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Messages - Marshall Burns

Pages: 1 ... 9 10 [11] 12 13 ... 20
151
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Wild FPS swings?
« on: March 04, 2011, 06:35:27 pm »
It might also be temperature, as the game has to track and make sure that nobody's gonna start melting/freezing when the temperature changes. I have a similar problem at my fort every winter.

152
DF Suggestions / Re: Why not add flails to DF?
« on: March 04, 2011, 06:30:26 pm »
Quote from: Dynastia on March 04, 2011, 06:59:51 am
For fantasy ball & chain flails, yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cep_bojowy_0211.jpg

This is what actual war-flails look like.

Yes, yes, I know. But the same goes for those. Aside from their ability to wrap over guards (which you can do no matter how short the chain is, as long as you're trying to do it), there's not much going for them. They're unwieldy -- it's relatively difficult to be accurate with one, and it takes a relatively long time to resume striking stance after a strike.

Ok, ok, and they also send almost all of the striking force into the contact area -- with a solid-handled weapon (sword, spear, axe -- pretty much anything that isn't a flail), a portion of the force is always communicated back along the handle and into the wielder's arm. Due to the chain/thong (however short) of a flail, only a miniscule amount of the force does that.

153
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Civilizations and other ?s
« on: March 04, 2011, 06:23:49 pm »
Quote from: PopeRichardCorey on March 04, 2011, 11:24:25 am
Not sure about freezing, but magma flows without pressure; there's no pressure to kill.  If you mean just its flow, I can't remember if diagonals will stop it.  I thought it only stopped gases. 

Magma gets pressurized if you pump it. Diagonals will remove the pressure beyond the diagonal passage.

154
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: How to breed chickens
« on: March 04, 2011, 02:14:27 am »
(They're unnecessarily complex to use, and also inconsistent with the rest of the language's syntax. In my book, that equals pain in the ass. Your mileage may vary, natch. I'm the guy who loves Java, specifically because it's consistent from top to bottom, and not really for any other reason (well, ok, also because it's super-double well-documented). My computer-nerd friends think I'm nuts.)

155
DF General Discussion / Re: What you DONT want in DF?
« on: March 04, 2011, 12:29:56 am »
Quote from: Sowelu on March 03, 2011, 11:44:59 pm
Good heavens!  It's almost like they were creating their own world of fiction instead of relying entirely on the source material.

If that's what they were doing, then they did it badly. Like, really really badly. Like, oh my Gawd.

There are things that D&D is good at. Fiction is not one of them.

156
DF General Discussion / Re: What you DONT want in DF?
« on: March 03, 2011, 10:52:25 pm »
Quote from: Assassinfox on March 03, 2011, 01:03:04 pm
Quote from: Jacob/Lee on March 02, 2011, 09:37:56 pm
What's wrong with homogenous races?

Nothing.  It's when you have an entire homogenous race of "rare" half-elf/half-orc/half-whatever hybrids that I get annoyed.  For example: Half-orcs.  They're just slightly less orky orcs.  Why not just let us play as orcs?  Or half-elves.  If elves and humans hate each other so much that half-elves are sooooo rare, why is there an entire self-supporting population of them?

D&D doesn't let you play orcs because it's too namby-pamby. Seriously, you can't just be an orc because they're the "bad guys." Luckily there's The Burning Wheel.

The half-elves thing is especially stupid, considering that in D&D's prime reference for the elves thing, Lord of the Rings, half-elves had to choose to live either as elves or humans (e.g. Elrond chose to live as an elf, but his brother chose to live as a human). They weren't somewhere in between.

Don't get me wrong, I like D&D every now and then, but a large portion of it makes my eyes roll uncontrollably.

157
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's your music choice?
« on: March 03, 2011, 08:57:54 pm »
Glad to know I didn't offend you with my musician pedantry! The differences really are crucial -- the structure and materials of the guitar itself are different, and the strings are very different. Acoustic guitar strings are made with steel, nickel, and/or bronze (depending on what kind you get), while classical guitar strings are made of nylon (or catgut, but hardly anybody does that anymore) and silver. They're quieter but more responsive and capable of more nuance than acoustic strings. If you try to put acoustic strings on a classical guitar, the tension will rip it apart. You can put classical strings on an acoustic, but they won't resonate properly due to the difference in the guitar's materials and structure.

I prefer acoustics, though. Even when I play in a classical style. I like their loudness and sustain, and their higher string tension feels more satisfying under my fingers.

God, I'm a nerd.

158
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Confessions of a DF player.
« on: March 03, 2011, 08:41:16 pm »
I don't use raise-able drawbridges, and I only use retractable bridges for pit traps (in one fort I had a 10 x 10 x 10 tigerpit with at least two corpses on every tile. I pause the game and hit '.' to advance a frame at a time while I watch goblins fall in. I really like it when they hit the wall on the way down first).

Instead, I use double-doors linked to levers. Trolls can break them down, but as an anti-troll measure I have upright spikes on the tiles where the trolls will have to stand.

I build cave-in traps designed not to insta-crush invaders, but to blast them into my walls at high velocity.

159
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Antman civ.
« on: March 03, 2011, 08:28:45 pm »
But I didn't get any messages. Do you just have your init options set up differently?

160
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Antman civ.
« on: March 03, 2011, 08:18:00 pm »
I don't mean "wiped out" as in there's no sign of them; I mean "wiped out" as in, "You have discovered a huge cavern! Hey, look at all these antmen corpses everywhere!"

Do critters still move around down there before I breach? Were they all just murdered by elk birds?

161
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Civilizations and other ?s
« on: March 03, 2011, 08:09:14 pm »
Civs won't show on your fort-mode civ list until they've entered your map.

162
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Antman civ.
« on: March 03, 2011, 08:08:24 pm »
Every time I get an animal man civ, they've been wiped out by the time I dig down to them. Which is weird, since there shouldn't be anything going on down there until I've breached the caverns, right?

163
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's your music choice?
« on: March 03, 2011, 07:01:10 pm »
I actually grew to like the default music (which is neither a mandolin nor an acoustic guitar, but a classical guitar, and I have to be pedantic about that because I'm a musician who plays all of those and is acutely aware of the differences even if they seem trivial to the philistines normal folks), but when I'm not in the mood for it I play Harry Partch in the background. It's what I imagine dwarven music sounds like.

164
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: How to breed chickens
« on: March 03, 2011, 06:48:53 pm »
Quote from: mareck on March 03, 2011, 05:46:50 pm
The only thing i think that might be causing a problem is a pointer ID error with the chicken's previous batch of eggs. It might be that that chicken cannot rear any young until the previous eggs have been consumed or destroyed.

I think something like that is the case. My duck laid eggs, they hatched, I kept the ducklings around, and the new eggs laid subsequently did not hatch.

Pointers in C languages are a pain in the ass.

165
DF Suggestions / Re: Why not add flails to DF?
« on: March 03, 2011, 06:44:26 pm »
The only (I mean only) reason to use a flail is that the chain wraps around people's guard, making it extremely hard to defend against. Aside from that, it's a rather sub-par weapon. And that's a feature that DF isn't currently equipped to implement.

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