alanschu

Though at the same time, Laozi was discounting comments from someone under the assumption that if they haven't tried it, it's not possible to accurately report on it.

Observation is a foundation of science. Cause and effect is frequently determined by observing subjects in a controlled environment. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> true enough, but I doubt that applies here <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What do you mean? Seeing how people act before and after taking a substance is a decent start. You're results won't be 100% scientific, since it can't take into account placebo effect, and the resulting "roleplay" elements. For example, studies have shown that giving people flavoured water and telling them that it is alcohol may result in them acting drunk. But science has to start somewhere. When you start expanding your population base and try to control for outside variables, your results will become more conclusive, but that doesn't mean that without doing so initial results are worthless. This is how hypotheses are formed.

Observation is a foundation of science. Cause and effect is frequently determined by observing subjects in a controlled environment. EDIT: The burning of cigarettes and marijuana is most likely insignificant, and as a result inconsequential to the concerns about global air pollution and the greenhouse effect. The effect that 10,000,000 tons of air pollutants being released in the air is measurably the same as 10,000,000.0000000000001 tons of air pollutants being released in the air.

I think my favourite character was my Ventrue. My first playthrough was as a Toreador, which was also fun.

Someone's getting defensive!

If I want I can send out day bombing. I typically do, because the results are greatly increased.

I have typically preferred the image quality of ATI cards as well, but I haven't really done a side by side comparison in many, many years.

Chav is a derogatory term.

What type of distinction? Quality, performance? What did you find?

I have images of you being decked out in bling.

Thanks for the heads up

It's not the choice to use tilesets that resulted in a lackluster element of the end product. Remember, you're talking about a game that was designed for a middle-of-the-road machine in 1998 or 99 among other design choices. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I doubt NWN was released for 1998 middle of the road computers. 1998 middle of the road computers would be Pentium MMX processors and AMD K6 processors. Not to mention Winchips and . The minimum requirements for NWN is a Pentium II 450 MHz processor. Pentium III processors were just coming out in 1999, and a Pentium II 450 was still an excellent, high performance gaming machine. As was the brand new TNT2 chipset just released by nVidia later that year. The system requirements much closer to a 2002 (the game's release year) middle of the road computer. The idea for design to include the tile-based toolset is very much motivated by Bioware's desire to make the game mod friendly. They were setting up infrastructure for the online computer, and were very much hoping that the game's success would be accentuated with the online community making high quality adventures themselves. In fact, they even created the NWN Live team to create their own free adventures to prolong the use for their fans, which lead to projects such as The Witch's Wake (which a continuation was cancelled, likely due to the realization that this business model is not particularly profitable). Placing tiles is not a particularly difficult thing to do. There was no reason why they had to go with a tile-based system, from a hardware perspective. You were already getting more intricate level designs in games like Half-Life and Unreal. The problem of course, was that this was not easy. So the focus for the toolset was much easier content creation, which lead to artificial looking ramps for hills and whatnot. And because Bioware wanted to make the OC using only the toolset (likely to demonstrate that the toolset is powerful enough to make viable commercial game - a claim I wouldn't dispute despite what issues many seem to have with the OC). As a result, we get rather artificial looking areas. The choice to use the user-friendly tileset creation very likely resulted in the "lackluster" visual quality of the end product. And thank you for the points Cantousent.

THe offensive into Burma has paid off extensively. I have been able to capture Rangoon, which mean Moulmein and Tavoy were soon to follow. From Rangoon, I am using B-17s and B-24s to mine the harbours of Bangkok, and other Japanese Ports in the Gulf of Siam. Unfortunately my shore bombardment on Saipen was less successful. There are many large coastal guns, and they were able to inflict many hits on the ships, particularly the smaller ones, and it was enough to make the Task Force leader call off the attack. No ship is in danger of sinking, but some gun emplacements have been damaged. In any case, it's back to Pearl for repairs. Hollandia is being quite built up along the northern New Guinea. My plan is to make it a raiding base, where planes and raiders can inflict heavy damages upon ships heading to Truk and Rabaul. The only issue is getting fuel there is going to be a bit of a hassle. Going straight there from Hawaii involves running a gauntlet of Japanese airbases, whereas a trip to Australia, and around western New Guinea, will just take a very long time. Oh well, the small price of time to inflict (hopefully) heavy attritional losses.

The big issue I have with LCDs is the preferred resolution. There are still many games out there that I enjoy playing that come with fixed resolutions (typically 1024x768), and I would prefer to not deal with the degradation in image quality as the LCD attempts to simulate the resolution.

Do I get TOMBS points? To be fair, this situation can happen even with a private toolset. Time invested on making a toolset is not necessarily time that could be spent on making a better game, since the designers will probably use the toolset themselves. So there is already going to have to be some sort of time concentrated on the toolset, regardless of a release.

Yes. It was from a different thread. You see, Meta knows that that was something that he knew, that other people didn't know. So because he wasn't sure if it was the sinking of the Hood (since the Hood was sunk by a hit in the ammo magazine by the Bismarck), he tried sidestepping the issue by giving an example of something obscure that he DID know. It's all very elementary really.

I think his concern is that if the toolset, and probably more appropriately content creation, is TOO streamlined and makes concessions (such as using tiles), then (assuming the toolset is the same one used by the creators) we'll have to worry about these types of limitations in the professional game as well.

Was that by any chance the sinking of the Hood?

My favourite was when I tried attacking the man-with-a-stick militia man with a battleship...and lost. I'm not sure what he did. Toss his stick into the main battery, causing a jam and explosion on the ship, for a series of unfortunate and highly unlikely chain of events, blowing up the ammo magazine and subsequently putting a big hole in the ship. Or something.

What do you mean? I loved the unit health status in Civ. It makes the whole "Man with Stick beats Tank" so much less likely. It's not like I'd be controlling them doing elaborate flanking maneuvers or anything.

KAOS!

No. It's a large scale strategic game done at the macro level. You can watch some little animations, but I find they take too long so I just let it autoresolve really quickly and give me the details.

Well, for the most part I've been laying low, but I did want to have one last bit of fun. I'm waiting mostly for the Hellcat to become active, as it's a significant improvement over the Wildcats my carriers currently have. But I just sent out a huge carrier Task Force for one quick patrol. It consisted of 4 fleet carriers (Saratoga, Lexington, Essex, and Enterprise), and two Light Carriers (Independence and Princeton). 4 Destroyers and 5 light cruisers round out the escorts. I put William Halsey in command, since he has capable Air Skill, and is extremely aggressive. And wouldn't you know it, just south of Guam, I found CV Soryu. My attack was able to punch through well enough, shooting down a few Zeros and getting 17 1000 lb bombs to hit, and 2 torpedoes. At the same time, his strike force made a play towards my fleet, but they were chewed up by the large CAP protecting the fleet. No hits sustained on my part. The Soryu is sunk, and her flight crew gone with her. A big success for the Allies. I also sent out a surface fleet consisting mostly of refitted old battleships. They hope to do some convoy raiding themselves, and the Halsey's Task Force will provide air cover for them.

For building walls, I imagine you're talking about inside right? Because if you're going outside, you can just elevate the terrain and make walls that way. And they are walls to be walked on. Unfortunately, the interior tilesets are only flat. It would probably be possible to be creative with the much better outdoor terrain editor, and mimic something inside however. For building your city, check this out. I would think if you wanted to make a multilevelled city, it wouldn't be that difficult. As far as I know, the creator (Oerwinde) is not a computer programmer. This was his first screenshot. Check out this thread to see his work evolve. For building a Large Fountain, if you go into the object properties, you can change the length, width, and height of the object and make it bigger. As for your scripting issues, well, welcome to modding. I'm not sure how you were really able to get around this though. From what I have seen, to make something unique and meaningful, some form of scripting was required. When my friend made the SourceRacer mod for Half-Life 2, he had to jump right into aspects of the source code and edit the GUI of the actual game using C++. A game like Counterstrike requires a lot of difficult code work. I can't really think of any decent mods that didn't involve some sort of scripting/programming. Way back in the day there were some really good NWN scripting tutorials that was basically elementary programming for beginners. I don't know if they still exist, but they were somewhere out there in cyberspace. I know because I used them once upon a time. Once you get the hang of basic scripting, the big thing is basically learning the functions built into the game. You can go somewhere like the NWN Lexicon for that. Or just post questions on the Toolset parts of the Bioware forums.

I think Edmonton was burnt out by the 3rd period. Calgary was winning all the fights along the boards.