Erkki

The www.sorryeverybody.com gallery didn't work for me before, but now I got a look at it and well... it's kind of pathetic. ]edit]Oh, but some of the newer ones are good...

Oh, and my second choice would be that we would run out of oil tomorrow.

I'd not be lazy.

It would be funnier if the text said "..." or "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah"

Didn't you hear? They are funded by the US government and the government wants them to make a really good game about aliens, so people will get used to it before the real aliens land on our planet. A little off topic, but I'd like to know how Bethesda funded Morrowind... They didn't have any really successful games before as far as I know. Or was Daggerfall a success? I didn't know much about the games industry back then so I don't know.

I've been planning to get started with enchanting things (haven't tried before) and just captured my first soul, but I found the FAQ's on the Internet a bit worrying. They say you should boost your intelligence to at least 1000 or so for making the enchantments. That sounds crazy. Was the game designed so that with regular unboosted intelligence of 100 you can't make a really powerful thing? What about the Enchanters who do it for money? Is it better to let them do it or try to find/make things to fortify my intelligence sky-high? I tried an enchanter just for a test how much they would ask and Levitate 100-100 would have cost something like 1 million...

I think that's a very nice, short review.

At least one of those is in Magna Cum Laude.

Juhani is a Finnish name. Freaky.

Sorry, baby, I don't do chat up lines, but I'd like to do you.

I definitely do not want a copy. Although, hmm... it would be a nice Christmas present for my sister... Ok, you convinced me. You can send it to me.

How... pointless.

Damn. No you were right. I don't see where I got 40. I was almost certain I entered the right numbers in my calculator perviously. But I tried again now and 44 is correct. Weird.

Well, there are 4 degrees between 40 and 44

Deadworm made an error. A= 40 degrees. x = 13.9 ,not 18.blablabla. The 13,9 comes from x=8 * tan(60) ie. 8 * 1,blabla

That G-System sounds promising. I'd like to check out the demo, but I suck at using Linux and have never compiled anything on it. I do have Mandrake 10.0 installed, though, so I'll give it a try. I've wanted to do something like this myself (on a much smaller scale), but I haven't even managed to start yet.

Or in a NautilOY.

The demo seemed pretty difficult though. At least the dirt track. Driving on the asphalt was relatively easy, but on the dirt exponentially harder. Well I guess that's true in real life too. If I actually manage to get good at the demo, I might actually buy this game (still think those ragdolls are unnecessary and bad taste, but I can live with it if the game is really good)

The drama engine discussed in the article isn't so much about guiding the player actually... I searched for a quote and only found this And you know, in Morrowind there are times when I have too much to do. You really have to fill in some things using your imagination with that game, but you can always pick one thing and focus on doing that. So mostly the problem is not directionlessness, but deciding between possible directions --- So what was that story engine / game like, Yufster?

Well, the game could make the main goals very clear to you and everything else you could do would be optional. In the first post I mentioned I read somewhere about a hypothetical story engine of sorts that could detect if the player is lost or something and gently guide her towards the main story. Possibly Marek linked to an article about that in his "Future of Adventure Games" article. Found it. It seems actually Kingz linked to it in the AG forums and Marek linked to that post And here's a link to the article "Agitating for Dramatic Change" by Randy Littlejohn. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20031029/littlejohn_01.shtml

Oh yeah, and maybe some of you get the question that why would anyone even want to create such a game? Well, to give the player even more freedom, and expand that freedom in new directions, and maybe even make a game tailor itself to what the player prefers. I think it's an acceptable goal, or otherwise there would be similarly no point to Morrowind or Daggerfall.

I think I tried to discuss too many separate things in that post. I don't see my point either... I'll try again now and maybe leave a few things out... The relationship between designer and player. I think a lot players want to see every detail the designers put in. Like wanting to hear every dialogue line in Monkey Island or like in Morrowind right now, I really wish I could join all Houses without starting a new game, to get to do those quests as well. But still, I know I'm not going to catch all the quests or details because there are at least seemingly so so many of them and there are only 24 hours in the day... On one level I'm a little bit frustrated by this (not being able to see all the content), but on another level I really like this open-endedness. But I think it should to be taken even further (at least experimentally). Could the possibilities in a game be even an order of magnitude greater than in Morrowind, so that it would be very clear to the player that there is never ever hope that they can discover every tiny detail in the game and that it's intended this way from the first place. To overwhelm the player so much that he must stop caring for every detail and choose a subset that he wants to explore during the game. It would be kind of like bringing MMORPG to single player, maybe (I've never really played any MMORPG for more than a few hours). But creating such a game would have many problems... 1) If everything would be hand designed, it would take more than 10 years maybe. Maybe even way more. So some things would need to be generated by the computer (not necessarily randomly). But could computers create interesting content? Or would the players feel that despite having great freedom, everything feels, well, generic and insignificant? That leads to a whole new set of questions and even science-fiction... But I believe at least some amount of interesting content could be created by the computer even today if the designers supply enough building parts and if the systems are complex enough that the same kind of thing doesn't get repeated very often. 2) The designers would not have a complete vision of every detail the game, because only so much info can fit in ones head. And it would be a balancing and Quality Assurance nightmare etc. The game world would need to be extremely systematic and all the systems fool-proof so that the computer wouldn't generate bugs and so that at least a complete vision of how all the different game systems interact would be possible. I hope I made more sense now. I left some thoughts out, to keep the post "short"

I wouldn't have thought it was entirely hand designed. Do you know this? Well, maybe the landscapes, but certainly not every tree or plant was placed by hand... Hmm... actually they could have been... but it sounds so massive amount of work. Anyway, it sounds like they are using more procedurally generated things with Oblivion (there was some talk of soil type affecting what plants grow or something like that). I'm kind of interested in seeing how that turns out. I'm currently thinking of trying to do something like this myself (with much much simpler graphics of course )

I had one of those dreams that transform into something else every minute. The last scene before waking up was this: You Idle Thumbs staff were living together (or just hanging out in an apartment maybe). I clearly remember Jake, Chris and Marek, the other people were a bit fuzzy. Chris and Jake were sitting in a room, behind two tables, and they were just starting a contest of who could color comics faster. I think the comics were drawn by themselves. I stupidly asked Chris: "What are you doing?" and Chris told me to get out. I stepped out into the other room, where the rest of the people were sitting on a couch. I sat down too and Marek said "You picked the wrong person to bother." "So you were betting on Chris?" I asked. Then he probably said something affirmative, and that's all I remember.

Happy Birthday!