Bay 12 Games Forum

But there's the thing, it's not mass + gravity. It's mass * gravity. Weight is a heck of a lot more than just mass on it's own. If you had to move the weight of the cargo in a large spaceship, you'd soon find your engines crippled under the weight of it.

No, no, no. Weight depends on the local gravity, so it varies depending on the environment. A brick with a mass of one kilogram will have a weight of 9.81 newtons (2.2 pounds) on Terra, a weight of 1.62 newtons on Luna (0.36 pounds), and a weight of zero newtons (0 pounds) on the International Space Station. But in all cases it's mass will be the same: one kilogram.*

And engines won't be crippled when pushing something heavier than what they were designed for in space. They'll just provide poorer acceleration.


*Got that example from the Project Rho site, by the way. Here's the whole thing.

Mass Is Not Weight

There is a difference between weight and mass. An object's mass is always the same, but an object's weight depends upon what planet it is sitting on. A brick with a mass of one kilogram will have a weight of 9.81 newtons (2.2 pounds) on Terra, a weight of 1.62 newtons on Luna (0.36 pounds), and a weight of zero newtons (0 pounds) on the International Space Station. But in all cases it's mass will be the same: one kilogram. (Chris Buzon points out that if the object is moving at relativistic velocities relative to you, you will measure a mass increase. But this is not noticeable at ordinary relative velocities.)

The practical consequence is that if you are in a spacesuit on the Space Station, you cannot move everything by tapping it with your pinky finger (you may start it moving at a rate of one millimeter per week, but that is close enough to "cannot" for government work). The Space Shuttle may be floating next to the station with a weight of zero, but it still has a mass of 90 metric tons. If it is stationary and you pushed on it, there will be very little effect (in fact, about the same effect as if the Shuttle was sitting on the tarmac at Cape Kennedy and you gave it a shove).

And if it is moving slowly on a collision course with the station, and you are in between, the fact that it has zero weight will not prevent it from crushing you like a bug despite your attempts to stop it. It takes just as much energy to stop an object as it took to start it moving.

Sorry, but your orbital construction crews will NOT be able to manually manipulate multi-ton girders like they were toothpicks.

The other factor to consider is Newton's Third Law. If you push on a girder, there will be both action and reaction. Since the girder has more mass, it will start moving a microscopic amount. But since you have less, you will start moving in the opposite direction with much more velocity. This renders many common tools unusable in the free fall environment, such as hammers and screwdrivers.

I think 'leader' mobs drop them on death. You generally get cash drops, but sometimes you get power-ups.

You can replay earlier missions to get better results. You'll only have whatever tech you had when you previously attempted them though.

Ah, so I'm assuming you'll only get the difference between the old payout and the new one, to use in later missions?

Warcraft II and the expansion were released for PSX, and so was the first Diablo. If they port Diablo III to multiple platforms, I hope consoles have to deal with all the problems that entails. It seems that lately, as in for the last few years, most mainstream products have been multi-platform ones, and console games first and PC second. So PC gamers end up stuck with lousy controls, inferior graphic engines and dumbed-down gameplay.

I'd love to see consoles get the short end of the stick for once, but Blizzard has a history of doing things right (console RTS ports aside, but nobody cares about those), so probably no platform will be left in the mud.

Quote from: Greenbane on October 13, 2010, 11:48:48 pm

The only reason for trainer use[...]

Objection! Use of only!

As a counterexample, I pretty regularly pull out the memory editor or (if it's convenient) a trainer for games that also have built in cheats. I've done it to the original SC a number of times. It's mostly a matter of convenience; typing in some unwieldy stream of letters every few moments/once per game (may go through quite the number in quick succession while cheating, remember.) versus the one/two button (often in-game) functionality of trainers or the (potentially) persistent effect of the memory editor.

Trainers are usually a lot quicker and more fluid in their cheat activation than anything the developers put into the game itself, at least when there's been any effort at all to implement a decent UI.

So I'd lay bets with you not everyone using them was trying to get around the achievement thing. Some just wanted to type less. Probably other reasons, too. Quite a few probably were trying to get around the achievement system, of course, but that only language gets you in trouble

Rest of conversation I guess doesn't really do anything for me. Won't be buying SC2 anytime this half of the decade (or this decade, period), no real interest in clearing out the HD space to filch it from somewhere. Maybe if I hear about something amazing coming out of the mapmaking stuff and the price went down, I'd fork out some cash, but... eh.

EDIT: Has anything really neat been produced yet?

Well, I agree, it's a matter of convenience. And it's probably true not everyone was purposefully using trainers to cheat the achievement system, but the thing is Blizzard can't possibly tell if you're using an unlimited resources trainer function to have more fun against the AI, or more easily get the hardest achievement of the mission you're playing. The fact is these trainers work around the official cheat codes' achievement limitation and can be abused to commit foul play against the system.

The CheatHappens article is actually laughable. Who's really at fault here? The company who takes arguably harsh measures to defend its own, clearly-defined rules (EULA, which you have to accept to play the game at all), or the company that makes and profits* from tools they know the game itself forbids and are liable to get their users suspended/banned?



*The trainers in question are only available to CheatHappens users with paid memberships, so yes, the company's essentially profiting from them. They discretely covered themselves with the tiny "USE AT OWN RISK" sentence, and who knows how recent that is. Given the article's palpably defensive tone, I'd bet the tiny disclaimer wasn't there all along.

That suggestion might require quite a bit more research, but sounds good, too!

However, for legendary landmarks, like the cities of gold, El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, etc. I'd suggest their location be randomized, and maybe have a mini-quest attached to reveal them so they're not simply on plain sight. The 'real' landmarks, on the other hand, would be always visible and always in the same, fixed location.

Don't forget about my question!

I started a game as the Papal States and ended up unifying Italy and conquering all of Africa and Japan.  I like to think of my soldiers as fanatical warrior monks spreading the faith with cannons.  When Great Britain declared war on me in 1856 in the name of securing Japanese territory, I destroyed their navy in an epic battle in the English Channel and took their African holdings. 

The French and Portuguese joined Italy (which I now called the Roman Catholic Empire) against Britain, but when I added the conquest of Wales to my war goals, Russia declared a war of containment against me.  Russia was at war with China, which I influenced into fighting Britain as well.

Prussia and Austria were having their 52nd tiff over hegemony, so they kept out of the war.  Russia had no way of getting to me except by way of wooden boats that got ripped apart by the French ironclads.  In the east, I swept into the Russian border with a massive Japanese force.

With the British fleet vanquished and their only major ally rendered inert, the Italian navy enacted a full blockade around the British Isles.  Then came the invasion force, elite Italian shock troops backed up by thousands of Malagasy infantry.  The Battle of London took place in 1862, when 250,000 British soldiers died at the hands of 650,000 attackers, most of them in artillery units.  Italian and French losses were minimal.

The occupation of London began when a second invasion force landed on the shores of Ireland.  In 1863 with much of Brittania in enemy hands, we raised the war demands to include the full surrender of Ireland, and sued them for peace.  They agreed.

Ireland was freed in two years after the first major rebellions were put down, and remained an Italian satellite, completely loyal to the papacy.  Before Ireland was declared a sovreign nation, the Italian government spared no effort to industrialize the nation and build a first rate rail system and a naval base in Dublin.  By 1880 they fielded the sixth largest land army in the world and had become a major world power, displacing Austria for seventh place.

I like Victoria 2 because I like history as much as the prospect of messing with it. 

Wow, that sounds great! So I'm guessing you really have more freedom in Victoria 2 than you did in Victoria (and maybe Hearts of Iron I and II). The quirk I've always had with many Paradox games is that most non-major countries have no chance of doing anything significantly influential within the game's timeframe. You had to start with a really powerful nation to do whatever you wanted and actually succeed at it. Lesser countries were reduced to much punier goals, merely being able to choose between course of action A, B or C.

In the case of the first Victoria, I had the feeling the most you could achieve with minor countries was getting industrialized after, like, 50-70 years. I remember playing as Argentina back then, and after around 40-50 years, I didn't feel I had accomplished much. Sure, I had gotten a lot of immigration and the economy was getting better, but overall I was still far behind the major powers.

But the fact you could do all those things with the teeny tiny Papal States gives me hope.