Posts made by Sparks

Timex?

@Thenomain said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

@Arkandel said in NOLA: The Game That Care Forgot:

Are there new features available?

In computer terms, a beta means a feature freeze; no new features, just fixing and tweaking the existing ones. It's meant to focus on bug-fixing.

In theory an alpha is when something is functional enough to mostly use but not feature-complete, a beta is when things are feature-complete and frozen to put into testing, where the focus is on bugfixes. Then you have release.

That's a great theory; it hasn't been the case for a lot of the software industry for years.

At some point "beta" came to mean "people outside the company are using it". Look at how often MMOs have "closed betas" well before they're done. Look at how long Gmail stayed in "beta". Etc.

Generally nowadays it seems as though "beta" means "it's not done but you can use it" and "alpha" means "it's not done and it might also explode at any moment".

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

[citation needed]

I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'm saying I don't have very much information on this and would like to see some more. What little I do have says vaping is far less harmful to both the user and the user's environment than is smoking, but … studies can be bought.

It depends. Arguably it's better in many ways, but you still introduce a lot of crap into the air:

During the vaping sessions substantial amounts of 1,2-propanediol, glycerine and nicotine were found in the gas-phase, as well as high concentrations of PM2.5 (mean 197 μg/m3). The concentration of putative carcinogenic PAH in indoor air increased by 20% to 147 ng/m3, and aluminum showed a 2.4-fold increase. PNC ranged from 48,620 to 88,386 particles/cm3 (median), with peaks at diameters 24–36 nm. FeNO increased in 7 of 9 individuals. The nicotine content of the liquids varied and was 1.2-fold higher than claimed by the manufacturer.

—Schober, W, et al. (2014). Use of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) impairs indoor air quality and increases FeNO levels of e-cigarette consumers. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, 217(6). pp. 628–637. doi:10.1016

Now, whether or not that one's a completely reputable journal/article, I'm not sure! But I can find plenty of similar results with a few more quick journal searches.

Anyway, vaping's probably a lot better than normal cigarettes, you're not wrong. But it's not harmless, either, and if I'm an asthma sufferer I'm probably not going to feel particularly well-disposed towards _anyone) riding the bus or whatever who's putting crap in the air that makes it hard for me to breathe; whether it's normal cigarette smoke, pot (HI I'M FROM SEATTLE AND BOY THERE IS A LOT OF THAT BEING SMOKED AROUND HERE LET ME TELL YOU), or e-cigs/vaping is not particularly going to matter.

@faraday I like Asimov's approach to Nightfall, where he said since the book was in English, the terms and idioms were translated accordingly, but readers could feel free to pretend that he used the original alien cultural words instead.

I also present: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2008/10/01/xkcd-gets-it-right-again/

If the difference is important, use a custom term; if the mounts on your world are amphibious carnivorous snails, don't call them horses, but if it's an herbivorous quadruped with no meaningful differences from a horse... yeah, it's probably best to call it a horse and let folks move on.

@Maira said in Course Corrections:

Past tense: Maybe it's habit or something the other player prefers. Habits can be awfully hard to break, and if that's how they learned to RP, even more so.

This seems legit.

Tense convention among many MMO RPers is past tense, a'la writing a novel. Having started on MU*s, even as someone who writes stories in my spare time, I have been the jackass who poses present tense habitually among my guild mates, and then apologizes. (Thankfully, as it is usually in Google Docs, I can go back and edit my shame away.)

It can be really really hard to break those habits.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

@Sparks said in RL Anger:

status migrainosis

What do they call it when you've had the same migraine attack for 1-2 weeks?
Each migraine I get breaks roughly that often. I get a day off for every 1-2 weeks of pain.

That's the part that's worrying me. The 'mini-stroke' symptoms are becoming more frequent.

Honestly, as someone who suffers both migraines and cluster headaches (and is closing in on two weeks of cluster right now), that sounds terribly familiar. If it is a cluster, oxygen treatments might (but not definitely) help.

It still isn't normal migraine, so be very careful.

You have my sympathy, either way. From down in my own pit of pain, I offer a magic space tiara and the key to a hidden room of silent darkness.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

A part of me wonders if I can walk into the hospital and go 'I'm done taking care of myself for a while. It's your turn.'

Speaking as a chronic migraine sufferer, you not only can, but after three days of a migraine, you're arguably supposed to in order to avoid status migrainosis.

(I say this having been pushing through a migraine for more than 3 days right now. So, do as I say, not as I do, apparently.)

@EUBanana ...damn, and I thought I was crazy.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

A buddy of mine got me to watch The Expanse, finally, by recommending it as 'everyone of these idiots could be a MU character'.

He wasn't wrong.

This makes sense, because the Expanse actually started as an online RP game, albeit forum RP rather than a MU*. The Roci crew are apparently all based on PCs from that. The original players are the folks in the acknowledgements for Leviathan Wakes.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/the-evolution-of-james-s-a-coreys-space-epic-the-expanse/

(I like to imagine that after a certain point, every time Holden's player was like "I open a comm link" all the other players were OOCly groaning.)

@ThatGuyThere said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

@faraday said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):

I don't understand why you're equating "web based" with "not real time". I just responded to your forum post 16 minutes later. Is that not "real time"?

For the purposes of MUSHing I would not consider a 16 minute wait to be real time. I know it is a personal preference thing but if a sixteen minute wait was the norm for a scene with someone I would not be in a scene with that person often.

So, I'm a long-time MU*er but I also engage in MMO RP. (Predominantly for The Secret World, because frankly, who doesn't want to be a clueless newbie immortal fighting against eldritch monstrosities?)

And I will say, it's a wildly different thing. MMO RP tends to be on forums, or in Google Docs, and you'll write a paragraph or two and then sometimes find yourself waiting hours. I've had scenes that took weeks to play out because of that pacing. That can drive me nuts.

On the other hand, I can toss off a pose or two into a Google Doc scene over my lunch break at work, where I cannot really easily commit to enough time for a MU* scene. And I never have to ask for reposes in a forum or Google Doc!

But I don't think this limitation is inherent to the technology. There's an expectation among web-RPers of forum threads and Google Docs and so on being slower paced, sure, but that's a cultural thing. There's no inherent reason a web-based system has to be drawn out, just like there's no inherent reason a telnet-based MU* system has to be immediate. (Save the fact that the connection is inherently more stateful with telnet; you can't log in, pose, log out again, log back in and pose, etc. Not like flipping to a forum or gdoc to check for a pose and toss in a reply.)

And I think there are definite benefits to the idea of a chargen that happens in a webpage, setting up events via a web form, and so on.

Looking at a webpage and clicking on things are concepts everyone's used to; think of reading bboards with a web-forum like interface as opposed to, "Oh, wait, which was this game built on? Is it +bbread, or @bb/read, or @read, or..."

Are you talking system here, or setting, @Thenomain?

Because sometimes the two are pretty heavily tied together, and sometimes they aren't.

I feel like playing with Exalted or Scion, for instance, you're inheriting setting as well as system. Whereas "d20" or "GURPS" is a more generic structure you can build settings on.

I am rarely super-excited about the dice mechanics of a game, though I admit I love my time/advancement system I used elsewhere. There are systems I think 'oh, well, I already have that in my brain so I can use it easily', but I'm not going to go, "Oh, this game with this random setting is using GURPS, so I'm super stoked!"

@Auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@Sparks

...I want to look like a space princess.
Unfortunately, clearly, I cannot afford to- damnit.

I've been trying to soldier through. Some days it just does not work. Today was one of them- I was fucking up stuff with work that I haven't in years. I couldn't function. Just a week more on the preventatives before I schedule the first infusion. Hopefully it all does the trick.

FYI, you can buy the Cefaly in Canada way cheaper; it's not a prescription medical device there, and it's wholly legal to bring back. I just snagged one at Costco in Canada while visiting a friend.

But yeah. Mine have been getting worse lately—probably exacerbated by stress—so you have my sympathy.

@Auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

New treatment cycle started. No immediate results, but the neuro is confident it will work and I like the guy. He brought up my sinus surgery and complications from last year before I could, meaning he'd gone over my records (same hospital system) prior to seeing me. I appreciate that.

Good luck; I'm being sent to a neurologist (again) too. Though I've reached the 'giving up and soldiering through the pain' point some time back, my family is ganging up to force me into it. Either way, I feel you on the nausea and vertigo.

For what it's worth, one of the things that I've found helpful is this ridiculous space tiara thing called a Cefaly. It electrically stimulates the trigeminal nerve, which has three effects while I'm wearing it:

1. It short-circuits any migraine I'm having,
2. It makes me drowsy as heck.
3. It makes me look like a ridiculous space princess.

Downside is when I take it off, the migraine tends to come back within 30-45 minutes, but in the meantime... that thing is a damned lifesaver to give brief relief. (I have the original one, but they have a smaller second-generation one that's more like a forehead jewel thing now.)

@WTFE said in RL Anger:

To be fair, all those bizarre rules for passwords that companies employ really are bogus bullshit; they're the result of pure cargo cult thinking.

All I can say to that is "Correct Horse Battery Staple".

@Monogram said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)

Many people forget that the beloved ME 1(which is still my favorite in the first trilogy)was the exact same way. Exact same looking caves, or bases or hideouts. Recycled the same three or four layouts that looked exactly the same. Enemies popping in? Happened. But people are so quick to harp on DA2 for it but completely ignore the fact the fact that ME1 did the exact same thing. It wasn't anything new.

I think for me DA2 was more jarring than ME1; a mass-produced modular structure plopped down on some alien world made more sense than a supposedly-natural cave having an identical layout to every single other cave ever.

I mean, even in MEA, half of the buildings in outposts look more or less identical, but given that people are basically slapping down the construction equivalent of shipping containers, stacking them on each other, and connecting the rooms...

@Thenomain said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:

What left Andromeda buggy was EA's fault, the same issue that made Dragon Age 2 a bland and incomplete game, the same problem that plagues a lot of the games industry and what makes CD Projekt RED a stand-out.

I'm actually not entirely willing to point the finger at EA on this one.

This was supposed to be Bioware Montreal's chance to shine, Montreal being the B-team who usually did side-quests and stuff for previous games. But Edmonton—what we think of as 'Bioware'—was supposed to be there to pick up the slack if needed, as the more experienced team. But rumor is Edmonton pretty much left them to their own devices instead, in order to focus on Sekrit Unannounced New IP (whatever that is).

As a result, I'm guessing Montreal got into the weeds as they tried to handle making a giant sweeping game. Worse, none of the old ME code, written for the Unreal engine, could be brought over to EA's own in-house Frostbite engine; they had to build for this game from scratch.

Rumor has it EA had to sweep in to bail folks out by ordering Edmonton to actually help Montreal get the game to launch, bringing on the team from DICE to flesh out multiplayer, and bringing on the Frostbite engine team themselves to make things run smoothly.

I do wish it had been more polished at launch, but I still find the game perfectly playable—moreso now that, for instance, the colony administrator doesn't look like a soulless sociopathic android due to those cold, dead, staring eyes. And, you know, not spending half my lifetime watching the animations flying from planet to planet.

(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)

I feel that functions shouldn't be used this way, really. Side-effect functions are the devil. (Watch me be opinionated!)

That said, if you can turn it into something sane (like, say, a command), you might also want to look into semaphores. (The @wait/@notify pairing.) This will let you queue up a bunch of commands for a given object, and then @notify an object to execute the next command in its queue.

@Cupcake said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Can't connect. Anyone else having an issue?

I can reach it fine (for ping/traceroute) from my home machine, VPN'ing there.

However, from my colocated servers, there's occasional massive packet drop; some edge router heading into linode.com (where Arx appears to be hosted) is seemingly not super happy with, like, anything passing through Dallas (where my servers are) right now. Depending on your ISP, you might be passing through a similar mess.

So, I'm guessing whatever's gone sideways, it's some routing problem that'll clean up for you.

@Auspice said in RL Anger:

Migraine got so bad yesterday I missed the 2nd half of my workday and slept for 5 hours.

Upvoting for sympathy, as a chronic migraine sufferer.

@Ashen-Shugar I think that's a worthwhile idea in a lot of ways, but I don't think it'll help the original poster a lot in this case, sadly. Unless you can convince their staff to swap out the hardcode to pick up a feature.

I also do think there could be an argument made for functional expansion; if I had the origin command in a register, I could do interesting conditional things like add out-of-band data for the client to process. Like adding a conveniently, consistently parseable string saying 'this is a page from <X>' with a begin/end tag, so that even multi-line pages could be pulled into a specific spawn.

Of course, at that point, you're making this wildly more complicated, but it's still a personal pipe dream... to have a way to snag multi-line outputs for client-side processing. And if we're discussing adding user-specific formatting hooks that have a chance to alter output, making them conditional based on the origin command and enactor makes me happy.

From a more practical standpoint, making a way to process the entire output would allow for other nice things, like 'if this is a say/pose/emit, replace all instances of %r%t with just %r, trim %r off the beginning and end, then append %r to the end.' Because then you've just managed to standardize formatting even for the people who want first-line indents, or who add %r to the end of their poses already.

But at that point we're probably getting a bit beyond the scope of the original request.