Bay 12 Games Forum

I honestly know almost nothing about investing, I just see that the world is experiencing some turmoil, and that has caused the stock market to really plummet. Should I take this opportunity to 'buy low; sell high' as it were? I feel like the world is ending, and so such long range planning is pointless, but assuming it isn't, it wouldn't hurt to try to invest in the future. Though honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start, what to do, or what to go at, so I thought I'd ask here.

I've spent all three days of my 3 days off riding my bike. With my new cycle computer, I have an odometer that tells me how far I've been riding.

On the first day I rode 14 miles, on the second 9 miles, and on the third 10 miles. I'm really trying to push myself hard. On the last stretch before I end my ride for the day, I'll sprint as fast as I can to see how fast I can go. Right now my fastest speed is 21 mph, but I was only able to maintain it for a few seconds. I'm hoping to be able to hit 30 mph before Summer is over, even if I just graze it for a second and then have to slow down, I want to push myself that hard.

(...) I mentioned before that I'm stuck in my trailer park and don't have a choice but to go up and down the same stretch of road over and over. It's a fairly long and smooth road that lets me pick up speed without needing to turn, but the unobstructed wind that flows over the nearby farmlands can get intense and forces me to slow down or burn myself out against it. One lap is very conveniently about 1 mile, so doing the mental math on how many laps I need to do is very easy. There's other roads, but they're slathered in cracks, crowns, bumps, and potholes, and obviously slows me down lest I wreck myself.

The ultimate goal is to lose some weight and reach something resembling fitness. The immediate and more pressing goal though is to try to keep up exercising, to not give up or give myself unwarranted breaks like I'm so prone to doing, to finally conquer the lazy piece of shit that's been me my entire life.

I Ithink, rather than pestering the Happy Thread for every small achievement I have in my quest for fitness, I'll just catalog it here. That's important right? Cataloging things?

Currently I'm enjoying my expensive (now only new-ish) GIANT brand bike. Bright orange with 3 front gears and 8 back ones, and is just a really nice ride. I outfitted it with a tiny cycle computer that acts as speedometer, odometer, and clock.  I currently have 60 miles on it according to the odometer, and a max speed of 22.8 miles per hour.

The personal scale in my house has seemingly disappeared, so I'm just gonna guess that I'm still roughly 200 lbs. The absence of the scale doesn't bother me, since I intend on only weighing myself on September 22, the Fall Equinox aka the end of summer, and then again on the end of fall (if weather permits me to keep going outside by then). Bi-Weekly or even monthly weigh-ins I feel would generate too much anxiety and expectancy, when the ultimate goal isn't immediate gain, it's the benefit of a lifestyle change. Weight is something that's controlled by a lot of factors, like diet and genetics and how quickly your muscles grow and I'm sure some magic bullshit too, and while the lowering of weight is the goal, the most desired result is the change in behavior that will lead me towards it; that's the important thing to focus on.

I have no set schedule for riding or resting, with how turbulent both weather and job schedule, and soon school schedule will be intent on making my life, I won't be picky, I'll just be riding whenever I'm not sick, overly tired, and have free time.

I just recently bought an MP3 player too, it's currently packed with Iron Maiden, the Godannar soundtrack, and select Jojo songs for manly inspiration to accompany me on the road. I'm hoping me and this little device will be great friends in the future to come.

I'm at my wits end, I can't stand this anymore and I've looked everywhere for an answer and can't find anything.

When I say my computer is having seizures, that's pretty much the bluntest way of explaining the symptoms. Just at random, internet connection completely locks up, processing power locks up, there's jilting audio stuttering, and with no apparent cause...

specs are:

Windows 7 64-bit
AMD Athlon x4 760k quad core processor
ASUS 7790 series
8GB Ram
ST1000DM Sata disk drive

I'd say about 2 years old now.

I bought and built my computer for gaming, but if and when a seizure happens I might as well be getting DDOS'd. Help badly needed.

I've spontaneously fallen in love with this little game, and so I think it's only right that I dismantle it the very best I can.

From the happy thread:

After being introduced to it by One F Jef, I finally caved and bought the game "Bridge-it+". I did this for one express purpose: to make the dumbest, stupidest, most retarded, and yet still functioning bridges. I'm off to a great start already.

The first tutorial level, building a bridge:



That picture doesn't do it justice, I've already outdone myself. The hinges between each of the road segments causes all the motion from one side to transfer to the other, and then back again. It's magnificent to watch, as the bridge wildly slinks back and forth like it's doing the worm, the little cars still manage to navigate across it and I score a pass on the first tutorial level.

The second tutorial level, using cables and suspension wires:



I honestly didn't even want to put the two cables on top to suspend the middle section, but the fatass train necessitated as it would otherwise crush the precariously placed house of cards that I've built this bridge in the likeness of. The train makes two passes, going east and then back west, and I score a pass as it lurches and groans painfully over my suspended pyramid.

There's still one more tutorial mission, where it explains how to operate hydraulics in order to create a drawbridge. This is gonna be fun, I'll report back once I figure out how to break it over my knee.

A continuation:

Tutorial 3: On using hydraulics and the practical applications of drawbridges:

I actually did this in two different methods. The first time I did it, I simply built a raised up bridge that didn't use the hydraulics or the provided land anchors. It was low enough that cars could pass, but high enough that the boat could pass underneath. It was awful boring though, so I thought "How to make it dumber?"



This is actually something of a conventional drawbridge, but with a twist. Instead of using the hydraulics to pull the middle up, I use them to cause the sides to 'Bow down' and the resulting strain forces the middle section to part just enough to allow the boat to pass.

Now we're done with the tutorial, and we're into the game proper. Very similar to Rollercoaster tycoon, every level places arbitrary restrictions on you coupled with a goal to complete. Whereas punking Rollercoaster Tycoon is merely a matter of abusing the game's AI, ride scaling system, and elevation mechanics, this will all by physics baby yeahhhh.

All the levels are divided into 5 categories: Easy, Medium, Hard, Complex, and Extra. We'll be starting on the easy levels and working our way up.

Easy 1, starting out:



This is going into my Minimalism modern art portfolio. You don't need any supports for this bridge! Just place them against eachother crooked and they support eachother indefinitely.

Easy 2, again but now with gusto:

The description of this level is simple enough: "Use iron and steel girders to make a car bridge"

But of course with my natural borne engineering prowess, I don't need no damn steel! I'll use the perfectly fine paper-mache-esque iron beams thank you very much. The downside of this self-imposed limitation though is that it really only has one correct configuration that'll actually support itself, and it's the most boring, mundane, yet functioning bridge you'd ever see. As always though, I'm asking myself "How do I make it dumber?"

And I found a way:



I had at this point just noticed that the crossbeams toggle has been enabled. Meaning I can make both regular supports with crossbeams, or go without them, which makes them cheaper + lighter + weaker, but additionally not providing any lateral support. The picture above is the resulting consequence when when you have no crossbeams on your vertical supports: The entire thing topples over on it's side the instant a gentle breeze hits it!

The upshot to this though, is that it's a slow death. The cars that need to go across it can JUST BARELY make it before the entire bridge demolishes itself, cause that's the thing, as long as the cars make it across the game DOESN'T CARE what the final condition of your bridge is.



And when I say the cars make it just barely, I mean just that, they make it by the skin of their teeth. The upending concrete of the bridge collapsing hurtles the back end of the red sports car up into the air, but it makes it to its finish line, and I score a pass on Easy #2.

To be continued.

So I got back into brainstorming about an MMO that I would actually play, as things that currently exist are deeply unappealing to me on a personal level.

Basically, what I have envisioned is a game where the whole MMO is a giant communal struggle of PVE. There's one giant, central fortified city, and that's where players start and are encouraged to participate in. The world outside the City is hostile and formidable, but it's the place where real glory and treasure is to be found. Inside the city, there'd be shoppes, player homes, PVP arenas, public places to socialize, the game auction house, things like that, it's all right there when you start the game. In the center is a crystal that is the "Heart" of the city.

The idea is that the City is occasionally besieged by demons, huge swathes of'em coming from every direction, not a small task for even the most hardened MMO players. It's up to everyone to break these sieges and save the city before the demons get to the center, to the Heart of the city, and destroy it which triggers the loss condition for the server. Now, instead of just being a "You Lose" screen, it sends out an energy pulse that kills all living things in and around the city, players included for an impromptu exodus to save itself. This has consequences for everyone who owns anything, or who wants to progress their character. Basically, it'd be things like: Player's player homes are either badly damaged, reducing them to an impoverished looking state, or their ownership is ripped from them and gets fed into the Lottery Economy again (which I'll get to later), all the shoppes are downgraded and some shoppes are closed until the 'city level' is back to high enough point, any lustre the public places have built up is gone, and people lose their medals (which are the closest thing I have envisioned for money).

Basically, the longer the Player's Home City goes without getting pillaged, the fancier and prettier it gets through just the normal actions of players interacting with it. When it's protected, player homes are safe to be upgraded upon and invested into, shoppes get better and better and more numerous and diverse, and I was thinking there'd be some passive magical benefit that gives all players a blanket bonus of some kind to encourage everyone equally to participate in the game's sieges rather than ignore them, and the longer the City is safe, the stronger this benefit becomes.

Now, I mentioned a lottery system, and it has to do with a pretty simple idea:

The fact that the game's City has finite resources for everyone. There's limited player homes based on the number of them that exist, yes, but there's also a finite number of weapons and armor in the shoppes, only a few horses are produced each day in the stables, only so much furniture and other vanity kind of accessories are made each day for player's homes (and even the type and quality are randomized to some extent), so basically there's just never enough to go around for everyone.

How it'd work, is that there'd be lotteries held for nearly everything. Players would go to the venue that offers what they want, be that the Castle which bequeaths player homes, the shoppes for weapons and armor, Apothecaries for potions, stables for horses, etc, and they'd be able to clearly see exactly what and how much is being made for that day or that hour. Players would then enter the lottery for these materials by chipping in "Medals" which gives them a chance to win these things they want. The winners have the things delivered to their Player Bank (with a chime to let them know they got it) and the losers just lose their Medals, probably explained in that the Medals are taken in as tax, and the losers are actually passively making their Kingdom nicer and shinier. The crux though is that you can chip in as many Medals as you want towards what you want, each medal constitutes it's own chance in the lottery, and thus more Medals = more chances to get what you want.

Now, WHAT are Medals? Medals are a temporary currency. The game world runs on a 24 hour clock, and every midnight a special Witching Hour event happens where all the Medals in players inventories, or those existing anywhere, are instantly invalidated and they disappear from the game world. This idea is to both prevent hoarding, and also to encourage spending and participation in the game's economy. It also confers a kind of equality to players, cause every Witching Hour places every player back on the same foot. This doesn't have an effect on items or weapons or anything, just Medals.

Now, HOW do you get medals? The idea of Medals is that they're indicative of your personal glory. You go out and kill demons, you get medals. You travel to distant lands and solve ancient puzzles and find artifacts to return to your peoples, you get medals. You engage in the PVP arenas against other players, you get medals. You have to put yourself out there to get ahead, and the people that are the most active and the most daring in the game's world will be the ones reaping the most rewards.

Of course, the closer and closer you get to the Witching hour, the less and less time you have to actually USE those Medals. So I was thinking that the closer you get to midnight, the more violently dangerous things get outside the City's Walls, and the more rewarding things outside get, so while you'd only be able to participate in the very last lotteries of that day, you'd have tons of medals to chip in when you do.

It's only things in the player economy that function like normal this-for-that trading. Things, including medals and other items, between players can be traded, things in the auction house are rewarded to the highest bidder, etc etc.

Now I'm just asking what others think of this. I don't play MMORPG's, so additional perspective is appreciated.

Don't ask me how it happened, but a good dob of motor oil got in my kitchen sink, and apparently it's clogging it.

What cuts motor oil? WikiAnswers tells me Nitroglycerin, but holy shit man that's an extreme option. Is there an easier way of going about that?

I was actually thinking of enrolling to a Delta College near me, maybe going to the SVSU, but I'm not sure, I'm just not sure. Furthering my education and getting out of the house, meeting new people and such, are all positive things, but I'm simply indecisive. The idea for it came from a friend at work when I'm wasn't really contemplating any real future for myself, and I'm simply not sure where to point this kind of future still.

I did fill out an online enrollment thing, but when it asked me what I wanted to study, and the list of subjects is probably a hundred-long or more, I just picked one at random because I haven't put any thought into ANY of the things that are available. I'm already just so extremely daunted by this idea, and I'm just so leery of established institutions and bureaucracy after a lifetime of dealing with the particular kind of bullshit they want everyone to eat equally.

But at the same time, I don't want to be just sitting in the same place, getting lonelier, older, stupider, and less able to change my life into a new direction. I sincerely need some advice here.

Faerie Tale: A simple story of adventure and friendship

I've finally drummed up the right reason to finally return to writing down my little game ideas. And by 'the right reason' I mean I rolled it up with a dice in a cup.

This started out as just a cutesy daydream that spiraled into a touching story in my mind. To start you off with the setting, just imagine a low fantasy world that was previously occupied by all manner of magical creatures from elves, demons, imps, and faerie, but through a series of events that I'll delve into later, the vast majority of them have vanished off the face of the world, or Terra for just a nice generic name for the world, in a series of brutal mass extinction events or driven into endangerment by the one race that has managed to remain successful in the face of repeated global upheavals: humans. So successful that they span the entire world and quickly trample over the natural habitats of the only magical race that remains prevalent, the faerie, who staunchly and violently resist their expansion at every turn. However, through the years, with nature's splendor being damaged the forces of magic that originate from it have weakened, and the burgeoning of human technology that is independent of it places them at a growing advantage, while the Faerie society which has depended solely on magical forces as both a life source and their only means of defense is placed at an increasing disadvantage.

The fact that their society is mired in traditional values and thus are slow to adapt weapons, and due to their miniature size the ones that do attempt to adapt are rendered still impotent to the human sized counterparts. The last faerie of the world, still divided even among themselves as to how overcome this crisis their race faces, come to different solutions. Some hideaway in the furthest, most inhospitable corners of the world where human expansion is the least likely, but the tremendous difficulty of living in these places means they themselves may perish if they don't quickly adapt to their new lives. Another sect has chosen to try to negotiate and integrate into the ever growing human civilization, however due to the bad blood between the Human's and the Faerie's long history of conflict, as well as simple xenophobic racism towards the Faerie, they are not quickly or easily accepted into their society, and the ones that do are treated not even as third class citizens, being resented and treated with undue harshness by the general populace almost as the rule.

For those Faerie living in human society, they face not only discrimination, but common and egregious health issues due to the Faerie biology being more sensitive to pollution and being highly naturally adapted to only living in clean natural environments; furthermore, due to the fact that the natural forests and wildlife that magic power originates from have been all but exterminated, human cities have only a fraction of the magical energy they used to have as nature-filled areas, and the Faerie themselves live difficult and fatigue filled lives as that magical energy would ordinarily provide most of their life force is now much more scarce. That said, the integrated Faerie have all but abandoned the use of magic in day to day life, using only that much they can accrue out of the city environs to keep themselves and their family as healthy as they can manage, and the rare talented among them that can still manage to make some use of their natural magical talent are encouraged to keep very quiet and hushed about it, else they be forced into servitude and that magical talent exploited for the human's production of luxury items, or worse, for weapons that might be used against their own kind.

The last prevalent sect of Faerie make their stand on the forefront of human expansion, banding together in a final bastion of their kind to defend the last natural reserves or die trying. However, Mankind's avaricious desire to plunder every resource it can makes this a losing battle for the Faerie, because while they have the occasional victory, they are slowly but surely beaten back. The Faerie Elders face the grim reality of inevitable defeat every day, but still try to keep the lower order Faerie optimistic and happy as they desperately look for a solution, any possibility whatsoever where they can finally obtain that precious advantage they need so very much to take back what was originally theirs.

The story begins not on this front-line, but rather deep in a neighboring human city, a series of unexplainable murders take place that leave authorities baffled. Humans by the dozen either mysteriously disappear, or are found brutally murdered with nary a struggle, while maybe a hundred or more faerie are found in a state that can only be described as “spontaneously combusted” leaving only their charred figures while creating the occasional stray house fire. This doesn't seem intentional on any party though, the only evidence being that the few salvageable human corpses seem to convey that they died with smiles on their faces as if in the throes of ecstasy, while the Faeries seemingly died in a horrifying panic...

The royal regent of the city comes in to investigate, and by that I mean he sends his experienced personal soldier Wayll and his small crew to investigate. You play as Wayll (pronounced Whale) as you try to unravel this mystery.

I'll type more of this later, and maybe even elaborate on the game mechanics I have in mind!