Bay 12 Games Forum

Sounds like fun.

Oh wait - I have this sneaking suspicion that this is a game that was meant to be fun for people. I always assumed Oblivion was a kind of suicide booth or torture device.

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We should make a community adventurer on Morrowind and Oblivion and name both Urist. Then, we should see what happens. It's the only dwarfish way to end the ultimate question.
Which one is better? Which one will triumph?

Skooma will triumph. Or ... Mooon Sugar.

Well it was an excellent game at this time I think. And Morrowind was fantastic at the time. Oblivion just had better graphics, and it wasn't a great game at the time.

You remember the starter dungeon of Daggerfall? It kinda rocked. And the realization that you could climb walls? Yum. Guess they figure we don't want better gameplay, we just want more bloom.

The conversation system in TES is pretty cool too. I was reading earlier about conversation types in games, and we're seeing keyword convos like SNES Shadowrun or Morrowind, or tree convos like Planescape: Torment and NWN. But Fallout had both, it just didn't really use the keyword convo feature much.

But it showed a game that I can't remember its name, but it had a keyword + approach + truthfulness system. So you could talk about things in many different ways.

You could have inefficient moods.

Examples:

Surly Mood: Urist never gets out of anyone's way when he steps on them, slowing both down, and there's a small chance he smacks the guy if he thinks he can get away with it.

Gluttonous Mood: Urist eats way too much, and vomits all the time.

Melancholy should sometimes result in alcoholism - the dwarf will occasionally go in and drink 4-7 drinks and run around throwing up for a while. If he drinks 7 he falls unconscious and throws up while unconscious.

Claustrophobia: Dwarf exits to the outdoors and will not go into any Inside or Underground area.

Avoids Crowds

Laziness (lots of breaks, tasks take longer)

Disobediance (turns off own jobs)

Poisons the water source and/or food and drink stores

Sabotage of levers by re-assigning them to other devices (especially those devices near magma or water).

Destruction of engravings and high quality / value objects - even artifacts

Theft of objects owned by other dwarves

Theft of furniture, tossing his own furniture in an empty hallway or a refuse pit.

Etc.

The problem is that the bullet ricochets around and takes out both lungs and his left eye.

I'm imagining a game with poly models that are made up of smaller models. Each bone is a part, each muscle, and patches of skin. Every organ is an object. And each object has HP which when certain levels are reached changes the image.
Organs and muscle will also release blood if injured. Done right this would create the possibility of internal injuries from impacts that bleed internally because the blood has no nearby damaged skin patch to release it.

Transporters:

I remember that Two Rikers episode. There was also one about how Scotty from TOS saved himself in a shuttlecraft transporter and was "transported out" when TNG enterprise found him.

This suggests three things. First, that you can create a person if you have a computer file of that person saved. Second, that both will be identical. Third, that after transporting the subject is mentally and spiritually okay, which means any metaphysical or spiritual component is transported along with all the physical data that's scannable. If your soul couldn't be scanned, the computer would "transport you out" without one.

So why not take someone who is smart, hardworking, nice to be around, mentally stable, and skilled - scan him - and then "transport out" a few hundred copies?

Why not send a probe out at super speed with nothing but a transporter, the pattern buffer with his image saved, and a lot of stored energy to transmute into matter (or just stored matter to transmute into other matter).

But why not change the physical state without changing the mental state? I'm sure the computer could differentiate between the two in the file. After all, if the computer eliminated a skin cell, it would be the same thing as you scraping off that skin cell. So why not use the transporter to overlay the pattern taken of you that month with the pattern scanned in when you get injured, so you can "transport out" a completely healed person who is incidentally one month younger in all respects except memories?

Heck, just go in for rejuvenation every ten years. They scan your current body, match that with a scan from a decade ago, and use your latest mentality scan overtop your older physical scan.

This pretty much replaces a doctor with an engineer who has access to a transporter. heck, it looked like all you had to do was push those two handles up at the same time. I'd weld them together and have a barber push the button.

Also one interesting point.

Our galaxy is moving through space. It has a velocity. (Alternately, space is expanding, which negates this source of momentum)
Our galaxy is spinning. This velocity means our solar system is swinging through space in a different direction maybe than the galaxy is rolling along.
So our solar system is moving through space pretty fast. But our planets also orbit the Sun. Woo hoo!
On the planet of course we also spin. That's speed.

So if you add all that together, we're virtually zipping through the universe.

So we can't look at Earth and say that's a zero speed to which we can compare a spaceship. We can compare them, and say less time is experienced on the spaceship because it's faster than Earth. But Earth has a pretty hot velocity right now. We just don't notice, for the same reason we don't notice our velocity when we're in a car or airplane. We do notice acceleration. But not velocity. Skydivers? Once they hit terminal velocity it doesn't feel like they're falling anymore.

Anyway.

Point is, if we start with this Earth speed, and add to it, we see less time happen in the faster object. But what if we slow the object down instead? What if we figure out Earth's direction of movement and accelerate opposite that? Logically we would actually be decelerating, in the same way you decelerate if you run toward the back of a moving bus while you're on it.

Would that mean the ship would experience more time than Earth? It makes sense. But what exactly is the time distortion? Does it look like an exponential curve on a graph so this deceleration doesn't have much effect? Or is it a straight line, and we can decelerate eventually down to a zero speed?

If we move fast enough for the spaceship to experience 1/100th the amount of time as Earth does, can we decelerate enough so the almost-stationary ship experiences 100x the amount of time as Earth? It would suggest that you could decelerate, compute something huge, and accelerate again to meet up with Earth, slowing to Earth speed when you arrive. That way your computer is able to perform 100 years worth of calculations in just one year.

And what is our current speed? How far can we decelerate?

Also, oddly enough, light is found to travel at the same speed regardless of the speed of the observer. Hence calling it a constant (that's the "c" in E-mc²). But that creates weird problems that I have no clue how to deal with. If you had a ship that went at the speed of light, and fired a laser behind it back to Earth, the laser should not be able to reach Earth because the ship has a forward momentum equal to the speed of the light. The same thing happens if you're driving really fast and you toss a ball out the back. The ball is already traveling forward at 10 mph, and your throw accelerates it toward the rear of the car at 10 mph. This gives it a net velocity of zero, and it drops soon after your throw.
But light in this case would appear to shoot backward at light speed from the ship, and Earth would see the ship simply disappear and a laser beam shoot back to them moments later. In this case, the light should stand still after being thrown out the back of the car. But light doesn't do that.