Bay 12 Games Forum

So I took a short four year break from DF and started getting back into things this weekend. I got a fort rolling with up to 62 dwarves (and 32 pets/livestock), got a nice little tavern/inn set up and it was all humming along nicely. I got visited by a "mega beast" of the wereiguana variety. I dispatched my military to kill it and had a few instances of lycanthrope take hold on a few of my dwarves after this event. People would turn in my hospital and apparently bite some of the people that came to defend. Needless to say, I'm currently sitting at 49 dwarves (13 dead) and was working on making all the dead dwarves their own marble coffins and statues in the image of each. All of the sudden, the sim speed just tanked. I get about a step a second. My CPU is not even touched, so I don't think DF is number crunching something ridiculous (pathfinding, etc.) but my time advancement is just abysmal right now.
Is there a well known bug that could cause this that I'm not aware of?

I only saw mention of it once, and I figure I'll start a thread on it.

http://www.grimdawn.com/

From some of the creators of Titan Quest, it's a dark Diablo-like game using a modified Iron Lore (TQ) engine.

I dropped in a purchase/donation already.  Looks decent so far.

Inventory:

Generic Combat screens:

Combat Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqGP4LT_cYo&hd=1

So, I got tired of living alone and signed up for one of those dating sites... woo.  Not the topic, but I figure I should explain why I'm looking through tons of photos of people on my spare time. 

Scanning through pictures upon pictures I find one recurring thing and it makes me wonder:

Why do you think people take a picture of themselves in the driver's seat of their cars?  I've seen photo after photo of a person sitting in the driver's seat holding their phone up in front of or off to the passenger seat to take their own picture.

Yeah, there's a fair share of people taking a "mirror" in the bathroom pictures as well... but I found it odd that someone would sit inside their car to take a self photo.

Is it just me?  Am I really that "rude" because I do not tell everyone I see "Good Morning" before I start talking?

I'm sitting at work right now and for the past 6 months or so, the guy who empties the trash walks by and insists on saying "Good Morning" to me, and I'm thinking about not replying with "Good Morning."  I don't see the point of doing it.

There's also one guy in my work group that will insist on saying "Good Morning/Evening/etc" if I message him with something. I can assume the first thing he will reply with is a singular IM of greeting before answering the question I asked.

I don't consider myself rude, but I don't see the purpose of needlessly greeting all the time.

Is it just me or is anyone else seriously disappointed in this "sandbox"?

I actually loved the scale, story (even though it was pretty shallow), and adventure that was in GTA IV and decided that Rockstar could probably provide a fun game with RDR, but I was sorrily disappointed.  The only real fun I had was hunting down the treasures which is just a side aspect of the game.

I know it sounds juvenile, but you can't hire prostitutes.  There is a story rail that has no branches as far as I can see.  It doesn't matter if you decide to shoot all the villagers in a town, more will magically appear around the corner and you can just duck into one of the mission dots and help the sheriff as if nothing happened and you're treated as the hero in the mission even though you just killed 50 odd villagers including the merchants.  The missions only give you fame, no infamy, so you are pretty much forced to play the game as the hero type unless you're bored out of your mind... and that will happen.

There's one mission you get right away (at nightfall in the ranch) to patrol at night.  You follow a dog around and he leads you to a horse thief that you "deal with" then morning rises.  Cool, I can do this again the next night!  Wait, dog... why are you taking me over... oh hell, the horse thief I killed last night is back... in the same exact location?  Lame.

I got bored of the hero missions and decided to pop open the cheats and see what happens if you go pure evil (and that's where I found disappointment... not from cheating, but from the pure lack of realism and choice.)  Let's say you take the "evil" route and defy the law, get your bar maxed out to the "dark side" and a hooker walks up to you.  "Sorry Ma'am.  I'm married." WTF!

Let's try robbing a train.  You'd see old western movies... this was profitable.  Ride up along the train, jump aboard, pull out your gun, the people just sit there.  Fine, I'll kill them all and take their money, from all five of them.  Wow.  I got $10.  Let's check out the luggage cars... nothin'.  Maybe I can steal the train and drive it.  Nope.  Hop back on the horse and ride off.  Disappointed.

Now, about skinning animals.  There's actually some good money to be made doing this.  Unfortunately, you have to sit through a cut scene EVERY time you skin an animal.  That is, unless you find the bug that if you put your horse on top of the creature you can skin it without the cut scene, but good luck getting the horse to stay there.

Now, the treasure maps were pretty cool, I'll give them that.  You get a map with some pictures of terrain and an "X" where you'll find the treasure.  You pop open the map, try to figure out where this terrain feature is and head that way... but it's pretty sad when that's the only really fun aspect of the game.

I just lost a fortress of 72 to 12 goblins... of course, I didn't have any military planning or trained, so they all went gung-ho wrestlers on the goblins, and I lost every single one.  It didn't help that I have two invasions at once, but I had a caravan at my depot so I burrowed my dwarfs inside the gate and waited.  The goblins took out all the trader guards and proceeded to wipe the floor with me.

Today someone at work tried to tell me that +ve is a common convention for "positive" and -ve is commonly used for "negative" in documents.

I personally have never seen it and a rather quick internet search netted me few results.  Is this something being taught in college courses as shorthand for positive/negative?  Wouldn't it jsut be easier to use +/- ?

My personal opinion on the matter is that it's like saying "NIC Card" or "PIN Number" where you have a redundant word or letter.  They look like negative've and positive've to me.

I'm not sure why I'm posting this... maybe to get feedback, similar feelings... maybe even support(?) from someone.

I'm a professional developer.  Started off as a PC tech support guy for a small company in a small town.  If it was in a metal case, I could fix it.  I moved to phone support for a very large (fortune 100, international) company with help "networking" from a friend.  I went from phone support to field support and eventually into web development (coldFusion) and later into eLearning development (Flash/C/C++/C#).  (I loved programming as a hobby...it seemed to fit.)  I've grown to realize over the past few weeks that either the "Peter Principle" is starting to kick in, or I desperately need to go back to support.

We started using Scrum project management at work.  We previously had no real project management.  It was all, "I think it will take X days" type project management.  In other words... zero, zilch, nada.  I worked well in this environment.  I turned out a few huge multinational applications to support our coursework, saved the company millions, blah blah...  I began working with Scrum I've realized that I hate knowing what I'm going to be doing two weeks from now or even 2 days from now.  It's so tedious and numbing.  Sure, the boss loves it.  He can start giving better predictions on when things are to be finished.  This makes the corporate big-wigs happy... but it's eating my soul away....well, maybe not.  But it feels like it.

I love coming to work NOT knowing what I'm going to be doing that day.  If I got pulled into a meeting, was asked to code up a quick method to save interaction data, or just did jack squat that day... I was happy doing it!  It was a thrill every day.  Uncertainty (not instability) thrills me.  It makes my gears wind up and I get so much done.  I'm almost certain it's not an issue of lost control.  While I had control over my own timeline before, it still wore on me.  I couldn't wait for the project to be finished, but there were days I didn't even want to look at it.  I have never been able to sit down and complete an entire project on my own, because once I plan it out... I lose interest.  Solving the problem is my thrill.  Once it's solved, I'm done with it and I want to move on to the next challenge.

As I said... I'm mainly just venting, looking for someone else that might feel this way.  I'd hate to have to go job hunting again to float my troubleshooting boat, but I'd like to hear if someone else realized the same and took some positive action to resolve it.  Take it as you will.