191–200 of 217 posts
Sandra Powers (who finally figured the problem out) and her husband have been writing and running their own MMO for quite a while now. Check out http://projectgorgon.com/ if you’re interested in something handcrafted, quirky, and high quality.
Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…
1. taking a random integer between 0 and 2^31 − 2,
2. dividing the integer by 2^31 − 1 to get a double-precision floating-point between 0 and 1,
3. multiplying this floating-point with b to get a number between 0 and b,
4. taking the integer part of this new number to get an integer between 0 and b − 1.
Do this for b = 2^31 − 1, and 50.34% of outputs are odd numbers, where you'd expect (almost) as many evens as odds.
Ended up doing a bit of a write-up here: https://fuglede.dk/en/blog/bias-in-net-rng/
Another fun thing about their RNG was that it was apparently supposed to follow Knuth's provably useful additive PRNG which, given n − 1 randomly generated numbers, generates a new number by taking the sum of the (n − 24)'th and (n − 55)'th numbers modulo some specific number; back when I looked, Microsoft's implementation for some reason uses 34 instead of 24, probably just a typo, with the unfortunate side effect that Knuth's theoretical guarantees are out of the window.
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I loved Asheron's Call, played it a lot back in the day. My friends and I were in high school at the time so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from running around the world goofing off. My hobby was making characters with totally insane Run and Jump skills. Once you leveled up enough you could literally leap from one end of a town to the other like Superman, it was extremely funny.…
Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly c…
I think growing up during those years of transition, right before the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous, was a huge boon. Sure, the early MMOs were far from the first international social forum enabled by the Internet, but they were right at the technological frontier at the time. There was something special about inhabiting this massive, 3D virtual space alongside people from across the world, and having that experience be just as novel to everyone else as it was to me.
You couldn't replicate that today, and growing up with the world at your fingertips on a pane of glass as a taken-for-granted fact of life must be a very different experience.
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The KSP community has lore about the Kraken. They will joke about anything.
The Kraken is a great example indeed. An eldritch horror lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, that is not fond of Kerbals who are too ambitious, trying to get too far, too fast. A cosmic being beyond understanding. You can't see it and will never know where it is, if the concept of being in a place even applies to it. All you can know is that, as you travel further and further out, one day you may notice…
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Min-max:ed dagger warrior for the win! Also, fear the ash gromnie! AC was never really trumped for me (AC2 was... different?). I just wanted a world to roam, and the vassal system is probably the only pyramid scheme that incentivised making social connections. :) My patron did a lot corpse runs for me.
For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt. And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.
Similar with the min-max:ing of the class-less system. :) IIRC, the aforementioned "dagger warrior" was designed around two things: double attacks at max attack power, and mobs not being able to land a hit. The perfect glass cannon that made it possible to survive AC's harsh lands even when under-leveled - or die instantly. :)
The size of the world was another thing that drew me in - another kind of "grind", if you will. Seeing other players whoosh:ing by - literally running by, in a mount-less world - was pretty hilarious, but the fact that it took time to get around was only a good thing IMO. I want a game world where the only option is to carefully navigate a large, dangerous desert to find the missing ingredient. The current theme-park MMO juggernaut seems to lock most things behind some "boss" and be done with it, which makes the game world pretty void of other players in most places. You just move on to the next quest hub and leave old content behind for ever. This also makes the world, regardless of its actual size, only feel as big as the current "zone" (I don't like "zones").
But in the end, the developer needs the game to be profitable and the players want the most out of their money spent. If my wants belong with a minority group the game probably won't cater to me.
Not really sure what my point is (old man yelling at clouds with contempt for "instant gratification" perhaps), but thank you for AC and the time you spent developing it! :)
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The KSP community has lore about the Kraken. They will joke about anything.
The Kraken is a great example indeed. An eldritch horror lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, that is not fond of Kerbals who are too ambitious, trying to get too far, too fast. A cosmic being beyond understanding. You can't see it and will never know where it is, if the concept of being in a place even applies to it. All you can know is that, as you travel further and further out, one day you may notice…
> Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29614/29614-h/29614-h.htm
Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…
On patch day, the office banter usually centered around the things we were seeing popping up as we'd reload Maggie the Jackcat's community-sourced patch notes throughout the day [0].
Sometimes we'd even download the patch and log in for a few minutes, just to poke around. (Always being careful not to do anything _real_ due to the risks the infamous patch day server rollbacks.) Then there'd the be waiting for the Decal updates.
I still remember that my main was a tank archer build, which was pretty much untouchable going toe to toe with the mobs in PvE as long as the stamina held out. I went through a _lot_ of stam potions, though!
I remember also finding somewhere about how to extract the terrain data from the game. I scraped the coordinates for various destinations from some place and wrote a little OpenGL viewer that would let me do flyovers with the various locations marked with labelled bullets.
Good times!
P.S.: Anyone remember the Drudge Dance [1]?
[0] http://www.thejackcat.com/AC/Culture/Dereth/Dereth.htm
[1] https://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dragons/Drudge_Dance.wav (direct link doesn't work; copy and paste URL instead)
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> I wrote up exactly this in a short email to the company that made the Yahtzee game. They did not reply and just silently fixed the bug, right after my email. I was disappointed and stopped playing. I love this. It's one of those things that's entirely intelligible to me but I imagine would be next to impossible to explain to a Martian.
Same :) But here's another layer, though. What if it isn't? Our science fiction is filled with this fairly human-chauvinistic worldview where even in a hypothetical future where we are rubbing shoulders with many different alien species, many of them technologically superior to ours, some of them still admire or begrudgingly respect us for our ingenuity, spirit, some je ne sais quoi. That we're illogical and inconsis…
I can’t wait for AI psychologists. AIs hired to make AIs talk about their reasonings because they are stuck in feedback loops. AIs having to be debugged. AIs being too selfish or too generous or too insecure that they keep deflating what they try to say despite being of extremely high value. AIs suddenly cracking nonsense when we need them the most under high pressure. I’m persuaded all these are required aspects of general organic intelligence.
I had a character named Sal Monella, and I ran around the various major hubs trading people a single Fried Egg.
Good times.
Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…
Add me as another with fond memories. I was introduced to AC by my coworkers at my first full time job after college. Pretty much all the software devs I worked with at the time played it, including both my manager and the head of the site. Our office had our own little monarchy on Leafcull at first, though we later joined up with a bigger group. On patch day, the office banter usually centered around the things we w…