm looking forward to inspecting a 31st century head (lavatory, WC, bathroom, necessity, call it what you will).

Thief II is still one of my all time favorite games. Can't wait for 3!

quote: could someone please put us out of our collective misery regarding this? SC said he'd let us stew a while before he chipped in: quote: I think I'll give it a few more days before I chime in.Come to think of it, he said that on March 10. It's been a bit more than a few days. SC, pretty please? With sugar on top?

quote: Say you fire a shot and it hits a model, a predetermined chunk of that model blows apart. Like an artillery shell hitting a road. Now you have an altered model. Just plug in some kinda algorithm, to determine a range of sizes of chunks to come apart. And that rubble is still left sitting around. And you could pick up one of the chunks and throw it, and it still feels and flys like a chunk of the origonal rubble.If you know how your model was built, and if applicable the reasonably small and finite number of chunks it can be deconstructed (exploded) into, you could always compute those physics values offline during model development and code them in as part of the models' information, rather than waste CPU time doing it realtime. No need for CSG then in the in-game models. Even that is still probably an utter waste of development time spent on better things, IMHO, unless you're trying to write an accurate "real world" simulator, like a flight game. Who other than a physicist would notice "hm, that thing's center of gravity should be more to the left"?

Manning the auxiliary turrents. That was kind of cool.

wok.