metadigital

Yeah, it sounds like a particular graphics function is blowing a stack. It's not uncommon for the intro graphics to work, presumably so that the publisher gets their name in lights even if the game has to be returned ("no such thing as bad publicity" ? ) ... Win XP has compatibility properties for the runtime objects. Check the properties in the third tab (conveniently called "Compatibility") to see if they help.

Same engine as Pirates (2004), able to zoom in-to and out-of the terrain; shorter games (hours, like the original, rather than days, like the subsequent sequels): gamespy p1 page 2 ... Religious beliefs have had just as much of an impact on history as political systems, but until now the Civilization games didn't tackle this topic. Civ IV is adding religion as a new gameplay angle. The designers are trying to avoid controversy by implementing it so that all religions function identically within the game -- they're just names -- but they'll have a big impact on the strategy. Seven faiths are represented from around the world: Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Christian. Each faith is tied in with a certain technological advancement -- the first nation to discover that technology also discovers that religion, and has the option of making one of their cities the holy city for that faith. You can also choose a religion to be the official state religion of your nation. Much like culture, religion helps to spread your influence beyond your political borders on the map. For instance, you can send out missionaries to try to convert citizens in other cities to your home religion. These converted citizens will not only send money to your empire, they'll be more likely to have favorable diplomatic relationships with you. ... page 3 ... Of course, conquered people who have a different religion than your state religion will naturally be pretty unhappy. In later eras you can research technology to mitigate these effects, but religion now has to factor into your overall strategy. It adds another level of depth to the game, and hopefully won't ruffle too many feathers. ... ... Six victory conditions are available, so as with the earlier Civ games, there are plenty of avenues to explore. A "Domination" victory is achieved by simply controlling the majority of the planet, whereas a "Diplomatic" victory involves having the U.N. elect you as World Leader after you butter up the other leaders. A "Cultural" victory is available to whoever can get three cities that each have over 100,000 culture (build lots of theatres and monuments.) As before, you can also be the first to build a spaceship to colonize the Alpha Centauri system for the win. One way to take over the world without slogging your way through years of combat is to form new, permanent alliances with other nations. This in effect joins two civs together, even to the point where they share line of sight and wonder bonuses. Choose your allies carefully: there are 26 different leaders available for the 18 different civilizations. It's the leader's personality that determines how a civilization behaves, not the civilization itself -- so if the French are being led by Louis the XIVth, your relationship with them will be considerably different than if Napoleon is in charge. ... ... Certain conditions might trigger off the appearance of a great scientist, a great engineer, a great merchant, a great holy man, or a great artist (who looks like Elvis, natch). Each has his or her own special abilities. You can have them hang out in a city to bestow long-term benefits. Or, you can use them up: a great engineer can be used, for instance, to instantly finish a city building project, while a scientist can instantly give you a new technology. Or, two great people can be combined to kick off a golden age for your nation. ... [/i] page 4 (w00t)

No, Baley, don't bother with that manual ... you won't need it ... "

Well, I'm the star, naturally: My #1 result is Frodo Baggins My #2 result is Legolas.

You are for genocide and against test-match cricket? Pick up your gaunlet, sir, I challenge thee to a duel!

We have to submit moves? "

:angry: <_< Kaftan, what is the game asking for and what platform are you playing it on (i.e. Windows version) ?

I've just started Grim Fandango (I'll be disapearing back to it shortly ) and I have a different irritation (no rash, though): the relative directional controls change according to a (secret) agenda at randomly set places within the game environment, so that pressing "up" (straight ahead) might move you around the expanse of a hidden underground cavern to get a key, but equally might send you back to the room you just left! Apart from that I'm having a ball.

I have little time for the C64 ... poor relative to the grand Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs' Apple ][, complete with 48kB main memory, and 16kB language card (additional memory). DOS was loaded via the floppy drive into the (1MHz?) 6502 8-bit processor. (The IBM PC was 16 bit.) Anyone remember the Beagle Bros? Of course, my first computer experience was the school's Challenger 1P, which had 1kB of RAM (but there were a couple that had expanded RAM of 4kB). Then my university had one of the first computers in the world, it was still on display and functioning: card readers! Anyway, back on topic: I had about 400 360kB 5.25" diskettes of games for the Apple ][, including all the Infocom adventures and many, many arcade and adventure games. There is no way I could even name all the Fantasy games on the Apple, even with my old catalogue ...

Hoth hasn't been in any KotOR games.

I know what you mean, but don't forget a couple of things: - Consumers (that's you and me) expect much more from games now, and we've usually seen it all before - the days when we see something truly original in games are over because it's all been done. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> We expect more, yes, but we get less. "... It's all been done."? Garbage! We are getting slop that has been done so much that it is chich

I would develop the mod. First of all, it will be excellent practice; you will gain more skills in the doing than can be got in ten times ten times the corresponding time in a passive learning environment, like a classroom. Secondly, if you have a mod to show, this is your "killer app" for your resume. Even if you don't go inot game programming, or design, you will have demonstrated: initiative, self-starter drive and motivation, determination and closing ability to finish. All of these skills are in high demand in the workforce: if you can produce proof of them, you will walk into a job in front of people a lot older and more experienced. Once you have the mod, whether you sell it is another matter altogether. I wouldn't try to sell it, because I doubt very much whether you will get permission; even should this be overcome, you will still have penurious royalties to give back to LA.

Call in the Barber's Federation, we have a plethora of hair-splitters here! The size of the character literals? To quote John P. MacEnroe: "You cannot be serious!" The original poster was asking for tips on what languages were worth studying for games design; instead of constructive comments, like mine, there have been a number of detractors trying to win "technical victories" over a generalisation I made to give some perspective of languages to hav0k.

Think about it: * Malak the Betrayer (and Revan the amnesiac) * Wound in the Force * True Sith What do these three things have in common? They allow for the same cookie cutter story to work whether you are Lucifer or Sir Galahad. DSers are reduced to playing the reluctant ANTI-HERO instead of having an actual Dark Side path. It appears KOTOR 3 is going down that all too familiar path. Hopefully, though, at some point, the LS and DS paths will be much different (yes, even if that requires two seperate cds). <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I must agree here; the trend in modern game production is towards greater efficiency in the process; much like the Japanese car manufacturers revolutionized the car industry in the latter half of the twentieth century with their kaizen philosophy and focus on improving the production process rather than the product, we now have games producers that can produce a game with relatively little investment in IP. For example, let me quote a review for Psychonauts, from this month's UK PC Gamer magazine, issue 150, July 2005, pp100-1. ... Double Fine, the studio responsible, is home to a hero of the '90s: Tim Shafer. A script writer on the early Monkey Island games, her went on to create what must be recognised as the finest adventure games to have existed: Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. Back then Shafer did something special to a fine format. He looked at adventure games and he decided to make a new rule: Everything has to be Game. If an object was present in a scene, then there must be a unique gag for looking at it, picking it up, using it, even talking to it. "I'm sorry, I can't do that" was not an acceptable response. If the player could think of it, it was to be met with a written reply. Every scene was pored over, explored and experimented with, giving rise to the magical and delicious impression that someone thought of you when they made this. ... ... Games only occasionally have the kind of moments that follow. The first came when exploring the cabin area where the children sleep. A few of the vast cast of fellow psi-campers were hanging around, having conversations. ... But one character stood on his own, his head pressed to the building. I 'used' him to talk, and he explained he was waiting to watch the girls get changed through a hole in the wall. ... I went to 'use' him again, but accidentally hit the wrong button, and smacked him with Raz's whopping great psi-punch. But I didn't lose a life, receive a warning message, or watch him ignore my violence. Instead, his head was pushed through the tiny hole, leaving his tubby body and little legs waggling off the ground. I dashed inside, and there was his head, stuck through, dazed and confused. And there, in that moment, there's a rush. The realisation that something far more involved is happening here. And it wasn't a fluke. Everything is game. Puch someone, jump on someone, and there's a unique reply -- appropriate to their character, relevant to your action. ... This sort of detail is sadly lacking in -- seemingly all -- modern games. In the rush to launch yet another shallow saccharine-rush rip-off, real gaming is being left behind. Seemingly, there is no HBO game producer and the David Attenboroughs of the games industry are dinosaurs marked for termination ... I just bought Grim Fandango, and I shall spend the next few days playing it. Not because the graphics are superb, but because the narrative is compelling. There were comments made in this and earlier threads about the importance of a new engine for any sequel. I would point out to you that that direction leads us further into the doldrums: the last Star Trek: Elite Force game was an improved graphics engine with a plot that was a direct copy of the previous game! It even had the same training mission! (The only difference, apart from the improved polygon count, was Patrick Stewart doing the voice over.) Bring back the story! Forget the special effects, they're nice to have, not deal-breakers. PS The fact that LA produced the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango is excruciatingly ironic; they have "evolved" into a crap "fast-food" game producer from a "fair-trade organic wholefood home cooking" one.

We had a discussion about this in the general forum, IIRC, and Cloris was quite adament that there are no examples in history of absolute morality; i.e. any moral code that you might like to name has been broken by some "civilzation" in our recorded history. I did challenge her on several codes, like extreme p

I should kill you for saying this. You just dissed the Dean of Science Fiction. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Not really, I suggested that he tends to recycle some common (to him) conceits in his novels, like telepathic powers and a cynical evaluation of society and religion. All of which are pretty good things, just I found it a bit repetitive ...

Get everyone in the US to move to Las Vegas and wait for the critical mass to bend space-time ...

... And speak in complete sentences.

>Bing!< And so I do! Are you American, Meta? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Nope. (Don't worry, I'm on the winning side.:D)

I was talking about a virtual body, i.e. transferring the intellect of a dead person into a computer. Granted, some sort of sensory input would need to be wired up, otherwise all our current psychological evidence would suggest that the intelligence would go mad ...

... And there were no more terrorists, and no more arguments and disputes, and we all went to live in the gingerbread house at the end of lollipop lane in the land of chocolate ... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> What is it with you and war? Do you enjoy it? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Where did that come from? No, actually, I don not enjoy it. (My father fought in WW2: in both the European and Pacific theatres.) I do see it as inevtiable -- at least for the foreseeable future. And creating clones for warfare is just nonsensical. For a start, the clones will need to be taught, much like our children are, for a decade at least, to be able to understand their function and perform it well. It would be cheaper and easier to use some other mechanism, like a killer virus that all the "friendlies" have been vaccinated against ...

I strongly suspect that when science can re-animate the intellect of a dead person, we will see no appreciable difference in their personality ... after all, the only difference to the intellect is that they have a new body ...

So you admit that you wouldn't sustain a relationship with her. It's a short-term event, at best. Personally I have wasted far too much time with people I don't like already, I'm not about to do it anymore. (It's a function of age.) I put it to you that the "sex" you would have with this Paris would be meaningless; more like doing the ironing than climbing Everest. It would be a chore, to achieve a secondary aim: the fame and feduciary success. As I said, you may have different standards, different goals. I will only connect to another human being where I am fully metally and emotionally connecting: all other sexual congress merely feels cheap, like a McDonald's thickshake tastes of plastic because of the straw that you must suck it through. That's what I have against her. She's a waste of space. No-one would seriously want to have a relationship with her for who she is, only for what she can give them. I would say I feel sorry for her, but I don't. She has too much money and has had far too many opportunities for me to feel any sympathy for her.

Actually, I've known some people whose personalities have been fundamentally changed by blood transfusions and cardiovascular surgery. That experiment with neurons might not end well at all. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Eh? A blood transfusion that changes someone's personality? You'd better write that up and send it in for peer review! That sort of discovery is revolutionary, to say nothing of the social implications! Forgive my skepticism, but how can that be? What mechanism is changing the brain functions? Different blood type? New Antibodies? That is very difficult to believe.