alanschu

Hmmm. If you play on higher diffculties, I bow before you. Is this in Medieval?

Why?

I think negative ad campaigns are annoying. I'm much more interested in hearing what a party's plans are in the upcoming term. In terms of voting practices, while I do have right-wing beliefs (fiscally), I typically like to see governments change, even if they aren't doing a "poor" job necessarily. It helps to provide accountability to governments. Here in Alberta the same party has been in control pretty much forever.

I'm not sure why people have such an anti-American sentiment. People talk as if we have crap relations with them at the moment. EG: Yes, a friendship with thim is alright, because we're each other's largest trading partner. A large part of Canada's economy is related to US trade. It's a parliamentary democracy, with a first-past the post system. There's 301(ish) seats in the House of Commons. The candidate that receives the most votes in a constiuency receives the seat. The party with the most seats in the house are declared the party in power, with the 2nd place party being the official opposition. The last time was 2000-2004. It is not uncommon to have a majority government. Minority governments are quite rare. Just guessing, but probably income tax The GST stands for Goods and Services Tax. It is typically only applied to things such as "luxury" items that are not necessities. Though it's a bit bogus, because things such as gasoline still get the GST, as well as other things that we can't really do without. Though AFAIK we don't get GST on basic utilities, and most food (at least if it's bought in a supermarket) does not have GST on it. The GST "hatred" is kind of silly, as it was brought in to replace the Manufacturer's Sales Tax. It actually helps Canada's export industry, as manufacturers no longer pay the tax when the commodity is created. Naturally, the public became upset because the tax was directly placed upon them (an economist would argue that it doesn't really matter where the tax is placed though...we all pay for it somehow). The current party in power, the Liberal Party, made the GST a big issue in the next election (and it has come up in all elections), stating they will remove it. They have yet to do so. All in all there are some things that I hate about the Canadian government system. John Nunziata actually voted against the Liberal's first budget, because they were not abolishing the GST. He was expelled from the party. According to Wikipedia though, it accounts for 15%-17% of Canada's federal tax revenues.

I don't remember that happening. Unless something changed more recently in a patch. I had no problems (seriously) persistently clicking on charm to improve the characters.

Ottawa has Toronto's number this season.

It did affect lots of people though.

In which aspect in particular? I'm also about to step out and get something to eat, so it might be a bit.

Fair enough.

To each his own I guess. I get way more out of the game when I roleplay it.

I have played through Morrowind. I actually enjoyed the game. And while I wouldn't disagree that characters had rich histories in books...that's not dialogue. Repeatedly mashing on the skills to improve their perception of you isn't exactly "engaging."

Once you get the hang of it, you'll love it (and hate it! sucks when YOUR guys freak out! :D)

I wonder if you actually played it. There was a known bug, that the developer admitted to, that deleted important system files when uninstalling the game. You wouldn't be able to start your computer after uninstalling the game. Odd how you were the only person that didn't seem affected by this.

Mmm, I was going to reply, but I'd like you to expand on your thoughts before I do, please. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What you are asking for would require many, many, many, many, MANY more animations in order for it to work. Art content has already resulted in an explosion of development costs, which is part of the reason why a game like Spore uses algorithmic patterns for its animations. But it's being used to animate non-human creatures based on their size, skeletal structure, etc. Stuff like this is also more expensive processor/RAM wise. Furthermore, the AI required would also be very expensive. Not just dollar wise, but in system requirements. You'd be requiring the AI to do some sort of search algorithm to determine the best course of action to do at any instance. And given you want these actions to be fast, it's going to be performing this very frequently. But the thing is, for the AI to actually be good, it has to anticipate what it thinks YOU will try to do, as well as predicting how results we look into the future, based on a whole bunch of conditional probabilities that would become murderous for the CPU to try to calculate in a quick manner. Even if you store the probability distribution table in memory. Finally, this is only concerning a 1-on-1 fight. What happens if there is more actors? Even if it's all 1-on-1 fights, it still causes more AI searches to be performed to determine the best action in every situation (I couldn't even imagine the heuristic involved to determine the cost of each action). What about N vs 1 fights, where N > 1. Now you have to have your AI determine what to do when fighting MULTIPLE targets (which is sick), and create even more animations to take care of that. Trying to mimic the Darth Maul vs Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon fight would not be easy to do in a video game. And how does the AI react in a multiple enemy situation? There's been no success on finding an optimal solution for a battle with two sides, both sides having more than one guy. So if you're leaving things up to the AI for determining who it fights, it's not unlikely that it might do something "stupid" based on its target selection algorithm. If you'd like me to go into more detail, I can.

Fortunately my computer is plenty fast and restarts the game in no time Someone somewhere probably just forgot to put in a 'delete' line, and if it's not picked up when it happens, then good luck finding it.

If that's the case then fine. Though you already stated your intent when you said "why bother" because you already knew the outcome. You're just trying to rationalize your decision to take you sweet time.

That thought occured to me but to give hime a chance to explain i imagined this to be in development fantasy land - infinite money and time. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Either that or they'd have to do some sort of algorithmic process ala Spore. Though I'm not too sure how that game does it either, nor how easy it is to program or anything like that. Even then, I doubt you could get the algorithms to properly apply rules to people so that their animations would look proper. I bet you'd get wierd results. Though I'm not so sure because he is tossing around words like "simply" and "just do this" a bit liberally.

If there's a leak though, you'll still expend it all.

Hmm you could play Baldur's Gate 100 times and it would never go stale. New games they make these days. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> False. 100 times playing the same game gets stale. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Nonsense. You're just not a die hard BG fan like me. BG and Fallout never grow tiring no matter how many times I've played them. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Then why do you buy new games?

And obviously doesn't care much about her hometown.

It did slow things down for me. I don't recall a workaround though, outside of getting the fan made patch (which may not have even fixed it). Unless the work around was "restart the game" at which point I performed that work around often

Right

It's called roleplaying. If your character cares about the village, then you should proceed to find the GECK as fast as humanly possible. If your character doesn't care about the village, then don't worry about it.

Just inexperienced. The tactics of the game are very important, and you want to do whatever you can to try to hit the flanks of your opponents. Routing is great, as it spreads. One squad panicking causes other squad's morale to sufffer, and once they've routed, it makes life easy on you as you mop things up.

Well, slowdowns caused by that memory leak are a bug