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Sotha

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Everything posted by Sotha

  1. Thanks! I edited the original post to contain some design notes for those interested.
  2. YOU TAFFERS! Happy new year! Deadeye is a small/tiny assassination mission recommended for TDM newcomers and veterans alike. Briefing: Download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JWslTAC3Ai9kkl1VCvJb14ZlVxWMmkUj/view?usp=sharing Enjoy! EDIT: I promised to someone to write something about the design of the map. This is in spoiler tags below. Possibly useful to new mappers or players interested in developer commentary.
  3. The call for betatesters is now closed. Thanks for those interested. I am already much better, thank you. The cough and the snot-explosion might continue for weeks, I fear... But like in all matters, there always light side too.
  4. Hi! That nasty COVID finally catched me and I got locked alone into a room for a while. After recovering enough for basic functions and mindlessly consuming hours of trash from Youtube I decided to do something more fun to pass time... and now out comes a new FM called Deadeye. After years of hiatus, mapping indeed was like riding a bike. Deadeye is a small few room assassination mission one could play through in less than an hour and I would like to have betatesters for that. Maybe two is enough. Reply below if you are interested. Thanks!
  5. I don't know about consensus, but I think it is a matter of values of the observer: Builders: all magical dealings with dead are blasphemy. It is okay to bring flowers to tombs, pray and remember dead non-magically. Pagans: always okay (and probably common practice) to ask for guidance from the spirits. Probably evil to raise dead for selfish power gain. Possibly okay to raise dead to defend own community as a last resort. City dwellers, commoners: Magic? Scary! Nobles: Possibly attractive free time amusements, but maybe a bit perverse and dangerous if the church would hear about it. But forbidden fruit makes it even more enticing.
  6. Hi! I got back into TDM after a long break. Amazingly fun mission. Thank you for making it! Good: Excellent use of sounds Nice plot Excellent plot delivery and I liked the way things escalated Spooky. I especially liked how the environment changed a bit (wait... wasn't that gargoyle somewhere else just now..) Backstabbed the father skeleton out of undeath with my sword. Serves him right! Bad: None So nice to see ultra-talented people working on TDM maps!
  7. I have zero time mapping these days, so I might as well spill out my ideas for others to use. 1) I had similar idea as Thieving Barbarian: Ulysses-mission with a smallish section of a city, or a district of it. A VIP convoy goes through the area. Heavy armour AI team moves with the VIP, and the VIP is never left unguarded. The player is supposed to intercept, take out the VIP and escape. Plot twist: killing the VIP brings shutdown of the district, making escape more difficult. All player accessible areas are also AI accessible, so no easy mode fleeing the area. At higher difficulties the VIP might be armored (plot twist2). Allow player plentiful money to buy gear and do the hit exactly how they please (flash bomb & melee assault, explosive mine, gas arrow volley, sniper broadhead, or whatever). 2) Adventure / mystery mission with elements of the good old Lucasarts point&click adventure games. All moveable objects would serve a function, similarly how the player use the cannon to break a door in the Lich Queens Demise. The location would have a story, which is spoon fed to the player as they solve puzzles. Perhaps, in the end a group of AI would move in to give the player some good old sneaking gameplay. 3) city watch raid. Player goes in a thieves den to do something (steal, assassination or rig a gambling game). When they accomplish the task a city watch raid comes in and wrecks the place and the thieves. Of course they want to wreck the player as well. Emphasis on dynamic gameplay where AI fight each other and the player laughs in the shadows and slips by.
  8. I had to use calculator to determine my age. *grabs nitros*
  9. I have not received any threats to the e-mail associated with this site.
  10. I detected an empathetic emission from this origin and came to investigate. I can only guess what has happened. Something exploded around post #34. What a pity content has been erased. Now there is nothing to learn. Let's start having more political discussions on this forum immediately. We must practice political discussion in order to master it, secure it, contain it and preserve it for the future generations. Without the ability of political discussion, the future of humanity is doomed. And I would not like that...
  11. +1 on what Orb said. I have a completely different strategy of being happy with my OSes: I customize nothing. I learn to use the OS as provided. If I did customize my own OS and learned to use it, I would be immediately confused when I get exposed to another computer with different setup. If I learn to use the mainstream setup, I am familiar with every mainstream setup I encounter. Mainstream is more common than customized. Hence, off with the customization! Weren't humans supposed to be the masters of adaptation and thus the dominant life form on this planet? There is great power in adaptation, I think, if you adapt to the most common setup.
  12. LOL! Today I had time to install Lubuntu on my wife's old laptop. I think it was again a typical linux-experience: 1) Installation went great. I did spend some time looking up how to partition properly, because it is over 5 years since my previous linux install and I had forgotten. Found info and continued. 2) Everything worked out of the box, except.... 3) Windows key opens the launch menu -> great! But there is no way to do the snap-window-to-50%-of-window-space operation which I use all the time. Again, looking for information... 4) It turns out the functionality should be there, with key binding Windows-Key+Left or Right. But the functionality does not work out of the box. Again, looking for information.... 5) Turns out the developers dropped the ball and Windows key cannot simultaneously open the launch menu AND have the window50%snapping working. It is either or. Again, looking for information... 6) I disabled the windows key->launch menu feature. The windows key + Left/Right 50% windows snapping started working! Fortunately, ALT+F2 starts a launch menu, so now I can both snap windows to 50% and use a shortcut to launch apps. 7) now the old laptop works and is lightning fast without sacrificing functionality or useability. So the Linux-experience is that things are often almost great, but then there is some silly overlooking by the developers and you miss out functionality you would really like.... but if you are ready to do some investigation and play around, you might get a fix that gets you everything you need.
  13. Oh god, I am a linux nerd, because I understood (and mostly agree with) what he said. But a newbie is flooded with many distros and they may easily choose a poor one. Or a once-good distro might fall out of grace... that's what Kubuntu looks like to me, because it used to work better than nowadays. Bloat gets added, I guess. This might help (or just muddy the waters even more: https://www.distrowatch.com/
  14. " Many jobs are paid badly because there is always a "dumb one" doing it because he or she is just happy having a job. If people don't have to rely on those jobs, they must get paid better to attract people doing them. And getting paid at a reasonable level (not neccessarely high, but also not low) is an important part of the satisfication a job is able to provide, as it tells the employee how valued the job really is. Current payments don't reflect that very well." This is mostly correct, I think. In market economy jobs that everyone could do have low wages. But globalisation + market economy means that if in Germany nobody does the low wage jobs and demand more salary for these jobs, then the low wage jobs simply move to less wealthy countries, if possible. Amount of jobs will go down, unemployment goes up. And people on UBI must be worse for the economy than people on low wage jobs. But it is true, that occupational injuries and retirements are very expensive. Someone ought to do the calculations. It is fun to speculate, but it does not produce new knowledge. Statistics produce new knowledge, and the preliminary results show only well being benefits. That is fine, if the purpose of the society is to produce well being, and the increase in productivity (from the automation that makes the jobs disappear) is capable of funding it.
  15. I used to use Linux. After Win10 came out I've been using that because it seems to be stable and pleasant to use. I am not sarcastic or trolling. For me Win10 has mostly worked just fine. Actually, it was the Linux side that had problems. In win side, you just install programs and stuff work, most of the time. In Linux side stuff mostly work, but if something goes wrong, you have to spend a lot of time trying to fix it. For example, if you use proprietary drivers for your video card, and you get a kernel update, you desktop environment is trashed and you have work in console to get the drivers back in working conditions. I usually search the issue online and always I have been able to fix them in the end. I don't have an unpleasant experience of the Linux community. But I just don't have time for fixing basic stuff that break surprisingly. On Windows side, stuff just work. Actually, my wife is the Linux user in the family nowadays. She has an old laptop she uses for work on text documents. The machine had Vista, so it worked horribly slow until I installed Kubuntu on it. She has been mostly happy with the Linux she has been using, and we have gotten more life out of the laptop. Now, the Kubuntu has gotten updates, and it is getting slow, too, so I think I will install Lubuntu on the laptop. Maybe she gets few more years out of the laptop and we save some money. Of course, we could used 300EUR and buy a new Windows laptop, and that would save my time because then stuff would mostly work and I would not have occasionally fix stuff. So I guess I see Linux as a good way to save some money by bringing old hardware to life.
  16. Typically, in finnish societal discussion (including but not limited to politicians, experts and media) the economy is King nowadays. That means economical benefits are often the main arguments that are used to drive reforms. If the argument was "the unemployed will have more fun while unemployed!" even the UBI *test* would have never been conducted in this country. Now, the argument have been "maybe UBI empowers the unemployed to get employed, which would be beneficial for our economy" What the logic is is not entirely clear to me, but it might be like you said in post #42, that UBI might empower unemployed people to start small businesses, which might hire other people and then get the snow ball rolling. But that does not seem to happen at least during the first year of receiving the UBI. Finns like science a lot, and the science that has gotten news coverage indicates that being poor incapacitates people (routine tasks get impossibly difficult, not because the poor are stupid or something, but their lack of wealth impedes them. How do you get into a job interview in another city if you don't have money for the train ticket?). So there is some logic in how this incapacitation would be removed if people had predictable UBI at their disposal.
  17. This was in finnish news coverage of the data. I noticed that Huffpost for some reason left out some of the negative sounding results from the finnish news. It may have something to do with political lean towards left, I guess. It they support UBI, they don't want to mention the negative sides to their readers, correct? But sad, also. :/ Here is yle, the goverment controlled news site: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10636726 I will translate for you: translates to-> I do not pretend to be a specialist and I am relying on these statistics. But to me it sounds the employment data is only marginal between UBI and non-UBI groups. The data is only preliminary, and the second year analysis data will be published later this year. But yeah, it is true that one year is short time for getting employed. I've personally seen freshly graduated highly talented shoot-patents-outta-fingertips -doctors in my field spending one year looking for a job before getting one. What is clear is that UBI is no instant-magic-bullet-get-employed-free card. I wish it was.
  18. Spring said, Aye, and when discussing UBI the question is, does UBI do this (move a person from wage slave to job enjoyer)? Looking at our preliminary data, it does not. UBI does not improve employment of their receiver. A society generates wealth when it's people work, wage slaves, or happy workers. When a person is on UBI, they do not generate resources for the society, but simply consume them. Everyone else has to feed the UBI receiver, who does not produce anything (necessarily, sure there could be an artist working for free, or similar). Thus, a wage slave must be better for the society than a happy non-monetary pursuer on UBI, correct? But another perception is this (which I read from the newspaper today): What is the purpose of our societies? Is it generation of wealth and competitiveness? Or is it generation of well-being? If wealth, productivity and competitiveness, then UBI is a disaster. If well being, then UBI experiment was a success! (People did not gain employment, but their life quality improved substantially.) For RPGista and others who say "things are worse than they used to," I must point out that humans have, for some reason, a bizarre bias towards negativity. I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness This negativity bias the book reveals freaks me out because, what I think it results in is roughly this: *things are getting better and better *people think things are getting worse *people vote with distorted worldview *facists posing as populists gain power (have you noticed how the populist groups that gain popularity these days often have strong connection to groups that seem more fascist than liberal?) *after gaining power, these groups enforce their position. *bye bye, democracy, welcome dictatorships. We must fight this ignorance!
  19. I can see how the discussion is gravitating towards perception of things. I mean, aren't we all just exploited wage slaves, if we decide to look at it like that? Are we entitled to do what we want, or are we just doomed to do what we have to do? Why would we be entitled, at all, to do what we want? I think it is more of a norm in the world that creatures do what they have to do to stay alive and well. Sometimes what we want to do happens to align what we have to do, but mostly we do what we have to do, right? Or we might just decide we want to do the things we have to do. Just a matter of perception, right? Isn't it so that UBI might confuse people to separate what they want to do from what they have to do and pursue what they want to do at the expense of what they have to do? It is the "have to do's" that keep the gears of the society running. "Want to do's" are dangerously often just entertainment with no human/economic/welfare/other growth.
  20. As always, the discussion is interesting and good points are made. I find these so useful, because I get new viewpoints and ideas. Thanks! The point Cookie rises is probably correct: if one country gives money for free, it results in people moving in just to enjoy the benefits. I think this point makes it clear that UBI *must* be compensatory. The receiver *must* contribute back to society to earn it. It is a salary for being a citizen, and you must contribute to earn it. That's what money was invented for in the first place, right? You contribute to the society and the society is indebted to you for it. RPGista said, Beautiful, and I wish it was true. But I am cynical enough to see that people who got rid of work would not strive for higher fulfilment of their potential. They would just waste away doing social media and pursuing pleasure after pleasure and end up unfulfilled. And most horrifyingly, insignificant and meaningless. If what you said was true, people with UBI would get an employment boost over non-UBI folks. But that did not happen. 70% of the benefit receivers didn't even reply to the researchers questionnaires. They just gladly took the money and did nothing, it seems to me. I may misinterpret and the results were preliminary. I hope I am wrong. Orb makes a valid point of the funding. I agree and would really like to see different parties run the calculations and show the numbers. If UBI is the future, it will be funded by the economic growth the automation brings. Perhaps that's what UBI will do: it just patches up the problem the automation brings and -at then same time- consumes the benefits the automation brings. And lastly, how would UBI affect the rest of the economy. In Finland we have a system where the social system pays part of the rent for the poor. This is really problematic because: 1) the rents increase so that the support goes directly into the coffers of the house owners. You are supporting the poor but feeding the rich. 2) you cannot shut the thing down, because then the poor people cannot afford to live in their homes, will end up evicted and homeless. 3) if you could shut the thing down, the prices of apartments and rents would plummet, because people could no longer afford them and demand would go down. ...yet the poor people would benefit of the lower rents that would exist if the system was shut down. So the system stays, even if it sucks. I think it might be the same thing all over again with UBI. If everyone had 600e for free, the economy would adjust itself so that the pricing would reflect that. The wealthy will have their way to funnel those 600e to their own coffers, somehow.
  21. ...meanwhile in Finland... https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5c5c3679e4b00187b558e5ab What do you think about UBI? Here is my take: Initially I was in favour of UBI. Reason: automation, self-driving cars, AI and pals will make many jobs extinct. Millions of people will lose their jobs and the old system of small rich elite, big middle class and small poor unemployed population will transform; middle class shrinks a lot and amount of poor people will increase. This will cause a lot of social problems. The problem is that I am not at all impressed by the results of the Finnish UBI test. The results are preliminary, but could be summarized like this: 1) people who got the UBI got happier. 2) The unemployment of UBI folks did not improve during the first year compared to non-UBI folks. If UBI does not improve the ability of the unemployed getting jobs, then it is only an extension of the welfare state. The little happiness injection to keep the lower classes from causing trouble. So perhaps UBI will be used to prevent the poor from rioting and breaking the toys of the rich elite. Another solution would be riot police and extra security. UBI is probably cheaper in terms of cost and human suffering. In democracies the rioting could be replaced by wrecking ball-type politicians getting more power. The problem is that people receiving it will still have pretty bleak outlook in life: you get this basic income, you will never get a real job and cannot thus move forward in the social hierarchy. But it is better than nothing, I guess.
  22. I think it might be like this: 1) stealth games are a bit niche market. 2) Thief4 was a failure 3) TDM exists for free 4) because of 1-3, it is a financial risk to try to make a new thief game. It is a small market (low gains even if successful), and someone has already failed due to demanding customer base (high risk of failure). There is no incentive to take the risk. It is better to just make another version of (insert-usual-AAA-title-name-here). Maybe some small indie studio might go there...
  23. I played the redux version of the first episode on the xmas holidays just recently. The redux is better than the original, and they had some good new ideas (I really liked the left OR right mouse button choice with the convict.) I really sit a bit pondering what would be the right thing to do. That mechanic was exactly what they should capitalize on more. For example, they could have used it with all the NPC's, somehow: Blind woman meeting: Left click - try to grab the gun, Right click - try to talk Trying to talk would go to the normal course of events, where the player would do chores for the lady. Trying to grab the gun would result in a gun struggle where the gun goes accidentally off, resulting in randomly either: 1) killing the blind lady (player gets a gun. player must find clues in her house to proceed, player loses permanent fire in the fireplace) 2) getting the player locked out from the house with a gunshot wound (player needs to heal up and then explore on his own to proceed, and does not have access to lady's house). That sort of stuff would be great, especially if the player somehow later runs into consequences of his actions earlier ("I saw you leaving from the house with the dead lady. You killed her, now you pay!"). You know... more interesting choices... choices with consequences. That's the stuff that makes a story in computer games.
  24. In engineering terms, I think, it acts as a pressure release valve. Let everyone have their say about the matter here, and then be done with it. Conclusion and closure. Case closed.
  25. I get a deep feeling of deja vu. Smooth operation is everyone's responsibility. It is tough decision, but sometimes it just has go so that partial liabilities are reduced so that the entirety can function better. Proceed as normal.
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