Bay 12 Games Forum

I have another method of anger management too, if you're curious. It involves a sofa, a computer, six bottles of Sun Peak Peach flavoured Boone's, a bottle of lotion, your mom, and the entire Dragonball Z anime collection.

Fixed.

Clothespins.

We need to put clothespins on the dwarves' noses so they can't smell the loot outside. Plus it prevents unhappy thoughts due to miasma!

Here's what I've found.

Let's say I build aboveground. The tile is Outside Light. No matter what I do to it, I cannot make it Dark. However, putting a roof of any material over it will make it Inside. However, your dwarves will still not want to go there if you order them inside.

Let's say I build underground by digging out a space. It's Inside Dark. In the middle, from above, I channel out a single tile. That single tile is now Outside Light. The underground tiles around it are unaffected. If I floor over that tile from above, it becomes Inside again (though as above, Dwarves will avoid it if they can't go outside, as if it were still Outside).

Aboveground plants need light, but they can be grown Inside. So you can channel out an area aboveground, making a room below, then floor over it. The resulting underground room is Inside Light. And assuming it's sand or soil you can grow aboveground plants on it.

You can't grow underground plants on a Light tile even if it's underground.

Question: If I channel out ten Z-levels, rebuild them with floors, and muddy them, can I build farms on them? It would probably result in ten z-levels of Inside Light farm rooms. But could I even build the farms in the first place?
I know Dwarves obsessively clean muddy floors, so would they clean it up before it could be constructed?

I tried playing SS1 but I couldn't get past the awkward controls. Ultima Underworld had similar controls, but it just looked SO COOL I guess I was willing to work harder to learn to use them right.

good job bullion. although the historical event in question was symbolized by that little legend - snakes were symbolic of pagan worship, so when they talked about st patrick driving the snakes from ireland it was probably about his work destroying the native religious practices in ireland to make way for christianity.

I wish people didn't watch this link http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI.

These days I just google the video URL. It came up with all Rick all the time ... so I was able to identify the video as a rickroll without actually being rickrolled! Not a winner, try again.

Anyway.

Granted. Your motherboard isn't defective. Your system boots up. And you realize you're running Windows ME. *screechy horror music*
Then you wake up in a cold sweat. Streetlight filters into your dark bedroom  through your window blinds. Far off you hear a train.
You get up, wiping your brow and face, and moment later emerge backlit from the bathroom. As your toilet finishes flushing, you glance at your monitor with its flying toast screensaver. You approach.
With a trembling hand you reach for your mouse. You pause, a hair's breadth away, fighting against the fear gripping your heart. You wince, and bump the mouse.
It's Vista *SCREECH SCREECH SCREECH*
(And then it crashes again)

I wish more people used mass transit and carpooling, and worked closer to home.

I played a really irritating flash game called Chronotron. You have a robot that starts in a time machine, and you have to get through the level to pick up an object and then move back to the time machine.

You can go out, do things, and come back to the time machine, and then go back in time to when you started the level. Your controllable robot can then wander around the level at your leisure, but your "past self" goes through the motions that you already did.

You can keep doing this over and over, generating multiple robots all doing their own thing which you determined earlier by doing it yourself.

There isn't a paradox, so long as all the robots get back to the time machine at some point. But of course, built into the game are ways to create a paradox. For example, if one of the robots falls into a pit, you lose because you created a paradox.

The game is driven by the level design - most levels require the actions of multiple robots in concert to reach the MacGuffin. Often you have to walk out, stand on a button to open a gate, and time yourself to decide how long you should wait on it for when the future self comes along to get through the gate and pick up the item.

So this game says that nothing arbitrary happens to prevent paradoxes. It's okay to meet your past self and make out with you. But any timeline that involved a paradox wouldn't result in a continuation of the story in the next level. So if you want to get to the next level, you have to play through it without generating a paradox.

Something tells me Sowelu was onto something with re-running worldgen, but I think you'd re-run worldgen every time you traveled through time. Ideally you'd re-run worldgen every tick, to take into account your character killing his grandfather. I think it would be possible to do this with a large game world eventually, but right now you could definitely do it with a small community. You'd have to have excellent AI, of course:

Example: You live in a small farming town. You can travel through time. It's the year 1000 right now.
Your friend's mother is a midwife, his father is a librarian. His young life involved lots of study and not much getting out to play. He hasn't married yet. If you end the game, the ending shows your friend becoming an old man who never marries, and he die at a reasonable age.

You travel back in time to when your friend's father was born. You steal the infant, though you don't know who it really is, and throw it off a cliff. As soon as the theft occurs, the worldgen assumes the infant is gone forever. If you leave the infant on the ground, worldgen would determine the likelihood of an unattended infant being picked up by someone and who that would be, and whether the infant would be returned to the parents.

Based on random chance, you could end up with your friend's mother marrying an ironworker instead, and so he grows up to be strong but uneducated, marrying a woman early and having lots of kids. That might mean he never becomes your friend, if you never met.

The paradoxes come in when the event in the past changes the actor, or changes whether or not the actor would have done it. For example, if your friend were sick you might go back in time to plant curative herbs in the forest so his parents would pick them and he would never develop a serious sickness. But if he never got seriously sick, you would never have thought of going back in time to plant the seeds. Effectively, you would have to figure out what of all historical events you need to go back and do for no reason other than to make sure they get done.

Likewise, say you go back and convince your grandfather to marry someone other than your grandmother because you know he's your grandfather. Even if you still exist, because someone else did marry your grandmother, there would be no reason for you to go back in time and convince some random dude to marry some random woman. If you didn't do that, he would probably marry your grandmother instead. So hello paradox.

We could get around this by giving the character some mystical protection from the effects of time travel. Meaning even if you break the world, you still exist and remember everything that has happened from your perspective. If you kill your parents, you still exist even though nobody could have conceived or birthed you. But the effects on your character are important and interesting, so this should be used only as a last resort.

The fate-style conservation of timeline is an easy way out. After all, most large scale processes are beyond the scope of individuals to influence. Even assassinating a hated political leader might not stop international events from occuring, since that leader isn't operating in a vacuum. He's just taking advantage of existing politics, the sentiment of the people, economic forces, cultural movements, etc. Someone else will fill the void, though you might argue that you could kill off every one who stepped up to lead. It's likely that the military would step in and take control, and we're playing a time travel game not a Rambo simulator.

I think making the main characters relatively weak, so they can't just solve their problems by force, is just about required. That way, you can protect important people and places just by making it certain that the time traveler will be slain trying to destroy them.

Then again, why restrict him? If you're already setting up a complex world, why not make him the most powerful force in it? Omnipotent characters are generally very boring, so still I'd go with a weaker one. It seems more satisfying to think and finesse your way through something rather than just bash it good.