Humodour

Yeah, in fact, I'm gonna go start an Assassin that throws blades everywhere and kicks smegheads in the face repeatedly. P.S. type /playersX - where X is 1 to 8, and sets the game difficulty (but also level of XP rewards and item drops).

Hey, just saw this sorry. I'd stop putting points in energy if I were you (most people suggest base energy). You'll probably soon realise it was a bad idea to abandon vitality, though it can make things more entertaining as you pay more attention in combat (or die a lot). Dex is ok to keep your blocking up, but it's all or nothing. General rule is: enough strength for gear, enough dex for max block, the rest into vitality. Generally multi-element sorcs go 20 frozen orb, 1 cold mastery (pierce does wonders), then the rest of their points in another skill + its synergies. Example - charged bolt sorc takes: 20 frozen orb 1 to 10 cold mastery (+ skills helps here, I'd go 5 for a fresh char) 20 lightning mastery 20 charged bolt 20 lightning (synergy) 1 to 10 warmth (+skills helps here, I'd go 5 as above) Since I doubt you'll get above level 80 it's probably not worth thinking about the rest of your points. Obviously items to look out for are +skills and fast cast. Energy shield is dangerous. It's generally an all or nothing deal. You'll note it requires a decent investment in telekinesis as well in order to not sap your mana ball completely within a few hits (no mana = no teleport, no killing = dead). What Azure says is generally on the money, though I'd disagree with him about energy. The most fun sorc is an enchant sorc, though. Although if I were going to build a starting sorc it'd probably be a Hydra sorc... either way, Sorcs aren't good starting chars IMHO... very item dependent and fiddly. *cough* MP with me! I promise to play a 'unique' build and let you set the pace *cough*

Could somebody please ban Nick_i_am? His signature smells like Walsingham after he's on a training run with his unit.

Absolutely Fabulous!

I went to do the zombie survival test and got the following ad: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagea...TzIIT0IfHVpEYtg (hundreds of thousands of unhappy ones) Zombies: You Have a 75% Chance of Survival! You could take on 28 five year old kids in a fight. Pogo stick?

Hey, ****ing sweet mate. Law right?

This just in: my liver and I aren't speaking

Your time would be better spent learning how to programme. If you really insist on doing something involving game development during school, the Python SDL wrapper PyGame offers a great compromise between coding & control vs. rapid development & ease of use.

Haha, YES! Burn Notice is great. I wouldn't mind a bit of this, either:

Cheers for that mate! Yeah, I wasn't really paying attention to AP till I read this interview here and I started to get a bit pumped about it. And what do you know, they spelt his name correctly.

I really wouldn't mind if they were NOLF type gadgets tbh.

It means they're trying to pull a Blizzard.

Anyway... I'll give you somewhat of an answer. Mathematics is the closest subject to programming you'll ever do without actually doing programming (there is a huge overlap in the logical processes involved and abstract thinking skills utilised). Try and take the more advanced maths classes in highschool. Also related is that a lot of graphics programming involves linear algebra, which is the mathematics of vectors and matrices (which you might cover somewhat in calculus, trig or geometry). As for writing... well, I thoroughly enjoyed English literature classes. It might sound weird, but I found analysing a poem or Shakespearean play to be a rather logical and entertaining process - quite similar to thinking about how to solve a coding problem in many ways. It's been my experience that creative writing isn't something you can learn in a year or two, though (it's mostly intuitive). The best you can do is pick up good style and structure tips from analysing the works of others (hence we arrive back at why it wouldn't hurt to take English literature). I took a software design class for 2 years in high school. It taught a lot of valid stuff, but nothing you couldn't learn at university in first year, and it was very boring (probably because good software design is generally common sense). I'd generally recommend staying away from computer classes in highschool and experimenting with a nice starting language on your own until university (like Python, and to a lesser extent Haskell, Java or C++). Science classes are great fun. You get to blow lots of stuff up, burn things, and melt stuff with acids in chemistry... but overall I'd say take it because you're interested in it, not because you expect it to help you with programming.

Um... no. Maybe if this was 10 years ago an RPG/FPS crossover would be risky.

true, lightning javazons have that problem too, but hammerdins are fine, because blessed hammer does magic damage, not physical, and only like one critter pretty much in the whole game is magic immune Wow, that makes Hammerdins even more boring than usual then. Honestly, immunes make things a bit exciting. You know - clicking more than one button for once. But see, this is why I hate cookie cutter builds - they're boring as bat**** (and yes, that's saying something in Diablo 2). mkreku: you're not alone. If you make it to nightmare, the thing to remember is that his red lightning hose does lightning damage. If you get about %40+ lightning resistance it makes the world of difference. Another trick which you probably discovered is to either run around him or away from him when he shoots it. It does damage per second like act 3 shaman's inferno, so it's nasty.

I'm surprised they didn't eliminate it in Diablo 2. It was a problem right through, yet they didn't bother to fix it in LoD or the 3 subsequent massive patches. I'll shed no tears.

I'm sorry, but could you justify that? YouTube has probably done more to do free advertising for the entertainment industry than it ever has to damage it through piracy. You'll note YouTube doesn't allow more than 10 minute long videos and the quality is not good (about 200 to 300kbps per second - DVD quality is about 40 times that) and the size is only 320 * 240. Audio is similarly low quality. It also immediately takes down any show it is requested to (you know - the legal DMCA way). You'd have to be pretty desperate, determined and uninformed to successfully use YouTube to consistently view illegal material. YouTube is first and foremost an exposure service - piracy doesn't really even rank in there, as this data will no doubt prove, and which some more prominent entertainment companies like Sony seem to have already figured out and capitalised on. YouTube isn't profitable for Google, and it eats about $1 million in bandwidth each day. So I'm bemused as to how Viacom thinks it can show Google profits off Viacom's supposed losses. Random n00b and Mesh are spot on. And apparently Viacom is currently planning to launch their own video sharing service to rival YouTube... they don't want to win this case - they want free access to multi-million dollar data. I'm not clear, but I'm not positive Viacom actually wanted the usernames etc. specifically, just accurate view stat information w/all the duplicate views eliminated, and perhaps those two things go together. Not knowing how such databases work, it feels a little odd that there isn't any other way of giving Viacom the stat information it wants w/out also having to fork over such information. Google wants to anonymise the data. Viacom wants usernames and IPs. Go figure.

When I do 4 characters I find it's most fun if they are multiclass. More powerful, too.

Walsingham: Slashdot (ya ya biased fanboys... really, it's pretty neutral as a whole) has good commentary on that issue. Certainly, the release of Vista has seen gains for Linux and Mac. Nothing major, but still above average and, more importantly, consistent market share growth. Meanwhile Microsoft is resisting open source with all its might but they do seem to acknowledge the inevitable shift from selling programming to selling consultancy and support. Once Balmer and Gates fall out of the picture more, I imagine we'll see a significant shift in Microsoft as its other heads are far less hostile to open source. It'll be interesting to see how their plans to shift Office sales from once-off to pay-per-year affect the rise of things like the free OpenOffice competitor (which is actually surprisingly good, at least the word processor). I think it's a smart move for them, because it gives them a consistent income source and is justifiable through consultancy provided. I think Vista's below expected performance spurred such a move as they realised they can't keep selling the same product with little variation to a saturated market - especially not in the wake of free alternatives which only ever improve. On the other hand people will pay for the guarantee of professional consultancy. Meanwhile Firefox looks set to become the dominant Browser some time soon (but moreover it has set a precedent in that any new innovation in this area must be free and most likely open source). Edit: Meanwhile Google has, fortunately, maintained its strong open source and "don't be evil attitude". Sure, it's had some ****-ups, and made some questionable decisions, but at its heart it is an open source bastion in what's expected to be an uncaring corporate world, and there's little sign this will change much in the years to come. We have far more to fear from the entertainment industry.

Yeah actually, not a bad solution; that way people could choose who they played with.

Slept for 14 hours. Slightly more than average for me, but I still envy you. Of course my body did have to repair all the cuts and bruises I scored whilst drunk.

Petition to have that smiley obliterated from the boards.

Thanks to all of you for creating and modding one of my favourite PC games.

I'll stick to the Commonwealth games.

KOTOR was non-linear and adaptive? Of course, if it's all in what happens at the end, that's kind of silly. I know they often tout how awesome it is that you get allies and enemies at the end, but honestly, people don't care so much; people care more about consistency for the entire game. So sure, make the end enemies/allies change depending on your choices, but don't make that the only time your choices count.