Bay 12 Games Forum

Assault on the Necromancer's Lands

---

This is the in-character game thread for Assault on the Necromancers Lands.

Links:
 * Out of character thread
 * Character submission guidelines
 * How magic works


Current Characters










Game Updates
 * Introduction
 * Searching Junction
 * The road north, first blood
 * First night
 * Cleanign up, and arrival at Laketown
 * Scouting out laketown, more combat, +19 points of skill gain, injuries, water is low

Imagine if people could use out of context mechanics to get in-real-life "perks" in a manner similar to that of gaming microtransactions.

In some cases you might have people exclusively using it to get impossibly cool clothes. Probably nobody would be very upset by that. Or how about name/class/gender changes. I don't see many people complaining about that. Would probably make life a lot more comfortable for some people. Or what about increased bag space? So some people, because they bought that perk, they can carry 50% more groceries at a time. Not a big deal. I suppose those people would have an extreme advantage applying for menial warehouse and restocking positions, but that's not such an advantage that I think people would be very upset about it.

So what about people who buy in-real-life "mounts?" So there might be some people who get to live their entire lives with basically a free car. That would be a terrific advantage. Be the guy who has a porsche in high school, and never has to make car payments. That would be neat.

And then you might have cases where people get gold/xp bonuses. So, say...every class you take you take maybe you get a 20% "boost. So you only have to take four classes a week instead of 5, and you learn just as well. Or maybe regardless of what results you get on tests, you get a free 20% added. And for the gold boost, for your entire life, whatever job you work you get a 20% bonus to your salary. Make $40k/yr, you actually collect $48k. Make $50k/yr, you actually collect $60k.

That would be kind of neat.

Kind of a toss up which would be more powerful, the 20% gold/xp boost or the mount. On paper, for most people the permanent car/mount would probably be a bigger perk, but it depends. Sure, having a free $2200/mo lamborghini is going to be worth more dollars than a permanent 20% boost to salary for most people, but if you're making $50,000/yr, you might be better off taking the extra $10,000 and settling for something more practical. Still, I lean towards the car. Would depend on how you gamed it. Having and living in an $80,000 RV through college and your early 20s  might be worth more, long-tern, than all the extra sex you'd have in the back of your lamborghini during high school.  But is the sort of person who'd buy real-life microtransaction bonuses the sort of person who would live in an RV to save up to buy a house? Wouldn't they tend to be more the type for immediate gratification?

Of course, that's assuming you had to pick only one. The sort of person who uses microtransasctions probably wouldn't limit themselves to only one. So imagine having a porsche, and a lamborghini, and an $80,000 RV, starting in high school and that stay with you your entire life, plus a 20% boost to whatever salary you make, always. Plus the ability to switch your name, profession and gender any time you want to. Plus you can carry 50% more groceries. Can't forget that one.

What about server transfers? Not sure how to evaluate that one.

What about time speedups? Fast forward through your wait at the DMV at 10x speed.

What about games where you can outright buy gear? Those tend to be the microtransactions most frowned on in games, but I think it wouldn't seem as bad in real life. Bob down the street, POOF! has a brand new gaming computer and lawnmower that he didn't have to buy with in-real-life money. Not a big deal. Pets? So imagine every now and then you have a neighbor with a bengel tiger or elephant in his backyard. Interesting, but not real-life-breaking.

Overall I think people are unhappier about microtransactions in games than they would be if they applied to real life.

Was reading over some esoteric material recently, and came across an interesting idea.

For purposes of this discussion, when I say 'space' I mean, as in, cosmologically.


Imagine that, 'space' is not quite the 3d dimensional 'volume' construct that we think it to be. There is, in physics, a notion of spacetime, in which space and time are basically the same thing. So maybe there's some justification for this idea. But at this point we're not arguing for or against, we're simply exploring an idea.

Imagine that, when you look out into space and see another star or another galaxy, what you are looking at is not simply a different ball of gas or balls of gases 'over there really far away.' But rather, you're looking at an entirely different phenomenon that because of worldview and socially trained manners of thinking, you're not interpreting correctly. Imagine an ant looking at a bridge. He wouldn't understand what he's seeing. imagine a dolphin hearing the noise made by a boat rudder. He might tend to think of it as 'oh, well that's the singing of that particular species of creature.' Because 'creatures make noise to communicate' is a familiar part of his worldview. It doesn't occur to him to think that the noise is an unintended consequence of an unfamiliar means of locomotion. He lacks the context to properly interpret what his senses are telling him. Imagine that humans, similarly, lack the context to properly interpret what we see and what our instruments tell us when we gaze out into space.

Again, I'm not asserting that this is or isn't the case. This is a thought experiment.

So imagine, that those lights that you by training tend to think of as stars 'over there,' and not actually 'lights over there' and that 'space' is not composed of 'volume' or 'distance' that is crossed via physical movement.

Instead, imagine that a much smaller area, say...our solar system, is a discrete reality bubble. And imagine that other star systems are their own reality bubbles. And imagine that the spatial relationship between these bubbles is not Euclidean. Imagine that the light you see coming from other stars does exist, that it does occur, but that its arrival to your experience did not happen via a process of 'going really fast over time.' Because what we receive as 'space' is not 'volume. Rather, light from other stars is instead encroachment upon your reality by other reality bubbles.

Discuss.

So apparently google translate, available for free from the play store, is capable of doing real time language augmented reality translation of foreign language text you point your cellphone camera at.

Demo video

I've been playing with it, doing google image searches for street signs in foreign language, watching it translate them on my phone. What you see in the demo video is apparently what it actually does.That's not extensive liberties taken with photoshop. And of course, it also does voice translation, but that's not super new. I hadn't seen the visual AR aspect until just now.

Did everyone already know about this? Because apparently this is almost a year old now. I've played with a couple AR apps, but this is actually useful, and I haven't seen that in AR until now.

So this is a fascinating little thing that seems to have happened.

As of this post, nasa.gov is non-responsive from all the traffic they're getting because they've recently announce that, quote: "under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars."

Now, at first glance that's not a big deal. Water has been "discovered" on MArs so many times that there's a wiki page chronicling all the discoveries. I've been seeing an article every several months for years "discovering" that yes, Mars does have water, as if it were any surprise.

Ahh, nasa.gov is responding now.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid-water-flows-on-today-s-mars

"NASA Confirms Evidence That Liquid Water Flows on Today’s Mars"

So that might be a little different than finding ice. And interestingly, apparently NASA gave a statement says (among other things) that they want to send live people to the surface to look for life. So, great! We've all wanted this. It might or might not be news. We've known Mars has water for decades. But this does seem to be a stronger statement to that fact than has been typical in recent decades.

It is however, a curious thing, that this announcement was made within 12 hours of the fourth lunar eclipse of the Bloodmoon prophecy.

"Wait, what" you say?

Ok, so...everybody remember that line from the movie Ghostbusters about sun turning black as sackcloth as the moon as red as blood, the seas boiling and the dead rising from the grave? That's actually a quote from revelation 6 of the bible. (Though apparently Ghostbusters incorrectly cited it as verse 7:12)

So, anyway, the "moon turning red as as blood" is generally assumed to be a reference to a lunar eclipse. Like the one last night, the moon looked red. The sun turning black, of course, is a reference to a solar eclipse. And according to some random assorted Abrahamic religious people a moderately long time ago, based on...stuff that I never entirely followed...the particular configuration of solar and lunar eclipses that happened this year and concluded last night, is "a match" for the biblical prophecy about the sixth seal in Revelation.

Now, I notice that we're still here. But I find it fascinating that NASA chose this day to make this announcement.

Simplifying the content of Revelation to say that "the world is gonna end!" is...possibly not the best interpretation. Of course it's tempting to simply dismiss it as religious nonsense. But the Book of Revelation is supposed to be writing of a guy from thousands of years ago who was shown a glimpse of the future by an angel. So, let's just humor that idea for a moment. Imagine being a guy living in +-100 of 0 AD, being shown the world today. You would have absolutely no context from which to understand, the internet, nanotechnology, etc.

It's not uncommon among the religious crowd to interpret many of the things in Revelation with that in mind. Causing "great fire to fall from the sky" is not an unreasonable description of a nuclear bomb. A "mark, without which none could buy or sell" is not an unreasonable description of a hypothetical scenario in which implantable credit card chips become the norm in a cashless society. A lot of the content of Revelations..."could possibly be interpreted" in a manner that is plausible in a modern context.

So, NASA has announced flowing water and a desire to land humans on Mars to search for life,within 12 hours of the final eclipse in a series that some have suggested corresponds to the sixth seal of the Book of Revelation.

What is a "seal?"

It's a thing that contains. A barrier, or a substance used to prevent things from mixing. The common christian interpretation seems to be that the thing being "contained" by the seven biblical seals is the beast of Revelation that will bring on judgement day.

But...what if, the "Angel" who revealed the future to the author of Revelation was actually a space alien in charge of the zoo that is planet Earth, telling of the time when humanity would be released?  Imagine a mostly benevolent galactic civilization, applying the "Prime Directive" and insuring that developing species be allowed to grow unmolested. And this whole religion thing was simply a misunderstanding resulting from their initial contacts before they cordoned off the area.

Rather than a "beast to end the world" it's a far more interesting interpretation, to suggest that the thing being contained is humanity, and that once all seven seals are removed, we will be released from this zoo here on Earth, to join everybody else among the stars. Metaphorically, a fetus "dies" when a baby is born. Metaphorically, it would be the "end of the world as we know it" if we discovered that life is ubiquitous everywhere, that interstellar civilizations exist, and we've simply been kept in the dark, and now it's time to go be friends with everybody.

Finding life on Mars would be a good step towards that.

So VR is going to be a thing here pretty soon. Unreal Engine and Unity seem to be the preferred environments. I've recently downloaded both and done some dabbling, but both seem abysmally horrificly nightmarishly designed for graphic artists rather than programmers. Creating models is a nightmare. Animating them is a nightmare. Both engines seem to heavily favor scripted, static animations rather than animations controlled by code. The mesh/texture/bone design seems like whomever made it expected 3d modeling to be done exclusively by teams of people with poor communication rather than one person.One guy does meshes. One guy does textures. And never shall the two speak to each other. And incompatibility issues are terrible. The amount of effort required to download a model and turn it into anything usable is ridiculous. Taking a Gary's mod or Skyrim model and getting it into Unreal or Unity seems to require 2-3 intermediary steps through various 3rd party converters and even then I always seem to end up with something mutilated beyond  usability.

The whole of 3d modeling, from what I've seen, seems like it was designed deliberately to be difficult. I was able to download the android SDK and in an hour or two get a "hello world" app up and running on my tablet in an hour or two despite having never worked with java before. With this, even after a week or two of casual dabbling, I still don't have anything to show for it.


But, VR seems like it's going to be big. And having the ability to create my own experiences seems especially awesome. I would dearly love, for example, to make Summer Lesson with Twilight Sparkle as the tutor. The code logic for such a thing would be completely trivial. But the 3d modeling seems to present a huge barrier.

Is anyone here doing anything with VR? Or planning to?

"You are a kitten in a catnip forest."

So lately I've been playing Kittens. I think it's the most brutal incremental game I've ever played. You start out collecting catnip. Then you start processing the catnip into construction material and making buildings out of it. Then hunting. Science! Steel, steam, oil, and moon colonies. Build ziggurats! Gather starcharts from skygazing and build a fleet of trade vessels. Worship ceiling cat and carry your faith over across multiple world resets.

Rawwr, kittens!

Screenshot