Best posts made by Sparks

@auspice said in Magic, The Earth Way:

@admiral said in Magic, The Earth Way:

That would be a really cool idea for a story.

Mathmagic. Castin' mathic. Theorem-slingers. Quantifying -faces-.

This actually is sort of part of the magic in the world of Grossman's Magicians novels. Mages have to be geniuses to manage all the math and shit required to be able to do magic to begin with.

It's not just math, but it factors heavily into it. It's part of why I love those books.

It's also arguably the idea behind Charles Stross' Laundry Files, where applied mathematics have an unfortunate tendency to alter reality, and thus computer science and math grad students have an unfortunate tendency to nearly be eaten by otherworldly Lovecraftian entities. This is also why you have things like "Applied Computational Demonology" in those books.

(It is also more or less the premise of Margaret Ball's tongue-in-cheek Mathemagics—originally a short story called "Career Day" in Esther Friesner's Chicks in Chainmail, later a whole novel.)

It's a fun concept to play with!

@sunny said in RL Anger:

I am in so much pain I can't see straight. Been just about two weeks now. Doctors can't figure it out. In the ER for the second time. Have no idea how to cope with this. Also, wait time here is terrible. Ugh. Thank goodness I have insurance.

Sympathies. Chronic, prolonged pain is zero fun.

@skew said in skew's Playlist:

Arx: Cassius

Heya, cuz! (Aislin's player here.)

@Testament — Every person I know in my old industry who works (or has worked) at a studio under EA loathes the Frostbite engine with a passion usually reserved for those you've sworn lifelong vengeance against; it's not a degree of emotion one generally sees with regards to development tools.

Coincidentally, no one I know who works at a studio under EA works on FPS games.

ETA: That said, I think the tales of mismanagement and the inability to lock down some pretty core bits of the game's design until way too late in development put the lion's share of the blame on BioWare this time. Frostbite sure as heck didn't help the situation, though.

@thatguythere I mean, you aren't wrong. The chargen was arguably more fun than the game.

@sunny said in RL Anger:

@sparks This is still in acute territory rather than chronic. ^^

Ah, for some reason I thought this was a recurrence of a past pain. Fair enough, then; I hope it's cured and doesn't cross into chronic, either way.

@Tinuviel We've got a burn notice on you; you've been blacklisted.

@Sparks said in General Video Game Thread:

I enjoy the DA games greatly, but there's little question which BioWare franchise truly owns my heart.

...as attested to by the fact that my housemate is now listening to the Mass Effect soundtrack while she writes, and hearing that distinctive music is giving me a little dopamine hit of happiness that very other video game soundtracks—as much as I might love them—can inspire in quite the same way.

@arkandel said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

@griatch I think the issue here is that some clients handle command lines starting with / as internal commands instead of sending them as-is. Or that's my understanding - nothing done on the server side can fix that.

Yeah, Atlantis—like TinyFugue—passes / lines to a command/macro parser. I could make it so that instead of a "No such command" in the current for unknown commands it passes it on to the game, or I could just add /me as an internal command aliased to "pose".

My mother's cancer may be coming back already. We don't know yet; she had tests done last week, and we get the results back tomorrow. And as a result I'm too nervous to sleep well tonight.

And simultaneously, one of my childhood best friends just had his son—his very young son—diagnosed with leukemia.

As was said: another round of "fuck cancer".

@scar said in Scar's Playlist:

Updated for Fifth Kingdom, Iseabail~

Man. How many of my friends are going over to that game? I almost feel like I ought to check it out.

@Auspice - ah! Yeah, the out-of-box setup gave me an absolutely raging migraine after like 60 seconds for some reason, but it's possible to adjust the PSVR's headband in enough ways that I found the right spot for me. And then it became the easiest to wear long term because it didn't have the first-gen Vive or Rift's front-heavy tendency to slide down and press on the nose after half an hour, which also causes a (more minor) headache, at least for me.

But the Vive Pro was, for a long time, a reasonably close second in the comfort game for me; while I didn't get to try the Index for long, the Pro's now been tentatively pushed to third.

I just really want to try the Reverb, because everyone I know who has, regardless of which headset they preferred for comfort previously, now says the Reverb is the most comfortable. With that much unanimity, I really wanna see for myself. (Mind you, this is a sample size of three, so there's a large margin of error here; it's anecdotal evidence at best. Still...)

@bored said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

Arguments over telnet and whatever ill it does or doesn't do aside, I think there's probably at least some kind of general feeling that a modernized web version would do a lot if it could do it without totally jettisoning our more advanced text-land backend stuff. This is the route that both Ares and Evennia are taking, where you have both the text interface and a web portal, so... I dunno why anyone has a problem with that?

Because it does require duplicating a good chunk of the work if you want more than a basic web version of a normal client. Your bboards need two front-ends—one that runs in the traditional plain-text telnet interface, and one that works like a web forum. Your mail program needs two front-ends, one that works in the traditional plaintext and one webmail style. Etc.

It is basically duplication of all your UX; if you do everything just on the web, it quite literally cuts the effort in half.

@Kanye-Qwest — Truth.

@Jennkryst said in Sparks' Playlist:

@Sparks With GMC XP costs, it is much less intimidating that you might think, so all is well.

It's less the costs and more that this is about 7 game systems smashed into one, all of which are fond of Capitalized Terms.

@Bobotron said in Sparks' Playlist:

@Sparks
Changeling the Lost is fun. Don't let it intimidate you. Just... let your inner fairy tale run wild. What are you building, if you don't mind me asking?

I was thinking of an info-thief/hacker sort who was a mirrorskin. Has no memory of who she used to be before she was taken, doesn't even know if the face she wears as a Mask is her own, and so her personal quest would be to find who she used to be, or at least settle into her own skin as to who she is now. And she'd also want to help others find their place and get to know themselves better.

A whole bunch of Pokémon Sword and Shield / Gen 8 reveals today! A couple of new Gen 8 Pokémon revealed! The legendaries for the Galar region revealed! Dynamax (giant) Pokémon! Multiplayer cooperative battles, where you can meet up with your friends and battle together instead of as opponents!

flails around madly

Gameplay reveal trailer, as well as the general game information page with new information and a longer version of the above gameplay trailer.

flails around more

(Look, there's a special place in my heart for games falling into the "RPG I can carry in my bag and play in short bursts throughout the day, but could also play for hours on a plane" category; the Pokémon games have long dominated that particular spot, though admittedly the Fire Emblem games also often wander into that bucket.)

What would be awesome is if Ares and Evennia both supported exporting their world lists in a standardized JSON or XML format from a given endpoint.

Then someone who wanted to make a new listing site could a) pull from the Ares and Evennia lists as at least a baseline for 'here are some games', and b) export their own site listing in that same format, so that c) clients or third-party tools could import it too.

@Aria said in RL things I love:

HOLY SHIT, YOU CAN INVITE GRITTY TO YOUR WEDDING.

(I invited Gritty to our wedding.)

You know that scene in The Man from UNCLE while infiltrating the factory, where Solo just looks over at Kuryakin and asks in a bewildered and plaintive tone, "...why?"

Yeah. Picture that as a response here. Same exact tone.

@skew hey! You were Tourist1 to my Tourist2 on F&L.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

@Sparks said in General Video Game Thread:

@egg said in General Video Game Thread:

I am incredibly excited about the FF7 remake, despite all of the sour grapes FFVI fanboys and girls who come out of the woodwork every time a new thing related to FF7 comes along...something something opera...something something Kefka...you know, FF7 has musical themes for every playable character, too.

waves FF6 banner anyway, albeit sullenly

Look, I'm just saying we've had a pre-smartphone phone game, a PSP game, the original PS game, two movies, a PS2 game, a smartphone game, AND now a remake of the original game. I'm a little Shinra'd-out, and I'm feeling the urge for some Magitek.

(Also, FF6 has better music, no matter how much a whoooole bunch of people want to say that One-Winged Angel is the definitive FF song. Terra's Theme is better, fight me.)

Shadow's Theme is better.

I will fite you over it.

I will grant it a very, very close second, and accept that someone else might (erroneously) rank it higher.

And Marc Papeghin's cover of it is pretty amazing. But Terra's Theme will always remain, in my heart, the music I associate most strongly with FF6.

Actually, I'm trying to think of any modern game soundtracks (for 'modern' let's go with in the past ten years) that I think of as being as iconic as the games of that era. Not just ones that you can recognize when you hear them—there's plenty that reach that level—but ones where you can hum them without prompting, without listening to them first?

I feel like Nate's Theme (in all its variations) from the first three Uncharted games is, in its own way, as memorable as the Indiana Jones theme; that one sticks with you once you've heard it, and it's easy to remember.

And of course, there's the Dovahkiin Song from Skyrim, which I think everyone on the internet knows. Whether or not they played that game. Or any video game. Ever. (FUS! RO! DAH!)

There's bits of the soundtracks from my beloved Mass Effect trilogy that might achieve that level; ME3's main theme, Leaving Earth, probably foremost among them.

Maybe Aloy's Theme from Horizon Zero Dawn? We're at edge cases now, though; I really like this one, but I don't know how many people who played HZD could still hum this one now, two years after the game's release, without listening to the track first.

But how many classic games are there where the themes are ones you could hum immediately without prompting? Super Mario Brothers, the main theme to Zelda (and the Epona song!), the main theme to the Pokemon franchise, Tetris, the soundtracks to the early Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger, etc... I'm not sure if it's just because they were, in many cases, games during our formative years, or if it's just that in making the soundtrack for primitive sound hardware, they had to boil a song down to its basics and make those really matter.