Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - JT

Pages: 1 ... 61 62 [63] 64 65
931
DF General Discussion / Re: Dwarf Fortress vs Jade
« on: April 04, 2007, 03:37:00 pm »
Based on my observations, there is no difference between open-source and closed-source as far as quality is concerned.  There are countless excellent open-source games and countless terrible closed-source games.

That said, of course, I believe strongly in the right of a developer to protect his work's uniqueness by making it closed source, and it doesn't affect my opinion on a product one way or another.  Most people who complain about a non-open-source product are usually complaining because they either want to lift some of its source code for their own purposes or because they want to cheat and see everything the game has to offer with no sense of discovery.

The latter isn't so bad in its own right, of course.  For instance, Nethack wouldn't even be installed on my hard disc if it didn't have source code.  I didn't like the game, but it's very interesting to delve into its source to see some of the interesting features (I'm an amateur developer myself).  I know I created my own version of the ONE_IN_(X) macro they have when I spotted it in the source code, for instance -- that's a really simple and elegant function.


932
DF General Discussion / Re: Dwarf Fortress vs Jade
« on: April 03, 2007, 04:10:00 pm »
Yeah, DF bases how much damage a body part can suffer on the SIZE attribute, I believe.  It's not possible to completely divest yourself of a hit point system unless you want to get into modelling the volume and mass of flesh and bone that get damaged by attacks.  While it would be pretty darned cool to play a modern combat simulation which had accurately-simulated human bodies to the point that a perforation in your gastro-intestinal region resulted in peritonitis and all of those nasty things, it's a lot easier to abstract it.  The difference is that DF abstracts it only a little, while other roguelikes abstract it a lot.  I'm a fan of both simple-and-elegant and complex-and-emergently-unpredictable, however, so I like both kinds (though the HP spiral in most games does bug me... superhero or not, a ballista bolt is going to pwn you).

933
DF General Discussion / Re: Dwarf Fortress vs Jade
« on: March 25, 2007, 10:00:00 pm »
Incidentally, I was extrapolating based on what people were saying.  I don't know of any ADOM fanboys who detract from DF personally.  Hell, I'm an ADOM fanboy and I don't detract from DF. ;-)

934
DF General Discussion / Re: Dwarf Fortress vs Jade
« on: March 25, 2007, 04:51:00 pm »
quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>Isn't ADOM closed-source anyway?</STRONG>

Yeah, I think that's the nature of the hypocrisy here... ADOM is closed source, yet all of its fanboys who are eagerly awaiting the still-closed-source-but-intended-for-open-source JADE are detracting from DF because it's closed source.

Man, wouldn't it be a much better world if no one had to learn the definition of the word "irony"?


935
DF General Discussion / Re: Dwarf Fortress vs Jade
« on: March 24, 2007, 04:50:00 pm »
JADE is vapourware, no doubt about it.  However, Biskup in Christmas '06 did mention he was still working on JADE, so it's not like it's been non-existent forever.

ADOM is a flatly amazing game, incidentally.  It's my favourite roguelike of all time simply because it's so elegant and it leaves its humour for circumstance, not for bad cliches and fourth-wall violations.


936
DF General Discussion / Re: Odd purple tint.
« on: March 23, 2007, 11:58:00 pm »
Is this the point where you two try to meet in person? ;-)


I wasn't actually referring to font-smoothing, but something else entirely.  Font smoothing is just anti-aliasing.  I have font-smoothing enabled on my computer and I don't get the stray pixels designed to make the graphics crisper.  I'm referring more to this sort of thing:


When I scale down the image and rescale the image upwards in Paint, the grey background gains some additional colours that weren't even in the original picture: you can see the grey has been given a cyan tinge in order to better distinguish the red.  In true-colour images, with contrasting true-colour objects (e.g., a brown tree trunk in a grassy field), the effect looks very good, but in logo-type images, the effect looks terrible.

Some video drivers (I imagine OpenGL drivers in this case) and programs do this automatically to smooth out the display of some 2D graphics.

[ March 24, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


937
DF General Discussion / Re: Odd purple tint.
« on: March 23, 2007, 04:19:00 pm »
Some video drivers do this quite by intention.  They automatically rescale the textures in memory to produce graphics that look a little more pleasing to the eye at higher resolutions, by taking advantage of the displacements of the individual lights comprising the pixels on your monitor.  If you look really close at a CRT monitor with a magnifying glass, you'll see that blue, red, and green dots are arranged in a certain pattern (it's easiest to see on a white background).  Some rescaling tries to take advantage of this to produce crisper shapes by altering the pixel information as it's displayed to the screen; when you look at a "crisp" line with a magnifying glass, you'll notice that the line really isn't all that crisp at all.  Our brains think it is, but it can actually be much crisper.  This effect is even more pronounced on LCD monitors, which is why the system was invented.

Like many other people, I still use a CRT monitor, so the effect just looks ugly to me and I disable it at every opportunity. =)


938
DF General Discussion / Re: Population cap
« on: March 24, 2007, 12:02:00 am »
My latest immigration wave on my current third-Spring fortress took me from 38 dwarves to 65 dwarves, and that was when I was just running out of food... thank goodness I managed to get some food harvested before more than a third of my population went rat-hunting.  No one died, either.

939
DF General Discussion / Re: GENPOWER
« on: March 25, 2007, 04:52:00 pm »
You know, I'm just waiting for Toady to say, "Honestly, I have no fricking idea what that flag does."

940
DF General Discussion / Re: GENPOWER
« on: March 22, 2007, 03:48:00 pm »
Wow, three different answers.

I think it has something to do with hydroelectricity, myself.


941
DF General Discussion / Re: gay dwarfs?
« on: March 21, 2007, 11:15:00 pm »
I heard the last human caravan went to Steelcrags and saw one of those dwarven orgies.  The headmaster vomited for three days and clawed out his own eyes.

942
DF General Discussion / Re: gay dwarfs?
« on: March 21, 2007, 03:25:00 pm »
Back when we got the public alpha, there was some mention of a bug that caused dwarves to cuddle resting people -- the bed wouldn't be marked as taken, so someone would go into the bed and snooze.  I don't know if that was ever fixed, so that might be what you're seeing here.

943
DF General Discussion / Re: Share your monstrosities
« on: May 27, 2007, 05:51:00 pm »
You can edit and redistribute the raws, but you can't distribute a repackaged Dwarf Fortress without making a clear list of the modifications in the end of the README file.


[edit]Serves me right for not double-checking the licence before posting about it...[/edit]

[ May 27, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


944
DF General Discussion / Re: Share your monstrosities
« on: April 20, 2007, 05:17:00 pm »
quote:
Originally posted by Chariot:
<STRONG>because winace is the main compressor on my comp and im not sure how to use the default windows unzipper to zip things.</STRONG>

I suggest 7-Zip for .zip and .7z packing, and it can do most other unpacking as well.  It's free and very handy.

Most of us are pretty much screwed when it comes to .ace.  As far as I can tell, it's mostly prominent in non-English countries.  On the English side of the internet, .zip prevails (dead reckoning estimate puts it at about 10 to 1 at least, even taking into account .z (Gzip) and .tgz (Gzipped TAR)).

I tend to use WinRAR, simply because it offers better compression over ZIP, has a free extractor, and is supported by most other extraction programs, but WinRAR isn't free.  If 7-Zip existed before I bought WinRAR, I would've just taken 7-Zip instead. =)

[ April 20, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


945
DF General Discussion / Re: Share your monstrosities
« on: March 12, 2007, 11:08:00 pm »
@Naminator: Pretty cool!  However, only amateurs slash with a knife.  A knife is a stabbing weapon, piercing in this game sense.  If you want to kill someone from behind, for instance, you use your free left hand to fold their left arm over their torso, slide your right arm under their right arm, then stab into their abdomen, pull sideways to expose their viscera, pull the knife out, cut from top to bottom of their sternum, and finally stab up and into their heart.  The idea of evisceration (a very quick move) is to guarantee death due to peritonitis even if they manage to escape the rest of your assassination attempt.

...I've never put this into practice, don't worry.  Actually, as someone who wants to be a police officer, it's a little surprising I know the method in the first place. ;-)


Pages: 1 ... 61 62 [63] 64 65