Messages

556

AI War / 5.021 - Hybrid Systems online

« on: December 14, 2011, 12:34:42 PM »

"just this weekend I was teaching the hybrids some new tricks for 5.021 (a little ways to go on that, though)."- Keith

1) advanced?
2) what sort of tricks?
3) rebalance?

Will siege starships become useful? Will triangle ships return to glory in 2012? All this and more in the next episode of Dragonb-..

557

AI War / Re: Major performance issues

« on: December 14, 2011, 11:21:47 AM »

Here is how I would troubleshoot:

-One of the things I would do is look at your resources page (a sub dialog of your Task Manager), and look at what the processes are doing reads and writes while your AI war is loading.

-Your benchmark is significantly slower than Keith's, which also means you should start unplugging everything from your computer except for your mouse, keyboard, and sound cables. That means no headset, no digital camera, no printer cables, no external hard drive, nothing. When a computer starts to experience delay, sometimes that is due to flooding the bus. I/O devices can do that. Imagine what happens when your virus protector starts to automatically scan an external drive.

- Shut down all processes except for those required to run AI war. This is not because your machine is too slow, but rather eliminate any suspects.

558

AI War / Re: Philo's Beginner Guide to AI Wars

« on: December 14, 2011, 11:10:04 AM »

This guide is doing well so far, mainly because it stays away from controversial opinions about what you should do, and instead just offers a starting point. There are so many ways to play. I like how you avoided talking about starships versus triangle altogether, although you really should mention it in some kind of neutral format. It is a lot like rock paper scissors.

Also, I think you should introduce the buttons on the bottom of the screen, and at least discuss two of the reference pages(economy and the ship reference page). That's how you understand where you are losing money, and it's also how you understand how to counter whatever ships the AI is throwing at you.

559

AI War / Re: A Beginner's guide to AI War(AKA How not to die in five minutes)

« on: December 13, 2011, 10:17:04 AM »

I'm tempted to write up an accurate beginner's guide for the current build.  I've done them before but there doesn't seem to be much joy for the game anymore in the IRC and the like.

I don't see an easy way to get a request for this outside of this thread, but would anyone find something from a recent beginner to a beginner valuable?

If this thread didn't deter you, I'm sure it would be an interesting read. But this time, I think it should be put in a wiki so it can be edited. A beginners' guide on some random thread that is not stickied would get lost and out of date really quickly. I actually enjoyed this guide- even though there were some inaccuracies- mainly because it brought about some discussion on the mechanics of the game.

560

Off Topic / Re: I'm going to speak about the elephant in the gaming room...

« on: December 12, 2011, 01:33:36 PM »

It was just an example Obviously it'd be better if he coded Aurora not in java and not in vb6. I know VB6, and i learned to program in it eons ago (and quickly learned that perl is way more awesome) after that i forgot everything about VB6 ,p

I went from Visual Basic(fun) to C++(not fun) to Perl (most fun I've ever had) to Java (rip my hair out unwrapping someone else's object design) to C (stab my eyeballs out)... with various languages in between. Perl is by far the most pleasant to work with, least restrictive, and the least verbose.

561

Off Topic / Re: Personal finance software

« on: December 12, 2011, 01:29:42 PM »

Same here, i do all that via openoffice spreadsheets, or excel for your windows variety..

It takes some effort to get going but its a lot more dynamic. Your bank might or might not offer a data feed though. If it doesn't it takes some typing effort.

Or a Perl script, if you are so inclined.

562

AI War / Re: A Beginner's guide to AI War(AKA How not to die in five minutes)

« on: December 12, 2011, 01:26:00 PM »

Off Topic: What are you guys, art students?

Off-topic:
My major was computer science, but I had a minor in arts. I love art history in particular, enjoy foreign and domestic museums; it's one of my favorite topics! Most people don't care about that stuff, but art is a way of documenting the human race, and the medium is one component of that. If you are interested, or want to be interested, start reading about Hieronymus Bosch and go backwards/forwards from there. No matter what you think of his paintings, you can't help but have a reaction.

on-topic:
Fighters are not useless. They are the best triangle ship. Frigates and bombers have better substitutes at the starship factory than fighters do.

563

AI War / Re: A Beginner's guide to AI War(AKA How not to die in five minutes)

« on: December 12, 2011, 10:29:02 AM »

I am fully aware that people make fun of comic sans, but here is the beauty of it: it can be monospaced and the letter i, l, and the number 1 look different. If anything, we should be vilifying fonts that make those look the same. Like Times New Roman.

Times new Roman:
il1IL

Comic sans:
il1IL

564

AI War / Re: A Beginner's guide to AI War(AKA How not to die in five minutes)

« on: December 12, 2011, 09:54:56 AM »

It's a legitimate playstyle to ignore the command station, just eliminate the guard posts, and be selective about eliminating warp gates, but there is a methodology to it. I play that way. If you just eliminate everything, your progress goes UP

565

Off Topic / Re: GoG.com "network service charge" ?

« on: December 12, 2011, 09:45:21 AM »

I use PayPal, and my August purchase on my account statement shows the exact price to the penny.

566

Off Topic / Re: Personal finance software

« on: December 12, 2011, 09:37:10 AM »

Quicken was the last personal-finance software that I used, and that was awhile ago. Online banking has progressed to the point where it's really quite functional. My bank allows me to export information into spreadsheets (on those rare occasions where it's necessary). If a spreadsheet cannot do the job for you, you must be running a small business.

567

Off Topic / Re: I'm going to speak about the elephant in the gaming room...

« on: December 12, 2011, 09:32:27 AM »

Converting to Java would be quite expensive. The model that Visual Basic uses is called "event driven programming," whereas Java is object oriented. Technically, Visual Basic 6 does have objects, but the style is different, and I think that converting it would be hell and a massive undertaking. Java is very verbose, and it takes a lot of construction work to do very simple things. As a programmer, Visual Basic is a lot more entertaining to program in because you have near instant gratification. Less than a day of work, and you have something to show for it.

When to use Java:
1) cross-platform support.
2) extensive library support, lots of references to API programming
3) The size of your team matches the effort
4) You have professional expertise with software design patterns. Project must be well-defined.

Beyond that, Java is an aging platform that is somewhat miserable to work with. I have worked extensively with it, and I have to say I prefer the .net platform to Java any day.

568

AI War / Re: A Beginner's guide to AI War(AKA How not to die in five minutes)

« on: December 10, 2011, 10:06:26 AM »

AFAIK, Warpgate don't have any relevance to reinforcement numbers, but rather Guard Posts.

Warpgates Spawn AI Ships, you don't need a Guard post for reinforcements

Actually no, I think warpgates only determine from where the AI Waves come from, they don't actually spawn ships at all. The AI Guard Posts and command centres spawn ships though.

This is correct. An improvement to the guide would be to make sure that you have one adjacent warp gate next to your territory so that waves are directed to a well-defended chokepoint.

569

A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Constructive Criticism

« on: December 05, 2011, 07:37:12 PM »

In one of your last posts you said you wanted your level 60 character to be different than someone else's That won't happen without loot collection and deep crafting system

And this proposed system isn't at all like Diablo... and it certainly would not allow for grinding - but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

In the same way that my 20 hour level 8 AI war game is different than yours. You can make meaningful decisions that differentiate you without hunting loot.

Taking research labs and finding buildings like datacenters and caches is the AI War equivalent of random loot

Actually, no it isn't   I think you should clarify what grinding is before you announce that every reward system in gaming is grinding  .

The act of grinding is repeating yourself over and over again, often for marginal gain. In AI war, different situations are kind of like puzzles that you have to adapt to. A lot of those puzzles are optional. And just like in chess, the board almost always looks different at some point. So that is not grinding. In Valley (and this has been said many times), people are feeling repetition. You jump around using the same spells over and over. I used the same 2 spells for the first 10 hours. Every once in a while I would find some marginal treasure, but it was definitely repetitious. That's grinding. I don't want to continue on that path where we do the same thing over and over and definitely not for some avatar graphics. The gameplay has to be meaningful. I don't object to decorating the character, but if the object of the game is to repeat yourself over and over for a awesome avatar, that's grinding, that's boring, and that is what I'm objecting to.

I want the game to offer some intellectual stimulation. If this was Zelda, we would have a story and an overlord. Over time, you unlock all kinds of abilities that allow you to explore even greater dungeons. Eventually, there is the moment where you finally take on Ganon. We don't have that here. We do have some bosses, but we don't have these handcrafted dungeons with bosses that reward us with some ability to progress to the next dungeon. We just get some shards to make version number five of some spell. I was hoping that the city building was going to offer that piece of intellectual gameplay, but maybe it's not. Maybe people are just going to be hunting down cartoon helmets That just seems like a simple goal to settle for. That's all right once in a while, something like Diablo or Titan quest can be fun, but I didn't think this was going to be that game.

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A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 / Re: Constructive Criticism

« on: December 05, 2011, 08:50:18 AM »

In one of your last posts you said you wanted your level 60 character to be different than someone else's That won't happen without loot collection and deep crafting system

And this proposed system isn't at all like Diablo... and it certainly would not allow for grinding - but rest assured that keith has ideas that go beyond this ;P

In the same way that my 20 hour level 8 AI war game is different than yours. You can make meaningful decisions that differentiate you without hunting loot.