Humodour

So I was randomly installing Divine Divinity on WINE since everyone says it works flawlessly there. I needed to get a patch so I went to Larian's website. Meanwhile I'm wondering "So whatever happened to Divine Divinity 2? It's been 7 years now." Lo and behold, I am greeted by the following: http://www.larian.com/egodraconis.php Divine Divinity 2 comes out this year. Anybody else excited? Looks like they've got a new engine, and you get to play as a dragon lord - so your character can switch between fighting as a dragon or a human. Sounds cool. I hope they still have character classes, unless they have something more akin to SPECIAL.

Microsoft has suffered the worst year in their existence, with the first ever year on year loss, which can only be partially blamed on the global recession (hint: netbooks): http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsofts_...rd_quarter_ever Apple has experienced the best year in their existence, despite the global recession, with their most recent quarter even being the best ever: http://au.gear.ign.com/articles/975/975650p1.html Winds of change and all.

That's pretty big. Enough for about 4 or 5 dedicated development teams. So certainly enough to work on at least 3 major games simultaneously.

That's Alpha Protocol. Well, that's one piece of info at least: none of Obsidian's current projects use the Unreal engine, besides AP.

Well, whatever, miscommunication abounds. The point Gorgon was making, largely tangentially, was that Kant was not a deontonologist, he just (seemingly) wrote from the perspective of the ethical framework he was currently analysing. And yeah, to a deontologist, the ethical choice is logically the 'best' choice, but from our perspective, it's often the opposite (who on earth would condone telling a murderer where their victim is hiding?). Edit: I did a quick dig, and I'm seeming to come to the same conclusion as you - Kant was a absolutist deontologist personally. Can somebody confirm/deny? Frankly, deontology is rather the opposite of utilitarianism.

*sigh*. You assumed your ethical system is the correct/only ethical system in your post (reproduced below), didn't you? If you'd actually understood Gorgon, I doubt you would have posted that. Not to a deontologist, or various other ethical frameworks. The 'better choice' depends on the ethical system. I'm pretty sure he was just pointing out that Kant didn't personally subscribe to deontology, he merely defined it. I could be wrong.

You can also go further up, say /. If you have patience and no one else answers, I can offer you a screenshot tomorrow. I press the '/' button, or type it into a command line..There are up and down arrows but they don't lead anywhere that shows the drives like the system dropdown menu. Maybe it's just that one application. Um. Ubuntu automatically mounts all drives, partitions and external storage. However, for internal drives/partitions, I often have to explore them (open as a folder) once at the start of each session for it to mount, but it will appear under 'Places' for you to do that easily. Assuming you've done that, go to /media and look for 'disk' or whatever the name of your drive is. If you're at command line, type: cd / cd /media ls And that will display all disks available. Oh, just to be clear, you don't NEED command line for this. You could just as easily click 'Places' then 'Computer' and see a GUI explorer view of it, like 'My Computer' on Windows.

I'd say 2 major projects + 2 or three smaller ones (including big projects in the early stages of production, expansions, etc). That sounds about right for a studio of 100 (I think the real number was actually about 120 last I heard). It'd be nice for somebody to dig up the real value, though.

Look up 'ethics' in a dictionary/encyclopedia: ethics is a system. You and I may have different ethical systems, and thus what's good to me may not be what's good to you. As such, the 'better choice' for a deontologist is to tell the truth. Whether or not you think that is the better choice is irrelevant to the ethical system of the deontologist. Kant definined numerous different ethical systems. He's worth reading. My ethical system is roughly utilitarian humanism.

How can you not have juries? That's just asking for trouble. Namely corruption and authoritarianism.

That was a serious example. You talk to him, he gives you a quest, you come back, he changes his mind and determines that you're not worthy of the weapon he crafted.

What about your LOLcats collection?

Can you refresh my memory? Gharbad the Weak. Not to mention that the direction Blizzard takes Dioablo 3 does not need to be in complete agreement with Diablo 2. Not many (any?) sequels are. Diablo 2 certainly changed a lot of Diablo 1 canon and backstory. I never did say that demons aren't evil, though. Nor has Blizzard. The point I was trying to get across was that many angels prize order above all else (including good), which provides room for shades of grey in how Blizzard portrays them and weaves the plot. The information released so far is simply that some angels wanted to destroy Sanctuary because they felt humans were ripe for corruption and chaos. Another aspect of the plot will probably be the notion that since humans are the offspring of demons and angels, they have immense magical powers unavailable to normal angels and demons, and since the world stone has been destroyed, these powers will no longer be dampened (under the World Stone, successive generations of humans lost more and more of their abilities). In fact the world stone's magical dampening net may have been what was preventing the above angels from destroying Sanctuary in the first place. So even without painting the angels as capable of evil, Blizzard could still fairly easily bring the player into conflict with heaven.

That's kinda hard to buy when we've faced thousands of demons, every last one of which was bloodthirsty and evil. And the leaders of hell are called the Prime Evils, with the Lesser Evils and Great Evils under them. Babylon 5 had the same problem; while the Vorlons weren't as good as they seemed, the Shadows were every bit as bad as they seemed. When we meet Gramnob, Demon of Liberty, and he doesn't immedately try to eat our face, then I'll believe Hell != Evil. We've already met a few such demons in Diablo 1 and 2. Anyway, I'm just reporting scraps of info Blizzard has released.

Since I've been running Ubuntu on a really crappy computer for the past 3 months, I can't use WINE (comp too slow), and there's no CD drive to install an XP partition. As such I've built up an array of fun Flash games: Gem Tower Defence: http://www.gemtowerdefense.com/ Bloons 3 (Tower Defence): http://www.towerdefence.net/games-192-Bloons_3.php The Space Game (RTS + Tower Defence): http://www.towerdefence.net/games-228-The_Space_Game.php More TD: http://towerdefencegames.com/ http://www.towerdefence.net/?page=allgames&ls=asd

any OS that is more user friendly is necessarily less powerful. i don't use linux to play games or have fun. i use linux to develop signal processing systems. at one point red hat was the only NSA approved linux distribution for carrying out the types of missions i'm interested in (and fedora/red hat are essentially the same minus support). taks Ah, fair enough. I've been looking at Solaris for that purpose. Hopefully now that Oracle bought Sun so they'd own Solaris, it'll get even better. One day I'll try compiling Gentoo or Linux From Scratch just for the experience.

I've heard that Tyreal theory before, but I don't think it's correct (though certainly the plot will be less Diablo-centric). Considering we already know one of the combat areas (acts?) is Heaven, I imagine that part of our job will be fighting Heaven's minions, perhaps corrupted, but perhaps not. Heaven = order, Hell = chaos. Good and evil factor into it less than you think. Sort of like Vorlons and Shadows. Apparently half the angels wanted to destroy humans (and Sanctuary) and half wanted to let them live and see what they became. The vote was 2 - 3 in favour of letting humans live, with Tyreal casting one of the 'live' votes, but the head of the angels casting a 'die' vote. So with that in mind it's not hard to imagine a civil war in heaven resulting in the good angels losing power.

I told you so!

i would never use ubuntu. taks Well there's your problem. You can also go further up, say /. If you have patience and no one else answers, I can offer you a screenshot tomorrow. I press the '/' button, or type it into a command line..There are up and down arrows but they don't lead anywhere that shows the drives like the system dropdown menu. Maybe it's just that one application. Um. Ubuntu automatically mounts all drives, partitions and external storage. However, for internal drives/partitions, I often have to explore them (open as a folder) once at the start of each session for it to mount, but it will appear under 'Places' for you to do that easily. Assuming you've done that, go to /media and look for 'disk' or whatever the name of your drive is. If you're at command line, type: cd / cd /media ls And that will display all disks available.

Did I mention how much Giants rocks? You don't see games like that anymore. (Do you?)

I think the argument that everybody is too "mature" these days for Fallout 1 style saving and loading is pretty ridiculous tbh.

BEST. GAME. EVAR.

Yeah, I know the name "Scott Evertts" from BIS, and I know he's awesome. I just confused why he's awesome (Fallout with Torment).

Damien "Puuk" Foletto Scott Warner is currently the lead designer at Pandemic Studios. Obsidian's Scott Everts is an artist. Wow, epic fail on my part. Cheers.

Is that Puuk? Or is Scott the guy who did a bunch of PS:T stuff?